LHM: Love the characters, hate the canon.

This is Part III of In the Bleak Mid-winter, my Van lives!, Stefen isn't taken to Haven but ends up a literal bought-and-sold slave of Leareth, and meets Van when he heads north to avenge Savil...fic. Part II is Angels We Have Heard, in which Van, recovering from the end of In the Bleak Mid-Winter in Haven, feels through the lifebond that Stefen is contemplating doing Something Bad to himself and heads to the city where he's living to stop him and try to make him feel better. 

In this installment, If I Have Freedom in My Love, a few more months have passed and Stefen is feeling at loose ends, not sure what to do about the lifebond or with himself now that he's free from Leareth/Master Dark, so he follows Van to Haven to ask basically both of those things. Van has had waaay too much time to think, and accordingly, says about the worst things possible. This starts dark, really dark, with one of Stefen's nightmares. The rest is not as dark, I promise? Although Stef is running around, trying to find someone to sleep with, basically to try to distract himself from his attempt to get off dreamerie. 

So...trigger warnings for everything? Stefen is a child sex abuse survivor and drug addict trying to get clean and deal with his memories and figure out what feels like a very hopeless future. This installment is told entirely from Stefen's POV, no back and forth like I did in the first two parts, this needed to be too focused on Stef for that. My actual intent with this installment was to end with Stefen having an idea of how he wants to go forward.