Anders, Post-game Living in Tevinter
It was the one place the chantry could not reach him. Not the Orlesian chantry, anyway, and the Tevinter chantry had no interest in punishing a mage who'd destroyed an edifice belonging to their rivals.
He found it darkly amusing that it was the words of Fenris that had made him even think of coming here, after Hawke had told him to leave Kirkwall. Ordered him to leave - made it clear that if he remained, she'd kill him herself. He'd almost thought he wanted that, at first, but once he'd started moving, he'd realized how much he wanted to live. He'd fled the city in a panic, not even daring to return to his clinic in Darktown to retrieve anything - not food, or clothing, nor the little money he had left, nothing.
As he huddled in a his robes that night, hiding in a cave that was little more than a sandy-floored nook in a tumble of rocks, words Fenris had once said came back to him. "You should have lived in Tevinter. You'd be happier there. There, your magic would be a mark of honour."
The elf had not meant them for advice; they'd been meant to be cutting word, coupled as they were with mention of owning slaves, and blood magic, but he saw the wisdom in them then. He might not want to be a Magister, as Fenris so obviously imagined - but he'd heard healers were respected in Tevinter, and left largely out of the political machinations of the magisters.
Surely, he told himself, life would be better for him here. Surely not all lesser mages ended up as thralls or slaves - did they?
Fenris/Anders – Family
"You don't remember anything about them at all?" Anders asked, surprised.
"No. My earliest memory is of unbearable pain, as these marks were made in my flesh," Fenris said sharply. "I do not recall my family at all. Can we drop this line of questioning now?"
"All right. Sorry," Anders mumbled, and went back to grinding elfroot for poultices.
They worked in silence for a while, Fenris picked over the bundles of weedy growths, stripping the leaves from the stems and piling them near at hand for the mage for process. He still wasn't sure why he'd volunteered to help; possibly because of the mage's comment that so many of them were used up on him, since he preferred not to be magically healed if it could be avoided.
"What about your own family?" he suddenly asked. "Do you remember them?"
Anders paused, pestle motionless in his hands. "A little," he said softly, then added another handful of leaves to the mortar and resumed pulping them, frowning as he worked. "For so many years I tried to purposefully forget... a lot of it has faded. I remember the colour of my mother's hair, the sound of my father's voice, the smell of their clothes... but their faces? Even what name I answered to back then... it's all gone."
They worked on in silence for a while.
"I did not think it would be that easy to forget," Fenris ventured after a while. "Everything that has happened since I... awoke again. I remember clearly."
Anders shrugged. "People's minds are funny places. Everyone remembers things differently. And sometimes... sometimes people are thankful, to be able to forget. Aren't there things you wish you didn't remember?"
A soft snort. "All too many of them." A long pause, then, quietly, "But I do wish I remembered what family I'd had, before. If I even had one."