Title: Accordance
Fandom: Dragon Age
Rating: T
Length: 1,970 words
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Written for the ‘role reversal’ challenge in fan-flashworks, although the characters decided that the role reversal I had imagined wasn’t going to happen in this vignette, so it is actually some of the build-up to it instead.
Summary: Anders is spending a quiet evening at home alone when Fenris returns from a successful slaver hunt. A slice of casual intimacy between Anders and Fenris when Sara Hawke is not around.

***

Anders was lying on the bed when Fenris arrived home, reading an interesting book on the Chantry schism Sara had picked up for him in a Hightown curios shop. He heard the front door slam before Fenris strode in confidently, his armour covered in blood and purpose in his eyes. But he faltered when he looked around and couldn’t see Sara.

“Anders,” Fenris greeted him, voice carefully neutral, as he unbuckled his gauntlets.

“She’s gone with Merrill and Varric to see the Dalish,” Anders said, answering Fenris’s unspoken question. “I don’t know if she’ll be back tonight.”

Fenris just nodded, then crossed the room to place his gauntlet on the armour stand. Anders could read the disappointment in the set of his shoulders.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“It was a good tip,” Fenris said, turning to his second gauntlet. “We cleared out another warehouse. Freed a lot of prospective slaves.”

So it was a good evening for him. Anders well knew that Fenris liked to celebrate his success hunting slavers with an ecstatic reunion with Sara. It was too bad for him that only Anders awaited him this evening.

“Could I suggest having a bath before coming to bed?” Anders said. “You seem to be covered in the slavers’ remains.”

Fenris looked down at his breastplate and smiled, the kind of inward smile that suggested he was reliving how he had acquired his gruesome decoration.

“Yes, that seems reasonable.” He placed his second gauntlet down on the armour stand and walked out of the bedroom. Anders turned his attention back to his book. Shortly thereafter Fenris returned, lugging two steaming buckets of water and followed by Orana, Bodahn and Sandal each carrying one of the same. A couple of trips later, and the claw-footed bath in front of the fire was filled. Fenris thanked the servants for their help, closed the door behind them, and started to remove his breastplate.

Anders shut his book and made to swing his legs off the bed. “I’ll head down to the library,” he said. “Give you some privacy.”

“No need,” Fenris said, as he worked on the buckles. “It’s not like you haven’t seen everything before.”

Anders refrained from pointing out that, while true, it had always been when Sara was around – and involved. But if Fenris didn’t care, then he didn’t either. He shrugged, made himself comfortable on the bed once more, and re-opened the book.

After a few moments of work, the breastplate came free. Anders glanced up to see that, beneath his armour, Fenris’s linen shirt was stained with sweat, dirt, and blood.

“Do you need any healing?” Anders asked as Fenris carefully placed the breastplate on the armour stand.
Fenris glanced down at his clothes.

“Mostly not mine, I think.”

As Fenris started to strip off his shirt, Anders hurriedly looked back down at the book but out of his peripheral vision he could see Fenris’ brown skin being revealed, the dramatic swirls of lyrium highlighting the contours of lean muscles. Fenris was right, it was nothing he hadn’t seen before, many times – even before they had entered their arrangement with Sara – but it felt different in this context, without her here.

Fenris dropped his shirt unceremoniously on the floor – Anders hoped he would pick it up later – then started on the laces of his breeches.

Anders meant to keep his eyes on the page. The book really was very interesting. But he could not help but glance up as Fenris’s breeches fell to the floor. And as he stepped out of them, Anders could see he was still half-hard with battle lust.

Thankfully, Fenris then stepped into the bath, and the struggle not to look at him was over, for now.
That is, until Fenris made a noise of frustration.

“Could you pass the soap, Anders?”

Was he deliberately trying to aggravate him? Anders looked up and saw the soap sitting on a washcloth by the toilet stand. Sara liked to wash her face first thing of a morning and must have left it there.

Placing a marker in his book, Anders put it down on the covers and stood up. He crossed the room to the toilet stand, picked up the soap, and brought it back to where Fenris lounged in the bath. The water had turned a faint pink but was otherwise clear, hiding nothing. When Anders offered the soap without comment, Fenris only thanked him.

Anders returned to the bed, and his book. Fenris began to wash himself. Anders tried to keep his mind focused on the Chantry schism and the implications for the dogma of the present-day Chantry. But his thoughts kept wandering.

If Sara had been there when Fenris had arrived home, Anders knew he would have quickly been on his knees, taking his reward in the form of pleasuring her. Sometimes this would lead to more but, as often as not, Fenris seemed satisfied with Sara’s satisfaction alone. Anders had suspicions about where and how this desire had arisen, given the nature of the bondage to which Danarius had subjected him, but it was not something he could ever imagine broaching with Fenris.

He watched as Fenris sluiced water over his chest and face to wash off the soap, then slid deeper into the bath to wet his hair. Sara would sometimes wash Fenris’ hair for him, lathering it with her own rosemary shampoo and massaging his scalp before rinsing it off with clean water. Anders wondered how Fenris would react if he offered to do the same.

It wasn’t long before Fenris placed the soap on the edge of the bath and stood up. Water dripped from his hair, down his back, and over his buttocks. Anders looked away, but not before he had noticed the fresh blood welling from a slash across Fenris’s scapula.

“You’re injured,” Anders said, trying to sound professional as Fenris stepped out of the bath and reached for his towel. Any hope that Fenris might use it to cover himself up vanished as Fenris instead used it to towel his hair.

“Hmm?” Fenris said.

Anders waited until Fenris had finished rubbing his hair with the towel, and wrapped it safely around his waist.

“Your shoulder blade,” he said, gesturing.

Fenris tried to turn his head to look, but the angle was awkward. He reached over his shoulder to touch the wound, and inspected the blood that came away on his fingers.

“It’s not serious,” Fenris said.

“In your expert opinion?” Anders asked, raising an eyebrow. He stood up and walked over to where Fenris stood. Fenris turned slightly so Anders could inspect the wound.

Fenris was right. It wasn’t serious. It probably didn’t even need healing. But --

“Sara would want me to heal it,” Anders said, which was true - she hated to see Fenris hurt - but Anders was also not averse to a legitimate reason for touching Fenris’s bared back and he knew invoking Sara was the best way to sway Fenris towards his preferred course of action. Fenris turned to look him in the eyes, and Anders wondered whether his calculation was obvious. He maintained as neutral an expression as he could under Fenris’s scrutiny. A long moment passed before Fenris nodded and turned away again.

Anders restrained his eagerness as he reached forward slowly to touch the skin around the gash. Fenris’s skin was warm from the bath, and surprisingly soft. He opened his connection to the Fade, drew on Fenris’s memories of wholeness, and used them to knit together the skin that had been separated. As he did so, Fenris made a barely audible grunt. It took only a moment, and then it was done.

“I’m sorry it hurts you,” Anders said into the silence after. It was the wrong thing to say. He knew as soon as the words had left his mouth. The last thing Fenris wanted was pity. From anyone, but perhaps especially from him.

Fenris ignored him and turned away. He walked across the room to the chest of drawers, retrieved a clean shirt, and pulled it over his head in brusque movements.

Anders watched mutely as Fenris dressed himself in soft underclothes suitable for bed. It was only after he was dressed that Fenris turned to face Anders again.

“Thank you for the healing,” he said evenly.

Fenris walked to the other side of the bed, lifted the covers, and laid down.

“I’ll leave you to get some sleep,” Anders said, collecting his book from the bed.

“You don’t have to,” Fenris said, facing away.

Anders paused in his movements, hesitating. He should just go. But something in Fenris’s tone arrested him.
“Do you want me to stay?” he asked.

“You don’t have to go,” Fenris repeated. He seemed incapable of asking for what he wanted, although whether that was pride or a remnant of his conditioning Anders did not know. But in his words he thought he heard an unvoiced plea.

“Okay,” Anders said. He lay back down on top of the covers on the opposite side of the bed, and opened the book once more.

Time passed, but sleep did not seem to come easily to Fenris. His breathing remained uneven, and he would occasionally shift.

“Do you want me to extinguish the light?” Anders eventually asked.

“It’s fine,” Fenris said, still facing away.

“I should get some sleep anyway.” Anders placed the book down on the bedside table and, with a wave of his hand, dismissed the flames from the candles and the fire. In the ensuing darkness, he got up, removed his outer robe, and folded it neatly before placing it on the bureau. Then he crossed back to the bed and slid beneath the covers.

The bed was large enough that the only sign of Fenris’s presence was the sound of his breathing and the occasional movement of the mattress when he turned. It was different when Sara was there. She liked to cuddle up with the both of them, which would inevitably bring their arms and legs into contact with each other. Anders missed the incidental closeness, but at least Fenris had decided to stay. Having someone nearby was comforting. In Kinloch tower, the only times he had been alone was when he’d been in solitary confinement. He wondered if the night held something of the same terrors for Fenris.

Anders stared up at the ceiling. Dim moonlight entered the upper windows, keeping the room from being entirely dark. Fenris shifted again on the other side of the bed. Anders wished Sara was there, to bridge the gulf between them. He would have enjoyed witnessing their love-making too. He closed his eyes and imagined Sara in bed with them, Fenris moving over her in the dark, her gasps and moans, his quiet grunts and whispered Tevene. If Anders was lucky, she would turn to him next. They would both probably be able to sleep easier then.

Anders wondered how Fenris would react if he reached out for him. Offered, perhaps, to help relieve his frustration. Not well, he suspected. Even if he wasn’t offended, and was in any way interested, he regarded himself as belonging to Sara and Anders thought it unlikely he would countenance anything between them without her prior permission. If it was something Anders wanted to pursue, it would need to be with her present to endorse it. Still, Anders was conscious of every sigh, every frustrated roll as Fenris tried to make himself comfortable, and every inch of the gap between them.

Finally, Fenris’s breathing evened out. Anders glanced over, his eyes attuned to the darkness now, and saw the tension had left his body. With a gesture, Anders reignited the candle on the bedside table, shuffled up so he was leaning back against the headboard, and opened his book once more.