fadewalk | RP: Logan Hawke, Anders (serhealsalot)

The hallways were quiet. The kitchens were quiet. Everything had just been strangely quiet for a while now. Alistair was in socked feet, loose linen pants and a soft unlaced shirt, standing over a small pot of porridge he was cooking... for himself? It was more porridge than even he could eat comfortably, especially considering it was porridge he was making, which no one could eat comfortably.

He rubbed at his forhead. Why did he feel like he was missing something? Well a bigger more something than usual anyway.

He'd have to ask... someone. When he saw... them? Zevran, his brain whispered. How many days has he been gone? He frowned, and looked out the small window slits that ventilated the room, and the question was gone already as he wondered for the thousandth time whether it was morning or night.

It was whatever time it was, but he'd woken up alone in his bed, with a headache from too much wine and his shoes on, feeling despondent. Lonely. Which was fairly usual, all things considered. He stirred again, frowning into the whitish-brownish-greyish paste. "Probably more water," he muttered.

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Logan just shook his head disapprovingly at Anders at that, though he did chuckle quietly when Anders kissed his cheek.

"We should," he agreed, "because these are delicious. And I'm sure I can find us something better than that porridge later, if there aren't silence-tossing not-templars around to distract me." He frowned faintly, shook his head again at the memory, and considered the tree for a moment before he remembered how long this shirt he was wearing was. "Oh, hang on." He untucked it from his pants and tugged up the front like one would with an apron. "There, makeshift basket."

Anders started picking apples and loading them into Logan's shirt-front-sling, expression pensive for a minute. "So, how close to murder did you come when he silenced me and I fainted like one of those weird little goats that falls over when they're startled?" He gave Logan a sidelong look and a faint smile.

He squeezed Logan's wrist and moved to another bough of the tree to pick more fruit. "I mean, I'm not saying you should've murdered him, but you looked really spooked when I woke up."

"Goats. Heh." Logan gave a wan smile in response, not even able to properly argue against the comparison because really, it was rather apt for how abruptly Anders had gone boneless.

He rolled his neck and took a step after Anders, watching him pick for a moment before he answered. "Took me a bit to figure out it was something he'd done that made you pass out, and not some weird side-effect of your magic. And then...well, I didn't burn a hole in the wall this time? Though I'm not sure what would have happened if he hadn't pointed out my hand was sparking." He frowned down at the shirtful of apples he was holding. "It probably helped that I figured out who he was. If it had been Cullen or some other templar randomly silencing you for trying to help him...I don't know."

Logan wasn't above hurting people who hurt those he cared about, but murder? That scared him. It would be way too easy for him to kill someone, without even meaning to or planning to, with this new magic inside him and the way it seemed tethered to his emotions, his rage. He shuddered.

Anders winced when he realized Logan was answering his question honestly, like Anders thought he really would have killed Alistair. He turned to face Logan and reached up with both hands, framing his jaw. "Hey, Logan, that's not... I shouldn't have said that. I wasn't thinking. You wouldn't have killed anyone."

There was a pile of apples between them, hammocked in Logan's shirt, so Anders couldn't just cleave to him like he wanted, but he pulled him in for a brief kiss. "And as for the sparking, we're going to learn how to control it, right? Between the other me and Alistair to help with templar stuff, we'll figure it out."

Logan exhaled. "Well, I wouldn't have meant to, anyways. But I-- no, you're right." He nuzzled forward into the kiss as best he could with both his hands occupied. "We'll figure it out."

He shifted, lifting the corners of his shirt so the apples all tumbled together, and glanced down at how many Anders had gathered. "I think that's probably enough, don't you?"

Anders looked down at the apples and nodded. "I don't think eating more than six each over the next day or two is a good plan, so yeah, that's plenty." He looked back up, watching Logan for a moment, a little worry in his eyes still.

He turned and looked around slowly. "So. I'm going to have to figure out the basic layout of this place in case we ever get separated. Otherwise I'm going to be stuck just sitting in one spot like a five year old that got lost at the zoo waiting to be found."

Logan snorted. "Probably not," he agreed, voice round with humor. He pursed his lips at the look in Anders' eyes, the worry there in the intensity of his gaze, and stepped forward so he could bump shoulders with him, gently enough that the apples were more or less undisturbed.

"The image is kind of adorable," he teased. "But I don't think that's what you were going for. Do you wanna try and lead us out of here?" He grinned, mischievous and ornery. "I can be the annoying voice in the background telling you when you're getting warmer."

"Hmph." Anders smiled though, and shrugged helplessly. "Well, at this point it would just be guessing." He shot Logan an embarrassed glance and then started toward the doorway that was definitely not the one they'd come through that led back into the keep, but would probably put them in a hallway that was closer to the guest quarters without having to double back through the great hall again.

He opened it and frowned at the corridor on the other side, and gave Logan a querying glance. "Anywhere close to warm?"

Logan arched a brow and ambled after him, clearly ready to find this endeavor very amusing, judging from the look on his face. Well, that and, again, it did offer him a very nice view of Anders' ass.

He tried not to blush at the thought.

"Mm-hmm. That's not how we got here, but I think it'd be a faster route back to the guest wing, so we can give it a shot."

Anders smirked at the tiny tinge of a blush on Logan's cheeks and the way his eyes skipped up when he'd turned his head. Well. He could work with that. He grinned a little as he looked right and then left along the corridor before turning left - another complete guess that happened to be correct.

He also managed to put a little twitch in his step, not swaying exactly, but just a little bounce. The incredibly tight leggings were obscured, somewhat, by the long tunic, but even that only hugged midwaydown his hips, leaving the lower curve of his ass visible in the skin-tight black fabric.

Logan gave a low noise of approval in his throat, though whether that was for the choice of direction or the fact that Anders was obviously aware of him watching him, even he wasn't entirely sure. He was sure that the best word to describe Anders' hips and that little shimmy to his walk was 'sin'. He paused mid-step as something occurred to him, and then quickened his pace to mostly catch up, still walking half a step behind Anders.

"I had a thought," he began, conversationally. "I don't even know how you feel about dancing."

"Dancing?" Anders stopped as the corridor branched, or got complicated, with stairs leading up and down and a t-crossing leading left and right. "This place is a bloody maze."

He exhaled shortly and then shook his head and gave Logan a sly, sidelong look. "I like dancing. I mean, nothing formal. But I dance at clubs or parties or whatever." Anders was a very good dancer in those kinds of settings, actually, and more than one of his brief relationships had started with a very particularly roll of his hips to the beat of overwhelmingly loud music.

He pointed up the stairs with a questioning eyebrow raise.

Logan chuckled. "Well, it is a castle. I think that's usually par for the course? Not that...I've ever really been in a castle before. Hrm." He tilted his head and considered the stairs up, which he knew they would have to take eventually, and the left-hand hall, since he thought going up right now might bring them to a mostly unfamiliar part of the next level. Still, up was definitely the right direction. He nodded and waited for Anders to take the lead again.

"I haven't done much dancing in a long time," he admitted as they continued. "I used go swing dancing a lot - most of the guys I've worked with would do that on the weekends. Sometimes clubs when I was working in a city, but...less so since Mom and Carver moved in." He hadn't much thought about the correlation there. He had Varric now, to hang out with, a real, good friend, and not just a coworker who didn't actually know anything about him. And coming home smelling like alcohol and sweat and whatever the crowd had been smoking wasn't something that he wanted to do with his mom just down the hall. Especially since half the time he came back smelling like some stranger's cologne no matter how the night went. And then sometimes his seasonal jobs, like the one down at the docks, were little better than graveyard shifts, so it was a moot point, anyways.

The more he thought about his life from Anders' perspective, outside looking in at his current choices, the more he was beginning to think he'd forgotten how to relax in the last few years. It wasn't bad that he was more responsible than he'd been when he was on his own, to his family, to his friends, to his guild in a way, but did he even have much of a life outside of all that, outside of working and saving and taking care of people? The fact that the answer was probably no was distressing.

Anders kept his hand on the banister rail as they climbed. He was still a little weird in the head from the silence and with Logan's hands full of shirt and apples he didn't want to stumble or trip. He paused to look back down at Logan when he admitted to swing dancing, grinning.

"I think I might be a little too tall to go flipping over your back, love, but aside from swing, I'd love to dance with you." He gave Logan an openly appreciative once-over. "Even if I wasn't desperately in love with you, I would have tried to catch your eye at any club I saw you at."

He mused on that as he climbed, imagining what it would have been like to bump into Logan at a club. It would have been too loud to recognize each others' voices, sweaty and hot, just strangers dancing up on each other. In the last year he'd barely been out at all, mostly just for a few friends' birthdays, because Logan had been waiting on the other end of the headset. But what-ifs tumbled around in his head as they reached the next floor.

Logan laughed a little at the thought of flipping Anders over his back as he reached the landing. "No, I don't think that would really work," he agreed. He hummed. "I've never done that with a partner I was actually interested in, though. Just girls." He hadn't given it a great deal of thought - it was movement and music and a good time, and some people had come with a dance partner, sure, but not everyone, and that had been fine. He knew some of the girls had looked at him with a bit too keen of a gaze to be just interested in him for his dancing, but he'd gotten used to just shrugging that off.

"Would you?" he asked, unable to keep the small note of surprise and warm pleasure out of his voice at Anders' second comment. He would have noticed Anders, even in a crowded room, he thought, but that didn't mean he would have tried to catch his eye. Logan was pretty notoriously bad about approaching other people. Which was okay because he usually had other guys notice him and do the work for him, but was yet another reason he'd stopped going to straight clubs unless totally forced. If he was bad at approaching guys, he was a disaster at approaching girls, so the only ones he ever got roped into dancing with when he was...well, to put it bluntly, pretending to be straight, were the drunk, handsy ones. Not pleasant for anybody, although it had been years since he'd subjected himself to that particularly miserable idiocy.

He smiled to himself, ducking his head slightly, imagining what it would have been like if he'd gone out and Anders had gone out and they'd somehow found each other at a club long before it took the universe throwing them together for them to meet.

Anders gave Logan a long bemused look. "Would I?" He tipped his head to the side, looking Logan up and down again. "Yes. Very much yes. A thousand yeses. I would have yes-ed right into a bathroom stall with you when I was young and stupid and using a fake ID."

He didn't check when they reached the next branch, turning right down the hallway and opening a door at the end that led them... into the gallery overlooking the great hall. "Hmph."

Logan didn't quite trip, exactly, but he didn't lift his foot quite enough and the toe of his sneaker scuffed the floor enough for him to flounder. He righted himself with a half-swallowed chuckle. The look he shot Anders was all heat, but something deeper, too, need and want for more than a quick fuck in a bathroom stall, even if Anders' obvious appreciation was incredibly hot. "Well," he said, clearing his throat against the rumbliness in his voice. "This is better."

When he looked down over the great hall, he smiled with one corner of his mouth and gestured back the way they'd come with his head.

"Yeah," Anders voice was a little husky as well, when he agreed with Logan's assessment. Getting to keep him was way better than some nameless hookup. And something warmed and loosened in his chest when Logan didn't recoil from his off-hand mention of his youthful inclination toward indiscreet casual encounters.

He was flushing though, realizing what he'd just said to his boyfriend. Hello, I used to have sex in bathroom stalls with strangers when I was underage, and some of them were old creeps, so if you want to make yucky faces at me I understand was what it sounded like when he thought about it.

He moved back down the hallway where Logan gestured and continued past the stairwell to another t-branch, but this one was the gallery that led to the guest wing, and he recognized the high arching windows that showed all the spooky horror of the sky outside.

He pointed toward the correct door with a sardonic lift of his eyebrow and then opened it and bowed Logan through.

Logan wasn't sure what the flushing was about, exactly, though he gave Anders a careful look and tried to puzzle it out. Something he'd said? Something Anders had said? He'd been talking about what he might have done if they'd met before, and...oh. Logan screwed up his face in thought as Anders moved back towards the right hall, following along automatically. It wasn't the first time Anders had referenced doing stupid shit when he was younger, and the memory of it seemed to bother him more than Logan could quite understand. Everybody did dumb things when they were young, didn't they? Logan didn't see why Anders seemed to think it would color his perception of him now.

"I would give you a round of applause, except my hands are kind of full right now," he said dryly, lips twitching with amusement, as Anders bowed him through the door.

When he was through, he bit his lip and turned back. "You know the only thing that could make me think less of you is if you turned out to be an axe murderer, or something like that, right?"

Anders almost knocked into Logan when he stopped and turned back suddenly, stumbling and catching himself with hands on his shoulders. He blinked at the statement. Or question? And then flushed more deeply even while he managed to smirk, a defensive mask, and dropped a wink.

"How convinced are you that I'm not?"

He wasn't sure how far down this rabbit hole they should go. His past was fucked up in a lot of ways. He squeezed Logan's shoulders and nodded toward the door to their room, a handful of yards down the hall. "Isn't that what they always warn people about when they meet people online? 'They could be an ax murderer! You'd never know!'."

Logan studied him thoughtfully, cataloging this reaction automatically and filing it away.

"Oh please," he laughed as he continued down the hall after Anders' nod. "I thought only my parent's generation still spouted that crap. I'm sure there are weirdos you can meet online, but the amount of hours we've spent in game is pretty much guaranteed to weed out the weak." He paused outside their door, leaning a shoulder against the wall so Anders could open it and let them in. "Anyway, love, there's nothing fake about you. You're the realest person I know."

Anders ignored Logan's studying look. He could just keep on pretending he wasn't avoiding the subject of whether or not he could dredge up secrets from his past that would change the way Logan felt about him.

The angry, younger, hurting part of him, the self-destructive streak he'd learned to ignore wanted to tell him every terrible thing right now, because if he wasn't good enough, well, it would be better to know now, wouldn't it?

And the fearful, lonely part wanted to never tell him, and just live with the guilt of lies by omission, so that he wasn't driving away the one person who'd made him feel safe and whole and loved since Karl.

And the thing with Karl was it's own bucket of nuts that might make Logan recoil, don't forget that.

He pushed open the door and shook his head a little, grinning lopsidedly. "You're telling me that you don't think that Fenris at least has some bodies buried in his back yard?" He followed Logan into the room and shut the door behind him, sighing softly. "I try, Logan, but I've been a lot of different people in my life. You probably wouldn't have liked or even tolerated all of them."

That was the most diplomatic way of putting it, he guessed. He'd had to be things, do things, to survive. It was something he tried not to be ashamed of, because he'd lived... but it was still hard when he looked into those blue eyes and didn't want to see that look of adoration ever change.

Logan moved past Anders into the room and started unloading the apples onto the coffee table, dumping a few of them gently at first until he could hold his shirt open with one hand instead of two, and then switching to lifting them and setting them carefully on the table instead, so they wouldn't bruise. He listened intently to the silence before Anders sighed, wondered for a moment if he'd said the wrong thing. Maybe it would have been better to just drop it, pretend he hadn't noticed. Come to think of it, that usually was the best plan when he noticed things that other people maybe didn't want him to.

And then Anders cracked a joke about Fenris and Logan dropped the apple in his hand from a couple of inches higher than he meant to. He reached for another and kept his voice carefully steady, "Yeah. Well. Fenris's stepdad was a fucking psychotic bastard, so I don't really give a shit about the bodies he's got hiding in his past, or backyard, or what-the-fuck-ever." He sighed, scrubbed his hand down his thigh before placing the rest of the apples on the table methodically. "And he would be fucking pissed if he found out I told you that. Shit."

He straightened when he was done and turned back to Anders. "Look, love, you don't want to talk about it, it's fine. I get that. But since I'm the one who's wildly in love with you, I think I'm allowed to doubt the assertion that I would have hated a younger version of you. I can't know everything, Anders, but I know how I feel about you, and trust me when I tell you you've got no cause to doubt that."

Anders blinked at Logan's defense of Fenris, flinching at the anger in his tone when speaking of Fenris' stepdad. It was similar to the anger when he'd reacted to Anders' scars, and he didn't know how he felt about that. Confused that Fenris was more than just a raging dickhole. A little jealous that Logan defended him like that. Petty and small for feeling that jealousy.

He stayed very silent, very still, unsure if he was seething or recoiling or about to burst into until Logan was done talking, and then he shook his head and blurted, "I didn't say I doubted that you love me, did I? I just... fuck. I mean, do you want to know that I used to steal the wallets from guys whose dicks I sucked in club bathrooms? Because I did that. So, tell me that doesn't change how you feel about me, at all. Go on. Try."

Logan shrugged, his expression not even flickering with surprise or shock or anything like condemnation. He ran his hand over his hair and probed at his own emotions briefly, finding nothing there to echo back except how ridiculously much he loved this impossible, achingly insecure, hurting man. Anger, yes, for the parents that had hurt him and the system that had failed him, but for Anders? Nothing but love.

He folded his arms over his chest and looked Anders in the eye and said, quietly but firmly, "It doesn't change how I feel about you."