STEP THREE: GET WHAT YOU WANT
Cora stood outside the bathroom, listening to the shower knobs squeak and the hiss of water die off. Minutes later the door opened and Cullen, clad only in his pants and white undershirt, emerged.
"Maker, that was amazing," he sighed, rotating his shoulders and bringing a small flutter to Cora's belly as she watched muscles ripple under the shirt which clung to his still-damp skin. "If you're trying to give me a reason to like this world, you just found one."
With a grin she pushed passed him into the bathroom to grab a comb and her pomade for his hair. While the unruly wet-curls look was really sexy, she needed him looking war room ready for Dee.
"Get your hair dried," she said, "we've got to make you look like you."
Twenty five minutes later Cullen was polished, preened and looking amazing in his armor. She had to tease him about how long it took to style his hair - that had taken the majority of the prep time. She'd even given him one of her replacement toothbrushes to use, and had laughed outright when he had put the paste-covered tool into his mouth and grimaced at the flavor. He had smiled at her laugh, a small, nostalgic expression, and she stopped.
"I have always loved your laugh," he murmured, and Cora felt her face get hot.
"I have the same laugh there?" She asked and Cullen nodded, giving her a look that said 'why wouldn't you?'
"I always thought it was a bit high-pitched when compared to your speaking voice," he admitted, "but hearing it now, I understand how it fits you. Which reminds me, why is your voice so different here?"
The buzzer in the living room went off and she sighed. "There's Dee," she said, gently pushing Cullen back into her bedroom. "I'm going to let her in. Just stay here until I call for you. Okay? She's not going to believe you're you at first. She knows you, and where you're from. It shouldn't be possible for you to be here. Not as far as anyone knew, at least."
"She knows me?" Cullen repeated, glancing up at the apartment door as he backed into the bedroom. "Does she also come to Thedas as you do?"
"Yes, but you wouldn't know her," Cora admitted, "she goes to a different Thedas - a different reality - where the Inquisitor is a man in love with Dorian." She turned from the room, recognizing Cullen's silent demand for further explanation as the buzzer sounded again, this time longer. "I'll tell you more later. But let me open the door for Dee first. Okay?"
"Yes, of course." He murmured, and she hurried to the door, flipping the knobs for the locks and opening it cautiously.
"Hey chica," she smiled awkwardly, and Dee's eyes roved over to the tv and the computer first off.
"Hey girl. So you got something to show me or what?"
"Yeah. But first sit. Okay?"
Beside her Dee gave her that familiar look of rapidly thinning patience. "Cora, you're freaking me out here."
"You're not the only one who's done that in the last twenty-four hours." Cora admitted. "Now, sit."
"Ugh! Fine!" Dee plopped down carelessly into Cora's empty armchair and tried to glare up at her friend through her unease. "There, I'm sitting. Are you happy? What's the deal?"
Walking over to stand in front of the hall that lead to her bedroom and bathroom, Cora turned her head slightly so that her voice would carry. "Okay, you can come out now."
Barely daring to breathe, the blonde watched her friend closely as Cullen entered the room behind her, moving to stand at her side. Dee's eyes widened impossibly at the sight of the man next to her, but Cora kept her cool, waiting for a reaction.
"Whoa," Dee's face split into an appreciative grin as she leaned forward in her seat eagerly. "Man, that's amazing! What did you do - get plastic surgery? You look exactly like him!"
Cora swallowed. She had figured Dee wouldn't just assume he was the real deal. Hell, two days ago Cora would have called bullshit. "This is my friend," she said, turning to Cullen and gesturing to the girl in the chair, "Delia Sanchez. But everyone calls her Dee for short. Would you introduce yourself?"
"Certainly," Cullen said, and gave a bow with his shoulders as though the woman seated before him was a member of Orlesian nobility he didn't detest, and not a short, frumpy little thing in a maxi-skirt and a glasses, gaping at him like he was about to perform acrobatics for her or something. "I am Cullen Rutherford, Commander of the Inquisition's armies. It is a pleasure, Ms. Sanchez."
"How…" The smile vanished like paint thinner thrown on a portrait and Dee blinked at Cora for a second before turning back to Cullen. "How did you do that? With your voice? And your face? You're… Jesus you're spot on!"
"Chica," Cora called and her friend looked up from behind her plastic frames, slightly dazed, "we screwed up. He IS Cullen."
A snort erupted from the chair. "Fuck off. No he's not."
"Dee I'm not playing with you. It's him!"
Dee scowled, her voice oozing in that patronizing way she could get when she thought she was right and everyone else was wrong. "No. It's an uber-fan who took cosplay to the next level. And now you're hot for him because he looks exactly like the character you've been obsessing over since Origins. But I'm tellin' you right now," she continued, pointing an accusing finger towards the man standing next to Cora, "he might be good, but dude has issues if he went that far."
"Delia. Look at me." Cora said seriously. "I am not playing here. It's him. He busted through my TV yesterday at 9:41 in the morning. 9:41 - as in the year Inquisition started? As it, the same time you uploaded the next mod to make him more real? Well surprise! It fucking worked!"
Black hair swayed heavily around her face as she shook her head slowly. "No," she said a little quieter, "no. This is another trick of yours."
Cora was about to lose her patience. Dee was stubborn as hell, and about as Earth-bound as someone could get, but how could she think that there was someone in this world who could get the impersonation that right?
But it was Cullen who stepped up first; his hand draped over his sword in unconscious habit. "Miss Sanchez, if you can think of another plausible explanation for my being here," he said - all business just like when he was in the war room, "I would be grateful if you would share it. I for one would very much like to return home."
"Chica," Cora sighed, "be serious now. Look at him. Every detail is right - all the way down to his freckle on his right cheek and his laugh lines. There's no way he's a fake. No surgeon is that good. Even you have to admit that. And then the voice? Come on!"
Dee didn't respond or even move for that matter, not even when she started to wheeze like a balloon slowly leaking air. Cora shook her head and pounced.
"Dammit, your inhaler." She muttered, and rifled through her friend's messenger bag until she found it, shoving it in between the frozen woman's lips and counting to three before pressing down, gratified to see Dee take a long pull from the canister. Shaking fingers rose up to cover Cora's and another dose was squeezed down into the dark-haired woman's lungs before the inhaler was pulled away.
"Holy shit, Cora," she breathed, "I mean - holy shit! Is it really… him?"
"Yeah," Cora sighed, "Yeah, it's him. Cullen, why don't you have a seat."
Together she and her friend watched as their ally from a fantasy world sat on the couch across from the chair. Not wanting him to feel like a bug in a jar, Cora waited for him to get settled and then sat beside him. "Well, that went better than I thought." She sighed.
"La madre que te parió! Cora!" Dee cried, "You have fucking Cullen Rutherford in your living room! How is this even a thing?" Wild eyes turned to the man at her side as Dee's arms waived expressively, her voice rising to a squeaky shriek. "How are you a thing!?"
"Well that's just it, Dee," she sighed, her patience thinning, "I don't know. But I think the mod you loaded into my machine did it."
"My mod?" Dee gaped, her eyes skipping back and forth between Cullen and Cora repeatedly. "How the hell does a mod make a person?"
"I don't know, but we need to figure it out," Cora said. "Because if yesterday was any sort of a clue, he's not up on the idea of staying here forever."
Beside her Cullen paled slightly, "No, I can't..." Immediately her hand was on his.
"I know, Cullen," she soothed, "I know. Don't worry. Dee and I will get you back. I promise."
XXXX
It took a few to bring Dee up to speed once her friend had calmed down, and poked Cullen about seven or eight times in the face and arms "just to be sure." Cullen had scowled, muttered "Maker's Breath" once or twice, and at the final invasion glared at Dee and announced that his physical presence had not changed in the five minutes he had been seated beside her, so could she bloody well stop prodding him? Cora figured work would be the best distraction, and so she turned on her "Inquisitorialness," as Varric had once called the title, and started in on what she knew.
Last night she'd researched the Fade for hours before finally passing out on the couch, and while there was a lot of posts and threads, most of it was just conjecture. And absolutely nothing about how to travel between worlds using the Fade rifts.
Then she started looking at it from different angles. Things like eluvians, and the magic crystal Dee's Inquisitor got from romancing Dorian, and the anchor. There were so many items that danced the line between Thedas and the Fade. She and Dee had stumbled onto that line too, and now she had to figure out what it had been. The internet had failed her - after all, this wasn't exactly cannon, so why would people put serious thought into trying to figure it out?
And of course she wondered again why she wasn't freaking right the hell out. Here she was seriously researching magic - not that hocus-pocus Houdini shit but real magic - and trying to figure out how to apply it to the real world. If it wasn't for the adonis sitting next to her on the couch she might laugh it off as sleep deprivation or caffeine overdose and check herself into the hospital for a little medicated R&R. But he was there, smelling like her styling products and metal and leather and - Christ why does he smell so good?
Giving herself a harsh mental shake and a slight physical one just to put herself in check, Cora picked up her keyboard and brought up the file folder she'd set up the night before - inside were articles and copies from forum boards she'd copied for later reference.
"So far everything I've found online gives hints about traveling to other parts of Thedas, or to the Fade. Nothing about other worlds."
"No shit," Dee muttered, "we're not talking Mass Effect here."
"Dee," the blond woman sighed in frustration and the woman opposite her pushed at her glasses sheepishly.
"Sorry," her friend muttered between her teeth and Cora blew it off.
"So we're in uncharted territory here," she went on, "and that means it's time for some inside information." Blue eyes trained up to the rich caramel ones beside her, and Cullen blinked.
"Wait," he drawled cautiously, "you believe that I might have information on what happened?"
"You worked as a templar for the better part of your adult life," Cora pointed out, "didn't you learn anything about magic?"
"Only the basic applications so that we could counter it when necessary," the former templar pointed out stiffly. "Discussing magical theory with the apprentices wasn't exactly an encouraged practice in the Circle." Cora frowned.
"Right." She grumbled. "I forgot about that. Why try to understand when it's easier just to be afraid and angry?" She'd always found that part of the game annoying: the whole hatred of all things magic. Shit, if magic existed in this world think of all the good it could do! Cancer, the environment, so many things could be so much better! Yeah, sure, there'd be a whole new set of problems, but locking up all mages sure as hell wasn't the answer.
Cullen frowned at her side. "That's not what I-" He sighed. "Forgive me. I did not mean to offend."
"Just forget it," Cora waved off her hand, wondering why in the hell she should get so upset over his reaction. It's not like she was really a mage. Her character was, but that was just a character. Right? "What I'm looking for from you is information on what happened before you landed here. What was going on exactly at that last moment? I get that the whole situation was probably crazy, but did anything stand out?"
Cullen sat quietly, staring off into space for a while, his eyebrows pulling down into a faint scowl here or there as he went through whatever motions he had to in his head.
"You..." he said at last, "you had your staff drawn. You were fighting off a shriek that was too close to allow you to safely put away your weapon. I was approaching you to take over fighting the creature so you could close the rift. I came up right beside you-"
"I remember," Cora said, "I saw you come up to my left. I put my staff away and started in on the rift. Then I hit pause on the ga- on the keyboard," she corrected quickly, "so I could grab some food."
"You walked away?" Cullen frowned. "No… no you were still there at my side. Right up until..." his eyes trailed over the the doorway into the kitchen, "until you were standing there."
"You were in the television, until I left the room…" Cora thought out loud. "until we weren't together anymore… like the mod was programed to make us…"
"I don't understand."
"What if," Cora continued quietly, as though he had never spoken, "what if you came through because the mod was doing what it was supposed to?"
"What?"
From her seat Cora vaguely heard Dee speak up. "Give her a second. This is how she works. She's not going to hear a thing you say or make any sense to the rest of us until she pulls herself out of her own head."
Cora ticked through her teeth and turned her attention to her best friend. The idea was unraveling in her mind like a coil of rope and if she didn't get it out quickly it would end up a tangled, unusable mess. "Be quiet and hear me out," she blurted, pulling up the folder where her mods were loaded and sorting down to the newest addition. "You load a mod into my computer at 9:41. 9:41 is also the year the Inquisition started."
"I'm following," Dee said, her eyes trained on the television screen.
"The mod was one for Cullen," Cora went on, "to make his interactions possible outside of Skyhold, right? So you load a mod meant to make Cullen more interactive. And at the same time he has another mod active on him that keeps him with me - he can leave Skyhold to follow me. So he's standing next to me when a mod is loaded to make interacting with him more realistic. In the fight I connect the anchor to a rift so that I can close it. Then I leave the room here."
Dee scowled. "Okay, now you're losing me." Cullen wore an equally perplexed look on his face.
Cora sighed in exasperation. Why could no one see where she was going with this?
"You loaded that exact mod at that exact moment and while I had a Fade rift in my hand," Cora explained, holding up her hand like her Inquisitor did when closing a rift. "A Fade rift that lets people - things - slip between worlds. Then I froze the fight, mid rift-sealing. While that rift was frozen in place, I left the room. I 'broke' the mod that kept Cullen with me, while at the same time another mod made him more real. What if, in our own way, we were unlocking the door for that rift here? Giving the magic an exit door to go through, which took Cullen since the mod was for him? Because both mods were meant to keep Cullen and I together - and I was in another room."
"You're talking magic and Fade rifts, girl, but I'm looking at something that was only ever digital coding turned into pixels on your TV. How in the hell are you telling me that the magic was real? It's nothing but an electronic story!"
"Then how is he here?" Cora countered, slapping a palm to Cullen's bicep and hearing the solid ring of skin against metal. "Huh? Come on now. I know you're not one for stepping outside your programers' coding, but try to have a little imagination here."
"Look, all I'm telling you is what I see." Dee argued. "Sure he's here, I get that. I think. Jesus. But if you ask me to link that to a real Thedas existing in my computer I'm gonna call you a liar. Thedas is a story, made up by people working for a company that wanted to sell a video game!"
Cullen bristled. "A game?"
"Then give me a better answer." Cora demanded impatiently. "Where did he come from?"
"I don't know." Dee grumbled. "Someone give us a businessman's trip when we were at the bar?"
"Seriously?" Cora snorted, slightly offended for Cullen that Dee would reference drug abuse with him sitting right here - even if he didn't understand the slang term. "A hallucination that took two days to kick in? Kind of hard to imagine - especially because neither of us do that shit. Come on Dee, you can do better than that." Cora loved the woman - counted Dee as one of the few people who actually understood her - but sometimes the blonde found her friend's stubbornness to be a royal pain in the ass. If Dee didn't feel like listening to you, you weren't going to get your point across. Period.
"I can't!" The dark woman exploded from her seat. "Yeah, I see him and hear him, and get that the odds of some Joe Schmoe from the street hitting the mark this hard are about a billion to one, but this is still pushing the limits of my logic, Cora. For shit's sake - you have a fucking video game character in your living room! And now you're trying to tell me that I'm somehow part of the reason he's here. I'm sorry for trying to figure out a way to make the world make sense again."
"I understand completely." Cullen mumbled quietly and Dee barked a laugh at him. Cora's hackles immediately went up, but Cullen didn't seem to mind. "I do," he pressed. "You live your life believing that the world is orderly. That it makes sense. That there are rules which can never be broken, and safeguards in place which can never be breached." His eyes slid from Dee to the gloved hands on his lap; palms turned up like he was supposed to be holding something. "You hold these beliefs in such high regard that you decide to dedicate your life to them. And then, just like that, everything changes. The more you learn of these safeguards and rules, the more you understand that the world is nothing of what you thought it to be. It is a terrifying place of madness and danger, and no matter how desperately you try, you can never reclaim that peace you once held to." He shook his head sadly. "You can only press on, and hope that someday, perhaps if you do well enough, you can start it on its path to that world you once lived in."
There was silence for a while, and at last Dee piped up, quieter now and a hell of a lot less obstinate, thank God. "And you want to go back there?"
"It's my home," Cullen answered, lifted his eyes back to her stoically. "It's where the people I love are..." his gaze slid over to Cora. "Most of them, at any rate."
Her heart jumped into her throat. Holy shit. Did he just look at her like...
"You made it here, okay?" She pointed out quickly, not certain if going down the path she had been tiptoeing on was a good idea. "Reason stands that there has to be a way back. We don't need to know all of the rules behind it. We've just gotta figure out how to pick the lock."
"Then we're out of luck." Cullen sulked. "You're a mage and I'm a fighter. But what we need is a rogue."
Cora smiled widely. "We've got one." She stated, and pointed her finger to Dee. "If you're up for the challenge, Levellan."
Dee sighed and plunked back down in her chair. Forget that she played as a bow-wielder in the game - in the real world Dee could hack a system like nobody's business. Cora joked that her ability to break into anything electronic was why Dee played as rogues - it suited her real-life nature.
And it seemed that, in spite of her current opinion, Dee couldn't resist the challenge even now. "God I can't believe I'm buying into this." Dee's sigh was dramatic and heavy and everything that someone who didn't want to take part in this would do. But that light was starting to sparkle in those brown-black eyes already. "I must be out of my effing mind. Alright, Cora. What do you need from me?"
Cora grinned, and suddenly the name of Dee's latest and greatest mod seemed too appropriate.
Girl, I get what I want!
XXXX
