A short piece: a re-specialisation headcanon between Cole and Blackwall. Post-personal quest for both Blackwall and Cole, so will contain spoilers.

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Real Things

It turns in the light, glinting, blinking in the sun, shutting its eyes to pretend the pain isn't there. But it can't pretend, its eyes are always open...

'Cole?'

Can a voice be scarred? His voice is scarred. They called him Blackwall, and now they all know why, and now they're angry. But he's doing his best, and that's enough. It has to be enough, because if isn't enough for him, then it isn't enough for...

'Cole, you in there?'

High on the walls of Skyhold, Blackwall approaches slowly, eyes narrowed, measuring the situation. He's still a soldier, even now, and caution is his watchword. The spirit, the boy, sits on the parapet with legs crossed, turning a dagger over and over in his hand as if seeing it for the first time. And perhaps he is. Where before he saw the thing with the eyes of a spirit, now he is something more, and he looks on the blade with human eyes.

'It's all in here,' Cole half replies, speaking to the cold air, still staring into the blade as the sunlight dances on its surface. 'All the frozen hurt, like dead things in ice.'

'And here I thought you'd be in a fairytale mood,' Blackwall mutters.

Cole doesn't look around, makes barely even a motion to indicate that he sees or hears the man.

'I open them up and real things fall out,' he says, 'And it hurts me like it hurts them. I don't want to see the real things any more. Don't you see them? You draw your sword and they're still there, the children, waiting for their real things to fall out...'

Blackwall can't help the chill that creeps through him at the words, and his wariness bleeds into something like morbid curiosity. There's nothing to hide now, nothing more to fear, so he would know what it is the boy sees inside his head. He approaches the parapet, his caution dropped, and leans on the wall, trying to peek up beneath the broad rim of Cole's hat to see those far-away eyes. The boy stares into the blade, mesmerised.

'Cole, look at me.'

With an obvious effort, the boy breaks the blade's hold on him, and he meets Blackwall's gaze.

'I see those children every day,' Blackwall says, but it isn't Blackwall, not really. Now it's Tom Rainier, looking out through Blackwall's eyes, howling from deep within. 'Every time I draw that sword, I see those children, and I think about why I'm holding a blade.'

'But you still make the real things fall out...'

'Yes, I do. Because if I don't, then some other poor fool will suffer for it.'

'Sometimes the people we kill are poor fools. The mages and the templars didn't all choose to be who they are.'

'Everyone makes a choice.'

Cole raises his head, looking out over the Frostbacks, the army of the Inquisition camped in the valley below, but Blackwall knows his vision goes further still.

'A letter from far away,' Cole murmurs, 'To say that mother and father and brother are dead. The templars are coming. They burned the last village to the ground, on the whisper that a mage lived there. What can he do? He's not even a man, not yet. He runs away, and finds a new family...'

'Everyone has their reasons. A reason isn't the same thing as an excuse.'

Halfway to a full beard, a man drowning in his own thoughts, the ale no longer a balm. Mistakes aren't always things we do. Sometimes mistakes are things that happen to us, too swift for us to notice in the moment we could have changed it all-

'You had a reason, once.'

'I did. That's how I know one from the other.'

Cole twists to face Blackwall, and for the first time he looks the man full in the eye. The difference almost gives Blackwall pause. Cole is here, real and present, for the first time since he appeared on their doorstep. There's a keen edge to him, something more than what he was before the change. Blackwall can't quite put his finger on it, and that, he supposes, is sort of the point.

The boy looks confused for a moment.

'But when the dagger finds where it needs to go, the reasons all fall out, along with the real things, and everything becomes lumps of other things.'

'Blade work is bloody work, Cole. There's no escaping that.'

'I don't think my work is blade work.'

Blackwall suppresses the smallest of smiles. That keenness is there in the boy's voice, too. A show of lucidity that promises future change.

'You mean to say you won't fight?'

'No, I have to fight. There are too many people out there hurting others, and the bad people carry hurt in their hands.'

'Perhaps we should find you a change of weapon, then. Something a bit cleaner. A fight is bloody business, but there are ways to go about it that won't give you so much to think about.'

Blackwall frowns in thought.

'Now, look,' he says. 'I'm no marksman, but I can show you how to shoot a bow.'

'Like Varric?'

'I mean a real bow. One you have to be a real person to shoot.'

'Varric isn't real?'

Blackwall lets out a dry bark of laughter.

'Not entirely, no, but that's not my point. Come, I'll show you.'

Blackwall leads Cole down from the battlements, to the stables he has all but claimed for his own. He gestures to the far wall, where bales of hay are stacked.

'They'll serve us for targets. Now...'

From a rack on the wall, Blackwall fetches down a bow with a light draw, and hands it to the boy. The boy takes it, half in wonder, turning the thing end on end in a way that tests more than just its weight. A small sad smile tugs at one corner of his mouth.

'It remembers a time when the elves would pass through the wood, wending, working, singing magic. It waits for the day the magic comes back.'

'Right. In the meantime, what say we use it to shoot some arrows?'

'Yes,' Cole says, and Blackwall can almost feel the shift in his awareness, as if Cole has just stepped into the room from many leagues away. 'We should shoot some arrows.'

The basics take more work than Blackwall had expected. Cole, it seems, has long worn a human body without truly understanding it, and now he finds himself thinking about it for perhaps the first time. The soldier talks Cole through the way to plant his feet, the way to nock the arrow, and to draw the bow not with his arms, but with the muscles of his back. Hold, he says, and when you're ready, simply uncurl your fingers. The sheer act of teaching a pattern he knows so thoroughly unknots something in Blackwall's chest, relieves a pressure in his skull.

They abandoned the talk about eye dominance, however, when it threatened to turn complex. It seems Cole does not aim with his eyes.

After several false starts, Cole finds himself holding the bow at full draw, arm beginning to tremble as his mind wanders.

'It's complicated,' he says. 'So many things to do at once, like taming ants.'

'I said you'd need to be a real person to shoot a bow, didn't I? You'd best get to know it. It won't be any easier in a fight.'

Blackwall takes a position with his back to the boy, with a bow of his own, facing down-range.

'Now, feet planted, just like we said. If you're wanting the arrow to go to the same place twice, then you need to be the same twice over. You move your feet, you move the arrow. You move your anchor, you move the arrow. You can't just think your way through this one, Cole. You have to be a real boy.'

'My arm is tired.'

Blackwall glances over his shoulder.

'Maker's balls, you're not supposed to just stand there holding the damn thing. Loose your arrow or come down.'

Cole lowers the bow, and watches as Blackwall runs through the motions.

Nock. Raise. Draw. Release.

The arrow zips from the bow, thudding into the bale.

'There,' Blackwall says. 'One less to worry about.'

Cole looks between the bow and the arrow for a second, the expression on his face not unlike a dog hearing a new noise.

'It's like real magic!'

'I don't know what that means.'

'Mages bend the world, clawing, changing, shaping new things. But you think of the bow and it happens! It's real!'

'I'll take that as a good sign. Now, Sera's more skilled with a bow than me, but-'

'Bad influences.'

'Well, I wasn't going to say that.'

'It's okay. You want it to be you. We both did bad things and we looked away, so we know where we should never look again.'

That morbid curiosity is in Blackwall's head again; that desire to hear his own thoughts out loud, coupled with a fear of the selfsame thing. The guilty, he muses, can't help but find fascination in their own horror.

'Something like that,' he replies. 'Now, it's your turn to try.'

Cole follows the motion. Nock...

A indrawn breath. It all rests on this moment. The end of the war on the end of an arrow-

Raise.

A retreat? Now? But the darkspawn still come-

Draw.

The righteous stand before the darkness and the Maker shall guide their hand...

Release.

He turns, the shaft buried in his ribs, and gives one final smile-

The arrow sings through the air, striking the bale, and Blackwall whistles through his teeth.

'Not bad at all. We'll make a right bowman of you yet.'

Cole is pleased, not for the mechanical action of weapon to target, but for not feeling the need to speak out with every voice that sings to him.

They practice for an hour more, and at the end of it Blackwall swears that Cole's arrows fly truer than his own, guided by something more than the hand and the eye. He remembers Varric telling him what the boy had said once: I go where the knife needs to be, but he doesn't let himself think too hard about that one.

There's something calming in it all. The motion, the lessons, the simple companionship of training together. It's an acceptance Blackwall hasn't tried to obtain in a long time, and one he hasn't dared look for since the truth made itself known. Perhaps even since he took the name of Blackwall. It's a memory of better times, when the oncoming beast of a man's own future is unknown to him, and he remembers halcyon days under bright sunshine, when he was as young and green as Cole is now.

'I'm glad I helped,' Cole says suddenly, breaking Blackwall from his reverie. 'I wasn't sure if I still could.'

'What?' is all Blackwall can manage in response.

'Nothing. Thank you.'

Cole fits another arrow to the string, as if nothing has been said.

'Well,' the soldier says. 'Just...remember what I've told you, and you'll do just fine.'

'Remember,' Cole echoes, sharp as a knife, swift as an arrow, and his voice holds the far-away tone that gives Blackwall a sinking feeling, and recalls to him that for all the familiarity he sees in Cole, there are leagues between them still. 'If you want to remember, remember this: if you become Rainier again, I will be here.'

Cole draws back the string, holds for a moment, and then lets fly the arrow.

'And I will kill you.'

Blackwall opens his mouth to reply, but Cole isn't finished yet. As he speaks, he nocks another arrow.

'And if I become a demon again and hurt people...'

Draw. Hold. Release.

The arrow strikes the bale dead centre.

'You will kill me.'

Blackwall nods, strangely at peace with the notion, the ghost of Tom Rainier for a moment quiescent. Not so strange, perhaps. The boy has been talking the whole while about helping people. But Blackwall has never truly let himself understand before now.

'I believe I can work with that,' he replies, after a long moment.