Anders shook his right wrist, looking for all the world like a cat that had just stepped into a puddle and was shaking away the horrible wet.

"Hawke says 'It will be fun, Anders. Don't worry about it, Anders. We just need to drop in on Xenon, Anders. Oh, sorry, I forgot to tell you we needed to bring Fenris, Anders. Just wait over there while I buy this, Anders. Why did you touch it, Anders?'"

"Shut. Up."

Anders closed his mouth with a snap and glared at the man on the other end of the chain that hung between his right wrist and Fenris' left. Admittedly, Fenris looked no happier about the situation, but that really didn't mitigate the utter clusterfuck his day had turned into.

• • •

Every day that the lantern was lit outside Anders' clinic was a busy day. He had tended to one case of pirate-borne disease, a toddler with a cough that his mother said had persisted for months, and a case of advanced old age that no magic under the sun could treat. He had given out ointment for the first, a syrup made with embrium for the second, and two hours of listening to tales of Kirkwall as it used to be for the third.

Hawke arrived just as he was showing old Mother Hawley to the door with a promise that yes, he would drop by for tea some afternoon, but no, give her lovely, marriageable granddaughter his regrets that he would be unable to attend her Autumn Equinox gathering.

His pleasant smile for Mother Hawley turned into a scowl for the man she passed as she carefully navigated the stairs outside his clinic. Hawke pinched out the lantern flame at the head of the stairs.

"What is it this time?" Anders asked, turning away to retrieve his staff and load his belt pouches. "Slavers? Bandits? Tell me it isn't spiders, I'm really not in the mood for spiders."

Without waiting for Hawke's latest tale of adventure and imminent bloodshed, Anders prepared himself for mayhem and violence. At least after the false chokedamp incident of the past summer, he had managed to clean the vomit stains and lingering smell out of his coat. With Winter just around the corner, the last thing Anders wanted to do was face the cold with only a Tevinter mage robe to turn to.

Hawke lounged in the door frame, watching Anders gather his supplies, and Anders didn't have to look to see his self-satisfied smirk. Void take the man, but all he had to do was show up, and Anders dropped everything to help him, no questions asked. Well, a few questions asked, but he would still go, regardless of the answers.

"We're going up to the Bone Pit," Hawke drawled. "So it could be any of that. Don't worry, it'll be fun!"

"The Bone Pit," Anders said with a sigh. "Then add dragons to the list, because you can't tell me that all those dragonlings we fought up there just laid their own eggs."

"Good point," Hawke agreed. "Which is why we'll be making a stop by the Black Emporium before we go."

Anders groaned and raked the tie out of his hair with his fingers. He caught up all the strands that had escaped while he worked and tied his hair back up again without benefit of a mirror, going more for function than form. "If Urchin is giving Xenon one of his baths, I'm leaving. I've seen broodmothers, darkspawn, and more demons than I care to count, but I do not need to see Xenon naked ever again."

Hawke waved that away. "Big bad Gray Warden can't stand to see a man who looks like beef jerky getting a sponge bath?"

Anders flipped him a hand gesture that did not mean he was ordering two beers.

"I'm ready."

"Good." Hawke straightened the daggers at his back and clapped Anders on the shoulder as he locked the clinic door. "It's good to have you along."

Anders dropped the scowl and smiled over at him. For all his swagger and bad jokes, he couldn't help but like the man. "Damn right it is."

However, when he saw Isabela and Fenris lounging at the entrance to the Black Emporium, he considered rethinking his liking for Garrett Hawke.

He grabbed him by the arm before they reached the waiting pair and hissed, "You didn't tell me that Fenris was coming."

"So?" Hawke shrugged off Anders' hand and tilted his head quizzically. "You still would have come."

"That's not the point!" Anders insisted. "I just need time to prepare myself to deal with Ser Pricklypants. You don't want to clean up bits of fireballed elf."

"I thought you two were getting along better since last Summer," Hawke said and started striding down the catwalk to join Fenris and Isabela. "Do I need to lock you two in a room and make you talk it out?"

"No!" Anders yelped and hurried along after him. "I've had quite enough of close quarters with him."

Yes, he – and his "stamina" – could easily go the rest of his life without being stuck in close quarters with Fenris ever again. He and Fenris had given their friends rough outlines of what had happened under Darktown during the heat wave, but neither of them was at all inclined to share some of the particulars about what had happened while they were trapped in the sarcophagus together.

As though Isabela needed any more fodder for her ridiculous friend fiction.

"And if by getting along better, you mean it's like the difference between a combustion grenade and a fell grenade, yes. It's not as explosive—" he dropped his voice as they approached Fenris and Isabela, "—but it still blows up."

He nodded to Fenris and let Isabela bump her shoulder against his as they followed Hawke into Xenon's realm.

"Look at you," she greeted, "I think you shaved sometime this week. Got a new girlfriend? A new boyfriend?"

"Not bloody likely." Anders elbowed her lightly. "Just because you and Hawke are doing the bump and grind doesn't mean all of us are."

"It would help your mood. I know you have needs. I've seen them up close, remember?" She grinned and tilted her head to watch Hawke's ass. "Just find someone other than Hawke. I sort of like him."

Anders rolled his eyes and hung back, eying Urchin and Thaddeus as they moved into the light that filtered into the Black Emporium, the undercity's finest, and only magic and curiosities shop. At least Xenon wasn't currently having a bath.

Xenon's voice wavered out of the air above them. "Ohhhh… customers. I haaaaave a fresh shipment of weapons and some loooooovely grotesqueries, but I aaaaaaask you not to touch the glass displays. Do not touch them!"

While Hawke made a beeline to the crafting items, Isabela drifted over to look herself over in the Mirror of Transformation, leaning in to pull at the skin by her eyes, checking for crow's feet. Anders imagined that she would be looking rather refreshed when they left the Emporium.

He gave Fenris a sidelong look and went to examine one of the new glass cases. He noted that Fenris went the opposite direction to do the same thing. The first case held trinkets, baubles, and a ceramic baby doll that followed Anders' every movement not just with its eyes, but with its whole head, turning it to watch him.

"Grotesque is right," he muttered to himself and moved on to the next case before the baby doll lunged through the glass at him because his eyes were prettier.

The next case held seashells with little crabs that waved huge bejeweled claws at him, a tiny silverite castle model with animated figures moving behind the windows, and a small pile of iridescent feathers that actually made him rub his fingers together against the sudden urge he felt to take them out and hold them against his pauldron to see how they would fit with the feathers already there.

Too tempting. He moved on to the center, longest case, ignoring Fenris who came up on his right, having already examined the other two cases on his side.

In pride of place in this case was the most beautiful staff he had ever seen, chased in lyrium, topped by… a kitten? From the instant he saw it, he wanted to touch it, his thoughts already cataloging his every possession to determine what he could sell to acquire it as his very own.

Beside him he heard Fenris murmur, "That sword…."

Xenon's droned warning was far too slow as both Anders and Fenris touched the glass.

"Do not touch the glaaaaaass!"

Click.

For such a small sound, it seemed to echo throughout the shop.

"What?" Both Fenris and Anders said simultaneously.

"Thaddeus! Thaddeus!"

The golem was lurching toward them and Anders had mental images of splattered mage, all over the glass display.

"Wait!" he cried. "Wait! Xenon! I'll wipe the fingerprints off. No harm done!"

He tried to grab for the kerchief he wore around his neck to wipe the glass, but found his right hand jerked back as it met some resistance.

And that was when Anders realized that he was well and truly fucked, and not in the fun way.

Locked around his right wrist was a gleaming cuff covered in faintly glowing runes. All by itself, that might be bad, but not necessarily tragic, but of course that wasn't all – attached to a link integrated into the cuff was a chain about two feet long that attached to an identical cuff on Fenris' wrist.

"Xenon!" It was Hawke. "Call off Thaddeus. Whatever it was, we'll make it right. You know I'm a good customer. I've spent plenty of coin here."

Hawke moved up to the dais in front of the shopkeeper. "Xenon, call off the golem."

"Please!" Anders shouted, trying to back away from Thaddeus while Fenris realized that it was near impossible to wield a broadsword with a mage attached to his wrist.

He jerked on the chain and sent Anders stumbling forward on the other end of it. "Ow! Watch it you bastard!"

"Thaddeus," Xenon called once again. "Back to your place."

Isabela sauntered over, replacing her daggers on her back, and Anders was faintly pleased to realize she had been prepared to fight for them even here. She smirked at Anders and Fenris, remarking, "Just how I like my men – in chains."

Fenris snarled, and Isabela had the grace to look abashed. "You know what I mean, don't go getting all feral on me." She rolled her eyes. "I swear, some men have no sense of humor."

She held out a hand while she pulled her lock picks out of her belt with the other hand. "Here, let me see those."

"Yes, please, and thank you," Anders said, holding his wrist out to her. "Two minutes of this is too long."

"That—" Xenon began.

"Hm," Isabela mused, twisting the cuff, her smile fading away.

"—won't—"

"Anders," she murmured in a tone that he did not like one bit.

"—work," Xenon finished.

"There's no lock mechanism on this," she said, looking up at him with a frown.

"Xenon, my friend, good man, Kirkwall's finest merchant," Hawke said, putting on a winning smile. "You know that they didn't mean any harm. What say you let my friends out of their chains and then I'll finish my purchases."

"I cannot," Xenon replied.

"Oh come on,"Anders protested. "It was a mistake. I really will clean off the fingerprints."

"What do you mean you can't?" Hawke asked. "Just have Urchin fetch the keys or whatever and we'll just move on."

"I cannot," Xenon repeated. "There is no key."

"No key?" Fenris asked.

"Nooooooo," Xenon said. "The security spell was not designed with a release mechanism."

"What do you do with people who get caught by it, then?" Isabela asked, though she was still examining the cuff.

"I have Thaddeus… take care of them and drop the remains in the seeeeeewers," Xenon replied. "And then Urchin cleans up the blood."