[closed] it's not the long walk home that will change this heart

[onlyhymns]

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

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.

Comments

cw: self harm

[nadasharillen]

Nari is flustered as he looks away and lowers his head slightly, his face going red again. Something she'd said? Something she hadn't? Just embarrassment at having been witnessed?

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

[onlyhymns]

As Nari speaks, Cade slowly, uncertainly lifts his gaze to watch her. He'd never suspected that anyone else could feel the way he does, and the elf's gift with words is such that he feels them intimately without even having to know what she does. Seeing her scars confirms it, and suddenly there's an ally. He doesn't know what to do with an ally.
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.

[nadasharillen]

Nari, for her part, is looking very determinedly at the path, her cheeks still ruddy.

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.

[onlyhymns]

The constant hurt in his leg and shoulder, compounding with the general Rest Of It that he carries about with him always, dwindles some to see Nari so unsure of herself. So... honest.
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."

[nadasharillen]

“It’s fi—” Nari starts, and then cuts herself off with a quiet laugh and a wry sheepish smile. It wasn’t fine, and since she’d just gotten at him for saying so, she amended the words. “It’s... it was bound to happen, sooner or later. We were so... there were only the twenty three of us who’d survived the raid, in the heart of forest together for eighteen years. Leaving was the most terrifying thing I’d ever done, but Sina dying was even more terrifying than that.

“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.”

[onlyhymns]

Catching her laugh, Cade's smirk grows a little, though it remains at a respectful size for the subject matter. He knows so little of the Dalish that isn't from Beleth or now from Nari, the rest of his impressions being entirely borne of rumor and books written by people like himself.

"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.

[nadasharillen]

It’s something Nari’s certainly able to chew on for a while, as they travel. Everything that’s changed; how much “everything” truly was. Before wandering off into the thought though, she tilts her head slightly at Cade, curious as to whether he meant to continue aloud or lapse back into quiet as he was wont to.

[onlyhymns]

They're not quite that far yet, into a place where he can openly unpack things like how desperately broken his self-worth has always been, how current events have torn that open so wide it can never be hidden again. He has to take peace where he can get it, and, with their lapse into silence, this seems to be as good a place as any.

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.