[[Backthreading nsfw romantic history post for
birdhousesoul. Set not long after they hook up, before All That Remains]]
Hawke falls back on the bed, sweat sticking her hair to her forehead, skin flushed. It's the middle of the night, but the fire in the fireplace still burns enough to cast more light than shadows on her skin, and on the skin of the man next to her. "That was amazing." Still breathing hard, she smiles brilliantly at him, then decides that's not enough and rolls towards him for another kiss. She can't seem to stop kissing him now that she's finally able to. Not that she's tried hard to resist the urge for the past...week, maybe two weeks? It seems longer, and not long enough. "Andraste's flaming pyre, Anders, where'd you learn to do all this?"
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Hawke falls back on the bed, sweat sticking her hair to her forehead, skin flushed. It's the middle of the night, but the fire in the fireplace still burns enough to cast more light than shadows on her skin, and on the skin of the man next to her. "That was amazing." Still breathing hard, she smiles brilliantly at him, then decides that's not enough and rolls towards him for another kiss. She can't seem to stop kissing him now that she's finally able to. Not that she's tried hard to resist the urge for the past...week, maybe two weeks? It seems longer, and not long enough. "Andraste's flaming pyre, Anders, where'd you learn to do all this?"
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Date: 2011-12-27 10:11 pm (UTC)From:He gives a good-natured groan. "Everyone knows where I learned to do all this. Isabela's already told you more than I ever knew she knew about my sordid history, I'd wager." Rolling onto his side to face Hawke, he yields to a less colorful temptation, allowing himself to tuck a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. How many times in the past three years has he longed to do that, something so simple? "I ought to ask the same question of you. You're far too good at, mm, a few things I could list, but I'm too much a gentleman to name them all. And I know you turned down Jethann, so I can't credit him for it."
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Date: 2011-12-27 10:24 pm (UTC)From:"As for me, reading all over Varric's books, of course. He's a dwarf who does his research, those things are detailed. And you'd lose that wager; Isabela suspects a great deal and is all too pleased to come up with wild theories but candidly admitted she knew very little for certain." A few weeks ago, Hawke would not have been willing to admit pressing Isabela for information on the subject of Anders' previous sexual exploits. Now it's just something else they can laugh about. Hawke laughs a lot these days.
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Date: 2011-12-27 10:35 pm (UTC)From:You get all the love for mentioning the duck. Seriously. *is too fond of that duck*
Date: 2011-12-27 10:58 pm (UTC)From:"Anyway, you know what I've been doing for the past year, you were there for most of it. Running around being Kirkwall's unofficial pest control service, spending a surprising amount of time dealing with the Qunari, and trying to convince you to give this a try." She moves her hips against his as she says this, a suggestion of a recent memory. Though it wasn't sex she'd been asking him for all that time, or at least not just sex, as he knows very well. "No time in there for intensive training. Though I'll grant you the not a blushing ingenue part. I didn't get started quite as young as you did in the Circle--fifteen, did you say?--but it was certainly a while ago."
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Date: 2011-12-27 11:10 pm (UTC)From:It's still difficult to think of Karl, it will never not be difficult, and the banter loses its effervescence for a moment, Anders closing his eyes. Kissing Hawke's forehead, soft and chaste, nothing like the kissing that's been going on in this bed or the kissing Anders has just been recollecting. It would kill me to lose you. She promised he wouldn't lose her, and he's clinging to that promise.
He sighs. He lets the pain go. There's too much happiness washing over it, drowning it out, too much happiness even to allow room for guilt. "Now, you, I expect you reinvented kissing, not a false move or a single misstep. Graceful in everything," his hands move again, caressing her back, petting her the way he would pet a sleepy cat.
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Date: 2011-12-28 01:19 am (UTC)From:"You'd lose that bet too. I was an ungainly thing growing up, all tangled arms and legs and curiosity. Like a puppy, I suppose, though if you ever use that comparison you'll make you suffer for it." His hands feel wonderful on her cooling, still over-sensitive skin, and her free hand begins to wander in return, stroking along his shoulder and upper arm. Her other hand is still pinned between them, but her fingers can toy with his collarbone, and do. "Hmm, perhaps around that age for me as well, then, depending what we count. Most of my starts were your basic adolescent fumbling experiments in haylofts. Classic." With an almost shy smile, she adds, "Though I might argue that I hadn't been properly kissed until you."
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Date: 2011-12-28 01:30 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-12-28 08:28 am (UTC)From:That in turn leads to a few moments of quiet contentment, just holding each other, though something still so astonishing and joyous can't be preceeded by just without its being misleading. But something he said earlier is toying with her thoughts, combining with old curiosity and suspicion, so she asks: "Tell me about Karl?" The arm wrapped around him presses; this is a difficult subject for him. "I know he must have been important to you."
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Date: 2011-12-28 11:01 am (UTC)From:new relationship energylove. He could have gone on happily enumerating the third, fourth, and fifth times he ever kissed Hawke, and so forth, possibly with reenactments.Right, he's just mentioned kissing Karl, and. That's why. "Er, that doesn't bother you, does it? That I've been with ...?" The line doesn't quite come out the way it might if Hawke were also a man. "Yes, he was. Important. Essential. I talk a lot of rubbish about Kinloch Hold — it's all true, mind, but it's not nearly as much fun as I like to make it sound, everyone kissing everyone. It's only a distraction, and a way to kill time, or curry favor. It's not enough. To have someone who cared for me made all the difference in the world." Cared for, not loved.
It isn't easy, no, but he will talk about it, with her, because he loves her, he's allowed himself to love her, and because Karl deserves to be remembered.
"He was a healer, like me. Far more patient than I've ever been." Even in the calmest, most focused act of healing, there's an anger that fuels Anders' work, a refusal to accept damage and disease as inevitable, a rage against mortality and the depredations of violence. It makes him burn the brighter, goads a faster flow of mana; it's useful and wasteful at once. Karl never had that problem. "And generous, and kind, and a true friend even when I didn't deserve one, which ... was most of the time. He was just able to accept so much, all the indignities Circle life could throw his way, and he'd rise above it as though it weren't even happening. We found ways to make it bearable. For me, it was just pretending, though, a temporary respite from the truth of what the Circle was. For him, it really was bearable. He tried to help me with that. Didn't work, but bless him for trying."
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Date: 2011-12-28 01:41 pm (UTC)From:It's a sobering realization. Hawke grew up with the iron-clad certainty that her family had to do everything possible to keep their father and later Bethany out of the Circle. Malcolm Hawke had never told them much, and even less that was specific to his own history, aside from one private conversation with his eldest daughter when they realized that Bethany was going to be a mage. Perhaps he had a similar conversation with Carver; she's never known, and never will. But somehow none of the rumors or warnings, even the ones from her father, not even the stories she's heard from Anders over the past few years or the things she's seen for herself, have encapsulated the severity of Circle life quite like this. Seeing that this possibility existed in Anders' life and couldn't be grasped, and how that must have shaped him. Those three years of resistance begin to make a bit more sense.
"You're not one for accepting the unbearable, no," she says, smiling a bit, because neither is she. "If he was able to help you with it even temporarily, I'm grateful to him. I wish I could have known him. He was your first, I take it? And no, that doesn't bother me at all. I have another woman in my past history, come to that." Her hand stops tracing patterns, rests on his lower back. "How did it happen? If I can ask."
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Date: 2011-12-28 03:04 pm (UTC)From:"Tell me it was Isabela, and I'm afraid I'll need to have words with her, just to be on the safe side. I've waited years for this and it's my turn now; I'm not inclined to share." He pulls her closer with the arm that isn't tucked under the huge down pillow he'll never think of as his. "You're warm," he notes, appreciatively. "Why are we on top of the covers, instead of under them, again?" Changing that would require some wriggling about and some rearrangement, and he's quite comfortable where he is, thanks. He'll just have to cozy up for more warmth. A terrible fate.
"You can ask, but only because you're you. I told Bethany a very, very little, when you all were still living with Gamlen, when it seemed she might be considering turning herself in to the Circle. I wanted her to understand what she'd be losing. I think that to some Blight refugees, the Circle wouldn't sound all bad, compared to what they'd been through getting here. You're sheltered, you're clothed, you're fed, there are Templars around who could fight off any darkspawn or, I don't know, bogeymen. Never mind that the selfsame Templars will happily throw you at demons," and there's a little snarl in Anders' voice now, and he forces it back, instructs himself to behave. Karl shouldn't be remembered this way, he should be remembered for himself, for the good things about him, not for the fact he lived his life under constant Templar oppression.
Bethany, that's where he left off. Yes. "The pressures were obvious even to me, very much on the outside of things, and I thought that if I didn't say anything, Bethany might turn herself in just to give you one less mouth to feed, with Gamlen pressuring your mother about money, and the two of you fresh out of bloody indentured servitude, and I had to be very clear with her what she'd stand to lose if she did this. I didn't talk much about Karl. A little more about Senior Enchanter Wynne, and what everyone knew, that she'd had a son who was taken away. All children born to Circle mages are taken away in infancy, you know. Other people I knew, things that had happened to them, Templars taking a fancy to them — I didn't go into very much detail, even so. I had ways of getting around those kinds of problems, for myself, and I told her what they were, too." That advice essentially amounted to You can't rape the willing. And a little bit of Do you really want to become me? Because it's not as much fun as I let on. Bethany was innocent, and sweet, and she might have a farmgirl's earthy sense of humor at times but she wasn't cut out for Circle politics. Anders is not sorry she became a Grey Warden, if the choice was between that and eventual Circle confinement.
None of this answers the question Hawke actually asked. "You want to know how ... things happened. Between me and Karl. I take it you're not asking about the mechanics of the act. Is it that you want to know about the specific occasion? Or how it all began? Or how it is that a dissolute rake like me would seek out some serious graybeard? I'll tell you right now, that was premature gray you saw, and it wasn't gray back then to begin with."
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Date: 2011-12-28 03:33 pm (UTC)From:There's a twinge of pain at the mention of Bethany, though it's fainter now. Leandra has almost forgiven Hawke for taking her younger sister into the Deep Roads, and for the choices she made there; whether Bethany can forgive Hawke or Hawke forgive herself is another matter, though she knows that the if only game is a dead-end path. At least Bethany is alive, even if she is lost to them. And if she's unhappy in her new life, there's at least the hope that her life will change to make her happy again in time. Given the choice between time and no time, Hawke knew what to pick.
And Anders is entirely right in his judgement that Bethany might have chosen to hand herself in voluntarily; she'd brought up the subject to their mother once (and only once, given Leandra's reaction), to Hawke a few times. Hawke had been able to talk her out of it with various arguments every time, but wondered if those arguments would hold if she weren't to hand. One reason why Bethany had been brought with her to the Deep Roads after all.
Not now. Too painful, too serious for now, for this time. They've discussed this before, will discuss it again in the future, but not now. Hawke tries to turn the conversation back to a lighter topic. "I want the story, of course. Young, reckless Anders chasing--it was you who did the chasing, then?--the older, more experienced man all around the tower. Did he take some convincing, or was it a case of catcher-turned-caught?"
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Date: 2011-12-28 03:53 pm (UTC)From:A pause. He traces the line of Hawke's shoulder, his finger an imaginary pen, her skin the parchment. Idly he draws little glyphs on her shoulder blade. "He knew that it wouldn't be doing me any favors to go easy when the stakes were low. Even when he was being stern, he was really being kind. And I'd seen so little of that, in anyone, for ages," Anders admits, and there is not a lump forming in his throat, and he does not have to swallow hard. "I knew one way to show my gratitude. This will sound dreadful, but I was horrified when he was horrified. I assumed it was the done thing, you see. Everyone talks about their favorite and least favorite of the apprentices and enchanters; everyone claims they've gotten by with something perhaps they really haven't, or that they've earned some special grace, so they can feel special, for a while. And I knew the way he looked at me, and I thought I knew what that meant. Imagine my consternation when Karl Thekla very gently picked my hand up off his knee and deposited it upon the desk. The maneuvering I had to do even to be sitting on his side of the desk, to make that move ..."
Is she going to laugh? Anders has to laugh at his younger self, a little. "Well, then he'd just made it a challenge. I could have let it go, before that. Not after."
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Date: 2011-12-28 04:38 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-12-28 05:14 pm (UTC)From:Anders has disappointed Karl too many times, for too many reasons, for there to be anything much funny in that, the double entendre notwithstanding.
"So eventually we were working together. He wasn't that much older, little more than a handful of years; the way you saw him, the Gallows had changed him, aged him beyond his time. They had no right —" Anders' hand clenches into a fist behind Hawke's back. He's silent for a moment.
He doesn't know whether he can finish this story without ruining something, casting some shadow across the evening that can't be dispelled. It's the middle of the night, he's not inclined to pull on his pants and head back to Darktown, and if he tried, Hawke would probably point out very sensibly that this is the hour for roving gangs with silly names to be waylaying solitary travelers. Anders forces his hand flat, lets it rest in the curve where Hawke's back dips in and yields to the outward swell of her (amazing, incredible) hip. Soaks in the warmth of her skin.
"Anyhow. There was one time, we were making some salves that turned out to be rather convenient, and I asked Karl, is it strange for you, to be working beside me when I used to study under you? And he said, I wouldn't call it strange, it's how the Circle works; you'll be teaching soon enough yourself, and then your students get older. I hadn't gotten that much older, mind. He was deflecting, and I wasn't about to let him get away with that. I took his wrist, and I said, You've done me a disservice. You haven't taught me everything you could. The look on his face, I don't think I'll ever forget it — as though I'd burned him." The barn burning, but it was an accident, an accident, no one was supposed to get hurt.
No one was ever supposed to get hurt.
"I'd really gotten to him. No more evasion. He said it straight out, more honest than anyone in the Circle had ever been. I can't love you, he said. It costs too much. I should have taught you that." Perhaps it does sound too much like Varric's stories. The Circle mages do a lot of reading. Karl might have planned out what to say in this eventuality, Anders has no idea. All he knows is that it happened, in this way, and no other. "Well, what was I going to say to that? I was never as kind as Karl, otherwise I'd have let him go. I said to him, Who said anything about love? And then I kissed him, very smug, probably smirking, I was so damned proud of myself. For about thirty seconds. Then I was the one being kissed, and I couldn't be smug in the slightest."
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Date: 2011-12-28 06:01 pm (UTC)From:Though perhaps she has some healing abilities of her own after all; perhaps that's something she can give him. Or if not healing, at least comfort, understanding. She listens, feels the moment of tension as he speaks, the deliberate release of it, the way he uses her skin and presence to ground himself to now. Eventually she takes his hand from her hip and brings it to her mouth, kissing it in silent, brief gratitude that he's here, trusting her not just with this story, but with himself. That he's finally let himself love her despite all of this.
All she says is, "Turned the tables on you, did he?" There's a quirk of a smile. It sounds a bit familiar. Teasing, goading, and flirting with Anders had become...not routine, but second-nature, to a point where even though she still wanted a response beyond more banter she had no real expectation of getting one, not after three years of hedging and refusal and reluctance. His sudden capitulation and that starving kiss had caught her by surprise.
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Date: 2011-12-28 06:45 pm (UTC)From:"The only time he ever said a word, I'd gotten involved with this apprentice transferred in from Orlais, she'd been a troublemaker where she was, fairly strong Resolutionist sympathies. Karl and I didn't see eye to eye, politically, and I thought that was the problem, or else that he didn't like my being with a woman, someone he couldn't match or best." They had a tacit understanding: No matter how many lovers I take, you're the one I want most, better than anyone else. Not love. Preferential treatment. "That was the one time he had to speak up. As pretty as you are, he said, you ought to know it isn't you she wants. I thought that was comical, really, coming from Karl; he had less interest in the Circle's romantic intrigues than anyone else I knew." Which was part of why Anders had to be the one to play the field, to confuse the trail.
Anders clears his throat. "This is something I did tell Bethany. Resolutionists, you know, want mages to be free of the Circle completely. They're the main faction supporting the mage underground. And one of the principles they have is, the more mages there are, the harder it will be to ignore their plight or suppress them. The more mage children are born, the more power we'll have to fight for what should be ours. I can't say Karl was right in what he thought or feared, but he could have been. In essence, he decided what she wanted was to ... carry my talents over to the next generation. Posterity, and all that, in a literal sense. It's ridiculous this should ever have come up, but it's the one time he ever asked me to stop seeing someone else. I did cool things off a bit with her, to keep him from worrying too much — he was a world-class champion at worrying. But I got to know other Resolutionists through her, and I wasn't in the Tower for much longer after that. Not as a permanent resident. Being in the cells doesn't count."
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Date: 2011-12-28 07:19 pm (UTC)From:She forces herself to let go of the idea. From the way he's phrased things it didn't happen, might not even have been more than a suspicion on Karl'es part. And Maker's name, they've only been together a few days. She has no right to be possessive in this respect, particularly not of things that happened long ago, before they ever met. That's getting off-track and then some.
The political aspects of the idea don't surprise her. She's heard a bit about Circle factions here and there, more than a non-mage would usually manage to learn, and there's a logic to the idea of solving the mage problem by making a lot more mages. The sheer cold-bloodedness of it is still a bit sickening to her, however.
Hawke calms her breathing and settles back down next to him, looking for something else to concentrate her attention on, though what else there was in this bit of the story isn't terribly encouraging either. And it's not as though she can ask him to get back to Karl, skip to the end; she knows the end, how devastatinly painful it was, how wasted. That's why she wanted to know the beginning as well. "In the cells, huh. I take it that's a result of one of the infamous escape attempts rather than something more risqué." Dark humor to approach still dangerous subjects, but things she also very much wants to know, has wanted to know and been unable to ask for years. "I take it Karl disapproved of those, if you had different political leanings."
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Date: 2011-12-28 07:40 pm (UTC)From:Anders kisses Hawke's forehead, again. The same place where the Tranquil brand would go, he thinks, despite himself, and shudders. Part of the justification for allowing himself to be with her, to love her, to let her love him: she's not a mage, she will never be subjected to that.
"When they put me in solitary confinement, that was the end for Karl and I. It saved us from all kinds of unpleasant discussions we'd otherwise have needed to inflict on one another, I suspect. I hated being alone, thought it was the cruellest sentence they could have imposed, and Karl thought they were doing me a favor, going lightly on me. They don't want to make an example of you, you idiot. They just want you to stop giving people stupid ideas. That's what he claimed to believe, anyhow, the one chance we did get to talk before they locked me up for a year. It wasn't as bad as you might think, hardly the stuff of martyrdom — there was Mr. Wiggums the cat on that floor, and I wasn't being starved, and I had books, and I knew half the guards already so there were chats every now and then, sometimes shouting matches if it was a guard I didn't like. But it was like torture to me, all the same. If it took becoming a Grey Warden to keep from ever going through that again, by the Maker a Grey Warden was what I'd be. I didn't plan on becoming a Grey Warden, of course. But I don't regret it. Or the same, for Bethany," he tells Hawke firmly. He knows there's hard feelings there, will always wonder whether Bethany blames him for the hardships of her new life, too.
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Date: 2011-12-28 08:01 pm (UTC)From:She can't find anything to say in response to that, to any of this. All she can do is kiss him. Which she does, deep and emotional, as her arms wrap around him with a silent promise: Never again. I will never let anyone cage you again. Even if it means taking on the Knight-Commander and every Templar she has.
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Date: 2011-12-28 08:18 pm (UTC)From:He lets her kiss him, unsure why that is her response to hearing all of what she's just heard, most of which hasn't cast Anders in a very good light. He likes being kissed, so he's not going to object. His arm is trapped under the pillow and he'd like to return her embrace, so he rolls them both a quarter-turn, pulling her atop him, careless of the weight, and twines his arms about her waist. She did reinvent kissing, he thinks, after all, whether she'll admit it or not. It's certainly different to kiss Hawke than to kiss anyone else.
So, of course, he has to tell her that, which means he has to break off kissing her. "You did some kind of arcane research in Lothering, I'm sure of it, just to develop unique kissing abilities. An elven courtesan sprang out of concealment in a haystack and taught you everything she knew. That's got to be it."
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Date: 2011-12-28 08:57 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-12-28 09:08 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-12-28 11:32 pm (UTC)From:She shifts position so she's half on him and half on her side, using his chest as a pillow. It's a bit more comfortable for storytelling than holding herself above him. "Let's see, my sordid sexual history, hmm? Not that sordid, really. Downright prosaic." She makes a vague gesture above their entwined bodies, a sketch of a horizon. "Picture, if you will, a small farming community, and in it a fairly gawky young girl named Marian. Looks a bit like me but with much longer hair, usually pulled out of the way or braided, which makes it easier for her to stick her nose into everyone's business. Which she does without shame." Hawke grins at her imagined younger self. It was a good childhood, for the most part; she enjoyed being Marian.
"Something of a mischief-maker, forever getting into trouble, and forever curious about things." Some things never change. "And on that note, picture if you will a fairly ordinary farmboy named Lonny, who wasn't anything particular to write home about but who tended the animals on his uncle's farm carefully, instead of kicking them when no one was looking like some of the other town brats, and who had rather nice brown eyes, and who was sweet, if quiet. And then picture a hayloft and a certain amount of experimentation that took place here and there over several months."
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Date: 2011-12-28 11:39 pm (UTC)From:"I'm picturing the farm boy. He's nowhere near as dashing as I am."