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feynites · 7 years

Text

Spider-mind

So the Sense8 crossover thread might have inspired a fic… (tweaked a little bit of how lyrium worked for Reasons). TW for canon-typical non-con elements and substance abuse.

Hope you enjoy! *pushes fic forward shyly before running away like a very mature and reasonable adult*

Also on AO3

Cullen is eight years old and he already knows he wants to be a Templar. His aunt is telling his parents of a group of sensates put down by Templars from the Circle two towns over just the other week. The word sends a chill equal parts fear and excitement up his spine.

Sensates. Spider-minds. Mages so powerful and far from the Maker’s path that they can corrupt the minds of normal people, even across long distances.

Apparently, one had gotten to some poor noblewoman or another - Cullen doesn’t recognize her name - and she’d gone mad, started talking to herself. She had been so far gone that she wouldn’t even give up the others, no matter how many times she was asked.

“Is this really an appropriate topic for dinner?” his mother asks, glancing in his direction. “There are children present.”

Cullen is deeply offended by this. He’s almost ten. Well, almost nine, which is almost ten.

“He’s got to hear of these things sooner or later.” Cullen heartily agrees. “Maker knows these people don’t have similar compunctions about children. They’ll latch on to anyone.”

Cullen thinks of someone doing something so terrible to his mother or his sister or his new puppy and he knows that he wants to be the one who protects them, who protects everyone.

“Such a shame they had to put her down, but once something is tainted by magic the stain can never truly be washed clean.”

Cullen is sixteen and a half and there’s at least one person he’s sure hasn’t been tainted by magic. She’s pretty and smart and smiles at him even though he apparently forgets how to speak every time he’s within four feet of her. He knows nothing can come of it, but he wants to do little things for her - bring her flowers and books and other bits from the outside world. He questions the Circles for the first time, wondering why someone like her should be locked away from everyone else.

He’s eighteen and he doesn’t know if he’s ever felt so betrayed. She’d made him question, tempted him to stray from the light of Andraste and the whole time she’d been a fucking spider-mind. She’d conspired to help a malefecar escape, all because they were part of the same sick, tangled web. He feels sick.

He’s nineteen and his friends are dead and his aunt was right. He feels sick, but he doesn’t think it’s from the rocking of the ship bringing him to Kirkwall.

He’s twenty-four and there is something wrong with this city. Most places will only have to deal with sensates once every decade or so, but he and Meredith have had to track down three separate webs in the past few months.

The last member of the latest web is Smited at his feet, sobbing, alternating between begging with him and cursing him. She glares up at him, eyes wild and braids askew and he’s reminded of shy smiles and teasing laughter.

He runs her through in one swift motion.

He’s twenty-seven and Meredith is starting to worry him a bit. She’s gotten it into her head that the bloody Champion is a spider-mind.

“How else would you explain that fight? No one is that well versed in that many different fighting styles with that many different weapons.”

But that can’t be true, can it? The Champion had saved them. Sensates use their powers to corrupt and control and…

He pushes the thought aside and resumes his duties and doesn’t bother to think about what methods Meredith might be investigating to “deal with the problem.”

Cullen is twenty-eight and he wakes up in a room that isn’t his. It’s small and sparse and when he goes to open the door it seems to be locked from the outside.

That doesn’t stop him from trying a few more times, throwing his wait against the door.

A small window on the door slides open with a snap and a grumpy-looking Templar peers in. “You gotta piss or something? Use the chamber pot like everyone else.”

The window snaps shut before he can respond or ask what in the Void is going on.

“You’re new,” a female voice says to his right.

He whirls in her direction. She’s smirking at him, arms crossed over her chest - which is rather fortunate because she’s only wearing a night shift.

“I know this is a bit disconcerting, but, in the future, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t cause quite so much of a fuss. Last thing we need is too many Templars looking our way. Or, well, my way.”

What?

“What?”

She peers at him and cocks her head.

“Am I your first?” She snorts at her own double entendres before continuing. “I mean, the rest of us have been visiting and sharing for a few months at least. You must be a late bloomer.”

Suspicion and horror are growing at the back of Cullen’s mind. “What do you mean?” he asks, but he already knows the answer.

“You’re sensate now, part of our cluster.”

No.

She must see the revulsion and denial on his face because she rushes to continue, words coming out a mile a minute, “It’s really nothing at all like the Chantry says, honest! We can’t control your mind and no one has any big bad dastardly plans - well, unless you count Adaar’s plans to nick some vitaar from-”

“This can’t be happening.”

It can’t.

She tries to put a hand on his arm, but he backs away from her.

“It’s going to be alright,” she says as if trying to soothe a rampaging druffalo, which is frankly infuriating.

“No it bloody well isn’t!” he hisses. “Maker’s breath, I’m a Templar.”

Her face, if possible, gets paler.

“Shit!”

“How do I get out of here?” he asks, brusquely.

“Look - you can’t tell anyone! Please, don’t tell anyone!” She’s cornering him and can’t breathe and how did the Maker let this happen to him?

“I have a duty to let my Knight-Commander know I’ve been compromised!” he shouts, willing himself to believe it as much as her.

“You’re going to go tattle to mummy?” She says and there’s something brittle in her voice. “They won’t spare you, you know. You’re ruined for them. A mad dog that has to be put down.”

He knows she’s right. He doesn’t have to ask again how to leave because all of a sudden he’s gone, back in his bed by himself.

He doesn’t turn himself in. Not yet. He needs to learn more about the others so he can go to Meredith with a full report, a list of names and locations. If he went to her now…well, she has been overtaxed as of late and might eliminate him in her enthusiasm before thinking to deal with the larger problem. It’s sound reasoning and most of the time he actually believes it.

So when he finds himself pulled into places he’s never been, speaking with people he’s never met, he tries to absorb as much information as possible.

He learns names and places and fighting styles, but he learns other things, too.

He learns you have to apply balm to qunari horns on a regular basis or they chafe and itch. He learns that some Dalish clans, like clan Lavellan, openly celebrate their sensates, believing them a gift from their Creators, who they also call the Original Cluster. He learns that surface dwarves are seen as sick and dangerous by their Orzamar kinsmen not only for their loss of Stone-sense, but because they can be pulled into clusters outside of the Great Castes (“Fucking isolationist shits!” Cadash curses cheerfully before making Cullen try some truly revolting whiskey.) He learns how to sew a perfectly even stitch from an elven slave named Gaius, who smiles up at Cullen and calls him and the other cluster members “my wonderful, bright escape from this hell-hole” and Cullen doesn’t know if he feels better or worse that there is probably no way for the Chantry to reach him in Tevinter. He learns and learns and learns, but he keeps telling himself it’s not enough, not yet.

He’s stuck with her more often than not.

She’s the most wary of him, at first - unsurprising, considering she is both a Circle mage and the person to whom he’d blurted his plan to expose them all (in a moment of tactical genius). However, as weeks go by and he doesn’t say anything, she seems to relax around him.

This is a good thing and a bad thing.

Good because she is no longer openly hostile to him, bad because she then thinks it’s acceptable to tease him.

She giggles as she makes him attempt simple spells, taking over eventually because “I’m not going to actually fail my classes on a laugh!”

She sits in the corner making funny faces and cracking jokes while he’s lecturing some of the newer Templars. He’s equal parts annoyed and amused until she smiles at him just so and he’s reminded of a much prettier face that didn’t have a hooked and crooked nose that used to smile at him before-

He doesn’t acknowledge her or any of the others for the rest of the day.

He starts to notice patterns about their visits and realizes that they are much briefer and less frequent right after he’s taken his lyrium. He tells Cadash as much, who seems to think he’s on to something. He goes on for a while about the differences between surface clusters and dwarven clusters and proximity to lyrium. Cullen doesn’t understand all of it - partially because the history and science of it all is a bit beyond him and partially because Cadash’s particular version of common appears to be about 80% swearing and mixed metaphors - but he does latch on to the take-home message that lyrium might be used to suppress this kind of magic too.

He sits on a muddy beach in Tevinter, teaching Gaius how to read Common by drawing letters with a stick and can’t bring himself to do anything with this information yet.

An elven boy has been accused of being a sensate. He denies it heartily, with none of the subservience Cullen had come to expect from most Kirkwall mages.

“Might have been Dalish,” Lavellan reasons, looking more than a little proud at the way he keeps his chin held high.

There’s a lot of back and forth until the boy bursts out, “He’s only saying I’m sensate because I refused to blow his stupid tiny prick!”

Trevelyan sucks in a breath through her teeth and clenches her jaw and glares at the Templar.

“Piece of prickly poisoned nug shite,” Cadash murmurs from the corner.

Cullen does his best not to look at either of them.

Meredith sentences the boy to Tranquility on suspicion of sensate practices and slander against a Templar.

“Knight Commander, are you sure-”

“Do I not look sure?” she asks, raising an eyebrow at him.

“But- what if the boy is telling the truth and Ser Tormon has been abusing his power-”

“I will keep an eye on him for the next few months in case of any abuses. Will that do, Knight Captain?”

No! The cluster responds as one.

“But-”

“What is danger of one Templar grown slightly lax in his duties versus the danger of a mage who can control the minds of dozens of normal innocent citizens of Kirkwall?”

“Lax in his duties?!” a voice behind him cries. He doesn’t so much as flinch at it.

“Of course, but perhaps we could delay-”

“You’re not saying we shouldn’t take the danger seriously, are you?” Meredith says, narrowing her eyes at him.

For a moment he wonders if she can see the figures crowded around him and he can barely breathe.

“Of course not, Knight Commander.”

“Good. I’d hate to hear my right hand had sympathies that were…misplaced.”

“No. Not at all.”

“The Rite will be carried out at dawn.”

A command and dismissal all at once.

“Are you seriously going to let this happen?”

“How can you just sit there and do nothing!”

“Do you actually eat the pig shit she’s serving or do you just swallow it like a good boy?”

“I have some contacts - we could get the boy out of the tower tonight-”

As he walks back to his chambers, they surround him and bombard him with questions he can’t answer, demands he can’t fulfill.

He takes more than his usual does of lyrium all at once and the voices fade to nothing along with his fear and guilt.

It’s about two months on this increased dose before it stops working.

A man is holding him down by his wrists with one hand while fumbling with his (her? their?) robes with the other. “Keep quiet about this and I’ll keep quiet about you talking to yourself in the library.”

He smells of ale and sweat and lyrium and he is (she is, they are) panicking.

“Magic is meant to serve man, after all,” he says with a chuckle, groping at him (her, them).

Cullen head-butts him, breaking his nose with a satisfying crunch.

“Fucking spider-mind, demon-bait bitch!” the Templar says, lunging at him.

He’s drunk and he’s expecting a mage who hasn’t left the tower in years and barely knows how to fight with magic, not a seasoned Templar who has taught the very moves he’s trying to use.

He breaks the mans fingers and dislocates his arm and is about to kick the ever living shit out of him-

“What the fuck have you done?!” Deirdre Trevelyan asks.

“He was going to rape you!” he hisses, can’t believe she is lecturing him for this after they all teamed up against him over that elf boy.

“Do you honestly think it would be my first time? That’s what Templars do!” She shouts at him.

No, no - she’s wrong. He knows there are those that abuse their power, he knows, but they are in the minority, surely?

He opens his mouth, but he doesn’t know what to say.

Deirdre fills the silence for him, “He’s going to report me! I’m going to be made Tranquil! I can’t- I can’t-”

Her breaths are coming in sharp bursts and tears are streaming down her face.

Cullen doesn’t know how to fix this.

When he’s back in Kirkwall he fumbles with the lyrium, fingers shaking, and takes twice his allotted dose and stops trying to figure out how.

His days pass in a blur and he fudges the books and moves numbers around to ensure that he can continue his new dosage. It’s for the best, he tells himself. I’m only safe if I can keep them out.

Most days he doesn’t really believe it.

Most days he doesn’t really care.

He keeps his head down and follows orders and does his duty.

He hunts down blood mages and abominations (and sensates! a voice in his head that sounds too much like Lavellan supplies) and keeps the city safe.

He does his duty.

He catches a Templar cornering a girl just passed her Harrowing and reports it to Meredith.

The mage is put in solitary confinement for three days and placed on probation for compromising the virtue of a Templar. She gives the Templar a talking to.

Cullen stares in the mirror and forgoes his dosage and wills someone else’s face to appear beside him. Is she alright? Had he gotten her killed? What had happened to that Templar?

No one comes.

He vomits and he doesn’t know if it’s disgust with himself or the other Templars or withdrawal from the lyrium (probably all three).

The next day he corners the Templar, gives him the shittiest work detail he can think of for the foreseeable future and informs him that if he ever hears that he’s so much as looked at a mage the wrong way again he’ll make sure he accidentally gets gelded the next time he is in the training yard.

He thinks it will make him feel better.

It doesn’t.

He takes the last two days worth of lyrium all together in one go.

The Chantry explodes and Meredith calls for the death of all the mages and even in the lyrium haze he has drugged himself into he can’t. The last fifty thousand fucking steps he’s taken have all been steps too far, he knows, but this is the step he finally refuses to take.

He can’t bring himself to go with the other Templars as they all scramble to find their place in this new world. He’s still terrified of mages and what they can do, but his uniform makes him feel filthy and soiled and his title feels like a curse.

He tries and fails to stop taking lyrium a few times before he simply gathers up his remaining supply and throws it down a latrine (To his credit, he only considers going to retrieve it once or twice).

He locks himself in a tavern room and pays for food and drink to be brought up, though he rarely has any. He vomits and shivers and has headaches so bad he can barely see. He thinks he’s starting to go mad.

He thinks he feels Lavellan stroking his brow and hears her asking the innkeeper for herbs. She tells him it will help. One of the others (he can’t tell - everything is so loud and hot and cold) says he doesn’t deserve help. He heartily agrees.

He goes in and out and sometimes they’re there and sometimes they’re not. He tries to search and find Trevelyan (Deirdre), but he can’t and, Maker, he’s so tired.

Cullen is almost thirty and Seeker Cassandra has asked for his help, which makes it easier to ask for hers. She agrees to watch over him as they travel to the conclave, as more of that blue shit slowly leaves his body.

She’s fierce and stubborn and righteous and seems to genuinely want to do the right thing. A part of him feels eight years old again and thinks that, maybe, he has been given a second chance.

“It’s okay, I like her, too,” Gaius says to his left. He’s got a black eye today, curtesy of his master, no doubt, but is smiling regardless.

“Hang in there, pretty-boy!” Adaar says, slapping him on the back. “We’ll see you at the temple in a few days.”

They both vanish.

Wait. What?

#submission #thank you for submitting!!!#this was really good #oh man #deidre tho #and going to the conclave D:#could be fascinating but could also be DISASTER #i really liked the combination of the firm wall of self-protective denial cullen put up around himself #with the cultural bias drilled into him #and also that hint of self-serving-ness that sometimes gets glossed over in his character #how he tends to try and rework things into a narrative that makes sense for his current worldview #rather than face ugly truths a lot of the time #and his lyrium dosages oh man #i might do my own take on this concept yet but i really enjoyed this one so far! <3333 #sense8 au #sensate cullen au

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