You get all the love for mentioning the duck. Seriously. *is too fond of that duck*try_winging_itDecember 27 2011, 22:58:04 UTC
Hawke mmms as he toys with her neck, almost purring. "Hardly that. Pity, it sounds like it would have been fun. I'd have dominated the flexibility and stamina sections but been beaten at the last minute by Isabela and her pirate wiles, because she would have seduced the judges before preceedings even began." She spends a minute with her eyes closed, enjoying his touch and fantasizing about what might have been involved in a sexual triathlon, particularly with him involved, or at least watching.
"Anyway, you know what I've been doing for the past year, you were there for most of it. Running around being Kirkwall's unofficial pest control service, spending a surprising amount of time dealing with the Qunari, and trying to convince you to give this a try." She moves her hips against his as she says this, a suggestion of a recent memory. Though it wasn't sex she'd been asking him for all that time, or at least not just sex, as he knows very well. "No time in there for intensive training. Though I'll grant you the not a blushing ingenue part. I didn't get started quite as young as you did in the Circle--fifteen, did you say?--but it was certainly a while ago."
He thinks about it. "Fifteen maybe, depending on what counts. What achievement lifts a person from the ranks of ingenues, blushing or not? You start early, in the Circle, because there's nothing much else to do unless you really love books to a degree that's unhealthy. So, earlier than fifteen, for that, but does it really count if you're just sort of messing about with people just as inexperienced as you are? Making it all up as you go along? I wouldn't say I'd really even been properly kissed until ... oh, until Karl, and I'd done a lot more than kiss by then, just not properly."
It's still difficult to think of Karl, it will never not be difficult, and the banter loses its effervescence for a moment, Anders closing his eyes. Kissing Hawke's forehead, soft and chaste, nothing like the kissing that's been going on in this bed or the kissing Anders has just been recollecting. It would kill me to lose you. She promised he wouldn't lose her, and he's clinging to that promise.
He sighs. He lets the pain go. There's too much happiness washing over it, drowning it out, too much happiness even to allow room for guilt. "Now, you, I expect you reinvented kissing, not a false move or a single misstep. Graceful in everything," his hands move again, caressing her back, petting her the way he would pet a sleepy cat.
The kiss on her forehead is more gentle, more sincere, the sort of moment Anders has a gift for, the ones that steal her breath for reasons that have nothing to do with arousal and everything to do with wonder. This is the rule I will most cherish breaking. He does make her feel cherished. That's not a sensation she's ever experienced, or imagined, and already she can't imagine living without it.
"You'd lose that bet too. I was an ungainly thing growing up, all tangled arms and legs and curiosity. Like a puppy, I suppose, though if you ever use that comparison you'll make you suffer for it." His hands feel wonderful on her cooling, still over-sensitive skin, and her free hand begins to wander in return, stroking along his shoulder and upper arm. Her other hand is still pinned between them, but her fingers can toy with his collarbone, and do. "Hmm, perhaps around that age for me as well, then, depending what we count. Most of my starts were your basic adolescent fumbling experiments in haylofts. Classic." With an almost shy smile, she adds, "Though I might argue that I hadn't been properly kissed until you."
He chuckles at that, quietly, and stops petting her, lifts a hand to her face. Runs his thumb across her lips. "Our first kiss was not even close to proper. I ought to be ashamed of myself, attacking you like some starving thing. I hope I've made up for it, somewhat, since."
She lips at his thumb. "I was referring more to the second kiss, it's true. Though the first had its charms." The conversation demands a kiss of its own, and she takes one, slow and thorough and appreciative.
That in turn leads to a few moments of quiet contentment, just holding each other, though something still so astonishing and joyous can't be preceeded by just without its being misleading. But something he said earlier is toying with her thoughts, combining with old curiosity and suspicion, so she asks: "Tell me about Karl?" The arm wrapped around him presses; this is a difficult subject for him. "I know he must have been important to you."
It is a difficult subject, and also Anders needs a moment to string together this request with its likely catalyst, to get why Hawke is asking him about Karl. He's a little blurry with exertion and the general intoxication of new relationship energy love. He could have gone on happily enumerating the third, fourth, and fifth times he ever kissed Hawke, and so forth, possibly with reenactments.
Right, he's just mentioned kissing Karl, and. That's why. "Er, that doesn't bother you, does it? That I've been with ...?" The line doesn't quite come out the way it might if Hawke were also a man. "Yes, he was. Important. Essential. I talk a lot of rubbish about Kinloch Hold - it's all true, mind, but it's not nearly as much fun as I like to make it sound, everyone kissing everyone. It's only a distraction, and a way to kill time, or curry favor. It's not enough. To have someone who cared for me made all the difference in the world." Cared for, not loved.
It isn't easy, no, but he will talk about it, with her, because he loves her, he's allowed himself to love her, and because Karl deserves to be remembered.
"He was a healer, like me. Far more patient than I've ever been." Even in the calmest, most focused act of healing, there's an anger that fuels Anders' work, a refusal to accept damage and disease as inevitable, a rage against mortality and the depredations of violence. It makes him burn the brighter, goads a faster flow of mana; it's useful and wasteful at once. Karl never had that problem. "And generous, and kind, and a true friend even when I didn't deserve one, which ... was most of the time. He was just able to accept so much, all the indignities Circle life could throw his way, and he'd rise above it as though it weren't even happening. We found ways to make it bearable. For me, it was just pretending, though, a temporary respite from the truth of what the Circle was. For him, it really was bearable. He tried to help me with that. Didn't work, but bless him for trying."
Hawke strokes his back as she listens, learning more about Anders, and about the man she met so very briefly a few years ago. She catches the distinction between cared for and loved, has an idea of its importance to him. No mage I know has ever dared to fall in love. It's not hard to see that in other circumstances, he would have loved Karl, been loved by him. Outside the Circle.
It's a sobering realization. Hawke grew up with the iron-clad certainty that her family had to do everything possible to keep their father and later Bethany out of the Circle. Malcolm Hawke had never told them much, and even less that was specific to his own history, aside from one private conversation with his eldest daughter when they realized that Bethany was going to be a mage. Perhaps he had a similar conversation with Carver; she's never known, and never will. But somehow none of the rumors or warnings, even the ones from her father, not even the stories she's heard from Anders over the past few years or the things she's seen for herself, have encapsulated the severity of Circle life quite like this. Seeing that this possibility existed in Anders' life and couldn't be grasped, and how that must have shaped him. Those three years of resistance begin to make a bit more sense.
"You're not one for accepting the unbearable, no," she says, smiling a bit, because neither is she. "If he was able to help you with it even temporarily, I'm grateful to him. I wish I could have known him. He was your first, I take it? And no, that doesn't bother me at all. I have another woman in my past history, come to that." Her hand stops tracing patterns, rests on his lower back. "How did it happen? If I can ask."
"Another woman, hm?" He's a little surprised; not too surprised, as it's not uncommon in Thedas and certainly nothing remarkable within a Circle, the issue is more that he's never seen any inclination of Hawke's in that direction. Flirting with Isabela doesn't count, since flirting with Isabela is basically an exercise in sport and wordplay, as much for the spectators as for Isabela's partner. Belatedly, it occurs to Anders that he's never seen such inclination because that would require his being present to see it, and that with him there, Hawke's inclination toward him would take precedence. He still can't really believe that he wasn't the only one of them who spent three years aching for the other, but he's accepted it on an abstract level, at least, as fact, because otherwise he'd be calling her a liar, and that's the last thing he'd ever think of her. Humorous exaggeration, maybe; lies, never.
"Tell me it was Isabela, and I'm afraid I'll need to have words with her, just to be on the safe side. I've waited years for this and it's my turn now; I'm not inclined to share." He pulls her closer with the arm that isn't tucked under the huge down pillow he'll never think of as his. "You're warm," he notes, appreciatively. "Why are we on top of the covers, instead of under them, again?" Changing that would require some wriggling about and some rearrangement, and he's quite comfortable where he is, thanks. He'll just have to cozy up for more warmth. A terrible fate.
"You can ask, but only because you're you. I told Bethany a very, very little, when you all were still living with Gamlen, when it seemed she might be considering turning herself in to the Circle. I wanted her to understand what she'd be losing. I think that to some Blight refugees, the Circle wouldn't sound all bad, compared to what they'd been through getting here. You're sheltered, you're clothed, you're fed, there are Templars around who could fight off any darkspawn or, I don't know, bogeymen. Never mind that the selfsame Templars will happily throw you at demons," and there's a little snarl in Anders' voice now, and he forces it back, instructs himself to behave. Karl shouldn't be remembered this way, he should be remembered for himself, for the good things about him, not for the fact he lived his life under constant Templar oppression.
Bethany, that's where he left off. Yes. "The pressures were obvious even to me, very much on the outside of things, and I thought that if I didn't say anything, Bethany might turn herself in just to give you one less mouth to feed, with Gamlen pressuring your mother about money, and the two of you fresh out of bloody indentured servitude, and I had to be very clear with her what she'd stand to lose if she did this. I didn't talk much about Karl. A little more about Senior Enchanter Wynne, and what everyone knew, that she'd had a son who was taken away. All children born to Circle mages are taken away in infancy, you know. Other people I knew, things that had happened to them, Templars taking a fancy to them - I didn't go into very much detail, even so. I had ways of getting around those kinds of problems, for myself, and I told her what they were, too." That advice essentially amounted to You can't rape the willing. And a little bit of Do you really want to become me? Because it's not as much fun as I let on. Bethany was innocent, and sweet, and she might have a farmgirl's earthy sense of humor at times but she wasn't cut out for Circle politics. Anders is not sorry she became a Grey Warden, if the choice was between that and eventual Circle confinement.
None of this answers the question Hawke actually asked. "You want to know how ... things happened. Between me and Karl. I take it you're not asking about the mechanics of the act. Is it that you want to know about the specific occasion? Or how it all began? Or how it is that a dissolute rake like me would seek out some serious graybeard? I'll tell you right now, that was premature gray you saw, and it wasn't gray back then to begin with."
Hawke chuckles. "Not Isabela, no, not for lack of her trying. There was one rather memorable kiss one night a while ago, but don't tell me she didn't do the same to you because I won't believe it." Good news, Hawke! He's not broken! She hadn't known whether to be mortified, relieved, envious as hell, or to laugh herself sick. Being Hawke, she'd gone for the last option. "No, it was back in Ferelden, when I was a soldier. And you're getting cold, where'd all your body heat go? I swear I didn't steal it." Obligatory theft jokes, part of being a rogue. "We're on top of the blankets instead of under them because we were doing deliciously wicked things to each other against the headboard, and if you've forgotten already we'll just have to do them again. Though perhaps not just yet." That would involve moving, and she likes being where she is, leg hiked up over his hip and arms entwined everywhere. No more than a breath away from a kiss at any given moment.
There's a twinge of pain at the mention of Bethany, though it's fainter now. Leandra has almost forgiven Hawke for taking her younger sister into the Deep Roads, and for the choices she made there; whether Bethany can forgive Hawke or Hawke forgive herself is another matter, though she knows that the if only game is a dead-end path. At least Bethany is alive, even if she is lost to them. And if she's unhappy in her new life, there's at least the hope that her life will change to make her happy again in time. Given the choice between time and no time, Hawke knew what to pick.
And Anders is entirely right in his judgement that Bethany might have chosen to hand herself in voluntarily; she'd brought up the subject to their mother once (and only once, given Leandra's reaction), to Hawke a few times. Hawke had been able to talk her out of it with various arguments every time, but wondered if those arguments would hold if she weren't to hand. One reason why Bethany had been brought with her to the Deep Roads after all.
Not now. Too painful, too serious for now, for this time. They've discussed this before, will discuss it again in the future, but not now. Hawke tries to turn the conversation back to a lighter topic. "I want the story, of course. Young, reckless Anders chasing--it was you who did the chasing, then?--the older, more experienced man all around the tower. Did he take some convincing, or was it a case of catcher-turned-caught?"
Anders laughs. "I won't deny I did some chasing. Not of Karl, though. He was a captive audience, you see: my tutor. If you're thinking I cribbed this out of Varric's stories, I promise I'm not. It all seemed very logical to me, only it took some time to construct an argument he would entertain. The sweetest man you could ever hope to meet, but give him a pot of red ink and a report to use it on, and he was an absolute terror."
A pause. He traces the line of Hawke's shoulder, his finger an imaginary pen, her skin the parchment. Idly he draws little glyphs on her shoulder blade. "He knew that it wouldn't be doing me any favors to go easy when the stakes were low. Even when he was being stern, he was really being kind. And I'd seen so little of that, in anyone, for ages," Anders admits, and there is not a lump forming in his throat, and he does not have to swallow hard. "I knew one way to show my gratitude. This will sound dreadful, but I was horrified when he was horrified. I assumed it was the done thing, you see. Everyone talks about their favorite and least favorite of the apprentices and enchanters; everyone claims they've gotten by with something perhaps they really haven't, or that they've earned some special grace, so they can feel special, for a while. And I knew the way he looked at me, and I thought I knew what that meant. Imagine my consternation when Karl Thekla very gently picked my hand up off his knee and deposited it upon the desk. The maneuvering I had to do even to be sitting on his side of the desk, to make that move ..."
Is she going to laugh? Anders has to laugh at his younger self, a little. "Well, then he'd just made it a challenge. I could have let it go, before that. Not after."
"You seduced your tutor?" Hawke does have to laugh, a bit. He's right, it's too much like one of Varric's tales. "And he resisted? A man of firm principles and iron willpower, then, in addition to compassion. Oh, Maker, I can just see it, the way your dismay would've turned into determination." She can, too. A younger, more callow Anders, lanky, his eyes narrowed with purpose.
"A man of principle, indeed. He kept on resisting up until he wasn't my tutor anymore. Can you have any idea how long that took?" Anders is amused despite himself, remembering. It's Hawke who does this for him, lets him see what's good amid so much that could be painful. "It wasn't as though I could tally the days on a chart, or count down how many left, because he didn't tell me he'd be all right with it when he wasn't my tutor anymore. He should have done; I'd have worked even harder. I've always been gifted," he says this as a fact rather than a boast, "and I had two strengths, healing and elemental magic. My natural inclination might even have been more strongly toward the latter." Burning down the barn, that was an accident, best not to allow that memory in to taint the rest. Fire and lightning and ice, the sheer delight of releasing those forces, letting everything burn, sizzle, crack ... "It was Karl's work that made a healer out of me. I was very good at it, and he was a good tutor, so soon enough I was advancing to the higher levels. I may have been holding back a little bit, not wanting to let those lessons go, but I couldn't do that for too long. He'd be terribly disappointed in both of us if I didn't perform well."
Anders has disappointed Karl too many times, for too many reasons, for there to be anything much funny in that, the double entendre notwithstanding.
"So eventually we were working together. He wasn't that much older, little more than a handful of years; the way you saw him, the Gallows had changed him, aged him beyond his time. They had no right -" Anders' hand clenches into a fist behind Hawke's back. He's silent for a moment.
He doesn't know whether he can finish this story without ruining something, casting some shadow across the evening that can't be dispelled. It's the middle of the night, he's not inclined to pull on his pants and head back to Darktown, and if he tried, Hawke would probably point out very sensibly that this is the hour for roving gangs with silly names to be waylaying solitary travelers. Anders forces his hand flat, lets it rest in the curve where Hawke's back dips in and yields to the outward swell of her (amazing, incredible) hip. Soaks in the warmth of her skin.
"Anyhow. There was one time, we were making some salves that turned out to be rather convenient, and I asked Karl, is it strange for you, to be working beside me when I used to study under you? And he said, I wouldn't call it strange, it's how the Circle works; you'll be teaching soon enough yourself, and then your students get older. I hadn't gotten that much older, mind. He was deflecting, and I wasn't about to let him get away with that. I took his wrist, and I said, You've done me a disservice. You haven't taught me everything you could. The look on his face, I don't think I'll ever forget it - as though I'd burned him." The barn burning, but it was an accident, an accident, no one was supposed to get hurt.
No one was ever supposed to get hurt.
"I'd really gotten to him. No more evasion. He said it straight out, more honest than anyone in the Circle had ever been. I can't love you, he said. It costs too much. I should have taught you that." Perhaps it does sound too much like Varric's stories. The Circle mages do a lot of reading. Karl might have planned out what to say in this eventuality, Anders has no idea. All he knows is that it happened, in this way, and no other. "Well, what was I going to say to that? I was never as kind as Karl, otherwise I'd have let him go. I said to him, Who said anything about love? And then I kissed him, very smug, probably smirking, I was so damned proud of myself. For about thirty seconds. Then I was the one being kissed, and I couldn't be smug in the slightest."
Two strengths, elemental magic and healing. She likes that. It's not something she can put into words, but being a refugee changed something about Hawke. She's a fighter, always will be, knows someone must be, but it's not enough. It's not even what's most important, to her mind. What matters is what happens after the fighting, the rebuilding process. That Anders is capable of both causing and healing damage is something she envies.
Though perhaps she has some healing abilities of her own after all; perhaps that's something she can give him. Or if not healing, at least comfort, understanding. She listens, feels the moment of tension as he speaks, the deliberate release of it, the way he uses her skin and presence to ground himself to now. Eventually she takes his hand from her hip and brings it to her mouth, kissing it in silent, brief gratitude that he's here, trusting her not just with this story, but with himself. That he's finally let himself love her despite all of this.
All she says is, "Turned the tables on you, did he?" There's a quirk of a smile. It sounds a bit familiar. Teasing, goading, and flirting with Anders had become...not routine, but second-nature, to a point where even though she still wanted a response beyond more banter she had no real expectation of getting one, not after three years of hedging and refusal and reluctance. His sudden capitulation and that starving kiss had caught her by surprise.
"Anyway, you know what I've been doing for the past year, you were there for most of it. Running around being Kirkwall's unofficial pest control service, spending a surprising amount of time dealing with the Qunari, and trying to convince you to give this a try." She moves her hips against his as she says this, a suggestion of a recent memory. Though it wasn't sex she'd been asking him for all that time, or at least not just sex, as he knows very well. "No time in there for intensive training. Though I'll grant you the not a blushing ingenue part. I didn't get started quite as young as you did in the Circle--fifteen, did you say?--but it was certainly a while ago."
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It's still difficult to think of Karl, it will never not be difficult, and the banter loses its effervescence for a moment, Anders closing his eyes. Kissing Hawke's forehead, soft and chaste, nothing like the kissing that's been going on in this bed or the kissing Anders has just been recollecting. It would kill me to lose you. She promised he wouldn't lose her, and he's clinging to that promise.
He sighs. He lets the pain go. There's too much happiness washing over it, drowning it out, too much happiness even to allow room for guilt. "Now, you, I expect you reinvented kissing, not a false move or a single misstep. Graceful in everything," his hands move again, caressing her back, petting her the way he would pet a sleepy cat.
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"You'd lose that bet too. I was an ungainly thing growing up, all tangled arms and legs and curiosity. Like a puppy, I suppose, though if you ever use that comparison you'll make you suffer for it." His hands feel wonderful on her cooling, still over-sensitive skin, and her free hand begins to wander in return, stroking along his shoulder and upper arm. Her other hand is still pinned between them, but her fingers can toy with his collarbone, and do. "Hmm, perhaps around that age for me as well, then, depending what we count. Most of my starts were your basic adolescent fumbling experiments in haylofts. Classic." With an almost shy smile, she adds, "Though I might argue that I hadn't been properly kissed until you."
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That in turn leads to a few moments of quiet contentment, just holding each other, though something still so astonishing and joyous can't be preceeded by just without its being misleading. But something he said earlier is toying with her thoughts, combining with old curiosity and suspicion, so she asks: "Tell me about Karl?" The arm wrapped around him presses; this is a difficult subject for him. "I know he must have been important to you."
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Right, he's just mentioned kissing Karl, and. That's why. "Er, that doesn't bother you, does it? That I've been with ...?" The line doesn't quite come out the way it might if Hawke were also a man. "Yes, he was. Important. Essential. I talk a lot of rubbish about Kinloch Hold - it's all true, mind, but it's not nearly as much fun as I like to make it sound, everyone kissing everyone. It's only a distraction, and a way to kill time, or curry favor. It's not enough. To have someone who cared for me made all the difference in the world." Cared for, not loved.
It isn't easy, no, but he will talk about it, with her, because he loves her, he's allowed himself to love her, and because Karl deserves to be remembered.
"He was a healer, like me. Far more patient than I've ever been." Even in the calmest, most focused act of healing, there's an anger that fuels Anders' work, a refusal to accept damage and disease as inevitable, a rage against mortality and the depredations of violence. It makes him burn the brighter, goads a faster flow of mana; it's useful and wasteful at once. Karl never had that problem. "And generous, and kind, and a true friend even when I didn't deserve one, which ... was most of the time. He was just able to accept so much, all the indignities Circle life could throw his way, and he'd rise above it as though it weren't even happening. We found ways to make it bearable. For me, it was just pretending, though, a temporary respite from the truth of what the Circle was. For him, it really was bearable. He tried to help me with that. Didn't work, but bless him for trying."
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It's a sobering realization. Hawke grew up with the iron-clad certainty that her family had to do everything possible to keep their father and later Bethany out of the Circle. Malcolm Hawke had never told them much, and even less that was specific to his own history, aside from one private conversation with his eldest daughter when they realized that Bethany was going to be a mage. Perhaps he had a similar conversation with Carver; she's never known, and never will. But somehow none of the rumors or warnings, even the ones from her father, not even the stories she's heard from Anders over the past few years or the things she's seen for herself, have encapsulated the severity of Circle life quite like this. Seeing that this possibility existed in Anders' life and couldn't be grasped, and how that must have shaped him. Those three years of resistance begin to make a bit more sense.
"You're not one for accepting the unbearable, no," she says, smiling a bit, because neither is she. "If he was able to help you with it even temporarily, I'm grateful to him. I wish I could have known him. He was your first, I take it? And no, that doesn't bother me at all. I have another woman in my past history, come to that." Her hand stops tracing patterns, rests on his lower back. "How did it happen? If I can ask."
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"Tell me it was Isabela, and I'm afraid I'll need to have words with her, just to be on the safe side. I've waited years for this and it's my turn now; I'm not inclined to share." He pulls her closer with the arm that isn't tucked under the huge down pillow he'll never think of as his. "You're warm," he notes, appreciatively. "Why are we on top of the covers, instead of under them, again?" Changing that would require some wriggling about and some rearrangement, and he's quite comfortable where he is, thanks. He'll just have to cozy up for more warmth. A terrible fate.
"You can ask, but only because you're you. I told Bethany a very, very little, when you all were still living with Gamlen, when it seemed she might be considering turning herself in to the Circle. I wanted her to understand what she'd be losing. I think that to some Blight refugees, the Circle wouldn't sound all bad, compared to what they'd been through getting here. You're sheltered, you're clothed, you're fed, there are Templars around who could fight off any darkspawn or, I don't know, bogeymen. Never mind that the selfsame Templars will happily throw you at demons," and there's a little snarl in Anders' voice now, and he forces it back, instructs himself to behave. Karl shouldn't be remembered this way, he should be remembered for himself, for the good things about him, not for the fact he lived his life under constant Templar oppression.
Bethany, that's where he left off. Yes. "The pressures were obvious even to me, very much on the outside of things, and I thought that if I didn't say anything, Bethany might turn herself in just to give you one less mouth to feed, with Gamlen pressuring your mother about money, and the two of you fresh out of bloody indentured servitude, and I had to be very clear with her what she'd stand to lose if she did this. I didn't talk much about Karl. A little more about Senior Enchanter Wynne, and what everyone knew, that she'd had a son who was taken away. All children born to Circle mages are taken away in infancy, you know. Other people I knew, things that had happened to them, Templars taking a fancy to them - I didn't go into very much detail, even so. I had ways of getting around those kinds of problems, for myself, and I told her what they were, too." That advice essentially amounted to You can't rape the willing. And a little bit of Do you really want to become me? Because it's not as much fun as I let on. Bethany was innocent, and sweet, and she might have a farmgirl's earthy sense of humor at times but she wasn't cut out for Circle politics. Anders is not sorry she became a Grey Warden, if the choice was between that and eventual Circle confinement.
None of this answers the question Hawke actually asked. "You want to know how ... things happened. Between me and Karl. I take it you're not asking about the mechanics of the act. Is it that you want to know about the specific occasion? Or how it all began? Or how it is that a dissolute rake like me would seek out some serious graybeard? I'll tell you right now, that was premature gray you saw, and it wasn't gray back then to begin with."
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There's a twinge of pain at the mention of Bethany, though it's fainter now. Leandra has almost forgiven Hawke for taking her younger sister into the Deep Roads, and for the choices she made there; whether Bethany can forgive Hawke or Hawke forgive herself is another matter, though she knows that the if only game is a dead-end path. At least Bethany is alive, even if she is lost to them. And if she's unhappy in her new life, there's at least the hope that her life will change to make her happy again in time. Given the choice between time and no time, Hawke knew what to pick.
And Anders is entirely right in his judgement that Bethany might have chosen to hand herself in voluntarily; she'd brought up the subject to their mother once (and only once, given Leandra's reaction), to Hawke a few times. Hawke had been able to talk her out of it with various arguments every time, but wondered if those arguments would hold if she weren't to hand. One reason why Bethany had been brought with her to the Deep Roads after all.
Not now. Too painful, too serious for now, for this time. They've discussed this before, will discuss it again in the future, but not now. Hawke tries to turn the conversation back to a lighter topic. "I want the story, of course. Young, reckless Anders chasing--it was you who did the chasing, then?--the older, more experienced man all around the tower. Did he take some convincing, or was it a case of catcher-turned-caught?"
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A pause. He traces the line of Hawke's shoulder, his finger an imaginary pen, her skin the parchment. Idly he draws little glyphs on her shoulder blade. "He knew that it wouldn't be doing me any favors to go easy when the stakes were low. Even when he was being stern, he was really being kind. And I'd seen so little of that, in anyone, for ages," Anders admits, and there is not a lump forming in his throat, and he does not have to swallow hard. "I knew one way to show my gratitude. This will sound dreadful, but I was horrified when he was horrified. I assumed it was the done thing, you see. Everyone talks about their favorite and least favorite of the apprentices and enchanters; everyone claims they've gotten by with something perhaps they really haven't, or that they've earned some special grace, so they can feel special, for a while. And I knew the way he looked at me, and I thought I knew what that meant. Imagine my consternation when Karl Thekla very gently picked my hand up off his knee and deposited it upon the desk. The maneuvering I had to do even to be sitting on his side of the desk, to make that move ..."
Is she going to laugh? Anders has to laugh at his younger self, a little. "Well, then he'd just made it a challenge. I could have let it go, before that. Not after."
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Anders has disappointed Karl too many times, for too many reasons, for there to be anything much funny in that, the double entendre notwithstanding.
"So eventually we were working together. He wasn't that much older, little more than a handful of years; the way you saw him, the Gallows had changed him, aged him beyond his time. They had no right -" Anders' hand clenches into a fist behind Hawke's back. He's silent for a moment.
He doesn't know whether he can finish this story without ruining something, casting some shadow across the evening that can't be dispelled. It's the middle of the night, he's not inclined to pull on his pants and head back to Darktown, and if he tried, Hawke would probably point out very sensibly that this is the hour for roving gangs with silly names to be waylaying solitary travelers. Anders forces his hand flat, lets it rest in the curve where Hawke's back dips in and yields to the outward swell of her (amazing, incredible) hip. Soaks in the warmth of her skin.
"Anyhow. There was one time, we were making some salves that turned out to be rather convenient, and I asked Karl, is it strange for you, to be working beside me when I used to study under you? And he said, I wouldn't call it strange, it's how the Circle works; you'll be teaching soon enough yourself, and then your students get older. I hadn't gotten that much older, mind. He was deflecting, and I wasn't about to let him get away with that. I took his wrist, and I said, You've done me a disservice. You haven't taught me everything you could. The look on his face, I don't think I'll ever forget it - as though I'd burned him." The barn burning, but it was an accident, an accident, no one was supposed to get hurt.
No one was ever supposed to get hurt.
"I'd really gotten to him. No more evasion. He said it straight out, more honest than anyone in the Circle had ever been. I can't love you, he said. It costs too much. I should have taught you that." Perhaps it does sound too much like Varric's stories. The Circle mages do a lot of reading. Karl might have planned out what to say in this eventuality, Anders has no idea. All he knows is that it happened, in this way, and no other. "Well, what was I going to say to that? I was never as kind as Karl, otherwise I'd have let him go. I said to him, Who said anything about love? And then I kissed him, very smug, probably smirking, I was so damned proud of myself. For about thirty seconds. Then I was the one being kissed, and I couldn't be smug in the slightest."
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Though perhaps she has some healing abilities of her own after all; perhaps that's something she can give him. Or if not healing, at least comfort, understanding. She listens, feels the moment of tension as he speaks, the deliberate release of it, the way he uses her skin and presence to ground himself to now. Eventually she takes his hand from her hip and brings it to her mouth, kissing it in silent, brief gratitude that he's here, trusting her not just with this story, but with himself. That he's finally let himself love her despite all of this.
All she says is, "Turned the tables on you, did he?" There's a quirk of a smile. It sounds a bit familiar. Teasing, goading, and flirting with Anders had become...not routine, but second-nature, to a point where even though she still wanted a response beyond more banter she had no real expectation of getting one, not after three years of hedging and refusal and reluctance. His sudden capitulation and that starving kiss had caught her by surprise.
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