the sweetest sadness in your eyes; contagion

[leliana]

goodbye, my almost lover
goodbye, my hopeless dream --

Leliana had never felt fragmented—not by her gifts.

Even when she had wandered off the Mountain, her hip pressed into her sister and her hazel eyes widening as her wings were stripped from her to be replaced with something static and unchanging. Even when she felt her healing, that thing as part of her as her bones, her marrow, leave her breast. Even then she did not feel unwhole. It was enough to have her sister by her side, to have her laughter ringing in her ears. Even when they had realized their mother was not coming back, it was enough to find solace in Tephra, under the watchful eye of Magnus, to grow up wild and free under the constant rain of ash, untethered, unbound.

But now—now she knew the meaning of it. She knew what it was to wake in the morning and feel a hollow in your chest, an ache you could not fill. She knew what it was to learn the meaning of wholeness, to find passion and fire in the touch of another, an unyielding need that drove you on, that weaved through your very soul. And then she knew what it was like to have that very fire taken from you. To have it burn so bright that it singed your fingers, left nothing in its wake. That’s what she was now: just the remains.

When she heard him, she dropped her head down and startled, a soft “Oh,” flying from her lips with the lightness of a bird. She turned her head to find him, delicate and yet deceivingly strong, the angles of his body belying the glass that would one day rise to claim it once more. “Oh, you’re not interrupting me.” Nothing but selfish mourning, nothing but the silent drowning. She turned her head toward him and ruffled the silver on her back, the motion moving them like water. “My name is Leliana.”

She took a step toward him and then paused, lifted leg slowly rooting to the ground once more.

“Please don’t leave,” she whispered, unable to stop herself reaching for the company.

leliana