He runs out onto the landing and stares out over the foyer. Fenris is fighting furiously, a ghost of glowing lyrium - one that bleeds. He has taken down perhaps a dozen men already, but he is heavily wounded and tiring.
One of the slavers notices him and shouts to the others; Fenris twirls his sword in a circle, forcing them back.
"Anders, run!" he shouts.
"Not leaving you!" Anders shouts back.
"Venhedis, this is not the time -" Fenris gets no further, forced to defend himself as his opponents press the attack once more.
"Sadly, it is," Anders murmurs to himself as a group of slavers peel off from the main group to start running up the stairs towards him. He throws up a shield over Fenris before turning to face them.
The staff isn't enchanted, but it is, at least, something he can use as a focus. He levels it at the foremost slavers and unleashes a chain lightning spell that dances among the clustered men who are suddenly all rather regretting their armour choices. Chainmail probably looked like a good option when they donned it that morning, he muses. He follows it up with a fireball then he's leaping down the stairs past the charred remains of what were once men.
Ice fans from his hand, freezing several men to the floor whilst he turns to deal with others coming towards him. He unleashes a spirit blast, hurling them back, before turning to block an attempted sword strike from a slaver who had tried to flank him with the haft of his staff, breathing a fervent if breathless prayer of thanks to Andraste when the staff holds and doesn't shatter under the blow. He smacks the slaver upside the head with the foot of the staff before unleashing another spirit blast.
He's tiring. Maker, he's tiring, and there are too many of them, and he's not used to fighting like this, and they're both going to die and damn it, this is so unfair. He can't even see Fenris for the slavers around him, though he can hear him swearing furiously. Not dead yet then. He unleashes another fireball, then reaches out to send a wave of healing in the direction of the elf-shaped ball of pain he can sense even as he freezes the feet of the nearest slavers to the floor.
He's aware of the door bursting open and shouts as Hawke, Bethany, Varric, Isabela and Merrill erupt into the room like a force of nature and start laying into the group, but he has eyes only for Fenris who has just cut down the last of the slavers nearest him and is staring around with murderous eyes until his gaze falls on Anders.
"Mage," he snarls.
Anders' blood turns to ice.
He backs away, but Fenris is faster; he's dimly aware of shouts and screams, but Fenris' clawed hand is suddenly about his throat and then his back is slammed into a wall and his head bounces off plaster. He's seeing stars, and he can't breathe.
The hand about his throat loosens, and he blinks hard, dizzy, finding himself staring into furious emerald-green eyes.
"You deceived me!" snarls the elf.
"Sorry - I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!" he babbles. "Please - believe me, I never meant to, I never -"
Pain. The most indescribable pain he has ever felt. His eyes widen with the agony and he would scream, but he has no breath. He drops his gaze to Fenris' hand, glowing, buried within his chest; and he knows the elf's fingers are curled around his heart as it falters, heartbeat stuttering.
It hurts, Maker it hurts, beyond any pain he's ever felt before. But worse is the look of hatred in Fenris' eyes as he glares at Anders, and it is not pain that brings tears to his eyes.
"Fenris! What in the Void is wrong with you?"
Hawke. It's Hawke shouting; shouting at Fenris. Varric too. Bethany's voice in the background.
"Is this the way you treat the ones you love, Fenris? Better not write this one into the stories, Varric."
Isabela's voice - and that finally gets through to the elf where nothing else has. He whirls away to confront the Rivaini woman with a howl of fury, and suddenly the pain eases as Anders collapses to the ground, clutching at his chest and gasping for breath.
"Easy there, Blondie; are you -"
He pushes Varric's hand away as he scrabbles for his staff and then lurches to his feet.
He turns and runs.
He hears them calling to him, but he doesn't look back. All he knows is that Fenris finally knows what he is, and he can't stay there any longer. He has to run. He doesn't know where to go; he has nowhere to go - except the Gallows, and he's not going back there.
His feet find the way back to Lowtown, adrenaline giving him energy that he lacked before. He finds himself standing outside the Hanged Man - but surely that's the first place they'll look for him.
Down. Something inside - some instinct, perhaps - tells him to keep going down. Every time he comes to a staircase, he goes down, until the ramshackle houses of Lowtown give way to the fetid sewers and shanties of Darktown.
His feet stumble through muck, and he's beginning to shake badly as the adrenaline wears off. He aches all over and he's exhausted, at the limits of his endurance.
He finds a boarded up hole and manages to wrest a couple of boards away, enough to crawl in, before tugging the boards back behind him. He crawls along the narrow passage, dragging his staff with him, until he can crawl no further. He finds a pile of dusty rags - perhaps the remains of sacks or something; he neither knows nor cares as he makes them into a nest and then collapses, falling swiftly into an exhausted sleep.
"He deceived me! He deceived all of us!" Fenris glares at Hawke, who glares right back, undaunted by his fury.
"Is it any wonder, if this is the way you react?" she exclaims. "You make no secret of how much you hate mages! You rant about it every chance you get! How often did he have to hear it when he was still sick and wounded? Maker, no wonder his wounds weren't healing - you realise he was probably poisoned with magebane when you found him? I don't blame him for keeping it to himself when he was finally coherent enough to actually talk to us!"
"Wouldn't surprise me if he'd barely gotten out of the Gallows with his life," Varric shakes his head sadly.
"He had," says Bethany quietly.
"You! You knew what he was, and you kept it to yourself!" Fenris snarls; Hawke steps in front of her sister.
"Don't you speak to my sister that way!" she growls, setting a hand on the hilt of her knife.
Instinctively, he lights up his brands - then holds still as a very distinctive and loud click announces that Varric has just cocked Bianca and is holding her trained upon Fenris.
"Don't do it, Broody," the dwarf warns him quietly.
Fenris lets his brands die, and Varric steps back after a moment and lowers Bianca slightly.
"Now. Why don't we all just calm down and discuss this like friends?" he suggests in a reasonable tone.
"He betrayed me," says Fenris quietly.
"It looked to me like he was saving your ungrateful arse from where I was standing," argues Isabela. "Honestly, it's a wonder you have any friends at all if that's the way you treat someone who cares about you."
"Cares about...!" echoes Fenris hotly, turning to glare at her; to his mortification, Varric is nodding.
"Anyone with half a brain and a pair of eyes could see it," shrugs Isabela. "We were all expecting you two to finally figure it out between you last night."
Fenris glares at her but the expected smirk is absent from her lips. He blinks, and remembers feeling Anders snuggle up against him in the dark hours of the morning. Touches, here and there; fingers brushing. The blush stealing across Anders' face when he'd tucked the man's hair back behind his ear. The sleepy smile early that morning - and the cup of tea he'd had waiting for Fenris when they'd emerged from that final cave, fixed exactly the way Fenris preferred.
"I don't blame him for running," Merrill remarks quietly. "I'd have run too - and I don't even particularly like Fenris. Did you see his eyes? He was crying."
"Not now, Daisy," murmurs Varric, but Fenris reels. Crying? He'd thought the man's eyes watered merely from pain, but -
"He was crying?" He glances to Varric for confirmation, and the dwarf sighs.
"Go find him, Broody. Maybe it's not too late to apologise. Assuming you just realised you don't actually hate him after all?"
He pushes past the dwarf, ignoring Hawke as she calls his name.
Maybe it's not too late.
It's been three weeks, and there is no sign of Anders. Fenris has hunted everywhere he can think of; tirelessly, he has prowled Hightown, Lowtown, the docks - anywhere and everywhere he and Anders have been together. Anders does not know the city well; he had been on his feet such a short time, after all. Fenris had assumed his lack of knowledge was due to being held by his captors; he had never dreamed those captors were templars.
He finally swallows his pride and asks Isabela, Varric and Hawke to go with him to the Gallows. But there are no new Tranquil in the courtyard with blond hair and honey-brown eyes, and Solivitus has heard nothing of any escaped mages or apostates being brought in in the past three weeks.
Fenris feels relief wash over him at those words. Relief, that a mage has escaped and runs free. That thought should anger him, but he finds himself questioning much he'd taken for granted. He nursed Anders through long nights. He remembers the marks of torture upon that starved, milk-pale body; the screaming nightmares. He had assumed Anders a slave.
Perhaps he had not been so wrong at that.
He finds he eyes the templar patrols with different eyes now. Where once he saw them as necessary, righteous, to be admired - now he views them with suspicion, and wonders which one wielded the whip against that frail form he had nursed. How many others they had tortured.
Four weeks. A month. Two months. And still no sign of Anders.
Time passes. He still searches, but out of habit. He accompanies Hawke on various jobs. He is quiet, withdrawn; he fights readily enough, but when it is over, he returns to his mansion alone.
He sits, staring at Anders' empty chair, and he drinks himself slowly into oblivion where he sometimes dreams of honey-brown eyes, soft dark gold hair, and a voice that huskily breathes his name. More often, he dreams of those honey-brown eyes wide in fear and pain, tears rolling down bloodless cheeks. Sometimes those dreams are nightmares in which he is cradling Anders' lifeless form and stares at the bloody hole where the mage's heart should be.
Those dreams are the worst.
Hawke has almost gathered all the coin she needs for Bartrand's expedition. Varric says they need an edge; something Bartrand won't be able to say no to. He's heard of a man down in Darktown who, it's rumoured, has maps to the Deep Roads. A Ferelden refugee. They go to see Lirene and learn the man is a healer.
They exchange glances.
"Where can we find him?" asks Hawke.
That is how Fenris finds himself walking into a ramshackle clinic in Darktown - the one place it never occurred to him to look; and it's him.
Anders.
Fenris' heart leaps in his chest and he cannot speak.
Anders is bent over a patient - a young boy. His eyes are closed as he focuses on his work, oblivious to all. As the boy gasps and sits up, Anders staggers and nearly falls; the boy's father catches his arm and gives him a grateful look. Anders waves away his thanks and the meagre coin they offer and turns away, glancing up as he does so - then freezes for a moment as his eyes fall upon them. Upon Fenris.
He whirls and snatches up his staff then turns and brandishes it, and Fenris can feel the air become charged with power as the mage begins to draw mana to him.
"This place is a sanctum of healing - why do you threaten it?" he calls challengingly.
And his eyes as he stares at Fenris are cold as ice.