Title: dooms of love
Author: Jade Sabre
Notes: A sort-of follow-on to my fic "Domestication," inspired by YouTube videos, since the conversation in my game is bugged. Thanks, YouTube!

The title comes from the poem "my father moved through dooms of love" by e.e. cummings. Alternate title: "dooms of feel." Oh Mr. Cummings, you know me so well.

She has a son.

He is—surprised, and after a moment's examination he puts it down to too many stories of witches and magic and too little thought to the natural order of things, to forget that a child born of ritual and darkness might be bound by nature as much as anything else.

A son.

He does not delude himself into thinking that it is his son—he'd given away that right, freely, in exchange for his life—but he cannot help looking for traces of his blood in the dark hair, the strong nose, the furrow of his brow as he sits reading a book his mother handed him as soon as she saw the Warden lurking at the edges of the garden. She is not looking at him, but her arms are crossed possessively, a warning. And he'd made a promise ten years ago; and though few would believe it, he does try to be a man of his word.

Ten years ago the world had gone up in light and he'd lived to tell the tale; now the sky's jagged edges shine bright over their heads, and having come this far he can hardly avoid the encounter, at least with the mother. He will not bother the boy—

a son

—and he'd never—there'd been no chance to even entertain the desire; after Anora had been born they'd been warned another child would be Celia's death—and then she'd died anyway; but Anora had been—enough. More than enough, taking to sword and shield as easily as he'd taken to ribbons and curls, secrets shared between them in the spaces that belonged to neither Maric nor Ferelden, the quiet understandings of two fiercely protective and independent souls. And now she sits a country away wearing Ferelden's crown and the Theirin name and even now she is his world, though she rules in circles almost entirely out of his reach; she lives, and he is a dead man walking.

(No, not sitting. She'll be pacing, he amends; Anora never was one for sitting still.)

And he's barely thought of the child—never imagined a boy—and yet upon seeing him there is an all-too-familiar pang, as if his attempts to quell his fatherly worries have faltered in the face of a new target. He reminds himself there is no prospect, that this path, too, is beyond him, and yet—

he remembers a younger man, and a motherless girl in pigtails, and another garden, the scent of roses in the air and the sense of being hopelessly lost lingering in his mind even as she looked at him with her mother's brave smile and said, "Don't worry, Papa, we'll be all right," and he—

watches the witch look at her son, and remembers, and knows he does not have the right.

So he steps forward, out of the boy's sight; the witch inclines her head to him, arms still crossed, waiting; and he says quietly, if only to clear the air, "That—?"

"He knows nothing," she says sharply, though her voice is equally soft. He raises an eyebrow, remembering a hot-headed girl driven by friendship and fear who seemed to know little of the role she was accepting, who cared more for the knowledge and less for the practicalities that awaited. She glances at her son, and her expression gentles, though he doubts she realizes it. "Of you. Of any of it."

"And when will you tell him?" he asks.

"He is an innocent," she says, flatly, but she is protesting—fate, he thinks, a fate she chose for the boy long before she knew him. He remembers Maric pressing for a betrothal between their children, thinking it was too much for the babe in her mother's lap, not yet knowing the steel will behind the wide trusting eyes. And he remembers, too, feeling all-too-strongly the unfairness of life—something he'd long accepted for himself, something that seemed entirely unjust for his child, and he smiles, roughly.

"As we all were," he says, and she looks back to him, a mother's fear in her eyes—and she'd been innocent of that, when he'd last seen her, and he thinks the difference does her good. "Once."

"Yes," she says, as if what he says chafes, and he is—amused, that she should still be bothered by him, that she now understands him even as he has always understood her and yet still resents him for it. "And I would—"

"Spare him," he says, and the fear in her eyes relents a little. "I gave my word, madam. I merely wished—" and he isn't sure that he knows what he wished, not after all this time, and settles for, "to see." She glances from one to the other, as if making her own comparisons, and he offers, "He is a fine boy."

"Thank you," she says, and the faint lines around her eyes crinkle with involuntary fondness. He remembers thinking her a child, once, and this sudden proof of the passage of time sets his bones to aching. He looks at the boy and knows Anora, too, is a woman long grown, and for a moment he mourns all the time he spent in Denerim, missing—

"There is nothing like a child," he says, "to make you aware of your own mortality."

She looks at him, startled, and he knows it is not her mortality she fears; and he regrets his words. "Peace," he says. "I will not disturb yours any longer."

He sketches a bow and departs before she can respond. He catches a hint of a voice as he leaves—Mother, who was that?—but it is not his place to answer. (He remembers the incessant questions, and cannot keep a smile from his face.)

He will write Anora; and he won't speak of the Wardens, or politics, or the breach in the sky; he will take the liberties of an old man, and talk of children's toys and the fripperies of Orlesian fashion, swords and ribbons, and the whiff of Skyhold's roses on the breeze.