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Tarquin heard Pavus’ voice first when he reached the top of the stairs leading into the pawn shop’s back rooms. He prepared to start a fight—this fucker was the Archon, he couldn’t be sneaking off to come here when it put them all at risk of discovery—and then his words registered.
“You can hardly hold me accountable for your unbearable reticence in the matter,” Pavus was saying, in that annoying posh tone of his.
That wasn’t the sort of thing Tarquin would expect someone to say to Ashur who, more often than not, had to be held back from sheer reckless action rather than urged towards it.
Of course, Pavus spent far more time with Ashur in his other life and there was probably shit he was privy to that Tarquin would never even know about.
He was a jealous fuck and he hated it. Fucking embarrassing emotion. Mortifying, even. Didn’t stop him from pausing just out of sight to listen, though.
He could fight Pavus later.
“You know very well all that holds me back,” Ashur said quietly. He sounded almost… sad.
Tarquin wasn’t used to that tone of voice from Ashur, either.
“Well, get over it,” Pavus said without sympathy, “I certainly didn’t go to all that trouble to make it so that we could marry, only for you to refuse to do anything about it!”
Tarquin’s stomach plummeted to somewhere within the vicinity of the catacombs below the shop.
He didn’t—he hadn’t realized—they had never indicated—
But he’d heard the little jokes Pavus made, the ones that made no sense to anyone else but caused Ashur to let out amused little chuffs without fail. ‘You had to be there’ and ‘it’s hard to explain’ sort of banter, the kind of thing that grew between people who had known each other for a very long time. They had been acquaintances since Ashur was basically still a kid, if Tarquin understood right, and they’d worked closely together in the Magisterium for damn near a decade now.
It seemed horribly, miserably obvious in this moment of excruciating hindsight.
Ashur and Pavus were in love.
Of fucking course they were.
Tarquin remained there, frozen in place.
He wanted to listen, to hear why Ashur was resisting marriage now that they could be together. He wanted to leave and forget he ever knew about this. Fucking no chance of that actually working. He wanted to walk over and end the conversation now because at least if he did, they wouldn’t work out their marriage here while he listened, and maybe… maybe the day Ashur married someone would be delayed just a little longer.
You should want him to be happy, Tarquin told himself—and he did want that. He just… Ashur was never going to have been happy with him. He wasn’t enough of a fucking idiot to have ever hoped for that but… maybe he could have been happy with someone that wasn’t Pavus. Preferably someone Tarquin didn’t know and would never have to meet.
Tarquin realized that, in light of the sudden gaping hollow where his stomach had previously been, he had forgotten to breathe. He forced himself to do so, slowly and quietly, like nothing in the world was the matter.
If this was… if Pavus and Ashur were getting married eventually, it didn’t really change anything, did it? They’d been in love for Maker fucking knew how long apparently, and the only thing that had changed was that now Tarquin knew about it.
How could he have missed it? Ashur was a secretive shit, sure, but…
Tarquin wasn’t going to interrupt, not when it wouldn’t change a damned thing. He turned silently on his heel and walked back out of the pawn shop, past Lorelei patiently explaining something to Bren, and straight down the street to Hermina’s stall to buy himself a damn drink.
He managed to get through half a pint of the cheapest ale she had to offer before he started planning.
That was what he fucking did, he was the strategist to Ashur’s reckless tactician, and this… this called for a plan.
The most important thing was that nobody fucking feel sorry for him. He had done his damnedest to make sure nobody knew how he felt, especially not Ashur, because he didn't want their fucking pity. So all he had to do was act normal and even celebratory when the announcement was made and…
Shit.
Fine, acting celebratory was right out. They’d be onto him in an instant if he even tried; he was a competent enough liar, but a shit actor. Nobody’d expect more than a terse congratulations from him—maybe he could get away with throwing out something about ‘Alti like to do that, get married to the most important person they can manage, don’t they?’—and a grunt of acknowledgement.
Ashur wouldn’t buy it for an instant though.
Ashur would expect him to answer the kind of questions that—that were fucking creeping up him now, shit, fuck, damn. There was no precedent for the Archon marrying the Divine, of course—as roles traditionally held by men, it wouldn’t have even been an option until Pavus’ marriage legislation passed the month prior. But it had to be concerning in the Magisterium, yeah, the consolidation of that kind of power? It ought to be concerning to everyone, matter of fucking fact.
Sure, Pavus was a good enough man for an Archon and Ashur was one of the best Tarquin had ever known, but…
Power corrupted, or some shit like that.
And neither of them were incorruptible.
And, well, say they did marry, say they managed to stay focused on the cause and not become the exact thing they were fighting in a bid to stay in power and further their cause, righteous as it was. The other Magisters would be unhappy about the imbalance of power. Some of the moderates, Tarquin was pretty damn sure, would throw votes against them on principle alone. In the end, the consolidation of power might weaken the whole base. Pavus had always been politically reckless, and Ashur not much better, but they ought to see that.
No wonder Ashur was reluctant about the marriage, Tarquin thought despondently, no matter how in love with Pavus he was. Ashur was ambitious as fuck, sure, but that… that was perhaps too much power to risk, and they stood to lose too much if it went wrong. And it would go wrong, somehow or other.
Fuck.
Tarquin finished the pint, tossed down a couple coins, and stalked off to his apartment. He wouldn’t be missed if he didn’t go to the shop for a single evening, surely?
He wasn’t done thinking, and he wouldn’t be able to do that if he was wondering if Ashur and Pavus were just around the corner flirting or fighting or whatever it was that got their rocks off.
It wasn’t his job to fix this.
It was extremely not his fucking job to fix this, point of fact, and his help would be unwelcome besides. And if he didn’t try to do anything about it, he could go lay down in his bed and rot in his miserable fucking unrequited feelings as if Ashur not wanting him was somehow news.
He passed by the turn he would ordinarily take to the pawn shop without pause.
It was only that… Ashur being in love with someone else had been purely theoretical up to this point. Ashur had never given any sign of deeper affection for Pavus, and either Pavus was surprisingly reluctant to show affection in public or more discrete than Tarquin would have given him credit for. Or perhaps they simply kept their affair confined to their other lives, the ones Tarquin wasn’t privy to and knew relatively little about.
It was probably what he fucking deserved for being stupid enough to fall for an Altus mage, let alone one as important as Ashur.
He unlocked the door to his apartment, slipped inside, closed it, slid down the back of it in the dark interior of the room, and stared sightlessly at the shuttered window as the last of the worrying and planning slid away.
In its place was something far stupider; raw, aching heartbreak.
Maybe Tarquin, absolute fucking idiot that he was, had been clinging onto a bit of hope in the back of his mind after all. Maybe he’d thought that someday Ashur would look over at him and see him in a new light and…
Fucking shite fuck Maker-damned-cock-n-balls-onna-stick.
Or maybe he’d held delusions that they were—fucking shite—meant to be, and that in some other life where Ashur wasn’t the second most important man in the Imperium and Tarquin didn’t spend his days rotting in a musty templar cellar and his nights moonlighting as a renegade abolitionist they would be together and it was only those things that kept them apart in this life.
This was what he got for reading too many damned serials. Stupid fucking notions.
He groaned slightly and thumped his head back against the door, savoring the hollow thud and the little flash of pain that reminded him he was at least still fucking alive.
He ought to pack up his shite, walk straight to the nearest traders’ hostel and take the first guard job that would get him out of Minrathous before things blew up like gaatlok in a lightning storm.
He wasn’t going to do that, though.
He was going to sit here by the door, stewing in his hurt and loss (could you lose something you’d never had in the first place?) until his neck was bent in a shape that would be agony for a week, and then he was going to get the fuck over himself, figure out how the Shadows could make this work, and badger Ashur into doing the right thing.
Ashur did deserve to be happy, whatever that meant for Tarquin’s own heart.
Fuck that shriveled, miserable old thing, anyway.
That the following day was absolute shite was no surprise.
He’d woken two hours early, still leaned up against his front door by a spine trying to emulate a series of hinges that had been rusted into immobility. His favorite pastry stall had been shut for the day, something about a sick grandson, and he hadn’t been hungry, just sort of tired and sad and empty, so he’d gone straight to work and struggled through his day.
There had been a request from the Archon’s palace for information on templar rotations at the last Archon’s wedding—the fucker before Radonis, Tarquin could never remember his damned name—and Tarquin shoved the realization that they must have sorted things out between them to one side. There had been no announcement; it wasn’t too late to talk to Ashur about his concerns and… figure out how to get Ashur what he wanted, whatever that was.
Tarquin hated himself for trying, and knew he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t.
Even the desk clerk had commented that Tarquin looked like he might be getting sick, and did he want a sick leave form to take home with him so the clerk didn’t have to bring him one later? There had been a friendly reminder about sick leave paperwork being mandatory, too.
After, he found himself dragging his feet through the streets toward Glandivalis Square, trying to muster up a suitably professional facade so he could tell Ashur that he was very happy Ashur and Pavus had found love, but that marrying Pavus without a plan in place was a very, very bad idea. It was going to be tense and awkward and Tarquin was of half a mind to toss himself into the harbor after it was over, especially if it didn’t go his way.
And if Ashur figured him out, well… the harbor wasn’t far enough. He was boarding the next ship straight to the wild lands south of Ferelden.
He trudged through the pawn shop’s front door miserably enough that Hector frowned at him, and his best efforts to whip himself into acting normally did absolutely fuck-all.
Maybe he should wait until he feltless like his heart had been carved out of his chest, he thought, but then Ashur and Pavus might do something stupid and it would be his fault for not speaking up in time and—
“They in?” he asked Lorelei, annoyed that his voice came out hoarse. He sounded fucking miserable, like the idiot arsehole he probably was.
“You feeling all right?” she asked, frowning at him with concern.
“I’m fine,” Tarquin said, managing to sound at least somewhat normal on his second attempt. “Ashur and Pavus—are they here today?”
“Just Ashur,” Lorelei said, her brow still creased with worry. “He’s up in the treasury, I think.”
“Ah,” Tarquin said, tension he’d hardly noticed was there leaving his body. If he had to have this conversation, at least he didn’t have to have it in front of bloody Pavus.
“Thanks,” he added before moving away from Lorelei’s puzzled, concerned frown.
The bookshelf slid out of his way and he slunk up the stairs like a blob of half-clotted blood.
Ashur wasn’t at the table or at the desk he favored when he was working on more private documents so Tarquin dragged himself over to the stairs and up to the treasury. The door was locked and there didn’t seem to be any light under the threshold, which wasn’t promising for his search. He had a set of the keys in case he needed to pay out expenses when Ashur wasn’t around, though, so he might as well check.
Ashur looked up at him as the door opened, the shadows under his eyes vivid without the hat or the mask even in the dim light falling into the room from the stairway.
“Quin,” Ashur greeted, with a faint little smile, “I should have known you’d hunt me down.”
“Yeah, sitting in the dark amongst your hoard of gold…?” Tarquin said, baffled enough that he briefly forgot his own heartache.
“I wanted a quiet moment,” Ashur confessed softly. “A lot has been happening lately, and…”
He trailed off, staring at some point over Tarquin’s shoulder.
Tarquin crashed back into reality. Yeah, he bet a lot was happening now that Ashur was getting married to the only man in Tevinter of higher rank than he was.
“I imagine so, what with the wedding and all,” Tarquin said.
“That certainly isn’t helping matters,” Ashur agreed. If he was at all surprised that Tarquin already knew, he hid it well. “If Dorian would just stop harping on about speeches and decorations and guests…”
“You can’t have been surprised that he wanted a grand affair,” Tarquin said, more sourly than he intended.
Calm. Normal. Totally fine with all this, just voicing some concerns, Tarquin reminded himself.
“Not surprised, no,” Ashur replied wryly. “I wish he’d leave me out of the planning, though.”
Now was his chance. Tarquin mustered every ounce of willpower and said: “About that.”
“Oh no,” Ashur said, his gaze shifting to focus on Tarquin for the first time, “I recognize that tone of voice. What has he done now?”
“It’s not just him,” Tarquin said, sounding impressively normal. “If you’re determined to go through with this, we need to plan for the fallout. There’s a lot of risk in this alliance, you should know that better than I do, and—”
“It’s hardly come as a surprise to anyone,” Ashur interrupted, his brow furrowed and his eyes boring into Tarquin’s. “It would have happened years ago if the laws and the Chantry had permitted it.”
Ah. Well, fuck me, Tarquin thought. It wasn’t as if he knew much about Ashur’s other life beyond what the general public did—he was impressed that they’d kept it out of the gossip rags if it was so widely known by all the highbloods, though. Those fuckers loved their rumors.
“Look, I’m happy for you and all,” Tarquin began, and paused, wincing a little at just how much he did not sound happy for Ashur. He sighed.
“I am happy for you,” he said, and there was enough truth in the words on his second attempt that he didn’t sound like a total blighter. “But if you’re going to marry Pavus, we need a plan.”
There was a long, dreadful silence, during which Tarquin decided he’d radically overstepped and might as well start packing his bags for Carastes at once.
“I’m not marrying Dorian,” Ashur said.
It took a moment for the words to register.
“What,” Tarquin said, and remembered, belatedly, to close his mouth.
Ashur’s brow had somehow drawn even further down.
“Dorian is marrying the Herald of Andraste in six months. Everyone knows that they’ve been together for the last decade. Why would you think he and I…?”
Tarquin’s heart had no fucking clue what to do with this revelation, so it sort of bounced around inside his body in a way that was deeply confusing and really fucking unpleasant.
“What are you—Pavus said he’d gone to all that trouble so that the two of you could marry,” Tarquin said without thinking.
Ashur’s lip twitching upward was the only indication that he’d noticed Tarquin’s slip and knew that Tarquin had eavesdropped on them.
“I imagine he meant in a broader sense—that the two of us could now marry legally, not marry each other,” Ashur said. “I will have to officiate the wedding, of course, but that’s the extent of my involvement.”
He was looking very intently at Tarquin, whose face felt embarrassingly hot. He hoped his beard hid the worst of the flush of embarrassment at least.
“Oh,” Tarquin said, realizing he’d let the moment drag on. “Er. In that case, I’ll be going.”
“You weren’t at the shop yesterday,” Ashur said before Tarquin could leave. He sounded puzzled again. “Did you—leave? After you overheard, I mean.”
Well, Tarquin had no fucking clue how to explain that one. ‘I was so emotionally devastated I walked out and went straight for a drink’ was not an option, but he didn’t have a lie ready to hand.
“Needed to think,” Tarquin ground out. It wasn’t technically a lie.
“About the marriage you invented between Dorian and myself?” Ashur asked, still sounding puzzled.
“Well, it would have been a bad idea, but if you were going to do it we needed to figure out how to have the greatest impact with the fewest consequences,” Tarquin ground out. He hadn’t been wrong about that—just the whole premise that had convinced him he needed to worry in the first place.
Relief had started to sneak in behind all that, though.
Ashur wasn’t in love with Pavus. He wasn’t marrying him and riding off into the sunset, too busy to look back. Tarquin wouldn’t have to watch them be a couple or read about their marriage in the gossip rags or—
He sagged a little against the door frame before he could catch himself.
“I see,” Ashur said. There was something more quiet and pensive than usual about the words, almost… sad. In much the same way he had sounded sad during his discussing with Pavus in the first place.
Tarquin had a horrible realization.
Just because Pavus was marrying someone else didn’t mean Ashur wasn’t pining after Pavus just as badly as he was pining after Ashur. If that were the case, Pavus was even more of a damned idiot than Tarquin had believed him to be.
What a pathetic fucking mess.
“He doesn’t know what he’s missing out on,” Tarquin said in an attempt to be comforting. It came out more bitter than he intended.
There was a long pause.
“Who are you talking about?” Ashur asked.
“Pavus,” Tarquin clarified with an awkward little cough. “He doesn’t know what he’s missing out on with you.”
“… Why should he be missing out on anything?” Ashur asked. He sounded deeply bemused.
Tarquin suspected he’d misspoken again. He felt like more of an idiot than usual, off-kilter and confused by the revelation that he’d spent the last day reeling over a discovery that he’d invented in his own head off a handful of misinterpreted words.
“Because… you… all right, what is there between you and Pavus?” Tarquin asked. It ought to have been a demand, but it came out weaker and more confused than he intended.
He hadn’t wanted Ashur to realize just how thrown he was by this whole debacle.
“Dorian was friends with my elder brother after a fashion,” Ashur said, still bemused. “We collaborated some when he led the Lucerni, and of course with the Shadows, though more frequently through Mae. She’s an old family friend, you know. It has been easier to explain her visits as a result.”
Tarquin ground his teeth against the urge to ask explicitly if Ashur was in love with Pavus. But—for better or worse, he needed to know.
“You’re not in love with him?” Tarquin asked, and then cursed himself. Too much demand in those words, too much challenge.
Ashur’s response was a hollow laugh, and Tarquin braced himself to hear a confirmation.
“I’m not in love with Dorian,” Ashur said instead. “I just told you, he’s marrying the Herald of Andraste.”
Tarquin felt faintly dizzy with the speed his emotions were moving at.
“That doesn’t mean you’re not—you know what, okay, good, I’m glad, nobody is getting their heart broken here after all, I’ll just go dunk my head in the canal, see you around,” Tarquin said.
The cold water would clear his head, probably faster than whatever toxins and diseases were in it could kill him.
“Quin,” Ashur started as Tarquin turned to leave, “Thank you… for worrying about me. I assure you that my heart is in safe hands, where it belongs.”
Tarquin should leave. He should dunk his head in the canal and hope for the best. Instead he asked: “Who?”
There was a long pause and the soft rustle of Ashur’s cloak as he moved. Tarquin was grateful that he couldn’t see Ashur’s face, at least. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see that softness again, not when it was for someone else. Worse—he didn’t want to see Ashur’s face when he put the pieces together and realized that there was really only one reason for Tarquin to ask.
At least I probably don’t know them, he thought, dangerously optimistic. At least Ashur won’t shame me. Probably. If I just don’t look at him, I won’t have to see the pity.
“Quin…”
“I know I shouldn’t ask,” Tarquin cut in, “I know it’s none of my business. I just…”
What was there to say, really? At least if he had a name, he’d know, and maybe his damned heart could finish breaking in peace and he could put it back together and let it heal. Maybe, somewhere down the road, there would be someone else for him.
Un-fucking-likely.
“It’s your business as much as mine, I think,” Ashur said quietly into the hush of the treasury.
What?
“What?” Tarquin asked. Yeah, he handled a lot of Ashur’s shite for the Shadows and even some of it as the Divine, when paperwork needed tweaking to allow holes for Ashur’s activity, but…
Ashur sighed heavily.
“I shouldn’t… I know I shouldn’t say anything. The power imbalance alone is… but you wouldn’t hesitate to tell me where to shove my foot if I’m wrong about this, would you?”
“Have I ever?” Tarquin asks, and then, blankly, “What are you wrong about, then?”
He has the sinking feeling that he is about to find out he does know whoever Ashur is in love with, and that it isn’t someone he’s going to be happy about.
There was more rustling of fabric and leather as Ashur moved, and then a hand on his shoulder, turning him. Tarquin let himself be guided but looked stubbornly at the ground as he moved, afraid of what Ashur might see if he could look Tarquin in the eye.
“I want to ask why you care so much, but—it would hardly be fair of me to ask you to say something when I have been unwilling myself,” Ashur said quietly. “I have… almost since we met, I have cared you, but I am aware of the pressure you might feel to reciprocate were I to say something, to say nothing of the dangers you would face if you were discovered to be my… the person I... loved, and… but…”
Ashur’s words trailed off with a lost little huff.
“In spite of all that, Dorian has been demanding I ‘stop moping and do something about all that unresolved sexual tension reeking up the air’—” his impression of Pavus was so spot on that even in the midst of his shock Tarquin let out a little snort of surprised laughter, “—and now that I could marry you… not that you would want that… well, it would be an avenue in which I could offer both a relationship and safety. If you wanted.”
Tarquin felt oddly frozen, as if he’d been listening to a monologue in a street play or a recitation of the Chant and not—not whatever that had been.
“Er. Could you perhaps summarize?” he managed to get out.
“Quin,” Ashur said, sounding as exasperated as he ever did with Tarquin’s antics.
“Ashur,” Tarquin responded.
And then he made the mistake of looking up into Ashur’s eyes.
For such a cold color, they looked awfully soft and warm and fond as they looked back.
“You can’t be in love with me,” Tarquin said, almost accusing, because that look made his stupid traitor heart hope otherwise.
“Why not?” Ashur asked quietly. His look was still stupidly warm and fond.
“Because—I’m—”
Because Tarquin was a dozen things, none of them good, and none of the things Ashur probably wanted.
Except… Tarquin thought maybe, somewhere in all those words, Ashur had said Tarquin was what he wanted. Maybe.
“Why not?” Ashur asked again. He moved a little closer, the hand still on Tarquin’s shoulder sliding down to his bicep and squeezing a little. “If you don’t want this, Quin…”
Tarquin could only stare at him with wide eyes as he leaned in, slowly enough that Tarquin could easily pull away, and pressed tentative, soft lips against Tarquin’s slightly open mouth.
And, well, on the off chance that this was the only opportunity he would ever have—
Tarquin surged into the kiss, knocking Ashur back into the treasury as he wrapped both arms around Ashur’s neck and cupped the back of his head and pulled him in hard enough to bruise. He thought Ashur laughed a little into the kiss, or tried to. Ashur’s hands came up to tangle in his hair in turn, his thumbs bracing Tarquin’s cheeks, and for a while the rage and frustration and sorrow that filled Tarquin quieted and everything was calm.
Then Ashur pulled away, panting heavily. But—he was smiling.
“You don’t have to say it,” Ashur said, when Tarquin opened his mouth and froze, unable to find the words. “Not unless… if this is not something you want, or if you don’t feel as I do, of course I will… respect your wishes in this regard…”
There was something hollow creeping into those eyes and that, that Tarquin couldn’t stand.
“I’m shite with words,” Tarquin burst out. “I’m not… I don’t know how to do this kind of thing, never have. But… but I’m glad. That you, that it’s me. I thought—I was—Shartan’s sagging sacks, Ashur, when I thought—ugh.”
Tarquin was really bollocksing this whole speech. The hollowness fled Ashur’s eyes, though, and that was the important thing. He laughed again, still quiet, and dipped his head to rest in the curve of Tarquin’s neck.
“I hoped you might feel that way,” Ashur said, lips moving against his neck through the fabric of his tunic.
Tarquin was still pretty sure he was going to wake up from a dream any minute now, but just in case he wasn’t—
“Ashur,” he said, “I had better not be about to find out you let that dog sleep in bed with you.”
Ashur’s laughing response of “She’s very clean!” would stay with Tarquin for a long, long time.