Cold upon the mountain

[hlif]

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.

Comments

[hlif]

Even though it hurts, and even though he was privately sick of staring at the tent above him since that was the entirity of his world, Asher moves to lie on his back, urging Christine to move with him; she's slight enough that even now she's not going to hurt. She'll keep him warm like this too when he can bring his arms around her and cradle her, when he can try to remember the strength he had only a few short weeks ago.

(His mother's voice in his head, every condemnation about the space, the attention, the effort Asher Hardie was not worth then howling in him; if he was relatively unbloodied then, how much less worthy of any of this is he now when he's carved a bloody path through Thedas killing for coin since the age of fifteen? Near half his life nothing but violence and revelling in it?)

Asher lived out of spite so many times. Christine isn't spiteful, that's not what he wants for her but he doesn't want to be a shadow over her. So ready to step out of lives the way he'd been when Mal had been different the first he'd seen him in Skyhold; hurt but willing. Mal was a friend, Asher knows what he is. Christine is good, Christine is warm bright light that doesn't hurt, Christine is the teasing edge of a smile, Christine is a wicked streak hidden beneath years of Circle discipline and Orlesian manners, Christine is determined in a way Asher respects in the marrow of his bones.

He kisses her forehead with his dry chapped lips, smiles his bleary. "That's my girl, and you wear it when you're facing down Templars and reminding them that they'll never control you again. That you're--" Fighting to get the words out, he wants to, he's going to, his lungs will burn and his throat will ache but he'll do this- "That you're free."

Now he'll accept the water gratefully, just warm enough to be soothing after sitting in the tent all day. Cold water feels like a kick in the gut these days.

[aceso]

Asher has always understood the plight of mages in ways that others don't. They only saw the potential of mages to be dangerous and nothing else. Some (usually Chantry sisters) hid behind words about "protecting" mages from average people, but never bothered to teach average people not to be murderous fools. But Asher has come from a society that doesn't fear mages and treats everything so logically. Outside that world, people just look to the Chant of Light to tell them how to treat mages. The Tevinters have even had to "reinterpret" the Chant to make it work for them. The Avvar seem so much better with their views, and that's the way Asher thinks too.

She lowers the waterskin when he's done and sets it aside off the edge of the bed before curling in against his chest and taking a moment to control herself. Crying doesn't become her. It makes her face puffy and pink, and gives her a terrible headache. Stupid emotions.

"I will never go back to a Circle," she agrees. "Not after being out here and seeing what can be." Sam once asked if she wanted a family after she joked that in another life she could have been a happy housewife. And right now, Christine isn't sure. She doesn't know what will become of mages after a new Divine is elected. Will the Circles be reinstated? If so, she'll have to hide out, living life as an apostate and knowing that if she's discovered, she'll be dragged away and her children taken from her. Is it worth putting a child through that? She needs a life where she doesn't have to run.

"I may have to hide out, if the Circles return. But I will do what I must."

[hlif]

Gjurd is a mage and Asher loves him like an uncle (calls him old man when Gjurd looks in better condition than Asher himself), Amalia is a firebrand and wild and Asher would battle legions if they ever tried to take her from him. If there's one good thing he could say for Eleanor Hardie, it's that she did get the Avvar attitude to mages. She's never stood by the Chantry treatment. Not one of them in that house ever understood it: it was practical for everyone to have their place, to pitch in, to do things that other people couldn't. (If there were mages sometimes working on the farm, then that was for the Hardies to know alone.) Asher's son might have magic under his veins, he's a little too young to tell just yet. If he did then he could be a battlemage or a spirit warrior. The Avvar don't even mistrust spirits the way the Dalish do.

Look on the bright side Christine: you'll still be looking better than Asher. (That's a joke. You have to laugh at the dying man's jokes, otherwise that's just rude.)

"You know that none of my crew would let anything happen to you. Yngvi and Gunnar wouldn't even charge, you'd just need to bolster the healing supplies, probably give Yngvi a kiss." Yngvi is a shit, but he's Asher's and he loves him. "Knowing them they'd probably think the safest place for you is up the mountain though."

[aceso]

Christine has made friends here so unlike most she had in the Circle. Oh, there were good people there to be sure, but many played the Game, hoping for a way out of the Circle, and Christine knew they wouldn't hesitate to turn on her to make their way higher. Here she has a support system like she's never known, even when the rebel mages were on the run and all they had were each other.

"They would really help me?" she asks, a little surprised. It just doesn't occur to her that she would mean anything to them. Of course, lying here beside this dying man suddenly makes things clear and she tilts up her head to look at him properly. "You mean because you like me, that they like me?"

[hlif]

Politics is an awful lot like a rash in some ways: the more you scratch, the worse it gets, and oh how the damn thing spreads. Laughing quietly, he strokes her hair and nods. Maybe it's because his family put him out when he was still old enough to really know what a family was that made him revise the definition yet still be able to just haul people into it.

"Of course." Maybe he sounds offended. A trifle offended. A small trifle. Not some big opulent Orlesian production of a trifle, just a small understated Ferelden sort of trifle. "Their friends are my friends and my friends are their friends, everyone is welcome by the fire. Yngvi and Gunnar like everyone, and Amalia wouldn't say it but if a mage doesn't want to go back to the Circle? She'll respect them. You're family to them."

A beat passes, and he huffs a laugh. "Sorry 'bout that."

[aceso]

It's difficult the express what his words mean to her, and that means she's silent for a moment, trying to hold in her tears. Fingers stroke his heated skin, and she spares a thought for how she wishes he could stay and be part of her family too. Nothing is fair. Children playing games aren't fair, butchers hiding bad meat under good aren't fair; nothing seems to be, especially not life and death.

"Thank you. I will endure it all, you can be sure." Meaning being part on the Boneflayers' family. Another moment passes before she asks, "Would you like to hear a story?"

[hlif]

At least he knows all of his will make her welcome because that's the thing about his family - loud and gregarious, never shy about sharing what they have even if it's rough compared to what a person is used to. The best sort of people in his book. There are words that die before they get halfway out his throat - that isn't enduring, that she's Christine Delacroix (don't laugh at me saying your surname, isn't that what he's said before, can't help it if Orlesian is a stupid poncy language) and there's a whole other world but he nods. It's as fair as he can give her when he asked her to keep promises.

"What sort of story are you telling me?"

[aceso]

"One that you will sit and listen to if you know what is good for you," she says, and in this moment her sorrow has moved aside to make room for some humor. Just a touch, however.

"There was once a woman who lived alone in the wild. Some called her a witch, others a hedge mage, and a few even called her a seductress, though she thought such a title was foolish." Christine lifts her head to give him a knowing look.

"One day, she was out walking when from far above, she could hear the sound of a landslide. A nearby warrior ran towards her from between the trees, yelling at her to run for cover, but she thought she knew better. The warrior simply didn't know her power. She raised her arms and attempted to hold back the landslide with her magic, but it was simply too much for her. Trees bent and cracked under the weight of the falling mud, rocks were dislodged and started to roll down towards her, but she was too prideful and too stubborn to quit. And so the warrior grabbed her around the waist, tossed her over his shoulder, and ran under an outcropping of rock, which shielded the pair as the mud, trees, and rocks rushed past. The seductress realized that the warrior had been much wiser than she, because he did not think to stop the landslide, but to hide from it. She swallowed her pride and thanked him for saving her life, and do you know what he said? He called her a fool. And she very much felt it. From that day on, she vowed to use common sense instead of thinking magic could solve everything, inspired by the warrior who was more worldly than she, and knew better than her."

Her story was made up on the spot, but inspired by him and the stories he'd told her about the Avvar and their spirit gods. He's opened her mind as to a new way to look at spirits, and she wants to learn more.

[hlif]

"I'd say gag me, it'd be a good way to go," he jokes, utterly aware of just how terrible, no, how hideous a thing that is but he settles in to listen, because she's got his attention. Well, Christine always has his attention but stories are important, loved and cherished, and he finds himself smiling through the pain.

He recognises the thread of the story - because this is how Avvar stories always go, you take one and spin off from it, twist it around and make it yours - and there is a lump in his throat it's like being strangled. Enough that he very nearly makes a sound because he didn't expect this. This is the sort of thing that would have had the first trainer laughing at him when he signed up. Would have had Melisende laughing. Asher teaches people to watch their weak spots, their blind spots, to know where every gap in the armour is then there she goes, finds it so easily and he's gone.

All he can do for a moment is press his lips to her hair, her soft golden hair, gleaming brighter than sweet sovereigns after a long hard slog of a job, or the sunrise up in the mountains. "You be sure to tell the story that goes before too. About how the warrior had been saved by a witch with hair so fine all who saw it swore she'd won it in some wager with the sun. Else he never would've been able to come running in the first place." Be careful, he means. Even if I know you're more than good enough and strong enough without an old bear.

[aceso]

Christine could never be a healer if she had no compassion in her. If she was a cold, hard thing, she could never rest her healing hands on the injured and feel anything beyond her own frost. But Christine is warmth and light, sun rays shining through the clouds to lift out the bad and replace it with the good. Only it didn't work with Asher. Her sunlit hair and soft, warm hands couldn't draw out the bad, and she releases a soft whimper of despair where he manages to hold it in.

"I will never forget you," she whispers, hot tears spilling across his chest. "Not ever. I will keep telling stories of you." And in that way, he will never truly be gone.