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Author's Note: Thank you so much for your support readers! I'm excited to finally have some angst for these two. I hope you enjoy.
Interlocking
Chapter Seven: Nightmare
"These are the things she remembers." – Krem and Harding find each other in a world torn apart. A story told in brief glimpses.
Harding remembers the day her sister died.
Redcliffe. Blight. Undead. She was seventeen.
These are the things she remembers.
Her sister, fourteen winters old, body limp and blood-splattered, eyes peeled toward the sky. She pulls on her arm uselessly, crying, screaming. Her touch is already cold.
Redcliffe. Blight. A Warden too late.
Her sister is wrapped in white cloth speckled with red blooms. Her face is not her own when they push the boat off the edge of the lake. Harding releases the arrow that lights her sister's corpse aflame. Something sharp and deep-seated digs its claws into her heart. Her breath is tangled up in her throat where her scream lays raw and dying. She falls to her knees, her sister's blood still caked into the creases of her palms.
These are the things she remembers.
Harding stirs to wakefulness in the cold of the Frostback Mountains. Looks around at the weary and injured Inquisition soldiers littering their makeshift camp miles from the fiery remnant of Haven.
She finds she has survived another nightmare. She closes her eyes once more and tries to find sleep.
Krem wipes a hand over the back of his neck and sighs. He is sitting along the edge of rock at the base of the mountain shielding their camp from view. His hands hang limp over his knees. Everything feels heavy and sore and throbbing. But alive. Stinging and harsh in the whipping cold, but alive.
He looks up at the Chargers around the circle before him. Stitches is bandaging Grim's burned arm as he sits quietly in the snow, eyes on the fire in the middle of their little circle. Skinner is lying on her back along the furs spread next to the fire. Her eyes are dark and fixed on the stars, her teeth grit in pain, sweat coating her skin. Her body trembles in muscles spasms, her right thigh wrapped in bloody rags. She will not take the sleeping draught.
Dalish and Rocky stand a few feet away, counting out and separating the remaining healing potions to portion out amongst the wounded. And Bull sits inside the nearby tent, writing frenziedly along a strip of parchment. Krem can only surmise it is an update to the Ben-Hassrath. He watches his boss's tight frown, his hard eyes, the unattended gash down his arm that he refused for Stitches to heal until everyone else was bandaged up. The way the anger and resentment is bundled tight in his muscles. And Krem knows they will be sticking around for the long haul. Krem knows Bull has a taste for Corypheus' blood now. And he will not let go until he pulls his blade from the darkspawn magister's chest himself.
Krem finds the quiet blossom of relief blooming in his chest. He couldn't leave like this either. Not with so much unfinished. Not with so much unsaid. Not when he looks around at the men and women of the Inquisition and thinks 'family'.
Not when he catches sight of Harding sleeping a couple tents down, her leathers splashed in blood and bow held tight even in her slumbering hands. Not when he imagines her shaking in her sleep.