Fingers Stained with Charcoal

Tags: Colemance if you squint, Drawing, Slice of Life

Published: 05/10/18

Summary: Cole finds a new hobby in drawing.

Cole sat in the corner, a wad of paper in his lap and a stick of charcoal dangling between his fingers. He'd been dazed and lost, drowning endlessly in wrung worries and tangled tension that only got louder because it was his. Things hadn't been right since he'd confronted the Templar. Since he'd let his killer go. His own worries weren't meant to be louder than everyone else's.

Varric listened and nodded, offered advice that really didn't help at all because he didn't understand. When Cole had started pacing, Varric gave him the paper and told him to 'Go draw something, kid.'

But what was he supposed to draw? He looked out the window, frowning and following a new line of frustration. There, a couple, arms flailing and pointed gestures, yelling though he was too far away to hear. They were so angry. But, beneath that...

His hands were moving across the paper before he knew it, mapping the lines of their souls, their bond, their love that screamed louder than their words.

He stopped and looked at his drawing. It was a picture of the couple embracing, their hearts entwined and beating as one. He drew two more, one of each of them, reaching and incomplete and beautiful. To remind them. He sneaks the drawings in front of them so that they can see each other how they did before, how they feel and sing underneath it all.

It works, the hurt untangles.

He thinks he likes drawing.

There's a pull of pain on his way through the courtyard. A soldier, young and yearning for home. He stopped and listened like he'd done a thousand times before, searching for the knot of pain. But it was an honest ache.

There was no worry, no guilt, nothing to untangle, just a hungry hole where home used to be. He could see it, rolling hills and fields of wheat, the horses in their stables and the children playing, women getting water from the well, gossiping and giggling as the youngest tugged at their skirts.

That night, the soldier found home on his bedroll in a pile of sketches.

It was enough.

Cole finds himself drawing much of the time. Sometimes it quells and quiets the tangles of his own head, sometimes the still echoes of life on paper unfold aches in others that he couldn't get to otherwise. The causes vary, but the ending is Cole's long fingers clutching a charcoal as he painstakingly sketches what he sees.

The Inquisitor finds him surrounded by his drawings, brings others that she found lying about. She's curious.

He explains each one.

'She wanted to practice.''He was too scared.''He wanted to fly.''They couldn't hear it anymore.'

He doesn't think the Inquisitor understands, but she tries. She smiles anyway, joy and wonder bubbling up at him, for him.

He doesn't have to sleep, but he still has a bed. A loft, a corner of the Inn to call his own. The Inquisitor had insisted, but she didn't have to. He was there often, and others found him strange, avoided him and the place that he called his. It was harder now that people saw him, he could still go unseen if he needed to but it wasn't the same. They saw him unless he tried and that was too much to bear, their whispers and glances pushing him down and deep until he had to hide from it all.

Tonight something was different. He glanced around his room and saw piles of papers. They were drawings. Drawings of him. There were hundreds of them, sketches of him looking, laughing, smiling, hiding behind his hat, or seated in a corner with a drawing pad in his lap. All of them were by different hands.

The Inquisitor stepped into his room. "Do you like them?" she asked, worry coiling its way around her heart, what if what if.

He looked back at the drawing of himself playing with a nug.

"We all wanted you to know how we see you."

They all saw him. They all saw him but it was okay, no one was mad, they saw him truthfully. They saw him better than he saw himself. He looked around, surrounded by his own face looking at him, open and honest and kind. If others saw him like that, then he could be that. Perhaps he already was, perhaps was too human to see it.

"I love them," he said, simply.

He smiled and pressed his forehead to hers, her hands wrapped in his own charcoal stained fingers.