Title: Descent
Fandom: Dragon Age
Rating: T
Length: 759 words
Content notes: No warnings apply.
Author notes: Written for the ‘doubt’ challenge in fan_flashworks. This is a sketch of a scene in Act 3, the beginning of the end of the golden era of their relationship.
Summary: Anders discovers that Sara and Fenris have been working for the Templars behind his back.

***

He hadn’t meant to read it.

He had been mid-way through a brilliant argument about how Chantry law supports the concept of mage freedom when he had run out of paper. It wasn’t an argument he wanted to forget, so he had gone searching on Sara’s desk for a scrap of paper to capture the rest of it. She had never been particularly neat, so he’d had to rummage.

That’s when he found it. And the argument flew straight out of his head.

Sara received many missives requesting help, and they tended to differ only in the details. But this one was different. It had the Templars’ seal attached, and the message that accompanied it was brief. It took Anders only a moment to read it.

Champion,
Addresses enclosed for three more. You know what to do.
M.

Anders felt like his insides had suddenly been grasped by a wintry hand. He held the piece of paper away from himself between thumb and forefinger, like it was toxic. Then he sat on the bed and waited.

It wasn’t unusual for Sara to go on jobs without him. Quite reasonably, he had thought, she had prioritised his manifesto and his work in the clinic over him acting as her battlefield medic. But all of a sudden, the decision to leave him behind seemed more ominous. The enclosed addresses were not to be found on her desk, and Anders knew what she had first made her name in Kirkwall doing.

He didn’t know how long he had been waiting when he heard the front door open downstairs. The fire had burned down, and Anders didn’t bother to reignite it. Heavy footsteps up the staircase, and Sara pushed open the bedroom door, Fenris following her.

Anders could see the fine spray of blood that covered her armour. It wasn’t unusual, with her fighting style, but it gained a significance he hadn’t attributed to it before. How much of the blood that covered her was the blood of civilians, innocents?

“I can’t wait for a bath,” Sara said with a groan, and started to take off her gauntlets. She had just dropped her first one on the ground when Anders re-lit the fire with a thought.

Fenris swore, his tattoos flaring into life. Sara pulled her shortswords, then saw it was Anders, and re-sheathed them.

“Anders,” she said with a laugh – was that a thin cover for a guilty conscience? – “I didn’t see you there. Why were you sitting here in the dark?”

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“What, are you jealous?” she said. She sauntered closer and gave him a kiss on the cheek, then spoke low into his ear, “I can promise you that Fenris and I were not off seeing another man.”

“Where were you?” he insisted when she pulled back.

Sara looked at him quizzically.

“We had a job,” she said with what seemed like forced nonchalance. She began unbuckling her other gauntlet. “I didn’t want to pull you away from the clinic.”

“This job?” Anders asked, brandishing the paper with the Templars’ seal.

Sara glanced at it. Did she look a second longer than she needed to? Did her cheeks flush with guilt? Was her attention too focused now on her gauntlet as she finished pulling the strap from the buckle?

“Oh, yeah,” Sara said. Did she glance at Fenris before she continued? “The Templars are having a problem with some of their recruits skiving off without permission.”

Anders narrowed his eyes. “And what is ‘you know what to do’?” he asked.

“You know, clean up the Templars’ mess, as always,” she said lightly, then threw her second gauntlet onto the ground. Anders always hated when she just dropped her armour where she stood.

He let the paper fall to the ground and stood up.

“Why won’t you give me a straight answer?”

Sara just turned away, so Anders rounded on Fenris. Fenris, however, held up a hand to ward him off before Anders even spoke.

“Hawke has told you all you need to know,” he said. His composure was unruffled as he removed his vambraces and placed them carefully on the armour stand.

“So neither of you will tell me,” Anders said bitterly. He picked up his staff and stomped towards the bedroom door. “I’m heading back to the clinic.”

Sara turned back towards him then. “No, wait, Anders,” she said, her face open and appealing. “Please stay.”

He slowed down. “Then will you tell me?”

Her face fell, and Anders had his answer.

He left.