Da2 Fic - Apology

[miri1984]

Title: Apology
Words: 1300
Rating: T
Characters: Saoirse Hawke, Fenris
Summary: Saoirse has a bad case of foot in mouth disease that Fenris caught from her.

The mansion was still a mess. Fenris may have been a slave, but he certainly wasn't the domestic type. She stepped over some fallen rubble and made her way to the room where he normally slept. He was perched in a chair with his shoeless feet up on a table, holding a sheet of paper which she recognised as Anders' personal story held close to his eyes.

She knew reading was still difficult for him. He despised anyone see him struggle with it though. When he heard her step (her boots were not made for stealth) he threw the page down and sat up, scowling.

"Hawke," he said. "What brings you here?"

"Varric said you were brooding again," she said, shrugging. "I wanted to know how he could tell the difference."

"I would have thought you wouldn't want to see me again."

She bit her lip. The last she'd seen him had been in the clinic. She winced, remembering what she'd said to him, what she'd done to him.

"Are you all right?" she asked finally. "I never asked… if what I did to you would have any lasting effects…"

"Do you care?"

She drew in a sharp breath. "I could say no. Would that even matter to you?"

Fenris swung his legs down and stood, facing the fire. "Why do you come here, Hawke?" he said harshly. "You never liked me. Even when we… it wasn't out of affection…" his voice cracked with bitterness.

"No, it wasn't," she said. "Luckily for me, considering what happened afterwards."

"I…" he spread his hands on the fireplace and leaned against it, as though he wanted to push it through the wall. "You don't understand. You didn't then and you don't now."

"No. But you never bothered to explain it to me either."

There was a faint hint of blue glow in his tattoos. She raised an eyebrow. "Would you even have listened? It seemed like… minutes between me leaving and Anders moving in."

"It was three months, Fenris."

"Ha!"

She sighed. It was so difficult for the elf not to rub her the wrong way. He was lucky he hadn't caught the brunt of her anger in magical form. But no matter what else he'd done, he'd saved Anders for her, kept her heart alive. Just thinking about what might have happened had Fenris not followed her that night made her shiver and sweat at once. "I didn't come here to argue with you."

"Really. The world shudders in surprise."

"I came to apologise," she crossed her arms and frowned, looking at one of the ruined portraits on the walls. "But of course I've managed to fuck that up completely."

"I… to… apologise?" He turned to face her, his green eyes wide.

"And to thank you. I owe you Anders' life, which is… far more than I can ever hope to repay."

"I notice he isn't here to thank me for it."

"I didn't tell him how I saved him, Fenris," she said. "I figured you wouldn't want him to know."

Fenris' eyes narrowed as he looked at her, then he cocked his head on one side, considering. "You do know me, Hawke."

She smiled and shrugged. "Six years of broodiness can't hide everything about a person. And I grew up with Carver, remember."

Fenris gave his short bark of a laugh and she felt a small surge of pride. It was always a pleasant thing - making him laugh. She remembered why she had been attracted to him. "Will you sit?" he said then. "I think there's more wine."

"I wouldn't say no to a drink," she said. Fenris poured a glass for her, the only glass he owned, she suspected. He preferred to drink from the bottle.

She took a sip, savouring the smoky flavour. Danarius kept a good cellar, of that there was no doubt.

"I said some things… I probably shouldn't have in the clinic, Fenris," she said once the first few sips had warmed her belly. The elf cocked an eyebrow at her.

"Some?" he said.

"Yes. Some."

"You were… upset."

She snorted. "That's one way of putting it."

"I… I've been reading the stories," he said then, glancing at the desk where the sheafs of Anders' manifesto lay. "It's still slow going for me. And I still don't believe mages can be free."

"Can be free or deserve to be free?"

Fenris frowned. "You are dangerous," he said. She wasn't sure, then, if he meant mages or just her.

"So are you," she pointed out. "But I thought we'd agreed to disagree about this. And you still haven't turned us in."

His eyes flashed in anger. "You think I…" he shook his head, took a breath. "Of course you do. I haven't given you any reason to think otherwise. But I would never turn you in Hawke. Or him. I know you care for him, and I would never knowingly hurt you. Not again."

She blinked, caught off guard by a rush of feeling, shocked to feel the prick of tears in her eyes. Fenris had always been there, always fought by her side. She'd never really stopped to think about why she could inspire so much loyalty when she embodied pretty much everything he despised.

"If it's any consolation I was pretty determined to hurt myself back then," she said finally. "I'm sorry you got caught in the crossfire."

"He doesn't deserve you," Fenris said forcefully.

She tugged at her hair and sighed. "I don't deserve him either," she said. "We rarely get what we deserve, Fenris. Surely you know that by now."

The small resigned smile on his face told her more than words could have. "This was meant to be a thank you and an apology," she said after a long pause where they both drank deeply. "What say we move to the Hanged Man and turn it into a drinking competition instead? I know Varric's down there already. Isabela too."

"They both live there."

"All the more reason to join them, they have tabs."

"What about Anders?"

She frowned and looked down. The attack had hurt him. So much. Not because of what they'd done to him specifically - but the others who'd been targeted. The mages whose stories weren't anonymous enough, the one group of printers who'd had their livelihood taken away and their equipment burned, the Templar on every street corner of the city. Aveline was up in arms, raging that Anders had made her life practically impossible, and his earnest arguments that it wasn't he who had made the Templars so damned vicious were falling on increasingly deaf ears.

Despite that Saoirse had seen it as a victory of sorts, Anders was crushed that this victory had cost lives, made good mages tranquil, sent more to scampering to darktown under the weight of poverty and persecution. She knew that Justice was riding him harder than ever. He barely slept, she had to force him to eat…

…only when she could convince him to make love to her would he show signs of the old Anders. He would be sated for an hour, maybe two, before he would leap up from the bed and go to his books. Searching, searching, all the time searching, although what for she had never been able to get a straight answer on.

"He's busy," she said to Fenris, shortly. The elf raised an eyebrow, but didn't press the issue, and she was grateful. For a while, she would forget about him and drink with friends.