Fenris marched into Hawke's sitting room, petrified but determined.
When she turned to look at him, startled and pleased at his sudden entrance, everything he had been rehearsing outside clearly fell right out of his head.
He wavered for only a moment, then spoke anyway.
"I have been thinking of you. In fact, I have been able to think of little else."
Deep breath.
"Command me to go, and I shall."
Hawke smiled radiantly at this. It was everything she had been waiting to hear.
"Don't leave," she said.
The first kiss is slow and sweet, with a long intake of breath from both parties. They both smiled when it ended, and Hawke sighed happily and put her arms around his neck. Then things started to happen quickly.
Merrill could not have avoided witnessing the next scene if she tried. The dream swept her along forcefully, settling into a kind of feverish headlong rush as Hawke and Fenris kissed and stumbled together and kissed some more. She pushes him up against the wall and presses herself to him, and he growls. He was pulling her hair down from its clasp and she was trying desperately to find a way into all that spiky armor. She managed to get his gauntlets off, one at a time, and he brought his bare hands to the sides of her face as they kissed deeply.
It's so... private, what they're doing, but Merrill couldn't help the little bubble of happiness that she had when she watched them kissing each other. She had never seen Fenris smile this much or Hawke laugh like this and they both deserved to be this happy. Merrill thought everyone should be this happy at least once in their lives.
They were finding their way up the stairs and Merrill was sort of pulled along with them until Hawke was opening the door to her bedroom and giggling with delight.
Merrill thought the dream might skim over this part as well, but everything seemed to stumble to a halt in Hawke's bedroom, a place with sharp clarity in comparison to everything else in the dream.
She was pulling him in after her, and Fenris was ready for it to begin. He took her in his arms and started towards the bed.
But she laughed again, and she said: "slow down. We have all the time in the world."
She had lost interest, temporarily, in undressing him. Her hands rested lightly against his shoulders and he was obviously perplexed, wondering what this was for, what did she want him to do now? She just smiled and looked into his eyes. Her hands stayed there and they demanded nothing. They were just - touching him. They met behind his neck and her fingers touched him there too, lightly. A soft stroke at the back of his neck that made him shiver.
After everything Merrill had seen, after the pain and cruelty and abuse, this was the thing that breaks him. This little touch. A small, gentle caress that had no purpose but to feel good. Not to punish or manipulate or to make him hard for her so she could use him to fulfill her needs. She did it because she wanted to.
It felt good, and it was agonizing. Never once in his memory had he been touched with kindness before this, not ever. He took it like a blow and he didn't show it but inside he was staggering.
The feeling was bewildering and inexplicable, and it reminds him of something he can almost but not quite remember. A lost memory. Of something that felt the same.
He stared into her cobalt eyes, and the momentary confusion fled. He couldn't have named the look she was giving him, but Merrill could. Hawke loved him. Already, and deeply. Fenris didn't understand it, but he took it in just the same. She calmed him, and when she touched him again it was only pleasure, no pain.
Things proceed from there very naturally. Nothing felt wrong; everything was right. Every new touch was a discovery. Hawke was sweet and patient and so soft and so beautiful. He has heard this referred to as making love before but that had never made any sense to him until now. She showed it to him, that this could be different.
When it was done he had remembered gentleness. He lay panting on the bed with Hawke curling into his side and he suddenly remembered. He had known tenderness after all; when he was a child he knew it well. There were embraces and kisses on the forehead and helping hands. There was encouragement and love and briefly he saw all of it. He had been treasured once. He had known peace, happiness. Perhaps he could know it again, here, with her.
Merrill knew all of this as he did, even as she averted her eyes from their lovemaking. Then she knew what happened next.
He awoke in Hawke's bed empty and angry and cold, and every inch of the goodness he had briefly known is utterly gone. He is hateful and bitter again, and undeserving of the woman in his arms.
He can't remember it. It's all gone.
He thought he knew who he was and where he had come from, and saw the man he could be. But it was all an illusion. A cruel joke. There was no old self inside him, no innocent and deserving person. He was still empty and lost. All he had seen was what he is no longer and will never be again.
Fenris pulled away from Hawke and dressed himself and paced beside the fire.
All of their happiness had turned into shame. He knew, in a factual sense, what they had done together was pleasurable, but his body remembered it differently. He had the same sick feeling he had always had when his body had been used. He tried to think of only Hawke but he remembered everyone else instead. His master, the magisters. Nameless faces he had tried to blot out of his mind and never think on again. It was all coming back, and vividly. The sensations smeared together in his mind and became disgusting, and it was awful to think of Hawke and think of those things at the same time. All of the things that he had done, that had been done with him. He wasn't even taken against his will. He had no will then. It was what he was for. What he still is.
He had been fooling himself. He was not a free man who could love a woman such as Hawke. He was an imitation of a person, a tool to be used by others, and that was not what Hawke deserved. What he did here was wrong. If Hawke had known what he was she would never have allowed him to touch her. She didn't see a worthy man inside him, not truly. He had fooled her too.
He couldn't do this. He couldn't love her, he wasn't capable. He didn't have anything inside him that was deserving of her.
When she awoke it was so much worse. He couldn't explain. She clearly thought she had done something wrong, and there was nothing he could tell her. She made him remember loving and being loved and she has broken him. But it isn't her fault. It's his own fault. He should never have come.
He walked out on her, the only good thing that had ever happened to him and he walked away. He hadn't expected walking away to hurt so much, and all he could think of as he did it was her lovely voice saying "don't leave" the night before.
It was all he could think of for a very long time.
Things were moving faster now.
Merrill was in the Hanged Man, and there was Fenris's sister, and there was Danarius.
And all of Fenris's remaining hopes were utterly crushed.
The moment he saw his Master he was no one again. He was powerless, voiceless. All of his carefully constructed persona fell to pieces in an instant.
He fumbles for something to cling to and there was Hawke, coming up beside him, shouting at Danarius. She was angry. Both on his behalf, and for herself, and in a way she had never been before. Even Merrill was a little surprised. Hawke was not a vengeful person. But she wanted to hurt Danarius and she would enjoy doing it. She lashed out at the magister with everything she had.
It compelled Fenris to remember his own rage. The only thing original to himself.
No, it wasn't for Hawke to destroy this man. Revenge did not suit her. This was his task. His only task, his only remaining purpose.
The rest of the scene flew by in a blur – the fight, Danarius dying, Varania pleading for her life.
Merrill paused there a moment to hear Varania tear down any remaining illusions he might have had about his former life. He had chosen to become this. He had chosen, and it had been the wrong choice. It had all been for nothing. There was no family waiting for him with open arms. His "sister" despised him for doing it, and for what he had become.
There would be no other life for him than this. This misery. This despair.
Suddenly they were outside Hawke's manor again, standing in the street late at night, only this felt recent. Merrill could see Hawke through a window, and her hair was longer and she looked as lovely as ever, if a bit sad. This could have been a few months ago, or last week even.
Fenris stared through the window and took a drink from a bottle he had brought with him hoping to find courage in it, but now it was empty and he felt no different. He just felt drunk and pathetic and watching Hawke through a window would now qualify him as creepy as well.
He wanted to go to her more than anything else in the world, but he couldn't. He just couldn't.
Who knows how often he had tried it, standing outside her home like this, trying to find something in himself that he could share with her. For the last year he had devoted himself to finding his sister, in the hopes that it would bring something back to him. It had only smashed what little he had to hold onto. Even killing Danarius had changed nothing. He had hoped for so long that once he had eliminated his former master he would be truly free. That it would mean something. Change something in himself. Maybe without the man who had destroyed him he could become someone new.
It didn't happen. All of his hopes, dashed. No hope left. Nothing.
This scene didn't really end. In the dream, it went on and on.
But this was the end for Merrill.
She woke up in her home in the Alienage, the spell finished, and looked around her in disappointment.
Merrill finally understood.
He cannot be with her and he cannot be without her and she will not stop waiting for him. Years have gone by and she has taken no lover. She only watches him for a sign that they could be together again. She doesn't move on and he blames himself for this, knows he should leave Kirkwall and leave her to get on with her life but the thought of never seeing her again is unbearable.
This was the only way. He knew his death would hurt her. But she would recover. Losing him to a gang of thieves in the night, she will grieve and she will blame herself but she will get over it eventually. If he had simply cut his throat himself, that she would never forgive herself for. So it had to be this way.
And Merrill ruined it. She saved him and now he can't do it, two accidents would be too suspicious and Hawke is suspicious already. Now there is no way out.
Merrill sank her head into her hands, suddenly very aware of how very foolish she has been.
How arrogant of her, to think she could repair a lifetime of pain with one spell. That she could rebuild a person from the ground up in a single night. How in the world would she have done it, even if it had been possible? All of this was beyond her. Even seeing it with her own eyes, what happened to Fenris was something she couldn't possibly understand.
And what there was between Hawke and Fenris was even more unfathomable; in the face of it she felt like a foolish child. She had no idea what she was doing, she was only fumbling in the dark - only the dark was someone's very soul and she could have done irrevocable damage to it.
Merrill thought she would find a way to help him inside his dreams, inside the memories that plagued him. She expected a wound that she could heal, so that he could move on with his life. She had never expected, in all their interactions, that inside he was nearly nothing but wounds. He had carried with him the ghost of his master, the man who destroyed him, in his every word and deed. How could she possibly repair that? A hurt so deeply imprinted on his soul that it was part of him? What was she thinking?
The only person who could save Fenris was himself, and it was going to take a very long time. And she had invaded his most private being for nothing, in her arrogance.
This had always been her folly, the belief that she could fix everything herself. The mirror, the old ways, the whole history of the elves - she had truly believed that she could save them all. She, Merrill, who could barely walk through a door without tripping over the threshold. The Keeper had always tried to tell her and she had never wanted to listen. It was never going to be her. She wasn't the savior of anybody. She couldn't even save herself.
She could only pray that her dream-walking had not made anything worse for Fenris and Hawke.