Chapter 38

Eve walked through Hightown alone. It was dark and the hour late, the streets empty and uncannily quiet.
She had spent most of the afternoon with Fenris sparring, enjoying fighting another who was incredibly skilled with a long sword. Then they'd spent most of the evening in his bed.

She was thinking of the elf as she stepped quietly through the streets despite having been in his company for many hours already. To be honest she spent far too much time thinking about him. About how he'd saved her from Ramond, even if she'd almost been sliced in two because of Ramond's jealousy on seeing Fenris.
They had gone from cold tolerance of each other to talking like they once did before the night they'd spent together and now frequently ended up in bed, against walls, or on the floor with one another whenever they were alone. Fenris was a very competent lover, a quick learner, she wasn't wanting for anything whilst with him. Except maybe... no. Not emotions. She didn't need that. She had hoped for it, but he wasn't offering. Besides, the last time she'd accepted such a thing was with Alistair and that had gone badly. The kind of badly that continued to ache like a poorly healed wound. With Fenris it was just uncommitted fun, no feelings beyond friendship involved. It was tension relief, purely physical pleasure. Definitely. Yet that mantra sounded more and more hollow each time Eve repeated it to herself.

She stepped through the doorway of the Hawke estate, her thoughts now running to her empty stomach, practically walking head first in to Gamlen.
Eve hadn't had much interaction with Garrett's uncle, only a fleeting introduction a few months ago. The man glared at her with red rimmed eyes before silently moving round her and leaving. He had never been particularly polite so it was hardly a surprise that he didn't say anything to her.
She walked in to the main hall to be greeted by a cacophony of voices.
"He shouldn't just be alone up there." Aveline said, her voice annoyed.
"Well he was pretty clear about not seeing me!" Eve heard Isabela huff.
"His mother just died, horribly, he's not going to be in the best mood." Anders scolded.
"What?" Eve yelled on hearing Anders words, everyone falling to silence to stare at her. "What do you mean Leandra is dead?" Surely not, she had to have heard wrong.
"Deadly. Shit. We've been wondering where you were." Varric spoke.
"What's happened?" She asked searching the faces in front of her.
"I'm sorry, Eve," Anders stepped over to her. "Leandra is dead. We've been searching most of the day for a suspected killer only for Hawke to find the real killer had abducted his mother." He pulled her in to an embrace, his words fluttering around her. How could she be dead? How could anyone want her dead? She was the nearest thing Eve had known of a real mother, and though they'd never been dress shopping or sharing secrets kind of close, and it was barely a shadow of the relationship Leandra had shared with Bethany, Eve enjoyed the woman's company.
Maker, her eyes started to sting with tears at the thought of Leandra no longer being around. How could this have happened?
"Where is Garrett?" She asked pulling away from Anders.
"Upstairs in his room. He refuses to speak to anyone." Varric told her.
"Has anyone tried?" She looked at Isabela, those two were in a relationship of sorts weren't they?
"He chucked me out." The pirate replied. "Not that I'm any good at all that comforting nonsense. He said he wanted to be alone." She defended.
"He always says that. He said that after his father died, but he only does it because he thinks he's going to be a burden to people." Eve shook her head.
"Sounds to me like you ought to go see him, Deadly." Varric urged. "You knew Leandra better than us after all."
"Yeah." She sighed. "Shit. She's really dead? I just can't believe it."
"The guy who did it was a monster. Trying to turn her in to a copy of his dead wife using bits he'd... collected from other women over the last few years. It was horrible."
The truth of her death made her feel sick and it must have showed because Anders grabbed her arm and led her to the nearest chair.
"Tactful, Blondie." Varric tutted, shaking his head.
"What? She deserves to know the truth! She wouldn't sugar coat it for anyone else." Anders replied.
How could anyone do that to a person? Eve had seen some awful things in her life, but hearing about what had happened to Leandra, that was up there with the dwarf Laryn, the broodmother of the Dead Trenches. The memory made her skin crawl and now Garrett's mother had been subjected to something equally awful and she couldn't help how her stomach roiled and her throat burned with the need to cry.
"The bastards dead isn't he?" She managed to speak, using anger to hide her sadness. It was easier to deal with anger than tears. "Tell me the fucking bastard is dead for what he did?"
"By Hawke's own hand, Deadly." Varric confirmed. "Then burned the body to nothing but ash just to be sure."
"Good." She nodded. "I should see Garrett. He shouldn't be alone right now."
"Agreed." Aveline spoke. "Tell him we're here if he needs us, but maybe we should leave you both in peace. Let Hawke mourn without an audience."
Eve nodded, rising from her seat to walk to Garrett's room. What in the Void was she going to say?

She approached his bedroom door. It was firmly closed. He'd retreated like this when Malcolm had died, except he'd not had his own room to lock himself in to, instead he'd gone to their place, Barlin's abandoned falling down barn. Garrett had tucked himself away in the hayloft and pulled up the access ladder. All because he didn't want to let his mother or siblings know how distraught he was at the death of his father and how afraid he'd been of having to be the 'man of the house'.

Eve knocked on the door and was greeted by silence, so she just went ahead and pushed the door open. She would have grievously harmed anyone that had done that to her if she'd asked to be left alone, but Eve mourned best in lonely silence. Garrett did not.
"Garrett," she called out softly, his room was bathed in the flickering glow of the hearth. He sat on the edge of the bed, head in his hands. She walked over and sat down next to him.
"I'm so sorry." She said for lack of anything else to say.
"I just can't believe she's gone." Garrett mumbled from between his fingers. "I don't want to believe it. But I saw her... in that place..." He choked out, his voice rough.
"Anders told me what happened."
"I failed her." He looked at Eve, his eyes red and swollen.
"You did no such thing." She told him. If anything she should have been there with Garrett looking for Leandra. Instead she'd been seeking her own selfish pleasure with Fenris.
"When my father died he made me promise I'd look after them. I couldn't even get Bethany safely out of Lothering, even after you had urged us to leave. Then I let Carver die in the Deep Roads. I had to kill him myself!" He sobbed. She didn't know, how could she have known, he'd never said he'd ended Carvers suffering himself. She couldn't even begin to comprehend such a thing, to end the life of a sibling. The two Hawke brothers were often rivals, but they were also close.
"None of it is your fault." She tried to soothe, tentatively wrapping an arm across his shoulders.
But he ignored her. "And now I've lost mother, to a mad blood mage who carved her up to look like his dead wife!" He breathed out shakily. "I feel so damn broken. Like the ground has been ripped from beneath my feet, cast adrift. Alone. Is this how you felt with your mother?"
"Not exactly, no." She shifted uncomfortably. They had never really spoken about her mother though he'd pressed her to. She had merely thanked him for clearing up the abomination she'd become and for how he had fed some story to Knight-Captain Cullen about Saira living with Eve. The Knight-Captain had bought it, just. "I've never had a proper mother. Seeing Saira Tranquil, and then her turning in to that abomination, well, it hardly gave us time to bond. I know I should feel sad about what happened to her at the hands of my father. It was horrible to hear it from her mouth, that it was worse than I could have imagined, but I still feel mostly angry at her being so weak, to give in to a demon. I didn't know her enough to feel like I'd lost anything, not really. I tend not to think about it." She still had a lot of anger towards the woman that had turned to a demon, to use Eve as a pawn in a demons game. Nothing but leverage. But she also felt guilty for what she had forced her mother in to, that she would still be alive of not for Eve's misguided sense of 'saving her'. But this was not the time for admissions of guilt, Garrett had just lost his mother, her own losses were incomparable.

"I'd been angry with mother for a while." Garrett confessed. "She'd given up fathers name so she could be recognised as an Amell again. I thought she just wanted to forget about that part of her life. That she was ashamed she'd ran off and had a family with an apostate. That she was ashamed of me. She still blamed me for Bethany and Carvers deaths, she was right to, I failed them. But when she was dying she told me how proud she was of me. How could she be proud when all I seem to do is get my family killed?"
"You did not kill them!" Eve told Garrett sharply. "How can you think that? You did nothing but your best for them. And no, it wasn't easy, you've lost them along the way, but none of that is your fault! You can't predict ogres or taint sickness or crazy killers. It's not fair, none of it. None of them should have died, but never think it was your failings that caused it."
"It was my failing that caused you to leave Lothering though wasn't it?" Garrett shot back. "We don't talk about it, we never have, but it was my fault you left, my fault that all you had to deal with afterwards changed you."
"We shouldn't talk about this now." Eve told him, pulling away.
"Why not? It's as good a time as any!" He reasoned angrily.
"You're upset. You need to rest, we don't need to drag up the past." She didn't want him to drag it up. It was stupid and useless. Why must he always feel the need to talk things through like this?
"If I hadn't been trying to impress you with my magic then that Chantry Brother wouldn't have spotted me and ran off screaming to the Templars forcing you to stop him." He looked at her, frowning, tears brimming in his yellow eyes. "I forced you to kill him, for me. The first time you had taken a life. Then you had to leave Lothering in case they implicated me!"
"What's the point in this?" She asked in annoyance. What he had said was true, all of it. She'd even been bitter about his foolish use of magic for a time, back when she thought Garrett could make her happy, that life could be a happy ever after. She knew better now of course.
"The point is I'm cursed! I can't keep anyone I love safe or alive! It's my fault no matter what you tell me! All of it is my fault!" He broke down in to wracking sobs that caused Eve's chest to tighten in pain, her throat to constrict and stray tears to roll down her face. She pulled him in to an awkward hug.
"This will hurt." She told him gently when he'd calmed a little. "This will always hurt. You will always miss your mother, just as you do all of them, especially when they are taken so cruelly and unfairly from you. I, the others, we are all here for you. You aren't alone. You must stop blaming yourself, for things that happened years ago, for what happened today. The only one to blame for Leandra is that monster, and you killed him."
"I wish I could kill him again." Garrett seethed.
"Me too." Eve agreed.
"Every time I close my eyes I see her. Mutilated."
Eve could relate, Saira still appeared in her nightmares from time to time as that disfigured monster, though she admitted it to no one.

"You should try and rest. You must be exhausted." She spoke tenderly after a while.
"Stay, please?" He asked. Maker, he sounded so heartbroken. "I don't want to be alone right now."
Eve nodded, climbing on to the bed next to Garrett as he lay down.
"Thank you for coming up here." He said after a few moments.
"I didn't think you should be alone." She told him, staring at the canopy above them. She felt Garrett turn on his side towards her.
"She'll need a funeral..." He started to say.
Eve turned to him. "Shush, that can wait. Don't think about it for now, just try and rest." She urged him.
"You'll help though?"
"Of course I will." Not that she knew the first thing about funerals. She took a hold off his hand closest to her, rubbing her thumb over his knuckles to soothe him.
He sighed tiredly, sadly, before his breathing slowed and deepened, and Eve looked over to see that he'd fallen in to sleep, despair still marring his face.

She stared in to the darkness above her, berating people for their cruelties, cursing the unfairness of the world, silent tears creeping down her cheeks, her hand still holding Garrett's, before she too slipped in to sleep.
Nightmares plagued her slumber, nightmares of Leandra, Saira and as usual, darkspawn.