Approval Disapproval

Author: B.H. Ramsay

Disclaimer: I own nothing, and I claim nothing, which is what YOU'LL get if you sue me; nothing. Consider yourselves disclaimed.

Rating: Teen

Dedication: Thanks to Drakependragon and the gang at FB Dragon Age Fans

Summary: The Inquisition's allies have some strange foibles quirks and pet peeves, a few vignettes concerning them.

Blackwall Disapproves

8

9

The only thing that saved Blackwall's head from the thrown glass exploding against the wall was his fast reflexes and his momentary hesitation at Evelyn Trevelyan's door, at the time it seemed a cowardly gesture, now it seemed a sensible precaution.

As it was, he was scarred by shards of broken glass.

He paused a moment longer fearing other missiles but it appeared Evelyn had satisfied her immediate desire for destruction... if only briefly.

"A good throw." Blackwall quipped.

"Maker; Blackwall, I'm so sorry," she leapt across the room snatching up his hands and peering at them closely. The cuts were largely superficial.

"It's just a couple of scratches my ladyship hardly worth fussing over." The burly warrior sputtered trying to hide how much Evelyn's attentions pleased him.

And why not, her straw colored hair and elfin features made her look like one of the ancient race but her normally shaped ears and thick athletic body marked her as human, although she did share the pale skin most mages were known for.

Years spent studying magic in the darkened archives of The Circle of Magi did not lend itself to acquiring the ruddy honed-by-the-wilderness physique Blackwall himself possessed.

She'd recently embraced the magical knowledge of The. ..what had that pampered peacock witch Vivienne called them, oh yes, Knight Enchanters.

Her teaching instructor had her running the battlements every morning in essentially her small clothes.

Not that anyone would negatively comment. She was leader of the Inquisition after all. If she wanted to run about in small clothes, there were no small amount of people who would take it as the Maker's will made manifest.

And besides, her combat prowess was becoming nothing short of unreal The central throne room's growing collection of High Dragon skulls was chilling testimony of her power and savagery in battle.

Evelyn rolled her eyes at his male posturing pulling his hand closer. Warm light filled her eyes and seemed to flow down through her body to her hands.

Blackwall watched the wounds and cuts close up leaving not even a scar to mark their presence.

"You can heal?" Blackwall marvelled, "shouldn't you be down helping the soldiers and all the refugees?"

The courtyard of the Inquisition fortress known as Skyhold was full to the bursting with fleeing citizens hoping to catch a glimpse of Evelyn Trevelyan.

Grand High Inquisitor. The Herald of Andraste, sign of The Maker's grace in the midst of these dark and uncertain times.

The truth was much much more complicated and the overall refusal by the throngs of penitent souls to accept Trevelyan's denials of her divinity had lead her to, as much as possible, avoid the camps. If only so the medics and healing mages could do their work without the distraction that was inevitable whenever the Herald of Andraste was forced to traverse Skyholds public areas like the Chantry Garden or the Clinic in the lower courtyard.

"Thank you for voicing my own guilt," The Inquisitor replied dryly, "I'll just fit it into the few spare moments I have when I'm not closing rifts, fighting Corypheus' minions or trying to master Commander Helana's lessons."

Blackwall wasn't as comfortable with sarcasm as the dwarf Varric or the elven girl Sera. Even Trevelyan possessed a kind of grim gallows humor that occasionally grated on him.

He sensed it in the Hinterlands when they'd first met, but to feel its absence or worse it's turn to something cold and dark since The Attack on Haven, that was infinitely worse.

"Sorry, I ...I know you do everything you can." He mumbled.

"Sorry that was beneath me," Evelyn Trevelyan grunted, "That Orlaisian noble, Marquis deSomething-or-other sent several bottles. I've had a few, more then a few if I'm honest."

"I remember him," Blackwall replied, "Sara wanted to shoot him in the-"

"I was there," Trevelyan snapped, "Took everything I had to talk her down."

"Another pampered noble," Blackwall snorted, "pushing around those he thinks are beneath him?"

"You do recall that I'm a noble?" Trevelyan snorted, "if it weren't for the magic, my life would've been very different."

"Sipping wines and entertaining foolish twits?" Blackwall replied. "That's not you."

"The gowns and corsets were kind of fun." Evelyn sighed, "but once the Templars came calling, all that ended."

Evelyn assumed a high screechy voice that sent chills down the warrior's spine. "A Trevelyan does their duty," she shrilled before returning to her normal voice, "my Great Aunt Lucille told me that. She was constantly reminding me of my position, rank, and responsibilities."

"I can't picture you tolerating those soft headed idiots, not for very long at any rate," he snorted. "Besides, I've heard what noble women get up to during those quiet ladies salons."

Evelyn blushed. "We bored pampered noble women need something to do when we've no strapping muscular men around to lift heavy things for us," she replied.

Blackwall laughed, he seen this woman leap on top of a raging high dragon and cut it down with terrifying ease. Iron Bull, that Qunari mercenary captain openly joked he was hiding behind Trevelyan the next dragon they hunted.

"But I doubt you came up here so I could throw overpriced booze at you, what's up?"

Blackwall exhaled, this was going to get ugly but it was necessary.

"I'd like you to reconsider punishing that Venetori Magister."

"Erimond?" Trevelyan replied, "-What? You'd like me to reconsider Tranquility, to what? Exile?"

"The Wardens. You can give him to them, let them deal with him as they choose or just lock him up?"

"Did I ever tell you I met the mage Anders."

"Really?"

"I was on a field trip, we stopped at Vigils Keep for resupply. This was before he left the Wardens and fled to Kirkwall."

"What was he like?"

"Handsome ... dashing, like out of the tales you read as a child," Evelyn sighed. "I don't want to sound like a girly-girl but I was hoping when we met that you'd be sort of like him."

"I hope I wasn't too disappointing." The warrior chuckled good-naturedly.

"Nothing I couldn't get over," Trevelyan replied with a bawdy wink. "Anyway, my templar minders, one of them walked over to him and shook his hand."

"Really?!"

"The Templar had family in Amaranthine. When Warden Commander Amell saved the city, Anders was at her side," Evelyn replied. "Wish more mages were like you. He said that. To Anders."

"Wasn't this the same mage who escaped the Circle tower at Calanhad a half dozen times."

"Eight, actually," Evelyn sighed. "Anyway, Anders turns to him, points at me and says for all you know she might be like me and if she wasn't piss scared of you templars, she could be."

"Sounds like a smartass."

"I thought he was incredible. I wanted what he had. One day, I said to myself, templars will shake my hand and show me some respect."

"A noble goal."

"I worked hard. Every spell that was too tricky, every theorem I couldn't grasp... I just reminded myself what I was working towards. Then I heard about Kirkwall."

"The Mages Underground and the Chantry explosion."

"A dozen people dead including the Grand Cleric."

"What does this have to do with Erimond?"

"Somewhere out there is another little girl who admires that ...man." Blackwall couldn't help noticing the disgust in her voice. "I want that little girl to know what happens when you think power grants privilege."

"I heard about Anders, what he did, what they say he was. If that templar had struck him down all the good Anders did before the end might not have happened."

"Your point?"

"I saw the look on your face as you sentenced him," Blackwall replied. "You enjoyed his fear."

Trevelyan hugged herself. "Many good Wardens are dead because of him," she snarled.

Blackwall heard it then, that tone of voice that was all too familiar. Someone repeating words that they'd said a million times before all the better to convince themselves of their truth.

"And torturing him by making him tranquil won't change that."

"But the next Erimond will think twice."

"Or more likely, someone terrified of Inquisitor Trevelyan's wrath will become the next Erimond."

Trevelyan scoffed.

Blackwall countered, "I've seen it happen." He replied, "Good men who might never have done harm in their lives take up the sword because they were frightened."

"I don't need to hear this."

"I think you do. Erimond's evil doesn't make you good. There's been enough evil and terror in the world."

"What's the alternative? Erimond isn't exactly the hug-it-out kind of guy," Evelyn replied sharply. "By the way, where was this righteous indignation when I conscripted the mages."

Blackwall reached out and grabbed Evelyn's arm.

"That was for a purpose not to satisfy some petty desire for vengeance."

She looked at him coldly, "There's nothing petty about my need for revenge," she snarled before slapping his hand away as if it was a bug.

"So you admit that you just wanted payback, The Inquisition's justice has to be about more than personal vengeance."

"You didn't order a good man to stay in The Fade to buy the others time to escape. Stroud's blood is on Erimond's hands."

"There's ways to make Erimond pay for his crimes that don't lower us to his level."

"Don't worry Warden Blackwall," Trevelyan scoffed. "You won't have to get your hands dirty, I made the choice and I'll live with it like I always do."

He turned to the stairs. "I bet there was a time when the Anders you met at Vigils Keep couldn't have imagined hurting a fly never mind blowing up a Chantry. It is the little choices you make along the way that lead a man to glory or to ruin."

"Well, he made his choices didn't he?"

"So did you. Did that little girl at Vigils Keep think for one second she'd be standing here condemning a man to Tranquility essentially for standing up to her."

"That's not why I'm doing this!"

"Isn't It? I saw how angry his petty defiance made you, everyone saw it. You wanted him to be afraid of you so you sentenced him to the one thing mages fear above all others."

"You think I'm a monster?"

"A monster? No... not a monster," he paused. "But you're definitely not the woman I met in the Hinterlands."

"She had to watch friends die to stop a mad man."

Blackwall grimaced. "I remember what you saw ...what you say you saw in that twisted version of our future."

Trevelyan hugged herself shuddering. "You and the others died after spending a year being tortured by people like Erimond; died to save me."

"The girl I met in the Hinterlands, the girl who chased rams across the grasslands for a whole day just to feed starving civilians. That girl was strong. She didn't need to indulge vengeance to save lives."

"That girl lost Haven," Trevelyan snapped. "And she sat back and watched while Clarel slit the throat of the girl we convinced to join The Wardens."

"That wasn't your fault."

"If you're finished, you can return to you post Warden Blackwall," Trevelyan hissed.

Blackwall looked at her sadly. "As you wish Inquisitor Trevelyan, " he replied. "You are, after all, ìn charge."

The warrior departed leaving Trevelyan alone with more questions then answers. She snatched up the bottle of wine taking a long pull. She thought about Erimond and Blackwall, but mostly about the little girl at Vigils Keep.

Blackwall was right. She'd have been horrified once to see a man condemned to Tranquility and she never imagined giving the order. She looked into the fireplace and saw that little girl's frightened eyes looking back, "Scared of what you have to do, or what you had to become to do it?" Trevelyan whispered.

She looked at the report she'd been reviewing when Blackwall interrupted her. Cassandra had summarized their off-the-books mission to discover the true fate of the Seekers of Truth.

Seeker Lambert had gone insane, all but destroyed The Seekers with some mad scheme to remake the world into a paradise. The man had revealed at the end. That the Rite of Tranquility, the greatest weapon mundanes had to rein in dangerous mages was reversible. They'd always known yet kept the secret of how to do it from mages already chafing under The Chantry's controls.

Even now Fiona's mages were protesting the sentence of Tranquility seeking to save Erimond's mind and magic. Not out of any loyalty to the magister, instead their concern was the broader implication that a mage, one of their own, was willing to use that most fearsome of tools as an instrument of punishment.

Ironically nothing would please Evelyn more than to restore the minds and magic to so many who had been needlessly branded dangerous and forced to undergo the Rite.

She'd known a few back in Ostwick.

Gerald a fellow apprentice, whose terrible nightmares were seen by the templars as proof he wouldn't be able to control himself.

It was her own mentor who discovered the truth after the Rite had already been carried out. Gerald had been a victim of terrible abuse as a child. He still went back to that place in his mind night after night. Ironically the coming of the templars had actually freed him from bondage in every sense save one.

How many Geralds were out there, minds cleansed of emotion not out of malicious intent but simple misunderstanding of what they really needed.

But the dark part of her, the part that Blackwall clearly saw and rightly feared, raged at the thought of criminals like Erimond escaping justice, no, call it what it was, her vengeance.

She stood up straightened her clothing squared her shoulders and hurled the report into the fire watching the billowing fireball belch into the air.

Until the full ramifications of a cure for Tranquility could be known revealing the truth was reckless. But to allow someone like Erimond to escape justice was ... the thought was abhorrent to her.

Leilana, Cassandra, even Iron Bull, they'd all done ruthless and vicious things to protect the Inquisition, to protect its soldiers, to protect Trevelyan herself. Did she have any right to ask them to sacrifice friends, allies, their very sense of right and wrong then turn around and give any less?

"We are Trevelyans," Aunt Lucille had said. "And Trevelyans do their duty no matter how hard. If you remember that then I'll be proud of you no matter what you accomplish child."

She was Inquisitor Evelyn Trevelyan and she would do her duty, no matter how hard.