justice_is_blond | Inbox for Fade Rift

"Because it matters."

It's a murmur of an answer, and an agreement; not a judgment so much as a question of itself. The words never fit together the way he'd like them to, without sounding them aloud. They're too wrapped up in picture, in scent, in the sense of something greater than all this earth and meat.

It should matter for its own sake, doing something. Trying to do something. Shouldn't it? He's always taken it on faith: If you can help, you help. Even when he was the one hiding, running from it all, he'd known he was doing the wrong thing.

Perhaps it needs a reason — this business of doing right and wrong. Perhaps it needs self-interest. Instead of banishing the I, hammering it into productive shape.

We.

"Thank you." A moment, he tips his head down low to breathe. "I'm glad you're here."

He nods. It does matter. Justice had been right about a few things, and one of them was that Anders had spent far too much time focused on his own needs and even wants. He'd been selfish. Flighty. Self-indulgent. There's no making up for what he's done, but he can at least work on making the world better. Leaving something behind that's not all destruction.

At Alan's words he blinks, a little surprised, and then the tension that's always in his body when meeting an unknown fades.

"Thank you." That's not something he hears often. "I'm..." He trails off and gives Alan a small smile. "Most days I'm glad I'm here. What's, what's brought you here?"

The smile he offers back is sheepish, faint, but no less genuine for it. A kid's pencil sketch, faded by the rain.

"I found a magic rock."

A beat. He's... he's not quite sure that's what Anders meant. And he's heard all that, anyway, knows how they first spoke. Alan tries again:

"I mean. I suppose that — for a while I hadn't realized how bad it was getting out there." It's easy to forget, spending long enough with your face in the wind. It's easy to let go of the things that hold you to humanity. "Or I didn't want to."

He steeples his hands under his chin. That's maybe not what Anders means either.

"I hit someone," Alan finally confesses. "I don't think I would have stopped."

For a moment his smile becomes a smirk at the magic rock bit, but it fades away as Alan continues talking. He breathes out and sips his tea again, nodding quietly.

He's been angry enough to want to hurt someone, but they've never been in range when he's hit that point. Not for years did he know who had been responsible for taking Karl from him, and when he found out, Justice had taken that moment.

"They hurt you. And you wanted to make them hurt in return." It makes the caged comment more clear; that drive, the desire to hurt the way you've been hurt is its own sort of cage. "But you don't like being that sort of person, so you're caught."

It's an easy conclusion, it seems. "You both want to avoid them and don't?"

It's a relief to see Anders gets it. His shoulders sag.

"I tried avoiding him," But. "There’s someone who wanted us to talk. Thought it would make it — better, somehow."

"I thought I’d be fine. It shouldn't have mattered, it happened. I can't change it. He can't. But then he was talking and there were all these," Excuses, he wants to say. Instinct forces moderation — "Reasons, and they were saying he wasn’t wrong for having done it, and,"

"And then I was hitting him, and then he took it away." He doesn’t have the words. Doesn’t really think that Anders will need them. "I’d never. I knew they could do that, but I hadn’t ever felt it. It was like,"

All the breath gone out, if breathing were that Other sense. His hand opens and shuts on empty air.

If Alan stopped to think about it rationally, he’d understand why Alistair had done it. Understand that what he is owns the power to frighten.

But he’s not thinking like that. He’s thinking like a scared kid in the snow, staring down a problem with the knowledge that if he doesn’t work this one out, there won’t be any more after. And that’s the way it’s always going to look, as long as he’s looking at Alistair.

It’s different now. His hands are strong, he’s grown, he’s alone. No one is going to take anything from him, because he has nothing for the taking. Nothing except his own magic, except the solace of another soul to run to; nothing except the sureness of capability, of survival.

(Nothing except a friend, he’d thought, perhaps —)

Alan hates him for it. Hates it like he hates the first loss, the second. My family, my god, my magic,

(She’d called them friends.)

He’s done the wrong thing here, he knows. Anders is right. Kindness — it’s the right decision to make. For everyone. For himself, even if he doesn’t feel it.

It’s the right decision. It’s not going to be the easy one.

He listens to the story. At 'it' being taken away, he figures he doesn't need more than that. Not between mages. The first time he'd been silenced he hadn't even understood anything, had been too overcome with the yelling and the armored men taking him from his home. A mage who gets that they have magic, knows how it feels, to have it taken away like that the first time? Definite a shock.

Not a shock: that it's a Templar Alan has a problem with.

"I'm sorry." It's the best he can offer, really. "It would be nice if ghosts stayed in our pasts rather than appearing again. But they have a habit of not doing so."

He gives Alan a few moments of quiet.

"Do you know what you're going to do about this?"

He listens, and that matters. Alan rarely speaks so much of himself in a breath. To find that Anders has heard, it's —

— The best he can offer, and no falsehood for it. Alan's head tips up to settle into the silence. A spider makes slow passes between the cross-poles, weaves itself a home within the corners.

"I can't outrun it." Neither of them can. The past owns a rapid pace, of late. "So maybe I need to let it find me."

Not be led to it, not like that again, a dog on a lead. No: Wear the skin of it, those places he's from, the truths he's felt. Let them see who he is, and let himself know it, too. If you hold any shape long enough, it starts to seem as though it's all that's there.

And he's been holding hidden for twelve years.

"Was it — is it better?"

Now that they've found Anders.

Letting it find him, it sounds like Alan's asking, and that's... complicated. Anders looks off to the side. He's not one for opening up, much of the time. He'll use details to make a case, certainly, tuck something into a joke to soften the truth of it, but it's only rarely that he voices something that strikes close to home.

His lips press together, and he shakes his head after a moment. When he speaks, his voice is hushed.

"In some ways, yes." Another breath, and then he's looking back at Alan.

"There's a fair chance, with the world as large as it is, that none would have found me. That I could have taken up residence as a healer in a small village somewhere warm, and simply avoided the world." Grown a full beard, kept his hair short, few enough survived that had known him that he could have made it.

"But I couldn't. I'm only one of the multiple causes of the war, the mage-templar war, but I am one of the causes. I've a responsibility to help, and I knew it. That awareness... I couldn't step back from that. I couldn't become non-aware, non-involved."

A shrug, as if to suggest walking into an outpost where people knew him and others were likely to discover him had been nothing.

"I didn't think I'd long left, when I walked into Skyhold. But I knew I had to use it the right way, and so yes. It's better to take a stand than slip away, even if it's far from easier."

"You could have done good there, too,"

He points out, voice soft. A responsibility to help,

Anders has bared his throat here, Alan isn't unaware, wants instinctively to comfort — but it's a token sort of offering, because the decision that Anders speaks is familiar, almost nostalgic for its certainty.

Perhaps it shouldn't be, they always held themselves apart from the world below. But it was to a higher purpose. It was taking a stand, in its own way.

(It couldn't last.)

It's all... complex. He doesn't know what to make of it still, all these shifting little convictions, the way his feelings flit from one view to the next.

"We have to," He mulls, begins again. "We have to choose our responsibilities, I think. Have to commit to them. To each other."

"I just wonder at what we trade. Andraste gave her life —" Twice over. "— At times, I wonder if it was the only way."

A confession he's not aired elsewhere, and guilty for it.

"She probably didn't see another way."

It's blasphemy to compare himself to Andraste, he knows it, but in this he feels there's a parallel. They hadn't seen other ways.

"When the situation is overwhelming, sometimes it seems like there's no options save what one can do in that moment. And sometimes that's not a good option, not in the least. They forget to hope, or they've forgotten how to hope."

He doesn't think Andraste wanted to die. Then again, sometimes having a martyr can bring power to a group it otherwise wouldn't have had. Maybe that had been her hope. Or maybe there really hadn't been any other choice. He can't say. He wasn't there.

"You make a choice, and it's made. Sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. And yes, returning to the other. I could have done good for a time. But I would not have done the right sort of good if I stayed hidden away."

What choices Alan is facing, Anders doesn't know. He just hopes the boy has more room here than Anders had felt he had in Kirkwall.

"Thank you,"

He shifts, at last, to stand.

"I should," Think about all of this. "Should check on the soldier."

(A broken leg, that's what happens when you run on a slippery battlement. At least that's what happens to other people.)

Anders stands with Alan, nodding.

"Let me know if you need anything else. I'm often available on the crystals or in the healing tents."

And hopefully he helped here.

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