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Listening to the susurrus of Merrill dragging a human body out of the street, Hawke leans on his staff and nods empathetically at the dwarf, who is still wringing his hands and rambling.
"They seemed like perfectly reasonable smugglers. They smiled and everything."
"Yes, I know quite a few myself, and it is in their code of conduct to only smile when they have honorable intentions." Hawke smiles. Beside him, Carver snorts.
Anso giggles, high-pitched and abrupt, and his pale eyes flash to where Merrill is kicking someone’s severed head into the gutter. “The goods are valuable, however. And illegal. And my client wants them very, very badly. You know how these Templars can be!”
“It’s lyrium. For Templars. Of course it is.” Carver hugs his arms around himself, staring off broodingly in Merrill’s direction, where she’s unwinding a scarf from around a Sharps Highwaywoman’s neck and stuffing it into her pocket. “You’re gonna take the job anyway, aren’t you, Garrett?”
Hawke ignores his brother and rests his cheek against the smooth body of his staff, gazing off in the direction of nostalgia, which is up. "Yes, well, I've never done any lyrium smuggling professionally... Conflict of interests, you see... Running a smuggling business, one doesn't want to go around handing out freebies with the product, such as mages delivered with the lyrium, you understand... But during the Blight, I did smuggle a man partially made of lyrium out of the country."
The dwarf's eyes widen. Hawke's narrow. Anso shakes his head rapidly.
"No, no, no!"
"You know him! The lyrium man, you know who I'm talking about!"
"No, no, I swear on my ancestors--"
"There's no way! How? Where?"
"I swear, I have no idea—I just, I just never heard of such a thing, that's all--"
"He's here, isn't he? Are you smuggling a man? Are you a slave dealer, dwarf?"
"No! Ancestors, I would never—He hired me! He hired me to do this, he hired me!"
So Hawke shakes this dwarf’s hand and marches off to do whatever it is the lyrium man hired him, by proxy, to do—At first that would seem to be a whole lot of nothing, but once outside the Alienage house it becomes obvious that they’ve taken the man’s part in a slavehunter’s ambush. All fine and good: Hawke gets to murder slavehunters, and Merrill gets a new ring, but with the dust settling and no sign of his mysterious employer anywhere, Hawke begins to get anxious.
Anso had said, “I don’t know where he is, I don’t know if you’ll meet him—maybe? Please, please go, I wasn’t supposed to tell you any of this!” But Hawke had fully expected to see him, the white-haired elf who glows when he says “mage.”
Not to see him now, after coming this close—It just isn’t fair.
To really, really never meet again after such prime romantic parting words—
“Maybe we’ll meet again when it’s more convenient,” the swarthy apostate said throbbingly.
“I doubt it,” the stoic, sweat-glistening elf intoned, and walked out of his life forever… Or so he thought.
“Don’t take up writing, Chuckles,” Varric says, and at that moment another slaver barrels down the stairway and threatens them, and in the same moment, the lyrium man walks back into Hawke’s life. And Hawke finally learns his name.
Fenris. He’s just as astonishing as he was a year ago; Hawke was almost convinced he’d imagined him.
He’d intended to say something clever and charming, like I like your new armor, it’s a better fit for you, but after seeing him—Fenris—plunge his hand into that man’s chest, Hawke gets a tad queasy and distracted. “You were going to do that to me, weren’t you? When you started glowing?”
Fenris starts to speak but closes his mouth. He furrows his brow.
Hawke says, “We’ve met, ‘Ser Jon.’”
His eyebrows shoot up. He says something foreign which, Hawke can guess by tone, is not something Tevinters say in their chantries.
Or maybe it is. Hawke doesn’t know that much about Tevinter.
Fenris had seemed to have a speech planned, but now he blanks. He stares, Hawke laughs, and Fenris clears his throat. “Did… Did your brother ever return? From Ostagar?”
Varric elbows him. “Aw, he remembers you, too.”
“Who the fuck is this?” Carver says.
After everything, going through his former master’s demon-infested mansion, not finding the bastard, Fenris calling Hawke “mage” again afterwards and Hawke calling Fenris “handsome,” they talk at Fenris’s new house. Fenris throws a bottle against the wall. Hawke says, “Is now more convenient?”
Fenris laughs and says, “No.”
And that’s fair. But Hawke thinks they could be friends, and it looks like that’s what they’re becoming until Feynriel.
“Feynriel, you know… Quite the divisive issue,” Hawke tells the raven. The raven twists her head down towards the bay outside, where Hawke imagines a fish has just arched above water.
He’s telling all this to a crow on the other side of the window, the single three-by-five inch barred window in his cell, trying to keep himself on one side of the edge, rather than over it. He heard stories that the witch woman who’d sometimes visit Lothering could change shapes, so he imagines it’s her he’s talking to, not just a dumb animal, pitiless and concerned only with fish. Or it could be one of his Amell cousins, or even a long-lost relative on his father’s side. They’re supposed to be Chasind, after all, and the Chasind are supposed to do things like turn into birds.
The most powerful magic is, of course, one’s imagination.
“I didn’t intend to drag Fenris into that whole apostasy mess, with Feynriel,” he tells the raven, after a very slight coughing fit. “Truly. He has reasons to feel the way he does about all that, I’ve never asked him to help me champion mage rights on purpose.”
It was nightfall when Hawke spoke to that ex-Templar in Lowtown, and it was near midnight by the time he left the warehouse where they were keeping her, Olivia. Ser Thrask’s daughter. He had her letter in his hand, and he had the account book marking who Feynriel had been sold to, and it so easily could have been him and Bethany.
So Hawke, Aveline, Anders and Merrill were cutting through Lowtown to reach the mining elevator closest to Anders’s clinic, because Anders was sure he knew how to find this Danzig, and Merrill was repeating, “Do you think we’ll reach him in time? Do you think we’ll reach him in time?” And Hawke was repeating the letter and the receipt to himself, in his mind:
Father, I know the sacrifices you’ve made to conceal
2 barrels of fish, Viscount’s Keep
I cannot burden you my whole life, lest my secret destroy
3 barrels of rum, Hanged Man
I hope you one day make peace between what you have been taught and
1 male human mage, Danzig (Undercity)
It is oddly freeing to write the word. All my love, Olivia.
Fenris was standing outside the Hanged Man, and as the four of them rushed past he fell into step beside them.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Killing slavers,” Hawke answered.
“I’ll join you,” he said, and the details did get hashed out on the way—The boy they were rescuing was a mage; it made no difference to Fenris. Of course it didn’t.
But no one thought to discuss where they would send the boy after.
It was nearly morning by the time they made it to the Coast, to the cave where Feynriel was—still alive, still well and whole. They killed the slavers. Feynriel didn’t trust him; he asked, “Why would you help me?”
Hawke lit his hand on fire and told him: “I am you.”
The air changed.
He said he wanted to go to the Dalish. Merrill said they would take him, and that Marethari would teach him.
Fenris said, “You must know that the Circle is the only place equipped to care for you.”
Anders immediately fired up—Oh, really?—but Hawke was as taken aback as he always is, because for some reason he always lets himself forget that even good people, people he thinks of as friends, want him locked in a tower. Side effects of a sheltered childhood.
“It’s not,” Feynriel said, voice cracking. “Look at them—“ He looked to Hawke, Merrill and Anders—their eyes connected for a second, Feynriel’s were pleading—“They’re not in the Circle, and they’re fine.”
Fenris nods to Anders. “He’s an abomination.” He gestures to Merrill. “She’s a maleficar.” And he holds a hand out toward Hawke, and he says, “For every mage like him, there are dozens more who deal with demons, who sacrifice others for power, who become monsters. You don’t walk an easy path.”
Feynriel had gone pale and was biting down on his lip, trying not to cry.
Hawke hissed, “Stop this.”
Fenris’s shoulders tensed, and he clenched his jaw, but he kept his eyes on the boy.
“You’re a hypocrite,” Feynriel said.
“But am I wrong?” Fenris said.
Hawke sent him to the Dalish. Fenris did not try to stop him, walked with him back to Kirkwall to tell the boy’s mother where he had gone, bid him farewell at the Alienage gates, and Hawke did not see him again for two weeks.
Their relationship cooled, after that.
“I suppose it was only a matter of time,” Hawke tells the raven. She’s rustling her feathers now, like she’s about to fly off to pursue one of her fish, so Hawke, wincing at the pain, reaches to where his dinner plate lies, by the opposite wall, and slides a crust of moldy bread between the bars. She hops back from it, at first, but when his hand leaves the window ledge she cocks her head at the crust and starts to peck.
Hawke breathes a sigh of relief. That hurts, too.
“Just a bit too star-crossed,” he continues, but he’s drifting, now, distracted by the footsteps down the hall, the nearing sound of steel plates hitting each other. “A bit like you and me, if you think about it.” He taps the brick under the raven’s feet, and she stills a moment before returning to the bread.
The footsteps stop, and Hawke can hear talking but he can’t quite make out the words. Sitting on the plank that’s serving as his bunk, he sets his head back against the wall and stares down at the crack under the door. No shadows yet.
A sudden clatter, and the voices stop. More footsteps.
The raven pokes her beak through the bars. Hawke crosses his legs, frowning.
He has to tug at the skirt of his new robe to disentangle his legs, unfortunately. He’d been a good sport about putting the robe on, all things considered. It’s older than he is, doesn’t fit even slightly and it’s itchy as damnation, but he could see it being flattering on someone with entirely different proportions. Very flattering, even—the cape is rather fetching. He’d probably love it if he could cut the sleeves off.
He’d been told that the older he got, the less likely it was the Templars would risk taking him captive: past a certain age, the reasoning goes, an apostate is both completely unviable for Circle training and assuredly a master of forbidden magic. Better to put him down now, save trouble and expense.
So waking up alive surprised him, until he remembered the signet ring on his finger.
Noble mages are better than knights for a ransom, because they don’t have to give the mages back. Dead noble mages, however, mean irate noble families stirring up trouble for months. The choice to keep him alive must have been obvious. When they saw him awake they asked for his name, which he took to mean they didn’t recognize the crest: another blessing. He has something like seven tranquil cousins on the Amell side, and he’s not sure which Circles have each of them, so he decided it best not to tell them anything, just in case they recognized the name. The Amell line has been silent for years now, after all: hardly a better name than Hawke for a ransom.
And he always said that if they ever tried to take him he’d get himself possessed and take the whole damn lot of them out with him, but when he actually got there—In anti-magic chains, brains smitten out, surrounded by men and women with blades of mercy engraved on their chests and holy suns sewn into their skirts—A gruesome death-by-vengeance was better than captivity, tranquility, humiliation, certainly, but in that crucial first moment the situation didn’t seem quite so bleak to Hawke. He could still find a way out of it, probably. No sense in being rash with a thing like tentacles.
And it did get quite a bit bleaker, but by then, Hawke was in a Circle where hundreds of people lived, and he was beginning to think that becoming an abomination had been a terrible plan all along.
He did try to escape, though. Thus, the solitary cell.
He kisses the ring and thanks his mother, his dead grandfather and grandmother who’d wished he’d never been born, all the Amells before that who weren’t mages and gave the family a good name, and finally, he thanks his father for being such a stone cold fox.
Maker bless you, Malcolm Hawke, for marrying up.
“And fuck you, Isabela, for getting me trapped in this shitshow. Amen.”
The raven squawks, surprisingly loud, and Hawke starts.
“What, you want to know what Isabela did to deserve that? Well, that’s a bit of a story, but if you want to go into it…”
The lock on the door turns, screeching, and the raven flies off. Hawke thinks this means they’re going to brand him now, or try, but the door swings on its hinges and reveals just one Templar.
They’d definitely send more than one to brand him, after he knocked all those Knight-Ensigns off their feet with the pull of the abyss. And the one he immolated… Well, he definitely took some punishment for that, but to see him scrambling to get his suddenly-superheated, lava-red armor off before his skin completely cooked away—That was worth every smite.
The single man’s wearing his visor down, which brings back memories, and before he can speak there’s a bang down the hall. He looks over his shoulder after it, and Hawke snorts at his own joke before he even makes it.
“Aren’t you a little short for a Templar?” he says, bitterly.
The Templar turns and stares, silently, through his visor. “I’m wearing fucking platform boots.”
“…What?”
The Templar lifts his helmet off, and Hawke’s jaw drops.
Fenris combs his white hair back with his hand and, quickly, looks back into the hall again. “It’s me. I’m here to rescue you.”
“No! Really? No!”
“Yes.” He closes the door just enough to block the view from the hall and, glancing at Hawke, flashes an absolutely heart-stopping grin—Hawke’s certainly in the Fade now, but he knocks on the wall and lo, it doesn’t wiggle like jelly or turn into the ceiling.
Fenris gives him a curious look and jerks his head to the side. “Come, we have to be quick. I’ll explain more on the way.”
And that’s a fine idea and something Hawke can definitely do.
Hawke gets to his feet at once, one motion, and he stumbles into the wall, but that’s fine—He keeps moving, takes one step, then two, then grabs at the wall on his way to the floor, because actually he lost count after a while but he’s been hit with the holy smite at least ten times today—a dizzying experience, the aftereffect of which is much like the last day of one of those deadly childhood fevers that leave you with a blurred memory of the past two months and, strangely, unable to lace your own boots until you’re retaught—and moving about makes that stabbing in his chest much, much worse.
Fenris swears and catches him, arms hooked under his arms.
“You beautiful, sexy hero, I’ve swooned.”
Fenris lowers both of them to their knees instead of yanking Hawke up and telling him to get moving, which must mean that Hawke looks truly precarious. “What did they do to you?”
“Now, that’s a story, but if you want to go into it…” Hawke grins, and Fenris’s eyes are so bright in the beam of light from the window, but before he can say anything winning Hawke is racked by another round of coughing. Fenris keeps his hands on him while Hawke coughs blood onto the white brick floor. The pain this causes him is so extraordinary tears actually drip from his eyes.
Hawke tries to suck in a breath, but the sharp pain that constricts around his chest like a corset made of razor blades tells him it’s a bad idea. “I broke a rib, I think.” Kicked while he was down, literally. His voice is thinner than he’d like. Then, he remembers the winning comment: “I had a scrape with a few dozen Knight-Templars.”
He looks up, and a smile flicks onto Fenris’s face which doesn’t reach his eyes. “Stop it,” he says, surprisingly gentle. Worried? Is he worried about him?
To be completely fair, Hawke is fairly worried about himself, too. He’s been escorted to Death’s door in six different carriages in the past twenty-four hours; he’d basically accepted that he’d have to knock sooner or later.
“You need to walk.” Fenris shifts closer and slides his hand down Hawke’s back, and with his arm braced around him he says, “Hold on to me.”
So Hawke slings an arm over his shoulders, Fenris grabs the helm he dropped to the floor when Hawke dropped, and with a steadiness granted by the disproportionate strength that used to baffle Hawke, Fenris lifts them both to their feet.
He puts the helm on with one hand; Hawke would help him, but that much twisting seems like a truly bad idea.
“Isabela is waiting at the bottom of the stairwell,” he says, and he steers them through the winding corridor, past heavy locked door after heavy locked door, and part of Hawke—the part that lives in his eardrums—is screaming to pick the locks, save the others. The pragmatic part of Hawke--the part that’s currently living in his cracked rib and skipping, battered heart--limps by and calls to each passing door, So long, you poor bastards.
He asks Fenris, “So Isabela’s here?” He’s focusing on Fenris’s hand on his bicep and how close they are, even through the pointy armor, rather than the way Fenris’s arm, wrapped around his chest, makes it feel like his chest is about to collapse. However much he likes this man, the distraction is not very effective.
“This was her plan, so yes.”
“Did she explain to you how I got captured by Templars in fucking Ostwick?”
“Not very well.”
“Two reasons: the first, a badly written poem. The second, someone’s old fucking boot.”
“That explains everything, thank you.”
When the corridor ends, the door to the stairwell is ajar and Fenris, a gentleman if there ever was one, shoulders Hawke into the corner and, shrugging Hawke’s arm off, mumbles, “Try to stand.”
“I’m not dead,” Hawke says, and then hacks more blood into the crook of his elbow, relying on the friction between the bricks and his robe to hold himself up.
Fenris steps into the stairwell and raps on the wall three times. It’s a cloak and dagger signal, Hawke thinks, excited.
Nothing seems to happen.
He raps again, and he swears.
“We’ll find her,” he says, and Hawke—refusing aid, this time, because now that his feet are on the ground he’s getting a sense of his legs again, even if they are rubbery—follows him, shoulder-first, into the steep stairwell.
The Ostwick Circle was once a Queen’s castle. Hawke doesn’t know anything, really, about Marcher history, but when they first caught sight of the Circle on its cliffside perch, Isabela took a deep breath and said, “I wonder if the queen was as robust as her castle…” Then growled, slapped his back and laughed.
She was, in retrospect, clearly as out of her mind with how bad of an idea going there was as he was. The raider stash that was, supposedly, buried under the floorboards of the Circle’s stables was, clearly, not worth the risk. The two of them were laughing and snapping viciously at each other right up to the moment the Templars threw open the door and Isabela said, “Luck to you, sweet thing,” as she leapt out the window.
Whether or not a queen ever had it, the castle clearly has a colorful history. This tower, for example: Hawke really didn’t get a chance to admire the keep, but the tower—the tower where they keep the bad mages, the tower with five stories, the slim spindly tower built into the land, the bricks of whose foundation are kissed day and night by the stormy waters of the Waking Sea, whose stairways are so slim you have to enter them sideways—That tower, the tower they’re in right now, just screams “colorful history.”
“How did you--?” Hawke starts, but he’s stopped by the echo of his voice bouncing off the sloped ceiling. Fenris holds up his index finger: hush.
“How did you find out so quickly?” Hawke whispers. “I haven’t been here a day.”
“Isabela and I crossed paths on the road between here and Kirkwall. She was going back to find help, but I was closer.”
“Why were you following us to Ostwick?”
A second’s hesitation. “I wasn’t. I was on my way to Markham.”
“Markham?” Hawke cringes at the echo and lowers his voice. “Wait--You were leaving Kirkwall?”
“Not permanently.”
“Oh? When were you coming back?”
Fenris halts; Hawke stumbles into him and nearly loses his balance, and Fenris twists around. Hawke can just see the flash of one green eye through the slit in his visor. “Do you want to discuss this now?”
Hawke smiles. “Later.”
Fenris turns away.
The tower is five stories: Hawke was on the fourth, the first two levels below that had looked like storage rooms, and all he saw of the ground floor was a desk, a wall of cabinets, and what was definitely a branding iron mounted on the wall.
The door led out to the courtyard, and Hawke sincerely hopes Fenris and Isabela, wherever she’s gotten off to, have a plan from there because, if memory serves, the only way out of the castle is guarded by two very large doors and more than several very large Templars. And then, there’s a moat. With a trained gurgut, if the Knight-Corporal who bashed Hawke’s ribcage in is to be believed.
The stairs spiral down the center of the tower, but aren’t continuous: a door spits them out onto the third story, but to get the second they’ll have to circle the floor and find a door on the opposite side, to a second staircase.
Isabela is, as predicted, nowhere to be seen. Where the fourth floor was walled with cells, the third is left open and filled with cabinets, crates, and tables full of arms and armaments of various shapes and colors.
Hawke whispers, “Look, that’s my staff.”
Fenris whispers, “Say goodbye to it.”
Hawke scowls, completely betrayed.
“You’re a prisoner,” Fenris elaborates. “Act like one.”
Getting into character himself, Fenris seizes him by the arm and yanks him forward—The wind leaves his body, but Hawke stays on his feet.
He can hear someone shuffling papers around the corner, so as they turn it, he acts like a prisoner:
“Oh you, you nasty, horrible Templar,” he tells Fenris, loudly. “You terrible man, my oppressor.”
Fenris tightens his grip enough to sting. The real Templar, a long-haired man standing with a book--what Hawke assumes to be the inventory account--drops his quill on the nearby table and nods to Fenris.
“You, new guy. Where in the void are you going with that robe?”
“The infirmary,” Fenris says. “This mage needs a healer.”
The Templar glances at Hawke. “He’s fine.”
Hawke, to make the point, coughs into his fist. That, however, triggers a very genuine fit: doubled over, he has to press his hand against his left side to hold his chest in place, and after a suffocating moment he spits a lovely lungful of phlegm onto the floor.
“I’m taking him to the infirmary.”
“You’re not even following bloody protocol.”
Still bent, gasping for air, Hawke hears the account book clap against the table, boots clapping against the floor, and the swift open-and-shut of a drawer.
“He’s in solitary for a reason, Corporal,” the Templar says, and Hawke hears something rattling. “He’s dangerous. If you want to take him out, you need two men, and he needs the cuffs.”
So he seizes Hawke’s wrist and pulls, and when that doesn’t have the result he wants, he seizes the collar of Hawke’s robe and drags him to his feet. The last time Hawke was manhandled this thoroughly, he was thirteen, earning coppers running messages and packages between the docks and market in Amaranthine—the job, then, was getting snatched by the shirt as you ran down the street and handed a letter and a coin, then getting cuffed for being too slow.
He says as much to the Templar, in wheezes, as he watches him pry open the inscribed cuffs.
The Templar says, “You’d do well to remember how to be that humble again.”
Which is a fine idea, and something Hawke could definitely benefit from.
And it’s not as if the cell hadn’t been inscribed inside and out with anti-magic sigils, it’s not as if Hawke’s mana pool has had any time at all to recover, but when the cuffs snap around his wrists the wave of nausea is almost enough to knock him to the ground.
Seeing him close up, he recognizes the Templar, the man with the aquiline nose and the long hair. Hawke smiles at him. “Were they able to grow your friend’s skin back?”
His gauntlet cracks into Hawke’s face and shatters the cheekbone, skull, that whole affair, judging purely by feeling.
Hawke hits the ground and hears a grunt, a gurgle, and another body hitting the floor with a crash.
He opens his good eye, and the man lying dead beside him is not Fenris.
“My knight in shining armor,” he chokes out, along with more blood.
Calmly reciting foreign words which Hawke knows to be incredibly crude to himself, Fenris crouches down, slides an arm under the ex-Templar’s back and an arm under his knees, picks up the body and carries it to a wardrobe: a cacophony of steel-on-steel. The heart, still clutched in his hand, drips, and he grasps at the handle with his free hand a moment before saying, “Hawke.” The please help is implied.
Hawke does not quite manage to get to his feet, but he gets to the wardrobe and turns the knob. This wardrobe, luckily, is only housing a row of staves mounted on the back side, and Fenris has no trouble at all stuffing a grown man’s fully armored cadaver into it.
He’s closing the newmade casket when Hawke hears the door downstairs open and shut, the warble of someone’s voice, and tells Fenris to shush, listen.
He does, and he looks down at his glistening red gauntlet, then at Hawke and the bloodstains on the brick all around him. Footsteps echo up the central column, the song getting clearer as the singer rises closer, and Fenris pulls Hawke to his feet and shoves them both into the wardrobe.
It’s a tight fit.
Hawke finds a way to fit his feet between the corpse’s limbs, and Fenris manages to get his helmet off so that his neck will bend at the necessary angle against the wardrobe’s top. They spend a moment trying to reconcile both sets of knees with the space given them, Fenris jams an elbow into Hawke’s solar plexus and kills him, and their frantic hushing dies down just as the footsteps clack, clack, clack to a halt and a high-pitched voice calls out,
“Ser Langston? Are you still here?”
Fenris’s eyes track the movement of the sound: clack, clack, pause. Clack, clack. Hawke wants to tell him that they shine in the dark, but he probably already knows.
Clack. Clack.
“Why are you doing this, Fenris?”
His shining eyes snap to Hawke.
“You believe in the Circles,” Hawke continues, just a breath of sound. “This doesn’t make any—“
Fenris presses a cold plated finger to Hawke’s lips. Hawke shuts himself up.
The girl calls, distant, for Ser Langston. Hawke mouths, under Fenris’s finger, Why?
Fenris runs his thumb, the sharp edge of steel, under the split in Hawke’s skin, under one eye.
Did you change your mind?
Why? Hawke is barely breathing, not only because of the pneumonia. Fenris’s knee between his legs, only a moment before an uncomfortable practicality, is now burning with implications; Fenris lowers his gaze and Hawke, by the light coming through the crack of the wardrobe door, can just make out his lips bending around the word, Quiet.
But actually, Hawke really, really needs to know. He remembers vividly the afternoon when Fenris’s elbows were on a crate and his eyes were squinted against the sun, glaring off the harbor water, and he asked Hawke why he thought the Circle was so terrible an option. He remembers, vividly, Feynriel.
It’s possible that there will be a better time to ask, but there’s a thrum in his ears like a switch on his knuckles that tells him, Don’t be so sure.
So with a scrape of wool on wood, Hawke twists his arm free enough to take Fenris’s wrist and pull it down from his face, and he says—too audibly—“Why are you doing this?”
Fenris wrenches his hand free. “Freedom is a worthy venture,” he hisses.
Hawke feels like that has some hidden, venomous significance, but he can’t for the life of him figure what.
So he says, “What?” Again, too loudly, and Fenris covers his mouth—a scrape of metal on wood, too loudly—and again, Hawke pulls his hand away, and then quite suddenly Fenris’s lips are so close to Hawke’s they brush; he exhales and they trade breathes, and neither moves closer but neither pulls away.
The door opens, a shock of light and a gasp, then claps shut.
“Sorry!” The girl says. “Didn’t mean to interrupt! I’ll come back later!”
They listen to the clack, clack, clacks rush, grow distant, and fade away.
“I owe you a debt,” Fenris says, slowly and deliberately. “I am repaying you, and after that, I am moving on to Markham. The rest doesn’t concern you.”
He opens the wardrobe door.
Fenris trades his bloodied gauntlet for a fresh one from a set on a rack, and they exit the tower with no further complications. Before they can even consider the obstacle of the enormous barred door and its dozen guards at the other end of the castle courtyard, Isabela bursts out of the keep—wearing a full suit of armor and, inexplicably, a wide-brimmed feather hat—with a dozen robed mages at her back. With a few well-cast sleep spells, a stolen key, and some convenient horses, the lot of them escape the Ostwick Circle in less than ten minutes’ time.
See, the Ostwick Circle is small, the smallest in the Free Marches. It’s a little institution set up in an old fortress that was, just a few generations ago, nothing more than a crumbling heirloom on some noble family’s holdings. It was that noble family who, bequeathing the castle to the Chantry, caused the small Ostwick Circle to come into being—a smaller, more easily controlled home for the mages that inevitably popped out of their bloodline. If you can’t fight the system, be the system, Hawke supposes, although he doesn’t suppose that at all.
If Hawke had been spirited away by Templars closer to home and found himself inside the Gallows—an island fortress that was once the greatest prison outside mainland Imperial Tevinter, which is now the most strictly guarded Circle after the White Spire in Orlais—Even if Isabela was dumb enough to try and rescue him, there was no way imaginable she could succeed.
As it was, though, Hawke had been spirited away to Ostwick, and Isabela rescued not only Hawke, but half a dozen enchanters and one pet rat without really even trying. Indeed, she freed them completely on accident after being ordered out of the tower to perform some Templar duty she never managed to get the specifics on, because she’d freed the mages before she could get to it. Without knowing for sure what exactly a phylactery was, Isabela broke into the phylactery chamber and shattered four shelves of them. They decided to assume that one of those held Hawke’s, because if it didn’t they’d find out sooner or later anyway. Better to sleep sound while you can, after all.
Before fleeing on one of the white horses, one of the enchanters healed Hawke’s ribs and lungs, and Isabela picked the lock on his cuffs.
Twenty-four hours in the lion’s den, and Hawke was no worse for the wear. He would say he was better off, in fact, because on the point of dying forever, his friendship with Fenris was given a second breath. He’d take another dozen holy smites and ten more kicks to the chest to stop Fenris from taking off to Markham without even a chance to ask him—Why?
(Of course, declarations like that are somewhat paler coming from someone who grew up in a house with healing magic. Still, the pain factor is not to be discounted.)
The four of them, including one botanist who’s planning on holing up in a cave here permanently, make camp in the mountains, like criminals, which they are that night even more than usual. Isabela and Hawke gather wood for a fire, during which time Isabela claps him on the back and says, “Well, I came back, so if you hold it against me you’re really a fascist, aren’t you?” Which is about as close to an apology as Isabela can get, so Hawke forgives her, and she wanders off to go hole up in the botanist’s cave.
When the fire is lit, Fenris is seated at a distance from it with his head in his hands.
“Fenris,” Hawke says, and sits on the ground by his feet. Fenris says nothing.
“Your debt is repaid. You don’t have to stick around and help me anymore. What are you going to do now?”
“My debt isn’t repaid,” he says, eyes still covered, shoulders like swords staked over a battlefield grave. “You saved my life and I saved yours, that is balanced, but you also helped me try to ambush Danarius at the mansion. I still owe you.”
“You owe me nothing. I told you I didn’t need payment for that, and anyway, you’ve let me drag you into a dozen more dangerous situations—the balance is in your favor, at this point.”
“Do you wish me to leave?” He looks up now. “Say so, and you’ll never have to see me again. I promise you.”
“I’m saying you can leave. I’m asking if you want to stay.”
He stares off at the fire.
“You were the last bright thing in my life for a long time. When we met, in Lothering,” Hawke clarifies. He’s facing the fire, but what he’s actually looking at is Fenris: the bags under Fenris’s eyes, the line of his back, the lines running up his hands and his hand, twitching from a pain that is rarely visible, but which Hawke suspects is usually present. Hawke clears his throat. “After you left, it all fell to the Void. The darkspawn came, worse than I ever imagined it could be. Most everyone left in town was killed. My sister was killed.”
“You should have made me stay. Perhaps I could’ve made the difference.”
“I never thought of that. Would you have stayed, even?”
“If you demanded I repay you for your help. I might have. I can imagine it.”
He wouldn’t’ve, but he wishes he did.
“I only thought of you again on the ship. You were like the warm dream you linger on before waking and accepting winter, yeah? All I wanted was to throw myself overboard, but I stood with my elbows on the rail, I watched the water and I wondered where you were at that moment. The mysterious lyrium man, the man so diametrically opposite me I could hardly imagine what you might be doing, where you’d go. Where did you go, by the way?”
He doesn’t answer directly. “I learned what happened to Lothering while I was in Denerim. I was sure you died waiting for your brother.”
“Were you happy to see me alive, when we met in the Alienage?”
“Yes.”
He opens his hand, and Hawke swears he‘s going to touch him, but Fenris only sits up, looks away.
In the dark, a few feet right of his foot, Hawke sees a little red flower reflecting the moonlight. So he plucks it and ties the stem around one of the spikes on Fenris’s bracers, because he’s wanted to do that for ages and because it belongs there. In the distance: the sound of Isabela gagging violently.
And she’s quite right. This is all far too chivalric ballad romance: far too many declarations and near-declarations for anyone to swallow in good conscience.
Fenris blinks down at his arm, dazed.
“Thank you for killing that Templar for me,” Hawke says.
He touches a petal, confused. “He was a poor Templar.”
“Feynriel,” Hawke says.
“Yes,” Fenris says, and leaves the flower be.
“Quite the divisive—“
“You didn’t help him for the sake of freedom, you helped him because he was a mage like you.”
And oh, that was it, wasn’t it? Freedom is a worthy venture. “…Couldn’t both be true?”
“Yes. But I wasn’t sure then. You have to understand, aligning myself with you isn’t… easy.”
What he means is, trusting you isn’t easy. He doesn’t want to say it.
“That’s fair,” Hawke says. “You frighten me a little, too.”
“I should,” he says, and drops his head to hang.
“You don’t mean me harm, though.”
“I see why you avoid Circles.”
“I’m not that unusual a mage. The others don’t deserve that, either.”
“The Templars should do their jobs better,” is all Fenris will concede, and Hawke decides that that’s enough.
“Are you leaving for Markham?”
He doesn’t answer directly. He stands, and with his back to Hawke, he says, “You must understand that this isn’t easy for me.”
“It’s hard to stop running,” Hawke extrapolates. Fenris’s shoulders rise with a sigh, and from his silence, Hawke extrapolates, “Or something else…?”
“No,” Fenris decides, shaking his head. “No.” He looks over his shoulder, the flash of one green eye. “I am going to Markham, yes. For now.”
Hawke nods.
“I’ll come back.”
“Of course you will.” Hawke pulls on a smile. “You have a mansion in Kirkwall. You can’t just leave it for squatters.”
Fenris ducks his head and grins, and Hawke should know when to quit. He should really learn.
“You were going to kiss me.”
That easily: his smile, gone. “I was. I apologize.”
“No need.”
“But there is, and I apologize.” Fenris turns, then, to look down the mountain path, past the white rocks reflecting the moonlight, and for a second Hawke can see his life unfolding this way: the years notched like carvings in a doorway with moments where Fenris decides to leave again. (And Hawke could see himself cherishing this future, too, because at least Fenris would come back, one of those stars that disappears for a generation, but comes back. He can’t be sure that he will, can he?) “I think I’m going to start making my way north now,” Fenris says.
“At least wait until morning, traveling the mountains alone is dangerous enough in daylight.” Hawke listens to himself say this, and he can already hear a rhythm of ritual in this. One more night, one more word, please.
“I’ve done it before.”
And trying any more to stop him would just make him run faster and farther, so Hawke bites his tongue, physically. In silence he fetches Fenris’s pack for him, hands it to him and their hands don’t touch; he follows him to the mountain path that dips down, like a fall, into the conifers. That wish, “I’ll be seeing you,” hasn’t left his throat when Fenris stops, gripping the strap over his shoulder.
“I thought of you,” he says, and he locks up a moment as if he could say more, but he doesn’t.
Hawke shrugs. “Me, too.” What?
“If I were to kiss you now… Would it have to mean anything?”
And honestly, he’s such a fool for this man Hawke almost says no. But he looks down, he smiles at his feet. “Yes,” he says. “I’m afraid it would.”
“That is fair.” Fenris nods, and he smiles at Hawke so ruefully before turning and walking away, down the road.
Hawke watches him go, and he watches him stop and turn around.
He comes back, slides his hand into Hawke’s hair, and he kisses him.