Chapter Text
Fenris opens his eyes.
At first the world is too bright, the sunlight streaming through the open window enough to blind him; he blinks through the watering, and slowly finds the heavy beams of Varric’s ceiling, the deep-stained wood walls, the fat brass lamp still cheerful atop the side-table. He blinks again, lifting a hand to his head as he struggles to chase back the groggy memory of dreams, and begins to rise.
“Oh,” says a voice, startled and light. Merrill. “You’re—you’re awake!”
An irritated noise at his side: his sister, fingers pressed over her own eyes, her mouth pinched with exhaustion. “Be silent, please.”
“I will, only—only—“ Merrill bites her own lip, her fingers white around her staff. The room is empty save her, even the dog gone—how long have they been asleep? “Lethallan?”
Fenris twists, ignoring the protests of overtense muscles, of the faint throbbing ache behind his eyes. Hawke—
Hawke, who lies still between them with one eye cracked open, a faint, weary smile, her fingers wiggling a slow hello to the room at large. Merrill makes the noise like the cry of a swallow. “You’re awake. You’re awake! How are—are you feeling all right? Are you—all right?”
“I’m awake?” Hawke croaks. “I feel dead.”
“Let me go fetch Anders. He’s just outside—after you stopped screaming he made everyone leave until he decided they could stop hovering. But I don’t think he’ll be able to stop them now.”
That Hawke does not immediately demur tells Fenris how poorly she feels. Eventually, she says, “That…might not be a bad idea. But—Merrill—“
Merrill’s eyes soften. She smiles, small and bright. “Of course, lethallan. For as long as I can.”
“Thank you,” Hawke breathes, and Merrill slips away, the door closing softly behind her.
At last, there is silence. Varania rolls to her side on Varric’s crumpled quilts, pushing up with a careful elbow; then, with a long, slow exhale, she rises to her feet. She wavers only once, reaching for the side-table to steady herself, glaring at Fenris’s aborted stretch towards her. “I am no invalid,” she says shortly, pursing her lips. “Look to your Champion.”
“I resent that implication,” Hawke mutters, just as hoarse as before, and sniffs at Varania’s rolled eyes. Still, as Fenris’s sister makes her cautious way to the chair beneath the window he cannot help but be grateful for her consideration, for even this little privacy she can give them before their friends burst through. He lowers his gaze, finds Hawke’s eyes already on him, something both expectant and opaque enough in her look to nearly unnerve him, even now.
He lifts a hesitant hand to her cheek. Her eyelashes flutter; he grows bolder, brushing her hair from her eyes, smoothing the backs of his fingers over her forehead, the rise of her cheekbone. “Tell me the truth. Are you well?”
Her head shifts on Varric’s embroidered pillow. “The truth?”
“Yes.”
“I feel like I’ve been raked apart over hot coals and then put back together all wrong.”
He snorts quietly, bending closer, feeling her breathing change with the shift of his weight on the bed. “I believe you.”
“Why? Do you feel much better?”
“…No.”
Hawke gives a soft, tired laugh, and when he feels a tug at his hip Fenris looks down to find her fingers twisted into the hem of his jerkin. She says, quietly, “I remember, Fenris.”
His heart jumps. “What part of it?”
“Everything.”
He tries to speak, finds no words. “Hawke—“
“How long,” she asks, her voice low, her fingers tightening, “are you going to make me wait?”
Fenris laughs, the sound made looser by the hammering of his pulse in his throat. He slides one hand into her hair, the weight of her head reassuring and real in his palm; with his other he curls his fingers beneath her chin, touching the tip of his thumb to her lower lip. Hawke watches him throughout, steady and unflinching; at that her tongue comes out to wet her lips, and despite the heat that explodes through his chest Fenris manages to chuckle.
He leans down. Her eyes flutter but do not close, her hand skittering from his hem to his stomach, his chest, the bare curve of his throat. His lips brush just barely over her forehead and she sighs; he catches her cheek despite the quick turn of her head and she sighs again, more impatiently. “Don’t tease,” she whispers, looking up, her voice pained—
Fenris kisses her.
Hawke makes a quiet, startled noise that he feels to his very bones; then her eyes close and her hand slides to the back of his neck, pulling him nearer as she slants her mouth better against his. He drags in a breath through his nose, shifting his weight above her, his free hand moving to brace itself on the bed at her shoulder. She laughs against his lips, her eyes crinkling with good humor; he smiles himself, and kisses her again, and again, long slow things that draw on every part of him left after this waking dream, holding nothing back, not any longer, not after three years’ worth of wasted time.
Somehow she frees her other hand from the throw tangled around her hips, reaches up to his nape, dragging her fingernails into his hair there to send a rush of heat down his spine. He knows the lyrium lights in sporadic flickers over his bare arms, his back, his ribs where the thorns twist beneath his leathers; he does not care and Hawke does not once look to them, her mouth seeking his mouth over and over again, hot and wanting, her fingertips dancing down his jaw, up the curves of his ears to make him shudder, into his hair again.
Three years. He will never be able to repay her.
But, lifting his head at last at Varania’s quiet murmur of his name, looking down at Hawke with her lips reddened, her cheeks flushed, her dark hair caught hopelessly around his fingers, her eyes alight with hope and gladness and a silent promise that makes his stomach twist in dizzy anticipation and his fingers tremble as he cups her cheek one last time, he thinks—
If it takes every moment of the rest of his life, he will try.
—
Later, when the room has quieted again from the explosion of laughter and tears and the dog leaping excitedly enough to break nearly every breakable thing in the room—to Varric’s vocal dismay—Fenris seats himself beside Hawke on the edge of Varric’s bed. Isabela throws him a quick, proud glance before turning again to Anders beside her, his clear fatigue from their healing beginning to fade, if only a little, as she teases him. Aveline and Donnic stay only long enough to promise a later visit to them both; then they are gone with Toby’s barks ringing behind them.
Merrill goes next, when the story is finished and the explanations completed, drooping nearly as badly by the end of it as Anders. Hawke embraces her fiercely, whispering something in her ear that Fenris cannot catch even so near as he sits; whatever it is it is enough to make Merrill’s eyes grow damp at the corners, her head held high and proud.
“And take Anders with you,” Hawke suggests. Toby flops atop her feet beside the bed, his tongue lolling happily; he licks Fenris’s ankle once, then rests his heavy head on his toes. Fenris grimaces. “He looks like he’s about to fall dead asleep standing up.”
Isabela shakes her head, sliding smoothly from the windowsill and tucking her arm around Anders’s waist. “He’ll never make it,” she says, and rests her chin on his shoulder. “Come sleep with me for a little while, sweet thing. I’ve got a bed and a pillow and everything.”
“Sleep?” Anders says doubtfully.
“Just sleep. Unless you’d like anything more.”
He shakes his head, laughing, scrubbing a tired hand over his face. “Fine. Hawke, you know where I’ll be. Any signs of—anything, and you send someone for me, you understand?”
“Yes, ser,” she says, then adds more quietly, “Anders, thank you.”
“Of course.” He gives a general wave as Isabela guides him out after Merrill; they hear his booted feet stumble down the narrow hallway, Isabela’s low, throaty laugh—and a distant door clicks closed. Sebastian follows close behind, pausing only to clasp arms with Fenris and bemusedly receive Hawke’s kiss on his cheek. She does not explain and Sebastian does not press, and after a quick, genuine smile that brightens the room as much as any benediction, he is gone with the rest.
Varric sighs, tipping back in his desk chair until its legs creak, hands toying with some bauble from his desk in his lap, staring meditatively at the ceiling. “Well,” he says into the sudden quiet. “That’s that, then, isn’t it?”
Hawke closes her eyes, leaning without shame to rest her head on Fenris’s shoulder. “Oh, Varric. Isn’t that enough?”
“I don’t know. It seems like a perfectly good setup for a sequel.”
“What sequel? ‘And then they all went home and slept for a hundred years without dreaming once.’ The end.”
His voice is deceptively mild. “I was thinking more of the new characters.”
Hawke’s head lifts away from Fenris’s shoulder. He would mourn its loss—but Varania lifts her chin in challenge, her red hair knotted again where it belongs. Carefully, Fenris stands, freeing his foot from the dog’s weight; then he crosses to his sister where she stands at the window, framed by the brilliant blue sky. “Varania.”
“Leto.”
He inclines his head, acknowledgement; he says, “The choice is yours.”
Her eyes flicker to Hawke, to Varric at his desk, to Fenris again. “I… I would stay here. For a time, at least. I have no coin,” she adds defiantly. “No home. No clothes, even. I have nothing. But I would stay here. With…with you, my brother. I would know you as you are now.”
A slow warmth begins to unfurl in his chest. “Are you sure this is what you wish?”
Her eyes flash. “Do not question me.”
He—he remembers this, remembers too that he has never triumphed over it, and when his sister scowls he laughs, inexplicably glad. “I have rooms.”
“They’re filthy.” Hawke rises gingerly to her feet, her hand on Toby’s bracing head as she crosses to them. Fenris puts a hand beneath her elbow; she looks at Varania and adds, wryly, “Just warning you.”
“I’ve slept in gutters before. I will try it. I will see for myself, and no one else.”
“Good,” Varric says, the front feet of his chair knocking to the ground again. His eyes are very warm as he drops the trinket he’d been toying with into Fenris’s hand—Danarius’s pendant, the chain broken, the power snapped and gone. “Now, all three of you—go home.”
Hawke’s home, they decide at last, at least for the moment. “Not that Fenris’s mansion isn’t fit for visitors,” Hawke explains as they ease down the stairs into the emptied main hall, the marks of battle already scoured away along with Danarius’s body, Corff already behind his bar, Norah already tipping drinks into empty glasses. “But, well—it isn’t fit for visitors. Yet.”
Fenris snorts. “It will be.”
“Will it?”
“Yes,” he says sourly, mock-glowering at Hawke as she grins at Varania, biting back his own smile. His sister rolls his eyes and jumps as the dog noses her out of the way of a chair; then she smiles herself, stroking Toby’s nose, exclaiming as he bounds forward, his hindquarters wriggling so hard in excitement at the door to the Hanged Man that he nearly upends a table.
“Do all nobles in Kirkwall own such beasts?” she asks, and across the room Norah curses at his bark.
“No,” Fenris says, too quick; Hawke adds just as fervently, “Thank the Maker.”
Varania laughs. And strides forward and throws open the door, allowing Toby to precede her into the square, as if she belongs there, as if she has never meant to be anywhere but this city, this place, her future laid out at her feet, her brother at her back. She pauses once, and looks back over her shoulder, her hair afire in the sun. She asks, “Well? Do you come with me?”
His sister. A mage—a Tevinter mage, another apostate to count within their circle—and his mother’s hands, and eyes like his own eyes, and a memory not so faint as it was before. He meets Hawke’s lifted eyebrow with his own, hardly able to fathom how they have come to this place; she shakes her head and he smiles, and though they move slowly they move together, towards his sister where she stands in full day, no shadow on her face.
He touches her shoulder, gently. Hawke stands on his other side, her arm linked through his own, smiling bright as sunlight. He says, “With you.”
Varania stills. Then she smiles herself, not as widely but more precious for the cost of it, and she turns, and they walk together into the city.
—
end.