A prompt! 5 - “This isn’t your fault, okay? I promise.” for Carvermerrill?
I’m so sorry that you sent me this prompt for @dadrunkwriting all the way back in May 2019 when I first signed up, and I’m only just answering your fic prompt in… January 2021. 🙈 But thank you, belatedly, for sending this, and here’s the filled prompt! ❤️
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Monsters (500 words)
Merrill had been weeping into his shoulder for at least an hour now, and Carver had been uselessly patting her back for most of that time, reassuring her as best as he could.
“This isn’t your fault, okay?” he said, for the ninth time. “I promise.”
“But why did he run?” Merrill sobbed. “If I wasn’t there… Pol wouldn’t have run into the varterral. Pol would still be alive.” She dissolved into fresh tears, and Carver tried to make soothing noises as he rubbed slow circles into her back. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe I am a monster.”
“No.” Carver was firm. “You’re not a monster, Merrill. Anything but that.”
But it was as if she hadn’t heard him.
Varric had warned him about this. He and Isabela had apparently tried to comfort Merrill, but she remained utterly distraught over Pol’s death, blaming herself for it all. You need to go see Daisy – she could use a friend right now, Varric’s note to him had said, and Carver had come as quick as he could. But now that he was here, he had doubts that his presence was doing any good.
“What must they have been saying about me?” Merrill wondered aloud, angry through her tears. “What must the Keeper have been saying about me, to make Pol think it was safer to run into a varterral than be anywhere near me?”
“I don’t know,” Carver said. “I just know it’s not true. You’re not a monster. You’re—” Lovely. Wonderful. Beautiful. Clever. Kind. “—Well, they’re wrong.”
Merrill sniffled and wiped her eyes, and seemed to finally register what he’d said. “You’re just being nice to me, Carver. Like Varric and Isabela.”
“Varric and Isabela wouldn’t be nice to you if they thought you were a monster, Merrill, and neither would I.”
“Varric told you to come and see me, didn’t he.”
It wasn’t a question. But Carver answered it anyway.
“Yeah, he did. But I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t want to.”
“No,” Merrill eventually agreed. “You’ve always been honest like that.”
“And I definitely wouldn’t have come if I thought you were a monster.”
She smiled at that, then, and Carver hoped he was finally getting somewhere. He didn’t know what had happened with Pol and the varterral on Sundermount, but what he did know was that it was useless for Merrill to blame herself for the tragedy that had occurred.
“No,” she said, quietly. “I know you wouldn’t.”
It was a start, at least. Carver didn’t know if his presence was helping at all – he was no Varric, he never knew what to say in these situations; he’d never been good at talking about his own emotions, let alone comforting Merrill with hers.
Maybe she would never see herself the way he saw her. And maybe he would never be brave enough to tell her. But if she stopped thinking of herself as a monster, even for a while, then for now it would be enough.
















