you still can't look me in the eye

[fightingale]

WHO: Leliana & various!
WHAT: catch all for July/Solace
WHEN: from roughly the 8th on throughout the month.
WHERE: Skyhold, various.
NOTES: set ups all in prose, but will happily match brackets if you prefer them! Open starters and a bit of a timeline on Leliana's health in the post (more to be added as we plod through the month), closed starters in the comments. If you'd like to do something that isn't in the open feel free to get in touch with me via pm or pp @karmacharging!
WARNINGS: Likely reference to illness, attempted murder, actual murder, and the range of terrible things that come with being the Nightingale. Will update as necessary, and endeavour to label subject lines.

OOC Recovery Deets.
After the team returned from the Brecilian Forest on the 27th, Leliana was given a series of potions with the ingredients that the team has acquired. Her recovery was not immediate, given the brutal effects of the poison, but the groundwork was laid. By the 1st of Solace she was able to speak again, although her voice sounded terrible, and some of the scarring had receded. By the 4th she was able to stand, although No One Approved. Since the 6th she has been walking, but only a very little. She normally has to sit in the presence of others, but from the 14th onward her strength has noticeably improved, although she's still thinner than she was before. Report on the Plot here.


OPEN.
8th - 11th - The Rookery.
It is safest to linger about her tower, still. Better that she be seen beyond it and that her recovery be confirmed, and yet if she were to falter or fall or appear weak that would only do harm. Her mind has recovered far more quickly than her body, and some motions still feel strange and foreign. Writing takes longer than it used to, but she is nothing if not determined. A hideous sort of stubbornness has been one thing that has never changed, not since she was a little girl.

She is writing or reading letters and orders and reports near constantly. Beleth and several scouts did much in the way of dealing with smaller matters, while Charter saw to other more pressing matters. Despite their efforts, however, there were a good many things that only the Nightingale could see to.

Pausing in her writing, Leliana flexes her hand, shaking it out a little, before looking towards the staircase. "Enter."


14th - the day after the Snow Battle Royale.
Though she did not stray down to the valley for the fight itself - such a move seemed a singularly poor decision. The Nightingale was not a social butterfly, and though it would have been an opportunity to assert her good health it would have been... inappropriate, she suspects, to attend.

That is not to say she didn't watch from the Rookery, and receive regular reports from her scouts on the progress and any Events of Note, whether they were interpersonal reactions or displays of skill, or just particularly amusing instances of people being decimated with snow.

Now she walks through the valley, observing the remains of the fortresses, still largely intact with the cold that always lingers this high in the Frostbacks, snow and ice crunching underfoot as she moves carefully, curiously, through the field. The cold bites into her lungs, and she swallows a cough that threatens to rattle her back, resting her gloved hand against the polished ice.

Comments

[fightingale]

"You were worse," Leliana agrees, almost flippantly. "You were the worst of all of us."

Perhaps even worse than Oghren— no, she can't make that joke. No one was worse than Oghren, a man who she loves dearly as their comrade, but who she also found herself wanting to strangle, from time to time.

Her smile softens a bit with the kiss to her palm. This is so very, very strange, this softness between them, the give afforded of spending hours in Leliana's bed without words, only afforded embraces. It has set them in a strange place, now, a tenderness that Leliana had only really allowed herself in part because she had thought she was going to die. In retrospect, if she had been so certain, it might have been kinder to be distant to Morrigan rather than demanding closeness. Alas, Leliana was not so selfless as that.

"Old enough to be sentimental, obviously," Leliana replies rather dryly, before leaning forward to murmur against Morrigan's ear. Her fingers are entangled with Morrigan's, and they are sitting in the sunset, and they are exchanging banter instead of anything more romantic, and it is terrible. "If you've no great objection, I would like to kiss you."

Here. In the garden, in public, never mind that there is no one here. There are always eyes, always people watching. She is disinclined to concern herself with that, in this moment. Not over Morrigan. Not over... well. Sentiment, evidently.

[arcaneadvisor]

"So eager to return to your bed I see? I can arrange that." Only she smiles still, no sting in it.

Zevran had asked Morrigan if she had wished to see Leliana, if that was the way she wished to remember her should the worst come to pass. That mad urge to laugh when he'd warned her that it wasn't pretty when nothing in Morrigan's life could ever be described as pretty save for the shell. Morrigan hadn't snapped though - her declaration had been quiet and proud. That she had strength enough for both should the worst come, that she would be there. That Leliana would not be alone. Not after being alone so long.

She still has that now. Someone who knew her for a long time should be there and Lothering was as far back as memory stretched, and she wouldn't have regretted it, even if she had slipped away instead of growing stronger in Morrigan's arms each night.

"Says the woman who names dresses up her nugs as a girl might her dolls, and gives her ravens names." Instead of turning, because that would mean disturbing Leliana and no longer being so close that the hairs on the back of her neck are prickling, she smiles. Smiles wide enough to let her see it. Unafraid. Morrigan who always was afraid, even of simple friendship.

"I have no objections." Always the last word. And then she does turn, two fingers under Leliana's chin and her breath is caught; still recovering but her hood is down, and here, in this quiet and with the sun turning her hair to copper, to flame-- "You are so beautiful, impossibly wonderful."

[fightingale]

If she were Zevran, Leliana might have turned that to innuendo. She resists, but there is something of an arch to her brow all the same.

"I will have you know it was Zevran who commissioned that armour for my nugs," Leliana replies, rather crisply, "and I would not deny my birds the dignity of names when they do so much to aid my and this Inquisition. Besides," she continues, decidedly not looking at Morrigan, "they like it when I say their names."

Ah. Hah.

Leliana is prepared for many things. She is not terribly prepared for compliments, and especially not compliments from Morrigan. For a brief moment she feels lost for words, bewildered, as tongue tied as she might have ten years ago, and she flounders.

"'Impossibly' meaning I am not wonderful at all, then." She doesn't stumble on the words; as graceless as they might be, at least she doesn't sound entirely idiotic. Or, at the very least, the evidence of her idiocy is more understated. She—

She might be stalling. Awkwardly stalling.

[arcaneadvisor]

Would you like her to add that she has a more interesting way for you to lose your voice Leliana? It's tempting but all the same, she would rather not end this moment too soon, not that she thinks it will but she's enjoying it. The things she never thought she'd have.

"That explains a great deal. I wondered why it covered so little, even on a nug." Do you remember Zevran's armour skirts Leliana, of course you do, you had to stand in the back with your bow at times the way Morrigan did with her magic. She didn't need to see Zevran's backside as he raced into battle. "I suppose that an enemy might laugh themselves into their pyre were they to intercept a raven and discover their identity," she supposes, easily enough before she gives Leliana a look that says what do you know. Sometimes she spies. Can Leliana truly tell all her birds apart? Does she note the extra raven that hops about demanding her attentions?

"I think that perhaps I preferred you silent." No, she didn't believe all of Leliana could be a smooth, skilled seductress but the look on her face says it all: what was that? 'Tis cold in my bed all alone' is better than that.

She can have mercy. She can lean close, cup Leliana's cheek and brush her thumb very carefully against her lashes, smiling fondly. But she doesn't quite kiss her, no, instead just brushing their noses together; Morrigan had no objections but Leliana was the one that wanted to do the kissing, she should make good on, this is encouragement and not teasing.

[fightingale]

"And yet you keep speaking yourself," Leliana replies, with just a note of dryness. Dryness is safer, easier. It allows her to regain something of her certainty, making jests and treating the rest of the world as a brittle thing, rather than proving brittle herself.

It is so strange a thing, to let someone else have their hands on her. To be aware of skin on hers and not be gauging it as a threat. And these hands are no longer strange and unfamiliar. Morrigan had stood as a comfort when Leliana was shaking and burning without a pyre to stand upon, when her body tried desperately to consume itself.

The bump of their noses makes Leliana exhale a breath, hard enough to huff some of her hair away, before she shakes her head a little at both of them. Absurd.

No. Enough of this— this childish hesitation. Leliana leans forward, a single certain motion, claiming Morrigan's lips in a kiss, as her hands stay lingering just barely on the edge of the bench.

[arcaneadvisor]

This time they're far more likely to be interrupted but Morrigan finds herself enjoying this kiss more than the last. The last was not their first yet how do you count a kiss in a dungeon when both parties are near drowning? There was an air of inevitability about those first two kisses, and something of desperation about the second, about something real and solid. (Still she has not asked of what the Fade was, worries at it like a cut in her mouth at times but now she is more than likely to leave it to lie still with the other old bones, after Leliana's poisoning.)

The Fade is a cruel place, and Morrigan is used to what people say about her, she doesn't care what they say, truly, she doesn't. But to be the person Leliana came to. To be wanted after she had been told to go.

Without breaking the kiss because she can't, she won't, not until her lungs burn for want of breath, her hands find Leliana's to pry them free of the bench so she can link them together, something settling in her. She will have had this. If she has nothing else than she had this, and she was wanted even if only for a time, and they have had this warm golden moment in the garden with Leliana stronger and alive. No one will take that from her.

[fightingale]

She allows her hands to be eases away from the edge; she is glad for her hands to be drawn away and held in Morrigan's instead, although one slips away to cup Morrigan's jaw. It is foolish, absurd sentimentality, and she relishes each moment of it. That alone is as warming as the brush of the sun over their skin, painting both of them in tones of fire and saffron and bronze.

Her teeth find Morrigan's lip, only for a moment, and her fingers lips to thread partly into her hair, and Leliana does not break the kiss, but she does smile against it, crooking the corner of her mouth. She has survived. They are defiant, she and her dread apostate, and it demands that she pull Morrigan closer.

Onlookers be damned.