Prompt: There are no victories, only battles
Sometimes he wonders if he's making a difference. Day after day they come to him with their wounds, their broken bones, their festering ulcers, their pregnant women with breech babes, and he does what he can for as long as he can.
But sometimes magic isn't enough.
The baby is too small, too early to be born. Anders's magic cannot force the child to stay within the womb, only ease its passage. Covered in its mother's blood and the slime of afterbirth, the child-a boy-mewls pitifully for an hour or so before succumbing to internal deformities that doomed him the moment he was conceived.
He turns away from the quietly sobbing parents, ragged with exhaustion, his pool of mana a mere trickle. He needs to rest.
"Healer! Help! My brother, he's hurt bad!" A pair of boys, not past their thirteenth year stumble into his clinic. One is holding his hand to his eye, blood running down his face to stain his shirt. Anders turns to the nearest empty cot-he needs to sanitize it before letting the child sit there-but his magic refuses to respond. He's bone tired and a child might die because of it.
Anders closes his eyes in defeat. "I'm sorry, but-" His eyes fly open as a hand closes on his.
Hawke's eyes are determined and clear, her mouth lifting in a brief smile of greeting.
"What... what are you doing here?" He's given her the maps she'd wanted; what else could she possibly need?
"Show me what to do," she says simply.
He stares at her, eyes flicking to the staff she held ready in one hand. To trust his patients with another, so untested... yet, she had healed that guardsman in that fight with the templars, right?
"You cannot win every battle down here," he says.
Hawke lifts a shoulder in a shrug and goosebumps roll over his skin as healing magic blossoms at her fingertips. "But I can still fight."