ELLANA LAVELLAN
PG | NARRATIVE, COMPLETE
There is mention of death, but nothing beyond mention.
Ellana had done about a weeks work of drinking in three days. The first night had actually not been that bad - she hadn’t actually gone home between waking up and going out and meeting up with Cassandra and Varric and it had been… comforting to see familiar faces, faces she’d seen dead (or, at least, near death) one other time. It had been comforting to just be awake and feel like things were real again and not feel like she had to second guess whether she was in the Fade or reality. That hadn’t been the worst part though, not really, and Ellana let herself merely get lost in the weekend. The Inquisitor wasn’t so emotionally incompetent that she didn’t know that she wasn’t just hiding away from everything because, much like what she’d seen when she’d seen the future Corypheus would have brought them, she just couldn’t share it with everyone else. She wouldn’t burden everyone else with something that had fallen on her shoulders.
She knew that wasn’t healthy and she knew a few days of drinking it away was all she could give herself. Come Monday morning? She’d been sober as the most upstanding Chantry Sister and at her desk looking over new training schedules to accommodate the change in the command structure. She was tired, but only because none of her sleep had been good over the weekend. As much as some people claimed they slept better drunk, it hadn’t been enough to bury the flashes of memory. Not from either of the futures she’d seen. Whether it was at Corypheus’ or Solas’ hands.
By Tuesday? By Tuesday she’d been staring at the note on her dresser since the early hours of Saturday when she’d found herself back in her room. She didn’t need to recognize the script to know who it was from; the phone alerts did enough to tell her that without anything else. There was some sort of joke here - about how at least she’d gotten a goodbye this time, maybe even some sort of explanation. But right now? Well, it couldn’t have come at a worst time. Right now? She wasn’t willing to read whatever excuses, whatever reasonings, whatever… platitudes that note may have contained were entirely lost on Ellana.
The note was never to be read, she’d decided that much when she’d first seen it - but it had taken her a few days to actually build up the courage.
Some things, if you asked the Inquisitor, were just to be buried. Like the blood on her hands or what her and Dorian had seen - that was now followed by what her and Reinhardt had seen. She had no intention, none whatsoever, with burdening her friends with what might happen. What they all knew might happen. That she’d fail.
Ellana had succeeded, thrived, truly become what she wanted to under the Inquisition’s banner. Under her mantle as Inquisitor. It had been the place she’d been looking to find herself that she never could have expected and that had come at a cost. A mantle of burden that she couldn’t bear to share. Compartmentalization pulled close around her like a warm winter cloak. Ellana often played at being careless or being flippant, but it was just the way she coped. She didn’t talk about how much she’d killed, not seriously. No, it was just for the odd pun here or there. Ellana didn’t even talk with Dorian about what they’d seen, there was no reason. At least, none that she saw as being worth it to relive those things - Dorian had suffered enough with the loss of Felix and that had been a major contributing factor in why she’d forced Alexius into serving the Inquisition, rather than killing him. Maybe that had been why she’d chosen Redcliffe over the Dales… she’d wanted to… make sure it wasn’t that all over again, and it hadn’t been. In some ways, it had been worse. There was no struggle there, there was no one left to fight, it was just… done...
The decision she was making right now was no different than any of those that she’d made before. The Inquisitor picked up the note - walking into her bathroom, tossing it into the sink. She stared at it for a moment; part of Ellana so badly wanted to read it. But that part of Ellana had a bad habit of never winning over. She may have been a glutton for punishment in many ways, but if a solution wasn’t to be found - she merely found a way around it. The Dalish woman saw no solution for Solas’ departure. The Warrior standing there saw no solution for what she’d dreamed. She saw only the fact that he was gone, again, and she saw only the fact that that meant even more than ever that she just… simply couldn’t fail.
Digging into her pocket, she pulled out a lighter and leaned down - holding it to the edge of the note as she stood there, willing for it to catch fire. Slowly, surely it did. Slowly, surely it burnt to a crisp in the cool basin of the sink. Slowly, surely Ellana turned the faucet on and washed it all away. Just like she could with the memory of what she’d seen.
The vision of Apocalypse, for a second time in her relatively short life, would be buried deep down into the recesses of her nightmares to visit her only at night when they couldn’t simply be ignored.