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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.
Hawke was in a fine temper when she slammed into the Hanged Man. She had started her day with Finn Blackwood, the middle son of a prestigious Kirkwall family, on her doorstep with flowers and pretty words about what a great viscount she could be, particularly with the weight of the alliance his family headed behind her. She had almost believed he meant it, which had lasted just long enough for him to vaguely mention that of course it would be better for all concerned if her "condition" could be dealt with in an approved way before she took the throne, at which point she had told him that his options were to leave immediately on his own two feet or in five minutes as a corpse. "This is why no one could ever trust you to be Viscount" had been his parting shot, and everything had been worse from there. Gamlen had showed up looking for "company" which meant he'd emptied his purse again, and she'd found a note on her desk from a contact in the Docks mentioning a ship that had too many people going up the gangplank and not enough coming back down.
A good fight with slavers would be a productive way to deal with her temper, but Maker, she was so fucking tired of being apparently the only person in Kirkwall willing to take initiative.
She detoured by the bar for two whiskeys and then took the empty seat at Varric's table, where he was playing Wicked Grace with Merrill, Fenris, and Anders. The stack of coins in front of Fenris was much taller than the two mages' stacks, though Varric seemed to be holding his own.
Hawke slammed down the first whiskey without taking a breath, and then picked up the second one, which she drank half of before putting it back down.
Since she could feel Varric's concern like a blanket, she flashed a smile at Merrill, who was watching her wide-eyed instead of the cards she was shuffling. "Deal me in, Merrill," she said.
Merrill swallowed hard, and dealt the cards. Hawke picked up her hand and swallowed a curse before throwing her copper coins into the center of the table. The game passed in an awkward, brittle silence; Hawke finished her remaining whiskey in the first betting round. Fenris and Anders were engaged in another one of their glaring contests over cards, which was just fine with Hawke, really, she loved sitting in the middle of tense not-fights that were not about her but might as well be.
When she lost, as she'd known she would since her first card, she flipped an extra silver at Anders. "With my compliments," she said with a laugh. All three of them watched her like they expected her to drop an inferno on their heads. She'd never do that. Infernos took a lot of energy. If she was going to be bothered to do that to anyone in Kirkwall she hadn't already killed, it would be Knight-Commander Meredith. She only realized she'd said that aloud when Varric choked on his ale.
Anders opened his mouth, then covered it with his hand for an ostentatious cough when Hawke glared at him. Fenris scowled and leaned back in his chair. Merrill bit her lip, and then made the foolish choice Hawke had been hoping she wouldn't. "Are you all right, Hawke? It's only, you don't usually drink that much, and you don't drink whiskey when we're playing."
"Oh, I'm fine, just another day when people tell me to my face I'd be a better person stripped of my will and sense of self," Hawke replied. The thought of being tied to a chair, with that brand drawing closer and nothing she could do about it, watching the last few seconds of her awareness and emotions drown under a wave of terror, was enough to have her signaling Nora for another drink.
Varric's eyebrows drew together. Anders clenched both hands into fists where they rested on the table. Merrill's face fell, and Hawke felt like she'd just kicked a kitten. "I'm sorry, Merrill," she said.
"I don't think you've done anything to be sorry for," Merrill replied. "Who threatened to make you Tranquil?"
"The other list is shorter," Hawke said, and threw back half the whiskey Nora brought.
"Hawke," Anders began mildly.
"Do not," Hawke said, and oh, yes, there was the nice heat of whiskey burning her entire throat and stomach. "Do not lecture me, do not, I am fucking sick of lectures--"
"I was going to ask," Anders interrupted, "if you'd like me to take you home."
Hawke heard the scrape of Fenris's gauntlet on the table. She ignored it. "Ah, yes, home, my giant empty manor full of ghosts," she said, and she knew her laughter had gone fully into hysterical territory. "No, Anders, I don't want to go home, why do you think I'm here?"
Fenris cleared his throat and she snapped her head around to him. He flinched back, and that was it for Hawke. "I have never," she said, taking great care to shape every syllable with extraordinary precision, "done you harm. I have healed your wounds and treated you as a friend, and more than a friend. I have killed your enemies. And yet you fear me." She shook her head. "What do I have to do, Fenris, to prove to you I don't want to use blood magic? What would it take for you to realize I won't hurt you? Or is it that you like the idea of me being Tranquil?" She was going too far. She'd known she was out of control before she walked in the door, and three whiskeys on an empty stomach was making the room slosh. She wondered if that was what it was like to be on a ship. She wished she'd talked Isabela into taking her sailing before the pirate had run off with the book. She wished a lot of things.
Fenris stood up very slowly, the muscles in his jaw visibly tight. Without a word, he turned and walked out of the Hanged Man, and Hawke watched him go.
Twice now he'd walked out on her, and this time was probably--okay, definitely--her fault, but it just went to show it didn't matter how much of herself she gave anyone, she was just a useful but dangerous tool, to be discarded when the danger exceeded the usefulness.
She caught herself crying, and scrubbed the back of her hand across her face savagely. Anders caught her wrist very lightly. She jerked her hand away and buried her face in her hands.
"Daisy," Varric said, sounding farther away than he should, "would you ask Nora for a bowl of the stew, please?"
Merrill's chair scraped. Hawke squeezed her eyes shut and pressed the heels of her hands into them and wasn't sure whether the sound she made was a laugh or a sob.
There was a long and uncomfortable silence until Merrill came back with a steaming bowl of the stew. She placed it next to Hawke and slid into the chair Fenris had abandoned. Then she gently pulled on Hawke's hand until she could guide it down to the spoon she had also brought. It took three tries for Hawke to get the spoon properly in her hand, and two more to get it into the bowl right side up, but she managed to scoop some stew into her mouth.
It was awful, of course. It always was.
There was a hunk of dark bread as well, and Merrill offered it to her. Hawke put more stew in her mouth and bit into the bread.
Anders strategically chose that moment, while she was trying to chew it, to speak.
"No one here thinks you'd turn to blood magic," he said.
"I don't think even Fenris thinks you would, really," Merrill said, her eyes fixed on something in the corner.
"It doesn't matter," Hawke said when she'd swallowed the bread and managed to wash it down with another bite of stew. "It doesn't matter whether he thinks I would because I'm still a mage." She was pretty sure those words came out slurred. The room sloshing was less appealing now.
"That says more about him than you," Anders said, with the throbbing echo that meant he spoke not just for himself, but Justice as well.
Hawke laughed bitterly and shoved more bread in her mouth so she wouldn't point out that an abomination and a blood mage were hardly the most reliable people to be talking about the general trustworthiness of mages. She knew what she could become. Her father had done it. Apparently two-thirds of Kirkwall's circle was blood mages, even reducing her guess to account for Meredith's bias. She hadn't done it yet, never wanted to, but that source of power was always there. She could hear it singing to her in battle, when she was wounded and tired and needed just a little more. The "more" was always to hand. All it took was one little cut.
When she'd waited long enough to have put a little thought into her words, she looked up at Anders. "It doesn't matter, really," she said. "The porcupine has left the building." She laughed again at her own words. Anders looked confused. Varric shook his head.
She'd once told him she wasn't turned off by crazy. She rather wished she had been.
"Sometimes," she said, "I think maybe it would be easier if I was Tranquil."
"Never say that." Anders grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her fiercely. The room spun. Hawke lost all sense of up and down and found herself half in Anders' lap, his fingers digging painfully into her upper arms. "Never say that, Hawke, not ever. No one deserves that. Especially not you."
She thought of Elsa's calm demeanor, her serene smile. She thought of Karl's empty eyes. She thought of the threats the templars had made when they kidnapped her.
Deserve? Perhaps not. But that wasn't what she'd said. Though she didn't think Anders would appreciate the distinction.
She pulled herself back upright and rested her elbows on the table. Merrill nudged the food closer to her, but Hawke's stomach churned at the thought. Anders, and Justice, were watching her too carefully. "I'm not about to run off to Meredith and turn myself in," she said tiredly.
"Hawke...." Anders trailed off.
"I'm sorry," she murmured.
Merrill rested a hand, light as a butterfly wing, on her arm. Hawke added another wish to the pile of pointless longing: she wished Bethany was still here.
"I guess I'd better go make my apologies," she said.
"No," Anders said, "you'd better sleep. If you insist on letting him hate you to your face, you can deal with that tomorrow."
It was on the tip of her tongue to protest that he didn't hate her, but then again, she couldn't separate being a mage from being herself, so she supposed that wasn't true. All the people in Kirkwall and she went ahead and made the worst choice possible.
"Hawke? What's wrong?" She glanced up to see that Sebastian had arrived. He'd left his gleaming white armor in the Chantry, and wore a comfortable and plain tunic and boots, though his grandfather's bow was still slung on his back.
"Someone told her she'd be better off Tranquil and she came here and had a lot of whiskey and then got in a fight with Fenris, though I don't know if it's actually a fight, but we're trying to tell her she shouldn't be Tranquil," Merrill explained, and Hawke closed her eyes and rested her forehead on her fists.
There was a brief pause.
Sebastian took a seat. "Well then," he said quietly. "Is it distraction you're wanting, Hawke?"
She almost said something too honest, and bit her tongue to stop it--too hard, as it turned out, and she cursed quietly. "Please do distract me," she said.
Sebastian began teaching them a Starkhaven card game that involved adding a number of facedown cards to a pile in the center of the table while saying how many and what rank, where everyone else tried to guess if the player was lying; correct guesses gave the player the pile of cards, while incorrect gave them to the accuser, and the goal was to have no cards. It kept Hawke solidly occupied until she sobered up enough to stagger back home on Sebastian's arm.
"Don't let me think too much," she said when they were out of earshot of the Hanged Man. "I'll end up at--" A cobblestone leapt up and interfered with her boot, and Sebastian caught her when she lurched into him. His arms were warm and strong. She wanted to stay there, so of course she had to pull away.
"Did I ever tell you of the first time I decided to make my own arrows?" He steadied her with a hand under her elbow, and thankfully didn't wait for a reply. "This was not, as you might initially guess, something I did as a child, but rather once I was beginning my career in carousing. I had a friend, Declan Ovlin, whose mother kept prize peacocks. I decided that my arrows should have peacock fletching, which is a terrible idea in general but seemed great after a few bottles of wine. So Declan and I went to his mother's house." He continued on in this vein with a running commentary of nonsense stories of his misspent youth. She'd never been so grateful for anything in her entire life, and she told him so. He left her safely at her door and went back to the Chantry.
She went to bed, but it was a long time before the tears eased enough for sleep.
Chapter Eight
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.
Hawke was in a fine temper when she slammed into the Hanged Man. She had started her day with Finn Blackwood, the middle son of a prestigious Kirkwall family, on her doorstep with flowers and pretty words about what a great viscount she could be, particularly with the weight of the alliance his family headed behind her. She had almost believed he meant it, which had lasted just long enough for him to vaguely mention that of course it would be better for all concerned if her "condition" could be dealt with in an approved way before she took the throne, at which point she had told him that his options were to leave immediately on his own two feet or in five minutes as a corpse. "This is why no one could ever trust you to be Viscount" had been his parting shot, and everything had been worse from there. Gamlen had showed up looking for "company" which meant he'd emptied his purse again, and she'd found a note on her desk from a contact in the Docks mentioning a ship that had too many people going up the gangplank and not enough coming back down.
A good fight with slavers would be a productive way to deal with her temper, but Maker, she was so fucking tired of being apparently the only person in Kirkwall willing to take initiative.
She detoured by the bar for two whiskeys and then took the empty seat at Varric's table, where he was playing Wicked Grace with Merrill, Fenris, and Anders. The stack of coins in front of Fenris was much taller than the two mages' stacks, though Varric seemed to be holding his own.
Hawke slammed down the first whiskey without taking a breath, and then picked up the second one, which she drank half of before putting it back down.
Since she could feel Varric's concern like a blanket, she flashed a smile at Merrill, who was watching her wide-eyed instead of the cards she was shuffling. "Deal me in, Merrill," she said.
Merrill swallowed hard, and dealt the cards. Hawke picked up her hand and swallowed a curse before throwing her copper coins into the center of the table. The game passed in an awkward, brittle silence; Hawke finished her remaining whiskey in the first betting round. Fenris and Anders were engaged in another one of their glaring contests over cards, which was just fine with Hawke, really, she loved sitting in the middle of tense not-fights that were not about her but might as well be.
When she lost, as she'd known she would since her first card, she flipped an extra silver at Anders. "With my compliments," she said with a laugh. All three of them watched her like they expected her to drop an inferno on their heads. She'd never do that. Infernos took a lot of energy. If she was going to be bothered to do that to anyone in Kirkwall she hadn't already killed, it would be Knight-Commander Meredith. She only realized she'd said that aloud when Varric choked on his ale.
Anders opened his mouth, then covered it with his hand for an ostentatious cough when Hawke glared at him. Fenris scowled and leaned back in his chair. Merrill bit her lip, and then made the foolish choice Hawke had been hoping she wouldn't. "Are you all right, Hawke? It's only, you don't usually drink that much, and you don't drink whiskey when we're playing."
"Oh, I'm fine, just another day when people tell me to my face I'd be a better person stripped of my will and sense of self," Hawke replied. The thought of being tied to a chair, with that brand drawing closer and nothing she could do about it, watching the last few seconds of her awareness and emotions drown under a wave of terror, was enough to have her signaling Nora for another drink.
Varric's eyebrows drew together. Anders clenched both hands into fists where they rested on the table. Merrill's face fell, and Hawke felt like she'd just kicked a kitten. "I'm sorry, Merrill," she said.
"I don't think you've done anything to be sorry for," Merrill replied. "Who threatened to make you Tranquil?"
"The other list is shorter," Hawke said, and threw back half the whiskey Nora brought.
"Hawke," Anders began mildly.
"Do not," Hawke said, and oh, yes, there was the nice heat of whiskey burning her entire throat and stomach. "Do not lecture me, do not, I am fucking sick of lectures--"
"I was going to ask," Anders interrupted, "if you'd like me to take you home."
Hawke heard the scrape of Fenris's gauntlet on the table. She ignored it. "Ah, yes, home, my giant empty manor full of ghosts," she said, and she knew her laughter had gone fully into hysterical territory. "No, Anders, I don't want to go home, why do you think I'm here?"
Fenris cleared his throat and she snapped her head around to him. He flinched back, and that was it for Hawke. "I have never," she said, taking great care to shape every syllable with extraordinary precision, "done you harm. I have healed your wounds and treated you as a friend, and more than a friend. I have killed your enemies. And yet you fear me." She shook her head. "What do I have to do, Fenris, to prove to you I don't want to use blood magic? What would it take for you to realize I won't hurt you? Or is it that you like the idea of me being Tranquil?" She was going too far. She'd known she was out of control before she walked in the door, and three whiskeys on an empty stomach was making the room slosh. She wondered if that was what it was like to be on a ship. She wished she'd talked Isabela into taking her sailing before the pirate had run off with the book. She wished a lot of things.
Fenris stood up very slowly, the muscles in his jaw visibly tight. Without a word, he turned and walked out of the Hanged Man, and Hawke watched him go.
Twice now he'd walked out on her, and this time was probably--okay, definitely--her fault, but it just went to show it didn't matter how much of herself she gave anyone, she was just a useful but dangerous tool, to be discarded when the danger exceeded the usefulness.
She caught herself crying, and scrubbed the back of her hand across her face savagely. Anders caught her wrist very lightly. She jerked her hand away and buried her face in her hands.
"Daisy," Varric said, sounding farther away than he should, "would you ask Nora for a bowl of the stew, please?"
Merrill's chair scraped. Hawke squeezed her eyes shut and pressed the heels of her hands into them and wasn't sure whether the sound she made was a laugh or a sob.
There was a long and uncomfortable silence until Merrill came back with a steaming bowl of the stew. She placed it next to Hawke and slid into the chair Fenris had abandoned. Then she gently pulled on Hawke's hand until she could guide it down to the spoon she had also brought. It took three tries for Hawke to get the spoon properly in her hand, and two more to get it into the bowl right side up, but she managed to scoop some stew into her mouth.
It was awful, of course. It always was.
There was a hunk of dark bread as well, and Merrill offered it to her. Hawke put more stew in her mouth and bit into the bread.
Anders strategically chose that moment, while she was trying to chew it, to speak.
"No one here thinks you'd turn to blood magic," he said.
"I don't think even Fenris thinks you would, really," Merrill said, her eyes fixed on something in the corner.
"It doesn't matter," Hawke said when she'd swallowed the bread and managed to wash it down with another bite of stew. "It doesn't matter whether he thinks I would because I'm still a mage." She was pretty sure those words came out slurred. The room sloshing was less appealing now.
"That says more about him than you," Anders said, with the throbbing echo that meant he spoke not just for himself, but Justice as well.
Hawke laughed bitterly and shoved more bread in her mouth so she wouldn't point out that an abomination and a blood mage were hardly the most reliable people to be talking about the general trustworthiness of mages. She knew what she could become. Her father had done it. Apparently two-thirds of Kirkwall's circle was blood mages, even reducing her guess to account for Meredith's bias. She hadn't done it yet, never wanted to, but that source of power was always there. She could hear it singing to her in battle, when she was wounded and tired and needed just a little more. The "more" was always to hand. All it took was one little cut.
When she'd waited long enough to have put a little thought into her words, she looked up at Anders. "It doesn't matter, really," she said. "The porcupine has left the building." She laughed again at her own words. Anders looked confused. Varric shook his head.
She'd once told him she wasn't turned off by crazy. She rather wished she had been.
"Sometimes," she said, "I think maybe it would be easier if I was Tranquil."
"Never say that." Anders grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her fiercely. The room spun. Hawke lost all sense of up and down and found herself half in Anders' lap, his fingers digging painfully into her upper arms. "Never say that, Hawke, not ever. No one deserves that. Especially not you."
She thought of Elsa's calm demeanor, her serene smile. She thought of Karl's empty eyes. She thought of the threats the templars had made when they kidnapped her.
Deserve? Perhaps not. But that wasn't what she'd said. Though she didn't think Anders would appreciate the distinction.
She pulled herself back upright and rested her elbows on the table. Merrill nudged the food closer to her, but Hawke's stomach churned at the thought. Anders, and Justice, were watching her too carefully. "I'm not about to run off to Meredith and turn myself in," she said tiredly.
"Hawke...." Anders trailed off.
"I'm sorry," she murmured.
Merrill rested a hand, light as a butterfly wing, on her arm. Hawke added another wish to the pile of pointless longing: she wished Bethany was still here.
"I guess I'd better go make my apologies," she said.
"No," Anders said, "you'd better sleep. If you insist on letting him hate you to your face, you can deal with that tomorrow."
It was on the tip of her tongue to protest that he didn't hate her, but then again, she couldn't separate being a mage from being herself, so she supposed that wasn't true. All the people in Kirkwall and she went ahead and made the worst choice possible.
"Hawke? What's wrong?" She glanced up to see that Sebastian had arrived. He'd left his gleaming white armor in the Chantry, and wore a comfortable and plain tunic and boots, though his grandfather's bow was still slung on his back.
"Someone told her she'd be better off Tranquil and she came here and had a lot of whiskey and then got in a fight with Fenris, though I don't know if it's actually a fight, but we're trying to tell her she shouldn't be Tranquil," Merrill explained, and Hawke closed her eyes and rested her forehead on her fists.
There was a brief pause.
Sebastian took a seat. "Well then," he said quietly. "Is it distraction you're wanting, Hawke?"
She almost said something too honest, and bit her tongue to stop it--too hard, as it turned out, and she cursed quietly. "Please do distract me," she said.
Sebastian began teaching them a Starkhaven card game that involved adding a number of facedown cards to a pile in the center of the table while saying how many and what rank, where everyone else tried to guess if the player was lying; correct guesses gave the player the pile of cards, while incorrect gave them to the accuser, and the goal was to have no cards. It kept Hawke solidly occupied until she sobered up enough to stagger back home on Sebastian's arm.
"Don't let me think too much," she said when they were out of earshot of the Hanged Man. "I'll end up at--" A cobblestone leapt up and interfered with her boot, and Sebastian caught her when she lurched into him. His arms were warm and strong. She wanted to stay there, so of course she had to pull away.
"Did I ever tell you of the first time I decided to make my own arrows?" He steadied her with a hand under her elbow, and thankfully didn't wait for a reply. "This was not, as you might initially guess, something I did as a child, but rather once I was beginning my career in carousing. I had a friend, Declan Ovlin, whose mother kept prize peacocks. I decided that my arrows should have peacock fletching, which is a terrible idea in general but seemed great after a few bottles of wine. So Declan and I went to his mother's house." He continued on in this vein with a running commentary of nonsense stories of his misspent youth. She'd never been so grateful for anything in her entire life, and she told him so. He left her safely at her door and went back to the Chantry.
She went to bed, but it was a long time before the tears eased enough for sleep.
Chapter Eight