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buttsonthebeach · 4 years

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A Secret Shared

@im-calling-the-lord did me the honor of letting me write Abby and Solas again! Thanks friend!

I previously wrote about them in A Gilded Cage and @im-calling-the-lord wrote about them in Eternity.

Pairing: Abby Grace x Solas (non-Lavellan, non-Inquisitor OC x Solas)

Rating: Teen for references to childbirth and canon-typical violence

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Abby had been a secret-keeper all her life.

There was the big secret, of course - mysterious origins, inexplicable powers - but it was all the little ones that made her really good at it. All the little mischiefs and adventures of childhood, like staying out too late or wandering too far or tempting fate with a magical experiment or stealing a bite of the pie her mother had insisted needed to wait until after dinner. The world was wide and she wanted to live in every corner of it, even the corners she needed to stay away from, and so she had to become good at keeping secrets.

Solas was always her partner in those secrets. It was what formed their friendship - their shared thirst for knowledge and experience without limitation. And now, so many years beyond childhood, beyond their reunion in Ghilan’nain’s great and terrifying hall, that had a new layer to it. They were bonded in truth, wed to one another - but in secret. It was fitting, giving their friendship, given their lives.

Solas was also a partner in Abby’s latest secret.

He just didn’t know it yet.

Abby turned that thought over in her mind as she paced the halls of the refuge where she lived with Solas - though most people called him Fen’Harel these days, whether in admiration or fear or loathing. She, the so-called Herald of Fen’Harel, had a secret from the great man himself.

She was pregnant.

She’d figured it out for certain in the stillness of morning, in her private chambers (because she had to have her own chambers, of course, since it was a secret that she had a bondmate at all). Her monthly bleeding had been missing of course, but it had taken a visit with a spirit of healing to confirm the other changes in her body, and what they meant.

A child. A child for her and for Solas, the man who had always been her partner.

The man who was now leading a rebellion, more or less.

So the timing wasn’t impeccable, any more than it had been impeccable for them to reunite at Ghilan’nain’s party under the threat of death and political intrigue - so maybe it was just par for the course for them.

They hadn’t even thought it was possible for her to get pregnant by Solas, considering that she wasn’t an elf - but then again everything about her seemed impossible, and sometimes her luck in having Solas as a partner seemed impossible too - so maybe this was all to be expected in some strange way.

Once she was able to wrap her mind around it, Abby decided that she could keep this secret all to herself - just for now. She wouldn’t be able to keep it forever. But there was still so much danger around them, and so much to do. She would hold onto this impossible thing on her own.

That meant she had to keep going with her usual routines, even when she was bone tired and more than a little nauseated. So she walked around the fortress every day as she always did, checking for supplies and chatting with guards and making sure new refugees were situated with somewhere to sleep and food to eat, medical attention if they needed it. She’d already gained a reputation of her own as the Herald of Fen’Harel, and people often recognized her from sheer height alone. So in that sense it wasn’t terribly surprising when a young woman approached her one day on her rounds, a small bundle in her arms.

“Herald? Do you have a moment?”

“Of course,” Abby said, even if the title still filled her with equal parts unease and amusement. Unease because she’d been a secret-keeper her whole life and she’d never set out to be anyone of importance and amusement because - well, if she didn’t keep laughing at the situations she and Solas ended up in, she was going to go stark raving mad. “How can I help?”

“My name is Nuala,” she said, shifting the small bundle - and that was when Abby heard the little mewling sound it made, and realized abruptly that the woman was holding a well-swaddled baby.

That’s going to be me in a few months.

The thought didn’t help her queasiness.

Focus, Abby. She’s still talking.

“ - and we are just so grateful for the chance to start over somewhere new - to have a real life - and - ”

Nuala held out her infant.

Abby hesitated a moment and then extended her arms to hold the baby. She had no idea what the rest of Nuala’s speech had been but clearly this was what she wanted. She smiled and handed her child over at once, and Abby swallowed, looking down at the little person in her arms. How old were they? She realized abruptly that she didn’t know how to tell how old babies were - or what they needed - and that they were so much more squirmy than she expected, and heavier to boot. The baby she was holding had deep brown eyes and big soft cheeks, and dimples on either side of pursed pink lips.

“His name is Elaryl,” Nuala said, smiling and nervous.

“Hello Elaryl,” Abby said, instantly feeling a bit silly, because he probably couldn’t understand her anyway.

He wriggled in her grasp again, as much as he could in his tight, thick swaddling, and his frown deepened. It had a hood on it that was lined with fur, something far too warm for their current climate. She found herself absently rocking him, and then untucking the swaddling just a little so he could wiggle more and feel a little cooler in the warm air of the fortress. His frown smoothed out and he cooed again, looking up at her.

“You’re so good with him,” Nuala said. “He’s been so fussy since we came here. It’s so much warmer than home but we left in such a rush to escape the fighting that I didn’t have anything cooler for him to wear. He’s calmed right down with you though - do you have children of your own, Herald?”

I do. Right now. In my belly. And I can hardly believe it and I don’t think I’ve said those words out loud yet, and thank whatever gods there are that I can keep this little one happy because I have no idea what I’m going to be doing with my own -

“Someday,” she said, hoping she sounded convincing, and not too terrified. It wasn’t even a lie. Someday was coincidentally coming in seven or eight months or so. She handled Elaryl back to Nuala.

“Thank you, Herald,” Nuala said, beaming, curtseying, and Abby knew she didn’t deserve such deference but she would be damned if she didn’t live up to it anyway.

So she did double the rounds that day, even though she was bone-tired, more tired than she had ever been. Everything seemed to matter a little more now, like someone had dialed up the colors in the world. She’d always been part of Solas’s rebellion because it was right - and of course because it mattered to him, and they were nothing if they were not partners - but now she found herself thinking of the kind of world she wanted for their child, and what she could do to make it happen.

She didn’t see Solas until late in the day, which was normal. He’d been away from the fortress for most of it, meeting with contacts in various places, wearing his different guises. Many of them did not even know that it was the Dread Wolf they met with. He did not look very Dread to Abby when he slipped into her chambers. He just looked tired.

For a moment her heart leapt and she wanted to tell him, to make him a partner in truth to her secret - but then he did not even speak to her, and simply collapsed into bed, snaking his arms around her and pillowing his head on her chest, and sighed the sigh of a man with the world on his shoulders. He was so far from the boy she’d known now, and her heart ached to see all the ways this war was stripping him bare.

Abby held him tight, kissed the top of his head, and decided to keep her secret a little longer.

A little longer turned out to be two more months - but who was counting.

She’d managed to hide the extent of her exhaustion and sickness from Solas in that time. She was just starting to feel better, which she learned from the texts she read was entirely normal, and likely meant that she had passed the three month mark of her pregnancy. She was out of the worst danger - of losing the baby, at least. She was starting to feel more and more like her old self. That meant it was time to tell Solas. There were more reasons to be joyful than there were to be afraid.

Other than, of course, all of the death and injustice around them.

Which was why Abby simply could not sit idle when she heard of a remote village that was the target of an attack by Falon’Din’s forces. Not when there was time to evacuate them before they were taken as slaves to a man who would bathe the whole world in blood to soothe his ego. Solas himself was away from the fortress fighting against Andruil when the report arrived, so it was up to her to make the decision and carry it out.

She called up a small unit of soldiers used to such strikes and headed out through the eluvians, and of course counterspies had heard they were on their way and mobilized Falon’Din’s forces sooner than expected (of course). So of course it was not the quick and quiet in and out mission she’d assured herself it would be.

Instead there was fire and death.

And Abby was abruptly aware of just how much she was risking by being there in person.

Because even if she and Solas had managed to keep their bonding a secret, everyone knew she meant something to him, even if only as his foremost lieutenant, his Herald. His childhood friend. His special weapon.

So the Evanuris had studied her, and they knew what she feared most, and it was the fire.

So while the soldiers she’d brought with her to that remote place, perched high in a mountain range that divided the continent, spent their time shepherding terrified villagers out of the way, Abby spent her time fighting Falon’Din’s soldiers, all of whom were wreathed in flame and smoke - slinging gouts and spurts and balls of fire towards her. She nullified as much as she could - broke open their minds so she could hear their thoughts and predict their next moves - filled their minds with shouts and thoughts of horror - but she was tiring rapidly. Her abilities exhausted her far more than using magic seemed to exhaust most people. Solas had tried to explain to her the concept of mana, but either her pool was much smaller than most, or it drained much more quickly, because she could never seem to sense her limits the way he could his.

And now she was not just fighting for herself, or even for the innocent people her soldiers were currently saving. She was fighting for the child nestled in her belly.

What have I done? She thought when the first arrow struck her in the left shoulder, piercing her leather armor, taking the wind from her lungs.

She sent a wave of force towards the soldier who’d fired it, knocking him off of the nearby cliff.

I am fighting for the kind of world I want my child to grow up in, she reminded herself when the second arrow struck her, again in the left shoulder, numbing her left arm.

She was dizzy from diving in and out of the minds of her enemies and she staggered and that was all the opening the one closest to her needed to shoot flames straight at her, lighting up her right leg with pain. She screamed and the cold mountain air made her throat raw with it.

The woman who’d wounded her was closing in, magic sparking around her fingers again.

I am fighting for my child.

Abby summoned the last of her strength and choked the woman with the same invisible force she’d used to push one of her comrades off the cliff.

“Herald!” one of her own soldiers shouted. “The village is clear!”

Time to go.

Abby fled.

She barely remembered the journey back through the eluvians if she was perfectly honest. She just kept putting one foot in front of the other. The arrows were still in her left shoulder and she could smell her own charred flesh. Her stomach turned. But she looked ahead and saw all the people they’d saved and she knew she had to get them to the fortress. She’d brought them this far.

So she managed not to collapse entirely until every last one of them was inside.

But then she did collapse into a darkness so complete she wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t death.

There were snatches of memory after that. Hushed voices, cool hands, the tingling rush of healing magic. Soft linen sheets. Her whole body was too heavy with exhaustion to process much of it. Time didn’t have its usual meaning but she knew it was passing - a day, maybe two, maybe three. And then, finally, there was something familiar.

Solas - his face filled with a concern so fierce it frightened even her. He seemed to fill the world with it. There was nothing but him and his blue eyes and his brow furrowed with worry.

“Where - ” she began, her throat dry, her head and vision swimming.

“You’re pregnant?” he finished.

Well, shit.

“Yes,” she said, weakly.

Solas dropped his face into both of his hands, scrubbing at his eyes before looking back at her, as if to assure himself that all of this was real. Abby felt herself come back more fully into her body. She ached but she wasn’t in any severe pain. She could feel lingering healing magic all around her and fought the urge to nullify it that her powers always gave her. She began to take in details of the room around them. It was Solas’s room. Not her own.

“Am I in your room?”

“I asked them to move you here when I returned home.”

“But - is that wise? Won’t people - ”

“The whole fortress was already filling with rumors when I arrived, considering that when the healers brought you to our very public hospital to remove the arrows and heal the burns on your leg, they discovered that your abdomen was unusually swollen and confirmed their suspicions aloud.”

Abby’s head wasn’t swimming anymore, but her heart was sinking.

“But - there’s nothing to say that it’s yours -”

“People drew their own conclusions the moment the news of your pregnancy began to spread. Perhaps we have not been as discreet as we thought, or perhaps it is inevitable that any closeness between a man and a woman is interpreted this way. In any case, the rumors spread like wildfire.”

“We can contain - ”

“Andruil herself told me, Abby. Threw it in my face on the battlefield.”

Abby sat up at once.

“What? How - ”

“We know there are spies in our midst, no matter what we do to root them out. Once the rumor spread through the castle, it was inevitable it would reach one of them and make its way back to our enemies. I am confident it was sent as an urgent dispatch, considering the leverage it would give any of the Evanuris to know that I have a bondmate and a child, to boot. It was likely only hours before Andruil knew, and I did not.”

“Shit.”

Abby tried to run through all the implications and scenarios and how they could be manipulated, what they could do to mitigate this, but her mind and her heart kept returning to Solas, to the way he was sitting at her bedside, tense and afraid and angry. Her mind played through the image again - Solas and Andruil locked in combat, and Andruil’s beautiful, sneering face when she said it. How many insults had she added? How had she phrased it to best shake and mock and destabilize him? Abby had no doubt that she had taken something that was meant to be beautiful and twisted it to the fullest, turning its beauty inside out.

“That is not how I wanted you to find out, vhenan,” she said. She started to reach for him and then hesitated, letting her hand fall back to the comforter. Solas did not reach for it.

“How could you keep this from me?” Solas said, voice rising in anger now.

“I hardly believed it at first!” Abby said, her own anger rising in her. “You and I both agreed that it was nearly impossible considering that you’re an elf and I’m - whatever it is that I am! And it’s always risky early on and you already had so much on your plate so - I wanted to give you one less thing to worry about. I’d just crossed three months when I went on that mission. I was literally going to tell you when you returned from your mission against Andruil. I was just sidetracked by a couple of arrows to the shoulder.”

Solas sighed, looked away from her, shook his head. The window in his room was open. A breeze came through, making Abby’s skin prickle. She brought both of her hands to her belly. It was barely rounding out, but it was there now. Unmistakable.

“I cannot believe you risked yourself so, knowing what you knew,” Solas said finally, quietly. “I cannot - vhenan, if I had lost you both -”

Abby reached for him again. This time, Solas took her hand in both of his own and pressed it hard. The mask of his anger fell away entirely, and only fear and love were left in its wake. He leaned towards her, pressed his forehead to hers - let go of her hand with one of his and cupped the back of her head and held her there. Abby closed her eyes and lost herself in the closeness of him. They each breathed deep. The world didn’t seem so complicated in that moment. There was only them.

“You should go away from here,” Solas murmured. “To your parents. Until the baby is born. I fear I cannot protect you now.”

“No,” Abby said, barely letting him finish. “When you and I bonded, I swore to stay by your side regardless of the danger, and I stand by that.”

Solas let out a hollow laugh. “Somehow I knew you’d say that.”

“I am terribly predictable.”

His laugh was more genuine that time. They drew back so they could see each other. Abby took in the face of the man she loved - her best friend - basking in how lucky she was to have him to share all her secrets with.

So it wasn’t exactly a secret that Abby was pregnant anymore - but they could deal with that. And they did. They spread conflicting information through their own spies in the ranks of the Evanuris - that it had been a lie, that she’d lost the baby, that it was someone else’s - until the water was muddied enough. That bought them time. In that time, they increased security at the fortress - more magic wards, more spirit guardians who reacted poorly to anyone who didn’t know the password, which was always shifting. They doubled the efforts to root out spies who did slip in.

Of course, in that time, Abby’s belly grew. She was a tall woman - almost absurdly so - which meant she had plenty of time before she was big enough to be truly noticeable, but she still got there. And, truth be told, it was hard for Solas to keep up the pretense that it wasn’t his. He wanted to be near her, to check on her, to touch and hold her, like some primal instinct had been awoken within him. It was both annoying and endearing. He was also even more zealous - something she would have thought impossible before all of this - about his need to take down the Evanuris and their empire of blood and death and lies. She had to remind him to sleep sometimes.

But in the midst of all of that, she found time - like when she was lying in bed and she could feel the little one rolling and wriggling and kicking within her - to feel incandescently lucky. She had a bondmate who loved her and a child she never thought possible on the way.

She found time - like when she spoke to her parents via sending crystal - to feel properly terrified. She had no memory of her own mother, and her parents reminded her that she’d been a very big baby for her age, and now she was convinced that she had killed her mother in the birthing bed.

She found time - like when she looked at the elves all around her - to worry that her own child would feel as alone and alien as she had all her life.

Eventually, as it often did, time started to get away from them. Abby got too big and too tired to continue attending to all of her duties. She and Solas both became abruptly aware that this was no theoretical child, but a child who would be here very, very soon.

Abby started getting the false contractions near that ninth month, so long after that day with Nuala and her son Elaryl. Elaryl was walking now, chattering too. Soon Abby would be the one with a baby in her arms. Each false contraction sent her into a tizzy of worry that that time was almost on her. Solas too. It went on for two weeks like that - the two of them tense and nervous, like an attack was imminent.

Of course, when labor itself did begin, it might as well have been an attack.

Abby wasn’t sure there were words for that kind of pain in any language. How endless it felt. How it yanked you out of your own body and mind and into some other world where pain was all you knew, all that existed.

It went on for hours, and hours, and hours.

The midwives were exhausted, perplexed, muttering about the size of the baby, about how dangerous it was for the birth to go on this long, about infection and strangling umbilical cords, and Solas was white as death, gripping her hand almost as hard as she gripped his.

“It is fine. Everything is fine,” he kept saying, over and over again, though to himself or to her she wasn’t sure. Either way Abby didn’t believe him, either way the pain just went on and on and on and on and on -

Until, suddenly, he was there.

Her son, huge and wailing and pressed against her chest.

And all the pain was gone, so fast it made her doubt it had ever existed. That anything had ever existed other than the new little person cuddled against her.

She heard Solas take a shuddering breath at her side.

Their son - the secret they’d shared - was here. Breath and bone and beautiful as dawn.

Abby’s sense of wonder only grew as the minutes passed - as he ate and then got cleaned up and returned to her, warm and swaddled and sleeping now.

To think - all those childhood adventures - the stupid shit they’d done - and then their adult lives - the way they’d found each other, the days and nights and battles and embraces they’d shared since then - it had all led to this. To him.

Fen’revas.

“I do not even know what to say,” Solas murmured when it was just the two of them, sitting together in their bed, holding Fen’revas, studying him.

“That may be a first,” Abby said.

Solas chuckled, kissed her forehead. Fen’revas was soft and warm in Abby’s lap. She was soul-tired - it had been more than a day since her labor started, and Fen’revas was not small, as the midwives had predicted - but she couldn’t imagine sleeping. Not when he was here, and his little chest was rising and falling, and each breath was a miracle.

“I have to make this work,” Solas said finally, quietly. “This war - what we’re fighting for - I have to make everything right for my son.”

Abby leaned into Solas, hoping the wordless action would remind him that he did not carry that burden alone.

They did have to shift him to his bassinette eventually so they themselves could sleep. After she’d done so, Abby reached into the drawer of her nightstand and pulled out the crystal necklace she’d had as long as she could remember. Her parents had found it tucked into her swaddling clothes. It was the only connection she had to birth parents she’d never known - to a life she’d never known.

Now it was a connection between her and her son. The most precious secret she had ever shared with another person: you are not alone.

Abby slept, and dreamed of all the precious secrets that were to come.

#beach does commissions #beach writes #abby grace x solas #im-calling-the-lord #dragon age fanfic #arlathan #pre-inquisition #ahhh these two are such a delight to write

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