da2 is full of monster stories, but fenris’s might be my favourite.
it’s a story about what comes after a terrible thing has been done to you, and done again, until you live your life in wait for terrible things; and you are also the terrible thing, the thing remade in the shape of brutality, with violence graven into the soft animal hide of you. (violence has never been a question it has always been the answer, the only answer, before all other things. you keep your head low and your voice brief and you do not think about your gentler hungers.)
it’s about the body, about fettered skin and hands and blood and tongue, about having your flesh forcibly rewritten until it isn’t yours, it’s the prison that holds you in unnaturalness, an arcane language of savagery and threat and punishment. fenris can’t read, was never taught, and after he escapes and finds hawke learning to read is a slow and frustrating labour, because after all those years in the dark you need a new alphabet and new words for this new bright world in which you walk free but sometimes drag behind you the shadows of your chains.
i am very very wretched about fenris’s sharp metal-cased hands touching faces gently and clumsily and reverently, because after the terrible thing has been done to you, you can still choose: you are full of ghosts, there is a violence in you that will never drain out entirely, but it is yours, only you can wield it, and there are lines you have drawn, will draw again and again, here and no further. the strange paths of your body can be yours again, you can choose by inches to be your gentler hungers, to be soft-skinned and tender and capable of love, even if this light is only a brief space between two darknesses.