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Glory days, the Iron Bull called them.
The Inquisition wasn’t some grand adventure. The sun didn’t always shine. They didn’t always come home victorious to Skyhold. Sometimes, the Inquisition meant blood on the snow and people suffocating in the mud and the slow, lingering death of a wound treated far too late.
But in the Iron Bull’s version, the forests were green and the seas sparkled. The plains, haunted and haunting, spread out before him and his strides ate up the land. Whispers of ancient elves called to him the same way his own people’s history did. The sun was warm on the back of his neck and his axe felt right in his hands, the ridges of its wooden handle worn and familiar to him after years of use.
Glory days, Cole thinks.
There wasn’t much glory in them, he pointed out, and the Iron Bull said, that’s true, kid, but there wasn’t none. There wasn’t none.
The Iron Bull called him kid a lot in those days. Varric also called him kid, but it meant something different when Varric did it.
Varric said kid and meant understanding why the scullery girl cried when Cole didn’t get the answers to her questions right, playing Wicked Grace under the low-burning lamps late into the night, the slide of a knife between the ribs of a red lyrium-addled templar who would never know his young son had his eyes.
The Iron Bull said kid and meant a fear he couldn’t name and couldn’t erase.
It’s still there, even now; Cole can hear it when the Iron Bull speaks and taste it like the tang of metal on his teeth. The Iron Bull claps him on the shoulder and it buckles Cole’s knees when he remembers and the taller man laughs, louder and heartier than he should, to keep the fear away. (And when Cole doesn’t remember, neither does the Iron Bull. Did his hand land on the sharp angle of Cole’s shoulder? Did it pass right through like Cole was halfway in the Fade? Was Cole ever really there at all?)
But there’s something sad in this, in all of it, that pulls Cole in the same way the old songs do. Something about the way that, for a moment, all the world seemed to hang motionless, waiting for the Inquisition to change everything. And it did, Cole thinks. Not the way everyone thought it would, maybe. But it did.
Is that glory? Maybe. Glory is an intangible thing, like faith or fear, but not one Cole can easily understand. There are no spirits of glory; courage, perhaps, and valor, and the peculiar kind of belief in the justness of someone’s cause that keeps them fighting long after that cause is lost. Are those glory? Cole doesn’t think so. At least, not the way the Iron Bull feels it.
Glory is sad to the Iron Bull. Not right away—not in the heat of battle when his axe is swinging and his enemies are falling and it’s the same heady, flying feeling he imagines he’d have if he were a dragon. But afterward, when it’s over, it’s like the lead starts to show through the gold plating and the Iron Bull orders a pint of the tavern’s strongest ale and pretends he isn’t wishing for the days when it was still pure gold.
Cole can understand that. It’s not hurt, but it’s something similar, turned sweet by mixing it with pride and love and nostalgia. It’s close enough for Cole to sense all of the jumbled-up emotions that go along with it whether the Iron Bull acknowledges them or not. It’s close enough for Cole, who is still learning how all of this works, to feel them too. (That’s new. Not feeling, not exactly, but knowing that the things he feels belong to him. Knowing which ones are in his mind because they’re all around him and which ones are in his mind because that’s where they started.)
(Having a reason to feel things is new, too. The hurting and the helping—that used to be all Cole was. He could have been a person, Varric said, but Cole knows the truth. Varric has always believed Cole is a person, more even than Solas did. To Solas, Cole was a memory—a relic from a time when spirits were people, a time Solas still wishes for as though it were pure gold even as the lead shows through the cracks. To Varric, Cole simply was.)
Next to him, the Iron Bull leans over the bar. The tavern keeper has long since fled for her life, leaving the remaining patrons to fend for themselves in the waning light of a warm summer evening. Since then, the drinks have been more and more generous in both size and strength—not to mention spillage, Cole thinks, tentatively probing the stickiness of the floor with the toe of his shoe. It’s not about the sadness, though, or even the happiness—the two things that brought most people to the tavern at Skyhold back then. For the Iron Bull, today is about masking something else.
The something else is fear, but not the way he fears Cole, like prey afraid to bleed in a predator’s territory. Like many people in the Inquisition—like Cole himself—what the Iron Bull fears most is himself. And today, that fear is stronger than ever. Even the drinking is pretending; there’s no maraas-lok in this tavern and fancy Orlesian wines won’t blind and deafen the Iron Bull the way he wants them to.
The Inquisitor has already called for them once since their arrival at the Winter Palace. He’ll call again. But these aren’t glory days. There are no dragons, no Venatori, no demons to take out at the knees (save perhaps Cole himself, who is sometimes a spirit and sometimes a demon and sometimes something altogether new). There is only the trail of the dead, which Cole knows the Iron Bull is afraid will lead straight to something he would rather not find.
But the Iron Bull was afraid then, too. Afraid of Corypheus and the Grey Wardens and the strange, unfamiliar magic Solas and Dorian wielded without a second thought. He was afraid of death—not his own, but the Inquisitor’s, the Chargers’, his friends’. He was afraid when missives from the Qun arrived and when they didn’t and when he was left behind at Skyhold while the Inquisitor went out alone. So maybe, Cole thinks, glory is just what’s left over after the fear is gone.
A sound from behind him, like magic gone wrong (like gaatlok cannons firing in the distance, the Iron Bull thinks as Cole turns to look), and the shadowy tavern lights up in flashes of red, green, blue. Fireworks, someone says. Cole has never seen anything quite like it before—like the Breach, but beautiful—and he stares, entranced, as the sky flickers in front of him, feeling the joy and amazement of the other tavern-goers around him.
(The fireworks are magnificent, but Cole has seen too many things tear open the sky to find them joyful. Even so, he can take pleasure from the fact that others do, the fact that for a moment they forget the hollow hurts that linger after what Cole is beginning to learn are glory days.)
The Iron Bull offers him another drink despite the one that sits untouched in front of him.
A messenger appears in the doorway and calls to them both. The Inquisitor has asked for them at the doors of the Palace. Bring armor, he’s said. Bring weapons.
The Iron Bull grins at him, face creasing under the eyepatch, visible eye twinkling. Cole hears the words as though he’s said them out loud. Come on, kid. We’ve got work to do.
Maybe, Cole thinks, these are glory days after all.