faderift | [open] we sit and grow our roots into the floor

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[open] we sit and grow our roots into the floor

WHO: Cade and his many friends and admirers
WHAT: a dumb sulky baby got hurt at the Winter Palace because he was dumb and now he is sulking about it
WHEN: post-Halamshiral, simultaneous with red lyrium plot hell
WHERE: Skyhold
NOTES: Injury stuff, nothing ridiculous

The Healing Tents

For the umpteenth time in the span of two years, Cade is under supervision. But this time it's not because he was violent-- well... it was, but indirectly-- it's because he got a couple spikes of red lyrium through the thigh after flipping out and battling Red Templars completely unarmored in the Winter Palace.
He ingested red lyrium once before, and from what anyone can tell it caused him to smack an elf. This is a lot more of the stuff, and Cade is notoriously unstable, so he's being watched to make sure it doesn't alter his personality.

He's the first to reassure the healers that lyrium doesn't work like that, you have to take it daily and it slowly builds up in you and so forth, but, you know, caution is caution. He respects it. But he hates being fussed over, so periodically he'll sneak off a small ways just to have a bit of solitude.

Near the Healing Tents, Being a Renegade

Usually this means sitting up on the ramparts and watching people, reading, anything that gets him a little peace and quiet. For someone who seems to thrive on being told what to do, no one can tell Cade what to do and he will be stubborn for as long as it takes for him to be deemed Safe again.

This is pointless.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Whatever else! Hit me up if you want a specific scene, or just start one here and I will accede to your whims.

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There are people who can order Cade around, and then there are mages. And then there are apostates, and then there is this apostate, whom Cade would sooner be killed by than allow to tell him what to do.
He narrows his eyes at Anders, and doesn't budge.

If that's the way the Templar is going to play, well.

"I'm the current spirit healer on shift. We're down to three, which means you're going to be listening to me. Or, in order to make sure you rest, I can paralysis glyph you right here, right where you stand. It's the bed or the glyph. Choose."

"...you can't do that," Cade grumbles, bristling. Technically he can dispel it if it should occur, even if he hasn't done anything too Templar-y recently, so his skills might be rusty.
Best not to think of it like that.

"I'll go back for a real healer." Not you, anyone but you.

"I can, and I am a real healer. Any other healer will back me up." Probably not Christine, but she's an idiot who especially doesn't count as a real healer if he doesn't.

"I'm going to count to three. If I reach three and you've not moved, I'm casting. If you're moving in the proper direction, I won't. This call is entirely in your hands. One. Two."

Two can play this game. And if he's under a glyph of paralysis, that just means he stays right here, doesn't it? Cade folds his arms and lets Anders count.

"Three." Cade hasn't moved, so Anders casts before ducking inside the tent and returning a moment later with a chair and a book. He sets the chair down and gets comfortable with his book.

"I can do this all day."

Cade considers doing it now, but instead waits for Anders to come back, and looks him dead in the eye as he raises both fists, pressing one against the other as if holding the pommel of an invisible sword (it's just muscle memory) and dispels it in a burst of light. Then, with a sneer, he turns to take a step back toward the healing tents.
His injured leg buckles and he falls flat on his face.

He feels a wave of smug satisfaction, followed swiftly by aggravation at him from Mercy that gets him up and out of the chair and by Cade's side. The problem with working with her in particular is that she doesn't abide smirking about being right if someone's down.

Anders casts, doing some makeshift work on the leg for now, before holding out a hand. "Here. Let me help you into the tent and I'll continue there, when I know you won't immediately undo everything by putting weight on it again." Somehow he manages to keep the 'I told you so' tone out of his voice just this once.

Despite the unexpected kindness of Anders' gesture, Cade doesn't take his hand. He hoists himself up somewhat, but is wincing in pain and unable to do much more than that. "Don't touch me," he growls, a more frantic note in his words. He looks around in front of him, toward the tents, seeking assistance from literally anyone else, his anxiety building.

"Right, that's going to work." There's no one else around at the moment, no one he can see, at least.

"Though maybe it's about time a Templar put themselves in pain before making a mage serve them." He hasn't taken his hand back, despite what's being said by either of them. "Your choice is basically my hand or crawling."

Cade continues to avoid Anders' hand, his mind swelling with rage before he can stop it. As though Templars have never felt pain? As though--

"You murdered the Grand Cleric," he snaps, his voice as frantic as it is angry, "we watched her die, we saw our Chantry go up in flames and you're here, and she's not! And now you-- now this, now--" He pushes up onto his side, still favoring his leg and unable to stand without support, but at least he's not crawling on his stomach.
"Get away from me," he hisses, his eyes fixed on Anders and filled, somewhat uncharacteristically, with abject hatred. "If you ever try to touch me again, I'll kill you."

His expression goes cold.

"And you murdered how many mages? Watched them die, watched them walk around Tranquil, watched them vanish off with Templars who had specific desires and never come back, and you're here." Anders straightens. "I am a healer in these healing tents, and you are a patient. I'm going nowhere, and you'll not be killing me."

As if a Templar has any ground to stand on whatsoever, especially one from Kirkwall. All of them there, save Thrask and a bare handful of others, were criminals in the extreme.

"You should have more blood on your conscience than you place on mine, but the day one of your sort looks inward will be the day Thedas ends. I'll stay here to do my duty whether you will it or not."

It wasn't murder, he wants to say, it was what they were meant to do, their whole purpose for being; but something in Anders' barrage hits Cade in a way it probably wasn't intended, and he shudders and recoils as if struck.
"Go away," he insists, fixing his eyes on the ground, groping around for anything he can use to drag himself up, "go away, go away."
It becomes almost a mantra rather than a command, words he can focus on saying to hold himself together. Periodically he checks over to the tents, to see if anyone's coming: his movements are erratic, and seem to have transitioned from those of an angry man to those of a cornered animal.

Someone's coming. Someone in a Chantry Brother's robes, specifically, with the cowl already pushed back around his neck and a crutch in the pit of one arm. He'd already been looking for Anders—for a mage—but he picks up the pace when he sees Cade, to the extent he's able. He can't run. But he moves quick enough with a crutch, too fluid to be called hobbling after twenty years of practice.

As soon as he's within speaking distance—not shouting, he's not going to cause more of a scene than the two of them already are if it can be helped—he says, "Monsieur Warden," in greeting, blandly pleasant, and places himself nearly directly between them. Two steps forward and he'd block their view.

He'll take those steps if he needs to.

For now he only looks at Cade and smiles. There is nothing actually uncertain about the smile, though it looks that way: one side of his mouth first, then the other, before the smile goes away altogether. The entirely intentional message is I am a friendly person and would like to smile at you but that is clearly inappropriate at the moment so never mind.

"Here," he says, and takes the crutch out from the pit of his arm to offer it to Cade instead. He can walk without it if he's careful. "What is the matter?"

As always, there's someone there to rescue the Templar. Mages in distress? They can rot. The Templar working himself up and making death threats, he clearly needs help.

Jeannot gets a look that's tired and a little irritated before Anders exhales and crosses his arms. Of course the Chantry brother asks the Templar what the matter is. Why would he ask a mage?

The Templar working himself up is likely to become violent should he be touched, but fortunately it doesn't come to that. He remains in his defensive position, blinking rapidly, waiting for a reason to lose himself completely, when suddenly a man intervenes.
He's seen this person around but never spoken to him directly, which, to be fair, applies to most of the people Cade encounters from day to day. He stares at him dumbly, taking the crutch as it's offered and starting to prop himself up with it, but he doesn't answer the question yet. His mind is racing too quickly for him to form anything reasonable anyway. What is the matter? Well he's dying obviously, the sky is falling down around him.
Probably not the best way to explain his situation at the moment.

—well, then.

At least he's stopped repeating go away. There's yet hope he hasn't had a complete breakdown into madness. Jeannot gives Cade another faint and bewildered smile before he looks at Anders and his crossed arms. Equally baffling! But it is what is is. He could guess why a Templar and an Anders may have difficulty coexisting, but he'd hate to assume. Perhaps someone slept with someone else's mother.

He pitches his voice lower, quieter; his tone isn't unlike one a parent might use while talking to the other about a troublesome child within earshot, as if they won't hear that way. "What happened?"

"There's only one spirit healer on duty at any time, now that we've just the three in Skyhold. He made an attempt to leave the tents while injured and I'm the mage on duty. And, of course, to a Templar, the blood on a mage's hands is more significant than that on theirs. Even when they're a Templar from Kirkwall."

It's delivered flatly, expression matching his tone.

"So he'll not come back to the tents or accept help, and even told me if I try to help him up again he'll kill me."

He doesn't know what's going to happen here. He doesn't want to lose the relationship he has with Jeannot, which is the only reason he's not pressing. But he could still lose it.

"Apostates are dangerous," Cade weakly insists, avoiding Anders' eyes as he tries to help himself up on the crutches and is mostly successful. His ire has left him, replaced now by uncertainty: the only thing standing between him and total chaos is the belief in his worldview, so this conversation is stressful in more ways than one.
He looks at Jeannot in anguish, immediately jumping to the conclusion that he's about to be outnumbered. "I'll go," he says quickly, "just not with him."

"I see," Jehan says to both of them. He does not entirely see, but he does see well enough to go on: "Then you may take my crutch, Ser, and Anders, perhaps I might take your shoulder—"

He doesn't need it. He does, in fact, loathe asking for assistance when it isn't necessary, and rarely admits it's necessary until he's bleeding. But if pretending to helps make a point to Cade about cooperation, smooths Anders' feathers, or otherwise facilitates everyone moving toward the tents—where no one will injure themselves further and where there are people who can do more than stand here and die helplessly if Cade makes good on any threat of violence—then that would be worth it.

"—and we can refrain from killing anyone, Maker willing, for a few more minutes."

Apostates are dangerous. Anders' eyes narrow at that, but Jeahan's request distracts him from his anger. He's not going to let the man suffer or struggle just because he's letting a Templar take advantage of him.

"Of course." There isn't warmth in his voice, but there's no anger either. Anders steps close and offers his shoulder (and an arm, in case,) to Jehan.

"And refraining depends entirely on him." The man who had just been throwing a temper tantrum. "Has anyone looked at your injury?" Likely, as he had a crutch, but Anders can ask. And maybe help Jehan to be able to walk, and show off to Cade about what happened when people listened and cooperated with mages rather than caging and slaughtering them.

As with any situation in which Cade finds himself losing his cool, the embarrassment kicks in the instant he starts to calm down. Though still very much averse to interacting with Anders, he is now more compelled to flee the scene and avoid causing further damage than he is to score any points on him or see anything done about the invasion of space.

"Thanks," he mutters quickly to Jehan, taking his leave toward the tents as rapidly as he can, his heart pounding and his head swimming. Stupid, stupid, can't you go anywhere?

Once he arrives back at his bed, he sheepishly requests of a non-magical healer that they return the crutch to the Chantry brother outside.

The look Jeannot gives Anders, eyes sliding sideways without turning his head, falls somewhere between exasperated and conspiring. He knows who needs to refrain. He also knows something about deescalation, even if that something is only that you can't berate and snark a man clearly having some sort of breakdown into behaving better.

"Many people," he says, have looked at his leg. "I would not call it an injury any longer, I think. I would call it my leg—ah."

Cade is leaving. Jehan isn't very sad to see him go. He takes back his crutch when offered it and watches until he's talking to someone else to look at Anders.

"Do you know who he reports to?"

"Norrington," Anders says after a beat. "Norrington's in charge of the Templars here to the best of my knowledge. If that's changed..."

He shakes his head and sighs. "I try to pay attention to Templar organization, because that has repercussions for my own people, but it's not exactly like many Templars want to discuss matters with me for some reason." His voice says he knows exactly what the reason is.

"Will you be reporting him? I think they'd be as quick to listen to a report from me as they would discuss their hierarchy." Not a surprise, probably to them both. He is who he is, and even before he'd blown up the Chantry no one was listening to him. The unanswered letters about the issues in Kirkwall served as proof of that. Just about everything regarding the Chantry and the Templars was, really, in his opinion. At least this Brother was actually treating him like a person.

"I will speak to someone," Jeannot says. "The boy—" who's older than him, but that's neither here nor there "—does not seem well, to behave that way."

Traumatized, he would say, if he were in the business of diagnosing people rather than calming them down and telling them the Maker loves them. He looks off in Cade's direction again and shakes his head. Pity. The war between the mages and Templars doesn't strike particularly close to his heart, the loss of a Grand Cleric in a Free Marches hellhole five years ago doesn't stir any serious passions, and his personal preference for having mages and their fireballs residing somewhere they may not light him on fire is tempered to something even milder by the former Divine's sympathy for their situation. But it is sad, how many lives have been ruined.

"In the future it may not be wise to force the issue quite so adamantly, monsieur," he says, "if only for your own safety. And I would say the same to a Templar who insisted on approaching a panicked mage. No cause will be served by a murder in the courtyard."

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