[ closed ] my past has tasted bitter for years now

[apostasia]

WHO: Martel Leblanc + Cassandra Pentaghast.
WHAT: A nice evening in.
WHEN: Early Harvestmere.
WHERE: Skyhold; Martel's private room.
NOTES: His hair's still white, currently. No I'm still not photoshopping that.

What surprises him isn't that it's different.

Of course it is; he'd dropped revelations on her like a rock into a pond and watched the way they rippled behind her eyes. He could see the moment when he shifted from her handsome daydream to something else, and it felt right, but it had still ached. No; that she looks at him with new wariness, that she hesitates where before she hadn't, that she studies him when his vague past had seemed not to bother her before, these things don't surprise him.

What surprises him, when she's settled at his side - up enough, by now, that his linens can be changed regularly enough not to make this a sweat-soaked mess - is that it isn't more changed. That she hasn't (yet) cut her losses, that his mistakes might perhaps not be insurmountable. That he can still put his fingers in her hair when he isn't turning a page, and she still hasn't hit him with the book yet for raising his eyebrows at her over it when reading aloud a particularly salacious paragraph.

Comments

[stabsbooks]

It is something that they share, that absence of love for their respective homelands, but Cassandra does not comment on it. She is listening too closely to what he does not say, her brow furrowed faintly in concern.

I am myself a product...and it is nothing I care to revisit.

I leave all that to those better men.

She lifts her hand, cradling his cheek gently, fingers caressing his jaw.

"You are so hard on yourself," she murmurs sorrowfully. "But there is wisdom, I think, in recognizing when it is best to seek a different path. And...and goodness, in turning away from power that is not yours to have." She smiles at him, encouragingly, her expression full of affection and pride.

"Perhaps you are a better man than you think."

She wants so badly to believe it.

[apostasia]

If he could - God, if he could.

Martel presses a kiss to her temple and stays there, the affection and gratitude in the gesture as real as the ache in the pit of his stomach at being looked at that way, a hard thing to bear after so long. So unfamiliar, and will it ever not feel undeserved?

"What I believe," he says, finally, quieter, "is that I can be."

A better man. He has to believe that, or the only worthwhile thing left for him to do is die, and -

Well, he goes back and forth on that.

[stabsbooks]

Cassandra studies him for a moment. She can feel his melancholy, even if he doesn't put words to it, and she can't help but be affected by it as well.

She sighs quietly, lowering her head to rest on his chest and curling close and warm around him. Really, there doesn't seem much else to say.