Sitting under the mistletoe
(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),
One last candle burning low,
All the sleepy dancers gone,
Just one candle burning on,
Shadows lurking everywhere:
Some one came, and kissed me there.

Tired I was; my head would go
Nodding under the mistletoe
(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),
No footsteps came, no voice, but only,
Just as I sat there, sleepy, lonely,
Stooped in the still and shadowy air
Lips unseen—and kissed me there.

—Mistletoe, Walter de la Mare

—

Hawke always drives when they travel.

Fenris has his license, of course—well, not of course, because there's enough wrapped up in the history of him managing to get any sort of government-issued ID that's his, that has never had Danarius's name attached to it, that being licensed to drive is not a thing he takes lightly, and—anyway. He could take the wheel if needed, but the bottom line is Hawke prefers to go faster than he does and she likes controlling the music, so Hawke drives, and Fenris reads.

It's about a four-and-a-half-hour drive to her parents' place. Four and a quarter, if Hawke pushes it, but this year they're not in a hurry; Carver has two full weeks off work and Bethany's already finished with finals, so once they get to the house, there's nothing ahead of them but more laziness than Fenris knows what to do with.

"And cookies," Hawke says out of nowhere, and Fenris glances up in time to see the sign for exit 252 flash by. Less than twenty miles to their exit, then. He's not exactly prone to carsickness, but he's more than ready to stretch his legs.

"What?"

"You haven't turned a page in fifteen minutes. Either the plot's gone that convoluted, or you're thinking about drowning in unscheduled time again."

Fenris smiles despite himself. It had frightened him at first, how quickly she'd learned to read his mind, but over the years the skill has stifled enough brewing arguments he finds it more convenient than anything else. "I'm sure your mother will find occupation for the both of us, given the chance."

Hawke groans. "The last time she asked you to load firewood onto the deck to dry, there was more wood by the door than the fence by the time she let you stop."

"Better that than your assistance in the kitchen, I think."

"You're only saying that because I gave you food poisoning."

"You gave everyone food poisoning, Hawke."

"The gift that kept on giving," she says, laughing, but she reaches across the center console and squeezes his knee. "Not this year, I promise."

He covers her hand briefly with his own, then links their fingers when she turns her palm up in question. A hard-won thing, this simple affection, but too much of their history together has been hard to let the easy moments slip away now. "Besides, Bethany will hardly permit it."

Hawke grins as she flicks her signal and merges into the right lane, and Fenris reflexively smiles again. "Two weeks before she has to go back for class, too. You'll both be gnawing at the doorposts before Saturday."

"You did mention there would be cookies," he suggests. In the back seat, Toby's ears flick forward, but when no cookies proffer themselves he resettles to sleep with a huff.

"If Mother's not baked a triple batch of ginger snaps just because she knows they're your favorite, I'll eat your beanie."

"I thought you intended to avoid food poisoning this year."

"Ass," Hawke says, and they at last pull off the highway onto the country road that will lead them to the house.

—

The first time he'd come home with Hawke for Christmas, they hadn't been in a relationship. They'd hardly been friends at all; they'd only just met in a filthy alley behind the bar where she worked, when she'd come out back to toss some bottles in the recycling and he'd been elbow deep in a fight with three of Danarius's hired men. Retrieval specialists, he'd called them once, though Fenris had had no intention of being retrieved. They hadn't been impressed—but then again, neither had he.

She'd helped. For nothing besides the warm fuzzy glow of doing the right thing, she'd told him after, her eye already turning black and his shoulder burning from the near-dislocation. She'd brought him inside and given him two shots of whiskey—one for the pain, and one for the "meet-cute"—and then she'd handed him the first-aid kit to mop up the rest of his mess while she finished her shift.

He doesn't even remember what happened next, exactly. He just remembers she'd somehow found out he had nowhere to go, and instead of throwing him right back out in the cold she'd taken him home, and he'd slept on her couch three weeks running before finding out she'd been about to leave for Christmas, and she'd intended to bring him with her.

They'd had one of their worst arguments ever, that night before she was supposed to leave. He was not a stray, no lost dog come begging at her feet for a roof and a bowl of food and a handsome leash; he no more wanted to go to her home for Christmas than to be handed back to Danarius again, bleeding out all over the fine leather of his limousine. But she'd won the fight with the promise of free escape from the city—for a few days, anyway—and an offer of a job on their return, something close enough he could walk to. If nothing else it had been a handhold in a stone wall he'd scrabbled at for months, and the survivor in him could not bear to let it pass.

So he'd gone with her, and suffered in silence the house built with more money in its gardens than he'd ever seen outside of Danarius's manor, and the half-dozen gifts gone out and purchased especially for him after Hawke had called, and her mother shoving enough turkey and steak on his plate at meals Hawke's brother had protested at the loss of meat. They'd gone out of their way to include him, to make him feel welcome in their cosy, elegant, expensive home. He'd hated every moment of it.

Aside from the showers. Those had been excellent, steaming hot and stocked with the pricey shampoos he'd genuinely missed and hadn't been able to afford in years, even if he'd had to put on the same torn, filthy jeans he'd been wearing for months afterwards.

Even their gifts had been thoughtful. Good clothes, new shoes, a duffel bag, a wallet with an offer of a prepaid Visa card if he'd been willing to accept it. He'd thanked them as he'd opened each package, stiff as stone, and his stomach had writhed with shame and humiliation. Better to be back in that filthy alley, his back against the wall and blood in his teeth, than forced to accept this endless charity from benevolent, insipid strangers who knew nothing of what it meant to suffer.

(He'd learned later, of course. That Bethany had been desperately ill for half a decade, only growing well enough to finally attend medical school within the last six months; that Leandra and Malcolm had eloped and lived hand-to-mouth in the projects for fifteen years while he'd scrabbled out a living as an artist; that Hawke had become the sole provider for the family of five when Malcolm had been badly injured in a hit-and-run when she was eighteen. Leandra had been his caretaker, the surgeries he needed impossibly out of reach for a family that could barely keep the gas on, and Carver and Hawke both had flatly refused to let Bethany give up her college scholarship to stay home and help.

Then Leandra's parents had both been diagnosed with cancer when Hawke was twenty-five, and the relationship she'd thought irreparable had been mended—or at least bandaged—with deathbed apologies and a generous revision of their will. The house had come with them, and the family investment portfolio, and the Hawke children growing to know their grandparents at last for the half-year they'd had before dying. So—a price for the wealth and name they'd inherited. He doesn't begrudge Hawke that.)

Still. He'd hated them then, and indeed had packed his one bag and had been halfway to the nearest bus stop when Hawke had come running after him, her sweater too thin for the freezing air, near as threadbare as his jacket and twice as expensive. "I'm sorry," she'd said, breathlessly shoving his new duffel into his arms, doubling over with her hands on her knees to breathe again. "Sorry. I screwed this up. You can leave if you want. Just—take these, at least. Please."

He'd sneered, the ice that coated every tree branch around them bleeding into his skin. The bag had been heavy with the new clothes, the new shoes, expensive canvas slipping through his frozen fingers. "Find another project for your holiday generosity. I don't need your pity. Your family's pity."

"It's not—you're not—I don't pity you, Fenris, I swear."

"The last time a wealthy man said such a thing to me, he owned me in less than six months."

She'd recoiled and tucked her hands into her armpits, paltry defense. "If you think I'm trying to—to make you owe me, or to give myself some hold over you, you're in more trouble than you know. I don't even remember to eat on a regular schedule unless Bethany calls."

His lip had curled. "Hawke—"

"I'm not joking. I killed an unkillable cactus with vodka once."

"Hawke—"

"It was an accident. Unlabeled bottles."

"I don't—"

"And I once broke my thumb walking in a straight line."

"Hawke!" he'd snapped, thoroughly irritated, but—it had been a clean sort of irritation, milder and without poison, and when she'd rocked back onto her heels and glanced at him with undisguised hope, he'd had to shrug his shoulders to clear the itch between them. "I—" he'd started, stopped, and started again, every defensive instinct he'd had clawing the back of his throat raw. "If I go back with you."

"Yes?"

"I owe you nothing. Those things—those are mine. I'll—I can take them if I wish. The—gifts."

"Of course. They're gifts. I mean, no strings attached, as gifts ought to be. You could take them out in the yard and burn them to rubble right now if you like, though Da would probably make you clean up the ashpit after. He's extraordinarily proud of his landscaping."

"If I leave, you will not follow me," he'd warned.

"Couldn't track my own feet if they weren't glued to my ankles."

He'd laughed. He hadn't meant to, more a bark of surprise than anything, but Hawke had grinned and tucked her hand into his elbow. "Come back," she'd said again, not ungently. "Carver's built a good fire and he'll pout if no one warms themselves at it."

"Only for a few hours," he'd said, his skin stinging even through the leather at the cold. "The last bus leaves at eight tonight."

"Of course," she'd said, and reluctantly, he'd gone with her back down the tree-lined street, the new canvas duffel bag resting snug at his hip.

—

"We're here!" Hawke shouts as she flings open the front door. There's a general shout of hello, both her parents and Carver waiting in the great room with the hearth, and Hawke sails in with her arms spread wide and the dog bounding joyfully between her legs. Fenris has never been so easy; for a instant, as always, he is overwhelmed by the size of the double driveway and the ten-foot windows and the two-story foyer, with the glimpses of even larger rooms beyond, cut crystal chandeliers and a grand piano and antique furniture so old it's become ageless—enough, he tells himself, as always, and pushes through the moment by stamping his snow-covered boots too hard into the mat.

"I'm glad you made it," Bethany says, and Fenris looks up as she comes to meet him down the dark oak staircase. "She said you two might have to work, but with Carver home for a while at last, it's time we all had a decent holiday."

"Bethany," he says, genuinely glad to see her, and lets her take the duffel from his shoulder so that he can better manage the three gift boxes he'd brought in one-handed. "Have you been here long?"

"Only since yesterday. The last leg of my flight stalled thanks to this snowstorm. How was the drive? No, don't tell me—"

"Fast," they say at the same moment, and the corner of Fenris's mouth quirks up. "As always."

"As always," Bethany says, laughing, and leads him into the great room with the rest of the family.

They're all there, the Hawkes, Carver and his father on the sofa across from the enormous, roaring fireplace, Leandra in her favorite chair set corner to both, and Hawke standing in the center of the Persian rug, her coat half-unbuttoned and her scarf knotted hopelessly over one shoulder. Their housekeeper, Orana, stands in the far doorway, laughing at some story of Hawke's mid-telling, the smells of steak and garlic and something green and savory floating from the kitchen behind her. Toby has already claimed the warmest place on the rug near the hearth, flopped on his back with all four legs in the air, and without meaning to, Fenris pauses in the archway.

He'd hated them, once. Hated Hawke, too, when he'd first learned where she'd come from, but now—now—

"Fenris," cries Leandra, and he smiles as the family as a whole turns to greet him in delight.

—

Another hour slips by before everything's finally brought in from the car. He's traveled light, as always, and Hawke has managed to restrain herself to two bags and a satchel, but between Leandra trying to feed him every cookie in the house and Carver's interest in his latest travels, they can't quite seem to find the time to bring in the bags, the dog crate, the (store-bought) brownies, and the truly appalling pile of presents Hawke's jammed into every crevice not otherwise occupied by passengers.

And yet, even that pile is dwarfed by the mountain spilling over and around the Hawke family tree. Even more impressive than last year, Fenris thinks, towering twelve feet and decked root to crown in gold garland, but Malcolm has always taken the display seriously, and Fenris knows that a good portion of the presents will be given to a local charity run by a family friend. He doesn't care much for Anders's politics—their argument the first time they'd met had nearly spoiled the Thanksgiving turkey, Hawke had told him—but he can respect the man's work with the underprivileged, and he's aware enough of his own biases to realize how near he came, once, to relying on the same charity to survive.

Still, the red and green and gold dazzles, ribbon tumbling down in curls, glitter spreading like water from Hawke's truly offensive wrapping papers to corrupt their neighbors in turn. His name jumps from every corner. To Fenris—from Bethany. Fenris, from Leandra & Malcolm. FENRIS, no signature, but Carver's unmistakable sloppy capitals. Mon chéri, surrounded by a dozen messy hearts.

He closes his eyes, swallows down the old bitterness. Not here. Not any longer. So much more to him, now, than the old and burning hate…

"Are you all right?"

Hawke's voice, soft behind him. No footfalls on the heavy carpet, but he feels the air warm as she reaches around his waist and rests her chin on his shoulder. Her fingers link together, steady, loose, nothing holding him still and in place but his own self, and Fenris lets out a long breath.

"Of course."

"Of course," she says, gently mocking, and leans her head against his. "Same offer as always."

"We don't need to leave, Hawke."

"Well, I was hoping not. It's a long drive to make twice in one day."

"Short enough, as you drive it."

"Ass," she says again; he shakes his head and feels her smile in response, hears the laugh curling into her voice. "Shall we take a walk? Da said the back pines have gone pretty as postcards in all the snow."

"If you like," he says, glancing out the window at the white lawn that stretches away from the house, the split-rail fence that lines the gravel path leading back to the small pasture, the untamed woods that mark the far edges of the property. "The snow is not so deep."

"If you like," Hawke counters, and kisses the side of his neck.

He does, as it happens, and so they do.

—

Hawke always holds his hand when they walk together. He'd shied away at first, in the earliest weeks of their whatever-they'd-been, oddly uneasy at even this little display of a heart; she hadn't tried again for years. They'd been complicated enough as it was, working opposite shifts at the same bar, his tiny apartment two buildings away from her own—but his, rented in his name and no other, the salary paying for it deposited in his own bank account, the checks in his hand and with his awkward signature and no other's. The flirting had been harmless enough, once he'd realized he disliked her less than he missed her company when she was away. Then the one desperate, drunken night after he'd read of Hadriana's overdose had transformed want into need, and in the unbearable silence afterwards—and in the horror, and the hate, and the love he not known the look of—he'd choked on every memory he had at once and ghosted out of her life.

Three years it had taken after that, too long, for him to gather enough of his edges back into himself, to find the man behind the animal fear and make him strong enough to stand again. He hadn't even managed the words for promises, shy as he had been of somedays that might never see dawn; he only remembers it had been a night much like this, bitterly cold and white with fresh snow, a walk down a popular holiday street in the city's market district, and before his traitorous mind could reason his way out of it he had reached across the little space between them and taken her gloved hand in his own.

She'd not even stopped her story, he remembers. Instead her voice had only hitched, just for an instant, and her cheeks had grown red as her scarf, and her fingers, tentatively, had threaded through his. The strung fairy lights had danced over her hair, fire-gold and warm, and he'd ducked his mouth into the folds of his scarf to hide from the falling snow.

He's reached for her ever since.

—

"Here you are," Carver says without preamble. "Mom wants you to help bring in some firewood."

Fenris closes his book—he'd guessed the murderer four chapters ago, anyway—and stands up, dusting off the cookie crumbs Hawke's left on his knees. "You have the carriers?"

Carver lifts them, tanned leather and handles on each end, and Fenris snags his peacoat from where it lies over the back of an armchair. "Take your gloves," Hawke says sleepily, one arm snaking out from under her blanket for a throw pillow to replace Fenris's absent leg. "It's cold. You need your fingers."

"I'll take the work gloves from the basket." She's called him a snob for it before, but he knows better than most that each tool has its purpose, and he's not going to take Sherpa and calfskin to raw bark.

"Ready when you are," Carver says impatiently, and Fenris suppresses his smile as he goes.

Carver had struggled with him the most, those first years when Christmas with the Hawkes had become a relative tradition. Not that he'd minded the intrusion, as Fenris had first thought; he'd soon learned Carver brought home friends and girlfriends of his own often enough, since the Hawkes encouraged large gatherings at the holidays. Rather, he'd seen the way his sister had looked at Fenris and disapproved. He'd recognized the writing on the wall—or on her heart, as it had happened—and had known from her face alone that first Christmas afterwards how badly things had gone. That had been the only time in five years that a Hawke had ever asked him to leave; Hawke herself had come down the stairs as Carver had said it, and the shouting match that had ensued between them had nearly been enough to chase him from the house anyway, if he hadn't ridden with Hawke in her car.

That had been the first time she'd called him family. Family doesn't leave after a fight, Carver, she'd shouted. You stick around and you deal with it. Things change. Relationships change. But you don't ever tell family to leave on Christmas.

He'd gone to his room after that fight (only borrowed, only temporary), the weight of being the interloper in the already-full home of the Hawkes heavier than it had been in years. He'd stared at his half-unpacked luggage, the duffel still the same, the clothes different, newer, a little nicer, purchased with his own money but the money from the job Hawke had gotten him, all of it rooted in someone else's generosity. Nothing he'd earned on his own, not truly. Nothing that hadn't come, at the heart of it, from someone else bothering to glance down at him in the dirt and extend the afterthought of a hand—

Carver had knocked on his open door, eyes down, shoulders high and tight. "Sorry," he'd muttered awkwardly, his hands jammed into his pockets. "Shouldn't have said that. Any of that. I—sorry."

"It is your family, not mine," Fenris had said, tense as the stormclouds that had threatened the pines all morning. "I understand. It was wrong of me to intrude."

"Nah, she was right." Carver had shaken himself, a quick thing like a dog bounding from a stream, and his face afterwards had been easier as he'd looked Fenris in the eye. "She was right and I wasn't. You're family. You should stay."

He had, though it had remained stilted through breakfast the next morning, until a bird had come down the chimney and Toby had upset a gallon of tea in the chasing. Somehow, after that—they'd been all right. You're family. You should stay…

"So," Carver says, the gangly boy of eighteen in Fenris's memory fading into the twenty-something man leading him out to the woodpile. "My sister says you two are going to Italy next year."

"Yes. Rome, Verona, Tuscany."

"Vineyards," Carver offers, smirking. "Old vineyards."

Fenris snorts, his boots crunching pleasantly through the fresh snowdrifts. "Entirely a coincidence, I'm sure."

"I'm sure," Carver says, and laughs. "I was stationed in Vicenza for a while. Pretty country."

"Pretty women," Fenris suggests, and watches with great interest as the back of Carver's neck flushes red. "As I've heard."

"Oh, sod off," Carver mutters, slapping the carriers open onto the snow as they come upon the woodpile at last. "Hey," he adds as they begin loading logs into the carriers, "I never thanked you. For the package last summer. With the, you know, everything."

A ball cap from his favorite soccer team, a packet of some local sweets, a handful of handwritten letters from friends, a sturdy framed photo of the family (without Fenris, though Hawke had scribbled his name on the back anyway). "You are welcome, though your sister did most of the work."

"Maybe, but she told me it was your idea. She'd never have thought to do that without you." Carver stops loading the logs and glances at Fenris, rubbing the back of one glove across his forehead. "She's been different since she started dating you. Better. I mean—not that she was bad before, but you're—you've—shit and balls, you know what I mean. Stop looking at me." Fenris can't quite find words to answer, but it seems one isn't required, as Carver goes back to loading logs without waiting. The flush of his neck has spread down his throat and up to his cheeks. "All I mean is I've met other people she's brought home before. Since high school. And you're the first one, man or woman, where I've actually cared enough to hope you stick around. So. Fuck it. Don't take off without a goodbye, or whatever."

He's not so blind that he can't see what this cost Carver to say, but neither is he foolish enough to think this means Carver would welcome his gratitude. Instead he clasps his shoulder, just for a moment, ignoring the heat spreading through his chest that has nothing to do with the exercise; then he bends again to the rough-split firewood and the leather carriers with Carver, side by side, log by log.

—

In retrospect, Fenris should have known better than to hope a midnight search for a glass of water would be uninterrupted. But here he is, barefoot on the kitchen hardwood, and there stands Malcolm, looming over the island stacked two layers high in cookie tins, looking for all the world like a boy of twelve caught red-handed instead of the six-foot-five bearded giant he is. The effect's hardly helped by either his bathrobe—neon pink terrycloth, a gift from Bethany when she was a child—or his slippers, which are bright red with Santa buckles across the top and fluffy white wool overspilling at the ankles.

"Thank God," Malcolm says, and finishes the frosted cookie with relish. "You won't tell me I should watch my sugar."

"Certainly not," Fenris says, affronted, but when Malcolm lifts an enquiring eyebrow he's got little choice but to follow him to the great room once he's achieved the water glass. The tree's still lit, white twinkling lights glancing between the fir needles as they cross to the couch in a soft, muted glow; dozens or ornaments reflect the lights into hundreds and thousands more, glass and gold and glitter alike nestled in the branches. Here and there dot the older ornaments, cheaper and infinitely more precious; the peacock Hawke made out of tissue paper when she was in high school; Bethany's paper star, won this year by Leandra and her husband as the treasured tree-topper for the season.

He has to move a pillow that proclaims naughty/nice to the floor, but eventually he finds a modicum of comfort on the Hawke's sofa as Malcolm takes the other end. The fireplace has long died to embers, shielded now by the glass doors pulled to; a dozen stockings have been crammed along the mantel, one for everyone they expect this year at Christmas. Not just the five Hawkes, but—Toby too, and Hawke's uncle and cousin, and Fenris, and the Hendyrs, and a handful of family friends Fenris knows well by now. Even Anders has a stocking. Fenris briefly considers cutting a hole in the toe, but—Christmas, he supposes, and takes a sip of water.

"Couldn't sleep?" Malcolm's voice, soft with the dark. Fenris glances over, but he's looking at the garland draped along the stair rail instead, the scarlet ribbon that twines around it knotted into exceedingly fluffy bows at every joist. "Or just chasing off a hangover?"

"Off the red from dinner?" Fenris says, allowing his amusement to show. "More likely a soporific than anything else."

"And yet here you are. At least I'm honest about my thieving ways."

"Too much salt in the popcorn after dinner," Fenris says, relenting. "I ought to have taken a glass then, but I was distracted."

"To be fair, it was a terrible movie." Malcolm produces from the pocket of his bathrobe a second cookie, eats it with relish, and sighs in satisfaction. "Unlike my wife's snickerdoodles."

It had been a hideous movie. A Hawke tradition he has never fully understood: find the worst Hallmark holiday movie possible and watch it as a family, no heckling allowed. He'd lost count of the impossible, last-minute airport coincidences years ago. "It might have been worse."

"You fell asleep twenty minutes in." Gentle, though, and teasing; and he had, after all, his head dropping onto Hawke's shoulder without his meaning to, more tired than he'd expected from the day's drive to town and the walk through the local botanical garden's annual Christmas show.

"I caught the end," Fenris offers, but Malcolm only smiles, the silver shot through his dark beard glinting in the low light, and the conversation lapses into a comfortable silence.

Fenris likes this room, honestly. One of his favorites in this enormous house, the ceiling eaved and reinforced with natural wood beams, a bay window overlooking the snowy forest behind the house, open archways to the kitchen and dining room, the comforting brick hearth and its dozen stockings. Everything's been festively decorated—Malcolm's doing, he knows, as Leandra laments every year the sprouting of garland from her ears—but he likes the greenery on the mantel, the handmade wreaths on the windows. Sentimental in his old age, Hawke had said last year, but so be it.

"Has the house temperature been all right for you? Warm enough?"

"Yes," Fenris says, and takes another sip of water. "Hawke would say it is too warm, but to me it is comfortable."

Malcolm laughs. "Cold hands, warm heart."

"So they say."

Another easy silence, broken only by a creak here and there of the house settling; then Malcolm says, "I eloped with Leandra, you know."

He does, and he knows Malcolm knows this. "Hawke has mentioned it."

"We were idiots," he says fondly. "Fools in love, and they hated that I had no degree and no interest in pursuing one. No regular job, either, for all that I worked more than full time on the paintings."

"She has said you had her soon after you married."

"Leandra was pregnant when we left, though we didn't know it until later. We didn't even have health insurance when she realized." Malcolm pauses to straighten some decoration on the side table, a ceramic elf clutching an oversized mug of candy canes, and leans back into the couch. "Every dime meant something, back then. We had no Christmas the first year because we couldn't afford it. Used to joke that Eppie was our present to each other, along with the sleepless nights and never knowing how to pay for diapers."

Fenris says nothing, too keenly aware of such holidays of his own, and Malcolm continues. "We were lean for many years. Even before my accident, it was tight to get each child something special, and after…" he trails off, looking at his hands. Straightened now, thanks to surgery after surgery and a dozen metal pins and a thousand hours of rehabilitation. No artist's salary in those fingers, not any longer. "After…we weren't ever homeless, but more than once we were only one check away from it."

"I know," Fenris says, though the words stick tighter than he'd like. "I'm sure Hawke has mentioned this."

Malcolm nods, his voice pensive. "She's mentioned a few things. Mostly during that first year you came, when we weren't sure if you'd be staying." He pauses again; now his tone grows firm, and he looks Fenris directly in the eye. "I want you to know that you never have to doubt us. For Eppie, or for yourself. There's no conditions, no terms—whether you two ever get married or not, you're one of us now. No wills. No demands. Just…if you need us, I hope you know we're here. For anything you need."

Even in the soft shadows cast by the twinkling tree, Fenris can read the earnestness in his face. He swallows, hard, and his fingers tighten around the glass; then, somehow, he finds his voice again. "I…thank you, Malcolm. There are few so willing to welcome strangers into their house—" –and fewer still to give them duffel bags, and desperately needed friendship when one had spent a lifetime bitter and alone. "I did not deserve it. You have been—" and it sticks again, damn! "—kind to me when I did not deserve it. Thank you for that."

Malcolm waves a still-strong hand at the room around them. "Nothing of this means shite if we can't use it to help when we can."

Fenris nods, fingers still hard on his glass as Malcolm at last pushes to his feet and knots the pink robe tighter around his waist. "Good night, Malcolm."

"Good night, Fenris."

He stays a little longer, watching the black, silent trees out the windows beyond the Christmas lights, watching the light play through the fir needles to cast shimmering shadows along the stairs. Then he takes his glass and climbs to the second floor, and as he opens the door to the room he shares with Hawke she shifts sleepily under the navy comforter. She stirs a little more when he slides in behind her, an inarticulate protest at the coldness of his feet as he tucks them against her calves, but soon enough she's out again, her black hair already tangled around his fingers, her nose buried in his shoulder.

Fenris presses a sober kiss to the crown of her head, wondering, wondering—but no, he decides at last, closing his eyes, letting his breathing slow into something that matches Hawke's steady, sleeping rhythm. He has loved her so long he cannot remember when it began. For her sake he is grateful her father has more sense than her grandparents; for his own he knows he has been given too much already. He cannot ask more; he has no right.

For Hawke, though…

He draws in a breath through his nose, deep and clean with the smell of her shampoo, and goes to sleep.

—

Fenris has always been the cold one in the relationship. He means temperature, he thinks, watching Hawke bound after Toby in the snow in nothing more than a sweatshirt and a toboggan, but the sentiment applies too well to the rest for him to ignore it. She'd been the one to invite him home for the holidays that first year; the one to chase after him both then and again later, back in the city, when he'd found a message on his phone from an unknown number saying Danarius had persuaded someone in the police force to reopen Fenris's sealed records. He'd been running so long he hadn't known how to look anywhere but behind him, desperate with fear; Hawke had been the one abruptly in his path, arms open, eyebrow raised, waiting for him to stop just a moment and catch his breath.

She'd been the one to notice, six weeks into sleeping on her couch, that he'd always been balled up under the blanket in the mornings when her alarm went off. She'd been the one to bring him two quilts twice as thick from the secondhand store down the road; the one who, for his first ever apartment-warming present, had bought him an electric blanket and a thermos that held heat for twelve hours.

She'd shared her own heat later, too, when enough years had slipped behind them that she thought nothing of leaning against his bent knees on movie night, or sharing a blanket as he read and she played games on her phone. That had been an intimacy altogether foreign to him—but so easy to Hawke, who needed touch like she needed air and thought nothing of a casual brush of a hand over a shoulder or a kiss to a cheek.

Fenris, on the other hand, had been a man who hadn't even known he'd lived his life starving. Then Hawke had come, and he'd found a wholly new need—not for touch in general, but for Hawke's touch, and he's not too proud to admit the years they were apart had been some of the most difficult of his life.

Still. They had mended, and his heart with it, and if now he discovers a sudden, vital need to whisk Hawke behind the nearest tree and kiss her senseless, it's only right that he do so, having wasted as much time over the years as he has. Hawke herself doesn't seem to mind, her blue eyes brighter than the sky as he cups her face in his gloved hands, her smile so wide his chest grows hot.

"Why, Fenris," she murmurs, her hands coming up to link behind his neck. A bit of snow tumbles from her hair to the cuff of his coatsleeve, stark white flakes dusting down the black. "How very forward of you, sir."

"At your mother's home," he agrees, and ducks his head until he can catch her mouth with his. She laughs into his kiss, linked fingers yielding to a full embrace, and he doesn't even care that her sweatshirt is soaked with snow and her rubber boots squeak every time she shifts her weight.

She's so warm in his arms, and in this weather, it's all he needs.

—

Hawke's only just managed to pin him against the kitchen counter when her mother rounds the corner from the great room. Fenris's hands move back to Hawke's waist reflexively; she leaves hers on the granite counter, though, hemming him in on either side, and drops an unrepentant kiss on his chin.

"How cute," Leandra says, looking as though she means it, and wipes her hands on a tea towel embroidered in tiny Christmas trees. "Darling, will you help your father at the grill? He needs to step away for a moment, and Carver's gone to go pick up Merrill and Isabela from their hotel."

"The steaks," Fenris says, alarmed. That Hawke should supervise any aspect of the Christmas Eve meal is nigh unthinkable, but the steaks—

Leandra laughs. "He can't leave them unattended," she says, and Hawke tosses her head.

"You doubt me, sir?"

"In this—yes. Very much so."

"You're not the only one," she says, grinning, and kisses him properly before pushing away from the counter. "Will you make sure Dad's present gets put under the tree? The big box? I think we left it in the garage last night."

"I will," he tells her, and lets her go.

Leandra watches her leave, a fond smile playing over her face as her daughter yanks on an old overcoat and heads out onto the snowy back deck. She passes by the enormous kitchen window, pulls a face at them both against the glass; a moment later they hear her voice as she passes out of sight, and Malcolm's deeper rumble answers before fading away.

Leandra sighs, still smiling. "She tries, you know."

"She does," Fenris offers, and turns back to his original purpose in the kitchen before Hawke had waylaid him so pleasantly. "I meant to have this finished."

"We're not in any rush." She hands him the rest of the plates, then fishes out the large box of silver from the next drawer down. "If you'll get the glasses after, this should do it."

He nods, and so he and Leandra move to the dining room and begin to set the table. Danarius had used finer china than this, silverware older and worth more; he remembers plates so delicate and thin they were almost translucent, and a beaten floral pattern on the handle of the knives that he would find etched in reverse on his palms, later, his grip so hard for so long that the skin would keep the marks for hours—

"Are you all right, dear?"

Leandra's voice. Gentle, worried. Fenris shakes his head roughly and forces a nod, setting down the plate at last. "Of course."

She watches him for a moment, then turns back to the utensils. "She's mentioned your recent holidays were hard, before you began coming here."

"Not only those," he mutters, but lets the rancor go before it can root again. Not today. Not here, not with Hawke's mother. "It's been years, regardless."

"I still remember the first time Malcolm bought me a Christmas present. The year after Euphemia was born, he sold two paintings at the beginning of December—an unexpected windfall. He bought me a lumberjack ornament and an ironing board." Her smile is wistful. "I remember that fight better than I'd like."

He knows what she means. Still… "I have seen this ornament."

"Oh, yes. I love it, now. A place of prominence on the tree every year, as a reminder of what matters and what doesn't."

Fenris sets down the last plate, then begins to pull the crystal glasses from the china cabinet beside him. Enough seasons have passed at this house that he knows the routines by now, knows that even with the dozen places set there will still be someone added to the table, some last-minute soul brought home for a family never quite full enough. "Hawke has not told me that story."

"I'm not sure if she knows it. It was important to us that the children be left out of our fights. It still is, even if the arguments are different, now. We've left them scars enough over the years from things we couldn't help fucking up."

He startles; Leandra winks, placing the last spoon beside the place at the head of the table, where Malcolm will sit later and proclaim the Hawke feast open for business. "I will say, Fenris," she adds, "for what it's worth, I think you two have done a much better job than we did."

He nearly laughs in her face. A violent beginning, a barely-there friendship kept alive only by Hawke's persistence; then whatever had been burgeoning between them nearly throttled to death by his own fear. Three years of being forced to learn himself again from the roots up, stark and hard in ways he thought he had overcome long ago; and only in the last handful of seasons has he—have they—come alive in a way that might survive his own deficiencies.

Leandra's watching him, now, something in her face he cannot read. He says, "That may be… generous."

"I don't think so." Quiet and sure, and she circles the table until she can take his hands in hers. "The people who've never had to work for love—really work for it, I mean, even when everything was falling apart around you and nothing could ever be right again—those are the ones who can never seem to hold onto each other when the world presses in." She squeezes his hands gently. "It's those like you and my daughter, who know what it costs to build a life together and have still found it worth it to keep trying anyway, because you know that what you have is worth fighting for—that's what lasts, Fenris. Those are the ones that shake the earth."

"Leandra," he says, his throat tight. "I…"

She blinks, then lets him go, her cheeks a little pink but her smile just as sure. "Anyway, you two are my only hope for grandchildren in the next few years, so I suppose I may be a little biased."

He smiles despite himself, his fingers flexing at the memory of her grip. "I'm sure Hawke has no opinions on the matter."

"None at all," Leandra says, just as dry, though Fenris doubts she's entirely joking. "Now, come back to the kitchen; I made ginger snaps for you and we should make sure Malcolm's not burning down the house."

"Lead the way," he says, but she folds her arm around his elbow, and they go together instead.

—

"If you were a cat," Hawke murmurs in his ear, "you'd be purring loud enough to shake the rafters."

"I think not," he says, just as low, but even as she laughs her hand doesn't pause its idle scritching through his hair. He turns another page in his newest history of the Italian peninsula, Bethany's gift to him this year, and settles back further into Hawke's enduring warmth. "You might, perhaps."

"I've never been a metaphorical cat in my life. Dogs only, sirrah, and I'll thank you for the consideration. Did you call your sister?"

"Yes, this morning." A short conversation, but good enough for the complicated history between them. "She says hello."

"Tell her to come down when she can. It's too cold in Canada."

He smiles, and Hawke pulls the blanket a little tighter around them both before wrapping her arms around his stomach. "Did you have a good Christmas, Fenris?"

Fenris considers. Early afternoon on Christmas Day, the great room where they sit a wreck of wrapping paper and torn bags, one long trail of fir needles marking the place where Toby had dislodged a branch from the tree and carried it aloft, a prize won, until thrown outside by Leandra. He can see the dog now, still mouthing the now-bare branch as Merrill chases him across the snowy yard. Carver and Isabela are outside too, playing with the palm-sized hovering helicopter toy he'd gotten from his father; Malcolm himself stands on the deck, calling advice, and even as Fenris watches he pulls a second helicopter from his coat and begins an unexpected aerial ambush of his son's toy. Isabela laughs loud enough they can hear it through the window, a ripple of bells, and demands the control from Carver, her long, fur-lined jacket trailing out behind her like a pennant.

Varric's voice carries from the kitchen, where he's begun a discussion with Leandra of some business of her father's; she enjoys these things, Fenris knows, and certainly understands more of the nuances than Malcolm, and he wouldn't be surprised if Varric's already brought out the bottle of expensive whiskey he always stashes in her cabinets every year, his gift as manager of the family's fortune. Glasses clink, Leandra laughs; of course, he thinks, and smiles to himself.

"Yes," he says at last, and turns his head enough to kiss Hawke over the folds of her new scarf. She catches his cheek with her fingers, holds them together a moment or two longer, then lets him go to rest her temple against his own. "And you?"

He can feel her smile, and one hand strokes over his chest. "Always."

Cheers and groans alike sound from across the hall where Gamlen's annual card game is well in play—he recognizes Aveline's voice among the defeated—and Anders shifts where he dozes on the loveseat, then settles again with a sigh, his newly-slippered feet dangling well over the armrest. Soon enough they'll rise and dress to help Bethany and Sebastian finish clearing the dishes, help Orana begin to prepare the late lunch they always have on Christmas, but for now, he's more than content to be happy and safe and still in a way that few other hours of the year allow.

"I love you," Hawke breathes against his skin. It catches like a slow flame, spreading to warm every inch of him inside and out, and Fenris drops a hand to cover hers, linking their fingers together until he can't tell who's holding on more tightly. "Merry Christmas, you damned great cat."

Fenris laughs, his heart racing. "And you, Hawke."

She smiles into his shoulder, and Fenris closes his eyes. In a few hours even this little space they have carved for each other will have vanished, he knows, whisked like smoke into memory, and all too soon they will be on the road again, Hawke driving too fast, this Christmas like so many others become nothing more than a cheerful, gold-lit blur behind them.

Still. Still, for this moment, in the warmth of Hawke's arms, her family—his family—in pleasant chaos, he does what he can to press the memory down into his heart, where the best of his years are: the day Danarius had died, his sister's voice through a long-distance call; the first morning he'd woken in his own apartment, a gentle rain pattering down the windows; the first time Hawke had ever kissed him.

"We'll come again next year," he says, more of a question than he means.

"Of course," she says staunchly, and he is satisfied.

—

end.