AN: A few months ago, a kind anon sent me several links to some unfilled prompts on the kinkmeme. A number of them caught my eye, including this one: Hawke/Fenris, soulmates. Everyone has the name of their soulmate somewhere on their body. It shows up sometime during puberty, but gives no indication of where the soulmate is or when they'll meet each other.

I've always liked this trope, so of course I was suckered in from the start. And now, even cleaned up as best it can be by Jade's generous and speedy beta and significant contributions to the summary, I have the dubious pleasure of presenting to you this terribly indulgent, mawkish, iddest of id-fic. I love it all the same.

Recommended soundtrack for this chapter: I Need You (/watch?v=RCuzUmdhGtw) from the Catching Fire OST.

Enjoy.

Rom. By a name
I know not how to tell thee who I am.

—Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene II

Were We Not Called

—

Ah, at last. At last! She's finally become a young woman, full of promise and verve and a dozen new worlds opening up before her feet. Just the right time to bud into this new stage of her life! Now she will seize with both hands all the chances life affords a young lady of intelligence, of character, of beauty nearly surpassing her father's own—

Oh, Malcolm, says Leandra in gentle reproof, and she covers her daughter's hand with hers where it's pressed to her chest. Her oldest, her first child already showing her own magic at fourteen, now come into the name lightly scarred over her heart.

Her daughter blinks back tears, turns her face away as Leandra slides aside the neckline of her shirt. The name itself is unfamiliar to her—certainly not Fereldan—and she touches the faint raised lines just a shade or two darker than her daughter's skin. Malcolm had hoped she'd be one of the few without one, but she'd beaten the odds as apostate already and Leandra supposes she's grateful, at least, that it's somewhere that can be easily hidden from prying eyes. They must be so guarded already; another secret to conceal would strain them all.

The whisper is barely a breath. "Take it away. Papa, please."

Ah, Malcolm sighs, and kneels before his daughter, and takes her hands in his own. It is not a thing to be taken. Not by magic or blade or burn; it is an old sorcery, from the days when Andraste walked, and will not be removed by mortal touch. To cut it away will bring it back in another place; to mar it with ink or scar will change its shape only for a day.

"I don't want it. I want to choose for myself."

Leandra does not touch her left shoulder where the name of her husband is written. Instead she bends forward, just enough to kiss her young daughter's hair, and then she tells her the truth: there is always a choice.

"For both of us?" There is so much hope in her eyes.

Yes, she murmurs, certain. For her daughter, and for—

—

"Leto!"

He flinches, guiltily yanking his sleeve down over his wrist before he stands and turns. His sister's cheeks are bright with anger; her fists are closed knots at her sides. She says, "Where have you been? The master has wanted you a quarter-hour!"

He has been nowhere, staring at nothing he can understand.

Varania sees it in his face. She lets the tattered cloth fall shut behind her, closing away the glare of Tevinter's summer sunlight, her anger fading into shadow. "What is it?"

He does not wish to show her. For all her being the younger by two years her name had shown first; when their master had seen it on the pale curve of her neck he had brought all three of the slaves he owned with that name to his great hall and asked her to choose the one who would lose his tongue. She had not recognized any of them, neither the two boys nor the girl, and when her weeping had won her nothing but blows she had pointed, faint with horror, to the one farthest to the left. Leto still remembers the shrieks as he'd been dragged away.

His sister had not even known the name that had cost the child his speech, if indeed their master had kept his threat. No slave could read it; her master did not speak it, not to her, not to the slaves that he had brought before her. Leto has seen it twice: medium length, many curves, a sharp spiked character to end with, but after that day Varania has worn only high-collared dresses to hide it from the world. He does not wish to show her—

"Show me," she says softly.

He does.

It is a long word, tangles of smooth angled lines wrapping near the whole way around his right wrist. There are bits of sunlight arrowing through the gaps and holes of the old cloth hung over the doorway; Varania pulls him by the hand until a slender gold spar strikes his wrist. She turns his hand over and over and he allows it; she tells him, her mouth tight, "It will not be easy to keep this from the master."

He shakes himself loose, tugs his sleeve into place again. He does not like it when his sister sounds so—old, when she has more worry in her thirteen years than their mother has known her entire life. He will not hide it. There is someone in the world who is his; even their master cannot take that from him.

"Hide it," his sister says flatly. "Forget it, if you can. It will kill you otherwise."

He inclines his head until her shoulders relax, and thinks: whatever else, he will remember this.

—

She looks up at her father where he walks the path beside her, unable to understand. "But you didn't even know her!"

He looks meditatively into the distance without slowing, fishing pole slung over one shoulder, Carver's three small fish on a line at his waist. The twins have lagged behind, their arguing voices just loud enough over the wheat field she knows they have not been lost to the summer heat. Still, she does not understand. "You didn't know anything about her. You didn't know if she was stupid, or if she loved someone else, or even if she liked dogs!"

"Of course," her father says, grave enough she knows he is laughing at her, "I was most worried about the dogs."

"Papa."

"Euphemia," he says in the same tone, and she pulls a face. Then, more gently, "Tell me. What are you so afraid of?"

She stops. Looks back down the narrow path between the golden wheat swaying to mark their passing, and farther, to the green wood that borders it and the creek behind it. She cannot meet her father's eyes. "What if I don't like him?"

"What do you mean?"

"What if—I meet him, and he has my name, and I—I just don't like him? What if he's ugly and cruel and he… I don't know." She laughs, humiliated. "What if he doesn't like dogs?"

Her father says her name again. His face is very serious. "First, you must remember that the face does not always reflect the soul, and handsome men may be cruel, too. Second, despite—and perhaps contrary to—Ferelden's charter, it is entirely possible to have a happy marriage without a single dog in the home. And third—" he bends forward, enough that the fish at his waist slide down on their line, enough that the pole throws a slim shadow over her shoulder. "Your mother had the right of it. Listen to me. There is always a choice."

Her eyes sting. "What if I choose him, but he doesn't choose me?"

"Now that," he says, sighing, "is one of the great mysteries of the ages. It has lived long before you and me, daughter, and will live longer even than Maferath's curse. But," he adds with a grin, taking her chin gently in thumb and forefinger, "you bring me the man who won't have your heart, and I'll bring him to the feet of the Maker for you."

She laughs again, more easily, and before she can doubt herself she links her hand with her father's and turns them both down the path again. In the distance their home rises on the hill, the small square farmhouse made of gleaming honeywood, Mother's white Orlesian curtains in the kitchen window. "When did you know? With Mother?"

Her father turns up his face to the sun, a sudden summer wind catching at them both, brushing her hair from her eyes, teasing at his beard. "Before I even knew her name."

—

"But will it take?" his new master snaps impatiently, and Leto swallows down his apprehension as the artist pinches his wrist between two fingers. She looks wild to him, her hair nearly shaved and ink tattooed into her skin from knuckle to elbow, her eyes too pale for her face—but his new master is more frightening with every easy word, and Leto cannot suppress the shiver as he lays his fingers gently on the pulse-point of Leto's upturned wrist. "I'd have had an unmarked one if I could, but he's enough of a swordsman that I preferred the skill over the damage to his aesthetic."

The artist nods, digging the sharpened nail of her smallest finger into the name wrapped around his wrist. It—hurts, enough that he wishes to pull away, but his master's hand is still on his hand and he does not dare. The woman's voice rasps like one stone against another. "How wide is to be the cut?"

"No more than this." His master shows the woman a page in a small book, covered in drawings and spidery indecipherable text. Leto cannot read it, can neither stop the sudden fearful pounding of his pulse where his master touches him—

The woman runs her finger down the page, then, unblinking, makes the same motion down Leto's arm, scraping a red line into his skin. "You will go here, Magister, between the letters. Branch at the bones of the wrist instead of the forearm."

"You refuse to remove it?"

"It cannot be altered. It is good that there is room here as it is; at eighteen already he has risk for scarring. If I were to shave off the skin it might return somewhere less easily avoided."

"And ruin my symmetry, you mean."

"Yes, Magister."

His master frowns, a slight pinching of the eyebrows that makes Leto's mouth go dry. He has already won this place at Danarius's heel, won his mother's freedom and Varania's too, and he had thought he knew the cost of it, but now—

"Leto," says his master, stroking his thumb along Leto's palm, pushing up, until he touches the very edge of the letters. "Do you know what this says?"

He licks his lips. "No, Master."

"Would you like to know?"

His heart slams painfully against his ribs. "Master, I would."

"What would you give me to reward you with such knowledge?"

A trick? And yet, he cannot lie— "Anything. Master."

"Mm." His master smiles, a thin-lipped thing as amused as it is dangerous, a serpent's smile, and moves his hand to cup Leto's cheek. His tapered thumbnail rests close enough that it brushes his eyelashes. "We shall see."

—

She wakes thinking of Leto.

It's not the first time she's wondered, nor even the first time she's dreamed of him—or what might be him—but there is something this morning that makes her uneasy, something different, something wrong. The house is still too close with her father's death; instead she takes up his staff and lets the eight-month-old mabari out behind her, and she sets off into the fields. It is early enough no one calls out, too close to dawn even for the insects to be out in force, and by the time she reaches the creek at the end of the path through the fields her breathing has begun to steady again.

The willow tree is still pale and young with spring, its branches dipping into the rippling water with a sigh at the deepest places; across the creek where the bank rises the cattails have begun to shoot slender green stalks from the rushes. Enough trees arch overhead to shade it cool even in summer, and it is up one of these she climbs, then onto the low branches that reach out over the water. The mabari pup bounds into the creek beneath her to set the tadpoles in uproar, shivering downstream and away from his overlarge paws. She settles with her back against the trunk, her legs outstretched before her, her arms crossed.

"Maferath's curse," she says aloud, and closes her eyes. The names are older, perhaps, than him, but the legend of his jealousy over his wife's marriage to the Maker and the curse that had arisen from it has always been both convenient and conducive to Chantry teachings on the Betrayer, and it is her own preference besides. Only something born from mistrust and the desire to possess could give rise to such a spell, as if knowing who fit a soul best might make that soul worthless without them.

Her own concern annoys her.

All her life she has been determined not to be guided by chance's scar over her heart. The Circle would not have her; this Leto would not either, not for nothing, no ownership given solely because some quirk of fate allowed his name a place on her skin. If he had arrived with intent to court her she would have permitted it; then, if she had felt that she could love him, or that he might love her, she would have given him the same chance as any suitor, the same expectation and respect awarded by choice and not demand. Her father taught her to cherish freedom; her mother taught her to cherish love, and she will not have one without the other.

And yet. And yet, with this disquiet in her mind at every thought of him, she cannot shake the sense that there is something wrong here, that whoever dares to harm him ought to know that he is not theirs to hurt. If she is to have his name—then he must have hers, and no others, no others ought to raise their hands against someone marked to fit another heart!

She leans her head back against the tree, blowing out a breath that stirs her hair. He is not hers; he is his own. She cannot take that from him.

Besides, it is a dream and nothing more; and even were it truer there is nothing she can do for him from Lothering. More and more over the years she has become convinced he is not Fereldan, but beyond that she cannot say. No Fereldan farmgirl has ever been meant to roam the world's wilds with nothing more than a name.

Eventually, when the dragonflies begin to hum distant and low over the creek, and the sun begins to dapple yellow-gold across the water's rippling surface, and the dog curls panting at the tree's roots beneath her, Hawke allows herself to drop into a doze. She does not know his face, or his voice, or any part of him besides what he is called, but she knows that it is him all the same—

In her dreams, Leto cannot stop screaming.

—

They are scars, his master tells him, from his previous life: unimportant, and therefore to be ignored. There is no part of him that does not belong to Danarius.

He breathes assent. He hurts—

His name, his master says, is Fenris.

—

A year passes, and then another. The worry fades, or becomes constant enough that it is as good as fading, and in time, she learns to put it from her mind.

Still. She does not forget.

—

He remembers nothing.

—

Regardless of the names scarred into their skins, very few in Lothering are willing to put aside their rising interests in courtship for the sake of a stranger who might never come, or who might come late enough it makes no difference anyway. The oldest Hawke girl is one of these; she smiles at them all and flirts with a few more, and when one day she comes mussed from the creek at the edge of town hand-in-hand with the blacksmith's son, no one is terribly surprised. They are a good match, both kind, if he a little gentler, and the town soon grows used to seeing them thick as thieves in the shadows of the windmill, in the ivy by the stables, walking with the younger two Hawkes to the great stone bridge at Lothering's western border.

Then, all at once, it ends. No one seems to know why; it is simply over, the two of them no longer smiling at one another, though he holds his arm close to his chest when she passes and she will not meet his eyes.

His name, they say sagely. Come into his name at last, and now he can't make himself settle for anything less. Even the Hawke girl, pretty as she might be one day, can't hold a candle to the missing half of one's heart.

So it goes, they decide, nodding at each other, those who have married their names drawing closer together, those who have chosen elsewhere gripping their lover's hands. So it goes, so it has always gone. Then the Blight comes, and courtship gives way to only war.

—

He doesn't think of the name on his wrist for a long time. Years, perhaps; a slave does not track more than the seasons by their turning, and Fenris has much to occupy his days now. He grows more proficient than ever with both sword and lyrium, learns too the words hidden in his master's lifted eyebrow, the slight turn of his lips. He hears, of course, other slaves speaking of their names, sees the unfortunates branded in places too difficult to hide from daily life: on the palm, the top of a bare foot, and in one hapless case the line of the man's jaw. Still, his master ordered him not to think of it, and so he does not…

It is the small things that bring it to his attention, in the end. The way his master's apprentice stares at him if he rubs his wrist after training. The way he is ordered to wear his gauntlets at all times when out of his master's chambers. The way, one evening, after his master has finished and he has been sent away, he realizes that his master's fingers have bruised him around that wrist and no other place.

After that he cannot forget it. When he is bathing his eyes go first to those scars as if one day he will abruptly comprehend their meaning; when his master says this name or that name he memorizes it, so that later he may try to map the sounds to the characters written in his skin. It is a small defiance, but it is defiance, and when Hadriana finds him in the practice yard with his pensive gaze on his bared wrist and not his sword, he knows the penance will be nothing more than he deserves.

Still, it is harsher than he expects. His master is displeased and expresses that displeasure nightly for near two weeks. Hadriana binds him by his wrist in one of the cells beneath the estate and brings men and women alike before him, telling him each time that this slave bears the name that Fenris bears as well, or that one does, or that one. He does not trust her, knows she lies, and yet—he cannot stop himself from searching every fear-pale face for some glance of recognition, of choking on fury and shame as those slaves are beaten and humiliated before him, as he is occasionally beaten before them, until Hadriana's streak of cruelty is satisfied for the evening and he is left to lick his wounds in peace.

It is his own fault, he tells himself. A slave should not… he belongs only to his master. He knows this. He knows this.

Then, one day, his master tells him over his breakfast that Fenris is to prepare for a journey to Seheron. It is the first time in near a month that his master's voice has come close again to kindness, and Fenris tries to breathe through the sudden swift relief that floods his heart.

—

There are rumors that darkspawn have been sighted to the south. Rumors, too, that the forces at Ostagar have been routed, and on the nights that Bethany cannot bear the wondering she crawls into her sister's bed and tucks her head under her chin, as if there is nothing in this storm that can breach the outstretched wing above her. Her sister bears the weight so easily, enough that Bethany forgets, sometimes, that she cannot stand against the wind alone, but Carver is her twin and her sister is strong.

It is only for a time. Only for a little longer, and then Carver will be home and the world will go right again and they'll have something, at last, like peace—

—

The Fog Warriors decorate themselves with feathers and with dye, adorn the places where they are named with rings and gold and silver. Fenris's own has been a source of pain for as long as his memory reaches; they cherish theirs, unashamed, and hide nothing.

He does not understand. He wishes to.

—

Her sister is dead. Aveline's husband, too, and when they sit curled in the bowels of the ship's dim hold she cannot stop rubbing the place on her ankle where Wesley is written. Dead, she says, twice, the word hard and sick with grief, and Hawke buries her head in her knees when her mother begins to cry. Her sister is dead. Her father is dead, and her sister, and her mother blames her and Carver blames her, too, and Aveline's husband is not even here to complain of escape alongside apostates. She cannot imagine the severing of souls Aveline suffers, the pain of knowing that he who fit her best has gone somewhere beyond her reach.

Bethany had had a name. She'd showed her once; it'd lain over her ribs, just at the base of her right breast, and it'd been something with so many consonants neither she nor Bethany had been able to make it out. They couldn't even tell if it was meant to be man or woman, and Bethany had laughed for ages at her rock-mouthed attempts at pronunciation.

She wonders if the person who has Bethany's name knows. If something had broken, if something had changed from one moment to the next, like a song ending just before the final note. She is glad, suddenly, that she has never met—

Leto lives. Of that she is sure.

Of all else—nothing.