AN: The next few chapters are my contributions to the first-sentence meme on Tumblr, in which a friend submits the first line of a fic and the recipient is meant to write the next five sentences.
(I am, as you might have expected, very bad about sticking to five sentences.)
Please note that these fills may contain Inquisition spoilers or feature Inquisition characters. Otherwise, enjoy!
1. From w0rdinista, 300 words. Hawke/Fenris.
—
Outside, rain fell from the leaden sky, colder than ice and sharper than needles; fortunately the liquid in his glass was far warmer—though it too was sharp, it burned on the way down.
—
It wasn't the first time he'd suffered cheap liquor for the sake of its more medicinal properties, but even the whiskey couldn't dull the memory of the creature the Wardens had kept leashed in their secret tower.
A magister. One of the magisters, if the beast was to be believed, the first, who'd blacked the Golden City and brought the darkspawn into being with their defilement. The thing had not even noticed Fenris; the weird, piercing eyes had looked upon him and passed over him, slave, too base for acknowledgement when Hawke stood between with her blood a challenge to the magister's very existence.
He shuddered again, remembering the weight of foul, foreign magic seeping into his lyrium, and threw back the rest of the drink. A move better-suited to Isabela, perhaps, but he was tired, and unsettled, and made uneasy by more things than he could name, and when the door opened behind him he nearly missed the sound of it beneath the thump of his glass against the table.
"At the risk of banality, I'd say this looks a lot like brooding."
"Hawke," he sighed, and a moment later her arms came around his shoulders from behind, her mouth coming against the crook of his neck as she bent over the back of the sofa. "I didn't expect you so soon."
"You're in my house," she pointed out, her words muffled in his skin.
True enough. "It was warmer than mine."
"And had bad whiskey."
Also true. He touched her hair, just for a moment; then she sighed and straightened, moving to sit on the sofa's back behind him, her hip by his shoulder, her hands folded in her lap. "It is over, Hawke."
"Is it?" she asked distantly, and took the bottle he offered her, while outside the rain continued to pour in long unbroken sheets of water, steady and drumming, greying out the world.
.
2. From servantofclio, 400 words. Hawke/Fenris.
—
It had been raining long enough for everything, and everyONE, to get thoroughly musty and irritable.
—
Not even the city's regular supply of bandits had been willing to venture outside in days. Now and then Varric heard reports of one path or another on the Coast flooded to impassibility; Anders, when he emerged, dripping, from Darktown, offered similar tales of the tunnels below, rank standing water preventing all but the most foolhardy from plumbing their depths.
Even Hawke's irrepressible cheer had dampened under weight of the rain. Few of her friends were willing to brave weather like this–Isabela and Merrill perhaps, she thought, though the former only with very good reason–and with the city quiet she couldn't even muster cause to drag them out of their safe, warm, dry-ish homes for nothing but the sake of their company, despite how grateful she might have been for it.
All the same, she'd been indoors for days. Nothing else to do for it, not if she didn't want to go mad; she snatched up the furred, enchanted hood left by her father and an oiled cloak from the foyer, and after a brief word to Orana she set off into the streets.
For a while she amused herself by pretending she didn't know her destination. An alley here, a flight of long stairs there, a turn around another corner–and then, grinning even through the rivulets of water tracing down her cheeks, she found herself beneath Fenris's window.
Briefly she considered throwing a pebble, but the streets were relatively clear beneath the puddles and Fenris had few unbroken windows besides, and so in the end she settled for the barest brush of magic against one of his sturdier (if unused) shutters, knocking it against the wall one-two-three, too deliberate for wind.
She waited a moment and knocked again; then, his expression already blacker than the weather, Fenris's head and shoulders appeared in the window above his door. "Hawke," he said, brushing irritably at the stray droplets that managed to sneak under his cobwebbed eaves onto his hands and shoulders. "I should have known."
"Fenris," she singsonged, her mood already markedly improved and rising further, rain pattering cheerfully at her feet. "Have you got any dry spots left in this place?"
"That depends," he said, lifting an eyebrow, "on how wet you are."
She laughed, delighted. "I'd be happy to give you a personal demonstration."
Fenris rolled his eyes and disappeared from the window; but when he opened the door, he was smiling.
.
3. From mynameiscloud, 360 words. Hawke/Fenris.
—
He groaned into her ear.
—
"I don't know what you expected," Hawke snapped, almost sharp enough to belie the worry. "That's what happens when you take arrows for other people."
Fenris let out a soft huff of a laugh, then groaned again as she worked the second of the barbs free. "If it matters," he said after a moment, pain tightening his voice, "the arrow was meant to hit the armor."
Hawke laughed, was angry for laughing, and cupped Fenris's cheek with her hand where his head lay in her lap. The other hand still held the ash-shafted arrow in place, its many-barbed tip embedded deep in Fenris's left shoulder, not an inch shy of the breastplate that'd done little good by proximity. "This will hurt."
"Do not waste time on my comfort, then," he said, and turned his head away.
Hawke took a breath. The man was not Fenris. The only way to bear the hitching half-gasps, the rippling, repeated shudders of his throat as he swallowed over and over, the way his bare, lined hand clenched white-knuckled around his own thigh for the sake of something to hold. Only some faceless wounded soul thrust into her path for saving. Not Fenris, who'd thrown himself between her back and the archer on this stupid journey halfway to nowhere with not even a decent village to seek for shelter.
The last barb came loose with a twist, and Fenris let out a long, hissing breath through clenched teeth. Hawke dropped the arrow on the ground, immediately set hands to healing the wound left behind (not poisoned, thank the Maker), but too torn, too deep, too near his heart, too everything. She could not bear it.
"I wish I could make you promise not to do this again," she muttered, infuriated by her own emotion.
Fenris lifted his hand, fingers trembling with the aftermath of pain and adrenaline, and gripped her shoulder. "I will not," he said too easily, "so long as no arrow aims at you again."
"Idiot."
Fenris laughed, soundless, breathless. "Only because of the set example."
"Idiot," she said again, but they were both still alive, and she supposed that counted for something.
.
4. From bearfootscar, 400 words. Hawke/Fenris.
—
The night she left, Fenris heard the vague click of the door closing, but rather than investigate, he snuggled into the Hawke-scented pillow a little deeper.
—
They'd said their goodbyes. Said them more than once, and with great enthusiasm and greater grief, and because he could not watch her leave and not follow he had asked this instead: no warning, no farewell, only a night where she was there and a morning where she was not.
He woke with dawn, and for a long time he did not move. His bed was cold, unfamiliar now after so many years; worse, the little house had grown quiet in a way it never was, not the silence of stillness but a deeper, implacable emptiness, a hollow place where there had not been one before, where part of him was missing.
For a moment his eyes burned; then, impatient, he rose and dressed himself and went to the window, drawing in a clean, calming breath, the edges of it sharper with the scent of her herb garden laid carefully, row by row, beneath the window. Somewhere behind him lay a sheet with explicit instructions on its tending; beneath that hid another page for daily chores, and another for reminders, and scattered haphazardly through them all almost careless declarations of unending affection, as if between caring for the verbena and washing clothes he might forget that she loved him.
He missed her. Already, not a day yet gone, as if a knife had slid between his ribs, and he wondered at the hurt.
In another room a small cry began, low at first and then rising, and Fenris turned away from the window. As he entered the room the cries quieted; as he lifted his daughter from her bed they became hiccups and short, heaving breaths, her dark head fitting so easily on his shoulder as he settled her against his chest.
"Hush," he said softly, and when she did not he began the long walk through the small house, into rooms and out of them again, down the narrow hallway of this place he and Hawke had intended to be a home. He did not think of their emptiness; he did not look for her. Eventually his daughter's cries quieted; and when he felt her breaths smooth out again into something like sleep he touched her small cheek, and her shoulder, and freed at last from her tiny fisted grip a long, worn, loved length of red ribbon, the last gift Hawke had left for them both.
.
5. From kiracompton, 230 words. Hawke/Fenris.
—
The look he's giving her is particularly vile, but Hawke does her best to stand her ground.
—
She's not here on her own behalf, she tells herself. For the Inquisition. For the Inquisition. For the—
"And to bring that with her," the man says to his expensively-dressed companion, voice obviously pitched to carry, and Hawke thinks: right, screw the Inquisition.
It surprises her that he's obviously surprised at her approach, his grip tightening on his perfect Orlesian champagne flute, his eyebrows lifting behind his perfect Orlesian mask. "Forgive me," she says on approach, her gown swishing delicately at her ankles as she bows and smiles and hopes her tone conveys as much of the opposite sentiment as possible, "but I think I heard you mention something of my companion?"
He stutters, glances at his friends, and recovers again. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean, Champion."
"Oh, my friend, but you did! In fact, I could swear to hearing the words 'knife-ear,' 'brand,' and 'savage' more than a dozen times in the last hour. Remarkable, really, that as grown as you are you should know so few words."
"Now see here," he starts, obviously incensed, "just because you brought a Tevinter bedslave to a formal ball—"
"Tevinter—" Hawke echoes, and that is how she ends up writing a formal apology to Lady Montilyet for punching Lord Evereaux Montpensier into the four-hundred-year-old Cherub's Fountain at the Fête of the White Palace.
(She does not, however, regret it.)
.
6. From marigoldfaucet, 365 words. Hawke/Fenris.
—
Fenris is baking.
—
It's not the first time Hawke's found him in her kitchen, especially not when Orana is cooking, but it is the first time she's discovered him there with a bowl in one hand and a book open on the counter before him, his lips moving slowly with every word. Orana perches on a tall stool beside him, nodding at something he says; she nods again when he proffers the bowl, pleased by whatever she sees inside it, and Fenris turns to the greased metal sheet beside the oven.
Somehow, Hawke doesn't want to—interrupt this, and she waits until Fenris has dolloped eighteen creamy, ginger-brown spoonfuls of dough on the sheet and then deposited it in the oven before she shifts in the doorway. Orana glances over, begins to smile; Fenris flushes, of all things, the very tips of his ears staining red, and meets her eyes with something like defiance.
"Hungry?" she asks, interest without mockery.
"No." He fidgets, turns to the book, back again. She has never seen him so discomposed. "I thought you were with Aveline."
"We finished early. She found the handkerchiefs she was looking for at the second place we tried."
"Ah," he says, and frowns.
Perhaps she shouldn't have stayed after all. "Sorry, I've interrupted. I'll leave you to, um. Whatever this—"
"No," Fenris says, cutting her off, and then he sighs and gestures at the book. "How long have you been giving me lessons, Hawke?"
"Oh—I don't know. Three years, almost? Not that you've needed them for some time."
He lifts his chin. "So. I can read or I cannot."
"Of course you can," she says, and then understands all at once what he means. "Oh. It's a test."
"Just so."
"With a very obvious pass or fail."
Fenris inclines his head, and Hawke can't repress the urge to kiss his cheek. "If it matters," she adds, winking at Orana, "edible or not, I will eat every single one of them."
"Please don't," Fenris says, but Orana smiles.
"They've looked wonderful so far. They ought to be perfect."
(They are, as it happens, but the quiet, embarrassed pride in Fenris's face would have made ash taste sweet.)