Chapter Text
The world is too quick to see what the former Inquisitor is suddenly missing, and quicker still to rush to fill the void.
She is given two arms before she even leaves Halamshiral—beautiful, gilded things. The first made of gold, the second of marble. She assumes they were stolen from statues—she is raw, still, and her rage at even being offered these things flares up.
Misplaced anger, she knows. She wants to blame anyone and anything but him for the absence of her limb, the pins holding her left sleeve in place.
By the time she reaches Skyhold, to see about what it really means to disband the Inquisition, there are fifteen more waiting. Imitations of what she is missing—they think it’s only her arm, the cold bastards, when the man she loves walked away with so much more.
Gold, silver, dawnstone—she loses count of the gifts over the months, the attempts by those who would have her favour to make themselves feel better by having no void when they look at her.
It is almost a year later when Dagna makes her offering, sheepishly, and it is clockwork and iron, with a hand that is not a hand but will clip to the hilt of her dual blade. It is crude and strange, and it catches as it turns, always—but this is the first she wears, because it has gaps where the sunlight shines through, and it does not attempt to make her whole again.
The annual Viscount’s ball is something Varric has sincerely hoped he could ignore, could wave his hand and make a sweeping declaration and then be done with it—as much as Bran complained, the man would be miserable if he wasn’t constantly scrambling to make Varric’s spontaneous announcements perfectly legal in a matter of days.
He had made that pretty clear on his less than formal invitation to Aevalle Lavellan—don’t worry about it, the letter said. I’ll have it cancelled by the time you get here, and then it can just be me, you, and a few choice friends of mine sitting pretty in the Hanged Man playing Wicked Grace. Don’t even pack anything fancy! Oh and that reminds me, Daisy has more questions for you about the Crossroads, I’ve included the list she gave me...
So it is that Aevalle shows up in Kirkwall, expecting to spend a relatively quiet week in the estate she’s been gifted but has never seen, and instead finds Varric wringing his hands and giving her a sheepish grin.
“It’s still happening, isn’t it.”
Varric throws his hands up in the air. “In my defence, I tried my best.”
Hand on her hip, the stump of her left arm and its bizarre clockwork prosthetic hanging at her side, Aevalle can’t hide her warm smile as she shakes her head at him.
“Did you uh—ignore my advice about something fancy?”
“This is all I have,” she tells him, fidgeting with the ragged ends of her hair. Her appearance has been slipping her mind as of late—her hair has gotten too long, and about halfway down it is still red although the colour has faded. The rest of it up to her scalp is its natural near-black brown. Even the half of her head that is normally shaved is growing out a little too much. The sturdy dragon bone of her Dalish scout armour is scuffed and coated with a thin layer of dirt from the road, and one of her bare toes has a nail cracked right down the center. She’d let it get too long, and it had caught on a rock during a training exercise.
She looks like shit, she realises as she stands there before Varric as his eyes flit over her. It’s a bit overwhelming—she’s never considered herself particularly vain, but she can feel embarrassment making her cheeks warm as Varric’s eyes twist with concern.
“Well,” Varric says, and his voice is thick so he stops to clear his throat. When he speaks again, he sounds his usual self, and she can ignore the sorrow at the corners of his eyes. “It’s a good thing I sent a runner to Wycome, then.”
Something suspiciously like panic races through her, and Aevalle immediately tugs at the ratted ends of her hair with her hand. “Varric,” she says, urgently, and she glances around as if her clan will leap out of the shadows—and they will see her, her ragged edges and missing limb.
“Relax,” he tells her—as if somehow sensing where her thoughts have gone. His eyes flick down once to her left arm—and she follows his gaze to see that her arm has jerked, the imitation hand has gotten twisted and locked up in itself as it made to retract, blocked by a stuck gear.
She curses, and pulls a small metal pick out of her belt. She stabs at the offending gear until it releases, and the hand extends again. She tests its movement gently by moving her arm around—it’s not so much a hand as it is two fingers and a thumb, all hard iron and worn wooden pads, but they make grabbing motions as she twists her arm. Not entirely smooth, but it does the trick.
“Needs to be oiled,” she grumbles, as if that explains anything. She can see Dagna’s crestfallen expression already—only a heartbeat, before the Arcanist is back to her usual self. If a little more aggressively optimistic than usual.
“I was just about to say that Councilmember Deshanna expressed an interest in seeing you when she arrives tomorrow,” Varric continues as if nothing has happened—a little too gently, she thinks, but she tries not to bristle at it. He gestures for her to walk with him, and she follows him through the dusty Lowtown streets. “You have a whole day to rest up before she gets here.”
Clean up, more like, she thinks. But her bitter thoughts are unfair, and she knows it—Varric smiles up at her with a warmth that is without judgement. She knows she could show up to the Viscount’s Ball as she is, and Varric wouldn’t care in the least.
“As keen as you are on some alone time, I happen to know a tailor who doesn’t mind a rush order. Not that I can take you there myself, because someone is insisting I go sign some trade documents or something.”
She catches the exasperated sigh behind her—Bran, she thinks, already having forgotten he was standing with Varric when she arrived. She manages a smile at Varric’s delighted wink.
“So I’ve arranged a tour guide for you,” Varric finishes simply, steering Aevalle towards a stall filled with fresh fruit. There is a slim blonde elf haggling with the merchant, her voice soft but her words precise and calm as she holds a bruised peach in her hand.
Varric waits for coin to change hands before he calls, “Orana.”
She turns, hazel eyes bright in the sunlight, and her smile upon seeing Varric is small but warm.
“Ser Tethas!” she greets, and Aevalle is surprised at her Tevene accent. Not as thick as those she’s become familiar with as of late—muddled with Kirkwall’s, clearly having lived here a few years. “And this must be Mistress Lavellan,” she continues, holding her basket full of produce in front of her as she gives a little bow. “It is an honour, my lady.”
Orana doesn’t even bat an eyelash at the state of the former Inquisitor in front of her. She has the look of someone who would be completely unfazed if Aevalle showed up covered in giant spider guts.
“Please,” she says with a smile, “call me Aevalle.”
Orana deals with every single one of their stops with an apt attention to detail, a polite refusal to see anything but what they came in for, and a nervous twitch of her hands whenever they are forced to dally too long in one place.
As they walk, Orana makes easy conversation with Aevalle. She is soft-spoken, an occasionally there is a loud shout that makes her tense, slightly—Aevalle has the impression that Orana was once impossibly skittish, from the way her cheeks flush each time it happens, and her lips move as if she is chastising herself.
Aevalle, for her part, is mostly quiet. She occasionally asks questions about the shops they pass or the streets they walk—Orana answers as she can, but mostly she can only provide information on the people, not the city itself.
It’s hard for the former Inquisitor not to look over her own shoulder whenever they pause. Without Varric’s easy presence to distract her, she feels eyes watching her at every turn—if someone looks at her too long, too curiously, she finds her shoulders tensing of their own accord. Twice she jerks her arm at a strange angle, and the traitorous gear gets jammed again.
Orana is impossibly patient as Aevalle fixes it, each time. She watches with alert and curious eyes, and the second time she asks, “Do you need anything for its maintenance?”
Aevalle looks up, eyes narrowed, the small tool jammed into the recesses of her arm. The skin on her back feels tight, anxious, and she knows there are a hundred pairs of eyes on her but she doesn’t know how many of them are his.
Her tension must seep into her expression, because Orana smiles with an impossible patience and says, “I know someone who might help.”
Their day drags on quite late—at first Aevalle relents to finding someone to sell oil, tools that will allow her to tighten the screws that have come loose. Then Orana makes another gentle suggestion, and they stop by the alienage where an old woman is selling herbs, roots and strippings of tree bark—not the right ones for red, and Aevalle doesn’t have the time to bleach what has grown out dark in the sun so they buy dried nettle, rosemary, sage, black walnuts and a couple roots that Aevalle only knows the name in elven. Orana buys a bottle of dark oil and sends it along with all their other purchases with a young boy. “To the Lavellan estate,” she says, and it is strange to hear.
All told, it is quite late in the evening by the time Aevalle actually sees her own estate. Orana places their last purchase on a small table—some clean clothing for Aevalle to wear about the house—and she attends to the candles in the middle of the room.
“Please,” she says, “make yourself comfortable. I will ready your bath.”
“You don’t have to,” Aevalle tries to say, but her guide has already taken a candle and slipped upstairs.
Aevalle stands uneasily in the dark room—she grabs a candle off the table and raises it above her head, trying to spread what little light it offers. She catches glimmers off furnishings, the shine of polished wood and metal, the colours of the fine textiles dulled in her night vision.
She hears the roar of water rushing through pipes—plumbing, she thinks, allowing herself to actually be impressed. Varric must have gone all out in setting this up for her. She hears soft footsteps, cupboards opening, and a light humming as Orana moves around.
Aevalle circles the main room—it takes her only a moment to find the fireplace, already stacked with wood, and her elven eyes pick out the flint and steel sitting on the mantel, a basket with kindling just off to the side. It takes her only moments to start the fire, and when it is roaring she leaves the great room for another on the side.
This one is a library—small, she thinks, but as she lights the candles she finds on the tables she sees a comfortable couch, a couple shelves with a scattering of books and decorations—a deepstalker skull, a bowl full of dried flower petals, and a carving of a halla among other things. She glances at the book titles, but most of them are either Genetivi’s work or Varric’s, and she doesn’t feel inspired to read them.
Against the far wall is a lute, and that is what finally gives her pause.
Her heart leaps into her throat at the sight of it—it looks as if it’s never been played, the polish on the wood gleaming in the light from the candles. It has images in a darker stain on the body, all up the back of the neck—she recognises the tale of Fen’harel and the slow arrow immediately, the wolf’s many eyes and his sharp grin, the monster’s curving spine.
The phantom of her left hand itches, and she remembers the feel of strings under fingers, the precise progression of chords she wants to strike.
This was meant to be a gift, along with the house. And that aches at her heart, and she tries to clench a fist that isn’t there, and she hears the grind and click of that fucking gear sticking again.
She has to lean on the table and focus on breathing for a while. To stop herself from ripping the clockwork arm off and throwing it into the fire she’s made in the other room.
By the time Orana finds her, Aevalle is calmly working the gear free with the metal pick.
“Your bath is ready,” Orana reports, her hands folded in front of her demurely.
“Thank you.” She places the pick back in her belt and tests the arm, gingerly. “I should get the dye ready.”
“Oh,” says Orana, and she pauses to take a steadying breath. She looks impossibly shy, for someone who appeared so accustomed to the errands they have been running all day. “I... would like to help you,” she continues, hesitantly. “I’ve never seen it done.”
Aevalle can’t remember ever feeling self-conscious about her body before—there was no room for that in her clan, where a hot summer’s day might send them all screaming into a lake or river with their leathers lying on the shore. Not even when she was old enough to take lovers, for the woods away from the campfire were dark, and under the moonlight with elven eyes their bodies seemed more beautiful than in daylight. Even with Solas, in the woods outside Halamshiral, when she dragged her teeth along his neck and he relented, she was just drunk enough on wine and more than enough on him that she had no worries about baring herself to his hungry gaze.
But standing next to the bath, alone, with a full-length mirror on the opposite wall, she realises that she has been avoiding looking at herself for the better part of a year.
Once, Solas compared her skin to the colour of copper, the shine of her lips to its sheen. He compared her eyes to the colour of sunlight filtering through leaves, her smile to wonders he had only seen in dreams.
Now she sees only dark circles under dull eyes, the foreign pallor of her skin, the cracks in her lips, and, as she strips, a piece of a wolf’s jaw hanging around her neck, protected from sight by a muted beige scarf.
She takes it off and stares at it, cradled in a hand of flesh and a hand of metal. She thinks of it pressed between them when they embraced, its string wound around her fingers as they made love, and the bite of its teeth into the hand that wasn’t killing her as he took the other away.
It takes her longer than she would like to set it aside, gently, on the counter, and to set about loosening the straps that keep her prosthetic arm on.
There is a real thread of panic racing through her when Orana enters the room, Aevalle with the prosthetic arm unstrapped from her shoulder, her leathers in an undignified pile on the floor. She feels a pain like a physical thing racing up her phantom limb, a fist clenching that isn’t there, and she tries to move the remnants of her left arm behind her, as if to hide it.
Orana pauses in the doorway, the bowl of hair dye in her hands. She looks Aevalle in the eye—for the first time that day, she realises belatedly.
“I would like to help you,” Orana says with such a gentleness that Aevalle has to bite down something harsh in response. “If that’s alright.”
Aevalle doesn’t say anything for a moment, stuck in between the desire to take care of herself and the knowledge that she is unable to.
Orana holds her gaze, her cheeks flushing.
Aevalle tries to remember to breathe. “I... I would like that,” she says, the words clunking together like the mismatched parts of the arm Dagna made for her.
Orana tries very hard to hide her obvious delight, but her little smile is contagious, and Aevalle’s heart feels less heavy at the sight of it.
She steps into the tub, and the water is hot—so hot she realises the moment her feet break the surface that there are deep muscle pains all up her legs, her back, her arms, that she’s been ignoring for far too long. Her muscles are wound tight, springs unable to find release, and Orana has to move forward and steady her as she wavers, half tempted to jump back out of the water.
But then she breathes in the steam, the smell of elfroot and dawn lotus wafting up around her, and Orana’s hands on her shoulder and back are steady, patient, and Aevalle sinks into the bath.
Her right arm rests on the side of the tub, and her left has slipped off the edge so many times she gives up and lets it hang. The twisting scars right at the end of the stump are all submerged, the skin there tender from being rubbed against the prosthetic for... days on end. It had been painful, but she wanted both her weapons on hand if anyone snuck up on her in the night.
That’s what she gets, she supposes, for slipping away the escort Cassandra insisted on and making the journey to Kirkwall with only her thoughts and dreams of a wolf for company.
Orana helps her wash her hair, and she pulls up a wooden stool and sits there with a comb until all of the tangles are out. She trims the ends, then takes a blade and shaves her scalp where the hair is significantly shorter, something Aevalle has not been able to do properly since the Winter Palace.
Orana hums as she sets about dying the ends of her hair, to remove what red is left there, and Aevalle closes her eyes and tries to relax. She finds her hand clutching the side of the tub, her shoulders tight, no matter what she does.
Then Aevalle feels the other woman’s hands on her shoulders, and she stiffens further.
“You’re so tense,” Orana murmurs, more to herself than to Aevalle. Then she says, “Please, lean forward.”
Aevalle tries to let go of the breath she’s sucked in, but it’s not quite working. She clenches her hand tighter on the tub to stop herself from leaping out of it.
Orana waits and says nothing. Aevalle remembers to breathe, reminds herself that she is safe, that Varric trusts this person, and she shifts with deliberate and stiff movements until she is leaning against the far wall of the tub, her arms crossed and her head resting on them. Orana retreats for a moment while Aevalle settles herself, and comes back with the bottle of oil she bought from the herb merchant.
Her hands are soft on Aevalle’s shoulders, her movements gentle. The oil smells of spindleweed, embrium, and something earthy that she can’t identify, but it makes her skin feel warm. Aevalle feels a hesitation in Orana’s touches, although it seems more for her benefit—giving her a chance to back out, to say no. Slowly, Orana begins to work deeper, to press harder, and her fingers slip along tense muscles, up and down the back of Aevalle’s neck, slide against Aevalle’s skin and the pressure builds slowly, like a cresting wave.
It is not gentle, this touch—Orana releases a displeased hum at how tightly wound the muscles beneath her fingers are, and Aevalle digs her fingers into the unyielding side of the tub as Orana works her flesh beneath her hands. But between Orana’s ministrations and the heat, the herbs in the tub, Aevalle feels her body relent, begin to relax, and the pressure slackens to something almost pleasant, something she hasn’t felt on her skin in years.
She closes her eyes, and it’s like she can feel someone else’s fingers on her back—someone else’s deliberate movements, breath huffing into her hair as he works her flesh with practiced, warm, broad hands.
Through a warm, pleasant haze she feels his lips on her neck, her shoulders, her back, following the patterns his fingertips are burrowing into her flesh. Her face is buried into the pillows, both hands clutching the sheets as he kneels above her, legs on either side of her.
She notices only belatedly when he pauses, his breath hot on her ear, his thumbs pressed into the small of her back. He raises one hand, slowly, to wind in her hair, as if to examine it.
She turns her head to tease him, to invite him to lie down so she can return the favour. She cannot see his face—she sees only her dark, dark curls twining between his fingers.
“Red suited you better,” he whispers with a broken voice, and Aevalle jerks awake.
The bath water is cold, and Orana’s hand is gentle on her shoulder. “I didn’t expect you to fall asleep,” she chides, gently. She must see the panic in Aevalle’s eyes, then, because her smile fades and she says, “Are you alright?”
Aevalle ducks her head. There are tears forming in her eyes and she wills them not to fall, grits her teeth and stares at her arm, at the scars and the red skin there, until the moment has passed.
“Just a dream,” she says, finally, her voice surprisingly thick, and she’s not entirely certain if she’s speaking to herself or to Orana.