Author's Note: Oh, I'm so sorry it's been so long since an update! But I actually do have a reason why I've been gone - I found out that I'm going to be having a baby! Unplanned, but we're keeping it, and so naturally my life's become a bit hectic (understatement understatement understatement). Little one (don't know if it's a boy or girl yet, I'm only 7 weeks along), is due around December 23, in case anyone's curious (I doubt it, but I'm gonna be a mom so I just have to share, haha).
So this chapter was a little rushed, I found myself with some unexpected computer/internet time and decided to take advantage of it. While it's not as long as I'd hoped to give you folks, I hope you can forgive me at least a little, I really am sorry :(
Also, it was done in WordPad, so I had no spellcheck or grammar check or anything of the sort, and had no time to go back and proofread (I'm rushing to write this now), so please excuse any errors or inconsistencies. I'll try to check next time I get internet, we'll see how it goes.
As always, read and enjoy my dears, and I'll try to get another update up within a month or two!
Since Cullen could barely ride on his own, Toriana ordered them to make camp early. He managed to take care of Aethelstan himself (for which she was grateful, since she didn't want to go anywhere near that beast), but she had to help him with his tent. His hands were shaking so badly that it collapsed whenever he tried tying the ropes, until he was cursing under his breath and looking on the verge of breaking down. No one spoke.
"Here," Toriana said softly, coming up next to him and slowly reaching to take the rope, but even though she tried to be calm and soothing, he still jumped and looked at her wildly, and it took him a moment of glazed-eyed panting before he recognized her and let out a deep breath.
"Sorry," he gasped, dropping the rope and backing away a couple feet, eyes fixed on the ground. Sweat coated his skin, and it was all Toriana could do to keep from brushing a reassuring hand across his brow. But instead she picked up the rope and set up his tent for him, even going so far as to take his bedroll from the ground and lay it out inside.
"If you need anything-anything, just tell me, okay?" she told him, eyes fixed on his face and all previous awkwardness forgotten in her concern for him. He merely took a shaky breath and nodded faintly at the ground, unable to look up into her eyes. She turned away with a spear of pain in her chest, seeing him so unlike himself, so broken. It was almost unbearable.
Toriana finished pitching her own tent and getting her things in order before she joined the rest of the Wardens (besides Cullen, who had retreated into his tent immediately) around the fire and helped herself to a bowl of the thin radish and potato soup Moiraine had put over the flames.
"What exactly is going on, Commander?" Moiraine finally gathered the nerve to ask, timidly, after Tori finished her meal and had been staring into the fire for a while.
The Warden-Commander sat in silence for a minute, eyes fixed on the hypnotically dancing flames. They were beautiful and dangerous, dancing gracefully and swirling but utterly capable of destruction, and so simple was the fire that she found it hard to look away, to leave the comfort and simplicity of the flames and return to the harshness of reality. But eventually she did.
"Lyrium is the main ingredient in mana-replenishing potions," Toriana began, "A highly dangerous element when unrefined, capable of causing defects and insanity, and only marginally safer when it's refined. It's mostly safe for magic-users and those resistant to magic. Mostly. Templars are spoon-fed it in nonlethal amounts by the Chantry from the time they take their first vows to 'harness their talents,' they say." She snorted bitterly, "More to control them with a hard-to-obtain drug and an addiction that will kill you if you try to stop."
Carver interjected, "That doesn't make sense, why would the Chantry do such a thing?" He sounded incredulous, stubborn.
Toriana smiled mirthlessly, "Templars aren't allowed to have families, they're encouraged to disconnect from any family and friends they may already have. They live with other lonely people their whole harshly disciplined lives, suppressing other human beings made different by no choice of theirs, seeing some horrors that would break a person, sometimes dying in their service or, adversely, learning to hate what they do. Most people with a choice would leave within a few years, but how can you do that when you're addicted to lyrium and the only way you can have it is to stay a Templar?"
That was met with silence. Toriana stared glumly into the fire for a minute, letting that much sink in before continuing. She explained the side-effects of lyrium withdrawls, the high mortality rate, the even higher risk of insanity. She told them exactly what could happen to Cullen. In the end she had to fight to keep the anger - anger that this would happen to such a good man, anger that it happened only after she realized she loved him, anger at the injustice of it all - from tightening her throat and bringing tears to her eyes. She fetched an oiling cloth and her staff and began to clean and polish it as minutely as possible, digging the dirt and dried blood out of every little etching, every small crevice. It kept her mind and body occupied, kept her from screaming and throwing the nearest thing into the fire, from cursing the gods and crying till she had no energy left in her.
Moiraine, once again, was the one that broke the silence. "What... what are we gonna do, Commander?" Her voice was soft, concerned, pained for her friend and the newest Warden.
Toriana didn't say anything for a long time, just focused on getting a tiny pebble out from a wolf's mouth with her knife. When finally she worked it free, she looked up, and her eyes were red and tired, more tired than the redheaded Warden had ever seen her, and when she spoke her voice was weary. "You get some rest. I'll take first watch."
Mekel growled low in his throat, "He's going to slow us down and take up supplies, and he might go crazy and attack us. Val Chevin is less than a week's ride away, only a couple days if we push it; I say we drop him there."
Toriana's eyes flashed and her mouth tightened. Nostrils flared dangerously, and when she spoke her voice was tight and barely restrained, the words clipped short as if she could baredly contain her fury. "I said, I'll take first watch. Good night."
That made them disperse quickly. It was a very rare thing for the Commander to get so angry at her recruits, but when she did it was a warning that if they did not stop what they were doing, there would be serious trouble.
When she was alone, Toriana tried to keep working on her staff, but she couldn't focus, could barely bring herself to lift the dragonbone. She sighed and set the staff and cloth down and looked up at the rapidly darkening sky. The days were getting shorter and shorter as winter approached; soon they would have to start travelling after dark or they would lose many precious hours. Now the sky was just starting to show stars. The King's Eye was the biggest one, large and fiery red and blazing above all the rest. Toriana couldn't even remember the story associated with it and the constellation that went with it. Wynne had been the one to teach her that one, when she was much younger back at the Circle.
She wondered where the old healer was now, whether she was even still alive. A morose thought, but in her life Toriana had grown used to the thought of her friends dying. A high-risk lifestyle had consequences. And especially now she found herself thinking dark thoughts.
It was nearly an hour later when Tori heard rustling and the creak of armor and turned to see Cullen crawling out of his tent and slowly walking to sit a polite distance from her. His breathing was shaky, and he ran a sweaty hand through his hair, making it stick up even more. There was a bit of an awkward silence, but after a few minutes Cullen broke it, wringing his hands.
"I... I c-can't figure out how to get m-my armor of-off..." he choked out, his face going from deathly pale to sickly green within seconds. He looked as if he wanted anything but to be there, saying that to her, right then.
Tori's mouth dropped open, but seeing the tortured look on his face made her close it quickly. Was he asking her to help him take his armor off?
But she couldn't leave him helpless like that, not if he was already so far gone as to be unable to take of his armor - he had been wearing armor for most of his life, the withdrawls had to be bad if he couldn't manage to take it off himself - so she scooted closer to sit in front of him and slowly reached out a hand towards his side.
His nostrils flared like a terrified animal and he clearly stopped himself from moving away, and she looked down and found that her hand was trembling as she touched it to the buckle on his side. Maker but it killed her to see him like this! "It's okay, Cullen, it's me, Toriana," she murmured softly, in a voice to comfort a frightened child.
That seemed to calm him slightly, and as her hands got to work undoing the buckles on his sides, he stared down at them silently. When she lifted her hands to unclasp the buckle on his shoulder, near his neck, he sucked in a sharp breath and looked up at her with frightened, utterly unguarded eyes, and what she saw there made her reel. He was afraid. Not just the basic fear, but deeply, instinctually terrified, and somehow she knew it wasn't just because her hand was near his exposed neck, but for the fear that he was losing himself, losing his mind. And he looked to her as if she could save him.
It was then that Toriana knew she would never give up on him, that she would stay by him and help him no matter what, until he was better or... or... or she couldn't think of the alternatives.
Removing the rest of his armor didn't take much time, as he no longer resisted, and soon it was in a pile beside them and he sat only in a cotton tunic and pants.
"Is it alright if I touch you?" she whispered, surprising herself, and even more to her surprise Cullen seemed to come a little back to himself as his cheeks tinged pink and he opened his mouth to respond. When nothing came out but a choked little squawk, he shut it and nodded meekly, amber eyes startlingly wide.
Toriana didn't know what she was doing, she had no idea what she was doing - what in the nine hells was she doing? - but it seemed as if something was drawing her along, something pulled her forward to put her arms tentatively around him and, sensing that his tenseness was from surprise and awkwardness and not fear, pulled his head gently down to rest in the crook od her neck. He gasped in surprise, but as she pressed her cheek to his soft golden-auburn hair and rubbed her hands soothingly up and down his back, he slowly began to relax until his arms hesitantly came up to wrap around her waist and his breathing slowed against her neck.
"Everything will be okay," she murmured, in a voice that sounded more sure than she felt (and calmer, too, considering her pulse was racing to have him pressed against her like that, his lips barely touching her skin and sending goosebumps travelling down her spine). "I'll protect you." Even as the words left her lips she knew there was no going back, that she had crossed a boundary that could not be crossed over again. She could feel it in the sudden press of Cullen's fingers against her back, in the way his beath quickened slightly, in the way she suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to run, run before things got awkward and she was hurt!
But for once Toriana didn't run. She stayed, and held him until he finally, reluctantly, pulled away and looked directly into her eyes. The shadows under his hand darkened even more since earlier, she noted, and the look he gave her was somewhat guarded, almost accusing. "Is this some trick?" he asked softly as his hands fell away from her sides and into his lap, "Are you merely leading me on yet again to drop me as soon as you feel the desire?" His tone was flat, with a hint of bitterness.
Tori froze. She hadn't been expecting that, to say the very least. And now the look he gave her, so obviously hurt by her previous actions, made her suck in a sharp breath and furrow her brow, "Cullen, I... I didn't mean to-to hurt you, I..." She bit the inside of her cheek to distract her from the urge to cry, to break down and tell him everything, about Alistair, about her broken heart, about her stupidity. But now wasn't the time, especially not for a hysterical confession.
"I was a fool, I was mean, I..." her voice cracked with guilt, with shame, and she dropped her eyes to the ground, "I'm sorry I hurt you. I won't be so stupid again."
There was a long silence as Cullen stared at her and she avoided his eyes, hating herself for what she had done and, petty as it was, hating him now for putting her on the spot and confronting her like he was. Finally, when she was about to cringe away and put a modest distance between them, he spoke as if he had never brought the subject up.
"Will you... stay w-with me tonight? So I can s-sleep? The nightmares..." he trailed off, his eyes now shuttered and dark, not noticing that she had looked up in surprise and indignance at first. "They're horrible. Worse than before. I can't sleep." His voice was raw, tortured, but when he glanced up at her there was a far-off hint of warmth, buried under the shadows. "But you help me, if you're just... there... it might..." he trailed off, his eyes becoming blank and confused, as if he'd forgotten what he'd been saying.
Toriana was frozen, but finally she nodded and cleared her throat. As uncomfortable as it would be, she would do it for him, she owed him that much - and much more. "O-of course," she whispered.
And then it seemed like no time passed at all before she'd woken Carver for second watch and crawled under Cullen's tent beside him. He instantly curled up on his side away from her, allaying her vague (and utterly unfounded) fears that he was perhaps trying to persuade her into more sex, and she lay on her side facing him, watching over him as he gradually fell asleep.
It wasn't long before the nightmares started, and he muttered and sweated and tossed and turned. Once he rolled to face her and was shaking violently, and she reached out to put a hand against his burning forehead. At first he jerked back and from his throat came a hissing noise, but after a moment he calmed and pressed into her touch, eyes tightly closed and hands tangled into his blanket. The nightmare slowly subsided and Toriana eventually fell into sleep beside him with dread in her heart.
She didn't know how she was going to do this. If this was only the first week, bad as it was, what would the second week bring? She was terrified to think of it.
And even if she did manage to miraculously heal him, to pull him out of the dark hole he was in, where would that leave them? How could he ever forgive her? How could she ever forgive herself for hurting him the way she had?
Toriana didn't know what she dreaded more, the thought of Cullen losing himself and going crazy or dying, or him being healed and hating her for the rest of her days.
I also forgot to mention that this chapter was kind of crappy, I apologize again :/ Next will be better, I promise!