millennium-fae:

Cassandra

She sees your eyes wander aimlessly during the War Councils, half-lidded and lifeless. She sees your arms shake as you gather papers, your limbs weakened and aching. She notices how you no longer speak with conviction and instead mumble with an uninterested monotone.

After a skirmish in the Hinterlands, where you fight with no joy or enthusiasm, she pulls you aside and rests a gentle hand on your shoulder; “I can see your duties have weighed heavily on your soul,” she says, but you shake your head – this is just a stretch of bad days, you reply with a tired smile. Cassandra looks at you with intense compassion. “If so, then rest easy. No matter if this ‘stretch’ of ‘bad days’ lasts weeks or years, I will be at your side.”

Cullen

He notices how you no longer stay to mingle amongst your colleagues after a mission and how you instead retire to your quarters at only 9 in the evening. You sleep for 10, 12, 16 hours at a time. But you are never rested enough. One day, you laugh about it to Cullen, claiming that you’ve grown soft in the days past. But he is somber – he recognizes this exhaustion.

During his time in Kirkwall, he felt much the same, but he kept it hidden like he kept so many things buried away. He stops your false laugh with a full body embrace and holds you tightly. “You’re so brave and strong,” he says without any trepidation, “and don’t ever think yourself not.” Unlike myself, he thinks privately in his head.

Solas

He knows exactly what’s wrong even before you do. You’ve always struggled with relapses of troubling ailments throughout your life, and you know they come relatively regularly. But in the rise of so many responsibilities, you’ve not thought much of your sudden insomnia. You can live on five hours of sleep, although you wish you didn’t wake up in the middle of every night. It’s only when you suddenly find yourself drowning in thoughts of self-hatred do you realize that something is wrong.

Even before that point, Solas had been making an effort to pay you with excess gentleness. What was previously a simple ‘hello’ would be a soft embrace. What was once a fond gaze became a slow kiss on your forehead. He would reach for your waist when you visit his rotunda whereas previously he seemed to constantly remain a respectful distance. When you confront him on this recent development and tell him that you’ve lived like this since you could remember, that it hasn’t destroyed you yet and it won’t now, he smiles kindly with unabashed pride. He offers to take you on a quiet outing, just because he loves you. Solas doesn’t tell you that he knows depression like its a second skin and that your own fortitude gives him strength, but you have an inkling nevertheless.

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