encephalon | Ϟ fenders is gross there is no fenders here

[There is very little that is beyond the CDC's capacity to accomplish. He's learned that well in the time he's spent with them. They need the 'Yes' in order to keep the crew, and they'll use whatever coercion or bribery is necessary to get it.

The mission is finished. The rewards go out. He is alone in the corridor leading to the Neheda's medical bay when it happens.

There's no way to describe it other than what it is: having his consciousness ripped in two. As it turns out, unmaking an abomination is even less enjoyable than making one was; the separation is not gentle, and Justice does not go willingly. It's a snarl of rage and desperation and pain, like pieces of himself being torn off one by one, as inelegantly as by an apprentice butcher. His vision goes dark around the edges, and it's only distantly that he sees himself hit the floor on his hands and knees.

At first, he feels the protests as his own. Then, just that simply, he doesn't -- the anger is disconnected, an echo, like Justice were back in the corpse and simply shouting in his ear.

Then, nothing. It could be stillness, if there were anything peaceful about how empty his mind suddenly feels. It's silence louder than he's felt in years, since before Kirkwall, before the night he left Vigil's Keep, and it isn't calming in the slightest.

It doesn't take a genius to deduce what happened. It doesn't even take beyond a single leap of logic. Whatever he'd been doing before is abandoned; it doesn't even take him long to search the ship. When he finds Fenris, he's a mess of frayed nerves, jumbled emotions, and bald-faced panic.]

You had no right.

( i rolled 14 but WHATEVER'S CLEVER. )

[ The Chantry caught him outside of Treviso after months of fleeing through the wilds, worn down and starving, too vulnerable and too outnumbered to withstand their descent. He was a fool to have thought travel by land would be safer than by sea, having guessed the Templars would be looking for Hawke and his co-conspirators on ships bound for Rivain. Fenris had opted to find his way to Dairsmuid via Afsaana or Ayesleigh and he was used to running across entire continents, so figured the journey would be difficult but doable. Now he's rotting away in Antiva City, in a cell in a Circle-turned-gulag. The Templars must surely have more connections to the Magisters' methods than they care to admit, or to the Qunari's, because they've found a way to hold his lyrium at bay by the shackle round his neck. It's not quite slavery, but some days it may as well be for the loss of freedom he's suffered.

It is 9:39 Dragon and Fenris has been here for two years, interrogated, beaten, tortured, and largely unaware of the chaos in the world outside. He does see the Templars gaining fervor while simultaneously leaning away from the word of their Maker, packing these chambers to bursting with apostates and fugitives and whomever else they deem a sufficient menace to Thedosian society. By and large it seems they've given up on being discerning.

Fenris listens to anything he can these days to keep from going mad. The solitude is deafening. He's had too much time to think about the events that brought him here, how he'd followed Hawke into the fire and had genuinely begun to believe they had chosen the lesser of two evils, but can't linger too long on thoughts like friendship. The only thing crueler than having never been free is having tasted freedom only to have it wrenched away again, and Fenris spends every day fighting the slip into acceptance that he's going to die in this place.

Once day, when he's bruised and shaky and pale (the Templars have learned that his blood contains no shortage of self-replenishing lyrium, given time) the door opens and his jailer says something about a partner, he thinks, in gruff Antivan. There's scarcely any room left in the Circle. Seems even special political prisoners are beginning to get bunkmates.

Nothing prepares him for what he sees. ]

WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN, or: THAT TIME JUSTICE GOT HIS SHIT WRECKED BY THE CDC

POST-GAME MEGA BAD END