Note: So I am totally guilty of editing chapters over and over, even after posting them. If you were thinking of getting new glasses after re-reading the story, my bad! It's not you, it's totally me.

Also, I'm SO SO SORRY for taking forever with this! But to make up for it, it's extra long.

Chapter 4: The Thanks

Rattling, harsh breaths became Ashe's measurement of time. Stitches lay on the soggy, grassy bank beside her, his chestnut-brown skin slowly paling, the undersides of his eyes becoming tinged with lavender. The crudely-made black arrow bobbed up and down almost absurdly with every breath the man heaved, scarlet globules bubbling up around where the arrow had sunk into his chest.

Lyrium potions, breathing elixer, cure for warts - useless, useless, useless. Ashe set aside the elfroot extract and dried crystal grace for their ability to fight infections and kept digging through her pack, half listening to the Chargers argue until Krem started shouting.

"No one is gonna tell her anything besides 'hello, here's your husband back and congrats on the baby'," the Charger roared. She looked up and flinched when he stared right at her, pinned under the force of his tightly leashed control. "You're a healer. Can you heal him?" he asked.

Worry furrowed his brows and the glint of ease and humor she had started to get accustomed to was gone. It was a hair easier to turn back to hunting through her pack than to hold his painfully hopeful eyes. "I'm looking for-"

"You know Glen. He hates the taint," Skinner interrupted, advancing on the downed Fereldan man with a blade half drawn. Her face was set, determined. "He'd rather die than turn." She only halted a few paces away from Ashe and Stitches when the broad, sandy-haired bulwark of a man planted himself firmly in her path, hands on his own weapons. She couldn't see their faces, but she heard Skinner bite out, "move, Grim. You know it's true. It'd be a mercy."

"It might not be the taint," Dalish objected fiercely, joining their tense standoff. "We don't know if the arrow-"

"You tellin' me that ain't hurlock fletching?" Rocky spat, stabbing a stubby finger at the black arrow pointing skyward from the unconscious healer's chest. "We were always sprayed with a fuckload of those til we looked like porcupines down in the Deep Roads. Lemme tell you - that's a fucking darkspawn arrow and they're not fuckin' known for being hygienic."

"Even if it were, we don't know if it's tainted him!" Dalish insisted, her voice shrilly climbing an octave as she faced off against the dwarf. "We have to know for sure before we kill-"

"No one is killing Glen," Krem ordered just as Ashe victoriously shouted, "he doesn't have the taint!"

Everyone turned to stare at her. Ashe held a small vial and peered intently at the blood spilling from the embedded arrow head. "The arrow's pierced the pleural cavity, so he's at risk of infection and hemothorax, but he doesn't have the taint."

"How do you know?" Krem asked, briskly sidestepping Grim and kneeling beside her.

She held up the vial and its muddy blue contents, relief making her hands tremble. "This stuff reacts to the taint by making the blood sample froth white. See this? It hasn't frothed at all and he's not showing the classic signs - y'know, the chalky grey skin, blackening veins, the rotting smell, the grey films in the eyes. As far as I can tell, he's not tainted."

Ashe had wondered if Skinner and Rocky had hoped that the healer was tainted - their eagerness to diagnose and condemn him was alarming. But the palpable relief that broke over their faces told her differently, and made what she had to say next a bit harder. "That was the good news. The bad news is that he's probably been poisoned - see the yellowish hue in his skin?"

The elven rogue approached, making a face. "Smells like deathroot poison," she said, grabbing her pack from the pile by the boulder and handing a small vial from her pack to Dalish.

"Actually, I think the first thing we need to do is get that arrow out," Ashe muttered, ignoring Skinner's snub. The poisoned arrow posed a number of emergencies and complications and she didn't have her magic to assess or heal him. "He'll get atelactasis due to hemothorax if it's not sealed soon. His second rib may be fractured and I hope the subclavian artery hasn't been nicked. We'll have to wait for him to wake to drink the antidote. Might get an infection down the road. What supplies do I even have?" she muttered to herself. She bitterly wished more than ever that she could use her magic and that she hadn't been caught by the Venatori in the first place-

Krem clasped her shoulder and Ashe peeled her eyes away from the bloody bubbles, her heart thundering in her ears and she was sweating harder than when the bandits had attacked. "Tell me what you need," he said simply, grounding her back into reality. She didn't think the hint of faith in his tone was real, but that didn't matter - it hammered iron into her spine and hardened her resolve.

She took a deep breath and organized her priorities. "Shelter, warmth, clean water," she rattled off, "and I'd also like Dalish's help."

Krem issued orders and the Chargers were in motion.

Ashe glimpsed bare feet in her periphery before Dalish kneeled beside her, steadying herself with her staff and glaring at her defiantly. "Look, poacher," she began, glancing between her and Stitches' face, "I- I don't know much. I learned how to heal skin, but that's the farthest I got with healing magic."

Ashe was already lining up her vials within reach next to Stitches, trying not to knock them over with the shackle chain. "Do you know how muscles are structured? I mean, how the muscle fibers weave together at the tiniest level, or how serous membranes knit together to slide-"

"You aren't listening," the Dalish elf bit out tightly, her skin mottling red from her ivory neck up to flush her face with frustration, "I don't know about membranes or, or fibers. I wasn't the First of the clan so I didn't learn about all this and I had to leave before they got more scared than they already were. I barely had enough time to learn about skin before I got kicked out, alright?"

She flung the words at Ashe as if saying them faster would mask the undercurrent of hot shame. The taller elf glared at her, shoulders tensed up. Ashe recognized the scared apprentice behind the vallaslin.

"How skilled are you with healing skin?" Ashe asked carefully.

"Good enough," Dalish said frostily, "no one's complained. I think."

She looked up at Dalish from across Stitches' chest and smiled. The blonde elf blinked, her glare softening into a question. "First or not, I'm glad you're here. I wouldn't be able to prevent infections half as well if you weren't around," Ashe said truthfully. "Here's the plan: we'll extract the arrow, I'll infuse some anti-infection elixers into the wound, then you'll heal his skin. He has to drink the antidote for it to work properly. We can't do more than that until we get a professional healer."

Dalish seemed to debate internally, then warily handed over Skinner's antidote. Ashe accepted it with as confident an air as she could muster, trying not to read too much into the action. They worked together to stabilize Stitches' torso and Ashe was moving to squat over the dark Fereldan man when a hand pushed her back down.

"Woah!" She pitched to the dirt, almost falling on the healer before Grim steadied her. He raised a gauntleted hand and ducked his chiseled features a bit in what she recognized as an apology, then pointed from her to her vials then got into position over the healer and grasped the arrow shaft.

"I can take the arrow out," Ashe said it like a question, but was mentally recognizing that Grim's way was more efficient if she'd understood him correctly.

"Grim can't talk much," Dalish interjected helpfully, drawing a line across her throat and jerking her chin at him. "And he's stubborn. Does this work with the plan, though?"

Ashe squinted, then stared. From her angle, she could see under the neck guard of his armor and right at the thick, pale scar that roped around the merc's neck like a collar. It bit deeply into the tanned, muscled cords of his neck, so much so that she was surprised that he'd survived the attempted murder - because there was no way that that was not caused by a garrotting wire.

He met her gaze with a stern look and she was reminded that she was gawping at him like a green healer who'd never seen anything besides a sprain in her life. "Right. Let's get to it. On three."

Ashe focused on stabilizing Stitches' torso with Dalish while Grim yanked out the viciously barbed arrow. She quickly poured the elfroot extract into the open wound then Dalish held her staff with one hand and hovered a trembling hand over the wound and called forth a gentle, sky-tinted light to seep into the crimson foam notched underneath Stitches' collarbone. Grim stood guard, peering into the surrounding farmland as the sun set. Ashe and Dalish rooted through Stitches' pack to find one of his poultices that infused the body and helped speed up healing of tissue and bones.

She didn't even realize that the other Chargers had gone until Krem returned alone, limping along the brook, as the sun sank behind an orange veil of clouds.

Ashe Fayrel: female, elf, mage, x Tranquil - NONCOMPLIANT

Day 1: no sleep/food

Day 2: discipline

Water splotches marred the ink on the fine parchment until:

Day 7: receptive to technique.

Day 8: inspection with batch 2.

The rest of the page was washed out.

Ashe stared at her name scrawled in spiky black ink in the journal. The tiny fire in the stone pit cast just enough light for her to read in the dark barn if she lay the small, thin book open in her lap. The briefly written summary of that week four months ago wasn't what she was looking for; she'd pored over the small leather-bound journal repeatedly ever since she'd swiped it from the Chargers a month ago.

Initially, she hadn't realized what a treasure trove of information the journal held until she'd rifled through the schedules of trade exchanges in the front of the book. Those pages had helped her plan and scout out other Venatori camps. Her stomach had dropped into her feet when her name jumped out in the pages when she'd looked through the journal a little further; a numbing static had drowned out all other thoughts when she found notes on the prisoners who had been with her four months ago, and vague references to an experiment. The pale grey fish eye that laid the blame of their capture and "pet project" at her feet surfaced in her mind when she'd read those pages; a ghostly remnant of a dream.

Chilled by the night, she quickly flipped to the beginning, chancing glances over at the sleeping and still figures of Stitches, Dalish and Rocky huddled close by, hoping she didn't breathe too loudly or that the gnawing black pit in her stomach didn't reach out and shake them awake. She snuck a glance at Grim, who was safely snoring in the darkened corner by the doors, vibrating the walls with the force of the snores emanating from his tousled mane. Skinner still hadn't returned from her advance scouting journey to Crestwood.

She was just starting to through the journal again for details she'd missed when the barn door creaked open, lancing in a shaft of moonlight. Her heart ricocheted around her rib cage; she stuffed the journal back up under her chest plate and she scrabbled quietly for her staff as a dark figure slid in silently.

This was it. Grim's snores had finally lured every bandit and their bandity friends nefariously through the hills and they were all going to be slain while they slept. Before she could kick Dalish and Rocky awake, the figure turned and she recognized the slicked back cap of hair and the shape of his armor.

Grim was already climbing to his feet with a quiet grunt, proving himself to be a light sleeper somehow. The two briefly spoke and Ashe was still awkwardly frozen, wondering if it were too late to lay down and pretend to be asleep. She felt like a child again, about to be caught staying up past her bedtime. The door creaked quietly shut as Grim slid outside, closing it gently behind him.

Firelight glinted off of Krem's armor as he trudged over to their huddle around the fire, favoring his right leg. Dirt had mixed with the sweat from the battle and dried on his temples, bone-deep weariness dragged his face and shoulders down. He looked around and seemed startled to see her.

"You're awake," he commented, finding a spot between her and Dalish and drooping down. Sitting seemed much more of a production than it should be with armor. "You should be the one snoring. We need you and Dalish rested if we're gonna get Stitches to Crestwood tomorrow."

Ashe was more awake than ever. She let go of her staff, pretending like she hadn't been prepared to simultaneously skewer him and catch her heart jumping out of her mouth. "You want the two wimpy elves to carry deadweight all the way to Crestwood? You're merciless."

His cheek twitched into a lopsided grin before he reined it back under an unimpressed look. "I'm sure a strapping young woman like you won't even need Dalish's help," he said seriously with a twinkle in his eye. He looked across the fire to Stitches' slumbering form.

"He's in the same condition as the last time you checked in," Ashe answered pre-emptively, holding her hands out to the fire. She'd sat as close to it as she could without actually sitting on the burning wood to escape the chill of the night and thoughts better left silent. "He woke up once to take the antidote. Dalish and I've been keeping an eye on him since."

Krem slouched with a nod and looked like he would sink into his armor and sleep like a turtle. He seemed not to notice its weight or bulk, and even managed to look comfortable in it. The silence stretched and she was about to start trying to get comfortable under her cloak when he suddenly asked, "how are you holding up? You're the one we pulled from a Venatori prison this morning."

Inwardly she reminded herself that he liked being nosy and was only checking up with her to hold up his end of the deal. But she marveled at it - who'd have thought that he'd be concerned about her a month after she'd poached from them? "Shoulder's fine. The poultice seems to be working," she answered, rubbing her arm. The cuffs felt a little tighter than they had this morning; she'd been trying to twist them off throughout the day and had ended up with some serious chafing. "My hands and wrists are freezing - but there's not much I can do about it besides stick the chain into the fire and hope I don't over-bake."

Krem sat up straighter and leaned towards her. "Can I see?"

She didn't know why everything suddenly became infinitely more detailed. She noticed how the chill of the air was suddenly crisp and pleasant, how the fire turned the tone of his skin golden and his eyes amber, how his sure movements cast graceful indigo shadows on the barn walls. His hands were gentle as he lifted her wrists to examine the cold cuffs which leeched the warmth from her bones - but she only noticed how he seemed to carry a current in the pads of his fingers, since every ghosting touch streaked electricity into her skin.

Goosebumps rippled up her forearms when he wrapped his large hands around the cuffs, his skin almost burning in its heat. "This may be a bit safer than burning your hands off," Krem said, not quite meeting her eyes. "You're more handy with uh... hands."

The pun only caught up to her mid-ramble. "Y'know, cauterizing amputation sites is still practiced in some areas of Thedas? I mean, sure, it stops the blood and pain at the stump, but it only sets you up for swelling in the interstitial sites and infection later on and possible compartment syndrome and trust me, draining the abscess will make you hurl everything you ate in the past year when you smell it."

She wished she hadn't talked as soon as her mouth stopped moving. He was looking at her in a faintly bewildered way, like when she'd started talking about Revas'sahlin. "Well, I'm impressed," he said, "I have no idea what you just said, but I'm still impressed."

Ashe groaned, exasperated with herself. "It's not," she said, "they're all just fancy terms and most healers don't even use them. Skills are more important than terminology."

Krem was still grinning - she sort of wished he'd let go so she could crawl into Grim's corner and sleep if only to shut her mouth up. "How was working with Dalish?"

The blonde elf's hair shimmered in the fire's glow and cast the blood stains on her hands black. She'd rolled to curve her body loosely around Rocky's in her sleep and all the dwarf had done was snore, crack an eye open and glared grouchily at Ashe before settling back into sleep as the little spoon. Ashe smiled at that. "She's good with skin and good with direction when given tasks. Minimal sniping and everybody still has their head."

"I'm glad I didn't have to bury two more bodies with the bandits today," he said with a smile. "Although with our luck, a necromancer will wander by and pick a fight with us."

Her wrists were pleasantly warm now, but also kind of clammy. She was trying to think of a graceful way to take her hands back when he coughed and brusquely asked, "how do you feel, uh, magically? Do people ask that?"

She was still marveling at how all the nerve endings in her wrist seemed to be fizzing with energy. She pursed her lips in concentration. "Stop me if you're heard this before, but... the Fade is a realm, sure, but it's more than a separated world. If you have magic, not only can you feel the thickness of the Veil but also how it moves. It has a rhythm, a pulse. It bends and warps in reaction to the intangible: thoughts, emotions, perceptions, dreams. It's almost a living thing."

"You sound like Solas."

"Who?"

"A rotten egg. Continue, please."

"Well, I can't feel the Veil or the Fade now. The cheesy way I can describe it is like suddenly becoming deaf. But it's more like... instead of breathing air, I'm now breathing fog. Every breath should feel full of life, but it feels like breathing air that's already been breathed a hundred times before. I can't even dream anymore. I only know that I'm not tranquil because I still get grossed out when Rocky flicks his boogers."

She drank in his soft laugh and tried to wipe the goofy smile off her face. A small, companionable silence cocooned them, and she relaxed. She was starting to nod off when he shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. "I want to thank you. For making sure that Glen didn't have the taint and for helping him all night."

It was a little easier to face his sincerity even as she felt the edges of the journal dig into her ribcage, her insistent secret. "Yes, well, it'd put a damper on our deal if I let one of you die," she said flippantly, withdrawing her wrists nonchalantly from his hands and into her cloak. "Skinner might have killed me outright, then everyone would lose something. You guys and your rep, me and my life. Equal, all things considered."

There was a curious look in his eye as if he were trying to puzzle out her change in tone and the distance she'd created between them. Still didn't stop him. "Dodge it all you like, you're the one who diagnosed and directed Glen's care," Krem said persistently. "We'd be down a Charger if you weren't here."

She'd seen enough of how they acted with closeness and intimacy with each other under the rough exterior to know that when he said Charger he meant family. While her wrists were warm for once, she felt loneliness well up inside her again, dividing her from this mercenary group she'd wormed into.

"You're welcome," Ashe said abruptly. Krem stilled in the act of stretching out between her and Dalish. She felt like she was churlish to ignore his thanks and still felt awkward enough to blurt something else out but she successfully kept her mouth closed and wrapped herself in her cloak. She only started to relax again when he finished settling, the static of the fire lulling her to sleep.

"I said I'm fine!" Stitches insisted, "Void take it, I'm not some noble scut - I can walk to the tavern." The Fereldan man tried to sit up in the wagon bed but wilted back down, groaning, after seeing the landscape bump along past him.

"You ain't walking anywhere, old man," the hooded dwarf scoffed cheerily. He managed to keep up with the mule-drawn wagon, walking alongside it and chatting over the side. "You're gettin' slow in your twilight years. Ain't our fault you took a hurlock arrow. Skinner and me almost had to take you out."

"I'm only thirty-four, nug-turd. You're thirty!"

"Well, you're lucky you got out of a collapsing lung, poisoning, and the taint with just a fractured rib," Dalish called back tartly. She'd grumbled at the beginning about prejudice but lead the mule without complaint. "You'd be dead if Ashe weren't here."

"Where did you even get that stuff?" Rocky asked Ashe curiously. She was sitting inside the wagon bed, leaning against the side closest to where the dwarf was walking. "That blue stuff that tells if you're tainted or not. Fuckin' worth its weight in raw lyrium."

She could feel her blood pressure spike just from remembering. "I make it myself," she said tersely, "these... soulless assassins part of the Deadliners back around Redcliffe specialized in revenge. They'd scout the target's house, shoot a family member, sometimes the children, in a glancing blow with a tainted arrow and let them go back home. Then they'd barricade the doors and windows from the outside. 'Revenge through the generations' was their slogan."

There was a short silence where all they heard was the creaking of the wagon and the birds chirping in the morning sun. "Tell me you hunted them down and chucked them into the Deep Roads," Dalish said icily.

Ashe flashed a toothy grin. "I worked with the guards to catch them, strip 'em, and tossed them into one of the targeted houses. We barricaded it overnight and cleared it out the next day. I made the powder to see if the taint had spread in the village and it's was a lifesaver."

Rocky gave her a flinty smile and punched her in the shoulder. She winced and bore it, recognizing it as a friendly though painful gesture. "Work done right, poacher. Maybe you're better off with those hands attached after all."

The wagon lurched over a pit in the dirt road, making the contents of the wagon bounce and Ashe's behind smart when she landed. "I'll vomit on you and die if you don't slow down, Dalish!" Stitches threatened with a croak, "we aren't in a halla race you wild heathen!"

Rocky just shook his head, as Dalish snapped back at the Fereldan, a grin tucked under his thick mustache. "Healers," he said to Ashe, rolling his pale aquamarine eyes at the clear blue sky, "they're the worst patients." He trotted up to the front of the wagon where Dalish was leading the mule on foot, leaving Ashe and Stitches in relative peace.

Ashe suppressed a smile and checked her patient. He was miserably curled on to his side with his arm shielding his face, covered with the Chargers' cloaks and pillowed with their packs in the wagon bed. His color had returned to a healthy, burnished glow in the morning sun. The clammy skin was just a side effect of his motion sickness. All in all, he had recovered remarkably - the wound was a deep purple splotch under his right collar bone and his breathing was now normal. She'd been a little afraid that the taint would surface in him despite all of her precautions, but she breathed easier knowing that it usually manifested within twelve hours. She'd forced him to take the wagon that Rocky had found to avoid aggravating the hemothorax and rib fracture.

One thing niggled at her. "You're surprisingly calm for someone who has friends willing to murder them," Ashe pointed out low enough that Rocky and Dalish couldn't overhear.

Stitches lifted his arm and cracked open a watery eye at her with a grunt. "Good thing you were around so they couldn't. But it's what I asked 'em to do if I got hit by darkspawn."

She nodded, staring out at the flatter plains of Crestwood. They had passed the border an hour ago and Krem had said that they would reach the new Crestwood village in a day or two if they kept the pace up. As she watched the Hinterlands mountains get smaller behind Grim, who was taking up his usual post as rear guard, she wished she had friends who'd do the same... but perhaps not quite as quickly. "Friends aren't friends unless they're willing to kill you fresh," she agreed, overly-helpful.

Ashe studied Stitches as he lay with his arm across his eyes. His tightly curled dark hair was starting to recede from his lightly lined forehead. Old acne scars created shallow rivulets in his chestnut-brown cheeks, long since healed. His large ears balanced out the broad, pointed tip of his nose. He'd shown that he was moderate during their hike through the Hinterlands, offering steadiness against Dalish's arched words and Rocky's grousing. There was still something of the inner calm he seemed to carry with him on his face even in pain.

She was starting to consider how to take back the bad joke when he continued the conversation. "Twelve years ago, I had a wife and a small farm back in Lothering," he said, talking to the cloudless sky. "No one knew about the Blight until we were already waking up in bed with it. My wife was pregnant with our first and we couldn't run." He paused, his voice dipping. "You know how it usually goes. I couldn't protect my home or my family against the horde. Somehow, I woke up as myself. She didn't."

"Shit. That's..." All the unspeakable horrors of having a beloved family member return as a bloodthirsty darkspawn hung heavily in the air between them, wraithlike. The fact that his wife was pregnant... She looked at Stitches' face and could almost see it ten years younger, with less lines and the furrow between his brow completely erased.

He lifted his arm and made a face at her, almost as if he could see her adding another layer to him. "It's why I thank the Maker for having murderous friends, poacher. I could never do that to Laura."

She could feel her eyes about to fall out of her skull. "Not... your wife...?"

Stitches sat up, a small but true smile unearthed from the bleakness in his face. "My second wife. She's in Crestwood village and about to have our first child. It's why I want to thank you, Serah Fayrel. I wouldn't be able to return to her without you."

She found herself gripping forearms with him in a soldier's greeting, surprised and a little bemused for being thanked for saving him from his friends. The Chargers were strange. "Serah me all you want, it's just Ashe. But, I will respond to Your Perfection, or even The Number One since the Champion and the Hero are both taken and there aren't any other synonyms at all."

He was looking at her like how Krem had last night, trying to puzzle out the distance. But he smiled and squeezed her arm before letting go. "Deflect all you want, 'it's just Ashe'. A healer learns to accept thanks when given, earned by your own hands or the hands of your team."

Ashe groaned at the dad joke then drew her hood and rubbed her hands like a villain. "Good thing I'm a lowly poacher then. I -"

"Hey Stitches, got someone for ya," Krem said, leading a gangly human toting a staff up to the side of the wagon as it lurched to a stop. "He's your applicant."

"Greetings, Serah Stitches." The tall, moon-faced man in his late thirties thrust his pale hand over the side to handshake. "My name is Dimitri Albion and we wrote about that healer position? I've just been eager to meet with you but I'm sure you'd like to settle into the Dragon's Breath first."

Stitches sat up a little straighter with a wince, and Ashe thought poorly of this (obvious) Circle mage who couldn't wait an hour for the Chargers to check into the tavern she could see just beyond a rolling hill. He wore a number of rings on both hands, a gaudy trend some Circle mages followed to flaunt their wealth and artifacts since some of them were enchanted. One of them was shaped similarly to the Inquisition eye.

"That would be appreciated, Serah Albion," Stitches returned graciously. "We will have the interview in a private room off the common room in an hour."

Dimitri bustled off without a word to Ashe and few greetings to the other Chargers, only acknowledging Krem and Grim. She frowned, knowing his type.

"Who are you hiring for?" she asked Stitches as the wagon started to move again, slower this time. "Is the Iron Bull looking to expand back into a company?"

He shook his head, eagerly watching the tavern grow nearer. Dimitri had disappeared over the hill. "I'm retiring, what with the baby and all. I want to be around for them and Laura will trounce me if I stay away any longer. The Chargers-"

A crack reverberated alarmingly close by, and the mule screamed as green light fractured the sky just beyond the hill where the trail led. The sound of billowing wind gusted from the pulsing cracks as it burned brighter and brighter, washing them with sickly pale light.

"It's the Fade," Ashe and Dalish shouted in unison.

"For fuck's sake!"

Note: does anyone know of a forum/site/community where fanfiction writers encourage each other and give constructive feedback? It'd be great to bounce ideas off others! Preferably DA-centric.

Please leave a review! They're my crack!