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It’s raining in Kirkwall.
The water feels like blood and looks like lyrium - blue, blue drips that hug the valleys between stones and paint the ground beneath Hawke’s feet and catch on the sharp tip of Fenris’ ear. Sweat moonlights as tears from the sky, crawls in rivulets down Hawke’s back beneath his robes. It is hot under the downpour, like every drop that splatters in the dust releases fire in a mist.
There was a time, a few summers ago, when you could watch steam waver in front of your face, and the embrium growing through the cracks in the cobblestone walls in Hightown breathed shakily in rhythm with your lungs, and Isabela’s laugh had shaken the sea at the same moment that Fenris’ hair had glinted, quicksilver, in the midday sunlight and Hawke had licked dry lips and dug his fingers into the dirt. Bianca would gleam, Aveline’s hair would shift with the wind, Merrill would slip flowers into everyone’s pockets and this place of chains would get a bit looser.
It never rains in Kirkwall.
Fenris’ blade is a spectre that glides in the night; there are templars here and up above and somewhere behind but there is also a rune, embedded in the base of the fuller of Fenris’ sword: it glitters an aqua color and Hawke thinks, I watched Sandal put that there. A lifetime and yet only a heartbeat ago, there had been places carved out in Hawke’s bones, accommodated to fit a select few. They are not empty, but some are bleeding: they leave his body a ghost in the shell, no ties to the waking world or the asleep - this is not a matter of magic except that it is, in the basest sense, and there is no simple solution, only a collection of desires and wants and half-formed thoughts that tear at the seams of Hawke’s skull.
Merrill falls with a cry: Aveline’s body goes through the motions of a swing and touches down-
-on a templar, and the crush of his body coincides with the hand she gives Merrill to help her up. Aveline says, Don’t let this go to your head, Hawke, and doesn’t say I’m doing this for all of us.
*
Sometimes, there is a moment that spans the beat of a breath: it sprawls heady tendrils in thick coats underneath your skin and over the walls and below your feet. It is a moment that knows no language of man or traceable thought; it exists only in your veins, in the non-linear movement of time, in the hollows between you and there.
It exists in the arch of Fenris’ back, in the curl of his fingers around the hilt of a blade, in the green of eyes that Hawke knows and doesn’t, in the slow fall of Fenris’ body into Hawke’s; it exists in the breath between the point of his sword and the shallow of Hawke’s stomach; it exists in the transition between I hope it is by your side and Now I must leave you.
Hawke does not want Fenris to leave, but Hawke is flat on his back in the middle of destruction and Fenris has freedom and a blade levelled at Hawke’s throat and this is the inevitable conclusion to a story being written as it was told.
(They all come back but one, and it is the one that matters most.)
*
In a few days, in a year, in generations long after this, they will speak of the Champion of Kirkwall. They will tell of the times that he fell and got back up; of the horrors and laughs that he faced; of the wins and loses that he experienced. They will weave a tale about his companions and how, as diverse as they were, they did not turn away when the world came to an end. They will whisper in sorrow about the times the Champion had to kill his friends - a first enchanter, his brother, strangers he knew and did not. They will praise his final triumph in battle over Meredith, the ripple that brought about change in a society that wanted it but was not ready for it.
There will only be some who know of a moment, one that cannot be catalogued in black and white, and they will not speak of it even to their gravestones.
This moment is not their own.
*
Hawke says, “Fenris,” and does not get an answer.
“Fenris,” he says to the steps of betrayal under Fenris’ feet.
“Fenris,” Hawke says around a blade in his neck.
Hawke wants to ask, Do you remember that time, but that was something that belonged to them, like the strip of red around Fenris’ gauntlet, and it has no place here where there is no mercy.
The blade turns, and when Fenris draws it back, he murmurs, “This is my only regret.”
It takes only a thought that spreads like a slow burning fire, and this land is no longer theirs.
*
In another life, where grass grows wildly and birds sing a song that is not tragic, Hawke makes Fenris laugh. It isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last; but the curve of Fenris’ lips are warm like the sheets of Hawke’s bed, and Varric calls out when Merrill leaps onto Anders’ back, her fingers tangled in his hair, and Hawke feels a word on the tip of his tongue, its shape like home but the syllables are too mangled.
Where they live has a name, as cheap as Ferelden or the Free Marches or Nevarra, but they simply call it, here.
*
When Hawke approaches the gates leading into the Gallows, it is without the color of scarlet. He tells his companions, “It is time,” and does not tell them, This world will end, but I have already left.
It does not rain in Kirkwall. The City of Chains has come undone: the walls have come down and the docks are flooded with the mistakes of man.
*
It is raining, and Hawke pushes open the gates leading into the Gallows.