Dragon Age Stuff

spicyshimmy:

I’ve tried to forget about this side of myself. Justice is… so strong. Sometimes the Wardens seem insignificant. The Darkspawn taint. The call of the archdemon. It’s inside me, as much a part of me as Justice.
It’s not easy, being a Warden. Sometimes it’s better to cut all ties with your old life. When I joined, all I wanted was an escape from the Circle. But it’s more. It’s a calling, it really is.

Anders, Legacy.

Hawke has a scab. 

Those are worse than scars, objectively, if only because they’re not scars yet. They aren’t anything. They’re just a stopover between injured and healed skin, to pick at until he realizes it’s his own fault nothing’s getting better and he’s back at the start again—same as when he takes a wrong turn in a tunnel and finds himself somewhere other than planned, face to face with another dead end. 

‘I took you all here for the view,’ Hawke explains, leaning casually against a sealed-off exit, toying with the scab on his thumb. He’s been using his staff more and more lately, new blisters between the old calluses, which is—if you’re going to get all Varric about it—like any new relationship: finding where the old grip fits, finding where the new grip works.

Bodies against bodies regularly encourage a ritual friction, and that pleasantness can’t happen if something isn’t out of place. 

Something’s out of place all right. They’re lost in the deep again. And the more Hawke pushes the limits of his skin with the scab that won’t leave him alone, the less likely the scab is to leave in the first place. 

‘Note the handsome carvings, sweetly accentuated by streaks of spider venom and, of course, our blood,’ Hawke adds with a flourish. ‘As far as haunted rubble goes, you won’t find a better-decorated example in all of Thedas. There—now you can’t say I never took you anywhere nice.’ 

‘Like in circles, huh?’ Varric asks.

Anders, quiet since the admission, quiet completely save for the rise and flutter and fall of his feathers with each unheard breath, pushes the hair back from his face. ‘Like from circles,’ he adds. 

They let that rest for the time being, also a scab of sorts.

‘Don’t look at me, Varric,’ Hawke says instead. ‘You’re the dwarf. You’re supposed to be good at all the hex stuff. …And all the beard-growing, too, come to think of it.’

They don’t look at Anders, who’s the warden. He’s supposed to be good at all the underground stuff, but Hawke has this scab and for a moment it seems as though it might finally peel free, if not without a little blood. 

That’s dangerous enough, when there’s darkspawn about. 

It’s possible—anything’s possible, Hawke’s discovered, especially the improbable—that he’s postponing the sunshine, the inevitable trip back, the customary retrace-your-steps portion of their trek, pockets laden with junk and mementos and memories, new wounds just beginning the process of becoming old ones. And when day breaks at last all of them—friends squinting into the bright sky while their eyes adjust, enough to realize how dirty they are—it won’t actually shed light on anything. They’ll still be just as dark, just as dirty. That damn scab will still be itchy by half and painful by another. 

‘So does that make it more of an unwitting foursome?’ Hawke asks, passing beneath the same arch on the way in, still with a jaunty step. ‘Sometimes I feel like three separate people, too, but Anders, you have to warn a man before he embarks on these things. It’s not just an accident, you know. It’s a—calling.’

Anders knows.

Hawke rolls the scab on his thumb against his forefinger, this dance he’ll never stop until the day he does—and after that, he’ll never start again. 

They could sit each other down beside the spider venom and the blood and of course the corpses and talk about what it means and maybe even about what it doesn’t, why Hawke can’t let the scab be, the three men he found and the one he was looking for—or they can bump shoulders while leaving the accursed place, having learned too much already during their stay. 

This time, Hawke gets them out. 

That’s a calling too, even if one day the scab won’t heal over. 

‘I’ll tell you this—I’m not looking forward to crawling through those Deep Roads again,’ Hawke adds, wiping some of the blood off Anders’s cheek with his thumb. 

Anders blinks, neither toward the darkness behind them nor into the sunshine at Hawke’s back, but Hawke in the middle of both. ‘I hate the blighted Deep Roads,’ he says.

Finally, the scab pulls itself loose—though not without a little help along the way. 

Girl. I love your words so much. Sooo much. You know it, right?

(Fonte: dragonagestuff)

Postato 3 mesi fa — 121 note