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[goethbeforethefall]

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Visuals Caldera Vhenan

Solas The Dread Wolf Fen'Harel

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[loosed]

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."

[goethbeforethefall]

"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."

[loosed]

"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."

[goethbeforethefall]

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."

[loosed]

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."