Work Text:
“Am I doing this right?” It’s hard to throw a single sheet of parchment, but Fenris tries as he enters the library. It wafts gently down onto Hawke’s desk.
She looks it over. Precise marks, made with a stick of charcoal--or perhaps a piece of firewood straight out of his hearth. “There’s a ‘c’ in chicken,” she says, keeping her voice neutral.
“I used one,” he replies.
“There’s one in the middle too.” She ventures a glance up at him.
His face contorts in confusion. “Why?”
Hawke can’t hold back her grin any longer. “I don’t know. Fenris--” she looks at the parchment again, then back up at him--”can I keep this?”
Fenris shuffles his feet. “It’s just a list.” Hawke continues to grin at him, and finally he says, “You can keep it.”
She puts it in the box that holds Bethany’s letters. “Wine,” she proposes, and Fenris nods seriously, and while Hawke is up the stairs filling two glasses from the cask, she hears the library door open again.
“Oh. Is she…”
“Anders,” she greets him, and descends the stairs and presses the glass that was going to be hers into his hands. She kisses his cheek. “We were about to celebrate.” She gives Fenris the other glass, and turns back to the stairs. “Fenris has started writing.”
She’s halfway up the stairs. Anders says, “Memoir? Novel?”
She’s holding her glass under the spigot. Fenris says, “Grocery list.”
She’s halfway down the stairs. Anders says, “Have to start somewhere. Today the grocery list, tomorrow a treatise against mages.”
She sighs. As ever, she wasn’t fast enough. “Just the time it takes to drink a glass of wine,” she says to Anders. “That’s all I ask.” Anders looks away.
“I should go,” Fenris mutters.
“No, don’t bother,” says Anders. “I’m to bed.” He downs his wine and leaves the glass on his desk. He squeezes Hawke’s forearm, a gesture of habit and fondness more than anything else, and says “Congratulations” to Fenris before he goes.
Hawke and Fenris wait, still, until the door closes upstairs, and even then Hawke feels like she’s waiting. “It’s not my place to comment,” Fenris starts.
“You’re right,” Hawke says, without malice.
“But. The tension isn’t just between me and him.”
“You’re right about that, too.” Hawke goes to the nearest shelf and selects a book she isn’t particularly invested in. She trusts Fenris and he, she’s fairly sure by this point, trusts her; still, she isn’t ready to make their problems his burden too. She doesn’t think she could even articulate their problems. “Let’s drink.”
He nods, they sit, and Hawke raises her wine. “To your future memoir,” she says, smiling again. “May it inspire countless others to throw off their chains.”
Fenris twists his mouth at her, and clinks his glass against hers. The first sip of red is sweet, until it’s not. “Your handwriting is excellent,” she tells him after the sharpness fades from her tongue. “If Mother were here, she’d ask you to write all her social invitations.”
“In which case I would hope none of her friends were named Chicken,” he says, and Hawke laughs, genuinely. She hands him the book. The more he reads, the better he’ll spell.
Fenris reads aloud, and Hawke stares at the fireplace for a long while until he says, “I can tell you’re not listening. You haven’t corrected me once.” She turns, mouth open to apologize, but he holds up a hand. “And it’s fine. Thank you for the wine, my friend. Until next time.”
“Do you want an escort?” she asks, inwardly kicking herself. She always looks forward to hearing Fenris read, and now she’s squandered it.
“No need. Goodnight, Hawke.”
“Goodnight, Fenris.” Hawke puts the book back, washes the glasses, gives the dog a thorough pet, and checks the latch on the front door before she goes upstairs. She opens the bedroom door, steps inside, leans back against it, and says, “How are you?”
“In a foul mood,” Anders answers from the bed. “Why?”
“Because if I didn’t know you, I’d say you have a jealous streak a mile wide.” She steps away from the door and starts to undress.
Anders’s eyes are on the fire. “I don’t mind you spending time with Fenris in your own house.”
“Our house.” She sits heavily on the edge of the bed, her back to him. “You’re allowed to mind. You’re allowed to be in a foul mood about it. We’re allowed to be two different people.”
“I feel very affirmed,” he says.
She gets to the question she has wanted to ask since he came home with his coat dyed black. “Are you here because you want to be, or because it’s safe?”
“I love you very much,” he says, too quickly.
“Why are your drafts in the fire?” There are only fragments left, but she would know the words and the horrendous spelling anywhere.
“I don’t need them anymore.”
“They were important to you.” He took them with him from Darktown, kept them in the desk for years. Every page, except for the one he brought over and then, while she was called into the entryway to receive a guest who needed her particular skill set, he lost his nerve and threw it into the fire. Told her he was there to have a conversation with her dog.
“They’re just words,” Anders says. “Words don’t change minds; they just make people cling tighter to the lies that comfort them.”
She wants to roll her eyes. Wants to sigh until her lungs collapse. Wants to have something, anything, to say to that, but if there ever was a shining paragon of the power of words over brute force, Marian Hawke is not it. She lies down, blocking his view of the fire.
“Where do you buy quills in this town?” she asks the ceiling.
“I’ve always made my own.” Of course. He can pluck them from his pauldrons. “But if Hubert is out of stock, Jean Luc probably has some.”
“Right.” She wonders if chicken feathers make good quills. Maybe she can cut one herself.
Sometime later she says, “Anders, I still believe in everything you’ve done.”
She feels how heavily the words land between them. There’s no faster way to burden someone, Hawke knows full well--she carries a whole city’s belief. They think she can bear it because she has a hero’s shoulders. Anders has begun to bow under unraveled plans and failed escapes, but perhaps… Perhaps one more burden will somehow undo the rest. “I still believe in changing minds.”
She takes his hand, and he allows it.
“I’m sorry,” he says after several breaths. Whether it’s for the jab at Fenris earlier, or for the fact that she still believes in what he has given up, or for something he hasn’t done yet, Hawke couldn’t say. She clings tighter to his hand as the fire burns down.