"This is why the Maker left." for Cullen/Astoria OR Astoria & Cass
Yippieee please enjoy some Cass & Astoria party for my first THWEEE! @thedasweekend
Cassandra Pentaghast did not indulge much outside of routine.
Most people knew that she was a woman of little patience and even fewer passions. Her mind she sharpened with scripture, her will she sharpened with prayer. Her body she honed with repetition and combative instincts woven into her very core.
Her passions were small and private— her inner world privy only to those who had dared get close enough to risk harm to understand her. To find out that she spent her time with her back rounded in a posture that would make the Lord Seeker weep, nose stuffed firmly into stories of dark, daring knights and blushing maidens.
The words would whisk her away to lands familiar and foreign to her— and she daydreamed when she was not dedicating her entire being to being a hand of the Maker's purpose. She would stay up late as the candle on her desk pooled wax along the floor, read until her eyes burned and the pages blurred in front of her. She would cry when the heroes would cry, and throw her book when a protagonist would declare his love at the inopportune time.
This was her time and her time alone—and nothing would make her deviate.
So when the Inquisitor came to her, unable to make eye contact, fists at her side, hackles raised, and demanded, "I need you to teach me how to read."
Cassandra's first, immediate reaction was simply, "No."
Who did the Inquisitor think she was? Cassandra was not anyone's personal tutor; she was not someone who could sit and teach and coddle someone like Astoria Trevelyan, encouraging her to sound things out or running practice writing drills with a soft smile on her face and a word of encouragement.
She was not someone who could offer that. She never would be.
And so she had said no. The Inquisitor, to her credit, took Cassandra's no with as much grace as she could offer, and only huffed and walked off. She did not tantrum, not that the Inquisitor ever did, but she also did not snark either. She simply accepted Cassandra's firm decline and left.
Cassandra returned to her routine of reading her book out in the yard.
It was only two days later when Cassandra was in the courtyard again, and something shifted across the yard that drew her eye. She spotted Astoria sitting on the ground in the garden, half camouflaged by late spring foliage. Her brows were furrowed in intense concentration, with her eyes fixated on the tablet that was propped up on her knees in front of her. The quill in her hand looked odd and misplaced, the only feathers Cassandra had ever seen her handle with fletching, which Astoria could handle with practiced ease. The quill was awkward and clumsy in comparison, and she moved it in a hesitant, unsteady manner across the parchment.
Cassandra watched from a safe distance as the Inquisitor’s concentration shifted into a deep frown. Astoria’s face became red with rage, and she whipped the tablet and quill in frustration into a garden bed before letting her head drop to her knees, arms wrapping around her legs.
The Inquisitor looked very small in that moment—sensitive and embarrassed in a way that she very rarely looked. This was a battle she clearly had fought many times, alone, and lost.
Before Cassandra could stop herself she was already halfway down the path to the garden, hands on both her hips as she crowded over the Inquisitor, waiting for her to speak.
Astoria did not offer up anything first. She rarely did. Cassandra decided to take the lead instead.
"What are you doing." It was less a question, more a demand for information, and the Inquisitor grunted back, the silence lapsing another few seconds before she peeked her tired eyes above her crossed arms.
"Josephine said I need to start…signing things. So…I was trying…I was trying to learn how to write my name." Astoria admitted, head tilting back and lolling against the stone behind her. She raised her arm to point over at the discarded tablet to the left of her. " I can't get it, but you can see for yourself so you can judge how bad it looks."
Cassandra fished the tablet out of the bed, shaking off the soil and taking a solid look at the work herself to make her own judgment, ignoring the dirt and smudged ink and unconfident lines. Astoria had been trying, it seems, for a while, as the page was nearly filled top to bottom with a hapless, smeared scrawl. The letters were misshapen, often more unreadable than not. But what caught Cassandra's attention were the first few lines at the very top.
Trevelyan—misspelled at least three times over before a blot of ink was hastily scribbled over the majority of the top half of the page.
"Stop analyzing it and just tell me how ugly it is already—"Astoria snapped, her cheeks were still blotchy with color, and she averted Cassandra's eyes entirely. "It just has to look…passable. Eventually. That's what Josephine said, whatever that means."
Cassandra could see that the confession had wrung Astoria out. Looking down at their leader, curled up upon herself, Cassandra saw someone young, someone short with themselves. Who had not wanted the burden of her station, who had actively fought against it but shouldered it anyway. Someone who had clearly tried to do this one thing by themselves for so long and had gotten nowhere.
And Cassandra had told her no.
She thought of the heroes in her stories. Of the dashing swordsmen and clever mages, of the way fiction could force ice through her veins or send heat curling deep in her belly. How her daily readings of the Chant had given her a well to draw from in her darkest moments when she was sure the Void would consume her. When she had fasted and hollowed herself out, how Andraste's words had guided her out of the pit to bring her back to herself.
And then she thought of Astoria. To be cut off from that completely. To have your own common tongue inaccessible to you through no fault of your own. To look at a sign in the Crossroads and squint at it and to see… nothing.
To rely on others constantly and hope they would not deceive you.
"When you write your name, you must first make sure that the first letter is capitalized—" Astoria looked up at her as if she had just begun talking in a foreign language, which Cassandra realized that she might as well have been. Cassandra fished the quill out of a thorny bush, found the inkwell on the bench, and dipped the nib into the ink, flipping the parchment over.
"Write the first letter, T, larger than the other. Cross the line at the top rather than the middle." She demonstrated quickly, probably more quickly than was useful, writing, 'Trevelyan' out fully as an example, and held the quill and tablet out. Astoria gave her a long, displeased sideways glance and then plucked them both back, setting them into her lap again. She put the tip to the parchment in a bit of a ham-fisted grip, but Cassandra did not correct it.
Two shaky lines later, the T was there. And then slightly below it, the lowercase 'r' and the rest of the surname followed, misshapen, but spelled correctly. Cassandra could see Astoria's eyes flicking back and forth between Cassandra's sample and her own writing, assessing and making micro adjustments as she tried to copy it.
Astoria tried again three more times. And each iteration improved upon the last. Her last attempt was completely readable, much more than any of the others on the opposite side of the page.
Astoria held the parchment up for Cassandra's inspection, and Cassandra nodded.
"It is better."
"Shit, thank the Maker for that—" Astoria exhaled and looked at both of her hands, which were thoroughly coated in ink. She stared at them with an almost childlike wonder that made something unidentifiable twist deep in Cassandra's chest.
Cassandra wrestled with the decision. The Inquisitor would be no easy student. Astoria despised routine. Someone else could do this — there were plenty of well-qualified individuals in Skyhold.
"I will teach you to read."
"You will?" Astoria blinked, clearly bewildered. " Two days ago you said no—"
"That was earlier. I have changed my mind."
"Yes, you did, but why."
"I am capable of changing my mind."
"Are you?"
Cassandra's left eye twitched.
"We will meet every day in the afternoon for at least an hour—"
"—every day? What? No, that's too—"
"—and you will study the Chant of Light. It will be a good place to start. The passages have been written in a way that will teach you advanced vocabulary if you study hard. And you are to study and practice while we are not meeting."
"The Chant?! Cassandra, come on—"
"It is the Chant of Light first. If you wish to read other things you will do so on your own time."
Astoria cycled through several emotions very quickly, before settling on a mixture of what looked like all of them. "So you'll never let me read those books you're always hiding away, huh? Varric told me those were the smutty ones."
Cassandra offered Astoria a long, flat look. "This is why the Maker left."
Astoria's mouth twitched, not quite a smirk, but the sprout of one. "And I'm sure you could tell me all about that," she said.
"I will not tell you. You will learn it for yourself."
Cassandra Pentaghast did not indulge much out of routine, but perhaps she would make an exception.
Besides, this was not indulging anything out of her routine; it was simply reshaping it.
