Note: Lines are for timeskips.
Cassandra
Even chained, he was large, built from stone and mortar and granted life by Andraste's breathe.
His hand crackles, and the first sound he makes is a groan that seems to make the mountains quake and the stones her boots are standing on sit up and tremble. He sits up, and she learns that his eyes are bluer than the sky and deeper than the seas.
She swallows, an idle thought wondering if she could manage this man if he wasn't already exhausted and bound.
But he seems compliant. He rests on his haunches, blinking slowly as he considers the room. His eyes fall upon her, and she must set her scowl more firmly on her lips as she approaches. He is muscle and strength, and ordinarily, she might find him attractive. There's a scar on his lip, another above his eye. One looks like a busted lip, split and never healed. The other, perhaps the edge of a shield. Driven in and creasing the honeyed skin of his face.
She ignores the questions she wants to ask him.
She focuses on the questions she needs to ask him.
He has things to answer for.
She finds out far too quickly how good he is with a blade.
Though, perhaps more accurate would be to say, how proficient he is as a shield and with one.
The bridge crumbles, the shade rises. And she thinks she has it, fending off blows that leave her arms trembling and her fingers numb. She can handle this. It is only a Shade.
That's when she hears him, the same deep voice that shook the room has risen to a roar that has her taking a step back, eyes widening in shock as her prisoner tackles the demon, a cracked wooden shield in one hand and a battered sword in the other.
It's impressive to watch, even if humiliating as she witnesses what must be a six-and-a-half-foot tall man finish off the demon.
His armor is coated in blood though, and he's panting, shaking even as he rests atop the corpse. It hisses, slowly melting into the ground, leaving him on the cold ice, grip loose and tentative on the weapons he's scavenged.
She swallows, leveling her blade at him. "Drop your weapon prisoner."
He doesn't reply to her command, and instead stands. It's a monumental effort by the look, heaving his massive body up before turning his too-blue eyes on her.
He stares at her, breathing heavy. It's like he's ready for war, coated in demon blood and standing firm on slick ice.
His weapons clatter to the ground, and she's shocked to see a flash of white teeth before his reply. "If it makes you happy Seeker."
She feels like he's mocking her, but that feeling is overshadowed by the guilty as she looks behind her, finding another demon corpse sinking into the ice.
He'd defeated one.
And charged to defend her.
She huffs, shaking her head as she withdraws the blade. "No." He cocks one brow, and she hates that instead of looking arrogant, he looks considerate and curious.
"Where we are going…" She trails off, "it is no guarantee that I can protect you. I must remember… that you came willingly."
He bends down, picking up the fallen items. The sword slips easily into a holster, the shield he leaves on his arm, the wooden implement seeming small comparatively.
"If you ask," He says softly, "then I will drop them again."
She recognizes that that is supposed to be comforting. But all she can think is how he'd taken a wounded demon to the ground for a woman who truly didn't need the help. "Perhaps." She responds, turning her back on him and instead marching up the pass.
She wants to think he won't.
Part of her knows that he would.
She finds that she is regretful, watching him waste away on the bed.
He had fought true, and like a warrior, in a way that she wondered if anyone truly did anymore.
Not to say he was perfect in combat. He missed strikes, blocks, had nearly died several times on the way up the pass, as well as in closing the rift. But there was a authenticity in his actions that surprised her as he stepped between blows, putting his bulk between all energies, whether it was for Solas, Varric, or on occasion, even her.
She rose from the stool, finding Lelianna at the door. She smiles, all teeth and no joy in the expression before meandering in. Cassandra relates her movements to an afternoon shadow in some ways- smooth, unnoticed, overlooked until it has grown large enough to loom over you.
"He's an interesting one." She murmurs, bringing her fingers to her lips. "He saved quite a few of my men as well in that last fight."
"But lost quite a few soldiers saving that patrol." Cassandra reminds.
Lelianna hums at that, neither defending him, nor agreeing with her.
"We shall have to see what he becomes then."
He will become a warrior.
He will become a hero.
Cassandra scoffs at the thoughts, forcing herself to rise. He may become something; she glances at the body once more, but for now, he is dying. He is dying, clinging to life by the last threads of his will, plagued by something that cannot be due to wounds or pain. He will die from something unseen.
She growls, leaving Lelianna with the man as she stalks out of the room. How unlike the warrior he was.
He survives.
She tries not to act surprised when he walks into the Chantry.
She tries not to act surprised when he muses that maybe it was providence that granted him the Mark.
She tries not to watch him as he greets his new friends. She's not sure she succeeds when he looks at her, a smile on his lips and gives them his name.
"Maxwell. I don't need a title. Just call me Maxwell."
She scoffs at it then, but perhaps in the privacy of her own room she wonders how a man she'd chained up, dragged through frozen hell and thrown into the front lines had managed to give his captor a smile as easily as that.
She believes.
She has to.
She believes that no mountain can kill this man, because the other alternative is recognizing that someone sent by the Maker had been snuffed out like a candle in the cold winter night.
She clutches the bleeding arm wound, scabbed over and sticky as she stares at the mountain tumbling down on Haven. He had… dropped it.
On himself.
Maker.
Her knees give out, and it's Varric and Cullen that come to her aid, hoisting her up, screaming for a healer. She wedges her legs back under herself, forcing the muscles to work, the bones to bear weight.
"I'm fine." But the words sound hollow, false as she speaks them.
Because how can she be fine when he has died. How can she be fine when everything else in the world has twisted so wrongly out of order? How can she be fine when a man she'd convinced herself was unbreakable rose and fell to a monster?
She lets Cullen pull her to camp.
She lets Lelianna go over numbers with her.
She lets Varric poke and prod her, swallowing the barbed retorts with a huff.
"It's the Herald!"
She's running.
Sprinting through the snow like a madwoman across the barren wasteland of ice and cold. Cullen is beside her, and how he is managing to do so in such heavy armor, with such a thick mantle is beyond her, but that is a question for another time.
She sees him.
He's trudging through the snow, honeyed skin looking pale like the snow, and his lips a worrying shade of blue. But his eyes… they still shone bright as he stumbled through the snow towards them.
He collapses into Cullen's armor, the Commander buckling under the weight before finding the strength, heaving the man up and onto his shoulders.
"Weighs half a Druffalo." She hears him whisper, gritting his teeth as another soldier aids him.
He returns.
And something in Cassandra's chest flutters.