NOTE: Hello all! Uh, this is my first multi-chapter Dragon Age fanfiction. It is, yes, another one of those retellings of Blight stuff, but don't plan on the inclusion of any extensive amounts of in-game dialogue. Also don't plan on this Cousland being like any Cousland you've ever met.
This chapter is a bit short - just sort of an introduction. (So I promise it gets more exciting after this!) Please, please feel free to tell me what you think! I already have the second chapter mostly-written so expect it soonish...if I don't die of nervousness first. Eheheh...heh.
Also, before I forget, many thanks to Sushifer on BSN as well as Morwen33 for their assistance. X3
All right...here goes...
...
The garden is all pleasant cobbled paths and blossoming roses and sprays of Andraste's Grace and six other flowers she recognizes, and three she doesn't, and one strong and twisting vine that is weaving its way up the estate's stone wall, all on its own. There are the other thorny shrubs, the ones she landed in after scaling the wall, and patches of the soft little leaves that rub up against her legs like kittens, and the spongy dirt beneath them that almost silences her footfalls as she approaches the garden's only other occupant (guards aside): another girl, who stands only a little taller but manages years more pride and composure in her straightened back.
"I brought you something else," she says, shaking the bramble from her hair, and her voice sounds as scratchy and scrawny as she is.
"Oh? And what is it?" asks the other child, golden eyebrows lifting with polite interest.
"Elfroot." The disheveled girl balls one fist into her dress, revealing the trousers she's wearing beneath as she bunches the fabric. She solemnly straightens her other arm to offer a bundle of an unimpressive plant, dirt still tumbling from its roots. Sagging, it looks its part: the type of plant that is weeded from this garden, because its roots sap away the flowers' lovely colors.
"Oh," says her companion, the one word ringing diplomatic. "I…much prefer roses. But thank you." Her eyebrows are still raised as she speaks, forming upon her face an expression of discomfort and civility and distance.
"But roses are stupid," the other girl continues to proffer the elfroot, oblivious or headstrong or maybe just distracted as she clarifies: "because all they do is prick you. Elfroot makes you all better." With a deep breath, she pushes on: "You could put it in your hair like a rose and then it's right there to use if you get hurt." She plucks one leaf from the plant and crushes it, rubbing it against one of the deep scratches from the thorny shrubs she leapt into, and her nose stings with its acrid scent. Already, however, the wound seems to be healing.
"I…" the other blinks, her tact failing momentarily before she restores her regal tone: "I cannot put elfroot in my hair." But she pulls the plant from the girl's hand, and soberly twists it into a messy, dirt-covered crown before placing it upon the girl's head with an apologetic smile.
The scrawny girl breathes slowly, fist loosening as she exhales and diverts her gaze to take in her surroundings, too afraid to look at her crowner, and then startles: in the shadows near the guards who stand watch over the girl with the lovely gold hair and the beautiful blue eyes has appeared another set of blue eyes—the eyes of a man who she's seen speaking to her father and a man who has never spoken to her but just stares at her quietly and a man who belongs here while she most definitely does not, and so she whips around and balls her dress up irreverently in her hands while she sprints over to the wall. She scrambles up and over, knees hugging to a pillar as she wiggles her way up, and the elfroot crown tumbles from her head before she makes the final leap over the top.
"Anora," says the man, after a pause. "Come. We're dining with Maric and I'm sure that Cailan is as impatient as ever for you to arrive."
She smiles, and with one glance back over the wall, follows her father.
...
She has been thinking of three things since fleeing the castle:
She has been thinking of Fergus and
oh Maker when he hears we'll tear Howe a new—
and she has been thinking of Atlas trotting beside her because
without him I'd—
and she has been thinking of being a Grey Warden and
by the Fade, I'm free.
She notices Duncan looking over his shoulder at her while they travel along the edge of the woods, and steadies her gaze forward, walking with her shoulders hunched over but with some barely contained power planting each foot firmly and quietly against the ground—prowling. The footfalls are carefully placed and beat half-time with her mabari's steps. "You seem to know your way through the wilderness," he says. It is not idle chatter. "Do you…"
"I spend time outdoors," she snaps before he can finish his sentence—if he intended to, anyway. Before—before the castle was just a pile of rubble and bodies miles behind them—she would creep into Fergus' room while he was training or learning this-or-that about being a Teyrn, and take a pair of his pants, and scale the castle walls when no one was looking, and disappear into the woods for the day. Her mabari, Atlas (Atlas, which, it had turned out, was not the Dalish word for dirt), would invariably find a way to meet her on the other side. They trekked into the woods and found tracks and took dirt-baths and for those moments nobody called her Lady Cousland and everything was right.
"I hope you enjoy it," Duncan seems to be fighting off a smile. "You'll be spending a great deal more time outdoors from now on."
"Good." It is good. It is exactly what she's always wanted—besides her parents being dead and the lovely elf woman from the kitchen being dead and her giggling blush silenced and her soft thighs charred—but—no—but—besides that, this is exactly what she wants. No Grey Warden has to be a lady, a Lady, and gossip carefully and wear paints on her face. Grey Wardens can be strong without being pretty because no one gives a damn who's killing the darkspawn as long as they're getting dead. She wonders if this is the end of the nightmares about marriage ceremonies where she smells of perfume and makes vows (vows!) to some sniveling nobleman. She will, she decides, wake up without wondering whether visions of unnamed Banns trying to press her back to the bed are eventualities, if her life will get ugly for slugging them across the face if they did so.
She stretches her toes in her boots, pretending she is barefoot and just running away like the normal days she'd run away. No use wondering how much it matters that she's only now getting the hang of fighting with a sword and dagger and that all she could ever really do was hide—hide, and climb, and pick locks when Fergus started thinking he could just hide his trousers away from her in trunks. She knows other, less useful things that would be of no benefit to her any more: like just how the guard who usually stood post at the kennels would blush when she shoved him up against the wall, and how the elf that lugged their laundry to and fro in the castle would find her in the cover of the shadows and submit his body to her as if he were hers to take. The thought of it makes the corners of her mouth twitch into a deeper frown and her teeth grind up against each other. They are probably dead now, the both of them. Those two and the kitchen elf, and more, all of her—all of the people who shared themselves with her and demanded no more, who kept quiet and made something sacred and feral out of those heartbeats.
"You know, Rima, being a Grey Warden does not mean you are forbidden from mourning the loss of your family," Duncan prompts, perhaps under the impression that her silence means she's holding something back, whimpers or tears or somber words.
She remains silent. She isn't thinking about—about the spark of hope as the burden of having to choose to stay or leave was removed from her shoulders—about—she isn't thinking about them.
It's not—
They aren't—
She isn't.
He clears his throat at the growls that seem to have issued from her without her noticing, at the mad way her eyes narrowed and widened as she circumnavigated everything that she could possibly… "I only thought that your loss might—upset you."
"'Upset me'? Andraste's blazing ass!" Rima drives her toe into the ground with a grunt, knocking a clod of dirt loose and then kicking it into a tree. She watches it burst against the trunk, and Duncan looks on with curious but careful eyes for a moment before continuing on without a word in response. Atlas whines and nudges up against her.
And at least he survived, she thinks. She remembers her parents bringing him, as a puppy, to her one morning when she was but a puppy herself. They were halfheartedly swearing and moaning that after all the time she spent sneaking off to the kennels it was going to happen sometime anyway… She thinks of her parents rolling their eyes at her nonsense-word name for the puppy as she repeatedly insisted: one of the elves told her that his mother from the alienage told him that her father had been a Dalish elf and he taught his mother some Dalish and his mother said something about earth to him once, in Dalish, and he swore it was atlas, that was the word. She thinks of Atlas' famous kitchen break-ins and Nan's shouting and Mum's soothing words to Nan (Nan! Maker bless her, Rima thinks, and remembers of all the trouble Nan has saved her from) and she thinks (doesn't think, doesn't think) of Papa's smirks as he snickered through sessions of scolding Rima for not watching Atlas more closely.
She never needed to, anyway—it was always Atlas watching her. He knew—he knew everything. And when she wasn't, she couldn't—he was and he could. She didn't know how to say it—but Fergus knew, too, what Atlas was for her. In the awkward moments when they couldn't say what they needed to with sarcastic jabs and crass comments, Atlas would curl up by Fergus and lick his face while Rima curled by the fire across the room, watching. And Fergus would scratch behind Atlas' ears, and his tail would thump, and so would Rima's chest. "What would we do without you?" he'd ask the dog sometimes, and Rima tried not to think too hard about that, either.
"We should arrive at Ostagar by the evening after next," Duncan tells her, and she is grateful to be snapped back to the snapping twigs as Duncan walks and the crunching leaves as she follows. "Then we can get the final details sorted out and officially declare you a Grey Warden."
A Grey Warden, she thinks, and for all the things that have gone so wrong lately, there is at least this, and it is the best thing that could have happened.