#tbc i do think carver grows into his own after he leaves the scene in kirkwall

[shivunin]

WIP Wednesday

Thanks for the tag @greypetrel💗! Tagging in turn @dungeons-and-dragon-age @daggerbean @ndostairlyrium and @inquisimer no pressure as always c: I've largely been working on a BG3 backstory things now that I've finally finished the game, but here is a bit more of the Hawke in the Fade fic. Here, Hawke's friends have gathered for a sort of last farewell. It's brutal, but I had a lot of fun writing Carver and Fenris in this scene. Their dynamic is working out to be a lot of the backbone of this fic so far and I'm really enjoying seeing where that goes.

“Decided to show up after all?” he asked. 

Fenris stopped just inside Carver’s field of vision. Carver didn’t bother to straighten up. 

“Didn’t have something more important to do?” he went on, abruptly seething. 

He thought of the letters he’d received these past months. M had gone from her usual mischievous self to an increasingly brittle version, as if the effort to keep up the facade had started to strain her, and then…

Sometimes, I wonder if there really is a curse on our family, she’d said in that last letter. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? I swear to you that I am doing everything that I can, but it feels rather like one of those nightmares where you’re running and running and your feet never move. 

Carver, if anything happens to me—I have no right to ask it, but will you please look after Fenris? I don’t know what he’ll do if I’m hurt, and you have a more level head these days. I can’t help but feel like something is going to happen, like those last days in Kirkwall before the end. It looms over me. 

Tell Aveline I’ll see you both soon, alright? she’d said. 

I don’t want either of you to worry, she’d said. 

Well. Carver was feeling plenty of things, but he couldn’t say that worry was one of them. 

“Didn’t feel like taking any more trips across Thedas?” he went on, because fuck him, because he’d said he would be there for her and he’d lied, because Carver wanted Fenris to hurt like he was hurting and he—

He was just standing there. Looking at Carver, as if he’d never seen him before and wasn’t enjoying the experience now.

“What, nothing to say?” Carver snarled, straightening at last. “You aren’t even going to pretend you gave a shit about her?”

“Carver, please—” Sebastian began from inside the house, but it was too late. Fenris had shifted into a slightly different stance, one Carver recognized at once, and his rage turned to a sick sort of relief. At last, this—this was something he knew. Grieving M was wrong, was foreign and unwelcome, but this? 

This was something he understood very well. 

“Say that again,” Fenris said in a low, rough voice. 

Carver spread his hands, Warden armor winking in the dim light through the clouds. What a relief it was to be angry. What a relief it would be to punch the bastard right in the chin. 

“You fucked her and ran away once,” he said. “Don’t know why she was surprised when you did it again.”

He barely managed to finish the last word before the elf was on him, a fist driving into the unshielded space at his ribs. Carver managed himself well enough in turn, he thought. He threw a punch at Fenris’s jaw and kneed him hard in the gut before he was unbalanced enough to fall to the mud and muck below. Perhaps Fenris would have kicked him then; perhaps he would have fallen upon him with fists and elbows. Neither of them had a chance to find out, because Varric was abruptly there. 

Maker, but he looked a decade older than he had when Carver’d last seen him. 

“Stop this,” he said. Carver turned his head and spat blood onto the earth beside him. 

It was still drizzling. The rain fell quickly enough that it blended with the blood until it all looked like nothing at all. 

When he looked up again, Fenris stood some two feet away, hands loose and bloodied. He didn’t look angry. He looked…

“You look like her,” Fenris said, his voice ragged. 

“Piss off,” Carver said, and—as if he hadn’t been hearing the same cursed thing his whole life—tears stung his eyes. 

Fuck that. He wasn’t going to cry over her. M wouldn’t have wanted that. Instead, he scrubbed his hand over his face and levered himself to his feet. Varric tucked the hand he’d offered away again and sighed. 

“Let’s get on with things,” he said. 

What else could they do? Just what he’d done after Bethany and Father and Mother. Exactly what he’d done after losing half the Wardens he’d ever known to some fool’s errand in the desert. 

Get on with it.