#thethirdamell

For the prompt list / DADrunk Writing

3. Anders (Any Pairing or No Pairing)

Would be a lot of fun if you felt so inclined :>

Thanks so much for sending this in @thethirdamell and I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to get round to doing this! 

Microstory prompt: 3. [I] trusted [you] -- for @dadrunkwriting 

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Varric might have been determined to make the Champion of Kirkwall look innocent when the Seeker questioned him about whether Garrett Hawke knew of Anders’s plot to blow up the Chantry -- but those closest to Hawke knew the truth. And the man closest to Hawke was none other than Anders himself. 

‘I trusted you,’ Hawke said simply, when Anders asked him -- again -- why he was still by his side, why he hadn’t just killed Anders as planned. ‘I trusted you then, Anders, and I trust you now.’ 

‘Even though you were forced to leave your home? Even though we’ve been on the run all this time?’ 

Hawke just shrugged, and conjured an orange flame in his hand which he used to light a cooking fire in front of them. Carrion for dinner again, Anders thought. It was a far cry from Hightown finery and fine dining, and there were days Anders wondered if Hawke ever questioned if it was all worth it. 

‘In case you hadn’t noticed, Anders,’ Hawke said, turning the dead bird on the spitroast over the flames, ‘I’m a mage too. Your cause is my cause. Your fight is my fight.’ He paused. ‘Until the day we die, remember?’ 

‘Until the day we die,’ Anders repeated. 

Maybe one day he would believe it. Maybe he had to trust Hawke as much as his lover clearly trusted in him. Maybe that was what this all came down to. 

Anders had had very little to trust in his life. Very little to rely on. The moment you trusted that someone or something would always be there, was always the moment it would be taken away. 

There is a boy in the Kinloch Circle that templars talk about. A powerful mage, smart. Someone the Senior Enchanter has personally been grooming to take his role sometime down the line. From what Cullen can tell, the boy is something of a prodigy.

But the templars don’t talk about his intellect or his magic. They talk about his mouth and his body and the way he looks at them when they’re done. Cullen tries not to listen to those parts.

The mage with the striking eyes and striking mouth has a name. Fausten Amell, named after his family’s patriarch, is a slender mage. Raven-haired with rich brown skin and the eyes of an albino. Though Cullen himself hasn’t had any meaningful interactions with Fausten, he’s listened to enough of the gossip to know something of the Amell history; or as much as the grapevine can be trusted to tell it.

According to rumor, the Amells were a wealthy noble family hailing from Kirkwall. They had migrated to Ferelden sometime in the early Dragon Age after a combination of scandals and bad luck had left them bankrupt and disgraced. Fausten’s line specifically was burdened with mages, of which he was one of five. Their story was as tragic as it was gossip worthy.

Cullen wasn’t sure how much of the rumors could actually be trusted, but he found them fascinating if only because he’d yet to find the courage to ask Amell about them himself.

Cullen sneaks a glance across the library to where Amell has his nose buried in a dusty tome as thick as his arm. Another apprentice Cullen can’t remember the name of sits across from him, feet kicked up on the table, balancing in his chair on two back legs. He tosses balled paper shreds at Amell, who catches them midair with a gust of wind and sends them gliding back. Cullen smothers a smile.

I had to laugh because ‘remember’ and variants turn up no less than 24 times in my current WIP, so I just picked the one with the highest density:

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He doesn't remember his last return to Lotus Port, not clearly. Those hours are streaked through in his memory with gaping holes, deep red-lined black. He knows that Uncle Jiang and Madam Yu are dead. He does not remember how he knows. He doesn't remember what became of their bodies. 

What he does remember is this: 

The great windows shattered, all the purified air and crystalline water vented into indifferent space. Plants sere and withered, fish frozen in their ponds, birds suffocated in their nests. The ponds choked with bodies, blue-and-purple clad, dragged there and dropped in. The main docks crawling with soldiers teeming red and silver -- silver with their chrome-chased powered armor, sheeted red with blood, dusted black with char.

He remembers standing in the little landing bay with Shijie, trying to load Jiang Cheng into the back of one of the dragonfly shuttles -- the little ones, with room for a pilot and a piece of luggage and nothing more. Everything else had been smashed or gutted, but three flitters would be enough to take the three of them away.

I'm a little out of touch with all this, but from what I read people are upset the creator ships Ryoma and Xander with the Avatar but... Those characters aren't even related to the Avatar. Ryoma confesses as much in his S conversation with a female pc. It's like these people haven't even played the game.

This is also what’s really frustrating to me about this situation. The artist made content for a ship that isn’t incest at all - you don’t even have to have played the game to find out, it’s pretty easy to research (it took me all of two minutes of googling and actually ASKING someone who had played the game)- and yet they’re still screaming like banshees over a completely imaginary transgression.