Chapter Text
She’d chosen the templars.
It seemed the better option. Or at least the less vulnerable one.
Frankly, she'd barely understood what a templar was a few weeks ago. The mages seemed upset about them, but surely there were more important things than that in a war. Besides, she'd rather hide herself behind a trained militant force than these rogue witches.
She still didn’t really understand them if she was being honest. She knew enough to see that people were afraid. No matter how evil the templars may be, at least they were stable. Maybe that was enough.
She had hoped, assumed even, that Cullen would be doing this part. That she’d point at the templars on the map and he’d set off with his less than stellar army to collect them. That the man who’d been advocating to bring his old comrades into the fold would do the legwork and return with the mage killers and she’d be just that much safer.
But no. She’d pointed at the map and then been sent off. They hadn’t even given her time to complain.
Not that she would’ve. It would have ruined her perfectly crafted image of the sweet doe-eyed girl that ensured they wouldn’t throw her to the wolves. The one that changed her from a tool to a manipulable, scared girl.
She was fine with being manipulated. So long as they thought she was weak-willed, there was no reason to hurt her. She just had to ensure that whatever was best for her was the path of least resistance for them.
Besides, it wasn’t like she wasn’t returning the favor. The little notebook buried deep under her floorboards ran through the easiest way to get to all of them. Not to endear her to them, just to make her safe. She’d foster pity, camaraderie, desire, whatever would keep her in their good graces for the longest.
She was always harmless. That was the one thing she had to be. Harmless above all else. Any sign of competency turned to threat under anything but the softest light.
And yet they’d sent her fragile, bumbling self off to the templars to secure themselves some allies. Josephine had insisted she wouldn’t have to do anything, that she just had to show up while the actual soldiers being sent alongside her would do the heavy lifting.
Iron Bull had promised much the same, posturing as he normally did. She almost always took him with her these days. He was a beast of a man who threw his weight around like it was nothing, more than happy to take blows for her. And even more importantly, he was growing incredibly fond of her, the kind of ally she needed.
Their actual leader, the one who made the real decisions, was Cassandra. Cassandra was disinterested in coddling her, more focused on gathering troops than on the strange girl who’d inexplicably been shoved towards leadership because of an ability she’d been given by some higher power.
Solas, the mage she’d been forced to take with her, was too busy huffing and puffing about prioritizing templars over mages. She thought about snapping at the elf, at insisting that maybe the mages should have been an organized militaristic force if they wanted to be prioritized in this fight.
Instead, she rolled over like she always did, playing afraid until he stormed off, clearly uncomfortable with the tremor in her voice as she swore she was just trying to get the strongest possible troops so no one else would get hurt.
Good. Let him be uncomfortable. She had never liked him much anyways.
But even so, when they arrived at the templar camp she kept herself wedged firmly between Solas and Iron Bull, as far away from the leader of the templars, the Lord Seeker she was pretty sure he was called, as she could.
She still didn’t fully understand who he was, couldn’t make sense of what he was doing here or why she was meant to care about him. In her defense, she hadn’t expected to be forced to come along.
Despite her disinterest in him, despite her safe position, despite the way Bull attempted to lead the conflict, when something snapped in the Lord Seeker and he lunged forwards, he lunged at her.
The world lurched under her feet and it felt like it had the last time, when she'd been pulled through the fade to this awful place and given the strange power that stuck her heading an army. It made her reel in her skin, her muscles and sinews feeling like they were being tugged along faster than she could keep up with, her mind stretching impossibly thin as it did.
And then she was alone. Her warriors and mages were gone, no Bull or Cassandra or Solas to keep her safe.
Then this Lord Seeker appeared once more, and she suspected that even if she had listened when they’d told her all about the templars and their plight, she would have no better of an idea who this Lord Seeker was.
This idea was only reinforced when the Lord Seeker began to morph, turning into eerie, hollow puppets of her now absent companions, cycling through her advisors as well.
She allowed herself the freedom to not perform innocence for these poor mockeries of her cohorts. It seemed probable that this ‘Lord Seeker’ was a demon and as such, unlikely to respond to her usual fawning.
So instead she got on with things, turning away from the creature that had just decided to morph itself into the face that she tried to avoid seeing in the mirror, and began moving forwards in this strange new space.
The exploration was slow, the terrain littered with traps. The demon seemed frustrated with her persistent refusal to listen to it menace her.
The rooms revealed little. Some had puppetted versions of the members of the Inquisition, acting out some situation or another. She decided not to devote her attention to it. It seemed to be intended to display what might happen should she die here and to be frank, she couldn’t care less. She would be dead after all. If Cullen ended up in a jail cell after she died, so be it. It would serve him right for forcing her to come here anyway.
She explored another room, empty and strange, not sure what she was looking for. It wasn’t like she could just find a way out, she knew she was somewhere incorporeal and beyond things like exit doors. Maybe it was the fade, maybe she was in her own mind, maybe it was this demon’s territory. She didn’t much care, unless figuring it out led her to an exit any faster.
And then, as she drowned herself in hopelessness and melancholy, a voice sounded from behind her.
“You.”
The voice didn’t sound harsh nor antagonistic, a far cry from what she’d heard from the demon’s many faces. It was soft, almost curious in its tone.
She turned around with wide eyes, forcing her face back into the soft façade she’d been free of whilst only under the scrutiny of the demon.
“Thank god I found someone,” she gasped out, hoping she wasn’t laying it on too thick. “I thought I was all alone in here.”
A young man stood before her. She tried to take him in but it was difficult to due to the frankly absurd hat he was wearing. It covered most of his face, obscuring him from her, the shaggy ends of blonde hair and a stern looking mouth barely peeking out from under it.
He also, fairly notably, was hanging from the ceiling, which did not help with the matter of the oversized brim of his well-worn hat blocking her view.
He spoke once more, in that same gentle, inquisitive tone. It was off putting in a way it shouldn’t have been, its softness not quite managing to shield it from that. “It's not the same. Soft words, hard thoughts. You hate me. People do that but you think I’m human and you hate me anyway. Besides it, because of it. It’s hard to see, hard to understand, covered more and more, shying away from the light. The light brings eyes and the eyes bring hurt.”
“Are you inside my head?” Her tone was laced with a spite she rarely allowed to see the light of day.
He looked around. “We’re both inside your head. You’ve guessed that already.”
She shook her head. “Not here, not this place. You, what you’re saying, those are my thoughts. You’re stealing them from me.”
“Not stealing. Just seeing. Hearing.” He paused for a moment, and then said with a decisiveness she’d yet to hear from him. “You’re a bad person.”
“What are you doing in here?” she asked, brushing right past his statements, desperately searching for a way out of this. As much as she hated it, this weird creature that she’d found lingering in her mind was probably her best chance of escape. At least he didn’t seem intent on killing her.
“I grabbed onto you, when you were pulled through the fade. I wanted to go help, but getting out is hard. You made it easy but part of me is stuck up here now. You could help. If you go back I can follow you then too.”
Great, so she’d picked up some sort of mind-reading monster in the fade. She was tempted for a second to take her chances with the demon but she wasn’t stupid. She couldn’t get out on her own, and he clearly knew something.
“What are you?” she asked, at least wanting to know what she was dealing with before she threw her life into his hands.
“I’m Cole. What are you?”
That earned a ghost of a laugh from her, the short huff of air barely noticeable. Not that it mattered, Cole could probably feel it as she did. “I’m Rosemary.”
“You’re wrong,” he said, suddenly behind her, standing on the same floor she was on.
“About what? My name?”
“Wandering, alone, unnamed, searching for something soft on the tongue. Rosemary made people see the ghost, not the person. Rosemary earned gentle hands. What are you?”
This was spiraling out of control faster than she could figure out how to manage it. “Can we focus on getting out of here?” she asked. “Can’t you interrogate me when there’s no imminent threat on our lives?”
Then he breathed a word out like he couldn’t decide if it was a prayer or a curse, like it was a horrible truth that had just occurred to him. “Britches.”
Her head snapped towards him, a tension she’d long since trained out of herself rearing its ugly head. “Where did you hear that?”
“You told me. It echoes in your head, the closest thing to you that there is. It’s so far, fleeting, fading. But it’s almost you.”
“We need to leave,” she practically pleaded with him. “Can we please just get out of here?”
“I’ve never heard someone who wasn’t a who before. Where did it go?”
“I promise I’ll answer all your questions when we get out. Please, we need to go.” She wasn’t above begging. There was very little she was above, in all honesty.
His head tilted once more, as if considering asking about that thought, before deciding the promise of honesty in the future was worth more.
“It wants your face,” he declared. “It would hurt more than you ever could, claw the people apart instead of just holding. You want to leave. I can help.”
“You can get me out of here?”
He didn’t even bother to nod, just continued speaking in his strange little riddles. “You need to make it more. Right now it’s just a few. The further you go, the further it stretches.”
“Why would I want to make it bigger?”
“The smaller it is, the closer together the power. You have to stretch it thin.”
Right, so she just needed to keep moving and eventually something in this seemingly endless demon would snap.
She didn’t need him for that, she could travel on her own.
His head tilted as the thought passed through her head. “We’re in you already. If you leave me behind, I stay. You want me to go so you can’t leave me.”
He was right. As much as she didn’t want to travel with this weird creature, leaving him festering inside her head seemed infinitely worse.
“Alright then Cole, we’d better start walking.”
He nodded but did not move. “We will need to fight.”
“You will need to fight. There’s not much I can do.”
“No. You don’t fight, you move softer. Sneaking, slipping, stealing. You only have to roll over if you get caught.”
“I wish you’d stop doing that,” she said, and her voice was instinctually softer. He paid her no regard.
“I can be quiet. We can move softly together.”
She hoped the creature actually understood what it was saying, that it could be as stealthy as it promised. Or at least hoped that it could fight.
He still didn’t move and she wondered if he was waiting for her to go first.
She turned and took a few steps out the door, hearing no footsteps sound behind her.
When she turned, Cole was nowhere to be found.
A voice came from right behind her, outside of the doorway. “Should we not leave?”
She whipped around and glared at him. He didn’t seem to react to the look at all.
To be fair, she wasn’t very intimidating. She had little practice at being menacing and she most certainly was not a natural.
Emboldened by the fact that he did not seem to need to move to follow her, she set out, walking out the door, blowing right past him.
A scream sounded from her left and Cole said, “Keep going straight. It wants you to wind around and around and around so it doesn’t have to stretch.”
His voice echoed and she wasn’t sure if it was an audible noise or not. She turned to where it felt like it had come from and there he was, walking alongside her.
The sound of her footsteps remained the only ones in the hall as the two of them walked.
“We should move quietly,” she said.
He looked around as he moved. “Envy can’t hear me. It doesn't know I’m here. You wouldn’t have either.”
“If not for safety then maybe you should be quiet for my own sanity.”
“You’re not going insane,” he declared. “You are frustrated.”
“You don’t seem to mind.”
“No,” he said. “You can be frustrated if you’d like.”
“No,” she informed him, although she imagined he knew already. “I would not like.”
She turned to look at him and saw a glimpse of his eyes under his hat, a little wrinkle formed between them. “Then you should stop.”
“You first,” she huffed.
“The Iron Bull is out there,” he said, undeterred by her clear irritation. “He isn’t bad but he brings hurt anyway.”
She decided to try a more direct approach. “Can you shut up?”
“If you let them bite, then it doesn’t count. It only hurts if they take it, if you allow it it's still yours.”
She stopped with a jolt, whipping around to scold him. “If you can see everything in my head, why do you keep talking? You know what’s up there and I know what's up there so what exactly are we achieving?”
“I have thoughts too,” he said, almost wistfully.
“Really? I have yet to hear them. You instead seem intent on airing every thought I’ve ever had as obtusely as you can.”
“It’s hard. Your thoughts are so loud. You’re very angry.”
She huffed as she stormed onwards. “Wouldn’t you be?”
“I don’t know. I think the hurt would make me help. It just makes you want to dig your claws in and hold.”
“Fucking irritating little creature, that’s what you are. I’ll be glad when I get out of this and I never have to see you again. Then you can stew on my rotten thoughts as long as you’d like.”
His head cocked to the side. “You’re not convinced we’re inside you. You still hope this could be the fade. You think I may belong here, that I might stay.”
“Frankly, I don’t care where you go. I know you’re not staying with me though.”
“We’re tethered.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. You can see in my head, right? Do you really think they’re going to believe a demon over me? You’ll be killed in a heartbeat. Which is fine by me, no skin off my back.”
“A bad person,” he muttered to himself, hands flexing and unflexing slowly, rhythmically as he spoke. She wasn’t sure if he even knew he was doing it.
He went silent as they heard the shouting of troops. Cole faded away and she took to the shadows.
If this really was her mind, which she was not ready to wholeheartedly believe on the word of some creature, then she had no idea how stealth worked here. Was it really as simple as being quiet and hiding away? Surely in this space that the demon allegedly created, it could sense where she was.
And yet she watched soldiers run in front of her, looking desperately for someone to fight as she slunk further into the artificial landscape.
Cole made himself scarce from there on out, occasionally warning her with that strange, disembodied voice to turn now or to avoid the room ahead, although never in such clear terms.
Eventually, she realized where she’d ended up. She was where she’d begun, where the Lord Seeker, or perhaps the envy demon, had lunged at her past her several bodyguards, most of which were standing protectively in front of her.
It wanted her. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe because of her perceived position of power. Maybe because of whatever this ability was that the fade had given her seemingly at random when she’d been pulled here.
It didn’t really matter, at the end of the day. She just needed to get out.
And at the top of all those staircases was a dead end where she had been attacked.
She looked around as the sound of battle-ready troops got louder.
“Cole,” she hissed. “Where do I go?”
His voice sounded from above and she looked up to find him in the palm of a massive statue.
“You remember it wrong. The statues don’t have faces here. You didn’t care to look.”
“I still don’t. We have more important things to be worrying about than what some weird statues look like.”
“It should end where it began. You must escape in the center.”
She made the mistake of turning her head, of looking nervously towards the false templars that resided down the stairs.
When she looked back up, she was alone again.
Or at least she hoped she was, looking around nervously, checking for any signs of an aggressor.
But demons didn’t play fair.
Before she could so much as catch sight of it, the faux Lord Seeker was slamming her back into the wall, hands tight around her throat.
The face looking back at hers was the half-familiar one from the mirror once more, one she tried to avoid looking at at all costs.
It was typically unfair, she supposed. To be forced to look at an imitation of herself as she died.
She kicked and flailed, trying to break from his grasp, to get away by any means possible, but she knew it was a losing fight. She could feel the strength in its hands that far exceeded hers.
Cole’s voice sounded from right beside her. “He is afraid of you.”
She could see no sign of him out of the corner of her eye as she thrashed in the demon's hold, but she could hear him perfectly.
The fight began to drain out of her, sinking into herself as her kicks lost all their power.
And then the hands around her throat went stiff and the world folded in on itself.
She collapsed to the ground the second she saw Iron Bull in front of her, pulling the Lord Seeker away from her. She heaved in air where she sat, clutching her chest as she did, eyes beginning to water.
It wasn’t her best performance, a bit overdone. She honestly could have just reacted as she would naturally but the sudden appearance of her companions had thrown her. In her defense, it was a sudden shift and she’d been preoccupied with other things.
The strange creature with the stupid hat was nowhere to be seen. She wasn’t sure if she hoped he was still trapped back wherever they had been or not. She certainly didn’t want him lingering in her head but having a mind-reading creature roaming around would prove an ever greater problem.
Bull carried her inside as the other two talked about a demon and some transformation she hadn’t been privy to, instead caught up in her own dramatics.
He tucked her away on a chair in the corner as Solas said something, probably whining about her. Cassandra gave her a firm order to stay put and they left her inside, amidst the templars.
She stayed tucked in her corner, choking down any panic that might want to arise.
She didn’t like being alone with groups of men, let alone groups of men that she didn’t know and hadn’t built any repertoire with.
The fight was over fast. She stayed dutifully in her corner, not one to disobey orders. When it was over, Cassandra and Bull returned for her, Solas presumably off worrying about more important things than her.
Cassandra did not let Bull carry her any longer, insisting she was fine without giving her the chance to speak. She rose to her feet, despite her plan to feign weakness a little longer. She didn’t want to upset Cassandra.
Cassandra dragged her back to their control room to debrief about the mission, where she would inevitably try to pull something approximating leadership out of her once more.
It wouldn’t work. She knew any attempt to lead would upset more people than it would please.
It was safer to be weak.
Cullen was upset about something, which didn’t make sense to her considering she’d helped his precious templars first. Josephine was upset too, not that she’d ever admit it. But a liar recognizes a liar and that calm voice was as put on as it could be. Leliana was endlessly practical, so presumably she was telling her something important. She barely listened to any of it, instead focusing on clutching her uninjured stomach in faux pain, hoping that the hands that had been around her neck left bruises, despite having been in that world between worlds.
And then their typical, predictable chatter turned to something more panicked and she looked up to find Cole sitting on their table.
Her eyes shifted from an impression of someone trying to be brave about their pain to a very real panic, lurching away from him before she could think.
Swords were being drawn in the blink of an eye and she did her best to position herself behind Cullen. He was already the fastest to the draw and Cole was too dangerous to her. Hopefully, if he felt he had something to protect he would be even more likely to end this creature now, before Cole could become a problem.
“You left,” Cole said, looking straight at her, the weapons pointing at him not seeming to concern him at all.
All heads turned to her. “Rosemary?” asked Josephine hesitantly, waiting for an explanation.
“He helped me against the demon,” she said reluctantly. “But I don’t think we can trust him.”
Cole’s head cocked to the side. “Fleeting, fearful, frantic. You need me to be gone, they can’t see what I know. We both will stay.”
She prayed the others didn’t understand that as the threat it was.
Leliana glanced between the two of them and asked, “A spirit helped you?”
A spirit. It made sense, she’d apparently picked him up in the fade and he hadn’t done anything truly menacing so it was unlikely he was a demon. At least not yet. She wasn’t sure how Leliana had deduced this but she stored the information away.
She nodded. “He did. And maybe I was unfair. He was nothing but kind to me, and he saved my life. We could give him a chance.”
Cullen scoffed. “Trust him? He’s a demon and you just said we shouldn’t trust him! Now you want to set him free in the camp?”
“Wasn’t it you who said I could stand to be a little braver, Commander Cullen?” she said, sitting up a little straighter. She needed to do this, if Cole was inside her head he could get her killed. “He saved me, and I say we give him a chance.”
Cole was gone before she finished defending him, disappearing with hints of fade green in the air where he’d sat.
Josephine looked nervous but she seemed the most content with their situation, saying, “He could be a useful resource-”
Before she could so much as finish her sentence, Rosemary bolted out the door to go find the ticking bomb that had invited itself into her army.