Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K
Word Count: 1000
Prompt: T. An obscure AU: the Hunger Games, from anonymous.

—

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

She expects the quick turn, the heft of the machete; she doesn't expect the handaxe to smack into the branch six inches left of her cheek to set the leaves trembling furiously. Hawke grips the trunk a little tighter, her heart pounding hard in her throat, and raises her voice. "Just a bit of friendly advice, you know."

The man below her draws further back into the cover of his chosen tree, his sharp eyes scanning through the foliage for her hiding place. When he finds her his eyes narrow—very green, greener than the woods—and he reaches into the pack beside him.

"Another axe?" Hawke blurts as the steel emerges, and scrambles up a few branches further, hopefully out of his reach. "How long were you at the Cornucopia?"

"Long enough," the man from One says curtly, and draws his arm back to throw.

"Stop!" Hawke suggests earnestly, her voice higher than she'd like, and when he shows little inclination of stopping she presses herself closer to the oak's trunk and adds very quickly, "Those leaves are poisonous, just so you know!"

His arm checks mid-swing, and the hatchet thuds harmlessly into the thick base of the trunk instead of her very tender everything. There's a pause as he looks at her, eyes glittering under his hair, and then he stalks over to his abandoned pile of leaves and stems and the mortar stone he'd been using to grind them into a paste. Innocuous enough on good skin, but she knows the way he'll die, choking for breath, if he applies any of it to the gash slicing across his left calf.

"Poisonous," he says at last, and looks suspiciously up at her tree. He hasn't yet moved for the axe, which she counts as a good sign.

"The number of leaves." She makes a cautious movement towards the branch below her, and when he doesn't go for her throat, she makes another. "You picked the one with three, not four. Baneweed. We have a lot of it in Twelve. I take it…not where you're from."

"The only plants in One are in gardens," he says tersely, flicking his hair from his face, and Hawke catches another glimpse of the heavy scars that run from his bottom lip down his throat into the collar of his shirt. "I have little experience with them."

"Well," she says, and drops to the dirt with a thump. "I happen to have lots, if you promise not to kill me right now."

His lip curls, but she can see the sweat beading at his temples, the pallor under his olive skin starker than she suspects he knows. "You're a fool if you think my word counts for anything here."

Her pulse races under her skin. The little silver tube in her belt is a reassuring weight, bottled fire, and her halberd with the lovely blade on the end is not so far out of reach against the rocks as he thinks. But if she can persuade him instead— "We don't have to ally forever, you know. Just…for the moment. I know the rest of the Careers are trying to kill you."

He makes a sharp motion, almost a flinch, but says nothing, and when she pulls the small leather case from her belt and tosses it at him he catches it easily. "There's salve in there," she says, "for infection and pain. The one with the green cap."

It works quickly, as she'd known it would, and within a few minutes the sharp lines at the corners of his eyes have relaxed, his cheeks flush again with color, and he tosses the case back to her with no fuss. "My thanks."

"Yes, well," she says, and distantly, the cannon booms across the world. The trees above them tremble with the motion, a handful of birds spearing into the sky with piercing shrieks.

After a few moments, the forest settles around them again, and Hawke drags in a breath. Then she reaches behind her to yank his axe from the treetrunk, and before he can jerk forward, tosses it into the grass at his feet. He grits his teeth as he looks at her, all the muscles in his jaw jumping, and then suddenly he turns and plucks her halberd from where it leans against the rockfall that makes up the edge of their clearing. He looks up, his hands clenching around the haft, and there is such violence in his eyes—

Then all at once he twists the staff in his hands, the blunt end offered her instead of the blade, and Hawke very nearly hides her relief as she wraps her fingers around the weighted wood.

"I was bought for the Games," he says abruptly, and his grip tenses on the staff once more before he releases it into her hands again. "By the man who gave me these scars."

"I…didn't know they could do that."

"Few people do." He shifts restlessly, his shoulders tight, his eyes scanning through the woods before returning to her. "He has connections to the Capitol. His nephew was chosen in the lottery, and I…it was decided I would replace him."

"The recordings show you volunteering."

He lets out a short, rough laugh at that, and slings his machete into the makeshift sheath along his hip in one motion. "A second broadcast. My sincerity was in question during the first."

"But why?"

"He holds my sister."

"Damn," Hawke says, because she can't think of anything else, and a thin, light rain begins to fall between them. "You—well, you have to survive to save her, right? I can help with that."

"For now," he says, his eyes still green above the scars, and when she extends her hand he doesn't hesitate to take it. "Fenris."

"Hawke," she says, and grips his hand.

For now.

—

.

Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K
Word Count: 1300
Prompt: Y. Tears, from anonymous.

—

Hawke can count on one hand the times she's seen Fenris cry. Most of them hadn't even been real tears, just a sheen to his eyes when he had been particularly angry or particularly lost in his own past, and she's certainly never seen him break down with the thick, throat-catching sobs she's fallen prey to once or twice in her life. She's not even certain he's still capable of it; maybe it's only one more thing beaten out of him by the magisters, like scarless skin and easy trust and his original hair color.

The idea of it's about the worst thing she can imagine, which is probably why it's become the demons' favorite image to produce for her amusement.

She doesn't know how long she's been the Fade. Time's meaningless enough here, minutes as long as days, hours passing in the blink of an eye, no thirst to slake and no hunger but what the demons kindle in her heart. It would be easier if she could escape—could walk, even—but the fight with Nightmare has left her with two broken legs and a full cave's worth of spiderwebs tangling her to the rock spires around her, and she's left with little choice but to grin and bear it as best she can.

The despair demon who's currently toying with her slips a long-fingered hand up the column of her throat, forcing her chin to lift. The image of Fenris still kneels in front of her, bleeding at all the places the lyrium used to be, and even as she watches his shoulders hitch in a sob.

"Please," he begs, the word breaking in the middle, and lifts his bound hands towards her.

"The voice," she says, "is a little high, I think."

For an instant the hand tightens around her throat, and then the image of Fenris vanishes from the ground up and she is left instead with the bare landscape of the Fade instead, the tors of stone glimmering wetly around her, the world outside her clearing disappearing into a dense gold-green fog. Nightmare has become a dessicated husk behind her, the shadows of eight curled legs spiking over her shoulders, flicking over the false Fenris' faces just infrequently enough to alarm her before she remembers it is dead.

Well. As dead as anything gets in the Fade, anyway.

—

The next Fenris is not crying, not yet. That bodes the worse for her—this usually means she gets to watch whatever torment's planned for him in the making—and her mouth twists as he strides towards her out of the fog.

"A little too broad in the shoulder," she advises, and the despair demon's faceless face presses cold and damp into the curve of her neck. "Now, now, don't cry. You'll get it next time."

The false Fenris breaks into a run, and she shifts her shoulders lazily as three more shadows emerge from the gleaming mist behind him. One slim, holding a staff taller than she is—Merrill, she thinks—and a mustache she recognizes as Dorian, and a tall woman with a bit of green glow in one palm that she realizes must be the Inquisitor.

"Quite an eclectic collection," Hawke says, and watches with disinterest as Fenris yanks at the cloud of spiderwebs surrounding her. "I wonder how deep you had to dig to find these particular people?"

"Oh, lethallan," Merrill cries, and then she lifts her staff and the world ripples with green light. It's a very good likeness, she thinks, distantly impressed.

Fenris distracts her with a rough hand to her cheek. His gauntlets are shockingly cold, the joists catching a bit at her skin, and suddenly the demon is hissing behind her, a wet, furious thing like steam on a hot pan, and she's never heard it make that sound before—and then Merrill's green light has mixed with Dorian's ice and all at once its fingers have tightened around her throat and the nails are digging into her until she feels blood run hot and damp down her skin—

The Inquisitor shouts. Hawke blinks, the world abruptly beyond her comprehension, as a blade flashes down and the hand falls away from her throat. Fenris tears her from the last of the webs, white caught in her hair and dragging between her fingers, and then she's over his shoulder and they're moving almost too fast for her to understand. The Fade flashes into existence and out of it again with the flares of Dorian's magic, Merrill threading something brilliant and strong through her hands, leading them somewhere, somewhere—else—

She sees a mirror, tall and narrow and just the size of a door. Merrill touches one side, the Inquisitor the other, and all at once it fills from top to bottom with a brilliant, blinding light—

—

The world is too much after all this time.

So loud. Every voice is thunder; every step is an echoing shock through her bones. She can't see properly, her eyes too used to the dim dead glow of the Fade, and there are hands on her, so many hands, her legs broken, her ribs cracked, everything so sore and impossible and horrifyingly terribly real and she can't—

She can't—

Even the stones of Skyhold hum. It's a quiet thing, just at the edge of hearing, and slowly, so slowly, Hawke realizes she is in a bedroom. In a bed, too, the fine damask curtains drawn shut and the world comfortingly dim, her legs splinted and bandaged to the thigh, a light blanket drawn to her waist.

There are no webs in her hair. No hands on her throat.

No whispers in her ears.

She drags in a breath, past understanding, and someone shifts. A chair, she realizes, drawn close to the bedside, and someone sitting in it. Someone stirring, now that she has stirred…

"The shoulders are a bit broad," she says, hardly knowing what she means, and Fenris smiles.

His fingers come to her cheek carefully, so carefully the touch hurts, and then his hand is curving fully to her jaw and he is bending close enough she can feel the heat of him, and his mouth presses very tenderly to the corner of her own. She says his name, once.

"Hawke," he murmurs, and kisses her again.

She doesn't understand. One hand struggles to cover his, to cut the choking panic off before it begins. "This is real," she says, blind with fear. "This is real. This is—tell me this is—"

"This is real," he says, quietly, and Hawke clenches her eyes shut.

"You are real."

"I am real."

"You came to the Fade."

"I came for you," Fenris says, every word fierce, and cups her jaw in both hands.

Hawke can't breathe. His eyes are too warm, too green, and when she feels the treacherous prickle of tears she doesn't fight them. She's so very tired of fighting.

Fenris's thumb slides up to her cheekbone, passes tenderly through the trail streaking down her temple. She blinks, blinks again, and in the silence Fenris's eyes grow very bright.

"This is real," Hawke whispers, and touches the corner of his eye. Her finger comes away wet, and when she slides her hand tentatively into his hair he leans into her touch.

"Yes," Fenris breathes. Alive. Alive, alive, alive…

In the distance, the stones of Skyhold are singing.