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The afterlife sounds fine. It’s warm and soft, the way the Maker’s bosom ought to be, and somewhere distant, muffled, is a sound she knows, at once abrasive and poetic. Hawke could happily spend eternity listening to it.
And then the divine breeze shifts and the sound grows clearer, and Hawke realizes that no self-respecting paradise would include Varric’s writing. Grudgingly, she rouses.
“‘... and as the fearsome Qunari lowered his great head to charge once more, Hawke’s faithful warhound escaped the--stoy--’”
“That’s ‘stoic’,” Varric helps.
“‘ Stoic elf’s grasp. The dog threw himself into the path of his master’s attacker, harrying the Arishok’s heels. Hawke laughed.’”
Hawke coughs. “Get the mage,” Fenris says, and Hawke hears the creak of a stool as Varric rises, but she holds up a hand. Another moment and her breath is under control, as is the pain in her gut. She opens her eyes.
Fenris hovers above his seat between the bed and the hearth, all coiled readiness like there’s a fight. The book is forgotten on the floor. He would hate her for telling him so, hate her even more for telling Merrill, but Fenris is absolutely looking at her with puppy eyes.
Varric is halfway to the bedroom door. At the foot of the bed, stretched out where Hawke has told him repeatedly not to lie down, Max lifts his big block head and thumps his stub tail on the covers.
“How long did I sleep?” is insufficient, but it’s all she can think to say.
“Four days,” Fenris answers, and without looking away from her he pours a glass of water from the pitcher by the bed, and then leans over to put it to her lips. He’s not wearing his breastplate or gauntlets. How often has that happened, ever? Not since the only other time he was in her bedroom.
Obediently she sips. “We kicked Aveline and Merrill out an hour ago,” Varric says as he returns to his spot by Fenris. “Blondie’s asleep in the library. I’ll ask Bodahn to go to the Chantry and tell Choir Boy he can quit praying.”
“And Isabela?”
The dwarf fidgets. Fenris’s gaze slides away from her but doesn’t quite meet Varric’s. “We haven’t seen her since that night,” Varric says.
She tries not to wilt like a lovesick daylily, but there’s no helping the way her head drops back to the pillow. Don’t do this for me, Isabela had pleaded, and Hawke, on her way to the center of the Viscount’s hall, had produced a wan, wry smile for her.
Well, I’m not doing it for Kirkwall.
She aches. Slowly she inventories the mess: her left arm is splinted, though underneath the bones must have already knit, since her fingers still move. She reaches for the covers, and Fenris murmurs, “Broth, I think,” and Varric nods and goes.
Beneath the covers and her shift, she is swathed from ribs to hips in linen bandages. They are neither bloodstained nor brown with infection, so perhaps the worst is past. She touches them experimentally, groans at the pain, and lays back down. Her gaze finds Fenris and beseeches him. “Wine?”
His eyes are soft. It can only be pity. He covers her again and sets his bare hand on her forearm, the unsplinted one. “Not yet.”
Varric steps through the door with Orana and Anders trailing him, and Fenris takes his hand away. Hawke misses it immediately.
“It’s good to see you awake, mistress,” Orana says. She sets a bed tray across Hawke’s lap and stacks bolsters; Anders eases Hawke forward and Orana pushes the stack behind her back.
The bone broth smells incredible, and Hawke’s mangled gut pines loudly for it. “Thank you,” she tells Orana, and presses her hand with her good one. Orana dips her head and goes.
Anders sweeps a hand across Hawke’s brow. She feels a prickle of magic, milder than healing, and he pronounces, “No fever, and no infection. Our champion is officially on the mend.”
A small blessing, that she slept through the tedious parts. Hawke arranges her mother’s good linen napkins in a path between the tray and her chin, determined to make this process as dignified as possible without assistance. “Good. When I’m done with this, I need some fresh air.”
Varric makes a show of bracing himself, while Anders takes a deep breath and says, in a rehearsed tone, “You need another nine days of bed rest.”
“Bullshit.”
“There was considerable internal damage,” he continues, infuriatingly calm. “One wrong move and you could tear something that’s half-healed, and start bleeding again.”
Her face burns. “I’m not--”
“I’m not a Hightown physician you can intimidate, Hawke. I know how quickly you’ll find a fight when you leave this house. Nine days. No less.” She closes her mouth and he nods, satisfied. “I’ll check on you in the morning. Rest.” And he goes.
“Well, you’re gonna get bored,” Varric sighs. “Just keep in mind, I have plenty more of that first draft.”
“Yes, thank you Varric,” she bites. He waves cheerfully, and follows Anders out of the bedroom.
Fenris starts to rise. “I should--"
“Wait,” Hawke says, and immediately hates that she said it. Who does she think she is? How long has he already spent at her side? He owes her nothing and she has no right to ask. She’s so bloody selfish.
Hasn’t she earned a little selfishness?
Fenris waits halfway between sitting and standing again. Hawke licks her lips. “Just… stay a little longer?” He doesn’t even have to be in this room. Just to know that he’s near, that not everyone has left her, would be enough.
He watches her for one long, careful moment. “As long as you want me here,” he says at last, and sits back down.
Hawke lets out a breath, and takes the first half-spoon of broth. It’s rich with flavor, as restorative as a potion. “What happened next?” she asks. Fenris reaches for the book. “No, would you tell me? Without all this…” She gestures at the book. “Swashbuckling.”
One corner of Fenris’s mouth turns up. “Your mabari did get loose and trip the Arishok,” he says. Max’s tail thumps the covers again. “You didn’t laugh, though. The next blow from his sword shattered your shield, and your arm with it. You screamed, with pain at first but you turned it into rage. You sidestepped the next charge, and landed a hit that loosened his shoulder guard...”
With good food and a warm bed and the tales of her own valor told by her favorite voice in the world, Hawke finds herself looking forward to the next nine days.
It’s only the second day, and she knows how insufferable she’s being. “Just to the market and back. I swear I can do it. I just want to see the sun.”
Orana, midway through changing the covers, opens the drapes. Midmorning light streams in. Hawke drops her head to the pillow in frustration. “Velus flos moriens,” Orana says to Fenris.
“Flos de sudor,” Fenris replies, and Orana stifles a smile.
“I can hear you,” Hawke snaps.
Fenris leans against a bedpost and regards her smugly. “Sed tu non intellegis.” At Orana’s bell-like laugh, he shoots her a smile, and Hawke wonders again whether he truly doesn’t realize how charming he is.
She hurls a pillow at him. It hurts, but it’s worth it--Fenris lets it hit him square in the face, and just blinks down at her afterward. “So teach me,” she snaps. It’s a gamble, but his eyes flicker in surprise. She guessed right.
“You… want to learn Tevene.”
She wants to know what he and Orana say to each other behind her back. She wants to speak Fenris’s language, moreover, if it offers any chance of understanding him better. “What else am I going to do with myself?”
And so her tutors begin. Fenris finds a copy of Tevinter Journeys Inward in the library and reads its proverbs and meditations to her. Orana ceases speaking Trade at all in her presence, and Hawke’s bedchamber becomes a small slice of Tevinter with one hundred percent less oppression. When Hawke learns what flos de sudor means she squawks in outrage and reaches for Fenris’s wrist to wipe her brow, but he only grins and twists out of her grasp, and it’s Hawke’s wrist that ends up pinned to the mattress. He releases her an instant later, and if he notices the speed of her pulse he makes no mention of it.
On the fifth day Orana enters the room with a cushion and says, “Pedes tolere.” Hawke, just roused from a nap, works to translate this, but not quickly enough. Fenris snaps his fingers, imperious as a bloody magister.
“Pedes,” Orana repeats patiently, like Hawke is a child, “tolere.”
Hawke is still gaping at Fenris. She takes a guess, raises her feet. Orana makes a pleased sound and slides the cushion beneath them. “Was I this rude when I taught you two to read?” Hawke asks.
Fenris picks up the book he’s used to pass the time while she slept. “You taught us to read a language of mercantile diplomacy. We’re teaching you to speak the language of Imperium. There’s an entire class of conjugations devoted to commands from a master to a slave. Tevene is rude, Hawke.” It’s the most he’s said to her in the common tongue in two days.
“Etsi non taediosum,” Orana says. “Et habet haec vocabula sunt angustiae,” she adds to Fenris.
“Sed quid ad nos removere a voce Ferelden?” he replies.
Orana is right--Hawke has not been bored. Her head has hurt, and she has had to beg intermissum now and then, but they are keeping her occupied and, consequently, sane. At times it’s even fun, like the dozen variations on Avanna, mori parere they have concocted for the next time they encounter slavers on the coast.
“That’s going well, then?” Anders says as he enters.
“Sic,” Hawke says, almost automatically.
He checks her forehead. “You’re not,” he says, and she opens her mouth to explain, but Anders smirks and Hawke rolls her eyes. Anders pulls the covers down and Hawke glances to Fenris; he has found someplace else to look.
As Anders moves Hawke’s shift out of the way, Orana brings him the shears. “Forfex,” she says for Hawke’s benefit, and a moment later Hawke feels the cold back of one blade against her side, moving up. Anders folds the cut dressings away, and they do not stick to her.
“It’s healed on the surface, at least,” he says, and finally Hawke lifts her head. It’s magnificently ugly, a raised disfigurement two handspans long across her belly. There was a sword there, barely a week ago.
Fenris gestures with an open hand. “Cicatrix.”
“Formosus cicatrix,” Hawke breathes. She can’t remember the last time she was this proud of something.
“You have strange hobbies, even by our standards,” Anders observes, wadding the bandages. “No need to change dressings anymore, but you’re stuck here for another two days.”
“You should come see this, Hawke,” Varric calls from beyond the door.
Anders makes a bitter face, but at Hawke’s look, he helps her up. Her feet sink into the carpet, and she’s never felt anything so divine. Fenris moves to one side of her, and Orana to the other, and Hawke lets them offer support without hanging off of them and stretching her torso. After only a few steps, it is an effort to keep from panting.
Outside the bedchamber, on the upstairs landing, Varric gestures them over to the window. Hawke joins him, and looks out at the Hightown courtyard. “That’s not,” she says.
“That was fast,” Anders says.
“I heard Meredith commissioned it,” says Varric, and Anders makes a disgusted sound.
And if Meredith thinks she can win Hawke to the Templars’ side by commissioning a statue nearly as tall as her house with a flaming sword, she underestimated Hawke, but maybe only slightly.
Hawke swallows. “Did I look remotely that valiant at any point in the duel?” she asks Fenris.
He glances sidelong at her. “Ten times more valiant,” Varric answers for him. “And they even included the head of the Mad Ox himself.”
“The what?” Fenris demands, at the same moment Hawke says, “Have some respect, Varric.”
Varric stares up at them. “Well, I came here to deliver this, but I can see I still have some editing to do.” He takes his leave of them, manuscript under his arm.
“And that’s long enough on your feet,” Anders tells Hawke. “Back you go.”
“Gallina morsus,” Hawke mutters as Fenris and Orana guide her to the bed.
“I heard that.”
“Sed tu non--” Fenris pinches her side.
Anders sees her back under the covers and gives Orana directions to start on solid food, and then he’s gone. Orana follows him downstairs, and Hawke props her feet back up on the cushions and lets out a breath. “I have a statue,” she says, wonderingly.
“Dicere Tevene,” Fenris tells her, settling back on his chair.
Her head aches, and her body will hate her in the morning. “Et statuam possent?”
He gives her one tiny smile, and now her heart aches too. “Manaveris Defensor.”
- - -
On the sixth day, Bethany’s letter arrives. Hawke reaches for it, but Fenris takes it from Bodahn first and holds it out of her reach as he opens it. “Soror,” he translates, and Hawke collapses back on the pillows. “Quid factum est? Nemo inquit mihi quid. Audivi obsidione finita per duellum, et non erat nomine Defensor. Sunt tibi bene? Mitte est. Item, mercedi augendam Orana.”
“She didn’t say the last part,” Hawke grouses.
Fenris fetches paper and quill. “Would you like to dictate an answer? Dicere Tevene.”
Hawke blows out a sigh. “Soror, bene sum…”
And when she finishes, Fenris shows her the Trade translation. “I didn’t say anything about the food.”
“I added that.”
Hawke gestures for the quill and Fenris relinquishes it. At the bottom of the sheet she writes, Scribed by Fenris, because I am not permitted to lift a finger .
- - -
Hawke wakes on the eighth day, and she is alone. Orana comes and goes with honeyed toast, mild fruit, and roast fish, but not even her cooking can lift Hawke’s mood. The lessons are on hold. Fenris is more than capable and worrying for him is the last thing she should do. Still, the farther the afternoon light travels across her carpet, the larger the knot in her stomach grows, and it has nothing to do with scars or food.
He must have left her side sometime before in the last seven days, but she has no idea when. When she woke, he was there. When she drowsed, he held his sentry position, ever in the chair between her and the fire. When Merrill chattered at her for hours, he remained. Even during the time she spent distant and full of self-pity, wounded by Isabela’s continued absence, his silence was companionable. Has she driven him off for good this time? Is he well and truly sick of her?
She tries to focus on conjugating verbs. It doesn’t work.
Aveline visits, and Hawke’s demeanor only makes her more stubbornly cheerful. “Did you know street gang activity has dropped significantly in Hightown since the end of the siege?”
“Because the street gangs died in the siege,” Hawke presumes, voice sour. How else is she supposed to get back into shape if no one gets assaulted in the streets at night anymore?
“Because they’re afraid of the Champion,” Aveline replies serenely. “Hightown is defended.”
Hawke glares at the far wall. “What of Lowtown? And Darktown? Or does the Guard only collect statistics on gang activity where people are rich enough to matter?” She is being unfair. Also a terrible person.
Aveline clasps Hawke’s arm and stands. “You belong to the whole city. Rest and heal, Hawke, so you can get back to them.”
The light through her windows has purpled and dimmed when she hears the front door, Bodahn’s greeting, and Fenris’s answer. Hawke has her face almost under control when he enters the room with Max at his heels. “Benevesperam,” she greets him, trying not to sound accusatory.
“It’s about to be,” Fenris says, and opens the sack he’s carrying.
“Is that…”
“Aggregio,” he confirms. “I spent today finding the last two bottles in the city. Because tomorrow--” He twists the cork out of the first bottle--”tu ambiveris.”
The scent of the wine wafts to her and she lets out a voiced sigh. Fenris takes a swig directly from the bottle, like they’re in his mansion, not hers. “I have goblets, you know.”
“I know.” He gets down from his chair and sits with his back against the side of the bed, facing the fire, then reaches up to hand Hawke the bottle. She takes it and drinks, brief and savoring to start. Even without adequate time to breathe, the Aggregio is velvet-smooth.
They pass the bottle between them twice more before Fenris speaks. “Who was the first person you killed?”
Scintillating conversation. Good thing Mother never invited him to her dinner parties. Hawke can’t bring herself to say either of those things aloud, though, not when he’s spent an entire day and an obscene amount of coin to do something nice for her.
“A man in a village three or four stops before Lothering,” she tells him. “He saw Bethany coaxing our cookfire, and he ran to tell the Chantry in the next town. I caught up with him in the woods. Mother didn’t ask about the blood when I got back, just brought me a damp cloth. We packed and left that night. I was seventeen.”
Fenris gives her the bottle. Hawke drinks.
“The first I remember,” he tells her, “was one of Danarius’s apprentices. I woke from the ritual terrified and agonized, and the first thing I did was rip out her heart. Danarius was delighted at the immediate demonstration, but of course, I also had to be punished for killing someone valuable to him.” And so the foundation of his life was laid in those first moments. She hands him the wine. He drinks.
“Do you remember all their faces?” Hawke asks. Fenris shakes his head. Good, she’s not alone in that.
“Some of them had helmets,” Fenris says, and through the pain of laughing Hawke is unspeakably grateful for his dry wit.
“How many, do you think?” she asks, when the mirth fades and leaves an abyss.
“Hawke.”
“Just since we all arrived in Kirkwall. Between the lot of us.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Hundreds?” She doesn’t know why. She’s always been sanguine with the purpose of her hands. Perhaps it matters now because there’s a statue outside her window, commemorating the one time since she arrived here that she killed someone and it wasn’t for money and it actually made a difference.
Fenris gives her the bottle. Hawke drinks. “Let’s talk about something else,” Fenris says.
She nods. “Have you had any more dreams? Memories?”
He is silent for so long that she fears she’s offended him. “Many,” he says.
It wasn’t her. It wasn’t being with her. She could sob from relief. “Do you remember them?”
“Dicere Tevene.”
Of course. “Memorar tu?”
Fenris shakes his head. “Memoro luce. Flavus, in area. Omne aliud obscuratur.”
“I’m sorry,” she tries, but he waves her off, stares at the fire.
She hands him the wine. He drinks. “Getting you drunk was a mistake,” he says a moment later, and she can hear he’s only half joking.
He’s not wrong, either. It usually takes longer than this for wine to make her morose. The period of recovery, the period before that when she avoided his mansion, it had a toll. She is miserable and pathetic, and she is going to drive him away again.
Hawke shrugs. “Don’t stay, then.” She means to sound casual, but she ruins it by continuing, “I’m sorry. I have no right to make you wait on me. I didn’t--”
“Stop that.” His voice is calm. He turns his head and regards her. “I want to be here,” he says, and to hide the way that makes her feel, she reaches for the wine.
She passes out after a bottle and a half.
- - -
A dream (a memory): she went to the kitchen early in the morning to nurse what felt like a hangover of sorrow, and she was huddled over buttered toast at the table when her mother glided in and said, “An elven slave? Maker’s breath, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Her head snapped up. “What did you call him?”
“Him?” her mother echoed, just as Orana entered the kitchen. The girl glanced from Hawke to Leandra and back, and then ducked out to find someplace else to clean.
Understanding dawned, and Hawke scrubbed at her face. “Orana is free, Mother. I freed her. I’m paying her, with my own money. And if she displeases you, don’t ask her to do things.”
Leandra’s eyes flared with offense, but she remained stubbornly diplomatic. “Very well. And the other freed elven slave? Will we be seeing any more of him?”
Hawke set her jaw. “I doubt it.”
“Shame,” her mother said. “He has fine manners.” She turned to go.
“What’s wrong with me?” Hawke said.
Her mother turned back and stared at her.
(Hawke, from outside the dream, recognizes that this is the place where memory and guilty conscience would take different paths and her mother’s spectre could proceed to list her every fault, culminating with the way she let her die. Tonight, at least, memory sets the course.)
“There is nothing wrong with you,” her mother said, and when Hawke’s head drooped she crossed the space between them to cup Hawke’s face in her hands. “There’s time yet for you to find love, dear.”
But she had. She thought she had. She shook her head, against the resistance of her mother’s palms. Her words come faster, as if she can stop the tears that threaten if she just speaks them quickly enough. “That’s twice, and it can’t be coincidence and it can’t just be them. So what’s wrong with me?”
Her mother cradled her head against her chest, fiercely tight. “Nothing,” she said again. “And one day he’s going to realize what he left, and he’ll regret it so bitterly--”
“I don’t want to cause him regret,” Hawke protested against the silk of Leandra’s gown.
Her mother stroked her hair. “That’s just how good you are,” she soothed.
Hawke wakes, and Fenris’s arm is across her waist. She tries not to stiffen or change her breathing, but she must let something slip, because he stirs. Surprised, perhaps, at the way he migrated in his sleep. Reflexively, she puts her hand over his, and an instant later withdraws it again. “Sorry,” she murmurs.
Fenris lifts his arm, but not far; she feels his warmth. Hawke wishes he’d get it over with, the leaving. “It must hurt, to be back here,” she says. She hurts. She’ll hurt more when he’s gone again.
The scantest of breaths warms the back of her neck. “You must not think that,” Fenris says. He puts his arm back where it was.
It can only be pity, and yet when she dozes once more, she is happy.
- - -
Later still, a shadow crosses between Hawke and the fireplace, and she opens her eyes.
Fenris’s arms are still around her. Isabela takes a knee at the side of the bed. Something in Hawke leaps at the sight of her. “Don’t wake him,” Isabela advises; Hawke reads the words on her lips more than she hears them. When Hawke holds out her hand, Isabela clasps it. “I think it’s best not to show my face around Kirkwall for a while,” Isabela says. “I’ll be back, and until then you’ll be in excellent hands.” Hawke presses her hand. Isabela runs a thumb across Hawke’s lips. “Thank you, Hawke.”
She leaves silently, and Fenris whispers, “She’s so loud .”
“That’s the wine.” Her head hurts, too. “Dormi.”
They do.
- - -
The ninth day dawns with curtains pulled back briskly. The light offends her eyes and Hawke ducks beneath the covers.
“Up,” Fenris says, curt but not harsh. “Get dressed.” Hawke tests her furred and sour mouth, and concludes it would be best not to argue. He waits by the door while she works her way into the clothes he chose for her, and he does not offer to help.
When at last her boots are on she stands, atrophied muscles straining against gravity, and looks to Fenris. He opens the bedroom door and offers his arm. A courtesy, not an assumption of weakness. She takes it.
Fenris escorts her downstairs and out the front door, into blazing late morning sunlight. He waits while she blinks, and then turns south.
Passersby call her “Champion,” which somewhat hinders Hawke’s ability to imagine herself on a casual stroll with a lover. She returns their nods. And then she realizes where Fenris is taking her, and she hisses, “Oh, damn you.”
High above them is the Viscount’s Keep. All those stairs.
“One at a time,” Fenris replies, and they start to climb.
Seven minutes later her feet are lead and everything burns from her waist down, but she’s done it, and she’s only a little winded. Then it’s in through the main hall and under the dragon crest, and out the door that has a chain across it every other time she’s been in the barracks, and there Hawke discovers a perfectly serviceable training yard. They are the only ones in it. At the far end, there is a sparring ring, a blunted longsword, an oak shield, and cadet maille sized for her.
She is weakened, out of practice, and hungover. Still, Hawke’s fingers itch, and without being told she gears up. Fenris paces a diagonal line across the little ring, and scrapes his feet into the dust at the far side.
The weight of the shield is a comfort she hadn’t realized she missed. She tests the armor’s range of motion and finds it satisfactory, then tries a swing with the sword. It doesn’t sing the way her finer blades do, but she’ll manage. Hawke raises her gaze to Fenris, and nods once.
He flows across the ring and, infuriatingly fast, swings at her. She catches his greatsword on the shield, jarring even though it’s only meant to test. The briefest of sensations, a glimpse of broken shield and broken arm, and then she’s back in the present.
“Pedes,” Fenris says, and yes, her footwork is rubbish after so long in bed. Hawke shifts, centering over her forward foot, keeping the rear one canted to brace herself and throw him back. She takes short sideways steps to her right, circling him, and flashes wine-purpled teeth over the edge of her shield.
“Fari, dominus.”
He makes no sign of hearing her, but that just means he’s tamping down his righteous anger, saving it for later. Hawke can wait. He has brought her here reeking of a sickroom, with an empty belly and every possible physical disadvantage, but goading is one of her best skills.
She attempts a strike, stiff and slow. He parries it without visible effort and dances around her shield. Hawke rolls underneath his blade. It takes several seconds for her body to obey her commands to get back up, and when she does, she’s panting. Some champion. She should have brought the dog to get in his way.
Fenris leaps at her before she has a chance to straighten up, and Hawke takes two strikes on her shield, painfully high, retreating nearly to the edge of the ring. She pushes back a step, a solid hit on his blade. She attempts another and he catches it too soon, her arm at full extension--a twist, and her sword lands in the dust.
In the fraction of a second before he knocks her down, she sees no pity in his eyes.
His sword slams the edge of her shield, and Hawke’s body is done with all this. She drops, left arm beneath her. The shadow of his sword passes over her, and her innards seize in anticipation. At the last instant, in a reflex born of fear and pain still fresh, she raises her right hand.
The blade slices her palm, and at first she doesn’t feel anything. The bite of the cut only comes when she starts to bleed, and it’s followed by Fenris’s incredulous voice. “What are you doing?”
Hawke holds her fist close to her chest and looks up at him. His eyes are wide. He says, “You knew I’d stop in time.”
She nods, throat too dry to answer. The cut isn’t deep; she has his reflexes to thank for that. “Then why ?” Fenris presses.
Because some dumb animal part of her mind was back inside the keep, anticipating a blade through her guts. The flinching Champion of Kirkwall. “Sorry,” she grates.
The fear or fury on his face doesn’t ease, but Fenris closes his mouth and sheathes his sword. He crouches beside her and gestures for her hand. Hawke uncurls her fingers and winces as air stings the laceration.
Working quickly, Fenris unties the red silk from around his gauntlet. He wraps it twice around her hand, tight. When it’s secure, he grabs her wrist and pulls her to her feet. Hawke unbuckles the shield and borrowed armor, and Fenris collects them and the fallen sword, puts them where they were before. The yard is still empty, and she’s grateful no one was there to see their Champion fall on her shield and bleed. Again.
She wishes their places were reversed. Not the injuries, no; that thought appalls her and she wills it away. But if Fenris was basalit-an (the way he should have been, with all his knowledge and aplomb in the Arishok’s presence) he would have won the duel in moments, would not have lost half his blood on the floor of the keep, would have stayed on his feet for the next week and used his status to force Kirkwall to confront the slavers that plagued it, to take down those awful statues in the Gallows. Let Danarius try to come for the city’s hero.
Hawke would be a footnote, a sparring partner occasionally spotted at his side. In that moment, it feels like what they both deserve.
Quonium ferat, Fenris had read to her from the meditations, tu daranc. Because you can bear this, you were given it. She had looked in his eyes then, to see if he really believed that--it sounded like something a Chantry sister would say. Was he speaking of her, or himself?
At the edge of the ring he offers his arm again. Hawke takes it, and sneaks a glance at his face. It is set and fierce. No one greets them on the walk home.
Orana brings gauze and salve to the bath. Fenris discards his gauntlets, unwraps Hawke’s hand, and takes the silk immediately to the basin as Hawke drips blood into the tub. Orana stays to clean the wound and help Hawke apply the salve. It contains just enough elfroot that by morning the skin will be closed and pink. Orana takes her leave, and Hawke wraps the gauze, watching Fenris’s bent back.
“I know you’d never hurt me,” she tries. He doesn’t acknowledge her. What does he see in the water: the Fog Warriors, his temptation in the Fade, or something else?
When the cut is covered, she joins him at the basin. He scrubs and scrubs at the silk with practiced vigor, and red blooms in the water. “We can just throw that one away,” Hawke says. “I can give you another.”
He hunches a little more over the basin, keeps scrubbing. Hawke takes the hint, goes back to the edge of the tub and regards her bandaged hand. She could leave the room, escape this heavy mood for the moment, go lie down the way her body wants. But she needs to hear him.
“How do you say wound?” she asks.
“Vulna.” His voice is flat.
“And pain?”
He is watching her in the glass over the basin now. “Dolor.”
Hawke gathers her courage. “In dolor vives.”
She conjugated it wrong. That must be why his hands go still in the water.
A moment later, so quiet isn’t sure she heard it at all, he answers, “Ego quo.”
Hawke struggles to hold her expression together, her voice steady. “Is there anything we can do to ease it for each other?”
Fenris straightens, and turns, and his eyes are soft. It’s not pity. It never was.
In three strides he is before her, his hands in her hair. She holds her breath. He rests his brow against hers. Her tears break past her defenses. She tastes them when he kisses her.
They are tender with each other, Fenris for the sake of her injuries, and Hawke out of awe at this second chance. As much as she would like to have him right there in the tub, that will have to wait for another day. He helps her out of her tunic as they walk, her breastband, her trousers, her braies. There is a tray on the side table with breakfast; they will get to it eventually.
“Stay down,” Fenris advises when they reach the bed.
That’s wise. She wouldn’t want to tear something. But she stays standing a moment longer. “Dicere Tevene.”
Fenris repeats, “Et manere.” His voice is neither a growl nor a snarl, but it still sends something bright curling low in Hawke’s belly.
Smiling, she gets on her back.
She watches him undress, and licks her lips when he’s bare at the foot of the bed. Before, she didn’t have a chance to tell him how beautiful he was. In the time since, she wondered if she should have. Not because it could have changed what happened, but because he may never have heard it, or at least never heard it from someone who actually loved him. Would he take offense? Would it dredge up some horrifying memory?
She has to say it. She’ll say it forever, if he lets her. “You’re beautiful, Fenris.”
He lifts his gaze to her face. She tries to put the truth of it in her eyes and hopes, Maker does she hope, that it doesn’t look like pity.
Fenris kneels over her on the bed, and when Hawke reaches for him he takes hold of her wrists, and oh, yes . He kisses her mouth, her breasts, her newest scar. At that Hawke shivers. He drags his tongue across the spot on her hip where the shield’s edge left a bruise. “Please,” she whispers.
He releases her wrists and pushes her thighs apart. “Please,” Hawke says again. She touches his hair, brilliant in the sunlight. He lowers his head. Hawke lets out a breath.
He goes slowly, and tenderly, and constantly, and Hawke’s climax builds, gradual as the dawn, until it overwhelms her.
When Fenris sits up to regard her, Hawke pants, “Please.”
His weight and warmth on top of her is sweet, the anticipation sweeter. When she tries to arch against him, he shoves her hips down. She raises her head just enough to reach his ear. “Please, Fenris.”
He studies her face as he presses into her, slow, the effort of control in his eyes. A deep ache, one she has lived with so long she barely noticed it anymore, eases. It must show, because he says, “Dolor tuus?”
“Gone,” she tells him. “And yours?"
Fenris moves his hips, presses his mouth to the side of her neck. “Si vales valeo.”
“I am,” she says. He moves, and she is well. He breathes against her skin, and she is well. He goes taut, his eyes distant, and she is well. He lays down beside her, and smiles, and she is well. “I am.”
She is. They are.