Chapter Text
Cole is thirteen, or near enough, when he… when his family dies. Then the Templars come, bright helms and bright swords and bright mail and the blinding bright conviction that they are doing the right thing. Then he is locked away in a cell. It’s not so bad, at first. He is hungry, and cold, but he is used to that. There are beatings, but he is used to that, too. (There are other things too, worse than beatings, but at least when that happens he gets to be warm again for a little while, and one of the knights who feels guilty lets him eat whatever he wants after. He tells himself it’s not the worst thing ever. He tells himself it could always be worse. He tells himself quite a lot of things, and only some of them are true.)
It gets worse, after some time, because that’s the way things always happen to him. Cole is cursed, Papa said, so it makes sense that it goes sour. He is moved to a new cell, farther down, farther in, away from the lights and noise and people. No one comes to beat him anymore, or for the other thing he is Not Thinking About, but no one comes to give him the daily slice of bread and bowl of watery porridge either. No water, too, but his new cell is damp and the wall leaks, so he can sip rainwater off a crack in the stone. The water tastes funny, like putting a copper bit on his tongue, but it’s water, anyhow, so it’s good enough. He is hungry until he’s not, and then it feels like his insides are eating him, and he gets dizzy when he stands up. Cole screams until his voice is gonegonegone, rattling the bars, slamming his fists into stone and only stopping when his hands are so numb he can’t tell if they are still there at all, anything he can think of to Make Noise.
No one ever comes for him, not templars or mages or red and white priests, not the Maker or Andraste or any of Mama’s gods. Pain becomes all he knows, pain and a strange kind of sleeping-that-isn’t-sleep and darkness and silence and alone. He has been forgotten, left to die here, no one to care about him, and that almost hurts more than the body-hurt of him.
Cole realizes, after another Long While, that he is dying. He is also, probably, going mad. Already has, seeing things in the dark. Hearing voices. Little nothing, ghost boy, losing what’s left of his little nothing mind. He is going mad, has gone, will be, always is. A ghost that isn’t one, not yet but near enough for it not to matter, not really.
Cole Lannigan is thirteen (he thinks so) when a Thing appears in his cell, a Thing that looks like Bunny if Bunny was glowing and green and not-dead-not-dead-I’m-sorry-I-didn’t-mean-to. No one came for him, because the Thing in the cell Wasn’t There and now Is, and anyway the Thing isn’t a “no one”, because to be a “no one” you have to be a “someone” and he doesn’t think the Thing counts as a “someone” if the Thing isn’t real.
“But I am real,” says the Thing, in a hundred voices all at once, none of them making Cole afraid even though some part of him thinks distantly that he should be. He’s still dying, though, so maybe it doesn’t matter now.
“I can help you,” says the Thing. “I want to help.”
Cole doesn’t think it’ll work. Dying, and cursed besides, and the Thing isn’t very big. The Thing seems young, like he is. Suddenly, viciously, he wants his mama to be there, to hold him and stroke his hair and tell him everything will be alright even if Cole knows without Knowing that she’s lying to him.
“It will work, I can do it!” the Thing says earnestly, “I can help, but you have a choice. Do you want to go now, and see your mother and your Bunny again? Or do you want to wait a bit longer, see what happens?”
Cole thinks about it, takes a long swallow of Time, then thinks, I want to live, please I want to live. I’m scared. I want to live.
Cole is thirteen, or near enough, when a Thing called Compassion takes his hand and does… something, something Magic, something Strange, something Cole certainly doesn’t know, but he isn’t in the dark anymore, might not be dying even if he still feels sick with the almost of it. He is in a barley field somewhere that feels like home but no bad-wrongness. The Thing called Compassion hasn’t let go of his hand. They promise not to, not ever, if Cole doesn’t want them to stop. He wonders if he’ll believe it someday. He hopes so. It sounds nice, belief. Sounds like something he’d want, when he can want things again. He thinks he’ll work on that one first.
He is eighteen, probably, when he sneaks into the temple, tired and hungry and wary of everyone around him. He hides in the shadows the way Compassion taught him, brushing snow off his clothes with chilblained hands. He hides in a coat cupboard for a while, stealing from the kitchens whenever Compassion nudges him to (Cole forgets to eat sometimes but it’s okay because his friend reminds him), until many more people show up and he flees to a less trafficked area. There is an explosion of some kind, and the Fade butting in where it’s not supposed to, and an old woman in a funny hat who tells him to run, and then he wakes up in a dungeon with a lot of swords pointed at him and there is something Wrong with his left hand.
He screams like a wretched thing, wrenching at the shackles and baring his teeth, making himself something to be afraid of because if they’re afraid then they’re more likely to make a mistake that will allow him to escape. Please I want to live. Don’t let me die in the dark please I’ll be good I promise don’t leave me here alone. Two women walk in, then, one with a sword and one without any weapons at all but no less dangerous for it. The sword lady wants to kill him, and the other one asks him questions he doesn’t know the answer to so he says nothing at all.
The sword lady (Cassandra, and what, exactly, do they need him for?) wants to take him to “the rift”, never mind that Cole doesn’t want to go anywhere with her at all (he’s used to people not caring about what he wants, though, so at least that’s familiar) except a bridge collapses while they’re standing on it. He hits his head on the stone, dizzy-making and sick-feeling but there’s nothing in him to sick up so he just Feels Bad the whole time he’s fighting the wraith-who-was-once-Curiosity. He still feels dizzy by the time they get to where they meet a Storyteller and a Thing-who-is-pretending-to-be-a-mage. Varric is nicer than Cole deserves, and Solas frightens him. A mage and a Fadewalker and something that isn’t a mage at all, grabbing Cole’s arm without so much as a please. The touch burns, makes his skin want to crawl off his bones and hide, but he wants more. No one has touched him without violence since he was thirteen, and his head is so muddled by it that he almost doesn’t notice the sharp-cold-burning-throbbing-stabbing in his left hand.
Cole is a mage but doesn’t want to be so he isn’t, because that was what almost killed him the first time. He pretends that keeping the magic trapped behind his ribcage doesn’t hurt. He is good at that, the pretending.
Fighting the Pride demon is. It hurts, and it hurts right up until closing the rift means he gets thrown back into a bit of wall and wakes up somewhere as unfamiliar as everything else has been. (His left hand aches, and he stares at the green thing on his palm with no small amount of fear, Compassion peering over his shoulder and muttering about anchors and being “Fade-touched”.) He is still a bit dizzy, but softer, where he can ignore it mostly.
An elf girl walks into the room, then, and drops a crate of things that clink and crash and Cole is suddenly very aware of how loud everything is. She left the door open, and he can hear the crowd outside and a blacksmith working a forge and soldiers clamoring and horses and it is too much in its muchness. The girl babbles something at him, but Cole presses himself into a corner, slamming his fists into the sides of his head onetwothree, a low noise curling from his mouth like a wounded animal. Small hands wrap around his wrists and tug, his skin on fire, whispers flitting in and out of his ears as he struggles to focus on the fingers rubbing tiny circles over his knuckles.
The elf girl’s name is Irina, and she gently herds him through back alleys and servant’s passages into the Chantry kitchens, where the loud has a different mouthfeel and he can finally breathe. Cook bullies a bowl of soup—parsnip, with plenty of onion and garlic and something sweetish that he can’t place—into his hands, Irina keeping up a steady stream of chatter beside him. Two types of warm, and when he slips into the war room through a side door, he feels more grounded in his skin than he’s been in a long time.
A fussy old man he only vaguely remembers from a few days ago wants him executed. Cole is not exactly surprised. Lots of people want him dead; now there’s just a few more. He’s more surprised that Cassandra doesn’t. There is talk of an Inquisition, and some more things he doesn’t have the energy to pay attention to, and then they are asking his opinion on something. They want him to join them. They call him “Herald”. He is not a prophet, and he tells them so. He follows no silent gods that did not save him. The blond man whose name he didn’t catch puts a hand on his sword in response to ice creeping across the floor that Cole half doesn’t believe is his, and Cole vanishes. (Josephine reams Cullen out heatedly, words biting and sharp in her concern for their evidently templar-shy Herald as they all scatter to go looking.)
Snowing outside, and new straw and puppies. Tiny things, but they’ll get bigger. Tall as a dwarf and just as wide, muscle and strong jaws and hungry always. The littlest one, reddish with a white chest, totters over unnoticed and uncared for by his mother. She doesn’t want him, Compassion whispers. Too small, too many pups, likely to die anyhow. Cole hums, soft and low in his throat, quick fingers stealing a touch of the puppy’s blocky little head. The puppy nips at his finger, wriggling into Cole’s lap. Warm safe companion mine, Compassion says, half-there hand reaching out to tap the puppy’s nose. Human witch boy frightened fearful hurting, needs me, needs my help, I want to help. Spirit-friended shadows-walker. Human witch boy is mine, my friend, my hunting companion, mine. My name is Feasts on the Blood of His Enemies. You are my human. What is your name?
“Cole,” he rasps, voice gone from panicking. “Can I call you Fifi?”
Acceptable. I am yours, and you are mine. We are we, together, two made one whole, stronger for the joining. I am hungry now, Cole-my-human. Are we eating now?
Varric finds the kid sitting next to the tavern, shivering in his thin shirt and trying to coax a tiny puppy into drinking goat milk. Explains why the Master of Hounds was so pissy earlier. “Hey, kid. Never did tell me your name, you know.”
“Cole,” kid mumbles, not quite meeting his eyes beneath that floppy dark brown mop that Josephine probably wants to take scissors to.
“Cole, huh? Nice dog you got there.”
Cole jerks his head, sharp and sudden, gnawing at his bottom lip. “We’re each other’s. His name is Fifi.”
“Course it is. C’mon, let’s get you and Fifi out of this cold, what do you say? Need to get you a coat, kid. Too cold for you to be out here like this.”
“Been cold before. Always, feels like. I don’t mind,” Cole says, unfurling his scarecrow limbs to lope along after Varric.
“I don’t have the words to explain why that’s a bad thing, kid. Kitchens first, I think, then the quartermaster. You need a sandwich and a good coat.”
Cole tilts his head, birdlike, confused, and says, “oh! I don’t need a sandwich, Varric Tethras. I already ate today. I’m alright.”
Varric insists on escorting Cole to the kitchens—most of the servants seem to know the kid already, which is good—and then picks up a set of daggers and slashes at one of the training dummies until it’s a pile of straw and shredded burlap. Fuck, he did not sign up for this. Maker help them all.