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Visuals Caldera Vhenan

Solas The Dread Wolf Fen'Harel

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Solas opens his mouth to immediately reply that yes of course they are, and then reconsiders and very nearly says the opposite— but says nothing at all, instead. Neither is the truth, he realizes, and then again he falls upon the recognition that now, that now it is all laid bare, or shall soon be. He had said it that first day, the very hour that he had reappeared in Caldera, had he not?

I trust you. I will tell you everything.

"I had long considered my body as a tool," He replies, slowly, as if he must feel his way blindly along the sentence, groping after each word in the dark, "If it were marred, injured, or taken ill, I would be limited. First in how I could serve, and then... in other ways. When I woke, I was nearly powerless; I had my knowledge, my expertise, but my capabilities were no greater than that of any other mage in Thedas as it stands now. Less than many, to tell the truth. It was... humbling."

Humiliating, frustrating, enraging, horrifying... He had spent longer than he would like to admit just mourning himself as he had been, and raging against the new limitations, before picking himself up to move on. It was not until the first of his body's new scars that Solas had really understood what had become of him, and how far he truly had fallen in the world.

"I was forced to contend with the world as myself, fully within myself, for perhaps the first time. That experience has been invaluable. To answer your question... I don't know. I would not have taken them willingly, and each is tied to a memory of pain, or servitude. And yet, I cannot bring myself to wipe it all away. Perhaps that is foolish."

It isn't entirely guilt that Felassan feels. Either of them could have chosen differently; neither of them did. Perhaps neither of them ever could have. But something sits heavy in his stomach, whatever it might be called, at the thought of Solas stripped of his power and learning the shape of the new world alone. Felassan had never told him everything he might need to know because he'd been certain, until mere days before the end, that he would be there, along with Solas's strength and all of the necessary tools.

But it's past, and they cannot keep apologizing to each other in new ways for the same mistakes in an endless loop. That nameless feeling is tucked into a brief drop of his eyes and his hand sliding further down to rest against Solas's neck, until he finishes speaking and Felassan looks up again.

"Perhaps," he says. "Or perhaps it's incredibly wise."

Joking. Not joking. The fine lines at the corners of his eyes that crinkle with an affectionate amusement, they reach into the lines of the vallaslin that Solas could clear away the moment Felassan asked him to. But he never has, and the odds are good he never will, so who is he to tell Solas what's foolish here? Felassan still feels it sometimes, too: the divide between body and spirit, between who he is and the ingenious biological device he's acquired to move about the world with, though his sense of it is likely much less keen and more painless.

Less glibly: "It's pain that you've survived and servitude that you've cast off," mostly, "and when I see them I feel some sorrow that you've suffered. But grateful, too, that you came through it and let me have this time with you. And wonder that we can still change and learn, after all the ages. You are already so different from when I left you. Who knows what you will be in a thousand years?"

"Evidence might suggest I will be much the same: an intractable thorn in your side," He replies, light with feigned good humor, though his face belies the attempt. Serious talk, this, "Falon..."

The words crowd around his lips, jockeying for room. He cannot decide what to ask, what to say, and so is rendered helpless, and falls silent. Why is it so different, with Felassan's scars, than for his own? Why can he never let anything go, and be at peace? Will Felassan not ask him for more, and tell him more? The berry-taste is sweet and tart on his tongue still, and Solas feels the rough edge of a callous against the pulse-point of his neck, daring and dangerous and tender all at once.

"Will you not kiss me?" is what he says, finally, for it is the only thing he can.

Seeing through Solas's tone doesn't stop Felassan from smiling, himself, and then smiling wider. Thorn in his side. The fang there could very well be. The next time someone entitled to neither of their histories asks what it means, maybe that's what he'll say it is —

— though it is never what Solas has been. Even at the worst of times. Felassan has stood in thunderstorms, and he's stood in forest fires, and he's stood beside Fen'Harel, and it was never because he was helpless to do anything else. He could have, just as anyone who only feels right and alive and themselves on a battlefield could nonetheless find the costs too great hang up their sword.

"I might," Felassan says, smiling wider still, pleased to have tied up his tongue and outlasted his patience. He takes his time about it nonetheless, trailing his fingers down, contemplating the options presented to him. Mouth first. He's unhurried and steady, trading berry-taste for berry-taste, and if Solas has ideas to the contrary Felassan will retreat and press forward again with more insistence on slow.

It leaves him time to ask, half into Solas's mouth, "Did you remember this when you were gone?" I missed you, Solas said, but he'd had cause to miss them, both of them, either way. Felassan does not sound anymore afraid of the answer than he did while he was waiting to die — but it is not for nothing that he's taken this long to ask.

Solas accepts the kiss with pleasure and an eager heart, at first merely letting himself be guided, relaxing into the gesture, then building into a mounting interest in the wet heat of tongue and teeth— only to be chastised and stymied, and forced to begin again. Who was it that was a thorn in the side of whom, once again?

But he forgives Felassan immediately, and loosens his grip on his collar, until they are both breathing hard, and overheated, despite the cool of the water and the greening shade.

Did you remember?

For a breath or two, Solas in uncomprehending, then his hands harden and he surges to his feet. The bottom of the stream is silt and clay, alternating between slime and grit between his toes, but he pays it no mind. His answer is ferocious, reaching grasping, biting, as much to say I will never forget you, as to illustrate the viciousness with which he clings to that memory.

Solas would tear himself to pieces, for the sake of the memory of those he has loved; not a metaphor, nor poetic speech. His is a dangerous love, so often self-destructive. You had been warned...

"I remembered this, all of this world, as a dream," He says, rough-voiced and husky. The river-damp is creeping up his robes, unheeded, "It faded, or tried to fade, but I am not a mortal dreamer, to shake off the night every morning, as if the Fade were no more than a fantasy. But it could mean nothing, not while Elgar'nan yet lived, and the blight surging. I remembered this."

Another kiss, searing and wet, almost hostile in its fervency. Solas has thrown his arms entirely around his lover, and given himself to the moment entirely.

"I will remember you until my last breath, Felassan."

No instinct for surrender, has Felassan. It's something he has to reason his reluctant way around to, and with Solas crashing in like a storm surge there is not immediately time for reason. So Felassan cedes no ground, gives no slack, feet dug in to the stream bed and a fist threatening to leave lasting wrinkles in the fabric against Solas's side and kiss clashing toothily against kiss.

For those moments he doesn't understand the ferocity. It might be apology. It might be fear. To lose these months and what the three of them have become would be its own kind of mortality.

He doesn't understand until Solas explains, and as he does relief floods out some of the stubbornness. Some. Felassan's stance turns softer without turning slack, and he meets this next kiss with collaboration instead of competition, a noise in his throat, and open roving hands. One finds the side of Solas's head. No hair to rake his fingers through (or to hold and tug, in another genre of fantasy) but there's a separate tenderness in finding the ridges of bone and the lines of tendon with his fingertips. How strange to be made of so many different pieces —

Felassan doesn't hurry out of the half-daze that comes from being remembered and wanted and grasped at. When he gathers himself up enough to speak, it's quiet.

"Is that all?" he says. "I've remembered you past mine."

This is only true from the narrowest of angles, one that counts his impermanent death and not Solas's, but the point isn't accuracy. It's only to tease. Let Solas remember, if Felassan can't follow him and Beleth into their forever after: let him remember Felassan joking about the worst thing between them without bite, all forgiven. And Felassan's hand slithering through layers of clothing to press a callused palm against the skin Solas didn't want to inhabit and to stroke a reverent thumb against the ridge of a scar he doesn't want to erase. And Felassan adding, "Sileal," like a punctuation mark, and the first L making his tongue dart out against lips.

Solas thinks, very briefly of doing any number of things, most of them wrong, many violent, all inappropriate. Shortly, he cannot bear to discard all of them, and so is forced to break the deadlock by attempting to choose to least offensive among many.

"I ought to drown you like an unwanted cat," He hisses, annoyed at Felassan's teasing and the presumption that he would have forgotten, and the fear that he might've.

He turns his head, meaning to bite him, and the motion is a stroke against his cheek and Solas is once again knee-deep in the memory of Haven's unswept snowbanks, and someone is touching him with gentleness for what seems the first time in his life. It was only an iron will and an age of ingrained guilt that had kept him from tears, that night, when Beleth had first kissed him— it is the same, now.

A longing he did not know he had, rising up, impossible, impossible. He struggles, briefly, against the irrepressable softness; no, he is annoyed, and rightfully so! But it cannot hold, and so he sighs and allows Felassan to gentle him with his name, and wraps his arms around him against for a kiss that is nothing of teeth, smooth and wet and tender.

"I wondered if they would be so foolish as to give me my tools," He murmurs against his mouth, when they are both breathless and leaning into one another, soft and slack and in love. He knows Felassan does not need to be told, to know him, to know what he means. The water is cold, soaking up through his knees, and he welcomes the cooling radiance of it, "It was my intention, when they asked me, to make the attempt— to bring you home. I will not beg as if I were a servant; we should not be in their power, and I can accept no denial in this. If the orb and dagger cannot be enough, I will do yet more. You deserve the effort."

Another time, Felassan wouldn't try to soothe him. Another day he'd be pleased to wrestle and bite and pinch halfway out of their clothes in the river or the trees, playful and vicious as the games young animals play with fang and claw. But today has been sweet, and the stream is too gentle and the breeze is too warm, and Solas is not fully recovered, and Beleth will probably have come home by the time they turn back.

Felassan still grins at the threat, though. Try it makes it from his chest to his throat before he stops it without a sound, for the sake of this embrace that matches the stream and the breeze, a counterweight against all the struggling they've done and will do, with the world and one another.

The expression it leaves behind on Felassan's face, when Solas takes enough space to speak, is cracked open enough that he can't help the impulse to hide it. He ducks his head down and in, forehead to Solas's jaw, held still even when you deserve the effort threatens him with a shudder. (He does not lack confidence, but he settled into that last dream quite confident that Solas would find him disposable enough to dispose of. He was right. He was wrong, too.)

He nods and says, "Beleth said something about it," relieved that she has now said something more recently than the first time, the orb and dagger and obvious prompt, and Felassan will not have to try to speak his way around what they saw in the Salt Spire.

He could not trust it, in the vision Cordelia showed Beleth. Easily manipulable; even Felassan can conjure up a false vision for a sleeper. He can't trust a god, he can't trust anything reliant on their favor, so he's been so reluctant to truly hope for anything he might have to ask them for — but it's a different matter, if Solas holds the power in his own hands. If they do not have to supplicate.

"There are things much worse than death, you know, and you've saved my ass from them all." His body is his own. His mind. Beliefs, choices, heart. Whatever responsibility Solas bears for his death, he's more responsible for the fact he died free. Felassan's hand strays to the side of his face, opposite the press of his forehead, to the dramatic angle his jaw, the soft lobe of his ear, adoration in his fingers belying the dryness of his tone. "But if you have another rescue in you, I'll take it."

"It was I who took you from Thedas in the first place," His wry tone is as adroit as his hands, tangled in Felassan's loosened hair, and fisted damply in his shirt, with a fine tremor running through all three, "Therefore, it seems only fitting that I serve to return you to it."

How few of his regrets, his mistakes, could ever be se remedied? It was an impossible chance. But the possibility of true forgiveness, of truly setting something, anything, anything at all, that mattered, to rights... He could not help but long for it. Just this once, let some folly of his come to a good end. Let anything he has ever done be aright.

In the meantime, Solas closes his eyes and leans his face against Felassan's palm, suddenly weary for his burst of furor, and grateful to be held. Of course Beleth had told him. Of course— clever Vhenan, always safeguarding them both.

"We must... bring her here, some time. She would appreciate the beauty of this place."

"She'll add to it," Felassan says, smile pushing his cheeks against Solas's jaw. "Soon, while the berries are still this good."

They can come back with Beleth, with lunch, with a basket for the raspberries. With what Beleth needs to save honeysuckle for her teas and with something for Solas to sketch with. With a blanket or two. If Felassan is very charming perhaps he might convince them to forgo their soft bed and stay the night here.

He stores the plans away. Solas was not quite shaking, a moment ago, but near enough. The lean of his head is heavy and tired, and Felassan eases back to look at him. The vulnerability he'd been hiding has seeped out of his face, for the most part, but not the love; it's only more surefooted, as sturdy as his hand against Solas's cheek. His fearsome, fragile friend. He tilts Solas's face within range to kiss the eyelid of one of his kind, sad, mischievous eyes, and the sun-touched bridge of his nose, and one last time — at least for an hour or so — on the mouth.

"Let's get you home," he says. They'll have to hunt another day. A fiercer day than this one, which he wants to keep this way now, gentle and unbloodied. "After the time she has had lately, it's best if we don't make her wonder where we've gone."

Solas huffs a breathy chuckle, low and dry, but genuine, closing his eyes to linger a moment longer in the weight and warmth of it. Then he sighs, and cannot argue: yes, he is tired already, and the water which had been a bracing refreshment a moment ago is now merely cold.

"Yes. I have given her many reasons to fear that I might vanish," He hesitates though, in moving to go, though he has not yet even stepped away from Felassan, not fully, and turns back, "...Perhaps you can sympathize?"

He had found those notes you left, lost letters, ancient pleas for help to a man who's mind had been struck low by his own folly, and who had crawled through the mud towards survival. Solas thought, perhaps, that it might give his detractors among the survivors of the Veil's initial rise, to imagine him thus... but it was a cold comfort, and useless. He had left the messages where they had been found, and hoped that if they did not vanish into history, that they might at least bear witness to his crimes.

"Ir abelas, for your pain, but I think... you both know who and what I am, now."

It's an old pain — a wound that has not healed cleanly, maybe, but has healed, in the thousands of years since Felassan last glimpsed the Lighthouse and what they left behind there — and Solas is a thousand things, becoming more by the day, always shifting in the light, and to claim to understand even the simplest man fully and forever would be arrogance and boring besides —

But Felassan knows enough of the hard things in Solas, and the sharp things, and the things that slip out of his hands if he tries to hold onto them. Felassan came to love him in wartime, with blood on his teeth and lightning in his hands. Every part of Solas he's ever bruised himself against was a part that also helped free their people. Every story he told Briala about Fen'Harel's inscrutable cunning he told with affection and admiration. So Felassan knows enough of him to nod with confidence, smile small and unbothered, as he links his arm around Solas's to draw him out of the water and back toward the deer path.

"Someone we'll lose," he proposes, "and someone we'll find again. Although you are always welcome to communicate your plans," he adds with a touch of tartness, "if it suits you."

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