Chapter Text
The first time in his life that Garrett Hawke meets Fenris, it’s in the cramped moonlit courtyard of Kirkwall’s alienage, with Aveline at his back and the corpses of a dozen slavers at their feet.
The second time in his life that Garret Hawke meets Fenris, it’s on the rain-slick sidewalk in Orlais as he dodges a motorbike and drops a bag of bruised apples, seven centuries later.
---
Hawke is taking his very first vacation. He’s twenty-seven years old.
“This is disgusting,” Carver says. “Look at all the vacation time you’ve accrued. You’ve never used any of it! What the hell have you been doing?”
“Uh,” Hawke says, because the answer to that is working and nothing, both of which are equally shameful, and Carver already thinks he’s a fucking nerd.
So he shuttered his apartment and left his dog Lola with Aveline and now he’s in the airport texting Isabela a photograph of a packet of chips that costs $9, because he’s two hours early for his flight and nine fucking dollars for a bag of air? Airports are ridiculous. When his flight number is called, he presents his boarding pass like a first-grader proudly turning in a book report and then hits himself in the face with his own luggage as he sweatily crams it in one of the overhead bins.
“Need a hand?” he asks an elderly woman as she limps down the narrow aisle. She doesn’t answer but he thinks she mumbles feckoff over her shoulder.
Hawke sits down and folds his excessively long legs into the tiny space, his knees jabbing into the seat ahead of him. The last time he was on an airplane was when he was thirteen and his family -- or what was left of it -- was moving to Kirkwall, and it was miserable. He threw up in his mother’s lap and then Carver did too. Carver was a sympathy-puker, which was deeply unfortunate, because Garrett threw up a lot. Like a defensive response. His mother had a stash of emergency barf bags in the backseat of her car for his entire childhood.
The novelty of flying wears off after about twenty minutes, which says a lot about how inured Hawke has become to actual fucking miracles, and his legs hurt. He’s hungry and he regrets not buying that $9 bag of air. He doesn’t throw up, though. Progress.
The wide-open space of the Val Royeaux airport is overwhelming in comparison to Kirkwall, and Hawke is buffeted by bright light and loud sounds and something that smells unbelievably appetizing. Right outside the terminal there’s a cluster of carts and stands, food vendors and people hawking trinkets and chattering in Orlesian to him as he passes by.
One of the carts is selling thick cuts of grilled meat wrapped in bread, and he buys one in a process of trial and error. Lots of pointing and guessing, but whatever he ends up with is delicious and probably didn’t cost $9 (he hopes). Hawke shrugs his backpack over his shoulder and wanders down the street, eating from wax paper and dripping meat juice down his elbow. A few taxis slow to a stop at the curb next to him but he waves them off; theoretically the hotel should only be a few blocks from here and anyway he’s having a tender moment with this incredible sandwich-thing that he doesn’t want strangers intruding upon.
But because Hawke’s life is a farce, the hotel is over a mile away from the airport and he gets unbelievably lost looking for it. He asks for directions once from a kindly-looking man and the answer he gets is a garbled mess of Orlesian that is honestly kind of terrifying. They talk so fucking fast, Hawke marvels as he continues to walk in the wrong direction.
Eventually he relents, flags down a taxi, and it costs a lot more than $9. Jetlagged and aching and a little bit more broke than he was before, Hawke stumbles into his hotel and falls asleep for thirteen hours.
---
On the second day of his first vacation, Hawke visits a museum, gets lost again, is shouted at by a gaggle of young women because (from what he could gather) they liked his beard, nearly gets taken out by someone riding their bike on the sidewalk, and ends up wandering down a meandering cobblestone street where he finds a very small cafe. He pours himself bonelessly into a wrought-iron chair on the patio of the cafe as the sun goes down with a signed copy of Varric’s newest book and a pristine white cup of something frothy and caffeinated. The evening air is warm and lovely and Hawke is exhausted in an otherworldly way, like how it feels to come down from some truly fantastic sex. He really likes museums.
Orlais is pretty fucking amazing, he texts Isabela. People here seem to appreciate my beard.
yes hawke your beard is nice, Isabela says with a degree of eye-rolling that can be felt across time and space, and tells him to take pictures of all the crisply-dressed attractive people that absolutely litter the streets of Val Royeaux. They are everywhere: every single person that Hawke passes is dressed like they are attending a wedding, a business meeting, or a funeral. Or all three, probably. Rich fabrics, pressed shirts, shined shoes, tailored suits, vibrant dresses… Hawke feels out of place in his jeans and boots that are both about two weeks away from disintegrating entirely.
He leans back in his chair, the metal pressing cold lines into his skin, and tries to take a surreptitious photo of someone passing by, their head lowered to stare at the sidewalk as they pass the cafe. Black leather jacket, perfect-fit black trousers, expensive black shoes. White hair, dark skin.
white hair haha wtf, Isabela says. is he old? a sexy grandpa???
Idk I didn’t see his face, Hawke says, putting a frowny emoticon at the end.
ok well unless he’s like 100 years old then white hair is just pretentious, Isabela proclaims. orlesians are fuckin weird.
---
On the third day of his first vacation, the sky is grey and wet but Hawke decides he wants to blend with the locals. His hotel is on a major street and so he looks right, looks left, then picks a direction and just walks, hoping he’ll find something interesting. He passes bookstores, restaurants, a comic book shop, a sex toy store, a couple of bars, and then he comes upon a corner market in a whitewashed brick building that has a wooden box of sweet-smelling mangoes sitting on the front step, propping the door open invitingly.
Blend, Hawke thinks.
Inside it’s cool and quiet and Hawke picks up various pieces of fruit as if he were inspecting them for quality when really he’s just doing it because he doesn’t know what else to do with his hands.
The floorboards are warped and old and Hawke thinks they look like they’re original, that they’ve been in place since this building came into existence, and the thought awes him a little bit. Most things in Orlais are much, much older than even the oldest thing in Kirkwall. His feet are touching history. (Briefly he feels guilty again for his scuffed, dirty boots.) So he is looking down at the floor when he walks into a stack of apple crates; his knobby knees knock them all to the ground and the apples scatter.
Hawke buys all of the apples that hit the floor because his mother raised him to do chivalrous shit like that. Outside, it’s starting to rain and the sound is beautiful, like soft static.
“Sorry,” Hawke mumbles again to the shopkeep, hefting the bulging bag in his arms. “I’m sure these floor apples will be delicious.”
She squints in annoyance and shrugs at him, not understanding, and he ducks out the door into the rain. The drops are cold but the air is still warm, and Hawke hesitates on the corner for a moment, staring dreamily out at the domes and spires of Orlais.
“Bouge de là!” someone shouts. “Bouge de là, stupide!”
A hand closes around his arm and yanks him out of the way as a motorbike putters past at top speed, roughly a quarter of a centimeter from ending his life. Hawke startles and drops his bag of apples and they roll away sadly, whereupon he decides that these apples should just be allowed to return to the earth.
Black leather jacket, black pants, black shoes. White hair, dark skin.
“I recognize you,” Hawke says.
Hawke’s savior blinks at him. Green eyes. Aquiline nose.
“Er, I guess thank you would probably be a better opener,” Hawke says.
“You’re welcome,” White Hair says, then glances down at the honestly ridiculous number of apples now littering the sidewalk.
“They deserve to be free,” Hawke explained, following his gaze. “They tried to escape earlier and really at this point I think they’ve earned it.”
“How magnanimous of you,” White Hair says. It comes out more deadpan than the most deadpan thing Hawke has ever heard before in his life, and Hawke tries not to laugh but he ends up snorting. It’s horrible. White Hair grins crookedly.
“What was that guy yelling at me? Telling me to move?” Hawke asks, kicking an apple into a storm drain. Bon voyage, fucker.
“Yes. Bouge de là,” White Hair says. His accent is perfect. “And he called you stupid.”
“Hardly the first time,” Hawke admits. “You know Orlesian? D’you live here?”
“I do,” he says. “And you sound Fereldan. How did you end up in Val Royeaux?”
Wow. He’s got a good ear.
“Visiting on holiday.” Hawke resists the urge to boastfully add it’s my first! like a kid who just lost a tooth. “Always thought Orlais was beautiful, but I don’t know if I’d be able to live here. I mean, for starters, I don’t speak the language.”
White Hair looks him up and down critically. “You don’t dress the part, either.”
“Cruel,” Hawke says. “You save my life only to bleed me dry with your words.”
“Before you expire, you should tell me your name,” White Hair says, flicking rainwater out of his green eyes.
“Garrett. Well, Hawke, actually, I suppose. Nobody calls me Garrett.”
“Fenris.”
Hawke extends a hand and White Hair -- Fenris -- considers it for a moment before shaking it. White ink tattoos brush over his chin in serpentine lines and disappear under the collar of his jacket. Hawke has never seen them before but for a dazed moment he feels as though he has -- he feels as though he could trace the pattern by memory, down his throat, over his chest, across his hips. And then the memory rolls away like the apple in the storm drain.
---
Day four, and Hawke has plowed through three art museums like he’s got something to prove. He’s seen the Grand Cathedral, he’s toured the grounds of the University of Orlais, and he took a bunch of selfies with the White Spire in the background because the history of the place creeped him out too much to actually get close.
He is touristed the fuck out.
It might have been poor planning on his part, considering he’s got nearly six weeks of time off and plenty of opportunity to see absolutely everything, but he’s just so excited.
Besides, he had to distract himself somehow. He got Fenris’ number yesterday -- at Fenris’ request, no less -- handed his phone over and Fenris tapped it in with fastidious fingers, white hair falling lazily into his eyes.
“You want to see Orlais?” Fenris asks. “I can show you the parts of Val Royeaux that nobody ever talks about.”
Hawke’s idiot brain thinks, I want to see the parts of you that nobody ever talks about, which is inappropriate and also doesn’t even make sense, while his mouth says “yes, that would be wonderful, thank you.”
Anyway, now his phone is dead because he wasted its entire battery obsessively checking it or texting Isabela pictures of history-rich relics and beautiful men, so Hawke takes a taxi back to the hotel and flops down on his giant white bed to plug his phone in. The bedclothes are mussed and he burrows into them like a large mole. Within ten seconds, he’s half-asleep.
His phone makes a small, charming ding noise as it struggles back to life, and then it dings a few more times in succession. Hawke rolls over, kicking his way out of the blankets, and looks at it, then feels immensely popular. He has six -- six! -- new text messages.
Aveline, telling him to stop distracting Isabela while she’s working; Isabela, thanking him for the distraction while she’s working; Merrill, sending him links to even more tourist attractions in Val Royeaux; and Fenris, inviting him downtown later that evening.
Hawke does a fist pump of personal victory and accidentally yanks his phone charger out of the wall, so he has to plug it back in and wait for it to turn on before he can respond to any of his thousands of texts from his adoring fans. He jogs around the hotel room.
Send Aveline a picture of the marble relief of that pack of hunting mabaris, he makes a mental note. She’ll love it and forgive me.
Aveline likes dogs almost as much as Hawke does. (Which was why she agreed to put up with his dog, Lola, for six weeks while he jetted off to Orlais.)
Tell Isabela about Fenris, and inform her that he is not a sexy grandpa. Show Merrill the close-up photo you took of Andraste’s cleavage in the Grand Cathedral, because you’re both sinning heathens. He ticks these things off on his fingers.
And tell Fenris you will go anywhere he asks you, forever. Hawke shakes his head at his reflection in the bay window that looks out over the street. Tell Fenris yes, thank you.
When his cell phone is functional again, Hawke opens Fenris’ text.
Fenris (3:09 PM): Friend of mine is playing a show later tonight in the city. Want to accompany me?
Hawke (3:45 PM): Yes, thank you
Fenris (3:49 PM): Meet me at the bazaar at sunset. We can walk the rest of the way.
---
The bazaar is a an open-air market staged in a courtyard paved with white flagstones. Everything is covered in flowers and someone is playing an accordion. It smells like spices and cigarette smoke and summer air, and the slowly fading sunlight paints everything orange. Hawke wants to take a picture, but he thinks the flat, contextless silence of a photograph would not capture what mattered.
Instead, he wanders, stepping around passersby who are shopping before the bazaar closes at dark. Nearby, there’s a covered patio filled with people eating and drinking and laughing. Two children dart in front of Hawke, giggling, but then they skid to a stop when a familiar voice scolds them.
Hawke looks up and Fenris is there, kneeling in front of the children -- two girls dressed in frilly white lace. He says something in Orlesian and the girls shyly point at the patio. Fenris nods and shoos them back in that direction with a gentle hand.
When he notices Hawke looking, he seems abashed and says, “Parents get lax when they drink and their kids stray too far, and then you see their face on a milk carton.” His green eyes glow in the vibrant dusk light.
He leads Hawke away from the bazaar and they fall into step, side by side. Fenris points out various local landmarks: “I once sat on the lip of that fountain to eat my lunch and I was so violently mobbed by pigeons that I had to run away and leave my sandwich as a distraction.”
They pass a theater marquee lit by bare bulbs. “This place apparently shows old porno films on Friday afternoons. Oh, and that bistro there has the best cafe au lait I’ve ever tasted.”
A beautiful and imposing brick building looms over the street, one of the university’s libraries. “I fell asleep on the steps of the library once and woke up to people throwing coins at me, thinking I was homeless.”
Hawke grins. “What’d you do with the money?”
Fenris jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the bistro they’d recently passed. “Bought myself a cafe au lait.”
“How long have you lived here?” Hawke asks, quietly amazed by the life that this stranger is telling him, unspooling fragments of stories that are just as mundane and yet twice as magical as anything Hawke has ever done.
“Hmm.” Fenris shrugs in the dimming twilight. He and Hawke part for a moment, bifurcated by a group of teenagers obstructing the sidewalk, and when they return to each other, Fenris is staring down at his feet. “Long enough, I suppose.”
“Where did you live before you came to Orlais?”
Fenris offers a cigarette to Hawke, a brand called Gauloises, but Hawke declines, having been badgered into quitting by Aveline last year.
“Everywhere. I drifted,” Fenris says. A brief spark of flame casts his face in gold as he lights his cigarette. “And you? Where have you put down roots?”
“I’ve spent most of my life in the Free Marches,” Hawke says, “but Ferelden is really my home. Most people can tell, too. It’s like they say -- you can take the man out of Ferelden, but you can’t take Ferelden out of the man.”
Fenris chuckles softly. “Can’t get the dog smell out, either, if Orlesians are to be believed. They say all sorts of unsavory things about Fereldans.”
“No, they don’t like us much, do they?” Hawke sighs, shaking his head. “Their loss. As you can see, Fereldans are both handsome and charming.”
With a noise like laughter, Fenris pushes Hawke inside a brightly-lit bar teeming with people. The place is all dark stained wood and fingerprint-smudged glass, a line of scratched mirrors lining the far wall. There are wrinkled, threadbare rugs on the floor, worn through in some places by treading feet.
“This doesn’t look so different from Kirkwall,” Hawke says.
“Dive bars are universal,” Fenris agrees, raising his voice to be heard over the general din. “What do you drink?”
“Everything,” Hawke says, which is true.
Fenris elbows his way to a spot at the bar and orders two drinks with words that Hawke doesn’t understand.
“Sazerac,” Fenris tells him, handing him a short whiskey glass full of something dark. “I took a guess.”
“You guessed right,” Hawke says, impressed. He loves whiskey. He wonders for a moment if Fenris is the most perceptive human being to ever exist on earth. “What’ve you got?”
“Dandelion wine,” Fenris answers, and Hawke doesn’t even know what to say because dandelion wine sounds like something that magical elves would drink and it doesn’t surprise him at all that Fenris would drink it.
Hawke finally manages to call “thanks for the drink, I’ll get the next round” before Fenris is disappearing into the crowd, slipping between bodies with lupine grace, his long-stemmed glass held protectively aloft. Hawke follows in his wake like a bull in a china shop, knocking shoulders and muttering apologies as he goes.
There is a small dais in the corner of the bar, raised barely more than a few inches above the floor, on which is stood a battered microphone and a few tangled black cables leading to a squat stack of amps. Fenris takes Hawke’s elbow and pulls them both right to the front, the toes of Hawke’s boots pressed against the edge of the dais, and he’s face to face with a red-haired woman who smiles sadly at Fenris and speaks to him in Orlesian. She’s wearing an incredibly short dress and she has thighs that could probably crush a man’s head like an unfortunate tomato.
She nods to Hawke, says “hello” in a heavy accent without introducing herself, then picks up a guitar and plucks a few strings while sipping her own wine. Someone whoops and the girl raises her glass in acknowledgment.
Fenris tugs at his sleeve and Hawke bends down slightly. “Leliana,” Fenris says into his ear. “I met her when I first came to Val Royeaux. She’s usually friendlier, but she just had her heart broken, apparently.”
“Oh?” Hawke says, without moving away. He likes the way Fenris’ breath tickles the hair at his temples. The dandelion wine smells sweet.
“Long story.” Fenris shrugs. “She was in love with someone who didn’t love her back. It happens.”
It does happen. Hawke knows. It’s happened to him enough times. Hell, it’s probably happening to him right now.
Leliana has a high, breathy voice that Hawke likes a lot, and he drinks and listens to her sing sad songs while Fenris sways in place to the rhythm and occasionally mouths along to the words. She goes through a litany of instruments, but Hawke’s favorite is a small, round six-stringed thing made of lacquered golden wood that she holds in her lap and she coaxes such lovely bright notes out of it that he gets a little emotional.
Hawke asks Fenris what it is. “A mandolin,” he says.
“You drink dandelion wine and you’re friends with people who can play mandolins,” Hawke says. “Are you magic? Are you an elf?”
Whoops. Shit. He’s kind of drunk already.
Fenris tips his head back and laughs, and the smile lingers on his face for a while.
“Maybe in a past life,” he says.