Fanfic writer with a passion for exploring romantic relationships // Fandoms: Horizon Zero Dawn, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age // Fandom: Dragon Age, Horizon Zero Dawn, Mass Effect
Just realized I never posted this in full on Tumblr. This was one of the earliest things I wrote for the DA fandom and gosh well it turns out IT IS PERTINENT AGAIN NOW.
Post-Trespasser, perhaps 1 month after. I also just wrote a direct response to the teaser trailer, which is here. ~3800 words. Read on AO3 below: tinyurl.com/solavellanhell2
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Lavellan sometimes came awake from dreams in which her lover watched her sadly from across an endless distance. If they were more than simple dreams, she could not say, for every time she reached for him, he vanished into nothing. Still she searched, and dreamed, and waited for a way to change the Dread Wolf’s heart. – Epilogue from Trespasser
When Elia finally finds him, he’s not what she expects. Or perhaps he’s just not what she hopes.
He glances over his cloaked shoulder at her. “You should stop searching for me,” he says.
His blunt words are a slap in the face. Pride, he calls himself; unapologetic arrogance, more like, but she supposes that’s not as pithy an appellation. He couldn’t be more dismissive unless he refused to look at her altogether.
She strides towards him, picking up speed until she’s running, sprinting, and still he watches her coolly from across the forest.
She runs, grass flowing into water melting into snow and ice and flowers beneath her bare feet. She ignores it all, her eyes fixed on the back of his neck.
Eventually Elia stops; no matter how long she runs or how fast, he remains out of reach across the sandy dunes. Finally he turns to face her, his hands clasped easily behind his back. “Stop looking,” he suggests. “Don’t waste the years that are left to you.”
The years that are left to you. He speaks of her eventual death like it means nothing to him. His presumption takes her breath away. He’s so damned cold and detached. This is not the man she knew – or thought she knew.
She thinks back to when they first met. He’d been humble, helpful, a touch pedantic but nevertheless fascinating in his talk of the Fade. His arrogance started bursting through shortly after, but she ignored it, accepted it as part and parcel of loving such an esoterically intelligent man. She’d point out his more pompous moments and he would smile, chuckle, pull her close, kiss her softly like they had all the time in the world.
It was an act.
She knows this now; of this she is certain. After he stepped through the eluvian, leaving her maimed and alone at the feet of a handful of petrified qunari, she hid from this truth for months. She denied it until long after he was gone, clinging to her rationalizations until they became poison. A potent combination of Cole’s patience, Dorian’s humour and Cassandra’s pragmatism eventually dragged her out from under the weight of her disillusionment.
“The balance you need for a lucid dream is like standing on the precipice of climax,” Solas says. “The pleasure rises inside of you, but you must hold it back if you wish to truly enjoy it. It is a heightened state of torturous ecstasy.”
“So you want me to learn lucid dreaming by withholding orgasms?” she asks in a strained voice.
“Exactly,” he replies in satisfaction. “When you feel you are about to come, you will tell me to stop. Then we will repeat. You will not come until I decide you are ready.”
“And when will that be?” Elia retorts. Her voice is sharp, she knows, but her arousal is such that she’s feeling irate already.
“When you have learned this lesson, vhenan,” he whispers.
I find it odd how all of the memes about Solas are how he’s such a liar. In fact, Solas bends his words into pretzels to avoid lying. It’s clear from how he coaches his words that he abhors it. Hence him going off on Blackwall when they learn the truth about Rainier. It wasn’t until he’s chewing out Blackwall for all his shortcomings that he sees a reflection of his own past actions and is willing to apologize.
Solas’ hatred of lying appears in Trespasser as well, when Lavellan confronts him and he defends himself with “only a lie of omission.” He thinks that not telling everything isn’t the same as deceiving, or tries to convince himself. If there was an opportunity to flat out accuse him of being the Dread Wolf, he’d have had to come clean. But of course there isn’t.
I can only hazard a guess that his visceral need to coach his words and reveal just enough that could damn him even though he need not is due to growing up under the Evanuris. He despises them, calls them false gods, liars. To lie is to be the same as the Evanuris.
Solas hates lying, and in his mind he never is.
Totally agreed with this. In all my fic of him, he abhors the thought of lying to Lavellan and phrases his words very carefully so that he doesn’t do so. “Bending his words into pretzels to avoid lying” is very apt. Lies of omission, yes, but he never wanted to lie to the Inquisitor or her people. I think that deep down, he knows his claim of “a lie of omission” is only a feeble and insufficient defence, and the knowledge of this is yet another burden he carries.
The Sharper Edge of Love: Romance, Sex, and Fanfic 