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Hawke woos Anders with meat pies. Meat pies from the seller outside the Hanged Man, roasted chestnuts from the cart by the Qunari compound at the docks, wedges of cheese from the Lowtown market, even sweet pastries from the bakeries that open in the dark before dawn if he’s out late enough.
He doesn’t remember when it became a routine. He doesn’t remember any one night he decided to visit the Grey Warden healer in Darktown. What he does remember is a blur of them, night upon night upon night that all bear the same shape, that wore that shape into his mind, his heart, as habit.
Night upon night spent roaming the streets of Lowtown with Carver. He could do their rounds in his sleep. They took jobs from whoever had the coin, above-board or shady, they weren’t picky. They collected debts, coordinated bets, did favours that promised to become profitable later.
Night upon night, they met Varric Tethras at the Hanged Man past midnight. Later on, Isabela too. They’d drink, play Wicked Grace, trade underworld stories. Often Aveline would join them after her shift, yawning into her drink, dressed in civilian clothes but always unmistakably city guard. (Aveline was permitted to drink in the Hanged Man only because she was as good as a third Hawke. She would have broken the nose of anyone who said otherwise, anyway.)
And then, night upon night, as the drunks were turned out into the streets of Lowtown and they all should have been heading home, Hawke would peel off from the others.
"He’s sweet on that Darktown healer," Carver would say to the others, half tease and half glower, while his brother flipped him a rude gesture. "The man’s got him wrapped 'round his little finger."
Just the once, Aveline caught him by the shoulder. "Be careful, Hawke," was all she had to say.
He’d pick something up from some vendor on some street corner and—keeping his footfalls quiet because even in the small hours before dawn there were footpads and worse about, the sort he might not want to run into alone—he’d wend his way down to Darktown. Down in Darktown’s stink and shadow, no matter how late, he never found the lantern outside Anders’ clinic unlit.
They say Kirkwall never really sleeps. Hawke was convinced that, given half the chance, Anders wouldn’t either. So, though he couldn’t say it was actually a conscious decision, most nights he slips into the clinic and settles himself somewhere out of the way, and waits.
When the clinic winds down and the last of Anders’ helpers leaves, Anders falls into a rickety chair across from Hawke. And Hawke unwraps the paper from the meat pies, pulls out the bottle he slipped into his coat in the Hanged Man.
Hawke discovers early on that Grey Wardens eat like starving wolves—especially Grey Wardens who are themselves practically starving. So even though the pies from the seller outside the Hanged Man are the size of a dray’s hoof, he always brings at least three. Anders—lanky, rake-thin Anders, wilting with tiredness—can put away a pie and a half before coming up for air.
After eating, Hawke puts his boots up on the table while Anders leans back against a pillar, and they finish the bottle, and talk. Once, sated and halfway to drunk, Anders says, "I’m a simple creature, really."
"Oh?"
"Honestly. Justice aside." He smiles a rare and languid smile, stretches like a cat. "A good meal, a good fuck, and a long sleep. That’s all I ever really need."
Hawke chokes on his mouthful of wine. When he regains his composure—Anders laughing, bright-eyed and surprised—he says, "You can’t just say things like that to me."
Anders cocks an eyebrow. "No?"
"Don’t get coy with me." Hawke lets a grin uncurl across his face. This was thin ice, he knew. Too much, too fast, Anders would retreat behind his walls again. "You can’t go about saying things like that without expecting it to put certain images in my head."
Anders reaches for the bottle in Hawke’s hand. For a moment, his hand covers Hawke’s. Anders’ fingers are cool and dry. The long, nimble fingers of a healer. Hawke holds Anders’ gaze.
"I can hardly be held responsible for where your mind wanders," Anders says, plucking the bottle from Hawke’s grip. He takes a long swallow. Hawke watches the movement of his throat as he does.
"Oh, but you should be." Hawke’s voice is quiet now. He knows he’s going too far, trespassing Anders’ inexplicable boundaries, but wine makes him stupid. "It always seems to wander to you, nowadays."
Anders puts the bottle down. His face has gone still now. There’s no trace of his earlier smile. "Then you should find better things to think of."
Hawke shakes his head. "In all Kirkwall, there’s no one I’d rather dwell on."
"I’m sorry." It’s almost a whisper. "I’m no good. For you, for anyone."
Every inch of Hawke vibrates with the tension of not reaching out his hand to brush the hair back from Anders’ face, not taking his pointed chin between his fingers and turning his face up to the light, not grazing his knuckles across Anders’ cheekbone. Not making him look Hawke in the eyes as he tells Anders how he admires him already, and he’s barely known him any time at all.
But he doesn’t do that, because Anders isn’t his to touch that way. Not yet, and quite probably not ever.
So damn it all. Instead, he leans closer, and asks, softly, genuinely, "Would you prefer it if I found someone else to think of?"
Anders sucks in a breath. His eyes meet Hawke’s, and they’re a bright flash of panic. "Don’t ask me that."
"Why?"
"I can’t answer honestly." Anders expression is pained.
It’s answer enough. If Hawke were still in Lothering, if Anders were some simple farm kid just like him, if life were easier, Hawke would kiss him here and now. But nothing about Anders is simple.
Hawke reaches out. Anders holds his gaze, but his hands are trembling. Instead of kissing him, Hawke takes the bottle gently from Anders’ hands. He puts his lips to the mouth of the bottle, takes a swig. Then he says, "In that case, I’ll keep visiting. As long as you don’t mind."
A relieved smile crooks Anders’ mouth. "Please don’t stop." He sits back in his chair. "If you stopped coming, how would I get my late night mystery meat fix?"
It’s a weak joke but it gives them both the chance to laugh, shrugging off the intensity of the conversation.
And just like that, Hawke knows he’s lost. While he wasn’t looking, he left his heart in this dingy room in Darktown, and now it’s no longer his. He’ll keep visiting, night upon night upon night, just to catch another one of those smiles that crinkle the corners of Anders’ eyes, or steal another touch of his careful hands.
And he does. Until the night of the unofficial Tethras expedition launch party in the Hanged Man. Until the next day, when Anders wakes, mouth like a dead thing, head in pieces, Justice’s reproach worrying at his metaphorical heels, knowing that the Hawkes and the Tethrases had already left Kirkwall for the Deep Roads.
That day, Anders drags himself from his cot to splash his face with water from the shallow basin by the surgery table. He rolls his shoulders, one after the other. The clinic is slumbering still, the only sounds the laboured breathing of his most fragile patients. Outside, Darktown is quiet.
Awoken from the pleasant dream of the past few months—of friends, of talk and touch and, dare he even think it, love—Kirkwall feels like a stranger once more. Time to shed the dream like the comforting fantasy it was. He’s alone in a city that doesn’t want to be his home, with nothing but his rage and his purpose to keep him company in bed at night.
Anders wants to crawl back into his cot and pull the blanket over his head. His fingers tighten on the edge of the table. He’d like to close his eyes and blink out of the world like a lost spirit.
Instead, Justice’s cold embers burn in his gut. It’s Justice that stiffens his sinews, keeps him upright through the long day and the longer night. It’s Justice that puts him to bed when there’s no more to be done. He can’t be sure if it’s Justice or himself that keeps him from sleep, lying in his cot in the small hours when once he would have been drinking with Hawke, calling himself a Blighted coward for being unable to face the Deep Roads again.
So it goes. The year wears on, high summer in its sweat and stink at last breaking and passing into autumn, as the winds from the sea grow brisker. The city darkens around Anders, working in its belly without pause.
Then one night—a night like all the rest—Anders feels rather than sees a figure lean against the doorframe, and knuckling his tired eyes he raises his head to tell whoever it is to come in or go out.
And, as if he were a boy again, his worn-out heart skips a beat in his chest.
Hawke, wearing oddments of armour and a handful of new bruises, stands propped against the doorjamb. His hands hang empty by his sides. There’s so much about him Anders had forgotten and was just now remembering—and there’s so much about him that is different.
Most strikingly, there’s no trace of a smile on his face.
Anders crosses the distance between them, stopping only a scant foot from Hawke. Hawke meets Anders’ eyes with his own hazel ones. In them, Anders sees a look he recognises too well. He saw it in other mages at Kinloch Hold after a Harrowing, and he saw it in fellow Grey Wardens at Vigil’s Keep after battle. He’s seen it in the faces of other Ferelden refugees—people just like Hawke, people with nothing but their will and their love and their spite to keep them going—when he couldn’t save someone.
Anders takes Hawke by the elbow and leads him out of the clinic. When they’re out of the light, into the shadowed warrens, Anders wraps his arm around Hawke’s shoulders—the heat of him warming Anders through and through—and says, "Talk to me."
Hawke can only manage, "Carver," before he chokes on his own grief. He doubles over under Anders’ sheltering arm and Anders spins him around with a tug and pulls Hawke into an embrace.
Hawke doesn’t cry. Not in any meaningful sense of the word. But they hold one another, cradled in black Darktown shadow, Hawke’s fists balled in Anders’ robes and his face against Anders’ shoulder; every inch of Anders alive to Hawke’s heat, Hawke’s breathing, Hawke’s heartbeat. Anders’ own treacherous heart beating out his shameful relief—that it was Carver who died down in the nightmare dark, instead of Hawke—so loud he was afraid Hawke must hear.
When Hawke pulls back to look Anders in the eyes again, Anders curls his fingers around the back of Hawke’s neck, reassuring. Anders could kiss him, now, and he knows in his marrow that Hawke wouldn’t resist. Would welcome it, even, happy to drown his sorrows in simple desire.
The cold of Justice burns down his veins like ice water, reminding him that it’s not in him any more to be less than moral—and whatever Anders might want, it wouldn’t be right. He drops his hands to Hawke’s shoulders, gives them a squeeze. "Come," he says, his voice remarkably even. "We’re going to the Hanged Man, and we’re getting drunk."