Fenris approached consciousness with deep resentment, trying to piece together his surroundings without actually opening his eyes. The claws of his gauntlets dug into the soft nest of bedding underneath him. A faint trace of sweet, clean scent drifted across his senses. A foul, fuzzy taste coated his mouth, and an unforgiving, drumming throb had begun to beat between his temples. He was alive. That was something, at least.
A door popped softly open and closed again. In the dull thud of silence that followed came a short, high-pitched giggle. Fenris reluctantly cracked his eyelids open-and froze.
Yellow-white sunlight pooled in irregular rectangles on a carpet that was neither white nor brown, but somehow the ugliest possible compromise between both. The sheets beneath his cheek were soft and fine, patterned with pale blue swirls that made him feel alarmingly dizzy. Bookshelves lined the wall opposite the bed-two tall in the corners, two short beneath the window. A squat desk dominated the wall on the north side, with a luxurious black chair shoved against it. Two chests of drawers were crammed side-by-side on the south wall, the nearest so close he could have laid his hand flat atop its surface, were it not already occupied by several stacks of books.
And the books were everywhere. Stuffed into the shelves, scattered across the floor, piled untidily onto the corner of the desk. He was surrounded—sharp corners and flat planes all leering at him with teeth of nigh-incomprehensible print—
Fenris took a deep breath and rolled over, releasing it only when he found nothing but white-gray wall on the western side, opposite the window. It was strangely comforting, that emptiness; it gave him space in which to think. To remember. Images swept over him in a jumbled, chaotic wash. He chased them down, put them in some semblance of order. The ambush. The bloodmage's smirk as he launched his attack. And then—and then it was impossible. One step to the next, and he was far away from Hawke, from Kirkwall, from everything. Yet he was close enough to watch his own life flash across a flat black stage that could glow, with barely a touch from small hands that darted through the air like pale and anxious birds—
Erin.
The mattress squeaked quietly as Fenris bolted off the pillow. He was in her place. In her bed. And he was alone. She had left him to himself; only her books—her many, many books—crowded solitude. So where was she, then?
There were two doors in the small chamber. One opened into a wardrobe stuffed with what seemed like enough clothing for six people, nevermind one. Only nobles possessed so many clothes, in his experience. But somehow, he couldn't make any of these strange garments fit on the haughty Kirkwall gentry. He couldn't picture Hawke, for example, in the loose, thin shirt and the truncated breeches laid out atop one of the stacks of books on the desk.
Fenris padded across the carpeted floor and pressed his ear against the other door, straining to detect—anything. There was nothing familiar in the cadence of muffled noises on the other side of the wooden barrier. A dog—Scooter—whimpered with excitement at the bone-like rattle of something being poured into a container. Liquid and pressure made a hollow hiss. Wood thumped and glass knocked quietly against itself. Beneath everything was a pointed, careful silence, as though someone was trying to make as little noise as possible.
Fenris curled his palm around the doorknob, wincing at the harsh scrape of his gauntlet against metal. The door swung gently toward him, and he hesitantly stepped into the short, narrow hallway beyond. To his right was the privy-room he remembered from the night before. And to his left—
A black-and-blue blur darted across his path and dove beneath the low table. All he could see of the mottled hound was its black nose, glistening wetly as it twitched. A gray-striped cat leapt delicately onto the back of the dark blue sofa to regard him with a contemptuous black-and-amber gaze; a second was a black streak as it fled into the open bedchamber. The third was little more than a pair of tufted ears and eyes narrowed into sleepy, acid-green slits, peering at him from atop a three-tiered tower covered in cream-and-brown carpet. But of his hostess, there was no—
"Hey."
She carefully stepped closer to him on stocking feet. One hand held out a mug, handle pointed toward him, and he warily accepted it. A warm, light brown liquid sloshed gently inside, smelling strongly of the same bitter drink she'd thrown in his face last night. "Are you trying to poison me again?" he asked.
She—Erin rolled her eyes pointedly at the empty bottle still resting on the low wooden table. "Three quarters of a bottle of tequila would poison anyone, including most marine mammals and one or two extinct varieties of mammoth," she drawled.
Fenris sniffed apprehensively at the whorls of steam drifting toward the ceiling. Her answer was no answer at all; he tried to sieve some sense out of the mud in her apparently natural sarcasm but found none. What was a marine mammal? For that matter, what was a mammoth?
Erin huffed a brief sigh, shoulders slumping in apology. "Coffee's not for everyone," she explained. "But it's not poison."
He took the first sip through pursed lips, determined to let as little of the bitter drink pass into his mouth as possible. But then the first drops rolled across his tongue. It was as bitter as it smelled, savoring of deep, brown earth and tempered with sweetness. The salty-sour fog of the previous night was abruptly blasted away, leaving his mind feeling clear and alert. Erin grinned unexpectedly as she watched him drink; her teeth were even and white, and he felt his own taut features soften in response.
Coffee. He would remember.
He followed Erin into the tiny galley; he traced the cool, black coils of metal atop the stove with his eyes and followed the swanlike neck of the faucet with a fingertip. Erin bounced between the parallel countertops, absorbed in the steps of some chore he could not fathom. She filled a glass pitcher with water from the pump-less faucet-then emptied it into a black-and-steel—box? She lifted herself onto her toes and took a large jar of dark brown beans from one of the cabinets above her head; these she scooped into a small, raised bowl and flipped its hinged lid closed. He fought not to leap out of his skin as a harsh, grinding sound growled through the morning's hush; it halted as suddenly as it had begun and Erin tapped the fine-ground, brown dust into a basket nestled snugly in the strange box's top. She passed her hand down its front; there was a quiet click, and it abruptly released a wet, coughing growl. Dark water trickled into the glass pitcher, and that same, bitter savory aroma burst into the air in clouds of steam.
Fenris sipped from the mug in his hand, watching as the pitcher slowly filled with coffee. Silently, he considered the woman standing an arm's length distant. She knew not to press too close. Because she knew. Something fearful and wild whipped through him, as the possibility took shape in his mind. If she knew, could she know—
"You know who I am," he finally broke the strained silence.
The air stirred gently around her as Erin reached into a cabinet above her head. She spooned a grainy white powder—sugar, he thought, but he couldn't be sure—into another mug and poured the fresh coffee over it. "You're Fenris, and I'm Erin," she replied with distracted flippancy. "I thought we covered this."
"No," he snapped. Temper and frustration surged hotly through him. Coffee splashed over the back of his hand as he roughly slammed his mug onto the counter; he took a menacing step toward her. "You know who I am. You know who I was before—this." He held up his clenched fists between them in illustration, making the markings dance mockingly over his skin.
Erin's expression seemed to sag, as comprehension dawned. Her eyelids dropped over her pale irises, and for the first time he noticed the violet bruises that marred the delicate skin around her eyes. Had she not slept?
She heaved a sigh, and ducked past his upraised arms to reach into yet another strange box—this one radiated pure, elemental cold, and he caught a glimpse of meat and vegetables as she pulled out a paper crate of white cream. "Yeah," she admitted resignedly. "I know who you are."
She knew. Something broke open inside him; it was a long moment before Fenris could give it its name. Hope. "Tell me." Strange, but the demand felt like a prayer.
Erin's mug made a hollow, scraping sound against the countertop as she spun it in her fingers. Almost imperceptibly, she drew her shoulders closer to her ears, and she was gnawing on her bottom lip again. Fenris had the overall impression of something tightening its coils upon itself. "I don't know much," she warned him feebly. "But. Your name was—or maybe is—Leto. And you have a sister." The mug shook as her hands trembled, and she set it down carefully. A bluntly-chopped curtain of auburn hair shielded her downcast eyes and sheet-white cheeks from his hungry, supplicating gaze. "You learn most of this from her—um, later."
"I—I have a sister?" Fenris dared interrupt her reluctant mercy.
"Yeah. Varania." She swallowed hard, and pushed one of those perpetually-nervous hands through her hair. "You meet her—will meet her, sorry—when, uh—oh Jesus." Erin buried her face in her palms and curled her shoulders over herself. "She—she betrays you," she explained, sounding as though she was speaking through broken glass. "She, uh. She leads Danarius to the Hanged Man because he'dpromisedtomakeheramagister." She rushed through this last confession; she'd squeezed her eyes shut, and she'd pulled her hands into the sleeves of her bulky gray sweater until only her fingertips were visible.
Fenris dug frantically through the murky depths of Before—before Danarius, before the markings, before everything. He tried to find something—anything—that would link this Varania to him: a face, or even a feeling. He tried to leap from joy to rage when he heard of her predestined betrayal. But there was nothing. Only empty darkness.
He didn't want to know, he told himself. A treacherous sister whose face he could not even recall was bad enough. But—he had to know. "The markings?" he whispered raggedly.
"Fenris please don't make—"
"Tell me!"
"You won them!" she capitulated in a burst of misery. She drew in a deep breath, held it for a count of three, and let it out agonizingly slowly. "Okay. Okay. You won them," she repeated, and finally met his eyes. She seemed calmer, if only a fraction. "There was this—contest, I guess. And whoever won got those." She nodded at the markings. "So. You won, and they—the Imperium, Danarius, I guess?—gave you the markings. That's all I know," she finished with a helpless shrug.
A prize. With his eyes, Fenris traced the crisscrossing swirls of lyrium burned into his skin. A prize. Leto—whoever he was—had traded his memories for this. Had traded his life for this. Willingly. "Why?" he managed hoarsely.
"In the game, you did it to free her," Erin replied, sounding small and lost. "And your mother." Her hand drifted through the air and alighted on his armored shoulder. She carefully spread her fingers around the black spikes; all he could feel of her was the negligible pressure exerted by her palm. "On the plus side," she added weakly, "you shove your hand through Danarius's chest and rip his living heart out. And Hadriana's. Though that happens a bit earlier in the game." Her hand slid from his shoulder like a bird brought low by a stone. "So there's—there's that."
Fenris bent his head and pressed his eyes shut. He was only distantly aware of Erin, of the space between them growing as she retreated. Words like sister and betrays and game splintered like hollow trees, while others-prize—dropped like rain, icy on his marked skin. He had no reason to believe the distressed confession he's forced from his hostess, other than he could not fathom a reason for her to lie. For years, he'd held fast to the certainty that the markings had been forced upon him. He felt something dry to crackling darkness and die within him: it was not so, it would seem.
Now what?
A warm, solid weight landed on his foot, and he glanced down in surprise. The mottled hound leaned against his leg, gazing up at him with mournful, dog-brown eyes. He could feel the pressure of its bulk through his armor, the coarseness of its fur on the top of his foot. But other than that—nothing? He laid his palm atop the bony skull, moved two fingertips to and fro behind one floppy black ear. The hound's eyes narrowed to slits, and he stopped. It nudged his hand with its muzzle, and he surrendered to its—her mute entreaty. "I have many more questions," he began slowly.
Erin blinked behind her oval spectacles, as though surprised to be addressed. "Ask anything you want," she blurted.
He nudged his mug with a fingertip. "Is there any more coffee?" he asked hopefully.
She tossed back her head and released a brief peal of laughter. "All you want, babe," she answered.
It was the oddest, most informative tour Fenris had ever received. A demonstration of how to make a pot of coffee became a rambling history of the beverage itself, which apparently began with desert tribesman and—dancing goats? Had he understood that correctly? Her explanation of power—electricity, which anyone could use and he found that frankly incredible—turned into an impassioned recounting of the rivalry between two mages, or as she called them, inventors. And when she showed him how to operate the flushing privy, he couldn't contain a startled laugh any longer.
Wires. Pipes. Pressure. Circuits. Television. Laptop. Internet. These words, he committed to memory. But not once did he hear her utter the word magic.
"There isn't any," Erin answered, when he broached the subject. "You hungry?" Without waiting for an answer, she pulled a loaf of bread from the pantry, brown-and-white slices neatly contained by a sack of some sleek material she called plastic. He watched in wary fascination as she pulled two jars from the cold cabinet—refrigerator—
with one hand, and a butter knife from a drawer with the other. She slathered a light brown paste onto one slice; the other received a generous dollop from the second jar, which Fenris belatedly recognized as some sort of fruit preserves. She pressed the doctored slices of bread together and sliced the final product into triangular halves.
Fenris sniffed cautiously at the half she passed to him on a blue-and-white plate. It smelled like bread, nuts and fruit. His stomach rumbled tellingly; he'd put nothing but coffee into it all day. He was unprepared for the rush of flavor, for the malleable depth that stuck to his teeth and tongue long after he'd swallowed.
The corners of Erin's mouth twitched. "Shit-sorry," she apologized. He'd started thinking of the phrase as one word. Biting down hard on what threatened to be a giggle at his expense, she pulled a jug from the refrigerator and poured him a glass of cold, white milk. "This should help," she offered blandly, but amusement still faintly creased the corners of her eyes, warmed to a startling green.
They ate together in silence, he standing beside the coffee-making-machine, she perched on the countertop opposite. Each took his or her cue from the other; when Erin rinsed the crumbs from her plate and placed it in yet another cabinet she called a dishwasher—how many cabinets could one person need?—Fenris followed suit. When he glanced at the open laptop, she led him out of the tiny kitchen and into the more open living room, which seemed to serve any and all purposes except sleeping and bathing. He discovered she had meant it when she had said he could ask her anything; even if the answer left him with more questions, such as her convoluted explanation of the relationship between the histories and religions of her people, she ungrudgingly offered one. And if she couldn't, she pulled her laptop toward her and with a few quick strokes across the black squares—which were called keys, even though they unlocked nothing—she requested answers from Google. Which, as far as Fenris could discern, was some sort of impersonal deity of information and nevermind why the supplicant wanted it.
He appreciated the effort his hostess expended not to burst into derisive laughter, when he finally said as much. Even if her urge to do so was plain. "I'm not laughing at you," Erin assured him in response to his scowl. "Well, not just at you. This is my world," she struggled to explain. A furrow deepened between the russet brows. "I've never had to explain all of it to anyone before."
"And—that amuses you," Fenris surmised.
"Oh yeah," she replied candidly. "Crap, I need to walk Scooter." She thrust her laptop to one side and disappeared into the bedchamber. Scooter's ears perked forward, responding to some stimulus Fenris could not yet identify. The hound's tail burst into sweeping motion when Erin reemerged, a pair of shoes dangling from one hand and dressed in an unadorned, long-sleeved shirt and trousers of some indigo fabric he could not name. The trousers clung to her, while the shirt merely hinted at the shape beneath its folds. Fenris had the overall impression he could see only the bottom half of an hourglass.
She tugged the shoes onto her feet with two precise, economic motions, the better to dodge her dog's excited lunges for her face. Scooter's tail whacked against the furniture in a way that sounded almost painful as Erin took a brightly-colored lead from a hook on the wall and attached it to a metal loop on the hound's collar with a smart click. Only when she turned and looked at him expectantly did he realize she meant for him to accompany her.
"You would permit me to leave?" he asked in surprise.
She blinked once, slowly. "You're not a prisoner, Fenris," she replied softly. "Besides, could I stop you?" she added pragmatically. Very deliberately, she kept her gaze restrained to his face, instead of allowing it to wander over his markings. Guilt squirmed faintly in the pit of his stomach, even as he admitted to himself she had a point.
The world beyond the door was even more riotously strange. Erin's apartment was on the edge of a small, square courtyard, paved in red brick. Young trees had been planted at strategic intervals, their trunks braced with poles; older, taller trees sheltered the structures with broad leaves and dappled shadows. Black posts topped with bulbed lanterns—lightbulbs, he remembered—were scattered across the brown grass lawns, so that no one stretch of steps was left in the dark. Other doors, other apartments honeycombed the surrounding buildings, stacked atop one another in three stories. Fenris struggled to find a comparison among the places he knew, and could find none. It was too clean for Lowtown, too humble for Hightown, and too—too cheerful for the elven Alienage he had always gone out of his way to avoid. Even the birdsong sounded utterly alien, underscored by a distant hiss he at first mistook for wind, before he realized the trees' topmost branches remained unmoving.
Erin led the way down a narrow footpath paved in rough, gray stone she called cement, and added that the original formula had been invented during the reign of an empire, long gone but apparently not forgotten. The cement yielded to an open stableyard of blacktop, which Erin explained was a precise mix of tar and fine gravel. Fenris was shocked to find neat rows of carriages, black wheels and jewel-toned bodies shimmering in the pale light cast by the late afternoon sun. He counted nearly two dozen alone among those he could see. Confusion burned like a brand in the back of his mind. All these carriages and not a horse in sight—? He followed Erin's example as she skirted the fathomless puddles standing in the blacktop; she led him onto another cement walkway, Scooter trotting happily beside her.
And then, without warning, all hell broke loose.
The first sign of danger was an aggressive, broken growl. Fenris whirled, only to find himself face to face with a gleaming, black-and-silver sneer as the monstrous carriage barreled toward him, independent of horses or any force he could see. The growl's timbre rose to a deep-throated whine; he felt the wind of its hot breath stir his hair as it blew past him. The growl faded as swiftly as it had advanced, until all he could hear was that incessant his in the background. Fenris supposed he should have felt grateful he was beneath its notice; instead, all he felt was angry. He should have known.
"Compensating for something?" Erin yelled derisively in its wake. She tossed him a grin over her shoulder, which quickly faded. "What?" she asked, the creases in her forehead deepening in concern.
Fenris glared at her. It was offensive enough that she had claimed there was no magic when plainly there was. But that she still pretended ignorance in blatant contradiction to the obvious? "You said there was no magic," he snarled. A second carriage crept towards them, its belly low to the ground as it made a ponderous turn onto a blacktop path. "You told me it was all wires, or pipes."
A stricken expression stole instantly over her features. Her eyes widened in realization, and her brows drooped with remorse. "It's not magic, Fenris," she insisted. Hurriedly she pulled out a rectangle of polished blackness he thought was called a screen, and tapped her fingertips against its surface. Her eyes darted from side to side as it revealed whatever answer she sought. "It's—well, it's complicated. It's like this—there's this big mess of gears and cables, called an engine. It needs fuel to work. Pumps and things move the fuel from the gas tank to the engine, which causes a reaction that converts the fuel to energy. And the engine runs, which makes the wheels move, the brakes, the steering wheel, everything." She smiled nervously, fingers pulling the cuffs of her shirt over her knuckles. "Do you want to go for a ride?" she offered hesitantly. "I can show you what I mean."
Fenris eyed the swift, horseless carriages distrustfully. Fuel, she had said. Pumps. Engine. Fuel and pumps could accomplish small things, he granted, but this? Monsters that raced to and fro at dizzying speeds, faster than any horse-drawn cart he had ever seen-how could such things even be possible, unaided by magic?
Erin stared at him, wide-eyed, bottom lip firmly trapped between her teeth in apprehension. There was no way to be certain, except the one she had offered. "Fine," he bit out tersely.
"Sorry?"
"Let's go."
He followed her back to the blacktop stableyard—the parking lot, she called it. Hers was one of the smaller carriages, or cars, sapphire blue paint obscured by a thin layer of dust. Up close, he could see each car had a wheel on one side, and at least two places for passengers to sit. At a word from her mistress, Scooter hopped daintily into the long rear seat, sitting obediently as he and Erin slid into the two chair-like seats in front. "Steering wheel," she explained, placing a hand on the circle before her. "Seatbelts, ignition, brake, accelerator, gearshift—oh, sorry about the mess," she added contritely when his feet rattled against a veritable bone pile of cups, cans, and yet more books. "Grab that end of the seatbelt-behind you, right shoulder, and pull it across to this buckle here." She tapped a small orange rectangle on his left side with one fingertip, and he followed her direction. He heard a click, and he was fastened into his seat. "When we stop, you push this—" She did, and the flat metal protrusion sprang free of its slot. "And you're out. You good?"
"I am required to wear this seatbelt?" he asked, tugging experimentally on the strap. It slid back and forth between his gauntlets, resisting his grip ever so slightly but not enough to make sitting uncomfortable.
"'Fraid so. Don't worry," she assured him. "You're perfectly safe."
She fished her ring of keys from her pocket, flipping through them until she selected a long key with a large black insignia on one end, and pushed it into the slot on the right-hand side of the steering wheel. She turned it in her fingers, and the engine coughed to life in response. From inside, the engine's growl was little more than a quiet purr. Erin pulled on the unobtrusive lever between the seats, and the carriage lurched into backwards motion. With another gentle tug, she coaxed it into crawling forward, lightly pressing down with her foot to add speed. Fenris watched her leg shift, and the car slowed to a stop. Another shift, and it was moving again, following the practiced motion of her hands on the steering wheel. This...this he thought he recognized, even though it was mad. It was not a carriage at all, but a ship. A ship without water.
"See that button with the little triangles?"
Fenris glanced at the array of black squares under his right hand, and nodded. "Push down on the one with the point facing you," Erin directed. She was smiling—a secretive, conspiratorial quirk in one corner of her mouth that made him wonder anew if he should afford her even the most marginal measure of trust. He did as she bid, and the oblong pane of glass disappeared slowly into the door.
A burst of cool wind whipped through the open window, and he blinked against its sting as once again, the carriage began to move. The wind pulled at his hair, roared in his ears as Erin's strange carriage gained momentum on the smooth black road. It was a curious sensation, moving this swiftly while sitting still. Fenris's lips curved of their own volition, as he leaned into the seat and closed his eyes. He'd been wrong. He was neither in a carriage, nor a ship.
He was flying.
Gravel crunched and popped beneath the car's weight, as Erin guided it to a stop. Fenris opened his eyes, and found himself staring at an emerald-green expanse of thick grass. Small groups of people milled unhurriedly about. Other dogs with their masters traveled the dirt paths crisscrossing beneath the trees. Children shrieked with laughter, engaged in some game that seemed to be based on no rules but run. Pale gray clouds threatened rain as they drifted across the sun, a threat made empty by the puddles he saw collected between tree roots. He poked his head through the open window, and was surprised to hear the faint cadence of running water under—over?—the incessant hiss of carriage wheels—tires, rather—on blacktop.
Scooter pawed excitedly at the inside of the car's door, muzzle pointing at the black interior handle. Fenris gave the handle on his own door a cautious yank, and it popped open without resistance. Erin grabbed for her hound's lead, and fished a flat, round disc from the floor. Fenris eyed it curiously, unable to form a guess as to its purpose. But Scooter recognized it. She made a toothy grab for it, and was rewarded with a light smack on the snout for her trouble. "You know better," Erin admonished her firmly, but her reproach was softened with a quick, one-two scratch as she led the way down one of the dirt paths. "Welcome to Riverside Park!"
Fenris had to admit, it was aptly named. The river was a palpable force, insistently tranquil as it bent and curved against its banks. Erin stripped out of her shoes and socks, using the unearthed roots as footholds as she carefully picked her way down to the water. Scooter swiped her tongue along her chops, brown eyes riveted to the disc in Erin's hand. The hand twitched, and suddenly the disc was spinning gracefully through the air to land in the center of the river. Scooter splashed wildly after it, leaving Fenris alone with his hostess.
"So this is pretty much it," she broke the silence. She waved a hand through the air in front of her, as if to encompass—well, everything. "Modern life." She wrested the disc from Scooter's jaws and threw it again, much to the hound's displeasure. "It's no Kirkwall, but maybe it won't be so bad while we figure out how to get you home."
Kirkwall isn't home.
Fenris wasn't so foolhardy as to give voice to this sentiment. Though a part of him badly wanted to. Whatever—wherever home was, he hoped he could do better than an abandoned, decrepit manse, whose stone and mortar whispered of despair every time he turned a corner. He hoped he could do better than near-constant entanglements with mages' schemes and scraping a hand-to-mouth living and a pair of disconcertingly blue eyes that focused on him too often and too—too much.
He returned his attention to the woman standing a short distance ahead of him. Water rippled around her ankles as she adjusted her stance, preparing to toss Scooter's toy again. The brightly-colored disc soared downriver, and the mottled hound dove after it with a heedless abandon he envied. Erin's mouth quirked in amusement as her dog paddled furiously away from them. She breathed in a deep sigh; she tipped her chin sunward and remarkably, something in her seemed to ease. The sunken violet bruises beneath her eyes lightened. The taut curve of her shoulders relaxed, and the amused quirk slowly widened into a true smile.
"No," Fenris conceded without thinking. "It won't be so bad."
He accepted Erin's unspoken invitation when she offered him the disc, and tried to imitate the precise snap of her wrist he'd observed. The disc tilted sideways in midair, and landed gracelessly between Scooter's ears.
"Nice shot," Erin snorted, as the confused hound wildly swiveled her long muzzle to and fro.
Fenris slanted her a cautious glance, uncertain of the proper response to her sardonic teasing. Scooter dropped her toy at his feet and sat expectantly. He tried again; this time, it sailed a respectable distance before veering off to the side. Again and again he threw it, technique improving each time. Again and again, the hound splashed into the current, broad pink tongue waving from her jaws like a flag. It was a novel way to pass the time, he reflected, and not one he'd ever thought to experience.
Play.
Erin only called a halt when Scooter was practically dragging her tongue through the sand and dirt on the riverbank. She draped a long length of soft, absorbent cloth over the rear seat of her car, and the mongrel hopped inside with the ease of routine. Fenris caught himself lamenting the brevity of the return journey; he shut his eyes determinedly and let the erratic breeze play havoc with the strands of his white hair.
Flying carriages and no magic. The expression that crept across his features felt too small and strange to be called a smile, but it was present. No, he thought, this would not be so bad at—
Change frosted the atmosphere with danger, so abruptly familiar he instinctively grabbed for the hilt of his greatsword, forgotten on a stretch of sand an entire existence away. Erin stared expressionlessly into empty air, chest rising and falling with a slow, measured rhythm. He followed the direction of her gaze, but could see only a handful of the same cars in the lot as had been there before. He half-turned his head, straining to keep as much of the parking lot in view as was possible. Any one of these cars could provide cover for an unseen assailant; Fenris schooled his muscles into a wary, sitting crouch and peered through the slanted glass of the car's front-facing window. "What's wrong?" he asked, voice low and urgent.
"My boyfriend's home," she replied, almost inaudibly.
Her answer took him aback; it was so at odds with her demeanor, with the change in her, that he wasn't certain if she was serious. The muscles of her throat worked as if she struggled to swallow. She clenched her fists around the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. The relaxed smile he'd seen at the park had tightened into a grim, nervous line, and her pale eyes had turned icy green above the half-moon bruises. What was a boyfriend, he wondered with mounting alarm, that it inspired such a fearful reaction?
A boyfriend, it soon became apparent, was a young man of gawky build and a narrow face thinly stubbled with dark whiskers. A boyfriend's hazel eyes flashed with instant dislike, even as the man's thin lips curved in an insincere smile of greeting. A boyfriend stretched his hand through the cold, empty space in false friendship, and said coldly, "I don't believe we've met."
Erin introduced him as Charlie. She stepped between them, waving a hand through the intervening distance like decorum could build a bridge. "Charlie, this is Fenris," she finished the ritual, defiantly polite.
Charlie's eyes narrowed sharply, first on Erin, and then on Fenris. Another flash, one of recognition, gleamed in the chilly depth of his gaze as he rolled the name around in his mouth. "Fenris. As in—Fenris."
Erin nodded, expression twisting into a rictus of good cheer. "He blew in with the storm last night," she explained casually. Fenris may as well have been a stray cat, or an inconvenient leaf. "Or very early this morning. We were just about to start brainstorming ideas on how he got here and how to get him back to Kirkwall."
Gallantry was not a habit Fenris had had much practice with, but pity—pity and not a little guilt—stirred him. She might have done as much for a common vagabond, or an injured child, but she had been kind to him. He owed her. "Erin has been kind enough to offer her hospitality," he offered.
That wintry, hazel glare flicked to him for the barest instant, and returned to Erin with a vengeance that could only be called jealousy. "I'll bet she has," Charlie sneered.
The counterfeit smile crashed from Erin's face, leaving it blank and pale with anger. "Just what is that supposed to mean?" she demanded waspishly.
Oh. Realization, palpable and merciless as a mace to the head, and much too late to be of any help, struck Fenris. A boyfriend was a lover. And this—this was a lovers' quarrel. Because of him.
Futis.
"You know exactly what I mean, Erin!" Charlie's voice rose, and he drew Erin away with a fierce grip on her elbow. "You expect me to believe this is the Fenris? Who is he to you, Erin, really? I deserve to know that much."
She tugged her arm free, fists clenching and unclenching at her sides. "I told you, his name is Fenris," she insisted. "He blew in with the storm last night." Her chin tilted stubbornly towards the ceiling; she held her shoulders in a rigid, unyielding line. A line that abruptly sagged in self-consciousness, as she half-turned toward Fenris with a pained expression. "Look, can we maybe take this outside?" she suggested, sounding anguished. I'm sorry, she added silently to Fenris, when Charlie acquiesced.
Scooter poked her nose through a gap in the curtains and released a piteous whimper. Fenris bitterly regretted the errant impulse that had in one fell swoop deprived him of his guide and made him the focus of a vicious lovers' quarrel. This Charlie, this boyfriend now not only believed Erin a liar, but complicit in—in some vulgar betrayal. This Charlie knew who he was. A reckless impulse indeed, he thought darkly. One he would take care not to repeat.
He attempted to occupy his hands with the steps to preparing coffee; he tried to mimic the swift, practiced trails of Erin's hands through the air. His gauntlets made handling the pitcher an unnaturally precarious task; the claws scratched across the glass surface with a sound that made Scooter whip her head towards him with mingled confusion and distress. He set it down hurriedly, grateful no one besides the dog had seen his blunder.
He prowled restlessly through the living room, desperately seeking something to snare his attention besides the escalating argument on the cement stoop. Whereas the bedroom had seemed full to overflowing with books, the living room was a riot of papers bundled together and held in place with a small sliver of metal, bent into prongs. He'd seen this manner of neat, tight paragraphs before—these must be treatises of some kind. Fenris squinted at the titles in bafflement. mtDNA Reveals Secrets in Ourselves; C-R-A-N-I-O-F-A-C-I-A-L Measurements in Juveniles; F-E-M-U-R Length and Height— He recognized the letters, even most of the words, but their configurations formed only nonsense. He thumbed through the stack on the low table, and was only further frustrated by a non-pattern of arcane squiggles: a backwards Z with too many angles; an O with a line straight through its center-in what realm could any of this make the slightest sense? What was she, that she needed all this, these purposeless symbols and jumbled letters—?
The front door swung open. Fenris guiltily jerked to his feet, embarrassed to have been caught snooping. Erin pressed her back heavily against the door's momentum, and it clicked shut. She looked drained—even ragged. The whites of her eyes were tinged an angry pink; her hair had the wild look of having one or both hands repeatedly shoved through it. She stared blankly at the mess Fenris had made of her treatises, as though it didn't matter. She gave him a wan, lost glance and—shrugged? "Well," she remarked flatly. "That's done."
"What is?"
"That. Us." Erin waved her fingers towards the porch. Through the gap in the white curtains, he could see it was deserted. Charlie was gone.
Venhedis.
"Hey, um. Will you be okay, by yourself?" she continued haltingly. "For a little while? I've got some, um. I need to—"
Fenris felt his lips work soundlessly. There were things one said, he knew, in situations such as this. I'm sorry was on the tip of his tongue. My doing lurked blackly in some forgotten pit of his conscience. And somehow, Please make more coffee seemed singularly inappropriate. "Of course," was all he decided he could say safely. "Take—ah—take your time."
She nodded slowly without looking at him. She rifled through the clean, white treatises and, using some scale of judgment he could not identify, pulled a select few from the stacks. These, she slid into a shapeless brown satchel. In a monotone, she promised to leave the laptop, so he could read up on—
"Life, I guess," Erin surmised. "I'll be back, um. Later. Oh." She set down her satchel, and gestured him out of her path with a distracted flick of her fingers. "In case I'm not back, lemme show you—" She shoved her short table out of the way and began pulling the cushions from the dark blue sofa. She tugged on a handle concealed beneath the middle cushion, and—a bed unfurled from inside the furniture. Clever. Mechanical. No magic.
The door swung shut. Fenris was alone.
Venhedae futis faasta vas.
How long was a little while? Fenris didn't know. He paced the length of the living room; he counted the number of strides it took to follow the perimeter of the room's irregular rectangle. Twelve. When he added the bedchamber to his pacing the number increased to twenty-two. He glared back at the leering bookshelves; up close—and sober—he noticed other objects scattered upon the wooden surfaces. Small, eerily exact portraits in wooden frames; empty jars painted with vivid swirls of color; a ceramic bowl filled with flat, oval coins that upon closer inspection, were each stamped with a different design. Vishante, there had to be close to fifty of them—
Varric would have called them knick-knacks; Fenris called it clutter.
He had to crane his neck to clearly read the sideways titles of the books packed tightly together. Some of these were as incomprehensible as the treatises in the other room: what, for instance, was A-R-C-H-A-E-O-L-O-G-Y? He used the claw on his index finger to coax it out from between two of its fellows: the illustration on the front cover did little to allay his bewilderment. A man stood beside a deep pit, the bones of some great beast half-unearthed at his feet. S-T-A-T-I-S-T-I-C-S: An introduction proved to be a tome covered in the same indecipherable symbols he'd seen in the treatises.
Fenris slid the volumes back into their places, attention caught on a smattering of titles etched on cheap, paper spines in elaborate script. He flushed to his tapered ears at the illustration on one of the covers: a voluptuous woman was held in thrall by an improbably muscular man, an expression of tender ecstasy stamped on her painted features. Hurriedly he shoved it back among the others like it, making a mental note to avoid that shelf in the future.
He tapped the tips of his claws against the outside of the bookshelf, frowning in concentration. So far, his reluctant hostess appeared to be a noble, a pack rat, and a scholar-though he could not begin to guess at her purpose. A furtive inspection of the desk's drawers served only to strengthen this tentative impression: odd utensils, neither quill nor stylus but clearly intended for writing rolled across the drawers' bottoms as he pulled them out. Paper of all sizes rested in neat stacks, tightly bound between stiff covers with spirals of wire. He picked one up at random, only to hastily thrust it aside when Charlie is driving me FUCKING CRAZY leapt at him from the page, scrawled in haste with black ink. Bad enough he had irreparably disrupted her life; he had no wish to invade it.
Scooter followed his erratic pacing with her muzzle, watching him with forlorn bewilderment as a little while stretched past dusk. Fenris tried again to prepare coffee, and once again was foiled by the elusive rapport needed between the pitcher and his cumbersome gauntlets. An ache had settled into the space just behind his forehead, and his stomach caustically reminded him that the long-ago half-meal of bread, nut paste and fruit preserves simply would not do.
He wanted to shout with triumph when he found a bowl of apples in the ice-cab-the refrigerator, along with some cold meat and a wedge of sharp cheese. These, he could eat without the pathetic struggle that plagued him whenever he tried to make coffee. Scooter skulked into the kitchen, pointedly eyeing his small feast with an imploring expression. He offered a slice of apple, and she accepted it delicately.
"Well, at least you're still speaking to me," he muttered, and immediately chastised himself for his foolishness.
A little while slowly rolled into night. She had left him the laptop, as promised. He stared at the illuminated, mirror-like surface, plagued by uncertainty. Erin had done her best to explain the internet: satellites and cables and companies bounced the desired information through some invisible network like a courier relay. All he need do was Google.
It's not magic, Fenris.
He drew his index claw across the touchpad's gleaming surface, unconsciously holding his breath. Nothing. The tiny white arrow remained motionless, no matter how forcefully he tapped his finger against the small, reflective rectangle. What good was Google, he thought angrily, if he couldn't get to it?
He glared at the backs of his hands, encased in the black armor that fit him like skin. It had served him well for as long as he could remember-quite literally. The benefit of its protection had always outweighed the small annoyances he'd borne. The only time he was completely free of his armor-the only time he left himself vulnerable-was to bathe. He'd learned to hold his tankard a certain way so the sour ale wouldn't spill. He'd trained himself to carefully fan his cards so they wouldn't tumble from his tenuous grasp. These things, he accepted as Life.
Life, it seemed, no longer really applied.
The claws were snugly held in place by intricately-worked catches; he dislodged them with a practiced flick against each one, until all ten were arranged on the coffee table from pinky to thumb for the left hand, thumb to pinky for the right. He ran his bare fingertips along the wood's grain: smooth, worn. Used, and used often. The laptop was warm; that surprised him. He'd expected it to be cold, impersonal. He tapped a finger to the touchpad, and this time, the white arrow jerked across the polished screen.
His bark of surprised laughter echoed behind him as he thrust the laptop to one side and hastened back to the kitchen. "Tertio felitae, coffee pitcher," he growled. Third time lucky.
A handful of minutes later, as he savored the first mug of coffee he'd made for himself, he reflected that triumph was a sweet taste indeed. And it had nothing to do with the obscene amount of sugar he'd scooped into his cup.
Fenris tensed instinctively as the front door swung toward the kitchen. Erin stepped over her threshold and pushed it softly closed behind her. A little while had come to an end. Finally.
She blinked at him, nonplussed, as though surprised to find him lingering. Her pale features had regained none of their vitality; if anything, she seemed even more bent over with weariness. Guilt soured his small sense of triumph, and he fumbled silently for the proper greeting for this...predicament. Surely one must exist—
Erin nodded at the mug in his hand. "Any left?" she asked.
He had made enough for an army, he thought. "I believe so," he answered. Scintillating. "It's fresh," he added, feeling the sentiment wholly inadequate but certain something needed to be said.
Her eyelashes fluttered behind her spectacles, and the corners of her mouth twitched up and down so fleetingly he wondered if he perhaps imagined it. "Thanks." He stepped courteously aside so she had room to prepare her own mug. "'Night," she bid him farewell, and shut her bedroom door behind her.
A little while, he realized glumly, had just reset.
A little while slowly froze into a brittle silence, punctuated by the empty trickle of coffee against the glass pot and the fitful rattle of metal on Scooter's collar. Fenris caught himself holding his breath against the building torrent of questions, checked by Erin's perfunctory answers and deadened expression. She came and went daily, occupying her hours with an errand she called class. Fenris burned to ask what this was, why it took so much time, did it have anything to do with the books and symbols he'd found, but didn't. She retreated into her bedchamber each evening, and emerged in the morning looking more depleted than she had going in. Somehow, she was fading—more gone in presence than in absence. It made him nervous.
Google was much more forthcoming. More often than not, he found himself lost in the intangible library of Wikipedia, drowning in information. In facts. Drowning in history and philosophy and how to cook and nowhere did he find a single mention of real, raw magic, except as fiction or fantasy or trick.
No magic. It couldn't be. But it was.
He anchored himself in this small new world with short instructions he wrote on scraps of paper. Push. Turn. Pull. Even without their clawed tips, his gauntlets made these basic, everyday tasks nearly impossible; he stripped them off, and stood before the kitchen sink for the better part of a half hour, letting the warm water from the faucet trickle over his forearms, bared to the elbow.
Scooter watched him, floppy ears half-perked, as he crossed the apartment in three long-legged strides. He stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, half-awed, half-afraid of the man he saw. He watched himself unhook-unbuckle-un-arm himself, disbelieving even as he beheld the evidence. The air in the apartment was warm, though autumn was in full swing outside. He stared at the pale blue scars of his markings, stark against his tanned flesh. He turned the knobs—right-y tight-y, left-y loose-y—and clean, clear water cascaded from the metal faucet. It beat against his hands, hot and immediate and easy. He tugged on the metal spigot, and the water diverted from the faucet to the head, dispersing into a steady spray that drummed rhythmically against the bottom of the tub.
The first touch of that hot rain against his skin was pure bliss. He wet his hair, goosebumps prickling over his skin in surprise. He sniffed the lightweight jars of viscous, colored liquids until he found one he liked, and squeezed some onto an abrasive sponge he found dangling from one of the knobs. Together, they felt as they sloughed away years. He stayed under that relentless, subtly violent stream long after the fragrant white lather had been rinsed away, head leaned back against empty air and eyes shut of their own accord.
Erin had warned him the supply of heated water was finite, when she was still speaking to him; when it was exhausted, he spun the clear knobs to the right until the water stopped and stepped out from behind the striped green curtain. Bulky, absorbent towels lay neatly folded on a rack above the priv—the toilet. He wrapped one around himself and padded on damp, bare feet past the pile of his discarded armor and into the bedroom.
He pawed gingerly through the clothes in the wardrobe. After the disastrous meeting with Charlie, he hazarded a guess that at least some of them were his. He chose a long-sleeved shirt of some lightweight fabric and tugged it over his head, feeling the unfamiliar material settle and stretch across the breadth of his shoulders. He found a pair of the indigo trousers he judged would fit, if not perfectly. They were dense, but soft; he pulled them on by the waistband and, after a moment's struggle with the button and a toothy fastening he remembered was called a zipper, they settled over his hips. He bounced on the balls of his feet; he swung his arms in circles as he prowled into the kitchen for another mug of coffee. They were easy to move in, these garments—that pleased him.
His armor, he piled neatly into a corner of the wardrobe. If Erin noticed, when she returned and disappeared for the night, she gave no sign.
A firm hand rapped on the front door. It was his fourth morning in this place, as far as Fenris could tell. Or perhaps it had been five. He glanced apprehensively at Erin's bedroom door, drawn firmly closed against disturbances. Hesitantly he rose from the couch to his feet, Scooter on his heels. Feeling the worst sort of fraud—what manner of uncouth ingrate admitted guests into someone else's home?—he swung the door open.
A woman shouldered her way past him, dragging a wheeled case behind her across Erin's wooden floor. He caught the scent of something heavy and floral, and had to wrinkle his nose against a sneeze. She whirled on him; his first impression was of gray-blue eyes, hot with indignation. "You've got a lot of fucking nerve—oh." The fury sputtered, to be replaced by curiosity so intense it was unnerving. She shook a lock of rich, brown hair out of her face, smooth and doll-like in its flawlessness. "You're not Charlie," she observed, sounding mildly put out.
"Ah—no, I'm not," Fenris agreed carefully.
The curious, blue gaze swept him up and down speculatively, before the woman dismissed him with a quick shake of her head. "First things first. Where's my sister?"
"Ah—" Fenris glanced at the closed door, apprehension quickly escalating into panic. Sister?
"Thanks!" She flashed him a grin, parking her odd, wheeled case against the wall as though it belonged there, and disappeared into the bedroom.
What just happened? Fenris shook his head violently to clear it. Muffled female voices battered against his beleaguered senses. The sister reemerged briefly, and ducked away again with a glass of water and two tiny white capsules in her palm. Scooter stretched her jaw in a yawn and leaned against his leg in a bid for attention. He absently rubbed his palm over the top of her head, frowning as he worked through the last minute.
"—disgusting. Helena, this is Fenris. Fenris, this is my sister Helena."
Fenris shot to his feet at the sound of his name, earning a wounded huff from the dog sitting on his foot. Erin stood shoulder to shoulder with her sister. Her auburn hair dangled in limp strands across her forehead, and the evidence of her sleepless nights was etched so deeply into the indigo half-moons beneath her eyes he feared they were permanent. She looked like the worst and roughest part of the morning after a night at the Hanged Man. But she was looking at him. For the first time in days, those pale green eyes were really looking at him.
"Yeah," Erin said decisively; he wasn't certain if she was addressing him, her sister, or herself. She could just as easily have been talking to the wall. "I definitely need a shower." She spun on the ball of her foot, and with a swift whisper of movement, closed the bathroom door behind her. The water surged on with a shudder of pipes, and she poked her head back out—fully clothed, he was relieved to see. She glared fiercely at her sister. "Behave!" she warned, and with a squeak of painted wood, shut the door. Helena only pouted, and busied herself with a flimsy bundle of papers embossed with glossy portraits.
Fenris watched the long arm of the clock slowly inch its way around its hourly circle. It had reached its halfway point when the water ceased. As if responding to some signal, Helena set down the papers-book and pulled her wheeled case into the bathroom. A duet of feminine chatter seeped through the apartment, banishing the last of the icy quiet. Fenris removed himself to the kitchen; they would not thank him for eavesdropping. He knew his way around well enough by now to locate a broad, flat pan and a rasher of bacon; these he left on the stove. He prepared coffee, muttering the steps to himself as he filled the pot with water from the sink and scooped the dark beans into the electric grinder.
Push. Turn. Pour. Grind. Somehow, he managed not to flinch, even if the sawing whine of the grinder did set his teeth on edge.
The pan of bacon on the stove was silent and cold, and he frowned at it. He had placed it directly onto one of the metal coils, as he was supposed to. He dusted the ground coffee from his fingertips and faced the stove. "Why won't you sizzle?" he muttered.
Stocking feet padded softly across the hard floor. A fresh, sweet scent drifted over the coffee's bitter depth. Fenris acknowledged Erin's presence with a quick sideways glance—and had to look again. Kohl framed Erin's eyes in shades of gray. Her pale cheeks had been dusted with a pink powder that shimmered in the kitchen's gentle light. Her deep violet sweater scooped across her collar bones and hugged the silhouette of her body; he was looking at the whole hourglass, now. And the sand had begun to pour.
Venhedis.
A pale, delicate hand reached across the cold stove. Long fingers turned a dial with a click, until the crude arrow pointed to On. "That usually helps," Erin quipped, lips twitching. She slipped past him, and nimbly seated herself on the countertop beside the sink. She crooked her fingers through the handle of the bright blue mug he offered to her, sipping her coffee with an appreciative sigh. Bacon sizzled warmly, as the metal spiral glowed orange beneath the pan. All was well.
Well, well enough.
"Let's go out!"
Helena's suggestion reverberated through the comfortable silence like a clarion. Almost as one, Fenris and Erin craned their necks to stare at her. By her consternated blinking, Fenris guessed Erin hadn't made any more sense from the younger woman's words than he had. Out? Out where? Outside? "Let's. Go. Out," Helena repeated slowly, as if conversing with simpletons.
Blink, blink. Fenris could almost hear the swish of Erin's eyelashes beneath her spectacles, as he coaxed the bacon onto a plate with a fork. "Out—? Oh." He watched curiously as comprehension dawned, and she seemed to crumple into herself. "No, Hel, I don't think that's—"
Helena cut her off with a quelling, storm-blue glare. She planted her hands on her hips and squared her shoulders against Erin's half-formed resistance. "I did not just spend an hour and a half turning you into a goddess for you to sit at home and mope. There has to be someplace we can go to show you off."
So this is a sister, Fenris thought with no little amusement. Or, what a sister should be. Erin darted a glance at him, expression entreating. He neatly avoided her gaze by returning his attention to his coffee. Let her be the focus of that instantaneous ire.
Erin's mouth worked soundlessly, until a harsh scream interrupted her. Helena pulled a small black screen from her pocket; her face twisted with displeasure, and she turned away with a muttered apology. She slipped out the front door, and before long, she was carrying on an animated, one-sided conversation with her hand, as far as Fenris could tell.
It didn't seem to bother Erin that her sister was likely mad. She merely watched with a mixture of affection and confusion, as Helena's movements grew more agitated. The air in the kitchen grew still, as they passed the plate of bacon back and forth. "Your sister is a force to be reckoned with," Fenris remarked diplomatically.
Erin grinned ruefully around a mouthful of bacon. "She is, at that," she agreed. She blew a sigh through her nose, following her sister's hands with a twitch of her pale irises. Silence awkwardly contorted in the spaces between the crunch of bacon and the quiet slurp of coffee, until she inhaled decisively and blurted, "Listen, Fenris—I'm sorry about the last few days." She set her mug to one side and knotted her fingers together in her lap. Her spine visibly straightened, and she determinedly affixed her gaze to his. "I, uh, I haven't exactly been an ideal ambassador for the modern world. So—"
Unbelievable. Incredible. It was one thing, Fenris reflected, to land practically in a woman's lap and subsequently sabotage a long-standing love affair. It was quite another to receive an apology for it, rather than offer one. "It is I who should apologize," he interrupted firmly. "Your relationship with your lover is over because of me."
The gray-and-black kohl on her lids made the glacial snap of temper in her eyes all the more pronounced. "My relationship with Charlie ended because we disagreed on a few key points," she bit out. "Like where the line is between what is possible and what is real."
Anger was good, he told himself. He much preferred angry to—to nothing. She glared sightlessly into her half-full mug for a long, tense moment; her shoulders relaxed, and she exhaled the breath she'd been holding. "And he never really got along with Scooter," she added, with a credible attempt at humor. Delicately she snatched the last piece of bacon from the plate and offered half to him. Her half, she popped into her mouth with a happy crunch. "You're here," she needlessly pointed out once she'd swallowed. "You're real. I think 'possible' has kinda taken a back seat."
Fenris was nearly as reassured by the realization that she did not blame him as he was by the knowledge of what a back seat was. Her expression warmed with approval, when he divulged his newfound trivia, even as she teased him with the promise to make him a modern city slicker. He wasn't certain what to make of that.
Erin heaved a sigh, brow furrowed as she bent her stare into her mug. Her expression eased from fatigue and resignation to thought and decision. A sweep of her lashes went a long way to disguise an analytical glance in his direction; it may have even gone unnoticed, had he not been studying her face for any telltale hint of her thoughts.
"Okay! So where are we going?"
The easy silence broke apart, as Helena breezed back through the front door. "Crazy," Erin muttered. Her lashes flickered towards him again, and her lips twisted. He watched her over the rim of his coffee mug, attention narrowing to minutiae of falsehood. She was not well-practiced in deceit, that much was obvious. What he could not fathom was her reason. She bore nearly all the classic hallmarks: an inability to meet another's eyes, an unconscious restlessness as she shifted from foot to foot. The line of her shoulders wavered as she spoke, alternating between a defensive hunch and a square openness. She waxed pathetic about dark places, bright lights and crowds of strangers; her words were punctuated by the occasional, furtive glance she slanted his way from beneath her oval spectacles.
Realization brought little satisfaction. He had endured for four days without her aid, stumbling through the invisible wilderness. He had suffered her knowing of him, in the most brutally intimate way one person could know another. And now she thought to coddle him?
You're late, he thought with a humor as dark and bitter as the dregs left in the coffee pot.
"Oh honey," Helena crooned, "of course we'll go wherever you want." She curled an arm around her sister's shoulders—a wasted gesture, since Erin had to immediately extricate herself to lock the door.
"You have no issue with lights and crowds," Fenris stated bluntly. Together they followed Helena to the parking lot, where her vehicle awaited to bear them—he knew not where. "You are more concerned with how I will react."
Erin took her bottom lip between her teeth and shrugged one shoulder in acknowledgment. "All right, that's part of it." The uneven ends of her hair tickled her jawline as she raked her hand through it. "But truly, I just want to have a beer at a quiet corner table, where I can people-watch and have it not be so creepy."
A barrage of images crashed against his senses. Unbidden, memories of coarse wooden floors and hollow merriment spun from desperation assailed him. Stiff odors and bent cards spread in a fan. Varric laughing. The hard edge to Isabela's easy smirk. Aveline, arriving with Merrill in tow because she knew someone would walk her home. Anders hunched over a scrap of paper, cramped with erratic thoughts but saying nothing. Catching Hawke's eye, as she watched him watch them. He'd watched three years; how many more might he have spent, had he not arrived here instead?
"I can sympathize," Fenris mused. He shook himself back to the now. He pressed the pads of his toes into the rough blacktop, inhaling the sweet-toxic fumes of fuel, of rubber, of fast food and air unsullied by the press of too many in a city too small for the desperate edges of people. "I suppose I should be grateful you know me so well," he continued, exhaling loudly. He felt his mouth twist sourly. "Next to Danarius, you may be the one person who knows me best."
Erin's eyes narrowed, lips pursed with displeasure. "The only thing I know for certain about you, Fenris," she sniffed, "is that you make a killer pot of coffee. The rest is just guesswork that so far, has just happened to be right." She spun away from him, neatly robbing him of the chance to retort. Helplessly, he followed her into Helena's vehicle, folding himself into the cramped back seat like a stork.
"Shit, sorry!" Helena exclaimed—it was apparently a family motto. She reached between her knees; there was the telltale mechanical sound of release, and the seat smoothly slid forward. "Better? Okay."
There was a marked difference, Fenris discovered, between the way Erin smoothly handled her car, and the way Helena sped away so violently her tires screamed against the rough blacktop and left wide black streaks trailing behind her. He clenched the inside of the door, fixing his gaze to a point somewhere in the middle of the back of Helena's seat. Erin, it seemed, had been gentle with him. He barely attended to the brief conversation between the sisters in the front seat, preferring to concentrate instead on keeping his meager breakfast of bacon and coffee where it belonged. By the time the car lurched to a halt, he was not only grateful for Erin's guesswork, but eagerly anticipating the moment he could again take solace in it.
Even the taverns in this world were strange. For one thing, it was nearly empty of patrons. Only the barkeep kept company inside; the scant others were scattered around the veranda, seated at small wooden tables raised high on stilt-like legs. But it was quiet. And clean.
"This seems—cozy," Helena remarked dubiously, as she trailed in her sister's wake.
Fenris eyed the uneven slope of Erin's shoulders with renewed interest. Her features had again eased into relaxation, kohled lids half-closed as she shoved her hands into her back pockets to keep them still. "I love this bar," she answered her sister's comment with a lazy half-smile. Helena only sighed fondly, and paused at the bar to purchase a round of drinks.
Fenris followed Erin to a table in the south corner of the oversized porch. She slid onto one of the tall stools and leaned into its curved back with a small sigh. Life around him moved at a steady, untroubled pace. A couple with a dog on a lead approached without taking almost any notice at all. He saw the dim lights within the tavern shimmer across Helena's hair, as she tossed back her head and laughed at a joke she shared with the barkeep. Absent were the appraising glances, the hard stares over his shoulder. Absent was the need to ceaselessly watch his back, to keep hand close to hilt because at any moment greed would overtake caution and Danarius's lackeys would come for the bounty on his head or the pleasure of licking that bastard's embroidered hem—
Three brown bottles materialized on the wooden surface as if out of thin air. Erin's pensive gaze snapped to piercing attention as Helena glanced between her face and Fenris's. "Know what?" she trilled. "I forgot to—I'll just—you two go ahead!"
Away from her sister's influence, Fenris watched as a part of Erin's unease returned. It was easily recognizable, in the way her teeth again sank into her lip, in the crease of her forehead as she leaned forward to rest her elbows on the small table.
Her discomfort was contagious; Fenris caught himself mirroring her hunched posture. "Erin, I—"
"Fenris, listen," she began at the same time. With an audible click, she clenched her jaw shut and fluttered one hand at him in deference. Carefully, she tore the paper label from her bottle of ale. "Um, you first," she offered, flushing.
He watched her hands as she folded the label in accordance with some design likely only she would recognize. "I did not intend to make you believe I was angry with you," he said softly. He curled his palm around the cold, brown bottle, frowning as he sorted through his thoughts. Erin's label assumed shape beneath her fingertips—he thought he saw a close facsimile of a head, and perhaps a wing. "I lived in Kirkwall for almost four years," he struggled to explain. "I knew my place in Kirkwall. I knew where I stood with Hawke, with each of her companions. But here?" He waved a hand at his new surroundings in baffled illustration. "I do not understand who I am in this place."
She glanced up from her project, one eyebrow arched in question. "Are you ranting or do you want my opinion yet?" she asked matter-of-factly. "I'm finding it hard to tell.
He watched her in silence, holding her gaze as he waited for her next words. Most in his acquaintance did not hesitate to offer their opinions, and often without being asked. It figured that out of everything he had seen thus far, this would be the most familiar—
"Okay, speak, please? I don't speak brood-ese yet."
He blinked in surprise. Her hands had stilled, fingers interlaced atop the wooden table. A quiet chuckle reluctantly worked its way from silence to sound. "Please, I would like to hear your opinion," he assured her. And—he would, he realized with a small, inward start. He wanted to know what she thought—this pale, polite scholar with a penchant for flippancy and a well-intentioned bully for a sister. He sipped carefully from the bottle in his hand; the crisp ale fizzed lightly across his tongue and tickled all the way down. He studied the letters emblazoned across the yellow label with painstaking concentration, and wondered what it said of the people here that they named such a smooth beer after another word for bruise.
Erin took a long pull from her own bottle, cocking her head toward the ceiling with a pensive frown. The unfinished paper creature tipped to one side, as she bumped the table with her knee. "I know who you were in Kirkwall," she said at length. "Danarius's pet experiment. Escaped slave. Assassin. Mercenary, on occasion. And, if you'd not gotten dropped here, Hawke's lover."
His shock must have made itself plain upon his features, for she interrupted herself with an emphatic nod. "Yeah, that's right," she continued with a faint smirk. "You hated all mages, hated magic itself for what it did to you in Tevinter. And always, always you knew you were living on borrowed time. Sooner or later, Danarius would come for you."
Fenris breathed deeply through his nose to calm his racing heart. He knew she knew him; thus far, however, he had been able to neatly dance around the subject by the simple fact they had not been speaking for the better part of a week. But to hear his own thoughts echoed by a near-complete stranger made his nape tingle—it felt like danger. It felt like pursuit. In silence, he drank deeply from his bottle, and tried to quell the voice of instinct in the back of his mind screaming at him to run.
"But here's the thing, Fenris," she continued, propping her chin on the heel of her hand with a toothy grin that hinted at madness. "None of that is true here. And if none of the things that created Kirkwall-you apply here, what's the only logical conclusion?"
"You're drunk?"
Her nose crinkled underneath the wire bridge of her spectacles, and she seemed to take his words into weighty consideration. "That—is a possibility," she admitted, peering shortsightedly into her nearly-empty bottle. "But not where I was going." She finished her ale and set the brown bottle carefully to one side. "What I'm trying to say is that you get to choose who you are, because the things that are true of Kirkwall-you aren't true of Texas-you."
Breathe. "I don't feel any different," he answered skeptically. "I'm still—all of those things." Watching. Waiting. He's still out there. "Besides Hawke's lover, that is."
Shamelessly Erin confiscated Helena's unattended ale and began peeling away the label; it came off wetly in her fingers and she swiftly folded it into lopsided squares. "You know that, and I know that. But does anyone else?" she asked cheerfully, and shook her head without waiting for him to answer. "Nope!" She drained half her sister's bottle in one long gulp, leaning forward on her elbows across the table. "And you know what else?" she giggled. "No one knows you're here, besides you and me. Know what that makes you?"
He hazarded a guess. "Lost?"
"Uh-uh." She lifted herself from her seat by her fingers, curled over the edge of the table on his side. Halfway atop the table, she halted; for a fearsome, horrible moment Fenris thought she meant to kiss him. Motionless, he waited for the demanding brush of skin on skin—breathe, just breathe—
It never came. She was close—soclose. He could feel her scent pushing against him in waves of sweet and tart. Her hair was tinged honeyed red by the late afternoon sunlight as it bounced forward across her cheeks. Fenris stared at her, fascinated by the way her bright, conspiratorial grin revealed warm blue secrets beneath the pale green surface in her eyes. Secrets he longed and feared to discover.
"You're free," she whispered.
"Goddammit, Erin, you drank my beer!"
Erin tore her gaze away from him with an apologetic shrug. "Busted," she admitted. She pursed her lips and blew a sharp puff of air across the bottle's narrow opening, making it whistle mockingly. She balanced there for a precarious moment, tipping back and forth on the fulcrum of the table's edge, before she crashed heavily back into her seat. Fenris made a swift grab for the bottle before it could spill; Helena kept Erin steady with one manicured hand glued to her sister's shoulder.
"Jesus when was the last time you slept?" she wondered aloud. A note of concern—and a trace of alarm—struck true to Fenris's trained ear.
Erin waved a hand dismissively, wearing an unconcerned smile she directed toward a point somewhere to the left of Helena's head. "Last...week?" she guessed vaguely. Her expression brightened. "Broke my record!"
"That's not something to be proud of," Helena insisted exasperatedly.
"Sure it is—"
"Time to go, honey. Come on, grab your stuff—you've got your keys?—Fenris can you grab her other side—?"
Between the two of them, Helena and Fenris were able to maneuver an intoxicated Erin into the long rear seat of Helena's car. He rubbed his palms across his borrowed trousers as he slid into the front passenger seat; the soft tickle of Erin's purple sweater lingered long after he released her into Helena's care for the evening. So did the memory of sea-blue warmth beneath a cool green surface. So did the impression of her smile, stretched wide and out of focus as she leaned close and gave him something precious and dreadful. So bright and hot to the touch.
Lost?
Or free?
Hope. It would scorch him to ashes and burn him blind, should he let it.
Yet—how could he not?
Fenris drifted to sleep to the scent of something sweet and tart that echoed through his dreams like laughter.
