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Year One
Iris sits on the Rivaini beach close to the house Dorian rented for the two of them and Iron Bull in what is the first real vacation she’s ever taken. Dorian has talked to her about spending winters in Antiva and the year he spent in Nevarra as a teenager, but the notion of travelling simply for leisure is foreign to most Dalish elves.
The timing of their trip coincides with the first year anniversary of the Exalted Council and she’s not fool enough to think that’s at all a coincidence. Over the last year she’s been angry at Solas. Sad for him. Even annoyed at times - there was an entire week she spent fuming over his inability to have an honest conversation with his fucking girlfriend. Instead, he made decisions for the both of them despite waxing poetic about the importance of free will.
Ass.
She’s also done a lot of thinking as facts have presented themselves. Human politicians were never going to give an elf grace and they certainly aren’t now that Solas has been unrepentant in his desire to rewrite reality. The cabin in the woods with the garden? Could not be further away.
Or, so she thought for awhile. Solas loves the Fade and she can’t help but wonder if that might be because the Fade was once his home. He views the ancients as something separate from the elves of today and lately that has her thinking that maybe, just maybe, he was once a spirit. It would make sense, right? Vivienne said he sounded like a Pride demon, but there was a contrast in the way he spoke to Iris. Wisdom and not Pride. The difference was their expectations and Solas adapted as a spirit might.
“Dorian,” she calls out, and moments later Dorian, clad in a black pair of bathing smalls, his brown skin deeply tanned from days in the sun, sits down next to her. “If I suggested something most mages would deem absolutely mad, would you listen without judgement?”
“But judging is my favourite!” Dorian quips and she huffs at him. “Fine, fine,” he says with a wave of his hand.
“If we can talk Solas down, I think I would need to leave to live in the Fade with him,” she says.
Beside her, Dorian begins picking up fistfuls of sand and letting it slip through a gap in his fist. Over and over; a constant flow. “Thedas won’t accept him. He’d never be safe, even if he repented for his actions and swore off his current path. But in the Fade… Dorian, maybe we could make something work.”
You have a rare and marvellous spirit. In another world…
“Iris, it’s a lovely idea - for you. Horrifying for me, to be clear, but is it realistic?”
“One day it might be. What do you think?”
“That you’re utterly mad,” Dorian says cheerily, giving her a clasp on the shoulder. “But I thought as much when I saw you making eyes at him in those ragged tights he always wore, so nothing’s changed.”
Those tights showed off his rear beautifully so Dorian, her dearest friend, is just hopelessly wrong on this matter.
Year Two
Solas stares, brows furrowed, at the canvas in front of him, focusing on the shade of red of the portrait’s lips. It’s unacceptable, he decides, but cannot bear to destroy a canvas upon which he painted his flower’s face.
Silently, he wills a private closet to open in his office; a stone door invisible to all but him, the Caretaker and Iris, and places this fresh canvas in the closet alongside half a dozen other rejected paintings, a book of poetry and a few sketches he’s allowed himself to indulge in during breaks in his research.
What is it about the red of her lipstick that is so impossible to capture using paint?
Year Three
A human man named Tomas runs the library she regularly visits in her search for information about the ancient world, the veil and the Fade. Today, over coffee at a table in his empty library, he asked her out. She was kind in her rejection, telling him that she had a lover but that circumstances keep them apart.
He’s an abolitionist and quietly follows the Lucerni political faction, though he’s hardly prominent enough that his approval means more than a face in the crowd when Maevaris speaks of the changes she’d like to make.
Guilt eats at her; stupid and irrational, because it’s Solas who chose this separation. Solas who told her they cannot be together. Solas, who thinks there’s no option remaining but destruction.
Yet it’s her who cries alone in bed tonight, wishing it was his affection she felt and not that of the kind human librarian who welcomes an elf into his space with open arms.
Year Four
Angrily, he tosses the wig and mask onto the table in the library, silently cursing his foolishness when he thought such a disguise would be sufficient. Why did he not learn to cast a glamour? It is not magic he’s ever had skill in, but he could have managed to fool a room full of mortals, right?
The non-mages, sure, but not the necromancer; the conclusion he came to every time he pondered altering course and skipping his absurd bard disguise.
He should have drank the tea. He hopes that, when Charter briefs Iris, she has a nice laugh at his expense, for he’s been the cause of more than enough sorrow in her life by now.
With the idol in his possession, now comes the time to determine how to purify it - and what the cost will be to him when he does so.
Year Five
Years, Iris has known that Solas probably won’t survive bringing down the veil. Their meeting five years ago felt very much like she was speaking to a man resigned to his fate.
Why, then, is she crying late into the night, mourning a death that has not yet happened? Is she a fool to love him as she does? They’d only shared a year together and it’s now been five years since their last conversation.
Most would have moved on. Married a kind man like Tomas and built a life that’s more than just trying to find a way to talk Solas off the edge of oblivion.
She never did things like most people, did she?
Finally, she slips into a restless sleep where she, as she often is, finds herself haunted by spirits of Despair showing her Solas’ red lyrium-tainted corpse from Redcliffe.
Only, tonight the scene shifts to the meadow Solas crafted for her years ago when their love was new and innocent. Love that existed before the weight of their titles threatened to crush them. At the edge, as he so often is, is Solas in the form of a wolf. He stands, tail tucked between his legs, as if awaiting a scolding and she whimpers. “Solas, why did you let me fall in love with you if you knew I’d eventually watch you die terribly?”
Solas says nothing. He never does.
Year Six
His physical form is wracked with fever and overwhelming pain; a consequence of the method he used to purify the dagger. No longer blighted red, the blue gleam of the dagger is a reminder of his victory when he can manage to endure the pain that comes with consciousness.
Sleep is easier and tonight, as he has all week, his mind has brought him to Iris. He’s rescued her from nightmares where she watches his death, demons tormenting her with images of her family’s corpses and all other manner of horrors. Does she endure this every night as she sleeps or is the attack on her dreams truly an attack on him: the mockery of demons who recognize that he’s weak and ill?
Iris sits in the meadow he created for her years ago, toying with the purple irises, her expression fond. She doesn’t try to touch him; he remains at the edge of the meadow and she learned long ago that he does not allow for touch, or for her to address him directly.
“That’s four times this week. I’m happy to see… that my dreams have offered me a glimpse of Solas. I can’t help but wonder why it is such. Perhaps I should not question a gift.”
Still in his wolf form, he lies down on the ground, resting his head on his paws. If he’s a wolf, he can pretend she doesn’t know it’s him. If he’s a wolf, he cannot speak to her.
If he’s a wolf he can pretend seeing her suffer in her sleep does not break his heart.
“I’ve got my makeup company with Dorian. We sell a lot of lipstick in Orlais and it’s just a fun thing for us, but it’s making real coin. I don’t think it ever would have happened if you… if Solas didn’t express how impressed he was by the spell I use to keep my lipstick from smudging.” Iris leans back on her right elbow and smiles at him. “I’m up to a lot more but Solas’ spies will have to speak of that. I hope that wig wasn’t too itchy. Or maybe I hope it was terribly itchy. Depends on the day. Or the minute, really.”
He can’t help but wag his tail at that and Iris beams at the acknowledgement. Then, promptly slips away, as if something has woken her up.
A whistling, pathetic whine escapes his canine mouth and he remains alone in the meadow, hoping for her return to the land of dreams, but she does not return before his own body forces him awake to contend with the consequences of repairing the cruel weapon he crafted to break the world.
Year Seven
There’s a new faction of people working in Arlathan Forest who call themselves the Veil Jumpers. They’re investigating the fluctuations in the veil and the revival of ancient technology in the crumbling ruins of the forest.
While she has no hard evidence, she gets the impression that at least some of them are former agents of Solas’. Perhaps those disillusioned by the years of fanning the flames of conflict between Tevinter and the qunari, leading directly to the Antaam breaking away from the Qun.
At least there’s some other people out there aware that what he’s planned is an absolutely shit idea, she supposes - and perhaps they might be in a position to show the Dalish elves who join up that the Evanuris were nothing more than slavers and conquerors.
Solas, for all his flaws and mistakes, deserves to be remembered in a kinder way than the Dalish currently perceive him. She also recognizes she’s one of the few who see it that way and that most would sooner see his head on a pike.
Varric nearly caught Solas in Minrathous, but the chase went awry and finally he’s figured out that he and Harding aren’t going to be able to catch Solas. As she said years ago: it needs to be someone Solas doesn’t know.
Now, Varric’s about to leave for Rivain to speak with an old friend of his about hiring a Lord of Fortune. She only hopes he isn’t too late to change Solas’ heart and save the world.
Year Eight
When the prison offers him a reprieve from its torment, the area is disturbingly silent. No wind, no laughter, and none of the sounds of the world around him. So quiet it is that he can hear his own heartbeat when he holds his breath, the sound a torment all of its own while he whittles down the seconds of an eternity.
In dreams, he searches for any indication that Iris is safe without actually asking after her, if only to keep word from reaching Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain’s ears that Iris was his lover.
Nothing. Rook hasn’t said a word about Iris - he knows of the calamities Rook’s fumbling has caused but not how they affected Iris. She’d been living in Minrathous with Dorian and Rook told him she’d rescued the city from an attack by a blighted dragon, damning Treviso in the process.
Is Iris even still in Minrathous? Or did duty call her back South to wield the heavy weight of a title she loathes once more?
He doesn’t know and today, for the first time, he allows himself to sit against one of the crumbling columns the prison summoned as a reminder of yet another of his failures, and weep.
Spirits had been tasked to watch over her; a duty his companions had taken seriously. A duty they will continue, even after his disappearance.
With no way to know of his flower’s fate, he resigns himself to the shameful tears rolling down his flushed cheeks.
He does not deserve the release offered by his tears.
Year Nine
Some mornings in their little shack, she likes to watch Solas while he sleeps, his expression slack, relaxed in a way he never is while awake. She counts the freckles that dot his cheeks and nose, gazing upon every scar, new and old, as if his face were carved of stone.
It’s been a few months since she and Solas left for the Fade; long enough that most of his wounds have healed and they’ve settled into a routine that seems to satisfy them both.
Sometimes, in the early moments of the day, if he’s had a rest free of the torment of thousands upon thousands of years of horrors, he’s something closer to relaxed, giving her a bit of time to offer him the sort of love that was so long denied to him.
The horrors always take root; his eyes darken and his face becomes distant. Vacant. Some days he weeps, lost in grief and guilt, torn between hiding away and accepting the tender comfort she offers. Other days he’s focused on tending to the titans, wearing himself to the bone in his efforts to protect all those harmed by his crimes.
Healing is slow and it’s not just his pain that simmers beneath the surface, but the early hours of the morning? Those moments belong to them and she won’t let their pasts steal away the joy of daybreak.
“You’re being creepy,” Solas murmurs, eyes still closed and when she points this out, he replies, “I can feel you breathing on me.”
“Has anyone ever told you how handsome you are?”
“You have. Repeatedly,” Solas says, one eye cracking open. “What inspired this bit of sentimentality concerning my form?”
“I realized I’m not going to have to miss you again.”
Lifting himself up onto his elbows, he turns his body and gazes upon her, expression unreadable. “No. I suppose you will not.”
“We should fuck about it. Call it a celebration.”
“You do realize that I am not a morning person and sooner, rather than later, I will tire of being woken by your admiring gaze for sex?”
“Ah,” she leans in and presses her lips to his, and then kisses both corners of his lips, “but you have not tired of it today. Allow me to enjoy the indulgence for a century or two more.”
Solas lunges, almost cat-like, moving so he’s hovering above her and looks down, pupils blown wide and his mouth quirked into a smirk. “Perhaps I can indulge you on this day.” He kisses down the side of her neck and nips at her collarbone. Her hand slides up his back, resting flat on his head, holding him in place. “Perhaps the day after. And the day after that. Missing you was most tiresome and I’d sooner not miss a moment with you. Even,” he begins kissing down her chest, “if I must wake with the sun.”
What a perfect start to what will be a beautiful day in their little sanctuary.