Lilou88 asked: #20 for Fenris and Hawke. :D
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Characters/Pairing: F!Hawke/Fenris
Rating: G
Word Count: 700
Prompt: 20. Author's Choice; I picked #18 - underwater kiss!
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Fenris doesn't remember learning to swim.
He supposes he must have, once, perhaps with his sister by his side in some warm Seheron river, the jungle-green leaves stretching broad and silent above their heads—but this is a fancy of his imagination, he knows, because those days to him are lost. Still, his muscles' memories remain if nothing else, and as he cuts through the cool lake water with long, powerful strokes, it is with the ease of much practice and many hours spent like this.
The water is calm and clear, dark with night sky and ringed with the shadows of trees, and as he draws near the place where Hawke treads water in the center of the little lake he slows to an easier stroke, feeling the water tug and pull against his bare feet with what little current Hawke has stirred. She grins, her pale shoulders just edging out of the water, and shoves her dripping hair away from her face.
"Glad you could join me," she tells him, her voice quiet in the hush of evening breezes and the distant call of crickets.
Fenris snorts. "You said the water was warm."
"I'm sure it's very nice during the day."
"Of course," Fenris says, perfectly aware of her duplicity, and when she moves to float on her back he drifts beside her in content silence. Her hair spreads out behind her, a black fan drawn over the lake's mirror of reflected, shimmering stars, and Fenris draws his fingers through the feathering ends until the heavens shiver with the motion.
Hawke laughs, softly, and turns her head to look at him. Her eyes are very bright. "You can't get views like this on the Wounded Coast."
"No," he agrees, watching the water lap at the bare skin of her shoulders.
After a long moment Hawke smiles, the moonlight catching only a moment on the glimpse of her teeth, and then with a quick exhaled breath she disappears beneath the surface of the lake. Fenris blinks, looking at the place where she vanished; then, as the ripples begin to settle and the stars smooth into mirrored glass, he smirks and lets out his breath, too.
The lake is dim beneath the surface, no star's light to show him Hawke here—but Fenris needs no such luxuries, and with a moment's thought his lyrium begins lighting, vein by vein, faint blue-white light resolving the gentle shadow before him into the softer features of Hawke's face. Her eyes are wide at first, caught in this unexpected trap; then she smiles, and draws nearer with a smooth motion, and lyrium light plays down the curve of her cheek, the rise of her breast, rippling with the motion of the water and the slow kicking of their feet.
He reaches for her, his palm alight. A silent laugh bursts free of her mouth in a cloud of a thousand tiny bubbles that flicker like white stars as they vanish upward; then her fingers are on his and between them, and her legs are tangling with his legs, and in the smooth cool glide of water her mouth glides across his own.
His eyes close despite themselves, and when she draws back it is harder than he expects to open them again. And yet somehow she is still there, caught in his arms and in the gentler grasp of the lake, and her eyes are bright with the light that flows from his skin to hers.
It's true that Fenris does not remember learning to swim. Still—still. Like this, with the stars somewhere above him in one smooth unbroken stretch across a still, silent lake, there are some things he knows he will never forget.