Fourteen days after falling to the Arishok's blade, Sophia woke.
Eventually it became acceptable to transport the Viscountess back to her own bed, and there she lay, pale as a corpse, still as a statue save for the slight rise and fall of her chest from breathing, and utterly peaceful, a contrast to the state in which she'd been in the moments before she'd nearly died. After perhaps a week of danger, it became clear that Nostariel's healing techniques had indeed saved her life, and she would wake again, the only question being when. By the time that her eyes did crack open, she had only regained a fraction of her color. Under the covers of her bed, she almost looked like she'd just come down with a sickness. The scars she'd earned from that fight remained hidden.
She stirred at last when the setting sun filtered in through her window to fall upon her face, and at first she thought it must be the Maker's light, greeting her to a never ending rest with her family. But she had always imagined pain no longer existing in death, certainly not bodily pain, and almost immediately there were uncomfortable twinges, and a few outright jolts, through her abdomen and down her back. She recalled the wounds she'd been dealt, the course of the fight, how hopelessly outmatched she had been.
That, more than anything, settled upon her in her first waking moments. She had been unable to see any kind of hope in her situation, and feeling that, she had resigned herself to what seemed like her fate, what should have been her fate. There were no dreams to be had in her sleep, no time to think, and the fight itself seemed as though it had only just occurred, but somehow she acquired some kind of separation from it, and now, lying in this bed, which she knew to be her own simply from the feel of it under her skin, the utter pointlessness of her actions washed over her like the waves that first brought the Qunari to Kirkwall. Of all the struggles in her life, grief had never been among them. It was an enemy completely foreign to her, and it had taken a grip on her heart so strong it had blinded her to all hope.
"What happened?" she mumbled, sensing she was not alone in the room. She cracked her eyes open, but her vision remained temporarily blurred.
As it happened, the only person currently in the room was Lucien. Heād bade Nostariel go rest a couple of hours ago, and as it was now safe enough for the healer to sleep in an adjoining room rather than on a cot in this one, she was next door. When Sophia stirred, he considered going to wake her, but decided it was more prudent not to do so unless it became necessary. For the moment, Sophia seemed disoriented more than anything, and perhaps that would pass as she adjusted to being awake. Carefully, he closed the book heād been reading and set it down on the small table next to his elbow.
It was a curious time for his tongue to fail him, but for several seconds, Lucien found it seemingly adhered to the roof of his mouth, perhaps because he had too many things to say, rather than not enough. The relief hit him with enough force to knock him down, so it was rather fortunate that he was already seated. In the end, he won the battle with his capacity for speech, though his response may well have been rather underwhelming, all things considered. āYou were unconscious for a fortnight,ā he confessed. You almost died. I almost lost you. āThe Qunari are goneāonce the Arishok died, they took the book and left. Knight-Commander Meredith is keeping things in order for the moment.ā Youāve had several visitors. Everyone was worried about you. Call it force of habit, but he found it hard to say any of the more personal things when he knew the question had been seeking the factual ones.
Only when that much was done did he manage to force himself to utter anything that might have betrayed his concern. āAre youāhow do you feel? If you need, I can go get Nostariel, sheās just next door.ā And he was reminded, not for the first time, that it was probably more than slightly irregular that he was in here by himself. It had been easy to persistently forget before. Now, perhaps because of the stilted manner of his speaking, he was quite unable to.
Lucien was with her. Of course he was. He was one of the many things she had blocked from her vision with the blindfolds of her grief, and now she was lanced with guilt for the things she could remember. Please, he'd said, with altogether different but no less powerful form of agony than she herself had carried at the time. And she had ignored him, selfishly, villainously, so that she might continue striving for her revenge. Because if she'd really allowed herself to hear him, the weight of her guilt would have crushed her, and the Arishok would have walked away. Instead she had taken her revenge, and it failed to surprise her how little relief it brought.
What did surprise Sophia was how little she cared for Lucien's summarized report of what had happened in Kirkwall following that night. The Qunari were gone, and she could not help but feel glad for it. The Templars were keeping order, which she agreed with wholeheartedly. Whoever was to take up a leading role now, it surely could not be her, not after how wicked she had proved herself to be. How callous. Unthinking. Selfish. Reckless. Weak.
She forced the room into focus, blinking at Lucien beside her bed. "No, I... not right now." She would want some assistance from the Warden, considering how she felt, but she wasn't going to die now of all times, and there were more important things to be said first. Mostly with her arms, out of a desire to avoid using her core muscles, she pushed herself up slightly higher in her bed, the effort monumental, and causing her to wince painfully. "Help me sit up."
It was a slow, careful process, but eventually she found herself in a sitting position, pillows bracing behind her. She tentatively traced a finger over the newly formed scar under her night clothes. That would remain with her for the rest of her life. "Lucien, I..." She struggled to find words. This was not a place she had ever expected to end up in her life. These were feelings she had next to no experience struggling with. "I fear you've misjudged me. There cannot be a less worthy individual than I. Not after what I did."
For a moment, Lucien hovered, a bit unsure what to do with himself, clearly vacillating between going back to his chair, remaining standing, and something else. In the end, he pushed out an exasperated breath at his own indecisiveness and sat at the foot end of the mattress, drawing his legs up and underneath him. There was plenty of room, and he wasnāt terribly close, even, but there was a sense of emotional proximity greater than if heād remained in the chair. Resting his hands on his knees, he tried to decide what to say, or rather, how he wanted to say it. That he would tell the truth wasnāt even really a matter that needed decidingāthe closest heād come to telling a lie in a very long time had been two weeks ago, and he hadnāt been able to do it then. He wouldnāt be able to do it now, either, not to her.
āI thinkā¦ā he started softly, glancing down at his hands. There was a thin white scar that ran vertically down the back of the left one. Like anyone whoād regularly trained with sharp weapons, he had many more like it. Little mistakes heād made when he was too young or too stupid or simply too inexperienced to know better. They were much more merciful than nearly being disemboweled, but the general principle was the same. āThat what you did was reckless, and foolish, and quite likely to kill you. I think that you displayed a truly surprising lack of understanding when you did it.ā He grimaced, and met her eyes. āOr at least, I hope you did, because to think that you realized exactly what you were doing to your friends, to me, and chose to do it anyway isā¦ unpleasant.ā An understatement. You nearly tore something out of me.
He swallowed thickly, shaking his head slightly. āBut I understand why you did it, even so. For a long time after my mother died, Iā¦ felt powerless. Useless, ineffectual. It is perhaps harder to bear than the grief itself. I expect that I would have done something similar, had I come to be in your position then.ā He flexed the hand with the scar.
āBut what I donāt think is that worthiness comes from never making mistakes. If I did, wellā¦ I donāt expect Iād be able to find the wherewithal to drag myself out of bed in the morning, much less try to do anything worthwhile. Neither of us is without flaw, Sophia. And I have always thought that your worthiness is yours because of how well you learn and adapt to what is put before you. How you overcome the obstacles you face instead of allowing them to cow you. How even in moments of poor judgement or weakness, it is impossible for me to believe that you are anything but good. And thatā¦ that I do not think I have misjudged at all.ā Lucien sighed through his nose. She had hurt him, deeply, and he wasnāt going to behave as though she hadnāt. But it was not an unforgivable transgression by any means, and he forgave it.
Sophia could not stop herself from crying by the end of it. A fortnight did much to regenerate tears, it seemed, and she wondered how long it would be before she was finally out of this bed, and no longer crying into it. She could hardly remember anything that had happened before Saemus died. There were vague images of a party, a beautiful dress, a memory of how her heart fluttered in her chest. A child was all she was, then, still blind to the cruelty of her future. It had not approached stealthily, either, but she'd ignored it all the same, certain that her effort and her goodness would somehow win out in the end. It was, of course, not enough.
Her throat was constricted to the point where it was difficult to breathe, and she fumbled with her hands, eyes seeking anything to settle on, because she could not meet his. "I... I wasn't thinking, I... couldn't think. He just... tossed my father's head at my feet, and I just... I forgot. Everything. None of it mattered anymore." The city that she'd struggled so hard to secure ceased to exist in that moment, and her friends suddenly became distant distractions in the way of a selfish, bloodthirsty goal.
"Maker, what have I done? I didn't want to hurt you, Lucien. I could never want that. I didn't want to hurt anyone. I knew it was wrong, but I thought... if I could make it so that only I suffered for it... such a stupid, pitiful excuse." She brought her knees up towards her chest, carefully, so that she might bury her head against them and fight against the growing shaking throughout her body. "I'm sorry." The word was completely inadequate to describe how she felt, but she could not be bothered to come up with anything better now. She could not stand the thought of hurting him, and she could not stand the knowledge that she had done just that.
Heā¦ hadnāt meant to make her cry, but he had to acknowledge that it was a possibility. Lucien honestly hated the fact that heād done it, especially considering everything else that had happened, but some things needed to be said. Some wounds had to be lanced and bled, else they would fester and rot and become something poisonous. It was because heād said what he had that he was able to bring himself to move closer, sitting such that he could reach out and place a hand on one of her raised knees. āI know,ā he said gently. āAnd it is done now.ā His second hand found the crown of her head, and he threaded her hair through his fingers, combing it out in soft motions, so as to avoid pulling at any tangles. It was considerably lanker than usual, given how long sheād spent in convalescence, but that didnāt concern him.
āLet that much at least trouble you no longer, for it was forgiven weeks ago.ā He could not, of course, assuage any of her grief regarding her father, but he had no wish to add to it, really. Only to take away what he could.
He was quiet for a few moments, and then because the vein of honesty had been leading him so well, he risked something else. āIām just glad youāre alive. We didnātā¦ we didnāt know if you would make it, for a while there.ā He knew that the scene in the throne room would be the stuff of his nightmares for a very long time, modified in various ways but never missing the acute, terrible sensation that was warm blood soaking his hands through what had once been his sleeve. It would doubtless join the litany of phantasms that heād accumulated over his life, and he could not doubt that it would always be prominent in that ordering. Especially not given how many times heād woken from it in the last half a month.
But she was awake now, and alive still, and somehow, the air felt easier to breathe than it had in too long.
She huffed out a shaky breath, trying to steady herself. She touched her forehead to the fingers that were on her knee, the feeling of his touch somehow calming her. It was sufficient, for the moment, that he could forgive her. Forgiving herself would most certainly take much longer. This was... new territory for her. Nothing in her life previously had prepared her to handle what she'd gone through. She supposed she was the Viscountess of Kirkwall now, but she could not help but feel that in her current state, both of mind and of body, she was not even remotely fit for such a responsibility.
"I... don't know what to do, Lucien," she admitted. "Meredith can lead, I think. At least... until I'm ready." She did not know when that would be, or if the day would ever come. She knew that right now, she did not want it to. Politics and games of power and war had taken so much from her, her station and responsibility taking away or holding back what happiness seemed within her reach. She had been determined to wait, until the moment when she and Lucien might be more than just the closest of friends, but she was beginning to think that while the forces of their respective lineages pulled at them, they would never be free enough for that.
"I need time. Time to rest, time to think. Also... I think I may need Nostariel." She was slowly becoming aware that a fair bit of the pain in her was not emotional. But she tried her best to smile for him, to show him that this had not broken her, even if she would never be the same.
Lucien nodded. Time, at least, was something they had now. The Qunari were gone, and though he doubted Kirkwall would remain entirely peacefulāif it could even reach such a state to begin withāfor the moment at least, there was no looming war. There was time enough to breathe, to rest and recuperate. Something which likely needed to continue now.
āThen I will go get her.ā
Eventually it became acceptable to transport the Viscountess back to her own bed, and there she lay, pale as a corpse, still as a statue save for the slight rise and fall of her chest from breathing, and utterly peaceful, a contrast to the state in which she'd been in the moments before she'd nearly died. After perhaps a week of danger, it became clear that Nostariel's healing techniques had indeed saved her life, and she would wake again, the only question being when. By the time that her eyes did crack open, she had only regained a fraction of her color. Under the covers of her bed, she almost looked like she'd just come down with a sickness. The scars she'd earned from that fight remained hidden.
She stirred at last when the setting sun filtered in through her window to fall upon her face, and at first she thought it must be the Maker's light, greeting her to a never ending rest with her family. But she had always imagined pain no longer existing in death, certainly not bodily pain, and almost immediately there were uncomfortable twinges, and a few outright jolts, through her abdomen and down her back. She recalled the wounds she'd been dealt, the course of the fight, how hopelessly outmatched she had been.
That, more than anything, settled upon her in her first waking moments. She had been unable to see any kind of hope in her situation, and feeling that, she had resigned herself to what seemed like her fate, what should have been her fate. There were no dreams to be had in her sleep, no time to think, and the fight itself seemed as though it had only just occurred, but somehow she acquired some kind of separation from it, and now, lying in this bed, which she knew to be her own simply from the feel of it under her skin, the utter pointlessness of her actions washed over her like the waves that first brought the Qunari to Kirkwall. Of all the struggles in her life, grief had never been among them. It was an enemy completely foreign to her, and it had taken a grip on her heart so strong it had blinded her to all hope.
"What happened?" she mumbled, sensing she was not alone in the room. She cracked her eyes open, but her vision remained temporarily blurred.
As it happened, the only person currently in the room was Lucien. Heād bade Nostariel go rest a couple of hours ago, and as it was now safe enough for the healer to sleep in an adjoining room rather than on a cot in this one, she was next door. When Sophia stirred, he considered going to wake her, but decided it was more prudent not to do so unless it became necessary. For the moment, Sophia seemed disoriented more than anything, and perhaps that would pass as she adjusted to being awake. Carefully, he closed the book heād been reading and set it down on the small table next to his elbow.
It was a curious time for his tongue to fail him, but for several seconds, Lucien found it seemingly adhered to the roof of his mouth, perhaps because he had too many things to say, rather than not enough. The relief hit him with enough force to knock him down, so it was rather fortunate that he was already seated. In the end, he won the battle with his capacity for speech, though his response may well have been rather underwhelming, all things considered. āYou were unconscious for a fortnight,ā he confessed. You almost died. I almost lost you. āThe Qunari are goneāonce the Arishok died, they took the book and left. Knight-Commander Meredith is keeping things in order for the moment.ā Youāve had several visitors. Everyone was worried about you. Call it force of habit, but he found it hard to say any of the more personal things when he knew the question had been seeking the factual ones.
Only when that much was done did he manage to force himself to utter anything that might have betrayed his concern. āAre youāhow do you feel? If you need, I can go get Nostariel, sheās just next door.ā And he was reminded, not for the first time, that it was probably more than slightly irregular that he was in here by himself. It had been easy to persistently forget before. Now, perhaps because of the stilted manner of his speaking, he was quite unable to.
Lucien was with her. Of course he was. He was one of the many things she had blocked from her vision with the blindfolds of her grief, and now she was lanced with guilt for the things she could remember. Please, he'd said, with altogether different but no less powerful form of agony than she herself had carried at the time. And she had ignored him, selfishly, villainously, so that she might continue striving for her revenge. Because if she'd really allowed herself to hear him, the weight of her guilt would have crushed her, and the Arishok would have walked away. Instead she had taken her revenge, and it failed to surprise her how little relief it brought.
What did surprise Sophia was how little she cared for Lucien's summarized report of what had happened in Kirkwall following that night. The Qunari were gone, and she could not help but feel glad for it. The Templars were keeping order, which she agreed with wholeheartedly. Whoever was to take up a leading role now, it surely could not be her, not after how wicked she had proved herself to be. How callous. Unthinking. Selfish. Reckless. Weak.
She forced the room into focus, blinking at Lucien beside her bed. "No, I... not right now." She would want some assistance from the Warden, considering how she felt, but she wasn't going to die now of all times, and there were more important things to be said first. Mostly with her arms, out of a desire to avoid using her core muscles, she pushed herself up slightly higher in her bed, the effort monumental, and causing her to wince painfully. "Help me sit up."
It was a slow, careful process, but eventually she found herself in a sitting position, pillows bracing behind her. She tentatively traced a finger over the newly formed scar under her night clothes. That would remain with her for the rest of her life. "Lucien, I..." She struggled to find words. This was not a place she had ever expected to end up in her life. These were feelings she had next to no experience struggling with. "I fear you've misjudged me. There cannot be a less worthy individual than I. Not after what I did."
For a moment, Lucien hovered, a bit unsure what to do with himself, clearly vacillating between going back to his chair, remaining standing, and something else. In the end, he pushed out an exasperated breath at his own indecisiveness and sat at the foot end of the mattress, drawing his legs up and underneath him. There was plenty of room, and he wasnāt terribly close, even, but there was a sense of emotional proximity greater than if heād remained in the chair. Resting his hands on his knees, he tried to decide what to say, or rather, how he wanted to say it. That he would tell the truth wasnāt even really a matter that needed decidingāthe closest heād come to telling a lie in a very long time had been two weeks ago, and he hadnāt been able to do it then. He wouldnāt be able to do it now, either, not to her.
āI thinkā¦ā he started softly, glancing down at his hands. There was a thin white scar that ran vertically down the back of the left one. Like anyone whoād regularly trained with sharp weapons, he had many more like it. Little mistakes heād made when he was too young or too stupid or simply too inexperienced to know better. They were much more merciful than nearly being disemboweled, but the general principle was the same. āThat what you did was reckless, and foolish, and quite likely to kill you. I think that you displayed a truly surprising lack of understanding when you did it.ā He grimaced, and met her eyes. āOr at least, I hope you did, because to think that you realized exactly what you were doing to your friends, to me, and chose to do it anyway isā¦ unpleasant.ā An understatement. You nearly tore something out of me.
He swallowed thickly, shaking his head slightly. āBut I understand why you did it, even so. For a long time after my mother died, Iā¦ felt powerless. Useless, ineffectual. It is perhaps harder to bear than the grief itself. I expect that I would have done something similar, had I come to be in your position then.ā He flexed the hand with the scar.
āBut what I donāt think is that worthiness comes from never making mistakes. If I did, wellā¦ I donāt expect Iād be able to find the wherewithal to drag myself out of bed in the morning, much less try to do anything worthwhile. Neither of us is without flaw, Sophia. And I have always thought that your worthiness is yours because of how well you learn and adapt to what is put before you. How you overcome the obstacles you face instead of allowing them to cow you. How even in moments of poor judgement or weakness, it is impossible for me to believe that you are anything but good. And thatā¦ that I do not think I have misjudged at all.ā Lucien sighed through his nose. She had hurt him, deeply, and he wasnāt going to behave as though she hadnāt. But it was not an unforgivable transgression by any means, and he forgave it.
Sophia could not stop herself from crying by the end of it. A fortnight did much to regenerate tears, it seemed, and she wondered how long it would be before she was finally out of this bed, and no longer crying into it. She could hardly remember anything that had happened before Saemus died. There were vague images of a party, a beautiful dress, a memory of how her heart fluttered in her chest. A child was all she was, then, still blind to the cruelty of her future. It had not approached stealthily, either, but she'd ignored it all the same, certain that her effort and her goodness would somehow win out in the end. It was, of course, not enough.
Her throat was constricted to the point where it was difficult to breathe, and she fumbled with her hands, eyes seeking anything to settle on, because she could not meet his. "I... I wasn't thinking, I... couldn't think. He just... tossed my father's head at my feet, and I just... I forgot. Everything. None of it mattered anymore." The city that she'd struggled so hard to secure ceased to exist in that moment, and her friends suddenly became distant distractions in the way of a selfish, bloodthirsty goal.
"Maker, what have I done? I didn't want to hurt you, Lucien. I could never want that. I didn't want to hurt anyone. I knew it was wrong, but I thought... if I could make it so that only I suffered for it... such a stupid, pitiful excuse." She brought her knees up towards her chest, carefully, so that she might bury her head against them and fight against the growing shaking throughout her body. "I'm sorry." The word was completely inadequate to describe how she felt, but she could not be bothered to come up with anything better now. She could not stand the thought of hurting him, and she could not stand the knowledge that she had done just that.
Heā¦ hadnāt meant to make her cry, but he had to acknowledge that it was a possibility. Lucien honestly hated the fact that heād done it, especially considering everything else that had happened, but some things needed to be said. Some wounds had to be lanced and bled, else they would fester and rot and become something poisonous. It was because heād said what he had that he was able to bring himself to move closer, sitting such that he could reach out and place a hand on one of her raised knees. āI know,ā he said gently. āAnd it is done now.ā His second hand found the crown of her head, and he threaded her hair through his fingers, combing it out in soft motions, so as to avoid pulling at any tangles. It was considerably lanker than usual, given how long sheād spent in convalescence, but that didnāt concern him.
āLet that much at least trouble you no longer, for it was forgiven weeks ago.ā He could not, of course, assuage any of her grief regarding her father, but he had no wish to add to it, really. Only to take away what he could.
He was quiet for a few moments, and then because the vein of honesty had been leading him so well, he risked something else. āIām just glad youāre alive. We didnātā¦ we didnāt know if you would make it, for a while there.ā He knew that the scene in the throne room would be the stuff of his nightmares for a very long time, modified in various ways but never missing the acute, terrible sensation that was warm blood soaking his hands through what had once been his sleeve. It would doubtless join the litany of phantasms that heād accumulated over his life, and he could not doubt that it would always be prominent in that ordering. Especially not given how many times heād woken from it in the last half a month.
But she was awake now, and alive still, and somehow, the air felt easier to breathe than it had in too long.
She huffed out a shaky breath, trying to steady herself. She touched her forehead to the fingers that were on her knee, the feeling of his touch somehow calming her. It was sufficient, for the moment, that he could forgive her. Forgiving herself would most certainly take much longer. This was... new territory for her. Nothing in her life previously had prepared her to handle what she'd gone through. She supposed she was the Viscountess of Kirkwall now, but she could not help but feel that in her current state, both of mind and of body, she was not even remotely fit for such a responsibility.
"I... don't know what to do, Lucien," she admitted. "Meredith can lead, I think. At least... until I'm ready." She did not know when that would be, or if the day would ever come. She knew that right now, she did not want it to. Politics and games of power and war had taken so much from her, her station and responsibility taking away or holding back what happiness seemed within her reach. She had been determined to wait, until the moment when she and Lucien might be more than just the closest of friends, but she was beginning to think that while the forces of their respective lineages pulled at them, they would never be free enough for that.
"I need time. Time to rest, time to think. Also... I think I may need Nostariel." She was slowly becoming aware that a fair bit of the pain in her was not emotional. But she tried her best to smile for him, to show him that this had not broken her, even if she would never be the same.
Lucien nodded. Time, at least, was something they had now. The Qunari were gone, and though he doubted Kirkwall would remain entirely peacefulāif it could even reach such a state to begin withāfor the moment at least, there was no looming war. There was time enough to breathe, to rest and recuperate. Something which likely needed to continue now.
āThen I will go get her.ā