Edit: The beautiful Millijana has done a read of this for me. She has the most beautiful accent. You should all listen here: wadebramwilson-tumblr-com/post/34338078785/millijana-okay-it-is-done-this-is-the
(replace the first two dashes with dots!)
Trigger warning. Really badly. It hurt me to write this so I expect it should hurt to read.
TW for claustrophobia, isolation, suicide, implied rape and torture, but the hardest thing I think was the hopelessness that accompanied it all.
Thank you kisssanitygoodbye for Betaing this for me : )
He runs bloodied fingers over those scratches in the brick wall, his fingernails all but gone now. They are just raw cuticles that don't stop bleeding for anything anymore. They always hurt, but it is a steady, grounding pain, and Anders has other hurts to contend with. Still, he knows that if he wants to keep his mind he will have to start using his teeth to carve soon, or he will forget.
He loses count again and has to start from the beginning, but that is okay. Time is not really much of anything down here. Anders suspects that his meals have been coming irregularly, but there is none of the sun's measured light to gage time's passage. There have been no visits or letters. Sometimes the Templars will keep him alone for longer than they should just so he will lose track of shift changes, so that he will lose what little routine he can find.
At least some things are getting better, Anders thinks. He has almost stopped feeling like he has been cut in half. Not like the first few weeks of being without the comfort of the fade at his fingertips. Losing his magic had felt severing, as it always did, like someone had pulled out his eyes and made him blind. Now his magic was just a phantom limb, he knew it was there but he could not touch it, there was no proof that it did not simply exist in him own mind.
He wonders if he would ever have full control of that limb again if it were reattached, or if he would ever be given the chance to feel it again. He wonders if he had even possessed so much power and knowledge and comfort within himself to begin with.
He reaches the end of the tallies, but it is wrong. He has miscounted. There are 276 days marked. Anders knows that he must have added more than he has lived, because they have never kept him in for so long before. What is that? 276 days… That must be 9 months at least.
No, they had never kept him in so long before. They wouldn't.
The thought is comforting when he stops to consider it, that maybe all those times that he thought he was dying of hunger or thirst, it was instead fear that had driven the cramping of his stomach, fear that made him throw it up when he was finally given something to fill his shrivelled belly. Moribund, not death. Just a shade of death, a joke, or a test.
It made sense, because Anders didn't think that Greagoir would let them starve him like that.
He didn't like to feel afraid, but it was better than feeling crazy. He had been actively trying to avoid that state.
And then all of a sudden, it wasn't very comforting at all, that they could still make him afraid, even after everything. There was always something worse that they could do, until there wasn't. Until there was Tranquility. Problem solved. No more fear, no more torture, but no more life either. It wasn't a very appealing compromise and Anders didn't think he would ever be able to accept it. Good, that meant he still had his head, it was a good a test as any down here.
The image of lifeless, glassy eyes came unbidden into his thoughts. The eyes were always the first thing that came to his mind, he could never help it. This pair of eyes came to him especially often in solitary. They were brown like that time he had escaped on his name-day to try whisky for the first time, with a flash of gold when his mind's light caught them just right. But it was never really right because they looked so very wrong, absent and empty. All of the colours were right, the thin set of them, the lashes, all were a perfect imitation, but the focus was off. Anders thought it was the spark of life that was gone, and no amount of sunlight could bring it back.
These were his own eyes. Even without having seen a looking glass for Maker-knows-how-long, Anders remembered his own eyes, even when their image was dead like these were.
He thought of himself walking down the corridors, more dead than alive, eyes empty, with every memory, every good feeling, every moment of happiness stolen from him by a brand that looks like the sun but would feel like the darkest of nights without any hope of dawn. It set his body to shivering. He could feel it right down to his bones. Even its thought left him empty.
This was a bad path of thoughts to travel down in a place like this, with so many watchers waiting for him to slip. Anders instead focused on the pangs of hunger that gnawed at his gut, not usually a preferable focus, but he felt better.
Anders still had food leftover from this morning but he couldn't eat it even as his stomach clenched and groaned. The taste of salt was overwhelming and he couldn't afford to dehydrate again. With nothing better to do, he started the count again.
In solitary, the darkness was always terrifying at first, but eventually it grew to be your friend. Anders always thought you had to take friends where you could find them. There were worse shadows in the world than merely the absence of light. The darkness wasn't so bad. He was thankful that he couldn't see himself at least. Sometimes he felt like he was just bones. He tried not to let his hands touch any part of himself either, because even without magic he knew that he was ill, more ill than was normal. His skin was stretched like wax over ribs and hip bones, and yet it hung loose. He had pressure sores almost everywhere that there were bones. He was all bones, so really those sores were everywhere. And they festered.
The fever was not so bad either, for the fever let him sleep and it made the cold not quite so bad until stale sweat was cooling on his skin and sticking to the grime on the floor and on his wounds. The fever sleep always came with nightmares, but so did regular sleep so it wasn't so bad. It was better than waking.
It is stupid to use up water on anything but thirst, but Anders cleans his sores anyway. He is not here to die and he is not here to lose himself either.
Sometimes they bring him pills, but he doesn't recognise them from the infirmary, and so he doesn't take them unless he can't cheek them without drawing attention.
This place doesn't feel like a cell anymore. Yes, it is still a prison, but really it is more like a tomb. He is buried under the weight of so much rock and isolation that he wonders how he is able to breathe here at all. He knows he will die here.
oO0Oo
Later, a Templar comes to him and Anders hates himself for being happy to see the man. When he does speak, which he isn't supposed to –but otherwise how can he tell Anders what he wants?– the man reveals a smooth voice and Anders recognises him from another visit, even if he does not know the man's name. He is disgusted at how happy that makes him.
His throat is dry, but Anders always manages to speak on these occasions, which are happening less and less the longer he is down here – whenever his mouth isn't otherwise occupied, at least. Anders wonders that they would prefer him weaker and more submissive, but now he supposes he has surpassed that point and has fallen into uselessness. It wouldn't be the first time he has passed out while they needed him awake.
This one was okay. Sometimes his grip in Anders' hair doesn't pull too hard. The bruises fade quicker and the hurt is slower and smoother even if it can't really be called anything but brutal.
Afterwards when he lies bloody and broken again on the floor of the cell, the thought that he looks forward to these visits is what hurts the most. More than the physical pain. It leaves him feeling spoiled and dirty. Like he has forsaken himself, and Anders supposes that he has.
He hates that he feels like he is not worth their time. He hates how hard he tries to make them happy. He hates that he feels like if he did better, tried harder, then maybe they will stay with him for a bit longer, talk to him maybe. He doesn't mind the pain, he doesn't mind the scars, it is the isolation that will kill him. He cries for a while and then he promises himself that next time he will give them nothing, maybe he will bite down on whatever they put between his teeth. But weeks crumble away, and with them, his resolve.
He never feels clean anymore, and he doesn't want anyone that he loves to see him like this, to know what has been going on, not ever. Because they will know how weak he really is, they will know how tainted he is, and they won't want him.
Anders lets a hysterical laugh crackle forth from his mouth as he lies on his back, the force of it hurts his ribs so he bites it back as best he can. But it's funny, how he worries about anyone that he loves, knowing that he has no one to love anymore. No one who loves him.
They don't whip him anymore and he supposes that is good too because at least he can lie on his back now. That is newer and better than lying on his stomach, but only for a little while. His stomach is the best most of the time.
Anders can feel his body breaking slowly, not just from the scars, not just from how rarely he has to use his latrine (glorified bucket), how the water that comes out is too dark and too little, not just how often he sleeps and how tired he feels, not the oozing sores or the broken bones or the chaffed skin beneath his cuffs. But it is his willpower that he is worried for. It feels like it is being held together by a single thread. He will not lose that. He doesn't know what he will do when he has nothing left after they finally take that. It's only a matter of time.
He is skill sticky with his own blood and from the Templar. Mostly it is his own blood though and he isn't sure if that is better or worse. All that blood, and it would be so easy to use that blood. To reach out and talk to those beings that he knows lie just outside his reach. All he has to do is invite them. They will wait for him, as long as they have to, for they too have nothing else. But there are other watchers too, sometimes he feels like these other ones are here to protect him, to keep him strong, and he wonders that maybe that is another trick, so that when he finally decides that he needs to choose between them, he will choose them over the others. But most of the time they don't feel bad at all, they feel purer and cleaner. Better than him.
This last time that Anders feints when he is with a Templar in his cell, he wakes up with a raw throat, and no one comes back after that. He supposes they mustn't need him to stay awake after all, but they certainly prefer it.
oO0Oo
Anders is not trying to kill himself, he tells himself he does not want to die, even if it might be better, even if it might feel like a release. He just needs to hurt enough to get out, if only for a little while. Anders thinks that the only reason that he does not want to die is because they will probably thank him for it.
But his mouth is filling with blood now and even though he tries to shout through it, he has forgotten to take into account how dry and raw his throat is, how very much blood there would be. It tastes coppery and caustic, but like his body it is wrong as it slips down his throat and dribbles in a sickening trickle down his chin.
He shouts out but he only manages a gurgle, opening his lungs up to let the blood flow there too. And then his lungs are burning. He collapses before he knows anything else. The last thing he thinks is that maybe death will not be quite so bad. At least he won't have to live anymore.
oO0Oo
Later they tell him that it was lucky he fell on his front because they had found him about an hour later. The blood from where his teeth had cut thorough his tongue had only entered his right lung and he thinks he should probably be grateful for that.
They told him he weighed 48.5 kilograms when they removed him from that cell that had been something like home for three hundred and fifty-three days.
He couldn't listen to them though. He entered a shutdown state, tunnel vision. It was involuntary, reflexive even, but he was glad for it because he thought that if he could only block them out then maybe they wouldn't notice him. If he made himself small enough, as small as he felt maybe, then they would just ignore him.
Even when he tried to face everything outside of himself it was too hard. It was all too noisy. The things that were happening were all too loud and too harsh. The inside of his brain sounded like constant static and it was one part comforting and one part loneliness again.
Nothing felt real. He spent three months in the infirmary, and he was allowed no visits. Even if someone had visited him, he neither acknowledged them, no remembered it afterwards. The lights were too bright, he couldn't even open his eyes for the first day that he had been conscious. Sometimes they would find him on the cold tile floor, bleeding from where he had ripped out his cannulas, huddled in that blood and mess.
Anders couldn't remember those times.
All he knew was that he had wanted normalcy. He looked and he searched for the bars and the scratches in that stone wall of his, because for so long those had been all that was real. Concrete. Signs of what changed and what stayed the same, signs that he still had himself because he was in solitary and he was Anders and he had escaped six times now and this was solitary and he had been in solitary for one, two, three, four, five, six… Two hundred and… something days, and count again.
It was as though he was being woken up for the first time, but the vestiges of his nightmare were still clinging to him like sweat, not letting up. That point where the barrier between reality and nightmare was so thin that you could see right through it. He didn't eat for a long time when he got out. The first time he had, he had thrown up until all he could do was dry-heave, the noises were pitiful and choked. After that he got to thinking that they were trying to kill him with poison, and that he shouldn't eat at all.
Hospital beds and white sheets that smelled of bleach and sickness, fluorescent lights that hurt him more than the darkness, paper gowns and itchy scars and it hurt and it hurt and it hurt. But Anders had lost the real pain and he knew that he had done the unthinkable down in that cell, that he had dealt with demons to free himself, because this place could only be the void. This was not his life.
It was then that he had gotten out of bed. He had looked for needles and scalpels or anything. But the only needles they had left him with were the used ones in the bin and he supposed they were most likely his, but instead he broke the glass cabinet because he thought that if he were to survive, he didn't want to have another's sickness. And then he pushed that glass into his wrists because if he were to survive slitting his throat, he didn't want to have cut all those nerves in his neck. He knew, really, that he had made no deals, but it was easier to say goodbye this way. This time, Anders tells himself that he wants to die.
oO0Oo
When he wakes up this time, Karl is there and he is sitting too close. The smell of bleach again, just hiding blood and it smells just as bad as it always does. His wrists are bandaged but the blood is spotting through the white of the bandages and he knows that Karl knows what that means. Maybe they even called him there. But his presence is not comforting now. He is a stranger, just another person who abandoned him.
Karl knows everything. He knows what Anders had become down there. A toy, an animal, an object. Something to be used. Anders has been used so much that he is broken and tainted now. He will never be the same as long as he remembers everything that he has done and that he had let them do to him, every time he had let himself think that was what he wanted.
Anders has a new reason to hate himself because even in survival he is weak.
Now the Templars will know that they got through to him, that they broke him. Well, he is broken, but he still has all his pieces. Anders vows to fix himself better than before. Stronger and more determined than before. He won't have room for useless things.
He will be better at hiding now that he has been stripped bare. He will be better at evading after being invisible for so long. He will be better at escaping after having given up. He can be more determined after losing all hope. He won't need to feel because he knows that he cannot trust those feelings anymore.
Anders promises himself that he will never let another person think that he is theirs, because he is nobodies but his own.
But it will take time, and right now he is ashamed of what he had done to himself and what he let them do to him. Karl is a healer too so surely he can feel that scar tissue, the source of his pain, all those tissues that had been torn and torn again before they were even close to healing. Anders is sure that some places on his body will only ever be able to feel pain from now on, and that doesn't bother him so much as it should.
He doesn't want touches. He doesn't even want looks. Everything sparks memories of pain and humiliation. He doesn't want to remember any of that, and he won't let anyone force him to.
Anders can't even bring himself to look at Karl, still sitting by his bedside. There is no danger in those kind eyes, but there was no danger in any of their eyes until there was. He knows those eyes; soft, with feather-light crinkles at the edges. But they are not the same anymore. He is not the same.
Karl's fingers brush the inside of his arm and he feels physically sick. He cannot help the scream that leaves his lips, the way he tucks his whole body in and away. He is cowing back into his own mind but he doesn't care. Karl's hurt is nothing compared to the hurt of his memories. He wants him to leave, to get out now. He tells him so as he screams. Anders' own voice sounds awful so he keeps his hands clamped over his ears.
It doesn't matter that this is Karl, this is not a Templar. This was a man he thought he had loved. It doesn't matter because it feels the same and it hurts the same.
The nurses make Karl leave and Anders throws up over the edge of the mattress. He's torn his catheter out again. Shaking and covered in his own mess, it feels the same.
oO0Oo
They still haven't given him his magic back because they don't trust him with his own life anymore. Anders wonders what makes them think they deserve to control it, because they have done such a good job messing it up so far. The Templars are always there with their Silence, they change shifts so they never get tired and he never gets close to touching the fade, his second home.
The next time Karl comes back he shows Anders his own scars, because almost all of the mages in the tower have some of those scars. And even though it hurts him to do it, Anders lets Karl brush his lips against his bandages, because Karl said that they do not define him. Anders knows that they don't, but he also knows that the feel of those kisses on his arms is wrong even through the linen. The feel is sickening and he knows that this is Karl and Karl would never, but it doesn't stop the nausea that claws at his insides. "Don't," he says as he pushes Karl away.
He tries to push Karl away for good after that, there is no room for him anywhere within Anders anymore, but the older man won't stop visiting. Anders is getting better, not inside, but outside. He can play the part, slip on his mask and be a pretty good imitation of his old self.
He realises that they are friends again, even if the feeling is hollow for him. He makes a lot of jokes, especially when Karl says "I was so worried about you," or "I thought I'd lost you," because he doesn't want to talk or think about those things. Karl laughs at his words like they are young boys again. Jokes come easy to Anders, and laughter to Karl, they always had.
Anders knows he is using Karl when he helps orchestrate his escape plans. Karl says he wants to go with him at first, but Anders knows that Karl has never really contemplated leaving the tower. So Karl starts collecting the things that Anders will need on the outside for him.
When the Templars find their hoarded stash of money, Karl takes the blame and Anders lets him. When he is released from the infirmary, Karl has been moved to a different Circle, in the city of "Kirkwall", they tell him. He has never heard of the place.
It doesn't upset him, he is better at escaping on his own anyway. One less person to look out for. One less person to guard himself from.
oO0Oo
His magic comes back to him in a rush, it is empowering. Anders almost feels whole again. The connection doesn't work like it used to, not at first. But he practices healing his constant aches. Most of it is psychosomatic pain. There is nothing physical for him to fix, but the magic is comforting so he heals himself all the same. Eventually, magic starts to come naturally again. But they don't watch him as attentively if they think he is useless. To appear weak now is an advantage, so he pretends that his depression is affecting his abilities. He feigns incompetence and they let their eyes wander a bit farther from him.
He is restless when he is back among the mages of the tower, with his reacquired power and independence. Anders has never been the type of man who can be still for very long, now more than ever. He is ready to leave the tower again, this time he won't contemplate what will happen if he is brought back, because he will die as a free man.
The tower feels different, and at first Anders thinks it is only him, but it isn't. The mages too, are restless. They are ready to fight. He hears whispers but no one shares their plans with him because he has been gone for so long that he is a stranger. They can't trust him just as he can't trust them. Anders doesn't have to be told to know that this thing has been building for a while, and it is about to rupture.
The libertarians think that rioting will save them. They are wrong.
Anders does not want to die here in a reckless uprising. Change is not going to come from within the Circle; the Templars would never allow it. It will only lead to annulment. Anders would rather kill himself outside. Death by his own hand wouldn't feel so much like giving up if it were done out there, if his body could rest in the earth and under the sky.
He doesn't trust these people with his life anyway. He is not about to put it in their hands. Their idiocy will get them killed and Anders does not care enough to help them, or even to take any of them with him. He will be safer on his own.
When the rebellion begins, he makes himself small again and slips out. He has almost timed it too late, he is slowed as the demons start pushing through the veil around him.
Mr. Wiggums is consumed by a rage demon and Anders cannot stop to give him mercy. Three Templars fall to his wrath and Anders has never been prouder of the beast, even as he mourns the loss of his last friend.
He has made it to the first floor now, almost free, and the noise coming from upstairs is a cacophony of splintering wood and destruction, overlaid with the shrieks of the possessed and the cries of the damned. He knows that there are sufferers there that did not ask for this, but Anders cannot go back for them. He has to save himself first.
Only one Templar notices him and follows. "Stop, Mage," his voice is slippery smooth and Anders has a flash of recognition. The Templar is raising his arms ready to Smite, but Anders' rage is too quick. It turns to fire and he watches the man burn. He listens to that screeching high pitched cry, the others don't come because it sounds just like all the other screams. Anders remembers his own cries. He watches the man try to claw his way out of his searing hot armour even as its touch blisters his skin, he remembers his own scars. He watches the Templar's skin drip like wax and turn watery when the fire moves on. He watches him take his last, shuddering breath. This is the first Templar Anders has killed and he enjoys every second of it. He watches for longer than he should, and then he runs.