Work Text:
There’s something wrong in his head, he can’t get it out.
He’s Ashkaari, always bigger than the others and with more questions in his mouth. Harsh voices and gentle hands try to shape him, hone him into a better weapon.
“But I don’t understand, Tama.“
“You will understand.”
“I don’t, it’s - not right - the words are wrong.”
He knows the words can’t be wrong; he knows the only truth is to follow the path. Tama reminds him, every day. He reminds himself. There are rhymes and arithmancy, children’s tales and military routines; there are books, endless libraries full of books to help him remember victory in the Qun.
“You will understand. Here.” Her hands cup his face, and there’s a light in her eyes, a fire that does not burn. She places one of her hands over his heart. “And here.”
*
He’s Hissrad because he makes the most beautiful lies.
Struggle is an illusion. There is nothing to struggle against.
Two years, they say when he leaves for Seheron. Beyond that, the enforcers lose their mind to asala-taar.
He’s Hissrad, still larger than most but the questions are bound, laid to rest at the back of his tongue as he speaks to merchants, serving girls, soldiers, farmers. You will understand and the system follows a pattern here, he reads it like a book. He’s clever and quick, he likes to talk, figure things out.
He lasts two years, four years, five, six, seven, eight. He is unbreakable.
Then there’s a Tal-Vashoth with a light in her eyes, a fire that does not burn. A Tevinter agent smuggling sarebaas out of Seheron. A school full of children. A friend dying at the hands of savages.
Emptying his mind, his body crashes against the shores of it all.
*
He’s Ben-Hassrath and he’s the Iron Bull and there’s something wrong in his head, he can’t get it out.
He is the mindless ox-man in the corner, the captain of the Chargers who drinks too much and fucks everyone that moves; he knows the Inquisitor’s weaknesses, every strategic flaw of Skyhold, what the general plans and what the ambassador plots.
His notes are scant, the words are ghosts but he writes them, he writes them with his teeth clenched and his mind burning. He writes them because if he does not write them his soul is dust and he wants to care about that.
Orlais bleeds. Ferelden broke under the Blight.
The Qun would heal the wounds and improve life; the path is clear and full of truth.
There is no part of him - not of Ashkaari or Hissrad or the Iron Bull - that wants the Qun to reach these lands. There is no part of him that wants to be given orders to fight against these people, no part that can endure the thought for very long and what little willingness that once remained dies quickly. He couldn't. He can't.
It’s not right. The words are wrong.
“You don’t want to kill. You want to defend,” the creepy demon kid tells him in a ruin of some war he isn’t fighting for a change. Or perhaps he is - the lines aren’t as sharp here as they are in Par Vollen, the paths never unbroken.
*
He’s the Iron Bull and he watches the Qunari dreadnought crash and burn, the noises of fire meeting waves like lashes on his back.
You will understand, Tama says and places her hands over his heart, around his eyes. Like the baker making his bread with two spoons of salt instead of one, the fisherman selling one fish more than his daily allowance, the soldier going into battle with a token buried beneath the clothes or painting the Vitaar in the wrong order. The quietest of uproars, the most brittle of rebellions. Or the most important.
You will understand and when he sits by the campfire surrounded by the ragtag band of idiots he recruited in Orlais, accompanied by the pretty Vint and the Boss who would get her mouth sewn shut after a week of Qunari rule, who calls him a good man and worries about him like a Tamassran, he thinks yeah, maybe he does.