Headcanon Meme: Cullen, Question 1

[sarasa_cat]

Given that I have a few different characters who are getting the full 50 question treatment, on most nights I'll include all characters' answers in one post (occasionally with mini-fic). Given how long the bedroom answers are turning out, I'm splitting this across two posts, one for Dragon Age and the other for FFXII.

Here's Cullen for owlmoose



1.  What does their bedroom look like?

 

In Ferelden’s Circle, Cullen shared a large room with four other templars. He was the youngest of the five in that room, although two roommates were close in age. (Headcanon places Cullen a few months shy of his 24th birthday when Duncan recruits the new warden). 

 

You can tell which bed is Cullen’s because the sheets, blankets, and pillows are not military straight, taut, and square. You cannot bounce a gold sovereign off of his sheets, although you wouldn’t call his space messy. You get the feeling he makes his bed in a hurry, doing only what was necessary rather than making a disciplined military production out of the effort. Sometimes you’ll find his helmet on the floor near the wall, not far from the door. Yes, once again Cullen has forgotten his helmet but, by the time he is reprimanded (if at all), it’s too late for him to run back up to the templar’s floor to fetch his helmet. 

 

The few sets of clothing he owns are standard issue tunics and trews from the Chantry. He has very few personal items. An inexpensive toiletry and shaving kit. A small stack of personal journals tied together with length of string. (The journals contain sketches, sometimes done from from memory and sometimes drawn on location. All sketches are in a realistic, representational style. The most recent page has a detailed sketch of a dragon fly hovering over potted plants housed in the Circle’s greenhouse.) Stacked near the head of his bed, you find a few books checked out from the tower’s library. Cullen reads a wide range of fiction and non-fiction. On the day that Duncan arrived at the tower, Cullen had left a serial action-adventure novel sitting on his bed (the plot was formulaic and rather forgettable, he will tell you, but it was a page turner and it passed the time away). Surveying his personal space, you get the feeling that Cullen has absolutely no connections to family outside the tower. (However, what you don’t see is the inexpensive silver ring that he wears on a chain around his neck. The ring belonged to his mother. He last saw when he was twelve.)

 

In Kirkwall’s Gallows, Cullen received his own quarters as soon as he was promoted to Knight-Captain (a few months after his arrival). In all of his time there, he has done nothing to personalize or brighten up the drab ugliness of his two rooms—a meager sitting room and a small bedroom. With the exception of weekly inspections, his quarters become disorganized. The majority of his scant personal items are standard issue from the Chantry, he still has his stack of sketchbooks although they appear to be gathering dust. He has a growing stack of books piled near his bed plus a row of books by the window in the sitting room. (Some are from the Gallow’s library, although the library’s selection is paltry compared to Ferelden’s Circle; the rest are inexpensive volumes he has purchased in Kirkwall or has on loan from other people). During Cullen’s second year in Kirkwall, he started rebuilding/refurbishing old compasses and discarded navigational instruments. A Chantry brother got Cullen started on this as a meditative hobby. During the many nights that Cullen cannot sleep, he tinkers with sextants, octants, and astrolabes, and pages through borrowed books to identify the missing pieces of the elaborately detailed marine chronometer that he found in a Lowtown shop. 

 

Deep Headcanon Territory—sometime between DA2’s Acts 2 & 3, after Hawke is declared Champion of Kirkwall, my headcanon Cullen begins a very discreet relationship with Mari Hawke. (It’s a relationship born out of mutual loneliness, growing out of a rivalry that became respectfully friendly. Meanwhile, Cullen has started to have his first doubts about the Gallows. Although we see those doubts in some of is Act 3 lines along with Cullen questioning his prior beliefs, my headcanon has him privately questioning these matters during those years between Acts 2 & 3 off-screen while listening to Hawke and some of her companions). So… on the nights when no one at the Gallows is likely to miss Cullen’s presence, he stays at the Hawke Estate. Given the increasingly messy state of Cullen’s bedroom in the Gallows — his perpetually rumbled bed linens, the stacks of books on the floor, his bed clothes toss over the back of a chair — it isn’t apparent when his bedroom goes unused for two days in a row. Yet, evidence of Cullen’s presence in the Hawke estate is practically invisible. The first few times he stayed there, he borrowed clothing left behind in Carver’s wardrobe. Bodahn eventually purchased a few more items of menswear tailored to Cullen’s size, but when those items are stored in Carver’s otherwise unused wardrobe, those items fail to stand out. Likewise, one man’s toiletries and shaving kit look no different from another’s. The only telltale sign of Cullen’s on and off presence, assuming you know what to look for, are two books cataloguing old mariner’s navigational instruments sitting on a bedside table in Mari’s room, and a large, elaborate marine chronometer sitting on her bedroom desk that is slowly being restored and repaired.

 

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