#tree meme

Fenris smirks, but allows himself to be bullied into a handful of salts and creams and one small--very small--bottle of what Isabela promises are the most impressive bath bubbles east of Orlais. He’s sure this is a fool’s errand--Hawke’s one of the most practical people he knows--but it’s not like the coin’s over-dear and it will make her laugh besides, and that’s enough. Only one oil does he immediately reject, the heavy orchid smell as vivid today as it was in Minrathous a decade ago, floating behind Hadriana like a cloud, but the rest are inoffensive enough he has no objection.

“Trust me,” Isabela says, winking, and shoos him on his way with a sack in each hand.

--

“Fenris?” he hears her call from the foyer below, and he sticks his head out of the bathing room enough to answer. She gives inarticulate agreement, then a more delighted greeting to her dog who yelps, overjoyed, at the affection. He can track her movement by the noise; he moves back to the evening’s work, brow furrowed, and absently follows her progress along the foyer, up the stairs, across the landing where she greets Orana; the door of her bedroom, kicked shut as always, the huff as she sheds her coat over the back of the chair instead of its intended peg, as always.

“What in the world,” he hears her say, distracted, “It smells like a hothouse up here--”

The breath she looses in the doorway stirs his hair. She’s stopped dead still behind him, and he cocks his head, trying to see it as she does: a steaming bath filled high as the edge of the copper-and-wood tub, the windows fogged over and draped with heat; a handful of white rose petals tossed optimistically across the water’s surface, a fountain of frothing bubbles spilling over one edge and along the ceramic tile; the room filled with the smell of sweet lemons and spices. The handful of candles Bodahn and Orana had managed to scrounge up between them sit on mirrored tables on either side of the bathtub, bounding and rebounding off the bubbles in iridescent shimmers.

“Yes,” Fenris says pensively, crossing his arms over his chest. “Isabela suggested a--waterfall of peonies, if I recall. I felt it might be...excessive.”

“Excessive,” Hawke repeats, her voice strained and strange, and Fenris glances over his shoulder to see one hand fisted at her throat, her cheeks bright with color. “I should say so. What is all this?”

“Your nameday,” he says, surprised. “Had you forgotten?”

“Yes.”

“She recommended the gift of a...hm. A relaxing evening.”

“I see,” Hawke says, still staring, and shakes her head, as if it all might disappear if she glances away. “How...”

“Hm?”

“I don’t know! It’s so--so fancy!” She laughs now, still amazed, and at last takes a step or two past him. “Are those rose petals?”

All afternoon Fenris has expected only a gentle mockery, a shared joke at this needless excess; now, faced with a genuine, embarrassed delight he has not anticipated, he is abruptly nervous. “This is little compared to the bath halls in Minrathrous. The magisters are served iced wine in crystal so thin a loud voice might crack it.”

“Oh, pass,” Hawke says, and runs a giddy hand along the edge of the rolled copper. “This is the most elegant thing I’ve seen in my entire life.” She takes a step or two closer to the silver carafe of wine--crystal forgone, however, in favor of simple glass--and turns to look at him again. “Fenris, you did this for me?”

“Yes,” he says, startled and unsure.

Her cheeks are still flushed--not from the heat of the room, he thinks, and he swallows the delayed flood of embarrassment that he has done something so foolish--and then she crosses the room in four quick steps and kisses him.

She’s already warm from the steam. Already scented with sweet lemons, too, though the hands that come up to cup his cheeks are lined with dirt around the nails and dried blood in the creases of her palms. A hard edge, the blade at the heart of her no matter how the petals fall, and that’s good enough, he thinks, his arm coming up around her shoulders, his head tilting through the steam to match her better until there’s nothing left but the two of them, anyway.

“Fenris,” she whispers against his mouth, when they’ve come apart and the scent of spices has twisted between them, a laugh in her voice and her eyes bright as the sun, “the bath’s big enough for two.”

He smiles, all embarrassment vanishing like smoke, because she is delighted and his heart sings to see it. “Is that so, Hawke?”

She laughs again and pulls him forward by his hand, and he goes willingly, not even wincing at the cloud of bubbles that soars into the air above the splash.

--

–

It rains the day of her mother’s funeral. She’s glad, in a way; it’s bad enough to keep most of the insincere inside, especially with the chill, and the sharp no she gives when Sister Mayenna offers a postponement makes them both wince. Still–she has the rights of chief mourner (again, again, again), so the sister pulls on a lined shawl and Hawke ties her hair back, and they go out into the rain together.

As the moth sees light and goes toward flame,She should see fire and go towards Light.The Veil holds no uncertainty for her,And she will know no fear of death

Her heart is wild as thunder all through the now-familiar rites. Not rage, not quite–something colder, more dangerous, more feral. Varric had come to her and asked, delicately, what she wanted for the funeral, and she hadn’t understood, but–who knew, after all? Who knew where the rest of her mother’s body was? She had her head, and Alessa’s hands, and Ninette de Carrac’s body, and the feet of a stranger and so if Hawke liked, they could burn her in effigy instead, a straw figure draped in black silk, so that the poor creature her mother had become might be laid to rest somewhere safe and out of the way where she might never have to see it again and she can’t, she can’t–

A hand folds around her hand.

She blinks, startled, and looks down and then up again, and there is Fenris, somehow, dark hood drawn up over white hair still soaking in the rain, his eyes forward on her mother’s body–what remains of her mother’s body–his bare fingers tight enough on hers to bruise. Tight enough to root her in the moment and not the maelstrom of her mind, at least for now.

All right, she thinks. All right, all right, that’s enough.

She swallows, hard, and straightens as her mother burns. Later, when Fenris comes to her room and there is only the smell of ash, she’ll let herself bend under the weight of grief until she can’t breathe for it, but for now–for now, she grips his hand and lets him hold the storm away a little longer.

–

“The Maker spoke to me, once,” Hawke says, and her voice is echoing and strange in the high stone walls of the Gallows. “In Lothering, after my father died.”

“Those who oppose thee shall know the wrath of heaven,” Meredith snarls, the crimson light of the lyrium sword thrown in rippling fistfuls across the courtyard. “Field and forest shall burn, the seas shall rise and devour them–”

“Yes, yes, lightning shall rain down from the sky and all that,” Hawke says, lifting her staff above her head. “You had only to ask.”

make me–

make me the–

Only glimpses, then, as the lightning strikes again and again and again, dancing in great white sparks down the bodies of the metal slaves Meredith has raised for her fighting; reflected across the mirror-shine of Aveline’s shield, thrown up against a templar’s arrow; made dimmer, just for an instant, by the star-bright glare of Fenris’s lyrium lit all at once.

make me the storm–

–

There’d been a sapling in the shade of the great fallen oak. She’d found it the next day, inspecting the damage to the fence. Half its leaves had been missing, but the greenwood had borne the brunt of the winds and not been destroyed.

She’d heard her father’s voice, then, clear as if he’d stood beside her:

Weather the storm, daughter.

–

There’s fire at the heart of her, sky’s lightning in her veins. The metal giants fall, one by one, shattered to bronze stars; the templars yield, one by one, bending knee and head in the face of the onslaught. The storm has changed; the world can sense it.

So does Meredith, screaming, blinding scarlet. “She should see fire,” she shrieks, “and go–towards–”

Light, only, as the blade at the end of Hawke’s staff pierces her chest where she kneels, where crimson explodes, blood and lyrium and something deeper, cracking, corrupted all that is left of Meredith into the stillness that comes only after the passing of a storm.

“Sometimes a wood is better for the burning,” Hawke says into the silence, and pulls her staff free.

–

Never thought I’d take a whole city down with me, Hawke sighs, both elbows on the rail of Isabela’s ship, Kirkwall a spire of smoke heavenward on the horizon, the taste of ash lingering in the air. Sometimes I think it would have been better if…

A hand folds around her hand. She knows it so well by now, the calluses more familiar than her own, and she leans her head backwards onto Fenris’s shoulder until she can see nothing but grey sky. All right, all right, all right. Enough.

Don’t be silly, Isabela says staunchly, the feather on her hat blown almost sideways in the wind. Lightning never strikes the same place twice.

Don’t tempt me.

Fenris laughs, and so does she, and when they go to the fore of the ship she stays a little longer, breathing in, breathing out, testing how the world feels when the storm has come and gone in the heart of her and she has weathered the wildness of it.

A little wild herself, perhaps. Strong enough to bend. Strong enough to stand again, after.