log: sera + adaar WHO: Mrs. and Mrs. Adaar WHEN: Right after errbody was playing Wicked Grace WHERE: Their room! WHAT: Adaar asks Sera about her conversation with Cullen regarding wanting children, but no one can talk about any future plans until they figure out what to do with the Anchor on Adaar's hand. WARNINGS: N/A
_________________
It had been an exceptionally good night.
Everyone was back to normal and finally (finally) they had managed to get most people from their world together for a card game. They'd been betting stories instead of money, enjoying company more than anything else. For a while it almost felt like being at home.
They all had to scatter eventually. When Asala and Sera walked home, it was with Sera riding piggyback, Asala effortlessly holding her up. Most of the way back, their idle conversation wandered into comfortable quiet until Asala broke it.
"So. Kids, huh?"
Sera was happily slumped against her wife's back, her head on top of Asala's head, and her fingertips idly tracing over Asala's horns. Asala was so tall, it was the first thing that she'd noticed about her, because — well, of course you notice that thing about a person. Height. And horns. It wasn't even just about how much Sera wanted her in bed anymore. That height had become solid, stable, comfortable. Their bodies shouldn't have fit, but they did, just in ways that most people didn't think bodies would fit.
Like this. This was perfect.
She opened one eye. "What?"
"I saw what you said to Cullen." It was warm rather than pointed. "Never really got around to talking about it back home, did we?" There had never been time. The Inquisition had always taken priority in its way, and talking about children had seemed foolish even without it, between two women and all.
Sera frowned a little. "Oh. That." Had it not been private? Frig, she should've made it private. Asala was going to think it was all stupid. She had bigger things to do. Important things. Inquisitor things, even though she wasn't Inquisitor. "Guess we didn't. Is there something to talk about?"
"Is there? It's why I'm asking." Sera could be prickly at best, and this wasn't something that pushing was a good idea. Still, Asala sounded nervous, like she wasn't sure which direction to go in with this without Sera leading the way.
"I… is there?" Sera always sounded at the point of being angry when she was vulnerable, like she was scrambling at straws. She didn't like complicated feelings, didn't like being sad or feeling squidgy. "I mean…" One of her hands tightened on Asala's horns. "A baby's not going to come from trying," she said. "So no accidents. Can't blame that. You'd have to want one, and then figure it out."
"I wouldn't even know where to start," Asala admitted. "Not that I don't want to." At the door, Asala opened it and very carefully ducked down to get into the room. The ceilings and her own doorframe were still raised from when Peter had cast the spell, but the front door was still short and it took some finagling to get through it without clunking Sera's head on the stone.
Sera lifted her head slightly. "You what? You'd… want to? You? And me? You and me, with a kid?"
She chuckled, awkward and shy, the way she did when she was embarrassed or didn't know what to do with herself. "I mean, that's … stupid, innit. You, yeah, but me?" Cullen had already encouraged her, but it still felt wrong to admit wanting it. She knew what people thought about her, and she knew she didn't have any good motherly examples to follow.
"I don't think it's stupid," Asala replied, nearly muttering it.
Sera squirmed, kicking her feet. "Put me down, I need to see your face."
Asala let her drop, straightening her back out and brushing nonexistent dust from her shirt. "I don't think it's stupid," she reiterated more loudly.
Sera circled back around to look up at her wife, fiddling with the bracelet around her wrist. It was woven from Asala's hair and other threads, fixed with beads and baubles from their travels together. "Why not?" she asked, and it was genuine rather than judgmental.
"Why would I? You're great with kids. I'm…" Asala paused to pick a word. "Overly serious? I'd be the boring parent, I know that. My parents were kind of boring, too."
"But kids are work, yeah? It's all work," Sera muttered, looking down at her toes. "Kids are the thing you have when you don't want to have fun anymore, and I don't want to stop having fun."
The idea of a kid sounded fun, though. Having a little one, teaching it things, hearing it laugh and helping it play. Loving it was easy, that was just what you did. It was the rest — the feeding and the clothing and the not permanently messing it up — that sounded hard.
"I think that's a little unfair. Lots of people have kids and still have fun. My parents did." Asala ran a hand through Sera's hair before moving over to the couch. Most furniture was too short to be comfortable, so she ended up sprawling out length-wise.
Sera folded her arms, shrugging. "Yeah, well. Look where I come from. I wouldn't do that to my kid. I wouldn't lie just to make myself look better. I wouldn't let her think anyone hated her, because no one would hate her. Because she'd be perfect. And she'd be … you'd just have to love her, wouldn't you."
"I don't think anyone's great at raising kids." Though what did she know? The only parents she'd ever been around were Tal-Vashoth. "It's more about… making the kinds of mistakes you can be forgiven for, I guess."
Sera was too restless to sit down. She'd been thinking about this, a lot, ever since Cullen brought it up. "But we can't just make one," she said, tossing her hands up in the air. "It's not like if we want one, we try hard, and we get one. It doesn't work like that. It can't work like that, for us, no matter how much we talk about it or want it."
"You're not wrong," Asala admitted, picking at a loose thread on her pants. "At home we'd eventually run into someone who could use taking in, but that's not so much the case here." The Sky People were insular enough that they took each other's children in if they had to. It wasn't as if there was an orphanage in the mountain.
"So even if we want it…" Sera glanced away, blushing hotly with embarrassment. "What's the good of wanting? Might as well say 'can't' and be done with it. I can't do that for you. You can't do that for me. That's what we signed up for, loving women like we do."
"I just don't think we can write anything off. We don't know the future, something might fall into our laps or…" Asala trailed off, habitually shaking out her left hand. Neither of her hands ever felt normal; the anchor made the left one feel funny and the right one was… weird. Responsive, but weird. "I don't know. Something might come up, is all I'm saying."
"Might come up?" Sera had a hard time wanting things she couldn't have. "Right, when nugs piss glitter."
Asala let out a breath. "If you say so."
Sera scuffed her foot against the ground, stubborn, and then she gave up and she crawled on top of Asala, settling in against her wife. For a little while, it seemed like that was the end of the conversation.
Then, after almost ten minutes of silence, just their breathing and their heartbeats, Sera mumbled, "I want it. I want it so much it hurts, and I don't like to talk about it hurting. I don't want to think about it being hard, or not fair. I could be good. I could be so good, even if everyone says I couldn't."
"I know," Asala said quietly, idly running her hand over Sera's back. "I know."
"I want…" Sera wiped at her eyes, even though she wasn't crying. She wanted to threaten those tears and keep them from even forming in the first place. "I want someone who looks like you. And me. Someone that could look like us. Sometimes I can see her, in my head. Sometimes she's in dreams, and I hate it because it's not real. I never wanted this before, not with anybody. I never wanted a wife, either, and now I love that."
"We don't even know if we can—"
Asala was abruptly cut off by a stab of pain in her left hand, the anchor flaring green. She tightened her hand into a fist, her teeth gritting. The light was heatless, harmless to Sera even if it was sending pain up Asala's arm. This happened sometimes, every few weeks at most, lasting a few agonizing seconds before it passed and Asala could open her fist enough to shake it out.
"Andraste's ass."
Sera frowned, looking up. "Stop," she said, like telling Asala to stop would make it stop. She'd had the dreams, she knew that the Anchor on Asala's hand was going to become more and more unstable, that it was going to tear her apart. If she wanted to live, she'd have to lose her other arm. "Stop, it… it's bad, isn't it? Is it worse?"
"I don't know about worse. Not yet. I have a while before it starts…" Killing her. A year and a half, maybe. "I'll find a way. Or maybe one day I'll just wake up missing my arm and it'll take care of itself." She groaned, flopping back down. "We can't even consider children until I know for sure I won't die."
Sera stared at her. "You already know how to live," she said. "There's …" The option was to cut Asala's arm off, but she'd already lost her other arm in a werewolf attack here. Having some sort of magical prosthetic was impressive, but she couldn't do that for both hands.
"No, I don't. The anchor is in my hand but it's not in my hand." Asala spread her fingers, staring at her palm. "Corypheus couldn't take it out. Or maybe he could have and didn't do it right, but Solas had to remove it magically. The arm was just collateral damage."
"But…" Sera had grossly underestimated the problem. "We can't just lop it off like bad flesh? Then what do we do? Who's got magic like what Solas had?" That pissbucket, she wanted him dead. She wanted him a thousand frigging kinds of dead.
"Fuck if I know. Dorian, maybe? If anybody could figure it out." If they figured it out early enough, they might actually save her arm while they were at it, but it was so damn hard to talk about without getting emotional.
"What, like Solas is so special," said Sera, rolling her eyes.
"Solas is a few thousand years old and knows magic most mages haven't even heard of," Asala said flatly. "The anchor is old, old magic made with a focusing device that no one even remembers existed. He's special. An asshole, but special."
"Bullshit," said Sera flatly. "Magic is magic. Any magic that was learned once can be learned again. It's not so special that no one can figure it out, he'll just tell you it is and you believe it because you like him and think he's smarter than you. And maybe it's hard or whatever, I don't know, I don't know magic."
She frowned. She was horribly stubborn, and most of what she said when she got stubborn simply sounded childish, even if it was common sense.
"You're not wrong." It wasn't that Asala was stubborn about this, but she wasn't good at facing disappointment, and that's what this felt like. She could easily waste the time she had left or kill herself trying to make it longer.
"I know, right?" Sera fidgeted uncomfortably. "So not you, you're too close. You can't see it. But Dorian messed with magic that shouldn't be. He's one of those arseholes always with his nose in some book, saying something weird. You remember him and Solas, the way they'd go on for hours about magic this and snap-the-veil that."
Asala let her hand fall to Sera's back again, content to look away from it. "I'll talk to him. Soon."
"We don't have 'soon'," Sera muttered, reaching for her tablet.
"Optimistic."
Sera tapped wildly at her tablet for about a minute, fingers clumsily poking at the letters that she hadn't quite gotten familiar with yet. When she finished, she turned back to her wife. "There. Easy. Now you sit back and not think about it now."
Letting out a long breath, Asala kissed the top of Sera's head and gave her an affirming squeeze. "What would I do without you?"
Sera blushed. "Dunno," she said. She always a quiet little thrill when she was validated. "Good thing you don't have to find out."