Chapter Text
We could sing forever songs of hope and loss
-- Quiet Revolutionaries, Duke Special
If it makes you less sad, I will die by your hand 10
“Anders, eat.”
Hawke pressed the bread into his hands and watched as it tumbled almost immediately from his loose grip to the dirt of the clearing she’d chosen as that night’s camp site. He didn’t even look down.
She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the hot tears prickling but refusing to give in to them so early in the evening. Her frustration wasn’t for the ruined bread – a small, stale crust, whose flavor honestly would hardly be hurt by a coating of mud – even though it was the last of the food she’d been able to beg from farmsteaders wary of an armed woman and the gaunt, silent man who trailed listlessly after her.
The problem, the worry that caused her to cry herself to sleep most nights and wake exhausted and numb every morning, was Anders. Hawke was doing everything she could to keep him safe, hiding him from the Templars and bounty hunters, sleeping in the dirt, begging crusts from strangers, and avoiding every friend she’d ever made because she refused to expose anyone else she cared about to the dangers that trailed after her.
And none of it meant anything if he wouldn’t eat.
What good did it do to have saved his life at the Gallows and every time since if he was determined to starve himself to death?
Anders stirred slightly, as if he was aware of her thought. And maybe he was; she would have said once that he knew her as well as she knew herself. “You should have let me die.”
Autumn swallowed hard, forcing down the tears. She couldn’t do this again. Not tonight. “I’m not having this conversation.”
“I deserve to die for what I did. All the blood on my hands.” He continued as if he hadn’t heard her, his voice flat and monotone, a lifeless shadow of the man she’d fallen in love with. “I’d rather it be you holding the knife.”
She wanted to scream, to tell him that he was being stupid and selfish, how cruel it was to even ask that of her. But she’d tried that, over and over until her throat was raw from yelling and sobbing. It hadn’t gotten through to him, had only drained the energy she needed to take care of them both. She was out of ideas, didn’t know how to help him. All she could do was keep putting distance between them and Kirkwall, hoping that Anders would eventually start to find his way back from the dark places inside his mind. When he did, she’d be waiting. Until then, her purpose had been reduced to the daily struggle to keep him alive.
“You still could, Hawke. I wouldn’t mind dying if it was with you.”
“It’s never going to happen.” She tucked a blanket around his too-thin shoulders, shielding him from the evening chill, and pressed a kiss to his forehead, ignoring the tear that dropped into his hair. “Good night, Anders.”
You’re so fragile and thin, standing trial for your sins, holding onto your self the best you can 10
Hawke watched, helpless, as he withered more and more, shrinking in on himself. She knew it was the effects of Grey Warden metabolism burning through what little reserves his body had left, but some days she almost thought Anders’s guilt was devouring him from the inside.
His face grew gaunt, cheekbones standing in stark relief, eye sockets sunken. The skin stretched over his bones creased and wrinkled like parchment.
When she saw him studying his reflection in a puddle one morning, Hawke froze, afraid to do anything that might startle him and disrupt the first independent action he’d taken in weeks. She held her breath. Was he finally coming to his senses and realizing how far gone he was, what he was doing to himself?
Finally, after a long, silent moment of Hawke’s pulse pounding loudly in her ears, he moved. Instead of the recoil she expected – hoped for – he gave a small nod. Satisfied, content, almost approving.
She must have made some noise, given away her shock. Anders turned to her, his drawn face placid and calm. “I’d forgotten I used to look like this.”
Her heart went out to him. She’d never seen him anywhere near this thin. Had the templars withheld food from unruly mages, used hunger as a tool to enforce desired behavior? Was he starving himself in mimicry of a familiar punishment he thought he deserved? Autumn tried to contain her emotions and respond calmly, to be as casual as he was lest she spook him like a skittish wild animal.
“After your year in solitary?” When his face registered no comprehension – or confusion, only a blank lack of understanding – she elaborated. “Was that when you… looked like this?” She forced the words out, trying to keep her voice even.
“Oh. You misunderstood.” He sounded almost uninterested, like they were talking about someone else, a person he’d never met. “It wasn’t Anders; it was Justice.”
You can tell me how vile I already know that I am 10
Hawke lay wrapped up in a blanket like the physical warmth could give her comfort. She doubted she’d sleep tonight, but at least her body could rest even if her mind wouldn’t.
Anders had finally started talking again today, saying more than a few words at a time, speaking with emotion instead of a flat, heavy monotone. Hawke knew she should be encouraged by the progress.
And she would be, if only she could focus on the act of him speaking and forget what he’d said.
Words burned in her mind. Quit shielding me from the truth. I know what I’ve done. What I am. and I’m an abomination. I always have been. All the while his eyes had been screaming, Why won’t you hate me?
She’d tried to answer with love and gentleness and support, as she’d always done when his dark thoughts got to be too strong. Apparently it had been a mistake.
He’d turned on her next, spewing vitriol, digging into all of the places where he knew she was weakest, all of her failures. Not protecting Carver. Leading Bethany into an impossible choice between death and conscription, then denying her even the right to make that choice. Disappointing her mother so badly so many times. Dishonoring her father’s memory by failing in his final charge to care for those he was leaving behind. Bending her morals in the desperate, futile search to save her mother from a fate so horrific that death had been kinder.
Anders had abused years of trust, turning every secret shame into a weapon against her. She’d been shocked, outraged, humiliated. Hours later, lying awake with hot tears on her cheeks, she still was.
Hawke knew what he was doing. Begging her to kill him hadn’t worked, so now he was trying to goad her into it. To hurt her until she lashed out. To erode the love that held her hand back.
She wasn’t going to let him do that. She could stay strong against the attacks just like she had against the entreaties.
Hawke pulled her blankets tighter against a coldness that was more than physical and tried to focus on something other than the memory of her worst personal demons attacking her in her lover’s voice.
Anders was talking again. What he was saying didn’t matter.
Never wanted to waste your time, never thought I would get so lost along the way, never wanted to break your heart … It’s amazing how far you fall before you wake 3
Anders was coming out of a fog, a dark haze of guilt and regret and pain. He had no idea how long he had been in it, but judging from Autumn’s pathetically grateful looks when he did the most basic things – filling a waterskin, slapping away a biting insect – it had taken him a long time to make his way out.
He wanted to go back.
The selfish, crushing oblivion would be less painful than the shame he felt every time he looked at Autumn, the only person who had ever loved him unconditionally, and saw what he’d done to her. Her face was drawn and pale, dark circles spreading under her eyes. She constantly looked bowed down by the weight of her armor; her movements were calculated because she had no energy to waste. She was neglecting herself to take care of him, and the shame of that burned deep in his chest.
He wanted to comfort and care for her, to gently work the tangles from her hair and watch over her sleep until the color came back to her cheeks. But it would be utterly selfish, meaningless gestures to assuage his guilt by tending to the little hurts while ignoring the gaping wounds he’d inflicted on her life.
Because of him, Autumn had lost everything. Her friends, her home, her safety. A few nights’ sleep and all the gentle touches in the world could never make up for that.
Anders had tried to tell her from the start that he was poison, that nothing good could ever come from loving him. But she hadn’t believed it, and he’d been too weak to refuse the one spark of happiness in his life, even though he knew he had never deserved her. He’d even briefly thought that her love might be enough to overcome all of the darkness, that her perfect strength could make up for all of his inadequacies and failings.
He’d been blindly, willfully naïve, thinking she could save him. Nothing could have held back the doom flooding over his life, and all he’d done was drag Autumn down into it with him.
Every time he closed his eyes, he hoped to open them on a world of grey nothingness where he no longer had to see the tears in her eyes and know he’d put them there.
I’ve taken too much, given up, I am twisted, burning, breaking up 9
If you want me to keep going, Autumn, then tell me how to do it.
How am I supposed to get past what I’ve done, what I’ve become?
Everything in my head is ugly. My world is so full of injustices – abuse, death, torture, pain – that I can’t remember anything else. I don’t even know which parts of it are my fault any more, which tragedies I’m responsible for and which I let happen through cowardice and ignorance, which I saw and which I suffered.
When anything’s broken and out of balance, everything is, and I can’t separate the strands of cruelty and injustice and hate to trace them back to where they begin. There is no source outside of my mind, just this mass of tangled wrongs, all of them on my head.
How can I live like this, Autumn? Why should I want to?
If he could have said the words aloud, he thought she might have had answers. But he didn’t know what he would have done with any responses she gave him, and he knew quite clearly that he didn’t deserve them.
We could wear out from wondering if what we do is right or wrong 8
“Did I make the right decision?”
Hawke sighed. That was all he had said for two days. Over and over. “Was I right?” “Should I have done it?” “Was it worth it?” No matter what she said in response, it didn’t satisfy him. Maybe because he could sense she wasn’t being honest.
She didn’t know how to tell him the truth because secretly, she thought the truth made her sound like something of a monster.
“Was I right or wrong? Hawke, please, I have to know.”
Finally, worn down by the constant, desperate repetition, she let her honest answer slip out. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What? How can it not matter?”
It was almost worth it to hear him say something different.
“Because it’s done. We can’t go back and change it.”
“And that makes it all fine?” He sounded incredulous.
It was the most engaged in conversation he’d been in weeks, and Autumn was torn between relief that he could still connect with her and shame that this was the side of her he’d come back to see.
“That makes it irrelevant.” She struggled to explain, to find words he would understand. “If I’d known what you were planning, I would have done everything in my power to stop you. But I didn’t. And now we live in the world where…” She paused, taking a steadying breath before stating the harsh reality so plainly. “A world where you destroyed the Chantry and killed however many people were in it. There is nothing we can do about that; no amount of guilt and recrimination will undo the past.” A bitter laugh escaped her throat. “Believe me, Anders, if I could change things by blaming myself for them, there are so many things that would be different right now.”
She took his hand, daring to touch him, finding herself pitifully grateful when his fingers wrapped around hers instead of remaining limp and nonresponsive.
“But was I right or wrong? How can that not matter? People died. I need to know if it was worth it.” His grip on her hand grew almost painfully tight as he sought the answer he’d been begging for, the answer she couldn’t give him.
“I don’t know. I don’t think we can know yet, not for certain, not without seeing what happens next. What I do know is that adding your death on top of theirs can’t possibly make things better.” She squeezed his hand gently, staring him in the eyes while a part of her exulted that she finally saw someone familiar looking out of those eyes. “The only thing we can do now is shape a better future with the pieces that are left. If it’s going to be right, you need to make it right. And to do that, you need to live.”
Glad that you can forgive, only hoping as time goes you can forget 10
Anders didn’t know how Hawke could look at him, knowing what he’d done. What he was.
She said she understood why he’d made the decision. She said she didn’t judge him or think he was a monster. She said she still loved him.
He wondered if she knew she was lying.
Maybe not about loving him – although he really couldn’t fathom why – but about the rest of it. She had to be because it couldn’t possibly be true. He could feel it every time she looked at him. The blood on his hands tainting everything they’d had. The specters of the innocent dead rising up between them, forming an insurmountable barrier he didn’t know how to breach.
And maybe that was all right. Maybe this was how it should be, the judgment he deserved. Hawke hadn’t let him die for his sins because that would be too easy, a coward’s way out. And while he had always been a coward, running before things got too hard, Autumn never backed down from anything.
Autumn had been the one good thing in his life, so this was a fitting penance, to live with the constant reminder of how he had tainted their love.
The selfish coward’s voice in the back of his head hoped that someday he could accept her looking at him the way she used to, like he was something special and pure and worth loving, but he knew he didn’t deserve it. He let the hope flourish anyway, because having it continually shattered – that was fitting, too.
I see the world, the world is you 7
Some days were better than others. Anders still spent a lot of time withdrawn and blank, eyes distant, trapped in his own head. But there were moments when Autumn caught a glimpse of the man she loved looking out of those eyes, tortured and grieving, but familiar. She thought they were making progress, that things might finally be getting better.
Until the morning Anders woke up asking to die again.
“I can’t keep living like this. I don’t want to.”
Autumn nearly wept with frustration. Just when she thought she might be getting him back, might not be totally alone… She closed her eyes, looking away from his earnest, pleading face and trying to fight off yet another wave of pointless tears.
“I don’t deserve to live after everything I’ve done.” Anders was still talking, his words like shards of glass burrowing into her chest. “I know you think I should fix it, make up for it somehow. But Autumn, I can’t! It’s too big, too hard. I wouldn’t even know where to start. And I’ll only fail, find a way to make it worse.”
Autumn clamped her lips tightly closed against the sobs of frustration and despair welling up inside her. She couldn’t start this over. She didn’t have the energy to fight both the templars and Anders at the same time.
“You’re the one who fixes things, Autumn.” Anders’s voice had turned softer, almost reverential, and it was so familiar that it broke her heart all over again. “If anyone can find a way to make up for what I’ve done, it will be you. And you don’t need me weighing you down any more.” He sighed. “I’m not asking you to do it yourself. That was a terrible thing to do to you, and I’m sorry for it. Just next time they get close, whoever’s hunting us – let them have me.”
She couldn’t take it any more. “But I do!” The words came out unbidden, things she’d been holding back, promising herself she wouldn’t use against him when he was already so close to losing himself. “I do need you.” Desperate, she took his hand, her grip so tight she could feel their bones grinding together. “If you can’t live for yourself right now, I need you to live for me. You’re all I have left, and if I lost you, too, I don’t think I could keep going.”
The loss of control, when it finally came, was complete. Autumn broke down into giant, gulping sobs as all of the pain and fear and loneliness poured out of her. The only word she could manage was the occasional broken “please”, gasped out in a croaking voice thick with tears.
And then, just as she’d known would happen, his arms enfolded her, feeling too thin but familiar all the same. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” He cradled her to his chest, resting his chin on her head, and she could feel his tears soaking into her hair. “I won’t go. I won’t leave you. I swear. For as long as you need me, I’m yours.”
And just like that he was back. She knew he meant it; Anders would never break a promise to her. Autumn knew she should feel guilty, that she was being selfish instead of letting him heal in his own time.
But she couldn’t regret it, if it kept him with her. Instead, she was filled with an exultant relief that she wouldn’t have to keep fighting a losing battle against his suicide, worrying every time she closed her eyes that he wouldn’t be there when they opened.
Maybe in time he would learn to live for himself rather than for her, but at the moment all she could care about was that he would live.