fadewalk | RP: Marian Hawke (hawke_groundzero

At some point in all those hours of kissing (well, they might not have been hours, but they had certainly gone on for a while...), Logan must have dozed off, curled up with Anders in his arms. When he woke, he had no idea how much time had passed, because the light in the room was exactly the same. His mouth was dry, and Anders wasn't in his arms. He licked his lips and stretched an arm across the bed next to him and felt...nothing. The bed was empty.

Logan sat up abruptly, immediately awake. "Anders?" he said quietly, voice hoarse with sleep and strained with alarm. Nothing. He pulled a palmful of fire into his hand to light up the room further. Anders' clothes were there, right where he'd left them, even his shoes and Logan's hoodie. The door to the room hung open about a foot. He went to the door and leaned out. "Anders?" he called again, louder this time, but there was no sign of him. "Shit. Shit, shit. Oh, shit." He paced back inside the room and dressed with shaking fingers, trying to think where Anders might have gone. Could he have been pulled back without Logan? They'd arrived separately; maybe they would be taken separately. The thought shot a burst of panic through him. He hadn't even asked Anders for his number, or his address, or anything. He'd meant to. Had wanted to say 'Tell me where you live, love. If you get dropped back home as quickly as we got here, I don't want to have to wait to find you again.' But he'd lost himself in the simple wonder of kissing Anders, holding him, and had forgotten to plan ahead.

No. But the door had been open? If he'd just been taken back to their world, or...whatever, why was the door open? Logan gathered Anders' clothes in his arms automatically without paying attention to what he was doing and wandered back to the door, wondering if the tavern floor might be dusty enough to show where Anders might have gone. It wasn't. "Think. Think, Logan," he muttered, sidestepping tables to peer over the railing down into the tavern at large. Maybe Anders sleepwalked? That would make the most sense. But why hadn't it woken Logan - he was a deep sleeper from years of bunking in the same room as several other men at once, but he wasn't usually deep enough of a sleeper that a lover could completely disentangle themselves without him noticing. He paced. If Anders was sleepwalking there were all these stairs and battlements; there was no telling how he might hurt himself. Logan needed to find him. He hurried to the door they'd come in, thinking perhaps retracing their steps might be the best place to start.

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Hawke was restless. She wouldn't say bored. Spending a few days curled up with Varric, listening to him tell stories about hipsters and soap operas and kitten memes wasn't boring. But despite the fact that they'd been sleeping in the same bed since he reappeared, the likelihood they were going to cross that line seemed ever further away.

Still, a restless Hawke was a dangerous one, at least to property, sanity, and restful slumber of anyone within a mile radius, so she was out. Creeping. She was stiff and out of practice and her strength was coming back with rest and feeding, but she needed to get her muscles on board this program.

So... Creeping. The rooftops, mostly, eaves, gutters, climbing in and out of windows that she could reach. She had been at it for more than an hour and was currently scaling down the outside of the main keep tower from the library window that she'd had to wriggle to get through the casement of, and her arms were starting to shake.

"Balls," she murmured. She managed to get a good toehold in the mortar, taking some of the pressure off so that she could turn her head and look down. Straight down didn't look so good. But if she got a little to the right she could make it onto the edge of the walkway that led from one of the guard towers (it had a hole in its roof and wasn't even worth the effort). "No dying, that's the rule, Marian," she murmured and began inching sideways.

She was going to have to throw herself across the archway gap. No problem. Nope. Not even one. She steeled herself, wondering if she broke both her legs if Anders would heal them without telling the dwarf, and then swung herself that direction as hard as she could.

She missed.

Well not a full miss. More of a miss-ish sort of thump and scrabble, a squawk, catching the low wall in her gut and starting to slide. Someone was rushing toward her though, a dark-skinned young man carrying a bundle of clothes, something familiar in the eyes. "Oy! Give a girl a hand?" She slipped a little further and was hanging by her overtaxed fingers.

Logan was so caught up in looking about for Anders, and only Anders, that he didn't catch sight of the darkhaired woman clinging to the side of the tower until she squawked after missing her jump. He started, noted her clinging barely to the edge of the wall, and dropped Anders' clothes to run over. He grabbed her by the forearms and heaved. "I've - got you," he grunted, a flash of surprise filling him when she was much heavier than she looked. He had just enough time to think she must be made of more muscle than he'd expected before he was tugging harder and then wrapping one muscled arm around her waist when he'd pulled her up far enough and helping her the rest of the way onto the walk.

"Jesus!" He exclaimed, panting slightly. "How did you get up there? Are you all right?" He peered at her, concern in his bright blue eyes.

Hawke wasn't sure she'd ever seen anyone with precisely those color eyes before, the same color as hers, other than Carver. And he was gone. Long gone and never forgotten. Maker, he was as big as Carver too. Hawke gave him a gentle pat on the chest, reassuring, while her other hand checked the pockets of his strange... jeans. Varric had called them jeans... without even thinking about how weird it was to try to lift the valuables of someone who had just saved her life.

"Oh, I'm fine," she answered with a smile. "I climbed out the window." She hooked a thumb behind her at the window that was a full further story up. She leaned back, looking him up and down. "So. You're not from around here, are you?"

Edited Date: 2015-09-21 07:21 am (UTC)

Logan caught her wrist as she pulled her hand out of his pocket. He might not have ever been that quick-fingered himself, but he knew the tells when someone was trying to take his shit. He'd been around enough blocks, been on his own enough. You learned things.

"Didn't your mother ever teach you it wasn't polite to pickpocket people you've only just met?" One corner of his mouth tugged upwards, and he tsked. It was weird, strange women feeling around in his pockets would have normally put him on edge for more than one reason, but where there should have been tension or suspicion he only felt amused. He looked back at the window she indicated and arched a brow. "What are you, some kind of daredevil boulderer, or something?"

He tilted his head, finally noticing her eye color as well, and that was fucking bizarre. There were a lot of blue eyes in the world, but it wasn't every day you saw one that was exactly the same vivid shade as your own. Even the shape of them seemed about the same as when he looked in the mirror. That was freaky. "Uh, no, not exactly," he answered, too distracted to give a better answer.

Edited Date: 2015-09-21 07:43 am (UTC)

Instead of looking angry that she'd been caught (out of practice, practically numb, overtaxed fingers weren't doing her any favors), Hawke looked delighted. Especially when he didn't seem angry when he made a joke about her mother.

"Well she tried." Hawke's smile was a little bit sad, but Leandra was a dull, distant ache by now. Same as Carver. Turned out a body could get used to losing things if it happened often enough. "Never did stick though. Cat burglary is a hobby these days, but you never know when you'll need to make a dashing escape out of a tower window, have to get my climbing fingers back in shape."

She took a step away from him and circled on slow silent feet, studying his clothes and strange shoes. Very similar to what Varric had worn back from his eluvian sojourn. She held out her hand as she came back to face him. "I'm Hawke." It seemed safe enough to introduce herself that way. If he wasn't from a world in which she was Champion, anyway.

Logan chuckled. "Oh, of course. You never know." He tried not to let on that he'd caught the flash of sadness in her smile when she mentioned her mother; sometimes it was better to pretend his eyes weren't as keen as they really were, to spare people the kinds of questions they really didn't want to answer.

He had to resist the urge to fidget as she circled him. It wasn't a predatory sort of circling, though it might have been, but it was still a little uncomfortable, the level of scrutiny she was giving him.

"Um." He laughed a little at the coincidence. It was a coincidence, right? He held out a hand. "Nice to meet you, Hawke. I'm, um. Also Hawke."

Hawke's hand was warm and firm, a little rough from where her callouses were scraped by the stone of the tower, but despite the slender bones of her fingers, there was power there. And murder. When called for. Her eyebrows lifted and her grin split wider. "Well that explains the eyes then!" She squeezed his hand, a comforting press instead of a hard, intimidating grip, and tilted her head as she stretched up to inspect him a little closer.

"I haven't met another one of us yet, though Anders said there were a few. Are you the one in love with Fenris? Not the same Fenris Anders in love with, obviously."

Logan was aware of the strength of her hand in his big one, which was good, he thought. He was much less likely to crush her hand in that case, something he tended to be overvigilant against doing. He squeezed her hand back a little more firmly than usual.

"It - it does?" His brow furrowed in confusion. The mention of Anders brought his original mission and all his concern and panic rushing back to the forefront of his mind. His hand tightened on hers again, this time with a touch of desperation. "Wait, you've seen Anders? Oh, thank god. Where is he? He left without any of his clothes, I though he might be sleepwalking or something might have happened to him, or-" he ran his fingers through his short curls with a hand that was starting to shake, and then realized she was still talking.

"Um. I don't..." He gave an unsteady laugh. "In love with Fenris? What the fuck. No. I'm not - no. Anders isn't in love with Fenris either. What are you - what."

"Hey, woah there, kid." Hawke wasn't doing an impression of Varric, but there was something in her cadence that sounded like him when he was trying to keep her from going off half-cocked and stab happy. She put her hands on the big guy's shoulders, reaching up to do it. "Maybe sit down a second? I didn't realize exactly how new you were to all this."

She tilted her head to side as she considered how to approach, blue eyes bright and birdlike. Her grasp of reality had been completely nil when she'd first arrived, the explanations sounding like so much Fade gibberish. What was real and what wasn't was giving her less trouble, and obviously she'd managed to step away from Varric's room long enough to get herself in trouble, but she still wasn't... completely together.

"I'm Marian. You have a first name too that hardly anybody ever uses, I bet?"

"I need to find Anders," Logan protested, now that he'd remembered his purpose. But she was giving him that calculated look like how best to calm him, a look Logan was pretty sure he wore himself regularly and he sighed. He still didn't know anything about where they were. Maybe it would be good to find out what he could? He bit his lip and tried to ignore the anxiety in his stomach that was little more than a steady chant of 'ANDERS ANDERS YOU NEED TO FIND ANDERS' and reluctantly settled for leaning against the wall instead of sitting down.

"Um, Logan. I'm Logan. But yeah, most people call me Hawke."

"Okay, Logan. We absolutely are going to find Anders." Hawke let him go lean. That was probably good enough. As long as he didn't faint and hit his head. Herself, she'd never been much of a swooner... but he was pretty different.

She grabbed up the clothes he'd dropped, and handed them over. Yeah she could see them fitting a skinny mage with too many feelings to have room for common sense. Of course they were clothes that plainly didn't belong in her world so he must be talking about a new Anders. "So, are you a... what did Varric call them... are you a hipster?"

She hopped up to sit cross-legged on the low wall opposite him, unperturbed entirely by the empty space and thirty foot drop to the lower courtyard behind her. She was right on the edge too.

"Okay," Logan said, finding that he believed her. He took Anders' clothes back with a murmur of thanks.

"What?" He gave a startled laugh at the question, brows furrowing. "No? I'm not pretentious enough to be a hipster. I don't have the time to put into that kind of studied condescension. They're all 'ooh I will only drink out of glass mason jars, not water bottles like normal people' and 'I raise goats and have compost bins in my backyard because I care about the environment' and 'my weekends are all spent attending poetry slams.' I mean, really, who has time for that shit? Who? I've got enough with the three jobs I'm usually balancing at any given time."

He frowned, rubbed at the back of his neck. Of course he would go off on a rant about hipsters, of all things, when he was anxious, and really could be spending his time doing better things like finding his...his boyfriend. Oh.

He squinted at Marian. "How do you even know what a hipster is? You look like you're..." he waved a hand at the castle around them. "From...Thedas, or...whatever."

Hawke's grin could not get any wider. She had no idea what a compost bin was (Varric's tall tales must've missed certain aspects) and masons needed jars for what exactly? But her eyes were sparkling with humor by the time Logan ran down.

"Varric told me," she answered simply, rocking a little on her perch. "So, here's the thing. We're sort of in the Fade. Not the scary Fade with demons and giant mountains to climb and all your fears chasing you like a boiling horde of horrible spiders wearing helpful nametags. It's Fade-adjacent?" She ran her fingers through her hair, trying to focus. She didn't need to freak him out about all that other shit, really.

"So there's this mirror, old elven junk, an eluvian that apparently exploded or... something. And it broke the walls between different versions of reality. A bunch of people wound up here. We're... echoes of each other in ways. Some of the echoes are really true, where the people look the same, sound the same, mostly have the same stories. Some of them are... sort of loosey goosey. You and me for example. I'm a Hawke, you're a Hawke."

She narrowed her eyes to check to see if he was following, or if he was buying it. "My father was named Malcolm, my mother was named Leandra. Carver was my giant baby brother. Bethany is my sister. They were twins. Sound familiar?"

Logan nodded as she spoke, the gears of his mind visibly turning behind his blue eyes. "Okay, eluvian, weird magic mirror thing, I remember that from the game. Different realities. Okay. I mean, that's like, many-worlds theory, isn't it? Which you are saying is real. Um." He sucked in a breath, muttered, "Give me a moment," and clutched at Anders' clothes a little tighter.

Finally he said, voice strained, "You would think that suddenly acquiring magic and being able to light shit on fire with my brain would be the weirdest part of all this, but nope. You realize we're living the proof of decades of theoretical discourse, right? That's - that's straight out of some science fiction, right there."

He focused on the last part of what she had been saying. "That's my family," he said, highly skeptical. "So what...you're supposed to be...me...if I had been born white and a woman? And in some fantasy world. And liked dangling around off tall things. Okay, but no offense, aside from the fact that your eyes are like weirdly identical to mine, and your family has the same names, we don't seem to be that much alike?"

Hawke let out a heavy sigh and shrugged her shoulders. "Look, I don't know how to explain it to you better. Do you want to meet my Varric?" She pursed her lips. "I assume you've got a Varric. Hawkes need one. Or there's an Anders who's already here. Is yours possessed?" she asked gamely, pushing off the wall.

"Come on. Let's go take a walk, see if we can find your lover, and maybe bother someone who cares more about the intricacies of the whole thing." She held out a hand, beckoning Logan to come along. "

"Yes, I have a Varric; he's my best friend," Logan said, still sounding a little baffled. "I mean, if I'm understanding correctly, I'm not sure that there's more to explain? I'm just saying it's weird. And a little freaky. I. Hrm." He straightened and moved to follow, and then the possessed comment hit him.

"Possessed? No? Or...he wasn't..." He nearly dropped the arm full of clothes. "Shit. That's a thing here, isn't it? For mages. Which we are now. That explains the weird dreams I was having..." It only took him a couple of quick strides to catch up to her and then he asked, anxiously, "You don't think he could have gotten possessed while we were sleeping, and that's where he disappeared to, do you?" He tried to ignore the fluttering in his stomach when she called Anders his lover; he wasn't used to just telling random strangers about his love life, but he supposed that was what happened when you were running around with an armful of clothing claiming your boyfriend disappeared from your bed. She didn't seem to care, though? So that was...good.

For some reason Hawke made this little face when Logan called Varric his best friend. It wasn't a wince, or a smile, or a smirk. Her face just did things sometimes, apparently, and she'd have to be looking in the mirror to even describe it. Ignoring it and carrying on seemed like a very fine plan.

"Right. No magic. Limits your avenues of possession." She sucked on her teeth as she opened the door into the rotunda and gave a little half-curtsey, graceful and precise, but somehow still ironic, as she ushered Logan through.

Did she tell him the truth that it was possible and freak him out even though it was really unlikely? She shrugged. "Well, in my experience with Anders, he has night-terrors. He runs in his sleep. He almost fell down a cliff into the ocean one night when we were out killing slavers on the coast. So, if I were to guess, if you were having weird demony-dreams (and don't believe them if they offer to bring your da back from the dead, they're liars), he might've too, and run off without realizing what he was running from."

The rotunda still smelled of smoke but it had the benefit of having char on the ground that showed footprints and she pointed out the plain mark of a skinny, long, bare foot with the tip of her toe. "Looks like him, hmm?"

Logan wasn't sure what the look she'd just made was, or what it meant, but he automatically filed it away to think about later, like he usually did with the interesting things he observed from people. And then she did that curtsy and that was interesting too because it was so technically correct (he thought) but it also seemed very wrong when she did it. Dizzying, that's what it was, his brain tripping along and trying to figure out what made this Marian tick, all the ways she was different from and similar to himself. He shuffled the clothes in his arms to one side so he could reach up and rub his forehead, and wished, not for the first time, that he didn't think so damn much.

"Night-terrors," he repeated, wanting to smack himself for an insensitive idiot. Seriously, how had he not woken up? "He...didn't tell me about those."

"My dad's been dead a while now," he said, not sure why he felt the need to say that. He looked at the footprint when she indicated it, remembered Anders' legs wrapped around his waist, the shape of his foot rubbing up and down his calf. His cheeks darkened. "Yeah. Yep. That looks like him."

Hawke gave Logan a squeeze on the arm, above the elbow, the kind of thing she would've done to Carver a hundred times, and gotten an elbow thrown at her tit about ninety-seven out of those hundred, a good comforting older-sister squeeze. She hadn't had anybody to mother in a while.

"But, Bethany and your mum? They're alright?" She gave him a sidelong look. She wasn't sure how these less-tragedy-and-no-magic-Hawkes worked. She hoped for his sake that it was less tragedy anyway. There was a smudge on the step leading up into the library and she walked that direction with a little frown, her steps completely silent.

Right. Being reverse-mothered by...a version of himself was decidedly surreal. Was this how his friends always felt when he was being a mother hen? It was kind of...nice...to have the tables turned.

"Yeah, they're - they're good." He turned his head to look down at her. "You said 'were' twins. What happened to your Carver?" His voice was soft. For all his brother was an ass, the thought of losing him was...unthinkable. They'd always been the closest.

On the landing Hawke's eyes were scanning for any additional smudgy sooty foot prints. If Anders had gone further up... she was worried because there were only doors to the rookery lookouts and long, cold, horrifying falls form up there. But no, that door to the mezzanine above the great hall was ajar and, yes, there was another smear of charcoal on the the stone.

"I got him killed." Her voice was quiet, absent, a sadness that she had decided was long-ago and far away, but that she felt like a knot of scar tissue deep in her chest. An ache she was never going to not feel, she just forgot to notice it every once in a while. "Darkspawn were attacking Lothering, and I was trying to get them all out, and I looked away for a second and an ogre..." She shook her head. "It was a long time ago. It isn't important right now."

She stepped out into the great hall, looking toward what should have been the choir balcony, but instead held Madame de Fer's books and settee and things. Hawke wrinkled her nose. Vivienne hadn't been her biggest fan.

Logan said, "Oh," his voice soft. He remembered Lothering from the game. Strange to think real people had lived through that kind of horror, and stranger still to think of losing family to it. He touched her elbow this time, a simple press of his fingers rather than a squeeze, very aware of how much smaller she was even if she did seem to be made of pretty stern stuff. "I'm sorry," he said, letting go. He moved towards the - was that a fainting couch? right off the balcony so she didn't have to say anything back.

"I feel like this would have a nice view if we weren't looking out into an abyss," he said, looking through the glass doors. The balcony overlooked the main courtyard, but he figured it would probably have a view of the horizon beyond the castle walls too, under normal circumstances. If...normal was the right word for a strange fantasy version of reality where he and apparently all his friends still existed.

The comforting touch on her elbow made Hawke's breath catch just a touch in her chest. She gave him a soft look as he passed her, walked over toward the window, and then she glanced away.

Hawke tried really hard, generally, not to look out into the abyss. The drop from the top of a tower to splat on a stone floor, sure... but the void was too real for her still. She shuddered and nodded, looking at Logan's profile instead. "The Frostbacks are pretty impressive as far as mountains go," she agreed. "Only the most dramatic backdrop of Vivienne's salons." She pronounced salon with an overdone Orlesian accent and a smirk.

"Okay, looks like your boy went out toward the garden and the guest wing, that direction." She pointed at another door, that led to the row of rooms that overlooked the garden. If they were lucky they'd find him curled up in an empty bed confused about how he got there. "So, you and Anders? What's that like?" Her lips twitched as she teased him.

Logan looked back with a smirk and a raised eyebrow at the 'salon.' "That's the person whose stuff this is, I assume?" He gestured at the various furnishings and hummed. They were pretty fancy digs, he had to admit. Especially considering they were set up on what was probably a fairly public balcony under normal circumstances. Curious.

He moved towards the door she had indicated with renewed focus, which only wavered at her question. "Um." Don't panic, he told himself. It's perfectly normal to talk about your relationships. If you can't even tell yourself about you and Anders, how do you ever expect to come out with it to anyone else? "It's...kind of a new development?" He managed weakly. He kept his eyes on where he was walking.

Hawke's nostrils flared a little when Logan seemed ashamed of Anders, eyes narrowing as she trailed behind him on silent feet. She didn't know his Anders, didn't know him, but it was Anders and she'd always felt protective of his obsessive idiot heart.

She considered kicking the back of Logan's heel as he walked in order to make his feet tangle together. She definitely would've done that to Carver in the same situation. Maker, Anders would've driven Carver up the wall. And now she just felt sad.

"New, huh?" She rolled her shoulders, trying to get her hackles to quit it with the rising. "Well, maybe there's different scales for that sort of thing. Naked-new is different than new-new."