Fenris is not strong enough for this.

He does not know how long he stands outside the door to Hawke's estate. Long enough that the rain-hunched guard patrolling the empty square makes one full round and then a second; long enough that even the oiled leather of his jerkin begins to seep and stain and drip onto his bare feet. Protect, Sebastian had said, and he knows that Hawke will keep gentle after three days of asking for him, but—

She is going to send him away, and he will not be able to bear it.

Not like this, not now, not after everything that has happened. If he could go back—if he could have kept himself from hope—but now he is here and Hawke is hurt beyond repair, and it is every bruise his own fault. His own helplessness made real. In Minrathous a failure like this would have been met with public flogging and immediate auction, or abandonment to blood slavery, or torture of his own and then—death. To have left a magister to suffer and be maimed in his stead and for his sake—no. It would be nothing less than what he deserved—and nothing more. In Minrathous, his life would have been over.

He touches the Amell crest at his hip. Home again where it belongs, where he thought he might have once belonged—

Fenris closes his eyes. His life is over here, too.

Enough, he thinks, and his mouth shapes the word even as he lifts his hand to knock. Three days are enough. Three years—have been enough. Let her remove the damaged part at last; let her cut out the soft rotted place that threatens to poison the whole. He deserves no less.

The door opens. Orana stands there as if she has been waiting for him to simply make up his mind, her eyes sad and wounded on his behalf, and when he steps into the open warmth of Hawke's home she withdraws without a word. He knows the way. And yet, even resolved as he is, Fenris finds his steps faltering as he approaches her open door. He can hear movement inside, see shadows dancing across the far wall through rain-lit glass, and as he gains his first glimpse of Hawke in three days he stops despite himself.

Hawke sits cross-legged on her bedcovers, dressed in dark trousers and a soft grey shirt that hangs too large on her now, her hair cleaned and tied back at the nape of her neck. She does not see him standing shadowed in her doorway, focused as she is on her right hand splayed over the crimson coverlet. Her left arm matches the other's angle as far down as the middle of her forearm; there a white bandage cuts it off like a sentence stopped mid-word. Even as he watches she turns her arms, bends her elbows so that she reaches towards her own face. She holds them there a moment, looking at the movement of muscles where the stump of her arm ends; then she rests her elbows on her knees, shoulders bowing forward, and puts the flat of her right hand against air in space before her, as if there were another hand to meet it palm-to-palm, as if she were praying. Again her left arm mirrors the angle, the motion, the bandaged stump of a forearm trying to meet its match; again, still, there is—nothing there.

He makes no sound, but all at once Hawke's head comes up. The movement is sharp and startling like a kite's wings snapping; her eyes are sharp, too, above her hollowed cheeks, pinning him where he stands in the door in the way prey is pinned before being killed and eaten—and he thinks, when he can think, that it is right that she should eat his heart after this, after what he has done to her.

She says, too loudly, "Fenris."

He steps forward.

Hawke says his name again when he is halfway across the room, softer and more surprised, and abruptly he realizes what he must look like, soaked as he is, his hair plastered to his forehead, his clothes wet and rain-stained and leaving streaks of water on her floor. But he has come too far to turn back now, his heart not strong enough to make this journey a second time, and as he draws nearer the bed Hawke makes a short, quick motion as if she means to rise.

"No—" he says abruptly, because he can see the splint still wrapped tight to her ankle, and whether it is his words or his face that stops her she goes wholly still, half-raised hand falling back into her lap, her face turning up to him like a flower turns its face to daylight. She knows him. He can see it in her eyes, and even though his mind has known for three days that her fever has healed and her bruises have lessened, it is still a terrible shock to see her so much less—damaged than he remembers. "Save your strength."

"You came," she says, wondering.

"Yes," he tells her lamely, reaching her side, finding suddenly he has no further plan, his hands hanging loose and awkward at his sides. "I…yes."

"I—wasn't sure if you would."

"Sebastian told me," he begins, then falters into silence. Hawke watches him, expectant, and he gropes for words, for—anything. "How—are you feeling?"

Her mouth quirks as she flicks her fingers at herself in an encompassing gesture. "Better than I was. As you can see."

"The bruises are fading."

"Anders is marvelous."

"Unlike—" he begins without thought, and then his mind catches up with his tongue and he clamps his teeth together.

But Hawke has already caught his meaning. "Unlike Nys's healer, yes."

Guilt swells in his gut, twisting him into a hot, tight knot. "Forgive me. I did not mean to speak of that."

"Afraid of unpleasant memories?" Hawke asks, and at Fenris's stony glare she lets out a bark of laughter. "No need to worry about that. Those have settled so near the surface I don't even have to stir them to bring them up."

Fenris winces, hurt. "All the same, I apologize."

Something snaps tight in Hawke's face at that, something thin pulling thinner until he thinks she might tear apart, and her voice comes out choked. "Please. Fenris. Anything but more apologies."

"Hawke—"

She forces a smile. "I've had nothing but three days of people telling me how sorry they are for not coming sooner. You're the one person in the world who doesn't need to apologize for that, too."

His jaw clenches. It is not even his own guilt he wishes to ease—Sebastian, like an arrow, had struck too near that heart—but he does not know how else to convey to Hawke his shame, his regret at his own helplessness. But—Hawke wishes him to be silent, for what little time he has left here.

He will accept that.

At last, his voice foreign and formal to his own ears, Fenris says, "As you wish."

And now Hawke flinches, her gaze flicking away from him to the coverlet. "Please don't say it like that. That's not—that isn't what I meant at all. I just meant…" But she cannot seem to find the words, and instead she trails off into a forlorn silence.

He does not know what to say at all, now, so instead he says nothing. The room is still for a long time save the drip of water from the ends of his slow-drying hair and the rain against the window-glass; then, finally, Hawke says, "Fenris. Are you—angry with me?"

His shock is enough to startle him from silence. "Of course not."

"Then why are you—acting like—" she makes a rough gesture at him, the lines at the corners of her eyes deepening with unhappiness. "Why did you take so long to come?"

As if she does not—Fenris knows she does not mean to toy with him, but he is stretched too thin himself already and he cannot pretend to restraint when his memories still flood with Hawke's screams, with metal on flesh, with the smell of hot iron and blood. Guilt and shame run so hot in him he might have been staked spread-limbed in the great shadeless arena of Minrathous, slave laid out a sacrifice to the regret that spreads like wings of fire behind his ribs. He snorts and turns on his heel, scrubbing one hand over his face and into his hair because there is no answer to that, no possible response that will not hurt him or her in the giving of it.

Hawke says, "You are angry."

Not at her, but he is angry, furious, caught in the terrible impotent rage that has burned for ten days and consumes all things in that burning. "Yes," he snarls into his fingers, and he turns again to Hawke. The words tumble out like stones from an upturned hand, heavy and precise and cracking on the floor beneath him. "This morning. I returned to the cave."

"What?"

"I burned it." He can still see it in his mind, the empty, scarred table splashed and shining with oil; the bodies rank with rot and insects still lying where they had fallen, where he had felled them; the spear-haft still jutting from Nys's broken breastbone. "Everything. To ash."

"What?" Hawke breathes again, and when he turns she is white as unfired china—and yet even as he watches two spots of color begin to blaze high on her cheeks. "You went back without me?"

"Yes."

"You—why? You think I didn't want to see that place destroyed as badly as you?"

He does not want this hurt in her face—and yet he savors it all the same, sickening himself, prizing beyond reason the life and strength that must lie at the root to give her its voice. Something pounds in his chest like a hammer against his ribs. He cannot quite draw breath. "It was best this way. You could not have walked the path."

"I would have found a way!"

"And harmed yourself further? Undone all the mage's work?" The anger is hot in his chest, a white pinpricked star that makes his skin tingle and his lyrium flicker with light. Her eyes catch the reflection, throw it back just as strong and brighter. The rain still has not stopped.

"That didn't slow you down, did it?" she snaps, and Fenris moves closer, wanting to be close to this scalding heat even as it tears him apart. "You left me behind—you didn't even give me the choice."

"You expect me to know your mind from a distance?"

"You could have at least asked! After everything—after all of that, I'd have hoped you'd at least—stick your head in the door and mention, 'oh, I'm going to go back to the cave and burn everything in that Void-taken place to cinders, do you mind,' and then I could have said—'no, I don't mind, enjoy your massacre-broil,' or 'yes, actually, let me come and I'll save you a torch, I'll just get someone to tie this rope around my waist so you can drag me up the mountain behind you!'" She clenches her eyes shut, opens them again, and suddenly, without warning, Fenris can see the weighted shadow of sorrow and fear that has dogged her for three days, that has been shackled to her throat by his own silence. "Anything—anything would have been better than being forced to sit here going mad, waiting on you, ter—" she chokes on an unexpected gasping sob, tries again, "—terrified that I'd chased you off again because I wasn't strong enough when you needed me to be."

He doesn't know how he finds his voice, how the words come out level. "I meant to protect you, Hawke."

"And now you've had your revenge twice over," she bites out through another heaving gasp, her hand fisted in the cloth at her knee. "When do I get mine, Fenris?"

Oh, but her voice drips with hurt, with unspent fury, and he grieves at the strength of it because this is not a thing meant for Hawke to carry; this is not what he meant to bring her on this last visit. "You want it?"

"Yes!" Hawke shouts, the word falling dead in the rain-dampened corners of her room. She glares at him, her eyes bright with tears. "No. I don't know. I don't know. They cut off my damned hand. I can—I can be upset about it if I like."

"That is not what I meant!"

"Isn't it?"

"No!"

"Damn it," Hawke gasps, swiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. "Why are you here, Fenris?"

To say—to see one last time—

He straightens, his jaw tight. There is nothing to say that will mend this. "Excuse me," he says stiffly. "I should go."

"You should—" Hawke repeats, astonished; then all at once she puts her hand over her suddenly sheet-white face and collapses into herself, and his racing heart stumbles into an abrupt limp.

For a long, stretching moment, she does not move. Her shoulders are curved like a bow and strained as tight, her face hidden from him, something so stone-hard and hurt in the air between them that he cannot breathe beneath it. Quietly, he says, "Hawke?"

"Shit," he hears her say, the word thin and muffled with her fingers and desperate even so, and her hand fists against her forehead. "Damn it. I've done this all wrong."

He doesn't know what she means, but even from here he can see that she has little strength left. But then again, for this, neither does he. "You should not blame yourself for this. You're tired; you should rest."

"Not yet. Not yet. Fenris—listen." She lifts her head with great effort, holds his eyes with a pale, bruised, pleading gaze. "It's not even about the cave, not really. For all I care the blasted place can get sucked into the hills and never seen again. We each have to figure parts of this out by ourselves and I understand that, I do—and I understand why you went there alone. But it's been—" she swallows, hard, and he finds himself clenching the bedpost with one hand for as much anchor as support, because there is something terrible swelling behind her eyes and if he is not careful he will sweep out to sea with it, drowned, lost without hope. "It's been three days. And before that I was—sick, and before that we were in the cave, and before that we were fighting, and I think—I thought—"

She looks down, clenches her eyes shut; her voice is a whisper through dying leaves. "I was afraid you'd decided having to deal with the—thing I'd become was…too much. I wouldn't have blamed you if it was."

He drags in a breath, stricken. "No. No. Never."

"Was it the nightmare? Orana told me what I—but Fenris, those were fever-dreams. I didn't know what I was saying, I swear. It was just a terrible memory."

"I know that, Hawke."

"Then why—" she starts, but before he can speak her eyes fly to his, a new numb horror rippling across her face like a stream burst by a thrown stone. "But—" she breathes, aghast at her own delayed comprehension, "what you went through in that cave was worse, wasn't it?" She blinks, looks at him like a stranger; then her eyes go distant as she looks back with sudden perspective on this conversation, on the week in the cave, on his own three days of absence. She swallows as if her throat has closed; then Hawke covers her face with her fingers and says, certain, "It was. What I put you through—it must have been. I only had to endure."

Of course not, he wants to say, of course not—but all his words are stopped up in his throat, throttled by truth, by the sight of Hawke bent so suddenly and so totally to the realization of his own suffering. Without meaning to he reaches out, his fingers hovering over her disheveled hair, but her shoulders shudder in a dry sob and his hand curls into a fist instead. He manages only, "Hawke."

"I'm sorry," she says, pushing against the bed, against herself, straightening without meeting his eyes as she wipes the tears from her own. "I'm so sorry. Fenris, I—I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I should have—I should never have demanded those things of you. I should never have asked you to make that kind of choice. I've had so many people here and I know Aveline's been feeding you, but I didn't—I should have—"

The words escape him without thought. "I thought you wished for no more apologies."

Now she looks at him; then she lets out a soft, startled laugh, and suddenly the thick bruised place in the air between them begins to lighten. "You're right. I did."

He hovers a moment more, uncertain, but after a few seconds Hawke shifts her weight away from him, opening a place on the edge of the bed for him to sit, and with only a flicker of hesitation he takes it despite his still-damp clothes. This will only make it worse in the end for him, he knows, but Fenris is a selfish man and if it gains him a few minutes more, here…

"This is a mess, isn't it?" Hawke's voice is quiet as she picks at her bandage, and when she looks at him there is little left of that white-cold anger in her face. Now she looks only tired. "I think I liked it better when we were only uncomfortable and a little awkward before, instead of miserable and angry and hurt." Her mouth quirks. "And handless, in my case."

Fenris shakes his head, the gesture as much at the sentiment as at the manner of its expression. "The joke is too soon."

"Impossible," Hawke tells him, cupping her forearm in her hand as if to present it to him. "Anders takes the bandages off tomorrow. If I'm not joking about it already, Isabela will get the first one and I'll spend forever catching up."

He shakes his head again, smiling through his own reluctance to do so, but she holds her arm a moment too long and her cheeks flush just too bright, and without meaning to he reaches out, reaches forward, touches his fingers to the inside of her elbow, lets his palm come to rest just above the edge of the bandages so that the red band around his wrist meets the white. "I did not come here to fight with you," he begins, the apology already on his tongue; but she is watching him as if he has become something at once wondrous and terrifying, and the words vanish without voice.

She covers his hand with her own, her words quiet and unsteady. "It's my fault. I didn't realize. In the end I was so sick, and I didn't realize—what you must have gone through while I had no mind. I'm sorry I didn't understand before. I'm sorry I didn't thank you before. For waiting." A corner of her mouth tilts up. "For trying. For risking your life for a raving lunatic."

A half-choked laugh tears out of him. "I could do no less."

"It would have been easier on you. To do less, I mean."

"Nothing would have kept me from you, Hawke," he says, his voice low, intent, and feels suddenly her heartbeat skip forward beneath his palm, a surge into a thundering rush of something he doesn't dare name, not yet. His thumb strokes along her elbow once, and then again. A third time.

He has no right to do this—not to be here with her, not to touch her like this, not to—anything more, even if he cannot stop himself wishing it.

She does not pull away.

"Fenris," she says quietly, the humor gone now to leave something more anxious in its wake, and her eyes jump down to his hand and back again. "What you said…what you said. In the cave. When I…"

"Yes."

Hawke swallows, meets his eyes. There is no stumble in her voice—only longing. "Did you mean it?"

His heart leaps. He has enough regrets to bend even the back of a magister, but this…

Fenris does not regret this. He says, "Yes."

Her eyes close and open again, slowly, and when she looks at him it is as if the world has tilted between one moment and the next. "Why did you wait so long to come?"

No sound but the rain outside; no words but the truth. "I expected to be sent away."

"But I don't want you to go."

She says it easily, simply, as if these words have not shredded the lonely, shadowed path he expected into glittering shards; his blood pounds in his ears. Somehow he has leaned closer to her; somehow his other hand has found its way to her shoulder, to the line of her neck, a skimming brush over the too-raised bone of her cheek. His voice is low and thick and rougher than he means it. "I have no wish to leave."

"You left once."

"I was a fool."

She gives a watery laugh. "I didn't help."

"I should have…" He swallows down the jumping pulse in his throat, touches his fingertips to her cheek again. The things that mattered then still matter now, Danarius and a sister and a past he does not remember, but one full week in a lightless cave—and so much wasted time. "That night. Hawke, I should have stayed."

She draws in a breath, lets it out again, slow and smooth as curtains pulling apart over a broad sun-swallowed window. Her heartbeat thunders under his palm; her face is alight. Alive.

Then she says, the sound breaking in the middle as if she is too small for the emotion that roils inside her, "So—stay now." Fenris stares, caught unbalanced; Hawke's hand comes up to catch his wrist, holding his fingers against her cheek, her too-bright eyes holding his. "Here. If you still want. With—me."

There is no promise he can make to that. Words are such worthless things anyway, falling away before the swell of emotion in his chest like sparrows thrown back by the west winds. He leans forward, closer to her, meaning to say—something—but a light catches in her eyes instead, something like hope but deeper than hope, and her lips part as she draws nearer to meet him, as she draws in a short, shallow breath.

Ah—

He hesitates when she does, giving them both a chance to check their hearts; then all at once she laughs and he smiles and his hand curls around the back of her neck—

And he kisses her.

It is only a little thing, chaste and cautious and gentler than he knows to be. Her lips are chapped; his own are rough with salt and smoke and his clothes are still damp enough to be uncomfortable, but none of it—none of it matters, not now, not like this with Hawke pulling him closer, her hand on his cheek, holding him in place despite his soaring, her smile against his mouth. They have survived so much hatred and death over the last seven days; this is no panacea, not for wounds that run so deep as theirs—but it is a step to healing for them both, small and sure and a start.

He draws back, kisses her again. Twice more. Three times. The third time she does not let him go.

Three years. A lifetime like this and it would still not be enough.

Still, despite the circumstances—despite themselves—the embrace remains quiet, as if that might disguise the wild driving drum-beat of his heart, and Fenris finds himself glad of it. Hawke is still injured and they are both still wounded, and to press so hard on something still so young and tender could only cause them pain. This thing between them is new enough; better to let it grow into steady life and breath before they test its endurance.

Then Hawke makes a soft, gentle noise in the back of her throat as he pulls away, and Fenris nearly throws his resolutions to the rain. But the hollows of her cheeks check him, and the shadows beneath her eyes, and the wince she makes as muscles pull on twinging ribs, and though he does not quite know the way of comfort Fenris settles for gripping her only hand with his own, as if that might stop them both from trembling. Time later for the rest; it is enough that she does not wish him to leave. In Minrathous—

In Minrathous, Danarius would have given him to die. In Minrathous, there would be no place in his heart left tender and yielding beneath the scars. He no longer lives in that city; that city must no longer live in him.

"Sleep, Hawke," he tells her, his voice low.

Her hand turns over beneath his, palm to palm, as if she is praying. "How long will you be here?"

This answer is easy, no hesitation in the baring of it. "Until you tell me to go."

She laughs. "Couldn't if I wanted to. You're the only one who enjoys my humor."

"Enjoy is a strong word, Hawke."

"Tolerate, then."

"Better," he says, and watches her as she watches him, her eyes half-lidding, one corner of her mouth turned up in a smile. She tugs at him gently and he lets himself be tugged, lets himself move into place beside her on the bed without thought to his rain-stained clothing so that her head rests on his arm, so that her knees fit alongside his knees, so that his mouth brushes over the soft skin at the nape of her neck. He wonders if she can feel his disbelieving fingers shake where they hold her too tightly; he wonders if his pulse thumps as fast and uncontrolled in his throat as hers.

Pulling memory between them, she asks, "Will you tell me about Seheron?"

"I will," Fenris murmurs, memory's other half; and he does, quietly, until eventually she falls asleep, her fingers twined with his.