January: Only Two, Dragon Age

[melime]

Title: Weird dreams

Fandom: Dragon Age (video game)

Characters: m!Inquisitor & Lace Harding

Rating: Teen

Prompt: You know that dream where you’ve gone back in time and you’re reliving the craziest moment of your entire life?

Word Count: 374

Summary: The Inquisitor asks Lace about her newly acquired dreams, his own might give a glimpse at how exhausting it is to save the world.

Weird dreams

“You know that dream where you’ve gone back in time and you’re reliving the craziest moment of your entire life?” the Inquisitor asks, leaning against the bar to retrieve a bottle of wine from behind it.

Lace always had a certain image of the Inquisitor, mostly serious from a distance, or energetic when they met at a camp, when she was scouting a new region. Only a couple times she had seen him like he looks now, when he was staring at the fire in the camp, after his friends had gone to sleep and away from the eyes of whoever was keeping watch. He just seems exhausted, and like he’s telling himself not to let it show.

“I never had that. Is it a common one?”

She’s still getting used to dreams, and she can understand the Inquisitor’s curiosity. A dwarf who dreams, it’s not every day that you see that. Most of the time, she doesn’t know how to make sense of them, and that’s why she keeps asking people about theirs, but the Inquisitor’s response to learning that she could dream is the weirdest one yet.

He shrugs. “I don’t know, I have it all the time,” he says, glancing at his left hand for a moment then taking a swing of the wine.

He doesn’t say what that dream was for him, but she has a pretty good guess. The funny thing is, if she were to, hers would also involve Solas, in a way. She wants to ask if he’s alright, but it really doesn’t feel like her place.

“I had a dream where a nug was wearing the Divine’s hat though. Or maybe Leliana was a nug? Dreams are weird, nobody had ever told me,” she says instead, they were never friends, they hardly even know each other.

He laughs, and all that exhaustion is hidden again. “You know, that’s what I like about you, Scout Harding.”

Before she can ask what that means, Morrigan calls him, and Rook waves at her to leave. Lace tries to put the Inquisitor out of her mind, she already has one hero who refuses to acknowledge when things upset him to worry about, she can’t spend her time thinking of another.

January: Mini Bingo, Doctor Who

[melime]

Title: Sonic Gun

Fandom: Doctor Who (2005)

Characters: Ninth Doctor

Rating: Teen

Prompt: Bananas, Alien, Wish, Sick

Word Count: 200

Summary: Again with the guns, the Doctor’s sick and tired of guns.

Sonic Gun

Again with the guns, the Doctor’s sick and tired of guns, but it’s a thing that humanity never loses the taste for. Even in a place like this, surrounded by the horrors of war, Captain Jack Harkness, which is certainly not his name, has no problem pointing an alien weapon to something that he doesn’t understand. And it just twists in his stomach, a sick feeling that’s part disgust, part dread.

Humanity never changes, and sometimes, he just wishes it would. Too many times he’s seen what happens to places that choose war and violence over trying to understand, but if a wish was enough to fix anything, his own home wouldn’t be…

He waits for a moment of distraction and swipes the gun for a banana, always good to carry a few fresh bananas in his pockets, with just about anything else that he thinks might be useful. He’ll take pockets full of things that he can use over guns any day, but a sonic gun at least has other uses beyond violence.

These people are sick, taken by something alien, and he won’t fight them if he can help it. What he wants is to save them all.

January 2025: 10 out of 20, Dragon Age

[melime]

Title: His mistakes

Fandom: Dragon Age (video game)

Characters: m!Inquisitor

Rating: Teen

Prompt: 10 out of 20: Confused, Depressed, Empty, Escape, Hands, Hurt, Mistake, Portal, Surrender, Unbearable

Word Count: 500

Summary: The Inquisitor wakes up with a pain to the hand that he no longer has, and it's one more reminder of his mistakes, and how tired he is after giving everything to save a world that's still in danger.

His mistakes

He wakes up with a sharp pain on the palm of his hand, and sits up on the bed, his vision nearly entirely white for a moment as the pain washes over him, before his room appears into view. The anchor gets worse with every day, but he's used to it by now, he has to be. He goes to cradle his left hand with his right and misses, grabbing at an empty shirt sleeve. Frowning, he looks down at his hands, and for a moment what he sees only makes him more confused, then he drops back to the bed.

Of course he remembers, as much as he would like not to. Solas, the one he once mistakenly thought he could trust, cut off his arm and left through a portal to where he couldn't follow, with essentially the promise of ending the world. Nearly killed him in the process, and he still wishes he had. After all that was taken from him, Solas might only be killing an empty shell.

The world would be destroyed because of his mistake, because he let Solas escape his hands, or hand as it were. He let Solas escape, he didn’t do enough to stop him, he just let him escape. He could have tried harder, grabbed his foot before he stepped through that portal, done something, anything instead of what he did.

The great Herald of Andraste, supposedly a hero, and he laid there in surrender. He can say that he was hurt, that the pain was simply unbearable, and it was, the worst that it had ever been with the anchor, somehow made worse by cutting off his arm. The pain was unbearable, but he had to bear the unbearable before, that was the deal to save the world, he wasn’t allowed to surrender, he wasn’t allowed to be weak, he wasn’t allowed to let the pain get to him.

He wasn’t allowed to make a mistake, and now that he had, he was terrified of what would happen.

His vision gets blurry, and he already knows to wipe his eyes with his right hand, his left has only had one use for a while now, and he furiously rubs them until his vision is full of dots. He can’t take this anymore, he’s done, not because of the arm, but everything that happened since the conclave.

Thedas asked everything of him, and he gave it all, he’s empty now, nothing left to give. But he can’t surrender, that’s one mistake that he won’t make again. It’s still his responsibility, he trusted Solas, he let him escape, and he has to find him again. All this hurt can’t take him down, all this emptiness and sorrow that seems to drown him, he can’t surrender to it. The world is still counting on him, and he might as well be dead already for how he feels, but he won’t let other people suffer for his mistakes.

He’ll stop Solas, for good.