sixthiterationlogs | i put away enough irish whiskey to fill the river styx.

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i put away enough irish whiskey to fill the river styx.

WHO: Reyes Vidal
WHERE: Their house
WHEN: Early February /handwaves
OPEN TO: Marian Hawke
WARNINGS: Nothing for now

Reyes’ eventual return from the hike meant trudging exhausted back into the village with a few scrapes from the black foxes, only to find a house warmly glowing with electricity waiting for him: lights, a stove, a fridge. Like some kind of consolation prize for having made it back in one piece.

Somehow, that makes him even more furious.

He faceplants into bed, with the loneliness and quiet of the house pressing against his eardrums — which is about the point when he realises that in addition to missing the hum of a station or ship or colony’s generators, now he also misses the sounds of Hawke puttering around the house. Fuck’s sake.

Once she makes it home safe too, though, it’s back to their regular schedule, like two satellites gently orbiting each other — she’s up early, he sleeps in, their schedules intersect for hunting, and Hawke seems to have a bee in her bonnet, since she’s out scouring the village for something. But a few days in, they’ve resumed something next to normal (although he sleeps with a dagger close to hand now).

Until the night Hawke storms in carrying a bottle of booze. Reyes looks up, startled. He’s in the well-lit living room, a chessboard laid out in front of him that he’s been slowly chipping away at with a solo game. For all that the man loves parties, she’s also learnt that her housemate often prefers his own company, and retreats to solitary pursuits when he needs to recharge.

“Everything alright?” he asks. There’s that immediate flicker of paranoia, the kind he’d never experienced before but now knows intimately: what’ve the Observers done now?

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The ridiculous thing was that Hawke had a lot of time to think on her journey back, and while most of it was about surviving and worrying for the others, some of it was coming down off the tension of that memory in particular. Anders wasn't with the others, she looked for him immediately, and it was in the back of her head, this uncertainty of where he was. She felt like she had to talk with him, she had to deal with some of the emotions the memory brought up, and that might include yelling at him. But he wasn't there.

She looked for him everywhere in the village and the surrounding areas. She asked people as casually as possible, and he was here and gone so quickly no one had truly seen him. Hawke started to wonder if she made it up in her head. If she truly pulled him out of the fountain or it was all a fantasy. No. In a fantasy, it would've gone differently. More punching, probably. She hated how frantic she got. He was gone. Again. Who cared. She didn't care. She let it simmer for a few days.

Then she starts caring. So the drinking happens. She's already thoroughly tipsy, drinking straight from the bottle the way the gods intended if you ask her, and she figures going home now is better than getting lost later. Hawke smiles cheerily at him, and hangs up her coat, her cheeks flushed with color from outdoors and the liquor. "Oh yes, everything is marvelous." It's a credit to how used she is to drinking that she doesn't trip or wobble in the least, as graceful on her feet as ever.

He is bloody handsome. She thinks that frequently, whenever she gets a good look at him. He looks vastly different from Anders, his personality was also very different; he reminds her much more of Varric. She misses Varric. Hawke flops down in a chair nearby, slinging her legs over the arm to sit sideways, drinking from her bottle. "Have you ever been in love?" She apparently decides to ask out of no where, like sane people definitely do.

The question catches him off-guard for so many reasons -- this isn't the easy, frothy sort of subject that they usually linger on, the safe and simple topics. Besides, it's a question he's never liked looking at too closely, and one that makes his gut clench with self-doubt.

"Maybe," Reyes says. It isn't just a hedge or an evasion, though: it's the actual truth. He's not sure. "How can you tell? How would you define the difference between love or very, very strong attachment?"

Spoken like they're philosophising. He's leaning back on the sofa himself, the chessboard half-forgotten in front of him (one of the rooks had been backed into a tight spot), watching her instead. They both like to drink, but the village's relative scarcity means it isn't as easy to get a hold of liquor to get fully sloshed. The fact that Hawke's got an entire bottle to herself is unusual.

"If you have to ask, you probably haven't been. Romantic love at least, it's a fucking nightmare." Hawke loves many people, as a matter of fact. She loves all of her friends deeply. She loves her sister. She is very fond bordering on love with her new friends here, they've bonded quickly out of necessity. The room is spinning a tad and she closes her eyes, pleased to feel a little vertigo to throw her off.

They don't talk about serious things, it's an unspoken type of agreement, especially considering they are lovers too. Hawke is usually sunny tempered, quick to shrug off anything that gives her pause, but she has times like this too, when she wallows, and unfortunately now he has to see more than one version of Marian Hawke. Her inner circle knows it, so it's almost like a right of passage, dealing with Hawke when she's drunk and dwelling.

"My ex was here. I think he was here. He didn't talk to other people so no one else remembers him here, it might've been a hallucination." He showed up right before the party, and he knocked her off her feet, shook her, made her feel everything she'd been suppressing all at once. "But he's gone again." Which explains what she's been frantically searching for. "My memory in that bloody shrine was the moment he broke me, my city, our friends, our lives. And I didn't have a chance to come beat the shite out of him."

She wouldn't have. That's part of the problem. Aqua, Jake, and Cougar saw it, so maybe she's feeling more raw about it, willing to share.

That confession draws the rest of Reyes' attention, sharpening this conversation from hypothetical philosophical musing to something really quite personal and true, actually. He hadn't known this part. Their avoidance of the subjects that matter means he had absolutely no idea her ex had been in town; Reyes had never known that was the reason she'd jumped him at new year's, either, but it's making some pieces fall into place.

"Some strange shit happens here, but I don't think I've heard of people hallucinating others. I've heard of some people showing up then leaving again fairly quickly, though."

A beat, before he asks, carefully: "How did he break you?"

There's so many different ways to interpret that question; none of them good. Marian can laugh most things off, so the fact that she's reeling from this, those memories, means they're deathly serious.

Hawke is very aware that she needed to lose herself in someone else that night so she wouldn't think about him. Perhaps it wasn't the wisest, to pick her housemate, but she wanted him and she felt the most like herself with him. It was very sexy, but also comforting somehow. Now she was peeling back another layer for him, and she'll eventually be concerned that there's not many layers left to hide from him, which is too open. But she's not thinking about that now. Or how she'd rather just walk over, curl into his lap, and let herself feel better, which is one giant red flag of warning.

"Mmmm where to start." Where to start with Anders, with Kirkwall, with the mages, with the templars. "I think I've mentioned the mages and templar issue, if I haven't, templars control mages "for their own good," she makes the quotation marks, "and mages try not to turn into demons to chuck off the repressive regime." Hawke is quite good at words even while drinking heavily, with an occasional slurred word. She drinks again. "Kirkwall was run down and struggling when we first got there, our group worked tooth and nail for the city, to make it stronger, better. We didn't say out loud we were trying to be good people doing good things, because we're all allergic to admitting we care about doing good." Rogues. They always have trouble with that.

She lays her head back to look at the ceiling. "It was years before we got together, but once we were, it was ...." Wonderful. So happy. Everything she dreamed of. She didn't want to admit to so much foolishness. "Nice. But the mage and templar problem was always on his mind, even if living with me did protect him from them for a time. He asked me to do some favors for him. Get him certain items for a potion, for example, without telling me what it was for." Hawke rubs the bridge of her nose, as if the hangover headache was already starting, but it was really a headache over her own stupidity.

"I am certain a good rogue like you can see a giant warning signal in that, but I didn't question him. And then he blew up the chantry. The religious center of the city. He killed people within it, using what I brought him as a bomb of sorts, and set off the official mage and templar war which still rages on in many ways now. The templars were instructed to kill all the mages in the city, so many people still died, even as we tried to stop it." More than Hawke really knows, she can't count it up, she would if she could.

Oh gods, she's been talking all this time, hasn't she. She clutches the liquor to her chest like a security blanket. "My team, we were all scattered to the winds, never to be together again, I was in hiding or living on the road, staying out of the way with a few solo missions, and that's the sad little story about how the Champion helped her apostate boyfriend destroy the city she loved." She raises the bottle. "Cheers."

It's a lot of somber information to absorb at once, and Reyes unthinkingly slips into his old automatic mindset of an information broker-slash-spy, a sort of analytical thoughtfulness as he takes in all the details. Mentally jots them down and parses them.

And some of the details stick in his throat. Lying to one's significant other, asking for favours leading to an ulterior motive, a hidden agenda. Withholding secrets.

It's chillingly familiar, maybe, and for a fleeting moment Reyes considers the fact that he and this Anders -- the Anders that broke Marian Hawke -- might not be all that different. Is Ryder out there in another world somewhere, drinking away her own sorrows and fury over what he's done?

(But then common sense and self-preservation kicks in a moment later, and he shakes it off. Reyes stopped a war, rather than sparking one. One woman dead versus hundreds. Surely the men aren't the same, in the end.)

Reyes is silent for a while, processing that, before he finally settles on a question: "What... happened with him after that?"

It's not the most important question, really, but it's one of the loose ends from the tale. And approaching it from this angle is the only thing he can think of. I'm sorry sounds toothless; isn't quite enough.

It was a good lesson in what not to do with Marian Hawke, as they would probably always be triggers for her from now on. She was so very good at putting up walls and cheery smiles and handling everything serious with a cavalier attitude, because life was short and often meaningless so she didn't like fretting too much. That was the visible face, underneath there was the truth of a woman who lost most of her family and blame herself for every one, who loved and trusted so deeply that even her jaded mind didn't protect her from betrayal.

Broke was the right word, because for a time after all of this, she couldn't be her old self again. She lost her smile. She was a shade of herself, steeped in guilt and sorrow, speaking to no one, engaging with very little. Unfortunately the moment she got her life back was when she lost it. But parts of her still felt broken, and he was the one who did it; death had nothing on Anders.

She sighs. "He told me to kill him. Everyone told me to kill him." People seemed to think this was a hard choice for her, but it wasn't in fact a choice at all. Varric already knew where it was going, because Varric knew Hawke inside and out. She was never going to kill someone she loved. "I let him live, of course. I don't know where he went. I hadn't seen him since, until I pulled him out of the bloody fountain."

Hawke frowns and swings her legs around, trying to sit up. "Why do I care ... Oh that was a bad idea." She sat up too fast. The room spun, but then it righted itself, phew. She really didn't want to get sick on their living room floor. "If he's here or not. He doesn't regret it, he's never going to regret it. There's no closure to be had."

He's straightened in his own seat as she wobbled, almost on the verge of leaving the sofa and heading over to help steady her, but Reyes holds off at the last moment. She's a big girl; she's managing for now.

"I understand caring, though. If he was here, at least there might've been the chance for closure. Tying up loose ends. I hate leaving a problem unresolved."

It was one of the things that nagged at him the most; part of why he planned so obsessively when it came to a job, tried to calculate every angle and eliminate every possible obstacle. So it was all the worse when it was a personal issue rather than a professional one, and therefore without clean edges or neat resolutions. Personal problems were fucking messy.

Hawke's doing pretty well, yes, she is not at the point where he needs to carry her somewhere. That's by the end of this bottle. "The only closure I could have is if he said oh I was wrong, I messed up, I love you, I miss you, please forgive me." She scrunched up her nose and sighed. "Gods it sounds like I want that, I do want him to say that, but it doesn't mean I want him." She just wanted him to be sorry and regret it and then she could go I don't need you and move on. Or maybe she did want him, she wanted to throttle him and also to be held by him, it was all very messy.

"Ugh, I should not be this pathetic around you." She's quite drunk at this point, holding the bottle to her skin because she feels too hot. "I'm your sexy fun housemate not the pathetic whining about her ex girl." At least she's not crying, no. Hawke got that all out earlier. She hated not being on her game at all times, but this was a rare occurrence. Anders was excellent at throwing her off, turning her life upside down.

"Promise you will forget all about this tomorrow and you'll remember how good I am at being fun and having sex."

He smiles wryly despite her misery, because Hawke is still fun and charming and likeable even when she's wallowing like this. "If you like, I can get drunk and pathetic and whine about my own ex," he says lightly. "If she showed up here, I'd be a qualified mess, too. Seeing her in a vision at the shrine was bad enough."

She's bared enough of herself tonight that he wanted to offer some of himself back; something Reyes almost never does of his own volition, but it just seems unfair, to know so much about Hawke's problems without giving something back in return.

"Either way, I think you should share some of that bottle." Partially because he doesn't like being stone-cold sober while she's reeling drunk; partially to make this conversation easier for him, too; partially to rescue her from downing absolutely all of it.

"Yes, yes, Andraste's tits, please drink and tell me all about your ex so I stop obsessing over mine." Hawke handed over the bottle and decides the chair is too high up so she chose to sit on the floor. It was a nice floor. She was also hungry. "First off, is it mess as in you'll just be like me, or mess as in I might have to stab her to protect you? Because I like to know these things in advance."

She unsteadily got up. "Wait, wait, two minutes." Hawke moved into the kitchen nearby so she can try to scrounge up something to eat. Miraculously nothing sounds like it gets broken by the time she comes back in with roasted meat and something to nibble on, putting it on the floor between them because she had chosen the floor as her new lounging place whether it was hard to lie on or not.

"Go on," she said, chewing.

Her foraging in the kitchen gives Reyes time to consider how he's going to approach this particular story or exactly how much to share. By the time Hawke's returned, he's slid to the floor and has taken a few hefty swigs from the bottle too: helping him unwind, loosening up his tongue.

He grazes on the snacks before he starts. More hesitantly than she's used to, from Reyes. "First off, unlike yours, it isn't a story where you'll wind up wanting to stab her. It's more an instance of, your roommate's a goddamned mess."

In a way, Reyes is already regretting having broached the subject, because it's hard to find the right way to spin it. What if she hates him? What if she does think it's like what Anders did?

"Ryder is one of those... almost irritatingly well-intentioned people. Always wants to fix everything." Similar to Hawke, actually, in that way. Running around the galaxy picking up so many errands for complete strangers. "Unfortunately, she also had some rigid ideas on always doing it the right way, the upright and honourable way. And that doesn't exactly work well in the real world, or on the kind of planet I came from. It was a place of criminals, thieves, murderers, and that requires a certain way of doing things. So I let her down."

They were rogues, they both knew that, and were familiar with the messy quandaries you could wind up in, without a clear idea of what the right thing to do was. But he could still feel that twist of anxiety in his chest upon laying this out, and he took another sip.

"It's not as dramatic as what happened with you, but-- You know when you just want to be able to make it work with someone, but you might just be too fundamentally different, and yet you're overlooking those differences? So. That."

The thing about Hawke is, she's always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. She's willing to listen. It means that she can be very forgiving and gives several chances to people, but that's what happens when you're a rogue surrounded by rogues. All of them were heavily flawed people strangely optimistic that maybe they could make their city just a little less terrible.

The warning signals to her that Reyes knows that he's about to say something she might not like, and he doesn't need to seem visibly worried for her to get he might be. Even tipsy she's aware, and she hunkers down, listening as closely as she's capable of.

Hawke raises an eyebrow at him and she kicks his foot very lightly with her own. "Jacob and I were talking about this at the party, it's difficult to be a shade of gray when it comes to morality, when people want to be one way or the other. I know a good bloke here who just ... doesn't believe in killing others. Ever. He's real strict about it." And of course for someone like Hawke, who killing was legitimately her life's work, it was terribly baffling. Jacob understood and she knew Reyes did too. She's not sorry, but it did throw her off slightly.

"People like that can't really understand what it's like to live in a place where most of your choices are a collection of bad with lesser degrees of bad being the optimal choice." She thinks she's still making sense, things are sort of moving together. Still she blinks at him. "What d'you mean by let her down? Precisely."

"Trust you to sum it up perfectly. A collection of bad choices with lesser degrees of bad." It's always been a bit of a relief that she understands, that Hawke generally comes from the same place he is. But then, naturally, Hawke would have caught the loose thread of his story and yanked right on it, too. Waiting for his tale to unravel.

And he's had enough of that foul, bitter liquor that he's able to just rip off the bandage now, lay it out flat:

"I assassinated my rival," Reyes says, bluntly. More bluntly than he's accustomed to; normally he'll dance around a subject for as long as he can get away with. But she'd have noticed that even more. "Sloane was... increasingly violent, unpredictable, and running my town into the ground. Bleeding it dry with protection fees, driving off the very people who could help it. So I lured Sloane into a trap and shot her in the back, right in front of Ryder. Gambled on her choosing in the heat of the moment to let me live. I was right."

It had been a cold calculation at the time; he always recognised those uneasy moments when he felt himself retreat from the emotions of a scene, distancing himself and becoming the Charlatan rather than Reyes Vidal. He'd wreathed himself in that skin during that high noon showdown, in that cave.

"A lesser degree of bad, as far as I could estimate it. The cost for stabilising the town, though it cost me the relationship."

Worth it? Probably. He still couldn't say.

He's staring into the bottle now, skittish of meeting her eye.

Hawke raised an eyebrow at the story, and her more specific thought about it was that it meant something to Reyes and he felt some shame about it. It sounded like the woman deserved it, and Hawke wasn't really against murdering people who deserved it. She did it all the time. There was not a doubt in her mind that she would shoot someone in the back, although she did ordinarily prefer to shoot them in the front, just on the principle of the thing. Hawke did on average try to give people the choice to live or die, but sometimes you simply couldn't offer that. So she understood.

But it was his mention that it was in front of Ryder that hit off some warning bells for her, because yes, Ryder was obviously one of those black and white people, from what he was saying. She wouldn't approve of what he did. But the fact that she would want to possibly kill him for it .... "What is she, a city guard? Or, rather, someone who is supposed to keep the law such as no murder?" Otherwise she would have no reason to punish someone for their own personal business. It didn't sound like murder was necessarily against the rules of that place though.

Hawke took back her drink and then handed it to him again, he really seemed to need it. If he was concerned that she wouldn't like it, perhaps there was an element to the relationship that was really poking at him. "Did you use her to set up the assassination?" Because that would certainly fall under the vague issue that Hawke had, and she didn't know if she would hate that or not if it was true.

And trust Hawke, of course, to hit the nail on its head and root out the exact detail he'd been skirting and semi-hoping he could omit. It means that this conversation isn't a cathartic venting, let's compare notes on our terrible exes; but rather a baring and laying-out the things that both hurt them. Possible mistakes, metaphorical beds they'd made and then had to lie in. The corners they'd backed themselves into.

With a lot of people, he might have lied. Might have spun the whole tale to make himself sound as good as possible, as blameless. But Hawke deserves the truth, potentially ugly as it is.

"I did," Reyes says. He admits. "She wasn't a city guard, but she was... something called a Pathfinder, for the entire human species in our colonisation initiative. They're representatives. Leaders of a sort, though they'd already exiled the people in Kadara, kicked them out to fend for themselves. But Sloane still called her in as backup. Trusted Ryder would be fair and removed from the power plays between criminals, not knowing that she wasn't. Probably Ryder's equivalent of having to make one shitty decision versus another shittier decision."

It was messy. Love was messy, and so was war.

"I think it worked out in the end -- Kadara was like your Kirkwall to me, my new home, the place I wanted to succeed above all else. I hated seeing what was happening to it. I made mistakes, and I wish it could have been cleaner; pretty sure I fucked up in not trusting her earlier. Can't pretend it's the same situation as yours, and I'm not trying to. I'm just--" God, he'd joined her in drunkenness, and why the hell had he started talking about this? "I think I'm just trying to say, we've all made mistakes, and hindsight is 20/20, and I understand being a mess over how things went down with someone."

Hawke did bristle just a little at the start; her instinct, and her rational mind started to file that down as a stop trusting Reyes fact. Except she metaphorically punted the rational fact out of the way, because no. If she spent all her time distrusting people because they fucked up in their life, she'd be a lone wolf, and she hated that. There was a vast difference in what he was doing, and what Anders was doing, because Reyes at least seemed to have regrets. Regrets that Anders showed no actual interest in. Only more excuses for why he was right.

Hawke moves over on the floor to sit next to him instead, decision made, and she doesn't particularly care if she'll have regrets. Twice bitten by lying exes and here she still is, like a fucking idiot. Oh well. She finds his hand with hers and laces their fingers together. It's way too intimate of a gesture and a setting for her comfort level, but she's also drunk and they've both poured their hearts out so she'll let herself be weak for now.

"Well if she shows up here looking for revenge, she'll still have to go through me. Because I have a feeling you'd be shite about fighting back in that case." Hawke does declare her loyalties fairly fast; all of her friends were 'chosen' by her and fiercely defended within a short time of meeting. The same has been true here.

"You fucked up, Reyes. I can't absolve you of that. I hope if you ever get to see her again, maybe she will." Hawke sighs and rubs her free hand through her messy hair. "If he was sorry and said all the things I wanted to hear, I'd probably forgive him." She gazes at the fire place. "Anne said she moved on from Eddie within a year because she couldn't sit around waiting for him, something like that, and I couldn't imagine going from engaged to that. It's been years and I still am emotional about him. What does that say about me?" She smiles sadly. "Outside of obviously being pathetic as fuck."

Something tightly-wound within him finally unclenches when Hawke takes her seat at his side and takes his hand, a sign that she's made up her mind and he isn't out in the doghouse. Reyes' shoulders loosen. For all that he purposefully projects the air of a languorous cat, he's almost never properly relaxed; there's a kind of perpetual wary tension as an undercurrent to everything Reyes says and does. But the closest he's come so far is in this house, with his friend. The warmth of her hand, the companionable bump of her shoulder against his.

"And if Anders comes back again, and is still an unrepentant shit about his act of actual terrorism, then I'll fling a boulder at him from my glass house. Pact?"

Her mention of Anne's ex-fiancee -- who's actually here in the village, speaking of people running into baggage from their past -- makes Reyes huff a dry laugh. Only half-amused. "I couldn't imagine being engaged, period. Not sure what this all says about anyone. We're all pathetic in different ways, I suppose."

Hawke surrounds herself with people with baggage, people who have reasons to stay guarded. It's almost the reason her group became so special. Here were a bunch of troubled, guarded dangerous folks who decided to love and trust each other despite their better judgment. And yes, it burned them, but she can't really see a way to regret loving those people or living the way they did. Regrets for not seeing Anders sooner, absolutely, but would she take back their little family just because it turned to shit? No. Never.

Hawke snort-laughs. "He's without magic here, he'd have no idea what to do without it. He'd be very easy to fling about." She was very tempted. Especially when he kept on being him and holding steady to his position. But harming him is simply not an option she can live with. "I think what made me angriest when I dragged him out of that bloody fountain, for whatever reason, was him assuming I executed him. And I know why, I was supposed to, everyone wanted me to. It probably was the thing to do." People were executed for far less, and at that moment, she was the authority of the city. "But maybe he never knew me that well, because I could never kill someone I love in cold blood. In a fight, maybe, but just sitting there waiting for it?" Ugh. Stupid Anders.

She sighs, putting her head on his shoulder. "I thought about marrying him. Not having kids, I never wanted any kids, but I don't know, it was a ridiculous thought." Hawke isn't sure when she'll be over it entirely. Maybe never. Over him, for sure, but over that level of betrayal and loss, that's a harder pill to swallow. "By the time I died I think I was just ready. It wasn't a suicidal impulse, but you outrun death every day for your bloody life, eventually you're ready for it." Hawke jokes about her death, she mentions it off-hand, this is the first time she brought it up with more sincerity.

It had been easy, almost, to pretend that Hawke's death had been clean. It's been simpler that way. She's described her past adventures, the reckless abandon and the absurd situations they'd gotten into (demons! giant spiders), and it's almost a miracle her party did survive that long. He'd always half-assumed that her inevitable death must have happened in a battle, bad luck finally running out and catching up to her. But.

Shit.

It's chilling, trying to imagine being that utterly ground-down. His hands splays across her arm beside him, and he can feel her pulse beneath his fingertips.

"You must've been so fucking tired," he says quietly. "To have reached that point."

She laughs. Or it sounds like a laugh, comes out like a laugh, but lacks amusement. Hawke moves her arm around, almost instinctively understanding what he's searching for. She's done a great job of not thinking too much about the details, because it's death, it's done, she's breathing for the moment so that's what matters. But it wasn't that simple in the least, and that's likely why she avoided it.

"I lost my mother not too long before our lives destructed, it was my fault. I didn't pay attention, I missed clues, she was taken by a serial killer mage, trying to construct a woman made of many parts." So basically, it was as horrific as that sounds. Hawke still sees it clear as day. One more thing she wasn't fast enough for, smart enough for. "But I still had my city, my sister, my friends, Anders." So she kept moving, kept existing, and that guilt never left but it got more tolerable.

"I lost all of it, that day. My sister's a mage, she had to go on the run, we all split up, I was living on the roads." The people who meant everything to her, who she breathed and existed for, were gone. She was alone. "I kept fighting where I could, but fucking Corypheus." Hawke hasn't actually gone this far in her explanation of things, because it's not fun or funny. Maybe referencing the giant monster she went up against, laughing boldly about it, but the details, no. "My fault, again, I didn't finish him when I should have, and now he was trying to destroy everything. I chose to stay behind in the Fade and buy them time to get out, because that's the only way he would be stopped. I could have gotten out and let someone else die, he offered, but ...."

She was just so tired. And so many things were her fault, were adding up on top of the pile of reasons the world was better off without her. So they got out and she helped save the world, grand, but it wouldn't guarantee her seeing the others, it wouldn't guarantee her ever getting a life she wanted. "Not everyone gets to choose, honestly. Fighting until I died was aways going to be my end. So I just picked when."

Edited 2019-03-07 01:26 (UTC)

A painful twinge in his chest, hearing all this. The gruesome details that she'd always glossed over until now, laughed off and handwaved away, and instinctively skirted (an instinct he knows well). But a serial killer assembling women from fucking parts?

Somehow, the life of a criminal kingpin pales in comparison. He'd seen ugly things in his line of work, seen horrors and wonders in the Heleus cluster as well, but somehow they haven't had that particularly dark, morbid touch that's haunted Hawke's life. The hardened criminals in Reyes' life knew what they were getting into; they hadn't been plunged into it like her mother or sister.

Self-sacrificing yourself for others -- something he doubts he would ever, ever do. She's a better and nobler person than he could ever be. He knows he probably doesn't deserve to warm her bed, but he's the one that's here right now.

And Reyes is mulling over her words, chewing over something that bothers him about them. "You keep saying 'my fault', Hawke, but from all I've ever heard about your adventures it's been a group effort. How is it when you all succeed, it's a team win, but you shoulder the blame when something goes wrong? Shit just... goes wrong, sometimes. You can't avoid it forever, can't plan for every single eventuality. Believe me, I've tried."

Hawke often joked (she always jokes) that if she didn't learn to laugh at her life it would be a non-stop misery train of sadness. It still was that, of course, but laughing kept her from lying in a puddle on the floor until she wasted away. It was a miracle when she had those years in Kirkwall, happy for such a bright spot, and it was worse, in some ways, to have it and lose it. She wishes even now she could laugh, joke, take away the tension, not be this pathetic mess leaning on him. She usually only allowed Varric and sometimes Isabela to see her this way. Even with Anders she tried to be a certain way. Reyes filled that gap the two of them had, between best friend and lover.

"Because I am the leader. It isn't something I chose, but I accepted. And the leader is responsible for what their people do, and what is missed." Hawke seems firm in this belief. She rarely admits to how serious she took that position, she laughed about being the Champion and how ridiculous the title was, except she cared very, very much about being the Champion if someone had to be.

"I dealt with leaders of their own sects, bloody Meredith and Orsino." So much anger suddenly attached to those two names in particular. "Were Templars and Mages under them responsible for their own actions too, yes, but they were held accountable for their people." She held them accountable. They held her the same way. "When Isabela stole from the qunari and they tried to take over the city, she was responsible, yes, but I am the one that dueled the Arishok. When Anders destroyed the city's peace, I had to pick who to fight for and lead the charge against."

It was exhausting and guilt-ridden and nothing was ever good enough.

As she describes her negotiations with the city leaders, the realisation is starting to slowly, horrifyingly dawn on him: he is so fucking predictable.

The two women are different in their specifics, but the broad strokes are oddly similar: Ryder had been shoved into that role too, wrangling the Initiative and the exiles and the angaran resistance, juggling all the various ingredients that had been tossed into the pot and left to simmer and stew. Leaders who hadn't expected to be leaders. Who piled too much onto their shoulders.

Reyes exhales, and tries not to look too closely at that thought. "How do you feel now?" he asks, his voice low against Hawke's hair; normally it would have been seductive except that today it's just gentle, intimate. "Now that you're here. Away from all that, the politics, the mages, the life-or-death questions. Or -- well, we do still have them here, but on a smaller scale."

Hawke either hated or loved the position she was in. Most of the time hated, but there was no doubting that she chose it. She could walk away at any time or refuse to follow requests, stop walking around Kirkwall and solving all their little problems. But she couldn't seem to. She's just glad the Inquisition didn't really get a hold of her like they wanted. The last thing she needed was to become another terribly chosen savior.

The voice by her ear does make her shiver a little, because well, his voice is always going to be sexy, and she also is hastily reminded how much of herself she's actually given him tonight. He's under her guard, and it's not because she's drunk, she could have gotten drunk with anyone. With the Anders situation so fresh, she should be more careful, but she craves this all the same. It's not a question she's considered honestly. She keeps surviving, that's all she puts her mind to. She helps the village. She teaches other people how to survive as well. She doesn't think much, and feel even less.

"If I could get my friends here, it would be the perfect afterlife. But it's probably wrong, wishing them stuck here, and I can't stop all the same. I'm bloody selfish. I miss them so fucking much." Hawke speaks often about her friends. Varric and his stories, Isabela and her sultry feistiness, Merrill and her shy sweetness, Fenris and his incapability of smiling, Aveline and her poor long suffering authority, her darling and dear sister, and yes, fuck, Anders just a little, the Anders he was before it was tainted.

Hawke picks her head up slightly and leans it back, looking at him. His gorgeous jawline, that hair that always screams touch me please, and she's stupid, stupid, stupid. She feels something stirring up from her heart or her gut or maybe both that's like burning poisonously through her system and she's pretty sure it's not her getting sick but who knows. "You're so pretty," is what she blurts out instead of other things she's thinking, because well, yeah that works too.

That little outburst makes him laugh, and she can feel it thrumming through his chest beside her. "You're very pretty too," Reyes says, and while it might sound obliging, humouring, he reveals the underlying gentleness by tipping Hawke's chin up with his hand and kissing her. The liquor they've been drinking burns on her tongue and his alike, a pleasant sting. She tastes of bad decisions. (Bad decisions that have somehow become good ones. Maybe.)

"Thank you," he adds a moment later; and it's not clear, exactly, whether he's referring to the goofy compliment or everything about this: accepting him. Not shoving him aside, as soon as he'd revealed his true stripes to the first person who wasn't his companions at the shrine, who'd seen his betrayal play out first-hand.

Most likely a mix of all the above.

Hawke returns the kiss and she's glad her drunken series of confessions and whining didn't put him off, because seducing him again would take more energy than she has at the moment if it did. Because she wouldn't give up on getting it back, of course. No, he's been claimed as one of hers now, whatever way that shows itself. The kiss is nice, almost sweet, and she sort of just lets it be. It's been a bad day.

"Thank me? Thank you. I'm the one who threw unnecessary drama and backstory at you out of no where." She usually is stronger than that, but that's the thing about having a housemate. Typically when Hawke went home in the past, she could wallow in self-hate and sadness all on her lonesome. If she felt like crawling up the stairs without talking to him, she probably could have, but oh well.

"I'm too drunk to thank you properly." She smiles, kissing him again, lightly. "But if you take me to bed, I'll show you my appreciation in the morning."

[Maybe a last tag from you? or we can assume he says yes lol.]

"Wellll, I was planning on finishing this scintillating chess game by myself, so I don't know..." He looks mock-longingly at the in-progress board over by the coffee table. When Hawke shoves his shoulder, he laughs again. "It's late. I'm tired. Bed sounds great."

Reyes stands up and tugs her to her feet; they're both shaky, but he's a shade more sober and steadier as he walks, and so it's the easiest thing in the world for Hawke to drape herself over him as if they just can't stop touching each other, a reassuring little confirmation that the other person is still there, still present. He'd have carried her if there weren't the stairs to contend with -- as things stand, though, they wander off together arm-in-arm. By some implicit understanding, they crash in her bedroom. He's been spending more nights there than his own bed lately, but that's a problem to examine some other day.

Right now, he's happy for the company. It beats his own empty bed, and it beats cold camping on cold ground.

When they flick off the bedroom light (which is electric now, an actual lightbulb with electricity), it even feels like a kind of normalcy.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

i put away enough irish whiskey to fill the river styx.

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help, this whole scene

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& closed ♥