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“Strange Power, I know not what thou art,
Murderer or mistress of my heart.
I know I'd rather meet the blow
Of my most unrelenting foe
Than live — as now I live — to be
Slain twenty times a day by thee.”
—Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, “To Memory”
Hate had been scrawled over Fenris’s skin long ago. Sometimes, he felt like hate was all he’d ever known.
There had been a time—a long time, longer than he cared to remember—when obedience had come as easily to him as breathing. In those days, he hadn’t even needed to be told in words what he was to do for Danarius, for the crook of a finger or the implication of a demand had been enough to send him scurrying to help, to fulfill a need, to…
To allow the most essential parts of himself to be subsumed by another.
Obedience had been automatic and thoughtless, but that did not mean Fenris hadn’t recognized it for what it was. He’d been Danarius’s weapon, his first threat to those who would challenge the magister for power, a piece of fatal jewelry for the mage to parade around fetes and meetings. He’d been many things in those days, but Fenris had not been a person.
Not to Danarius or nearly anyone else; not while he had been in Tevinter.
How odd—how unthinkable it was that three years in Kirkwall had almost made him forget what those days had made of him.
No. Not “forget.”
Set aside, perhaps—Fenris never really forgot his life before he’d come here. He did not forget the snap in the magister’s voice when he’d grown impatient, when the promise of punishment hung thick as storm clouds in the air. He did not forget the slick blood on his arms at Seheron, nor the last dying gasps of one who had briefly been his dearest friend. In his most cherished dreams, he saw Danarius dead before Fenris ever laid a hand on the Fog Warriors. In his worst nightmares, he saw Hawke in that jungle instead, Hawke gasping for breath on the bloody earth, Hawke’s heart in his hands when he—
It came to nothing; Fenris would not harm her, not unless she had been hiding some other self all this time. He would not hurt her—but in this moment he wanted to. In this moment, she was not Hawke, but yet another mage, one who’d offered to bring this slave girl home just like—
Fenris wouldn’t hurt Hawke, but he wanted her to hurt, to feel exactly how he felt in this moment.
“I didn’t realize you were in the market for a slave,” he spat, as coldly as he could manage through the anger boiling in his throat. Hawke, who’d looked unusually solemn since he’d batted away her joke at the cave entrance, turned to look at him.
Her eyes were placid, but—well. He knew her well enough to see the wound beneath the calm veneer. It was what he’d wanted, and yet Fenris hated that he was the reason she looked like that.
“I gave her a job, Fenris,” Hawke said, her tone measured, and Fenris grimaced.
Much as he might feel like hate was all he understood in this moment, there were other things he’d learned thoroughly. Who Hawke chose to be and how she acted were near the top of the list.
Hawke, whom he’d once caught crying over an abandoned kitten in an alleyway; Hawke, who’d gathered all her friends up and set them on their feet again simply because she could; Hawke, whose family seemed to dwindle by the hour. Of course she hadn’t intended to own the woman; on any other day he would never have entertained the idea. No, she intended to pull the girl into her orbit again, just as she’d done to Fenris all those years ago. He knew her better than to accuse her of such things.
The betrayal he’d felt vanished like feathers set to flame, and he cleared his throat.
“Ah,” he said, the shame warring with the urgency of knowing that Hadriana was close, almost in his grasp at last. “Then…that’s good. My apologies.”
He couldn’t stand to look at Hawke; he couldn’t see the way she was looking at him, the way she was always looking at him, like she saw something in him that he couldn’t place or understand. Fenris turned away instead, shoulders hunched, and strode for the exit.
“Let’s find Hadriana and be done with this place.”
|
Hadriana was dead at last.
Fenris should feel relieved. All those years of pain, of torment, of debasing himself for a meal—there were few who deserved this fate more than she.
But even as he gloried at the slick of her blood on his hands, his mind warred with itself.
First came vindication, then heady relief—that Hadriana was dead and could no longer harm him or anyone else again. Then rage, that all she’d done could never be ameliorated by anything so paltry as a swift death. Beyond that lay confusion and grief, for she’d told him he still had family. A sister, she’d said, when he’d thought he was—that he didn’t have—
Fenris didn’t know what to think about this, except that it made him afraid. A sister could only be a trap, something to lose, something to snare him. He’d had enough of chains, of traps; he would not trust this one until he was damned sure that he understood what it would do to him.
The feelings brewed themselves into a storm, the sort that snapped ships in two and flung them into the deep. He hardly knew what he was saying when he wheeled on Hawke, with her uncharacteristically soft words, with her healer’s hands and determined chin and her eyes that always seemed to be lit with some kind of—
She was a snare, too, and like a fool he’d already let himself be caught.
“May she rot, and all the other mages with her.”
Some part of him, deep in the back of his mind, winced at this as it had winced at the accusation of slavery earlier. It was a small part, though, and easily silenced in the din of his anger. He did not see the room around him; he saw other rooms, hundreds of them, where he had been forced to crawl on hands and knees, to watch other elves and slaves drained of every last drop of blood to perform a party trick, a stronger spell, or some needless whim. It did not matter that Hawke had never so much as lifted a hand against him, that he had never seen her work blood magic even in her most desperate moments. It did not matter that she was Hawke at all.
“Maybe we should leave,” she said.
When she set her hand on his shoulder, it felt like a brand. Fenris shrugged her off and turned, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.
“Don’t comfort me,” he spat; comfort was weakness, comfort was foolishness. He was many things, few of them good, but Fenris had never been a fool.
“Even if I found my sister, who knows what the magisters have done to her?”
Hawke still looked at him with concern and understanding; he despised that. She shouldn’t be so calm; she should be as angry as he was. She should fight back, shout, throw something. Something.
“What has magic touched that it doesn’t spoil?” he spat, and got his wish at last. There, at the corners of her eyes, a flinch; there, at the crease of a line carved by too many smiles, a frown.
Good, he thought viciously, but horror followed hard on the heels of the thought.
Hawke had helped him. Hawke had called him a free man, had stood at his side in every fight he’d dragged to her doorstep. She’d fought her way through this foul place, too, and said not a word of complaint about it, even though she preferred to loudly and theatrically decry every discomfort she encountered on these trips.
And Fenris in his anger had punished her for it.
It shamed him.
“I—need to go.”
Before he said anything else to her; before he destroyed this, too, like he wanted to destroy everything else. Fenris strode from the room, quickly outpacing the others. He only let himself feel relief when he was long out of earshot.
It was a bad idea to walk back to Kirkwall without them; they could so easily find another patrol sent by Hadriana, another set of slavers determined to drag him back to Minrathous. In the moment, it didn’t matter; what mattered was getting away before he did something truly unforgivable. He could not trust himself not to hurt them—hurt her —again, perhaps not in body, but in spirit…no.
It was worth walking away, whatever the danger.
Fenris didn’t let himself breathe, really breathe, until he was halfway to the city gates. Only then did his mind begin to clear; only then did he begin to sort through what had happened.
This sister—he discarded the thought of her almost immediately. Whatever she was to him, if she existed at all, would take more thought than the return to Kirkwall would allow. Hadriana’s death, too: the relief of it, the feelings that had sprung up along with that relief, were something to be turned over and considered at length some other time.
But Hawke…
Fenris stopped on the path at the thought of her, chin slightly raised at the suggestion that she would take the girl as a slave. He thought of her expression when he’d crushed Hadriana’s heart, how she hadn’t lifted a finger to stop him.
He thought of the way Hawke had listened to him not two weeks past as he stumbled his way through a difficult book in his bedroom. He thought of the way she’d looked at the theater the week before that, freckled shoulders bare in the stage lights, face alternately grimacing and sparkling with laughter. When she’d leaned toward him to whisper in his ear, he’d had to work hard to convince himself that he wanted nothing from her but her friendship.
Fenris thought of the way she watched him—not with possession, but with a bizarre, budding hope he couldn’t wrap his mind around. He was not a fool; he knew what she wanted from him, or at least he thought he did. The two of them were walking down a road. If he did not turn away, he knew precisely where it would lead.
Hawke was—she was everything he was not. She drew people to her as a candle drew moths, as if her very presence was something by which to find a path. That magnetic pull was something Fenris could not make himself understand. He knew the world far too well to believe that it would be kind. It would snuff that laughter, that light, and turn it to bitterness and gall in an instant. How could he not fear the day it happened to Hawke, too? He’d seen too much cruelty to believe it could turn out any other way.
And yet—he, too, could not bring himself to turn away from her. He, too, was caught and had done nothing to shake off this fascination and walk free.
When Fenris at last returned to the city, he wandered its streets for a time, his head aching, his fists clenched at his sides. He could not seem to make himself forget the way she’d flinched when he walked away from her.
May she rot, and all the other mages—
What has magic touched—
No.
He needed to apologize. Now—tonight. He would not be able to rest properly until he did. Her face would haunt him if he went home now.
Her housekeeper, a nervous woman he’d only met twice, let him in and promptly vanished into the depths of the manor. Fenris spent several minutes pacing alone in Hawke’s foyer, gathering his thoughts, but Hawke did not appear.
Perhaps she would refuse to see him. It was late; they’d spent hours longer on the coast than she’d expected to when they’d departed Kirkwall this morning. Why should she see him now, when he’d spoken to her like she was…like she was Hadriana, or another such creature?
Why did he need to see her so badly at all? Tomorrow would be better for both of them, give each of them time to think. He knew that. Yet—here he was and he could not bring himself to leave.
Fenris set himself on a bench at last, bowed under the weight of words he could not take back. He could not blame her if she decided not to speak to him; he would simply have to try again tomorrow. Hawke did not hold grudges—not against her friends. She would likely forgive the harshness of his words, if he only explained—
“Fenris?” her voice at the doorway to the living room called him from his thoughts, and Fenris looked up at her.
She must have been bathing before she’d come downstairs to him. Her hair was loose and damp, darkening the silk of her robe wherever it touched. Fenris could see that she wasn’t wearing a shift beneath. Water droplets still clung to the side of her neck. As he watched, two of them joined into one and spilled down her skin to collect on her collar.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, a crease between her dark brows.
He would be sure in his words. He would be clear. He would apologize, and then he would leave. Fenris straightened and stood, already shaking his head.
“No. I have been…thinking about what happened with Hadriana. I took out my anger on you, undeservedly so.”
Her brows arched, and her wide mouth opened slightly. Fenris hurried on before she could speak; she would blunt this apology, turn it into some joke. He could see it in her face. He had to get the rest out before she had the chance.
“I was…not myself,” a weak excuse; even he knew that. “I’m sorry.”
She closed her mouth again and took a breath through her nose.
“I didn’t know where you went,” she said at last. “I was…concerned.”
Fenris could see the truth of that in her eyes; not a joke, for once, but plain honesty. His plans withered, replaced by the need to explain himself properly, to explain what he had been before. Perhaps if she understood, she would forgive him; perhaps if she understood, she would stop looking at him with that odd light in her eyes.
Fenris let those days unfold between them, the days when Hadriana had been his chief tormentor. It helped to know that Hawke understood, though he hadn’t doubted he would. Even so—he hadn’t come here for himself. He’d come here for her.
“But I—” he cut himself off with an irritated sigh, turning away to gather his sword from beside the bench. “I didn’t come here to burden you further.”
All that time, all those hours wandering, all his plans—and all it took was that interested tilt of her head before he was spilling every woe before her. He did not know how she did this to him; he did not know what it was about her that made him want to bare his soul. Best he leave now before she asked him for more and Fenris made a mistake they would both regret. If he watched her too closely, if he looked too hard, he would not be able to keep more dangerous words in his mouth where they belonged.
“Goodnight, Hawke,” he murmured as the door clicked shut behind him.
If she said anything else, he did not hear it.
|
By the time he made his way to the Hanged Man several days later, Fenris had grown tired of training in his manor alone, swinging his blade at various wardrobes and chests while his own shadow watched. He had not realized how comfortable he’d become with company until he was without it. It was a relief to step into the tavern at last, raucous and foul-smelling though it was. He nodded to Nora at the bar and strode for the stairs without speaking to a soul.
Fenris paused at the top, just out of view of Varric’s room. He could hear Merrill and Hawke singing inside—Merrill’s voice high and melodious, Hawke’s stumbling through the Elvhen phrases—and for a moment the relief he felt was so shocking and immediate that he could not bear to walk into the room where someone might see. He may have closed himself inside with his thoughts these past few days, but the world had gone on moving outside.
What a relief it was to know that the world had gone on.
The singing dissolved into laughter as he crossed the threshold. The others were arrayed before him, Hawke’s legs slung over Isabela’s, Sebastian bent toward Aveline and Varric. Anders was leaning past Merrill to talk to Hawke, and though Fenris was frequently annoyed by the sight of them it was a comfort to see them all laughing together here.
“Well, look who finally made it,” Varric called over the noise, and Fenris slung a leg over the open end of the bench. “Looks like Hawke can stop making up reasons not to start the game.”
“I never,” Hawke protested, and took a long drink from her goblet. “These shpurious accusations will not stand! It was ab solutely necessary—”
“Spurious,” Isabela said to Merrill across the table, waggling her eyebrows, and Merrill laughed.
“—that Merrill share her special music with me. Would you have her abandon her culshure entirely? For shame, Varric.”
“For shame!” Isabela chimed in, though she’d been teasing Hawke moments ago.
“Yeah, yeah,” Varric rolled his eyes and pulled the cards toward him, shuffling them expertly.
“Hullo,” Hawke said, her back brushing against Fenris’s arm when she leaned back to look at him upside-down. Her breath smelled of spiced wine and her hair trailed briefly over the exposed skin of his upper arm.
“Hello, Hawke,” he replied automatically, watching the glimmer of light in her eyes for a moment too long before he reached for the pitcher in the center of the table. She brushed against him again when she swung her legs off of Isabela’s lap and took her cards from the table.
Her mannerisms and voice spoke to too much drink, but the jiggle of her leg as she surveyed her cards gave her away. When she was really drinking, Hawke was languorous and happy, often lying on whichever of her friends was nearest or clinging to their arms. This was an act—she must have some particular goal for cards tonight and the appearance that she was an easy target figured into her plan.
As he decided that must be the case, Hawke slid her eyes in his direction and winked. Fenris shook his head at her, hiding his smile in his cup, and waited to see what she would do next.
Watching the act unfold was almost entertaining enough to distract him from the amount of coin he was losing. Almost. When Isabela leaned over the table to say something to Merrill, Hawke deftly removed three cards from the pirate’s belt and hid them in her own skirts instead. She caught Fenris’s eye again when she was done and smiled that odd, surprised smile she sometimes wore—as if she hadn’t expected to see him there.
Fenris tried to pay closer attention to his own cards, but he knew a lost cause when he saw one and gave up after the second hand. Already, they’d lost Aveline to her patrols and Anders had slid into her empty space to prod at Sebastian. They were only playing cards out of inertia at this point, minds focused more on conversation than money.
Or—this was true of most of the group, anyway. Hawke raised her bet each time the round came to her and she lost every hand like clockwork. She played almost the whole third hand with her head pillowed on her arm, voice sleep-thick and echoing against the wood of the table.
It was too hard to watch her directly; Fenris stared into his near-empty cup instead, holding in the laugh even when it scratched at the corners of his mouth to be let out.
In the end, Hawke took them for all they were worth, delightedly scraping the entire pile of coins over the table and into her belt purse. The others groaned and cursed at her, then rose and stretched and readied themselves to part ways and wander off to their respective quarters.
While the group waited outside, Hawke danced her usual round with their friends, embracing each, kissing a few on the cheek. Isabela carried Merrill on her back, the mage sleeping drunkenly on the pirate’s shoulder. Hawke grinned at the pair of them before approaching Fenris.
“Ready?” Hawke asked, even as the others began to drift away.
“I am,” Fenris told her.
It was a relief to start up the stairs to Hightown at her side. For once, she did not immediately begin to talk. The city was quiet around them, the other nighttime denizens giving them a wide berth at the moment, and he might even have called the night air peaceful.
Once they reached the first landing Hawke glanced at him and spoke.
“How are you doing, Fenris?” she asked, “Really.”
“Really,” he echoed, thinking of his shadow on the wall in the manor, thinking of Hadriana’s blood on his hands and the flinch in Hawke’s eyes when he’d snapped at her. “I am well enough.”
She looked at him again, but said nothing. When they reached the other side of the landing, she curled her hand into the fabric of her robes and lifted them to walk.
“I…am not ready to speak of it,” he amended at last, “not yet.”
“Of course,” she said, not unkindly, and they passed another section of the stairs before either of them spoke again.
“In the caverns,” Hawke said carefully, “when I touched your shoulder. I wanted to…apologize for—”
“Don’t,” he told her, pausing with one foot on the next step. She stopped, too, her eyes level with his for once.
“There is nothing to…apologize for,” he went on. “It was not ill-intended.”
“But even so—”
“Hawke. I do not want your apology.”
She pressed her lips together, that unhappy look creeping back into her eyes. The two of them looked at each other for a moment, Kirkwall hushed around them. Fenris thought again of the markings chiseled into his skin, of hate and candlelight and moths and gall. He knew so little of his past, and it had been so filled with pain that he could hardly imagine fitting anything else inside of it.
But—Hadriana was dead now. Perhaps Danarius still lived, but Fenris had spent more than three years in freedom. If he wanted a life of his own, he must someday begin to make room for something else. Hate would consume the rest of his life, too, if he never made an attempt.
He and Hawke were not standing very far from each other. It was easy enough to reach for her, to brush his fingertips over her knuckles. Perhaps he had intended to end it there; perhaps he had intended only a gesture of conciliation. He did not know. Whatever he’d meant, she turned her hand slightly, palm toward him, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to press his hand to hers and twine their fingers as together as one.
The night was cool, but Hawke was warm. He would have expected no less. She shifted closer, still looking at him, and their hands hung loose in the air between them.
It was too much. It was not enough. He could not bear the tenderness of it; he wanted to take her in his arms and find out whether her lips tasted as good as they looked.
“We should move on,” he said, as he’d said a hundred times before, and averted his eyes to start up the stairs again.
Fenris did not let go and neither did Hawke. He held on all the way to her front door, where they said their usual goodbyes as if nothing strange had happened at all.
That night, he dreamt that he was in her foyer again. He dreamt of warm silk under his hands, of the drops of water he’d seen on her neck. In the dream, Fenris kissed the dampness from her sweet skin and traced lines between the freckles on her shoulders with his mouth.
In the dream, Hawke welcomed his touch—his fingers, his mouth—and ran soft hands over his arms until he could bear it no longer and—
When he woke to another cold morning in his bedroom, the ache he felt had nothing to do with strained muscles.
|
The dream hounded every interaction with her.
It sat between them at every table and it nipped at his heels when he walked with her through the city. When they climbed the stairs back to Hightown together in the evenings, Fenris reached more and more readily for Hawke’s hand and found it waiting for him every time. Neither of them acknowledged this. Neither of them even so much as looked down at their hands, joined in the air between them.
This thing he felt when she was with him, when she touched him—he wondered if it was what his foes felt when he reached into their chests to crush their hearts with his bare hands.
Every night, they would reach her door, embrace, and say goodnight. Every night, Fenris would find her again in sleep, settling into the comfort of her body, exploring curves he’d only ever felt through stays or robes. It was a foreign thing, this wanting, made all the more difficult to ignore by this new liminal space the two of them wandered through. Before, when he’d never felt her touch beyond helping and healing, it had been easy to shut these thoughts of her away. Now that he had…
It was as if he’d left a door cracked and some part of her had slipped in through it. He could neither shut the door nor allow her all the way inside—not yet—and the in-between they occupied was interminable.
Fenris was drunk when he told her about Seheron. Likely, he would have told her sober nonetheless, if somewhat more gracefully. But he was hungry for her company, hungry for the way she looked at him when he told her she was beautiful (she was beautiful; it was absurd that he’d only told her so once before. He ought to tell her again, and again, and—no; that was enough wine). In the end, he spilled the whole sordid tale, half-hoping she would withdraw her affections entirely and make this easier for him, half hoping for her unconditional acceptance.
After three years, he knew Hawke very well indeed. If he’d been thinking straight at all, he would have known which of the two she would offer him.
When he walked her to the door at last, Hawke brushed her fingers over his to say goodbye. It was all he could do to keep his word. Another night, he’d told her. It had been the right thing to say, and he did not doubt his choice. Even so, she looked so lovely when she turned back to say goodbye, her lips slightly parted, her graceful hand lifted to wave. He thought of the dream again, of pressing her back against the door and kissing her, of how she would sound when she—
After Fenris had shut the door behind her, he leaned against the wood for a long, long time before his legs were steady enough to carry him back upstairs.
|
It was too much in the end; he could not bear the distance, nor the waiting.
After missing Hawke several days in a row, Fenris walked to her house and knocked on the door. This time, the slave girl—Orana, who was not a slave—let him in with the meek dip of her head that he remembered all too well. Fenris thanked her as kindly as he could manage, indicated that he did not need anything more from her (for he certainly did not need the reminder of what he’d once been), and paced back and forth in the foyer as soon as she’d vanished again.
What if Hawke said no? What if she wasn’t ready, or—what if she didn’t want him?
If she said no, then he would leave. Of course he would; that was not in question. If she said no…he would shut these dreams, these thoughts away for good. Hawke was too important to lose. Of that, he was certain.
But—what if she said yes?
Fenris sat with a soft thud, bracing his elbows on his knees. It had not occurred to him until now that she may say yes. The need to come to her had been too strong to ignore. It hadn’t allowed him to think far ahead. He had none of the graces he was certain she must be used to; he would have no idea what he was doing. Whatever he’d known or done before the markings was lost to him and Danarius—
No. He would not think of that here and now. He would not taint her home with such associations. Fenris wrapped one hand around the other and brought himself back to the question he was struggling to answer.
Hate and avarice had been written into his skin, but he understood the words now. He could rearrange them, perhaps, to make new ones. For the first time in his life, he’d allowed himself to want and he knew he wanted Hawke. He wanted happiness, wanted those starlit walks to Hightown and cool mornings in the city and golden evenings in her company. Desperately, he wanted her arms around him for longer than a goodbye, wanted to make space in himself for something that wasn’t pain.
If she said yes—he didn’t know. Fenris couldn’t imagine what it would be like to want and have at the same time. He knew that he had to tell her what he felt. Anything beyond that was in her hands. That was…that was something he could live with. He had followed her this far, had he not? Of course he could follow her one step further.
Again, Hawke stepped into the room with bare feet, and again he did not hear her until she was already standing in the doorway. Fenris rose at once, determined to explain himself in as few words as possible.
“I have been thinking of you,” he said before she could speak, and stopped one step before her. When she took a deep breath, her chest brushed against his. He couldn’t actually feel her—of course he couldn’t—but she was so close and—
Tell her, he reminded himself, and went on.
“In fact, I have been able to think of little else. Command me to go and I shall.”
There; let that be the end of it, one way or another. He had no more words at hand, nothing else to explain the confusion her presence instilled in him, nor the heady torment it had wrought upon his sleep. The rest was in her hands.
Whatever she said, he must accept it. Fenris reminded himself of this as she stared up at him, her eyes gleaming faintly in the light of her foyer.
“Did I say anything?” she asked, her voice husky.
Fenris did not know who moved first; if it was he, hands settling onto the warm silk over her shoulders, or Hawke, lips hot over his chin, his jaw, his mouth. He knew only that she was pressing him against the wall, enveloping him in the scent and warmth of her. It was better than the dream had been by orders of magnitude, better by far than anything he’d felt before. When she kissed him, he felt as if she was tracing a new language against his skin, one he had no knowledge of but was nonetheless desperate to learn.
It was a shock when Hawke let go and stepped back, breathing heavily.
“We—I—will you come with me?” she asked, her eyes full of some new light.
“Yes,” he said, always yes; he could not imagine telling her no. Not to that question; certainly not now.
Hawke took his hand in hers, soft, freckled brown skin curling over sharp metal, and Fenris was abruptly, potently aware of how easy it would be to hurt her. All it would take was another misplaced word, a thoughtlessly clenched fist, and she would be left bleeding in his hands.
He would not hurt her, he vowed to himself; he knew himself too well to think for a moment that he could be as careful as she deserved right now, but he would not see her hurt. Fenris shed his gauntlets even as she turned the doorknob to her bedroom. He’d discarded them beside the fireplace before she shut the door behind them.
There had been nights—many nights—when he’d thought of her like this. Now that Hawke stood in the firelight before him, hair mussed, mouth red and full, he found again that his imagination had been sorely lacking. A taste of her had not dulled the hunger at all; it had only made the craving worse, stronger, more desperate.
She waited a few steps from the door; Fenris caught her in his arms again, finding her mouth with a feverish intensity. Three years he had waited, many of them wanting her, often despising himself for wanting or trying to convince himself that he was mistaken. No more; if she would have him, then let them see each other plain. No more constraints; no more caution, no more hiding or obfuscation. If he was the starving man led to the feast, then let him devour her until both of them were sated at last.
Fenris pulled her tightly to him now, even the slight distance between them too much to bear. They stumbled toward the bed, clumsy, all hands and teeth, lacking any semblance of grace. There was a soft sound as he wrapped her in his arms, a gasp or a squeak—he did not know which—but she never stopped kissing him, so he supposed she must not have minded terribly.
Hawke sat at once when her legs hit the bed’s side rail. Fenris let go of her, breathing hard, and watched as her hands toyed with the neckline of her robe. It had loosened slightly with their activities, exposing most of the curve of her right breast. Her fingertips traced the edge of the red silk, brushing over her skin in an arc before pulling the fabric aside at last.
He didn’t realize that he’d been holding his breath until he gasped for air.
“Hawke…” Fenris began, his voice ragged, but could not gather his scattered thoughts. He wanted to touch her more than anything. Even so, it felt as if something would be broken if he reached for her, some last unnameable boundary. His hands twitched at his sides, squeezing into fists and releasing just as quickly.
Hawke’s tongue traced her lower lip, a nervous habit of hers, and she tugged on the loose end of the robe’s belt. The fabric fell down her shoulders in a soft gasp of silk, leaving her chest entirely bare to the night air. Fenris stared at her, tracing the swell of her breasts with his eyes, marking the way her nipples tightened into peaks against the cooler air of her bedroom. Hawke was beautiful—he’d known this since he’d first seen her in the alienage courtyard, when the word meant nothing at all to him.
But she was beautiful now, too. She’d never stopped being beautiful and in that moment it meant everything.
“I, ah,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I’m not an expert, but I suspect this will be easier if neither of us is clothed.”
Of course. Of course it would. He knew that.
Fenris reached automatically for the buckles and ties that held his armor on, eyes still fastened on the rise and fall of her chest. These last barriers fell away far too slowly for his liking, though he removed them as quickly as his fingers could move. His breastplate clanged against the stone of her floor when he dropped it and the leather armor beneath slapped the floor beside it. When at last he wore only his underthings, Hawke shifted forward on the bed.
“Can—can I?” she asked, hands half-raised.
He couldn’t stand this; it was so sweet, so easy, and he did not know what he was doing. Whatever words he might have said fled from him like waves from the shore and touch filled the breach.
The curve of her jaw—he had touched her there before, searching for a pulse after battle. Fenris traced the skin now, his hands hesitant and foreign to him. Hawke closed her eyes and leaned into the contact, her warm breath skimming the inside of his wrist. He let his palm settle at last, thumb tracing the curve of her freckled cheek.
Fenris could not say the words; he could not begin to string them together into a sentence. He reached for her hands instead, still hanging in the air between them, and set them on the ties to his underthings. She understood at once, tugging the ties loose and tracing his hipbone before sliding two fingers into the waistband.
It was almost nothing—almost no touch at all, but Fenris had to let go of her and wrap his hand tightly around the post at the end of the bed to hold himself up. Hawke did not stop. She grasped the other side of the cloth with both hands and tugged it down, down, until at last he was bare before her.
“Oh,” she said, more sigh than speech, and tipped her head up to look at him. “Fenris—you’re beautiful.”
Fenris couldn’t stand it. It was too much—not enough—everything he wanted and nothing he could bear. His hand still rested under her jaw. He used it to turn her toward him now, catching her mouth with his and silencing any further words. When he touched the silk that had fallen to her elbows, she helped him shrug it off. Her hands were careful at first when she touched him, but bolder when he did not stop her. They traced up either side of his ribs and passed softly over his stomach.
Silently, Fenris reached up and pressed a hand over hers. Harder, he urged her without words. Hawke obliged, dragging her nails lightly over either nipple before grasping his shoulders and tugging him down to her.
Again, he could not say later what happened next. It was a blur of pleasure, the inexperience he’d worried over more than made up for by the sheer headiness of touching her and being touched in turn. It wasn’t until he rolled his hips against hers and felt her wet against him that he realized just how far they’d gone.
“Hawke,” he said, and she leaned back as he planted his hands on the bed just over her shoulders. Her pupils had swallowed most of the brown in her eyes, but they still glinted in the firelight.
Beautiful. She’d called him beautiful, but blushed when he’d called her the same. He had no idea what he was doing. He never wanted to leave.
“Y-yes?” she said, and he saw that her lips were red and swollen with kisses, that he’d left a line of red love-marks over her neck and collarbone.
Good, he thought, but exerted the last spider-silk strands of his control to hold himself back. One inch; he would give her one more inch so both of them could be certain.
“Tell me you want this,” Fenris told her. He ached—ached in a way he had not expected, for completion he didn’t remember ever knowing.
Hawke was never still; she was always in motion, as if she couldn’t help herself. Even when they stood and waited for payment on a job, she rocked from foot to foot or tucked her hair back into its plaits. She was restless now, too, her hips lifting and grinding against his. She called a moan from his throat and Fenris pressed himself against her, stilling her movements enough to recall what he was about.
How had he gone so long without kissing her? Holding himself even this far back felt like an impossible exertion of will.
“Hawke,” he prompted, and when he adjusted his hand on her bedspread a loose, black curl wrapped around his finger. He stared at it for a moment, caught by some unspeakable emotion deep in his chest, but she cleared her throat and drew his focus back to her.
“Maria,” she said, and when Fenris blinked at her she went on. “Call me—call me Maria. Please. Not Hawke. Not here.”
Maria —he had heard her called such only once, when she and Carver had gotten into a drunken argument in the Hanged Man. Maria Antonia Beatriz, the younger Hawke had said, in a sing-songy voice plainly intended to annoy her. Fenris, who’d remained entirely sober out of mistrust, had rolled the syllables on his tongue later as he walked home, weighing them against the brusquer, one-syllable Hawke everyone else seemed to prefer.
“Maria,” Fenris said, her name all but a whisper, and he moved his hand away from her hair. When he went on, his voice was ragged. “Tell me you want this.”
“I do,” she said at once, her hands moving again, brushing over his collarbones and lower. “I want you. Fenris, I—”
Fenris didn’t want to hear his name on her tongue; he didn’t want to feel the strange things it was doing to his chest. He wanted only to take great, greedy handfuls of her and hold them hard against him—to know that the flush on her skin was on his account, that the desperate look in her eyes was for him, but his name—
His name would remain his own for now, even if she’d given him hers.
The kiss was hard, half-teeth and half desperation, and she met him touch for touch, her nails digging into the unmarked skin at his hips. Her legs already bracketed his; it was all too easy to slide a hand between them and position himself just so. Maria was slick, inviting, and he wanted to bury himself in her; not just his body inside her warmth, but his self inside of her. He wanted to sink deep and come out new, to be the kind of person who could leave his past behind and—what had she said to him two weeks ago?— look around and build something new.
There was a hate that lived inside him, yes, a poison that he had not willingly placed beneath his skin and could not purge. But now—with her teeth against his throat and his gasps pressed into her shoulder—Fenris could almost convince himself that none of that mattered here. Hawke was good—her body, yes, and her touch—but her mind, too, and her strength and—
Hawke was goodness. If he meant to lose himself anywhere, he’d do far worse than to lose himself in her.
“Oh, there,” she gasped into his ear, and pressed messy kisses over his cheekbone, his ear, his neck.
Fenris hooked an arm under her knee and set himself deeper, deeper inside of her. All reason had fled him; all thought of caution and steadiness and care. He wanted only, desperately, for her to feel as good as he did now, to give her one ounce of the wonder he felt and could not have articulated even if he’d tried.
A log collapsed in the fireplace. Sparks shot forth, brightening the room as her voice rose and her back arched off the bed. For one glorious moment, Hawke shone before him—not like gold or silver or some precious metal; not like harsh sunlight or inconstant moonlight. She shone like the stars in the sky, like the one he’d sought on that long journey from Seheron to Kirkwall, when the only thing he’d had to navigate by was often that most distant of lights.
Maria was still shaking when she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him tight against her. Fenris slid his arm around her back in return, his pace slowing slightly. When Fenris kissed her neck, her breath caught and he tasted salt. He kissed her again and again, softer, slower, as if watching her find release had stolen some of his desperation.
“Fenris,” she said at last, her voice catching between the two syllables.
It was only a name—only his name—and he’d heard her say it a thousand times. Even so, Fenris had never heard her say it like this. He had never heard her say anything like this, so soft and vulnerable he was half-convinced he’d imagined it. He did not itch at the sound of it as he had before; it sounded right, now. It finally fit.
Fenris still rested inside her. Now, he pressed his hips firmly against hers again, marveling at the sensation as it joined with the softness of her arms and legs around him, the slight sting at his waist and back where her fingernails had dug in. The latter seemed right, somehow, as if it had been some tithe he must pay to feel the rest of this liquid joy, as if the pain made the pleasure real. This was no dream, and he was endlessly grateful for that.
No—not grateful. Not anything so insufficient or indistinct as that. He was…he was alive. Awake, as he had not felt in an eon, as if he had just now opened his eyes and found himself in his own body for the very first time.
“Fenris,” she sighed, tipping her head back.
“Maria,” he murmured back, the only word he’d managed in what felt like ages. Maria shuddered and closed her eyes.
Fenris kissed the skin she exposed to him, pressing his thanks into her skin when he could not find the words to voice them aloud. Her eyes were still closed when he leaned back enough to look at them, but he did not fault her for it. It was easier to feel her—to feel all of this—when his senses were not lost on the beauty of her body.
He kissed each of her eyelids, deliberately and carefully, and then each dimple beside her mouth when she smiled at the touch. This could not last much longer—whatever shivering realization he was having was sped along by the pleasure in his body—but he did what little he could to make it last. It did not matter that he knew the feeling must be a product of the moment. He never wanted to be without her, never wanted to lose this awareness of himself again.
Maria let go of him when he leaned back, but he laced his fingers between hers and brought them to his lips. It felt important, somehow, that he hold onto her for the end.
|
Once they’d stripped the mussed blanket from the bed and cleaned themselves up, Fenris waited by the side of the bed, looking anywhere but at Hawke directly.
He was certain that he wasn’t supposed to leave after…something like this. He certainly didn’t want to go. But…
“Will you stay?” Maria asked, and he felt her hand brush against his.
What a fool he was.
He knew her better than to think she would tell him to leave.
Fenris caught her hand in his and lifted it, kissing each of the knuckles in turn, slow and thorough, taking his time. He’d moved too fast before. He had meant to take his time, to make her feel…well.
Perhaps they could try again after they’d rested.
“Of course,” he said, and let her lead him to bed.
He never came closer to telling her he loved her than that moment, when she settled her head on his shoulder and wrapped an arm around his waist. The words were so clear, so obvious that he felt he could almost see them in the air.
I love you.
So simple. So short.
To love something is to lose it, a phantom voice whispered in his ear, a woman’s voice in accented Tevene, hide it away where none of them will see it, Leto. The others will take it if they can.
Fenris frowned, searching his memory for where the words had come from, but he came up short.
“Fenris?” Maria murmured, tucking herself closer and kissing his shoulder. The plait she’d woven in her hair lay over his shoulder, soft and heavy.
“Yes?” he asked. She laughed against his skin, the dimple at the corner of her mouth deepening.
“I just wanted to hear your voice,” she said. Fenris laughed at her—more a huff than anything else—and kissed her forehead, the closest part of her available to him.
“Go to sleep, H—Maria,” he said, and her smile deepened.
“If you say so,” she yawned, and squeezed him one more time.
He could tell she’d fallen asleep a moment later because her breath evened out and her grip on his waist loosened. Even then, the smile did not fade, as if whatever happiness she felt had followed her into sleep.
That smile was the last thing Fenris saw before he, too, drifted away.
|
Leto sat in the herb garden, face turned toward the night sky.
Most of the household was asleep. He should have been asleep, too, only he’d listened at the door to the library today and he’d heard the tutor for the altus say that the stars were people once, or maybe stories. He hadn’t really understood, but then he’d hardly looked up at them before. It made sense to sneak out here in the middle of the night, to settle in the back corner amongst the rosemary bushes and basil plants.
The stars did not look like people to him. They looked like…light through a cloth someone had thrown over the sky.
“Find your way by the stars,” he’d heard a garden slave whisper to one of the kitchen slaves weeks ago. The next day, the kitchen slave had been gone and there had been a terrible uproar. Leto still didn’t understand what had happened. Nobody would explain it to him and Ma had told him to stop asking.
Had the stars, those people very far away, told her where to go when she’d left?
Leto held very still and listened to the night. When he was sure it was safe, he lifted one hand and held it above him, a dark silhouette that blocked a small section of stars overhead.
No matter how he reached for them, they stayed far away.
|
Leto was curled up in a bed, bodies pressed snugly in around him, and he was exhausted. His hands were sore—though he did not know why—and someone had rubbed sharp-smelling balm into them before he’d curled up for bed.
How comforting it was to climb onto the mattress and know that the day was done. How comforting, to know that he would not be left to huddle in the greatness of it alone.
|
“Shh, Leto,” a voice said, and pressed a warm piece of bread into his hands. Butter and honey melted into the steaming treat.
Above him, a vague figure laughed, and he loved the sound of it.
“Share with your sister and keep it to yourself,” they whispered, and pressed a hand to his back to hurry him off. “The others will take it if they see it.”
Leto went, already calculating precisely how much he could eat of this—fresh, steaming, sweet!—before Varania objected.
When he bit into it, he thought it must be the best thing he had ever tasted in his life.
|
It hurt when he was beaten, but it hurt him worse to watch it happen to Varania
She was so little, you see; she didn’t understand yet that clumsiness would not be tolerated. Leto had told them that he was the one who’d dropped the plate, but it hadn’t been any use. He hadn’t been there when the dishes fell. Everyone knew it. He’d been thoroughly switched for the lie.
Varania whimpered and pressed her face into the pillow when he dabbed the elfroot balm onto her back and Leto winced with her, his own shoulders burning with the results of his punishment.
He did not like to see her hurt. He did not like to look at the stripes, blooming red across her back, nor the blood it left on his hands when he pressed balm over the angry lines.
It was then, looking down at his sister, that he first thought:
There must be a way out for them, and for me.
|
He had always remembered receiving the markings. This memory was not a surprise to him, nor the pain. Fenris lay on a bed afterward, incapable of speech, fading in and out of consciousness. It would have been a blessing if the pain of the lyrium was a momentary thing, gained and gone, but the pain lingered with the memories, flaring up anytime he was so foolish as to think he might move.
No one kept him company now. He lay on a cot alone, too weak to move. When he managed to drag his eyelids open, he could just barely see through the tiny window set high in the wall.
A brilliant star shone in the only sliver of sky he could see.
Fenris could not lift his hand to reach for it.
|
A shape scrawled in dust: two stick figures, one big and one small. A tiny finger points to one.
“That’’s you, Leto.”
Hands tangle in his hair, dragging him from cold water that spills across his naked skin. A voice whispering “little wolf” into his ear.
A rap across his knuckles; “Shut your eyes, boy; a slave does not read. Do as you’re told or it’ll be the switch next time.” Hot tears down his cheeks, hands dipped into scalding, soapy water.
The pointed tip of a knife tracing the markings over his bare ribs, a woman’s cruel voice reminding him to mind his place. Hunger that gnaws on his ribs and cannot be ignored.
“Kill them, my wolf.” Blood on his hands. Blood in the air. He is choking on it, as if his very lungs reject what he has done.
Stars, stretching wide above him, encompassing the whole world until it feels like it is spinning around him. Fenris is running, running, glowing and burning with them, and the sky is where the road ahead should be and it is wrong, wrong, wrong—
|
When Fenris opened his eyes, he was abruptly, intensely awake.
It took a moment to situate himself, because his mind was lost in the thousands of days of his life before this room. He was Leto, hands reaching for the stars, biting into the softest bread he’d ever tasted, minding his sister’s wounds. He was Fenris in agony, lyrium winnowing itself through his flesh and blowing away everything that had come before.
Even as he sorted through these moments, they slipped through his fingers. He tried to grasp them—tried to hold on to something, some memory, some minute fragment—and it was all in vain.
My name was—
No. Gone.
When he lifted his hand above him, he did not recognize it at first. Lyrium streaked beneath the skin, pulsing with a fading light that outlined each knuckle and joint. Beyond it, a red canopy loomed over a four poster bed.
Hawke’s bedroom.
He was Fenris, and he was in her bedroom because he’d…because they’d…
The soft rise and fall of breath beside him caught his attention and he turned to look at her. Maria slept deeply, facing away from him under the sheets. She’d plaited her hair before the two of them climbed into bed, informing him as she did so that it would be horribly tangled in the morning otherwise. Fenris’s fingers were tangled in the end of it now, wrapped around the thick red ribbon she’d tied at the end. The ribbon was silken and delicate. It clung to the calluses on his fingers when he tried to draw his hand away. The silk slipped from her hair easily, but her breathing went on unchanged as if she had not noticed its loss at all.
There was something horrible about the sight of the red clinging to his fingers, the shock of her dark hair against the pale sheets, the cold air around him, and he—he was momentarily certain that he was going to be sick.
The fire had died down at some point in the night. The sheets had been warm enough when the two of them had slipped underneath, for Maria had immediately wrapped herself around him and she was always warm. Now, the sweat on his skin chilled him and the shivers did not abate after several moments of panicked breathing.
Still clutching the ribbon in one fist, Fenris rose and padded to the fire to stoke the dying embers. That task accomplished, he just—stood still for a time, staring at the flames.
It had been—it had all been right there. He’d held it in his hands. Fenris had been— someone before, someone who’d meant something to others. Nothing remained now but the certainty that he had forgotten something important, something unforgivable that he had done. No; no, he could not recall it. It was gone, and he was left naked and shaking and bereft of his own history once more.
Fenris dressed in silence. This much, he remembered how to do. More than once, he was forced to brace a hand against the wall when he would have lost his balance. He’d thought the armor would help, would provide some sort of—of steadiness. It didn’t. It sat wrong on his skin instead, brushing over the markings in a way that made him aware of them all over again. He held as still as possible to make the sensation stop, needing to think (why couldn’t he think?), needing to focus.
When he held his hands before the fire, the firelight shone across the markings again. What a fool he’d been to think he could move on; he’d been so certain he could erase them in his own way, that he could write something new in their place. Instead, he’d found hidden volumes already scribed away in secret.
Had he thought to set his past aside, to make room for her, for happiness? Had he really thought that such a thing was possible? She’d dipped her hands into his soul and drawn memory forth and the sight of it made him sick.
No—no. That was not fair. Maria had done nothing but l—care for him. She was blameless in this, and because she was blameless he owed it to her to wait for her to wake before he walked away. She deserved an explanation—whatever paltry explanation he could give.
Shoulders hunched, Fenris turned away from her and waited for the end.
|
Fenris didn’t tie the ribbon over his gauntlet right away. He didn’t even remember he’d taken it until two days later, when he reached into his pocket to pay for a loaf of bread and found soft red silk instead.
It was no exaggeration to say that he forgot what he was doing entirely and walked home in a daze. He didn’t eat dinner that night. Instead, he sat on the floor before the fire and ran his fingers over the narrow strip of red instead. It still smelled like her—sage and anise and smoke.
He was punishing himself. He knew that. Maria had offered no recriminations, had said very little at all when he’d paced around her fireplace raving about memories and what he had lost. She’d just looked at him, the sheet half-pulled over her, a feeble shield against the damage he’d done.
If there was a way back, if there was a way forward, he could not see it.
He didn’t tie the ribbon around his wrist then, either. He tucked into his pocket instead, curled up on his bed, and stared out the window at the hazy night sky.
Through the smoke that hung about Kirkwall’s sky, Fenris could see a distant star.
He rolled over and looked at the wall instead, counting cracks in the plaster until his eyes grew heavy at last.
|
He wasn’t certain if he ought to go to the Hanged Man to play cards.
Fenris did not ask himself if she had told the others or in some way made him unwelcome. He knew Maria better than that. Still, it might cause her pain to see him—or perhaps it would cause her pain if he stayed away.
He did not want her to think that he’d left for good, that he had abandoned her entirely. Never that. So when the time came for him to leave, Fenris put his hand in his pocket, twined the ribbon between his fingers, and set off for Lowtown.
They were laughing in the room above—someone was always laughing when Hawke’s friends were together—and he followed the sound with no small amount of dread curling in his stomach. He almost turned back twice—once when Nora nodded to him from the bar, the second time when he paused at the top of the stairs and heard Isabela telling the rest of them about some sailor she’d tupped the night before.
No. He could do this. He would go into Varric’s room. He would look at her. That was all he needed to do—just look at Hawke and he would know where they stood.
They didn’t fall silent when he walked in the room. They kept talking instead, Isabela half-standing from the bench as she spoke, the others laughing or leaning past her to talk to each other. The last seat on the bench, the one between Maria and Varric, stood open. Fenris hesitated, certain that this must be the wrong choice, certain that he should stay away. Perhaps there was no place for him here anymore; perhaps it would be better if he just—
Without pausing in her conversation, without even looking up, Maria hooked an arm around Isabela’s waist and pulled them both toward Varric. The open spot was now on the opposite end of the table, as far away from her as he could get while still not looking at her face.
How could one person feel so grateful and so sick at the same time? Fenris sat, taking the hand of cards Isabela passed to him, and tried to sort what he was feeling into anything comprehensible. He failed miserably—he ought to have expected as much—and later, when everyone else had said goodbye, he waited behind them like a fool, still wondering if she would take his hand and lead him up the stairs to home.
Of course she wouldn’t. He knew better. Hawke didn’t walk home at all; instead, she called a cheerful “goodnight everyone!” to the assembled crowd, took Merrill’s arm, and turned away toward the alienage.
Fenris watched her walk away, his heart squeezing in his chest. The others walked away, too, saying their goodnights to each other as they left: Anders to Darktown, Aveline and Sebastian to Hightown, and Isabela and Varric back into the tavern. Soon, only Fenris was left standing alone in the night.
He tucked his hand into his pocket and found the ribbon again. It didn’t smell like her anymore—it had been almost a week, and constant handling meant the subtle scent had faded quickly. Even so, the ribbon had been hers, was now the only part of her he could hold onto.
For several long moments, Fenris stood alone and held it up against the sky, trying to look at it in the light. A useless notion; the moon was hidden away behind thick clouds and the starlight could not reach far enough to help. Even the light from the tavern did not quite reach him, standing in the shadows as he was.
In the end, he tied it around his wrist instead.
It could be a…reminder of what he’d had and lost.
No. That wasn’t right; he knew he would never forget. How could he? It had briefly been the happiest night of his life. He would remember and mourn it for a very long time yet.
A…promise, then.
A promise that he would choose to stay until he made this right, if such a thing was possible. He would tie it around his wrist where he could see it plain as writing on a page.
Yes. That thought sat better.
Fenris tied the knot off and tucked in the ends with exquisite care, still alone on a Lowtown street. When he was done at last, he let his hand fall away and turned on his heel.
There were many stairs to Hightown and a long way to go until he could rest. He might as well get started now.