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Nameless jeering uncles handed Oghren cup after cup, their names were lost in a distorted blur and their faces slipped out of focus and the burnt amber liquid, flat expensive ale, flowed like the lavafalls inside Orzammar. It hadn’t been the first time Oghren was drunk, it was the first time that it mattered. Because stolen sips of nutty ale in the cellars, when his beard was an optimistic fuzz, didn’t count.
There were no jeering uncles anymore, but if Oghren stopped for long enough he’d find himself somewhere on the cusp of sobriety and wakefulness. And he hated it. So he sipped the bottle of Legacy that the Warden had tossed his way and he clawed at the rough plaited mess of beard. The liquor tasted like slate, minerally and gritty, cold like chewing a spearmint leaf, but somehow clean at the same time? It wasn’t pleasant, but he wasn’t drinking it for the taste.
Oghren grunted, readjusted the way that he was sat and took another long swig of the Legacy. With each sip, he was becoming surer that it had lyrium in it. And the lyrium spluttered against his teeth, cold and sharp.
It sparked up against his stone sense, that he had been sure he’d lost a long time again. And like sliding back inside a well-worn, well-loved glove, he was comfortable in himself. The Legacy made him feel heavier again, like he could take off his armour and not go falling up into the vast sky above. He looked up at the slate-grey storm clouds, and grunted, when had he turned into such a cloud-gazer?
The lyrium settled uncomfortably in his stomach and there was no shaperate to keep his recollections in order, so the etched runes under his ribs were meaningless. He could stop drinking it if he wanted to, he could. If he wanted to. But in the sodden Ferelden weather he wasn’t want to do such a thing - because worse than feeling the pitter patter of the fucking rain was when he stopped drinking long enough that he could start to pick out that image of Branka, of that first time he saw her.
Branka’s arms had crossed over her wedding gown and her face looked like a smacked-arse.
But he hadn’t been paying attention to her face. She was a pretty thing, Oghren thought, that first image of her, in a dress that moved like liquid bronze and shamed the lavafalls. One of those jeering uncles had leant across the table and told him about her dress, she’d made it, her dowry not only in the worth of the beaten sheet copper, but also in the skill required to make it. It was some Smithing tradition, the finer the dress the better the bride.
For a whole night, he loved that dress. Loved the way she moved in it, loved the way it rippled. Oghren could hit anything with a hammer, and he only had the strength of his body to give her in return, but nothing he’d ever hit looked like that when he was through. He just left a trail of mess and destruction wherever he went. But, the stupid naive part of him, hoped that Branka liked the look of him too.
She didn’t, he discovered rather soon after.
When he came to like that blighted dress better on than off. He actually hated the thing when it clanked and puddled on the floor by their unadulterated wedding bed, and Branka’d expected him to do something - that thing he hadn’t done with Felsi yet - that thing that even if he’d wanted to, he’d drunk too much to accomplish the task.
So he hadn’t.
And he didn’t think Branka ever forgave him that first slight.
In the pissing rain, his old man started to react and he uncrossed his legs to give himself space to grow. Too late now. But the pretty, prissy one in the peach robes with the red-hair stood up offended in a huff. Leliana’s offence didn’t bother him, at least it wasn’t her pity or the sad, soppy way she looked at him while imagining his duty to Branka had been anymore than duty. Leliana wanted a romantic story, something epic and timeless; something worth the brittle blue lyrium to record it.
And Oghren couldn’t give either of them what they wanted, because the sad fucking truth was that it was always easier for him to like Branka when she wasn’t there. When she wasn’t the obsessive workaholic that skipped meals, threw her heavy steel tools when her prototypes failed, who always wanted head but never once reciprocated.
Branka was better as the unknowable Paragon, somewhere far away. The woman who’d convinced his same jeering uncles to dissolve their ancient house in favour of her in less than an afternoon. Who’d barely said twenty words and the whole lot of them picked up their axes and followed her into the Deepest of Roads - who’d left him behind in their barely broken-in marriage bed nursing the second worst hangover of his life.
Everything went to Branka in the end. She had her own gravity, a charisma that Oghren had never understood, could never hope to match. All deep roads led to her and he once thought he’d never escape her underground. Didn’t much want to, he liked that he couldn’t disappoint her anymore, like the precision of his whole life focused to a single point; that it was his duty to get her back or find out what happened to her.
And if he hated the shame of it, of being left behind. He didn’t speak of it or drank to cover it. And after a while the shame was hammered into purpose. And Oghren liked to think it was that, that sense of purpose, that was the high that Branka had been riding all those years.
Even with her gone he didn’t go a single day without thinking about her - it crept upon as vicious as a deepstalker that knew right where his ankles were. Oghren was left with the gritty sediment of her affection, it clung to him, chaffed him, swilled around the bottom of his ale tankard. And when it had swallowed him back, he’d woken up in a dark little cell, his hands covered in blood and told that he’d murdered a man who had made the mistake of slighting the Paragon.
Shadows cast long, flicking in the light of the single wall mounted candle, laughing at him. He couldn’t even remember the boy’s face, he didn’t mind the unfinished punishment, but he wanted to at least remember it. He didn’t know if the boy's brains looked as pretty as Branka’s wedding dress splattered across the floor?
He hated her for it, he hated that dress. But he went and found her in the end, didn’t he? He followed the roads, met her down on her level. Watched her give her pretty speech about some anvil he didn’t care about. The whole time, he saw the Warden watching him out of her corner of her eye. But all he could think about was that beaten copper dress and the way it toppled and how it lay limp across the floor.
By the time he’d finished the bottle of Legacy, Oghren was just a drunk surfacer. He couldn’t see Branka’s face, or hear his jeering uncles and he was wet to the bone from the rain. He rather liked it.