Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K+
Word Count: 2600
Notes: A companion piece to "love letter to a striking match," chapter 39 of this compilation. for an anon who said that piece explained why fenris loved hawke, but who wanted to know why hawke loved fenris in return.

Soundtrack: I Could Hear the Water at the Edge of All Things, by Hammock (watch?v=mnMKch3S1J8).

—

reply, from the stones of a sea wall

—

It's hard to hold back the sea.

The lesson comes quicker than most. All her life she's watched her father work, laughing, stone after stone passing through his hands. Every day the wall he builds to hold back the world grows a little higher, a little broader, the wind and waves a little lesser for its building. It is strong, grey stone and white mortar so steady before the sea; it is good, and what else is her father but unfailing? He is her father. Nothing he touches can fall.

Oh, but he―

She's watching the day he dies.

There is no storm. No warning, aside from the sudden upswell of salt and silt carried to her nose by the breeze. He has begun to teach her how to build, how to shelter from the sea; he has moved slower these last years so that she can follow, and she had not understood he had been raising stones around her, too. The water swells abruptly and he stumbles; she turns from the wall's higher edge, aghast, in time to see him stumble again, and fall, his skin so slick and wet her fingers only slide away with every gasp.

She cannot hold him. Only a bright, brief instant of his eyes on hers, the sudden proud lift of his head; and then the white, cold wave crashes over him and swallows him. Spray breaks against the wall to ice her face, and when the wave recedes again, her father is gone.

So Malcolm dies, his daughter watching, and when the funeral is done and their friends have come and grieved and gone away, Hawke picks up the chisel and begins to build again.

―

The first year after that is harder than anything she's ever done. Her mother's lost to grief, the twins just―lost―and when Lothering becomes the leading edge of a living Blight they have little choice but to run. They leave her father's ashes where the fever burned him alive, abandoned to be burned again by darkspawn, along with the house her father built and everything else they've loved for the last seven years.

She can feel the walls cracking as they run. She's never been much of a builder―she burns much better―but she's tried, and she tries now, and just for a moment when they crest the hill she dares to think that maybe this has been enough after all, maybe, maybe―

Bethany dies like lightning strikes the sea. One moment she is there, shining and strong―

Then she is gone, and the world is blacker than it was before, and the agony rolls like thunder through their bones.

―

Kirkwall breaks over them in brine, a thick and icy swell that never warms. Gamlen has no welcome for them, no home like the home that burned behind them; he gives them a roof instead, and bitter neighbors, and a year of servitude to buy these things and keep them for their own.

Hawke does not grieve. Instead she picks up her father's staff and picks up her father's stones, and with every man she kills for Meeran she builds the wall around her family a little higher, a little stronger, filling in the torn and gaping places where her father and her sister were torn away. She does not grieve; she lines the rock with mortar instead, her blood shed now to pay the price of the blood the ocean has taken. A small cost, when her mother and her brother still live. When she still has something left to guard.

Day by day, stone by stone, tide after unending tide, her wall holds back the sea.

She does not grieve.

―

Here is what the sea takes: the last-gasped edge of sunlight over a glancing wave, the cry of a solitary gull, a life never offered for the taking.

―

Aveline is the first. An easy addition, this woman who knows what it means to protect, who knows what it means to have someone stolen all the same. Then Varric comes, glib dwarf with a glib tongue and a dangerous promise of an offer. He only needs her help, just this once; a small job, a small favor, a little more blood and stone to make her family that much safer. How can she say no?

Besides, she likes Varric. Likes Aveline too, and Merrill when she comes, and Anders when she finds him in the refuse of the city, gleaming with magic and purpose. She can guard them too, she's sure of it. The shore is broad enough, certainly, an endless stretch of glinting sand; she need only work a little faster to raise the walls against the sea, made stronger by the storms, that still rises every day to rush against the stones she has laid to keep it back. It breathes in her ear, steady as the stars, a living thing to remind her there will never be an end, that this sea has existed always and will continue beyond the memories of time.

She doesn't care. She's strong enough. She will be strong enough.

―

(Isabela will not have her. Impossible to keep a woman born in the waves from its waters; she can no more be taken than air can be taken by air, or a wing torn from a tern without killing it. She walks into the tides and comes back again, unharmed, the sooty tangles of her hair longer, or shorter, the smile on her face still as bright as a blade turned under a wave. No walls can hold bones like the bones of a shark, laughter graceful as a moray, eyes like the copper coins gleaming in the wreckage of some treasure-ship, forgotten long ago.)

(And Fenris―)

―

She meets Fenris on a cold night in the alienage, and though he takes her aid he will not take her protection, not yet, not easily. How is she to guard a man with her walls who has spent three years fleeing the ones behind him? Her heart cannot bear to cage him; his heart has built its own cage instead, brambles made of hate and fear tightly twined through the longing for more he cannot kill. She cannot free him of that herself―her hands are not made for such fine work―but sometimes she finds it enough to sit with him in his home, or in hers, as he works on the unknotting, and when he asks if he should go this way or that way, to give her answers as best she can.

The first time he laughs, every defense she has crumbles at once.

―

Over time the wall grows, brick by brick and stone by stone, and her arms must spread a little wider. So it must be to guard her dwarf, a pair of elves, an apostate made home for a spirit, a woman with a dead husband and a shield made wall in itself. Gamlen stays too, grudging acceptance as it is, and her mother, and Carver―

The Deep Roads tear Carver from her in a matter of days. He is fine, he is healthy, he is just as much her little brother as the warrior he wants to be―and then the sea finds the fissure she forgot, the little crack between two stones, and just as quickly as her father, as her sister, he is gone in the roaring rush. The Wardens are a wall even she cannot breach with all her stubborn will, and months pass before she learns he has at least been brought to the safety of someone else's guarding. Not hers, though, and how can she be sure, how can she know that he is safe if she is not there―

Well. She has never been able to protect her family, after all. Perhaps this way he will live a little longer.

―

For a long time, she thinks this might be―enough. She has lost her father; she has lost Bethany; she has lost Carver; but Gamlen lives, and every one of her friends, and even if the lives they choose take them occasionally to the places where the shore gives way to grey saltwater, they never go so far they can't be dragged back again, gasping, grinning a little wilder for the touch of the sea.

There are other nights, too, warm and lamplit in the dry safety of Varric's rooms, every one of them gathered around his table, cards spread in hands and laughter reminding her there are places that are not lost to wind and waves and the break in a stone wall. Other nights, where she lets her head loll on Aveline's shoulder as she tells stories of how she learned to use a sword; where she stands beside Anders in his clinic, magic in his hands and hers, a woman's tearful gratitude in their ears as she walks away with both her children still living.

Other nights, with Fenris's warmth pressed against her shoulder to elbow as they sound out the shape of his world, word by word, letter by letter, step by step.

―

He gives her one night. It's more than she expected and she's far too eager for fear, for the caution that another's heart died in his ungentle hands not so long ago. She takes what he offers and gives him what she can in answer, and she doesn't realize until it's over that her fingers have begun to bleed. Even after all this time his heart is still too wrapped in thorns, the brambles of his fear too tight and too there; he goes, wounded, and there is nothing for her to do but begin the wall again.

So be it. She's used to stone by now, and if nothing else, water always washes out the blood.

―

Still, he stays, and if from time to time he lets himself stand in the shadow of the wall she's been building for ten years, she doesn't mention it. It's enough he's there, and enough he'll occasionally smile when she teases him, and for many months, she's satisfied that at least their friendship has survived. She has him here; she has Aveline and Merrill and Anders and everyone as close as they can bear to be held, and if this is what she can do, if this, if this can be enough―

The sea swallows her mother in one violent froth of salt and spume. Nothing is left but the suggestion of a step in the sand and a voice on the wind―so proud of you―and then the sea takes that too, washed away into grey sand and slate-dark sky.

Why fight it after that? No matter the pressure the wall has always crumbled; no matter how she spreads her arms she cannot reach wide enough to keep them all. Better, perhaps, to take a breath, to lift the weight from her palms and be washed away with the rest of them. At least then she would not have to see the empty places where her failures have cost them their lives. What good has she ever done for any of them?

She wonders this a long time, the fire in her room unlit, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes fixed ahead, into nothing. She has never saved them. She has never been strong enough. Why?

―

(A startling thing, then, one day to hear the chink of hammer and chisel at her back, to turn and find Fenris there, one eyebrow lifted, one hand outstretched towards her where she stands knee-deep in the flood tide. To find his fingers gentle on hers as he pulls her back towards him, towards the things she has built and the people she has even now to protect, a smile on his face as if to say: there is life here yet, Hawke.

More startling to find there are sections in the wall repaired, that there is new growth on the ends she did not build herself, that there is Anders's touch here, and Aveline's there, and Merrill's mark on the low places where the roots were not strong before. She turns―and there are palms alongside hers, bracing, ready, Fenris's back sharing the spread of the weight.

She is not alone. She had forgotten.

She does not forget again.)

―

The years pass, and she learns. The Qunari blow through the city like a hurricane; Isabela goes and returns and goes again, a cockle shell on the leading edge of a tsunami, and when it is over and they drag themselves ashore again, bruised and battered and alive, it's with the shadow of her wall still there, a little beaten but a little stronger, strong enough to hold back the storm, just this once.

She learns. She grows, stone by stone, and lifts her face into the clean winds that blow in from the sea. She was afraid, once.

She is not afraid now.

―

Neither does she fear when Fenris's face changes like an ocean's dawn, when his master rises and opens his hand for his return. He had showed her, once, that she was not alone; he is not either, and if what they have built between them can withstand the strength of the Arishok and all his forces, she does not doubt it will hold against the weight of one man who knows nothing of what it means to protect, who knows nothing of the will of the sea.

―

Here is what the sea takes: the fear when a man leaves his master for the last time; a ship from a savage shore.

―

There's nothing left to do, then, but to let Fenris take her brittle defenses against him in his hands and tear them down once more. They'd never been strong anyway, and he's had too many years dismantling his own heart's cage to falter now with hers. It hurts to watch them fall, if only because she knows the cost of them to build, but there's something in the sight of the stones crumbling to the sand and the world opening up again on the other side, more beautiful than she'd remembered―

Fenris kisses her, his hands warm on her cheek and the small of her back, his fear gone with the thorns that have snared him for so long. Ten years to unwind them, unbind him from the brambles; ten years for her to understand that not all cages are safe and not all walls must stand forever.

Some should. The ones she has built to guard her family, her friends who are her family; she will build and rebuild those as many times as she must, because the sea is endless and waits endlessly, but it will not take them from her one single moment before they stand at the shore and tell the horizon they are ready. The stones are too familiar to her now; she has worked the mortar too long to let it go.

But the rest―

Fenris takes her hand, and when he turns she lets herself follow him through the gap in the sea wall that had not been there before, the stones' edges crumbling a little under her touch. The shore spreads wide and white before her, sand glinting where their steps have displaced it, surf skating over their edges in white froth and green-glass gleaming to smooth it whole again, and over it all the steady ebb and rise of the salt waves rushing, rushing. Ten years since her father died, and only now has she realized how much the sea gives, too.

―

The rest, she thinks, she might be willing to set free.