Chapter Text
I.
“When the moon is down and the hour is none.” – Stephen King, Lisey’s Story
When the moon is down and the hours is none Anders rises from the blood-soaked ground and turns his face toward the Gallows where smoke billows and muffled whumps – explosions wrought by either magic or alchemy – make their way across the harbor to the city proper.
Anders stands staring blankly across the harbor. He should feel something, some sense of anger or excitement or fear… something. All he feels is empty. Justice’s last words haunt him from the time (the hour is none) when they existed somewhere in the non-existence where they were neither on this side of the Veil nor the other, I see it. That’s all. I see it, a flare of hope, then the Veil took Justice from him and thrust Anders back into the body they had shared for more than a decade.
His absence leaves Anders empty, and it’s only now that he realizes how much of who he had become was because of Justice, or because of Vengeance.
Why is he even alive when he can still feel the ache of a wound in his back that he didn’t heal? He’s done what he planned – or what Vengeance planned, the distinction is moot. He’s sacrificed everything, every connection, every tie, every friend, even his own life, and what does he have to show for it?
Nothing. He has nothing.
The whumps come more slowly now, like a violent storm that is moving on, letting the slowly emerging sun pick out the wreckage it leaves in its wake. Even so, on the horizon is the fleeting flare of lightning and (one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, wait and listen until it comes) the ever more distant rumble of thunder.
Anders stands there, watching the Gallows long after all sounds of strife fade into (nothing, nothing left, nothing at all) the silence of a city dumbstruck by the precipice that has opened under its feet.
Anders leapt.
He leapt and the only flying he has done is the false flight of an endless free fall while he knows that the bottom still waits for him.
The bottom isn’t betraying his friends.
The bottom isn’t the sharp pain of a knife in his back.
The bottom isn’t knowing that the man he (loved him, loved him, wanted him every night, ached for him) respected has taken a path that just hours ago he would have found despicable. He has nothing left with which to despise.
The bottom isn’t on Kirkwall’s streets, when unthinking back-brained habit has his feet retracing familiar routes where more often than not the people he passes are bloody stains on the ground, and the few living souls he sees are wide-eyed and flinching.
He has a moment in Darktown when he thinks that he’s found the bottom, when he takes the last flight of stairs up to his clinic and sees the doors in splinters and the angry light of fire dancing inside the closest thing he’s had to a home that was his and his alone.
Distantly, he thinks this should be worthy of tears or anger or even fear, but he feels as hollow as a harvest gourd at midsummer. (Shake me and hear the rattle.)
He stays there at the top of the stairs and lets the visions of dancing flames and (how many people did I kill?) red light fill the empty space where his heart once beat.
It’s there that they find him, and at least for a moment he’s certain that he sees the bottom rushing up beneath him.
II.
He’s sitting with his back against the railing across from his clinic watching everything burn. He thinks with a distant kind of bemusement that it should hurt to watch his few possessions and a decade’s work go up in flames, but it doesn’t (a pillow, thrust into his hand as the templars take him away, her face twisted with the effort of not wailing until her son is out of sight, if not out of earshot) affect him in any way he can understand. There is something like black water filling the hollow where his soul used to be, and he thinks that perhaps there is pain under there waiting for the water to recede and expose it. Maybe the pain will drown down there and the place where he used to hold hope and hate, happiness and despair can just become a sunken graveyard of dead emotions.
He doesn’t know when he draws his knees up to his chest and hugs them any more than he knows how long he sits there in Darktown’s constant twilight, but he eventually (the hour is none) hears a sharp intake of breath and only has to shift his eyes to see a pair of bare feet with leather-stirruped armor nearly painted onto strong legs.
He thinks that his deliverance from this life has come, which he knows is a foolish thought, because when does he ever see Fenris that he is far from (behind him, offering hope only to take it back before the bite of the blade) Hawke? What if Hawke decides that killing him once has taken all the mercy he had left for Anders?
He sees the top of Hawke’s head first as he ascends the stairs and then his golden eyes are on Anders; for a moment, they widen in surprise before they narrow in displeasure.
“Hawke.” Varric’s voice, cautioning but tentative, as though he has seen things from the Champion that may never be told in tavern stories.
Hawke ignores whatever prudent counsel Varric might offer. He’s up the steps and standing over Anders in the space of an indrawn breath.
Anders cranes his head back to look up at the man who turned on his own family to side with the templars. Even now he can’t summon the righteous fury that should be there when he pictures Hawke accepting Meredith’s praise after he helps her kill every mage in her charge, even his own sister.
There’s a plink of a falling droplet of sorrow into the dark well over his feelings, but the ripples still almost before they form.
Hawke holds in him his cold gaze and waits, but Anders can wait better than Hawke now because he has nothing left to push him to speak or move or care. If he couldn’t still feel his magic waiting to come to his call and the submerged threat of emotion, he would think the day’s trials had left him Tranquil.
Hawke finally stirs himself and looks back at the still-burning clinic. “Did you do that?”
No. But Anders isn’t sure if he says it aloud.
He thinks he must not have, because Hawke’s cold eyes turn into a heated blaze of fury as he leans down and hauls him up off the floor by the front of his coat to snarl, “Did you do it?”
Now Anders feels the faintest zephyr of curiosity flit across his calm waters. Why would Hawke care? Aren’t there plenty of other fires in Kirkwall that might be more important than the one in a trashed Darktown clinic?
It isn’t enough to stir him to speak.
“He is broken,” Fenris says, speaking for the first time. “I have seen this…” He hesitates but finishes, “…in Minrathous. In slaves.”
Hawke turns his hot glare on Fenris, “How do you fix it?”
Again, that breath of curiosity. Why does Hawke care?
Fenris’ answer has a vinegar bite that Anders recognizes from the occasions when he speaks of his time as a slave. “I did not have a master who cared enough to try.”
The next he knows, Anders is stumbling and falling to the floor at Fenris’ feet, thrown there by Hawke.
“You’re the closest I have to an expert,” Hawke says, already striding past to go down the stairs. “Bring him back enough to answer questions. If he’s burned all his books, he’s the next best thing.”
Ripples spread from under the dark water, but whatever stirs in the depths does not come near enough to the surface for Anders to identify.
III.
Hawke leaves them with only a final caution, "Tell no one Anders is alive," and then he is gone without a backward glance, striding through Darktown radiating such barely contained rage that no one dares speak to him.
Varric gives Fenris a helpless shrug. "You got this?"
Fenris only sounds resigned and weary. "It seems I have no choice in the matter."
Anders can't read the look the two men share over his head. He doesn't know if he would have understood it in the past when he wasn't just a hollow man, but the question doesn't trouble him. He looks at Fenris' feet instead and almost incuriously notes that the tops are not marked with lyrium. He has wondered before about the extent of Fenris' markings, but only in passing. Too much of his mind has been reserved for (the cause) his own concerns (self-destructive nights spent aching for what could never be) and his efforts for others.
Fenris bends to pull him up off the ground while Varric trots off in Hawke's wake. "Follow me," he says as though speaking to a dog or well-behaved horse. "Do you understand?"
Anders does, but his tongue is lead in his mouth. He only holds Fenris' gaze and thinks (new growth in spring) green thoughts for green eyes.
"Pfaugh." Fenris grabs his arm in a painful grip and pulls him, stumbling, away from the ashes of his old life.
He notices little on the trip from Darktown to Fenris' home in Hightown. He stands passively at one point when they encounter a rage demon digging in the remains of a man in guardsman's armor. He lends no aid while Fenris fights the demon and cuts through the shades the creature pulls through the tissue-thin Veil for backup. He does not hear his own soft gasp when Fenris reels back from a pair of shades with blood welling from deep gashes across his side.
Fenris summons some final reserves to cleave through the shades and leap into the air with his sword held high over his head to impale the rage demon before he falls to his knees, one hand clasped to the wounds over his ribs. "Anders."
Anders takes a few steps forward, drawn by habit at the sight of a wounded comrade.
"Anders," Fenris says again, and holds a bloodied hand up to him. "Heal me"
This he can do. This he knows how to do. He reaches out and takes Fenris' hand, lets his magic flow out of his connection with the Fade and into Fenris. He feels it racing through Fenris' body, traveling the lyrium pathways at a speed that outstrips even thought and reverberates through both of them before it pulls back, bringing with it Fenris' wounds and Fenris' pain, and for a fleeting moment, Anders feels again. Then the magic is gone, Fenris is healed, and Anders is on his knees beside Fenris, oblivious to the tears streaking down his dirty cheeks.
IV.
Fenris pulls his hand out of Anders' hold and stands while Anders stays where he has dropped. When he looks up, he sees curiosity in the tilt of Fenris' head and the frank stare with which he is pinned. He thinks that must be what he is now - a (monster) curiosity. He is the thing that sparked the tinder that will set the fire (don't they deserve justice too?) that will start a war, and while he remembers his reasons, he cannot summon the feverish conviction that drove his actions.
He cannot even give himself a reason to rise from the ground until Fenris says "Get up."
He finds his feet then and follows when Fenris says to follow him. He thinks that before he was a hand puppet, manipulated from inside, and now he is a marionette. It's easier this way anyway, to put his marionette strings in someone else's hands and let them dance him along, rather than find the will to move himself. He's used to it (and empty now), and if Fenris uses him, perhaps it will expiate some of what he wrought with Vengeance.
He will let Fenris hold his strings, because Fenris will not let him misuse the Maker’s gifts again.
Not Hawke. (Did he kill her himself? Did he put a dagger wet with Anders’ blood into his sister’s heart?)
They are in Hightown when that thought strikes him, the image coming to him of Bethany’s dark hair and wide eyes growing even wider as her brother betrays not just all mages in general, but his own sister in particular.
The surface tension breaks and the first real emotion he has felt since waking explodes in his chest. It is caustic and (make it stop!) furious and his steps falter and stop while he sways on his feet with the force of rage and pain and a sense of betrayal on the behalf of all mages that boils away some of his heavy layers of calm.
He is keening without hearing it, he is not seeing the city street or Fenris turning with concern writ large on his face, he is not thinking of who or what he might attract with his escalating, grief-stricken, rage-stricken cry. Where he had been nothing moments before, now he is only a red beam lancing into the sky ready to—
Fenris slaps him. It isn’t hard or meant to harm, but the jolt startles him, and his wail is cut off by his indrawn breath.
“You will not do this,” Fenris snarls in the moment of Anders’ sudden silence. His eyes do not actually change color, but his heavy frown seems to shadow them, turning them from the green of new growth to a dark, secret green of damp moss in hidden places. He latches on to Anders’ upper arm and shakes him. “Do you understand?”
The keening is gone and the rage is receding, if not the pain. Its departure leaves room for another emotion on the lifeless shores of Anders’ dark lake. It struggles to the surface, half-drowned but there – gratitude.
Fenris shakes him again. “You will walk with me to my home in silence. Do you understand?”
This time Anders nods, and that seems to satisfy Fenris. “Good.”
They travel the rest of the way in the silence Fenris demanded, and his grip on Anders’ arm is a lifeline while the rage slips back under the lifeless waters and the simple sense of gratitude struggles not to sink back along with it.
Once inside Fenris’ mansion, he is released, and Fenris stalks away up the stairs. He can stay in the foyer with its corpses and mushrooms, but Fenris turns halfway up the stairs and scowls to see that Anders is still (haunting) standing in the entry room.
“Don’t just stand there,” he says impatiently. “Come upstairs.”
V.
Has he ever really given Fenris’ home his full attention before? Every time he came here, it was with (hope and need and failure) Hawke, and there were always other things to think of – his needs, Hawke’s wants, people to help, people to hurt, and (red thoughts, blood thoughts, rage thoughts, put them down!) sela petrae and drakestone.
Why would he have cared about the conditions in which one mage-hating elf lived?
He sees the mansion with new eyes because he has left the distractions behind. He sees the bodies and the mushrooms and the debris and decay. He sees the one room Fenris has claimed as his own with piled books and empty wine bottles, its fireplace and lute and shattered windows and littered floor. He might fit here.
He is thinking his (broken) thoughts of broken things when Fenris snatches him by the coat and shoves him back against the wall. It’s so fast, so unexpected that the spin leaves him dizzied, or perhaps it’s the sight of Fenris inches away from him with lyrium light blazing through even his gauntlets and metal breastplate that shatters his fragile equilibrium.
He’s gasping for air and he doesn’t know why. Fenris’ grip isn’t painful, he didn’t hit the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of him, and he doesn’t (I’m afraid) feel anything but faintly curious and confused.
“Where is it?” Fenris’ breath is sour. Dehydration and exertion smell like this – sour and dry and more sour the more dry it gets. He should rest, Anders thinks distantly. He should rest and have water and—
Fenris shakes him and his head knocks back against the wall with a rap that he almost expects to hear echo in his empty skull.
“Where?” Fenris asks again, harshly. “Where is the demon?”
Which one? Anders thinks. Kirkwall has no shortage of demons, both the kind that are spawned on the other side of the Veil and the ones that are nurtured in mortal hearts. Which demon?
Fenris puts a hand over Anders heart and pushes.
If he never feels that sick sense of violation again, he will still remember it until he dies a final death. His flesh and bone don’t part under the shove, they make room where no room should exist, as though Fenris’ gauntleted fingers slip through the interstices like water through piles of pebbles, finding the empty places without moving the solid objects that are already there.
Fenris’ fingers flow through his chest and wrap his heart and Anders feels something.
Pain.
His body stiffens to prepare for flight until those fingers tighten and his vision greys along the edges. He is a mouse in the cat’s teeth, going limp in the hope that the cat will grow bored and either eat him quickly or move on to livelier prey.
The grip loosens, but now Fenris’ words hold a cutting edge that promises more pain. “Where,” he spits each word out as though it tastes foul to him, “Is. Justice?”
(Nowhere.)
He finds his tongue because he must, and because the one word is an answer and a cry of grief and a plea for mercy and a request for an end to everything, even his life. “Gone!”
Fenris searches his face and sees something (looking at him over a hand of cards before raising the stakes) that must make him believe Anders’ answer, because in the next moment the fingers are gone, the hand holding his coat is gone, and Anders sinks to the floor to curl around his chest where Fenris has left his heart to limp from the next beat to the next, miraculously whole for something so fundamentally destroyed.
Fenris snarls something under his breath and stalks out of the room, leaving him alone with the sound of distant shouts borne on chill breezes that whip through broken windows and holes in the roof.
When Fenris returns, it is to drop a bundle of cloth on the floor within Anders’ reach. “You’ll bathe and change into these. Bring that with you and follow me.”
VI.
Anders picks up the bundle and a faint scent of dust, cedar, and lavender touches memories (an accidental touch that is no accident standing side by side at an alchemist’s workbench) he doesn’t remember making. They are domestic memories, homey memories and he does not want them, but Fenris is looming over him and his expectation is palpable. He meets Anders’ gaze and curls the fingers of his right hand at his side. “Do it.”
He has to push himself up against the wall, reversing his slide down into the self-protective curl he found after Fenris released him, but those fingers beckon and Fenris’ will pushes, and there is no fight left in him that isn’t going under after another desperate gasp for life at the surface of his black lake.
Fenris nods. (Approval like a balm on a burn.) “This way.”
If he held expectations, he would not expect where Fenris leads him, but he is an empty vessel and the sight that greets him fills him with a blue-lit wonder.
The room under the mansion holds not just one, but two spring-fed pools. Torchlight casts dancing reflections on tile mosaics of ocean waves and fantastical fishes in the walls and ceiling. The larger of the two pools would be suitable for swimming while the smaller pool that it feeds into is large enough for a man Anders’ size to float in with arms and legs outstretched only just touching the smooth marble edges.
Fenris turns away from him to methodically strip away his armor, saying over his shoulder. “I don’t care where you do it, but you’re bathing before you sleep under my roof.”
He can smell Fenris when he peels his armor off his body; it strikes jangling notes of stale sweat and fierce exertion, smoke and blood, desperation and determination. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but if he focuses on that, he can leave higher thought behind. It makes Anders lift his head, eyelids dropping closed, nostrils flaring to sift through the disparate odors.
The sound of Fenris slipping into the smaller pool doesn’t jolt him from his reverie, but he loses the scents under the stronger odor of mineral-rich water, not salty, but still heavy.
“Anders.”
Fenris is in the water up to his shoulders. Anders can just tell that he is naked, but the uneven torchlight and dancing reflections clothe his skin in shifting silver and blue like trickles of a spilled lyrium potion on a heat-hazed stone that deceive his eyes as to what is reflection and what is truly lyrium in Fenris' flesh.
“Get in.” Fenris raises a dripping, silver-etched arm to point to dishes laid at intervals on the edges of both pools. “There’s soap there. Use it and be quick. The water is cold.”
To tell the truth of it, Fenris shivers convulsively before setting his teeth and ducking under the water to wet his hair, coming up with a hissed inhalation and lips gone blue.
Anders shivers with him. It will take more than one dip for Fenris to wash away the (never wash away the blood) the filth and stink of the day’s fighting. He sets the cedar-scented clothes by the door and moves to the smaller pool’s edge.
“What are you doing?” Fenris sounds more exasperated than curious. “I don’t think you’re so addled that—”
Anders kneels at the pool’s edge and thrusts his hands into the water. He knows what it is to be cold, even colder than this water that must flow down to Kirkwall from icy springs. He knows and he takes that cold into himself, pushing it down into the cold that he has embraced at his core, balancing it with heat he draws from the Fade (two sides of a coin) and pours out into the water until Fenris clamps a hand on his wrist and snarls, “No!”
He stops, but it’s already too late. His arms and sleeves are soaked up to the elbow in water warm enough to soak the pain out of sore muscles and wash away the reminders of (slaughter) the day’s horrors.
He is passive in Fenris’ grip, waiting in the liar’s light reflected off the water.
VII.
Fenris is angry, that much is easy to see, his lips press thin while his cheeks flush red, but Anders doesn’t do what he used to do. He doesn’t prod Fenris to see him snap and bite, because he is long past the time, the mind, the will to be jealous of Fenris for getting (the knife) any of Hawke’s attention. He also knows he can stay there all… night? Day? He can’t remember if there was sun or stars behind the pall over the city (the hour is none) and in this windowless bathing chamber, he has no reference. He is exhausted, but that is as much an exhaustion of the soul as of the body.
He waits and offers no challenge to Fenris’ anger, though a distant, calculating part of his mind pushes a thought out into the hollow chamber where other thoughts used to gather – Fenris could deliver him from living like this; it would only take one small act of defiance, one flicker of magic raised to push the elf from anger to murderous rage.
One act of defiance. (The strike of a staff on flagstones, once, twice…)
He closes his eyes and moans, long and low, feeling the surge of self-hatred like bile in his throat, a cold burn like bare skin pressed too long against ice, a scream caught behind the mass that gathers behind his sternum as he realizes that he has not learned from what he wrought if he can allow his thoughts to turn to using someone to his own ends like that again.
The numbness was better.
Fenris releases him so abruptly that he falls and catches himself on his left elbow, his right hand reflexively casts out for some purchase that will keep him from falling face first into the water. He can’t think of hating himself because he is teetering and (blood spreading from him like steeping tea) Fenris will not want him in the small warm pool.
He is flailing and he is falling and there are firm hands on his shoulders, bearing him up, pushing him back, and Fenris (armored in lyrium even nude) is right there to keep him from falling. Right there and again Anders can smell the sour dryness of fatigue and dehydration on his breath. Fenris holds him there on the brink of falling and says, “No magic unless I allow it.”
Anders says nothing. His knees protest being forced to bear most of his weight on the unyielding tiles, but he is distanced from caring about the pain again, just as he wants to be.
Fenris is not satisfied with his silence. This close Anders can see his pupils dilate and his nostrils flare before Fenris pushes him, a hard shove that rocks him back upright on his knees away from the pool’s edge.
“You stink,” (carrion, charnal house reek, a dead thing without the sense to die) Fenris says. “If you’re going to listen, you can join me here. If you want to argue, you can get in the other pool.”
Anders doesn’t want to argue. Now that the spasm of madness has passed (it hasn’t passed, not at all) he doesn’t want anything. Fenris’ want wins by default. He sits back on his heels and unclasps his coat while Fenris sinks back under the water to his neck and backs away to the far side of the smaller pool to watch him warily.
His coat and shirt are glued to his back with dried blood, although with less blood than someone unfamiliar with quick death might expect. Hawke’s knife ended his life too quickly for his heart to pump profligate amounts of blood out of the wound, but there is enough that he has to peel his clothes off his upper body with a sound that reminds him of the time he fell asleep with his shirt off on a hot day. He had been on the run and too tired to wake while he burned until he blistered. The subtle hiss his skin made when it peeled away in the following days is the sound of his shirt peeling off his skin now.
He drops his clothes to the floor in a stinking, bloodied pile and slides into the warm water in the small pool. He will not fight Fenris’ wishes. On the contrary, he has pinned his fragile hope of (an end) expiation for his crimes on the elf who hates mages.
VIII.
Fenris watches him until he is in the water before he takes a ball of soap from one of the dishes around the pool’s edge and holds it out for Anders. “Take it. Use it.”
The soap is heavy in his hand, but Fenris doesn’t wait to see if he uses it. He’s turning away to take a rough sponge from another dish to scrub his hands first, where the blood is dense under his nails and creased into his palms. Anders watches because he has never before thought of Fenris as a person who has to bathe away the blood and sweat and pain. He hasn’t wanted to think of him as a person at all before because Hawke (the pain is still a surprise) always seemed to favor Fenris with his gifts and his time. Fenris gets a book; Anders gets an amulet that could get him killed. Fenris gets reading lessons, alone with Hawke; Anders gets….
(Sela petrae and drakestone. He knew. He knew, he knew, he knew!)
The soap slips from numb fingers and makes no sound when it tumbles slowly out of Anders’ sight under the water. He feels it bump against his foot before it rolls away.
He’s so cold inside that he more than half-expects the water to freeze solid around them, locking him and Fenris in an icy embrace. He won’t make a sound this time, he tells himself. He can’t, but he’s putting patterns together that he had been too focused, too blind to see before. Hawke questioned him about the ingredients for the bomb, and challenged his lie, but then helped him anyway. Hawke helped distract Elthina without protest and he…
(Anders, what did you do? But with his back to the others, his face said…)
“He knew.”
He doesn’t realize he’s said it aloud until Fenris stops scrubbing his hand and raises his eyes to look at him. “What?”
Those two words should be a scream. They should inspire rage or horror because Hawke knew what Anders was doing, enabled his efforts, and (the pain is still a surprise) chose the Chantry’s side when all was said and done.
He knew.
His legs will not hold him. His weight has doubled, tripled, the world is on his shoulders pushing him down and he is sinking into the warm water until it covers his chest, his shoulders, his chin, his mouth (will not scream!) his nose, and finally he’s submerged in all ways.
He stays under the water, shivering despite its warmth, until his lungs start to burn. He lets the air out in an explosion of bubbles and stays under, hugging himself for cold comfort. He knows instinct will not let him drown so easily, but he cannot face what he has finally seen in the cold light of truth.
Fenris takes the choice away, hauling him up with hands in his armpits until Anders gasps in a deep breath of air and releases his tight hold on himself to throw his arms around Fenris’ shoulders. They have been used, betrayed, all of them, and the sheer horror of it drives his words away and impels him to cling to Fenris even while Fenris stiffens and flashes lyrium-bright in response to Anders’ effrontery.
He doesn’t care that they are naked or that Fenris is caught between anger and embarrassment while Anders stifles a cry against his shoulder before the pain boils out of his black lake and bursts from him in wracking sobs.
He weeps until he is weak from it, arms and legs leaden in water that feels as thick as old oatmeal, and somewhere in the storm of it, Fenris loses some of his stiffness and pulls Anders to the side of the pool where he can pull him down onto a stone bench built under the water. They sit there, Fenris still straight-backed and staring past Anders’ shoulder; Anders, legs drawn up to curl on Fenris’ lap in a way that wouldn’t have been comfortable for either of them if he weren’t buoyed by the water, and the storm slowly passes.
When it does, it’s as though he has cried out a large portion of the black lake in his soul and he can feel again for now; the lake is fed by a wellspring of pain and anger, and it will be all too easy to go under again.
He’s still hiccupping with sobs that think they’ve found a permanent home when he raises his head from Fenris’ shoulder and whispers, “Hawke knew. He could have stopped me, and he didn’t.”
IX.
Fenris’ breath catches and Anders waits for a blow or a shove or even a denial. He waits for Fenris’ anger. Hawke is not a mage, he is the man who saved the city from the Qunari, who lost his mother to a mad mage, who has stood on the side of the law if not always on the side of right. He is the man who helped Fenris win his lasting freedom from a magister’s yoke.
He expects Fenris to tell him that Hawke is flawed, but unlike Anders, he is not a monster.
Fenris says no such thing, only sits in the eerie waterlight that bears so much similarity to his lyrium glow, and looks past Anders at something only he sees. Anders has seen this expression on his face one time before – when Danarius confronted him in the Hanged Man – and he wonders what Fenris saw Hawke do. Was it something in the Gallows while Anders lay dead?
(After Bartrand and Varania, why not Bethany as well? Hawke never balked at fratricide. Was he cruel to her?)
Anders has broken his silence only painfully and has no difficulty waiting for Fenris to react. Slowly his hiccups taper down to silence. The water is cooling quickly as it rises to spill over the lip of a drain set below the pool’s edge, displaced by fresh, cold water that feeds in from an opening on the opposite side of the bathing pool. Anders’ thoughts are still sluggish from lingering shock and pain, and he still feels half a man with Justice gone. He thinks that his skin should hang in folds to indicate on the outside how little is left on the inside.
Finally Fenris stirs himself to lift Anders off his lap as easily as he might ordinarily shift an importunate, clinging child. Anders wants something to cling to, but he raises no protest, settling where Fenris puts him on another piece of bench.
Fenris slides off the seat and stands, looking down at Anders with water streaming down his chest, shoulders, and arms, and even now Anders can feel a faint stir of admiration for such beauty. He shouldn’t think it, but he can’t help but see that the patterns Danarius laid into his skin are designed as much for beauty as for utility.
“Are you going to ask where I’m going?” Fenris asks. “What I’m doing?”
Anders shakes his head. If he asks, he might have to have an opinion, might have to act, might have to feel, and he has had enough of all of that for at least this... night? Day?
Down here the moon is down and the hour is none. All he wants is to let someone else care, act, and feel for him.
Fenris shows no surprise. Anders would think he looks serene, but his brows are still drawn down, darkening his eyes. For the first time, Anders thinks that Fenris must be at least as exhausted as he is.
“I think you would let me tell you to jump off my roof and you would do it,” Fenris says in a low, musing tone before he picks up his forgotten sponge and soap. “Wouldn’t you?”
Anders thinks No. Then he thinks, Yes. Then he thinks, No, but I’d go up there and let you push me. But it’s all too complicated to explain, much easier to just look up at Fenris waiting for a question he can answer more readily.
Fenris’ already dark eyes grow darker as his eyebrows pull down even further. He looks fierce and frightening and Anders shrinks back, more than half-expecting that horrible violation in his chest before Fenris finishes the job he started earlier and crushes his heart.
Fenris looks bleakly at the soap and sponge in his hands before his lips turns up at the corners in what is mechanically a smile, if a smile were nothing more than muscles moving thus and so. It isn’t a smile; it is a snarl in smile’s clothing.
“You would,” he says, answering for Anders. “You would and I won’t. Why are you alive?”
He changes subjects so abruptly that Anders can only stare.
Bubbles well up out of the sponge’s craters as Fenris’ hand closes in a fist. “Why are you alive?”
Anders shakes his head.
Fenris nods and relaxes his grip. “Nor do I,” he says as though Anders had said, I don’t know. “But it seems you and your life are mine now.”
He throws the sponge at Anders, bouncing it off his chest when he doesn’t get his hands up in time. “Finish. We’ll sleep and tomorrow I want to talk to Varric.”
X.
Even the task of getting clean (some stains never come out) daunts Anders, but he has direction from Fenris and habit to guide him. The sponge is harsh and leaves his skin feeling naked and vulnerable as it scrubs away layers of grime, but it’s his back where the (if I touch it I’ll scream) blood has dried like paint on a wall, applied too thick to leave a heavy texture in places.
The water will not just soak it away, it must be scrubbed, and Anders has neither the heart nor the flexibility to reach it all.
Fenris’ disgusted grunt and the shuddering roll of the water with his motion draws Anders’ attention away from his halfhearted attempts to wash away the (memories) blood. Fenris takes the sponge from Anders’ unresisting fingers and gestures with it. “Turn around.”
At first Fenris only uses the sponge, roughly scrubbing away the blood that has painted a blotch on (his soul) Anders’ skin. He jumps at the heavy sound of the sponge hitting the water and jumps again when rough fingertips draw what feels like a circle on his back. He knows that Fenris is circling the point where Hawke’s knife thrust into him and is forced to consider what he has shied from thinking of – what must his back look like? If Fenris can see it to circle it, there must be a mark.
He can’t bring himself to ask and doesn’t thank Fenris for telling him. “It’s black,” Fenris murmurs, still only tracing the periphery of the mark. “A black scar.” Fenris touches an old scar across Anders’ shoulder (childer grub, nightmare creature, man-maggot-spider) and says, “This is normal. This is n—” His fingers brush the black scar and Anders’ knees buckle.
(The pain of the wound is not the knife, it’s the pain of murdered hope. How could Hawke allow him to hope that he could fight for his cause and only then push the knife? He hears his own surprised sigh before the world shifts and he is falling, blood heavy in his chest where it spills from his broken heart.)
Fenris holds him up with a strong arm around his chest until the searing memory goes back into hiding.
“What happened?”
(Everything. Nothing.)
He doesn’t know how to answer, but he knows that he never wants Fenris to touch him there again. He shakes his head and manages to say, “Please.”
Please what? Please don’t touch me there. Please hold me up. Please give me a reason to live. Please help me understand
All that and none. Please is enough. He has little to offer to a man who abhors magic in exchange for what he needs, but (you and your life are mine) he knows he will freely give anything, even when all he has to give is…
He turns in Fenris’ hold and registers the dark shadows leaving his (green can be hope or rot) eyes as his brows raise in shock before Anders’ lips are against his.
(Help me. Keep me. Remember that I am yours.)
He has time to grow cold when Fenris’ lips stay pressed together, his body stiff and uninviting (a mistake). He has time to regret (fool!) and pull away before Fenris raises his free hand and catches Anders’ hair in a hold that keeps their faces only inches apart.
“What are you doing?” Fenris asks, sounding so detached that Anders is certain that he has made a mistake, until he feels the stir of blood slowly swelling Fenris’ cock (salt and iron on his tongue) against his thigh.
His mouth is dry with need and anticipation and fear, and eloquence is a lifetime behind him. All he can say to explain it all is, “Please.”
“Please.” Fenris says it as though he has never heard the word before, rolling it around in his mouth like the finest of wines. He must like the flavor of it because that stirring against Anders’ thigh continues until his cock is a hard line against his flesh.
“You will do as I tell you?” he asks, but hasn’t Anders already shown that he will?
Anders nods, feeling the pull of Fenris’ grip in his hair.
“And if I turn you away?” Fenris asks, but his hips cant forward and Anders can feel that he doesn’t want that.
“Please,” he says to answer the question.
Fenris’ fingers tighten in his hair until Anders gasps, but he holds himself still and his compliance seems to satisfy something in Fenris because he steals that gasp away with his mouth hard over Anders’ mouth.