faderift | [ CLOSED ] I'm in here, can anybody see me?

"As before, we will start with five, then I shall check in- as this is a different kind of pain. If you wish this to stop?" Rituals, routines- these things were important. He wasn't certain if he'd get to build this up properly a second time. As before he gave a few experimental swings to familiarize himself with the weight and heft of the flogger, warming himself up for the first blow. It came hard, thudding across Cade's upper back.

"I'll say stop," Cade repeated shakily, flinching once again at the sound of the thing sweeping through the air. He gave a start when it struck him, but as promised, it was a different kind of pain. It hurt, but not as immediately or as pointedly as the cat had.
Of course, he only had as long as it took for the second strike to land to consider this, and though he flinched again, he gritted his teeth and endured it without a sound.

Five strikes, alternating on either side to raise welts in a diagonal. The flat strips of leather thud through rather than sting and cut like the cat might, offering a different, lasting kind of bruising. After the fifth blow he swung to a stop and fought his instinct to rest a hand against Cade's arm or shoulder to test him- he had to go by sight and sound.

One day that might change, but today was not that day.

"Cade?"

It was like the breath was knocked out of him with each strike, and Cade was already breathing more raggedly, trying to find a rhythm to it. He nodded wordlessly to Zevran's check-in, indicating that he'd be all right. He wasn't sure he liked it, but he also wasn't supposed to like it, so it figured in just fine.

"Tonight we'll start with twenty and go from there." Zevran gave Cade a little longer to breathe, to find his pace amid this new pain before he resumed. Regular, alternating strokes across one side then the other, drawing up wide bands of red along his shoulders and upper back with each blow.

Whereas the stinging and burning of the cat had kept Cade alert and almost hypersensitive, several more blows of the flogger and he was beginning to feel disoriented. He had been flinching and hissing through his teeth with each strike, but it turned into gasps as Zevran continued. It was like being shoved, over and over again. Or bashed with a shield from behind.
By one of his own men. While several others, mad with red lyrium, watched him go down. They'd jeered, relished in the brutalizing of their commanding officer, who had made the mistake of trying to rein them in. They left him beaten in the tall grass, armor dented, breathless, almost more humiliated than injured.
He had killed them. At least the ones who the apostates didn't get to first. He had no memory of what happened, only that it had.
He was standing in the Hinterlands, covered in blood and viscera, being bludgeoned over and over by an unseen source, taking it because he was smaller and couldn't overpower it.

It had only taken several seconds for him to become almost completely unresponsive, shifting from gasps of pain to just... nothing, at least beyond the hitching of breath that came naturally from the force to his back. He was gone, but not where Zevran had wanted him to go.

Edited 2016-05-04 22:51 (UTC)

An unpleasant side effect of experimentation: On occasion? The results are not what you expect. Zevran had thought taking the sting out of it would help Cade down into that safe, floating space quicker, easier- that was the way for most that learned to drift under the lash. But the way he went tense and abruptly locked down? Not even on strike eighteen and he stopped entirely.

That was a response he knew. That was what he did when he went somewhere else to not endure. Punishment this might be, but Cade was not the only one that could use the word to stop. With the insistence that he not actually touch Cade- all he had was his voice.

Low, gentle, coaxing- he spoke. "Cade? Where are you right now?"

The bashing stopped, and there was a voice, and Cade sank to his knees with his hands over his face. "I couldn't stop them," he brokenly moaned, hunching over, mindless of his aching back. They'd only respected him when the Knight-Captain was still alive. When he'd had to take charge, all hell broke loose. It was his fault.

"Could not stop who?" Zevran knelt as Cade knelt, setting the flogger over his shoulder to hang. This had not been the intention but- this was a learning experience. Certain things put him in a poor place as well. Cade seemed to have more threads that when pulled would tip him somewhere unpleasant. He could ignore the tangle...or attempt to unknot them.

He was ill prepared for the latter but he could not leave it like this.

Perhaps it wasn't that he had more, but that he simply had left them so unaddressed for so long. In his universe, things were ignored until they went away. Or until you died. Either would have been fine, but here they were.

"My men," he hesitantly answered, his fingers tightening their grip over his face, digging into his hairline and temples. He took a deep, shuddering breath and sighed it out, at least distantly comforted by the fact that someone was speaking to him.
At the time, it had been Alayre. The Knight-Commander had dismounted, given Cade water, helped him deal with the rest, then sent him back to Skyhold to meet his destiny there. But this didn't sound like Alayre, and it began to occur to Cade that perhaps he was not, in fact, in the Hinterlands.

He slowly lowered his hands to gaze ahead at the wall, blinking rapidly, finding his presence again in the dark stonework.

"Cade." Gently- as gentle as he could possibly manage, he reached out to set a hand in his field of vision on the wall rather than on his arm or his shoulder. The flogger was out- obviously. Much as there was no way of knowing how pain would twist the main from session to session? This was a decidedly poor reaction.

"Where are you? Who are you with?"

The wall was helping. It was nothing, and it also wasn't Redcliffe, which meant he was somewhere else. The floor was cold, and hard, and his back hurt. It burned, not in a way that felt bludgeoned.
He looked down at his own knees, pensive, then slowly raised his eyes to see Zevran's hand. He followed it back to the man's face, and it took him several moments to recognize who he was looking at.

"...I'm sorry," he said, still a bit disoriented, but aware enough to know something had gone awry. He gave a cursory glance over Zevran's body, his brow knitting with sudden worry. "...did I hurt you?"

"No." He kept is voice gentle, kept it light and kind as he leaned away enough to drag the waterskin close. This he offered to Cade, waiting for a more thorough sign of recognition. "You did not. You went quiet- somewhere else. Apparently somewhere unpleasant. I know you have asked me to not but- may I touch you? Just your hand."

That and that alone, something decidedly nonsexual, decidedly not aggressive to ground him.

Cade was unusually docile, but in this he became a bit more open. He carefully took the waterskin, drank from it, then rested it back down, giving a small and timid nod to Zevran's request.

"I didn't mean to," he said quietly, apologetically. This wasn't the usual self-loathing, in which he'd immediately start pummeling himself; he was just still trying to get past feeling like he was in trouble.

He took Cade's hand gently, squeezing his fingers to help bring him back. Something not of then- of wherever he'd been or of what the man that hurt him did. Something that belonged only to the here and now. "These things do not always go the way we think they will. We are still learning about one another and how you react to this. You have done nothing wrong."

The only thing he might consider is that Cade did not bid him to stop when it became different and wrong- but he'd caught it. Somehow bringing that up now would not go over well.

In truth, Cade hadn't seen it coming any more than Zevran had. He could have called out had it become too painful, but he had no control over when the fear would take him. That was what made him so dangerous-- it was why he was here in the first place.

He looked down at Zevran's hand squeezing his, and though it wasn't normally something he would want, it felt good for what it was. Suddenly exhausted, he leaned forward to rest his head against the wall, enjoying its cool solidity as he had the last time.

"I have," he replied, but in a tone that indicated he was returning to himself. The fear was draining back into guilt.
"I... in Redcliffe, um, the Hinterlands..." He tried to explain, but his thoughts were still scattered, fluttering away from him each time he tried to voice one. He turned his head back to press his forehead against the stone, closing his eyes. "...the Captain was killed by apostates. ...leaving me in command. I..." He took a deep, shuddering breath; he had tried to explain this to Alayre, but had been dismissed on account of what was happening all over the Hinterlands. "...the red lyrium, I think, um... or... they didn't..."
He took another breath and forced it out. "I k.. I killed them. All of them."

"The apostates?" Anyone else might judge. Zevran? Knew well he had no room to do so. Death was death. War was war- and what was this mess with mages and templars in the Hinterlands if not a war? A war no one on either side were at all prepared for, mages unprepared for the freedom outside, templars overwhelmed and stranded with the chaos in their order.

For a man as devoted as Cade- lashing out in such a way? Was not entirely beyond the realm of reason.

"What of the Red Lyrium?"

Cade nearly shook his head, but it wouldn't have been true: he had killed apostates as well. The difference was that those deaths didn't tear him up as much as the others. He had been sent with the purpose of killing them. He had killed them in Kirkwall when they had rampaged.
"..my men," he weakly replied, bracing himself for Zevran's reaction. The only other person who knew was Alayre, who had helped him finish them off.

"They had... they wouldn't listen. They... attacked villagers, looted their carts, I..." He pressed his forehead a little harder into the stone, wincing. "...I wouldn't let them, they didn't care. Seiler said it was necessary, to keep going. They listened to him instead." He had been more charismatic, larger, a born leader; there was no contest between him and the timid Lieutenant.
Cade squeezed his eyes closed, trying to block the mental image and mostly failing. They had turned on him, certainly, but had he been a competent officer to begin with, it all could have been prevented.

"So you, keeping with the vows taken to serve man and protect them, were trying to keep your fellows from being murderous bandits and bastards. They failed to listen to reason, followed a greedy man, you killed them." Zevran shrugged. "In your shoes I would have done the same. You did due diligence by attempting to control them. It is not your failing if their greed overruled their good sense. They became bandits and bastards; you handled them as such. Where in this does the sin become yours?"

A lack of proper leadership? Hardly. Zevran squeezed Cade's hand tighter- wanting to reach up and smooth his hair out of his face but- he'd said only the hand. So he shall keep to only the hand.

"How is this your failure?" He did everything that had been expected of him.

Cade hung his head, glancing at their hands but then diverting his gaze to the stone floor. "I was in charge of them," he weakly replied, "they were my responsibility. I..." He shook his head. "I was made Knight-Lieutenant when the acting one was demoted for drunkenness. It was a... superficial title, I was never... never supposed to inherit command." He had, more or less, been told just that.
"..I didn't do my job. And so many died as a result." He sniffed wetly, and as he lifted his other hand to press at his eyes, he realized he still didn't have a shirt on.

Oh yeah.

He looked again at Zevran, this time with a new awareness-- not that he hadn't been aware before that, but he had been so wrapped up in himself that he'd actually forgotten what they'd been doing, why they were here. His gaze fell to the flogger, then past it, as he found himself at a loss for words.

"And yet you were, and yet you attempted to do as was your right and your duty- to ensure they fell in line and weren't complete bags of shit. It is not your fault that they failed. Were you commander or someone else- they would have failed all the same. Greed sinks its hooks deep into men of all sorts. Their sin? Is not on your hands." He would not sit here and listen to such things.

He could not help but wonder how many have done just that- or did not care.

"Are you here once more?" He offered an apple as he had last time, not sliced as knives right now? Not the best idea.

Cade didn't disagree right away, instead just watching Zevran thoughtfully. He didn't necessarily agree either, but the reassurance had jogged something strange in his memory: something said to him by a boy whose face he couldn't recall.

You were able to let love in, once.

He took the apple with mild hesitation, but nodded the affirmative, and just held it in his hand for a moment as he looked at it, his eyes distant.

There was a place for it. There still is.

A question swelled in him, but he was almost too afraid to ask it. He opened his mouth, took a breath, closed it again, tried again, then pursed his lips and looked away for a moment. Then he forced the words out.
"If this weren't about preventing... another incident," he began, "would you still...?" He trailed off, the word 'care' unspoken. If the answer was no, he wouldn't be too thrown by it; that was just how things were.

"Still...?" Cade would have to use his words. Still flog? Still mind him? Still give half a damn? Without context he couldn't sort out exactly what it was Cade meant to ask. There were too many variables and he still was not quite able to pick out what mattered most to Cade in all this.

The structure, the contact, the understanding that came from someone that endured what he lived through? Someone that worked around it?

"Still what, Cade?" He cannot answer without knowing. Moreover? He would not. One wrong word in all this? And what little progress they've made? Will come tumbling down.

Cade nearly lost his nerve when Zevran pressed him. Maybe it was stupid, maybe he was wrong to guess. But nobody had ever listened to him before.
"...care," he timidly concluded, glancing at Zevran's face and then away again. Assuming he had ever cared.

Only all his years of training kept his face open and empathetic. Kind. Caring. It was a trick he'd learned as a child in the Crows, to project empathy. He...perhaps might be bothered to assist were Cade not a danger, if he knew what he'd endured. But one was tied deeply to the other. After a moment's consideration- not so immediate as to seem insincere, not so lengthy a pause to seem an outright lie, he murmured. "Yes."

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