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Hawke is sort of irritated by Aveline at first. Well, after she’s recovered from the initial shock, that is. Strawberry blonde hair, striking green eyes, and bare, well-muscled shoulders are not so easily ignored. But Aveline is the nagging, self-righteous type, convinced she knows the way things ought to be, and it doesn’t exactly help that she’s got a rude, annoying Templar husband.
It’s sick, but there’s some satisfaction in watching him succumb to the Blight.
Distantly, Hawke is aware that she has a history of falling in and out of love, at what some especially nosey siblings, who shall remain nameless, might ungenerously term lightning speed. She’d never admit it, but she does try to remind herself of this sometimes, when the attraction du jour is particularly ill-fated.
Not that it helps, of course. Some dreadful, aching thing inside her always insists that this time is different.
It’s something well past surprise when Aveline knocks at the door of Gamlen’s Lowtown hovel one afternoon. “Is something wrong?” Hawke asks her first.
Aveline looks surprised. “No more than the usual,” she says, in her frank, brusque manner. “Just stopping by to see you’re not living in utter squalor.”
The late afternoon sun catches in her hair and accentuates her freckled skin, and Hawke forgets to respond for a moment too long.
“Well,” she manages at last, stepping back to make room for a sweeping gesture, “I am delighted to disappoint you.”
“You haven’t gotten yourself thrown out on the streets yet, was more my meaning,” says Aveline as she enters. “Or, more precisely, you haven’t gotten your sister mixed up in something.”
“Your concern is so heartwarming!” says Hawke airily. “Yes, somehow my treasured sister has avoided the wretched curse of my existence.”
The look Aveline gives her catches her entirely off her guard. She is expecting pure exasperation, and it is there, to be certain. But there’s undeniable fondness in the set of Aveline’s lips, and the warmth of her voice. “Sure, joke if you like. Just remember that not everyone is like you, Hawke. We can’t all take the same things into stride that you do.”
A mirthless huff of laughter escapes her lungs. “That’s me, taking everything into stride,” says Hawke thinly. “But what is this really about, Aveline? Beth is as fine as can be. And so am I, in case you care.”
Aveline scoffs, but she doesn’t quite manage to hide her widening smile. “Don’t pull that with me. You’d hate it if anyone tried to fuss over you.”
“Are you…” Hawke begins, before the thought has fully formed. Delight blooms warm and bright in her chest. “Are you actually worried about me? Why, I think I shall faint from the sheer excitement of your attentions!”
“Regretting this already.”
Hawke lays a hand dramatically across her brow. “And here I thought you barely tolerated me!”
“You were correct,” Aveline replies flatly.
But it’s far too late for that. She’s already shown her hand. Aveline might think she knows everything, but she doesn’t understand people the way Hawke does. “Oh, but Guardswoman Vallen, why-ever would you come all the way out here in your limited free time to visit someone you can barely tolerate?”
Aveline looks up at her with a smile that she is trying to pass for mockery. “Insanity, probably. Anyway, everything here seems to be in order, so I think I’ll be on my way.”
“What,” Hawke affects a pout, “don’t you want to stay awhile? I can shoo away some rats or, I don’t know, dust off the shattered remains of a chair for you.”
Aveline doesn’t laugh, but neither does she frown. She claps a hand firmly upon Hawke’s arm and looks up into her eyes with such intensity that Hawke almost feels compelled to look away.
“Take care of yourself, all right?”
Oh, this one is bad. Really, really bad.
Now that Hawke understands the way Aveline cares, she sees it in everything. It is intoxicating in a way, that subtle, quiet affection, carefully woven into the fabric of an existence Hawke had previously believed to be rather plain and joyless.
She is blunt, often harsh, because she doesn’t want to be misunderstood by her friends. She doesn’t read people easily, and so she makes herself, in some ways, easy to read.
Which makes this situation particularly impossible, because Hawke is really more the sort to flirt shamelessly, and then leave the right and proper first move up to the other party.
And so she allows herself to agonize. Does Aveline notice, and is she politely ignoring it? Does Aveline not notice, and would she be horrified if she did? Flirting shamelessly is one thing, because in the end you can always say it was a joke. The idea of telling the plain and honest truth, the way Aveline does, of saying exactly what she means and then weathering the storm of the answer, is at once beautiful and terrifying.
“Have you ever thought of seeing anyone, Aveline?” Hawke asks her one day, driven by what she can only assume is pure madness. “Romantically, I mean.”
They’re walking along the streets of Hightown, over a bridge that allows for a view of nearly every part of Kirkwall. Aveline pauses to lean on the railing, and considers Hawke’s words with surprising gravity. Hawke isn’t sure when or how they grew so close that Aveline wouldn’t rebuke her for even daring to ask such a question.
“Not really,” says Aveline at last. “Why?”
Hawke does her best not to stammer. “Oh, I don’t know, just… You’re always working so hard.”
“I love my work,” says Aveline.
“Of course you do,” Hawke waves a hand vaguely. “But there is more to life than that, in case you’d forgotten.”
“Hm.” Aveline frowns up into the sky for a long and heavy moment. Then she affords Hawke a wry sidelong glance. “It’s worth thinking about. Thank you, Hawke.”
Really? Hawke almost says before she thinks better of it. “Just…don’t think too hard, all right?”
Aveline inclines her head studiously. “And what about you, Hawke?” she squints. “Are you getting tired yet, of jumping into bed with everyone you bring into your immediate circle?”
Hawke snorts, but the joke aches more than it amuses at the moment. “That’s hardly fair, Aveline. Unless this is meant to be some sort of overture.”
To her surprise, it is Aveline who laughs. Well, sort of. It’s a brief and distinctly joyless sound, but when Hawke looks up, Aveline is smiling. “At least you have some standards. Though what they are is anyone’s guess.”
“Is there a point to this?” Hawke sighs, but there is only fondness in her tone. “Apart from making me feel cheap, I mean.”
Aveline turns to look at her, mild surprise in the stern set of her brow. “I don’t doubt your intentions, Hawke,” she says, like it’s supposed to be an apology. “I only mean I wish you valued yourself a little more highly.”
I could say the same to you, Hawke almost fires back, but the words catch in the back of her throat, and she is left wondering stupidly at the precise shade of Aveline’s eyes. Has green ever looked so severe? So devastating?
The silence stretches on a little too long, but Hawke swallows down her foolishness and plasters on an easy smile. “Oh, come now, Aveline. Even you must know that passion doesn’t much care for how you’ll feel about it in the morning. Let alone a few years later.”
This time, she’s expecting a laugh, and gets none. Aveline’s brow furrows subtly, and she turns away to look out over the city. She folds her arms around herself, not such an unusual gesture, but somehow it looks like she’s closing in, or collapsing. Hawke has never thought of Aveline as looking small.
“Passion is all fine and well, Hawke,” she says quietly. “But it’s no way to build a life.”
A few years ago, Hawke might have laughed. Now the words settle uneasily in the pit of her stomach, and she doesn’t find them very funny at all.
She’s known a lot of passion in her life, perhaps more than most. It’s not exactly that she runs hot and cold on people, it’s just that things always seem to get so tangled up, and she never has the slightest idea how to set them right again.
And then one day, it’s suddenly too late, when it definitely wasn’t too late the day before.
Maybe Aveline is right.
Hawke can’t stop herself. She asks Aveline out loud, and with a clear bite to her tone, what it is that could possibly make Donnic so special.
Aveline answers her honestly: nothing.
And what is Hawke supposed to do with that?!
Because Hawke is an idiot, or possibly certifiably crazy, she falls all over herself to help. Because she wants to see Aveline happy, she tells herself, but the horrible twisting in her gut tells her it’s because she needs to understand for herself. Why him, of all people?
And sure. Maybe if she were in her right mind, she would admit that he is pleasant enough. She’s pretty sure her companions actually like him, but are too fearful of Hawke’s misplaced ire to say anything.
But he’s…nothing. What does he like? What does he want? Is it merely blind obedience to the ubiquitous Way Of Things that has stolen Aveline’s heart? Does she want Donnic because Donnic would be easy to have?
Hawke can see it plain as day. But no, Aveline doesn’t seem to think so.
Then again, Hawke thinks, somewhere around hour number two of the most awkward evening of her life, perhaps Aveline’s crippling indecision is less about Donnic and more about jeopardizing her job. Perhaps it’s charitable to believe Aveline wouldn’t be devastated if this bland and boring fellow inexplicably turned her down, but Hawke chooses to assume it’s because he might take Aveline’s clumsy advances as professional misconduct.
And, well, he wouldn’t be wrong at this point. Changing up the guard duty to send some sort of message? Even Hawke knows that’s a terrible call.
Hawke and Donnic have absolutely nothing to talk about. Which is really scraping the bottom of the barrel when you think about it, because Hawke has always been the sort of person who could carry on a conversation with a particularly stubborn fencepost. No wonder Aveline didn’t want to go on this stupid date. It’s insufferably boring.
She finds Aveline through Varric, who informs her that Aveline has gone outside to sit on the roof, of all things.
It’s a nice night. Clear and chilly, with a sky full of stars. Aveline looks strangely out of place in darkness. She is all warm colours and sun-kissed skin, washed out by the pale light of the waning moon. Her clothes are out of place, too—a pretty blouse and a long, simple skirt—but Hawke reasons that might be because she hasn’t seen Aveline out of her guard’s uniform since they arrived in Kirkwall.
“Oh,” says Aveline thinly.
“Oh?” Hawke echoes, meaning to mock her, but it doesn’t come out right. “Is that all you’ve got to say for yourself?”
Aveline turns to look at her, anguish and misery clear in her eyes. “I…” She turns away, closes her eyes. “What happened?”
Hawke sighs, and swallows down her hurt and her annoyance. “He thinks I’m interested in him,” she climbs up to settle herself upon the roof next to Aveline.
Aveline covers her face with her hands and groans. “Oh, Maker. This is so stupid.”
“Admitting it is the first step,” says Hawke, but there is a smile in her voice. “But what’s the problem, Aveline? I’ve spent the entire evening with your Donnic, and…” Hm. How to say this politely? “Well. Let’s just say he’s not some sort of unfathomable mystery.”
Aveline scoffs, and her hands fall into her lap. “Of course you would say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Hawke cannot help but marvel at Aveline’s strong features cast in the silvery light of the moon. Why him, she cannot help but think again and again? Is it just because he would be easy to have?
“You didn’t exactly answer my question,” says Hawke instead.
Aveline sighs, opens a hand vaguely in an approximation of a shrug. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do anything but my job. And killing highwaymen doesn’t exactly afford a lot of time for banter.”
“No?” Hawke narrowly avoids laughing. “You seem to find a lot of time for it when we’re together.”
“That’s different,” Aveline’s brow furrows subtly.
Because I’m not boring? Hawke narrowly avoids sniping back. “Is it?” she wonders instead, not a little thinly. “How?”
“Because…”
Aveline frowns deeply for what feels like a long moment. She looks up at Hawke with something unreadable in her eyes, then looks away with a heavy sigh. “Because…you’re you. It’s just different.”
Well, great.
“So…” Hawke tries, even though the mere act of speaking is starting to make her chest ache. “We arrange a patrol. You go about your duties with Donnic, and I’ll get Fenris or someone to help keep the way clear.”
A long and terrible silence follows. Hawke is half-hoping she’ll say no.
“You’d do that?” she says instead, her voice uncommonly soft.
I’d do anything, Hawke almost says, and wonders if she means it.
She affects her usual easy smile, and settles on, “So long as you promise never to make me ask him out again.”
Aveline lets out a small, breathless chuckle. “It’s a deal.”
A part of Hawke had begun to wonder whether perhaps she’d feel better once she finally got it all out in the open. Surely it would be better to speak her wretched heart than to continue on the way she has been, tying herself up into knots to aid in the creation of something that frankly turns her stomach on the best of days. Surely it would be better to tell the plain and honest truth and be done with it, for better or for worse, than to die never really knowing.
She was mistaken.
Indeed, the only thing worse than hearing herself finally giving voice to the horrible truth of her tragic affection is the howling silence that follows. Two stern faces, one significantly more stunned than the other, peer back at her as though she is some sort of wild, rabid animal, which is exactly how she feels.
“Hawke…” Aveline begins.
It is unbearable. “Sorry,” she holds up her hands sharply. “Sorry, just…forget all of that. Forget everything, just…I’m sorry.”
She jerks away from Aveline’s outstretched hand, and does her very best to leave slowly, with some tattered vestige of her dignity.
The Hanged Man is nearly empty. It’s late, probably. Or else really, really early. Hawke is distantly aware that she is exhausted, but the thought of sleep is laughable. She’s been here for…well, who knows how long, actually. Waiting for nothing. Waiting for something that will never happen. Waiting to be noticed, and praying no one would see her at all.
In the end, she gets her wish.
Aveline bursts through the door like a gathering storm. Always strange to see her out of uniform, and her hair is even down. Wild and unkempt, a little like she looked when they first met. Well. Minus all the blood.
Aveline’s gaze lands squarely upon Hawke, and Hawke wonders briefly whether perhaps she has fallen asleep at her table. She also wonders how a person can look so threatening and so deeply, profoundly vulnerable at the same time.
“This is your fault,” Aveline points at her.
Though the words twist a knife in her chest, Hawke puts on a thin approximation of a smile. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”
Aveline’s eyes flash with scarce-contained fury. “Do you know what he said to me, after you left?” she demands. “He said, ‘How could I ever compare to the Champion of Kirkwall,’ that’s what he said!”
“That’s…” Hawke flounders. It’s like knowing a song but forgetting all the words. “That’s completely absurd, Aveline.”
“You’re damn right it is!” Aveline jabs a finger at her. Hawke expects a tirade to follow, a long and detailed listing of her faults that would be cruel if it weren’t so honest.
Instead, Aveline sighs. Her shoulders sag.
Somehow, this is worse.
“Donnic is a good man,” says Aveline. “A good man, and it was…it was fine between us! No. No, it was better than fine. It was good. It was stable. And you—!”
Hawke doesn’t know why Aveline stops. She feels the unspoken words like a physical blow. “I, what?” she presses. Her throat is dry.
Aveline looks up at her with such pity that Hawke almost feels sick. “You’re a mess, Hawke,” she says, and opens her hands as though to say, don’t you know that by now?
Hawke is reminded of the way Fenris used to lash out at her, when she was just trying to be kind. She thinks she understands it now, a little. “Then why are you here?” she asks sharply, without entirely meaning to.
Before Aveline can stammer out a syllable, Hawke cuts her off. “Why aren’t you running after Messere Good and Fine and Stable? Why don’t you tell Donnic what a mess I am, and how absolutely wonderful he is, instead of forcing me to listen to it for the hundredth time?”
“Because—!” Aveline gestures vaguely, desperately, reaching for words Hawke is sure she doesn’t want to hear. Anyone else might apologize for hurting Hawke’s feelings, for saying something that is true but perhaps oughtn’t to be spoken aloud.
Not Aveline.
“Because,” says Aveline again, and suddenly her expression is unbearably fond. “Because you’re a wonderful mess.”
The ocean roars in her ears, and all the fury leaves her as quickly as it came. She doesn’t know what she expected Aveline to say. Anything but that. Vaguely, she realizes that Aveline has reached for her hands, and Hawke has offered them.
Warm, rough fingertips. Hawke’s hands are always so cold.
“Aveline?” Hawke hears herself murmur. A small, pitiful sound.
Hawke has often felt that Donnic was awfully lucky to have Aveline looking at him a little like this. She’s not like anyone else Hawke knows. She keeps her distance, maintains her composure, draws a firm line between them where others allow the edges to blur. Even when she came to comfort Hawke after her mother’s death, she just…sat, several feet away, a pillar of strength unyielding against the tempest of Hawke’s existence.
Aveline’s fingers curl into Hawke’s. She is close enough now that Hawke can feel the warmth of her erratic breathing. Her strawberry blonde eyelashes flutter, catching the dim light from the flickering sconces.
“Hawke,” Aveline whispers. “Please.”
The same way she makes any request, Hawke cannot help but think, with a kind of quiet determination that cuts right to the heart of the matter.
She could do it. She could do it, and no one could blame her. Aveline is asking her, pleading with her, and tugging gently upon the very tips of her fingers. Hawke could find out what it feels like to thread her fingers through Aveline’s unbound hair. She could uncover the precise taste of Aveline’s skin at the artful angle of her exposed collarbone.
It is not compassion, but an ugly sort of pride that holds her back.
“Come now, Aveline,” says Hawke, in a breathless attempt at her usual airy tone. She pulls away, and straightens her shoulders, but she doesn’t quite manage to let go of Aveline’s fingertips.
“You said it yourself, didn’t you?” Of all the horrors she has witnessed, nothing quite comes close to the anguish shining in Aveline’s eyes. “I’m a mess, and you’re—“
Perfect.
“You’re you. So.”
She gives a curt nod, and an awkward squeeze of Aveline’s hands as she staggers away, upsetting chairs, abandoning her half-finished drink and whatever she brought in with her. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.
Life goes on. Aveline patches things up with Donnic, and for a few dreadful weeks they all awkwardly tiptoe around one another. Hawke wants to say something, preferably sober and in daylight, but the mere idea of it seizes her like an icy panic, and she can never seem to find the right words at the right time.
She tries to make it right some other way. She forces herself to visit the barracks even when she feels she’ll shrivel up and die of sheer embarrassment. She offers up trinkets she comes across that only ever seem to upset Aveline further. She practices the questions she’s going to ask, tries to think of any possible way they could be misinterpreted, and still somehow receives prickly non-answers at the very best.
And then one day, it is too late, when it definitely wasn’t the day before. Nothing has changed, really. At least, as far as Hawke can tell. It’s like Aveline just made the decision that it would be too late from now on, and so it is, because that’s just the sort of person Aveline is. She could shape the world to her whim if she wanted to, and instead she has fashioned for herself a very small and very plain sort of box to live in, and she contents herself with whittling away at its edges.
And life goes on. In the end, who is Hawke to say that Aveline doesn't have the right of it? Passion is all fine and well, after all, but it's no way to build a life.