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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"Um," Logan said. "Hang on. Did you just say...blowing up the Chantry? What?" He was pretty sure that was what the older Anders had said, and Marian hadn't even looked the least bit surprised. Was he the only one to think that seemed a bit...extreme?

But then. Game lore said it was Chantry dogma that wrote the mages off as less than human, and it was the Chantry that oversaw the Circles and ruled the templars who more or less enslaved the mages. And when you thought about it in those terms, in terms of glorified slavery - well. Maybe that kind of thing did take extreme measures to fight against. People wanted to think the abolishment of slavery and the Civil Rights movement had eradicated racism, but it hadn't. Marriage equality had only just become a thing, and people were already afraid with that made into law, everyone would just pretend homophobia was over. Those kinds of systematic prejudices didn't just disappear. Hadn't it always taken acts of bravery that went outside the law to fight those kinds of discrimination?

He looked at his Anders and nodded, thoughtful, waiting for the other one to answer.

Hawke looked stricken twice as Anders rolled on. First, when he said the Circles had been reinstated. That... she hadn't known. And then when he claimed he should have died. She made a low noise in her throat and lurched forward to wrap her arms around him, tightly, over his arms, pinning them at his sides.

"Damn it, Anders," she grumbled. "You're not disposable. Not even a little bit. I... I don't support the Chantry. I don't. I'm sorry. I didn't know that the new Divine put them back together again. I wouldn't have said what I did. I'm... I'm such an asshole."

She meant it, every bit of that, and she really didn't want him to be angry at her. Other than Varric, she didn't have much, and even if this wasn't her Anders, it was close enough to make her feel normal. With the added bonus of him not judging her crazy. She squeezed harder.

Anders let out a quiet grunt as Hawke latched onto him, both his eyebrows shooting up with surprise. "I-" he choked. It was unexpected and entirely unlooked for and he felt like sobbing, the steady increasing pressure of her wiry arms around him another reminder that he was alive, that he was allowed to go on breathing and planning the revolution, that he didn't have to throw his life away for his cause. He still didn't feel like he deserved it, and he didn't think that was ever going to change, but there were all these people here, a Varric who treated him almost the same as ever and a Hawke who still obviously cared about him even if it wasn't in the same way that his Hawke did, and his Fenris, slowly, gradually, opening himself up to the possibility of affection, giving Anders far more of it than he even knew he had to give.

He dropped his cheek against the top of Marian's head and just breathed for a moment, trying not to sniffle.

Logan and the younger Anders were still watching them, their questions unanswered, and when Anders could speak again in a halfway steady voice, he lifted his head and said, "Yes. The Chantry, in Kirkwall. They were going to wipe us all out anyways. The Divine was contemplating an Exalted March. Meredith was just waiting to enact the Rite of Annulment. So I struck at the seat of their power. I broke what was unbreakable. No one could pretend we weren't dying then." He looked down at Hawke. "But I'm not just Anders. We're Justice. I...killed a lot of people, innocents as well as our enemies, and we should have died for it. Their blood in the streets of Kirkwall screams out our name with every breath we still take. I've never thought I was disposable, Hawke, but the fact we live and breathe when they do not is as much an injustice as the kind we fight against."

"Of course I want to help plan the revolution. And I suppose I will, now. It's a good a penance as any." He swallowed down the tears that made his eyes gleam gold and damp and wriggled out an arm from Marian's grasp to chuck her under the chin. "All my favorite people are assholes, sweetheart. Don't worry about it."

Well, you make kissy faces at Fenris, so you must like assholes." Hawke blinked and then turned scarlet. "Didn't mean it like that." She gave Anders one last squeeze and then let him go, surreptitiously wiping her own eyes on her shoulder as she turned around.

She watched the other Hawke, the other Anders, the different ways they responded to Anders rhetoric. Interesting. Or weird. Unsettling maybe? For them to have feelings about a world they'd never lived in was odd enough, but they kept referring to the game and strange scraps of historical or political knowledge, had opinions about Templars, and hadn't Logan even mentioned Cullen by name?

"Hold on. Before any more of this revolutionizing. Can we talk about how you two know anything about this? Magic isn't real for you, but you know about it. Explain." She probably didn't want to know this, actually. The idea that their world was a story to the pair of them was making her ears ring in a way that was uncomfortable. Were they all just stories then?

More booze was the answer. She hopped back up onto the bar finished her second glass.

Anders blinked at her, torn between amusement and offense. He thought offense might be the stronger emotion, because while Fenris was indisputably as much an asshole as Hawke and himself, he was also...so much more than that. He was fiercely loyal and impossibly tender at times and he laughed at Cosa and Anders' sarcastic asides without fail.

But Hawke apologized and squeezed him affectionately and Anders shrugged the irritation away. "Or maybe I just like warriors, with all that delicious muscle tone and biceps bigger than my thighs," he quipped, raising both brows at Hawke as she moved away.

He took a deep breath and looked back to Logan and the other Anders, curious about that point as well.

"Doesn't really have to be a warrior for..." Anders coughed and shot a sidelong glance at Logan, cheeks coloring as he ducked his chin. "Ah, um, the game."

He looked pained for a moment. How did you even explain a video game to someone that had never seen a film? Or even a photograph? Did they have theater? He chewed his lip. "It's like a theatrical performance, a play, but we - the players - get to play the parts instead of be in the audience." He looked at Logan with a quizzical expression. Was he making any sense? "And in the story of the play we fight monsters, save the day, look really stupid in our terrible nipple-exposing Tevinter mage robes."

He smirked and shook his head. "Anyway, the story is set in Ferelden, during the... the fifth Blight, so we have heard some of this stuff, the history of your world there. But we also play with people you know. Fenris, Isabela, Varric... they're all our guildmates. We play together. They're real, actual people, but characters like Cullen, they're background characters, that follow a script. Nobody 'plays' them. They just exist."

He shrugged uncomfortably. "I don't know if that makes any sense to you at all, or if I should be expected to be burned as a witch presently."

Logan was giving the older Anders a look of studied focus at his explanation, turning this revelation over in his brain. He suspected he could learn some things about his boyfriend by what that kind of - sacrifice? dedication? zeal? - said about a person. It was guilt and self-loathing all wrapped up with determination and a refusal to regret, and Logan found that tangle of emotions rather fascinating. Perhaps admirable? He would have to think about it.

And then Anders mumbled about muscle tone and biceps and he cleared his throat a touch awkwardly (and also delightedly, he was not above admitting) and grinned when his boyfriend glanced at him. He squeezed Anders' hand.

"Varric would say...it's like, collaborative storytelling," Logan said, thoughtfully. "Like there's this world already in existence, the game - we didn't really create that - but we make our own characters, create their stories, and put them into that world. In our world Varric's as human as any of us, but in the game he's a fast-talking dwarf rogue, which I'm guessing is what your Varric probably is? So, yeah. Me, Anders, my brother Carver, Fenris, Isabela, Merrill...well sometimes Sebastian when he decides his gaming isn't some kind of affront to God because it means he's passionate about something other than religion." He coughed. "Yeah, we're all real people, with representative characters in the game. Everybody else, more or less, who you all seem to know as real people are just...background characters."

Hawke listened silently, so still she could be a statue, except for her eyes, ticking back and forth between them. This was unsettling. The designation between people who were people and people were not was not comfortable. At all.

"But Cullen is real," she said quietly. "I don't..." She ran fingers into her hair, elbow on her knee, and rested her head in her hand as Logan started talking about Varric as a human who only pretended to be a fast-talking rogue and a dwarf.

"And this is... this is fun?" Plainly neither of them had ever seen their brother smashed in half by an ogre, been nearly bitten in half by a high dragon, had to clean giant spider innards out of their hair. She rolled her eyes up just enough to look at Anders, her Anders, who apparently counted as a real person. It sounded like it was just their friends, the people Hawke called family in her heart, that were 'real'.

It sounded like the stories he and Karl used to tell when they were still apprentices. Anders' head in Karl's lap, Karl's fingers in his hair, reading the adventure stories they could pilfer out of the tower's libraries and eventually, when they'd read all the best ones, telling their own in hushed voices. They had been filled with good mages and evil templars, those stories; the heroes were always free, and always defeated the bad guys, and were always happy. Telling each other those kinds of stories had been one more way to escape the imprisonment that was their life, and he didn't think these two had been imprisoned, not like that, but they certainly had reacted strongly to his talk of the injustices perpetrated against mages. So maybe wanting to escape by any means possible was something they understood too.

Anders looked at Marian, and shrugged. "We are the stuff of legend, sweetheart - even you can't deny that, o Champion. Maybe it's a lot more ugly when you live it, but when it's just a story - well, Varric has always said it's a damn good one. Of course, he edits willy-nilly, so you'll have to take that with a grain of salt."

"Do you have a copy? Can we read it?" Anders glanced at Logan, smirking. "Well, I want to read it anyway. I want to know about the Hawke of legend." He looked back at Anders and Marian and bit his lip.

"Sorry." He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. It was a lot to take in, as strange for him as it was for them, and he was tired and hungry and itchy and after having finished nearly a glass of rum or brandy or whatever the liquor was, also a little tipsy. "That isn't helping, probably." He yawned and then ran his free hand through his hair. "Do you know, either of you, if it's possible for us to go home?"

Logan threaded his arm around Anders' waist again and drew him close.

"Sure," he told Marian. "It's...something that's not mundane, like your monthly struggle to have enough money to pay all your bills on time. Something to forget when you got nothing much beyond working and eating and sleeping and trying to just...keep on existing, I guess." He glanced at Anders and frowned. "God, that sounded pathetic, didn't it? Um. Hold that thought, Anders," this to the older one before he refocused on his boyfriend. "Love, you should really tell me your phone number and your address before they answer that question, because I..."

His voice died, and he swallowed before he whispered, "I would really like not to go back to that."

"You are absolutely not allowed to read anything Varric has written about me!" Hawke huffed and shook her head, eyeing Anders with comically narrow-eyed suspicion. But the tenor of his and Logan's conversation changed and she hmmed and looked over at the older Anders. "We should let them rest I think. This is a lot. Show them the bathhouse, get them a bed that isn't full of straw, and see about the weapons in the morning."

For herself she was starting to feel like she'd like to finish drinking herself to sleep, and ignore the aching strain in all the muscles she'd overtaxed creeping and climbing.

Anders hummed, most of his attention fixed on Logan when he spoke. He had the damnedest bright blue eyes, keen and certain and wanting on the younger Anders' face, and it was hard not to think of another pair of blue eyes equally afraid of being left alone, those ones less vivid and more verdant, blue and green mixing together like they said the seawater did in warmer countries he'd never seen. Don't leave, Hawke had begged, and Anders had known it was about Leandra, but it had been about more than that, too, about Malcolm gone and Carver gone and Bethany in the Circle, even Fenris - then - gone from her. It had been about loneliness, and the inability to face it, and Anders had known the look in those seagreen eyes because it was the same look he'd worn every day for years after they'd taken Karl away from him. And where it had been only about not being alone, either of them, for so long, it had become so much more, and he hadn't even realized it, hadn't even been able to accept it until the very last, and he - Maker's balls, but he missed his Hawke.

"Hm?" He looked at Marian, startled a little out of his thoughts. "Mm, yes, of course. Better bed for them. More tomorrow." He nodded.

He should go to Fenris, in the meantime, and try not to think about how a part of them was missing without Jicosa, even if Fenris didn't know it yet.

"Logan." Anders voice was a soft murmur as he listened to him talk about a life of going through the motions. He had a busy life, full of things, full of causes and classes and movement, but it lacked meaning. A reason. But he'd found it. In Logan he'd find a reason. "Of course, love. Can you memorize it?"

Without their journals he had no paper, no pen. He ran his fingers into his hair, a sudden panicky fear that this moment he'd be sent home and there would be no way for Logan to find him, forgetting they were in the same town, that Varric had their information and Logan Hawke was a name that he could bloody well google.

"Can I-" Logan huffed quietly. "Yeah, love. Yeah. Do you know how long I've- I'm pretty sure you'd have to lobotomize me in order for me to forget."

He took the hand Anders was running anxiously thorough his hair and squeezed it gently, mindful at least vaguely that they had an audience even if mainly he just wanted to gather Anders up in his arms and tell the world and whatever powers had dragged them here to go suck it, because he wasn't ever letting Anders go.

It was an extremely immature impulse and he kind of thought it was fantastic.

"Okay, we're being ignored." Hawke rolled her eyes and swung down off the bar, easy and steady despite how her muscles complained and her head swam. "Memorize numbers, get your shit, it's pretty obvious you two need more alone time."

She gathered up the bottles she'd ferreted out and offered Anders one. If he had Fenris holed up somewhere, they'd probably want it. She caught him looking pensive and far away, and she smiled a little sadly, not for him, for herself. Ugh. She needed to get her own shit together.

"Please, two old fogeys like us? I am hardly surprised," Anders shot back, grinning faintly. "To have a Hawke looking at me like that, and at that age? I would have been ignoring us too."

He took the bottle from Marian with a nod of thanks, humming thoughtfully, and then flapped his free hand indulgently at the lovers. "You two carry on. I'll just..." he stepped sideways around them, to where he'd placed the basket of food he'd been carrying on the bar, and nestled the bottle inside it. Next to the basket, his black coat lay abandoned, and he frowned at it dully, dropping his hand onto it after a pause, and running his fingers over the feathers.

"Do pardon the smell," he said, abruptly, balling the coat up in one hand, turning on his heel, and marching back to the large fireplace in the center of the room. He tossed it onto the hearth with a quiet whump, the un-swept ash from the last fire billowing out in a small white cloud. Before he could think better of it, he flicked his wrist and tossed a fireball in, setting the whole thing ablaze.

He wouldn't leave the revolutionary behind - never that - but he wanted, for Hawke, for Fenris, even on some level, for himself, to leave the man who would have been a martyr behind. "Fenris did say black was a terrible color for me, anyways," he said, mostly to himself, watching the flames.

Anders leaned forward to whisper his phone number directly into Logan's ear. Not that it made a difference if the others heard, it wouldn't mean anything, but it just seemed... personal and real, something from their real lives that made this more real. And if his lips were brushing the shell of Logan's ear while he repeated the sequence of numbers? Maybe it would be easier to remember.

He snorted softly and turned his head when Hawke and the other Anders groused about being ignored and then startled slightly when the black coat he'd recently been wearing was cremated. "Shit," he muttered. "I didn't think my cooties were that bad." He smirked slightly, but was watching Anders a little worriedly.

Logan shivered slightly at the brush of Anders' lips against his ear, nodding. He closed his eyes briefly to commit the number to memory. When he opened them again, Anders was turning his head to look away, and Logan leaned forward quickly and pressed his lips to the corner of Anders' mouth. He shifted so he could whisper the same in Anders' ear, lips brushing Anders' cheek lightly as he moved.

Then he sat back to watch the older Anders with a small crease between his brows. "I don't think it was you, love," he murmured.

Hawke watched Anders burn the coat with a tiny, hopeful smile. Until she caught a whiff of the smoke and then wrinkled her nose with a cough. "Maker's ass, burning feathers never smell good."

She cocked her head at Logan and the younger Anders and shook her head, rolling her eyes at how ridiculously in love they appeared. It was easier to pretend she was unaffected by it. She wondered if she looked that stupid when she thought about Varric, and hoped, deeply, that she kept it out of her gaze. She shook her head sharply at the thought intruded that she was both obvious and ridiculous for all that these were feelings that he didn't want from her.

She rubbed at her forehead and then gestured toward the stairs. "Let's get along then, hmm?"

"I did warn you," Anders said, pulling an impish grin at Marian. He went back and gathered up his basket again, giving the other two a peering sort of glance. "Are we ready, then?"

He tilted his head and finally registered the younger Anders' earlier comment. "Assuming I get back to where I'm from, it's probably best if I don't go around wearing the coat I intended to die in." He cleared his throat, frowned a bit at himself, like he hadn't quite meant to say that. "I mean, the coat I specifically designed as a statement of my dark and revolutionary designs." He shrugged, his cheeks coloring faintly.

Anders had gone very still, breath hitching as Logan whispered into his skin. He nodded and started murmuring the number under his breath until he caught Anders' statement about he coat.

He turned pale. It felt weird to have worn the coat that an older version of himself had intended to die in. Leaving aside the blowing up of buildings and being in love with Fenris, that was pretty fucked up.

"Yeah, let's just... I'll run up and see if the journal is upstairs." He squeezed Logan's arm and then turned to take the stairs quickly, two at a time with his long legs.

Logan's lips curved at the hitch in Anders' breath. And then the older Anders had to go and say that and Logan could feel his boyfriend stiffen before Anders was squeezing his arm and then disappearing.

He straightened off the bar and watched Anders go, feeling like he should follow him, and then thinking with Anders already halfway up the stairs it was probably pointless. Also. Away from these two there might be kissing and that wouldn't help them get a move on, at all.

Logan settled for giving the other Anders a small frown. Hearing an Anders, even if it wasn't his Anders, profess to an intention of dying, of letting himself be killed, perhaps even arguably of seeking it - it made him feel tense and angry and afraid. He didn't like it. He also didn't like the way Anders had paled before he disappeared up the stairs. He huffed. "I'm assuming your Hawke gave you the requisite 'throwing your life away is bad' talk, perhaps even more intense than the one Marian just did, and soundly beat you over the head? Because I'll need to have a talk with this other other me, if not."

"Hmph." Hawke gave Anders a look after the younger one and Logan both seemed to take his words as spooky and personal. They were spooky and personal, but not personal for them.

"Yep, you were definitely designing your revolution's aesthetic. Complete with feathers and gold piping." Hawke snorted softly and watched the young Anders disappear up the stairs.

When Logan spoke she gave him a toothy grin. "I like this one. If you want to give him--" she nodded toward Anders "--a kick in the ass, I will definitely clap your efforts." She kind of wanted to ruffle his hair in an odd show of near-sisterly pride.

Shortly though, the younger Anders was already coming back down the stairs, his vest and a leather-bound journal clutched against his chest.

Edited Date: 2015-09-27 08:04 am (UTC)

Anders held out his arms in front of himself and inspected his tunic, which was rather Tevinter in style, honestly, with its streamlined cut and gold thread on black cloth. He was fairly certain he ought to dig around and find something else to wear as well, though he wasn't about to strip it off right here. There was probably some clothing in the wardrobe of the room he was sharing with Fenris. It had felt somewhat like a betrayal of Fenris's trust, blowing up Chantries and freeing mages while dressed like this, like he'd been proving the blighted elf right all along. Still, he'd had a point to make. At least he'd thrown out that old Tevinter chantry amulet Hawke had given him before Fenris had finally moved in with them. That would not have gone over well.

He looked back to Marian. "Feathers are an important part of the wild mage aesthetic, I will have you know. You're just lucky I abandoned the skirts as impractical in battle before I ever came to Kirkwall. Rather more practical for other things though, weren't they." He sighed dreamily, then cocked an eyebrow at Logan.

"You're very sweet, sweetheart," he said, voice caught between flirty and simply surprised and warmed. "You may knock me over the head anytime."