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Like this, then:
He is forgiven. Nothing to forgive, Hawke said, smiling a watery smile against Fenris' lips.
Stumbling steps, interrupted by kiss after kiss. Hawke's hands on Fenris' hips, engulfing but carefully light. Heat at that, at the size of him, the strength. At how willingly he surrenders it all. For Fenris.
For Fenris.
It is Fenris who pushes Hawke down onto the edge of the bed, hands firm on his shoulders. It is Fenris who bends over him, tilts his head up with firm hands to kiss his brow, as though bestowing benediction. Hawke's eyes are closed and his breath shudders. His expression is naked, the flutter of his eyelashes, the silent parting of his lips.
"Fenris," he says, and, "I want—"
"What do you want?" Fenris murmurs.
Hawke swallows. Fenris feels it where his thumb is pressed against the underside of Hawke's jaw.
"What do you want?" Fenris asks again.
Hawke opens his eyes. The breath he draws is unsteady, but there's humour in his smile, and isn't that something. "I thought maybe you could have your way with me," he says.
Fenris laughs. Presses harder with his thumb to force Hawke's head back and bends to press their lips together again. Deep and slow, feeding the longing that he has held within himself to Hawke in pieces, breath by breath.
"You wish me to take control," he says. "For my sake, or for yours?"
"Can't it be both?"
Fenris considers Hawke's face, his pupils wide in the dim light, the scatter of freckles across his broad nose. Considers the question for what it is, rather than what his pride would make of it.
"Yes," he says. "It can be both. You should undress."
Hawke is clumsy in his obedience. But he does obey. Clothes pooled on the floor, a discarded skin.
Fenris lays his own shell carefully on top of them, piece by piece. When he lay with Hawke before, he withheld some pieces of himself: a cuff around his wrist to hide the ugly marks of an old injury from a punishment he prefered not to remember; the tight twist of cloth around his ankle he has needed since Seheron to keep it from aching. A little piece of defiance against the evidence of his pain written boldly and inescapably across every part of his body.
He discards these things now. Hawke watches with avid attention. Eyes on his chest, on his cock. On his lips.
"Lie down," Fenris says.
His bed was a fine thing once, grown uneven over the years he has slept in it without troubling to care for it, his form impressed permanently upon it in a curious mark of existence. This space Hawke fills, weight settling into the hollows of Fenris' body.
Fenris sits beside him. Hand on his chest, fingers curling, hair brushing against them. He touches Hawke systematically, tests his reactions. The slide of his thumb across a nipple has Hawke biting his lip. He closes his eyes when Fenris traces the line of his ribs with a firm hand, gasps at a touch to his stomach, below the navel.
"Look at me," Fenris says, because he needs, he needs to see—needs to be seen.
It is a soft thing, his words quiet and measured even as his heart races. He could not give Hawke a harsh command, not if Hawke begged for it; it would be too close to the razor-edge of memory, too dangerous. Danarius' foot heavy on his wrist, how dare you disobey—
If they are to claw at each other, fumble and fuck and do it roughly, it must always be on equal terms. Perhaps one day they may.
He does not dislike the idea.
But now he suggests, and Hawke obeys. It is a choice. There is no enforcement. No punishment. And all the same, Hawke is his.
Hawke looks at him, and Fenris' breath catches in his throat.
He is Hawke's.
"I want your mouth on me, if you would," Fenris says, and he climbs up to kneel across Hawke's broad chest, knees of necessity barely touching the bed, his full weight on Hawke's body. They are both smiling at it, the absurd politeness. They are both unsteady with the weight of this intimacy.
Fenris' hands on Hawke's head again, pulling him up.
His fingers on Hawke's mouth, pushing gently in.
Hawke sucks at them as gently, eyes on Fenris' face as he does it, and Fenris knows that he is flushing terribly.
His thumb coaxes Hawke's mouth open.
He rocks forward, slides his cock between Hawke's parted lips. Only the head. And still, they gasp in unison.
Hawke's eyes have fallen closed, his expression transcendent. The steadiness of the rise and fall of his chest is a studied thing.
"Look at me," Fenris says again. "Hawke—"
Half-lidded eyes. That same spill of curling hair across the pillow that he remembers so well.
Hawke's hands back on his hips.
Has he had sex with anyone else? Not within the limits of his memory. The other thing is not this, is not to let himself go, is not to willingly share his body. In fragments he thinks that perhaps there was another, before. Who shared wine with him on a summer night?
But he lets it go. Fenris is not Leto. Fenris' body knows this sort of intimacy only with Hawke.
Three years ago, it was too much. This unknown country.
Now, it may never be enough. Hawke's magic plays across his skin, as it did before, inevitable. And it is not a threat or an obstacle, although it is not an enticement. It simply is. And Hawke's hands and his face and the arch of his body, pressing up against Fenris—these are enticement enough, and more.
These things he has won.
It is Fenris, this time, who must close his eyes. Hawke swallows around his cock, strains to lift his head and take him deeper, deeper, greedy as though he wants nothing more. And so Fenris gives it to him, and breathes raggedly, and feels his pulse thudding through his cock at every shift and slide.
Heat. The tightening of his body, the beginning of that crest of pleasure—
Too soon. He will have more than this. Always, more.
He withdraws with a groan; sits back, his cock hard and damp against Hawke's chest, almost at the dip of his throat.
They stare at one another, panting.
Hawke's hands draw along the front of Fenris' thighs, slide back up again, a question.
"Yes," Fenris says, so that there can be no ambiguity. Swallows. "I am more than well."
Lays himself against Hawke's stomach, rolls his hips carefully so that their cocks brush together, no hard friction, no immediate intent. Only a slow tease, keeping the heat between them alive.
He crosses his arms over Hawke's chest, smirks down at him. The arch of his spine the position entails presses his stomach more firmly against Hawke's. Presses them more tightly together.
"You just enjoy using me as a pillow," Hawke says, but his voice his hoarse.
"I do," Fenris says. "But not only."
And then Hawke is straining up to kiss Fenris, and Fenris is bending into it, and it has been three wretched, long years—
And Hawke has waited for him. Hawke has simply—never considered being with anyone else, even as he knew Fenris might never be ready for him, might never want him in this way.
Fenris never stopped wanting him in this way.
Hawke, his head tipped back against Fenris' indifferent pillows, cries out at the twist of Fenris' slicked fingers inside him. A hand thrown above his head, clutching at the sheets.
His body opens easily to Fenris, as it did before. Sex seems so simple for Hawke. No struggle to relax, no undercurrent of tension. He does not need to be taken out of his head.
Once, Fenris was envious.
Now he lets it carry him, lets himself sink into Hawke's uncomplicated pleasure. Lets it become his own.
He is Fenris and he exists and he, this complicated messy living creature, does this to Hawke.
Body and mind.
Hawke cries out under him, half-voiced gasping pleas. Fenris bends himself to carefully suck a bruise into the inside of Hawke's thigh, just above the knee; another beside it.
I am here. In the present tense.
"Please," Hawke says.
"If I allow you release now," Fenris says. "will you still wish for me inside you?"
He twists his fingers again; has discovered with a certain wonder that there is a place inside Hawke that will jolt sharp arousal through his entire body, set his cock straining. He applies himself to it now.
Hawke's breath whines from him, out through his teeth. "What," he says, when Fenris relents a little, "you think you can't get me off more than once? For shame."
But his bravado is only in words. The tone is something quite different.
"Very well," Fenris says, and presses his fingers up inside Hawke, and swallows around his cock.
Act by act, he rewrites the meaning. Pleasure not taken but given.
It is imperfect, forever a work in progress. But all the same, it is good. It is—
"I'm going to—" Hawke says, and Fenris pulls back to let Hawke spill across his stomach, stills his fingers inside of him, feels how Hawke's body tightens around them.
Hawke's heel kicks against the sheets. His whole body shivers, shock upon shock.
"Oh," Hawke says. "Oh—that's—"
Yes. It is.
We are.
Hawke's hips tilted to the side so that Fenris can fuck slowly into him, one leg hooked up over Fenris' arm.
On Hawke's stomach, their hands are tangled.
Here, they meet, two people who have only a tenuous sense of home. Strangers in their own lands. Here, together, they search after—what? After meaning.
Love.
A haven.
And Fenris gives and gives and has no less for the giving.
Hawke breathes in gasps, moans oh, oh, at every press of Fenris' cock into him. Clings to Fenris' hand.
I love you, Fenris says in the press of his hands against Hawke's skin. I love you, in the line of his spine, bowing him down towards Hawke.
The words sit locked tight in his chest. But he knows that one day soon he will say them.
Hawke is so hot around him, so pliant under his hands. He is unashamed in every expression of pleasure, begs always for more, more—
A slow build, because Fenris cannot bear for it to end, wants to stay in this moment always. He knows now that there will be so many more, so many things to learn. And yet this one, just this one right here, feels precious.
Perhaps all of them will.
"Inside me," Hawke says. "When you come—ah—"
And there is a fragility to his words where there should be filth, and perhaps Fenris is not the only one who holds this precious, who needs something from it that he cannot quite define.
It has been three years—
When he comes it seems to take a very long time, as drawn out as the slow build of pleasure that brought him to it; and as he shakes his way through it Hawke's hands are in his hair, brushing it back from his brow; are on his face, tracing the lines of it with delicate reverence, and Fenris is lost, is lost, is lost—
But remains himself.
He does not rise from the bed.
His clothes remain where he placed them on the floor.
"Fenris," Hawke says, and he says it as he said it before, as a prayer.
The bed is too small for them both, and yet here they stay: Fenris’ arm around Hawke's neck, holding him close. Hawke's hand on the small of Fenris' back, shifting gently.
"Would that I had come back to you sooner," Fenris says. "I meant what I said. I have never stopped wanting to."
But Hawke says, "You took the time you needed, Fenris."
And it is true.
"I had no idea you could be so tactful," Fenris says, and Hawke laughs, and twists until they can kiss, Hawke's head tipped back, Fenris' hand on his neck.
Slow and deep, languid in the afterglow.
This he has won: not only a moment, but the promise of moments to come. A sort of home.
A future.