AN: omg guys we're nearing 10k reads, and almost 100 followers! how nuts is that? like, that people actually read this dribble. you're all mad, the lot of you. i adore it.

She could say with absolute certainty that Atlas was her least favorite person in the history of forever.

She had carefully established her reputation of not being an early riser (or at least not enjoying it) via Seren's antics (usually shouting) in order to wake her up that were probably heard all the way in Redcliffe. At the least, the guards that had recently been outside her door probably heard it, and they probably gossiped in the barracks all about the Inquisition's 'Herald'.

Atlas, it seemed, had not gotten that particular memo. She didn't know if was his idea, or someone else's, but she was subjected to the traumatic yanking of her rather comfortable covers at some ungodly hour of the morning, and toppled onto the floor with a shriek.

"Good morning!" he announced, far too loud for her delicate morning hearing.

Eden, of course, was capable of little more than nonsensical gibberish which somewhat managed to vaguely communicate her anger. She was not generally an angry person - she was, in fact a ray of sunshine.

"What the hells are you doing!?" she hissed, trying to recapture the covers on the ground. Thank the Maker that Haven was too cold to sleep in just her smallclothes. She had a shirt and pants on, thin though they were. "You - I - I can't believe - I could've been naked!" She managed to clutch at her comforter to cover herself.

"Ah, but you're not. Speaking of, get dressed. Meet me at the training grounds." He said, entirely too cheery. She spluttered again for a few moments, her fury not allowing her to form proper sentences. It was entirely her anger and not the fact that thoughts of what could've happened had she actually been naked that were flustering her, yes indeed.

"How dare you?" She demanded. "I - you... suck!" It was a terrible comeback, but she was running on empty.

"Mhn. Perhaps if you ask nicely. Another time. Training grounds. Five minutes. Be there or - what is it you say? Be round- no, that's not it. Just be there." He beamed again and turned to leave. She was stunned into silence at the fact that Atlas, handsome mysterious stranger, Atlas who meditated on the docks instead of sleeping, Atlas who was prone to dry humor and quiet smiles, had just flirted with her.

"I - this... is outrageous. Unacceptable. How dare he, who does he think he is?" She said to the empty cabin. She stood up and went to her dresser, not sure why she was doing what he said and not willing to think on it. "By all rights, I should be going back to sleep. It's -" she looked out the one window above her desk and gasped. "It's barely even light out! Hate. Hate, hate, hate. Dreadful man. He's not even that attractive." She grumbled to herself as she tugged on proper clothing.

Her grousing continued on the walk to the training area, each step thundering with irritation. He wanted to train, did he? "I'm going to kick his arse." she promised herself.

Lo and behold, the complete twatwaffle himself was standing in one of the circular areas designated for one-on-one training. He was the only one about; even the tents next to the training area were empty. Except for the night shift patrols, which were now approaching the end of their watch, all of the soldiers were asleep.

"What is the meaning of this?" she stormed her way up to him, placing her hands on her hips. At her obvious wrath, Atlas offered only a broad smile. Stupid perfect teeth. He has no right to look that good while I'm angry. Fortunately, her thoughts were not broadcasted out loud, or even on her face, and she managed to keep control of her visible anger.

"I had another discussion with the Inquisition's Council. In the process, they deemed that your continued education in the finer arts of combat was necessary in the time leading up to Redcliffe and the Inquisition's further operations." He spoke with flowery words, and Eden narrowed her eyes, sleep-addled brain trying to make sense of it.

"You little shit," she settled on, "give me something to hit you with. Where's the practice swords?" She began searching, eager to hit him with something that wasn't her fists, because he was bigger than her and could probably just hold her back. He was trying to use the Council as a scapegoat for his own terrible ideas. She wouldn't let it stand.

He tutted - tutted, the nerve of the man - and leant down to pick what she then realized was in fact a wooden practice sword from the ground. "Situational awareness," he chided lightly, beaming at her again. He tossed the sword and she just barely managed to catch it. He had on himself in his other hand.

"You are the most infuriating man I've ever met." She cursed him, shifting to hold the sword properly.

"That's it, Edie, let it out." He said faux-gently, as though consoling a child. She blinked, stunned into silence once more. A nickname? Maker, I'm going to kill this man.

With a shout she rushed forward to strike at him. Naturally, unaffected by the early hour or victim to the same anger he'd inspired in her, he casually parried the direct strike to the side, stepping away.

"Footwork." He chided.

"Oh my god, can you get any more annoying?" She bit back, twisting to guard her now-open right flank as she turned to face him.

"Your attack was sloppy. You're attacking me, but not watching me." He said instead of answering. Her eyes narrowed again, and he offered a challenging smile.

"I'm going to kick you in your perfect teeth." She growled, starting forward again. She was more cautious though, and despite her aggressive tone she began probing his defenses instead of clumsily swinging, because as annoying as he was, he was right.

The closer she got, the easier it was to see the spark in his blue eyes. "I'd like to see you try." She rose to meet the challenge, feinting a stab but twisting her blade down towards his lead leg.

Atlas head his practice sword like she'd seen chevaliers hold a rapier, albeit more grounded. One-handed, the other arm behind his back, and stance shifted such that he was almost adjacent to her chest. He didn't fall for it though, and caught her blade on his, wood-on-wood, and slid his sword down the length of hers, closer to the hilt.

She readied herself to meet the pressure he'd apply to the crossguard, for he was no doubt seeking some form of bladelock, before it suddenly abated and she felt pain blossom on the inside of her left knee with a resounding thwack. She yelped, stepping back to guard her vulnerability. Atlas did not press the offensive.

"Hm," he intoned, and said nothing else. She grit her teeth and stepped forward again. She tried to get in close, aiming for his leg leg then flicking her wrists upward. Predictably, it was met with a nonchalant block of Atlas' own, but she'd succeeded in making him shift his own guard in the last moment, and used her footwork to carry her closer.

Atlas carried himself backward in response, and he was quick enough to disallow her to gain any ground. They traded a few quick strikes thereafter, but she had not gotten any closer, and she broke away.

"Your technical skill is good, but your thinking is off. You're too direct." Atlas commented, and she prayed to the Maker for patience, because the next time she saw Atlas on the dock she was going to stab him in the back.

"You're supposed to be teaching me, right? Training, you said. So, teach." She griped.

"Hrm," Atlas murmured, amused for some reason. "Like I said - you're attacking, but you're not watching me. What is my stance?" he continued, and she frowned.

"Like a chevalier's when they wield a rapier." She answered.

"How does one fight with a rapier?" He pressed, obviously looking for a specific answer.

"Sparingly. Use reach to your advantage."

"Good. More accurately, one fights linearly." He gestured to himself; he was definitely positioned to be in a straight line against her, tip of the practice sword directed towards her chest and as little of his profile exposed as possible. "Facing the tip of the sword limits an opponent's avenues. They have to overcome the reach before they can even get to me, and if they do there's very little exposed."

She parsed this, examining him. "But you're not wielding with a rapier."

"No. But I'm fighting like I am." She pulled a face. Okay, linear. What's the opposite of linearity? Circularity. Sort of. It's more like adjacent to linearity, but still. Any attack she made would have to get around his superior reach, would have to get the sword out of the way first. Hrm. Unless...

She dropped her blade, adopting a fool's guard: two-handed grip, blade held at a forty-five degree angle from her center of mass, towards the ground. Technically it guarded the legs, but left the chest completely open, thus the name. It was essentially a taunt, and judging by the quirk of Atlas' lips, he knew it, but he moved to attack anyway.

Still fighting like it was a rapier, he stabbed first towards her open chest, and Eden jerked her sword up to smack his off to her left, then continued with the motion in an overhead arc to come back in a horizontal swipe towards his collarbone. Her footwork made the move possible. Despite the initial execution being successful, Atlas somehow managed to bring his own blade back ground to catch hers and guide it away while he twirled beside her, bringing his sword back to smack her on the back of the leg. She cursed.

He chuckled, and she was startled by the warm sound. "Good," he complimented. "You're taking my advice to heart. Now, shall we begin in earnest?" They'd separated again, facing each other from a few metres away. The back of her thigh where he'd hit her ached.

She heaved a breath, trying to calm herself. "I'm going to kill you," she said evenly. He grinned, and they both moved forward.

She did not get to kill him, unfortunately. Nor could she say she even got particularly close. It was one thing to fight alongside Atlas and have him cover her flank whenever she left it open, or to have him slyly offer critique in the middle of combat on her form. It was another thing entirely to fight against him.

Everything about him was frustrating. Oh, sure, his advice was good, but half the time the way he'd give it was just on the edge of infuriating, toeing the line between intransigence and playful banter. Not to mention his actual swordplay. Even her old teacher had never trounced her this badly - stars, at least she'd landed a hit on him!

He had encouraged her to to adapt to new strategies and tactics while fighting him, and he had shifted to some of his own. Except, for every new avenue of attack she practically pulled out of her ass and somehow managed to make work (some of them were quite good, she thought), he was there, like he'd been expecting it. Logically, she'd have the advantage in speed, being smaller and not entirely made up of muscle mass like he seemed to be, but nope. He matched her for that, too.

Not too mention, perhaps most annoyingly, he wasn't tired. She hadn't known when they started, and she didn't know when they stopped, but by the time she called it, the soldiers had come out for their morning routines, although some of them were content to simply watched the famed Herald get hit with a stick far too many times. It had to have been more than an hour, maybe more than two, and for most of it she'd been running on anger and spite alone.

He had only started sweating partway through, while she'd had to take breaks to get water and dab at her own oceans of perspiration several times. She'd practically been heaving for breath by the end, and he wasn't even winded.

And somehow, throughout it all, he was smiling. No, not just smiling, he was laughing. True, proper laughter, and not at her so much as with her. It had goaded her on at first before she realised that he wasn't making fun of her, he was just... happy.

It occurred to her then that for all she'd talked to him, private conversations in the night and on horseback and in camp, she had never actually seen him happy. She had seen him mirthful, amused, satisfied, and content, but nothing quite approaching joy had ever crossed his face. Until they'd started training. He danced around her and she was just barely keeping up with him, but when he smiled it was full of sunshine. She had actually tripped once after he smiled and stubbornly blamed it on sloppy footwork when he'd asked if she was okay.

In the beginning she'd been genuinely angry and wanted nothing more than to shut him up. But as it went on... she came back because she wanted to see him smile again. Little by little, her own glares had turned from irked to fond, and she was fighting an exhausted twitch of the lips in the end, refusing to let herself smile because he had still woken her up at an absolutely unfair hour. And then he went on smiling like that... she huffed. He didn't make any sense.

"Oh?" came the intrigued noise to her left. She and Atlas were both sat against a gnarled old pine tree near the training grounds, though separated by the circumference of the tree itself. She couldn't say whether that was fortunate or not.

"What?" She said.

"'Don't make any sense', do I?" he said, tone playful as it was during their spars. She frowned.

"...did I say that out loud?"

"Yes, you did." He was clearly amused. Shit. She thought she'd gotten better at that. Clearly, she was exhausted.

"I still don't forgive you for dragging me out of bed." She remarked instead, refusing to comment on her earlier slip of the tongue.

"Dearest apologies, my lady Trevelyan." He said in an overly-dramatic tone. If he were standing, she wagered he would've bowed. She snorted.

"'My lady Trevelyan' this, 'Edie' that. Maybe you should leave the nicknames to Varric." She advised, with no real bite in her tone.

"Why, Edie, I'm hurt. Are you saying you don't like my nicknames?" He retorted, faux-distress in his tone. Stars, her title was enough, but her heart did little backflips each time he said 'Edie'.

"No," she mumbled, crossing her arms and closing her eyes and pretending to be tired. Well, not pretending, every part of her body hurt, but she wasn't about to pass out. Probably. "I'm saying you're a bully who wakes girls up in the middle of the night and hits them with a stick until morning." She continued, probably sounding mulish.

He laughed again, and she felt a smile pull at her face. "It wasn't that early in the morning. And as I recall, you were plenty eager to hit me with a stick, too."

"That's because you deserved it. I did nothing. I'm an angel." She grumbled, purposefully omitting the various obscenities she'd shouted for the first forty-five minutes of throwing herself at him. Thankfully she'd stopped before the soldiers had arrived to train themselves.

"Oh, yes. Clearly. An angel with anger issues." She reached over to smack him in the arm, and he chuckled. She just managed to resist the urge to giggle.

"So why are you actually training me? Don't use any of that courtly speak to try and confuse me either, I'm too tired for it." She changed the subject.

He sighed, and she shifted to glance to him. They were facing different direction, sitting against the tree as they were, adjacent to each other.

"Did you know that I'm a mage?" He said suddenly. She froze.

"A what?"

"A mage."

"You?"

"Yes."

"A mage?"

"A mage, yes." They both said nothing. "Is... that bad?" He asked a moment later, almost sounding sheepish. She frowned.

"No. I've... I've never had anything against mages, try as my parents might to indoctrinate me. I'm... just caught off-guard. Are you really?" She shifted again to properly look at him, noting that he'd done the same.

"Yes. I have been this whole time - er, except... well, you know I'm not from here, yes?" She glanced about. The sounds of swords clashing and shields banging did enough to disguise their conversation, plus most of the Inquisition personnel running about gave them a wide berth, for whatever reason.

"Yes." In light of their earlier training, she was beginning to put more credence into his explanation. No regular fighter moved like he did, or could fight as long as he did with nary a break.

"My magic is not the same as Thedosian magic. It's so dissimilar, that for most, if not all, of the time I've been here, it's been entirely ineffective." He sounded confused about this, and she guessed that he didn't know why. "But - I am a mage, except I'm not at all like one of your mages."

"How do you - d'you mean like... Solas?" She tilted her head. Solas was indeed unlike any other mage she'd ever met (of the admittedly few she'd actually met).

"Yes. Er, no, actually. Solas is weird, but I'm not that kind of weird." She exhaled sharply through her nose at his Solas comment. "No offense to Solas. He's an intriguing fellow."

"Yes, he is - you were saying?"

"Right. My magic doesn't work like yours. I'm not in danger of possession like your mages are - or at all, actually. I'd have to willingly seek out and strike a deal with a demon for them to gain control of me. And even then that doesn't usually happen - generally they ask for simple things, like your soul, or the occasional firstborn child. Sometimes the lastborn child. That's a tricky one, actually, because theoretically you could just keep having children every time they show up. Eugh, sounds like a nightmare. Can you imagine all that work?" She was caught up in the fact that he was actually rambling, and a smile slowly spread on her face. Normally she was the one who rambled. "Not to mention a bunch of little gremlins running ab-"

"Atlas." He quieted immediately, meeting her eyes, and her smile widened.

"Yes?" He said eventually, not breaking eye contact.

"You're telling me, essentially, that you're a mage."

"Yes."

"A really shit mage."

"Yes. I mean - er, no, what, you're terrible, distracting me, I'm not a shit mage." He looked away then, making to lean back against the tree and she properly giggled at having finally gotten one over on him. All it took was a little sustained eye-contact and close proximity. Good to know. "I'm a rather good mage, I'll have you know."

"One who can't use magic, yes." She retorted.

"Here. I can't use magic here. If we were back home, it would be a different story." He huffed, crossing his arms. She rolled her eyes fondly.

"What does that have to do with why you were training me? And for the record, if you wake me up that early again, I'll cut your toes off." She threatened.

"Well it - my toes?" He began to answer, then paused.

"Yes, Atlas, your toes, now answer the question, scatterbrain." If it didn't require an uncomfortable stretch, she might have reached over and flicked his ear.

He grumbled something, but continued nonetheless, "Yes, well, Commander Cullen found me meditating and I admitted to him I was a mage. After I proved that I was not in any danger of becoming possessed and that I was in fact from another world, with the help of Solas, he agreed not to imprison me - very kind of him - with the acknowledgement that I'd tell the Council. And so I did. And in the process, convinced them that it would be worthwhile make use of my skills and train the soldiers of the Inquisition."

Eden frowned. "'Soldiers of the Inquisition' - so, not me? And - you said at the beginning that it was their idea."

"It was my idea to help train the recruits, but it was their idea to help train you. They knew I'd already offered but hadn't had the chance to actually do so. I agreed."

She huffed. "Traitors. The lot of them."

She could practically hear the eyeroll from a foot away. "Don't be so dramatic. For the record, you're very skilled. Your past teacher has my compliments."

She harrumph'd. "Atlas, I don't know if you noticed, but I didn't hit you a single time."

"You hit me just a second ago, in the arm." She hit him again. "Ow."

"With the sword, you brat."

"Oh, yes, yes." He said, yielding, "I know. But you got much closer than most ever do. You'd demolish any of the recruits out there now, and probably some of the templars the Commander has under him, too. The reason I'm teaching you is so you'll be better than all of them. You have the potential to." The compliment would've made her blush, if the cold didn't already disallow that.

She'd never done well with compliments, so she just tried to burrow herself into her coat. "Thnkyou," she murmured.

"You're very welcome," he said, smile audible in his voice. "Now," he continued, making to stand, "I'll have to make good on the second part of my promise to the Council, and go whip some of these recruits into shape. Good heavens, I think one of them is holding their shield upside down. Dreadful." She looked, and he was correct; one of them really was holding it upside down, and was confused when the templar overseeing them - it might have been Ser Rylen, she thought - went to correct him.

"Go easy on them," she advised, "they're all too young to die. They won't survive the treatment you gave me."

He laughed, and warmth blossomed in her chest. "I'll try not to. You should go eat something, or get some rest. There'll be more training tomorrow morning. No, not at some 'unnatural time of night'." He said before she could complain. "But still."

"...fine. Have fun, Atlas." She offered a weak wave.

"You too, Edie." He smiled again before heading for the training area. Stars, that man... was something else. He was going to drive her insane, she was sure of it.

AN: another chapter! shorter, but this way i can give more frequent updates so you'll get less words but more often, instead of 9k words every two months. this is more like ~4k-5k words every 2-3 weeks, so it's really more like 16k every two months. maybe.

hope you enjoy!

~ylri