[private] haunted by the ghost of you; dovev

[leliana]

leliana

she said “oh, I know that love is all about the wind
how it can hold me up and kill me in the end”

He strips away her defenses, strips away the calm exterior and leaves her raw and open and it hurts but it’s also the closest she has felt to being alive in weeks. The hurt in his eyes is echoed in her own; the ache and regret and want—that desperate need to find the sweet beginning they had once shared. He sinks down into the water next to her and she leans into his touch as his mouth finds her cheek, holding it there for a second so that she can just linger, savoring that familiar feel of his comforting touch.

But it doesn’t last forever and she sighs softly as his head comes to rest in the water.

She feels as scrubbed clean as the wound on her wing and she shifts, unable to fight against the need to just lie next to him. It feels so natural to rest here, the water softly washing up over her legs and between them, lapping gently around their bodies. Her shoulder rests against his and her wings flare up and over them both, the red down soaked from the saltwater and the brine but drying beneath the tropical sun.

“I don’t even know what ‘us’ means anymore,” she confesses quietly, curling her head and resting her cheek against his neck. She cannot stop the way her thoughts go back to that tumultuous time in their life, to the way they constantly had to fight against fate, the way they raged against it—the storms that continued to blow into them again and again. Every obstacle placed between them and happiness.

She closes her eyes, tears falling more softly down her cheeks and she breathes in that familiar spice of him. It is so easy to pretend that they are once again young and curled around each other in the meadow, or in that hidden cave of his in Ischia. It is easy to pretend that the world is melting away and it is just the two of them. “Would it change things if I had it right?” Her brow furrows slightly and she exhales.

“Just tell me one thing,” she can’t bring herself to look him in the eye, and so she doesn’t.

“Did you love me back then?”

And even that is softened.

She can’t bear to ask if he does still.