Trash Vint Dad Love

Let’s start with the obvious. Alexius is an antagonist, a minor villain in service to the Big Bad, who already made one attempt on the Inquisitor’s life. The way I work around it in my fic(s) and art is as follows: Inquisitor Lavellan, having learned Alexius’ motivation behind joining Corypheus’ cult (i.e. a deal to save his dying son), becomes sympathetic towards him. Out of pity that some of her advisors deem misplaced, she visits him in the dungeons below Haven, trying to alleviate his depression over Felix’s impending doom, and even helps him reconcile with Dorian (who, in his own words, which I do have screenshotted somewhere, once treated him as a man ‘to whom I compared all others’).

Alexius is cold towards her at first, but with each new visit, with each new conversation, he becomes attached to her, learning what sort of person this ‘thief’ Corypheus tasked him with killing actually is. A kind, compassionate person, fascinated by magical research and trying her best to change the world - in a way, she reminds him of himself at a time when things  were better (which is also canon, as per Dorian, who claims that Alexius wanted to improve Tevinter for the better, and then stopped when tragedy struck his family).

The Inquisitor (still Herald then) even allows Alexius and other, less high-profile prisoners like bandits and such, to sit with the people of Haven at the feast in honour of closing the Breach - which is what she does. I make multiple references to her taking pity on each and every adversary she faces, even Corypheus himself.

Unfortunately, the feast is interrupted by the arrival of the Red Templar army, and it so happens that Inquisitor (Herald) Lavellan and Alexius are stuck in the snowy mountains together, and have no choice but work side by side to ensure each other’s survival - which, I believe, is a classic bonding scenario. Later on, at Skyhold, Lavellan appoints Alexius is Inquisition researcher, and while he still has limitations imposed on him just in case (including, but not limited to, magic-suppressing manacles and a sample of his blood being used to make the Inquisition’s only phylactery), he begins to feel like his life has found new meaning. Seeing the destruction of Haven made him disillusioned with Corypheus, and he pours all his energy into redeeming himself. Which includes owning up to his involvement in making the Oculara (I headcanon that Alexius hated the idea from the outset, hence his efforts to kick the Tranquil out of Redcliffe, as a sort of roundabout ‘fly you fools!’; this is entirely conjecture on my part, though, and I do not insist that this is actually what’s going on).

Throughout all this time, Lavellan pops in to visit, helping Alexius with research, having long conversations with him. Developing inside jokes. Doing what friends do, essentially. They even leave the confines of Skyhold on adventures sometimes! At this point, Alexius is no longer antagonistic: rather, he is sincerely polite and interested in Lavellan’s opinions. Her presence is often the highlight of his day, and she inspires him to face and defeat the literal Despair Demon that is still haunting his dreams, ready to lash out whenever Felix is mentioned.

This is but a brief section of the journey these two make, very slowly coming to understand each other and to leave that horrible confrontation in Redcliffe behind. Falling in love is but the next stop.

Now, let’s touch on the adjacent baggage. Alexius is a(n ex) Tevinter magister, and Lavellan is an elf. This is a very glaring issue, in this story as much as in any Pavellan story. The latter situation, while possible canon, is, sadly, glossed over - but fan fiction would not have been fan fiction if people did not explicitly develop what has been left unsaid. It is also fantasy fan fiction - so it’s easier to imagine a reality where a middle-aged man formerly in a position of power is willing to become self-aware and expand his horizons. Well. Let’s imagine he is. If he did not have it in him, Dorian would probably not have admired him so much.

So yeah, Alexius does make blunders - but he acknowledges them, and both he and Dorian seek out a spirit of Wisdom in the Fade to learn more about elven culture. Because Lavellan obviously has other things to do than assuage Tevinter guilt. From the Doylist point of view, I make a point of never using language that might indicate that Alexius is possessive of Lavellan. Quite on the contrary, he respects her boundaries and, once the infatuation kicks in, pines ridiculously in silence rather than try to make advances that he assumes would be unwanted.

Here’s another valid point that squicks a lot of people: Alexius is some 25-30 years older than (this particular) Lavellan. It’s completely okay to steer clear of such a large age gap, and I will never blame you if you do! But it might still be useful/soothing for you to know that, other than an occasional ‘Kaffas, I am too old for this’ as he fights off risen dead in the Fallow Mire with a stick, Alexius does not lord his age over Lavellan. He does not condescend or dismiss her as a child. Nor does she blindly look up to him. Even in the last chapter, which is the only explicitly smutty one, they spend a while talking about each other’s consent and comfort before they dive in.

I am sorry if this post turned out to be huge; but before introducing my ship on a new platform, I have to cover all bases, as, after all, I do set myself up to fail by choosing such a peculiar pairing of characters that most people will look at the juxtaposition of names and immediately assume that there is abuse going on.

Looking at them, you would have thought that they were comrades in arms.

You would have that they have helped each other carve their way through packs upon packs of demonic creatures - which now lay curled up on the dusty, long-uncleaned floor, their spindly-limbed, toothy-stomached, triangular-headed forms made even more grotesque in the rippling, almost underwater aura of the green sky that is visible in oozing, acidic patches through the gaps in the crumbling roof.

Looking at them, you would have thought that they have made this journey together.

That they have trekked into the very heart of a battered castle that sinks ever more into decay under a sunless, green-choked sky.

That they have navigated the maze of dusky, gore-splattered rooms, where red crystals protrude out of the walls, emitting cloying heat in feverish breaths, and where a deathly silence clings to everything, like unseen but dense cobwebs, which are pulled taut and sometimes snap when a distant scream echoes through the abandoned hallways.

That they have done it all side by side - two men and a woman, two Tevinters and a Dalish elf. And that now, after the older of the Tevinters has succumbed to his wounds from yet another confrontation with demons, his companions are keeping him company in his final moments. The woman, Lady Lavellan of the Inquisition is kneeling next to him and cradling his head in her lap; and the man, graciously self-introduced as ‘Dorian Pavus, most recently of Minrathous’, is standing guard, staff clasped so tightly that the knuckles of his otherwise sun-bronzed hands stand out as pale lentils. You would have thought that they are paying their respects.

You would have thought… You would have thought wrong.

The truth is that, but a few moments before, the older man - the magister, trapped in the throne room of the castle that he himself once seized, jerking convulsively with paranoia and lack of sleep - lashed out at the other two, and summoned demons to tear them apart.

The truth is that, but a few steps away, Lavellan and Dorian’s other companions have gathered, looking over the battlefield, which is still wreathed in purplish-grey ribbons of lingering magic. With their faces ravaged by months upon months of torture and isolation in chambers with parasitic crystals that have been lining the walls, crawling under the captives’ flesh like ticks with diamond-hard, crimson carapaces, and gorging themselves on their blood and marrow and brain matter.

The truth is that, with but a single husky outcry, one of those sombre, harrowed figures - a short-haired woman in scraps of tarnished armour that once bore the insignia of the Seekers of Truth - broke through the magister’s barrier, with the vividly turquoise shards of disrupted magic slicing at her half-crystallized flesh more ferociously than any broken glass… And plunged her blade into his stomach before he could release the charge of electric energy that he was aiming at Dorian. At his own apprentice, who was standing, face drawn into a determined expression, between him and Lavellan. Between him and the target he never did manage to claim, the prize he never did manage to lay at the feet of his dark master, the ‘Elder One’.

And yet. And yet, the very same target is now holding on to him. And her small brown hand, speckled with freckles just as her blotchy, twitching face, is travelling in soothing strokes along the side of his clammy, clay-grey face, and her large blue eyes holding are his gaze again. Just as back at the tavern. Before he dropped all pretenses of courteousness and, in an attempt to erase her from time, instead flung her and Dorian one year ahead. Into a future where his master rules the world, just as he promised. Into a future that is…

'Wrong…’ he croaks, his chest heaving in a tremendous struggle to stay alive just a moment longer, to hold in just enough air to speak.

'This is… wrong…’

'Oh, this isn’t what you were counting on, is it?’ Dorian snaps, the whiteness of his knuckles now mirrored in crescent folds under his eyes. 'Not the beautiful glorious golden age for Tevinter that your cult was in such a hurry to usher in?’

He tries to sound accusing, angry, scornful… But his question ends in a sniffle that he does not quite manage to hide, even as he presses his forehead against the adornment at the upper tip of his staff.

'No…’ the magister mouths, his voice seemingly crisscrossed by bloodied cracks, just as his lips are, while something moist clenches at the back of his throat.

'This is not… All I ever wanted… was to…’

'To save your da'len,’ Lavellan nods, slanting her eyes in the direction of another prostrate form that is not a dead demon. The magister’s son, who perished, despite all of his father’s ever more desperate, ever more insane plans to save him.

Drained for years by the darkspawn taint, he ended his days as a mindless ghoul. Pale-eyed and unable to speak, or to walk on two legs, or to endure bright light. He was felled by the unwavering wrench of a dagger across his throat, as the Inquisition’s Spymaster - herself clearly subjected to the taint, with her head looking like a skull dipped in lumpy wax - pulled him, wriggling and whimpering as a captured feral animal, towards her, and spat into his father’s face,

'I want the world back’.

…'I understand. I… I read your journals. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but we were looking for a way to escape this timeline. You have lived through horrible, horrible pain. I guessed as much when I glanced at you in Redcliffe - but now… Now I know’.

Lavellan repeats the last two words, intermingling them with the first two - 'I know. I know. I understand’, - over and over again, folding herself almost in two and planting a kiss on the magister’s cold, sweat-filmed forehead. All the while, her fingers keep stroking, wiping away the murky tears that stream noiselessly out of his glazed eyes, reflecting the flashes of green overhead.

'I know. I understand. We will fix this’.

'How?’ he asks, strangled. 'I… I tried… And failed…’

'Dorian thinks we can reverse your spell,’ she tells him, through tears of her own, a droplet dangling off her small, tattooed chin. 'Return us to the point when you confronted us. Before the world turned into… this’.

'Dorian…’ he slurs after her, almost blissfully - and then adds, rolling his head woodenly to the side, trying to discern his apprentice’s silhouette with his blurry vision.

'Please’.

'Well, how can I refuse if my mentor has given me homework?’ Dorian quips - but the magister does not answer. His chest moves no more, and his body suddenly presses down heavily onto Lavellan’s knees.

'He is gone,’ she mutters, in a small voice, moving her hand to his eyes to slip his eyelids shut.

'Not for long if I can help it,’ Dorian retorts with rather artificial self-assurance. 'Now, could you please hand me his amulet so we might set to work?'