Fic prompts - "Where you go I’m going, so jump and I’m jumping, since there is no me without you." (for whatsoever pairing or character dynamic you wish to write :D)
My love you KNOW it's going to be Fenders and also I adore you <3
(If you’d like me to write you a da2 fic, send me a prompt from here!)
Characters: Fenris, Anders
Tags: established relationship, post canon, domestic disagreements
“You’re not coming.” Fenris’ tone brooks no room for disagreement. Somehow, Anders finds a space anyway.
Fenris picks up his enemy-friend-lover-acquaintance’s bag and upends it over their bed of the last year. A tinkling crash of potions follow it, throwing up liquids that stain the glass as they swirl around the bowls. With them are a handful of wooden pens, nibs stuffed roughly into them and worn blunt with use, a thick sheaf of torn pieces of parchment, and an old knitted scarf. Fenris drops the now empty bag onto the bed, “No, you’re not.”
Anders raises an eyebrow. “Really?” He’s already packing his things back into the old satchel, but his eyes dart warily to his well-stuffed travelling pack. Fenris bites the inside of his cheek.
“It is dangerous for you to come with me.”
Anders huffs a laugh. “It’s dangerous to breathe, for either of us. What makes the border any worse?”
Fenris’ mind is dark with memories, and he will not stain this cabin with them. “You do not know them as I do.”
Anders softens at that, the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth shallowing as he steps forward. “That, I’ll grant you. But then there’s all the more reason not to travel alone.” His voice is soft and rough as he speaks. Fenris focuses on his thickening beard instead of meeting the sincerity in his brown eyes. “Fenris?” Anders’ voice is barely a murmur.
Fenris turns away from him, the movement too fast and too explosive for his frustration. Anders flinches, and Fenris wants to kick himself, and doesn’t, taking the restless energy and using it to pace the short breadth of their little cabin. Outside, birds sing in the late morning, and the trees sigh a symphony to the sky.
Above Fenris’ head, strings of dried garlic and herbs waft fragrant from the rafters. Fenris looks at Mercy, propped beside the window look a humble woodcutter’s axe, made strange by the domesticity of her setting. (Like him.) He curls his fingers and uncurls them, feeling the elastic stretch of his lyrium against his tendons. He clenches his teeth so tightly his jaw hurts.
“I am not meant for this.” He says the words to the wooden walls of the building, and the small half-full basket of firewood beside the window. “I cannot be what you want me to be.”
Anders lets out a breath, and the floor creaks as he steps closer. Fenris’ skin prickles with his closeness, but he doesn’t touch him, just stands behind him and waits. “Who says I want you to be anything other than you are?”
Fenris shakes his head, and feels tears, hot and stinging, prickling senselessly at the corners of his eyes. He gestures abruptly to the cabin: to the basin, and the iron bathtub, and the crooked little bed and its straw stuffed mattress. “I do not how to do this for you. I cannot be a husband. I do not know that I can even be a lover. Not in any way that’s kind. And -” Fenris hesitates, breath catching, as he turns at last back to the mage before him. “I am not sure that I want to.” At this, at last, Anders’ expression crumples. But Fenris has grown weaker than he used to be, and he cannot bring himself to take the opening for what it is.
“I hurt people, Anders. That is what I do. And I want to hurt them. I am so angry, all the time. For myself. For the others like me. I want to tear these people apart limb from limb so much that sometimes it scares me, and I cannot do that here.”
The words hang heavy in the air between them, and Fenris thinks for a moment that he can feel the clay-like press of blood-soaked sand between his toes on the beaches of Seheron.
Anders nods, and turns back to his pack, drawing it shut with a toggle. “Right, so I’m coming with you.”
“I don’t care!” Anders’ voice is a roar, and outside the chickens hurry squawking away from the cabin wall they’d been sheltering under.
Fenris steps back, for once not afraid of what the mage might do to him so much as he fears what he might do to himself. Anders pushes a hand over his face and through his overlong hair, tugging it hard.
“I - do you seriously think that my life matters to me if you get killed and forgotten by some slaver on a road in the arse end of nowhere?”
Fenris’ hands feel cold. “I cannot be the reason that you live.”
Anders settles a little, broad shoulders dropping. There’s silver in his hair, these days, and in his beard. “No, and you’re not. You’re not the only reason. But there is no world left in which I let you die without me, Fenris. We go down together or we don’t go down at all.”
“I cannot watch you die.” The admission is pulled from Fenris’ chest on a string of thorns, and it feels like bleeding to admit it. Anders’ expression softens further, and he steps forward, gait stiff with the weather and his bad knee.
“Yeah, well, you always were a hypocrite.”
Fenris’ lips quirk, despite the aching in his mind. “Takes one to know one.”
Anders steps closer. “Pots, kettles.”
Fenris falls forward into his lover’s arms, pressing his cheek against Anders’ chest. The man smells perpetually of the sweet, green scent of elfroot. “You are incorrigible.”
Anders presses a kiss onto the top of his head. “You want to fight a one-man war against every slaver in Tevinter.”
Fenris frowns. “When you say it like that, it sounds impossible.”
Anders hums, and his arms tighten around Fenris, his body warm and strong. “Maybe, but we’ve done impossible things before.”
