Selise awoke to a dry throat and a swollen head that throbbed unrelentingly. She winced at the piercing light streaming through her window and flopped herself over to her other side to hide her eyes from the glare. Too much whiskey, she groaned inwardly. Stupid stupid stupid. There had come a point in the previous night when she knew she was drinking too much, but despite all her better judgment she had still poured herself another glass. Anders too had gotten downright drunk, at first getting silly, and then sad, and then all conversation had faded into a tired, comfortable silence. Eventually he ended up laying on the floor with his head in her lap while she stroked his hair, the same as she had several hours earlier.
The memory of the feelings that had emerged the night before came stabbing back at her, making her cringe even as a confusing and excited shiver rippled down her body. She had a vision of herself in a small, quiet moment as she was admiring how the firelight enhanced the warm gold of his skin and how long the lashes were that were resting against his cheek. Her fingers were threaded through his hair, and she realized she had just been sitting there, looking down at him and she was struck by a feeling. It was appreciative and scared and adoring and felt very much like…. love. But that couldn't be possible. Not so soon. And sharing feelings like that with Anders was not a path she was free to travel anyway. He was her charge, and should be completely forbidden to her. It could only have been the whiskey making her all soft and playing with her emotions. Besides, she barely even knew what love really was.
The way he looked at her after the whiskey had taken hold of him, like he was starving for her, had made it so that she could barely sit still for all the sensations coursing through her body. Unnerving, unfamiliar desires bubbled up that she didn't know what to do with, other than to smother back down, the same way she'd been doing her entire adult life. But eventually the hours began to wear on her, and her eyelids had begun to droop and she couldn't hold herself up any more. She pulled him up off the floor and helped him to his bed, his warm hands grasping the bare skin of her arms, and then she staggered back to her own room with her skin ringing with the memory of his touch. She could still feel it when she was lying alone in the darkness of her own room.
Selise rolled over again onto her back and kicked the blankets off of her, suddenly feeling overheated. And as she fully emerged from the last vestiges of her shallow, hungover sleep, she winced once again when she remembered she was supposed to meet Fiona and Leliana right after breakfast.
She sat up and the whole world lurched. Swinging her legs over to the floor and coming to a stand seemed to require a herculean effort that only made her dizzy and nauseated. Her heartbeat pulsed in her ears, and she groaned as she walked unsteadily to the door, pulling it open and making her way around the hall to the washroom. As she passed the kitchen, she almost ran right into an exiting Anders.
"Good morning," he said softly and then let out a small laugh. "Don't you look miserable."
She conjured up a bleary eyed frown at the observation that he looked perfectly normal and not hungover at all. His eyes were still rimmed in pink, but he was up, alert and had apparently just eaten. Selise would have been happy that she had succeeded in pulling him out yesterday's incredible funk, but someone had apparently filled her skull with molten lead while she was sleeping. She excused herself and continued making her way to the washroom.
"I can help with that you know," he called behind her. She stopped in her tracks and let Anders approach. He stepped around so that he was directly in front of her and tried to suppress the small smile that was creeping over his lips. She must have looked as bad as she felt.
"I'm glad this is so amusing for you," she croaked.
"It's cute," he said and she scowled in response, which only made him smile even more. "Don't worry, you'll feel better in a minute," he said as he raised his hands and gently cupped her head, lacing his arms around her neck. His touch was soft and gentle, and quickly began to pulsate with a soothing warmth that washed straight through her. She closed her eyes, letting herself be filled with the sensation of Anders' energy. It bloomed and expanded, growing beyond just her head and stretching down her neck to her lungs, wrapping itself around her and filling her up with his presence and his scent. She let go of the weight of her head, letting it rest fully inside his hands. With each pulse that she felt rush through her, more and more of the pain ebbed away and the more she surrendered to the forces of his hands. Finally the throbbing receded completely and there was only a pleasant, cascading shiver spreading from her scalp down to her fingertips and toes. She heard a low moan escape from her throat, and barely even recognized it as her own. When finally she opened her eyes, his face was hovering just inches from hers and she realized she had unknowingly brought her hands up to rest on his waist. His reddish brown eyes were smiling and burning into her with a satisfied warmth.
She sighed with relief, and then remembered again that she was about to prepare for a meeting about her duties with Fiona and Leliana. Duties which explicitly included not succumbing to temptation. But she barely even felt like she was doing anything particularly dutiful at all lately. Anders hadn't had the time to try to go anywhere, and everyone had been coming to him. Mostly she just sat around trying to fill the empty hours while dodging all the foot traffic in the hall.
She took a deep breath, trying to press down the desire to just rest there in his hands all morning, and prepared herself to pull away from him. But before she could raise the movement in her wobbly limbs, he slid his hands out from under her head and straightened his posture, pointedly training his eyes onto something behind her. She steadied herself, and turned to follow his gaze. It was Varric, standing several feet away and watching them with his arms folded over his chest and an eyebrow raised.
"Sorry to interrupt you two," he said to Selise, "but I need a word with Blondie here."
Selise cringed yet again, and turned to step around Anders and close herself into the washroom. She sat on the room's wooden stool and dropped her head into her hands. That could all look very, very bad she realized. She wondered what the likelihood was of Varric informing Leliana, but the more she thought about it, the more something told her she didn't need to worry about it too much. Varric had been Anders' friend for a long time and she couldn't remember ever seeing the dwarf fraternize with the advisers. If he had loyalty to anyone, she would have expected it to be Anders first. You need to be more careful, she admonished herself sternly. Better yet, don't get yourself into situations like that in the first place.
Oh but it had felt so heavenly, she thought as she sighed again, still feeling the tingles prickling her skin. If that's how good it felt to just have both his hands on her, she wondered what it might be like to be fully in his arms. She shuddered.
In a sudden flash of sight, she knew why Varric was there. He'd received a message while en route to the Fallow Mire and had returned on his own in order to meet the arrival of the Champion of Kirkwall.
Based on how distracted Leliana and Fiona were as they greeted Selise, she could only guess that the news of the Champion's arrival had already made it to the advisers as well. Since ascending from the lower floor, Selise's mind had been racing with a million warring thoughts, particularly regarding what consequences there might be due to the presence of Marian Hawke. This was Anders' "lost love" after all. Would she hurt him? Would he be back to spending all day in bed after she left? And she shouldn't have anything to be jealous of, right? She and Anders couldn't be together in the first place, despite the flashes of golden skin and warm brown eyes that continued to invade her consciousness. And then there was the fact that Varric's books had detailed what sounded like a very passionate, and still ongoing relationship between Hawke and that elf from Tevinter. She could look into her mind's eye and see that not only were they still together, but their family would be growing very soon. So what did she have to worry about?
What she really needed, was better control over her emotions and behavior around Anders. It went against everything she had ever experienced before with any other man to be so emotionally affected in so short a time. Her experience with men was extremely limited in the first place, and she for the last several years she hadn't had more than just a passing interest in anyone. She had been glad to be free of distractions. Maybe Marian's presence would encourage him to get a handle on himself as well. She and him were to be friends, and that was all. She couldn't bear the thought of the disappointed faces of her employers if they were to discover that she couldn't be trusted to complete a simple mission.
If not for the fact that her head and body were still carrying the warm glow of Anders' healing energy, she probably would have felt much more anxious and jittery. But the lingering magic was imbuing her with a strange serenity, and she hoped that at the very least it would help her not to look too much like the proverbial cat that ate the canary.
"How are you getting along in this assignment? I know there has much less for you to do than we anticipated," began Leliana.
"I am pleased with the downtime. I have been working my way through all the rare volumes in the downstairs library," Selise told her.
"Well I'm happy to hear that. But things will probably be changing. The inquisitor has been reconsidering Anders' future here, especially now that we have fully documented everything he could tell us about Corypheus, which was much less than we'd hoped. It seems Corypheus' affect on his mind was severe enough to throw many of his memories into question," she said and paused to reposition some papers on her desk. "Has he talked to you about that?"
"No. We haven't had a lot of time for conversation," she told them. "You and Cullen have been keeping him very busy."
"Right, of course. One thing we know is that our questioning of him has reaffirmed our decision to keep him far from any fighting, or any important events," she said and paused again. "Also, we are wondering, if you can give us any insight into his… psychological health? Commander Cullen is concerned that he appears very unstable. And we all agree that we cannot afford to let him stay here if there is any possibility of him being a threat to the people of Skyhold. Or that he might attempt to expose himself in order to bring problems to the Inquisition," she said. Selise felt herself grimace at the accusation.
"Have you witnessed anything that should be of concern to us?" Leliana asked, eying her warily.
"Well." Selise began, "He does seem prone to depression, but more of the despondent kind than the angry, lashing out kind. From what he has expressed to me, he prefers and values anonymity, and is grateful for the safe harbor here. I do not believe he is a threat to anyone, here or anywhere else. Except maybe himself."
"Interesting. And how is your relationship? Does he seem to trust you?"
"Yes…. I think he does," she answered. "At the very least he doesn't believe he has anything to hide since I already know everything he has done."
"If I might ask," Fiona cut in, "Have you seen any sign of the spirit?"
"I did see him once, his first night here. I was able to subdue him quickly. It was not a problem."
"Well, that is good, though that is probably something you should have informed us of, yes?"
"Probably. My apologies. It was such an insignificant moment that I completely forgot about it actually."
Fiona and Leliana cast each other a quick look.
"Well that is good to know," said Fiona.
"The Inquisitor has mentioned the possibility of moving him out of Skyhold, putting some distance between us and him in case it turns out he is as unstable as he appears," continued Leliana.
"Well that's my job, isn't it? To make sure he never becomes a threat to the Inquisition or the people of Skyhold?"
"Would you not prefer to have your life back? We would be happy to push this through in order to relieve you of this post, so you can move on to other things." Leliana told her.
Instead of feeling relieved, Selise felt a surge of anxiety. "To be honest, I think removing him from Skyhold and shuffling him from place to place, possibly into the hands of people who might mistreat him, would only remind him of his imprisonment in the Circle. And if anything is liable to make him unstable, I think that would be it."
The room was silent for several long seconds. Selise steeled her eyes and tried to remove any traces of a grimace from her face. She must appear calm, reasonable and unbiased, she told herself.
"That is an interesting point," said Leliana eventually.
"In truth, there has not been much change in my life since beginning this assignment. Other than gaining much nicer quarters." Selise continued. "I would not be sad to see it continue. And I do not believe he will cause any problems that I can't neutralize."
"I see," Leliana said and she sat back and looked over to Fiona again and they seemed to have a moment of unspoken conference. Selise's heart jumped into her throat and stuck there, the seconds stretching into hours.
Finally Leliana continued, "Well as you know, we all have quite a bit on our plates at the moment, and the Inquisitor will be out for several more weeks at least. So it is certainly not a problem to postpone a decision about Anders until her return. In the meantime, please make sure not to forget to tell us any other important bits of information that might come up?"
Selise nodded and rose from her seat on legs of jelly. She realized as she was descending the stairs that her hands were shaking, but whether out of anger, or fear or something else she did not know. She definitely did feel angry, she realized. Angry that a bout of depression could cause accusations that Anders might just up and start hurting people. Had Cullen never been depressed before? Of course he must have been. Cullen had as dark and tumultuous a history as anyone else in the Inquisition, at least to her knowledge. That he might not still struggle with it from time to time seemed incredibly unlikely, yet no one was calling his stability into question. It didn't automatically make him dangerous, did it? How unfair of him, of them all to level such an accusation at Anders. If it was anyone's fault that he had started descending into depression, it seemed to be theirs.
She raced down the stairs with her fists clenched, but then stopped herself at the bottom and took a deep breath. She wasn't thinking clearly, she realized. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. Maybe it was her own history with depression. Maybe she'd killed too many brain cells the night before.
Of course, given Anders' history, she should not be surprised at all at their concerns. Especially when taken along with his dramatically diminished appearance over the past week. Obviously they just didn't see the man that he really was underneath the extreme action that he'd been pushed to four years earlier. They didn't see a lot of things about him. They only saw a murderer and a terrorist.
She was jolted out of her inner dialog when the bald elf peeked into the stairwell with a questioning look. He obviously heard her come to a stop there, and must be wondering why she was lingering.
"Sorry," she said as she pushed the argument out of her head and began making her way through the large round room that was his office.
"Not a problem. May I be of assistance?" he asked graciously.
"No thank you. I'm fine," she called over her shoulder as she exited into the Great Hall. One thing was sure, she realized. She could no longer call herself unbiased.
Selise reached the lower floor of Skyhold and almost skidded on her feet coming to a stop when she spotted Anders in the library. He was sitting in one of the arm chairs with a large dusty tome open on his lap, but his eyes were vacant, staring right past whatever was on the page before him. She eyed him closely as she crept into the room, taking in his long nose and delicate mouth, the shading of stubble around his angular jaw. He had his hair pulled back into a ponytail and his deep brown eyes were far away.
"When would you like to go see her?" she asked him quietly.
His eyes flicked up and he needed less than a heartbeat to answer. "Now?" he asked.
"Give me a moment,"she said and she rushed back up the stairs and peeked her head out into the garden. It was midday and there were people everywhere. Some were working on the plants, some were lounging in the cool grass. Some were sitting quietly and listening to Mother Giselle.
She sighed, and returned to Anders.
"Do you own a hat?" she asked him when she returned to the library. He shook his head.
"Okay, well keep your head down. This is going to be interesting."
Once out in the garden she tried to walk on the outside of him while he kept close to the surrounding wall. But the benches stuck to the wall were full of people, including many soldiers who would probably recognize one of the most wanted men in Thedas no matter how low he kept his head. They took tentative steps toward the stairs leading to the battlements, but then Selise was seized by an impulse, and she turned to send a small wave of a Waking Nightmare spell to a sour faced man on the opposite side of the garden. Immediately his eyes widened as his mind began conjuring up visions of whatever frightened him. He began to panic loudly, his voice rising into a shrill peal, and then he fell into a crouch, protecting himself from some unseen assailant. Selise watched as every head in the garden turned to observe the man, and then one by one people began to rush over to him to offer help. She grabbed Anders' hand and they sprinted over to the stairs, climbing to the top as quickly as they could before anyone happened to catch a glimpse of them. The noise of the man receded from their ears as they walked quickly down the path toward the outer perimeter of Skyhold. She felt bad for the poor man, and wondered if maybe she could send Cole out later on to help him wipe whatever visions she'd given him from his memory.
They passed four soldiers on patrol as they traversed the battlements, each dealt with by a slight push of the disorienting spell. Finally they rounded a corner and Selise felt Anders tense up, his grip of her hand tightening like a vise. She looked over a ledge to a small section of roof that was set lower than the battlements, and there sat a black haired woman in a light suit of leather. She had two impressive looking daggers at her back, and was pouring over an open map, brows drawn in an intense focus. As soon as the stairs leading to her section came into view, Anders dropped Selise's hand and rushed ahead.
She stopped where she was, and watched. She didn't particularly need to go down there with him, she figured. She would let them have their space.
Anders sprinted down the stairs and halfway across the square to her, but slowed nervously for the final approach. She watched the woman's head turn at the call of her name, her hair short and windblown, her features delicate but fierce. And then Marian stood and raced to close the distance to Anders, picking up his hands first as she asked him question after question. Finally she just threw her arms around him.
The Champion of Kirkwall. Selise was at enough of a distance that she couldn't see her in detail, but it was clear that she truly was beautiful. She had lithe, muscular limbs and moved with a striking feline grace. And it was clear that even if she and Anders hadn't remained lovers, she still cared for him deeply. They held each other for a long time, and still hadn't yet let go when Selise finally turned away.
She walked over to the ledge of the battlements behind her and looked down into the icy valley below. It was a beautiful vista, if cold, distant and unnaturally still. She tried to bring the peace of the valley into her, to help her to calm herself and get a handle on her thoughts and feelings. But she felt like she was ensconced within a thick fog, her thoughts darting around and hiding just beyond the point of clarity. There was a deep ache in her gut, this one definitely belonging to her and no one else, as well as a general sense of need. She needed to do something. Anything. But she had no idea what or where to begin to find out. But she knew that she felt now that Anders needed her protection. She had not considered that the advisers might actually be hostile to his presence here, especially considering that they were the ones who brought him here in the first place. But they were now conspiring to pawn him off onto someone else. At Skyhold he at least had a measure of freedom, thanks to her. Maker knows what any other regiment would do with him in their possession.
But of course the Inquisition was afraid, cautious and concerned. It was so difficult for her to hold onto the knowledge that what he did colored the way everyone looked at him, even people who knew him, making him a permanent target of suspicion regardless of his actual behavior.
She supposed her assumption that others might look past his history existed because she herself so easily looked past it. She wasn't sure if she ever saw it, as she had always understood how such extreme measures came to be taken. He'd seen the need to force a much needed change, to free people being oppressed by a corrupt system that was ruled by fear and love of power. It would never have been peaceful no matter how it happened, but it needed to happen. But so many people, most people, were just completely incapable of seeing that.
She felt a deep pang of sympathy for him. He would always be assigned malicious intentions now, even though all he ever wanted to do was create real and important change that would help people. What a sad and lonely life.
She saw in her mind's eye that he was coming up to get her now, to take her down to meet the Champion. Selise turned away from the valley and walked toward the staircase. Anders slowed his pace, his eyes revealing his recognition that she knew why he was coming, and he let her cross the distance to him. She wasn't sure how she was expecting him to look after having just had an intense reunion with a ghost from his past, but she was not expecting to see the warmth that was there, the easy, proud smile he gave her as he waited for her. She would have guessed there would be more regret, more longing, more sadness. But inside the fiery eyes that were fixed firmly on her face, she saw only affirmation.