Andienavillus

Fenris slashes at an enemy, his chest heaving with the adrenaline pumping in his veins, feeling the familiar burn in his body, the delight of an easy fight. He’s been too scared, lately, to even think during his latest fights, chased from town to town, picked at with magic he cannot understand or undo. He forgot it is supposed to feel like this, if worth anything.

She glues her back to his, her foe dropping at her feet, providing a temporary distraction and nuisance to the next wave of enemies. He didn’t realise so much damage can be done with the worst daggers set he’s ever seen.

He can feel their sweat mingling, gluing their shirts to their back, the warmth and width of her back firm, certain, so blessedly by his side. Even in his worst practices, he has never been allowed the blessed relief of a companion, this short respite of relying on someone else but himself. A guard slave worth the type of money Danarius funneled into him does not need anyone or anything else but himself. 

The thought almost has him turn his weapon against her, before he stills his arm, reminds his panicked, poisoned brain that he asked her to be here, that he expressly asked for her help.

“Here they come,” she whispers just for his ears to hear, her body tense and poised as a great feline before its prey.

He turns to look at her for a brief second, muscle memory guiding his own legs and arms in a ready stance despite the momentary distraction. 

“You’re used to fighting alongside warriors,” he says, a mere observation that he doesn’t even think about, meant more as a compliment than anything else. 

Her expression shutters, her grin freezing on her face, the blood drying across her skin - though none of it is hers, theirs. 

“Yes,” she says simply, jumping into the battle sooner than she needs to.

After a quick, foreign swear word, he follows, and any of his blood that spills that night is because he stepped in front of her, any of her caution and attentiveness thrown to the wind after his comment. 

***

It’s utterly morbid, and utterly brilliant - Hawke is an immediate fan of it, even when Merrill yelps at the shadow of a mouse at the entry hallway. Squatting, Aveline immediately aptly describes it, but reparations sings in Hakwe’s wronged, poor refugee soul. She sees nothing wrong with it, and when more than half of their group disperses at the doorway, Hawke’s head pops in each nearby chamber until she finds the kitchen, and in it the broom. She shoos her gawking friends with a gesture that has them sighing in relief, and the door closes definitely behind them, leaving just the two of them in a mansion designed to hold ten as many.

She starts swiping the floors, kitchen first - he’s a bit surprised at the choice. It’ll require a bit more heavy lifting than that, Fenris thinks, as he puts together an inventory of the jarred food, countless bottles of the finest wine he’s seen, even as a slave, and does his best to ignore the ease and companionable silence he’s sharing with this strange rogue of a woman. 

It’s not that irritating even when she starts slowly whistling, a melody he cannot recognise, imagines it is from back during her Ferelden days. He’s placed her accent, and nothing more. In the past years, Kirkwall has taken its fair number of refugees, so she is not that strange for it. Fenris knows better than most what one must learn and accept for mere survival, so he decides, at least for now, the tiredness in his bones say, to let Hawke be, curious as she is. 

He’s too optimistic, he’s offering her the benefit of a doubt that literally kept him alive so far - he knows nothing about her, and with that level of battle skill, he’d better not be lulled by the first scene of domesticity he witnesses. But then again, she didn’t bat an eyelash at his situation, didn’t hesitate for once to assist him. What kind of person even does something like that, with no form of expectancy?

The kind that turns, no sign of exhaustion even after a night of battle, and asks him which room he’ll take for himself. He shrugs, and when he starts a proper perusal of the estate, she follows several steps behind, broom in one hand and rag in the other, a homely parody of her usual battle getup. 

He keeps his reactions to himself: this a fancier version than the magister’s usual chambers, which means particularly used for trades, and he feels a shiver down his spine at understanding Kirkwall’s freedom is never quite as absolute, not when indentured servitude is the only chance at life for some of the refugees, the elves in the alienage, the orphaned children. Chains in the Tevinter empire is just a step further, an exchange of coins away. He catalogues the origin of the rugs, the make of the paintings, feels the softness of the bedding and furs under his fingers. 

Hawke says nothing, and he yearns to hear her thoughts. He almost asks her then, angry at her silence, if she finds it blasphemy that someone like him, pointy ears and ownership markings, can walk these halls with this much pride.

In the largest rooms, where if he still belonged to Danarius, he would have been brought washed and naked to do his master’s bidding in the middle of the night, Fenris stops, allowing his anger washing over him anew, forcing his body not to tremble like a leaf at the memories, not to feel the phantom pain of a whip touch against his back, in the rare instances when he refused.

He took it, for the most part, and it is that which shames him the most, as he tries to switch the optics, force his muscles to relax, make his brain catch-up with the understanding that his most hated enemy has never been in here, no such cruel intent in the history of this place.

It could be his, it could be made anew.

“This?” Hawke asks, voice soft at his back, and Fenris sighs, all tension leaving his body on the exhale too. 

“This,” he agrees, and turns to grab at the broom she’s holding, careful not to touch her in the process.

She simply turns, attacking the first surface she can see with her damp rag, same ease as before settling between them. It shouldn’t be this easy, Fenris keeps thinking, though maybe after so long of things being horrendously difficult, he deserves this ridiculous peace too. Maybe if he tells himself that long enough, he will eventually believe it. 

She helps him air out the blankets from the drawers, and in the dead of night, so late that it’s close to the rooster’s first call, she bids him farewell, leaving behind a somewhat acceptable bedroom and a clean kitchen. They didn’t get to work on much of anything else in the mansion, but it’s enough to serve him well for at least a week, and he’s more surprised at the extreme common sense that possessed her to think of such details, than the fact that she’s refusing his payment.

She shakes her head, her hands fisted in the pockets of her trousers, and Fenris growls in tired frustration as he is forced to open the small pocket at her jacket and drop all of his coins there. He’s too close, he can feel the rapid pulsing of her heart beneath his palm for a second, even through the albeit thin material of her clothing, and he almost throws up over her dirty boots with the gross closeness of their bodies, manages to hurry himself several steps away before making an entire scene of it, though he’s frowning all throughout at the absolute ridiculousness of her stubbornness.

“Good night, Hawke,” he says, pointedly.

She whistles as she waves at him, making her way back home. If he was a different type of person, a different type of man, maybe he would have offered to accompany her, roads a danger even at day for a woman as relatively pretty as her, down in the slums. If she was a different type of person, a different type of woman, maybe she wouldn’t have left unless he did offer, but even the whisper of such a discussion would have been an offense upon her skills. He waits five beats after hearing the main door closing, and then he follows her steps, locking and double twisting every single safety point in the house, making note of needed repairs, weak points - if he decides to stay, make this something more than a temporary stop.

He refuses to think about it, not this first free night. He falls onto the bedsheets, alongside places smelling of her, and he sleeps like he hasn’t done in years. 

When Fenris goes downstairs the following morning, just in a large tunic, to work at boiling water for his morning tea, the sunlight catches the glint of the gold on the shelf, the entire sum left like an offering. He swears under his breath, pockets it all, upset not at the gesture, though embarrassing enough, but at the fact that he didn’t even hear her make this detour.

***

They don’t really see each other much in the following weeks; he’s busy putting the place back into a pre-fight semblance, and she’s busy… being a grand name in Kirkwall’s underground, or whatever it is that Hawke does on the usual, that would put her in his path to begin with. 

He meets with Varric in the Hanged Man once, trying to buy intel on a slaver’s cell, its path around Kirkwall and recent purchases. The dwarf refuses any payment but alcohol, dirt cheap in this disreputable establishment, and takes him upstairs for the actual business transactions. From his uncomfortable chair, Fenris can make out the legs sprawled in Varric’s bed even from a distance, thrown over the furs, and he recognises them as Hawke’s because of the boots carefully laid on the floor, the only good, expensive thing that the woman owns. 

Varric makes no effort to hide his words, shows no hint that he recognises Fenris recognising her, so he betrays nothing either. He’s barely a silver poorer by the time he exits back on the streets, and so much richer in information, maybe most surprising of all this unexpected closeness with Tethras.

He visits the alienage, on a whim, during a long evening, trying to imagine that maybe this is what his life could have been, under different circumstances. He even wears long sleeves, a high collar, hiding as much of what he is as he can, trying to attract as little attention as possible. In the middle of an awed circle of elven children, Hawke wildly gesticulates, relating a dramatised mythological story that even he recognises, one hand busy holding onto a bag of pastries, that she sometimes allows to pass around in a quick, wide circle that all kids giggle and struggle to chase. He is most certain that she must have stolen the sweets, if she so squarely returned his payment, but even so he cannot stop himself from pausing under the shade of a tree, far away from the woman’s line of vision, but still close enough to catch the tilts in her voice, the joyous laughter that she incites.

The docks he tries to ignore for as long as possible, mostly because he cannot stand to look at Kirkwall’s statues, such perfect renditions of a slave’s suffering, sight you cannot escape next to the boats. He tries to go at night, when he’s less likely to make out the shapes against the mountain. His second time, he’s arrested on the spot at the sound of a familiar voice, playing a song he heard just once, but he recognises for its strangeness. He stops in front of a beautifully taken care of ship, and listens to Hawke practicing her singing, voice soon accompanied by unsure strings too. She’s nothing special, he’s heard dozens of better performers, but against the starry night, Fenris cannot get himself to move away.

It takes them three months to end up on the same job again, and Hawke smiles at him as if they’re old friends - though maybe in this industry, they’re as close as they can be to the term. When they get their pay at the end of the day, she grins at him.

“I could have negotiated you a better sum”, she says, and Fenris merely raises an eyebrow at her, just barely, but it’s enough encouragement for her. “If we worked together.”

“I’m not working for you,” he explains, because he’s tired of belonging to other people.

“Work with me,” she stresses instead, and Fenris looks outside the small office, where her group is waiting, fully trusting that she won’t pocket the bulk of the gold, so at ease after a job that was made easier in their numbers. 

Can people like her really exist?

“Maybe next time,” he says instead.

But it will take several more odd jobs for them to end up together on one again, and at least three move invites before Fenris actually considers her offer seriously.

***

It will take him eight more months to understand the gravity of what he’s said to her during their first battle, just as long as it takes him to meet the rest of her family, mage sister included. He’ll be told by a tipsy Merrill that it’s the longest she’s kept them away from any of her other companions, and something in his heart will chip at a scrutiny he found himself unworthy under. 

Hawke herself never speaks of her dead brother, Bethany’s other half. It’s partially the guilt she carries over his death that has her leaving her only other sibling safely at home, and partially the guilt she carries over her own survival that she can’t allow her sinner, useless, unworthy tongue to ever speak his name. 

It explains however, suddenly, the cruel ways in which her family acts towards her: from an uncle that clearly holds no affection for anyone else, to her own mother, who cannot look her eldest in the eyes. It explains however, suddenly, why Hawke is currently flying away from this nest, so often, without a glance back at most times. It explains all the odd places he finds her, but somewhat so rarely here, at home.

Fenris does not try to make a good impression, so he doesn’t. He’s hated almost on default, for his strangeness, for his broken status as a slave, for his obvious elfness - feeling the familiar bitterness that so abated when only in Hawke’s company.

He may not have a family of his own, but he can’t imagine it’s supposed to be like this. He wonders how someone so… positively different could have come out of such a bunch, and it’s the type of question he’ll ponder for years to come.

***

“You can make use of the rest of it as you see fit,” Fenris graciously offers, though even he doesn’t know if he actually means it. 

At least this corner of the mansion has tremendously improved in the past few months: windows initially barred and then replaced, a collection of clothing now hanging in the wardrobe, the smell of his soap faint in the air, refreshing mint. There’s a small collection of seashells growing on one of the shelves, a scarf carelessly thrown around the back of a chair. All signs that despite it all, he’s living on. Hawke looks and tries to stifle her smile, lip caught in-between her teeth as she considers what he’s giving her.

“You’ve seen my house, Fenris,” she warns with a jest that doesn’t land - the hanging hammock in the corner of a bedroom she’s sharing with three other of her family members is the extent of her private world. 

Then, in a softer voice, when he doesn’t hurry to walk back on his word: “Are you sure?”

Fenris looks out the open window, the autumn night still warm enough for it, in the general direction of the slums. He does not have the luxuries Tevinter has made him used to, even as a slave, but he’s by far one of the luckier from her company. He may wake up in the middle of the night terrified of a knife poised at his throat, but at least there’s no one to witness his horror, his immediate, following shame, anger.

He wonders if she dreams, and what of - and with a shake of his head, he chases away the thought.

“And you’ve seen this house, Hawke,” his arm lifting to encompass the largeness of it. “Big enough for both of us.”

She shakes her head, fondly, taking a new sip of her drink, deal sealed. The low candle light still catches the mark of deep rouge she leaves on her glass, and Fenris’s eyes ghost across her mouth for a moment. 

“Kirkwall isn’t big enough for both of us,” she says, this time her voice sounding exactly as light as he recognises, remembers it, the depreciating humour that makes her so instantly likeable, in a long chain of prideful individuals. 

Fenris sips at his own drink.

“For you alone,” he corrects, because her name is growing bigger by the day, and he’s no one and nothing in the face of her, just an afterthought in even his most loyal customers.

 “Just stay,” she says, slipping, her eyes burning curiously, a new glaze to them at the alcohol, and she means in their ragtag group of misfits, not the city, but it is one and the same. 

She does not ask him to prove himself, months past anything of the sort. That doesn’t mean Fenris is not a tougher crowd to appease.

“Why, Hawke?” he asks instead, feeling himself suddenly weirded out that he doesn’t even know her first name.

“I’m made of different stuff than the rest of them,” she replies with a shrug, like it doesn’t hurt her to say it, though her mouth turns in a downward curve, almost a pout.

“True,” Fenris simply says, with such conviction that she almost believes it to be a good thing, exactly how he made it sound.

***

He counts the changes in the mansion, tries to still the panicked beating of his heart in his chest at knowing himself so easily found, so vulnerable, a key around her neck that mimics the one in his pocket, the weakest point in his defense.

A pot of leather cream, left on a visible shelf in case he might need it as well for his armour straps, which miraculously never finishes, even long after he gathers the courage to use it.

A game of chess, just one colour’s piece moved across the board, to which he replies with a move of his own, an exercise that will take them months to finish, in-between her clandestine visits, neither of them ever speaking of it.

A selection of teas in the kitchen, some he never tasted in his life, quiet evenings across weeks spent testing them all in turn. 

A growing collection of books in the study, which he spends his mornings staring at, just the shape and colours of them comforting merely because his master never had any scholarly interest, to which he begins to add at random, interesting looking tomes he comes across during markets, though he has no idea about the titles, authors or topics.

A blanket, left disheveled on the couch in the farthest room from his. 

***

It’s the type of strange celebration that only Kirkwall could come up with and that only someone like Hawke would thrive taking part in. It involves, to start it, some complicated hand-stand motions, ending with a twist of hips that he tries not to think too hard about, lest he ends up allowing his drink convincing him that she’s lovelier than she actually is. It’s silly for the most part, made for boasting and jesting first and foremost, clearly practiced only in the lowest rungs of the city, though she seems to remain unbothered at the fact as her body goes flying in the air in a movement that looks as gracious as it does during battle. He supposes the dancing must have come first, for her to so naturally wear even these strange, exaggerated motions, though he will never ask. 

He sits and drinks by Isabela’s side, both of them watching their friend, as he ignores the casual flirting from the other woman. It’s the type of amused words he has always received, with no real promise or heat behind them, so he gives them about as much thought as they deserve. He thinks nothing of them even when Hawke approaches them, and she turns with a question clearly written on her face as she swaps places with the pirate. 

“Would you not bed her?” she asks, unashamed, fanning her heated face with her palm as she signals for a drink of her own.

Fenris pushes his pint in front of her in the meantime, if only to keep himself from throwing it in her lap in surprise at the question. She gulps down the rest of his drink gratefully, and he watches, transfixed, the sweat falling down her throat, the soft dip of her breasts, as she pushes apart the first few buttons. 

It’s too much skin, too soon after the beautiful outline of her moving body, and Fenris tries his best to look anywhere but at her as he mumbles a negative in his palm.

“She does not mean her flirtations,” he explains, half surprised that Hakwe can’t already clearly tell.

“If there’s one thing Isabela means when she says it, it’s her flirtations,” Hawke rebuts, as if he missed the punchline of a great joke. “You’re a wonderfully handsome man, Fenris. I see no reason why she’d joke about her interest.”

Wonderfully handsome, his mind gets stuck on, and he looks at her wordlessly, to see if she’d take it back, the compliment way too much. He’s worried about her well-being for a bit, maybe all that blood rushing to her head damaged her rationale, but she’s unfazed as she sits back against him, allowing the waitress to pass and settle their drinks.

It’s just an accidental brush, her knuckles against his as they’re both going for the same pint of ale, a touch that she shakes off instantly as she shifts off on her side, catches the other pint in her hand with a loud victorious cheer that has the barman and half the gathered individuals grinning at her. 

But Fenris stays rooted in space, feeling his skin tingling, the faintest of light glowing from the small length of skin she’s touched, his other palm clasped over it, keeping it hidden and unseen as he takes in a shaky breath.

He hasn’t been touched in months, years in such a casual, innocent way, without being brushed away, washed after, beaten for. For Hawke, it has been nothing, the type of accidental contact that she goes through multiple times a day, but to him it has been a revelation of how deeply he belongs to freedom.

And Hawke offered him this gift in the middle of a conversation about who he’s planning to fuck. He almost wants to be crass, say his fist will do just fine if needed, if only she leaves him alone with his newfound sense of self, but she’s smiling at him expectantly in such a way that his emotions wash out of him just as forcefully as they arrived.

“She can joke about it because she knows it is not reciprocated,” he says, and Hawke sits straighter next to him, all her attention fixed on him in a way which is almost disconcerting.

She pushes a hand through her hair, dragging strands of it behind her ear as she takes another sip of her drink, thinking.

“Why not?” she asks, the type of question a child would, and Fenris sighs.

There’s a multitude of answers he could give her, too many revealing too much: exactly because it reminds him too much of a past where he’d easily be passed to people who’d make such remarks, for a political favour or straight up gold. Because Isabela may be objectively attractive, but Fenris has no interest in beautiful, shiny things, not even when pleasurable as well. Because yes indeed, he hasn’t found pleasure in sex in far too long, and he’s not sure he wants to start exploring that possibility - if even possible - with someone as shameless as the pirate.  

“I’m a runaway slave. Surely no position for a lover to be in.”

“You haven’t been running in over a year,” she admonishes softly, her knee pressing against his in a way which anchors him to this moment, in time and place, because indeed the only place he’s hurried to lately has been by her side.

That’s another touch, something shifting, breaking between them, and Fenris’s entire life feels unmoored for a second, again. He must look so slow, so stupid, so drunk, taking this long to talk back to her, but he doesn’t know how to be just a man, not yet.

“What do you do when you stop running?” he asks, fearing the answer is obvious, already known.

Hawke closes her eyes, reminiscing on how it had felt to flee for her own life, years ago now, how good it feels to now feel a stray breeze against her cheek, feel her beloved body capable of so many things she thought she won’t when malnourished at the gates of an unwelcoming city.

“You start over,” she declares, softly. “So why not start with that?” she presses, chin turned to point at Isabela, dancing with her knives juggled in the air, men pushing forth like a wave to catch her waist with one hand, her knives with the other, her laughter booming across the market. 

Fenris shakes his head.

“I’m fine where I am,” he declares, the warmth of her body seeping through the material of their trousers, growing where their knees are touching. “Why not you, then?” he pushes back, because he cannot help himself. 

“With Isabela?” Hawke clarifies, a smile growing at his nod. “I could never handle her.”

“She could never handle you, rather,” Fenris corrects, and Hawke laughs for real now, his heart settling in his chest at the sound of it.

***

The note pressed to his front door is clearly hurried, because there are smudges of ink at the end of every word. He cannot read any of it, however. He recognises only the pole-like symbol, H, that begins the last word, simply because he has watched over Hawke’s shoulder, her hand signing her name over and over again. 

He makes his way to her house - if she was sleeping inside the mansion, then she would have simply come to him. It’s been months since she found the need to crash anywhere else, unless special circumstances demanded it, like the time Merrill admitted the mirror in her house is talking to her, or Anders collapsed in the clinic in the middle of the day because he was too scared to sleep at night, lest Justice comes out. At any other times, she’s in Danarius’ abandoned mansion, alongside him, leaving him tells to make her presence known, a light on in the hallway, her perfume sprayed in the bathroom.

He knocks. He waits.

“It’s the elf!” her mother shouts from inside, and he shifts his weight on his other leg as he hears a muffled commotion inside, tries not to feel a sting at the casual mention of his race, first and foremost.

Hawke opens the door, her unbound hair cascading down her back, in a casual style he’s never seen it in. 

“Oh!” she exclaims, delighted and self-conscious at the same time, a hand brushing over the front of her clothing - and Fenris notices with that too, that she is wearing a dress, such a strange attire that he cannot move to follow her inside just yet, instead stuck staring at her from the entrance. “You didn’t have to come all the way.”

She turns when she doesn’t feel him follow, and alongside her curiosity, that of everyone else present is piqued as well: Aveline’s face lifts from the embroidery hoop in her hand, Bethany’s from the cloak she’s attempting to mend. Their mother is presiding over the meeting with a spinner in one hand, not yet set for use. He feels, for a moment, deeply self-conscious to have crashed what is very obviously a planned meeting. 

“Not a trouble,” he answers, quicker and more polite than he’d have if not so dissected by six other pairs of eyes.

Hawke’s ghost of a smile shows him that she knows. 

“Just wanted to share the good news,” she says, and makes a gesture towards her mother. 

There’s a long explanation, about charters and the Amell line and more documents, more writing attesting this and that. The bottom line, some rich fuckers are going to get fucked over, eventually, since petitioning to the viscount is so important, and that is all Fenris cares to know.

Until, with another look at Hawke and her strange clothing, he realises what that actually means: Hawke, a noble lady. Not only the dress and the delicate hair-dos, but the gallivanting at night doing mercenary work, definitely a big no in elite circles. Hawke of no patience nor skill in this exact type of nitpicky job: needle through a thread and not a body, conversation of weather and arts, not fucking and deals. 

He didn’t find himself fit for a pirate, how can he possibly be fit for a lady? 

She accompanies him outside when he goes, and theatrically slumps her entire body towards his, his arms lifting to catch and cushion her fall automatically, in the kind of trust he would not have extended to her if the roles were reversed.

“They’re killing me,” she whispers, with one furtive glance at the door, hurrying her steps back towards Hightown. 

“They’re teaching you,” Fenris kindly corrects, his posture correcting as she rests her hand through his elbow, lady-like indeed.

“I’m an old dog,” she complains further. “Can’t teach me a new trick.”

Fenris lifts an eyebrow, as if to point at his own white hair, earning himself another fleeting smile, the secrecy of a language growing between the two of them that he doesn’t know what to do with except let it be, grow more fluent in.

“If your mother is to succeed in her endeavour, then you must succeed in this.”

“Must I?” she challenges, though he knows it is not him that she’s frustrated at. “Have I not done enough?” and this spoken way more softly, promising a truth that almost everyone else in their group knows, and Fenris has been oblivious to for far too long. 

“Would you tell me?” and at her big, scared eyes, blinking up at him, he adds. “One day.”

“You don’t want to know,” she says, stopping at the steps to Hightown, halfway through walking him back, as far as her mother’s attention span can allow her to disappear for. 

“I do,” he says, firmly, and Hawke stands, staring at him, for a long moment, before turning on her feet without a word of goodbye.

He cooks dinner that night, waits until long after the fire died in the hearth for Hawke to show up, but she does not.

***

It’s the slums, and in the hottest days of the year, it is warmer still: than the warrior compound of the qunari, than the greenhouses of the city’s richest, even more than the docks, with their terrible death smell ingrained in wood.

The night brings no release either, the air more humid, stickier, but not cooler by any degree. Just breathing it in is a chore, and regardless of what type of cloth one attempts to put on, it turns into a drenched rag in a matter of minutes. One by one, everyone in their group gives up any but all mandatory actions, even Aveline in her office, doors and windows all open for the slightest chance at a draft. 

Fenris spends the nights walking through Kirkwall’s streets, safest they will probably be, even criminals too uninspired by the weather. He does not remember last summer to have been this horrendous, and he’s sure he would have heard about it from Varric. 

When he turns the corner to the small clearing in the knot of Kirkwall slum streets that would bring him in front of Hawke’s house, he stops, spotting her already - the only person also still awake, not trying to at least pretend to sleep in hope the real deal arrives.

And Hawke is not wearing clothes. Okay - she is, but such a scantily clad body may as well be naked, leaving nothing to the imagination, not that Fenris has spent a long time imagining her in any kind of way, he assures his own mind, as his frown deepens when she sinks her arm in the still, smelly water of the only fountain in the Kirkwall slums. 

“That will kill you, Hawke,” he says matter of factly, as he stops in front of her.

She looks up at him with a smile - and he is a hypocrite, because he is currently wearing just a thin vest too, leaving much of his chest naked. Her eyes currently trace the markings across it, the lean curve of his muscles. 

“I’ve faced worse,” she declares, and with an immediate childish force, she sends some of the warm water flying towards him. 

There’s a pause, a few seconds of utter silent stillness, before Fenris is upon her. She attempts a shriek that she swallows as she remembers the time and place, just a tiny yelp before she finds herself dunked in the fountain. But she does not let go, hand grasping with a vice around Fenris’s forearm, so her splash is followed, immediately, by his bigger one.

She emerges with a satisfied chuckle, even as she immediately goes under again, his palm pressing at the crown of her head. 

“If I go, you go,” she proclaims finally, as she extracts herself from his weak hold, swimming a bit away from the aggression her words will surely instill anew. 

“If you go, I go,” he agrees softly, and he shifts closer to her, and she does not move at all after all, as they let the feel of the water cool them, somewhat, at long last.

“It’s the wetness, you know,” she explains. “We’re not actually cold, just wet.”

“Yes,” Fenris replies drily, shoving very obviously wet hair out of his face. “I could tell,” he continues, as he moves to do the same to her, pushing strung-together hair away from her face.

Like this, his body turned towards her, they’re so close that he could count her eyelashes, that she notices his are definitely longer. He hasn’t seen Hawke like this in a while; normally her rouge is equally an armour as the leather is, for her, and she looks much younger without it, like the twenty something girl she is supposed to be. 

He doesn’t even know, for certain, how old he truly is. 

She grabs hold of his wrist, the faintest of blue flashes following her touch; something he still hasn’t found how to properly control, not when she is so widely tactile, no pattern to be traced, just instinct to be followed. If she notices his body’s involuntary reactions, she never shows, never brings it up, which is the only mercy he can truly hope for, after all. Her thumb rubs calming circles against his skin, his name caught in a pleased hum.

“It does feel better though,” she admits softly, even as she drags herself - and him after, too, out of the fountain. 

“There’s a whole ocean out there,” Fenris points out in the direction of the beach.

“I didn’t exactly plan for a night swim, though that’s a delightful idea,” and Hawke’s eyes twinkle, and he knows with a certainty he can’t explain that he’ll do the same trip tomorrow, and they’ll both end up on the shore, just as wet as right now. 

She ignores the dripping she’s leaving in her wake. Her hammock is hung on the outside terrace of their house, and she settles herself in it with practiced ease, flaying an arm in air to get him to hurry towards her, too.

He is half dry already, but he does not refuse her. When he takes her outstretched arm, she lets go of her body weight, and promptly sends both of them over the edge of the hammock, pleasantly if not somewhat confusingly mingled in it. Her lips are over his chest, feathery touch over the portion above his heart, his fingers tangled in her hair, as he hurriedly tried to protect her head from a potential wound. 

She hums against his skin.

“You run colder,” she observes, pressing her body closer to his in a way that has him running training sequences in his mind to keep his body from reacting in an entirely inappropriate way. 

He shifts, just the tiniest bit, moving his arm around her. His hand, palm splayed as far as it can go to touch as much expanse of her back skin as he can, warming with her own body heat, allowing her some brief minutes of relief. Another sigh against his throat makes his already dry but flat hair dance, his body shiver.

“This can’t possibly be safe,” he redirects, while shifting, not away,  but just to more comfortably cushion the fall of her body on top of his. Her legs settle over his, sticky, and glue immediately against the raised curves of his marks, though even if she feels those against her skin, Hawke makes no sign to acknowledge it. 

“It can hold double our weight, Fenris,” she says, her voice falling softer around his name.

“You sleeping outside,” he corrects her silly assumption.

“For others, yeah,” she throws back, a bit more full of ego than he expected from her. “Why are you walking on Kirkwall's streets at night?” she throws back at him.

“To reach you, clearly,” he replies, too quickly, too dryly to take him too seriously, and she blinks against the sleepiness settling over her eyes. 

“I’ll be so pleased to be underground and away from all this,” she murmurs against his skin, her breath indeed a bit too warm, but clearly already half asleep.

He twists a strand of her hair around his index finger, playing with it in the air, as it dries in a curl that has no chance of holding in this weather. 

“Will you take me with you, Hawke?” he asks, unfairly at her weakest moment. 

“Amwayss,” she replies, word muffled against his chest.

***

“When is your birthday?” she asks, and Fenris shrugs, shifting his weight as he examines the weapons in front of him. 

“I do not know.”

Hawke sputters, almost dropping the array of shopping in her arms, most of it his - and he feels a strange prickle of warmth, that she’d do something like that for someone like him, even as she’s currently petitioning for her family’s noble right. This expedition they’re preparing for, over a year since meeting each other, is supposed to be the tipping point, their fortune making moment, the money enough to make each and every one of their dreams come true. 

“I do not remember anything prior to Danarius.”

“If I didn’t know how badly you want to do it, I’d kill him myself,” she proclaims, seething in hate and distaste on his behalf, this how she shows her loyalty too. 

“I can celebrate other days.”

“Yes,” Hawke agrees mildly. “Like the day he dies.”

“Like the day I met you.”

She stops, taken aback at his words, the openness and honesty of them, her fingers trembling around the stock of goods in her arms. Fenris notices, easing her of her burden in one swift movement, as he keeps walking back to his place.

“Surely that’s nothing worth celebrating,” she insists, hurrying her pace to keep his stride; even at almost the same height, his walk is quicker, almost hurried, always hunted. 

“You made me stay,” he explains, as if that encompasses everything, and maybe it does. 

He’s less scared with her - just a tiny bit, but when fear conquered every fibre of his being before, even the littlest change is felt like a shock to his system. 

“Fenris,” she presses, immensely patient in the face of such a silly argument. “You will have thousands of more wonderful occasions to honour instead.”

He’s not sure, but he is wise enough to say nothing, watching her as she unlocks the side doors of the mansion, pushing it open with her hip as he brushes past her with their load. Mere weeks now until the Tethras’s expedition, and a hum descended her entire being, more unsettled than usual. She has kept her promise though, and even in the face of her family and friends’ disapproval, she has announced she’ll have him by her side. He has attempted to prove it since, that he is worthy of that trust, while in the same breath trying to disavow every single rumour born out of such proclamation, out of the familiarity and ease with which she’s making herself at home in his own house. 

He has noticed, that she’s moved several rooms closer, in a proper actual bed this time around, more and more time spent here than anywhere else. He has tried not to let it affect him, though he knows he can’t be the only one watching, questioning, wondering. 

***

“He is going mad,” she says, voice afraid at long last.

Fenris has been feeling this unease growing for days now, didn’t voice it out just in case his stubborn stoicism was the last thing holding this whole expedition together.

“He is,” he agrees, easily. 

His hand lands on top of hers, where they’re sitting on the ground around the dwindling remains of their camp fire. It’s a small comfort he’s trying to offer her, but she turns her hand around, fitting her fingers through his in a hand-holding gesture.

“Do you think we’ll survive this?” she asks. 

It’s not like Hawke at all, and Fenris frowns, pressing his digits just a tiny bit tighter into her skin before releasing his grip again.

“Yes,” he replies truthfully, because he cannot imagine her ever failing at anything. 

“Okay,” she breathes in, deeply; out several seconds later, repeating it several times to ground herself back to the present. 

And then, out of nowhere:

“Happy anniversary, Fenris,” she says, softer, as if she cannot hear the howl from far away tunnels, as if she cannot count their dwindling resources, as if she isn’t certain this will break at least one of them, most likely Varric.

He shakes his head, in utter disbelief.

“Two years since we met,” he replies, and Hawke smiles up at him, before shuffling just a tiny bit closer, leaning her head on his shoulder.

***

“She refuses to see me,” Hawke says, angry, in passing, as she enters his house. 

They’re both wearing finer clothes, but bypassing the finer laws of her new class. She is not known by her family’s last name, even now, though Fenris has heard, at long last, the mixture of her first with either surname, and has made up his mind he prefers her as Hawke, indeed. 

“Bethany?” he asks, though he already knows the answer, this a common complaint since their return from the Deep Roads excursion.

Even with the laurels of their success, the hurt in her family continued to run deep: a satisfied but alone mother will turn all her disappointments on her only remaining child; a disgruntled uncle being surrounded by what he once deserved but had no hand in gaining back will forever blame his fall of grace on their dashing hero; a wronged sister will see in this mirrored death of a sibling that of her own, and will find hate anew for the survivors. Out of all, this last hurt was the most difficult to repair, with Bethany now within the Circle. 

Hawke had not seen her sister since her return, turned at the gate each time, half proud of her sister’s stubbornness and half mourning what they had, fragile as it was. 

“I don’t know what else to do,” Hawke admits, falling onto one of the kitchen chairs, most of their conversation happening in here: more comfortable for both of them, any other place too far away from the entrance for her fraying patience.

“Take Aveline with you next time,” Fenris lightly suggests, as he presents a cup of steaming tea on the table in front of her.

Hawke takes an immediate sip, having no reaction at how scaldingly hot it must be on her tongue, thinking over his words.

“Could work,” she agrees easily enough. “Why didn’t I come to you sooner, you brilliant man?”

“You tell me,” he says and has to take a painful sip of his beverage himself, to stop himself from casually dropping an endearment at the end of his sentence too, so taken aback he is by the ease with which it came to her.

Hawke shakes her head.

“It’s the damn new place, the damn new title, all of it,” she sighs. “I don’t know how to act anymore.”

“You’re here. Alone. As you’ve always been,” he points out, not unkindly.

“But I resisted it, you know. It’s improper, my mother insisted.”

Fenris can imagine it, exactly in the tone Leandra would have taken with her stubborn first daughter.

“But you’re here,” he impresses again, a conversation that is going in circles, revealing too little for his liking, for how he knows Hawke to be - the mere few months of nobility surely can’t have shaken her out of a lifetime of habits.

“She’s already pressing suitors upon me. I told her I already have you.”

All of Fenris’s mug’s contents go over his shirt, as he chokes on a mouthful of tea, body wrecked with loud coughs. 

Hawke continues, unperturbed by his outburst.

“You have a nice place in Hightown,” she starts counting on her fingers. “Skills to save me, a scared damsel, at every turn,” and his cough turns into a light snort. “You’re devilishly handsome. And according to all reputable rumours in Kirkwall, you’ve been devouring the nectar of my flower for the better part of a year.”

“Are those reputable rumours started by romance author Varric Tethras?”

By gods, he thinks privately, these metaphors are turning ridiculous, though he has to pretend to wipe his face with his sleeve of any remaining stray tea, just to hide the reddening of his cheeks for a moment, as he imagines exactly how devastatingly delicious she’d taste upon his tongue.

“Maybe,” Hawke agrees, shifting her weight to go flying on the last two legs of her chair, her fingertips against the table maintaining her balance. “Do you terribly mind? We’re as good as engaged in my mother’s mind, and that shall keep her occupied and content for at least a year.”

Fenris shrugs.

“Surely she’d want grandchildren by then.”

Hawke slams her chair back to the ground, loudly.

“Don’t curse me like that, Fenris!” she says, indignant, with a laugh chasing each word.

“Can you even imagine?” he continues, properly amused now, even with his clothes all wet, as Hawke prepares as stormy of an exit as her entrance.

She stops in the doorway for a moment, looking back at him over her shoulder.

“Yes, I can.”

***

They want to catch him like you catch a prey of a hunt, in a trap. Dehumanised until the very end, he simply cannot exist as an equal being in the head of all these Tevinter magisters, can’t be anything more than the expensive marks upon his body. Just because he knows they finally caught another sniff of him, doesn’t mean that he knows when they’ll attack, and the nightmares return with a vengeance. 

The lack of sleep makes him snappier than usual, more careless too, and when Anders has to heal him for the fifth time during what is supposed to be a routine request, Hawke tables him instead at the end of the day, and does not call upon him the next morning. It’s strange, to have all this new time for himself; she’s a good leader, more restful than any of his past ventures for sure, but ever since she asked him to stay, she has never refused to take him out on a quest. 

He supposes days will pass before she’s back, so he does what he hasn’t done in a really long time, and goes around the mansion seeking signs of her. An entire library shelf is now filled, spines broken, words clearly beloved, and something clenches inside his chest. He gathers her blanket in his arms, and lays down on her first ever sleeping quarters, the couch in the farthest corner of the house. And he does not mean to, but when he closes his eyes, darkness envelopes him whole.

Hawke is not trying to be quiet, but when she notices the stillness of the mansion, she instinctively muffles her steps, presses her lips together to keep from calling out his name, following a similar path to his earlier one, room after room, until finally that last one.

Fenris sleeps curled into himself, occupying as little space as possible. At the sight, the soft rise and fall of his chest, something inside her chest comes undone, and she steps closer. Her hand is halfway to his temple, impulse overtaking anything else, just wanting to push the hair away from his face, when she finds herself face to face with the cold glint of metal, pointed squarely against her throat.

The smaller dagger is so sharp, she can feel the paper cut of its kiss against the thin skin of her throat as she swallows. She forces herself to meet Fenris’ eyes, hold his hateful gaze, knowing it’s not intended for her, not really.

“It’s me, dear one,” she whispers, soothingly, though she does not dare to reach out again to touch him, not yet. “It’s me.”

He breathes in, confirming it to himself through all his senses, feeling the familiarity of her smell settle over him, blinking himself back to awareness, weapon slipping through his grip and onto the floor.

“They’ve found me,” he says, simply - though she feels his words like it’s very clearly her fault, her from four years ago so easily convincing him to stay put in place, right by her side. “Nowhere else to hide, now.”

Nowhere else to run, remains unspoken between them, nowhere else Fenris wants to go anymore, if she’s not there.

“We will kill them,” she replies, fiercely, and when she presses herself close against his body on the too-small couch, he can feel the indentations where she has all her knives strapped to her body. His body relaxes, limply, legs stretched out, tangling with hers.

***

“Again?” Fenris asks, when Hawke’s head pops-up through the door of the balcony, her new earrings singing with each movement, a soft sound that he catches just because of how on edge he always is these days.

“Who else could I possibly rely on for this?” she asks instead, and at the same time it upsets him for him to be her only, last choice, it also makes him so proud to be fitting these strange criterias for her quests.

Because truly, who else would be fitting to be brought up in front of the Arishok? Isabela would insult on the spot, Varric just barely escaping it. Aveline is too closely entrenched with the city to be comfortable, and Anders’ prejudice runs deeper still with people he sees as so deeply wronging their mages. Merrill still hasn’t quite learnt to successfully lie, and this is not the type of internal politics in which she can invite the prince of a neighboring city. Indeed, she does not have any other options, a sister too far away even if now more welcoming than she used to. Fenris’ little expertise with the qunari does not hurt, either.

The issue is Hawke. She cannot hold her tongue, replying too quickly, too honestly, too desperately. It’s like blood in a hunt, everyone can smell it off her. Fenris tries not to think too deeply about why he finds it so appalling when she turns to flirting, when all her other options are exhausted. 

“He will never let go of his duty,” he says, in a tone he works at making sound patient, in the most private corner of the Hanged Man.

Surely they can afford better alcohol these days, though he never voices his displeasure for everyone’s favourite establishment out loud. 

Hawke sighs, biting at her bottom lip in deep thought, nails tapping against her mug. There is no reason for her to do this either, just a request thrown in her direction so flippantly she could have simply shrugged it off. But if years by her side thought him anything, it is that she will rather have her body broken and bloody, before refusing even the most random of demands. He has yet to make up his mind if he finds it admirable - in light of her helping him make something out of a hunted life, or if he resents her for it - in light of her not quite managing to make something out of her own.

“And I do not want to give up another home, Fenris,” she says, softly, and he doesn’t even dare breathe, this a truth of her past she hasn’t spoken of to him before. 

“You cannot seduce your way into the Arishok not taking revenge on Kirkwall,” he replies, harsher than he intended, still somewhat irked that this is the best plan she could have come up with.

“I know,” she sighs, pushing her hair back in a frustrated gesture, and he sees her once again as the brilliant woman he knows, and not the fault of all his most jealous thoughts. “I’m trying to humanise us. Some people do feel bad for doing terrible things to other people they consider equal.”

“They do not consider us their equal.”

At this, Hawke grins, though it’s the shadow of her usual expression.

“Not yet.”

Fenris sighs, a hand reaching out to gently tap the back of her palm, in quick, soft succession. The most he’s allowed himself to touch her, uninvited first, just a parody of all the usual ways in which she comforts him. She shifts, just enough to turn her wrist, grasp his fingers in her. 

“We do not have enough time to recondition qunari,” Fenris says, gentler still.

“I know,” she repeats again. “But what is left there but to try?”

He wonders, his heart in his throat, incapable to voice out his questions, why this is the most comfortable route she could have taken. Back when she was also in the slums, there were just the mere mentions of her names, alongside some compliments for her skills. Now that she ascended above them, the rumours have grown, the past has slipped through the cracks, in pieces that he is still trying to put together: a debt paid for right of passage into the city, at the side of Kirkwall’s biggest smuggler. He knows himself what that type of work can demand of someone, and what is seduction but another weapon?

He stares at her in the low light of the tavern, still holding her hand, and recognises her as kin, the both of them more alike than he could have ever imagined.

***

“Hawke,” Fenris says, his dagger fixed in the wooden panel behind her, just barely above her head.

“Fenris,” she greets back, waving up a hand above the rim of the bathtub. 

The entire room is warm, heavy with the smell of her bath salts. He knows she’s taken up the habit in his residence a while ago, her signs all over the place, but so far they have successfully managed to avoid such an awkward meeting. She’s usually noisier while she’s at it, so he can merely avoid her. He mostly drinks the nights away in taverns, when they return from their more gruesome battles, allowing her the space and time for this habit. At worst, the trail of clothing she leaves from the hallway is telling enough, and he turns on his feet, as far away from her as possible.

Her eyes glint up at him with barely concealed humour. Of course there would be no one else inside this place, definitely not in the one bathroom with a tub, but he’s been growing more paranoid since he’s learnt of being hunted again. For the most part, Hawke has manoeuvred around his measures: put a new lock at all of his doors, presenting him with the key. Learnt to always walk with her weight at her toes, making the slightest of recognisable sounds. Even, after months of his stubborn refusal, had Merrill place wards around the place.

“Sorry, darling,” she says, not sounding sorry at all. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You did not scare me,” he putters out, indignant. “I just… didn’t expect you.”

She smiles, cocking her head at him, because she’s been half living here for years. What he meant is that he did not expect to ever catch her like this, naked a few feet away from him, just barely concealed from view, her shoulder tantalisingly beautiful. He has known, for a while now, that his body’s reactions to her are his to claim, not invited by her gestures, not goaded out of him. He merely wants her, the realisation of which left him sleepless for the better part of a week. Wanting something - anything - has always been off the table for him, and wanting her feels like sacrilege, even when he has no religious bone in his body. He does not think he should be seeing her like this: not Hawke, the head of their mercenary group, and not young lady Amell, the heir of her house. 

She lifts a cupped palm, allowing the water to drip down her back - lets it go soon enough impatiently and merely goes sinking into the tub, her toes dancing in the air instead with the shift. Fenris smiles, he cannot help it. Maybe simply her, the woman, he can allow himself, for just a few more seconds. 

He shifts his gaze away when she reemerges, a push too forceful to allow for modesty otherwise. His eyes stop at the book on the floor, pages crinkled in obvious sign of previous abuse, a careless dip in one of her other baths, its red the same as the scarf Hawke has started to wear around her neck. She is blindly reaching for it, and Fenris glues his eyesight securely to the ceiling, but not before just catching the swell of her breast, the softness of too much naked skin, swallowing down a curse.

“I’ll go,” he says, half an apology in the word.

Hawke makes a sound, somewhat of an indignant yelp. He turns back to her, in the small space of the room, skin redder from the warmth of her bath,  the wet strands of hair glued to her back, and wishes he was capable of making art, though no rendition would be as beautiful as she is, at this moment.

“Yes?” he presses, because if neither of them will say anything, he’ll be stuck like this, merely staring at her like a rude fool, and even in the dazed, panicked current state of his brain, he understands that is a liberty he cannot allow himself to take, for this long.

“I can read out loud to you?” she says, waving her book in the air, the colour of its cover deepening around her wet fingertips.

Fenris stares at her, feels his muscles mellow in the hot humidity of the place. What would it mean, to accept her offer, like this? 

He steps closer, the tub tall enough that even so, he cannot see what they would not be able to turn back from, if he did. In a graceful movement, he drops to the floor, his back resting against the marble edge, to her, refusing to look at her. Hawke hums; he can hear the water whishing as she finds a comfortable position herself.

And then, her voice starts, the beginning of one of the short stories, though Fenris doubts she’s as careful of a reader to have so neatly stopped at the end of a different one, knowing she picked it so just for his sake. She has a good cadence, her words following the tilt of a question, the indignation of an exclamation. He closes his eyes several sentences in, allowing  himself to get lost in the story, the only other sound interrupting them being that of the turning page, the soft movement of the water. Several pages in, her hand snakes up his back, faint trails at his nape that have him trembling on the floor, swallowing a gasp as he feels himself grow hotter under such innocent, tiny touch. Then, her fingers dig into his hair, massaging softly, rhythm not troubled at all by her other action.

At a particularly tense scene, she increases the pressure of her touch.

Fenris moans, an unwanted sound that he is too mellowed out, too relaxed to catch before it escapes his mouth. They both freeze at the same time, and he shivers anew, this time in embarrassment, in such deep hate for his own weakness.

There’s a long pause, her fingers curling around the longer strands of his hair, before she resumes her reading.

***

“Dodge, Chuckles!” Varric calls out his warning, just at the same time she does her command.

“Stay your weapon, Varric!”

He curses, his arrow just barely missing Fenris. Hawke skids to an awkward stop, her entire body slamming to the floor, just in time to miss the harsh fall of the elf’s greatsword. She pushes herself away, a worming motion which would have been embarrassing if she wasn’t fighting for her life against a person she refuses to hurt. She knows him well by now though, understands his feigns, the moment when it takes him just a moment longer to lift his weapon. She springs to her feet, running away just in time to avoid Fenris’ grasping hand.

“Hawke,” Varric warns, voice exhausted as he’s trying to keep at bay all the other summoned demons. “He’s possessed.”

But she did not grow up in an apostate family of mages to be put off, defeated by something as simple as possession. She refuses to think death is Fenris’s only way out, not when they have a possessed man healing half the population of Kirkwall. Her entire body strains with the effort it takes to avoid his blows, and when she has no other choice but parry or be cut down, she feels the force of his blow in her muscles, all the way to her jaw, her arms trembling, daggers almost snapping in half.

She picked him, years ago, because she thought he is the most formidable man she’s ever seen in battle. She felt safe, having him at her back, since their first fight together, and she never imagined, even in her worst nightmares, that there would be a day she’d need to fight against him. Every single cell in her body refuses to acknowledge this moment, each dodge and panicked yelping run just a desperate attempt at trying to ignore reality. Her brain cannot catch up, think of a solution to this dreaded situation. 

A careless second, and one of her daggers goes flying in the air, settling with a loud noise on the floor. She moves to catch a new weapon from a hidden pocket at her sleeve, but Fenris must know her as well as she knows him, and he catches her hand with one of his before she thinks to conceal her intentions. She’s breathing harshly, looking into his face, seeing nothing she recognises anymore, Fenris’s eyes shining with an unfamiliar, unnatural colour, her arm struggling against his. 

They’re too close together for his weapon to be useful, but just a bit longer, and he will best her by physical prowess alone. 

“Fenris,” she tries, desperate - she does not know of successful reasonings with demons, though she never thought she’d need that type of knowledge.

She’s gone through life blissfully ignorant, ignoring that this could have been her reality ages ago, if only she had a weaker family. A shiver wrecks her body, understanding at last exactly the elf’s disdain and hate, his fear too. 

“Fenris,” she says again, this time weaker, her arm trembling, as he guides it away from her concealed weapon.

His body shifts closer to her, all glued against her; she can feel his hot, heaved breath over her face, and her heart breaks, knowing that she hasn’t known him like this any other way but in the midst of a fight, and now she won’-

Something shifts across Fenris’ face, his pupils just for a mere moment slipping back to their usual, comforting, familiar green. The hold on her body slips, at the same time his greatsword slamming the floor with such force that she winces at the loud noise, feeling the random cut of its edge at her ankle.

She bites back her reaction, pushing closer to the man she cares for, half a stumble that is not faked, as she stares more carefully at him.

“I know you, Fenris,” she says, voice firm but still soft, filled with the kind of affection she hasn’t allowed herself to show in full. “I am yours, and you will return to me.”

The fierce battle of power turns into a dance of affection, as Hawke shifts, pushes her arms around his body, holding him to her. It’s a trust he shouldn’t receive, there’s two weapons at least that he could easily access like this, but something in her heart fell apart when he attacked her in the first place, and if this is how she’s supposed to go, then so be it.

She can hear Varric growl out a warning, weary with exhaustion, and she closes her eyes, muffles her face closer to Fenris’s chest, engulfing herself in the familiar smell of his skin, mint and the stain of the leather oil.

Fenris’s arms lift, but they do not fall in a death blow. He twists his fingers in her shirt, grip so ferocious that she feels the strain of its sewing at her shoulders. His head, ashamed, falls against her shoulder, his lips a ghost at her neck.

“Hawke,” he breathes out, a sob that wrecks through his body, that she can do nothing but feel as she hugs him tighter.

And then he says it again, a litany of her names, first and last, cries muffled in her clothing, as she pretends she does not feel the material growing wetter. When, weak and exhausted, he falls to the ground, she does not let go, following him down, twisting so she presses closer to him, feeling the pulse of his heart against her body, knowing him well and alive, back to himself.

Varric left an hour ago, and the Fade dust around them starts to smell, but she refuses to move, all the way until Fenris at long last lifts his head, forces her movement too with a tug at the hair grasped in his hand.

***

He cannot see her. Not now, not when he was so easily bested by his fear, not when his betrayal has been so swift. After the battle, Hawke struggling to walk by his side until he tired of her bravery and simply carried her in his arms, he took stock of the fact he was the only one unharmed.

She did not speak to him, at him - even as he bandaged up her wounded foot in his mansion. Something too monumental has passed between them, and Fenris does not know how to move past, does not know if there is a way to remain someone’s friend after trying to murder her.

So he hid and he ran, in a movement so familiar, even after years. He knows her so utterly, so fully, that avoiding Hawke is as easy as knowing where to find her. He did not bet on her knowing him as well too, and he hates to think what a transparent man he has become in the wake of knowing her.

She catches up to him in the early afternoon, three weeks after the fact, as he’s on the ground on the beach, catching his breath after the last of his training drills. She’s been here several times before, though she hates the heat of the place, sometimes even joining him in sparring. He did not think she would remember; their training moved on to something more formalised, in the Amell’s inner courtyard, in recent years. But where would he be, what would he do, if not fall into old habits in her absence? 

She’s the one making him a better man. 

She stops next to him, and he can see her, upside down, from his position laid in the dirt. He feels the sudden rush to want to cover himself, too much skin and too many marks exposed, too much dust settled over his sweaty body. She’s frowning, slightly pouting, and he feels the sudden rush to get up, push his thumb against her lips, forcefully turn around her expression.

He does neither, merely staring at her, waiting. 

Hawke is not a patient person.

She did not claim him, even in front of a terror that threatened all their lives, Hawke never claimed him. Instead, she gave herself to him, proclaimed him her master, that a willing bond that withstood even the delightful promises of ultimate power. Fenris forces his body to still, before being overcome with the heartbreak he’s been trying to abate since that battle. 

Hawke is patient in just this one thing: her pursuit of him.

So, she waits. Fenris blinks away the sweat on his eyelashes, keeps his eyes closed hoping that when he next opens them, she would have gone. He has no such luck.

“What do you want?” he asks instead, crasser than he’s ever been with her in years.

“You,” she replies promptly, a word that has his entire being burning in something else but pain and exhaustion. “I want you back. Fenris,” she starts, a sigh after his name, so delicious upon her lips. “You cannot believe it was your fault.”

He’s on his feet in one sharp, smooth, quick motion. Hawke yelps, but she does not step away, their chests touching, their eyes meeting, foreheads almost brushing, so close that he can make out the strange speckles of colour in her eyes. His palms settle around her elbows, keeping her firmly on her feet, calming his soaring heart just a little bit with the comfort of touching her. His fingers splay, covering more of her exposed skin, her short sleeve allowing the healing bruises still visible.

Fenris frowns, letting go as if burnt. 

She did not think, when she got dressed this morning, of anything but the heat of the day. She swears under her breath, grabs at him in a mirror of his earlier gesture, holding him close, not letting him move away from her.

“Whose fault is it, then, Hawke?” he asks, voice soft as to not scare her, his fingers tracing the marks upon her body. “I failed you, for nothing else but the promise of power.”

She shakes her head. 

“Promise of safety,” she corrects, tenderly, because it’s been years of waiting, body poised for battle, knowing the blow is to come, and not being able to count from where, when. 

“It’s the same, Hawke. I’m no better than the worst, weakest vermin on this earth.”

This hate, searing, almost blinds him, keeps him from seeing how her expression shatters at the force of his words, the certainty behind them. He hates himself so much, so deeply - and she is not sure she can convince him that he does not deserve to. 

She cannot at least not try.

“I am yours,” she says, an echo of what snapped him out of his cursed possession, and his entire body wrecks with the start of a sob, holds himself together at the last second, though it’s impossible she didn’t feel that tremble. “Would you give me up, then, if so unworthy?”

He should be saying yes. If he truly cared about Hawke, then he should be saying yes, wishing better people around her, a better person vying for her affections. But he’s just a man, and even as his mind screams at him to do it, his lips remain tightly pressed together, a frown growing at his forehead.

Hawke sighs, a tender smile growing on her face, which only makes him more upset. She should not be alright with having the likes of him claiming her, even in jest, even just as lightly as this. She should care more about herself, too, if he is weak enough not to put her first.

“Well, then,” she says, finality settling between them. 

Fenris lets himself be held by her, hating himself and hating himself and hating himself. 

Her hand moves, lifts, gingerly touching his cheekbone, settling around his face, thumb placed over his lips, rubbing at the horrible expression he is wearing.

He opens his mouth, takes her finger in-between his teeth in the lightest, teasing bite.

***

“Your mother has always liked the freaks, too,” her uncle says, and she cannot hide her surprise at still finding him awake quickly enough, although still drinking, which in turn just makes him crueler. “I suppose once you find a mage acceptable, what more is it to fuck the elf?”

She does not react, not immediately anyway - unbuckling her boots with a patience that makes the older man’s skin itch. She has paid a decades’ worth of debt in a year, a feat that placed her name squarely on every scums’ lips, admiringly. Her uncle cannot go and borrow money from anyone else, all too weary of her to test her patience, and despite the returned grandeur of their current life, he finds himself resenting it, too.

What need did he have of someone coming in to save him, that someone being the off-spring of his perfect sister? And to see history repeat itself, another one of his kin falling for the most unsuitable option presented, he would have hated himself forever if he didn’t say anything.

“How many kids do you have, uncle Gamlen?” she asks, brightly, as if she’s asking for the weather. 

He frowns, swirling his drink around in his mug, trying to think what kind of trap she’s laying out for him. 

“None, and you damn well know that!” he answers, gruffly.

“I don’t. You don’t know either, not really,” she says, just as serenely, and Gamlen’s animalistic brain is finally catching up with the fact he’s being ensnared. “How many whores have you bedded? How many have you come inside?” She presses, and she pretends to count on her fingers. “Twenty years’ worth of fucking around, and you think no one in the slum shares their blood with you?”

Gamlen feels the cold run of certainty down his back, that this is not an empty threat, that his niece must know something: if not proof of the bastardly result, then at least of the activity.

“You’ve been down at the Blooming Rose,” he accuses, throws back.

She cocks her head at him. In the middle of the night, her mother long asleep, there’s no one to stop her, at long last.

“You’ve sold me into indentured servitude, uncle. There’s not one dirty, cursed corner of this city that I do not know.”

“Which is exactly why you have a reputation to clean up! Not soil any further with your dalliances!”

“Nothing you say or do will turn me away from him,” she says, with pure adoration, cold trust - she is so much like her mother right now that Gamlen drops his drink to the floor in shock. “You do not matter, in this or anything else I do.”

Hawke waits, letting the alcohol sip into his lap, as Gamlen struggles to rise. He’s suddenly immediately made sober by the glint of her dagger in the fire light, though she merely resheats it in a different compartment over her body.

“You will hold your tongue though, uncle,” she threatens, and he gawks at the gall of the girl - though not much of a girl left in her. “If you want me to hold mine. How many bastards can you pay off, with what is yours of the Amell's riches? How many can you claim?” 

It’s a math he runs through quickly in his head; all depending on the asked price. With Hawke’s astronomic rise and growing reputation in the noble circles, he imagines it won’t be cheap. With his spending habits still strictly in place, and even Leandra’s eyes on their finances, the possibilities run out way too soon.

Hawke bids him goodnight.

***

Hawke has seen him do this particular trick only once before, the night they met. He has confessed that using the lyrium like this leaves him with the ghost pains of their marking, something that for the most part he has learnt to control into submission. 

But when Hadriana is done speaking, Fenris does not allow her the presumed freedom. Instead, for a faint moment, the world around him turns blue, and a heart is held in his hand. Hawke swallows, because each time he has crushed them in his hold, she gets reminded that that’s where hers resides too, finely in his grasp. He lets it drop to the floor with a squelching sound that almost has her stomach quivering, as he spins, desperately, on his feet and paces towards her.

His hand tangles in the hair at the back of her head, his forehead pressed against hers.

“Are you hurt? Did they hurt you?” he breathes out, all almost as if in one hurried word.

Hawke places her hand over his chest, above his heart, as she shakes her head.

“I am alright,” she says it out loud too, her gaze skipping to the dead body next to them, which Merrill is toeing with scholarly disinterest. “You did not keep your word.”

“There’s no bargaining with oppressors,” he spits out; they’ll always want just that tiny bit more, until there’s nothing left to give.

Hawke nods in assent, this a familiar song that she knows, from her short dealings with Kirkwall’s nobility, Circle. She presses a bit harder against his forehead, his nose falling across her cheek, nuzzling close to her.

“Are you hurt?” she asks back, hand pawing at her pockets, a potion still safely stashed somewhere.

He shakes his head too.

“Do you think she spoke true?” he asks, so low that if his mouth wasn’t so close to her ear, she would not have heard him. 

A sister, still alive. A family, memories from before he was made. He does not dare to hope.

“Why would she lie?” Hawke asks, blindly hopeful, the best person he knows.

“Laying one last trap. Lashing out one last punishment,” Fenris offers. “She was Danarius’s apprentice, after all.”

Hawke thinks, nods again. 

“We’ll be careful.”

And just because he is not physically hurt, it doesn’t mean that this battle doesn’t change something in him. He needs to be alone, put order in his thoughts, make some decisions about what path to pursue now. He can do neither, if she is near - he will think of her first, always, otherwise.

He does not want to drag her into this any more than he already did; her issues as big as the city they reside in, these days. 

There’s no way he can be careful, not if Hawke is by his side, a truth he has learnt long ago. She drives him mad, be it with her kindness, beauty, or loyalty. She did not have to fight this battle with him, but the victory shines even brighter on her face, than his. She has promised him, years ago, when they first restarted their hunt for him, that she will see them killed. This is the start of her keeping it.

***

“Where is Fenris?” Aveline asks, as the door to the office closes merely behind Hawke, her shadow not behind her.

“I do not know,” her friend says simply, and Aveline sighs, pulling the secret bottle of the strongest alcohol in Kirkwall from the locked drawer of her desk.

Not even that works, Hawke shaking her head, refusing the gesture.

“What is wrong, Hawke?” Aveline asks, worried for real now.

“I do not know what to do.”

“I recall you knowing exactly what to advise me to do, though,” the guard replies calmly, as she watches the other woman pacing her tiny office, three steps in one direction, five in the other.

Hawke shakes her head, forcefully. Now that Aveline clearly looks at her, she recognises the disheveled hair, the long jacket very obviously thrown over a nightgown, the mismatched shoes. 

“It’s not the same.”

“Why?” Aveline asks, earnestly. “Because he used to be a slave? He is still a man.”

“That never mattered,” Hawke sputters, passionately, hands fisted at her sides, calmed down only when she notices the satisfied grin on her oldest friend’s face.

“There you have it, then,” Aveline says, softly.

“I can’t. I can’t ask it of him, I won’t.”

Of him, or of anyone - Aveline wants to ask, because Hawke has only given, to her and all of her other friends, and never asked for anything in return, too scared, maybe, that if she opens her mouth to admit exactly how much they mean to her, they will disappear like others did before: her father, her tenderest love; her brother, the one that was most like her; her sister, the kindness she never allowed herself. It’s not that strange, all things considered, that despite all the flirting Hawke is capable of, real vulnerability is harder to own.

“Hawke,” Aveline chides; cowardice looks horrible on this otherwise brave woman.

“I won’t,” she repeats, stubbornly.

Because she can remember the first year, when each of her body’s motions have been chased, desperately, lest she might touch him, even by accident. Fenris’s body, poised taut always, ready for a smooth escape, not allowing her skin to touch his, gestures barely accepted through two rounds of material. They’ve come a long way, and she refuses to ask for more than he feels comfortable giving.

It’s been a few days since their battle with Hadriana, but this is how Fenris has always thought through his issues: away, alone, even from her.

***

It’s a few days later when Fenris returns to her, and noticing his hunched figure waiting on the bench in her family’s courtyard, she hurries her steps. She’s spent the evening assisting Varric with some form of tax evasion, because surely Kirkwall’s rising literary star cannot be expected to pay that much, and she’s feeling pleasantly light, the satisfaction of work that did not require her sweating through her clothes, or ending bloodied in Merrill’s bedroom.

“Fenris,” she says in greeting, and when he lifts his head to look at her, her smile vanishes.

Something has changed, the charge between them running with a different current. Something unspoken, but suddenly acknowledged - and all the air flies out of her chest with the blow of it. 

He rises to his full length, eyes watching her watching him as he goes through the motions. The quick glance-over is first, to make sure he is okay, at least physically, and then the slowest, satisfied perusal, with the little pauses at her favourite bits: the taut pull of the muscle at his waist as he stretches; his chest, pausing for a few beats, watching the rise and fall of it; the swirl of his most obvious lyrium mark; his face, just in case she might catch the one dimple she knows him capable of showing.

Hawke has been so predictable, with him, for so long, that he can count that in perfect order. She blushes, prettily, still not shying away from his gaze, as she realises that, at long last, he knows. Understands.

“Command me to go, and I shall,” he says, not knowing that time will split open in this moment, before and after clearly delimited by his one moment of foolish bravery.

“I am yours,” Hawke says simply, and Fenris’s expression turns so gentle, so awed that her heart hurts in her chest.

Then he is upon her, in a flash of lyrium blue, his kiss so violent that she feels it bruising against her lips, her body going willingly, back arched against the wall, as he settles his entire weight over her. He kisses her like a man who has dreamt of doing it for years, like a man dying of thirst who has finally found his life source. His desperate need alights her in turn, and when his tongue prods at her lips, she opens with a muffled, swallowed moan.

She can feel him growing against her hip, one of his legs nestled between hers, and she pushes closer, chest heaving against his, grinding her core against the firm muscle of his knee in a desire that she didn’t know herself capable of.

When they break their first kiss, she presses her forehead to his, as their chests heave together, catching their breath. There’s the dimple in his cheek, the delightful twinkle of mischief in her eyes. Her lipstick, smeared around both their mouths, neither with the need to care about such things.

He snakes his arm around her waist, under her tunic, as she struggles to unlock the door, a kiss peppered at her pulse which has it stopping, for just a moment, in surprise. She can feel his smile against her skin.

They struggle on the stairs, too busy to steal hungry kisses off each other, articles of clothing removed and gathered, a quick chase up that has her giggling and breathless when he catches her, her laughter like the sound of a bell in his ears.

She drops to the floor, and him, sinner and desperate and utterly destroyed by the sight of her, goes after her, no patience or want left to do this properly.

“I’m yours,” she whispers in his ear, as her hands undo his breeches, his pull off at her chest binding, then blindly groping at her breasts.

He groans, face bent so he can press his mouth to one of her nipples, sucking and licking in a way that has her arching closer, moan high in the night.

“Shhh,” he whispers against her skin, hand snaking in-between their bodies to find her legs already spread as far as they can go. “Or do you want everyone to know?”

It’s a question he doesn’t even think about, first thing that sprung to his mind to make her fall silent, but Hawke meets his eyes, holds them as his fingers prod at her entrance, and find her already leaking.

“Yes,” she says, and suddenly he cannot deny her anything.

He pushes two fingers in, watching the reaction across her face, the clamped shut eyes, the open mouth around a silent moan, the shaking of her legs around him. It’s heady, this power that she’s just given him over her. He could have her fall apart; he wants nothing more than just exactly that. 

He allows her time to adjust to the stretch; in all the years he’s known her, he has never seen her bed anyone, and this is a patience that has never been rewarded to either of them in the past. It’s only when her hips start moving, chasing friction as she’s attempting, fumblingly, to fuck onto his hand, that Fenris picks up speed too, eventually adding a third finger that has her moan again.

She tries, Andraste bless her. She tries, biting her lips, muffling her sounds against his shoulder as his thumb presses against her clit, as her core explodes in a wash of pleasure, having her tremble under him. It’s so heady, feeling her walls squeeze around his fingers, watching the reddening of her cheeks, that Fenris almost comes all over his breeches, on the spot. He continues to fuck her through her orgasm, and when she pushes at his shoulder, he almost does not want to move.

But there’s nothing, now, that he would deny her at this moment. 

She just tugs at his breeches, enough to free his hot, hard cock, a movement that has him hissing in her ear, as she settles her knees on either side of him, her hips hovering above him. His hands settle around her waist, fingers massaging reassurances in her skin, and she smiles at him, her affection so obvious that he cannot return it in full.

“I’m yours,” she says again, whispered against his mouth before she kisses him, as she gives herself to him, willingly, happily.

He growls, a sound just barely caught at the back of his throat, as he feels her cunt taking him, the warmth squeeze of her overwhelming, inch by delicious, tortuous inch. When she finally settles in his lap, all of him inside her, his palm rests over her navel in awe. She smirks, feeling his cock twitch inside her, as she tries and fails to stifle the shiver running down her back at the image. His splayed hand, palm over her stomach, where he can see, feel himself inside her, is so big against her naked body, covering almost all of her. They both require a moment right here, to try and compose themselves, though she is not sure this is a possibility anymore. She surely must have lost her mind, this beyond even her wildest fantasies.

Fenris didn’t know it could be like this. He didn’t know it could feel good.

And when she starts moving, it’s even better than good, it is perfect.

She tries to maintain a constant rhythm, but tires quickly with the position, a cramp growing in her leg. Then Fenris helps her, hands around her waist guiding her, up and down, as she feels the smooth glide of his cock inside her, deliciously perfect. Her nails dig into his shoulders, his mouth finds purchase at her neck, biting hard against the skin there when her movement turns erratic, her cunt rubbing against his abs, as she’s seeking some friction.

With one hand holding her against him, he moves the other in-between their bodies, first to gather some of her wetness on his fingers, and then to fix them over her clit. She moans, chokes on her own saliva as she finds purchase against his harder knuckles, rubbing herself, harshly over them, taking his cock with her in the movement.

He groans in her hair, hand digging painfully in her body. She ignores him, busy chasing her new rising orgasm, and Fenris thinks, blindly, back at her I’m yours, I’m yours, I’m yours.

When she comes, impossibly hard, he follows immediately after, hot rope of cum emptied inside her, as her cunt keeps squeezing him dry of every drip, their harsh breathing the only sounds in the room.

“Fenris,” she says his name, a whisper and a prayer and reverence, as she presses soft kisses over his face.

He gathers her in his arms, manoeuvres them both to bed in a swift, sure movement that still keeps him inside her, even with the cum leaking and smearing all over their bodies. And then, tentative and tender and utterly safe, he places a kiss at her temple, as she falls asleep.

***

She wakes to his restless trashing, but when her arm reaches out to try and touch, comfort - Fenris is already out of the bed in a smooth, quick motion, pushing his hand through his hair, taking in a trembling breath. It’s been a millisecond of trying to gain her awareness, and he’s already gone.

“Are you alright, Fenris?” she asks, suddenly afraid.

It’s a long pause before he replies, his back turned to her that she can’t even read his feelings on his face. 

“I remembered my old life,” he admits at last, voice not certain at all, frustration lacing every word. “And then… it was gone.”

She swallows, shifts, tries again to reach him. Fenris sidesteps her touch easily, and her expression shutters, trying to harden herself for what she knows is to come. This explains then, his longer absence than usual, the desperate attempt at grabbing at something of life as he knows it, even if that something is her.

He says her first name out loud, that which he calls her only in their tenderest, weakest moments. She does not look up, she’s not brave enough for it, not after what just passed between them. She thought… she thought they finally understood each other.

He dresses in silence, and she recognises each item by sound, even though it takes him longer than usual. When she sneaks a peek at him, his hands are trembling. 

“All I wanted was just to be happy,” he admits, softly, all dressed as she is still holding on to the sheet, covering her body from him, ashamed as she’s never been.

He doesn’t want to tell her, that he’s only felt that at her side. The glimpses he can still recall, although already fading, didn’t show him a much better life either. So then, her alone. And instead of doing the same, make her happy, he knows he’s about to break her heart, gift her pain instead.

“Forgive me,” he adds, and the door falls closed behind him.

He can hear her first sob through the door. She does not move, and he remains rooted on the spot for a long time as well, on the other side of a closed door, until her cries subdue, and only then does he go. 

***

She knew she’d find Anders awake, so she simply brushes past him, waiting until the door is closed and locked to remove her hood, open her mouth to talk to him, in a low voice so unlike her usual self. 

She makes her request as directly as she can, refusing to avoid his eyes, knowing that she regrets nothing of what she’s done. The name of the herb falls awkwardly out of her mouth, this part of the process at least always taken care of by Athenril in the past, the materials simply pressed in her palm the next morning. 

“It was him, wasn’t it? Fenris?” he asks, watching the truth colour her expression.

Hawke’s spine straightens, as she answers her confirmation out loud as well. Anders wants to grab her shoulders and shake her, imprint into her exactly how this is not something to be proud of, keeping himself from doing it in partial fear and disgust that the elf might just linger over her, still. Justice piques in, unhelpfully, to let him know that indeed, her thighs are smeared in the elf’s drying cum, under the dress and nothing else she’s wearing.

“He shouldn’t have dared!” Anders hisses, hands trembling around the herbs container instead; he has issues even imagining someone he so despises with someone he so admires. “You’re a lady now.”

Hawke snorts, though she does not lift her head from where she’s defeatedly and shamefully turned to look at the floor, at hearing the disapproval in his voice. It’s a humiliation route, being here, but she is smart enough at least after the act to consider the consequences. Aveline is trying for a baby, so she thought she’d keep her oldest friend away from the mess she’s made of her heart. 

She swallows, breaking the start of her laugh with a choked sob. 

“I wanted him to,” she answers Anders, though she is not sure anything she says will change the medic’s opinion. “I wanted him to for many years now.”

He mixes the poultice with more vigour than she’s ever seen him use, this a type of anger she didn’t expect. He’s become a man in the circle, and she a woman in the slums of Kirkwall - modesty doesn’t exist, need is used. This needless dancing around the topic, this keeping of sensibilities she never possessed, annoys her more than Aveline’s lecture would have, she decides. 

She pushes to her feet, drags her cloak closer around her body, her hood up. Anders still catches the bruise around her neck, a mark that should not exist across her beautiful, blemishless skin, the white of her dress, through which he can just about make the darkest circle around her nipple.

“I’ll go,” she says, and Anders growls, in both his and Justice’s voice. 

“You will not,” he proclaims, and she sits back down on the low, tiny wooden chair in the clinic, palms sweating, wiped on her knees. “You will at least fix any further failures.”

So she waits, stewing in the mage’s fury, uncomfortable to the deepest turn of her bones. She can feel her cunt flutter around emptiness, a begging that echoes the one of her hurt, bruised heart, and she shifts on her chair. Anders’ magic erupts, for just a millisecond, a familiar shade of blue that she’s seen over Fenris not long ago, Justice barely contained within him.

Anders cannot contain the spirit, not like this, where its voice booms in his head, demanding him to take her instead, write over whatever marks that blasted elf left on her. His senses are heightened by this erasure of borders between him and the spirit, and he can smell everything off her, a mixture that enrages him anew, almost has him throw the jar in his hand at the wall.  

Hawke sighs, forcing her body to still, not before pressing her legs harder together, a new wave of arousal going through her which Anders feels as strongly as if her thighs rested over his shoulders, so close he can almost taste it on his tongue.

His hands shake, as he pours the boiling water. 

“There are better choices for you,” he says softly, wanting to be cruel, hit her while she is down.

Hawke closes her eyes, meeting his when she opens them again, an eyebrow quirked in challenge at him.

“Who? You?” she replies, sounding so disgusted, so humoured by the concept that some of the hot water goes over his fingers; he doesn’t even feel it.

“Am I such a horrible option?” he asks in return, allowing the hurt to seep in his tone, maybe he even exaggerates it a bit; he does not want her for her wit or her prowess, just for her beauty.

He has been charming in his pursuit of her, at the beginning: all the right words ready, when Fenris used to give her none. But even then, they were too pretty and too polished, too soon. She refused him, as gently as she could as a clumsy twenty-years old, and that never stopped him from trying further, whenever he thought the moment was right. It amused her, then annoyed her, and now she’s merely bored to death, of how little her no meant to this man.

Hawke smiles, her untrue smile - though Anders cannot tell the difference.

“To me,” she agrees easily, and she shifts anew, her cloak falling off her shoulders.

It’s a purposeful gesture, so he can see the true extent of her debauchery, how truly and definitely she’s been ravished, how fully she has allowed Fenris to claim her. The mark at her neck, yes, but bruises blooming also across her chest, her skin is still aflush with her afterglow. The light burn over her knees, the disheveled twists of her braid. 

For a flash, she can see the mask of Anders fall, leaving just Justice, snarling in an expression of pure hatred. 

Her smile sharpens, turns real.

And so, Anders hands her the poultice, which she drinks in one go, to its terrible, bitter end. She muses that he may have done that on purpose, a taste which will linger on her tongue for many hours after, a fact which only makes her recount her night with Fenris all the more strongly. 

***

She misses his expansive bath tub, as she fingers herself under the shower instead, coming several times with his name on her mouth, chasing a sensation that her own fingers cannot satiate, now that she knows how his feels. 

She washes off the ghost of his touches, but uses the same soap he has at home, smelling him all around her, such a small comfort in his absence.

She feels the need to peruse the expensive library collection they’ve been building over the years, and sighs when she has to settle for her family’s more scholarly one. 

She sends tray after tray of food back to the kitchens, and only when Bethany arrives, Templar positioned at the door, does she at long last let herself take a bite of their favourite cake.

She notices, eventually, right before her first outing, her red scarf missing, because the purple mark at her neck is fading, but it is not gone, and she has nothing to hide it with. 

Alright then, she thinks. She’ll own it, in front of others as she did in front of Anders.

***

Even if he is scared, utterly terrified, and confused at it, Hawke has agreed to love Fenris. 

He doesn’t look any different, maybe just the tiniest bit of length in his locks, more hair than usual hiding his piercing gaze. The armour is perfectly cinched around his body, no weight loss to mirror hers, no dark circles under his eyes. She feels, suddenly, inadequate to exist outside the bounds of her home, though she knows the more generous reads on her appearance will be excused by her growing tension with the qunari. Only two people know what happened between her and the elf anyway, and she needed Anders for the knowledge and the medicine, on how to abate unwanted consequences of a night of passion, of a love that he now regrets.

The red around his wrist, the visible mark at her neck, make it terribly obvious to anyone with brains. She remembers, on the spot, acutely, how she told him she wanted everyone to know, and how even separate, even hurting, Fenris has gifted her at least this: no space for shame. She’s his, even if he is not ready to claim her, accept her.

She gulps, feeling bile rising in her throat. She looks down at the laces of her boots, and tries to will herself that they’ve been too expensive to ruin with her simple lunch.

Fenris looks towards the direction of the docks, and says nothing. Hawke follows, the first time she did not lead, because for a few days longer, she need not pretend at being strong, lack of heart covered by his tentative, far-away care.

***

He does not want to buy this book, Fenris decides, as he turns it around in his palms. He cannot make out any of the words on the back, a rivulet of scratches and semicircles that remain as confusing as they’ve ever been. Danarius needed a butcher and lover, not a scholar - something that he grows more and more frustrated at every day, so many things happening around him in writing: the notes in the market, Hawke’s missives that so far he managed to pretend away, showing up in person, even though he clearly still makes her uncomfortable, the intel Aveline’s still gathering for him. 

Speaking of, this is the reason why he stopped at this stall to begin with, the seller proudly and loudly proclaiming to sell the hottest title from master Tethras, a romance of courageous, daring adventure and hot, sizzling amour. On the cover, there’s a barely changed rendition based on Hawke's and the head of guard’s physiques. So… their story, then? Even if widely blown out of proportions, it is still much more than she’d be willing to offer him now anyway, and he feels vulnerable with how obvious the implications of his past are, how easy it is to read between the lines of his life, and how closed off hers are, at this point.

He tries not to grumble when he presses the coins in the seller’s hands, hurrying home as quickly as he can, lest he’s being spotted holding this abomination, even with the cover stubbornly held to his chest. He cannot possibly add it to their growing shared shelves: he has no idea if Hawke even knows this book exists, or if the contents will allow the continuous existence of what he is pretty sure is her best friend. His room is not busy enough that it could easily blend in, and most of the other rooms remain firmly untouched. So then, under the unused pillow of his bed it goes, and he can feel once again the shame of his lack burning through his skin.

It’s worse when Hawke shows up the following evening, brandishing a text he is sure he would love, if only capable of reading. The overwhelming pleasure on her face is what breaks his secret open, because he wants to offer her that for real, at least in this way, if they are to forever dance around the other one they’ve found together.

“Hawke,” he stops her, in the middle of an explanation about the content of the tome in her hands, waiting until she lifts her eyes to his. “I do not know how to read.”

She frowns, eyebrows curling together, her hands stilling mid-air, lips pressed together as she’s gathering her thoughts. 

“Wha-” she starts, changes routes. “But the librar-” 

“I do not know!” he erupts, in a way he didn’t intend to, sending the inkpot on the study desk flying into the nearest wall, blue seeping through the paint, dripping over the floor.

His chest is heaving, his mind is spinning, he feels like a cornered animal, scared out of his mind, upset because he cannot be what she thought of him. 

In a softer voice, in the silence that has so clearly descended over the room, Hawke’s body still in a way it never is, he presses forth, at least letting his shame be expelled utterly, entirely.

“What need is there for a slave to know how to read?” it’s barely above a whisper.

“You are not a slave,” she says, simply, maintaining a similar quiet voice, as she allows the book to drop to the floor, walking closer to his own body, curled onto itself.

He refuses to meet her gaze, all the way until he feels a tender hand at his shoulder, another softly at his cheek, turning him towards her. It’s such a gentle touch, such a caring gesture that he cannot do anything but listen to her request. 

He looks, searching for a sign that she is made ashamed anew, by this new way in which he’s failed her, but there’s no form of judgment, no sadness, just the vast expanse of her understanding.

He is not worthy of it, he will never be.

“Everyone can learn how to read,” she explains, firmly but kindly.

“Even an old dog?” he asks, joking because he doesn’t know how else to protect himself from this vulnerability.

Hawke squeezes his hand in hers, casual and fleeting and sweet, and Fenris swallows the hard knot forming in his throat. How can her touch still feel so wonderful, how can it be so welcome and so freely given, still, when each brush makes him want to crawl out of his skin, proffer his hide to her as offering. 

“Yes,” she says, truthful and believing, and it’d shame him worse to disappoint her. 

***

How does one defeat an undefeated army? How does one keep a conquered, accosted city? Fenris feels the overwhelming, sickly strong smell of blood in the halls, noble after noble with a twisted neck and punctured insides, and can only imagine the same fate for her.

When he invoked the one-on-one battle, he intended to push forth as Hawke’s champion, do this for her with the ease he’d do anything else. He did not think that after years of goading the Arishok, he’d remember her, he’d want her, he’d accept no one’s win but hers. It’s a battle to death, and he intended to try or perish, not offer her such an impossible choice.

He’s sick to his stomach, as he watches her take her battle stance, so small and tiny that she’s not even reaching half the height of the qunari.  For the first half of the battle, he watches it from somewhere around the ceiling, outside of his own body, terrified out of his bones, in a way he’s never been in his entire life.

For the briefest of moments, as she does a backlift, landing on her palm and quickly twisting out of the path of a hammering blow, she catches his eyes and smiles. He whimpers and shivers in pain, fingers going white with the strength used to hold onto the balcony railings, keeping himself from dropping in the middle of that fake rink, try to help her. Varric grabs at his wrist, where her scarf sits twisted around his skin, and he can hear him pray under his breath, first to Andraste, then to his dwarven gods.

Fenris cannot tear his eyes away, even when she starts tiring of running around, jumping and skidding out of the way of each death blow, the Arishok just half a second behind her, at all times. Fenris cannot look away, even when she starts slashing at the qunari’s body, such pitifully tiny cuts against his huge muscles that she may as well need to keep at it for hours, for it to count.

Fenris does not stop following each of her movements, not even when the minutes do turn into hours, her breathing turned to wheezing, every single one of her limbs trembling with effort, still alive despite the expectations of everyone in the audience. 

She cannot do this for much longer, and he cannot feel his heart in his chest anymore.

Hawke clearly comes to the same conclusion he did, at the same time, because something in her posture straightens, fortifies. Fenris wants to shout at her, tell her not to dare do something stupid, but this is his doing, his fault, and whatever else he will speak to her, it will forever be shadowed by him sending her to death.

For the first time since this small chase started, she attacks the Arishok outright, with no caution or escape put into place, ready at a muscle call.

Fenris watches, transfixed, unblinking, unable to look away, as Hawke impales her weapons, down to their hilt, in the soft belly of the Arishok. Just at the same time the Arishok pierces her back with his own great sword, and lifts her body onto it.

He screams, his throat turning raw, but in the commotion of the hall, it is just another sound.

***

“You love her, you fool. You’d rather see her dead than admit it?” Varric demands, for the first time showing the depth of his feelings towards Hawke, his best friend, laying white as a corpse on a bed he can’t imagine her rising from.

“She will not die,” Fenris says resolutely, holding her clasped hand close to his lips, breathing his belief into her body. 

“You have no way of knowing that,” Varric says, because he’s been there when Anders assessed her, when her mother hired six other physicians, who related the same bleak news.

It took a week for the Amell household to let Fenris inside, another week before he progressed past the hallway. Kirkwall may now know Hawke’s as the Champion, but those closest to her remember why she’s been put in a position to fight in the first place. He bears it all, disdain and hate and leftovers that they’re throwing to the dog at the same time they offer them to him. For those first, terrifying days, no one tells him anything about how she’s doing. And yet, he accepts it all, because he knows if Hawke was awake and well, she would find no fault in him, and that is unacceptable. He must atone, somehow, and if everyone hating him is the price he has to pay for her life, then he’ll gladly offer it.

By the time he made it to her room, three weeks and a half have passed. Two more before he’s trusted in here alone with her - and all along, Hawke sleeps, the type of deep rest that so many say she’ll never awake from. 

“I do know,” Fenris says, unfaltering. “I haven’t told her I love her, yet.”

Oh, Varric realises. Broody’s heart is breaking, again, anew, differently but oh so surely.

***

“I can’t imagine what Hawke sees in you,” Anders says instead of a greeting.

He’s miffed to see him again, Fenris the most steadfast companion of her convalescence. Even her mother has to leave, short breaks but taken so often that Leandra’s more absent than not.

The elf looks up from the desk he’s huddled at, countless papers strewn around him. Anders notices he’s moved his set-up closer to Hawke’s bed, an arm away from being able to touch her, if she’d ever wake up to require it. He does not think the trust the Amells are displaying in him is deserved, though two months of feverish devotion can sway even the hardest hearts. Fenris does not look at him as he replies, but at the woman.

“It is done. Leave it be.”

“Yes,” the mage spits, as he makes a scene of displaying all the creams and poultices of his trade, all ways in which he’s more useful than a scholar. “Done. So stop sniffing around her, there’s nothing left for you here.”

Maybe he is trying, in whatever twisted way he’s trying to convince himself, to protect Hawke, keep her away from more suffering. Fenris knows, with a certainty that would have him to his knees if she was awake to recognise it inside him, that there’s nowhere else she wants him but by her side.

She’s his.

She knew, well before he did. She also knew, what that would mean, once accepted, once proclaimed: this maybe just the start in what will be a long string of complaints. 

“Leaving her was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Fenris says, in a surprisingly tender display of honesty that makes Anders, a mage used to lying his entire life, sick to his stomach.

“Certainly the second time around would be easier, then?” He replies to her ex-lover, as nastily as he can.

Fenris shakes his head, returns to his missives, pen awkwardly held in-between his fingers.

Anders works in silence, noting down her temperature, seeping through her some magic to maintain as much of her energy and power, even as she sleeps. The elf, wary, pauses his scratching from time to time to look at him, but he says nothing else.

This only annoys Anders further, this assumed superiority, like he is not the reason she is in this situation to begin with. 

“She came to me after, did you know?” Anders asks, and his smile widens at the fleeting expression of hurt on Fenris’s face.

Even if they dislike each other, they’ve known each other for over half a decade, easy to recognise the tender wounds they can push against. 

“I do not need to know,” the other man replies, this a jab that finally landed.

“You used her,” the mage presses, finally blow. “Like she is nothing more than a common whore. That’s why she came to me.”

He does not allow Fenris the grace of a rebuttal, simply leaves the room in a flounder of robes and self-righteousness. Fenris sits, looking at the emptied place where he’s been, his mind reeling, the pen cracking in his hold.

He did not… he did not think, simple as that. He allowed himself that night without considering any consequence at all, guided by a past that never allowed him a willing partner, shadowed by a status so disdained that he would have been beaten close to death before allowed the thought of procreating. With another man, he never had to worry about something like that.

And now he sits next to the woman he loves, his head filled with dreams of an imagined, better future, his hand growing stained with ink.

***

“You know how to read,” Hawke says, half the sentence a barely recognisable croak from a too-dry throat.

Fenris startles mid-sentence, the book in his lap falling to the floor with a loud noise, his eyes big and shocked landing on her, then softening when they meet her gaze, Hawke at last truly, finally awake.

They sit in shocked silence for a long moment, just drinking each other in, surety growing that at long last, they’re together again, as they’re supposed to be. 

“It’s been a long time,” he agrees, hurrying to fill a glass of water, helping her up against the pillow so she can drink it.

Half of it goes coursing down her chest, her brain not quite catching up with the normal functions of her body, but she is still so shocked by the picture of him, in an armchair she recognises from his own place, reading out loud by her bedside, that she doesn’t even mind.

She stares at him like she used to at the beginning, Fenris thinks, and lets her.

The desk had been moved out two weeks prior, replaced with the more comfortable seating option once the skill she offered him was bested. He has slept in it too, since.

He bends to pick up the hardcover off the floor, and at Hawke’s curious glances, he turns it towards her, front cover clearly on display.

“Champion of Kirkwall…” Hawke reads out loud the title, not yet knowing that is her, still sheltered from the comedown of her actions. “Read it out to me?” she asks, and there’s nothing he will refuse her again.

Fenris ignores all the points in the book where he snapped the spine, dogeared a page, turning again to the first page instead. He knows how selfish he is, stealing these minutes with her, when he should be running down the hallways and let everyone know of her recovery. Hawke’s hand, coming to settle over his, steels his decision; she must know it too, she must feel it in her bones, how close she’s been to dying, how long has passed since then. 

“There was once such a tale, for if it didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be here to tell you of it…”

***

The cake is sweet and syrupy and will definitely make her refuse her meal later, but Hawke still turns, oohs and aahs around the kitchen table, until Fenris returns to her side, offering up a spoon. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says instead, a fleeting glance at her midriff, where the scar of her battle will forever remain imprinted on her body, in an ugly harsh ridge of tissue.

She makes a gesture in the air with her spoon, as if she’s swatting away flies. 

“I’m fine, dear heart,” she confirms, the third time in this visit alone.

Everyone has been insufferable, not allowing her to leave her room for days upon days, even after waking up. She’s been through so many mages’ check-ups that she still feels her skin tingling with its residue, and more than anything else, she is bored now. Surely, now that she pulled through, they should be celebrating the trials and tribulations of everyday life, renewed. Aveline, bless her soul, is the only one who has tried, setting up her temporary office in the Amell’s hallways, so at least Hawke gets up to speed with the city’s current situation. 

She does not tell Fenris, not yet, that she missed his mansion, the way it’s not truly his, the way it’s been more hers than the bedroom she’s spent the better part of half a year in. She’s sure he already knows, or her room wouldn’t have been dusted and cleaned, every item still in its original place.

She cuts with her spoon directly into the cake, shoving an impressive mouthful all at once, her cheeks cutely rounded with the effort.

“It would have ended up with you, anyway,” Fenris tells her, his spoon clean and on the table.

“What’s the occasion?” she asks, the mouthful obviously muffling her words, and she barely manages to catch the quick smile on his face.

“Seven years since we’ve met.”

The salty aftertaste is her tears. Fenris pretends he doesn’t see them, just as she’s pretending she can’t notice the way his hand shakes, not daring to pick up the porcelain plate off the table.

***

He will always blame himself for this too, all a series of events that he started, way too long now for his logic to withstand scrutiny. But if Hawke hasn’t been distracted by him, if she hasn’t been still in the early days post-recovery, maybe they would have noticed quicker that something is going on with Leandra.

Hawke, even in the depth of her grief, will never blame anyone but her mother. Even the woman’s later gratitude and softness hasn’t been enough to thaw her eldest daughter, and their relationship has been tense until the end. If they were a different type of family, if she was anyone else but her mother, maybe she would have felt more at fault. Considering Leandra has seen her daughter slave away as a smuggler and head a mercenary company, she has been curiously innocent about the darker going-ons of the city. A crazed mage is like an usual Monday in Kirkwall.

Bethany cannot make it to the funeral, not allowed to leave the Circle any longer, and her lettered grief is harder to bear than her own sadness. Hawke recognises no one, sees no one, goes through the motions of the day, nodding along with each condolence, letting herself be carted here and there, by all well-wishing nobles that apparently knew her mother, and her mother never thought to present to her.

She sees, for the first time, with heavy eyes, the world she’s offered back to her mother, the world her mother has spent over twenty years grieving, always comparing the worth of her children against. Of course Malcolm, of course their kids could have never been as splendid, as dazzling, as good as pure power feels.

She catches a glimpse of Varric’s jacket, she hears Sebastian’s voice as she turns around a corner. Everyone else, she cannot catch sight of, and knows with a certainty that makes her sick why.

When her mother is finally, firmly in the ground, Leandra’s daughter turns around on her heels and doesn’t look back.

Fenris finds her on a random bench in Hightown, looking up at the starry sky. He sits, looking up as well, and allows time to pass between them in companionable silence.

“They didn’t allow you in, did they?” Hawke asks, the grind of her teeth, anger brimming just below the surface.

Fenris shakes his head, but does not answer her out loud; he doesn’t need to. Kirkwall itself must know the company she keeps, and yet here’s the Amell’s last hateful gesture to her. There’s no one of that name left, if she ignores her horrible uncle - and she shivers, thinking of ever returning to a house that she now has to share with him alone.

“Come on,” Fenris helps her up, guides her, as through a dream, not back in the house she shared with her mother, but through the streets, back to his own instead.

He sits her on the tiny wooden stool in the bathroom, a new addition to the place, as he runs her a bath. The water is a bit too hot, maybe, he thinks, but he makes sure to add all her favourite oils and herbs.

Then, with reverent tenderness, he helps her to her feet, slowly starts undressing her. First the sash around her waist, holding the Amell’s crest painted over it, which he unceremoniously allows to fall to the ground, neither glancing back at it. Down he crouches, slowly unlacing each of her boots, then guiding each foot out. The floor is cold under her feet, but she anticipates the promise of a warm bath. When he reaches the inner layers, the brush of his fingers are followed by the even fainter touches of his lips against her skin: against the naked curve of her shoulder, at the back of her knee, pressed at the arch of her foot.

The kisses are affectionate, but not heated, to remind her of the fact she is loved, but not to act upon it. He spends a long time around her new scar, a thing she hates, a blemish she would never be able to hide, no matter how much she tries. When Fenris goes on his knees, to more easily press his lips against it, she shivers, tears barely swallowed back.

And then he is back on his feet, offering her his arm, as she balances herself inside the tub, blessedly sinks herself in the waiting, warm water. He folds himself down on the small stool, a feat that seemed impossible. 

“You can miss her, regardless of how else you feel about her,” Fenris explains, softly, shattering her world apart. 

She cries, the desperate, upset wails of a child, until she hiccups with her upset, until there’s snot running down her face, and all throughout he sits right by her side, witnessing it all, judging none.

***

The others tease her, to spare her the embarrassment of tender care. When they are done with the new awkward way she’s holding her weapons, always overdefending the side she’s been skewered on, they move onto Fenris.

If Isabela’s not present, it is tame enough: Merrill stops all explicit conversation with her innocent, scholarly questions. But the pirate’s back, so the teasing grows, burdened by the force of rumour, Hawke and an elf gallivanting around Hightown, the broody warrior seen buying silk and lace, the returned ease with which they’re fighting when alongside each other. 

“You got back together!” Isabela happily arrives at her own conclusions, pushing the round of drinks onto the table.

Fenris’ palm comes under the table, resting heavy over Hawke’s knee, calming her reaction exponentially.

“We did not,” he replies, steadily, as if he’s not kneading soothing gestures onto his woman’s skin.

“Lucky me,” the pirate drawls, pushing herself closer to the two of them across the table, a movement that automatically deepens her cleavage, though it is not clear which of them she’s flirting with exactly, maybe both at the same time.

Hawke thinks, for a heady second, if she was just as shameless when pursuing the man.

They’re saved by the loud arrival of a different mercenary band, their leader’s loud slap against Isabela’s bottom leaving the other woman laughing, following the man, ignoring the two boring individuals in the corner.

Hawke sighs, relieved.

And then, feeling the jolt of Fenris grabbing at her chair, dragging it closer to his, she looks at him.

“That night…” she starts, not knowing where she wants to go with this conversation, just knowing she cannot take another moment not knowing; she’s being just as forcefully annoying as Isabela has been just moments prior.

“I wish you wouldn’t give it another moment’s thought,” he proclaims, and something feels like it’s squeezing around her heart, and it’s not the strange, terrible drink in her pint.

“Best thing that ever happened in my life, and you’d rather me forget it?”

“Hawke,” he says, as if her words have physically harmed him. 

It’s a warning she heeds, because even so, he does not move away from where he sits, glued at her side.

***

He’s been falling into bad, old habits. Hawke realises it first, because suddenly he does not trust her in battle anymore, going berserk, in the midst of a rank made of a dozen, all on his own. She pushes herself harder, trying to keep up, which in turns just proves to him exactly why he needs to fight the way he does.

She wishes she never mentioned what passed between them. She wishes he never saw her scar, never heard the teasing about her favouring a side.

Because when a blow is meant for her, instead of minding his own enemy, Fenris steps in the path of the cut, the sword catching his body, instead of just merely missing hers.

Hawke screams. That one enemy is taken out by Aveline, the rest by a thrown poisoned explosion, stolen from her pouch by a relatively unbothered elf. She’s still screaming when Fenris turns to her, because she’s staring at the pool of blood growing on the ground, dripping steadily from his body.

“Shut up,” he says, but his voice is faint, and in the next beat, he goes swaying on his feet. 

She does, but she bites her tongue in her hurry to aid him, cushioning his weight, dropping to the ground with as much care as she can muster in an underground tunnel. She can make, against the faint hung lights, the dirt caking over his open wound, and her mind is already running ahead of her, to all the ways she will lose him.

Aveline drops to her knees by his other side, dagger already cutting away at the material of his armour, fingers already working at pulling apart gauze to at least stop the bleeding.

“Heal him,” she demands, turning on her knees to stare at their mage.

Anders crosses his arms over his chest, starting a staring contest with the woman.

“You’ve seen him lose control,” he argues, as she feels his warm blood between her fingers, her brain turning to cotton inside her head - she couldn’t give a fuck that Fenris held someone’s beating heart in between his fingers, and crushed it, time and time again. “If anyone, he’s the real abomination here.”

This is not the time, she wants to scream, but she can already feel the pain there, at her panicked fear. 

“Heal him,” she asks again, body shaking as she forces herself to her feet, wiping her blood off on her trousers.

Her oldest friend is still trying her best to keep the man she loves together, alive.

Anders turns his gaze behind her, where the complicated stairs to the entry of the underground will never allow them to get Fenris out in time to receive proper medical care. Hawke moves, stepping closer to the mage, gathering her forgotten daggers from the ground.

She does not sheath them. In a move so quick that she will have Varric forevermore bemoan he wasn't present to see it, she presses the sharpest edge against the soft, fluttery, pulsing skin of Anders’s neck.

“Hawke,” Aveline warns, just slightly concerned.

“I swear on most Holy Andraste, Anders, if you don’t heal him, then you will both die here.”

Anders measures her, calculating the gravity of her threat. He finds it sufficiently significant. Both women look at him as he approaches the elf, as he works his magic, and Hawke in particular remains sick to her stomach as she sees his flesh pulled back together, mad with the concern that she has no way to tell if Anders has actually listened to her request.

It’s a long wait, the blood lost significant, but there’s no way they’ll move without him. 

And when Fenris awakes, the first word out of his mouth is her name.

She presses her lips against his, and he follows her when she tries to pull back, like a lamb to the slaughter.

***

“Would your sibling want you killed? Enslaved? Raped?” Leto Fenris asks. “She’s no sister of mine.”

But she is at least alive, which means there’s an infinite possible future out there now, simply because Hawke asked him to hold his anger. She still does not know if she’s made the correct choice in this, even as she watches their party empty out the entire bar, just the two of them and the dead alone.

“I’m alone,” he observes out loud, a truth that he has known for a very long time.

He is a fool, for imagining he was wanted.

“Come on, my heart,” she says, taking his hand in hers, guiding him back towards their side of Kirkwall. “You are not.”

You have me, settles unspoken between them. If only you’d have me. 

Fenris looks at their entwined fingers, a memory of his sister holding him like that too overlapped over the present moment.

“You heard her,” he says, his spirit defeated at last. “I wanted this.”

He points at his body with his other hand, hand twitching - he can feel the phantom pain again, made stronger by the wave of memories he now possesses, can hold in his grasp.

“Even if you did,” Hawke says, her finger stroking the lyrium marks covering his body, “No one wants to be a slave. You were a child.”

Her voice breaks on the last word, the true horror of what has been done to him. He was a child. It should have never fallen on him to provide for his family, his only chance at life to be the erasure of his whole being, in service to a cruel master.

***

She does not allow him space. She does not allow him time, not this time. They go to the home they now share in earnest, and Fenris falls in his first true restful, unhaunted sleep, all his hounds finally dead. 

When he wakes, it’s thirty eight hours later, and Hawke is cooking breakfast, the cup of coffee waiting for him on his nightstand already. 

He is only wearing a long tunic, her only a nightgown dress, in a picture of ultimate domesticity that holds no taint of their pasts.

“You know all of me now, Hawke. Would you still want me, even like this?” Fenris asks, his soul in need of purging or punishment.

“Would you?” she asks back, and on the table separating them is that book he purchased once, years ago, with her in mind.

“Hawke,” he starts, face breaking open in an expression of such open adoration that she can barely bear to look at him. “I was so scared.”

She sighs, food forgotten on the fire. She steps closer to him. 

“I always understood. You don’t have to explain anything to me. Would you have me?”

“Yes,” Fenris says, devotion miring every sound.

***

He finds her sitting on the decks, legs swinging in the air above the water. They can hear, even from so far, the sound of the Templars’ drills, though Hawke is making a valiant effort at focusing on the sunset and ignoring all that.

It takes him longer than she thought it would to find her, though by the troubled frown on his face, it is clear he’s been held off.

They do not greet each other; they do not say goodbye either, their life together merely continuous, uninterrupted living, both understanding what a blessing that is. He sits down next to her.

“Would you like children one day?” Fenris asks, looking at the sky and not at the woman he loves.

Hawke tenses for a second, then relaxes again against him.

“You know.”

He nods, her frown deepening, mirroring his own now.

“Can you? Have children?” she asks back, fingers softly against his marks.

This quantity of lyrium is higher than what a Templar ingests during their entire life’s service, such a level of concentrated magic source that no one else has survived it before, and no one else probably will.

“I…” he sighs, starts again. “I do not know.”

“Then there you go. I do not know.”

***