#aunny

With his hands finally clean, he pressed his face into his knees and hugged himself, breathing in little hiccups and trying to master himself in a way far beyond a nine-year-old’s capability.

“Cato?”

“Go ‘way, Aun,” he said, muffled though he was.

“I’m sorry,” Aunny whimpered.

Cato hated it. He could hear the tears in his crybaby little brother’s voice, and hate, hate, hated it, because he knew what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to stand up and say it’s okay and stop, but how was that fair? It was Aun’s fault. Why does he get to be the one to be sad?

“I said I’m-”

“I know!” Cato shouted.

“Do you forgive me?”

“No!”

Cato wondered if he could get in trouble for that. He didn’t care. He didn’t even care when he heard Aun’s crying get ugly, get all sloppy and snively and wailing like a baby.

“Are you gonna hate me forever?” Aunny asked, broken little voice scratching between his sobs.

Cato paused at that, bringing his hand up to his face to smear away yet another miserable tear, to scrub away tear tracks and any evidence that he was soft and felt. “No,” he said, tremulous in the effort not to make any more noise. “Not forever.”

“I said I was sorry!” Aunny said, shrill little voice too loud in Cato’s flopping ears. Accusing. Cato had enough.

He stood, little fists balled at his side, and yelled back. “Why’d you have to go and tell her?”

Aunny balked. He wasn’t used to his brother biting back, usually able to get away with his tantrum outbursts without repercussion, so long as it was just the two of them. Seeing Cato now, snotty and shaking and mouth all crooked trying to swallow down sounds, frightened him. Quieter, he said plainly, “She would have got mad.”

“She’s always mad about something,” Cato countered, but seeing Aunny’s face sapped at his anger. It left behind a wash of sadness he was too tired to fight.

“I’m sorry,” Aunny said again, this time softer and clear, and offered a hand to his brother.

His brother took it, fingers squeezing tight in the small gesture. Between his own crying, Cato forgave him.

They had rabbit stew for dinner.

--

Cato felt a flash of chill in the hot room, one that had nothing to do with the whorling steam and gathering condensation. The chill was inside him, hardening down his spine in icy little spokes.

“Fenedhis,” he swore, staring at where his satchel should have been. The satchel with his glyphs notation. The satchel with his favorite quill. The satchel with his ear cuffs and clothes. The satchel that was gone.

A titter rose behind him, a little tinkling laugh from different directions. It hadn’t been the first time someone stole from him. Usually it was at the Circle, harmless little things that made him roll his eyes and curse himself for not being more vigilant. Just some mild teasing between the upperclassmen shem and the uppity little knife ear.

But now, stepping out of the bathhouse with naught but a towel gathered at his hip, the enormity of his loss settled heavy and dreadful in his stomach. He was stranded. He was a wet elf in the middle of Tevinter with no clothes and no identification and a ten minute walk until he was safe again on Fen’Rhea estate grounds.

He considered begging a pair of trousers off one of the other patrons, and felt his gut squirm in shame, flinched at the thought of Tamas’ staff coming down, at her son, groveling like liberati shit, and banished that thought away as quickly as it came.

He couldn’t steal a pair, not with all the eyes watching him, not with the surreptitious giggles and the scrutiny of the rest of the patrons weighing down on him. He could feel his cheeks and the back of his neck going ruddy to match his hair. Cato went to the baths attendant.

“My things were stolen,” he said, voice strangled and small.

“I’m certain they were,” the attendant replied calmly. At a glance, Cato was elvhen, nothing more or less.

“I am serious. I am Cato Fen’Rhea, Altus heir to this district's Magister representative.”

The attendant paused this time, deigning to look Cato up and down once more carefully. Her glanced stopped at his face, at, “Your ears!”

Cato’s half turned away, his free hand coming up to shield the flabby, flapping tip of his ear still visible to her. He cleared his throat. “As you can now see, my claim is earnest. My things are gone.”

“I am so sorry,” the attendant said, alarmed now. “I didn’t… you’re… I will get you a spare robe immediately.”

She disappeared for a time, and Cato gave a sigh of relief, now that the humiliation was over. However, when the attendant returned, robe in hand, the dread returned.

“This is… you do not have a praetexta robe, do you?” he asked, not daring to hold out hope. The stain of blush ran rampant over his skin.

“No, I- oh. Oh. I can… send a runner to your estate for something more appropriate?” she offered with a cringe.

Cato gave a twisted, strangled smile. Tamas would kill him. “No, no. That would not be necessary. I’m certain I can manage myself. Thank you.”

Cato returned to the hot room, letting the towel slide away from his hips long enough to slip into the robes. They fit well. They were even comfortable, but looking down at his own tapered waist, Cato felt a stirring of unease without the thick red stripe indicating that he was an underaged freeman.

He plucked at his wet hair, hoping to hide the crumpled tip of his ears and pass for human.

Shame devoured him.

He stepped into the sun, walking through the wide streets quickly, but not too quickly. He bowed his head and refused to imagine what his classmates would say if they saw him. He refused to think of much of anything for most of the walk home, until a heavy, wide hand connected with his hip, thrusting him hard into the crumbling city wall.

“Are you lost?” a man, tall and broad, a masonist, a Soporati (always kicking down, the way of the world) asked.

Voice lost, Cato shook his head, loose ears flapping with the motion.

“Tch,” the masonist clicked his teeth, reaching out and pinching one ear between his thick fingers. He tugged out and up, bringing Cato to his toes with a wince, and spoke. “You’re not wearing a brand, and you’re not wearing a crest.”

For emphasis, the man’s hand came down again over Cato’s hip, the place where slaves traditionally wore the crest of their owners for identification. Just fingertips, digging into Cato’s flesh harshly.

I am Magus Altus, Magister heir and Hound of Seheron, and I can and will burn your face off of your head if you dare risk to touch me a second longer, is what Cato wanted to, burned to, say.

Instead, he spoke the words he had practiced in the mirror, the plan made along such contingencies as a Qunari raid or a hurricane. He murmured, “I am under protection of house Fen’Rhea.”

A title only did you any good if people believed you held it.

“Do they know you’re out this far, alone?” the masonist asked. “You are alone, aren’t you?”

“They will not be best pleased to see me harmed,” Cato reasoned, cautiously.

“No, I don’t think they would. They’re fussy like that,” the masonist agreed, and twisted, slowly, the flap of ear. “Maker, you’re a pretty one.”

Cato was better than screaming. His jaw tightened, but not a sound escaped. If the masonist killed him, right there, the man and his whole family would be put to death. It would be a slow, grisly affair. Probably public. Very serious.

And Cato would still be dead.

“You’re not going to run around these parts without being marked again, are you?” the masonist asked.

“No,” Cato said, placating and shaking his head as far as the tight grip would allow.

“No, what?”

“No sir,” Cato breathed.

It came so easy to him, as did the bile rising in his throat. The masonist released him and Cato wasted no time tucking tail and fleeing.

He was grateful his hair was still wet. Cato had long since mastered himself enough not to loose an ugly sob, but the prickling tears eked their way past, hidden in the drops the fell from his ladened locks. A child’s indignation clawed at him, the lingering terror, the ache on the inside of his hip bone and the bruises and threats.

He was Altus. He was a magister’s son.

He was free.

He was an elf.

--

“Are you even listening?”

Cato’s eyes slid open, the shadows of a smile painting his mouth. Shayne’s hand rested on his cheek, her thumb brushing idly over his lip, a tender and proprietary gesture. He kissed the pad of her thumb.

“I’m listening,” he said, evasive. Then, in honesty, “To your heartbeat.”

She looked down at him where she was propped up on the pelts at the head of the bed and set aside her book, and Cato glanced away, bashful.

It was a silly little truth, but as much as he enjoyed listening to Shayne’s voice as she read to him a slow translation of the Seheronese field report, he enjoyed the secrets of her body more. Resting his head on her chest, he could hear her heartbeat, her breathing, hum of her voice resonating in her chest, and feel the heat of her body through their thin rec shirts. In the Seheron summer, when she was damp with humidity and he was dripping with sweat, their clothes clung to their skin, and it was much like laying with her in nothing at all.

The scent of her stirred something rearing and restless inside him, making his belly twist.

“There is my boy,” she said, her voice a strip of silk at odds with the severity of the military outpost.

In so many ways, they were so very different, that he could not for the life of him understand why it was so easy to talk and to touch, and to be touched. Her fingers traced his jaw featherlight, then to the caved in shell of his ear. One thumb slid beneath, and she rolled the skin and shapeless cartilage gently. He did not wear his cuffs out in the jungle. They got too hot, and the minute cost it had to his hearing made him just that much more on edge, so the crumpled flesh had been left swinging all day, left tender.

She worked them gently, sweetly, with a kindness that made Cato distantly bitter. Shayne had first killed a fourth of his life ago, hardly long at all into her bleeding. And yet, she was still permitted to be soft? She was capable of being soft? It defied what he had been taught, and what he had

begrudgingly learned.

But the bitterness was not for her. Not when she met the lessons he had been given with tacit and loving rejection.

(“I thought you had not seen war,” she had whispered, touching the puckered edge of his scars.

His throat, working hard to form the words as he struggled and failed to find the pride he usually had when his scars were inspected. “Different kind of war.”)

She rolled the vulnerable flesh between her fingers. Cato knew she’d be able to feel the half-formed lumps of structure under the fatty, flabby skin, but it had been a while since he cared. It made him sick with discomfort when she first massaged there, but it was sensitive and sore and had gone too many years without a pleasant touch, without touch at all, really. His teachers, when he was young, twisting them in reprimand. Later himself, plucking and pinching when he was angry at his own shortcomings, and the fumbling of half-lovers that understood they required a soft hand, but always erred on the side of too rough with him. But mostly tucked up and hidden.

Not so with Shayne.

She leaned in towards him, her full, full lips parting in invitation, and he met her halfway, straining to meet this kiss and sighing in contentment when they brushed. Despite being a mage like him, a mage that could match him, her arms were dense and pulled him up easily.

He turned his hips to match hers, one leg between her two and their kiss deepened and multiplied. With a crook of her thigh, she encouraged him to rock, to slide slickly against her, kissing and sucking off the sweat at her neck until their breathing staggered drunkenly.

“I want you in me,” she said. She took his mouth with hers, tongue running into him before they broke and she clarified. “Deeper in me than that.”

Cato stared at her, breath stuttering, before he pulled back enough to sit on his knees. His hands were shaking but remarkably proficient as he loosed his belt and the tie of his trousers. He was hard and hardening when he freed himself, and she looked at it with the unveiled hunger that she always had when he was naked before her. This time, though, her gaze was slow and lingering.

“Are we-?” Cato asked, the feeling of foolishness growing the longer he sat holding himself. Feeling discomfort in the stillness, he stroked himself slowly. Long, loose, downward strokes, more for her benefit than the grinding tease in his own arousal. “Have you ever-?”

“We are. I have not,” Shayne said. She drank him in. Hunger and thirst and all sorts of needs on her face, flashing in warning. “You have?”

“Not like this,” he admitted, nervous laughter in the words. He’s been with a many, some friends, some acquaintances, many he barely tolerated but for their skill. Never out in the open. Never with someone he loved. His chest ached.

She reached up and kissed him, her hand rubbing lightly at the back of his neck. “I love you, and I want you. Is this what you want?”

“Maker, yes,” Cato whispered. Her hand went to his heavy cock as she pulled him forward with the other, herself back. Helping guide him in, as Cato rolled his hips smoothly and parted her with a wordless moan.

She was wet, impossibly more hot around him than the Seheron air blanketing them both, and her own moan struck hard the crack she had made in his guard.

He shattered and sobbed, sinking slowly and full into her, with tears that rolled over his cheeks like beads of sweat. Cato kissed against her neck, the lank silk of her hair a nest, a home.

“I love you, I love you, I love you.”

--

Something was going to give.

The smooth metal nozzle was forced over his tongue, chipping a tooth as the Qunari fed more of the leathery tubing between his tightly sewn lips. The sack at the end was squeezed. Cato tasted the slimey gristle as it seeped into his mouth, down his throat. Thick and clogging.

He gagged, tried to rip the stitching in a scream, to get away, to breathe, but the only thing he managed was to choke and force up the slop. It dripped from his nose and between his thread-pressed lips, down his chin and onto the too heavy bas saarebas collar. The hand there, wide and grey, released him, letting him fall back onto his back and cuff hands with a revolted scoff.

“If it will not eat, it is welcome to starve,” the Qunari warned him.

Cato rolled to face away, drawing his legs up, and wept bitterly. Something was going to give. One way or another. There had been another abomination in the pens that morning, and Cato’s time was coming closer and closer. There was only so much one elf could endure. He would either be ripped apart by the demonic remnants of his broken friends, or break himself and take host for his only chance at self-destruction.

Mercifully, his captor did not press the issue. With a swift kick to the base of Cato’s spine, glancing off Cato’s bound hands and striking a broken finger, he pulled the heavy doors to their pen shut.

For a while, the only thing Cato could see was the blanket of qamek gas that filled the pit. It burned at his eyes, burned his throat and lungs, and he found a wash of saliva filling his swollen mouth. It mixed with the fatty grits lingering on his tongue, frothing and threatening to choke again.

Cato swallowed it down and smeared his filthy face into the dust. The trickle of mucus and tears irritating his skin was a final misery, a last stone atop the mountain that pushed everything into ‘intolerable’. Behind his pressed lips and clenched teeth, Cato screamed.

“H-he-e-e’s ba-hack,” someone called through great, wet coughs. They wouldn’t last long, either. When your lungs start to blister, that’s when you’re about done.

Cato felt the percussion of movement through the ground, and it wasn’t until the hand was inches from his face could he actually see it out of the artificially made fog. He flinched, eyes rolling, and reared back. It took ahold of him by the collar and pulled him into a sit.

“Why’d they put him back with us?” Someone else asked. Their voice was raw, but not wet. There was hope for them, still.

We’re the only ones left, Cato wanted to say, but even if he could speak, he knew what happens to mages who tried to. The hands on him moved, feeling up the topology of his body and finding Cato’s mouth. One disappeared for a moment before returning with a sharp white sliver of something. Cato hummed a questioning noise while they cut the stitches at his lips.

“It’s a shard of Scout Lucas’ femur,” the second voice continued, sawing at the thread. The soldier was too hoarse to place, but Cato was certain it was one of his wolves. With a little ‘prk’, the thread snapped, and the soldier’s fingers picked at the frayed end until he pulled the final stitch free. Cato could make out his face in the fog only barely, and recognized him as Lieutenant Leto. A good soldier. Handy with a knife.

“Lucas-” Cato gurgled. He could feel the slide of blood in his throat. The sound of his own voice scared him, but he needed to know. “When? How?”

“Last night? Maybe this morning?” There was no way to tell the time, here. It could have been a very long five minutes ago for all they could say. “They just kept hitting his head.”

“Hands,” Cato instructed, struggling to turn around on his weakened knees. Leto crawled behind him, sawing now at the thicker leather strips. “Captain Aunnriel?”

“He hasn’t said anything since Lucas,” Leto said.

“Salatar or Qamek?”

“Dunno. Could be something else.” The binding on Cato’s hands went slack at once, and Cato brought them over his chest, rubbing the feeling into his fingers haltingly. “They worked him over before they got to Lucas.”

“Take me to him,” Cato demanded, and Leto put a hand under his arm. They crawled along the ground, part because the gas was marginally less dense than if they stood, part because neither of them trusted the strength of their legs.

Leto’s hand stretched out and disappeared before them, feeling for a body until he found something. Both he and the other jumped at the unexpected contact, Aunny’s body barely visible in the fog.

Captain Aunnriel was on his side, back curled, with one leg drawn protectively over his belly. A hand covered his face, the other stroking in compulsive, soothing pets over the back of his shorn head, all twisted around himself. Cato thought about sending Leto away for this, to try and get a moment of privacy so he could speak to his brother candidly, but it was pointless. There was no place for dignity here.

“Aun,” Cato tried, little more than a crack of his voice. Bubbles of blood popped in the back of his throat, such a disconcerting sensation. He put a hand on Aunny’s wrist and tried to pull it away, but Aunny shook him off with a wordless, hollow moan.

“Aun, it’s me,” Cato persisted, trying the other hand. Beneath Aunny’s splayed, crooked fingers, there was a mess of blood on his face. He looked forward as if there was something there to see, and one sclera was stained red.

He shook Aunny gently, and he started as if waking from sleep. His eyes snapped at once to him, wide and yellow. “Cato.”

His name in a breath, and Cato nodded. “Talk to me, Aun.”

“Cato, they-” Aunny began, smoothly, almost eagerly, before shuttering completely, blinking out of communication. His face remained frozen in the expectation of speech. A blip in time, until another rush. “They-they-they killed Lucas. And Mercia. Julian and Florian. They-”

He froze again, and Cato felt his jaw clench. Florian had been their medic, and Cato had hoped he would be able to hide his magic and keep the squad together long enough for prisoner negotiations to be established. Their timer went from months to days.

“They-”

He had been taught to shake, slap, to beat the words out of his useless, stuttering mouth, but instinct and Shayne’s lessons rallied hard against him, and Cato slid forward in the blood-made mud. He guided Aunny’s head atop his bare knees and stroked over the uneven velvet and scabbed cuts on Aunny’s scalp, same he would in their youth, when Aunny would wake up crying with bad dreams.

Aunny was trying. Past the pained mask, Cato could see the furrow of his brow and draw of his lips, the expression he wore when he was struggling to remember obscure bits of history when they studied together in the Circle.

“They didn’t make it quick, and I-... couldn’t-”

Cato cried with him, a silent counterpoint to Aunny’s broken weeping. He hadn’t seen or heard Aunny cry since his voice dropped, but the great, wracking sobs were still familiar. Some things don’t change. Cato coughed, and it felt like swallowing glass.

“They just- like dolls and there was no- they wouldn’t let me-”

“Look at me,” Cato instructed. They had a precious, narrow window, and any chance they had would grow more and more slim with each casualty. Aunny’s mind couldn’t be one of them. Aunny turned to look up at his big brother, eyes glassy and wide and utterly, utterly desperate. “We’re getting out of here, now.”

“We are?” Leto asked in a whisper. “Field-Enchanter, we’re instructed to-”

“Florian’s dead, and the other squad is already wiped out. Captain Hadrian was taken by a hunger demon just before I got here and it will be another two days before the Qunari raven reaches Alam. Do you think any of us will be alive in two days?” Cato turned back to Aunny, tucking arms under him and heaving him carefully into a sit. Aunny spat, a long rope of blood and spit sliding down to the dust. “Some of us don’t have two hours, by the sound of that cough. And next time the oxmen come back, none of us will have two minutes. Tell me who we have and what we have. Aun, you need to sit up. We’re going home.”

--

“Excited?”

“I’m howling at the moon,” Cato deadpanned. In truth, he was more than excited. He was ecstatic. He was also wildly terrified, mentally rehearsing how to hold a babe while supporting the head.

Maker, he wasn’t made for soft, breakable things.

“You’re going to be fine,” Aunny reassured him gently. Or, as gently as Aunny could manage. He still sounded like he had been smoking Qameva everyday for his entire life, froggy and creaking, but the healer did a decent job with him. There is only so much the body can do at once, even with the judicial application of spirit healing. Cato was just glad all their bones were setting straight between the two of them. “Stupider people than us have kids all the time, and they turn out well enough.”

“Of course,” Cato said, lightly. “Tamas managed rearing both of us, didn’t she? Comparatively, I’m quite well equipped.”

“Mmm, maybe you can use all that excess shame you’ve brought to the family to baby-proof the house.”

Cato laughed, pain aching over his heart. It was good to laugh at these things. Better that then keep the bitterness to yourself and let it root and grow into doubt. “A fine idea! Young Master Fenris would do well to get acquainted with it early.”

“Ah, Fenris,” Aunny said, flinching at the name just slightly. “That begs the question: have you decided on a name?”

“Not Justus,” Cato said with a snort. Tamas had been referring to the little pup by the name she had selected for him ever since he had returned from Seheron. Cato had nothing against the name, but at this point he would defy her out of spite. Slowing his pace, Cato admitted, tentatively, “I was actually thinking ‘Leto’.”

The smile of Aunny’s face receded, growing somber. “It is a good name. Cato, we haven’t-”

“Don’t,” Cato warned. A single, tight-lipped word he managed from behind his now-forced smile.

“It might help ease the burden to talk about it.”

“Don’t. I don’t want to hear it. I got us out of there. I owe you nothing,” Cato hissed at him.

Aunny frowned sadly. “I didn’t mean for my benefit.”

“I-” Cato began, pausing to pick his words carefully. He sighed. “No. Thank you, but no.”

“Maybe some other time,” Aunny offered kindly.

It was at this point that they reached the nursery door. Nothing but the gentle creaking of a rocking chair emanated from inside, but Cato would hazard to say he’d heard less daunting explosions. Looking to Aunny and receiving a single, confident nod, he slipped silently into the room.

The wet nurse was rocking in the corner, pausing for only a moment to look up from her charge before ignoring Cato and Aunny in favor of the small bundle tucked against her chest. There was no crying, no sound, just the creak of wood.

“Is that... “ Cato asked, “Is he-”

“He’s sleeping right now,” she said, quietly.

Cato creeped forward, drawing up until he could see the swaddled baby’s round face. Just watched. Silent. Still. Unblinking.

The wet nurse stood slowly and drew up to Cato. “You can hold him, if you’d like.”

“But, if he’s sleeping- you would tell me if- I-,” Cato stammered, before Aunny gave him a small hip-check. Cato latched his fingers into Aunny’s sleeve, leaning backwards reflexively.

“Take him, Cato,” Aunny encouraged.

Cato’s face crumpled. “I don’t want to hurt him.”

Aunny placed a hand on the center of Cato’s back, and the wet nurse carefully, gingerly deposited the baby into Cato’s arms. The world didn’t end. The baby didn’t even wake

“I need to sit down,” Cato whispered.

They directed him into a chair- not the rocking chair, but a plusher one in the corner- and he sat smoothly, never taking his gaze off the small, peaceful face.

“He’s very healthy,” the wet nurse supplied as he settled, slouching back so he could rest some of the weight on his chest. “The perfect size. Delivered right on time. They told me he cried quick when he was born, which is a good sign. Oh- but he’s not colicky. He’s a good one.”

“Aun,” Cato said, faintly. “Look at him.”

“I am,” Aunny replied, unable to keep the amusement from his voice.

“Look at his face. Oh- his hands,” Cato murmured, and reached up to brush his finger over the tiny, curled fist of his son.

The fingers unfurled, blindly seeking, reaching, and closed contentedly around Cato’s finger. Cato stopped breathing. He whimpered in his throat, feeling the sting of tears only a beat before they came rolling down his cheek, so sudden was the rush of feeling. His son.

“Oh, Maker,” Cato said weakly.

“I think he likes you,” Aunny teased. His smile faltered as he watched his brother’s shoulders hitch with suppressed sobbing, watched him press his lips to the child’s brow. “Are you… going to be okay?”

“I didn’t think this was how it was going to be like,” Cato choked out. “Aun, I love him.”

“He’s your kid. Of course you-”

“There is no ‘of course’, and you know that. If there is, we are a couple of bastards, because I would never… I will never-” Cato said, throat closing over the admission. “I’m going to keep him safe.”

Aunny smiled crookedly, leaving Cato to his brood brooding and glancing over to the wet nurse in askance. “This normal?”

“It’s never normal,” she said, watching the new father with moony, lidded eyes.