AN: I've always wanted to write a Christmas fic, and I've always wanted to write a "five times" fic. Happy coincidence! And I hope you're having a very warm, safe, merry holiday season yourself. :)
Soundtrack, if you're interested: "Lokaðu Augunum" for one through four, "Haust" for five, and "For Teda" for the last one. All of these are by Ólafur Arnalds, and all of them can be found on Youtube. Enjoy!
-.-
one.
The leaves have begun falling from the trees.
Hawke notices them first, her boot scuffing through red and gold and brown beside the boxed trees in the Chantry square, and Fenris watches her face turn up to the baring branches above her, to the greying sky beyond them. A wind picks up, easterly, whispering winter, and Fenris turns his head so that its chilled fingers cannot catch the tips of his ears. Somewhere he has a cloak; somewhere he has furred boots, both gifts from seasons past when neither Hawke nor Isabela saw fit to permit him his stubborn chattering teeth. He grimaces at the thought, and Hawke laughs.
"It comes every year," she tells him, turning so that the trees are behind her, their dark, slender branches stretching out over her head, what leaves are left clinging desperately to their twigs. "By now I'd think you'd be used to it."
"It is not," he says sourly, stepping closer, because she is warm and he is not, "a thing to become used to, Hawke. It is a thing to endure until it is finished. Nothing more."
Hawke laughs again, looking down as his bare toes disappear into the sift of fallen leaves between them, as her fingers twist into the rough leather of his belt to tug him even closer. The square is nearly empty this early in the day, moreso with this morning's chill to chase the hour, and as Fenris lifts his head to check the sun the wind picks up again, ice-touched air pinching his ears, stirring the hair at the back of his neck, tracing the long stripe down his spine where there is no armor to guard him.
He shudders despite himself, and Hawke slides her hands from his belt to his waist, and to his back, her palms spreading warm—warmer, he thinks, even than they ought to be—between the blades of his shoulders.
"We are standing," he reminds her, because it is Hawke and she has forgotten these things before, "in the yard of the Chantry."
Forgotten—or ignored, perhaps, instead. Hawke does not pull away; nor does the heat of her hands lessen. "We're only two people passing through the square, Fenris. It's morning, it's terribly chilly for the season, and we've decided to…mm. Ward each other against the weather."
Fenris smiles despite himself, despite the thinning leaves above them, despite the breath of bitter cold that finds Hawke's hands on his back, marking their outlines like a pen has drawn them. "Only a deception, then?" She smiles, and he adds, perhaps unwisely, "Tevinter was never so cold."
Hawke hums, her fingers tightening, and warmth spreads from her hands outward across his skin like wings. "Not all things grow well in Minrathous's summer."
"True," Fenris agrees, and allows himself at last to take Hawke's shoulders in his hands, pulling her nearer him, pulling himself nearer to her. Her robes are thin for the weather, thin enough that he fears tearing them with his sharp-tipped steel—and—not enough to let her go. She leans her head back, watching him through lowered lashes; the clouds have thinned at last, and for a moment it seems they stand in a riot of fire, gold and scarlet and orange swirling at their feet, her hands on his back burning, the hiss of leaves a hearth.
Fenris says, "I would kiss you."
"That would warm us against the cold," Hawke murmurs, gaze flicking to the open, empty streets beyond them; at the dark branches stretching above their heads, still flecked here and there with enough brilliant color to cut away the sunlight; at the golden-doored Chantry that rests, bells silent and still, atop its polished stairways. Her eyes come back to his, and she smiles, and says, "You never have to ask, Fenris."
Fenris shakes his head. He knows better than her his reasons; he is not so removed from his own memory to think so little of permission, of being welcomed, of being wanted. Neither is this thing of theirs so strong yet that he cannot doubt it, not with exile so newly ended, not with reunion still a child-in-arms, young and tender and staring at all the world in astonishment.
He does not know how to be gentle. He is not sure he wishes to be. But when he kisses her, when Hawke sighs against his mouth and slides her hands from his back to his waist, when she closes her eyes and smiles and leans into him until even the bitterest wind could not bring winter between them—
—he tries.
-.-
two.
The first sign is a groan. And then a sigh, and then a rustle of the mattress, and then the clink of ceramic on wood, and when Fenris turns from the windowsill, it is only to catch a fleeting glimpse of the teacup vanishing into the cocoon atop his bed.
"Good morning," he murmurs to himself, turning again to the window, and he does not hide his smile at the wordless grunt behind him. The weather has turned at last, true winter settling over Kirkwall like a cloak to freeze the bones of the city clean through. Below him on the street round, heavy masses of clothing bundle by each other, gloves held over noses and hats pulled low over red-tipped ears, coat-ties knotted like nooses against the cold. He lifts his own cup to his mouth, letting the damp steam-heat curl against his lips.
"Fenris," Hawke says, her voice thick with sleep, "will you light the fire? It's absolutely freezing in here."
"It is lit," he tells her, and listens with interest to the stream of muffled curses that spill from the nest of blankets. Thoughtfully, he adds, "You may stoke it if you wish."
"Bastard," Hawke says sourly, and he glances back in time to see her glare before it disappears again into the quilt. "If you're wondering why I never stay here in the winter—this is it."
"I had thought Fereldans to be partial to the cold."
"When we're outside, you ass. Not first thing in the morning, not in horrible ruined drafty mansions with a hundred broken windows and a lover who doesn't even have the decency to stay in the bed to warm it."
"Come here, then," he demands, and Hawke's face emerges long enough to glare at him a second time; then in a mass of quilts and sheets she rises from the bed, swearing when her bare feet strike icy stone, swearing again as a narrow wind slips between the blankets to grope at her ankles. She wraps the blankets more closely around her shoulders and they fall in layers away from her tangled hair, a hood of pin-feathers and weft-thin faded fabric to a cloak with no laces.
Intoxicating, to realize that she is wholly naked beneath it. His home. His quilt. His bed.
And Hawke, whom no one has ever owned.
Her eyes are bright in the cool morning, glare still fixed in the lines around her mouth, but as she reaches him by the window he can see the stirrings of wry amusement, too. "My nose is cold," she tells him, and when he snorts she tucks her face into his neck, pressing her nose—and it is cold, he cannot deny it—beneath his ear. "See? It's so cold the icicles are shivering. I don't see how you can stand it."
After a moment, Fenris wraps an arm around her shoulders, quilts and all, and pulls her closer. It is hard to know her meaning, sometimes, and harder without experience to guide him, but he thinks, occasionally, that he is improving. His cloak—the gift from Isabela—falls over his arm to drape heavy down her back, another layer of protection against the winter that is not barred by his broken windows, by his doors that cannot be closed again.
"It is easier with company," he admits at last, and Hawke laughs into his neck.
"I'll take that as a compliment," she murmurs. "Even if you are cheating by—you know. Being dressed. Wearing that cloak."
Fenris shakes his head, shakes it again when he feels long, chilled fingers snake beneath the thick fabric to the clasps of his shirt. He does not stop her, though, and does not draw back, and when at last her cold hands glide over the bared skin of his waist beneath his cloak and her quilts Fenris lets out a flinch of laughter that stirs her hair, and he wraps his other arm around her, too. Hawke lifts her face to him and he is unsurprised to see her grin; he kisses her, twice, and is unsurprised to feel her hands curl into the small of his back, to hear her sigh and hum and move closer to him. How peculiar, he thinks, to have such things be—so easy. To be so expected.
"Thank you," she murmurs against his mouth, "for the tea."
Her hands are warmer now. Her nose is warmer, too, and her mouth, and her shoulders. Her eyes are still just as bright. He says, "I will repair the windows."
Hawke laughs, soft and startled, and then she tugs him towards her, stepping backwards, quilts slipping away from one bare shoulder as he stumbles on the rumpled train, as he kisses her again, as the backs of her knees strike the side of the bed. "Share your cloak instead, serah," she tells him, smiling, sliding her hands lower, "and I'll stoke the fire myself."
-.-
three.
He has never seen Kirkwall's sky so blue.
Nor has Hawke, it seems, because she cannot keep from staring at it in the same way that she cannot keep from smiling at the fresh snowfall that has dusted the city white overnight. The air is still bitingly cold—colder, Fenris thinks, than it was even before last night's grey-sky storming—cold enough that moments come when he cannot even feel it. The streets will darken with dirt and slush soon enough, Hawke tells him, and the gutters will fill with the runoff of soiled snow, but for now the world is white and unbroken save a lone boot-track here, save the running of a cat's feet there.
"Look!" Hawke says, and a pair of children shriek with laughter as their father pulls their sled through the street; "Look," Hawke says, and a mourning dove fluffs herself in her nest in the scrollwork of the Chantry's eaves; "Look," Hawke breathes, and sunlight flashes on a long row of icicles lining the stairs to Lowtown.
"I have seen snow before," Fenris points out, and gloved fingers curl into the crook of his elbow.
"Not here. Not in Kirkwall."
"No," he says. "Does it matter?"
"Every city's so different in the snow. Every town." Hawke laughs, her head thrown back, and scuffs her boots along the next three steps down to clear the snow from their edges. She stops at the bottom to survey her work; then she looks up to the brilliant, cloudless sky. "Look at this. The whole city's gone silent."
He cannot deny it; Kirkwall has fallen still as slumber beneath the snow, as if the muffled cold has hidden its heart away, too. Mid-afternoon on a week's workday—the city ought to be alive, ought to have markets and merchants and cutpurses alike about their business for hours yet. Instead—
Instead, there are no souls in sight but their own. An odd thing: as if he and Hawke have become the only living creatures in the world. He thinks, perhaps, it ought to unsettle him, this solitary wild; he finds instead that he does not mind it.
But Hawke looks up at him, eyebrows lifted, and Fenris says, belatedly, "Perhaps they are the wiser."
"You're only saying that because you know you're right."
Fenris laughs and Hawke lets him free to bound ahead in the silent street, snow spraying up before her boots at each step like breaking waves, her arms flung wide, her hair loose and gleaming in long strips of winter sunlight. "Look at this!" she cries again, whirling to face him, laughter nearly giddy as her fingers brush loose snow from a shuttered window. It glints like stardust over her dark cloak. "Every city changes with winter. Lothering—Lothering only stopped with the worst blizzards, because it snowed four months of the year there and you'd starve if you didn't. I remember Carver once lost hold of the line to the barn when he was—oh, I don't know. Thirteen? Fourteen? And Bethany and I went out with Papa with all our wrists tied together and melted the whole damned yard before we found him in the woodshed, curled up with the dog." She laughs again, tilting her face up to the snow-laden roofs that line the street. "And that afternoon we were out feeding the cows and the sheep all the same."
"There are no livestock to feed here."
"And the dog's got enough sense to stay at home, you mean." Hawke eyes him, sudden and intent enough to make him wary; then all at once she leaps forward to grasp his hand. "Come on!" she cries, and the sound of it echoes off the ice-gilded windows like glass, like the chime of bells. "Look at this!" she says a third time, and before Fenris can speak she is running, dragging him, booted feet pounding into the snow with the thick-cold crunching of winter frost. He can do nothing but follow her; he cannot feel the cold. There is only Hawke's back ahead of him, cloak flaring with the wind, with her too-quick strides, her arm outstretched back towards him like the break in a blackbird's wing—
"There!" she shouts, and the road ends.
Or rather it turns, sharp enough that the corner stops them, and Hawke whirls until her back is against the grey-stoned wall that marks its turning. Fenris stumbles to a stop, uncomprehending, barely managing to keep from crushing her; she takes him by both shoulders and wheels him back the way they came. "Look," she breathes, and rests her chin on his shoulder.
Two lines of footprints in the snow, one strong and even, the other faltering at first before catching the steady stride: ten paces, twenty, thirty. Drifts of powder mark their edges, the only break in a field of unceasing white; even the now-distant stairway shows only what they have disturbed in their passing. Fenris follows their trail as far as he can see before it disappears; then he turns again to Hawke.
"It's ours," she tells him. Their breath plumes between them, quick bursts of white smoke, vanishing just as quickly as it appears. "The city. This street. There's nobody awake in the world but us."
It is hardly true—even now their friends wait for them in the Hanged Man—but this moment seems real enough for him all the same, and when Hawke lifts her hands to hold the edges of his breastplate Fenris steps closer, crowding her against the wall, leaving no space between them, no snow, no breath. His palms rest against the bare stone wall on either side of her head; she grins, and lifts her chin, and when he kisses her she meets him just as hard and just as hot, her mouth opening at his demand, her grip shifting from his armor to his arms to his jaw, desperate, strong, fierce as the burning sky.
His arms find her waist; one of her legs hooks around his hip, holding him in place as he presses her harder to the wall, as the lyrium under his skin ignites and quickens with sudden heat. Her lips drag to his jaw, to the hollow of his neck, and he lets out an explosive breath that hangs cloudlike in the air around them as her tongue finds a silver vein. They must stop—they cannot, not here—it is the middle of the street and the middle of the day—and the world is silent, and there is no one to walk living in this city but them, alone—
Hawke shouts. It is loud enough to rattle ice and dislodge a crust of snow from the wall's edge above their heads, dousing them both with snowdust as Fenris's teeth come away from her throat. She stares at him blankly as he straightens, as if comprehension is beyond her; then, as the last fading echoes of her own voice die away beyond the distant snow-whitened roofs, she shakes her head and breaks into a smile, rueful and exhilarated at once.
"Sorry," she says, putting the back of her wrist to one cheek and then the other, as if that might be enough to cool their heated flush. "Sorry. That was—um. I didn't mean to do. That."
Fenris grimaces. He is little better, out of breath and sparking light through his leathers, the lyrium unstilled by the falling snow. "You will be the death of me, Hawke."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"This evening," he begins, and closes his eyes as Hawke's forehead comes to rest against his own. "Tonight. Have you any plans?"
"I plan to be thoroughly debauched by a certain elf as frequently and in as many ways as possible before this snow thaws. What do you think? Will that work for you?"
Fenris laughs and kisses her again, and when it is finished they both pull away, straightening themselves, straightening each other. "I will say," he tells her as he brushes a bit of snow from her hair, "that your proposition appears to align with mine."
"Then I propose we finish this game as soon as possible," Hawke suggests, and when he nods she turns to walk beside him.
They leave two trails of footprints behind them to mark their passing, side by side, with even steps.
-.-
four.
"Remind me why we're out here again?"
Anders's tone is peevish. This irritates Fenris in part because it is inherently grating, and in part because he knows that if he were to speak it would be in the same tone. He settles for scowling at the mage from behind, but the satisfaction is somewhat lessened by the knowledge that Anders can neither see him nor would care if he did.
Hawke, however, is no less cheerful than usual as she turns on her heel, walking backwards up the wide path winding along the coast's low bluffs. "We are here," she says, ticking the points off her fingers, "one: because it's your herbs we're here to get, Anders; two: because Solivitus said the best place to get them is seaside; three: because Merrill said she wanted to get out of the city for a little while; and four: because Isabela said there's a storm coming in off the Waking Sea and if we don't do it now everything'll freeze over by the end of the week."
"And Fenris?"
"Fenris just loves being on the Wounded Coast in the middle of winter."
Fenris snorts without deigning to answer Merrill's quizzical look. "And why we're here together…?"
"Oh. That's because I have all the—how did Aveline put it the other day, Anders? I have all the foresight of a netted flounder."
"It was rather cruel to the flounder," Anders mutters.
Hawke rolls her eyes before linking arms with Merrill. "Come on. I don't have to stand here and listen to this."
"You can hear it just as well over there," Merrill agrees, and Fenris is the only one of the three to see Hawke's shoulders slump, just slightly. He tells himself his satisfaction is not vindictive.
He knows he lies.
Still, their progress is excellent and Hawke keeps the conversation steady enough, and before long Merrill points towards a patch of small blue-green grasses growing across the face of a boulder by the sea. The coast is, despite Hawke's laudations, utterly miserable in winter; the waves break like grey glass against the cliffs, throwing shards of ice-spray across their faces, and with the branches of what few scrub trees remain as knobbed and bare and black as burnt bones, the place resembles nothing so much as a child's dream of loneliness. Even the sky hangs low and heavy, steel-dark and stretching Sundermount to horizon in one unbroken shroud.
Fenris does not enjoy the Coast in the best of times. This is worse even than that.
It is treacherous going the closer they draw to the water, and after Hawke slips for the third time Anders relegates her to guard duty with Fenris as he and Merrill collect the herbs in small, oiled pouches. Fenris watches only long enough to be certain that neither of them will step away into the frosted froth below; then, as Hawke clambers back up the last rock-choked bend in the path, he turns again to the empty bluffs and sandhills that stretch away, up, to a sky they cannot reach.
"You manufactured that," he says, and grips his sword.
Hawke takes two steps up the chunk of boulder beside him, then sits so that her eyes are of a level with his. "Well. You were acting rather pathetic."
"Apologies," he says sourly.
"It's not like I wasn't expecting it."
"And yet I am here all the same."
"You could have said no."
Fenris says nothing. Below them Anders and Merrill are quiet as they gather the last of the herbs, their soft words susurrant as the waves hurrying against the bare rock at their feet. The clouds still hang unbroken grey; the winds from the sea still knife over his cheeks, the tips of his ears. In the distance, a seabird cries out before diving into the water.
At last, Hawke says, "That was unfair. Sorry."
Fenris shifts his shoulders, shrugging away his temper with effort. "I will survive."
"Survive what?" Merrill asks, her pack swinging with the weight of the herbs packed away into it. Anders is close at her heels, his own pack slung over one shoulder; even from his place at the top of the path Fenris can see him shivering beneath his threadbare coat. "We haven't seen anyone at all since we left the city. Not even Tal-Vashoth. But it's terribly cold for them not to be wearing any shirts, I suppose."
Anders laughs, blowing flame into his cupped fingers. "They're all in their caves, Merrill. Gathered around their fires, wearing knitted sweaters and swapping stories of Satinalias gone by."
Merrill stares. "They are not. Are they?"
"Who knows?" Anders says, and knots his scarf closer to his neck. "Let's get back to the city. I'm going to freeze solid if we don't get out of this wind."
"A Satinalia miracle," Hawke murmurs as she watches them fall into step ahead, for once with no animosity and little bitterness between them. Merrill's face is turned up to Anders in wide-eyed wonder; he mimes knitting and laughs again at her amazement. Hawke makes to come down from the boulder to follow them—
—but Fenris is there first, one hand on the rock at her hip, the other at the back of her head, holding her in place as he presses his lips briefly to her cheek, then to her mouth. "Apologies," he says again, and this time means it. If nothing else—if nothing else, his words, his actions will be his own. He will be master of himself.
Hawke smiles, and kisses his nose, and if heat curls in the pit of his stomach as she leads him after Anders and Merrill, he does not think it is her magic this time.
Perhaps he does not mind the Wounded Coast in winter, after all.
-.-
five.
He comes to her in the night, like a slave.
It is night and the city is ice-stars and silence and her room is warm, dark, lit only by the embers of a dying fire in a smoke-stained hearth. She herself is only shadow and a hairline of gold light drawn along the curve of her hip; as he watches she sighs in her sleep and shifts, her leg uncurling beneath the embroidered coverlet, her hand drawing up by her cheek before she settles again. Coal cracks with a hiss and sparks spray skyward, a dazzle of fire that is gone again before he can blink.
Fenris knows this rote. He is summoned—he kneels—he waits, for a word, for a glance, for dawn—
His armor is already gone. He moves to the side of the bed that is empty with swift, silent steps (his side, his place, where he belongs, as a slave knows he belongs—) and he stands there, his fingers on the top clasp of his tunic, plush carpet beneath his feet to keep back the chill, a fire lit to keep him warm, a bed laid with expensive linens to keep him close. How many times has he stopped, just like this, a magister asleep not an arm's length from him, a magister's heart beating so close he can hear it, can feel it pulsing in his palm?
She does not understand. She, who has never been owned, who does not know that to a slave an invitation is a command, who does not realize that suggestion means nothing when there is no choice in the answer.
Go here. Kill this one. Kiss this one. Take this one's heart in your hand and drive your fingers into it until it bursts, like fruit, like blood is water and all hearts are made for eating. Do this because I wish for it to be done.
Fenris strips, quickly and efficiently and with no movements that are not necessary. When he is naked he turns down the embroidered coverlet and the fine linen sheets beneath, and he kneels beside the pillow in its linen case, with its tracework of gold leaves stitched by hand along the hem. The bed shifts with his weight and Hawke shifts with it, rolling away from the fire, towards him, her eyes still closed, her cheek red where it has pressed too hard against her own fingers.
"Fenris?" she says, the word nearly nonsense through sleep-softened mumbling. Her hair falls into her face and she brushes it back, cracking one drowsy eye just enough to see his face. "What time is it?"
He still remembers when she owned no sheets at all. "Late."
"Early. Happy Satinalia." Hawke closes her eyes again and stretches, and the hair-thin cord of gold stretches with her, from her hip to her waist to the curve of her breast, to the long slender line of her neck.
Fenris leans over her, one hand on the heavy carved headboard, the other braced on the ivory sheets by her shoulder. Her eyes come open then, slow and calm; she watches in silence as he watches her, feeling the muscles shift beneath his skin as he moves, as he bends, as the lyrium stretches and pulls across his elbows, his back, his calves. The shadow of his forearm falls across her throat and she does not stir away, does not lower her eyes.
He cannot find fear.
When he lowers his mouth to hers it is in something near kin to defiance. He does not know what he expects—and then she rises to meet him, to meet his challenge, and it is a challenge, as much as if he held the glittering edge of a blade to her lips in his place. Her lids flutter but do not close, holding his gaze as if to spell him with her look alone. They do not touch save this; her hands lie where they are, one at her waist, the other by her cheek; his fingers score into wood and weft alike, blunt nails tearing threads where they are weak.
Her breath comes so thin. His does too, and quicker than hers, silent through his nose and louder gasps when they part long enough to breathe, long enough to gauge respite and assault alike. She comes to meet him and he is already there; he opens his mouth to her and she demands more, demands everything, and so he does as well, because he is a slave without a master and he has no chain, no lead save what he has made with his own hands, no shackle save what he has tied to his wrist himself. He presses harder and she drags in a sharp breath; she bites his lip and he groans, a rough thing made rougher in the silence of the dying fire. He cannot bear this—he will break, and she will burn and he will burn with her in this bed, in this little lightless room that is too warm and too soft and too hers—
Then, all at once, she yields.
It is sudden enough to startle him from breath. Her mouth softens and her teeth pull away from his lips—and her eyes close, and the lines of her throat grow easy, and all at once her hands are on him, at last, at last, when he did not know he needed them most. Her palms draw up his sides, her thumbs gliding over the thorns of lyrium that mark each rib without mark for the little lights that follow; she reaches further and finds his spine, and the muscles of his shoulders, and when she presses there he cannot help but lean nearer, to bow his head and bend his back until his chest brushes hers, until his whole weight sags to his knees, over her, atop her.
He turns his head and kisses her again. Her fingers trace the bones of his spine to where they disappear into his hair; there they tangle, not to confine but to anchor, and Fenris somehow finds the line of her jaw with his thumb, her cheekbone, her eyelashes where they flutter at his touch. The embroidery scratches against his chest with every breath, shallow as they are, sharp contrast to the slicker sweat that beads at her temple, across his own shoulders.
"Here," Hawke says softly, and smooths his hair away from his eyes. Her fingers drift down his cheek to the base of his ear; then she cups her palm full to his face. Her face is dim with embers, but even so he knows her well enough to read it.
No fear. Even now, even like this there is no fear. There is only the slow rising of her chest against his, the press of her skin to his skin, the glint of embroidery in a sea of scarlet—and a thin curl of gold caught in Hawke's eyes.
Fenris buries his head in her neck. His weight falls to the side, against her hip, his knees at last permitted to straighten from their strain; her arms tighten around him at the same moment, as if she knows even the lyrium cannot keep his mind whole here before her, that he will fly to pieces the moment he is free.
The moment he is—he is—
Fenris has come to her in the night as a slave comes, his heart made to be eaten. And she does not understand this, because Hawke, with her linens and her hearth, does not know what it means to be an owned thing, and somehow because she does not know he wonders if he may yet learn to forget this, too.
He kisses her throat, where her heart beats against his mouth. I am not a slave.
"You are not a slave," Hawke whispers, echo to words he did not realize speaking, and to hear her say it is as much a revelation as her yielding.
And, because he may, he chooses to believe her.
-.-
one.
Fenris is not drunk. Of this he is certain.
The rest, though, he cannot swear to; Hawke's cheeks are redder than the cold alone can claim and he himself saw Isabela spike nearly every glass in Varric's suite more than once. He had not strictly understood the point—the room had been drinking as it was—but Fenris had learned long ago to let Isabela do what she wished at parties, even if she wore a plant in her hair that Hawke called festive and Fenris knew to kill the trees it touched.
"Did you have a good time?" Hawke asks.
"Yes," Fenris says—truth—and adds, "and you?"
"Always. That spiced rum was quite good, wasn't it?"
"Yes," Fenris says again, and smirks as Hawke skips forward a few steps, twirling so that her new, furred cloak flares away from her knees. A bag at his hip holds their other presents: a book for him, and a short, sharp knife, and a belt Hawke has eyed for months. He is not—used to such things. To the giving of such things. He finds that he enjoys it.
Still, it is the evening of Satinalia, and of all nights Fenris thinks this is one that should be enjoyed. It is not so cold as it has been, though the snow has stuck to earth and stone far longer than even Isabela expected. In the dark it shows every color but white: blue in the shadows, where it has piled against stone walls and caught in curls of green ivy; grey on rooftops, where there is only starlight to see it; fire-gold on windowsills, and in the spill before an open door.
White against Hawke's hair, perhaps. White in the moment it falls.
"Oh—listen!" Hawke says suddenly, her fingers wrapping around his arm. "Bells!"
He turns his head—and there is the Chantry, every window aglow with candles and wreaths and the trappings of the evening service. There are bells, too, ringing above and within, and as Hawke leads him closer he can hear the choir as well, voices lifting above the bells in a song he does not know.
They stop before they reach the stairs, though, under the bare branches of a tree that once bore autumn leaves. Fenris looks at Hawke. "Do you wish to go in?"
Her gaze follows the light draped along the long stairway, pooled in snow, twisted into the curves of the golden doors that even now stand open to cool a room that must be overcrowded, where the choir's harmonies might reach out into the winter and touch what wandering soul might yet pass by.
"No," Hawke says at last, and Fenris thinks this is right, too, because Hawke knows herself too well for wandering. "I think I'd just like to listen for a while."
They do. The choir finishes their song and moves to another, and then a third, a solemner thing that Fenris has heard before and liked. Hawke's cheeks are not so red now; all the same her eyes are brighter, and when that one ends her fingers slip between his at their sides. The last song has no words. It is only bells, high and light and silver first, and then the brighter golden-tongued ones join them, and by the time the deep brassy basses add their voices to the song Hawke is laughing, delighted beyond reason, and Fenris cannot help but smile at her in answer.
"I love this one," Hawke says, and laughs again. "It sounds so much better here than it did in Lothering."
"More practiced?"
"More bells. Brass isn't cheap, and we were only a country chantry. But the children always did a special little tune on Satinalia, and I can't tell you how much I used to look forward to that."
Abruptly Fenris is struck with an image of Hawke, younger, a child, both hands gripped around the handle of a bell too large for her, brow creased in earnest attention. He cannot stop his laugh, does not try—and when Hawke smiles at him and slides her arms around his waist he pulls her closer without hesitation, without fear of her reactions or his own. Her cheek slides against his; her temple brushes the tip of his ear. The tree-branches above them glitter with the stars shining on thin ice.
He says, "I am glad you are here, Hawke."
Her cloak rustles as her arms tighten around him. "I'm glad I'm here with you."
They stand there a long time. Long enough the bell-song ends, long enough that the mother superior begins her sermon, long enough that the heat of mead fades from his hands, his feet in their boots. He does not mind. Hawke is warm enough for the both of them.
Eventually, though, she pulls free, grinning as she tugs his coat closer to his neck. "We should make this a tradition," she tells him. Her voice is very quiet. "One for us. Next year—we'll stand here again, just like this, and listen to the bells and freeze our toes off."
Fenris does not know what the next year will bring. He does not know if they will still be here in the city, if the Chantry will still stand golden and shining on its hill, if some new threat might stir across the continent to draw them both. He does not know if they will even survive the dangers Hawke will lead him through in the months to come. And he is certain she will—they neither of them lead lives of safety—and he is just as certain that he will follow her all the same, without doubt, without regret.
He might kiss her now. He thinks a promise would be worth more.
"Yes," Fenris says, and takes her hand, at peace.