Guarded Love (COMPLETED)

Epilogue

Eighteen Months Later...

Wiping the sweat off the brow under her hat, Reiss closed the file that'd been sitting in her case box for the past month. Raising her voice to be heard in the small but packed room, she spoke, "I'm pleased to announce that the City Watch has just accepted the confession of one Mr. Derick Larner and we have officially solved another one."

A smattering of applause broke out as Reiss jammed the closed case file onto the sword she was gifted for preserving the King's life and foiling Cade's dastardly deeds. He actually had "dastardly deeds" engraved onto the hilt, the alliteration striking him as hilarious. Over a dozen other case files were already wedged onto the blade, each one plucked from the streets and once declared unsolvable by the Watch, but Reiss and her company proved them wrong. It was growing so heavy, the brackets that held the sword on the wall were beginning to bow. Either it was going to fall off, or they'd run out of space to store them. That was a dragon they'd slay when they came to it.

"All right everyone, get back to work. We've still got a good three open ones to put to the sword," Reiss called to her crew. It took awhile for Denerim to warm to this ragtag group of outsiders, no one certain what to make of the elf skimming in and out of places where dead bodies landed while another jotted down everything Reiss told her to. But when they began to get results, the City Watch and other organizations with questions no one could answer turned to them.

They didn't have a name to begin with, Reiss too busy scrounging to bother with something so trivial, leading Denerim to name them the Solvers. It was silly and not really accurate, but who was Reiss to argue. The Solvers rested in the bottom floor of a small building just outside the alienage sharing the corner with what used to be a tanners turned avant garde painter's saloon, and a bakery that kept them all well stocked after the great croissant caper. Three desks crowded around a barely working stove for warmth, which used to be more than enough space for the tiny group until their ranks began to swell. Now they were often working in shifts just to give everyone a chance to sit down. Above the agency, Reiss rented her own little room for an apartment. It wasn't much more than one open room and she'd often wake to find rats cuddling up on her pillow but it was hers.

Knocking her hat back in place, Reiss swung around the desk, her new coat flapping in the always leaking breeze. She moved to sit, her back hovering in the free air and discovered that that would be impossible.

"Where's my chair?"

Lunet cranked around from her own desk and jabbed a thumb towards the dwarf twins, "Jorel's got it."

"I have not!" he shouted before running his fingers under the seat. "Ah, shit, I think I do. Where's my blighted chair then?"

Reiss collapsed an elbow to her desk and began to massage her forehead, "Let's not have a repeat of this summer's 'chair war' please."

"Some of us still limp when it snows," Lunet shouted as if she hadn't been one of the driving forces behind it.

Rather than get into a long fight of trading chairs, Reiss grabbed some of the boxes that were always stacked four or five high around the place and dragged them over to sit on. She had work to do, they all did.

The sound of the bell jangling above the door drew all the eyes but Reiss' to it. Hidden in the back and behind one of the weight bearing posts, she couldn't see anything but the back of her friend's head and the gold polished horns of their newest Qunari investigator and lunch fetcher.

Lunet spun in her chair, about to rise to her feet to greet the customer, when she cracked a grin and rolled back to eye up her boss, "Oh, it's just Reiss' sidepiece."