oh, i fall apart, leliana.

[leliana]

I've never loved a darker blue than the darkness I have known in you

And, like that, her world implodes. The confusion that had crept so quickly into her veins splinters, fractures, pressing metal shards into her flesh until she is nearly crying out with pain. Her lips part on a jagged breath as he continues to toss daggers at her, each one finding purchase in her breast, the wounds opening up beneath his assault. He has never been cruel to her before—not her. He has never turned the edge of his fang her way; if she didn’t know better, she could have assumed he didn’t even have them.

But she knows now.

“Shiya?” She continues to echo his words, letting them sit like stones in her chest, the names of the one she doesn’t know. “Who is Shiya?” But she knows—she knows in her bones. She does. All of the ghosts that she thinks she has suppressed come roaring back into life and she feels her legs nearly buckle beneath her. Suddenly, she is a young girl standing in a meadow, watching Dovev race after the golden stallion. She is a young girl in Tephra, watching the little eyeless girl wander up. She is a young girl and she’s learning that the boy she gave her heart to was never hers to love; there are others, there are others.

There are always others.

She cannot stop the tears that begin to softly fall, silently making their path down the curve of her cheek. She cannot stop the trembles that begin in her spine, the edges of her vision going spotty as she tries to hold onto some semblance of control, some semblance of reality. She wants to fold to the ground and slip into the darkness that now crawls around the edge of her consciousness. She wants to give into the numb, into the tide. But he says their daughters name and it gives her a lifeline, something to hold onto.

“Why weren’t we enough for you?” The question escapes before she can hold it back, and she nearly chokes on the words, the surprising bitterness of them as they cut her tongue. She suppresses the soft cry that builds in her throat at the thought of their daughter, of the way this will break Adna.

Vulgaris is her whole world. Her hero. The earth around which she rotates.

“Wait,” she calls after him, hoping he will stop long enough to hear her. “Adna.” The request builds in her and she swallows the poison down, refusing to think of it fully now, refusing to acknowledge the enormity of it. It’ll break her, if she does. “L-let Adna stay.” The words shake and her stomach twists painfully. “Please, Vulgaris.” His name, once so sweet on her tongue makes her throat close up now, turns to dust in her mouth, ash in her throat as the agony she withholds threatens to slip and overcome her now.

“I’ll go. I’ll leave you alone. But please let her stay.”

like fire weeping from a cedar tree, know that my love would burn with me