A small smile playing on her lips as the pair of them stood on Skyhold’s battlements, overlooking the courtyard where Cullen and Cassandra were currently engrossed in conversation. Admiring the Inquisition’s Commander from afar, was perhaps a better way of describing it. “ My entire complaint is that he never takes it off. How would we even talk him into leaving it somewhere so that we might hide it from him? ”

This room had become her favorite room because it was her mother’s favorite room when she would visit the palace. Blue stone and mosaic tiles everywhere, and the sound of rushing water. Her blood is in the secret rivers of Damar, Arya knew. And that blood was in her too, as much as the wolf blood. She brushed her fingers over the beautifully crafted tiles. Made from hand and stained their deep, rich color however many centuries ago, the pattern and pearling makes her think of being underwater.

Haleth had told her all about the history of this room. The loving care with which it was conceived, its careful construction. A gift.

Her thoughts broke apart to the sound of Caranthir's footsteps entering this place. He tread heavily so that he would not startle her, she knew. The sound carried beautifully though, melting into the murmur of flowing water. Arya turned around to look at him with kelar-bright eyes; they widened at the sight of the long package in his hands.

Remember your courtesies. She could hear her mother and sister and septa chiding softly in her ear, though two were dead and one was lost to the wind. So Arya stood and made a gesture of respect, hand out and palm down, fingers spread. He brushed his fingers against the back of her wrist as he stepped closer, and then used one hand to hold her chin, to tip her face upwards.

What had he called her when he found her out in the Hills? Half-dead but grey eyes blazing gold? Little killer. Wild with kelar. It took him little time to work out who she had once been. It was taking him and Haleth much longer to help her feel safe being that person once more. For she was still wild and bright with blood, and it was no fading strength, growing as much as she had within the walls of the palace.

“What were you thinking of before I came?” His voice was gentle; it reminded her of her father’s.

She thought about lying. It would be easy; she had learned that skill well enough in the Hills. Perhaps she could trick him. But she was doubtful; his own kelar might notice even the thinnest of lies. “My mother.”

He nodded, something flashing in his own grey eyes. Was it pity? She hoped not. His large rough hand cupped the side of her face for a moment, warmer than she had expected, and Arya stifled two warring instincts. One, to slap his hand away. The other to wrap her arms around his middle, to bury her face in his chest. He removed his hand before she could do either.

“Haleth-sol wished for me to show you this,” he said as he took a seat upon the bench. Arya sat beside him, and watched as he carefully unwrapped the long package. Inside was a slender blue sword; Arya nearly stood up to see it.

“Gonturan,” she whispered, wide-eyed once again. What child of Damar had not grown up on tales of Aerin-sol, slayer of dragons, wielder of the Blue Sword? She gripped the edge of the bench tight to keep from reaching for it, knuckles showing white.

The king spoke then, of the woman who used this sword to free Damar from corruption those many centuries ago. Of the great men and women who had wielded it before and after. Of what it meant to their people, and to him and Haleth. What Damar meant to them.

“I was prepared to kill for it. Die for it,” he finished, and looking into his eyes Arya knew that even now in this time of tenuous peace he still felt the same. That he would always feel the same.

A silence fell upon them for a time, nothing but the sound of the little stream and fountains in the room filling it. They both looked upon the sword in his lap, too small for his hand. Just right for someone of Haleth’s size. Or mine someday. The thought came unbidden and it felt sacrilegious to think it; she hoped Caranthir did not hear. She looked back at him, kelar in her eyes once again.

“I want to ride in the laprun trials.” Her eyes burned with that desire, the very air from her breath seeming to take shape before her, as if she could speak herself into it. “I am thirteen, that is not too young.”

   𝚂𝙾𝙼𝙴𝚃𝙸𝙼𝙴𝚂 𝙷𝙴 𝚃𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙺𝚂 𝚂𝙷𝙴 𝚆𝙰𝙺𝙴𝚂 𝙷𝙸𝙼. He stirs to the soft, thought-rich feeling of her dark and laughing voice touching the edge of his mind, the frayed corner of a page. She summons him, he’s sure of it, the way that he could summon his mother to him as a boy, the way that horses come to him, the way that cats in the street stalk nearer and nearer when he thinks of how he would not hurt them. No one before her has ever intentionally whispered back to him in this language. No one before her has seemed to truly understand it.

   He wakes clear, bright and rested, and knows that she has made it so. Just as she wakes him, she puts him to sleep. He needs it. His body aches, and the slightest shift in the air will sometimes stir him. He is less a hunted man when they are together. When he sleeps beside her, he dreams of her, and wakes knowing they have spoken. Wakes to her summons, and always comes.

   Now, rising to see the sharp-lined shape of her limmed in the dawn against the fire-bright illumination of the window, Aragorn is less concerned with her beauty than with the stillness he can feel around them. A sad and distant quiet, edged in bitterness. A thing long broken, past mending. All this, and the honeysuckle richness of her hair, freshly anointed, on the morning air.

  He comes to her, holds her slim and warm in his arms, and kisses her shoulder as he looks across it to where her eyes are looking—children chasing a stray cat up the street, stopping to scoop up lemons spilled from a cart, laughing when the cart’s owner comes shouting from behind the mule and scatters them like birds. Estel bends his head, and rests his cheek upon her shoulder. The morning in the room is muted, but below them, in the street, the city is coming gradually to life. His voice is a murmur into her satin skin:

  “Sometimes we miss the world, even as we are in it.”

   A ghost or a woman in the window. She looks out like she has been doing it for a thousand years. He is not so foolish as to presume to know her mind, a mistake often enough made in their first days together to become a well-learned lesson, but Estel understands this. He understands the ache of it, the way that he becomes edgeless in a crowd, without boundary, until he dissolves into every person in the street, in the city, in the world—and the way that, in the very next moment, there is hard and unsurpassable wall that curtains him from other people, so that all talking is just knocking hopeless messages across the borders of bodies like individual cells, so that all being together is impossible. It is painful, but he is a man who knows how to soothe all manner of hurts. It is his passion, his gift. It is the only thing he truly knows about himself.

   They are here now, in one another’s hands. Coexisting in a comfortable, sometimes breaching, closeness. When they blend, or blur, she redraws their lines. Maybe it exhausts her. He will do it now, only as a service to her. As she puts him to sleep, as she rouses him, so he can rouse her. So they can rouse one another.

   “Come down to the market with me. We will break our fast on fruits and olives, drink water straight from the wall of the well. Cold enough to sting our teeth. It is easy to feel like a ghost when one is hungry. It is almost impossible when one is preparing for a feast.” Who knows this better than he? How many times has he been a ghost, a ghost child, the child of a ghost, prince of ghosts, king of ghosts—all ghost himself, a ghost, underfed, in a tarnished black cloak. He kisses her shoulder again, asking without command, entirely a man unafraid of begging, “Come.”

It was a big, empty, lifeless house: not the sort of place that Jack had ever envisioned that someone like Margaux Hawke would live. Not that he’d ever seen her home or even asked about it before now, but she’d struck him as the self-made, self-reliant sort who, like him, would be content with a modest flat either overlooking the river or the inner city, personalised with charm but otherwise maintainable for one person. Instead, upon driving her home in companionable, if somewhat tired, silence after another late night escapade, only speaking to convey directions, Jack had wound up at a place that looked like it ought to belong to some rich aunt or uncle instead. But she’d gotten out, produced a key, and headed on in, and so Jack had followed ---- whether out of curiosity or some gentlemanly desire to see her safely indoors, he wasn’t entirely sure, but it urged him on nonetheless.

Inside hadn’t proved any less... grand. It was a strange sense of deja-vu; standing in the entrance hall, Jack might as well have been transported back to his childhood, and the fancy Edwardian-era house in South London where he’d spent his formative years with Teague. Something about Hawke’s home struck him as just as unhappy a place, not least because of the heaviness in the set of his companion’s shoulders, the weariness in her eyes that had only seemed to worsen since their arrival.

No siblings, or parents, or housemates. Jack caught sight of her dog curled up, fast asleep underneath the staircase, but that was all. Some part of him wished that he’d honoured his own joking proposition attempts and had actually taken her back to his Soho flat. At least they could have stopped off at one of the district’s flamboyant gay bars on their way through, and bought some discounted drinks on account of Jack’s notoriety.

“ Not what I was expecting, love, ” he finally said, breaking the silence between them as he hovered between the staircase --- which, presumably, eventually led to whatever room here she called her own --- and the front door. Something about being in what should have been an intimate place for her and yet one that felt adversely not at all intimate had set him strangely on edge, awakened some protective urge in him that wanted to linger here as long as he could. As company, if nothing else.

He didn’t expect her request, the words uttered much more quietly than he was accustomed to hearing from her. Meeting her gaze, something passed between them in that moment, but the last thing Jack wanted was to go about thinking deeply enough on it to give it a name. A gentle, almost nervous breath of a laugh, instead, escaped his throat. “ I suppose I’d have my pick of the bedrooms, wouldn’t I? ” But the tease fell short and, still thinking on his options, he rocked back on the balls of his feet. 

MISC MOVIE SENTENCE STARTERS  /  ACCEPTING

   𝙷𝙴 𝙷𝙰𝙳 𝙱𝙴𝙴𝙽 𝙿𝚁𝙴𝙿𝙰𝚁𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝚃𝙴𝙰 𝚆𝙷𝙴𝙽 𝚂𝙷𝙴 𝙴𝙽𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙴𝙳 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚂𝙷𝙾𝙿.  Not for any thirst, of course, but because it is a ritual that he enjoys, and setting each instrument now on the tray makes a satisfying sound of motion. Kettle, saucer, cup, and spoon. A small creampot of milk. He had sensed her approaching, a curious and unfamiliar sort of signature, but only vaguely. The bell above the door had startled sweetly, but Regis had not warned her away as she played at browsing his stocks like any other customer, despite the fact that it was, technically, after-hours. Though punctual by nature, the Higher Vampire is not particularly concerned with measuring the hours.

   For two such as they, it is a bit of an anachronism.

   Regis picks up the tray, not bothering to inject the motion with a slight fabrication of unsteadiness as he might in the presence of a human. At her warning, he hums softly in acknowledgment. “Difficult to untangle anything with too many sets of hands, don’t you find?”

   There is a sharp, dangerous slant to her face in the backlit space of the doorway. The lights in the street are thrown across her features which are, he intuits, deceptive in their naturally scenic softness. Even for one of their approximate kind, she is uncommonly beautiful. Not unlike a Bruxa in her impression: how brutality and sensuality seem so easily to serve one another. By the smell of the blood in her, she is not a Bruxa. No Bruxae he has ever known have possessed such an ability of presence. Indeed, the space around her is suffused with a distractingly dark and honeyed warmth.

   By comparison, Regis imagines she must find him a dreadful disappointment.

   His own impression is cool and mild. Perhaps even stuffy. Black trousers cut neatly close against long legs, a soft navy sweater, the faint wave of his thick dark hair coiffed in an orderly sweep across his hairline. He has no beard, no drama, no ornament but for a silver Calatrava worn high on his left wrist. Beautiful at a long look, certainly, but nothing so striking as she. He is deliberate in containing his own thrall. Regis considers it something of a type of courtesy, though it will also serve to disguise a measure of his register that she may or may not be capable of noting.

   “You are welcome to return at your leisure,”  he gestures to the space around them, the shop and the street and the city. He could, if he desired, disappear in the interim. No doubt she would recover his trail in time were she motivated to do so, though a lack of carnage left behind due to his chosen lifestyle does allow Regis a particular ability to ghost across the world unseen. He has been in London this turn only half a decade. It will be a half a decade more before he is likely to move again.  “I will be here.”

   His black eyes gleam good-naturedly.

   “During business hours, of course.”

   Regis turns his back to her, the tea tray in his hands, preparing to climb the narrow staircase to his flat above. He pauses at the darkened threshold and lifts his head, drawing in a breath of air for the first time since she had entered. It had seemed wiser not to allow the clearly orchestrated smell of her to drive him to any distraction—but now that she has dismissed herself, he lifts his head and scents the air visibly, almost involuntarily, and then turns across his shoulder.

SEND ME A WORD FOR A DRABBLE  /  ACCEPTING

   𝙳𝙴𝚂𝙿𝙸𝚃𝙴 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝚂𝙸𝚉𝙴, 𝙷𝙰𝙻𝚆𝙽’𝚂 𝙿𝚁𝙴𝚂𝙴𝙽𝙲𝙴 𝙸𝙽 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚁𝙾𝙾𝙼 𝙸𝚂 𝚁𝙴𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙸𝚅𝙴𝙻𝚈 𝚄𝙽𝙸𝙼𝙿𝙾𝚂𝙸𝙽𝙶.  Posture straight in his chair, but slack enough for comfort, his chin canted slightly down though his eyes are up and set on the other man. A soft, comfortably neutral air, neither oppressive nor submissive. There is a charge in the air, circumstance demands it—and behind it the intensity of Halwn’s unerringly observant gaze.

   When he rolls his shoulder, tight from the morning’s rabbles, the man who calls himself Tempest tracks the motion. It’s a slight reaction, fast but obvious. The Mage has done nothing to conceal it, nor to conceal the way his eyes linger on the outward line of Halwn’s shoulder and then follow slow across the broad line of his body to the other. Like a physical touch down the Inquisitor’s strong arm. He lingers longer on the hard line of Halwn’s belly beneath his hauberk than he does on his gloved left hand—and though that is unusual, it is not entirely rare.

   Halwn is aware that he’s a handsome man. That some people take particular interest in his height, his build. The size of his hands, the loose and wavy texture of his tawny hair. Lovers have, in the past, made their appreciation clear. Every one of those lovers, to the man, began it in this way—though not always so brazenly. It is an invitation, or else a goad. Halwn isn’t easily goaded and, as one might expect of him, he always waits to be invited.

  Though he sits with a neatness schooled into him in childhood, the Inquistior pulls his shoulders back just a little further;  an obliging acknowledgment of the attention.

   “You seem distracted, my lord—”

   Halwn’s voice, like the rest of him, is steady and mild, touched with a muted Andersche accent just at the edge of bygone nonregional wealth.

   Lord Tempest. Hal finds the title more than a little ridiculous, though he’s sure he was at least partially meant to. And he understands the need for hyperbole. Just as Sera’s Jennies, or Antiva’s Crows. A mother to urchins, or carrion come courting death. Whether the effect is chilling or a lulling normalcy, every pseudonym has its intended purpose—and the Inquisitor would be a hypocrite to comment upon it. It isn’t as though Herald of Andraste rings of any particular note of subtlety.

   Of course, Halwn hadn’t chosen that moniker anymore than he had chosen to be His Worship. 

   “Would you prefer to discuss this with one of my companions? I would trust any of them to treat on my behalf, if that would suit you better.”

   Vivienne, Solas, and Varric stand in the vestibule behind them, separated by a half-shut door and a pair of unfriendly guards. Halwn can feel the low, wrapping coolness of the two mages’ protective wards on him, maintained for as long as they are able. Both are exceptionally skilled in barrier magick. Skilled enough that Halwn had not hesitated to lift his harness over his shoulder and leave his greatsword propped beside the door without having first been asked.

   Should the wards fail—well, few understand the Anchor’s power. Most who have seen it have not lived to tell any revealing tales. He has that secret, too, though Halwn has not planned on using it tonight.