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Nathaniel feels it the first time he gets into a real fight. He's eighteen and it's his first week in the Free Marches where he will serve as a squire.
One of the other boys, men really, older but smaller, thinner, probably weaker too, trips Nathaniel. Intentionally. He laughs as Nathaniel's face hit the stone floor with a loud crack, as the rough stone left long white cuts along his skin, not bleeding, but close to it.
And Nathaniel can feel the pain of the impact in every bone of his body.
And then he sees red.
He hauls himself up off the ground as quickly as he can, and before he can even stop himself, he has his hands around the other boy's neck, and he's squeezing.
Choking someone manually isn't as easy as books would make one believe, but Nathaniel is strong.
He presses his hands hard. Watches the fear in the other boy's eyes, smiles wide when the boy tries to fight him, his fingers clawing at Nathaniel's hands trying to break his grip.
Finally, when he thinks the boy is about to pass out, he lets go, and leans the boy up against the wall, and lets him catch his breath.
“If you do that to me again,” he warns, “I won't stop.”
The other boy runs away frightened.
When Nathaniel catches his own breath, and wipes the sweat from his forehead, he realizes he's hard.
He writes it off as nothing. After all, it doesn't take much, at his age, for that to happen.
It's normal.
But that night, the way he brings himself off thinking of the fear on that other squire's face, that's probably not normal.
And the way the thought of doing it again won't leave his head certainly isn't normal.
–
It comes up in drinking conversation between Nathaniel and a few of the other squires, not the one he choked, who was too fearful to be around him any longer, but a few others, that there is a woman at the Blooming Rose who specializes in more violent tastes.
Well, actually it comes up that there are two such women, but that one will flog her clients if they ask, or tie them down, or whatever they want, and the other will let her clients tie her down and hurt her.
The next time he's able to leave the manor to visit the city, he heads to the Rose with coin in his pocket.
He pays up front. The owner insists on it. And then she takes him to see the woman.
Her name, he's told, is Augusta.
She's an elven woman; young. Nathaniel's age, maybe a little older.
She has long golden-red hair, and the most unearthly purple eyes Nathaniel's ever seen, even on an elf who's eyes were often such colors. They're large, heavy lidded, and thick lashed. And sad.
She's small. Even for an elf. She's got tiny bones, and the ones in her legs bend slightly.
The very poor in Amaranthine, the children of those who were too injured to work as servants, or too drunk to do so, had such bowing,
“Did Ted, the bouncer downstairs, did he go over the rules?” she asks him in a soft voice. Her accent isn't from Kirkwall. It sounds Tevene.
And that's the last straw. He hasn't got the nerve for this. He can't add to her probable suffering.
He pays her an extra six sovereigns, despite her protestations, and leaves the Rose as quickly as he can.
–
In Bloomingtide, he hears of his father's death. And he takes the first boat he can get home.
–
Cousland, the Warden-Commander, is an attractive woman, with curly dark hair, deep dark eyes, and brown skin that caused rumors she wasn't really her father's child when the girl was younger.
And Nathaniel hates her.
He hates her, and he hates the drunken dwarf who insists on turning everything into innuendo, and he hates the damned mage who keeps mooning after him, and the other mage, the elven one who takes offense at him calling her 'my lady', and the fade spirit in the corpse. He hates all of them.
Well. Except Sigrun. No one can really hate Sigrun. It isn't possible. The woman is like a kitten in dwarven form, curious and adorable.
But he hates everyone else.
They're in Amaranthine.
Cousland insisted he come, though for what reason, Nathaniel can't fathom, since all the Commander seems to be doing is walking around to each shop and looking at their wares, something she could have done on her own.
He shouldn't be surprised when the drunken dwarf starts talking again.
Surprisingly, it isn't crude innuendo towards Sigrun despite her obvious disinterest in him.
He looks up at Nathaniel instead, giving him a broad grin. “You know,” he begins, his smile growing, “when your father took over the Arl of Denerim's palace, he moved his bedroom next to the dungeon.”
Nathaniel's blood goes cold. Even without thinking too deeply, he knew why his father would do that. Because he knew why he might. And he feels sick.
He swallows back bile and tries to pretend he doesn't doesn't though. “What are you talking about?”
That makes Oghren let out a breath of a laugh. “Sounds like someone liked to nip down for a bit of torture before bedtime.”
He forces himself to keep his breathing steady, forces himself not to think about it. Not to think of what his father did, and picture himself doing it instead. He doesn't want those pictures in his head.
He doesn't want to think about it. He tries to will himself not to, but that just makes him see more flashes of images.
A man with very familiar blond hair, and a golden earring, tied to an X leaning against a wall, nude, back exposed, and Nathaniel, in this imagination, has a whip. The sound of his scream would be so satisfying
A blonde woman he knew when he was a teen, who's name he couldn't recall, tied to the rack, Nathaniel with a knife in hand, cutting into her flesh. She cried, but she didn't cry out anything but his name in a low breathy voice he might almost think was pleasure.
Someone, he sees nothing but their wrists tied above their head, and he can only hear the whimpers they make.
He's glad the Commander asked him to wear plate today, otherwise he wouldn't hear the end of it from the dwarf. He swallows again, and opens his eyes, trying to add disgust to the sadness he already feels at the idea of his father doing this. At the idea that he wants to do this.
“Delilah did say that Father had begun indulging his darker side....”
“Everyone needs daddy issues. Just trying to help.”
–
He tries not to think about it. He tries not to think about his desires, even at night, in bed, alone, except for other wardens barely on the periphery of his senses, the taint in their bodies calling out to the taint in his own.
He tries to shut his eyes and just sleep.
And when that doesn't work, he tries to take himself in hand, thinking about something else, someone else. Something normal.
The body of his first lover, a noblewoman, twenty five and pretty, with dark brown ringlets, with angular features, but a round body, pale and soft and beautiful.
But flashes of one of his fantasies would interrupt.
Andraste help him.
He was his father's son. And he was a monster.
He needed help.
He needed help and needed to make these thoughts go away.
He starts to pray again after that. For the first time in years. He starts to pray for the Maker to send him help.
–
The Maker has a sense of humor.
And it is the sense of humor of a cruel and capricious twelve year old.
And the punchline of the Maker's joke is Nathaniel ending up in bed with Anders.
He's honestly not completely sure how it happened.
Not sure in the slightest.
But what was for certain was that both of them were squished into Nathaniel's bed, a look of satisfaction on Anders' faces.
“It's a pity Sigrun didn't want to join us,” Anders mused, “Or Moira.”
“Should you really be calling the commander by her first name?”
“I don't think Moira would mind much. I think she's too busy still being offended about me suggesting she sleep with us without her husband also coming along.”
“You asked her to join us?”
“Why not? She's attractive. Talented. And she seems like the type of woman who could cut me into a million pieces just by glaring at me. Can't think of anyone better to sleep with. Next time I'll invite her and the King.”
Even in the low candlelight, Nathaniel can see the marks he made on the other man's body, feel the shot of lust go straight into his spine as he eyed them, even as he tried to push away the thoughts.
The bruises starting to form on Anders' thin hips in the shape of Nathaniel's fingertips pushed hard into the skin, the nail marks still visible. The bites along the exposed skin of Anders' neck, parts of his chest. The scratches along the other man's ribs.
Even during, he'd tried to fight it.
And he didn't.
The lust, still flowing, is tinged with shame now. He hurt Anders. He hurt him, even if the other man didn't mention it.
“I'm so sorry,” he murmurs, whispering. He turns away from Anders now, turns to face the window. Even in the darkness, he can see the lanterns of the soldiers doing their last checks before they locked the Keep for the night.
When he lived here as a child, Nathaniel used to stay up until midnight every night he possibly could to watch them do it from the large window on the third floor. His father used to do it too.
Yet another way they were the same. Yet another way he was like him. Like the man so many called a monster. And that made Nathaniel a monster as well.
“For what?” Anders asks, craning his body as best as he could to see Nathaniel.
“I hurt you.”
Anders laughs. It's undignified, and almost a snort, a breath of air out of his nose, barely audible. “If you think this is hurting me, then I need to tell you about the pirate queen I slept with in Denerim. That woman left me with rope marks around my wrists that didn't go away for weeks, handprints on my neck, my arse...” Nathaniel can almost hear Anders grinning. “She was probably the best lover I've had in a very long time... Maker... You know how they say sailors know knots? She knew knots. She knew more knots than I could probably ever learn. She was wonderful.”
“You weren't mad she hurt you?”
“I would have been more mad if she didn't. She teased me, after I shocked her, that she'd get me back for it. If she didn't, it would have been a pity.”
“But she hurt you.”
“Sometimes people like to be hurt,” Anders says. Nathaniel rolls over to look him in the eye.
“And you're one of these people?”
“Sometimes.”
“Doesn't it bother you that your lover wants to hurt you?”
Anders shrugged. “It's better they do it with someone who likes it, instead of...I don't know... Becoming a templar and torturing mages...Or kidnapping elven children like that one Orlesian noble during the rebellion, and torturing them.”
“Or like my father did,” Nathaniel said softly.
“You're nothing like your father.”