Work Text:
“There’s still the matter of the Anchor,” she said. “It’s getting worse.”
His face had hardly been without emotion throughout the whole of their fraught conversation, but now it collapsed in upon itself, the new lines on his face furrowed deep. “I know, Vhenan. And we are running out of time.”
The Anchor spat, like hot oil added to water. The pain was considerable, even by her standards, and she found herself collapsed to the ground, panting, as the latest wave subsided. The roiling light pouring from the yawning gap in her palm didn’t abate this time, whatever spell Solas - Fen’Harel - had used to calm it spent. She looked up at him, saw the way that his gaze bored into the ground between them, and she knew what it meant even before he began to speak.
“The mark will eventually consume you,” he said, slowly, as though the words parted from his tongue unwillingly. “Drawing you here gives me a chance to mitigate the effects upon the Veil, to prevent a second Breach. However-” He bit off his own words, glanced up at her face, but his eyes slid away again, unable to meet her gaze. “I have searched, and I have bargained, and I have wracked my mind for a way, but I could not find it. The Anchor…cannot be removed, by any means that I can devise.” Finally, he looked her in the face. “I am sorry.”
Though she was prepared, the words still hit her like a blow to the whole body. Numbness followed, in her elbows and her thighs, and she thought that she would’ve fallen to the ground if she hadn’t already been kneeling.
Somehow, the idea of dying came as a shock to her. She had survived so many things, things which had killed people with so much more will to live than she’d ever possessed. What a surprise, therefore, to find that she’d already died some time ago, and it was only just catching up to her.
In the end, it was only right. There would be no survivors of the Temple of Sacred Ashes. She had merely chanced to extend her death over a little more time. She had not outlived Samahl’len after all, even if her body didn’t lie beside his. His killer was hers too, and as he stood over her now, distress written into every contour of his face, she forgave him for both of them.
You don’t just forgive someone killing you. Shows what you know, Varric.
“If you want the Veil torn down,” she asked, “why bother mitigating the effects? Why not let me tear open another hole in the sky and end it for you now?”
“For multiple reasons,” he said, evasive once again.
“Solas, I’m dying,” she said. The words felt heavy in her mouth, but she said them regardless. There were some things which could never truly be hidden from. “I’m not going to be able to tell anyone anything.” Although, if she could activate Dorian’s pendant without being noticed…
“True enough.” His words were bitter. “Were the Veil to fall in this moment, whether by your death or some other method, such as the killing of the last two Archdemons, it would release the source of the Blight, which is currently contained within the Black City. The whole world would be consumed. I cannot allow the Veil to fall until a new, better prison can be created for it, and the remaining Evanuris.”
She stared up at him, hand frozen on the opening mechanism of the pendant. The Anchor was almost forgotten. “That’s why you were so angry about the Wardens,” she whispered, as though that was the most pertinent piece of information she’d learned from his uncharacteristically quick summary. Then she bent over, as another wave of pain hit her unawares.
“It is,” he agreed. “The Veil will fall regardless, whether by the ending of the Seventh Blight, or the constant wear of centuries of bloodshed. It is merely a question of what happens next.” He sank to his knees before her. With one hand he took hold of her left wrist, to which the boiling green light was beginning to spread, and with the other he cupped her cheek, the hard metal of his gauntlets catching in stray strands of her hair. She gripped that hand with her own, bare fingers to hold him still, and nuzzled into his palm.
“Vhenan,” he whispered, voice cracking open upon the word.
The sensation in her hand was fading, along with the pain. She thought that he must’ve been doing something with his magic, but it was a faraway thought. He seemed more familiar from so close, less an unknowable, ancient power and more of the man she’d thought she knew. Despite everything, and perhaps in opposition to everything she should’ve felt, she was glad to see him again. It was certainly better than dying still wondering where he’d gone, and why he’d left.
There was still one last thing gnawing at her, though.
“Solas,” she asked, “why did you never lie with me, while we were together? You must’ve known that I wanted it.”
“Because I did not wish to do so under false pretences,” he replied. “Not to you.”
“Well, I know now,” she said simply. “And if this is to be our last and only, I wouldn’t let this chance go. I want you, Solas,” and she did. It had all come flooding back to her, a ripple spreading across a perfectly still pool. The request was insane. Perhaps even disturbed. He had every reason to refuse her - but already he had leaned forward, the first tear catching the golden light as it streaked down his face.
The kiss felt as though she’d pulled it out of a memory, from that blissful, dawn-stained time that they’d spent alone together in the thin mountain air. Not a true memory, but some amalgamated impression of the way that they had been, worn smooth by time. She’d remembered the eagerness of him well, the way that he’d press against her open-mouthed, begging, or perhaps demanding, permission for entry. It was easy to give.
From there the reality diverged from the memory-construct, however. He was too frantic, peppering her mouth with short, sharp kisses rather than the heady luxuriation that she remembered. The taste of salt on his lips was new, also.
Helplessly aware of the limited time available to them, she spoke into his mouth. “Take it off.” She tugged at the gauntlet on his left hand, still cradling her face, then reached down lower to untuck the wolf pelt from his belt.
His gasp as she slid it loose from his shoulder interrupted the steady stream of his kisses, and he cursed loudly in the Elven tongue. Movements frenzied, he tore his gauntlets from his hands, shrugged loose of everything that was loose enough to do so, then began to attack the buckles holding his armour together. Reaching to help with her one good hand, it surprised her to notice how alike in placement and make the ancient armour’s buckles were to the ones she knew. Perhaps there were only so many good ways to secure a breastplate.
Raggedly stripped of half his armour, panting for breath with his mouth flushed red, the illusion of the collected and controlled god evaporated completely. He stared at her open mouthed as she pulled away his codpiece and felt for him through mail and padded trousers. He was not hard to find. She was able to pull a single, choked noise from him before he pulled her roughly closer, and demanded hotly into her throat, “Now you.”
Her armour was far less elaborate and extensive, and so much easier to remove. When her shirt was finally pulled off over her arms he tossed it aside and drew her to him once again, pressing them skin to skin as he mouthed at her throat. One hand snaked down her abdomen, beneath the waistband of her trousers; though there was little space he managed to slide two fingers through the slick-soaked hair at her sex. They didn’t hesitate there, pushing into her hard and fast, no time for delicacy. She gasped, and clenched down tightly around the intrusion, then did so again as the Anchor sparked, and pain flushed through her once again.
Cursing, he removed his hand from her cunt and wrapped his slick fingers back around her wrist. The pain subsided again, but this time she could still feel it, distantly, like impacts vibrating against a magical barrier. No barrier could hold out forever.
They simply breathed together for several long moments. She took note of the birdsong in the air, the soft rustle of the wind in the leaves, the sound and sensation of the water streaming around their knees as they knelt in its path. He leaned down to kiss her again, longer this time, the way she remembered, and as she kissed him back he hooked the fingers of his free hand into the waistband of her trousers. With a hard jerk that almost hurt in its ferocity, he pulled them down with her underwear, so that her ass was exposed to the open air. Another pause as he cupped the exposed flesh, his fingers kneading against the soft outer layer to feel the hard muscle underneath, then he pulled back fully, his hand on her burning wrist their only remaining point of contact.
“Turn around.”
She would’ve preferred to see his face, but time was against them. How long would it take, how many buckles would need to be undone, to remove the restriction on her legs? She turned away from him, and felt the bare skin of his chest against her back.
He pushed her to all fours, then down onto her elbows, using a hand on her abdomen and the bulk of his body above her to adjust her where he wanted her. The other hand was so tight about her wrist that the skin below the band of his fingers had turned white, but the expected pain still failed to manifest, kept away at a distance. Then he was pushing his own trousers down, and she felt him spring loose against her, the hot weight of his resting in the cleft of her ass.
Her breathing was long since out of her control, but the tight knot of anxiety in her gut eased a little as she felt the shaking of his hand, where it brushed against her skin on its way to direct his cock to its intended destination.
His entry was made in the same frantic rush as everything had been up to that point. Too fast, and he too large. She hissed out loud despite his spell dulling the pain. He murmured apologies into her hair even as his hips began to move, driving himself deeper, pressing her insistently open with every thrust. With the muffling effect of his magic, only the low, throbbing ache of her arousal remained, and quickly overtook what remnants of pain she could still sense. In fact, it subsumed them. The drumming pulse in her hand began, slowly, to feel the same as the pleasure burning low in her gut. When her hand twitched with a new wave of raw Fade energy, her cunt would twitch also, tightening around Solas as he pounded into her with wild abandon.
His apologies never ceased as he curled over her, their skin stuck together with dirt and sweat. He whispered them into the nape of her neck, the tangled mess of her hair coming loose, the shell of her ear. Falling tears slid down her jaw, dripping from where his face was pressed into her skin. The sobbing of his breath only seemed to spur him on to harder, faster, more erratic thrusts. A true frenzy seemed to have overtaken him.
When his fingers brushed against her clit she came at once, a shocking burst of sensation that shuddered violently throughout her body. She hadn’t known that she was close. Feeling the quaking of her body around him, Solas moaned her name, and the rush of heat inside told her that he had spilled also.
They remained still, panting for air, his breath blowing in gusts against her shoulder. After a moment, he began to pull back, and she thought that it was over. However, as he moved her tugged upon her, by his grip on both her wrist and hip, and, with some coaxing, managed to pull her back with him, so that she was sitting in his lap, his softening cock still sheathed within her. She lolled her head back against his shoulder, blindly gazing up at the blazing blue sky overhead, and he wrapped his arm around her belly, pressed the bridge of his nose beneath her jaw. She wondered how he was normally, in the glow of orgasm, whether his clinging was normal or an artefact of her oncoming death.
Solas was still clutching her about the wrist, the green light crackling and licking around the band of his fingers, unable to pass into the arm below, despite the fact that her fingers had already begun to break apart, like the last fragile remnants of wood from an already-dead fire. She felt his tears coming still, sliding down the skin of her neck to her clavicle and pooling there.
She closed her eyes. He wasn’t going to make it easy. “Solas,” she murmured, trying for coaxing but unable to find any tone but bitter determination, and laid her hand over his. “You need to let go, Solas. Mala suledin nadas. Ma ghilana mir din’an.”
Finger by finger, with no mercy for either him or herself, she prised his hand away. The pain was at once overwhelming, as though her nerves had relaxed in its absence and were now forced to reckon with a backlog of suppressed pain. Her whole body was drew tense with it, her back arching involuntarily. She felt like a bow, bent with tension, pulled by the string of the pain.
Distracted, she felt rather than heard Solas’s cut-off gasp. It meant nothing to her, until she felt him stiffen once again within her. Because, of course, she had tensed all over, including internally, her cunt now vice tight around his hardening cock. Experimentally, she rocked herself against him. The sinuous, writhing motion felt better, more natural, than remaining still, so she repeated it as his fingers dug hard into her side, and his breath came in short, heaving sobs.
She could no longer distinguish pain or pleasure within her body. One moment it seemed that she was burning alive with anguish, and the next she was so cold that the urge to chase the heat bubbling up from within became a desperate need. In between gasping breaths Solas was calling for her, for his heart, as his hands shifted to her hips and his knees spread her legs further apart, to make space for his own rough thrusting upwards.
Her heart raced within her, an odd, strained feeling creeping into her chest, and she knew as she glanced down and saw the emerald light creep from her arm into her shoulder that she was running a desperate race against death that she would inevitably lose. When that light reached her heart she would probably die, from the strain if nothing else. What would happen to her body, afterwards? Would the destruction cease, cut off from her life source, leave her body intact but for a half-disintegrated arm and shoulder? Or would it continue on, consume her fully, tear her apart the way that she’d torn Corypheus apart two years ago?
She hoped it would be the latter. Let it be a clean death, at least. Let there be nothing left to weigh anyone down. Let her be free of everything at last, one with the wind and the sky and the Fade. Let it all be done.
Wrapping her remaining hand around the back of his head, she pulled him into another kiss, an awkward thing of teeth and tongues and spit, started at the wrong angle. Nevertheless, he groaned into her mouth like he was wounded himself, kissed her wildly as if it was his death creeping gradually across the skin of her breast, searing deep and painful as a brand.
Grimacing, she clenched tightly around him once again, this time in an attempt to feel everything, to chase the sensation that would bring her to her final release. It wasn’t enough. Her fingers slipped from the back of his head, down her body to toy with the apex of her sex.
The pressure was mounting. Her shoulder felt paralysed, frozen solid with pain, which now began to send searching tendrils of heat snaking up the side of her neck, and flowing out across her ribcage. It was mostly Solas moving her now, her strength flowing away as though she was bleeding it out onto the ground. A little more, just a little more.
The climax came for her at last, jolting up from her cunt into her trembling body, and at the same moment she felt her heart jar within her, tendrils of searing pain at the very core of her being. Her mouth opened into his; she might have screamed. It was hard to know for certain. Once again, pain and pleasure were one and the same for her, an overwhelming wave of sensation crashing over her, erasing fragments of her very being. Then the balance tipped, and she could feel her body seizing around her, thrashing apart against some great force, an awful tearing of her soul.
Then the tether snapped, and she was gone.
She tipped backwards into him, and he knew at once that it was over, her body having given out at last under the immense strain. He sobbed into her throat, still as warm as if the life hadn’t yet left her, and, despite himself, pulled her close to spill one last time deep inside her suddenly lax body.
For a long time he held her close, even as the final throes of her death caused her body to release its filth onto him. He didn’t release her until the green light finally swallowed her whole, her body disintegrating into ash beneath his clutching fingers.
Afterwards, when he returned to his followers, cold-eyed and empty-hearted, there were signs that not all was well with Fen’Harel. A bright ribbon tied about his wrist, never removed, even when he slept. An aversion to touch, particularly skin to bare skin, though difficult to detect in one so aloof as he. And once, just once, only witnessed by a terrified few, he had wept uncontrollably at the scent of a simple white flower, growing wild at the side of the road.
Of Solas, they spoke no more. After all, only a god could survive the absolute destruction of his heart.