Templar Tantrums - Relearning to Live


She'd never left without saying goodbye. Until today. His head is imploding with desperate conflict as he watches her step over the threshold without a backward glance. The need to reach out to her, to touch her, has never been stronger, but his arms are weighted with lead, with despair, grief for his fallen brothers, for his fallen innocence. The sandy blonde man with lyrium glazed, blue burning eyes, the same fire that flickers now in hers, places his hand on mine! her lower back, guides her as she stumbles. Even he is tense, tired and saddened by the disaster they leave behind them. This girl-Grey Warden, a strange reflection whose eyes he does not recognize, but knows all the same, covers her mouth to try to hide the sobbing, and Cullen cannot raise his arms to draw her in, pull her close, stroke her until her tears dry.

Greagior's hand pats stiffly on Cullen's shoulder. A sideways glance reveals more understanding than Cullen would ever have imagined from his Knight Commander. "Go get cleaned up."

The Quartermaster takes Cullen's arm, tugging him to the makeshift base the Templars had used while the Tower burned. "We'll see if we can find a place to rest, hey?"

Cullen nods dully, the lead still heavy on his limbs, but begins to move anyway. Stripping off his armor, he goes to find clean water. He wonders if there is a way to scrub clean his soul.


Days later, the task of hauling bodies is finished, and only the scrubbing remained. Cullen has begged off, and finds his way to the training rooms. Without armor, his body feels…light, as he moves through the forms, swings his blade at the dummy, finds a semblance of peace in movement. He hasn't put his armor back on, since she left. He can't bear the weight of it, the notion that it makes him what he is. A Templar. A Mage killer. A weapon for the Chantry, with none of the mercy he'd seen in the Harrowing chamber. The vitriol that had flooded his words while he was caged at the hands of the blood mages has seeped from his mind, leaving a calmer contemplation.

The hole her tears had torn in his heart is still raw, weeping and unhealed. He is trying, Maker knows he is trying, to balance what he is with what they are, but can't seem to find the key. Muscles unused in weeks days, years? burn under the harsh use he puts them to now. Sweat drips from him, and every move, every drop is one tiny bit of anger released, one small part of his anguish mastered. Hours later, he is once more in control of the rage inside him. Barely.


He slowly comes out of the fog, eventually stops pushing away everything, afraid to accept it as real, because it hadn't been, for so long. If dreams of temptation won't break him, perhaps dreams of normalcy will? He is so tired of the tricks, the visions of her laid out before him, underneath him, each one designed to make him accept the dream as reality, give in, be conquered, and have everything he has ever wanted. Lives lived in flashes of contentment, pleasure, bliss, heaven. They learned quickly that the dreams without her didn't move him at all. But after the first vision of her, rejected because it didn't smell like her, they pounded at him relentlessly. But even if they got her perfect now, exactly the way he remembered, wanted, still he knows she is not real. Can she forgive him, then, for not knowing that she was real that last time? For spitting out his hatred of the demons, the mages, the Maker, at her, thinking all the while she stood before him only in his mind?


He dreams of her, every night she is away. Of course, this is nothing new. He's been dreaming about her since he met her, a tiny slip of an elven girl with wickedly playful eyes, and a smile that would drive the Maker to his knees.

This morning, he wakes from a place in which his girl-Mage was eight months pregnant, in which he had rested his hand on her swollen belly and felt the child kick at his touch. His other hand clasped hers, fingers tightly intertwined.

He's given up fighting his dreams. He can't see past her tears to the better times they had shared, so his dreams, when they are good, are all the comfort he has left. He knows she is alive, rumor tells him as much. Beyond that, he knows nothing of what she does, where she is, save that she is far away.


The months grind away slowly, and he can barely function in his duty. Since she left, he has been at loose ends anyway, his sole responsibility taken from him. He helps to fill the watch rotation, but his suspicion of the few mages left is noted by both Greagior and Irving, and he is kept from the main floors, set instead to watch the doors to the phylactery chambers that had started the whole mess.

When the remaining mages leave for Redcliffe, he stays behind, still too fractured to function as either Templar or warrior among so many that he desires only to see dead. Too fractured to pretend to be human, yet. He is a failure, allowing his mage to be taken from him, failing to protect her, failing to protect the world from her, and now she leads the charge on the Archdemon, calling her allies to Redcliffe to fight. And he is not beside her, he is not where he belongs. He is trapped inside his head, fighting against the demons still, but now demons of his own making.