Thanks to The Allusive Man for beta!

Chapter 11: What Ships Are For

A story was being told right in front of Leliana's eyes, written in the play of light on Justinia's face, in the small creases and wrinkles that crossed over it like clouds on a summer's day. It unfurled in the stiff silence of the cell in an odd echo of the roaring city outside and above them.

Part of Leliana would have liked to watch Hawke's face, too, just to see where it complemented Justinia, or contradicted what he was saying, where it revealed and hid the truth of his words and the depth of his desperation. She had to choose, though, she could follow only one face's nuances and hope to follow the story as it unfolded.

Justinia had been silent for a long time after she entered the cell. She stood in the doorway in flowing robes, but nondescript otherwise with barely a hint of who she truly was. She could be any Chantry mother, high-ranking, but invisible to the grander scheme of things. Difficult to recognise in the dead of night by guards or servants who somehow had taken barely any notice of her descent from the Divine's own rooms. It was a different kind of magic than what Leliana had witnessed these past few days, pure where the power of a mage was riddled with pitfalls, but no less a force because of it.

In the end, Hawke had broken the silence with a voice gone rough and quiet, barely more than a whisper, but he couldn't stop the walls from picking it up and throwing it back a him, doubled in potency.

And as Hawke had finished speaking, his soul laid bare on the rough stone floor between them, a small line appeared between Justinia's eyebrows while the rest of her face held on to a stony serenity.

"You think I will accept," Justinia said and although the words could be thought as a question, or even a challenge, her tone was free of all traces of such.

"It's the asking price," Hawke said calmly. He moved, the low sound of leather as he did giving him away. Leliana imagined he had spread his arms slightly, a gesture only akin to submission. "What use am I to you, rotting away in a cell? Think on it."

A slight narrowing of Justinia's eyes, something dangerous at the back of her eyes, quickly hidden before she spoke.

"You are one man," she said.

"With an apostate and a dog," Hawke added. "If we want to be thoroughly exhaustive."

This time, Justinia allowed her anger to leak onto her face, if only for a moment. "You bargain as if you had something left with which to do it."

A pause and its accompanying tension; Leliana chanced a quick look at Hawke and the firelight as it played on his face rather than the Divine's. These last nights seemed to have aged him, drawn his handsome features into haggard sharpness. Raptorial even. He smiled a little, glancing down and then back up. He lowered the arms he had raised before and it became the stance of a man who would never retreat another step.

"Let's not kid ourselves here, shall we?" he said. "I'm more use to you alive and well than I am as some martyr on a pyre. We both know that. So why not take me? Let me work for you."

Misgiving drew sharp lines into the fine skin around Justinia's mouth, thinned her lips into a line.

"You are one man," she reiterated, without any change in inflection at all, no hint she had heard what he had said, or that she cared.

Another pause, only a moment. Hawke must have used it to make another gesture, tilt his head, perhaps. Leliana was no longer looking at him.

"I see," he said, too casually. "Let me put it another way, then. Obviously, I can't really win here, I get it. On the other hand, it's always dangerous to leave a man no options. You never know what he'll do next."

"Threats?"

Hawke drew his breath in sharply, almost as if slapped and with it, a layer of self-control peeled away, allowing new emotion to seep into his voice.

"Had I wanted to lie to you, I'm sure I could have managed."

Incredibly, this softened Justinia's features, if only slightly into the face of sorrow or compassion or at least something close to both that Leliana didn't know the name for. Then again, if Leliana had ever met a great woman in her life, it was Justinia. She didn't know what the Divine saw in Hawke, what she thought of him and his choice, what path she could predict for him or what hope or trust she would afford to put in him.

"And the stage you ask of me?" Justinia asked. "The spectacle you expect me to allow you in my own city?"

"That's political expediency, not ego-stroking. You think the Templars and the Seekers and whatever other organisation you have stashed away somewhere, you think they'll just let this go? No, you don't. I need security you can't give me, even if you wanted to stick your neck out that much, which I doubt anyway. This spectacle will be my insurance. It'll make me untouchable, at least for a time."

"And when that time runs out?"

"When that time runs out," Hawke said, "the world will be different."

Leliana studied Justinia while Justinia studied Hawke. A play of emotions on her face, chasing each other too quickly to make sense of. Calculations and predictions and considerations reaching far into the future, into the annals of history — or at least of story. This would be written one day, in conjecture and guesswork about the truth, about what had happened on these fateful nights and Divine Justinia's hand in it, about the role of Hawke of Kirkwall and his apostate lover. What would it say, Leliana wondered, all those centuries from now, when the ages had turned and the world was indeed a different place?

"Very well," Justinia said. And the pieces fell into place, just like that, making barely any sound at all.

Anders startled awake. Not the slow haze of waking up he knew, dogged by nightmares of the Taint and the insidious whispers of some distant Archdemon. The inside of his head had been scraped with steel-wool, leaving nothing behind but the aching bone and empty thoughts. It took him a long moment to realise his eyes were open and he was seeing a slate-dark brick wall, lit only by a flickering torch from somewhere else in the room. He frowned at it, trying to place it and the lack of familiarity, but found no steps he could retrace.

Scrape scrape.

At first, he had thought the sound was only in his head, an imagined supplement to the raw feeling there, but as his mind came fully awake, he realised it was coming from across the room.

He sat up only to be wrapped in a sudden, nauseating sense of vertigo, like a thundercloud drawing together around his head and crushing his forehead. His vision dimmed for a moment and he chose to lie back down instead of forcing the issue. He turned his head, slowly, and waited for the revelation.

Across from him, Hawke sat on the metal frame of a cot, polishing a piece of armour in his lap. He looked up from his work as Anders stirred, but didn't stop. Shadows drew a dark streak across his eyes, leaving only the hint of glow where they would be.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

Anders opened his mouth to answer, but found himself unexpectedly stumped by the question. "I have no idea," he finally said. His mouth was dry, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth and his lips cracking with the movement.

"What do you remember?"

Anders opened his mouth to say I remember nothing but it wasn't true. The question yanked his memory free, spilling into his empty mind with force so sharply it made his eyes water. Not just thoughts and images, but pure knowledge, every sparkling detail of the events just past. Every sneer in Kameron Amell's face, every lie he had told him over the years and the underhanded, utterly cruel way he had tried to use Anders' own feelings against him by forcing him back into the Vigil and the alluring promise of better days.

He should be angry, he knew, but he couldn't quite summon the feeling. Kameron was pathetic in this way, powerless as all vile creatures must eventually become in the face of virtue. Kameron had tried to pry him free of Justice, but all he had done was to fuse them closer together. In a way, it was a gift. To know now, separate of Justice, who he was and what decision he took back then. To have been right all along and that there was no need for suffering at all.

"Everything," Anders said. He thought he heard a slight stutter in the scraping, but he couldn't be sure.

"There is a flask of lyrium at the foot of your bed," Hawke said. "If you want it."

He had known, he had heard its voice even before waking up, but somehow drinking lyrium seemed a disgrace, an act of blasphemy of something so beautiful. His body would need it, though, but it could wait a little longer.

Anders sat up again and this time, nothing was taken away. He glanced around while Hawke continued his work, seemingly oblivious. They were in a small, square room, dark of stone and old. A door of heavy, if corroded, metal bars cut the dark hallway beyond into narrow slices.

"Where are we?" he asked.

"A nasty, dark little room," Hawke said. "A prison cell under the Grand Cathedral, as it were. But are we happy in it?"

"A …cell?" Anders startled. He was halfway on his feet, but Hawke's calm kept him rooted to the spot. "What?"

Hawke watched him, cruelly letting him flounder. Then he put the armour aside and reached for the door, giving it a shove and it fell open slowly on slightly creaking hinges. "It's just temporary," Hawke explained as if it was the simplest thing in the world. "This wing hasn't been in use for decades. No guards, just rats, which is arguably worse, but there you go."

"Why are we in a cell?" Anders asked somewhat tonelessly.

"It's a concession I had to make."

"Why are we not locked up?"

"It's a concession they had to make," Hawke chuckled a little. "It's good enough and we'll only be here for another day."

Anders rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand and was somehow surprised to feel nothing strange. Just skin, as there should be, slightly damp from a thin layer of sweat. His sleep seemed to have been less peaceful than he thought.

Scrape.

"Are you going to tell me…?" Anders said slowly, the words trickling from his mouth in barely a whisper. He hadn't meant to be this quiet, he didn't know why the strength was suddenly all gone. He forced leaden limbs to move, his body to sit up on the bed. He fished for the lyrium flask and hissed when he touched it, feeling something like a sting crawl through his fingers and up his arms.

"I'm going to work for the Divine and in exchange she gives you amnesty," Hawke explained. He glanced up at him.

Anders found it momentarily hard to bear that look, it was too heavy on him, too knowing and far too compassionate. The lyrium flask seemed to pulse in his hand, a living thing struggling to free itself from his grasp. He retaliated by clutching it tighter, until his knuckles stood out white. He unstoppered it with shaking fingers and finally took it to his lips, but the moment he did, all restraint fell away and he swallowed it all. Lifeblood and the sweeping symphony of it, tingling through his body and back into his fingertips where they touched the flask.

He breathed, let his head fall back to the wall and return Hawke's gaze calmly.

"Why?" Anders asked. "Why all of this?"

Hawke narrowed his eyes at him, let his hands finally fall away from the armour piece and the cloth he held, forgotten in his lap. In the half-dark of his place, Hawke said, "I'm so tired of running."

With the lyrium beating in his veins, Anders saw everything sharper and more in focus, the contrast between light and dark as it played on Hawke's features and danced on the armour pieces beside him. He saw, too, how a calm settled in Hawke's gaze, beyond all the desperation and the bitterness. Whatever had happened, Hawke was still there, still by his side and it seemed neither demon nor spirit nor all the armies in Thedas would tear him away.

Anders opened his mouth to say something, anything, just so the moment didn't slip away again and was lost in the maelstrom of his thoughts. There were no words, but Hawke seemed to retain no more doubts. He shrugged, just slightly, a gesture to the whole world in a way, but also to Justice's sneering at the back of Anders' thoughts. About Hawke as a corrupter, as a seducer and tempter. Underneath it, however, lay a different truth, harsher and more glorious: The truth that love was all these things, just as it was pure and beautiful and redemptive.

It didn't matter, it didn't matter at all, what had transpired before, what they had lost; the murders and the blood and all the sacrifice, because in the end, they were both still here and now, clawing at each other's clothes and exposing heated skin to cool, damp dungeon air. They had been apart for too long, close enough to touch perhaps, but unable to reach out because betrayal had opened a chasm between them. So this was love, but also lust and desire with the will to consume.

At some point, the torch had gone out and the room was thrown into a pitch-black darkness that seemed to have a texture all its own, an additional lure into madness.

The metal edge of the bed was digging into his skull from below and Anders felt the dull ache along his leg where the edge of the bed pressed into his skin under Hawke's weight.

"I lov—" Anders heard himself begin with breath he thought he lacked.

Hawke fell forward and closed his mouth with the steely grip of his finger. His thighs pressed down hard on Anders' flanks, forcing him into stillness and held him there for an agonising moment. Hawke leaned forward and his body vibrated with tension. He brought his face close to Anders', slowly shifted his fingers out of the way.

"Don't," he breathed lowly and Anders' heart beat like a diseased thing.

"Don't," Hawke said again and brushed his lips over Anders' in the slightest hint of a touch. "You've lied to me too much using that line."

He shifted both his hands away from Anders, found some handhold above his head in the darkness and gave a slow, delicious roll of his hips.

"Say my name instead," Hawke growled.

The Fury plowed the waves leisurely. She wasn't the fastest ship, but she was sturdy, with a numerous crew and solid weaponry. Anyone wishing to tangle with her would likely learn quickly how it wasn't the best of ideas. So far, there had been no sign of pursuit, only a few merchant ships which wisely gave them a wide berth. If Hawke had had his way, there shouldn't be any pursuit anyway.

Kameron stood at the bow of the ship, his face turned toward the wind and his eyes closed in a rare moment of tranquility. Back in Ferelden, his work was only just beginning. He needed to get Alistair firmly on his side in the mage question. He would also have to finally deal with Wynne and the Circle there, something he had avoided as he told himself Zevran needed his help in Antiva. And then, when he had gone to Kirkwall instead. At the time, he had rather believed himself and his motivation, but the truth was less appealing. He didn't want to deal with these problems and he had only the faintest inkling of how he should do it.

It seemed quite easy in his mind. He would prance into the Circle Tower and hand over leadership to the First Enchanter, he'd then demand the Templars either abdicate or leave the country. Alistair would back him eventually, even if Anora might balk in the beginning. He knew he could go far on his reputation in Ferelden, where he had the dwarves and the elves to call on. It was the country he had saved, after all, but would it be enough to drive the Templars out? Was his influence and his renown more powerful than the Chantry? He could break himself on those cliffs and be left with nothing by the end of it.

"How does it feel?"

Fenris was leaning on the railing by his side, keeping a safe distance, but close enough to speak comfortably over the ocean and the wind.

Kameron opened his eyes and only glanced at him without turning his head. "What?" he asked, only slightly surprised that Fenris had sought him out at all.

"To lose like that," Fenris clarified. "To throw all your power into the fight and fail?"

Despite the words, there seemed to be very little of his customary rancour in his voice. It sounded more like actual curiosity.

"If you still take me for some kind of magister, you've missed one of my most important traits."

"Your modesty?" Fenris asked.

"My loathing of slavery."

Fenris chuckled and it was a parched sound. "It's only the slavery of your own kind you despise. Everything else can burn in your wake."

Kameron shook into motion, turned to face Fenris, resting one limp wrist over the railing. "If what you say is true, perhaps taunting me isn't the wisest thing to do."

Fenris said nothing for a long moment. "I find myself in a strange place," he said finally.

Kameron kept his silence, watching Fenris and giving him whatever space he needed.

"I expect you have grand plans for when we reach Ferelden. Men like you always do," Fenris said, slowly picking each word with great care. "I've been an accomplice for a very long time. Of Hawke and even of Anders. I know as well as anyone that I cannot go back any easier than them."

A faint frown settled on Kameron's face. He made a vague gesture with one hand. "Fenris, are you asking me for a job?"

Fenris snapped his mouth closed and looked away, over the expanse of the sea spreading out around them. "I will have to live with what I've done," he said.

Kameron watched him, searching his face and then unexpectedly began to laugh. "I appreciate the gesture, I think I have an idea what it has cost you."

"I'll face up to my responsibilities," Fenris said seriously.

Kameron looked past Fenris at Isabela as she approached and gave her a quick grin in greeting as she joined them.

"Lune said you were looking for me?" she asked.

Kameron nodded, but spoke to Fenris, "I think I have a better solution for you."

He looked at Isabela. "You remember the privateering contract Zevran offered to Aed? I'll extend the same offer to you. You'd need a ship and a crew, of course, but I have the funds to get you started, a loan of course, not a gift. We'll stop in Amaranthine and you can negotiate the terms with the Commander of the Grey in Vigil's Keep; I know Aed will."

Isabela's face remained blank for a long minute. She blinked slowly. "You are giving me a ship?"

"I can't stand back and let talent go to waste," Kameron smiled. "Unless you don't want it…"

She cuffed him. "Of course I want it, stupid. I just… I guess I was getting used to not having a ship, you know? I'm not so sure about that contract. Not being my own woman, what kind of captain is that?"

"The Wardens are easy masters, they won't tell you what to. Besides, you'd be free to leave any time you wanted."

The light in Isabela's eyes caught the glitter of sunlight on the water, just for a moment and her features were bright. The worn mask of the hunted cracking from one moment to the next and the pirate underneath was still the same, a little older and more bitter with the years, but a force of nature nevertheless.

She grinned broadly.

"You'd hand me over to her, then?" Fenris asked and his tone was scathingly neutral.

"I'd offer you a better choice than grovelling to a wannabe magister you detest," Kameron shrugged. "But do as you will."

Isabela's face fell for the briefest of moments as she studied him. "I'll keep Merrill, too, if she wants to."

Fenris hesitated, but it was apparent he was fighting down a smile of his own. "I'll… think about it," he offered.

Zevran had come up behind them and now slung an arm around Isabela's waist, leaning his head on her shoulder and grinned. "Business done?" he asked.

"Done and done," Isabela agreed.

"Good," he grinned. "What about sex?"

References:

"Michael George Hartley... this is a nasty, dark little room. […] We are not happy in it."— Lawrence of Arabia

"A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for." — William Greenough Thayer Shedd (attributed without citation in Gary Ninneman)

Author's Note: A short chapter after a long wait. I haven't been too well recently. One more chapter to go, I'll make sticking around worthwhile! Promise!

Feedback welcome!