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.