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[closed] it's not the long walk home that will change this heart
WHO: Cade, Nari, a healer at the end (Sam?)
WHAT: a camping trip turned awkward family reunion
WHEN: sometime in Guardian w/e
WHERE: the easternmost edge of the Planasene forest
NOTES: warning for violence, discussion of self-harm and sexual abuse of a child
WHAT: a camping trip turned awkward family reunion
WHEN: sometime in Guardian w/e
WHERE: the easternmost edge of the Planasene forest
NOTES: warning for violence, discussion of self-harm and sexual abuse of a child
Between the flu, the fire, and Kit's passing, things have been rough lately. One of the few boons of Cade's excommunication from the Templars has been an abundance of freedom, with which, until recently, he had no idea what to do.
But sometimes one just needs to get out of the city. Not on a special mission or anything serious, just a little hunting trip, a pocket of time spent in the quiet isolation of nature. It's the one thing he missed from his time in the Hinterlands, and perhaps it's time to do it again.
Nari is invited, for her particular losses, and for her help throughout the flu. She looked out for him, and he's worried what she might do if left alone in the wake of her grief. Perhaps it's best if they both remove themselves for a while.
In separate tents, of course.
It's on the edge of the Planasene where they finally make a less temporary camp, setting up to stay for a few days by a small creek in a grove well-insulated from the still sharp winter winds. It's early morning, and the horses are lazing tethered to a tree, content to spend the day eating grass and rolling in whatever dust is nearby.
Cade is preparing for the day, sitting by the fire and sharpening his arrows, waiting for Nari to join him so they can cast out.
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But who is he kidding? No one has been fooled. That's why he's here, an embarrassment, a scrap of wood too big to throw away but too distorted to be useful. Now, instead of a friend, he has one more person in his life who will look at him and shake her head and wonder what went wrong.
"It's fine," he says, defeatedly, staring at the spot between his horse's ears. It's not fine, but pretending would require far more effort than he has to give.
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"Nothing I saw in that camp was mine to see," she says, adamant. "Not the scars on your back, not the echoes from whatever happened to you. They're yours, Cade. They're yours to give, they're yours to keep, to hide, remember, or forget. It should be your choice, and I took that. Not on purpose, but I did, and I can't--" Nari pauses to blow out a breath and stare at the blurring sky, raking a hand through her hair. She wants very badly to stay that way until the danger of actual tears had passed, but at the same time recognizes it for an opportunity to give something small in return. Not because her hands were being held and couldn't rise to cover her face, like with Pel. Even then she'd lowered her head. Another breath, and Nari looks down from the sky and back at Cade with eyes open and glassy and oh, how it's hard to be seen.
"I can't give that back, and I'm sorry."
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He sits there in dumb silence while Nari speaks, and then for a while after, looking very much like a frightened rabbit who has no idea what to do next. Her words have sunk in, and he hasn't the faintest clue how to use them. If at all.
He opens his mouth, closes it, meets her eyes for the briefest of seconds, then looks away, his face burning. There's a lot that was brought out, just now.
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At the bottom now, with that pound slowing, Nari near mirrors him; opens her mouth again to see if there was anything still in there and finding only a heavy sigh which she lets out through her nose and awkwardly, stubbornly, waits for him to say something.
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But the way Nari looks at him, he feels strangely guilty for not wanting to acknowledge her concern. He lowers his head, frowning, his shoulders tensing as he deliberates on what to do, what to say. She isn't the first person to discover the scars, or any of the rest of it, but it feels wrong to do his usual evasive maneuvers and avoid her. Especially since they're about to be traveling home together for a good long while.
"...thank you," he says thinly. What else is there?
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As they continue on, she tries not to think too hard about what she'd done (although for good or ill the air felt a little clearer to her for having done it). After all, you can't catch an arrow after it's shot. She tries instead to let her mind slip into the feeling of the early spring forest. Wind in branches, birdsong, the soft regular thuds of the horses steps. There was something comforting about knowing the land didn't care whether or not you were a halfwit.
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They ride in silence for a while, Cade fully stuck in his head, so absorbed in the conversation they just had that he could very well walk right into a second hunter's trap and probably not even notice.
"...um," he speaks up after a time, his voice raspy and uncertain, "the scars are... not... don't worry about them." Said with all the confidence of a 'please don't tell mom', and now his ears are red again.
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Truth be told, she had been worrying about them. The lines that patterned his back ranged from pale and silvery even against the alabaster of his skin to pale pink to the slightly raised darker color of healed wounds that couldn't be more that a couple of months old, silently bearing witness like the rings of a tree. Whatever they'd come from had been going on for years, and it wasn't over.
And if they were connected to the way he'd reacted in the tent...
"...Why shouldn't I?" she asks, only loud enough to be heard. If he didn't want to answer, they could always go back to the sounds of the road.
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And that just makes him want to do it more, as the tension rises.
"...it's... private." Sometimes he wonders why he's allowed to speak at all.
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But after a few moments she finds herself speaking again, looking at the road.
"I just-- it's not--" she starts falsely a couple of times, thinning her lips in frustration at herself. "Just tell me it's not someone hurting you. That it's private because it's yours, not because someone told you it has to be."
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When has anything ever really been his? When has his private world not revolved around secrecy and shame, the fear that any kind of honesty will result in rejection and pain? It already has.
"...um," he stammers, a quaver in his voice, unable to reassure her. No one has ever called it out like that before. If nothing else, however, he can at least confirm that no one else is doing any beating.
"...it's... me. I do it."
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Even though she wanted to look at her horse's neck or at the slowly thinning trees as they neared the outer fringes of the forest to think about it, she didn't want him to think she was looking away from him, so she didn't. She couldn't make her face say much more than 'I'm still here,' but sometimes that's all that needed saying.
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Attention you don't deserve and never have.
Visibly regretting saying anything, he frowns and holds his silence again. Apparently that was the end of the confession.
cw: self harm
She presses her lips together. Tries to gather her thoughts into some order, fails, abandons it. Looks at the angle of the shadows. Remembers.
"Because there's something inside you that's too big for your body to hold," Nahariel says finally, hoarsely, reaching to run her fingers through her mount's mane, her hands needing something to do so she doesn't give over to what they'd done. "Something that doesn't leave room for anything else, and it can't get out unless you make it a path. Guilt, or grief, or just ...wanting. Wanting something gone, wanting something you're scared will go."
Too well, she remembers. It's not enough to say, in case she can't say all of it, or say it well, or right, so she untangles her fingers from the mane to slowly pull at her sleeves one by one until her forearms--with their curving young scars pink against the mahogany of her skin--touch the air. It's chilly.
"Or there's nothing, and the nothing is too big, and you need something because if you can still bleed you're not a ghost and--" she makes a small pained gasp and slams her eyes shut and now she's red-faced and miserable looking and maybe it hadn't been that way for him and it wasn't a bridge it was a pile of weights that should have been hers, she should have kept them, shouldn't have said anything, and she curls around it as much as she can while still in the saddle.
Re: cw: self harm
Having the tendency to retreat every time someone gets a little further inside his head, Cade is paralyzed by his dueling desires to speak extensively on the subject or never again.
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She hadn't meant to say all of that. Just enough that Cade would trust it wasn't something she'd judge him for. Instead, she'd lost control of it and had laid bare how fragile and tenuous her grasp on the world had been. Is still, sometimes.
Spoken or not, she supposes he'd seen it already in the pre-dawn Grove, with the clarity that bitter cold always brings. Had seen her barely able to stand, or to struggle into Kit's tunic. Or, well, he hadn't seen the latter, he'd been facing the wall with bright pink ears at the time--which makes a small smile twitch briefly on her lips. It's enough of a change in her mood to let her look over at him, although she startles a little to see him looking back.
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It's that which tips the balance, and though still quite red himself, Cade meets her gaze with the faintest of encouraging smiles.
"I'm... sorry," he says quietly, with a newfound conscientiousness, "...for... making things awkward with your family."
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“I made us travel only at night for a week before I stopped thinking everyone I saw was going to try to kill us,” she says dryly, “Trying to find out how to get to Skyhold listening for rumors of the Inquisition at the windows of taverns and inns.
“Things changed, at Skyhold. I didn’t want them to. I wanted the Inquisition to know how to cure her, to do it, and to let us get back to the life we’d had. They didn’t know, we stayed, and I learned things. About people. About what was happening to the world.
“I love my family,” she says, fiercely. “More than anything. But I can’t go back to the way Dahlasanor lives after all this. After knowing what we’re fighting. What the price is for losing. After making shem’len friends who had the sheer audacity to be likable.” A smile twitches briefly on her lips, and then disappears as Nari sighs and ruffles her hair. “They knew that, when I stayed in Kirkwall after Sina’s death. My bringing you here... everything that happened... it was just proof they couldn’t deny anymore.”
She looks embarrassed, burying her fingers in the horse’s mane again to work a small plait into it. “I’m sorry. You apologized and for your trouble I near told you my life’s story. I don’t usually talk this much.”
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"I don't mind," he assures her when she's finished, and looks off into the distance for a bit, happy to have the distraction from his aching arrow wounds. "...I think... I think the Inquisition changed a lot of things. For everyone." As bad as his experience has been with it, Cade isn't foolish enough to still be alive if another purpose hadn't been found for him.
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The ride back to Kirkwall is blessedly uneventful, accompanied by the tentative birdsong of early spring and the bracing wind that periodically shivers through Cade's bandages. Getting home will be a relief, but despite all the trouble, this hasn't turned out so bad after all.