Ooh yes what an excellent prompt for @dadrunkwriting ! Thanks!

I doubled up and filled a Fictober 2018 prompt as well – this dialogue line: “Take what you need.”

Read on AO3 instead. Smut warning. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

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When a person’s life spans thousands of years, is memory a blessing or a curse?

Solas considers himself a being with a particularly good memory. Some elves who began as spirits would forget over time what it was to be a spirit, but Solas never had. Epitomizing a singular virtue had a certain simplicity that he sometimes misses. He knows he sometimes acts as though spirits have all the answers, but the truth is more complex; for some spirits, answers and solutions are not their concern.

This is a simplicity he sometimes longs for so badly that it hurts.

Alas, Solas’s memory is very clear about the grim but necessary path he has to walk. What did surprise him, though, was the eventual realization that there was one significant thing he had forgotten.

He’d forgotten what it was to feel wanted.

Leading a rebellion was a solitary role. Centuries of being reviled as the Dread Wolf, being ridiculed by those he had once called friends, being rejected by those too afraid or indifferent to stand for what was right… It would have crushed Fen’Harel’s resolve if not for the walls he’d constructed around himself to keep the doubts at bay.

Unfortunately, not even the sturdiest of walls could repel the chilling creep of loneliness.

But now, Solas is not alone. Now, he travels across Thedas as part of a pack. Now he is consulted – even respected? – for his expertise in matters of magic and the Fade.

Now, he spends every night curled in Elia Lavellan’s unequivocally welcoming embrace.

Solas loves Elia for so many reasons. He loves her gentle manner and her sharp mind. He loves her slow and careful thoughtfulness, and he loves the speed with which she casts her spells, the crackling energy of her magic as it flees her fingertips. But her most seductive trait, the trait that lures him more than anything else, is her open-armed acceptance. Elia doesn’t want anything from him. She just wants… him.

Solas knows he shouldn’t have encouraged her unequivocal love. He will only disappoint her. But the joy in her face when she looks at him is more than his ancient heart can resist. He’s allowed himself to be engulfed by the tidal wave of her affection, but he has no doubts that this is going to lead to trouble.

He hadn’t anticipated that he would encourage this particular kind of trouble, however.

She moans softly, and he hushes her with a thumb on her lips. “Quietly, vhenan.”

“I know,” she gasps, then moans again, and Solas smiles fondly. He presses his lips to her cheekbone. “You must be quiet, or else we’ll have to stop,” he whispers.

He braces one palm on the cool stone of the castle’s wall behind her head. Meanwhile, his other hand continues its delicate dance between her legs. They’re in the garden pagoda, a most conspicuous location indeed, but at this hour of night, the only people awake are the guards on the ramparts. And the only way the guards will spot them is if they call attention to themselves.

Hence this little game of silence.

Solas’s finger is cocooned in Elia’s slippery heat. He touches her with a torturous tenderness, his finger stroking her swollen little pearl with long, slow caresses.

Elia presses her hips toward his hand. “Remind me why we can’t just cast a fade cloak?” she asks, her voice soft but strained.

He presses his lips to her ear. “Where would be the fun in that?” he whispers, then trails his lips along the tendon in her neck.

“You’re terrible,” she whimpers, and Solas chuckles before silencing her with a kiss. Her fingers rise to dig into the back of his neck, her hips thrusting eagerly toward his teasing caress, and with every urgent movement of her hips, his own urgency rises in tandem, thrumming through his limbs and lifting his cock to full attention.

Her tongue tangles with his own, her teeth a punishing little nip on his lower lip, and Solas gasps quietly against her lips. This impatience, this rush, it’s another thing he’d forgotten – a callback to his youth, to a time when his body was new and strange and so full of feeling that he needed to expel it all at once. But Solas knows his body now, and despite the clamour of lust that rises like lava in his belly, he can hold his patience for her.

He crowds her firmly back against the wall and savours the desperate little mewl that trembles from her throat. “Take what you need, Elia,” he murmurs. “Hold back nothing but the volume of your voice.”

She releases a soft and breathy little laugh. “You,” she pants, “are such a smooth talker.”

Solas hums with satisfaction against the juncture of her neck and shoulder. The thrusting of her hips is hard but sinuous, a hungry undulation that brings his finger more firmly against her clit. He continues to stroke her fervently, his finger slipping down along the heated length of her folds, then back up to swirl around that exquisite little bud.

Her eyes are tightly shut, and Solas can see the rising of her rapture in the tilting of her eyebrows. He slips a second finger into her smalls to join the first, his stroking fingers framing her clit with a sweet relentless pressure.

Elia presses her lips together hard, but a sharp moan of pleasure and distress escapes her nonetheless, and Solas brushes her cheekbone with his nose. “Hush, vhenan. Quietly,” he reminds her.

“I can’t,” she blurts, her voice tight with desperation. “Solas, please, I can’t-”

Her voice is as sharp as the edge of a knife. Solas swiftly raises one hand to her mouth, his fingers gently curving over her lips, and Elia’s reaction is instantaneous: as soon as his hand muffles her, she arches her back viciously and releases a high-pitched keen of pleasure into his palm.

She writhes between his body and the wall, her own hand rising to press his hand more firmly against her lips, and Solas fights to control the harshness of his breathing as his lover’s cry of bliss fills his palm. Once her trembling body starts to still, he gently lifts his hand from her face.

“Come, Inquisitor,” he whispers. “Let us go upstairs.” Elia’s rapture is like the breaking of a ward, and if Solas doesn’t whisk her away to a private place soon, he may forget why he should.

Elia pants against his lips. Then she reaches down and tugs his hands from her trousers. She lifts his hand to her mouth, then carefully sucks her own juices from his fingers.

A dragon’s roar of desire rushes from his scalp clear down to his toes, and his cock pulses toward her like a magnet. He’s lightheaded with lust, breathless with it, helpless to do anything but stare at the plumpness of her lips around her fingers, imagining her lips wrapping around something infinitely more enjoyable…

She smiles slowly at him, and through the blood pounding in his ears, he hears her whispered taunt. “Upstairs?” she asks. “Where would be the fun in that?”

Her smile is devilish and her aquamarine eyes are glowing with intent, and Solas’s besotted heart thrums madly in his chest.

This is trouble, he thinks. But the burning affection in his Dalish lover’s eyes is the most tempting kind of trouble he can imagine.