Lineart commissioned from the phenomenal negacrow, colors and wee fanfic by me. I found this stuff in the deepest depths of my blog and realized that, since I colored negacrow’s lines after posting the drabble, I never actually posted this all together! I’d really like to have it all together somewhere on my blog, so here goes.
“Blessed Andraste… how long has it been like this?”
Commander Amell rotated Justice’s wrist and elbow with a delicate touch, watching sinews creak over patches of raw bone. It was, at least, a small blessing that nothing essential appeared badly damaged, though the corpse’s brittle skin had been stripped away from the forearm entirely.
Justice looked on impassively, his clouded eyes fixed not his wound but the other man’s pale, anxious face. “Perhaps three days. I believe the initial injury occurred during our encounter with the Shrieks, and seems to have progressed.”
“You have to tell me these things, Justice.” Tobiah’s thin lips pressed thinner, fingers still gingerly exploring Kristoff’s mutilated flesh. “Move your thumb in a circle, please, if you can. You need to tell me when things like this happen right away, not after it gets worse.”
Justice obliged, flexing the thumb at the Commander’s insistence, then the rest of his fingers in succession. “I apologize. There has been little opportunity. It did not seem relevant so long as the limb remained functional.”
With his head bowed, Tobiah’s hood- never quite the right size for him- slipped down further over his face. Though they stood close enough that Justice could make out some small amount of detail through the cataracts long-since filmed over his vision, he could no longer see the mage’s own eyes, only the stern set of his frown. “We would have stopped for anyone else’s injury. You’re no different, Justice. You have to take care of yourself.”
This, Justice knew, was inaccurate. It was not his self that the Commander now doted upon; it was a body, a prison of skin and bone. The spirit fluttered within like a bird against the bars of a crude cage. Yet he understood the deeper fear that drove the mage’s words, as it was one with which he had become intimately familiar.
How long would he remain ensnared?
Thinking of unknowable years of bone and gristle, of being too delicate to swing a sword, of dust and ash and lonely eternity, Justice balled Kristoff’s withered hand into a fist and watched the labor of his borrowed tendons as they complied.
“As you say, Commander.”
Tagged: #Dragon Age #Dragon Age Awakening #Justice #Tobiah Amell #Amell #DA:A #negacrow #negacrow's art #rabbit's writing #fanart #fanfic
