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Look at the sky and the sea and it’s a good day. Nothing but wind in the grass, sun hot on his skin.
Used to be a day at the beach was a freedom between horrors. City forgotten and games in the sand, momentary children again, or for the first time. They’d drink in the sun and shiver as it fell, and even in winter they’d sit in the damp sand using the foamy waves to clean off evidence of the life they live to keep on living. The jobs they take to live at all.
Today, though.
Today is bleak.
Fenris makes his way down the steep, sandy path to the narrow beach, sand blinding white. There’s freckles and white patches growing slowly larger, that turn pink in minutes. They’re new and he’s not sure how to handle them. Like everything else, he’s putting it off.
He thinks he’s alone and is startled by Merrill. She’s sitting on a rock away from the waves, and lifts her hand without smiling.
‘Hello,’ she calls.
He doesn’t respond fast enough and the moment drags and drags.
‘Habits die hard,’ he says, finally, of his coming to wash. Already half naked he’s holding his shirt like he’s trying to cover himself up. He’s never sure about this. He doesn’t care and she doesn’t care, but he’s sure they’re both meant to. She turns back to staring at the horizon.
The waves are no fun given the circumstances. He keeps his hair dry, combs wet hands through the bedraggled mess, and climbs back up the cliff.
The campsite is quiet. Once, there would be talking, or singing, or a fife being poorly played, or one of Isabela’s obnoxious word games being shouted, or someone playing with the dog, or anything, anything at all. People existing should not be so quiet.
Isabela’s sprawled half out of her tent with Hawke’s head on her stomach. Idle hands run through black hair, but neither of them are saying anything at all. Hawke just stares at a seagull making shadows on the ground, wings outstretched and riding the summer air.
Fenris puts his shirt on his head to protect against the sun and sits with a flump in the sand outside his tent. Sebastian’s inside pretending to sleep. Fenris can’t. He tried that, tried to stop existing but life keeps on happening.
The silence is building up inside his skull and all he can hear is the noise of the city on fire.
If turns around he can’t see the smoke. Two days ago they could but it’s been two weeks since they left; one week on the ship and that was through weather unbearable, Isabela letting out words he’d not heard before and the whole of them in a daze. They slept, they ate, they worked, and when a sail tore and with it came a piece of the rigging, they found a beach and crawled ashore.
His whole life, fighting. Poorly rested with mediocre food and the sky clear overhead, still he’s weary to the soul. Perhaps this guilt will never scrub clean. Perhaps it shouldn’t.
A twig cracks and he looks up to see Aveline stepping through the bushes. She’s barefoot and her nose and shoulders are red. She looks at him and says nothing, where once she would have commented about his attempted sun protection. She’s angry; she didn’t leave with Donnic to hunt. He comes behind with a hare in each hand and looks the same kind of angry. She doesn’t offer to help as he sets himself up to clean up the hares for eating. All of them are city folk forgotten to this kind of survival. Fenris is just glad someone’s doing the work. If it was left to him he’d likely just keep sitting, just keep staring.
Fenris wants to fall apart into the breeze over the cliffs and crumble into the waves and the ocean, disintegrate and wander the world seeking complete oblivion. Instead he is living. Uninjured, even. A single potion after the battle, and his wounds are fading. Even old scars are faint, healing atop healing dragging his body back in time.
Not far enough, and not where it counts, and it would feel better, he’s sure, for the pictures his brain gives him to mirror his outside.
Inside the tent, Sebastian rolls over, and over, and over.
Ready for cooking, Donnic begins to drag together the wood for a fire. No one helps him, not even Fenris, just watches him dully until he goes to make a flame and Hawke jumps up. Her hands are in fists. Donnic stepped back at her moving, and now he’s tense. They all are.
But she stalks off without a word, dry bushes rattling as she pushes through.
‘Her nightmares are on fire,’ Isabela says.
‘But we need to eat.’ Donnic’s voice is slow and rough.
Sebastian gives up sleeping and goes to help Donnic with the cooking. Isabela leaves to find Hawke, and needing space from the vacant stares around the campsite Fenris collects waterbags to fill.
The stream comes slow from a pool and gains urgency before rushing off the cliff into the ocean. It’s wide and deep, and Fenris drops the bags to the shore and his shirt into the water, and dunks it on his head. Memories of blood run down his back and he rips the shirt off his head, shakes himself like a dog, and wipes his hand over his shoulders and back until he is sure the water is just that.
Hawke’s nightmares are on fire, and Fenris’ haunt his waking steps, and Merrill is fading, and Anders - Anders is lying in the water in front of him.
Panicked, Fenris leaps a lumbering run through the water and Anders rights himself, spluttering.
‘What?’ He sounds like he’s been choking on gravel.
‘I thought -’ He doesn’t continue that. ‘Donnic’s making lunch.’
‘And you want me there?’
But Fenris doesn’t care if Anders eats or doesn’t, doesn’t care about anything or anyone at all. He fills the bags and goes back to the campsite, which isn’t the better place to be. Anders follows and sits down next to Isabela, who gets up to fill her bowl and sits back down away from him. And when Merrill shows up there’s not much space left except for next to Anders, and she looks at that spot and walks away.
‘Hey!’ It’s Hawke who yells. She stands up bristling anger. She’s been brewing all week and now it’s falling out. ‘Come back, sit down.’
‘Next to him?’
‘We’re friends.’
‘Not him,’ she says, arms folded over her chest.
‘If you want me gone,’ Anders mutters. He’s hunched over. His skin is blistering over his face, hair ugly and patched from ash burning bits out. They ran out of potion and he never complained, Fenris realises.
‘No,’ says Hawke. ‘You’re not going anywhere. I got you into this gang and I’ll keep you in it.’
‘I blew up your home.’ No inflection, no hint of pride or sorrow. A mere fact.
‘Can you stop?’ Hawke asks, spent up and gone over exhausted.
‘We shouldn’t do this today,’ Aveline agrees.
‘We shouldn’t do it ever. We’re friends.’
‘Not with him,’ says Sebastian. He looks to Fenris for support, but in Hawke’s rage he’d seen the sketch of a future he wanted to be part of and the feeling keeps his lips stuck closed.
Merrill sits down, and they eat in stifling silence. Anders leaves soon as he’s done, a small portion fast eaten and the bowl tipped upside down in the sand near a line of ants. His robe catches on the dried up bushes and sends them twanging as he stalks away quietly insulted that they do not support him wholeheartedly. Varric waits for the quiet to settle again.
‘How long are we staying here?’ he asks, to Hawke.
‘Where should we go?’ It’s a counter like his question was a challenge, and it’s the kicker, the real question no one has an answer for. Fenris notices Isabela and Merrill both looking reflexively at the horizon behind his head, but the smoke’s faded from view if not memory.
‘Penny-pocket poor and no home to get to, mum used to say,’ Hawke says. It’s a nice try at a joke and Aveline very nearly smiles. ‘We’ve all been here before.’
‘I haven’t,’ Varric cries.
‘Rich shit,’ Isabela says. It comes out harsh.
Never one for money, Merrill interrupts, arm waving wildly in the direction Anders took. ‘You’re just going to let him go?’
Sebastian leans in towards Fenris and asks, ‘You really don’t have a problem with it?’
‘I do.’
‘It was your home,’ Sebastian pushes. Still raring to go, a single-glanced insult away from going at Anders, Hawke’s protection or none.
Sitting in hot sand with his only shirt on his head and a line of ants marching around his heel, Fenris disagrees. His home is here. All of them, their home is here.
‘It was mine.’ Varric claims it with a growl that expends all of his energy, and he sits glum and silent in the sand. After a while he pipes up, ‘There’s no alcohol, is there?’ They’d had the last of it first night on shore after their ship did its best to wreck itself on the rocks.
Nightfall brings an array of stars brilliant, some slicing silver lines through the diamond dusted velvet.
And dawn brings enough collective restlessness that they pack their things and trudge away.
‘To where?’ Varric asks. ‘I’m not made for walking, you know.’ And their bags are heavy, uncomfortable, cumbersome. They escaped with what they could. Money was the easiest to carry. But Varric has more books than is sensible and Merrill her knick-knacks - dust collectors, Fenris called them, teasing, a flick at her ear as punctuation - and Isabela mementos that she calls silly even as she carefully stows them, each thing wrapped in its own scarf.
‘I should go home,’ Sebastian says. Fenris marches ahead to get away from him. Unable to fathom losing him, too angry for words at the mere suggestion - no, angry at all of it. Angry at how Sebastian has dragged this out for so long, this daily reiteration. And infuriated, lung-clenching scalding hot fury for Anders himself.
Killing is always astonishingly easy. Fenris still thinks there should be some kind of test, a difficult puzzle or some other barrier to death. But it’s not. It can be sudden and accidental or flippant or to make a point or drawn out, and it’s always easy. Less easy for Hawke to forgive Fenris in the afterward, but she’s forgiven Anders.
And she’s forgiven all of them terrible things.
How does she decide that they’re worth saving? he thinks. What gives her the right?
He walks next to her now, slow, weary steps through ankle-deep sand. On the other side is Isabela, connected to Hawke at the very edge of their fingers, perhaps not even aware of their almost hand-holding. Every few steps Hawke looks down at him and gives a grim, squinting smile as if they’re together on a secret that isn’t happy but is theirs to share. And when he smiles back he forgets what they’re leaving behind. Forgets that he wants to kill Anders. Forgets everything.
For a long while they followed the coastline, only nothing seemed to be anywhere so they turned inland - and that was an argument. And now the sun is falling from its zenith, and there’s another. Fenris hadn’t joined in because he doesn’t care where they go. He’ll go where they go, that’s all he knows.
Waiting while they finish their water to wet their mouths to yell some more, Fenris pulls his shirt away from his back. His feet are muddy from sweat.
‘Where do you want to go?’ Aveline asks. But he shakes his head and ignores the question.
‘I want to go back,’ says Varric.
‘We need food.’
‘We’ll find a farm,’ is the hot retort, and Merrill ducks away, bullied into silence. ‘They need us there. They need you there.’
Arms folded over her chest, Hawke asks, ‘Why?’
‘You fix things. You fixed the city before.’ It’s a plea. He’s pleading with her. ‘You can help them rebuild.’
‘An apostate fixing up what a mage has done to save the mages?’
‘I don’t have to come,’ says Anders. ‘I don’t know where I’ll go but I don’t have to go with you.’ He’s speaking to the dirt. ‘I’m very glad, of course, not to be dead. But I can go, if it’s easier.’
‘Of course it’s easier,’ snaps Sebastian. ‘You ought to be dead. Don’t you think, Fenris?’
‘I’ve hated enough things,’ Fenris answers. On his tongue there’s the hint of some taste unfamiliar except through imagination, the scent of a home all his own, safety without arguing on the daily about it.
Peace.
The thought’s a wash of cool air blocked from his face by the argument.
‘I don’t mind where we go,’ he says, only it feels like a lie. To Hawke, ‘I follow you.’
‘Why aren’t you fighting?’ Sebastian cries, as if though Fenris standing to the side is the lone thing causing Sebastian great anguish.
‘I’m not a mage.’
‘You were hurt -’
And he was, he was cruelly treated by mages, but not in recent years. In recent years it’s been a mage healing him and a mage unconsciously sharing half her cake with him and a mage welcoming him, wanting him, wanting him.
So he gestures at Anders. ‘He was hurt, too,’ he says, cutting Sebastian off.
Anders stares, eyes finally off the dirt and locked onto Fenris. He can’t meet the gaze so he looks at the clouds, little wispy things dotting out like a sheet, like sand in a pool rippling under lazy waves with nowhere to go.
A burned up city is a fine a time as any to have a change of heart, but he reckons this one’s been a while in the making.
‘I don’t want to go back to Kirkwall. It was grey. It’s in my nightmares.’ He doesn’t know what else to say to push forward his point. He imagines a future glorious in its simplicity, where people are happy without trying and fed without fighting, and where grievances are gone soon as it’s decided they ought to be over.
‘I’ve done my time,’ Hawke says.
‘I miss the sea,’ adds Isabela.
‘Maker drag you to the depths,’ Varric curses, and stomps away towards the hills that hide the blacked out skeleton of the city he loves so unreasonably.
‘Should we go after him?’ Isabela asks.
Hawke takes her sweet time answering, waits for Varric to be half over the rise before she mutters something unintelligible and goes after Varric.
‘Maker,’ Isabela sighs. She looks at Fenris. ‘You and me, we’ll run away to sea, make a fortune. How about it?’
‘You’d never be happy with just me.’
Refreshing like lavender cake and cold tea, her grin big and always startlingly white in that dark face of hers, like she’s going to eat you up, like she’s the happiest person in the world. She nods at the clouds. ‘It’s going to rain.’
But there’s sweat on his face and his neck and his chest and his back and all of the rest of him. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘You really don’t want to go back to Kirkwall?’
‘Really.’
‘Well then. I’ll be seeing you,’ she says, and goes to join the rest of them into disappearing over the hill.
It’s silent in the absence of them. He licks sweat from his lips and closes his eyes to enjoy it. The emptiness.
‘Vishante kaffas.’ Fenris runs to catch up.
They walk until they are tired enough to ignore their hunger, sleep badly, wake and walk and walk and walk. Varric leads a poor march but none of them want to go fast. Around midmorning Merrill catches a small flock of birds in a horrifying spell, a tree magicked upwards to crucify them midair. Ravenous, Hawke does away with her previous misgivings and sets them on fire to be eaten mostly burned partially raw and dangerously fresh.
They’re strung out like strangers, none of them walking together and great lengths of space between. Fenris is right near the end and the last to learn they’ve found a farm.
Hawke sits carelessly cross-legged on the crumbling stone wall next to where Fenris is leaning. There’s grass sticking out between her lips and her jaw grinds restlessly. The farmer’s promised them food and offered one of his paddocks for sleeping, but the food’s got to be slaughtered.
‘You seem to be remarkably calm,’ she says, to him.
‘Pot to kettle. What’s your accusation?’
‘You don’t want Anders dead.’
‘I made my choice when I chose you. The rest?’ He picks it up and tosses it away, and is immediately embarrassed by the flourish. ‘It’s time to be a better person.’
‘Look at you, growing up.’
‘How are you coping?’ She glares at him. ‘Everyone can hear the nightmares. Same as always, I’m here with no idea what to say.’
She picks up his hand and laces their fingers together. Looks at them contemplatively. And then lifts their hands to peer closely at his wrist.
‘You’re melting.’
‘What?’ He snatches his hand back.
‘Right there.’
His brown skin is pulling away to show white. He pulls his shirt over his head to show his shoulders and her fingers are gentle when he hisses at the sunburn. She fluffs his hair.
‘You stink.’
The river is slow like it doesn’t care about anything at all. Cool in the water and blistering out, they kneel so they’re up to their chins, knees slipping in the mud. Isabela, she lies on her back, hair a black halo, breasts falling heavy to either side of her ribcage, head tilted back in supplication as the sun bathes over her. But Merrill kneels with Fenris, and Hawke is too tall to kneel and so struggles with with mud on her arse and only her face above the water, and every time she talks she swallows a mouthful.
Aveline and Donnic are setting up the tents and their laughter is brief but loud.
‘Do you think we’ll be okay?’ Merrill asks, breaking the birdsong and cicadas, the wind in the leaves, the pleasant haze of tired comfort Fenris is sinking into.
Hawke reaches for her, folds her easily against her side. ‘We always are.’
In attempted atonement Varric brings out the cards after dinner and deals them all a hand. Anders plays poorly but he does play, and Isabela and Merrill sing them a story.
‘You know,’ Merrill whispers later that night, when they’re lying on a blanket borrowed under the stars, her body distanced from Fenris’ but their heads close enough that she’s braided their hair together. ‘I still think I’m going to be told someone else is dead. In the alienage people died all the time. One morning, I don’t think I ever said this, but one day I was woken up by the people next door screaming because their daughter was nailed to their door. In pieces.’
He finds her hand and holds it tight. His demons are different and he hates them, but he’s glad not to have hers.
‘It wasn’t a good city,’ he says.
‘It was awful. And they love it. Do you think humans always live like that?’
‘I don’t have much to compare it to.’ Huffed laughter, and silence before he whispers, ‘Why didn’t you tell us that?’
‘We’re not the only gang in town.’
‘I know.’ He drags it out so it’s teasing. She flicks his nose.
‘It must have been around when Lady Leandra,’ she can’t say it. Swallows instead. ‘I didn’t want to make Hawke deal with that, on top of the rest.’ He puts his hand on hers and strokes it with his thumb. Slow, comforting circles until she quells her sobs and gasps in. ‘Why do they want to go back? Do you? No, you said. I want to go home but I don’t even know where that is. I just want to feel safe. My clan were mean to me. I thought that was bad, but it wasn’t anything. It was just words, and not even bad ones. But I don’t think I could go back there.’
After a while he starts to doze off. Merrill can’t sleep and wakes him to make up stories about the stars.
He can’t remember ever feeling safe, except in comparisons, except in the fast-heart-beat moments when the attackers are definitely definitely dead.
It’s Donnic who wakes them, and he’s yelling at Varric.
‘It was my place more than yours, more than any of yours. I grew up there. I protected it.’
‘Shit job of it. Hawke did more than you ever did. Your lot were all corrupt -’
Fenris rolls over, feeling grass underneath the blanket. Breathes out and fills the little cavern his face has made with his hot breath. The sun’s newly risen and the whole of him is damp and sticky from the heat of the air pressing down.
‘They always talk about me like I’m a god.’ Hawke’s voice is muffled, face in the blanket same as his.
‘You saved us,’ he says.
‘I barely did anything.’ She rolls onto her side in a way that prompts him to do the same. ‘Sebastian’s gone.’
‘Starkhaven?’
She nods.
‘And no goodbye.’
‘An apology, if you want to call it that.’
‘He’s always been a coward,’ he says, and lies on his back ignoring the argument until the insects get too much and he goes to wash.
At the next town comes a crossroads, and with every step closer his feet feel more like lead. It’s obvious to see the line of them who wants to return and who does not. Varric is ahead. He and Donnic are still at odds over who deserves to love the city best. They walk close, but not too close. Exasperated, Aveline is too far behind to do more than glare at her husband’s back. And then Isabela. Hawke. The dog.
And Merrill and Fenris trudge behind with half conversations, as if they’re twins not needing to say the rest of their sentences. Things like, ‘Do you think they know how bad it is for elves there?’ and ‘Sometimes I think the stones are screaming,’ and ‘Isabela keeps saying it’ll rain.’ And in every step, every breath, he does not want to go back.
The tavern stinks like old wood gone sour from smoke and piss and ale. They take their drinks to the crooked table taken unpolished from a tree. There’s no signpost but they know. They know in their skin and their blood and their absolute innards. Turn left for Kirkwall. Right for the rest of the world.
Even in the shade it’s hot enough that Fenris rolls up his trousers, and finds more of those patches. He’s sure they’re not appearing overnight but he’s equally sure they weren’t there last he looked.
Melting, he thinks, and thinks of going south.
‘Would you go back to Ferelden?’ he asks. It’s a common enough question but not recently asked. Still the answer is the same.
Hawke shrugs, feet stretched out and touching Isabela’s. ‘There’s nothing for me there.’
‘There’s nothing for us anywhere,’ says Anders.
‘Kirkwall,’ says Varric, under his breath.
Hawke looks off into the middle distance. ‘I want to buy an island.’
Silence.
‘Can you?’ Isabela asks. ‘I guess you can. Can you though?’
‘With a mountain,’ says Merrill.
‘Snow,’ Fenris hums. The patch on his knee is long and curved, and he remembers a spear through the joint there once, early in his time in Kirkwall, before he trusted Anders. And he remembers the squeezing dread of his life shut up, folded over. Done. He’d pulled himself to the side of the cave and tried to bring himself to do anything except hold the pieces of his knee together with both hands.
When Hawke had come over to him he’d been unable to look at her face, certain her expression would be hopeless. Instead there’d been a finger snap. Anders promptly answering. That burning slice of magic, a thousand knives through every single layer that makes him.
A week later it had turned into a scar, and a mere month after that the scar had gone entirely.
‘Four in for the island party.’ Hawke looks at Varric. ‘There’s nothing for me there.’
It’s clear from the look on Varric’s face that he thinks that he should be enough. He’ll be there. And Fenris feels a guilty longing to go with him, to set this all right. But he knows he will not.
‘It’s my home,’ Varric says. ‘It’s a shithole and a nightmare and truth be told setting it on fire was probably best thing for it. But it’s my home.’
‘We’re going with him,’ says Aveline. She’s going with her husband. Not that there’s nothing for her in Kirkwall, but it’s clear the primary thought in her mind is Donnic.
It’s Anders turn to offer a future plan. He’s silent, and turns away when they look at him. His face isn’t looking any better than it did. The sun isn’t helping, his pale skin blistering just from the walking.
‘Right, then,’ says Donnic. Hands on his thighs he stands stiffly. ‘It’s been a fine run. Come visit, when we’re better set up.’
‘Right now?’ Merrill cries, and she leaps from her seat to Aveline’s, clings to her with all her limbs.
Fenris is barely more dignified in his farewells. He hugs Donnic like he’s trying to meld them together. Holding on with all his might.
He cannot look at Hawke. He hugs Varric after she has and finds the collar of his jacket wet from her face. Aveline’s, too.
When they go he feels himself stretch out after them, pulling and pulling. And the trees hide them, and it hurts even more.
Isabela’s already gone to get them ale. They drink morosely until Fenris grows tired of that. He makes Isabela sing one of her sailing tunes, and makes Hawke join in. They’re aware of what he’s doing and join in all the same. Midday they nap, and take a wandering stroll around the little town. As the night grows the town gets smaller than the tavern, the only light around. The air fills with insects delighted to be free of the heat. Exhausted they sleep together, except for Anders who sits cross legged in the chair by the window and stares unseeing into the night. Fenris wakes to see him again and again, so it feels like he didn’t sleep at all and only watched Anders watching the world.
In the morning Anders says, ‘I think I should go.’
‘No,’ says Hawke.
‘I’m allowed to leave.’
‘No. Tomorrow. Next week. Not today. Where do you want to go?’
‘Does Justice want you to do something?’ Merrill asks.
‘No,’ Anders says slowly. ‘I don’t think so. We haven’t spoken about that. He’s pleased.’ He darts a glance at all of them, as if he wants approval. Fenris looks away. ‘I want to go somewhere better for mages.’
‘Then I’ll come. We should all come,’ Hawke declares. This with a glance to Fenris, who feels free in the light of his decision to let it go. Endless possibilities rolling out before him, a bubble of laughter in his throat that this is what he could have felt, this is who he could have been.
‘You need an escort,’ says Merrill, hitting Anders on the arm in a sudden carefree gesture that has them all stumbling for the normalcy of it.
Anders’ eyes are wet. His throat bobs in that skinny, bird-like neck, and he feints pushing hair from his face to wipe his eyes. ‘I don’t deserve you.’
‘No,’ Isabela agrees.
They’re interrupted by their food being brought to them, breakfast a mismash of things from all over. Merrill takes Fenris’ plate and splits what they each have into what they each like. Isabela does the same but slower; she just takes things direct from Hawke’s plate, and Hawke, in turn, takes things from Isabela’s and puts them on Anders’. He eats slowly and gives the rest for the dog who goes, hopeful, to all of them.
It’s different without Varric. They’ve eaten without him before but not so completely absent from him. Fenris feels cut off, bereft. If he looks up fast enough maybe the world will slide back into Kirkwall and things will be as they were.
‘They’ll be okay,’ Merrill says, quietly, almost a question.
‘They better be,’ Hawke answers. ‘Else we’ll have to go back and give them what for.’
They’re going to go to Ostwick. From there a ship, for Isabela’s sake. And from there, the world. Though more likely the south, the far south, below Ferelden, below whatever is never on any map Fenris has seen. Hawke wants to go. The unfathomable unknown is enough for the rest of them. Fills them with lightning flashes powerful as any mage might make, the map fresh despite age, the cotton along the edges fraying but the ink still strong and folds untested.
Fenris thinks of snow, a wonder he’s only ever experienced in reading. He thinks of places empty until they come to fill it, of languages he’s never heard, places too foreign to fathom. He touches the map and dreams of a future self free of his present. Someone who sleeps without fear. Someone who can laugh without guilt. Someone he’s been waiting for, been surviving for.
They buy a pair of donkeys for their packs, and so freed they walk a dancing pace in the early summer air down a dusty track under bowing trees.
Fenris raises his head and breathes in the air. It’s a hint and barely that, not enough to hold, not enough to even touch.
The rain is coming.