brosca is the only one who will ever see Duncan as a savior, at the end of the war.
you’re a human noble. you’re a proud, happy member of house cousland. when howe betrays your family and you’re there, terrified, in the cellar with the shattered remains of your dying family, it’s you and your mother against the world. your mother: the pain-in-the-ass, hardheaded, spitfire of a woman that sassed you yesterday about manners is beside you, her eyes haggard and haunted. “He’s my husband,” she says, begging, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “He’s your father, and he’s dying, and I love him. Whatever he faces next, he faces it with me.”
She cannot be argued with. She cannot be reasoned with. You can beg and beg and beg your mama to come with you, to survive beside you, but the outcome will always be the same. Duncan will ask you to leave, and she will choose to stay. How can you live with that?
(It’s poetic justice, perhaps, how quickly you come to understand it.)
—-
You are a dwarven princess, beloved of the house aeducan, noble of caste and certain of birthright, when your brother betrays you.
Not the brother you expected to betray you, of course. Your bosom friend, your sovereign sibling. The one who would’ve had your back eternally, if the wide expanse of the throne hadn’t stood in the way. If only love could’ve bridged the chasm. the warden bridges what Trian could not, what Bhelen would not - a last-minute pardon, excusing you from a game you never knew you were playing.
(you had a birthright, certainly, and it was taken from you. all else you cling to is stolen valor now.
checkmate.)
—-
You are the young bride tabris, and your husband stands there bleeding.
Your cousin has already been stolen away, and it hurts, how innocent she was, when so much of you had been stolen away. You would’ve stood in her place a thousand times, and all the evil, lecherous, unspeakably human hands in the world wouldn’t have stopped you, if it meant shielding Shianni. Your husband, bright-eyed and already dying, even if he knows it not, comes to save you. He does not know you, but he saves you from horrors that you have braced against a thousand times before, before he knew you, even if it does not matter. he is noble, in that way.
Duncan is noble too. He offers you a way out - a way out from your family, from your friends, from the only world you have ever - could ever - know. he offers you a chance to die on the battlefield instead of dying in the cellar, before you would ever know this suffering, the suffering laid on you at birth, by mere sin of being elven.
(To die without knowing. Isn’t that worse?)
—-
You are mahariel, free to the wind, to the rain, to the very corruption of nature.
shemlen in the forest was an ill enough omen. to come with grave warnings of burial grounds and curses and demons? you should have fixed your young dalish curses on them, da’len, on what they wrought, and you should’ve turned and fled
you did not, and, by your side, he did not. in another world, you would have lived by his side. in this one, you watch him die again and again.
(it is in your nature, after all, the watching over of dying things.)
—-
You are a mage, human or elven, and it makes little difference.
the maker hates you regardless, or so the templars say. You are good, perhaps, and you turn them in, or else you are kind. It matters little to Andraste, if she’s the one listening, or to anyone else.
Duncan speaks. He offers you refuge, outside of the Circle, far from home. You’ve never seen sunlight unobstructed before, let alone war. You have to choose - Tranquility, or a noble death, somewhere down the road.
(it isn’t a choice, not really. it was made for you before you were even born.)
—-
but you, grey warden, you are something special.
He offers you a worthy death, somewhere in that nebulous future, and you don’t have to worry about how it comes anymore. You know where death will take you - on the doorstep of one darkspawn or another, not here, gasping, in the dirt.
Your sister says this life is worth it.
And it is, isn’t it, for yourself, for your family, for the few lonely friends that you leave behind? for finally, desperately, clawing your w ay out of poverty, even when it costs you everything? for rica to be safe?
(It will be worth it.
It must be worth it.)
