A/N: So, this story just kind of... happened. I meant to work on some of my other stories, but this idea appeared instead. I hope you enjoy!
He lacks the patience for secrecy.
The fire in his veins does not allow stealth.
What remains of his heart will not permit understanding.
Fenris lets the rage overpower the grief as he storms up the elaborate stone staircase to the fortress, shoving reluctant but persistent Inquisition scouts and soldiers out of his way. Eventually, they relent, falling behind slowly until they stop following at all. Whispers trail his footsteps up to the door.
It nearly cracks in half with the force of his entry.
Several dozen heads whip around to stare, wide-eyed, as the mountain breeze collects his fury and sweeps it through the hall. None of them are who he is looking for. Pathetic nobles and scouts, all too startled to be the one. One familiar face he recognizes, less startled and just as wracked as he feels, meets his gaze.
But he is not here to talk to Varric.
He lets his eyes rake over the assembled people, searching. A few wither under his stare, some blink and look away. The gestures are familiar; running so long had caused more than his fair share of wary glances. Especially when the lyrium in his skin is a living, reckless thing, accompanying the rage to spit and crackle just beneath the surface. He can see the eerie shards of light winking along the walls.
Silence reigns as he continues searching, back and forth, back and forth, for the one. The one who left her to die, the one who killed her. Maybe not with her own two hands, but the blood is still there. She is still to blame.
A pair of eyes near the back of the room catch his gaze and hold it. They are eyes of steel and war, grey like the blades themselves. Swirling tattoos cover her face, rimming those dagger-sharp eyes. The tips of her ears peek through the strands of pristine platinum hair done up in a bun at the nape of her neck, and her angular features are set in a mask he had seen Danarius wear countless times when dealing with members of the Magisterium. One of cool indifference that makes his blood boil hotter.
He has found her.
Fenris expected her killer to be threatening. Any who had led to her death should shake the world with their presence. But the Inquisitor doesn't. She is an elf. A Dalish elf. She tips her head at him and blinks, once. Her mask doesn't move an inch. Small, then, but smart. And intelligence adds danger.
One thing he had already learned not to underestimate.
She moves, coming to stand on the dais overlooking the hall, near the throne. Her steps are light, entirely silent on the stones. Out of the corner of his eye, Fenris sees Varric suck in a breath, and it looks like a warning. But his rage and his grief are too powerful to let him turn away. He draws the greatsword from his back, the scraping sound as it leaves its sheath resonating with his loss.
He lets the tip connect with the stone floor in a ringing collision that sends the assembled scrambling for the door. The Inquisitor doesn't move save to cross her arms and blink. Again. Each word that he lets slide into the silence shakes the fortress.
"What gives you the right?"
Her face remains serene. Disinterested. Not even a hint of what she's thinking revealed in her eyes. He has met only one other this difficult to read, and she buried her emotions behind jokes, not silence. Silence has always unsettled him.
She doesn't break his gaze when she replies, and her voice rings with the authority of a thousand kings. "The right?"
Rage causes the lyrium to flare, turning the room a brilliant shade of blue. The light highlights the sharp angles of her face, warping her into something sinister. He taps the blade against the stone again. "The right to…" his voice fails him for a moment, and the Inquisitor's lip twitches in his moment of weakness. He narrows his eyes. "…kill her. To decide whether she lived or died."
Fenhedis. Voicing what had happened drags everything into crystal clear focus. She is gone. …Dead. Left behind, to never return. He is never going to see her again. Hear her again. Fenris grits his teeth together to prevent the release of the pain.
"Fenris. Don't." Varric's voice is equally strained. He's the only one besides himself and the Inquisitor left in the room. The two words bounce off the emptiness and hover in the space between them.
Don't? Is he insane? Doesn't he understand? The time for words is long gone. Whatever chance he had of changing his mind vanished when his steel scraped his intentions into the chamber. The Inquisitor has to know.
"It's too late," he spits through gritted teeth, gripping the hilt in both hands. "She never answered my question."
The smile that spreads across the Inquisitor's face is an all-too-familiar thing. One belonging to someone who held power and knew far too well how to wield it. It sparkles with promises kept and shattered, broken and held. It cries with the fall of hundreds. "I asked her…" the Inquisitor says, too softly, too gently. She twirls behind the throne and retrieves a staff, spinning the weapon through her fingers. The sight of it sends ice through his veins. A mage. He should have known.
"…And she listened."
His skin itches as she draws on the Fade, bending and summoning it to her will. The lyrium sparks in response, acknowledging the presence of magic. But it does nothing besides fuel his fury. That she could have such contempt for what she has done… such calm…
He enters a corner of himself long buried, covered by genuine smiles and laughter and lyrium-blue eyes. It fills him, crumpling the grief and replacing it with who he once was. Fenris dashes sideways, feeling the ends of his hair rise as she strikes the space he had been standing with a white-hot bolt of lightning.
Varric shouts a faintly strangled, "No!" from the corner of the room, but he doesn't interfere. The Inquisitor glances at him for just a moment, and Fenris seizes her distraction to advance closer. But she isn't distracted, not really. He realizes this almost too late to dodge the fireball, perfectly small and terribly precise, that flies at him as her steel gaze returns to his.
As he rolls to safety, the fireball collides with the wall of the fortress, creating a perfect scorched circle in the stones. His knuckles turn white around the hilt of his sword. Varric isn't wrong; he shouldn't be attacking her. But he is lost. She killed the only constant thing in his life.
Deftly, swiftly, he charges at her, a ghost of rage, prepared for any attacks she may launch. But once he is close enough to reach her, close enough to wound her, the world stops. A sound like an explosion rocks the room, a massive weight resting itself on his chest and flattening him to the stones. His limbs feel heavy and light, full and drained. His head spins. Magic… he has never felt magic like this before. The lyrium burns, like someone has set it ablaze.
Fenris has lost. He strains under the spell still crushing him, refusing to fade entirely. Not quite yet. There are still things he has to do, explanations… answers… but the world is on fire. Raw agony fills every fiber, as at the same time he feels nothing at all. Such… a waste…
Her face floats in his vision, lips pulled up in a smile. She is so beautiful… but gone. Stolen. Her name aches as he whispers it to the stone floor, caught by the darkness and the pain.
The weight continues crushing him, shattering and bright. Draining, taking, pulling him down and apart, up and away. This magic…
"Arana! You're killing him!" He cannot tell through the haze who the voice belongs to, but a heavy pair of footsteps sounds near his head, accompanied by a rustle of fabric and a soft inhale. The weight suddenly vanishes, and the echo of wood against stone rings through him.
Her words are simple, diligent. As though she didn't nearly kill him on the floor of the main hall.
"Get him out of my sight."
He must be dreaming.
Fenris doesn't remember falling asleep, but he has to be. Though the bars of the jail cell they tossed him in are cold beneath his fingers, he must be dreaming. Because Hawke… Hawke is gone.
And she can't be real, sitting not three feet away.
Her skin is scratched, bleeding brightly in several places. But she doesn't move to wipe it away, or even acknowledge it exists. Red also stains the area around her midsection, darker and heavier. She draws her knees up against her chest and wraps her arms around them, like a child. She looks so hopelessly small and exhausted. Smoke clouds her lyrium-blue eyes.
The urge to touch her, comfort her, flares through him, but his head is still spinning, and the thought of confirming her false sends steel into the remnants of his heart. So he sits, forces the grief down and away, and memorizes the details of her. How much he had already forgotten hurts.
A raised scar on her arm, from the Tal-Vashoth who got too close. The smattering of freckles on her nose, only a few of them. Flecks of jade hidden behind the blue in her usually bright gaze. And the scar over her heart, from the strike that should have killed her all those years ago. He can see the edge of it peeking from beneath the fur of her robes. The other time he failed to protect her.
She still has not spoken, which is wrong for her. Words normally are a waterfall from her lips. Fenris grips the metal bars tighter, seals his eyes, anchoring himself in reality. Or whatever's left of it. She's not real, she's not real, she's not—
"Fenris…"
Fasta vass. Her voice. Her voice is enough to drag his attention back to her. She's staring at him, a sadness in her gaze as deep as the sea along the Wounded Coast. "…I'm sorry. So sorry. I love you, and I don't expect you to forgive me, but I'm sorry."
The words worm themselves all the way down into his bones and sit there, laced around each one tighter than the lyrium in his blood. Her lips curl in the hints of a smile, but it is shattered and sad and lost. He has never seen her so broken before, not even after Leandra died.
He reaches for her on instinct, longing to press her close and fight away the world, but when he blinks, she is gone. The ghost of her eyes hovers for a moment, then vanishes, too. His fingers close around empty air, and fire washes through him, hot and bright. Fenris snarls under his breath. Magic. Just a trick of the Fade, of the Inquisitor's spell, preying on the corners of his soul.
But there is nothing in the cell he can release his anger on, so he shoves it down, deep and locked and buried. The pain he frees in the form of a sigh that rattles the stones with its force, resting his head against the wall. Words chase it into the silence, heard only by the walls and covered by the barely audible drip of water.
"I am yours, Hawke. Always."
A heavy boot on the stairs follows the words, causing every fiber of him to snap into awareness. Heightened and alert. But he remains on the floor, his fingers laced together, wrists on his knees. His body still feels heavy, drained, and he will not display it by attempting to stand.
He relaxes only slightly when he realizes who the short, quick footsteps belong to. It doesn't even require turning his head.
"Fenris… shit. I warned you," Varric sighs, the words little daggers of pain. They bounce harmlessly off Fenris' armor, falling to the cracked stone floor between them. He doesn't reply, running a thumb the length of the scarf around his wrist. Hawke's scarf; all he has left.
Varric rests a hand on the bars of the cell, drumming his fingers in a severely agitated melody. Listening closely, Fenris recognizes the tune the bard in the Hanged Man favored. Drinks and Wicked Grace within its walls seem like a lifetime ago, a string of events that happened to a different elf.
That happiness belonged to one who doesn't exist anymore.
Without Hawke, he had returned to recklessness. He had returned to running. And Varric has returned to looking at him like he's volatile.
Fenris grits his teeth and hooks a finger beneath the scarf, anchoring himself to something real. "I don't want pity."
"Did I say I came down here to pity you?" The rattling of the song stops, leaving behind a lingering silence, heavy with their shared loss. Varric kicks the edge of the broken stone with a toe, hissing a curse between his teeth. "Concern is an entirely different thing."
Concern. Because he had willingly attacked the Inquisitor, the most powerful woman in Thedas. She, clearly, could easily have killed him, and he hadn't even given it a second thought. For Hawke… someone had to pay. Somehow. Whatever the cost to him.
He lets his voice remain harsh when he replies. "I don't want concern either."
"Someone has to be. Considering—"
"Do not complete that sentence." Fenris stands, ignoring the wash of dizziness; rage and pain and shock flicker blue beneath his skin. Why would Varric, of all possible visitors, dare? It doesn't need to be voiced. Never again. It will forever crack to hear it spoken aloud, spindles and daggers in his mind and his heart.
The dwarf's lips don't stop moving, and his eyes spark, gold like bottled lightning. "…Considering you were nearly killed earlier," Varric spits, the words quiet in the face of Fenris' anger. The silence that follows settles on him as heavily as Hawke's apology, her hollow eyes a sharp contrast to the ones in front of him now.
Fenris deflates. The lyrium retreats as though it may hurt him to maintain it, extinguishing like a snuffed candle. Beaten by words. He should have known Varric wouldn't be so flippant. So petty, so cruel. He bites off the end of his retort and swallows it, taking the anger with it back to that corner. Loss flows a churning course through his veins to new and uncharted places that ache.
He keeps his lips sealed and loops his fingers through the scarf again. His thoughts begin a war between apology and silence, and the quiet emerges victorious.
Varric sighs, the fight fleeing into the past. "You're not the only one who lost someone, Broody." He runs a hand through his hair and lets it hover over his face while he breathes, just for a moment, hidden behind its grasp. When it falls, he falls with it, settling on a crumbling stone near the cell door and craning his neck to hold Fenris' stare. "Just… once, it shouldn't have been her who had to pay for others' mistakes."
Gauntlets nearly tear through Hawke's scarf at the sentence. She had paid far too often. Kirkwall had piled a debt that cost her everything; her family, her safety… and she'd stored all her grief and all her loss behind a smile and a warm hand in his. The realization is like a dagger to the stomach. The world had finally requested more than she had to give. Fenris slams a hand on the bars of the cell, unsteady for the first time in recent memory. The rattle of metal on metal matches the pounding in his head.
"No. It shouldn't have," he whispers, closing his eyes to block out the world. "The Inquisitor had to understand." She had to understand that there were consequences, that her power did not protect her entirely. He wanted her to be afraid. Fear kept the world sane.
The hollow note of Varric's boot against the stones draws Fenris' eyes back to him. "Attacking her was not the answer. She could have killed you with a twitch of her fingers. She nearly did." A drop of panic bleeds into the sentence, coloring it brighter. Fenris blinks. He had not given a moment of consideration for his own safety. What was the point, without Hawke? He is alone.
He opens his mouth to reply, but Varric moves, standing inches from Fenris, now. The lightning in his eyes crackles to life again, sparking like the lyrium. "Damnit, Broody. Hawke wouldn't have wanted you to die."
Words elude him, out of reach like distant birds. He stares at Varric, gripping the bars now to prevent the cracks spreading through his skin from breaking entirely. He'd let his rage cloud his judgment, as she'd made him promise not to.
"You… have no sense of self-preservation. You could use one. …Please."
Her request assaults him, the wobble in her voice clear as a bell. A moment, so long ago, where she had dropped her mask and the pain had written stories over the smile lines in her face. She'd buried herself in his arms, safe, protected… and then had shattered.
Hawke…
Varric's finger on the bar snaps him back to the confines of his cell and the present. Hawke is still gone. "I talked to her. She's letting you go if you stay away."
"…Letting me go." He repeats the words, not entirely processing them. Varric smirks, the corner of his lip lifting.
"Apparently I'm incredibly persuasive," he quips, clearly trying to lift the mood just slightly. The light-heartedness trips and falls flat, slamming into the stones. Varric's smile disappears. "Look. She's… difficult, but she's not entirely unreasonable. If you leave now, she won't pursue you. Last I checked, you're a free man. Don't waste it here."
Free, because of Hawke. Safe, because of Hawke. Alive, because of Hawke. Real… because of Hawke. She had been his world… but Varric is right. Even without her, he is still real, still alive, still safe.
Still free.
Reluctantly, he straightens, removing his hands to fold across his chest and meeting Varric's gaze with what determination he can muster. This mindless rage is not the way to best remember her. Anger is no longer the only thing he feels.
Varric grins, a small one, and produces a ring of keys from inside his coat. The first one fits easily into the lock, and he waves Fenris into the open room. "Glad you're still there, Broody." He nods in the direction of the stairs. "I'll see you when all this is over."
Fenris nods before arching an eyebrow. "My sword?" The blade is nowhere in sight. His fingers are empty without it, the weight on his back an echo. Varric jerks a thumb toward the staircase.
"She has it."
A step closer reveals a familiar outline in the doorway, his sword pressed into a crack between the stones, the hilt in her hands. The Inquisitor meets his glare with her mask still perfectly intact, but no hint of a fight in her eyes. She lifts the heavy blade easily and extends it to him, the hilt hanging in the air between them.
Fenris watches her, fire in his veins threatening to spark at the sight of her. She's too calm, too poised to be simply a Dalish elf. He lets his raised eyebrow rest. War changes everyone.
So he takes the sword and leaves it sheathed.
The fire in him retreats, hissing under a layer of calm, but contained all the same. She is still Hawke's killer. He will never forgive her. Yet he cannot deny what Varric said.
Hawke wouldn't want him to die. Not yet.
And she wouldn't want him caged, either.
Silence rests itself over the prison like a heavy blanket, thick with tension and loss. Fenris inclines his head to Arana as he skirts around her, not a gesture of compliance but of acknowledgment. He made a vow to bow to no one.
"Inquisitor."
Those steel eyes blink, once, then shift rapidly over the details of his face. Something washes through them, fast as a raging river, and then is swept away. He begins climbing the stairs, leaving her behind with the knowledge of what she did. He hopes she never forgets.
The way she says his name, half dismissal, half hollow, implies she won't.
"Fenris."