I wish you would write a fic where... Post-Callier Debacle but Pre-Warden Gordon Meeting
The hovel is small and wedged in between two larger, more lavish buildings. Which seems fitting considering the ale in there tastes like horse-piss but costs next to nothing and its customers are nothing but bare-faced commoners and the occasional traveler. It’s the safest place he’s found in months.
“I had begun to think we’d lost you,” the barmaid says as he shuffles into the tavern when late afternoon has swallowed the city. Bright and burning. “Another victim of the Summerday celebration, eh?” Thom grunts into the ale she readily serves. The streets had been crowded today, full of children marching towards the chantry to celebrate their coming of age and he had busied himself tending to the horses outside the city gates instead. In the basking sun, beneath the choir of light-hearted voices, he falls so deep into his own nightmares that he struggles to find any scrap of momentum. “You want butter soup with that?” He doesn’t notice the barmaid talking to him until she leans over the counter, her tits nearly bursting out of her thin tunic that looks damp in the heat. “Huh?” “Food.” Her grin is wide and infectious. In another life, he thinks, he would have been full of suggestions and innuendo, a belly full of laughter and a mouth full of filth. Now, he stares down at his hands, seeing the invisible blood on them. He’d never touch her. “You know, things most people have with their ale.” “Nah, I’m fine.” A while later she places a bowl in front of him anyway. Soup, a chunk of bread, some olives and an apple cut into pieces. There’s a brief stab at the back of his mind at the sight. Apple slices. His mother used to do that for him and then later for Liddy, in a life far away before he became this man, one who no longer deserves his own past. His chest tightens. “What do you do that for?” he mutters, gruff and hopeless, thinking why do people bother with a wretched bastard, thinking what do I have to do to make it stop? The barmaid shrugs and shoots him a glance over her shoulder as she moves away again, out of sight. He eats the food methodically and without looking up, biting back tears.
