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Another small jolt.

Another jab, a greater one and a still greater one, sending sharpness up their bones. And then, before they could truly begin to grasp the tremor of the irresistible shaking in their legs, as though the ground had begun rolling with storm-built waves underneath, the ground beneath their startled-staggering feet gaped suddenly, open as a dagger-struck gash, wide and black, and their world was flooded with darkness and air.

The plunge was as short as it was sudden. They fell upon hard surface in a tumbling heap, their yells and groans of shock and pain thrown int,o utter, obsidian-polished darkness. Hawke heard Fenris give several low, constricted coughs. He felt the sting, streaked with swirl-risen dust, of heavy old air Hawke he felt around in the rapid dark for him, blind-dazed. Almost, Hawke tumbled over again as another wave tide rolled through him but when he finally felt the touch of a dark-spiralled arm stray the pads of his fingertips, it was him who grabbed upon that muscle-lissom arm to remain tall within that last shouldering of the earth.

Their voices chased each other around the utter raven-blackness.

“Is everyone alright? Is anyone hurt?”

“Andraste’s –  Hawke, I think you broke my nose just there!”

“I have always been falling for you, Varric.”

 “Maker’s breath, what was that?”

“An earthquake, it seems.”

Eventually, Fenris’ voice, cavern-deep, beside him like a hum struck from an apprehensive string.

Languorously, the night sky revealed itself once more, a distant peacock blue face gloating down upon them. Little by little, the unfurled dusk-dust stepped away.

To Hawke’s fingers light-tongued sparks sprang quick as silver-gold arrows. With the sudden blink of a goddess, pale rock quickened all around them, gleaming with a sheen as of shining moonlight, dense with flickering shadows. While Hawke’s hand wandered carefully through the gloom, his fire flames gulping in a wet manner of the air, the faint trickle-rill of water whispered from behind thrusting peach-colored stone. Wan, glistening stalactites and stalagmites narrowed into the small cave like silky drapes and spearing guards.

Unwillingly, the night around Hawke melted away to lay bare a shaft within the rock-infused walls behind which obscurity abided. A tunnel, low, smooth-rocked and faceless with blackness, gaped to their left as a deadened vein leaves a void heart-chamber. More dripstone impaled its snaking ground and stone-skin ceiling. They would force a grown man to stoop low and gather his guard to wind into the close-pressing darkness.

Abruptly, despite the absence of another shiver in the earth, there blew a vociferous roar above them. It seemed to reverberate within the cave walls. Then, the sea-blue eye, blinking at them from afar, high above, vanished.

A chill-cold freshet of air whipped around their faces.

“Hurrah for the dwarves,” Varric said, his low baritone echoing slantingly into the jet-black of the tunnel.

Hawke neared the dark vein with some uncharacteristic caution.

“Any advice from the sole dwarf in here?”

“If you are asking for my stone sense, Hawke, Bianca might like to give her greetings.”

“Is anyone hurt?” Tersely, Anders’ voice wove between them.

Varric gazed around, squinting behind the glittering stone columns. “I still think Hawke broke my nose. The bigger they come, the harder they fall.”

Moving his flame-bright hand from side to side, Hawke was still considering the tunnel. “The ladies might like this new one a lot better, Master Tethras.”

For the nonce, they determined to stay where they were, to spend the night within the hollow embrace of the small cave. It would have indeed been foolish, they agreed, to brave the tunnel in the stark middle of the night, stooped perhaps and led solely by the guiding fire in Hawke’s hand, thus inhibited and chained should there be the need to fight, when during daytime there might possibly be a hope of swirling beams and rays drifting through the rock’s armor ahead.

With their fall, a half-broken tree, too, had bolted into the cave with them, sucked into the ground’s abysm alike, and Fenris chopped it, without a glance around.

So, they built a fire right at the tunnel’s gashing mouth to deter whatever might have been lurking within its darkblood-vesseled vein - ensured by the steady grip of drifting cold air.

They huddled, scrambled for sleep beside the apricot-striate stone teeth next to the light-stroking, warm-hissing fire under the protection of the night watch, which Fenris took, as ever. They fitted to the echo-blunt ground, breathing with every delicate rumbling of the earth that visited them for a time. Before the stone around them, too, sank into restfulness once again.

Then, Hawke awoke. 

There was no saying how long, if truly at all, he had been asleep.

Hawke awoke to the reverberation of muffled, explosive breaths.

Despite the wheezing tunnel, the air felt stiff within the cave, void of movement. The sound woke him as a stroke in his heart. When his fire-honeyed eyes raked the cave, blind to both fire-light and shade-darkness, they darted to a figure clasped firmly to the trembling shadows as Andraste to her stake.

Slowly, almost stone-boned, Hawke sat up. His steady gaze upon him, he stood. Hawke’s eyes wavered not from where the sharp short breaths broke against the darkness as high waves against a diving hull.

He found him on the stone elevation furthest from the smoking tunnel entrance, a spot for observance and vigil.

The air in which Hawke moved felt thick as curdled milk. Drenched with the smell of sweat laced with iron blood.

Slow deliberation on his skin, Hawke sat down on the smooth rock among the winds of weaving shadows and lashing light, ankles crossed in front of him. Hawke simply looked at him. Watched. With a keen and steady eye.

Up close, the tendons stood out on Fenris’ slender neck. The darkness moved around him, waves cresting, ready to absorb. Hawke could sense his muscles, bowstring-taut, arrow-striking-ready. His limbs. His sylvan eyes. His body. Everywhere.

His right leg was resting on the ground, his arm slung lose around the other, a limber embrace that was like a storm enfolding an isle, nevertheless. The black-watered shadows lapped at him like a dark ocean.

Eventually, Hawke’s eyes fell on the charcoal-clothed fabric clinging tightly to his leg which was torn on the left side. Rivulets of thin blood were tracing down his thigh and calf. 

Hawke heard himself murmur, “You were hurt. You should have said so after the fall.” 

Fenris answered not. His gaze was kindled hot as embers from a furnice. This near, he smelled like just-sparked flame. His breaths were rasping coals.

“Did you sleep?” Hawke inquired, night-quiet and foolishly.

 A flicker of spite gleamed in Fenris’ gaze. For a moment, his eyes were darting.

At last, in a low voice, Hawke spoke.

“I recall asking you whether you wanted to talk about it.” A keen softness tugged at Hawkes lips. “I might warn I am no man to learn from my mistakes.” His smile, withheld, grew gentler still. “I might also warn you if you shout at me the echo in here may make me sorry indeed, this time.”

The shadows leaped from Fenris’ bowed brow to his chin, to his ear, his cheekbone. As dancing moths following dapples of light.

So, Hawke could not see his features, which even in a fury were beautiful to him, but he rather thought he imagined a tiniest, most fractures curve in the right corner of his mouth. His breaths, however, remained small, sharp bursts.

Within his fingers, Hawke’s blood was beating forcefully.

Until last night, he had grown used to Fenris speaking of things, abruptly, quickly and snarling, of the things he had seen and felt in Tevinter, as if he could destroy them or make them another’s if he only flung them away hard enough. Not often. But often enough, as if in a fit, with the force of a blighting meteor. Like a storm-tossed, gale-torn raincloud not knowing how to cry.

They would break out of him, as spill-gushing blood with an irate fierceness, his searing fury the sole thing that would make him not crumble beneath them.

A savage relief.

Afterwards, Fenris would draw back into himself like a predator licking its wounds, snarling and fiercer still, repulsed by what he had revealed to others so candidly. Until that furor, budding at the smallest prick of any needle like droplets of relentless blood, would whittle again.

Now, the light of the fickle flames threw itself upon one half of his body. The other part prevailed, dipped into the gloom as one swollen crescent of the moon would blink its silver eye, the other half not.

Hawke’s breath rushed in his throat. 

Behind him, the other’s plane breaths shifted. Hawke did not look over his shoulder. Behind his back, he could hear the rubbing of Anders’ clothes against the stone-ground underneath. Silent, Hawke listened to Varric’s breath, rasping and dragging with sleep.  A rustle of their woolen blankets. A small inward cough. The surge, loose of deliberation, and drop of their chests.

The voices of Fenris’ respiration grated into Hawke, carved hollows behind his temples and between his ribs. His palms throbbed. His shoulders ached. How Hawke longed to reach for him, his arms hurting physically with the sheer wish to draw him into his chest, into his heart wild with beating, to hold him, his hands to his mouth, the shivering in them absorbed into his lips.

But there was something limned in the swaying darkness behind Fenris, a living pattern painted without color.

Would you like to sleep next to me?, was what Hawke wanted to ask. Yet, he desisted. His skin, the spaces between his fingers ached. However, Hawke felt Fenris would not grant it. Not with the other’s presence pressing into the tight air. Asleep or not.

Last night, a kiss, like a honey-laced blade, sharp with sweetness. Hawke had pored, poured into Fenris, found a new wonder, however small, at every moment: the softest curve at the tip of his miraculously-white hair strands; the petal tenderness in his skin on the inside of his wrist, starbursting at the briefest contact with Hawke’s lips; the arch of his ankle, softening to his touch, coltish with strengh; the most delicate tilt of his honed-shaped chin as his breath was drawn out, the faintest twitch of his charcoal brow beneath Hawke’s lips. Following a line of lyrium, a horror and beauty on its own, delicately, cautiously, tentatively, not to touch its scarred riverbed save the skin around and beside it.

He had whispered his name, spoken it aloud, Fenris, tasting the sounds. Listened for the intaking hiss while his own name tided in Hawke’s mouth in dizzying sighs. Sensed for the wildness in the strength of Fenris’ thighs, a fervor around him. Tasted the skin of his palm against his mouth, whispering: Tell me to stop.

It nearly swept him into madness, an insane longing almost surpassing Hawke’s sense and sanity. A marvel he was to him, a marvel, however, he would not name so aloud for fear of chasing him away, like a beauteous forest phantom, despite the fierceness with which Fenris had kissed him, raised Hawke from his chair in his hall in a frenzied hurl, bleeding out all other thought.

If there is a future to be had, I will walk into it gladly at your side. 

They had slept, for the very first time, together, side by side, on the old broken bed dwindling in Fenris’ room.

He had not thought Fenris would have permitted himself to fall asleep but for the hunger-whirled, dazzling, furor-wearying rapture before.

It was then when, with a rush in his throat, Hawke suspected Fenris had not slept beside another living person for the eternity of years. He shifted, this way and that on the sheets as one might on a coal brazier. For a while Hawke watched him, without speaking. Then he reached out his arms.

Tell me to stop, he whispered.

With each movement of his arms, every time Hawke slightly searched more for the embrace, seeking out spots and angles, uncovering, inch by inch, the right places to rest each of his ten fingers, moment after moment, to rest slowly the weight of his forearms, until Fenris fitted into his limbs as a sheening pearl was enfolded into its shell.

Gradually, Fenris’ muscles lessened as ice thawing into water. His soft hair a lingering smell brushing Hawke’s beard, a tickle on his neck, Fenris’ upward gaze strained at Hawke’s jawline for another eternal moment’s time. 

A long, very long time.

First, the stir of a knuckle. Hesitation. Then, a hand placed solitarily on Hawke’s warm chest. So, an unfurling of fingers against Hawke’s skin.

Vacillation.

At last, after a myriad of breaths susurrating silently in the dark-lit chamber, the feel of Fenris’ lashes against his neck, closing.

In the middle of the night, after hours, a sound to tear the world in half.

Thus, Hawke had finally learned the reason inside Fenris’ vigil. Why, after all, Fenris invariably volunteered to take the first, and mostly only night watch. He had slept with Hawke, next to Hawke, once and only. He would not let anyone else see him dream. He would not let them hear him sleep.

The flickering shadows leaned in to listen to Hawke’s quiet voice. “Why do we always end up in caves? I bet this one is crawling with massive spiders, too. Almost ten years and this place is still teeming with vermin.” Despite his low-soft tone, some revolted humor slinked behind Hawke’s voice. “Kirkwall must be the ugliest place in Thedas.”

The darkness roamed around the cave and met droplets and stones of glistening water an all sides and returned upon itself until the man of shadows behind Fenris’ delineated outlines resembled one with his hands in his arms in the shrouding gloom.

 “When I was a boy, Bethany caught small spiders with her hands. She would find them everywhere, wickedly, many-legged things, in winter in the small nooks and cracks of our house, in summer under firewood stacks and between fence poles, wherever she looked. She and Carver would take them with them to peer at, closely, by the fire or in bright sunlight. They did not see the giant one coming out of the forest. But I did, and I beat it with a stick, yelling until father ran towards us.” The cave’s contours veiled their shadow-gold around Hawke’s words.

“At night, I left a candle burning to watch for its return. What I saw, when I woke in the middle of the night, was a small one swinging just above my eyes. I did not sleep soundly for days after that.” Hawke’s mouth was moving on its own now. His eyes, however, rested on Fenris. “A few weeks later, Bethany dropped one over my clothes. An accident, probably, although I would not put it past Carver to have done it for fun. I would have certainly done it for fun.” A huff in Hawke’s smile-wrought voice. “Maker, the way I shivered and itched all day. At night, I found it, at last. But it was not the one Bethany had examined, not the small one, sitting right across my chest.”

Hawke felt himself shudder and chuckle simultaneously, his hand rubbing over the middle of his chest. “You should have heard me scream. The neighbors thought somewhere a child was dying.”

His gaze averted, Fenris legs wrapped themselves into angled shapes.

Hawke listened to the swirl of glow and gloom in the gentle dripping of the stone. The abrupt sound of Varric’s nose. 

Hawke listened for it. No, Fenris would not sleep, however sweet with coaxing Hawke’s voice might be laced, whatever words he might conjure from his jesting, witty chest.  He still knew one to aim the spear.

Behind Hawke’s gaze, Anders was turning around again. And Fenris’ eyes flickered to the movement as the malice-shadows to the twinkling laugh of light.

No. They would not see him dream.  They would not hear him sleep.

Yet, Hawke could see Fenris fingering the terror inside him. He could listen to him observe the unrelenting grimness and its edges like a ruined blade caught under winter’s skim of ice.

Still Fenris’ breaths came fast. Drenched in a soft rasping sound.

Aimed at his own hands amid his crossed legs, almost beyond hearing, Fenris’ voice came low.

“There is a cage in the Imperium,” Hawke could see Fenris tasting the sharpness of his own breaths in his chest, “used for disobedient slaves.” Briefly, Fenris’ eyes fulgurated. “No higher than a small child’s height, nor wider,” briefly, his teeth clenched with his whisper, resonate with depth. “A pet’s prison, one might say.”

The cold air churning out of the tunnel blew sharp against Hawke’s cheek. Suddenly, he felt the others presence, asleep or not, like a sprawling plant, overrunning, infringing.

“You told me you never defied Danarius before the fog warriors,” Hawke said quietly.

Fire-glow scampered, night-somberness darted around Fenris, his lips bled pale with his voice, keen as an unsheathed blade. “I did not. He was hurt by my markings.” A look, lit-hot as gusts from a bonfire, but darting away.

Hawke’s pulse struck in his skin, prickled in his fingers.

“How long?”

“Only a day and a half.” Nearly shrugging, Fenris’ drew another gasp of breath out of the ravening darkness. “It is enough for most slaves not to enjoy tight spaces.”

Still, Hawke looked at him, watched with an unwavering gaze. In his lap his fingers rested, the tips of which burnt like his heart in the dark shades around them in a storm-surge, waves cresting. Presently, Hawke wished for Varric and Anders to sink beneath the rocks, to disappear completely. Slowly, Hawke tiled his head down. His eyes, though, never left Fenris’ shadow-lit features, the full immensity of his terror unfolding before him.

“They were supposed to work during a fight, were they not? He gave them to you, after all.” Hawke heard himself say with an inquiring wryness that was the only salvage to the winds of whipping shadows and spinning light.

At this, Fenris finally lifted his eyes to him, his gaze resting on Hawke, a swirl of greens, each facet of color so lustrous as if lit from within. Hawke could feel his tension, pressing fiercely into the air.

A long, hard look.

“I was not fighting when it happened.” His stare was cold and deep as an empty-dark well. “Not the way you think.”

For an instant, there was nothing save the lecherous shadows lifting to reveal the ravishing pull of the wind.

Their hair set afly, raven and silvery white, Hawke felt Varric behind him move no more, sensed the gush of wind churn behind him, around Anders’ soundless form. Fenris’ hands, he could see them not, shrouded by the opaque darkness of his armor.

With an effort, Hawke refrained from looking around. At Varric, whom he deeply loved. At Anders, whom he trusted. Yet still he now fervently wished them to be anywhere but here. Almost painfully he strained his senses for fear of a moving noise, of a rubbing on the sheets of Anders’ head as though he was going to hoist himself up, for Varric’s silence, or no sound at all.

Under Fenris feet, the tenebrous shadows pooled and stretched. And Hawke thought he could hear Fenris eyes dart again, into the unmoving stirring silence, freighted with a shadow-teething something, a heaving in Fenris’ chest. As if he knew one to aim the spear.

The rigidity of Fenris’ gaze, however, was such that Hawke almost tasted the warning fierceness on his tongue.

Within his throat, Hawke felt a revulsion rise inside him that was strangling, nearly choking him like a physical pain. It laughed inside the darkness and whipped in the light, just as if both were companions, not only to each other but to the man sitting in front of him as well.

It was only a modest movement, artless.

Plain. Simple.

Yet to Hawke it seemed like the splitting of stones, a reach for the night, like a draught of all the oceans in the world, what he did then.

Tell me to stop.

The shade-infused viridian in Fenris’ eyes was resting, downcast, had roamed from Hawke’s visage down upon his armor-clad chest. But first, Hawke’s finger slid under the metals and folds where the hem and collar of a shirt would have been, sought for the leather-scented openings and fastenings until the chill-bitten breeze trailed along his pale-bare skin and the curved bones that jutted out below his throat.

Tell me to stop.

Fenris would be able to read the words whispering upon Hawke’s chest, could listen to them with his observing fingers, those fingers which had touched them a night ago. For none to hear but him alone.

It was only a small movement.

The slow placing of Hawke’s left hand on the gibbous, cold-wet stone. The shadows floating around it, away and then back again, pooling in Hawke’s palm, collecting a modicum of light like dashing fish.

Eventually, Fenris’ hand, palm open, coming to rest, opposite.

Their fingers all but touching.

“Would you like to know,” light with the fiery shades, Hawke’s voice was but a whisper carrying through the stone heart-chamber, “how I came to sleep in my bed again?” Like splashes, sanguine stains were crusted on Fenris’ finger tips and nails. “My father placed his hand against mine.”

Tell me to stop.

“It was so much larger than mine, then, yet I hoped they would fit.”

In the ravening cave-air, inlaid with cold fire glow and warm shadow-sizzling, Hawke’s other hand stilled over Fenris’ open palm, floating.

“And he told me,” Hawke’s amber-darkened eyes, too, were still, “to count each fear against his fingers, until his hand was complete.”

Light as dabbing water, Hawke touched his thumb to Fenris’ slightly bended one.

“First came spiders.”

Fenris’ index finger he brushed next.

“Then, a little ashamed, the darkness of a moonless night.”

The tip of Fenris’ middle finger, then.

“The neighbor whose goose had bitten me for which I set its tail on fire so she shrieked she would give me a good caning if she ever got hold of me.”

A twitch as of arching lips in Fenris’ fourth finger.

“Also, that strangers might come and take Father away, as my mother once had whispered, crying. And, finally,” lightly, their little finger’s tips touched, and so did all of their fingers, “that my hand might never grow as big and strong as his.”

Fenris was silent.

“Did it help?”

“Yes. This, and the fact that I found out how to set not only geese but spiders too on fire.”

Fenris’ eyes lifted.

He was silent.

All around them the confluence of lapping shades and purling light was resplendent, each shimmering stalactite and shrouded stalagmite interminably caught in between.

“So what if there are not enough fingers? Or hands? Or numbers to count?”

What then?

The chill surge of air sharpening on the bareness of his chest, Hawke rose to his feet. Awash with something he could not name, all of a sudden, his heart vibrating within the confinements of the cave, he reached out his hand. He felt his voice gurgle like a whirlpool, but upwards, rich and smoothing. Over his amber-lit eyes his eyebrows arched forward, his lids softening, warming like the first rays of morning light.

“You start over, I guess. Counting.”

Fenris was utterly still.

A stilling quiet of everything. Of breath and pulse. A stillness that slept in the stars and the bed of oceans and listened into the night for the hunter’s bow.

Then, at long last, Fenris’ viridian-facetted eyes locked with his.

When he grasped his hand, the stillness dropped like an arrow-struck bird from Fenris’ almond-colored limbs and willowy muscles onto Hawkes dulled breast-plate armor on the ground.. His strengh-slender fingers were like a feathered baby bird’s touch on Hawke’s skin.

As they approached the pitch-gaping tunnel entrance, the flames over which they stepped flared high behind them. Fenris’ cool fingers laced around Hawke’s knuckles.

“What about the others?” asked Fenris, his breaths short. 

Despite the pulse leaping in Fenris’ fingers with tenseness, Hawke felt the smile spread wide on his face, liquid and brilliant. “They know how to count, don’t they?”

As they were standing in front of the tunnel, the light drained out of Fenris’ face. When their hands clasped firmly around each other, the utter, leaden jet black slumbering deep inside the vorago did not become bright as water, nor did the distant wails of forgotten winds string pure or dulcet but gulped and swallowed their first step whole. Hawke watched the walls closing in, listened for the many-legged rustle.

One after another, the soft tips of Fenris’ long fingers pressed lightly against the back of Hawke’s hand.

One. Two. Cool as the airy darkness. Three. Four. With each quickening pulse. Five. One. Two. Sharp with each expelled, explosive breath.

They had to duck their heads, first Hawke, then, with one long unstrung sharp exhalation, Fenris, in order to set foot into the tunnel’s staring gaze.

Three. Four. Five.

The seams of their armor murmured against each other.

Beside him, the cool skin of Fenris’ hand lay warm against his.

After a while, Hawke stopped counting.

The gloomy darkness streamed by, every squeeze of Fenris’ fingertips a small spark illuminating the shadowy night.