9:32 Dragon - Darktown

He was silent when he entered the clinic. Just the pushing open of the door that I caught in the corner of my eye and looked up from my work for, expecting another patient, and then Hawke, moving to lean against the wall and not saying a word. There was something wrong about that - didn't he always come over and bother me, whether I was in the midst of healing an injury or an illness or not? - but I couldn't interrupt what I was doing to speak with him.

He waited in silence, too, a dark look on his face and something in his figure that was more tense than usual. The shoulders and arms, perhaps. At one point it seemed he'd taken a jar of a salve from my shelves to toss back and forth between his hands, though soon enough he put it back. Perhaps he'd thought better of letting it accidentally slip from his grasp and shatter on the floor below. After that, he took up wringing his hands instead. Not that I was watching, not at all; my attention was fully focused on cleansing as much of the foundry-smog poison from the lungs of the woman on my table as was possible. Or so I told myself. Once the first of them had discovered my clinic, it was barely days before nearly the whole of the workforce of the foundry district - and half the population of the neighboring hexes - had appeared at my doorstep. I did what I could and sent them on their way, at least until the next week or month. Maker, but I always had to step in and try to delay the inevitable, didn't I? I missed the days when I could look a problem straight in the face and walk away because it was so entrenched that nothing could be done to change it – if ignorance was bliss, refusing responsibility had to at least be its runner-up. But neither made you a better person; neither made any society a better place to live. Justice had gone and smashed my old attitude into a million pieces, and I could almost say I was the better for it.

Hawke barely looked at me when I finished my work and went over to him. "So, what crisis have you gotten yourself involved in now?" I asked him with a smile. "Or did you just miss the smell of chokedamp everywhere?"

If anything, his expression became a fully-fledged scowl. "I just couldn't stand another minute in that damned house," he muttered.

"I thought you'd moved out of that shack of Gamlen's," I teased.

"Well isn't that just the problem," he bit back. "Yes, we live in a mansion now. The old Amell estate. Maker's breath, if one more person claps me on the back and calls me the new scion of the Amell family, I'm going to light them on fire."

I frowned at this. "What's this about?" I asked. "I know you're not a fan of the nobility, but…"

"It's like somebody's been following after me and trying to wipe up all the footprints I've left on the floor. Trying to get the stains out of a coat that I put there on purpose."

I knew what that was like. It was a game, in the Circle; spilling potion ingredients and conjuring slicks of grease along stretches of floor the templars had just cleaned; rearranging stacks of books and papers that some senior enchanter wanted ordered just so. Little rebellions that made you feel the victor for a few hours, perhaps even a day, and wouldn't get you in too great a trouble once somebody cottoned on. Unless you were like me, and took it past the point where you were an amusing, reckless young scamp all the way into immature-troublemaker-who-should-have-stopped-this-behavior-once-he-passed-his-Harrowing territory. But even so, the satisfaction never lasted, because someone who played by the rules would always come to put it right like you hadn't even been there.

"I never wanted to come here," Hawke confessed. "Maker knows it's not like I actually had a home in Ferelden, but why Kirkwall? Beth and I never wanted… I said we should leave and try somewhere else, when the guard wasn't letting any of the refugees into the city, but no, we had family, and an estate, and we were supposed to be nobility… 'We're not putting Mother through that again,' Carver said, because aren't they the ones who always matter. Of course they're the ones who've survived, why shouldn't they be? The Maker loves them more, everybody says. But no, I went and found the will, and I let Carver stay in case something happened to us, and I brought back coin enough to get her the damned mansion, but it's still not good enough. She's just going to settle back into her old life with her noble friends and we can all be Amells again, and leave Father and Bethany behind in the dust. I heard her and some of those friends talking, and do you know what they said? They said it was so nice to have the Amell family back in Kirkwall again, to leave behind 'all that nasty business with Revka, and everything else'. That nasty business was a person! A little girl, not… I don't even know, some smuggling deal! And Mother just said nothing, even with me in the room. As if I wasn't exactly the same."

I touched his arm lightly, hoping to offer some comfort. I wanted to take the entirety of him in my arms and wipe all his pain away the way I would for a patient, but the latter was impossible and the former… I could not trust myself with that. It would feel too much like taking advantage. "I'm sorry," was all I said.

He let out a bitter laugh. "I shouldn't be whining about this to you," he said. "Like you don't have bigger problems. More important things to deal with. I'm one of the lucky ones. What does it matter if I feel -"

"Erased," I completed softly. "Silenced."

Hawke stilled, and there was a look in his eye, something I couldn't quite place. Perhaps it was the feeling of having somebody else who could understand, without you needing to explain. For once.

"It does matter," I told him. "When you don't exist, it's that much easier to hurt you. And for every person who falls to templar blades and angry villagers, there's another who falls to his own despair, of being told his existence is a sin and having nobody around to listen when he cries. And if that weren't the case, even if it weren't a matter of life and death, we shouldn't have to live in a world where anybody is made to feel that way."

I felt his knuckles brush the back of my hand, then the heat of his palm pressed against my own. He took my hand, threaded his fingers through mine till they were intertwined, fitting perfectly as though there was no other place they belonged. His hands were shorter than mine, slender rather than long and bony from my chronic case of not eating as often as I should, though both our pairs were worn and staff-callused.

"You're brilliant," he whispered, voice brittle and cracked. "You help make things better for mages, and you've given up everything for it, and I sit in a mansion and mouth off to templars and let children turn themselves over to the care of people like Karras…"

I bit my lip, wanting to say something, but in the end forced myself to simply give his hand a reassuring squeeze. There are jobs I could bring you in on, I wanted to say, he wanted to hear; a person like Hawke would be invaluable to the Underground, but the number of people who'd come to know his face since we came back from the Deep Roads… it was just too risky.

"You can't just force someone to live outside the Circle," I told him instead. "If he didn't want it, he'd never be able to survive on the run. " The words had come so grudgingly when he'd said them: The templar Thrask is outside… Surrender to him… And then after we returned, their chance meeting in the Gallows Courtyard, anguished whispers and that eventual hesitant confession that left Hawke's expression dark as the stormy waters beneath the boat back to the city. I doubted even my words were a comfort for that.

He didn't even try to argue with me, just clenched my hand tighter and pressed it close against his chest, glassy eyes and crumpled expression turned down to the gulf of negative space between us.

I knew what he wanted. Maker, I'd known for a year, practically since the very day we'd met. As if I wanted it any less. And this, this brush of fingers, this press of palms more enticing and intimate than all the suggestive comments and smirking movements of lips and eyebrows we'd exchanged. This was the lifeline you clung to when you were tossed overboard on a ship, holding tight to keep from drowning as someone else pulled you in. But I was no ship, no safe harbour for him. More like a whirlpool that would grab hold and trap him underwater no matter how he struggled to get away, drag him further beneath the waves and watch him drown.

Don't you want someone to drown with you?

Maker help me but I did. There were times I missed my old selfishness, but even with Justice it seemed not all of it had gone. I wouldn't even be asking for anything, merely saying yes to a question posed to me, over and over in glances and touches and stolen moments that let the world stand still.

But the fact that it would be my answer rather than my question did not make it any more right, any more just. I could see better than most that inaction is a deed in itself, that allowing something others want rather than interposing yourself and saying enough holds you just as culpable. Allowing the current to carry you over a cliff when there's a sturdy branch to cling to right beside your hand isn't any less a suicide than leaping from the top of a tower. And so I could not, would not make myself a hypocrite like that. I could hold him and comfort him as best as I could, though undoubtedly that best was lacking, and remain by his side as a friend; it was the least way I could repay him for everything he didn't need to do for me. But I could not love him.

Gently, slowly, I slid my fingers from his and stepped back. I couldn't bring myself to look at him from anywhere but the corner of my eye. How often had I been in the position he was in now? Far too many times. I remembered first seeing the city, stepping off that wretched boat with a swarm of filthy poverty-stricken refugees who I could do little and less for without revealing myself for a mage. They spit us out right into the Gallows and I shook like a leaf at the sight of each face-swallowing helm, half lost in my own sickened mind as I drank in the surroundings. Cold stone towering above, slits for windows across the carved edifice like a thousand eyes all watching. Watching me. A slave prison, it used to be, I heard someone saying, and the rage beat at my skull like a drum. Used to be. Used to be. Wrong tense. And here I'd come – what? To help these people? To help Karl… even that seemed too big, too impossible a task. I was a single man who'd been caught as many times as I'd ran, and I could tear a man apart with my bare hands and revel in it because it had all gone so, so wrong.

A man had come up to me then, and asked if I was okay, and I'd stared blankly up at him for several moments before I realized I'd sank down into a hunched position against a wall, eyes shut tight and fists clenched in my hair. Like some tormented madman. I mumbled something in reply and picked myself up and made sure to stare resolutely at the cobblestones beneath my feet for the rest of my stay in that wretched place. Even that did little to quell the hate and despair and dread, because I couldn't ignore any more. Couldn't push the knowledge of what was just beyond myself into a little locked box in the back of my memories, like before. Eventually, worried I might transform again into that… creature… the next time somebody disturbed me, I dug out the blood-filled pendant with the etched griffon the Commander had given me. The guards must have been drunk or bored or just sick to death of refugees, everywhere, because I managed to pass through the line of guardsmen as a stranded Warden who needed to re-provision himself at Kirkwall before setting off for the nearest outpost. I'd chopped my hair and stained it a temporary mud-brown and hopefully didn't look anything like myself, if the other Wardens came calling. Maker, I'd hoped not. But it was that or stay in the Gallows going mad, and I knew which chance was the better to take.

I probably had that choice to thank for Hawke, too, if I really considered it. One of the refugees must have overheard and spread it about, because I certainly hadn't been discussing the Wardens with my patients, and yet he turned up anyway, knowing what I'd been. Or a part of it, at least.

He seemed to come back to the present when our hands parted, pulling me along too. "Sorry," he murmured, dropping the offending limb back to his side with an awkward speed that made it look as though I'd shocked him.

"I didn't mind," I replied then, before my mind had apparently caught up with my mouth. It was true, he had no reason to be sorry, but there was a line between being supportive and leading someone on. A thin, blurry one that we had the unfortunate tendency to play jump-rope with when we noticed it approaching at all. "It's not a bother. I don't like seeing you upset." The rope flew over my head, and I jumped.

Hawke rubbed the back of his neck and looked away. "Yes, well, uh… I really… shouldn't have. Just gotten all grabby and hey! You're all there for grabbing on to and… that really came out wrong and I think I'll just stop talking." He tried to give me a smile, as if to say, see, all better now, but it looked more like a grimace and it never reached his eyes. "Y'know, I should go," he said, backing up in the direction of the door, hands stuffed into the pockets of his trousers. "You've got more stuff to do I'm sure, and Aveline said I should come see her about a job soon and that was a couple days ago so I should really go do that. Uh, now."

He practically fled the place with barely a good bye, and I let him go. It was fear, truly. Fear and the knowledge that, even though he was a mage and thus part of my cause, I could not serve my true purpose giving so much of my energy to him. Bad enough that he'd begun to dog the hours I tried to sleep, like the deranged mutterings of the darkspawn had when I still dreamed; the time I was awake, I should devote to patients, to my writing, to the tasks I could do for the Underground, not to these self-indulgent interactions that only fueled my developing… obsession. And weren't his words right? That I had bigger problems, more important things to deal with? What was one man next to an entire Gallows of his unlucky counterparts; an entire Thedas?

Everything. Nothing. I wanted him with everything a man could want, heart and soul and body. But I was more than just a man. I had to be.

Even for an elf, my charge looked too skinny. Disheveled, malnourished, and sunken-eyed, she had the hunched, defensive posture of one who'd spent too many nights clutching at some rusty scrounged knife to keep at bay the sort who'd steal whatever crust of bread she'd found for the day's meal, or worse. She'd heard about our services from a flyer hung up at the shelter, Annai had told me the last time I'd seen her. We got a decent number of clients from Annai's place, between those who needed the food and beds she provided and those who heard about her Underground connections from the former. I wasn't all that surprised about this one, really. From what I'd seen, there were two sorts in the Alienage: the ones like the Commander who despised the Chantry and literally fought tooth-and-nail to keep the templars away from their friends, and the ones who wanted to keep their heads down and get anyone with plate mail and authority out of their neighborhood as fast as possible. This girl wasn't one of the lucky ones. I didn't know how long she'd been on the street, or whether she had any idea of where she'd go after Kirkwall, or even what her name was. When I'd asked, she'd just given me a silent, distrusting glare from beneath the tangled, matted curtain of dark hair that fell about her face, and I knew better than to press the matter.

She followed me with similar silence through the smugglers' tunnels, all the way until they spilled out to jagged rock and slopes of pale sand and the crash of waves below us. I leaned against my staff and scanned the horizon, the elven girl standing off to the side behind me like a ghost. If she'd brought any possessions with her, they had to be strapped to her person or otherwise concealed beneath her clothes, a too-big tunic and a stained, inexpertly patched skirt.

It wasn't long before the next leg arrived, the pair of them rounding the jut of stone wearing wary looks that relaxed a touch when they took in the sight of us. They were both humans, the man with a wicked-looking blade strapped to his back, and the woman with a dagger at her hip and carved quarterstaff in her hand. I hadn't seen these two before, but then I'd only escorted runners a few times so far, so it wasn't too surprising. "No phylactery, I trust?" the woman asked. She had a northern accent to match her brown skin, putting her origins near to Starkhaven, best I could guess. I took a closer look, racking my brain to see if she was at all familiar, but I couldn't place her at all. She had too much of a look that said sneaking and hiding was deeper than habit for her to be a recent Circle escapee, in any case.

"Never had one to begin with," I replied, when my charge remained, as ever, silent.

The woman nodded. "Good." She reached out a beckoning hand to the elven girl, who shuffled over toward them. "Sorry we can't stay and chat, but the sooner we're out of here the better. You know how it is. And we've got a long way ahead of us."

I did indeed know, just as I knew not to pry for more details. The fewer people who knew of any individual piece of our collective puzzle, the better. That was a lesson drilled in the Circle just as sure as in the Underground, as different as they were. So I nodded off an acknowledgement and a short farewell, and they were gone with another free mage just as quickly as they'd arrived.

Sometimes it seemed like all these encounters could be just the fanciful product of a fevered mind, so little impression did they leave on the fabric of the world. Nobody to witness, nobody to speak, nobody to listen. They were shadows skirting the edges of a brilliant sun, all the lives and interactions and stories of mages throughout the continent. We could be sequestered away and ignored until the whims and fancies of a king or nobleman required us as accessories to their stories, or we could motion through other people's lives pretending they were our own. Like you're going about all your daily business in town, Hawke had described it once, but your mind stays back inside the wardrobe or standing before the mirror, checking your presentation to make sure nothing's slipped up and revealed the truth.

I'd been jealous of his freedom when we first met, and I doubted that would ever go away. But we'd had enough conversations since then, many of them while he was supposed to be at his new mansion entertaining nobles with his mother, for that freedom to slide off the pedestal I'd tied it to, all the times I glanced out the Tower windows at the expanses of lake and countryside just out of reach. In or out of the Circle, there was no such thing as a free mage.

Heavy grey clouds were building in the distance, and a breeze tugged at my coat and the bristles of hair against the back of my neck. I should get back to the city, check my stock of supplies and open the clinic for a few hours, work on the section I was writing about the much-ignored role mages played in Andraste's war against the Imperium… All things I needed to finish before tonight's meeting with the Underground. No matter which way I went, though, it would be slow going, if only to make sure I didn't stumble into a den of raiders by accident. The route along the coast at least had the benefit of fresh air, and thankfully few questionable plants or gigantic spider webs.

A flash of black and red caught my eye after a time walking uninterrupted, and I turned, hand falling to the grip of my staff. There was no threat in the area though, just a lone, familiar figure sitting in the sand in the passage below me, facing out to the ocean. I walked round the jut of rock, boots sliding enough on the sloping path that I made sure to go carefully.

"Hawke."

His eyebrows jumped in surprise when he saw me. "Funny seeing you here. Somehow I'd gotten the impression I was the only one mad enough to wander about the coast without a full escort of rugged, hardy mercenaries."

He made me smile. I couldn't help it. "Well considering the mercenaries are normally the ones that try to attack you and steal your coinpurse, I think it's better if I go without. Am I intruding upon anything?"

"What? No." He cocked his head, a friendly gesture if it didn't look quite so forced. "I'm just busy brooding. Varric was going on about how he needed material for a good brooding scene for whatever it is he's writing about me these days, so I thought I'd come up here and oblige him. Mansions aren't exactly the choicest setting for that whole sort of thing, I learned recently. Not unless they're all dilapidated and full of corpses, and well. You know how Mother hates dealing with guests who're dead on their feet."

I chuckled and moved to sit beside him, setting my staff to the side and then leaning back against my elbows. Hawke remained fully upright, if slightly hunched over, giving me a good view of the back of his head but little and less of his expression. The wind seemed to catch his hair, causing little tufts to stand straight up, and I burrowed my fingers in the sand to keep them from reaching up and smoothing it back down.

The only sounds for a time were the spray of water against the cliffs below us and the calls of a bird or two in the distance. There was a time when I'd thought silence peaceful, but I'd since become too accustomed to chattering voices and clacking footfalls all around me, and a few months with the Wardens wasn't enough to get me out of the habit of finding a lack of other voices and people-noises disconcerting at best. "Hmmm," I murmured, tracing patterns in the sand with a finger.

Hawke turned and caught my eye, questioning.

"It's nothing," I replied, giving something resembling a shrug. Neither of us spoke for a little while longer.

"Hawke… I'm sorry, about yesterday."

He turned again, but this time his gaze was on the ground. "You don't have to be." His voice was flat. "It's not your responsibility to fix my problems."

"Perhaps it's not my responsibility, but that doesn't mean I don't want to help. I'm a healer. I fix people."

"I'm not broken."

We're all broken. "No. It's the world that's broken. It's the system that needs to change." I could feel the edge in my voice as much as hear it. "One day, that change will come, and we'll all be free. Truly free, with the same rights and opportunities as any man. We won't be… marked, just for our magic."

"I want to be a part of making that happen, too," Hawke murmured.

I sat up fully and gazed out across the Waking Sea, far out to where the grey of the waters met the grey of the sky at the horizon and mingled until you could barely tell the beginning of one from the end of the other. "Then you should. Maybe I don't know how, exactly, but we can think of something, I'm sure. Perhaps you could be a voice for change among the nobility."

He seemed to chew his lip a bit, brow wrinkling with worry or deep thoughtfulness. "Nothing good ever came from hiding in safety, I suppose," he said after a moment. "I just wish I didn't have to hide at all."

"You don't have to hide here, at least," I told him. "And our actions will make it so mages in the future never need to say that. I try to think that can be enough."

Our eyes met, and I liked to think I could see some comfort taken from my words in his. They were half-lidded, but I could still see the flecks of gold. He had a long nose, and my gaze travelled the length of it down to the root of a reluctant smile at the corners of his lips. I might have kissed him then, if this were some other world, some other Anders not saddled with a spirit passenger and a hundred other burdens. But those possibilities had been snuffed out before they could even begin to burn, and space between us remained.

"Perhaps it can be enough," he replied, half a question itself. "For now."