#ch: anders

Hawke changed everything by leading him out of the haze of desperation that surrounded his clinic, not only reminding him of the sun’s warmth, but introducing him to others who worked – willingly – beside him.

Of their half-dozen, he had not expected the blood mage, Merrill, to be the one who extended her hand most willingly. It was a skinny thing, her hand, with long fingers and painted nails and mail gloves with a fraying, knitted orange fabric beneath. Her skin was covered with jagged little scars that ranged from the fresh to the faded, and despite his perhaps occasionally hypocritical stance on her magic, he couldn’t ignore the rush of relief that filled him upon seeing them.

All it took was one visit into Darktown along with Hawke for her to scuttle over to his side, flushed cheeks full to bursting with her offer.

“You ought to visit the Alienage sometime,” she said with a decisive nod, as if she’d accepted the request on his behalf in an instant. “There are loads of people who could use your magic there.” She must have noticed the way he paled at the admission, as she quickly added: “But it isn’t just that! There’s a tree and a bit of the sun and the food isn’t half-bad, even if there aren’t many vegetables.”

Anders could not help but laugh at the time – a husky chuckle that tugged the perpetually downturned corners of his mouth into something reminiscent of a smile.

‘You deserve better’ wasn’t something he could swallow.

‘You need better’ was.

There was only so much drowning he could take before the satisfaction of healing the destitute would only pull him farther under. His cup had been emptied of water and replaced with bile, with blood. And so, he took Merrill up on her offer sooner than he ever anticipated, taking the walk up from Darktown to Lowtown one afternoon after leaving the clinic in a pair of somewhat capable hands.

He remembered with startling clarity the freedom of leaving Kinloch Hold for the first time – the icy waters, the sky that stretched out every direction and its sumptuous blue, the thrill of escape and the promise of adventure and the brilliant explosion of promise in his belly. A similar feeling took hold of him again, though it was much more subdued… and more than a little guilty. Leaving the men and women of Darktown due to the stress they laid upon his chest felt cruel.

Anders had taken up the mantle of caretaker willingly, thrusting himself into an unfamiliar role to bury the man he’d been. The runaway mage was not the sort of man to heal the poor for free, but he had not been the sort of man to put his heart into mage liberation, either.

He slowed to a stop on the side of the path that snaked between the lath and plaster buildings that lined Lowtown’s cramped streets. Pressing his hand flat against his chest, Anders felt his heart hammering against the cage of his ribs, thrumming up against his sternum with concerning speed. He exhaled, waited, then inhaled, repeating the process a dozen times before he felt the guilt leave him like smoke. The scent of it clung to his threadbare robes, to his hair, but when he took another breath, the tension in his breast had faded.

How long would he have to survive this? If he didn’t, if he gave in to the pressures that threatened to crush him, how long would Justice carry his corpse?

His thoughts lingered upon Kristoff as he turned the corner and picked his way slowly down the crumbling stairwell that proved to be the only entrance into the Kirkwall Alienage. Only once he looked up and opened his eyes did the landscape in his mind change.

Slowly, piece by piece and bit by bit, his mind cleared itself of his worries, replacing each errant thought with a new sight, a new sound, a new smell. 

While the buildings were made from the same materials as the rest of Lowtown, the homes that surrounded the square were stacked on top of each other like a treacherous tower of books, each of them with their own painfully obvious flaws. One home’s face was missing its windows, leaving its patched curtains to be flicked limply outside of the empty square by the faint breeze that teased the otherwise stagnant air between the buildings. Another home was covered with a mural he did not quite understand – an elf woman, a thrice-painted seed, a river of tears from under closed eyes. The paint had been cracked and worn by the hands of time. Right beside that building stood one that did not even have a door. Instead, a blanket hung from the rectangular frame beneath lashes of scorched black that spoke of a fire.

And in the very center of the square stood a tree – the vhenadahl, Anders recalled – that was altogether larger than any he’d ever seen. The firs that stood as sentinels around Lake Calenhad were narrow nothings in comparison, just silvery wisps whose smell burned his nostrils. Even the array of larch and pine trees that populated the Coastlands of Ferelden did not grow as tall as the one rooted before him. They gave off ample shadow for afternoon napping, but they only stretched so far into the sky.

Just before noonday, the vhenadahl laid a thick shadow across the ground of the Alienage, making the few beeswax stumps that were scattered around its roots the only light around the tree’s impressively broad trunk. The candles’ flames flickered just high enough for Anders to see the rich red paint that flaked from its bark and the surprised expressions on the elves’ faces when they lifted their heads in his direction.

There was so much he could have said. Explanation after explanation rose to his lips only to fall still and force him to stumble over his own tongue.

The elves closest to him stepped back with wary stares and white-knuckled grips on their children and their possessions alike. As a mage, he understood something of the panic that resided inside of them. One of them reached out with a sudden, shaking hand, intent on stopping him in his tracks.

Anders’s ears burned in a rush of awkwardness, and a single, pleading word finally broke free.

“M… Merrill?”

One of the elven men – older and weathered, likely by a lifetime in Kirkwall – stepped forward. He was not the one who lifted their hand in defense, but when he spoke, his tone was sharpened with accusation. “What do you want with Merrill?”

“What do I want with her?” Anders murmured in disbelief. The thought that he could ever be seen as just some human man creeping into the Alienage to snatch up one of their maidens bewildered him. But what was he, if not human? What was he, if not exactly what they feared? He was so tired of being what people feared. “She… invited me.”

The elves cast doubtful looks to one another, passing along the ripple of distrust from one pair of hands to the next, while Anders stood there, locked between indignation and hopelessness. In the quiet, the old man coughed violently into a handkerchief, and those around him shifted on their feet, unsure of how to progress.

“Go, child,” a woman whispered to the little boy clinging to her legs, nudging him in the direction of the door that he knew led into Merrill’s home. The child set off in a flurry of limbs, as if he was still growing accustomed to using them for speed. Children were only ever children, after all, whether they resided in High- or Low- or Darktown, whether they were human or elven or dwarven, whether they were happy or they were afraid. “Fetch her! See if she knows this human.”

They’d been traveling together for years, but Hawke did her best to keep them out of the Alienage unless Merrill needed them for a job. It’s better to keep our distance, she’d explained, at the very beginning of their time together, when Merrill wondered aloud why they never visited. I don’t want to bring trouble onto your doorstep.

Varric teased, claiming that she didn’t have a doorstep to bring trouble to, and Merrill laughed despite the lonely resignation in her eyes.

Sprouting from around the door leading into Merrill’s home were scribbles of daisies, drawn into the old wood with white and yellow and red chalk. They climbed their way up towards the home’s single, tiny window. There,  a planter full to bursting with elfroot hung, its tender leaves dripping down along with the water that had been recently poured into its pot. Similar planters – each of them different shapes and colors and containing different plants, herbs, vegetables – hung from other windows, stood in what few empty corners that remained to the alienage. 

The square was not all scars. There was color still. There was a future. There was hope, hidden amongst the wretchedness, and Anders saw more and more of it as he took in more of his surroundings.

From the branches of the vhenadahl hung ribbons of the same red that decorated the massive tree’s trunk. Many were washed out and faded by the march of time, threadbare and tattered at the ends, but not all.  There were just as many, if not more, that were the rich crimson of blood, shifting faintly with each brush of the wind. They were beautiful.

For a moment, Anders wondered what scant few beauties he’d missed out on in Darktown.

“Anders!” 

His eyes snapped in the direction of Merrill’s home just in time to see her hauled in his direction by the eager, blessedly task-driven child. She was brimming with smiles, and it did not take long for her to delicately tug her wrist away from the boy in order to hurry in the direction of the crowd. Dispersing them would – hopefully – be her first step.

“Ir abelas,” she said over and over as she approached, reaching for the arm of the old man only to draw her hand away before she made contact. “I should have warned you all that he might be coming, but truthfully, I didn’t expect him to!”

The mother drew her boy back towards her. Her four-fingered hand slid into his pale brown hair, and while the proximity visibly softened her, she did not take her eyes off of Anders for a moment. “Who is he?”

A mage, Anders thought. A runaway. A warden. A deserter. A possessed apostate.

“He is a healer!” Merrill offered as she went to his side, her hand finally finding purchase around his wrist. There was no hesitation in her touch, even after all he’d said to her in the past. He felt the tension in his chest unravel bit by bit. “His clinic is in Darktown, though… Quite a ways away, and it is very… dark, so I said he should visit us to clear his head a bit.”

Anders opened his mouth to speak, to apologize for intruding upon their space and causing them no small amount of unrest, but then, he felt her hand curl around his wrist, squeezing almost painfully tight.

“I hoped he might be able to look after some of you, as well.”

The elves bristled even before he did.

“The last time an illness spread through the Alienage, the Chantry didn’t even bother sending any of their healers to help!” The dissenting voice belonged to someone who’d been silent thus far – a young woman, broader and taller than the others, with the rounded ears of a half-elf. She stepped in front of the old man in what could only be defense. “They let that fever burn through us. Why would your healer even bother?” 

Anders’s stomach turned. The knots in his chest twisted, winding together even more tightly than before. Had this been her reason for inviting him all along? Not out of concern for him, but in an attempt to ingratiate herself with the elves who could barely stand her?

He moved to pull away, but found that he could not. Between her grip on him and the pleading look in her wide eyes, Anders was rooted in place. 

“Anders has a clinic in Darktown,” Merrill repeated herself, carefully picking over the words as if they hadn’t been clear enough the first time. Her tone fell upon displeased ears, but they still listened. They still considered the human standing in their midst – a healer, one who worked without thought towards payment. “We may not always agree, but I know he’s kind. He has to be in order to do what he does!”

Weariness threatened to smother him.

The desire to assist the less-than-fortunate was entrenched inside of him now, but deeper still, there remained a seed of his old selfishness that railed against Merrill volunteering his services without his knowledge or consent. He longed for rest. He longed for quiet and for peace and for a nap beneath a tall tree, as he’d indulged in so often when traveling with the Warden-Commander.

He missed those parts of his old life – just another version of himself that he’d shed like unwanted robes. He missed Warden-Commander Aeducan and the way Oghren made her laugh. He missed Nathaniel and all his bickering with Velanna. He missed Sigrun’s dark sense of humor and the way she snorted when she laughed. 

He missed…

Justice thrummed at the back of his skull, humming like a too-close memory. The ache that radiated through his head in response pulled him away from any pleasantness that reached for him and replaced it with a much more solid, much more painful reality.

“I will help you,” Anders said. Exhaustion marched through his words, but he spoke them loudly enough to reach each of the elves gathered in front of him. “Beginning with the old man.”

The elderly elf crumpled his bloodied handkerchief in his hand, gray brow furrowing.

“Step forward.”