some men you've reduced to ashes are finally dusting themselves off

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WHO: Benevenuta Thevenet + ensemble.
WHAT: Hercules Hansen has died.
WHEN: After Solace 7th.
WHERE: Skyhold, Warden Camp.
NOTES: Planned threads, but please feel free to give me a bell via pm or other means if you'd like to add to them!

Word travels quick in Skyhold. Not uniquely - word travels quick anywhere there are people, everyone knows. Less usual is that when word of the party's return from the Deep Roads travels (less one member), it stirs Benevenuta early from her work - but not to meet them. No, though she goes to the camp she goes directly and without tarrying to the tent she's shared with Hercules for these past weeks and for a long time stands there, studying the small signs of a life briefly shared.

By the time Alistair finds her, first, Herc's belongings are already half packed and Benevenuta does not look surprised to see him.

Comments

closed; stop the clock

[hlif]

Ever since they first met, Asher spent most of his time being a pain in Herc Hansen's arse usually teasing him about his age and how his Nevarran lady love was going to be the death of him. Certain lines of work though and joking about death is just what you do because you look at it every day, and hadn't both of them dragged their sorry selves just out of reach of it within a month or so of one another?

Asher goes to the camp to deliver some supplies as a gesture. Because Herc was a good man (it sounds like a cliche but they're rare, good men) and the last time he was here he was throwing goats and well he knows where the tent is, and Bronson goes lumbering ahead of him. Subdued. The hound might go nosing at the tent but Benevenuta Thevenet is a lady, a Nevarran lady, and grief can be a very private thing when he stops outside, clearing his throat. (It's a cough he's stifling because he's been forcing back the urge to scream, to cry, because it's Herc, as stupid as that seems, it's Herc and he just seemed like he'd be the one to make it through anything.)

"Lady Thevenet? It's Asher, Asher Hardie? I'll go if you want, you don't need to say a thing but...but I-" he pauses to think, almost huffs out a laugh at how ridiculous this is. "I thought it was proper to check on you, see if you wanted anything. Brought you another blanket too."

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She'll swim in blankets, she reflects, between what she and Hercules had had between them, what Bethany had made for him, the pelt she'd already bought from Asher long before any of this - just build a nest of the damned things somewhere and curl up in it, go unbothered. She stands still in the middle of the tent, long enough that maybe he'll think she means to say nothing,

flicks the flap aside, her eyes tired but not red.

"Hardie," she says, and then, "Thank you."

What do you say? What are you supposed to say? She knows the words for everything but this, apparently - she would know, she's sure, what to say to herself if she were on the other side.

[hlif]

At least she can speak. Asher still remembers Liadan, will never be able to forget what happened when the news came about Kirkwall; a solid month of silence when the screaming stopped, but this is Nevarran nobility where there are probably rules to dictate how you grieve, with her here in the heart of it all. But Herc was a friend, and he likes to think that if somehow thinks were reversed that Herc would check on Korrin and Mal (not exactly the same but they're the two people Asher cares for most in Skyhold since the one he does love best and dearest is still safely back at home.)

Bronson having all the manners she'll know from Max only needs the flap to budge half an inch before he trots in, whining quietly.

"I'm sorry. That you never had enough time with him." Herc never said much exactly but Asher can put two and two together and get four sometimes, inclining his head respectfully, managing a smile. "He'd probably say something awful like in those letters we'd send back and forth."

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Two and two gets four and four is the awful lump in her throat because she can speak about everything except Hercules, except absences, except how much time they didn't have and how long she knew it. How well she knew it, watching him sleep, pressing her fingertips to the furrows in his forehead like she could smooth away the dreams and keep him near her longer. It isn't as if she'd been ignorant. It isn't as if she hadn't known what she'd been getting herself into, it's -

Somehow, she thought there'd at least be more time than this, and it feels like the worst form of foolishness. Of course there wasn't.

"I did," she says, after a moment, to Asher's shoulder, a small furrow in her own brow as she gives voice to a thought that's still forming, been forming. In the quiet, matter of fact way of someone who must speak so if she means to speak at all, she says, "It was the time that we had." Her jaw works. "It was enough."

Enough to have loved him. Enough to carry with her, now. Enough because it was all there was, and she can't bear to regret.

[hlif]

It's painful to miss Herc's frankness because he already has to stop himself from turning to make a joke. Asher will walk himself out of a life as easily as his mother marched him out of hers but he allows people in and never begrudges them room, and there is a very large empty space right now. Later he'll see how much of that he can fill up with ale back at his own camp in the quiet, with Bronson next to him since no one else needs to see his grief.

"You never have enough time," spoken like he knows because the Boneflayers have never lost a member though it was almost Asher himself that became the first casualty and something still makes all of them watch him when his chest rattles after every cough that keeps waking them all in the night, but he had years before that. Years to lose plenty of comrades, friends, flings, people that meant more and less than he did to her in different ways. Asher still misses a lot of them.

Fereldens, Benevenuta, they're so terribly but charmingly frank and blunt.

"And how are you actually holding up?"

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They are, aren't they. Her lips twitch in something that might have been a smile in another life, hands pressed together and hidden by the deep cuffs of her gown's sleeves. (More fabric for her wrists than her sternum, yes - perhaps not suitable mourning wear, or perhaps the most suitable. Hercules never complained about the way she dresses.)

"As I must." Nothing stops just because she's sad. There's work to do, wars to be fought, mages to wrangle; what can she do but carry on? What is there for her to do but what she's always done? They understood that in one another - duty. It will be cold comfort until it isn't, until she turns around one day and finds she doesn't need comforting any more, that the wound doesn't bleed any more, that her heart doesn't hurt the same way when she thinks his name. One day she will stop pressing her hand to the place where he doesn't sleep any more, one day she will love another -

And she will bear what she has to, before that.

Quieter, "They all got better, after Adamant. But still he woke in the night beside me. The same way. The same song still playing in his mind." Something tightens in her expression, betraying more than she wishes it to, and she looks away. "I knew what it meant long before he left for the Deep Roads. He knew."

(Her grief is not new.)

[hlif]

Everything Asher has ever done has been angry. Lashing out at a world that tried to make him into a shape he never wanted to be, so part of his grieving after this won't be much different; he'll train until the legs go out from under him, he'll probably get drunk in the camp and get in a fight with the rough crowd, or maybe some of his own crew will do it so people will just shrug it off as mercenaries behaving as they will. He doesn't have the resolve to just be the way the world needs him to be. Not until all the fight is out of him and he can be quiet, and still, and pray alone in the dark to gods Herc didn't believe in because Asher's gods were in Ferelden first.

"Is it a Nevarran thing? I've been there, I know that you're all more," a pause for him to search for the right word, not quite satisfied with any of them but he settles on the least likely to offend, "comfortable? With it. It's not the same with other Andrastians."

Or maybe she's reminding him too much of other women he knows, who do just carry on, women Asher fears and respects when he's the yapping mabari to their quiet solemnity, as if they might have been graven from stone.

"Before any of that he was joking about Grey Warden years, that they worked differently to human years." No one is old so long as they're younger than your parents because your parents were always old unless they died young, and Asher just joked back since that's what a Reaver does. Looks death in the face and grabs it by the throat. "Takes a special sort of bull-headed to just...to just be able to go and do it." Dying in a battle is something everyone knows is a risk and the ones that don't are the idiots that get the people around them wounded at best and killed at worst. Making your peace before you go.

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"Perhaps I am better prepared."

Something in the crooked delivery of that makes it almost some sort of awful gallows humour; she isn't, she doesnt feel it, she is bleeding her unreadiness but all beneath the soft, smooth armor of a certain kind of womanhood that she has cultivated all her life. This gentle thing to be underestimated, a force of nature underneath, and she--

doesn't want to have been ready, not really. She is a woman, not a burning star, and she wants to be a woman; to have soft places that ache with loss. To not forget that feeling while she neatly categorizes what is worth protecting and what isn't. To save a world, one must live in it, and wholly. Live in each experience until it chokes and she is choking, but she smiles, very slightly.

"A man who was not for this death would not have been Hercules. And I would not trade him for that man."

[hlif]

"No one's going to think less of you if you do something mad. If you scream, or claw your hair, or tell them they brought back the wrong Warden months ago." A pause where Asher scratches his beard and turns away to cough when the effort of holding it in makes his chest rattle. "I did that. Wouldn't recommend the fighting the abomination bit though."

And then because a part of him knows- "Can you prepare?"

The list of things he should've asked Herc when he had the chance but he doesn't know any other Wardens well enough, and if he asks Kaisa then it might mean something, so he's not about to do that. Benevenuta is the closest he can get, inspecting the ragged edge of a nail until it begins to bleed again.

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Her laugh is so sudden - barely a laugh, like something gutted. Like the guttering flame of a candle burning down, losing it's light -

"I told Hercules that," she says, sinking down to the bare seat by her desk. "In a manner of speaking." What she had actually said, sighing, settling into the warmth of Herc's body in her bed, was that if Anders had to do what he did, he should have died in the process. A martyr's death might have served the cause that Anders' continued presence only hurts; he could have been a powerful symbol but instead he is a living, flawed, contentious man and though she minds him little personally she can see little use left in him, practically.

The way her head turns, very slightly - it isn't funny, is it.

She has no answer for preparing.

[hlif]

"My people have our ways. Corrupted is corrupted, people go to sleep and never wake up all the time, no one questions it." It doesn't take an augur or an assassin to know how to do it. If Asher had thought he could've gotten away with it? If the rest of the Boneflayers hadn't been dealing with bandits or bounties in and around Ferelden? One woman's judgement in a city already gone mad still supposedly saves his neck again when he lit the match to set half the world on fire.

Part of him hasn't forgiven Kaisa for giving him that look that said he was only angry because it was personal as if he had no right to be hurting. That dangerous black mood of his that earned him the nickname where his hand had curled into a fist, the world red at the edges, whispers in his ears of how easy it would be to make her stop talking. But then Asher wouldn't be any better than an abomination so he got his head screwed on straight.

Not that the clarity is helping now.

"I'm going to be saying some prayers at my part of the camp, I'll add some for you. This high up and the Lady of the Skies won't have to listen hard to hear me."