rubyvroom asked you: fenris/f!hawke, drink me
—
Characters/Pairing: Fenris/F!Hawke
Rating: T
Word Count: 6000 (oh my goodness, this one got away from me!)
Prompt: Drink Me: two characters drink, separately or together.
Summary: They have two long unwinding roads behind them, and the important places are marked with empty glasses.
Recommended Listening: Frysta (watch?v=MvVEY2Emy1U) by Olafur Arnalds.
—
She is ten and her brother is five and her sister is five, too, and the wind is sharp enough that it slices between the walls and the door despite the blankets her mother has wedged in the cracks, cold enough to frost the quilts they four have wrapped around each other even before the roaring hearth-fire, loud enough that the howling rattles the windows and shakes the door and thumps at the roof like a wild demon seeking entrance to their souls. The snow is high as the sills and growing higher, swallowing them up in the way a quiet tide rises black in the night to leave no trace of them behind, and though she is the eldest and the tallest and her father has told her to be brave, her heart trembles to think of him out alone, lost, wandering, seeking a house that has been eaten by snow and swallowed in the dark.
"Are you afraid?" her mother asks, her voice gentle, her heavy shawl pulled close around her shoulders, touching first Carver's head, then Bethany's, disturbing neither of them from their uneasy sleep on her lap.
"No," she says, and lifts her chin. "Father promised to come home."
Her mother smiles, then, and warms the room with it; moth-like she draws closer, drawn by love's open light. Her mother stretches out her hand and strokes her hair and she feels the knot in her heart break a little, undone, giving way to simple surety. "He will come," her mother murmurs, and because her mother says it, it is true.
And it is true, she finds, when less than an hour later the front door blows open and the storm thrusts her father through, blustering and blowing snow into the corners like an angry maid with a broom, winds sneaking in through the blankets with chilled fingers as her mother rises.
"He'll live," her father says through four layers of scarf, ice cracking in his voice. His fingers are gloved thick as sausages and clumsy on his coat as he tries to unbutton it, and when her mother pulls his hat from his head a fresh torrent of snow sifts down over his shoulders. "He broke the leg clean through, but the mending was easy enough. He won't even have much of a scar." Her father pauses, his unwound scarf draping over one ungloved hand. "Unless he wants one, I suppose. Flames! I should have asked."
"Malcolm!"
Her father winks at her where she still sits by the fire, watching, and then turns to his wife. "Never fear, love. The boy will live unscarred and we will live undiscovered. Here," he adds, smiling, and pulls from his overcoat a large bottle of amber liquid that catches the firelight like gold. "Healer's fee."
"He owes you more than that for calling you out in this weather," her mother says, pursing her lips, but instead of putting the bottle away with the others in the locked cabinet above the stove she looks thoughtfully at her husband, and then at her daughter, and then she fetches two little clear glasses from the china cabinet and brings them over to the fire.
Her father joins them, most of his coats shed, his snow-crusted boots puddling on the rush mat by the front door, and without a word he lifts her into his lap, quilts and all. Bethany and Carver have curled together before the fire, their tousled dark heads nestled against each other; Carver snores, just a little, and moves closer to his sister, and though her father's chest is cold even through the blankets, and though she is the eldest and the bravest, she tucks her head under her father's chin and listens to his heart beating.
Her mother pours out the liquor in a smooth, gleaming fall, and hands one of the glasses to her father. "For the cold," her mother suggests, one eyebrow lifted, and raises the glass to her lips.
"Naturally," her father says, and there is something burning in the word, something burning in her mother's eyes—but the moment is a candle's breath, there and gone again, and after a long swallow her father hands her his own glass. "Here. Try it."
"Malcolm—"
"Just a sip! Just a sip," he adds to her, grinning in conspiracy, "or I'll be out in the storm again."
She looks to her mother, uncertain—but though her mother shakes her head she is smiling, just a little, and very, very carefully, she lifts the glass to her mouth and takes a sparrow's swallow of whiskey. It burns and she coughs, her eyes watering, her throat closing—but as she swallows she warms too, a little fire-bright coal dropping right into her heart to burn there.
This is how she falls asleep: her head on her father's heartbeat, her mother's voice and his entwining over her head, low and gentle, and heat unfurling in her chest, spreading out behind her ribs like wings.
—
He is eight and his sister is six, and he does not like the dry heat of Minrathous. Seheron is already fading in his memory, the traders' laughing voices giving way to slavers' shouts in the city marketplace, the soft undyed tents yielding to blazing scarlet banners that glare down at him with golden eyes, but even now he cannot forget the way the hot, wet warmth of the jungles wrapped around his skin, nor the way the sunlight filtered down in a heavy haze between the broadest leaves when he walked beneath them, one hand upstretched to their light-limned edges.
His mother wishes him to forget these things, he knows. Their master does not approve of daydreams.
But for all their master's power he cannot yet open a heart with his hand nor read a mind with his eyes, and so despite the risk of it he lets himself dream and he lets himself remember. He ducks around a woman with her arms full of dirty linens and thinks of the thick-boled trees dripping with vines; he passes under an awning's shadow and sees the tent-roof of their unburnt home; he lifts the curtain to his family's room and it is the little waterfall that tumbled down the rocks at the mouth of the creek, cool and dim and whispering secrets he could almost understand.
"There you are," says his mother without turning from where she kneels, her voice flat, her shoulders curved, and Seheron is gone. Her hands work a lump of pale dough on a stained cheesecloth, kneading, twisting, unceasing in their movement. "Help your sister with the candles."
The room is dim with shadows thrown by the rags strung over the window, thin shafts of dry sunlight choked with dust piercing the places where the weft has worn thin, mottling pale the far wall, his sister's shoulder where she sits at a worn basket, the red-gold of her hair where it falls from its tail. She looks up and smiles to see him, sweet enough for the bruise on her cheek, and when he crosses to her she passes him the packet of brass pins. The bedroll they share is thin but not as thin as nothing, and he sighs as he dumps a handful of slender white candles to the blanket between them.
They are quiet a long time. The work is mindless enough that he can dream and he does so, for a while, pretending the pins he pushes into the soft wax to mark the candle's hours are like the game he used to play with pebbles placed on a straight and balanced branch, dropped just so into position without weighing down one side or the other too heavily. Varania had been too little to play with him then; he does not know where he could get a branch in the city but there are pebbles enough, and if he is very good for the next week perhaps he will have a chance to ask the overseer for—
"Leto!" snaps his father, and the brass pin drives hard through the candle and into the soft flesh of his thumb. He knows better than to cry out—but the pin is thick and sharp and it hurts, and despite his best efforts tears sting fiercely behind his eyes. His mother's hands thud into her lump of dough without pause, without breaking, steady and dead.
"Stop that," his father says to his trembling lip, and then, "stand up. Come here."
He stands, his thumb clenched into his fist, and goes. Varania's eyes are huge above the bruise. "Did I do something wrong?"
"No. I am sold." His father's voice is bitter as the colus leaves that lined the jungle paths, and for once there is no sanctuary in the memory of his home. His mother's hands still do not stop their kneading. "I'm to go with Erisus in an hour. To Marnus Pell."
"Father—"
"Be quiet. Listen to me."
"But—"
His father grips his shoulder with tight, pinching fingers, the hold cruel enough to make him cry out. "Your mother," he says, his eyes fierce and wild and blazing as the sun through the jungle's trees, "your sister. You will protect them, Leto. Do you understand me?"
"Y—yes."
"Swear it."
"Father—"
"Swear it!"
"I swear it!"
His father thrusts him from him, then, and fumbles into the pouch at his waist. Ceramic clinks against steel and for an instant he thinks wildly of a knife—but instead his father pulls out a small flat dish and a tiny jug of sweet wine, and with trembling hands he pours the wine into the dish until it spills over the rim. "Hold this," he says. "Give me your hand."
He does, trembling himself; his father grasps the thumb that had been pierced and squeezes harshly, the skin turning white under the pressure until a fat drop of blood falls heavy from the end of his nail. Then his father snatches up a dropped pin from the ground and pierces his own forefinger, and with a motion almost frantic does the same to his own thumb until his blood has mixed with his son's in the pale wine.
"Drink it."
He does not want to—he does not like the sight of blood—but his father curves his weathered, work-callused hands around his son's, pressing, pushing, until the cool ceramic touches his lips. "Drink it," his father commands him. "You've made the oath of a man; seal it as one."
So he does, his eyes wide, three swallows until the dish is empty. He is not a man—he cannot be, not yet. He has too many dreams. His master will not approve.
"There," says his father, and when the dish is empty he smashes it on the ground in one quick movement and yanks his ancient, rusted dagger from beneath the other bedroll. "Remember this," he says without looking at his children, and Varania begins to cry.
He cannot move. He is frozen from the inside out, his veins iced over, the jungle heat of Seheron a lifetime gone and less than a ghost of a memory. His father pauses once at the doorway, his edges caught in cold light, his face turned back to the shadow where his mother kneels; then he draws in a quick breath and is gone.
Two days later, they hear word of a slave killed in assault of its master on the road to Marcus Pell. Varania does not understand. Leto does, and as he watches his mother's face settle into frozen stone, he thinks of wine, but he tastes only the hot bitter bite of blood.
—
She is fifteen and her idiot brother ruins everything.
The girl hadn't even been nice, idiot Elara with her idiot beautiful face who kept dipping Bethany's braid in ink, but Carver's big mouth is apparently a perfect match to Elara's and her templar father's, because thanks to all three of them here they are again, wandering Hawkes, mules hitched in the dead of night to a wagon loaded with all their earthly possessions as they fly from yet another town.
She'd liked West River, with its view of the Wilds and the cosy Chantry and the winding creek with the bridge that had lined the edge of the fields. Stupid Carver. Stupid her, for not thinking quick enough to stop him when he'd opened his mouth. Bethany had been soexcited about Summerday, too, promised by Mother Gera she'd get to light one of the candles at the service, and now instead they're starting over again—
She lets out a short, sharp sigh of frustration and shoves her hair behind her ears with one hand, tightening her grip on the mules' reins with the other. Her mother is in the wagon behind her with Bethany, asleep; her father and Carver walk just past the edge of the rutted dirt road, little more than shadows glinting here and there with crisp moonlight, her father's hand on her brother's shoulder, her brother's hands clenched at his sides. They walk there a long time, quietly, her father's voice little more than a bee's hum in the darkness. Carver says nothing at all.
They reach an inn just past midnight. It is not large, and not overly clean—but it is warm and dry and the mistress kind enough to put what is left of their dinner's stew over the fire, and by the time they have cleared their cracked wooden bowls her anger is not so hard to swallow, either. Carver looks only at his spoon, even when Bethany throws him tearful looks.
"Malcolm," her mother says, then, "why don't you put the twins to bed?"
Her parents share a look, and then her father goes, Bethany's hand tight in his and Carver close behind, and her mother takes her sister's empty seat and pushes her untouched cup of mead across the table. "Don't tell your father," she adds dryly at her daughter's look.
She takes a sip, looks down into the mug, cups both hands around its cool surface and watches the sweet honey-gold liquid settle again, smooth and flawless as if it had never been upended, never had its world spun around it without even a word of warning. "I'm so angry at Carver," she says, suddenly, and is startled by the sound of it.
"I know, darling," says her mother. "But he's your brother. You can't fight with him forever."
"I can fight with him tonight," she mutters obstinately, and takes another, longer swallow. "He ruined everything."
"He's ten."
"I had my magic by ten. I never told anyone and made the whole family pack up and leave."
"No?" her mother asks, gently, and she flushes from throat to cheek. She knows what her mother means—a girl she'd thought a friend, and a pond not quite warm enough to swim in, and a long, embarrassed, tearful journey north—and she drops her eyes to the cup again.
"I won't be upset with him tomorrow," she says. "I promise."
Her mother touches her hand. "You can be upset, darling. But you must also be kind. Your brother is angry too."
"Because we're all mages and he isn't."
"Because he put your sister—and your father—and you—in danger. He doesn't want you hurt because of his careless words."
She thumbs a chip in the cup's handle, inexplicable tears pricking behind her eyes, and her mother's hands slide from her wrist to her chin to tip it up, until their faces are level. "So," she says, swallowing once, and then again, "I should not be careless with my words, either."
"My girl," her mother murmurs, and then she smiles so warmly something aches behind her heart. "What a wonderful woman you're turning out to be."
She does cry at that, just a little, and that night, when Carver crawls into her bed whispering sorry, sorry, sorry, she pulls him close the way a big sister should and tells him don't worry, everything is fine, I love you.
—
He is seventeen and he is dead drunk.
The room is very dark—or are his eyes closed? He cannot remember; he opens them as wide as they can go and snorts a laugh when he stumbles over a sleeping body in the darkness. His mother makes a soft, crooning moan like a wounded bird and rolls away from his dirty feet, and he takes two—three—four uncertain steps before hitting the wall hard with both palms.
He laughs again and sinks down against it, leaning his head back against the cool dusty stone and staring blindly at the narrow strips of starlight at the edges of their door's curtained opening. "Done," he whispers to himself, and covers his face with his hand.
"Are you—are you drunk?" Varania's voice hisses out of the shadows like a coiled viper and he flinches away, startled, unsettled by the venom. "You are," she says, sitting up from her pile of thin blankets in the corner, and her hair tumbles down around her shoulders. "All that silver—Leto, how could you?"
"Leave it," he tells her, or he hopes he tells her, and drops to his side on his pallet, turning away from her without bothering to undress. There is a crack in the clay wall a handspan high, and as he watches it it seems to lengthen first one way and then the other, stretching across the whole of his vision until he blinks it back to dimmer starlight.
"What have you done?"
He does not answer. A moment later he hears the spindle-crack of her magic snapping flame to a candle, and meager yellow light spills over his shoulder and the side of his nose. He closes his eyes.
"Leto," Varania says, and when he still does not answer she kicks him hard in the ankle.
He bites back a snarl and props himself to one elbow, candlelight smearing across his eyes, and glares. "Leave me alone."
"Not until you tell me what you've done."
"Lower your voice!"
She kicks him again, hard enough to hurt. "Tell me!"
He is angry—he is drunk— "I entered the tournament!"
"You—" she says, her voice a ghost—then she pushes to her knees and fists a hand in his worn shirt to drag him closer. "You are a bastard."
He looks at his sister, his foolish, skinny, fifteen-year-old brat of a mageling, her eyes hard as diamonds and glittering, her mouth pulled hard and tight to keep her lips steady. "You know what our master does to slaves with magic."
"I do not need your protection."
"The victor wins a boon of the magister."
"Victor!" she scoffs, disdain dripping from her teeth, fury in her tongue. "You will die in the third round."
"I will win."
"You will die," Varania says, and after she releases his shirt she slaps him open-handed across the face. He stares at her, astonished, lifts one hand to touch the sharp sting under his eye; her tears are gone, now, her cheeks white with anger and despair. "You will die and you will leave us alone."
"I will win," he says again, but the words are empty of hope, an offering to a deafened god. Varania flings herself back to her blankets, her spine stiff as a rail, and does not move again.
He watches her a long time. The cheap candle burns down, then gutters; he licks his fingers and pinches it to smoke, and then he stands and pushes the curtain aside to lean against the open doorway, crossing his arms over his chest, listening to the sounds of twoscore slaves settling around them for the night, just as they have the night before this and the night before that.
There is a step behind him near the second hour. Varania comes forward without a word, without looking at him, and sits silently by his feet in the doorway. Her shoulders are still stiff against the clay wall, her hands still knotted with anger, but soon enough her head comes to rest against his knee, and though the movement is not gentle it is sure.
Like this, they wait for dawn.
—
She is eighteen and she is in love.
He is tall and tow-headed and the son of the blacksmith, and as gentle as a pup with Bethany and Carver when they visit. More than once her sideways glances have caught him glancing back, and when one night he comes awkwardly to the window beneath the room she shares with Bethany, bringing with him a fistful of wildflowers and a genuine grin, she laughs and takes her father's bottle of whiskey, too.
They spend the night in the barn's loft, watching the stars through the skylight, watching each other drink from the same place on the rim, testing with fingertips and mouths and half-gasped words the things they had not known before. They spend the summer like this and the fall, too, in lofts and by the banks of Lothering's little river, under the oak his mother planted when he was born, in her father's fields, sunlit and warm. The whiskey comes along with them more often than not, but if her father notices, he never mentions it.
(She knows he notices.)
It is, though she is not fond of the word, idyllic. Her mother even hints at marriage, once or twice, though her blacksmith's son says nothing of it and she is not ready for the word herself, can hardly even imagine it: wife. She tells her mother this and laughs at the thought; her mother sighs and smiles and shakes her head, and her father leans his elbows on his knees and tells her, grinning, to save them all the trouble of planning and run off to Denerim instead.
But dreams, she knows better than many, are never things to be trusted, not when they are perfect, and when one day an accident crushes his hand in the forge they come to a gentle end. There is no one else near them and the injury is beyond simple splinting; so she heals him, carefully, quietly, her hands cupping magic like water, his fingers realigning themselves, the pain in his eyes giving way to the deeper wound of betrayal.
"I'm sorry," she tells him afterwards, when he clutches his hand to his chest and listens to the lies that slip so easily between them, even after this, even after everything. "My parents don't know. You're the only one."
"You never told me."
"I was afraid."
"I loved you," he says helplessly, and she says, just as grieved, "So did I."
"I won't tell anyone," he says, later, once the forge is cleaned and his hand is straight and they have both put away their hearts. She fumbles for a moment at the counter behind him; then she thrusts the nearly-empty bottle of whiskey into his hands.
"Keep this," she tells him. "My mother doesn't like liquor in the house anyway."
He thumbs the glass corner and musters up a half-smile that knocks her breath from her chest. He says, quietly, "It was good while it lasted."
"It was," she agrees, and makes it halfway home before she starts to cry.
—
He doesn't know how old he is.
He wonders about it, once, when he hears another magister discussing the ages of two of his stud slaves, but his master says it does not matter and so he does not think of it again. It is not his place to wonder, after all. He knows better now than to spend his thoughts on anything besides his master's will.
"Fenris," his master says, and he steps forward smoothly, one hand cupping the base of the silver decanter, the other wrapped just so along the elegant curve of the handle so that the lyrium is on full display. The markings are still tender, even after two years; he is grateful that the wine is not chilled tonight.
The Agreggio spills out in a smooth crimson stream, swelling inside the crystal of the woman's glass like an opened wound. Her fingers are long and elegant and adorned with many rings where they hold the stem, and when he bows to her and withdraws he can feel the weight of her curving smile settle heavy over his shoulders. The next course comes and she leans closer to his master, whispering, flirting, flicking her eyes at the watching slave in clear suggestion. Danarius leans back in his chair and lifts an eyebrow—and smiles.
His heart begins to race. He knows how this will end—wine licked from the end of his master's fingers, or the woman's mouth, or the stone between his master's feet—and he knows too that this is as much a test as any other task his master has set before him. He has not failed his master yet; he will not fail him here, either.
Danarius nods, approving, and even as a hot rush of pride swells in his throat his mouth goes dry, half-sick with anticipation and anxiety; the lyrium flickers up his arms in lines of white fire and his master smiles to see it, lazy, amused, gaze hot and open with lust. The woman twists in her chair to see what he stares at; when she realizes she lets out a light, beautiful laugh and lifts her wineglass to her lips. Fenris watches her helplessly, locked in place like a hare pinned by a hawk, her many rings burning bronze in the torchlight as she pinches the stem of her glass. Her throat opens and closes and opens again as she swallows, her eyes heavy-lidded and languid, and when the glass is empty she draws her tongue around its rim in a smooth circle.
"Don't tease my wolf, Hadriana," Danarius murmurs, though the words are pitched for Fenris, and the woman smiles, white teeth between lips stained scarlet.
—
She is twenty and her father is dead.
The world is cold for spring—or she is cold, she can't tell. The pyre burns hot enough to make her sweat and bright enough to sting her eyes with light and smoke, but she cannot feel the tips of her fingers and her teeth chatter like a child's in winter. Her mother is tall as a statue in her veil and she doesn't know how she has the strength—but Bethany is strong too, and Carver, and she-the-eldest-and-the-bravest is the one with trembling knees among them.
Eventually, Carver—fifteen and a head taller than her now—takes her elbow and guides her home. She sits at the kitchen table where he places her, staring at the golden grain of the wood her father had sanded and stained and polished, unmoving until the funeral ends and the entire town comes to their house to help them grieve.
Malcolm Hawke fished my son out of the river once. He helped me bring in half the harvest when my plow broke three summers back. He patched my roof the day after that terrible storm. Such a nice man, that Hawke was. So kind. Do you remember? Do you remember?
"Oh, flames," she breathes, and pushes up from the table. Someone has brought a crock of homemade liquor with a black ribbon tied around its throat; she plucks it from the table without ceremony, slipping out the back door, breaking into a dead run until she is so deep in the grain fields her father sowed that she cannot hear their consolations.
Then she lies flat on her back, crushing half the stems beneath her, and yanks the cork from the bottle. The smell alone is enough to burn her nose, but she screws her eyes shut and takes three long swallows, scalding the back of her throat and making her cough like she hasn't in years. The sky is very blue; she watches it deepen with noon, shading her face with her arm, drinking, listening to the empty place in her heart where her father used to be.
It's old Barlin that finds her there eventually, tramping back through the same fields on the way to his own farm. He looks at her upside down, his broad-brimmed hat shading his face and hers.
"What are you doing?"
"Grieving," she says—slurs—and wipes her mouth with the heel of her hand.
"Well, hurry up," he tells her, and looks back to the east fields. "Someone has to be Hawke for your family now."
—
He is four weeks without his master, and he is weakening. The Fog Warriors are very kind—too kind, for a slave missing his master—and despite his every effort they will not leave him be. He eats because he must be strong and hale, but he cannot pretend there is not something familiar in the food that makes his heart race; he trains because he must be honed as his blade, but he cannot say the way the heavy wet heat of the island curls around him does not loosen something long clenched in his chest.
One of the women goes hunting and invites him; he goes without knowing why, his feet silent on the jungle floor, steady in his path as if he knows it. Sunlight filters down in great swaths around broad green leaves, dappling the woman into shadow before him, and when she disappears to stalk her prey he stays where he is instead, breathing the secrets of the shadows that he can almost understand. There are thick-boled trees all around him, wide at the trunk and smooth with years, untouched by Tevinter magisters or qunari blades, known only to these warriors he has found himself with. His eyes fall closed despite himself, the sound of insects and far-distant voices and an unseen stream all blending together, sharpening, striking something deep inside him that he cannot name.
He draws in a breath, looks up, into the sun, and stretches up one hand to touch a leaf edged in light. It is only an instant, but he thinks this might be—
Careful, slave, careful. Be wary. There is no home for you but me.
He wonders, suddenly—is this true?
Later that evening he joins the warriors for the evening meal, and for the first time in his living memory he does not once wait for his master's leave to sit. All around him are people laughing, talking, trading stories and food alike as if there is no difficulty to it, and though Fenris cannot quite mimic their ease he thinks he understands the reason of it. The woman he'd hunted with smiles at him from her husband's other side, twining her fingers through his between their knees, and gestures at the dishes of strong, clear liquor laid out in the center.
"Choose one for yourself," she says around a mouthful of sweet berries. Her husband shakes his head in mock chagrin and she kisses his cheek, unabashed, unashamed.
"Thank you," Fenris says, and—he does.
—
She is twenty-three, and this is the worst year of her life.
Bethany is dead. Carver will barely speak to her. Her mother drifts between grief and hard bitter anger like a broken spar tossed by the sea, surfacing only moments here and there with the gentle affection that had once been so easy. Even Gamlen is little better, a quarter-century of old grievances rising like accursed darkspawn to poison the house around them.
The third night in a row Meeran's jobs send her home bloodied, she makes it two steps in the door before Gamlen's glare and Carver's sulk and her mother's grief flood over her like physical things, a cold tidewater swell dragging at her heart to pull her under.
"Enough," she snaps, sick past death of sorrow, and she grabs Carver by the arm. "Everyone, get up. Right now. We're going out."
It takes some convincing for her mother and a little more for Carver, obstinate only for the sake of it, but before long they are at a tiny scratched table in the Hanged Man, wedged between a group of card-playing sailors and a laughing pair of off-duty guards. She ignores her mother's wide eyes, ignores too Gamlen's suspicious stare, and when Norah makes her way to the table orders a bottle and a dozen shots of the strongest swill Corff has to offer.
"What—" starts her mother, but she cuts her off.
"We," she says, "are going to drink together as a family. Mother, Uncle, the bottle's for you. The shots—" she adds, cutting her eyes at Carver, "are so we can bond."
Carver snorts and rolls his eyes—but by the end of the night he is laughing, and Gamlen is grinning, and when Norah collects the empty glasses and calls her Hawke her mother smiles, and nods, and tucks her hand into her daughter's arm.
"Your father would be so proud," she whispers, and though it's not quite healing, not really, Hawke knows how it feels to have the knot in one's heart begin to loosen.
—
Three years gone and he's running, running, running—death at his heels and the whip behind it, and he cannot run far enough. A ship's belly bears him south until he's found in Llomerynn; he bribes another captain for passage to Ostwick, and though he spends the voyage crammed in the cargo hold with four barrels of pickled eels, his sword is sharp and his eyes are sharper and Ostwick finds him undiscovered by his hunters.
He travels west, because Kirkwall is large enough to lose himself and find information at the same time, and because he has heard the Circle there to be strong enough to keep the mages back. The city is divided into districts; he finds a disreputable inn in the poorer section that asks no questions and takes a small room, and for three days he watches the traders of the city ply their wares.
Eventually, he settles on a dwarf: on hard enough times not to wonder at the coin, friendly enough to be trusted with the task, simple enough not to think of spreading word of the elf approaching him with questionable work. He meets Anso at a tavern in Lowtown, wine at his elbow, ale for the dwarf, and pushes both the flagon and a small purse across the table.
He says, "Find me someone who will fight."
—
Two hours and one shade-filled mansion later, and she doesn't know whether she's made a friend or an enemy.
"I should have realized sooner what you really were," he snarls, and even though Carver, her wonderful idiot brother, finds a sudden protective streak, the elf's apology still sounds like it's been dragged out with thorns.
"Can't be helped," she tells him lightly, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. "But you wouldn't be the first to distrust me for it."
He frowns, staring at her, and for one wild moment she thinks of whiskey and a summer beneath a spreading oak.
All these years, and it seems she's never made it past eighteen.
—
He has been in the city too long. Too many people know his name, his face, where he sleeps; too many people call him friend and expect his blade in their defense.
Come to the Hanged Man, she says, for cards. Have a good time. Stay a while longer.
He doubts her, but somehow—he does.
—
She drops the bottle and two heavy tumblers on the table between them and he looks up, wary but not afraid.
"Fenris," Hawke says, and she smiles.
—
"Let's have a drink."