#bad buddy commedy

[codenamecynic]

Then, and Again  (For @polkadotfoxx  f!OC mage, f!OC templar, set in a world where the Inquisitor recruited the mages to the Inquisition.  Warning for death - sort of.)

They haven’t seen the sun in months.

Lynna remembers the Blight – but doesn’t.  The Darkspawn never touched Hasmal, never even claimed the southern shore of the Waking Sea, but she remembers tales of how the land turned dark and dead.  The horde brings the rain, they said, but this is more than that.  The sky glows a pulsating, hungry green that one by one consumes the stars.

Beside her, Saf quietly uncorks one of the few vials of precious lyrium they have left.  It’s a muddy color and radiates a song that registers off-key, but they haven’t had the pure blue stuff for some time.

At least it’s not red.  Saf still has some standards, even if the bar has dropped so low it drags the dirt.

It’s not red.

Not yet.

“Stop worrying,” Saf grouses from her left, and immediately she glares, spits back.

“I never worry.”

Saf only chuckles, the sound tight around the new scar that splits the side of her face, still pink and raw where her helmet failed to protect her from a demon’s claws.

“That’s your job,” she adds, quietly, an afterthought.  A memory.  A whisper in the Circle library, pages fluttering like moth wings and flames perfectly controlled behind lantern glass.

Saf tips back the vial and doesn’t hear her.

**

They’re not going to win.

The soldiers around her gird themselves with expressions like ploughshares hammered into blades, crude and grim.  The walls of Redcliffe Keep rise above them, dark against the darker gloom.  The light itself writhes with anarchic glee, giving lie to figures with too many arms, too many eyes.

Too many.

This is how the Inquisition dies, led by desperation, bureaucrats, and children fashioned into toy soldiers on the anvil at the edge of the world – one final blow before the long fall into the abyss.

Lynna’s never been afraid of falling.  She relishes the feeling of wind in her hair, of the tingle and drop in the pit of her stomach that comes from standing far too close to the edge.

Saf isn’t afraid to fall either, she just worries about the landing.

A swath of monstrosities tears through the ranks in front of them, too corrupted to be called templars.  Lynna doesn’t think of them that way anymore, can’t when they’re little more than automatons of burning stone and hunger.  They devour everything, grinding flesh, bone and shield beneath their crystalline feet, and hot blood sprays across her face and neck as a scream is cut short by the wide sweep of a blade that nearly catches her.

Saf pushes her back, nudges her behind her shield.  She’s good with it now, her arm riddled with muscle that ripples beneath the skin like the backs of fish disturbing the surface of a pool.

She wants to see the ocean again.  Wants to feel the water pulling at her feet, eroding sand away beneath her toes.  Before her the battle heaves and they rush forward, reckless cries that she can feel reverberate within her chest lost in the snap-boom of her magic, loosed and wild.  Fire blooms like the first green shoot through cobblestones, spraying shrapnel everywhere.

The hole they make fills up, spills over.

**

They fall.

They fall and fall and fall, toppling like dominos and pieces on a chess board that none of them can see.  They are pawns without a queen, and they have no hope of turning the tide.  Instead they will stand like the story of the Grey Wardens she heard once upon a time, breaking the waves of the impossible with their bodies, a bulwark against the innocent and the end of the world.

Only there are no innocents anymore, no civilians in the apocalypse.  And no one knows where the Grey Wardens have gone.

Her breath comes hard in her chest, thick with smoke and smog.  Her legs burn, her arms ache, and she barely stumbles aside as a beast too large to be a man barrels through the crowd.  Her staff splinters under its feet, six of their soldiers laid low in its wake.

"I don't know how long we can keep this up," someone says.  She looks to Saf, who only shakes her head.

They both know that isn't the point.

**

It was bound to happen eventually.

That's what she thinks, always, in those moments when they shave it just a little too close, a grudging draw snatched from the jaws of defeat.  It's what she thinks when the sound of metal shearing off a shield splits the air around the crackle of lightning from her own fingers and Saf stumbles back, the spur of a glowing red crystal thrust through her middle.

They were always going to die.  She just usually assumed it would be because of something she'd done. A smoking crater with their name on it, she'd joke, and Saf's eyes would roll.

Probably better that it wasn't her fault. Saf deserved better.

Saf pretty much always deserved better.  The templar monster attached to her friend who died screaming in a column of fire from the sky, not as much.

“Lynna-”

“Don’t be stupid.”  The soldiers behind them surged forward, rushing headlong into the lights and the blades, and at least it would never be said that Ferelden went quietly to its death.  She just wasn’t sure who would be left to say anything at all.

“You should go.”

“I said shut up!”

Saf didn’t even blink, one gloved hand curled around the shard of corrupted lyrium burning through her midsection.  Lynna bent over her, and was waved away.  “Leave it, it’s- fine.”

“Well if you want to just lie there bleeding all over the ground, you’ll get no help from me.”

“Then lift me up, you idiot.”

**

Saf is a heavy drunk, and she staggers like one, her arm slung over Lynna’s shoulders.  There is still fighting in the distance where the best of their soldiers press at the foot of the wall, but all around them is death.  It encroaches from behind, rifts blinking into existence at their backs and already long-limbed creatures stalk their prey.

Corypheus is only toying with them now.  The nightmare is real, bubbling beneath their feet, clawing up from below with hands too like her own.

“I’m ready,” Saf tells her, the words bubbling around the blood frothing at her lips, and drops her shield.  “Go, Lynna.  Go.”

It clangs against the ground, tinny and hollow like an empty bowl.

Lynna doesn't listen, because Lynna never listens, and feels the cold, sharp shards of a smite scream through her on the power of Saf’s dying breath.

Then she's gone, the stubborn light in her eyes winking out like stars devoured before her armored knees hit the ground, and Lynna reaches for the last thing she has left.

Saf's sword has always been too big for her, and she too small for it.  They don’t get along.  The blade is dented, marred and scratched, smudged with ash, and she has to take it in both hands to hold it steady.

She's always known it could come to this. She's seen it before, the pause like the quiet before the storm as the world holds its breath.

But the storm is breaking all around them and its voice has howled for so long she feels deaf. Numb.

Certain.

Green lights streak the sky like the last flash of sunlight on the horizon, and the demons that Saf pushed back draw near.  She can feel the tickle of their voices in her mind, the pull of their thoughts at her own.  Promises, temptations, whispers, whispers, whispers, and Saf on the ground at her side, arm bent and raised near her head as though in salute.

A templar, even now.

She deserves better than this.  Deserves better than to be some unclaimed corpse on a battlefield, or worse, a puppet for some demon.  Lynna never has been worth much, but Saf -

Her friend.

Her only friend.

Saf is worth everything.

There is already fire in her eyes when the blade sinks into her stomach, flames licking her hair and up the side of her face.  The power is there, ready, just beneath her flesh, and she pulls it around herself with all her might, feeling it build and swell until it crackles and bursts through her skin.

“Bye, Saf.  I'll see you on the other-"

**

“-side!  LYNNA!”

“Whosa? Wassat?” Lynna sat up and was immediately hit in the face with a shoe.  Fortunately it was one of her shoes and not Saf’s giant manly boot of death, all armored up and festooned with the blood of their enemies.  And all, you know.  Muddy.

“What the shitty fuck.”

The blond warrior stared at her from across the room, half in and half out of the window.  It was impossible to tell what time it was with Saf filling up most of the window frame with her long legs and broad shoulders and the mountain of incredulity and disapproval of anything Lynna was ever doing that she carried around on her shoulders like Commander Cullen’s fancy fur coat.

“I said turn over on your side.  You were snoring.”

“Lies.”

“Not.”

“Slander and libel.”

“It has to be printed to be libel.”

“You hit me with a shoe!”

“That still doesn’t make it libel.”

“No, that makes it assault.  And rude.  Extremely rude.”

Saf just snorted and turned to slip out the window again onto the roof, leaving Lynna to sit up in the darkness.  She put her shoe on, looked around for the other, couldn’t find it and gave up in short order, clomping one-sidedly across the floor to muscle in next to Saf, who signed irritably and blew a puff of smoke out over the rooftop.

“Did you roll that yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“I can tell, it’s garbage.  Give it to me.”

Saf (who clearly knew better at this point than to argue with any of the unquestionable truths that fell from the mouth of her friend and erstwhile self-appointed sidekick like - things that fell from the sky - rain or something - whatever) looked annoyed, but handed over what amounted to a handful of fitfully smoking herbs in tattered rolling papers.

Maker.  It’s like Saf had never been a teenager.  Ever.  

“I thought you weren’t smoking these anymore,” she said, shaking out the charred bits and carefully repacking the roll.  Not that smoking elfroot was the preferred way of utilizing its medicinal properties.  In fact, she wasn’t entirely sure it really did anything at all except stink up your clothes, but it was better than chewing the leaves.  In some light Saf’s teeth still looked a bit green.

“I had that dream again.”  Lynna’s silence and pointed lack of eye contact wasn’t enough to dissuade Saf from the conversation.  “Don’t give me that, I know you had it too.  You were talking in your sleep.”

Lynna sighed, annoyed.  “Was I talking in my sleep, or snoring then? It’s hard to do both.”

“You manage.”  Saf cast her a wry look out of the corner of her eye, and she made a face, handing back the stupid elfroot cigar.  At least it wouldn’t fall apart now as soon as it was lit, and out of early morning pique she lit a spark between her thumb and forefinger in front of Saf’s face as she fumbled with the matches, almost close enough to catch her hair on fire.

Saf was not amused, which was perfectly normal.  Lynna fidgeted awkwardly for a long moment, tucking her sleep shirt down around her bent knees.  “They’re just dreams.  It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I know it doesn’t, but…”  Saf shrugged.  “Do you ever think about what could have happened?  When the Inquisitor…”  The templar - former templar - gestured, smoke trailing a lazy sigil in the air.  “Set the clock back.  Travelled through time.  The future that she saw, and what happened to all of us.  Do you ever think that we-

“Went out in a hail of fire and glory?”  Lynna grinned, felt unexpectedly sick, and grinned even harder.  

“Yeah, that’s the one.”  

“Because we are heroes.”

“Big damn heroes.”

“The biggest.  And most attractive.”

Saf snorted smoke and then coughed, exhaling messily like a dragon with something stuck in its craw.  “Clearly.”

They both laughed, and then sighed, and then leaned together like two tired trees, bracing themselves on each other’s trunks.  Skyhold’s courtyard was silent and still, cast deep in blue by the pre-dawn shadows.  It still looked a bit strange.  Not glowy enough.  Not enough green.

“Saf.”

“What?”

“Don’t die.”