An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dragon Age II
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Fenris/Male Hawke (Dragon Age)
Characters: Fenris (Dragon Age), Male Hawke (Dragon Age), Anders (Dragon Age), Varric Tethras
Additional Tags: Poisoning, Lyrium Fisting, Purple Hawke (Dragon Age), Spirit Healer Hawke (Dragon Age)
Summary:
Marcel Hawke has been poisoned. Anders can work fast, but the poison is faster. There’s one last thing Fenris can do.
Fenris didn’t see the feathers of the blow dart until it was already in Hawke’s brown skin. With a grunt, Anders fired off a few more fireballs and Varric a few more bolts, taking out the last of the Tal-Vashoth in this stretch of the Wounded Coast. Hawke fell heavily to his knees, his staff clattering to the rocky ground.
For @fenhawke-week !! It’s Free Day, so here’s something that I wrote based on a discussion that was had wayyy back when we first started the discord server. I’ve borrowed Marcel Hawke from @hekaerges 💜
This was a standard run - from the supply depots at Proxima colony to the Imperial base at Vega. It was not a glorious or exciting by any stretch, the sort of mule work that got pawned off on the less ambitious, the middle of the pack, the non-strivers. And on ISS Sand Creek, a middling little freighter of no great renown, Captain Franklin Silas chafed at the banality of his current command. How low he had sunk. But the new empress was cleaning house in Starfleet, and heads had quite literally rolled, and since his wasn't one of them, he could use the very mediocrity of his position to plot a path to greater things.
At least, that was the plan.
They were cruising easily at warp four, due into Vega in twelve hours, when it all went terribly wrong.
The ship rocked suddenly with the percussive strikes of something against the hull. "Report!" Silas ordered.
"Sir, we appear to have been struck by some sort of space debris," said the ensign at the helm.
"How did sensors not detect it?"
"I'm not-"
Another rocking thud - the lighting flickered, died, flicked again, and returned only in dim auxiliary status. The momentum of the ship slowed, and suddenly, the stars on the view screen were ordinary points of light. They'd dropped out of warp.
"What now?" demanded Silas. The helmsman audibly gulped.
"Uh…we sustained a direct hit to…both nacelles, sir."
"How is that-?"
"There's another ship approaching," the helmsman continued anxiously. "They're hailing us."
The comm engaged, audio only, a bright, cheerful, feminine voice issuing over the speakers.
"Hi there! So…here's how this is going to work. You have things on your ship that I want, and you're going to give them to me. And I know it's a cliche, but…we can do this the easy way or the hard way."
Silas sneered. Pirates? Really? Sand Creek may have been a middling freighter, but it was still a ship of the Terran Empire. Damaged nacelles or no, they still had options.
He stared at the small ship on the view screen, an odd little vessel that almost looked like an Ares-class light cruiser, but if it was, it had been heavily modified. He glanced at the MACO at the tactical station. "Open fire. Destroy them."
In the second between the order and the phase cannons powering up, a sharp pulse of blue light arced between the pirate vessel and Sand Creek, and every panel on the bridge suddenly overloaded, showers of sparks pouring from them like water. Crewmen leapt back to avoid burns and shocks, and even the auxiliary lighting blinked. There was a heavy sigh from the voice over the comm.
"Hard way it is, I guess."
The pirate ship darted swiftly to port; the MACO at tactical cried, "Sir! We're being boarded!"
"We'll see about that," Silas snarled, unholstering his phase pistol.
Sand Creek was not a big ship. That meant it only took a moment to get to the port hatch, ready for the invaders. But it also meant that her crew complement was only 18, and Silas only had a trio of MACOs at his immediate command and only three others elsewhere on the ship. He was still confident about their chances, a confidence that only grew when the airlock opened, and the boarding party appeared.
His lip curled at the sight of them. One was an Andorian, a tall, lean man dressed in black, some sort of long gun slung over his back and a dagger so long it was practically a short sword held in his right hand. Its curved blade shone in the strobing emergency lights. The other one…
She was an average height, curvy, round-faced, pretty. She wore utterly ordinary clothes - comfortable, multi-pocketed trousers, a plain tee shirt, and a pack on her back. Her auburn hair was pulled up in a messy, half-done bun, and she was smiling. "You really did just go straight to the hard way," she said, shaking her head and shrugging. "Okay."
Silas raised his weapon, having nothing to say to these interlopers; the MACOs followed suit. These two would be dead in an instant.
Except…
Nothing happened when he engaged the trigger.
The MACOs muttered amongst themselves, looking at their phase rifles in disbelief. Now the Andorian was smiling, a nasty, satisfied smile.
"Oh," said the woman, features pulled into pity that almost looked real. "You didn't know." She glanced at the blue-skinned man beside her, the pity vanished as she returned his smile. "See, my Karveth here is a genius. And when we disabled your weapons…we disabled all of your weapons. If you're going to fight us, you're gonna have to do it the old fashioned way." She reached down to a sheath strapped to her right hip, drawing a wavy-bladed knife with an odd, central hand hold. "One way or the other, we're taking what we came for. You can't stop us. So…let's try this again. My name's Monica, and I'll be robbing you today."
Silas ground his teeth. "Get off my ship, bitch."
The tip of the Andorian's blade was at the underside of his chin before he could blink. "Keep a civil tongue," he said, his voice a low growl, "or I'll cut it out."
"Now sweetie," said the woman calmly, "I think the…" She made show of peering at Silas's rank pips. "Oh, the captain, how exciting! I think the captain knows better now. At least I hope so." She stepped closer, trailing her off hand down the Andorian's shoulder in an obvious caress, before shooting a confidential little smile at Silas. "But Andorians do love stabbing things. And I like letting him do what he loves."
The Andorian, Karveth, gave her a meaningful sidelong look from the corner of his eye, lips curving in a smirk. The gaze held a brief instant, then she stepped back, reaching for something on her belt - wrist restraints, which she tossed to the bewildered MACOs. "Lock yourselves up, boys, and if you're into it, I don't need to know." She turned back to Silas. "Now, Captain…why don't you lead us to the hold. We'll take what we came for and we'll be on our way."
He was marched at knifepoint to the cargo hold, seething the whole way, both at the indignity of being held hostage by this pair, and that none of his crew seemed interested in his rescue. Cowards and traitors, all of them. Probably seeing how the whole thing shook out before trying to make a move. When this was over, they would all enjoying a few sessions with the agonizer.
The woman who'd called herself Monica smiled as they entered the hold, looking around happily. "Lovely," she said with a pleased sigh, before raising her blade to Silas's throat.
Karveth turned, sheathing his weapon and passing behind her to collect…something out of the backpack she wore. The way they moved around one another was easy and familiar; very familiar, to judge by the way his hands lingered of her hips before withdrawing what she'd carried. She noticed Silas's noticing, and gave him a Yeah, what about it? smirk, her blade never wavering.
The Andorian moved about the hold, tagging various crates with small, flashing devices. He seemed to know exactly what he was looking for, which was disconcerting. When his hands were empty, he returned, pulling a communicator from his pocket. "That's all of them," he said. Monica beamed at him.
"Perfect."
She looked at Silas. "Sorry about the nacelles. That's gonna be a real mess to fix." She put up her weapon, moving to stand by the Andorian. Silas lunged for her, enraged - she didn't get to just walk away-
But Karveth saw him, and was quicker. "Down," he said shortly, and Monica, never missing a beat, ducked as he brought around the plasma rifle on his back and fired once.
Monica looked at the captain's corpse. "The hard hard way," she said.
"He made his choice," Karveth replied.
"True." She reached up, resting her forearms on his shoulders, and gazing at his handsome face. "Let's get out of here."
"Let's." He flipped open his communicator, wrapping his free arm around her waist and pulling her hard to him. "Icecutter, this is Karveth. It's done," he reported. "Energize."
Then they, and half of the cargo in the Sand Creek's hold, vanished.
It's not r*pe, it's rape. It's not su*cide, it's suicide. Not unalive, dead. The backbone needs to be reintroduced en masse because softening the blow of these concepts with advertising language does absolutely nothing but allow people unaffected by them to feel not even a sting of what they can do, prompting inaction.
And it's been proven that on certain websites, you don't even face a repercussion for using the words as they are. People just started censoring themselves because they feared the potential lack of views and likes and followers which is so nasty itself.
I attended an anti-suicide seminar in college. One of the big takeaways from it was that stigmatizing suicide increases the rate of suicide, because people who are feeling suicidal feel like they can't ask for help. Every time I see babytalk garbage like 'unalive', I think of that.
100 random non-social media websites, 20 offbeat youtube channels to check out, 20 online missions to do instead of scrolling on social media -- the internet is so much bigger than the algorithms would have us think so I hope this inspires you to go out and explore!
[[ get a printable or read only copy here for free - enjoy! ]]
