I sometimes wonder if the Chantry's many laws regarding magic are even necessary. Darkspawn are a greater threat than blood mages, even abominations. It takes decades for the world to recover from a Blight. - Duncan


Fenris started pacing in front of the fireplace in the Hawke estate's library, keeping his gaze fixed on the floor. Hawke had insisted that she was perfectly fine, but she seemed to have forgotten that he wasn't blind. He saw the stiffness of her stride, and he worried that he'd seriously hurt her. It was the last thing he ever wanted to do.

"De vacuo ea!" he spat, looking up at the statue above the fireplace. He told Hawke time and again that he hated that statue, and yet she insisted on keeping it. He couldn't imagine why, when she had no recollection of when or where she acquired it.

"Say that again? Only try the common tongue this time, I don't speak Arcanum." He turned to see Hawke in the doorway, still in her armor. She had yet to replace her ruined finery, and he forced himself to suppress the memory of exactly what had happened to it. "I have something to tell you, and I'd rather you be sitting down before I do."

He eyed Hawke warily before sitting in a chair that was turned away from the statue, his gaze never leaving her face. Her normal self-confidence was being overshadowed by an insecurity he would never have expected to see from her. She became restless and began pacing, something she constantly berated him for. Rather than point that out, he simply waited as patiently as he possibly could.

"This is definitely as difficult as I thought it would be, so I'll just come right out with it," she started, the speed of her words resembling Merrill's, and he suppressed the instinctive bristling at the thought of the blood mage. "We figured out what happened with Arais, and what happened to you. She's something called Mensana…" Fenris listened as Hawke explained exactly what a Mensana was, practically drilling the fact that it was not blood magic into his head with every other sentence.

"From what I was able to gather when Anders was explaining it all, the healing incident was just residual energy from when she had healed you in battle. As for what happened with us, the only viable explanation we could come up with was that when you... climaxed… the burst of energy was lyrium leaving your body and transferring into mine. They found lyrium in my muscles, but Arais was able to remove it, albeit unintentionally. Afterwards, any pain I had been feeling was gone."

"And what of my memories returning?" he asked, his voice betraying only a small amount of the significant anticipation he was feeling.

"When you told me about how you received those markings, you said that the pain of the lyrium being burned into your skin was severe enough to wipe your memory clean. I think it was the lyrium—not the pain—that actually affected your memory. The only way to explain how your memories returned is brief exposure to Arais' unique ability to heal lyrium-induced brain damage."

He stood from his chair and—suddenly animated and feeling the need to move—began pacing. "Did I tell you that my markings hurt less? The pain was the same when I came here last night, but as I left this morning, I noticed that the pain wasn't as severe. The lyrium that transferred from my body to yours… it must have been connected to my markings."

"If that's true, Fenris," she began, approaching him and laying a hand on his upper arm to still him, "do you think she might be able to heal the markings? Would you want her to?"

"I don't know," he replied, too caught up in his own thoughts to be upset that she was pointing out the obvious again. "If it is true, I don't know what I would do. Without these markings, Danarius would no longer have reason to hunt me down. But life with these markings is all I've ever known. I can't imagine what it would be like without them." Fenris watched as a flurry of emotions clouded the violet eyes that refused to meet his, clearly desperate to console him in some way.

He put his hands on her shoulders, shaking her a bit so she would meet his gaze. "Hawke, just because you've set out on an impossible quest to save all of Kirkwall from running itself into the ground does not mean you have to save me, is that clear?" She nodded, doubt still glimmering in her eyes. "I can take care of myself."

"That doesn't mean I don't want to be there, Fenris," she persisted. "I care about you, maybe a little too much. I'd do anything to protect you. I have to make up for…" she trailed off, a lone tear trailing down her cheek.

"You still blame yourself for what happened to Bethany in the Deep Roads," he stated more than asked. He had been there to see the corruption consume Hawke's younger sister, had heard the last words exchanged between sisters before Bethany took her last breaths. Hawke had held herself together well on their journey back to the surface, but for the most part refused to talk about it to anyone but Varric.

"If I had only listened to my mother; if I hadn't been such a blighted fool, she'd still be alive."

"I cannot imagine what it must be like to lose your family. Anything I could say would be insufficient." He lifted his hand to wipe the stray tear from where it had paused on her chin. She turned her head to lean into his palm, sighing as another tear streaked down the other cheek. "I'm sorry."

"Let's go upstairs," she whispered, grasping the hand on her cheek in hers, lowering their joined hands before leading him out of the library and up the stairs. When the door to her bedchamber was closed, she kissed him gently, and his heart ached for her as he felt one of her tears touch his lip.

Maker, he wished he could take away her pain.


"You think you'll be able to make it?"

Alistair smiled at Arais, who stood less than a foot away from him as he got up from the examination table. "I'm a bit sore, but I'll manage. I can't stay still any longer."

"You never were the patient type," she pointed out, smirking at him. "The number of times you had to come to me to heal a wound you had reopened because Wynne refused to do it again was astounding. Not that I minded. I enjoyed teasing you."

"Don't tell Wynne, but," Alistair leaned in close, almost conspiratorially, "You were always a better healer than she was."

"And yet you still managed to reopen the wounds after I healed them."

He glared at her. "They itched horribly! I can't stand itchiness."

"Oh, hush. You sound like a child," she teased, taking his arm as he began to take tentative steps forward.

"Ow. My pride." He turned his attention to Anders, who was sitting silently at his desk, his attention focused solely on the Tevinter tome he had used to identify Arais' ability. Alistair was tempted to thank him, but feared any attempt to speak to the healer would go unheard. He turned back to Arais. "Back to the Hanged Man, then?"

"Yes," she replied.

She said a quick farewell to Anders, who, as Alistair suspected, didn't seem to register the words in the slightest. Arais rolled her eyes almost imperceptibly before leading Alistair out of the clinic.


This story has officially taken on a mind of its own. I'm about to jump into my own imagination and kick every character's ass. Except I have no battle training and they're all at least Level 12 in their respective classes so I'll probably get destroyed and then I won't be able to finish my story because I'll be in some kind of vegetative coma or something...sorry, done rambling. If you hadn't noticed, I'm pretty much the real-life equivalent of Merrill, sans pointy ears.

Thanks again to twixtnightandmorn. She knows what she did. :-)