Hi! :) I'll be posting some one-shots here while I keep working on Chapter 2 of In the Clouds. Hope you enjoy!
After a week of travel up the mountains, they were finally here. Crossing the drawbridge, entering the keep, and hearing greetings and questions but not registering any of it.
The air was… warm, here at Skyhold. As if it were on the cusp of summer. The night sky above was scattered with bright stars. Fenris saw himself reading at a desk by an open window - how could a window be open in the middle of Harvestmere? How could he be here so suddenly… where was…
He had to stay awake. Marcus was still wrapped in his cloak. Fenris slowly unfurled it, trying not to jostle his sleeping child. After some thought, he gently peeled off Marcus' hat and mittens and stowed them in the pocket of his padded jacket. When Marcus stirred in his arms and mumbled a complaint, Fenris patted his back to soothe him.
Scout Harding had gone to stable the pack horses; Blackwall had gone… somewhere.
Varric. Varric would know where she was…
Fenris was becoming aware of how every muscle and bone in his body cried out for rest. He wanted to sit.
So he did. There was a wide staircase directly in front of him, across the grass and around the people who were heading toward the music and voices and light spilling from an open doorway. Fenris briefly thought of food. He was not hungry, the dried provisions had been more than enough for all of them, but the tavern had made him think of tomorrow, when he would be well-rested and sitting down to a hot meal shared with-
Fenris tipped his head back and closed his eyes.
Twenty-three days had passed since she left.
They were so close now - she might be just beyond that doorway, buying a round at the bar or tuning her lute - and yet his legs would not move.
He listened to a song thrush warble in a tree nearby, and counted how often it repeated the same trills and chirps. When he opened his eyes again, he watched soft clouds pass across a softer moon. Waning, a pale gold. Sliced in half like cheese…
"I could go and get us some."
What?
"There's a pretty decent variety here. We could have a picnic under the moon."
Fenris realized, first, that he had been thinking aloud, and second, that Hawke was standing in front of him with an uncontrollable grin spreading across her face. He felt one spreading across his own in a pulse of sheer joy.
She looked much the same as before, save for a few healed-over scratches on her forearms. Her shirt was loose, sleeves rolled up, same dark red trousers, same worn brown boots, but her eyes… He caught a flicker of something beneath the smile. Later; he would ask about it later, what was stirring that melancholy she so often tried to hide, even from him. The answers were all too clear, but he did not want them intruding on this, not now.
Hawke knelt down and brushed away the curls plastered to Marcus' forehead so that she could plant a kiss there. Then she sat down beside them, close enough that her and Fenris' thighs touched, and laced her fingers through his.
"I dropped a really good hand of cards just now," she whispered, and kissed the long edge of his ear. When they had more privacy, thought Fenris, he would kiss her the way he had imagined he would. More privacy, and a chance to clean up. He stank of wood smoke and stale clothes. She clearly didn't care, but he did.
"I need a bath," he said, with a wry glance at Hawke.
"Mm, not a bad idea." (Perhaps she did care.)
He held her gaze for as long as he could manage. "I have missed you."
"Same here, love. I couldn't stand it."
As he finally drifted off to sleep that night, sweltering beneath layers of clean blankets and the familiar weight of Hawke's embrace and Marcus' restless thrashing, the breeze from the open window drifting across his face, Fenris listened to the music that floated out of the tavern and mingled with the songs of the night birds in the garden.
In the months that followed, he would think of that moment, and wonder if he would ever again know such peace.
Note: this was written for a prompt on C/P Sells Seashells by the Seashore (Wordsworth poem for a night in June).