General warnings for references to past-Danarius- and current-templar-related abuse (nothing graphic).
Hawke wears her magic like a peacock wears its feathers. Someone watching from the outside may think her proud, but birds are not proud, and Hawke is not either.
As he promised, Fenris watches her closely in those first weeks – a task made almost pleasurable by how easy it is to follow Hawke with his gaze, whether he watches her hands shuffling worn cards or strands of hair falling loose from her braids.
She is a beautiful woman, with delicate wrists and skin that smells always of milk and honey, and like too many beautiful things, she is dangerous. A refugee clawing her way through Kirkwall's filthy streets, a mercenary, and an unrepentant mage – but she helped him, without a moment's hesitation, though her brother growled the whole way back to Hightown.
He realizes too late that watching her has become a habit, but when she appears at his door to ask for his help in taking out a nest of bandits on the coast, he cannot say no.
Worse, he does not want to.
She uses her magic without a trace of self-consciousness or fear, for all that she spills ice and fire from her hands – and she laughs as she does, as if magic exists for her pleasure, and not for power's sake.
Hawke clicks her fingers to light fires or candles, or to indulge her mother's taste for flavored ices in the middle of the summer. There is not a single mote of healing magic in her — it would exist uneasily beside all the fireballs, Fenris muses wryly — but that does not mean she is not generous with what spells she does possess. Soothing warmth, gentle breezes, light from darkness: Hawke glories in spells Danarius would have disdained with a sneer – but Fenris wonders if he has begun to trust this purposeful, joyful magic.
It sickens him – after all magic has done to him, trusting a mage is a bitter, savage betrayal.
I'm not trusting a mage, he realizes, lying awake in his ragged, cold bed, watching snow drift through the hole in the foyer's ceiling. I'm trusting Hawke.
A small distinction, but a vital one.
No one as beautiful as Hawke has a right to any wit at all — so say the looks the shopkeepers share over Hawke's head as she browses their stalls. She is blithe and oblivious, overpaying for everything and smiling the whole time, and through it all, guilt pricks at Fenris' heart. After all, he had been no exception — he saw her darkened lashes and painted lips first, and assumed the worst: a beautiful mage, no doubt greedy enough to fund her vanity by returning him to the slavers. He had known so many of the kind, in Tevinter.
Fenris cringes to think of it now — but he cannot blame himself for heeding his instincts. Better to have trusted them and been wrong, than to have ignored them and ended up back at the end of Danarius' leash.
But wrong he was, and now those who make the same assumption infuriate him.
He finds Hawke in the market place, just as the baker overcharges her by seven coppers for her bread. With a wave and a smile, she greets him, handing over her money without a qualm as the baker smirks. She lingers as he buys his own, telling him about a job out on Sundermount and holding Fenris' loaves as he pays. The baker is not foolish enough to try and cheat him; the fact that the man thinks so little of Hawke that he does not try to hide his cheating makes something hot and full of hooks clench in Fenris' gut.
So he tries to warn her as they walk away, the fact that he had once thought little better of her making him gentle, and slow to speak.
She shrugs, and blows her hair out of her eyes. "Oh, I'm quite aware," she says, tucking loaves of dark bread into her sack. "Maker, it's hot, isn't it? Here, this one's yours."
He takes the loaf absently, frowning at the top of her head as she ties her coin purse shut. "Does it bother you?"
"No." Hawke looks up, brows puckered in a frown. "Does it bother you, Fenris?" She seems genuinely confused when he nods. "Why? Please tell me you're not about to go and bring me back that man's heart for trying to cheat me. I'd much rather prefer cheese or flowers, if you feel like being generous."
Though they stand on a sun-warmed street, with the sea wind drying their sweat and blowing Hawke's hair into tangles, it is a private moment, and Hawke's smile is only for him. Be cautious, he warns himself, knowing it is far too late for any caution to help him now. "I'll keep that in mind for your birthday," he says, the corners of his mouth twitching.
"Oh, no need to wait that long," says Hawke, turning toward the butcher's stall. "Any time you feel like spoiling me, I promise you, I won't mind."
"Of that, I'm sure." He falls into step at her side, well aware her head barely tops his shoulder. Such a small woman, he thinks, watching the fine bones of her neck move under her skin, and steels himself back to the subject at hand. "But, Hawke –"
"Are you really worried about this?" Hawke looks up at him through dark lashes, and reaches out, pausing just before her fingers touch his arm. The lyrium in his skin rouses sleepily, then recedes as her arm falls back to her side. "Oh, Fenris, please don't be. It doesn't bother me if they think I'm stupid. They don't know me. If you think so, well —" She shrugs again, her eyelids flickering before she tilts her head and gives him a wide grin. "Besides, while he was ducked down, getting my loaves? I stole back the coppers he tried to cheat me out of."
Fenris's laughter surprises him. "You didn't."
"I did! And you didn't notice!" Hawke wrinkles her nose at him, guileless eyes glittering. "See what I mean? It's good to be underestimated. Excellent camouflage."
"So it would seem," he murmurs, as she waves at the butcher.
Hawke is a spendthrift, Hawke is lazy, Hawke knows no jokes but terrible ones, Hawke's arms are red with blood to the wrists, and Hawke is a damned mage.
Fenris' hands are bloody, to the elbows.
He tried to turn himself into a fortress: impregnable, unassailable. Nothing could breach his walls, nothing and no one, especially not a mage.
Or so he thought.
It terrifies Fenris, how easily and how quickly he has learned to forgive Hawke all of her flaws. Even Hawke's sin of being a mage is one he finds easier to live with, after two years of walking next to her, through Kirkwall and beyond. Tonight, he followed her to the sea, and now their companions sleep as Hawke keeps the middle watch.
He turns to his side, watching Hawke sharpens her staff's blade on a small whetstone. She never expected him to stay, or demanded it of him. Every step of this long road, she has left the choice up to him.
And when he asked, she sang.
No doubt she thought little of it, the way she thinks so little of all her small kindnesses, but Fenris holds the memory of her voice close as he drifts toward sleep: her voice, cold and clear as a mountain stream, and her pulse feathering against his palm.
They have both killed for many reasons, both good and bad, but Fenris has never seen Hawke kill in anger. Never, until they track Ser Alrik and his templars to a cave soot-stained by the smoke of many fires, and see the mage girl fall to her knees.
"Please," says the girl, her eyes brimming over with tears. She cannot be more than seventeen, with round cheeks and uncallused hands, and she is the first mage Fenris looks at with pity.
A child. His own thoughts surprise him, but go no further; Hawke waves them all back, snatching at Anders' arm when the mage lunges forward, his skin cracked by blue-white light.
"Don't!" she hisses, and shoves Anders back against Sebastian. "You idiot, have you never heard of stealth?"
In spite of himself, Fenris almost smiles. That Hawke, of all people, should claim to know anything of stealth — but then Ser Alrik's voice rises to their little group's ledge, a sly insinuation of power.
"Say it again," says the templar. The mage girl sobs, and covers her face. "Again." The other templars shift, a ring around the girl, swords unsheathed, the gleaming bars of a cage.
Fenris shudders. He does not know why, and does not want to.
"Please," whispers the girl, into her hands. Alrik laughs, all delight, all satisfaction, and the girl cries harder as he strokes her hair.
Anders growls, low in his throat, but Hawke goes still, not even breathing. Her face blazes in Fenris' memory for days afterwards: white lips and cheeks, teeth bared, her eyes the only color in her face. The air around her crackles as she drives her staff into the ground, bone-white sparks flaring around her hands and face.
And still Alrik laughs, and laughs.
Why would he stop? Even if Alrik looked up, even if his attention turned from the mage for one moment, he would see that Hawke is small, and soft, and too beautiful to be dangerous. So many would laugh, and so many have.
Hawke clenches her fists around handfuls of the sparks, and Fenris' markings flare to life as she shouts.
The templars turn blank helmets to the ledge, to Hawke, and Alrik cries a command that Fenris cannot hear over the roar of flame.
He has seen Hawke conjure fire from empty air a thousand times before — to warm, to burn, to defend — but this is no fire he recognizes. It burns purely, the color of snow and cruel stars, and falls in a torrent from the ceiling of the cave to drown the templars, one by one.
Fenris watches as the templars stagger under the weight of the flames below him, both horrified and entranced. His markings sing, alive and awake as they have never been before, called to answer by Hawke's magic.
A few of the templars crawl out of the firestorm, their armor glowing where the flames heated it red-hot. Alrik — of course the bastard still lives, though burned and stained — calls the command to attack as Hawke's flames die out, the great currents of magic rolling back into her.
She slumps against her staff, shadows dark as bruises under her eyes, and fumbles for a lyrium potion at her side. Fenris hesitates, torn between the fevered need to see this battle ended, and these men punished, and to stay by Hawke's side.
Their eyes lock — for a heartbeat, no longer — and he nods, unsheathing his sword and turning to follow Anders as the mage thunders down the stairs, flinging twilight-shaded bolts of light at the remaining templars.
This is not a battle he would have chosen, three years ago. He might not even have chosen it this morning — but he has walked every mile of the coastline, and he has seen too many sides of evil to keep his blade still now.
You will do great things, my little wolf, Danarius told him, with a smile Fenris does not let himself remember. Great things.
Yes, I will, Fenris thinks, bracing himself as the first templar comes for him at a run. And none of them will be what you wanted.
His markings wake again, as Hawke's familiar flames knock Alrik to his knees, but beneath the screams and blood, he almost welcomes the sensation.
Almost.
The question is not one they can avoid forever; Fenris does his best to ignore it, and succeeds for weeks at a time, but always, it lingers between them.
In the end, Hawke is the one who drags it into the open, eyes serious over flushed cheeks.
"Fenris," she says, running a length of red ribbon through her hands. "You've never told me how you feel about me being a mage. Well, besides that first conversation."
Fenris watches the firelight catch on his blade, considering his possible answers.
"I saw nothing in your actions that gave me reason to doubt you," he says, finally. "There was nothing to say."
Hawke gives him a cool, measured look. Fenris' skin prickles with gooseflesh, flaring cold along his markings. Meeting Hawke's gaze is like plunging his hand into a frigid stream, and finding he cannot reach the bottom. "That's a very good answer to a question I didn't ask," she says. "I won't press if you don't want me to, but I'd like to know, Fenris. What do you think of me, and my magic?"
He has spent years trying to answer this question himself. If he cannot find words — any words, so long as they are true — he will lose whatever part of herself Hawke has chosen to give to him, and she will not fill this empty mansion with her voice again.
What does he think of her, and her magic?
Magic rots, magic spoils; it takes good souls and warps them with dreams of power, and those with souls already corrupted are fouled beyond measure. Anders is tainted, Merrill is tainted, every mage in every Circle is tainted, and it should follow that Hawke is tainted. She is tainted, and someday there may be a temptation great enough to push her to darker means, and bitter ends.
But there has not been, not yet. Fenris would have seen, as closely as he has watched her all these years, and she is still Hawke, her hands full of stone and wind. Even in her fury, she did not act out of cruelty or greed.
"I trust you," he says, as the fire crackles, and the first of winter's winds rattle at his windows. "Not your magic, but you."
She smiles, as still and quiet as a jewel in the low, flickering light, and ties the ribbon back around her wrist. "You know," she says, "I see what Anders does down in the clinic, taking care of all the refugees, and I want to tell him that will do more in the end for his cause than anything else."
Fenris stretches out his legs, soles toward the fire, and watches Hawke from the corner of his eye. "The clinic," he says, after she falls silent, her chin pillowed on her knees.
"Mm." Hawke nods sleepily, and turns her head to smile at him. She has cut her hair, and it falls in ragged waves over her cheek. "It may not seem like much, but none of those people wanted to go to a mage. But it was better to go to a mage to save their child or their husband than the alternative. They go when they have no other choice, he asks nothing for his help — and they leave, knowing a mage helped them. That we're not all monsters."
"A fair point," Fenris concedes, frowning at the fire. "But enough are, Hawke. You can't deny that."
"I'm not." She tosses her hair back. "Maker, you think I don't know? One of my first memories is Mother crying over me freezing the water in my bathtub. Because I was a mage, just like my father. My own mother was afraid of what I was." A long, shaking sigh escapes her. "I worry, every day, that she was right, and I would rather die than find out that she was."
Fenris can find nothing to say to that. The hooks rustle in his stomach, slender and so sharp they do not hurt as they pierce him. He has only caught glimpses of this Hawke, with all her bright layers shed. She is still beautiful, still close enough to touch, but there is no laughter in her now, and no songs. He barely recognizes her, and he doubts half of Kirkwall would know her, if they saw her like this. No camouflage, no peacock feathers, no joy: this Hawke is weary, and afraid, and Fenris can fix none of it — and he would not, given the choice. Without this fear, she would be someone else, someone he could not trust.
Hawke tilts her head back to the ceiling, the long line of her neck glowing pale and vulnerable in the firelight. "I've always wondered. Is that why they keep mages in the Circles? If people really knew what we could do — keep crops alive, make sure livestock stay healthy, everyone's got a fire in winter, not just, I don't know, earthquakes and blood magic — would they be as afraid of us?"
"Probably," Fenris says, reluctantly. "There's always the chance that someone will give in to temptation. It'd be naive to deny that, Hawke."
"Oh, I know." She laughs bitterly, and rubs her forehead. "But I wish — I wish it wasn't. 'Magic should serve man', and all that. I think most of us would want to help, given the choice." She sighs again, and gives him a sidelong look that pricks his heart. "I'm sorry. I'm being selfish. You've every right to think the worst of us."
Danarius carved the lines into his skin first, with a knife heated in a dark flame. Fenris choked on the smell of his own burned flesh, unable to breathe or think past the pain, conscious only of the point of the knife tracing its path over his chest, his feet, his thighs.
And then — then came the lyrium, and pain became a living thing, shrieking in a thousand voices, and the man Fenris had been was washed away in the unending, mindless flood.
Yes, he does have every right. But that does not mean he has not learned mercy, or to value actions above intent, and it does not mean he cannot love Hawke.
I do, he thinks, his heart leaping at his own daring, finally putting words to this truth. I love her.
"I've been so selfish," Hawke says, as if she had not been silent long enough for the flames to begin to fade. "My whole life, I thought I had the shit end of things. Running from templars, hiding what I was, being terrified they'd take Bethany and me away, or hurt my father…" She winds a lock of hair around her finger and yanks it tight. "But really, I had it easy. Compared to what's been done to — to you —"
"Hawke," he says. His pulse throbs in his throat. "You don't…"
"Please, let me finish." Her eyes close, and Fenris watches her fingers dig into her arms. "When I was a little girl," Hawke says, her voice fading to a whisper, "my father told me, you need no circle if you carry it within you. It's worked for me, all my life, and it's worked — it worked for Bethany. Stupid me, I thought, maybe it could work for everyone, maybe we could help each other make it work. But what you told me about Danarius, and then, with what Anders almost did to Ella…"
She rubs her cheeks, more naked now to Fenris' eyes than she ever could be unclothed.
"I'm sorry, Fenris." Her words blur together, almost too quiet under the fire's crackle. "What happened to you — I knew mages were feared. I just didn't think we deserved so much of it. I was wrong. So stupid. I don't know where the balance is, or who's right. Well," she says, the bitterness in her voice cresting, "I know Alrik wasn't, and it isn't Danarius —"
"Hawke." He reaches out, touches her wrist. She hesitates before threading her fingers through his, and his markings prickle, not unpleasantly, as their skin meets. He could get used to the sensation. He could.
The thought no longer disgusts him. Hawke understands, more than he ever thought a mage could, and though he hates how her fear hurts her, he cannot hate that it will keep her safe, that it will keep her careful.
Perhaps, it will keep her alive.
He will still watch. It is not in him to stop, not after so long, but he watches for her now, not merely for himself. But that — that is a thought for the morning.
"It's not a mistake to hope for something better," Fenris says, more gently than he thought he could.
"Is it?" Hawke whispers. "Will we ever stop being afraid? Any of us?"
"I can only speak for myself," he says, eyes lingering on her throat, her mouth, the faint shadow of lashes on her cheeks, "but I'm willing to hope." And he is; he is as close to peace as he has come in this short second life, and fear has no place in this moment.
If any gods are watching now, he thinks, his thumb tracing idle circles on the inside of Hawke's wrist, they're surely laughing. A mage, and Danarius' little wolf.
But he is that no longer, and like fear, there is no place for such dark thoughts tonight.
"Me neither," she says, smiling shyly as the fire fades. She does not move to rebuild it, and so Fenris does not, content for now to watch her in the dying light, warmed only by her hand and the echo of flames within it.