1. A cup of water

It did not take long for Nox's leg to heal. She glared at Bethany over potions, resting and stretching as asked with a fixed determination that might have made Bethany nervous, if the healer hadn't had a near endless stream of Ferelden refugees, Carta dwarves and Coterie lackeys to see to, all clamoring over the mess of her clinic. She worked until it hurt, and then past it, half sure she could hear her own blood whisper approval when she had to pry her own stiff hands from her staff, eyes dry and tongue thick with exhaustion.

Water went stagnant in the deeps. Blades were thin and ragged and hard to clean. Folk went home for dinner and came to her with tetanus. As word crept out, others shuffled in for a discreet apostate's services. Bethany found herself clearing up more itches and sores than she had known existed between shamefaced adults. She blushed every time. But the pay was good, and Justice let her take the coin.

"So many are ungrateful."

Bethany looked up from the wreckage of a medicine chest, where she had spent the past hour looking for salvageable vials and lengths of wood. She eyed the elvhen woman warily. Nox had barely spoken to her in over a week.

Nox flushed. "All these people," she muttered. "Coming in here no matter the hour, expecting you to simply be there, and ready for them. Logic alone should tell them that everyone else thinks the same way, and so they're better off finding someone else. Someone less—"

"—capable?" Bethany covered a smile with her hand. "That's very kind."

"Less overrun."

"If it wasn't overrun," Bethany said, sighing. "There wouldn't be much point. Not when the city is like this."

"Like what?" Nox limped over to the water barrel, drawing herself a cup and avoiding Bethany's eye.

"Desperate," she said. "Frightened and sad and full of people who should do something, but won't." Bethany shook her head, setting down her tools. "I've never lived in a city before. I never thought it would be like this. And we're not overrun right now, you know. It's just us."

"It isn't." Nox sniffed. "You've described the world's condition, not a particular city. To give this place a personality is fanciful and useless. And it's just us and those three old men you've let sleep in the corner. With the promise of another hoard tomorrow."

"I am fanciful, Nox. Haven't you worked that out, yet? It keeps me sane."

"Sane."

"Functionally sane."

Grimacing, Nox dipped a second cup into the barrel, and pressed it into Bethany's hand. "You are a madwoman possessed by demons. Drink, before you fall down."


2. Ebb and flow

There was a pattern in the mess and madness of the healer's clinic. The beardless dwarf came at least once a day, with a story and a smile and an over-the-shoulder suggestion that his Hanged Man tab had room for another.

"Sunshine vouches for you," he said. "And you're a bit too pale and interesting for comfort."

The pirate swaggered in for no reason Nox could see except to make Bethany blush. Sometimes, she had her arm around another elf, dark haired and earnest and always talking. While the Isabela kissed Bethany on the cheek and conjured pirate ships in the dank room, or gave dramatic readings from highly improbable novels, Merrill often turned her attention to Nox, who winced and gritted her teeth against the mix of sweetness and the fine scars that ran over the Dalish woman's palms.

"Your brother is fascinating, Nox," she exclaimed. "A magister, and one of the People, if he—"

"—that magister is not my brother."

Limpid eyes met hers. "Yes, he is. It's in your blood, clear as day."

Hawke's presence was stormy. When she entered the clinic, she filled the whole room, pale eyes flashing as she took in patients and scaffolding. She re-hung doors. She told smaller, angrier stories. When Nox had two weeks' worth of strength left, Hawke challenged her to a fight, eyes widening when Nox picked up the old, borrowed sword. It was still the wrong weight, but close enough for this.

"You use that thing? Look at the size of you!"

"My true sword was left in Par Vollen. It was bigger. This…serves."

Hawke laughed. The two of them were standing outside the clinic, an audience creeping in and whispering bets. Hawke's laugh, Nox thought, might be the reason so many seemed to follow the woman. Bright and fierce and reaching somewhere murky at the back of her mind, where there might have been other sparring matches such as this.

"You're big talk for a runaway," Hawke said.

Bethany sighed from the doorway. "Hawke, if you undo all my good work—"

"I'll be gentle, sister."

Nox bridled. "You won't need to, human."

When it was done, Nox's body rung with pain and shaking muscle, but the rogue still looked up at her from the dirt, a lopsided smile on her face.

"Well," she said. "I haven't had my ass handed to me that way since Aveline got her promotion. You need a better sword."

"I…" Nox shifted, looking from Hawke's pleased face to Bethany's inscrutable one, then the floor. "That was gratifying."

"I'll bet. Help me up?" Hawke held out a small, scarred hand. Nox took it.


3. Histories and hopes

"Watching you and Hawke was like seeing Carver all over again."

Bethany was quiet after her sister left, healing a small boy's broken leg and taking Nox's arm unasked when the magic caught up with her and made her stagger. She and Hawke and an extremely cranky Isabela had rebuilt a bench that morning. Bethany sank onto it.

"Carver?"

"Our brother. My twin." The word sat heavy between them, and Nox's stomach twisted as she thought of the liberati magister. His eyes met hers in the mirror when she wasn't careful.

Bethany's shoulders slumped, new-old grief twisting her face. "He and Marian always fought that way," she said, breaking the reverie. "Greatsword and dagger."

She chuckled, hand moving to the scarf at her throat. "Maker. The first bit of healing magic I ever learned was a trick for one of their broken noses. Probably Carver's." She did not look at Nox, or the sleeping patient. Her face was abstracted, voice soft and a little too slow. "I'm not a natural healer, you know."

"Says the woman who tries to fix every louse-ridden corpse who staggers in here." She paused. "Or falls through your wall."

Bethany looked up at her. A small smile graced her mouth. "Was that a joke?"

"It was uncomfortable. I won't try again."

Bethany laughed, soft and slow, and still deeply sad. Nox tried not to squirm.

"I heal here because…" she shrugged. "Because it's a calling, I suppose. Because it feels right. Because—"

"—because the demon tells you." The words came out hard. Bethany did not seem to notice.

"Justice doesn't tell me much of anything, these days. He's a need. A strength. A weakness."

"You admit as much?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

Nox bent to straighten one of the bed sheets. She shifted from foot to foot. "What are you, then?"

"A force mage. Remember with Denarius? I've been just as good at whacking people as you and Carver, only you can't see when I do it." The smile was wicked, and then it was gone. "But it didn't help. I couldn't save him."

She shrugged, wiping her eyes. "I'll never be as good at healing as Fenris's friend. But at least it helps."

"Everyone else calls him my brother," Nox said, eyes fixed on the ceiling. "Why don't you?"

"Because he isn't. Not really. Not yet."

Bethany reached out, taking Nox's hand in her own.

Nox flinched, but did not pull away. She was fascinated. Appalled. She looked into Bethany's dark eyes and wondered—a little dizzy, a little sick—why she kept expecting them to be blue.

Bethany, for her part, did not close her hand around Nox's paler, stronger one. She simply let her palm rest under Nox's own, warm and dry and still.

"Everyone deserves the chance to be more than their history, I think," she said, voice gone thick and hoarse with tears. "That's what I try for, at least."


4. Dares and dreamers

"You know, I think I might be jealous."

Anders did not hide his grin as Fenris glowered at him over a hand of Wicked Grace. Varric had left them for the bar, and Anders took the opportunity to rifle the dwarf's cards. Three pairs of roses and a serpent. It fit. And it would win the game. It also gave the former magister time to shift awkwardly in his seat.

"You are ridiculous."

"All these weeks, and you're invading someone else's dreams? Definitely jealous."

"He's a child," Fenris said. "A somniari, completely untrained. It's—" he winced, meeting his gaze briefly, then fixing on the tabletop. "Alarming."

Anders sighed. Things had been tense between them in the weeks since the fight with Denarius. Varania—no, he reminded himself, for the hundredth time, Nox—had not spoken to either of them. She barely left Darktown, though he had seen her in Bethany's clinic, when he helped with the rebuilding or a bad birth, and saw snatches of her outside, usually in Hawke's wild and tangled wake. She was, he had noticed with a pang, entranced by good swords.

Denarius's mansion sat empty in Hightown, waiting for either sibling to make a claim.

"Can you train him?"

"There's no question."

"A magister in the Free Marches, losing at cards and teaching dangerous apostates." Anders whistled. "Maker's breath, Fenris. You never do anything by halves."

"You always joke." Fenris set the cards down, disgusted.

"It's always helped," Anders said, more gently. "You know that. And it's good, what you're doing. Just and right and true. And dangerous." He smiled, feeling something ease in his chest and throat as the other mage gingerly smiled back. "You know how I feel about that."

Fenris swallowed. "You're wrong, you know."

"Hardly."

Fenris downed the sad, warm remains of his whiskey in a gulp, glaring at him. "I didn't 'invade' your dreams, idiot mage," he growled. He blushed. Even his voice seemed to blush. "You always ended up in mine."


5. Other people's children

"You're sure you're not a demon."

Fenris watched in fascination as the elf-blood boy coaxed a small pocket of the Fade into a world of his own making. They had created the space over weeks of nervous, fragmented conversation, Feynriel admitting to magic and his own name only after Fenris spent a week in the boy's dreams, quiet and insistent and never quite out of sight. Once convinced, Feynriel proved loquacious. And very young.

"If you truly thought I was a demon," Fenris said, nodding as the boy changed the sky above their heads to a virulent green unlikely to be found in nature, "You'd have more sense than to keep pestering me about it. You'd run. Or you'd have fallen."

"How do you know I'm not a demon?" Feynriel—who wore his own tall, fair, raw-boned shape in most of their encounters, even when the shape of his ears changed without his consent—smiled crookedly at him.

Fenris sighed.

"You are considerably more annoying."

"Don't talk to me like I'm a child." Fenyriel's shape rippled with his distress, turning slight and fully elvhen, Dalish markings standing out stark over his face.

"I'm talking to you the way my master spoke to me," Fenris said. He wondered, with a brief twist of memory and pain, what Castor would make of that lie.

"Your master in Tevinter?" Wide eyes and a breathy hope in the name. Fenris fought an urge to laugh.

"The very same. He saw what I was. And even freed me for it." Slowly, he let the dream-space take on the colours and sounds of a Minrathous he had never truly seen. It was all heat and noise and grand, decaying columns; a wonder to the young boy, and not a slave it sight. It was more like something Anders had dreamed up than his own memories of the place. "He taught me as I can teach you, if you are willing. I have taught you, already."

"The voices," Feynriel mused. "They've been quieter, since…"

"They are drawn to you because you have power, and because you don't know how to use it. Once you do, it is easier to block their influence." Fenris moved across the space, sitting opposite the boy, legs tucked beneath him, back against a pillar. "This is your world as much as theirs."

Feynriel's breath caught. "Where are you?" he asked. "Outside the Fade, I mean. Are you here? In Tevinter, I mean. I can run, it'll be—"

Listening to the dreamer, holding out his hands to stop the tumbling, hopeful run of words, Fenris did not know whether he should laugh, or curse, or weep.