Summary: Hawke stinks. Anders is sick of it. It goes about as well as expected.
Hawke legitimately cannot remember the last time she took a hot bath.
The last time was definitely before the Blight, and possibly long before then; the Hawkes were not well off, and Mother was always wary about overusing Beth's magic, even though Hawke made many a convincing argument based on the Chant of Light. Magic serving man, and all. Mother was not impressed. "Don't try to talk your way around me, young lady; it may work on the merchants, but it won't on me!"
So she contented herself with clandestine dips in the creek that ran through Lothering (when she last saw it it was seething with blood) and then, during those first dusty months in Kirkwall, she used the hipbath in their room after Mother and Bethany, because being clean made them smile, and sometimes that was all that kept Hawke going.
(Also because she gets the water all bloody, and no-one wants to bathe in bloody water.)
Eventually, though, she cops onto the Kirkwaller way of things, and bathes in the sea with harsh lye soap. It makes her smell like one of them, of salt and potash; Varric says you wouldn't be able to tell that she's Fereldan, but for the mabari trotting at her heels. It isn't great for her skin, though, or her hair, but they're not in a much of a state anyway; the unforgiving sun of the Free Marches has darkened her until she is almost as swarthy as her dark-eyed mother and sister, and most days she gives up her hair as a bad job and ties it back with copious amounts of string and forgets about it until Beth almost sets it ablaze with a stray fireball.
Which is why she freezes when confronted with a steaming bath in the Darktown clinic, conveniently vacated. Anders is staring at her impatiently, nose scrunched up like he's smelled something bad. Probably her. She's pretty sure that there's a piece of intestine snarled in her ponytail, and the gigantic infected slash in her thigh leaking pus probably doesn't help matters.
"Look, Anders, if you wanted to see me naked, you could have just asked."
He snorts. "No, thank you. Do you mind getting in? You smell like cat piss. Believe me, I know."
"C'mon, you know I'm a Fereldan refugee, and we all stink. You, for example." She pantomimes sniffing him. "You smell like elfroot and regret."
He actually does laugh at that, and Hawke grins in triumph, because Anders has lines around his mouth and eyes that tell her he must have smiled a lot, once.
But the levity vanishes. "What are you? A cat? Get into the water."
She gives in, because Anders doesn't have a whole lot of patience, and Justice even less. She strips without ceremony, pieces of padding and leather falling to the packed earthen floor, and stares at her almost-naked body dispassionately; she's always envied Beth's abundant curves and flawless skin. Hawke is weatherworn, patches of darkening brown and sunburnt red alternating along her limbs, not to mention the ubiquitous freckles, and could be charitably described as stocky. Compared to her sister with her plush lips and high cheekbones, Hawke looks like a child who hasn't yet lost their puppy fat.
She untangles the twine from her hair with difficulty, cursing and stamping, and her hair remains frozen in shape when it is gone; she pulls her fingers through it and finds a clump of dried viscera, which she gives to Anders with a gracious smile when he stomps over with a bowl of something oddly fragrant.
"Lovely," he mutters, shoving it into a pocket. "Show me your leg."
She hops up on a table and presents him with her diseased thigh. The laceration is deep, almost to the bone and surrounded by dirty streaks of purple and green. Poisoned, and apparently it was lucky that she dived in front of that blade; if it had hit Fenris like it was supposed to, the magebane would have reacted badly with the lyrium coursing through him and killed him on the spot.
Anders prods at it, ignoring her wince of pain. "Can't heal this," he mutters. "Risk sealing in the poison. Only thing for it."
He grabs her by the scruff of her neck like some sort of stray cat and dumps her unceremoniously into the bath, with surprising strength for a weedy mage. Another of Justice's side-effects, she reckons, along with glowy eyes and crumbling sanity. She surfaces with a splutter and a few choice expletives, glancing down at her soaked, translucent smalls with a flush. Anders doesn't seem to notice or care, plonking himself down beside the bath and plunging his hands into the water. "What are you-" she begins, but then his hands begin to glow.
Healing magic is strange; it arcs through your body like electricity, rattling off all your aches and pains until you feel as if you are about to shatter, but when the pain reaches a certain threshold it disappears, leaving you weak-limbed and light-headed. It is never a pleasant experience.
This is different. As the light seeps from Anders' hands into the water, a feeling of warmth spreads through Hawke. Good warmth, like a ray of sun on the back of your neck, or a hot mug of tea during a cold night.
She lets out a hiss as the magic worms its way into her skin, settling into her muscles. Slowly, the weariness recedes; she feels light, and wonders how on earth she managed with all that snarled up in her back. Her puzzle-piece necklace floats up to the top of the bath, polished white winking through the slightly discoloured water; the water supply in Darktown is questionable at best, but Anders, refusing to treat ill people with dirty water, had installed some strange sort of filter to purify it.
Said mage grumbles at her. "You could have told me about your wrist."
She raises it, and examines it with surprise; she forgot about the stone shard embedded there, hidden as it usually was by her gauntlets. Anders takes her hand and yanks it out without ceremony, ignoring her wince as her hand drops back into the water, blood curling out of the wound.
"Glitterdust," he mutters. "Idiotic. That's why you were getting sick, not the damned ale." With a dismissive swish of his hand, the wound cleans itself and closes. "What else are you keeping from me?"
Hawke shrugs, and slides further down into the water with a sigh of satisfaction, her knobbly knees poking out. She feels both refreshed and immeasurably sleepy; the dingy little clinic swims, and she smells valerian. Sneaky mage probably put it into the bathwater.
But as she relaxes, Anders wilts. "What's wrong?" she manages, her tongue oddly heavy.
"Creation magic, it…" he hesitates. "We don't destroy the pain, we just… we take it away. Is your little finger broken?"
"Fractured, I think. " She wiggles it experimentally, and just as she gasps, he does too. "You… you feel everything?" Images rush through her head; Isabela's hamstrings slashed, Fenris on the wrong end of a greatsword, an arrow through Merrill's delicate palm…
Anders had fixed them all. Did he truly feel all that pain himself?
"Yes." He trembles as the magic reaches the laceration on her thigh and begins to burrow in. The light stutters and stops, and for a second the pain intensifies, but Anders quickly regains his control and settles.
"How… how do you stand it?"
"It's someone else's pain. It… makes it easier to bear." He meets her eyes, dark with a strange sort of sorrow. "You have an awful lot of it. Why didn't you tell me?"
"Didn't want you to worry." She lets out a feeble laugh.
"Wouldn't have stopped me." He looks so horribly sad; she reaches out a hand to him, and gives him a clumsy pat, soaking his arm.
"It's fine! I'm fine, I always am. No need to worry. I don't need another mother. Maker knows the one I have gives me enough trouble as it is."
Anders gazes at her for a few long moments, and then sighs, shaking his head. "You are the strangest woman I have ever met."
"No, I'm not." Noticing his confusion, she adds; "Merrill, remember? Cute squirrelly socially awkward maleficar? Or did I hallucinate her?"
"No, Merrill… exists." Unfortunately, she can see him adding under his breath.
"Good. She borrowed my copy of The Bastard and the Wolf, and I want it back." The words are slurred and sluggish, sliding reluctantly off her tongue.
"Go to sleep, Hawke. It'll make my job easier."
"Anything to make life easy," she mumbles, and soon the clinic vanishes, replaced by the comforting unease of the Fade.
When Hawke awakens, the bath is lukewarm and Anders is gone; she pulls her fingers through her hair to find it washed and free of grease. She glances down at her thigh to see nothing but a pinkish ridge, where the gash used to be; when she brushes her fingers over it, there is no pain. Reluctantly, she hauls herself out of the bath and locates her clothes in a spare cupboard, stuffed in behind some ragged bandages; she's taken to keeping spare sets of clothes and weapons in all their safe houses. In Merrill's little house they are in the privy, and she thinks they're in with the wine in the cellar of Fenris' mansion. Shedding her sodden underthings, she pulls on the clean garments and her fur-lined boots, which came all the way from Ferelden with her.
Just as she's decent, Isabela bursts into the clinic, Fenris in tow.
"You could have knocked." Hawke buckles her belt into place; the pirate sweeps up and undoes it again. She scowls at her, but Isabela's busy searching for the resident healer to notice.
"Doors are nothing but an impediment to one such as I. Anders, come on out! Hawke's not naked any more, if that's any incentive."
A muffled expletive comes from one of the back-rooms, and Anders emerges, her armour over his arm.
"Here." He holds her gear out, and Hawke snatches it to have a look. The metal positively gleams, and the leather is soft and supple. There's not even any blood stains on it, which is a pleasant surprise.
"Did you polish it? Didn't think mages got taught that." She tries to imagine Cullen instructing a recalcitrant Anders in the art of armour care, and fails miserably.
"The Warden-Commander made troublemakers polish every single piece of metal in the armoury," Anders explains as she begins to don her cuirass. "Once Nate and I both did it three times in one week. Oghren claimed he blinded some darkspawn with his plate. I said he probably knocked them out with his drink-breath, and the Warden-Commander made me polish it all again." He makes a face.
"I'm liking this Hero of Ferelden more and more," Fenris deadpans.
"She was a very flexible lady, as I recall. I'm rather jealous of our dear King Alistair…" Isabela pauses to think. "Then again, I wouldn't throw him out of bed either. His… talents would have been absolutely wasted on the Templars."
"Too much, Isabela," Hawke eventually manages, after all her armour has been buckled into place. Fenris' face is priceless.
Isabela only grins. "Any bathwater left for me?" She pads over to check, and makes a face. "Oh, my. Did that all come off you?" The water is indeed putrid, dirty brown with murky black spots.
"Your hair really is brown," Fenris says. "I thought it was just dirt. You do have less freckles, though."
Hawke draws a self-conscious hand across her face. "I smell nice. I don't think I like it."
"And that is the last favour I am ever doing for the lot of you," Anders grumbles as he flips her daggers over; she catches them deftly and slides them into their sheaths in a practised motion. Isabela whistles appreciatively.
"Come on, let's go. I have an appointment with Varric. He might wax lyrical if he sees me clean." Hawke strides out of the clinic, and the three of them follow, Anders bickering with Isabela about something involving electricity as Fenris watches in bemusement. She smiles, and walks on.