Dragon Age Inquisition: Their Wonderful Abnormality

Simplicity

The low creak of hinges swinging a heavy door alerted the Commander of her entrance. Cullen could only acknowledge the Inquisitor's shadowed entry with a fleeting double-take while he spoke to the soldiers gathered around his desk, their armour glinting in the candlelight.

"In the meantime," he attempted to finish, setting down the papers as he averted his eyes, "we'll send soldiers to assist with the relief effort."

Elsa Trevelyan leaned her head back against the wall, a void smirk of amusement quirking her lips as she rose a careful eyebrow, her slender finger tracing the soft-lipped smile that both unsettled and intrigued him in the complex manner Elsa so often had in tow.

An unaccounted for moment of quiet descended upon the room as the Commander faltered. He cleared his throat and pushed himself away from the desk.

"That will be all." He concluded finally, following them tightly out of the room as they left with formal departure. Elsa's eyes flicked from face to face as they passed through the door and into the night which, in the brief moment granted by the open door, sept into the office in a sweetened gust of frosted breath. A heartbeat later a candle flickered and the wind dashed its glow, a velvet plume of smoke snaked into the dim room, winding and fading spectrally.

When the Commander closed the doors, he remained with his gloved hands planted on the wood as his head bowed. He sighed deeply, forehead nearly touching the wood. Elsa watched him, unperturbed, running a long nail back and forth over the pad of her thumb. She was in a slightly oversized worn, white shirt. Her usual off-duty attire that sometimes fortuitously revealed a smooth shoulder or the soft line of a collar bone.

"There's always something more, isn't there?" He grumbled, voice baritone.

Her lips upturned.

"Metaphor for my life." She quipped, watching him push away from the door and rub the back of his neck hard with his hand in an attempt to massage out the taut cords of stress. Planning war did this. Like pulling the strings of an instrument so tightly they splintered and snapped, the notes becoming tense and discord.

As he crossed to his desk, she followed slowly, boot heels clicking as she meandered. She must have sensed tension for when she spoke every note of jest had gone from her voice, leaving it quietly serious.

"War doesn't last forever." She said. "And if it's any further consolation, I believe our chances to be far better than before. Things have changed."

Cullen watched her retrieve the flameless candle and hold the blackened wick above a lit one, waiting with the shadows dancing across her features until it relit. She did not flinch when a tear of clear wax rolled across her finger. She watched the new flame grow, spluttering into life and placed it back carefully, rubbing the wax from her skin as she leant back on the desk.

"You're right. Things have changed. At first I considered little beyond our survival for that seemed like a daring ambition in itself, once. But now... now I find myself wondering what will happen after, when it's all over."

He had expected a reaction, for her face to be flooded with a hesitant consideration, carefully composing how to break it to him she wanted only to leave for the furthest shores as soon as humanly possible.

But she held his gaze assuredly, understanding what he was saying, blinking slowly.

"I want to move on," he told her, "from all the stress and the worry and the wondering whether or not it's enough, whether we'll make it. I want to move on... but not from you."

His hand softly pushed away an escapee lock of deep red as he smiled.

The strange promise of devotion and loyalty felt enlaced within his words and he had once thought that something as binding and sentencing as that would have her running for the hills. Her reaction was unrevealing. What if she was truly feeling completely confined now? What if she was painting a calm façade while she frantically planned a way out?