log: erik+fenris WHO: Erik Lehnsherr and Fenris WHEN: February 17 WHERE: Down in the ~forge~, at Erik's workstation WHAT: Fenris has commissioned a wedding ring for Hawke, and he has one last request in order to make it perfect. WARNINGS: N/A, but some potential squick regarding the lyrium under Fenris's skin.
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Erik tended to keep to himself. He had a group of mutants that he considered family, spanning across multiple universes and timelines, but his relationship with all of them was complex, at best. He was, depending on the day, a megalomaniacal terrorist or at best, a grudging ally that people viewed with healthy doses of fear and respect.
It didn't bother him, but it made close friendships difficult.
Not that things were different in his own world. Even when he had been leading a group of mutants against oppression, they had all been friends with one another while Erik led from a distance. He had his moments of joy, his moments of bonding, but they felt few and far between in comparison.
He was different from the others, he knew that much. He was a weapon, a monster, a tool to be wielded so that others could find freedom and happiness. His own life experience often felt so far removed from what others had lived that he hadn't the slightest idea how to relate. His personhood had been stripped from him long ago, but he'd made peace with that.
What he struggled with most was idleness.
He was no stranger to it. He'd spent a decade of his life locked in a plastic prison, alone, with only the occasional book. Ten years without sunlight. Ten years without a genuine conversation. Some days it simply felt like enough to be surrounded by people, to listen to them talk, to feel the energetic hum of magnetic fields around him after ten years of silence. He didn't hate it here — on the contrary, he quite liked it, but he hadn't yet found a purpose.
He saw war between factions as inevitable, but it wasn't here yet. Mutants hadn't had their rights stripped away. There were no Nazis to track down and hunt — with the exception of one, but Erik had grudgingly accepted that they were to let him live. Living a normal life without some sort of goal, without a violent endgame, left him feeling lost. He'd offered his services to Steve and Adaar, as some sort of agent, but they all knew that he was no rank and file soldier.
So he fixed things in the forge. He made jewelry. He exercised his powers in different ways, channeled his abilities into something other than inflicting violence. It was almost meditative, Erik taking pleasure of feeling a metal bend to his will, shaping delicate filigree. To make something beautiful was an entirely different set of skills, and Erik spent long hours in the forge with bits of scrap metal trying to hone his power — not to seek raw and devastating power, but to tame and refine his abilities with absolute precision.
It would be useful, one day.
He was alone today, sitting quietly at his workbench and surrounded by various projects. Perfectly-shaped cubes of metal were lined up across the edge of the table. A shimmering, impossibly smooth sphere the size of one's fist was resting atop a curving iron stand, providing a reflection of the entire room. A massive copper sculpture that looked like a winding, gnarled tree stretched up from behind his chair up to the ceiling.
He lifted a hand. A small branch of the copper tree broke off from the rest, floating down into his palm as delicately as a leaf in the breeze.
Fenris had struggled with many of the same feelings--of not knowing who he was without a quest for justice or vengeance, of feeling like a weapon rather than a person. Sometimes he still did, though not so much as he had in years past. Hawke had helped him change a lot of that, starting from the earliest days of their friendship. It took patience to love him, Fenris knew, but for reasons Fenris would never completely understand, Hawke had always found him worth the trouble. Hawke had taught him to have fun, had helped him find interests outside of killing slavers, had given him the nudge forward that he needed to start exploring the world outside of single-minded purpose.
There weren’t any slavers to kill at Mount Weather, at least not yet. Fenris had joined the guard here, which rarely involved killing anyone at all. He felt like Aveline back in Kirkwall, stopping domestic disputes and pulling drunken idiots out of fights and generally speaking just waiting for something to go wrong. There was so much time in between--even once his daily training was done, he had time for reading philosophy, playing cards, drinking horrible liquor, and talking with friends new and old. He didn’t have as much time on his hands as he’d had in that musty old mansion in Hightown, but he enjoyed the time more. Even when he was alone, he was thinking rather than stewing.
Fenris tried not to think about the world he’d left, the one where Hawke was lost to the Fade and he was murdering his way down the northern coast of the Waking Sea. It wasn’t the ended he’d wanted. He’d always said, certainly, that he and Hawke were certain to die before retirement was an option, but there had always been an image in the back of his mind of the two of them growing old drinking themselves to death on a beach in Antiva. He’d never been bold enough to believe in it, but he’d wanted it. Drinking rum and watching Hawke’s hair go gray in the shade of a palm tree had sounded good, and the dream had been yanked away like every other he’d had, by magic. By the time the pod had taken him, Fenris had been living on sheer spite.
But now they were here, and neither of them were dead, and Fenris was slowly allowing himself to hope again. He’d asked Hawke to marry him, of all the insane things, and it was surprisingly not terrifying. That was why he’d come to see Erik today: the ring. Rings were not required for a marriage, but they were traditional, and if they were to formally pledge themselves to one another, this time Fenris wanted to be able to give Hawke something tangible to go along with it. The first time they had exchanged favors, Fenris had tied a piece of kitchen twine around Hawke’s wrist, because he’d barely had a copper to his name at the time and his only real possessions were his sword and armor. Now things were different, and Fenris found that he was looking forward to giving Hawke something truly special and significant.
As he stepped into the smithy, Fenris nodded politely to Erik. “Good afternoon.”
Erik glanced up. The piece of copper hovered just above his fingertips, shaping itself into a smooth ball before he grasped it and set it down on the table.
"Fenris." The corner of his mouth twitched upward into a faint smile. He found that he liked Fenris, in a strange way. They were almost kindred spirits in shared experience, even if they chose not to speak of it most of the time. They didn't need to discuss what was done to them and how they dealt with it in order to find some sort of understanding.
And Fenris fascinated him. Erik could sense his presence at a distance, and in Erik's view of things, Fenris practically shimmered and sang with energy. Whatever strange metal was under his skin, it called to Erik like a beacon. The version of Logan who was here was much the same way, his skeleton laced with adamantium.
"You're here to see the ring?" Erik asked.
“I am.” Fenris didn’t tend to say a lot, except on the occasions that he had a great deal to say. Small talk was not his forte. He’d never really learned how to do it; as a slave there had been no call for it, and as a free man he had generally confined his conversation to either friends or enemies, neither of whom required it. Erik was more on the friend side; they didn’t discuss the very unfortunate ways in which they were similar, but they knew of them, and that was enough to form something of a bond. And now Erik had made the ring for Hawke, which made the bond a little stronger, for all that working metal was Erik’s job. “Is it complete?”
Erik held up a finger, a gesture for Fenris to wait, and he ducked down to open a drawer.
He pulled a small box from it and offered it out to Fenris. "Exactly to your specifications. It's been done for some time, and if you want to make changes, it won't take me long." Erik's unique abilities meant that altering a ring's size or design was nearly effortless compared to what a normal smith would have to do.
Fenris opened the box and smiled faintly. It was beautiful, exactly what he’d asked for. It would do perfectly well exactly as it was. He’d gotten an idea a few weeks ago, however, that refused to be silent, and which might make this ring exactly what he needed it to be.
“You control metal with your mind, yes?” he asked, looking up at Erik. He knew the answer to that question, though. It was the one that followed that was significant. “The lyrium under my skin. Can you sense that as well?”
Erik leaned back slightly in his chair, his fingertips drumming lightly against the table. "Louder and brighter than most," he said after a moment. "Like nothing I've ever experienced."
To say he was curious was an understatement, but Erik knew that the lyrium beneath Fenris's skin was there through torturous experimentation and cruelty. Erik knew better than to ask questions; he bore his own permanent marks from Auschwitz, a number branded into his skin. That he was able to hide with a sleeve. Fenris didn't have that luxury.
Those experiences of experimentation and cruelty had given Fenris a strange relationship with his own body. It had taken years for him to really feel as though he belonged to himself, that his body was his regardless of anything that had been done to it when he was a slave. He’d made a determined effort to claim himself, to declare ownership of the things that Denarius had given him. The lyrium tattoos were his now, just as his name was his, and it didn’t matter where they came from. Or rather, it did matter, but in a different way than it used to.
“Do you think you could take a bit of it to work into the ring?” Fenris asked, and added a mild clarifier that probably would have disturbed anyone but Erik. “I know it would hurt. That is not a concern.”
Erik furrowed his brow, taking a moment to consider this.
"Come here," he said, and he beckoned with a hand as he leaned forward, just enough to reach out across the table and take Fenris's hand. He held it delicately, his touch soft, and he turned Fenris's hand over to brush his thumb over the inside of his wrist.
The call of lyrium was like nothing he'd ever experienced. It had power in its own right, pulsing with energy, as if it had some sort of life of its own beyond the forces that none but Erik ever seemed to sense. "You want me to take some of this."
A few seconds passed as Fenris looked down at his hand and considered his words. He didn’t have to explain. Erik would probably do as he asked even if he didn’t. Fenris found, however, that he wanted to be understood, by one of the few people under the mountain who might genuinely be capable of understanding.
“I have not always been my own, able to do with my body as I see fit,” he said. “But this is mine now. I can keep it, use it, give it away as I choose. There has also been a great deal of thinking about symbolism that you would likely find tiresome, and about the potential practical use of a little extra magical power...but suffice it to say that I find it a meaningful addition to the ring, if you think you can manage it.”
Erik took a steadying breath, his hands closing around Fenris's wrist as his thumbs traced the lines of the markings. Merely being in the presence of such a substance was a rush not unlike a heavy drug. "I could do this," he said, lifting his eyes to meet the other man's gaze. "Pull it from your skin. If you're willing to endure that pain, then I can do this for you."
Hawke had said that his blood was his, to do with as he wished. Fenris couldn’t do anything of note with his blood, but the lyrium...that was his. He wanted Hawke to have a piece of him, something that would endure. There was no statement of ownership more powerful than to give something away freely. Fenris was his own, and he knew this in part because he could choose to give himself to another. Hawke had his heart; it seemed fitting that he have a sliver of the lyrium as well. The pain would be brief, it would require only a tiny amount, and it made a statement that Fenris, at least, found beautiful.
“Just a drop,” Fenris said, meeting Erik’s eyes with no trouble. “Enough for a touch of it.”
If Erik were a crueler man, he might have taken want he wanted for curiosity's sake — but Erik was not that man. If he had a need for it, perhaps he would have gone to whatever lengths he pleased, but no matter how badly he wanted to play about with more of it, he could — and would — settle for a single drop.
He ran his hands over Fenris's forearm, gentle, like he wanted to brace him for it (while also feeling the hypnotic buzz of the lyrium beneath his touch). "I won't take anything more. It shouldn't hurt you too much. Tell me you're certain."
“I am certain,” Fenris said, perfectly calm and steady. He’d thought it over extensively. Other people purposely endured pain to have something added to their body--Carver’s tattoo, Isabela’s piercings--he saw nothing wrong with enduring pain to have something taken away, and probably for a more meaningful reason. It might not make sense to most people, but it made sense to Fenris, and once he made up his mind he was seldom swayed.
"Good."
Erik had spent months working more delicately with metals, using them to create things of beauty rather than using his power for violence. Months ago, he might not have been able to do this without causing Fenris significant amounts of pain. Today, however, he closed his eyes and focused on the pull of the unusual metal, on the energy surrounding it, the shape of it beneath Fenris's skin.
The lyrium was difficult to work with, far less compliant than other metals he was used to. He didn't have a useful analogy, save that it felt like trying to harness a wild animal over a tame one. He felt that it almost wanted to interact, that it wanted to be used.
One drop, he had to remind himself.
He drew up a bead of it. If it were blood, it would have felt like a pinprick and nothing more. Erik had no idea how Fenris would actually feel.
There was a time when any touch to the markings would hurt. Years passed, and it became simply an intensity of sensation - he felt more on the markings, whether good or bad, and even the good was sometimes too much. Still more years had passed since then, and while the skin remained sensitive, the pain this caused was not unbearable. He had lived through far worse in several different battles. This delicate operation felt like more than a pinprick, but much less than a stab wound, and it felt like doing exactly what he wanted, which was the most important part of all of it. The only indication that he felt anything at all was a sharp, inward hiss of breath, and then staring in fascination at the lyrium existing outside of his skin.
“Well,” he said, and almost-smiled. “That settles the question of if you can work it.”
Erik returned Fenris's expression, the faintest ghost of a smile, and then looked down at the bead of lyrium hovering over his fingertips. "I can inlay it along the band," he said, marveling at it. "Perhaps in a similar pattern to what you have on your skin, unless you'd prefer something else."
“No, that would be...that would be perfect.” It was exactly what Fenris had envisioned himself. It would be just what he wanted, and that made the sting of pain more than worth it. He nodded, almost a bow. “You have my thanks, Erik.”
Erik took the ring in his free hand, turning it over between his fingers. "Show me your arm, or whatever pattern you want me to copy," he said, his expression calm despite the fact that the bead of lyrium was exciting and new. "And I…"
Mm.
He wasn't used to being thanked.
"Of course, Fenris."
Fenris nodded to acknowledge the acceptance, and rolled up his sleeve. There might have been another bit of a smile starting on his face. It could be hard to tell with Fenris.
“I thought the pattern as it goes on my arm here…”