Chapter Text
When he remembers falling out of the wardrobe, it doesn’t feel like he’s returned anywhere. Cullen sees it as a second birth; both times, he had not asked for it to happen. Things started the same way both times too; he opened his eyes and started screaming.
His siblings take to being forced back into their younger bodies and their former world with different levels of grace. Mia barely stumbles. She takes it in stride, just like she’s taken to everything in the past twenty years, with her head held high and an authority that can only come from ruling. Her shoulders are heavier than they were before, but she doesn’t lose any of her authority. Mia adapts, keeps her head held high. She may have lost her kingdom, but she’s not going to let that stop her.
There are new kingdoms to be won.
Branson becomes sullen and angry, frustrated by his weak limbs and small stature. He wants nothing more than to be strong again. In time, his anger subsides, as do his memories. Secretly, he’s glad. He always hated the attention, that everyone knew his face and had expectations of who he was and who he should be. Now he’s entirely anonymous, and it’s a relief. He’s still homesick, at times, but copes by never speaking of it. As if pretending it never happened will dull the pain.
Rosalie misses the Kingdom the most, spends her days writing down everything she can remember in notebook after notebook in frustratingly childish handwriting. It takes her the better part of the year. When she’s finished, she locks the notebooks in a trunk at the base of her bed and doesn’t mention them again. She builds herself a new court, a following of people who she’s picked off of the ground and healed as best as she could. As the years pass, she thinks of it less, and when she finds the notebooks in the trunk years later it’ll all feels like a dream to her.
Cullen falls out of the wardrobe and straight into disbelief. He’s so deeply convinced that this world is a lie that he refuses to accept that this is now their reality. He sneaks back into the room that night only to find a wall at the back of the wardrobe, and it takes out any hope he had. Mia finds him there later with the wardrobe knocked over, beating against the wall with bloodied palms. She holds his too small body against hers, crying as Cullen sinks into his grief.
“You promised,” he sobs, clinging onto her nightgown with bloody hands. “You promised.”
They both know that she couldn’t promise anyones safety, even when she’d made the promise, days and weeks and another world ago. It doesn’t stop Mia’s heart from breaking for him, watching as he gets so entrenched in his grief that he doesn’t know how to start climbing out, unsure of how to live in this new old world.
As it always does, the grief recedes over time, changing to hollow longing over the year. It sinks into the background, and soon all he is left with is the nightmares and feeling overwhelmingly out of place. The city is too big and too loud; all the sensory input leaves him with splitting headaches. He doesn’t fit in, with the noise and the civilians. He has no purpose here, no future.
“They don’t understand,” he spits at Mia after getting suspended for the third time that month. “How could any of them possibly understand?”
She just looks at him with tired eyes, shoulders too heavy to hold up. Sometimes he thinks that even she doesn’t understand. Other times, he think she understands just too well.
“We do as we have always done,” she tells him. “We endure.”
Most nights, Cullen dreams of war. He spends hours hacking through demon after demon, wearing faces of people that he thinks he knew, once. He’s not sure what’s worse; having to cut them down or knowing that he’s forgotten them.
On the easier nights, he isn’t fighting alone. He never sees her, but he can feel her there. Her sword always made a particular sound as it swung through the air, and he feels the electricity radiating off of her. At times, Cullen thinks he hears her laugh, and it cheers him even as he watches his soldiers get torn down around him.
As much as he wants to, he never seems able to turn around to look at her. It doesn’t keep him from trying, to catch a glance of her over his shoulder or out of the corner of his eye. Cullen will try to shout for her, waking up with her name still caught in his throat.
Ari.
It’s a close call, but Cullen graduates. He doesn’t bother changing out of his robes, just heads straight for the recruitment office. The woman sitting at the desk takes one look at him and wordlessly hands him the form. Cullen knows exactly what she sees in his face, has seen it himself in enough recruits. It’s the look of resignation. This is the only thing he knows how to do, and he’s going to do it.
Rosalie cries when he comes home in a uniform while Branson says nothing. Neither does Mia, but her face says enough. She knew this was coming. She understands; she had helped shape him into a warrior long ago. It’s not something he can just let go of.
Mia is the only one who comes to send him off. They don’t say anything on the way to the station, don’t mention how people move out of their way when they move through the crowds. Neither had ever quite unlearned how to command a room by movement alone, how to pass through a space unseen. They didn’t forget how to ignore the looks either, so when they get to the right platform Mia pulls him close, ignoring everyone else there.
“Be careful out there,” she demands-- the same demand she’s made of him countless times, lifetimes ago. “Do only what must be done.”
Mia stays on the platform until the train leaves, a Queen sending her last soldier into battle.
Cullen does not make friends in the army. He fights a little too efficiently for that, to the point that he makes the others uneasy. Once he’s deployed, it doesn’t take long for the rumors to start. About how he guesses the enemies strategy more often than not, how he saved someone’s life with a knife to the enemy’s jugular, thrown from ten paces. Everyone agrees that he’s a good soldier, and one you want on your squad. But he’s too quick, too efficient, and entirely too at ease with blood and death for a nineteen year old.
He knows they whisper about him, in the dark. Cullen doesn’t care; he has a purpose. A way forward, a way to help. That’s all that matters.
When he had joined up, Cullen had assumed that battle would keep him focused. That it would give him purpose again, would help him forget. Instead it dredges up memories, and he spends each night dreaming of home. If he’s lucky, he’ll dream of her; of red hair spilling across clean sheets, the laughter that followed a barely-dodged bolt of electricity during training, the weight of her on his chest when she’d bested him in a sparring match, the lilt of her voice when she sang in Dalish.
Cullen isn’t usually lucky. Magic had made war that much more brutal; he’d seen soldiers get possessed, torn apart, electrocuted, and incinerated. He doesn’t miss watching his soldiers get torn down by darkspawn. Even without the magic, swords and arrows made for slow, painful deaths. If nothing else, it makes him thankful for his gun, even if he misses the weight of a sword and shield in his hands.
At the end of the day, war hasn’t changed at all. The details are different, but it’s still bloody and it’s still terrible. It’s what he’s good at. It gives him something to wake up for.
He ends up leaving the army as abruptly as he joined. When Cullen wakes up in the hospital, he’s surprised that he’s there at all, and by the look of the nurse staring down at him, she hadn’t been feeling too hopeful either.
“Someone’s watching out for you,” she tells him as she changes the bandages that cover his torso.
Cullen can’t suppress his grimace and has to look away. “Something like that.”
It’s another month before they let him stand up by himself. When he catches sight of his reflection in the bathroom mirror hysteria comes bursting out of his throat, starting as shaky laughter and ending up in hyperventilation that tears his stitches. He clutches onto the sink with shaking hands and makes himself stare at the still healing cut across his upper lip. There are dark shadows under his eyes, and his hair is greasy and limp, but he hasn’t looked this much like himself in eight years. The sound of the mirror shattering brings a nurse rushing back in.
They don’t let him up again for another week, and when they do the bathroom mirror is gone. He avoids his reflection after that. When Mia comes to pick him up, he knows that it’s scarred exactly like it has before by the way the blood rushes from her face. Neither of them mention it.
Cullen goes to physical therapy twice a week as prescribed, takes the pain medication like he’s told. But when it’s time to start coming off the pills, he can’t bring himself to take the final step and stop taking them at all.
“It still hurts,” he finds himself telling the doctor. “I can’t sleep, otherwise.”
Neither of these statements are false, Cullen tells himself as he shakes the pills into his palms. He’s just letting the doctor assume that he’s talking about the tangle of freshly healed wounds that are layered across his torso instead of how useless he feels. The drugs keep him comfortably numb, keeps the nightmares and the headaches away. He spends a lot of time staring at the ceiling before he falls asleep, alternatively hoping that he’ll actually wake up where he’s supposed to be and wondering if the whole thing was just a childhood illusion after all.
Maybe it was just a shared dream after all, he finds himself thinking.
It was only a matter of time before Mia finds out, and it’s the first time he sees her lose her composure in years. She yells while he sits silently on the edge of his bed, not moving even as she flings objects past his head. He’s still too numb to react, too tired to protest. It ends with Mia deciding that he is in no state to live alone, he’ll be moving in with her. Cullen follows her as he always has, quietly.
It’s a long time before he’s able to quietly follow her lead again. Withdrawal is not a quiet or easy process, but Mia stubbornly refuses to let him fail. She stays with him through his night terrors, sits infuriatingly still as he throws harsh accusations in her face, makes him eat even when he doesn’t want to.
“You have weathered worse,” she tells him, holding him tight as he shakes. “You will get through this.”
Cullen doesn’t think there’s anything worse than this. He doesn’t think it will ever end, that maybe this is a punishment for two lives worth of blood on his hands.
It takes time, but he does get through it. He’s a little worse for wear, eyes more tired than before, but he’s standing on his own two feet again.
The last thing he does before he moves out is to have someone shave his hair off. When Mia opens the door, she spends a moment staring at him. Cullen is just about to break the silence out of awkwardness when she speaks.
“You look good,” Mia says.
Cullen knows she means you don’t look like yourself . That’s exactly what he’d been going for. He can’t do anything about the scar on his face, but he can change his hair. It’s one less reminder of what he’s lost when he looks in the mirror. It’s the best he can do.