Got the devil in my eye, Feel the devil by my side; Leliana

[leliana]

I see a ghost out on the water; I swear it has my face
I bend and drink the lonely down, the lonely down

He is similar enough to the ghost the haunts her that it nearly wrecks her.

It nearly unravels her until she’s flung wide, the thread that make her up coming undone at an alarming rate. It’s close enough that she can almost ignore the confusion in his eyes. The way that his head tilts and eyes glaze over. The way that they look at her but somehow don’t see her. As if she is nothing but a ghost. As if she wasn’t even really there.

But he’s at her side so quickly that she can’t breathe.

She can’t stop to process.

Because his mouth is in her like he owns it, and it’s so similar to that first time they cradled against one another that her heart breaks. It shatters in her chest completely and she sinks into the tumultuous waves of him, getting drunk on the fire of his passion.

She tips her head back and revels in the touch for a moment, but the joy that swells in her at being near him wars at a sorrow that spreads like wildfire through her, tears forming in the corner of her hazel eyes and then sliding slowly and surely down her mahogany cheeks.

She knows she is not the same girl he left behind. She is not the young and naive girl he found in the meadow. Her heart, although it aches for him, no longer belongs to him alone and even standing here so close that she can feel the heat radiating off of him, smell everything that brings a tidal wave of emotion crashing over her, part of her is gone.

Part of her is curled next to the scaled stallion with guarded eyes and a gentle touch. She is standing with her cheek on his cool back, feeling the echoes of home in his pulse.

Dovev left and tore a hole through her.

Vulgaris found her and filled it.

But even if she had not found and loved another. Even if she had not started a family with the scaled stallion, the serpentine girl growing in her stomach, she knows him. She knows his touch.

And she knows when she is with nothing but the shell.

His mind, his beautiful and precious mind, has been tampered with before and she remembers what it’s like for the curtain to be lifted. She knows when someone has broken past walls they shouldn’t, and although every part of her wants to ignore the signs and deny, she knows in her heart of hearts that something is not right. That something is terribly wrong.

“Dovev,” she says his name like a prayer, like a plea, and she pulls back from his touch, the ache in her growing. “Say my name,” her voice is so quiet at this request that she is almost not sure that he will be able to hear it. She almost hopes that he doesn’t because she is not sure that she can bear to hear him admit that he does not know what it is.

I’m gonna stand here in the ache until the levee on my heart breaks