White lilies and a missing woman, it's a familiar story in Kirkwall, the kind of headline shouted about on street corners as people pass by, tutting about what the city is coming to. A familiar story, no longer just a story, now the latest in the long line of tragedies which have plagued the Amell house, the death of Leandra Hawke.
Hightown dons its black armbands for the death of one of its own, and whispers in its parlours and at the market and in the Chantry.
"Terrible, just terrible." They sniff over their tea and cakes.
"They say it was her daughter who found her you know." The gossip is too good not to share.
"The one with the absurd name? Moss or Vine or something, isn't it?"
"Briar, darling, yes." She continues. "They say she hunted the madman down herself."
"Oh, how awfully pedestrian. Isn't that what we have a city guard for?" The conversation turns to something more palatable.
It's not so easy for the one left behind.
The guard hadn't been there when the injured man had fallen on his latest, unsuspecting victim. They hadn't been there when her brother and daughter tried to retrace her steps. It hadn't been the guard frantically following the trail of blood to the cellar in the foundry, running through the Lowtown streets, oblivious for once to the possibility of attack, and hoping against hope that this time it would end well. It had been her, it had been Briar, who led that desperate search, who leapt into frenzied battle, daggers whirling, a black and silver blur as she sliced through flesh and shattered bone. And it had been Briar with whom the dying woman had shared a few last words, in the dark basement, before she was gone.
Before the last of her family was gone.
Briar didn't cry there. Not in the dark, kneeling in the filth and surrounded by the stench of death, of decaying corpses, old bones and dried blood, cradling the body, the living corpse, that was both her mother and not her mother. She didn't cry there, when she closed Leandra's eyes, once so warm, like amber in the sunlight, now clouded and empty.
Had they even been her eyes?
She didn't cry in the moments after, when she let the lifeless body fall, hands shaking, the red mist descending, until all she could see and feel and taste was the salty bitterness of blood, of vengeance, and her enemies weren't dead enough. Not yet. She didn't cry when indulged every primal, primitive urge, hacking the monster responsible to pieces, the silence only broken by her grunts of exertion, the howls of her hound, matching snarls on their faces as the butcher's blood soaked her skin, her friends looking on in horror.
Her eyes were dry, too, in the library that night, dry as the logs which fed the fire, when she told Gamlen that his sister was gone forever. He blamed her, for a moment, just a moment, relented quickly, more forgiving than Leandra had been outside Lothering. He just wanted answers. But Briar knew the truth, and it only made it harder, only made it more senseless, not less, so she kept it to herself. Anyway, he had already guessed the truth, even if he rejected it. Mother was dead because she, Hawke, couldn't save her.
She said as much to Anders, later, staring into another fire, voice quiet and flat.
"She wouldn't want you to blame yourself." He'd replied.
It didn't matter. Only the living can want, and her mother was dead. Dead, and she could have stopped it, could have prevented it, if she hadn't been so caught up in her own life, if she'd paid more attention, if she'd made more of an effort in her investigations. She knew, she knew, that she could have stopped it. But she hadn't. And now her mother was dead.
Briar has the house decorated with white lilies for the funeral reception. Mother's friends seem impressed. She half-remembers that white lilies are supposed to mean purity in the ridiculous language they use to send each other messages with bouquets. Maybe they think she's trying to make a statement. Or maybe it's just the obvious display of wealth, a house full of lilies in the middle of winter, with the frost thick on the ground. Idle thoughts soon chased away by the more pressing realisation that this is Mother's funeral, she's dead, she's gone.
Her own friends are disturbed by the display. She can see it in a half-dozen looked exchanged, Sebastian to Aveline to Varric, Fenris to Isabela to Anders, back and forth. She pretends not to notice. She doesn't care. Somehow it feels morbidly appropriate to have the killer's calling card scattered around the home of his last victim. It feels right to fill the space with little white reminders of her failure, like notes everywhere she looks, reading: here's another life you couldn't save, here's another death you failed to prevent.
She stands near the library doors during the reception, stands vigil by Sandal's table, the vase with the original bouquet just out of reach, as half of Hightown comes to offer their condolences. Do I even know you, she wonders, more than once. It doesn't matter, really, because she can't hear the words they speak over the sound of the lilies in her head.
"You lost her." They whisper, the blooms, the soft whorl of petal as perfect as her mother had been mutilated. "It's your fault."
Their voices swell, the words blend together, louder and louder, until the low hum of polite conversation, the tinkle of glasses, of cutlery on porcelain, has been drowned, obliterated by the accusations. Her vision blurs, the familiar browns and reds of the room washed away in a sea of white. White lilies, white gown, white veil, white skin, soft and cold and dead and in her head all she can hear is "Your fault!"
She excuses herself before it's over, before the voices and the images and the pressure build to the point where she's forced to run screaming from the room. Today isn't a good day to make a scene.
She spends two days in bed. Anders makes an effort to rouse her, to comfort her, to connect somehow. She turns away. She doesn't want to be consoled. Eventually he leaves her be, a presence she's dimly aware of, there if she needs him, nothing more.
By the time she gets up, most of the detritus from the reception is gone. Orana is puttering around the foyer, tidying the correspondence, the note and the cards on the desk, removing the bundles of flowers still scattered about the room. Briar watches it all from the stairs, not able to move any further, but not wanting to return to the bedroom either. She simply sits, until Orana approaches Sandal's table, and reaches for the vase of those first lilies.
"Wait." Her voice is a croaking whisper, rusty from two days of silence. She clears her throat and tries again as the elf's slender hand clasps the stems. "Wait." She repeats. "Leave those ones."
The girl bobs a curtsey and moves on to other duties. If she's startled by her mistress' request, she doesn't show it.
Briar stays on the stairs, staring at the lilies on the table. She's sure they know she's there, that they're staring back. "Too late," they whisper to her, "too slow." She turns and goes back to her room.
She returns to life a little more each day, her world expanding again, from the bedroom to the kitchen, the library. As she comes back the lilies are fading, they wilt, the blossoms drooping, the stems bending under the weight. It only makes them louder.
"You failed her," they tell her as she passes by. "You failed them all! Failed Father, failed Carver. Failed Bethany. Now you've failed her." They're crushing her, suffocating her, squeezing the life out of her, even as they're dying themselves, leaves yellowing. But she keeps them where they are. She needs to be reminded; she wants to be reminded.
She deserves to be reminded.
The lilies are dead in the vase, the petals brown and brittle, leaves dried and fallen undisturbed on the table, by the time she's able to leave the house. A quiet night at the Hanged Man, interrupted early when Anders receives word of an accident in Darktown, tunnels and rubble and poor refugees. He kisses her on the head as he walks out the door, and she doesn't see the look he gives Varric, her face buried in the first of many mugs in a long, long night.
He doesn't come back, so it's Fenris who helps her home, half-leading, half-carrying her to her front door. He watches to be sure she gets inside, but she doesn't invite him in, and he doesn't impose. He simply vanishes into the night, like the ghost Varric often accuses him of being.
The house is quiet, the servants and the dog asleep, as she walks through the entrance and into the main hall. It's all quiet, silent as the grave, until she sees the lilies, dead on the table. Or maybe they see her. They don't whisper anymore. They shout.
"YOU FAILED!" and in the shout she can hear the echo of the voices of her family. "You were too late! You were too slow! Too weak! Too stupid! How could you not have known? It's ALL YOUR FAULT!"
And it continues, it builds, and as she braces herself on the table to stare them down, room spinning around them, the voices fill her head, bearing down. Her shoulders sag. It's all she can hear, all she can feel, the pressure building on her chest, until she's sure her heart won't beat, her lungs won't fill. She just wants a little peace, a little room to breathe, to think…
"SHUT UP!" She screams. "Just SHUT! UP!" Hands made clumsy by hours of drinking sweep the vase away, the crash of ceramic on stone mingling with her echoed cries.
The voices stop.
Unsteady feet stumble to the wreckage, and, breathing heavily, she stares at the remnants. Fragments crunch underfoot, deafening in the sudden silence.
"It wasn't my fault," she whispers to the dead lilies, as her legs, barely able to hold her before, finally give out.
"It wasn't my fault." Tears well and overflow as shards, like tiny knives, cut into her hands, her legs.
"It wasn't my fault!" she declares, louder, crying in earnest. "I'm sorry. Oh Maker, I'm sorry." She shakes her head, frantic. "Can you hear me Da? I'm so, so sorry. I did everything. I did everything I could. But I couldn't stop it. I couldn't. I'm sorry."
She's sobbing, but in between the tears and the confession and the apology she hears her own words. She hears Maker and it's not my fault and she finds herself screaming to the ceiling, "WHY?! Why do you keep taking them from me!? What do you want with them? Just give them back to me! Give them back! Givethemback givethemback givethemback…"
The words run together and she's crying too hard to speak, gasping for air between the sobs, choking on hair and tears. Choking on grief and guilt built up over the years, braced on hands and knees over the evidence of her latest failure, struggling to breathe. Struggling to live.
When Anders returns she's still on the floor, silently sobbing in the empty room, arms wrapped around herself, blood and tears smeared on hands and legs and face. She doesn't turn when he approaches, doesn't notice him at all until he's with her, pulling her into his arms. Then he's there and she's clinging to him, arms tight around his chest, coat bunched in her fists, her face buried in the feathers on his shoulders, tear-soaked hair sticking to his neck. He holds her close, heedless of the blood and the shards and dead flowers on the floor. He rocks her until she quiets, until the tears have stopped and the incoherent murmurs have finished. He holds her until the sun peers in through the eastern windows and he's almost certain she's falling asleep.
But she makes no move to let him go, because the lilies whispered one last thing before the end.
"We've taken them all. Do you think we won't take him too?"