Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K
Word Count: 1900
Prompt: from elfgirl39.
Cedar - protection.
—
It's snowing—pale, fat flakes that have more weight than they ought as they dust down her shoulders, her hair, and the black slope of Fenris's cloak. Better than not, if she's honest, since at least this way their footsteps won't last more than a few seconds, but the trees ahead have gone to shivering ghosts through the snow as it begins to billow, and Fenris, already cold from the loss of blood, has started dragging his feet through the drifts instead of clearing them properly.
"Come on," Hawke hisses, the whisper no louder than the slush of snow-fat leaves against each other, but edged harsher than she means it. "Fenris, we're almost there. Don't give up just yet."
Even with his head hanging low with exhaustion, she can feel him roll his eyes. A quick huff of pain as she helps him adjust the arm over her shoulders, then: "So you said before the river. And… before the rockfall, too."
"One wrong turn in a mystery forest and everyone's a critic." He laughs, then stumbles hard enough they both nearly go down, and Hawke grits her teeth. "Watch the roots. Sorry."
He shakes his head, but there's no argument, and soon enough he offers neither comment nor aid as his head droops further, and his arm slackens, and the bandage jammed against his ribs soaks through and begins to drop thick scarlet spots in the churned snow behind them. The snow comes heavier and heavier, daylight dropping faster than Hawke can see to guide them, and for a moment she thinks this must be it after all, that Leliana's informant was mistaken and they'll have to do the best they can in the shelter of the largest tree she can find, until—
"It's here," she gasps, sweat freezing her eyelashes to her cheeks. "Fenris, we found it. Just a bit further, and—come on. Come on—"
He doesn't answer, but when she chances a glance away from the rock-choked path she can see his eyes open again, narrow green slits tight with agony and exhaustion. But it's there, the old cabin Leliana had promised, the hunter's refuge meant for trappers caught too late in the season, now to be repurposed as shelter against the red-lyrium-crazed templars that hunt them. Red lyrium, tainted blades cutting through Fenris's armor easier than water, and—poisoned—
"Here," she says aloud, and they stumble together through the door.
Fenris goes down almost the moment it closes behind them. She leaves him curled on the moth-eaten rug for the moment, breathing almost as hard as he does, and in a gout of flame lights the hearth's dry, withered logs without even checking the chimney. Her gloves are stiff with dried blood and she struggles with the latch and chain; at last it catches, and she slams the two crossboards into their braces as well. The windows are already shut and bolted, black iron rusted red, and only rarely does she feel the ice-winds slithering through the cracks.
There. Her pack drops behind her, staff rattling in the fall, and Hawke yanks open the tiny supplies chest Varric had promised would be there beside the fireplace, the casing lined with royals and in a black velvet bag at the bottom, infinitely more precious—
One of her own bottles. She should have known. The wax stopper her favorite lavender, stamped with the Amell seal and tied with Merrill's twine.
"Here," she says again, desperately calm, and does not panic when Fenris cannot stand but tries to crawl towards her, when the efforts to move him closer to the fire leave smears of blood across the floorboards, when she realizes the pull has become a drag and his eyes have closed again, mouth open, face lax. Just a bit closer. Just a bit.
Close enough.
She loses track of the time after the second hour. The chimney, blessedly, seems clear enough not to choke them with the smoke, and as Fenris is unconscious, she doesn't even have to suffer his complaints as she sears his armor away from him in three white-hot lines. The wound's not infected, not a trace of red tinge to the forking lyrium up his side, but there's little in her to spare rejoicing; the scimitar had hooked deep enough to score his ribs, and he'd already been nursing a broken pair from the last fight, and someone must have gotten well within his reach because bruises mottle him from throat to knee, and he's still losing blood no matter how she tries to stop it—and—and—and—
The hard sharp snap of a branch underfoot. Heavy, too, if it's the same armored foot she remembers. The breathless sigh of hot steel against snow. The teeth-gritting pressure of red lyrium, before and behind, surrounding the house.
She keeps working. The door thuds hard, twice, wood rattling against steel. Fenris's eyes flicker without opening. The worst gash is three-quarters closed, but without rest he'll be nothing but a body for the crows to pick apart. Too weak, too much blood. She blows her hair away from where it sticks to her forehead and spreads her fingers over the hottest place in the wound, slides the other over his heart.
"Stay with me," she whispers, and the cabin door explodes.
She does, in fact, recognize the feet. Too bad—she'd meant him to bear the message to his masters. Three pairs follow—no, four, and a fifth behind the cabin if her ears don't lie to her.
His voice grinds like stones. "You'll come, now. Come with us."
Hawke wipes her fingers with a rag, then checks Fenris's pulse. "I doubt it."
A snarl, wordless, wild. "You will come."
"No," Hawke says, the white-gold mix of the vial's potion burning in her blood, and when her eyes open again, there is only fire.
She'd told Varric about the dangers of this mixture. Had told the Inquisitor too, who'd agreed only a few ought ever be made and even those more carefully given away. In the hands of a weak mage the power would burn them from the inside out; a stronger one might lose themselves in the bone-deep madness of a siphon of Fade-light opened directly into their veins. Dorian had found the ancient recipe in the library; even he had refused to take one when she'd offered.
Well. Well, well, she's strong and mostly sensible, and the half-heartbeat of the templar's sword descending between them she pulls the fire from her heart and wraps the world in heat.
It's not a perfect dome, the peak a little low and one side rather flatter than it should be, but in her defense she's tired, and afraid, and Fenris isn't awake to chide her for the display of power. It is, however, large enough to cover them both and keep the templars out, and she's even refraining from burning down the cabin around them, which, all things considered, she's rather proud of.
She can see the templars through the fire. Every now and then, just glimpses, a flicker of sun-bright steel as a sword rebounds the barrier, a flame-dart down the burnished breastplate of the templar leader. Fenris's hair has washed orange, his cheeks ruddier than life. A thin line of blue light stretches around her fingers, healing throttled now by the demands of the barrier, but Hawke can wait. It is still enough, and for this—for this, she can wait.
So—they do. For hours, the flame burns with no fuel but her blood; for hours the instants where they break apart show her sword and steel and the burning red, deeper than blood, of the captain's eyes. The roar is overwhelming, so loud and close she almost cannot hear it at all; now and again the roar spikes as another blade is rebuffed, or another attempt to force through by sheer will fails. She is stronger than them. She is.
Two die in fire. She feels them shove, the rage inside them burning almost as bright as her barrier—and then they wick out, soft as melting snow, and the floorboards rattle under her feet with the falls. Hours—hours—
Hawke blinks.
The light's changed. She'd not noticed. It's different, bluer, cooler—and when she can draw her mind from the barrier's fiery weave she realizes the red lyrium pressure is gone. Not diminished, not dampened—gone. She can hardly dare, but she's giddy with exhaustion and Fenris hasn't opened his eyes to scold her, and in the hollow sigh of a leap from cliff-peak to open air, the shield of fire around her—vanishes into nothing.
Dawn. Past dawn, thin blue slivers of light drifting through the smoke and ash that surrounds her and Fenris in a solid, imperfect circle. No templars. No red lyrium. She'd wondered if they'd burn the house around them out of spite—but it still stands, too, if colder through the broken door and the hearthfire long burned to nothing.
Her knees won't hold her, so she crawls to the doorframe and leans her head against it, just enough that she may see around its edge in case—in case. Four sets of footprints; two longer lines behind, the bodies dragged away to keep them from their supplies. The snow has stopped, the world colorless and grey in the shadow of the black-barked trees, and in the distance, a flash of scarlet at the trees' edge—
"You'll come!" the captain bellows, voice echoing as if they stood on a mountain instead of the heart of the forest, sword glinting above his head, his eyes burning red enough to be seen even from where she kneels. His men have already vanished down the hill. "One day, you'll come!"
"I won't," Hawke whispers, smoke on her tongue, and when even the memory of the captain has disappeared into the rising morning, she wedges the door back in place as best she can and works her way back to Fenris's side. Too bad Varric hadn't included wine in the supply chest—she could use it now as soporific if nothing else, given that her heart's racing like jackrabbit's in the hunt. They'll be back. Not today, maybe, but soon, and when they come…
Fenris's eyes are open.
Have been, she realizes, watching her, exhausted and lined with pain, his head turned at an awkward angle to see her better in the shutter-choked dawnlight. How long?
"There's blood on your cheek," she says instead, soft, and reaches for one of the rags. She's got no spit left in her, though, mouth dry as bone, and her waterskin's only steam when she opens it, so instead she wipes at the dried smear ineffectively before he catches her wrist in his fingers.
"How long?" he asks, cracked and deeper than usual. "All night?"
She shrugs, wipes once more at his cheek, then gives up to curl on her side beside him. "They were persistent."
"Or stubborn."
"Not stubborn enough," she sighs, closing her eyes. "How do you feel?"
"I will live."
"Oh," Hawke says, one corner of her mouth twitching up unwillingly, the air changing as Fenris slowly pushes to a sitting position, puts a careful hand on her shoulder as he surveys the results of her night's handiwork. "I know."
A breath, the air changing as his mouth glances over her temple, as she hears the shift of knee on wood and the gathering of snow for water, the strike of a match to the hearth once more, as the last of the fire in her heart wisps away into exhausted sleep.
I'll make sure of it.
Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: T
Word Count: 1100
Prompt: Jade, being the spirit-of-prompt-breaker that she is, included no tree but asked for "Aveline and Isabela and Fenris performing a shopping errand for Hawke. Bonus points for bath products."
I have no idea what I'm doing. Behold.
—
"I'm telling you, sometimes a girl just needs the luxury. Rose petals, bubbles two feet high, steam smelling like wisteria…it's heaven on earth."
"For Hawke or for you?" Aveline asks, staring at the pile of assorted bath creams at her elbow as she might an unpredictable viper. "In ten years I've never heard Hawke once ask for fancy bath soap."
"She's Fereldan. She probably doesn't even know it exists."
"Isabela," Fenris says, but the reproach is weak even for him, and besides, Aveline's right. Hawke has used the black stoney lye bricks from Lirene's as long as he's known her; even after coming into her fortune she'd only laughed as her mother rediscovered the floral soaps and scents of her youth. When he'd asked Aveline to help choose a nameday present, he'd been thinking of a new blade for her staff, or perhaps a new inkpen for her journaling. "There's nothing like this in the estate."
"Not yet," Isabela retorts, and thrusts a fist-sized ball of crushed salt under his nose. It smells aggressively of cherries. "This will make her skin glitter. For a week."
Aveline rolls her eyes and barely manages to avoid knocking a precarious display of imported soap off its pedestal. The shopkeeper, an elvhen man with an elaborately braided ponytail, winces. "As if she needs to draw more attention in a fight. They'll smell her coming before they see her."
"Oh, come on, big girl." Isabela runs her fingers through her hair, saunters around a table of expensive and impractically tiny bath towels, and drapes both arms over Aveline's shoulders from behind. "Are you telling me you've never once, once, wanted to drop down into a bath so hot you couldn't see through the fog on the glass, have Donnic rub three-sov bottles of orange-blossom oil into your shoulders, and enjoy white Antivan wine with a host of candles stacked around you on every surface?"
Aveline stares. "Certainly not."
Fenris smirks, but allows himself to be bullied into a handful of salts and creams and one small—very small—bottle of what Isabela promises are the most impressive bath bubbles east of Orlais. He's sure this is a fool's errand—Hawke's one of the most practical people he knows—but it's not like the coin's over-dear and it will make her laugh besides, and that's enough. Only one oil does he immediately reject, the heavy orchid smell as vivid today as it was in Minrathous a decade ago, floating behind Hadriana like a cloud, but the rest are inoffensive enough he has no objection.
"Trust me," Isabela says, winking, and shoos him on his way with a sack in each hand.
—
"Fenris?" he hears her call from the foyer below, and he sticks his head out of the bathing room enough to answer. She gives inarticulate agreement, then a more delighted greeting to her dog who yelps, overjoyed, at the affection. He can track her movement by the noise; he moves back to the evening's work, brow furrowed, and absently follows her progress along the foyer, up the stairs, across the landing where she greets Orana; the door of her bedroom, kicked shut as always, the huff as she sheds her coat over the back of the chair instead of its intended peg, as always.
"What in the world," he hears her say, distracted, "It smells like a hothouse up here—"
The breath she looses in the doorway stirs his hair. She's stopped dead still behind him, and he cocks his head, trying to see it as she does: a steaming bath filled high as the edge of the copper-and-wood tub, the windows fogged over and draped with heat; a handful of white rose petals tossed optimistically across the water's surface, a fountain of frothing bubbles spilling over one edge and along the ceramic tile; the room filled with the smell of sweet lemons and spices. The handful of candles Bodahn and Orana had managed to scrounge up between them sit on mirrored tables on either side of the bathtub, bounding and rebounding off the bubbles in iridescent shimmers.
"Yes," Fenris says pensively, crossing his arms over his chest. "Isabela suggested a—waterfall of peonies, if I recall. I felt it might be…excessive."
"Excessive," Hawke repeats, her voice strained and strange, and Fenris glances over his shoulder to see one hand fisted at her throat, her cheeks bright with color. "I should say so. What is all this?"
"Your nameday," he says, surprised. "Had you forgotten?"
"Yes."
"She recommended the gift of a…hm. A relaxing evening."
"I see," Hawke says, still staring, and shakes her head, as if it all might disappear if she glances away. "How…"
"Hm?"
"I don't know! It's so—so fancy!" She laughs now, still amazed, and at last takes a step or two past him. "Are those rose petals?"
All afternoon Fenris has expected only a gentle mockery, a shared joke at this needless excess; now, faced with a genuine, embarrassed delight he has not anticipated, he is abruptly nervous. "This is little compared to the bath halls in Minrathrous. The magisters are served iced wine in crystal so thin a loud voice might crack it."
"Oh, pass," Hawke says, and runs a giddy hand along the edge of the rolled copper. "This is the most elegant thing I've seen in my entire life." She takes a step or two closer to the silver carafe of wine—crystal forgone, however, in favor of simple glass—and turns to look at him again. "Fenris, you did this for me?"
"Yes," he says, startled and unsure.
Her cheeks are still flushed—not from the heat of the room, he thinks, and he swallows the delayed flood of embarrassment that he has done something so foolish—and then she crosses the room in four quick steps and kisses him.
She's already warm from the steam. Already scented with sweet lemons, too, though the hands that come up to cup his cheeks are lined with dirt around the nails and dried blood in the creases of her palms. A hard edge, the blade at the heart of her no matter how the petals fall, and that's good enough, he thinks, his arm coming up around her shoulders, his head tilting through the steam to match her better until there's nothing left but the two of them, anyway.
"Fenris," she whispers against his mouth, when they've come apart and the scent of spices has twisted between them, a laugh in her voice and her eyes bright as the sun, "the bath's big enough for two."
He smiles, all embarrassment vanishing like smoke, because she is delighted and his heart sings to see it. "Is that so, Hawke?"
She laughs again and pulls him forward by his hand, and he goes willingly, not even wincing at the cloud of bubbles that soars into the air above the splash.
—
Isabela teases him for two weeks over the glitter. It is, he finds, worth it.
Characters/Pairing: Hawke/Fenris
Rating: K
Word Count: 1500
Prompt: from tarysande, faejilly, and thisonelikesaliens.
Aspen: overcoming fears and doubts
Palm: bend without breaking
—
Once, when she was a child, a storm rose over the hills over Lothering. She had stood in the doorway of the house her father died in, watching the sky go green and wild as the winds turned dark, as the trees whipped each other into a frenzy and her brother took Bethany and their mother to the storm cellar beneath the western wall. Lightning had leapt from the towering thunderheads like the Maker himself had marked their path; the sky had rolled like water towards her, billowing and beautiful.
She'd watched an old oak tree, sixty feet high at the corner of the south field, twist like a rope under the wind. It had bent, all its leaves buffeted sideways; then all at once the winds had caught it and uprooted it, a net of wood and root and earth torn loose and spattering dirt high into the sky. She'd watched the fence shatter under the weight of the bole, watched the storm surge into it and over it, the rain like sheets blown in the wrong direction until even under the porch roof her skin glittered with water.
She'd prayed, then, her eyes open, breath slow and measured as thunder. Maker, never let me be so brittle. If not the tree, make me—
make me the storm—
—
Isabela calls her a storm, once, laughing, unpredictable as a summer squall and just as likely to leave wreckage in her wake. It's hardly a fair comparison in Hawke's opinion; she's always been quite clear on the brevity of her temper, and she honestly does her best to mitigate the damage she can't stop leaving behind. Hardly her fault if the Arishok picks her, lone among a city, to defend a people who hate what she is; hardly her fault if she happens to keep killing—or nearly killing—everyone she loves.
Not that, as she confides to Sebastian one night, when she's had a little too much to drink and he's the only one who's stayed after cards to help clean up her library, it wouldn't be easier, sometimes, if she hadn't been born.
He sucks in a breath, sharp enough it cuts through the drunk-sweet haze, and she impatiently explains: she doesn't want to die, fool man—she's too stubborn for that—but can't he see how much better they all might be without her? Fewer forced excursions out to the Wounded Coast in winter, if nothing else. A net benefit for them all.
Don't say such things, Hawke. The Maker hears all prayers, good and ill.
The Maker, she says, scoffing enough Sebastian shakes his head. The last time he listened to my prayers, Lothering burned to the ground. And Bethany—
Her name again, more gently, and a hand on her shoulder. Had you not been there, more might have died.
Had anyone else been there, she might have been saved.
Sebastian shakes his head again, and so does she, and she wakes the next morning with a headache like lightning behind her eyes.
—
It rains the day of her mother's funeral. She's glad, in a way; it's bad enough to keep most of the insincere inside, especially with the chill, and the sharp no she gives when Sister Mayenna offers a postponement makes them both wince. Still—she has the rights of chief mourner (again, again, again), so the sister pulls on a lined shawl and Hawke ties her hair back, and they go out into the rain together.
As the moth sees light and goes toward flame,
She should see fire and go towards Light.
The Veil holds no uncertainty for her,
And she will know no fear of death
Her heart is wild as thunder all through the now-familiar rites. Not rage, not quite—something colder, more dangerous, more feral. Varric had come to her and asked, delicately, what she wanted for the funeral, and she hadn't understood, but—who knew, after all? Who knew where the rest of her mother's body was? She had her head, and Alessa's hands, and Ninette de Carrac's body, and the feet of a stranger and so if Hawke liked, they could burn her in effigy instead, a straw figure draped in black silk, so that the poor creature her mother had become might be laid to rest somewhere safe and out of the way where she might never have to see it again and she can't, she can't—
A hand folds around her hand.
She blinks, startled, and looks down and then up again, and there is Fenris, somehow, dark hood drawn up over white hair still soaking in the rain, his eyes forward on her mother's body—what remains of her mother's body—his bare fingers tight enough on hers to bruise. Tight enough to root her in the moment and not the maelstrom of her mind, at least for now.
All right, she thinks. All right, all right, that's enough.
She swallows, hard, and straightens as her mother burns. Later, when Fenris comes to her room and there is only the smell of ash, she'll let herself bend under the weight of grief until she can't breathe for it, but for now—for now, she grips his hand and lets him hold the storm away a little longer.
—
"The Maker spoke to me, once," Hawke says, and her voice is echoing and strange in the high stone walls of the Gallows. "In Lothering, after my father died."
"Those who oppose thee shall know the wrath of heaven," Meredith snarls, the crimson light of the lyrium sword thrown in rippling fistfuls across the courtyard. "Field and forest shall burn, the seas shall rise and devour them—"
"Yes, yes, lightning shall rain down from the sky and all that," Hawke says, lifting her staff above her head. "You had only to ask."
make me—
make me the—
Only glimpses, then, as the lightning strikes again and again and again, dancing in great white sparks down the bodies of the metal slaves Meredith has raised for her fighting; reflected across the mirror-shine of Aveline's shield, thrown up against a templar's arrow; made dimmer, just for an instant, by the star-bright glare of Fenris's lyrium lit all at once.
make me the storm—
—
There'd been a sapling in the shade of the great fallen oak. She'd found it the next day, inspecting the damage to the fence. Half its leaves had been missing, but the greenwood had borne the brunt of the winds and not been destroyed.
She'd heard her father's voice, then, clear as if he'd stood beside her:
Weather the storm, daughter.
—
There's fire at the heart of her, sky's lightning in her veins. The metal giants fall, one by one, shattered to bronze stars; the templars yield, one by one, bending knee and head in the face of the onslaught. The storm has changed; the world can sense it.
So does Meredith, screaming, blinding scarlet. "She should see fire," she shrieks, "and go—towards—"
Light, only, as the blade at the end of Hawke's staff pierces her chest where she kneels, where crimson explodes, blood and lyrium and something deeper, cracking, corrupted all that is left of Meredith into the stillness that comes only after the passing of a storm.
"Sometimes a wood is better for the burning," Hawke says into the silence, and pulls her staff free.
—
Never thought I'd take a whole city down with me, Hawke sighs, both elbows on the rail of Isabela's ship, Kirkwall a spire of smoke heavenward on the horizon, the taste of ash lingering in the air. Sometimes I think it would have been better if…
A hand folds around her hand. She knows it so well by now, the calluses more familiar than her own, and she leans her head backwards onto Fenris's shoulder until she can see nothing but grey sky. All right, all right, all right. Enough.
Don't be silly, Isabela says staunchly, the feather on her hat blown almost sideways in the wind. Lightning never strikes the same place twice.
Don't tempt me.
Fenris laughs, and so does she, and when they go to the fore of the ship she stays a little longer, breathing in, breathing out, testing how the world feels when the storm has come and gone in the heart of her and she has weathered the wildness of it.
A little wild herself, perhaps. Strong enough to bend. Strong enough to stand again, after.
That's that, then, she says aloud, and goes forward with the others, the wind strong and steady at her back.