Chapter Twenty-Five: Warning: Sebastian

Disclaimer: I do not own Dragon Age 2.

"Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please!" Sebastian pleaded as they walked along Hightown.

The other party members did their best to tune him out.

Varric was the first to crack. "Not that I want to be known for being this easy to break but if someone's got to fall on their sword then I guess it might as well be me. Fine, Sebastian, we'll go help you now."

"You can't just decide that!" Emma objected. "You're not even the leader or anything!"

"Well, no," Varric conceded. "But do you want him to start up with that again? He's been at it for three hours."

"Try two minutes," Carver corrected, glancing at his watch.

Varric rolled his eyes. "Well, sure, if you want to be all factual about it. It felt like three hours, Carver. Do you really want to listen to," he paused, "what feels like 270 hours of him saying 'please' for the next three hours?"

"…No," Carver replied.

"It really is remarkable that he's managed to be so very annoying," Fenris agreed. His eyes narrowed. "In fact, it's almost mage-like."

Anders' eyes flashed blue. "Oh, no! Do not try to pin this one on us! I mean, we've had to accept the blame for a lot of things that were clearly not our fault but this is just too much!"

"Is it?" Fenris challenged. "Is it really?"

"Alright, fine, we'll help," Emma conceded reluctantly. "But after this we never want to hear from you again, okay?"

"You don't mean that," Sebastian said, smiling.

"I could kill him right now," Anders informed them.

"Anders, you can't just talk about murdering someone in front of the captain of the guard!" Aveline complained.

"Oh, now you care about doing your job," Carver said, irritated.

"I see the problem," Anders realized. "You would rather I just do it."

"No!" Aveline cried out.

"This is the place," Sebastian said, stopping in front of one of the houses. "We shall have to pick the lock."

"Here, let me," Aveline volunteered, stepping up to the door.

"It was nice while it lasted," Carver said, sighing. "All thirty seconds of it."

Aveline ignored him and the door soon swung open.

As they walked inside and began exploring, Sebastian began to annoy everyone with his strange observations.

"There is something very, very wrong in here…" he said slowly.

Merrill – Merrill! – rolled her eyes. "Really? And what makes you think that?"

"I can just sort of tell," Sebastian tried to explain.

They came across a woman holding a bowl out in front of her drunkenly. "More, you lazy son of a bitch! What's taking so long?"

"Flora," Sebastian helpfully identified.

"Oh, is this what you meant?" Carver asked. "This 'Flora' clearly out of it?"

"What?" Sebastian asked, thrown that someone had said something not negative to him. "Oh, no, she's always like that."

"It's like she can't even see us, though," Emma protested as Flora continued to rant about drowning in dregs or something.

"Flora always was kind of self-centered," Sebastian said, shrugging.

"Well if that's not the weird part then what is?" Isabela inquired.

"I'll know it when I see it," Sebastian said confidently.

They came across another room where a man was holding an elf at knife-point.

"Is he going to attack her?" Emma asked, narrowing her eyes.

"More gold! I want to pour it all over her and make her beautiful!" the man cried out.

Emma relaxed. "No, I guess he's just going to drop gold on her head. That would probably hurt."

"I think he's planning on melting it down first," Isabela corrected her. "That would probably kill."

"Still, it could be worse," argued Emma.

"Don't, you'll kill her," Sebastian said listlessly. "Well, he can't hear me. Clearly there is nothing I can do."

Carver shot him a disgusted look. "You are useless, you know that?"

"I have heard some rumors to that effect," Sebastian agreed. "But I am not! Here, watch this!" He punched a passing elf.

The threatened elf took that opportunity to flee the room.

"See, I'm practically a hero now," Sebastian bragged.

"Aren't you here for bloody vengeance?" Varric asked him pointedly.

Sebastian shrugged. "It's no good if these people out of their senses! I want them to be fully aware so that they may suffer when you kill them and I can stand by judging you."

This Harriman, who Sebastian had not bothered to identify, did not appear to notice what had just happened behind him. Instead, he pondered, "Perhaps I should be the one. I look nice in gold…"

"We must end this madness so that I may end them!" Sebastian exclaimed, a lot more animatedly than he'd tried to save that elf.

"Let's check the basement," Emma suggested. "I know that if I were going to be all evil and blood mage-y then I would definitely do it in the basement."

"Who said anything about blood magic?" Aveline asked.

Emma nodded Merrill's way. "Just her very presence reminds me."

"Aw…" Merrill said, looking down.

"Just ignore them," Carver said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

Flora, the crazy gold man, and a shirtless man greeted them down in the basement.

"Go away," Flora said, sounding a lot less drunk all of a sudden.

"We can't, Sebastian wants us to kill you all," Emma said, almost apologetic.

"You shall not enter," Flora said again. Then she and the other two all promptly fell over at the same time.

"…How, exactly, do they intend to stop us if they're not even conscious?" Carver inquired.

"Maybe they're going to…No, I've got nothing," Anders told him.

"Maybe that's how," Fenris said, pointing to the three demons that had suddenly materialized.

"But…Why are they unconscious? Did summoning them kill them or sap them of their energy or something? Are they astral projecting or something?" Emma demanded.

"Who cares?" Aveline cried out. "Let's just kill them already!"

"I hope this will kill the Harriman siblings," Sebastian said eagerly. "That way I will be perfectly justified in striking them down!"

Once the three demons were killed, Sebastian quickly ran over to check the Harrimans' pulses.

"Damn," Sebastian swore. "Still alive."

"There's nothing stopping you from killing them now," Isabela pointed out.

Sebastian's shoulders slumped. "Yes, there is. Servants of the Maker do not kill an unconscious foe. I'll have to wait until they wake up and by then I might not even really be interested in it anymore."

"Don't you just hate it when things get in the way of your violent, bloody revenge?" Carver asked sarcastically.

"Yes!" Sebastian shouted, the sarcasm going right over his head.

"Let's keep going," Emma suggested. "I don't want to have to wait for them to wake up by themselves. I'm bored already. Though, to be fair, I've been bored ever since we came here. Bored and annoyed."

"Can you be both at once?" Isabela asked curiously.

Emma nodded. "Oh, yes."

Merrill frowned. "But Emma, can't we use our magic to wak-"

"Moving right along!" Emma said loudly, marching onward.

"Wait for me! I'm the one who kind of sort of know where we're going!" Sebastian cried out, trying to get in front of her.

Their path through the demons that littered the basement was complicated a little by Sebastian and Emma constantly trying to stay ahead of the other but it wasn't annoying enough that anybody (even Carver) felt like starting an argument with Emma about it.

And eventually they came to a middle-aged woman kneeling before a desire demon.

"We can come back later," Anders offered, looking away.

"They're here!" the woman said, flinching. "Quick, give me more! Starkhaven won't listen to me and I just don't understand why."

"Perhaps it's the fact that Prince Sebastian keeps telling everyone that your family was the one that murdered his family and it's clear that Goran Vael is your puppet," the demon suggested.

The woman shook her head. "No, that can't be it."

"You know, Choir Boy, I think this is a pretty compelling case for you finally returning home and taking your throne as you should have done three years ago," Varric said pointedly.

Sebastian shook his head and looked sad. "If only I could. But Her Grace needs me."

Varric rolled his eyes. "Why don't you let 'Her Grace' be the judge of that? I hear tries to talk you into returning weekly."

Sebastian practically swooned. "She is so very selfless."

"At some point you're going to need to accept the fact that he is just never going to do his duty," Carver said shrewdly.

Varric sighed. "Oh, I know. I was just hoping that if he left he might leave us alone and, though this is probably optimistic to the point of foolishness, if he became king then we might actually get something out of being associated with him."

"My duty," Sebastian said firmly, "is to the Chantry no matter what the Chantry itself might have to say about it."

"You don't understand!" the woman cried out. "I must marry Vael off to my Flora to solidify my position but I need more power to do it!"

"That's Lady Harriman," Sebastian spat out.

"If you control Vael and Vael controls Starkhaven then why do you need more power to marry them to each other?" the demon wondered.

In lieu of answering, Harriman turned around to face them and blinked a few times. "Sebastian! How…awkward."

"You were my mother's friend! How could you murder her?" he demanded.

"Murder is such an ugly word," the demon tempered.

"How fitting, then, to use it to describe what she did," Sebastian snapped.

"All she did was remove the one obstacle between herself and her desires," the demon defended.

"Yeah, through murder," Sebastian said hotly. "You are aware that my brother – the oldest one, the one that would have taken the throne – was completely in love with Flora, right?"

Harriman froze. "No…I did not. You're lying."

"You can ask Flora, if you like," Sebastian said coldly. "They told me about it and were going to make an announcement only a few days after you had my entire family murdered. All of this could have been avoided if you weren't psychotic!"

Harriman was thrown for a moment before she rallied. "Well, maybe if someone had told me I wouldn't have done it! I'm not psychic!"

"If you weren't so terrible, them waiting wouldn't have had such a big body count!" Sebastian countered. "In a way, I'm glad this has happened. You don't deserve to have anything to do with ruling Starkhaven."

"Are you seriously saying that you're glad your family was murdered?" Aveline demanded. "For any reason?"

"And do you realize that she's already ruling Starkhaven more directly than she would have been had she not murdered your family?" Merrill asked.

Sebastian valiantly ignored these perfectly valid questions.

"The desire for power is easy to understand. You both possess it, do you not? You and your friend-" the demon started to say.

"Which friend?" Sebastian interrupted. "I brought several."

"You brought none!" Emma said harshly.

"That one, there," the demon said, nodding Emma's way. "But don't you both wish to possess more?"

"Who wouldn't?" Emma asked rhetorically. "But I don't really want to have to do much to get it."

"I…I don't know," Sebastian looked torn.

Carver snorted. "Please. Sebastian, if you had even a mild longing for power then you would have long since gone back to Starkhaven and done what everyone wants you to do."

Sebastian straightened up suddenly and beamed. "My friend! You are right! Oh, thank you!"

"I'm not your friend," Carver said, twitching.

"Quick, someone attack her!" Sebastian ordered.

"The demon or the woman?" Aveline inquired.

"Both," Sebastian replied.

"Why can't you do it?" Fenris asked him.

Sebastian shrugged apologetically. "My vows-"

"She's a demon," Anders interrupted. "Surely you're allowed to kill them!"

"Only in self-defense," Sebastian explained.

Everyone was standing there at an impasse until Varric finally had enough. Rolling his eyes, he shot Lady Harriman in the chest.

"Aw, I wanted to do that one…" Sebastian whined before turning his attention to the demon.

Varric was not at all sympathetic. "You had your chance."

Once the demon was dead and successfully looted, Sebastian brightened once again. "Maybe…maybe the Harriman siblings are awake by now! I should go and see so that I may have you all kill them and I may judge you for it."

"Well," Varric said, heaving a great sigh, "I suppose we had to go back that way anyway."

"We're almost done with him," Fenris said, trying to be optimistic for once and failing pretty badly because he was sorely out of practice. Not that he was sure if he had ever really been in practice.

It looked like they really had awakened because Flora was wringing her hands as she waited for them and her brothers were nowhere in sight. "Sebastian, I feel like I should say that I'm sorry but how exactly does one say 'I'm sorry my mother was psychotic and made a deal with a demon and killed your entire family'?"

"I think that actually was the way that someone would go about doing something like that," Emma said helpfully.

"Well...that then," Flora said, a little lamely. "When I think of what mother made us do…what those creatures made us do…"

"Wait a second," Sebastian objected. "This isn't about my family at all! It's not like you were actually the ones to murder my family."

"Why did the demon make her become a wino, her brother pour gold on things, and the other one…well, I can only speculate but he wasn't wearing a shirt," Isabela said, her question sort of petered out at the end.

Fenris shrugged. "She was a demon. I do not believe that she was supposed to make sense."

"Well, I had a hard time, too," Flora said defensively.

"My entire family was murdered," Sebastian said simply.

Flora sighed. "Right, I can see where that's going to get really old, really fast. I said I'm sorry, alright, even though this was in no way my fault and, if you think about it, I was more of a victim than you were, all safe in Kirkwall's Chantry."

"We were friends, Flora," Sebastian said tightly.

"Yes, yes we were," Flora agreed. "You did get the part where none of this was even slightly my fault, right? Am I going to be blamed for my mother's actions? Her demon-influenced actions?"

"The demon made it sound as if she were already jealous of my family," Sebastian pointed out.

Flora threw her hands up in the air. "Oh, who cares? I think the fact she never actually did anything stupid until the demon showed up is a pretty good indication that it was to blame."

"I agree," Anders spoke up, surprisingly. "It is demons who should be feared, not mages."

"Sometimes I really do wonder if you think about what you say before you say it," Carver said, sighing.

Anders blinked at him. "Of course I do. Why?"

Carver sighed again. "Never mind. If I have to explain it then you're just not going to get it."

"I suppose that I should still make a gesture and offer reparations or whatever," Flora said thoughtfully. "And since you're right here in front of me and probably the living person most directly hurt by my mother's actions, I'll pledge my support to you. My mother wasn't the only one with her eye on Starkhaven. If or when you go to reclaim it you face opposition, you have my support."

Sebastian did not look particularly enthused. "That's so nice…"

"He'll let you know if he ever decides to actually go out and do his damn duty," Varric translated. "I wouldn't hold my breath, though."

"Being in this foul place is making me sick so I suggest that we leave," Sebastian said loudly.

"I'll walk you out," Flora offered.

Sebastian shot her a disdainful look. "No thank you."

"Well, at least I'm still getting 'thank yous'," Flora said wryly. "Farewell, then. Call on me when – if – you have need of me."

"So," Carver said as they made their way out of the house. "You have your bloody vengeance."

Sebastian shrugged. "It could have been bloodier. And I am deeply ashamed of all of you for your senselessly violent actions."

"It's good to see that that famed Chantry hypocrisy is alive and well," Anders said mockingly.

"But seriously," Emma told him. "Now that that's done, you'll leave us alone, won't you?"

Sebastian frowned at them. "Leave you alone? I don't remember agreeing to that. You guys are my friends!"

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