log; fenris & hawke WHO: Hawke & Fenris WHEN: Just after the Bloody Mary attacks, but before Christmas WHERE: The Hospital WHAT: Hawke has been spending 100% of his time in the hospital after Bloody Mary, and Fenris comes to make sure he's actually taking care of himself. Fluff ensues.
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Hawke was being... call it semi-responsible?
The bulk of the work was finished. That initial push of everyone and their mothers needing some kind of immediate care was over, and anyone who needed much more than that had been well tended to. The hallway outside still resembled a clinic and the hospital was still full of people who could potentially take a bad turn, but the scariest moment was over for now.
Even when there was no medicine to be administered, there was work to be done. If Hawke wasn't using his magic, he was trying to do something else, help someone else, do something. He napped every now and again, but never for more than a couple of hours at a time. He drained his magic once, helped along by a spirit healing spell that called in the personification of resilience (a creature Hawke hadn't known existed until it answered his call), and again, and again, feeling dried up and hollow each time. He activated a magical aura to promote healing when he could, until that drained, too.
And when he had nothing left and was too anxious to sleep even when everyone else was unconscious, Hawke quietly prodded at the stab wound in his left arm and used little shreds of a darker magic to heal small wounds while his patients were sleeping. A gash here, a cut there, minimizing the need for stitches and painkillers, subtle in the way he shortened their recovery times and their discomforts. The blood magic was getting easier every time he used it, and Hawke hated himself for it -- all while privately comforting himself with the idea that so long as he was just using the energy from his own blood and no one else's, it wouldn't be as bad as consorting with demons.
By Saturday morning, Hawke was strung out, uncomfortable, slightly anemic and exhausted. He hadn't made it home over Friday night (or Thursday, really), had barely remembered to eat, and had fallen dead asleep spread out on a recently vacated hospital bed, the curtains drawn for someone's privacy (his or everyone else's). Hawke slept on his stomach, an arm and a leg hanging off the edge and no effort made to cover up with a blanket. His dreams were vague, full of cool, disturbing colors that burned the inside of his eyes. Especially blue. Mostly blue.
Fenris didn’t know about the blood magic. If he had known, he would have been furious. Once mages started down that path, in his experience, they seldom abandoned it. They justified their need for more power by any means necessary, and then they tore through whomever they had to in order to get it. To be a mage in Thedas was to live with constant temptation, and one slip tended to very quickly lead to another.
Had anyone asked him if Hawke practiced blood magic--had they even asked if Hawke would under some circumstance practice blood magic--Fenris would have said no. He would have answered without hesitation that there was no way Hawke could ever stoop to that. Hawke had seen too many lives destroyed by blood magic. He would never. That would only make Fenris’ fury greater when he eventually found out, because it would be backed by feelings of betrayal and disappointment.
But for now, Fenris remained blissfully ignorant. His only worry was that Hawke was, as usual, working too hard and setting himself on fire to keep other people warm. His dedication to helping people who needed it was one of his better qualities, but it was sometimes also one of the ones Fenris found most frustrating--such as, when Hawke was determined to run for days on end without food or rest.
Thus Fenris came again to the medical wing of the vast underground bunker they now called home, getting direction to his lover’s last known whereabouts from a passing nurse. Upon seeing Hawke passed out on the bed, looking like an abandoned rag doll, Fenris sighed faintly. Typical.
He came to sit on the edge of the bed and gingerly ran his fingers into Hawke’s hair. “If you are properly asleep, I will not wake you,” Fenris said quietly. “But if you are not, you should eat. I have brought sandwiches.”
Hawke didn't catch any of what was said, but it was enough to make him wake up with an uncomfortable jerk, dizzily yanked out of the middle of a nightmare too vague to properly describe. He was usually graceless in his sleep, sometimes snoring, seemingly out until he suddenly wasn't. It was only known that he had nightmares when he admitted to them, which wasn't often, for Fenris's sake.
Speaking of:
"Hey. Hey, you." Gradually getting his bearings, Hawke pushed onto his side, catching Fenris's hand before he could pull it away and pressing his face to the elf's palm. "What time is it? I just meant to take a nap."
A tiny smile tipped up one side of Fenris’s mouth. A nap, indeed. A nap fueled by impossible exhaustion had probably gone into sleeping straight through to morning, if he had to guess.
“I could not say how long you have slept, but if you intended to come home last night, you missed your window of opportunity,” he said. “It is morning, and when I woke alone, I thought I might find you here...and indeed, here you are.”
"Haven't been elsewhere in a while," Hawke admitted. "I think I laid down sometime last night. I think." Not for the first time, he wished that Mount Weather was a little less underground. He spent so much time in the hospital that he couldn't let the sun set his schedule, and he missed the early morning light shining through the windows or the gaps in a tent. This underground stuff was always going to be unsettling.
Pushing himself up, he forgot for a second that his left arm was injured and flinched when he attempted to put weight on it, before leaning primarily on his right instead. The bandages needed redressing, but it didn't feel urgent just yet. "I'm sorry, you---is that food? You brought food. You're my favorite."
“I was already your favorite,” Fenris calmly replied, but he reached into the little canvas bag he was carrying and took out a sandwich for Hawke anyway. “I was told that it is a peanut butter sandwich. The young woman in the kitchen said children like them, so it seemed perfect for you.”
Because really, what was their relationship without a little gentle ribbing here and there? If he didn’t say something like that, then Fenris would have to say that he had been worried when he woke up alone, that he’d missed him, and that he didn’t care for sleeping by himself anymore. Even after ten years, Fenris typically preferred to simply let those things be understood rather than speak his feelings aloud.
"And she was correct. I have a rough childhood to reclaim, you know." Hawke grinned, returning Fenris's snark with an irritating dedication to optimism. He'd learned a long time ago that he wasn't necessarily the best at trading barbs (or so he thought), and at some point had made the deliberate choice to be annoying by very pointedly not being offended when he was made fun of. With his friends, it came off as good-natured and humorous; with his enemies, it drove them into an irritated rage. Win-win.
It was the first food he'd eaten in… awhile. (Better not to count the hours.) He might have moaned when he bit into the sandwich. Maybe. A bit. "How is it out there?" he asked, only half intelligible. "No one's died in the halls? Please tell me no one died in the halls."
“None that I am aware of,” Fenris answered, watching Hawke as he ate. As soon as one sandwich was finished, Fenris was prepared to hand him another. He wasn’t good at talking about his feelings, but he was very good at handing off food. Having spent some time starving, Fenris could say with confidence that everything was better on a full stomach, and hunger was a thing that he could fix.
“At this point, things out there are quiet,” he went on. “Some have retreated to their rooms in search of some peace, or to the tavern in search of companionship and drink, and the rest are at work on cleaning up the mess.”
"I could use a drink," Hawke drawled, happily devouring another sandwich. This was a bad time not to be eating, between the general use of magic, no sleep, and the blood he was quietly losing. He was fortunate that the people around him expected him to be exhausted right now. Alcohol was probably a bad idea, but not if he ate first, right? "When I feel like I can leave, that's my first stop. Maybe second stop, after a shower."
With a self-satisfied sound, Hawke scooted over just enough to lay his head on Fenris's shoulder. Anytime Hawke initiated touch, he always went for something gentle first, or submissive enough to show that he wasn't being aggressive. In ten years he probably could have moved past that, but now it was habit, and he wasn't willing to risk spooking Fenris even when everything seemed fine.
Fenris appreciated the consideration, though he didn’t often think on it anymore, and when he did he didn’t find it as necessary as he once had. In the early days, he had been easily startled, put on the defensive by any unexpected touch. Human contact had meant nothing but excruciating pain for him for years, and the old habits that told him to brace himself for it had taken a long time to unlearn. On a bad day, sometimes they were still there. Hawke had always been careful with him, though. He’d been gentle. He had made it clear from the very beginning that his touch would never cause Fenris any pain, and that anything between them would always be entirely by choice, never through threats or coercion.
A decade down the line, Fenris didn’t require so much warning for a touch. There were good things about easing into it, though. The light tap of Hawke’s head on his shoulder let Fenris know exactly where he was, gave him a moment to sort out the space and figure out where his hands could go--to the small of Hawke’s back this time, then slipping carefully around to his hip, drawing in a little closer.
“And what conditions must be fulfilled for you to feel like you can leave?” Fenris asked, his voice lowering again. “Because you did not appear to be sleeping well, and could likely use some time in your own bed in addition to your shower and drink.”
"I'd like for everyone to be well enough to get up and dance the remigold just to prove it, but I'll settle for checking them all over one more time to make sure they're breathing." Pulling away was like a small torture, so at first, Hawke just didn't. He briefly pressed his face to the side of Fenris's neck, resting in the curve of his shoulder before finally sighing and leaning back.
"Let me go pretend to be a doctor for a few minutes, and then we'll go."
A faint smile came to Fenris’s lips. He was pleased Hawke had agreed to come home so easily; he had half expected that he’d need to launch a full campaign complete with not-at-all-empty threats of simply tossing Hawke over his shoulder and carrying him out.
“Good,” Fenris said with a nod. “I will refrain from following you about to be certain you just check them over, but I will wait here to encourage you to finish with reasonable speed. I find it extremely unlikely that any of your present patients even know how to dance the remigold.”