Chapter Text
The first thing he’s aware of is that his newest client is huge, nearly waist height and bulky with muscle. And very excited to see him, if the whines and rump shaking are any indicator. He’s not entirely sure if it’s excitement that has the mabari practically vibrating or if he’s about to be mauled by one of the biggest doggies he’s ever seen.
He really hopes it’s not the latter, because he just had his eyebrows done and he’d hate for the world to be robbed of such beauty so soon. Also death by puppy wouldn’t look good on his grave and Carver would probably never stop laughing. The ass.
He’d been assured, multiple times, that she was such a sweetheart and he’s just the teeniest bit anxious about their first meeting. Usually when someone has to tell him that their dog isn’t going to take a chunk out of him, repeatedly, he gets a little worried that their dog is definitely going to take a chunk out of him. More than likely repeatedly.
The house is an unnecessarily huge three-story, perfectly spaced between two other unnecessarily huge three-stories. And of course, the lawn is well-manicured and dripping with flowers. He doesn’t spend much time (any time, really) in the nicer parts of the city so he feels out of place in his neon pink jogging pants and his grey ‘SUNS OUT GUNS OUT’ tank top.
He runs his dog-walking business mostly out of Lowtown, so the neat and tidy houses freak him out a little. His own house is a lazy mess that definitely looks like it’s been lived in, unlike the cookie-cutter houses of the gated community the Du Puis family lives in.
There’s a wide dirt driveway firmly separated from the neatly paved ‘U’ drive way that belongs to the three story, hidden almost entirely by unruly trees, and he wonders where it leads to while he digs around his back-pack for the keys he’d been given. The front yard is fenced in with a chest height brick fence.
Effective and practical. It’s not like he could hop this fence with relative ease. The front gate has a code, which he’d been told beforehand over the phone, but probably could have guessed eventually given the amount of wear on the buttons.
He opens the front gate without any trouble, trying his hardest to look innocent and not like he’s trying to rob the place. Which is hard to do, because in his youth this is definitely the kind of place that would have been high up on his list of places to rob.
He gives the elderly woman walking her poodle in a jumpsuit that probably cost more than he makes in a week a pleasant wave and laughs to himself when she glares beadily at him and power walks away, knobbly fingers tight around the leash.
He follows the curvy side-walk around the side of the house to the back yard, which is separated from the front yard completely by chain-link fence and is padlocked shut. He finds out where the dirt driveway leads to, a guest house nestled in the small copse of trees that litters the land a few hundred feet behind the main house.
Of course there’s a guest house. Of freakin’ course. There’s a black motorcycle parked in front. It’s a really nice bike, from what Hawke can tell, sleek and black and incredibly sexy. Not that he knows much about bikes. He drives a mini-van for fuck’s sake.
He leans on the gate, arms dangling loosely down the other side with his chin propped on the top of the gate. He likes the little house, even if it does look like a murder shack. His new client, Lucy, dashes out from her shockingly small dog house and makes it to the fence in record time, paws skidding in the grass as she comes to a stop just before she would have crashed into the fence.
“Well hello there, sweet girl, would you look at you. If they aren’t careful I just might have to steal you away, you lovely thing.” He gushes, watching her jump around. She puts her paws on the fence, making it rattle, and thoroughly licks his fingers when he offers them. Her long, pink tongue lolls out of her mouth and she looks up at him eagerly
There’s no growling so he unlocks the padlock and leaves it to dangle in the lock. He’d been warned that Lucy had the nasty habit of digging up the flower beds given the opportunity, so instead of unlatching the gate and giving her the chance to slip out, he hops it instead.
Hawke grins happily at the wiggling giant as he drops down on the other side. He offers his fingers to be sniffed again. She snuffles at them, leaving another heavy coating of spit and dances excitedly around his feet as he bends down to scrub a hand through short, tan fur. She flops over onto her back and he scritches her white belly with a near manic smile on his face.
Maker, he loves dogs.
The next thing he’s aware of, now that it’s been established he isn’t going to be murdered by a dog, is his back hitting the ground hard enough to rattle his teeth. His breath knocks out of him on sad little wheeze and he tries to suck in a breath through the spasming pain in his chest. He wedges his fingers under the man’s knee and lifts long enough to gulp in a breath before the crushing weight is back in full force.
The man currently pinning Hawke to the ground with a well-place knee to his chest is the most attractive person Hawke has ever seen and that’s saying something because he owns a mirror.
Lucy’s boofing away, skipping around excitedly while Hawke wheezes in a breath around the knee squashing his lungs. The fingers currently wrapped snuggly around his windpipe aren’t helping with the whole not being able to breathe thing, either, and they are definitely not helping with the rush of heat that goes zooming straight to his dick as little black spot dot his vision.
His spluttering, muddled mind still takes a second to notice the intricate tattoos covering what appears to be almost every visible inch of this man’s skin. There are even tattoos on his adorably freckled chin and Hawke swoons a little on the inside. Okay, so he swoons a lot.
Swoons while laying down and struggling to breath. It’s way easier than it sounds.
“I might not like my neighbors all that much,” the man who just laid him out flat growls in a voice that does wicked, melty things to Hawke’s insides “but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let a poorly dressed vagrant steal their dog.”
Hawke can only stare at him, google-eyed, red in the face for two entirely different reasons. Lucy darts in to lick his eye and then the guy eases up enough for him to suck in a breath. He coughs and the knee on his chest pulls back enough for him not to die of oxygen deprivation. His coughs give way to soft, panting little gasps as a sweet rush of oxygen floods his lungs.
The Dog-Guardian of High Town glares down his nose at him, devastatingly good-looking even if he does look like he’s considering dragging Hawke back to his murder-shack. Presumably to murder him. A fate he’s almost-but-not-quite alright with. He thinks of all the dogs that he won’t get to walk if he gets murdered and tries to clear things up.
He can’t let every elven cutie with a sick undercut and enough tattoos to make Hawke’s heart trip murder him, he has a business to run, after all.
“I’m Garrett, by the way, and I think you meant well-dressed, not to mention handsome, vagrant steal their dog. Which I’m not, by the way. Stealing their dog.” He pauses and looks up into narrowed eyes that can’t seem to decide whether they’re grey or brown.
Grown? Brey? It’s like the two colors got mashed together and created a beautiful dark shade of green that Hawke doesn’t even know how to begin to describe. “Also, not a vagrant.” He’ll pester Varric about it later, Varric’s good with words.
“I don’t think I’ll be sharing my name with a thief. I heard you say you were going to steal the dog.” The pressure is back and Hawke grips the man’s upper thigh in a mild panic.
It’s beautifully muscled and lean and if Hawke could breathe worth a damn he’d say something saucy but as it is he tries to think of something he can say to get this fantastic man off of him.
Which is not something he’d ever thought he’d say, but here is with a knee in his sternum, dog slobber in his eye and the beginnings of an incredibly embarrassing erection.
“It was a joke? And that’s a little harsh, don’t you think. Common courtesy and all that other non-sense.” He offers, feet scrabbling gently in the grass when Lucy grabs the laces of his right shoe and starts to tug. He wants to laugh, because the dog he’s supposed to be walking is currently stealing his poor, ratty tennis shoe while a stranger assaults him but he just doesn’t have enough air for more than a pitiful gasp.
He imagines he’s starting to go red in the face and opens his mouth to explain that no, he isn’t stealing the dog, he’s the dog walker, please stop crushing him, it’s doing confusing things to his body and now is really not the time for a boner.
“Watch your hands if you wish to keep them.” The voice is frigid, calm despite the warning in his eyes and Hawke moves his hands clear and holds them to the side in a blatant ‘I surrender’ sort of way.
“Watching my hands because I do in fact want to keep them.” He recites dutifully. His body isn’t listening, about the boner, and really it’s entirely this man’s fault, you can’t just appear out of the ethers and body slam a man and not expect him to get an erection.
He thinks maybe the severe corners of the frowny man’s mouth twitch up, just a little bit, but then it’s gone and he’s being fiercely glowered at.
At least not this man, he amends, praying to the Maker that he lets him up soon because it’s too early in the morning for utter humiliation. Humiliation should come sometime around noon, at the earliest, thank you very much, not 9 in the morning.
“If you’re not a thief,” his lips twist into a slight snarl around the word and Hawke swallows hard as something that feels a little like liquid fire slips through him “then why did you state that you were going to steal the dog and then jump the fence?”
Hawke doesn’t know what it is about being snarled at that’s such a turn-on, but he’ll be damned if it isn’t.
“I was joking. Ever heard of one of those? Incredibly rare and hard to come by, I’ve been told.” There’s still a knee crushing the breath out of him so he adds with a put-out sigh “I’m the dog-walker.”
He pats blindly for his backpack, moving like you would move when trying not to startle a wild animal, and pulls out his wallet with a bit of undignified wiggling. He flips it open and shows him his driver’s license and his business card. The one that has his name and number on it and says he’ll walk your dog if you pay him.
There’s a pregnant pause in which intense, cool eyes flit from the cards back to Hawke’s sweaty face and then his lungs flood with sweet, sweet air as the man rises smoothly to his feet. His bare feet, tattooed feet. Hawke’s laughter rasps in his throat as he props himself up on his elbows and watches Lucy bounce around the yard, flinging his shoe as far as she can before running after it.
“My apologies.” He offers, not meeting Hawke’s eyes with his arms crossed across his chest as they watch his shoe tumble across the grass. Hawke takes that opportunity to pull his tank-top down as far as he can, which honestly, isn’t very far.
Lucy’s would-be savior is wearing a pair of red boxers and a loose, faded t-shirt that slips down the curve of his shoulder. His tattooed, delicious shoulder. Hawke’s really not sure what qualifies a shoulder as delicious, but this man’s shoulder is delicious.
“Love, I’d forgive you for just about anything.” He levels a dazzling smile at the guy who looks like he’s currently trying to make himself disappear and takes the calloused hand he’s offered. He winces a little at the ache in his chest and back. He dusts himself off and tries to ignore the feeling of wary, curious eyes on his skin as he pops his back and rolls his shoulders.
“But if you’re really sorry,” he says with a wry twist of his mouth, trying to coax Lucy over with a treat he pulls from his bag. “I think a name would be a perfectly acceptable apology.”
That gets him a huffy, begrudging chuckle and a quiet “Fenris.”
Huh. Fenris. He rolls the name around in his head, lets his tongue curl around it and then offers him a hand “Garret Hawke, it’s an absolute pleasure.”
“I’m sure it is, seeing as I just spent the better part of 5 minutes with the majority of my weight on your lungs.” Fenris drawls, taking the offered hand with a small measure of hesitation. Fenris grips his hand firmly and then releases after one shake. “You already said that.”
“Not that last bit.” Hawke tosses over his shoulder, trying to wrestle his shoe from Lucy while Fenris watches on with a dark eyebrow quirked. He doesn’t make any move to help, just watches Hawke struggle.
“Du Puis told me it’d be alright if I used the trail that runs through the woods, so fair warning, if you see an-”
“Incredibly handsome man, walking a dog, he is not a poorly dressed, dog-stealing vagrant and I shouldn’t lay him out flat on his back.” Fenris interrupts drolly, checking his bare foot for dog poop and looking vaguely disgusted. Hawke flashes a devious smile at him.
“I didn’t say incredibly handsome. And that last bit wasn’t too bad.”
“Hrm.” If Hawke isn’t mistaken he’d swear that there’s color on Fenris’ high, olive cheeks. “Again, I apologize for the misunderstanding. Carry On.” And then Fenris just leaves even though he’s glistening in the sun and smiling his most charming smile.
He hops the fence with far more grace than Hawke had managed and crosses the distance between the fence and his home with long strides and disappears inside without looking back even once. Hawke hears the echo of the screen door slam and tries not to feel too disappointed.
Hawke pouts a little as he finally extracts his poor shoe from Lucy’s mouth. “Think he forgot to give me his number?” He gets a string of ecstatic barks in response and braces a hand against the fence post while he jams his foot back in his shoe. His incredibly damp, dirt encrusted shoe.
“You’re right of course, love, he must have.” He clips the leash onto Lucy’s very nice, expensive looking leather collar “Who could say no to this face?”
Turns out Fenris can say no to that face, because an hour or so later on the return jog by Fenris’ house he catches the object of his new and confusing affections just as he’s leaving.
He had traded his boxers in for jeans torn at the knees and a dark red beanie. Same shirt, if Hawke’s not mistaken. He’s wearing black, scuffed boots and Hawke grins at him so hard he’s pretty sure his dimples are showing.
And I’m the poorly dressed vagrant he thinks, corner of his mouth hitching up. His mouth goes incredibly dry at the sight of him and he swallows around the sudden lump in his throat.
Hawke gives him a friendly wave, slowing from his steady jog only to have the man turn around immediately and slam the door shut behind him.
“Huh.” Hawke frowns, feeling surprisingly hurt as he stares at the chipping paint of Fenris’ door.