In her mind, she pictured it. She pictured that dark library room, a cave made of bookshelves and power, just after she had left. She tried to see what had happened. She imagined a thick, wet sort of power in the air, she imagined Delia, pulling at Anders, pulling at his innermost workings, dragging out the parasite that Justice had become. She imagined the smell of ozone, the crackle of power; she imagined Fenris in the corner, the elf not sure if this was indeed at all how it was supposed to happen.
She tried to think of the Justice she knew, but she realized that that wasn't the spirit, the demon, the entity, the thing that had been separated from Anders, but that was all she knew how to see. She watched it being dragged out of the mage, her mage, her healer, watched it come pouring out of his eyes and his nose and his mouth, and she saw Fenris draw his sword as the spirit, the thing took a more corporeal form than anyone had been expecting, she saw Fenris draw his sword and she saw the lyrium coursing over his brown skin and she saw the warrior cut the spirit down.
And she heard Anders scream.
That was what she saw in her mind as she charged down the hall to Fenris' quarters, that was what fueled her, powered her down the hall and through his door; if it had been locked, it wouldn't have mattered, it might have been for all she knew.
"You," she growled in a voice nothing like her own, thundering at Fenris who stood by the window. If she had been more cognizant, she would have realized that it almost seemed as though he were waiting for her. But her wits were not about her and she grabbed him by his collar, and though he was of a greater height than her, she drug him down and pulled his face to hers.
"You had no right," she spat. "You had no right to do that to him!" Mahariel's volume, her pitch was rising; the door to the hallway stood open and she could not have cared less. She shook Fenris, and his fingers wrapped around her wrists, but he made no move to stop her; only looked her dead in the eye, his jaw set.
His voice was quiet, but his words stopped her cold. "I know."
She let him go, but he kept his hands on her wrists as she pulled her arms into her chest. "You… what?"
"Lyna, listen to me. Delia spoke to you. I knew she would. What I did, I…" he shook his head. "It doesn't matter." His hands moved to her shoulders. "That thing, inside of him. It was the only thing I - it was the only thing anyone could have done."
"The only thing?" she gasped. "The only thing!"
"Yes, Lyna. The only thing. What would you have had me do? What would you have done if you had still been there? Delia could not manage it, she could not dispel or free it. Even her blood magic failed her. It had to be destroyed."
"But he -"
"I know. I think I knew it then, too. If I could have said for certain, do you think it would have stopped me? Should it have?" He slipped his hands from her shoulders to her elbows and held her back a bit. "What would you have done?" He touched her hair, his eyes darting across her face. "Hate me. I will understand. But know this - I am not sorry. That was why you wanted me there. That? Was what you could not have done."
"Lady Mahariel?" Anissa's soft whisper came from the doorway.
Mahariel spun around, breaking free of Fenris' grasp. Her eyes were red and damp.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt… He's awake."
Mahariel was running again, always running, and this time Fenris was hot on her heels. She still hadn't taken her armor off, hadn't had a moment's real rest, and she clanked and shuddered as her boots rang off of the stone. It wasn't far, but it seemed like a thousand miles, and Mahariel knew what a thousand miles felt like.
Why had she left him? She had been right there, could have been next to him when he woke. What had been his first thought, his first thought without Justice in almost a decade? She should have been there, should have -
But when Mahariel burst through the door Delia was already there at Anders' side, and Anders was sitting up in bed, his robes only slightly askew, and he was smiling.
Smiling.
"Lyna," he asked her in a calm, gentle tone, "what's wrong?"
In the doorway, she couldn't breathe. She couldn't tell. She approached him slowly, like he might attack at any moment, her hands reaching out and holding him back at the same time. But she took step after step closer to his bedside.
"Anders," she said softly, "how are you feeling?"
He kept smiling. "I… wonderful," he said. "Light." He looked up at Delia, and kept smiling.
Mahariel pulled off her gloves, let the drop to the floor with a solid clunk, and she reached out, and touched the sides of his face, touched his rough, auburn stubble, his course, dishwater blond hair.
"What's it like in there?" she asked him slowly, rubbing her thumbs along the creases in his forehead, creases that hadn't been there when they had first met.
"I might ask you the same thing."
He wasn't.
He was all there.
He was Anders.
Her hands fell from his face and she collapsed into his lap, her forehead pressed against his belly, and she laughed and cried at the same time. "It worked!" she said into the plush fabric of his robes. "Maker's breath, Delia, it worked!" She was nearly hysterical, taking Anders robes in her fists and clinging to them with a vengeance, not looking up to the woman at Anders' bedside but thanking her profusely.
Slowly, she picked up her head and murmured, "Oh, Andraste, Delia, you had me so worried, so scared…"
Mahariel turned her head to the doorway just in time to see Fenris bow his head and duck out of the room. But she would deal with that later.
"I'll let you two have some space," Delia said with a grin.
"Oh, but you don't -" Mahariel started.
"Oh, but I do. And I'm exhausted. I think it's going to take more than a few hours to recover from that. A few days perhaps," and she dismissed herself, closing the door behind her.
"I remember this room," said Anders. "I remember loving this room, because I could be alone and," his face fell sharply, "hating it. Because I was alone."
"You were never really alone, Anders," Mahariel said, climbing up to sit on the edge of the bed next to him.
"I wasn't," he agreed, "and I was." He reached out his hand and took hers, the only bare skin on her aside from her face, and gave her fingers a squeeze. His skin was warm.
His skin was warm.
His eyes were clear.
His color was good.
Mahariel put her free hand to her mouth and gasped.
Anders nodded his head.
"It's gone. I can feel it."
"I don't believe you, how -"
"I don't know. Delia only had a few moments to speak to me, but she made it sound like she took more than just Justice out of me. Something else came with him, and she didn't know if -"
"Anders, I thought I made you Tranquil!" Mahariel blurted. It was almost a shriek, almost a laugh.
"What?"
"She said…" Mahariel shook her head. "Until you woke up we couldn't know. She told me the same thing, that something more than Justice had been released from you. I thought - of course I thought the worst. Isn't that what happens to mages? To keep this from happening in the first place? What else could I have thought? That Justice had been with you so long he couldn't be pulled out… out cleanly. That he took all of that spirit, that connection to the Fade, with you. And when Fenris cut him down -"
"When Fenris did what?" He let go of her hand.
"He… He couldn't go back to the Fade, Anders. He was changed."
Anders eyes fell. "That… was what I had tried to prevent. That was why I did what I did. To keep one more spirit from being wiped away; there are so few left now…"
"You said it yourself, Anders. He wasn't Justice anymore. Maybe he wasn't a demon. Maybe he was. Maybe he was something in between."
"Maybe it was the Blight."
Mahariel picked up her head and looked ceiling-ward. How had it never occurred to her? Anders was a man, and perhaps Justice had been warped by his anger, his desire, but Anders was more than a man. He was a Grey Warden. There was - had been - something else that lived inside of him this whole time. Maybe Justice hadn't been the only thing fighting for space inside of Anders' head.
"It doesn't matter," she heard him say through her thoughts. "It's over. It's done now. I am… who I was. Who I used to be."
"That's not entirely true," Mahariel said. "You're still Anders. You're still the mage who defended Vigil's Keep. The healer of Darktown. The catalyst for the mage rebellion. That's still you."
The corner of his lip twitched, and she couldn't tell if it was supposed to be a smile or not. "That was what I told Hawke."
"Hm?"
"When… you gave me the list. The recipe. I told Hawke the ingredients were… for a potion to free myself from Justice."
"Well," Mahariel said, sitting up tall next to him, her hands in her lap, "in a roundabout way, I suppose it turns out that they were."
His lip twitched again, and this time it was definitely a grin. "That's one way to look at it."
"Can I see your…" she motioned her hands along the side of her body, where the worst of Anders Blighted skin had been.
He obliged by carefully beginning to undo all the fastenings on his robes. She waited patiently; his fingers had not entirely recovered, she noticed, and realized perhaps all his ailments were not from the Blight or the spirit; perhaps there was still work to do. But as he let his robes fall open, and Mahariel reached out her hands to push back the black fabric all along his ribs and around to his spine, Mahariel saw almost nothing. The skin was fresh, pink; there were small puckers, like scars on new flesh after a bad burn well-healed, and that was all. There were even small, pale freckles dotting his skin; freckles like the ones that dotted the rest of him as well.
"It looks good," she said.
"That doesn't matter. I… can't hear it anymore. That's how I knew. I woke up and for the first time in, Maker, in so long, it was silent. Blessedly silent. I thought I'd gone deaf, or died. And then I opened my eyes and I was in this little room, and I thought that if I'd died and been denied the Maker, I'd be in the Void, and it wouldn't look like this, and if I'd died and joined the Maker at his side - fat chance of that - it would probably look a lot more like your bedroom than mine." And he winked at her.
And she kissed him.
Author's note: Hey guuuuuys, the first chapter of my NaNoWriMo project, Inquisition, Indiana, is up! Please head on over and check it out. Posting may be very slow-going because unlike my previous projects I wrote more than 80,000 words of it before I edited it at all, which is why I posted the first chapter now; kind of a place-holder so you guys know that it's like, a real thing. Oh, and also, I still have to finish it.
Anyway, happy Turkey Day to all my US-ian friends, if I don't post again before then. Eat pie for me.
