"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
I don't know what I'm supposed to do, haunted by the ghost of you
Time has no meaning anymore.
In the aftermath of the encounter, the color has leaked from the world, and she struggles to maintain her hold on reality. Food has no taste and so she stops eating. Drinks do not quench her thirst and so she stops trying. Sleep does not come easy and when it does, it is fitful and full of nightmares. It has not been long enough for such behaviors to drastically affect her, but there is a sharpness in her face again, the flesh pulled taut across her cheekbones. Her hazel eyes are dull, the flame within not able to reach the surface.
She doesn't leave the Pampas, cannot bring herself to pull her children from their home, but she finds herself lingering when she comes to the Island—especially when she sees that he is no threat to Adna and Sabbath. She doesn’t fear what he would do them, even though she is terrified of what he means to her.
She argues that the flight takes more out of her than before, and there is truth in that sentence.
Her body is covered in a thin sheen when she finally lands on the edge of the island and her breath comes heavy. She welcomes the weight of the exhaustion. Her landing is less graceful than usual, and she takes a few stumbling steps before she comes to a stop. Her head drops and she feels the cool breeze wrap around her. It is soothing, but it doesn’t reach her. She can barely feel the comfort of it, can barely relish it.
The sound of the gentle waves lapping up catch her attention and she angles her head toward it. She takes a few steps forward out into the ocean, letting the water rise up to her chest. The pressure of it is enough to drag her closer to reality than she has felt in days. She holds her battered wing—red dragon, she cannot bring herself to see the serpentine scales wrapped around her—close to her side and can feel where his fangs had punctured the flesh. She has not healed his marks on her. Not yet.
He could nearly sense her. He didn't have any other explanation for the way he'd slipped away from his children. Now he stood watching her from the shore, those familiar crimson-dipped legs settled in the water. Something had happened. He knew it even before seeing the wound, the bruises in her eyes.
It was not like her to be so isolated away when there were sick nearby. So still and hollow.
Leliana.
After watching for what seemed like a small eternity, he made his way to her. His feet pressed crescents into the sand, lining an unwavering path to her until his prints vanished with hers and joined her in the water. The trickle of the lazy tide was the only sound he heard above her breathing as it scrubbed away dried blood on his legs. Fresh blood slipped away with it unnoticed, the salt stinging comfortably in his permanent wounds.
He didn't say a thing, only hovered his nose near her hip, leaving space between them as he followed her spine. Too thin again. Why? Her coat was dull, her hair thin. She wreaked of her husband and he hated it. His mouth twisted with disgust before he smoothed it away, tucked it down deep where she didn't have to see how he hated her life. How he hated her happiness.
She wasn't happy now, though.
She wasn't healthy.
When the salt of the sea could no longer hide her injuries from him he hissed and jerked back, scrutinizing them sharply as an instant rage welled up inside him, burning brightly in his dark stare. His teeth clenched tight, jaw muscles pulsing, and his black eyes flew to her face. What the fuck was this? Why was she hurt and not healing it? Just like when Zoryn had--
Why the fuck are those from fangs like her husband wears?
He stared in her face and waited for an explanation, his legs trembling with the need to rip someone apart. He should've been there to protect her.
I don't know what I'm supposed to do, haunted by the ghost of you
She doesn’t flinch from him. Even though touch has been so difficult for her lately, she doesn’t flinch when he comes up her side, when he walks slowly up. She exhales slowly and with it, her golden light of healing unspools from her chest. It floods into him and it is nearly a relief to feel it move through her. It is nearly a relief to heal when it has been days since she has tried. It is even more a comfort to follow the usual paths of his body, to trace the veins she knows well, the wounds in all of the familiar spots.
He is not as injured as she has found him before, but she tends to what she does find.
She takes her time, focusing on him instead of the sting of saltwater in her wounds, focusing on him and him alone. Her breathing comes easier when she feels him there and, for the first time in days, she is able to feel the knot in her chest loosen, even a little. So much of her wants to fold into him, wants to collapse into him, bury her face into his mane and smell nothing but the familiar spice of him.
But she knows he is not hers anymore.
Maybe he never was.
The reminder stabs at her and she closes her eyes, breathing through the pain, all the different ways that her life has not turned out the way she expected it to—all the ways she has failed. When she finally opens them again, he is staring at her, and she tries to not think about how much it hurts to look at him. He has seen her wounds, she can tell, but she can’t bring herself to explain to him what happened.
Instead, she searches his face, her eyes bruised and her expression empty.
“How are you and your children, Dov?” She swallows. “And Heartfire. Has she healed?”
She’d rather this pain then having to explain how the rest of her life has crumbled around her.
Her healing fed into his blood so warm and familiar, pushing more ache to his heart. She was so stubborn, always bringing him back to health despite that it would just rip and rend again in a while. Every square inch of him was healed, deep within him and on the surface, skin repairing and resealing to the shards of bone thrusting out of his body. She couldn't reach the pain, though. She never could.
So damn stubborn and still not healing herself.
She opened her eyes, so hollow and making his heart hurt, and his attention fell to her lips. No real reason, but there they were. There was a time when he could take them, when he could push her down and shower her body in kisses both soft and fevered. When those wings would turn into sexy black gossamer or silk, drape over her gorgeous body for him. He could feel her under him. He'd nearly had her, she'd nearly been his. But he was too damn stupid. For once, he'd tried to be selfless instead of selfish and look where it got them.
"How are you and your children, Dov? And Heartfire. Has she healed?"
It felt like a slap and he threw his gaze away from her. Like a violent yank back into the fucked up reality. Probably so fucked up because he fucked it up.
"They're fine," he clipped shortly. He was furious though, brought back to it now. "Why aren't you healing yourself, Leliana?" His teeth were gritted and he waited for an answer that he knew would be so stupid and unsatisfying. He didn't turn back to her, eyes out over the water and body stiff.
I don't know what I'm supposed to do, haunted by the ghost of you
He breaks through the fog—just a little, but more than she’s felt in weeks. It’s a point of clarity that touches her mind, splitting open the clouds and pouring down into her. She nearly blinks against it, nearly feels the saltwater and the brine clear from her mouth so that she can breathe. She can forget in this moment. Forget that she’s broken and beaten and falling apart. Forget that she’s hollowed out.
His eyes go to her lips and her breath hitches, just a little, her heart stuttering to life in her chest. It’s a breath of time. A moment where it flutters wildly at the look in his eyes. An electric shock to her heart that he accomplishes with just a look. With just his presence being so near to her.
The moment stretches, and she wants to get lost in it.
Where she is just a girl and he is just a boy and he is looking at her with liquid heat.
But it snaps and recoils violently when she asks her question and he looks away. She feels herself slipping away again, regret and guilt and that wild, reckless joy falling between her fingertips. Her gaze falls downward, the green and the gold of her eyes dimming as she feels the fog roll back in again.
He asks why she hasn’t healed again and she can’t answer him the way he wants. “I don’t deserve to heal,” she says quietly, her eyes finally looking up again and to the horizon. She deserves to wear this badge of pain and sorrow. She deserves to remind herself about what a fool she is.
But then he asks about her wound and she trembles slightly, remembering that moment when he had found her. When he had risen over her and that rhythm that had once meant love meant something else entirely. Her eyes shutter and she pulls herself inward, finding refuge in the shadows of her heart.
“Don’t make me say it,” she pleads quietly. “I can’t. I can’t make it real.”
Something shifted in the air between them, changed both their stances more relaxed and yet not at all relaxed. He could nearly feel himself being pulled closer, swept up in her gravity. It made him want to yank her in against him, remind her of a night in his cave after she'd found him but hadn't allowed him to have all of her.
It was almost regretful when he snapped the moment in two, shattered that looking glass that had nearly taken them both back in time. A better time. It was for the best, though. He'd already destroyed her who-knows-how-many times, and he was trying not to do it again. He was trying not to do it to Heartfire too.
It was what he always did. It was bound to happen.
"I don't deserve to heal," she answered him quietly and he scowled at her, his eyes flashing. The fuck she didn't. But he held his heated argument and waited for her to answer his other question, his body tensing and coiling up. "Don't make me say it. I can't. I can't make it real."
That fuckin' bastard.
His eyes sharpened and bladed with hate, pinned to the injury on her neck with a snarl, jaws clenched tight. He shot to her like a bullet, throwing his weight against her shoving her down in the shallow water. He pressed against her, holding her down as he roughly scrubbed the salt water over her wound with his nose to clean it. She was so damn stubborn and impossible, and he argued at her the whole while, his words clipped and growling.
"You DO deserve to heal, Leliana. There is never a reason you shouldn't heal yourself. You deserve fucking everything, anything in this damn world you want. Why the fuck you ever settled for this guy-- I swear you can be so fuckin' stupid sometimes. What the fuck am I going to do with you?" he snapped, still cleaning her injury.
Nothing. He couldn't do anything with her. Every time he tried to stay near, protect her, she vanished.
she said “oh, I know that love is all about the wind how it can hold me up and kill me in the end”
What Leliana wouldn’t give to go back to those times.
What she wouldn’t give for but a momentary do-over—a chance to get it right.
It flashes in her eyes, across her features, that painful desire to find the start once more. To be nothing but the calm one watching her comet of a sister light up the night sky. To be nothing but a shy healer walking through crowds and easing wounds, suppressing hurts wherever she could find them.
But such a girl is a long ways away from who she is now, from what she has become.
And, despite it all, she finds that she cannot regret it. She cannot regret the hurt and the ache and the way she has fallen so deeply in love, her beautiful daughters. She will never regret what brought them alive.
She doesn’t expect his sudden movement, even when she saw that sudden and dangerous shift in his eyes, and she inhales sharply as he presses into her. She folds to her knees because she doesn’t have the strength to stand up against him and she closes her eyes, a frown building between her brows and tension pulling at the edges of her mouth. She trembles against the violence and the sudden wave of panic that it brings in her—the panic that sears through the fog, the rare anger that is suddenly sparked into life.
“No,” she says, and the word is almost a whisper, a soft murmur, a moan. Then suddenly: “No.” Firmer, her eyes opening and something like steel glinting beneath them. “No!” and she pushes against him. Tears fall down her cheeks. “No, you don’t get to lecture me. You don’t get to talk down to me.”
Her expression is raw, her injured wing clung tight to her sides. “I have never been enough, Dovev. Never.” Her voice trembles and then finds its feet, growing more and more steady. “Not for you. Not for Vulgaris. Never.” She shakes her head, her own words finding purchase in her chest.
“All I have ever done is love you and watched you love others. Watched as the ones I loved most walked away or turned into someone I don’t recognize anymore. You don’t get to lecture me for trying to find some piece of joy.” More tears, her thin face shaking as she gasps for air, shaking and struggling for oxygen. She opens her mouth and then closes it, closing her eyes as she fights for clarity. “All I have ever wanted was a family. I wanted the kind of family I never had as a child. I wanted children.”
The fight leaks from her and she sinks down into the water, the sudden outburst draining her.
“I thought I could find it. I thought I had found it.”
She closes her hazel eyes as a tear falls down her cheek and she listens to the sound of the tide.
"No," she said, softly at first in almost a whimper. But there was so much more in her and he pushed harder to find it. She was so much stronger than she was perceived. Only the strongest could do what she does. She put herself through it day after day, withstood the pain in herself and focused on her family no matter what it took. She became what everyone else needed of her and never did a damn thing for herself.
"No," she got firmer. "No!" She pushed against him and he relented, leaning back and panting, still scowling at her as he listened. "No, you don't get to lecture me. You don't get to talk down to me." His heart pinched and swelled as he watched her, as if he could see a withered and weak flower suddenly bloom alive again. She was perfect, why couldn't she see it?
A ghost of a smile barely shaded his mouth as she continued, held there even under the attack of her words. His eyes were tired and he didn't hide the hurt he felt at everything she said. He deserved it, they both knew it. He deserved all of it and more. If only he could take it from her, feel all that pain so she didn't have to. So he took it like a well-deserved beating, hoping that it somehow eased hers even a little.
She fell quiet, drained and sinking down in the water with him, their legs folded and soaking. His hair was matted and clinging wetly to his bone faceguard and neck. He just watched her, his sides heaving from the exertion. The sickness and fight drained his energy too, though he remained where he was to reserve what was left of it. Just in case he needed it.
"I thought I could find it. I thought I had found it."
"You won't find it without me," he murmured under his breath, the sound of water drowning it out as he shifted near enough to reach out and brush away the trail of tears left on her cheek. He sighed and let his head drift down into the shallow waves, pillowed into a bed of loamy sand. Exhausted. Resting.
"You wanna talk about us? We can talk about us. Because you got it all wrong, Leliana. You've always been enough. You'll always be enough. You got it all wrong."
she said “oh, I know that love is all about the wind how it can hold me up and kill me in the end”
He strips away her defenses, strips away the calm exterior and leaves her raw and open and it hurts but it’s also the closest she has felt to being alive in weeks. The hurt in his eyes is echoed in her own; the ache and regret and want—that desperate need to find the sweet beginning they had once shared. He sinks down into the water next to her and she leans into his touch as his mouth finds her cheek, holding it there for a second so that she can just linger, savoring that familiar feel of his comforting touch.
But it doesn’t last forever and she sighs softly as his head comes to rest in the water.
She feels as scrubbed clean as the wound on her wing and she shifts, unable to fight against the need to just lie next to him. It feels so natural to rest here, the water softly washing up over her legs and between them, lapping gently around their bodies. Her shoulder rests against his and her wings flare up and over them both, the red down soaked from the saltwater and the brine but drying beneath the tropical sun.
“I don’t even know what ‘us’ means anymore,” she confesses quietly, curling her head and resting her cheek against his neck. She cannot stop the way her thoughts go back to that tumultuous time in their life, to the way they constantly had to fight against fate, the way they raged against it—the storms that continued to blow into them again and again. Every obstacle placed between them and happiness.
She closes her eyes, tears falling more softly down her cheeks and she breathes in that familiar spice of him. It is so easy to pretend that they are once again young and curled around each other in the meadow, or in that hidden cave of his in Ischia. It is easy to pretend that the world is melting away and it is just the two of them. “Would it change things if I had it right?” Her brow furrows slightly and she exhales.
“Just tell me one thing,” she can’t bring herself to look him in the eye, and so she doesn’t.
She calmed down too, both of them spent from the burst of emotions. She was all scrubbed up though, that scab on her heart all scraped off and bare and bleeding like the wound on her wing. Then she shifted in the water next to him, settling in beside him. It felt so natural to hold her in close, and he nearly did without thinking, but he held himself in place and focused on catching his breath. He could feel all of her so damn close to him, though. He could smell her, he could remember everything from before.
"I don't even know what 'us' means anymore," she said quietly after blanketing her wet wings over the both of them, leaning into his shoulder. He swallowed, counted his breaths, and she leaned closer to rest her cheek on his neck. Fuck, she made it so hard to just lay here like he didn't feel a damn thing. "Would it change things if I had it right?"
He didn't answer that one, but he couldn't just lay so still. Even this close to her, he felt too far away. Had there not been Cerva before her, she would've been his greatest obsession. She'd never have been out of his sight, never away from his side. She would've been his entirely and no one else's. Even their kids would've been competition for her attention and he likely would've barely tolerated them.
But he'd had Cerva. And his beautiful obsession was dead because of him.
"Just tell me one thing," she started again quietly. "Did you love me back then?"
"Yes," he answered in a firm murmur without hesitation. If he was even capable of the emotion, he'd felt it for her. And still did. He didn't add anything more though. He'd showed his love by breaking her time and time again, one thing after another until she finally left him on the mountain. And he finally showed her love in the right way, by staying the hell away from her and letting her have a real chance at life. At the life she wanted.
The only life he could offer anyone was a third level of hell.
He closed his eyes and let the self-hate consume him, leave him prone and useless in the water next to her. It rolled off him in thick waves to cling to him like an aura. He clenched his teeth and breathed in tiny little breaths that barely raised his chest at all, and he felt the heat of silent tears join the sea and wash away.
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