A warm welcome back!

First thing's first— Yes, I have disappeared for a very long time, for very good, sadly life-infected reasons. Some parts of this chapter like many other future ones I wrote back in October when Inquisition was still not out, therefore when you see a reference to it, it's because of wanting to subtly go for "Hey guys, remember, Inquisition's coming!" But now it's February, therefore it has no charm anymore, therefore, well, you understand.

SO, where were we?

There was a man in the corridor. A corridor that seemed to take unstable shapes and colors of countless mansions in Kirkwall, my own included. The man himself, standing in front of me through all that wobbly, shaky, out-and-out rickety matter that made the corridor, he was also free of definition. He was without a face, subtle traceries of his nose and jawline were simply too ghostly and unhinged to catch anything that remotely resembled a face, and the margins of his human shape seemed to glow and vibrate and twist. The robe that veiled him faintly changed into ceremonial garments, then a hunter's winter coat, then simple peasant-like rags, then a mage's robe again.

In that weird, ever-changing reality, he turned.

I was uncertain, but I think I saw his hand rise to beckon me. His hair at least, always remained grey.

I followed him through the corridor, and just as it seemed we reached the end of it, the realm changed. Or perhaps we simply stepped outside.

Out under heaps of everchanging white light and violet darkness, Fenris sat alone in a soft shapeless garden.

The man without a face pointed at him.

I got a measure of his full height when he rose upon seeing me, which was quite unusual for an elf, and I let out a girlish gasp and then a streak of laughter. He winked at me.

He had his hair short, but rich, with not at all modest bangs on one side of his face. Never had he succumbed to the typical boring military cut or wore his hair long, which resembled too much both the mark of human nobility and perhaps the heritage of Dalish appearance.

He was always somewhere outside the current.

I was always sure that in his fugitive years, he cut it far away from any mirror until he no longer felt it reach his shoulders or pluck him in the eye. And when he did have exposure to mirrors on a daily basis, he decided it wasn't really all that bad. I agreed.

But it was white and full of sunlight in the garden, and he seemed the brightest, most impressive man I'd ever laid eyes upon. He was full of kindness when he looked at me. He took me in his arms.

The skies were still dancing between day and night, as if someone was repeatedly turning a light on and off in a fit of compulsive fretfulness.

But no matter, I said. It was Fenris I kissed in this vision; it was Fenris with whom I danced.

A shower of flower petals descended upon us as upon a bridal couple in Kirkwall, and Fenris held my arm as though we had just been wed, and all around us people sang. There was a flawless happiness, a happiness so keen and powerful that perhaps there are those born who never even have the capacity for it.

The man without a face stood atop a broad staircase of marble.

This was an enclosed place, filled with people, but it was sunny and cool, and the sandy wind was blowing in our hair. Certainly it had to be the gardens of the Keep.

Once again the petals fell, petals of all colours, and peacock feathers waved about us, and branches of gleaming magnolia trees, fully pink redbuds and other people holding large, cone-shaped hydrangeas that symbolized eternal good fortune. There was singing in great lusty bursts, and the sound of riotous drums, and Fenris' face was remarkably flushed and mobile, not a chance of his gaze sweeping over the crowd surrounding us, his green-painted eyes only beholding me.

All began to dance, save the faceless man. Had he had eyes, they would have risen and looked over their heads. Various instruments were playing. The dance had become a delightful frenzy.

Fenris was smiling as I'd never seen him smile.

But in that frenzy, a weary and secretive darkness crept into his face, a distraction, as though his soul had traveled out the doors towards some distant realm, and then he looked sadly down. He looked lost. Anger overcame him.

I heard a voice cry out in a deafening voice, "The rogue slave!" The crowd fell silent. "Bring him to me."

The crowd parted to let us see this struggling furious figure.

"You dare judge me!" Fenris shouted. It took ten armoured men to hold him.

I reached for my side. Nothing. Just fine, soft, useless wedding garments. I saw only red in front of me.

I couldn't see, but I'm sure it took twelve to hold me.

"Into the burning caves, in the mountains, in the strongest fetters!" the man in robes shouted. Fenris was dragged away.

"I won't bloody well allow it!" I shouted in an aggressive manner, just managing to get one arm free of the guards. One caught me back and shoved his elbow in my shoulder, hard. I fell down.

The faceless man was, in the meantime, strolling like a god towards me. I could still barely see a face when he stopped right in front of me, looking at me from above.

He beckoned the men to lift me up. He lifted my chin to behold him.

"And you say," said the incredulous man, "that you have some authority I do not know over this?"

I was outside myself at this point. I saw myself looking up at him with no emotion. His guards fled.

"Yes," she said. Her eyes stared fixedly on him.

"Shut up," Fenris said hastily.

It's as if she didn't even hear him. "He is mine," she said in a flat tone.

"Your name?" the man asked.

"Hawke," she said. "And you will do nothing to step over it."

"That's enough, Hawke!" Fenris was roaring. His face was engulfed with black horror.

The man laughed. "Over your name or over your authority?"

"Why, I am quite known for avenging my family's name by slaying those who besmirch its honour," she said. He knew it was sarcasm.

"You do not seem to mind those who are yours to step over your authority either," the man said while giving Fenris a quick glance.

"He is free to say and do whatever he wishes," she said.

"I thought you said that he is yours," the man said with a scrutinizing look.

"In the way you say it, he is hardly mine as he is hardly yours."

"Why, I must sadly disappoint you then, for he already did belong to someone else, as I say it, when you acquired him," he said and smiled. "Namely myself." He grinned and looked up around the walls of the Keep and opened his arms. "Surely you have laws here that recognize the original owner's priority of right to his own possession, do you not?" He looked like he was starting to snort when he continued, "Or do I need to order a replegiatum— my apologies, what do you call it here? Claim to recover property?— and be civil about this?" He was trying not to laugh, I could see it. Was he amused by this pretend muck-about to be civil, or because he made a pun about being civil.

"We do not allow actions in recovery of people," she said. "But surely you're not that stupid not to very well know this, so I can only suspect you are even more stupid for pretending to be so."

"Hawke," Fenris growled.

The man snorted, looked at him and shook his head. He turned to her. "You are his mistress then, 'Hawke'?" the man asked. "Non-conformist mistress, of course." His face started to show definite shapes, but nothing I could recognize. He was smiling, however, in such a faint, serpent-like manner I was disgusted. It meant he knew he had already won.

"Venhedis, curse the Heavens, I beg you, Hawke, shut up!" Fenris shouted, before he was punched hard by one of the men. He said, "Silentia, famulus!" Oh, I did not need a quick Tevene lesson to know that he called him a slave and told him to shut up.

I knew I was— she was trying not to look at Fenris. That would mean to offer her rival the most fundamental sign of weakness. She stared at him unbendingly. "He is free. He is my comrade. My friend. And this is my city, a city in which you have not been invited." The man's eyebrows furrowed. She looked at him and in the most decisive and inoffensive manner said, "Now shoo."

"Shoo?" he asked, his eyebrows lifted. Her blank stare didn't change. He looked at his guards laughingly, as if silently discarding the ridiculous reality she was fruitlessly trying to inflict on him.

He lifted her, like a small fragile girl of twelve, and tore at her throat as an animal might do it, letting the blood flood from the fatal wound. "Little Queen," he said. "Little Kingdom."

Late morning, The Hanged Man

It was late morning, and the tavern was currently swallowed by the plethora of disgusting post-celebration smells that were almost crossing that thin border that suggested somebody died in there.

Corff, son of Coriff, was hanging onto the broom with both left hand and right, while his two left legs were tangling into each other on account of sacrilegiously giving in to temptation while on duty the other night. His father, as he said, "Oi'm no' disappointed, bu' you're still cleanin' off all this shite for two weeks, and don't forget to unclog the toilet. 'Tis quite nasty this time." He smiled a little when he finished.

Varric, or a wraithlike, half-invisible, pale, sickly, spectral form of Varric, was sitting, quite insubstantially, at the Table of Fenris and crankily massaging at the skin that now felt very much like an igneous holding cell for the chemical factory of his liver. He wished he had an extra set of hands to hold the superfried short-circuited control room of his brain— that ever since he had woken up felt like it attempted Voudun-monk yoga on a circus trapeze swinging in mid-air over a circle of hot lava the other night. He sighed. Varric had always firmly believed that he was the master of his own mind. Unfortunately he had now realized that the body is not run by the mind, despite the mind's opinion on the matter.

The wooden floor began to creak, the magnified sound of which Varric felt was a really unnecessary addition to his pain. He turned his head to see— his neck cracked. "FUCK ME!" he shouted. That hurt his own ears.

"I am inclined to refuse," said the very hoarse voice of what seemed like a Fenris.

Yes, yes, Varric thought—upon blinking and rubbing through the condensed muck on his eyes— it's a Fenris. Indeed. What?

"Do you ever just start rubbing your eyes so hard that you just start entering some all new unknown dimension consisting of twists and patterns like you're tripping on pickled deep mushrooms or something?" Varric said as Fenris approached the table, rubbing his eyes.

Fenris swayed for a moment and stopped in front of him. It felt like, at the moment, there was more Fenris than one body could contain and he had to hold it all properly in place. He growled crankily as he brushed his forehead, assembling connections between neurons, sensory input, thoughts, the meaning of life vocal chords and tongue—and then very innocently asked, "Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?"

Varric laughed and snorted and it looked and sounded like it very much hurt. "Boy did we get hammered last night," he said with an air of attempted mental departure from the horrors of post-hammered morning sickness. Pregnant with thought! Varric shouted in his mind, and it hurt. He laughed inside and it continued to hurt. That's how he looks like. Three years. It took me three years to figure out the right word for what Broody looks like! Pregnant with thought—snorts inside— Varric, don't you dare forget. You need this for later. Capisce?

"No… you got hammered," Fenris said, trying to adjust his legs over the seat at the table. "We just ran around after you apologizing to everyone."

"I see," Varric said. "Then it must have been somebody else that ran around after a crazy dwarf-hating murderous elf that—" he said, and stopped angrily to stroll around the inside of his own head, then flung a dismissive hand towards him, "—that did something."

Fenris' eyebrows came together. "You spent all night talking to imaginary goblins."

"I did?" Varric said. "Well I must say they were a rather friendly lot."

Fenris sighed and looked down, biting on his psychological tongue, but the pressure mingled with the weariness and the impatience, so he let himself ask, "Have you seen Haw—"

"I couldn't sleep in my own bed. Hear this? In my own damn bed!" Varric rambled irately.

Upon being cut like that, the rest of Fenris' sentence got lost somewhere in the realm of unspoken words, but its unspent energy had to get out somehow. "—How awful," Fenris said.

"You know that awkward moment when you pull your blankets up, and you punch yourself in the damn face?" Varric said grumpily.

"I do not sleep with a blanket," Fenris said flatly.

"Don't remind me," he said, rubbing his forehead. "You don't sleep with night clothes either."

"Indeed," Fenris said with a faint upward movement of his lips. "Have you seen Hawke?"

"Who? Oh, Hawke… Oh, I've seen—" he said and paused to press his eyes painfully, "— I've seen a lot of her, quite enough for a lifetime."

"This morning," Fenris said, annoyed.

"When? Oh... Uh, let me think—" He brushed his hair upwards and sighed. "Hooh, no. I don't remember her around here this morning. She might still be sleeping somewhere or—"

"She left," Fenris said.

"And how do you know?" Varric asked, a bit of supercharged sense coming hastily in his mind. His eyes narrowed. "What did you—"

"Or she left, Varric, or she left," Fenris said in annoyance.

"Right," said Varric nervously. "Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. I— Oh."

"Oh?" Fenris asked, arching an eyebrow.

"She has the thing today—"

"What thing?"

"With the— uh, with the… the stuff—"

"What stu—"

"Andraste's ass, can you let me think?" Varric shouted, massaging his temple. "I can barely hear my thoughts with you harrowing the goddamn Inquisition on my ass."

"If the Inquisition ever came to question you over anything, given your present astounding eloquence, I think they'd be luckier getting earthshattering secrets out of the lizards surrounding the city than from you," Fenris said.

"I don't see why that's a bad thing."

"I did not say it was a bad thing."

"Technicalities," Varric said in annoyance. "Anyway, where was I—"

"I believe you were regarding Hawke's present affairs with the… stuff?" Fenris said rather mockingly.

"The Keep, things, trials, meeting, the Viscount, or whatever."

"For what?"

"Right, I know my face suggests I'm a very rich and reliable source of information, but you may as well ask me what the Empress of Orlais has for breakfast on Saturdays."

"What does she have?"

"Crepes with salted butter caramel, but that's not the point."

"Of course not," Fenris said sarcastically.

"In 8:01 Blessed, Princess Valentina Sofia of Antiva brought a gift of caramel to Orlais, okay?" he said in annoyance. He flung his arms around in story-mode, and continued in a rather bored tone, "An imperial caramel maker was employed, and caramel has been a rage fest ever since, especially on the weekends. I mean, can you even imagine Orlais without caramel now? This breakfast treat is mind-blo-wing-ly irresistib—"

"Enough deflection," Fenris said flatly.

"I say," Varric grumbled. "It's just my inner filters of passion for history and good food released from the inhibitory reign of my—"

"Enough passion then," Fenris said again flatly.

"Fine," Varric mumbled. He rested his head against his hand. "I don't know, kid, she didn't say. Or I didn't listen."

"I am inclined to suspect the first option, no offence."

"None taken, it's my thing."

"Indeed."

Varric's neck creaked again as he stretched. He let out a yawn, and then said, "So, what happened with you two last night?"

"I prefer lemon crème."

Noon, City Square

Kirkwall had not always been Kirkwall. Well, that is largely said, because Kirkwall's never been itself for too long without some war, or mad ruler or Knight-Commander to shake its identity and buck everything up. With that said, you could say Kirkwall had always latently suffered from an extreme case of post-traumatic stress disorder, and given the remaining statues of slaves everywhere in Hightown, doubled by one or two ounces of hysteric regression.

The city was founded under the name Emerius, after the Magister that successfully won the competition for governing the port long back in the Ancient Age. Shortly thereafter Emerius became one of the most powerful Imperial cities on account of harbouring more than one million slaves working in the city. It used to be the heart of all trade between the North and the South, much like today, if you don't count the fact that its primary trade goods were the slaves themselves. That was the backbone of all Imperial reign, but it was hanging by the skin of its teeth once another wave of rebellions begun all over Tevinter. One such massive wave began in Emerius as well upon the murder of a notorious Alamarri slave who had "poisoned the minds of many". That was the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were, and launched heaps of deadly retributions against the Magisters. The death of its Tevinter rulers marked the end of Emerius as an Imperial province, and as such, it quickly became known as the independent city of Kirkwall.

The city managed to combine beauty with cruelty for a thousand years.

Hightown had been sacked, but restored and the homes of Tevinter high classes became the homes of Kirkwall nobility. Lowtown became the home of low class citizens, and the sewage system underground expectedly became the proverbial underworld, because Tevinter was obviously not going to stop trading and stealing slaves just because they lost a bit of territory.

All the spikes and bronze statues of slaves which made the name of The City of Chains remained, on various accounts of "difficulty to remove."

Above the façade looking towards the abundance of jet stone buildings that suggested sometime a millennium ago used to be white, and behind them, The Waking Sea, The Kirkwall Keep was surmounted by great bronze statues of griffons and ornamented with the Kirkwall heraldry. Other statues of the proverbial slave "adorned" the ramps before the main façade, sickening slave frescoes galore, completely bowed slaves with their hands covering their heads met you right in front of the main steps and the ones in the internal courtyard had somehow been "successfully removed".

Inside the Hall of The Supreme Court, also known as the Great Hall or, in the times of Emerius, Aula Maxima, all the slave frescoes had been removed and the walls had been covered with Highever limestone.

That was the image that regaled Hawke's eyes, who was sitting on a bench in front of the Keep, 959 years later.

I can't imagine how he can stand walking past this building every day, Hawke thought to herself. Walk and live and be in this city, as he has, every day of almost three whole years.

I can't imagine why— why I'm stubbornly keeping him here, under claims that it's his best bet for protection.

But it is… she thought. It is. I don't care how highly skilled and exceedingly clever he is that he managed not to get caught for three years. It's been almost six now. He's had peace— artificial peace, she corrected herself rather painfully, for almost three years. He's had the means to heal his wounds—patch his wounds, she corrected herself again, and to become a norma— himself. That's it, he's become himself. And for shame, if he lost that altogether incredible self again.

Although… he's not been particularly careful this past year. Not at all careful almost. Geographical stagnation is the first mistake into getting caught; she knew that. That had been Hawke's life for twenty years.

What if someone, or somehow— something goes wrong.

What if his stay in Kirkwall will be the death of him.

Her throat was already hard as iron and her chest felt very much as if it was occupied by a black, spiky, rough blob of wrongness.

But only for a moment, she closed her eyes.

"So, Hawke," a low voice came in her right ear that yet again resembled that of a Fenris.

"So, Fenris," she said, as if she had a third eye on the right side on her head and had already saw him coming.

"I heard you had affairs again," he said calmly, looking behind, "at the… Keep."

"You've heard correctly," Hawke said a bit tiredly. "I'm not due for another ten minutes though."

He noticed she had already changed, wearing black gloves, a modest white shirt, black pants and she wore her "friendly" sword on the side next to a small family crest.

"What is the nature of these affairs then?" Fenris asked, still standing up.

Hawke gave him an annoyed smile. "Although I seem to be right on time for the Inquisition."

He looked away from her. "I did not mean to upset you."

"It was only a joke," she said, but there was no smile to follow it.

"Ten minutes, you said?" Fenris asked, withholding a sigh. Gingerly, he sat down beside her.

"Eight now," she said.

The powerful noises of the crowd were flooding his ears, but they were just muffled voices that constantly suggested the forbidden. Yet again, he did not quite successfully bite his spectral tongue, although he wished he had at least took another second in consideration of himself not to sound so stupid, "How's it… cracking?"

The battle between her two eyebrows consisting of one of them firmly militating to come together with its comrade while the latter was trying to get as far away as possible from it confirmed this.

She looked away and said, "Barely survived with my life from an ancient dungeon full of assassins and mages, got dragged down to get my magic fixed and Anders is treating me as if I'm five and I'm at my first fireball, sneaked in my friend's mansion and redecorated it up to the last vase, got horrifically screamed at for sneaky-sneakily redecorating my friend's mansion up to the last vase, as a result got maaaassively drunk, turned to the primeval red hot roots of my ancestors, assaulted my friend, probably made another friend either plan me an agonizing death or wake up with dicks drawn all over my house, was compelled to dance like a whore and kind of shamefully liked it, woke up with the most gagging, splitting, excruciating headache, preparing, hungover, to fight for the rights of many, which might already be a lost battle, and in all this absolutely grand nexus of my timeline, the Viscount wants to "talk". Happy days."

She did not even catch her breath afterwards.

Fenris appreciated how such a comprehensive enumeration of one's past actions can appeal to one's critical thinking in such a way as to agree, contrary to previous convictions, that one is an idiot, but he also did not overlook to appreciate the salient hole in Hawke's chronology between the hours of midnight and this morning.

"You've had quite the month," Fenris said, resting his elbow on the backrest.

He noticed she mirrored his position. "Indeed," she said.

To understand Fenris' bother, one must empathize with the hardship of remembering things ten hours after massive – Ferelden – alcohol consumption, as well as being certain which things had actually happened and which had been the product of intense wackadoodle dreaming. He'd remembered, quite insubstantially, that he had engaged in a rather challenging exchange of ideas with Hawke, and he'd also recalled that his lower regions had experienced quite an overdrive, as he suspected, as a result of very intense talking.

The historically unmistakable red band of Hawke lying on the bed in which he had woken up half and one quarter naked was also quite helpful evidence.

His masculine brain had also petitioned him to think for a second, that if they did do what he thought they did, and then had no memory of it, then he was undeniably the biggest idiot in a three planet and seven moon radius including the asteroid belt between Hesperia and Panopaea, no ifs, ands or buts about it.

"Varric made it through the night?" she said, cutting off his chain of thought.

"I believe the expression is— by his nose," he said impassively.

She chuckled. "A nose."

"What?"

"The expression is 'by a nose'."

He furrowed his eyebrows and dispassionately said, "That's stupid."

"How so?" she laughed.

"I appreciate a language that provides one with an abundance of ordinary words that paired with other just as unremarkable words become the finer points of expressing a particular trait or situation seeming considerably far away from being connected to them, but 'by a nose'? Just as well, when most idioms I am familiar with to express such situations in this language require an explicit relation to the one experiencing the situation, such as 'by the skin of one's teeth'."

"Well there's also 'by a small margin'," she said.

"Well that does not regard one's own physical margin, but an impersonal unit of measure," Fenris argued rather passionately now.

"There is also 'by a whisker', if it makes you feel any better," she said musingly.

His eyelids fell chillingly, thus Hawke appreciated that she was still alive and that she indeed survived by a whisker.

"That is out of the question," Fenris said coldly, realizing he had a bee in his bonnet and that was breakfast, lunch and supper for Hawke's passion for deflection.

Several moments later, Fenris curled his lips in annoyance for a second and his eyes rolled in different directions out of impatience, something that she did not get to notice.

"Hawke," he said, in that way of his that suggested he was annoyed and she was a child.

"Fenris," she said, in the retributory way that suggested she was rather enjoying it.

"What happened after your punishment last night?" he asked, and as soon as he did, she lifted her eyebrows and he felt himself blush. He looked away and said, "I have… difficulty remembering."

"And you believe my brain had been less encumbered to remember more?"

"I haven't discarded the possibility."

She sighed. "I remembered we talked."

"I do, too."

"We had one of our intense debates, I wager," Hawke said with a shrug, her hand starting to play at the back of her hair.

"Indubitably," Fenris muttered.

"And of course there was a variety of opinions—" she went on.

"Of course there was," he muttered again.

"—I believe we saw eye to eye on one or two ideas— "

"—As always—"

"—And we were on the point of reaching a rather generous agreement, however, the weariness took its toll and it was agreed to put the debate on hold."

"Categorically," Fenris said.

"Quite a lovely night, for the little that I remember," she said, amused. "Do you feel a roaring pain just at the north-western side of the back of your head?"

"It is past ten minutes," Fenris said coolly. He rose from the bench. "Time to go in."

She looked a bit thrown off. "Ah, right." She got up as well. "If I don't come back with the day tell Mother I love her deeply and that I am in prison for philanthropic activity consisting of giving generous advice to the Seneschal on where to shove it."

He chuckled. "I often count to ten before I give my hostility free expression."

"Really?" she said. "That hasn't seemed to work."

"On most occasions they still deserved it after I counted," he said with a smile.

She laughed and looked down. "Wish me luck," she said, and started to go up the steps.

And then he remembered. He searched his side pocket, and shouted after her, "Wait."

As she turned her head around, he reached her from behind. "I can do better," he said, and gave her the red band.

"That will work better," she agreed musingly. "I keep losing it, I don't know why."

"I keep finding it," Fenris said flatly, as if the sentence was cut out before he would say something more.

She genuinely smiled, and then he watched her march up the steps.

A few minutes later, Chantry Courtyard

"Fenboy!" Varric's voice echoed all over the courtyard as he was walking back home.

Fenris turned indifferently as Varric desperately ran towards him and said, "Fen-boy?"

"Fen-ris, Fen -boy, what the hell, they almost rhyme," he said, catching his breath a little bent forward.

Fenris crossed his arms and said, "Is there a point to why you're spewing your lungs out and befoul my name in the process?

"Knight-Commander Cuckoo-Crackers is at the Keep," Varric said frantically.

"And?" Fenris asked indifferently. With quite considerable delay on account of his mental muscles still forgoing cognitive regeneration, above the distant clatter of nonsensical mental flatware, an inner voice completely piloted Fenris, or rather slapped him one should say, out of his hangover, and it said, "Fool!"

"And—" Varric said, but was interrupted.

"Hawke is also at the Keep," Fenris said methodically.

"Right."

"And we don't trust Hawke to be as discrete as she used to be, I don't know, in her seventh hundred past life perhaps."

"Eeeexactly."

Another clonk readjusted the faulty gears in Fenris' brain. "Do you think—"

"Oh, yes."

"Kaffas," he growled.

They both turned back and hurriedly marched.

"You know I always try to guess what that means and I can't decide whether it's 'damn it', 'shit', 'fuck' or what."

Fenris didn't look at him. "Bollocks," he said.

Meanwhile, The Viscount's Keep

"How much longer do I have to wait?" a nobleman said irately to one of the Guards.

Hawke was unsure, but it seemed to her as if that man had been persistently and ineffectually waiting and asking the same question for three years, which might have made for good evidence that there were still strong chemicals in her body. She walked past them, and took a second to be sure she had her wits, or at least one of them pretending to be functional enough to guess which room was which.

"—Serah, if you kick that wall one more time—"

With the red band still in her hand, she looked at the Kirkwall heraldry on the distant northern wall, and tied her hair with it.

"—Disgrace! That is my sword you're pointing at me, and I paid for your shield, so take my bloody helmet off when you speak to me, son!—"

If you let your mind dwell on rooms like this, you could end up being oddly sad and full of a strange protracted compassion which would lead you to believe that it might be a good idea to wipe out all the races and start again with amoebas.

A voice which many could agree was the very expression of carefully hidden animosity came to her ears, "Serah Hawke."

Many people meeting Seneschal Bran for the first time formed one to three impressions: that he was Kirkwall-born, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a pink forest full of unicorns on methamphetamine hydrochloride. Two of those were wrong.

"Well if it isn't the brightest, most remarkable of the Viscount's administrative assistants," she said with a smile.

Bran's eyelids fell halfway. "I am the only administrative assistant to the Viscount."

She bit her tongue from saying, "Indeed" and let him figure it out. After all, one of those three impressions was hazardously true.

"I'm afraid His worship has his hands full at the moment," Bran said and gathered his hands behind is back. "Surely you don't mind waiting."

"No, by all means," Hawke said cheerfully. "It leaves us time to catch up."

"Pardon?" he said.

"I don't know. Where you have you gone for the holidays?"

Seneschal Bran cleared his throat and eyed her fixedly. "I would prefer to discuss your current intentions in this city, given your most recent – the pretentious eyebrow had finally risen up – lively petitions."

"Oh, well, trying – within my rights – to remind the office of a few laws fallen under desuetude, a call for reassessment of the system at present, sharing strategic ideas in order to find the best course of action to benefit both the city and the office of the Viscount… I'm sure you understand."

"And by that are you suggesting that you have – he consulted the delicate thesaurus in his mind that for hundreds of years helped lawyers excrete bags and bags of money – considerable insight to cooperate with for the future development of our government?" Which was word-on-word translation for, "Are you saying you're trying to do my job?"

Hawke shrugged with a lot of smiles. "The last few executive rulings have been rather amusing."

"Are you trying to be amusing, Serah?" he asked, crossing his arms.

"Actually I was just being flippant, but I can do sarcastic if you like."

Ten minutes later, The Viscount's Keep

Elves and humans are generally as sociable and agreeable with each other as cats and dogs, but also as cats and dogs, there are locations and times and neutral grounds in which they meet at something like peace.

But unlike humans or dwarves, elves aren't exactly along the popular lines of things you run into Hightown every day, and over, respectively, depending on the bugger.

And when an elf is in the city square midday and entering the Keep, especially if he was comparatively unknown, people would find the excuse to keep an eye on him, preferably without appearing to do so.

Several footsteps of nonchalance had come with delay, and Fenris contained the metallic feeling in his head that he was, indeed, being watched by a Guard.

It was a proper policeman stare. It said, "I can see you and now I'm waiting to see what you're going to do that's wrong."

He reciprocated the unnerving deadlock of snarky stares with a very distinct expression of absolutely nothing.

"— Did you see Knight-Commander Meredith come in?—"

The hall was already considerably loud and crowded that day. Fenris remembered this about the Keep. As soon as there is a free space, any kind of space, even the space created by the departure of a Guard during a switch, people rush into it like moths to a flame, usually in terrible dispute with each other over who got there first and consequently, who is first in line to see the Viscount.

"Sweet mother of green cheeses, did the old fart die?" Varric asked irately, elbowing his way through the crowds.

"—I heard there's some kind of mage trial today. Can you believe it? In civil court!—"

"On most occasions it seems that way," Fenris said tiredly, just when he bumped into a rushed and inattentive old noblewoman.

She fell down, flowered hat flying around in mid-air. They both helped her up immediately. As common sense would dictate, they were prepared to hear, "Oh thank you, young man." But what Fenris got was, "How disgraceful. Not even an apology?"

In Kirkwall something like this would have attracted a lot of inhospitable eyes, but since everyone around them already seemed to be screaming into other people's faces, Fenris was merely a momentary and unremarked nuisance with suspiciously white hair.

"I am very certain you collided into me, Madam," Fenris said impassively.

"I say." She adjusted her Orlesian flowery hat. "My vision was merely obstructed in the attempt to readjust my hat, but you young man had your undoubtedly healthy eyes way ahead and could have made way!"

Fenris looked strangely polite and unoffended by the ridiculousness and stupidly-based vanity of that sentence, but beyond the glory of his kindness there was a tumultuous sound going—Ten, nine, eight, seven…

"My word, this has been all my error, Madam," Varric intervened charmingly. "I was selfishly keeping him occupied with talking about how the Viscount seems time-poor, if not dead, considering—" He flung his arms out beholding all the people.

"— There's a woman on trial under suspicion of magic—"

But Fenris already saw the Guard coming. There was about to be trouble, if they didn't think fast enough. As soon as he crossed the line of no return, Fenris found himself staring up to, what he considered from experience, two hundred pounds of organic uselessness.

"Good day," Fenris said. Varric finally noticed and repeated.

A nod from the Guard with the additional contemptuous lip curl indicated that he was prepared to agree, with quite the inconvenience at the available evidence, that it was day, and in certain circumstances, by some people, it could be considered good.

"Is there anything we can do for you, Sir?" Varric asked politely with a convivial face.

"Oh no, the question is, 's there anethang I can do fer you, lad?" the Guardsman said while folding his arms with a mock disdainful stare that said he was slowly preparing to do something for him, although Fenris might have had the preposition wrong.

"Yes, actually, where can I find—"

"Did you disturb the lady, lad?" the Guardsman cut him.

Fenris glanced over his shoulder. The lady with the invisible broom suck up her nether ends was still there, doing what he considered to be a remarkably convincing take on imitating a very, very irritated statue that coincidentally had flowers in its hat with an uncanny resemblance to bird droppings.

Looking over his other shoulder, Varric was gone, perhaps because he had appreciated this was a time to innocently step around the corner and then run like hell.

Bastard, he thought.

"On the contrary," Fenris said calmly. "She was the one who disturbed me." He immediately regretted what he said.

"Arrest him!" came a very sharp, high-pitched fake-accented voice that seemed to be on a warpath. "Go on, officer, are you waiting for the fanfare? Arrest him already!"

"On what grounds?" Fenris asked impassively.

The Guardsman appeared to be annoyed, but it was unclear with whom. "What is the situation exactly, Lady Quirrel?"

"This, this knif— – she paused to correct herself – sharp-earedlittle – she paused briefly either from the unhealthily fast escalation of her angry pitch or from trying to find an aristocratically acceptable term for 'bugger' – citizen, pushed me down and destroyed my two-thousand sovereign hat."

Judging by her high-pitched voice, sharp teeth and mean little eyes, her name might have been off by a letter at the start.

"With all respect," Fenris said with an edge, "You bumped into me without looking, fell down, and I helped you up, while what happened to your hat was the product of your own negligence and the natural counterforces of blown air and gravitational pull." The Guard seemed to be lost after "product of". "I speak the truth," Fenris said calmly.

"This is why you elves are always trouble—"

"I am a person," Fenris said. "A state of being which your grace cannot recognize perhaps because you lack the capacity for being one."

There was a fractional chorus of "Why you little—" and "That is no way to talk to Lady—" both of which were tumultuously interrupted.

"What in the Maker's name is going on here?" came Aveline's voice which obviously suggested it was tired of having to sound angry. Varric was behind her, giving Fenris a very friendly thumbs up.

"Guard-Captain," Fenris saluted calmly.

"This little man—"

The way she kept saying 'little' was getting on Fenris' nerves like nothing else.

Thankfully, Aveline averted him from that red chain of various negative emotions. "I am extremely certain a disciplined warrior like himself would never simply bump into somebody or be that stupid to intently attempt such a thing in the very heart of this public institution, milady," she said assertively.

"You Guards," the old woman said, with such a perfect tone that her tongue certainly pronounced the letters in "Guards" but somehow managed to make the word come out as scum. "Good for nothing fustilarians always out for your own, merely a lot of ne'er-do-wells just like the elves."

Lady Quirrel belonged to those people who believed themselves too educated to make the difference between Guards and criminals, and other races alike. Her kind of people believed that the Guards were a sadly necessary sub-set of the criminal classes who were the only ones desperate enough to agree to keep other criminals like themselves in line in exchange for a few hundred sovereigns a year, benefits and a right to officer people about, and as a result should be using the back door of the Keep like any other servant. They had this mental map of the city being divided into parts where you found decent upstanding citizens (and it seemed only money could help one achieve such a state) and other parts where you found criminals, scum of the earth and ne'er-do-wells.

And while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole lot of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.

"I'm sure you have more and richer complaints where that came from, but you can see we are all terribly busy," Aveline said coldly.

"Then what do you suppose—"

"Write a letter." Then she beckoned for Fenris to come with her and Varric to the barracks.

Long ago Fenris and Varric decided that they couldn't help but like Aveline, if not for her incredible officering skills, then at least for the type of enemies she made as a result of it.

Seconds later, Aveline's Office

Aveline seemed to make a point of not muttering one word on their way to her office, a point which was quickly confirmed by her rapidly closing the door upon entering like those times in which you were locked in a room and you knew you were given the options of get beaten or start talking.

She stayed that way for a moment, with her hand on the door and diffusely looking down.

"Aveline—"

"Bloody, bloody, clogging, shoe-sniffing, gouging, crackbrained idiots," she said angrily.

They forgot that beside Hawke, Aveline was also Ferelden, which sadly meant she was always likely to carry that passionate swear gene.

"It was the tru—"

"I know, I know it was the truth," she said dismissively, flinging an arm around and appearing oh, so positively tired. Her forehead couldn't wrinkle more and she kept looking down with her hands on her hips for a few more moments.

Finally she looked up and glared at them darkly. It was a clear expression. It said: it's been a bad day, and now there's you.

"You know Hawke is here?" Fenris said.

"Yes, she came by earlier since her meeting was delayed. What of it?"

"Knight-Commander Cuckoo-Cr— Meredith is here," Fenris said in annoyance. Varric chuckled.

Aveline crossed her arms. "So?"

"You are obviously too tired to think critically today," Fenris said meanly, crossing his arms.

"She has one meeting with the Viscount as far as I'm aware and I saw her go in not long— Oh."

"Oh," Fenris said flatly with half-lidded eyes. "And we've heard things about a trial."

"It can't be what you think it is and I haven't heard anything about a trial today," Aveline said. "Obviously if there is one that has to do with either of them, it still wouldn't be about her, since this is a civil court. She'd have been in chains on a boat long ago and the Viscount certainly wouldn't have anything to call on her and talk to her about if that's how things were."

"The Templar might not have any form of suspicion now, but look at you and how tired and…"

"And?" Aveline said sharply.

Fenris scratched at the back of his head. "I believe the word is bitchy," he said blankly.

"What did you—"

"You called me a, how was it – he almost sang it mockingly – bloody, bloody, clogging, shoe-sniffing, gouging, crackbrained idiot. That's six bloody offensive words you got to call me without counting the double word and I used only one. I think that's more than fair."

"Your hand is showing seven fingers."

"Well I'm tired too."

"She's spent three years here, two and three quarters of them hungover," Aveline said. "I think she'll be fine."

"I have a bad feeling about this," Fenris muttered in annoyance.

"Oh, well that's new," Aveline said sarcastically.

"Your sarcasm is fruitless," he said.

"Hawke is a fully grown fucking woman and she can bloody well do a day in the Keep without getting dragged down to the Gallows," Aveline said angrily. Fenris was about to say something but she cut him, "—Getting thrown in prison, well, that's another story. But that's not as bad in comparison. I'm sure you agree."

Fenris pressed his lips. "Very well," he said. "I have other things to do here anyway."

"Like what?" Aveline asked with narrowing eyes.

"I would like to apply for a post here," he said.

"Like a Guard?"

"Like a… public consultant."

Her expression said everything. "No."

"You are not the one to get to make that decision," he said. "Plus, you would certainly love my help around here, I'm sure, as you have so persistently asked for what seems like millennia."

"And why in the Keep?" she asked in suspicion.

Fenris never really liked lying, so he decided to go for the back-up plan of vagueness and relative truth instead.

"I have a newly found perspective," he said calmly. "And I'm poor."

"Why should I even consider letting you apply now?"

"I can tell you one good reason."

"Well, go on then."

"You should let me do this, and then of course assess my skills, and if you or whoever it is decides to recruit me, then I can give all my reserve to the benefit of this city. You know I can do the job better than most people and you also know who I am, so if I do anything wrong you know where to find me."

"So you're telling me that if I do what I want then you'll do what you want?"

"I'm saying, Guard-Captain, that I can handle this quite thoroughly, if only I have your support." And by support she very well understood, "Don't tell them my real name and or where I live."

Aveline looked at him a little too long and sighed. "The recruitment office is that way, but you'll need to be assessed by the Seneschal. Public consultants are… not my thing."

"Very well."

"And you'll actually share your information with me?"

"Honestly, no, I don't think I should do that."

"I am Guard-Captain, Fenris."

"Yes, Captain. And I'm not. I think that's my point."

Outside Aveline's Office

"I hope you know what you're doing, kid," Varric said worriedly.

Fenris looked over his shoulder at him. "I need to get in that office, and there's no other way."

Suddenly everything made sense. "And I can also get places under very good pretenses."

"You seem to be getting the hang of it then," Fenris said with a grin. "I suggest you keep an eye out for now."

"I will be the keen eyes and ears of this hall, practicing my systematic mercantile bullshitting and convivial joie-de-vivre all over the place."

"Excellent," Fenris said calmly, and walked towards the steps.