The city is on fire. Again.
Closer. Brighter. Hotter.
It seems destruction follows her no matter where she goes, whatever she does.
It's all confused chaos, anger forged into a weapon, aimed at her, but one voice cuts through all the others.
"I invoke the Rite of Annulment! Every mage in the Circle will be executed, immediately!"
Maybe it's Hawke's imagination, but she swears she can hear a hint of glee in the Knight Commander's voice.
It's what she wanted all along, after all.
And Anders has just handed her the excuse she needed.
Hawke glances from the burning Chantry, broken and continuously consumed by magical flame, to Anders. He is huddled on a nearby crate, haunted by the screams of the children dying because of his decision.
He is broken too.
"The Circle didn't even do this!" Orsino protests.
But you would have if you could, Hawke thinks. Wouldn't you?
She walks over to Anders, lit only by flames.
He'd asked her to trust him, and she did.
"I am the cause of mage freedom now," he'd told her, in one of his moments of sweeping intensity, determined to channel his pain into some kind of action, to break through the walls of the inescapable cage he'd spent his whole life trying to flee. At moments like those, like this, he turns into something more than just one man. He'd never cared about himself.
He doesn't care about himself, but she does. She cares about him, she has from the start, from the first time she stumbled into his clinic, alone in a strange city, but so was he.
She sees him, when everyone else only sees the symbol, the target, the terrorist and the revolutionary.
She takes his hand, he flinches away. But she won't let go.
Not you, she thinks. We.
We are the symbol, the revolution.
She watches flames leap from the collapsing wreckage of a holy place, and knows: We did this.
He didn't tell her, but she knew.
He thought he could protect her but she didn't need protection. He thought he could absorb the pain of a whole world's war on his own, but nobody can do that, and he doesn't have to.
She won't let him.
"Fight with me," she tells him.
"I... didn't think you'd let me," he says softly.
He still won't look at her.
I didn't think you'd want me, is what she hears.
"I need you," she reminds him. "I can't abandon you now. I won't."
He curls away from her, huddling into a smaller ball, as if he's trying to make himself invisible as he sits on his crate. His eyes flicker back to the crowd of acquaintances and enemies that have somehow attached themselves to his life despite his attempts not to connect to anyone through these years in Kirkwall.
Despite their rage and yelling, both the Knight Commander and the First Enchanter are ignoring him.
Hawke doesn't know why she should be surprised by this. They ignore everything except their own stupid pointless fights, it's what brought them here in the first place.
"Anders," she says softly. "Please. You..." she swallows hard, and listens to the crackling of the consuming fire, the cries and desperate begging of the people trapped. And nobody is helping, they're all standing around trying to lay blame, ready to take vengeance, to spread even more death while the fire still burns. "You started this," she tells him. "Help me finish it now. The mages will need us to fight for them. Help me protect them. Help me save them."
Help me save you.
He wants her to be mad at him. She thinks she should be, but she isn't.
She doesn't feel much of anything beyond an empty ache.
He shakes his head, offers half-hearted protests, and it's all too obvious that he's crying. Tears spill that he doesn't acknowledge. She resists the urge to brush them away, the way she would in the middle of the night.
"I can't," he tells her hoarsely.
He broke the rules, and he expects to be punished for it.
He's waiting for her to walk away, to abandon him to pain and darkness with some meaningless apology. He wants her to leave him to suffer and tell him he deserves it.
He expects to die, he's expected it for years, since before she ever met him.
He's crossed a line, and he knows it.
He's fought before, lashed out with angry words and even vengeful spells channeled against men who tried to hurt him first. He's even killed before.
But this is different. This is entirely new.
He is a healer, but he made the premeditated decision to attack innocent people in the one place of established sanctuary that exists in the world, even if the peace the church provided was fragile and kept out of reach for too many.
He broke his own rules.
"I won't make you, Anders," she tells him, as she starts to walk away. She won't force him to do anything. He's had too many people try to control him in his life and she won't be one of them. She's pretty sure she wouldn't be able to make him do anything he doesn't want to do, anyway. Nobody else ever could. "But I won't leave you here. If you're going to let somebody kill you, they're going to have to kill me too."
His eyes flicker up to hers, for the first time, so dark and full of pain that she stops breathing.
"You do it," he tells her. "If I'm going to die, I want it to be you."
"No way," she snaps. "Never."
She watches as the Knight Commander begins to herd her templars toward the Gallows. It's only the two of them now, left alone here among the burning fires, left to make a decision.
"She's going to kill all the mages," Hawke reminds Anders softly. "All of them. If you and I die here, without even trying... then all of this was meaningless. Is that what you want?"
Anders draws in a shaky breath, and slowly shakes his head.
"I can fight better scared than they can angry," Hawke tells him. "So can you."
He gives her the tiniest nod, agreement, a sign of life.
He hasn't given up yet. He never will.
She knows him too well to have ever thought he would.
She pulls him to his feet and they race to the Gallows, to fight side by side against the entire world.