Nathaniel was obviously displeased. He paced back and forth, arms folded across his chest. "You could have told us this before you put us through the Joining."
"Well, I never wanted to live forever anyway," quipped Anders.
They stood in a small antechamber on the second floor of the keep, door closed. Lyna leaned against it, subtly blocking the exit. If either of the two men was going to get angry with her, she wanted to have the argument and be done with, not worry about double meanings and dark insinuations hiding in every word for the next month. She hated noble courts. She didn't need her team to turn into one. "I don't recruit normal people for good reason, I'm sure you can see that."
Nathaniel ceased his pacing and turned to face her, his lips drawn into a thin line and his face a picture of mistrust and betrayal. "And yet you were willing to recruit the two of us? I know you don't like the Howes but if you wanted me dead you could have just done it cleanly!"
"I didn't do it to murder you! You were in prison, at very real risk of the hanging you suggested for yourself. I didn't have a lot of options, unless I wanted to let you wander off so you could kill me when you saw fit."
"I-"
"What were the words? 'I might come back, and next time you might not catch me'?" She shook her head. "I take death threats seriously."
"Yeah, you get your highs off of them," said Anders. One edge of his mouth twitched up, but the expression was not at all reminiscent of a smile.
She didn't have anything to say to that, so she said nothing. He was right, of course, there was no point in denying it. They had both seen her fight. She could feel control of the conversation slipping through her fingers. The hope had been that she could achieve some sort of kinship with these people, like she had with the friends who had helped her fight the blight. She knew it wasn't all going to happen in a single week, but having so much dislike in her direction already didn't speak well of the likelihood of friendships. She could only hope they would come to terms with it given time.
.
...
.
"You can draw the taint out," she said, breaking the silence in the small warm room.
The rain had started coming down harder, and even Revas had drifted inside to wait out the storm by the comfort of the fireplace. Anders sat by the window, sorting herbs and roots that Lyna had brought back from the surrounding wilderness. The action was comfortable, familiar, safe, and on top of that it felt useful. Lyna for her own part had been staring into the fire ever since she had coaxed it to life, eyes dark.
"Push it onto another being. Or drain it into one." She smiled into the fire mirthlessly. "At least that's the idea."
Bay leaf crumbled in Anders' hands. "You would kill them,"
"-or reduce them to darkspawn, yes, I know." She grimaced. "Even if there's something to it, it's not much of a trade for the blood mage."
The smell of blood, of rot, of stale air and near-drowning threatened at the edges of his consciousness, and he swallowed hard. He spent several long moments gathering the crumbled pieces of leaf, focusing on the simple action to steel himself against it, before he realized what she had said. "You were going to kill me!"
Lyna's eyes flicked toward him, anger drawing at their corners, and then back to the fire and down. "I wasn't looking for you."
Anders was aghast. "You were going to kill some poor sod fool enough to conjure a demon for you. All due respect, but that doesn't sound a whole lot better." He turned to face her, away from the window, accusation in his eyes. "And it's hardly as if you stopped asking me for help when you learned-"
"I was going to kill an abomination."
A swell of emotion rolled up inside of him. Stinging at the edges like broken glass and too big to fill his skin, it raked at the inside of his ribs and throat. I'm not- He was. His own voice, resonant, echoing, boomed inside his mind, condemning abominations, condemning blood magic. They had stepped off the path of righteousness, they deserved-I am not a demon. He was an abomination, he had been, that was why he was here, he was dangerous, waiting to die, waiting. He choked. He couldn't breathe. A sharp pain exploded behind his eyes, shimmering and sharp, and he pulled himself away, toward the wall, toward the window. He saw Hawke's green eyes staring down at him. You're a monster.
"Anders?"
He wasn't certain if her voice was concern or trepidation. Lyna was in front of him now, hand resting by her knife. Instinctively he pulled a shield from the air, but the motion felt like dragging his hand through knives, and for a moment shimmering blue burned the edges of his mind as his mana burned off into nothing.
"Anders, stop." The phrase was an order, but she was afraid. He could hear the uncertainty in the way her voice pitched a little higher than it should, see in her eyes that she was deciding whether to leap toward him or spring away, calculating risk. "Stop, now."
He cut off the spell, but the mana didn't stop. It drained away until he felt a husk, dry, empty, and continued to pull. He was drowning. He was blind.
The green greys of the fade were dotted with broken glass and lines of blue blood, flowing between them. The air was full with magic, with the fog of ideas ever so easily twisted into being. As the thin streams of blue rolled downward, they dragged shards of glass with them, and shards of something else. Metal? Anders reached down to touch the blood and recoiled as it tried to drag him down into its swift current. Memories flowed in those waters. His own, and someone else's. Those that belonged to him reached out with grasping limbs in a frenzied attempt to pull him back, and he was forced to make a hasty retreat. A voice behind him intruded into the fade.
"Anders? Bloody... Come back, damn you." He opened his eyes to see an elven woman crouched over him, fingers resting on the side of his neck. "Wake-up, thank the gods." She pulled away, sitting back on her knees as he blinked the green and blue out of his vision.
He shifted uncomfortably. Everything hurt, and he felt drained, both physically and mentally. His left hand was bleeding, and he could taste iron in his throat as well. He was sweating, but the air felt cold, and while he felt thoroughly stripped of mana, the magic in the air was nearly palpable. Rain continued to patter against the window, a heavy cloak of grey draped over everything but the fire. He fished for her name, dragging memories carefully back from the depths of the fade. The tapestry of time felt frayed and full of holes, but he didn't know the images in it well enough to know what was missing, and he was too tired to search. He let it fall back into place like an old worn cloak.
"What did you just cast?" Momentarily, the commander seemed to have cast aside her frustration with him in favor of concern, and something else. Curiosity, perhaps, or anxiety?
"A... shield? At least, that's what-were you...?" He scanned her for signs of injury, but found none and slowly exhaled. His eyes met hers and he felt his throat tighten. "You would be better off without me."
"And why is that?"
"I'm-" He choked on the next word, and swallowed hard. "We're an abomination."
She rolled her eyes and pushed up onto the balls of her feet. "So you've said."
"We're not safe."
"I can see that." She shifted up into a crouch and then pulled herself to her feet and retreated into the other room. Moments later she returned, bandaging in hand. "So far you seem more a threat to yourself than to me. Just let me know if you plan on burning a hole through my chest first." She crouched by him again, and then after examining his hand a moment, slid down into sitting cross-legged to his left. "What in Fen-harel's name did you do to your hand?"
Anders looked. His hand looked as though he'd cut across it with half a dozen tiny knives. He shrugged and pressed his teeth together as he watched Lyna carefully bandage it up, pressing torn edges of skin together before pulling the fabric over them. He closed his eyes and breathed as deeply as he could manage. "I can't say I know. Only I really wouldn't like to repeat the experience."
Lyna's eyes flicked up to his, and he felt suddenly as though he was being assessed. After a long moment, she muttered something to herself and returned to his hand, brows pushed together and mouth drawn into a scowl.
"I wouldn't have killed you," she said when the bandages were finished. "I made you a promise."
"I made you a promise too," Anders said flatly.
"Well, at least one of us keeps our word then, hm," she muttered. She didn't speak to him after that.
center.
...
./center
He dreamed of Hawke, standing by a bed in a brothel, pressing her own knife to her neck. He could see through the glass hanging in the air the magic dripping red, tying threads about her arm and holding it steady as her eyes filled with panic. The knife drew closer to her exposed throat as her eyes darted pleadingly toward him.
He reached out with magic to dispel the threads, but suddenly it was him, holding his own shard of glass to his throat. He looked for help but found only Hawke, threads tied to her fingers as she slid down onto the bed in front of him. She smiled at him, and he tried to reach out, tried to go to her, tried to ask for help, ask her to stop, but he found himself voiceless and immobile. Panicked, he watched as another him stepped into his vision and approached her. He tried to shout, tell her it wasn't him, but the copy pushed Hawke down against the bed and as her hand moved to touch its face, the threads pulled against his hand and drove the glass into his throat.
He shattered, the scene shattered, and he could move again. He was surrounded by Templars as his hand pushed through the armor of one like it was soft butter and into the chest of the offending man, into the spine. His hand was through Hawke, then, through Fenris, through a dark haired girl, through the red haired elf with the magelight, and the whole thing shattered again. Then suddenly he was falling, falling. He wasn't broken, wasn't disoriented, when he hit the ground, but he was surrounded by footfalls, by blood, by pulling, down, down, and the Corypheus creature bending him over himself. All of it, all of it drove together with one, awful, thunderous song.
Somebody screamed.
He awoke to the sound of shouting and the feeling of weight and nauseating dread, the song still ringing in his head. Sweating and still only half-dressed, he wrapped the blanket around himself and felt his way across the room to the doorway, and beyond that to the bed where Lenya slept, crying and turning in her sleep. Lightly, he touched her arm, and then more forcefully, and she jolted awake, grabbing onto the offending arm and clinging to him in the dark.
She remained this way for several minutes, shivering violently into his shoulder as he silently attempted to calm his own rattled nerves. The song didn't fade. It hummed there in the back of his mind, discordant and strange, at once alluring and horrifying. Finally Lyna released him and drew herself into a ball, shaky breaths wracking her small body. "Go away," she sobbed quietly. "Go away go away go away go away."
"Commander?" Anders touched her shoulder lightly, and instead of pulling away from it, she leaned into the touch.
"It's too late, Anders, I took too long, I didn't find-" She pressed her eyes shut, pushing her face into her arms. "I'm going to die."
center.
...
./center
"I was dragged away from home because, fuck it, I needed treatment and the Grey Wardens had something and who cares if I'd have rather died than wander off with some Shemlen bastard-"
"Oh, boo hoo, must suck to have a family up until-well, ever, really. My father tossed me to the chantry as a boy and I wasn't even a danger to anyone."
"Oh fuck off, you asked about it." Lyna folded her arms across her chest and turned her eyes away from him, glaring off at the window.
"Well I didn't know I was asking for the privilege of being told a sob story about how you get to live in a nice cushy castle instead of the wilderness now, did I?" Anders rolled his eyes, leaning back in his seat. "When the king himself deigns to meet us, should I ask him about the horrors of having everyone cater to his slightest whim?"
"That's some bullshit and you know it." She turned on him, jaw clenched. Anders wasn't sure how he had missed her hand curled into a tight fist in her lap, or the way her lips bent into a thin line. "I walked through living hell for a year, two, to protect people who spat on me, knowing I could never go home, knowing-Alistair fucking did it too. He's not some bastard we dropped on the throne for no reason. He doesn't like ruling any more than I do."
Anders knew he should stop pressing, but annoyance, pent up over days, a week now, spurred him onward. "Oh yes, the poor warden commander, laid low by a room full of squabbling banns, recruiting poor souls into a death march she herself laments participating in."
"They wanted to kill you, you bastard!"
"So does everyone. I'm afraid that's just the way I live my life."
"Would you rather have lived it in a jail cell in some godforsaken tower somewhere? I could arrange for it."
"Well this is hardly much different now, is it? I'm just in your prison now, instead of one full of templars, but don't worry because I'm sure if you ever need one you'll just make eyes at the one in Denerim and he'll be right over." He had crossed a line. He saw it in her eyes, and in her stiffened shoulders, and it was funny because he'd thought he'd crossed the line when he'd started this. There had been a second line he didn't know about. Where the first one had felt dangerous, this one was just a broken thread. The warden commander didn't move. Part of him wondered if he had won.
"Anders," she said, breaking the silence she had allowed to fill the room. Her voice was low and tired, and she did not look him in the eyes. "You can hate me, if that's what you need. And for whatever it's worth, I'm sorry." She sighed, and suddenly Anders felt as though he was looking at a young woman, only just an adult, and far too tired, too bitter, too broken for her age. Looking at her now, the idea of winning by pressing enough buttons felt stupid and petty. "If you need to, you can go. But I can't protect you if you do."
He felt his anger leech away. Twisting anxiety rose up to take its place, and then regret. For once in his life, there wasn't a clever quip to break the tension, to make it as though the conflict had never happened or twist it into something darkly funny. "We're alright," he said, in-he didn't know, an apology? Forgiveness? Reassurance?
"We're not okay," the Commander said softly.
It was Anders' turn to sigh. "No, we really aren't. We will be, though. I'm not up and leaving."
The Commander smiled a wobbly smile, nearly a grimace. "I guess I'll take it."