Title: Funeral for a Friend
Summary: Danica Amell learned well and early to toe the line in the Circle of Magi. But the Templars are never lacking for ways to reinforce that lesson, even years later.
Author's Notes: This one-shot is a companion piece to Through the Blackest Nights ,which establishes the framework for my vision of the post-DA2 world. Those who have read it may recognize the summary, though this piece stands alone as well. Little bit dark, here.
She knows by now how the game is played. Give them your eyes as well as your deference, and they know it's genuine. So she does, even as she takes care to keep her pace calm and her gait measured, her every peaceful step desecrating his memory with its decorum and its compliance.
She manages to stop on her way back to the apprentice quarters to counsel a trio of younger students, offering a gentle reminder of the virtue of the week. Patience. Temperance. Faith. Whatever translucent veil the Revered Mother preached over the top of the weekly gift of loathing and shame, she has of necessity learned to spin into a masterful veneer of belief in the Maker's will her warnings against provoking their earthly captors.
As she sits upon her neatly covered bed in the scant privacy afforded by the warren of empty bunks, she is not surprised to find in her hands the intricate ceramic figurine. A halla, she remembers he called it.
She remembers him speaking in the coarse whisper of the ever-observed of his mother's desire to find him a home among the Dalish, that he might learn the value of his gift over the burden of his sin.
She remembers gathering clay shards and spending hour upon painstaking hour affixing them to one another to restore it. She remembers cursing the insignificance of her labors, the futility of her hope that his shattered innocence might be repaired so easily, the true lessons of their prison wiped clean from his memory.
She doesn't remember hearing it shatter again as it strikes the floor at her feet. She thinks, for a moment, that it's fitting. Here, youthful naiveté is the first myth revealed as a lie.
As her hand closes around the first shard, that signal of emotion she knows her jailers can never see, she remembers him.
"What do you think it's like? Being like him, I mean?" There isn't a rule, but she whispers because she knows others don't like talking about the scary people who see to the chamber pots and clean the rooms and put the candles in the chandeliers like the one over their heads in the library. But he's been her friend since she got here almost a year ago, so she can ask him anything.
He rolls his eyes. "Probably boring, like everything else in this place."
"But Enchanter Wynne said in Ethics they don't feel anything. What do you think it's like to be bored if you don't know you're bored?"
Now he's thinking. "Maybe that's why they do it. So they don't have to keep finding new people to climb all those ladders."
She can't tell exactly why, but she really doesn't like that thought, so she doesn't really mind when Enchanter Torrin appears around the shelf and tells them they shouldn't whisper the sins of others.
She thinks if he were here, he would probably laugh himself off his perch if he knew the first memory that came to mind.
His laughter was always deep and genuine, even if it was rare. She reflects for a moment on that blond mage, the one who's always laughing when he's here, even if she never knows when he's not here whether it's because he got out again or because he's down there. She's never understood how anyone can find much of anything funny in this place.
Especially not when she remembers, as a cracked ceramic horn bites into her palm, what it means to be down there.
She hasn't slept much in the last three days. Hard to, sitting up in a chair, but ever since they let her in here she's sat by his pillow keeping him company. She'd been so worried when he disappeared, until the whispers that he was being punished for some unknown crime found their way to her ears. With such an object lesson before her, she can see now why the Enchanter had warned them so long ago not to gossip over others' transgressions.
He hasn't talked since he came back, and he won't let her see. That just makes her even sicker at the thought that she had to get a note from one of her instructors saying she hadn't studied any healing magic before they let her be with him.
She tells him stories. She watches as he escapes into the Fade. She doesn't acknowledge his pain, even when tears track down his cheeks. She knows he would never want them to have that power over either of them.
While he sleeps, she charms one of the instructors out of a fine brush and a small pot of glue. She'd seen the regret under the anger when she found the ceramic pieces in a cup on the chest at the head of his bed. While he dreams, she spends countless hours in her chair, hunched over her friend's tortured puzzle.
When she offers it to him, he hesitates. And then he speaks. "If… I take that from you, it has to be a promise. You promise me you won't ever break the rules. Not ever."
She doesn't offer it to him again until a week later. He accepts it without a word, and she knows he understands. They both had struggled to balance the weight of their desires, that choice between taking a stand and keeping the concern of a friend.
She struggles now, having a choice between discarding the shattered pieces of her friend's youth in the face of his dubious guilt and restoring it once more. She wonders if he'll be capable of extracting a similar promise now, should she present it to him again as he organizes and cleans and inventories under the watchful eye of Owain.
An eternity later, with the dinner bell still ringing in her ears, she brushes the pieces into a velvet sack and hides them away under the old clothing in the chest by her own pillow. She is satisfied that her eyes have stayed dry, that she has remembered well how the game is played, and it wouldn't do for her not to be seen dining with the other apprentices.
She can't bring herself to decide the fate of her friend's childhood purity. Not in these halls. Not in this place where innocence will ever find no home.