Title: THE LUCKY ONES
Rating: T
Warnings: Non-graphic description of rape, self- and victim-blaming language.
Summary: Hawke starts asking questions, and learns a few truths about Anders' past that he wasn't entirely prepared for.

Author's Notes: Sometimes stories just sort of... happen, not according to any actual plan. In all honesty I don't know who this fic is for - it's probably not what I would look for on a night of hurt/comforty indulgence, but it's not exactly sunshine and bunnies, either. It's an angry fic, about an angry person.

The thing about Anders was - he was terrible at Wicked Grace, but he kept trying to play it, all the same.

Over time, one friendly night of cards after another, Hawke had learned all of Anders' tells. It was about one parts card shark strategy and about three parts plain fascination, since during their long period of mutual obsession and pining Hawke had found his attention drifting to Anders anytime they were in a room together. It was part of getting to know Anders, getting to know his quirks and eccentricities, of learning to fight and work and flirt beside him.

And it had never been a problem before, until Hawke found those very same tells flashing up - like bright red beacons, clearly signaling the location of a trap ahead - in the very places he least expected or wanted to hear them.

"Did something happen to you in the Circle?" Sebastian had asked, sounding so concerned in his soft Starkhaven accent. "I understand there were problems… in Ferelden... "

"Are you saying a mage can only be unhappy in the Circle if demons were involved?" Anders had snorted sharply. "It's not about demons. It's not about being beaten or raped by a templar— that does happen, but I've been fortunate."

I've been fortunate, he'd said.

I've been fortunate, kept echoing in Hawke's head for hours afterwards.

And now they were home, cuddling up on one of Hawke's ridiculously oversized couches, basking in the last few ways of sunlight falling in from the western window. Anders had his arm over Hawke's shoulder, and Hawke was leaning up against his chest and tracing one hand absently over his stomach, and the words wouldn't let him go.

"Anders, love..." Hawke said, hesitantly breaking the silence.

"Mmm?" Anders replied. He sounded half-asleep, and Hawke hated to break him out of whatever contentment he'd found.

But he had to know. "What you said to Sebastian earlier today..." He trailed off. "Was that the truth?"

That woke Anders up immediately, his body going tense and alert under Hawke's. Hawke felt him swallow, felt him inhale and exhale and inhale again before he said, in a tolerably neutral tone, "What makes you think that it wasn't?"

"Because when you said it, you were holding your breath." Hawke flattened his hand out over Anders' solar plexus. "I've noticed before, you do that when you're…" Lying sounded too accusing, here, so Hawke changed midsentence. "When you're trying to bluff someone."

"Do I?"

Hawke took a deep breath. "Please. I have to know," he said, and added, "You can tell me anything, you know that, right? I'd never hurt you."

"...Why do you care?" Anders said after a long moment, and Hawke's stomach dropped; none of this was a clear and unambiguous no, and anything else was almost a yes. "Why does knowing whether it's true or not matter to you so much?"

"I don't know," Hawke said. It wasn't just morbid curiosity; just the thought of anything like that happening to Anders, in even the vaguest of imaginings, made his stomach churn with dread. But the not-knowing was even more terrifying. Why? Why did it matter so much, why was it so important to know? What difference did it make to him, to Hawke, that he had a say in the matter that meant more than Anders' choice to keep to himself?

"I don't want to force you to talk about anything you don't want to talk about," Hawke said at last. "But... I'm scared. What if I do something, or say something out of ignorance, that hurts you? Because you kind of have to admit that saying ignorant things that blow up in my face is kind of my specialty," he added in a lighter tone, going for a laugh.

"No." Anders didn't laugh; instead he sat up straight, looking Hawke right in the eye. "No. You've never said anything or done anything that hurt me. You couldn't."

Several moments passed as Hawke searched Anders' face, saw the clear determination there. "All right," he said slowly, and the two of them lay back down together. He tried to push past the irrational hurt that came with Anders not telling him, not trusting him; it wasn't Anders' obligation to say, nor Hawke's right to know. Anders had heard Hawke's fears and addressed them; that was enough.

They sat there for a long time in silence, as the light from the sunset lowered and slanted red; Hawke petting Anders' chest and stomach, and Anders running his fingers through Hawke's hair.

"So you know I escaped from the Circle seven times, right?" Anders said abruptly, breaking the silence.

Hawke blinked, jolted out of his unhappy thoughts. It took a moment to realign himself with the sudden shift in the conversation. "So I've heard," he said tentatively. "Most people don't even escape one time, let alone seven. That's a pretty impressive feat, I thought. "

"Well, less impressive to the Templars," Anders said with a wry twist of his lips. "The first attempt, I think they thought it was - cute. The dumb impulses of a little kid, running for home.

"Second attempt, third attempt… not so cute." The smile faded. "By the time they got me back to the tower the third time, there was already talk of making me Tranquil, just to keep me 'manageable.' " Anders laughed, a dry and hollow sound. " 'Manageable.' "

Hawke's breath caught, not able to avoid a sudden horrible vision of Anders in the Fomori robes, Anders with the brand on his forehead. "You and manageable in the same room?" he joked feebly. "Can't picture it, really."

Anders chuckled, but it quickly died. "Irving pushed for me to take my Harrowing early - on the grounds that the Rite can't legally be used on Harrowed mages, don't you know." Those last few words spun off with savage bite. "I was young, I was reckless... but I wasn't suicidal. For about three weeks between my third escape attempt and my Harrowing, I was on my best behavior for a change."

"Still having trouble with that picture," Hawke said.

He didn't get a chuckle this time. Hawke wasn't sure that Anders even heard; he wasn't sure that Anders was even in the same room with him any more. Only his hands still playing lightly in Hawke's hair seemed to anchor him there.

"One night with about a week to go, one of the Templars..." He trailed off. "It's funny, I don't even remember his name." A hitch, a tension held under his breastbone as he said that; he's lying. "Anyway, he caught me alone in the History section."

A small smile flickered over his face and was gone, just as fast. "I had many fond memories of the place, a rare little slice of privacy you wouldn't often find in the Circle. He knew it, too. He backed me up against the bookshelf and told me, since I was 'giving it away' to everyone in the tower, that he ought to get a piece of me too. Said that since I was such a pain in everybody's ass, he ought to - well, you get the idea." Anders shrugged dismissively. "Very crude. No particular wit involved."

Hawke sat there listening, silent and stiff with dismay, his mouth going dry as his heart sped up to match the litany going through his head. Oh Maker, please no, please no…

"Well. I wasn't too fond of that idea, as you can imagine. He told me that if I shouted - if I put up a fight - if I told anyone, if I said anything, he would go right to the Knight-Commander and tell him that he'd caught me trying to escape again," his voice caught for the first time in this narrative, hands tightening in Hawke's hair. "And I'd be Tranquil before sundown."

"They wouldn't dare!" Hawke exclaimed furiously.

Anders shrugged a little. "It would have been his word against mine - a mage against a Templar," he said, his voice dust-dry. "And with three escapes to my record, it's not like anyone would have had a hard time believing it. Especially with my Harrowing coming up - everyone knew I didn't have much of a chance of surviving it. You know, in retrospect, I wondered if that's why he picked me?" His voice rose up at the end in sudden speculation. "Because he was sure I'd be dead in a week, and unable to testify. I saw him around the Tower a few times, later on, but he never looked me in the eye.

"I didn't fight him. I didn't..." Anders fell silent for a long moment; only the pounding of his heart under Hawke's ear gave him away. At last he shook his head a little, and continued talking. "I was more afraid of being made Tranquil than I was of doing what he said. So I did what he said.

"He made me suck on his cock, and then he fucked me." Anders delivered the words with the same calm tone as the rest of the story - detached, almost clinical. It was surreal. "It didn't... Actually didn't hurt all that much, not really. Like I said, I was quite active in the Circle those days, so I had plenty of practice. I knew how to relax so that it didn't hurt. It could have been worse. He fucked me, wiped himself off on my robes, and left me alone."

Hawke sat bolt upright, staring at Anders in horror. He felt like he was falling, a sickening plummet into the darkness. It's true, it's all true. "But - but then -" He swallowed, tasting tears and bile. "The times that we - that I, I took you - you didn't -"

It was Hawke's distress that seemed to bring Anders back from wherever he was; he smiled sadly at him, putting a hand on the side of his face. "No, love, don't beat yourself up over nothing," he urged him. "I've shared my body with plenty of partners after that - and even before. He didn't break me or anything like that, I'm hardly traumatized." He gave Hawke a little shake to emphasize his words. "It's just one more ugly memory, to add on top of a pile of them."

Hawke's life had hardly been sheltered. He and his family had traveled a long way even before the Blight, and had seen many of the more unsavory parts of the world. He'd had Bethany, and had grown up knowing he had a big brother's duty to protect her - even from a young age he'd been aware that there were some things Bethany was at risk for that he and Carver weren't. Malcolm had sat them down and had some very serious talks - some about the typical dangers for any young woman traveling through the poorer parts of Ferelden, and some about the special dangers faced by any mage in the face of the Templars, about what might befall Bethany if she were ever taken into the Circle.

Once their father had died, once Carver had died, once they'd lost their home to the Blight and gone on the run, things had only gone downhill. Hawke had seen the ravages of the Blight, and maybe worse, he'd seen the ravages that desperate, broken-down human beings could inflict on each other. He knew that many women were made homeless, widowed, orphaned by darkspawn and civil war and worse; he knew what happened to women who couldn't protect themselves, or what women would do to themselves just to survive.

But it was one thing to know that it happened, and another thing to know that it happened to someone he knew. Someone he loved. And to know that it had all happened so long ago - that Anders had carried this under his skin for as long as Hawke had known him, and he'd never known -

"You never told anyone?" Hawke asked. "Even after the Harrowing?"

Anders shook his head. "What would be the point?" he said wearily. "The other mages couldn't do anything about it, and nobody else would have cared..." His eyes narrowed in sudden thought, and his voice took on the hint of a growl. "At the time I was too selfish, I thought it was all about me, but - now I wonder. How many other apprentices did he do that to? How many of them were too scared to speak up?"

One wasn't enough? Hawke wondered.

"The funny part of it is -" Anders broke off in a chuckle. "The funny thing is, he wasn't wrong. He was right about most of it, really. I did try to run away again, the first chance I got. I did sleep around an awful lot in those days, and it's not like my reputation was any secret. Either part of it. I did make trouble, for myself and for everyone in charge, and had marked myself as a rule-breaker. I didn't even try particularly hard to resist. So, you see, in many ways I brought it on myself."

He said it so calmly, so matter-of-fact, like he was delivering statistics on Kirkwall's yearly exports. "Anders… Anders, no," Hawke begged him. He was crying, unable to stop himself; why wasn't Anders? How could he sit here and recite this story and stay so fucking calm? How could he possibly say these words and mean them? "Why... why are you saying these horrible things?"

"BECAUSE IT SHOULDN'T HAVE MATTERED!" The dam broke; the mask of calm cracked and shattered, revealing a seething fury underneath. Anders jumped to his feet and stood there, breathing harsh and hands flexing, knuckles showing bone-white through the skin. "He shouldn't have done that to me! It was wrong. It was wrong! So what if I slept with a lot of people? I still should have had a choice! So what if I broke their Maker-forsaken rules?! I never hurt anyone! Even if I had, I wouldn't have deserved that!"

Anders began to pace, gesturing wildly while he talked. "It's not right that they can do this to us, that each and every one of them holds the power of life and death and worse over our heads. And what do we have? No rights, no protections, and no recourse! Nothing except praying to the Maker that our Templars are going to be some of the good ones. The good ones, like Cullen, who stands there and to my face tells me that I'm not a person, that the Ferelden Circle was too soft on me!"

He was so incandescently furious that Hawke more than half expected to see blue fire rise in his eyes, blue cracks in his skin as Justice pressed against the world. But nothing uncanny appeared - this rage was entirely Anders.

"Anders - " Hawke tried to say. "I'm so sor -"

"I don't want anybody's pity! " Anders turned on him with a snarl, cutting him off with a savage slash of his hand. "Not yours! Not anyone's! Especially not from some self-righteous prick like Sebastian Vael, who thinks that all I need is to forgive my enemy and move on. It's not about poor little Anders, the victim. It's not about my suffering. It's about the fact that it's still going on, and on, and no one is doing anything to stop it!"

He stopped in his frantic pacing and took a deep breath, raking his fingers through his hair. "At least I got out, I still have my life - and my mind. So you see, I didn't lie after all. I was fortunate. I was one of the lucky ones!" He began to laugh, hysterical and bordering on broken. "Maker help us, Maker help us. I was fifteen years old when I was raped by a full-grown man and I was one of the lucky ones!"

Hawke moved at last, standing up and approaching Anders with his arms held out, hands turned palm-up. Anders was still laughing, wrapping his long arms around his skinny ribcage, his body shaking with every sob. Hawke wrapped his arms around him, pulled him close. "Shh," he said in his ear, hugging him tight. "You're right, you're right. It was wrong. They were wrong. They should never have done those things to you."

He kept on repeating those words, over and over again. Anders slumped against him, hysterical laughter muffled against his shoulder into nothingness. It was much longer before the shaking stopped, and he relaxed into Hawke's hold. "...Thank you," he muttered at last.

"For what?!" Hawke said incredulously. Maker knew he'd done precious little, either then or now.

"Just for saying that." Anders' thin body heaved in a sigh, and he rested his forehead against Hawke's shoulder. "It's just… it's nice to hear it from outside my own head, for a change."

"I'll tell you as many times as you need to hear it," Hawke said. "I'll shout it to the world, and I'll punch them in the face if they dare to say otherwise."

Anders choked a laugh, his fingers seizing tight on Hawke's shoulders. "Maker, you would, wouldn't you?" he muttered. "Please… please don't, though. I don't… I don't want anyone else to look at me and see just a…"

"I understand," Hawke finished for him, when he trailed off at a loss. "You're right. Nobody else needs to know this, not Sebastian or anyone else. It's none of their business."

Anders' forehead thumped against Hawke's shoulder a little harder, and he inhaled sharply and pulled him in tight. Hawke returned the embrace just as fiercely, feeling the incredible strength running through that frail, wiry body, and trying to match it with his own.

"I'm going to stop it," Anders told Hawke, quiet but determined. "I've got to stop it. Don't you see?"

"I do see," Hawke whispered. He'd always known what Anders had in mind, always known that his cause drove him without rest or respite. But it was one thing to know and another to know. What else could he do?

"It's not about… that one Templar," Anders continued. "I don't care about him. I don't care what happens to him. But this has got to stop. This whole system, it has to be torn down. The Circles have failed us in every possible way. We mages must be free, with no Templars to have power over us ever again. It's the only way."

Hawke nodded. "Whatever you need to do, love. I'm here for you," he said. "Whatever happens, I'll stand beside you. You know that, right?

Anders hesitated for a long moment.

"Yes," he said, and there it was again; that hitch in his breathing, his chest held tight. He's lying. "I know."

~end.