Author's note: Bad (by which I mean glorious) puns aside, this is in part a continuation to Karl's Alphabet but can be read as a stand-alone. It is following the advent calendar formula of one treat a day, only instead of chocolate, it will taste like heartache. It will go to dark inner places, so please be warned.
Doors are scarce on the levels of the tower Karl is allowed to frequent; a constant reminder of how mages are always watched and never quite trusted. Privacy is a luxury generally not wasted on them, seen as a danger more than anything else, and Karl tries to not think of the last time he saw an ordinary wooden front door that anyone could push open and with a normal lock, as memories can easily lead to longing and all the dangers a feeling like that might bring.
Some days the key to survival is to not want anything at all, because when you want too much, you feel the restrictions placed upon you all the more.
For others the only way to survive is to fight against the same suffocating restraints with all the determined desperation of someone attempting to reach the surface of lake Calenhad before they run out of air and drown; Karl takes the former route, Anders the latter, and for all else they share this difference between them has Anders alight with frustrated impatience turned fury.
"Don't you even care?" he hisses, pacing between the storage room's door and a shelf stocked with glass jars filled with dried herbs; as much nature as most of them will touch in a lifetime. "Don't you ever get sick of all this? Locked up, ordered around, having to hide-" he waves his hand vaguely in the air, the gesture for this or possibly usweak from despair temporarily overcome anger. He stops his pacing to look at him with the most haunted eyes Karl has ever seen. "This is not living", he whispers, so hopeless and for the moment drained of all fight.
"I know", Karl has to answer when he knows that lying to Anders about this would hurt him even further, and because there are things he cannot bring himself to lie about even to himself. He has felt the weight of the tower for longer than Anders has, but he still vaguely remembers what living outside it was like.
When he reaches out to touch Anders' cheek in a silent peace offering he closes his eyes and let him, and they stand like that in the gloom of the fragile sanctuary that the storage room can be for ten silent breaths before Anders snaps his eyes open to stare at him with pure challenge.
"Then do something", he demands with pretended calm before stepping away.
He slams the door on the way out with enough force to make the jars on the shelf next to it shake, and Karl looks at it numbly. Leaving so soon after him could be a danger, and he loathes that it is.
So instead of walking out the door he sinks down on the floor and rests his back against it, feeling like a drowning man unsure of whether he should kick with all strength left in him in an attempt to reach the surface, or let himself sink.
This is not living; this is surviving. And he does not know how to tell anyone that the two are not the same.