Alistair POV/0228
The stew is a good thing to think about.
Rabbit, allegedly. He has doubts. He relayed these doubts aloud because that's what he does — releases whatever forms first, then evaluates the damage in real time. He has been trying, lately, to stop doing that. To think first. He's been trying very hard.
It's going spectacularly.
She's looking at the soup now instead of him. He looks at the table. Then at Leliana, who is doing something conspiratorial at the bar. Then at the window, where the tower sits in the lake.
Emma's going back in there tomorrow. With him, and everyone. Back into the place that made her. He doesn't know what that means to her and he's been afraid to ask because every time he opens his mouth she looks at him with that particular expression — not unkind, just confused.
“I miss you,” she says.
He looks up. What? like a stuck door. “I'm here,” he says.
She meets his eyes. “Not really.”
Right. Right. Yes. He's been aware, in the way you're aware of something you've also forgotten, a stone in your boot that you've decided you'll deal with later and then you've been walking on it numb. Gone stiff. She'd used that word once, talking about something else, and he'd filed it under things that apply to me, specifically, right now.
“I decided to stop embarrassing myself,” he says.
She says, Oh, which does not make it better.
He explains. He's explaining. He tries to sound like someone who has thought about this calmly and rationally and not like someone who, in the business with Leliana, lay awake rearranging the same thoughts in increasingly baroque configurations until sunrise. Maybe it was better if I didn't say the wrong thing. Very sensible. Very measured. He'd been trying. He'd been doing her a favor, actually, by not filling every silence with whatever falls out of his head.
“So you said nothing,” she says.
“Yes.” He winces. “Which appears to be worse.”
She's looking at her drink now, and she says something about how he used to just talk to her. About anything. About nothing. About templars stealing lyrium, about — and here she names the incident. She remembers, in detail. The lyrium, the fire, the accident — and he says that was an accident, and she says I know, that's why it was funny, and she says she misses it, when you tell me the first thing that comes to your head, and something about that specific phrasing...
He explains: after Leliana, he panicked. He doesn't use the word panicked. He says he started thinking this was a sign, that he was out of his depth, that he doesn't have a lot of experience with this — which is a spectacular understatement, he has exactly no experience with this, he grew up in a hayloft and then a monastery, and then the Wardens and the Blight started, there was not a lot of time for — anyway. He thought she deserved better than an idiot with a mouth running ahead of his brain.
“I liked the idiot,” she says.
He almost smiles. He tells her he's trying to be worthy of it, because that's what it felt like — like this mattered enough to become the kind of person who could handle a conversation without constantly putting his foot in things. Like he owed her a better version of himself. Like the version he'd been wasn't enough.
“Please stop,” she says, and there's something in her voice that makes him go very still. “You were enough when you weren't trying. That's the problem.”
He was enough.
He processes this.
He was — all right, the problem with that is: if he was enough, then why — but that's not a productive line of thinking. He's really not going to think about why she was flirting with Leliana if he was already enough. Nope, not in a public inn where the stew is dubious and he's already on thin conversational ice.
He can't treat something like this casually. He's trying to say that.
He looks at the table. Then his hands. Then at Emma.
And Leliana, murmuring at the bar.
Fine. He asks about Leliana. He'd been saving this question, turning it over, still not sure if it was ever any of his business. She'd shut something down with Leliana, and he'd watched it happen from a tactical distance of approximately fifteen feet, and he'd thought: because of me? possibly because of me? And then he'd talked himself out of it, because that was probably arrogant, to assume —
“Yes,” she says.
So she chose this.
“I did,” she says.
He was going to say I wasn't sure, which is true, and then he was going to say I didn't know you felt that way, which is also true, but then something else comes out of her—
“Why would you ask me to choose you and then stop being you?” — it is unfairly accurate and it lands somewhere under his sternum.
He puts his elbows on the table and puts his face in his hands and looks at her. There is nowhere better to look, and she asked a direct and reasonable question that he does not have a direct and reasonable answer to. The answer is: being chosen felt so improbable that when it happened he immediately started trying to earn it retroactively, which is not how that works, which he knows, which has not stopped him.
But he asks, “So, where do we go from here?”
She says they could stop. He looks away, says right, of course, I understand, and means it in the bleakest possible way, because of course that's how this ends, because he did something stupid and overcorrected into a different kind of stupid, the full arc of a genius—
She says no, no, so quickly he has to look back. You don't understand.
“You got scared. I—”
She hesitates.
“I don't want to scare you.”
That he was not prepared for. His shoulders drop about an inch, like something that had been braced too long finally accepts that the hit isn't coming. She was worried. About him. About scaring him.
He'd been so busy trying to be careful with her that it hadn't occurred to him that she might be doing the same thing from the other side. Two people handling the same object so gently it was floating untouched in the middle.
And then she asks: my magic. Is that it?
He stares at her for a second. Of all the — he's fought abominations. He says this, almost before he means to, with more heat than he intended: he's fought darkspawn and ogres, they've fought them together, he's not afraid of her. She tells him she doubts it's that simple, and he tries to regroup — what did you mean, then? That I see you as a risk? As something to manage?
She doesn't answer.
He's quieter when he says: “I know what you are. I've always known. It's never once been the part that worried me.”
She crosses her arms and tells him he can barely look at her.
He has to think about that. He has, in fairness, been looking at the table a lot. The drink. His hands. The alleged stew. Things that don't look back with that particular, specific expression that makes him feel as though he's melting internally. But not because he's afraid of her — afraid of magic, afraid of Emma — that's not it, that's never been it.
What worries me, he says, reluctantly, is me ruining this.
She looks at him like she was expecting something substantially worse.
“That's it?”
Yes, he says, and he is, frankly, a little irritated now. Yes, that's all. Merely—
”—Just the little matter of I don't want to take you for granted. And how I'm trying to, for once in my life, think before I say something stupid. Is that so horrible?”
She asks why, and she looks tired. The chair creaks when she leans back, and she tells him he was never wrong in the first place, “Now... you act like I'm fragile,” she says.
Which makes no sense. She's the least shatterable person he's ever met.
He starts to say I'm not— because she absorbed the Joining and the Blight and all of this fighting and tragedy like something uncomfortable and inconvenient.
“You are. You think one wrong word and I'll stop talking to you? Decide you're not worth it?”
He hadn't — he hadn't thought of it that way. He hadn't thought of it as thinking she was the problem, as treating her like something that would shatter if mishandled.
“I didn't realize it looked like that.” He sits back.
That's — yeah. She's right. He's been treating her like that. But he's the one who is fragile. The whole time.
“Do you think I don't know what you are?”
She knows who he is.
She's saying it like it's obvious. Like she has to point it out because he's forgotten, and the thing is — he has, a bit.
He's been so busy trying to construct a version of himself that was worth the choosing that he let the person who got chosen in the first place evaporate quietly into the background.
He tells her he was trying to do her a favor.
“I don't need that favor,” she says. Irritated, arguing. Because she knows who he is, and wants him. Maker, he'll try to stop. but he's not sure he knows how to stop flailing.
“I didn’t do you any favors. I know that now.”
She says it's not an audition, which is — he opens his mouth, and he says he's sorry, he's doing this all stiff and wrong, he'll try — and she says please again, like she's actually begging, “I need you to actually be here.”
She asks about going back to how things were. He can hear what he's not saying: even though you let Leliana down for this, even though you burned something for this, you'd just—
“It’s a truce. We don’t escalate. We don’t audition. We just… talk.”
“I'll take it,” he says, immediately, and then something human reasserts itself and he hears himself call it extremely un-suave, which it is. She says she's not good at romance, like it's a fact about her, some practical information for navigation—
”—you should learn this.”
“That’s tragic,” he replies.
“For both of us,” she's so dry, so even, always.
He tells her, then, carefully: he doesn't know if he's ready for “—well, you know.“
She says she's not worried about that.
“You chose this,” he said again, like he was testing the shape of it.
“Yes.”
“And you’re not… reconsidering.”
“No.”
He looks down. I don't know where this goes, he says, because that's the truest thing he can produce at this particular moment, and it's the one thing he can actually say out loud without it turning into something he hasn't sorted out yet.
“So?” She raises an eyebrow. “The truce.”
“Although—” He starts. Stops. He'd been about to say something. Something in the vicinity of —that maybe the truce is a mistake— and then he looked at her and the sentence died of its own accord.
She looks at him.
“Nothing,” he says. “It's fine. Truce.”
He believes this approximately sixty percent.