#a little schmaltz from the wip folder

[s1ithers]

I need you.

It costs Hawke a great deal to say, not out of pride but as a sort of dereliction of duty, Anders has come to understand. But how it floors him, to know he’s not a useless, kindly suffered thing.

She says it to him in bed and it thrills him – the champion, the hero. The city at her feet—everyone loves her, hates her, needs her, wants to stand in her light. And she needs him, the apostate, the renegade. She says, I’m yours, oh lover, I’m yours.

-

She says it to him after he loses control on Alrik, when she finds him in his clinic. He’s packing, sorting his meager belongings by some pantomime intuition, knowing it doesn’t matter at all what he takes and what he leaves. He is going. She says, right, time out of Kirkwall will do you good. His throat aches. She says, I’m coming with you. She says, you’re in no state to go alone.

Won’t she understand? He says, I can’t endanger you any further. You or anyone else. How can I trust myself to heal, to work magic, even to...to walk about and see them in the streets? I have too much anger.

She says, if there’s one thing I know, it’s anger.

Her arms are around him then, solid as his own compulsions. Her breath is hot on his neck as she says, I can’t lose you too. I need you, Anders. Don’t go.

Tears sting his eyes. Three years and he’s kept all his weeping to his little room, or the dark streets walking home from the Hanged Man. The shame pools in his belly but it’s distant and odd now, a harmless thing he could turn in his hands. What will she see in his tears—that he’s too weak to control himself, broken, less than a man? She was there in the tunnels.

What could I ever bring into your life but pain? He’s said it before, when they were strangers and almost took an easy comfort in one another. A statement, a warning, an act of self-control. This time, he is worn and defeated and her arms are around him, and the question mark slips in at the end.

You are the light in my life, she rasps, voice cracking.

-

She doesn’t have to say it, in those strange unbounded days on the voyage out of Kirkwall, as they gaze out to sea and his mind fractures and falls away and slowly settles somewhere deep enough to rest, as she twines her fingers in his hair. Her weight beside him is a truth before words, before reason. She has chosen him above all else, and so sealed his fate. Whatever else befalls, he will live.

When the time comes, on some faraway shore, he will follow her voice back up to the light.