Note from SF: As Is will be a collection of short fics about Anders, mostly centering on his various and sundry flaws and how they impact those around him. Some will crop up in other places, but there is really no set universe besides "DA2".

These are being done for the DA2 Anders Prompt Group (.com/group/4488). Join us! Manifestos are welcome!

This week's prompt is Misguided.

After Hawke leaves with the others, Anders slips into an old routine of not sleeping nearly enough, passing the night time hours scrawling out plans and ideas and memories that had flickered at the edges of his consciousness for a lifetime but refused to be allowed full light lest they interfere with his flirting and his fucking and his unceasing plans for the next escape.

Now, with those three things behind him, the memories come unabated. His father's cold fury when confronted with the barn gutted by Anders' hand, an accident it was an accident and there had been a girl involved but she'd made it out safely, thank the Maker. His mother's face is stiff with dried tears when he gives her one final kiss good-bye. She can cry no more, exhausted and beyond heartbroken over the loss of her kürbis.

There's the first templar that ever captured him. Anders never knew the knight's face, only the echo of his voice and the threatening gleam of his eyes through the slit in his visor. He also recalls the way his gauntlet felt, digging into his bared wrist and how vulnerable he'd been, standing naked in front of the faceless man, his worn farm clothes and belongings stripped away for inspection before he's allowed amongst the other apprentices.

There's being pushed into tubs of frigid water, despite the fact that he could warm it with his hands if they'd only let him. There's being shoved into stone walls by templars twice his size, grown men who harass him and the other apprentices with anonymous immunity. The mages wear thin robes, their faces uncovered. The templars are wrapped in steel and they hide behind it like the cowards they are.

There's half-eaten meals, and assignations interrupted. Anders stands to the side while his partner is berated, or he is berated while his partner stands aside. After, they part in wordless silence and will probably never speak again.

Screwing around in the Tower usually ends in one of two ways.

There's Karl and that goes a little better and lasts a little longer, but Anders is foolish and uses Karl's access as a Senior Enchanter to sneak into Irving's office and steal a few passphrases. It's made even worse by the fact that he only gets as far as The Spoiled Princess before he is caught.

All he does is sleep free for one night, yet they take him with force, his bruised and bloodied body dumped into a holding cell equipped to negate magic. This is his home for three days, until Karl is sent to release him, his blue eyes never quite meeting Anders' as he escorts him to Gregoir's office.

"This is my punishment, Anders," there is no anger in Karl's voice, nor regret. He understands why Anders did it, he understands the younger man's desperate need to just not be there anymore. Had things been different, Anders would have kissed him and maybe even uttered a not quite true I love you. Instead he accepts this small offering of personal freedom and swears to the Knight-Commander that Karl had been a means to an end and not a co-conspirator. Both are true, and Anders momentarily despises himself and the position life has placed him in.

There are other beatings, other mages who slip and fall, or jump. But Anders buries and convinces himself that his life isn't terrible. There are still attractive people he hasn't seen, and that one perfect escape is just around the corner.

He knows it.

He's a lover. And Namaya is useful. Perhaps it's because she's been passed over so many times in her life, but she clings to Anders when he charms his way past her defenses. She does what he wants and, in the weeks that they are together, he never sees past this willingness to the woman within. He needs her help, not her, and her body is a nice way to pass the time until he manages to get out of Ferelden (unlikely) or is recaptured (so very likely that it actually happens).

There's confinement and loneliness and a year spent forever on the edge of dehydrated starvation. Demons tempt, and demons are rejected. Mr. Wiggums visits, and Mr. Wiggums is slain. He cries, he prays, he imagines in increasingly graphic detail how he'd personally like to kill every templar he sees. But then he cries more because all the templars look the same and he might accidentally kill a decent one during his rampage and, despite what they might say to him (all of them, templar and demon) he is not a monster.

And Namaya is not Karl, she does not understand, so she turns on him. Maybe. He can't really blame her, when he shows up to their rendezvous months late and with a well-appointed human woman at his side.

He's a lover. His commander is, too, and it's inevitable that they find each other in inappropriate places and delight in doing inappropriate things. She frees him from the Circle and he is so much lighter without chains. He's no longer being shoved, or pushed, or forced to think about what she can do for him, although when she wants to move on...

There's the morning she leaves him, despite the way he pleads. He all but holds her down on the bed they've been sharing for months and, although she made him no promises, he swore he'd heard a few in the way she whispered his name in his ear, the way she always wanted him by her side, no matter the situation.

But she has a country that clamors for her, that depends on her far more than he does. And he'd be a burden in Denerim. No longer a fellow Warden, but her mage lover, the one who'd killed templars in Amaranthine and gotten away with it. So she chooses the king and leaves Anders to be recaptured, reclaimed by the templars with the Warden's support.

It's not what she wants to happen, of course. But it does.

He's no longer free.

And the chains...he'd forgotten how heavy they are, how they chafe and dig and scrape at his thoughts. They wear him down to a fine edge, until Justice's offer finds footing in his lonely desperation and it seems like a good idea, the right thing to do...

But it isn't, because of all the things he's buried.

Justice hates when he thinks this way, although it is he who forces out these memories. He studies them, searches them for answers and ideas and fuel for their cause. And it works, because every memory is another scratch of Anders' quill as experience becomes reasons, and reasons become an argument and an argument becomes, he hopes, a movement.

Perhaps even a revolution.