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“What did you mean?” Anders asks, voice pitched for only Hawke to hear. Isabela and Merrill meander ahead beneath the Keep’s massive stone arch, leaning on each other and giggling breathlessly over Aveline’s courting mishaps. “You’re… not afraid of me? Of us?”
Hawke doesn’t know which us Anders speaks of—their nascent relationship, or the twining of him and Justice—but her answer will always be the same. “No.”
She studies him in the ensuing silence, stricken by the stormy conflict in his eyes—confusion and longing and grief brewing in bursts of gold and flashes of icy blue.
“Never,” she insists. His (their?) certainty that they mean so little hurts, and even though she’s equally certain he’s clouded by decades of trauma and pain, that for once this blame is not hers to bear, she can’t help but blurt, “But I am afraid I’ll lose you to the Templars or to my own Maker-damned luck. I’m afraid for you, every time you risk yourself.”
The flicker of setting sun dances across his face like a bedroom fireplace. She falters a little at the sight, armored feet clattering in time with the words still stumbling off her tongue. “I’m terrified that Justice really is unwilling.”
Anders recoils so quickly that Hawke’s stomach hasn’t finished sinking before he grabs her by the elbow, tugging her with him into the shadows of a stone wall. “Why do you care?” he presses. Bewildered, urgent. “He’s—we’re…”
Hawke swallows. Her throat is tight, hands clammy in her gauntlets. She wants to curse her implacable mouth, smash something, run, but instead.
Instead.
“I don’t have to be a distraction,” she pleads. “I want to help. Let me be your shield and your sword.” She shakes her head even as she says it, attempting a wavering, rueful smile. “I suppose your greatsword, more like.”
His hand falls away.
A helpless protest falls too from her lips—and when he leans in, looking distraught, she kisses him. Desperate, artless, like she can make him (them) feel the frantic truth, like she can make them see.
“It’s always been both,” she croaks after Anders abruptly pulls away, the taste of lightning lingering on her tongue. “All the pieces of you that are Justice, and all the pieces of Justice that are you. Everything.”
“Hawke,” they rumble, brushing their lips with staff-worn fingertips. They sound hesitant and uncertain, and her heart breaks anew.
“It’s all right,” she whispers, even though it’s not all right, not even a little, because the tenuous peace between Anders and Justice just might be cracking where they stand. “My door will be open.”
They turn on their heel and hastily retreat, blonde hair burning in the flaming sunset, even now still straight-backed and proud—
And she loves them, so fiercely it aches.