AN: I forgot to mention this last chapter, but this collection of prompts is from citrusconcerto's flower prompt meme on tumblr. The complete list can be found on tumblr here: tinyurl dot com/oaa9hcj.

Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K
Word Count: 500
Prompt: from shadoedseptmbr and marigoldfaucet.

Persimmon: bury me amid nature's beauty.

—

They buy a cottage in Wilhaven. It's small, far smaller than the Kirkwall estate, but it's sound and strong and has room for a garden and a small yard for chickens and goats, and within the month Hawke has already coaxed the weed-choked earth to yield a variety of herbs and flowers Fenris does not recognize. Neither does he understand this fascination of hers with dirt, not truly, but she is happy and thus he is happy, too, and he supposes there are worse Fereldan habits than harmless gardening.

She begins to hang dried herbs from the lintels above all the windows, cheerful bunches of green tied with twine and ribbon. The sills she decorates with small pots of flowers, purple and gold and white, small blossoms he cannot name, others with strange, familiar scents and words on his tongue with different sounds than those she gives.

He accuses her once of domesticity, one night when they sit on the small sofa together, her back against his chest, one leg thrown over his, her rounding stomach the prop for the book they both read, chapter by chapter. She only laughs, low and glad, and asks, do you mind?

He does not. It is a strange thing, slave as he is: married, a house in his own name as well as hers, a child expected by midsummer. He has no reference for such things, no world where this might ever be expected for such a person as he is; even here he wakes with nightmares of blood, memories of his violence, hearts he has crushed and regretted. So does she.

They both know this is only a temporary peace, no matter how much they might wish otherwise. They are people of violence, both of them, death in their hands and at their backs. This calm is only borrowed; even now there are rumors of disquiet in the west, a Conclave, Varric's letters increasingly vague and increasingly disturbed. This will not last.

And yet, when he looks up one afternoon from the kitchen sink where he washes the last of the lunch dishes, he sees Hawke on her knees in the garden, her hair tied away from her face as she coaxes the young tomato plant to grow more closely to the trellis she's built for it. She ties the last knot, looks up at the window as if she feels his gaze; one hand comes to rest on her stomach as the other shades her eyes, and then she gives him a brilliant, beaming smile that makes his breath catch even through glass and shadow. Beautiful. She is—

This will not last. He knows this. And he knows, too, that no matter what the next month brings, the next year, there is no doom in this world or the next that will ever touch the sight of this moment here, Hawke kneeling in herbs and small flowers colored purple and gold and white, dirt smeared across her cheek, smiling bright enough to dim the day.

.

—

Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K
Word Count: 560
Prompt: from anonymous.

Sweet pea: delicate pleasures.

—

Fenris, she discovers, has a taste for fine things. Expensive food, expensive wine; if given the choice he will have his clothing cut to the latest fashions, trim and strong and made from good cloth. The knowledge is somewhat at odds with her perceptions of him, given the general squalor in which he lives, but—time tells all, and over the years Hawke learns that in some things Fenris can be remarkably fastidious.

He refuses, however, to admit it. Nor will he permit gifts of any real cost, even if she knows how much he desires the new belt, or the cloak in Jean-Luc's window, or the newest volume of the mystery series he enjoys done up in fine, embossed leather and gilt-edged pages. Even holidays and celebrations are difficult occasions despite their generous nature, and the few occasions she makes the mistake of choosing gifts too costly she's caught off-guard by Fenris's prickly, edged gratitude instead of the unfettered delight she expects.

She asks him, years later, when they are both deep in their cups and there's enough trust built between them to know he will not run. He does not answer at first, thumb running along the edge of his wineglass pensively; then he lifts one shoulder in a shrug and drains the glass in one swallow.

So many reasons. Too many to be properly laid end to end and sorted in one conversation, though he tries for her, because she has asked. Danarius's tastes, the earliest of his memory; he is comforted by their familiarity, the fine things he was raised among. He despises them for the same reason–but is that his taste, or another thing Danarius molded in his creation? He does not know; neither does Hawke.

He tells her also, in halted, stilting words, of his unfamiliarity with gifts in general. The small things he is prepared to accept with equanimity, the useful tools any soldier might give another to maintain their survival; it is the softer gifts he does not understand, the reciprocal nature of such things paralyzing to him who has never known before why one would wish to give such useless trinkets to their lovers.

Until now, Hawke says, her heart hurting, and when Fenris looks away she stands, and goes to kneel beside him on the sofa, and holds his hand until he meets her eyes again.

I love you, she says plainly, watching his eyelids flutter, and then she says it again, and again, until he takes her face in his hands and kisses her. That is all the gifts mean when she gives them, she tells him: the book, the whetstone, the ridiculous hat she knows he will never wear. No expectation, no catch. No truth other than that her heart is his, than that she thinks of him when she gathers these things. All that matters.

He listens intently, though he does not reply, and when she is finished he only nods. She does not know if he understands, if she has made any difference at all, but–she has told him. That must be enough.

(Three days later, she wakes to an empty bed and a small bundle of wildflowers tied with twine on the pillow beside her head. She only cries a little, and he does not ask why when she comes downstairs and kisses him without a word.)

.

—

Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K
Word Count: 500
Prompt: from locketofyourhair.

Quince: temptation.

—

My magic will serve that which is best in me, not that which is most base. Her father says it often while she is young, often enough she begins to know the way he will breathe before the the words. By the time she is twelve it is part of her memory; by the time she is sixteen it has no meaning, a rhythm familiar as water, a lullaby for the tone if nothing else.

What has she to be afraid of? She is young and fearless and without regrets. There is no demon's offer in the world to sway her, who wants for nothing.

And then—

And then, year by year, the world teaches her loss. She grows older. She learns fear; she gathers regrets like wildflowers, one by one, braiding them into a cloak she carries with her always, tucked into the crook of her arm.

Her armor chinks and cracks, footholds in her skin where there were none before, tiny places for a demon's whisper to catch and hold, to pull her open a little wider every time. My magic will serve—

Fenris does not understand. She does not expect him to, not at first. He is no mage, after all, and even if the understanding is closer after Feynriel, he is still oceans from the nightly whispers in her soul. She was fearless, once.

By her thirtieth birthday she has killed her sister and her mother with her own failure, murdered men and women beyond counting, and sparked a war in her heart's home, violence rippling outwards until the whole of the nation is consumed. Strangers speak her name in mixed admiration and revulsion; men she has never met curse her in the same breath as the Betrayer. She was made for grain fields and Fereldan mud; what does she know of worlds like this, where rulers of countries come to her door and ask for aid?

Fenris asks her, once, on a night where she has woken in a cold sweat and startled him with the gasp. She does not know how to explain it to a man who is not a mage, a man with no past; there are no words in her for the immense, unbearable longing every time they take the sunlit farmhouse from her memories and fill it with the souls she lost long ago. She has fought for so long to keep the precious things she can. Impossible to explain that the simplest whispers are the strongest against her will.

Still. She tries, and Fenris listens, and when she is finished he takes her in his arms and presses his lips to her temple. It is no answer, not the way he means it, but–it is enough.

My magic will serve that which is best in me. A lullaby for the dreaming. She had forgotten.

She closes her eyes again, listening to Fenris's heartbeat, and when she dreams again that night, she is strong enough to murmur, if only one more time—no.

.

—

Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K
Word Count: 565
Prompt: from uatu-watches, playswithdinos, and lastcousland.

Witch hazel: a spell.

—

The lyrium can always tell.

Even from the first days of his memory, he has known the taste of magic. Danarius's had been subtle and sharp, the edge of a hooked blade; it had grown darker when he needed blood, like rust, and every pulse through his veins had been thick with the weight of iron when his master called for his use.

A volatile thing, too; Danarius's temper could flicker black in an instant if he did not guard, and the magic would go with it, lyrium scars heavy as shackles themselves under their coursing. For many years, he had not known there was any other way.

Merrill's magic carries the same rust, even if she refuses to see it. He tastes the iron tang every time she casts, salt and blood rippling through the lyrium in a familiar pattern, though hers carries earth with it instead of steel. Hers is stronger, too, in a way Danarius's never was; not a sharp strength but a blunt, straightforward, inexorable power, a rooted thing that pries into stone over eons and crushes it.

He knows himself well enough to admit he fears her. Such a small, slender woman to hide such power; so blithe in the face of demons he has watched best greater mages than she. She is stronger than even she realizes, and she will not see it.

Anders sees too much. Fenris does not like his magic, cold and pitiless as a winter wave, touched with the alien strangeness of the spirit that lives in him. He has never felt anything like it, precise as a surgeon's knife and as ready to wound as heal. Even his healing is bitter, potent as it is. No other can magic his wounds closed so well they will not scar, no matter the depth; no other can leave him chilled to the bone from nothing more than a touch. The lyrium knows Anders does not like him.

And Hawke—

He does not understand the first time her magic washes through him. She is hot—but she is always hot, and if the lyrium leaps in the scars to welcome the touch it is only his starvation for gentleness after so many cruel years. It is only the absence of pain that sends him yearning, nothing more; it is only the Fereldan in her, warm and wild and welcoming as she would be to any desperate soul throwing himself on her mercy, no mark on him to set him apart from the rest.

So he tells himself, but the lyrium knows her better than his heart, and as the years pass more grows in the touch of her magic than only heat. Too long to recognize it, longer still to bear its naming—but Fenris has known magic since the first days of his memory. He can turn away only so long.

She gives him the words of it, eventually, when his fear is dead at last and there is no touch of iron left inside his skin. He knows; he has felt it for years, singing fierce and hot in his veins with every touch of her magic, even when she did not speak.

She laughs when he tells her, rueful delight. She says it again all the same, her mouth on his, and the lyrium gleams, steady and unfaltering, with every beat of his heart.