A/N - I've been using verses from a single prayer out of the chant of light for Cullen. It's also the one he quotes from after the Arbor Wilds in game. I'm shocked how well it fits.
A/N part 2 - It's book release day for Dwarves in Space 2 so I might be a wee bit panicky right now. PANIC
9:44 Anderfells
Littered across every backroad, forgotten thicket, and dried up riverbed on thedas rested towns of such little note no one bothered to jot them on a map or sometimes even name them. The three of them wandered into such a one hoping to find anywhere to pull back a chair and rest for the night. It proved more difficult than expected, as not only was the barely-a-village home to only a chantry and half tavern - the other half being the chantry itself - but the pair of them did not project the most welcoming of visage. Alistair's cheek swelled until he couldn't see out of his left eye; red dots broke out over the surface of the black bruise giving him the look of a plague carrier. Cullen wasn't in a much better state with his own bruises and constant scowl lengthening his hunched brow. He couldn't sleep after their fight, though the king went down almost instantly - his snoring jagged enough to keep any wild animals far from their uncovered camp.
With Lana's phylactery pressed in his hands, Cullen watched the stars slide through their nightly dance while he tried to recite all of the Chant of Light. He was no chanter himself and had to mumble through a few forgotten passages. By the time the sun rose, he startled from the king's hand on his shoulder, not out of sleep but from an almost hallucinatory state. His frozen fingers ached from how tightly he clung to her bottle willing it to do what the king promised it would, but no red light poured forth, no life returned.
It was Honor, out of all of them, who managed to secure lodging in the home of the Mayor/Guard Captain/Bartender. Diversifying was the only hope most small villages had of surviving. She had every intention to kick the dangerous ingrates out of her little town until she caught sight of the mabari gnawing upon a back leg and the woman melted. While the humans were left at a tight corner table, doing their best to not look at each other, the Mayor dangled all manner of succulent treats in front of Honor's nose. She'd preface each course with "I'm not sure if you'll like this" as if his dog wasn't prone to eating anything put in front of her, including but not limited to rocks, mud, sea urchins, and one pirate's eye patch.
Rolling the full mug around in his hands, the king kept glancing over at Honor lolling about in the floor in pure joy, then returning to his alcohol of some variety that had never before been categorized. He'd been quiet for their entire day's march towards the west, the silence digging a knife into Cullen's gut. Either it was guilt or a fear the king was waiting to retaliate; he couldn't be certain.
"Has it," Alistair began, then dropped his voice down as if the Mayor wasn't distracted singing a song with the mabari, "has it returned?"
Cullen's hand ran down the side of his leg, glancing upon the bulge from the phylactery in his pocket, "No."
The king frowned deeper. He dabbed his sleeve against his watering left eye and risked a full glug of the drink. "It's never taken this long before."
"So you say," Cullen countered with, but there was no victory there. He didn't want to be proven right.
"Maker," the king slopped his head forward on the table, "the suspense is killing me. Lanny better have a...a good reason to be playing around like this." He tried to laugh but it folded into a croak, the man rolling his forehead back and forth across the tabletop while he recited something unintelligible under his breath.
After a night and a day of this, Cullen couldn't stand anymore. Struggling to his feet, he smiled at the Mayor and asked, "Madam, may I head to my room? I could use sleep."
"Uh," she broke from a game of tug with Honor and a dishtowel. "Of course. There's only the one room and..."
"It will be fine," Cullen sighed. After the day, sharing a room with the man seemed the least worst news he could receive.
"Second door on the left, up the stairs," she said pointing in the direction behind her. Honor released her hold on the towel and took point as her master shuffled past.
Cullen waved a hand at her, "No, you can stay and play." Woofing once, Honor's entire backside wagged and she scooped up the towel to shove in the Mayor's hands. Trudging up the stairs one at a time, Cullen clutched his head tight, the pounding increasing through his veins.
Behind him, he heard the Mayor ask the only other person in the room, "Are you and he, um...close?"
Almost sad to have missed the king's stutter or more likely vapid response, Cullen stumbled into the second door on the left. It was pinker than he expected. Not the soft pastel pink of a nug's skin but a blaring and nauseating hue that seemed the shade to induce a homicidal rage if anyone gazed upon it too long. It was the kind of pink you feared to find on the edge of death while staring at the back of your eyes, or fresh blood mixed into white soap. Maker, that was not a fun malifecarum to take down. Sure, he's an evil blood mage who was chopping people up, but his soap makes skin so smooth and silky. It can even wear away wrinkles. It was the first time he'd ever seen Meredith blink in the face of such public scorn.
On the plus side, there were two beds in the room. Cullen slumped onto the first, baring a pink bedspread of course, and his backend sank another foot deeper towards the ground. He could feel the floor skimming not even an inch below him. It didn't matter, it was off the ground, that was the height of luxury for him now. Digging his boots off and placing them under the bed, he twisted around to lay out and discovered he was nearly a foot too tall for it as well.
"Can today go worse? I'm asking in case you had more planned as I'd prefer to get it out of the way now."
Andraste didn't answer his plea, but the whine of the mattress from the Blessed Age did. He massaged his temples, certain there had to be another four wrinkles added to his growing mass. Maker only knew how many more grey hairs snuck in overnight. A chuckle rumbled in Cullen's throat at how he'd look to Lana now - ragged, aging, drawn, and haggard after two years of commanding armies. She'd probably shriek and run back into the fade.
He meant for it to help, to ignite a lightness in his darkened soul, but everything crashed inside of him. Walking kept him distracted, kept him from thinking about her, about the possibilities. After she fell into the fade, he'd often take meandering constitutionals around Skyhold before bed in the hopes he'd wear himself out so sleep would be instantaneous. By day, it was easy to throw himself into work, a hundred people needing to speak to him, needing to use him for whatever purpose was required of the commander. Night was when it struck him, when he was no longer the commander and only Cullen. When the final report was sealed up to be trundled off to Josephine, Leliana, or the Inquisitor in the morning, he'd lower the lantern light and find himself alone. His room was no longer the almost homey refuge from before, but a desolate prison. Each breath rattled through the thin air, amplified by the lack of feet stomping past his desk, the lack of bodies filling up his space, the lack of anyone breaking apart the endless void. He thought he was alone in Kirkwall, that he'd kept himself beyond the other templars, certainly beyond the mages or any civilians in the city. This was a whole new type of loneliness; the cliched frozen man with his nose pressed against a window pane watching the roaring fireplace and happy family inside.
"Lana," Cullen whispered aloud. His eyes burned from exhaustion and he screwed them up tight. "I wish you were here. I wish you were always here." Digging into his pocket, Cullen's fingers ran over the phylactery but he felt no life stirring inside. That wasn't what he intended for and he kept reaching until he grabbed onto the black crystal wadded below. Laying the pendant upon his chest, Cullen cupped a hand over what had once contained darkspawn blood. He never meant to keep it, she was right to suggest someone look into it, use it for anything to help. Then she fell and he couldn't part with the only piece of her she ever gave him.
When he needed to hear her words, to know she felt even a fragment of what he did for her, Cullen would flip through her journal. But if he needed to connect with her, to give himself a rung of life worth clinging to, he'd wrap his calloused palm around the crystal and squeeze hard enough to leave indentations. Now he rolled it around on his sternum, struggling to find a peace of mind.
"I wish I was better at this," he whispered to the pink room. "Better at talking to you, better at explaining what I'm thinking to you. I know you were in pain, it...Maker, I felt it too. Which isn't to say it was the same, that- Am I screwing it up without you even being here? Naturally. I wonder sometimes, if you'd reached out to me from your Keep, would I have gone to you? Left the order, stood by your side and abandoned the chantry to its own devices? A part of me wishes to believe it, believe I was a better man even then. If I had, if I'd been there for you, even responded to your one letter, for the love of Andraste, told you you weren't alone, I-I..."
He had no answer. In his heart, Cullen wanted to believe that if he'd done something for her she'd never have traveled to Seheron with the king, never fallen into such despair she took the Calling, met Hawke, and lost her wardens in the process. As if he could have shielded her from machinations beyond the both of them by some imaginary power of love. It was ludicrous, but it felt like the proper punishment for him. She tried, opened herself up, risked everything for his sake and what did he give her in return? Backed her into a corner? Made her feel terrible because she couldn't love him, may never love him? Was it such a surprise she chose to stay behind? To leave him?
For the first time in months, he felt the thirst clawing up his tongue - one that couldn't be slaked by any water or mead. It came at his most vulnerable. Even after five years of being free from the chantry and three from its song, the lyrium never left his mind, not fully. One philter and he'd feel whole again, right, not stripped for parts with his veins drained. He could drift away into the certainty that came with it, to have duty drilled into his marrow the way it once did. No more questioning every choice or wondering why. Cullen gripped tight to her pendant, swallowing repeatedly to try and drown out the thirst.
"I will be strong enough, I am strong enough for this. To reach the end of this..." Cullen's mantra drifted away as he wondered what would happen to him if after all this heartache they found nothing, or worse, came too late? Would there even be a reason for him to keep fighting? "Lana, I... Why does he call you Lanny? Why do they both keep on with that one?"
"Because," the king's voice broke from the door and Cullen sat bolt upright, his hand clenching around the protect the pendant. "That's what she told us all to call her. Sorry for listening to that part," he sounded broken himself, his good eye red rimmed as if from too much drink. But the man'd only had a pint. Alistair slid into the room and crumpled onto his bed, "All of us during the blight, we called her Lanny. I asked her once why that one, and not the Lana the mages used. Apparently, someone in the tower called her Lana and she didn't want to think about him."
Cullen narrowed his eyes and laid back, "I do not know who you refer."
"Jowan, it was Jowan. The one who..." Alistair paused, a snort reverberating in his bruised but not broken nose, "broke her heart. Then I went and did the same thing, bad enough to cover over her oldest friend becoming a blood mage and all but leaving her as a sacrifice for the templars. Maker, I'm an ass." He dropped his forehead into his lap, then groaned as his cheek brushed against thigh. "Just, tell me we'll find her, that she'll be right as rain and Lanny'll come waltzing back into our lives as if she never even left. I can't, I know she..."
Even with his head muffled by his lap, Cullen could hear the tears welling up in Alistair's eyes. He screwed his own up tighter to stem any threatening to rise. Barely pausing in his anguish, the king continued, "She was in pain, because of me, because I... For the love of the Maker, I knew all about her bad turns and yet I thought she needed time to herself, to fix it alone without me. You were right, she stayed behind because of what I did."
"No," Cullen's lips moved before his brain could shout at him to stop, "it was me."
Alistair lifted his head, snot dribbling down his nose, which he wiped away with the back of his hand. He let the tears continue unabated. "You? You didn't do anything. She blighted loved you."
He hated this man, hated him beyond reason, beyond a point of no return. They'd only tried to kill each other twenty four hours prior. Alistair didn't deserve to know a single thing about him. "She didn't. I pushed it on her, placed my own feelings upon her head, and she told me she wasn't ready to return them."
"I...uh," Alistair extended a hand out as if he needed to pass Cullen a kerchief or something. "I'm sorry."
"Why? Maybe she couldn't face up to telling me the truth of it, that she'd never feel for me what I did for her, so she remained behind." He'd never said aloud what flitted through his mind at the darkest hours. Cullen needed to blame someone, and he couldn't put it upon Lana - not again- so he turned to the next likely candidate, himself.
He expected the king to shake his head, huff off to sleep, or make some snide joke. Instead, the man slapped both his hands against his thighs, startling Cullen. "That is pure bullshit if I've ever heard it, and I'm surrounded by nobility constantly. I've heard every grade of bovine feces. Lanny, Lana, whatever you call her, she'd never in an age, in two ages, three give up on someone she cares even an iota about. And if Leliana noticed, spotted it enough to try and stick it to me years later, Lana cared deeply. I don't know why she wasn't ready. I assume it was my fault, most things are, but I knew that woman for eleven years."
"I thought you were only together for the blight," Cullen spoke up.
"Exactly, one year as lov...more and ten as friends. I've watched her rain fire down on people who'd so much as look crosseyed at people she'd befriend. She took on the crows for an elf that tried to kill us. Her friends were family, end of story, and she'd fight through anything for them." In the middle of his tirade, Alistair leaned so far forward he was in danger of falling clean off his bed. Suddenly realizing it, he didn't scoot back, but reached a hand down to the floor to anchor himself. "Look, Lanny, she didn't do the romance stuff much. She tried, but things kept getting in the way."
Things such as a nosy king of Ferelden, Cullen thought. Then his traitorous brain threw up a familiar refrain: duty, command, never becoming attached for fear of suffering loss, thinking he didn't deserve it.
Alistair touched his bruised cheek and hissed from the pain. "If she tried with you, even a little bit of letting herself fall, shirking her duties and stopped being aloof, then she was far more gone than you can imagine. And now I'm sick and tired of trying to give a pep talk to the man who blackened half my face. If you don't mind, sleep's all I want to hear now." Without even prying off his boots, Alistair spun around onto his bed, faced the wall, and buried his head into the pillow. His feet hung off the edge, the man not caring a whit - he was already asleep.
Cullen licked his fingers to dampen the candle. By the light of the moon hovering in the window he watched the smoke dance off the wick. Rolling onto his back, Cullen wrapped his hands around Lana's pendant in prayer and recited the first words to rise in his troubled mind, "I have faced armies with You as my shield, and though I bear scars beyond counting, nothing can-can break me...except your absence."