Chapter Text
She literally ran into him.
One minute, she was moving toward the Gallows at a full sprint, the next, she smacked dead into a solid wall of armor and Templar, and there was a moment of panic at being in such close quarters with one that she set aside like a good soldier – but when she looked up, her breath caught.
Fuck.
She shouldn’t be here. She should not bloody be here, this was not her place, she was Warden Fucking Commander, and she had no business involving herself in the affairs of mages and Templars, even if she had lived among those affairs most of her life, even if she had always been first elf, then mage, then anything else in her heart, even if this war was the culmination of every injustice she’d ever experienced, of a system that in its very bones denied everyone in it their most basic personhood.
It did not matter. Hers was now a different purpose.
And yet.
And now, now here he was, and she would have to fight him, she would have to kill him, and she found that despite everything he’d done, despite everything he would do, she didn’t want to kill him, because she remembered – she remembered that shy, gentle, nervous boy, and how he’d looked at the silly, awkward, nervous girl that she’d been, and the way she’d looked at him, and –
Fuck.
His gloved hands closed around her upper arms, and somehow she could feel the heat of his skin through the leather of his gloves and the fabric of her robes and fuck.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, his eyes ablaze with fury.
“Oh, you know, just popped in for a visit,” she said, any tremor in her voice undetectable, she was certain.
“Are you a part of this?” he asked through clenched teeth, his hands uncomfortably tight on her arms now. “Were you?”
The din of battle, the violent chaos around them, the world on fire, all paired with his grip on her, the look on his face –
It was different than in the tower. He had more control now, more power, but the same intensity, and… desperation, but of an entirely different kind, and it was subdued by so much else.
He was not that boy anymore. She was not that girl.
“I would desperately hate to have to liquefy your innards, Knight-Captain,” she said, her tone light, but her gaze intense and unblinking. “So do unhand me; you don’t want to leave a mark.”
“If you had anything to do with the Chantry –” he gritted out, grip still relentless.
“I bloody well did not,” she snapped, giving him a shove rendered ineffectual by his continued hold on her arms. “Now take your hands off me before I do something you regret!”
Jaw tight, he looked at her for another moment before releasing her. She would have punched him in the chest but had the presence of mind to recognize plate armor’s dominance over her hands. Instead, she slapped him.
His face turned, but nothing else did.
His hand lit up, and she felt the mana drain out of her body. Everything went blurry for a moment, hazy – then her eyes widened, her lips parted, but before she could speak, he had grabbed one arm again and started pulling her toward the docks. It was another moment before she could get her bearings.
“You bloody bastard,” she hissed. They turned twice, and he pushed her into a corner, his body between her and the square.
“Why can’t you just go?” he asked. “Why do you have to be in the middle of this, of all things?”
“You bloody idiot, this city is about to collapse in on itself, and you really think interrogating me is the best use of your time?”
She shook him off, then shoved at him, more effectively this time.
“Warden-Commander, if the Knight-Commander finds you here, she will kill you,” he said, keeping her boxed into the corner with his sheer stupid human breadth.
“She can try,” she responded with an arched brow.
He closed his eyes, and it looked as though his jaw might break. He took a breath, then opened his eyes.
“Think, Warden-Commander Surana. If you’ve completely abandoned any sense of self-preservation, think of Warden Hawke. Think of the Wardens in general; Meredith will see your presence here as evidence of Warden collusion with the rebel mages.”
Fuck. Double fuck. Fuuuuuuck.
She pressed her lips together and shook her head.
There was no bloody way in this world or the next that she would be able to convince Carver Hawke to leave Kirkwall under these circumstances, and she, an idiot, could not leave him here to face all this alone.
And of course, the bloody irritant in her head pointed out, could she live with herself if she left the Circle mages in Kirkwall to their fates after the Chantry had just been obliterated, when those fates were in the hands of a zealot like Meredith?
Of course bloody not.
She looked up at Cullen’s face.
He was strong again. Broader, now, than he had been seven years ago; taller, even, more physically imposing and powerful, and with greater ability in terms of his Templar powers apparently. A man. A proven warrior. A Knight-Captain.
A killer.
There were no traces of softness left in his appearance except in his eyes.
“Cullen,” she said, her tone low, “this is wrong. All of it. You have to know this. I know – I know that you went through so much, but – do you really think we’re all such monsters as to deserve – “
She looked up and gestured to the Gallows.
“this?”
He was silent for too long, then shook his head. The din of battle was getting louder.
“I have to go,” he said finally, quietly, looking at her with inscrutable intensity.
She reached for his arm now.
“Wait,” she blurted out. He looked at her, doing just that.
“After you left the Circle – they said – there were rumors…”
His jaw tightened.
“Yes?” he asked. “What did they say?”
“They said… you fell into a rage and killed three mages – unprovoked. Supposedly they were unarmed. They said that was why you went to work for Meredith.”
He inhaled deeply.
“No,” he said.
“No?” she asked, looking up at him, trying to read his face.
“No,” he affirmed . “I have never killed anyone unarmed, or any innocent.”
He looked at her, shaking his head.
“Is that what you think of me?”
“I don’t know what to think of you, Cullen!” she exclaimed. “You went to work in bloody Kirkwall, of all places, for Meredith. Everyone knows Kirkwall is likely the worst city in Thedas for mages, and Meredith is known all over the South for how bloodthirsty she is. And here you are, her second-in-command, enforcing her rules, these abuses to mages –”
“It’s to protect Kirkwall from them!” he exploded. “To keep what happened at Kinloch Hold from ever happening again! You were there! You saw what they did – what they became!”
“Not all of us!” she near-shouted back. “Those were a handful among a whole tower of people! People who laughed and played and felt, and you would have murdered all of them! All of us, because if it hadn’t been for the Wardens, I’d have been there, too!”
He paled.
“It – it wasn’t murder that I wanted. You don’t know, you don’t know what they did –”
“I know, Cullen. I saw,” her voice cracked, and she shook her head. “And I’m sorry. It was your home, and you saw terrible, horrible things that never should have been. But it was their home -- my home -- too.”
“Someone had to take control of this situation,” he said, gaining his composure again. “And Meredith is willing to make the hard choices that Greagoir wasn’t – that you weren’t.”
Her eyes widened and she looked up at him, mouth open, silent for a moment. Finally, she said,
“You have no idea how sad it is to see you this way, Cullen. To see how different you’ve become from –”
“From the idiot boy in the tower who fawned over you?” he sneered.
She recoiled from him.
“From the kind, gentle boy in the tower I fawned over, you bloody git,” she retorted fiercely.
He looked like he’d been struck, then.
He shook his head, as though trying to clear it.
“Get out of Kirkwall, Warden-Commander. If not for your own sake, then for the sake of the Wardens’ ability to continue to claim impartiality.”
With that, he left her, walking swiftly toward the Templar headquarters.