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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 woke to the sounds of campfire cooking and a murmured conversation between Sebastian and Isabela. When she sat up, blinking the sleep-grit from her eyes, for one jarring moment, she thought she was on the Wounded Coast in the early days before the Deep Roads expedition, hunting bandits to keep food on the table for her mother. She struggled upright in her blanket and caught sight of Clarice stirring something with an expression of great concentration, and memory and reality crashed back into her with the weight of sorrow she hadn't realized she had been carrying. Fenris sat across the fire from Sebastian and Isabela, tending his armor.
For a long, piercing moment she looked her fill of Fenris's face, in profile, his markings glinting in the firelight. The straight lines and planes of his face felt like cuts. Then he turned his head and saw her awake, and the half-smile that curved his mouth might have been a blow.
She had to learn to leave the drama to Varric.
She shaped her face into something like a smile and freed herself from the blanket. Sebastian was sitting up, Fenris's blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his own over his knees, and she told herself to be glad of it as she checked him over with magic. He was much better than he'd been the day before.
"I cannot thank you enough, Hawke," he said gravely when she was finished.
"Ah, someday you can grant me a favor when you're back on your throne," she said lightly. "I'm sure you'll think of something."
He gave her a look that said he could hear the edges in her voice despite her efforts. The awkwardness was broken when Isabela sauntered up with an even more exaggerated swing of her hips than usual, holding out a tin travel plate piled with cooked oats. "Breakfast in bed for His Highness," she said. "Shall I have Hawke feed you?"
"I was poisoned, not turned into a child," Sebastian said, but it was kind.
Isabela laughed, that deep full laugh all the way from her belly. Hawke missed that laugh. She missed Isabela's easy company in the Hanged Man and her sharp wit when she accompanied Hawke on some trek or another. She filed that firmly under "things it was pointless to want," right alongside Fenris, and Sebastian's smiles. She turned away and took a seat by the fire. Clarice handed her a plate of oats, and Hawke set to them with determination, if not enthusiasm. She had to admit they were better than she would've made.
"It's time, and past, that we moved on," Isabela said, sitting beside her with a plate balanced on her lap.
"You waited here for us," Hawke said. She supposed she was lucky that it hadn't been Isabela who planned the ambush.
Isabela hummed noncommittally and handed her a scrap of paper. One side had clearly been part of a ledger at some point; the other held an address in Lowtown in Isabela's distinctive scrawl. "He owes me a favor," Isabela said. "I won't be in Kirkwall long enough to get information for you, but I'll stop by to tell him to help you. Assume he's selling whatever he tells you to anyone else who pays, but he'll be accurate enough."
Hawke pocketed the paper. "Thanks," she said. "I appreciate it, Isabela." She put all the sincerity she felt into the words.
Isabela finished her oats and stood up, her necklaces jangling lightly as she did so. "Safe travels, Hawke," she said.
Across the fire, Clarice had been tidily packing their belongings into travel backpacks. Hawke hurried to finish her own food and collect the tin plates. There was a moment of confusion as she and Clarice sorted out which ones had belonged to which traveling party, and then with the last of their items packed, Isabela and Clarice headed out of the cave, presumably toward Kirkwall.
"How are you feeling, Sebastian?"
"Well enough to head back," he said.
Hawke nodded. They packed their own gear and made their way through the cave, passing the bodies of the Crows who had attacked them. A few flies buzzed around the corpses already. Without a word, Fenris and Sebastian dragged both corpses out of the cave to rot in the forest.
Someone had tended their horses the night before--Hawke suspected Fenris, on the grounds that he'd been conscious and not poisoned--and the animals were hobbled just outside the cave. They resettled the tack and mounted up. The sun was up, but between the trees and the mountains, the forest floor was quite dim. They let their horses pick their own way back to the high road and turned east toward Kirkwall.
The cave at the edge of the forest had not changed much since last they passed through--although this time, there were fewer bandits. Sebastian had ridden in wide sweeps to scout the area, and found nothing but a wide-eyed doe in the shadows of the trees, and a nest of rabbits. He left them undisturbed.
He led his horse back to the cave with a significant amount of deadfall wood lashed to the saddle, to re-stock the supplies in the cave. Fenris was sitting by the fire, carefully toasting some bread and cheese they had picked up in the forest village where they'd camped last night. It smelled wonderful. Hawke had just finished tending the other two horses, and she came to collect his as he transferred the firewood.
Something had been amiss with her since the Crow attack. It was to do with Fenris, somehow; she gave him the kind of longing stares he thought she'd left behind after their reconciliation. It made his heart ache for her, even if he didn't know what the problem was. Fenris, for his part, seemed unaware--surprising, for someone who watched the people around him with ingrained wariness.
He reminded himself firmly that his role in the Chantry included giving help where it was needed, but that did not mean providing it unasked.
He carried a few of the larger branches to the fire, where Fenris was concentrating intently on his task. It seemed a one-man job, so Sebastian turned his effort to breaking apart the branches into kindling and larger pieces. Hawke joined them and Fenris kissed her temple lightly. She had her company smile on, Sebastian noticed, the one she used when she was among people she expected to betray her and she didn't want them to know that she was on guard. He wondered why.
Dinner was a bafflingly surreal affair. Hawke and Fenris were both nervous, trying to start conversations and then dropping them as though burned a few exchanges in. After the second time, Sebastian stopped trying to participate, but his silence seemed to have the opposite of the intended effect; Hawke flinched, and Fenris stuttered, and then both fell silent, overly fascinated with the simple food.
Nervousness whispered across the back of his neck. Not the same as before a battle, but the feeling when he knew there were traps nearby and couldn't see them.
Hawke stammered her way through some explanation of being tired, then all but dove into her blanket, rolling herself into a tight bundle and facing away from them. Sebastian rubbed away a frown that seemed to want to embed itself permanently between his brows.
Fenris took a seat beside him, quietly, as they both tended their weapons. Fenris also had Hawke's armor, which he was checking over with more than his usual care--not that he was ever slapdash about equipment. Sebastian considered asking him, just to see if he could chase whatever was circling them into the open, but instead he recited the Chant in his mind in pursuit of patience.
It was not as effective as he'd like it to be.
Fenris cleared his throat, barely audible, and out of the corner of his eye Sebastian saw Hawke's shoulder tense and pull up toward her ear before she visibly forced it back down. Her breathing was too even. He looked at Fenris, who was focused on the armor in his hands, and then looked up and met Sebastian's eyes.
"Forgive me if I've misread," Fenris said, and then paused.
Sebastian worked to keep his expression neutral. He was very familiar with one particular kind of conversation that might start with that sentiment, and reasonably sure that this was not going to be that.
Fenris hesitated long enough that Sebastian thought he might actually flee, perhaps even leave the cave, but at last he drew a deep breath and said "You have been friendly to me, of course, but I thought perhaps there might also be....something more to it." Even in the firelight, Sebastian could see the color rising under his brown skin. Maker help him, it was that kind of conversation. "And if I am reading that correctly, I--" He coughed slightly. Out of the corner of his eye, Sebastian saw Hawke flinch. He thought his heart was going to break for her, and a very slow anger was beginning to build somewhere deep in his ribcage. He'd thought better of Fenris.
"I would welcome it," Fenris said, and then rubbed his forehead. "This was easier once," he muttered to himself.
Sebastian silently recited two of his favorite lines of the Chant for bringing calm while he sought the proper words. "It seems," he said slowly, "that I have not been as careful as I thought." He paused, and watched that particular hope light Fenris's face. He worked to keep his voice equally gentle and even as he continued, and not let it become a dagger. "Yet I was under the impression that you and Hawke had fully reconciled, and committed to each other."
He heard a muffled sniffle from the pile of blankets, where Hawke's shoulders had curled high again, and laid his hands flat on his thighs to keep them from bunching into fists. His anger wasn't only on her behalf. It was for himself, too, and his own disappointment--he was honest enough to admit it, although he also knew hers must go deeper.
Fenris frowned. "We did."
Sebastian raised both eyebrows.
"She told me to talk to you," Fenris said, his eyes narrowing as he took in the growing tension in Sebastian's shoulders and the flex of his hands.
Sebastian froze. "I beg your pardon?" Surely this conversation was not really happening.
Fenris sighed. "She perceived my fondness for you, and told me I should act on it."
When that sentence settled in Sebastian's brain, the complete understanding of exactly what Hawke had done landed next to it with a thunderous crash.
"Maker," he muttered. He could see exactly what Hawke had decided. "So you mean..." He pinched his own thigh and winced at the sting. Fenris still sat before him, looking slightly perplexed.
Fenris tilted his head. "I would have thought that a man with your....experience would be familiar with the idea."
"It is not," Sebastian said, very quietly, "my experience at issue." He let his gaze travel past Fenris's face to the lump of misery and blankets that was Hawke.
Fenris flinched back when the realization hit, and Sebastian rubbed the center of his forehead. Maker's breath.
"You thought she meant to share?" He asked it because he needed to hear the reassurance. It wasn't fair of him, but he needed this one thing.
"Of course I did," Fenris said, his expression slowly twisting into horror and sorrow. "She looks at you just as I--I mean--" He floundered.
Sebastian rubbed the center of his forehead again. "Hawke," he said, louder, "stop pretending to sleep. There are things we need to talk about."
For a long moment he thought she would ignore him, but she sat up slowly, her face blotchy and reddened in the firelight. Fenris hissed in a breath. Sebastian prayed for patience.
"Hawke," Fenris said, strangled, "I did not--I would not--"
She had one hand pressed to her mouth, fresh tears in her eyes, hunched in on herself.
"I think," Sebastian said, "that we all need to talk."
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 woke to the sounds of campfire cooking and a murmured conversation between Sebastian and Isabela. When she sat up, blinking the sleep-grit from her eyes, for one jarring moment, she thought she was on the Wounded Coast in the early days before the Deep Roads expedition, hunting bandits to keep food on the table for her mother. She struggled upright in her blanket and caught sight of Clarice stirring something with an expression of great concentration, and memory and reality crashed back into her with the weight of sorrow she hadn't realized she had been carrying. Fenris sat across the fire from Sebastian and Isabela, tending his armor.
For a long, piercing moment she looked her fill of Fenris's face, in profile, his markings glinting in the firelight. The straight lines and planes of his face felt like cuts. Then he turned his head and saw her awake, and the half-smile that curved his mouth might have been a blow.
She had to learn to leave the drama to Varric.
She shaped her face into something like a smile and freed herself from the blanket. Sebastian was sitting up, Fenris's blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his own over his knees, and she told herself to be glad of it as she checked him over with magic. He was much better than he'd been the day before.
"I cannot thank you enough, Hawke," he said gravely when she was finished.
"Ah, someday you can grant me a favor when you're back on your throne," she said lightly. "I'm sure you'll think of something."
He gave her a look that said he could hear the edges in her voice despite her efforts. The awkwardness was broken when Isabela sauntered up with an even more exaggerated swing of her hips than usual, holding out a tin travel plate piled with cooked oats. "Breakfast in bed for His Highness," she said. "Shall I have Hawke feed you?"
"I was poisoned, not turned into a child," Sebastian said, but it was kind.
Isabela laughed, that deep full laugh all the way from her belly. Hawke missed that laugh. She missed Isabela's easy company in the Hanged Man and her sharp wit when she accompanied Hawke on some trek or another. She filed that firmly under "things it was pointless to want," right alongside Fenris, and Sebastian's smiles. She turned away and took a seat by the fire. Clarice handed her a plate of oats, and Hawke set to them with determination, if not enthusiasm. She had to admit they were better than she would've made.
"It's time, and past, that we moved on," Isabela said, sitting beside her with a plate balanced on her lap.
"You waited here for us," Hawke said. She supposed she was lucky that it hadn't been Isabela who planned the ambush.
Isabela hummed noncommittally and handed her a scrap of paper. One side had clearly been part of a ledger at some point; the other held an address in Lowtown in Isabela's distinctive scrawl. "He owes me a favor," Isabela said. "I won't be in Kirkwall long enough to get information for you, but I'll stop by to tell him to help you. Assume he's selling whatever he tells you to anyone else who pays, but he'll be accurate enough."
Hawke pocketed the paper. "Thanks," she said. "I appreciate it, Isabela." She put all the sincerity she felt into the words.
Isabela finished her oats and stood up, her necklaces jangling lightly as she did so. "Safe travels, Hawke," she said.
Across the fire, Clarice had been tidily packing their belongings into travel backpacks. Hawke hurried to finish her own food and collect the tin plates. There was a moment of confusion as she and Clarice sorted out which ones had belonged to which traveling party, and then with the last of their items packed, Isabela and Clarice headed out of the cave, presumably toward Kirkwall.
"How are you feeling, Sebastian?"
"Well enough to head back," he said.
Hawke nodded. They packed their own gear and made their way through the cave, passing the bodies of the Crows who had attacked them. A few flies buzzed around the corpses already. Without a word, Fenris and Sebastian dragged both corpses out of the cave to rot in the forest.
Someone had tended their horses the night before--Hawke suspected Fenris, on the grounds that he'd been conscious and not poisoned--and the animals were hobbled just outside the cave. They resettled the tack and mounted up. The sun was up, but between the trees and the mountains, the forest floor was quite dim. They let their horses pick their own way back to the high road and turned east toward Kirkwall.
The cave at the edge of the forest had not changed much since last they passed through--although this time, there were fewer bandits. Sebastian had ridden in wide sweeps to scout the area, and found nothing but a wide-eyed doe in the shadows of the trees, and a nest of rabbits. He left them undisturbed.
He led his horse back to the cave with a significant amount of deadfall wood lashed to the saddle, to re-stock the supplies in the cave. Fenris was sitting by the fire, carefully toasting some bread and cheese they had picked up in the forest village where they'd camped last night. It smelled wonderful. Hawke had just finished tending the other two horses, and she came to collect his as he transferred the firewood.
Something had been amiss with her since the Crow attack. It was to do with Fenris, somehow; she gave him the kind of longing stares he thought she'd left behind after their reconciliation. It made his heart ache for her, even if he didn't know what the problem was. Fenris, for his part, seemed unaware--surprising, for someone who watched the people around him with ingrained wariness.
He reminded himself firmly that his role in the Chantry included giving help where it was needed, but that did not mean providing it unasked.
He carried a few of the larger branches to the fire, where Fenris was concentrating intently on his task. It seemed a one-man job, so Sebastian turned his effort to breaking apart the branches into kindling and larger pieces. Hawke joined them and Fenris kissed her temple lightly. She had her company smile on, Sebastian noticed, the one she used when she was among people she expected to betray her and she didn't want them to know that she was on guard. He wondered why.
Dinner was a bafflingly surreal affair. Hawke and Fenris were both nervous, trying to start conversations and then dropping them as though burned a few exchanges in. After the second time, Sebastian stopped trying to participate, but his silence seemed to have the opposite of the intended effect; Hawke flinched, and Fenris stuttered, and then both fell silent, overly fascinated with the simple food.
Nervousness whispered across the back of his neck. Not the same as before a battle, but the feeling when he knew there were traps nearby and couldn't see them.
Hawke stammered her way through some explanation of being tired, then all but dove into her blanket, rolling herself into a tight bundle and facing away from them. Sebastian rubbed away a frown that seemed to want to embed itself permanently between his brows.
Fenris took a seat beside him, quietly, as they both tended their weapons. Fenris also had Hawke's armor, which he was checking over with more than his usual care--not that he was ever slapdash about equipment. Sebastian considered asking him, just to see if he could chase whatever was circling them into the open, but instead he recited the Chant in his mind in pursuit of patience.
It was not as effective as he'd like it to be.
Fenris cleared his throat, barely audible, and out of the corner of his eye Sebastian saw Hawke's shoulder tense and pull up toward her ear before she visibly forced it back down. Her breathing was too even. He looked at Fenris, who was focused on the armor in his hands, and then looked up and met Sebastian's eyes.
"Forgive me if I've misread," Fenris said, and then paused.
Sebastian worked to keep his expression neutral. He was very familiar with one particular kind of conversation that might start with that sentiment, and reasonably sure that this was not going to be that.
Fenris hesitated long enough that Sebastian thought he might actually flee, perhaps even leave the cave, but at last he drew a deep breath and said "You have been friendly to me, of course, but I thought perhaps there might also be....something more to it." Even in the firelight, Sebastian could see the color rising under his brown skin. Maker help him, it was that kind of conversation. "And if I am reading that correctly, I--" He coughed slightly. Out of the corner of his eye, Sebastian saw Hawke flinch. He thought his heart was going to break for her, and a very slow anger was beginning to build somewhere deep in his ribcage. He'd thought better of Fenris.
"I would welcome it," Fenris said, and then rubbed his forehead. "This was easier once," he muttered to himself.
Sebastian silently recited two of his favorite lines of the Chant for bringing calm while he sought the proper words. "It seems," he said slowly, "that I have not been as careful as I thought." He paused, and watched that particular hope light Fenris's face. He worked to keep his voice equally gentle and even as he continued, and not let it become a dagger. "Yet I was under the impression that you and Hawke had fully reconciled, and committed to each other."
He heard a muffled sniffle from the pile of blankets, where Hawke's shoulders had curled high again, and laid his hands flat on his thighs to keep them from bunching into fists. His anger wasn't only on her behalf. It was for himself, too, and his own disappointment--he was honest enough to admit it, although he also knew hers must go deeper.
Fenris frowned. "We did."
Sebastian raised both eyebrows.
"She told me to talk to you," Fenris said, his eyes narrowing as he took in the growing tension in Sebastian's shoulders and the flex of his hands.
Sebastian froze. "I beg your pardon?" Surely this conversation was not really happening.
Fenris sighed. "She perceived my fondness for you, and told me I should act on it."
When that sentence settled in Sebastian's brain, the complete understanding of exactly what Hawke had done landed next to it with a thunderous crash.
"Maker," he muttered. He could see exactly what Hawke had decided. "So you mean..." He pinched his own thigh and winced at the sting. Fenris still sat before him, looking slightly perplexed.
Fenris tilted his head. "I would have thought that a man with your....experience would be familiar with the idea."
"It is not," Sebastian said, very quietly, "my experience at issue." He let his gaze travel past Fenris's face to the lump of misery and blankets that was Hawke.
Fenris flinched back when the realization hit, and Sebastian rubbed the center of his forehead. Maker's breath.
"You thought she meant to share?" He asked it because he needed to hear the reassurance. It wasn't fair of him, but he needed this one thing.
"Of course I did," Fenris said, his expression slowly twisting into horror and sorrow. "She looks at you just as I--I mean--" He floundered.
Sebastian rubbed the center of his forehead again. "Hawke," he said, louder, "stop pretending to sleep. There are things we need to talk about."
For a long moment he thought she would ignore him, but she sat up slowly, her face blotchy and reddened in the firelight. Fenris hissed in a breath. Sebastian prayed for patience.
"Hawke," Fenris said, strangled, "I did not--I would not--"
She had one hand pressed to her mouth, fresh tears in her eyes, hunched in on herself.
"I think," Sebastian said, "that we all need to talk."