Written for Bea / @elhuen ❤️ chargestep ft. Julia. Thank you so much once again for letting me write Hunter.
Do you dare check the time?
Idle tapping on the back of the phone, nails clattering out a pattern that was likely not to be forgotten anytime soon. If you check, again, and again, and again, maybe it would’ve been only ten minutes. Maybe closer to three hours. Bite the inside of your cheek, and hold off that urge.
As it was nearly midnight, and you were still alone by the bar. Sure that your message hadn’t been sent, wasn’t received. Definitely wasn’t the first time you’d thought about that brick of a phone, and wondered if it had been upgraded. Run a finger along the rim of your glass. Would make it a right side easier to tell if a message had been seen.
So you sigh, where are you, Julia? A haunting question that you don’t let linger for too long, because things would get dark. Too fast, one light.
Shake your head out, and think of anything else. Come on, Hunter, you can do it. Wait for the bar to brighten again, for the condensation to touch your fingers. For the hand that lands on your shoulder, shaking you. A, “hey, fancy meeting you here?”
And you jump, just a little. Enough to get noticed and Julia gives you an apology. Shakes out her fingers in a way that suggests she thought it was static shock. Or, doing the both of you a favour, playing it off as such. You take the offering, because what else were you supposed to do?
Admit that maybe, just maybe, you were—
There’s no chance to venture down that path, as Julia speaks up. Flagging down the bartender in a way that was so casual, just another person in the crowd. Not the first time you envied her, or just. Sat back. Watched how Julia laughs, in such a way that was too open, too friendly. Like attracting flies with honey.
Thought turning dark, and you’re leaking out. Can feel it on your face, as Julia notices you then. Perhaps you wish that time had meant she still couldn’t figure you out. Always looked at you like a puzzle she could put together with her eyes closed, and it hollows you out. When you remember. When you know.
“How have you been?” is the safe question. The dangerous one. Causes all manner of words to try to push past your teeth, to save her. Not yourself, not anymore. You stand in front of the mirror, every day, and can say it out loud with the aftermath on your skin.
Julia doesn’t deserve to know. You know it’s because she would want to save you. “Keeping to myself, mostly.” Idly run you thumb over the bright white scars on your pointer. Hold the finger there, callouses catching on raised skin. “Had to lay low because—”
“You said some people were after you. Yeah, I remember.” Always remembering. Always thinking — about you. Seven years, and Julia still looks at you with that honey warm kind of gaze. Welcoming and sticky, lingering on your hands, cheeks, shoulders. Places she had always asked to touch first.
Desperately, you tell yourself you don’t miss it.
“‘Course you do,” finally convince yourself to talk. “I should be fine soon. Just gotta keep my head down a little longer, and then I’ll move on.”
“‘Move on’? Hunter… you’re not going to leave are you? After—after seven years?”
Julia needs to practice her public face. Not a polite thought for you, as you look over her. Watch how wide eyes slowly begin to close, how teeth grit. “I mourned you,” she says, as one would say to a long lost lover, risen from the dead.
But you don’t consider yourself in that realm of possibility. “I know. I’m sorry.”
She wants to say something; you want her to say anything. Not the way she bites her lip, narrowed eyes and lines drawing it all in. Severn years had worn on her. Maybe you were truly to blame for the way that smiles never quite reached her eyes, and how her hand rests now, just shy of yours. Drinks long forgotten. Wants to reach out to you, but she won’t. Julia was a coward, still wrapped up in the shiny promises of Marshal, all those years ago. Never quite committing, which you are thankful for.
It hurts to think of her like that. It hurts that you have to pull away, because electricity finds your hand, and it’s too familiar. You need distance and you need anonymity and both of those things are lost, in the way that Julia wears her heartbreak on her sleeve.
You need to drive the conversation away from you. Julia wants to save you. A heart beat kind of thought, that thrums through your veins. “What have you been up to since…?” trail off, don’t speak the word. Ignore the growing headache behind your eye.
Incredulously. Looks at you incredulously, because you have become somewhat of an obvious master of deflecting conversations. Yet she will file this away to jump on you with later — you won’t be here. “I’ve been doing my own thing. Steel runs the show now, I’m old news.”
If you were still Sidestep, you’d nudge her. Tease her, about being ‘old news’. There’s an opening there, for you to swing right back into old habits. Old news. Old women.
So. You side step. “Mmm, that’s what you said last time.” Don’t want to go back there. Here. It meant that they would find you, because they always do eventually. “Haven’t been investigating anything new? Like Hollow Ground?”
Get her talking about Hollow Ground. That fixation was always the perfect way to throw Julia off anything. Always sitting at the tip of her tongue, and her fingers flex in their hold. She’s debating whether or not to talk. You hope you can coax even a few sentences out. Say your goodbyes. Disappear for only a few days more, and then.
And then. Your debut.
Something in you tightens then. And it would be smart assume it was nerves, but you don’t get nervous. You refuse to get nervous. That would mean that there is some part of you, that looks at Julia now, and thinks of other things. Unnecessary potentials and futures, where you don’t tug up the sleeve of your jacket just a fraction, and you watch the condensation on your glass fall.
Her eyes are on you. Seeing something that you don’t understand or don’t want to. Because if you acknowledge it, then it will be real. And it may. Stop you.
Don’t make eye contact. Tell yourself that, as your hands find purchase on the bar top once more. “What did you want to talk about, anyway?”
“Is it so bad to just want to see you again?”
Questions with questions. An exchange that could go on all night. Looking up, you catch the way she looks at you in the mirror over the bar. From far away, she looks like you remembered, all those years ago. Convince yourself that time hadn’t passed, hair tucked into her jacket, that the falling smile was because something serious had crossed her mind. Convince yourself that you are seven years younger, losing yourself in the way she smiles and the freedom you had.
“No.” You lie. “It wouldn’t be so bad.”
Rest your hand once more, and hers lay beside. There is static and there is movement and she finds your eye in the mirror, where you are warped into someone younger, brighter. Better.
text overlaid atop the dragon age logo that reads “@elhuen is a ray of sunshine who blesses the Dragon Age fandom -amongst others- with her gorgeous art and her amazing writing. Her OC Audrey Trevelyan is an absolute babe, everything about her is so exciting!”
