bringspeopletogether | [sandbox] out of the abyss

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sandbox

[sandbox] out of the abyss

It starts as a shimmer out by the lake. Look at the water from the right angle, and the light glinting off it looks a bit...green. Sickly.

(Familiar, if you're from a certain time and place in Thedas.)

Look up some minutes later, and you can pinpoint the source: a thin, glowing ribbon uncoiling in the sky. It emerges slowly, but the more light it casts, the more momentum it gains, until it explodes outward with an enormous crack like lightning splintering the ground.

A much quieter thump follows as something hits the dirt.

Someone.

The glow vanishes; the person doesn't move for a long beat. (Get up, he's telling himself, get up -- ) He manages to drag his hands level with his shoulders, press down to bear himself upward an inch, look up at where he's landed.

Get. Up.

Another shove, and Alistair lurches to his feet, sword hauled from its scabbard and shield at the ready. His breath rattles, harsh against his throat, as he stares wild-eyed around the grounds.

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"I rather think abandoning the family and then placing a massive target on their holdings by commanding the forces of the Inquisition would counter any sense of filial obligation," he returns, dry. "Would you find it comforting for me to tick off a list of my failures? I can do that. It's a much easier target than your hair, which is saying a great deal."

Alistair sighs, not without a little exasperation. His shoulders slump.

"I see two months wasn't enough time for you to have a change of heart about yourself," he says.

"I know myself."

Cullen rips off a small chunk of bread.

"Besides, I've been busy." And tosses it in his mouth.

"Perhaps you'd be less busy if you reduced your apparently mandated three hours of daily self-castigation."

Very dry.

Unsteadily, Alistair gets to his feet. "I think I'll investigate the bath. Or the tap above the bath."

"I don't have to self-castigate when I've merely accepted the truth of fact," Cullen says, stretching to get the folded linen clothes on the bed, and holding them out to Alistair.

"Keep talking, if you don't mind. Need to know if you fall in there."

A completely disproportionate flare of anger ignites in Alistair's expression. His jaw sets.

"You know," he says, and snatches up the clothes with more force than he intends, "if you were half as terrible as you insist you are, you would've already stabbed me twice over. Not -- done all this."

(What he can't articulate: he just managed to convince himself Cullen was on his side. Hearing otherwise, even in the language of failures versus successes, makes him feel like that fragile foundation's about to drop out from under him.)

He turns and talks -- well, staggers, more accurately -- for the bathroom.

This is the reason Cullen doesn't like to talk about his family: he knows how awful he's been for such a long time. People try to convince him otherwise. But not one of them was there for the whole thing -- from his first draught of lyrium to the last time he removed the armor of the Order.

Were this any other day, Cullen would snap at Alistair -- both because Alistair doesn't know, and because what Alistair said makes no damn sense. If Cullen stabbed Alistair, he wouldn't need to do it twice. Once would get the job done.

His expression's clouded, considerably, but he doesn't say anything. It's not any other day. And Alistair might be spoiling for a fight, but Cullen doesn't have to give him satisfaction.

Alistair might also slam the bathroom door with more force than necessary. Though considering his current state, it doesn't make nearly as satisfying a bang as he'd hoped.

For several long minutes, there's only silence. (He's leaning against the door, head tipped back, trying to kill the fury that he knows will strangle him as badly as the panic did.)

Then, finally: the sound of a faucet being turned, and a spray of water hitting the tub.

And a muffled voice: "I've no idea what you want me to say while I'm in here."

Because Cullen did tell him to keep talking.

Cullen rolls his eyes. In a burst of irritation, he shoves back from the table and stalks over to the window, arms folded.

"Just -- say something about cheese," he calls. "Or insult me. I don't care."

Fortunately, the frustrated growl Alistair makes in reply gets lost under the noise of the shower.

"There's no point to insulting you, you'll just insist it's all true even if it's -- I don't know -- " The sound of the water changes subtly as Alistair steps into the spray. "I'm too tired. And you're an idiot."

Say one thing for fighting in the Fade: it produces less of a mess than fighting in the real world. There's no dirt to wash off. No blood that isn't his own. He rubs a handful of water through his hair in the hope it'll clean off some of the sweat.

"That's never stopped you before."

"I'd never spent two fucking months in the Fade before, either!"

Alistair dashes another handful of water across his face. If it gives him an excuse to put his face in his hands, so much the better.

"Two months. Andraste preserve me."

Silence from outside the room.

Cullen's internal monologue is now going something like you command one of the major armies of Thedas, created on order of Divine Justinia V, fucking well act like it.

If he twists the tap farther in one direction than the other, the temperature of the water changes. Alistair cranks it as far over to the cold side as he can stand.

(Even if the warmer water felt better than any healing poultice on his sore muscles.)

"I'm sorry. I don't -- " Defeated. "Never mind."

"You fought with the Inquisition, Alistair."

Outside the sun reflects off the lake. Cullen watches the play of light on the water.

"You're not under my command. But you were with us. I'm responsible for you. That's -- just how it works."

He's an obligation, then.

Well.

"So I'd be dead in the grass out there if I hadn't fought alongside you."

"Oh, for -- "

Armies. Commanding. Professional.

"Which is it, Alistair? Am I too self-important and ambitious to recognize and remember my mistakes? Or am I a, a mere automaton judging people by the value of their function? -- no. You know what? I'm not fighting with you. I'm not doing this."

He's advanced on the bathroom door, leaning back against it, arms still folded tight. Snapping through the wood. "I'm making sure you get the care and good treatment that you need, that you deserve, until you've decided what to do from here. And I'm not leaving until I'm satisfied that you won't hurt yourself out of exhaustion and starvation. We can just -- mutually forget the part where we've known each other going on twenty years and somehow you think it just -- didn't matter that you disappeared!"

Had this been two months prior, Cullen might have gotten an amused, faintly sardonic, I never knew you cared so much, Rutherford. Instead, he gets silence. The only proof Alistair's still upright is the continuous, subtle shift in the patter of water against metal.

(And that there hasn't been an almighty crash as he fell over. That too.)

"It mattered." Very low. "You know why I stayed."

He has to know by now. Surely the Inquisitor gave a full report when she returned.

If Cullen rolls his eyes any harder they will fly out of his head and go floating outside the Observation Window.

Punctuated with a fist on the door: "Hang the military objective. You mattered."

The water shuts off.

Unfortunately, that also means Alistair loses his cover: in the quiet that follows, Cullen can hear a few audible sniffles. It's...just the humidity from the hot water. Yes.

(In death, sacrifice. It's a very noble cause; very selfless, until you think of how selfish it might feel to those you leave behind. No wonder so many Wardens come into the fold carrying armloads of broken ties.)

When he opens the door, clad in the linen clothes, still clutching a towel in one fist. his face is dry. Maybe it took a couple extra scrubs to do it, but nobody needs to know that but Alistair.

Cullen is back by the window, his back to the rest of the room.

Next move is Alistair's. Cullen almost wishes Alistair would kick him out. It's a lot easier to work off your -- feelings -- drilling a squadron of infantry, with a hypercritical eye.

"Cullen."

His throat feels too tight. It's not panic. Or anger.

"Thank you. For...all this. I'm sorry. I'm not -- I'm grateful." One shoulder pressed to the doorframe to keep himself steady, he worries at the towel between his hands. "I'm glad to have you as a friend. And I'm sorry I wasn't there after Adamant."

His mind only seems to be working in short, blunt sentences. There's more he wants to say, but he can't think how to phrase it, and he's too tired to try.

"Don't say things because you feel you ought to." It lacks sincerity, he doesn't say.

He watches a line of ducks march across the ground below. One would think that given Skyhold's relative warmth in the Frostbacks, they'd have more birds landing in the garden. Why don't they?

"You've eaten, you've washed, and now you should rest."

"That's not why I'm saying it." Frustration tightens his voice. "I'm trying to...damn it."

Alistair presses his forearm to his eyes.

"I'd rather you keep yelling at me if that will keep me awake, to be honest."

Cullen loses his people to the horrors of the Fade all the time. Frankly, the primordial darkspawn magister was an interesting change of pace. And after his embarrassing breakdown in front of the Inquisitor, it was very clear -- he has to keep a tight rein on the what-ifs that plague his mind if he wants to keep his mind right. Keep it functional.

It's one thing when the person walking out of the fade is the Herald of Andraste, who just... does that sort of thing. (Apparently.) It's quite another when it was someone who wasn't supposed to be in there in the first place.

"You're forgetting that I know what starvation and sleep deprivation, in conjunction with prolonged exposure to demons, do to a man."

Clinical. Dry.

"Whatever you're feeling now is going to get progressively worse until you recognize that sleep is mandatory. We can do whatever, or get whatever you need, to make it more tolerable. But you have to sleep."

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