Nathaniel hated the idea, and he didn't make a secret out of it.

"Are you crazy? Making demands is going to make them like you even less!" The inner conflict was plain on his face. Jonathan had been his brother, and he had to want his murder solved just as much as Catherine did. That tear deep in her chest, continuously bleeding hurt, he'd got to feel it too. Had to have one of his own.

Yet here he was, putting her above his need for redemption. It scared her. Deeply so. He wasn't supposed to be doing this. He was supposed to be immature and selfish, all those things she'd always thought he was. This was extremely off-putting.

"They don't have to like me, they have to respect me. Big difference." She waved her finger in front of his face to emphasize her point. "Which they'll be more likely to do if I'm willing to work with them in the first place. And if they know my motivation, maybe they'll think they can control me."

"They will be able to control you," Nathaniel said, his voice urgent. "Have you forgotten which side in this situation has the monopoly on information? They tell you something wrong, whether on purpose or not, and you're dead."

"I won't trust official information, I promise you."

"Then where are you gonna get reliable intel? You'll need it, you know that, right?"  He'd put more distance between them on the bed, so that now they could properly look at each other. And Catherine could clearly see that she had him hooked. From the hopeful gleam in his eyes to the small crease between his eyebrows and the way he was fidgeting -  she was able to tell that he wanted this. He really, really did, and he only kept protesting because he was scared. For her.

"Solas, for now. He really doesn't like the way that socienty works. And if I could get the Light Court to give up the Dwarves' crown and warhammer-thing, I might get their support."

The last part nearly made her giggle. Managing not to do that made her extremely proud of her composure, especially when Nathaniel snorted and began to laugh.

"Crown and warhammer?" he wheezed.

And then , she was laughing too. Not nearly as uncontrolled as the man next to her, but it was a proper laugh, and it made the world on her shoulders feel lighter.

"That's what they wanted from you? Their warhammer?" Freshly calmed down, his voice broke at the mention of the weapon.

"It seemed like it was very important to them." Why was she even laughing? This wasn't funny. Your nerves, the little voice in the back of her head said. She barely kept herself from nodding. Yes. Nerves made sense. She was under an enormous amount of pressure.

Nathaniel kept on cackling. Which was quite a relieving thing to hear, given the circumstances, but it did seem a bit out of place.

"Stop it! Don't make fun of them." She crossed her arms, entirely serious - but still fighting the laughter. Really, this wasn't fair. Why didn't she have more control over herself?

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Nathaniel said, raising his hads in defence. "It's just.... I didn't think people actually owned warhammers. Or Dwarves, I guess."

Catherine nodded. She herself had never even entertained the idea that Dwarves existed. Them owning warhammers was just the icing on the cake. Plus, it really was relieving that Nathaniel was just about as lost as she was. Until she really thought about it more closely and realized that that pretty much meant she was fucked, but she didn't want to think about that right now. Blinders. Mental blinders would be really nice. It had always been quite hard for her to concentrate.

The room grew quiet for some time, and she just sat there and looked at him. Why was he even wearing eyeliner? Was there a special reason? Or was it just like it was for her; he'd gotten bored and taken his make up out? It looked like he really knew what he was doing, the line very fine and very close to the lash line. Was he regularly wearing make up and she just didn't know? Jonathan had never talked about it. But then again, he'd avoided talking about his brother at all costs.

Nathaniel was sitting on the bed, feet entangled in some sort of lotus position, hair tousled as if he'd just been out in a storm. How he could look both so young and so old at the same time was beyond her. With his hair sticking out from his head so wildly he seemed so much younger than his twin, whose short hair was almost always combed back. (It had taken a very stern talking-to to turn him away from a terrible middle-part.) But the bags under and the pain in his eyes belied something she'd never seen in her fiancé: Hardship. She didn't think Jon had ever faced it. He'd always had a smile on his face, and something positive to say about everything. It pained her that this was likely the very thing that led him to walk to his death.

"Solas is a good lad," Nathaniel finally said. "But have you thought about the consequences this could have for him?"

That took her by surprise. "What do you mean?"

He sighed, carding his hands through his hair, getting stuck in a particularly messy strand. "They already don't like him because he's got such a free spirit. If that kid goes against direct orders - or even unspoken rules - it could get him into a lot of trouble. What if they see that as treason?"

Her stomach dropped like a stone. How could she not have thought about that? The way they'd treated him... Heavens, what if she'd already gotten him into trouble?

But there was something else, a nagging thought in the back of her mind. He didn't want to be treated like a child. He wanted to be respected. And that meant respecting his autonomy, his opinions.

"It's his choice," she said. Nathaniel looked like he had a very strong opinion about that, but she raised her hand to stop him. "I won't deliberately endanger him. I won't demand him to do anything. But I'll ask if he wants to help and if he does, he will. It's not like we'll be able to keep him from it if he discovered what we were doing somewhere along the way."

Nathaniel blinked owlishly. But as soon as he appeared to have understood what she'd said, concern bled into his face.

"You're probably right about that," he said, and he didn't look happy about it in the least.

"Just like you." Catherine smiled at the thought, and her smile got even broader when the wrinkles on Nathaniel's forehead grew deeper.

"What do you mean?"

"You're here to help me regardless of my opinion on that, aren't you?"

His face split up with a bright grin, then. "Yup."

She groaned. "Don't say that."

"Why?" Perfect innocence.

"It makes you sound like a teenager."

Nathaniel scoffed. "You make it sound like that's a bad thing. And besides: I stay young at heart."

"So you basically still are a teenager."

"Yup."

"Nathaniel..."

XXX

"So, there's this book," Nathaniel said when they'd arrived in the driveway of the mansion.

"What book?" she asked. What did he mean? She'd never seen a special book, or heard Jon talk about one. Sure, the house was full of them. Old books, ancient books, classic literature, poetry... You named it, it was there.

"I'm not a hundred percent sure." He scratched his head, looked at the ground as if the gravel of the driveway was going to provide him an answer. "It was always there, in the lessons. When Father wanted to explain something in more detail, he looked in that book. When he didn't remember something, he looked in that book. Must be some sort of guide book or chronicle."

"You had lessons?" Catherine was intrigued. Had that been happening when she'd already known Jon? Going on a hunch, it probably hadn't because Nathaniel had already been at boarding school.

"That's what you took away from what I said?" He laughed. "Yeah, we did.  But I never paid much attention, because it really only ever was about Jon. It didn't matter if I knew all that stuff."

She hummed in agreement. Of course he hadn't. Jon had called it the "curse of the second son" - he as an individual hadn't counted, simply because he wasn't the firstborn. Nathaniel, as a person, had always just been the back-up. And if she were to believe his brother - which she did - he had been treated as such by their parents.

"So what's this book about?" she wanted to know. Somewhere nearby, a crow cawed. That made her stop in her tracks for a bit. For an afternoon in summer, it was strangely calm. No other birds were singing, and there was no breeze, so all the trees were quiet too. Were they being watched. Did the animals know that there was something out there, someone dangerous?

Nathaniel took a deep breath. "I'm not completely sure. Just... you know, general Keeper-crap? There should be some sort of information in there that can help you. We just need to find it. And that's gonna be a bloody pain in my ass."

She tutted, more for show than anything else. "Language, Mister. There's a lady present. Stop being such a bad influence."

For just a moment, his face completely lit up in a grin, but he seemed to quickly remember the situation they were in. "Alright, let's get this done."

And he retrieved the key from beneath one of the flowerpots next to the door and opened it, leaving her with the painful reminder that this was his home more than it was hers.

XXX

They pretty much turned the place upside down, to no avail. About two hours in, they were sitting on the living room floor, books strewn all over the room, and Catherine was close to crying. They had looked at hundreds of books, most of which didn't even fit Nathaniel's description of "small, bound in leather, with some pretty gold stuff". And there had been small books, bound in letter, embellished in gold, but they'd all been about something else. Prayers, classics, poems. No "Keeper-crap".

And she was tired of it, she was so freaking tired. She'd had an exhausting day before she was even abducted, then she'd been abducted, thank you very much, hit on the head several times. And it hurt. She was hurting all over by now, but her head was the worst. Her eyes were strained from trying to find even the slightest hint about supernatural beings in countless of old tomes, her throat irritated by all the dust that had accumulated.

A few feet over, Nathaniel groaned and threw his head back. "Where is this damn book!"

"Not here," she said, her words muffled by her hands over her mouth. "I'm pretty sure we would know."

The deep sigh he heaved told her he was at least as frustrated as her. "I even looked in that damn step in the stairs where he was always hiding his shit, but nothing was there!"

Her ears perked up at that. "He was hiding his stuff in a step in the stairs?" That wasn't what she'd observed. Whenever he tried to hide something from her, it was either in an empty marmalade tin in the tea cabinet or in the hollow headbord of their bed.

"The headboard!" And off she went before he could answer her.

Nathaniel forged a particularl creative string of expletives, but followed her nonetheless. "What's this got to do with your headboard?"

Turning the corner into her bedroom, Catherine was extremely grateful that she was still wearing her shoes. Otherwise, she surely would have fallen on her backside - and on the hardwood floors, that hurt. She'd experienced that more than once.

"He hid things in there, I've never seen him do that with the stairs, but-" she carefully pried the engraved board off the top of the headboard - "this is where he stored presents and important documents."

With slightly trembling hands, she put the board down on the covers. How come she hadn't even thought of looking in there? Eight weeks Jonathan was gone now. Dead, more like. And it hadn't even crossed her mind to look in the one place she knew he was hiding important things. The safe, yes. All that obnoxious paperwork, check. She'd gone through his nightstand and desk, all in her desparation to find just one clue. To find him. And yet...

"Can you look?" she asked. "I'm scared I'll see something I don't want to."

His face changed from confused to astonished in under a second. "You don't know what's in there?"

She shook her head no.

"So what you mean to tell me is that you had a prime opportunity to snoop all this time, and you didn't take it?"

Again, she had to shake her head.

"Shame on you, Catherine Baker, shame on you. Didn't your mother ever teach you how to have fun?"

Her mother had, in fact, been the one to always snoop around, who you couldn't keep a secret from to save your life. Catherine had always resented her for that - still did, in a way - and vowed to never be the same, no matter how curious she got.

But Nathaniel wasn't going to understand it, so she just shook her head again, and said: "Please?"

He snorted good-naturedly. "Killjoy." But he stepped next to her and craned his neck to look into the cavity she'd exposed.

In the blink of an eye, he was all hyped up. "It's there, look!"

The hurry in which he reached for the book almost resulted in him toppling over, but he caught himself fast enough. When his hand re-appeared from the small wooden enclosure, he was holding the small leather-bound book he'd described.

Catherine sidled closer. It was in a remarkably good condition for the age she assumed it had, the golden ornaments still glinting in what was left of the sunlight. It was only after Nathaniel had turned it over several times that she reaized it didn't appear to have a title. She decided it made sense, though, something like Super Secret Secrets About Elves And Stuff or How To Not Loose Your Mind Around Dwarves (Careful, They've Got Warhammers!) would probably have been too conspicuous.

"Do you want to... take it?" Nathaniel seemed hesitant about what to do with both himself and the book. Not that she blamed him. After all, this was new territory for him too.

"Yes, please," she decided.

The way he handed it to her was almost reverend, but so was the way she held it. The brown leather was soft and supple, but the thing that got her the most was that it vibrated ever so slightly. It exhuded power in a manner she'd never felt before. Almost as if -

Fuck.

"Nathaniel?" she asked, and her voice was quivering. "Does Magic exist?"

Author's Note:

Well, hello, boys and girls, it seems I've managed to finish another chapter. So what do you think? If you liked it, you could leave me a vote and completely make my day. If not, I'd be very happy if you told me what it was that put you off, so that I can improve.

Anyways, does magic exist? What do you think? And will Nate and Kitty-Cat get poor little Solas in trouble?

(Killjoys, make some noise!)