#fenrhys

"Have I — what?" He pushes out of the nest and heads out to the landing. "What are you talking about?"

"I know I'm not the most observant woman, but I didn't think I'd miss a whole door where there wasn't one last week." A faint, metallic rattling punctuates her words. "It won't open. What do you have locked up in there?"

He goes down the stairs two at a time, and finds Hawke crouching down, hairpin in hand, eye to the keyhole of a door he's never seen before in his life.

"I'm going to pick it," Hawke says. "Unless this is where you've put all the corpses from the last time someone tried to break in. Then I'm just going to forget this exists, and —"

"I didn't put it there."

Hawke twists about, the hairpin halfway into the lock. Her frown is back, though slanted more toward confusion than concern. In the dark room, her eyes have no color in them at all. "Right," she says, letting her hand fall away. "So. This is a mysterious sort of door, that you haven't seen till now. I'm going to put picking the lock on hold, in that case."

"A wise choice," he says, as she stands up and backs away, her eyes now narrowed, and the wine forgotten at her feet. It looks like every other door in this place: heavy wood, a brass lock and doorknob, Marcher scrollwork around the doorframe. And just like every other door, it looks weathered from long use and ill-care, as if it had been here for years before Fenris arrived to claim this house for his own. "You said you tried to open it?"

Hawke nods. "I did. It felt real enough in my hand, and I didn't feel anything odd about it. Just a metal handle. But — hm. Let me…" She clenches one hand in a fist, then raises the fist to her mouth and breathes into it. Fenris watches a crackle of light spread over her knuckles before she presses her hand, now open, to the wood. A smell of something like damp leaves and a smoldering fire catches at the air, and vanishes before Hawke draws her hand away.

She frowns at her palm, though when Fenris peers at it, he sees nothing amiss. "In theory," she says, answering his unspoken question, "that should have told me if this was some fancy illusion, or cursed, or a hole leading to something very nasty."

"And in fact?"

"It told me this is a door." She gives her palm one last look, so nearly a pout Fenris feels his mouth tugging up at the corners. "Very useful."

They haven't been alone together in years. Why now? Why, of all the shitty jobs she takes because she has no idea what else to do with her time, did he insist on coming along for this one? The bandits — aside from the lucky shot, whose luck ended rather abruptly when she froze his lungs — were half-starved, fueled only by a long winter's desperation. She could have handled them alone.

Why? Hawke wants to scream, until the wind itself goes quiet. Why are you still here? You haven't had so much as a smile for me since I got off the boat from Jader, much less a friendly word. What do you want, Fenris?

She shouldn't have thought of the smile. They'd all been waiting for her on the docks, with lemon sugars and back-slapping hugs, and there, between Aveline and Isabela, was Fenris, smiling — but he'd disappeared, in between her kissing Merrill's cheeks and turning to face him at last.

Since then, nothing. If ever there had been warmth between them — well. She shouldn't think of that, either. But was it too much to hope, even now, that they would have found a way to be friends once more?

If I want something, it can be taken away. Her throat hurts. More to the point, it'll be ruined as soon as I reach for it, and I should have learned this lesson a long time ago.

"Are you warm enough?" she asks, by her reckoning an hour after starting the fire. Fenris has stopped fussing with his bandages and is slowly sharpening his dagger. On a whetstone, Hawke realizes, she gave him.

"I am," he tells her, still without looking up.

It's like falling down a flight of stairs, over and over. Your stomach drops first, you claw for balance, and just as you think you won't fall, not this time, the smallest thing sends you spinning, headlong, into the same old merciless drop.

How is it, she wonders, that two years ago she would have happily handed over her soul to be alone with Fenris for five minutes, and now she can only wish there was still an entire sea between them?