Homing
She could hear children playing. And fighting and crying and shrieking for every conceivable reason including the joy of hearing their own voices as loud as possible. It was as much part of this place as the call of the birds. The children weren’t hers, she had never wanted any of her own, but she did not dislike them, quite the opposite in fact. She wanted their proximity, if not always their presence. She let the sound wash over her and gazed at the play of light through the leaves. It was the first time in well over a week she’d sat in her garden and let peace flow into into her. It was something she did most days. It … balanced things, in her thoughts, in her emotions, in weighing which reactions made sense and which didn’t. It put her in a state of mind where her need for solitude was satisfied and she was ready to accept the company of others as something to be enjoyed, not endured.
Anya had been too busy welcoming her husband home to need to balance anything, the first weeks were always an overabundance of each other at their best. He’d forget to be a crank, she would have no need to retreat from others, including him.
Thom seemed to have a knack for returning home when her solitude was about to turn to loneliness. The way she missed him would increase from an occasional twinge to a keening ache and he’d be there. It was always glorious when he’d appear, roaring about needing a bath, exhausted, happy to be home and full of tales of his life as a Grey Warden. They would make each other laugh at the oddest things. Immediately on his return the world around them seemed to have brighter colours, cleaner edges, there was a feeling of shininess about everything as if it had acquired an inner glow and they’d spend days exploring every possible way of enjoying each other on every possible surface that could accommodate them. Eventually they’d start looking at beds as a place where someone could actually sleep, clean up the fresh squalor they’d imposed on her orderly home and exchange feasts with her tenants.
“Tenants” was not really the best word, they were more accurately a colony of semi-permanent guests living in the main house of her estate, while she kept home in a former forge behind the stables near the gatehouse. She had bought the place for the extensive, walled-off lands, not the impressive architecture. The only time she’d lived in the mansion was while she’d converted the high-ceilinged work-shed into a home with a huge central fireplace. She didn’t like the sheer size of the main house, it seemed ridiculous for a woman who preferred to live on her own, especially because it would require a small army of servants to keep it from falling into disrepair. It had made more sense to her to give the house over to a handpicked group who would live there and keep the place running for their own benefit rather than her comfort. They were a mix of human refugees, of Tal-Vashoth, of elves who’d escaped servitude or outright slavery, and dwarves who’d found themselves on the wrong side of House and Carta politics, some were reformed criminals, some permanent malcontents and trouble-makers, most were ordinary people who wanted ordinary quiet, lives, all appreciated the walls of her estate and were willing to maintain them. She liked having people nearby without actually having to deal with them unless she wanted to. It was, in fact, a joyous, busy place full of families, friendships and people working together. She was well aware that in some ways, with all that necessary communal living and common purpose, it was like the Qun without the strictures of living under the Qun. She was also well aware that there was a fine balance involved in keeping it successful by letting most decisions fall to others while knowing when to mediate the petty disputes that could become bigger and burn the place down. She enjoyed the time she spent with them, but inevitably all that happy noise and the demands for her attention would start buzzing in her brain like bees and she’d retreat to her quiet home.
Next week, Sera would arrive. She found the elf exhausting, but always felt a pang when she finished her visit. Thom would be in a wonderful mood for as long as Sera remained but once she had left he’d resume his inevitable slide into morose brooding and would eventually get stir-crazy and unpleasant.
Anya had always chafed at what she found to be excessive companionship, she could not see the joy in a constant presence at her side. She had been together with Thom for over ten years and none of those years had passed where they had spent the majority of time together, other than the first one when she had been the Inquisitor and even then they had just been in the same place, not always at each other’s side. Thom’s duties to the Grey Wardens took him away for long months; of training new Wardens at the fortresses, on missions in response to reports of Darkspawn, often spending weeks in the deep roads, and on recruiting assignments throughout Ferelden and The Free Marches. It was probably why they had lasted as long as they had; neither of them were capable of living a shared life for extended period of time. She would get increasingly irritated at the intrusion of another presence in her home while the relative ease of domestic life would unsettle him. He would begin to brood. Sometimes, when he brooded, he would also drink and it was never moderately.
******
Sera had come and gone. Her visit had been a treat. She brought out the fun, playful side in in Thom. Perhaps a little too much of it involved pranks, obscene jokes and unflattering stories about the nobility, often in combination, but Anya laughed as hard as they did. The end of the visit had been strange. Thom had seemed to retreat into himself in the final two days and when Sera left he grabbed her in a tight hug. He didn’t seem able to speak coherently when he tried to say good-bye, just kept shaking his head and squeezing her arm and patting the side of her face. When she had gone, he’d shut himself in his work-shop and not come back out for over a full day. He had subsequently spent more of his time than usual in there.
It was sometimes an unhappy relationship, but it worked for her. She couldn’t imagine a conventionally happy one lasting. It seemed like an awful lot of work for something she wasn’t terribly interested in achieving. It hadn’t been an easy life with him, but it certainly would not have been easier without him. She loved him and that one fact overshadowed all other concerns.
******
Thom had spent most of the past few days fucking drunk. Already in the early afternoon he was at the “can’t-focus-my-eyes-and-walking-is-questionable-at-best” stage, Super. At least she’d missed the part where he told maudlin stories about his failure to rescue dogs, abused nugs and neglected pit-ponies. She still wasn’t sure what a fucking pit-pony was but they were among Thom’s many regrets and secret sorrows. His kindness outweighed his flaws, but like everything with him, it had a darker side which caused him to sink into deep unhappiness as he berated himself for every failure or inaction. Grey Warden stamina meant he burnt though alcohol faster than others, It took an effort to consume enough for it to affect him strongly. He could get piss-drunk when the mood took him, which wasn’t often but still predictable enough to eat away at her affection for him. Sometimes she wondered if he had ever been the man she fell in love with or if she had unknowingly stepped up to care for the equivalent of one of the pitiable creatures that featured in his rambling tales about his moral failings. She used to find his gruff, plain-spoken manner intensely appealing. She had wondered why he never gave himself much credit for the good, helpful things he did for others, almost as if he were throwing good deeds into a void. She liked that there seemed to be no bullshit about him. Then she had learned that most of how he presented himself was a lie. After that, she had increasingly noticed how easily blunt speech became flat-out rudeness and how much his regrets were more about himself and what he termed his “wasted life” rather than those harmed by him. She’d stuck by his side after he’d stepped up to face the truth. However, afterwards she had refused to call him by anything other than his true, dishonoured name.
She didn’t like being around anyone who was drinking heavily, she had too much personal familiarity with the well-deserved reputation Vashoth had for functional alcoholism. It was especially an issue among the first generation, those who had left the Qun and struggled without it to guide them. She, herself had been careless about drunkenness when she’d worked as a mercenary and it often led her to predictable regret. As Herald, then Inquisitor, she’d come to care about her cause and her companions too much to risk being at less than her best. She’d rarely touched the stuff after Haven was attacked partway through celebrating the closing of the Breach, with the result that most of their forces had been forced to fight red Templars while partially or entirely intoxicated. She made an ill-considered exception once at Skyhold when The Iron Bull had got her passing-out drunk on Maraas-Lok, an experience that rapidly went from fun to horrible and it was the last time she ever took more than a polite sip of anything alcoholic. She wondered about his motives in that at the time and more so several years later when it became clear he’d been expected to take her down during the attempted invasion of the south by the Qunari. By that point he was full Tal-Vashoth himself and was more than willing to reject any attempt to repair the severed ties to the Qun, though she believed he could have easily flipped the other way had it not been for his loyalty to the Chargers and attachment to Dorian. She had liked him tremendously, if never entirely trusting him. She was untroubled by how right she’d been.
She remained in touch with him and with most of the upper structure of the inquisition, except for that lunatic arsehole, Solas, who was busy plotting to ruin everything while wearing fur and shiny, shiny, very, very tight armour. Arm-stealing bastard. They had got along more often than not, but she should have punched him out on one of those occasions he had inspired the impulse. As for the others, It was a polite long-distance letter-writing sort of contact with most of them. The only ones she saw frequently were Sera, who always showed up to visit when Thom was there and Vivienne, who stayed with her for several weeks every year and contrived to avoid visiting until Thom had gone. She didn’t entirely understand how or why she and Vivienne had become friends, but it was one of the few genuinely strong, unconditional relationships she had allowed into her life. They were both people who kept most others at arms length as much as possible. Oddly, that impulse had made them deeply comfortable with each other.
*****
There was something eating away at him more than usual, it was very different from the expected reappearance of the more sullen aspects of his personality. It was like there was something filling up his head that was cancelling out all other thoughts and memories. His eyes were far away and he’d start humming and muttering to himself. Sometimes he stared blankly like he wasn’t sure of her name, if he even knew her at all or if she was a curiously mobile hat-rack. He often didn’t answer when spoken to and when he did, his surly tendencies were worse than normal. It was surely too soon for him to hear the Calling. Then again, he had been so much older than other newly recruited Grey Wardens when he took The Joining and no-one had a clear idea what kind of effect that could have on someone who was already getting close to fifty, with years of rough living behind him, especially because the onset of the Calling varied amongst Wardens. It was rare for someone his age to be taken as a recruit outside of a Blight but the reckoning of his past and the remaining scraps of genuine honour he had clung to demanded it.
*****
He was pacing near the fireplace. The agitation that had taken hold of him increasingly throughout the day cleared until he slowed, then stopped and stood staring at the flames. He started to speak “There is no-one who remembers me when I was a young man with so much potential ahead of me. All the good I could have done, the things I might have achieved and even the good that I did… it’s tainted by how I squandered all that possibility and by the blood on my hands. You, at least can remember me as a man who tried to put things right. You’ve paid for that as much as I have; no children and a disgrace at your side.” She walked behind him and wrapped her arm around him, dropping her head to rest her cheek against the back of his neck. Now was not the time to remind him that she had never wanted to be a mother, not before the Inquisition and certainly not after. She had been clear from early on that a relationship with her was conditional on not having a family, none of her own, no adoptions. She enjoyed other people’s children a great deal, she simply lacked any urge to be a parent herself and had many well-considered reasons for that. As did he. “You would have made a good father” she whispered. It was true. He loved being around kids, he was wonderful with them. He didn’t want any of his own because of his ugly past, because he felt his complicity in the murder of children would have cursed his own. He hadn’t cost her anything but a nonexistent family she had never wanted. She hadn’t cared that he had never been able to give her much more than love from a badly damaged man. Love had been what she wanted from him.
*****
He was organizing his gear and shoving things into his pack. He hadn’t slept through the night in days, hadn’t touched her except in passing, couldn’t conduct a conversation or stop whispering to himself, except when he was humming instead. He closed the pack and hoisted it onto his back. He was staring at her, his mouth working like he was trying to form words but couldn’t. He just grabbed her and held on tightly for a long time. He kissed her repeatedly and he was crying. She didn’t cry, except that she was and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like any of this, it was awful. Everything was awful. Her head was howling like a hundred angry wasp nests. She heard him rasp out “Goodbye Anyanka.” then he stepped away and his eyes started sliding into that distant look. She trailed behind him and watched him walk towards the door in the enormous, wooden gate and let himself out. She wasn’t going to keep trotting behind him and watch him disappear down the road. It was pointless to prolong this. It was miserable. She turned and walked across the yard and looked in his workroom. As she anticipated, it was cleaned out; no unfinished projects, everything he had made had been given away, even his tools were gone. There was not a speck of sawdust, nor a loose scrap of wood left. She closed the door with no intention of ever opening it again. She went into the house and climbed up the steps to her loft. She wasn’t really thinking of the window that had a view of the road, but walked straight to it nonetheless. She could see him walking up the first rise. In a minute, he’d disappear, but if she waited long enough, she could catch a few more glimpses of him as he receded into the distance.
She looked down at her hand resting on the deep sill and noticed that there was something new sitting there beside it, a small, exquisitely carved chest. The outside had inlaid panels that looked like the mountain views around Skyhold, formed from bits of the pretty, coloured stones he used to collect in his pockets when he travelled. It was the type of container that could be filled with keepsakes. She would open it later. It didn’t matter if there was anything inside or if it was empty, it was the last thing Thom had made for her and that was enough.