girl-chama asked you: "Yahoo me!" :D

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Characters/Pairing: Fenris/F!Hawke
Rating: G
Word Count: 1,300
Prompt: Yahoo Me: the characters celebrate something.
Summary: Sometimes, two people having a quiet conversation in the dark is a greater victory than any battlefield.

Recommended Listening: Los Angeles (watch?v=smH3-JqEwoA) by Peter Bradley Adams.

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"Do you know what today is?"

Fenris looks at her without lifting his head. Every bit of him is lazy, loose, his hair falling pale and tousled over his eyes, the fabric of her bedspread draping heavy from his bent knee over his waist, his thigh. For once he is all curves and nothing hard: the swoops and curls of lyrium over his bared chest, rounding and easing again as he breathes; the dim firelight pooling gold in the hollow of his throat, in the bend of his elbow where he has tucked one hand beneath his head—

His eyes, open and unguarded in contentment. The half-curve of his smile.

Hawke rolls to her stomach, pillowing her head on her arms. Fenris's gaze slides down the curve of her back to where the covers spill over her naked hip; then his eyes come back to hers, and Hawke smiles herself at his expression. "Today," she says again. "Do you realize what it is?"

"No. Should I?"

"Maybe not. It's sheer chance I remember myself."

Fenris lets out a deep sigh, the sound meant to mock but emerging utterly relaxed instead, and closes his eyes. "And do you intend to dangle this secret before me all night?"

Hawke hums and resettles herself on her arms, flicking her hair away from her face. "That depends on how stubborn you are about guessing it, I suppose."

"I despise guessing games."

"And I happen to love them. Whatever's a girl to do?"

"Find less-tiresome entertainment," Fenris suggests, the corner of his mouth quirking.

"Impossible. Your continued refusal to spar against my sparkling wit is all that keeps me going some days."

"If 'wit' is meant to be 'unreasonable persistence.'"

"Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Three years ago today," says Hawke, dramatic as if she is announcing Orlesian nobility, "you came creeping into my foyer to tell me you were very upset about Hadriana's death."

His eyes come open again at that, his smile shrinking, but Hawke knows Fenris well enough to see he is neither upset nor disturbed by the memory—only startled, and counting backwards in his head. "Already three?" he asks himself, his eyes distant with time. "What is the date?"

"Fifteenth Kingsway."

"I don't—remember."

"I wouldn't have either if it hadn't been precisely a month before my nameday. Aveline mentioned it today and I realized she was right."

He turns on his side to face her then, propping his head on his hand. "There are some things about that time I would change."

"And some I wouldn't," she points out. Fenris looks at her but says nothing, conceding her the issue, and Hawke hides her smile in the crook of her elbow. "Besides," she adds, lifting an eyebrow, "I've been thinking up some wonderful ways for you to make up all those missed anniversaries."

"Ah," Fenris says. "Extortion."

Hawke laughs, reaching up to tug at a bit of the white hair over his eyes. Fenris grimaces but allows it, and after a moment Hawke relents, sliding her fingers fully into his hair and over his scalp, tracing an aimless path along his temple, behind his pointed ear, down the dip at the nape of his neck. "Oh, yes," she tells him softly, watching his eyelids flutter and close and open again, his expression somewhere between pleasure and deep suspicion. "Extortion as you've never dreamed."

His voice is lower than usual, rumbling with her ministrations. "Explain."

"Three poems."

"What?"

"Three poems," Hawke says again, careful to keep her hand moving through his hair, careful to keep her tone perfectly reasonable. "Penned by your own hand, delivered one each morning with a single red rose by my breakfast-table. You may give them to Orana for delivery."

His eyes come open at that, narrowed slits of green focusing on her face like arrows pinning quarry before a kill, but he says nothing, waiting, patient and inscrutable. Hawke bites down hard on the inside of her cheek before continuing. "Then, at noon on the third day, I will put on my mother's best courting gown from the attic and meet you in the square. It's a bit old-fashioned and I think you could fit four people under the skirt, but the velvet ribbons have hardly mildewed at all."

Fenris's eyebrows shoot up like a line has yanked them—but a moment later Hawke sees the start of a curling smile. "And then?" he asks.

Oh, damn, she thinks, and laughs. She's oversold it. But—oh well. She rather likes this next bit. "A healthy constitutional. We will tour the estates like a perfectly respectable couple and have perfectly respectable conversations about the weather and hors d'oeuvres and pointed shoes, and then you will return me safely to my front door with nothing more than a perfunctory hand to my elbow."

"Chaperoned?"

"Naturally."

"And a polite farewell."

"As reserved as possible."

He leans closer, then, close enough that Hawke's hand slides free of his hair, her fingertips trailing down the back of his neck and along his spine, pausing, pressing gently into the warm shift of muscle and skin between the blades of his shoulders. "And then?"

"And then," she tells him, her voice dropping with deep secrecy, "in the dark of night when everyone's asleep and there's only the moon to guide you, you'll climb the rose-covered trellis against the wall, slip in through my conveniently-unlocked window—to a breathless string sonata, if you can get the musicians—and make mad, passionate love to me until first light."

Fenris stares—and he drops his forehead against her own and laughs, soft but unreserved, his shoulder shaking where it presses against her own, his thumb ghosting over her throat as he lifts his hand to her cheek. "Hawke," he says, "you have no trellis."

"No trellis," she agrees as he lowers his head to her pillow beside her, so close her nose brushes against his as she turns to him. "And no roses."

"And no musicians."

"And no window wide enough for you to fit through."

"Not easily," Fenris says, and Hawke closes her eyes. He has settled near enough that she can feel the brush of his lips over the arch of her cheek, the rise and fall of his chest, the low steady thumps of his heart; she thinks a moment of another year, another night, a fat round moon like this one and a different ending altogether—and a beginning for them both. Less easy, perhaps, and with less warmth in its making, but no less precious to her for the pain of it.

Hawke opens her eyes. Fenris is watching her, quietly, his eyes half-lidded and golding with the flicker of firelight, and when she places the flat of her palm against his chest where the lyrium curves together to become one piece, he shifts closer to meet her, to keep her hand at his heart.

Oh, but she loves him.

"I suppose," she whispers thickly, smiling, "we'll have to make do with what we have."

His mouth is against her mouth, not quite a press, not quite a kiss. "And what is that?"

"The moon," she says, and his fingers smooth over the skin at the small of her back. "You. Me. A promise of first light."

"Hawke," he says, and she shivers at the warmth there, at the gentleness, at the lazy curling affection that twines around her name, "this is enough."

She smiles to keep her heart from her throat. "Next year I want roses."

Fenris laughs, and nods, and presses his hand against her back with the promise; then he kisses her, and though there are no roses, no poems, no musicians' strings to mark the sweetness of the moment—it is perfect.