Work Text:
The first thing Dagna remembered about Janar was his hands. The hands never stroked her cheeks because they would have left small scratches on the soft skin there. The palms and fingers were an endless labyrinth of scars – some from burns, some from a rare, careless moment while sharpening a blade.
His fingernails were never clean, but this was a fact that her mother didn’t bemoan. After all, Dagna’s mother was a smith, as well. No one approached the dinner table with clean hands. Soot found its way onto the crispy crusts of loaves of bread and acted as a garnish in rich, thick nug stews.
Janar talked with his hands, waving them around as he spoke. He told stories using the individual fingers to illustrate various points, and was adept at creating shadow puppets that represented the different types of darkspawn. Wiggling pinky fingers represented the tentacles of a Broodmother one moment, and the next, his thumbs jerked into the air, becoming a gesturing Hurlock General. These stories thrilled Dagna and frightened any smith children who might want to stay the night in their home, sleeping in a bedroll next to Dagna’s ancient stone bed.
His fingers were impossibly strong, with an unfathomably powerful grip. He gripped Dagna’s arm when she did something that she wasn’t supposed to do. He wielded his hammer with a force unseen but not unimaginable – after all, the statues of Caridin often showed him holding his own hammer in such a way. From Janar’s hands poured forth a stream of goods made to be sturdy, meant to last for a lifetime if need be, or meant to dazzle the eye if requested. Dagna once observed that even while he crafted boxes of bolts for those that carved the Stone itself into chairs and tables, he did not seem to let his attention stray away from the tiny folds in the tops and the facets of the long, cylindrical bodies.
As the years rolled by and Dagna began to craft lyrium engines, her own hands began to look like Janar’s. Some burns couldn’t be entirely healed with magical salves and healing spells. Scars did get left behind. Some of the concoctions she used in her workshop tended to sap the moisture from her hands, leaving behind spiderwebs of stretched skin and knuckles thick with wrinkles. Scented creams – Dagna preferred the cheap stuff sold by the pound at the apothecary’s shops – did little to help.
The sight of the sad state of her own hands caused her to smile if she took a moment to contemplate their condition. She might have been working with magic, but she was using her hands to make a living.
She knew that somewhere, far away, Janar might be proud of her for this.