A/N: This was originally written for a challenge on dao_challenge over on livejournal - something about keeping a memento of a loved one. It... changed.
Reflections
Shianni was just as she remembered her.
"One day," she said to her group of travelling companions, after she had wiped a few tears from her eyes, "we will go back to my home in Denerim and see them in person." They had nodded and smiled, not knowing anything of what her whirlwind rage through the Arl's castle had done to that home.
Of course, there was sadness and regret in the stone of that pendant, but to her there was more joy. It held reflections of her home and her family, where she had come from and where she would undoubtedly return to. The pain of seeing her betrothed bleeding his death on the cobbled floor and knowing her own failure in Shianni's fate – it had faded a little in the urgency of the Blight and in the grand travels that she was leading, and now she could look back upon Shianni's face in her memory without seeing the blood run down her wedding clothes. And with her new life and with the things she had witnessed since then, what was a kidnap and a few dead guards to her now?
She put away the necklace into a far corner of her pack, and rarely thought about it again. The memories of the living were more important to her than a memento given by a spirit. On occasion, rifling through the messy contents of her backpack, she noticed its sparkle and had reason to take it out – though it was usually only in the telling of her adventures in the Gauntlet around the campfire. After the storytelling, she would stare into the ceiling of her tent and remember her father, her cousins, Shianni, Soris... she smiled, because she was doing this for them, saving the world and all she loved from the Blight.
One day, after the Blight had long ended, she found the necklace stuffed into a pocket of an old tunic. She gave it to Shianni and thought it a good ending.
The party was somewhat surprised to see him so serious, stripped for once of any mocking replies, when he answered the Guardian and when he ran into the spirit in the Gauntlet. Of course they knew who he was talking to – he had never made a secret of his past, his recent losses or what he planned to do with Arl Rendon Howe once they reached Denerim, but even so the truth of it still took some of them aback. Perhaps they could not quite register how real the murder of his family was without seeing the evidence with their own eyes.
For him, though, it was a different matter. There had not been an hour in any day when he had not thought about Bryce and Eleanor Cousland, how he had abandoned them in that cold and dirty kitchen, Orianna and little Oren and his dire-bunny-killing sword of truthiness, poor sweet innocent Iona... and then of that traitor Howe. His friendly jokes as well as the snide comments hid that anger, but it was constantly seething under the surface.
The spirit talked of letting go, of peace and progress, but he could not. It was not that the words didn't affect him, for even though he knew it was no real father that stood before him and just some trickery of this mountain, he could almost believe that Bryce Cousland was advising him in that familiar gentle tone and he could find no cruel words to throw at this pretend-father.
And as always, he seemed completely unable to actually take that advice, however true it rang. He could no more let go of his anger and need for vengeance than he could kill his own father, or this spirit who pretended to be him. He took the necklace almost reverently and wore it as a reminder of the journeys he had been on and the sights he had seen as well as of the family he had lost, but he could not do as his father – the Gauntlet – asked.
It did not come as much of a surprise when the murder of Arl Howe brought almost no resolution, except for a strange sense of emptiness where the hot anger had lived just moments before. He touched the necklace around his neck and sighed.
She had no place for guilt-ridden introspection or doubt. There was only the present and the future, the unwavering belief that she would find her way back to the throne of Orzammar, and this impertinent Guardian had no right to pry into her past. She refused his questions proudly, because she was an princess of House Aeducan and would not answer to these human gods and their disrespectful questioning.
In the same vein, this spectre of Trian had no place to demand remorse from her, or to wonder about her emotions. Of course she thought about her past – it was hard to completely block out that one catastrophic event that had brought down the whole of her own plans for the crown – and of course she acknowledged them, because after all, even princesses make mistakes and are outplayed by their little brothers. But she would not allow this crumbling human temple to search her soul and ask for meaningless apologies; she had not quite sunk to that level yet.
She did not have relics to remember her past by, and nor did she want them. Those memories were all too clear in her head, and in any case all her belongings had been stripped from her before her last descent into the Deep Roads. None of this had so far made any impression on the firmness of her ambitions or nature, and a ghost of a dead failure of a brother was hardly going to change that.
He remembered Jowan all too clearly in his prison cell at Recliffe, and before then, stabbing his own hand in a fountain of blood and betrayal. He did not need another reminder of the man, this spirit masquerading as his old friend. If Jowan had not found Lily in the quiet of the chapel, if Jowan had not turned to those forbidden arts, if Jowan had not lied and pleaded and gained his trust, if Jowan had not asked him to help in his last desperate plan... if Jowan had not just been one big failure from the beginning, then none of this would have happened. He would have no Blight resting on his shoulders and no reason to step outside the familiar boundaries of the Mages' Tower. He would have no undeserved guilt riding on his back – undeserved, he knew it, but all the same he could not get rid of it. He squeezed the necklace tight in his hand, relishing the pain it gave him, and strode on.
What else could he have done? What else should he have done? Part of him longed to return to that dungeon below Recliffe Castle and tell Jowan to run, be free, live whatever dreams you dreamt as we ran through the Tower's basement. Another part said that he should have asked for execution, for that was justice – and Jowan was no friend of his now – and surely a better fate than what awaited him now. Instead, a foolish compromise, since the templars at Mages' Tower would undoubtedly call for Tranquility now that execution had been vetoed, and that... no-one deserved that.
Or perhaps he could have stopped the whole disaster in his tracks; if only he had noticed Jowan's hopelessness and desperation before he had tried his hand at blood magic, or if he had managed to talk him out of his escape plan and then somehow talk the entire Chantry out of the Rite of Tranquility, or another million things that he could have done. Well, here was the result of his indecisiveness – the Tower in ruins, Jowan most likely Tranquil and himself weighed down with guilt that wasn't even his. He knew, really, that there was nothing that he could have done to stop Jowan or Uldred or the whole of this dammed situation... and somehow, that hopelessness was worse.
He threw the necklace down onto the ground and stamped on it violently – the rest of the party watched, unwilling to interrupt his private anger. He didn't need it, he didn't need Jowan and he certainly didn't need to be reminded of him.
They had never seen her cry. What right did they have for that, anyway? These people were not and would not be her friends, and she had pushed them away before they could even try to strike up such a relationship. So them, who had asked Alistair to awkwardly bring her a handkerchief, or Zevran to talk to her, reminiscing about his memories of the Dalish, or Leliana to hug her and tell her that all stories came to a resolution? It wasn't right – she had no need for these sentiments, since these days she could see no meaning in anything save death, and for the past half-year that had been the only end she brought. (She had only spared the assassin Zevran because he was an elf, and by the Creators she needed another of her people – however Antivan or city-dwelling they were – in this shem-filled world, and she would not really care if she found his knife between her ribs one night. Perhaps she would welcome it, if it came.) She flinched away from their attention, hating the way that her heart longed for even a shem's concern, and hating the way that she could feel her heart at all. It was a reminder of happier times and not, she thought, something that she should bring with her to this sad ghost of a life.
In truth, her own death had come that half-year ago – her soul had died that day when Tamlen touched the mirror, and nothing had touched her since. Being a Grey Warden was a drawn-out kind of ending, but it was an ending all the same. She had not bothered with emotions, guilt or hesitation since. Alistair might mumble a small word of uncertainty (was there really any point in killing that elderly mage in her tower? Should she really have slit that merchant's throat without a second thought?) and Morrigan might look at her with renewed approval, but none of it had ever registered in her dulled mind. To be sentenced to this walking death, lost forever from her dear wandering home, travelling for days and nights on end between these unmemorable and repulsive human towns - there was nothing more, was there?
So it was a surprise when a trickster masquerading as one of her lost Dalish family had inspired such tears. The group that had accompanied her to the Gauntlet might have seen just a flicker of sentiment on her normally stony face, but it was enough. That evening, sitting with Morrigan away from the merrymaking of the camp and staring at that useless spirit-given trinket, the emotions had come back with their full brutal force. She had almost forgotten that she had ever smiled, ever felt sadness at yet another death, ever could have stayed Tamlen's hand out of mercy for one meaningless human life... ever felt anything except the detached satisfaction of decapitating another unfortunate villager.
Once, she had loved (her people, her life, her world) – and now, she cried at the mere memory.
It seemed the Ancestors just couldn't let him forget, could they? He had tried to put Dust Town behind him and tried to accept this new destiny on the surface. He was no duster anymore – he was a Grey Warden, one of the last two in this Ferelden country, and he had to stop the Blight. No more scrounging for scraps at the feet of a crime lord thug and no more petty theft just to feed a drunken mother. He had almost succeeded as well. These days he didn't think about much else except how many darkspawn his axe had beheaded.
Still, returning to Orzammar and clearing out that Carta hideout that had started this whole business had taken its toll. Leske, that Stone-forsaken idiot, of course he would go and betray them. He should have seen it coming. In Dust Town, you couldn't count on your best friends to stay by you to any end, and Leske was no friend. Maybe he'd become too used to Alistair's brand of human honour, because he really shouldn't have been so surprised by the turn of events.
In any case, Leske was now well in the past, and the Jarvia business had shown him that Leske did indeed belong there. Since he had almost succeeded in moving on past his casteless origins, after the whole Orzammar treaty business it had not taken too long to forget about either of them. The Carta was just another irrelevant group and Leske was just a name, another death amongst countless others, barely connected to his story now.
Which made it all the more irritating when that false version of him had appeared to him in the Gauntlet and handed him that bloody necklace to remember him by. He did not want a reminder of Leske or Dust Town or, for that matter, anything from that blighted Orzammar. Of course he would look back with fond thoughts on Rica, but he could not imagine ever living in that place again, not even with his family in the royal palace. He was a true surface dwarf now. This amulet wasn't even dwarf-made; it was a mockery of his old life, baiting him to relive those unwelcome memories.
Gifts from the Fade had no place in his hands, anyway. He gave the pretty necklace to Morrigan and was glad to be rid of it.
A/N no.2: Here are the PCs in case you really couldn't tell which origins are which, and the reason that they are unnamed in the fic:
1. Kalamari Tabris (the cheerful one)
2. SacredBob Cousland (the jokey one)
3. Tim Aeducan (the ruthless one)
4. Hosomaki Surana (the nice but angsty one), replace with Amell if you like
5. Mohita Mahariel (the depressed murder-happy one)
6. Billybob Brosca (... who actually has no personality).