while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
They are inseparable in the dark, knit together by flesh and starlight, seamless with his body pressed to hers and his mouth against her face, her neck, her throat. If she is being honest with herself, it is not just fear that flutters in her belly, not just fear that makes her skin ache and her bones tremble against him. It is the heat and the closeness and the echo of Leliana’s confession, of the man who pressed kisses to her skin and longing into her chest. But this, this is not it. Exist is certain.
He purrs and she pins her ears again, though she does not force him back, does not forfeit his lips against her skin, not just yet. You weren’t looking hard enough, he says, pushing his mouth against her forehead, brushing the copper aside to reclaim her burning, emerald eyes, you didn’t know to look for me. She does push him away now, not hard enough to move him, but enough to reclaim less than an inch of cold night air between them. “I wasn’t looking at all,” she tells him with a frown, her voice soft and sharp, uncertain and unwilling, “I don’t make a habit of looking for the things that go bump in the night.”
It isn’t entirely true, especially not now, especially less true with his mouth pressed to her forehead.
But the lie comes easily enough.
He disappears into the night and his absence is so sudden, so unexpected, so jarring that she stumbles back a few steps before she catches herself. Her ears unpin from her mane, slipping uncertainly forward as she lifted her head to peer out into the dark. But there was nothing out there, no shapes, no sound, not even the wind in the trees. It is eerie and she is unsettled, her refined copper face drawn tight in long lines of slender bone and hollows made to capture shadow. The first thing to find her, to break the stillness, is a long, unsettling shiver that races along her spine. It settles in her bones like the cold of deep winter, carving out the marrow until there is only fear inside of her.
It is like waking up in a nightmare, in a world that is too dark, too quiet, all wrong. It is like being at the mercy of waking up. If he were to slip back against her, to push his mouth against her ear and fill her up with his heat and the thrum of his voice, the world is gone, it is just us now, she might believe him. Fear is strange in that way. All consuming and illogical, a stain on everything it touches.
She almost calls out to him – not for him, never for him – but she is stubborn and she is silent, even in her fear. Instead she is stiff and erect, elegant like carved copper in the way that she strains against the dark, against the fear that he has planted in her belly. It is only when he eases alongside her again, coming from an entirely new direction (and it takes everything inside her not to show the surprise she feels in her chest), that she softens and settles and finds she can breathe again. He doesn’t touch her though, not this time, and the absence forces a different kind of ache into the curve of her chest.
I named myself. He says, and he is pleased, she can see it in the flash of his sharp eyes. But his story unsettles her, furrows her brow and forces her back one, two steps. But he follows her closer and so she stills again, those green eyes narrow and sharp against the cruel beauty of his face. He tells her how he hurt the mare, laughs, tells her that they have the same eyes, and she flinches. “You’re cruel.” She says, and it isn’t a question, isn’t an accusation though it should be. And then, warily, “Had?”
He is calm and quiet, breathing easily in the dark in deep contrast to the way her sides heave and her heart beats a tattoo against her chest. But she does not move to close the distance between them, does not move to press her lips to his face, to encourage him to do the same. She is only still, only wary. Why Exist? Her brow furrows and she turns her face slightly toward the dark, slightly from his eager eyes. “I would’ve died on the mountain,” she says, and those green eyes shift to find him again, “but someone told me to exist.” A pause and she watches him appraisingly, indecisively, still until she isn’t, until suddenly her lips are pressed against the curve of his jaw, the heat of wet-gold skin. “So I did,” she breathes against him, pulling away after one reluctant moment, “and I am.”
Then, suspiciously, and with bruises in her eyes, “What happened to her?”
What happens to someone who trusts you.
Exist