Archive of Our Own

There are days, long and hazy and full of the foul, hot-tar smell of futility, that Carver knows the Maker has well and truly abandoned His creations like a child abandons a bunch of puffy, bug-eyed guppies, leaving them to flail about senselessly until someone mucks up the water supply and they all go arse-over-teakettle and bite it. Maybe that’s how it’s meant to be. Or, maybe it’s not. It isn’t something he thinks of too often, because philosophy falls into the poncey realm of I Don’t Know, Go Ask Garrett and cannot be smacked into submission; it’s the sort of rumination better suited to one with a stronger grasp of the Chant and its cavernous, totally-not-suggestive depths. Someone with far, far too much time on his pasty hands. Someone who is sitting across from him and nattering at Garrett “Beautiful” Hawke about something that requires a lot of table-slapping and Disapproving Snorting. Carver can hear the capital letters.

He wouldn’t think about it. It’s just—well. Today is one of those days. He studies the cards in his hand and tries to school his face into the shape of something a normal, untroubled person would wear, which Bethany always said made him look like he had a bad tic.

“Trouble, Little Hawke?” Anders has this thing he does with his nose and the corners of his mouth, where Carver can’t tell whether he’s smiling or sneering. “You’re all twitchy.”

Carver folds. Anders laughs. Things that have gone right today:  absolutely none.

Beside him, Fenris snorts. Whether it’s meant for Carver or for Anders he doesn’t know, though given his general disposition and the look of extreme indigestion that crosses his sharp face whenever it concerns Anders, he’s inclined to think it’s the latter. Fenris is staring at the cards in front of him, frowning as if they have just done something inappropriate when he wasn’t looking and he’s not about to let it happen again; Anders does not deal him in for the next round, and Carver folds immediately.

Fenris snorts, again. Carver huffs. Snort, snort, hrfff, hrfff, “Meeting of a real brain trust over there, by the sound of it.”

Anders smirk-sneers at them from across the table like he hasn’t just interrupted the first conversation Carver has ever had with Fenris while Varric ignores them the way only Varric can and Garrett looks amused and contemplative while also managing to show all his perfect teeth in a winning Garrett Hawke smile. It’s disconcerting. It’s unnatural. It makes Carver feel small and inadequate and slightly nauseous, which is ridiculous because it’s just Garrett and his stupid face, so he watches Fenris pick at a piece of parchment from the corner of his eye while they discuss poncey, magey things and Varric beats them both soundly.

“No, no drinks for me. Got big plans with Justice tonight, I’d hate for him to get all consumptive and jealous.” Garrett and Varric laugh; Carver, irritated and bored, takes one of Fenris’ ripped-up parchment pieces and writes something before pushing it very discreetly toward him.

What a tosser, it says.

He’s seen Fenris leafing through books Sebastian gives him, asking him about certain passages, certain descriptors; he’s not sure whether it means Fenris is excessively fond of books or he’s trying to find very cutting remarks to make certain abomination’s reproductive organs shrivel up or, possibly, if he just wants to make a really good quiche. Fenris pulls the parchment slowly toward him with his long fingers, stares at it, and blinks several times. Then, he seems to forget it completely. He does not acknowledge Carver; he does not write him an answering Yes, Carver Hawke, I was just thinking the same thing but with much more profanity and more inventive adjectives, like they’re a couple of schoolgirls discussing the firm rippling of a young farmboy’s buttocks. Carver doesn’t know why he did it, suddenly, is mentally hurting himself very badly for doing it, but as he’s leaving, Fenris is right there outside The Hanged Man, not looking at him but not moving away, either, and that’s not quite as bad as being treated like a dim and misbehaving child.

“What is that word,” he says. The parchment is crinkled gently in his fist. “The last one.”

Oh, Carver thinks, eloquently, miserably. Oh.

“Tosser. It’s ‘tosser.’”

“Oh,” Fenris says, his frown intensifying and then smoothing out like a crease in a page. “Yes,” he adds, and then, “I agree.”

There is a silence, not a comfortable one, which Carver rushes to fill with the sort of bumbling, elephantine gracelessness only a nineteen-year-old boy can:  “I’ve, you know, I’ve got a book. Books, I mean. Scads of them. I could—you know. Show you… some of them.”

Fenris stares at him. His eyes are very green; Carver blinks enough to make up for the fact that Fenris does not, not even once. “If you want to. You know.”

“If you wish,” Fenris says at last, rough and noncommittal, turning the tight lines of his shoulders away from Carver, toward Hightown and home. “It does not matter.”

These are the first words they speak to each other.

There are some things Carver has never learned, things like how to sip tea delicately and how to have a conversation like a normal person or not shoving apple pie in your face like a deranged and perpetually starving wolf. These are things, he thinks, that should come easily to most people, normal, socialized people who do not have any strange tics and do not laugh at inappropriate moments. Normal people who would not be hovering over Fenris’ door, having already knocked five times, wondering if they should just go in. Normal people who would either come back later or go on inside.

But how very, very not normal he is, Carver thinks, turning the knob of Fenris’ door far later than is proper to find Fenris standing there too, his hand already on the other side of the knob and looking both mildly bewildered and mildly concerned, and, oh, he is probably waiting for Carver to say something.

“Book,” he blurts, holding up three of them as proof. “Books, I mean. I told you I had some.”

“I see,” Fenris says, blinking slowly, and Carver has just realized he’s forgotten his coat and it’s cold and he’s probably gone all splotchy, and why is Fenris frowning like that, has he never seen a madman? “Come in.”

Carver hesitates for no reason at all, and then steps over the threshold and closes the door behind him and follows Fenris up the stairs. This is the part where they would make small talk. Have a conversation. Do normal things like normal people. Discuss the weather or that escaped convict or the children.

“I like your—” What does he like? The air in the mansion is stale and there is something that looks very much like blood all over a few tiles. In fact, Carver is certain it’s blood. The dust motes are coordinating a waltz in a patch of sunlight. “Your bed,” he says, which is unmade but is also the only thing in the room, including Fenris, that doesn’t look vaguely sinister. He turns splotchy all over again.

How abnormal he is, he thinks, how bizarre, always wanting one thing in his head but never quite sure what his face or his mouth or his limbs are doing on the outside. They should stick him in a zoo.

“Will you stay?” Fenris asks him. Carver opens his mouth and closes it again, trying to read whether Fenris actually wants him there or not. He can’t tell. He can never tell, until it’s far too obvious and far too late.

“I mean, if you want,” he says, very carefully, trying not to disturb the dust motes.

Fenris looks at him and does not blink. Someday, if he ever gets any of this right, Carver is going to ask him how he does that; for now, he tries very hard not to blink either and succumbs after approximately four seconds, which is around the time he realizes he really ought to say something.

But then, Fenris says, “I do, if you wish.”

“Sure,” Carver says after he manages to unhinge his jaw, which is actually a little much. “I like those books, anyway. Had them for ages.”

“They look well-used,” Fenris agrees. He runs his fingers across the dull grey spines, spears a faded gold letter beneath his nail, and Carver sits down near the hearth, trying to warm his hands and toes and not look so much like a gangly marionette. “Ferelden’s finest, I assume?”

Carver bristles, suddenly aware of how tattered and waterlogged and bland his books look. Brown oatmeal sludge in Fenris’ hands. “Fereldens don’t beat around the bush. Straightforward, you know. They say what they mean. We’re not like poncey Orlesians.”

“That might explain why I have never heard anyone extol the intricacies of Ferelden poetry.”

“We write poetry,” Carver protests. “You just don’t have to dig thirty feet to get to the meaning.”

“Meaning, you write children’s nursery rhymes and Isabela’s favorite limericks.” Fenris is smiling. It’s a nice sort of smile; Carver has never seen him use it before and it might be nice to see it again, which might be why he feels his shoulders relax.

“I don’t even know what a limerick is.”

“It is what Fereldens write in lieu of proper poetry.”

“If I’d known you were going to go all Orlesian on me I might not have stayed,” Carver mutters, with no real bite. Fenris is smiling a little more; no, he thinks, he probably would have stayed. “Are you going to tell me one or not?”

Fenris does, and the words come a little easier after that.

Bethany Hawke was the sort of girl who learned her favorite poems by heart, even the ones that didn’t rhyme, even the ones that made Carver wonder what went on in a girl’s head that she could understand that, that she could feel it swimming underneath her skin as the words slid across her tongue. It was not something they shared. She would read one to him late at night like it was as much a part of her as her magic and the pull of her muscles, or her eyes would twinkle and she would quote something wicked and silver-sharp at him, and he’d just ask, What does that even mean?

With Fenris, picking apart poetry line by line in the clammy light of his stolen mansion, Carver’s eyes catch on every word, on every dusty-sweet turn of a page, and he hates himself for the way the stanzas suddenly jolt through his mind, the way it burns in his throat.

“O heart, o heart, if she’d but turn her head,” Fenris reads. It is the fifth time, searching for the meaning in the shapes; he does not look up for Carver. “You’d know the folly of being comforted.”

Fenris writes his name, Carver thinks, the way he does everything else:  thoroughly, vigorously, with little regard for pen or parchment or any breathing body in close proximity. He writes it so forcefully the first few times it leaves permanent scratches on the table, and when he’s learned to hold the pen a little more delicately between his fingers, it still bleeds out in inky splotches across the parchment but looks more sure of itself, like it can hold itself up between the musty pages of a book if it has to. Like it can endure.

“It’s a strong name, you know,” Carver tells him. He supposes he doesn’t need to be here for any of this; he can just leave Fenris with his books and his parchment and Sebastian will help him through it, but Fenris never tells him to leave and Carver likes the way he works his jaw when he’s tasting a new word, the softness of his mouth when he parses a phrase he likes. He also likes wine, which Fenris has in spades. “Fen-ris. Fenris.” It’s fennel and iron between his teeth.

“Car-ver,” Fenris mimics. “Carver Hawke. A name made for battle.”

“Name made for slagging off in Lowtown, more like. Only battle I’ve ever seen was a little like getting trampled by a whole lot of unholy somethings. Which it was, by the way.” He drinks his wine straight from the bottle like Fenris does, because Fenris does not have wine glasses and because it’s comfortable like this, easy in a way drinking very old and very expensive wine would never be anywhere else, or maybe with anyone else.

Fenris gives him that incomprehensible, crooked look Carver can never hold for long. It makes him feel like Fenris is staring at his bones, watching the way they fit together awkwardly and judging their misshapen, pointy visage. Carver suddenly has the extremely unpleasant thought that maybe Fenris can see through people, too. “No,” he says, slowly. “Not just one.”

He snorts. “I give you one book of poetry and you get all profound on me.”

There is an answering snort. “Perhaps you just don’t have an ear for it.”

“I’ve got an ear for lots of stuff. Fen-ris.”

“But no ear for the subtle and esoteric.” Fenris has picked up the pen again, regarding his parchment with something vaguely resembling trepidation. “It is tragic, really. Car-ver.”

“What’s that mean?” Carver asks.

“Ear? Tragic?”

His lips twitch up into a smile and he laughs a little. Fenris is funny. He likes it when Fenris is funny, and Carver thinks he secretly likes being funny, though he’d probably disembowel you and skip rope with your entrails before he ever admitted it. “Esoterical.”

“Esoteric. Something which requires knowledge not everyone has. Mysterious.” Fenris moves his pen in broad strokes across the parchment, pausing after a few and looking up again, shadows creeping into the hollows of his face. His nose looks very proud, Carver decides, or at least as proud as a nose can get. He takes another drink. “Alternatively, something Carver Hawke does not understand.”

With anyone else, it might have made him sour and might have sent him right out the door, but it’s Fenris, and his eyes are bright and he’s writing something Carver really wants to see; this is where Carver wants to be. This, probably, is something he wants to keep, and he can acknowledge this in spite of his nineteen years and in spite of always feeling just this side of socially acceptable. Maybe that’s a little seed of maturity, sprouting its way up his spine. Maybe it’s just the wine. “Just because I don’t get all feely about it. You’ll be on ripping bodices and kissing with the force of all the stars in the sky before long.”

“You sound eager.”

“Oh, yeah. Can’t wait til you’re reading me sexy bedtime stories.”

In a moment of brief and knife-cold panic, he wonders if he might have said something irrevocably and unbelievably stupid, but Fenris still has that soft, set look about his face, his pen lying on the table once more, so it’s probably all right. Carver sits by the hearth feeling like a lump of runny jam. Other people, he thinks, are at best unknowable and at worst terrifying, all edges and jagged tongues; they are best approached with warmth and possibly good food, with the open-palmed peace and sweetness their strange animal needs require, but he’s never been good at that, always all knees and elbows and embarrassing noises, so he offers Fenris what little he can:  distance, and the time to mold it into what he will.

“What’s that, there?” he asks, lumpy jam oozing on the floor.

A heartbeat, and then another and another. “Come and see,” Fenris says, and Carver does.

Carver Hawk, says one line obscured by heavy black slashes of ink. Carver Hawke, says the one beneath it, as strong and bold as the lines of Fenris’ own above.

He leaves a note with Fenris late one evening, resting neatly beneath his half-empty bottle of wine:  Do you want some more books? Do you also want some beef and cheese sandwiches?

Two days later, he finds an answer stuffed in the heel of his left boot:  Yes. I do. Yes, I also do. I will see you toomorow tomorrow.

He reads it half a dozen times before he snuffs out the candle in his room. The words are blotchy, but solid, sure.

Carver wonders if Fenris reaches out a hand to touch the sloping letters of his note. Carver wonders if he doesn’t.

Once upon a time never sounded as good as it does in Fenris’ rumbly baritone, not even when he was young and he believed it. Fenris hurries over the words, eager to get to the next and the next, always rushing toward the end; there is hunger in him like sea storms, like the setting sun, a compulsion to turn every page a thousand times over as if it is something lost to be found again, to be reclaimed. Carver thinks that maybe it is, but he never says so, and he never comments when Fenris picks a story he’s already read three times and lets his fingers journey through the pages to their worn, familiar destination.

“I used to want to be a knight,” Carver tells him one evening, full of wine and unfortunately chunky mashed potatoes. “Then I wanted to be a sailor. Then a giant squid.”

“In that order?” Fenris’ eyes are very bright, like they know something Carver doesn’t, or maybe he’s just been thinking too hard again. Carver privately hopes he’s not going to use this as blackmail material, but that wouldn’t be very Fenris.

“More or less. Some days I still want to be a squid. Nothing to worry about but eating fish and messing with ships. And scaring pirates shitless.”

“In Tevinter, they eat squid. Tentacles and all. With very complicated sauces.”

“You wouldn’t eat me,” Carver protests.

Fenris still has that odd, wild look in his eyes. “With the proper sauce, you’d probably be palatable.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me. You keep interrupting my stories.”

“Like you don’t know how it ends,” Carver yawns. “You’re supposed to be reading me dirty bedtime stories, remember?”

He meets Fenris’ sideways look head-on and feels his whole body go still like breath caught in his throat. “Are you sure you’re ready for me to read some of those words, Hawke? Is your youthful virility prepared for it?”

“I’ll teach you right now,” he says, more confidently than he feels, and attempts a leer that probably makes him look more like a confused wildebeest than anything. For some reason, he feels too big for his own skin; he doesn’t meet Fenris’ eyes.

“We will work our way up to it,” Fenris says with all the confidence of a man who knows he will soon read filthy words fluently in new and exciting languages, his eyes back on his book, the light golden on his high cheekbones as he reads. “For now, we have a princess on her way down a tower and I believe she may be with child. Who knew.”

Once upon a time always makes Carver feel strange, like there is something inside him lit and hissing away, like he is this boy or he is this man and he cannot find the surface in the violent waters between. Dragons and wars and princesses caught up in the reality of dragons and wars and princesses, and somewhere in all that there is Fenris’ voice, fierce and wind-weathered, breaking through the fog. Carver watches him with both his hands gripping the book and sees a man who was a boy who has found all the things he never knew he loved, truth and beauty and comfort and the belly-deep thrill of the enchantment that comes with it all, of all those things he lost and found.

“Once upon a time,” Fenris reads, with more conviction than he’s ever read anything, “and that is how all stories should go,” he adds, and Carver believes him.

“But what do you mean,” Fenris asks, very slowly and for the fourth time now, “when you say he is a wanker?”

“I mean—oh, Maker. I mean he’s a wanker. He’s an ass. He thinks he’s always right and he thinks his hair doesn’t look like something messy made a nest of it and then shit in it and he’s a wanker.”

“But that word has other meanings. Different connotations. Different contexts.” Fenris stares at him, his eyes wide and innocent, and, in this insane, increasingly humiliating moment, Carver thinks they are beautiful. “Explain.”

“Well, not exactly,” Carver starts, and then, “Oh, Maker.”

“Do you imagine that? Do you think of the abomination, with his belt undone—”

“No! No, no, no, stop, no, Maker’s arsehole, no, I cannot believe you, you, no.” Carver works very hard on turning purple, but Fenris is laughing at him, Fenris is smiling with all his teeth and his shoulders rolled back with humor, and Carver would forgive him any trespass.

On a thick, sickly humid summer afternoon, Carver comes home sweaty and achy from the Wounded Coast to find a letter on the desk:

To: 

The Right Hon. Carver Hawke

Lowtown

Dear Hawke,

I have never written a letter and I make no garantees guarantees as to its quality. I hope it finds you well. I think that is what I am supposed to say. I hope you also like your new title. Sebastian taut taught me some for letters and I like this one.

Do not let it go to your head however.

I bought orlesan Orlisan Orlei Orlesian poetry today. If you are not a coward you will come read it with me. I have biskuits and choko chocolate. No not the bitter kind.

Until then,

Fenris, esq.

To:

His Barefoot Majesty Serah Fenris

Hightown

Dear Fenris,

No one would ever know you’ve never written a letter before, you’re a natural. In fact it’s suspicious, if I didn’t know better I’d say you’ve been writing all sorts of people and holding out on me. If it’s letters you want, I’ll write you loads from down here on the sunless continent of Lowtown. Good to get some perspective, you know!

Orlesian anything and poetry are bad enough on their own but they go together like cabbage and mustard. We’ve talked about it, I know you remember and I KNOW you did this on purpose. I can’t believe I’m letting you do this to me, but I’ll be there. With something potent and bracing. We can take drinks every time the poet says something melodramatic and overwrought. We’ll be drunk by the third page.

I will see you soon,

The Right Hon. Carver Hawke

“Drinks, drank, will drink,” says Fenris, glaring down at his own writing with a furious kind of wonder. This, in itself, is like learning a language within a language, a very choppy, tripsy language which Carver does not speak, and he doesn’t know why Fenris is trying. It’s lunatic. “Talks, talked, will talk. Dreams, dreamed, will dream.”

“Sloshes, sloshed, will slosh,” says Carver, unhelpfully. It earns him a Grave Warning Stare. “Kills, killed, will kill.”

“Am, was, will be,” Fenris says, pausing to write each one. “You might learn something, if you would pay attention.”

“I know lots of words. Just not, you know. Intimately.”

“I want to devour them,” Fenris tells him. It is a ferocious, knife’s-edge thing; Carver does not think he understands. “I am, I was, I will be.”

Carver says, “We are, we were, we will be.”

On a chilly, moonless night, when the first crimson maple leaf of autumn falls to the ground, Carver makes tea with an obscene amount of cream and sugar and flips through Fenris’ new books, some borrowed from Sebastian and Isabela and some bought from Hightown merchants. The bookshelf in Fenris’ room—or at least the place where he keeps his things and his bed, which oozes such an air of Class and Respectability now he’s cleaned it that Carver can’t bring himself to call it a bedroom—is a dusty mess of parchment and ink bottles and books in no semblance of order, stacked on their sides and shoved into shelves, their dog-eared pages and makeshift bookmarks sticking out to speak their own sort of language. The one Isabela lent him ages ago, an ancient Nevarran epic which features both a giant squid and a knight, is displayed conspicuously on the mantel; it was difficult, but Fenris finished it, and also snorts more than usual now whenever someone mentions squids. 

Carver, for his part, always pretends to be much more unamused than he actually is.

“You just keep that there to mock me,” he says, jerking his chin toward the book. Fenris stops mid-page turn and looks up, the fire catching in his eyes in a way that gives Carver momentary heart palpitations. He wonders if Fenris’ eyes can give people heart troubles, too, or if he can see all the veins that might be plucked like gooey violin strings. “I think you’re just jealous of my knightly aspirations.”

“Your squidly aspirations, you mean.”

“I think I detect the distinct clang of jealousy there,” he says. “Don’t worry, I’m sure there are other beasts of the sea for you.”

“No beasts of the sea, I think,” Fenris says, eyeing him over the rim of his teacup. “I’ll leave those to you and your verdant imagination. You have precious enough time left before you are dragged, kicking and screaming, into adulthood.”

Which makes Carver feel young and stupid and nineteen years old, for young and stupid and nineteen-year-old reasons. His cheeks get a little puffy. “I’m not—”

“No, I know you’re not,” Fenris says, as if he anticipated it, and maybe he did. He is still watching Carver and he suddenly wishes his face wasn’t splotchy and he could ever hold that look at all. “I envy it, if I am honest.”

There is a difference between envy and jealousy; they do not really mean the same thing at all, though Carver imagines they are second cousins who probably shag during holidays. Fenris went over it one night, his voice a little hoarse and his fingers stained with ink, and Carver, suddenly, wants to reach out and run his knuckles along the swell of his jaw.

Something warm settles in his belly and then twinges in his chest, which isn’t altogether comfortable and keeps making him all itchy inside. He shifts in his seat.

“I should give it back to her. She might loan me some bedtime stories for you. You’ve been so patient.”

“You could just buy those in Hightown, you know,” Carver says. “They’d love you. Strong elf with strong eyebrows and a sword like the mighty oaks who finds time to read about doomed love and other girl-things. Actually, half of them are probably already in love with you in secret.”

“Doomed love makes for good reading,” Fenris retorts. He’s doing that thing where he inclines his head and lets his eyes slip over Carver from the side, which is impossible to decipher in any language known to man, elf, dwarf or Orlesian. “Most love does.”

“I guess it would,” Carver says, feeling tense and hot, as he reaches for a bottle of wine. His arm brushes Fenris’, who was apparently feeling the same. “Sorry,” he mutters. Fenris has arms like the mighty oaks, too.

Fenris picks his book up and starts again, and they drink, and Carver’s heart thumps dents into his chest, and they don’t mention it again. “What is the late November doing,” Fenris reads, halting and careful, “with the disturbance of the spring?”

When he pauses, Carver thinks he’s puzzling out another word, but he turns to find Fenris watching him, his lips slightly parted as if in gentle, foggy contemplation. All of Carver’s glands itch.

“Why wouldn’t it?” he asks. His knee is very close to Carver’s.

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Why wouldn’t love make for a good story?” He’s not blinking again. Every night when Carver leaves, Fenris must blink like a madman and run water over his eyes.

“I never said it wouldn’t,” Carver starts.

“You insinuated. Somewhat derisively. Very unbecoming, for a squid.”

“I just—I mean, I wouldn’t know,” he says, and it comes out a little heavier than he means. It usually does. “I don’t read stuff like that and I wouldn’t know.”

Fenris looks down his long, proud nose at him. “Your family,” he says.

“I love my family,” he agrees, “even the ones who act like their smallclothes are on too tight. It’s not the same as that, though,” he says, mostly to himself, but Fenris hears it all the same. “I don’t know. I just—I wouldn’t know.”

“You should—you deserve,” Fenris says, and stops. His eyes are back on his poem, not seeing the words, and Carver is grateful and sorry for it. “I am told most giant squids find mates, eventually.”

Carver barks out a laugh and feels his knee knock into Fenris’ under the table. He wants to stick his head out the window and breathe in the cold until the air freezes his lungs into prunes and he wants to run his thumb over the bridge of Fenris’ nose, his lips, his chin. He tries to laugh at the insanity of it through a mouthful of wine but just ends up drooling on his shirt a little and wondering, wildly, hilariously, madly, whether Fenris tastes like his name does.

Drooling wine and tasting names and glands that itch, and it’s not even the first time. The mark of the demented, Carver thinks darkly, and he has joined their ranks at the tender and delicate age of nineteen.

“Trying to learn to use words,” Fenris continues, “and every attempt is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure.”

Carver Hawke feels that one throbbing somewhere deep down in his esophagus.

Home, Carver knows, is a noun. Nouns, Carver also knows, are Very Important Things. Nouns are your mother, your best friends, your lucky blue smallclothes. Nouns are your brother’s pleased smile, a note folded into your pocket, your sister’s favorite poem, a promise you made on a summer night, under a full moon. Nouns are memory, and memory, Carver thinks, is home.

He tells Fenris this, once, when the days are short, heavy with frost and ashy grey skies; they’ve just finished scrubbing the floor down and the whole room smells like a pine tree and a bushel of lemons murdered each other and then bled out explosively on the tile. It’s enough to drop a small dragon, but with Fenris reading softly by the fire beside him and the flecks of snow flickering outside the window, Carver really doesn’t mind.

“Not really a place, I mean,” Carver explains when Fenris frowns at him. A young vagabond had found home again, and Fenris, his wanderlust still unsatisfied, wondered what home even was. “It’s like. A feeling, I think. I don’t know.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” Fenris says, and Carver balks. “Tell me.”

“It’s just—like Gamlen’s house. I live there, and my family is there, but it’s not home, you know?” Fenris looks at his bookshelf. It’s much less dusty than it was, but every bit as discordant and jumbled. “Home is what—it’s everything you love, I think. It doesn’t have to be brick and mortar.”

“And what it is you love?” Fenris asks. He is still staring at the wall. Maybe they’re going to scrub that next.

“You’re making me sound like a big girl, you know? Next you’ll be asking to see my diary.”

“You are not a girl,” Fenris says. “Girls have the foresight and focus to keep diaries, which you lack. Tell me.”

“Maker, you’re so—fine,” Carver grinds out, shoving his hand through his hair and sending up a silent prayer that Fenris will not laugh at him, though Fenris has never laughed at him before. Well—yes, he has, loads of times, but not when it’s important. Not when it concerns these fragile, jelly-legged things Carver pushes away to the back of his skull so no one else can see. “I loved—I love my sister. She used to separate all her stockings into winter stockings and summer stockings. And she loved poetry. She had soft hands. I love her,” he says, again, because loved is finite and distant; loved makes it feel like there was some set beginning and an end, like he could ever stop at all. Bethany once told him a story about a royal family who were all named for stars because they burned so hot and so fast, and then, in violent flashes of bright light, they were just gone, burst and shattered in all their beautiful, volatile glory. Ghost-like pinpricks of what they were, hardly real at all. Carver clings to the present tense.

“You would have liked her,” he says to Fenris. “She would have liked you. Probably would have asked for your interpretation of Monsieur de Petit Prick’s latest ballad or whatever.”

Fenris has gone very still, his jaw clenched the way it is when he wants to say something but doesn’t know what, or how. Carver watches him from the corner of his eye and just keeps going, because by now he knows it is what Fenris wants. “And I love the way dogs smell when they’re wet, and apple pie, and frogs making that weird frog noise—not ribbit, more of a, a croaky rrrrrrrr—and clean laundry, and my mother’s gravy. Half-moons and that feeling you get when you’ve slept just enough but not too much. And fuzzy blankets and laughing just because. The stories you read, I guess,” he adds, and he doesn’t have to look at Fenris to know he is fiddling with his wine cork right now. It’s what Fenris always does when he’s upset or uncomfortable or nervous or when he just doesn’t know what else to do. He shifts from foot to foot; he digs his fingernails into wine corks and folds bits of parchment into smaller bits of parchment.

“I love all that. And I love the memory of it—how you can just piece a moment together and it makes you feel better. I’d love it no matter where I was,” Carver says, suddenly feeling too old, and too young, and not nearly poetic enough to explain the way his rough-edged thoughts work, especially when they still seem to be boarding the ship as they’re leaving his mouth. “That’s—home, I guess. That’s what it means.”

“Sorry, that didn’t make any sense and I told you it’d be soppy,” he grumbles, chancing a sideways little glance at Fenris to find that he is looking around his room as if he has never seen anything quite like it before. The change is nearly imperceptible, but Carver catches it, the lift of his eyebrows, the sudden quickening of his breath; his eyes move from the empty vase on his table to his unmade bed to the piles of books and parchment and the chest in the corner, down to the disturbingly clean floor and, slowly, up to Carver, who feels his stomach leaping around in its latest bid to escape and join a three-ring circus, but he does not look away.

“You invalidate everything you say, before or after you say it,” Fenris says. “It is infuriating.”

“Well I’m real bloody sorry about that,” Carver snaps. Or, at least, he tries to snap but it comes out more fussy than anything else.

“You should be,” Fenris says, but his mouth is soft, his eyes creased with amusement and a bright, languid thing Carver thinks might be fondness, or maybe something else. “I think home, maybe, is a thing you carry on your back. If so, I may yet learn.”

Home is a noun. Fenris is a noun. Carver is a noun. When he puts all three together, and when he remembers slippery floors and falling snow and the warped shapes of shadows at dusk, Carver could be anywhere in the world, and he would still be home, come what may.

Early in the morning, Carver dreams one of those early morning dreams:  the vivid, unhinged sort that are so disturbingly surreal in magnitude you wake up and spend the entire day questioning the dark twists and turns of your mind and your apparently tenuous grip on reality. Years later, they still knock against your skull from time to time, as if to let you know they’re still around and you are a very, very naughty boy with some crucial marbles loose like misfiring cannons, just waiting for a chance.

“Long have I burned with my desire for you,” Fenris is saying, except, he’s Fenris and he’s not, because he is the Maker. “Is our love to be forever unconsummated? Will you refuse my hand, my blessing, my very soul?”

“I could no more deny you than forget to draw breath!” Carver is vaguely aware that he is wearing a dress. A very thin, loose dress, white as chalk and yet somehow emitting a faint golden glow; he is purer than the freshly laundered souls of a thousand virgins. He knows this because of the halo. “No, no more! No more! I love you; yes, lo these many years, we have shunned our desires, but no more! I ache for you, only for you! Say it:  say you love me, and I am yours,” cries Carver-Andraste.

“Ah,” murmurs Fenris-who-is-the-Maker, who is very close and very solid and whose steely scepter of love is poking into Carver-Andraste’s hip, “but what is it, love? What poetry does it sing to you, dear lady? Tell me, then, what you mean when you say it, and the ground below and the skies above will tremble at our coupling!”

It’s all very much like a book Isabela slipped into his back pocket one rain-drenched afternoon. In fact, it’s exactly like that book, except Carver has no bosom and no gentle, womanly curves, but he is definitely feeling the distinct stirrings of divine lust in every fiber of his saintly sinews.

Fenris-who-is-the-Maker has his hands on Carver-Andraste’s waist, waiting for an answer. This, blessedly, is the moment Carver wakes up, his quilt kicked down to the end of the bed and his eyes bulging almost painfully out of their sockets. His smallclothes are very, very tight.

Carver thinks, Mzzmsh. Grrazzzgnm. What?

Across the room, Garrett heaves an enormous snort and flops onto his belly, oblivious to the cataclysmic explosion that has just taken place inside his younger brother’s head. Carver thinks, Wait, what? Is that even legal?

Carver finally registers that his smallclothes are very, very tight. Carver thinks, Oh, fuck.

After the nightmare in the slaver den, Fenris’ words start to curl in on themselves, harsh, claw-like things so brittle they snap in the air around them, crackling even in his silences. Carver wants to touch him, wants to wrap his arms around him and hold him so tight he could take away all that knowledge, all that sorrow, everything that makes his whole body settle into that thin, heavy line of crumbling stone. Carver wants.

Of course, he doesn’t know how, all knobby knees and boyish hesitation, but Carver Hawke is old enough and wise enough by now to know, as only Carver Hawke does, that you can’t do that for people, anyway. You can never give them back all the things they lost. You can only love them.

What Carver does is bring Fenris poetry, everything he can get his hands on. What Carver does is listen.

“Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave,” Fenris reads. His voice is suited to it, aching and alive with a fury too great for his bones to hold. “Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”

A note, folded into Carver’s sleeve over cards at The Hanged Man with an extreme lack of discretion, very nearly resulting in a Snide Comment from Anders:  I have new wine, straw berry pie, and new Nevaren Nevarran stories. Also, I enjoy commas.

Its answer, pushed gently into Fenris’ hand underneath the table:  You always know what I want to hear, punctuation and all.

Conversation, Carver has always thought, is a strange, senseless thing. Sometimes you know exactly what to say like some animal instinct, and your muscles move accordingly; sometimes, you think things out meticulously in your head before you ever shove them off your tongue, and they still don’t congeal into the nice word-pudding you were going for. You kick them back and forth like apple cores, hoping they will settle and grow into a nice tree or possibly some shrubbery.

Or something.

“Know what we should do? We should get rid of that mushroomy… thing down by the front door,” Carver announces one afternoon, just as Fenris inhales enough dust to choke a whale and sneezes. He has a nice sneeze, which is absurd for too many reasons to consider. “I think there’s a toad living under it.”

“It stays,” Fenris sniffs. “I might name it.”

“The fungus, or the toad?”

“Both. They belong as much as we do.”

Carver pauses, dusty rag in hand. “There’s a story, about a girl who kissed a toad and it turned into a prince. Kiss it and maybe Sebastian’ll pop out and take you away to his fancy toadstool kingdom.”

“It was a frog. And, no. I’m not putting my mouth on it,” Fenris says. “Toads don’t want to kiss you.”

“Yeah, but they might,” Carver says. Fenris gives him one of those curious, sidelong looks. “You’d be a fucking king. Probably an Orlesian one.”

“Just because I have the patience for poetry. The depth for it.”

“You’ve got something, and it’s making my nose itch,” Carver grumbles. “I’d kiss it. I’d lick its feet.”

“Perhaps you do have depths,” Fenris amends, his lips turned up the way Carver loves. “Unplumbed, perverse depths, but depths they are. Though you can do better than toads,” he says, all mysterious and knowing, and there goes Carver’s stomach again, trying to leap up his throat to strangle him.

Hrrfff, says Carver. Snort, says Fenris, and that’s that, then.

Yes, he thinks, it’s strange, how the words sprout up around them; the way he could tell anyone about the breaths Fenris takes between sentences, the way the bones in his wrists move with his gestures, his crisp, precise enunciation. How easy it is, to cultivate their own dialect.

“Par les soirs bleus d’été, j’irai dans les sentiers,” Fenris says one balmy spring evening, sounding admirably fluent, and Carver chokes on his wine. “Picoté par les blés, fouler l’herbe menue.”

“Sorry Fenris, I don’t speak ponce,” he says, trying very hard to make his voice sound normal, because Fenris and Orlesian poetry definitely do not go together like cabbage and mustard. They go together like bare skin and silk, champagne and tea roses, chocolate and more chocolate. His face is doing that thing it always does when Fenris stands close and reads him poetry, lately. It makes him look like a constipated goose.

Undeterred by the holy war being waged just below Carver’s lungs, Fenris continues. “Rêveur, j’en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds,” he murmurs. “Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.”

“Where did you learn that,” Carver croaks. He has no idea what Fenris is saying, but it is melting his insides. Orlesian. In that voice. Coming out of that mouth.

“Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien,” Fenris says as Carver’s liver dissolves into his large intestine. The soles of his feet are sweating through his socks and he has forgotten how to use his limbs. “Mais l’amour infini me montera dans l’âme, et j’irai loin, bien loin.”

“You went out and learned that,” Carver sputters, as soon as he remembers (roughly) how words work, “on purpose.”

“J’aime les mots,” says Fenris, smiling sideways at him, wicked and close and beautiful, the slope of his jaw and the twist of his lips saying everything Carver needs to know, and then—that’s it; he feels, for the first time, something inside him shift and galvanize, his blood pulsing with the words, with memory, with truth, with love. Ignition. All his stars aligned. This is what I’ve been missing.

“J’aime les mots,” Fenris says again, and Carver, his tongue thick with the poetry of living and breathing, brushes his wrist with his fingers, saying everything he knows, somehow, Fenris is waiting to hear. “Qu’un brûlant amour. Mon cœur est plein d'amour,” Fenris tells him, and who knows where he learned that, either; Carver can hear the meter of their silence, feels it echoing in his skin with Fenris’ name, rhyming with everything.

In the spring, the trees burst forth with soft greens and the lush promises of life, and Fenris rolls words over his tongue like pomegranate seeds, his windows thrown open to the warm, wild winds that gust through the house and upset the pages of his books.

“Renitent,” he reads, each syllable caught between his teeth. “What does it mean, Hawke?”

“You know I’m illiterate,” he grumbles as the curtains smack into the side of his head. “Go on, then. Expand my vocabulary. We both know you want to.”

“Resistant. Recalcitrant.” Fenris lifts his eyebrows and angles his lips downward, an expression he seems to reserve for Carver when he’s being deliberately obtuse. “Stop hitting my drapes. Come here.”

Carver sits beside him on the rug and tries very hard to ignore the way Fenris’ voice shifts across his skin, the way he smells like dust and leaves and lavender. “Implacable,” he points out, his long index finger smoothing over the page. “Not appeasable. Not to be pacified.”

“If you’ve already eaten a dictionary, why are you going over them again?”

“Not for me,” Fenris says without looking up, but Carver can practically hear the slow pull of his lips. “For you.”

“My meager army of words isn’t enough for you, then?” Fenris snorts. “Let’s have it. Teach me all your impractical words nobody ever actually uses. I’ll say them to Garrett and watch him go cross-eyed.”

“Callow,” Fenris says, though he is not looking at his book. “Inexperienced.”

It tastes bitter and brittle in Carver’s mouth, and when he says so, Fenris blinks at him, his mouth making that weird, faltering shape Carver loves, like it can’t decide whether it wants to smile or frown and settles instead for trying to squirm off his face. It’s wonderful.

“Ridiculous,” Fenris says.

“I know what that means,” Carver interrupts.

“And how does it taste?”

If he didn’t know better, he might think Fenris was mocking him, but even when he does he’s so gentle about it, so easy, that Carver can’t be angry with him even when he wants. “Like tea with lemon in,” Carver says. Fenris is looking at his mouth, and every nerve in Carver’s body seem to be stretching themselves into noodles.

“Why?”

“Because tea with lemon in is ridiculous. But I like it. I don’t know.”

“Charming,” Fenris says, meeting his eyes, bright and startled with something. “Strange. Amusing.”

“Too many at once.” Carver does not look away, not even when he feels Fenris’ fingers at his elbow. Another gust of wind, and he shivers to his toes.

“What am I, then?”

Fenris’ face is alive; Carver has never seen him look so young, never so beautiful as now, his eyes like a flash of summer heat, the wind in his hair. “Iron and fennel and sunflower seeds,” Carver answers; they are so close. They are so close. It would be so easy to blame it on the wind.

In the end, when Fenris presses his mouth to Carver’s, he tastes a winter-sweet longing that is his and his alone, filling him like a river overflowing.

There are certain words and phrases not a single soul has ever understood, things with no proper syntax, their sharp barbs wrapped up in gauze and plaster so you don’t have to see the blood underneath. It’s so complicated. It’s my fault, really. You deserve, you would be better off—

Je ne sais pas, je ne sais pas, the Orlesians would say. Made of maybes and mistakes and I-don’t-knows.

Unrequited, Carver thinks; Unrequitable, Fenris knows.

He finds a note in the pocket of his trousers after he’s spent an afternoon doing laundry for his mother and being generally peevish and difficult, like a small, cranky donkey. Gamlen is off pissing away their money; Garrett is off Being A Hero, and that leaves Carver confined to the house and to his mind, which is not an especially pleasant combination.

I would speak with you, it says, soggy and blurred. Carver leaves it to dry in the windowsill, in the sunlight, and and wonders what words Bethany would sow for him, if she were here.

Time and distance do funny things to Carver’s voice. Words feel sharp and heavy in his throat; his inflection is rough, unpracticed, like he’s been living in the wild for a few months and doesn’t remember how people do these things, when to smile, when to click your tongue in sympathy as if you understand even when you don’t. He feels that everyone around him suffers for it, but none more than himself and the awkward, spotty teenager who lives perpetually in his stomach.

When Fenris opens the door for him as the sun is pouring out in blood-red rivulets across the sky, Carver’s whole body aches with want and fear and all the misshapen, unhelpful things he tries so hard to stamp down. He wants to say, It’s all right. I promise not to run. It’s all right.

What he says is, “I missed you.”

Fenris, his voice all slivers and shards but stronger, still, than anything Carver has ever known, asks, “Will you stay?”

Carver says, “I will.”

Freedom, defined in Fenris’ personal lexicon, is the ability to give as much or as little of yourself as you choose; it is refusal and acquiescence, it is greedy and giving, it is knowledge and it is ignorance. It is, above all, the accumulated choices you make for yourself and only yourself, the small and the large; it is all those things which make up your bones and blood, and it is all those things which are you.

He explains this to Carver, who almost, almost, thinks he can understand. “Who are you, then?” he asks, still unsure of his limbs, still unsure of everything.

“I am good with a blade and I am learning new words,” Fenris says. “I have a clean floor and a toad living in my house. I like apples. I want to learn Orlesian.”

“You’re on your own, there, you know,” Carver tells him, like he wouldn’t buy Fenris every volume of poetry in Val Royeaux if he could afford it. “I know about five words and they’d probably get you nowhere, unless you’re a right tit.”

“When I am stronger in this—” he gestures around the room, his ink-stained fingers falling on parchment and his teetering piles of books, “—then I may teach myself. I may yet teach you.”

Fenris smiles at him, very softly, and it makes Carver feel so much like a prize-winning red tomato he has to turn away. “Might take a long time. I’m still stuck on squids and knights, remember.”

“I suffered through that, did I not? I am a patient man.”

“In your own warped little head, maybe.”

Snort, says Fenris. Hrfff, says Carver.

Things are going to be fine.

Fenris weaves his fingers between Carver’s, tentative, ready to cut and run at the drop of a pin, but Carver holds him there, as gently as he knows how, and just breathes with him; sometimes, that is all you can do. “I like apples, too,” he says. “I like poetry, a little, which is mostly your fault anyway. The rest, I can figure out.”

He tugs Fenris a little closer, and he thinks maybe this is what freedom is, after all:  you, and another breathing body there beside you, pushing forward through the dark.

Love is such an utterly irrational word no one can even properly define it, dictionaries rendered worse than useless in the face of its profound simplicity and its uncomplicated labyrinth of contradictions. Almost every book he has ever read, and every poem and epic Fenris has devoured, makes at least a passing mention of it, and they all make it seem so—so lovely, like being crazy about someone isn’t actually crazy, like it doesn’t make your insides start thinking they, too, can become Antivan trapeze artists, like it doesn’t make you breathless and drunk with your combined stupidity. Love makes you delusional; it jumbles your words, makes you think unnecessarily fond things about your great slobbery git of a brother’s beard, makes you expect, sometimes, that your sister is still going to open the front door and smile your favorite smile and start speaking to you in rhyme, violets in her hair and blueberry juice on her lips.

It makes Carver Hawke sit on Fenris’ floor on a warm late summer night, and it makes his blood swell with the broad, even sound of his voice and the shape of his words. It inflates his heart-rate with the rhythm of the poetry he reads. It makes him think, I love Orlesian ballads.

“Always for the first time, hardly do I know you by sight,” Fenris reads, his knee resting against Carver’s, his shoulders astonishingly comfortable. “You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window.”

Carver watches him watching the pages, lets him take his wrist and turn it over in his hand, his thumb skipping over the veins there; they are both of them so strong, he thinks, and strength is such a difficult, terrifying lesson to learn, undeserved and unnecessary. He knows this. Fenris knows this. Carver shuffles closer, smells iron and cedar bark, familiar as a wound.

“There is, by my leaning over the precipice of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion,” he continues, “my finding the secret of loving you, always for the first time.”

“Orlesians,” Carver sneers. Fenris still has him by the wrist, and Carver clings to it like the last leaf of autumn. “Bunch of ponces.”

“Indeed. Somewhere, somehow, I am sure they seethe knowing how Carver Hawke has yet again misinterpreted their masterpieces.” Fenris turns to Carver. His eyes are green, green, green, and they steal the breath straight from Carver’s lungs.

Love is irrational and stupid and so horrifying, sometimes, it gives you bladder control problems. It is a heart learning to beat in excitement and in fear. It is nameless, ageless, heedless; it is home and memory and world and life, and it is the courage to guard those borders to the death.

It is the mercy Carver finds when Fenris takes both his hands and leans in until his nose is pressed against his cheek. It is time, distance, a safe silence in the dark. A wrinkled note. A favorite word. Uncharted territory, and all things found within.

“Touch me,” Fenris whispers, and Carver does.

Late at night, when the first winds of winter billow down from the mountains, Fenris makes a pillow of Carver’s stomach and reads until the morning light bleeds onto the horizon. Old stories, the sort everyone knows, the ones that never change with the years, easy as anything. Carver loves them all.

“And if they haven’t died, they’re still alive today,” he finishes, his fingers skimming across the binding.

“You know, that’s slightly morbid when you think about it,” Carver says, idly twining his fingers through Fenris’ hair. “They’re still alive. I mean, so what? So are we.”

“So are we,” Fenris says, and suddenly, alive is very poetic.

“One more, then?” he asks, and Fenris smiles and turns the page.