Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You know, Junior,” Varric says one soggy summer evening over yet another bloody winning hand, “you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t want to be the center of attention.”

“Of course I don’t want to be,” Carver snaps, because he definitely doesn’t and it’s not like he’s envious of his charismatic prick of a brother or anything. Not. At. All. “Why would I want to be?”

But Varric only hums and gives him that look, the one that just screams This-Is-So-Going-In-My-Memoir; Carver can almost hear the gears shifting in his head, the words already weaving tapestries behind his bright eyes. “You know, I could do with some new material. How about it?”

“No.”

“Think about it,” he says, flashing that grin Carver supposes has charmed countless women out of their dresses and underclothes and possibly their gold, too. He really needs to learn how to do that. “The things you could tell—you should write novels, Junior. Manifestos.” He takes a drink of his ale and Carver tries really hard to ignore the way he’s looking at him over the rim of his mug, like he’s trying to decide between one potentially unflattering adjective or another in his long-running epic that may or may not be filled with half-truths and exaggerations bigger and wider than the carved halls of Orzammar.

“I thought you just said the center of attention is where I don’t want to be.”

Varric laughs. “Of course not. That’s why I’m telling you to write. Haven’t you been listening?”

Yes. And this is making less and less sense. “But I don’t want to.”

“Then why not let me do it for you?” And there it is, the sly conqueror’s smile on his face, just like Carver knew it would be, his fingers itching for a pen and ink. “We could spin twelve yarns between the two of us.”

“You think you can just ply me with cheap ale and cards like a—a—”

“Yes.”

Well. Fine, then.

The thing is, Carver actually likes all those old heroic epics, the ones with knights and princesses and smoldering, swooning Antivans who are as likely to run a knife through your heart as they are to take you for a tumble or three; the problem is, the truth is really such a banal thing, and if there’s one thing life as a mercenary taught him, it’s that nobody bloody well appreciates you—especially not if you’ve got a charming, delightful, special older brother whose shadow you are forever smacking into face-first. Writers are liars. He supposes that is just the way of things, so that boys grow up to be young men like him who don’t quite know who they are or what they want. Or something.

So, no, Carver wouldn’t write a book, especially not one where he’s a piece in someone else’s play. He thinks he’d probably just keep a list somewhere, maybe tucked under his shitty straw mattress in Gamlen’s shitty ramshackle house, because lists are nice and honest and simple. He’d call it The Infallible Truths of the World, because that sounds good even if he isn’t completely sure what “infallible” means, and it would go something like this:

1. Garrett Hawke is an insufferable suckarse pig-headed dick except when he’s actually sort of all right

It’s a beautiful morning down at the docks, full of sunshine and the sea and the smell of piss and stale vomit in the alley where Garrett is peddling his broken bows and bottles of Maker-knows-what he found while rifling through some poor dead bastard’s pockets out at the Wounded Coast, and by now Carver can practically run through their nauseating rapport in his head.

“Oh, serah,” the merchant girl swoons, peering up at Garrett with enormous blue eyes and pretty patches of pink bubbling across her cheeks. “Of course I’m interested. I can have these fixed up by tomorrow! Thank you so much.”

Garrett dangles a few very poorly made bracelets in front of her and cuts a smile so smooth and sweet it could melt the gold jewelry right off a dwarven merchant. “Sure I can’t interest you in anything else? If it’s on me, it’s for sale.”

Carver is pretty sure that if he tried to pull that, he’d get cuffed in the ears and thrown out on his ass faster than Aveline had time to say, “I told you so.” Fortunately, she’s not here, and the only reason he’s even here is just in case any Carta thugs decide they need an outlet for their perpetual dissatisfaction with life again. He supposes he can’t blame them. Kirkwall is enough to piss anyone off, and right now it’s definitely pissing him off, so he stomps out of the alley around the time his brother starts leaning on the dingy counter and pulls a thick piece of frayed rope out of his pocket, wandering around until he finds a decent bench to sit on that isn’t occupied by any seedy types or sailors, glowering at the gulls and he’s not sulking, he’s not.

It’s been more than a year now, and Carver still isn’t sure whether he’s jealous of his brother’s infinite adaptability or if it just sort of disgusts him. He hates Kirkwall, chafes at its granite and bronze, but Garrett and his mother talk about how it’s their home now, how they have to get their stupid estate back so they can live a life Carver never knew and never wanted; as far as he’s concerned, this place, Lowtown, Gamlen’s shitty house and the Amell estate too—it’s not home and it never will be. Ferelden was home, its forests and pear trees and its endless expanse of blue, blue sky, and how are you supposed to just plant yourself someplace else, roots and all, and forget?

Because, Carver doesn’t want to forget. Not Lothering, not the windmills, not that gorgeous red-haired lay sister with the accent, not their old house and the way Bethany used to sit by the fire and sew him socks with little birds stitched into the toes. If Kirkwall in all its depravity has taught him anything, it’s that he is not particularly good at moving on, not the way his brother is. Carver is good at sitting and stewing and hitting things and thinking up witty retorts ten minutes after they would have been useful.

And no one needs that. His mother doesn’t need that. Garrett doesn’t need that. And he keeps getting the increasingly miserable feeling that there is no place for him in this life his brother is sculpting out all on his own.

Not that he’d say so, or anything.

“You ran off on me, little brother. What would I have done if some big, mean brute popped out of the shadows and stole all my coin?”

Probably convince him to buy those fucking useless pebbles you keep in your pocket. “Fry his skin off. Debate the plight of mages. I don’t know.”

Garrett tosses a peach onto his lap and plops down next to him, smiling that smile that gets him discounts on terribly illegal poisons and Antivan brandy, and probably girls down at the Rose, too. “But that’s your job. You run the little ones through, I stand back and laugh and take care of the big ones.”

Of course. Because there is no glory in taking out a thousand angry mercenaries; where there is glory to be had, it is huge and horrifying and Garrett’s for the taking. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that we are a team, Brother,” Garrett says, even and easy like he’s explaining something to a very slow, very petulant child, and it just makes Carver’s scowl deepen. It’s Garrett’s favorite I-Know-Better-Than-You voice. Carver really hates that voice.

“You fucking sure about that?”

“Carver. Language.” Garrett shakes his head and flashes all his perfect teeth. “What would Bethany think of you going off like that?”

Bethany, he knows, would have shaken her head too and tried very hard to look cross and not at all like she was trying not to laugh, and then he’d have tried all the harder to make her laugh. His twin, his little sister. How he loved her, how he still loves the wound she left on his bones; the silver-sharp stab of her memory has finally faded to something more resembling a dull ache, and he has just reached the point where he can stop missing her every single moment of the day, but it still hurts and he isn’t sure it’s ever going to stop hurting. When he closes his eyes he can still see his sister dying, her bright brown eyes closed, and it’s not a problem he can bludgeon away with a heavy two-hander. He has tried.

“She’d have laughed,” Carver answers, staring straight ahead, still stuck in the flush of memory.“She actually had a sense of humor.”

“I have a sense of humor.”

“No you don’t.”

“Just because it’s more refined than yours.” Garrett’s eyes are shining and his lips are quirked up and, well, it’s hard to remember what a piss-eared dick he is when he’s looking at Carver all fondly. “How ever are you going to stand me for weeks and weeks underground?”

Carver takes a bite of his peach. It’s hard and a little sour, just on the edge of ripeness, but it’s better than anything he’s had since they washed up in the gloomy brown ocean of Lowtown. He’s so sick of plums. Garrett loves plums. Carver never has. “I’ll manage if you can,” he grumbles, because he’s not so intolerable that he can’t deal with his brother and the staff wedged up his humorless, self-righteous ass. Really. “Who else is going to look out for little stuff while you fight off a bleeding dragon.”

He’s fairly sure there aren’t dragons in the Deep Roads, but these things seem to be drawn to Garrett like flies to honey.

“No one,” Garrett says, tossing the rest of his plum into the sea. “No one but my baby brother.”

Carver scoffs. “I’m not a baby.” He isn’t. He is nineteen years old and he can take a mercenary’s head off in three seconds and he even has a scowl to rival that taciturn elf’s, damn it.

“Yes, you are,” Garrett chuckles and throws his arm around Carver’s shoulders, and it’s really not fair how he can do that so easily when Carver is taller and bigger and would feel awkward as the day is long trying to do it himself. “You’re my baby brother. You and I, thicker than thieves and twice as rich. All the gold we can hold, and we’ll come back and buy The Hanged Man out of cognac and ale. How about it?”

Carver opens his mouth to say, no, he’s not a bloody baby, but that’s not what comes out. “You and me,” he says, standing up when Garrett does.

“Me and you.” Garrett always looks so tall, even though he’s really not. It reminds Carver of their father, how he could fill up a room all on his own, a force unto himself, stern and solid and just a little frightening. It’s like looking at a ghost sometimes, and Carver isn’t sure how he feels about that. “You’re not going to run off and leave me behind, are you?”

He should really be the one asking that question. But he is not, and his brother is looking at him, smile in place, waiting for an answer.

So, he just says, “I’m not going anywhere,” rather more gruffly than he’d intended, but that always seems to happen to him anyway. He can deal with Kirkwall. He can live with this. Garrett’s smile widens.

“Good,” he says. “I need you.”

And that’s the moment they’re ambushed by Carta thugs, and it’s also the moment Carver feels his heart swell with a white-hot shock of something as he hefts his sword over his head and throws himself between the horde and his brother. He knows what to call the something.

Not that he’d say so, or anything.

2. The Maker has such a shitty sense of humor.

“Andraste guide you,” says the straitlaced priest with the white armor and the matching blinding-white smile that just screams, By the Maker, here I am! Shoot me, shoot me now!

Then there’s a disgruntled grunt and the soft crackle of magic behind him, followed immediately by a haughty, irritated voice. “Yes, Andraste guide them. But only if they aren’t mages.” If Carver didn’t know better (and he doesn’t, now he thinks on it) he would swear Anders practiced that long-suffering scowl in his mirror every morning.

And here he is, trapped between the two most insufferable men in Kirkwall and his brother, who for some sick, inconceivable reason decided it would be a good idea to have these two anywhere near each other for an extended period of time. Carver can’t decide which one he wants to hit more, so he settles for thinking about Isabela, and Isabela’s hips, and Isabela’s mouth, and how she flirts with him right in front of his brother, and how her legs might feel wrapped around his hips or maybe with her fingers moving up the insides of his thighs. Yes. Like that. And she’d flip him over, pin him to the mattress, and then—

“I’m talking to you, Carver.” Anders flicks his ear much harder than is necessary, bringing him crashing back down to the sad reality of a surly mage, a rather-too-pleased mage, and the brightest, whitest priest in Thedas. It is a small tragedy. “You can’t be too prepared for a trip down there. If we’re going to be plundering the Deep Roads together, you need to master your taint. Like a Grey Warden.”

He knows Anders is making fun of him now, because after haranguing about the plight of mages and how the Circle needs to burn and how anyone who disagrees with him ever is wrong wrong wrong, Anders’ second favorite thing to do is prod people until they either rise to the bait or tell him to get fucked—and either way, he wins. He’s like one of those stupid gulls that never stops screaming, and if you try to throw something at it, the thing just flies off and comes back later, usually when you’re trying to sleep. His brother is too far ahead to hear, looking for herbs or some weird mage-thing Carver isn’t meant to understand, but unless he is very mistaken (and it has been known to happen, once or twice), Sebastian is trying very hard not to laugh. And that’s just not right.

“Something funny?” he asks, because anything that deflects Anders’ attention from him is good.

“Oh, no,” Sebastian says, his mouth pinched up in a way that says he’s definitely lying. “Not at all.”

Fortunately, by some sweet, sweet twist of Fate’s cruel lips, it works; Anders rounds on Sebastian instead, and Carver can finally go about his business of looking intimidating and killing anything that gets in the way. “Isabela’s told me stories about you, you know. If half of it’s true, you don’t belong within walking distance of a Chantry.”

“From what I understand, neither do you. For more reasons than I’ve time to list.”

“Which is why you don’t see me wasting my time in that ineffectual hovel.”

“How dare you—”

“Ineffectual, spineless, lazy, thoughtless—”

“Andraste be my witness, if Hawke weren’t here I’d—”

Maferath’s balls. “Both of you, shut up!” Maker, but he hopes he doesn’t act like this. He doesn’t act like this. Does he?

Anders sneers back at him and Carver tries to ignore how his brown eyes are sort of flecked with an unnatural blue. “Feeling neglected, little Hawke? Isabela’s told me stories about you, too. Shall I tell them?”

If it weren’t risking confrontation with an angry and frankly pants-wettingly terrifying abomination, Carver would have broken Anders’ loud, magical, mage-y jaw about ten minutes ago. Probably. “Keep your bloody mouth shut.”

But the problem is, whenever Carver says shut up, Anders hears oh, please, please, messere, tell me more. And he really ought to know better by now. Really.

“How you fumble your words, how you blush like an Orlesian virgin. Such a shame you’re not a mage. I could’ve taught you this thing I can do with electricity and—”

“Right! You really don’t need to finish,” he half-yells, just to drown out whatever atrocity is about to come out of his mouth next. As soon as he gets home, he’s going to ask Garrett what he did to deserve this and make sure he never does it again, ever; he hefts his sword over his shoulder and tries to will his ears not to turn red, but that only makes them turn redder, and from the corner of his eye he can see Anders smirking at him as he hacks away at some brush just for the distraction of it.

“Yes, Hawke. Swing that big, long sword like you know what you’re doing with it.”

That’s it. “One more word and you’re going arse over teakettle off this cliff,” he snarls, which is of course when Garrett decides to stick his huge nose in, getting between them with his reason and his big stupid beard, shaking his head all disapprovingly while Sebastian stands off to the side, praying, or begging forgiveness, or laughing, or whatever he does when he’s not being pious and intolerable.

“Behave yourself, Carver,” Garrett says, like he’s fucking five years old. “I expect you to play nice with Anders.”

And he’s acting like it’s all Carver’s fault again, like he always does, and he opens his mouth to say so but then he remembers who he’s talking to (a humongous, self-important prig with a really unimpressive beard), so he just shuts it again. Fuck everything. He kicks some twigs on the way down the Wounded Coast, and by the time they’re nearing Kirkwall again, he notices a red, burning sort of itch down by his ankle, which means he’s kicked poison ivy, or something, and—why did he even get out of bed this morning?

There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to ignore it until it goes away. The second is deeply unpleasant, comparable to having needles shoved through your ears.

“Could you,” he starts, very pointedly not looking at Anders. “I mean. Does this look like it’s going to go away?”

Anders frowns, snorts, looks him up and down and smiles. “I could give you something,” he says, looking far more amused than Carver thinks he should, which just makes his stomach twist into unpleasant little knots. “You’ll have to come back to the clinic to get it, though.”

Maker’s asshole, he thinks, except he’s pretty sure he actually said it because Sebastian shoots him a scandalized look before he takes off for the Chantry. He will pray later. Maybe.

“Come, little Hawke. We’ve much to do,” and he snaps his fucking fingers, heedless of Carver glowering behind him while tiny spirals of lightning weave their way down his hand.

Later, in The Hanged Man, half-drunk and headachy (but not itchy anymore), Isabela sidles up to him, wrapping her arms around his middle and stealing a bit of his ale as he tries halfheartedly to swat her hands away. “Heard you had a nasty bit of crotch-rot, Carver. You should have just asked me who’s worth their silver at the Rose, sweet thing.”

What? What? “I did not,” he sputters, turning a furious shade of crimson for the second or third time today. “I had poison ivy.”

“Everybody’s got a name for it,” she shrugs, slinking into the seat next to him. Maker, she’s beautiful, and he feels like such a huge, unwieldy lump next to her. “There’s no shame in it. I mean, Anders himself certainly isn’t one to—”

He just groans and finishes his ale, scrubbing at his eyes and planning a lot of things. Like, punching Anders’ fluffy, blond, magical head clean off his shoulders and into a Darktown sewer, and drinking half a bottle of brandy, and telling Garrett exactly what he thinks about the shitty company he keeps. But, for now, he’s got another mug of ale, and Isabela is chuckling and rubbing his back, and it could be worse. He guesses. He just isn’t sure how.

3. Some things are just Not Meant To Be.

Merrill.

Merrill.

Merrill.

“Oh, look,” she says, and her eyes are just enormous, so green and absolutely sparkling and the way they’re staring up at Carver right now makes his heart rattle double-time in his ribs. “Is this good? Isn’t this a good hand?”

It is actually a terrible hand, and you’re not supposed to show your cards to the whole table but Carver is finding it exceedingly difficult to care because Merrill. She’s just so sweet, and so cute, and he really likes her voice, the way it lilts like a ripple and flits about when she’s excited or nervous or she’s found an interesting bit of Lowtown violence she wants to know if they can reenact. Her long fingers are spread out on the table, pinning her cards down, and Carver can see the crisscross patterns of fresh cuts and old, fading scars; he’s not going to pretend that doesn’t bother him, because it does, but it’s just—it’s Merrill. How bad can it really be?

“It’s… not an awful hand,” he lies, and she just beams at him across the table and, Maker, she’s so adorable.

Carver has never been very good at this, this, whatever you call this; flirting, or, or romance, or maybe he’s just bad at talking to people in general, and he’s never actually had a proper courtship before to even help him gauge this whole thing. He’s had a few girls, and a few tumbles at the Rose, and lately he’s been wondering what it might be like with a man, but he is, admittedly, inexperienced. And there’s nothing Carver hates more than feeling like a fledgling duck that hasn’t even gotten its feathers wet.

“Am I winning?” Merrill asks him, all fluttery fingers and wide-eyed wonder, and Carver could just drink her voice in like honey. Which is a really stupid thing to be thinking.

He smiles at her, and then she smiles back, and he’s pretty sure he’s blushing right down to his toes. “Well, uh,” he stumbles, “do you want to be winning?”

What does that even mean? What is he saying? And now she’s laughing, a bright, pretty patch of sunshine, and she’s laughing at him but it’s all right because it’s Merrill, so he doesn’t let it feel like admonishment. “I am. I’m going to pin you down and take you for all you’re worth,” she says, like she’s confiding a great secret.

And.

Maker.

“Isabela taught me that,” she tells him when he forgets how to breathe, leaning over the table a little, and yes, that does explain a lot. “Does it make me sound intimidating?”

Carver clears his throat and crosses his legs very tight under the table while he tries to remember how words and thoughts and sentences work. “It’s, um, something,” he finishes with a weak, awkward laugh, and he sounds so bloody stupid.

Eventually, she manages to win a few rounds, and she’s so happy about it he buys her a mug of the awful beer they serve here, which she actually seems to like. She sips it and tells him stories about the Dalish and the alienage and a prostitute she met who said she could do this thing with her tongue, and Carver tries very hard to think of Sebastian reciting the Chant of Light or Fenris slicing through a giant spider but for some reason thinking about Fenris only makes it worse, so he just drinks about half his ale in one go and resigns himself to feeling stupid and a little uncomfortable, but happy all the same.

“So, do you miss your clan?” Because she talks enough about them for three elves or maybe four. He’s not sure how they threw her out, even with the blood magic, because look at her, this tiny little wisp of a thing with her bright eyes and her sweet voice and her sun-soaked smile. He couldn’t have done it, not ever.

But he regrets asking it as soon as it’s out of his mouth, because it casts the tiniest web of shadows across her face, fades her smile and pulls her lips down at the corners, and that just won’t do. “I suppose I’m a little homesick, but it comes and goes. Like seasickness, have you ever been seasick? I just wanted to curl up and sleep forever, and I still have days like that. Like a nesting dragon, only, without eggs. But it’s not seasickness anymore, just homesickness. But I can’t really say I’m homesick, because it’s not my home anymore.”

And, well. Carver can relate. He’s about to say so, but Merrill keeps going, her pretty voice rolling and curling around him like a stream. “And I know so many people here now. I know a pirate, and a Guard, and you and Varric have taught me so much, and there’s a prince, except he’s not a prince anymore, is he? Or maybe he is? I can’t tell. He’s handsome enough, don’t you think? But I never knew this many people before, and most of them don’t treat me like I’m a, a flesh-eating fungus. It’s so refreshing.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. He’s seen Merrill slit her wrist and her fingers and turn men’s entire bodies into puddles of bloody mush in seconds flat and kill people two or three times her size in ways that make even Carver—who is very used to guts and gore and various other horrors involving chunks of lungs and intestine—feel queasy watching her do it. Sometimes, he wonders what Bethany would have thought, or his father; his brother is mostly just condescending and dismissive, much like Anders’ I’m-Better-Than-You-And-Totally-In-A-Position-To-Pass-Judgment stance on everything she does, and for as much as it bothers Carver, he worries about her more than anything else. She’s such a lovely little thing. He doesn’t want anything to happen to her.

“And you’re sure, about what you’re doing?”

It’s like he’s just pulled the plug right out of her. She deflates, her brilliant green eyes faded to a mossy sea, and Carver realizes how he just sounded. It’s like they’ve both taken a wrong turn down Oblivion Avenue right now and they can’t even find each other in the mess.

“I know what I’m doing,” she says, firm and a little exasperated, like she’s tired of repeating herself over and over to people who have already made up their minds about her. And she probably is. “I’m not going to turn anyone into goats, or eat you, or anything. I would like a goat, though.”

“I know! I just—I mean, I worry,” he blurts out, quickly, trying to wrap a bandage around this whole conversation before it crumbles. “About—you know.”

Her eyes brighten a little at that, but in a knowing sort of way, like she’s heard this one, too, and probably from snobby prats far more well-spoken than he is. “You needn’t, really,” she says, patting his hand. He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t. “I can take care of myself. It was my choice.”

And, yes. He’s seen her rip flesh from bone and barely even need to lift a finger to do it. But everyone treats her like she’s a naïve, babbling-idiot-slash-hideous-monster or a dandelion in a windstorm or both, and how that must burn, for someone as strong, as smart, as Merrill. He knows, at least, how much he hates it, and the thought that he’s doing the same thing to Merrill that his brother does to him is—well, it’s complete shit, and he knows it better than anyone.

“Right, I—I’m sorry,” he says, and he means it, even though he still doesn’t understand why she does the things she does, and then he realizes he has never tried to understand. He’s pretty sure Varric could write poetry about the things he doesn’t know, and that really makes him feel like an ass and a half. “You own your choices. You’re not a little girl.”

Her smile is so alive, overflowing off her face. “No, I’m a lady,” she trills, and suddenly she’s won again, when did that even happen? She takes a very delicate sip of her ale and flutters her eyelashes and she is just so, so ridiculously pretty. “Do you suppose they have dragon steaks here? I’ve heard you can get them but that was in Ferelden and they said sometimes it was actually rat meat. Maybe there aren’t dragons in Kirkwall. You don’t think they’d serve rat meat, do you?”

Carver has never wanted to kiss someone so much in his life, but there’s a table in the way, and her hands, and, and, and—and something like an ocean, really. Great huge waves crashing through the air between them, and he doesn’t think he could kiss her now, not even if she leaned forward and asked him to. It’s just so—he doesn’t know what. A mountain sitting right in front of them, a roadblock he can’t just walk around, or maybe it’s just him. In fact, there’s a good possibility that it’s just him.

“Do you want another drink?” he asks her, because she’s finished her mug and she can definitely handle terrible beer that tastes like old dishwater and piss, apparently. “You could try some wine.”

The wine isn’t good either, white and sour and slightly stale, but Merrill swears she can taste pears and lime in it and tries to show Carver how to let it sit against the tip of his tongue so he can, too (apparently this is something else the prostitute imparted to her), but it doesn’t work. They wind up buying dinner from one of the Lowtown vendors before she goes home, bread and cheese and some not-quite-ripe plums, and Merrill points out the first stars of the evening while they eat, so much fainter here than they ever were in Ferelden, telling him the Dalish stories that go with them and some she’s made up herself. She tells really good stories, her eyes twinkling and her voice flickering down to a whisper in the most important parts, and Carver hadn’t realized, again, just how much she knows. There must be centuries’ worth of Dalish legend and religion and language in that dark-haired head of hers, more than he’s ever learned about anything in his life, and it’s really bloody amazing.

Merrill is really bloody amazing. And he hopes she knows that, after everything. “You’re really—you’re just good, you know. I mean, you’re a lovely person,” he tells her, right on the first stair down to the alienage.

She smiles at him and gives his wrist a little squeeze, right where his pulse jumps and quickens through his veins, and he is thankful for the dark so she can’t see the flush blossoming across his cheeks. “You’re so sweet,” she says, her eyes brighter than the moon. She smells like vanilla and rosemary and he can’t kiss her, he can’t. “Isabela’s going to teach me to cheat at cards. I’ll show you next time.”

“All right,” he says, “I’ll see you, then.” He turns to go before he says something stupid, lets his feet fall into the sweet, metered rhythm of one-way longing, and figures it will probably be all right. It usually is, after all.

“‘And then, it was just the span of a single breath, a bright-eyed look, and quicker than an Antivan whore—it happened. “Oh, Carver,” Merrill said, her huge eyes twinkling up at him, “I need you now, Carver, please, please.” And that’s when he—’”

“That didn’t happen,” Carver stammers, trying—and failing—to still Varric’s pen. “You can’t just make things up.”

The dwarf sighs and pours them both some gin, folding his hands across his chest and looking out at Carver the way a man might look at a sheaf of wheat or weigh a bit of gold, all the silver-tongued, calculating wheels spinning in his head. “Nobody likes a boring story, kid.”

“Good thing you’re not telling it, then,” he says, and Varric just laughs in a way that makes Carver nervous, so he takes a drink and goes on, knowing he’s going to hear about this—a much more sordid version of this—later; but, for now, he’s got some gin and someone is actually listening to him, and, well, he could almost get used to this. The hero of his own story and all, grappling around for something to hold on to.

“Then hurry up and tell it, Junior. Stop hyperanalyzing it like it’s some kind of Orlesian lock picking contraption or you’re never going to get anywhere.”

4. Fenris is really

Maker his voice though

do those tattoos go all the way up his

I wonder what his hair feels like

why is he so

4. It’s hard to know what you want when you’re nineteen years old.

He’s up at the Wounded Coast with his brother one bright, windy morning, looking for some errant Qunari or whatever that presumptuous dwarf asked them to do when he realizes with a jagged jolt—one that is becoming increasingly familiar—that he’s been staring at Fenris’ (very long, very tattooed) toes for a solid five minutes. Or more.

And Fenris definitely noticed this time, because he’s cocking his head at Carver, eyebrows knitted together in that semi-permanent glower, asking a question without saying anything at all. Carver really likes how he does that.

“Nasty bits of glass back there,” he supplies unhelpfully, much too late because Carver was not blessed with his brother’s quick, ever-so-clever wit. “Be careful.”

“Mmm,” says Fenris. Bullshit, says the toss of his head.

He doesn’t know when he started doing this, really, and it’s so bloody infuriating, because being young and living in a place he hates and getting constantly dragged on his arse through his brother’s big, pompous shadow was already hard enough without looking at Fenris and thinking, I wonder if he’d rip out my important bits if I told him I like his face.

Because, he does like Fenris’ face. And his arms, and legs, and the way he hefts that enormous sword over his head like it’s made of wood, a lithe, unforgiving executioner, outrunning and outmaneuvering everything around him. Fenris knows things, too, bits of the Qun and pieces of languages Carver has never even heard, and he figures he could probably even tolerate Orlesian if Fenris was speaking it in that low, wine-drenched rumble of his. Fenris is like the tip of a very sharp blade. Carver likes blades. So, sure, he does have a thing for Fenris, even if he has no idea what to do with it or if he should even risk some cautious conversation lest he say something stupid and wind up with one of those gauntlets through his chest and a really premature, embarrassing funeral.

He doesn’t even know how to talk to him, though. How do you do those things, with another man? He knows how to brew tea and gut fish and cleave right through darkspawn, but he doesn’t know what to say to Fenris and why doesn’t anyone ever teach you the important things, like how to flirt with surly, unfairly handsome elves with swords very nearly as long as they are tall?

Isabela is a few paces ahead with Garrett, her hips swaying close to his, her neck bared to the sun as she throws her head back and laughs at something he said; Garrett can talk to everyone, or maybe he’s just so fucking charming that no one can ever say no to him. He is devious and magnetic where Carver is transparent and fumbling, and if there was ever a time to wish he’d received just a fraction of his brother’s allure or maybe that bewitching effect he has on people, it would be right now.

But, he doesn’t. He’s Carver Hawke, brash and awkward and he doesn’t know how to talk to people, and he’s too impatient to wait a few years for the edges to smooth out.

He puts it from his mind, or tries to, when they come across the Qunari outside the cavern; the talking goes badly but the killing goes remarkably well, and Fenris is just fucking gorgeous with blood on his hands. So is Isabela, for that matter, but she’s standing over there with Garrett, and she’s got her fingers in his belt loops and he can see right now that’s probably going nowhere platonic.

But, here is Fenris. Gorgeous, long-limbed, mysterious Fenris. Right next to him.

“So,” he says once they’re out in the sunlight again, “nice day for it.”

“Mmm,” Fenris says, again, and it’s not a yes noise but it’s not a no noise either, and Carver doesn’t know him well enough to fill in the empty spaces.

So, he fills it with some more fumbling instead. “You’re very,” strong, smart, stupidly attractive. “I mean, you’re not like other elves.”

Fenris turns and blinks at him, his face just blank enough that Carver can’t tell whether he’s annoyed or mildly amused or if this is one of those mornings when he’s terribly hungover and has only just noticed that there are still other people around and one of them is talking to him. “How so?”

Carver stares for a moment and has an extremely inappropriate thought about what it might be like to kiss Fenris. Probably full of teeth. Probably very exciting.

“You’re just—you look different.”

Fenris just snorts. “It is what I am,” he says, “and I had no choice.”

Right, then. Annoyed and probably slightly hungover. Or, maybe Carver just said something he shouldn’t have, again. He doesn’t know. These things just happen to him even when he doesn’t mean them. It’s always been that way. It won’t stop now.

“Sorry,” he says, because he imagines it can’t hurt to apologize if you suspect you’ve been an ass. That does tend to happen to him often enough. Fenris doesn’t say anything else, though.

Garrett and Isabela peel off ahead of them, no doubt heading back to The Hanged Man, and Carver stops near the edge of the Coast to look out at the sky and the sea for a while. He used to wonder if he could see Ferelden from here on clear days, and he’d check every time they came up this way, but he can’t; just the sea, the stone, the remnants of old wrecked ships down below. Garrett never mentions it, hardly ever mentions Bethany anymore, and for as much as Carver wants to move on and chisel himself a place out of the granite of Kirkwall, he feels like he left part of himself buried away with Bethany outside Lothering and he can’t let go. Here he is, staring off into the murky sea while Garrett takes a jaunt down to The Hanged Man with Isabela and sets his Wise Elder Hawke machinations in motion to buy back a relic of a distant past Carver never wanted at all.

The thing is, Carver has no idea what he wants. And he just hates it.

“Do you miss it?”

Oh. Fenris hasn’t left, apparently, and he’s standing behind Carver with one hand on his hip and looking tense, but then, he always looks tense, long fingers twitching at his side like he’s ready for the killing blow.

“Not like I can go back,” he says. He wonders how Fenris knew he was thinking of Ferelden. Probably because he still whines about it from time to time.

Fenris stands next to him and Carver tries not to think about how he’s sweating slightly and smells like leather and steel and cedar, or something. Whatever it is, he likes it. “Couldn’t you?”

Well, could he? Just up and leave, back to Ferelden, while his mother and brother stay here with his colossal dickhead of an uncle? Lothering is gone, Bethany is dead, and they’re stuck in a city with more Templars than Carver has ever seen in his entire life and barely enough copper to keep the fire going in the grate. There’s nothing to go back to, nothing left for him there, and his brother—Garrett said he needed him.

And if Carver is honest with himself (and he finds that it is necessary, sometimes), he needs his brother, too. His big, stupid asshole of a brother.

“My place is here,” he says, looking around for stones to skip but not finding any. Bethany was always good at that. “Until I can think of something better, I guess.”

Fenris makes a really nice, deep sound in his throat, and Carver doesn’t know what that means but he can feel his eyes on him, and he can also feel his ears turning red and he really, really hopes Fenris doesn’t notice. If he does, he doesn’t mention it; he just looks out at the sea with Carver for a few moments, and Carver makes a point of not staring at his toes, or the back of his neck, or wondering what he might look like in those leggings and nothing else. It takes some effort.

“Isabela tells me,” Fenris starts, fixing Carver with one of those blank looks he can’t sort out, “you have a tattoo.”

Carver does have a tattoo. “It’s just a mabari.”

“And you can make it wag.”

He isn’t actually sure what that means, except—okay, he’s pretty sure he does know what that means and he’s definitely blushing all the way down to his ankles, and Fenris is looking at him like—something. His face is still fantastically bare but his eyes are wide and so bright in a way that says he’s either deeply amused or curious or that he’s going to laugh about this over his wine later, and damn it, Carver can’t tell what that look means but he wants to.

“I can make it do lots of things,” he says with all the bristly nineteen-year-old bravado he can muster, because he totally can. He’ll make it sprout horns or turn into a fucking dragon if that’s what Fenris wants.

There’s a sound, one that is suspiciously like a laugh, low and rough around the edges and it makes Carver’s blood surge through his veins, hard and fast. It’s so nice he doesn’t even care that Fenris is probably laughing at him.

“Work on your sloppy form, and I might have to see that.”

“I’m not sloppy.”

“You are. I’ve seen you.” Fenris looks at him, and Carver is suddenly acutely aware of how his clothes are splattered with blood and muck and how Fenris’ aren’t. “It is not without its charms, of course.”

He scowls. He can’t help it. “We can’t all come out of a cave full of Qunari looking like you.”

“Oh? Shall I try harder to look like a dog that’s rolled in a few corpses?”

He’s going to open his mouth to tell Fenris that dogs don’t do that, not mabari, anyway, but Fenris is smiling, actually smiling at him, a soft, twisted secret he has never seen before. It’s beautiful. Fenris is beautiful, and it sort of knocks the wind out of him for a moment. “No, I meant—you look good. With or without blood. You know.”

The smile splits, and then there’s a laugh, an honest, unguarded laugh, warmer than the sun and brighter than all the bells of Hightown, and it leaves Carver utterly limp and useless. “So glad you approve,” he says, eyeing Carver up in a way that… actually, he doesn’t know what that means. But Fenris can do it anytime he wants.

“Do you want to get a drink?” he asks, because it’s not like he’s doing anything else and he would really love to make Fenris laugh again, if he can figure out how. “I’ll change first, I promise.”

“Such a gentleman,” Fenris murmurs. He turns, and Carver trails after him back to the brown-and-bronze stone of Lowtown. “Will you walk me home, too? Make my dinner? Clean my wounds?”

Is he teasing? Carver doesn’t know what to make of this, this thing; it’s like something has just rattled his bones, assigned a new language to the cadence of their footsteps, the clench of Fenris’ fingers, the low growl of his voice, his laughter, the quirk of his lips, to the solid weight of their words and the sudden turbulence of his heart—and Carver isn’t sure he understands a single word.

“I can cook. Loads of stuff.”

Fenris looks over his shoulder at him and meets his eyes. Carver shivers, hopes he doesn’t notice. “Show me,” he says.

He’s not sure Fenris means cooking. He’s not sure what any of this means; he’s nineteen years old and he feels like a boy again, trying to learn the shapes of words and the soft, unfamiliar syllables of a foreign language, but he is going to learn. And he is going to keep it. And then he’s going to do something about it.

Definitely.

5. Pirates are actually the smartest people in the world (and swamp witches have their merits, too).

It’s a beautiful day, all sunshine and fluffy clouds with minimal burnt-copper smell from the Lowtown foundries, the perfect afternoon for a walk around the Coast or planting flowers or maybe even accidentally-on-purpose stumbling into Fenris’ house with a few bottles of wine he just happened to find (not that he’s thought about it, or anything). It’s just lovely, and for a whole two hours, Carver thinks that maybe this pisshole of a city isn’t so bad; he makes plans to scrub the outside of the house and maybe even plant his mother a rose, the salty air light in his lungs. Yes. He plans a lot of things.

Instead, he’s following Isabela around the docks because he owes her a favor or five, and they’re looking for something he’s already forgotten while Sebastian and Merrill stop every eight seconds to examine fish and ships and discuss religious quirks, and Sebastian has to gently explain a few nuances of sailors to her when they are accidental witnesses to some back-alley debauchery that Carver isn’t going to get out of his head anytime soon. They’re kind of cute together, Carver thinks, the way a hen and a mallard would be cute together:  ill-matched, strange, but feathery and adorable all the same. He’s pretty sure Isabela wouldn’t have asked Sebastian along if it weren’t for the fact that he’s a little too handsome and a little too worldly for a priest; the poor sod doesn’t seem to know what he wants, and Carver would sympathize if he didn’t have to be such a holy twat about it.

“Are you looking at his armor, too?” Merrill asks Isabela, who has had her eyes soldered to Sebastian’s backside for a good while now. “It’s so shiny. I bet his Maker can see him from here.”

Isabela laughs and it flutters through Carver like petals in the wind, or something equally ridiculous. Isabela has a laugh better than Orlesian cabernet and semisweet chocolate. “No, I’m undressing him with my eyes.”

“For this long?”

“I’m not finished, Kitten.”

Merrill nods sagely. “He has so many buckles. It would be like unwrapping the Orlesian Empress only with more metal. And different parts. Do you think he has silk undershirts? Maybe he doesn’t bother, but maybe he’d let me see? I think I could unbuckle him.”

Carver balks. “He’s a bloody priest.” He is fairly certain that is sacrilege at least, not that he has any place judging such things.

“That just makes it even better when you get to the sweet, soft center,” Isabela says, looking smug about something, and Carver really doesn’t want to think about what it is.

“And you’re not making it any easier on him, I’m sure,” he says in a way that makes Isabela arch an eyebrow and smirk, for some reason. That look practically screams, Are we talking about him, or you?

Either way, she just sighs and slips her hand into his back pocket. “I’ll remember that next time I catch you eyeing up your broody elf from behind, sweet thing.”

He flushes, opens his mouth to say something and then clamps it shut immediately. He had thought he’d been pretty discreet about that, but, no, of course not. Sly, satin-sleek charm is his brother’s Maker-given gift, not his, and Isabela can interpret the runes of a man like reading a child’s nursery rhyme. He is no exception to her scrutiny, and she watches his uncertain movements, the underwater shift of his body, and she sees everything.

And, really, Carver wishes he could be like that, so self-assured, so full of singular conviction and blooming with unabashed desire. Isabela wants something, and she has it; if not, then that is the way of things, and she still has the sea, the stars, the wind in her sails. It takes a certain sort of woman to pull off no pants and six pounds of gold jewelry and still have the audacity to parade it around Hightown, where she probably stole half of it in the first place, utterly fearless and unbending; so, yes, Carver wants to be like Isabela, only without so much exposed bosom. He would look ridiculous with that much exposed bosom. (Besides, if they were women, Garrett’s would be bigger anyway. That would just be his luck.)

“How do you,” he stumbles, knowing he will probably regret this, “do that thing?”

Isabela laughs, a low, glittery jangle of bells. “I do a lot of things. You’ll have to specify.”

“I mean—I don’t know—” He makes a vague gesture with his hands. “Be all confident all the time.”

“Oh, you,” she says, throwing an arm around his shoulders. “I suppose I could teach you to man the crow’s nest, if you’re hard enough for it.”

He is not well-versed in bad nautical analogies that sound vaguely dirty—basically, he doesn’t speak Isabela—but damn it, he just wants to be able to say something like that and not feel absolutely stupid doing it. How does she even do that? “Do all pirates say that?”

“No, that’s a Captain Isabela original. I’ll let you use it for a kiss.” Her teeth flash in the sun, bright white and sharp, sharp, sharp. For a moment, he forgets how to breathe.

He focuses on some sailors, shakes himself out of it. “So the world’s one big ocean for you?”

She laughs again. “If the world was an ocean, priests would never take their vows and skirts would always be slit up the thigh.” She drags her thumb down the side of his neck, her hip pushing hard against his. He swallows.

“You’ve got to take life as it comes,” she continues. Sebastian and Merrill seem to be observing a flock of shorebirds eating what looks like a—actually, he doesn’t want to know what that is. “Dodge the blows, fight dirty if you have to. And if they get one in, well, bruises will heal.” He knows that, he thinks; it’s just that it’s so easy to think it, and so easy to let it sting. Carver is very good at following orders and not knowing how he feels. He is not so good at taking the waves and currents of life as they come, constantly swimming upstream because he always thought it was what he must, but now he’s stuck here and he doesn’t know what to do with this thing burning inside him.

“Say it enough, and it just starts to stick? Is that it?”

Isabela sighs and tugs on his ear with her teeth, which makes him gasp, and then again when she flicks her tongue out. “No, silly. I’m telling you to do what you want and damn the rest.”

“I don’t know—” Isabela has her fingers at the hem of his shirt and it takes some work to remember what he was going to say. She’s doing it on purpose. He thinks he likes it. “I don’t know how to do that.”

She runs her fingers through his hair; he takes her unspoken suggestion and clasps a hand around her waist, feels her smile wide and slow against his throat. “If you let these things sit too long, they turn to vinegar, you know.” She’s steering him down toward the sea now, where a seagull is calling out to the rest of its flock; it’s getting late, he realizes, the sun painting watercolor patterns in pink and orange all across the sky, and it’s probably the most beautiful thing he’s seen since he left Ferelden. He turns to Isabela, lets her drag her palms down his chest and back up to his shoulders again, and when he grabs her hips and pulls her closer, a not-innocent vision in white and brown and gold, she grins and reels him in, easy as the sea. “Most of the best things in life are fleeting, Carver. Buy yourself something pretty. Drink the best booze you can get. Make love all day just because you can. Take the seasons.”

She leans in, closer, one hand still on his shoulder, her breasts pressed against his chest. “And don’t ever let your fear direct your desires,” she breathes against his lips. “It will only ever lead you backwards, sweet thing.” It reminds him of something the witch said, about regret and not allowing it to tunnel into your soul like a parasite, and if he could only remember how to speak right now, he would tell Isabela she’s the wisest person he’s ever known, smarter than any scholar and twice as beautiful, too. He would, but then she kisses him, nails drifting down his back, her tongue sliding past his lips and dragging a soft sound from the back of his throat, and he’s just gone.

He puzzles over it later, when they’re walking back to The Hanged Man under the smoky evening sky and Isabela pulls him up the stairs, around the corner and into her bed, and yes, he decides, the most beautiful things are transient, a laugh like bells at sunset, the moon behind a cloud. It is Merrill telling her stories, the bird-wing movement of her fingers; it is his brother, magic cascading down his arms in waves, leaning into Carver and looking at him like he’s ten years old again and still his baby brother; it is the steel-sharp quirk of Fenris’ lips, nearly indistinguishable from the rest of his face, glancing up at Carver in the late-afternoon sun. It is Isabela, who doesn’t kick him out of her bed until morning, who wears her own skin like silk and diamonds, who just lies with him and talks half the night and lets him kiss each of her vertebrae like little wishes; it is the moment, languid and moonlit, that he realizes he doesn’t mind at all when she gets up to leave.

Take the seasons. Take life.

“Who knew,” Varric drawls, looking at him a little differently in the glow of the firelight. “You have an interesting bone or two in your body after all.”

“We don’t all have to make things up,” he says, feeling triumphant and probably for the wrong reasons. Maybe it’s the gin. Maybe it’s the expert liar sitting across from him, who will remember the most delicate bits of this in the morning when Carver forgets.

Varric clasps a hand to his chest in mock-indignation, gives him a wounded look followed by some more gin. “Writers are liars by necessity, Junior. You think anybody would be listening to me if our own lives were so enthralling?” He looks almost innocent, if the concept could be bent and twisted to apply to Varric at all.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t stick some truth in there once in a while. With the name changes and ten-inch dicks.”

The dwarf scoffs, drinks, scoffs again, the light making shadows play under his eyes and chest. Carver thinks he could probably take a walk through Varric’s chest hair and get lost. “Is this all part of your narrative of truth, then? ‘The world works like this?’ Or maybe you’re working your way up to a tragedy. Woe is Carver, he can’t man up and tell Broody he makes him hot under the collar, his face is forever frozen in the shape of teenage angst and melodrama.”

“I wasn’t finished,” he says, mouth full of gin and sullen irritation and definitely not angst. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear Varric only does this to watch him flail and bristle. And, yeah, that would be about right.

“Then don’t keep me waiting,” he laughs, picking up his pen again. “You were just starting to grow up a little, too. I hardly even recognized you.”

6. Don’t forget where you come from.

Once upon a time, Carver had a twin sister named Bethany, and if you didn’t think she was the best sister in the whole world you were fucking wrong.

Once upon a time, because he doesn’t have her anymore; because he left her in Ferelden, like he left everything he ever loved in Ferelden, lost with their old house and the oak tree and the creaky old windmill that used to be his favorite. He misses her, misses his home and his peach trees and the tiny carnations that grew there and the meadow outside town where he used to play with Bethany (and Garrett, before Garrett got too old and proper and grew his first pathetic beard) when they were young, and he can’t imagine what it might have been like to grow up in Kirkwall. He’s glad he never had to, really; they never had much in Lothering, but it was all Carver ever wanted. Kirkwall makes him feel old. Not older, just old, like when he looks at kids playing kickball down by the alienage and thinks, was I ever that young?

Losing your father and your sister and witnessing the destruction of everything you’ve ever loved will probably do that to you, he thinks. But it could be worse. He could be surrounded by Orlesians. Or he could have some chronic condition that requires him to see Anders every day.

He doesn’t mention any of this to Garrett, because Garrett has his own problems and they mostly involve moving as far away from the willowy memory of Ferelden as possible, and he always acts like Carver’s a fucking child for thinking about it as much as he does. So, he doesn’t; he just lets it sit on his skin like a burn that will never quite heal over and resists the urge to stomp every Marcher whining about Ferelden refugees into the Lowtown muck.

He’s out again with Merrill and Sebastian (and Isabela, before she took off after some Antivan) in Hightown one afternoon, keeping watch while Merrill clips a few flowers the noble assholes at this estate won’t miss, and he sees it:  a really lovely deep red carnation, small, probably just planted this spring, the same kind they had in Lothering. Bethany loved them. She always kept a few in pots outside the house and brought them inside for the winter, and sometimes she’d tuck one behind his ear when he was particularly cross or mannish about something.

Red carnations are supposed to mean deep love and feminine affection. Or something like that. Bethany told him once, and he scoffed and said gardening was pretty manly when you thought about it. 

And he wants that fucking flower.

“Hey,” he says, and Sebastian turns around. “Keep watch a minute, would you?” He doesn’t give him time to answer; he’s off, wrestling his knife out of his belt and digging it up by the roots as fast as he can. He supposes it is a sin to steal, or to be complicit in theft, but he’s seen the things Sebastian does to highwaymen (and the way he tries very hard to keep his eyes level with Isabela’s) and Carver doesn’t think he’s got any business judging him. Maybe. He’ll pray for forgiveness later, that will make everything all right even if he doesn’t mean it.

“Are you picking flowers, too?” Merrill’s hands are full of what looks like lavender and a few tulips. “You have to be sneaky. If you do it right before sunset they’re usually at dinner and they won’t notice.” She crouches beside him, looking terribly proud of her devious flower-thieving plans, and Carver smiles at her while he pulls up the roots as gently as he can. They come up without too much fuss, and the three of them take the back way down to Lowtown, the one frequented by sailors, prostitutes and shady types with something to hide. Flowers, in this case.

Merrill leans over and touches her nose to one of the blooms, inhaling deeply and then sort of turning her ear to it like she’s listening, which is just weird. “I think it wanted to come home with you, Carver.” She beams up at him, delight written all over her pretty pale face.

“Perhaps you could get a job trimming Orlesian primroses,” Sebastian suggests, smiling all crooked the way he sometimes does. “You could wear one of those embroidered jerkins like they have in Val Royeaux.”

“Shove it,” he mumbles, but for his part, Sebastian only looks amused rather than disappointed in Carver’s language and life choices.

He leaves them near Gamlen’s house, asks if they’d like to come in, but Merrill is in a hurry to get her flowers in some water and check her cans and jars for signs of strawberries, which confuses Carver until she says she made some jam with Aveline a few days ago, and that makes a lot more sense. He promises to come visit her when it’s ready; Sebastian walks her home, and when he turns around, Carver notices she’s slipped a tulip into his quiver at some point. He tries not to think too hard about that.

They don’t really have much in the way of a yard here, and Gamlen doesn’t have any flower pots because why would he? Lots of empty bottles of shitty brandy. No clay pots. He finds a dingy metal bucket instead and fills it with Lowtown dirt, which is really half dirt and half sand, but it will do.

It smells like spice and wet earth and home. It smells like Bethany, and Carver falls in love with it all at once.

Garrett just laughs at it. “You’ve been gardening, little brother,” he grins, plopping down beside him and sniffing Carver’s carnation. “Keep it up and we can sell these. We won’t even need the expedition when we’ve got Carver Hawke’s fancy shrubbery.”

Carver really wants to tell him to fuck off, but he doesn’t have it in him, so he just sits and stares and thinks of his sister until Garrett stretches and sighs and looks at him sideways, and for some reason it reminds Carver so much of their father that he has to shake himself back to reality. He hates it when that happens.

“Do you remember,” Garrett says, “that winter in Lothering when those Templars came through, convinced there was a blood mage on the loose? You were—I don’t know, probably eleven or twelve, and we’d been to the market for Mother, and one of them decided Bethany looked suspicious. I still can’t believe it, I mean, I was with you and everything and they hone in on Bethany.”

Garrett laughs, and Carver just rolls his eyes because, yes, of course, everything has to be about Garrett, even when it’s not. He does remember, though, mostly because he was eleven years old and he’d never been that frightened in his life; the man was bald, which Carver usually took as a bad omen from the start, and he had eyes like butchering knives. They were waiting on Garrett to mail a letter when he leaned down and demanded Bethany’s name, who her parents were, if she’d ever made things happen on accident, and she was so scared Carver could feel her fingers shaking in his. No one did that to Bethany. Ever.

So, Carver hauled back with all his eleven-year-old fear and fury and kicked the Templar in the shins until his foot cramped up from the pain, and then he grabbed Bethany and ran, ran, ran, all the way out to the meadow and through the forest, where they hid in the trees, huddled together and freezing, until Garrett came to find them (because, somehow, Garrett always knew where to find them).

“I watched him limp out to the Imperial Highway that night,” Garrett laughs, because this has never stopped being hilarious to Garrett even though Carver really doesn’t think it’s funny. “That poor sod probably had bruises for months.”

“I suppose you could have just talked him down.”

“No, no. I rather liked your approach.” Garrett’s eyes are so dark and so bright, and they remind him a little of Bethany’s. He looks away, but Garrett musses up his hair. “And Father bought you a sword the next day.”

Yes.

He remembers.

Carver keeps his carnation-in-a-bucket next to the door, and Gamlen makes a stupid crack about it but Carver just ignores him because Gamlen’s really not worth the effort of thinking up a scathing insult. Sometimes, he clips it for his mother, and when he does, it’s like a flood washing over him, the shimmer of stars, the humid breath of summer, and he remembers. The grass under his bare feet. Sun on his skin. The cobblestone bridge and the stream underneath, bigger than a river to a ten-year-old boy. The smell of dead leaves in autumn, crashing into piles of them with his brother and sister. Apples, and the sound of nighthawks, and laughter, the endless sky, the bells of the Chantry, his sister’s hand in his. Rain on his skin, the first snow of winter, his heart ticking like a kettledrum when he kissed that girl underneath the maple tree, the world spread out before him like a map on a table when he was so young. He was still so young.

No matter where he goes, no matter what he does or where his roots may tunnel and grow, Carver’s compass will always point south.

7. Someday, you’ll get this right.

“Hawke,” says Fenris, only he doesn’t mean Garrett because Garrett isn’t here, “you’re hurt.”

He says it like a fact, because it is a simple fact that there is a crusty gash near Carver’s shoulder that he hadn’t noticed when they left the warehouse after Isabela’s latest wild goose chase, but a single word from Fenris is like opening up a chest full of gold if you know how to mine it. What would be idle conversation with anyone else is a glimpse of something he normally keeps folded away beneath blades and broken glass, and Carver is slowly learning to analyze his dialect, which roughly translates to something like, Are you all right?

“It’s fine,” he says, because it is. “Doesn’t hurt.”

“You really ought to wear some proper armor.” Aveline is frowning at him. Aveline is always frowning at him.

Isabela runs a hand along his other arm and squeezes in the hardest places. “And hide all this? Bless Andraste you’re not a Guard. She’d have all your good bits covered head to toe in steel. Most of them, anyway.” His ears are turning red. At this rate, he’ll be doing that if he lives to be eighty.

“Whore,” Aveline says, only it sounds so fond.

“For your man-hands, I might be. Except, I’m not sure they’d fit under my shirttails.”

They do that thing where they bicker and don’t actually mean any of it, and he doesn’t pretend to understand them. He hangs back a bit with Fenris, who walks so quietly Carver could almost forget he was there at all were it not for the sideways glances Carver keeps trying to toss his way, and he’s pretty sure Fenris notices. He always notices. He just doesn’t say anything, apparently content to stand there next to Carver in heavy (if comfortable) quiet, but he just doesn’t know how he can do that, not when there are a thousand things Carver wants to say to him and even more he wants to ask him (does he like Kirkwall, what’s his favorite wine, how does he walk without making any noise at all, what do those Tevinter words mean, does he know Orlesian, what’s his favorite food, I really like your hair). He’s full of so much he’s practically bursting with it, a tightly wound bundle of barely contained curiosity and frantic-heart want, and, oh, Carver wants. He really really really wants.

It would be easy. The graze of an elbow, the excuse of a stray piece of hair to brush away.

Except, it wouldn’t be easy, because Fenris is Fenris and Carver is, well, Carver. Subtlety is not his native tongue, and Fenris is a thorny, too-quick blade slamming full force into things that piss him off. So, this is all sort of delicate, but Carver doesn’t know what to do with delicate. He is good at hitting things until he figures himself out. He is not good at this.

“So, you like Hightown?” he asks, groping for a topic and settling on the most innocuous thing he can think of.

Fenris cocks his head at him. That look, Carver has decided, means he’s curious and considering and sometimes it also means he’s feeling indulgent. It’s also really, really cute, though Carver would never tell him so. Not yet, at least. “I don’t venture out around Hightown much. I do think the neighbors are terrified of me, though.”

“You could come down to Lowtown if you like. Scare some of our neighbors off.” He wonders briefly if Fenris could scare Gamlen off, but, no. Gamlen’s like a roach:  nothing short of an explosion or the earth itself opening up and swallowing the house whole is going to get rid of him. All the taverns and whorehouses in Kirkwall suddenly closing up shop might do the job, too. “Or, you could just bother me. I wouldn’t mind.”

“Oh? I bother you?”

“No! No, I mean, I just,” Maker, why doesn’t he ever think before he opens his mouth? “You’re welcome to come by, I mean. If you’re ever around, or anything. My mother,” he pauses for a moment and tries really hard not to groan because he definitely just brought up his mother like he’s ten years old, “makes good tea.”

He is so stupid. He clamps his mouth shut before any more Carver Hawke-brand awkwardness can come out. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

But Fenris is looking at him like he’s… oh, he knows that look. He’s trying not to laugh, smiling a little the way he sometimes does when he gets Carver all flustered on purpose or he just says something ridiculous, and it makes Carver’s heart lurch and his toes tingle. “I’ll be sure to accost you, then,” Fenris says, and that smile drags right through Carver, warm and slow as sunrise.

It’s probably stupid, and sentimental, and utterly, disgustingly soppy, but Carver remembers every smile he pulls out of Fenris because they are each precious, ethereal things to him, locked away inside this cloistered shell of theirs where Fenris allows himself to be unguarded, comfortable, perhaps even cared for. It feels so intimate, especially when it’s just the two of them, and it’s even better when Carver can make him laugh even if half the time he’s laughing because of him. It can be so easy when they let it, just melting and flowing from one thing to another until they can finally figure this out.

He wonders if he would trade this for the promise of soft caresses, the immediate gratification of a kiss, familiar territory. He wonders if he would trade it for anything at all.

“What will you do?” Fenris doesn’t look at him. “After that expedition.”

He doesn’t say, Your brother’s expedition, because Fenris is one of the few people who doesn’t look at Carver like Garrett Hawke’s Awkward Hot-Headed Little Brother; he is simply a man to be judged by his own strengths and failures, and he really likes that about Fenris, how he doesn’t actually give a flying fig who you are or what you know. People are just people for Fenris:  worthy on their own merits or not.

“I’ll find something,” he says, and he doesn’t even have to think about it. The only problem is coming up with the something.

Fenris looks sideways at him again. That’s a questioning look. “And you will stay here?”

For now, he supposes, yes. Maybe he’d have better luck elsewhere, someplace brighter and a little less filthy than Kirkwall, but Carver figures he could go anywhere else in Thedas and he’d still be Carver Hawke, a short, hissing fuse who doesn’t quite know himself or where he’s going on his unsteady, wavering course through life. Meeran still throws him odd jobs once in a while, and he could probably take up with the Templars if it comes to that. It’d be one way to feed his mother and fund Gamlen’s shitty brandy-and-brothel habit, and he could draw attention away from his brother if he had to, but he’s really not sure that’s what he wants. He’s also not convinced he’d look good in a skirt.

“Sure, why not. There are worse places.” Aveline and Isabela are playfully shoving each other far ahead of them, and he’s pretty sure Isabela tries to kiss her at least once because he can hear that awkward Aveline giggle even from back here. “Besides, there are a few things I like here.”

There. That was subtle. Wasn’t it?

“And what is it you want?”

Okay. Apparently it wasn’t.

What does he want? How does anyone know what they want?

To start with, he thinks he’d like a better mattress, and maybe enough money to buy his mother a decent set of dishes. Some cognac might be nice, too. He would also like to be sure of himself, just for once in his life; he wants to know what he wants, to have a place and a border he can guard and defend all his life. He wants to be something. He wants to gouge his own path through the thick granite of Kirkwall. He wants to plant his feet down and be the man his father thought he would be. He wants to be good enough to stand beside his brother instead of behind him. He wants to lean over and kiss Fenris, because Fenris is looking at him with those enormous green eyes and it’s making Carver’s mouth go dry.

He wants a lot of things, and he doesn’t know how to parse any of them.

“As soon as I figure that out,” he says, “I’ll let you know.”

Fenris makes a rough sound like a growl and lets his eyes linger over Carver. That’s a good noise. That means, I’m not going anywhere.

Carver wants to tell him he’s not going anywhere either, that he’ll listen to anything at all Fenris has to say and not even because of the things that voice does to him; he wants to know Fenris, everything about him, his secrets and philosophies and his seemingly endless knowledge of a thousand different things, the man he sculpts out of steel and debris while he learns to thrive on the frontlines of here and now and later. He thinks Fenris might already now that, though. Carver is nothing if not obvious.

Near the steps down to Lowtown, and Carver hesitates. Isabela says he who hesitates is a fainthearted fool, but she’s not here right now, long gone with Aveline, and he doesn’t know what to do. Fenris stops with him, waiting, and he feels like this is one of those times when he should definitely do something. Say something. And he wants to.

But, just. What?

He settles for saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” because he cannot think of anything else.

“You will.” Fenris bounces back on the balls of his feet the way he always does and looks Carver over, and his eyes are just so green. He’s so stupidly gorgeous. And strong. He could probably shove Carver up against that wall and—and, Maker, Carver would let him do anything. “I suppose I could come bother you, afterwards.”

“You could. Definitely.” He really likes the way this conversation is going. “I really—I mean, I’d, well.”

He doesn’t actually know where he was going with that, but Fenris is smiling again, sharp, the blunt edges of teeth flashing over his lip for a moment. It takes Carver about half a second to decide he definitely likes it. “You’d what, now?”

Fenris is teasing and Carver secretly loves it when he does this, the way he watches him and pretends he’s not laughing, the twitch of his lips, loves the way his eyes and the blue-white light of his tattooed fingers trail through the air and coil in Carver’s blood like the thrill of ghost sensations. He secretly loves most things Fenris does, actually.

So he supposes, when he gets right down to it, he’s smitten as an Orlesian milkmaid.

“I just—you’re very,” Maker, how does anyone do this? Maybe Fenris will put him out of his misery if he keeps fumbling. It might be for the best. “I like you,” he manages, and it’s easy, safe enough that it could mean anything.

“I should hope so. You bother me enough.”

All right. This is good; it means he didn’t say anything too stupid. Carver snorts and puts on his best exasperated face. “I could just take all that wine home next time. Hoard it.”

Fenris laughs, and Carver wants to breathe it in like it might go away someday. “There are worse things than handsome men knocking on my door with wine.”

“Get a lot of those, do you?”

Fenris’ mouth quirks up at the corner, and Carver loves that look, too, the way the dim light plays in his eyes and under his cheekbones; he could bottle it up, store it like some really, really good rum. “Only one. He is tragically unrefined.”

“No he’s not.” He leans against the wall next to Fenris. “He knows good wine when he sees it. And he combs his hair most days. Probably knows what to do with a handsome man, too.”

“And he brags.” Fenris smirks and cocks his head. “I am not certain he even tastes his wine.”

“Yeah, because you go so slow.”

“Elves are better drinkers. It is a fact.”

“And more graceful, and smarter, and not sloppy,” he grumbles, stealing another sideways look at Fenris. Yes. Definitely graceful.

Fenris laughs again. “And handsome. You called me handsome.”

“Are we keeping track now? You’re stubborn, too.”

“And you are obstinate, rash, sullen.” He’s still smirking and his eyes are just so bright. “And I suppose I like you.”

He needs to slow his heart down before Fenris hears it beating him stupid. Slower. Slower. He is a warrior, he can do this.

Slow.

Carver wants to kiss him. Carver wants to kiss the tips of his ears, the bridge of his nose, the corners of his lips, wants it so much his whole body goes still like breath caught in his throat, and right now he thinks Fenris might even let him. He wants to say, You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever known and you’re gorgeous and also I would probably let you stick your fingers through me. He wants to reach over and touch him, just brush his knuckles against Fenris’, the curve of his neck, the narrow angles of his hips.

But he doesn’t. Can’t. And after the moment passes, he wonders if other men even like being kissed goodnight, if Fenris would like it, or if it’s supposed to work differently than it does with a woman. He doesn’t think so; personally, he would definitely like to be kissed goodnight (among other things), but he also doesn’t want to make a muck of this because—because it’s Fenris, and being an idiot is worse than being a coward.

So, nothing.

He doesn’t even notice that Fenris has moved again, glaring over his shoulder as if he expects to find something there, fingers clenched, tension slung tight across his shoulders. Carver wants to run his hand along his back and make it go away. He doesn’t do that, either.

“Goodnight,” Fenris says, and there’s something almost soft about the serrated edges of his face here in the dark.

“I’ll bring you wine,” he half-stammers, the words falling out of his mouth before his mind has even had time to catch up. He hates it when he does that, like his tongue moves without him. “Tomorrow. I’ll rattle off every fucking note in it.”

Fenris shifts, looks back at him again. Carver knows he’s smiling even if he can’t quite see it from here. “Do you even know how?”

“I know how to drink.”

“Inelegantly. Savagely.”

“I’ll be real dainty when you’re done with me.”

Fenris tosses his head and Carver can feel his eyes on him. “Will you stitch my curtains? Read me poetry?”

“I know poems.”

“Appropriate poetry.”

“I can do those too.” He does know some, actually, in addition to all the limericks Isabela taught him. He’s not sure Fenris would appreciate those, though; if Fenris was a poem, he’d be one of those vaguely-ominous-yet-lyrical Orlesian things Carver doesn’t understand, as beautiful as oleander and twice as deadly. Or something.

“I’ll remember that,” Fenris says. It is a threat because he remembers everything.

“You think I’m joking but I’m not.”

There’s another laugh, light as the Lowtown breeze, and Fenris finally turns to go. “Tomorrow, Hawke,” he says, firm, decisive; it means, in their angular vocabulary, I want to see you.

Carver spends the rest of the night reading poetry he doesn’t understand, about revelations and rapture and loss, about love winding through flesh and blood like iron until it becomes the marrow in your bones, works its way into the rhythm of your heart; how it can wrap its hands around your throat and choke, rearrange your veins, turn your hands into claws and peel back your own skin until there’s nothing left. When he sleeps, he dreams of Lothering, of the windmill, the bridge in the middle of town. There is a heavy sword strapped across his back and he has no idea what to do with it; there is a small, black bird fluttering just out of his grasp, and it will not sing for him. He wakes up feeling groggy and strange, wonders if poets actually believe the things they write.

8. Nothing is ever quite as bad as it seems. (Unless it involves a Blight or severed limbs. Then you’re probably fucked.)

He’s at the Gallows with Garrett, waiting for him to finish talking to another mage (and he’s still not sure why they come here because if there’s another thing Carver has learned in Kirkwall, it’s that Fate is something of a tramp and she loves to be tempted) when the rain starts to pour down. It’s heavy and freezing and he’s drenched before he even takes shelter under some stairs, away from the Templars and the mages, too. He doesn’t want to deal with any of them right now.

He’d been talking to a few of the recruits about their duties, but they didn’t say much because it’s all so very hush-hush and secret, like a kid’s bloody treehouse club only more inane; he even has a few words with the Knight-Captain, a soft-spoken man who seems full of surprising bitterness, and he says some things Carver doesn’t like. The second he brings up mages, it’s mages-aren’t-normal-people this, Templars-can’t-be-friends-with-mages that, and he wants to say, You didn’t know my sister, you didn’t know my father, you don’t know Merrill, you don’t know my brother and he’s twice the man you are and would probably tell you so himself, but he keeps his mouth shut for obvious reasons (and because he’s learned nothing good ever comes from correcting people’s wrong opinions). He’s not sure what he thinks of the Knight-Captain, or of the Order, but if worse comes to worse, it’s an option.

On one hand, he understands why Anders proselytizes about mage freedom to anyone who will listen (and everyone who won’t), though he would never tell him so, not ever, not even if Justice was rearing back to smite him into oblivion. He can’t imagine what his life would have been like without his father or his sister or his smug-arsed brother setting his socks on fire, can’t imagine it without Merrill and her stories and her strawberry jam and pretending not to notice when she sneaks flowers into Sebastian Vael’s quiver, and the thought of someone like the Knight-Captain or that creepy bald Templar he’s seen around (there is something wrong with bald Templars) watching over Bethany, insisting she isn’t a person but a weapon to be used, a danger, a fucking human liability makes his fists clench and sends a shiver through him.

And on the other, he’s seen some things that would induce nightmares in darkspawn, if those bastards dream at all. That business with the Templar recruit—Keran, he thinks it was—made him lose his appetite for weeks afterwards whenever he thought about it. It’s terrifying. They could do terrifying things so easily, if they wanted to. Fenris rarely revisits his life in Minrathous, but Carver knows some of what happened to him there and it makes him want to murder something, which isn’t very constructive but he can’t help it.

So, he doesn’t know what to think. He’s tired of not knowing what to think, and the strain of it combined with the cold rain makes him very cross by the time his brother is finished and comes to collect him, like a dog he’s left tied to a signpost.

“You’re all wet,” Garrett says, grinning and running his fingers through his own soggy hair. His doesn’t hang in his face the way Carver’s does. “Did you have fun talking to the baby Templar recruits?”

“No.”

“Have fun getting a bath, then?”

“Shut up, Garrett.”

He swats Carver’s arm and stares up into the rain, which is coming down much slower now. It makes Lowtown smell a little better, he notices, less like hot iron and nickel and whatever some drunk threw up all over the nearest alley. It’s nice, and it would do wonders for his mood were it not for the Gallows and the drawn hangman’s noose of the Knight-Captain’s voice, and for knowing money’s going to get tight if they don’t do something soon, but his brother is just standing there, smiling and oblivious—or maybe not oblivious, just not too concerned. He doesn’t know how Garrett does that, just pushes things from his mind and thinks of something better, brighter, until even the most disgusting parts of Kirkwall start to look good to him. He wishes he could do that. He really does.

“Hey,” Garrett says, and he narrows his eyes and bumps into Carver on purpose, “is something wrong?”

“No.”

“Yes it is. I know it is.”

“Know everything, do you?”

Then he positions himself in front of Carver, arms folded across his chest, head cocked to the side. It makes him look older. “Carver. You’re brooding.”

He is not. “I don’t brood. I don’t even know how.”

Garrett laughs, and laughs, and laughs some more. “If you keep on the way you are, you’ll out-brood Fenris in a two years’ time.”

Carver gives him the best menacing glare he can drum up while soaked and surly. “Just move.”

“Your mouth does this little thing, the corner turns down when you’re upset,” Garrett says, “right here.” He pokes Carver’s mouth that is, yes, downturned.

“Aren’t you bloody perceptive today.”

He leans against the side of a shop that’s beginning to close up, the stucco cold on his back, and Garrett stands beside him and looks up all expectantly, clearly wanting to hear whatever it is that’s been eating Carver since they left the Gallows, and maybe Carver would tell him if he actually knew how to talk to his brother, if he ever knew at all. Before, it was always Bethany who listened to his worries and fears and tales of teenage confusion and frustration, and she was a good listener; they always understood each other the way he supposes twins just do, that inexplicable connection that comes from shared breath and blood, and Bethany never made him feel small or stupid for anything, not even once.

Garrett, though, always made him feel stupid for just about everything, so after a while Carver stopped coming to him, and the older they got, the more miles and wounds and sour truths they put between them. It didn’t change when they came to Kirkwall. He spends more time with Fenris and Isabela and Merrill and even Sebastian now than he does with his brother, and he wonders if there ever comes a point when you realize you’re a stranger to your own family.

But, no, that isn’t true; since they’ve been here, Garrett has been—something. He’s still pushy, he’s still an ass about anything that isn’t done exactly the way he would do it, he’s still condescending and dismissive and he gets hilariously sulky and makes that stupid face (which looks twice as stupid with his beard) when things don’t go his way, but he’s been trying with Carver. He thinks. Sometimes, he’ll ask Carver’s opinion about things or what Carver wants as if he cares, and maybe he does; more than once, he’s seen Garrett looking at him like he’s a completely different person and he doesn’t know what to make of him anymore, the sharp-edged, disassembled components of a man who can’t quite piece himself together. Carver looks at himself the same way, much of the time.

And here he is now, sopping wet in a dim, disused Lowtown alley with his brother, who is looking up at him with something like concern, and Carver thinks that maybe, maybe this is his brother’s priggish, head-shoved-up-his-own-arse way of reaching out.

He supposes it wouldn’t hurt to reach back, twine his fingers around this thin, threadbare cord that ties them together.

“What if this doesn’t work out? What if there’s really nothing left for us here? I’m sick of running and not knowing what to do, and worrying, and getting jumpy every bloody time we run into a Templar.” He doesn’t look at Garrett while he says any of this but he can still feel his brother’s eyes on him, sharper than flint and burning much brighter. “I don’t know.”

I don’t know what to do with myself, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it, not to Garrett, who can probably guess it anyway.

“You’re nineteen years old,” Garrett shrugs, wiping rainwater off his chin. “I was nineteen years old once. It’s supposed to feel that way.”

“You’re supposed to flee a Blight and lose your sister and not know what you want or who you are or whether the Templars are going to wake you up in the middle of the night when they come for your brother?” He knows how it sounds. He just doesn’t really care right now. “No one told me.”

Garrett meets his glower (it’s hard to glower convincingly when your eyebrows are drenched) and just blinks at him, giving him that look again, the one that can’t figure Carver out at all, and he hates that because it means he doesn’t understand himself and neither does anyone else. “No,” he says, quietly. “You’re not.”

He wants to tell Garrett to forget it, it doesn’t matter, and the way his face looks right now—all long and shadowy, the jagged edges turned to rust—makes Carver’s stomach twist up into knots. He shouldn’t have said anything. There’s a long patch of quiet, which he fills with thinking up awkward apologies to make it not-awkward again, but his brother hums and shakes the water out of his head, smiles a little into the tapering rain.

“You know, though,” Garrett says, that familiar flash back in his eyes, “you’ll figure it out. You want something and you fight for it. You always have.” He stretches out an arm and wraps it around Carver’s shoulder, light and a little tentative like he’s waiting for Carver to tell him it’s all right, holding out this broken, busted thing he would fix if Carver would only ask him to. “Whatever happens, you’ll come into it like you come into everything. Like a lion with a bladder infection.”

Carver leans into him. “And you’re just so graceful.”

“The mute swan to your quacking duck,” he laughs, because Garrett always laughs at his own jokes. “I’d do anything for you. You know that, don’t you?”

He does. “And I could take a Templar or two. For you. I guess.”

Garrett steers them out of the alley and into the slums, and it’s soggy and cold and smells like honeysuckle, the first telltale sign of early spring blooming along the tottery old fence near home. It’s dingy and cramped and decrepit but it’s theirs, and any warrior worth his sword, any fool and any beggar, will fight for what he has, for the chance at something better.

“Drink for the road?” Garrett grins his best lopsided grin, and once they’re inside he pulls a bottle of decent brandy out from under the desk by the wall, the one he keeps far away from Gamlen.

“Of course, big brother.”

They drink, and they talk, and they make plans for a hundred different things, for selling their accumulated junk, for taking Meeran up on a few job offers, for buying their mother a basket of peaches, for mapping their way into the Deep Roads and filling their pockets with all the gold they can pull between them. For the future. For themselves. For the road ahead, laid out like a worn-out map with the blanks left to fill in.

Wherever that may take them.

Varric is leaning back in his chair, pen pressed to his lips as he sifts through the turbulent waters of Carver’s mind, trying to decide which bits require embellishment and which need to be left out completely. His earrings are flashing in the fire and he looks something between impressed and suspicious. “That’s it, then? No grand finale, no tempestuous journey of self-discovery and growth? No epiphanies?”

“You asked and I told you.” Carver isn’t drunk, but he’s a little wobbly and indiscriminate with his words and he can’t remember if he’s said anything he shouldn’t have, which is just as well. “That’s it. The end. That’s what I know.”

“There’s room for improvement,” Varric says, eyes drifting over to Carver’s and then narrowing, contemplative, precise. He’s the sort of man who steals the words right out of your mouth, rearranges them and weaves them into a myth you won’t even recognize later, which is exactly what’s about to happen to Carver. “But you’ve got the right idea, Junior.”

Carver thinks he does, too. He’s nineteen years old and the borders of his world have finally begun to solidify, galvanize, and all the disjointed, mismatched pieces are finally starting to settle into something he can make sense of. It’s nice to have solid ground under his feet, even if it’s Lowtown sludge and stone.

“The least I could do is write you a happy ending.” Varric’s teeth are glinting over his bottom lip in a mockery of good intention. “Sailing off to become the most feared pirate on the Waking Sea with his smoldering elf, destroying wineries, breaking necks and hearts in every port.”

That doesn’t actually sound so bad, especially the part with the elf, but Carver keeps it to himself. “You don’t need to.”

“Oh?” Varric glances up at him, reaches for his glass. “Something you’re not telling me?”

“No,” Carver says, but Varric doesn’t stop looking, searching his face like he knows just where to find the lies. And he probably does. “I don’t make things up.”

Varric only shrugs, but Carver is as open as a filthy Orlesian bodice-ripper novel and twice as obvious. Varric knows. He always knows. “There’s truth in lies, if you know where to look,” he says, and yes, Varric definitely sees, “but happily ever after is overdone anyway.”

“Here’s hoping I’m about due for one.”

“Here’s hoping you are.” Varric laughs and pours him another drink, and midway through his last glass of gin, Carver decides it doesn’t matter; he can wait out his happy ending for as long as it takes.

The thing is, though, Carver lied.

Or, well, he doesn’t like to think of it as a lie lie, but one of those things where you just omit certain sort-of-maybe important details, conveniently forget to write the epilogue to your evaluation of nineteen years of life. It’s inconsequential as a scoff, smaller than a speck of sand and barely enough to qualify as deceit in the first place, but he supposes a tiny lie is still a lie, like pretending you don’t know where the last piece of cake went and Yes, Mother, that is definitely a mosquito bite on my neck.

Because there is one more thing Carver Hawke has learned, and it goes like this:

A chilly night in early autumn and a crescent moon high above the city, pale gold and sharp. A locked door in Hightown, a fire burning low. Two chairs. Old, dusty curtains fluttering, full of the night air. A laugh, and then another. Two bottles of blood-red cabernet, the swift, sweet bloom of anticipatory breath, and Fenris says, “I’m not seeing any wagging.”

Somewhere between a trip up Sundermount and Fenris’ bedroom, Carver lost his shirt, and his sword, and then his boots (there was a lot of blood on all three, so he totally has an excuse), and for the last hour or so, he’s been sitting in the cool, familiar cocoon of post-battle ecstasy, drinking and talking to his favorite person and throwing definitely-not-obvious glances in his direction. And now, Fenris is staring at Carver’s shoulder, near the place where there is a rather rigid mabari, remnant of teenage impulse and a life that slips farther and farther away from him by the day, and he really wants to explain that he would have picked something much more ferocious but if the way Fenris is looking at him right now is any indication, he doesn’t actually care about the tattoo.

Because Fenris is looking at him like he’s a delicious fish-free meal with a side of apple pie and a particularly velvety bottle of wine, and Carver really, really likes it.

“I can do that,” he says. He’s only turning a little red. “Definitely.”

“Can you, now.” Fenris’ eyes are brighter than the moon and all the stars, and when they come to rest on Carver’s it makes his breath catch in his chest. He’s fucking gorgeous and Carver wants to kiss him—Carver always wants to kiss him—but he’s never been very good at, well, expressing these things, partly because he’s Carver Hawke and it just comes with the package, and partly because it’s Fenris and he isn’t quite fluent in this language of theirs yet. He’s getting there, but—not quite.

“I can do whatever you want.”

Fenris flashes him that crooked smile, the one he seems to save for Carver, and then makes an interested sort of noise that sends a thrill through his belly. “So modest. So coy.”

“I can do those, too.” There’s a grin dragging its way onto his face. “Want to see?”

Fenris takes a drink and Carver watches him, his head tipped back, the way his lips wrap around the mouth of the bottle; he grips the edge of his chair. “And he is intrepid.”

Yes. Carver can be that, too. He can be a lot of things, for Fenris. He’s smirking at Carver now, and all he can think of is how easy it would be to just—just reach over and touch him, trace the dagger’s edge of his jaw, brush back his hair. Fenris’ fingers twitch around the neck of his bottle, as if he’s thinking the same thing.

“Fenris.”

“Carver Hawke.”

Maker, but he loves it when Fenris does that thing with his name. He doesn’t know what it is but it’s just wonderful, low and heavy and edged with something warm and secret, like it’s not a name but a wine to be tasted, a charm wrapped around his tongue. “I was thinking.”

“Oh?” His eyebrows arch and Carver knows this means he’s amused and probably making fun of him but it’s all right because it’s Fenris. “About wagging?”

“No. Maybe.” He takes another drink. He really needs to start rehearsing these things in his head before he says them. “I mean, when you asked me what I wanted.”

Fenris’ eyes are sharp, intense in a way that makes Carver feel like he sees something he doesn’t even recognize, himself. Like he’s been waiting for this, and for some reason that makes Carver’s heart pound like a horribly off-kilter pendulum. “And what is that?”

He is going to sound like a complete idiot and he knows it, but if he has to look stupid in front of anyone he’d rather it be Fenris, who mocks him so fondly. So. “I want to find something. Do something other than run around after my brother all over Kirkwall sewers. I just—I don’t want to keep going backwards, I guess. I want something to look forward to.”

There. That wasn’t so bad even if it was vague, and if Fenris is going to make fun of him, well, let him.

But he doesn’t. He’s still just looking at Carver, and his eyes have gone so wide and bright and beautiful it takes him a moment to remember how to fit words into complete sentences, but each one he manages to process is stupider than the last until eventually he gives up and takes another drink to fortify his nerves, though he’s pretty sure wine doesn’t actually do that. Fenris won’t stop staring, either, and he’s used to Fenris staring because they do this so often that it’s become familiar; most nights, he’ll wind up in this room flushed with wine and good conversation with a stupidly handsome elf, sure as the creases in his trousers or a pair of stitched-up socks, but he’s not used to Fenris looking at him so, so intensely. While he is shirtless. And hot. And near enough to reach out and—something.

Yes. Definitely not helping.

“Noble goals,” he says. Carver tries not to look at the place where his undershirt splits down his back, where there is a slim column of olive skin and muscle and faint, willowy blue-white lines running all the way down to where he can’t see anything more. He’s had lots of practice pretending not to look and he never gets any better at it. “Is there anything else?”

Well. “One or two things.” Namely, Fenris and the bed in the corner and about a million smaller things he has thought about in increasingly feverish detail for the past few months. There’s also something else, a thin vein of words threading through him like a river always threatening to bubble over and flood him right through, and he wants to tell Fenris but he doesn’t know how. So, he just asks, “What do you want?”

“I asked you first. You have yet to answer.”

“I did too.”

“It was unsatisfactory,” Fenris grumbles. “Tell me about these ‘things.’”

He can’t just say that. It’s bad form. He thinks. “They’re just things. Someday I’ll write you a poem about them and you can laugh at that, too.”

Fenris snorts. “You have no sense of rhythm. It would never work.” He takes another drink but he keeps Carver’s eyes, and it makes him grip his chair again. “Tell me.”

Carver sighs. He is so difficult. It’s endearing and infuriating at the same time, and he loves it so much it sends a rough shock through him and makes his toes tingle. “Fenris.”

“Is that my answer?” Fenris’ smile pulls itself wider, sharper, and Carver can feel the tension reeled tight in his throat.

He swallows. “I—do you—want it to be?”

“Do you?”

Yes. Yes, he does, very much, only he can’t quite figure out how to say it because Fenris’ eyes and his mouth and the way his fingers are clenched around the neck of his wine bottle are very, very distracting. “I could,” he starts, blinking and trying to remember how words work for the second or third time, “you’re very—I mean, I like you,” he finishes, and Maker, why does this have to be so hard?

“So you’ve said. I would like to hear what else you like.” Fenris’ gauntlets are off and all of a sudden he’s brushing his long fingers against Carver’s shoulder, near the place where that ridiculous tattoo sits on his skin, and he shivers because, holy shit, this is actually happening.

“I want—um.” There is no delicate way to put this, and Fenris is definitely doing it on purpose, his lips twitching while his fingers trace nonsense patterns against Carver’s shoulder. But he wants, he does, he wants Fenris and his voice and his knowledge of everything he keeps folded away like gold, wants the quirk of his mouth, the edges of his teeth, the curve of his spine, his wonder, his fury, his so-dry-it’s-shriveled sense of humor, wants his hands on him and the way his eyes look here, now, in the light of the fire and he wants this, all of this and all of them, this language he can’t speak without Fenris; and so, he charges forward with all the clumsy force and explosive impact of a rather misshapen and ungainly meteor and says, “I want you.”

It is exactly the proper thing to say. He knows this because he barely has time to inhale before Fenris drags him up, out of his chair and into him, and he kisses him so hard Carver’s heart can’t decide whether it wants to stop or beat right up his throat and out of his mouth.

It’s rough. And sharp. And hot, really, really hot, he tastes like wine and cinnamon and the bright-sweet tang of lyrium and every inch of Carver’s skin just burns under Fenris’ hands, which are pushing him backwards toward the bed until he collapses in a graceless heap of flushed skin and breathless, tangled-up want. He stares up at Fenris—Andraste’s scorched arse, he’s straddling Carver’s hips—and says, so elegantly, “Mmmph.”

Fenris leans down again and brushes his teeth against Carver’s jaw, and it’s like ball lightning to every nerve in his body. All he can see is Fenris, and he’s wearing way too many clothes. “You want this,” he says. It’s half a question, half not, but he can feel Fenris’ fingers flexing against his ribs, and he knows what that means.

“Maker, don’t stop,” he breathes, and Fenris growls, a deep, pleased noise that Carver is definitely going to drag out of him again. And again. His trousers come off. His heart thrums in his ears. There is a knee between his thighs. Fenris lets him pull open his undershirt and run his hands along the smooth planes of his back where Carver feels his shoulderblades moving under his palms, and then, it’s nothing but breath and teeth and the slide of skin, lips, words. It is a chain reaction. It is inevitability. They don’t stop.

He doesn’t know where they’re going, and he doesn’t know what sort of roadblocks and other unsavory bits might tumble their way, but he does know that he will keep this. He will take the fire burning in his belly, and he will find something to do with it; he will hoard the feel of Fenris’ lips pressed to the curve of his neck, the hitch of his breath, the shadows of his eyelashes when Carver reaches up and brushes his knuckles against his cheek. He will nurture this like a blade to the calloused skin of his palms, cleave to the bite of Fenris’ voice, and he will keep it.

Because this is what Carver Hawke has learned:

That love, when you cannot grasp it, is an elusive, fluid thing, a bird song you can’t decipher, a blade without a purpose.

And that when you do, it is solid, a firm weight beneath your fingers like a blanket, safe and worn as an old feather mattress. It is a sudden rush of blood, steel given form and function, a veil of stars leading you back home again. It is a language Carver has molded between his own hands and learned to speak. It is the dialect of the fingers threaded through his, the rhythm of Fenris’ breathing, the consonants of laughter muffled and broken against his throat.

And it is his.