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They didn’t know how much time was left, only that there was not enough of it. There could never be enough.
Hawke found them a small house, a cabin really, close enough to a village where supplies and healers were plentiful, but far enough away to give them the privacy they needed.
He had to carry Fenris over the threshold of their new home. “It’s tradition,” Hawke said, as if it was a spontaneous gesture on his part, rather than necessity.
Fenris smiled. He’d been smiling a lot, recently, his usual prickly nature and weary sarcasm tempered by exhaustion and concern for Hawke.
Concern for Hawke. As if Hawke were the one who was-
Fenris didn’t want to say goodbye to the others in any kind of formal fashion.
“I might write them a letter, or something,” he admitted one night, curled up close in Hawke’s arms. “But I’ll admit, I’m rather selfish. I’m quite content to remember them as friends who looked on me, finally, without pity.”
Hawke knew what he meant. He didn’t want to see them sad. He held Fenris a little tighter, and willed his body not to shake.
Months ago, days after they’d discovered the reason for Fenris’s illness and fatigue, Hawke had walked in on Fenris screaming his rage as he destroyed one of their rooms, books thrown from shelves and ceramics smashed across the floor.
“It’s not fair!” he shouted, falling to his knees when the energy for violence left him, sapped by the poison in his veins. “I thought- for once, in all my years, I thought…”
He thought he could see a future, where there wasn’t one before. He thought he might live to have a life beyond the pain of his past.
Since that day, Fenris had not been angry, or desolate. Instead, he’d smiled - often, and easily, and with his eyes fixed on Hawke’s.
He tried to convince Hawke to leave, once, when his hands shook too much for him to hold a cup of water and Hawke had to help him drink.
“It’s only going to get worse, and I’d rather not have you remember… this,” Fenris said, sedate practicality in his voice, a lie. “I imagine it must be depressing, to say the least.”
Hawke put the cup aside, taking Fenris’s face in his hands.
“No matter how much or how little of it is left, and no matter how it’s spent, I want to spend these days with you,” Hawke said. “You’re not getting rid of me so easily.”
Fenris smiled.
He started to sleep more, speak less, and barely ate, but he watched Hawke closely as Hawke filled the time with all the stories he could think of - from his childhood, from the lives of their companions, from their life together that Fenris already knew by heart. It passed the time, and in that shared space, the memories served to create a gentler, far more forgiving world that they could step into together. Hawke talked, and Fenris listened, and smiled.
“I love you,” Fenris said one night, lying in Hawke’s arms, barely a whisper.
Hawke felt his breath catch. He knew a goodbye when he heard one.
But he remembered what Fenris said about their companions, and he knew that it would be a waste to spend these moments in tears. That could, and would, come later, but not now.
(It occurred to him that Fenris never did write those letters, in the end.)
He kissed Fenris’s hair, pulling back so he could look into Fenris’s eyes, having already memorized the colour and pattern of them but thinking only of the present, of what was afforded to him now. He smiled.
“I love you,” Hawke said, kissing Fenris again. “It’s been good, hasn’t it?”
Fenris barely had the strength for it now, but he smiled back, softly.
“It’s been good,” he murmured.
There wasn’t anything else to say after that. Hawke held Fenris and listened to him breathe, listened to the dwindling thread of heartbeats under his hand on Fenris’s chest.
They fell asleep together, and the next morning, one of them woke up.