First Sight

Blackwall has become unused to being touched.

For the past eight years, his physical contact with others has been almost non-existent. Embraces, clasped hands, friendly slaps to the back or arms around the shoulder from friends - these are things that died in the rain with the children he killed.  Since then, he's known only a few grateful handshakes from farmers whose family he has protected from darkspawn, steadying touches to the shoulder of some young lad he’s teaching to defend himself and who has never held a sword before, the chaotic tangle of grappling against some bandit who managed to make it past his shield.  Even those moments have usually been smothered by gloves – and they have all been so fleeting. Tiny moments of connection with the world outside his armour, snatched away almost as soon as they come.

This… this is something that has become foreign to him. Feeling another’s skin against his, and having it linger.

Elera Lavellan’s fingers are cool against his face, their touch gentle and slow. Wordlessly, she traces every line, hovering over his closed eyes and his lips, studying the shape of his face with a kind of fascinated concentration. She does this every time, every night, every moment she has a chance – because this is the only way she can see him. Through touch, through the feeling of skin. Because if Blackwall opened his eyes now, the gaze he would meet would stare back sightless, unseeing.

Her movements stop, and everything is still and silent for a heartbeat. Then she sighs, and Blackwall knows why; she’s mourning the eyesight she lost, wishing she could see him. He brings up a hand and closes his fingers over hers, and she responds by leaning down to kiss him. It’s a quiet brush of her lips against his, soft and somehow thoughtful.

And he’s not complaining about that. He’s had his fill of fiercer kisses tonight, the hungry kind that set his skin aflame and remind him just how deeply he has missed being touched - more than that, how starved of touch he has been. They have shared them aplenty, and now their breathing has settled back into a slow, satisfied rhythm, now her room is quiet again but for the murmuring of wind against the window, Blackwall finds himself treasuring this tender aftermath. There’s something infinitely precious about these moments, when life seems to be lying still for a while, steadying its pace to let him and Elera savour their closeness.

Which is a relief. Because this won’t last forever, not so long as he keeps hiding behind a Grey Warden’s shield. Sooner or later, what he and Elera have will end. While it lasts, he will cling to every last moment, every breath, every touch of her hands and murmur of her voice.

So when she speaks, he hangs on every word, even though her sentence quickly trails away. ‘I wonder if I’d be able to…’

Blackwall opens his eyes to see her frowning, pursing her lips slightly as she always does when thinking hard. ‘Able to what?’

Elera sighs and lowers her head down to the pillows, and Blackwall slips an arm around her shoulders. A smile flickers around her mouth, and she moves a little closer to him.

‘Solas has been giving me lessons,’ she says. ‘Helping me develop my abilities – as a Dreamer, I mean. He’s been teaching me how to control and shape the Beyond – the Fade, to you - to make it reflect my memories, and… and how to draw others into them. He says that if I focus hard enough, I should be able to pull another sleeping mind into my memories, the way he can.’

A little of this goes clear over Blackwall’s head – he really, really doesn’t understand this Fade business. He knows the basics, of course, about how spirits and demons and dreams work, but when Solas and Elera and Cole start up their chattering about it, he's lucky to understand one word in ten. But Elera has spent many patient conversations describing her own abilities to him, so he has grasped enough: she is something called a Dreamer, which means she has a gift that appears among only a handful of mages in each Age. She can shape the Fade around her to her desires. She’s told him that Solas, who shares the ability, has walked with her through the Fade many a time, showing her the places their party has travelled to, so that she can see them as she can’t in her waking world –

The full meaning of what she’s saying hits him suddenly. Elera can see in the Fade. Her body – her physical body – is blind, but it’s her mind that travels to the Fade. And she was not always blind; she has memories of sight. So in the Fade, she sees – and if she can draw another into her memories…

‘You mean, you could…’ Blackwall begins, and then hesitates. Would it work? Solas probably has an easy time of bringing Elera into his memories – she’s a fellow mage, a fellow Dreamer – but he himself is no mage. He has walked in the Fade (and those are memories he wouldn’t be sorry to forget), and he knows that it is no place for him.

‘See you there?’ Elera finishes for him. ‘In theory, yes. I would have to draw your mind there, and make sure you were... conscious. Lucid. Even most mages aren't, when they simply dream. But If I did that, then, yes, I would be able to see you. I… simply don’t know if I could do it.’

She fumbles for the hand she isn't already holding, her fingertips brushing air a few times before finding their mark, and closing tightly, almost violently, around his own.

‘But I want to try.’ The words are a whisper, but there’s fierceness behind them. ‘I want to – Elgar’nan, I just want to see you. With my eyes, not with my hands. I want to know what you look like, vhenan, I - I just have to see you.’

And Blackwall understands, because how could he not? He has felt the same, even with his eyesight intact. Didn’t he say almost those words to Elera, that night when he crept up to her room and waited for her on her balcony, screaming at himself to turn and leave but unable to stop his feet from moving, unable to walk away once he was there? Because even though he told himself it was so he could thank her for going with him to the Storm Coast, the truth slipped from his mouth almost the moment she stood in front of him – I just had to see you.

So he leans in and presses his lips to her forehad, just above her vallaslin - another shining moment of touch. ‘I’m willing to give it a try.’

Elera smiles. ‘Thank you.’

The words are already forming in his mouth to ask her exactly how this is supposed to be done, but she beats him to it. ‘You don’t need to do anything. Just… sleep. I’ll do the rest. And if it doesn’t work, I'll try another time until I manage it. I will see you.’

Blackwall doesn’t doubt it. This is a woman who walked out of the Fade, mended time itself, and brought a mountain down on a would-be god. All without eyesight. When Elera Lavellan says she plans to accomplish something, it’s only a matter of time before it’s done.

He closes his eyes again, and lets the warmth of her body and the sound of their breathing lull him into sleep.

~

He wakes, except he knows he hasn’t.

It’s the wrong place to be waking in, for starters. This is very resoundingly not Elera’s room in Skyhold; it’s a place he’s never seen before, but he would hazard a guess at it being a forest somewhere in the Free Marches. Beneath his feet, the ground is thick with ferns; above him, the sunlight is warm, but blocked in a thousand places by leaves that split it into dusty shafts.  In every other direction, trees stretch away into a green and brown blur that goes on farther than he can see. He’s standing in a small clearing, where the trees have parted around the bracken-shadowed gully cut by a stream.

He doesn’t know this place, and unless he’s been kidnapped, dressed in his day clothes, carried halfway across Thedas and dumped unceremoniously in the middle of the Free Marches, there’s no way for him to be here. Which means that this is one of Elera’s memories, and her plan to draw him into the Fade has worked.

Looking closer, he can pick out a few telltale signs that this isn’t the solid waking world he’s used to. Not that he’s anything of an expert on the Fade – walking through it during the whole Adamant affair didn't make him understand it – but even a child would be able to notice that the whole scene is a little… off. Nothing here is detailed – not the patterns of bark on the trees, not the moss on their trunks, not the dappled patterns of light and shadow. The stream’s line is unnaturally straight. And here and there, Blackwall can see patches where the world around him becomes suddenly indistinct – just vague colour that suggests a tree or a rock, without actually being one.

It only baffles him for a moment before he understands. This is a memory of Elera’s from before she went blind – but she lost her sight at eleven. He’s standing in something she remembers from her childhood, perhaps a place her clan once camped, but there’s no chance of a memory from a child with failing eyesight staying completely intact for sixteen years. The lack of detail, the bizarre regularity of the stream, the patches of fuzzy nothing – they come from the things she’s forgotten, the things she can’t quite recall with clarity.

And for all that… it’s beautiful.

Blackwall breathes in deeply, and is rewarded with the taste of cool morning air in his mouth. Here he stands, then, in the Fade, in Elera’s memory. Here, she will be able to see him.

He’s struck by an abrupt and unexpected feeling that, after a moment of thinking, he recognises as terror. It takes him another moment to work out why. Now he’s suddenly confronted with the fact that she will see him for the first time, he’s – what? Awkward? Self-conscious? Embarassed? Ashamed?

What is this, pride? he snarls silently at himself. What do you have to be proud of?

It’s stupid. Infantile. He knows it is, and yet… and yet his thoughts are suddenly circling around the lines on his face, the grey beginning to thread its way through his beard. He hasn’t given a thought to these things in years, it’s just one more thing his life alone has made him unaccustomed to. Because Thom Rainer cared about the way he looked, Thom Rainer was arrogant and proud. Everything that Thom Rainer valued, everything that Thom Rainer thought was important, Blackwall has tried so hard to despise.

She knows I’m not young. She knows – and she’s blind. Maker’s balls, you don’t really think a blind woman cares about the way people look –

‘Vhenan?’

Her voice sounds from behind him - soft, but clear. And at the sound of it, Blackwall suddenly knows that no matter how suddenly, undeservedly self-conscious he feels, he wants her to see him.

And so he turns around.

Elera stands beside the stream, clad in a forest-green tunic of the kind she must have worn back when she lived with her people, the broken sun-glow casting patches of shadow over her hair. Her pose is more relaxed, more natural, than he’s ever seen it in the waking world. And for the first time, her eyes are looking directly into his.

What did she expect him to look like, he wonders? Is she surprised, disappointed? She doesn’t even yet have any way to know for certain that this is him, he realises – so he swallows down the dryness in his throat and says, ‘My lady.’

Her eyes widen ever so slightly.

He stands there, unable to move, as she takes a step towards him. Then another. She’s halfway to him when his body seems to unfreeze, and he coughs, rubs the back of his neck, gestures towards his face.

‘Probably… more lines here than you were hoping for,’ he says. ‘And there’s far too much silver growing into this beard for my liking. But I… well, I hope you…’

The sentence falters and dies.

She stops in front of him, looking right at him, meeting his eyes. Her face is unreadable, set into that still mask she so often wears whenever she’s forced onto her throne to hold a judgement. Blackwall feels a pang of pity for the prisoners he’s seen dragged before her – he knows now how it feels to be completely bared before her, awaiting her verdict, hoping –

And then she smiles at him, smiles with that little twitch of her mouth that always warns that one of her rare jokes is imminent.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘Perhaps I do believe in love at first sight after all.’

Blackwall lets out his breath, chuckles, and reaches out to put his arms around her. Even here in the Fade, she’s so wonderfully real to touch. It still seems incredible, that he can place his hand on her and find that she isn’t going to fade away from him, that she’s flesh and blood like him. It makes him feel… anchored. Grounded. Whole.

Elera places a hand against his chest, spreading her fingers against the front of his jacket. She’s still smiling, and there’s a trace of fond amusement behind it. ‘You were worried, weren’t you?’

‘Not really. Well. Maybe a bit.’

‘You needn’t have been. I just wanted to see you, that was all.’ A quick laugh escapes her. ‘I’m blind. I'm blind everywhere but here. You don’t really think appearances matter to me? And besides…’

Her hands stray to his face as they have done so many times before, tracing the shapes her fingers must know so well by now.

‘Besides,’ she says again. ‘You have a beautiful face, vhenan.’

Years of living in the wilderness, living inside a lie, have made Blackwall unused to feeling certain things. Two of those things he feels now, standing here with Elera in this quiet corner of the Fade. The first is the precious sensation of another’s skin on his, lingering.

And the second is joy.