Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: G
Word Count: 1100
Prompt: from lilou-approves: "20. Go nuts, and talk about writing. Or write me a little ficlet-whatsit using a character/image/line I shall now specify: Fenris/Hawke. How about a ficlet about Fenris writing, then? :D"

—

He did not enjoy writing. It was not a skill that came easily to him, and while he was no stranger to effort, nor to the hours of dedicated focus in pursuit of some new proficiency, he was unused to a practice that despite every effort showed him no improvement.

The nib snapped—the third in as many hours—and Fenris threw the pen to the desk with enough force to spatter ink. Not that it mattered; his page was a mess of misspelled words, a heavy smear across the middle where he'd forgotten to blot the paper, his lines uneven, curving upwards and downwards and running into each other so that the letters cramped and shrank to nothing. A full sheaf done like this, and a dozen sheaves before them—and all of them the same, all useless, all the unformed, shaky script of a child and as illegible.

He cursed aloud, a childish thing despite the profanity, and barely caught his ink-wet fingers before they raked through his hair. Hawke stirred in one of the faded armchairs before the window and said, thick with sleep, "There's another in the box."

"A waste of silver," he snarled, aware of his own distemper, incapable of suppressing it. "Better to have let it line Isabela's pockets."

"Isabela," Hawke said evenly, sounding more awake, "does not have pockets. And even if she did, no coin would stay there long. Perhaps you ought to take a break."

"Nothing will be solved by stopping the exercise."

"And nothing will be gained by you sitting there glaring like you've been copying Anders's manifesto instead of Hard in Hightown. Take a break. Walk around a little. Stare out the broken windows at the neighbors for a little while."

"Look at this," he snapped, snatching the page from the desk, stalking across the room to her chair where she sat in its high-backed shadow. He thrust it into her hands; embarrassed, furious, he said, "There is no reason to continue this farce. You waste your time and mine."

Hawke said nothing, looking at him for a stretching moment and then at the page, her eyes, dimmed by shade, flicking across the words he had scrawled there. A child's hand, he thought, closing his eyes, appalled at his own ignorance—he had seen Hawke's writing, looped and slanted and even; Varric's short, square letters, a frustrating mix of unnecessary capitals and abbreviations and yet entirely readable; and Anders's sharp, determined script marching line after line after line, close and straight and bold and sure, as if the blackness of the ink alone might sway his readers into action.

And him, no letter formed the same way twice, tight and too pointed and so difficult, even now, even after so many months. He curled his stained fingers into a fist.

He itched for a sword. There, he knew grace; there was skill made by nothing more than his will and his determination and a decade of discipline. There, he knew every shift of muscle, every bending joint, every motion entirely under his command in the way that a pen never was—

At last, Hawke lifted her eyes. "Fenris, I don't understand the problem."

He laughed, a hard, impatient thing. "No? You see no problem with this—scrawl?"

"So you have terrible handwriting. I can read every word."

"Every word. Spelled for me by Varric, because despite four months of these—lessons—I can't remember even the simplest rules of—"

He cut himself off, whirling in place, his chest hot with frustration. He heard Hawke rise, felt the shift of air as she drew near, and hesitated, and withdrew; then she said, a curious note in her voice, "I'll be back in a moment. Don't go anywhere. And don't try burn that book again, if you don't mind."

"I will make no promises," he said shortly, and knew the promise made all the same.

She was not gone long, no more than ten minutes—long enough for him to screw up his courage with a new pen-nib, or sheer stubbornness, or his unwillingness to accept defeat, even now. Hawke found him with one new line across the top the page, no less untidy but perhaps a little straighter, and when he lowered the pen she dropped a flat brown-wrapped package on the desk before him. He lifted his eyebrows; she shrugged, and when she made no move to stop him Fenris untied the twine that bound it, unfolded the thick brown paper in careful layers until its contents lay bare.

Letters. All opened, all old, the pages yellowed and too fragile at the creases. He touched the topmost gingerly, sliding his fingers beneath the folds until it opened, petal-like, to the quiet of the room.

"My father," said Hawke, low, "wrote these to my mother when they were courting."

He could read that. The first word, the letters narrow and tipped sideways, the capital too large for the rest: Leandra—

And then—

"Hawke," he said, "I cannot read this."

"Neither could my mother," she said, and he touched the smeared ink, the words run together three and four at once, letters made more by suggestion than real shape. He caught a word here and there—dearest, tomorrow, gold—and then Hawke flattened her hand to the desk beside him, and he saw that beneath her fingers lay his own page, his own crooked lines twinned by the letter he held. "Yours," she added, "at least has the benefit of legibility."

He looked up to her wry smile, to the shift of her shoulders. "Hawke. You did not have to show me this."

"I've never met a man so driven to such unreasonable perfection as you. Sometimes your standards are impossible. Even for yourself."

Fenris hesitated. The words caught on his tongue, tight and prickling and difficult to shape. "I have seen—an example. A standard." He drew a breath. "Your standard. I wish—to match it."

She grew very still, her eyes wide and startled. The back of his neck flushed with embarrassment; then all at once she softened, and slid both his page and her father's letter away to lay a new, fresh sheet in their place, still unmarked by ink or thought, no error and no life to it. Yet.

She said, "Then let's find a place to start," and, nodding, he lifted the pen.