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Author: SurelyForth
Title: Life & How to Live It
Game: Dragon Age 2
Character pairing: F!Hawke/Anders
Disclaimer: Rated M for language, violence and sexual content.
There have been dreams that felt like this.
Like she's found a perfect balance on the edge of perpetuity and nothing can sway her or tear her down.
It seems strange that it would be on a night like this one, splintered by a permanent loss and drunk and so recently...with Isabela.
But she feels victorious, as if she's doing something right and long overdue.
You should probably let go.
And she should. At some point it will go from kindness to creepiness, as if she only hugged him because he was vulnerable, where she could easily push him forward and into a place he doesn't want to go. And she hadn't.
Although...no. She loosens her arms around his neck and turns her head towards him, withdrawing but allowing her cheek to skim his own, stubble tickling and sending an ache of why can't I have this all the time? down her throat.
Why can't I have this all the time? She pulls back just enough so she can see his face again, his long crooked nose and his mouth and his eyes that she expects to be closed are open in intense observation.
Both of them remain ensnared and she should definitely let go because...this...isn't...
She does this thing when she's drunk, when something feels good against her fingertips she'll rub at it, mindlessly. Sometimes it's a spot on the table, or a piece of fabric. Once it was Isabela's ear and another night, Bianca's stock.
Varric had not been thrilled.
Tonight it is the fine hairs at the base of his skull, warm and soft and it reminds her of a kitten belly and while she's thinking about permanency and he's observing and his hand is traveling slowly down her back, petting his neck is a terrible idea.
Terrible. Her throat tingles.
"Do you need anything?" She asks without blinking, afraid to move her lips too much lest they somehow end up on his own. "I can get you something to drink, to eat, to...warm your bed."
His hand stops. Her fingers stop.
"Mina," he warns and it's like the warning Wil, only this isn't stop being charming because it makes me like you too much. It's stop existing because I am so close to throwing you on that bed right there and fucking you senseless.
Or maybe she's projecting. Isabela had awoken in her tonight something that has yet to be sated or laid back to rest and it's spilling inside of her, limitless and warm.
"O...kay," she moves backwards, suddenly aware that kind/creepy line has been crossed and the moment they're apart she realizes she's definitely on an edge, but far from balanced. Wobbly even. Certainly uncertain. My head hurts.
"I'm drunk," she announces. "I thought you needed a hug," is added in her most helpful tone.
As if a hug could heal him. As if a hug could do anything more than just alleviate his pain or momentarily defuse his justifiable anger that she will never completely understand because loving mages is not the same as being one, and even if they could be together, the clothes off, skin-to-skin and melting-into-one-another together that she's not allowed herself to dwell upon in too much detail, she would only be able to offer temporary retreat. Even with her arms around him, even with her heart and her support the world would be against him, the things he's seen and been through still festering within and amplified by Justice. Amplified and driving him always, and probably away from her.
She wants to do more than hug him, that she knows and in a sharp way that not even alcohol can confuse. But even if he were willing...
...his face is full of everything, so much so that it's impossible to pick any one thing out...
she's not certain what she's ready for, exactly. Lust and adoration and warm urges would not be enough. Aren't going to be enough.
Her heart aches. Stop thinking about it. Also, say something.
"We have cheese and bread and, um..." a naked pirate in the library. "Cider."
For a few seconds, he looks as if he's just awoken and the world is a concern. A frown creases the skin between his eyes and he takes a step towards the door. "Oh, I didn't intend to..."
He stops because she is blocking his way. Bodily. With her body.
"No! You're staying," it comes out like an order, as if she's commanding him in battle and not offering him a safe place for the evening. Realizing how unlikely he is to enjoy such an approach, she backs away, out onto the landing and clarifies, "If you want, I mean. I'm not going to force you, of course. But you're welcome to and I want you to."
She also wants him to stop looking at her with adoration, which has floated to the top of the mess of emotions he's managing to portray with the set of his brow and the curl of his mouth and the subtle flare of nostrils.
And she knows that she can give a good hug when a good hug is called for, but right now she feels a bit...undeserving of the praise in his expression.
"Whatever you were doing, I imagine it was far more noble a thing than I was getting up to," she's saying it more for herself than for him. "Heal the sick all day, fight for freedom all night. I did nothing today and I have a nnnnn-ight of nothingness to follow it."
For a moment it burns between them, he as much as she and he has to break it like a spell, shaking his head and exhaling.
"I know you do what you can, Wil," he attempts a smile that can't quite come to life. "But...I need you to be careful. I can't bear the thought of them hurting you. You're the best thing about this city-"
"Don't tell Fenris, he might get jealous," she's deflecting, uncomfortable by the intensity of him that's pulling it out of her, too. She's embarrassed by how much she feels, by how confused it's become as this tiny step forward has forced her to see an entirely new facet of him and what it means to be someone who cares. For him.
In a breathless and sinking in kind of way.
He acknowledges her joke with a grim quirk of his lips before pushing on. "You have no idea how worried I was tonight and I know that you're strong and I know that you could take them, I just...when I think of it I go...," his voice is rough with passion that falls spills over the words in a way he can't control. "I don't care. I would drown us both in their blood to keep you safe."
What?
"Drown me in blood?" Somewhere through the fog of feelings and uncertainty is a dim thought that she would do the same for anyone she cared about. But from him, and uttered with such fervor, it's... "Don't you remember what happened the last time I was drowned in blood? Do you really want me to gain secret templar strengths?"
She's shocked at how level her voice is, at how quickly she can defuse herself when she needs to.
"That's who I am," Anders' arms fold across his chest. I thought you knew that. There's a brightness in his eyes that might not be the best thing. "I suppose I should...I suppose I should return to my clinic..."
"Maker's breath, Anders," she presses her palms together, pushing them hard, painfully so and forces herself to focus. "I was just trying to be funny. This place is yours, whenever you need it...," her eyes meet his one last time. "I'd be letting so many people down if I didn't do everything I could to keep you safe."
And the faint smile she gets in return deserves another hug, and probably a kiss. It deserves beautiful things for being so beautiful. It deserves offered strength for being so fragile, for existing only because she is in front of him at the end of a long day and a hard night and he having to be who he is in this world, in this city, and alone save for a voice that will never stop reminding him of all that is worst.
She could be a counterpoint, she could be comfort on hard nights, warm laughter and tangled limbs. She could be such a distraction, such a respite, such a reminder of who he really is when the world has him seeing only what he's not and never will be.
But she can't force him into anything, not when she has questions herself. She has to walk away from him, walk away from those thoughts again, up stairs and up stairs and up stairs. She has to doff the things that could be
Not ready yet.
in favor of the things that are.
They might change.
Somehow she makes it to her bedroom and there's Isabela, ready to carelessly tug at Wil's tunic, teeth digging into Wil's exposed shoulder but only after her eyes betray clear confusion that Anders is so close, but Wil would choose to return and finish what they'd started.
They'll probably change.
When it's done, they fall apart in spent exhaustion, Isabela sprawled on one side of the bed while Wil stretches along a narrow edge, her body trained by years of sharing small spaces with her siblings. This is normal for them, the space.
But tonight Wil wouldn't mind...less space. Her arms are always empty these days, but tonight it seems like a waste of I'm here for you always that she wants to give, and not just sex or sarcasm or carefully prescribed distance. It's something she can offer sometimes, something she used to live and breathe, and for a few minutes this evening it had all come back to her and now her muscles are itching with the memory, aching to relearn the old steps and perhaps add new ones.
Her hand goes out in the darkness, searching for warm skin and finding the gentle slope of Isabela's lower back as the woman's hips shift in welcome of whatever a searching hand might have in store.
Wil just rests it there, fingers curling in possession of not a woman but the secrets and pains that that woman holds close, the things that have her anchored here, in Kirkwall and a lover's bed.
It's not perfect, it's not saying what she wants to say and more to someone who isn't even in the same room, but it eases the worst of the disquiet within and relaxes her enough to drift.
The Hanged Man, never the most orderly of establishments, appears to have been the victim of very brief, very targeted cyclone.
Tables are knocked over, chairs tipped sideways and littering the floor. Broken glass glitters beneath crooked lights and the darkened outlines of spilled spirits are islands in a sea of debris.
"What happened?" Wil hisses it, as if the Hanged Man can hear her and she doesn't want him to know that she's noticed his...situation.
Varric doesn't respond. He's as out of sorts as his beloved tavern, duster askew and shrewd hazel eyes dimmed with exhaustion. Instead, he runs his bared fingers along the flap of Wil's satchel, which is actually Isabela's satchel. It's the one Wil had given to her on Satinalia, emptied and discovered that morning on Wil's writing table.
"Sign the first," she explains, throwing the bag onto Varric's table. "Sign the second was all the whiskey being gone."
"Gone?" Varric's eyebrow raises. "Or gone gone?"
"Taken. Three entire bottles."
"She's not in her room, either. What happened last night?" He's not asking for details, for scintillating but tasteful glimpses into what he imagines is a fevered and depraved affair. He's playing detective and Wil realizes that the reason she's here might be the very same reason why the bar is in such a state of a pair of rabid bears decided to have their way right in the middle of the floor, and who were we to stop them?
"Well, there was alcohol-"
"Of course."
"And shenanigans."
"Inevitable."
"Anders had a crisis."
"And you dealt with it? In the middle of...shenanigans?"
"Yes?"
His eyes narrow thoughtfully, "She would have gotten suspicious otherwise."
"Probably," twisting the edge of her tunic between her fingers, Wil forces herself to mentally gloss over how she'd dealt with Anders' crisis, and how she'd not dealt with her own that had ensued in the aftermath. "She seemed fine when I came back."
"Oh," this wakes him up. "Hawke."
"Tethras."
The sigh he issues is one of you wouldn't possibly understand what I just realized and Wil's just hungover and worried enough not to mind.
"So that's what I have," she sinks into one of his chairs. "Care to fill in the rest?"
He stares at his fingernails, immaculately trimmed into neat squares and buffed to an impressive shine. Then he shrugs, a gesture of resignation, of defeat. Of not knowing when he usually knows. It's disappointing even without the whole and it happened in my home angle.
"No one who works here will give me a straight answer, and my usual eyes seem to be missing in action." Failure.
"Where were you?"
"Hiding," regret tugs at the edges of the word. "The Merchant's Guild is getting suspicious of my absences from their...to dos, so they've been sending stewards in to case the Hanged Man. Since I can't be here and Starkhaven at the same time..."
"Starkhaven?" Wil's eyes widen. "How long have you been holed up here?"
"Two days," dismissively. "Trip got cancelled. Carriage lost a wheel. I felt a cold coming on."
"Forgot to pack your smalls?"
"Ha," amusement relaxes his features. "If I wore them, that would be a pretty good excuse."
"As long as the Guild doesn't know, it can still be a good excuse. And not one anyone wants to verify," she adds with a smirk that turns into a sigh. "We should try to find Isabela. Make sure she's not gotten herself arrested or started a war or something."
Bianca is fit neatly against his back, the shape of her stock seemingly lathed for him alone, and it's the final piece he needs to become Varric again. "It would be just like Rivaini to start a war," he shrugs and manages her distinct lilt of What? Can you blame me? "Everyone was asleep and I was bored."
"They promised me treasure," Wil cocks her hips and raises one eyebrow in a lazy gesture of pure insouciance. "You know my feelings about treasure."
He forages ahead, into the tavern, and just as he said there are no eye-witnesses that are immediately willing to spill.
"For Maker's sake, what's gotten into you people?" Wil looks pointedly at Snitch Fallon. "Your name is Snitch-"
"Comus, actually," he interrupts over his ale, the sniff that follows positively disdainful of her ignorance.
"Whatever. The point is, you've snitched enough in your life that people call you Snitch. So...?" She jingles her coin purse suggestively.
"I'm not for sale," it's a bland dismissal but she catches the subtle tightening of his hand around his tankard and if it weren't for Varric waving at her over the heads of the other drunks she'd have actually plunked down a few gold.
"Too bad...looks like somebody else is going to benefit from my generosity."
The man who is finally talking is the man who always talks, all nervous babble and stream of consciousness. Today he's sporting an armful of string bracelets, some of which are adorned with a simple charm. Feathers, claws, a couple of teeth and a smooth shard of colored glass. It reminds Wil of Lisbetter, an herbalist near Dragon's Peak in Ferelden who wove her hair with bits and baubles found and traded to her in exchange for potions and treated herbs. But Lisbetter had been an apostate in the backwoods, not someone who Wil has never not seen in a city tavern and, well, it gives her pause.
"We're going to trust him?" Her nose crinkles slightly. One of the teeth is blackened with decay.
"We have no choice. Just...listen for a minute."
The man overhears, hesitating in the most infuriating of ways just as Wil allows herself to lean against the closest column and open her mind to his ensuing prattle. Dark eyes focus on her, and his fingers begin to toy with the strings around his arm, touching the charms for reassurance and perhaps to capture a memory that her face has shaken loose.
"Shouting, loud. Loud shouts from below...lost at sea is not lost at sea and the truth is that some fights are not so obvious," he stops fiddling and frowns, Wil noticing for the first time the faint brown stains that mar his skin and the way his eyes are disconcertingly crooked. "She could have won, but table tops and chairs and shouting and loud. The market could hold them, but orange stops the fun. Orange and blue and shields and order. I've seen order here, she is not order and she is order and together they are...like you, only different."
He smiles and she's fairly certain that the teeth he wears are from his own mouth.
Less creepy or way creepier? She steps away, leaving Varric to thank him and follow her out the front door of the tavern.
"Did you get it, Hawke?" His eyes are narrowed against the muted sunlight that manages to filter through a dense layer of clouds.
"That guy is creepy," she's being buffeted down the market by the noon rush, workers brought up from the docks and foundries in search of a quick meal. "But he also seems to pay attention."
"Do you think the guard paid people off?"
"Doubtful," Wil sidesteps a pile of horse shit and is forced into an alcove by an oncoming band of templars. They're not the normal recruits she sees around Lowtown, their armor is that of the full knights and lieutenants and something about the faceless wall of soldiers turns her cold even before one of the men goes out of his way to stare her down, his identity safe beyond the narrow eyeslit of his helm.
Unfair, when she is a civilian today. Unfair, when mages are not allowed such secrecy, such protection.
Varric finds her across the way, his gaze following the processional until they're swallowed by the crowds.
"To the undercity? There's an entrance nearby that should get us to Blondie in about ten minutes. Or you can take the clinic and I can get someone to the alienage."
The urge is to hug him for the concern that rasps in his voice, and for either sharing her priorities or knowing her well enough to automatically go there.
"No...they're heading towards the docks...hopefully this is just a reminder," anger flares where momentary fear had resided. "The Knight-Commander can't let anyone forget who really runs Kirkwall."
"I hope you know better than to say that around the Captain of the Guard."
She stops to regard him with bemused disbelief. Of all the things to hope that I know.
"Sorry, Hawke," as if it's a sacred trust that's been betrayed. "Sometimes I forget."
"I was told this would be kept quiet," Aveline's face is framed between ink-stained hands, calloused fingers digging into her temples to stave off a headache that might not have anything to do with the woman and the dwarf crowding her.
It might not have anything to do with them, but it probably does.
"Aveline," Wil leans forward, her hands doing what they can to disrupt the pre-existing chaos of paperwork on the captain's beleaguered desk. "Have you actually met Varric?"
"I can find out how much sugar you had in your tea last Tuesday," he shrugs. No big deal.
"Aveline doesn't drink tea, Varric," Wil bares her teeth in a fearsome snarl. "Aveline drinks only spirits as strong as she is, and the blood of her vanquished enemies. And those assholes that make too much noise in Hightown after dark. Grrrrr."
Aveline is not amused. It might not be an exaggeration to say that her lack of amusement is bordering on murderous.
"Ahem," hands busying themselves with resorting her paperwork, Wil takes it down about ten notches. "Also, there's that guy who is always mumbling around the Hanged Man? Apparently he saw what happened."
Sighing, Aveline leans back in her chair. This afternoon she wears a mask of exhaustion, eyes purple beneath bloodshot whites, fine lines visible at the corners of her mouth and Wil can't ignore the pang of guilt that accompanies why do you have to be such a jerk sometimes, Wil?
"I knew she was trouble, but to instigate an all out brawl," Aveline's profound lack of love for Isabela hardens every syllable. "It took twenty of my men an hour to sort out the mess in the bazaar, and I'm waiting for complaints of missing merchandise."
Brawl? Wil and Varric share a quick look and their lifted brows and matching expressions of Dammit, Rivaini don't go unnoticed.
"So you didn't know as much as you pretended," angry eyes cut from Wil to Varric. "I'm not surprised. It doesn't matter. She was the one who wanted it kept quiet, not me."
"Isabela didn't want us to know she caused a pre-dawn brawl in the Lowtown markets?" Wil does nothing to level her disbelief. "Do you have any idea how often she shows up with the blood still wet on her daggers and her pockets full of loot?"
It's not a wince that wrinkles Aveline's forehead, but it's close. She's not verbally opposed Wil's friendship with the pirate, choosing to target Varric's tendency to drag Wil into it instead. Nor has she mentioned in any direct way what she thinks about the two women's ongoing affair that, after a rather spectacular failure of the Hanged Man's soundproofing, had been made an undeniable fact one month earlier.
But it's clear she doesn't approve, not because of any moral reasons but because Isabela is, in her own words, trouble and Wil doesn't really need to be sleeping with trouble, on top of all the crooks, apostates and escaped slave hobos she keeps in her life.
"She knew you'd try to get her out," Aveline's armor harness creaks faintly as she shifts in her chair. "Apparently she has plans for her time in the brig-"
Wil eyes widen to a point that's possibly wider than she's ever made them, which is impressive considering how very many things she's done and seen that would cause such a reaction.
"She's in prison?" It comes out both low and squeaky and sudden onset nausea is not helping at all. "You...imprisoned her. Isabela. Friend Isabela."
"She broke the law, Hawke," Aveline stands in one strong motion, eyes narrowing. "And she's not my friend."
This is true. Just like Fenris isn't Anders friend, and neither men seem to love Merrill. Aveline and Isabela are at odds with each other, even in a cosmic sense. Nothing about them lines up but Wil and their mutual attachment to her. And their disdain for one another.
Disdain for Isabela's everything and thiefy hands and for Aveline's position and condemning frown. They are law and disorder and both wonderful and infuriating in turn.
"Hawke?" The edge of Varric's voice is concern. The rest is disbelief. "Are you...crying?"
She is and she isn't. Just like she understands why Aveline would arrest Isabela, because Isabela is often times breaking the law which Aveline is sworn to uphold, but also understands why Isabela breaks the law...because she can and it's fun and sometimes even for a good cause.
Usually for a good cause, when Wil does the breaking.
Also, there's that thing where Isabela is in prison.
"Not crying," she blinks back tears, wipes away tears and frowns when her fingers come away wet as if they could be anything else. "Clearly."
"Clearly," he coughs. Varric has been known to do well in times like these, even if she can sense the hesitation in his comfort as he's not certain how the comfortee will respond. It's a test for him because those are moments where people are laid bare and Varric likes to think he has them there already, a storyteller's arrogance. One wrong touch and-
her hand jerks in memory, the brush of her palm along Isabela's unguarded hip and how it had grown warm over the span of minutes before being shaken off with the tiniest noise of what the fuck, Hawke? and Wil snorted awake before rolling onto her stomach, embracing her bed because it had seen some rough nights and could probably use a hug
With this memory, the leaving and the empty satchel make sense. Less than that is the brawl and the brig, but Isabela always liked to take unexpected paths.
"So she stays?" Wil asks, composing herself and shoving aside a few of the feelings that have started to shift beneath her chest. Embarrassment, indignation, malaise, bemusement, panic and anger.
"She broke the law," this iteration is somehow less peeved. "But don't worry, it's only for a few weeks. And she seemed to think it could be a good thing."
"Smart, Rivaini. Chatty inmates, chatty guards...you can learn a lot if you ask the right questions, drop the right names and have something to offer," Varric muses. "And she knows how to handle herself."
"And here I thought she was trying to con me out of a sentence."
"That's a possibility, too," he couldn't sound more proud. "She likes to keep her options open. Hawke?"
Hawke? is Are we done here? He's comfortable enough with this outcome to get on to the next item of business.
She nods. "I'll probably stay a bit longer...catch up with Aveline if she'll have me."
"Then I guess it's time for me to make a token visit to the Merchant's Guild," his voice is suddenly much raspier, as if he's on the edge of a coughing fit or in desperate need of water. "Let them know the air up in the Vimmark Mountains isn't as good for my health as I'd hoped."
The responses earned from the two women he leaves behind say everything.
Aveline's eyes lift towards the ceiling. Wil laughs at her friend's temerity, of his willingness to play the suspicious again and again and his ability to never suffer for his lies.
Whether it's luck or charm, or an unfair abundance of both, she doesn't know.
"I might make it down to the Hanged Man this evening," she ignores Aveline's pointed glare. "Might lose at cards a few times and fall asleep under your table. So the normal Tuesday routine."
His throaty chuckle as he passes out of Aveline's office agrees and Wil is left with a frustrated Aveline, worn down past any Aveline Wil's known and apparently drowning in paperwork.
"Bad day at the office?" Wil raises her eyebrows, expressing concern now that the captain is free to speak. She expects anger, or even an outburst like Anders' the evening before, only on the nature of entitlement and laws aren't arbitrary, you know, and it's not fair for your friends to compromise me when I'm doing my job.
Instead Aveline snorts, the narrow line of her lips relaxing and her shoulders sagging slightly as she takes a seat on the edge of her desk.
"You don't want to know. The past few weeks have been...tense, to say the least. The knight-commander seems to think we're not doing enough to crack down on the apostate problem-"
"As if apostates are vermin?" It's said like a joke, but the venom in Wil's words burns her own throat. "Maybe you should try putting out little pots of poison and labeling them freedom. That might catch a few of the more desperate ones."
Aveline ignores her invitation to fight, although there's a detectable flicker of not this, too across her features. "And word from my guard around the qunari compound is that the situation there is growing tense. Although I don't know how one can tell, exactly. They're starting to get worried, though. My men, that is. I've doubled patrols in areas where the qunari have been spotted and a few have quit out of concern for their safety. But we've managed," pride flashes through the words. "With no extra funds requested and no accidents or harm to our ranks."
Her chin goes up, a ghost of a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth and despite their differences, Wil loves this Aveline. This no matter how bad shit gets, I stay awesome Aveline.
"I honestly don't know how you do it," Wil leans against the wall. "I thought I did. I think the past three years have proven me wrong."
"You weren't wrong," it's not a pity response, or from a friend to a friend. It's honest, brusque. An observant Captain of the Guard bolstering a comrade fallen on self-doubt. "You just need to find some permanency. Maybe petition the Viscount for your title and get more involved in the politics here. We don't agree on everything, but you're smart and I trust you to do mostly good. Why not make a career out of it?"
Nobility? Ah, no.
"Please, Aveline. More responsibility? I stay unimportant because it's comfortable," she smiles to hide the sharp fear...is it fear? Or is it just deep discomfort at the notion of being one of them? "Less pressure."
If Aveline notices the gap between Wil's smartass tone and the quiet panic beneath that pushes them out too quickly, doesn't let on and it's almost as if Hawke's become as good at subterfuge as Tethras.
"At any rate, I'd be getting back into a routine," she nods towards Wil's plain clothes and the single dragonbone dagger she carries at her hip. "Summer's coming fast and things are getting close to boiling already."
"Oh, just say it," Wil smirks, delighted at the implications of Aveline's evasiveness even as she tucks away the rest to be mulled over at a later time.
"If you want me to say that Kirkwall needs your skinny ass, no," her eyes narrow thoughtfully. "But I know I wouldn't sleep any worse at night if I thought you were around."
"With a big, fuck-off sword?"
"With a big...sword," a full-fledge smile breaks across the captain's pale freckled face or the first time all afternoon. "I can say yes to that, at least."
The Hanged Man is back in order although the arrangement of the tables is off just enough to be disconcerting. Wil wonders if she'd have the same reaction were she to wander into her own home to find Leandra or Bodahn had moved the furniture in the parlor.
She doubts it.
Varric is on the floor, surrounded by men she doesn't know. It happens sometimes and when he sees her, his back to the wall and his eyes aimed at the door, he offers an apologetic shrug and a summoning wave.
His friends for the evening eye her with interest. They're strangers, most of them scarred but not poorly turned out. Probably traveling merchants, the sort who act as their own caravan guards, and men who are accustomed to women like her in bars such as this jumping to warm their laps and their beds. She shoves up her sleeves and leans over Varric so they can see the dagger at her right hip.
Her eyes when they meet his are I will not hesitate to show them what.
"You're late," he observes coolly, no doubt trying to project an air of mystery around her. This is how he addresses the randoms who flit in while he's with her or the group. He has his business ventures, his personal ventures, and his fixing the shit that Bartrand screwed up ventures.
To Wil's knowledge, she's his favorite venture despite not fitting comfortably into any single category. Maybe he has a messy-haired woman venture. Who knows with him.
"I had some things to take care of," things, vague. The men need not know that she was shopping for sweets for her mother and a new collar for her dog. "You know...things."
"Blondie's in the back, working," his expression remains neutral, but his eyes gleam. The back is where Varric keeps his press. "Edwina has something for you at the bar."
He turns back to the game; transaction over.
She's neither important nor unimportant. Just someone he knows who for indiscernible reasons.
Edwina's something is a tray of food and cider. There is a large bowl of stew for Anders and a smaller bowl of tomato soup for Wil and bread and butter and a wedge of cheese for them to share nestled between them.
Wil slips the cheese to the edge of the tray, just next to her bowl, and carefully balances the wooden slab across her palms before taking it back through the small kitchen, where she ignores making eye contact with anything that might scare her off dinner, and down a half-flight of stairs to a doorway that she must duck to enter.
The back room is, like Varric's quarters, kept far cleaner than the tavern proper. Anders has done his best to reclaim the fastidiousness in his own disordered name, vellum and boxes of moveable type littering every free surface and his hands and face and tunic smudged with ink. Still, despite the mess and frustrated way he's pocking at the press, there's something in his posture and his eyes that speaks of unfathomable amounts of pride.
"I have dinner," she sets the tray down, knowing that it will be forgotten. It's fine, not eating. Before she'd seen him, she could have eaten everything on the tray and had room for a few pilfered sweets from the box she'd bought for Leandra. But now it's not hunger but memories that bothers her stomach, memories of skin of scent of the softness of hair in intimate places and curiosity at how it would feel to press her nose where her fingers had gone the evening before, to wrap her arms around him from behind and just breathe him.
Oh, no.
"What are you printing?" It's not wavy or overwhelmed or anything like how she feels, suddenly and damnably. "And how much trouble is Varric going to get into?"
He glances up from his task, contentment touching his features as if he's walked through a shaft of warm light and then turning back to an almost bemused sort of perplexed.
"Something I wrote last night, this morning. Today," he gasps out a laugh. "Muriel could handle the clinic and I was too distracted."
She doesn't ask why. It would be presumptuous and she knows that whatever had happened to cause him to seek her out, to explode the way he had, was the far more likely distraction.
"And I'll be clipping the corners of the pages," he continues, answering her second question. "Varric has enough typefaces to keep from being traced that way, so as long as there's no other marks they won't be able to prove anything."
He offers her a stack of the manifestos and she keeps her hands out for the scissors. On every page is a small insignia in the lower right corner, KFM followed by three dots in a vertical line. Any citizen could own a printing press, but only those licensed by their city could legally distribute printed materials in the Free Marches and those licenses were for the right only. Any who held one was subject to an entire litany of rules and laws regarding the content of their publications and their presses were altered so that their assigned mark would appear on every document produced.
"How many are you printing?" She makes the first four cuts, unconcerned with symmetry. The paper is too thick and the shears too dull for artistry.
"A few dozen," he pulls a fresh sheet off and sets it aside to dry. "Maybe fifty? I figure I'd leave them around the markets, and keep a few for my clinic."
"I'll take a dozen," Wil finishes the third and fourth. "The Chantry could use some decent reading material...or I assume it's decent." She fingers the paper, eyes hesitating at the margins. "Can I read it?"
He's smiling in that way that means he doesn't know he's smiling and that makes it even more difficult for her to actually look at what he's written.
"Since you're willing to risk your life to help me distribute it, it would be unfair for me to refuse," it's light and his eyes stay on her, expectant, and there's no way she can not read it, with him watching her like that.
All men are the Work of our Maker's hands; those who bring harm Without provocation to the least of His children Are hated and accursed by the Maker.-Transfigurations 1:3
We are taught these things as children, to engender compassion for one another, for our neighbors and those we will never meet. It is the foundation of morality, black and white and inarguable. We are all the Work of our Maker's hands, for all that Is is of the Maker, and yet there are those who are not granted the same freedom from harm, those who are viewed as accursed by their existence, despite being as much the product of His hand and His care as any other of his children. They are no different at their core than any other, they are flesh and blood, thought and hope. When they hunger it is sated by food, their hearts touched and wounded by the same kindnesses and tragedies. They breathe air, they eat too much, they are foolish and wise, shallow and thoughtful and normal save one difference, one small aspect of what they are that becomes who they are, who they will always be. Dangerous, even as children. Unworthy of love, despite being born from it. Harmed, despite the right of birth that should protect all.
So as you teach your children that all men are the work of our Maker's hands, think about those that are hidden, those that are denied the grace of her brothers and the compassion of his sisters. Think of those that are taught to be ashamed of themselves for what they are that becomes who they are, and wander how it is just, and wander what could be in a world where all of the Maker's children are truly equal, a world where every gift bestowed upon any of us could be used towards something better, something beautiful and free from the most basic of harms against humanity:
Unjust imprisonment and the subjugation of those deemed guilty before they can choose to remain innocent.
And this time it's impossible to ignore the tears that spill down her cheeks, that burn the edges of her eyes and sting a slick path to her neck. They're tears for a solid lump of anger that has formed in her throat, tears for the furious calamity of her heart as it responds to every word, lifted somehow from where it's been for years, beating for the loss of purpose as Bethany is gone, Malcolm is gone. Merrill too independent and Anders...
He's come to settle beside her, space between them that he covers easily enough with the tilt of his broad shoulders and one long leg that bumps against her own even as his fingers can't quite make the commitment.
"There's a couple of typos," she sobs, the words meant to defuse her the way she'd defused herself the night before are choking because fuck typos when the core of what she holds in her hands is what needs to be heard and accepted by everyone ever. Even if the Maker is just some jackass with an excellent spokesperson, the sentiment is so on. "I could help you next time?"
It comes out borderline incomprehensible and when she forces what is certain to be a ghastly smile he laughs to break the tension that's just there, as solid as the whatever it is in her throat, and as warm as a hand on her knee or hip or arms around another's neck.
"Do you even know how to write?" He's teasing, his expression heartbreakingly pleased with this reaction even though she can see pain there, too. "I mean, besides Chantry smut."
"Yeah, I think so," she brushes aside tears with the back of her hand, suppressing a quiet groan when she sees it's smeared in green. "It can't be that different, can it? It's all about inflaming passions."
A dangerous joke to make, considering how Justice usually responds to her seeming irreverence that even Anders is sometimes hard-pressed to swallow.
But the ghost of happiness remains in the sweet tilt of his mouth and the gleam of his warm eyes. "As long as you promise to not to get confused and start adding turgid members to everything."
"I wouldn't dare," she catches herself between flirtatiousness and sincerity. "They're fantastic and everything, but they don't exactly make a compelling argument for the rights of mages," her hand finds its way across his thigh to tuck itself neatly against his knee, testing something that shouldn't be tested. "This makes me think of how much better things could be for everyone, and I can't help but envision what life would have been like for my family, had someone like you come along sooner."
Silence is still around them until his fingers begin sliding along her forearm, the smooth pads barely touching the sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist, and she tenses for physical removal, a silent but unquestionable sign that she'd crossed the line.
Instead he traces, instead he moves in small circles and sweeping arcs to cast a spell that requires no magic beyond touch and that changes nothing save the way in which she sees him.
Because he's no longer just her healer, or someone who'd save almost anyone if he could and does. He's no longer even the person who'd kept her from having to kill her own sister, the bottomless doubt she has about that decision never once spilling or spreading onto him. He's no longer a confusing stranger who appeared as if someone had been instructed to design a man that she'd find amusing and arresting and terribly, terribly tragic.
He's Anders, his long, slender fingers finally folding between her own and transferring ink smudges and warmth in unequal measure.
He's Anders, his thumb continuing to move along the unguarded curve of her hand even as he stares at it in anguish, perhaps jealousy, his teeth digging into his lower lip and concern knitting his brow while he wonders if he'll be able to stop himself before his thumb becomes his arm becomes his mouth becomes their legs and their bodies and the heat within them.
He's Anders, who knows he shouldn't accept these gestures of reassurance sincerely offered by someone who can't even be honest with herself. He knows, but he accepts anyway because there are still tears caught in her eyelashes and they're her promise to him, which had been made after a day of people who don't need her as much as they want her to be around.
He's Anders and he is every night Bethany tried to cry herself to sleep because of magic, every tear Mina wiped from round pink cheeks while talking about a day when they would both be big and strong and swords and fireballs, untouchable, and when he brings himself to look he sees something optimistic and courageous within her. It's words he's written himself, a newborn hope for progress and something eventually right. Varric sees character, Aveline strength. Isabela sees surface and what's in it for her, but Anders sees someone who believes in him. In who he is and what he is.
Or he sees someone who understands the magnitude of his cause, at least, and who is getting close to understanding something more.
He pulls away and she withdraws, too.
Close.
"Aveline says it's going to be a hot one," she squints at her hands, which are folded neatly around her knees.
"She's probably right," he gathers the few pages he's copied and leaves them in his seat as he returns to the press. "We'll need to be ready."
We will be, fingers curl slightly, muscle memory guiding them around a phantom hilt. Me and my big, fuck-off sword riding in to save the day.
It's ridiculous, but slightly less so than it would have seemed the night before.

Description

Author: SurelyForth
Title: Life & How to Live It
Game: Dragon Age 2
Character pairing: F!Hawke/Anders
Disclaimer: Rated M for language, violence and sexual content.
There have been dreams that felt like this.
Like she's found a perfect balance on the edge of perpetuity and nothing can sway her or tear her down.
It seems strange that it would be on a night like this one, splintered by a permanent loss and drunk and so recently...with Isabela.
But she feels victorious, as if she's doing something right and long overdue.
You should probably let go.
And she should. At some point it will go from kindness to creepiness, as if she only hugged him because he was vulnerable, where she could easily push him forward and into a place he doesn't want to go. And she hadn't.
Although...no. She loosens her arms around his neck and turns her head towards him, withdrawing but allowing her cheek to skim his own, stubble tickling and sending an ache of why can't I have this all the time? down her throat.
Why can't I have this all the time? She pulls back just enough so she can see his face again, his long crooked nose and his mouth and his eyes that she expects to be closed are open in intense observation.
Both of them remain ensnared and she should definitely let go because...this...isn't...
She does this thing when she's drunk, when something feels good against her fingertips she'll rub at it, mindlessly. Sometimes it's a spot on the table, or a piece of fabric. Once it was Isabela's ear and another night, Bianca's stock.
Varric had not been thrilled.
Tonight it is the fine hairs at the base of his skull, warm and soft and it reminds her of a kitten belly and while she's thinking about permanency and he's observing and his hand is traveling slowly down her back, petting his neck is a terrible idea.
Terrible. Her throat tingles.
"Do you need anything?" She asks without blinking, afraid to move her lips too much lest they somehow end up on his own. "I can get you something to drink, to eat, to...warm your bed."
His hand stops. Her fingers stop.
"Mina," he warns and it's like the warning Wil, only this isn't stop being charming because it makes me like you too much. It's stop existing because I am so close to throwing you on that bed right there and fucking you senseless.
Or maybe she's projecting. Isabela had awoken in her tonight something that has yet to be sated or laid back to rest and it's spilling inside of her, limitless and warm.
"O...kay," she moves backwards, suddenly aware that kind/creepy line has been crossed and the moment they're apart she realizes she's definitely on an edge, but far from balanced. Wobbly even. Certainly uncertain. My head hurts.
"I'm drunk," she announces. "I thought you needed a hug," is added in her most helpful tone.
As if a hug could heal him. As if a hug could do anything more than just alleviate his pain or momentarily defuse his justifiable anger that she will never completely understand because loving mages is not the same as being one, and even if they could be together, the clothes off, skin-to-skin and melting-into-one-another together that she's not allowed herself to dwell upon in too much detail, she would only be able to offer temporary retreat. Even with her arms around him, even with her heart and her support the world would be against him, the things he's seen and been through still festering within and amplified by Justice. Amplified and driving him always, and probably away from her.
She wants to do more than hug him, that she knows and in a sharp way that not even alcohol can confuse. But even if he were willing...
...his face is full of everything, so much so that it's impossible to pick any one thing out...
she's not certain what she's ready for, exactly. Lust and adoration and warm urges would not be enough. Aren't going to be enough.
Her heart aches. Stop thinking about it. Also, say something.
"We have cheese and bread and, um..." a naked pirate in the library. "Cider."
For a few seconds, he looks as if he's just awoken and the world is a concern. A frown creases the skin between his eyes and he takes a step towards the door. "Oh, I didn't intend to..."
He stops because she is blocking his way. Bodily. With her body.
"No! You're staying," it comes out like an order, as if she's commanding him in battle and not offering him a safe place for the evening. Realizing how unlikely he is to enjoy such an approach, she backs away, out onto the landing and clarifies, "If you want, I mean. I'm not going to force you, of course. But you're welcome to and I want you to."
She also wants him to stop looking at her with adoration, which has floated to the top of the mess of emotions he's managing to portray with the set of his brow and the curl of his mouth and the subtle flare of nostrils.
And she knows that she can give a good hug when a good hug is called for, but right now she feels a bit...undeserving of the praise in his expression.
"Whatever you were doing, I imagine it was far more noble a thing than I was getting up to," she's saying it more for herself than for him. "Heal the sick all day, fight for freedom all night. I did nothing today and I have a nnnnn-ight of nothingness to follow it."
For a moment it burns between them, he as much as she and he has to break it like a spell, shaking his head and exhaling.
"I know you do what you can, Wil," he attempts a smile that can't quite come to life. "But...I need you to be careful. I can't bear the thought of them hurting you. You're the best thing about this city-"
"Don't tell Fenris, he might get jealous," she's deflecting, uncomfortable by the intensity of him that's pulling it out of her, too. She's embarrassed by how much she feels, by how confused it's become as this tiny step forward has forced her to see an entirely new facet of him and what it means to be someone who cares. For him.
In a breathless and sinking in kind of way.
He acknowledges her joke with a grim quirk of his lips before pushing on. "You have no idea how worried I was tonight and I know that you're strong and I know that you could take them, I just...when I think of it I go...," his voice is rough with passion that falls spills over the words in a way he can't control. "I don't care. I would drown us both in their blood to keep you safe."
What?
"Drown me in blood?" Somewhere through the fog of feelings and uncertainty is a dim thought that she would do the same for anyone she cared about. But from him, and uttered with such fervor, it's... "Don't you remember what happened the last time I was drowned in blood? Do you really want me to gain secret templar strengths?"
She's shocked at how level her voice is, at how quickly she can defuse herself when she needs to.
"That's who I am," Anders' arms fold across his chest. I thought you knew that. There's a brightness in his eyes that might not be the best thing. "I suppose I should...I suppose I should return to my clinic..."
"Maker's breath, Anders," she presses her palms together, pushing them hard, painfully so and forces herself to focus. "I was just trying to be funny. This place is yours, whenever you need it...," her eyes meet his one last time. "I'd be letting so many people down if I didn't do everything I could to keep you safe."
And the faint smile she gets in return deserves another hug, and probably a kiss. It deserves beautiful things for being so beautiful. It deserves offered strength for being so fragile, for existing only because she is in front of him at the end of a long day and a hard night and he having to be who he is in this world, in this city, and alone save for a voice that will never stop reminding him of all that is worst.
She could be a counterpoint, she could be comfort on hard nights, warm laughter and tangled limbs. She could be such a distraction, such a respite, such a reminder of who he really is when the world has him seeing only what he's not and never will be.
But she can't force him into anything, not when she has questions herself. She has to walk away from him, walk away from those thoughts again, up stairs and up stairs and up stairs. She has to doff the things that could be
Not ready yet.
in favor of the things that are.
They might change.
Somehow she makes it to her bedroom and there's Isabela, ready to carelessly tug at Wil's tunic, teeth digging into Wil's exposed shoulder but only after her eyes betray clear confusion that Anders is so close, but Wil would choose to return and finish what they'd started.
They'll probably change.
When it's done, they fall apart in spent exhaustion, Isabela sprawled on one side of the bed while Wil stretches along a narrow edge, her body trained by years of sharing small spaces with her siblings. This is normal for them, the space.
But tonight Wil wouldn't mind...less space. Her arms are always empty these days, but tonight it seems like a waste of I'm here for you always that she wants to give, and not just sex or sarcasm or carefully prescribed distance. It's something she can offer sometimes, something she used to live and breathe, and for a few minutes this evening it had all come back to her and now her muscles are itching with the memory, aching to relearn the old steps and perhaps add new ones.
Her hand goes out in the darkness, searching for warm skin and finding the gentle slope of Isabela's lower back as the woman's hips shift in welcome of whatever a searching hand might have in store.
Wil just rests it there, fingers curling in possession of not a woman but the secrets and pains that that woman holds close, the things that have her anchored here, in Kirkwall and a lover's bed.
It's not perfect, it's not saying what she wants to say and more to someone who isn't even in the same room, but it eases the worst of the disquiet within and relaxes her enough to drift.
The Hanged Man, never the most orderly of establishments, appears to have been the victim of very brief, very targeted cyclone.
Tables are knocked over, chairs tipped sideways and littering the floor. Broken glass glitters beneath crooked lights and the darkened outlines of spilled spirits are islands in a sea of debris.
"What happened?" Wil hisses it, as if the Hanged Man can hear her and she doesn't want him to know that she's noticed his...situation.
Varric doesn't respond. He's as out of sorts as his beloved tavern, duster askew and shrewd hazel eyes dimmed with exhaustion. Instead, he runs his bared fingers along the flap of Wil's satchel, which is actually Isabela's satchel. It's the one Wil had given to her on Satinalia, emptied and discovered that morning on Wil's writing table.
"Sign the first," she explains, throwing the bag onto Varric's table. "Sign the second was all the whiskey being gone."
"Gone?" Varric's eyebrow raises. "Or gone gone?"
"Taken. Three entire bottles."
"She's not in her room, either. What happened last night?" He's not asking for details, for scintillating but tasteful glimpses into what he imagines is a fevered and depraved affair. He's playing detective and Wil realizes that the reason she's here might be the very same reason why the bar is in such a state of a pair of rabid bears decided to have their way right in the middle of the floor, and who were we to stop them?
"Well, there was alcohol-"
"Of course."
"And shenanigans."
"Inevitable."
"Anders had a crisis."
"And you dealt with it? In the middle of...shenanigans?"
"Yes?"
His eyes narrow thoughtfully, "She would have gotten suspicious otherwise."
"Probably," twisting the edge of her tunic between her fingers, Wil forces herself to mentally gloss over how she'd dealt with Anders' crisis, and how she'd not dealt with her own that had ensued in the aftermath. "She seemed fine when I came back."
"Oh," this wakes him up. "Hawke."
"Tethras."
The sigh he issues is one of you wouldn't possibly understand what I just realized and Wil's just hungover and worried enough not to mind.
"So that's what I have," she sinks into one of his chairs. "Care to fill in the rest?"
He stares at his fingernails, immaculately trimmed into neat squares and buffed to an impressive shine. Then he shrugs, a gesture of resignation, of defeat. Of not knowing when he usually knows. It's disappointing even without the whole and it happened in my home angle.
"No one who works here will give me a straight answer, and my usual eyes seem to be missing in action." Failure.
"Where were you?"
"Hiding," regret tugs at the edges of the word. "The Merchant's Guild is getting suspicious of my absences from their...to dos, so they've been sending stewards in to case the Hanged Man. Since I can't be here and Starkhaven at the same time..."
"Starkhaven?" Wil's eyes widen. "How long have you been holed up here?"
"Two days," dismissively. "Trip got cancelled. Carriage lost a wheel. I felt a cold coming on."
"Forgot to pack your smalls?"
"Ha," amusement relaxes his features. "If I wore them, that would be a pretty good excuse."
"As long as the Guild doesn't know, it can still be a good excuse. And not one anyone wants to verify," she adds with a smirk that turns into a sigh. "We should try to find Isabela. Make sure she's not gotten herself arrested or started a war or something."
Bianca is fit neatly against his back, the shape of her stock seemingly lathed for him alone, and it's the final piece he needs to become Varric again. "It would be just like Rivaini to start a war," he shrugs and manages her distinct lilt of What? Can you blame me? "Everyone was asleep and I was bored."
"They promised me treasure," Wil cocks her hips and raises one eyebrow in a lazy gesture of pure insouciance. "You know my feelings about treasure."
He forages ahead, into the tavern, and just as he said there are no eye-witnesses that are immediately willing to spill.
"For Maker's sake, what's gotten into you people?" Wil looks pointedly at Snitch Fallon. "Your name is Snitch-"
"Comus, actually," he interrupts over his ale, the sniff that follows positively disdainful of her ignorance.
"Whatever. The point is, you've snitched enough in your life that people call you Snitch. So...?" She jingles her coin purse suggestively.
"I'm not for sale," it's a bland dismissal but she catches the subtle tightening of his hand around his tankard and if it weren't for Varric waving at her over the heads of the other drunks she'd have actually plunked down a few gold.
"Too bad...looks like somebody else is going to benefit from my generosity."
The man who is finally talking is the man who always talks, all nervous babble and stream of consciousness. Today he's sporting an armful of string bracelets, some of which are adorned with a simple charm. Feathers, claws, a couple of teeth and a smooth shard of colored glass. It reminds Wil of Lisbetter, an herbalist near Dragon's Peak in Ferelden who wove her hair with bits and baubles found and traded to her in exchange for potions and treated herbs. But Lisbetter had been an apostate in the backwoods, not someone who Wil has never not seen in a city tavern and, well, it gives her pause.
"We're going to trust him?" Her nose crinkles slightly. One of the teeth is blackened with decay.
"We have no choice. Just...listen for a minute."
The man overhears, hesitating in the most infuriating of ways just as Wil allows herself to lean against the closest column and open her mind to his ensuing prattle. Dark eyes focus on her, and his fingers begin to toy with the strings around his arm, touching the charms for reassurance and perhaps to capture a memory that her face has shaken loose.
"Shouting, loud. Loud shouts from below...lost at sea is not lost at sea and the truth is that some fights are not so obvious," he stops fiddling and frowns, Wil noticing for the first time the faint brown stains that mar his skin and the way his eyes are disconcertingly crooked. "She could have won, but table tops and chairs and shouting and loud. The market could hold them, but orange stops the fun. Orange and blue and shields and order. I've seen order here, she is not order and she is order and together they are...like you, only different."
He smiles and she's fairly certain that the teeth he wears are from his own mouth.
Less creepy or way creepier? She steps away, leaving Varric to thank him and follow her out the front door of the tavern.
"Did you get it, Hawke?" His eyes are narrowed against the muted sunlight that manages to filter through a dense layer of clouds.
"That guy is creepy," she's being buffeted down the market by the noon rush, workers brought up from the docks and foundries in search of a quick meal. "But he also seems to pay attention."
"Do you think the guard paid people off?"
"Doubtful," Wil sidesteps a pile of horse shit and is forced into an alcove by an oncoming band of templars. They're not the normal recruits she sees around Lowtown, their armor is that of the full knights and lieutenants and something about the faceless wall of soldiers turns her cold even before one of the men goes out of his way to stare her down, his identity safe beyond the narrow eyeslit of his helm.
Unfair, when she is a civilian today. Unfair, when mages are not allowed such secrecy, such protection.
Varric finds her across the way, his gaze following the processional until they're swallowed by the crowds.
"To the undercity? There's an entrance nearby that should get us to Blondie in about ten minutes. Or you can take the clinic and I can get someone to the alienage."
The urge is to hug him for the concern that rasps in his voice, and for either sharing her priorities or knowing her well enough to automatically go there.
"No...they're heading towards the docks...hopefully this is just a reminder," anger flares where momentary fear had resided. "The Knight-Commander can't let anyone forget who really runs Kirkwall."
"I hope you know better than to say that around the Captain of the Guard."
She stops to regard him with bemused disbelief. Of all the things to hope that I know.
"Sorry, Hawke," as if it's a sacred trust that's been betrayed. "Sometimes I forget."
"I was told this would be kept quiet," Aveline's face is framed between ink-stained hands, calloused fingers digging into her temples to stave off a headache that might not have anything to do with the woman and the dwarf crowding her.
It might not have anything to do with them, but it probably does.
"Aveline," Wil leans forward, her hands doing what they can to disrupt the pre-existing chaos of paperwork on the captain's beleaguered desk. "Have you actually met Varric?"
"I can find out how much sugar you had in your tea last Tuesday," he shrugs. No big deal.
"Aveline doesn't drink tea, Varric," Wil bares her teeth in a fearsome snarl. "Aveline drinks only spirits as strong as she is, and the blood of her vanquished enemies. And those assholes that make too much noise in Hightown after dark. Grrrrr."
Aveline is not amused. It might not be an exaggeration to say that her lack of amusement is bordering on murderous.
"Ahem," hands busying themselves with resorting her paperwork, Wil takes it down about ten notches. "Also, there's that guy who is always mumbling around the Hanged Man? Apparently he saw what happened."
Sighing, Aveline leans back in her chair. This afternoon she wears a mask of exhaustion, eyes purple beneath bloodshot whites, fine lines visible at the corners of her mouth and Wil can't ignore the pang of guilt that accompanies why do you have to be such a jerk sometimes, Wil?
"I knew she was trouble, but to instigate an all out brawl," Aveline's profound lack of love for Isabela hardens every syllable. "It took twenty of my men an hour to sort out the mess in the bazaar, and I'm waiting for complaints of missing merchandise."
Brawl? Wil and Varric share a quick look and their lifted brows and matching expressions of Dammit, Rivaini don't go unnoticed.
"So you didn't know as much as you pretended," angry eyes cut from Wil to Varric. "I'm not surprised. It doesn't matter. She was the one who wanted it kept quiet, not me."
"Isabela didn't want us to know she caused a pre-dawn brawl in the Lowtown markets?" Wil does nothing to level her disbelief. "Do you have any idea how often she shows up with the blood still wet on her daggers and her pockets full of loot?"
It's not a wince that wrinkles Aveline's forehead, but it's close. She's not verbally opposed Wil's friendship with the pirate, choosing to target Varric's tendency to drag Wil into it instead. Nor has she mentioned in any direct way what she thinks about the two women's ongoing affair that, after a rather spectacular failure of the Hanged Man's soundproofing, had been made an undeniable fact one month earlier.
But it's clear she doesn't approve, not because of any moral reasons but because Isabela is, in her own words, trouble and Wil doesn't really need to be sleeping with trouble, on top of all the crooks, apostates and escaped slave hobos she keeps in her life.
"She knew you'd try to get her out," Aveline's armor harness creaks faintly as she shifts in her chair. "Apparently she has plans for her time in the brig-"
Wil eyes widen to a point that's possibly wider than she's ever made them, which is impressive considering how very many things she's done and seen that would cause such a reaction.
"She's in prison?" It comes out both low and squeaky and sudden onset nausea is not helping at all. "You...imprisoned her. Isabela. Friend Isabela."
"She broke the law, Hawke," Aveline stands in one strong motion, eyes narrowing. "And she's not my friend."
This is true. Just like Fenris isn't Anders friend, and neither men seem to love Merrill. Aveline and Isabela are at odds with each other, even in a cosmic sense. Nothing about them lines up but Wil and their mutual attachment to her. And their disdain for one another.
Disdain for Isabela's everything and thiefy hands and for Aveline's position and condemning frown. They are law and disorder and both wonderful and infuriating in turn.
"Hawke?" The edge of Varric's voice is concern. The rest is disbelief. "Are you...crying?"
She is and she isn't. Just like she understands why Aveline would arrest Isabela, because Isabela is often times breaking the law which Aveline is sworn to uphold, but also understands why Isabela breaks the law...because she can and it's fun and sometimes even for a good cause.
Usually for a good cause, when Wil does the breaking.
Also, there's that thing where Isabela is in prison.
"Not crying," she blinks back tears, wipes away tears and frowns when her fingers come away wet as if they could be anything else. "Clearly."
"Clearly," he coughs. Varric has been known to do well in times like these, even if she can sense the hesitation in his comfort as he's not certain how the comfortee will respond. It's a test for him because those are moments where people are laid bare and Varric likes to think he has them there already, a storyteller's arrogance. One wrong touch and-
her hand jerks in memory, the brush of her palm along Isabela's unguarded hip and how it had grown warm over the span of minutes before being shaken off with the tiniest noise of what the fuck, Hawke? and Wil snorted awake before rolling onto her stomach, embracing her bed because it had seen some rough nights and could probably use a hug
With this memory, the leaving and the empty satchel make sense. Less than that is the brawl and the brig, but Isabela always liked to take unexpected paths.
"So she stays?" Wil asks, composing herself and shoving aside a few of the feelings that have started to shift beneath her chest. Embarrassment, indignation, malaise, bemusement, panic and anger.
"She broke the law," this iteration is somehow less peeved. "But don't worry, it's only for a few weeks. And she seemed to think it could be a good thing."
"Smart, Rivaini. Chatty inmates, chatty guards...you can learn a lot if you ask the right questions, drop the right names and have something to offer," Varric muses. "And she knows how to handle herself."
"And here I thought she was trying to con me out of a sentence."
"That's a possibility, too," he couldn't sound more proud. "She likes to keep her options open. Hawke?"
Hawke? is Are we done here? He's comfortable enough with this outcome to get on to the next item of business.
She nods. "I'll probably stay a bit longer...catch up with Aveline if she'll have me."
"Then I guess it's time for me to make a token visit to the Merchant's Guild," his voice is suddenly much raspier, as if he's on the edge of a coughing fit or in desperate need of water. "Let them know the air up in the Vimmark Mountains isn't as good for my health as I'd hoped."
The responses earned from the two women he leaves behind say everything.
Aveline's eyes lift towards the ceiling. Wil laughs at her friend's temerity, of his willingness to play the suspicious again and again and his ability to never suffer for his lies.
Whether it's luck or charm, or an unfair abundance of both, she doesn't know.
"I might make it down to the Hanged Man this evening," she ignores Aveline's pointed glare. "Might lose at cards a few times and fall asleep under your table. So the normal Tuesday routine."
His throaty chuckle as he passes out of Aveline's office agrees and Wil is left with a frustrated Aveline, worn down past any Aveline Wil's known and apparently drowning in paperwork.
"Bad day at the office?" Wil raises her eyebrows, expressing concern now that the captain is free to speak. She expects anger, or even an outburst like Anders' the evening before, only on the nature of entitlement and laws aren't arbitrary, you know, and it's not fair for your friends to compromise me when I'm doing my job.
Instead Aveline snorts, the narrow line of her lips relaxing and her shoulders sagging slightly as she takes a seat on the edge of her desk.
"You don't want to know. The past few weeks have been...tense, to say the least. The knight-commander seems to think we're not doing enough to crack down on the apostate problem-"
"As if apostates are vermin?" It's said like a joke, but the venom in Wil's words burns her own throat. "Maybe you should try putting out little pots of poison and labeling them freedom. That might catch a few of the more desperate ones."
Aveline ignores her invitation to fight, although there's a detectable flicker of not this, too across her features. "And word from my guard around the qunari compound is that the situation there is growing tense. Although I don't know how one can tell, exactly. They're starting to get worried, though. My men, that is. I've doubled patrols in areas where the qunari have been spotted and a few have quit out of concern for their safety. But we've managed," pride flashes through the words. "With no extra funds requested and no accidents or harm to our ranks."
Her chin goes up, a ghost of a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth and despite their differences, Wil loves this Aveline. This no matter how bad shit gets, I stay awesome Aveline.
"I honestly don't know how you do it," Wil leans against the wall. "I thought I did. I think the past three years have proven me wrong."
"You weren't wrong," it's not a pity response, or from a friend to a friend. It's honest, brusque. An observant Captain of the Guard bolstering a comrade fallen on self-doubt. "You just need to find some permanency. Maybe petition the Viscount for your title and get more involved in the politics here. We don't agree on everything, but you're smart and I trust you to do mostly good. Why not make a career out of it?"
Nobility? Ah, no.
"Please, Aveline. More responsibility? I stay unimportant because it's comfortable," she smiles to hide the sharp fear...is it fear? Or is it just deep discomfort at the notion of being one of them? "Less pressure."
If Aveline notices the gap between Wil's smartass tone and the quiet panic beneath that pushes them out too quickly, doesn't let on and it's almost as if Hawke's become as good at subterfuge as Tethras.
"At any rate, I'd be getting back into a routine," she nods towards Wil's plain clothes and the single dragonbone dagger she carries at her hip. "Summer's coming fast and things are getting close to boiling already."
"Oh, just say it," Wil smirks, delighted at the implications of Aveline's evasiveness even as she tucks away the rest to be mulled over at a later time.
"If you want me to say that Kirkwall needs your skinny ass, no," her eyes narrow thoughtfully. "But I know I wouldn't sleep any worse at night if I thought you were around."
"With a big, fuck-off sword?"
"With a big...sword," a full-fledge smile breaks across the captain's pale freckled face or the first time all afternoon. "I can say yes to that, at least."
The Hanged Man is back in order although the arrangement of the tables is off just enough to be disconcerting. Wil wonders if she'd have the same reaction were she to wander into her own home to find Leandra or Bodahn had moved the furniture in the parlor.
She doubts it.
Varric is on the floor, surrounded by men she doesn't know. It happens sometimes and when he sees her, his back to the wall and his eyes aimed at the door, he offers an apologetic shrug and a summoning wave.
His friends for the evening eye her with interest. They're strangers, most of them scarred but not poorly turned out. Probably traveling merchants, the sort who act as their own caravan guards, and men who are accustomed to women like her in bars such as this jumping to warm their laps and their beds. She shoves up her sleeves and leans over Varric so they can see the dagger at her right hip.
Her eyes when they meet his are I will not hesitate to show them what.
"You're late," he observes coolly, no doubt trying to project an air of mystery around her. This is how he addresses the randoms who flit in while he's with her or the group. He has his business ventures, his personal ventures, and his fixing the shit that Bartrand screwed up ventures.
To Wil's knowledge, she's his favorite venture despite not fitting comfortably into any single category. Maybe he has a messy-haired woman venture. Who knows with him.
"I had some things to take care of," things, vague. The men need not know that she was shopping for sweets for her mother and a new collar for her dog. "You know...things."
"Blondie's in the back, working," his expression remains neutral, but his eyes gleam. The back is where Varric keeps his press. "Edwina has something for you at the bar."
He turns back to the game; transaction over.
She's neither important nor unimportant. Just someone he knows who for indiscernible reasons.
Edwina's something is a tray of food and cider. There is a large bowl of stew for Anders and a smaller bowl of tomato soup for Wil and bread and butter and a wedge of cheese for them to share nestled between them.
Wil slips the cheese to the edge of the tray, just next to her bowl, and carefully balances the wooden slab across her palms before taking it back through the small kitchen, where she ignores making eye contact with anything that might scare her off dinner, and down a half-flight of stairs to a doorway that she must duck to enter.
The back room is, like Varric's quarters, kept far cleaner than the tavern proper. Anders has done his best to reclaim the fastidiousness in his own disordered name, vellum and boxes of moveable type littering every free surface and his hands and face and tunic smudged with ink. Still, despite the mess and frustrated way he's pocking at the press, there's something in his posture and his eyes that speaks of unfathomable amounts of pride.
"I have dinner," she sets the tray down, knowing that it will be forgotten. It's fine, not eating. Before she'd seen him, she could have eaten everything on the tray and had room for a few pilfered sweets from the box she'd bought for Leandra. But now it's not hunger but memories that bothers her stomach, memories of skin of scent of the softness of hair in intimate places and curiosity at how it would feel to press her nose where her fingers had gone the evening before, to wrap her arms around him from behind and just breathe him.
Oh, no.
"What are you printing?" It's not wavy or overwhelmed or anything like how she feels, suddenly and damnably. "And how much trouble is Varric going to get into?"
He glances up from his task, contentment touching his features as if he's walked through a shaft of warm light and then turning back to an almost bemused sort of perplexed.
"Something I wrote last night, this morning. Today," he gasps out a laugh. "Muriel could handle the clinic and I was too distracted."
She doesn't ask why. It would be presumptuous and she knows that whatever had happened to cause him to seek her out, to explode the way he had, was the far more likely distraction.
"And I'll be clipping the corners of the pages," he continues, answering her second question. "Varric has enough typefaces to keep from being traced that way, so as long as there's no other marks they won't be able to prove anything."
He offers her a stack of the manifestos and she keeps her hands out for the scissors. On every page is a small insignia in the lower right corner, KFM followed by three dots in a vertical line. Any citizen could own a printing press, but only those licensed by their city could legally distribute printed materials in the Free Marches and those licenses were for the right only. Any who held one was subject to an entire litany of rules and laws regarding the content of their publications and their presses were altered so that their assigned mark would appear on every document produced.
"How many are you printing?" She makes the first four cuts, unconcerned with symmetry. The paper is too thick and the shears too dull for artistry.
"A few dozen," he pulls a fresh sheet off and sets it aside to dry. "Maybe fifty? I figure I'd leave them around the markets, and keep a few for my clinic."
"I'll take a dozen," Wil finishes the third and fourth. "The Chantry could use some decent reading material...or I assume it's decent." She fingers the paper, eyes hesitating at the margins. "Can I read it?"
He's smiling in that way that means he doesn't know he's smiling and that makes it even more difficult for her to actually look at what he's written.
"Since you're willing to risk your life to help me distribute it, it would be unfair for me to refuse," it's light and his eyes stay on her, expectant, and there's no way she can not read it, with him watching her like that.
All men are the Work of our Maker's hands; those who bring harm Without provocation to the least of His children Are hated and accursed by the Maker.-Transfigurations 1:3
We are taught these things as children, to engender compassion for one another, for our neighbors and those we will never meet. It is the foundation of morality, black and white and inarguable. We are all the Work of our Maker's hands, for all that Is is of the Maker, and yet there are those who are not granted the same freedom from harm, those who are viewed as accursed by their existence, despite being as much the product of His hand and His care as any other of his children. They are no different at their core than any other, they are flesh and blood, thought and hope. When they hunger it is sated by food, their hearts touched and wounded by the same kindnesses and tragedies. They breathe air, they eat too much, they are foolish and wise, shallow and thoughtful and normal save one difference, one small aspect of what they are that becomes who they are, who they will always be. Dangerous, even as children. Unworthy of love, despite being born from it. Harmed, despite the right of birth that should protect all.
So as you teach your children that all men are the work of our Maker's hands, think about those that are hidden, those that are denied the grace of her brothers and the compassion of his sisters. Think of those that are taught to be ashamed of themselves for what they are that becomes who they are, and wander how it is just, and wander what could be in a world where all of the Maker's children are truly equal, a world where every gift bestowed upon any of us could be used towards something better, something beautiful and free from the most basic of harms against humanity:
Unjust imprisonment and the subjugation of those deemed guilty before they can choose to remain innocent.
And this time it's impossible to ignore the tears that spill down her cheeks, that burn the edges of her eyes and sting a slick path to her neck. They're tears for a solid lump of anger that has formed in her throat, tears for the furious calamity of her heart as it responds to every word, lifted somehow from where it's been for years, beating for the loss of purpose as Bethany is gone, Malcolm is gone. Merrill too independent and Anders...
He's come to settle beside her, space between them that he covers easily enough with the tilt of his broad shoulders and one long leg that bumps against her own even as his fingers can't quite make the commitment.
"There's a couple of typos," she sobs, the words meant to defuse her the way she'd defused herself the night before are choking because fuck typos when the core of what she holds in her hands is what needs to be heard and accepted by everyone ever. Even if the Maker is just some jackass with an excellent spokesperson, the sentiment is so on. "I could help you next time?"
It comes out borderline incomprehensible and when she forces what is certain to be a ghastly smile he laughs to break the tension that's just there, as solid as the whatever it is in her throat, and as warm as a hand on her knee or hip or arms around another's neck.
"Do you even know how to write?" He's teasing, his expression heartbreakingly pleased with this reaction even though she can see pain there, too. "I mean, besides Chantry smut."
"Yeah, I think so," she brushes aside tears with the back of her hand, suppressing a quiet groan when she sees it's smeared in green. "It can't be that different, can it? It's all about inflaming passions."
A dangerous joke to make, considering how Justice usually responds to her seeming irreverence that even Anders is sometimes hard-pressed to swallow.
But the ghost of happiness remains in the sweet tilt of his mouth and the gleam of his warm eyes. "As long as you promise to not to get confused and start adding turgid members to everything."
"I wouldn't dare," she catches herself between flirtatiousness and sincerity. "They're fantastic and everything, but they don't exactly make a compelling argument for the rights of mages," her hand finds its way across his thigh to tuck itself neatly against his knee, testing something that shouldn't be tested. "This makes me think of how much better things could be for everyone, and I can't help but envision what life would have been like for my family, had someone like you come along sooner."
Silence is still around them until his fingers begin sliding along her forearm, the smooth pads barely touching the sensitive skin on the inside of her wrist, and she tenses for physical removal, a silent but unquestionable sign that she'd crossed the line.
Instead he traces, instead he moves in small circles and sweeping arcs to cast a spell that requires no magic beyond touch and that changes nothing save the way in which she sees him.
Because he's no longer just her healer, or someone who'd save almost anyone if he could and does. He's no longer even the person who'd kept her from having to kill her own sister, the bottomless doubt she has about that decision never once spilling or spreading onto him. He's no longer a confusing stranger who appeared as if someone had been instructed to design a man that she'd find amusing and arresting and terribly, terribly tragic.
He's Anders, his long, slender fingers finally folding between her own and transferring ink smudges and warmth in unequal measure.
He's Anders, his thumb continuing to move along the unguarded curve of her hand even as he stares at it in anguish, perhaps jealousy, his teeth digging into his lower lip and concern knitting his brow while he wonders if he'll be able to stop himself before his thumb becomes his arm becomes his mouth becomes their legs and their bodies and the heat within them.
He's Anders, who knows he shouldn't accept these gestures of reassurance sincerely offered by someone who can't even be honest with herself. He knows, but he accepts anyway because there are still tears caught in her eyelashes and they're her promise to him, which had been made after a day of people who don't need her as much as they want her to be around.
He's Anders and he is every night Bethany tried to cry herself to sleep because of magic, every tear Mina wiped from round pink cheeks while talking about a day when they would both be big and strong and swords and fireballs, untouchable, and when he brings himself to look he sees something optimistic and courageous within her. It's words he's written himself, a newborn hope for progress and something eventually right. Varric sees character, Aveline strength. Isabela sees surface and what's in it for her, but Anders sees someone who believes in him. In who he is and what he is.
Or he sees someone who understands the magnitude of his cause, at least, and who is getting close to understanding something more.
He pulls away and she withdraws, too.
Close.
"Aveline says it's going to be a hot one," she squints at her hands, which are folded neatly around her knees.
"She's probably right," he gathers the few pages he's copied and leaves them in his seat as he returns to the press. "We'll need to be ready."
We will be, fingers curl slightly, muscle memory guiding them around a phantom hilt. Me and my big, fuck-off sword riding in to save the day.
It's ridiculous, but slightly less so than it would have seemed the night before.