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

He looks—mildly—surprised to see her, or surprised to see her like this, packing. His first thought is that she's leaving Herc, and it's good he's not here to see it, but the thought dies of its own lack of logic before he can voice it. Small blessings.

Alistair pushes the tent flap further open. Max is with him, pushing past his legs now while he unconsciously straightens up and sucks in his stomach. (It's half because she's pretty, half because she carries herself with a nobility that reminds him of Anora. Isolde.) He clears his throat.

"I hope you know how to handle a mabari."

Edited 2016-07-05 16:22 (UTC)

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."

"I will learn," she says, neutrally, with a steadiness that doesn't quite take her by surprise. She can do this - she can do all of this, and she will. It will -

It will be what it has been. It's official, now, that's all. Official doesn't change anything, except insofar as it does, somehow, and Benevenuta is not nearly so prepared for it as she wishes she were. Maybe no one would be. Maybe she couldn't be, and it doesn't matter.

She sets down a folded shirt, smooths her hands over it, looks up. "Someone will need the use of the tent. I am sure. I will make my arrangements."

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.

By the time Adelaide comes to her, the tent is nearly packed up. Time on the road and an existing inclination to organisation has taught her to be neat, quick and efficient; she isn't even entirely sure where it is that she intends to go, only that there is no sense in staying here any longer. She is not a Warden, and their ranks may yet swell. They will have need of the space, of the tent.

Sentimentality is not sufficient reason to waste resources.

Husband acknowledges the arrival before she does, nosing about Adelaide's feet.

With Husband and an unhappy Max at her heels, Benevenuta doesn't wait for Teren to come to her, in the end; she goes herself, leaving the arrangements for her belongings (and Herc's) for a short time and wanting -

She isn't sure what she wants, or what she thinks she'll get from the Warden in question, but she can't be still and nothing she has to say right now seems fit for anyone else's ears.

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."

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.

Upon reflection -

she probably should have spoken to him sooner than this. To anyone, by some estimation, but certainly to Dorian. She could have been a bit more organised about this. He will, she thinks, be patient with her, but it would have been wiser ... it would have been more considerate than simply appearing at his door with all of her belongings and what is going to feel like a substantial slice of Skyhold's canine population. It isn't as if she hadn't known, it isn't as if she'd not thought of what she might do -

She knocks again, without having waited nearly long enough for him to even be finished debating finding out who it is or waiting to see if they'll go away.

"Dorian," she says, quietly, to the wood. "I will owe you the greatest of favours if only you'll open your door."

Dorian appears at the door. He is dressed, in that there are clothes on his body, but he wears his fine-clothed tunic untucked and the boots he was wearing have been unbuckled and cast aside. He is expecting to see her, and is expecting to tell that she doesn't owe him any favours, don't be ridiculous.

Less so is he expecting her dogs, and a quick assessment of her face is cut off by looking down at the mabari shadowing along.

"Ah."

But he steps aside, anyway, and puts out his palms for Max to investigate and coat in saliva, a ritual to which he'd become accustomed in the long journey back from the Western Approach. The first time. "You can favour me with sharing all the sympathy wine being sent your way. And to be polite enough not to mind the mess." There isn't any mess, not really, save for his boots cast to the corner and his overburdened writing desk, where lit candles show the disorganisation of half-read books, leafs of parchment, scrolls, and a lovely writing set gifted him by Madame de Fer.

His bed isn't made, either, but any lack of order is made up for the fact that his room, modest though it is, branched off from the library, is immaculately clean. And doesn't smell like dog at all, but northern incenses burned recently.

Max noses at Dorian's hand, investigative; Husband trots directly past him and jumps up onto the end of the unmade bed, turns in a circle and settles in to make herself right at home. Benevenuta touches his arm in a gesture that she seems to mean to make in passing except that she doesn't immediately let go, staring about the room and not, truly, seeing it.

"I knew for weeks," she says, blankly. "Before they left."

Borrowed time, all of those unsaid things hanging in the air - she had understood what it meant before they'd said their private goodbyes in the camp. That the next time he left, he would not return; the idea of only having him a while had turned out to be different, in the end, than the reality of it. What had seemed so reasonable, so important -

It isn't that she regrets, or that she'd do anything differently. It's only that she feels as young and foolish as she's so fond of letting other people think she is, and it's galling -

It's only that it hurts, terribly, and there was no preparing for that.

Teren is preparing for the night watch, sitting on a log by the Wardens' central campfire and using it to light her lamp. It's not yet terribly dark, but there are still long shadows, enough cover for someone very stealthy to make their way around.
She pauses when she hears footsteps, and turns to see Benuta, which causes her to rise slowly to her feet and simply watch her approach. Teren isn't what most would call a warm person-- it took her until the moments before they abandoned Herc to even express appreciation for him, and she's said very little on the topic since. Her expression as she watches the girl is carefully devoid of strong emotion, in preparation for strong emotion to be flung at her. Benevenuta is the only person from whom she'll not only allow it, but accept it without judgment.

It never comes.

It isn't so much that no one will see - she has lashed out once this day already, and it is after that she decides so firmly to see Teren before anyone else, who might understand her anger if she chooses to share it - but that the grip she has on herself is iron, her mother's child in this as in all things, and she grieves in quiet, in small moments carved out of larger ones. It isn't a weakness to have loved but it is her nature now to be so measured. This loss is not a shock, does not startle her from her perch; she draws level beside her at the fire and gazes down at it a long time before she says anything.

"I return the tent to the Wardens," she says. "I will leave this evening. I have packed, it is done."

Teren angles her head to look down at the girl, brow slightly raised. "Returning to your rooms?" She either can't or won't keep this judgment out of her voice-- being in her appointed Skyhold chamber is far safer than hanging around the Wardens, unprotected by walls or the bulk of the Inquisition's forces. For Teren, concern manifests as irritation.

A brief shake of her head, hands tucked into the long sleeves of her gown. "The hold is over-crowded, I did not keep the room." As small as it was, it had a door with a lock and a fireplace; she's certain it's long since been snapped up, doubtless almost as quickly as she vacated it in the first place. "Dorian will have space, a while, and I will find something more suitable."

She's had time to make these arrangements - she should have done so earlier. She says nothing on her failure to do so because there's nothing to say; it had felt wrong, before anyone else knew, to be arranging the aftermath.

"Ah."
Teren is among the more open-minded of her generation, but when it comes to Tevinter, growing up Nevarran has given her its... biases. But if she let those stand in the way, she'd likely be dead already.
With the matter of Benuta's residence settled, Teren shifts to the real topic, with her usual grace and sublety: "He died well." She looks at the fire and not at the girl's face, an odd but historically successful way of giving her a modicum of privacy.

Tevinter has always been a complicated subject in the Thevenet household; Ayse has no love for the land of her birth, remade in the image of Nevarra, but it was always difficult for Benevenuta to condemn a place she owes half her blood to. Dorian is in some ways validation of that curiosity - there is hope for the place yet, if it can produce such a man.

But they need not discuss Tevinter. Benevenuta is quite aware of the way that friendship is commonly perceived, and cares less than she knows she probably ought.

"It is the only way he would," she says, very simply. The words are correct, and the tone they're said in - sparse. Her heart in her hand and her hand a fist, clenched, holding within all of the terrible, aching things that she doesn't know what to do with. He made them work for it, but he is gone, and there is nothing more that can be done.

It would almost be easier if she were a crying wreck, because then at least Teren could go with the platitudes she's learned to show when people are grieving who aren't solid stone inside. But Benny is... well. Just like her. It's taken her until now to see it fully, and though she doubts she was the only influence, it's still alarming to see.
She turns to look down at her with a measuring gaze, uncertain of how to proceed. Perhaps it's better this way.
"Do you need anything?" Here's Teren's area of expertise. A pat on the back? Socks? Someone murdered? She's a full-service nanny.

Cultivated as carefully as the hot-house flower that she appears to be and isn't, Benevenuta is not accidental; shaped to be the way she is, to be stronger and harder and smarter. To wield compassion as another weapon, her heart a tool to be used by her clever, clever mind -

What does she do with this, now? To what purpose can she turn her grief? When there is no one but Dorian, the dogs and the dark; then she will weep, and wail, and wish it had been different. For now, she gazes blankly back up at Teren and there is a sort of honesty in the calculated way she peels herself apart, in allowing her cold weariness to show underneath the carefully still way she holds herself together. She doesn't know what it is that she needs, or wants, and she decides Teren may see that, and the decision itself.

The softness is as real as the steel way she uses herself with the same ruthlessness she'd apply to anyone else.

"I will write to my mother," she says, eventually. "I'd have the letter pass through as few hands as possible."

There are few people who can stir Teren to full sentiment. In fact, it may be less than few, it may just be Benevenuta, perhaps only because her own existence is so incumbent on the girl's. So when she sees the veneer cracking, she lets her own down a little as well, her lips curving into the faintest hint of a tired smile.
"I'll see it done," she says, "don't concern yourself over that." Being the silent hand of the Thevenets has its uses.
"Get some rest then, girl. And given some time, you'll find it's all right again." At least as all right as possible.

Her mirroring smile is as small and sparse as what preceded it, but a true thing all the same; Ayse has trusted Teren and so Benevenuta does as well, but it isn't blind trust of child follows mother. She appreciates what she has seen - and the respite from those whose sympathies will follow more well-trodden paths.

It would be easier if she were a weeping mess. For all of them, probably.

"You love someone," she says, reflectively, without bitterness or complaint, "and it is meaningless. Still the sun rises."

She is a distant star, burning brightly, and it is this universal truth that drags her back down to earth with everyone else, the truth that this pain is not unique. This loss is not special. She is one of many, and in grasping that she takes some comfort from it.

The world still turns. The sun still rises. The war still needs to be fought.

It is the worst thing. And the best.

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?"

Teren strokes a strand of Benny's hair back behind her ear, an unusually affectionate gesture for her. "That it does," she agrees, firmly but not unkindly.

A slow exhale. "That it does," she repeats, quiet, like a prayer not for the dead but for the living, who have to live on.

Benevenuta pulls her shawl tight around her shoulders and moves away, Max and Husband following her like a guard.

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.)

Dorian's hand covers hers. To a lesser extent from his observers' perspective, the idea of their romance had been a different animal altogether against the reality, but the first time in the Western Approach, of delivering bad news, had been something of a warning for an inevitable outcome. For such neatly manicured hands, there's roughness there from both writing and staff use.

Oh, Benuta.

He reaches to close the door to his room, woman and dogs all safely inside. She can have his arm, his hand still cupping hers and leading her into his room a little further as if they were entering a hall, their names announced. The modest scale of his room is not that, however, and there aren't a lot of places to sit -- a bed, and a wooden chair with plush cushion insets. With Husband already taking a cue, Dorian opts for the first.

"And you knew because he knew," Dorian says, without an uptick in tone that would beg her confirmation. He knows enough about Warden particulars to know of the Calling.

When they sit, she turns toward him like something seeking heat; her knees rest against his and she looks down at their hands as if she doesn't remember how it happened. She has held up. She's done her best, all day, told herself that today isn't different because it isn't new, but today is -

it is very final. When no one else knew, it wasn't real yet. He wasn't gone yet so long as everyone else still imagined he was coming back, and now he is, and he isn't, and she has held her breath. Still holds her breath, but - the beginning of an exhale. She's safe, here, if anything comes after the sigh.

"He told no one. Seeker Pentaghast, before they left." A thin, terrible smile; "Not me. He needn't - I'm not such a fool. Everyone got better except Hercules. He still would wake in the night beside me, sweating, cold. I'd stay awake."

For all the good it did.

She's done well, of course, and Dorian -- who would be weeping messily and unattractively long before this moment, in her shoes -- can appreciate that sort of thing, being of that sort of upbringing. But they're not out there, and he keeps his hand on hers as a reminder of this. His thumb tracks the bumps of her knuckles.

He wonders if Felix will tell him, one day, when the time comes. He imagines he would be a tiresome sort of person to tell.

"And he wouldn't have been such a fool as to mistake it for pity," Dorian notes. His hand squeezes hers, subtly. "Not many Grey Wardens in this world can say they were fortunate men."

For a mere bit of folded paper- the letter is heavy beyond measure in Adelaide's hands This is not the duty of a friend, not something that should ever have come to her in truth- but she had given her word. And once given? It is something she keeps.

"Benevenuta..." Offering condolences feels cheap considering her own none too private disapproval of the relationship but that had been before she'd known him. Before she'd learned that he was infuriating and noble, good and dry and kind in his own long suffering way. Perhaps if they'd more time she might have liked him. Now there are only words that do not belong to her, waiting in her hands.

"I don't know that he thought me capable," she says, curling her fingers under his palm, the way her mouth lifts up at one corner worse than if she'd wept. "Does the storm pity the traveler?" A not inaccurate assessment of what Hercules had sometimes seen when he looked at her - but he hadn't been the traveler. She wasn't something that happened to him. He was -

A mountain. Stillness. Not as funny as he thought he was, and then, and then

and then is when it comes, tears, finally, the tightness in her throat that's been forming since the night she sat waiting in the dark to ask a question she already knew the answer to. It isn't pretty, but it isn't dramatic, either; like a cup overfilled spilling over, inevitable, clutching her throat against the constriction of pain that is tired of letting her choose how to express it, holding herself like she could still hold it back.

She presses her forehead to his shoulder and weeps.

The woman who looks up at her name might have been carved from marble in her stillness; her gaze drops to Adelaide's hands and, after a moment, she presumes to hold her own out.

"I take it," she says, neutrally, "that that's for me."

There are no meaningful ellipses. She does not bend.

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.

"It is." Adelaide tries to find any sign of emotion aside from placid calm in Benevenuta's face- and fails. Without words of comfort, for she has never been terribly skilled in such things, without anything beyond fulfilling her word and offering over the letter? That is all there is left to do. She passes it into Benevenuta's hands and the weight yet remains.

"Do you need help carrying anything?" That. That she can do if nothing else.

A moment's hesitation over the letter, just barely, less than a breath - Benevenuta tucks it within the folds of her gown. She will read it later, perhaps much later; when she is alone, when she is ready. In the quiet, dark place of her own mind she can be honest: she doesn't know when that will be.

"No," she says, matter of fact rather than sharp, glancing around at how tidily she has packed up what was a heartbeat's length of a life together. "I have made arrangements for it." She'd begun making them as soon as she'd heard the group was sighted returning.

"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."

"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.

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.

"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."

Candles gutter in their own wax. Dorian eases an arm around her and looks past her bowed head towards where Max has settled, heavy head on paws and watching the two humans with what is probably mild interest but through anthropomorphic projection, Dorian can imagine there to be sorrow. The sound of Benevenuta crying is a terrible thing. There's nothing abstract in it. Fickle empathy warms moisture in Dorian's own eyes, but that's as far as he's willing to indulge it while he lets her cry on his shoulder.

It's a good shoulder. More muscular and solid than backhanded comments about his nature would lead others to imagine. His chin bumps gently against the crown of her head, his other hand up to smooth back her hair, thumb stroking over glossy brunette braiding.

To Alistair--who's doing well on a day he can wrangle his heart onto his sleeve instead of having it sprawled out naked on his face--the steadiness is a surprise. A cold one. He'd cried.

But he's not crying now. He's standing there awkwardly, watching Max sniff at shirts and trousers and--not letting the dog make him sad again.

"We're hardly recruiting," he says, looking determinedly back up at Benevenuta.

Eventually, "What do I do?" terribly quietly, a question that does not expect an answer, that is barely directed at Dorian at all. A question she will write to her mother and still, perhaps, not truly expect to be given anything; they can't tell her that, and in the end, maybe she knows. For instance, she knows that she is going to cry herself quiet here against his shoulder, trust him in the way she'd asked him without asking to trust her when his father had written and they went to Redcliffe; that she will wake up, tomorrow, dry her eyes and do her job.

She will keep doing it - her job, and maybe sometimes the crying - until she can do it without feeling hollow. Until the ache is not gone but different, until this is no longer so stark and she begins to see the rest of her life with colour. Dorian's shoulder is warm and so is his arm, and it is very conscious that she allows herself the luxury of not wondering which wheels turn in his head and if he knows all of the ways this weakness could be exploited.

He does.

He wouldn't.

The latter wouldn't matter if the former wasn't true, somehow.

It's rather as if she's condensed herself down into nothing else but that calm, that coldness; absent her usual sly edge, the amused tilt of her mouth that up until this moment he might've just thought was how her face always looked due to it being so routinely turned upon him, the lightness of tone such as she employed to forcibly give him what everyone is still politely referring to as a dog. All stilled, the clear, calm face of dark water, and

she can't quite look at him. Not for longer than a moment. His gaze shifts back to her and she looks at Max, instead, which isn't much easier but feels less revealing.

"Dorian will not mind my company a while," she says, instead of the many other things she might, and - it is the smallest of concessions to make, that she allows herself to need his. "Regardless."

"Right," Alistair says, in a tone that suggests she is perhaps being unreasonable but he has too much self-preservation instinct to argue, which is ridiculous for multiple reasons, including that Alistair has no self-preservation instinct at all. If he did he wouldn't use tones like that with women like her at times like these.

He crosses his arms. Rubs his own elbow.

"You don't have to do the packing. We can send everything up."

"No," she says, more sharply than she'd planned to, the first hint of anything past calm behind that opaque facade; a moment later, more measured, "no, thank you. I prefer to do it myself."

That she stepped between Alistair and the piled up belongings is probably nothing. Unintentional and coincidental, meaningless.

"I have it well in hand," awkward only conceptually, regaining that tight grip on herself, "as you see. Thank you."

He looks past her for a moment, as if there might be something in the tent that's more the Wardens' than hers. But Hercules was either more careful than that or he wasn't. There's no helping it now either way.

"I didn't mean you weren't capable of folding shirts," he says after that glance. Despite the circumstances one eyebrow and one corner of his mouth do a thing, in concert with a slight turn of his head--a flicker of skeptical amusement. There and gone. "You'll let us know if you need help carrying anything, at least."

"The desk," she says, after a moment. "I will need someone to move the desk, eventually, but we'd not much between us." Even including Herc's belongings with her own, it's not more than she can carry up to the hold; a benefit, when she's not actually informed Dorian as yet that she's going to need somewhere to stay, trusting that he wouldn't turn her away.

(And he won't, so.)

Eventually, more gently, "He didn't want you to know. Before. To go into a fight, knowing you would lose a man whatever you did."

But she knew.

It's the sort of question that doesn't really demand answer from the person being asked it, but damned if Dorian isn't going to speak if not explicitly forbidden, and even then.

"You," he says, will love again, he wants to say, and manages not to, "will stay here as long as you like. I suspect you'll also help yourself to my brandy. In fact, I insist. You'll write some necessary letters -- tomorrow, I'd say -- and you'll tell yourself the things you need to hear that the rest of us aren't capable of guessing. You'll tolerate our awkward attempts at saying the right thing, also, with undue grace."

He isn't letting her go, nor shrugging her off, although his embrace is the kind one can free oneself off easily enough. Dorian separates mainly to pick up a crystal container of promised brandy, pinching a low, dainty cup along with it with a finger.

"I'm sure the dogs have their own ideas."

"Wouldn't have been the first time," Alistair says. "That's what we're for."

It's a reach for brisk stoicism that falls short, into some mixture of resentment and regret that is not all for Hercules. Some of it is for the Wardens at Adamant Fortress, baring their necks. Some of it is for a beacon lit ten years ago, too late. But neither of those things have a place in this tent--he's that tactful--so he squares his shoulders and steps back to leave.

"Let me know when you're ready for the desk. Or tell Kaisa. She can probably carry it on her own."

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

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for adelaide;

for teren;

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for dorian;

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