Dorian gives a curt chuckle at Hawke's struggle with the potent drink, toasting in kind. It's always the fruity cocktails that knock you on your arse.
"I was under no delusions that the south would be a utopia. People, ends up, are peopleāconfusing, beautifulāfrom Denerim to Seheron." But the south, at least, taught him one can pick what joys and miseries we are willing to tolerate. For that Dorian will always be thankful. "My mother hated it when I showed up with this beard to the family estate. I let it get too bushy. Not unkempt, mind you, but large. She chalked it up to bad southern influences. It intimidated everyone, terribly out of fashion as it is."
The champion's prickly pride isn't as interesting as what follows. Ah, the question of the night. Dorian presses the tip of his tongue to the corner of his lips, gauging Hawke's reactionāsincerity, too big for one's mouth, the kind that drives children to ask highly inappropriate questions without shame. Because they haven't learn it yet.
"And you would be right. I grated the man from the start. Back in Haven, when most thought the battle lost, he suggested we should turn the trebuchets upon our encampment, bury us and the enemy with one massive avalanche." Tactically, it made senseāwhy play at heroes, fight to the last man, when instead they could take the enemy by surprise, entomb as many of the enemy as possible in a frigid mass grave, buying time for whoever was next to fight the next battle? "But I thought the plan suicide, and accused our dear commander of thinking like a blood mage. Oh," Dorian sighs wistfully, amusement tugging at his crow's feet, "You should've seen his face. Like he wanted to smite me right there and then." And would've, if he'd been taking lyrium.
"A northern mage is a whole other pedigree. Our templars are neutered, for lack of a better term. We are not brought up with a cultural fear of the Order, they are subservient to us, rather. So, you must understand my fascination with their southern kind. A Knight-Commander no less."
"I, never a man to shy from sticking my hands into a flame, later asked Cullen atop the Skyhold ramparts if he'd found a better outlet for his temper than burying us all under a hundred thousand tons of snow." The memory wrings a snort out of Dorian, flint grey eyes dancing in delight. "Cullen did not toss me down the Frostbacks to my death. Instead, the man laughed, and I got the impression he could use a laugh more often. Thus it became my mission to distract him from his work as much as I could, needling him about anything and everything, particularly his views on mages. Despite warnings from my southern brethren, I willingly poked the Inquisition's lion, repeatedly. It was so easy. And it felt so right. I could tell, despite all of Cullen's protests to the contrary, that he enjoyed it."
"And I got the impression I was not the first to do this, that I walked on paths long worn into him. Kirkwall, I used to think," Dorian, steps measured, takes one forward, lips dangerously close to Hawke's earlobe, "I wasn't wrong, but I wasn't right either. I didn't have the whole picture then."