Inquisition's Placeholder of Glory

[avisionofhawke]

Or, the post from which we shall dangle the actual thread.

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[avisionofhawke]

Aisling nodded and stepped back. "I'll go ask around, then. I won't be far."

And with that, she stepped out of the clinic, her heart breaking for him. It wasn't fair, she knew - but this was Kirkwall, and nothing was fair. She just wished it could have happened to someone else for once instead of him.

[cattymage]

Anders spent a long time alone in the wrecked clinic. Occasionally, sounds of activity inside floated out to Aisling - short bursts of it, and it was easy to tell from the increased distance in noise when he'd made his way to the back, to where her Anders had kept his meager living quarters.

Once he'd finished in the back, he made his way out quickly, looking fatigued in a way that was achingly reminiscent of himself, as she better knew him.

He spoke matter-of-factly, before she could get the first word in - it seemed to be something he was starting to rely on, when he thought she might say something first that he couldn't handle.

"It's all covered over in dust. And ash, in back. Someone torched a lot of papers the old fashioned way. Made a little pyre of it. It was all very.. personal, the way it was carried out." His lips curled into an ugly sneer. "Maybe one of our Templar raiders had a crush. I'd be flattered, if Serrah's leavings didn't make me sneeze. But the point is - this happened a while ago."

[avisionofhawke]

The first thing he would have seen was Aisling hurling some unspecified thing angrily through the open wall. By the time he'd reached her, though, she had calmed down a bit.

"Sebastian," she growled. "It was bloody Sebastian. According to the lovely people stuck down here, he came in right after an explosion destroyed the chantry, ranting about you and tearing everything apart. They said that you never came back, and that was a year ago."

Were those... tears in her eyes? She wouldn't look up, so it was hard to tell.

[cattymage]

The urge to quip, to push away the complex weave of emotions spooled in his gut was difficult to shake - he just wanted to be dead to this. It wasn't really his clinic, it wasn't his problem, it wasn't his --

Not yet, at least. Wonder if you can run from a future that's already come knocking on the door?

"So he trashed your boyfriend's hovel in an impassioned fit, and now he's put a siege on the whole city? I'd hate to see how he treats the people that aren't his pals."

Ah, dammit. It had come out anyway, though sufficiently bile-fueled to not sound flippant.

A thought struck him.

"..you think your place has faired any better?"

[avisionofhawke]

"We'll find out," she replied quietly, finally looking up. For once, her eyes seemed more like ice than lyrium. "Sebastian might be a Chantry brother, but so help me... If he laid a finger on you I'll cut his princely heart out and grind it into the dust."

No, Hawke wasn't handling this well. That was a given. She'd lost her brother, with whom she'd fought at Ostagar, lost her sister to the Circle, had just lost her mother to a necromancer... And now she didn't know if the one person she had left was dead or alive. She could either break down or turn that pain into anger, so she chose the latter.

[cattymage]

He caught her gaze, the warm brown of his own eyes roiling.

"You do know just what to say to make a man feel appreciated, Aisling." Tentatively, he reached out a hand to clasp it on her shoulder, and give a comforting squeeze.

[avisionofhawke]

She laid a hand over it for a moment before leading him to the cellar entrance and taking out a key.

The door itself was plain, but it was sturdy and had a good lock on it. It was the sort of door which might last centuries if no one took an axe or something to it. The key slid in smoothly, even though the woman holding it was only half paying attention. Her mind was on what they might find inside-

Please don't be dead, please don't be dead, please don't be dead-

-rather than what was right in front of her. The lock snapped open with a quiet click.

[cattymage]

As soon as the door was safely closed behind them, a little spell-wisp popped into being courtesy of Anders, bobbing ahead slowly ahead of them and casting a pale, eerie light onto everything.

[avisionofhawke]

The cellar was empty. That was all Hawke managed to register as she stormed through and up the stairs.

Everything seemed in order.

Everything was coated in dust.

Her heart was hammering in her chest, loud enough that she was almost certain Anders - the Anders behind her, not her Anders, not the right one - could hear it.

No sign of anyone downstairs.

[cattymage]

He sped his pace to keep up with her - the wisp did it on its own, because Hawke was the one forging ahead, he'd considered it a better idea to set it to follow her - but still, kept silent. He could tell she was evaluating with as much of a strained, panicked eye as he'd been, earlier - except worse, because this WAS her home.

[avisionofhawke]

Empty. Everything was empty.

Empty, cold, and dead.

It was as she knew it, but... The life was gone from the place. This room - empty. That room - empty. She zipped up the stairs, taking them two at a time and making a beeline for the bedroom.

Empty.

At least there were no bodies...

She rushed through, the early afternoon sun shining through the windows as if to mock her. She stopped dead, though, when she saw it - Anders' manifesto, sitting at the table by the fireplace where it always was. She stepped closer as though in a dream, her fingers brushing against the dusty paper almost wistfully.

"He would take it with him," the rogue whispered, "if he left..."

[cattymage]

He waited in the halls, each time she dove ahead into yet another abandoned room - at the bedroom, though, he dared to follow her in, after the moments stretched on a tad too far as Aisling contemplated the manifesto.

He didn't dare come much further than the open middle of the room, taken in by the sight of her - enraptured, sorrowfully, by a paper.

--A note--?

No, she would be more intense about it if it was novel, he wagered - this wasn't the look of someone reading. More the look of someone remembering.

"I know one way to check," he suggested quietly, after giving her a few more minutes of reverie. "I know what wouldn't be here for certain, if... if he was still alive."

He always, always kept it where he slept, and it hadn't been at the ravaged clinic. He'd looked. Both in the likely hiding places, and in the ashes - nothing that looked like charred fabric. All paper.

[avisionofhawke]

She jolted out of her reverie as though struck by electricity. "Of course - the pillow," she muttered to herself, going to the bed and almost frantically tearing the sheets off. It...

It wasn't there.

"Maker, it's gone," she said with a distinct note of relief.

[cattymage]

"Then he's alright," he said, with clear conviction.

Dithering time was over. Where Hawke loomed, breathless, over the roughed up bed, Anders came over and sat down on it, so that he could look up into her eyes, for once.

"...technically, though..." Anders began, tone light, as he dug into his pack with motions practiced enough to not need to even look at what he was doing. The pillow emerged shortly, and he pulled it into his lap, carefully running hands over it and straightening it out. He left his fingers perched to trace the intricate embroidering. "Technically, it's also still right here."

It looked younger.

It made sense - the poor thing hadn't had to weather the Deep Roads once yet, after all - though it still bore the mark of long years of reverent love. It was brighter, but not truly bright.

It must have been beautiful, on the day it was finished. As fresh and ready for the world as the beloved son it was diligently sewn for.

[avisionofhawke]

Aisling settled down next to him and looked at it, resisting the urge to reach out and touch it. She remembered the nightmares he had and how he would clutch the pillow to him...

And her heart broke just a little further.

At least Anders was alive, though... Two of them, she supposed, given the evidence. But they were definitely the same man. It was all so confusing, and she just didn't know quite how to handle it.

She leaned her head against his shoulder, overwhelmed by everything now that she had a moment to pause without the danger of being crept up on by Maker knew what.

[cattymage]

One hand splayed across his pillow, to keep it safe, in place - the other he reached around in a one-armed hug, firm and supporting in a moment that Aisling looked like she was about to fall over like a puppet with cut strings. He kept still as she sunk down onto his shoulder, then, bowed his head forward to rest his own forehead against her, just below her breast.

He could feel her heartbeat from here, the heave of her lungs.

"For what it's worth," said with a keen awareness of the disparity, his lack of being who ought to be here with her, because he couldn't be her matching, hopelessly smitten lover, couldn't be this missing man with his face who she ached for, "I'm here."

[avisionofhawke]

"Thank you."

It was as though an entire world lay in those two simple words. They seemed to hold much more than just gratitude, more than simple acceptance. Those words were her incredibly inadequate way of saying that she was immeasurably glad to have him with her, regardless of the circumstances, and she was glad that he cared enough to comfort her even though, as far as he was concerned, they hadn't known each other for long at all.

She reached up a hand to run it through his hair, starting at the base. She had always liked playing with his hair - it was soft and he seemed to enjoy it whenever she did. It was comforting to engage in such a familiar activity when everything else was thrown into chaos and uncertainty...

[cattymage]

The hair petting earned a soft exhale, accompanied by a pleased hum; the gentle rush of air tickling a little where it trickled in through the pores of her shirt.

After a good minute of relaxed acceptance, he made a sound that wasn't just wordless appreciation - he tipped his head back to look up at her with eyes rendered bleary and murky from the attention, then spoke up in a near-whisper.

_{"If you keep that up, I'm going to have to move. I'll end up drooling into my own lap otherwise, and then where will you be?"}

In spite of his words, he'd been running slow, soothing circles with the hand on her back - light, not something meant to fix physically like the interrupted ministrations they'd went through with earlier.

[avisionofhawke]

She couldn't help but think how alike the Anderses were - they were the same man, after all. The rogue pressed a small, affectionate kiss to his forehead and smiled slightly.

"Nowhere that it would bother me to be," she replied in a gentle tone that usually didn't surface unless it was a particularly intimate moment.

[cattymage]

He closes his eyes when she presses that kiss to his head, and they don't open back up. His head drifts back downwards, cheek pressed flush against her.

"Sit down with me?"

[avisionofhawke]

Chuckling softly, she shifted to sit with him.

"Of course, love."

Her fingers continued to run through his hair, eventually pulling out the tie to free the silky locks so she could play with them.

[cattymage]

It's a different tie in about every way you can examine a hair tie for differences - a solid, fancifully ornate loop that must take a dedicated, steady-handed twist to pull all that hair through, rather than the simple, dime-a-dozen strip of leather he'd come to favor pinning up with in later years. It gave him a bouncy, sleek ponytail that showed off both the loop holding his hair in place and the loop in his ear, as opposed to the tufty cuter style born out of rushed pragmatism; put it up fast, and get it out of the way.

He sidled up against her as well as he could while still leaving them sitting side by side, and turned his head just so to give her a clean shot at mussing about with his loosened hair.

One hand, still protectively over that pillow.

It was a surreal situation, and the longer it went on, sent twinging prickles into random nerve endings about his spine as he couldn't quite zone into it, as much as he'd hoped he would - but the man was a healer. He saw hurt.

And in this case?

The placebo treatment might actually be effective.

[avisionofhawke]

Hawke just enjoyed it for a while, sighing every now and then as she thought things through.

Maker, she didn't know what to do for a change. She always knew just what she wanted and usually knew how to go about getting it, but now she had no clue whatsoever. Everything had been turned on its head.

"You're so much like him," she observed softly, talking mostly to herself. "It's confusing..."

[cattymage]

"Well, I wager we've had a lot of similar experiences, you know," he jokes. "That tends to create some commonalities."

Just as lost as you, Hawke. Just as lost.

[avisionofhawke]

A quiet ghost of a laugh.

"I can't decide if you are him, the way he would be without Justice, or... or if you're someone else entirely. Nothing about this makes sense, but... Thank you for not making things too terribly difficult," she finished awkwardly.

She was trying to open up, really she was. It just didn't come naturally for her. It was the only way to sort this nonsense out, but... Jokes were easier. They hurt less. It was easy to dodge around the painful bits rather than face them head on.