#dread wolf – @cloud-blossom on Tumblr

Cole asks Lavellan why she doesn’t have her vallaslin anymore, and she admits that after learning so much, after everything that happened, Lavellan doesn’t know if she believes in the gods anymore.

And Cole just quietly says, “One still believes in you.”

katalyna-rose

I needed to write something for this. So I did.

Believe

She was avoiding the pity and questions that had been fired at her continuously by the residents and visitors to Skyhold by the simple tactic of not being within its walls. She wasn’t entirely sure anymore how far she’d walked once she slipped past the guards and sentries who guarded her castle’s gates, but she didn’t really care.

She leaned her head back against the trunk of the ancient, gnarled oak she sat beneath. It had stood for time beyond counting, scarred and pitted over time until it looked as old and beat up as she felt. The Veil was thin there, in the cradle of its roots and sheltered by its branches. She wondered what memories that proud tree had stood witness to, but she dared not enter the Fade now. Instead she contented herself with slowly, gently touching her face. If she was careful, if she closed her eyes, she could pretend that the tingle on her skin was from a different hand, the callouses on the thumb belonging to a different person. If she concentrated, she could almost make herself believe that the brush of the thumb across her cheek would be followed by a sweet word or a gentle embrace. But it didn’t come.

She opened her eyes again and sighed, staring up through the branches at the twinkling stars. A single moon was visible in the sky, the smallest sliver winking at her. Mocking her. She frowned and turned away.

Leaves crunched at her side, a footstep, but she knew who it was. In truth, she’d been expecting him. Cole had spent a lot of time at her side lately as her pain called out to him, but there was little he could do.

He sat beside her, his hat in his hands and his hair shading his face. “Your arm hurts,” he observed quietly. She snorted.

“What’s left of it,” she muttered darkly, closing her hand over the stump on her left side.

“But that’s not why you hurt now,” he continued. She hesitated, then shook her head, though he didn’t need the confirmation. “They ask you why your face is bare. I thought all savages marked themselves with those ugly tattoos.” She huffed a reluctant laugh at the startlingly accurate impression of a stuffy Orlesian’s terrible manners. “You tell them that your face is too pretty to be hidden, but you don’t believe it. Your friends ask you if he took the marks from you by force, thinking the worst of him now that they know the truth. You tell them-”

“It was my choice,” she continued for him, knowing this conversation well; she’d had it with each of her friends. “I learned the truth and I chose this. And I would choose the same thing if I had to do it again.”

“And you believe that,” Cole finished, as though she hadn’t interrupted him at all and the words had come from him. They were silent for a while. She wondered if he’d leave. She couldn’t be the only one hurting in the night, but he stayed. Unlike Solas, Cole stayed with her.

“But then they ask you why,” he said after a few minutes, when she had all but forgotten the conversation in favor of studying the way the leaves shifted in the breeze. She turned her gaze to the spirit beside her and wide eyes met hers. She swallowed the sob that wanted to escape her chest; she had already cried far too much over that man.

“Because I no longer have faith in the elven gods,” she whispered hoarsely.

“But one still believes in you,” Cole told her earnestly.

Her sob broke free, wracking her whole body. She curled up, hugging her knees to her chest, and could no longer contain the tears she had denied him. She wanted to be angry, to turn her grief into rage, but she couldn’t. She loved him and she couldn’t hate him, no matter how hard she tried. She sobbed loudly into the night, allowing her pain the release it demanded, not worrying about anyone to overhear her forbidden cries over the man who had hurt her, who threatened them all, who had lied to them over and over even if only by omission. And Cole held her through it, allowing her to release some small sliver of her agony in the only way she could. He held her through the night, the Fade whispering at the edge of their consciousness, brought a little further through the Veil by this fresh agony that was witnessed there by the ancient oak.

And when her tears finally dried after a time she hadn’t bothered to measure, determination took root where only despair had dwelt. Solas believed in her, and she would find a way to change his course. She would show him a better way or she would die trying. Because she believed in him, too.

cadashly

Holy shit, this is beautiful!!

#im not crying #you're crying #oh gawd #lavellan #stuck in sollavellan hell #send help #dread wolf