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Without a doubt, Fenris’ burn is hideous, and does cause some of the younger assistants to blanch and retch. Anders simply quirks an eyebrow at the sight.
Once you’ve fought toe-to-tit with a Broodmother, the world loses its capacity to disgust you.
"Alright." Anders motions for Fenris to hold out his arm, not daring to touch him without permission for fear of a manic elf rearranging his organs. "Let’s see it then."
He asks mostly out of politeness; a quick look shows Anders all he really needs to know. The burn is obviously magical in nature, the greenish miasma wafting off the oozing pus evidence enough, but the vibrations of the exposed lyrium veins is the most obvious clue.
It looks horribly painful; even Isabela and Hawke avert their eyes from the worst of it.
Anders would empathize more if Fenris would stop glaring and actually allow him to heal his arm.
"Alright," Anders surrenders, mostly out of sympathy for Hawke and Isabela, currently doing their best to hold Fenris upright without touching him more than necessary. "Just sit down and keep still."
Fenris performs one of the requested actions, and only because Hawke and Isabela dump him into the cot. Despite retching and withering in the once clean sheets, Fenris still manages to swat at Anders’ hands and protect the festering burn with last of his consciousness.
Anders rolls his eyes. "Be a good boy, Elf, and I’ll give you a sweetie."
"Do what Messere Healer says, ser," advises a little elf girl laying on a cot at Fenris’ left with a cheerful pep. "Mama gives me kisses whenever I get healed good, maybe she’ll give you a kiss!"
The girl looks up at her mother for agreement and, given the woman’s pink cheeks and appraising glance, she’s seriously considering it.
Anders fights to keep a serious face and even Hawke, who’s fluttering around Fenris like an overlarge hen, snorts. Fenris makes a noise like a wet cat and his ears flatten firmly against his skull, reminiscent of Velanna during one of her moods.
Anders snickers as Fenris finally allows him access to his burn, remembering Velanna’s angry resistance to his healing as well. Although that irritating quirk had been based around a hatred of his race, rather than his magic- his very essence of being.
Anders immediately does away with those thoughts; reminiscing about the Wardens makes him wistful and fills Justice with a strange guilt that both of them prefer to ignore. To pull himself back to the present, Anders leans into Fenris’ space to examine his burn, acutely aware of how the elf bristles at his proximity.
The burn isn’t as noxious as it smells.
It’s charred slightly, blisters bubbling up along the edges, but is otherwise typical. A salve around the blisters, an anti-magic spell, a little scrubbing away of charred bits with telekinetics, and a bought of intense healing should get Fenris back to ripping out hearts by afternoon tea- if a barbarian like him actually observes teatime.
Usually, scrubbing away the charred flesh is first, but with magical burns, Anders always checks for residue. He wouldn’t want to tear away the dead flesh only to find the magic seeping further into the muscle.
He’d watched Flora (poor, sweet Flora) make that mistake in the Tower, and never wants to see it again.
Anders is about to run a hand inches over the burn, encased in his favorite Spirit spell, when Fenris’ undamaged hand closes around his wrist like a vice.
"No!" he cries through gritted teeth, eyes wide and delirious with pain. "No magic!"
Anders actually retracts his hand in surprise; generally, his patients don’t want to be touched by his evil mage hands, up until the pain overcomes their bigotry. Anders has to respect, at least a little, that a severe burn isn’t enough to melt Fenris’.
That’s some admirable dedication, he thinks bitterly as he leans away from the elf.
"Fenris," Isabela sooths, squeezing his knee and trying to remain supportive. "When you’re skin turns grey, that’s when it’s time to let the healer work his magic."
"No!" Fenris snaps, desperately attempting to wiggle away from Anders. "There are other ways, Abomination! Do those!"
There isn’t enough spindleweed on Thedas for this idiot, Anders thinks with a hiss.
Instead, he rubs his forehead and groans. "Fine! Maker, but when normal people die because one stubborn jackass takes up all the healer’s time, I hope you- and he’s asleep."
Fenris had passed out sometime during his tirade, leaving Anders to glower at an unconscious elf. Anders momentarily considers just healing him while he’s asleep, but he does have some sympathy for someone who had been held down and had magic forced on them.
Not a lot, but apparently enough.
Hawke gives him a tilted, sympathetic smile, as if being pretty makes up for having terrible taste in friends. "Need anything from us?"
"A blunt object to bludgeon him over the head with," Anders replies, not entirely sure if he’s joking. "Cut around his stupid tunic, Lillian will be around to apply dressing and give him his salt and soda, don’t touch the burn!" he adds, snatching his staff off the wall as he stands. "Don’t touch anything touching the burn, don’t chill it. And if he wakes up," he adds to Lillian, the shiest, tiniest escapee he’s ever met, "you have my full permission to be as mean as you like."
She giggles, but it’s humorless and mostly out of loyalty. As he makes his way to the door, Anders absently wonders if Lirene has been telling his apprentices that laughing at all of his terrible jokes is paramount to the healing process.
"Why can’t you just use a salve or a potion?" Hawke calls out.
"I could if there wasn’t so much dead flesh!" Anders replies as he stalks toward the door. Healing over necrotic flesh is probably the worst mistake a healer can make and Anders all too often has to deal with idiots who take poultices when their flesh is gangrenous. It’s not pretty.
"Where are you going?" Hawke shouts.
"Ingredients! It’s been a while since someone was so much of a tit that I had to collect…" Anders stalls in the doorway, eyes widening and lips tilting upwards as he fully contemplates the method of manually healing a burn. Anders can’t stop the huff of laughter he makes when he turns back to snatch the ceramic jar used to contain wet ingredients.
"I’ll be back soon," he adds as he shuts the door, allowing himself a moment to lean against the fraying wood and simply laugh.
When they see the non-magical burn treatment, Maker, will that be a riot.
Anders can’t wait to cover Fenris in maggots, he really can’t.
"Where have you been?!" Hawke cries, jumping to his feet to face Anders, who is aware of how inappropriately gleeful he looks. Fenris has awoken, for better or worse, and appears to be suffering stoically in tremendous pain.
Lillian did a passable job caring for him; the burn still oozes blood, but the worst of the charring has been scrubbed away and the magical effects dispelled through lyrium.
Which is technically magic. A fact Anders takes note of and mentally adds to his list of reasons why Fenris is an abominable hypocrite.
"Collecting supplies," Anders responds as calmly as he can, allowing the others to believe he’s collected elfroot or deep mushrooms or some such cure-all. He sits down at Fenris’ shoulder, ignores his glare, and balances his ceramic jar over his knee, tilting it away from Isabela’s curious eyes.
Anders digs around in the wriggling pile for the ripest, juiciest little blighter and pauses for dramatic effect.
The look on their faces when he pulls out the first maggot is something Anders will relish for years.
He's pretty sure Hawke has lost percentage points off his life when he plops the first one down and the noise Fenris makes is so funny, it’s actually cathartic for all the times he’s called Justice a demon.
"What are you doing!?" Fenris bellows, trying to squirm away from the mad healer until he flops back down, overcome with dizziness. He groans and fall back onto the bed, although he still manages to dredge up an intimidating glare.
"Applying maggots!" Anders remarks with far too much cheer and no desire to contain it. "Without magic to destroy the dead flesh, they’re my best option!" He grabs another handful and Fenris makes a sound like a kettle on the cusp of boiling over.
"What?" Hawke stumbles over, face twisting between confusion, disgust, and anger. "Anders, this isn’t funny, he’s seriously hurt!"
"One," Anders enunciates clearly over Fenris’ furious attempts to interrupt, "it’s sodding hilarious, and two, this is how you dispose necrotic flesh without magic. I can’t just heal over it with a poultice, he’ll get sepsis and die. If you honestly don’t believe me, I have several tomes that will prove me right." He jerks his shoulder to his desk, piled high with legally obtained anatomy books and grimoires.
"Can’t you just cut it out?!" Fenris seethes. His mouth is twisted in fury and his eyes narrowed, but he squirms in disgust and continuously makes nervous squawking sounds; he paints such a pathetic image, Justice actually begins to forgive him for his more vile insults.
"Yes," Anders chirps with a blinding smile. "But it’s not nearly as effective as letting these little buggers eat it."
"Um, how many do you…?" Isabela peeks inside the jar and emerges with wide eyes and a twisted frown. "That’s a lot of maggots," she adds, sounding slightly dazed.
"Yes! It is, isn’t it?" Anders replies, sprinkling the handful over Fenris’ shoulder. "They’re also very helpful with ulcers, if any of you have got any of those." He bets that, even if Isabela or Hawke were covered in oozing, painful ulcers, neither of them would admit to it at this point.
"They won’t, uh, eat him, will they?" Isabela tests as Anders plucks an escaping maggot out of Fenris’ hair and plops it back into the oozing wound.
"Of course not, they only eat dead flesh." Anders has long since lost his fear of maggots (he’d fought the Children, for Maker’s sake) and digs another handful out of the jar, allowing them to waddle helplessly around his palm just to watch his companions squirm. "And their feeding secretions fight infection!"
Isabela makes a noise that may’ve been intended to imply interest, but only sounds like a suppressed scream.
After distributing the maggots to his liking, Anders reaches for the more porous bandages and layers them gently over the wriggling mass.
Watching the bandages tremble as the maggots squirm to find their favorite spot on Fenris’ burnt shoulder is obviously too much for Isabela, who stands and walks briskly out of the clinic without another word.
Hawke remains, either out of loyalty to Fenris or fear that Fenris will kill Anders once alone. Whatever the reason, Anders is grateful because, now that the novelty of the situation has worn off in favor of focusing on dressing Fenris’ wound, he finds himself concerned that the elf might actually kill him.
He’s certainly glaring like he plans on it.
"There," Anders announces once the last of the bandages lies delicately over Fenris, forming a tent over the injured shoulder. "You’ll need to stay here for a few days, Hawke and I can move your cot if you’d like more privacy. I’ll probably need to replace the maggots at least once more and you’ll have a nasty scar when you’re done. Unless," he stresses, "you want to stop this silly farce and let me kill the necrotic tissue and the maggots and heal your wound with a spell?"
"No," Fenris snaps, leaning back into the cot and crossing one arm over his chest. "You may leave me. I will be fine."
"Fenris," Hawke groans. "You can’t be serious."
"This is satisfactory," he lies smoothly.
Anders eyebrow twitches, suddenly determined to make his clinic, which is impossible on the best of days, the least bit satisfactory.
After three bloody miscarriages Anders’ couldn’t salvage, two little girls and one little boy with torn insides that gave Justice yet another reason to stew in righteous fury, and the worst humanity had to offer him, Anders finds himself increasingly desperate.
Fenris’ burn requires him to remain in the clinic for another day, at least, and Anders worries the bastard might actually manage it.
He does not want Fenris learning the wrong lesson here.
So, that evening, hours after Anders has doused the lamp and fed and watered Fenris and the other remaining patients, the door swings open with a cheerfully cried, "Broody!"
Varric, followed by Hawke and his entire gang, marches in with their usual swagger. Sebastian and Aveline following behind and looking a little confused while Isabela and Hawke, probably afraid that Anders will bring out more bugs, appear wary.
"Mage!" Fenris shouts and turns his scowl onto his healer once Anders’ smiling face appears from behind a tattered curtain.
"Yes, burn victim?" Anders coos.
Fenris is decidedly not amused. "What are they doing here?"
"Why, I didn’t want you to miss Wicked Grace night!" Anders cheers sardonically. "So I invited the group over."
"You said you were using an ancient healing technique!" Merrill squeals, bounding out from behind Hawke and over to Fenris’ cot, ignoring his glare in an impressive display of willful ignorance. "I’ve never seen any ancient healing techniques, can you show me?"
Anders feels his patience with Merrill, usually drooping in the single digits, expand tremendously. "Sure." He shrugs as Isabela slaps her hands over her eyes and Hawke coughs. "Come over here."
"Anders," Hawke complains. "Come on, I agreed to come specifically because I thought you wouldn’t show us Fenris’ nasty burn."
"Come now, Hawke," Sebastian laughs heartily, moving closer to pat his friend’s unwounded shoulder and settle into the cot next to Fenris’. "I'm sure we’ve all seen much worse- SWEET MAKER!"
Anders can’t help but throw his head back and cackle at that.
“Oh!” Merrill chirps. “Maggots! How fascinating!” She moves to pluck one out of Fenris’ revealed shoulder, but Aveline, in a moment of surprising cleverness, snatches her wrist.
“What are you doing to him, Anders?” she demands, resigned to the fact that he’s always doing something wrong and sounding as if she had already prepared his scolding on the trek from Lowtown and is simply looking to add in some specific crimes.
Since Anders is too overcome with laughter, because Sebastian’s face, it's Merrill who answers. “They eat dead flesh! I’ve heard that sometimes if the Keeper isn’t around, you can put maggots on wounds! Isn’t that just beautiful?” She sighs blissfully, clutching her intertwined hands to her check and swaying with an imagined wind. “The Creators blessed us with everything we would need.”
“Mage,” Fenris snarls, the tips of his ears turning red under everyone’s gaze. Anders realizes he’s left the elf laying vulnerable without the protection of his spines or even a tunic. And although suffering is good for the soul, particularly one as miserable as Fenris’, Anders remembers his time left naked in the dark of Kinloch’s dungeon and tosses a blanket over Fenris’ upper body.
There, now the bastard can't claim a mage never did anything for him.
Fenris manages a softened stare at the blanket but still sneers at the man who gave it to him. “Mage. This game is unnecessary.”
“So are the maggots,” Anders snorts. “Let me heal you!”
“If you hoped to humiliate someone into submission,” Fenris hisses, eyes darkening in challenge, “you should not have picked the former slave.”
“If you hoped to guilt someone into letting you be an idiot,” Anders returns without missing a beat, “you shouldn’t have picked Wynne’s apprentice!”
The group watches them in silence, eyes darting between the glowing elf and the glowing mage like spectators of some bizarre fencing match.
“So,” Varric interrupts, immediately and unquestioningly drawing their collective attention. “How about a card game?”
The dwarf waves his deck of cards before them, and the group, almost unanimously, shrugs their agreement.
“Let me heal you,” Ander attempts the next morning, still in the process of rousing himself from a restless night of Broodmothers and water dripping down unfeeling stone into the impenetrable darkness. Anders doesn’t know why his Grey Warden nightmares occasionally blur with his regular nightmares in a slurry of horror, but he’s pretty sure it has something to do with Kirkwall’s general aura of terribleness.
“No,” Fenris replies easily, irritatingly well-rested.
“Fine,” he grumbles, removing the bandage on Fenris’ shoulder to check on his maggot population; they had grown as large as they were liable to get and Anders can’t sense much lingering necrotic flesh in the hardening wound. “You should be ready to go within the day, I’ll remove the maggots tonight and apply a permanent bandage. Then I expect you to never come back here and go to the damn Chantry for healing.”
Anders rubs at his eyes petulantly, falling into the cot next to Fenris' and enjoying a moment of blissful silence before Lirene arrives and launches into a discussion of politics with Fenris and the rush of patients that inevitably follows her. Anders doesn’t know what irritates him more; Fenris’ opinions or the fact that Lirene likes him. The traitor.
Fenris looks the mage over with a raised eyebrow, before something like concern furrows his brow. “How can one look more tired after sleeping?”
“Shut up,” Anders mutters cleverly into the cot’s flaky sheets. No one has ever demanded he be witty so early in the morning; his patients don’t expect it of him and Varric is hardly sentient until at least midday.
“Will you not attempt to convince me any longer?” Fenris continues, unimpeded by Anders’ obvious desire to not talk to him. “Your argument that magic is useful would fail, should I leave.”
“I’m not going to keep you here if you don’t need to be.” Anders arches his spine, leaning against his elbows to properly glower at Fenris. “You’re even more of a waste of space in my clinic then prancing about your mansion. And I’m not going to hold you down and heal you by force, so if I can’t convince you, then yes, you’re free to go once I replace your bandages.”
"But you will be wrong. I will still view magic as an unnecessary evil."
"Then my consolation prize will be that we're both wrong but you're still a bigot."
“You will not force me nor sabotage my treatment,” Fenris confirms with a rhetorical statement, eyeing the mage seriously. The expression is intense to Anders' eyes, and he shrinks away from it. Intensity, outside of threat or anger, is not something Anders is familiar with being the subject of.
“Of course not,” Anders replies anyway, falling back into his cot to avoid the elf's stare. “I’m a healer, you dolt.”
There is a long moment of silence before Fenris speaks up again.
“You may heal me,” he remarks firmly.
Anders sits up so suddenly his head spins. “What?” he sputters and gawks openly at his impossible patient, still lounging with his eyes closed.
“I said you may heal me.” Fenris opens an eye to shoot Anders an impatient look. “Use magic as you see fit.”
“Wait.” Anders only stares. “Really?”
“Really,” Fenris repeats, obviously irritated.
“Say it,” Anders demands nonsensically. "Say… "magic is useful", say it."
Fenris sighs, eyes boring into Anders’. “Magic,” he recites smoothly, as if it causes him no difficulty, “is useful.”
“Alright then.” And with that, Anders wills a force blade, a common fixtures in his surgeries, into existence and begins carving away at the last of the charred flesh. Chunks of it dribble into the dirt and the maggots begin their doomed gauntlet to freedom. With a simple wave of Anders’ hand, the mass of flesh and maggots catches fire and sizzles away, leaving a shiny surface in the dirt.
With the bugs and the dead flesh gone, Anders flashes a burst of force magic, draining the rest of the goop from the minuscule fissures and rivulets in Fenris’ flesh. Finally, with the poison gone, Anders lays his hand on Fenris’ shoulder and begins the process of knitting his flesh together. Veins curl outward, fat expands over lyrium viens, and skin grafts itself in a predictable dance under his fingers.
“Was that so damn hard?” Anders complains as he heals, involuntarily pulling energy directly from Fenris’ lyrium and worrying if the elf finds it painful. “You may hate me, but I am useful.”
“I have never claimed you were not,” Fenris replies evenly, watching his own flesh meld together with an impassive, uninterested gaze. “I claim you are arrogant, naïve, and cowardly,” Anders wonders if it’s his desperate imagination that catches the way Fenris pauses at the accusation, as if it merits further contemplation, “but you are useful.”
“Then why this stupid game?” Anders grumbles, sliding his palm across the closing wound to feel out the edges. “Just let me heal you and then go back to hypocritically hating magic like everybody else.”
“I wanted you to understand that it is my choice,” Fenris growls. “If I do not wish to be healed with magic, you will not do so.”
Anders quirks an eyebrow at that, finally looking away from his work to fix Fenris with a confused stare. “I know that,” he says. “I know it’s your choice. Did you miss me not healing you when you were unconscious so you could continue to take up unnecessary space in my clinic?”
“I did not,” Fenris agrees, curling back into the pillows once Anders’ hands leave his shoulder, implying that, for him, this conversation has been concluded satisfactorily. A small smile has settled on the elf’s features which, as Anders is horrified to notice, aren’t so sharp with half his mouth quirked and his shoulders relaxed.
Anders stares at the elf for a long moment before realizing he isn’t planning on elaborating.
“What,” he states, tone blank and eyes blinking wide in confusion.
Fenris raises an eyebrow in exasperation, then continues with the air of someone explaining something very simple to a very small, very stupid child.
“Yes, I know now that you understand. I wished to verify this fact.” Fenris’ condescending tone strikes Anders with the sensation of being called into the First Enchanter’s office; his spine snaps straight with the memory and it takes a conscious effort for Anders to slump forward again. “You will attempt to convince me, attempt to embarrass me, and you will not respect nor agree with my opinion, but you will not force me. Which makes you wrong, unfortunately, but honorable all the same. That is all I wished to know.”
Anders’ eyebrows furrow together, making his confused stare look aggressively incredulous. “There is no… I, you… What.” He stumbles with his words for a few seconds. “I put maggots on you!”
“Yes, you did.” Fenris nods.
“I put maggots in your flesh and you let me do it to figure out if I was as scummy as some slaver?” Anders knows he’s yelling now, frightening the small number of patients that have trickled in, but at least Justice remains passive, even slightly amused in a way Anders isn’t going to contemplate. Their mentalities have diverged enough for Anders to sense his spirit’s mirth while his own emotions have barreled off course into somewhere weird and confusing. “I’m not a, I’m no sodding blood mage magister and you, you!” Anders sputters furiously. “Your logic doesn’t even make sense! It’s stupid! You’re stupid!”
“I now know you can be trusted with healing, if nothing else,” Fenris responds, frowning at Anders’ sudden increase in volume. As if Anders is the crazy one. “I would not travel with a man who would act against my will, even for my own good. I’m sure you, for all your claims of suffering, can understand that.”
Anders turns away in blushing irritation, coupled with a small flush of understanding that he is determined to hide- as well as pride; no one has called him honorable before- and busies himself with the heavily pregnant woman who was so startled by his sudden yelling that she appears to have gone into early labor.
“You let me put maggots on you to prove a point,” Anders grumbles as he casts a rejuvenation spell to assist the woman in tightening her muscles. “I wasted time on you, dammit. You’re lucky it was so sodding hilarious, or I would be much angrier.”
“I will allow you a moment to relish in your victory, fool mage,” Fenris purrs in response, folding his sheets as he emerges from the bed and side-eying Anders with a smirk the healer can’t see so much as hear. “You need it far more than I do.”
“Thank you,” Anders snaps, “now shut up.”