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i.
Her halo is a strong one, and his is flickering and pale, unfit for a faith as all-consuming as his. He wonders, occasionally, why that is - he always comes down to the same answer. His vices are too great, his mind too rash; his soul is too young, still, even after all these years. The Maker has never been known for easy forgiveness, and His servants know that best.
And still, Sebastian wonders, and laments, and repents. He is not to question, he is not to ask.
That is all he wants to do.
Elthina, with her halo strong and bright as the sun, tells him that he needs to be patient. She might as well tell him to banish his lilting accent once and for all, to learn how softly consonants can be whispered and how they shouldn't click against his teeth as he says them. He tries so hard, but his tongue doesn't listen to him, because he suspects that the sharp edges make his voice all the softer, and he is fond of them. It is the same with his impatience, he fears - he cannot stop because he doesn't truly want to, because nobody thinks pillows are as soft as kittens and their sharp claws, jutting bones.
Then he tries to stop thinking like that.
Meeting Hawke does not make it easier. If anything, it is more difficult to keep himself in check.
It is a matter of circumstances as well. With his shock over the death of his always so distant family barely subsided and his white-hot anger like a metal band around his heart, he is easy prey for people who wish to divert him from his course. Or, at least that is what Grand Cleric Elthina tells him, and with his birth family gone she is the only parent he has left. He is not about to question her, not in this. He owes her that much after his unbecoming hissy fit at the Chanter's board.
Though his heart aches to follow, he doesn't, just thanks him, and the dwarf, and the Dalish, and the Rivaini pirate who tries to make him blush.
He hates it that he doesn't, even when she leaves and her hips sway from side to side. It is like a wound that cannot be healed, a permanent injury of having seen too much, of having lost the innocence Maker had granted him.
Not for the first time, he wonders if he's fit to be a Brother at all, or if these are all signs that are meant to urge him to leave.
When he asks Elthina about it, she shakes her head and strands of her graying hair slip out of the bun she has gathered them in.
"You see signs because you want to." She looks hurt, and Sebastian finds himself wishing he hadn't said anything. More so when she continues with: "I always knew I could not hold you safe. It's the man who visited you, isn't it?"
"I barely know who he was," Sebastian says, and tries to not make his anger so apparent. Why catch the poor man in this? Why he cares, he does not know yet. But Elthina seems to: her face hardens.
"And yet, you defend him. And, Sebastian, did you know the people who you let have you?"
"He is no one," Sebastian says, voice a little too high-pitched to be convincingly neutral. Words click against his teeth like knives, like the so very roguish protection he still carries everywhere. "He killed those people, and I paid him. He is a mercenary, nothing more."
The Grand Cleric throws her hands up, turns around.
"It is useless to talk about this if you will keep bringing up those poor souls. Go and calm down." And then she is walking away.
ii.
But Hawke comes back for him, and his smile looks different. More at peace, Elthina says. Haunted, Sebastian thinks. It is something in the way his mouth stretches wider but the skin around his eyes tightens into thin lines.
Sebastian follows him.
He finds that saying Hawke's name is easy. It sounds soft, softer than what surrounds it. It makes Sebastian feel soft as well, like a touch of a feather. A breath against a lover's cheek.
And that is what the problem is, he thinks when Elthina only grants him a worried glare in the evenings when he has followed Hawke into whatever the man wishes him to. He is still soft in the wrong way, in the wrong places. In his ridiculous heart instead of his scarred hands.
"He cannot love you like we can," Elthina says one evening, and Sebastian stiffens. "I know his kind. He will take you, and play with you for a while. And then he will leave you like a kitten that grew into a cat and stopped being whimsical."
Sebastian thinks of Hawke's full-grown mabari, whom the man has dubbed The Bark Lord and with whom he frequently wrestles all over the floor of his estate, and then thinks of the cats Anders tries to attract with milk and catnip and bread crumbs, and then of the birds that Merrill loves to feed.
Thinks of the cat that had lived in the Chantry until it had become old and stopped catching mice. Thinks of how he had tried to make them let it spend its retirement days safe in the building. How Sister Petrice had made her templar friend drown it, saying that it was better it died quickly.
iii.
Hawke’s friend doesn’t like him. He first thinks it’s because they are both archers, and since Hawke has started taking him along Varric stays behind more often. Then the word “boring” comes up, and Sebastian understands.
“Good,” Elthina says when he mentions Varric’s disposition towards him. “The Maker loves exactly the kind of people that liars and gamblers hate.” So he doesn’t even try to be whatever Varric considers interesting, just smiles and bears every insult thrown at him, even when it seems to make everyone think of him as a martyr of a kind. Dampens his temperament, even when it feels like he might explode if he doesn’t say something.
Eventually Hawke seems to realize that he is not going to defend himself.
“Why do you let Varric snipe at you like that, Sebastian?”
Hawke’s voice is quiet, and nobody else hears it, Sebastian is sure of that. He sits up straighter and smiles.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t do that,” Hawke says and looks down. “You make me feel like a horrible person for bringing you in this. I had no idea Varric would dislike you so much.”
Sebastian’s heart clenches and he grasps Hawke’s hand in a moment of impulsiveness. The man looks at him, startled, and he lets go, brings his hands close to his chest, like they burn, like they need to be contained better.
“It doesn’t hurt me as much as you think,” he says, and is skirting a fine, fine line between lying and playing with the truth. It is almost like gambling, he thinks, and feels his chest tighten in a way that is very familiar to him by now, that he has never been able to stop, that he had drunken away as a teenager and that he prays away now. Neither way has ever helped him.
But when Hawke lays his heavy hand on his shoulder and looks deep into his eyes, golden brown so dark in this light that it might well be black, the feeling lightens slightly.
“It does,” Hawke says, and he is too close, smelling of anything that is not the Chantry and its incense: alcohol, sweat, and always blood, just a slight undertone but still always there. “I know it does. And it doesn’t matter if it’s not as bad as I think it is. If it hurts, he shouldn’t do it.” He doesn’t turn his eyes away for a second, and Sebastian feels his breath coming easier.
“But he does,” he says, and smiles. “And he will not stop.”
Hawke looks down. Lets his hand down. Sebastian finds himself missing the comforting weight of it, the warmth that seeps onto his skin even through his coat.
“He doesn’t try to hurt you,” he says, and Sebastian feels compelled to trust him until he remembers how Varric smiles after every quip. “I guess he is just... used to people snapping right back whenever he does that. Even with Carver...”
He closes his mouth. Sebastian doesn’t open his own. Carver is a name he has often heard, and one that seems to give pain to Hawke. He hasn’t asked, he will not ask. He doesn’t want to. He wants to keep Hawke happy.
“He just doesn’t know how to react when people take it instead of talking back. Why do you do it?”
The Maker loves exactly the kind of people that liars and gamblers hate, Sebastian thinks, but doesn’t say it, because he doesn’t know what ‘liars and gamblers’ means, exactly, and he is afraid it could mean Hawke as well.
Varric stops calling him boring.
iv.
The Hanged Man is not half as scary as everyone in the Chantry thinks it is, Sebastian thinks when Hawke takes him there and keeps him close all the while, like he might bolt away like a prey animal at any given opening. He doesn’t tell him of all the scarier taverns he has been to because he honestly likes it when he gets to be the Brother of the Chantry, something less and still more than Sebastian Vael, the plight of the Prince of Starkhaven and an indecisive bastard.
Hawke doesn’t drink much, he realizes, and neither does Fenris. It is unusual, he sees it in the eyes of their companions when they give confused looks to the three of them respectively: first Hawke, then Fenris, and then Sebastian. And then again, from Hawke to Fenris to Sebastian. And every time their eyes stay longer on him than either of the other two, and Sebastian realizes that he is the reason they don’t get drunk.
When he gets up to leave, eyes turn to him again, and Hawke stands.
“I’ll walk you there.”
“You do not need to,” Sebastian says fast, glances at Varric who is rolling his eyes and Isabela who looks like there is a whistle and a crude comment just behind her teeth, ready to be unleashed into the air.
“I’ll be heading home anyway,” Hawke says and bumps against him, shoulder to shoulder. “Come on. Mother wants me to be home early tonight.”
That is a lie, Sebastian thinks, and it is said in such a way that he isn’t sure if he should even call his tongue silver: no, it is gilded, and glazed with sugar. He thinks it might be because nobody expects anything but meekness from mages.
He smiles, and laughs, and pretends to buy the explanation.
“Come, then. No need to keep Mrs. Hawke waiting.”
They walk in comfortable silence, until they are at the estate door. There, Hawke turns to him.
"Stay with me for a while?"
The question comes out so softly that Sebastian is halfway through the door before his mind can catch up with what is happening.
"You look worried," Hawke says then, when they are in the kitchen, and he is lighting a candle. Sebastian feels useless, standing there in unfamiliar space.
"Not worried," he says slowly, tries to catch the 'r's before they roll off his tongue like pebbles. "Troubled, perhaps. Torn. I'm sure you already know that."
Hawke looks deep into his eyes, the honey-brown accentuated by the candlelight. Sebastian knows that his own eyes look dull in the yellow shine, but holds the gaze all the same, heart racing in his chest.
"Do you need to choose either?" Hawke asks, and his arm slips around Sebastian's waist.
"It is my duty," Sebastian answers, pretends not to notice the weight that makes him feel warm in ways he never has felt. "I cannot ignore it."
"The world will rotate even if you aren't there to urge it," Hawke says and takes a step, presses them both gently against the wall. "There is a Vael on the Starkhaven throne. The Chantry will do fine without one Brother. You don't need them to define your purpose, and you don't need purpose to be loved."
The word slips so easily off those chapped lips that Sebastian isn't sure if it was meant for him at all. ‘Loved’ is an unfamiliar concept, he thinks, and that it might have something to do with the arm now pulling him close enough to burn him.
Hawke's lips are parted, eyes fixed on Sebastian's mouth. It would require a life in the Chantry to not know what is about to happen - and Sebastian does not have that.
He stands there, waits passively for it. Hawke gives him a look of fear, and sadness, and pity, and something Sebastian doesn't recognize. His eyes slide shut and he leans in.
Sebastian doesn't move away. He lets himself be kissed. He wants to tell himself that it is because he is confused, to ignore the fluttering feeling in the bottom of his stomach as his lips part and his hands timidly come up to brush his thumb against Hawke's cheek just under his eye.
v.
Grand Cleric Elthina slaps him when he tells her what happened.
Or, no. She doesn't. She would never raise her hand against her children. But many words softly roll off her tongue.
Confused, she says first. Manipulated, used. Then it changes into childish, naive. Without purpose, lacking in compassion. Lonely, oh so lonely. She should've done more, she should've tried harder.
Sebastian tells her that it is not her fault.
She knows, she has done everything she can, and still not enough, and Sebastian is lost and can't find himself. Can't save himself. All her fault. All his fault for making her feel this way. Purposeless, never compassionate, lonely. In Sebastian's weak mind those words turn into others, those he has often told himself, ever since he ran for the final time and Elthina saved him.
When she mentions Maferath, he cannot hold his tears anymore.
She tells him to leave the building, to come back when he has regained control over his childish urges. He'd scream and cry if he wasn't so damn tired and drained, he'd beg her not to chase him away when he is at his weakest, all softness he has found and gathered under his tongue vanished in his emotional turmoil. Instead, he just walks away.
He staggers through Hightown on shaky legs, and ends up at Fenris' door.
"Sebastian!" The man looks horrified, as much as he ever does, and Sebastian realizes that his eyes must be red and his face even redder. He roughly wipes the worst of the tears off his face. "What has happened to you?"
"May I sleep here tonight?" Sebastian asks quickly, before he can regret it.
Fenris is a blessing, he thinks when no further questions are posed and the elf makes way for him to go past. A gift from the Maker, and then there is guilt again.
He takes the dusty armchair in the corner of a room in the back. Fenris would give him the bed, he knows that, but he doesn't want it. An armchair will do just fine for him.
"Why are you here?" Fenris asks when he brings him pillows and a blanket, all as covered in dust as Fenris himself sometimes seems to be.
"You're my best friend," Sebastian says. "I didn't know who else to ask."
Fenris raises his eyebrows at him, but says nothing about Hawke, or the Chantry.
"Sleep well, my friend," he simply bids.
"I will," Sebastian says. "I hope you do, as well."
Fenris doesn't smile. Shadows cling to his forehead.
"Better, since you're here."
He leaves Sebastian to wonder.
Sebastian is only half awake when he hears voices at the door. He is drowsy enough to miss most of the conversation, but alert enough to understand that they are talking about him.
He does try to get up, but he finds his muscles aching. He groans quietly, and the chatter stops.
"Sebastian!"
Because of course Fenris would go fetch Hawke at the earliest possible opportunity.
He forces himself to throw his feet onto the floor.
"Good morning," he says. Doesn't look up.
"Maker, Sebastian," Hawke sighs and kneels in front of the chair. "What happened?" He lays his hand on Sebastian's thigh, like it's the lightest thing. Like it's nothing.
To Sebastian it is heavy like an anvil, and its hammer. He flinches, and Hawke doesn't pull his hand away. Like it's nothing.
"What happened?" he asks again, softer this time, and Sebastian moves, shakes Hawke off in a fit of bravery, or something the Grand Cleric would praise as such. But he cannot shake off the resurfaced guilt that Hawke's touch ignited within him.
"You do not need to worry," he says. His voice feels like it will shake, but he doesn't seem to know it because it doesn't. "I was in a confused state last night. I'm sorry, Fenris. I must've frightened you."
"You certainly looked frightening," Fenris says. "Are you sure you are alright?"
"Yes," he says, and gets up even when his muscles and joints tell him not to, aching.
Hawke does not look convinced. Fenris does not look convinced. Sebastian knows why.
"Where are you going?" Hawke asks, and Sebastian stops to wonder about that, even if his feet are still taking him towards the door.
"Back to the Chantry," he says, and hopes that the Grand Cleric will have him back.
When he steps in through the doors, he attracts everyone's attention on the second his feet touch the stone floor. Someone whispers, and another hurries away, no doubt to alert Elthina of her wastrel son's return.
He chooses to stand in front of the stairs, to wait in the dim candlelight and not think about how Hawke’s eyes might look in this nearly red light.
“Sebastian.”
He doesn’t look up in fear his eyes might suddenly be bloodshot. He doesn’t want to hurt Elthina more.
“Grand Cleric, I am sorry,” he says quietly, and hears her sigh.
“Sebastian, you cannot expect to be forgiven so easily.”
“I don’t,” he says, and still doesn’t look up.
vii.
Grand Cleric Elthina places him into seclusion. Three weeks, she says, and he will be a child of the Maker again.
Sebastian has spent more than enough time in seclusion. Not in a long time, but when he was younger. And he honestly hates it. He tries not to, but he does. Maybe it is an impression from his wilder days, from times when he could be in that small, excluded area of the Chantry for months at a time, other initiates and novices rotating around him but always leaving him behind to pray and pray and pray until his fingers and knees and tongue felt like he could rip them off and be fine with it.
He protests now, too, asks her to reconsider, but she shakes her head and that is a final decision if Sebastian has ever seen one.
He asks if he can tell Hawke where he has gone so he doesn’t worry. She shakes her head again.
“You cannot, Sebastian. He doesn’t deserve to know.”
And so he goes.
It takes more than three weeks. Sebastian loses his sense of days after a while, when initiates and novices rotate around him again, and he quietly wonders if it is possible for him to be here for so long that his tongue quits making everything click.
But it doesn’t quit. The Chant tumbles and clicks off it and if anything, his brogue becomes heavier and softer all the same.
Five weeks, and Grand Cleric Elthina lets him out. He only knows because Hawke is there right on the next day, clutching him to his chest and whispering about five. And it cannot be five months. Or five years.
Right?
viii.
Varric is... angry at him.
Sebastian is not sure what he has done to deserve it, but he is angry at him.
“Where in the Void have you been?” he snaps at him on the Wounded Coast, when they are waiting for slavers to walk past, with Anders and Hawke on the other side of the gorge, engaged in conversation. “Hawke has been worried sick.”
“In seclusion,” he answers, checks the fletching of his arrow just to give his fingers something to do, lest they clasp together around the pendant still hanging from his neck, the sign that he has been praying his sins away. Hawke has been worried sick. It shouldn’t make him feel so warm, he is sure.
“In seclusion?” Varric laughs angrily, tries his aim. “In fucking seclusion? You don’t even know what happened while you were nesting inside the Chantry, do you?”
“We don’t interact with anyone outside the Chantry during seclusion,” he says, as if that explains it, as if Varric would try to understand.
“You seriously don’t know,” Varric says, and shoots the first slaver that staggers past the point of no return. The rocks tumble down, trapping everyone inside there, and the Tevinters are dead before they know it.
“What happened?” Sebastian asks when he stops breathing so hard, when they are striding over the rocks to meet the mages on the other side. Varric casts him a glance that doesn’t look as angry as it looks pitying.
“Ask Hawke.”
He does, unintentionally. He walks into Hawke’s house when the man invites him there, and when they reach the bedroom he asks: “Where is Leandra?”
When Hawke cries, he holds him even when his legs start to ache with the man’s weight, even when his own throat gets tight and starts hurting. He asks about Carver and the man starts sobbing again. There are two more names, and his list of people dead around him is starting to look quite similar to Sebastian’s.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers when Hawke has calmed down. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you.”
“You’re here now,” Hawke says and his grip is tighter still, “that’s all that matters, Sebastian.”
They sit there for a quiet moment, then a quiet hour. It is a quiet Sebastian is unaccustomed to, with no boredom like in the Starkhaven Castle, no echoing footsteps like in the Chantry, no mumbling prayers like in the seclusion chambers. There is only the breathing of him and Hawke and Lord on the floor, sleeping in front of the door like guarding them from anything that could disturb their special kind of silence.
Sebastian gradually realizes that Hawke has fallen asleep, and the soft snore is the final clue. There is a warmth in his chest when he lays the man down softly and pulls the covers back, wrapping Hawke in the blankets.
But when he makes his way to the door, the mabari wakes up and sits up, looks at him with questions and pleas in his eyes.
“I need to go,” Sebastian whispers, and Lord whimpers back, nudging his waist, trying to turn him around. Sebastian looks back. Hawke looks peaceful, very much unlike earlier in the evening, but Lord is still whining quietly.
“You are worried for Hawke?” Sebastian asks then, kneeling down in front of the dog. He whines and nudges his shoulder.
At some point of the night Sebastian wakes up, confused about his location. He feels warm, like he never does in the Chantry cells, and there is a heavy hand thrown over his waist. He changes position subtly, and faces Hawke, whose eyes are open.
“Sorry,” the man says, but his arm doesn’t disappear. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
Sebastian closes his eyes and shuffles closer to the warmth, arms trapped between them, crossed across his chest. His fingertips brush his collarbones, and then Hawke’s shirt. There is a feeling in his gut, one that he has never quite had before but that he still recognizes. He knows what to do with it. His fingers hook on the neckline of Hawke’s shirt, the softness between his fingers almost disgusting.
“...off.”
“Sebastian?” Hawke asks, arm around his waist loosening. “What do you...”
“Take this off,” he says, and uncrosses his arms in the small space their proximity allows him, fingers tangling in the fabric. Some sort of a silk, he thinks, softened with something else.
“You’re doing fine job taking it off all by yourself,” Hawke says, but sounds confused. “Sebastian, what about...”
Sebastian stills. Vows, of course. There is the matter of the Chantry, and him being a Brother, and the Grand Cleric. Her disappointment in him.
My soul is too young, he thinks. Let it be. And he breathes easier.
“Take. It. Off.”
“Hawke,” he whimpers when he wraps his arms around the man’s board shoulders, feels like he is drowning in the best way possible, “Hawke, please...”
“Garrett,” Hawke whispers back, “my name is Garrett. Why do you always call me Hawke?” His hips move in a short thrust and Sebastian throws his head back.
“Garrett,” he moans, and everything is so sharp he might cry, were he not filled to the brim with this warm, warm feeling. And Hawke moans, buries his face in Sebastian’s neck, and his hips move again.
“Maker, your accent,” he mumbles, “you’re going to kill me with it.”
And then Sebastian is crying, burying his face in Hawke’s hair as the man moves him, sits up and maneuvers him into his lap.
“Sebastian,” he pants, paws at his hair, thrusts his hips lightly and almost involuntarily, “it’s alright, Sebastian, I love you.”
It doesn’t stop his tears.
ix.
Grand Cleric Elthina slaps him when he tells her what happened.
The sound echoes in the quiet of the Chantry and Sebastian’s head snaps to the side.
“You will not meet that man ever again. I will not allow it.”
Sebastian goes to cower, to bow, to nod and smile and bear it. And he remembers Garrett Hawke.
“You don’t know him, Grand Cleric,” he says. The words click, and snap, and fall off his tongue.
"I know his kind," Grand Cleric Elthina says, and there is an undertone of desperation. "He will take all you have to offer and then chase you away like a bird whose singing used to be refreshing and beautiful in the mornings, but the novelty wore off and now he is bored of waking up to it."
Sebastian thinks of Hawke and Orana, whom the man still tries to teach to be free, of Bodhain and his son, whom Hawke will let go once they want to go. Thinks of the countless nests birds have made in every part of his roof, thinks of the mice who scurry away into unused pots and kettles when the cellar door is opened, thinks of the cats he has begun to shelter for Anders, of Lord and how he isn't even bothered by all the other animals anymore, of how he is the kindest war hound Sebastian has ever had the pleasure of meeting.
Of how Hawke, buzzed by whiskey and late hours, once leaned close to Sebastian, pressed him against the back of the couch, and instead of kissing him he whispered into his ear that if there is one thing he hates, it is seeing others sad and suffering.
"With all due respect, Grand Cleric," he says, and his mouth is dry but not as dry as it could be, not anymore, "you don't. You know your own kind."
He turns and walks a straight line, away from the dim candles and out of the Chantry, into the warm and blinding light.