So I have this headcanon that part of the reason why Hawke is apparently so wilfully blind about the whole Justice/Vengeance/Anders Is Actually Kind Of A Nutter thing is partly because it would be pretty hard to recognise it for what it is, despite lots of clues leading up to it all. Of course, perhaps a mage Hawke would be better at understanding what's going on.

But a rogue Hawke? Well, even as the child of a mage... maybe that isn't so obvious. And sometimes we don't always like to assume the worst of someone we love. And Anders is very good at charming his way out of confrontation. It would be way too easy to overlook things until they're too late.

So here's a little something about that. I hope you enjoy it.

"—clumsy bastard!"

Instinct pulls me out of sleep, out of the bed and halfway to the door, daggers in hand, before the rational part of my mind kicks in. Max offers a reassuring whuf from his spot by the fireplace. I'm not camped in some hole in the wilderness somewhere, but at home in my own bedroom. The cursing and clattering that woke me doesn't come from some Kirkwall hood, but my lover.

I relax my grip on my daggers; you know what they say about old habits, and these ones stay tucked under the foot of my bed at all times, even now. Take a breath. Take another. It's fine.

It is, however, some obscenely dark hour well before dawn; what in the Maker's name is he doing out there? I'm wide awake now. I put the blades back beside the chest and reach instead for the soft red cloak draped over its lid, pulling it around me for warmth. Wisps of moonlight from the tall, thin windows are just enough to light my way out the bedroom door, down the stairs, to the source of the noise; there, in a little pool of candlelight is Anders, dabbing ink from the writing desk with a crumpled bit of paper.

"Anders?"

He starts, his expression surprised, then apologetic. "Oh, love. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to wake you." He presses the paper against a bead of thick black ink racing towards the edge of the desk, threatening to splatter to the floor. "Or make such a mess of your desk. I think I've managed to spill the whole bottle."

"It's alright." Bodahn keeps some rags in a drawer in the sideboard; I cross the room to grab a handful, giving one to Anders for his hands while I spread the rest over the desk. It's not so bad — the desk, that is, already stained nearly black from years of use—but whatever it was he was writing is ruined, as is the roughspun undershirt he wears.

I pick up a spilled sheet of paper covered with his handwriting, all densely-packed curls and strokes. Around the ink stains I can make out some of the phrases—

… the inherent hypocrisy of presuming any free mage has turned to blood magic while the Chantry's phylacteries lie waiting for …

… but the Chant of Light asks: who among you may call yourself just when you watch your brothers toil under the yoke of the …

I look at another sheet, this one adorned by scratched-out mistakes:

… a burden too great for child apprentices, some of whom were taken so young that they have no memory of a family, and are less than …

"What's this?"

It is furious, incandescent. There's pages and pages of this, spilled across the desk and the floor, twenty, maybe twenty-five sheets, all covered in tiny writing. How long has he been down here, writing this? I stoop to pick more of them up, and he watches me with a slightly hurt expression, arms tense across his chest, like he's waiting for a reprimand.

I might be more inclined to do it if this were a more reasonable hour, but honestly, I don't even think I could be bothered with the drama even if I were more awake.

"Dare I ask?" I say, instead.

"Varric says that whole tortured sexy writer thing is all the rage."

"What is it?"

"It's just… a thing I've been working on."

I pick up another page, this one marred by a fat black spider of ink:

… the cold and merciless templars whose thousand-yard stares reveal the abuses that they too have suffered, the lyrium's hold on …

"I suspect you'll find that the best-sellers have a whole lot more sex and leather."

"Right. I thought it was missing a certain something." He tosses the rag onto the desk. His sandy blond hair is loose from its tie, and skims messily across his cheekbones and down to his jawline. I notice then just how dark his eyes look; he's always been good at feigning levity, but he's never been able to hide his tiredness. "I'm sorry. I truly am. It's … it's as if it's stuck in my head. Like one of those annoying bloody tavern bawdy-songs with fifty verses. So I thought, you know … I thought maybe if I wrote it down, he'd let me sleep."

He. I know who he means, when Anders says it that way.

I don't even understand how it works, not really. Anders explained it to me once, how they are two same-but-different person in one... something or other. I have even seen him, more than once, but it still doesn't seem real. Days can pass, weeks sometimes, where he doesn't mention it.

And then, one day there'll be, well, something—a word or an expression that's not quite right, just something small like that. That's all it takes for me to start trying to make sense of things, to work out what it really is that lives in him, with him.

But I look at him now, my disheveled, scattered lover, then at the pages full of fury bunched in my hand, and it's so hard to remember what that's like—so hard to reconcile the two.

"Aren't you cold?" Anders asks. And then he smiles that smile of his, and he wraps his arms around my waist. He smells like paper and fresh ink, and vaguely like the herbs and other things he uses in his little clinic, and underneath it all there's something else that is indescribably just him. "I'm sorry, love," he says.

I stretch up on my toes to kiss him lightly. "If I find your inky fingerprints all over this cloak, there'll be trouble," I warn him.

"What if I were to mark your skin, instead?" he murmurs, and he slips his hands underneath the light woollen fabric to span the small of my back, to pull me more firmly against him. His skin is so warm; I swear I can make out each fingertip one by one. He returns my kiss, making a trail with his lips from the corner of my mouth to the side of my neck. We are well-practiced with each other by now.

I tangle a hand in his hair. "Are you trying to make me forget about this?" I ask.

"Maybe I'm trying to make myself forget about this," he says, his words brushing the skin on my throat, his fingers trailing lines down my spine. I feel myself begin to unravel in his hands.

"Is it working?"

"Oh, I think so."

I'm suddenly keenly aware of how little I am wearing. Carefully, I unwind myself from his embrace. "Why don't you come back upstairs?"

"Wait." Anders gathers up the rags and his sheets of spoiled paper, and for a minute I wonder whether his words will catch his eye and pull him back into his mood. But he bunches them together in a loose ball in his hands, and tosses them all on top of the last glowing coals in the fireplace; one curls up straight away. "There," he says, softly, and he blows out what's left of the stubby little candle on the writing desk.

And so I lead him upstairs, my hand in his, and the few bright seconds from the burning paper in the fireplace are enough to light our way as far as the bedroom door.

#

In the morning I wake, alone, the insistent sound of birds in my ears and the bedlinen tangled in my legs. It's well past sunrise. How have I slept so late? Why do I feel so poorly rested?

Then I remember.

And then there's the smell of baking bread, and I'm suddenly ravenous.

My red cloak is folded neatly back on the trunk, and for a moment I'm not even sure if I remembered it right, but there's a little note balanced on top suggests otherwise:

I've always liked you in red.

The smile stays with me just about all the way to the kitchen and the source of that wonderful smell. I find Bodahn there, kneading dough for dark rye bread, a clutch of freshly baked rolls already beside him, and Sandal sitting wide-eyed and quiet on a stool at the end of the kitchen bench.

"Good morning, messere," Bodahn sing-songs.

"I'm lucky there's anything left of the morning at all."

"Well, you're not too late for some fresh bread," Bodahn says, nodding at the rolls. "Why don't you try one?"

"Bacon," Sandal exclaims.

Bodahn begins to break the dough into pieces, rolling them into long strips to braid into a knotted loaf. "Yes, and we've a very good side of bacon at the moment."

"Perhaps I might trouble you for a couple of rolls."

"By all means, messere. But I hope you're happy to help yourself," he says, this last part delivered with a nod to his floured hands.

"You know I always am." I hate being waited on in my own home, in fact. I wonder if Bodahn gets tired of me getting underfoot in the kitchen. I grab a couple of the warm rolls, a knife, and a scoop of butter from the tray near Sandal and pull the bread apart, smearing the butter into the holes in the middle. The bread is soft, still hot, and heavy with several different kinds of seeds.

"Where's Mother?" I ask, realising too late that I'm talking rudely around a mouthful of the dense bread.

"Oh, she left quite early. Off to the markets, I believe." He flips the pieces of dough over and over with a practiced hand. "And Anders, he went straight out the door, messere. He does know he's welcome to stay for breakfast, doesn't he?"

"I'm sure he has something or other to do at his clinic," I tell him, though I can't help thinking about what he was talking about last night, the things he'd written on that parchment, how utterly ragged he'd seemed.

What is he doing? Something's up, and I wish he'd tell me.

Sandal looks at me with his big, pale eyes, as distant and familiar as full moons. "Anders is funny," he says.

I smile. "He is, isn't he."

"Inside him a spirit is burning."

"What?"

"He burns inside. You've seen him." Sandal blinks, his head tilted just-so. "One day he will be all burned up, and then what?"

Bodahn stops what he's doing, his head snapping around. "What did you just say, boy?"

Sandal gazes back, his face blank, and then breaks into a big, wide grin, the last few sentences clearly forgotten. "Anders has feathers," he says, and then he giggles.

I look at Bodahn, who furrows his brow. "I don't rightly know what that was about, messere," he says.

"Me either," I tell him.

Inside him, a spirit is burning. What else could it be? But there's the strange thing: I've told no one about Justice. No one. I wouldn't even know how to explain it properly, the words to use. The only other person who's seen that happen is Varric and I know he wouldn't tell.

"Well. Some strange things do enter that boy's head," Bodahn says, and goes back to his loaves. I look again at Sandal, whose stare is back to its usual spot in mid-air.

Suddenly, I wish I'd stopped Anders from throwing those writings into the fire. Perhaps the boy's ramblings are just that. But now, I can't shake the feeling that something is happening, beginning.