The Elvhen God of Gay Messes
You don’t sleep. Sera does, but obviously you can’t with her there. Cole doesn’t even show up, despite the fact you’d tried to use this being his tent as an excuse to chase her out earlier. Of course he wouldn’t; he could obviously tell you had company, and knowing Cole was probably just as happy as you about the situation. Probably more, since he didn’t tend to have your second thoughts and doubts.
You want to hate yourself more for the situation than you actually do, to be honest. But the thing is, she’s very warm and very soft and curling up next to someone, even when you’re not sleeping, feels very good. You wonder, idly, how much of this is that you like her specifically—you do, obviously, but how much?—and how much of it is just that you were a bit lonely and are prone to making bad decisions that hurt the people around you. Would you even care that you’d be hurting her if not for the fact you’re stuck around these people for the foreseeable future? How much of your pleasure is genuine; how much of your guilt is genuine? Such thoughts occupy your mind through the night and into dawn.
You rise before her. You’re kind of hoping that coming out of your tent early, without her, will somehow prevent people from realizing it’s your tent she’s coming out of when she eventually emerges. Of course, Seeker Pentaghast will probably have noted that Sera never came to their tent. And you’d put Cole out of a place too… well, he doesn’t really seem to sleep, but still. It was the principle of the thing, when you’d put up such a fuss to get him sharing a tent with you in the first place.
Come to think of it, if you hadn’t bothered, you’d be sharing a tent with Sera right now, and you could fuck every night like over-enthusiastic nugs and no one would be any the wiser—well not since you’d discovered the importance of finding something to muffle her with anyway. Ironically, it’s your own constant attempts at keeping this from happening that made it happen in the most awkward time and place possible. As is traditional in your life, you have only yourself to blame. The things you try to fix, you always wind up breaking worse.
Of course, it’s bad that you’re even considering how you could have made this easier on yourself. You shouldn’t be doing it at all. The fact that you keep failing in your attempts to do better is not an excuse to to stop trying. Which you know. Which, fuck, even Solas seems to know, going by the mildly disapproving look he gives you as you wander groggily over for morning stretches. And of course he disapproves; he probably knows the most about you other than Cole. Which. Admittedly is… almost… nothing. Ugh. You’re awful. And you’re going to wind up hurting Sera. Or, just as likely, she’s going to wind up hurting you, more viscerally. With arrows. Surely even your selfish mind could understand personal risk and stop this already.
Your distraction, or perhaps your soreness from “pick one: riding harts, riding Sera, or swinging the Inquisitor’s over-sized sword around like a frantic and terrified octopus,” has you clumsier than even you normally are. You fall over multiple times, including onto Solas once. On accident this time. Your frustration is probably apparent because instead of springing up and apologizing wildly, you just sort of flop there and groan.
“Are you… alright?” Solas asks, in a tone of voice that implies he knows damn well you’re not and is accustomed to ignoring it, however it’s getting increasingly difficult to actually do so.
“I’m a disaster person,” you reply, still laying face first on the ground, your waist and stomach flopped listlessly over his hips. “I’m the elven god of disaster.”
Solas pats you awkwardly on the back. “I don’t remember that one from my studies.”
“That’s because I’m such a disaster that all the records burned,” you say flatly, still into the ground. “Like my house.”
“The Dalish do not keep written records to begin with,” Solas starts, and you lift your head enough to glare at him.
“Don’t be semantic when I’m wallowing in self-pity.”
“Ah, of course.” He pats your bun, which has of course already begun to fray wildly. “There, there.”
You snort, then shove yourself off of him and onto the ground, reaching up to fix your hair. One day, they’ll design a hair tie that can actually keep it up reliably. Probably one laced with lyrium, since magic is the only thing that could possibly hope to control your damned hair. “You’re the worst. I should be talking to Cole.”
“You should,” he agrees. “I am certainly ill-suited to give advice in matters of the heart.”
You perk with curiosity, eager for a discussion that involves his shitty love life instead of yours. “No? Bad experience or no experience?”
He fixes you with a dour look that says he knows exactly what you’re doing. “I merely think I would make a poor adviser in this. Dorian, perhaps.”
“Yeah, let’s ask the Tevinter altus only attracted to men for advice on the intricacies in a relationship between two orphaned, low-class elven women.”
“See? I am not even good at advising on who to ask for advice,” Solas says, and you laugh.
“That’s okay, Solas,” you say, patting him condescendingly on the arm. “You’ve got other uses. Like helping me figure out how to hold that ‘cobra’ pose for longer than about thirty seconds.”
“Ah, yes,” Solas says dryly. “My greatest calling in life.”
You’ve just started breakfast when Sera finally arises. You’re not sure if anyone notices which tent she’s arising from—hopefully not—but you’re sure distracted when she stops outside it and stretches, yawning broadly. Her shirt is lifting just enough that you can see a sliver of stomach. Given how much you’ve seen of her in the last day, it shouldn’t have any impact on you at all, but somehow that all only makes it worse.
She plops down next to you with a bowl of whatever gloop Blackwall made. You’re being unflattering. It tastes good; it’s just completely indiscernible. It might as well be made of glitter and rainbows, however, as Sera wraps her arm cheerfully around your shoulders. “Morning, Em!”
She is the least subtle person ever, and it’s killing you. “Morning, Sera,” you mutter into your gloop, trying very hard not to look like someone thinking about sex.
“Don’t get up so early if yer gonna just be tired,” she advises, clearly misunderstanding the source of your sudden-onset attempt to sink into the ground. “No one here’s gonna mind if you sleep in a bit.”
It’s very tempting to fire back with the long list of things you have to do: taking care of the mounts, stretching with Solas to attempt to avoid being a pile of sore twisted muscles at the end of each day, now all this nonsense with swords, and oh yes, writing a fucking book. Also, you couldn’t sleep because she was in your tent, which is not something you can say for a number of reasons.
“I’m a naturally early riser,” you say, instead of literally any of that. You catch Solas rolling his eyes out of the corner of your vision, but no one else seems to have noticed.
Now that the sun is rising, it’s looking to be a bright and clear day, thank the Maker. It’s still a little bit crisp in the early morning, but overall you’re not missing Skinner’s jacket too much. You put on as much of your armor as survived your fight with the terror demon, and a cloak, but you’re feeling sorely underdressed after a week and a half of riding wearing leather armor. You feel lighter and more flexible for the lack of it, however, and for once riding isn’t too much of a chore… helped along by the fact you elected to ride Revas first instead of Tubby McBroadRibs. His canter is rougher, by a fair margin, but you’re accustomed to it. It’s easier to absorb with your legs, despite the extra bouncing, when you’re not straddling an absolute tree log of a hart.
The ahead party is Solas, Blackwall, and Cole, which is a weird group until you remember that the Inquisitor thinks primarily about defensibility. Two defenders with the group with you—a civilian—and Sera—recently injured—makes sense. Two people sensitive to distortions in the Veil riding ahead also makes sense. That it leaves you with the Inquisitor and the Seeker is just an unfortunate side effect. Very, very unfortunate.
You stay back from them, and Sera and Dorian inevitably sort of fall into a group with you. A more sensitive man might have tried to give you and Sera some privacy and distance, but fortunately, Dorian isn’t that socially aware. He chatters cheerfully nearby, some comments insightful and some probably insipid. You’re not sure; you’re not really paying attention. Because the beneficial side effect of the Inquisitor and the Seeker riding together is that neither of them appear to understand how elf ears work. A raised voice with that hushed quality of someone trying to be quiet and failing catches your attention immediately.
“She shouldn’t be anywhere near a sword, frankly. She’s a linguist, not a soldier.” Solas, it appears, isn’t the only one who takes issue with your new training routine of “take sword, panic, swing sword while panicking.” But you hadn’t expected Pentaghast to be your new stalwart defender. Maybe you should have, she seems rather convinced you’re going to accidentally kill yourself sooner than later.
“She needs to be able to defend herself,” the Inquisitor says, sounding like he’s repeated it about fifty times and is getting tired of doing so.
“She needs to not be in danger in the first place. She’s a civilian.”
Someone should really have told them by now how sharp elven ears are compared to humans, but you’re sure as fuck not going to be the first. Sera is ignoring them, instead engaging in Dorian’s idle prattle… the exact prattle that implies that he, despite not being much further from the Inquisitor than you are, can’t hear a thing they’re saying. You, instead, strain your ears to hear clearly over the pounding of hooves.
“She stopped being a civilian when she signed up with a military organization,” the Inquisitor says, and you can hear the sigh behind his words. “Corypheus doesn’t care if some of our people aren’t combatants. No one does. That’s why we send trained soldiers out with diplomatic and trade envoys. The more people we have who have some basic idea of how to protect themselves, the less casualties we’ll be dealing with. And I think we can all agree she would make a very bad casualty.”
“I’m amazed Leliana even agreed to let you take her out of Skyhold again,” the Seeker grumbles.
“Leliana agreed with my reasoning. Which should tell you something. When is the last time she agreed immediately with my instincts on anything? You can keep scolding me for bringing her if you want, but she’s here now. Lifting a sword isn’t going to break her in half. She’s got the stability of a wet noodle, but she’s clearly hard to seriously damage.”
“Our soldier seems to have managed it,” the Seeker says stiffly.
“And then he dies in his sleep in our custody! All the better to get her out of Skyhold!” the Inquisitor hisses, lowering his voice a bit more. Not that it helps; now that you’ve got the thread of the conversation, the cadence of their voices, no amount of whispering will throw you off. “You know how much tension she was in the middle of!”
Oh, now, this is very interesting indeed. You’d had suspicions about the Inquisitor’s motivations in bringing you out here. At least it doesn’t seem like he suspected you’d been causing trouble on purpose… just that you were an unwilling and unknowing figurehead of the tensions you’d been fueling. You drum your fingers idly along Revas’ saddle. So many lost opportunities… but unless he actually fixes the core problems, neither the mages nor the elves will settle themselves in your absence. And frankly, if he fixes the core problems, then your stunt will have absolutely worked.
“How much tension will we be in the middle of if we drag her out of the castle and she dies?” the Seeker counters, pulling you out of your considerations. “Not to mention that her life should not be a gamble we take to settle the elves!”
“Then you should be glad I’m teaching her the sword! Her fear instinct is freaking the fuck out and stabbing a demon to death with throwing knives, Cassandra! If anything, she’s in desperate need of some training, or she’ll just get herself killed. If the Chargers weren’t smart enough to give our ‘non-combatant’ armor, she might already be dead or crippled.”
You see the Seeker throw her hands up in frustration—or perhaps surrender. “Fine! You’re right. I just…” she sighs. “We are supposed to exist so someone like her never has to pick up a sword,” she says, and you’re surprised to identify the emotion in her voice as sadness. “She doesn’t have the temperament of a fighter. She is overly trusting. Haven’t you seen her with Cole? She has no experience with spirits; she simply befriended the first one she came across. That kind of innocence has no place on a battlefield. You’re right; she does need to be able to defend herself. But that speaks so ill of the world we’ve wrought.”
This. This is the funniest thing you’ve ever listened to. You focus on Revas and the road ahead of you, trying very hard not to laugh. Yes! Yes, Seeker Pentaghast, that’s you. Emma the linguist, trusting, friendly, innocent. Dear Maker.
“We haven’t wrought much of anything, yet,” the Inquisitor says firmly. “We didn’t tear the world asunder; that was Corypheus. And before that, even. We didn’t make the mages rebel, didn’t make Orlais unstable. We’re trying to restore order, but it’s a process.”
“If the Seekers had been doing their job properly, the mage rebellion would never have happened,” the Seeker sighs, and you find yourself agreeing, although for starkly different reasons. The Seekers are a joke. They have never policed the Templars properly, so far as you can tell.
Where were the Seekers in the years leading up to the Kirkwall incident? You were there in Kirkwall, six or seven years ago. It was already a mess then. Apostates across Thedas knew to avoid the madness of the area, thanks to the over-zealousness of Knight-Commander Meredith Stannard. There was no way apostates knew more about the state of the Circles than the fucking Seekers did. Her madness had been a fucking known problem since the damned 20s. There was a reason that your mother, in all your wanderings, never once took you near Kirkwall.
The Seekers are a joke, and they—and Miss Pentaghast—have more blood on their hands than you could dream of aspiring to.
“We can’t change the past, Cassandra,” the Inquisitor is saying. “We can only change the future. And in the future I want, we don’t lose Leliana’s pet linguist to her own violent impulses.”
The Seeker snorts. “Are we sure you’re the one to be teaching her, in that case? You’re still receiving lessons from me, after all.”
You can’t quite here what he mutters after that, but you can absolutely see his ears turning red from here as he grumbles under his breath. It’s slightly cute, which is disgusting; he’s not allowed to be even slightly cute in behavior. It threatens to make you physically ill.
Speaking of things that might make you ill, seems you’re a hot topic today, as your name pricks your ears again… this time from Sera and Dorian.
“—think I didn’t notice you coming out of her tent,” Dorian is saying, and you cringe. You knew that flimsy cover wouldn’t work; Dorian and Solas are the ones who put the damn tents up in the first place.
“Nothin’ wrong with a lil sleepover between friends,” Sera says cheerfully, and you pointedly try to ignore them as your own ears begin tinging red. The last thing you need right now is a reminder of your mistakes… or a reminder of how fun those mistakes were to make. Either one spells a frustrating day for you, so you try to ignore the two chattering birds and just focus on riding.
Despite yesterday being spent primarily dealing with the demons and the aftereffects of said demons, you’re making good time. This becomes abundantly clear when you see the rooftops of Montsimmard in the distance not long into the afternoon. The good time is attributed—generously in your opinion—to not having to spend as long caring for the mounts. Apparently, having a Designated Mount Bitch is actually accidentally a good strategy for fast travel. You hope that if the Inquisitor makes a habit of it, he at the very least doesn’t make a habit of you.
Montsimmard is a bit surreal for you, especially as you get closer. You don’t think you’ve been in the city ever since your stay in the Circle. It’s not that you’ve been consciously avoiding it… it’s that you’ve absolutely been subconsciously avoiding it. The closer you get, the itchier you feel, a sensation like walls closing in around you until you start making even Cole twitchy.
“Eyes in the walls.” That’s your thought, spoken out loud, enough to pull your focus to Cole. “Six walls, not four, floor and ceiling close in too, every side shrinking,” Cole mutters to himself as your group dismounts to head into the city. You’ll be staying in an inn inside the gates tonight, which isn’t helping the feeling like ants on your skin.
“It’s alright, Cole, that’s in the past,” Solas says, a low voice you recognize abruptly from all the times he’s used it on you. You look over sharply as Solas continues murmuring low, soft platitudes to a strained Cole. Those are your thoughts Cole’s echoing, aren’t they? But he’s comforting Cole as if he thinks him to be the source. And you’ve seen Cole get a bit lost in other people’s feelings before, but he does look very upset.
You’re distracted from your own fear, but Cole doesn’t look any better. Maybe your thoughts set off something of his own, something you didn’t know a spirit would have. Could have? Your mind is racing right along with ways to pry, before you abruptly stop and remind yourself… this is… just Cole. It’s Cole. Schemes are blatantly unnecessary, no matter how automatic they are to you. You make a mental note to just ask him about it later.
Unfortunately, without schemes to distract you, you’re just going to wind up thinking about the Circle again. It feels stupid to you, this shaky feeling in your limbs, glancing over your shoulder for a Templar that isn’t there. You went into the Circle fully voluntarily, as a citizen. Ostensibly, to do work for them, on magic tomes that needed work but were too valuable or dangerous to actually be sent outside the Circle. It was your own, conscious choice. You could have left at any time, even if it would have meant leaving the job uncompleted.
You were never a prisoner there. You don’t really have a right to be this jumpy about the experience. And yet…
At the inn, you’re abruptly struck with the realization that once again you’ll be in a room with Sera and the Seeker. This time, however, the Seeker doesn’t look any happier about it than you. Does she think you and Sera are going to fuck while she’s right there? …Well, then again, given Sera’s apparent lack of inhibitions vis-à-vis having sex where one could very easily be found out, perhaps it’s a valid fear. You, however, have no real intentions to spend the night indoors. Your nice comfortable bed will once again go to waste, because you’re not about to find out whether or not you have the willpower to say no to a quick tryst while the Seeker is in the bath, or something.
No, the second you’re checked into the inn, you slip out the front door. You don’t even bother making excuses first. It’s a fucking town, and you’ve been on the road for ten days. You hadn’t even expected to get this far in the journey, frankly; you’d figured something would have happened to cause you to bail out by now. You could honestly stand to do some shopping with all the gold burning holes in your pockets. Buy a nice meal that doesn’t come from an inn, maybe.
Unfortunately, it seems that Sera saw you slip out the door, because you’re no more than twenty paces away from the inn when she hits you, wrapping her arms around you from behind. You’re so jumpy that you almost somersault her over your back, stopping abruptly halfway through grabbing her shoulders once you realize who it is.
“Pretty girls shouldn’t explore the town alone,” she teases, and you roll your eyes, letting your arms relax like you’d just reached back for a totally normal, non-violent reason.
“It’s Montsimmard. The crime rate probably tripled just from us walking into town.”
“Oooh, are we doin’ a crime?” Sera says, sounding enthused.
“It’s Montsimmard,” you rationalize. “We’ll probably get arrested either way. When d’you think the last time they even saw an elf was?”
There is no alienage in Montsimmard. You’re pretty sure they ship them all to Val Firmin or Verchiel.
Sera rolls her eyes. “That jus’ means they’ll know we’re tourists! With big tourist purses.”
“So you’re saying we’re going to get mugged? By who, some noble’s nephew?” you ask with a snort.
“Hey, y’gotta be more careful around noble brats, not less,” Sera points out, and you have to agree with a nod as she finally releases your shoulders to just walk by your side. “Which is exactly why y’need an escort.”
“You’re just bored,” you accuse her, though you don’t actually make any move to stop her from following along. “So bored that you’re willing to accompany me as I shop for sand-proof socks.”
“No such thing,” she says with a sigh. “Trus’ me. I’ve looked. Jus’ go for really tall boots ‘n’ pray. Issat really what yer up to? Sock shoppin’?”
You shrug. “Yeah, more or less. I feel like this is the last time we’re getting an afternoon off for the next… eternity. And I’ve been in like, one city since I even signed up with the Inquisition.”
“If we keep makin’ good time, we might have a night in Val Firmin, but yer not wrong. Not a lot of places to spend yer coin in the Approach. Didn’t see any Darkspawn merchants last time I was there.”
You shudder at the mention of Darkspawn. You left the Inquisition hoping you wouldn’t see any demons and you wouldn’t see any Darkspawn. So far you’re one for one, and you don’t feel like your luck is going to hold out. “Don’t count on me to stab any of those to death for you,” you say with a shiver. “I’ve heard what their blood does.”
“It’s fine if y’just don’t get it in yer mouth. Or any cuts, I guess.”
“Yeah, just don’t get any blood in your mouth or on your injured person, in the middle of trying not to get stabbed to death,” you say, rolling your eyes. “Easy. Yeah, right, I was covered in demon goop yesterday.”
“Tha’s because yer anti-demon strategy is death by a million shitty ill-aimed stabs.”
“You don’t get to complain about my strategy,” you say loftily. “I saved your life. I’m your hero.”
She shoves your shoulder, and you stumble exaggeratedly. “Yeah, yer a regular Templar,” she says with a snort, and you grin. Your smart-ass retort, however, dies on your lips as someone else cuts in.
“No. She most certainly is not.”
Both you and Sera spin to see the sudden speaker, and you’re greeted by the sight of… just some… random… guard. Armor, but not Templar armor like you’d immediately feared. Just leather. Actually, on second glance, you kind of doubt she’s even a guard. Sellsword? Do they have those in Montsimmard? You squint at the woman, as if staring a bit more intensely will solve the mystery of who the fuck this lady is and why she’s bothering you. And why she’s giving you the kind of hate-filled glare you generally have to earn.
“I know exactly what she is. Alix Gagnon, you have a lot of fucking nerve showing up here.”