Author's notes: Hello all! Welcome to my first DA:I effort. I started this little guy before I even finished the game, and now that I've finally caught up with you all (and completed some hasty rewrites 😳) I'm looking forward to continuing.

(Memories/thoughts/Fade activities, and other languages are in italics.)

WARNING WARNING, this story is LIKE ONE BIG SPOILER.

9:38 Dragon, Skyhold

She leaned against the wooden doorframe, arms crossed over her racing heart. As always, he confused her, hurt her even...

...But the warmth of his mouth lingered on her lips even in the thin, cold air, the feeling of his fingers (like a scholar's, long and elegant) around her arms. On their first meeting, in the blood-soaked and desperate ruins of the Conclave, he'd grabbed her wrist, thrusting her hand forward and up. He held her firm against the buffeting waves of arcane energy thrown off by the Rift, like a nautical figurehead calming an angry sea. He'd hurt her then, almost wrenched her arm from its socket, in fact, those fingers like steel bands around her wrist. Now his touch was soft, but the feeling of it still lingered.

Solas half turned toward her, the sharp lines and angles of his face harshly shadowed in the half light. He looked torn, as he always did when they touched. She wanted desperately to confront him, demand to know what in Void his problem was. The Dalish were inclined toward prudery, at least where sex was concerned, but she sensed that this wasn't his problem. Solas was perhaps the least traditional person she'd ever encountered. He didn't wear the vallaslin. He disdained the Dalish and their many rules.

They had fought together, narrowly defying death, looking into the very Fade itself, and now she wanted more than just his eyes on her. More than words and phantom kisses and whispers in her dreams. She wanted her pulse to pound from something other than mortal terror.

But she knew that his cool demeanor concealed secrets. He was practically composed of them. Layers and layers of secrets. There was more going on underneath his calm facade than she knew, quite possibly more than she wanted to know.

...Probably more than she wanted to know.

So she said nothing. She demanded nothing. He was a brilliant man, and a remarkably perceptive one. She refused to believe that he couldn't pick up on her silent proposition. If he could act, he would.

"You're so young to have seen so much." He murmured. "I don't want to burden you further."

She had no idea what he was talking about, and she didn't care. A little flare of anger made her eyes narrow and her next breath emerge too quickly. Brilliant, perceptive, and somehow also completely stupid.

"I pick my own burdens, Hah'ren." She said, her tongue lingering on the Dalish word with perhaps more bitterness than she'd intended. The meaning was somewhere between elder and teacher.

She'd meant it in sarcasm. He was twice her age but certainly not an elder, and he certainly wasn't going to tell her what to do. She was no dewy-eyed maiden, weaving flowers in her hair, asking Mythal to show her her future lover's face in the surface of a calm pool of water. She was a grown woman, the First of Lavellan, the leader of a small but fierce rebellion. She chose who she consorted with, whether it was a good idea or not.

Solas actually flinched, his eyes shutting tight, his hands balling into fists for a moment before going slack again.

"Ma emma harel, Dah'len." He said finally, softly, and there was no hint of irony in his intonation. His tongue slid off the Dalish as though he'd learned it from birth- as though it were a living language, instead of a half-dead tradition, read haltingly from dusty tomes at weddings and funerals.

You should fear me, Child. He'd said.

They stared at each other from across the room in the orangish glow of dusk, wills clashing. If he hadn't wanted her, that would have been that. If he'd belonged to another, she would have moved on gracefully. Even an offense to his propriety, she would have understood. But this, the idea that this distance was for her own benefit, was so patently absurd that she couldn't help but argue.

His eyes met hers, his expression tender, if sad, his eyes so blue they were almost violet in the low light.

She didn't know what he could possibly mean, what she could possibly have to fear from him, and she reflected again that she didn't much care. He could hold his secrets, whatever past deeds he was so horrified by. She had learned to live within moments with Clan Lavellan, a mindfulness borne of necessity. Friends and clan members and lovers came and went, places came and went, sometimes there was joy, but there was more often hardship. She had learned to take her pleasure where and when she could. And to leave the past behind her.

And regardless of what he thought, she was a very good judge of character. She'd seen the way his gaze lingered on her. He'd healed her wounds with a touch and a whisper. Spoken to her in his deep, even voice about the legends of their people, the ancient Elvhen and their gods. Whatever he was, he was no threat to her.

She walked over to him and he turned to face her, his gaze falling from her eyes onto her lips. He inhaled deeply.

"I have nothing to fear from you." She said, tracing the line of his jaw with her thumb. He looked down at her, his expression turning slowly to one of something like wonderment. "I trust you with my life." She said, holding his gaze.

The breath came out of him in shuddering sigh and suddenly his arms were around her, lifting her, his lips warm, his tongue ghosting over hers. There was something electric about the man, as though the magic that he commanded ran through him even now. As though the Fade he so adored exploring had entered him in turn. Impossibly, he smelled of campfire smoke and the woods after rain, juniper and sage. It was a scent to integral to her time with the Dalish, a thousand summer nights. It made her remember their Mage, in her halla horn headdress, capitulating the Lord of the Hunt under the cold moon.

Exhilaration (and surprise) almost made her knees buckle under her, but he put his arms under her backside and lifted her off the ground, her arms around his neck. She wrapped her legs around his waist. He backed them up, approaching her neatly made bed. He deposited her carefully on the coverlet, one hand at the base of her skull, the other under her back. She grabbed him by his tunic and pulled him down with her, his knees coming down between her legs, the wolf's jawbone amulet he always wore awkwardly pinioned between them.

"Know that this is real, emma vhenan." He said against her throat, his low voice ragged, before she captured his mouth again. Those two words, even more so than the night that followed, changed everything.

He had called her, "My heart."