they are wicked things, leliana and dovev

[leliana]

I don't know what I'm supposed to do, haunted by the ghost of you

It is a good thing that Leliana cannot read minds because his thoughts would break her.

She is already dangerously close to the edge, held together with nothing but strength of will and the barest of threads—the barest hold on sanity for the sake of her daughters. Still, for all of the fears that beat like thunder in her breast, all of the suspicions that rise from the back of her mind to cloud her vision—he is but a child and she cannot bring herself to put the weight of her sorrow on his shoulders.

He blinks and changes his eyes and it’s enough to shake her from the fog. She gives her head a little shake, trying to force clarity on herself, and focus on him anew, trying to shed anything else.

She gives the barest hint of a smile at his insistence that he could be worse and she wants to draw him to her chest. For all of her struggle with physical affection since the attack, it has not yet contaminated her maternal instincts and she wants to shield this boy, wants to protect him. Perhaps it is because he looks like a young Vulgaris and, despite the shaky truth in the back of her head of his parentage, she yearns for a piece of her once serpentine husband. She longs for a piece of him that is yet undamaged, that is not cruel.

“It’s going to be okay,” she whispers, for his benefit and maybe even her own. She forcefully wipes her expression clean, leaving it kind and soft—even if the effort of erasing her grief exhausts her. “Despair,” she says his name softly and it twists her heart. When he mentions her mother, she considers asking more questions, but he looks worn out and tired, and she doesn’t want to know—not really.

Instead she just takes a small step toward him.

“I do,” and for the first time, a genuine smile radiates across her face like sunshine. “I have three daughters. Adna, Sabbath, and Malca.” Her heart and joy. Her anchors. The gravity of her life. “They will be back soon, I am sure,” she says, despite the fear in her heart that it has been days since she has seen her eldest daughter. “Would you like to find a place to lie down? You can stay with me, if you would like.”

@[despair]

i love him too much it's not fair