shok_ebasit_hissra | Doubt is the path one walks to reach faith

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Doubt is the path one walks to reach faith

The Bull found himself standing outside of Krem's apartment building, hands tucked into the pockets of his coat. He wore one, along with other layers, mostly because it was expected, and Dorian at least had refused to be seen in public with him if he didn't dress fully. That was fine; it was cold anyway, and even if he had been able to endure it during winters in Orlais and Ferelden, having a coat was nice.

He stood there for a long time, debating going in or going home. He didn't even know if Krem was home, hadn't thought to call ahead or text him. It could be that he was with one of his lovers. Well, if that was the case, he'd just leave. He headed inside, glad Krem wasn't up several flights of stairs. When he got to the familiar door he knocked, then stepped back. His frame filled most doorways, he found people didn't appreciate that when they opened the door.

When the door did open, he looked up. "Can we talk?"

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Krem was still a bit asleep. It was late enough in the dark that he shouldn't have been sleeping in, but things had been muzzy and gray lately, and he'd taken rest where it would come, and how.

Bull filled his doorway, but Krem didn't mind. He was used to that. He stepped back to let Bull into the apartment.

"Did something happen?"

Bull wasn't sure how to answer that, so he didn't at first. He ducked and turned his head as he came through the door and stopped once he was far enough into the apartment that Krem could close the door again. His shoulders slumped some when he actually got a good look at him.

"You were sleeping. I can come back, Cremisius."

"I'm fine, I wasn't asleep." He hadn't been, not really. Dozing listlessly. But he but on an honest face and grabbed Bull by the jacket sleeve, pulling him away from the door. "Take off your boots and jacket, pretend like you want to be in my company. Do you want some coffee?"

Bull shrugged out of his coat and left it over a chair, then shuffled to the couch to sit down. He took off his brace, his boots, as he'd been told to. He politely accepted Krem's offer of coffee. Then he had to think for a moment about why he was here.

He watched Krem move around the kitchen. "There aren't any other Qunari here," he started, though he wasn't sure if that was exactly where he meant to start. He didn't know how to have this conversation.

Krem made coffee, and Bull made himself comfortable. He looked over when Bull started to speak, a more cautious beginning than Krem might have expected. Over the years they'd known each other, he had not often known Bull to be hesitant about something.

He nodded a little. "Astute."

Bull didn't even have it in him to roll his eye at the comment. "There is no Ben-Hassrath, there is no Qun, except for me." He wondered if he was making sense. The thoughts all felt jumbled in his mind, things he had thought about again and again until they lost all shape. He tried something different.

"Dorian remembers me as Tal-Vashoth," he said quietly.

Krem was quiet, thoughtful about that. Dorian remembered a lot of things that neither he, nor Bull, would be able to experience themselves because, apparently, there was some divergence in the lives they had led that brought them to his point.

He finished the coffee and brought it out to Bull, settling onto the couch beside him.

"You're worried about it."

"Being Tal-Vashoth means you would've still been alive," he said quietly, staring at the mug he had in his hands now. "In Thedas, it would mean losing... everything else. I'd never be able to go back to Par Vollen, would never see the people I knew, my tama... any of them."

They would see him as a disappointment, as someone that betrayed the Qun and all of them. But he was cut off from all of them anyway, here in Darrow. The thought of becoming Tal-Vashoth terrified some part of him, because there was a deeper worry there. Bull knew what he was under the Qun. He knew who he was. And he knew what he could be without it.

"There's no Ben-Hassrath here to fix me again," he said quietly.

Edited 2016-12-14 05:20 (UTC)

"Being Tal-Vashoth to him means that," Krem pointed out. It was something Krem had known for some time, the little ache in his chest, the sadness that, if Dorian were to go back to Thedas, he would have all the things that Krem never would--namely, his life.

But he looked at Bull, quiet and critical, and propped his heel up on the couch to nudge at Bull's thigh.

"If I were alive, back home," he began, carefully, "would you need the Ben-Hassrath to fix you? Would you think you needed that?"

"It would't be a choice," he answered quietly. "If you were alive, I'd be Tal-Vashoth." If the Ben-Hassrath got their hands on him after that, he'd be re-educated or killed no matter what. Becoming Tal-Vashoth wouldn't have even been a choice if Krem were alive: he had left it to the Inquisitor because tools do not make choices, and for all that he was or was not, at that moment, he had been Hissrad, powerless in the face of what the Qun demanded for victory: the sacrifice of the Chargers to save an alliance that, until that moment, had been unheard of.

Could he have made that choice, though? If it had been left to him, if it had been forced? Bull didn't honestly know.

He kept his eye on the mug in his hands.

"If you were alive, if all of you were, I'd have something. My... family." Qunari didn't have family, but Bull had built one out of the Chargers. He looked at Krem, lost and uncertain. "What if I go mad?"

He'd done it before, when the strain of Seheron made him question the Qun, made him question his purpose. He'd ended up in the middle of a bloodbath of his own making. What if it happened again? What if he couldn't stop himself this time?

Bull had told Krem a bit of Seheron, but never much, and Krem had not pushed. He'd seen a bit of it, during times when it was at its most peaceable and they could do training exercises about the rebel natives. He couldn't imagine being there as long as Bull was.

"If," Krem said, wanting to emphasize that; it was an if, a potential, not a likelihood or guarantee. "If you go mad, you have family here. Dorian and I. And we've both got training, theoretical though it may have been at times, on dealing with Qunari."

"Don't let me hurt anyone, Krem. Kill me if that's what it takes." He trusted Krem to do it right; by now Krem knew his weaknesses, particularly on the left. He didn't guard as well, as evidenced by the injuries sustained there after losing his the eye. "You know I won't stop."

Krem and Dorian had both seen him in the heat of battle; not only was it catharsis but Bull relished the violence it allowed him. There was a reason he had long been considered for the army, until his tamassran realized he was too smart for his own good.

"I don't like thinking about where this could go," he admitted. "Either I go mad, as I've always been told I would. Or... I don't. I'm not sure which is worse."

"You're not going to hurt anyone," Krem said. He needed that conviction. He needed to be that conviction.

But a thought passed through him, a terrifying one, of what Bull must have become in the aftermath of losing the Chargers. The Bull that the Inquisitor had made in that sacrifice was not the one that Dorian had known, not exactly. But Krem had seen bits of that Bull before, had seen it in his eyes during missions that were vital to the Ben-Hassrath and not just contracts taken out by the Chargers.

Krem saw that look in his dreams, Bull bloodied and menacing, huge, and the two of them surrounded by the bodies of the Tribune and his men as Krem had tried to pull himself together.

He reached out and grabbed Bull's horn gently, grounding them both.

"Fairly sure not going mad is the preferable option here," he whispered. "Have you tried what I said? Writing to home? It helps me a lot."

"You don't know that," he said. Bull did. His head tipped toward Krem with that gentle grip. Memories of Seheron came unbidden. All the bodies, or what was left of him; the look on the faces of the men that found him. Take me to the Ben-Hassrath..

There were no re-educators here.

"If I don't go mad, then that means the Tal-Vashoth that I spent a decade hunting down might not have been either." What if they had just been trying to live, and picked poor ways to make their living? Bull tried to shake the thought off. Bull shook his head. "Who would I write to? You're here, Dorian is here. The Ben-Hassrath? What would that help, other than falling into old routines?" Old routines that meant reinforcing Hissrad.

Krem nodded, just once. He didn't know that. But he knew Bull, knew what he was like, how he was when he fought, when he got that rage in his bones and was destructive. That was the man that had saved him, that he had fought next to for nearly a decade.

But he could say nothing to the situation of that nuance. Likely, the Tal-Vashoth on Seheron had just been trying to live their lives. Just trying to be what they could be. There were a handful of Tal-Vashoth mercenary troops, especially along the Orlais-Tevinter border. The Chargers had never worked with them, but Krem remembered hearing about them as a soldier. They hadn't been mad, but the army had certain made them think they might be.

It was the same, in that way--Par Vollen and Tevinter. There was nothing positive either of them could find in the Tal-Vashoth, because their status as outsiders forced them to do unforgivable things.

"You could write to the Chargers," Krem said softly, focusing on that. "To your Tama. To anyone you wanted. You could just journal or something. I just know it helps me."

He smiled a little bit. "My handwriting has even gotten a little better."

He thought of writing to his Tama and he thought of how disappointed she would be if she ever heard he had gone Tal-Vashoth. The Chargers might be good, but he wasn't sure what to say to any of them, except maybe apologies.

A faint smirk tugged his mouth. "Good. You wrote the most useless reports, Aclassi," he teased gently. It felt good to have Krem in his corner again; he'd missed this in his first weeks in Darrow.

Bull ran his thumb over the top of the mug. "I don't know who I am without the Qun. I didn't have to think about it that hard. I was Hissrad and my duties to the Qun came first." Saying it made something in him hurt. That was the mindset that made it feel impossible to speak up to save the Chargers.

"You didn't have to think about a lot of things too hard," Krem said, but gently. There was no judgement in his voice, but some speculation. He watched Bull quietly for a moment, seeming to test his words over and over a few times, until he'd settled on some combination that made the most sense to him, and the point he was trying to get across.

"I used to wonder," he said, "why you were so easily accepting of me as a man, when you first found--met me, the way we met. You told the Inquisitor it was because the Qun had a word for people like me. But that was years after."

Krem looked into the middle distance, fitting himself comfortably into the corner of his couch. "I used to wonder if you'd think the same way, if you'd met a tailor's son instead of a defecting soldier."

Bull had to think about that, and he took his time in answering because he owed Krem at least that. What would he have thought if he'd met Krem and he'd been a tailor's son? Would it have been as easy for him to accept Krem's gender? The idea of the aqun-athlok existed either way, but...

"It might have taken me longer to get used to the idea. But you aren't Qunari. You are who you say you are."

He had no real way of knowing, but he wanted to believe he would have been able to accept Krem as a man; maybe it would have taken longer if his gender role (in Bull's eyes) had been more ambiguous, but he hoped it would have happened eventually.

"People of any gender can be a craftsperson... The division isn't as hard there." Not like it was between, say, tamassrans and soldiers. Tamassrans were always female; soldiers were always male. No matter what business they had going on physically.

The comparison had fallen a bit flat, and Krem wasn't entirely sure how to recover it. He'd wanted to point out that he was himself to Bull, that it was an easy acceptance, because of what they did; he'd wanted to point out that Bull was struggling with the idea of being outside the Qun simply because it was a more difficult acceptance, because he had needed the other side to be everything that he was not.

His face pinched with frustration, but only for a moment. He just drove on ahead.

"My point," he said. "My point is that you accepted me because I was a soldier, and so of course I was what I said. It fit in your view of the world. You have said you are the Iron Bull--and what is he? Mercenary. Lover of redheads."

"The Iron Bull was - is? - a-- a cover. A fiction."

Krem was making good points; Bull knew he was being deliberately obtuse. It was easier than the alternative. He sighed and sank back on Krem's couch.

"I was toeing the line of Tal-Vashoth for a long time... but I told myself it was different. Playing a part. Faithfully sending letters. Hissrad was real, the Iron Bull wasn't." He frowned at his mug, turning it in his hands. "Losing the Chargers - you - almost broke me. Again."

"The Iron Bull is real to me," Krem pointed out. He had never known Hissrad, in all the years he'd known the Iron Bull. Maybe bits and pieces, little snatches, but the man he had known for nearly a decade had only ever been the man before him now.

Perhaps that said that Bull was an excellent actor and spy. He that he meant more.

"Real to Dorian. Real to the people here."

Bull was quiet for a long moment, then reached to pull Krem against his side. He just held him, maybe unfairly using him as a snuggle nug but it gave him some comfort for a moment. He was familiar and warm and living.

"I think this is worse that demons," he grumbled quietly.

Krem moved along with Bull pulling him in. The feeling was mutual. Darrow was a strange place, out of sorts, and it was difficult to handle sometimes. But, ultimately, Krem was content here. He was more himself than he'd ever been able to be in Thedas. And, now, Bull was here. Krem was content with that, comforted.

He tangled his legs over Bull's legs and tucked his head against Bull's side. "Certainly harder to kill."

"There are good parts of the Qun," he said, like he needed to defend it. Bull knew better than many that it couldn't work for everyone, though. He had questioned it just once in the aftermath of something terrible. He sighed and rested the bridge of his nose against Krem's head.

He wouldn't go mad.

"Guess this means I can get back to living a life of excess." There was a smirk in his voice as he said it.

Krem nodded. There were good parts of the Qun, and Krem wasn't denying that in any shape. The Qun had made Bull a fantastic leader, had crafted him into everything a mercenary corps could ask for.

He stayed curled up against Bull, and burst out a short, sharp laugh at the joke, the sarcastic tease that it was. "Yes," he said, shaking his head a little. "Join us in our excess, Chief. Good to know we've finally corrupted you to our side."

Bull chuckled and shook his head a bit; he ended up nuzzling Krem's hair. "Guess I always had one foot over the line," he said quietly. "Damn good acting, huh?" He nudged Krem's temple before he lifted his head.

He sighed and let his head rest against the back of the couch, horns propped by the wall.

"I don't know if it's acting if you tell everyone you're doing it, Chief," Krem said, but it was soft and affectionate. Krem had always been aware of the weight and toll of Bull's work. It was part of why he tended to keep to himself; better to handle his own problems, as much as possible, than to burden Bull with that. It hadn't always worked. But more often than not.

He kept close to Bull's side, curled in against him. There was a comfort in this that maybe there shouldn't have been for such a heavy conversation.

Softly, he said, "If it ever does happen. If you ever become a threat. We'll deal with it. I will. Dorian. We won't let you hurt anyone."

"Thank you." He leaned down to lightly butt his head against Krem's. It was a dark thought, but it made him feel better to know that the two people he trusted most here would be the ones to put him down if it came to it. For their sake, he hoped not. He knew what it was like to kill people he'd cared for. "Feint on the left, go low. I won't see you."

He knew that Krem knew that, even if he never acknowledged it out loud. He'd seen first hand the injuries Bull had taken to that side since losing the eye: his leg, two missing fingertips, a dozen other scars.

"Tal-Va-fucking-shoth." He huffed and shook his head. "Gatt would shit himself."

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Doubt is the path one walks to reach faith

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