a friend reacted very badly to the idea of fenris wanting anders to die at the end of two forever ago, and i’ve been tinkering with this ever since
Alistair’s face would twist with disgust tinged with outrage, and he would draw his sword as he stepped between Hawke and Anders, shifting his shield up in a defensive position in front of the mage. “Keep your distance,” He’d say tightly, brows lowered over a dark expression. “I will not see this night turned upon the one person who has fought to prevent this every step of the way. You can argue with me –a few years ago I even would have agreed with you– but now, today, I am telling you to stand down, Hawke, and leave this man be.”
Leliana had a blade at the champion’s throat before they made it two steps. “I should consider the next few seconds very carefully, if I were you,” she said softly, face turned just so so Hawke wouldn’t see the lines of horror and grief drawn down a face gone bloodless and pale. “This man had years to try to come up with a better solution, where you have seconds. One less, now. Lower the knife, slowly, and then we can talk.”
Loghain’s blade hissed free from its scabbard to trace a silvery line before Hawke. “I know what it is to take the hard path,” he’d say in that low, clear, ringing voice that echoed about the rubble strewn clearing in the tumbling city, “and I know what it is to be called a traitor. I won’t have him die a miserable death, a coward’s death, for doing what he thought necessary to protect his people. Stand down. You don’t,” he’d add heavily, mouth turning down to twist at the corners, “want me to have to repeat myself.”
Morrigan’s lips pull away from her teeth as she hisses out a blasphemy that would have earned her a scandalized look from her companions at any other time but now only offer the briefest breath of a warning before she throws out a hand, hurling Hawke back, and then again, slamming them against a wall. “You think t’is so easy as all that, turning back the last hopes of a hundred generations?” She’d murmur, but her voice shook, her usual studied calm washed away.
Oghren’s axe crashes loudly into the cobblestones between Anders and Hawke, lifting only to admit the solid wall of muscle and glowering eyebrows that was Oghren. “Hey,” he snarled. “You’re gonna take a mighty few steps back until you run smack into yourself from yesterday. Might not fully, uh, understand what’s going on, but ancestors, who needs to? I know you’re pointing your blade at one of the few people I have walked beside in the world who deserves anything less than what you have in your head, so you can shove right off and fall on your own blade, less you want a little help,” he’d grind out, hefting his axe.
Shale’s sigh is as of rocks tumbling together down a mountainside, the crash and boom of stone meeting stone as they stepped close enough to close unyielding stone fingers about Hawke’s, gentle as a morning breeze but with the promise of more should Hawke resist. “Much as I detest shielding a mage,” they rumbled, “it has acted in defense of its kind. And,” they added, wrinkled nose present in all but name, “it is… mine. As I am its. And, as you will soon discover, I take such threats to my fleshbags as seriously as pigeon droppings. Euuuugh.”
Sten eased out a slow breath between steps, muscles playing beneath his skin in liquid shifts as he swung out a heavy blade that sang its name through the air, coming to a shivering halt just before Hawke’s nose. “Today is not his day,” he said in a voicce many would mistake for calm, had they not looked into his eyes. “Do you wish it to be yours?”
Wynne lifted a hand limned in shifting colors that stained the air with the taste of ozone and lifted the hairs on the back of Hawke’s neck. “These two have done a great and terrible thing here tonight, the only course left open to them. Can you say that you would do any different, after ten years, a lifetime, of crying out? I- I do not know what I would do,” she admitted, but even as her voice wavered, her hand was steady, its magics turning unerringly to follow Hawke’s every movement. “But this I do know: you shall not have them.”
Zevran‘s chuckle rolls through the air between Hawke and Anders before the man himself was seen, or, indeed, before the cold kiss of metal touched to Hawke’s throat. “This is rather more of a dance than I was expecting this evening,” he’d say easily, a smile that wasn’t twisting into the corners of his mouth, like a secret, “but I can pick up the steps easily enough. I believe the next is yours. Mine was made long before today, I just had to bring my head along after my heart, as they say. And please, do consider your dance carefully. I just bought these boots, I’d hate to have to clean them already.”
Nathaniel nocked an arrow before Hawke had had time to exhale their first, and final, words to Anders. “You will step away from him,” he snarled, lips pulled away from his teeth as he fought back to urge to send that arrow straight into Hawke’s heart. “Too much has been borne by him and his kin, too much has-” He struggled for breath, gasping through his nose. “I have not lost all, and what I have, you shall not take. Stand, Hawke, and know that you live only because it is because it is not my life to take. However…” He shifted a minute degree and released. Hawke let out a cry of pain and outrage as his arrow buried itself in their shoulder and into the wall behind them, pinning them in place. Nathaniel had already turned around, sinking down at Anders’s side. “It is his.”
Sigrun’s twin axes clanged together, startling Hawke long enough for Sigrun’s hoarse cry of outrage to penetrate just before her axes did, biting into Hawke’s shoulder’s and sending them crashing to the the ground. Sigrun bore down on them with an inarticulate cry. Tears poured down her face, curling into the lines pain and grief dug around her mouth. “Don’t you touch him! Do not! I will not stand here and let you condemn the bringing down of a wall when that is all we have done our entire lives, for generations! Lost wall after wall, children and elders and siblings we never had the chance to have, no! No and no again! I will tour out my own heart before I let you anywhere near his!”
Velanna‘s fingers curled into claws at her side, clenching and unclenching as she summoned up a tangle of thorned branches that surrounded in a shifting prison of bark and fury. “I will not have it!” She cried. She took another step towards Hawke and ripped a hand out to send, sending a thick branch slamming into Hawke’s side. “I will not lose another, not again! i have so little left to take, and you want him, too! Fenedhis lasa! May your children eat the grass that devours your bones!” She lifted a shaking hand to her mouth, only to tear it away with a harsh, strangled cry. “Too much has been lost to us, for this to be so. You will not have him, not now, and not ever!”
Aveline took a single step away from the line of companions at Hawke’s back and then another, not quite placing herself between Hawke and Anders but forming an obstacle, all the same. “Don’t do this,” she said, searching their face beseechingly. “Don’t stain the ground with yet more blood. Don’t turn this night that could –should– ring with the first cries of freedom we should have had a hundredfold long before tonight peter out. I know you, Hawke, and you- you cannot allow that. Not with everything that’s happened. I trust you with my life, and with his. Don’t make me regret that trust.”
Bethany’s staff rang out against the cobblestones. “Don’t you hurt him!” She cried out, eyes blazing in a face stained with the color of flame and fury. “I won’t let you! He is going to leave this thrive damned city, and I-” She gave a sudden laugh, a slow, spreading smile shining through the soot. “I’m going with him. I won’t let any of us fall when we can rise, not here, not today, not ever. So you will keep your place, Hawke,” she’d say, voice dipping at the last with a flash of tears hat she did not permit to fall, “just this once. Please stay. And let us go.”
Carver sucked a breath between his teeth, took a rapid few steps to close the distance between himself and his sibling. “You can’t mean to do this,” he hissed, eyes wide and scared but resolute. “This isn’t- no. No,” he said again, shifting to block Hawke’s path. “All of our lives, we’ve sought death. Just this once, let me do something right. Something that matters. That will turn a tide I hope to Bethany’s Maker I’ll live to see completed. Just now, just for today, and then I can go back to being that anchor at your throat.”
Isabela‘s hand closed about Hawke’s elbow, soft and slow. Of the other, there was no sign, and the lack was almost worse than the knowledge of where any of her innumerable knives could be. Was. “This isn’t the first time I’ve thrown away something valuable for that horizon, Hawke, hah, definitely not, but. This is where I’m standing, this one last time. You didn’t trade me away to be a slave when you had the chance. Don’t be so quick to do the same now.”
Fenris’s sword clattered to the stones. “Hawke.” His voice shook. With emotion yes, but fear was at the forefront, rattling through him in a wave, but his back was straight and his head upright as moved to approach Hawke. His hands were empty, curled upright. “Don’t. Don’t become what you always tried to protect me from, now, not at the last. I will always stand at your side, but I cannot, will not, watch you take that step back and offer your hand to what amounts to a slaver, Hawke. Let him go, as you let me go, and come with me, this last time.”
Merrill‘s scream grew in strength and power, ripping through the air between Hawke and Anders, holding Hawke aloft as the slim elf picked her way through the rubble. Her vallaslin was streaked with ash and tears. “How could you?” She started to reach for Hawke, then snatched her hand back and cradled it against her chest. “He did the only thing he could, anyone could, and you want him dead. What if it was me, Hawke? You fought for me, when no one else would, and now you’re going to stop, its-” She shook for a moment, then straightened. “Well, I’m not done, not ever, and neither is he. And I won’t let anyone, even you, bring that fight to its end.”
Varric’s voice cracked and broke apart upon meeting the air. “Hawke.” He tried again, coughed on smoke, and staggered towards Hawke, his hand faltering to fall to his side before he finished the movement. “Hawke. This is Anders, my-” Another pause, shorter, sharper, and, “our friend. Our conscience. And now that the conscience has decided, you wish it dead. Andraste’s thumbs, Hawke, I thought I knew you! Knew him! Let’s just- You can’t seriously think he would do this without reason, without having exhausted every other avenue. Hawke. Be quiet, for once in your life, and listen.”
Blackwall moved quickly for such a large man, a blur of motion that turned the whole world into a confusion of movement before the cobbles smacked hard against Hawke’s back, Blackwall’s foot planted squarely in their chest. Might well have missed a few things,” he’d say, hefting his sword to point at Hawke’s neck, “and you’re going to explain it to me, slowly, before you take one more step towards him. And if I don’t like what you say, you won’t be taking any more steps anywhere.”
Cassandra‘s fist met Hawke’s face within moments, sending them staggering back. Before they had time to recover Cassandra hauled Hawke up before her snarling face. “Champion. This is not how I wanted to have this meeting, but that is of little importance now. I am going to leave, taking the mage Anders with me, and here you shall remain,” she said, dropping Hawke none too gently back to the cobblestones. “It is not for you to decide his fate, or I. His action is too large, too- stay down, Hawke,” she said sharply. “You do not want me to ask again.”
Cole is gone in between one moment and the next, a flicker of movement rippling through the air before a deceptively frail hand closed about Hawke’s wrist. It refused to be shaken, no matter how Hawke struggled. “This is not how it happens,” Cole insisted, pale eyes looking right through Hawke to the mage beyond. “Why are you trying to- it’s how I wanted it, well,” Cole huffs, “that is not how the world has it, how the story ends. You like stories, like how everything wraps up neat at the ends with everyone happy and safe, the both of you. Let me help you. I know how, Justice. You used to know, too.”
Dorian’s laugh trailed through the smoke, weighed heavy as stones in the air between Hawke and Anders, before the man himself eased out between one breath and the next. His smile was gone, if it had could ever have been said to be there at all. “He wants to make things better, tried his damnest for ten years, and your idea of making things better is to strike him dead for it before he’s even had time to” Dorian shook his head. His whole body was trembling, fingers to his lips, parted around the shape of words he didn’t know. “I won’t allow it to end here, not like this. Not again.”
Iron Bull stepped up soundlessly behind Hawke and closed his hand upon their shoulder, an immoveable iron bar just ahead of a smile that showed far too many teeth. “Nice night of an evening,” he said in a faux casual tone, fingers tightening one by one. “You’re going to have a nice sit down now and think about what you’ve done –there we be, down you get– while your mage friend and I vanish into the sunset because, you see, I’m something of a sap for lost causes –unbelievable, I know– and ragged hearts, and here I’ve gone and found both. I think this is how all my favorite stories start, not end, and I intend to see this story goes on a long, long time.”
Krem was moving almost before Hawke started the movement, thrusting himself bodily between them and Anders. He was shaking with barely restrained fury, the kind he rarely allowed himself and even more rarely followed through to completion. “You stay away from him,” he grit out, shifting to keep himself between the pair when Hawke moved to the side. “He has borne enough. If you threaten him I will cut you down. Enough blood has been shed, you would and probably will say, and I agree with you. Hundreds of years of mages’ blood has been spilled and will spill again and you think to destroy one who challenged that cycle of pain? No. No. I will see you die first.”
Sera had an arrow out and lined up squarely pointed at Hawke’s eye before Hawke’s hand had fully begun moving towards their belt dagger. “Oi! Back away from himself! Yeah, he’s a fuckin ass, an I’m gonna stick my boot so far up his ass my toe’ll be tickling his tonsils, but he’s, he’s done somethin, where you failed to, where I failed to, hundreds and hundreds of years of us failed to do anything but pick their bums and complain at the smell a shit, and I’m not gonna let you or me or anybody take that away!”
Solas does not lash out with his magic or cry out; he simply walks between the pair, brows and hands upraised. “I know some little bit about matters such as this,” he would say quietly, “and I can tell you that killing this man now will solve some matters, yes, but create so many more. Holes appear, hope disappears. Allow me to take him, and you shall hear no more of him, this I can promise you.” At least, he adds silently, for now.
Vivienne’s magic grips Hawke up as gentle a sigh and cracks something in their wrist until they drop their dagger with a crime. There,” she’d say, in a studiously calm voice that cracked at the edges with a ragged tone that scraped her throat raw, “isn’t that better. You’re going to sit yourself down quietly –ah, thank you, dear thing– and we are going to walk one way, he and I, and you another. I do not agree with his actions tonight –could not-” she let out a sharp breath that hissed between her teeth “allow this to continue,” she added, face clearing. “Consider yourself lucky, my dear, that you are not slain where you stand. Ah, my apologies. Sit.”
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