Chapter Text
A week has passed since they left Kirkwall, and Anders is certain that Marian hasn’t looked at him once.
Not really, not fully. Her eyes skate over him, checking him for injury, making sure he isn’t too tired to keep going. They narrow on him when he stumbles. They dart away when he tries to catch them. When he opens his mouth to speak, he watches them shutter, watches them turn resolutely away, her full lips pressing into a thin line of disapproval.
“Don’t,” she will say. Or, impatient and exhausted, “Anders…” and he’ll close his mouth again.
She kissed him in the smoke and ash of Kirkwall, the Chantry explosion still roiling through the sky, and he tasted the tears on her face when she said that she loved him, that she would not kill him, that she still wanted him by her side.
But she had made a mistake, hadn’t she? Now, years after having prodded him to make a move even though he warned her that it would only lead to this, she has realized that she should have listened to him all along.
Perhaps it has taken her the week to understand that the opportunity to put a knife in his back was one she should have taken.
He understands: she just doesn’t know what to do with him. It must have been loyalty that kept him alive in Kirkwall, and it’s dogging her still. Muscle memory and a remnant of feeling that keeps her from turning on him even though she knows she can’t live with what he’s done. Some misplaced love still clinging from back when they were new, when he could still smile without Justice snarling at him, when he could lounge in bed with his head in her lap and tell her stories of his daring escapes from the Circle. Back when he could be almost himself again, because Marian’s presence made the overbearing rigidity of Justice just a little easier to control.
I have earned a moment of rest, he would tell Justice, defiant, as if Justice were a Templar standing guard inside his head, denying him the right to be with his love. Please, just a few more moments. And for a little while, Justice had allowed it. They were happy.
They aren’t happy now. And with every aborted glance she sends his way, every terse refusal to allow him to speak, Anders becomes more and more convinced that they never will be again.
If she can’t make the decision, he will have to make it for her.
But just a few more days. Just a little while longer. He just wants to be near her for as long as he can. Maybe she will change her mind. Maybe she will…
He’s a fool to hope, but he keeps walking.
He builds up his courage slowly, over the course of several days. A week and three since they left Kirkwall, since they separated from their friends with the intention of scattering the Templars’ attention, and she’s found them a well-hidden cave in which to spend the night. She hardly ever speaks to him unless it’s necessary, and he doesn’t think he’s been allowed to say more than a word since they left their friends behind, but they communicate well enough without it. That’s what comes of three years of cohabitation. That’s what comes of years before that spent working together, watching each other’s backs. Anders gets a fire going, and Marian drops her haul from hunting onto the ground beside him. Without speaking, he begins to prepare it. Marian leaves the cave again, and he knows she’ll be laying out some traps outside, and she’ll scout the area to make sure that there’s no one following them.
There hasn’t been. Not for days. But still, she goes to check, and he knows that means she’s worried. He has noticed the growing darkness under her eyes, the way it matches the growing darkness under his, and he knows that neither of them have been sleeping.
The fear keeps him awake more than the guilt of thinking of the people he killed. He can’t help but hear Templars in every cracking twig, every distant sound. Bad enough that so many relative innocents died for the cause. It was necessary. They were complicit. Something had to be done. Justice had to be served. But her? If the Templars catch up to them, if they cast her aside and kill her in their pursuit of him, he won’t survive it.
She lies awake at night too, apparently, still with him like it’s where she wants to be, even though she can’t bear to have him any closer than several feet away, and he wonders why she’s still here. She won’t look at him, but she won’t leave him either. Later, she will curl up in her bedroll, shivering, on the other side of the cave, and he will try to sleep alone, and he will think of how much easier it would have been for her if only she had killed him.
He thinks, too, of the way she used to curl up behind him, the way she would wrap her arm around his middle, nuzzle her face into the hair at the back of his neck. The way she would tuck her head under his chin sometimes, bury herself in his arms when she needed to, even though she usually liked to be the one doing the holding. Maker, it would almost be easy to survive this if she would let him hold her again.
He thought, when they first ran, when she cupped his face and said that she would follow him anywhere, that it would be romantic. They would be hunted, but at least they would have each other. What kind of foolish hope was that? He sees now that this is the only way it was ever going to happen: she regrets him. She regrets ever speaking to him, ever helping him, ever loving him.
The courage comes surging, unexpectedly, when she walks back in, and he says (quickly, before she can tell him to stop), “the food’s ready, love.”
His heart thumps in his chest as if he has confronted her. As if he has asked the question he wants to ask (why did you do this if you can’t even look at me?) or as if he has said the words he wants to say (you should have killed me. You still could. Please).
And he was right to fear, because the tense line of her body goes even more rigid. She stalks over, rips the offered food from his hands, and she sits across the fire from him, not looking.
“Don’t,” she starts, but she hesitates, softer suddenly, for just a moment. Her eyes flicker up to meet his, and he nearly sobs with relief that she’s looking at him, even if it’s only for a second before they go back down again, denying him. “Don’t call me that.”
There are a few moments of almost dizzy blankness after she speaks. And then it’s hurt. A painful denial, followed by an even more painful acceptance. It feels as if he has been hollowed out from the inside. As if Justice wasn’t the only spirit that had made a home in him, as if Love was a thing that possessed you and then could leave, having you realizing only when it was too late that it was something that you needed to survive. He exhales as if he has been punched in slow-motion, the sound shaky and oddly violent, and it echoes loud over the crackling of the fire.
“Why won’t you just kill me?” he finally asks, his voice much more tremulous aloud than the defiance it sounded like in his head, and she tears a piece off her food as if it blew up the Chantry and ruined her life. “Or if…if you can’t, then just go back to Kirkwall. Leave me here. Don’t do this to yourself.”
“You think I can go back?” Marian laughs, horribly, her mouth twisted into a sneer that would speak of hate except that there are tears in her eyes, and he understands. He knows that she doesn’t hate him. In some awful way, she still loves him. She just can’t remember why, can’t remember why she didn’t kill him, and it’s killing her, and this might be worse than anything Anders has ever felt. He was prepared to suffer the consequences of doing what needed to be done, but he’s not sure he would have done it if he had known what it would do to her.
Justice rumbles with disgust at the back of his mind. This is why the spirit has always disapproved of Anders’ love for her.
“Of course you can go back, lo…Marian. Varric and Aveline. Bethany. Merrill. Isabela. You have so many people who love you. They would all help you without question. And if you killed me, even if you just told them you did, Fenris and Sebastian would…”
“Shut up.”
“I’m only trying to…”
“I said stop talking!”
“Why? So you can go back to dragging me through the forest, refusing to look at me, making yourself miserable for me? This is pointless! Just end it, one way or the other! I can’t just sit here and let you suffer like this. Not for me. It isn’t just.”
The violence of her next movement, of the way she casts aside the food and looms over him, the way she shoves him with both hands, palms against his chest, is shocking. Even if he wanted to stop her, he couldn’t, and he doesn’t, and he falls off the log he’s been perched on, landing hard on his back. There’s a part of him that’s eager for this. Thinking: finally. She’s going to make it right. She’s going to do what she should have done when he was sitting in front of her beneath the flames of the Chantry, ready for the knife. She’ll slit his throat like she’s done to so many others before him, and she will free him. She will free Justice. She will free herself.
But she doesn’t take another step towards him. Even to do this, even to deliver justice, she can’t let herself get close to him. He’s sprawled on his back, hands up, reflexively defensive even though this is what he wants, and her chest heaves as she looks down at him. The rage was quick to rise, and it’s slower to settle, but it’s leaving her in increments, leaving her looking devastated again, and he scrambles back, tries to get to his feet. He’s exhausted, and the ground sways beneath him like they’re on Isabela’s ship, and he staggers forward. Marian takes a step back.
It hurts him, unexpectedly, to see the automatic move away from him, and so he reaches out for her. He isn’t even really sure why. He should anticipate what happens next: she flinches back when his fingers brush her jaw, as if he is some monster, as if she thinks he means to hurt her, and his heart stutters in his chest.
“Marian,” he begs, a sob more than a word, and she flinches back further, fingers curled into fists. She’s moving toward the mouth of the cave already.
“Don’t touch me,” she says, and her words are thick with tears as well. “Don’t touch me, Anders!”
The curse of it is that he can remember a thousand times she’s said his name before. Soft, sweet, kind, wanting, needing. And now it’s spat like a damnation, and all he can think is: you knew it was too late.
She’s gone from the cave before he can say anything else, and he thinks it’s dramatic but narratively fitting that his last word to her was a sobbing exhalation of her name. And the last thing he heard from her was loathing. Varric would have appreciated that, probably.
He leaves a note against his better judgement. He doesn’t want her to linger here, thinking he’ll come back.
Go back to Kirkwall, he writes. I shouldn’t have asked you to kill me. That was unfair. I shouldn’t have put you in that position. But I cannot stay. I can’t allow you to suffer for me any longer. I know where this was headed, and I truly do understand why you can no longer care for me. But you wouldn’t be you if you didn’t try to help every lost soul who needs it, so I’m taking that issue out of your hands, as I should have done back in Kirkwall.
I’m so sorry that I’ve done this to you. I should never have allowed you to run with me. But it isn’t too late, no matter what you think. Your friends love you. They’ll shelter you, I promise. Tell them you killed me, that you came to your senses. The Templars will parade you through the streets as a hero.
It may not mean much, and I doubt if you’ll trust me even now, but I want you to know that I have always loved you. Not one second of that was false, or a plot, whatever you think. You have been the best thing in the whole of my life, and I wish I had never met you, love.
He crosses out love, at the end. Scribbles it out until she won’t be able to see what was there.
Don’t call me that, she had said, and he hates himself.
It doesn’t escape him that he’s leaving her, too. Her parents, Carver, all taken from her. Bethany locked away in the Circle. For so long it was just the two of them in that big house, and maybe that’s why she couldn’t kill him. He is her family, no matter what he’s done. But he knows she’ll be better for this. She’ll go back to her friends. Back to the city she spent so much time trying to save from itself.
Maybe, eventually, she will be able to look back on him with fondness. Maybe she will be able to love the memory of him, the way she used to love the man. She can look back and think that when it counted, he did what was right, and he did it for her.
He folds the note and leaves it on her bedroll. He leaves all of his supplies, save for the staff she bought him in Hightown. She can decide what she wants to take with her and what she wants to leave to rot. He heads for the mouth of the cave and looks around quickly to make sure that she isn’t nearby.
And then he pulls up his hood, and he goes.
He doesn’t make it very far. The Templars were chasing them, after all.
Justice is oddly quiet when Anders doesn’t try to fight. But perhaps that makes sense: it is Just, after all, that he’ll now pay for what he did (what they did), even if it means an end. And Justice will be free, after all.
Goodbye, my friend, he thinks, and he feels the rumbling hum of agreement from the spirit in his head.
He was expecting Silencing and swords, but they force him to his knees instead, and he understands.
There was a time when the brand was his biggest fear. It’s a sign to him of how deeply broken he has become that he hardly even struggles when he sees it.