Disclaimer: I don't own Dragon Age or any of its related characters. This is just for my own enjoyment and the potential enjoyment of other fans like me, and no monetary gain was expected or received.
Rating: T
Spoilers: May contain spoilers for Origins, Awakening, and Dragon Age II as well as the novels The Stolen Throne and The Calling.
No Bull From the Big Bull, Volume One, by Varric Tethras, a Humble Storyteller
Excerpt: Flat-Eared Child; or, Half
He knew that he was different. Perhaps it was the very pains his parents took to ensure that he did not that forced the knowledge upon him. He was…between, neither one nor the other. As if the Maker couldn't quite make up His mind.
He had his mother's quick temper, easily frustrated to the point of rage, particularly by his own failures, and he had but little patience. But he was quiet, thoughtful, and very serious, much like his father. Like both parents, he could be more than a little…willful. And his curiosity and thirst to prove himself, even at this very young age, led him into misadventures to try the patience even of his imperturbable father.
"My little One," his mother would say, always with that emphasis that let him know she gave the endearment proper noun status, while patching up his injuries from some ill-fated adventure. "Always trying to be so much more than what you are, never content simply to be."
And why would he be? Who could ever content themselves with being merely half?
He hated going to town. The people of Oswin always looked at him strangely, as if they couldn't quite figure out what he was. The sisters at the Chantry were worse still, trying to catch him unprotected by his father and lecture him about the Maker and the importance of going to services lest his tiny, unimportant soul be lost to the Void forever. He thought them more likely to snatch him away than the hard-eyed men who leaned against the sides of the buildings in the back alleys that his father worried about. The townie children despised all from the surrounding freeholds, and sometimes threw stones at him if they thought they could get away with it. The fact that, young and skinny as he was, he'd already managed to thrash half of them didn't make them any happier with his occasional presence in their town.
So he led rather a solitary existence even when young, but if you asked him whether he was lonely he might well have looked at you as though you were mad. He had mother and father, and he had Adalla, the mabari pup his father found in their woodshed who never left his side for a moment. He had enough.
But if instead you asked him was he happy, you might have surprised him out of rather a different response. He loved both his parents and he knew they loved him, but he felt the tension his awkward, in-between presence brought to their lives and mistook it for disappointment. His father must surely want a strong, strapping boy that would grow into a giant of a man like himself, and too impatient for natural growth and frustrated by not being as strong and capable as he thought he should be he believed that great size would never be his. His mother must surely want an elf like herself, and he would never be that, either.
On one occasion, when he was very young and small indeed, an early foray into the fine art of tree climbing left him with a knot on his head and a broken arm. His father set the bone himself, praised him for his stalwart silence through the pain, and then his mother took over. Her relief that he had come to no worse end than this made her a trifle more clingy than she would perhaps have been otherwise, and she held him on her lap and rocked with him in her homemade wicker chair. Though he considered himself far too old at the sage age of five and a half for such babying he lay still in her arms and pretended to sleep so he would not be forced by pride to object.
After awhile she began to hum, a tune he did not recognize. She did not know human songs, so he thought it must be a song of the Dalish, and he wished he could know the words. While she hummed she stroked his hair back from his face and began to trace the shell of his ear with her fingers, round and round again. He wondered if she was trying to stretch it out, make it come to a point. If she could manage it, she was welcome to try. He was tired, already, of being nothing more than half.