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rose_in_winterCharacters: Fenris, Mage Female Hawke, Sebastian Vael (Fenris/f!Hawke/Sebastian)
Rating: NC-17
Contains: Canon-typical violence, explicit sex
Fic Wordcount: 117,000
Chapter Wordcount:
Notes: Canon-divergent, ignoring most of Act 3. A thousand thanks tosenmut's Discord server for cheering and brainstorming and reactions and encouragement.
Beta: breadedsinner and MikWrites_InSpace
Summary: After the duel with the Arishok, Ariane Hawke looks around at the wreckage of her life in Kirkwall and asks herself: what is left for me here? As tensions increase between the Circle and the Templars, she turns to helping Sebastian retake Starkhaven. Meanwhile, she is trying to figure out how to love Fenris when he hates mages, and also definitely not looking at Sebastian's gorgeous eyes. Definitely not. Neither is Fenris. Sebastian is not looking back.
Definitely.
Canon divergence in which almost all of act 3 goes in the bin, and three damaged people try to find a way to live with each other and themselves, and maybe heal a bit.
Chapter index here.
The demon laughed. Its voice bounced off the pillars of its prison and shook the crevasses beneath the mountain. Hawke cursed, drawing on the last of her magic to fling a bolt of ice at it. The bolt struck dead center in its chest, and the demon crumpled slowly, but as it did, it looked past her and smiled faintly. Hawke waited to be sure it wouldn't rise again--after all of that she was taking no chances on getting stabbed in the back for being careless--but the hulk of misshapen flesh remained still.
She turned to face Larius, who was pulling himself upright with the aid of a column that had survived Corypheus's assault. Larius shuddered eerily, as though he needed to resettle his skin over his emaciated flesh, and then smiled at her. "Thank you for freeing me," he said, formal and clear.
That's not right. Hawke pulled her mouth into a broad smile. "My pleasure, Warden Commander," she said. She had to buy some time for her magic to recover; she couldn't risk him guessing why she wanted a lyrium potion. "What will you do now?"
"I will have to tell the other Wardens that Corypheus is no longer a threat," he said. No sign of the fidgeting man who'd led her all the way into the depths of the fortress. No sliding pitch to his voice. No frantic jerking of his head as he tried to see everything around him. He stood straight and tall, and smoothed his tufts of hair back. "It will be good to walk freely again."
You said you were going on your Calling.
"It must be a great weight off your mind." Behind her back, Hawke lifted her left hand so it rested against her belt, and crossed her fingers. Varric snapped his in response. Good. "You've been down here under the effect of the Calling for so long," she continued. She heard the shift of metal as Carver and Fenris abandoned whatever they'd been doing and joined Varric. "I'm sorry, Warden Commander, I know your time is very valuable," she continued as she walked toward him, "but I have a question for you."
He smiled faintly, clearly impatient, and the shape of his mouth was both wrong and too familiar. "What is it?" he asked, with a completely different type of impatience to that he'd shown on the way down.
Behind her back, Hawke snapped her fingers, and at the same time, used her right arm to swing her father's staff forward, channeling as much lightning as she could at Larius. Bianca sang her song of death, and Fenris leapt forward, his zweihander slashing downward too fast for Hawke to follow. Carver hadn't forgotten their old signal, and he leapt past her to block Larius from escaping, his sword a crushing weight of its own. Fenris's markings glowed lyrium-bright as he plunged his right hand into Larius's chest, ripping out his heart and flinging it far away. It landed with a wet plop. Hawke fumbled a lyrium potion out of her pouch and gulped it down so that, as Fenris danced out of the way, she could crush Larius with a fist of rock.
He cursed her as he died--which, in all honesty, was fair--and the strange gray glitter in his eyes faded with his life.
"Not that I mind a good bout of surprise murder," Varric said mildly, "but would you like to tell me what that was all about?"
Hawke was so tired she was swaying on her feet, but she wanted to be very sure, so she awkwardly wielded the bladed end of her father's staff to hack off Larius's right arm--or tried. Fenris sighed and gently pushed her out of the way, taking over with substantially more skill and efficiency, so she turned to face Varric. "The Wardens said that no one with tainted blood could charge the seals," she said, "because the taint called to him. Did you notice what happened when we killed the demon?"
"Things stopped being on fire," Varric said, and Hawke couldn't help laughing.
"Yes," she agreed. "But also, Larius stopped twitching, and started talking sense--sort of."
Varric frowned, then hissed. "You think that Corypheus possessed him?"
At that, Fenris kicked the limbs he'd removed farther from what was left of Larius. Carver joined him.
"I think that's exactly what happened." Hawke looked at the five total Grey Warden corpses strewn about the bridge, and sighed. "Just once," she said, "I would really like to explore a crumbling ruin and not end up doing violence."
Varric ignored that, as she'd known he would, and joined Fenris and Carver in scattering the remains of the Grey Wardens. Hawke hesitated. "I'd like to burn them," she said.
Fenris and Carver prayed along with her as she stumbled through the litany she had heard too often; she wasn't a dedicant of the Chantry, but neither was she going to bring one down here, so the Grey Wardens would have to make do with her efforts. Hawke hoped the Maker took intent into consideration. When she was done, she gestured her friends away and drank another lyrium potion before she called down the most intense firestorm she could muster, enough to scour the prison clean of all the remains in it. The heat drove her back nearly to the stairs, coughing, and she braced herself on her father's staff to keep herself on her feet while she fed it more of her magic. When it was done, when nothing remained but ashes and the hope that she had served her father's legacy well, Hawke studied the stone prison. Part of her thought she should build a ward just in case. The rest of her recoiled from using any blood magic at all, even for this cause.
In the end, though she knew why her father had chosen this, she couldn't bring herself to do the same. "Let's go," she said, and let Carver lead the way back to the surface of the Vimmark Mountains.
A solid nap later, freshly bathed, Hawke sat down in the library to review the papers and journals she'd claimed from the fortress. As they'd explored, she'd checked each just long enough to determine that it wasn't something like a ledger of accounts before stuffing it into her bag, and now she spread them around her on the floor, sorting them into piles: correspondence, journals, scrolls, books.
She supposed she ought to feel guilty about scavenging from a Grey Warden stronghold, but on the other hand it didn't seem like they'd have much use for it with Corypheus dead, and she wanted these mementos of her father. She promised herself she would send on any Grey Warden-specific texts once she'd copied them.
Orana brought her a plate of bread, cheese, and cold meats. Hawke thanked her, and, satisfied that the texts were sorted, carried the plate to the writing desk in the hall. There was nothing written from her father, just the memory of his voice from the wards she'd touched, and so she opened her own journal and recorded her impressions, from their trip out into the wastelands to the murder of the former Warden Commander. She regretted his death, but the change had been too abrupt and too complete.
She would pray for him at the Chantry tomorrow.
The basic details recorded, she spent a little longer with food in one hand and pen in the other, slowly setting down her thoughts.
Whatever was left of my father said he hoped that his child wouldn't bear his curse. I wonder if he blamed himself for Bethany and I. He was so patient when he taught us, and he never tried to make us feel bad for our magic, but....I wonder. Even though Carver's the only normal one, he must've felt left out, which does not make up for him being a little shit, but still.
I hope Dad would be proud of me.
She stared at the words in her curling script and then put the pen aside, grabbing the last hunk of bread and tearing a hole in the middle for the last bit of cheese. She went back to the library, armed with fresh paper and pen, ready to dig through her new treasures. She sat on the floor for hours, paging through the journals of the dwarven legionnaires, before turning to the one journal stamped with the Grey Warden crest. It seemed the journal had belonged to a Grey Warden mage. He had spent a great many pages musing on things he'd read in various texts that make Hawke long to get access to a Grey Warden library; a lot of the journal didn't make sense without that context, but she found some fascinating details about warding magic and a lot more than she'd ever wanted to know about darkspawn.
A page in the middle made a chill run down her spine, and she re-read it three times.
The records say Corypheus has been trapped below the Vimmarks since the days of the Tevinter Imperium. Can it be a coincidence that the darkspawn besiege this area more fiercely than anywhere else on the surface of Thedas? Or that Kirkwall, the closest city, suffers from endless plagues of violence, lunacy, human sacrifice, and blood magic?
If one studies Kirkwall's public records, it becomes hard to deny that some malevolent force has long shaped its history. Could a darkspawn, even a powerful mage, have such influence even as it slumbers?
She'd joked with Varric that Kirkwall must be cursed one too many times to disregard that entry.
Was the city cursed? Could it be cleansed now that Corypheus was dead? She didn't think it was quite that simple. Oh, it might be where things had started, and given Corypheus's influence over the Carta she wouldn't take a bet against the darkspawn having had ichor-laden hands on the scales, but that explanation seemed too simple.
It still didn't make her feel better about being here.
But where would she go? Lothering was gone and there was no joy for her there anyway. She didn't think Ferelden needed another apostate mage, not that there was anywhere on the face of Thedas, except maybe Tevinter, where mages were desired neighbors. Leandra had always said her eldest daughter never met a problem she didn't want to solve, which meant even if she left Kirkwall she was likely to end up with the same problem Varric had accused her of, although she still disputed his description of her as heroic. First, she didn't exactly solve things in the nicest way, and second, it wasn't heroic if she was doing it to try to buy enough goodwill to keep herself safe another day or week or, if she was very lucky, a month.
"Messere?" Orana stood in the doorway. "Messere Fenris asks if you are at home."
"Of course." A quick burst of warmth washed through her. Fenris had come to her. It was enough to make her giddy. She squeezed her eyes shut and crushed that feeling as best she could. She was going to be an adult about this. Really.
She heard a sound at the door, and looked up to see Fenris standing in the doorway, looking at her as though uncertain of his welcome. She smiled and shifted on the couch, patting the cushion beside her. He crossed the room on silent feet and sat next to her. She turned so she sat longways on the couch, curled up with her back against its side and her toes tucked under his thigh.
He'd made enormous progress since she started teaching him to read, but the cramped writing of the journal was difficult even for her to decipher, so instead, she read the entry that had disturbed her aloud to him. He listened thoughtfully. When she finished, he tilted his head at her. "Kirkwall has no shortage of darkness," he said.
"I know. But I can't convince myself that what we did in that Warden prison will fix it."
"If it did, I would say we should go find whatever lurks beneath Tevinter," he muttered.
What lurks beneath Tevinter is magic, and anything we did wouldn't change that, she thought. But what she said was, "I think we'll need more friends for that."
He chuckled, as she'd meant him to, and she felt the dizzy relief of skirting a disastrous topic without falling into it. She set the journal aside and pushed her sock-covered toes into his thigh. "And what are you doing here?"
"I came to see you." He didn't look at her when he said it, and so she had a moment to wrestle her completely unreasonable enormous smile at the comment into something that seemed more proportional.
"And I greeted you with doom and gloom," she said with a mournful sigh.
"You usually do," he said, but his hand on her ankle seemed meant to convey that he meant it affectionately, as a joke.
Unfortunately, that did not make it less true.
She forced a smile. "Maybe we need a vacation," she teased.
His answering smile was uncertain. "Where would you like to go?"
And just like that, she was right back to where she'd been when he arrived. "Nowhere. Anywhere. I know it's not practical."
He frowned slightly. "I was not aware that vacations were intended to be practical," he said carefully. It was the voice he used when he was explaining the things he didn't know from a slave's life, and it made her feel guilty.
"They aren't, I'm just...." She sighed. The trip to the Vimmark Mountains had made her maudlin. "It's been a long day, I suppose." She uncurled to sit more properly alongside him, and he rested his hand on her knee. It was more affection than she'd expected. "You aren't injured?" she asked.
"No," he said, clearly puzzled, and then frowned. "Hawke, when I said I came to see you, I meant it."
Her eyes stung. She knew he was cautious of embraces, but she leaned into him, slowly enough he could move away. He didn't. That put her closer to the edge of real tears, which she refused to shed. "Sorry," she said quietly. "I seem to be a mess."
He chuckled faintly, and moved his hand until his arm was around her shoulders. "I think you could use some rest," he said.
"If you wanted to take me to bed," she said, "you could have said so."
He sighed, and she laughed, as lightly as she could manage. "Come on, then," she said. "Let's get some rest, and see what other trouble we can get up to in the morning." She paused, glancing at the clock on the mantel; it was later than she'd thought, though clearly not so late that Fenris had thought he couldn't come by. Then again, everyone knew she slept irregularly at best. "Maybe afternoon," she concluded.
He laughed genuinely at that, and followed her upstairs.
Chapter Four
Rating: NC-17
Contains: Canon-typical violence, explicit sex
Fic Wordcount: 117,000
Chapter Wordcount:
Notes: Canon-divergent, ignoring most of Act 3. A thousand thanks to
senmut's Discord server for cheering and brainstorming and reactions and encouragement.Beta: breadedsinner and MikWrites_InSpace
Summary: After the duel with the Arishok, Ariane Hawke looks around at the wreckage of her life in Kirkwall and asks herself: what is left for me here? As tensions increase between the Circle and the Templars, she turns to helping Sebastian retake Starkhaven. Meanwhile, she is trying to figure out how to love Fenris when he hates mages, and also definitely not looking at Sebastian's gorgeous eyes. Definitely not. Neither is Fenris. Sebastian is not looking back.
Definitely.
Canon divergence in which almost all of act 3 goes in the bin, and three damaged people try to find a way to live with each other and themselves, and maybe heal a bit.
Chapter index here.
The demon laughed. Its voice bounced off the pillars of its prison and shook the crevasses beneath the mountain. Hawke cursed, drawing on the last of her magic to fling a bolt of ice at it. The bolt struck dead center in its chest, and the demon crumpled slowly, but as it did, it looked past her and smiled faintly. Hawke waited to be sure it wouldn't rise again--after all of that she was taking no chances on getting stabbed in the back for being careless--but the hulk of misshapen flesh remained still.
She turned to face Larius, who was pulling himself upright with the aid of a column that had survived Corypheus's assault. Larius shuddered eerily, as though he needed to resettle his skin over his emaciated flesh, and then smiled at her. "Thank you for freeing me," he said, formal and clear.
That's not right. Hawke pulled her mouth into a broad smile. "My pleasure, Warden Commander," she said. She had to buy some time for her magic to recover; she couldn't risk him guessing why she wanted a lyrium potion. "What will you do now?"
"I will have to tell the other Wardens that Corypheus is no longer a threat," he said. No sign of the fidgeting man who'd led her all the way into the depths of the fortress. No sliding pitch to his voice. No frantic jerking of his head as he tried to see everything around him. He stood straight and tall, and smoothed his tufts of hair back. "It will be good to walk freely again."
You said you were going on your Calling.
"It must be a great weight off your mind." Behind her back, Hawke lifted her left hand so it rested against her belt, and crossed her fingers. Varric snapped his in response. Good. "You've been down here under the effect of the Calling for so long," she continued. She heard the shift of metal as Carver and Fenris abandoned whatever they'd been doing and joined Varric. "I'm sorry, Warden Commander, I know your time is very valuable," she continued as she walked toward him, "but I have a question for you."
He smiled faintly, clearly impatient, and the shape of his mouth was both wrong and too familiar. "What is it?" he asked, with a completely different type of impatience to that he'd shown on the way down.
Behind her back, Hawke snapped her fingers, and at the same time, used her right arm to swing her father's staff forward, channeling as much lightning as she could at Larius. Bianca sang her song of death, and Fenris leapt forward, his zweihander slashing downward too fast for Hawke to follow. Carver hadn't forgotten their old signal, and he leapt past her to block Larius from escaping, his sword a crushing weight of its own. Fenris's markings glowed lyrium-bright as he plunged his right hand into Larius's chest, ripping out his heart and flinging it far away. It landed with a wet plop. Hawke fumbled a lyrium potion out of her pouch and gulped it down so that, as Fenris danced out of the way, she could crush Larius with a fist of rock.
He cursed her as he died--which, in all honesty, was fair--and the strange gray glitter in his eyes faded with his life.
"Not that I mind a good bout of surprise murder," Varric said mildly, "but would you like to tell me what that was all about?"
Hawke was so tired she was swaying on her feet, but she wanted to be very sure, so she awkwardly wielded the bladed end of her father's staff to hack off Larius's right arm--or tried. Fenris sighed and gently pushed her out of the way, taking over with substantially more skill and efficiency, so she turned to face Varric. "The Wardens said that no one with tainted blood could charge the seals," she said, "because the taint called to him. Did you notice what happened when we killed the demon?"
"Things stopped being on fire," Varric said, and Hawke couldn't help laughing.
"Yes," she agreed. "But also, Larius stopped twitching, and started talking sense--sort of."
Varric frowned, then hissed. "You think that Corypheus possessed him?"
At that, Fenris kicked the limbs he'd removed farther from what was left of Larius. Carver joined him.
"I think that's exactly what happened." Hawke looked at the five total Grey Warden corpses strewn about the bridge, and sighed. "Just once," she said, "I would really like to explore a crumbling ruin and not end up doing violence."
Varric ignored that, as she'd known he would, and joined Fenris and Carver in scattering the remains of the Grey Wardens. Hawke hesitated. "I'd like to burn them," she said.
Fenris and Carver prayed along with her as she stumbled through the litany she had heard too often; she wasn't a dedicant of the Chantry, but neither was she going to bring one down here, so the Grey Wardens would have to make do with her efforts. Hawke hoped the Maker took intent into consideration. When she was done, she gestured her friends away and drank another lyrium potion before she called down the most intense firestorm she could muster, enough to scour the prison clean of all the remains in it. The heat drove her back nearly to the stairs, coughing, and she braced herself on her father's staff to keep herself on her feet while she fed it more of her magic. When it was done, when nothing remained but ashes and the hope that she had served her father's legacy well, Hawke studied the stone prison. Part of her thought she should build a ward just in case. The rest of her recoiled from using any blood magic at all, even for this cause.
In the end, though she knew why her father had chosen this, she couldn't bring herself to do the same. "Let's go," she said, and let Carver lead the way back to the surface of the Vimmark Mountains.
A solid nap later, freshly bathed, Hawke sat down in the library to review the papers and journals she'd claimed from the fortress. As they'd explored, she'd checked each just long enough to determine that it wasn't something like a ledger of accounts before stuffing it into her bag, and now she spread them around her on the floor, sorting them into piles: correspondence, journals, scrolls, books.
She supposed she ought to feel guilty about scavenging from a Grey Warden stronghold, but on the other hand it didn't seem like they'd have much use for it with Corypheus dead, and she wanted these mementos of her father. She promised herself she would send on any Grey Warden-specific texts once she'd copied them.
Orana brought her a plate of bread, cheese, and cold meats. Hawke thanked her, and, satisfied that the texts were sorted, carried the plate to the writing desk in the hall. There was nothing written from her father, just the memory of his voice from the wards she'd touched, and so she opened her own journal and recorded her impressions, from their trip out into the wastelands to the murder of the former Warden Commander. She regretted his death, but the change had been too abrupt and too complete.
She would pray for him at the Chantry tomorrow.
The basic details recorded, she spent a little longer with food in one hand and pen in the other, slowly setting down her thoughts.
Whatever was left of my father said he hoped that his child wouldn't bear his curse. I wonder if he blamed himself for Bethany and I. He was so patient when he taught us, and he never tried to make us feel bad for our magic, but....I wonder. Even though Carver's the only normal one, he must've felt left out, which does not make up for him being a little shit, but still.
I hope Dad would be proud of me.
She stared at the words in her curling script and then put the pen aside, grabbing the last hunk of bread and tearing a hole in the middle for the last bit of cheese. She went back to the library, armed with fresh paper and pen, ready to dig through her new treasures. She sat on the floor for hours, paging through the journals of the dwarven legionnaires, before turning to the one journal stamped with the Grey Warden crest. It seemed the journal had belonged to a Grey Warden mage. He had spent a great many pages musing on things he'd read in various texts that make Hawke long to get access to a Grey Warden library; a lot of the journal didn't make sense without that context, but she found some fascinating details about warding magic and a lot more than she'd ever wanted to know about darkspawn.
A page in the middle made a chill run down her spine, and she re-read it three times.
The records say Corypheus has been trapped below the Vimmarks since the days of the Tevinter Imperium. Can it be a coincidence that the darkspawn besiege this area more fiercely than anywhere else on the surface of Thedas? Or that Kirkwall, the closest city, suffers from endless plagues of violence, lunacy, human sacrifice, and blood magic?
If one studies Kirkwall's public records, it becomes hard to deny that some malevolent force has long shaped its history. Could a darkspawn, even a powerful mage, have such influence even as it slumbers?
She'd joked with Varric that Kirkwall must be cursed one too many times to disregard that entry.
Was the city cursed? Could it be cleansed now that Corypheus was dead? She didn't think it was quite that simple. Oh, it might be where things had started, and given Corypheus's influence over the Carta she wouldn't take a bet against the darkspawn having had ichor-laden hands on the scales, but that explanation seemed too simple.
It still didn't make her feel better about being here.
But where would she go? Lothering was gone and there was no joy for her there anyway. She didn't think Ferelden needed another apostate mage, not that there was anywhere on the face of Thedas, except maybe Tevinter, where mages were desired neighbors. Leandra had always said her eldest daughter never met a problem she didn't want to solve, which meant even if she left Kirkwall she was likely to end up with the same problem Varric had accused her of, although she still disputed his description of her as heroic. First, she didn't exactly solve things in the nicest way, and second, it wasn't heroic if she was doing it to try to buy enough goodwill to keep herself safe another day or week or, if she was very lucky, a month.
"Messere?" Orana stood in the doorway. "Messere Fenris asks if you are at home."
"Of course." A quick burst of warmth washed through her. Fenris had come to her. It was enough to make her giddy. She squeezed her eyes shut and crushed that feeling as best she could. She was going to be an adult about this. Really.
She heard a sound at the door, and looked up to see Fenris standing in the doorway, looking at her as though uncertain of his welcome. She smiled and shifted on the couch, patting the cushion beside her. He crossed the room on silent feet and sat next to her. She turned so she sat longways on the couch, curled up with her back against its side and her toes tucked under his thigh.
He'd made enormous progress since she started teaching him to read, but the cramped writing of the journal was difficult even for her to decipher, so instead, she read the entry that had disturbed her aloud to him. He listened thoughtfully. When she finished, he tilted his head at her. "Kirkwall has no shortage of darkness," he said.
"I know. But I can't convince myself that what we did in that Warden prison will fix it."
"If it did, I would say we should go find whatever lurks beneath Tevinter," he muttered.
What lurks beneath Tevinter is magic, and anything we did wouldn't change that, she thought. But what she said was, "I think we'll need more friends for that."
He chuckled, as she'd meant him to, and she felt the dizzy relief of skirting a disastrous topic without falling into it. She set the journal aside and pushed her sock-covered toes into his thigh. "And what are you doing here?"
"I came to see you." He didn't look at her when he said it, and so she had a moment to wrestle her completely unreasonable enormous smile at the comment into something that seemed more proportional.
"And I greeted you with doom and gloom," she said with a mournful sigh.
"You usually do," he said, but his hand on her ankle seemed meant to convey that he meant it affectionately, as a joke.
Unfortunately, that did not make it less true.
She forced a smile. "Maybe we need a vacation," she teased.
His answering smile was uncertain. "Where would you like to go?"
And just like that, she was right back to where she'd been when he arrived. "Nowhere. Anywhere. I know it's not practical."
He frowned slightly. "I was not aware that vacations were intended to be practical," he said carefully. It was the voice he used when he was explaining the things he didn't know from a slave's life, and it made her feel guilty.
"They aren't, I'm just...." She sighed. The trip to the Vimmark Mountains had made her maudlin. "It's been a long day, I suppose." She uncurled to sit more properly alongside him, and he rested his hand on her knee. It was more affection than she'd expected. "You aren't injured?" she asked.
"No," he said, clearly puzzled, and then frowned. "Hawke, when I said I came to see you, I meant it."
Her eyes stung. She knew he was cautious of embraces, but she leaned into him, slowly enough he could move away. He didn't. That put her closer to the edge of real tears, which she refused to shed. "Sorry," she said quietly. "I seem to be a mess."
He chuckled faintly, and moved his hand until his arm was around her shoulders. "I think you could use some rest," he said.
"If you wanted to take me to bed," she said, "you could have said so."
He sighed, and she laughed, as lightly as she could manage. "Come on, then," she said. "Let's get some rest, and see what other trouble we can get up to in the morning." She paused, glancing at the clock on the mantel; it was later than she'd thought, though clearly not so late that Fenris had thought he couldn't come by. Then again, everyone knew she slept irregularly at best. "Maybe afternoon," she concluded.
He laughed genuinely at that, and followed her upstairs.
Chapter Four