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

Leliana is haunted by him.

By everything about him.

About the way he had held her when they first met, tenderly at first and then possessive later. How he had pressed promises into her skin and dreams into her heart. How she had built her hopes around him, somehow finding it in the bloodied, bone-armored body of the stallion.

She is haunted by his love. By the way that her world crashed around her when the truth came out, the truth blocked from his memory. The truth of a mare who was both mother figure and lover. Of a child who didn’t deserve the pain. Of a sadistic stallion who loved it.

She is haunted by his absence.

By his presence.

She is forever marked by his time in her life, forever changed.

So perhaps that is why mindless wandering took her here today. Perhaps the ghost of his scent dragged her to the edge of the foreign kingdom, her hazel eyes dark with worry and fear and bruised with the ghost of him. Her stomach grows every day, turning her normally lean figure round with the blessing of her child, and she struggles to travel as far as she used to.

So she rests near the border, her wings crimson and dragon, the leather of them resting far enough away that it’s easy to see that she has changed, that her body is now a vessel. That is now carries a visible mark of the new love that has seeped in and through her, the snake stallion haunting her in new ways—the ghost of him never quite revealed to her in full.

She thinks on it, often. Dwells on the ache in her heart when she watches him leave to fulfill the many duties that the land needs him for—the many ways so many need him.

She aches now, hungry for something she can’t name, that Vulgaris will not give.

Hungry for a love to consume her. To take her under.

Not to hold her delicately and apart but grab her and plunge into it headfirst.

Such thoughts break when she sees him.

Her face falls open, cracked wide with surprise and then grief and then a wave of emotion she cannot bear to confess. She almost staggers beneath the weight of it, but manages to stay upright, her dragon wings shifting instantly to the onyx and ivory of him, the familiar bone pressing into her. Her healing reaches for him instinctually, winding through him and finding all of the familiar wounds—fresh and old—to knit back together again.

The intimacy of it, the way it knows the pieces of him that break first, almost undo her.

She doesn’t move but his name escapes her mouth, split apart with everything that rises in her, “Dovev.” Her throat closes and her velvet lips press shut, and she wonders at how after all this time the mere presence of him nearly manages to undo her.

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