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High crimes were probably better suited to a betrothal than a mere courting gift: you couldn't just start burning things down in hopes the other person found it romantic. You'd want to be sure.
- Olivia Waite, The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows
Afterwards, Anders only remembers the flight from Kirkwall in pieces.
Hawke’s hair slides from its usual bun, a long strand trailing down the back of their neck and into the blood splatter there. The quiet, hurried plans Hawke makes with their friends on the boat ride back across the harbor don’t stick in Anders’ mind, but the knowledge that the blood on Hawke’s neck is not theirs does. His palm sweats, held so tightly in Hawke’s grasp that the spikes on their gauntlets dig into Anders’ skin. He welcomes the pinpricks of pain for what they are, proof that he lives and breathes, proof that Hawke stands with him.
When they bid farewell to Aveline at the docks, there’s a moment where Hawke and Aveline fall silent for a moment. They just look at each other, both of them battle-worn and tired, templar blood caked in the grooves of their armor, shadows under their eyes. Aveline’s headband, dark with sweat and blood, tilts sideways over one eye. The sounds of the night -- water lapping against the pilings of the dock, the roar of the fires still burning in Hightowns, the cries of a city lost in blood and darkness -- fade away. For a moment it’s just Hawke and Aveline, last of the warriors at Ostagar, these two survivors who’ve never been far from each other’s side since Lothering.
And Anders’ mind is so, so quiet, quieter than it has been in months.
He waits for Hawke to let him go, as Aveline steps forward, but Hawke doesn’t. They hug Aveline back one-handed.
Anders feels such relief, he stumbles, expecting an off-setting of his balance from being released that never comes. While the others crowd around Aveline, Hawke turns to him, tilts their head, touches his cheek with their other hand. Their fingers, feather-light, smell like iron and ozone.
“Our palms are damp,” Anders whispers.
Hawke studies his face for a long time before they say, “Yeah.”
Still, they don’t let go.
When the others have said their goodbyes, Aveline sets her shoulders and turns away. She walks up the endless stairs to Hightown where the fires are burning alone, slow and steady and straight-backed.
Anders is pulled along at Hawke’s side, no different than always.
***
At the Amell estate, accessed via the sewers in Darktown rather than risking the Hightown streets, Hawke asks, “What would you like to take, love?”
Anders picks up his mother’s pillow from their bed, fingers smoothing along the whorls of the embroidery as they have so many times before, and marvels a little that when he had left it here, he never expected to touch it again.
And Hawke, who had caught Anders trying to give that very pillow to Varric, just smiles at him, softly, so softly.
“Mother’s pillow, of course,” they say, taking the pillow and packing it carefully, wrapped in the soft cotton shirts that Anders likes best.
***
From disparate corners of Kirkwall -- Varric, Isabela, and Merrill from Lowtown; Bethany, Fenris, Anders, and Hawke from Hightown -- they all gather again at the edge of the city.
Varric is the only one not carrying a pack. He pulls Hawke aside and starts talking about funds and accounts and looking after the Amell household staff for them.
Anders sits down on one of the rough-hewn boulders that have been placed here on the cliff’s edge, providing a place for visitors to sit before they descend the stairs or the lifts into the city proper. From here, he can see the entirety of the city laid out below him, and the taller buildings of Hightown on the cliff opposite. The red glow of the still-smoldering Chantry lights up the night sky. The air, even on this side of the city, smells like ash so thick it fills the lungs, and the breeze coming from the sea up here, where the smoke is at least clearer, doesn’t remove the taste of metal and blood from Anders’ tongue.
“No half-measures,” Anders whispers, a snippet of the speech he’d recited over and over in his head while he planned how he would die. The sea breeze snatches the words from his lips and carries them away before anyone else can hear.
Anders digs his fingernails into the stone underneath him. It crumbles a little at his touch.
The last of the mages are long gone, accompanied by Orsino and what remains of his mage underground. He had planned their flight as carefully as he could, but he had never planned to accompany them himself. He thought he would serve them better as a vanguard, holding off the Templars while they escaped, if he survived Meredith’s wrath in the immediate aftermath of the blast. And having survived entirely, he was a liability, a much bigger target than the mages and apprentices that remained. Cullen would take time to regroup, but he would send templars for him eventually, to say nothing of Sebastian’s wrath.
So that leaves him here. Looking out over the city he’s bled for and healed for seven years, and now, finally destroyed. This place has taken Karl from him, and so many others, but gave him Hawke.
Hawke, who is at this very moment planning how to take apart the life they’ve crafted for themself so carefully to follow him.
Anders had figured himself for the spark for this war, a catalyst to be consumed whole. Living, and Hawke promising that they would be fugitives together, is beyond anything Anders could have hoped to dream of.
“Ostwick, I think,” Hawke says, in response to some question from Varric, raising their voice so everyone else can hear too.
“What’s in Ostwick, then?” Merrill asks.
Anders doesn’t turn around, but he can feel all their eyes on the back of his neck as Fenris says, a little scornfully, “Another Circle of Magi, I expect.”
“Easiest Circle to get to from here, by my reckoning,” Hawke agrees. “We can keep to the Vinmarks for most of the journey -- harder to track us that way.”
“Hawke,” Anders whispers, helplessly. His voice breaks.
Hawke’s heavy booted footsteps crunch over to him, and then they drop down to kneel on the gravel and shale at Anders’ feet. One gauntleted hand lands on Anders’ knee; the other puts two knuckles under Anders’ chin and lifts, terrible in their gentleness.
“You said something about building a world where no one ever dies for being born like us, I think, love,” they say.
“Hawke, are you sure?” Anders takes their hand from his chin and twines their fingers together, his staff-grip calluses catching on the rough underside of their gauntlets. “Would you really give up everything you’ve built for this? Your wealth, title, home? For outright war? Because--”
“My home is wherever you are,” Hawke interrupts him.
And Maker preserve him, Anders knows Hawke has already promised as much, but all the quiet in his head is collapsing in on itself when he thinks about how much this will take from Hawke. How much he has already taken.
“I don’t know how to tell you that you don’t have to do this,” Anders says, dashing his free hand across his eyes. “All I’ve ever wanted was for you to have a normal life. I can’t promise you a future. I can’t promise you peace. Maker, Hawke, I can’t even promise that I’ll put you before the cause. Can’t you see that? Doesn’t this--” he flings his hand out, gesturing at the seething red flames where the Chantry used to be, “prove that? Don’t -- if you’re just doing this for me, and not for mages everywhere, don’t promise me something you can’t--”
"Marry me," Hawke blurts out.
"What?" Anders says, cut off mid-sentence, his mouth dropping open. "Hawke, you can't just--”
“Propose to you under the ashes of the Chantry, hours after murdering Knight-Captain Meredith herself? Yesterday, I would have agreed, on sheer likelihood alone. But it’s been a long day. My opinion about what’s possible has undergone a pretty massive readjustment.”
Fenris, behind them, snorts.
“Hawke, please,” Anders says, fully crying now. He can feel the way the tears track down his face, through the muck and the ash there.
“I’d like to choose you and the cause, Anders,” Hawke says softly. “I know I said we could be fugitives together, but we could be husbands and revolutionaries. All of it. Together.” They swallow, their hand twitching in Anders’ hold. “If, um. You want that.”
“If I want that--” Anders mutters, shaking his head. He grabs them by that annoyingly poky bit of metal on their champion chestplate, and hauls them into a desperate, salty, wet kiss. “That’s the last chance I’m giving you to get away from me and this war, you hopeless, hopeless man,” he growls into their beard.
“Finally,” Hawke says, laughing against his lips and kissing him again.
Behind them, sometime between one and five minutes later, Varric clears his throat.
“I don’t mean to interrupt, but there is one small problem with this little tableau. Besides all of the huge problems like, I don’t know, the burning Chantry.”
“What is it?” Hawke groans, breaking their kiss to glare half-heartedly at Varric.
And Varric has the biggest shit-eating grin on his face as he says, “Hawke, I want a divorce.”
***
Afterwards, Anders only remembers the flight out of Kirkwall in pieces.
A stillness in his head, where his rage and helplessness has lived for so long.
A strand of hair stuck to his lover’s neck with blood.
Aveline, unbowed, as she walked away from Hawke for the last time.
The familiar embroidery of his mother’s pillow against the tips of his fingers.
And this moment, on the edge of a city on fire, at the end of the world and the start of the struggle to birth a new one:
Hawke’s outraged splutter.
Varric, Bethany, Fenris, Merrill, Isabela, all laughing, all together, just for this last moment.
And Hawke’s hand in his, refusing to let him go.