You should see, she’d say. A million ports, a million festivals lighting up the nights, a million possibilities he was never supposed to see from behind tower walls. Life, real life. Worlds away.

Kirkwall wasn’t much for Summerday celebrations either. Start of the rainy season. A few flowers in windows, a few white-robed children running to the chantry between the raindrops, huddled under oiled cloaks. Anders didn’t think of Isabela’s stories again for years.

But in Val Royeaux, there’s a whole secret language encoded into those Summerday garlands with Orlesian deadly serious frivolity - cartloads of blossoms carried up to the mansions, probably with coded messages to complement the ham that tastes of despair, but flowers talk down in the less gilded streets too. Parades of masked revelers toss garlands to the crowds with hopes and promises woven into them, love, hope, a change in fortune, a turn for the better written into physical form.

Justice always did appreciate a bit of symbolism.

Anders always used to keep count of each day outside of the Circle, each escape he managed to stretch a few moments further. A week. Three weeks. A month. A year. A lifetime - he wants to but can’t ever quite believe the Warden’s promise of that, even while his second summer outside the tower wears on, even raising a glass in an Amaranthine tavern openly, with no templars or chains in sight.

It’s harder for him to celebrate those days wrested back from the Circle now. There’s no time in the Fade, just now, and now the Circles are still standing, and now, and now, and this may not be the Fade but he’s no longer sure time moves here either, one day looking much like the next. The faces in his clinic change. The Chantry doesn’t. The city doesn’t. Voices of long-dead Tevinter slaves that no one else can hear still crying out for justice, for Justice, as he watches Fereldan miners head down into the pits.

Hawke, though. Hawke, cheerfully offering him the Knight-Commander’s head on a spike. 

Wherever Hawke wades into the mire of this city, things change. And he can almost see time moving again. 

Makes him believe he can really do this, find some path to a future that looks different than the present.

He’s counting again -  hours until he can put out the lights and lock the clinic for the night, minutes of footsteps to Hawke’s door, moments of breath-held hesitation, wondering if Hawke’s door will be open.

Wintersend has never been Hawke's favorite holiday. Hard to celebrate winter's end when the snow on the fields in Lothering would last another month or more. But in Kirkwall spring arrives on time, right when the Chantry calendar says it should, and his mother's taken the holiday as an invitation for matchmaking. Barely escaped the de Launcet dinner party with his life.

Hawke leans back on a city bench, looking up at the branches above him. It’s lovely, and the air is fresh and smells like spring, and after all that work to get here, he’d rather be down in Darktown, listening to Anders tell him one more time that whatever is between them is a terrible idea.

Anders leaves his notes lying around their bedroom like his dirty socks - notes from the clinic and notes for the manifesto and notes actually intended for Hawke, in no particular order. Most of them wind up moved downstairs to his workroom eventually, the ones Anders doesn’t feed to the fireplace; but Hawke kind of likes the clutter, the assurance that Anders hasn’t changed his mind and fled the far-too-public Hightown just yet. Except for the dirty socks.

Hawke moves a few papers off his desk to retrieve the book he’d been reading - Land of the Wilders, bookmarks at the stories of Flemeth - and Anders' notes from last night are decorated with doodles all the way down the side of the page, more drawing than writing. Random swirls and geometric shapes, and then a cluster of templars at the bottom of the page fleeing from some kind of undead creature in heavy armor, the undead lovingly detailed with angular features and dark circles around the eyes.

The few lines of text have been scribbled out so thoroughly Hawke can’t tell what they were; and the notes that look like this, covered in doodles, always tend to end up in the fireplace. It’s a shame; he likes the little bogeyman scaring the templars away.

That first night on the road to the Circle, chains around his wrists, the boy who would later call himself Anders tried to get the templars to listen to him - I just won’t use magic, I won’t, I don’t even want to, I promise - that he’d ignore it like he always had before, that they could let him go home, that he could control himself.

“It was control set your barn on fire, then?”

And that wasn’t fair - he shouldn’t have fallen asleep instead of finishing the chores but that’s all he did, just took a break; it was just a stupid nightmare, everyone got nightmares, and he put it out, didn’t he, and no one got hurt and it was fine, it would have been fine.

"All right, kid. I’ll tell you what. I like you. I want to believe you. But you’ve got to help me out here. You show me how well you can control yourself, and I’ll let you go.”

The one templar was smiling when he said it, and the other templar laughed. They didn’t even try to pretend it was a serious offer.

But they just had to know, they agreed, that he wasn’t going to use the magic the next time he had a bad dream, or picked a fight, or stubbed his toe, or got stung by a bee, or got scared. If he could be scared for his life and still not use the magic, then he could be trusted to go home, to not burn the barn down the next time he got tired and fell asleep in the wrong place.

“I’m trying to help you. But if I was trying to kill you - and I don’t want to do that unless you make me - I think you’d use the magic.”

That wasn’t fair. If it was magic or death, what kind of a choice was that?

But he swore he wouldn’t, and he didn’t, not until there were spots in front of his eyes from the lack of air, until he couldn’t see and the gauntlet around his neck still wouldn’t move, and this wasn’t really a test at all.

It wasn’t even fire he reached for this time, he just wanted to make the templar move - and then as soon as he reached for it the magic was gone, like a wall slamming down on top of him, cutting him off and crushing him beneath it, and he was on the ground.

“And there you are. You see, kid? You’re all right. As long as you’ve got us, I promise you, we won’t let the magic get out of control.”

It hurt to swallow. It hurt to try to talk.

“I can’t control it. My anger.” Anders won’t look directly at Hawke. “A mage who can’t control himself is the whole justification for the Circles, for...” He rubs at his forehead as if he has a headache. “Shit.”

For Tranquility, Hawke thinks, filling in the blanks. For Karl.

He feels like he’s forced a confidence from Anders. This justice spirit is a secret Hawke hadn’t been meant to see. He’s known the man for one night; he shouldn’t be hearing any of this, wouldn’t be hearing it if he hadn’t been at the wrong - right? - place at the wrong time. But.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Hawke confesses, and Anders stops staring at the clinic floor, gives him an uncertain look.

Like a contained storm let loose - and Maker, Hawke’s own fire all around him, right in the middle of the Hightown chantry, leaving scorch marks on the fancy carpet.

The first night Hawke’s expedition starts down into the Deep Roads, Anders wakes from dreams of darkspawn to the not insignificant weight of Hawke’s dog lying across his chest, crowding between him and Hawke. And Anders freezes.

Animals are supposed to be able to sense abominations, he’s always heard that; stories of demons revealed by snarling mabari or cats sensing the wrongness of them, driving them away.

It’s not true, probably. Just the kind of legend that gets passed around in street plays or bad novels or to tease gullible apprentices, like the old rumor around Kinloch Hold that the templars were keeping live dragon eggs hidden upstairs. If there was any truth to it then the Circle would have had attack dogs at every corner, searching for hidden demons.

The mabari with the Darktown gangs always snarl at him, but they snarl at anyone who isn’t their master; and there aren’t that many cats hanging around the clinic, but he does see one by the Blooming Rose most nights when he makes his house calls, white with matted fur and no tail, eyeing his outstretched hand with irritation and keeping well out of his reach.

But Hawke’s dog lowers his head and settles uncomfortably into place on top of Anders, looking thoroughly pleased with himself. And hesitantly, Anders puts a hand on top of the dog’s head and lets out his held breath, ruffling his fur as Hawke sleepily mumbles for the dog to leave him be.

The coat of leather plates and rivets is both lighter and heavier than Anders expected when he buckles it into place; nothing like he’d worn in Kristoff’s body, more like the stiff and heavy aprons he’d worn for a precaution in some of the Circle’s more explosive classes. Flexible. Fragile, a part of him thinks, but this sort of thing had always seemed to work well enough for Nathaniel.

You don't always wear robes, do you? ...I mean when you run from the Circle. Robes would make you easy to spot.

So does the "I'm a mage!" sign around my neck. I like to make it easy for the templars.

His fine and expensive robes, Tevinter-made, all gold and feathers, now have a nice big hole through the middle of the chest to match his new knots of scar tissue, because they might as well be made of paper, both the robes and the living body beneath them, and he’d watched the sword coming and hadn’t thought it important to move.

And here he is, heart and lungs all whole and functioning and in their proper places. No harm done.