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The pounding in Samson’s temples was so loud that it almost drowned out the sound of the booming door closing at the top of the stairs. He didn't care to see who was coming to look and poke at the Inquisitor's caged bear. His head hurt. His body hurt. Without lyrium, his body was burning out, like a candle sputtering in its own wax. It didn't matter what the Inquisition decided as his fate, the void would claim him soon enough, one way or another.
The footsteps that echoed down the stairs were soft, not the usual tromping of armored boots, so much so that Samson wasn't sure that they and the slam which preceded them weren't imagined entirely. When they reached the bottom however, and the echoes spread out to fill what remained of the prison, he was certain they were real. Slippers or soft leather soled boots; not something a soldier would wear. Perhaps a scout come to spy or deliver a message then. Maybe they'd settled on a date for his trial—if they hadn't skipped over the farcical showpiece of a trial entirely and already set the date for his execution. Either way, Samson wasn't interested in knowing. It would come eventually.
“Raleigh?”
The soft voice in the dim light was like a knife to the gut, memories from another time—another life, flooding his mind: Her soft voice, dim early dawn light, cotton sheets and sweat-dampened skin—he shook off the memory before it could take hold.
After she left Kirkwall with her brother, Samson didn't think he'd ever see her again. He resigned himself to it, and to the fact that she would quickly forget him. Pretty little thing like her was sure to pick up a beau in every town they passed through. Not that he cared; no, of course not.
“What do you want, Bethany?” he grumbled, not even opening his eyes.
The footsteps stopped short. She'd been approaching the cell by the sound of it, but his abrasive question had made her reconsider.
“I never wanted anything from you. You know that,” she said, voice steadier than he had expected. Bethany Hawke was not a spineless waif, but she was soft, and kind, and that was its own kind of weakness.
Samson shook his head, his laugh a silent rise and fall of his chest. “Sure I do.” She'd always said that, back in Kirkwall. “Why are you here?”
Two footsteps closer. “I heard you'd been caught. I wanted to see for myself.”
Without getting up or even turning his head towards her, Samson spread his arms. “Well, here I am. Satisfied?”
She didn't respond, didn't move, and that silence intrigued him enough to finally look at her.
Maker, she was pretty. Always had been. Like a single bloom in the piss pot that was Kirkwall. She looked a little rougher around the edges than she had then, travel and probably combat shoring down the soft edges, sharpening her cheekbones and chin. On some women it would have blunted their beauty, on Bethany, it only seemed to heighten it.
“I didn't want to believe it was you,” she said, disappointment rather than pity coloring her voice.
Samson smirked. “Liked the idea of me out razing the land, tearing down the world better?”
She shook her head. “All of it. I wanted to believe it was someone else in that armor, making monsters and killing innocents.”
“There are no innocents.” He scoffed. “You should know that by now.” She believed he was better than the things he had done, and he supposed that made sense. Bethany had always believed he was better than he was, that he was worthy of some kind of redemption.
He had sure shown her.
As always, Samson's dour negativity seemed to flow off Bethany like water off a duck. Her optimism was antithetical to his sulking distrust and, for a time, it had almost done something to him. It had created a crack in his melancholic walls and offered the tantalizing promise of hope, once. Samson had almost begun to believe like she did, but Kirkwall had been too steeped in blood and chaos for it to last once she was gone.
“Are they treating you well?” She asked, glancing around the dilapidated prison. “Do you have enough to eat?”
He chuckled, sitting up. “You going to bring me leftovers again?” That was how they had met, really met, back in Kirkwall. Bethany showing up in whatever Lowtown doorway he had taken refuge in with food when she had “made too much” or warm clothes when they had been “outgrown”. At first, he hadn't trusted her altruism; no one offers so much for nothing, but Bethany Hawke had.
He had thought her naive then, and he still did. Everything has a cost.
Sometimes it isn't gold. Sometimes it's something worse, something you didn't think could be taken from you.
She set her lips in that old familiar, unamused tilt. “I'm being serious.”
“Two meals a day,” he droned. “Usually porridge, but it's made with lard instead of water so I'd consider that being treated well.”
Bethany didn't seem convinced, crossing her arms over her chest. “You're skin and bones.”
Samson laughed. “I was barely neither when they hauled me in.” He waved a dismissive hand at her. He didn't like when she fussed over him. “Your precious Inquisitor is doing their best to keep me alive until they kill me.”
Bethany visibly blanched, her pallor obvious even in the dull light, and Samson bit his tongue. Truth was truth. He shouldn't feel anything not sugar-coating it for her. Her discomfort changed nothing, and lying to her wouldn't do either of them any good.
“It is deserved,” he said when her silence started to hint at things he'd rather not hear.
Her hands tightened on her upper arms as if the room had grown suddenly cold. “If you are remorseful—”
He cut her off. “I'm not.”
Bethany blinked in confusion. “But you said—”
“I don't have to be recalcitrant to recognize the necessity of my death.” He looked away from her pained expression. “I don't have to feel guilty to know what I did was monstrous."
She took one step forward, her soft-soled boots scraping the stone. “You don't regret any of it?”
He slowly looked up at her. “I have regrets.”
Bethany met his gaze and it felt like whole conversations passed silently between them—things Samson couldn't bring himself to say, but Bethany understood regardless.
“I'll be there,” she said softly. “At your trial.”
He gave a harsh, bitter laugh. “They're going through with it then? I thought they might just leave me here to rot.”
His wretched smile dropped as he saw the hurt in her eyes and he cleared his throat.
“I'll speak for you, if there is an opportunity.”
Samson shook his head. “Don't.”
“But—”
Standing up, he cut off her objection with a swipe of his hand. “No.” He stepped up to the bars, as close to her as he could ever be again. “You’re not gonna make yourself a pariah in some futile and unnecessary attempt to save me from my own actions.”
Bethany stepped closer, reaching between the bars and catching one of Samson's hands before he could pull away. “I don't care about that.”
“I do.” He said simply. “Bethany, I'm going to die either way. Real soon the hangman or the lyrium will take me, no changing that. And I'll be damned if you go and throw away your life for one already wasted and gone.”
She bit her lip. “I'm sorry.”
Samson's brow creased. “There is nothing you could have done to change this. Not now or ever.”
“I could have stayed in Kirkwall, I could have—”
“You could have made yourself a martyr and I still would have done what I did.” He shook his head. “No. You did right. I did wrong. It was how it always would have been.”
Bethany wanted to argue, he could see it in the tightness around her eyes and the purse of her lips, but she wasn't stupid. She knew a losing battle when she saw it. She could recognize a lost cause when she held its hand. “I'm still sorry. That it came to this.”
She was sorry for him, and he hated himself for that more than anything else. She would have done better to forget him altogether. It would have been better if he'd turned her away back in Kirkwall; never accepted her charity or her kindness or anything else she offered.
She was his regret. His only one.
“Get out of here,” he said, letting go of her hand. “Get back out in the sunshine where you belong.”
She nodded and stepped back, eyes wet and lips pressed thin. “Goodbye, Raleigh.”
“Live well, Bethany Hawke.”
Her shoulders rose and fell as she took a deep breath, then she nodded a final time—a final goodbye—then Samson watched her disappear up the stair and out of his life.