Letters We Should've Sent

Eight years pass and they both keep track of it, words they didn't share but should have. Words that might have made all the difference.

(very minor DAV spoilers sprinkled throughout)

Rating: T? If that? Word Count: 4,880

[ao3 link]

Preview

Solas, 

I am on my way to Orlais, and the sunrise is clearing the fog from a meadow where I’ve made camp, and I am thinking of you. Thinking of moments like this from years past, where we would rise before the others and walk to the edge of our campsite for a few stolen moments alone at dawn. I cannot help but wonder if you might think of them too, wherever you are now. Is it warm there? Are you in a city? The mountains? 

To have known it all, or what felt like it all, for so long, and now to have nothing is a wound I fear will never heal. How am I supposed to look at these places we once walked together the same way? How am I supposed to continue on like this - like everything is just how it was?

You are gone and I am…this. A woman broken by grief and anger and duty. Someone I no longer like or recognize and I’m sure you wouldn’t either. 

All anyone sees anymore is The Inquisitor. Even with the inquisition disbanded. 

I am no longer a woman or an elf or a person at all. I haven’t been in so long. I have become something other, entirely not my own and yet not belonging to anyone in particular either. I am not a figurehead of the chantry or a single nation, I do not belong to the humans or the elves or anyone else. It feels as though I have given away a small piece of myself to everyone that’s ever asked and now I am hollowed out, staring at a sunrise and wishing I had left it all behind to end the world with you. 

I can’t keep myself from writing letters, filling pages and pages with thoughts I wish I were mindlessly sharing with you, knowing I’ll never send them.

I don’t even know if I ought to write vhenan on these letters anymore. To write my love on paper feels foolish, even if you’ll never see it. But then you know - you have to know. I will never love another as I loved you. I will never see another sunrise and think of anything but the mornings where you told me you loved me and always would.

Were you the god of lies even then? 

-Morinne