Dragon Age Inquisition: Their Wonderful Abnormality

Unmasked

Quick Warning: This chapter contains a single use of bad language. It also has themes of graphic violence running throughout (but nothing that bad - just the same level as I usually would include, I just felt the need to warn about the language, really).

 Thanks.

***

"How did you survive? Everyone died... but you?"

Images. Images flashed before her eyes. How it might have looked; all those familiar faces pale and dead, staring back at her blindly with blood on their clothes and across their skin. Whether they were scared - did they fight or were there too many to even stand a chance?

It all felt so unreal, like the moments before truly waking up from a nightmare in which you struggle to separate the terrifying illusions from the terrifying reality. The Trevelyans had finally struck at the Masquerades, after all this time. But they had done so with the deadliest precision Elsa knew belonged only to her father. To him, the Masquerades had been a threat, a terror, they had stolen a daughter, then a son and then the Trevelyan's honour and now he had made them pay.

He had killed them all.

Elsa could almost feel the guilt that washed over Jonn Flynt and looked up to the sky, she watched as he breathed in the leaden clouds of night and rain.

"I seem to have the talent of surviving by accident." He said finally in a sigh, "... for all the good it does me."

"Surviving by accident or losing your nerve?"

"I don't fear death, Trevelyan. I never have."

And Elsa deflated because she knew this to be true. She remembered how he had walked the walls of the battlements, soaring impossible heights above the city as though they were little more than a country lane. She had seen him barely flinch when a dagger was held to his neck and she had seen him watch death without so much of a flash of expression.

He was devoid, when he wanted to be, of all the things that makes one human. Devoid that is, aside from this flame of hatred that seemed to burn inside him. Elsa could sense it. Always had done.

"Did you come here to kill me, Elsa? Is that why you came?" He asked suddenly. "Because I've never seen anyone so armed to the teeth in my entire life... The Lyrium not relief enough, need something more? I can see you're trying not to shake, I know the symptoms of weakness all too well..."

"Don't." She cautioned lowly, sounding like an animal growling in warning.

"Don't?" He gave a harsh, breathy laugh, one of the first signs of human emotion she had seen from him in years; the bitterest resentment. "I'd drown myself in Lyrium if my family were slaughterers too."

"Which family are you referring to? The assassins or the nobles because as I see it, both have blood on their hands." She shouted, hardly acknowledging the burn of the cold on her skin. She breathed, looking at the ground then adding quietly: "Are you going to kill them? For what they did?"

Elsa could tell Jonn knew she referred to the Trevelyans and there was a very long pause in which she twigged he wasn't going to answer. Her gaze flew back up to him.

"Jonn?" She forced, suddenly feeling a little desperate, shouting again.

After a short while, he released a long breath, as though he was incredibly tired. The anger and resentment seemed to recede, to pull back into its shadowy cage.

"I wouldn't do that to you, Elsa." He concluded finally, sounding worn. "But the Masquerades have connections and friends - someone else sure could – You're still a Trevelyan to them, remember and now the Trevelyans are enemies."