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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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."

When he reached the top of the stairs Anders took a moment to breathe through his panic at how close to home the other Anders' willingness to martyr himself for his cause struck him. He looked at his own too-thin wrists and then shook his head sharply before walking toward the room he and Logan had claimed earlier.

Inside he found the journal that had been in Logan's sweatshirt pouch, and his own vest. He collected both and trotted back down the stairs to hear the other Anders using that flirty voice on Logan.

He missed a step and stopped about three risers from the inn floor, eyes flicking back and forth between them. It wasn't jealousy. It was just... if Logan could choose, then what did he have over an accomplished mage, with more experience, and a cause worth dying for?

Logan ducked his head slightly and shot Marian a small grin, and then was brought up short by the older Anders' response. He peered at him, trying to determine if what he heard in his voice was flirting, or if it was simply...surprise that so many Hawkes felt strongly enough about him trying to off himself that they would make a big deal about it. And if it was that last one, what did that say about Anders? What did that say about his Anders?

Logan was definitely going to be making sure his was more than simply nagged to eat and sleep by a voice over a headset from here on out.

"Um," he finally said. "It really sounds like you've got more than enough people to do that for you." He shrugged, modestly, chewed on his lip and tried to decide how to politely disentangle himself from the fact that his urge to take care of everyone had made it apparently sound like he was flirting with a different version of his boyfriend. Which he wasn't. He was in love with Anders, the med student, not Anders, the rebel mage, who had been up till now just a character the other one played. Especially not one who could also be in love with Fenris. He gave the older Anders a tentative smile, hoping that would suffice as a conversation stopper, and looked up with an expression of obvious relief when he noticed his Anders on the stairs.

Hawke was about twelve seconds and three bashful glances from grabbing mages by the ears and dragging them out into the air. She rolled her eyes as Logan shot that worried, unsure smile at the older Anders.

She looked over at the younger, coming down the stairs and skipped up toward him and grabbed his arm. "Come on, dove." He gave her a startled look as she dragged him down the last three steps and propelled him toward Logan.

She was willing to lead the way to the guest quarters. Leading was kind of her thing. Though usually it lead to a dragon's den, or a demon's den, or a slaver's.... den. What the bloody void was it with her and dens anyway?

Anders was convinced this Logan Hawke was definitely the most adorable version of Hawke he'd seen so far, bold and warm and kind one moment, tentative and embarrassed the next. Andraste's underthings, he was a baby. An adorable, extremely large, overgrown baby of a Hawke. It was intensely peculiar finding a Hawke who was so easy to read, so open about his emotions, and it actually made Anders feel a little bad for flustering him. He wasn't used to being met with awkward smiles instead of a laugh and a quip back.

He laughed a little at Marian's obvious impatience and settled comfortably into following her, as he had done so many times with Jicosa. "So it would appear," he agreed with Logan, sucking in one side of his mouth and shooting him an apologetic sort of glance.