faderift | Cold upon the mountain

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Cold upon the mountain

WHO: Asher Hardie; open (npc appearances by The Boneflayers)
WHAT: Asher's fever returns and his crew drag him to the healing tents, knowing it's the end
WHEN: Last week of Solace - mid-whatever August is called
WHERE: Skyhold, healing tents
NOTES: eventual character death; language, discussions about death, violence, faith. Discussions about Asher's childhood. Other warnings in subject headers. Feel free to make your own threads and have them open or closed, the death thread will go up closer to the time! Related ooc post

Asher has known for longer than he's cared to admit so he hasn't admitted it. He's shrugged it off the way he shrugs off pretty much everything else in his life until three nights passed of him coughing and coughing and coughing, keeping his crew awake with it. His chest has been rattling since they brought him back until blood started coming up with it. And now there are wounds cracking open; little cuts that weep for days on end, ugly wounds from the Storm Coast or sparring that feel hot to the touch. (They smell, Amalia had hissed as she'd pressed her hands to his chest over the burn scars to try to force the fever out. Melisende had sworn.)

So they bring him to the healers tents, the sweat rolling off him as he staggers; two dwarves and a Rivaini to help him, his hound with him as ever. The mage in her red leathers explains what she can with a slight elven woman, and the elfblooded one brings up the rear with a hand to his back. They're a constant from that first day to the last, a different combination each time at least one will always be there, stepping out for privacy or finally curling up to sleep.

And Asher...Asher isn't good with this. This isn't how it's meant to be as he presses his fingers into the festering gash over one hip from where a sword bit deep through his armour but the pain only makes him swoon, makes him cough and bite his lip. Doesn't make him focus, doesn't make him want to fight. This isn't how it was supposed to be and for the first time since his mother put him out the house twelve years ago, Asher Hardie is afraid.

It makes him a rather difficult patient, to put it politely.

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Gwenaëlle doesn't really ask permission.

A habit of a life lived with few in a position to deny it to her; she knows where the lines are, and for the most part dances by them without needing much of anyone else's input. She knows that there are tasks in a healing tent that don't require a healer and she knows that she can perform them and she just - turns up, of an afternoon, and gives herself a job to do. She keeps Asher company, rolls and changes bandages, takes what she's given to make poultices and frees up the healers for -

For people who they can save. A plainly awful thought she makes herself not shy from; this is not so new to her. Making him comfortable, keeping him company, being patient and quiet when that's what's needed and a running commentary when it isn't. Guenievre, her elven shadow, fetches down a shaving kit hustled from Maker knows where and she trims his beard neat, as fastidious about the task as if she expects him to go and show it off. As it's just as important, now, when he won't. When it's just his own small dignities, with or without audience.

The free time she has - and she has a great deal of that - is spent at his side, sitting by his cot with her sewing when there's nothing else to occupy herself with, painstakingly embroidering a scene of Asher fighting two dwarves wearing a bear pelt.

Edited 2016-07-26 06:17 (UTC)

Twelve years Asher's lived this life, and this is how he goes.

He's not good with it.

Drifting in and out when his body doesn't listen to him when he wants it to, when it's breaking down on him from something he can't fight no matter how angry he gets, no matter how many aborted escape attempts that leave him wheezing. He can argue with every healer, he can scratch at the poultices until a hand slaps them away. He can down the potions that dull the worst aches or make him sleep.

(That isn't how he wants to go, so he turns away more now, pretends he's asleep already. If he has to die here - he can admit that, in his own head - then he'll do it himself, in his own mind, not drifting away without some say in it.)

The world comes into focus slower, the sound of the needle loud as he turns his head to squint at Gwenaëlle, the smile not sharp the way it should be.

"Thought they'd lopped bits off me." It's meant to be a joke, but it doesn't come out like one since a man knows where all his wounds are and how bad some of them have been. "Will you thank her? The one making me not look like...like what I am." Since he might not have time, since even thinking that has an awful lump of panic and grief and anger catching in his throat.

(More often than not, Gwenaëlle knows when he's feigning it; she says let him be, he's sleeping and pesters one of the healers to reheat the tea that had been brought with a bit of fire, later, discreetly slips in something that could be described generously as 'medicinal' to make it a bit more appealing.)

"Guenievre," she supplies the name (she could tell him the truth, who will he tell? the lady of the skies?), lowering her hands a little in her lap but not immediately setting aside her sewing; she hasn't managed to poke herself in the fingers but she did break a needle on her thimble earlier, so she isn't immune to the stressors at play, just...accustomed. "I will. I thought it was a good idea, but I don't..." A wiggle of her fingers. What the fuck does she know about trimming a man's beard. "She knows, she did for my lord. I thought you'd like that."

Managing a bit of a fuck you to the Comte even from his deathbed, that's no small achievement, probably. She isn't sure he's quite at the making those jokes point, though, keeps it to herself.

"S'long name. Nice name, like yours." Names Asher can't say without mangling them, most of which he does for fun (or to wrinkle noses at fancy parties) but not when he feels like this. When each and every inch of him just feels wrong. It takes a lot of vigorous rubbing that's more like poking to get his eyes to stop blurring quite so uselessly - the last time he felt so bad he was younger and he wasn't a Reaver and a greatsword ripped him open from the neck to the small of his back, and Melisende gripped his face as they stitched him.

He laughs, and he does't really regret it when he chokes. He might not get many more laughs in this life after all. "Should send the lads to put some in his tea or whatever. Call it rustic." There's an attempt at pointing at her work but his hands (any part of him honestly but he'll focus on one part at a time, if he thinks about the whole lot it's too overwhelming) don't always feel like his hands right now. "You've made us all handsome."

It might not mean much in the grand scheme. Asher has revelled in joking that he's dirty, hairy, smelly, that he'd get lost in a great big bath. But when he sighs quietly, because it's just them, because there are some things that are different with her- "Can't go to my Lady looking a mess, can I?" Softer again, smaller than Asher perhaps has any right to be, small as he felt twelve years ago on a doorstep with a hand around his bicep, burning hot as a brand, heavy as iron:

"It isn't fair."

It isn't.

He's one of the biggest people she knows - maybe not physically (any more) but the biggest, the most alive, vibrant and defiant. A month ago the idea of a world that doesn't contain Asher Hardie would've sounded laughably impossible; she thinks she won't have quite accustomed herself to it until long after he's gone, this holding pattern of steadiness what she gives now because he needs it more than to have to hold someone else's hand through the unfairness of his death. She can hold his, she thinks; a moment later she does, hesitant, feather-light that even in this state he can easily shrug free of if he prefers. (Her thimble has warmed up while she works, still an odd metal note in softness.)

"Nobody's god cares about fair," she says, quieter, and it's the firmest thing she's ever said on the subject of faith, one she would ordinarily sidle away from at great speed. "But I thought she might take you more kindly with a sharper line, all the same."

Annegret never complained about fair or unfair but it had burned in her, Gwenaëlle remembers. The room had always been too warm, and her manner waspish by late afternoon; it still feels heavy with the said and unsaid. She doesn't think her father even notices the way it still never occurs to him to set foot in the wing of the house that had been hers. Guenievre doesn't go there, either, with her nice name that sounds like Gwenaëlle's - not an accident, that.

After a beat, "I'll stay as long as you like."

Few women Asher's known have had soft hands; ladies don't hold his hands, Melisende, Liadan, Amalia - they have hands as hard as his in different places from where their weapons rub a groove. His mother had hands like cold cruel iron, old strong oak, sure as stone. His sisters, even little Aura, they have hands that know work on the farm in the elements but Gwen's hands are warm, and sure, and they don't shake. They don't shake and Asher will take that surety.

"Our gods aren't cruel. Capricious." Look at me, he might have said in Bloomingtide in a tent like this when the burn was livid, I know big words too. "Thought I'd made it right with Hakkon when I could lift my blade again and say the words, watch him drink the blood."

Thought the gods had understood why he'd had to leave with the announcements when the wrongness of it all had burned and friends hadn't understood: Asher you only care because you lived in Kirkwall (didn't he have the right, when it was his home, and their home, when there had been funerals and Liadan's silence, Yngvi and Gunnar's smiles sharp as unswept glass). Not for lowlanders to understand the wrongness of the spirits, even when they went about doing whatever they wanted with them.

A laugh makes it way up from his chest, one that doesn't hurt quite so much unless he's moving to a place beyond all that. "Sharper line might be for someone else. I was the punchline to a joke my mother never wanted to hear: what do you get when you're born of the Frostbacks and deny all that to the world when all the gods might see? Your firstborn comes out like a slap." It's a very good joke, right?

Her hands don't shake but when he says your first-born comes out like a slap they tighten on his without waiting for her say-so. Asher has never liked Emeric, but it's her mother's ghost that haunts her; the one in that too-warm room and the quiet eyed elven woman helping the healers while she does her sewing, both.

All gods are capricious, she thinks. All of them. All of them worth as much as each other. None of them here, now.

"You always take such care," she says, quietly, "to be sure that everyone sees you not care what they think." And she's - she wishes she didn't, she thinks she's not so good at persuading anyone she doesn't, but like knows like. They're more akin than they're not, these strange not strangers.

Her fingers lace through his, a silent pre-emptive protest at pulling away from the call out.

"And you know, fuck her." Which sounds great in her princessy Orlesian accent.

Sometimes you know things in your bones, and Asher's had twelve years since he had to leave the house to know that he was right when he told Korrin that money and titles a happy family don't make. The Boneflayers are family. Korrin and Mal are family. His friends in Skyhold are family. Gwen is family. Eleanor Hardie is an unhappy memory, a long dark shadow. She will always be taller than him, she will always have one hand on Asher's arm, she will always tell him those six terrible words.

"I spent long enough being miserable in her house. I was an angry boy." Wheeling fists, bloodied noses, did he ever once have healed knuckles from the moment he first learned how to throw a punch? It made things go away when he hit. It was quiet in his head for a while and she wouldn't give him that pinched, quiet look. She had to look at him.

He rubs his thumb over her hand, the one that he split open almost to the bone once during some stupid axe-throwing game with Yngvi and Gunnar when they were guests at a hold that wasn't his.

"You should tell her that. Her face'll curdle milk while it's still in the cows." Asher as a rule doesn't really hate people. Oh he'll say he hates things, he'll piss and moan with the best of them but hate is such a final thing, and Asher is too live and let live unless it's politics, Templars, or the Chantry. But he's angry. It still hurts.

Gwen is - still angry, but the problem is there have always been too many things to be angry at. Too many things for her to be angry at, so many of them contradictory, she doesn't know how to be without it. If there's anything else, underneath-

She sets her sewing aside, properly, letting go of his hands so she can tuck needles away and move closer, quiet.

"You never met my mother," she says. She's thought much about Annegret since they told her, since she came down here. Unavoidable. "My lady." An exhale, "I was a slap, but I wasn't her first-born." Her fingers trace his palm, lips pressing together. "I wasn't hers at all. Do you remember that man, that walked in? Imagine if I'd married him, Asher." A small, terrible smile -

"Imagine if he'd ever found out whose I was." A hitch and she can't say it, still, not the words. Softer, "Her name is like mine. Take that to your lady for me, maybe." Maybe his gods could take better care of her than Andraste and the Maker ever have. "You take that away for me and I'll tell your mother all about herself."

The Comte was a joke to Asher, a man he liked to make a mockery of because he could but under that he knew. He knew there was a horrible thing. Same as a stone in a shoe that you can't get out, a bur in your clothes that rubs you raw.

"Gwen." Just her name, soft and fond, the edge of a smile that's only for her; this fierce little thing he's proud of and this world that's as jagged as the slur for the mother she shares a name with. It isn't fair, it isn't right, being stuck with the sins of a father.

"You're worth a hundred of him. Him and your father. You're wonderful." That won't change it. Won't change that the world is what it is, that she's had to live in that world, play all the games where she sits at the tables and makes herself fit but he nods, knuckles away what they can both pretend is just sweat and illness at his eyes. "My lady is the birds and the wind, she'll listen. Keep it safe for you. Same as me."

It's terrifying, the breath before he says her name; it's some sick thing that she can only tell him knowing she won't have to live with having done it, but - but he says what she's never really believed, deep as hone, that Gregoire would if she confided and it's an awful ache. She touches his jaw with subdued affection, lips pulled to one side - there are other things, other hurts, little ones that lodge under her ribs and press tight against her lungs, and those... those will stay there. Some things even obliquely she can't think, can't ask; how much of a betrayal is she? What did Guenievre -

"You've not enough mother and I've too much," she says, setting aside the hurt in her throat for later, when she's alone. Her hands still don't shake; she can be that, when it matters. She can be a true thing. "Maybe that'll be my scandal, I'll invite some Avvar to the Vauquelin estate and convert. Trust your lady."

Probably not; the only thing Gwen has faith in is the capacity for people to disappoint. It's a nice thought, though; she's always been a little wistful about the idea of believing in something like he does. She can't quite reach it, but - it seems beautiful, something she wishes she could even touch.

"You've been such a friend to me."

No matter what anyone has ever said about her, even if Asher's known them so long he's forgotten just how long it goes back, he loves her. That means she gets tucked neatly behind his shield and only he gets to poke fun at the things that won't press on the wounds. A family that leaves you wincing, leaves you with questions and tiptoeing? You can have all the money in the world and it won't help. Some people will be fortunate enough to never understand that.

"Just send Yngvi and Gunnar, they're guests of the hold, they're good as. They'll make off with his silverware once he's had to watch how they eat." That puts a shadow of the Asher grin on his face, to think about his boys because if two of them will do fine? It'll be those two. They land in so much trouble but haul themselves out of it. And they're just as daft for Gwen in the overeager manner of clumsy bear cubs.

"You're family. When I left...when Melisende took me in? It's not just the house I was born in. Not for me." Asher and his open messy affection, don't worry, no smear of kaddis on the forehead, just the bleary edge of his smile and the glint in his eye. "You keep doing me proud. Little bear cub."

Family is - complicated. Family is her parents (all three of them); family is the brother she isn't supposed to have, that she loves and is exasperated by in roughly equal measure; family is the Leblancs, a reprieve from the cavernous distance between her and everyone who's ever said they love her. Family is a secret, a tangle of lies, a delicate balance of what she can have if she makes herself fit the space she belongs in, it's always thinking Guenievre's daughters and never my sisters, it's Guenievre teaching her to say mama to Annegret, her fingers tracing the roundness of Gwenaëlle's small ears as a child and pinching them, imagining.

Family has never meant making anyone proud, before. She doesn't trust herself to answer, at first, so she makes her hands into little claws and bares her teeth at him, tiny little bear thing, silly and lovely and loved. She ducks her head a moment later, presses a kiss to her fingers and her fingers to his temple, follows the line of his jaw down and then tucks her hands back into his, and - it's the best, easiest, only way she knows to express that nearness. Just to - be near.

"You're easy pleased," she tells him, but there's no sting in the words.

Better to choose a family when you can. Asher is good at cutting, hacking and slashing; some people talk about careful pruning as if you're dealing with some sort of garden, but family is all too often a gangrenous limb that needs to be severed. The rest you stitch back up. Imperfect but scars are good reminders: look world, see that I made it through all you threw at me and survived, what next?

Catching her hands, he laces their fingers, nose wrinkling when he smiles up at her. No one can say Asher Hardie didn't wrestle a bear as one of his last acts.

"I'm a simple man, you know that. Never disappointed that way. Not that you ever would, don't ever worry about that, not now, not ever."

Gwenaëlle's disappointed everyone she's ever known, she thinks, which is -

at least a slight exaggeration, probably. Her fingers tighten where he's holding onto her hands and she gives him a nudge with them, a little thing, wry, dips her head again and kisses the back of his hands. "Stop comforting me," she scolds him, rubbing his fingers with her thumbs. "That isn't what I'm here for." She's here because - she can be, because she can handle it, because she knows how to be here.

Because she cares enough for him for the fact that she can do it to mean she will. Family.

Edited (i can fuckin type) 2016-08-05 13:35 (UTC)

Asher takes a deep breath for the count of three, holds it long enough for the world to blur black and grey, then exhales slow and steady. The nod is slight but his body relaxes and stiffens in different places; legs heavy, chest and abdomen tight from where the skin is too sensitive to stand.

"I know. I know." A hundred memories of his mother, how Asher took up too much, the impression of being undeserving of all of it that has followed him all of his days. "Sorry," he gives her half a smile.

"Never thought I'd want someone to be here for me like this, seeing me like this but...I'm glad it's you. I know it's not that long. Not now." No one else has heard this, no one else will hear it until he's sure he's talking hours and minutes, not days. If that makes him a coward well they don't know what it feels like to die this way. "Just having to lie here. And feel it. Accept it. Asher Hardie can swallow anything except this apparently." That's a joke, it's a bad one, he's sorry but he has the right as the dying man to make terrible jokes since she's the only one who will still tell him his jokes were bad.

Softer, should anyone else ever hear him: "I'm sorry you know how to do this. How to be here for this. None of us should unless we made some choice with our kin like the Augurs, or those who oversee the Rites for the Dead." Gjurd will know already, Hulda will be making what preparations she can back at the hold, and his kin will have tears in their eyes waiting for Asher to return to them one last time.

The face she pulls at him - he beats her to it before she can say I'm sorry you still think you're much funnier than you actually are, cuts across with sentiment that makes this steadiness so hard. Not impossible; not to be given up on. But hard, like things that are worth doing are.

"Don't be," she says, shaking her head. "I didn't want her to be alone." For all the faults and hurts - Gwenaëlle loved her. Annegret had been so much in confinement to her sickbed by the end, the friends she'd had drifted over the years, a faithless husband keeping his distance; she had been a lonely, angry, frustrated woman taking pain out on a household she could no longer control and there are a lot of things that Gwenaëlle is angry about, a lot of things that she wishes different, but -

She didn't leave her step-mother alone, and she could have. It would have been easier. It matters to her, still, that Annegret died knowing her step-daughter chose to be with her.

"I won't leave you alone, either. I won't wish I could." He wouldn't be, probably; Asher is well-loved, here, there are other warm bodies that might fill this seat. But if it matters that it's her - if he's glad - then that matters, and nothing could move her.

A man needs to have his pride and Asher needs to think he's funny because no one is going to say 'your joke was shit' to someone that can pick them up and suplex them or put them through a table without it even registering. Honestly he's just terrified of the moment when he can't do this. Because he's had moments where he's lost it. Not the temper because even before he was a Reaver he had a nasty temper but when he breaks down, what does he do? When every single person says 'oh that's just Asher' or 'that's what Asher's always like' as if he's a mountain.

Thing is, even mountains get carved by the wind and the rain. Time whittles them down too.

"Not everyone can. Aura could, out of everyone in my family that's not from the hold." No fault to his siblings, it wasn't a lot of fun for them either but there's a lot of guilt and resentment and hurt going either way so no one knows how to talk to each other in that house. He wonders if that marriage will survive. If his father will leave. If he'll go back to Denerim. If he'll go somewhere else where no one knows that he was Stafford Hardie and that he had a son that he allowed to be thrown from the house.

He knows it weighed on his father. Doesn't change that his father never fought to keep him. Doesn't get rid of that tight knot of never being wanted.

"Still enough left in me to put someone out if they tried to move you, don't worry about that."

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Cold upon the mountain

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