Chapter Text
It was early morning, dawn just beginning to colour the horizon, and there was blood all over his hands.
“It lives!” a voice declared. Behind him, the baby's weak cry confirmed the words. Anders sent up a brief prayer of thanks, but spared the child no further attention. He had his hands full trying to control the hemorrhage that was turning the mother steadily greyer with each passing second.
He shifted, keeping pressure with hands and magic on the girl's belly. His bad knee protested taking his weight in the awkward position and he ignored it, clenching his teeth. His arm had been throbbing for an hour now. He just needed to buy himself a few minutes...
“Merrill,” he said, “you're a-” blood mage. He strangled the words before anyone could hear. Even in the alienage there were sometimes Templars around, and he wouldn't bring the chantry down on an innocent mage, however risky her practices. “I'm going to have to let go to heal her,” he said instead. “Try to keep the blood inside.”
“What's happening?” asked the elvhen woman at the head of the bed. Her voice was hoarse but steady, her daughter's limp hand clutched tightly in both of hers.
“It was a long labour,” he said. “The womb is exhausted; it isn't clamping down as it should to stop the bleeding. I can fix it, but I need Merrill to hold off the bleeding, and I need quiet so I can work.”
He dragged at his sparse reserves of mana, worn down from the aftermath of a minor tunnel collapse that afternoon, and from keeping the child alive through the difficult labour, and threaded his magic into the overstretched fibres and twisting blood vessels of the woman's womb.
Back to work.
Most of an hour later, in the weak light of early morning, he pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, ignoring another warning twinge in his knee, and declared both mother and child provisionally safe. The mother would need fluids as soon as she was awake to swallow them, and the child would need watching, to be sure it had suffered no subtle harm in the minutes it had taken Merrill to call him, but both would live.
The baby's grandmother had released her sleeping daughter's hand in order to hold her grandson. She gazed down at him with a slightly satisfied smile, rocking him gently. Even tired as he was, the sight brought a smile to Anders' lips as well. It was far from the worst ending he'd seen for being called to a bad birth in the middle of the night.
His good mood carried him through the streets of lowtown and into darktown, a lightness in his heart that made the dim, grimy light of the undercity a little brighter. He took his time getting back to the clinic – If there was an emergency, someone would find him, and the awkward positions he'd found himself holding during the birth had been a strain on his battered joints – not so much pain yet, not with every step at least, but the awareness that it was coming if he pushed himself any further. It was worth a few extra minutes to move carefully, leaning a little against the tunnel wall to take the weight off his right side.
All he needed was a few lyrium potions and to catch up on a few of the many hours of sleep he'd missed that night, and he might even be fit to work in the morning.
So naturally it was less than half an hour later that he woke to Hawke pounding on his door.
***
“Just a small run up to the coast,” Anders growled under his breath. “We won't even need weapons!”
He dropped a fireball on the slaver mage, and fumbled for the second of the two lyrium potions Hawke had managed to supply him with, uncorking it and draining it to the dregs in a single motion. A brief rush of mana coursed through him, but he was painfully aware that it was not enough.
Nothing to be done for it now. He flung a healing spell at Isabela, catching her in mid-leap, and sagged back, watching two more slavers run towards him.
Damn it Hawke.
Fenris snapped his blade up, catching the rogue's dagger and sending it flying. The rogue tried to bring his other blade into play, but he'd underestimated Fenris' speed, and Fenris was already long gone. He waited a heartbeat for the wild thrust to throw off the man's balance, then struck, cleaving through the man's spine.
Watching the body fall, he felt a flicker of something he couldn't name. The man had been young, and childishly overconfident, clever with his knives and fool enough to believe that quick hands would make him a match for a warrior out of legends. Fenris might have felt sorry for him, if not for the manacles hanging from his belt.
He stepped over the body and made for the enemy mage.
Anders whipped his staff around, catching the swordsman on his left across the thigh and dropping him to one knee with a sickening thud. The twisting motion put his weight at the wrong angle on his bad leg and he stumbled as it gave out, caught himself on a root protruding from the crumbling embankment and hauled himself back to his feet just in time to unleash a wave of ice at the man coming up behind Hawke. That man ground to a halt, frost forming across his skin, and Anders turned back to finish off his own assailant with a wave of magical force.
He stepped back gingerly and surveyed the field. Isabela was taking on two at once, holding her own, her hands flashing faster than he could follow. Hawke had gutted the one he'd frozen, and was driving another back against the cliffs, dancing in and out of sword range on the heavier warrior. Fenris-
Fenris was laying into the slaver mage like a charging bronto, absorbing one blast after another from the woman's staff as he battered at her defensive spells. She faltered under the onslaught, her attacks growing more fumbling and and desperate, and despite his exhaustion Anders felt a brief rush of vicarious satisfaction. As a healer, perhaps he ought to have had more qualms. But as a mage, and one who had spent too much of his life in chains, he would shed no tears for someone who turned her power to such vile ends.
He was so caught up in watching the battle that he missed the second slaver creeping up on Fenris' left. The rogue appeared out of nowhere, materializing from a stand of scrubby brush that couldn't possibly have concealed a person his size to loop a thin cord around the elf's neck and jerk him backwards.
Fenris was equally surprised, but adapted quickly, moving with the force and turning the fall into a controlled roll that brought him up facing his new enemy. But the cord was still looped around his neck, and the slaver jerked it tight as Fenris grabbed for it. He managed to get two fingers inside, which kept him breathing, but now he was fighting one-handed. Worse, he had his back to the mage, who was gathering herself for a more complex working that Anders was fairly sure would do the elf real harm.
No time for subtlety. He pushed off from the bank behind him, praying his legs would hold him as he surged forward, gathering the tattered shreds of his mana. The last of his sustained spells dissolved and fell apart as he stripped away the power that had maintained them, using it to burn through the rope around Fenris' neck, and throwing the last dregs into a jolt of lightning, which he flung at the enemy spellcaster as she raised her hands.
Fenris, released from the rope, moved like lightning himself. He surged forward, his sword flashing as the slaver mage stumbled back, and the rogue who had snared him went down in a welter of blood. Then he was on the mage. His first cut took her across the chest, spattering blood across the sand. His second took off her head.
The beach was abruptly very quiet. Anders' body wavered as the rush of battle drained out of him. Pain flooded back to the surface of his awareness, stronger now for the loss of the healing spells that normally kept it to a dull roar. He sagged against a tree, indulging in a few seconds weakness while no eyes were on him, then straightened and forced steel into his spine and spring into his steps, ignoring the sudden anguished throbbing in his knee.
It's just pain, he reminded himself wearily. It's not doing any damage, it's just unpleasant. Which can't be helped at this point, so buck up and carry on.
He started down the trail, determinedly not limping. If that enemy mage had any lyrium on her he might be able to patch up that cut on Hawke's shoulder before they started back.
Fenris wiped his blade on the dead mage's robes, sheathed it, and turned to look around. Dead men littered the beach, variously armed and armoured. At least half carried some instrument of their trade – chains to bind their captives, whips and drugged flasks to keep them quiet.
Fenris, gazing across the mess, felt exhausted by more than just the day's skirmish.
He walked over to the young rogue he'd killed and nudged the body with one foot, flipped him over. The corpse's face still held an echo of the expression of furious shock, it had worn when Fenris had taken him down.
We kill twelve of them today, and tomorrow another twelve take their places.
“It never ends.”
“What doesn't?” asked Hawke.
“This.” He gestured vaguely at the scattered corpses with their armament of chains and shackles. “Slavers, blood mages...those with power preying on those without.”
“They made a choice.” Anders voice was weary, but there was venom in it under the surface. “And they paid for it. This lot, at least, won't be taking any more children.”
There might have been a flicker of blue in his eyes...or maybe it was just the light.
“You are one to talk about choices,” Fenris replied.
Anders grimaced and turned away, and Fenris sighed. He had not meant...
I was calling you a fool, not a slaver.
He could not accept that there was any justification for making a pact with a demon, and there was no denying that Anders was a fool to have done so. But if there was one thing Fenris had finally concluded about him, it was that he had not done it for power.
Fenris had seen mages who made deals in pursuit of power, seen the luxury and decadence and carefree destructiveness of their lives. Anders ramshackle clinic in the undercity and ineffectual crusading against the Chantry's laws was a far cry from it.
But Anders would likely not take any kinder to being called a fool, and attempts at clarification between him and Fenris usually ended badly, each of them taking the worst possible meaning from the other's words.
In truth, Fenris had long since tired of it. But they had made a pattern of arguing now, and neither of them knew how to break it.
“We should move on,” he said. “We've only a few hours to make it back to the city before nightfall.”
***
They would not make it back by nightfall.
At first it had been Isabela holding them up. The pirate was like a crow, ever on the hunt for shiny objects. She was perpetually spotting something just off the track that she needed to investigate, some body or old crate that had washed ashore. Hawke indulged her, in no small part, he thought, because Hawke was half-packrat herself. Her expedition to the Deep Roads might have brought her wealth and position, but she had never shed the habit of collecting everything of value she could lay hands on.
Anders had not joined them in their scavenging. In fact the mage had been unusually quiet the entire walk back. Fenris wondered at first if he might inadvertently have struck at some buried hurt with his earlier words, but as the afternoon wore on with Anders making no effort to strike at him in turn, he concluded that it must be something else. It wasn't just the uncharacteristic silence – the mage was tight-lipped and off balance, favouring his right side, and seemed to be getting worse, not better, as they walked. He leaned more heavily on his staff, and when they stopped his hand went unconsciously to the bandages he wore at knee and elbow, wrapping them a little tighter or massaging absently at the joints.
Finally Fenris dropped back to where the mage hobbled along the rocky track, and pitched his voice so the others would not overhear. “Are you quite well, mage?”
“Fine,” said Anders irritably, in the tone of a man who was definitely not fine.
Fenris looked him over, taking in the paleness of his face, the tension in his shoulders and jaw, the white lines around his lips where they pressed together, the deathly-tight grip on his staff. He had not been so badly off on the journey out here. Had he been injured in the fight? Fenris ran back over the battle in his mind, not recalling any unusually hard blow the mage had taken. But combat was chaotic, and Fenris had not been watching him every moment.
He asked as much, and Anders bristled, his voice growing even sharper than before.
“I said I'm fine!” he snapped, jerking away from the hand Fenris had unconsciously raised to help him over a patch of uneven ground. He stumbled, and stifled a cry behind clenched teeth as he caught himself. He pulled himself upright, resuming his steady, difficult progress. “Nothing happened to me today,” he said. Acidly, he added, “And my petty weaknesses are none of your blighted business.”
Fenris eyed him coolly. He knew better than to take offense at the mage's wounded snappishness. There was no insult in the man's words, no slight against Fenris' character or history, no veiled implication that he was no better than Danarius. The mage was in pain, that was all, and Fenris had seen enough pain in his life to know how it could make one short-tempered and sharp-tongued. It was nothing personal - which made it something of an improvement on their usual arguments.
He thought for a moment, about calling up to Hawke, asking for a halt whether the mage wanted it or not. It might do the man good, to rest a while.
But Anders seemed not to wish anyone to notice...whatever was going on with him. And for all Fenris knew the best thing for him would be to get back to his clinic, with his medicines and poultices, as soon as possible.
So after a long, thoughtful moment, he gave a deliberate nod and turned back to the trail, leaving the mage to his private struggle.
***
“I think I can get two sovereigns for the lot,” said Hawke, rifling through the bag of random junk she had pulled off the slavers and combed off the beach. “which makes five all together, with the coin those bastards had on them. Shall we meet at the Hanged man tomorrow? I'll see everyone gets paid then.”
They gave their agreements to this plan – Isabela's a saucy grin, Anders' only an exhausted nod - and began to go their separate ways. Fenris turned to follow Hawke up the stairs toward hightown, but stopped halfway up the stairs, his conscience gnawing at him.
The mage was injured, in some way, Fenris was sure of it. Hawke and Isabela might not have noticed, but he had. And however badly he and Anders got on, the thought of the mage collapsing somewhere in the tunnels between the city gates and his clinic sat ill with him. He would blame himself, if such a thing were to happen when he could have prevented it. And from the mage's pain-lined face and white-knuckled grip on his staff as they had entered the city, the scenario seemed all too likely.
It did not have to turn into another occasion for a fight, after all. They need not even discuss it. He could follow at a distance, and if Anders arrived at his clinic without incident, Fenris would simple get home an hour or two later than he would have otherwise.
He scowled. He did not want to escort the mage home. He wanted to go home himself, and clean the dust and blood from his armour, and rest.
But he had learned much about having friends, and comrades, over the years since his escape. And whatever their faults, Fenris was not a man who abandoned his friends. Not anymore.
He glanced back over his shoulder, thinking of the bright fires and spacious bathing facilities in his stolen manor. Then he sighed and followed the mage.