It is harder to listen. The roaring sound of being human crowds in—no, presses over the whisper of what is actually true. Physical noise is clamoring for attention over actual, unyielding hurt—the hurt is ignored. The more human Cole becomes the easier it becomes to ignore the hurt in others. People are loud and shouting, loud in action and loud in thought because they need to ignore the hurt in other hearts. This fact coils within Cole, giving him his own hurt to ignore.
It is good to be back in Skyhold. Kirkwall is large and dirty and exciting but Skyhold is home, the cool-warm air slipping into his nose to make him wistful, the pressing noise of becoming a person quieting to something that lets him listen. Skyhold, a good and bad beginning because it is the place where he was born but also the place where he died. The last place where he knew how to help.
If he could help he would silence the voices, the shouting shatter of a friendship, the words sharpened to blunt yet forceful points. Dorian and Varric, their hurts so obvious that Cole doesn't need to listen to feel the shape of it. Each one turning the other mean, hurting, ripping—salting the earth so no future friendship can grow.
Cole closes his eyes against the glow of Varric's room and presses his hands to his ears. It is too much, too much for even a human to hear. He draws in a breath, warm with the deceivingly cozy fire and thick with trailing smoke. He opens his mouth and makes his own noise.
"Stop it!"
Their noise does as he tells it. Four eyes stare at him from two different levels, two different firmly held beliefs. He says it again to keep Dorian's expression from becoming sound.
"Stop it."
Varric heaves a sigh—more noise, noise to cover up all of the hurt inside of him. He runs a hand down his face, dwindling in his own motion. "I'm...I'm sorry, kid."
An apology to the wrong person, noise again, and more determined evasion. Another sigh and a hand in the air, waving them off, waving himself out of the conversation, out of the situation, out of all of it—Cole can still hear that much, can still feel the all of it resting somewhere atop Varric's heart. It is why he has to leave at moments like these, why he has to walk out on everyone, even Cole.
"All the loyalty in the world doesn't excuse willful ignorance," Dorian shouts at the closing door. Cole doesn't say that Dorian's words come from the fear that lives within him. Cole doesn't fill the air with things Dorian already knows.
This doesn't stop Dorian from looking at Cole expectantly, retaliation already forming somewhere behind his eyes. When Cole stays silent Dorian sighs but it is a different sigh from Varric's, one to underline emotion instead of drowning it out. Dorian cannot speak his feelings with words—cheap and fickle things, words, elusive double meanings stripping everything of anything. He speaks in sighs, in gestures, in eyebrows raised over gentle or cruel or laughing eyes.
"Well, now that we've sunk this low, want to take a walk around the grounds?" An apology in the joke, but not to Cole. To himself, to Varric, to anyone who would listen but not hear. Cole follows Dorian in answer, accepts the apology on the behalf on the others.
The grounds are green and warm; it is not natural but it is good. The cold breeze slips from somewhere above them, tracing the truth of their place in the world, their perch on the mountain, their keep older than almost anyone Cole has ever known.
Forget, a memory tells him, so Cole forgets.
Dorian leads them to a quiet table in the garden, his favorite spot. He plays chess there, pieces in the shapes of tiny creatures with their own lives, their own relationships and their own wars. Cole can feel as much emotion off the pieces as he can off of most people, these days. This grows a hurt in him because now there is nothing, just silence and whatever the people are willing to give.
Dorian sits and when he gestures at the board he does so with all his years of metered upbringing, all the wealth of carefully nurtured habit. Cole sits and lets some of his own hurt drain away. Even within the silence people give away great deals of themselves and never know it.
"Do you play?"
Cole smiles. He smiles because Dorian has forgotten. "No," Cole says. "I know the pieces. That's a knight. He's not actually a horse."
This draws Dorian's warmest smile, the one he gives when he approves of you, when he would hate to see you go. "A good start, then. Here, I'll walk you through a game."
Dorian does just that, the pieces easy in his fingers, the rules easy on his tongue. Cole watches and moves and watches again, the shape of a memory forming, slipping upwards and out and he can almost see it, can almost untangle it from the rest.
Dorian looks up at him, raises an eyebrow. "Cole! Are you cheating? I thought you were only to read minds for good. Shame!"
Cole holds Dorian's eyes, holds them to his own even though it means that Dorian can see as much of Cole as Cole can of Dorian. Dorian's expression slips into a frown, slips into worry.
"Your father," Cole says, and that is all, the only shape the memory will take. Cole tries to push away the frustration but it presses at his eyes, closes his fists. He tilts his head down, the hat sending him away, allowing him that much.
"Ah. Yes." Dorian makes a move on the chessboard, gestures with a quick snap. Cole blinks under his hat, unsure of what is expected. "I would play with my father on occasion—no, that is not entirely so. I would play with him rather often, actually. He taught me the game during more, well. During different times." Dorian sighs and the sigh is a melancholy happiness, a wan regard of childhood. "I can still recall the first time I defeated him. I was only ten, perhaps, or eleven. He was well known for his skill with the game and had always been regretful that he had not started me out sooner. He was worried I'd never catch up to his standards, you see." Fingers slipped into Cole's line of sight, gently knocking over Cole's largest piece, the piece whose pair Cole has been holding even when he wasn't supposed to, clenched tight in his fist.
"He was shocked when I cornered him—he had to go over the board three times to be sure, to see how I did it. When he was satisfied he sat back in his chair, looked me in the eye and said, 'No one has a mind like my boy. No one.' I remember there being something close to emotion in his eyes. Pride, I suppose." A different sigh, anger injected over the pain, anger in any direction that would receive it. "I wonder if he thinks about that, sometimes, and feels a bit sick at his own hypocrisy, sick at the fact that he once admired the very mind he later longed to destroy." A third sigh, a final sigh, a full stop. "Oh well. It is a foolish thing to waste one's time thinking about."
"I'm sorry." Cole opens his fist and frowns at the chess piece within, leaving its red mark against his pale skin. "I don't know how to help. I can't—" but he has to stop talking, lest the words come out swamped by noise.
"What do you mean?" Eyebrows up, eyes sincere in their surprise. "You are helping, Cole. You're keeping me company and letting me beat you at chess. What more is possibly needed?"
Dorian and his smiling eyes, sincere and comfortable—rare. Cole takes the smile and returns one of his own.
It is true that Cole does not win at chess; the piece he had been clutching was something called a queen, something incredibly important. Dorian explains this as they walk to the tavern. The tavern is as it has always been, though Cole knows it is more an idea than an actual place, more a moment than a location. Cole glances towards the door leading down to the dungeon. Varric is still trying to get back to his tavern, even when he's within its walls.
Iron Bull is there—and Sera, though she frowns when her eyes touch Cole. Cole looks to the stairs and lets himself drift away, up and up, rising to a quiet corner where he can still hear. He does not expect Dorian to follow him but the steps do not stop, measured and correct, back straight after too many admonishments from Mother.
Cole stands in his corner and takes a deep breath. It is easier to listen, here.
"Cole, I have a rather serious question. It may not be fair to ask you, but I need to know." Dorian looks over the rafters, nose crinkling at dust, the rest of the body unaware. "You've seen his mind. What should we do with the elf?"
The always question regarding their always predicament—the elf. Everyone sparing whispers for the elf, for Fenris, memories so tangled that Cole is unsure he would have ever been able to sort them out. A new pain so loud it screams when whispering, the words wrong, so wrong that they killed her. I'll always be ready when you have need of me—a lie, his hands empty when she died, empty and elsewhere, his mind set to other things. No saving her, no reunion, no forgiving embrace—no life together. The only hope some great release, some sudden death or the right figure miraculously coming through the right door.
"Some nights the pain is so great that it doesn't hurt at all. Some nights he can dream her face and feel nothing. He thought he would have known what it was to feel nothing, before, when his life was chains and measures. This feeling is different. It is deeper, like fear without the terror." Cole takes his hat off, dropping the chess piece in the process. Dorian's eyes follow the piece as it rolls, his face a mask of stricken rage, the vengeful panic in his heart bleeding over the rest of who he truly is.
"I don't care about that creature's pain," he hisses, voice like the adder on his clothing, poison for any who would trod where feet should not fall. "I don't care that he lost someone dear to him. I don't care that his life has been impossible only to have been made even more difficult. When will people begin to understand that I do not fucking care?" Eyes on fire, arms crossed, chin jerking upwards to make the point, to draw volume into words said quietly. "I just want to know if that thing should be dead, lest he seek vengeance anew."
"Once I would have killed him," Cole offers. He turns the hat in his hands, the leather old and smooth, the smell a comforting hand on a back. "You have to kill them when they hurt that much. They look you in the eye when you do it. They thank you." Cole looks up to witness the moment of his truth-telling, to see the careful consternation on Dorian's face. "I don't do that anymore."
A snort to push away the uneasiness, an eyebrow to hide the emotion's existence. "I suppose that's a productive change to make."
"Fenris sees Varric. He sees Varric and he remembers something good. The pain still hurts but it is better with a friend." Cole blinks, the hat slipping in his fingers, falling but not all the way. His fingers tightening, closing on the edge of the brim as he closes upon his words. "Varric helps Fenris even when Varric cannot help himself."
Dorian sighs, frustrated, scared, worried that he is wrong for wishing the elf dead, that he has been wrong all along. Dorian is leaving soon, Cole sees, back to another life. Leaving soon and fighting the fear—fear so great that it is known fact—that one day he will be in the elf's place, alone and wracked by the utterance of the wrong words.
Cole shakes his head. He is so close to the right of it. "People...grow. They have to. I have to grow now, because I'm a person. Fenris needs to keep growing, because he's a person. I didn't see that before. That is why I would kill them. Then I knew someone who taught me that it's better to let them grow, even if they hurt." Cole looks into Dorian's eyes, past the sound of the fear. "Don't you think so?"
There is silence in lack of movement, in eyes studying the chess piece on the floor, in the whisper of a hat turning in twitching hands. Dorian stoops and picks up the chess piece, long fingers wrapping around it, shielding it from sight. He stares at his closed hand and Cole can hear nothing, can't find the feeling in the other man.
Dorian sighs and it is just a sigh. He moves forward with his measured steps and takes one of Cole's hands, placing the queen in it and closing Cole's fingers.
"Thank you, Cole," he says, but then he walks away. Cole cannot tell if he helped.
Cole sits on the floor. He balances the queen on one knee and his chin on the other. He peers at her, feeling her stillness as a slight weight within the noise of the tavern, the trill of the music, the bark of Sera's laughter below. A small, silent piece of bone, a life carved from something dead. He shifts and she topples, falling to lie forgotten but instead landing light in Cole's fingers, his aid meeting her silent need.
