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Adhlea’s arrival was overwhelming.
There was of course the birth itself, which was blessedly quick, and easier than he had feared it would be. In this age there were spells and medicines to steal Eira's pain away, and she was strong; he had been worried, but also prepared.
The baby was different.
Solas remembered thinking first, as Eira held his hand, that their baby was tiny. That she looked almost alien—small and wailing and pink and wrinkled. A patch of dark hair on her little head—Eira's hair, he remembered thinking distantly—and an almost grumpy expression on her face, as if she had decided that her surroundings were rather unimpressive.
Strange, he remembered thinking later, when the nurses passed the baby to him. He remembered Eira's face, pale, tired, but smiling at him as if she had never been this happy in her entire life. And held in his arms, a baby. A little person, who he had helped create.
He remembered thinking that she was perfect. He remembered thinking that he loved her more than he had ever loved anyone. It was strange and terrifying and wonderful, and nothing in the world could have prepared him.
When they returned home, later, members of Clan Lavellan stayed with them. Everything very quickly became a blur of sleep and diapers and crying. Their little Wycome house buzzed with near-constant activity.
Adhlea was rarely left alone; while he or Eira slept, someone else would watch or hold or care for her. When Eira crawled out of bed at odd times of night to nurse, bleary and only half-awake, someone was there to take the baby when she was done. They cooked and tidied and helped Eira adjust, and they expected nothing at all in return.
Though Solas had tried to prepare, had tried to learn everything he could, no book or memory or demonstration quite compared to having a wailing newborn of his own. So Eira's family helped him, too, despite knowing precisely who and what he was. They showed him everything they knew in chaotic, scattered moments: here is how you swaddle a baby, here is the most efficient way to change a baby's diaper, here is the best way to soothe a baby when she fusses. And even if he could sense their wariness through their smiles, he could also see their genuine desire to help, and for now, that was more than enough.
Even then, it was never truly fear he saw on their faces. Perhaps it was difficult to feel afraid of him when he was covered in sick, or half-asleep, or changing a diaper. And despite himself, he felt his own guard begin to slowly wear away.
One afternoon, late in the first week, the household felt oddly calm. Solas wandered into the living room after dealing with the laundry to find Eira resting on the couch, tucked under a blanket and a wooden tray, sipping at a bowl of bone broth.
When she noticed him looking, she set down her spoon and gestured him over.
There was noise drifting from the kitchen, soft laughter and chatter as a collection of aunts and cousins took turns holding the baby. This was a rare moment of quiet, of something close to privacy. He sat beside her and she sighed, reached for his hand and squeezed once before picking up her spoon again.
"How are you feeling?"
She huffed. "Tired. Sore. Strange. But okay, mostly." The spoon clicked against the bowl and she shot him a knowing sort of look. "How are you holding up?"
The question startled him. It hadn't even been a week; his own wellbeing had not been something he'd been thinking of at all. "I am well," he said.
"Hmm." She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and swallowed another spoonful of broth. "This is all new to you," she said. "It's okay if you're overwhelmed."
"You are new to this, too."
"Not like you are," she said. "I've been around this kind of thing. I've been the person they're being for me right now. And you—" she hesitated, swirled her spoon and sighed. "I know this must be chaotic, and even though we talked about it, living it is different."
"I am well," he repeated. "Overwhelmed, perhaps, but well."
Her expression was skeptical. She saw too much, he thought. She knew him too well. "My clan has been treating you all right?"
"They have been…wary."
"They do like you, you know. Some of them in their own way, but they do. Even if—well. I suppose it's a unique situation."
"Is it not often that a member of your clan has a child with your people's greatest adversary?"
She snorted. "Even if they were wary about that before, I don't think they are now. They adore her."
Solas looked toward the hall, where voices drifted down from the kitchen. Very faintly, he could hear the soft sounds the baby made as she was passed from hand to hand. "One can hardly blame them," he said after a moment. "She is perfect."
Eira's grin was lopsided and fond. "She is, isn't she?"
And then the moment was broken; a single shriek followed by a chorus of laughter broke out from the kitchen, accompanied by a sudden rush of footsteps. Eira looked ready to shove aside the tray and bowl to stand, but one of her cousins—Shara, a young woman with a shock of blonde hair—burst into the living room.
"No," she panted, half-laughing, "Don't get up, everything's okay." She glanced over her shoulder. "Maren was holding Adhlea and then she spit up—" she broke out into laughter, and Solas watched, a little impatient, as she gathered herself. "Do you have a shirt she could borrow?"
Eira closed her eyes, looking a little like an inconvenient but amusing report had been placed upon her desk. Then her composure broke and she cackled. "Yes," she said, and nudged Solas with her elbow. "He'll help you. I'm going to finish my soup."
“It really wasn’t that gross,” Shara said as Solas led her down the hall, “But the look on Maren’s face. She looked betrayed.”
He rifled through Eira’s closet. Pantsuits and blouses in deep jewel tones, the occasional patch of dark sweaters and billowy button-ups. It took some searching, but he did eventually find a t-shirt that he thought would work.
Maren seemed more than happy to trade with him; she took the shirt and scurried off toward the bathroom, and he took a surprisingly content Adhlea. Some of the mess had gotten on her onesie, but she seemed happy enough otherwise, looking up at him as if she didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about.
"Could've been worse," Shara said, following him into the nursery. "At least it wasn't poop."
Solas sighed. Adhlea squirmed on the changing table, looking up at him with a gaze so steady it felt a bit overwhelming. "I suppose there is that."
"That'll be fun to clean," she continued. "Aunt Feya’s baby used to blowout his diapers all the time, especially in public."
Solas scrunched his nose at the prospect, but supposed there were worse things. "An unfortunate thought,” he said. “But I have dealt with far more offensive messes in my time.”
"Oh." In his periphery, he watched Shara’s posture change a fraction. "Sometimes I forget who you are."
An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. At least she had said who, he thought, and not what.
"I, uh. I didn't mean that in a bad way or anything."
"Of course not," he said, snapping shut the clean onesie. Eira had bought it just a few weeks ago. It was pink, patterned with little stylized strawberries. Adhlea looked just as content in it as she had the dirty one.
The silence continued for an awkward beat before Shara broke it. "Did you ever have kids before this?"
Adhlea felt fragile in his hands, like something that could shatter. She was so impossibly small. She was strange and new and perfect in ways that he did not have words for.
"No," Solas said. "I have not."
"Aw," Shara said, and her tone changed, from curious and distant to something softer, something almost familial. "Well, you're getting the hang of it really quick. We're all impressed."
Despite whatever awkwardness there had been before, her words sounded genuine and her expression appeared earnest. He cradled Adhlea against his chest. "Thank you,” he said, and meant it.
Some days were more difficult. Sometimes Adhlea simply cried and cried, and nothing seemed to settle her. Sometimes everyone simply became too exhausted to do much of anything besides the bare minimum: food, laundry, baby, sleep.
As Eira recovered, her family’s presence thinned. They had their own busy lives, after all. But even with their advice and occasional presence, the transition was difficult. For a time, he and Eira slept in shifts, waking at odd hours to feed Adhlea or soothe her back to sleep.
Solas had dealt with many difficult trials in his long life, but none were similar to this. Some had been more painful, certainly, perhaps even more exhausting on a purely physical scale. He had felt responsible for an entire world, and he still did, but this was different.
He had never, in his long, long life, felt any emotion comparable to what he felt now. He looked at Adhlea and felt a love that he had not known existed. And what surprised him the most was that it grew, with every passing day, until it felt impossible that it could grow larger. But then it did, every time.
And he was not prepared, either, for the way she looked at him with wide, curious eyes, or the way her little hand would hold his finger, or the way she cooed and gurgled when he picked her up, or the way she sometimes smiled when she caught his attention.
One afternoon when she was being particularly fussy, Solas pulled a thread of magic between his fingers in a desperate bid to quiet her wailing. He remembered thinking that if perhaps he could manage to distract her, she would stop.
The air briefly rippled and glowed green as he siphoned magic through the Veil, and then the space between them exploded in a shower of harmless sparks.
Adhlea stopped crying. She stared at him, wide-eyed.
“It is a simple trick,” he said, in the same soft voice he’d used to sing her a lullaby only moments ago. “Would you like to see it again?”
She continued to stare at him. Since she lacked the ability to speak, he assumed this was a yes.
Solas summoned another shower of sparks and Adhlea began to grin, wide and toothless and so full of joy that he could not help but smile in return.
When Eira wandered into the living room half-asleep and shocked that the crying had stopped, she joined him. Together they cast every spell they could think of, filling the living room with bright sparks and colorful lights. Their daughter watched it all, transfixed, until at last she fell asleep.
By the time Solas returned from putting her to bed, Eira had fallen asleep, too. He draped a blanket over her and kissed her forehead, and set about making them some lunch.
The fear did not truly hit him until later. Throughout the first weeks, he had been too focused on Eira and the baby’s wellbeing to care at all about his own, and the first couple of months had been so difficult that he’d simply had no energy to think about anything else.
Then the fog of novelty began to clear, and they settled into a new sense of normalcy. He realized, suddenly, that everything had changed.
Solas found himself waking frequently, even when Adhlea was not crying, haunted by nightmares that should have had no power over him. Often he rarely slept, too afraid to let her out of his sight, worried that some harm might befall her when he was not watching. Sometimes he felt too terrified to look at her at all.
She was precious and she was perfect and Solas felt that at any moment he might discover she was never real at all. And sometimes instead he felt that he did not deserve her, that it was cruel of him to have her, and that he was a fool for thinking otherwise.
“You can talk to me,” Eira said one of those nights, crawling into bed beside him. He could hear the sleep in her voice, but let her pull him to her anyway. “You know that, right?”
Solas had told her some of his fears, before the baby had been born. These fears had been easy enough to predict. The baby had been planned, had been wanted, and he’d felt it had been only fair to share his reservations.
Other fears were newer. He did not want to voice them. Eira had her own fears, her own worries, her own troubles, and he would rather listen to those.
“Tell me how you are,” he said, tracing his knuckles over her face.
“I’m exhausted,” she said. “My body feels weird and kind of gross, and all I want to do is sleep and hold my baby and maybe cry a little.” She took a breath. “But I feel good, too? I’m happy. Are you happy?”
Perhaps it was her bluntness, or her honesty, or maybe it was the way she looked at him, with love and trust and understanding. But when he opened his mouth to assure her that yes, of course, of course he was happy, all that came out was a flood of tears.
“Oh,” she said, very softly, and she held him and rubbed his back and said comforting words he wouldn’t remember later. “Oh, Solas.”
When he finally caught his breath, he told her as much as he could manage, and she listened until he could not bear to speak anymore. Then she cried a little, too, and he comforted her as best he could.
It was not perfect or beautiful. It was not at all how he imagined parenthood might feel. It was certainly not easy.
But eventually he did fall asleep, for what felt like the first time in ages, with Eira’s arm slung over him and her face pressed close to his.
The fears never truly left, but they became far easier to bear. Often they only pestered him from the same dark corner where his other fears lived. Solas was old enough to have collected hundreds of them, and he was learning, slowly, how to live with them all.
Eira had always been too good at reading him, and often she could spot those particular fears the moment they appeared on his face. She would kiss his temple and squeeze his hand and listen to him when he needed to talk.
And Adhlea grew. She grew at a pace that was, frankly, terrifying. For several months she would do little besides cry and coo and gurgle, and then suddenly she was babbling. Little not-words spilled from her mouth any time she could get someone’s attention.
“You are so peculiar,” Solas said, holding her as he sat on the sofa. “It is remarkable how quickly you grow. I have rarely seen anything like it, in all of my years.”
Adhlea shrieked in delight and babbled again. Nonsense sounds, presented to him in the cadence of speech.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “You raise an excellent point. I suppose it would be strange if you grew slowly. Certainly it would be inconvenient for parents if their children remained infants for too long.” She stared at him with wide, dark eyes, as if she understood every word he said. “What do you think, da’ean?”
Another little scream, a toothless smile, a string of vowels. She wiggled in his grasp and reached for his face.
“You are undoubtedly correct," he agreed, "even if at times I wish you would slow down. Though I suppose you'll have the rest of your life for that."
Her little fingers grabbed at anything they could reach. His nose, his chin, his ears. She babbled at him again, for longer this time, as if she had quite a lot to say.
"Yes," he said softly, laughing a little as she tugged on his ear. "There is a whole world awaiting you. And one day it may look different than it does now, but then, so will you."
He kissed her forehead, the tips of her little ears, her chubby cheeks, and she wriggled and laughed and shrieked in delight.
Sometimes Solas thought about the future.
He thought about the future often. He had spent centuries thinking about the future, and how best to shape it. But now he found himself thinking of the future on a smaller scale.
He thought about the kind of person Adhlea might grow into. About who she might be in one year, in ten years, in twenty years, in a thousand years. He wondered what sort of magic she might prefer, or if she would take to magic at all. Would she like to read? What games would she play with her friends? Would she be as quick to anger as he had been in his youth, or would she have Eira’s caution? When she learned of her father’s long, long life, what would she think of it?
For now she was small, and it was easy to think of the future as a distant, nebulous thing. For now, Adhlea liked to babble. She liked to shriek as loudly as she could, as if testing the strength of her lungs. She liked her toys and she liked to lie on her blanket in the living room and play. She liked milk and she liked to sleep, and she liked to be held.
Solas was old enough to know that change was the way of the world. To attempt to stop it was a fool's errand. He had been one thing once, when the world had looked very different, and then he had become another. He had changed and changed and changed, and now, despite everything, he had changed again.
It was early morning now, far earlier than he liked to be awake. In the past handful of months, he had been awake at this time more often than not. Eira was sleeping and moments ago he'd finished feeding their baby a bottle. Now she slept, cradled against his chest, and he thought idly about going back to bed.
Babies did not dream the way adults or children did. His daughter's dreams were hazy, half-formed, more feeling than image, and not at all conscious. One day that would change. One day they would be able to dream together, and what a strange, wonderful thought that was.
Solas wondered what her dreams would look like. He wondered what he might show her, the memories and stories he might share. He wondered, more often, what she might show him.