A huge thank-you to slash Queen Nithu for giving this chapter the once-over for me :-)

~o~O~o~

Nathaniel Howe was surrounded. Clambering up a rocky ledge to gain a better vantage, he began to pick off the darkspawn with his bow, occasionally planting a boot in the face of any that scrambled up the rock after him.

Although he was by now a veteran of fighting these creatures, he could not ignore the fact he was vastly outnumbered, was rapidly running out of arrows, and soon would have to rely on his daggers and his wits alone. Deciding to save his arrows for any particularly troublesome darkspawn, he unsheathed his daggers and began slashing wildly at any that ventured too close.

He felt himself break into a sweat as the darkspawn closed in on him, and a wave of nausea washed over him as their proximity pulled at his blood, and their stench filled his nostrils.

"I won't let you bastards take me," he vowed to himself, and reached into his pack for one of the incendiary flasks he'd made earlier, having to vigorously defend himself with his feet as he did so.

Hearing a familiar whistling sound, he threw himself to the ground in the nick of time as an arrow glanced off the rock barely inches above him.

"Damn!" Nathaniel sensed the arrival of more darkspawn into the chamber. Hurriedly, he prepared his flask and lobbed it over the rocky ledge, which was now his only barrier between him and the darkspawn; the flask smashed on the ground below and he heard anguished shrieks as several of them went up in flames.

As he began to prepare another flask, he felt a stronger pull at his blood as he sensed the presence of an Emissary nearby. He immediately abandoned his plans to use the flask, as by now more darkspawn were climbing up the ledge after him. He got onto all fours and crawled forward, ready to meet them with his blade, then noticed an orange glow illuminate the cave walls; in a second it grew more intense and he felt the temperature in the cavern rise.

Without warning, he was thrown onto his face as the emissary's fireball destroyed most of the ledge, and, through his blurred vision, he saw several darkspawn lying on the ground, injured by one of their own; some of them, however, were unscathed and quickly descended upon him.

"No…" he gasped, reaching for his daggers as they drew nearer.

He heard another whistling sound - although this time there was a harsh, clunky quality to it - and in an instant, the Emissary winked out of existence in his mind.

"That was a beauty of a shot, Bianca!" he heard a voice call out in the darkness.

Feeling sudden hope as his darkspawn pursuers broke off and ran away from him, he crawled forward on his elbows and squinted. He could just make out three men entering the cavern: a dwarf, an elf and a human, who was obviously a mage.

He then felt another tug at his blood. At first he had trouble distinguishing it from the way the darkspawn called to his body, but as he concentrated, there could be no doubt about it: a fellow Warden was nearby.

Although he was immensely relieved that one of his party might be alive, having believed them all to be dead, he was confounded as to how they'd survived, and how they'd made their way to this part of the chamber without him sensing them before.

Wearily, he dragged himself to his feet and took up his bow, determined to aid his mysterious, and very timely, rescuers. He winced and gritted his teeth as he clutched at his ribs; he'd probably broken one or some of them in the blast. As he nocked an arrow and took aim, he felt a warm, benevolent energy settle over him, as though he was being held and caressed by invisible arms, and immediately he felt the pain in his ribs subside.

Obviously, someone had healed him, but whom? The human mage was too busy hurling giant boulders through the air to stop and cast a healing spell. Was there another mage nearby, then? Nathaniel quickly pushed this thought out of his mind and used the last of his remaining arrows to drop as many darkspawn as he could.

Finally, the darkspawn in the cavern were defeated, and Nathaniel clambered down the rock face to meet his rescuers. As the three of them walked towards him, Nathaniel felt he'd met one of them before, or at least seen his likeness.

"Nathaniel Howe?" the familiar-looking mage asked him.

Nathaniel narrowed his eyes at the tall, dark-haired man, whose eyes glinted like emeralds in the dim light, suddenly realising who he was.

"You're the Champion of Kirkwall, aren't you?" he asked, and the man nodded.

"Hawke," he said in introduction and gestured to his companions. "This is Varric, and Fenris."

Nathaniel bowed deeply to the men in gratitude, and then straightened up, noticing Hawke looking toward the entrance of the cave.

"Your sister Delilah sent us down here after you; she told us you'd followed our expedition's route. Why?" Hawke asked him.

"Because your group ventured deeper than any of us thought possible; the First Warden himself ordered this investigation," Nathaniel answered, and paused as he felt that same tug at his blood, telling him that a Warden was very close by.

"Forgive me, Messere Hawke, but I sense the presence of one of my companions nearby; I must check on them," Nathaniel said as he walked away from the group, feeling the pull on his blood grow stronger as he neared the cavern entrance.

"You're sensing a Warden?" Hawke asked; Nathaniel turned and nodded. "That's just Anders…ANDERS!" he shouted. "Stop skulking in the shadows and come out!"

"Anders…?" Nathaniel whispered to himself, stopping dead. It can't be. It can't possibly be him…

Out of the gloom stepped a tall, hunched figure, and, as he emerged into the glow of his companion's torches, Nathaniel held his breath, feeling a thrill of cold fury pulse through him.

"Hello, Nathaniel," Anders said quietly, looking at the ground as he spoke. "It's been a long time, hasn't it?"

Nathaniel, his fisted hands clamped tightly to his sides, slowly walked over to Anders and stopped in front of him, his eyes as pale and cold as ice as he stared down his former friend.

"Nate, I…"

"Hey! That's not nice!" Varric exclaimed as Nathaniel floored Anders with a brutal right-hook.

Hawke touched Varric's arm to stop him from intervening. "We don't want to get involved in Grey Warden affairs," he muttered. "We have enough to contend with as it is."

Varric grunted and reluctantly stepped back.

"Nate…!" Anders cried, scooting backwards with one of his hands held up; he'd seen Nathaniel angry before and did NOT want to be on the receiving end this time.

"Where the bloody hell have you been for the last six years?" Nathaniel rasped, his wrath barely concealed by his deceptively steady voice.

"Nate, it's complicated," Anders began.

"At least have the dignity to stand when you address me!" Nathaniel barked at him, and Anders quickly scrambled to his feet, taking a few steps away, but Nathaniel stepped closer, eventually backing him against a wall.

"Do you have any idea of the time and effort we put into searching for you?" he seethed in almost a whisper. "Do you have any idea of how worried we were about you? We scoured Ferelden for months for you, and then, finally, we assumed you were dead. We held a memorial service for you at the Keep, Anders! We grieved for you!"

"I-I'm sorry, Nate; I didn't realise…"

"Didn't realise?" Nathaniel replied, his tone becoming harsher. "Didn't realise what? That some of us at the Keep actually considered you a friend? Well, we did – and it would have been nice for you to reciprocate a little of that friendship and let us know where the fuck you were!"

"I wanted to!" Anders shouted back at him. "Nate, I wanted to more than anything, you have to believe me! I just couldn't…I had to get away…"

Nathaniel covered his face with his hands and turned away. "The Grey Warden Order is not the Circle Tower, Anders - it's not something you can just run away from! You have a sworn duty…"

"I also have a duty to protect my friends!" Anders protested. "That's what I was trying to do!"

Nathaniel wheeled around to face him, his expression hard. "I'm not interested in anything you have to say," he hissed, removing some rope from his back pack. "When I'm finished here, you're coming back to Ferelden with me."

"No! I'm not going back!" Anders cried, his words quickly silenced as Nathaniel grabbed his arms and twisted them behind his back, squashing Anders' face against the wall as he bound his hands.

"You don't have a choice in the matter," he whispered harshly into Anders' ear. "You're a deserter and will face justice."

Anders suddenly broke out into mirthless laughter at Nathaniel's words.

"I can assure you this is not a laughing matter," Nathaniel said angrily.

"Oh, and I can assure you I don't find it in the least bit funny," Anders retorted. "It's just what you said about justice. That's what caused this whole thing in the first place."

"If you're not going to talk sense, then don't talk at all," Nathaniel said as he shoved Anders forward towards Hawke's group. "Forgive me, Messere Hawke, but your group will be one short as of now."

"Look," said Hawke, "I can see the two of you have some issues to deal with, but Anders has been with us for a while, now, and I don't think we can do without him."

"Speak for yourself," Fenris muttered.

"Anders must receive the proper punishment," Nathaniel told Hawke. "I do not wish to make an enemy of you, messere, but he is no longer your charge."

Hawke flashed his most charming smile. "Of course, I do not wish for that, either," he said. "Does the Warden-Commander travel with you? Perhaps we can come to some sort of arrangement."

"I am the Warden-Commander," Nathaniel stated.

"What? What do you mean?" Anders spluttered. "What happened to Aedan?"

"Aedan's dead," Nathaniel said bluntly.

"B-but…he can't be!" Anders stammered.

"Oh, so now you think of him – after six years?" Nathaniel asked with biting rancour. "He's dead all right – I saw it with my own eyes; an ogre practically broke him in half, but of course we didn't have a healer on hand at the time, did we?"

Anders stared at him with his mouth open.

Nathaniel sighed, immediately feeling guilty at what he'd just said – it wasn't Anders' fault at all, but that hadn't stopped Nathaniel from blaming him at the time, and he was still too angry for the moment to back down.

"I'm sorry," Anders said sadly, hanging his head.

"Doesn't look like this guy's gonna bend," Varric whispered to Hawke. "Maybe if we help him out down here, he'll soften a bit. What do you say?"

Hawke glanced at Varric and nodded once. "Nathaniel," he began, "or should I call you Commander?"

"Nathaniel will be fine," he replied.

"Nathaniel," Hawke repeated, "you obviously weren't down here on your own. Are there any others with you?"

Nathaniel nodded slowly. "There were, but we were separated, and I've all but given up hope of finding them," he said quietly. "I don't sense any Wardens in the immediate vicinity – well, I didn't, until Anders showed up."

"We'd like to help you look for them," Hawke offered.

"That is very gracious of you," Nathaniel replied with a small bow, and walked over to the entrance to another chamber, pushing Anders along as he went. "We must go deeper into the tunnels to search for them. Stay alert for darkspawn," he warned the others.

"And what am I supposed to do?" Anders complained. "How am I supposed to defend myself with my hands tied behind my back?"

"Run away," Nathaniel spat as they entered the second chamber. "You're good at that."

~0~O~0~

As the five men ventured further and further into the thaig, and after engaging several small packs of darkspawn, Nathaniel, who could still not sense any Wardens besides Anders, began to lose hope of ever finding them. The last flicker of optimism within him was quickly extinguished as the group came across a pile of bodies, in front of which a severed head had been pushed onto the tip of a sword, and rested against the pile.

"Sick bastards!" Anders exclaimed as he vainly looked for survivors amongst the bodies; not an easy task, considering his hands were still bound.

Hawke approached Nathaniel, who stood away from the group, silently staring at the pile.

"Are these the Wardens you travelled with?" he asked.

Nathaniel nodded and continued to stare ahead.

"I'm sorry," Hawke said in commiseration.

"I am grateful to you and your friends for your aid," Nathaniel said quietly, still not taking his eyes off the dead Wardens. "By my estimation, night has fallen by now; we should make camp and set off for the surface in the morning."

"Are we safe here?" Hawke asked.

"The darkspawn are gone," Nathaniel answered. "I can no longer sense them; if there are any more around, they will not have reached us by the time we depart."

"Nathaniel, may I untie Anders' hands?" Hawke asked with a glance over at Anders, who was watching them carefully from a distance.

"No; I don't trust him not to run again," Nathaniel replied.

"But you're both Wardens," Hawke argued reasonably. "Surely if he were to leave the area, you would sense it? Besides, one of the main reasons he accompanies us is for protection from the templars; I have no doubt they would apprehend him immediately if he didn't travel with the Champion of Kirkwall," Hawke said wryly.

Nathaniel remained silent for several moments as he considered Hawke's words.

"All right," he said at last. "But he's still my prisoner."

"Fair enough," Hawke replied, still hopeful that he'd be able to persuade Nathaniel to release him. He beckoned Anders to join him; as he did so, his eyes never left Nathaniel once.

After burning the Warden corpses to prevent any darkspawn from further mutilating them, the five men split into three groups and made camp a distance away from the mass pyre. Hawke, Anders and Varric sat together and chatted quietly; Fenris and Nathaniel, however, each sat on their own away from the others.

"Your Commander's a real hard ass, isn't he?" Varric commented as Anders picked at his meal of dried meat and bread.

"No," he replied quietly, looking over to where Nathaniel sat against a rock wall. "He's a good man; he's angry with me though, and has every right to be."

"I remember you saying that you merged with Justice around six years ago," Hawke recalled. "Is that the real reason you left the Wardens?"

"You didn't fall for the story about the cat, then?" Anders asked miserably.

"Not for one second, Blondie," Varric answered with a warm smile.

Anders stretched his legs out and leaned back on his hands. "I did something terrible," he whispered. "Well, Justice did…oh, I don't know…it was both of us. Not long after we'd merged, I was heading into Amaranthine for something, I forget what. On the way there, I came across a group of templars from the Circle Tower who had been hunting an apostate. Some of them remembered me, and decided to teach me a lesson for all the headaches I'd caused them in the past."

"But surely they couldn't capture you as an apostate," Hawke opined, "as you were a Grey Warden?"

"That wasn't their intention," Anders explained. "Their intention was to beat the shit out of me." He fell silent for several minutes; Hawke and Varric, who was fighting against the temptation to take out his story book, exchanged a glance.

"What happened then, Anders?" Hawke prompted.

Anders sighed wearily and drew his knees up to his chest. "I killed them," he stated simply. "All six of them, in the blink of an eye."

"How?" Hawke asked sceptically. "Six templars against a mage? Seems pretty one-sided, to me."

"I don't remember what happened," Anders replied, "I just know that in a matter of seconds they were…they were…" He took a deep breath and sighed again. "We didn't just kill them, we destroyed them; they were no longer recognisable as men."

Varric let loose a long whistle.

"What did you do then?" Hawke asked him.

"I buried them…what was left of them," Anders replied, "and then I ran. I ran and never looked back. I knew I couldn't go back to the Vigil; I just didn't know what Justice was capable of. What if someone there did something that displeased him, and the same thing happened again? No, I couldn't put any of them at risk like that."

"Perhaps you should explain that to Nathaniel," Hawke suggested.

"I don't think he'd understand," Anders said with another glance over to where his Commander sat. "He was pretty pissed off that I'd merged with Justice in the first place; he called me foolish and irresponsible."

"So the guy might say 'I told you so', that's no biggie," Varric interjected with a shrug. "If you make him understand, he may let you go; where's the harm in trying?"

Anders shook his head. "No, there's more to it than that…he has other reasons to be angry with me."

"Well you obviously want to speak to him," Hawke added. "You've hardly taken your eyes off him the whole time we've been talking."

"Go on, Blondie," Varric urged him. "You have a right to put your side of the story across, and besides, something tells me I might miss you if he whisked you back to Ferelden."

Anders glanced at Varric, a small smile tugging at his lips. "Really?" he asked.

"Sure!" the dwarf replied, "and your story is by far the most interesting out of all ours. Hawke's? Too conventional. Fenris'? Well, when he deigns to actually speak to me, his mouth puckers up tighter than a gnat's asshole; can't get any information out of that one besides 'I'm a slave. Danarius must die. I hate everything'. But your story, Blondie?" he said with a glint in his eye, "you're happy to tell me your story, and I haven't needed to embellish any of it. You can't leave my story unfinished. Go and talk to him."

Anders snorted softly and nodded. "Well, if there's a good reason to risk another punch to the face, it's for the sake of your story, Varric," he said as he pushed himself to his feet.

"Atta boy!" Varric cheered, and he and Hawke watched as Anders slowly made his way over to where Nathaniel sat.