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Merrill has a dream.
There is a vast garden, stretching as far as the eye can see; plants and vines and flowers entwining, embracing each other, reaching up into the sky. In the distance, there is a black island. Merrill stands with her back to it. The garden is exuberant, gorgeous as it is chaotic. The earth is soft and warm under Merrill's feet. If she curls her toes she can feel the soil give way, the grains getting squeezed in the spaces in between her toes, digging into her flesh.
Something of great value is inside the garden, hidden amongst the trees. It pulls Merrill to it, a weight in her gut anchoring her and drawing her to the place where it sleeps. She only has to cross the garden and reach that place. Then, everything will be all right.
Varric comes to see her at her house in the alienage. Merrill is sitting on the floor in front of the Eluvian, trying to figure out what's wrong with it (the arulin'holm didn't work, but something – something has to), and she doesn't notice Varric's there until he says, "You need to stop staring at that damn mirror all day long, Daisy."
Merrill looks at him, gives him what she hopes is a reassuring smile. "I'm okay, Varric. I just need some time to think," she says. She feels like the answer is hovering there just beyond her grasp, and with a little more effort she will be able to reach it. Varric stands there looking like he's not at all convinced, and Merrill realizes she's being a poor host, as usual. "I'm sorry, Varric, I forgot to ask you – would you like a glass of water?"
She stands up to go fetch it, but Varric shakes his head. "Never mind that now, Daisy," he sighs, rubs his forehead. He looks around the room, and Merrill sees his eyes fix on the Eluvian. He says, "Fine, let's deal. You come take a walk with me now, and I won't tell Hawke on you."
Merrill smiles in spite of herself. "If Hawke needs me to go somewhere with her, I will. I just don't feel like going out right now, Varric. Maybe another time?"
Varric shakes his head and throws his hands up as if admitting defeat. "All right," he says, "but don't say I didn't warn you."
Merrill is making her way through the garden.
Once inside, it becomes apparent that this is closer to a forest than a garden; the path twists and turns, plants grow anywhere and everywhere without apparent order and the bushes on the side of the path rustle all the time as if small animals are hiding among the leaves. Their calls mix with a million other sounds; they echo, multiply and spiral in the air around Merrill. There is also a voice speaking to her from somewhere far away. It beckons to her to delve deeper into the garden. It is not the voice of the demon she has dealt with before; he is trapped in a cave in Sundermount and could never call out to her in dreams, cut off from the Fade as it is.
Merrill can smell humidity in the air, a sign of rain. There is a big puddle of water at her feet. If she looks down into it, she can see her own face staring back at her; but the features are different, dark and distorted, grotesque. Merrill steps in the puddle, and her reflection is gone. Her foot is now covered in mud; it permeates her skin and chills her to the bone.
As promised, Varric appeals to Hawke. This is what Merrill assumes when Hawke shows up at her doorstep two days later.
"Grab your staff!" Hawke tells her with a wink. "We're going on an adventure!"
Merrill thinks of the Eluvian. It will still be there when she returns, of course, as opaque and indecipherable as it is now. She takes her staff from where it's propped against the wall and follows Hawke outside, anticipating a day of running around Kirkwall and helping Hawke with whatever causes she has recently taken on.
However, there is no one else waiting outside. No Varric, no Isabela, no Aveline. It's just Merrill and Hawke standing outside Merrill's house.
"Are we going somewhere?" Merrill asks, feeling very self-conscious all of a sudden. "What about the others?"
Hawke waves a hand as if to bat away an annoying insect. "Forget about the others, and behold! The great outdoors!" She stretches out her arms as if to encompass the whole alienage, the whole of Kirkwall. "You can't help noticing the contrast with the indoors – the sheer openness of it all! I thought we should explore it today!" She doesn't even seem to care that she's getting strange looks from passersby for the theatrics. "What do you think?"
"I see the alienage all the time, Hawke," she says, smiling, but makes a point of looking around her, at the brownish walls and the mud and the Vhenadahl, just to humor Hawke.
"Look at that sky!" Hawke exclaims, pointing upward. "It's a wonderful day for a walk! Why, in this sun, even the Lowtown muck looks charming!"
Making Merrill come out of her house and into the sun is apparently the cause Hawke has taken on today. This thought lodges in Merrill's chest and warms her whole body. This is what Merrill imagines happiness feels like.
She is content to let herself be dragged up and down the Lowtown bazaar. Hawke stops by all the shops to haggle with the merchants over the most outlandish items and Merrill stops with her, always stays close to Hawke's side so as not to get lost. Hawke comments affectionately on how filthy Lowtown always is, and asks if Merrill is okay walking around barefooted.
("I'm surprised you haven't caught any obscure diseases from walking around in this mud all the time," she says, sounding almost impressed).
She offers to buy Merrill a pair of boots. Merrill thinks of Isabela's boots, the way they seem to go on forever. She would get lost in boots like that. And she's sure Hawke has to have more important things to do than worry about getting shoes for Merrill, but she still takes her to a small shop in the Hightown market where the shopmaster measures the width and length of Merrill's feet as well as the distance from her ankle to her knee and a million other things Merrill can't keep track of, all the while chatting away in a heavy Orlesian accent. He tells Merrill that she has the nicest toes he has ever seen.
"Maker, Jean Luc, do you say that to all the girls that come to your shop?" Hawke tells him, feigning offense. "I thought my toes were the nicest you ever laid eyes on?"
"Your toes are indeed breathtakingly beautiful, messere Hawke," replies Jean Luc with a chuckle. "But it is your ankles that I adore! Why, they are a thing out of this world!"
"Nice save," Hawke says, nods her head approvingly.
They come away from the shop with a sore ear and a note to pick up the boots the following day. Then Hawke walks Merrill back to her house in the alienage. In the sky, the sun is beginning to set.
"Ma serannas," Merrill says, smiles. "For everything. I had a lot of fun." I don't deserve taking up so much of your time, she wants to say, but the greedy feeling in her chest stops her. Instead she says, "I hope you will come visit me again."
"Of course I will, Merrill," Hawke says, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. Like there was no need for Merrill to ask. "It's a good thing I convinced you to come out today. Why don't you drop by the Hanged Man later? I'm sure Varric will be thrilled to see you. Yesterday I had to buy him three rounds to get that worried frown off his face, you know."
Merrill wants to tell her there was never any need to convince her; Hawke needed only to ask, and Merrill would have come out. Hawke is the one person she can never say no to.
"I'll be there," Merrill says.
That night in her dreams Merrill can hear the voice more clearly than ever before. It rustles the leaves and seems to come alive around her; like a wind blowing from nowhere and everywhere at once, it calls out to her again and again.
"Tamlen?" Merrill calls out uncertainly. "Is that you, da'len?"
The rustling becomes louder. Merrill walks deeper into the wilderness. Patches of it remind her of the Brecilian Forest in Ferelden. If that is what this place is, she thinks, and if Tamlen is there, then maybe the Eluvian is too. She only has to keep walking until she reaches Tamlen, and then she can fix the mirror and put everything right.
Something tickles her hand. A leaf from a nearby tree, she thinks at first, and leans into the touch. The leaf bites her finger.
The pain wakes Merrill up with a jolt. The forest fades away. There is a fat grey rat on the bed next to her hand. She bolts upright and flings the rat away by the tail, then looks at her finger; there is a spot of red blood blossoming on her skin. Merrill sighs. She'll have to ask Anders to take a look at it, and then ask Varric to make her some traps for the rats.
The surface of the Eluvian shines eerily in the dark of her room. Resigned to getting no more sleep that night, Merrill lights a candle and goes around the house trying to find all the rats' holes.
The following evening, Hawke and Isabela show up, Hawke hefting a heavy-looking sack over her shoulder.
"Special delivery!" Isabela announces with a grin, hands on her hips. "Completely free of charge, Kitten, since it's for you."
Hawke drops the sack on the ground and opens it. Merrill peers inside; it's full to burst with wooden rat traps. "This is a lot of traps," Merrill says, feels guilty just thinking what they must have cost. "I don't think I'll need this many. I hope! But that doesn't mean I'm not thankful!" Merrill backtracks at once, stumbles over her own words. "It's very sweet of Varric, really! I should go thank him later. I'm rambling again, aren't I?"
"Varric says you tend to lose track of things, and with this many you'll always have enough no matter how many traps you lose," Hawke says with a wry smile. "You can go talk to him when you've figured out if that comment is terribly sweet, or terribly offensive."
"I – thank you for carrying them here," Merrill says. "It was very nice of you."
"Don't worry about it," Hawke tells her, and produces a silk-wrapped parcel seemingly from thin air. "Here, I picked up your new boots. Why don't you try them on?"
Merrill undoes the knot on the parcel and removes the silk wrapping. A pair of gorgeous, dark green leather boots is neatly folded inside. Merrill runs her hands over the fabric, knows there is nothing she can possibly say to thank Hawke for this. When it comes to Hawke, her words always seem to fall short.
Somehow Merrill manages to put on the boots without wobbling too much or losing her balance. They come up to just below the knee and hug her knees snugly, like a second skin. It feels strange to look down at her feet and not see her toenails, but she'll get used to it. "They're lovely, Hawke," she says, smiling. "Thank you."
"You look lovely in them, Kitten," Isabela tells her with a wink. "Now, why don't Hawke and I help you set those traps?"
The third time Merrill accidentally triggers a rat trap when trying to set it, Isabela takes her hand and forces her to sit down on a chair and stop helping before she hurts herself again. Merrill tries to protest, but Isabela's having none of it, so all she can do is sit there and fidget while Isabela and Hawke work on the traps.
"I'm so sorry I'm not being any help at all," Merrill apologizes. "Isn't there anything I can do? Oh! I could make tea! Do you drink tea?"
"You do that, sweet thing," Isabela says with a smile. "Just stop apologizing, okay? We don't mind doing this."
Merrill nods and gets up to boil the water. Her finger stings a little where the rat bit it. As she works, she can hear Hawke and Isabela talking in the background. They're talking about the rat traps, but still Merrill feels like she shouldn't be listening. Like she's intruding, somehow.
"Merrill could never misplace even a tenth of these traps, no matter how bad her memory is," Isabela says. "Why would Varric give her so many? There are enough traps in this sack to catch all the rats in Kirkwall."
"Maybe they're multi-purpose?" Hawke says. "They can also be used as paperweights, that kind of thing?"
"Or as throwing weapons! We should take a bunch with us. Then next time we get ambushed, we can bonk our enemies on the nose!"
Merrill takes the kettle off the fire and fills three mugs, tries to concentrate on those sounds instead of on the conversation, but it's a small house.
"What I don't get," Hawke says, "is why I had to carry these all the way here. Didn't Varric say he was going to send someone to drop them off?"
"See, there's the reason you had to carry them. They spoil you in that Hightown mansion of yours, Hawke," Isabela teases. She pokes Hawke in the side and Hawke laughs, surprised. Merrill carries the three mugs to the table and stands there uncertainly, not wanting to interrupt their moment. She feels happy for them, and at the same time, sad that she always ends up wanting what she can never have.
Then Hawke turns around to look at her, and Merrill realizes she's been caught staring, so she hastens to say, "Hawke, I – thank you for helping me do this. You've both been very kind to me."
Hawke smiles at her. "That's what friends are for, Merrill. To help keep the rats away."
Merrill hands her a mug and tries to ignore the sound of her heart breaking into a million tiny pieces, again.
"You're being awfully quiet today, Kitten," Isabela says, throws her a concerned look. "Why don't we go to the Hanged Man later? We can have Varric make up stories about heroic griffons to cheer you up."
"Can we do body shots, too?" Merrill asks, plasters on her best smile.
When Merrill reaches the clearing where the voice is coming from, there is no Tamlen. There is only the Eluvian, whole once again and shining in the sunlight, and Hawke standing next to it.
"I've been waiting for you for some time, Merrill," Hawke purrs, beckons her over. "Come here."
All the forest has gone silent. Hawke's voice echoes unnaturally in the clearing. Merrill wants to cry. Hawke's mouth is on hers, then kissing a path down the side of her neck; her hands are on Merrill's skin, feeling everywhere they can reach.
"This is wrong," Merrill says, closes her eyes to stop it all from falling over her.
The thing wearing Hawke's body kisses the spot under her jaw, whispers in her ear, "This is what you want, Merrill. I am what you want."
"No!" Merrill shouts, pushes the demon off of her. "You're not her! You could never be her. Don't come near me!"
The desire demon gives her a lustful smirk, slowly runs a hand down its chest. Merrill wants to rip it to pieces, to force it to stop looking like Hawke, to stop looking at her like that – like if she just gave in, she could make the real Hawke love her, the way Merrill loves Hawke.
"Silly girl," purrs the demon. "I am offering you your heart's desire, and you would throw it all away?"
"You're not Hawke," Merrill repeats, as much for the demon's benefit as her own. Then she picks up a rock from the ground and throws it at the Eluvian. It falls down and shatters into a thousand pieces.
"I can help you get your clan's acceptance, tell you how to fix the Eluvian, make Hawke fall in love with you, and you only need to take my hand," the demon tells her in a seductive whisper that carries to her ears. "I can give you everything."
The demon's offer echoes in her head; in her mind's eye, she can already see the possibilities taking shape: the Keeper, admitting her mistake and asking for Merrill's forgiveness; the Eluvian, whole and working like it was meant to; and Hawke, beautiful, kind Hawke, turning away from Isabela and pledging her heart to Merrill and Merrill only –
"You want it," says the demon. "You only have to nod your pretty little head, and it'll be yours."
-- and all Merrill can see is Hawke, and the look of contempt on Hawke's face when she saw the Lady Harimann begging the desire demon for power in the Harimann Estate. That look shakes Merrill, makes her feel sick to the core. She sees the shattered Eluvian on the ground, and all of a sudden she can't take it anymore.
"Silly girl," the desire demon says. "Do you not want to be happy?"
"I have to wake up now," Merrill says, runs away.
Merrill wakes up. Her cheeks are wet with her tears, and she's drenched in a cold sweat.
The room appears blurry when she looks around, trying to find something, anything to think about that isn't the desire demon's offer. Do you not want to be happy?
The boots Hawke gave her are at the foot of her bed. There's something small and grey next to them –
"Out!" Merrill roars, snatching the boots up, and the rat flees, terrified. "Get out of my house! Don't ever come back!"
She stands there menacingly, hugging the boots to her chest, half expecting the rat to return. When it doesn't, Merrill sits down on the bed and closes her eyes. Her breath hitches on a sob. She rests her back against the wall, buries her face in her hands and wishes for dreamless sleep.