the natural disaster

lothering pt 1

She watched the sun go down, eating rabbit off a stick, and thought not for the first time that life was fucking weird.

And for all she thought, her heart started to beat faster.

She was better with panic when it wasn't paired with quiet.

Panic was for your hands, easier to beat into submission. All she had now was the sky, its mess of pink and orange, its clouds all soft and sweet and edible. When she breathed in, the fresh air seemed to go too deep. And Lothering was quiet, sat squat in the midst of a highway. They camped at its edge, arriving late into the night. Looking at it from a distance it might have even been picturesque and perfect. If you didn't look close enough. If you didn't know better.

Her warhound sat at her feet, breathing heavy and awaiting leftovers. He stank of war and blood and dirt, and it reminded her that she needed to give him a bath, but she found comfort in it and his heavy, pounding heart. She was thankful for this new friend that didn't ask why, as she breathed so deep her lungs and sinuses hurt.

There wasn't much to do about the smell of an alienage, try as you might to fix it with fresh flowers and incense. The houses were dense and the alleyways cramped, and they were many. Their lonely tree permeated a rich stench of soil, dense and thick. It was meant to mark some semblance of unity with them and the world and the people they used to be, but an alienage was an alienage. It was broken, and made to make broken things.

She'd been one of those broken things. Holding onto the corners of deep cracks, trying to pull herself out with fingers that grew older. She was designed to fall.

She wasn't supposed to end up trying to save the world. Destiny didn't mean shit.

'Fuck,' she said, bewildered.

'My thoughts exactly.'

She flinched through a glance over her shoulder at Alistair, firelight playing on his fair skin. She'd been so wrapped up in herself. Part of her just wanted to be alone, but on the same coin couldn't help but feel like since Ostagar they'd both been tumbling from the same upheaval, so she chewed her mouth shut.

He was a strange commodity. A rambler, filling the void, and sometimes it helped. Sometimes it just made her want to lug something at his big human head.

She watched him stare at his boot, digging it into the dirt, and for the first time since she'd met him he finally seemed as young as she.

What the fuck did they think they were doing?

He glanced at her finally. 'Crazy first few days on the job, huh.'

She snorted, scared when it sounded more like a hiccup and her eyes nearly burst with tears in a hysterical kind of way. She pulled Hobbs close and buried her face in his big shoulder.

'I was hired because I drank darkspawn blood out of some bygone chalice and didn't die a violent, gruesome death, so I figured it wasn't going to be all daisies and sunshine.'

'Yes, well it wasn't supposed to be royal betrayal and tragedy.' he said.

'Comes with the territory I suppose.'

'What territory is that?'

'Human politics.'

'Ah.' Alistair nodded in agreement. 'I've… never been one for it myself, either.'

'And yet here you are.'

'Here we are,' he echoed. 'Saddled with saving Ferelden ourselves. Duncan didn't...' His own mentioning of the old Warden seemed to shock him.

She stopped mashing her face into Hobbs' fur and finally got a good look at him. He looked baby-faced and heartbroken. Dark and puffy under the eyes. She swallowed down that strange sadness of losing somebody before you really knew them.

'I wish I'd handled it better.' he said softly.

'Someone you loved died. Sometimes you don't get to decide how you handle anything.'

'It's just that… he kept telling me to prepare, that it was inevitable, it's what we signed up for. I shouldn't have…' He dragged a hand across his face and looked frustrated with himself. 'Sorry, I shouldn't put this on you. You didn't know him as long as I did.'

'I care that he's dead.'

'You didn't seem to like him very much.'

She felt angry at that. Enough had happened for her to feel all kinds of ways about Duncan before he had kicked it.

She hadn't been very kind to him, that was a fair enough statement. She could tell that he'd learnt how to methodically rip desperate people with little choice out of bad situations. The more she learnt about Alistair, the more she was certain he was just another victim of it. It was all for the greatest cause she knew, but she had been bitter all the same. Bitter and cruel enough to ignore the great sadness in Duncan that he had tried to show her in an attempt to relate.

He had spoken for hours on long fitful nights over their campfires on the road to Ostagar. She'd given him a wide berth even as she'd been drawn to the stable timbre of his voice, as he told her how smart and terrifying he had known her mother to be, for the short amount of time she had been privileged to it. About his lonely childhood on the streets, about his short stretch of life that felt like a hundred years.

'Being a Grey Warden might be a shitting nightmare, but he still got me out Denerim before I got thrown in jail or- or worse. And he-' she stopped, feeling childish for the next few words, he knew my mother, and he told me stories about her. 'Of course I care that he's dead.' She repeated, and it came out with a lot more bite than she meant.

Her rudeness was borne of her own pain and an overwhelming alarm for the future, but she felt bad all the same. It wasn't like Alistair was any more equipped to deal with what happened than she was, if anything his stakes were higher, his losses greater.

And he should be sorry she ever became a Warden.

'Of course,' Alistair backpedalled, looking apologetic. 'Of course you do. I'm sorry. Look, all I meant was to apologise for the way I reacted. I shut down, with so much riding on me. Us. I shouldn't have done that. Not with the Blight and... and everything. I'm sorry. I'm trying to say sorry.'

A human sat beside her now with something she was shocked to find was guilt in his face, and there was this old feeling, this wretched feeling of being lured. But surely, what he'd just managed to trip his mouth over was a genuine apology. He had the most honest face she had ever seen.

'You've managed to say sorry four times.' she said finally.

'Sorry.' He winced. She couldn't help but smile.

They watched the last of the sun, nothing but Hobbs' huffs and puffs and a fire crackling behind them, Morrigan as she fussed over it and kept to herself. She'd lost her appetite, and so started to pull the meat off the skewer piece by piece, feeding it to Hobbs and trying to teach him to take food gently. He stared between her and the rabbit with rapt attention.

When the stars started appearing one by one faintly in the sky, Alistair spoke again.

'He deserves a proper funeral. Maybe once this is all done... If we're still alive, that is.'

'Not likely.'

'But if we are, well. I don't think he had any family to speak of, but...'

'He had you, didn't he?' she reminded him, and was pleased with the way some tension left his shoulders, and his eyes softened.

'He saved me too, you know. He was like a father to me sometimes. Not sure how he would have felt about that.' Alistair shrugged thoughtfully. 'Maybe he was something better than a father.'

It made her think of her own father. The tears on his old face, his final kiss on her hair, trying to find a spot that wasn't covered in blood. The way he said "you're just like your mother after all" like his eyes were finally open. Like it wasn't a good thing at all.

'I miss my father.' she said, without thinking. She turned her head away and felt the burning sensation of Alistair's eyes on her.

'What's he like?'

She thought about this for a moment. 'Old. Serious. He worries too much.'

'Is he nice, though?' The way he said it, like it was imperative to know. The only quality that mattered.

She smiled again. 'The nicest. Mam got mad all easy but he was always just so…'

An image came into her head. A split lip, a fight with a neighbour kid, her bouncing on his knee as he explained for the umpteenth time why using your fists was never a good way to settle your issues. He always talked to her like she was better than she acted.

The only issue was that she'd seemed doomed from birth to be a disaster. Her mother had named her after the wind and the world named her after a storm.

Tarasyl'nin, some had called her, sometimes with little more than tolerance. She had liked it because it made her feel like she was so much more than she really was. A storm stopped for nothing and no one.

And what a fucking joke that was, now that she was a really big thing, bigger than she could handle. The only problem was that a bad storm rattled bones and left devastation in its path. That's all it did, right? It didn't fix things. It didn't go from a life of malcontent and forced marriages to great wars.

'We didn't deserve his patience, at any rate.' she finished, sliding the empty skewer between her fingers in a fit of restless energy.

'Duncan told me about your mother,' he said carefully, like he knew he was playing with fire. She must have given him a look that said as much, because he held his hands up and shook them, trying to fan it out. 'Don't think poorly of him. He told me, you know, as a- I run my mouth sometimes and he didn't want me to say anything foolish. I just… does it get easier?'

She thought about that very hard. Had that feeling in her chest ever really gone away? That tightness that made her feel like something cloying was swelling up in her lungs and catching her breath. Sometimes it felt like it refused to give it back. And that emptiness, always on her shoulders, always too heavy.

'Not really. You just... get bigger than it.' Her words came out small, barely there. She put her face against Hobbs as he rested it in her lap, belly full and looking up at her with the sweetest eyes, and decided she was done bonding. The air might be too deep in Lothering, but it was better than this suffocating moment.

Alistair opened and closed his mouth like he was scrambling for an apology, but she didn't want it. You didn't get to ask the hard questions and then take them back. So instead, smartly, he said, 'I fear you did a better job of consoling me than I did you. Thank you.'

She was overcome with a memory, a few words stored away in a prepubescent time. All this thought and talk of her mother made her remember it. She hadn't taken it to heart at the time, not really understanding the implications of time and bad memories.

"Even when only the big, overwhelming things are happening it's dangerous to let the small things pass you by, because they are gentle and at the end of it all, they're what you remember the most."

She felt a place in her stomach twist up inside her. This new armour of hers was starting to get itchy. Oppressive. Alistair was her superior but he was crumbling and clinging to her willingness to help like he knew her, like she hadn't thought about deserting him so many times already in some deep, dark part of her.

'I need some air.' she said. If they noticed that she took her bag with her, Alistair and Morrigan said nothing.

The one thing Sten was not at all surprised to learn was that basra spoke too much, and managed to say very little.

It was late into the night when he met her. He had been whispering words of the Qun to himself. They might have helped before, might have made sense. He was not sure why he clung to it, or tried to feel something, some connection to himself and what he used to be, but there was nothing. Emptiness, but in a rough way. Like things had been cut out haphazardly.

It was the hound he saw and heard first, footfalls making the ground quake, the sight of it bounding under the streetlamps right for the cage, a shadow of muscle. From this distance it was hard to tell whether or not that slavering mouth meant any harm. He found it didn't really matter.

Somebody whistled, and then cooed out a name. 'Hobbs! Stay close, boy.'

He watched her jog down the path after the hound. It still came straight for his cage, sniffing madly. It stank, gave off waves of heat.

She said its name once more. Sharp, not to be trifled with. It gave her a look and slunk back over behind her knees, panting. She might have rode it for all its size, and lack of hers.

She looked at him then, and he looked back.

An elf-girl. She had tears in her eyes.

She straightened up when she realised, and squashed them away with the heel of her palm and looked angry that he had seen them. Angry was a natural look on her, deep little lines at her brow made a thousand times before.

'What are you looking at?' she bit out, crying had blocked up her nose and he heard her sniff. Her lip curled a little. Every inch of her was a jagged edge, too high-strung.

What was he looking at? The answer was not a simple one. An armoured, armed woman. A bad tempered child. A very guilty basra.

When he said nothing to stoke her anger, remaining silent and still, she seemed to deflate. Her mouth opened, closed, the hesitation in her was almost tangible.

Those elf iris' of hers glowed, tinged, and the whites captured stars and moonlight and made for a mesmerising effect. She assessed him, with all the wrong amounts of fear and curiosity. The people here were strange.

The lights of her eyes disappeared as she looked out into the fields, adjusting the pack on her back with a slight bounce. Hands clenching around the straps.

He guessed her path took her across the fields, but he had learnt from his guards that they were no longer safe to traverse at night. All manner of thieves and spiders and bears. Whether she could use that blade strapped to her back was of little consequence when you were alone in the dark.

'It is not a safe path at night,' he said, despite his better judgement.

She flinched at his voice, surprised he even spoke.

'What?'

He motioned out into the darkness and she followed the gesture.

'What- who says I'm going anywhere?'

They both knew the obvious. Full pack, full armour, itchy feet. He said nothing more.

The silence made something boil over in her and she deflated with a deep breath.

When she blinked excess tears spilled out down her cheeks, but instead of making her angrier they seemed to mellow her further. She wiped them away with armoured fingers, a delicate job.

'Who am I kidding.' she said softly. She glanced into the fields and the highway beyond again longingly. 'The truth is I want to just get out of here but that would be really… bad of me.'

'And that is why you are crying?'

He did not know what possessed him to ask such a question. The way her eyes slid over him, slowly, irritably, told him she thought the same thing.

'I can't help that I cry when I'm frustrated.' she snapped, like he should know better. Then he would not talk about the way her hands shook slightly, from more than the cold. From some panic and adrenaline she was trying to ignore.

Smartly, he kept his mouth shut.

'Why am I even talking to you? I talk to too many men in cages.'

'That is a strange habit.'

She shifted from foot to foot. 'Yeah well it kinda works out, you know? Maybe being in a cage makes you honest. Last time a guy gave me a key he had been smuggling in his ass and you know what that opened? A chest full of loot. So what do you have for me?'

'Nothing.' he said, still trying to process the ridiculous story.

'No ass-keys? A shame. So why'd they put you in there, anyway?'

'Why would anybody be put in a cage?'

The way she smirked when he continued to speak to her made him feel like he had lost at some sort of game.

'Probably because Lothering doesn't have any fancy dungeons. You're, um. What even are you? Looks a little squishy in there. You're bigger than any human I've ever fucking seen.' He watched her trying to pick him out of the limited races she might have known, but knew she would never find it. His kind was still fresh in Ferelden. He'd been mistaken by many for a Chasind at first glance.

'Is that blood or paint?' she asked, jutting her chin in the general direction of his bare chest. How she could see it under the faint light of the tavern lamppost many feet away, he did not know.

'Both.'

'You do something bad?'

'There are many here that would rejoice in seeing me dead.' he said.

'Well, you're pretty terrifying. And different. People are stupid and don't know how to deal with that.'

That he did not disagree with. He was acutely aware of their fear of him. They had trembled as they marched him to the cage, still covered in blood. As soon as their priest had locked the door they had exhausted their lungs with their hatred. But even the biggest man with his sharpest sword had kept a good many feet away while they taunted him, even those that threw stones did so from great distances. Typical of these small, soft things. It was interesting how quickly anger left them without the reaction they craved, and it eventually seemed as if he had faded into the backdrop, like he was part of it, like he had always been engraved into quaint farms and a little village.

But she did not know. She had too much confidence in speaking with him and none of the hatred.

'I would probably be in a cage or worse if they hadn't made me a Grey Warden,' she said, looking out to the highway once more, still itchy.

His gaze lingered to her, and something clicked. 'You are a Grey Warden?'

She perked up. 'Have you heard of us?'

He'd heard many legends of the Wardens. Perhaps Ferelden's most honourable of warriors, for its most selfless cause.

And his usual guards were clucking hens for all they gossiped. The language was like that to him sometimes. All manner of people passed through Lothering and they had a word for them all, even more so with the war and atrocities it brought. The people of the wilds and what they liked to do to their prey, the dark things they danced for. A great battle the bas had fought had just been lost to the darkspawn, the murmurs of a dead king. The great betrayal of an ancient order.

That Warden chatter grew over the last few hours, for a pair of strangers in very distinct armour had supposedly turned up at the edge of the village that evening. If they were Wardens, then they were deemed traitors and a disgrace to the crown. It seemed an odd contradiction for all the supposed good they did.

But… her? A Grey Warden? This small thing, smiling like an idiot. A Grey Warden. If the chatter was true she'd made a mess of those bandits that had been blocking the highway.

'I have heard legends of the Grey Warden's strength and skill.'

'I've been a Warden for aboouut, three days now, give or take. I was passed out for some of it.'

He rumbled. 'I suppose not every legend is true.'

She snorted. 'It's pretty disappointing, I know. It's just me and Alistair now. We're all that's left in Ferelden. Some serious shit went down at Ostagar.'

Suddenly, she sat on the mud in front of him. The hound followed. The hands that had gone to the bars as leverage uncurled and he meshed them at his knee. He did not remove his eyes from her. The breeze was picking at the odd strand of her pale hair.

'Lothering is so quiet, it's unnerving. How can you just sit here?'

'I am in a cage.' he reminded her.

She rubbed the back of her neck, sheepish.

'What do you want, elf?'

She seemed surprised at his bluntness.

'That's a great question.' And she looked troubled by it. 'I just… I… it's not really working out well. The people I'm travelling with might be better off without me.'

'So you were running.' A statement, not a question.

She looked like she wanted to deny it, instead she just clenched her jaw. He watched it jump.

She gripped the bars. There was only moonlight between them. He caught the way her hound stopped panting and held its breath at this. The disappearance of that heavy sound made the chirps of bugs in the fields suddenly dense. Sten thought the Mabari might even be capable of ripping apart the metal cage, if he gave it reason to. Smart, powerful animal.

'I'm not made for this.'

'Everybody is made for something.'

'What? Are you talking about fate or something? That's a load of crap. What happened wasn't fate. I'm not a Warden because I was born to be. I had no choice.' His silence made her make a sound of exasperation, bordering on a snarl. 'You can't judge me for shit, stop looking at me like that.'

'You assume much.'

'What I don't gotta assume is that you're in this damn cage because you've done something real awful, so what would you know about it, huh?'

More than you know.

'Sorry,' she mumbled, hiding the embarrassment on her face in the crook of her arm, propped up on a knee. 'I'm… I'm not good. I've never been good. And now I'm putting all my shit on you. Do you want something to eat? Bread, or…'

'No. Thank you.'

'I have apples, if you prefer.'

'No.'

'I'm sure you're starving? Just eat. I have water, too.'

'Parshaara.'

She gave a laugh. 'What was that you said? I bet that was something really mean. Why not?'

'Were you in my position, would you prolong your imprisonment?'

She blinked, like a thorough examination of her eyelids. 'And what position is that, exactly?'

'I will die in here.'

She looked shocked. 'You sound so sure of that.'

'If that is my fate, so shall it be.'

She snorted at him, clearly not impressed by his reply. 'Again with fucking fate. Couldn't you do anything more useful with your time?'

'I am in a cage.' he said, on the edge of a snarl. For her mocking, foolish words. The dog reiterated the sound deep in his throat at him, claws finding the malleable earth beneath them in long gashes.

He wiped a hand across his mouth, trying to swallow his anger. This hunger was indeed making him fade around the edges, lose his practiced control. He turned his face away.

'Leave.'

She did not. The crack in his calmness only seemed to intrigue her more.

'You think starving yourself in here is going to make up for anything you've done? Just letting the darkspawn take you?'

'No.' he said through a clenched jaw.

'Then why just sit here? Are you waiting for somebody to put you out of your misery?'

'Try, elf.'

She laughed as she grabbed an apple from her bag and took a large bite out of it, the sound piercing the air. She chewed loudly.

'I have absolutely no interest in killing you. Why would I? I don't even know what you've done. But I can sure as shit say that hunting an Archdemon is a much more effective way of punishing yourself than what you're doing now.'

'The chantry placed me in here.' he corrected her.

She had the gall to raise a sceptical brow at him.

'Did you help them put the shackles on, too? No one makes you do anything, I'm sure of it.'

'You bas like to talk.'

'Communication should always be the first response to discord, and killing second. So they say.'

Her glittering eyes and holstered blade told him all he needed to know about her preference.

'You will not find much welcome here,' he said, remembering the chatter.

'Ah, yeah? Think there's enough room in that cage for me too, just in case?'

'The Wardens have been declared traitors to your crown.'

'It's a lie. The king, the wardens, they were all abandoned at the battle by the same asshole whose framing us now.'

'Scheming basra.'

'We have no choice being here. We need food. We have no coin. I don't even know what we think we're doing.'

'So you run, because your duty is difficult.'

She frowned. 'Duty.' she spat back at him. 'Fucking duty, huh? I'm just trying to survive. Like I said, I'm not good and right now I'm being something I'm not. I mean look at me, I find it easier to be honest with criminals than with my own companions for shitsake. And you're still judging me, so what does that say?'

'I am beyond the judgement of another. Though none have been foolish enough to seek counsel from me.'

'That's a shame. You seem wise.'

'It was not wisdom that led me here.'

'Everyone makes mistakes,' she said, too casually.

He wanted to call her ignorant, if he didn't think back to an earlier comment. I would be in a cage or worse if they hadn't made me a Grey Warden. He wondered if she even believed that statement herself. Was she a criminal, walking free but somehow tethered to the order? Much of the way Wardens operated was a mystery even to the most skilled Qunari spies, but it was known that they would not shirk the help of even a single criminal in a time of crisis.

A Blight counted well enough as one of those.

'So what's your name?' she asked. 'Since we aren't strangers anymore.'

That also seemed too flippant a comment. Granted, nobody else sat at his cage, made him run his mouth, stilted a conversation as it was. He had not spoken to anybody so easily in weeks.

'Well?'

'I am Sten of the Beresaad.' Perhaps it was fine if at least one of them knew before he died.

'What's a Beresaad?'

'The vanguard of the Qunari.'

'Wow,' she breathed, almost taken aback by something she knew nothing about. 'My name's Syld. I'm not of anything. Nice to meet you, for what it's worth.'

'Propriety. Unexpected. Do you mock me?'

This seemed to amuse her, as she stifled laughter. 'No?'

'Then you show manners that I have not come to expect in these lands.'

'You are the first person to ever say anything positive about my manners. So you're a Qunari, huh? Whatever the shit that is. They all as big as you?'

'Yes.'

'What's up with your forehead- sorry, damn, that was rude.'

Before he could repy, somebody shouted at them. The dog, who had been dosing beside her, was on its feet in seconds. They both glanced towards the sound of gruff voices and heavy armour. His guards were returning, with a lean to them that implied intoxication, stumbling down the path straight from the tavern.

'Hey, you there! What do you bloody well think you're doing?'

She turned back to him and made a face. 'Oof, you even got guards? You have fun with that.'

She stood and dusted herself off, turned towards them all chipper. Her dog did not share the mood.

'Nothing! Was just talking to the prisoner here.'

'Be on your way, elf,' the older of them snapped, moustache moving furiously. 'That animal ain't worth it.'

She saluted them mockingly. She threw a look over her shoulder and winked at him, and then turned back for the town.

Not the fields, not the highway. Assuredness in her step. Hands not trembling.

She was out of ear and eye sight when their viciousness ramped up. 'The fuck do you think you're doing, talkin' to people like that? You're gonna rot in there you miserable piece of-' A boot clattered on the edge of the cage, piercing the night.

Another kick and he kept his eyes on his own hands, and his mouth shut.

Little rotation and breaks few and far between had put an edge to them. This routine had turned them vicious. Antsy. Angry. The older one, anyway. Always red in the face, spitting things that made parents cover their children's ears. The younger looked on with a kind of mirthless, pitiless acceptance and said very little. Unkind times made unkind people cruel, and he was their animal in their cage. Nothing he couldn't say he deserved.

But he was still an animal they feared. And so they should.

He wondered, if and when she found out what he had done, if she would too.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think!