Log: Fenris and Hawke WHO: Fenris and Hawke WHEN: Tuesday afternoon WHERE: Mount Weather Medical WHAT: Fenris is back! WARNINGS: Strong language, references to death and violence, HEARTBREAKING ARGUING.
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Fenris had been to Mount Weather before, but he didn’t remember a scrap of it.
That was nothing new for Fenris. There were huge chunks of his life that he didn’t remember. This place, though...it was so completely alien to him that he truly couldn’t imagine that he even might have laid eyes on it before. It was foreign in a way no country in Thedas had ever been.
The austerity of it, the bright whiteness...both immediately made him nervous. No one but the very wealthy could manage that kind of perfect cleanliness, and his experiences with the very wealthy had not been good.
He was still dressed in his armor, though, and his sword was there in the corner. Good. He could get out of here and get back to the work of slaughtering slavers by the dozens. If he killed off enough enough of them, maybe their blood would drown out his last sight of Hawke’s face before the bastard had left him to go die in the Fade. Fenris stood, hefted his sword back into its place on his back, and went to the door.
It was locked.
He wished then that he’d gotten Isabela or Varric to teach him to pick locks. In absence of that option, he banged on the door with all his considerable strength.
“Let me out of here!” he demanded loudly, looking as best he could up and down the hallway through the small window. He was just about to begin pounding on the door again when a face appeared on the other side of the glass. The last face he ever expected to see on this side of the Veil: Hawke.
Fenris was stunned mid-knock, staring, and wondering if he was indeed on the side of the Veil he thought he was. Had he died and not even realized it? That was the only reasonable explanation. Hawke had been trapped in the Fade, single-handedly taking on a huge demon. There was no way he could possibly return. And yet...there he was.
It was probably fortunate that they locked the doors on the individual hospital rooms now. It had been a precaution against new people punching poor Simon in the face on the way to freedom, but now Hawke was reasonably sure that it was keeping him from some serious pain.
"Fenris?" The door was too thick for Fenris to hear him, and Hawke scrambled the unlock it and swing the door open. Whoever had brought Fenris in must not have known to tell him, and it was luck that Hawke was the one to check on the new arrivals today. Without a wariness for the consequences, he pulled Fenris into a tight hug as soon as he could get his hands on him.
At first, Fenris was simply stunned. He stood stock still in Hawke’s embrace, trying to process what was happening. This did not feel like the Fade. Everything felt very solid and real, and nothing appeared obviously out of place--nothing, that was, other than the fact that he was being hugged by a dead man.
Fenris pulled away, even though there was part of him that wanted to simply melt into Hawke’s arms and let everything be fixed. It wasn’t that easy.
“Is this the Fade?” he demanded. “Am I dead? Because I know of no other way this could be possible.”
"No. No, you're not dead." Hawke kept his hands on him, because he couldn't imagine just letting go, so he held onto Fenris's shoulders like a lifeline. "This is going to sound insane, but we're in another reality. Something -- nobody knows what -- took us out of our own timelines and dropped us here -- I know it sounds crazy, I feel crazy saying it, but it's true. You're not dead. I'm not dead."
If Hawke had truly been some kind of Fade demon trying to convince Fenris to be content in death, he was doing a horrible job. Hopefully the absurdity worked in his favor.
It did, at least insofar as the task of convincing Fenris that nobody here was dead went. All kinds of strange and inexplicable and fundamentally ridiculous things happened when one spent time with Garrett Hawke. One quickly learned to roll with the punches. This sounded insane, but so did half of the true stories Varric told about them.
None of that, however, did much to help with the fact that Fenris had been abandoned in the middle of the night, left to wait around while Hawke went off to get trapped in the Fade, and then got a letter from Varric saying that Hawke was lost forever.
“And you just stayed here?” Fenris snarled, shoving Hawke’s hands off of him. “While I thought you were dead?”
"No!" Hawke protested, keeping his hands up defensively. "I don't have a choice. Don't you think I would have come home if I had the choice? None of us know how to get back." He knew better than to reach for Fenris again, but it was killing him not to.
“I don’t know,” Fenris growled. “Would you? You certainly left readily enough!”
Fenris had been both furious and crushed when he had awakened to find nothing but a note in bed beside him. He didn’t like having his choices taken away, or his trust broken, and that had been both at once. He and Hawke had been together for a decade, and seeing that note had felt like Hawke was simply throwing all that away. It made Fenris want to throttle him, and left him wondering if he could trust Hawke at all anymore, and he did not like it.
"You wouldn't let me go! What was I supposed to do, let you walk directly into the line of fire with me? Take you into the Fade and let you die next to me? You can be as angry as you like, at least you're alive!" Hawke was too upset to sound truly furious himself, but in his deep voice, anytime he raised it sounded like an angry roar.
Other people in the hospital could surely hear this, but if they were wise, they would stay away for now.
“Thank you so much for your permission to be angry!” Fenris shouted back at him. “Though I suppose it’s easy to give when how I feel matters so little to you.”
Fenris didn’t like being dismissed any more than he liked being abandoned. It did nothing for his ability to be calm or reasonable--not that there was anything to be calm or reasonable about here, anyway. He had been plucked from his world, brought to another, found his lover alive, and found that the man was being just as much of an idiot as he’d been when he snuck out of their home.
"Of course it matters! But I've already asked you to walk into certain death with me once, I wasn't going to do it again. And you wouldn't listen to reason!" Hawke dragged his hands over his face and tried not to audibly groan. That would just make it worse. "I know you, Fenris, you would have gladly died protecting me -- and that's all well and good, but it's not right for me to ask that of you in the first place."
“You decided that what you wanted was most important, and you betrayed my trust, and I do not particularly care why you thought that was acceptable.” The reply was short and clipped, the cold kind of angry that Fenris had very rarely turned on Hawke. “We were supposed to have a partnership of equals, Hawke. That is not what this is, not when you go over my head to make life and death decisions for me.”
"Corypheus was my responsibility. He escaped because of my family. It was a burden I couldn't share," Hawke insisted, feeling the ground come out from underneath him. He wasn't going to win this argument, he knew. "And then it was me, or Stroud, and I couldn't let him be the one to stay. The Wardens needed him and I owed him a life for saving Carver's when I was stupid enough to take him into the Deep Roads. Fenris, please."
“Believe you owe Stroud whatever you like, but if you don’t realize that ten years together merits more than a note--” Fenris cut himself off, shaking his head. There was nowhere else to go with this conversation. If Hawke didn’t understand how all this made Fenris feel like the very least important person in Hawke’s life and like Fenris was some lesser creature who couldn’t make his own choices about when and if he would risk his life, he wasn’t going to understand. He would keep right on trying to justify his actions, and Fenris was done listening to it.
“Where is the exit?” Fenris flatly asked.
"Of course I realize that, or did you miss the fighting we did for weeks beforehand? It was the only way you'd let me leave, it wasn't my preferred method of running off." Hawke shook his head. He nearly reached for Fenris again, but stopped himself halfway and pulled back. "I'm sorry. I am truly, truly sorry. It was shit, and maybe I made a mistake doing it, but I died alone for it. Can't that be enough?"
Hawke wasn't deliberately trying to keep Fenris from walking away, but he was too wrapped up in trying not to cry that he forgot he'd been asked a question.
An actual apology was a start, at least. Fenris certainly found it more welcome than any justifications Hawke had offered. It appeared to be a sincere apology, not just an excuse, which also helped. Fenris stood and glared at him, arms crossed, for some time, trying to decide if he believed any of this or not. His expression didn’t betray the fact that he was hit hard, right in the heart, at the idea of Hawke dying alone. Angry or not, Fenris still loved Hawke deeply.
“And if such a situation presents itself again?” he asked.
"Ideally, chances to throw myself at giant spider-shaped fear demons are in short supply here," Hawke replied dryly -- before he sobered again, his tone genuine. "But, if they aren't, or something else tries to kill me… I won't make the mistake twice. I promise."
He wasn't sure if he was forgiven yet, but he reached out again anyway, gesturing to show that he intended to touch Fenris's cheek. "May I?"
Fenris knew that he shouldn’t give in so easily. He should demand that Hawke earn back the trust he had broken, or at least tell him that he was going to be sleeping on the sofa for a while...but Hawke was alive, and Fenris had thought he would never see him again. A return from the dead brought a few perks with it.
Fenris gave a tight little nod to grant his permission, and as Hawke’s hand came to his cheek, Fenris turned his face just slightly into the touch. “I will not allow you to make the same mistake again,” he said evenly. “If you try, I will hunt you down and I will make you wish that spider had killed you.”
Hawke pulled Fenris in for another hug (being wary of the spiky armor, of course) and buried his face in the side of his neck. "Deal. I promise not to make me wish I'd been eaten by a giant spider."
Maker, just saying that gave him chills. Hawke hated spiders.
Fenris allowed himself to be hugged, and this time he brought his hand to rest at Hawke’s waist instead of just standing there. It was a small gesture, but an important one--Fenris didn’t touch casually.
“I mean it, Hawke,” he said quietly. “Do not do this to me again. Do not do anything like this to me again. Never, do you understand?”
"I understand," Hawke echoed. He would have been content just to stand there if it wasn't so inconvenient and so odd for Fenris. They would have time.
Hopefully.
Eventually he pulled back and cleared his throat. "Come on. We should get you settled. There are some people you need to talk to who can explain this better than I can."
“Very well,” Fenris agreed, albeit somewhat reluctantly. He still felt strange about all of this, but trusting Hawke was a long-ingrained habit, hard to break even after his utter stupidity about running off to singlehandedly rescue the Inquisition from Corypheus. Fenris would let Hawke lead the way, and once he had his feet back under him again and they were somewhere private, then Fenris would consider the prospect of some long overdue kisses goodbye and hello. For now, he needed to find out exactly where the Void he was.