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It is always the softest nights that she sleeps badly.
Kirkwall, for all that it was the start, the match that set the world ablaze, would never be able to change. Merrill feels it in her bones, a tingling in her vallaslin and the tips of her fingers and ears and it is almost like Kirkwall breathes, a slumbering giant with fleas and flies to bother her and no insignificant bug could ever transform her. Anders made his choices and the world changed with the carnage he left behind, but Kirkwall stayed.
She figures there was already enough fighting in Kirkwall. The revolution needed to catch on somewhere people weren't already used to it in the daylight, in the streets, in their homes and dreams and history. Kirkwall has never not been fighting. She has no room for more.
So things changed but things stayed the same and for a while she stayed out of the city walls, for a while she hid the staff and her spells and she gathered herbs and made poultices and potions and sent them to the Alienage. And when Aveline asked her to come back, the city was as it ever was. Mages both a bit more open and a bit more fearful and a bit more rash. Templars- what was left- were always on edge, always hesitant, wanting to fight, or to fall back, not knowing which one was truly serving the city and which served Meredith's insanity.
(She still walks by the statue, still takes a moment to look at Meredith's face as she passes. Some days she speaks to her, a small hello, because some days her eyes look almost like she is still in there.)
((Merrill likes to imagine that if she was ever possessed by such a madness, taken by such a curse, if she were locked into a prison of any sort, that her friends would still see her. That they might stop, say hello. She wouldn't mind pity and sorrow, even, just to see them. She doesn't think Meredith ever had such hopes or even friends.))
The Alienage is in shambles when she comes back. She had been living in the mountain (fighting off spiders and living memories) for months but they welcome her, the ask her to help, to lead, to guide. And Merrill, Merrill was the First for so long, Merrill was proud and so sure that she knew best what would help her clan and look where that led her, led them. Merrill says no when the ask her to lead.
Varric pulls her into the Hanged Man and sets her straight, though. She doesn't tell him how afraid she is to fail again, how she misses her Keeper's voice and wise eyes, how she wishes things were different. He doesn't tell her to try again, doesn't tell her to lead like he knows she can. But they get what they can out of what conversation they have.
(She misses sometimes, her father. She never even knew him but she knows he gave her his eyes, his nose, his magic. She wishes that she had more than just stories of him. She wishes that she could tell him all of the things that she can't tell Varric. Wonders what he would think of her choices.)
((She misses her mother not at all. The woman had been a hunter from another clan and she stayed for five years after Merrill was born, four years after her father died, and leaves without a word as if nothing could have kept her there. Merrill knows what cut ties feel like, and sometimes she wishes her mother had died instead of left, and maybe that wouldn't hurt as much.))
(((It hurts just a little less when Alerion gives her up, when they don't need another mage and she understands the necessity of it, but it doesn't make the pain less when they give her away.)))
She takes charge. She does well. But she misses the Hawkes, and she misses their group, and she is still so, so scared.
A year passes in days of flinching away from templars who no longer look at her beyond the usual nod, nights of emergencies and sicknesses and help that she tries her best to give. A year passes and she goes nights with no sleep, putting out every fire her people need her to, goes nights where they wake her up in the night be it whispers or shouts, goes nights where she collapses and sleeps like the dead. But it is always the softest nights that she sleeps badly. Those are the nights that she misses the sounds of the mountains, the forest, her clan and nature and everything that was good in her world before Kirkwall.
A year passes, and then Beth and Carver stroll back into Kirkwall, and Merrill had never been as close with them as with their older siblings, but it is a Hawke trait to have a presence that fills up rooms, houses, even cities. Things don't feel as broken and things don't seem as terrifying and she trusts herself more with a Hawke at her back.
Of course, they announce that they've constructed almost an entire village some distance from Kirkwall, and for the interest of comfort to mages, templars, and average citizens, she'd very much like for any mages who felt comfortable to come live there, under her own leadership. Carver approaches the other templars with a soft look and she watches as he asks each one individually if they would come, if they would like to do their duty and truly be protectors and not enforcers or oppressors. She watches as he is so gentle, so much less hardened than the boy she only barely knew outside of his siblings shadows.
Merrill watches and listens to the talk on the street, listens as mages and templars alike choose to leave and she almost wants to go with them.
Carver and Bethany find her the night before they set back out to prepare the new village for it's new inhabitants and Bethany asks her to come along. She says no. She has people she protects too.
Bethany nods, and leaves. Carver almost does the same, but hesitates on the doorstep, the same expression that he had used on his new recruits gracing his face.
"Even if you can't join us out there," he says, "I think you should still visit. We're making what the circle should have been. You could have some advice we haven't thought of yet."
It only takes a moment to say yes, but it takes a long time after he has left to figure out what the fluttering in her chest was at his smile.
(She remembers meeting them. The Hawkes. Asha Bellanar's amulet. She had barely even noticed him then, had focused on Marian with the loud voice and personality, on Garrett and Bethany who were mages like her. Carver slipped through her mind and left no impression beyond being the fourth of them.)
((She regrets that. Maybe he was softer, older, wiser now but he was still the person he is.))
Another year passes, almost, and in that time there have been three caravans from their little town (still unnamed) to bring supplies and more mages and templars to join them. Carver stops by every time and asks her to visit. She says yes every time. She never says when. Almost a year, and he asks if she'll visit, and she looks around at her quiet people, and they look so much better, so much less put upon and desperate and in distress. She looks back two years to how it was when the chantry fell.
"Do you mind if I just tag along with the returning caravan?" She asks, and his smile still makes her heart flutter.