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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.
Sebastian stood before the door of the manor Fenris had claimed. Thin tendrils of mist snaked around his ankles. Fenris never bothered to light the lanterns on the front of the house, and this corner of Hightown was quite dark. Still, a faint shimmer of light showed through the windows, so most likely he was home. He had not been in the Hanged Man, and wasn't with Hawke as she was in the Hanged Man, so Sebastian hoped to find him here.
He knocked, politely quiet at first, and then with more force when he thought that he'd been too quiet. He waited, and soon enough Fenris flung open the door and leaned against the jamb, a wine bottle in his hand. He wore no shirt, just bright silvery-white lines on brown skin, disappearing into his trousers. Sebastian pulled his gaze away.
"Hawke send you? Or Varric?" Fenris asked. He was well enough into the wine that he blurred his words together, but not so much that Sebastian couldn't understand him.
"I came of my own accord," Sebastian assured him.
Fenris made some sound, whether acceptance or disbelief he couldn't tell, and stepped back, gesturing with the wine bottle. Sebastian came in and wondered how Fenris could stand to leave things piled up in this way. It wasn't that he was obsessed with cleaning--he'd caught scoldings from the Chantry Mothers often enough for being untidy despite the few possessions he maintained--but this wasn't a homely sort of untidiness. It spoke more of despair than disinterest.
Still, he hadn't come to critique Fenris's housekeeping, so he followed his friend through the mess that was the foyer and up to a room that, while nearly as sparse as a Chantry brother's cell, at least possessed whole furnishings. Fenris slung himself across a large chair, one leg propped up; Sebastian was proud that he kept his gaze on Fenris's face.
"There's wine if you want it," Fenris said.
Sebastian had to admit he was sorely tempted, but he wanted his mind and tongue unhampered. "Not just now," he said instead.
Fenris shrugged and drank from the bottle. His throat worked as he swallowed. The muscles in his arm flexed as he lowered the bottle. Sebastian swallowed hard.
"If no one sent you and you aren't here to enjoy the absurd cellar I procured," Fenris said, "what brings you?"
"I thought you might want someone to talk to."
Fenris scoffed and drank again. In Sebastian's experience, drinking that hard and fast was more likely to lead one to wallow in the reasons for drinking in the first place, but he held his tongue.
"And what would I talk about?" Fenris asked, lowering the bottle to the table before him with a thud.
Sebastian shrugged. "The weather, or your life before Kirkwall, or your adventures by yourself on the Wounded Coast--" He'd guessed rightly about that, he saw from the slight guilty flinch, and he reminded himself to have words about that when Fenris was sober "--or the contents of your wine cellar. Whatever you choose."
"Or Hawke?" Fenris asked bitterly.
Sebastian held his gaze. "If you like."
He expected Fenris to take refuge in the wine again, but he only grunted and nudged the bottle. Sebastian held himself still, and waited.
"Did Hawke tell you how I left Danarius?" Fenris asked him eventually.
Sebastian shook his head. "She doesn't repeat your confidences."
Fenris frowned, then shrugged. "You know of Seheron?"
Sebastian had to cast his mind back to childhood lessons, the sort neither he nor his tutors had dedicated themselves to as a third son was unlikely to need lessons in rulership, but he remembered eventually. "An island constantly engulfed in battles between Tevinter and Qunari, if I recall."
"Yes. Danarius brought me with him for one such battle, and was obliged to leave me behind when the ship had insufficient room for all the magisters' pets." That familiar note of biting anger lingered under the words. "The Fog Warriors took me in. They were....good to me." Fenris stared at something only he could see. "Eventually, of course, Danarius returned to take me back to Tevinter. The Fog Warriors fought for me, and injured him, but he defeated them in the end. And then he ordered me to kill them."
Sebastian said nothing, afraid to shatter the tenuous threads of connection between them. He wondered if Hawke had done the same, or if she had managed to find a twist of phrase that kept the moment from being too heavy while not giving offense.
"I told you I was not to be trusted," Fenris said. "This is why."
Still, Sebastian didn't speak, only listened.
"I was so sickened by myself that I left Danarius while he recovered, and fled here." Fenris glanced around, and his mouth twisted. "Well, not here exactly, of course. I went to the Alienage first." He drank deeply; from the sound when the bottle hit the table once more, Sebastian knew it was now empty. "I betrayed the only comrades I'd ever had, on the words of a magister. I cannot even say if he compelled me with magic."
Sebastian thought about what Fenris had, and hadn't, said. When silence spun out and Fenris raised an eyebrow at him, as though to invite speech, he chose his words with care. "Do you think Hawke would try to command you so?"
His childhood nurse would have warned Fenris that his face was liable to freeze in such a state. Sebastian wanted to smooth the frown lines away. "Hawke? No," Fenris said. "But she may not always be....Hawke."
"In the Circle," Sebastian said, "there is a ritual where a mage demonstrates that she can be trusted not to yield to the temptations of the Fade." He paused. "Hawke is not of the Circle," he continued when Fenris didn't speak, "but I think she has been through something similar."
Fenris picked up the bottle and then put it down again in the manner of a man who wanted something to do with his hands that he might not have to give voice to his thoughts.
"If I would slaughter dozens of men and women who cared for me, who treated me like one of them, without magic to compel me," Fenris said at last, "how could I believe a mage would do better?"
"A mage, or a magister?" Sebastian asked. "They are not the same."
"Magisters are mages," Fenris snarled.
"True," Sebastian agreed, "but a mage is not always a magister."
Fenris scrambled out of his chair and paced unevenly, weaving across the floor as though it rolled like the deck of a ship. Sebastian thought of Isabela, and hoped she was safe, wherever she'd fled with the Qunari book.
"I thought the Chantry said that mages can only be tolerated in the Circle," Fenris said eventually, after three unsteady rounds of the room.
Sebastian nodded reluctantly. "It does," he said. "I..." He had to turn away, and stared into the fireplace, where the flames burned low. "I have prayed on this much," he said.
"You dedicated yourself to the Chantry and you would...." Fenris trailed off.
"I do not believe this Circle would keep a mage safe," Sebastian admitted, his voice low and strained even to his own ears. "So what should I do? Condemn Hawke to the Gallows for being born as the Maker made her? Drag her to another city, away from what family and friends she has left, and leave her in an unknown Circle there? Or trust that she will continue as she has been?" He looked at Fenris. "What would you do?"
Fenris slammed the side of his fist into the wall; lyrium flashed and flared, but he stayed in the room, as far as Sebastian could tell, not flickering through the Fade.
"You needn't have an answer," Sebastian said at last, "at least not tonight." He hesitated, unsure if what he wanted to say next was honest advice or self-serving. Perhaps it was some of both. "Fenris, if you cannot love her as she is--" He paused, but he had committed this far, and so he made himself continue. "Perhaps you must ask yourself if it would not be better for both of you to walk away."
Fenris flinched. Sebastian pressed his mouth shut firmly. He had said enough, or perhaps too much. Fenris turned away and stared into the fire, shoulders flexing intermittently.
Sebastian knew he should leave, but he did not want to leave Fenris in such a state, and admittedly he feared to startle him.
"I will not walk away," Fenris said to the fire, after so long a silence Sebastian startled a bit.
Sebastian breathed in that disappointment and hurt, and breathed out again. "Then you must make your peace with at least some magic," he said, and rose slowly. Fenris did not look at him. He turned and left quietly, navigating the tangled maze of the foyer with quiet, if not aplomb.
No one troubled him on his walk back to the Chantry, which was as well because he was deep enough in his own thoughts that a footpad could have sidled right up to him and he would have been tardy to notice. He gave the sister at the door an absent greeting and returned to his cell, where he stripped out of his armor and clothing and lay upon the narrow cot. He stared up at the ceiling as though the answers he sought were hanging there.
In his years in the Chantry, he had met many men and women who would have appealed to him in his wilder years--appealed to him still, if he was honest, but he had learned to set those wants aside and focus on the Maker's grace. Yet Fenris and Hawke both remained in his awareness, not merely as friends and fellow children of the Maker, but as very attractive people, who figured in heated dreams more often than he had cared to admit.
His life since he joined the Chantry had been a simple one: prayer, contemplation, restraint, compassion. Grand Cleric Aileen, who headed the Starkhaven Chantry, had sent him away to Kirkwall not long after he took his first vows, saying that he would find his new life easier with fewer known temptations. She had been right, of course, but ever since Hawke had careened into his life with her easy chatter and propensity to take every burden as her own--ever since the desire demon in the basement of the Harrimans' manor--he had wondered if Grand Cleric Aileen had had some ulterior motive in sending him here, away from the politics of his own city. Had she foreseen a crisis such as that which had taken his family? Such questions had not occurred to him, before Hawke and her blunt questions about his forsaken throne.
It would have been easy to blame her, for making him question this life, but he knew his questions were his own. Rather, he wondered why he had not thought to ask them before.
Was it enough that he asked them now?
He had not been idle, since their venture beneath the Harrimans' manor. He had perused what records Kirkwall held that were relevant, and ransacked his own memories, and begun reaching out to those he remembered as stalwart allies to his family. He was not fool enough to trust them sight unseen, but neither could he simply ride into Starkhaven and acclaim himself prince with no one to back him. His queries would raise questions, and whoever pulled Goran's strings would be expecting him, but there was nothing to be done about it. With luck, the puppetmaster would expect him to arrive at the head of an army, not a few warriors on horseback sliding into the city under cover of night.
He thought, too, of the other papers that the Seneschal had so-helpfully shown him last week, and grimaced. Sooner or later, he would need to decide about that, but not tonight.
He closed his eyes and began his bedtime prayers, but it was hours still before he slept.
Chapter Nine
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.
Sebastian stood before the door of the manor Fenris had claimed. Thin tendrils of mist snaked around his ankles. Fenris never bothered to light the lanterns on the front of the house, and this corner of Hightown was quite dark. Still, a faint shimmer of light showed through the windows, so most likely he was home. He had not been in the Hanged Man, and wasn't with Hawke as she was in the Hanged Man, so Sebastian hoped to find him here.
He knocked, politely quiet at first, and then with more force when he thought that he'd been too quiet. He waited, and soon enough Fenris flung open the door and leaned against the jamb, a wine bottle in his hand. He wore no shirt, just bright silvery-white lines on brown skin, disappearing into his trousers. Sebastian pulled his gaze away.
"Hawke send you? Or Varric?" Fenris asked. He was well enough into the wine that he blurred his words together, but not so much that Sebastian couldn't understand him.
"I came of my own accord," Sebastian assured him.
Fenris made some sound, whether acceptance or disbelief he couldn't tell, and stepped back, gesturing with the wine bottle. Sebastian came in and wondered how Fenris could stand to leave things piled up in this way. It wasn't that he was obsessed with cleaning--he'd caught scoldings from the Chantry Mothers often enough for being untidy despite the few possessions he maintained--but this wasn't a homely sort of untidiness. It spoke more of despair than disinterest.
Still, he hadn't come to critique Fenris's housekeeping, so he followed his friend through the mess that was the foyer and up to a room that, while nearly as sparse as a Chantry brother's cell, at least possessed whole furnishings. Fenris slung himself across a large chair, one leg propped up; Sebastian was proud that he kept his gaze on Fenris's face.
"There's wine if you want it," Fenris said.
Sebastian had to admit he was sorely tempted, but he wanted his mind and tongue unhampered. "Not just now," he said instead.
Fenris shrugged and drank from the bottle. His throat worked as he swallowed. The muscles in his arm flexed as he lowered the bottle. Sebastian swallowed hard.
"If no one sent you and you aren't here to enjoy the absurd cellar I procured," Fenris said, "what brings you?"
"I thought you might want someone to talk to."
Fenris scoffed and drank again. In Sebastian's experience, drinking that hard and fast was more likely to lead one to wallow in the reasons for drinking in the first place, but he held his tongue.
"And what would I talk about?" Fenris asked, lowering the bottle to the table before him with a thud.
Sebastian shrugged. "The weather, or your life before Kirkwall, or your adventures by yourself on the Wounded Coast--" He'd guessed rightly about that, he saw from the slight guilty flinch, and he reminded himself to have words about that when Fenris was sober "--or the contents of your wine cellar. Whatever you choose."
"Or Hawke?" Fenris asked bitterly.
Sebastian held his gaze. "If you like."
He expected Fenris to take refuge in the wine again, but he only grunted and nudged the bottle. Sebastian held himself still, and waited.
"Did Hawke tell you how I left Danarius?" Fenris asked him eventually.
Sebastian shook his head. "She doesn't repeat your confidences."
Fenris frowned, then shrugged. "You know of Seheron?"
Sebastian had to cast his mind back to childhood lessons, the sort neither he nor his tutors had dedicated themselves to as a third son was unlikely to need lessons in rulership, but he remembered eventually. "An island constantly engulfed in battles between Tevinter and Qunari, if I recall."
"Yes. Danarius brought me with him for one such battle, and was obliged to leave me behind when the ship had insufficient room for all the magisters' pets." That familiar note of biting anger lingered under the words. "The Fog Warriors took me in. They were....good to me." Fenris stared at something only he could see. "Eventually, of course, Danarius returned to take me back to Tevinter. The Fog Warriors fought for me, and injured him, but he defeated them in the end. And then he ordered me to kill them."
Sebastian said nothing, afraid to shatter the tenuous threads of connection between them. He wondered if Hawke had done the same, or if she had managed to find a twist of phrase that kept the moment from being too heavy while not giving offense.
"I told you I was not to be trusted," Fenris said. "This is why."
Still, Sebastian didn't speak, only listened.
"I was so sickened by myself that I left Danarius while he recovered, and fled here." Fenris glanced around, and his mouth twisted. "Well, not here exactly, of course. I went to the Alienage first." He drank deeply; from the sound when the bottle hit the table once more, Sebastian knew it was now empty. "I betrayed the only comrades I'd ever had, on the words of a magister. I cannot even say if he compelled me with magic."
Sebastian thought about what Fenris had, and hadn't, said. When silence spun out and Fenris raised an eyebrow at him, as though to invite speech, he chose his words with care. "Do you think Hawke would try to command you so?"
His childhood nurse would have warned Fenris that his face was liable to freeze in such a state. Sebastian wanted to smooth the frown lines away. "Hawke? No," Fenris said. "But she may not always be....Hawke."
"In the Circle," Sebastian said, "there is a ritual where a mage demonstrates that she can be trusted not to yield to the temptations of the Fade." He paused. "Hawke is not of the Circle," he continued when Fenris didn't speak, "but I think she has been through something similar."
Fenris picked up the bottle and then put it down again in the manner of a man who wanted something to do with his hands that he might not have to give voice to his thoughts.
"If I would slaughter dozens of men and women who cared for me, who treated me like one of them, without magic to compel me," Fenris said at last, "how could I believe a mage would do better?"
"A mage, or a magister?" Sebastian asked. "They are not the same."
"Magisters are mages," Fenris snarled.
"True," Sebastian agreed, "but a mage is not always a magister."
Fenris scrambled out of his chair and paced unevenly, weaving across the floor as though it rolled like the deck of a ship. Sebastian thought of Isabela, and hoped she was safe, wherever she'd fled with the Qunari book.
"I thought the Chantry said that mages can only be tolerated in the Circle," Fenris said eventually, after three unsteady rounds of the room.
Sebastian nodded reluctantly. "It does," he said. "I..." He had to turn away, and stared into the fireplace, where the flames burned low. "I have prayed on this much," he said.
"You dedicated yourself to the Chantry and you would...." Fenris trailed off.
"I do not believe this Circle would keep a mage safe," Sebastian admitted, his voice low and strained even to his own ears. "So what should I do? Condemn Hawke to the Gallows for being born as the Maker made her? Drag her to another city, away from what family and friends she has left, and leave her in an unknown Circle there? Or trust that she will continue as she has been?" He looked at Fenris. "What would you do?"
Fenris slammed the side of his fist into the wall; lyrium flashed and flared, but he stayed in the room, as far as Sebastian could tell, not flickering through the Fade.
"You needn't have an answer," Sebastian said at last, "at least not tonight." He hesitated, unsure if what he wanted to say next was honest advice or self-serving. Perhaps it was some of both. "Fenris, if you cannot love her as she is--" He paused, but he had committed this far, and so he made himself continue. "Perhaps you must ask yourself if it would not be better for both of you to walk away."
Fenris flinched. Sebastian pressed his mouth shut firmly. He had said enough, or perhaps too much. Fenris turned away and stared into the fire, shoulders flexing intermittently.
Sebastian knew he should leave, but he did not want to leave Fenris in such a state, and admittedly he feared to startle him.
"I will not walk away," Fenris said to the fire, after so long a silence Sebastian startled a bit.
Sebastian breathed in that disappointment and hurt, and breathed out again. "Then you must make your peace with at least some magic," he said, and rose slowly. Fenris did not look at him. He turned and left quietly, navigating the tangled maze of the foyer with quiet, if not aplomb.
No one troubled him on his walk back to the Chantry, which was as well because he was deep enough in his own thoughts that a footpad could have sidled right up to him and he would have been tardy to notice. He gave the sister at the door an absent greeting and returned to his cell, where he stripped out of his armor and clothing and lay upon the narrow cot. He stared up at the ceiling as though the answers he sought were hanging there.
In his years in the Chantry, he had met many men and women who would have appealed to him in his wilder years--appealed to him still, if he was honest, but he had learned to set those wants aside and focus on the Maker's grace. Yet Fenris and Hawke both remained in his awareness, not merely as friends and fellow children of the Maker, but as very attractive people, who figured in heated dreams more often than he had cared to admit.
His life since he joined the Chantry had been a simple one: prayer, contemplation, restraint, compassion. Grand Cleric Aileen, who headed the Starkhaven Chantry, had sent him away to Kirkwall not long after he took his first vows, saying that he would find his new life easier with fewer known temptations. She had been right, of course, but ever since Hawke had careened into his life with her easy chatter and propensity to take every burden as her own--ever since the desire demon in the basement of the Harrimans' manor--he had wondered if Grand Cleric Aileen had had some ulterior motive in sending him here, away from the politics of his own city. Had she foreseen a crisis such as that which had taken his family? Such questions had not occurred to him, before Hawke and her blunt questions about his forsaken throne.
It would have been easy to blame her, for making him question this life, but he knew his questions were his own. Rather, he wondered why he had not thought to ask them before.
Was it enough that he asked them now?
He had not been idle, since their venture beneath the Harrimans' manor. He had perused what records Kirkwall held that were relevant, and ransacked his own memories, and begun reaching out to those he remembered as stalwart allies to his family. He was not fool enough to trust them sight unseen, but neither could he simply ride into Starkhaven and acclaim himself prince with no one to back him. His queries would raise questions, and whoever pulled Goran's strings would be expecting him, but there was nothing to be done about it. With luck, the puppetmaster would expect him to arrive at the head of an army, not a few warriors on horseback sliding into the city under cover of night.
He thought, too, of the other papers that the Seneschal had so-helpfully shown him last week, and grimaced. Sooner or later, he would need to decide about that, but not tonight.
He closed his eyes and began his bedtime prayers, but it was hours still before he slept.
Chapter Nine