Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K+
Word Count: 1900
Notes: Unapologetically indulgent character study served heavy on the metaphor. For no other reason than I love these characters a lot, and I wanted to.

Soundtrack: Frailty (for the Dearly Departed), by Hammock. (watch?v=gOZkoalCoHc)

—

love letter to a striking match

—

Here is the heart of it: Hawke burns.

She's holding fire in her cupped hand the first time he meets her. Later she lets it go, a bloom of light vanishing between her fingers; her smile blooms instead, like the heat at the leading edge of a storm, but he is desperate and she is willing, and when he asks she steps into the heart of a shadowed mansion and lights every corner of it blinding. When death is through, though, it diminishes in unexpected relief; he blinks away the afterimages through burning eyes, and he flees to the refuge of Kirkwall's evening air where there is no smoke.

He should have known. There could be no other end to his life than this, his dependence once more on the same creatures as those who taught him the leash. One hand alight is the same as all the others.

—

She runs hot, he finds. Hot in everything: temper, temperature, her fingers scalding on his shoulder as she claps his back after a battle. He prods her selfishly, looking for the same spark of cruelty that lived in his master; often she snorts instead, or laughs like green branches breaking and snapping under their own heat. Sometimes she breaks with a shower of embers, one sharp crack and a sudden hot wash when he digs too sharply, but it never lasts long and there is never the rage in it that he expects.

It will come. It always comes in the end—

He builds himself in Kirkwall all the same. Weak man, addicted to the warmth, even what dregs of it reach the shadows where he is crouched to tend this bitter, barren land he has claimed as his own. He is from Seheron's jungles; he was made in the wild gold-baked Minrathous, and he knows best of them all the danger of rising heat.

—

This is what he learns over the years: given enough fuel, Hawke can be provoked past discipline. He sees it the first time after her brother is taken in the Deep Roads; he sees it again, months later, when a careless comment of his own throws oil on a spattering flame. She goes up like a greasefire, building higher and higher into a tower of fury that sends him startling back, hands raised in useless defense. But just as quickly—she is out again, and he is unharmed, and all that is left are the black scorchmarks on their history, saying: here they survived the burning.

More than one of those places behind them; yet more ahead, and it unsettles him to realize he does not fear their coming.

What he does fear is what he refuses to acknowledge in the quick glances out of the corner of her eye, the way she begins to turn first to him after a battle, the way he slowly starts to listen for her above all others in the crush of steel and blood. It is a cautious thing, drawn unwilling from his history of scars, a slow simmer with reckless flares forward in a night of drunken confessions, in other hot, embarrassed moments over one of Isabela's books in Hawke's library. He wishes she did not laugh so easily; it would be easier to hold away the heat of her if it did not catch on every one of his torn edges, an effortless warmth that licks at him and catches there and grows, and grows, and grows.

She touches his arm occasionally, after a fight with raiders or with each other, assuring herself that he is not hurt. Her fingers always scald regardless of the weather.

(He does the same, once, when a bandit's sword has breached his guard and left her with a bleeding palm. A simple thing, no danger to her life, but the red flush that surges across her throat when he takes her wrist surprises him.)

(A cruel relief, to know that she is as weak as he.)

—

Then, all at once—

He does not want to die. He goes to her after Hadriana is dead because Hawke is alive, and because she burns, and if he must burn with this bitterness and hate how much better that he have one with him who might stoke it into something hotter. He knows she wants him, has wanted him; he is not so distant from his past that he cannot read desire in a mage's face, and he is not so distant from himself that he does not know he wants her, too. To take the flame in the palm of his hand and hold it there, twisting, brilliant with heat, checked only by his command—

He is a fool.

He cannot even master himself; how could he think himself whole enough a man for this? He sweats in her arms like a field laborer baked beneath the sun; he closes his eyes and memories blaze behind his lids to blind him, a handful of seconds that stretch forever before they are gone again, nothing but shadow and a pressed hole in his mind where they glittered. Hawke arches beneath his lips, gasping pleasure; her fingers slide down his body to leave white sparks in their wake. She pulls her name from his mouth again and again, coals burning on his tongue.

It was better before. He was better before he knew this, before he realized he could not be strong enough to bear this light—

He goes the moment he can stand. He cannot let her have all of him now; this field he has scraped together is fallow but it is his, new, unturned—he barely knows yet whether it will hold life, and if he lets her sweep over him now in a fiery billow he will never know. It was the same with Danarius. He is so piecemeal a man he cannot yield only part of himself, and though she will not mean to consume him he can see himself already, bones gone black and cracking, head bent, hands outstretched for even more than that.

She will scorch him to ash, and he will cherish it. He must go.

He must.

—

Here is what fire does not burn: cold dirt, the memory of pain, an iron shackle.

—

He puts his hand to the ripple of heat, says: no, and she withdraws. Never gone, not completely; only licking at the edges, warmth and light never closer than he demands, even when the distance is farther than he wishes. It must be all or nothing for him and he is—

He is, at the heart of it, afraid.

—

She fears, too. He forgets that sometimes, that under the brash brassy hammer of her humor there is a girl who has set half her family to the pyre already.

Then her mother dies.

She is devastating like this, this towering rage that has seen only a handful of times: the spit and hiss of open flame from her fingertips, her eyes ablaze, her head thrown back in heat so strong the air wavers with it. This is when he learns temperance, that not all anger burns bright enough to give light, that a summerweight heat can writhe into itself, on and on, until even the slow-glowing embers that feed it are drained black and dead. Long after her mother's body is put away and the fire lit and the ashes put in proper heat to mourn, Aveline says: Hawke will burn out if left alone.

Fenris knows this, too.

All the same, he is shocked to find her so doused when he goes upstairs. (Heat rises, always rises—) But she is bent, and dark, and small, like the dead things left behind after a forest fire; he does not know if this can be sparked again, not as it was. It must be a coaxing thing, slow and careful: a touch here, a smile there, one evening of cards, one sojourn to the Coast, where there are memories not drenched through with grief. It is slow going. He tries regardless, and slowly, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, the world begins to lighten again around her.

He is startled by the victory he feels the first time he makes her laugh, after, and the delight when she makes him laugh in answer.

He is more startled to find that after tending the hearth so carefully for so long—he can no longer fear it.

—

The years pass, then. He steps back, watches her sputter and spit and swell into life again; watches her nearly be put out at his own words against the Arishok, only to manage to survive stubborn and hot-eyed as ever; watches her grow tall and proud into a beacon for a city that sorely needs one.

Watches her wait, eyebrows lifted above that burning smile, for him to welcome her at last.

And yet. There are bindings on him even she cannot break, and against both their wills he keeps himself apart. A little longer, he tells her, a month yet, a week, another hour. A slave does not own his heart. He has so little to offer her; he is determined to give her at least that.

(As if he has not given it to her already. The wicking candle of his bitterness has grown smaller with every passing year; he knows who lit that flame.)

—

Astonishing, how one step on a stair can bring back memories ten years removed, how one word can narrow his world from everything his friends have opened to the single point that is his master's voice.

Cold terror in the pit of his gut. Grey robes, a grey beard, eyes like ice and as implacable—looking down on him as they always have. He had thought he was past this fear—

Then—

Warmth at his back, steady and growing, and the slow unfurling of heat in his chest from his heart outwards, like stepping from shadow into the sun.

—

He can see the hope in her. She's alight in his rooms, flickering, looking up at him as if every word might be the one to send her soaring forward. How many reasons has he left to check her heart? More than enough—dozens, if he cares to count—but he's had enough of waiting, enough of testing himself and her, enough of looking for a light to lead him when he's held one in the palm of his hand for years. His word has kept the fire at bay; now, firetamer, he is ready to give himself to the pyre at last.

He is no Andraste, but he has no more excuses, no more fear; he opens his arms to the flame.

(All, or nothing—take it all. Take everything.)

It is not surrender. It is triumph.

—

Here is what fire does not burn: deep roots in good earth.

—

She loves him. He knew it already; she tells him all the same, over and over, until he is fairly glowing with the sound of it. He cannot pretend to understand why after all this time, after all she knows of him and his weakness and his fear and the many ways in which he is small. And yet—he knows these things of her too, and loves her just as fiercely despite them. Perhaps because of them.

Ten years since another has swept through him like this, a decade's worth of mast a ready tinder for the spark she sets to light it. She cups his face and the earth blazes; she kisses him and the trees go up in smoke; she smiles at his touch and his blood races in his ears like a pillar of fire, roaring, roaring—

—

Afterwards—peace. The fire has come and taken his heart, and he has survived its taking. Let the rest fall where it will.

(How odd, then, to turn back at the end of it and find the field he thought burnt to ash had only had the roughage cleared, that beneath the bracken and black earth there sprang the pale new peeping of hundred green shoots.

How odd, that something so new could already be so strong.)

She says his name like a light with no shadow. He kisses her, smoke-sore and tender, and slides his fingers between her own until they are warm.