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orbitalwings · 7 days ago

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Two Steps on the Water

Harding x Rook one-shot for @datvcompanionweeks Harding Week, combining the prompts for day 2, Inquisition and Veilguard

She had never believed she would go back there. To be proven wrong felt somehow more foolish than when she had thought for a time she would never leave.

Leaving Skyhold had underlined a time in her life that had felt like it would go on forever. Returning seemed to erase the ten year departure, though her body ached and strained in ways it had not the last time she had stood outside Herald’s Rest. New scars, new stories, a heart that weighed in her chest with fresh grief and an anguish as old as the mountains, all interwoven and inside her the messy scraps of the back of the tapestry.

The sign above the door had fallen off, never replaced. Door propped open, it was not the sounds of merriment and song that poured out, but conversation, quiet and overlapping. Creeping vines had crept higher, but the tree outside did not seem any taller. There was something to be said, on time and how it did not take all things in equal measure, but Lace cared little for that. It was probably only for how short she was by comparison, for it had always felt very tall to stand beneath it.

She was certainly not any taller.

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The last time she had gone into the tavern she was nineteen, looking for something that then she could not recall but in the moment had seemed tremendously important to her. She had been packing up her life, after all. Not for the first time. Certainly not for the last, though for years she had not had a life in any one place long enough to need packing.

Lace was older, she had seen most of Thedas, more than just about any one person, and there she was, back where she had started, like it was all only a dream left behind her in waking.

How much had changed, and yet how young she felt, a decade washed away as time and water smoothed stone, leaving her raw and new again against the tide. Polished by her mother’s fussing hands, holding her cheeks and kissing her nose, cradling her as if she were only that girl, wide eyed and off to join the Inquisition. Her little girl, and Lace never escaped seeing her without hearing it, rarely ever without an accompanying hug.

That day was no different, as she tried to slip through Herald’s Rest, looking not for something, but someone.

“Your mother seems,” Celene Thorne fought for words as she straightened from where she was leaning, “nice.”

Lace faltered. Of course she had seen the display, and her cheeks warmed as she turned to humour to combat the embarrassment, “You can say overbearing.”

“She only just got you back,” Celene said, taking on a gentler tone, and she stopped, hands on the railings and eyes on the tavern below. Lace knew where she was looking.

Herald’s Rest was not bustling with soldiers and patrons, but refugees. They congregated in the warmth, away from the busy barracks and crowded great hall. Livelier than it no doubt had been during the height of the conflict. People came and went, the door ever open. Andra Harding was often found in the middle of the room, caught up in conversation or pointing new arrivals in the direction of this or that place or another. As quickly as one conversation ended, another began, as kind and accommodating as her daughter, and as eager to lend a hand.

Yet, it was not her alone stealing glances to the upper level of the tavern.

Most of the refugees at Skyhold were Fereldan. Many had lived through a blight before. They knew better than most those who went to fight the blight did not often return. Even Wardens could be lost.

“They all did.”

Even Wardens could be lost, but a little dwarven farmgirl had come back.

Lace knew all the stories of the Hero of Ferelden. She knew so many that they contradicted one another, truth and rumour and myth all hitting the same familiar beats. It was a story like so many others; humble beginnings and a twist of fate, a chance encounter, and the world is saved. Still, there was no story like it. Stories had heroes with happy endings, and the world remained saved. The hero who ended the Fifth Blight and saved Ferelden, perhaps all of Thedas, lived large in Lace’s mind as it only could for a girl who had been no older than six when she had first watched the world burn. She would watch it burn again, twice, before thirty.

The word had come easily from others. She was a hero - their hero, and she had come home, as so few heroes did.

Lace did not feel like a hero. She felt like a little girl hiding up a tree, nostrils burning with the smell of rot and ash and blood, the sounds of mabari howling piercing the inside of her head louder than her own crying.

Taking a step back from the railing, she put a hand on Celene’s arm, grounding herself as she managed a breathy, “Yeah.”

“Lace?” The whisper of her name was ignored, fingers dragging down the sleeve of Celene’s shirt as Lace’s eyes found focus beyond her.

“Are you staying up here?” Lace asked. She did not wait for a reply before stepping into the old room in the corner, light still streaming in from the windows, though many of its trinkets and treasures had been stripped out. Celene’s travel pack was tossed on one of the benches along the windows, her sword beside it.

Celene followed her, leaning against the doorframe as she said, “Might do, it’s cosy, has a nice view, lots of cushions, room for two...”

“It barely has room for one,” Lace corrected, a laugh of indignant disbelief carrying the words to the high ceiling.

“Well, two if you don’t mind getting close,” said Celene. One long step took her to Lace, arms coming around her as she added, “Which, for the record, I don’t mind.”

“Oh, I’m very aware,” Lace whispered.

“Good, thought maybe I was being too subtle,” Celene teased, lips pressing the part in Lace’s hair.

Though she wound her into her arms in a lazy embrace, she could not wind Lace’s mind away from the past which surrounded her.

“This used to be Sera’s room,” Lace remarked, voice quiet, comment far less casual than she seemed to have hoped. Wistful, but it did not stop her continuing, “She used to shout out the window to get my attention. She never had anything to say really, usually just a dirty word. She flashed me once.”

Celene shook her head, smile pressing more firmly into the split of red hair. She had questions, curious and prying, as ever she had when Lace’s time with the Inquisition came up, but they would only serve to distract. It seemed an impossibly long time since Lace had willingly brought up her old friends, it would not do to startle her back into silence.

“You could always hear the Chargers from, well, anywhere really, all hours of the night, into the morning. They would always encourage me to join in when I got back with the other scouts.”

“Did you?”

“Sometimes,” she said, the word heavy with the regret that it had not been often or always. Still, “I taught them how to dance before the Winter Palace, right down there, and we would sing for hours, and it was like being back home just for a little bit. Maybe I was, home.”

“You miss them,” Celene whispered, lips migrating down to Lace’s ear.

A laugh that did not belie her nerves bubbled up as she asked, in a poor attempt at disbelief, “The Chargers?”

“The Inquisition, all of them.”

All of them, and Lace sighed, “Is it silly, that I thought I wouldn’t?”

“Maybe,” Celene offered. Tilting Lace’s chin up, knuckle tucked under it so she had to look at her, she said, “Maybe you just thought it would never end.”

No answer might have expressed it louder than the silence which followed.

It could not last forever though it felt as if it would. All the same, Lace let it pass over her, through her, before she could not stand the silence a moment longer. She took hold of Celene’s arm, already pulling her into the next moment as she said, “Come here, I want to show you something.”

Lace did not drag her down the stairs to the tavern, or out into the garden, but up onto the bench and out the window.

The gently slanted roof had lost a few tiles, but Lace walked it with the ease of a scout, and one who had learned to walk from stone to stone in the Fade, no less. She stopped near the edge, standing, the hand that did not grip Celene’s coming over her eyes. Not surveying, not watching, simply, she was looking, and when she finished, she bent and sat in one single motion, heels just on the edge of the roof.

Lowering herself to sit beside her, Celene placed her hand over Lace’s and followed where she looked.

Below them, people walked from place to place, the training yard stacked with crates and barrels, no longer populated by soldiers, walked through, not lingered in, paths worn into the dirt and grass. The tops of trees in the garden peeked over the walls. The hills in the distance gleamed impossibly white with caps of snow, disappearing into the distance with the yawning of the valley to draw the eye through it. There was birdsong and the buzzing of insects. Voices, too, but they came far and few, unfamiliar, new.

Eyes breaking from the spanning vista, Celene looked at Lace and asked, confusion measured with humour, “What exactly am I supposed to be seeing?”

“Nothing,” said Lace, face turned to the sky and quirked in a smile.

“Nothing?” Celene pressed, incredulous.

“Not any one thing, all of it,” Lace clarified, head tipping further back, and tilting, so she could with one eye see Celene. She let out a breath, long and slow, preceding her saying, softly, “The sky and the air and the sounds, the people are different, but everything else is...the same.”

“What about you?”

“Me?” Lace turned fully to look at her, serene expression contorting into bewilderment.

Shifting closer, Celene leaned over until their shoulders touched, bumping Lace’s as she said, “I never knew you then, back before you were the Lace Harding.”

“Stop it,” Lace mumbled, freckles disappearing as her cheeks turned scarlet.

“Scout Lace Harding, swift and cunning,” Celene began to sing, lyrics stopping themselves up with laughter as her shoulder was given a forceful shove.

“Just Lace Harding, to you,” Lace insisted.

Grinning, voice dripping with mock gallantry, Celene whispered, breathless, “An honour, from the great hero of the Inquisition.”

“No, no,” Lace seemed to warn, finger pressing into Celene’s shoulder as she told her, emphasising with a poke each time, “not a hero, not a Titan, not the anything, just Lace.”

“If you say so, just Lace.”

“Shut up,” Lace laughed, fingers already in Celene’s hair. She would not give her a choice in the matter or a chance to retort, smothering any more of her jokes with a kiss.

It was not the same as it had been, and it never could be again, nor could she. Time could not unspool and wind back like so much thread. But, Lace decided as she was hoisted into Celene’s lap and held firmly by the waist, not all change was bad.

#Lace Harding #Rook #Dragon Age #you better all go read this it's GOOD

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