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He will not let her touch him. Hawke tries, anyway.
“You’re bleeding,” she hisses. Her hand hovers by his arm, not a single scintilla of magic left in her fingers, nothing to shock or lurch or jar. “Maker, Fenris—”
The blow of his vambrace against her wrist will leave a bruise. It is a needlessly brutal way to get her to back off, but it works. His elbow folds in towards his chest a second later, and he staggers another foot towards the ground, nearly supine, now. His mouth works the words out from behind bared teeth: “Stay back.”
Hawke rolls her wrist in place, considering for a moment that a bone may have been splintered, but there is no sharp sort of sensitivity that would alert her to such a thing. It’s not much of a relief. Fenris—new, fickle, distrustful as he is — could still mean to break her. “Would you rather Anders heal you?”
He looks up at her through the jagged curtain of his hair. “I would rather be left alone.”
“You’re going to kill yourself, elf,” Anders chimes in. “Fighting like that and constantly refusing magic.”
Hawke grits her teeth. “Anders. Please.”
“You can heal him regardless of what he says,” Anders goes on. “Though it’s not energy I would waste.”
She is reeling towards him before she can stop herself, pivoting in place, extending one angry, accusatory finger towards his chest. “No, you’ve made that perfectly clear.”
“Blondie,” Varric warns. He steps nearer to Anders’ side, as if to place himself between him and Hawke, as if he would need the buffer. Ridiculous. Hawke just wants them to focus, she wants Anders to listen—
“However deep that is, it’ll need to be cleaned,” Anders mutters. His expression is passive, static. Removed, now, from antagonism. “Most likely stitched up, too.”
Hawke nods. Then nods again. She’s looked back to the open tear in Fenris’s arm and is having trouble looking away, having trouble swallowing past the gritted knots of some unnamed emotion in her throat. “We’re closer to Gamlen’s. I can manage it.”
“I can bring supplies—”
“You’ve given me plenty before, Anders,” she says. “Thank you. We’ll be OK.”
He looks at her a moment longer before seeming to resign himself to her dismissal. They must disband their party at some point in every reckless evening they share. Anders prompts it now, slinking back to the fringe of the alley with an unhappy sort of movement.
Hawke is keeping herself still, preparing herself to face Fenris again, when she feels a slip of glass against her fingers. She looks down to Varric, who offers her a grim, uncertain smile before backing away to Anders’s side. Her fingers curl around something thin and smooth. He’s given her one of his remaining health draughts.
Hawke exhales. She is thankful for Varric. She is always thankful for Varric.
“See you tomorrow, Hawke?” he says, and in the question is another, and she’s not much for translating Varric’s subtext but she doesn’t think she always needs to.
“Yeah,” Hawke responds, nodding with a bit of reassurance. She will see him tomorrow. She will make it tonight.
He leaves with Anders, the pad of their footsteps not long clear against the rest of Lowtown’s nightly noise: some sort of dog barks several streets over, and the muffled hollers of what could be bandits, could be more mercenaries, come from an alley they hadn’t yet stumbled through.
She catches Fenris’s stare about the same time the noise seems to disappear. It doesn’t, really, but there is little logic to these sorts of moments. She has not been alone with the elf long enough to work it out.
“Gamlen’s house,” she says. “I have a kit.”
Fenris’s scowl, impossibly, appears to deepen. “Leave me, Hawke.”
“No.” Hawke grits her teeth and takes a step forward. “I won’t. And I won’t use any magic. I swear. I’m going to stitch your arm up and if that’s as much as you allow, then so be it.” She extends a hand and focuses hard on hiding its waver. Let him lash out again, if that’s what he wants.
But he doesn’t. After a long handful seconds made of nothing but his steely stare, he finally reaches back with his unwounded arm and allows her to play a small—a miniscule— role in getting back on his feet, refusing to make a single noise as he does so—and Hawke can see, in the twitch of his clenched jaw, in his narrowed eyes, that he is in pain. That he hates it.
She has to let him go once he’s on steady ground, but she feels sure, now, that he will follow. They step together over the scattered bodies of the littered Sharps Highwaymen, and Hawke begins to lead him on her practiced path through the streets of Lowtown.
* * *
“I saw how you fight,” the elf had said, whirling on her like something ready to strike, those markings flashing white-blue in a sudden, abortive glimmer. “I should’ve realized sooner what you really were. Tell me, then. What manner of mage are you? What is it that you seek?”
What manner of mage are you? Hawke had blinked. A desperate one. Same as all the others. But she’d said to him instead: “What, you’re blaming me now? I just went out of my way to help you.”
He had sneered. He had looked at her as if she was holding a blade to his gut, as if her mere presence was enough threat to warrant such a guarding stance. “Someone like you shouldn’t pursue more danger.”
It was then that Carver stepped to the space just in front of Hawke, a perfect shield for her staffless-arm. He was taller than the elf, much taller, but he still drew his spine into a rigid stroke, the cheap leather armor he wore tightening between his shoulders. “If you have a problem with my sister, you have a problem with me.”
Hawke had felt, then, a surge of gratitude and rare affection. For all of his bluster, Carver wanted her safe. Wanted her protected. If someone wanted her suffering, he would stop it, but—
Fenris had blinked slowly, large eyes shifting from her brother, to her, to Varric, back to her. “I must appear ungrateful,” he said, unwaveringly sincere, even pausing to dip his chin in a brief gesture of acknowledgement. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Hawke hadn’t known what to do with that. She swallowed, and waited, and Carver glanced back over his shoulder in a reflection of her own bewilderment.
“I owe you a debt,” Fenris went on. He reached into a pouch slung around his broad belt, retrieving a small leather purse, holding it out between gauntleted fingers. “This is all the coin I have managed since arriving in the city—”
“No.”
Hawke had said the word without realizing she meant to speak. Fenris looked at her, steady yet nonplussed, and she could feel the startled glances of her companions pricking at her side. But she had said it, and realized with a sudden dash of clarity that she meant it, too. “We don’t need your coin.”
Varric took a step forward that she heard. Likely her still implausible place in Bartrand’s expedition was on his mind as he began to interject. “Uh, Hawke—”
“Keep it,” she pushed on, pointedly ignoring his outstretched hand and the purse held there. “Surely you have use for it.”
Fenris had pulled the proffering back awkwardly, had shifted on his feet in an unfitting display of disconcertment. “Fine,” he said, tucking the leather away. “Then—should you find yourself in need of assistance…”
Hawke felt something inconceivable and strange rise within her. She had to keep it from betraying itself in her expression, keep it from disturbing what she knew was the always-cutting threat of being betrayed as an apostate. “You’re not leaving Kirkwall?”
“Not yet,” he replied. In the light that slipped out of the estate’s open door, he was an obstruction of shadow, cutting the glow down the middle, standing so it may only brush against his back. “I will stay here. If Danarius wishes his mansion back, he is free to return and claim it.”
She nodded, and told him at once, “We’ll call on you,” and Maker, she meant that, too.
They left Hightown after Fenris shifted back behind the door of his former master’s estate, the promise of his service still raw in the air. Neither Varric nor Carver were altered by the night beyond the lingering indignation of being used as someone else’s bait, but as she left the shadowed streets of Hightown, Hawke realized the presence of something both incommunicable and vast followed her home, like the shadowed secrets of Kirkwall made tangible, like the eyes of the Maker himself.
* * *
The windows of Gamlen’s house are dim save for the orange-yellow haze of what must be a single candle kept burning for her return. When Hawke opens its door she finds its common room empty save Waldemar curled beside the hearth; he lifts his head in quiet recognition before letting it drop again with a heavy, dispassionate thump. She will read into the fact that he hasn’t marked Fenris as an intruder later—has she already managed to carry his scent home? Has the mabari learned of his presence in her life before seeing him firsthand?
Fenris is just behind her in the sparse stretch of a common room. Not for the first time, shame finds space in her stomach to idle while her companion observes the home. It is a sad and seedy thing, this dwelling, more a reflection of Gamlen’s mistakes than their own, and she knows Fenris has learned of this by now—the trial of her family’s circumstances—but she still hasn’t rid herself of the regret that she’s not managed better for them yet.
Hawke nods her head towards their poor dining arrangement, flush against one of the cob walls. “You can sit, if you like.”
Fenris does. He moves silent as a wraith, settling himself onto one of the rattletrap chairs by the wooden table, not even upsetting the uncertain structure of the wood, and it strikes her how viciously out of place he appears there, clad in black and silver, a piece of shining richness in her dreary framework.
Hawke is looking at him for too long without speaking, without moving. Her mouth feels dry. “Your armor,” she manages at last, and gleams inside at the composure she can affect.
Fenris frowns and sets to the metal and leather of his arm. Hawke would help if she thought there was any chance of it being welcome, but he manages with one hand and will not meet her eyes. The vambrace, first, and then the gauntlet, and then the strange feathery barbs that shield his shoulder and elbow, laid across the table’s surface in a neat and rigid line. She steps forward, finally, when there is nothing left to the arm but the sleeve of his black tunic, its own windows of fabric revealing the burn of lyrium and wound alike.
“It looks like it hurts,” she says, her eyes trained on the curving gash of a Highwayman’s blade. It doesn’t leak blood like it did, but it’s still open, angry in color. “Anders was right. Cleaned and stitched.”
Fenris is not the sort of person to order others around, but his expression says, Quickly, Hawke, and she can understand that, she can give him leave to be a little impatient with her fumbling bids at caretaking, so she moves to find the mage’s kit Anders had left with her beneath the paltry writing desk near the bedroom doors. A dry-rotted leather satchel packed with glass phials and pockets of herbs and a small roll of suturing thread in a haphazard arrangement that shifts as she carries it to the table alongside an extra candle and dish for good measure.
When she sets the items down, her gaze flashes to the sheen of a liquor bottle, half-full and uncorked, settled near the edge of the wood. She recalls that Anders himself berated her a few weeks ago for pouring brandy onto an open wound— “Do you want it to never heal? Andraste’s tits, Hawke! There’ll be no tissue left!” —so she turns to the satchel instead, fingers finding the stoppered solution he’d so emphatically pointed to after her blunder. In the candlelight the clear liquid turns golden-edged and clinquant. She holds it in her palm and with her other hand twists a chair to face the one he’s in, its legs scraping flatly against the floorboards.
She is trying to be quiet as her family sleeps, but she knows, too, the likelihood of Carver being awake, of him with his head in the crook of his arm and his eyes open, listening, waiting in the darkness for her to be home to stay. He will have something to say about this in the morning. She’s not sure, yet, if it’s something she should dread.
Fenris has rested his elbow on the edge of the table so that his bicep faces her in the bracket of his arm. His expression is no longer a reflection of the hostility he’d shown in the streets of Lowtown, but there is still no warmth to the way his jaw is set, to the rigid knot of his fist against the wood.
Hawke clears her throat. “It’s alright if I touch you?”
His eyes flicker from the phial to the coiled scrap of cloth she pulls from the satchel. “Yes.”
She shivers as she moves, unstoppering the phial and unraveling the cloth and pouring the solution into a damp circle in its fibers. “It’ll sting,” she says on an exhale, her voice pitched so low it sounds like a whisper to her own ears. Her hands hovers above his skin for just a moment before, decisively, she presses down.
Most of the dried blood around the wound comes away with the swabs of the cloth, the skin beneath paler than the flushed slant of his face. When she feels she’s gotten the solution to the worst of it, she sets the cloth down and starts at unraveling some of the silken thread, hovering the accompanying needle above the shifting flame of the candle. “I’ll try to be quick. No promises.”
He gives her no indication that it matters, any of it: the still-open stretch of skin, the pain, the terrible closeness of her hands and her face and her warm, stuttering breath. And perhaps it doesn’t matter. Hawke can’t be sure, she can’t know, she can only pull the thread through the needle and pull the needle through skin and hope she doesn’t make a mess of it.
When the needle punctures him the first time he does not react beyond a short puff of air from his nostrils; she can only hear it because she is so close. The needle pulls through with so little resistance; his arm is a static column, his fist pressing down solidly enough to keep it from shaking.
It’s been too long since she’s done this. The last had been Carver, a snaggy laceration across the back of his calf he couldn’t reach himself without doubling over. He’d been a testy, irritable patient, but then he always was, and he had still held himself still while she threaded his skin and kept them both distracted with a steady stream of curses.
Fenris is still, too, but he maintains his silence. There is nothing to distract from their proximity.
Hawke keeps on, looping from one side of the wound to the other, letting the thread stay continuous. Little shiny cords of the stuff pull at the skin of his arm in a slow-revealed pattern. It is vaguely uneven. It is working. In a distant way she is grateful for his immobility; she can focus on the rhythm of the suture, on keeping her fingers steady.
Until he falters—his next breath is suddenly sharp, chased by a broken, choked-on groan, and Hawke realizes that of course this hurts , it is hurting him, and she’s chalked his immobility up to pure indifference when it had, of course, been mostly frontage.
“I’m sorry,” she rushes out, and rushes to say it again, holding the needle back between the very tips of her fingers while she glances, distressed, between her work and his strained expression. “Oh, I’ll go slower—or faster? What would help?”
He takes a moment. Closes and opens his eyes, steadies his breath. Finally, he speaks: “Why are you doing this,” he says, and it isn’t delivered quite like a question, but like an accusation, a piece of censure, Why are you doing this, Hawke, how could you, why would you—
“Really?” Hawke leans back as if to stretch the space between them. Abruptly, she is angry. She’s incredulous. She’s forgotten his discomfort and has moved on to her own. This, Carver will surely hear. “You’re really asking me that?”
His voice is gruff, untouched by her disbelief. “Yes.”
“Because I would do this for—for Merrill, Isabela. For Anders—” Fenris’s expression turns even darker, but Hawke pushes on, breathless with the name she carries like promises, like distinct and definite scraps of hope. “For Aveline. Varric, too, though I think he’s more stubborn than you when it comes to being cared for.”
Being cared for. She means it in the sense of patching wounds, but the way she says it—she can’t help but feel suddenly exposed, like she’s given awful something away. She presses her lips together as if to keep more from slipping out. The needle and thread stall in her hands, forgotten.
Fenris seems more stunned by the words than she is. It is the first time that evening he looks back at her so freely, his eyes large enough to be ringed with white, his shoulders still lifting and falling with his breaths. After a beat, as if to challenge her, he says, “You want me able to fight.”
“I want you well, Fenris,” she insists. The spark of shame she held leaves her in a sudden rush. She is glad to persist in this. “I do not care if you slink through Lowtown with me or not.”
It’s enough for now. Fenris has no reply—only the parting and closing of his lips—and while his hair is so light but his eyebrows are dark, heavy things, nearly knitted completely together by the way his brow lowers and creases in focus.
Hawke’s fingers twitch against the needle. “I’m nearly done,” she says. “I’m sorry it hurts.”
He looks away at that. It feels like an acquiescence. She sets back to work with a new sense of focus, listening closely to every breath, draping a hand above his elbow, below the wound. Her fingers wrap firmly around his arm, stability and reassurance both. She tries to make it quick, the pulling of the needle, the tying of the thread, and soon his skin is closed, and the remnant blood is broken up by thin, slanted stitches.
It is quiet while she reaches for the cloth again. With another soak of the solution, she brings it back to his arm and begins to clean what’s left. The dry stains are slowly cleared away; the skin beneath is smooth and warm.
Hawke doesn’t expect him to speak more, but after a long moment, he does. “You do this often,” he says to her. He sounds somehow different.
“I have done.” Hawke folds the cloth and soaks it one more time. “I used to only watch. My father, and Bethany—” she pauses her voice and her hands pause with it, as if of their own accord. He is waiting for her to finish and she can’t help but keep talking. “They were good at the careful sorts of magic. I never got a hold of the finer points of healing, but I could do bandages well enough.”
Fenris is watching her and not her work. On a normal night she cannot divine the full meaning of his different expressions; now, while she’s still shaken from the work of his wound, while grief has begun taking its shape beneath the stream of her thoughts, she does not have a chance.
“If it’s just me—” Hawke shuts her eyes. She exhales. “Well, I can manage this.”
He is, at the edge of her touch, unnaturally still. “I didn’t mean to bring up—”
“You didn’t.” She is quick to stop him, quick to end that course of thinking. “I only think of them—well, always. I bring them up left and right.”
He presses his lips together. They form a perfect flat line until he speaks again. “They sound worth remembering.”
Something within her rattles, and Hawke thinks: He’s followed me home. In the short second it occurs to her, it is a miraculous thing. She can hardly believe it. She holds the thought inside herself until it fizzles out into dim and obscure warmth.
“If any mage could win your favor, it’d be Bethany,” she goes on, suddenly emboldened, though she looks down to her lap as she speaks. “She’s—she’s nothing but good. Mother says it’s me who reminds her of our father, but…” Here, Hawke cannot help but smile. It must look sad, wistful: her eyes downcast, the curl to her lips so slight and involuntary. “I think Bethany got his— goodness.”
She stops, thinks about what it means, what she’s saying—and it is silent for a beat too long. When she lifts her eyes— Maker , it is a hard thing to do—Fenris is only looking down at her, still unmoving, and there is no trace of hostility left in his expression. Only the crease between his brows that suggests focus, and the stoic line to his mouth and jaw, both, somehow, impassive and stern at once.
He says, “I believe you,” and then, “I’m sorry.”
This is where she’ll leave it, she thinks. Hawke feels dangerously close to—something. Like she’s held her breath for too long, or she’s about to cross a Lowtown alley where someone could jump out at her. She knows when to breathe. She knows when to walk away.
And—she is done with the work. The wound is closed. It is clean. She has curled the cloth into a wrinkled ball in her palm and has to let it unravel as she sets it back upon the table.
Her eyes glance across the unlit streams of lyrium in the window of his sleeve. While his skin reddens and swells, nothing has changed about the markings beyond a small slant to where a single curve lines up with itself. It will likely right itself in a few days' time, and if his bare skin scars, the lyrium will still shine clearer.
“Does it feel different?” she asks, surveying her own stitchwork.
Fenris doesn’t reply, and she thinks it’s because he will not , but she catches him nodding in a slow and careful way that satisfies her.
At this point, he could wrap the gauze himself. Hawke doesn’t ask; she does it instead. Loops her arms around his own in a wide circle so that her hands can pass the roll from back to front. She ends with tucking the end of the gauze behind itself and smoothing it with her fingers. Her hands are saying something she can’t.
“There,” she says, finally withdrawing. “Good as new, surely.”
She thinks the corner of his mouth twitches. It is too dim to tell for sure.
“Thank you, Hawke.” Fenris’s voice is somewhat flat, because it’s just like that, but Hawke feels a warm flush at the words, thinks, you’re welcome, you’re welcome, oh, you’re welcome—
“You’re welcome,” she tells him. It’s the last of their words, for tonight.
Fenris reaches for the discarded pieces of his armor, fastens only the vambrace back in place while the rest is tucked beneath his unhurt arm. He leaves to walk himself back to Hightown alone. Hawke does not worry that he’ll make it. In a warm, hidden recess of her chest, though, she feels pride to have made him safer.