AN: Tomorrow is my birthday, and as sort of a hobbit-y reverse present, I thought I'd put this chapter up a day early. In addition, I have been dying to reveal since the first chapter that this Silver Lion is indeed the inn featured in my shortfic "A Conversation," posted in January of 2013. Readers of both fics may have suspected its involvement from the first, and I'm happy to be able to report at last that they are one and the same. Those interested in another perspective of the following events may enjoy it as well, even if the timeline is somewhat muddled due to its being written, oh, a year and a half ago.
Recommended listening: Love So Alike (watch?v=SPGl0Byp67E) and Back From the Dead (watch?v=w1JRCU54_VA), both from the Tristan & Isolde OST. I'm sure the titles are entirely coincidental.
Enjoy.
Part Three
—
I am wild, I will sing to the trees,
I will sing to the stars in the sky,
I love, I am loved, he is mine,
Now at last I can die!
I am sandaled with wind and with flame,
I have heart-fire and singing to give,
I can tread on the grass or the stars,
Now at last I can live!
—Joy, Sara Teasdale
—
A woman walks into the Silver Lion.
She is tall, with dark hair pulled back low on her neck, her leathers weather-stained and traveled hard, an inexpertly-carved walking staff in one hand and an overladen pack on one shoulder; in her face there is an old, bruised weariness that runs deep as bone. Her eyes rove the room as she approaches the bar where the inn's proprietor stands with empty tankard in hand, flicking face to face without landing, and when she sits at last at the counter her back bends under some heavy weight he cannot see. Her boots are six inches discolored with mud and earth.
She does not linger overlong. The proprietor offers her brief words, glancing once at the back corner where he sits, his wine untouched at his elbow, his plate long emptied. The room is far too crowded; every few seconds another broad trader steps between them and robs him of the sight, or a serving girl crosses with a tray of steaming food, or the woman leans forward to speak to the innkeeper so that he cannot see her.
He cannot hear what she is saying. Cannot read her lips, either, not when her back is turned to him, not even with the perfect memory he has of every twist of them, every smile, every press of them against his own in the dark of another room in another city a lifetime's ride from this place.
She stands—
He is on his feet. He does not know how, does not remember pushing away from the table; he could not step forward if he wished to with the high hard beating of his heart in his ears to deafen him, held glyphlike to the worn wooden boards beneath his feet. She stands, and she turns—
She sees him. She moves towards him through the crowd, pausing only once to speak to some serving girl in grey and green. She gestures at him across the room, then lets the girl go again as she follows her own sweeping hand through the roaming traders and their friends too drunk to stand properly. She is ten feet away and she looks so tired, and then four feet, two—
"Hello, stranger," she says, her voice, her voice, her voice. "Mind if I share your table?"
His knees are gone beneath him. He grips the table to know that it is real as much for the support of it, because if the table is real then the room is real, and this is not a dream and she is not—
Her name is nothing more than a sigh. A breath of nothing, gone again before it lives. He says it again, stronger, and her eyes close; then a third time he says, "Hawke," and she looks at him and there is a light in her face at once brighter and more real than any torch, a keeping of a promise and an undying hope and a terrible, overwhelming joy like nothing else he has ever seen, like coming home.
"Fenris," she says.
He staggers.
Hawke reaches quick as an arrow beneath his elbow, a support that nearly undoes the rest of him, because her hand is warm and alive and she is—holding him—saying—
"What?" he asks, hoarse beyond words, unable to understand.
"Your room. Which way?"
Fenris shows her. Or she leads him, or they follow each other—but somehow they are in the hallway and her feet strike the stairs alongside his feet and he can feel, he can feel her warmth, can feel her fingers against his arm. He cannot hold all of this. He is too small—
"Here," says Hawke, and then they are in his well-appointed room with the wide bed and the chair by the window's desk, her pack dropping to the rug, her staff leant against the wall where his cloak hangs. The candles light themselves one by one as Hawke—as Hawke touches her fingers to them, and she turns to him in their yellow-soft glow and her eyes are the same as he remembers and her hands are the same as she remembers, and she—smiles—
His hand slips on the bed's rounded post. He reaches for it again—and then like a slide of earth from a cliffside he is on his knees, given out at last, his chest heaving from how tightly his breath comes in his throat, his eyes clenched shut against himself. He cannot command the lyrium; it flashes silver-blue through his closed lids, rippling heat up and down his arms as he tries to swallow, to stand, to master this masterless crush of grief and gladness and overwhelming relief too vast for the word.
"Fenris," Hawke says, and he shudders; then her hands are on his shoulders and he shudders again, reaching for a truth he can hardly bear. Her knees thump softly to the rug beside him and his hand closes blindly over her hand, her bare upper arm, around her waist, and then he has his arms around her and her grip has clenched into the back of his shirt like a ship mooring after sailing an endless sea, as if she cannot abide the thought of ever letting go again. As if he cannot—
Hawke.
Here. In his arms, crushed against him so tightly he can hardly breathe, her shoulders trembling, the muscles of her back shifting under his hands with every movement, her hair coming free from its tie already with every stroke of his fingers down the length of it. He is saying something, he realizes, words spilling from him in a torrent of trade tongue and Arcanum and what little else he knows, because no single language could possibly have the words for what he can barely understand himself, can possibly convey what he has waited thirty-three days to tell her.
She is crying. He can feel the hot tears soaking into his collar, her cheeks sliding damp across his own cheek. Or maybe they are his own; he can't tell. He could watch the whole of Thedas burn around him if it meant he did not have to leave this moment again.
"Hawke," he says, low and rough and tender, and she shakes her head, clutches him closer. He says it again, and again, running his fingers through her hair long loose, down the bent lines of her back, smoothing his palms to the curve of her cheek when he can, when she will let him between the tears and her own uneven murmurs. Sometimes it is his name, and sometimes apologies, half-explanations he can hardly understand and cares about even less, not when all that matters is her face tucked into the crook of his neck.
How long? Thirty-three days, a thousand years, a scant handful of seconds.
Fenris cups her face in both hands. Her eyes lift to his, swollen and brilliant, and her fingers wrap around his wrist where the red band rests, where their first promise began.
Fenris kisses her.
This is not the kiss from the Gallows, when he thought death as likely an outcome as any, when there was nothing but his own certainty that if they should die Hawke ought to know the truth from his own mouth. Promise me you won't…
There is nothing of death in this.
Only a second's hesitation breaks between them, the space of thirty-three days of fear vanishing into smoke, and then her arms are around his neck and her mouth is on his just as fiercely. Her eyes flick to his again and again through her lashes, as he drags in a ragged breath through his nose and her lips part and his heart hammers hard enough to break.
He closes his eyes. The world is too bright; Hawke is too bright; he will tear apart from any more than this. Her hands tangle into his hair and he tightens his grip, seizing her even closer as she tips her head for a better match; she sighs again and there is no space even for that little breath between them. Good, he thinks, dazed with something too great for gladness and too grave for joy. Let there be nothing else.
He had not known his soul so starved. Every brush of her familiar fingers is a balm on a cracking callus; every whisper of his name in her voice is a slender shaft of sunlight to a buried man. His name, and he has never loved the sound of it so much as now. How fickle his memory, to tear away half his life and yet leave every line of her face intact. A spur to his sorrow for so long, but now—
"Hawke," he gasps against her mouth, and the shiver runs through her hard enough to shake her lips from his. They stare at each other, both breathing hard, and then Hawke's hands come trembling to his jaw, her thumbs moving in long strokes along the bones of his cheeks. Her lips follow, pressing to the tip of his nose. Then his forehead, where the lyrium groups in three points, and then his chin, and the corner of his mouth. Something hot spreads behind his ribs like wings, and for a moment there is nothing he can do but clutch her to his chest.
He does not know how long they kneel on the floor of his borrowed room. He cannot even call it peace, not with the lyrium bursting light with every shift of her skin over his, not with his own lightheaded elation still roiling with the darker stain of sorrow beneath. An hour, and her face presses again to the hollow beneath his ear, her lips on his throat whispering words he can hardly understand; a scarce second and his stomach leaps and settles a hundred times.
She is here. She has come back to him at last.
"Hawke," he says thickly, when he can speak, "you will be the death of me."
She laughs, kisses his throat. "Impossible. I promised the opposite."
"You've always had a short memory for such things."
"Only," she tells him, "with the most excellent of reasons."
He snorts. "I would hear this story."
"And I'll tell you. But first—" and he feels her smile against him, feels her hand smooth over the aching muscles of his back, "first, I've got something to say. Something I've been meaning to remind you of for absolute ages."
Fenris lifts his head just enough to see her face. His voice is steadier than he expects; his own smile, when it comes, is truer. "Tell me, Hawke."
"I love you," Hawke says, and kisses him. It is enough.
—
He must help her rise, later, when the euphoria has eased enough that he grows conscious of his bent, stiff knees on the carpet, of Hawke's back beginning to quiver with strain and not emotion. "Three days," she says flatly as he braces her, "on a horse," and it not until she is steady on her feet that he permits himself the smile.
"You have had your fill of riding, then."
"And so much more." Hawke hisses as he eases her to the side of the still-made bed, her fingers clenching into his upper arms. "I shouldn't have stopped moving."
"It would have happened eventually. That it was here is… fortunate."
"True," she admits with a grin, but the moment is interrupted by a short, polite knock at Fenris's door. Baffling under the circumstances; then Hawke says, startled, "Oh! I'd forgotten about her!"
"About whom?"
"Emma. The serving girl from downstairs. I promised her half a sovereign if she brought a hot supper to your room tonight, and another half if she manages at least two meals tomorrow."
Fenris shakes his head, already turning to the door. "You draw attention to yourself too easily."
"My darling," Hawke drawls from the bedside, "with you around to look so splendidly unapproachable, who'd ever notice me?"
His mouth twists in both amusement and aggravation as he accepts the girl's wide-eyed offering of a covered tray, careful to keep the door between her curiosity and Hawke. "You'll be paid tomorrow," he tells her, brooking no barter, and closes the door again. The tray he carries to the bedside and uncovers, placing its simple contents beside Hawke: corned beef and hot brown bread and a dish of thin-sliced apples in a warm, spiced glaze, and a cracked mug of overboiled tea beside a questionably-washed fork.
"Perfect," Hawke says, and her sigh empties her like a sail.
It is not a hard thing to watch her eat. She takes to the meal like one gone too long without them, enough famishment to make his heart hurt, but there is no shadow in her eyes save that of exhaustion and long travel. Halfway through he reaches without thinking for her hand, for the pulse thumping strong and steady under the soft skin inside her wrist. Her chewing slows; her mug of tea pauses midair.
He says, shocked, "I thought that you were dead."
Her eyes slip shut, and she swallows the last of the bread with the tea's aid before replacing it on the tray. Quietly, she tells the mug, "I was afraid of the same thing, for a little while."
"A trader claimed he saw you fall."
"I left you half-conscious and bleeding from a stomach wound."
"I have survived worse."
"So have I."
Fenris snorts, brushing his fingers carefully over her cheek; then he tucks his foot beneath himself and settles back to let her finish. Even before she manages the last bite her eyelids have begun to droop; when the tray nearly slips unbalanced from her leg he takes it from her, ignoring the moue of disgruntlement at the crumbs' removal. By the time he returns to her side she has already bent over her knees, her head resting on her folded arms, and she does not move save to sigh when he places a careful hand on her shoulder.
"You are tired."
"I told you I shouldn't have stopped moving."
"Hawke. You have been moving for more than a month." She turns her head enough to meet his gaze; he holds it steady. "You are safe here. Rest."
She fumbles for his hand. "I'm telling you, Fenris: the moment my head hits that pillow you'll lose me until this time tomorrow."
Lose her? He will have her within his reach for the first time in thirty-three days; he has lost nothing and gained all. He tells her this.
Hawke lets out a long, slow breath. "Only because you say so."
It takes some doing to get her free of her worn leathers, her arms and legs heavy and near-useless with fatigue. Neither has Fenris any wish to rush; thirty-three days have given Hawke new welts and wounds and scars alike, and he does not intend to miss even one of them. A scattering of bruises across her shoulders, as if she has been grabbed and held roughly more than once; a tender place on her left cheek that she refuses to explain now; a stifled gasp when he presses too hard against a rib in the removal of her wide, new-nicked belt.
"I'll tell you everything," she promises again at his frown, pressing the heel of her hand into a sore place in her thigh. "I swear it."
He'll hold her to that. But he keeps his tongue for the moment, placing her shirts and belt on the little desk to be cleaned as she flops to her back and pulls blindly at the laces to her trousers. "Wait," he tells her, coming back again, going easily to his knees before her to pull her boots from her feet. And maybe he ought to feel something at that, some indignity or familiar shame, but there is no hardship in the service even like this, and as Hawke sighs and flexes her bare foot in his hand he sighs with her, his back bowing, bending forward until his forehead rests against her knee.
The bed shifts as she sits up, leans forward. Her mouth presses gently to the crown of his head, only for a moment; then he pulls free her other boot and stands to help her rid herself of her travel-beaten trousers. When even those are gone he leaves her fumbling tiredly at her breastband while he fetches the half-forgotten shirt Isabela had found for him in Wycome, after that first week when they had realized that there would be no quick stay, that they each would need more to wear while washing than the bare necessities they had managed to carry with them in abject flight.
It is not enough to drown her, but it had been nearly too large on Fenris who is broader in the shoulder; on her the wider neck threatens to slide off completely. All the same it is long enough to cover her to the thigh and soft enough to sleep in, and Hawke rolls the sleeves to her elbows and grins. "Perfect. Like you knew I was coming."
He shakes his head, his fingers skating once over the black fabric at her waist. "I did not always."
"You're here. That's all that matters."
It is not, but he forbears to argue with her at the moment. Instead he goes to extinguish the lamps one by one, leaving only a low brass-bound candle burning by the bedside. By the time he has stripped to his breeches Hawke is already beneath the covers, a low groan slipping loose at their clean comfort; by the time he slides carefully between the sheets beside her she is curled on her side with her black hair spread across the pillow, one hand half-closed at her mouth, her eyelids falling heavier with every blink.
"Fenris," she says, swallowing a magnificent yawn, "is there anybody after you right now? That you know of?"
"What do you mean?"
"Slavers, bandits, maleficarum. A goose with a grudge. Anything like that."
"Not… at the moment."
"Good," she murmurs, her eyes shut. "Then we've both got a chance to rest."
More than that, Fenris thinks, twisting long enough to extinguish the last candle between thumb and forefinger. By the time he turns back to Hawke her breathing has already begun to even out, to slow at last; he touches the pale line of her jaw in what little light edges around the drapes, drawn more against prying eyes than any threat of day. She sighs and turns into the touch, and for an instant he is overwhelmed with that same sudden devastating gladness again, as if the spreading warmth in his chest might overflow all at once to fill all the seams of lyrium with light.
Hawke is alive.
He does not remember closing his eyes. He remembers only that he watches her sleep for a long time, and then he dreams, fearing nothing.
