Really off-canon chapter, but the game events didn't speak to me when I tried to write them. I like this better.

Looking forward to hearing what you all think! Thanks for the support so far! :)

Chapter 10 – Blackout

Cullen had always thought of the Game as a perverse, underground network; it intimidated him, and he wasn't sure whether he wanted to understand it, knowing he would never uncover all the secrets. For that reason, he'd initially been quite put off by Josephine and Leliana, when Cassandra recruited him to the cause; the women seemed so false, delighting in trickery. As he came to know them, he realized that, while that was partially true, their stories were far more complicated and their tendencies toward compassion just as labyrinthine.

Leliana, for instance, doted on the birds in her rookery, but also could order a throat slit without so much as flinching; the calculation in her face in those moments wounded Cullen, but he told himself it was necessary. It was her job.

But watching the way Taranari decimated the Grand Duchess, publicly humiliating her into limp desperation, unable to call on her supports, unwilling to fight… He found a new respect for the Game, at least, the way his elven Inquisitor harnessed it to her will.

He was standing back, admiring her, as Celine's guards dragged Florianne across the ballroom, when the room shattered in a flash of heat and power.

Cullen was thrown like a sack against the wall, at least five feet behind him, pieces of the marble railing he'd been resting against coming with him. A few shards of white rock embedded themselves under his arm, the larger chunks bludgeoning his sides and arms, which had thankfully come up to protect his face.

He silently cursed the absence of his armor.

You should've been paying attention! He berated himself, pushing painfully to his feet, loping in the direction he thought the attack had occurred. The room was a blackish haze, darkened by the absence of the multitude of lighted braziers, most of which were put out by the surge of air and debris, and he found himself walking mostly blind.

It had to have been magic, but he hadn't even noticed the mage. There were so many magic users in the room, and his focus had been on Taranari and Florianne, the first because she was magnificent, the second because she was still a potential threat. He had smuggled men into the chamber for the purpose of monitoring the others, possible agents in Celine's assassination, but there were few Templars among them, and none as well trained as himself. He was to blame for the magic attack that was loosed on the chamber, ripping through the area like a bomb.

But he hadn't felt anything; even in a crowd this size, there should have been ripples in his consciousness if a mage were pulling on enough mana to blow up half the room. Had he truly been that distracted that he hadn't noticed?

Groping his way through the smoke and plaster dust, registering that his hearing wasn't quite right, he began to form an idea of what had occurred.

He headed for the center of the chamber, drawing his sword as he realized one of the noises filtering through the fading buzzing in his ears were daggers digging into flesh. Another sense, sight, had also begun to recover, adapting to the gloom, using the thin moonlight creeping through the windows and the few, scattered torches still burning to distinguish shapes and color through the smoke.

When he came to the place he thought Florianne had been, he was greeted with a small crater in the, until moments ago, pristine floor, but the darker shape of a twisted corpse he'd expected was absent.

He had theorized that the Duchess had somehow set off some sort of super grenade he'd never seen before, perhaps with red lyrium, effectively committing suicide before they could hang her, and perhaps taking the Empress' life as well. But her body was gone.

Could it have been burned to dust?

Cullen staved off the thought that Taranari had been the closest person to her.

He needed to get a handle on the situation before he could let worry cloud his mind. The Orlesians were already muddling him enough; having regained their senses much more slowly than Cullen, they'd broken into a chorus of hysterical screaming, intermittently punctuated by the sound of bodies colliding in the haze.

He could no longer make out the wet plunge of the dagger in the din, though he flinched toward where he had last heard it, sweeping a hand in front of him to clear some of the debris out of his line of sight.

A mist of red through the dust cloud filled him with anxiety. Was it Taranari's brilliant hair, or blood, or both? Did he want to know?

He forced his feet ahead, hands tightening around his sword.

Finally, a dim picture fizzled through the smoke, and relief clutched at him like a beggar when he saw Taranari's back, curtained by matted red curls, upright and moving.

For an instant, the most important thing was that she was alive, unbroken, and he wondered that he could possibly feel so whole. But it was a fleeting completeness, and he soon regained control of his emotions, the practicality of a soldier taking over as he saw what she was doing.

Her daggers, the shorter, nimbler set, were clutched in blood drenched hands, her hunched shoulders flexing as she stabbed and raked through a lump of charred flesh at her knees.

The Duchess.

Cullen couldn't see the elf's face from the angle he was approaching, but as he drew closer, he was able to make out a grinding, choking sound coming from her throat beneath the other chaotic noises. It rang with fury and heartache.

The dust was finally beginning to settle as he closed the distance between them, kneeling beside her. She made no acknowledgment of his presence, though he noticed the cuff she'd been wearing on her ear had ripped through the soft skin, hanging askew from both the cartilage it pierced and the skin of her scalp behind that which the other half of the jewelry had impaled. He realized she must have more injuries, but she didn't seem to care about them.

She was intent on grinding Florianne's corpse into a perverse meat loaf.

"Inquisitor," he called gently, though loudly to be heard over the cacophony around them, placing a hesitant hand on her arm.

She recoiled from his touch, a desperate anger in her features as she turned her gaze on him, daggers still embedded in the mangled body. The powders and creams Leliana and Josephine had adorned her face with were smeared with sweat, tears, blood, and plaster from the columns that had been damaged in the explosion, and out of her coated smudge of a face shone her piercing eyes, flinty with hurt and determination.

Cullen steadied himself with a breath at the sight of those eyes, which had awoken something within him he couldn't explain or address at that moment.

"Taranari." He used her name without thinking about it, without giving himself time to doubt. He needed to move through the cloud of emotions swirling across her face, and bring her back to him, where he could help her. He needed to call her by something that had meaning for her, beyond some petty title she refused to simply live by, however much she deserved it.

The twinge of shame at addressing her so informally came later, when her eyes weren't his light source, shining on him even in anger.

But they softened at his call, liquefying into the more familiar amber warmth he was accustomed to, and spilling over with tears he was definitely not familiar with. Yet how could he protest when she shakily relinquished her daggers to him, and melted into his arms?

Though the haze around them was thinning, no one was near enough to see them crouching in the darkness, and even if they had been, he couldn't have pushed her away. Instead, he dropped her daggers on the charred stone and clutched her to his chest, not giving a damn that the shards of marble embedded in his torso were screeching with protest or that the blood coating her leather armor was soaking through his shirt. The rightness of her being so close was almost overwhelming then, but there was a nagging thought that kept him grounded enough to pay attention to the word in her quite sobs.

"Varric," she spit the name out with an anguish that confirmed a deep fear he'd been holding since he regained his feet after the explosion. One of their own had been mortally wounded (or worse) in the blast.

Trying to be gentle, but acting on an urgency that trumped her current comfort, he grabbed her face and forced her to meet his intense gaze. "Where?"

Tears flowed silently down her face. "Solas is trying to heal him, but he won't—" she choked on the words, "I know he's d—"

Cullen pressed a more sympathetic hand to her mouth, stopping her from speaking the cruel word. "Where?" he demanded again, this time more calmly.

There was an old, worn tragedy in her expression as she pointed behind and to the left of her.

Tara watched Cullen's back as he trotted towards her friend's body.

Corpse, she thought, pulling her knees to her chest in the emptiness Cullen had left behind. She felt hollow, numb, as the tears ran silently off her chin, more a reflex now then a product of emotion.

Varric had been on his way to the landing where she'd stood while confronting Florianne to collect Cole, at her signal, who'd shadowed her through the ballroom as backup. She did not want him accompanying her when she spoke to the Empress, however, lest he choose that moment to reveal himself, and Varric was her go-to to keep an eye on the boy, as he'd become a sort of role model to him.

But then her communicative looks shared with Varric turned into a light show that cracked her head against the stone railing separating her body from the upper level of the ballroom, and Cole was dragging her across the floor, down the steps, trying to revive her, taking her to the spot by the stairs where a huge piece of marble railing had fallen on… And the boy was crying helplessly, humanly. Solas said he'd felt his anguish and come.

The elven mage removed the railing with magic, but the wounds… What could he do to uncrush a body? To bring back breath that left it?

Solas did not seem as distressed as she was, however, which made her furious. He kept calmly telling her that the dwarf would recover. He told her to quiet herself, and ordered Cole to aid him. He told her Varric was still alive, still breathing.

And what did she know about healing medicine?

Maybe he will be okay, she thought longingly.

But the sickly pallor and the way the left side of his chest was just… caved, extinguished that hope. She had seen it even through the darkness – his white, slack face, peppered with stubble was burned into the back of her eyelids

She kept flashing back to the dream of her mother's death, the dream she thought was memory, and had a horrid certainty that she was about to lose someone else. It felt similar: the same desperation, the same haunting ache sneaking into her bones.

But she had to know for sure, she decided, dragging herself upright and stumbling forward. She still felt woozy and not fully aware from the explosion, but she followed the path Cullen took with steady enough steps.

Well, they kept her vertical for the most part.

Tara quickly forgot what she'd left behind on the ballroom floor with her daggers, as well as the blood that stained her up to the elbows and permeated her leather's warm, tannery scent with a sharp, sickening tang. The blood and the image would haunt her later, as she attempted to scrub it from her nailbeds and conscience.

For the moment, she had to focus all of her energy on walking, as each step was becoming more difficult. She'd only made about a dozen before Cullen doubled back, a hopeful gleam to his face that made her instantly stiffen in distrust.

"He really is going to be alright." He offered her a small but sincere smile that made her want to flinch away from him; everything was too raw and as the dust filtered from the air, even the pale, hazy darkness felt bright and harsh. Cullen's golden hair, caked with ash and dried blood, seemed blinding; she couldn't look at him for too long.

When he'd found her… She had intended to find Florianne dead, but the woman had only been brutally mutilated, half her body shredded and viscous around her surviving parts. Pained breaths still fluttered through her, her pale eyes wide and blood shot fixed on Tara's face, and the gaping mouth formed pleas of mercy, death.

Tara had given her what she asked for.

The problem had been, she couldn't stop giving. The fury that swelled within her at the woman's audacity to ask for kindness in death was what spurred her hand, not empathy, and the desperate loss she felt in having seen Varric's body, broken, smaller than she'd ever seen it look before, drove her to keep cutting.

Cut away the evil. Cut away the darkness. Cut away the anchor on her hand that made everything so much harder. Cut away Corypheus, who had turned the world into a place she couldn't trust. Give the world a clean break, the red lyrium that swallowed the future she'd seen in Redcliffe a sad memory, obliterated.

Cullen had seen her like that, half out of her mind, and had summoned her back. She was ashamed of her behavior, and that she'd so simply thrown her grief into his chest. She cringed from the blood on his clothes that she'd left, stains from her weakness.

"Is he awake?" the cautious question was directed to the floor, quieter than they'd spoken before, as the nobles seemed to have regained some sense, no longer forcing them to yell.

Cullen drew closer, encouraged by her speech. "Barely."

She noticed that he was limping slightly and favoring his left side – he'd been injured too.

He had apparently noticed how she was shaking, because he offered his right arm in support, wrapping it around her waist at her consent. They hobbled like that for a few steps, but her injuries were making even that difficult, as determination and adrenaline waned. Finally, Cullen scooped her off her feet, wincing at the pain in his abdomen, and quickly ferried her to where Varric lay, surrounded by several figures, one of which was a raven haired woman Tara had met earlier in the evening.

Celine's arcane advisor. Morrigan.

"Well, I am happy to see you alive," the sharp featured mage said by way of greeting. "I am hopeful we will find Celine in as favorable a state."

Tara had to resist the urge to snort. She wouldn't exactly call her current state favorable, despite the muted pleasure she felt at being in Cullen's arms.

A shaky breath drew her attention, and she struggled to her feet, letting Cullen leave his hand at her waist to steady her. She couldn't deny that his presence was unthinkably comforting, and she wanted to keep him near more than she actually needed his support.

She returned for a moment to her trek through the snow the night Haven was attacked.

Tara had drug herself up and down the mountainside through the blizzard, soaked and shivering, unable to feel her hands, clutching them under her arms hoping she wouldn't lose her fingers. Or more.

She'd collapsed with relief and exhaustion when she heard the voices of her companions, having done all she could, expecting the embrace of the icy blanket she'd fallen into many times already. Cullen had caught her before her head hit the ground; he'd wrapped his ever present fur cloak around her, and the warmth of his wide chest and his scent, surrounding her almost instantly, had soothed her into unconsciousness before they even reached the camp. They all thought she'd fainted; she knew the truth.

It was shortly after that, that she'd developed the complex fear of him, cringing from the memories he brought back, but in that moment, he'd been the strength and comfort she needed.

And as she approached Varric's prone form, figures parting to let her pass, Cullen was her strength and comfort again.

It scared her how much she wanted, and sometimes even needed, to rely on him. She couldn't afford to think that way, not when she could so easily lose him. If anything, this experience with Varric had taught her how dangerous her connections to others could be to herself and their cause.

Though the dwarf was, in fact, going to recover ("Took you long enough, Red.") she couldn't shake that feeling of imminent loss.

"I told you it was not as dire as you assumed," Solas said gently, placing a hand on her shoulder as she kneeled down beside them and gripping Varric's hand gratefully. The elf's knowing eyes were studying her again, trying to decipher her grief, her loss of control. She knew he'd never seen her lose control before; she'd been very careful of it.

Cole was unusually silent stting opposite her, his pale, nimble hand wrapped around Varric's rough, hairy one, staring down at the fading bruises and lacerations that had a few minutes ago, threatened his friend's life. She'd seen the fear in him earlier and sympathized. The boy, or whatever he really was, had lost so many he cared for already; she was glad he didn't have to lose Varric too.

"Thank you, Solas," she said quietly, her fingertips ghosting over his hand on her shoulder.

The elf dipped his head, removing his hand. "It was not entirely my doing, Lethallan. The—"

"I," Morrigan interrupted, leaning into the cluster of conversation, "helped him to save your friend."

Tara nodded thoughtfully. "Then my thanks to you as well."

"And mine," Varric groaned, trying to sit up, eyes rolling. "Where's Bianca?" Solas' firm hand on his chest held him back. Of course he would worry about his beloved crossbow at a time like this.

"Do not ruin my work, dwarf," the mage said coldly, glaring at him. Tara noticed that he, too, looked exhausted.

The sound of steel meeting steel and a ripple of Orlesian shouts from the foyer silenced any further conversation, and her currently gathered people were quickly split up, one group heading toward the sound of fighting, the other to where Celine had been at the time of the attack.

She sent Cullen with the first party (though it pained her to order him away, and he looked almost like he wanted to protest), made of a few Inquisition soldiers that had been smuggled into the palace, leading the second herself, consisting of Cole, and the strange raven haired woman, Morrigan. She left Solas behind to defend Varric, if need be.

Cole offered her his shoulder as support as they made their way back across the dark ballroom, which had grown eerily silent, and up the stairs to the dais Celine had been speaking from.

Thankfully, her body was not there, and neither was anyone else's. Actually, the entire area they searched was devoid of people.

"Curious," Morrigan observed, to a silent nod from the elven Inquisitor.

"I propose we join the others. I have a feeling we'll find Celine with her people," Tara observed.

And as they exited the dark haze of the ballroom, that was exactly what they saw: Duke Gaspard, armed with his sword, and the Empress and Briala armed with bows, fighting the Venatori Florianne had left behind alongside Cullen and his men. The unarmed, cowering Orlesians and elven servants were huddled together behind their protectors, oddly quiet as they watched their leaders defend them. It was something strange and magnificent to behold, in a palace which had been consistently demolishing Tara's faith in the empire throughout the evening.

Reaching for her daggers, she realized she'd left them behind in the ballroom. All she had was a small hunting knife. She shrugged off Cole's support, steeling herself to join the battle nevertheless, and take a weapon off the first Venatori she killed, but Morrigan's hand on her forearm stopped her.

"No," the mage hissed. "Your Commander is enough and the battle is almost won. Let them save their country."

Seeing what the shrewd woman was really saying, that a moment like this had the potential to unite a warring empire without further bloodshed made her retreat back into the shadows as asked.

Perhaps the chevalier and elven usurpers need not be silenced after all.