Ashe

Her heart was drumming so hard in her chest that she could feel herself shaking from it, from the exhilaration of seeing Cullen, knowing that he and the others had come for her, but also from fear. She wasn't alone in the room anymore.

A mere moment after whispering desperately to Cullen that he had to leave, Anders had entered.

That motherfucker. She just wanted to hit him. But she knew from experience that it was stupid to engage a mage in a fight alone. She didn't even have her sword, or her armor. A skilled warrior she might have been, but not a stupid one.

"Who were you talking to?"

His voice was strained, but with what, she couldn't tell, as she was far too nervous and injured to be her normal, perceptive self.

"Only to myself, I was just trying to find something to patch myself up with." She tried to sound steady, desperate to not betray Cullen's recent presence.

"Found much in the window, did you?"

He sounded so cold. Maker's breath, what was wrong with him? She was bleeding, barely able to stand up and it was his doing. Who was this person? It was not her Adrian.

"I just wanted to look outside, I haven't seen the sun in..." She trailed off when he closed his eyes suddenly.

She yelped in surprise when he snapped them open again and grabbed her arm, hard enough to leave bruises. He started dragging her out of the room and up the stairs, ignoring her protests and cries of pain when she stumbled or hit the wall and the railing on the way up.

"Anders, please, stop it!" she sobbed. It really fucking hurt.

"I take you here, I save you, and this is how you repay me?" he yelled while he dragged her into 'her' room and threw her down to the floor. She scrambled backwards into a corner with her back to the wall so that he couldn't come at her without her defending herself.

"Anders, please calm down! I don't know what you're talking about!"

He narrowed his eyes at her and she flinched back when she saw how dark and manic they looked.

"Do you think I'm stupid? That I wouldn't feel that someone disabled one of the barriers?"

Shit.

She needed to buy the boys time. Cullen had said that Hawke needed to disable one more barrier before they could get to her. If Anders knew that there were only three of them out there, maybe he would decide to be preemptive and attack them, and she couldn't allow that. She didn't know how powerful Anders was.

She let her tears stream down her face harder than before, digging her nails into one of her wounds out of his sight.

"Why are you doing this to me, Anders? You were kissing me, telling me how much you wanted to be there for me, and I told you the truth about how much I'd missed you. Look at what you've done to me, for Andraste's sake!"

His expression softened as his eyes ran over her bloody cuts and dark bruises. But just as quick as it had come, his shame vanished from his face.

"You're lying to me. You didn't miss me, you just say that to distract me. If you'd missed me, you would have sent for me. You had all that time to do it, you could have, at any moment. You are the most powerful woman in Thedas, your will is law. But you didn't send for me."

Maker, he really was delusional if he thought her so powerful, but he was right about one thing. She could have sent for him if she'd wished. But she hadn't thought about that, not even once if she was honest with herself. But she couldn't tell him that.

"I was fighting a war! I didn't want you anywhere near that mess, Anders!"

"Stop lying!" he roared and sent a bolt from his hand straight into the wall. The room lit up with purple light and the house shook from the impact. "You didn't send for me because I was only a servant to you! Not a shiny templar or a king."

"Anders, please, stop it! That's not true. And I don't know how you can fault me for my romantic life when you made it very clear to me in Ostwick that I was like a sister to you, nothing more! You were the one who turned me down."

Anders was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling rapidly. But her words seemed to have had at least some effect on him.

He took a step towards her.

"I know that. I'm sorry. I just thought that you were too young, I couldn't allow myself to think about you that way. It was only after you left and didn't come back, that I realized how much you meant to me." He fell to his knees in front of her. "I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep. I was beside myself with worry. When I heard that you were considered the Herald of Andraste, I waited for you to send for me, so that I could help you. By the time you became Inquisitor, I'd given up hope that you would. I left Ostwick a while ago, to come to you. What I found was repulsive. Grown men like the King and the fucking Knight-Captain of Kirkwall, tripping over themselves to get inside your underclothes, like dogs. You're a teenager, Ashe."

Anger swirled up through her stomach. She hated it when anyone implicated that she was too young to do something, anything, since she'd proven a hundred times over that she was not. Who the fuck was he to judge any such thing about her? But she bit back the response she wanted to yell at him and kept quiet. He had never spoken about his motivations before and she wasn't about to interrupt him now.

"You're just a young girl. What you did with men back in Ostwick, I dismissed as youthful experimentation. I'm not a close-minded person, I believe in freedom."

Ashe almost laughed out loud, the notion of him believing in freedom after locking her up here so absolutely ridiculous.

"But you should know better now. Can't you see they're just using you? You're just a little girl to them, your power ripe for the taking. I can keep you safe from them, from all of that. Don't you want to be free of them?"

Ashe hesitated. What was she supposed to say?

She hesitated for too long.

"So you actually care for them, then?" he hissed, his eyes black again.

"Of course I do, they're my friends!"

"I'll be dead before I let your friends take you away from me. I should have killed them while I had the chance," he said and spun around and left the room, slamming the door behind him.

Ashe spat after him.

She woke up with a creeping feeling of unease in her stomach. She moved her limbs stiffly, groaning when she tried to stretch them out. Dried, crusted blood covered most of her skin and she was weak with blood loss. No wonder she'd fallen asleep where she'd been sitting on the floor. She had no idea how much time had passed but she hoped that it was enough for the others to finally get to her.

She just had to pray that Anders hadn't gotten to them first.

Her stomach did a somersault when she heard someone move outside the door and she whispered to the Maker that she would do anything if the person outside was anyone but Anders.

But the Maker did not hear her.

Anders came in with a bucket of water and a washcloth. She crawled backwards until she her back hugged the wall again when he knelt down before her.

"Shush, now, I'm not going to hurt you. We need to clean you up," he said, his tone gentle.

She looked at him suspiciously. "Why?"

"Because your friends are going to come in here soon, and I don't want them to think that I'm some kind of monster."

She stared at him. What was he on about? She pulled her hand away, disgusted by his touch, when he tried to hold her to clean her. He didn't look at her face, he only shook his head in what looked like regret before his features set with determination and he yanked her to him and started to clean off the blood.

It was a long and slow process, and she wanted to cry with humiliation when he cleaned her in places that she now felt like she'd rather die than let him see. She needed her strength back.

"Won't you heal me, please?" she pleaded. "I feel so weak, I've lost a lot of blood."

He shook his head. "I can't do that until this is all over. I need you to not fight me on this."

"What are you going to do to them?" she whispered.

"Me? I'm not going to do anything to them. You are. They're going to walk in here, and they are going to see that you're here of your own free will. And then they're going to leave, simple as that."

"You're fucking crazy if you think they would ever believe that," she spat.

"They are going to believe it, if they're as in love with you as you think they are. I know it broke my heart when I saw you with Cullen in Skyhold, and then with Alistair. Broke my heart before I even knew I was in love with you."

Ashe felt cold shivers run down her spine. He'd been to Skyhold? Spying on her, in her own fortress? How had they not known? Everything that he'd told her had been a complete lie, then. There was no doubt in her mind about that now. She'd held out hope that he'd been driven mad just now, that he hadn't attacked her in Denerim, that he hadn't been the one to kill Lady Hewlender or Mahariel.

But there was no other madman but him.

She felt so violated. How could she not have seen him for what he really was? She was so angry.

She spat in his face. "They're going to kill you."

He calmly wiped the dripping saliva off his face. "No they're not. They won't care about you."

He grabbed her then, deflecting her weak struggling as easily as a grown man would a child throwing a tantrum. He dragged her up on the bed and pushed her down into it, almost smothering her since her face was pressed into the mattress, before she managed to wrench her head to the side, gasping for air. He held her wrists behind her back and shoved the fabric of her torn robe to the side.

Ashe couldn't believe what was happening. Panic rose inside her when she realized that she was entirely too weak to fight back.

"Anders, please, don't. Are you actually going to fucking do this to me?" she whispered, not sure if he even heard.

But he did. "I'm just going to show them that you're mine, that you chose me over them, and then they'll go away." He sounded unsure of himself. She could almost feel how the crazy pulled at him and buried his reason.

Maker, she didn't want this. His filthy, treacherous hands on her, once so loving, now making her want to crawl out of her skin where they touched her. She panicked as she felt his hand on the bare skin of her legs, sliding up towards her center.

"No, no, no, please don't Anders, I'll do anything, please don't do this to me," she cried, tears and snot almost choking her.

He didn't say anything. She thought she heard him sob once but he obviously wasn't so sorry that he couldn't get it up. Because the next thing she knew, she screamed in pain as he forced himself into her. He snaked his hand around her head to hold it over her mouth and it was like she couldn't breathe, her only oxygen coming from short bursts of air when his fingers didn't also cover her nose, since they moved when he moved in and out of her.

He turned her over, and his eyes roamed over her naked body before he squeezed his eyes shut like he was struggling with himself, but he never stopped moving, instead driving himself relentlessly into her. She was trapped underneath him and when she felt his hand on her breasts, she wanted to turn her head to the side and vomit. She sobbed and pleaded with him to stop, but he only covered her mouth with his hand again.

This wasn't happening. She almost thanked the Maker when she felt her eyes roll back into her head and she was close to passing out from the lack of air, when he slammed into her hard again and her eyes shot wide open in pain.

She found herself jealous of Mahariel. She wished that she had been the one to die instead of her.

That thought was what pulled her out of the initial shock of what was happening to her. Was she really lying here, wishing that she would die? No, he would not make her think so little of herself. He would not take anything from her.

He was fucking with the wrong girl, in every fucking way possible.

And when she got her strength back, she would hurt him in so many ways.

The door slammed open and she wanted to scream in relief when she saw her knights in shining armor standing there. Cullen, Alistair and Greyer. She loved them all so very, very much. The only thing that worried her now was that they might rob her of the opportunity to take out her revenge on Anders. The shock of the scene before them had only paralyzed them for a second, and now they were moving, closing in on Anders like a pack of starved wolves. A moment ago, Ashe wished that she would have been anyone else in the world except for herself. She took one look at the snarling faces of her rescuers and knew that soon, Anders would know that same feeling.

Maker, let me bathe in his blood.