He woke as if he had fallen from above. The pain in his chest was alive as if it started anew.

Not three seconds later did Aveline wake up as if from a nightmare. She had tears in her eyes. They exchanged looks of horror. At their feet, Hawke was still out, peaceful and still.

"Oh Maker, we need a healer!" Aveline shouted.

Fenris looked perplexed at her. Aveline rose up and brought herself down to him.

He followed her gaze to where it was pointed, and so he looked down. His whole chest was red with blood. Worse, the wounds were letting out smoke.

Time contracted. Marethari, Anders and for some reason, Varric, showed up into the room, already frantic and hurried. Instantly, Anders shouted at Aveline to get away from him, and dropped down to stop the bleeding manually.

Fenris' roaring cry terrified the whole room. He fainted from the pain.

"Bugger!" Anders cursed in annoyance. "He lost consciousness."

"What is happening?" Aveline shouted hysterically.

"He can't be healed. We both tried," Anders said an urgent, furious manner. "His markings repelled the magic. They… burned into his flesh."

"That is a most powerful work of magic," Keeper Marethari said ominously.

"That's when they came to me for whatever I could bring. I sent for a medic, but at this rate—" Varric said, but he couldn't continue the sentence.

"This can't be happening," Aveline said, the tears coming back into her eyes.

"This won't be happening!" Varric shouted. "Hawke healed him when we were in the Deep Roads. I saw it! Wake her up now!"

"Why hasn't she woken up yet?" Keeper Marethari asked. "Were you two also pushed out?"

"Yes," Aveline said, looking ashamed. "But I saw Hawke. She's either finished with the demon or must be close."

"She better be," Varric said curtly.

"This shouldn't be happening to him, physically," Aveline said. "I have no wounds, yet I received more than I can count in there."

"Yes, that certainly shouldn't be happening," Anders said. "But the choice is between saving Fenris and saving everyone."

Eerily, positively starving, Torpor loomed around Feynriel.

"What's happening?" Feynriel cried, his hands clamping his temples. "This is still the Fade."

"Hush, son," Torpor said in soothing tones. "The Fade isn't all that bad… You're safe here."

"Hawke, is that you?" Feynriel said, as she revealed herself behind the demon.

"Open your eyes, Feynriel. You can get out of the Fade at any time," Hawke said sternly.

Torpor turned around in anger. "Don't tell him that! You gave your word to—"

"Never trust a human," Hawke said flatly, and shoved a psychic blade into the demon. This one did not explode, but rather deflated, leaving black dust and rags on the ground.

Satisfied though she was with the irony, she felt cold and restless inside.

"It seems it's twice that I owe you my life now," Feynriel said, approaching her carefully.

"Consider it a favour well deserved," Hawke said. "For your remarkable resistance."

Feynriel regarded the panorama around him for a moment. "The Fade feels different now. I can see the seams that hold it together." He looked up. "… Thank you."

"I don't know how much you should be thanking me, Feynriel," Hawke said bitterly. "If it were me, I would kill you now."

Stunned, the boy took a step back.

"But I have no experience with dreamers. I have to do as my father before me had done." She stared at him blankly. "I shall not kill you."

"How peculiar of you to concede to such a serious view that you oppose," Feynriel said, sighing in relief. "I suppose I should thank him as well."

"He's dead," Hawke said. "It's harder to argue with him now."

Anders spoke to him rapidly and somewhat desperately, but he couldn't make out what he was saying.

"Leave me," Fenris said.

He didn't seem to have heard him. On and on he went with desperate instructions. He heard Varric cursing and Aveline shouting. That in turn did not seem so unusual.

He felt Anders' hand on his forehead and it burned him, positively burned him. Fenris begged him not to touch him, but Anders couldn't hear him, and neither could Fenris hear himself.

Again he saw the gleaming waves, the wild trees, and the glass city. Then he would wake up again after a second. The pain would come back every time as if the blades had just entered him. Then he would faint again from it. In and out he went for several minutes. He would go out of consciousness wrapped up in the waves, then wake up mummified in bandages.

It seemed that his body was fighting a battle for life that Fenris did not participate in. He wanted to sleep.

Someone shouted. Hot pulsing blur. He felt a hand over his forehead again, but it was a different hand. His head swam. Then with astonishing clarity, he saw Hawke right above him.

She looked distressed and miserable, her lips quivering as she stared at him. He had almost no more breath. It was too cold to keep awake. So many things were going to be left unsaid, and fairly so, as he was the cruel demolisher of all his chances. He didn't want to look at her, but he felt it necessary that he should. As he peered up at her through his sweaty strands of hair, and saw the spellbinding beauty that was this very old battered soul, he thought… what a sweet mercy it was to be in the hands of his rightful killer, and how very grand of her to give him such small comfort, which was all the world to him.

I'm sorry, Hawke.

Fenris felt her hands on his chest and saw a light much brighter than his eyes could take. He couldn't explain it but he felt words that were not his own coming back to him. I know. I'm sorry, too.

Kill me, he said.

He couldn't feel his blood pouring through what felt like a thousand wounds. Maybe that meant he was out. Though what he did feel was a thousand infinitesimal veins, cold like icicles on the surface of his forehead, growing like a rampant vine to blossom in his every limb and organ.

I have already killed you, he heard. Forcing me to take heart-breaking decisions comes with a high price, and I have just decided the price is not dying.

Then the next thing he saw was… sound. A dull roar at first, but then a sort of pounding, growing louder and louder, as if something or someone was pounding on an enormous drum and coming up on him slowly through the dark. The pounding reverberated louder and louder until it seemed to fill not just his hearing but all his senses, throbbing in his lips and eyes and fingers, in his temples and in his veins.

Then Fenris felt himself yanked out, brutally, yet painlessly. And he realized the pounding sound was his own heart, as if all the bits of divine adrenaline had come from around the world to visit his veins, pulling him upwards.

She held Fenris' torso up as he inhaled, the air brutally filling his lungs.

"Andraste's ass, she did it," Varric said.

"Pull him all the way up," Hawke ordered. As hands drew him upwards from all directions, she stepped on his feet to keep him balanced.

Several moments passed of what he could only define as purely coughing death out. She took his hip and his chin. "There, there. You're alright now. Say something."

But what could he say, apart from finding the voice to say it.

"Alright, no pressure," Hawke said and looked away.

"We're running out of bandages," Anders said.

"There is no need for bandages," Hawke replied self-assuredly. "Take them off."

And indeed, when they took them off, the gauze was only soaked in old blood, the open vest revealing fresh scars.

Fenris looked up at her. His face bore the deeper wound.

"Clean him up," Hawke said. She let Fenris go in a rush. "I need to sit down."

While Varric, Aveline and the newly arrived medic tended to Fenris, Anders and Keeper Marethari tried their best to be there for Hawke. She held a cold compress to her forehead and didn't speak.

"I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for you to fight through a chain of demons as well as unfortunate betrayals," Keeper Marethari said in the best diplomatic manner she could fathom.

"Well, it is done now," Hawke said solemnly, bending downwards as if she were fighting nausea. "Feynriel is alive. It's good that Arianni is already back at the camp. He leaves for Tevinter."

Marethari's expression shifted slightly. "Perhaps that is indeed best. I could not help him more than I did."

"How do you feel?" Anders asked.

"I feel like a pig has shat in my head, Anders," Hawke snapped.

"You changed your mind and killed the demon in the end then," he said.

She scowled. "It was never my intention to acquiesce to his deal," she said. "Or rather, he was under the wrong impression of what the deal entailed— I never mentioned giving him Feynriel. He heard what he wanted to hear."

"You … made a demon fall into a trap?" Anders said in disbelief.

Hawke shrugged. "He complained that the Fade lacked surprises."

"What a wonderfully twisted human," Keeper Marethari said with a sweet, amused smile.

"Well, I don't know if that was the most idiotic thing ever or I should be the one feeling stupid," Anders said. "I'm sorry, I think. Justice… was all in control there."

"You think you're sorry?" Hawke said with a dispassionate expression, taking the compress off. "You're not sure?"

"Well, Justice is not sorry, but since he and I are one, it's…" He scratched his head and shrugged with only one shoulder. "Th-the line between is…"

"Now I know why they call it abomination," Hawke said with little emotion.

"Alright, I'll let you have that one," Anders said in defeat.

"I must confess, Fenris' markings are beyond my knowledge of lyrium," Keeper Marethari said. "And the vast extent to which they can go, not to mention this selective and dangerous aversion to healing… It is, to me, inexplicable."

Hawke closed her eyes and readjusted the compress. "What magister would create the perfect bodyguard, and still wish that he could be nursed back to health by an enemy in the event of his capture, to study him and to use him, and perhaps make a thousand more like him?"

Silence fell over them.

"Unless this was some sort of blood magic and you were the child or nephew of Danarius, I have no idea how you can heal him," Anders said.

"Perhaps trust," Keeper Marethari muttered to herself.

They both looked puzzled at her. She continued, "Magic is a psychic manipulation of certain elements of reality, and it springs from the Beyond, all bound by the most powerful element of all, which is emotion. And what is lyrium if not magic in its raw form, and thereby I can permit myself to postulate— perhaps his markings, on the whole, let in only the magic whose caster he trusts. He may not even be fully aware of this, rather, much like the wolves of the forest, it is sufficient that somewhere in his soul you bear the label 'safe'."

Hawke continued to look at her, dumbfounded.

"If that is the case, then what he had lived through in Tevinter had been truly monstrous, for the bar he set for 'safe' a few years ago was considerably low."

"If it hadn't been truly monstrous, do you think he would have still fallen to the demon?"

The corner of her lip danced. Hawke turned her head towards the window. "No."

Not long after, Varric came through the doorway with a pale expression.

"He should not be alone tonight."

For years it seemed that Fenris lay flat on the floor watching the fire burn itself out to charred timbers.

The room had cooled. The freezing air moved through the open windows. He was not wearing anything above the waist. It was a small comfort that the chemical factory in his bloodstream had pulverized his senses.

Now and then he prayed. He begged for forgiveness, though forgiveness for what, he couldn't have said. He thought of the Maker and wanted to laugh hysterically. Full of irony, he murmured the Canticle of Benedictions over and over again until it became a senseless chant.

Blessed are they who stand before

The corrupt and the wicked and do not falter.

Blessed are the peacekeepers, the champions of the just.

Now he lay flat on the stones, murmuring not prayers any longer but those inarticulate pleas people make to the faceless entity above that might be watching, all that may or may not exist by any and all names. Do not leave me alone here. I have already fallen. Do not let it happen.

Finally, he rose on his hands and knees. A quick rush punched him dry. He felt light-headed and mad, and almost giddy.

Fenris looked at the fire and saw that he might still bring it back to a roaring blaze and throw himself into it.

But he merely stared at it intently, thinking that should he take himself away without warning and without some explanation, it would be a cruelty Hawke didn't deserve.

"Don't overthink it," a voice came.

Looking over his shoulder, Fenris beheld that Hawke was standing in the doorway. She wore a black and red heraldry robe, belt over it and longer at the back, like the one a knight might wear underneath his armour. She had let her red hair down free over her shoulders and she was staring at him with cold, beautiful eyes.

She made to approach him, but he felt cold towards her, cold towards himself. He would not look at her, lest the guilt overwhelm him. She deserved to give him a clean, proper cursing. He would welcome everything. Yet he couldn't, simply couldn't bring himself to look at her. What a coward I am.

His naked arm rested along the top of the fireplace as he continued to stare into the fire. The flames illuminated his hard chest and his markings.

"I forgive you," she said softly.

His face appeared frozen, and the expression that broke out afterwards was like cracks in ice.

"I betrayed you," a husky, low voice came out. He looked in the complete opposition direction. "There is nothing to forgive."

"Oh, don't worry. It takes more than one instance of poor judgement for me to blow somebody's carotid artery," she said.

"Don't you understand what I've done? What this means?" Fenris snapped. The blood in his chest and his fist was pumping and roaring.

Hawke lifted an eyebrow and appeared to examine the emptiness around her. "Congratulations. You made a mistake." Her voice softened. "I know you are no cruel person. Would that you could cease being cruel to yourself."

"You know nothing," Fenris said, like throwing a knife at her. His eyes were complete glaciers.

Hawke came beside him, and put her own arm along the top of the fireplace. Their fingertips almost touched. She looked straight at him, other arm on her hip.

"I don't need to know everything. I don't need to know every intricate detail of your old life to judge what is right in front of me."

Fenris' face darkened. "You are unlike other people."

"Yes, I'm mature," Hawke said. "I take full advantage of my freedom of thought."

He didn't say anything. Years ago, an idiot in Lothering had told Hawke that women didn't find men's bodies beautiful, that it was only what men did that mattered. What an absurd fabrication. She loved this body, loved its hardness and its silky skin, and the indentations of laboured muscles, the straight angular masculine torso, the strong thighs. The clear detail of his veins all along his arm. Silky and hard, that's what men were.

"Then it appears I am on the wrong side of freedom," Fenris said bitterly.

"You know what is apparent to me at this very moment?" she said, their fingers touching slightly. "It is apparent to me that a puppet is free as long as it loves its strings."

Once more the frozen mouth cracked open and the hollow voice spoke. "Why didn't you do it?" His furious green eyes rose to meet hers.

"What? Blow your carotid?"

This anger was hiding something sad and beseeching in his expression. She opened her mouth but words didn't come out. She gave a little shrug.

"I prefer not to make a mess on my coat."

Fenris glared at her furiously, and his voice became scolding. "Oh, so I should believe that brutally stabbing me was some sort of warning."

Hawke's face was overcome by sadness. He didn't expect that. She took her arm off, the fingertips leaving his. She sat down in the armchair looking down at the floor. "They weren't… aren't supposed to do that to you in real life."

"Whatever unknown magic you used a magister would kill for."

"I didn't cut my wrist, so you may dismiss the accusation I feel is coming," she said in annoyance.

"I didn't think it was blood magic," Fenris said, now facing her, as if he had forgotten the sadness for a moment. "Likewise, if you were Somniari you would know by now."

She didn't say anything.

Fenris picked up one of the dining room chairs from along the wall and swung it around so that the back faced her. Then he straddled it, folding his arms on the top of it as he looked at her. It was very pornographic.

"So that leaves some other kind of magic," he said. He stared down, deep in thought. Then he looked at her. "It worries me to think you have no idea what you are wielding." At once the tenderness and the protectiveness in his eyes went to her heart.

"I do know what I wielded, but I had never had the chance to use it in the Fade, at least, not on another living person," Hawke said. Her eyes curled, tightened. "I never intended to hurt you."

At the same moment his mouth opened, that flicker of utter sadness, though his face remained so smooth that only the lower jaw dropped, and out came his hollow and toneless words, "You didn't intend to hurt me, although it was right of you to." Then his head rose solemnly. "However, I did intend to hurt you, Hawke, and it was beyond detestable that I did."

"Nobody can hurt me without my permission," she said.

But then he fell into silence for a long time. And so she fell back into the chair, patiently waiting yet desperately scanning his expression, knowing that this was the strongest man she had ever beheld, yet now his eyes were defeated and defeating him. That he had seen himself as he could have been and will never be. And still, what she saw now was just the best man she had ever known or touched or wanted ever. But what could I do for him?

She leaned forward, the better to face him. "Fenris."

His green eyes rose, full of burden. "Hawke."

"I can't bear to think you would suffer—" She stopped, as if she was saying or feeling something illegal. "Or even… I heard you, in the Fade. Telling me to kill you. You desired it, fully and earnestly. And it pains me—"

"Why?" he interrupted, flatly-toned, words like icicles. "Why does it pain you?"

Her eyebrows came together. She didn't expect it. Her mouth went on auto-pilot. "Because you mean a great deal to me."

Fenris looked at her fixedly for a moment, like he was taking it in for the first time, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were full of miserable lustre, and he was gently shaking his head. "Then you understand why it pains me, what I've done. Why I was ready to die."

"Even so," Hawke stressed, "to think that because you cannot fill this gap in your soul that you should therefore turn to death… No. You must abandon this way of thinking." Her cold demeanour weakened. There was something desperate in her expression, a battlefront of hard emotions.

"And what would you have me do?" Fenris said curtly. His hands turned into fists on top of the chair, pressing against his chest. His mouth seemed mean, annoyed, just a hint of panic.

"Tell me what's haunting you," Hawke said. Her voice was pleading and earnest. "Your head teems with thoughts and I catch them blinkering and crowding your brain as they seek a narrative, and so you must tell me—"

"Alright," he said in a stronger tone. He inhaled deep, the muscles of his chest contracting. "I hate myself. I hate that I loved what I saw in that mirror. And I truly detest what I've become."

"If anything, you learned an important lesson," she said. "And you gave in quickly, even as you were possessed. But I think we experienced different scenes in front of our eyes."

He closed his eyes and dismissed the vision quickly.

"It was the strongest demon I had ever beheld, and no illusion had been stronger, more truly visible." He paused and raised a gesticulating hand. "And the words spoken to me by the demon had nothing to do with my will… I had simply given it to him as he said them."

"I would try to convince you that the demon already had your mind before you had begun to decide, but I don't want you to get the impression that you had no responsibility in this."

"It would be childish to believe such a thing," Fenris said.

And now she seemed deep and saddened and more eager to know his thoughts. She leaned forward again from the armchair.

"Let me be plainspoken with you, because you deserve that much," she said, staring into his eyes. "I may have some weird magical talent, unrelated to the one discussed before. My mind in the Fade works at a rate ten thousand times faster than in waking life and I can see the architecture of almost every little thing and place there. There are no words to describe how invigorating a feeling it is to walk the Fade with this ability. But if I must, think of it like a spring morning after a nightlong of raining, when the air is cool and there's a fresh smell of green… now multiply that by the thousands. That's why I eat demons like Torpor for breakfast. And so, I should tell you what I saw."

His eyes narrowed in concentration. She had him listening now.

"After the demon made his offer, as I saw you turn your head in an odd way towards me, very like an empty wooden doll, I knew that this was not the man I knew speaking, but something inside of him which had gained possession of him, and at the moment of recognition, I perceived the true Fenris trapped within this body, unable to command his limbs or his vocal chords any longer, and peering out at me with terrified eyes. It was but a flash, but I saw it."

A terrible bitter expression came over his face. The illusion had begun to crumple, and the air was filled with lamentation, a terrible sorrow.

"You are not the first or the last to experience this. Aveline also succumbed to a demon, even though she had just seen you being tricked by one! Fought you! But the demon took the form of her dead husband and told her sweet lies about how she had to do her bidding to be together again. I had lost her with that. Utterly and completely. It didn't matter that she had known it was a lie."

Fenris forgot that detail entirely, Aveline waking up right after him.

"And remember Armand. Once he was captured by his master, he fought us at his behest. But he was still there somewhere, conscious and… unwilling. I saw the same thing in him as I saw in you in the Fade. And to think that an ordinary mortal could have that over him. Think of what an infinitely greater power a pride demon has in comparison. And you beat yourself up for that."

He stared at Hawke, fully frozen, like he was struck by a great crushing realization.

A great silence fell over them, and the rain sang its song on the rooftop.

"It wasn't that I wanted vengeance," Fenris whispered. Hollow he sounded. Dry. "But they were still after me and to deny this fact… You saw for yourself in Antiva how far spread they are, how awfully close, how quick—" His face was tightening. Stricken.

"I know," she said softly.

"I couldn't go back there— I can't go back." He looked away. "But I knew, as I had perhaps all along really, that what I was seeing were illusions. That I was still in the Fade. That you weren't malicious—" He paused when a flicker came in her eyes. "Ah, horrid imperfection, wasn't it? To make you look like my enemy. A horrid little giveaway that I'd made it all up. And out of real bits and pieces, too." His hands grasped the wooden bars of the back of the chair. "But in me flowed this great sense of weakness and danger, and I was sure that in the preternatural being who held me was the power that could give me back the sky and the wind…"

"That you already had—"

"Yes," Fenris said with cold eyes. He had that deep vibration to his voice again. "That I already had."

"But didn't want to lose…" Hawke sighed. "There you have it. That's how it's done. Whereupon I remind you of the vast trickery of the supernatural, and what the moral is— the Fade cannot be fully understood by reason, and therefore cannot by reason be ruled."

Fenris stared at the wooden bars he was holding on. "Ah. Why hadn't I been just a little more clever in fooling myself?" he said softly, miserably.

She drew a tragic smile. "It's been my lifelong question, that one."

The rain was beating at the window in front of him, leaving it clean and sparkling with drops of water.

"But you did it for me, didn't you?" Fenris said. "How you did grant me my wish to kill me, in the Fade, and so I had to repay you by not dying, in this world." It sounded so ridiculous now. "Such cunning." He felt a deja-vu for some reason.

"See, now you're beginning to learn," Hawke said cheerfully.

"Cheated out of death." Fenris put his hands over the top of the chair again. He tilted his head, enough to make his eyes alight from the fire while he regarded her with the most delicious smile. "You never cease to surprise me, Hawke."

"You have to admit, life in Kirkwall would be unbelievably boring without me."

He sighed and grinned. "Ah, for this I came here," he said sarcastically.

A curious thought. Would there even be a life in Kirkwall without her? Since he came here, he had seen his starting out a new life in two lights— one of annoying enchantment, of being overwhelmed by a world and way of life completely different than his own. The other light was self-destruction. Waiting. His desire to be thoroughly damned. Between these lights was the open door through which Hawke had come.

"You have come here for better things than this," she said, and gave him a most devilish and charming smile. "Come now. Put something on. Let's take that walk."

"You're kidding," he said. But it was too gorgeous, her smile, like somebody saying, 'We're now taking off for the moon'.