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Leo Hawke was the most romantic soul Anders had ever met, which didn't say very much given that high romance in the Circle usually consisted of providing your partner with a cushion on which to kneel during your hastily-arranged oral sex in a corner.
Anders had become aware of this aspect to the gruff young man's nature within a single moon-turn of their first meeting. Hawke had breezed into his clinic alone but for his dog, and wearing his nicer mercenary leathers - the ones that didn't have so much blood on them. He made a beeline straight for Anders, and it had taken Anders a moment to recognize the bizarre bundle he carried as a form of foliage.
"I've got you something," Hawke said, and dumped the flowers on Anders's desk.
"Ah," Anders said, and then, "Hawke, these are..." Weeds, if he were to be honest. Most of them were wilting, three of them were the kind of toxic that started eating through the wood, and one of them bit Anders on the forefinger when he tried to sweep them onto the floor and save his one working piece of furniture.
"It's All Hearts Day," Hawke said, like that explained everything, and then clammed up. Anders patiently slipped the tip of his belt knife into the maw of the trapper plant and began wriggling it from side to side, trying to work the nasty little thing free; it hissed at him not unlike one of Velanna's sylvans before it discarded his finger in search of easier prey in the form of one of the toxic flowers. Anders privately hoped they ate each other.
Free of predatory plant-life, Anders took the moment to examine Hawke, who was staring determinedly at the ceiling; a muscle twitched in his jaw. He said, "Leo -"
"Do you like them?" Hawke was still looking at the ceiling. His dog - Fang, because of course Hawke had named his dog Fang - sniffed the toxic flowers, sneezed, and promptly threw up under Anders's desk.
Anders had read books. He understood context. Hawke wasn't that hard to read, although to be fair Leo's slapping his ass and commenting on his sexy tortured look had been a fairly big clue in and of itself. "Hawke," he said, "Thank you."
Leo swallowed, and for the first time since arriving looked at him, really looked at him; his eyes were still that breathtaking shade of amber that made Anders's heart clench. The corner of his mouth moved, ever-so-slightly, in the closest he came to a smile - that oddly charming, boyish expression that soothed the heavy furrow of his brow.
Anders loved that furrow. It showed Hawke had lived a life complicated enough to cause furrowing. That and the callouses on his hands, the scratchy roughness of his finger-pads, the weathered texture of his cheeks; Anders hoped one day to live long enough to see more mages as frayed as Leo Hawke. He cleared his throat, and Leo nodded quietly, a small gesture. "Okay," he said. "Next time, less biting. And I..."
He paused. There was a muffled whimper from Fang; the trapper plant had caught his ear. Anders bent to free the hound, and in that moment whatever Leo had been about to say seemed to have deserted him; no sooner had Anders removed the dangerous plant from the mabari's ear than Fang had to lope off after his master's retreating back, leaving Anders carefully holding his malicious gift at arm's length to avoid another bite. It seemed appropriate.
Hawke gave him a few more gifts, over the years, seemingly at random - a box of pigeon feathers laden with lice as a thank-you for saving Carver, down in the dark of the Deep Roads (Anders politely accepted them and decided not to tell Hawke that his own feathers were in fact simir bird feathers and thus enchanted, especially when it transpired Leo had been stalking Lowtown pigeons for weeks to accumulate as many as he had); a new leather spellbook that still had blood on it; seventeen pairs of torn trousers, which at least kept the clinic patients bandaged, and - most impressively - a Tevinter Chantry amulet that could get Anders hanged.
All of this was somewhat eclipsed by the Templar helmet Leo brought him one muggy spring morning. Mist crept in from the bay through the broken walls of his clinic; there had been a chokedamp outburst the night before. Anders must have fallen asleep at his desk, because one moment he had been trying to write down a list of supplies to purchase in the morning and the next the helmet landed on his desk with a clang.
"Warghlbarg," Anders said, and compounded that graceful enunciation by falling off his chair and bursting out in blue lights.
Across the clinic a little girl cheered. "Look," she said, "I told you he glowed in the dark."
Her mother sniffed. "In this city, what doesn't?" she said, and turned a page in the book she was reading. Even from the floor, Anders recognized the red-headed woman carrying a man over one shoulder featured on the cover, not to mention the navy-blue strip of cloth that served as a bookmark, and felt only a moment of outrage that she had helped herself to the copy of Swords and Shields he kept under his pillow.
"Sorry," Leo said.
"It's..." 'all right,' Anders had been about to say, but his attention was drawn instead to the helmet on his desk. "Maker, Leo, is the head still inside -?"
"Your friend at the docks wanted help with a Templar hunter," Hawke said. "I found him."
Anders poked at the viscera of Ser Conrad Vernhart's exposed neck muscles. "So I see."
"I was just going to rummage his barracks room, plant some evidence of lyrium smuggling, and fuck off," Hawke said, "Then I found some documents referencing the Darktown Healer and all sense deserted me."
"Mummy," said the little girl - Helen? Helina? Herlin? - "I want a templar head."
"Maybe when you're older, darling," said her mother. "Now ssh, the Guard Captain's about to meet with her arch-nemesis for an intensively erotic sword fight."
"You brought me a Knight-Lieutenant's head," Anders said.
"It's All Hearts Day," Hawke pointed out, "I had to get you something."
He let the corner of his lip quirk again, like it was nothing; he met Anders's eyes without shame or hesitation. Anders smiled back. His heart was doing that clenching thing again - never seemed to stop, not around Hawke. More, these days, with every new thing Leo said, every slow lingering gaze.
There had been a lot of those. For such a normally reserved, reticent man, Leo spent a lot of time in the clinic.
"Do you think I could get it stuffed?" Anders asked. Vernhart had literally dragged a young elvhen apostate to the docks from her mother's house in the alienage, where he had found her hiding in the cellar behind a sack of potatoes. Anders had a feeling that her mother would appreciate the trophy, at least until he and the other underground members worked out how to smash her daughter's phylactery and bring her home.
Hawke's face didn't even change. "For you?" he said, and shrugged. "I can look."
Upside-down, Ser Vernhart's green eyes gazed unseeingly at Anders through the helmet's eyeslit, already clouded over in death. Anders looked at them straight-on, but the small smile he wore had nothing at all to do with the dead Templar. "Thank you, Hawke," he said, and meant it.
Hawke scratched the back of his neck. The edge of his mouth was curved upward, far more than just a quirk - the highest Anders had ever seen it. Not even Varric could get this reaction out of him. "Yeah," he said, "Well. All Heart's Day," like that explained everything.
"I know," Anders said, and it did.
Time often appeared to move differently in Kirkwall, seemingly too fast and not fast enough; no matter what Anders did the mages seemed no closer to their freedom. Eventually he did what he needed to do, reducing Kirkwall to ash and rubble for the second time in three years; Hawke's response to that was a shrug and that lip quirk.
Anders kissed him for it, in the middle of the Gallows. By then, of course, he had been doing a lot more than kissing with Leo, for a long time. But the kissing was nice enough. And anything else just then would probably have been received poorly by the rest of their group, with the exception of Sebastian (gone) and Fang (who didn't care) - so, kissing it was.
Maybe that was the greatest gift of all, Anders thought. Hawke's heart. His trust. And his support, even after Meredith fell, as their group splintered and withered away around them like the flowers Leo had given him so long ago, their first All Heart's Day together - before there had even really been a together.
"You're thinking sappy shit," Leo said. He was on the other side of the road from Anders, patiently using the dead man's hatchet to saw his wedding band off his forefinger; Anders shook his head a little, startled, and glanced down at the bounty hunter whose corpse he straddled on the far bank.
"Perhaps," he said. There was a small purse of copper in the man's pocket, a letter stamped with the Starkhaven seal, and three sovereigns sewn into the lining of his boots; Anders pocketed the money and let the letter burn in his palm, unread. "Thinking about All Heart's Day."
"Huh." Leo had managed to get the fingers sawn off, and was wiping the wedding band against the corpse's trousers, which had torn. Fang, lounging in the grass at his side, watched him mournfully.
Anders had no idea what Hawke did to the men and women he fought that led to their trousers being so often damaged beyond repair, but there it was; Anders blew buildings across skylines and Leo savaged trousers. He supposed that made them the nightmare of the Orlesian court. "I just wanted to let you know that I was grateful for those flowers," he said, standing up slowly with a crick of his back.
Hawke was silent for a moment, watching him make his way to the next corpse, and then said, "I picked them from the sewer on my way down to see you."
"I figured," Anders said.
"It was the seeing you part that mattered the most," Leo admitted.
Anders cut the next corpse's belt-pouch free. It contained four clipped coins, a Starkhaven sovereign, three Antivan queens and a small copper locket with an artist's likeness of the corpse holding her husband and three small children. He dug the picture out and tucked it into her pocket. "Thank you," he said. "For... the flowers."
Hawke grunted.
"And for the other things you gave me," Anders said, "But mostly the support. I love you, Leo Hawke. I'm sorry I never gave you anything in return."
"Don't be an ass," Leo said. He was watching Anders intently from across the road, those amber eyes blazing; Anders swallowed. "You gave me shit too. Metaphysical shit. Dreams. Hope for change. Orgasms. And stuff like that."
Anders grinned despite himself. "Fancy a sandwich?"
"Yeah," Leo said, and tossed him something shiny; Anders caught it out of midair. It was the bounty hunter's ring, cheap iron smeared with fresh red blood. "Fancy marrying you more."
Anders blinked at the ring and waited for the words to rearrange themselves in his head into something that made more sense. They didn't. "Oh," he said.
Leo went down on one knee next to the corpse. "Anders," he said.
"You're - are you - oh," Anders said, and then on reflex, "Would you like a cushion?"
"In a bit," Leo agreed. "Anders. D'you wanna fuck templar shit up together -"
"Yes," Anders said.
"- now and for the rest of our lives -"
"Yes."
"- until the bastard Chantry gets the picture -"
"Yes!"
"- or until we run out of Templars, whichever happens first?"
Leo was grinning. Dimly, Anders was aware that he was, too. "I'd be honoured," he said, and his voice sounded stronger than it felt.
The ring didn't fit, of course, not even around his thumb; but it wasn't like that actually mattered. Leo came over and helped him undo the knot holding his Tevinter Chantry amulet on; they added the ring to the leather thong, where it clinked against the Hawke estate key, the amulet from the Darkspawn magister, and the heretical Chantry symbol itself. It left a thin streak of blood across the fabric of his tunic.
"Happy All Heart's Day, love," Leo said, and cupped his face in one weathered palm, thumb-callous rough against Anders's cheekbone.
Anders could have pointed out that it was Kingsway, half a year away from All Heart's Day. Instead he kissed Leo, with tongue, exactly the way they'd never been allowed to kiss in the circle; drawn-out, sloppy, wild, happy. Fang ran around them, barking happily, those big gruff barks that emanated somewhere in his chest and ramped up in volume and pitch, and for a moment the world was this: Leo's mouth on his, the blue sky above and the barking dog, the smell of blood and death and the warm ring against his chest. It was perfect.
After all, All Heart's Day or not, Leo Hawke was the most romantic soul Anders had ever met.