Work Text:
The worst of it was the shame.
He'd told himself he wouldn't cry. He'd gone whole days without speaking when they brought him to the Circle, so what was a week in the dark to him? He'd sleep through most of it, surely; he was made of stronger stuff than they thought.
But it wasn't about the silence, or it wasn't only about the silence. In the dark he realised that they could just stop feeding him. It was so small and so empty and he felt small and empty, even though he tried not to be. He tried to be quiet and contemplative and stoic but it had never really been in his nature, and so he had begun talking to them when they opened the tiny slot in his cell and shoved in his food, and then when that didn't help, talking to himself to fill the space. When they came to change his chamberpot once a week he found himself trying to make eye contact and then, gradually, as even that was denied him, to touch - to lay his palm on silverite just in case there was a human being beneath it, one with eyes and hands and a maker-damned voice, pathetically grateful even when his jailers just tore his fingers loose disdainfully.
Eventually he began to rage, and even as he did so he felt like a toddler battering his fists against the walls of his door and screaming until his throat gave out and kicking over his slop bucket, hoping some of it would leak out through the gap under the door, even though sometimes it worked and they'd open up the cell to sluice him down with a bucket of ice water, and he was so fucking grateful to just see them that he didn't even care that they were unhelmeted, and that they looked at him in disgust like he had chosen to live this way.
And worse was the silence and what it did to his control and his sense of himself, of his own courage and his own dignity and his own humanity: the intervals. Sometimes when he begged he could hear them laughing on the other side of the door; one time after he'd been hammering on the door for so long he'd broken at least one of his knuckles a templar flung it open, snorted, "You cracked sooner than most, robe," and shoved a healing potion at his chest; the way they spoke about him at shift change as though he were an animal (the runaway been good today? And the response, Yeah, managed to get most of his piss in the bucket for once, like it was his fault he couldn't see) and he was so raw, he'd thought he could live through it but in the dark he was nothing, they made him nothing, and even after they brought him back to the light the cell stayed.
It hadn't been a week. He'd known that on some level but they didn't tell him the truth, not for some time. They put him in the infirmary afterwards because his legs were funny and he couldn't walk and he couldn't chew anything or hold anything. Wynne treated him with a sympathy he hated (I'm sorry, Anders, there is no cat in Kinloch Hold - I don't know what you saw) and the templars on guard at the door wouldn't look at him, and he couldn't stop wondering if they'd worked any shifts down there and had seen him, weeping, bleeding, unravelled and broken. He didn't want to know.
At first he kept going back there at night in his head, woke screaming so loudly Irving had to get the Tranquil to put silencing charms on the infirmary doors. He couldn't be in closed spaces and he couldn't stand the dark and he talked to himself sometimes, without even realising, and that was shameful, too, that he couldn't just get better despite being a healer of no small skill. Nobody at Kinloch talked to him about it, not at first, because all of them were aware it could be them, and as the months went by his shame and humiliation began to curdle, turn vicious and heavy in his gut, something in his eyes putting them off from even trying.
He'd been out the cell for six months when the Blight came. He stole a templar uniform and walked out with the rest of the bucketheads, fingers flexing inside his cold silverite gauntlets, and it was the dumbest escape plan he'd ever executed and should never have worked but it did. Maybe Kinloch itself wanted him gone. Maybe it could feel his rage and his hatred seething in his belly and wanted him out before Uldred split the veil, because if Anders had still been there he knew his Rage would have left no survivors.
At Vigil's Keep he talked too much and too fast, and he needled his new, fellow, Wardens, testing always the limit - what would it take, how much would they tolerate before he wound up back there in the cells? He slept with Pounce on his pillow and a candle burning at his night table, and although Oghren bitched about the light when he was trying to sleep they all let it go, because Anders had been woken up by the screams of every single one of the other Warden recruits and most of them were to do with Darkspawn but maybe not all of them were, and not one of them would ever push.
He told the Commander, airily, and when she looked back at him with sympathy but no real understanding he didn't bring it up again. When she gave him the world's ugliest blue scarf he wrapped it around his wrist and played with it whenever he thought he wasn't real, which was happening less and less the longer he stayed with the Wardens, with people who called him Anders because that was the name he'd asked them to use and who treated him as annoying colleague and not a ghost haunting Kinloch without even the decency to die first. He wished he'd taken the scarf with him to Kirkwall but by then he had something better: light he carried within himself and another who slept beneath his skin and whispered in his dreams, What they did to you was wrong. It will never happen again.
After the Commander left he killed six templars with his bare hands and thought, pleased, now I am not nothing - even in the worst places of Kirkwall with the Chokedamp oozing through his lungs, even in the dark and the damp of the sewers. But at night sometimes he dreamed of walls and bars and silverite and blood under his nails, and he made his clinic in an old mine-shaft half open to the sea air and told himself it was because it would help circulate the bad air, and hated himself for that, too, the way he cringed from the truth like a beaten dog.
He didn't tell anyone in Kirkwall. Isabela waxed lyrical about her time in the drunk tanks of every port city from here to Rialto; Aveline thought anyone in a cell had to be there for a reason. Fenris carried his trauma so openly on his skin that it made Anders even more ashamed that he had come from his unmarked, which made him angrier, so much so Hawke stopped inviting them to Wicked Grace at the same time. Sebastian asked him once whether something had happened in the Circle and Anders picked a fight with him about demons, because his knees had gone weak just at the idea and that too was humiliating.
Hawke thought it was romantic that Anders slept pressed so tight to his side, his hand splayed across Hawke's broad chest so that he could track his lover's heartbeat even in his dreams, and Anders loved him so deeply and so selfishly that he never once told him because he didn't want Hawke to know, ever, that Anders had once been nothing. Hawke was a man he could have dreamed into being, strong and handsome and talented and so Maker-damned kind, and Anders hated that even in the safety of their bed - with Hawke's heart under his palm and the fire banked low but never extinguished - he sometimes thought not sweet nothings like a lover should but instead, I will kill you myself before I let them put you in a cell, and he hated the templars all the more for making him think it in the first place.
He was so angry, all the time, but it got worse after the Arishok died - after Meredith began to squeeze and Kirkwall began to crumble, and his anger was a self-stoking blaze, because the more it grew the more he hated himself for damaging his spirit in this way, of taking something as good as justice and warping it with his hatred and his fear. It was a cycle he couldn't get out of and his friends - Hawke's friends - began to avoid him as he became crueller and colder and even Hawke began looking at him with such concern, and that hurt most of all, because some part of Anders wanted so badly to curl against him - to draw strength from those broad arms and say, I am so afraid all the time. He never would because he knew with gut-deep certainty that if he said anything at all Hawke would leave him, because that well of cowardice and shame ran so very deep through the core of him now and had done for so long that he simply did not know who he was without it. Better that it was anger. Anger drove him onward, anger got the cell open even if just to sluice him down with an ice-bucket, anger got the templars banging back on the door and yelling Shut up in there! and that was so very much better than being nothing.
Anger got him sela petrae and anger got him into the Chantry basement and anger got him through that last night in their room, the moon shining in through windows that Hawke never drew the curtains fully across. Anger got him through their last night of lovemaking, teeth and tongue and fingernails biting as Hawke held him close and he responded in kind. Anger was there for him when Hawke touched his cheek so gently to turn them face-to-face, expression sad and uncertain in the dim firelight that he had never once questioned and said, You'll tell me, won't you? If there's.... if you need me?
Anders wanted to say, I'll always need you, and he wanted to say, I am sorry I cannot be whole, and he wanted to say, hold me and show me I am real. But when he opened his mouth all that came out was a comment about the cause, and it played in his head all through the next day until they stood before Meredith in Lowtown and he cut through their bickering, and Hawke said, "Anders, what did you do?"
The red light was so fierce and so bright he could see it through his closed eyelids, and it felt like that bucket of ice water. It felt purifying. It felt like losing a rotten limb - a moment of sharp, intense pain, and then... nothing. He opened his eyes and looked at them, at the horror and fear on their faces, and thought, Nobody can ever say I am not real now.
He took a seat on some spare crates while they argued, and realised he didn't much care what they were arguing about. How had he forgotten how it felt, to be this peaceful? They were fighting, but the sun was going down, and for a time he sat and he watched the embers falling through the reddening sky with nothing in his head at all. There was no rage. No fear. No shame. There was a pang of grief for Hawke, who had loved him so well and so gently, but even that was distant, like his heart had been wrapped in such a thick suit of armour nothing could pierce it.
For a moment he simply existed in his body, worn and unkempt as it was. His socks were damp and there was a hole through which his big toe protruded; it was uncomfortable., He should have darned it. His coat was heavy on his shoulders. He knee twinged. His knuckles - never quite right after the breaks in the cell - ached a little, but nothing unbearable. His throat itched with the smoke. All the damage had always been on the inside, and he was suddenly glad that nobody would see it even after he was gone. It was the only thing Kinloch Hold had let him keep and it would be his alone now and... in whatever came next.
When someone touched his shoulder, he thought for a second it might be Meredith or one of her lackeys - but then Hawke squeezed gently. He had questions, which Anders supposed was fair, and he answered as best he could, for this brave man who had loved Anders and also spent so many years fighting for this city. The dead needed their Champion to be their voice more than he did, he supposed, until Hawke said, "Help me defend the mages," and everything turned upside down.
He rose, and Hawke clasped him by the cheek in a mirror of that last night in their bed. His face was unreadable. His eyes were clear and thoughtful. He didn't stop staring at Anders, not even when Sebastian swore bloody vengeance upon them, and Anders couldn't have moved out from under that gaze if he had tried. His heart was pounding in his chest, but he had no name for the emotion he felt - something quick and bright and growing by the second; something so massive and out of his sphere of knowledge that he felt almost a boy again, going for his first walks through the Fade, struggling to find the vocabulary to describe things never intended to be pinned down by words.
The fighting was brutal and bloody. He had known it would be but hadn't thought too much about it, having assumed that it was a part of the process he'd never live to see. Hawke fought as efficiently and cleanly as he ever had. Every time Anders glanced over he was focused on the task at hand, but at moments he thought he could feel the weight of Hawke's gaze on him. Even in the courtyard, when Hawke agreed to flee the city with him, to become fugitives, together (like it was that easy!), he thought maybe Hawke was keeping himself back. He wondered if Hawke was struggling with his own rage, if his hate was choking him the way Anders' was.
After they fled the city nobody would look at him at all. Hawke had given them time to go home and gather what belongings they wished to carry and they came to Isabela's ship one at a time, bodies exhausted and hands curled around both weapons and knapsacks. They gathered on the main deck and dropped their belongings where they sat and sank down atop them, one giant sprawl, and not a one of them watched him as he stepped carefully over and through discarded shields and daggers and swords and made his way up to the forecastle. The sky was grey now, smoke choking out the moon and stars, and the water was as black as the cell, but the fires raging across Kirkwall left enough light to see how filthy his hands were - coated with ash and blood, and little of it his own. He had always been a healer of no small skill. He set them on the rail and waited for the guilt and the shame, and none came.
Instead Hawke found him there, two ship bells later as the Siren's Call carefully managed her way out of the narrow shipping channel, slipping underneath the lifeless Twins on her way out to the ocean. He announced his presence in the form of a small ball of crimson magelight in the shape of a butterfly, which flitted onto the railing next to Anders' right hand and flapped its wings a few times. Anders could see how tired he was from the poor shape of the butterfly, the lack of detail in its wings, and turned so that his back was to the water to take him in.
He was covered in ash and blood. His trousers were torn mid-thigh, where one of Meredith's bronze statues had nearly taken his leg off. His face was filthy, and he walked slowly, like all his joints were creaking and old. Anders thought he looked magnificent, and only when Hawke's mouth quirked did he realise he'd said it aloud. "Are you sure you don't need any healing?" He asked the question carefully. He thought he'd healed them all completely before, when Cullen let them go, as they walked the damaged pier of the Gallows and tried to find a boat sea-worthy enough to take them back to Kirkwall's docks. There had been bodies floating in the water, and Hawke had been using his force magic to shove them out of the way so that they could leave the berth.
Hawke shook his head. "You got it all earlier," he said. He stepped closer, and in his own magelight Anders could see he was just dirty. The bags under his eyes came from exhaustion, not bruising, and the blood was old, or not even his. His expression was so hard to read. His mouth moved, like he was thinking about what to say, but all that came out was, "I came to tell you we're sleeping on deck - Isabela says she's not sharing her cabin with any of us while we look like this." Ruefully he plucked at his own sleeve. Anders watched him cautiously, waiting for the anger, the revulsion - the ash he was failing to brush off had been perhaps people. Instead, he closed the distance between them and leaned on the railing next to Anders, heavily, like he genuinely needed the support to stay up.
"I wasn't planning on sleeping in Isabela's cabin," Anders said slowly.
"Good," said Hawke. He glanced sidelong at Anders, who was shocked to see him smiling, a sharp cut of a thing. "I don't share."
"Are you -" Anders swallowed. "Do you mean that?"
Hawke just watched him, his eyes roaming over Anders' face, searching for something that Anders couldn't understand, and then he looked away, back over the black waters. "I packed a bedroll for each of us," he said. "I don't think I told you about the emergency packs behind the wardrobe."
"I, ah, already found them," Anders said. He winced when Hawke levelled an unimpressed glare his way. "I was - looking for a secret place to put something of my own. As I'm sure you can imagine."
He'd kept the sela petrae in his clinic, but the crushed high dragon fire gland Hawke had given him from the Bone Pit dragon needed somewhere else. The glass jar hadn't been very big and he'd wanted it close to hand, but when he'd lifted that loose floorboard in their room and seen the two stuffed knapsacks lying there - had realised why he'd mysteriously been running dry on socks and underwear and hadn't been able to find his favourite ivory comb those past few weeks - he had replaced the floorboard and vowed to say nothing. Hawke was an apostate too. He understood.
He'd thought Hawke would start in on him for his own secret, which had been so much bigger, but instead he just nodded, like it was a satisfactory answer. "We've got money, weapons, and some travel rations," he said. "I've told everyone but Isabela we're heading for Ferelden, but I was thinking we could get off at Ostwick instead. A lot of people will be wanting to find us and the sooner we start being unpredictable, the better."
Anders felt like he had prepared a different version of the conversation than Hawke had. His stomach felt tight and tense. "But - your brother," he said, and when Hawke shrugged, pressed - because he'd never been able to leave well enough alone - "You're going to leave him behind? Your friends? For me?"
Hawke laughed bitterly, which was a relief. "Here we go," he said, to the great night sea.
The anger was back, albeit smaller, and Anders said, clipped, "What do you mean by that?" His voice was waspish, and got lower pitched as he stoked that fire in his belly. Hate me, loathe me, leave me - just don't look too closely at me. "I gave you a choice at the Gallows - if you didn't want to travel with me you should have said then. "
But instead of getting indignant or shoving back or anything Anders could use, could build on, Hawke just grinned at him crookedly, no humour in his eyes at all, and said, "When are you going to let the Circle go?"
"What?" Anders pushed himself off the railing, momentarily stunned, and then hissed, "This has been my goal from the start, Hawke. I've never been less than honest. I burnt it down -"
"You bombed a Chantry," said Hawke, "And then we killed some templars, and hopefully saved some mages. I know what you did, and what you wanted to achieve. And I hope that it works the way you planned, Anders, I really do. I don't give a shit about the Chantry. I know I should, and I have been trying all evening - maybe it'll come to me later, but all I see when I think about the body count tonight is fucking Orsino stitching himself into an abomination made from his own murdered apprentices. I see the bodies in the water at the docks with the stab wounds in the back as they ran away. I think about the mages we found in their cells butchered under their beds as they tried to hide.
"I meant everything I said in the Gallows," Hawke continued. His fingers were curling around the railing, the tips of his stylized talon gauntlets digging into the wood; the magelight flared a little with his anger and Anders realised there were wisps of smoke escaping between his palms, wrapped tight to hide the shaking. He was still staring straight ahead at the water. "For the sake of the mages I will follow you across Thedas, Anders. I'll kill more templars, I don't give a fuck. I'll support the cause no matter what because it is my cause." And now he looked at Anders, and his expression was terrible to behold because it was so familiar; lip curled in rage, but in his eyes nothing but fear and - helplessness. "I won't follow you if you're going to try to push me away because some part of you is trapped in Kinloch fucking Hold."
Anders said, too quickly, "What happened to me there -"
"Don't," Hawke begged, hoarsely. "Please. I'm not Sebastian. I'm not Varric. I'm not looking to - get into your brain or dig into your story. I am the man who has loved you for six years. I have heard you crying in your sleep. I have watched you find a reason not to follow us into caves. I was there in the Deep Roads when the campfire burned out and you panicked and set fire to half our bedding, do you even remember that? Anders, I'm not - I'm not your enemy," And his eyes were wet, now, and somehow this was the most awful thing of all the things that had happened tonight.
All the blood that had been shed because of him, all the lives that had been lost because of him - none of it mattered as much as this man, this one single man, looking at him with such awful despair and heartbreak on his face, and Anders felt a surge of shame course through him, so strong that when he opened his mouth to argue what came out was instead a humiliating high, keening noise, and he clasped both his hands over his mouth, horrified, but it wouldn't stop, and for a moment he was back in the dark, screaming I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry until his throat bled, begging for pity from people who had taken everything from him and deserved nothing in return, and he thought that there might be no way out this time -
And then Hawke pulled him into an embrace so tight that left no room for the nothing. He clung to Anders with a savagery Anders could never have expected - his face pressed tight into the side of Anders' head, and he was crying now like Anders had never seen him cry before, and Anders realized with a mix of abject embarrassment and deep relief that he was, too - horrid jagged, broken little sobs that came from somewhere deep inside even as he tried to force them back in, to seal shut his throat, to fill his chest with the comforting familiarity of rage.
But Hawke's tears were pooling in his ear, and it would have been awful enough if he hadn't been whispering, "I thought you were going to die, Anders, I can't lose you, I thought you were going to die," over and over again, and Anders thought - maybe we're in this together. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't see. But he hooked his arms around Hawke's waist and pressed himself closer, closer to that sweat-smoke smell and the uncomfortable wetness, the heat and light and warmth of him, and took everything he was being offered as he cried like he hadn't since the cell.
He didn't know how long they clung to to each other in the night. Nobody came to find them. Probably nobody would again. Anders tried once again to find guilt for the dead, and found only sadness.
They'd left Kirkwall behind for good now, slipping past the lighthouse, and were loose on the Waking Sea; with the smoke falling behind them the stars had crept out, and a faint blueish patch that must be Satina, lurking in her gibbous form behind the clouds. At some point Hawke moved them away from the railing and they sat, pressed into each other, under one of the cabin windows. Anders didn't think his legs would work if he tried, but he wasn't trying; he curled half into Hawke, his face tucked so tightly into his throat he could feel every exhalation his lover made as a cool breeze against his still-drying ear. Hawke's left arm wrapped around his torso but he had both of his hands clasped around Hawke's right hand, holding on closely.
They hadn't said anything, not since at least the lighthouse, and yet Anders felt... better. Fuller. Like some hollow part of him had been filled. It wasn't quite as peaceful as he'd felt sitting on that crate awaiting execution but it wasn't too far from it, either, and this time he could honestly say he did not expect to die.
He had fought so hard to keep Hawke from his weak places; the shame he felt in that cell, the hatred at his own cowardice, the fear that it could happen again. That he was himself everything they said about him - paranoid, crazy, twisted by Vengeance. Hawke hadn't turned him away. Instead he had shown Anders the parts of himself Anders could never have guessed at - the terror he felt at being alone, born from a lifetime of apostasy. The templars lurking around every corner. The desperate loneliness, the yearning for a connection inhibited by that fundamental need not to be caught. The stubborn, white-knuckle viciousness he displayed to the world on behalf of those he called friend and family.
Anders had always thought of Hawke as a Just man. Even sharing his life with the man - entangled in his bed, struggling their way through domesticity together - part of him had thought he could never deserve Hawke, not truly. He was too noble, too brave, too good to be trusted with those awful, deepest parts of Anders' own heart. He was coming to see that this was not the case, that Hawke had felt that same, deep-rooted self loathing, and had made choices not because they were good and right and just but because they kept him close to the people that he loved. He didn't care about the Chantry, for example, and Anders suspected he never would - which felt odd, given that Anders himself did care. He had made deals with monsters, knowingly, unflinchingly. The boat they were on, for example. Isabela had traded it for an opportunity to catch a slaver lord, and Hawke had let her because he thought they might need an escape route. Anders still didn't know how he felt about that.
It felt strange to look at him as another human being, and not a man on a shining pedestal, a Champion and a hero. Perhaps these dark, wounded places were something common to all sentient beings. Or perhaps it was the magic, the shame they had both been soaked in by the Chantry and its adherents before they were even born. Anders rubbed his cheek lightly against Hawke's throat, stubble rasping against stubble, and considered this for the second draft of his manifesto.
Hawke said, his voice gummy and weary, "If it's alright with you I'd rather stay here tonight. I don't think I can face everyone else like this."
Anders wanted to say something sarcastic and light; he wanted to say something that slid off the edge of everything they had just been through. Instead he forced himself to take a deep breath and said, "I'm with you, love. To the end." After a moment, he added, "Fugitives, together."
The arm still wrapped around his torso tightened. In response Anders squeezed Hawke's hand where he held it between both of his, and eventually Hawke's bearded jaw scraped across his forehead as he pressed a kiss into the crown of Anders' head. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. They'd come through the darkness of the night together, and it had made them stronger.
He didn't tell himself he wouldn't cry again. In fact it felt entirely possible he'd cry more tonight. But he'd experienced the worst of himself, and the worst of Hawke too, and they were still here. Filthy, dog-tired, and with an uncertain path ahead of them: but still here.
He wasn't ashamed any more.