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~*~*~
She remembers the first night he came to the estate.
She'd been late, coming home, though she couldn't remember why, something that hadn't left her covered in blood, anyway, and Orana had been waiting in the entry hall, hovering anxiously as she took her cloak and waiting for her to slip out of her boots and into her house shoes so that she could take the former away for cleaning. In the few weeks since they'd rescued her she'd tried telling the elf girl it wasn't necessary, but without such meaningless tasks the girl had nothing to do. So she tried to ignore her as she tried to ignore Bodahn—it was Mother's task to run the house, anyway—but that night Orana had stayed close, whispered that the kind healer had come hours earlier and done nothing but stand by the fireplace and fidget, and was everything all right?
Hawke had sighed. Yes, she'd said, her stomach sinking and fluttering all at once, and then she'd stepped into the front hall to observe her guest.
He was handsome, objectively speaking, if too thin from too little food and too much work and the unquenchable spirit-flame burning within him, his nose long, his hair surprisingly neat, as though he'd stopped to fix it before coming. It shifted from burnished to shining gold in the firelight as he turned his head and saw her, a quiet hope in his tawny eyes.
She hadn't been ready. "I'm going to change," she'd said, and then she'd disappeared up the stairs. If your door is open, he'd said, and so she didn't close it, hid in the corner as she peeled off her shirt and trousers and donned her robe, stood in front of her fire with her arms crossed, huddling against an unseen chill.
He remembers that she'd laughed.
She had laughed, he'd heard it himself, not just when she'd made that crack about the sandwich but when he'd touched her, nervously receptive to his nervous gift, two fumbling fools making love on a quiet night, and he remembers that she'd smiled at him, pulled him to her, onto the bed, sighing away his fears that somehow this was a mistake, that he shouldn't kiss her shouldn't touch her shouldn't want her shouldn't be wasting his time having what wasn't his—
That, at least, he knew to be Justice. Because she'd taken his hands, kissed him whenever he started his nervous half-mad ramblings about impossibilities, told him she wanted him with words and so much more with her tight grip on his back, an unsurprising strength that made him heady with his own weakness. She was thunder and lightning, striking at will, and he hungered to be so electrified, to be so convicted, and she'd wanted him and he'd wanted her with the burning of three long years and too many sleepless nights and together the force of that wanting had consumed him. He'd given all he could, and in the morning he'd given himself again and she'd wanted it. He remembers that.
She remembers it had been…different. His fingers were long and his knuckles were knobbly and his hands covered her in large expanses. Isabela's hands had been small and her fingers delicate; his calluses were in different places. He was flat where Isabela had been round, and as for the rest of him—
Isabela had only ever needed her hands, and the sly curl of a smirk at the edge of her mouth.
He'd asked to move in and she'd said yes, said I want you here, and maybe he'd added in the bit about until we die but in their line of work, of being what they were, it wasn't something that necessarily needed to be said aloud. They both understood the limitations of their lives—
But their love was limitless, an unexpected freedom that buoyed his steps, potential and possibilities of a life beyond the grave he'd dug himself. She was powerful and perfect and he was part of that, part of her; having her was more than he had dared to hope, more than he could have imagined, a sweet release amidst Justice's impotent rage. He'd left that first morning—afternoon—stumbled into his clinic in the midst of his perfect happiness and the refugees had smiled, been happy for him. And he'd made her happy, and while Justice told him that mortal things never lasted he'd known—known—that this would be different. Because she wanted him, and he was hers and she was his and nothing (mages), nothing (freedom), nothing—
(vengeance)
—nothing could stop them, so long as they were together.
He'd left for the clinic and she had sat on her bed until the late afternoon sun turned the early lavenders of evening, and then she had gone downstairs and found her mother at the dinner table and announced that Anders would be moving in with them until future notice.
"Oh?" her mother had said, as she sat at the table and picked up her fork and concentrated on her food. "Anything else I should know?"
She had shrugged, and her mother hadn't pressed; in the safety of the ensuing silence she admitted to her plate, "He's in love with me."
"That's wonderful, dear," her mother had said; into the silence, she ventured, "But I thought you rather fancied that…pirate."
She couldn't have explained, not without telling her mother she was inviting an abomination into their house, not when they'd fought so hard for so long to keep the demons at bay—but Father and Bethany were gone, and she could take care of herself, and she'd see to him too. What was done was done but she could—distract him, and if it kept the others safe then she would do so, no matter the cost.
"He loves me," she'd said instead; she had nothing more to say.
~*~*~
Anders lives in a dream.
A dream, after all, is merely a perceived reality constructed by a Fade spirit for a slumbering mortal, and months have passed since he last felt anything resembling awake. Justice pervades his thoughts and actions; his hands move of their own accord, still healing, yes, but also turning the pages of dwarven crafting recipes and Tevinter manuals on elemental manipulation. He reads without quite understanding what he sees, but Justice knows what he wants, makes sure he gets it, takes care of everything.
Everything, that is, except Hawke.
Hawke is hard to see in a dream; she is inescapably real, hard to the touch, her glance like a shock of cold water—but he does not see her often; she is not enough to wake him.
In his dream, though, he remembers a time when she was the dream and Justice the reality, a time when she'd spent her evenings at his side, curled up with a book before the fire and occasionally correcting his spelling as he wrote his manifestos. Justice always sneered at those, as if mere words would ever have been enough to effect change, but Hawke thought people could be persuaded, had encouraged him, had let him reach for her hand and link his fingers through hers to remind himself of why he wrote. She told him stories of her childhood, painting a picture of her father, a free mage, a responsible steward and teacher, of what magic could be without fear. Hawke had inherited her father's fearlessness, and for an abomination who looked into his own future and saw nothing but despair, her confidence was—seductive.
And then her mother had died, and he'd sat beside her for months as she stared at the ashes in her fireplace, refused to let Orana light a single light even in the winter months when the sun lasted merely long enough to tease the world with its warmth. She had been rigid as the stone she manipulated so effortlessly, her magic kept under a lid so tight he'd thought for sure something would have to give; but as coal gives way to diamonds, whatever horrors she'd wrapped herself in turned into a drive, fiercer even than Justice's demands, and one day she'd stormed out of the house with a letter from the Viscount in hand and come back on Aveline's shield spitted upon the Arishok's sword and he'd thought—
there had been so much blood—
Isabela had been the one to dig her hands in with him, to hold the ragged edges of organs and muscles and skin together as he poured healing magic into the body he thought he'd known so intimately, but this—and Isabela had cursed, pet names and invectives blurring together in a desperate chastisement as Varric had scrounged every lyrium and healing potion from every contact he had on the Wounded Coast and the hours stretched in a haze of magic and mana as he reached deep into Justice's stores, draining the spirit—and through the spirit, himself—dry, forcing sparks through her veins to keep her heart beating in this moment, and the next, and the next—
And out in the streets they'd celebrated and named her Champion, parading her effigy throughout the Docks, Varric laughed, describing the scene to her as she lay wax-faced in bed, her eyes slits as she watched him, as Anders slept with his fingers on her wrist. Her chest was a mess of stitches and scars but she would live, and if he was too wrung out to do anything but curl at her side as Justice tended to them both, well, at least there was a later to look forward to.
How much later he didn't know, the days and nights still indistinguishable even as spring twittered beyond the thick stone walls—but one morning he'd woken and she was standing at the window, the cloudy morning light ashen on her still-pale skin as she twitched aside the curtains and looked into the garden.
"You shouldn't be up," he'd said, more from habit than any real medical concern, struggling through his panic to sit up and blink at her.
"The Arishok is dead?" she'd asked, lips slightly parted in concentration as she stared at whatever held her gaze.
"Yes," he'd said, hesitating.
"I'm sorry," she'd said slowly, and he'd frozen with his legs half-swung to the edge of the bed, the apology sounding as strange in his ears as it looked on her lips. "He was a great man, in his own way."
"He would have killed you," he'd said firmly, setting his feet on the ground. "Don't regret your victory."
"It wasn't my victory," she'd said, her voice still distant. "Petrice won."
He was at her side in an instant, picking up her limp wrist, but her pulse was steady. She'd lost so much blood—"Petrice is dead," he'd said carefully.
"And she wanted the qunari dead. I didn't," she'd said. She finally looked at him, but her eyes were—practically Tranquil. He shivered. "Varric said they've named me Champion."
"For your valiant defense of Kirkwall," he'd said, slipping his fingers between hers.
"If that's what they want," she'd said, her gaze unfocusing again, her hand suddenly gripping his like a vise, "then that's what I'll do."
"Come to bed, love," he'd said, drawing her towards him, but though she placed one foot in front of the other she clearly wanted to go elsewhere—but she went with him, and soon he had her tucked against his side and his arms around her and her head on his chest and for a moment—
for days, months—
And then she'd been well again, well enough to attend ceremonies in her honor, well enough to take the defense of Kirkwall to heart, well enough to venture out without her healer as she mingled with nobles and criminals alike, as she visited the Gallows and studied Meredith and Orsino in their madness; and then it had been a year, and then two, and the mage underground was failing and his manifestos were trampled underfoot and more often than not he was alone in what he thought she might have viewed as the cage of her estate, and she'd said the Champion could not defy the templars outright and he'd said the Champion was supposed to defend the defenseless and Justice—had said enough.
And he'd been tired—tired of healing, tired of fighting, tired of being alone, and so little by little he'd gone to sleep, and taken to dreaming. The dream is freedom, and change, all within his power and grasp, and he will do whatever it takes to make his dream come true, for all mages, for all people. No more will children be ripped from their parents or mages made to fear themselves for simply being alive as they were made to be; no more will the rest of the world fear them. They will all be free, even if he must be a slave to the dream until it has flayed him to the bone—he will take on their suffering, and they will know peace.
And in his dream she loves him still; in his dream, he makes her see, and she understands, and holds his hand and laughs.
~*~*~
She has work to do.
And if this work keeps her from her estate—well, the place is a tomb, her mother's hopes and dreams buried in the ashes of her pyre, and Hawke never cared for the place anyway. Orana and Bodahn keep it running without her interference, and Anders—is there, unless she takes him elsewhere. That happens more and more rarely, and she thinks he might resent her for it; she finds she doesn't care.
She wonders about him, sometimes, wonders when he became so quiet. Aveline tells her they were nearly as worried for him as they were for her, after the Arishok, but she has vague memories of his hands, holding hers, rubbing her feet, of his voice as he told her stories of the Circle to distract her from the pain. She remembers the pain; she remembers waking one morning and deciding she was through with it, no matter how it persisted in staying with her. He'd come to the official celebration when she'd been named Champion, and she'd seen Meredith watching them, felt every little reassuring brush of his fingers under the lens of the Knight-Commander's gaze. She may have been a known apostate, but Anders was a known revolutionary; she couldn't accomplish what she needed to with him at her side, and so she left him behind.
At first he hadn't minded, not that she'd particularly bothered to check; she had nobles and mages and businessmen to court, laws to learn, patrols to accompany, and he'd always been so good at staying in his clinic or sitting at home copying out his manifesto. She'd judged his contentment by his smiles when she came home, and he'd had plenty of those to spare, and she'd thought he was all right.
But somewhere—some when—Meredith had gone mad and Orsino had gone missing, or at least too absent to claim responsibility for his mages, and the burden of holding them together fell on her shoulders—which was what she'd wanted, not trusting either of them to have the public's best interest in mind—and Anders had…disapproved. His mages were trapped and no one was listening to him, but his message wasn't particularly what they needed when they were barely listening to the only voice of sanity in the entire city—namely hers—and he hadn't liked it when she'd said as much. She shouldn't have said as much, but for a moment she'd forgotten who she was and what he was, and she was—tired.
She notices when he stops writing manifestos. She wants to worry about that, but there are apostates to hunt down and a hundred ghosts from everyone's pasts appearing on the streets in flesh and blood, and between the magisters and pirates and elven abominations she barely has time to sleep, let alone fret about the abomination under her roof. And still there are gangs roaming the streets and nobles scrambling over each others' backs to fill the viscount's void, and she longs to tell them all to—stop. She does what she can.
And then out of the silence he says he thinks he knows how to be free from Justice, and for a few brief weeks she allows wishful thinking to take the place of everything she's ever known, and she helps him. And for those few weeks he's Anders again, the silent shadow in her bedroom gone, replaced by a man smiling and holding her hand, though the latter is irritating at best when her hands are full of so many other concerns. But she permits it. She helps him. It's all she's ever tried to do—
and it's a lie, a damned lie. "There is no potion," he says, and of course she knew that; even if there is a way to free him, it certainly would require nothing less than the Fade itself. "But what we've gathered will mean freedom for more than just me and Justice. It's freedom for all mages throughout Thedas. In the face of that, one lie means little."
She studies him. Gone are the worry lines creasing his forehead, the thin hint of a tired smile around his eyes; and his voice isn't pleading, or desperate, as it used to be when he asked for her help. He is calm. She is suspicious. "I'm the Champion," she reminds him, as if either of them needs it. "I can't act blindly."
"I am taking a risk. I would not see you drawn into it," he says, but gone is the man who worried that loving her would drag her into his monstrosities. Justice is reciting a speech he thinks Anders would find appropriate; but Justice has never cared for her, and Anders is nowhere to be heard. "Or perhaps your support of mages ends at just talk. It's easy to support freedom for mages if no one has to die for it. You cannot claim to love me, then turn on me now."
That is easy enough; she has never claimed to love the spirit, and his easy talk of death—easy for a spirit, safe within a willing host—chills her to the bone. In the face of her failure she snaps, "I care for you," as though there were not many ways to care, the cares of a city, taking care to tread lightly—and he cares nothing for any of these. "That doesn't mean I support every decision."
"You cannot care for me and despise what I stand for," he states, and if Justice has anything over the many demons she's faced over the years it is his impeccably flawed logic. He does not seduce or tempt; his interests lie beyond those of mortals, and thus he understands so little of human interaction; then again, she's never been an expert herself. "I am the cause of mages. There is nothing else inside me."
There was a time when he'd said differently; she wonders if that, too, had been a lie. Again she looks for Anders; he wears determination on his shoulders, but his eyes are tinged with resignation. In the wake of her silence he demands, "Will you aid us now? Or does your support stop at the Chantry door?"
"That's unfair," she says, because she knows it will annoy the spirit, because she is angry with him, because she longs to take his hand and tell him to hold on, for her sake, because he no longer cares. "I will not be blackmailed into some—mad scheme." And then her tongue escapes her, and she says, as she has never dared say, even in the confines of her mind: "You're on your own."
He scowls but does not flinch, and that takes her breath away. "I have always been on my own," he says. "For a time, I just forgot."
So she leaves him there, leaves him to his spirit and his scheming, steps into the street to find Aveline and Isabela and Varric and deal with whatever nonsense is happening at the Bone Pit, nearly as cold and desolate a place as the pit of dread in her stomach, warning her that she has failed, that the abomination needs to be stopped before whatever he is planning comes to pass.
She won't let him leave the house. He will find a way out. The price will be blood.
It always is.
~*~*~
They pass each other once, on the stairs, she going up to fetch her father's staff before going to the Gallows, he going down to the cellars, to Darktown, to the lift to Lowtown, to the steps to Hightown, to skulk around the Chantry one last time. Neither has told the other of their plans. Neither is sure they care to hear what the other would have to say.
But their hands brush; an accident, perhaps, or the dregs of her concern, or the tattered shreds of his humanity; and for a moment they pause, and look at each other, as if for the first time.
He sees a refugee unafraid to threaten a Grey Warden in his home, a woman reduced to blushes at Isabela's innuendos, a body underneath his when he'd thought he'd have nothing but Justice until he died, a hope for the man he'd almost forgotten existed. She sees—her father, his voice deep and stern and full of never evers that scare Bethany into staying awake all night rather than risk dreaming; she sees failure, and the barest shape of a man she thought she could control.
I love you, he'd said.
He loves me, she'd said.
And he remembers—
Justice sees a distraction. Justice turns his head. She strides away with her own purpose. It is not his. He is not hers. And so they part ways; it is better like this.
Between them, the world lies burning.
He remembers—that once, there was a thing he loved, that he was enough to love something, that something existed beyond mages and freedom and a pillar of fire raining stone and smoke around them. He thinks the thing was a woman—possibly the one standing behind him, the one he says made him happy—but perhaps it was merely the idea that she loved him back. Perhaps it was the idea that for a moment he could escape his chosen fate; but it could very well have been something smaller, barely worth the mention, nothing more than himself.
There was a time he loved himself. It seems a fitting thing to remember as he sits in hollow satisfaction, claiming victory, offering to pay the martyr's price. And why not? He'd been handsome and smart, witty and powerful; selfish, sure, but he'd had friends of his own making, and dreams of his own free will, and no one is left who even remembers that man. If this is the end—and it is, sharp and stealing his breath and even now she is still surprising him, though he thinks he'd rather have taken the sandwich—
see, now that was funny—
—if this is—
how he'd like to be remembered
laughing
~*~*~
She is alone, and not the sort of alone she's been for so long, surrounded by people who can't decide if they fear or deride her; she's found a world beyond Kirkwall, beyond the Wounded Coast, one she'd almost forgotten existed; and in this world, she is alone.
She doesn't mind. She's been abandoned by her companions, one by one; now she's abandoned herself, and the result has been remarkably…invigorating. She has nothing and no one to care for or about her, only the ground beneath her feet and the sky above her head and the horizon guiding her steps. She does not know where she is going; she knows war reaches across Thedas, but if she has failed in everything else she has always taken care of herself. She is not afraid; she is not worried; her sleep is easy, her steps light. The world is wide and she is merely a speck upon its surface; in obscurity, she has found her freedom.
She thinks the irony ought to bother her, but it doesn't. If anything, she thinks sometimes of seeking out a pirate ship; but her companions are long beyond her reach, and probably the better for it, if her own condition is any indication. Perhaps she will seek out the Grey Wardens, and at least let her brother know she yet lives; but she is in no hurry. She may meet others on the same journey to nowhere; she may die alone, unmourned. Each has its own appeal. This broad empty world is full of possibilities; she is content to let what will be, be.
Sometimes, watching the stars reflected in a still pool or taking refuge from the sun in the shade of a low tree, she thinks on all the potential she's missed over the years, whether from her own blindness or the insistence of others. Kirkwall has a way of suffocating those within its grasp; she knows now it is as much the thinness of the Veil as anything else, but here in the open air she wonders, without regrets.
There is a world in which she loved him.
The thought is an odd one because he was never someone to be loved; he was an abomination, and one of the few immutable facts in her freedom is the doom laid upon any mage who takes a Fade creature as an ally, demon or otherwise. And yet she remembers him at dinner with her mother, telling outrageous stories as her mother struggled not to smile, teasing her when she did, laughing as she mock-scolded him for corrupting her daughter. The subtle irony had been all-consuming at the time, but now, looking back, she sees the twinkling in her mother's eyes and even dimmer memories come to mind, of Bethany and Carver's mischief, of her father's innocent participation in their tricks. She remembers his affection for cats, though her mabari would never have tolerated them; she remembers his drive to heal, his compassion for the victims of war and famine. She remembers Evelina, and thinks she was not so different from him, in the end, from all the mages backed into corners, desperate to help, unable to see the world for the walls around them.
She might have loved him, in spite of that, but it would have been for naught. There can be no peace, he'd said, and even in her fury his words had stirred a memory, dusty with her sister's ashes, stained with Wesley's blood; later, sitting on the viscount's throne, she'd brought it out, heard the witch's reassurance, hard and honest: without an end…
She'd killed him, as one kills a workhorse that has outlived its usefulness, a knife in the back and a crumpled corpse in the street; the world went on burning, but his fire was spent. He hadn't wanted peace; she'd given it to him anyway, and she thinks, remembering his old tired smile when she came home, that the man who longed to love her as nothing more than a man was grateful. She does not regret his end. Somewhere, his soul has the freedom he so desperately craved. There is a world where that freedom is by her side; but this is not it.
This world is vast, but she'd been raised in it and still managed to forget; she doesn't think unfettered freedom is the answer, no matter how fiercely she will fight to protect hers. She knows this makes her a hypocrite, but there are no spirits of Justice to care. She will keep her mortal contradictions; she will contemplate love, and what she has lost; and she, and no one else, will decide where she goes next.
The wind laughs at her back, a lover's caress; she steps into the mist, a flash of lightning to guide her steps; she sighs, and disappears into the world.