A/N: Inspired by Florence + the Machine's song St. Jude, and posted originally under the title "On the Way to Over" on tumblr
Saint Jude, the patron saint of the lost causes
Saint Jude, we were lost before she started
She courts chaos her whole life, gathering it in her fingers like the loose fabric of her robes. It feels like spiderweaving, like a sigh, the kind like lakes turning over, silt bubbling up from the very bottom when it rains, light and convoluted. Order is heavy and warm and stable, the sort of thing her mother embellishes with embroidered flowers and admonitions. It doesn't always suit, stern as a yoke beneath which she learns to tame herself, to harness her father's magic that runs beneath her skin.
Cause and effect and the stuff the universe is made of; dandelion fluff in her sister's hands, dirt on her brother's face, the silver in her father's beard and her mother's hair and the glint of the sun off the water in their pond at just the right time of day- Or off the slate-plated roof of a mausoleum at night, the moon huge and full and the wind whistling past the eaves, thick with salt and the smell of blood in the water.
There are sharks. She never questions the shapes moving in the deep, just keeps swimming against the tide with her head barely above the surface.
It's what she knows how to do. Her arms are strong, and she floats - until she doesn't, drug under on a hilltop above Lothering as it burns.
Everything changes. She doesn't swim now, she runs and runs and runs, like blood in veins, like holes in her mother's stockings, like the notes her brother whistles on the trail, the melodies that remind her of their father.
The ground stays uneven. Hawke hates to trip, can't hit the ground if she just keeps lurching forward. She's used to the sensation of running, the cramps in her legs and the stitch in her side, the burn in her lungs like the dry summer air on the Wounded Coast right before a thunderstorm, clouds rolling in thick as the feeling of her tongue between her teeth, keeping quiet when all she wants to do is weep or laugh or scream.
She has an eye for trouble.
Fenris sneers that all she wants to do is save the mage from himself, and maybe part of this is true (but this truth applies to all of them). Her mother says that Anders reminds her of Hawke's father and she searches for that in his face sometimes in the Hanged Man, watching him lay his burdens down, watching him laugh and make jokes that one might expect from a man whose claim to fame is an electric reputation in a Denerim whorehouse.
That isn't all it is. It never is. He speaks with passion, with conviction, with fire and the more he tells her it probably isn't a good idea, the more she wants a piece of him. She's spent half her life cold, and moth wings don't burn until they reach the heart of the flame.
It doesn't hurt. Not yet.
It's a dizzy tumble. Up and down and around and around each other, three long years with less than thirty feet of space between them. When she lies in bed alone she imagines she can sense him in the clinic below, so close it might have been part of her very own basement, and light turns her room as gold as his hair is under the sun. There is blue behind her eyelids, hues shifting, and the shadows seem deeper than she thinks they are. She's a child of this light, budding like a bushel of her mother's roses, stretching arms to the sun. The magic that glows beneath her skin is the kind that makes things grow and she grows this, this fragile bloom that is his lips on hers and his hands and this persistent ache of long roads behind.
She can keep him for just a little while. What's a few years, after all, but a few hundred days, sun overhead and the wind in his feathers? They will make a safe place; they will fly free, if not far. They build a nest in mahogany bed and red silk sheets and the fuzzy slippers she buys him as a joke that he never has time to wear, always on his way to or from; going, coming, in between.
That may have been the first sign, but Hawke doesn't believe in signs. Signs are a thing for hunters, for predators and prey when she just wants to flourish on the hard ground she's already broken, and the more she is warned of the coming winter the closer she pulls him, tight around her like a cloak against the cold she remembers all too well. Sometimes he's heavier than she remembers, or maybe it's just that she has grown so very light. There are moments, fleeting and azure and lonely where she traces the reflection of her face in the window and wonders if all of this is worth what she paid for it.
She wakes up one morning and the descent is over before she ever realized it had begun. He has his boots on between the sheets, home for once rather than in the clinic for days, and he sleeps with his back to her, fingers dark with blood or ink, still as the dead. She's afraid to touch him with her hands, afraid to breach the space between them with anything but the lucent current of her magic, feeling for those places that lit up her heart with gold and finding only indigo and gray.
The shadows never seem any darker than they ever were; it's the rest of the room that has changed. The world is flat, matte and opaque, and small things she's allowed to become translucent glare back into focus. There are so many jagged edges, places that catch her skin, her hair, her clothes, and she can't help but tumble once more, into a place where hope collides with sense, and faith with knowledge.
If she can't run or fly perhaps again she can swim. The tides of change pull at her skirts, cold sharp fingers swirling in eddies of indecision, eroding down the walls of dams carefully built, and though the current is fast she wades in.
She goes to plead for peace knowing that war follows close behind, and carries temperance with her one last time.