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She's not old, she tells herself, but she's still too old for this...frivolity.
Half the Singing Maiden has dropped like flies—snoring on folded arms on tables, Flissa moving defty between them to mop up spills. Only the corner Katrina's occupying has any life really left in it, and even that is dwindling; she can hear Sera's bawdy song growing fainter from beneath the table. Cassandra, early bird that she is, has long gone, leaving them to their drink and cards with a slight wrinkle to her nose. Even Varric has departed, citing his advanced age, but Kat thinks he just misses Hawke. Tavern reminds him of Kirkwall, or something. She's read the tale. She's never known a man who pined after a woman he wasn't in love with more than Varric pines after Hawke. She's sort of envious, really. She's never been that good of a friend to anyone.
She considers the bottom of her mug, frowning a little muzzily. There's still a good inch of ale at the bottom. She thinks she's probably already had too much—people kept buying her drinks, the way they do, and she was too shy to refuse them, damn her nerves—but she shouldn't waste it. Reluctantly, she tips the tankard up and swallows the rest of the foul stuff down. Her teeth feel sort of numb; maybe that's why she hardly tastes it.
Still, she doesn't see any harm in steadying herself with elbows braced against the table, hands pressed to her head. "I think," she says aloud, being very careful to speak clearly, "I've had enough."
Across the table, Bull gives that low chuckle that always makes her stomach swoop. Stop it, she tells her midsection; she has a clear view of it from here.
"Too bad," he says. "I'm just getting started."
She groans. "You can't be serious."
Beneath the table, Sera has stopped singing and started snoring instead. Kat feels around carefully with her foot and delivers a swift kick to Sera's thigh. For five seconds, the snore stops—and then it goes on, loud as before. She sounds like a druffalo. Kat sort of wishes she could go back to the time she didn't know what a druffalo sounded like.
"Might get something to eat first," Bull says lazily, scratching his belly. She wonders if he ever gets cold, going round without a shirt all the time. Even now, in the tavern's warmth, with sweat beading around the collar of her tunic, the points of her fingers are still too chilled for her liking.
"Mess is closed," she points out, trying to focus on the conversation. She's listed onto her right hand now, chin propped in the palm. "You know they don't serve this late." She yawns—for emphasis, she tells herself, not because she needs to.
He gives her an odd look. "There's always the larder."
She frowns. "We can't."
"Why not?"
She's about to say, the templars will catch us. Really, the words are halfway to her mouth, starting to form on her too-slow tongue, and then she remembers that there are no templars. None that'll punish her for sneaking into the kitchens, anyway.
Still, it makes her uneasy. "It's rude," she tries.
"I'm rude."
"Too right," Krem mutters from beneath his arms, face-down on the table at Kat's side.
"Come on," Bull says, ignoring him. "You look hungry."
I look drunk, you mean, she thinks, but doesn't say it. Her stomach is sort of…gnawing at her. Everyone wanted to celebrate the success of Redcliffe, and her nerves got all worked into a knot over it, so by the time they started pressing drinks on her she'd hardly swallowed any of her meal, and now here she is, walking slower than she has in months to make sure one foot goes neatly in front of the other. Bull pauses every few feet to watch, amused.
"You would be like this," she accuses, catching up, "if you weren't so—so—" She flaps her hand at the whole of him and just manages to keep her balance.
"Big," he supplies.
"And I wouldn't laugh at you," she goes on. Her staff would make this easier, but it's back in her cabin, useless, and she has nothing to lean against.
"Nice of you."
She glares. He grins, wide and innocent. Thwarted, she looks at the stairs between her and the Chantry, all five of them, and grumbles deep in her throat. It's not that she can't, it's just that she doesn't want to. She should've stayed at the tavern and gone to sleep.
"Stairs, boss," he says, still grinning. "Easier than Redcliffe."
She shudders. "Think I've earned my right to never walk up stairs again, actually." She had no idea that drinking to excess would make her so ridiculous. She sort of hates the words coming out of her own mouth, but she can't stop them. "I should be carried everywhere from now on."
He laughs outright. "Maybe after you've sealed the breach."
"Ugh."
He cocks his head a bit to the side. "That was a passing impersonation of Cassandra."
"Don't tell her," she groans. "She already wants to kill me."
"Nah," he says wisely. "She respects you too much." Before she can demand his evidence for that, he says, "Up you go."
She doesn't really have time to react: his big hands grab hold of her waist, swing her up, and drop her at the top of the steps in one smooth motion. She wobbles, catching her balance, and he follows her up.
"Thought I hadn't done enough heroic deeds to warrant that yet," she says, a little peevishly now, to cover the stupid heat blooming in her face. Lucky her, that she blushes at the drop of a hat, anyway. He probably doesn't even notice the difference.
His eye narrows down at her. The grin is more of a smirk now. "That was a taster. You close that thing, I'll carry you across the fucking Hinterlands."
She releases a delighted laugh into the silent Chantry; it rings in the quiet and she slaps a hand over her mouth to stifle the remaining giggles. "You wouldn't," she says through her fingers.
He opens the door to the cellar, beckoning her through. "You think so?"
She tries to picture it—her arms braced on his horns, maybe, legs draping down around her shoulders—and tightens her hand over her mouth to quiet her renewed laughter. Going down the stairs is easier than going up, and as they descend, it gets colder. There's a single prisoner, all the way down at the end, but she doesn't think about him; their mark is within reach, the door on the right leading to the larder.
She pauses a few feet from the door, a last anxiety holding on, but Bull breezes right by her, pushing it open. Reluctantly, she follows him in.
It is coldest of all in here. The sight of food reminds her that, under that thin layer of nervs, she really is hungry, so she hurries over to the gorgeous apples piled neatly in a bowl on the shelf. A bite of one of them's in her mouth before she even realizes, and it's almost sickly sweet, but she munches approvingly.
She keeps one eye on the door, though. Just in case.
Bull takes his time. He unearths a mug from somewhere and finds a jug of milk while he considers the offerings, an entire wheel of cheese among them. She takes up the jug—already half empty—and thinks she might just drink straight from it when she catches the scent.
Bull's already lifting his mug to his mouth. Her tongue gets tied, and instead of speaking a reasonable warning, she panics and freezes the milk solid.
He raises his eyebrow down at it, then looks sideways at her.
She manages to unstick her tongue. "It's gone bad." She waves the jug through the air, nearly drops it, and quickly sets it down on top of a shelf. "Didn't you smell it?"
He sniffs experimentally. "Nope. Never could tell the difference."
She stares at him. "How much spoiled milk have you accidentally drunk?"
"A lot, probably." He holds the mug out to her, the corner of his eye crinkling. "Want to thaw this out, then?"
"It can make you really sick, you know," she says, irritated by his lack of concern, and wraps her fingers around the mug. She sends a little jolt of heat in, thawing the milk.
"Yes, Tama," he mocks, and carries mug and jug both to the hallway to pour them out.
She feels almost painfully sober now and more than a little stupid; if bears and demons and hundreds of bandits can't kill Bull, then a little spoiled milk certainly shouldn't do the job. She munches dejectedly at her apple, and he comes back and finds some dried meat that definitely isn't spoiled, and for a while they stand there in silence, eating.
"It'll be over soon," she says finally, because she has reached that stage of the alcohol burning in her gut where she allows herself to feel relief, to think of life on the other side of breaches and marks on her hand.
He swallows a mouthful of jerky. "No, it won't."
She looks up at him, the sticky core of the apple still in his fingers. "You think it won't work?"
He doesn't say anything for a moment, just resumes his chewing and frowns, one good eye squinting at the wall opposite. She wonders absently if he's ever grown his hair out, or if it grows at all—if the horns and the scars don't stop it from coming in evenly, somehow.
"Just feels too easy," he says at last.
She snorts—these last few months haven't felt easy to her—and turns his joke back on him. "Alright, Ma. Can you feel the coming storm in your old bones?"
Just like that, the somber mood's broken; he's grinning, but he's searching around as though he might find something suitable to toss on her for the insult.
"Mind your elders, imekari," he warns, his hand fastening around a pitcher of fruit juice. "If I say a storm's coming—"
She runs before he can dump the pitcher over her head, sprinting up the stairs and through the Chantry. The adrenaline carries her past a confused Josephine, who squawks in an undignified sort of way when Bull bursts from the cellar, too.
She knows she can't outrun him, so as soon as she's outside, she gathers up a fist of snow, turns on her heel, and throws.
The ball of it hardly holds together—she's not an expert at snowball fights, exactly—and her aim is terrible; it passes him right by and hits the Chantry door instead, but gives him enough pause for her to laugh and run off again, into the deeper snow around the corner of the building. She finds some cover behind a tree and waits, trying to still her breathing.
"You know I'm going to find you," Bull calls. She can hear him packing the snow together. "And I've got better aim than you."
She doesn't shout back. The tree is only just wide enough to hide her; if she moves at all, makes a sound, she'll give herself away. She listens hard for the sound of him creeping through the snow, and then—just when she thinks he's drawn parallel with her—she darts out from behind the tree and throws.
She misses, and something cold and wet splats at the hollow of her throat. Her squeal has him roaring with laughter, even as she furiously scoops up another snowball and lobs it his way. This one gets one of his horns—barely—but he doesn't seem to even notice. She tries to zap the next snowball out of the air with her lightning, but all she accomplishes is showering herself with a storm of flurries.
They throw snowball after snowball until she's tired herself out, her cheeks aching from grinning so hard, and she lands maybe half a dozen hits out of all of them and gets snow stuffed down her shirt, but by the time he walks her back to her cabin, lecturing her about her shoddy aim, she's forgotten about life on the other side of the breach. Sometimes, even under its baleful green eye, things aren't really terrible at all.