Author: uhoh , did I lose everybody? I hope this explains things for you.
Merrill watched in horrified fascination as the Magister finished his lavish meal and began his correspondence.
The resemblance was uncanny, and it made no sense. Why would Fenris act so like the man he hated so much, the man he would later kill? Fenris despised mages, and magisters in particular. Merrill bit her nails anxiously, wondering if her spell had done this somehow. It all seemed wrong. None of this was at all what she expected.
As the elf girl smoothed away the uneaten food from the table, Danarius uncorked the bottle of ink he had set aside and spread papers across the table. His slave still knelt at his side, motionless beneath him. From time to time, the magister would reach down and stroke his white hair affectionately, as you would a child or a pet. Fenris appeared to take this the way he did everything else: dispassionate, distant.
Danarius read his letters aloud, periodically, as he composed their response. He posed impenetrable questions of Imperial politics to the elf girl, chuckling at her bafflement, and repeated what he thought to be a particularly clever turn of phrase aloud for her befuddled admiration.
All along Fenris stared hard at the floor, but now with something new in his face. He was listening. Merrill could tell. He was listening very carefully to the news from Minrathous and the machinations of war with the Qunari, and what's more he followed it fully, having done it many times before.
This was the same Fenris after all. It was all true. The observant intelligence that she knew in him in Kirkwall was here too, though captive and deeply hidden. Behind this blank expression was a mind that hungered for stimulation and for knowledge. This was how he knew so much about Tevinter despite his status as a slave. However disinterested he appeared to his surroundings, Fenris was absorbing everything, every detail. Not for the day when he would somehow need them, because such a day was unimaginable, but simply because he was so very hungry.
She wondered if he knew. Danarius. Maybe that was part of the pleasure of it.
It explained, too, how he had come to know so intimately the body language and gestures of his master. He had been with him for a decade, after all. Nearly all of his time would have been at his side, attentive to his every action, watching him for signs of danger or reward.
Abruptly, the Magister closed his ink bottle and folded his papers away, and Merrill's contemplation came to an end. Something was going to happen now. Something really bad.
The elf maiden was fully his now, the blood spell having made her forget the Captain and the ship and everything that came before Master Danarius. She knew everything he wanted and needed and would happily do all of it for him, anything, even what shyness or decency or self-preservation might have prevented.
He took notice of her now, and nodded in satisfaction.
"Come, little rabbit. Little wolf."
Danarius took them both away - the girl walking beside him willingly, Fenris following behind, lead by the chain attached to the collar around his neck. It was unclear if this leash was truly necessary to keep him under physical control, or if it was just humiliation to keep him in his place. Either way it's horrible, Merrill thought, wincing.
They were going into the bedroom.
Merrill did not want to go into that room. She had promised herself that she would watch everything and not look away, but she really, really didn't want to watch this. Even so, she followed, because Fenris was going in there and he didn't have the option of looking away.
Or perhaps he did — in the dream, at least. Because it stuttered in a strange way, jumping through several quick flashes of imagery like paintings taken from memory. There was Danarius disrobed, and the elf girl, and Fenris pinned beneath his master, and there was blood. There was enough blood that Merrill knew it was highly unlikely that her poor cousin left that room alive.
But the dreamer averted his eyes from this memory and everything skipped ahead.
Abruptly the scene changed and Fenris was being dragged back into the hold. Literally dragged, not walking but prone and possibly unconscious, by two men who had him by the arms. When they get to the ladder down to the belly of the ship they look at each other and just pushed him down the stairs and he landed in a heap, groaning. As they descended themselves into the hold they debated together over whether it remained necessary to tie him up. They finally agreed to bolt him back to the wall as they found him earlier.
They left him there, hanging by his neck from the wall and scrambling again for a foothold. Only now he looked relieved, strangely relieved. Now he was alone again and his discomfort had a predictable rhythm and duration and the fear was diminished, for now, so that he could rest.
Merrill crouched on the wood floor again, thinking, watching him. She wondered how long this journey must have taken, if it was better in Minrathous, if it was worse.
She wondered what she was doing here, and how much longer the dream would last, and she wanted to cry.
And suddenly they were in Kirkwall.
It was that fast - they were in the ship's hold, in a seemingly eternal parade of miseries, and then Fenris was standing in his armor in Hightown, a free man, outside Hawke's manor.
Merrill opened her eyes and laughed with relief, to be back on familiar ground again, and away from that horrible place and that awful man. She opened her arms and whirled around in the night air, joyous.
The stars were out, and everything was beautiful.
Merrill's celebration abruptly ended when she noticed Fenris.
The elf did not look relieved at all. He stared at the building as though it were the lair of a dragon.
He was gathering all his courage. It was not the first time he has stood outside her door, unable to go any further. Clenching and unclenching his hands, working out the right words to say.
This looked more like the Fenris that Merrill knew. And like Danarius, she now recognized. But she could make sense of it now. Here in the street, with ordinary people passing by, it made more sense.
He would never go back. Now that he had walked without chains under an open sky, he would never again allow himself to be taken, never again be a slave. But they were pursuing him. Always there were slavers, bounty hunters, people who wanted to return him to the collar and the leash.
Merrill imagined it had made him feel stronger, to imitate the one who had terrorized him so. It must have intimidated everyone he met. It certainly intimidated her. He needed to inspire fear in his pursuers and in the people he encountered who could easily turn him in. He would have to be strong. He would hide who he had been. Admit openly to having been a slave, but never, ever show it. Such weakness could only endanger him. Return him to the nightmare.
When Fenris ran away he had never done anything. He had always been treated like an animal, not a person. He'd never eaten at a fancy table or held a long conversation, never purchased something for himself or chosen his own clothes or decided where to go and what to do. He had no parents or teachers, no peers who could have taught him these things. From what he could remember, he had only ever had his Master.
And he wouldn't, couldn't admit to anything he didn't know how to do. He was like this even now. He must have faked it. Everything. He pretended he had done it all a thousand times and the one person he had ever observed closely enough to imitate was Danarius. The man who had shaped him for over a decade, made him into his finest weapon and proudest possession.
This was the only way he knew how to pretend to be a real person. He did it badly at first, and then with confidence and then without thinking about it at all. It became a comfortable mask, one that admitted him to the company of free men. And if he had found something original to himself in this entire charade he regarded it a moment of weakness, something to hide away in shame.
He had bluffed his way through everything else but this was different. Hawke was different. All of his casual disregard, his contempt, he could not use with her. She deserved more than that.
Danarius would have despised her. She was kind and sweet and good, all things his Master would have considered weakness. But Hawke was not weak. Fenris admired her. There was a solid strength to her, a real courage to her generous spirit. She defended the weak and comforted the afflicted, and she seemed afraid of nothing. She had never hesitated to help Fenris when he had needed it - even though he had only rewarded her with harsh words and spite. She seemed to understand it, even when he really didn't. In the face of all his bluster she did not flinch. She seemed to see through it all, right to the core of him, where even he wasn't sure what there was to find.
She made him do things that made no sense. Feel things that made no sense.
He had no reference for someone like her. She had confounded his expectations at every turn. And what she wanted from him now he couldn't begin to imagine. The things that people who truly care for each other might do together… this was a mystery to him. Hawke should have someone be good to her. Fenris didn't know how to be good to her. All he'd ever known was cruelty and the only thing he could really call his own was his rage.
She filled him with impulses he couldn't understand, that weren't part of his facade. She made him wonder if there were vestiges of the man he once was, deep down inside him, that her kindness was slowly awakening. Maybe he could be that person again, and let go of the things the Imperium had taught him to be.
Or maybe he was fooling himself, and she didn't see any such thing. Maybe Hawke was simply kind to everyone regardless of whether they truly deserved it. And perhaps if he tried to approach her as a man to a woman she would recoil in horror, and any hope he had of a way out of all this misery would be crushed.
Merrill knew all of this in a moment and wished she didn't. She didn't want to know this about Fenris. She wanted to go back to the arrogant, insufferable Fenris who had triumphed over his background and emerged victorious, a free elf unbreakable.
Here, in the moonlight, he looked… fragile. So young, and so frightened, and so lost.
It isn't you, she wanted to tell him. This is what people do, everybody. It's always terrifying, and nobody knows how to do it exactly.
It's different for him, she knew. He had never been loved right. He hadn't had family, friends, a childhood, a soul of his own. If he had, it had been stolen from him, with all his memories. With everything. All he ever had was a lifetime of pain.
Going to Hawke would be starting entirely new, with no map and nothing to guide him. Through that door was a world completely unknown to him. He had walked through such doors before. But never had it meant so much.
This time he took a deep breath and walked to her door with his heart pounding in his ears, as it has not since he first escaped from the Imperium.
It took everything he had to go through that door, and Merrill wanted to applaud when he did.
But of course, this was the night that everything went wrong.