"In my city, I didn't make a sound
When I fell over and cracked my crown
Heard a woman say,
'Stay down, Champion, stay down.'"
-Tall Saint (Demo Version), The National
The fire on the hearth had dwindled and died though the embers still danced, seeming to crawl like glowing snakes among the ashes. Dawn had come, throwing its dull light through the curtains that hung heavily over the windows in Hawke's bedchamber. Though she saw the light, watching as it broke through the cracks between the panels of crimson fabric, Hawke could not make out whether it was early morning or if the day had worn well past noon and into evening. Her eyes, it seemed, were blurry and it was difficult to discern much of anything from where she lay on the bed. She might have lifted her head to peer around the room and get a better sense of her surroundings, but she feared the shattering pain that might accompany such a movement. Contemplating such an action, however, she realized that an almost pleasant numbness had pervaded her body and that the pain she could remember was gone. There was, admittedly, the slightest throbbing in her neck, but it was hardly as extreme as it had been when her body had given out under the agony. Surprised, she lifted one of her hands to her throat and lightly ran her fingertips across where Fenris had locked his hands. The touch was not entirely uncomfortable and she furrowed her brow with confusion. Her head was terribly light and none of this made sense, least of all how she had been allowed to live.
"Hawke?" His voice was gentle, full of worry and relief, coming to her from the corner where he had sat, keeping watch through the night.
"Anders?" she croaked, beginning to force herself to sit upright on the bed. Before she could fully bring herself to a seated position, Anders was at her side, easing her back down gently. His hand remained resting on her shoulder, the light pressure ensuring that she didn't try something as foolish as sitting up for a second time.
"No, stay down," he said softly. "You need your rest, Elena." His concern for her and the long, sleepless night that he had spent watching over her had made his face ashen and left purpling circles beneath his warm eyes. With light, shaking fingers, he pushed the hair back from her face, leaving his hand nestled amongst the tangled locks of her hair. "You're still not entirely healed," he murmured, continuing to pet her hair as if she were some sort of small, fragile bird. She wished that she could tell him to stop with his softness and his attention, but she had neither the strength nor the heart to reprimand him as he looked down at her with such evident concern. "I didn't heal the bruises," he told her softly, his expression becoming grave as his eyes flickered towards her throat. "I… I needed you to see yourself. I needed you to see what he did." It was clear that he was attempting to keep his voice calm, but a thread of anger found its way into his last words.
Hawke shook her head, rolling it from side to side on the heap of pillows that had been piled beneath her. "It doesn't matter," she wheezed, finding it took more effort to speak than she would have thought. "He remembered. I don't care what he's done."
Anders' eyes narrowed slightly, his lips compressing into a thin line as he fought the urge to shake her from her complacency. "He could have killed you, Elena," he snapped. Then, his expression softening somewhat, he added, "When I first arrived, I thought you were dead." He wove his fingers through the loose, tumultuous mass of her hair. "When Bodahn brought me here, you were unconscious. Even a little more pressure he would have crushed your trachea. It was fractured as it was. That's healed, but you had to see the bruises. I couldn't erase that before you saw it." His eyes lifted then, meeting with hers for a moment with some of his old tenderness creeping into them. Hawke met his gaze impassively as he leaned forward and pressed his cool lips to her forehead.
"Bring me a mirror," she rasped as he drew back from her.
His brow furrowed slightly. "Are you sure? You've just had a shock."
Looking up at him flatly, she replied, "You said that you needed me to see it. Let me see it."
Anders nodded solemnly, watching her blank expression as he rose from her bedside. He walked slowly towards her dresser to retrieve the gilt mirror that Hawke kept resting there beside a gilded comb. These small vanity items had once belonged to Bethany and, through the years, Hawke had always kept them close though she had never had the urge to use them. The comb still held a few strands of black hair woven throughout the teeth. There were nights, quiet nights when she had been alone and Anders had been in his study, when Hawke had toyed with those errant strands of hair, remembering the days that were gone and the people who ought to have lived instead of her. Sweet Bethany. Brave Carver. And here she was yet again. Alive when she had no right to be.
Anders placed the mirror gently in her hand. It was not large, but it was large enough for these purposes. "There," he murmured, sitting on the bed beside her and resting his open palm softly on the blankets that hid her still naked body. "I'll heal you fully when you've seen it. It won't be this bad for long, Elena."
She was scarcely listening to him as she readied herself for the sight of her reflection. She neither felt dread nor concern for herself, but only a sort of hollow curiosity as to what it was that had brought such worry to Anders' face. When she looked into the mirror, her eyes widened slightly with surprise. The sclera of her left eye was entirely red with burst blood vessels, the lurid color totally surrounding the pool of her golden iris. Her right eye, she saw, was also colored with a blotchy mosaic of vivid red and a few patches of remaining white. Across her eyelids and on the tender, soft skin beneath her eyes, it looked as if her face had been spattered with blood. Hawke lifted an exploratory hand to her face, attempting to wipe the flecks of blood from her cheeks. In spite of her light touch, the splatters of color remained. "Burst capillaries," explained Anders softly.
"Hmm," muttered Hawke disinterestedly.
Her fingers moved slowly from her flecked cheeks to her lips. They were swollen beneath her fingers and slightly numb. She would guess, however, that the slight swelling there had arisen from fervent kisses rather from the strangulation. Lightly, she pressed her index and forefinger against her mouth, mimicking the pressure of his lips that had lingered not so long ago against her. She felt her eyes welling with tears at the memory; she'd allowed this to happen, marking his body and her own with an act that she would never be able to take back. Once more, the irrevocability of her own actions had impressed itself on his life, scarring him in ways just as real as the lyrium tattoos that Danarius had etched into his skin. Worse, perhaps, because she'd driven down deeper than lyrium could ever go, burrowing down to his core and making a mess of him just as his old wounds were beginning to heal over. She bit down on her lip, only feeling the slightest pressure of her teeth through the haze of treatments that Anders had given her for the pain.
"And that's just your face," said Anders with a bitterness that she knew what meant for Fenris. "Look what that beast did to your throat."
"Don't call him that," she said, her voice low and still nearly devoid of emotion. Tilting the mirror, she looked at the markings that spread across her throat. It was less jarring, somehow, to look at these lurid bruises than it had been to see the flaming redness of her eyes. The bruises were purpling already, nearly black with pooled blood where the pressure had been the greatest and with the same freckling of burst capillaries towards the outer reaches of the encircling mass of bruises. She ran her hand along her neck with her free hand, pressing deeper against the bruises until she felt the sting of her fingernail digging against the tender flesh. "He should have done worse," she whispered, continuing to explore where his hands had held her throat.
"How can you excuse this?" he spat, gesturing to the whole of her damaged body with a fluid motion of his hand. "He could have killed you, Hawke!"
She smiled slightly, placing the mirror on the bed beside her. "It still wouldn't compare to what I've done." Her eyes flicked over Anders' face, watching his expression, his lowering gaze, and his disappoint that her reaction to her injuries had not been one of anger or even self-pity. "You saw what I did. When you came here, you must have seen. You must have guessed."
Anders shook his head slowly, not looking up at her face, as his fingers clenched against the blanket that stretched over her. She felt the warmth of his hand through the fabric, felt the pressure of his fingers as they dragged the cloth to pull it into a ball in his fist. "I thought that he might have…." Anders trailed off, unwilling or unable to say what it was that he had supposed when he had come into the room and saw Hawke's body, battered and limp, sprawled naked across the bed with semen dried between her thighs and stains across her sheets.
Hawke shook her head, letting out a bitter burst of laughter. "No, he didn't. Quite the reverse, I assure you." Anders lifted his eyes as she turned her own towards the pale light that filtered through the curtains. "I let myself forget for a moment all the things I've done and so I did something just as terrible. I stopped hating myself." Her fingers twisted against each other below the blankets, her voice sounding as if she might cry. "I loved him, you know. I loved him more than I hated myself." She laughed again, as she bowed her head and stared fixedly at the tight, rough weave of the blanket. "I can't believe I let that happen."
The words did not come easily to Anders. He pitied her and hated her in turns as the silence stretched between them. There was a time when the infinitely pragmatic, strong woman he had loved would have reared up in fury against any man who harmed her. Hawke, brilliant and dominant and always sure of herself. And now she lay before him, her eyes burst with blood and free of the fire that used to fill those amber depths. He'd come to her, he'd loved her, he'd healed her when she was broken. And she had never loved him in the way that she loved a feral monster that had nearly snapped her neck and left her for dead amongst a heap of soiled, shuffled sheets. She lay there, just inches from a man who had loved her and cared for her for years, and murmured hoarsely about the elf who had left her hollow and devoid of everything that had made her beautiful. For that, he pitied her. He knew all too well what it was like to love something to the point of breaking. "You can't hate yourself forever, Hawke," he said at last, his voice kept as gentle as he could force it to be.
She smiled at him, with more sadness than bitterness now. "We're so alike, you and I," she said quietly. "We always were. So easily overcome by what we feel. So easily blinded by passion, pride… apathy or vengeance. We got lost, I think, in our own minds. But our actions still have consequences, reaching beyond what our short-sighted minds can see. Every awful thing that happened to Fenris this last year was my fault and my intentions or my feelings mean nothing in comparison to what I've done. I raped him. I drove needles through his skin and made him bleed. I made him feel subhuman and broken and lost. And, on top of everything else, I let him believe that those things weren't my fault. I let him believe that I was worth loving. Because I thought that if I felt sorry enough and I loved him enough, I could be the sort of person that he thought I was. I thought I could redeem myself and become that person. But that was foolish self-delusion. Willful naivety and praying for a beautiful death that would wash away sin. But the past doesn't go away, Anders. It doesn't. And people don't change. As much as I wanted to believe that I was becoming a better person, the only thing that changed about me is that I found new way of hurting him. A new level of selfishness. I loved him like a child—single-minded and so lost in him that I let myself forget who I am. But I realize who I am now. I'm not a good person. I can never make amends and I'm sick of pretending that redemption exists when it doesn't. I know what I am, Anders. And I am through playing the hero."