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.