Felassan tips his head toward Beleth in gratitude for the condolences, which are worth plenty, and looks tempted, honestly, by the offer of sticks, raising his eyebrows and pursing his lips in a playful pantomime of consideration. That's an idea. No way to know if it would help unless they try.
That expression, raised brows and thinned lips, serves him well enough through Solas' explanation, too, albeit with less amusement coloring its edges. Is it normal, to feel some impulse to take blame for his own death? Arguably, yes. He still has one foot in those millennia of dreaming that what was broken could be repaired. If someone had asked Felassan four thousand years before, as people he had loved for as long as he'd been alive turned grey and hollow and fell beyond anyone's reach, grasping his hand with their weakened ones, sending him away because the sight of his unchanging face was too unfair to endure, devoured by something worse than the Blight because it could not be contained — if someone had asked him then what should be done with anyone who knowingly stood in the way of unbreaking the world, he would not have paused to think about the answer.
And if it isn't normal, well. By no mortal measure has he ever been normal about Solas. It's fine.
"I was his friend," is a correction to agent, in part, but a gentle one. One that needs its own further correction: "I am his friend."
Not the way he had been. Not yet, maybe not ever again. Something was broken between them well before Solas struck him down; friends don't kneel and await their executions without resistance. He had not believed Solas might change his mind, and perhaps that was his failing. It's good to have been wrong. It's also an open wound: changeable, changed, just not — after so many thousands of years — for him.
Aside from a pinch of grief at the corner of his eyes, none of this shows on his face. He smiles at Beleth Lavellan, controlled and formidable in her chair.
"I assume the historians will never know enough to record that you may have saved all of Thedas by being charming and," with so much mischief it can only be a quote, "utterly indomitable. That is a shame."
no subject
That expression, raised brows and thinned lips, serves him well enough through Solas' explanation, too, albeit with less amusement coloring its edges. Is it normal, to feel some impulse to take blame for his own death? Arguably, yes. He still has one foot in those millennia of dreaming that what was broken could be repaired. If someone had asked Felassan four thousand years before, as people he had loved for as long as he'd been alive turned grey and hollow and fell beyond anyone's reach, grasping his hand with their weakened ones, sending him away because the sight of his unchanging face was too unfair to endure, devoured by something worse than the Blight because it could not be contained — if someone had asked him then what should be done with anyone who knowingly stood in the way of unbreaking the world, he would not have paused to think about the answer.
And if it isn't normal, well. By no mortal measure has he ever been normal about Solas. It's fine.
"I was his friend," is a correction to agent, in part, but a gentle one. One that needs its own further correction: "I am his friend."
Not the way he had been. Not yet, maybe not ever again. Something was broken between them well before Solas struck him down; friends don't kneel and await their executions without resistance. He had not believed Solas might change his mind, and perhaps that was his failing. It's good to have been wrong. It's also an open wound: changeable, changed, just not — after so many thousands of years — for him.
Aside from a pinch of grief at the corner of his eyes, none of this shows on his face. He smiles at Beleth Lavellan, controlled and formidable in her chair.
"I assume the historians will never know enough to record that you may have saved all of Thedas by being charming and," with so much mischief it can only be a quote, "utterly indomitable. That is a shame."