there’s unexplored nuances to will learning to drive.
first of all, obviously he prefers to be a passenger princess. he is not driving people around all the time, and they don’t even want him to. not wanting to be treated like a baby means he gets his license and has basic autonomy, but will still abhors unnecessary hassle and driving is the most hassle-y hassle there ever was. not to mention the constant split second decision making and aggressive drivers. nightmare!
will would give the right of way to absolutely everybody on the road. he would let everyone else go first at a 4-way stop even if he got there first and they’d all be like what the hell is that guy doing. parking lots fear him. his first accident is in a parking lot and not even his fault but he just assumes it is and takes the blame. he would HATE merging and double check so many times before doing it that sometimes he’d miss his window. he would sweat like crazy getting onto the city interstate and always take the back way.
BUT, every once in a blue moon, when he’s on an open road with no one else around, he would floor it like no tomorrow
hc: cassandra and the advisors. Ultimately, I believe the Inquisition is more than Cullen’s road to redemption and peace of mind. It’s become, in many ways, a family of sorts... especially his fellow advisors.
When in Haven, he reveals that he had too few friends in Kirkwall, and that’s understandable --- the scars of Kinloch were still there, if not outright still-fresh wounds, and he’d changed, becoming more dour, agitated, and bitter. While before he was “eager to uphold the tenets of his new post” and “more inclined to converse with the mages than other templars,” he was now the exact opposite. He hated them. He was not there to make friends by any means, but to execute his duty, no more and no less.
He turned inward. He withdrew from his family, evidenced when he told Cassandra, “I wasn’t that person anymore... I wasn’t sure I wanted her writing to the man I was then” concerning his older sister's letters to him. Even after Kirkwall, he remained notoriously bad at keeping in touch with those who loved him most. He wouldn’t be who they remembered. They would see someone altered just as he saw himself altered --- and for the worse.
But the Inquisition? Things were different there. With exception to the Inquisitor later, there is no longer a higher authority that can corrupt him; he is the highest ranking officer over his own men, and so he has no fear that he can be twisted or manipulated by someone over him, as was the case of Meredith. He also has the comfort of knowing that many in the Inquisition did not know him before Kirkwall. They all died. He doesn’t have that fear of, “oh, they’ll see how I changed or that I’m not who they remember” like with his family. He wouldn’t have that fear of being compared to the brighter man he was a lifetime ago.
And the thing is? They love him. They believe in him.
Cassandra saw his worth right from the start after Kirkwall and hand-picked him specifically to lead the men. She is who he confides in with his lyrium addiction and with his innermost feelings concerning his family and how he views himself. She doesn’t look at him and see who he used to be, but who he is now and who he can be later --- and all for the better. Her pragmatism, honesty, and unshaking belief are a lifeline. She supported him when he hardly supported himself.
Then in come Josephine and Leliana. Josephine never knew him, and neither, really, did Leliana. They could have just seen him as the commander of the Inquisition’s forces, but you know what they do instead? They look past his “uptight” demeanor and tease him. They poke at him like, I think, the way his sisters did, but all without the pretense of having known, personally, who he was before. In a way, they become like his sisters away from his actual sisters. With them, he’s not Cullen “the boy from Honnleath” Rutherford or just Cullen “commander of the Inquisition” Rutherford as he is and should be to his men. With them, he can simply be Cullen.
And you know what? They don’t reject him, this changed version of himself, despite how poorly he sees himself.
Ultimately, that sense of belonging, which created a normalcy, I think, is very important in helping him overcome his own self-guilt and sense of shame. Perhaps, with them, he better learned that, while he cannot forget who he was, that doesn’t make him lesser, and he can continue to be a better him every day. With them, he had the support to push himself to be a better leader and a better man. The fact that he finally starts writing to his family again after the Inquisition, I believe, is proof of all of that.
