reikah:

21 – autumn!

[headcanon meme]

Anders was born on a farm.

Not many people left alive remember that. Anders himself doesn’t tell people about it. What would be the point? He can’t go back to being that farmer’s lad anymore than he could cast off his magic and come out of it whole. Whoever he was before the barn burned, it has nothing to do with him now.

But.

The wind whistles high and sharp through the streets of Hightown, this close to the sea and this high up; and there’s very little room for vegetation in the stone alleyways and the great townhouses – but a little bit creeps through, here and there. Kitchen gardens for the slaves, now maintained by servants. A small row of weak, struggling trees planted by the Orlesian quarter. Windowboxes, thyme and basil grown fresh within the shelter of a Kirkwall mansion’s walls.

He’s in the study working on his latest manifesto when something small and red-gold blows in through the open window, lands atop his open book; it takes him a while to notice it. Hawke reaches over from his spot at Anders’s side –  proof-reading his most recent draft, did you know there’s no u in templar? and that’s not how you spell ‘outrageous’ – and plucks it from the page, twirling it carefully between his forefinger and thumb. “Huh,” he says, “Haven’t seen one of those for a while.”

Anders takes it from him, turns it over in his hand. It’s stained a little with wet ink, here and there, and it’s smudged the manifesto, turned the words of the second paragraph into a thin smear of bleak blackness; he rubs his thumb along the length of it, feels the texture against his fingers. “Sycamore,” he says, and with a flick of his wrist, sends it whirling through the air; it spirals, as the seeds eventually do, and comes to rest on the carpet.

They used to have a sycamore tree near the western pasture, he remembers. The sheep liked its broad crown for the shade, and he had liked to sit there after the day’s work was over, one of the barn cats draped across his lap purring softly, watching the seeds spin their way down graceful and free.

“Must’ve come from one of the neighbours,” Hawke says. He picks the seed up again, placing it carefully on the desk next to Anders’s inkwell; when Anders glances over he’s watching the seed with a soft look to his eyes. They’re a common Fereldan tree, sprouting up across the bannorn, and as the seasons change and the seeds fall they come alive in a riot of colour.

Aveline once asked him what he thought of Kirkwall – how it compared to her home country. She had been trying to find some middle ground, some kinship in patriotism; Anders can’t remember what he said but knows it was probably petty. He was born on a farm in the Bannorn, but they took him away and labelled him the Ander like a banner – the outsider, the halfblood kid with his northern nose – and whatever love he had had for his country had bled away a long time ago, replaced by a sense of intrusion.

A reminder that he did not belong, not anywhere, not so long as the magic flowed through his veins.

Leaving Ferelden, he hadn’t looked back. Kirkwall was as good a place to be as any other. He felt no particular sense of belonging no matter where he travelled – forever an outsider, forever stateless. Vengeance, it seemed to him, upon magekind by the Chantry, for the sins of the Magisters. None to return to the lands of their mothers. By cruel magic taken, ice, lightning, and flame.

He doesn’t miss Ferelden. He doesn’t miss the farm. But sometimes, he thinks, as he carefully places his quill back in the inkpot – reaches for a fresh page, placing aside the ruined sheet with its smudged second paragraph – sometimes he does miss the sycamore trees.