faderift | open. you believe what you want to believe.

She comes closer, shoulders a little hunched--they both feel stupid, if Matthias is to be believed, and he always is. A flash of regret comes over her as she realizes she might have brought Biter with her. Their cat has no idea it should feel awkward about anything; she would sit on Matthias' lap and get fur all over the shirt he's mending, and Laura thinks it would make him more comfortable. And she, in turn, might feel more comfortable, too.

"I meant to come and see you," she agrees, climbing onto the foot of his bed. Where the prosaic come-and-go of the dream has receded, curling up beneath piles of furs with him hasn't. Sitting with her legs crossed, facing him with a gulf of rumpled fabric between them, brings it to mind now.

And it reminds her of that other girl, the one she was (or could be someday, five years from now). Who used contractions, smiled easily, hugged people, and found words for feelings. Laura tries to remember how simple it had seemed in the dream, looks for that projected confidence. At the very least, she tries to explain herself, rather than sitting silent and making Matthias talk them both toward the thing they're both thinking about.

"I was unsure we wanted to talk to each other. But I--" a little breath, rubbing the knuckles of one hand--"missed you."

(Explanation, she can do, if haltingly. Confidence is more complicated. But the words are spoken, and that's what matters.)

He lets out a little breath that he hadn't known he was holding. "I missed you too."

It's easy to confess, because it's very true. Matthias has grown used to Laura being around, and while the novelty of having a girlfriend hasn't worn off--someone you can spend time with, someone who always wants to be around you--it's become a novelty he's accustomed with, like a really good pair of boots or the warmest blanket, or the sending crystals. Being without has felt wrong.

He turns his hands over and looks at them instead of at her. "I'm not sorry for the magic." On his thumb, under his knuckles, there's the callouses from holding his staff. Only mages have those. Matthias rubs at them. He takes another breath. "I don't want to wait to say all of this. I'm not sorry for the magic but I am sorry for-- for what I did. The blood magic. I never have before, it came really easily, I'd never felt anything like that before, so I didn't think-- I knew I could, so I did. I remember that I felt like I had to save you. I had to stop him. So I-- did. But I know it scares people," he interrupts himself to clarify, "I know people don't like it. And I never have before. I think it did help," or it would have helped, but Laura finished the Vint, her lyrium claws tearing open his throat like shears into paper, "but I'm not a blood mage."

So they each stare at their hands as Matthias explains. The words blood magic always sit oddly with her--the fact of having a name for it at all, maybe, a way of talking about it. There's a cruelty to the sound of it that doesn't match Matthias' easy smile or sense of care.

Which makes it easy to nod when he says I'm not a blood mage. He isn't. He wouldn't be. It was a dream, and--as she'd had to inform Byerly--dreams are not real.

But.

"It did not help. Blood magic never helps." She flicks a glance up at him, head still tilted down, green eyes sharp and sad.

Matthias hesitates. He wants to agree with her--or, more, he wants this to be easy. He hasn't disagreed with Laura before. It feels as wrong as not speaking with her had felt. Worse, maybe.

But as much as he wants to agree, he doesn't want to lie. Magic is good. Magic has only ever helped him. Someone who hasn't got any magic, they wouldn't know that. Someone that was only ever hurt by magic, they wouldn't know that either.

"It could." There's caution in his voice. "I wouldn't do it, it's not for me, but-- People, mages, have to do things, sometimes. To defend someone or stop something from happening. Desperation, not something that they do normally--I wouldn't trust anyone that just, you know, did blood magic, but--someone that needed to."

She shakes her head, locks of dark hair falling in front of her face. There's no reason to push it back again--it's a curtain against the things Matthias is saying right now, all the things she's never thought about in relation to him. Of course he would hate bad magic as much as she: he's only ever performed spells that Laura approves of, as far as she knows. He mostly only starts fires, and only in places where they need fire.

It's obvious that she's treading on dangerous ground, as clear as stepping onto ice and hearing it creak. But she knows she has to say something. What, she isn't sure of. Her words are slow, deliberate attempts to feel things out as she goes. "Your magic does things that help. It makes you faster at making fires. And it is...I like what it looks like."

Matthias throwing fire around for fun, someplace it won't catch on anything--it's fascinating to watch. Sometimes it's beautiful.

"But anyone could do it," she continues. She swallows. "I can light a fire, too. I cannot tell someone's hands to betray them."

Matthias curls his fingers into a loose fist, more for comfort than anything else. His sleeves are too short to grab hold of. This is the next best thing. In his chest, his heart is beating very hard. The compliment to his magic makes him feel like he's stood on top of a mountain. The rest of it makes him feel like he took a wrong step and he's started to fall.

"But it doesn't have to be that. You can use your own blood. That's the better way to do it. Or if you had someone who was willing to give it over--just for the power. Not to control. I know that's what happened, in the dream," which is important to say, it was only a dream, "but that was only because I was, or I mean, I wasn't, thinking. It just happened."

He looks back down at his hands again. He's as rapid-fire as ever, especially when compared to her slow and deliberate speech. That makes the space between worse still.

"If you could. If you were a mage. And you were-- I dunno, you were about to die. Or if I was about to die. And you could save me--you really wouldn't use it?"

The question gives her pause. Of course she'd do anything she had to, if it kept him from dying--but blood magic isn't fighting. It's...something else, a kind of control that seems like cheating to Laura. There's no such thing as a truly fair fight, but a fight in which one person can't control what they do feels particularly dishonest.

But she's starting to realize that the problem isn't just the dilemma he's posed to her, the question of how far is too far. It's also the knowledge that Matthias knows how he would answer--and how he might think she should, too.

"I would save you," she says, feeling the edges of her fingernails biting against her palm, "but not like that. I could stab them. Or hit them. I would bite someone before I made them kill themselves."

It's hard to imagine that world, one in which she's both a mage and herself, as she is now. If she'd had magic, would she have claws? She might have exploded in rage at Reis, destroyed her captor and saved her mother--everything might have been different.

"I would do anything."

Anything. It's a huge word. The whole world can fit in it.

"If it meant saving you and stopping you from dying, I would do anything. I know I would. I love you," and that's huge, too, a depth so deep and a height so high. "I can't lose you. Everyone dies, in the end. I know that. Before I was in Riftwatch, everyone died, and if they didn't then, they were going to. No one wanted to come with me. So I left and I came here, and-- I reached for it. Magic." Blood magic. "I reached and it was there and so I used it. I know it was only a dream. But I would do anything, anything, if it meant you not dying."

Anything is too much. It's the whole world closing in around them, with untold dangers in all its corners. Matthias killing for her. Matthias dying for her. Matthias letting his magic into the minds of people, putting their hands around their throats, doing anything--and for her.

She can't even make space for everything he says at once. I love you. I can't lose you. The only person who's ever said that was her mother, and only at a time when she was already lost.

"Not this. Not--" She has to look at him, has to try to find a way to get it across the space between them. He doesn't understand--but he will, Laura thinks. He always understands. "Not taking what makes them people. If that is what keeps me alive, I want to be dead."

"No--"

He can't help himself--the distance between them isn't so great, the bed isn't so large, and Matthias closes the space by reaching for her hands. His throat feels very tight.

"Don't," he manages. Don't say that is what he wants to say but he can't get it out. This isn't the way that he thought this would go. He swallows, hard. "That's-- That's not what it would be."

But now that she's said it, he knows that she's right. Taking what makes them people, that is what it would be. Like the way making someone Tranquil takes them away. Just another shade of brutality. Making someone strangle themselves, pulling on them from the inside--it lacks the honesty of a fight. But he would do it. Anything. What does that say about him, really?

"I don't want to lose you." This time it's more desperate. I want to be dead, he keeps hearing it now that she's said it. "I only meant that I'd-- You said it as well, you'd save me if I needed it. That's all that I meant."

She tenses, her shoulders tightening against her neck, and she doesn't know why. Matthias reaching for her hands shouldn't make her feel like she needs to be ready to spring back, a startled animal someone let into the Gallows rather than penning in the stable.

Too many things are happening at once, and she can't seem to sift through them quickly enough to know what to say. And really, only one thing is actually happening--it's only a conversation--but it feels like ten different demons leaping at her. Worry for Matthias, a little stab of terror at the idea that she's this important to him (the faint awareness that he might be that important to her as well), her hands trapped, the scent of his fear, listening for the others who sleep here, knowing she's said something wrong if this is his reaction (and knowing that everything she's said feels right).

And magic, all the horrible possibilities she assumed would never be a problem. Matthias makes fire, he would not do something else. Magic used for her.

"I would save you," she agrees, her voice soft. She stares down at their hands. "But--not like that. Please."

"All right." He says it quickly, grips at her hands like he's drowning. She isn't looking at him but he's looking at her, the intensity of his gaze burning into the top of her head like a brand. If she looks up now she'll catch the heat of it directly. He can't do any differently.

What he's agreed to--will he be able to keep it? If the moment comes--a moment more dangerous than the one they'd faced in the dream, a moment of real danger--will he be able to stay his hand, keep himself from saving her? But if she would rather die than be saved by him, like that--then she'll come out of it hating him. She'll leave. And that would be worse, surely, than losing her to death. Or would it? At least she would be alive, even if she wasn't alive with him.

But when Matthias thinks of the day that she'd told him she was going away on a mission--when he thinks of the sour taste of panic when she'd started climbing his ice walls, determined to get away--no, losing her like that would hurt worse.

"All right," he says again, firmly, "I won't, I swear. On my life." Keep your word, Matthias, because losing her would be the worst thing of all.

And that's what she wants, isn't it? A promise--and before that, an apology. It feels hollow, somehow, but she's not sure what else is required in a situation like this. Matthias has said everything that matters. He sounded, for a second or two, and perhaps only in her mind, like he might begin to cry.

Everything Matthias has done is right. She doesn't know what more she could ask. But she doesn't feel better.

Maybe that will take time, feeling better about any of this. It's the part of the dream that's stuck with her strongest, wedging itself beneath her skin until she might hesitate to touch his hands, despite the fact that he holds hers without fear. I am dangerous, too.

"Thank you," she whispers, lacking a better response, and finally meets his eyes. The look in his eyes, she can't name, but it makes her chest hurt. "I do not die easily. So you do not have to worry."

If Matthias' eyes are a little shiny when he looks back at her--well, that's to be expected. The hot feeling in his throat stays only a feeling; no tears spill over out of his eyes. He makes a short almost-laugh at her reassurance, and it comes out thick and stupid sounding. That bluntness that she has, so deadpan it seems like a joke. He knows that she means it.

"I know. I will, though."

He looks back down at their hands. There's a skinny little scar that runs between his knuckles, white with age. He doesn't remember where it came from. You forget things, eventually, but the dream feels like it will stay with him forever, just the way a really bad nightmare might.

And he doesn't want to ask. He wants, instead, to get up, to go outside, to walk on the battlements with Laura or go into Kirkwall or leave the city entirely, back to the woods. He thinks about Laura's pale skin, and the glow of the firelight, and the darkness of the trees. Kissing her, hard, all tangled against her. He swallows.

"Had you seen someone do it before? Blood magic?"

He worries about me right now, she thinks, looking at him. Of course he will worry when I am in danger. If there was a way to make it so he wouldn't, she'd be sorely tempted; it makes her chest tighten to realize just how her safety matters to him.

(Much more than it does to her, certainly. She shouldn't let him know that.)

She's inching a little closer, thinking that maybe she can pull him into her arms and they can let silence say everything else for them--the idea of touching him isn't so disconcerting now, not with a promise from him--when he brings up blood magic by name. And then she's frozen again, just for a moment, her teeth clenching together.

Has she seen blood magic before? She assumes so, inasmuch as it appears to mean the bad kinds of magic on the rare occasions when people bring it up. The boundaries of exactly what qualifies feel academic to someone whose lessons in magic always featured her as the test subject. For Laura, blood magic is when it took away her choices. When it terrified her. When it hurt.

So. Closer but not exactly close, looking past his head until she realizes she's doing it and makes herself focus on his eyes, she swallows. If he knows, maybe he'll have more reason not to let the dream become truth. "Sometimes I did not do what I was told."

Hearing that feels like a punch, like someone knocked the wind out of him. People don't have to have had blood magic done to them to be frightened of it. He'd thought--maybe hoped--that was all that it was for Laura, that she was peripherally aware of the taboo of it. Hearing the opposite shifts everything into terrible place.

And he doesn't need to press. Matthias can connect those words with some awful reality, something he doesn't want for her. Only it happened before him. He's a mage, and a mage is what did that to her. Shame and sorrow washes through him, and he feels, suddenly, as if he'll be sick.

He swallows that down. He holds tightly to Laura's hands. He makes himself look her in the eye. She has beautiful eyes. Beautiful, the color of the trees in early summer.

"I won't," he says, again. "I'll never."

Laura nods, and they sit there, Matthias' hands clenched around hers. Her jaw doesn't seem to want to move, her lungs unwilling to breathe out an answer.

She can't remember if she's told anyone about that part of the magic before. She probably hasn't. People see the claws, and they know enough; they don't ask for more details. For people besides Matthias, she doesn't think she'd give them. Realizing that, though, that he's the only other living person who knows, however broadly, somehow makes her feel better and worse all at once.

(Eventually, she will feel better. Someday, a burden shared will be a burden lessened. Right now, she's filled with shame and sadness and worry for Matthias, who looks at her with such intensity. Her entire body is too light, not quite in her own control, liable to dissolve entirely if no one was keeping hold of her hands.)

It takes a few breaths, and she still feels off--trembling, she realizes belatedly, shivering like they aren't inside at all--but she can do something besides look at him, lost somewhere behind her own face. Carefully, with the eerie sensation that she's not actually the one doing it, just experiencing it from afar--not blood magic, something else, some feeling of distance--she lets go of his hands and creeps forward enough that she can sit beside him on the narrow bed.

There are things that can't be said, not easily, and one is everything that she means when she wraps her arms around him, burying her head in the crook of his neck. He smells the same as always, if more fearful, more worried, than usual.

Of course Matthias puts his arms around her when Laura moves closer to him. Of course he pulls himself close to her in return. This says something without that silence being broken just yet. And as he holds her he feels the trembling in her, and in turn he feels--something. He doesn't have a word for it. Bad, is mostly what he feels, bad that this is what they've come to, bad that he made her feel this way, that she has lived a life that has made her afraid like this.

When he pulls in his next breath, it's shaky. When he holds onto her, there's no shaking to it at all. He is at least certain of this: how they fit together, how he wants her to hold to him and how he wants to hold to her too. She has to know that. No matter what was before, they have this.

Laura isn't sure how long they stay there. She forgets to listen for sounds at the door or think more than a moment or two ahead of each breath she takes in. Until her teeth no longer threaten to chatter if she unclenches her jaw, she lives in their scents as they mingle and the familiar weight of Matthias' arms.

It takes time.

When she thinks she can tolerate it (at any time she could have, if she'd had to, but with Matthias she doesn't have to, he will not make her), she lifts her head enough to peer up at his face. Her cheeks are dry, her eyes tearless, but some tension still lingers in the angles of her face. "Before that...it was not a bad dream."

Which is to say, I do not wish to talk about this anymore.

He had needed that moment very badly--maybe not as much as Laura, how can he know that--but still, very badly. Holding onto her feels like touching ground after being too far out in the middle of a lake. It's solid, it makes sense.

So Matthias even manages to give her a little bit of a smile when she pulls away. "It was a good dream," he agrees. He lifts one hand, carefully--and if she permits it, he will brush his thumb just beside her mouth, like he might work out some of that tension from her. "It felt--real. In a good way."

"Yes." She lets him touch her, not quite relaxing, but not shying back from him. "I do not want us to lose the war. But--"

But even if they seemed very, very close to losing the war, there still was joy to be had. Hard work, quiet moments, waking a sleeping man and kissing him in the middle of the night. Living like people live, others looking at her and seeing a person capable of blending into society for more than a few minutes at a time.

She can't quite bring herself to say those things aloud. The not-quite-a-memory, lying next to him beneath piles of furs and blankets, feels fragile. Mentally, she's shelved it with her best recollections of her mother, things to be remembered and guarded carefully. Instead, she tries to summon her I am teasing voice--not entirely successfully--and finishes the sentence with, "--you were very handsome."

Edited (when you decide you gotta add something like 10 hours later) 2021-03-02 00:33 (UTC)

Wherever Matthias thought she was going to go, it wasn't there. He's caught off-guard, enough so that a smile jumps to his face. He smooths his thumb back again. She isn't smiling, but he hears that note in her voice. It helps, hearing it. Something to cleave to.

"Couldn't grow a beard, still." He remembers that much. "Probably won't ever be able to. I hope that's all right with you."

You know, for the forever they promised each other in the dark of their shared tent, years from now. It feels fragile to Matthias as well, but very real at the same time. He wants to ask about it, and opens his mouth to say something before he thinks, no, hang on, wait, not yet, not after you were just talking of blood magic. Keep them separate.

"You were beautiful. Still are. Don't think any war could have changed that."

Matthias smiling was, at that moment, the objective--she realizes it when it happens, his entire face shifting. If he's handsome always (and he is), he's especially so when he looks at her like she said something worth hearing.

"Beards do not interest me." A beard would only obscure his face, and she's grown fond of seeing all of it. She reaches up, fingers alighting at his jaw, letting herself feel the plane of skin, muscle and bone beneath. Some part of her still feels like it's disconnected from the world around her, shut up someplace inside her own skull, but it's smaller than the rest of her. "And I think you are biased."

Still teasing, still not quite making herself sound teasing enough, but with a certain softness around her eyes that means a smile as much as the curve of her lips might.

His grin shifts his face again, changing the angles that her fingertips are pressed to. It's a small grin on the Matthias scale--he has a variety, usually wider than not--but it's still a grin. And things move one notch closer to better.

"No, that's not it. 'Cause you are, and you don't need me to say it. Like I will say it, 'course, but it's also true on its own." He shifts his hand, pushes back to carefully tuck some of her hair back behind her ear. And here's her face, close to his, perfect and pretty. "I reckon I could look at you forever. You really don't like beards at all?"

She doesn't strictly disagree. However she might feel about the scars blanketing her limbs, Laura's aware that she's generally not unpleasant to look at. And Matthias is the only person in the world from whom she likes hearing opinions, when it comes to the subject of her appearance. But she has yet to find a way to accept the compliment easily.

So instead, shrugging at his answer--but with the corner of her mouth twitching up slightly, something shy coming into her face--she tells him, "I would see less of your face."

It's better than the other answers at hand: sometimes they smell bad, they can be unpleasantly bristly, they remind her of other people she'd rather forget.

Edited (fixing a bad sentence) 2021-03-04 14:30 (UTC)

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