Sunset ^beta

"Hey," Leliana says gently as she sits down in the dirt next to Solona. The night is mild and clear, and the moon is almost full. Even this far from the campfire, it isn't cold or dark, and that's only in part because Solona has her own, much smaller fire going to mix her potions over.

"Hello," Solona responds without looking up from her work. Her right hand holds a flask by the neck, slowly swirling it above the flame cupped in her left hand. When the liquid in the flask starts to bubble, the flame sputters and weakens. When the bubbling stops, it flares back up again. It's such a simple, elegant way to keep the temperature constant, and even though Leliana has seen Solona do this many times now, she still finds it fascinating to watch.

It's little moments like these, even more than the heated battles where whole hordes of darkspawn fall to barrages of ice and lightning, when Leliana feels with most clarity the truth of those lines of Transfigurations: that magic is a gift from the Maker and exists to serve His children, not to harm them. When the Blight is over, she'd like to whisk Solona away to a house with a kitchen and bake batches upon batches of warm, sweet pastries that always rise and never burn. She can already picture the two of them laughing as they work and kissing smudges of sugar off each other's fingers.

It would be wonderful to just exist peacefully with her love for a while, if the Wardens will allow it. Violence has its uses and even its joys, but the idea of taking something as beautifully complex as magic and reducing it to something that's only good for violence is more than a little sad. Everyone, mage or not, ought to be free to go where the Maker calls them and use the talents He has gifted them according to their own conscience. For that reason alone, Leliana has never liked the Circles much.

Now, she's starting to think that isn't even the worst thing about them.

"Is everything all right?" she asks Solona. "I'm here for you, if you need me."

"Thank you, but all's well enough," Solona says, still addressing the potion she's mixing instead of the woman speaking to her. "We should be back in Redcliffe tomorrow. We're making good time. Our friends from the tower have been complaining about the pace, but I think they'll hold up for that long. If Ser Harrith's done his job, we'll be returning to a properly restrained abomination and not another wave of undead. Even if he hasn't, our combined group ought to be able to handle it, with or without help from the village."

"Oh? Is that what you're planning to write down in your journal this evening?" Leliana teases. Solona finally looks up at her, her brow knit with bemusement, so she explains, "Dearest, I'm not asking for a report on the general state of affairs. I'm asking about you."

"Ah." Solona smiles at that, sudden and bright. "I apologize. I didn't mean to neglect you, I just wasn't sure if you..." She stops midsentence and bites her lip. "Sorry."

"You weren't sure if I what?"

"Don't worry about it. I was overthinking things, that's all. We can go to bed a little later, if you still want to. I only have a few of these left." Turning her attention back to her brewing, Solona snaps her hand shut to quench the flame, then lightly ices the neck of the flask to cool it down before fastening a stopper over it and setting it to her right among a growing collection of finished potions. To her left sit three more flasks filled with liquid and undissolved powders. Solona selects one of them, rekindles the flame in her palm, and starts the process over. Every movement of her hands is confident and precise.

"That still doesn't answer my question, dear one."

"Which question?"

"The one about how you're feeling."

"I'm fine," Solona says. "Why? Have I done something to make you think otherwise?"

"Not at all. That's what worries me. I know it can't have been easy to go back to the place where you grew up and see it like that. Whatever you're feeling, you don't have to hold it in."

"I'm not feeling anything in particular. It's not like I had any friends left there."

"Left?" Leliana asks, because once she sees the thread, she can't not pull it.

"Well, I didn't exactly have very many in the first place."

"I'm sorry."

"Oh, don't be! I deserved it! I was a terrible child, an absolute spoiled brat." Solona smiles sheepishly. "I used to just — I argued with everyone. Enchanters, sisters, Templars, didn't matter. I got so worked up I yelled, sometimes, because I thought I was right and no one was listening. And nothing ever came of it, because I was a good student and the First Enchanter liked me. It was utterly miserable for everyone."

"I don't know much about Enchanters or Templars, but I have trouble understanding how anyone could be surrounded by holy sisters for any length of time and not argue with them." Leliana mirrors her smile, though she isn't sure that Solona will see her doing so when she's so focused on the potion.

"The other apprentices didn't, because they were taught not to. All anyone ever did to me was yell back."

There's a lot going unsaid there. Leliana isn't sure that asking about any of it directly would be well-received, but she doesn't want this conversation to end just yet, either. It isn't often that Solona talks even this openly about herself. "What changed?"

"I grew up, that's all. Maybe something someone said finally got through to me, one of the many, many warnings about my future and where I was headed. And there were examples all around me, as I got older. But a lot of it was just maturity."

"It isn't immature to grieve," Leliana tries. "After everything that just happened, if you needed to cry — or to yell — no one would hold that against you."

"No one here would, maybe," says Solona, her sweet voice suddenly tinged with bitterness. "But that doesn't matter, because I'm fine. Why would I be upset? I didn't get upset over Harrowings. I know what those are now, what it means when people don't come back. It means that they turned into abominations and then died. How is this worse? Because it happened off-schedule? Because it happened out in the— not even out in the open. Still behind the tower walls. I'm so used to that being the whole world, but it isn't. No one out here is going to care even after all that, and I'm part of this world now, so I shouldn't care either."

"I care," Leliana tells her. "What happened back there was wrong. If that's what the Harrowing is like, then it's wrong too."

"You cry about it, then. I can't. I don't get to experience feelings as anything but problems to be solved, because demons. And I don't want you or anyone else trying to 'solve' my feelings."

"Why not?" It's an earnest question, but Solona winces as though she's been slapped and turns to look up at Leliana with a start. Leliana's earlier inferences were correct, then: something is very wrong here. "Why not tell me what's hurting you and let me at least try to fix it? You were there for me when I needed help. Why can't you let me do the same for you?"

"Because you had a real problem! The kind with a real solution!" She's raising her voice now. Leliana silently hopes that's a sign of progress, and wills herself not to flinch away from it. "There's no single enemy we can go get rid of and have that set me free. And I'm not going to ask you to tell me I'm a good person, either!"

"You don't have to ask. You are a good person."

"I'm a disaster waiting to happen!" The fire flares up. The potion bubbles. Leliana almost says something, but Solona shouts over her. "Why do you still want to be here when it happens? You saw the same thing I did, what we look like when we fall! That's what I am on the inside! I'm repulsive! Twisted up, putrid, gnarled—"

The flask shatters. Solona cuts herself off with a short shriek as the boiling liquid splashes over her, then simply stares at her hands in silence.

"Solona! Solona, are you all right?" When she doesn't respond, Leliana takes her hands and tries to examine them for signs of scalding. Solona cooperates, wordless and limp, but with the fire gone out, there isn't enough light. "Does it hurt? Should I get Wynne?"

"That's the better part of a sovereign wasted," Solona says quietly, the emotion in her voice snuffed out like the flame in her hand. "Careless. How could I be so careless?"

Leliana doesn't know what to do. The night became colder so suddenly. She should get Wynne, but she can't leave Solona alone with whatever horror has just seized hold of her. "It isn't your fault, dearest. It's mine. I'm sorry. I wanted to know more about you, and I got selfish and pushed too hard." Maybe it would be better to leave Solona alone for now, since all Leliana's presence has done so far is make things worse. Maybe what she really needs is some space.

When Leliana starts to pull away, though, Solona's hands clamp tight around her own. "No. I've been pushed harder than that. There's no escaping it, so I have to do better. I've done better." Her fingers press into the skin of Leliana's wrists, seeking purchase. "I'm slipping."

"You are a good person," Leliana repeats forcefully.

"I'm really not, and that doesn't even matter. This is what I wanted to avoid, making it all about me. I'm still alive. Other people are dead. Shouldn't that be enough for me?"

"I don't see how that follows, my love." She can't get her arms free to wrap them around Solona, so instead, she leans in and touches foreheads with her. A little more contact, a little more grounding. "What happened to them isn't your fault."

"Yes, it is. There was one ticket out, and I snatched it for myself. It could have gone to any one of them instead."

"You couldn't have known what would happen."

"I did know," Solona insists. "Not the specifics, not that it would swallow up the whole Circle at once, but little things happen there all the time, and if you're in the wrong place when they happen, you get drawn in. The tower's small enough that the long-term odds... aren't good. It's supposed to be better after you're Harrowed, but I couldn't count on that. I saw my chance and I took it, and I didn't care who needed it more than I did. I was so focused in on it that I did something horrible to my only real friend out of fear it would be taken away. And it's stupid and self-indulgent to keep wallowing in guilt over that, because I had the sheer dumb luck to get a chance at setting things halfway right later on. I've always been absurdly lucky, and I still act ungrateful."

"Counting your blessings is one thing, but there's no reason you should be grateful that you were locked in a prison and made to fear for your life."

"But no one ever actually hurt me! Other people got hurt. Jowan got hurt. I would have helped them hurt him a lot worse if he hadn't outplayed me." That's one puzzle pieced together, then: the mage in the cell beneath Redcliffe castle, and the way Solona withered under the heat of his accusations after Leliana had seen her stand tall and proud against anyone else who'd raised a voice or a hand to her. "No matter how you look at it, I'm not a good person. I don't have actual principles, I just look out for myself. Whether you think that they're right about us and should be heeded, or that they're wrong and should be resisted, I've failed."

"I know that's not true. I've seen you resist them." She kisses Solona's cheek, a bit absently, because she keeps wanting to kiss Solona every time she thinks of how that Templar at the top of the tower spoke to her.

"Only when it's easy."

Leliana can't help but smile at that. She hopes Solona won't take it the wrong way if she feels how her lips curl. "Dear one, are you really trying to claim that storming a tower full of demons with only a handful of allies was easy?"

Solona is silent for a good two or three minutes. Just when Leliana thinks she must be ignoring the question entirely, she answers, "Comparatively."

There's a sort of childish stubbornness in her voice, like she knows that she's just being contrary for the sake of it now. Leliana wouldn't be entirely surprised if she were smiling a bit too.

"If that's really the case," Leliana says, "then I'm impressed that you survived at all."

Solona's grip on her wrists slackens, at that, and she crumples forward, tucking her head under Leliana's chin. Before Leliana understands quite what's happening, she feels warm tears falling on the hollow of her throat. Only when she wraps her arms around Solona does she realize how badly she's shaking. This, Leliana thinks with a twinge in her heart, is a woman with a lot of practice at crying silently.

"I'm glad you survived," Leliana tells her. "I'm glad you got out. Whatever you had to do, whatever kind of person you had to be to make it this far, I forgive you. I love you. I'm so grateful that I got to meet you."

"There's that," Solona says, her voice cracking. "If I'd stayed, I would have gotten worse, not better. Even if I didn't become a demon, I'd have ended up like Irving and the rest. Like Wynne, even. She's not a bad person, but the first thing she said to me is that she thinks I did the right thing, about Jowan. At least I knew it was evil when I did it. I don't ever want to be someone who thinks that's all right. I don't want to grow up to tell apprentices that that's how they have to behave if they want to live."

"You won't," Leliana assures her. "You aren't the people who hurt you. Maybe they tried to make you like them, but they failed. We're good people, both of us."

"It still doesn't seem fair, though. I get to grow into a better person, and everyone else doesn't even get to live? Wynne says that everything happens for a reason, that maybe I survived the Harrowing when others didn't because I'm destined for great things. I hate that idea! Why should mages have to do great things just to be allowed to live?"

"Your friend Jowan is alive too," Leliana reminds her. "So are Wynne, and Petra, and so many others. Someone else might not have bothered to help them, but you survived long enough to do it yourself. Keep going."

Solona sniffles, then pulls away enough to look Leliana in the eyes, her face wet and her mouth curled into a determined smile. "Thank you. I will." Then: "I didn't burn myself. You don't need to get Wynne."

"I should hope not!" Leliana giggles in shock and abashment at the reminder that that was ever a real possibility. "If you'd been actually injured and I just sat there spouting advice... I'm so sorry! I'm not very good at this!"

"No, you're wonderful," Solona tells her. "Sometimes I feel like the Maker really must have sent you to me. If He exists at all, I can't think of many better things He could have done with his time."

Leliana's neck prickles with heat, feeling suddenly very exposed. "That's maybe a little too mean, my dear."

"Why?" Solona's brow crinkles in confusion for a moment before understanding dawns. "Oh, no! That's not teasing. I really mean it."

"Oh. In that case, I... don't know what to say, actually." Leliana rubs at her neck as the flush spreads through her, now carrying a different kind of warmth. "I suppose I should let you get back to your brewing?"

"Mm, no, I think I've had quite enough of that for one night," says Solona, and leans back into Leliana's arms — for a proper kiss, this time.