Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K
Word Count: 578
Prompt: from servantofclio.
Azalea: fragile and ephemeral passion.
—
Hawke's love is a killing thing.
Half her family is dead before she realizes. Then her brother nearly goes in her arms, sick and white and coughing blood into the dark, and the weight of the truth settles softly around her shoulders, a mantle of snow, just as cold. Even the Wardens cannot save him, not really; his death sentence is postponed, not commuted, and she knows him well enough to read his face as he turns away into the shadow. She has lost him as surely as her father and her sister, even if he breathes a little longer before dying.
Gamlen knows this too, sour and bitter as he is; he knows as well as she does that what she touches cannot live. He is the one she goes to after Fenris leaves that first night, not because she wants his gentleness (that comes from her mother, as little as it soothes) but because he understands, because he knows better than all the others how it feels to try and fail.
(Isabela leaves them just as often. Aveline's husband died, and Mother's, and Anders's lover—and Merrill is very sweet and cannot make out the meaning, even though she tries. Both Varric and Sebastian listen too well and see too much, and she's still too bruised to talk without bleeding, and she can't—she can't.)
Better this way, he tells her, not meeting her eyes as he hands her back the bottle. Better to lose the love quick, before it can die on its own. Before they can die on you and leave you with the weight of what you've lost. It's a fragile thing, that sort of feeling, and prone to a quick wither at the slightest step—and she has never had the touch to keep such delicate things alive.
Better this way. Surely…
So her mother dies, because Hawke cannot care for a thing without killing it, and because his affection is cruel Fenris comes to sit with her in the grief. She wants to shout, wants to shove him away before he's taken as well—doesn't he know what he does, coming here? caring?—but he does not go, and he doesn't falter, even if the years keep distance between them neither of them wants.
He does not die. Not that year, nor the next, nor the year after, and day by day the affection in her heart she cannot kill grows stronger. She would stop it if she could—all others, but not him, not him—but as thin and pale and unfurling as it is it will not die, even under her clenching grip. The irony of her life, that the one thing she would kill to save refuses to give way before her.
So. The years pass, and she loves him, and one day his master dies and he grows free enough to love her, too. She warns him afterwards, when neither of them has permitted the other's fear, when the flush of contentment and affection has grown familiar enough they may speak seriously through it and not weaken.
Fenris smiles. He kisses her without speaking, and all at once she realizes the unfurling thing in her heart has taken root without her noticing, grown strong enough that no storm could ever shake it loose, strong enough that not even she could kill it if she tried.
Better this way. Her love is a killing thing, but his, here—
His is strong enough for them both.
.
—
Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K
Word Count: 552
Prompt: from bossuary.
Zinnia: I mourn your absence.
—
He had known he'd miss her. He'd grieved before she'd even left, Varric's cursed Inquisition pulling her sense of duty between them like a shield. But it's been more than three months since he's seen her face and their daughter is growing without her mother, and he—
He misses her.
Their neighbors do not understand. They'd wondered when she'd left, whispers following him into the village with every step, they looked so happy before, I heard she was ill, they say such things are common with marriages to elves, but what will happen to the child?
He knows what will happen. The child will grow, and the rumors will change, and fade, and die, and then Hawke will return and they will surge again, made worse by their refusal to dispense details to every prying soul. Life will eventually resume, as normal as they can ever bear to be, and the village will be left with one more quiet mystery among its farms and rivers.
He knows this. And yet—
The weather changes, the air crisping, the leaves golding at the edges. Varric writes him now and then, spare letters of well-being, and day by day Fenris turns more and more often to the west where Skyhold lies beyond the mountains. He glances at his pack, at his sword where it hangs on the wall. He takes the milking goat to a lead and walks with her to the creek and back again, wondering.
Varric writes. Hawke does not. His daughter smiles at him as he takes her in his arms after a bath, and he realizes—such a small thing. Such a small thing, their child's smile.
Hawke has never seen it.
He leaves at dawn. The goat trails behind him, bell clanking with every step; Leda rests against his heart in the sling Hawke had made before she left, cheerfully cooing every time he glances down to meet her eyes. Occasionally wagons offer a ride when they pass the same direction; other days he walks dawn to dusk, resting only when his daughter can no longer bear the swaddle and demands to be fed from the patient goat.
They travel this way for two weeks. It is not the most arduous journey he has ever made, even with an infant in arms, and on the last morning he hires space in a wagon's bed to carry them the last way up the mountain's side, to the walls of the stronghold spreading up and away in every direction he can see, cage and guard and sanctuary for everything he holds most precious to him.
A simple thing to persuade the guards out of his way, to hide his daughter in the folds of his cloak like a parcel meant for keeping. A simple thing to stride into Skyhold's great hall and find Hawke standing at the other end with the Inquisitor, her head turned at the commotion as he enters.
She breathes his name into the sudden silence, her eyes alight. Fenris's heart is a soaring thing, even after the long and winding weight of their journey, and as he pulls the cloak away he sees her eyes drop to the baby he has brought half a continent to see her.
She covers her mouth. And Leda—smiles—
.
—
Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: M
Word Count: 450
Prompt: from fourth-age.
Forsythia: anticipation.
—
She's still laughing when her fingers slip around his knee. Fenris does not startle so easily these days, now that he has become used to such things; even so, he cuts a sideways glance to find her grinning at him over her cards. He lifts an eyebrow, but her fingers only tighten before sliding an inch up his thigh, and Fenris returns his eyes to his own cards.
Isabela notices, because of course she does, but the rest of their friends seem thankfully too involved in their own hands or their own cups to tease them overmuch. Isabela even restricts herself to a pointed smile and wink before turning again to peering over Aveline's shoulder; a generous gesture, and Fenris knows it. This—what he has made here, with Hawke, is still too new for such open laughter, yet.
He discards three, and as Varric deals him the replacements Hawke's fingers slip another inch or two before she squeezes his thigh gently. He keeps his eyes steadfastly on his cards, though he does drop a warning hand to her wrist—for all the good it does, as a moment later her foot hooks around his ankle and begins to rub, back and forth, along his own.
"Hawke," he says in an undertone, hardly knowing what he wishes her to do. She only folds, tossing her cards to the center with a delighted laugh, and leans back in her chair so that her shoulder brushes his. Across the table Donnic is frowning at his empty cup, one among the dozens of other empty cups scattered across the table, and Merrill and Sebastian have somehow begun arguing over some aspect of the Angel of Death's embroidered robe.
Varric raises the pot by three silver, and Fenris throws his coin in without the slightest awareness of his cards. Hawke's fingers have begun to trace circles on the inside of his thigh, edging ever higher, and when she turns to rest her chin on his shoulder his blood gives a lazy thrum of anticipation.
"Fenris," she murmurs, her lips barely brushing his ear, "how badly do you want to win this round?"
His eyes flicker closed, just for a moment. "You are drunk."
"So are you."
He laughs despite himself, and as Isabela lays down her winning hand with a flourish, Hawke's palm at last slides inward to cup him gently and with no doubt of her intention.
"Fenris," she says into his ear, thick with promise and laughter both, "come home with me, will you?"
He shakes his head, amazed at his own eagerness—but he does, willingly, and neither of them minds Isabela's quiet teasing as they go together into the coolness of the night.
.
—
Characters/Pairing: Hawke, Orana
Rating: K
Word Count: 450
Prompt: from seekenpalmeres.
Yarrow: cure for a broken heart.
—
The estate rattles after her mother's death. It's not just that it's become too large; she's become too small, a hard little broken rock cast into the emptiness, ricocheting off stone floors and wood walls and chipping at every blow.
She should have known. She locks up her mother's room, as if that might lessen the space she can't fill—but it doesn't help, the pit still just as yawning in her heart, the knowledge as present in her mind as if the locked door were nothing more than a curtain blown back in a gentle breeze.
How dare the world go on? How can the markets open every morning as if her life has not ended; how can the same Chantry bells ring dolour for her mother's funeral and then the next day find all the bright, brassy joy for the birth of a child, for a wedding? How unfair, that her dawns should be the only ones made dim by sorrow.
She is too selfish for grief. Fenris tries, and it—helps, a little, for that night, and then he goes and she stays and the next morning comes and her mother is still dead. And the morning after, and the morning after, and the morning after that, and every time the wound startles, as deep as when it was fresh, and she thinks—she cannot live like this.
One night when she is rattling worse than usual, she goes into her kitchen and sits down at the empty table in her mother's place. The room is dark, no candles yet lit, and she does not know how long she sits there without moving, without thinking, listening to the loss echoing in her heart.
And then—quietly, without fuss, Orana enters, candle in hand, and lights the bracket above the stove, and the pillar in the center of the table, and then she pulls out a pot and open a cabinet door, and she begins to make soup.
Hawke does not move, watching her in the silence. Orana moves with surety, with grace, her fingers steady as she measures and pours and stirs, the room slowly filling with the smell of sage and thyme and a sweet, spicy broth. It is not until she ladles out the first bowl that Hawke realizes she is crying, has been crying for some time; it is not until she takes the first sip that the knot bound so tightly behind her ribs begins to loosen, even in the smallest part.
"Mistress," Orana says softly, taking the seat beside Hawke, her own bowl in hand, gentle curls of steam escaping into the warm kitchen. "May I tell you about my papa?"
Hawke nods, too heartsore to speak, and Orana does, each word filling the air, sound by sound, until the rattling emptiness at last begins to yield.