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lenticularstudy{Everyone assumes that the "running" ending is a happy one. What if they're wrong? Dark take on the Anders romance ending with templar-f!Hawke.}
She has never been a fool; she knows that it was as much Anders who planted the bomb as Vengeance, knows that the plan relied on her trust in him. This was his desire for vengeance as much as the spirit's, this hatred of the Chantry bred through sleeping alone in a cell and things he won't tell her about but which she is certain have given him the jagged scars he would try to hide when they were together.
She refuses to give him the easy way out by granting him death; he can watch the pain he's caused, try in vain to heal the dying from the rubble, watch the world fall apart as his "grand revolution" comes to fruition.
All those nights obsessively scratching away at manifestos have paid off, haven't they? Once she found beauty, truth, in those words, believed them without having to be a mage. They made her dream. Now when she reads them she sees empty promises and the ravings of a lunatic, so she burns them. She doesn't have to read them anymore.
The jokes, the pleasantly-timbred laugh, the surprising tan, the muscle one wouldn't expect to find on a mage - they have all faded, been leeched away by a life of sitting writing and hiding underground, with the Cause too serious to allow laughter.
As she promised, she takes him back to the scene before the templars come back and the re-building starts; they sift through the rubble, and he heals those he can, those who weren't directly in the blast - when he does, just for a moment, she sees the man she fell in love with. Then he is gone, replaced by this pale, skinny, sad-faced creature whose mind is not his own, and she turns back to face the remains of the destroyed Chantry, her face set.
She runs with him not as his lover but as his templar; waits for the day - she doesn't lie to herself, she knows it will come - when the abomination before her will replace all of the man that she saw and loved, and on that day, he can expect a smite and a sword through the chest.
They will run. He will make amends.
~o~
She goes with him not out of some misplaced sense of obligation - she owes him nothing - nor out of a naive wish for a "happily ever after". Certainly not out of love.She has never been a fool; she knows that it was as much Anders who planted the bomb as Vengeance, knows that the plan relied on her trust in him. This was his desire for vengeance as much as the spirit's, this hatred of the Chantry bred through sleeping alone in a cell and things he won't tell her about but which she is certain have given him the jagged scars he would try to hide when they were together.
She refuses to give him the easy way out by granting him death; he can watch the pain he's caused, try in vain to heal the dying from the rubble, watch the world fall apart as his "grand revolution" comes to fruition.
All those nights obsessively scratching away at manifestos have paid off, haven't they? Once she found beauty, truth, in those words, believed them without having to be a mage. They made her dream. Now when she reads them she sees empty promises and the ravings of a lunatic, so she burns them. She doesn't have to read them anymore.
The jokes, the pleasantly-timbred laugh, the surprising tan, the muscle one wouldn't expect to find on a mage - they have all faded, been leeched away by a life of sitting writing and hiding underground, with the Cause too serious to allow laughter.
As she promised, she takes him back to the scene before the templars come back and the re-building starts; they sift through the rubble, and he heals those he can, those who weren't directly in the blast - when he does, just for a moment, she sees the man she fell in love with. Then he is gone, replaced by this pale, skinny, sad-faced creature whose mind is not his own, and she turns back to face the remains of the destroyed Chantry, her face set.
She runs with him not as his lover but as his templar; waits for the day - she doesn't lie to herself, she knows it will come - when the abomination before her will replace all of the man that she saw and loved, and on that day, he can expect a smite and a sword through the chest.
They will run. He will make amends.
