The journey to the Gallows passed in relative silence; the guard Aislynn Hawke assigned her was astute enough to discern she had no desire to speak. Quiet and competent, the dark-haired man led her through the dusty streets, which grew more crowded the closer they drew to the waterfront. Hightown's recovery from the riots had been swift: toppled masonry removed and replaced, uprooted shrubs replanted and the ashen remnants of the Chantry explosion scoured from the walls. But the rest of the city – or at least the parts Leena had seen – still reeled from the blow dealt to it by a lone mage.
She did not allow herself to dwell on that thought. Instead, she dutifully concentrated on wending her way through the sea of humanity. Her guide, Donnic, passed through the crowds with relative ease; recognizing his uniform, the city's inhabitants parted for him, but closed again once he was through, like a hungry tide, leaving her stranded. The fourth time this happened, he slackened his pace to match her heavily armored tread and the going became easier.
Leena smelled the docks long before she glimpsed the sea – a mélange of saltwater, damp wood, decayed seagrass, fish and human sweat. She saw a sable flag with the scarlet Amell crest, its stylized birds with interlocking talons, tails and wings fluttering on the mast of a single-sailed sloop and assumed that was their destination. The guardsman ignored it, requested she wait and strode purposefully past towards the far end of the pier where smaller boats moored, unloading the day's meager catch. It was a slight, not even an outrageous one, considering how her interview with the Viscountess had gone, but while she was sure the pair to whom Donnic spoke were skilled seamen, the thought of crossing the channel in a skiff while wearing platemail made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle with sweat.
The negotiation included a few obvious gestures: pointing (both at her and the island), shaking heads (Donnic's and the older man whom she took to be the father of the younger man still unloading the boat) and finally nodding (the guardsman insistently, the other man reluctantly). Leena saw a coin change hands – at a distance, she couldn't judge whether or not it was gold, silver or a city guard's chit – but observing their activity left her curiously dispassionate. Instead, she focused on the sea. Its dark blue color mimicked the night sky and the whitecaps its twinkling stars; a far more poetic picture than the stark reality of her situation, but a description she was certain Justice–
'I should not have come here.' A sentiment surely echoed by the multitudes of men and women that passed the city's sheer black cliffs or the towering bronze statues at Kirkwall's entrance.
None of the Wardens in her command ever truly warmed to her; she had their respect, she believed, but in general she discouraged familiarity which resulted in a palpable barrier between her and the recruits. So, Nathaniel Howe's letter, when it arrived, came as a surprise. It was brief, two sentences – fitting for a man who waxed loquacious only when he was in his cups – but its contents were not what she expected.
Anders is in Kirkwall. I believe Justice to be dead.
The instinct to reach out and steady herself by gripping the sides of the boat almost overpowered her; Leena kept her eyes riveted on the approaching edifice and tried to guess how many strokes of the oars it would take to reach the Gallows. She tried measuring the splashes against the regularity of the gulls' squawking cries; close enough to land, the birds called to one another with harsh wails completely unlike the high-pitched peek of the piculets native the forests surrounding her Val Royeaux.
Leena let the calculations carry her to shore; she lost track a dozen times only to doggedly start over, as if the methodology of the numbers – add, subtract, multiply and divide – could help her make sense of from chaos, both within and without. As unexpected as their arrival must have been, a hard-faced man waited at the docks, his blond hair cropped short against his skull. He extended a gauntleted hand to assist her as the boat's rowers moored their craft.
"I can guess why you've come; your livery speaks your introduction for you, my Lady. I am afraid, however, that without-"
"I have dispensation from Viscountess Hawke." She saw his gaze flick behind her, to Donnic, who must have confirmed her assertion with a nod, but he still opened his mouth and she could sense a denial on his tongue. "I have been granted a brief period of time to confer with a fellow Warden and you will not gainsay it. If you must – in order to fulfill your duties – take me to your superior, then do so. You may lead the way," she gestured forward, towards the bent and cringing figures she could see lining the courtyard even at a distance.
Bright enough to recognize a situation which exceeded his authority, the man gave a quick nod. "I am Keran and I think the man you need to speak to, my Lady, is Knight-Commander Cullen."
She didn't, as it turned out, do much talking but instead stood and listened as the Knight-Commander and another man – to whom she was not introduced – bickered back and forth regarding both the legitimacy and advisability of her request.
"If Aveline has been suborned, we have bigger problems than the Grey Wardens." This, from the nameless Templar; Leena heard Donnic shift restlessly behind her.
"But so soon after the executions, Carver?" The Knight-Commander hadn't looked at her in several minutes; it was a relief not needing to keep the surprise at this pronouncement off her face. "Adela… I still have trouble believing she was involved with Rathe and the others."
The two men might have continued to discuss these events, as if she and the guard who accompanied her weren't present, but Leena found herself growing impatient with their disregard. The spark in Kirkwall did not mean fires everywhere else in Thedas were suddenly extinguished. 'And I have recklessly abandoned my post when it may be I am most needed.' She cleared her throat, and both Templars' attention snapped to her.
"Knight-Commander, either conduct me to my Grey Warden, or else you will force me to seek him out myself." The wary looks they exchanged rankled, but she did not allow it to deter her. "Anders is imprisoned, is he not? Then you need only lock the door behind me and send one of your own men to consult with the Viscountess. If I am a liar, you will certainly have me at your mercy."
Leena was startled a second time when the dark-haired Templar's face burst into a wide grin. "By the Maker, she's got us there, Cullen! I can't say I'm looking forward to seeing my sister; she must be in quite the mood thanks to you, Warden-Commander." He saluted – his hands balled into fists, arms crossed across his chest – and with that quick sketch of obeisance, strode rapidly out of the office without being given leave to depart.
Cullen was already getting to his feet. "I suppose I'll owe him a favor – and my problems are not yours, Warden." His manner turned brusque and businesslike, "Anders freely admitted his guilt in front of witnesses; I don't know what you hope to gain by speaking to him."
The Knight-Commander took her back through the courtyard; again, her eyes were drawn to the statues as was surely the artist's intent in their creation. The Grand Cathedral in Val Royeaux boasted statuary with poses quite similar. They were called 'The Weeping Penitents', but whereas Pilon's chisel etched rapturous discovery – men and women fallen from the light and later redeemed by the prophet Andraste – the Gallows sculptor captured pain and fear, hidden behind hands and arms that always covered the figures' eyes.
She looked askance at the Templars' commander when they reached a thick metal door incised in rock well below where she imagined even dungeons might be; he had removed a torch from its tarnished sconce to get them this far and now he handed it to her. "My men grew tired of listening to his insults and I grew tired of listening to their complaints. As you might imagine, shipping in the months after Kingsway can be problematical; this is what used to be one of our root cellars. In the beginning, he sat on the top step waiting for us when we brought him his meals. Then we began bringing a week's worth of supplies at a time, so now…"
He unlocked the door without further ceremony and Leena stepped through; the stairway extended down into darkness. "No one speaks to him, Knight-Commander? How can you expect a man to retain his sanity with enforced solitude such as you describe?"
"No sane man would have done what he did, Warden. You know that as well as I do."
The blackness hovered like a live thing at the edges of her torchlight as she listened to the clank of the Knight-Commander's retreating footsteps and she experienced a moment of claustrophobic panic. Unreasonable, given her numerous forays into the Deep Roads, but those descents were done by choice. Only once had she been deprived of her freedom and Leena felt the same unreasoning fear then as now – an intense awareness of the rock overhead, the silence punctuated by the sound of her rapid breathing, the drip of pitch from the torch that blazed and vanished.
The staircase, slick with condensation, restricted her to slow, cautious steps. Leena knew Anders had a gift for healing but she'd be beyond his aid if crippled herself or broke her neck in a fall. A giggle, absurdly loud, broke past her tightly compressed lips until another thought choked it back down her throat. 'Justice.'
Sooner than she expected, she stepped onto solid earth and, holding the torch aloft, tried to decide which of the three branched tunnels to take. There was lettering on the wall, but not in any script she knew – Arcanum, the language of mages, a scrawled invective by a slave – and none of it left her any wiser. With difficulty, she crouched, passing the torch across the ground, looking for the telltale signs that Nathaniel and Velanna taught her to look for, but her lessons in woodcraft failed against gravel and rock; there was not enough sand or dirt to hold a boot's tread.
"So she's decided against a public execution? Is she afraid of what I might say – the truth – or worried that the staunch support she imagined she had eroded once Starkhaven's prince left Kirkwall to tend to his own city? Either way, I don't intend to lie down and die here in the dark without a fight, so if you want my head, you're going to have to earn it… or not as the case may be. I'd say it wasn't personal but you're a Templar, so yes, it really is."
She only had a moment to assimilate that the man talking was Anders before something struck her brutally in the back. Accompanied by the scent of burnt hair, the electrical shock caused her muscles to contract and, already off-balance, she pitched forward. 'Anders!' Leena felt her body jerk, but she couldn't open her mouth to speak or draw air into her lungs; the jolt of electricity left her paralyzed. Suddenly, it was as if she was looking at her own body from some distance above, because that pitiful creature couldn't be her – the thing that writhed helplessly face down on the ground as the spasms racked her slight frame must be someone else. 'Anders!' He was going to hit her again; his entire body surrounded in a blue corona, the blond mage stepped forward. Then abruptly the woman stopped moving and Leena's consciousness slipped blissfully away.
She awoke to the paradox of hot and cold. She faced a small fire and could feel the tendrils of heat as it flickered only a few feet from her face; the skin of her right cheek was already tight with overexposure to the warmth. Cold stone cooled the rest of her body; Leena realized she lay stretched on the floor, stripped of her armor, wearing nothing but her woolen underclothes. A moth-eaten robe covered her. It boasted silver-grey fur at the cuffs, but whereas once the trimming might have been something to boast about, now it only drew attention to the shabbiness of the garb.
"If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake, Leena."
Anders sat across from her, and anticipated her question. "Not long. I'm sorry about…" he waved a hand, "but the Templars don't usually carry naked steel – except Carver, and I could tell you weren't him. I thought Aislynn…" A look twitched across his face, only to be swallowed by shadow.
"I'm sorry," he repeated. After a minute, a familiar, lopsided grin appeared and melted years from his visage. "The Wardens – they've changed their minds and sent you? To get me out, I mean. Not a rescue, well, yes a rescue, but not in the conventional, 'Oh hey, what's that over there' conking the guard on the noggin sense."
"I–" Her personal need for answers warred with the instinct to reassure a subordinate the chain of command was inviolate and there were contingencies for every difficulty they might face. Nominally, Anders was still under Leena's command and, of course, he would always be a Warden, but this man across from her was more a stranger to her than a new recruit. Echoes of his former self were present – the same boyish smile – but there was the persistent feeling of wrongness. As if someone was wearing Anders' persona like a coat, which could be easily shrugged off or on whenever it was convenient. "What happened, Anders?"
His brow furrowed, obviously noting she didn't answer his question before she proceeded with her own. "Why are you here, Warden-Commander? Your face could curdle milk, the way you're looking at me." He stood, agitated, and began to pace restlessly before turning to glare haughtily at her. "You don't give a damn about me; the Wardens are in their own little world and anything outside the Deep Roads is barely worth your notice. But you should care!" There was a sharp crack as his fist smacked his open palm. "You could have done something! The Wardens sit by and do nothing when they see the in–"
"Justice!" The word echoed back to her as a shout, bouncing off the wave-cut stone walls; she drowned Anders voice with her own. "He left with you – Nathaniel confirmed it – and it was from him I had to learn of…" She was trembling and not from the cold. "If Justice," she swallowed, the lump in Leena's throat threatening to suffocate her, "when he died, you should have returned to Vigil's Keep with the body. Kristoff's widow was owed that much by the Wardens at least. Instead the two of you left Aura with the cruel burden of not knowing. I expected better of you – better of you both."
Her thoughts jumbled together, 'He was like an older brother… How could he leave…? Why did he go…' with all the questions that drove her to seek answers from a man she hadn't seen in over seven years. But the Anders who attacked her was a stranger, one she couldn't trust – even as his features softened again into a more recognizable likeness of the mage she knew.
"What exactly did Howe tell you?"
"That Justice is dead and you were here, in Kirkwall. Garevel has the Keep in my absence. I needed," Leena's voice hitched, "It was my duty to discover what became of my Wardens - just as it is nearly unheard of for Wardens to simply walk away from theirs."
"There are so many things we take for granted when we're alive. For instance," he held his arm level with his chest and pinched the skin on the underside, pulling it down then letting it snap back into place, "our skin. It helps protect us from infection, regulates our body temperature, keeps our insides from becoming our outsides..." His arms dropped to his side in a helpless shrug, "When we die, everything stops. Justice could bellow Kristoff's lungs to speak, but he couldn't truly live. He couldn't keep the body from losing moisture so his skin dried out – you saw how it stretched across his," Anders passed a hand across his face. "An open wound might mean infection – gangrene. You know he lost that finger on his left hand; he didn't pay enough attention to my warnings about being careful. I know he loved you like a sister, Leena, and he didn't want you to see–"
"Don't. You. Dare!" She was instantly on her feet, crossing the distance to land an open-handed slap across his stubbled cheek. "Don't presume you know anything about what we shared or tell me what you think I want to hear."
She lifted a hand, prepared to strike him again for his insolence, but he caught her wrist and held it against her struggles like she weighed nothing. "He didn't die, Leena."
Amidst her stammered exclamations, Anders' story unfolded: How Justice, knowing the mortal shell he inhabited was expiring, left with the mage. "There was more I could be doing, Commander, than standing in Vigil's Keep. You gave me that freedom; or would you rather the Wardens became a cage like Kinloch Hold?" The two men talked, sometimes long into the night, about conditions in the Circle. "Rylock made my life a living hell. Her hatred of me might have been extreme, but she wasn't the only exception to the rule" and why, in the end, he extended his untenable offer – and why Justice accepted. "He was like me, Leena – he felt he still had work to do."
She cried then, listening Anders story. She learned about Rolan – how the mage had killed the Grey Wardens sent after him at the First Warden's behest and gone into hiding. She cried for their hubris and Anders behindhand humility and contrition. "Aislynn locked me away because I'm a monster – an abomination, just as the Chantry preaches. I made an unforgivable mistake, which others paid for with their lives. And I can't stop it; it feels like righteous rage in the moment – but look what it's made me do, what I've done. It's not justice, it's vengeance. We never meant for any of this to happen."
'Can you see me? Can you hear me, Justice?' Leena wept as Anders held her, staining her cheeks with thin rivulets of sorrow – for the two beings warped beyond a friend's recognition, the perversion of their good intentions and for the joining that changed them both irrevocably, which killed the very thing Justice had been trying to preserve.
The second (and final) chapter in a two part piece for drathe on deviantART based on her drawing, Commander's Tears, which can be seen here: drathe. deviantart. com/art/DA2-Commander-s-tears-209441470 You''ll need to remove the spaces. I have no skill and don't know how to make ffnet recognize the address without chopping it into bits.
I've taken a few liberties with Leena Caron (Drathe's character and done with her permission). And by taken liberties, I mean I've probably crapped all over her canon. Sorry! Unstable Anders made me do it!
Too, I'll be frank - I cannot stand Dragon Age 2 as a whole (I'll give you that there were some interesting companions/characters but Hawke and the story were made of dumb, imo), nor do I like how Anders was/is portrayed. Working within the parameters I had to keep him in character, I did my best. It's lucky Drathe has interesting OCs or I wouldn't have touched this project with a 10 foot pole. Maker knows my own Hawke isn't interesting enough to merit a story. WARDENS/OC's FOREVER! Just say no to Hawke as a reoccurring protagonist in DA3!
If Zevran and Sandor venture into DA2 territory again (hopefully not ANY TIME soon) I'm not sure how much they'll be acknowledging it. I think I've got enough to keep them busy for at least a year or two, where they are, knowing how slowly I write.
Aislynn Hawke, Maric the Mabari and Leena Caron belong to drathe, random flavor NPCs are mine and Bran, Varel, Donnic, Keran, Cullen, Carver, Justice and Anders and and any other characters specifically mentioned but not seen belongs to Bioware. Feedback is welcome and encouraged (criticism is just as valued as praise).
I'd give all my worldly goods (and my soul, if they'd take it) to Bioware and David Gaider in exchange for Zevran being mine (all mine!), but until they accept my "offer", all rights to their characters and the Dragon Age universe belong to them. Thank you, DG, for creating Zevran – in all my years of playing MUDs, MUSHs, RPGs and MMOs, he's the only character who ever inspired me to write anything (such as it is - and even when he's not in the story, he's my inspiration).