Chapter Text
It helped that Krem knew he was extremely handsome.
“You are very handsome,” said Dalish.
He sat with this remark for a moment or so, then accepted the truth of it by taking another pull off his bottle.
Skinner’s face shifted into a sneer without seeming to move very much at all. It was a talent of hers. “He is square. He is like box with ears.” She sniffed, the tip of her knife dipping under the white of her nail to lever out some imaginary detritus. She had not been holding a knife at the beginning of the conversation, but Krem had long suspected she had been stashing spares underneath the bar top for moments exactly like this.
“Nonsense,” said Dalish, sounding offended to her very core. “He’s as handsome as they come.”
“Thanks,” said Krem.
“He is a handsome box with handsome ears,” said Dalish. “Sturdy. Reliable. Good for,” she gestured, “…stacking.”
“Well--” said Krem.
“In my city we do not kiss boxes,” said Skinner. “We find nice boy with sharp face. Then we do crime at him.”
The three of them let that information settle as much as it was ever going to.
Eventually, Dalish turned to him and patted his arm very kindly. “You are a handsome boy,” she said seriously. “I think you should go talk to that nice girl and tell her about your arm muscles.”
Across the tavern, as pretty as a picture and completely oblivious to the conversation currently taking place at the bar, Lace Harding chatted amiably with a handful of the other Scouts, a pot of tea steaming gently in the center of their table.
Skinner’s eyes followed where they were looking, then narrowed. “Yes. Good. Another box person. You will have things to talk about.”
“Sure,” said Krem.
“Evening,” said Krem.
The bar had mostly already cleared out by then, what with the change in the guard shift and the sudden arrival of a handful of nobles who had set up court in one of the corner tables. (Nobles were….. fine, in Krem’s opinion; the Chief provided a good enough buffer to weed out the worst offenders, and most of the ones working for the Inquisitor were all right, but this close to Orlais the odds of running into a decent person with a lineage attached grew slimmer and slimmer. This batch hadn’t made the cut. Krem supposed it came with the gold peacock feathers.)
The bar never closed per se; the barman kept a pallet in the backroom for the quieter hours, but apparently Lady Montilyet had seen to it that pretty much everyone could expect to come off a shift and be able to eat and enjoy a pint no matter the hour. The people with stranger schedules appreciated it-- the Scouts in particular, and Charter and her people-- and Krem liked it because he hadn’t had anything approaching a regular sleep schedule since he was sixteen.
And, well, because it meant he was still fresh-faced and mostly sober at an hour where the rest of the competition had begged off for some shut-eye.
Leaving him here, still at the bar, tipping his beer in Harding’s direction as she approached.
She blinked at him. “Oh, hey,” she said with genuine friendliness. “How’s it going?”
The Scouts had been over in western Orlais for three weeks, slogging through some of the roughest, driest desert country Krem had ever had the bad fortune to acquaint himself with, and Harding’s freckles had darkened into a nut-brown map across her face. The effect was offensively charming.
Krem shrugged, his beer halfway to his lips. “Can’t complain.”
“Well that’s good,” said Harding. “If somebody starts complaining around here we’re probably going to have to pack up and find a new fortress.”
Her head turned away the exact moment that Dalish chose to give a double thumbs up from across the room.
Krem’s entire professional life had relied on his ability to keep his face perfectly impassive while various people around him elected not to do the same. Back home, it had meant being bundled into non-commissioned officer rank as soon as his superiors had figured out that there was basically nothing a blooded member of the aristocracy could do around Serventi Aclassi that would warrant a raised eyebrow. Here, it meant the Chief buying him drinks every time they got hired by an Orlesian.
He changed the subject.
“Heard you and your boys ran into a swarm of Venatori out west,” he said, propping his elbow on the bartop as Harding wrangled a beer out of Cabot. “Must have been a good scrap.”
Her nose wrinkled. “Sure, but we’re not supposed to scrap. We’re supposed to look at things, go ‘Huh, weird,’ then run back and tell somebody else.”
“Aw, s’not what I heard,” said Krem. “No supply lines, no backup, all travel-by-night and secrets.”
Harding’s eyes creased at him. “We set fire to some tents,” she admitted. “Some magister yelled at the slaves to stop throwing sand at it because he was going to take care of it.”
“What, with blood magic?”
It was her turn to shrug. “Maybe. ‘Course that was when the varghests we’d lured over the dunes came to investigate the noise. He seemed pretty busy after that.”
“Nice.”
“I know, right?”
They grinned at each other, Harding still holding her beer and showing no indication of going back to sit with the other Scouts. Her hair was mussed, but still in its usual bun, and the laces at her throat were open a little to show the hard tan line where her cuirass usually stopped. She looked sweaty and happy and a little pink, but that was probably just the sunburn.
Krem had been in the courtyard when her squad had finally made it back from their last mission, most of them riding hastily purchased mules instead of the official mounts they’d been sent out with. Half of her unit had headed over to the surgeon’s barracks, the other half to the tavern, but there Harding had been, dropping down from a horse three times as tall as she was and limping her way up the stairs to the Nightingale’s tower. She’d looked tough but cheerful then, just as she looked tough and cheerful now, but looser, more relaxed, like all she ever needed was to be in her own element with her own people and things were right as rain.
“Refill, Aclassi?” asked Cabot, watching the both of them.
“Hey, come sit with us,” said Harding. “Bring your friends, they look like they’ve been trying to get your attention.”
Krem looked up. Dalish was miming…. something, while Skinner was making sustained eye contact while thoughtfully tapping her teeth with the point of her knife.
“Nah, they’re good,” he said.
“So,” said Krem. “Sheep herder turned Vint hunter. Impressive.”
He took another swallow of beer that he didn’t really want as Harding blushed so explosively that it traveled down her neck and across her chest before he could put his mug down again. Krem felt something in his face yank upwards and figured he might as well let it.
They had ended up by themselves in a corner, Harding’s scouts having begged off citing various excuses that Krem hadn’t cared enough to examine too closely. They were closer to the fire now-- too close, maybe, and he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves to try to compensate for it.
“That’s us,” she said. “Sheep farmers, tailors, and butcher’s daughters. Even some nobles, but they usually try and keep their heads down. Doesn’t matter though, it’s ruined all of us for real life.”
Krem shrugged. “It’s real enough. Anything that pays this good has to be.”
Harding wrapped her fingers around her mug, her eyes still crinkling at him. “So you’re saying I shouldn’t be saving up all that money for a cottage on the Storm Coast? My mother’s going to be so disappointed.”
“Eh, it’s your money, you do what you want with it,” said Krem. “Just make sure you hire somebody every two weeks to take care of your giant spider problem.”
Harding ducked her head, laughing, and Krem lifted a hand to rub his jaw, then clasped the back of his neck, and then took another drink. He then stared critically at his rolled-up sleeve, and gave it another push up his arm. Might as well.
“I have to ask,” said Harding carefully, and Krem went very still as something in the middle of his chest went tight. He kept his eyes on his brown forearm and the line of the muscle there. The thick hair that his mother had despaired of once, and the scar that the Chief had sewed up in the driving rain with a needle so small it had almost disappeared in his fingers.
“Ahuh,” he said flatly.
Harding drummed her small fingers on the tabletop, the bowstring calluses standing out like stones. “Is it weird,” she asked, “going from fighting for money to fighting for something that…… means more. In the long run.”
Krem’s face split into a grin; he couldn’t help it. “Nah,” he said. “Not one bit. Wanna know why?”
“Sure,” said Harding.
“Inquisitor. Lavellan, the Herald,” said Krem. “ You like her, you like following her. She keeps you fed, sends you on interesting jobs, asks you to kill all the right people.”
“Well, yeah,” admitted Harding. “I mean-- yeah. More or less.”
A pang went across her face, and Krem relented. He knew how that was, once.
“She took you out of the sheep business, yeah?” he asked, more gently, and Harding relaxed in response. “And you get to be Scout Harding,” he said, giving the words their full weight, “leading your boys off to adventure and glory and pot-shotting some Vints and Templars in the bargain.”
Harding grinned at him again, her shoulders loosening, and Krem leaned back in his chair, crossing his forearms in front of him. “That’s the Chief,” he said casually. “That’s how it goes, when everything goes right. You know they’ll send you where it counts.”
He paused, then added. “Less singing, usually,” and Harding winced.
“That makes sense,” she said, finally, tucking her hair behind one ear, before tilting her head at him. Her face was heart-shaped and as freckled as the shoulder of a speckled horse, and she still looked flushed and pretty and happy to be sitting there with him. Krem didn’t think he could ask for anything more than that.
“You’re really lucky, you know that?” she said, mild as anything.
Krem shrugged, then dipped his head to rub the back of his neck again. There didn’t seem to be much else he could do with his hands.
“And they’re not my boys,” she said, moving on like she’d been trained by Lady Montilyet herself. “You’ve met them. Half of us are girls.”
“S’alright,” Krem heard himself say. “I like girls.”