A/N: okay, so, this took a while to put up, chiefly because there was some major DRAMA with my stupid router. Damn you, AT&T. Internet was sketchy for a day or so after I put up the 2nd chapter, and then cut out altogether until today – we got a new router. Not that it matters. We're getting U-Verse later this week. Just couldn't live without the internet for any longer, though.
Aaaanyway, here's this chapter, and the last (?)* one, because I have both for you and I want to be nice :)
-AA
*I'm not totally sure, but I'm considering fleshing this out into a real story. Continuing it beyond this event. What do you think?
DISCLAIMER: The nouns are Bioware's, the adjectives are mine.
He stumbled over rocks and bodies and fallen weapons to the huddled mass at the far side of the battlefield. Toward the flaming red hair, fluttering in the breeze, toward the frightening stillness of both his form and hers. She seemed to be stirring, barely. He ran faster.
By the time that he got there, She was passed out, too.
On top of the elf's body.
Anders didn't find the image particularly appealing.
Isabella and Varric had burst into his clinic, covered in sweat and blood, gasping for air and sputtering something that had initially been unintelligible.
Eventually, the pirate had managed something to the effect of,
"H-Hawke – Fenris – stabbed – blood everywhere – elf not... not breathing. Hawke's hysterical."
He'd left before she finished her broken tale, robes flaring out behind himself as he dug a traveling spell out of his memory. Alainka had found it for him, in a book of magic they'd come across in their travels. Alainka, the Hero of Ferelden.
She'd come to him broken, beaten down by a year of struggle and loss, by the flame of a romance that had guttered and died in the cold breeze of duty and racism. He'd done his level best to heal her, to fill her up again, but she was so empty that he'd not have been able to manage it on his own. In the end, it was only possible with the help of Howe, Sigrun, Ogren, Justice and the others.
As though the recollection of the spell had unstoppered a bottle of Orlesian champagne, memories frothed through his consciousness, a creamy sea of better times that lapped on the shores of the bleak present.
Anders cast the spell, and felt himself flow out of time and space and physical being, melding with the real world and the fade, somewhere in between but also in both places. His mind became slippery and hard to focus, and he was unable to stem the tide of thoughts and feelings that came with the Warden's name.
A shriek from the room next to his, and he was out of bed in an instant. Never a deep sleeper, Anders was liable to be up at the slightest noise, let alone the loud cry that had emitted from his neighbor. He hesitated at the door, but another shout laid waste to his reservations.
The blond mage gently entered his commander's suite, taking in the sparse furnishings, the dusty carpet, the cobwebs in the corners and the packed satchels lying haphazardly across the floor.
It's like she's not even really living here, he thought to himself as he walked around the corner into her bedroom. The sight he was met with was shocking, to say the least.
She was small, slight, tiny even for an elf. She had curled up in a tight ball, tangled in the blue comforter. She looked as though she was drowning in the overlarge bed, with its ornate posts and silver canopy. The opulence of the room was absurd: high-backed chairs surrounded a small card table carved with ferocious looking griffons for legs. A vanity, again absurdly ostentatious, stood against the left wall, and the deep color of its wood clashed against the vibrant paisley wallpaper.
The overall effect was garish, and Anders felt like he was wading through an Orlesian whorehouse as he fought against the sickly-sweet scent of disuse to get to the warden.
When he had finally made it, it took another twenty minutes to wake her up all the way. After that, an hour to calm her down, and then a sleeping spell (per her request) to get her through the rest of the night.
It was not the first time he was to be in her rooms at four o'clock in the morning.
A few months after that incident, in fact, Anders had woken again to the shrieks of his leader. This time, however, she had been specifically calling his na –
'How exactly is pining after the Warden furthering the cause? You burned that bridge. Stop wallowing and get to Hawke.' Justice's voice cut through the mage's mind like a knife, snapping him back to reality as they materialized somewhere along the wounded coast, and the ex-warden was forced to acknowledge the fade-spirit's presence, no matter how unclean it felt. No matter how wrong.
I am an abomination.
Alainka will never forgive me for letting her be abandoned twice.
Karl is dead.
This is my life, now. Here, in Kirkwall, with Hawke.
With Justice.
"I – I'm sorry. I'm finding her, now. You're right, I shouldn't dwell on the past." he answered aloud, beginning to pick his way as fast as possible towards the site of the battle, hating the subservient tone in his own voice.
Anders stepped over the twisted, stinking bodies of slavers. He slipped in pools of blood, nearly landing on his rear end more times than he could count. Occasionally, he would step in something warm and mushy near a particularly mangled corpse, but he never looked down to find out what it was.
Don't want to know.
Eventually, he reached Hawke and Fenris.
She was bent around his body like she wanted to shield him from further harm. Her arms were covered in blood up to the elbows, and more was smeared across her legs and what Anders could see of her neck. Pieces of her armor were strewn around her person, cast aside as though they were worthless. The mage lightly brushed her exposed arm with his fingertips, noting her clammy skin, the way she shivered in her sleep, the shredded hem of her tunic. She'd tried to save the elf, and might killed herself in the process, had Anders gotten there any later.
He sighed, shrugging off his own thick wool cloak and covering her with it as snow began to fall gently, purifying the battlefield as the white flakes concealed the carnage.
Anders smiled ruefully to himself, loving the irony.
He set down his pack and squatted by the two warriors, gently prying Hawke off of the elf. When he'd managed to extract Fenris, he set the ex-slave to the side on an old bedroll and began to make camp.
He set up a large tent with one plush bedroll to the left, and a simpler one to the right. He extracted several blankets from his pack and created a sort of nest on the nicer sleeping place, into which he gently laid Hawke after removing the rest of her armor. He was quick, efficient. His hands moved with the deft precision of an experienced healer, making up a fire in the increasing cold, setting the logs aflame with magic when flint wouldn't work. He boiled water quickly, again using a spell, and left several bandages in the pot while he healed Hawke's worst injuries with less conventional means.
He drew upon his power, knowing exactly when to stop, when to push her body to heal itself in stead of doing all the work alone. Anders was keenly aware that even the best healers had only so much energy to put into a patient, and when he neared the end of his own supply, he dressed her minor cuts and bruises with poultices of Elfroot.
When Hawke finally stopped shivering, he used a warm rag to wipe the worst of the gore from her skin, then left her bundled in blankets to sleep. It was the darkest part of the night, and Anders was exhausted from the healing, but he went out of the tent to clean the body of the elf, so that Hawke wouldn't be too distraught when she saw it in the morning.
'Why bother making up this mage-hater's corpse? Better to let him rot, or be eaten by vermin.'
Anders shook his head, trying to clear it of Justice's influence.
"Everyone deserves a proper burial, Justice." he snapped aloud, stepping out into the cool air, his boots crunching in the new snow as he made his way to the elf's body, "Fenris is – er, was – a brave warrior, and a champion of freedom, if not that of mages in specific. We may have disagreed on the particulars, but the goal was similar."
Anders could hear Justice's mental snort of derision, but he ignored the fade spirit and bent over the corpse. "Dog you may have been, Fenris," he muttered, bending to inspect the elf, "but you were Hawke's dog, and I think well enough of her to believe that you must have been possessed of some worth."
The mage turned to look at the campsite over his shoulder, at the long shadows cast by the cheerful fire, and was pleased to hear what sounded like a snore come from the tent. He grabbed the damp rag from his pocket, and began to wipe Fenris's torso clean, removing the blood-soaked bandages and even tidying the dark, ragged hole in his belly. The elf was cold to the touch, and his lyrium tattoos had ceased to glow.
Anders put his hand over Fenris's prone form, using some of his sorely depleted energy to try to force a thin layer of grayish skin to grow over the terrible wound, erasing a little of the grotesqueness of the corpse. He poured a tiny bit of magic into the hole, tugging at the few remaining live cells, pushing them to heal themselves.
Even further tired by the expenditure of his mana, the mage tried to lean back on his haunches.
He couldn't.
He was frozen. Something was pulling his energy from him; the connection he'd opened between his own life force and Fenris's body wouldn't shut. He couldn't pull himself away, or move, or speak. He was being drained of everything.
Panic pumped adrenaline through his veins, but Anders still couldn't jerk himself away from the elf.
I'm going to die, he thought, I'm going to die, right here, in the cold and the dark, alone, unfulfilled. None of this will have been worth anything. My whole life, fighting to save mages, only to die pouring myself into one who would have us chained.
He stared, unblinking, unmoving, at Fenris, until he felt himself starting to fade. His body slumped forward, his vision became fuzzy, and the connection finally broke off.
It took him a few minutes, but Anders was eventually able to get up from the ground, albeit shakily. Justice seemed to have gone quiet, sort of dormant, as though he, too, were utterly spent.
The mage stood over the elf's body, breathing in sputtering gasps. The frigid air hurt his lungs, but he was grateful for it. I'm not dead, he thought, I have no idea what in Thedas just happened, but I'm not dead.
He shut his eyes for a moment, trying to slow his breathing, to calm down. He opened them again, and then wished he hadn't.
