A Few Notes: This story contains spoilers for Act I and Act II, up to and including "All That Remains".
Trigger Warning: As the tags indicate, this story is a portrayal of incest. Read at your own discretion.

The Other One

As you lay to die beside me
On the morning that you came
Would you wait for me?
The other one would wait for me.

"Your Protector" - Fleet Foxes

I.

The night the news of Leandra comes, Carver drinks himself stupid on golden mead and memories. She would have been so proud.

He had been thinking of her, his beloved mother, the night the letter found its way to his hands, but that in itself was hardly strange. He is always thinking of her, mother and sisters all, they and a hundred other things to while away the time. There has been nothing but time for him up in the mountains, wintering in a crumbling outpost retaken from highwaymen after a little frostbite and a lot of bloodshed. In the months since, he's spent his days carrying timbers and driving nails, his mind consumed by the work, with no time to think or remember or regret – and glad for it, gladto use his hands for more than knocking heads and killing darkspawn after more than half a year in the Deep Roads. By night, however, the wind through the pines can be a lonely, haunted, living thing, and it's a cruel fate to be left to his thoughts.

Dark and ugly and mean, his thoughts. Resentful, and petulant as a child, and he is relieved that his sister is never there to see his mouth twisted in that way she said he had, and night after night he consoles himself with that meagre reassurance, and slowly each dawn comes anew, the days marching on to put his misery in the past where it belongs.

Then the news arrives and his mother is dead and there is no more hiding.

He sits by the fire in the great hall that night, his hunched and hulking form casting a daunting shadow against the stone, and he listens to the other men as they laugh and drink and dice. Word has spread, he knows, but he can't summon the will to care. The truth of the whole business bleeds out like washed ink, and mother and magic and Marian are all hammer blows upon his heart, and with each strike Carver is reshaped, remade, and forged stronger.

A few of the other Wardens ask the name of his mother. Carver gives it, ashamed to speak it when he has failed her so, and he does not ask after theirs. Let them whisper; it bothers him not. All among them know what their oath has cost him, for all among them have paid its price time and again. His fellows in the hall leave him to his brooding, and raise a silent glass in her honour, for Wardens are men from all walks of life, and all men had mothers once.

Everything seems so distant then, the voices and the hearth and the mead. Carver drinks deep, grieves deeper, and watches the fire for hours, keeping his close watch as the logs warp and pop amidst a cloud of sparks, and slowly crumble to ash. His heart is lost in faraway Ferelden, seeking the safety of another night, another hearth, and a past that cannot be recaptured or repaired.

A father's words, a mother's touch. A sister on each side to keep him warm.

All gone now – all gone, but for motherless Marian.

The night after the news came, he drinks as well, but it's not for the grief and it's not for the pain. That night is for his anger, white-hot and blinding, for everything that has come and gone, and all that cannot be undone. He drinks for his sisters, the dead one and the damned one, and all the memories that he cannot chase away. He weeps for them both, and his big hands cover his face to hide the shame of it, and all he can see through his wet, bleary eyes are little girls in linen dresses, running and laughing and calling his name.

He hates her then; she could have saved them.

He hates himself; he should have stayed.

The Maker can take his blighted blood ties, if she is truly all that is left to him in the world. To the void with honour, with duty, with titles and crests and coin. Where was all her status and power when – when –

He once had sought to calm the tempest he felt stirring within himself, thrashing his sense and his pride with bitterness and doubt, but in his weakest moment, there is no escaping what has come to dwell in his heart and so he drowns himself with whiskey and goes numb 'til the blackness takes him, and he can't for the life of him remember her name.

It's on his lips all the same when he wakes come morning, head pounding, stomach reeling.

He says it aloud only once, like trying to capture the last remnants of a dying dream, just before the world gives an almighty spin and he's on his knees retching into the basin.

.

The second letter comes a few weeks later.

He's in the mess hall when the post arrives; it's the first time the caravan has made it through in all the weeks since the last visit had stolen his mother away from him and what remained of his joy along with her. His head is down and he's intent on his breakfast when his name is called out, and Carver freezes for a moment because his gut tells him that it can't be right, the only person who had ever bothered to write to him was cut to pieces alone in the dark, and those left standing are nothing to him now.

He takes it anyway, because no matter how many times he tries to convince himself he doesn't care, he still wants to know what could be so bloody important, even if the news may very well have the power to kill what's left of him. He pockets the letter until he reaches the barracks where he's quartered, where he can suffer and swear in relative privacy. He doesn't recognize the wax or the seal, and the paper is stiff and officious; he feels quite the blundering ox just unfolding the damn thing.

Maker –

Carver sits down on his cot as he reads.

The letter is from Aveline – or at least, it's her heavy scrawl, easy to recognize even with the ink blotted and smeared, but there is a rhythm and an eloquence to her words that makes him think perhaps the dwarf had spent more than a little time pacing at her back reciting introductions as she penned it.

He reads it twice, and by the time he's done his jaw is clenched so tight his teeth begin to ache, and the words on the page blur together until he touches a hand to his forehead and closes his eyes, because nothing can be done to change what the letter says or what it means.

A deep tremor goes through him then, and his shoulders slump with burdens he'd long since thought he'd shaken off. It takes a good deal of goading to convince himself to stand, even more to force his legs to carry him, but once he is on his feet, it's as if he's moving in a trance, separate from himself, watching on from afar as he finds his commander, and says something more has happened in Kirkwall and he is going to need to take his leave, after all.