When Merrill came to the Darktown clinic to inquire after Fenris, it was night again, and the clinic was nearly empty.
Hawke was still with him. According to Varric, who had given Merrill a detailed account earlier that day, she had come to the clinic right after it happened and refused to leave, hovering over his bed with open concern. Every time Anders had backed away she would bend over the elf and touch his cheek, speaking to him softly. Fenris couldn't even moan in response, so serious was the damage to his throat. He just looked at her, and only at her, like a drowning man looking at a distant ship.
"I don't understand how this could have happened," she kept saying to Anders.
Anders had wisely decided to refrain from his own assessment of Fenris's character. "I'm afraid for the time being we can't ask him for an explanation. You should go home and rest, Hawke. He'll be fine here."
Hawke insisted on staying, when Varric left her. She looked pale and drawn, he said, so shaken she was by how nearly she had come to losing Fenris forever.
Now, as Merrill arrived, she found Hawke asleep in a chair, her knees that pulled up to her chest, her auburn curls fallen all around her face. Awake you would nearly always find her with a peaceful, encouraging smile, but asleep she looked troubled. There was a little furrow there between her eyebrows, and Merrill wondered what she was dreaming about.
Fenris, awake, lay perfectly still on the clinic bed. His face was battered and bruised, and his white hair stained red at the ends from all he had bled. He would be weak awhile, Anders said. He stopped the bleeding but he could not return all the blood he had lost, nor could he repair all of the damage to his throat.
He was watching Hawke sleep.
Merrill knew this feeling. It was nice to be able to look at Hawke without her staring back - she had this piercing sort of gaze, something she did with her eyes that made you have to blink and look away. Asleep, you could just see the softness of her face, watch how her full lips parted ever so slightly in a small, inaudible sigh as she slept.
He had that look again. The look that was both pleasure and pain at the same time, with that crinkle around his eyes and the wrinkle to his brow. This was more expression than you ever saw on his face, this look that only hinted at the naked longing beneath it. Puppy eyes, Merrill thought, but it didn't make her smile this time.
Why couldn't they just be together? Merrill could never understand it. Obviously they adored each other. Fenris was mean and grumpy most of the time but around her he was different. She eased something in him, smoothed him out, made him less... prickly. And Hawke, she just lit up when she saw him like a magic spell that made her all aglow from the inside. Why then would they not simply go to bed together and love each other? Why did people have to make things so… complicated?
Some of her friends said it was for the best, that Fenris was no good for her. And it was true that Fenris could be incredibly difficult to deal with. But Hawke was patient and loving and they were good to each other, and not being together was making them sad.
Merrill hated to see her friends so sad.
She was so distracted by this thought that she stepped too close, and the other elf's green eyes darted away from their contemplation of Hawke and narrowed at her slightly.
"Oh dear," she mumbled hastily. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean… to disturb you, you can — I just wanted to see how you were."
He shrugged extravagantly, and Merrill remembered that he couldn't speak right now. His neck was mended but his vocal cords had been cut, and they were taking longer to heal.
"Oh! I'm sorry, I forgot - anyway, you don't need to answer me. I just wanted to bring… these are Vir Atish'an Enansal... um, Sylaise's Blossoms, for health and healing."
He closed his eyes dismissively, and she knew he could not possibly care less about her flowers. But she fussed with them anyway, laid them out on a table next to his bed. These things worked whether you believed in the old ways or not, and Fenris was still an elf even if he was like no other elf she had ever met.
As she arranged the flowers, she examined the scar across his neck. It was still ugly red, and would probably stay. The rest of the healing would take time, but he would be back on his feet soon, if not in fine speaking form for awhile yet.
And then what would he do? Would he try the same trick again?
"I am sorry, you know," Merrill said in a low voice, making certain not to wake Hawke. "I think I ruined your plan."
Fenris's eyes flew open.
"It is yours to decide, lethallin. If I'd been thinking… I only wanted to help."
He sat bolt upright and grabbed her by her arms. Even weak, his grip was very strong and he shook her violently enough to make her teeth rattle. His eyes were wide and panicked and he made a croaking sound deep in his throat, trying to tell her… something.
"Fenris! Stop!" Startled awake, Hawke rushed around the bed to try to separate them.
"It's all right," Merrill kept saying, as Hawke worked to detach very strong hands from her. She was caught by the look in his eyes, the pain there and the fear.
"Don't worry," she told him. "I won't tell."
He let go, and fell back onto the bed.
Hawke looked between the two of them. "Won't tell what? What happened here? Merrill, are you okay? Fenris?"
He closed his eyes and he looked so tired.
Merrill stuttered over a possible reply. She was so bad at lying, especially when it was important. Usually the best thing to do was not lie, whenever possible.
So she turned and ran out of the clinic.
In the alienage, Merrill paced across her tiny home again and again, wondering fretfully what she ought to do now, or if she even should do anything now.
She wished there was someone she could ask for advice. Usually she would ask Hawke. But Fenris did not want her to know, her above anyone else — that much she understood, from what had happened in the clinic.
She would sometimes ask Varric for advice. But not if it was a secret. You could not tell secrets to Varric, because then they would no longer be secret. Absolutely everyone would know within a day or two. Isabela was... not any better with such things.
The Keeper… she could not ask the Keeper anything anymore.
Merrill slumped in a chair and thought, hard.
He had confirmed it, she was sure. His reaction proved that she was right and he had meant to die in that alley. But why? And why now?
It made no sense. After all he had fought for his freedom, to just give up? Only recently he had killed his former master, and although Merrill had not been there she had gotten the whole story. He had killed Denarius by his own hands. His great goal accomplished, he could now live as a truly free man. He should have been happy. He must have been. He hadn't looked happy, but Merrill couldn't say for sure what a happy Fenris would look like, having never seen it herself.
If not for the evidence of her own eyes she would not have believed it to be true. But she had seen, and this memory was haunting her. The way his eyes had closed against his killer, how he had welcomed him. The peaceful glaze in his expression as he lay dying. He had wanted it. He wanted everything to be over.
And had she not stumbled upon him at the very moment she did, none of them would ever have known what really happened. They would simply have found him on one last battlefield, bled dry.
What should she do?
Fenris had been no great friend to her; he had been cruel, at times, and at other times simply dismissive. But she could not just forget what she had seen. And there was Hawke, who Merrill loved dearly. Her heart would be broken if he had died, she was sure of it. For Hawke's sake she had to do something.
And… well, Merrill couldn't stand to see any living being in pain.
He reminded her of a bear caught in a trap. She had seen one while traveling with the Dalish, a fierce mother bear defeated by a small metal claw. She could not get herself free, had plainly fought for many hours to get loose - but when Merrill had approached her wanting to help she growled at her fiercely. Whatever her intent, if she had gone anywhere near the bear she would have been torn to pieces just the same. It was in the animal's nature - she could no more accept help from an elf than she could turn into a bird and fly away.
For the bear, she could put the creature to sleep with her magic so that she could get close enough to pry the horrid teeth open and treat the wound before it was too infected to repair.
Unfortunately there was no aid that Fenris would accept from her, under any circumstances, and especially not magic.
The more she thought on it, though, the more Merrill became convinced that magic was the only way to help him. Better he hate her completely for it and be alive than hate her marginally less and be dead.
That was how she decided to perform the spell.