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Wrath, from within
Wrath
The air is hot from used magic and fire waves that ate all oxygen. Smoke is rising from burned grass and dust. Fenris sees Hawke brace herself against the gravel, narrowing her eyes with stress, teeth bared, blades in front of her face, and when he blinks she has disappeared into the shadows. Someone shouts a warning from behind.
His zweihänder feels light in his slender fingers, he lifts it above his head, smashes it back down, and in the same breath he pulls it back up, like a sabre, a sword, something weightless. Something delicate. Even though the sun glares down on him his lyrium marks are visibly flaring up, the glow creeps from under his armour over his neck up to his chin. The archer, hopelessly in panic, trying to get another arrow onto the bowstring, stares at him in confusion, his eyes fixed on the marks like they were an attraction. Fenris just hopes his death isn't as painless as it looks seconds later when he splits his head.
Everything afterwards is silence. Hawke sneaks out of the shadows, vibrates back from a flicker into visibility, and Fenris still wonders how she manages to deceive even is elven eyes.
The air smells of blood, but mostly of heat and mana. Like water slowly seeping into dried-out soil. Hawke has blood in her face, she wipes it over her cheeks with her bare forearm and breathes heavily, blinking into the sun.
"You're injured," she says and Fenris wonders how the hell she can tell with all the dirt he's covered in. His arm just now begins to hurt where a blade has cut not too deep into his flesh. It's bearable, the burning just on the verge of being inconvenient. Fenris leans his zweihänder flat on his shoulder, slowly bobbing it up and down, and smiles.
And then suddenly there's Anders, lifting his arms, his fingers in his hair tightening his ponytail. There's an afterglow in his eyes, magic slowly ebbing out of his body. And Fenris almost bites off his own tongue so he doesn't growl like an aggressive dog.
Anders looks tired, the shadows around his eyes are deep and dark, he's paler than normal, probably used up all his willpower somewhere between healing and fire jumping from his fingertips.
Fenris spits on the ground, disgusted, feels the weight of his weapon nice and real on his shoulder. Then he turns around, disappears without a word, leaves a trail of blood that seeps out of the wound on his arm and onto the ground. Eventually he pulls a plain clay flask from his belt, downs the bitter liquid and feels his skin growing hot as the wound closes up. All that's left is a pleasant numbness.
From Within
Anders is in one of his philosophical moods, he can't stop smiling at the starlit sky and feeling good, and Isabela and Hawke believe every story he's telling them, baring their teeth while they laugh, almost howling, as if Anders were suddenly funny instead of a fucking depressed hypocrite.
Fenris is braiding the leather straps of his bracers with such angry force that they groan and creak under his fingers while he grimaces into the dark. The marks on the back of his hands are glowing, sometimes he can't control them, sometimes his rage fuels them. But he is an open book to anyone anyways, he's not enigmatic and quiet like the mage, he's carrying his thirst for revenge openly in his face.
Earlier Anders had just pulled the campfire out of the ground, like it were nothing, with one single motion that didn't even seem to cost him any energy. Now the flames are sunken down and barely more than glowing embers on dry ground. There's a forest behind them, radiating cold into their backs, and in front of them, down a short slope, lies a lake.
Fenris forgot why they headed out weeks ago. Hawke stopped reminding him again and again, she accepted that he doesn't care. No-one knows why he's still with them and when he's totally honest he isn't even sure himself. Something about routine, he mostly tells himself, and the irrepressible desire to taste blood.
Hawke is bearable, she shares the love for blood rage with him even though she's not as unapologetic about it as he is. Isabela loves to tease but she takes fighting very serious. She doesn't know fear, Fenris respects that. But they don't talk to each other, not anymore since Isabela's attempts of flirting with him proved fruitless.
Hawke sometimes manages to draw some stories out of him, mostly after a lot of alcohol or when it's especially late at night, and from time to time he allows her to carefully place a hand on his shoulder. At first Fenris was irritated, understood the gesture as something more than silent sympathy, almost felt compelled to clear things up. Wanted to spit it into her face, something about touches and the impurity of human skin, and then about the fact that he has no use for broad hips and round faces. Something about hard edges and wiry limbs, if at all, if he would like to touch anyone at all. But that was before he understood that Hawke felt similar but the other way around, that she was able to live without the exchange of affection, especially when they were coming from a man, let alone an elf. That was before he saw how she and Isabela entangled their hands, or their arms when they were drinking, lips always close to the other's face.
Anders has long stopped talking. Hawke's eyes are getting heavier and she finally claps her hands together like a mother at the end of a cozy evening. "You look awake, Fenris," she says and gives him the first night watch. Isabela laughs and laughs and then she disappears together with Hawke to their tent, and surprisingly there's nothing to be heard of them after that.
The really surprising thing about Fenris still being with them is how much he despises the mage. He tenses up and his stomach turns when he looks at him, especially when he hasn't fought for a while, when he's all nervous and eager anyway. There is nothing left to say between them, they exchanged every imaginable cynic remark, went on to pure hatred and angry stares, and then eventually cold indifference.
Fenris can't change the fact that Anders is with them, he actually sees his usefulness and just tries to ignore how much he reeks of mana, how aggressive he's making him especially when Justice takes over his body and his voice becomes hollow and heavy from magic.
Sometimes, in quiet moments, Fenris tries to imagine Anders without magic. He's pretty sure he would have already broken his neck. Anders is weak, his mind wavers, and it's not only Justice throwing him off balance. He's fluctuating between manic diligence, quick fingers and a false smile that could be real at its edges, and a deep disruption, a broken mind. Fenris can't keep up with the mood swings of the man, and, to make matters worse, there's his deeply seeded repulsion against magic, the fear of a superior enemy that he can't admit even to himself.
The fire burned down to a dark red carpet of ember, barely radiating warmth. Behind them the forest lies threatening but silent. Anders draws a rune into the dark air, it flares up for a second, straight lines, no squiggles, then it fades away into the blackness of the night. Fenris wrinkles his nose, opens his mouth and closes it again.
"You can calm down," Anders says and his voice sounds so tired. "A simple alarm spell. Nothing you would notice, just something I will hear. You can stop snarling."
"The moment your magic comes too close to me is the moment I cut your throat, abomination."
Even those words are nothing more than empty threats, uttered a thousand times. They reached a point where death won't shock them anymore. It wouldn't be a punishment but salvation. A reward.
Anders sighs but not too serious, not like the hatred really hit him, and then he gets up and throws his cloak around his shoulders because he's obviously feeling the cold now. He doesn't revive the fire, just shivers, short and undecided, his slender body crouched. Then he leaves, down the slope and towards the lake that lies there like a black disc.
The silence is piercing. The sky is vast but empty, starless now, black. Fenris feels as hollow, shakes the cold off and stares at his arms as they begin to glow along the lyrium lines, bluish and cool.
Down at the lake the surface crackles, only slightly, and suddenly the smell of mana hangs heavily in the air. Fenris slowly rises, his muscles tense, suppresses the glowing of his skin with all his might until it grows dark around him again, his hand twitches towards his sword.
In the darkness, down at the lake, Fenris sees Anders painting shining lines around him, he's whirling sparks and creating swirls, throws them upwards and catches them again. He moves flickering orbs over the water until they sink under the surface and disappear into the blurry deep. He swings both hands above his head, a fast and fluent movement, steps into the darkness and is invisible for several seconds before he flares up again, his eyes first, a bright blue that slowly peels itself out if the blackness.
Fenris stares, rooted to the spot. He's never seen magic so bright before. It had always been nothing more than a short flicker before it formed flames or ice. At day it's almost invisible, that's why it's so dangerous. But here it crackles and sizzles, flares up, tumbles upwards into the night sky, falls back and burns out.
"Anders!" He shouted it before he decided to use his name, and Anders actually turns his head around, half interested, half irritated because Fenris never calls him by his real name, not when he can help it. "By the Maker, what are you doing?"
The grass down the slope is wet, Fenris' feet barely carry him downwards, his limbs feel brittle from the cold. Anders lowers his arms, the flames die down and all that's left are his eyes, two shimmering dots drawing smudgy lines into the darkness when he moves his head.
"The Fade," Anders says when Fenris is close enough to hear, but not too close because the apostate is vibrating with magic and reeking of willpower. "I can access it so easily here. Maybe the veil that holds it back from this plain is especially thin here, maybe there is a shrine somewhere nearby, maybe down at the bottom of the lake."
Fenris grips his sword tighter. "What does that even mean? Please stop the magic babbling."
He's so close to draw his zweihänder, to brace himself against the ground and then charge forward to cut Anders in half, so quick and clean that even magic wouldn't help him. Fenris could do it and Anders probably wouldn't feel a thing, wouldn't even be able to throw a single curse in his direction.
But before he actually prepares himself to attack, before his paranoia overwhelms him, his fear of an enemy that is so much stronger than him, that will force him to his knees, just like it had already happened once, before he actually decides to kill the mage, Anders finally faces him, his cheeks illuminated, his eyes deep and bright.
"I feel so alive," he says. His voice is heavy but not hollow, nothing like when Justice speaks through him. It's like he's another person, not Anders, not the one he knows anyway. Maybe that's Anders before the circle broke him, before they tried making him tranquil, before they killed his friend, before the sadness.
And Fenris' loosens the grip on his sword, slowly and unknowingly, and he stares and stares and looks into the incredible bright eyes of the mage until the smell of used mana makes him sick, until he feels dizzy from the darkness. He tumbles towards the lake and there he pushes his hands into the icy water till his blood and head and mind calmed down.
Fenris doesn't sleep that night. Anders keeps walking along the shore till dawn. They don't wake up the others to take over the watch, and when the sun finally rises behind the forest they are sitting at the newly lit fire, staring wordlessly into the orange sky together.