A/N: For Dragon Age Reverse Big Bang. Alfeegi was my artist and she did an amazingly evocative piece of Anders that I totally cannot do justice. Link to her work is in my profile. Please take a look!
Alone
An owl soared through the forest, a mouse in its beak, and settled on a branch to feast. Hawke wrinkled her nose and turned her head to look at the owl. It hooted in surprise, dropping the mouse, and launched into the air again. She went back to watching Anders' cottage.
The solitary home stood in a small clearing. Light spilled out of one window onto a patch of elfroot and gardening things. Beds of herbs and vegetables spread out in one direction, ending at a pen with a lone goat and a chicken coop. Anders had set himself up better than she had since she'd escaped Kirkwall.
Years of dead ends and she'd finally found him. She was surprised he'd come back to Ferelden. He didn't seem to have good memories of the muddy country. She'd started looking for him in the complete opposite direction at first, heading across the plains of Nevarra toward the arid plateaus of Anderfels. She'd only gotten a quarter of the way before her leads dried up and she turned back south for the Waking Sea and Orlais.
Hawke looked up at the sky to judge the time by the stars and moon. The dense canopy blocked most of the sky, but she assumed it was past midnight.
She slipped from one branch to another until her feet touched the soft ground. The mulch underfoot, damp from earlier rain, masked her steps as she crept forward. Her reinforced leather armour, a motley mixture of greys from ash to slate, made her disappear into the dappled shadows between the trees. She stopped at the edge of the clearing and knelt to pick up a stick.
She threw it.
No proximity spells triggered.
She waited anyway, watching the cottage for any sign that Anders was alerted to her presence. By the time Hawke was satisfied, the shadows cast by the moonlight had lengthened.
She wondered whether Anders was as nocturnal as he was three years ago, or if the light from his window was a forgotten candle left to burn. The latter seemed too wasteful for Anders.
Hawke still remembered his threadbare living quarters in Darktown: the frayed blanket and half-empty pillow a sad pile atop his salvaged cot; the stumps of candle he thought Hawke didn't know Bodhan saved for him; the carefully-portioned food he kept stored in a box covered with a damp cloth so everything would keep for a day or two longer. After their expedition, he needn't have lived so frugally, but anything Hawke tried to outright give him, he'd turn down. It was only ever things from Hawke he'd refuse too. She'd gotten good at pawning things off onto Merrill, or Varric, or Aveline, so it would eventually end up in the stubborn mage's hands.
Keeping low, she detached herself from the tree line and crept toward his cottage. Every step was gingerly placed, her eyes seeking out the faint glow of an enchantment etched on the ground. She cut through his patches of vegetables and herbs rather than taking the paths between the beds. When she reached his cottage unharmed, she let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. That was easier than she'd anticipated.
She crouched below the window with the light, listening for any movement inside the cottage. The only things she could hear were the forest around her—the rustling of animals in the undergrowth, the flap of wings above, the wind through the trees. Elfroot's minty fragrance dampened the smell of rotting leaves and pine that had engulfed her in the forest. She took a deep breath, smiling at the familiar smell that often chased away the sewer stench of Anders' old clinic in Darktown.
Stepping back to skirt the light falling from the window, she peered through the window. Her foot brushed against something and she looked down. A watering bucket… with a faint glow.
Andraste's flaming ars–
Anders took a sip of his tea. Hawke had tripped his sensors hours ago. In the Korcari Wilds, the rudimentary ones he'd used in Kirkwall were too obvious for the feral Darkspawn who sometimes ventured too close to his sanctuary. As good as Hawke's rogue skills were, she didn't have the same senses as an animal.
When she didn't immediately come knocking on his door in the hour or so it would have taken her to walk to his cottage, his goodwill ebbed. If she was going to sit out in the spring drizzle and wait for dark, she could. If she wanted to creep through his vegetable patch—and Andraste help her if she crushed anything—then she could. And if she wanted to peer in his window, which he could see out of the corner of his eye in the crazed mirror hanging atop the fireplace, then she could.
His black and white cat, Ser Pouce-a-Lot the Second, stretched in his lap before jumping to the floor.
A second later, Anders heard a thump from outside. He chuckled.
Setting his tea on its saucer, he placed it on the table next to his seat and stood. Pounce followed him to the door.
"We have a visitor." The cat meowed, looking up at him, to the door, and back again. Anders opened the door and Pounce sprinted out. "Happy hunting. Don't bring back anything. It's disgusting."
A few minutes later, Anders staggered back into the house with Hawke draped over his shoulder. He huffed and puffed under the weight of her and kicked the door shut behind him. He winced as he heard a dull thunk; he may have hit Hawke with the door. Oh well. It was her fault for sneaking around his vegetable patch and getting caught with a sleeping hex.
He dumped her onto his bed. The bed, while sturdier than the one he slept on in Darktown, still creaked at the rough treatment. Metal clanked and, in the light, he realised she'd come fully armed. He supposed she'd have to be fully armed to brave the Korcari Wilds, but he couldn't help suspicion trickling into his mind. She snuck up to his cabin fully armed. To a hunted mage, that usually meant one thing.
With as much clinical detachment as he could muster from amidst his distrust and disappointment in his old friend, he set about divesting Hawke of her armament and pouches before the sleeping hex wore off. He was sure she had all sorts of little bombs and poisons and knives hidden on her, but he wasn't willing to start rooting around underneath her armour. If she wasn't here to kill him already, that was a sure-fire way to make it her new goal.
Hawke mumbled something that sounded like "arse" and he jumped out of her reach. He scooped up the weapons and pouches he'd taken from her and hid them in his storeroom. When he returned, staff in hand, Hawke was sitting up and rubbing her face. He leaned against the wall, watching her come to.
She looked up and her bleary eyes turned sharp. The flicker of her gaze to his staff and her hands slipping to find her pouches and weapons gone betrayed her nervousness. Her eyes narrowed.
The lines around her eyes had deepened in the three years since he'd seen her and her dirty cheeks weren't as full. The defiant aura and tautness of her body, as if she were ready to spring into action at any provocation, hadn't changed at all. He fell back on old niceties, for lack of anything else to say that wouldn't start an argument.
"Do you want some tea?"
"That depends. Will it make me go to sleep again?"
Anders sighed. "If you're going to be a pain in the arse, then maybe it will."
She glowered at him the way she used to glower at Knight-Commander Meredith or First Enchanter Orsino when they appealed to her for help. It was a piercing, unblinking stare that tried to read the minute tics and gestures that betrayed a person's true thoughts. Anders stared back at her. He'd had worse looks levelled at him while in the Circle.
"Yes, I'd like some tea." A pause. "Please."
Anders' eyebrows almost met his hairline. "Well, that's new."
He gestured with his head for her to follow him into the main room of the house. She moved silently but he could feel her behind him. Years apart and his body was still acutely aware of her.
"I hadn't heard you left Kirkwall," he said, hanging a kettle of tepid water over the fire.
"You live deep in the Korcari Wilds." He heard the creak of Hawke settling into a chair and the sardonic drawl that never seemed to leave her tone. "I suspect you haven't heard much about the rest of the world."
He shrugged as he gathered the tea and a cup. "I know Circles have fallen across Thedas. That's all that matters to me."
"Not all Circles fell. Some were annulled, like Dairsmuid in Rivain." His hands froze. His shoulders tensed. "Over a hundred mages, mostly poisoned at breakfast with the rest hunted throughout the fortress. Their throats were slit like animals."
Justice raged against the cage Anders had learned to trap him in. In Kirkwall, Anders had allowed his anger to get the better of him. In the solitude of the Wilds, he finally understood how to contain what he once thought would consume him completely. Unfortunately, it was only in the wilds that he could maintain control. He doubted he would last long against Justice were he still ferrying mages to safe havens.
Anders grit his teeth as Justice grappled for control. "Please, don't provoke Justice."
His nails dug into his palm as Justice's thrashing crested and faded. There was only so much energy a starved spirit could expend.
"He's harder to contain now, isn't he?" she asked.
Anders' let his hands relax, palms stinging from the half-moon shapes he'd left. He nodded. "I started last summer. He'd take control for hours and all I could do was watch as he slaughtered anyone who uttered a single word against mages."
He could feel Hawke's gaze burning into him. When he looked at her, she turned away to stare into the fire. She sat hunched over in her seat, both hands wrapped around her cup of tea. A stray lock of soot-coloured hair fell from the leather strap that held her hair in a bun. The choppy hair he'd gotten used to for six years was long gone.
Birds started to chirp and Anders looked out the window. The moon had set and the sky was lightening.
"Get some sleep, Hawke. I know you were out there sitting in the trees all night. We'll talk more later." He nodded his head toward his room. "You can have the bed."
"Where will you sleep?"
"Here, in front of the fire. It's warmer anyway," he said with a smile that drooped from fatigue.
Hawke's piercing look was back. Her gaze raked over his face and the rest of him. He knew he looked bedraggled and gaunt, but he was slightly fatter than he used to be. Escaping to the Wilds had lessened Justice's hold over him. In the months since he'd regained control, food became a pleasure again and sleep didn't elude him for days on end. The days of simple bare-minimum sustenance were behind him.
"Goodnight, then," she said, coming to some conclusion he wasn't privy to, and she disappeared into the room, leaving the door open enough for her to see him from where she lay on the bed.
He shook his head and stretched out his legs. Hawke's paranoid vigilance hadn't changed either.
Hawke woke to the sun shining on her face. She groaned and rolled over to bury her face in the pillow. It smelled like herbs and woody oil. She breathed in deeply, telling herself she needed to breathe deeply to get enough air, but knowing she was simply revelling in a scent she'd missed.
An annoying trill kept nudging its way into Hawke's hearing. It took her a few seconds to realise it was whistling. The technique was artless, the tuning atrocious. Growing up with her father's pitch-perfect whistling, anything less sounded like the squeal of a dying pig. She may have missed this scent, but she did not miss the songs Anders tried to whistle.
She clambered out of the bed, reluctant to leave the warmth of the thick blanket and the softness of the mattress. Where he'd found such comfortable things in the middle of the Wilds, she didn't know. She quirked her lips at the thought of the Flemeth in her dragon form, delivering bundles of household goods to the hermits of the Wilds.
Slipping her feet into her boots, she stuck her head outside of the room to tell Anders to shut up. He wasn't in the living area. She stepped out, surveying the room now that it was bathed in daylight. The fire had died to a few flickers, keeping hot a pot of something sweet-smelling that made Hawke's stomach growl. A cat was curled up on the hearth. It opened its eyes a crack to watch Hawke but made no move to greet her. Goddamn cats. Give her a mabari any day.
A quick look behind the other two doors in the cottage revealed a bathroom and a storage room. The latter held her weapons. She reached for her blades then stopped. He didn't trust her. He wanted to—she saw it in the way he pleaded with her not to provoke Justice, wanted her to sleep in comfort, spoke so frankly—but he didn't. He kept well out of arms reach and whenever she'd dropped her hands somewhere on her body, his fingers twitched toward his staff, as if he was scared she might throw a knife at him. She did have a knife hidden on her, but she wasn't here to kill him. Or maybe she was. That depended on how her time here ended.
She left her things where Anders had hidden them and followed the atrocious whistling outside.
He was kneeling in the dirt, digging up bits of the soil and dropping seeds into the holes. He wore a straw hat with a few holes in it and a threadbare yellow ribbon. She burst out laughing.
"Your hat looks ridiculous."
"I think you're mistaken. My hat is incredibly beautiful," he said, sitting back on his haunches and smiling at her.
"I think you've lived alone for too long if you think that," she said, shaking her head.
She walked toward him, using the paths through the beds of herbs and vegetables. His shoulders tensed with every step she took. She stopped on the other side of the patch he was working in. Anders' shoulders relaxed at the distance between them. Hawke wondered if he even realised the little signs that betrayed how he felt.
"Living alone has its perks—like being able to wear a hat with a nice ribbon without some upstart giving me grief," he said without malice and went back to his gardening.
Hawke wasn't much of a herbalist. Give her a poison recipe and she could mix something up, but tell her to go find her own ingredients and she'd blunder around a forest picking up the wrong mushrooms or getting stung by nettles. Bethany had been better at that sort of thing.
"You like it better here, don't you?"
"Better than Kirkwall and the Circle, yes, definitely." He shifted to the side, continuing to plant on a freshly turned patch of earth. "But I do miss everyone. Except Fenris. And Vael. I could do without them for the rest of my life."
Hawke snorted. "Fenris and Merrill took up Isabela's offer of adventure across the sea, so I doubt we'll be seeing any of them soon. Sebastian…" She sighed and shrugged. "He hasn't marched on Kirkwall like he swore, but I suspect he has bigger things to deal with."
"Do you hate me for blowing up the Chantry?"
"For a long time I did. Bethany had to return to the Grey Wardens and I was on the run again with barely any money. Unfortunately, my reputation preceded me. Mages and sympathisers welcomed me with open arms, but then they expected me to fight every battle for them. The rest of the people I encountered were either scared or angry." She paused, looking down at her hands clasped in her lap. "But then I realised that while you destroyed the Chantry, it was my choice to side with the mages. So, I abandoned the name Hawke. I'm just Marian now."
"Marian of the unadorned armour," he said, dropping the last of the seeds into the last hole. "I think you're more Hawke now than you were in Kirkwall."
She chuckled. Anders had heard her complain enough times over the years about her newfound nobility and subsequent duties. Still, she wouldn't let that unadorned comment slide.
"Are you calling me plain?" she asked, raising a challenging eyebrow
"You could never be plain. Not to me."
Hawke grinned and ignored the flutter in her stomach.
Anders stirred a rabbit stew that was simmering over the fire. Hawke had offered to cook, but he already knew she was as dismal a cook as she was a farmhand. She'd been kicked by the goat while she tried to milk it, pecked by the hens when she'd tried to harvest the eggs, and cut her leg with a scythe when he'd told her to leave the animals alone and cut some hay into smaller chunks. How someone who handled knives and swords could be so careless with a sickle, Anders didn't know.
"Why did you come here?" he asked, putting the lid back on the pot and coming to sit opposite her at the wooden table.
"I wanted to try the quiet life. You know, fresh air and animal dung," she said with a quirk of her lips.
Anders raised a disbelieving eyebrow.
Hawke sighed and leaned forward to cross her arms on the table. Her smile disappeared and she fixed him with a serious gaze. "I told you when I decided not to kill you that you would have to atone."
"I did. I helped settle mages in the new farming communities of the Free Marches and when I got back to Ferelden I helped mages find passage to Tevinter or the Free Marches." Anders took a deep breath and ran a shaky hand through his hair. "But Justice–"
"Vengeance. That sprit stopped being Justice a long time ago."
"Call it what you like, Marian, but it believes it's still Justice," he said, frowning at her. "There is no stopping him when we're around people. After Kirkwall, it's not happy with fixing a problem without violence."
"Then you have to learn to control him," she said, as if it were a simple problem with a simple solution.
He stood from the table, letting the chair dig deep furrows in the fresh rushes underneath his feet. He rubbed a calloused hand over his face as he walked away from her, his movements jerky with annoyance. She didn't understand. No one who hadn't had a spirit or a demon inside them could understand—least of all someone with no connection to the Fade.
Justice wasn't a weed that could simply be pulled up and thrown away. Anders didn't have an impenetrable room in his body where he could lock Justice away and throw away the key. Controlling Justice took every fibre of his being. Sometimes, he was too scared to sleep, in case it wasn't Anders who woke up.
The blue orb atop the mantle glowed bright blue, catching his eye, and he froze midstride.
"Templars." He rounded on her. "Did you bring them here?"
"No!" She shot up out of the chair, letting it fall to the ground. "You left a trail, you know. That's how I found you. You can find anyone if you know who to ask. I'm getting my things."
She rushed into the storeroom. Anders wasn't surprised she'd already snooped around his home and found where he'd stashed her things.
He went into his room to retrieve from the cupboard the outfit he hadn't worn in months. The oiled black feathers still shone in the candlelight and the gold cotton stood out against the black and dark turquoise of the rest of the coat. It wasn't made for stealth, but the myriad of components meant ample space for enchantments. He reached into the cupboard again for his old staff. Cold magic swirled underneath red steel and the blade at the end was as vicious as it was when he'd been fighting in Kirkwall.
"You kept the staff I gave you," said Hawke, waving her hand at the staff when he reentered the main room.
"You didn't give it to me. Aveline did." Hawke rolled her eyes and Anders' lips quirked. "I'm just keeping up pretences. You're the one who didn't want me to know."
Her mouth dropped open. "You turned down everything I tried to give you."
"I wouldn't turn down this staff. It's too good to pass up."
Hawke turned on her heel, throwing her hands up with a frustrated sigh, and walked out the front door.
Anders snorted as he followed her into the frigid night. "We have about an hour if they're on foot, less if they're mounted.
"If we leave now, we can circle around them," said Hawke.
"I'm not leaving. My life is here now."
Hawke stopped mid-stride and spun back to face him. He didn't stop in time to maintain the distance between them he'd been careful to observe over the past days. She grabbed a hold of the front of his coat, pulling him down a few inches so they were face-to-face. If he wasn't sure she had no affinity for magic, he'd swear he felt shock magic jump from where her hands brushed against his stubbled chin.
"Do you know how many Templars there are?" she asked, her voice a low hiss. "Or what rank they are? Or even what direction they're coming from? Is this position defendable by two against five, ten or maybe fifteen Templars? Do you have a new form of magic that Templars can't annul?"
"You're not the only one who knows how to set traps without magic, Marian." He pulled her hands from his coat and she snatched them away, stepping back from him.
"I'm still going to take that as a 'no', Anders. If this place isn't defensible, then it's lost. For one thing–" she waved an arm at the trees that surrounded the clearing, "–they have cover, and we don't."
"I can't be around other people," he said, hating the way his voice wavered between pleading and angry.
"That's ridiculous," said Hawke, waving her hand dismissively. "You've been around me."
"You're different."
"Does Justice suddenly approve of me?"
"No. He still disapproves of you." Anders paused, his heart beating a loud staccato in his ears. "But what I feel for you is stronger."
In the light thrown down by the moon and stars, he saw her lips tighten into a thin line.
A flock of birds erupted from somewhere north and the background hum of the forest became conspicuously quiet.
Hawke knew how he felt for her and she was sure he knew her feelings for him. His fervour for mage rights and her need to keep the peace between the mages and the Templars had widened a chasm between them that neither could jump across. Now, she supposed that chasm was barely a crack in the ground.
No. As much as she'd like to deal with this new information now, they couldn't afford to.
"Get into the tree line," she said, shoving him toward the closest trees before sprinting in the opposite direction.
She reached a tree and started to clamber up into its branches until she had a good view of the cottage. She slipped the bow off her and reached for an arrow, notching it and waiting. Her eyes scanned the trees. Anders had melted into the tree line, his colours and feathers camouflaging him in the perpetual gloom of the forest. Even the gold seemed to disappear.
The faint pounding of hooves turned suspiciously quiet behind her. She twisted her body, keen eyes spotting a Templar on a light mount in the distance. A scout.
She raised her bow. The scout dismounted and tied his horse to a tree. She sighted down the arrow. Her heart beat in time with her breaths. The scout spotted the cottage and fumbled for his horn. Hawke let the arrow fly. It caught the scout in the eye. Another arrow to the throat cut off his cry.
A horn sounded to her right and Hawke spun her head to look, her eyes wide and her muscles tense. Another scout. On foot, his horse likely tethered out of her line of sight, and now moving toward the scout she'd just killed. She notched another arrow, but not before the scout caught sight of the skewered scout and blasted a high-pitched, two-note call on his horn.
"Perfect," she muttered to herself, tracking the retreating back of the Templar. Damn those stupid robes that hid Templar legs. Wait too long, though, and he'd be out of range. She let go of the arrow, hoping she would hit something other than a skirt.
The Templar cried out and fell to his knees, Hawke's arrow in his calf. She let fly another arrow but the Templar rolled behind a tree. He blew another blast of the horn and the sound of hooves thundered toward them.
The first rider appeared through the trees. Behind them, eight more followed. She pressed herself against the tree, waiting for them to either slow their gallop or clear the tree line. The lead rider sat atop a destrier far larger than the coursers the scouts used and the rounceys the other Templars had. He shouted orders for the Templars to encircle the clearing and cleanse the area.
Hawke swore. She hoped Anders really did have non-magical traps set.
She hadn't noticed the glyphs on the ground or the glow of enchantment on certain objects in the clearing until they were gone. The Templars moved in once they'd cleansed the magic from the area. The leader stayed on his horse while the others dismounted.
Two Templars were dispatched to retrieve the wounded scout. Hawke notched an arrow, turning away from the clearing and looking for the scout. The Templars, with their torch, lit the forest enough for Hawke to catch sight of the wounded scout. Unwisely, he leaned forward to check his wound, making the back of his head a clear target. She sent the arrow flying and the Templar toppled over his knees, her arrow skewered into the back of his unhelmeted head.
The two Templars blundered through the forest. They seemed wary of calling out for their comrade, not that it mattered. Even without their torch making them a well-lit beacon, they couldn't hide the clinking of their heavy armour.
She slipped a poison bomb from one of her pouches. She shook the contents together and threw it at the Templars. It landed on the soft mulch, unbroken, and the Templars spun. One unsheathed their sword and the other held out his arm, a cleansing spell likely on his lips.
Hawke shattered the glass with an arrow.
The shaken potion exploded as it was exposed to the air, splattering the Templar's robes. The fumes spread upward, making the Templars gag and cough as they fell to the ground and emptied their stomachs. Hawke fired off more arrows, releasing them from their agony.
A wall of noise and force toppled Hawke from the tree. Instinct made her hand shoot out for a branch to slow her fall. Her body slammed against another branch, winding her. She lay her head on the branch as she tried to catch her breath.
Her eyes widened.
Anders' cottage was ablaze.
The heat reached her even through the thin layer of trees between her and the clearing. Judging from the Templar bodies strewn across the clearing, Anders had blown up his own cottage. She shook her head in disbelief.
Hawke set her sights on the leader. He'd been thrown from his horse and was checking his men. Hawke's bow lay somewhere on the ground beneath the tree and she started to climb down to retrieve it when Anders emerged from the trees opposite and walked through the flames toward the Templars.
Except it wasn't Anders.
Lyrium-coloured lines like lightning cracked across Anders' skin. His eyes shone the same haunting colour.
The leader shouted a retreat and they sprinted into the tree line.
Justice's blue glow stood out in the night, rushing after the Templars. Hawke swore and jumped to the ground, rolling and popping to her feet in one graceful move. She raced to intercept Anders.
She slammed into Anders' side, sending them skidding across the ground until they hit a tree. He was on his back underneath her, dazed. She slipped her arm under his neck, clutching her hands together. From this position, she could cut off the blood flow to his head and have Anders—or Justice—unconscious in seconds.
"Take control, Anders," she said into his ear, her voice raspy through her heavy breathing.
Anders clambered to his hands and knees, the blue cracks in his face belying Justice's continued control.
"You can control him." She tightened her hold as Justice stood, her legs wrapping around his waist so he couldn't shake her off. "Please."
Anders froze and, for the brief moment, the blue faded. Hawke felt relief surge through her before he slammed her back against the tree, the glowing cracks bright again. Her head cracked against the tree and her vision blurred. Her body went limp without her permission. She fell to the ground. Her stomach heaved from the knock to her equilibrium and warm blood seeping through her hair.
"YOU HAVE INTERFERED WITH OUR CAUSE TOO MANY TIMES, HAWKE," said Justice, his booming voice interlaced with Anders' smoother tone.
She looked up at him through blurred eyes. The dark swirl of blood magic danced around him.
Hawke reached out for him, her arm moving through the swirling magic. It felt like ice and burning and shock all at once, but she bit back her scream and grabbed hold of his coat. Her words of encouragement caught in her throat but she looked up at him, hoping her expression would tell him what her voice couldn't.
Anders watched with eyes that didn't feel like his. Either sweat or tears tracked through the dirt on Hawke's face. Justice was going to kill her, with his body, his magic.
Release me, thought Anders.
NO, replied Justice.
Anders tried to grab the form that was Justice within him. Justice slipped from his grasp as if he were smoke.
YOU WANT JUSTICE FROM THE TEMPLARS. I WILL GIVE YOU JUSTICE ONCE HAWKE IS REMOVED FROM YOUR PATH.
Despair tried to drag him down even as Justice tried to shove him away. On the fringe of his awareness, though, he felt the tug of strength, the tug of belief. His body looked down. Hawke's hand clutched his coat, her arm bruised and bloody from the magic that swirled around his body.
The pleading look twisting her features seemed to drown out the roar of blood magic and Justice's insidious voice telling Anders what he really wished for.
You will not kill her and you will not have this body.
He gathered what was left of his tattered control, bolstered by Hawke's belief in his ability, and hammered Justice back into the cage Anders had spent months building. For every inch of Justice that was shoved back into the cage, Anders could feel his body coming back to him. Instead of the floating nothing he felt when Justice was in control, he felt the bruises and fatigue that told him his body simply wanted to rest.
Bit by agonising bit, Anders wrested control from Justice until he collapsed to his knees and let himself fall to the ground beside Hawke.
His breathing was ragged, his heart pounding in his ears. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to lie here until the sun rose again. He wanted to purge Justice from his body.
Anders' eyes slipped closed until he felt the nudge of a hand entwining with his own. He turned his head and opened his eyes again. Hawke lay on her side, blood trickling across her forehead. She gave him a little smile edged with pain.
"Let me heal you," he said, fighting his protesting muscles and clambering into a kneeling position.
He muttered healing spells over her. With each minute that passed, the lines of suffering on her face eased. His already depleted mana pool trickled to emptiness, healing her worst injuries and leaving the scrapes and bruises to heal themselves.
Anders collapsed next to her again, staring up at the stars. His cottage was gone. His goats and chickens had fled. The Templars knew where he was hiding. He had no choice but to leave now.
"Do you think it'll be enough?" Hawke's voice broke through the silence that had descended over the clearing.
"Will what be enough?"
She rolled onto her side and propped herself up on one hand, leaning over him. "Me. Us. To keep Justice at bay."
He shrugged and shook his head. "I don't know."
"It better be," she said, and kissed him.
Anders leaned against his desk, his eyes closed while he fought Justice for control.
The tiny fishing village he and Hawke had settled in was perched on the northwestern coast of Ferelden. The place was almost untouched by the Mage-Templar War. News trickled in, but not enough that Justice was given enough fury to overpower Anders' control.
He was still covered in the blood and bodily fluids of a birth. The babe next door was crying even as he heard the soft murmur of the mother trying to soothe her newborn. If only soothing Justice was so easy.
The smell of wildflowers and oiled leather wafted toward him. He wiped the distress from his face and looked up, smiling. Hawke leaned against the doorjamb, naturally silent enough to catch him in one of his weaker moments.
"I know we're in hiding, but you don't have to hide from me," she said, walking up to him. She placed a hand on his cheek and he leaned into the warmth. "If you need time to breathe, I'll close the clinic. We'll go into the forest for a few days."
His smile was genuine as he shook his head and pulled her into his arms. He buried his face in her hair and breathed deeply. Justice slunk away into a corner of his cage, angry to be foiled when he was so close to regaining control.
"If you're determined to fight in this war, then I'm determined to keep fighting Justice."
YOU WILL HAVE NONE OF MY ABILITIES IF YOU KEEP ME LOCKED AWAY. YOU ARE NO MATCH FOR TEMPLARS AND SEEKERS ALONE, taunted Justice.
I am not alone, he replied.
A/N 2: Thank you to Algeefi, whose art sounded too good to pass up in the the description and was even better when I got to see it. I'm so sorry I putting this up late!
Thank you to the DARBB mods, too, for organising everything and for letting me slide on the checkpoint because a kangaroo was an asshole and jumped in front of my car.