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Chapter Text

9:32 Dragon

"I'm going to market," Hawke called on her way down the stairs. "Any cravings from the homeland?"

She could kiss whatever plucky entrepreneur decided to bring an import market to Lowtown square on the mouth. Lirene's store was a pillar of the community, but despite its name it was less 'imports' than it was secondhand goods that were donated and then purchased by various Fereldans, and she never carried food or alcohol. At least now, once a season, Hawke could swing by the handful of pop-up stalls behind the Hanged Man to stock up on root vegetables and terrible mead just in case she wanted to knock herself clean out of consciousness and into a comfortable, homestyle trance for a day. 

Downstairs, her mother was sitting in her new favorite chair by the unlit fireplace and just barely visible among crates of rich new drapes and carpets, reading a book that hadn’t yet touched a shelf. The newly-reclaimed Amell estate had been emptied of all traces of banditry and was now in shambles on purpose, as the lady of the house decided to use her daughter's newfound wealth to do a little bit of redecorating. It made little difference to said daughter, except for all the late-night stubbed toes. The argument about whether or not she ought to stop coming home in the middle of the night was in year two of a stalemate.

Leandra looked up from the book to smile at Hawke, but the smile quickly curdled as she looked her up and down. "... To market? The one in Lowtown? Dressed like that?”

Hawke glanced down at her outfit to see if she’d spilled something or, considering the way her mother was looking at her, wet herself without noticing. What she saw was a slightly plain but nicely-tailored tunic and trouser ensemble. The boots were a bit dusty but she didn't think it anything to fuss over, considering she was about to go traipsing into the dust anyway.

“Like what? I’m not going to armor up for an errand. No one’s stupid enough to try to jump me in broad daylight.”
Leandra scrunched her face a little, and shook her head. “That’s not what I mean.”

This again. Hawke inhaled, nodding slowly, and let herself take a nice comfortable lean against the stair railing, so that she could receive this apparently-regular scolding with all the seriousness it was owed.

“If you have a problem with my clothes, you can take it up with the tailor you recommended."
“When I recommended you that tailor, I was hoping you’d opt for something more …” Leandra gestured vaguely in front of her, searching for a diplomatic way to word what she actually meant, which was that she wanted a daughter she could parade around high society as if to say, 'See? Even this bastard child of an apostate can be brought to civility.'

Maybe that was a little uncharitable. She meant well. Unfortunately, the more she pushed the issue, the more it made Hawke feel like her own skin didn't fit her meat right. 

“... well, you know,” Leandra finished. “More becoming of your new life.”

Hawke pressed her teeth together to keep herself from saying something reflexively juvenile. She missed the days when she could picture grief as something mournful and cloaked in billowing black instead of an eccentric houseguest that was prone to overstaying its welcome. It was easier to understand when it manifested in her mother as wailing or rage; less so now that it became an anxious and overbearing prying. She had reclaimed the Amell estate for her mother so that maybe the dignity and comfort of Hightown life could help her heal. She'd forgotten that her mother carried more ghosts than she could see, and they all lived here. Rookie move.

“If you want to play dress-up, your other daughter is in the Gallows and very bored, from what she tells me.”
“I am well aware of where Bethany is, and where she would be if you had been more careful." 

Hawke flinched as if struck, and then dropped her gaze to the rug-less floor.

Her mother cleared her throat, and the gentle rustle of fabric meant that she was smoothing her skirts over her lap. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“I am just trying to set you up for a proper, happy life, Hesta,” she continued.

Hawke felt that weird skin-fit feeling again, like her fingers were too tight. In her mother's hands her first name seemed to be some kind of weapon. 

“I think you and I have different definitions of proper happiness,” she answered blandly, more at the floor than anyone in particular. “Mine does not include being draped in fineries and marrying a banker. Tragic, I know.”
“What does it include, then? Hiding behind dirt and steel all the time? Running around Lowtown, pretending like you still belong in that company?”
She would regret pressing later, but they were already on a roll. “And what company do I belong in, Mother?”
“I wouldn’t mind if you’d come with me to a dinner or two and try to make friends. You are the granddaughter of Aristide Amell, people expect you to show your face.”

Hawke had a lot of patience for her mother's grief and understood her role in it. The constant reminders of that role, she could take — somberly, bitterly, but she could do it. Father, Carver, Bethany — their absence was a shared burden. Aristide Amell, however, had given her nothing but his blood and now, a constant headache.

“Did Aristide know that he was my grandfather? Because from where I'm standing, he’s a man I never met, who did not ever contact us, help us, or think of us in any way.”
“Of course he thought of us —”
“Writing a sad letter on his deathbed doesn’t count.”
“That sad letter was his will, Hesta. It is the means by which we were able to have this home returned to us.”

Leandra inhaled sharply. The Amell lineage was another point of contention between them now, something Hawke had inherited from her father once he died. When times were tough and her mother needed to be convinced of the light at the end of the tunnel and the lasting power of love, he would spend hours cajoling her. But, her father was long gone and therefore all that remained to be resolved was laid at her feet.

Slowly, as if talking to a frightened animal, Leandra continued her appeal. “All I am asking is that you go to a dinner with me every once in a while. Maybe you’ll make some new friends. Maybe you’ll even meet someone you like.”

Hawke nodded. She slowed down as well, but not because she was trying a different approach. She was just suddenly tired. “I did go to a dinner with you. And I sat there quietly and smiled like you asked, while the children of your new friends asked me insulting questions and recommended a tutor to ‘help with my accent.' And then, if I remember correctly, I told you that if you made me do that again I'd show up fully nude, riding the dog sidesaddle.”

Nug, who had apparently been napping behind a stack of covered paintings, huffed in protest.

Leandra ignored the threat, likely for the best. “They wouldn’t comment on your accent if you didn’t exaggerate it just to agitate them.”
“I did no such thing. I sound Fereldan because I am, and this may surprise you, Fereldan.”
“You are half- Fereldan.”
“I was born there. I grew up there — I would still be there, if it were up to me."
"What about Aveline, then? She at least makes some effort at assimilating."
Hawke pushed herself off the railing. She'd learned to see the signs of wars of attrition long ago; it was easier just to withdraw. "She won't let you dress her up either, if that's what you're angling for."

Apparently unable to resist the temptation of the last word, Leandra let her daughter make it all the way to the door before getting out of her chair to follow her. “I just don’t want you to make the same mistakes I made.”
Hawke, with her hand on the door handle, looked over her shoulder. “And what mistakes are we referring to, here?”
“Do not take this life and all its comforts for granted. Please. I don’t regret what I did, I loved your father, but you and I both know just how much harder our lives were darting all around the continent.”

---

Hawke took the stairs to Lowtown as fast as her legs could carry her without looking actively upset — as of late, she found herself stared at more often than not. In her experience stares lead almost directly to whispers, and the last thing she needed was to have those whispers give her mother even more ammunition for discussions about appearances and assimilation. 

Over the last two years she’d gotten used to it all, more or less. The way the heat clung to the towering stone well into the night, the noise, the crowds, the smell of the sea air and the strange taste of the water. She could handle the accents, the food, even the way people sneered at her in Hightown; she could forgive Kirkwall a great deal of its flaws and settle into contentment here if her mother would just let her do it on her own terms instead of constantly trying to stuff her into a silk coffin. She wouldn't even look good in it! She was raised a farmhand and remained shaped like one — evidently the muscles one used to till the soil were not that different from the ones used to brawl. The only thing that had changed was that her skin was now half-red almost all the time. The kind of pale that she was did not exactly tan well.

Another thing she could thank the Amell side for, she supposed. She wouldn't know, having never met her grandfather. His portrait looked pale enough.

As soon as her feet hit the worn brick of Lowtown, she slipped into the shadows of the cramped-together buildings, savoring the sea breeze whenever it chose to give her some relief from the sun. Some of her fellow refugees, the ones who had the energy to pick up the pace and join the cadence of life in a big city, were beginning to spread out and blend into the day-to-day. The remaining stubborn uncles and former farmers stuck to the Fereldan quarter and lovingly nicknamed it Dogtown before anyone could make it sound like an insult — and that’s where she could find the market.

There wasn’t a terrible amount of profit in selling to the poor but a copper was better than an empty palm, so the market lived on. Shabby stalls set up once every few months, with voices everyone recognized and food everyone missed. It wasn’t much, but it put all the refugees in a slightly better mood. Even Hawke felt some of the tightness in her release as she wove between gaggles of her countrymen and towards a pile of potatoes that looked like it survived the voyage across the Waking Sea much better than last season's.

The rumors from the mainland were about what she expected: Denerim was already on the mend, the settlements along Lake Calenhad would probably be the next to receive assistance so that Orlais didn’t get any ideas about ‘helping’ the areas close to the border in hopes people would soften on the whole 80 years of occupation bit, and the South would stay completely fucked for the forseeable future. Long live Queen Anora, long live the Hero of Ferelden (who was either some sort of ten-foot-tall demigod or a surprisingly compact and polite elf from the Circle — hard to tell).

“Well, look who it is!” Hawke rolled her eyes and just barely glanced up from the potato in her hand to catch Gustav emerge from the throng behind her, apparently still in one piece. All things considered, she didn't know how to feel about his presence here: Either he was picking up something for a friend, or someone at the market was about to have a very bad day.

“Meeran hasn’t found a way to kill you yet?”
“Not for lack of trying,” the merc said, laughing loudly and elbowing her. “He still tells us he’s gonna call you in when we fuck up.” At that, he laughed even louder. "Keeps going on about how three of the new help he's hired ain't even worth half of you." 

Hawke, who had been only half-listening because — well, it was Gustav — paused. “You keep laughing, but I haven't heard a joke.”
He looked at her like she sprouted a second head, suddenly. “Oh, come on. You got out, Hawke. Sleeping comfy in grandpa’s mansion. No one with a silver spoon in their mouth stays a threat.”

She just barely set her jaw, but that seemed to be enough to spook him. She threw a much harder punch than he ever could, and he knew it.

"Hey, hey, I'm just kidding, Hawke. Just playing. I'll see you around, alright?" he said, and disappeared into the crowd before she could say anything.

Hawke stood there for a moment, put down the tuber she'd been holding, and took off to go find a drink.

Chapter Text

It was a long ways for a drink, considering Isabela forced Hawke to go back and finish her shopping (not for any altruistic reason so much as the looming threat of not getting the soup she’d been promised), and only once the vegetable situation had been resolved did she let her sit down and take the edge off with some shitty beer. By the time they sat down at their usual corner table, she was hot, she was sweaty, she was tired, and halfway through a sip realized that had probably been the point.

“Are you tipsy enough to tell me what’s wrong yet?”
“Depends, are you going to make me do a lap around town about it again?”
“I dodged a near-mutiny with the power of a few laps, more than once.”
“So twice?”
“Shut up.” Hawke huffed a laugh into her drink before taking another swig. 

Alas, Isabela was not the type to be swayed from being nosy by light bullying. “If you don’t tell me what’s wrong I’m just going to start guessing.” Hawke considered the threat. She leaned back, uncrossed her legs, re-crossed them the other way, took a breath of stale Hanged Man air ... and shrugged. "Have at it, then."
Isabela lit up. There was a metaphor for their friendship somewhere in the challenge of keeping a dog and a cat from boredom simultaneously. "Really?"
"Really." Whatever she was about to come up with would at least be funnier than the truth, given that the truth was just that she got into yet another argument with her mother.

Less of an argument really, and more of a fundamental disagreement they had always kind of had, that was now just … out in the open given that there were three fewer people in the house to keep her company. Letting her mother take her loneliness out on her for the time being was a small price to pay no matter how irritting it was, all things considered. Especially when she could apparently just walk it off.

Isabela's list of possible grievances started with a stubbed toe and went to the botched sale of a family heirloom, all before Varric descended from his suite and graced them with his raw talent for escalation. Hawke kept buying them drinks until the conversation became less about what had her fuming earlier in the day and more about crafting an outline for what would apparently be Varric’s next big hit: Hero’s Roost, a series of novellas about a wealthy debutante who would moonlight as a vigilante, all the while hoping that neither her wealthy lover or her network of spies on the ground found out about her horrible secret … 

Hawke stumbled home late at night, ale-drunk and content, and then stubbed her toe on some wooden crate full of fancy knick-knacks on her way up to her bedroom.

The next morning, she woke up so, so hungover. Just terribly hungover. Trampled by a thousand horses, and then a cart for good measure hungover. She was sick-hungry, too – or hungry-sick? It was hard to tell before she stumbled her way to the kitchen for some bread and water, squinting against the mid-day sun, not even aware enough of the house being empty to be grateful for it for once. She had half a mind to go curl up in the cellar where she could lean her forehead on the cool stone and pray no one found her ‘till she slept it off.

A crust of bread gave her just enough resolve to reconsider the whole cellar idea. If she was lucky – and judging by the contents of her cupboards, it seemed like she might be – she’d have everything to make the ol’ Hawke family hangover cure. A vile-tasting concoction that included herbs and raw egg, but she did remember it working the last time she tried it. Maybe. Probably. She'd chance it.

It was a sharp-smelling liquid all told, sharp enough to chase her sleepy dog away from the kitchen and all the way up the stairs. It was some real piss and vinegar nonsense, but at this point she’d drink anything short of actual piss to get her head to stop throbbing and her stomach to stop flipping around. She watched a pot boil in some sort of trance, more and more repulsed by the idea of putting the dirt-green liquid in her mouth, until a stroke of genius came to her: boil it down, and throw it back in one gulp. Her genius, as almost always, came at a cost.

The egg at the bottom of the glass wasn't even the problem, it was the aftertaste. The aftertaste was so potent it doubled her over and pooled saliva in her mouth, threatening to evict a lone crust of buttered bread from her stomach, but Hawke held on … for a while. She did have to run and vomit after a few minutes, but to her father's (questionable) credit, she did feel a bit better afterwards. 

It took nearly tripping over her bag of spoils from the day before to remember that she’d been in Lowtown for the market in the first place, and not just out to get hammered with her friends. If she was gonna be honest about it, it was still a bit too hot out for stew of any kind, but … it had been so long since she had any taste of home, and she was already feeling nostalgic. Not to mention, the menial labor of washing, peeling, and chopping vegetables sounded soothing in comparison to writhing miserably in bed. 

Seemed like she was right, too. The chopping was almost meditative, and by the time she was done her stomach settled and welcomed the thought of a hearty bowl of stew. Her mother came home just a few minutes after the vegetables, meat, and spices started to mingle in the biggest pot she could find, making the house finally smell home-like. Unfortunately, Hawke's pleasant mood shattered when she found Leandra standing shock-still by the entryway, hand covering her mouth, eyes wet.
“Mother? What’s wr –”
“It smells like Malcolm.” 

For some reason her mother always insisted on eating at the dining table, even if functionally there was no difference between that one and any other table, other than to make them both feel small and lonely without anyone else there. Sometimes she had half a mind to invite Gamlen over, just to add a third voice to the crushing silence of their giant, pointless house. 

Leandra caught her daughter eyeing the great wooden expanse and mistook her homesickness for longing. "When we finish renovating, we'll finally be able to have people over."
“Just give me fair warning so I can keep myself scarce.”
Her mother gave her an exasperated look. "That includes your friends as well, you know." It was a strange non-apology for making them sound like unworthy rabble, but it was better than nothing.
“Oh. Well, I’m sure they’ll be glad for a free meal.” 

Despite the over-formal table setting, their dinner was just stew and bread. Hawke dove right in, fully and rightfully confident in her ability to combine ingredients in a pot and let them do their own thing over time. Leandra, however, sniffed her spoon before taking a tentative bite. Hawke stared at her. "Now seems like a good time to remind you that you have never not liked my cooking."
“And I like it now! I just ... thought I smelled something rancid.”
Hawke snorted. “Oh. That was dad’s old ‘grown-up tea.'"
“Oh, Maker. Talk about keeping yourself scarce. After the first time he made it, I told him he’d better start making that wherever he got drunk enough to need it in the first place, and not in my house.”

It was strange to talk about Malcolm Hawke so openly. They only ever mentioned him in passing anymore. She wasn't really even sure how her mother was dealing with the loss beyond poorly. “It doesn’t taste much better than it smells.”
“Well, did it at least work?”
“My head still kind of hurts, but I’m upright. The soup helps.”
“You really are his daughter.”

Hawke stopped with a spoonful of stew halfway to her mouth, and glanced up. Leandra was staring at her, chin in hand, smiling sadly. Her stomach sank at the sight — for a moment, she had really thought they could get through this without that weird, looming sadness seeping in. The kind that threatened to crawl into her and find a place to stay. “You look like him, you talk like him, you’re always taking in strays. Your cooking tastes the same.”
She had the same stupid sense of humor, and the same stupid hope that it'd save her in times like this. “But unlike him, I've never lost a fight to a rooster.”

Leandra sat back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap, smiling without letting it reach her watery eyes. Hawke set her spoon down and watched her go somewhere she couldn’t follow, waiting in silence for a moment until finally her mother sniffled and stood from the table. “I’m sorry, I think I spent too long in the sun today. I think I’ll go to bed early, if you don’t mind. Thank you for dinner.” 

The thought of the rooster story had not been enough, apparently.

Hawke sat at the table by herself for some time, holding her spoon and praying for her appetite to return, but all she felt was that sadness starting to creep in again. She needed something to do, somewhere to be. She could deliver leftovers, but it was probably already lights-out at the barracks and it would be a bit late for dinner by the time she made it to Lowtown ... which left her with just one Hightown stop to keep her from thinking about her continued series of well-intended fuck-ups.

The troubling thing was that the cellar door to Fenris’s reclaimed mansion was missing the padlock. One still had to navigate through an overgrown and neglected garden to get to it and there was a trick to getting it open even after unlocking it, but usually he at least forced her to pick the lock in order to get a pulse check on him. She was mostly unarmed, too, just in plainclothes, hair tied back under a scarf, a single dull dagger in her boot. Usually she visited with Isabela in tow, but this was the rare time she wasn’t coming up directly from Lowtown.

She didn’t hear any noise from the inside, which either meant everything was fine and he was up to his usual crotchety business, or …

Hawke’s heartbeat picked up in speed, and without any further thought toward the risk she dropped down into the cellar with her wrapped basket, and crept her way to the first floor. The cellar was dark but so under-utilized that she had the messy path memorized and could creep through it nearly blind, all the way across and up the stairs she knew didn't creak. At the top, she pushed open the kitchen door just enough to slip in and press herself into the wall to listen. In the silence, she couldn't help but picture the elf prone on one of the dirty, too-expensive rugs, couldn't help but wonder if she'd let someone else die on her watch. She listened, but all she heard was her own heart, thumping against her chest, in her ears, in her temples. Not again.

Not again.

In a moment of sudden, desperate clarity, Hawke knocked on the counter. “Delivery,” she yelled into the semi-dark ... and then there was a rustling, the movement of cloth, and Fenris cleared his throat.
“In here.” Hawke took a breath for the first time in a minute, half-collapsing into the doorframe she'd been hiding behind. Suddenly, she was exhausted. What was wrong with her? "Hawke?"
"Not all of us have great night vision," she called, kicking something hollow and metal to the side to buy her some time. Thirty seconds. Just thirty seconds, and she'd be fine.

After a count, she straightened, took another breath, and put on her best traipsing posture to go see to feeding a misanthropic elf. She rounded into the sitting room he often lurked in with her basket and a somewhat forced smile, greeted by the completely normal sight of him curled up in an armchair. Fire lit, book in his lap, and a bottle of wine at his elbow. No blood, no corpse. Alive.

“Did you know your cellar door is unlocked?” she asked, nodding back the way she came.
“I got tired of you and the pirate breaking the lock all the time,” he said sourly, but there wasn’t nearly as much edge to it as there had been six months ago. She'd figured eventually they'd either wear him down or he skipped town. What a pleasant surprise that he seemed to be leaning towards the first of the two options.
“Someone’s gotta make sure you’re still kicking.” She dropped the basket she was carrying from her elbow to her hand so she could hold it out to him. “I brought you some food. Family recipe, and all. Imagine: A taste of Ferelden without leaving the comforts of your haunted house."
Fenris eyed the basket and she braced herself for the inevitable question of why , but apparently he thought better of it. "No Isabela today?"

Hawke kept her smile up, but just barely. Her stomach turned, but she was quick to blame it on the hangover. "Sorry. You just get me today."

Fenris slowly uncurled himself from his position, tucked his book under his arm, and rose to accept her offering. Once free of her basket, Hawke crossed her arms over her chest and watched him peer hesitantly inside.
"Thank you," he murmured, visibly unconvinced that she wasn't trying to randomly poison him when he was least expecting it. Either that, or just still wildly uncomfortable with the concept of having someone checking in on him despite the fact that she and Isabela dropped by with lock-breaking regularity.

The handoff had been completed. In theory, she should say her goodbye and leave, but something kept her rooted there. Some weird, paranoid fear that the moment she turned around, he'd drop. So, small talk it was.

"I'll admit, I never took you for a big reader."
"What?" Hawke nodded to the book tucked under his arm, which he seemed to forget was there. She extended her hand for it, and he stiffly handed it over. 

She had not expected to end up holding the Hard in Hightown Collected Chapters, vol 2: Even Harder. Signed by Varric, and everything. "Well it's no wonder we never see you," she said, barely containing a laugh. "Seems like you're really tearing through the Tethras literary canon." Fenris immediately flustered, and snatched the book back to stuff it under his arm again.
"It was morbid curiosity," he said. "That's all."

Hawke nodded slowly, trying to make the split-second decision between trying to find some other topic to hook him, or just leaving. By all accounts, she should leave. She would leave. "Well, don't let me keep you," she said, and forced herself to retreat back toward the shadowy path through the cellar. He would be fine. Everyone was fine. She was just very hung over.

To her surprise, Fenris seemed confused. "You're going already?"
"That was the plan."
"Oh."
"What?"
"You … usually stay longer."

Now this was new. Hawke had been firmly under the impression that he only barely tolerated anyone else's presence in his house. "Do you ... want me to stick around?"
Fenris blinked at her, hesitated, started to say something, seemed to choke on it, and then after all that managed to take a step back and say, "I've gotten used to the intrusion." 

Hawke stared at him until he couldn't hold eye contact anymore. He averted his gaze for a second, and tried again. "I would like it if you stayed for a while."

She thought about it for a moment. On one hand, she felt awful, but on the other ... the alternative was them sitting in their respective silent houses, bored out of their minds, or worse.

"You do know, instead of waiting to have your house broken into to have company you can just come see us at the tavern, right?"
"I will endeavor to keep that in mind." Surprises on top of surprises.

Hawke hesitated just a moment longer, and then reversed course, back into the sitting room. She went straight for the chair she usually fell into, and reached for the wine the moment she hit cushion.
"Are you ... hungry?" Fenris asked, after a moment.
Maybe that's why she'd freaked out. It must have been. It had to have been. "I could eat."
"Then I will ... figure out how to heat this up."

Chapter Text

9:30 Dragon

Malcolm Hawke’s body was found in the woods just south of Lothering. He had almost made it home from what must have been a shortcut through the Wilds, but the Blight was faster than his legs could carry him. He was dead, clearly afflicted, and he would not be allowed a burial inside the village. He would not be allowed a burial at all. No one was to touch him. He was just to lay there.

Ser Donall and a few of his men had burned a radius around the body. If no one could touch it, no one could build a proper pyre, but they could limit the burn to the broad rectangle around where he had fallen. Malcolm Hawke would get burned face-down in the mud, to the tune of the Chant, and there was no stopping it. No one that survived him could risk branding themselves a heretic when they had one more living apostate to protect, and no one in the village dared risk becoming a pariah.

Chanter Devons and the Reverend Mother both were busy consoling the inconsolable widow, in tandem with her youngest daughter. Her eldest stood as close as anyone would let her stand, staring at her father’s corpse in rare, stark silence. She'd never seen him this still before, and as if on instinct she stilled too. No part of her thought that he'd suddenly get up and admit to this being some poorly thought-out prank. This was an ending her body felt before her mind could fully wrap itself around it.

Elder Miriam was the only one brave enough to approach her, lay a cold hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think your mother is in any shape to light the pyre,” she said.

An orange light from behind them stretched their shadows over the mud and leaves, over her father’s lonesome body. It felt wrong. She had grown comfortable in his shadow, and now she just felt exposed.

“Hawke?” Ser Donall called. There were three of them there, but she was the only one who turned around. Mechanically, she reached for the torch. The Templar passed it to her. 

Over the wailing and the crackle of flame and somebody asking her if she was sure, if she could really do this, she heard approaching footsteps. She looked up and Carver crested the hill, breathless. He looked at their father. Looked at their mother, their sister. At her. She waited for him to protest or try to take the torch from her hand but he didn't; he just stood there looking hurt, angry, and lost.

Miriam asked if anyone had any parting words, and got only one response: A gasp came from where Leandra’s sobs escalated to horrid mourning wails, and where she lost the strength to keep herself upright. Chanter Devons and Bethany just barely caught her before her knees wholly hit mud.

Malcolm Hawke had always told his children to be decisive. So, his eldest daughter turned around and tossed the torch into the dead leaves next to her father’s body, and then committed to keeping it company long after everyone went home, and the last ember went out.

Chapter Text

9:33 Dragon

“Hammer.” Hawke stretched her hand out, eyes trained on the nail she was pinching upright between her fingers. Merrill repeated the ask, and then placed the handle in Hawke’s palm. It was a blissfully overcast day so at the very least the sun wasn’t scorching the back of her neck as she patched the leaks in Merrill’s roof. For her part, the elf was being a deeply attentive and cheerful assistant, and had promised some sort of Dalish honey sweet in return for the labor. Who would have guessed that Kirkwall’s best and most infamous meddlers’ greatest strength was actually their barter system? 

“Oh, I think I should be able to handle this myself next time,” she said. “I don’t know why I keep thinking repairs in Kirkwall are going to be any different than repairs back home. Everything’s just so square.”
“Honestly, I just thought you liked watching me do manual labor.”
“It is pretty fun.” 

A sharp whistle from below got Merrill’s attention; Hawke waited until she was done bashing the small pointy piece of metal in her hand with the heavier, blunt piece of metal to look down. “Well, look who it is!”
Anders rearranged the covered crate he was holding to wave at them. “I brought some surplus supplies. Where should I put them?”
“Under the vhenadahl, please,” Merrill answered, pointing to the tree in the middle of the courtyard. Hawke got the final nail in by the time he made his drop-off and came back.
“Are we just meeting at the Hanged Man, or do you two want to walk down with me?”
“Ooh! What’s the plan today? I thought Wicked Grace was on Tuesdays?” 

Hawke and Anders turned to her in unison, heads slightly tilted.

“Merrill,” Hawke said, “how deep in the woods was your clan when you lived in Ferelden?”
“Deep. Very deep.”
“Well. How would you like to celebrate your very first Fereldan Independence Day?” 

Anders was more than happy to wait around and share in the candy while the other two got themselves dusted off and sorted out. Much like Merrill, it was the sweetest thing Hawke had ever encountered, and made with one of the jars of clover honey she’d brought with her from dipping in to see her clan. It tasted like summer. 

“It’s the same old story.” The hard candy stuffed in Anders’s cheek was making his summary of Ferelden’s liberation a little less dignified than most people would appreciate on this, the most anticipated of holidays, but hey. “The rich looked out for their own hides and sold out their country, Orlais taxed everyone into poverty to fund their own oppression, and it took eighty years of rebellion to finally take their frilly boots off everyone's necks.”
“You can’t bump into anyone old enough to have grandkids without them wanting to tell you what they did to contribute to stomping out the Orlesian scourge,” Hawke added. “If an uncle so much as gave an apple to a soldier’s horse, you’ll hear about it.”
“By the end of the story, you’ll know the color of the apple, the pedigree of the horse, and every heroic achievement of the rider that would not have been otherwise possible.” 
"And now, we can be taxed into poverty the Fereldan way: Blaming mages for the taxes used to fund their own imprisonment, distracting everyone from the fact that the rich are still robbing everyone blind."

The Hanged Man was already rowdy by the late afternoon. Anders somehow managed to position himself behind Merrill and use the poor thing as a shield as they pushed through all the way to the back, where Isabela was waving them down from on top of a table with Varric open-armed and ready to spot her if her wobbly ass fell over. Hawke detoured to the bar first — had to push her way through a few layers of sweaty, loud Fereldans to do so — and waved Corff down her way. He’d apparently wisened up since his first go-around: brought on some help, stocked up on kegs, and most importantly, clearly been drinking a bit himself. He said something in greeting but she couldn’t hear him over the noise.
“Next three kegs are on me,” she yelled, and he nodded. “And slide me a pint.” 

One of the dockworkers crammed next to her overheard and immediately wrapped her broad arm around Hawke’s shoulders, pulling her in for a drunk half-hug. “You all hear that? Drinks on Hawke!”

The magic of being the patron saint of drunk disorderliness was that, no matter how loud and hot and humid it was in any given space, ‘free drinks’ cut through everything and elicited a cheer. 

She was able to elbow her way most of the way back to her friends on her own, but Isabela had to reach into the throng to pull her out the last little bit. “You,” she said pointing at Hawke, “need to catch up. I’m going to go get another round for the table and you better have finished that one by the time I get back.” Hawke raised her mug in acknowledgement of the command, and proceeded to down the lukewarm ale. 

There were no chairs to steal from neighboring tables, so once she returned from her excursion Isabela had the bright idea to push two chairs together and share the makeshift bench between herself, Merrill, and Hawke, with poor Merrill in the middle. It was hard not to accidentally knock each others' drinks from their hands, but not nearly as hard as it would have been to sit next to Varric while he was in the full throes of pantomining his way through his version of the end of the Fifth Blight.

“— and then she took the Archdemon’s neck in her bare hands, and wrung it like Sunday’s laundry.”
Anders rolled his eyes so hard his head followed the motion. “You realize I knew her, right? She was like, up to here on me with boots on,” he said, pressing a hand to about the middle of his bicep.
“What does that have to do with anything? She could still be five feet of raw muscle.”
“... No."

Aveline and Fenris showed up after the sun set, when the party had long since spilled into the streets and at least freed up some room to breathe. Isabela, still somehow capable of being upright, squealed upon seeing them and slid off her portion of the seat to go grab more drinks from the bar. Everyone left at the table finally exhaled, as she had also been capable of drunkenly whipping all their asses at cards. Again.

“Merrill,” Hawke said, nudging the elf. “Now. Anders, get the cards. Varric, when she gets back, distract her."

Merrill slid over, and finally the two of them could occupy whole chairs. Aveline, ever the just, caught this betrayal and made sure to pull up enough chairs for everyone. That, and she strategically collapsed next to Varric so that Fenris could be at least two seats away from Anders, who was too busy trying to smash all their loose cards together into a haphazard pile to pay any mind to the arrival. The elf, evidently deciding to risk Isabela’s mild annoyance at being further separated from Merrill, dropped in next to Hawke.

Drunk, it was easier to admit that she found him handsome and that his appearance was exciting. She felt a girlish giddiness at seeing him slot into their group, all suspicious eyes and naked determination to not have a good time (though he inevitably would). A part of Hawke was a little jealous of how openly he could express discontentment while she had to speak hers disguised as glibness, like she herself was afraid of how bad she felt ... kind of all the time.

But not now. Right now she was among friends and there was a handsome elf that she was just drunk enough to flirt with. Just a little. Just to see what happened. The rest was tomorrow-Hawke's problem.

“My, my,” she said. “You showed up.”
There was a loud, twangy clang from behind them — someone clearly dropped some sort of stringed instrument. Fenris looked over his shoulder at the band assembling. “Aveline told me you’d be disappointed if I didn’t.”
Hawke’s eyebrows shot up. “And that worked?"

He looked at her again and then gestured at his body in the chair. 

Hawke snorted and picked up her beer again. "Well, then you should know I’ll be very disappointed if you keep disappearing for weeks at a time.”
Fenris looked mildly offended out of habit at first, but then softened to some version of… bemusement? It was always a little hard to tell with him. “I’ll keep that in mind.” 
"So I'll see you Tuesday, then?"
"Perhaps."

When she finished with her drink, she caught Varric’s squinty, watchful eye from across the table. She tilted her head, and in response his eyes darted between her and the elf. She mouthed, what? at him, but before he could answer Isabela sloshed back over with a tray full of drinks and nearly dropped them on the table.

“Oh, Hawke,” she said as she made herself comfortable on Aveline’s lap and kicked up her feet on the empty chair, despite the guardswoman’s half-hearted protests. Apparently the Varric distraction wouldn't be necessary, as she'd already forgotten what they'd been doing five minutes ago. “I put a few more kegs on your tab.”
“Thanks, Bela,” Hawke said dryly, though she really didn’t care.

The band of surprisingly nimble-fingered drunkards behind them apparently got their act together, and decided to start their portion of the evening with a long, raspy bellow. It took about two lines for every drunk Fereldan in the room to recognize the old tune — a naughty little ditty about all the different ways Ferelden could think to tell its Orlesian oppressors to go suck eggs. Hawke sang along, at the start. The first time she tripped up on the words, she blamed the booze. The second, though … it dawned on her that some of the words were simply different from what she’d learned in Lothering. 

Funny, how quickly a room full of people could start to feel like the loneliest place on the continent. After all, there was a chance that she was the only one left who remembered that Southern song at all.

Chapter Text

No matter how hard she drove the blade, the hoe wouldn’t break ground. Hawke had been at it for hours, trying over and over to get through the unnaturally dark earth, with nothing to show but the slow and steady rhythm of a scratchy tink, tink, tink.  

Eventually the hoe went down and stayed there, and she couldn’t bring herself to pick it up again. She stood frozen a moment, then slowly dropped into a crouch, eyes unfocused. It didn’t matter where she looked, it was all the same: gray, brown, withered, dead. 

Well. There was little else to do but keep going. 

Just as she made to stand again, a pale hand stretched towards her. Awful. Familiar. Her father. Her father, the body. A body, hollow-eyed face half-pressed into the earth. And she’d never outrun the flames.

Hawke sat up with a start, eyes wide, shoulders braced, gasping for air. Her eyes darted around, trying to piece together where she actually was from what little she could see in the dark — the low light of an oil lamp, the endless darkness, the pebble jabbing into the heel of her palm. Fenris curled up on the ground to her right, her sister on her left — she squinted at Bethany until she was sure, really sure, that her chest was rising and falling in her sleep, and only then caught her own breath. Hand over her racing heart, she took a long exhale, and only then noticed Varric staring at her from a few feet away.

“You alright, there?” His voice echoed a little bit. 

Right. Deep Roads. Assassins. Something about a Hawke’s blood, her dad’s past come to haunt them. Normal day. 

Hawke peeled herself slowly to her feet and took a stretch. “Yeah,” she whispered. “‘S my turn to take watch anyway, isn’t it?”
Varric shook his head, but pat the spot next to him anyway. “Not for another hour.” At least he knew better to try and get her to go back to sleep.

She joined him on the little ledge where he sat, both their legs dangling into the endless black below. And ahead. And above. Probably not the most defensible position, but about as effective as any other they could pick.

“Bad dream?”
“I only dream of cakes and fairies.”
“Are the cakes also filled with sarcasm or do you prefer something subtler and somehow more ironic between the layers?”
“I have never been sarcastic or ironic once in my life.” Varric snorted. 

Hawke let her hair out of her mussed-up ponytail, ran her hands through it to get the big tangles, and promptly tied it back up again.

"Your hair's getting longer." Hawke wasn't sure if he ever did it on purpose or just had uncanny timing, but Varric had a talent for not letting her sit in silence when her mind was churning. 
"It was about down to here in Ferelden," she said, pressing the side of her hand to halfway down her torso. "It was always in a braid, so I never noticed how long it got until it got tangled in something."
"Did the Blight inspire you to change up your look, or something?"
"Something like that." 

Varric watched her out of the corner of his eye, and chose not to press. She was glad for it. It was easier to keep the gory details of her escape from Ferelden to herself — not just to spare herself from the retelling, but to keep her friends from pitying her. It was bad enough that everyone knew how poorly she'd reacted to assassins breaking into the Gallows to take Bethany's blood. Aveline had to hold her back from clawing the Knight-Commander's eyes out with her bare hands and once that got back to Isabela, it got back to everyone else. That, and there was no cheeky way to dress up the fact that her hair had become so matted with dried blood on the way over that she had to cut the whole braid off on the boat. No one would have wanted to spare what little bath water they had to save a farm girl's overgrown hair even if she'd cared to try, anyway.

Something screeched in the depths and Hawke visibly tensed. Varric sighed. “I hate this place, too.”
“Memories of Bartrand?”
“You could say that. I’m still pissed at him.” Hawke nodded slowly. She remembered being mad at Carver for a while. “Who do you think’s gonna trap us down here this time? The elf?”
“Too obvious.”
“Not Sunshine?”
“She’s perfectly capable of evil. Maybe you didn’t see the diabolical things she did to take revenge on our brother, but I did. Or — maybe you’ll do it. It’d be a — what did you call it? Satisfying, something-or …”
“Satisfying narrative arc.”
“That’s it.” He kind of half-chuckled under his breath, and that was the last of it. Both of them were too tired to keep the masks on.

Eventually, Varric went back to snoring on the ground, and some stretch of time after that, Fenris came to relieve her of her uneventful watch. She laid back down in the same cold spot she’d been occupying before, closed her eyes, and slowly drifted into a tense, dreamless sleep, as dark and pointless as tilling Blighted soil. 

In the ‘morning,’ or at least the period of time after the last watch that they vaguely hoped lined up with morning top-side, they didn’t talk much. Just rolled up their bare-bones camp, and got moving as soon as they were fed and ready. 

“The plan for today is the same as the plan from yesterday: We follow the weird dwarf into the depths and hope we don’t die,” Hawke said as she took point.
Bethany, somehow already at the end of her rope, huffed. “Would it kill you to take something seriously just once?”
“I’m in the Deep Roads again, Bethany. I’d say I’m taking things pretty seriously.” 

In fairness, Bethany had good reason to be on edge (considering the assassination attempt) and at least kind-of good reason to be mad at her sister (considering the shouting match she got into with the Knight-Commander and the First Enchanter). It was just a shame that she was a fully-fledged adult now, and that having her older sister joke through yet another family misfortune lost its charm years ago. The challenge was, how could she say sorry without opening the floodgates and apologizing for all of it? For not being able to save Carver, not being able to keep her out of the Circle, not being able to keep their mother happy, and now all this?

The Deep Roads were just fucking endless, too. There were signs now of Wardens having been there, just not recently. Ruins, ruins everywhere they looked, the only difference being that some of these ruins had the Warden insignia on it. How fancy. She had sworn to Varric that she’d sooner cut off her own leg than come back here again, and now here she was. Stuck down here with no conversation to cover up the Darkspawn screeching somewhere out of sight. 

Hawke heard her companions stop walking at some point, and turned around expecting to see that perhaps some piece of rubble had caught their attention, but no. It was Bethany. She had stopped entirely, one hand covering her eyes and the other set square on her hip, shoulders tense. 

She might as well have been ten again, crying in some hole while the Templars raided their house. Hawke immediately made a beeline for her, one hand half-outstretched. “Are you alr —”
Couldn’t even finish the question. “No, I’m not alright!” she snapped, uncovering her eyes to reveal the tears that were just on the edge of spilling over. “I’m exhausted, and I don't know how much more I can take. First Father, then the Blight, then Carver, then finding out that Gamlen lost the estate, getting caught by the Templars — I thought at least the one good thing about being in the Circle was that things would calm down, but no. The Templars can’t take their eyes off me for a second because they think I’m somehow going to sniff out where the phylacteries are and break out like Father did.”
“Beth—”
“Don’t. Don’t start. Do you want to know why else they watch me? Because of you. Because you’re ‘trouble’ and this point you’ve got the whole town convinced it runs in the family.” 

Hawke stiffened. As if on cue, Varric slid out from behind her, waving his hands to calm the younger one down. “Hey, hey, Sunshine, that’s not entirely fair —”
“Don’t talk to me about fair. I don’t want to hear about fair. Nothing has ever been fair, and I’m —” 

A whistle from the dark cut her off.

Varric and Fenris looked around for the source, but not the Hawkes. They knew that whistle: Two notes, each a little flick upward, like a bird call. A Hawke call.

The two sisters stared at each other, unmoving, until Bethany suddenly jolted to life. “What are you waitin —”

With equal suddenness, Hawke put two fingers in her mouth, and whistled back: Three quick, high-pitched tones. Varric started to ask after what was going on, but Hawke shook her head, eyes darting around into every bit of darkness, listening. 

After what felt like forever, they heard it again. “It’s coming from up ahead,” Hawke said. “Come on.”
“What? What’s coming from up ahead? Hey, Haw —”
“Our father used to call us in like that, when we were on the run.”
Fenris, who had wisely kept quiet for a good portion of their trip considering Bethany’s emotional state, frowned. “Dead men don’t whistle. It could be a trap.”
“It’s most definitely a trap,” Varric grumbled, though no one tried to stop them from going toward it. 

They didn’t quite make it. Hawke stopped abruptly again, extending her arm to stop Fenris from passing her. Some of the rubble on the ground was moving to a steady thump, thump, thump. Something big was just out of sight, and lumbering in their direction. No one spoke, but as she moved to unsheathe her daggers she heard Varric's grip tighten on Bianca and Bethany's steadying, shuddering exhale. Any moment now, the creature would round the corner and expose itself — except, it stopped.

No one moved. Hawke just about started to mistake her own heartbeat for more foosteps when Varric whispered, "Well where the fuck did it go?"

As if to answer, the creature roared.  

An Ogre burst through the rubble to their left, and Hawke’s mind went completely blank at the sight of it. She watched the thing approach as if in slow motion. For some reason, she just immediately came to terms with the fact that it was now her turn to get smashed in by one of these things, as if it was simply her penance, right up until someone shouted something and Fenris pushed her out of the way.

Whatever was happening to her had never happened before. It was like she’d never held a blade. She was dodging too slow, making bad calls, taking too many near-misses, couldn’t parse what she was seeing, or hearing, couldn’t breathe right. There was a moment — just a moment — when it seemed like Fenris and Varric had the situation handled and she could stop and get her bearings for a few seconds. She tried to breathe her heart into submission and to focus on what was happening, but every time the creature made some footfall or hit the ground she heard the crack of Carver's skull in her head. Even Bethany seemed content to take out her frustration on this encounter, lobbing fire and ice at the thing as often as she could physically manage.

The hot-and-cold treatment was apparently so effective that it caught the Ogre's attention over the glowing elf and the rapid-firing dwarf. The last thing Hawke remembered was it turning towards Bethany and starting to reach for her, at which point her body moved on its own and the next thing she knew, she'd been thrown into a cave wall and left crumbled on the ground.

Everything was black for a while and she was completely winded, gasping for air. Someone came to pick her up, but it didn’t help, her knees refused to hold her up and she found herself scrambling to get away and get herself up by her own means. There was a large, awful thud behind her, and Varric yelled, “It’s dead! Hawke, it’s dead!” but it didn’t matter.

Hawke stumbled forward, doubled over, fighting for air, grasping at stone with one arm and at her chest with the other, clawing at plate like that was gonna stop her heart from slamming against her ribs so hard she felt it in her teeth. She was terrified. The beast was dead and she was still losing her mind, finally understanding what it meant to be scared senseless as she struggled to make sense of anything around her with her spinning head and numb hands, gasping like a fish out of water. 

Someone laid hands firmly on her shoulders and she dropped to her knees, completely unable to parse whatever Bethany was saying to her until she was nearly yelling at her to breathe. She gripped her sister’s arm and forced her shallow gasps for air to turn to gulps, then slowly to less and less desperate inhales and exhales, until she was exhausted and suddenly aware that she’d been crying. 

So was Bethany, though. “I'm sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” 

In her defense, Hawke hadn’t known either.

Chapter Text

Hawke woke up exhausted. Her shoulder was rolled under her at the most uncomfortable angle her anatomy would allow, and her head was propped up on Varric’s crumpled-up jacket. Limbs heavy, eyes swollen, mouth dry, she just lay there with her eyes half-open into the darkness of the Deep Roads until the memory of what happened earlier washed over her, followed shortly by raw shame. 

She sat up with a hiss, having to drag and roll her shoulder to loosen it, but it was so tight that she could feel the sinew of the muscle snap over her bone as she moved. Her ponytail was all messed up again so she just gave up and pulled her hair loose. The sad, dirty locks flopping over her shoulders probably added to the pathetic visual of her curled up against a wall, anyway: Knees to chest, elbows against her thighs, head only held up by leaning into the cradle between her right thumb and forefinger. Sniffling, too. She’d had ass-beatings that felt better in the aftermath than this. 

At least she was alone, for the moment.

“You’re awake.”
Maybe not. Then again, she’d probably have taken offense at being left to nap unprotected in the Deep Roads once she was conscious enough. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m up.” 

Hawke let both her hands drop between her thighs, but still couldn’t bring herself to look at Fenris. He was standing a few feet ahead of her, surveying their pointless, rocky surroundings. And now he was staring at her, and she just … couldn’t. “Are you —”
“Where’d the,” she paused to clear the dryness in her throat, “where’d the other two go?”
She could have sworn she heard him sigh. “Your sister was anxious to scout ahead.” The whistle. “She told me to tell you that she wouldn’t go too far. Just far enough to see if there are any … signs of life.” Something in Hawke’s grim, pained half-smile must have given her away. “But ... I assume there won't be?
“No.” 

She allowed herself one more deep, self-pitying sigh, and then started to pull herself up to her feet.

“Hawke.”
“We should catch up.”
“You need to rest.”
“I’m fine.”

The elf was in front of her before she could take a single step forward, blocking her path. Hawke set her jaw and tried to sidestep him, but he met her there. When she tried to go the other direction, he grabbed her forearm and held her in place. At first, she refused to make eye contact. Instead, she just stood there with her eyes burning into the ground, trying to take slow, measured breaths, get her heartbeat to calm. Fenris gave her a few seconds, and then tried again, more insistent. 

“Hawke.” Finally she looked at him, ready to face the all-dreaded look of pity ... but what she found instead was a strange, clear-eyed determination. And also, the swift realization that he’d never, ever gotten that physically close to her before — sober, anyway. “Bethany and Varric are not going far, and you are not fine.”
“Since when are you on a first-name basis with my sister?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“You’ve never called her by her name before. Not too long ago you were just calling her ‘mage.’”
"I call you Hawke."
"That's different."

They weren’t in a particularly well-lit area, but even in the lantern-light she could have sworn she saw him flush a bit. That, and suddenly he was avoiding looking at her.

“You are the one who keeps telling me that mages and magisters aren’t the same, are you not? I’m … trying.” Well, there was something she wasn’t expecting to hear. “She told us about your brother. How he died. I’m sorry.”
"It's alright."

Fenris’s grip on her forearm loosened a bit. If she wanted to break free now, she could. Instead, for some stupid, weird reason that she couldn’t begin to articulate to herself let alone him, she raised her hand and reciprocated the hold. And then, when he didn’t totally flinch away, she let her heavy head drop as gently as she could onto his shoulder.

He tensed for just a second, but then shuffled another couple of inches closer. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s fine, Hawke.”
“I just need a second.” In truth she probably needed about a year of just laying down, but a second would keep her going through the end of the day.
“I’m here.” It was a bizarre little pantomime of what could maybe be considered a hug if someone squinted really, really hard, but it was enough. She’d take it. They’d probably never speak of it again, anyway. 

Varric would, though. The moment he rounded the corner, he let out a long, low whistle. “What did I miss?”
Without missing a beat, Hawke picked her head up, dropped her grip, and raised her arm up where Fenris was still holding on to it. “I’m being held hostage.”

The elf released her then, and bolted several paces into the dark. She tried her best not to laugh. It was probably not how he'd intended to cheer her up, but it worked anyway.

“Did you find anything?”
"Mostly a whole lot of nothing,” Varric said. “Except a bad feeling in the air. Oh, and a Warden prison tower, if you'll believe it.”
"Oh, lovely."

Bethany shuffled awkwardly, guiltily next to him. “Sister, I —”
“We should move on. I’d like to get out of these blasted ruins before I go gray. Clearly the lack of salty hot air and shit booze is driving me to the brink.”

She didn’t need an apology. Bethany hadn’t said anything untrue, after all, and she had every right to feel angry and cornered. It was fine. It would always be fine.

The four of them retraced Bethany and Varric’s steps and to Hawke’s great relief they truly hadn’t gone far. To her even greater relief, they were back in an area that was a lot more intact and had a few more of those seemingly everlasting torch flames to light their way, though all of them had to take a second to let their eyes adjust to the luxury.

“Alright,” Varric started. “I’m taking bets on what the Wardens were keeping up there.”
Bethany hummed. “Maybe a dragon?”
“You gotta think bigger than that, Sunshine. If it’s a dragon, it’s probably messed up in some way.”
“Whatever it is,” Fenris grumbled, “I’d rather it stay where they put it.”

Hawke took one more step forward with the full intent of turning around to contribute, but the very corner of her vision caught a dark fog rising quickly all around her, and when she pivoted she found herself faced with two bright blue lights, like eyes, bearing down on her. And then her father’s whistle burst from the fog, and ran through her bones.

And then it vanished.

“Hawke,” Varric said finally, slowly. “Blink twice if you’re not possessed.”
“Possessed, no. Haunted, maybe,” she murmured. “Heads on swivels. I don’t like this.”

It happened a couple more times as they pressed on: A whistle, a whisper, a swirl of dark fog, but nothing ever came of it. No trap, or curse. Not until they turned a corner and stopped dead, as the dark cloud in front of them seemed to be pacing the hall with a stride all-too familiar. Bethany called out, but the fog only shivered slightly. It did not respond.

Hawke put her arm out in front of her companions to signal them to stay there as she took slow steps towards the mass. It didn’t seem to register that she was approaching, and even when she stood in the middle of its path, it simply passed through her. 

And then, they heard it. It was strange enough to hear her father’s voice fill the hall as if from the walls themselves, stranger still to hear him sound so young, so … somber. “Leandra,” was all it said, like a prayer, and then the pacing fog dispersed.
“Definitely haunted,” Varric said. 

Bethany broke rank to join her older sister at the front, and the two of them just stood very still waiting for something else to happen, but it never did. “It’s like this place remembers him,” Bethany whispered. "I've never seen anything like it."
“Well, it does have his blood holding a bunch of magic together, somewhere in here. Doubt the Circle has a manual on that.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I think it means that you had better start thinking of some real clever things for your vapor apparition to say for the next several decades, if you end up taking over the seal.”

Eventually they stumbled upon what looked like a small, decrepit workroom. There was a giant spider waiting to jump on them just around the corner from the entrance, but the perk of dragging around an elf with a giant sword was that things like that were quite easily taken care of before Bethany could even think to torch it. 

Inside the dusty room there was that same, lingering, oppressive feeling that had been following the fog apparition around. It kept Fenris glued to the threshold, and Varric’s eyes darting around the room, trying to anticipate its appearance.

“Did your dad make a habit out of scaring the shit out of people?” he asked, to which both sisters responded yes in unison and without hesitation.

There were papers strewn all over the two shabby wooden tables, most of them rendered illegible over the decades, but under a few layers of tattered parchment there were letters: Some finished, some not, all addressed to their mother.

“I don’t think we should be reading some of these,” Hawke said, shuffling something that got quite racy very quickly off to the side. She did not need to know the specifics of the things that brought her into this world. Varric, unable to resist, snatched the parchment and immediately started laughing.
“Hawke, your dad was a freak.”
She couldn’t see it, but she could bet Bethany immediately turned beet red. “Varric!” 

Hawke had to literally jump to press a hand over the dwarf’s mouth to keep him from reading the rest aloud, so he just delivered a snickering, giddy monologue into her palm, and dragged her into giggling along right with him. Bethany gave them what was supposed to be a withering look over her shoulder, but she was also trying not to laugh so it was fairly moot. Even Fenris was grinning from his little guardpost at the door, and Hawke figured she was feeling better if she was well enough to be a little distracted by that.

Eventually she got the paper away from Varric and rolled it up with some of the other intact ones to keep safe in the satchel at her hip. She was on her way to get whichever ones Bethany had been sorting through, but whatever she'd picked up had made her shoulders droop.

“I’ve bought our freedom, Leandra,” she started reading, but as soon as she did the dark fog swirled around her feet and their father’s voice picked up the rest of the letter. 
“... We can go home now, us and the baby. We’ll be together. I hope it takes after you, love. I would wish this magic on no one.” 

The fog dispersed again revealing Bethany standing there, gripping the letter, watery-eyed and heartbroken. “Well,” she said, voice strained. “At least he got two of us right.”
Hawke shook her head. “Beth, look at me. He loved you. He was just scared.”
“I know. But he was right, wasn’t he? It can be a horrible burden.”
“It’s not,” she said, closing the two-step distance in front of them. She put her hands firmly on her sister’s arms and prayed that she could somehow will her to not internalize this stupid, one-off letter from a frightened twenty-something mage trapped in the Deep Roads. “You are not.”
“How can you say that when you’re stuck in Kirkwall because of me?”
“Beth —”
“Oh, like I don’t know you. If not for me you’d have gone back to Ferelden as soon as Mother was set up.”

Hawke let her sister go, and instead set her hands on her hips. She had to think about that one for a minute, actually — would she have? They were getting letters from some of their mother's friends now confirming that Lothering was too blighted to rebuild, and that even stubborn old Barlin was giving up on it. None of the other places they lived felt like home to her like that silly old village did. If it was no longer an option, she'd just have to start all over again in Ferelden, and that felt ... daunting. 

She looked back at Varric, and then Fenris, both of whom were staring at her expectantly. If she didn't know better, she'd say they almost looked nervous.

“I don’t know about that,” she said finally. “If not for me, that idiot would be bored out of his gourd and this one would never leave his house.”
“She’s got a point there, Sunshine. Not a dull day to be had around your sister."

Bethany choked out something that sounded like it could be a laugh. Her eyes trailed down to the letter in her hands again and Hawke felt herself stop breathing, but then ... she just read it over one more time, and handed it over. Hawke took it, crumpled it up, and threw it over her shoulder.

“You alright?”
“Yeah. Are you?”
Hawke shrugged. “Just keep hearing our dead father’s voice coming out of the walls. I’ve had stranger days.”
“Imagine if Rivaini were here,” Varric added. “She’d be trying to hit on your dad’s disembodied voice.”
“Varric, if you keep going on like that, I’m going to start to think you’re trying to hit on the apparition of my dead — and happily married — father.”
“Shh! Not in front of Bianca!” 

Once all the letters worth taking back home were identified, they resolved to once again keep moving. One step, one shit joke at a time, they’d keep going, and hopefully sooner rather than later they’d resurface, and she could take her sister out for a drink and for one night pretend everything was actually fine and normal. For the moment, Bethany said her goodbye to their father’s disembodied voice, and followed Varric down the hall as he picked up his little creature guessing game from earlier.

Hawke couldn’t help but linger by the door of the workroom for a second, though. That weird, thick feeling was gone from the ruins now, and it felt … final. This wasn’t exactly an opportunity to say goodbye but it was, in its own bizarre way, cathartic to have heard him again. And, to have heard him as he was when he was scared, unsure, and just trying to get through some awful circumstance and live to see the next day. It made her feel that much less lonely. 

Chapter Text

The fact that the four of them managed to escape the collapsing tunnels was a miracle in and of itself. Once freed of the Deep Roads, all found themselves breathless and in various states of collapse in the sand, covered in sweat and grime and who knows what else, but alive. Hawke’s panting quickly turned into loose cackles — who’d have thought her father’s blood was keeping some wild Magister darkspawn monstrosity trapped for roughly a quarter of a century? Not her, certainly. In a better world, she'd have been able to ask him about it. 

“Oh, what fun. Never again, though,” she said as she pushed up to her feet.
"Maker have mercy," Bethany said in response.

Of the four of them, Beth was in the best shape, followed by Varric. Hawke knew the dwarf was fine because he seemed more concerned about Bianca being dusty than his own scrapes and scratches. Fenris, however, was sat up in the sand with his hand covering his side. Hawke stalked over and dropped to her knees next to him before he could protest being fussed over. That was when she noticed his hand was covered in blood.

“Let me see.”
“It’s fine.”

She peered back over her shoulder to check if the other two snoops were listening. Not yet, apparently.

“You and I both know I'm going to win this. Let me see it.” 
“Is Fenris alright?” Bethany called from a few dozen paces behind.
“Trying to figure that out.”

Fenris relented, if only to get all the unwanted attention off him. Hawke nudged his arm to lift the bit of fabric that was obscuring the wound, relieved to find a fairly clean gash tearing through ... lyrium markings she hadn't known were there. Fenris caught her pause and answered the question she wouldn't have dared to ask.

"They are everywhere."

“I have good news and I have bad news,” she said looking at the deep, six-inch gash along his side. “Good news, I’m pretty sure you’re going to live. Bad news, if we want to get out of here …”
She nodded back towards Bethany, and Fenris visibly tensed. “No.”
“Okay, then we sit here for a week while you heal up.”
“I don't need a week.” He tried to stand up again, but made it only marginally farther than the first time before he flopped back down and yelped. “Fasta vass!”

Hawke just sat there, eyebrows raised, as he started running his very obvious mental calculus. Eventually he looked up and met her eye and she could tell he was straining to find an argument, any argument at all, that would let him have his way. But there was none to be had. “Fine.” 

Once waved over, Bethany jogged to her sister’s side and gracefully descended to her knees. Hawke lifted the elf’s shirt again to show the wound.
“Brings back memories,” Bethany muttered while stripping her gloves.
“Of what? Working for Meeran?”
“That, and growing up with you and Carver. Mother used to get so tired of them," she said to Fenris, clearly leaning on the old Hawke bag of disarming tricks. "Carver used to get into all sorts of fights, and then Hesta would have to go win them." 

Considering Fenris was looking very openly apprehensive about the whole ordeal, Bethany let her hands charge up before she ever laid them on him, and even held them up to show the faint blue glow around her fingertips. “I’ll be quick. Ready?” He nodded tersely, and she went to work.
“Varric, can you grab my bag?” Hawke called over her shoulder again. 

In about a minute the wound stitched itself back up again, leaving just an angry red line and an elf looking vaguely uncomfortable but otherwise no worse for wear. From her bag, Hawke pulled a couple of clean cloths and a bottle of grain alcohol she’d thankfully remembered to pack. She soaked them both and handed one to Bethany for her bloody hands, and one to Fenris to clean his own side. When he went to take it from her though, she hung on, and jerked her head towards her sister. She only let go once he cleared his throat and said, “Thank you, Bethany.”
Bethany, being a Hawke, couldn’t help but look just a little smug. “You’re very welcome, Fenris.”

With everyone back in one piece the trek back to Kirkwall was only about as annoying as the trek out had been. Hawke was made cranky and sunburnt by the heat to the point that she was actually grateful to see the looming, ominous silhouette of the city when they finally made it back some two days later. It was dark already when the guards waved them in, and to Hawke’s great surprise … there was no cavalry of Templars waiting for them. 

Hawke turned to look at the gate guard behind her, who just blinked back. Practically a kid, so obviously green. “Hey. If anyone asks … we aren’t here yet.”
The kid started to protest, but then she tossed a sovereign to him and his cohort, and both of them just saluted her and turned back to their posts. Bethany recoiled.

“That’s… not good.”
“Try not to think about it too hard. How do you feel about a drink, and then a warm bath and a night spent in your family home?”
If there had been some disgust on Bethany’s face a moment prior, it washed away at the thought of a bath and plush bed. “What, really?”
“Yes, really. Are you in?” she said, pointing to Varric.
“Obviously.”
“You?” to Fenris.
“I will take a drink.”
“Let’s rally the troops then. One of you,” she said to the gate guards, “go get Aveline for me, would you?” 

The moment they got to the Hanged Man and Isabela laid eyes on Bethany, she wrapped her whole body around the young mage and rocked back and forth, refusing to let go. “Oh, look at you! Back where you belong, among the rabble!” Merrill, who was already flushed with a few drinks herself, piled on to the hug.
“What took you all so long?”
“You’ll never fuckin’ believe it, Daisy —” How Varric had the energy, no one would ever know. Hawke, for her part, went straight for the bar and did her usual no-brain routine of paying for a keg and sliding a little extra to Corff for his discretion. Not that the bartender himself would say anything to the Templars, but he was quite useful in making sure that no one else would if they ever wanted to show their intact face around Lowtown again.

Weird. Being back in this stupid tavern with its stupid noisy regulars was such an immediate relief, she could hardly bear it. Even travel-weary and frankly, still a bit worn down from her little episode in the Deep Roads portion of their journey, she felt … better. It had been such a long time since just being somewhere made her feel better.

Before she could get too sappy about it, Aveline ran through the door. She got there in record time, panting, having clearly run from the barracks. Bethany waved at her enthusiastically, but after waving back the guardswoman went to join the elder Hawke at the bar to wait for drinks.
“When did you get back?”
“Less than an hour ago,” Hawke said. “Everyone’s exhausted, but if I can give her one night out, well. One night out she’ll have. Did I miss anything dramatic?”
“Anders has been more reclusive, but otherwise it’s been business as usual. Strange, how that happens when you leave town.” 

Hawke pretended to be offended, but her attention was pulled by the sudden and loud laughing from their usual table. Varric had one leg up on a chair and was sweeping his arms dramatically. She reckoned he might have skipped to the dirty letters considering the way Bethany was desperately trying to cover her face.

She watched them all for a moment, idly drumming her fingertips on the bar. Aveline started picking up the first pints as they slid over, letting Hawke bask a few extra seconds. “You’ve really built something for yourself here, you know. You should be proud.”
“Yeah,” Hawke said as she looked upon her mostly-assembled band of miscreants. “Could certainly be worse.”
“It could,” Aveline said, and then she thwapped her friend upside her head. “Now, stop bribing my guards.”
"Ow! Tell your guards to stop taking my bribes!"

Bethany did keep them to just the one drink — they all knew that Leandra would be absolutely bereft if she didn’t get to say a proper goodbye to her youngest. Just leaving the Hanged Man was an ordeal, what with Isabela and Merrill insisting on another prolonged hug.

On their way home Hawke kept to the lesser-trod routes, guiding her sister through alleys and empty streets and stairs clearly in need of repair. Bethany followed in step, though neither of them were in too much a rush. The night was pleasantly warm instead of stifling, for once, and it would be a long time before she got to walk the streets like this again. For her part, Bethany was full of Circle gossip. Meredith kept all the mages under a very watchful eye, but that could never and would never stop a bunch of incredibly bored people from engaging in the kind of melodrama you could only engage in when locked up in a tower with only a courtyard to occasionally wander for years on end. Things that would be minor slights in the regular world turned into full out petty warfare: Crushes began to feel like epic love stories unraveling before all their very eyes. Beth, thankfully, was as level-headed about all of it as she could manage, but ever-watchful. Not much else to do between prayer and studies, after all. 

By the time they got home, Leandra was very much asleep, so Bethany was able to indulge in a long and luxurious bath before ever waking her. And after, she sat perched on the side of her mother’s bed, their giant dog curled around her and snoozing while she gently pet him and chatted into the night. The elder Hawke, for her part, drifted in and out of sleep on the nearest chair until called upon to pass on her father’s letters.

“And please,” Bethany begged, “don’t read them while we’re both here. Some of them are … creative in a way I don’t think I can stomach.” 

Even if just for a few hours, they all fell asleep like that. Leandra and Bethany and Nug on the bed, and Hawke in a cushioned chair with her legs kicked up on an ottoman. She probably got the most sleep of them all that night and therefore woke first, early enough to make her sister breakfast before the handoff. Leandra, to her credit, tried not to cry as she held her youngest one more time. Hawke waited patiently until her younger sister was finished reassuring their mother that she was fine, really, and then set them off on their slow march back to the Gallows. 

It was hard, at that point, not to ask the question. “Are you really fine in there, Beth?”
“It really isn’t so bad. It’s interesting, at least, to learn about magic the way the Chantry wants you to learn it.”
“Not like dad school, then?”
“Not at all. Much more restrained. And they really try to make you feel bad about being good at magic if you are.”
Hawke snorted. Sounded about right. “Well, keep an eye out for those phylacteries anyway, and don’t let them get to you. You’re a Hawke, through and through. As much trouble as the rest of us.”
“I really didn’t mean that, you know.”
“I know.” 

Aveline met them at the bottom of the stairs, there to be the designated de-escalator before her shift. The Knight-Captain and his wide-eyed recruits met them at the entrance gate the moment they crested the last step, though at least the sisters were allowed one last hug before being separated again. Bethany went quietly and willingly, with nothing but a wave in her sister’s direction, and that was that. Back to visitations in the courtyard, whenever Meredith’s whims allowed it.

The Knight-Captain gave her a shallow, polite bow. “I assume the threat has been resolved?”
“Sure has,” she said, eyeing him. He was Fereldan too, she knew that, but she genuinely couldn’t tell how old he was even this close. She reckoned he was about her age, but he could also easily be forty — there was something sunken about him, a little hollow. The rumor was that whatever brought the Fereldan Circle down really got to him, and by the looks of him that was an understatement. “What happens now?”
“She will get tested for possession and demonic influence, as per protocol, and then reintegrated. She should have nothing to worry about if you followed our instruction.”

Hawke absolutely did not follow a word of their stupid instructions, but they didn’t need to know what Bethany was capable of. An apostate’s education was more than enough to protect her — they’d have known as much if they actually went by what they could see of the mages with their eyes and not what their Chantry-sanctioned schoolbooks taught them. “Can I ask you a question, Knight-Captain?”
“I will answer to the best of my ability,” he said, clearly apprehensive of whatever was about to come out of her mouth. Aveline seemed to brace, too.
“How long have you been a Templar?”
He had to stop and genuinely think about it. “Ten or twelve years, now.”
“And how old were you when you enlisted?”
“Thirteen.” Hawke hummed, feigning interest to cover the genuine sickly feeling in her stomach. “Is there a reason you’re asking?”
“Just curious,” she said. “We’ll be off, then. Give Meredith my regards.”

Only once she and Aveline were out of earshot did Hawke sigh. “You know, when we were in South Reach, Carver started becoming mysteriously scarce. He was twelve. Took me a week to figure out he’d been hanging out with the Templars, and they were actively trying to recruit him. He almost fell for it, too. Nothing better to do with that fat Chantry allowance than louse about and exploit poor, lonely children, apparently.”
“Wesley was fourteen, when he enlisted,” Aveline said. “You only realize how shocking it is once you start befriending apostates, for some reason.” 

It was a poor joke — not even a joke, really, but Hawke scoffed out a little laugh anyway. “Do you like how he immediately jumped to assuring me that I’d have nothing to worry about? I think I really did a number on him.”
“Hawke, you do a number on everyone you meet. It’s just what you do.”

Chapter Text

Hawke had been summoned to Varric's suite to help him gut check the new Hard in Hightown, as she occasionally was called to do. It was a lazy type of afternoon spent with her feet kicked up on a bench, elbow set on the too-large table, idly snacking on whatever dry fruits and nuts he happened to procure that day and nursing a shitty lukewarm ale. 

On this particular occasion there was no shitty lukewarm ale, but a bottle of shitty lukewarm Fereldan cider. Good old Corff knew his audience, maybe one of the only people in Lowtown who had  immediately seen the opportunity in the refugee crisis. Either that, or he knew her pockets were deep and there was good business in nostalgia and homesickness. Couldn’t blame him either way.

"Are you gonna drink that or just make eyes at it?"
Hawke shrugged. "It's just such a nice bottle, you know? So sturdy. Practical. Reminds me somewhat of myself."
Varric chuckled. "Yes, because that's what everyone says about you. Hesta Hawke: Sturdy and practical." 
"Well, most people don't know my first name."
"Most people don't know you have a first name."

A cider meant that the orchards were coming back, that Ferelden was recovering in earnest now, and she was just … around. Why was that so upsetting? When she said home now she meant Kirkwall, when she wanted to be somewhere alone she was specifically thinking of lounging in her stupid canopy bed. She’d been in Kirkwall at this point longer than they ever lived in Honnleath, and had no friends or family to speak of on the mainland. 

Maybe she was just a tired old dog who hated to admit that she was changing. Fereldan, sure, but one of the weird new breeds of Kirkwall-Fereldan that were starting to crop up as people continued to assimilate. Maybe it was scary to think she was finally letting go.

Hawke popped the seal on the bottle without much further thought, took the first sip, and grimaced. The melancholy contemplations on being a refugee were a little premature, apparently. "Oh, that tastes like ass."
"Let me see that." She slid the bottle across the table and into Varric's expectant hand. He had a similar reaction, except his was accented with a loud blech. "Tastes like bronto ass. Shocked you don't like it, though."
"Oh yeah?" She was only half-listening now, having already cracked open his manuscript. There was no point thinking herself in circles about it — not when Donnen Brennokovic needed her sharp witticisms to punch up his tales of daring.
"Bitter and repressed seems to be your thing."
She knew exactly what he was getting at, unfortunately, but it was more fun to play dumb. If she ever had to flee another calamity, she’d have to remember to make less-nosy friends. "Is that right?"
"The elf, Hawke?"
"I know several elves." 

Varric hit her square in the temple with a crumpled up piece of parchment. "Don't be a smartass." Hawke broke away from the manuscript in her hands to roll her head lazily around to the dwarf. If he wanted her attention, he had it now. Couldn't promise it would be any less smartass-y though. "I'm just surprised, that's all."
"Surprised about what?"
"That you and the one-man anti-mage brigade have been making big googly eyes at each other for months."

Hawke squinted. If Varric was trying to get her to admit that she found handsome men swinging big swords around kind of hot, there were easier ways to get there. If he was trying to get her to admit that she was starting to catch herself idly wondering what that specific sword-swinging handsome man was up to on random afternoons, he'd have to work a little harder. "Uh huh. What new work of high literature are you trying to extract inspiration for?"
Caught red-handed, judging by his expression. “It’s a draft. Don’t worry about it. Spoilsport,” he added under his breath.

Hawke snickered, and went back to the manuscript. Disappointed in his own ineffective snooping, Varric went downstairs to grab them that aforementioned lukewarm ale. When he came back, she decided she could afford to cave a little. For the cause of friendship, and all.
“Magister,” she corrected. “One-man anti-Magister brigade.”
He lit up and she regretted tipping the gossip wheel into motion. “And since when do you find semantics sexy?”
“You would know if you ever bothered to read my fan mail.”

Chapter Text

Hawke was fairly confident that Fenris had dozed off on her — literally on her — but she wasn’t about to risk waking him up to check.

It was a strange little rhythm they’d settled into over the last few months. She’d come by and inevitably they’d end up on the couch, her leaning against his side and his arm wound around her stomach, either drinking and talking or sometimes enjoying these rare moments of peace and quiet that they got. On this day she found herself flipping through some weird dirty novel Isabela had dug out of a bin somewhere, which was far less sexy than it was logistically puzzling in the way the sex was written. Sure, it had been a while since anyone had seen her naked, but even if one was feeling particularly athletic these stunts defied the most basic idea of what a person was. Like, anatomically. Backs weren’t supposed to do that and necks really, really shouldn’t bend that way. To the extent of her knowledge, anyway. Maybe she just wasn't versed in the way things were done in the big cities.

While she was busy trying to untangle fictional limbs in her head, Fenris had wholly knocked out, judging by the weight of his head on hers and the complete lack of movement otherwise. If she was smart, she would have gotten up and moved, left him to his own devices to nap. But she had stopped being smart around Fenris some time ago. Evidently she’d inherited whatever cast aside any sense of self-preservation for an ill-advised romance trait that ran in her father’s side of the family. 

The elf did eventually stir and sit up a little straighter, taking a deep breath to announce that he'd awoken.

“How was your nap?”
“Good, I think,” he said, still a little sleep-slurred.
“What were you reading that knocked you out?”

As if knowingly refusing to indulge her, Fenris closed the book on his lap and presented her with the cover. She had to read the title twice to make sure she had it right, and wasn’t just going cross-eyed from reading about gravity-defying pleasure stunts. “... Fenris.”
“Yes?”
“This is a manual.” 

The silence that followed was so weirdly loaded that Hawke peeled herself from her nested position and turned to face the elf, who took the book back into his lap and sat there staring at it, tapping the cover. There was nothing for her to do but to let him take his time about it.

“Most slaves serve specific functions. Mine were to serve as a trophy, a killer, and a — bedfellow. Reading was not required for any of those things. Most are not allowed to learn even if they have the time.” He only glanced at her after that, and then promptly looked away. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you pity me.”
“Why not just lie to me?”
“You wouldn’t have let it go, and caught me anyway. Just admitting it is slightly less humiliating.”
“Why would this be humiliating?”
His tone shifted to the defensive. “Because it makes me dependent. If I go to the shops I must eavesdrop for the prices, if I have to travel I cannot read the words on a map. I can single-handedly turn the tide of battle but struggle to buy food. How is that not humiliating?” 

The two of them had known each other long enough now that his outbursts no longer gave her any pause. The resentment was never aimed at her. “If you think you can be a better student than two five-year-olds, I can probably teach you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“You just complained about how much harder your life is because of this.”
“But I didn’t ask you to fix it.”

Well, that felt aimed at her, but in the following seconds of silence Fenris had time to process what he’d just said. He ran his hand through his hair, took a deep breath, and promptly sank back into the couch, jaw locked. Embarrassed.

“Offer still stands,” she said after a pause. He glanced at her again, then deflated.
“Sorry.”
Hawke shrugged. “You don't have to apologize."

After another couple of seconds, he let his head flop to the side to level some inscrutable stare at her. Hawke had to ignore the temptation to reach out and fix his hair, or just offer her hand. Instead, she decided to break the silence with literally any cheap clownery that would keep her from hearing her own heart beating in her ears. “I want you to know I’ve never lost a staring contest.”
He ignored her, but she only ever meant to get him out of his head. “I would demand to repay you.”
“Easy. Once you’re able, you’re going to read this stupid sex book Isabela found with your own two eyes.”
“Hawke.”
“That’s my offer. Non-negotiable.”
Fenris’s eyes darted down to the beat-up novel in her lap, and he winced. “How bad is it?”
“Oh, so bad. Very bad.”
“... Perhaps I overstated how much of a burden not being able to read is. On second thought, I’m getting along just fine.”

Hawke thrust the book at his chest with a laugh and he reflexively caught her by the wrist, they locked eyes, and then something … happened. Her throat tightened and her stomach went weird, like reality was about to drop out from under her and thrust her elsewhere. A horrid and irrational vision possessed her; like if she got any closer to the elf she'd be able to sink her palm into his chest just like she'd seen him do and crush his heart on accident.

Before he could ask, she recoiled, and pressed her hand to her own chest. Her heart was thumping against her numbing palm and her body grew restless. 

“Hawke?”
“I’m fine,” she said, compelled beyond reason to stand from the couch and stare wide-eyed into his dusty, threadbare rug, frantically taking inventory of whatever was happening to her. She tried to breathe through it, but she couldn’t. Her own breath was running away from her and she was struggling to catch it. She felt Fenris’s hand on her shoulder but flinched away. “I should go.”
“Hawke, what is going on?”
“I don’t know. I need to go. It’s fine. I’m fine. I’ll see you later.” 

He called after her one more time, but she was gone. Through the kitchen, through the cellar, and out into the night air. She was wheezing by the time she got out and forced to hide in the tight alleyway between the abandoned mansion and its unfortunate neighbors, hoping on hope that no one was in the room with the open window just above her head as she muffled her sobs with the palm of her hand, trapped within the traitor confines of her own body as it shook her to her knees. She stayed there until the waves of fear finished crashing over her and left her tacky with sweat and tears, forced to sneak her way back to her own home and in through a window where no one would see her or ask any questions. 

Unfortunately, her mother had ears like a bat.

"Hesta, is that you?" she called from downstairs, and without waiting for an answer started making her way up to the second level. Immediately, Hawke started taking slow breaths and willing them to stop quivering, wiped at her eyes with the heel of her palm, and started trying to focus all her attention on something, anything in the room. She just barely got herself under control when the knocks came.

"Yes?" she just managed to choke out.
Her mother opened the door — just a bit at first, and then forced to go wider when Nug forced his way past her legs so he could jump on Hawke's bed. "When did you get back?"

Hawke made some noncommital hand gesture, too busy trying to swallow past the sob trapped in her throat while clenching her jaw as tight as she could.

"Are you alright?"
"Yeah," she said, clearing her throat. "Just uh - choked."
"Choked?"
"Mhm. Fine, though." Talking was a gamble. On one hand, it got easier with each word, but on the other she could feel the swell of emotion ready to overtake her mid-sentence. "Did you need something?"
Leandra stared at her for a moment, and then shook her head. "No. No, I was just ... well I was going to tell you I got some flowers today. That's all."

There was a long stretch of silence in which Hawke just nodded appreciatively and cleared her throat, and Leandra looked like she wanted to press but didn't want to risk it. Hawke knew the look well — concern and fear, hand-in-hand, like her mother was trying to figure out how to approach a feral animal and not her adult daughter.

"Good," Hawke said once she was able, forcing a tense smile. "Lovely. I'm glad."
"... Have you eaten?"
"Mhm."

Another silence, and then Leandra relented. "... Alright. I'll leave you to it."

Hawke held it together just long enough for her mother's footsteps to start slowly heading down the stairs again, and then her body gave out on her again. She backed up to her bed and sank down, head in hands, until she was too tired for silent sobs and flopped back. Eventually, she kicked her boots off and snuggled up to her dog, only to dream of blood on her hands and wake with her mind having forgotten but her body keeping score.

Chapter Text

9:34 Dragon 

Hawke was sitting. She wasn’t really sure why she was sitting or how long she’d been sitting, only that she was, finally, sitting. She couldn’t remember the last time she really had time to lounge around in the big comfy worn-in chair she refused to let her mother get rid of, half-laying down with her chin pressed into her sternum and her ankles crossed out in front of her. Warm fire. Perfect quiet. Blissful eternity. 

She thought she heard someone call her name, but then her dog thumped slowly into the room and sank into the floor by her feet, so she wrote it off as a figment of her imagination. There was no one home, no one visiting — just her busybody reflexes. After all, why would anyone call her name now? This was sitting time. 

Hawke let herself doze off and when she opened her eyes next, she found herself hankering for soup, maybe with some crusty bread on the side if there was any left over. She slowly started to peel herself upright, forced to stretch her arms up and out and roll her neck just to loosen her upper body from the weird position in which she’d let herself snooze. Nug huffed by her feet and thumped his wagging tail against her chair until she reached down to give him a scratch behind the ears. “What do you say, hm? You want to share some bread?” 

She leaned back again and set her arms against the chair to get up, but before she could even try she caught something on the side table next to her: a full bowl of soup with mushroom and barley and shreds of chicken, and a whole half-loaf of bread. As soon as she saw it she began to salivate, and was already tearing a piece of crust to offer to Nug as she shouted towards the kitchen. “Who’s home? Mother? Bodhan?” 

No answer. 

Something about that tickled in the back of her head but the feeling came just as soon as it was washed away by tranquil coziness. It was silly of her to question free soup, wasn’t it? Was she already so spoiled by her station that she forgot what it was like to go to bed hungry? Hawke ate, and fuck if it wasn’t the best soup she’d ever tasted: Thick and meaty and herby, perfectly warm and comforting. She kept ripping chunks of the bread off for Nug and ate until she was full, and just as soon as she wondered if there was ever to be an end to this delicious bowl of soup, the warm fire started to pull her under. She snuggled back into the chair, and let herself doze. 

When Hawke opened her eyes again, she felt … non-committal about being awake. She let herself slide in and out of consciousness until finally, she figured she ought to at least sit up. She thought to maybe get up and stretch her legs but Nug made a noise at her and yawned so big and sweet that she couldn’t possibly leave him without another scritch. 

She stopped only when — and she could swear she heard it this time — someone called her name. “Hello?” 

No answer. 

That tickling feeling was back and she really, really felt like she should go check it out, but when she tried to stand up the cozy-comfort bore down on her and became almost … oppressive? Surely not. What a nonsense thought, she was just tired. Hawke gave herself five minutes to gather her strength, and then told herself she absolutely must get up. She tried again, despite the fresh wash of deep, sleepy comfort that came over her and bade her to stay down. She fought the feeling all the way up to her feet but before she could feel victorious about it, Nug rose from his spot next to her chair and onto his back legs to put his paws on her chest and knock her back down again. 

Hawke stared at her dog and saw something in its eyes that she didn’t recognize, something that reminded her that this was all wrong. “Where the hell am I?” she asked not-her-dog, but it gave no answer, only seemed to now be ever-so-slightly warped in her vision.

They stared at each other until not-Nug seemed to grow bored and lay back down at her feet. Hawke did not give him a moment to change his mind: She got up immediately, and stepped in the opposite direction of the creature. She watched it for a moment but it didn’t move, only eyed her from its position. She heard — definitely heard — someone call her name and turned to head to the door, but as soon as her foot hit carpet it sank into a thick, sticky wetness. 

Blood. 

Hawke was ankle-deep in blood before she knew it, the floors and walls and ceiling of her not-house weeping it all around her as if they’d been doing it for hours and not started just now, at random. Just as she resolved to hoof it towards the door Hawke tripped and landed in the blood on all-fours, turning her head to look at what had gotten her only to be faced with her sister’s dead body lying in the pool next to her. She screamed, but not loud enough to drown out the voice of her not-dog. It sounded like it was coming from inside her head. 

“I tried to do this the nice way,” it yawned, and now that the cozy feeling had inverted itself to sickening guilt and fear, Hawke saw it for what it was. She was being subdued. She was being anchored to the floor by the sheer thickness of emotion in the air as the blood rose slowly around her and more corpses floated into the corners of her vision. Where there was warmth there was now empty, awful futility, the desperate desire to just give up and let this take her once and for all. 

The tip of her nose was almost touching the blood when she heard her name called one last time, and someone’s battle-worn hand reached down to pull her to her feet by the forearm. 

It took a little while for reality to start to set back in but the strong, spiced smell of Varric’s cologne helped to start the process. When Hawke came to, she was sitting on her knees in front of the dwarf, her head leaning against his shoulder as he rubbed her back and tried to get her to wake up. There was noise behind her — Merrill giving someone the what-for? — but the words still sounded strange and far away. Hawke sat back and took what was around them: The Gallows, but wrong. The buildings taller, darker, nearly blotting out a sickly-green sky.

Varric, exasperated, snapped his fingers in front of her face to get her attention.

“Hawke!” he yelled. “Will you say something so I at least know you’re in there?”
“I’m in here,” she said, a little cotton-mouthed. Reality was coming in waves: Marethari’s ritual and the fact that they were in the Fade seemed to come back to her last, at least in time to make Merrill scolding a sloth demon less of a surprise. Fenris stood behind her looking back and forth between Hawke and the demon, white-knuckling the hilt of his blade. As soon as he saw that she had fully come to, he held her gaze until she got the hint and nodded, and the four of them could descend on Torpor. 

By the time they were finished with the Sloth demon, Hawke’s recollection of the day had finally come back to her. They were here for Feynriel, and somewhere along the way all but Merrill fell to the temptation of a demon. Fenris had been tempted away by power enough to face the Magisters, Varric by being the one to walk away a winner over Bartrand, Hawke by being able to put down her load for just a minute. 

They all owed Merrill an apology for leaving her alone to rescue them from their respective trances, and offered it with bowed heads. Merrill, being the best of them that day, merely threw her hands up in the air.

“You can all stop with those big, sad eyes. We should just be grateful that we and Feynriel made it out of this in one piece.” And then, because she couldn’t help herself, she looked around. “Oh, but I do wish we could stay here just a little longer to look around.”
Fenris and Varric said, “No,” and, “Absolutely not,” respectively and in unison.

Arianni didn’t seem thrilled with the drowsy explanation Hawke offered about Feynriel running off to Tevinter to develop his powers, but wasn’t willing to push her son’s rescuer much further in her sorry state. Thanks were exchanged, Marethari left with hardly a word towards Merrill, and the four of them stepped outside to say their goodbyes and split in their respective directions. Merrill was the only one who actually started walking.

Hawke risked a glance at Varric and Fenris and saw what must have been her own lost expression mirrored on their faces, and something about that made her laugh. She must have looked completely delirious because Varric immediately said, “Hawke, stop that, you’re scaring me,” but she couldn’t. She laughed until she was sore in the stomach and forced to wipe tears from her eyes. She laughed until the other two cracked and started laughing at her, leaving Merrill concerned and feeling like she missed something. 

The first thing she managed to say through her fit was just, “I need a drink,” and heard no protest at the idea. 

Strewn about Varric’s suite, Merrill was bursting at the seams to talk about all the interesting things she learned about the Fade, but even she knew better than to start considering the sorry state of her companions. The other three were trying desperately to not think about what they just saw of themselves (and in everyone’s case but Hawke’s, of each other) and just wanted to bring themselves back into the real, normal world. 

So they drank. They played cards. They were overjoyed when Isabela burst into the room already in the middle of telling them a story about her latest successful swindle, and got her drunk too. Hawke was admittedly relieved when Varric ordered ales and ciders and abstained from any red wine — there were moments where she thought her hands were still sticky or that she could smell iron and immediately had to fidget or shift her position. Staring at a goblet of deep red liquid was probably not going to help rid her mind of the horrid images Torpor nearly drowned her in.

It wasn’t until Isablea really got going in her storytelling that Varric leaned back and lit up a pipe next to Hawke, staring up at her like he was studying her.

“What?” she said to him, using her goblet full of beer to muffle herself.
“Is that really how you think of things?” Caught off-guard she couldn’t really think of a clever deflection in time, so Varric tsked at her disapprovingly when he felt like he gave her enough time. “You know, when most people go through tough shit, they blame the nearest god. You blame yourself. Maybe pick a god.”
“Alternatively: Have you considered that maybe I am a god?”

That was supposed to be her mandatory attempt at a joke, but at this point Varric knew her too well. He could see right through her thin distractions, especially on the day he was forced to come face to face with some ghoulish visual of her ever-present guilt. “You’re my best and most mortal friend, Hawke. I wish you’d remember that.” 

Hawke was simply too tipsy to hear that and not feel the full brunt of her deep fondness for Varric. It was also just … funny, she supposed, how through the haze of alcohol some things could be so suddenly clear. She really was only human, and in admitting that she felt some tiny part of the horrid weight in her chip and fall away. Only human, but surrounded by people who’d follow her into the Fade to save a teenager they barely knew. 

“Now what the hell are you looking at me like that for?” Varric said, clearly uncomfortable being the focus object of her contemplations.
“If I’m not a god,” she said to the biggest eye roll she’d ever seen out of the dwarf, “then how do you suppose I’m quite so handsome and perfect?”
Varric shoved her playfully away, sloshing her drink all over the table and earning them a scolding from Isabela — half for interrupting her story and half for leaving her out of their conversation. Hawke could hardly hear her over her own laughter, this time definitely from relief.

Chapter Text

9:35 Dragon 

Hawke stood by a pew — not sat, sitting felt weird — and focused into the middle distance at nothing in particular. It was odd to be standing almost perfectly still in the center of a whirlwind of activity. Any time she so much as looked in the direction of a task, one of her friends stepped in to take care of it for her. Arguably, the only work she’d done for this funeral were the things she was allowed to do by the people who knew that she would feel drastically worse if forced to sit idle. Busywork to keep the grief from hollowing her out completely in the two days between holding some other woman’s dead body with her mother’s head attached in a basement that smelled like death, and this strange pantomime. 

On an inhale, her eyes focused against her will and Hawke found herself watching the swaths of mourners make their way from weeping family member to weeping family member. There was a pretty clean divide created by Hightown’s elite being swarmed by rich and poor alike, and the Lowtown families being left only to their fellows. Only Hawke stood to the side of all of this, spared the empty condolences from people who only knew Leandra Amell the reborn, the post-Ferelden, by the grace of being flanked by two elves that no one wanted to brave.

She didn’t even need to talk logistics. Aveline spoke to the Templars and Varric to Elthina and Bran. Bethany put on a brave face to shoulder Orsino, and if any of them tried to insist that they wanted to talk to the elder, Isabela stepped in to redirect. This was possibly the most coordinated she’d ever seen this particular group of people. 

The only person allowed through the team barrier was Gamlen, who seemed content to stand next to his less-social niece in tired silence. They both stared off at whatever caught their eye in that particular moment, glad that they didn’t need to find words to comfort the other. He stayed only a perfunctory amount of time; no relation of theirs had any illusions about who funerals like this were really for. The only thing he said on his way out was, “That big house gets way too quiet. Try not to leave yourself alone there too often. It’ll drive you to drink.” 

This left Hawke to continue to stand there and stare off, having now lost the only other person in the room who knew what it was to bury a parent on their own. At one point Bethany came around and gripped her arm and said, “Just another twenty minutes and you can go.” It felt strange to think of leaving early, but all the bodies had already gone through the grim work of being sorted, burned, and handed off in urns to their respective families. There was nothing to sit here and watch.

The you caught up with her a second later. “Meredith didn’t let you off for the night?”
For some reason, Bethany looked guilty. “My friend’s aunt died by Quentin’s hand too, but Meredith only gave me leave. I can’t leave her alone tonight. The Templars get antsy if anyone cries too much.”
Hawke freed her arm from her sister and draped it over her shoulders instead, sighing. “Who raised you to be this conscientious?”
Bethany hugged her around the middle like she used to do when they were little. “My elder sister.”

The candlelight from behind them danced across the tile, outlining their long monstrous shadow in a way that made Hawke’s stomach lurch.  

Elthina had offered the Chantry funeral to all the families affected by Quentin’s murders, and the Hawke sisters only decided to take her up on the offer because they knew their mother would have wanted them to. They themselves were thoroughly aware that there was little left of any of the women, and unbearably guilty at the thought of their father being burned face-first in Lothering dirt in comparison to all this. Hawke wasn’t entirely sure which burial was worse: The one where no one let her turn her father onto his back to offer him the last shred of dignity, or the one where she had to sit there pondering which urn her mother would like best and then stand there like the world’s saddest show pony while she could hear people whispering about her. 

Twenty minutes dragged into eternity, but eventually Hawke’s group began to rumble with the intent to leave and after everyone made sure that all the various affairs were sorted — the fact that there had been affairs was news to Hawke, given they seemed to have been taken care of without her notice. They left as a unit, leaving Bethany behind with the Knight-Captain to be marched back into the Gallows.

Newly- (and thoroughly-)reclusive Anders had not seen it fit to show his face at the Chantry or stick around to see anyone in person, but had stopped at the Hawke estate to help Bodhan and Orana with dinner. By the time everyone got back to the house, dinner was laid out on the long dining table and the group descended upon it like locusts. Hawke, still smelling decay deep in the back of her throat, slipped upstairs under the cover of noise with the intent to change out of her mourning clothes, but instead ended up sitting on the bed with her head in her hands. The grief came in waves. 

She ran through it again. 

Were there any signs? Could she have known? The flowers arrived the day before she left for Sundermount but had there been anything suspicious about them? A sinister air about the card? Anything her mother had told her about the courtship that set off red flags? Had she heard about the flowers on the rumor mill and missed the connection?

Downstairs, a knock. Hawke made to stand but before she could even push off the bed, she heard Aveline telling the stranger that she wasn’t taking house calls and shut the door presumably in their face. What a good friend. 

The second knock came from her bedroom door, and was thus inescapable unless she wanted to pretend to be asleep. Hawke gave herself a second, hoping she didn’t look as wrecked as she felt, especially considering it took her two tries to get her throat to make a noise. “Come in.” 

Fenris slipped in and closed the door behind him, and cleared his throat before speaking. “You disappeared.”
Hawke took a deep breath and ran a hand through her hair to get the strands that had fallen in her face out of her way. “Right. Sorry. I’ll be right —”
“How are you ... feeling?” The tears burned in her eyes at the question. Fenris gave her a second to clench her jaw, and once he realized that she would have trouble unclenching, slowly crossed the room and plopped down next to her, worrying his hands in the space between his knees. “I don't know what to say.” 

Met with another silence, he anxiously went on. "Ah — they say death is only a journey. Does that help?" It was such an inexplicably ridiculous thing to say that some kind of choked half-laugh managed to escape her. At the very least, she was briefly so confused it distracted her from the sadness. Or, whatever it was she was feeling. 'Sad' didn't quite cover it, but she wasn't the literary one.

“Bethany has done a formidable job making arrangements. She told us that if we so much as let you lift a finger, she’d scorch us all. A Hawke through and through. She… is worried you blame yourself for this. As am I. As is … everyone else.”
Hawke dropped her head, and picked it back up on an inhale. “No, of course not.”
“Not your most convincing performance.” 

Hawke flattened her lips and took a deep breath, trying to search for reassurance in her doorframe. Who else was there to blame, other than her and Quentin? She knew she wasn't the one who did the physical damage but she was her mother's last defense and she wasn't there. She slipped. She didn't learn her lesson about being sloppy and complacent from Bethany's capture, and now paid an even greater price.

The elf stilled almost completely watching her and in a series of small, awkward movements untangled his hands from one another and offered one to Hawke. She eyed it, unable to repress the not-so-distant memory of a kiss that had backfired on both of them so spectacularly that they seemed to simply pretend it never happened. It took months for them to just be friendly with each other without feeling like they were constantly tripping over the tension.
“Fenris, you can’t — ”
“This is fine. This, I can do.”

The night after Hadriana had appeared, there was nothing but wild panic in his eyes. Hawke tried to look for any hint of that again, but this time he seemed completely cool. Resolute. So, against what was perhaps her better judgment, Hawke wove her fingers through his. Why that of all things made the dam burst was beyond her, but as she predicted once she started crying she simply could not stop. Cried herself well into a headache, and then some. 

Fenris squeezed her hand and stayed there until she was cried out, so that between that and the noise of the rest of their friends milling about downstairs, she could feel assured that on that night she would not know a silent, empty house.

Chapter Text

9:25 Dragon 

“She’s over there!”
Hesta had to keep her breathing low and even despite the fact that her lungs burned for air as she stay crouched behind a rotting log. The Templars’ footsteps were finally headed in the opposite direction, giving her just a moment to gather herself; her palms were blistered with burns and her legs were weak and twitching from exertion, but she was too close to shaking her pursuit to give up. She had to keep going, and then lay low on the road so she could intercept her father on his way home. This was the plan, she had to stick to the plan.

At least the little trick she’d been practicing with Bethany worked: the flames looked like they’d been cast from her hands so the Templars thought she was the mage, and not her little sister. That would at least buy her mother and the twins enough time to clear out. The good thing was that there were only two Templars stationed this far out into the countryside, and both of them were in pursuit of her; the bad thing was that these two goons were particularly nasty. There was a big difference between the barrel-chested idiots happy to collect a Chantry salary and ignore anyone who wasn't actively setting their britches ablaze and the new pair that had just been stationed at South Reach, who seemed to get a real kick out of hounding the locals and pretending like they knew an apostate was hiding amongst them.

There were two apostates hiding amongst them, so bad start.

Once the footsteps faded, Hesta pushed herself upright and stumbled on into the pines. She stuck to the shadows as much as she could, but her body wouldn't listen anymore. Her footsteps were clunky and seemed to find every snapping branch and crunching leaf underfoot, and her pursuit hadn't gone far enough to miss her bear cub stomping. The Templars caught up to  her quick — they were still energized and wild-eyed on Lyrium while her legs claimed so much of her energy that her scorched hands went numb. She heard them clanging along behind her before she saw them, but even fearing for her life didn’t give her the strength to run, only to hobble slightly faster.

When they finally cornered her, she reached for the knife in her boot, so incapable of moving with any intention that she cut her calf in the process. The two men laughed in her face. “Done already, little witch?”
“That carrot peeler won’t do much against us. You’d best surrender.”
The ‘carrot peeler’ hurt to hold, but she wouldn’t drop it. “Tempting, but I don't think so,” she said through chattering teeth. Her voice sounded far away, even though it was coming from the hole between her ears, same as always. The men sneered at her, and panic pierced through the fog of her senses, the yawning dark chasm of it flaying her mind open as she stood there, scared to die but with little else to do, barely armed and standing on legs that couldn't carry her a step further.

She knew she stood no chance against two grown men in plate, and that would be true even if if the grown men in question knew that they were fighting a mostly-unarmed kid and held back even a little. These two took no such care, and pummeled her like an equal as soon as she was within arm's reach. 

She was barely conscious by the time a hot, orange glow erupted overhead and sent the Templars careening backwards. Her family wasn't the type to believe in miracles but when her father burst from the shadows like a dragon, breathing flame at his daughter’s assailants (a trick, one Bethany was determined to learn), it was hard to believe that she was experiencing anything else. Either a miracle, or this was her mind comforting her in her dying throes. Thankfully, eventually she realized that the pain in her body had settled into a dull roar and that as soon as the last clang of armor quieted with a thump, the forest went entirely silent, and she was alive enough to know that.

And then everything went black, for a time. 

When she woke, she was still on the ground. 

“Come on, kid, wake up.” It took some seconds for Hesta’s foggy mind to put the pieces together: her father muttering over her, his hands glowing blue, sweat on his brow.
“I’m up, I’m up,” she slurred, like he’d been trying to wake her up to go sow seeds at dawn and not keep her from bleeding out into leaves and dirt. She even tried to flash him a thumbs-up, but her hands hurt too much to ball into fists so it was more of a half-hearted claw with her thumb awkwardly sticking out. “Ow.”
“Ow?” he repeated, on the brink of hysterics; hard to tell if laughter or tears. "What did you do to your hands?"
"Fire. Obviously."
Malcolm's relief came out in a shuddering exhale and a flurry of blinks as he sat back. His eldest watched him in stunned silence, waiting for a punchline that never came. Instead, he ran his trembling hands through his sweat-soaked hair, pushing it back from his forehead, and ground the heels of his palms into his eyes for a few long moments.

When he resurfaced he did his best to put on a face, but the girl simply did not buy it. She'd seen something she couldn't unsee, even if she couldn't name it in her state.  "If you have enough energy to be a smartass, I think you'll make it. But we don't have long. Drink this so I can move you.” With one hand cradling her head he tilted her up to drink what must have been a pretty potent elfroot potion — one so bitter she could taste it through the blood coating in the inside her mouth — but at least she hurt just a little less at the bottom of that bottle.

In a minute's time the throbbing in her bones either quieted, or her head simply stopped registering it. Either way, her father saw enough improvement to try and lift her; she thought she could get through the ordeal without making a noise, but whatever control she thought she had over her body was gone. She whimpered and yelped all the way up. "I know," Malcolm said, "I know."

Every step he took jostled her, every single breath told her that something about her ribs was wrong, but it's not like she could ask him to stop. All she could do was hiss and whimper into his ear instead. But Malcolm did, eventually, stop. "Would you like me to put you to sleep?" he said, gentle as he could manage.
The thought of the dark of sleep tore her mind open again. She had never felt fear like this before — like she was on the verge of falling through the ground and somehow, into the sky. "Will I wake up?"
Malcolm adjusted his grip on the backs of her thighs and steeled himself, though his voice cracked. "Of course you will. I swear it."

The very moment she nodded her consent, she drifted off.

It was a dreamless sleep, deep and dark. Only once in a while the eldest of the Hawke children would half-wake at the sound of a two-note whistle. She wasn’t sure how long they walked until they heard the answering call.

She next came to in a bed. 

Hesta let her head droop to the side. For a long time, there were no thoughts, only throbbing. The first thing she recognized was the fire, but the second was Carver’s guilty face half-obscured by the doorframe, standing there and watching her. As soon as their eyes locked, he disappeared. There was some light commotion from some other room in the wherever-she-was, and then her father appeared in the doorframe, his hair a mess and beard untrimmed. He looked about as rough as she felt. Well, almost.

It was very rare for him to be rendered speechless, and every time it happened his eldest found it completely unsettling. “Is there something on my face?” she asked, knowing full well her right eye was swollen almost completely shut.
Malcolm sighed and crossed the room, footsteps heavy, and sat himself on the edge of his daughter’s sickbed. They'd placed her in the middle of some dilapidated hut. She was about to ask if this was their new home, but her father was quicker. “What were you thinking?”
“Someone had to protect the kids.”
“You are also ‘the kids.’”
Half-true. “How’s Carver?”
“This isn’t about Carver.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Not right this second, no.”

Hesta knew that her little brother didn’t mean to rat them out. He had looked guilty as the Templars came to the sisters with him in tow, and as soon as things went south, grabbed his twin and fled to the house without protest. He probably thought spending time with the Templars would get their dad to pay attention to him. He didn’t have it in his head how that could backfire.

Malcolm reached over and moved a stray strand of hair out of his daughter’s face, then laid his hand on her bruised cheek and let the cooling flow of healing wash over her. “Don’t tell your mother I’m doing this.”
“Uh oh. Banned magic in the house again?”
He smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Yes.”
“She’ll get over it the moment she loses track of the flintstone again.” Normally, that would make her father laugh, but it didn’t. He just sat there in silence, watching her. She had hoped that she dreamt the man who shuddered at her side in the forest, but no. Even Malcolm Hawke could be afraid.

The world felt ... bigger, suddenly.

Once her eye could open most of the way, he moved on to her seared hands. “It’s my fault you understand when something must be done,” he said eventually. “I’m sorry.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I keep thinking about the choice you had to make. Fleeing with the family would have put you all in danger. Turning Bethany in —”
“Is not an option.” Hesta wanted that to sound forceful but something was wrong with her throat. She sounded like a frog.
“That’s exactly what I mean. I should never have left you to make that kind of choice on your own.”
Only one shoulder could shrug. “As long as you keep showing up at the last second to save the day, we’ll be fine.” 

Again, she lost him to looking for something past her head. “Do you remember how you promised me you’d always look out for your siblings?”
“Yes.”
“I need you to promise me you’ll look out for you, too.”
“Wh — I —”
“Promise me,” he said, his icy blue eyes suddenly bearing down into hers. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen him this serious. “Promise me you’ll survive.”
“Okay,” she replied, her good eye wide and the other trying its best. “Alright. I promise.”
Malcolm's shoulders drooped and he nodded, like all the energy suddenly sapped out of him. "That's my girl."

He sat casting a while longer, until his brow started to shine again and he seeemed to run out of energy. "How's that?" Hesta flexed her less-pained fingers. Her father watched her move a moment, assessing his work, and then sighed one more time. "You should get some rest," he said, and then leaned over to kiss her on the forehead. "We have a long walk ahead of us, as soon as you're able."
"Where are we going next?"
"Lothering. There's a farm there that's been abandoned, looking for a new owner. We should be able to stay there for a good, long time."

Malcolm stood and made his way over to the hearth, where he pensively threw another log into the flames and stoked it. Hesta watched him for a long moment, wondering what came over him. She was fine, there was no damage that wouldn't heal in time and she wasn't upset at him, or the twins, or their mother. They'd made it out. Everything was fine.

"I'm fine either way you know," she said. "As long as we keep together."
For the first time since this conversation started, the darkness left Malcolm's eyes and he turned and smiled at his daughter the way he always did. "You're the best of me. As long as you remember that, I'm never far."

Chapter Text

9:36 Dragon

Hawke was vaguely aware that the import market was happening in Lowtown, but could not be bothered to get up and try to go browse it. 

She could hardly be bothered to do much of anything as of late, as long as no one was looking at her long enough to be concerned. She would get up and attend to the things she was asked to attend to, though often half-heartedly and with her joke-shield enfeebled, and even then she felt like most of her dwindling energy was spent deflecting questions about her well-being. Just busy Champion-ing, she’d say to anyone who pointed out the lack of her in some place that she used to haunt. Little did they know there wasn’t much of her left anywhere.

Her complete stillness, half-buried in bed linens, was interrupted only by her eyes flicking to her chamber door at the sound of heavy paw-pads. Nug nudged the door open with his nose just enough for his thick Mabari body to slide through, and then he made a beeline for her bed to do his twice-daily checks. When he put his giant head on the side of her bed, they were almost nose-to-nose.
“Hi, boy,” she said, the sound of her own voice unfamiliar to her ears, but apparently still hers enough to make her dog’s tail wag. She reached a heavy arm around to scratch him behind the ears. “Still alive.” 

Nug jerked his head up and took the hem of her sleeve gently between his teeth, giving it a tug. “I don’t know if I have it in me today,” she confessed. The dog pulled again, his low pleading growl muffled by the effort. “Weren’t you the one who used to love nothing more than napping with me all day?” 

The thing was, Hawke’s dog was almost as stubborn as she was, and planted his butt on the rug until she finally relented and climbed out of bed, if only to save herself from being dragged onto the floor along with what remained of her dignity. As soon as her body remembered how to move, it became sick with hunger and sent her half-nauseous to the kitchen, where she found some cured meats and cheese to snack on. There was some momentum there now, to go through the motions of life, so she forced herself to wash and dress and at least stip her bed of her too-lived-in sheets. She had given the house staff the week-end off, and so was left to her own devices.

She was loathe to admit it, but doing laundry helped. She gathered all the soiled clothing scattered around her room and tossed it into a pile with the sheets, then opened a window to get the stale air out. She filled a tub, found where Orana had moved the soaps, and rolled up her sleeves to do her own chores for the first time in what felt like ages. Her hands pruned and a knot between her shoulders made itself known, but by some miracle this was the best she’d felt in weeks. Not good, mind, but at least upright. Upright was progress. 

There was a little voice in her head that wanted her to believe that upright was futile, and wouldn’t it be so much easier just to let herself wither away into the nothingness? But then Hawke thought of how Bethany would have to eulogize her and forced the voice away. Languished away to her slow, sad demise was a little sad, even for her.

Once the blistering sun started to set and the early evening breeze swept in off the sea, Hawke and her dog elected to go on a walk. She didn’t have a particular destination in mind, only that she wanted to keep out of sight and maybe go sit by the water for a bit, get some fresh air, look at the sunset. It was harder to move about the city now that Meredith had done her the great inconvenience of naming her Champion — people were generally grateful for her duel with the Arishok, but it had taken her a long time to recover and in that time some of the noisier elements of Kirkwall decided they had other opinions. The good people of Hightown felt deprived of her company at their fancy dinners, some going as far as to feel annoyed with her for not weighing in on the machinations for Viscount, while in Lowtown people either loved her as a folk hero or resented her for not pulling other Fereldans up with her. She was a public figure now, and she hated it. Her situation seemed so bleak, in fact, that she was almost glad to walk into an ambush. 

It was not a particularly good ambush but there were kind of a lot of the bastards, at least for the fact that she was still weakened from the events of the last several months. Her withering wasn't a metaphor. She was thinner and weaker; she slept poorly and her reflexes suffered for it. Merrill and Anders had worked miracles on her back, but if she put just a little too much force on the outside of her right foot, a debilitating pain would shoot up from her heel to the base of her neck and blind her. This was an improvement on what it had felt like before.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” she said in her best imitation of herself, but before the thug could answer, an arrow pierced his eye socket. He fell prone with his mouth still open from an attempted inhale before what was sure to be a melodramatic introduction.
"The Champion of Kirkwall is to die today," the assassin — Antivan? — said, not quite but almost gleefully. "Call it providence." 

Hawke drew her blades and let herself drop into stance. The backs of her thighs felt tight and her grip, uneven. She had to flex her fingers several times, letting the handles of her blades warm and adjust in her grip. Inside, her survival instinct seemed to have similar trouble finding its place. Normally her vision would narrow and she'd let muscle memory take over and guide her to victory, but all that practice felt as foggy and distant as the rest of her thoughts were lately. 

"Nug," she said. "Go get help."

The dog seemed hesitant to leave her but did so anyway and, luckily for her, even these very expensive-looking assassins were capable of underestimating and therefore ignoring a Mabari. 

Not that she expected him to find anyone and drag them tho this dark alley fast enough to actually help. She just didn't want her dog to watch her die. And she would, probably. She could feel death lurking there, in the shadows of the alley, in the way the couple of overhead lanterns flickered and made her shadow dance. Death by assassin was a eulogy she could stomach.

As soon as the Antivan made his first move, he was shot through the eye by an arrow. 

Hawke blinked hard and then found herself having to side-step from underneath two more bodies as they dropped from the rooftop. The culprit swiftly descended between buildings then to slice the neck of the fourth assassin. A fifth was dispatched by a thrown blade as soon as he came around a corner, and when he fell forward he drove the knife even further through his neck. Hawke was left with nothing to do but to watch her red-headed elf rescuer confirm her kills, and nonchalantly turn to her.  

“You’d think the Crows would be less sloppy,” she said, clearly disappointed in the performance.
"I could have handled them." 
"Of course. You're the Champion of Kirkwall." 

Hawke swallowed past the stone in her throat. The elf eyed her still-drawn blades. "I'm sorry. I should introduce myself: My name is Tallis, and I've been looking for you. Well, I've been looking for your invitation to Chateau Haines." 

—

“Absolutely not,” was Hawke’s definitive, final answer. 

Nug had found Varric, who insisted on hearing Tallis out on her offer and then walking Hawke back to her home. Upon digging through her mail, they did indeed find a fancy invitation to a hunt in Orlais buried in the piles of parchment, but being invited did not mean Hawke had any desire whatsoever to go. The only thing she wanted to do at the moment was to go back to bed. 

Varric, her best friend Varric who unfortunately knew her better than she knew herself, was echoing a quiet little voice in her head. Something trapped deep inside her rattling the bars of her ribcage, begging for survival.

“Hawke, five years ago you would have agreed to travel to humiliate Orlesians before that elf could finish asking the question.”
“Yeah, well. I’ve matured,” she said dryly.
“No, you got depressed,” Varric countered.
“Same thing.” She made to toss the invitation into the fireplace, but Varric snatched it out of her hand before she could. 

“Let me paint you a picture: Breezy countryside, wine so expensive that there’s an insulting way to drink it, the opportunity to offend people with noses stuck so far up their own ass that they end up in the right place again.” He spread his arms through the air as he talked. Hawke tried to snatch the invitation from his grip but with a flick of his wrist, it vanished from sight.
“I am not above reaching up both your sleeves to find it,” she warned. "Tallis can rot, I'm not going." 
"Tallis saved your hide. And she seems like she knows how to party."
"I didn't ask for her help!" 

Something shifted. Varric's tone took on an urgency that made Hawke's insides twist. She wanted to believe that he couldn't have known but he did. He clearly did.

“I’m trying to tell you that you need a change of scenery.”
“What I need is to be left alone.”
“Why, so you can waste away in bed for another two months?"
"I'm not —"
"You suck at lying, you always have."

Hawke took a deep breath and held it for a beat, hoping it'd suffocate that thing beating at her insides long enough for her to win this argument and be left to rot. 

“Varric, I just don’t want to deal with whatever mess happens the moment I look away.” 
And there was her critical mistake. She immediately recognized the glint in Varric’s scheming eye and remembered with striking, sudden clarity that the worst thing one could do in front of him was start digging for excuses. Not only was she depressed, apparently, she was out of practice. “I think Aveline can handle the city for a little while.”
“Someone needs to keep an eye on Bethany.”
“Since when do you not trust Daisy and Rivaini to check on her while you’re gone?”
“Someone needs to look after the house.”
“One of your three live-in house staff makes explosives for fun.” Nug growled lightly from his sprawl by the fireplace. “And you have a massive guard dog.”
“I just don’t want to go.”
“Liar.”
“I can’t go.”
“Says who?” Hawke set her hands firmly on her hips and took another long, deep breath in through her nose. They stared at each other until Varric ran out of patience. “Come on. You, me, this Tallis character, a poorly thought-out scheme. It’ll be just like old times.” 

One could bring back the ‘old times’ about as well as they could bring back the dead. The best they would ever be able to do would be a sad, grim, patchwork imitation.

Chapter Text

“If you’re going to stare at me, at least help me.” 

Hawke could feel Fenris rolling his eyes at the back of her head, but he peeled himself from her kitchen wall to join her at the extremely heavy and hard-to-move work table, which she and Bodhan had barely got into the corner of the room in the first place. There she was elbow-deep in a murky water basin scrubbing potatoes. In the last week, every single person she knew seemed to turn up at her house at Varric’s behest to try and get her to sail off to Orlais. Not one succeeded (though Merrill got the closest), so someone thought to send in the heavy artillery. 

“You’re angry.”
“I’m not angry, I’m annoyed. Here.”

She handed him the small knife from her side of the table, and watched as he mechanically picked up one of the clean potatoes from their rest on a too-clean towel and got to work freeing them of their skins. He wasn't a graceful peeler yet, having been hesitant to believe Hawke that kitchen work was rewarding and meditative when done for pleasure and not as part of forced servitude until a free and paid Orana convinced him otherwise. The fact that he recognized that learning how to cook properly meant he could have soup whenever he wanted and not just when Hawke got the whim to make it helped, also.  

“Wipe that grin off your face.”
“I’m not grinning,” he said, grinning. Hawke flicked starchy water at him; he flinched, but seemed no less amused.
“I’m regretting giving you keys to my house.”
“You’re a poor liar, Hawke. Where do you want this?” 

Hawke checked the disrobed potato in his hand and nodded towards the clean bowl set out just beyond her basin. “Just chop it into chunks and toss it in there.”
“This is your father’s recipe again?”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “I don’t know why but I remembered he talked about making it with wine instead of a dark ale once. We never came across anything of the sort in Ferelden but I’ve got a cellar full of the stuff now, so.”
“I assume we’ll be drinking the rest?”
“If you want.” She laid the last cleaned potato on the towel and went to mind the carrots and onions next, too-aware of the slight drop in the elf’s shoulders at her response and unable to shake a persistent feeling that’d been dogging her for months: She was a bummer to be around now.

Her better days were actually the harder ones. Yearning for death came easy. The feeling would ride in on a wave of numbness, often chasing circumstance. How easy would it be to simply drink enough to fall asleep in the bath or find the wrong alley to walk into at night? It felt easy, until she found herself sitting in her tub, a bottle of wine still two-thirds full in her hands as the first real feeling bashed its way back into her consciousness: Fear. She was afraid to die. Not death itself, but of what she'd leave behind. Who would find her body? Who would arrange to bury her, to tell Bethany? She'd been through all the mundane horrors of death thrice already and knew them all by heart. They were unbearable. 

And therein lay the problem: Living meant bearing them.

She'd woken up that morning thinking of her father, trying to remember what he would do in the face of the impossible. All she had was a memory of him in some roadside inn, awake before the sunrise and trying to console the twins — they couldn't have been older than four, maybe five. He'd had them both in his lap, slouched in a chair that she remembered had a single leg made from a completely different kind of wood than the rest of it, and he taught them his list. 'It'll be just like home,' he'd said. 'We'll take a bath, we'll eat, we'll take a walk, and you'll feel right as rain. You'll see.'

And so, Hesta had gotten up. She'd bathed. She forced herself to eat a crust of stale bread, and let Nug lead her on a walk. She didn't know if she was better but at least by the time she got back, she felt hungry for the first time in days. And that was when she heard the knock on her door. 

When she sighed, Fenris peered at her over his shoulder. “What?”
“Nothing.”

He drooped again and went back to his task, leaving Hawke to wonder about what exactly was wrong with her. Once upon a time, she was funny. Or, at least funny enough to keep two small children from going at each others’ throats constantly. Now she was half-alive; too burdened by guilt to want to live and too coward to let herself die. 

She’d cleaned the carrots before Fenris got there so all they needed was a quick peel and a chop; same with the onions. Cooking while her house staff were away was usually the easy way to keep her bummer thoughts at bay, and if she got really lucky her mind would wander and she would be able to pretend she was in some farmhouse in the South instead of a creaky stone-walled room that she was almost certain her uppity grandparents had never seen, let alone made anything in. It was harder to let her mind wander with the elf around. She was too aware of his presence in the room and so, too grounded in the present. Trapped.

“You look angry for someone who isn’t angry,” Fenris said. At some point he’d turned to face her, bowl of passably-chopped potatoes in-hand. Hawke pretended not to hear him.
“Bring that over here,” she said, now nodding towards the tubers of his labor. “Do the meat next, please.”
“I’m not peeling it, I hope?”
What she wanted to say was, ‘Of course you are,' but what came out instead was a cold, “Only if you’re bored.” 

Fenris did not take his eyes off of her for a second while he deliberately put the potatoes down next to her on the counter, and then picked up the bundles of stew meat and bacon. A hot ball of shame set up camp in Hawke's stomach and just as the elf turned around, she felt the flush of it creep up her neck. 

The pot. The pot needed to go on the fire with some oil, to heat up. The half-minute it would take the find the pot, move it to the fire, and pour the oil was a half-minute of relief from the bubbling in her gut that reminded her she was simply unwell and unfit to be around. She stared at Fenris's back and tried to make peace with the image of him finding her body strewn in some alleyway but she couldn't. Not him, not Varric, not Merrill and Isabela as a pair, or Anders who she hadn't seen in — Maker, months now. Not Aveline or even Donnic on patrol.

The cellar. She needed wine from the cellar. Hawke bolted toward the hatch and down the ladder without so much as a word, unconcerned with anything other than finding the furthest and most inconvenient bottle of wine that she could in order to buy herself time to calm down. Instead, she found herself standing at the first rack she saw, hands shaking and with that blooming pressure in her torso.

Standing there trembling in the dark basement, listening to soft footsteps overhead, Hawke finally saw her situation for what it was: Untenable. 

She looked from bottle to bottle and she knew she had to choose. She could not bear another week of this horrible oscillating between numbness and being suffocated by her awareness of her own despair, of not being able to commit to life or death. She decided then that there would be no moving from that very spot until she either decided to shatter a bottle and slit her soft throat with the glass, or to commit to living. 

It wasn't actually all that long that she stood there, trembling more by the second, but her mind stretched the half-minute. She felt every heartbeat in her chest as something in her tried to goad her hands into just doing it. Ending it would involve a simple series of gestures that her body already knew the beginning of from many a bar brawl. But she couldn't — she wouldn't. She didn't want to die.

She didn't want to die.

Her entire body shaking, Hawke grabbed a bottle by the neck and turned to run back upstairs on uncertain feet. By the time she stumbled into the kitchen doorframe she knew she looked a mess because Fenris took one glance at her and threw the knife he was holding aside to very nearly trip over a chair on his way over to catch her by the elbows as she started to collapse. It was like some spell on her mind lifted and she was finally capable of actually feeling the weariness of her mistreated body.

"Help me," she choked out between barely-withheld sobs. 

The elf somehow managed to gather her up into his arms and hold them both upright as he clutched her half-limp body against himself, letting her cling to him with her free hand and to sob into his shoulder. She would have kept at it until she ran out of tears, except she smelled something burning. 

"The pot," she blubbered, and tried to peel herself away to go to the hearth, but her knees disagreed. She wobbled and nearly fell again, forcing Fenris to right her and guide her the couple of steps to a chair, where he safely deposited her and then went to stir the burning meat. 
"It's fine," he said, voice hoarse, and then dove back in her direction when he noticed how she made to get up again — successfully, this time. 

Hawke wiped her tears with the heel of her palm as she made her way over on uncertain feet, sniffling. Through bleary eyes she saw a little char, but nothing so ruinous as to force them to waste the meat and onions. "Open this," she croaked as she unceremoniously thrust the bottle of wine she'd apparently been white-knuckling the entire time in the elf's direction. He managed to get that done while she pattered confused circles around the kitchen for the requisite herbs, issuing hoarse instruction as she did so. The wine needed to go in, as did water and the herbs she was carrying. She made him get salt from a spot she'd walked past and forgot, and then join her by the fire to watch a pot try to come to a boil.

There, Hawke allowed herself to take her first full, shaking breath of the day. As she exhaled, she felt her mind clear a little and as a result, felt a little embarrassed at her outburst. Fenris just kind of watched her, like he was afraid that he could say something ruinous and cause her to die off in her own body again. He didn't know — and she didn't quite have the words for it yet — that she'd chosen this time.

"You look ..." 

Apparently he didn't have the words for it, either. If she had to guess, she was still short of better.

Instead of saying anything, Hawke risked bending over to grab the half-empty bottle of wine from where he'd apparently set it on the floor in a panic, and rose slowly to take a swig. It was nice — not too dry, but complex in a way she knew she was supposed to savor and appreciate. At least, that's what the most annoying people she knew always said. Once finished, she passed it back to him. That was a gesture her body already knew, too. 

"Orlais, huh?" she finally said, pursing her lips at the idea. "They don't like elves or Fereldans much over there, you know." 
Fenris shifted his weight a little, then drank. "It sounds like exactly your kind of stupid."
"That's what Varric said."
"For once, the dwarf has a point. You ... need a break, Hawke." 

He offered her the bottle back and she took it gladly. 

"That's a long way to sail for a break." 
“You know I’d follow you anywhere you asked. So ask.” 

Did she know that? He said it like it was obvious. Only when he crossed his arms over his chest did she notice — not for the first time, surely? — the frayed red favor wound around his wrist. Entranced, she reached over and gently lifted one end of the crimson fabric with her two fingers as if to inspect it. She even remembered giving it to him. Barely and as a joke, of course, she'd been hammered and Isabela had them playing some stupid game, but she'd meant it. How long had she willfully ignored that he continued to wear it? 

Hawke clutched the neck of the bottle in her hand and went for a gulp.

"Fenris, how would you like to hunt some Orlesian wyverns?" 

Chapter Text

Hawke could feel the de Launcets staring wide-eyed holes into the back of her head, all three of them. She could see why her presence was a shock: She was in Orlais, at a function, dressed in something other than armor or worn-in street clothes, and for once not surrounded by her hand-picked gaggle of Kirkwall's finest. This was not her preference; Tallis had recruited her companions to scout the area while she as the Champion took the brunt of the socializing, which was the elf’s second strike. The first, of course, was making her stick her entire arm into a giant pile of wyvern shit, but in fairness all three of her companions were complicit in that.  

She was in a ... precarious mood. She had not been prepared for what it would mean to take a passenger ship to Orlais. Despite the steep upgrade to private cabins and scenic views of the Waking Sea, every creak sounded like the muffled, mournful wail of a refugee. Varric caught on after her first sleepless night and managed to coax her into sleeping in his cabin instead, where she slept curled against him in the same way her dog slept with her on cool nights. She didn't always remember her nightmares but she would understand that she'd had one once she woke to the dwarf firmly rubbing her back. 

The wyvern hunt itself had kept her occuppied, but now she was stuck being idle, and idle made her antsy. She worried that something was happening in Kirkwall while it was out of sight, and every time she felt her head tilt about it, had to walk herself through all the things Varric had set up to allow her to leave: Isabela on Bethany duty, Aveline with her eye on the streets and the Templars. His network was also activated, and could send them information faster than the news tended to travel traditionally. 

Her only job for the moment was to have a good time.

She chose to sit on the edge of the ornate fountain in the courtyard. It was a good people-watching seat, and as a bonus, the light breeze blew some of the spray at the back of her neck. She had a glass of wine and had tried one of each appetizer that had been brought to her, trying to busy her mind with ranking them instead of imagined horrors. She'd forgotten what it was to sit in clothes that actually fit; everything had grown too big on her over the last several months. The black, gray, and crimson ensemble she wore was new, but she'd been with the same tailor for so long that he offered to leave a lot of give in the garments for when her body eventually filled back out again.

It was a small gesture, but it made Hawke feel just a little more like herself. Every time she had walked past a mirror and caught sight of herself in passing she saw some secret third sibling she'd never met before; her face but gaunt and more severe, hair nearly as long and unkempt as she had before Kirkwall. She hadn't lost all her muscle — she hadn't been out of commission that long — but she could see where the bones in her wrists were more defined while her shoulders were less so. Training with Aveline helped, but she was still too injured to do it as often as she wanted.

From the corner of her eye, Hawke watched Dulci de Launcet wave over some other ready-made Orlesian woman and do her best at being discreet (her best was not very good). The new woman looked right at Hawke, then remembered herself, and pretended to simply be surveying all the guests (somehow, this was more graceful than Dulci’s attempt). The second woman then pulled a man into the fray, who at first seemed entirely disinterested in the tittering and then found himself looking around until he set his eyes on her. Finally, someone direct. And headed her way.

While the man started in her direction, Hawke finished her glass of wine and beckoned someone over to ask for a replenishment. The one nice thing about being malnourished was that she got drunk faster now. Isabela had called her a cheap date.

What she did not expect was to be greeted by a Fereldan accent. “Ah, could it be? The Champion of Kirkwall?”
Hawke decided that her countryman, at least, she could play nice with. She even stood to greet him. “Most just call me Hawke. And you are …?”
“Bann Teagan, of Ferelden.”

Hawke only sort-of-half-remembered hearing that name before, but smiled anyway and exchanged the perfunctory little half-bow. He seemed nice enough despite the company he seemed to be dragged into, anyway.

“We’ve heard a great deal about your adventures in the homeland, though I’ll admit some sound larger-than-life.”
“I’m sure that the ones you find the least believable are the ones I wish were fake.”
“I think the last decade has had that effect on all of us. I’m just happy to see one of our own find such success after the Blight. Quite the stroke of luck, to have been living so close to the coast.”
“Lothering, actually,” she corrected. 
The Bann seemed a little surprised by this. “So that is true? I just thought — if you’ll excuse me saying it, your accent sounds a bit strange, for the South.”

Hawke opened her mouth to say something, but it dried right up. Sipping more wine didn’t help considering it was also, well. Dry.

“That must have been a precarious journey. I almost can't believe you survived."
"Not all of my family did," she said bitterly, taking another long sip. Someone passed with another tray of drinks and she was tempted, for a second, to reach for another glass to hold in her free hand.
"My condolences," Bann Teagan said, inclining his head politely.

What would Carver have thought at having his death acknowledged by a Bann, she wondered? He'd probably have called her a liar, and then bragged to everyone who'd listen for the rest of time. 

She excused herself after that, much to the Bann's apparent surprise. Between his commentary on her accent and thoughts of her poor little brother, she felt ill-equipped for small talk. If she was lucky, he'd point out her eccentricities to his wife and they'd keep their distance for the rest of the evening. Sure, Hawke's job was to be a distraction, but she reckoned she could be plenty distracting just by being kind of a misanthrope. She spent the entirety of her early 20s doing that in Hightown anyway — this was just a natural extension of her aversion to old money. 

An elven servant gently cleared her throat as she approached with a delicate silver tray of appetizers. “We have a fine selection of cheeses for our most honored guests tonight, Messere. Certain pairings are said to evoke powerful emotions: ambition, passion, despair.”
Hawke was glad for the distraction but not at all sold by the pitch. “Between you and me, I think I’ve had more than enough despair for a lifetime.”
The woman seemed a little surprised by the response — considering what Hawke had seen, not so much by the content as by the length and relevance to what she'd originally said — and then politely backed away. 

Once the elf retreated, Hawke realized that her strategy had backfired. Her slight rudeness towards Bann Teagan visibly set the whisper networks in motion, and now Hawke was forced to turn towards a third unfamiliar voice. This one was distinctly Orlesian and dripping with the same annoying, posh affectation the Duke himself had.

“Ah, there is our winner! I had heard you finally made your appearance, Serah. I should thank Fifi: She said you can always be found ah — what is the phrase in Common? Encanailler. You like the … less-fine people and places.” Hawke inhaled to collect herself and turned to find a young noble about her age swaggering towards her in a way that, had she been in a better mood, would compel her to bully him. “I am Cyril de Montfort, at your service. Welcome to Chateau Haine.”

Hawke decided in that moment that she had no interest in knowing how to translate whatever Cyril had said to her in Common; not that she was annoyed at the implication that she spent her time in ways he disapproved of, but that these people seemed to love to erase what she was before she stumbled ass-backwards into Deep Roads money and breathed some life into the family name strictly as a favor to her mother. Still, annoyed at the wealthy was better than teetering at the edge of whatever identity crisis she had been approaching again, so she pressed her lips into a thin smile and took another sip of her drink. “Pleasure to meet you,” she said, and hoped she was as bad a liar as her friends accused her of being.

Apparently not, because Cyril posted up next to her and smiled in that grating way old money idiots smiled at her when they clearly thought they were doing her a favor by spending time around her, even though they thought she was wearing the Amell name all wrong. Despite the fact that she went by her father's family name, they never seemed to catch on that it wasn't her intent to wear it at all. “I am sorry that your mother could not be here today to see you take the title, mine always spoke very fondly of Leandra. They were quite close when they were young.” 

Hawke tried to remember if she’d ever heard her mother talk about friends in Orlais, but not only was she drawing a blank, it was clear that Cyril did not need her participation in this conversation to keep going. In one practiced motion, he pulled a coin from his pocket and offered it to her. She accepted if only to have something to fidget with.

“Allow me to give you this Caprice. It’s an old custom, some say it will grant a wish when tossed in the fountain. Perhaps if you make the right one, our families could continue our storied friendship. We’ve heard a great deal about the Champion of Kirkwall here at the Chateau, you know.”
“Not all from Fifi, I hope,” Hawke said, examining the worn coin.
“Most from Babette, actually. She’s described the … colorful company you keep. I hope the Chateau has been hospitable. You would be a most welcome guest here, and if I may say so, a sought-after match. I am sure there are plenty who would be happy to overlook less savory parts of your background.”

Hawke rubbed the surface of the coin with her thumb and looked to the sky, wondering if she could see through whatever barrier separated the living and the dead. She wouldn't have been surprised to see her mother peering over a cloud, trying to will her into accepting this offer. This would have been her perfect revenge for all those years she dodged parties or showed up late, half-drunk, and muddy specifically so that future invites would be revoked and letters offering Hightown's finest sons would stop showing up. 

"Is it Orlesian custom to bring up marriage immediately after you meet someone for the first time?"
The young de Montfort seemed stumped by the question. "Is it not a normal topic in Hightown? Every time the Mademoiselles de Launcet come to visit us they have marriage gossip to share. I would think you'd understand the Champion of Kirkwall is a sought-after match. I assure you I am not proposing, if that is your concern, but there are many who would value that kind of connection to the Marches."

Hawke ground the pad of her thumb down against the metal, it was the only thing keeping her inside her body instead of watching this entire conversation happen as if she were a spectator and not a participant. She clenched her teeth to keep herself from insisting that the connection would be to Ferelden instead, even though it wouldn't. Being in Orlais was just making her feel like an outsider again, like she'd just stumbled through Kirkwall's gates and was trying to buy groceries while the vendor pretended not to understand her, but backwards somehow. Bann Teagan thought she grew up on the coast.

“I think I have my wish,” was all she said, and then unceremoniously approached the fountain to flip her Caprice in: She wanted to go home. And if she could indulge in two wishes, she'd like to never be invited to this function or anything like it ever again.

The coin landed in the water with a thick plop, and sank quickly to the bottom just like her mood. Hawke watched it wobble under the surface, surrounded by its equally old brethren, and sighed. She thought she heard the old Hawke two-tone whistle on the wind. It made her so lonely she felt it in the pit of her stomach, like a hunger.

Cyril clapped his hands together behind her. “Voila! You’ll fit right in.” Hawke brought her wine to her mouth and for just a moment, pressed her teeth against the rim, wondering if chewing the glass would be more pleasant than this interaction. She decided against it, finished the drink, and began to look around for a fourth. Her friends didn’t know it, but they were racing against the clock: Either they came to get her, or she got drunk enough to curl up under the table and go to sleep until it was time to leave. 

She decided to graduate from glasses, just to speed the whole process up. Cyril watched her beckon another server and then grab the uncorked bottle by the neck with the same kind of look people reserved for exotic animals — she even raised the bottle towards him for emphasis. “Cheers. Thanks for having me.” 

Mid-swig she heard the whistle again, louder, and nearly choked. She wasn't sure yet, but it sounded like it was coming from the same exact spot as the first time; just behind the courtyard. She whistled the three-note response back, just to see. At best, one of her friends somehow remembered the call. At worst, she’d have to deal with the implications of being haunted by the fog-ghost of her dead dad, which would still be better than this party. 

Cyril looked at her like she sprouted a second head. “Is that some sort of … bird call?”
“It’s how I lure out the wyverns,” she said, and thankfully that was enough to get him to uncomfortably look behind and then excuse himself. The third time she heard the call, she headed right for it. 

Whoever was beckoning her was hiding behind a tall outer wall and had no intention of coming to meet her, apparently, so she made the decision to chug the last of the bottle she was still holding and then do her best to avoid slipping in her fancy loafers as she scaled up the old brick. The further she got from the de Launcets and their Bann and Cyril and the despair cheese, the lighter she felt. She wasn't failing at being an Amell, or Fereldan, or whatever — she was Hawke, and someone was calling her home to roost.

Atop the wall she paused, not so much because the rapidly-drunk wine was catching up with her, but because swinging her right leg to the outside threatened to trigger her skewer-scar and send a sharp bolt of pain all the way from her hip down into her toes. Hawke looked down at her caller before making any more sudden moves, somehow surprised to see Fenris standing there half-obscured by shadow. Something gripped her at the sight of him, a strange and complicated wave of sentiment. “Was that you just now?”
The elf raised his arms up to help catch her on her way down. “No, it was your father’s ghost.”
“I’ll be honest, I didn’t rule that out.”

If she hiked her knee up first and then kind of dragged it over the ledge, she probably wouldn’t pop anything important, and if she focused on the exacting way she needed to move to prevent a spasm she could pretend that she was not feeling any particular way about the fact that he remembered her family call.

“Do you need help?”
“No, just give me a second.” Hawke’s plan to get her leg over worked, and she managed to have a seat on the wall without incident. Once settled, she pressed her hands against the stone and hopped down.

It took a few seconds for her head to right itself, but when pulled back up and allowed to find her footing again she noticed that she was not the only one forced into fineries for the evening. Fenris had managed to adhere to his preference for wearing toe-to-tip black, but apparently Varric took him to a tailor and forced him into something nice. With her hands still on his arms Hawke could even feel some sort of embroidery on the sleeves of his tunic. 

Fenris watched her stare at his sleeve with great interest, unmoving. "You're acting strange."
"I've had a lot to drink."
"You were in there for less than an hour."
"Is this not the kind of break from Kirkwall you were picturing? I was left unsupervised."
He struggled not to sound amused. "Fair enough."

Maybe drinking was a bad idea; her head was a mess. She hadn't expected to slip into homesickness as deeply as she did, but the way she slipped out of it as soon as Fenris had his hand on her shook her in a way she could maybe reason herself out of while sober, but not now. There was a depth of feeling there that scared the shit out of her. Or was she just dizzy? When she retracted her hands from his arms, she nearly flinched to do so. 

This made him frown. Handsomely, of course. "Hawke?"
"Bug," she lied.

Judging by his face, she did so poorly and transparently, as always.

Chapter Text

Hawke hadn’t won a round of Wicked Grace in about a year, give-or-take, and the only reason she was winning this time was because her only job was to hold the cards in her left hand and pat Isabela on the back with her right. The pirate was half-coiled around her, slumped into her chest and making devastating plays with one eye pressed closed, all the way through the moment that the winning hand hit the table. “And that’s how you clean house,” she said over the sound of everyone else collectively groaning, and then slowly rolled up to an upright sit.

Hawke discreetly scoot herself a few more inches away; she didn’t mind the conjoined gameplay except that Kirkwall was now in the dead heat of summer. Every single door in the Hanged Man was propped wide open, but the ocean breeze coming in did little to help against the sweltering. Everyone in the pub was half-slumped and either fanning themselves with whatever they could find or unbuttoning their clothes a little more with each passing hour. Hawke herself had her sleeves rolled up and half her buttons undone but neither of those things stopped the river of sweat running down her spine. 

One of those merciful breezes blew through the room and she closed her eyes against it, trying to savor it. Isabela kicked at her foot. “If you fall asleep, I’m robbing you.” Aveline sighed pointedly. “What? You’re off duty.”
“My husband is on patrol.”
“And when he comes here to meet you, he will be off patrol. Don’t worry your pretty little red head about it.” 

Merrill fanned Hawke with some pamphlet she’d found on the table earlier, just as flushed and sluggish as her human friend. “The summers never get any easier, do they Hawke?”
“No, they don’t.” Hawke peeled her eyes open again and tried to look alive. The table was distinctly split between the Southerners who still couldn’t handle the heat, and the ones who seemed immune to the way the air turned thick and cloying for three months at a time. Drinking arguably made it worse, but at least it also made being drenched in sweat feel like it mattered less. “Is there another one of those?” 

Merrill slid a flat piece of paper over and Hawke only half-glanced at its content before folding it into a thin pleated stack – she caught something about the Chantry and the word ‘debauchery’ and that was about as much as she needed to see to completely lose interest. Everyone needed a hobby and apparently some people picked writing lightly unhinged religious pamphlets instead of say, knitting. 

Once equipped with her homemade fan, Hawke leaned her elbow on table and got to trying to stir the air around her. She felt a little less pathetic by the time Varric grumbled something about the air being so wet it made the cards impossible to shuffle. When Isabela responded by offering to take over, the entire table hit her with a resounding no.
The pirate tsked. “You’ve all even poisoned Merrill against me. I think I need to drown my sorrows on Hawke’s tab.” 

Hawke snorted and immediately trained her eyes dead forward, somewhere past Aveline’s head, because the moment Isabela removed herself she felt every single hair on her body stand on end. 

It’s not that she was avoiding Fenris so much as she was holding off on talking to him until she had the strength to do the right thing and let him go. Unfortunately, five words from him uncorked a barrel-full of feeling that lived so deep in her she’d fully forgotten what it was and taken it as one of the many dull aches she learned to ignore, and now it was just … there. Like a fever, but worse: she wanted little else but to be around him, but every time she had the opportunity she felt the cold grip of fear deep in her gut. She could feel him looking at her out of the corner of his eye, too. He knew something was wrong and judging by the way he sighed and shifted in his seat, was getting impatient.

And now, Varric was staring at her. She locked eyes with him across the table, and he winced. “You look like you’re about to lose your lunch.”
“I think the heat is getting to me,” she said, maybe a little too eager. “I’ll get some air.” 

It was a quick little dart through the alleys to the docks, where the heat was broken up by a merciful westerly breeze. She let out her damp ponytail and re-tied it higher, hoping that exposing more of her neck to the little relief she could get would cool her off and maybe buy her enough composure to act normal. She watched the waves roll in and crash against the stone and tried to match her breathing to the rhythm — an unsolicited tip from Isabela that told her just how obvious her constant anxiety was now. But it did help, until she heard footsteps behind her.

“Hawke.” Apparently she had been right about the impatient bit, because Fenris had given her all of a two-minute head start before following her down.
“Did I look that bad?” she said over her shoulder, still unable to look directly at him.
“No,” he said as he descended the final steps and came to stand next to her. “But now I’m sure that you’ve been avoiding me.” Hawke turned to him to make some excuse, but the knowing way he was looking at her shut her right up, and she quickly found herself with nothing to say in her defense. 

Once the silence got too heavy, he sighed. “I remember a time when you used to just say whatever odd thing was on your mind.”
Hawke hummed, and shuffled uncomfortably. “It does feel like I ran out of jokes a couple of years ago, doesn’t it?”
“It feels like you’ve started living entirely inside your own head. You leave your body behind and just disappear.” The couple of inches between them burned. Hawke was trapped between the desperate desire to grab him and the equally desperate desire to flee for both their sakes. “You’ve gone again.”
That, at least, made her laugh. “Sorry.” 

Fenris reached for her hand, but as soon as she felt his fingers graze her wrist she flinched away. 

There was another stretch of silence, and then he called her bluff. “Tell me you don’t want me here, and I’ll go.”
Hawke’s insides squeezed. “You should go.”
The elf shook his head. “Tell me you don’t want me here.” She couldn’t. Couldn’t think of anything else to say, either. “Then help me understand, because I cannot spend another night wondering why you suddenly can’t stand the sight of me.” 

Hawke finally forced herself to look at him, though she hadn’t realized just how close he was standing. There were ways to deflect this but they felt ... unfair, and much harder to think through when she was being stared down. All she had to offer was the sad truth.

“Everyone that gets too close to me dies." She let that hang between them for a moment, for some reason hoping it'd be enough to deter him from this. "I have nightmares about Bethany constantly. If anyone around me gets too quiet I am afraid that I will turn the corner and find a corpse where a person used to be. I’m only myself in spurts, I’m constantly terrified, or feeling out-of-place. Out-of-body. I don’t know if I will ever get better. Why would I want to put you through that?”
“What would you say if it was Bethany in front of you, telling you all this?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Why not?”
“Because —” Hawke sputtered, trying to come up with a reason, but none came. Her face flushed and warmed further, this time unaided by the weather. “I would tell her she was being an idiot.”
“You are being an idiot.” 

She knew that had been coming but threw her hands up anyway and let that propel her a few paces back along the pier. Another breeze rolled through just as she set her hands on her hips to try and ground herself and stared off, searching the dirty grooves of the stone in front of her for any means to get him to drop this. "Are you finished?" he called to her. Hawke had thought she'd heard his tone turn, but had to twist to look back at him and confirm that he was now smiling at her like he'd already won.
"Did you come out here just to torment me?"
"I am not the one doing the tormenting."

Hawke turned and took her pacing back in his direction. "You can't have been here this entire time and tell me I'm not some sort of misery magnet."
"I can. And so could everyone back in that tavern."
“And if I’m still afraid I’ll lose you the moment I get close?”
"Allow me to prove you wrong." 
"That's not something I want to chance."
"Hawke."
"Don't —"
"Hesta."

She froze. How long had it been since someone called her by her given name? Hawke, always. Serah, Champion, any selection of curses, sure. But it had been so long since someone used her name that the sound of it sounded the same as being carved open. If she had not been convinced that he could always see the through to the truth of her, she felt like it was spilling out of her now, left to steam on the hot stone.

When Fenris reached forward and took her hand this time, she did not flinch away. She let him take another step closer to meet her and bring it to his chest, where his heart raced against her knuckles. At just that much contact, every lonesome inch of her set ablaze and anchored her to the stones below her feet. As much as her head wanted her to break off and run, what remained wouldn't let her — not when her very bones knew that the way she was living would kill her sooner than any blade or poison.

Finally, he said, “I owe you this life, Hawke, many times over, but I’m not offering it to you because of a debt. I am offering it to you because I cannot imagine spending a day of it without you. I have loved you for longer than I think I’ve understood, and I am yours if you will have me. I will not let anything take me from you. You have my word.”
Everything went very quiet, except for what must have been the sound of the entire ocean suddenly rushing into her head, leaving no room for sad denials or self-sacrificial distance. “I believe you,” she said, and then kissed him before she could snap out of whatever possessed her.

Chapter Text

9:37 Dragon

Hawke rapped her knuckles against Varric’s doorframe twice, and as soon as the dwarf looked up from his manuscript, she chucked an apple at him. He caught it, gave it a once over, and then bit right in. “Well, fuck.” 

That had been about her reaction as well. She’d also grabbed some mead and cider while at the import market, and set the bottles down on the table as she came to sit down with a heavy sigh. There were more apples in her satchel, each of them red, sweet, and crisp. There were also two different types of jam, and three jars of pickled vegetables. She’d barely resisted buying a giant sack of flour, if only because she had no idea how the fuck she was going to carry it home. 

Varric put his quill aside and leaned back to take another pensive bite. “So, what now?”
Hawke shrugged as she uncorked the cider and took the first unceremonious swig. Sweet, just like the fruit, with that little bite of alcohol on the tail. “What do you mean?” she asked as she passed the bottle.
“The land is coming back. The country hasn’t fallen apart yet. You and I both know the elf would follow you anywhere, and me and Aveline could take care of Sunshine.”

She knew this, and had thought about the logistics the entire walk down from the market to the Hanged Man, but … for all the times she lay wasting in her bed and thinking about how little she had left, she had even less in Ferelden. Going to Chateau Haines proved that the Champion of Kirkwall was hardly anonymous across the border anyway, so it’s not like she’d be moving to get some peace and quiet. 

That, and. Well, her big empty house was a little less big and empty nowadays. Not just because her staff finally stopped tip-toeing around her, but because Fenris just … kind of stopped leaving.

Hawke and Varric maintained unbroken eye contact as the dwarf took a slow drink, waiting for any reaction at all. She couldn’t hold a straight face for long though, and broke out in a slow grin. “I bring you a snack and you try to kick me out of the Marches?”
“I’m not the one constantly sighing at the sea!”
“Did you really think I would just leave you the first chance I got?”
“I figured you’d at least consider it.”
“Eh.” She shrugged, and then leaned back in the chair to kick her feet up on the table. “Thought about it. Decided against it.” 

Varric furrowed his brows at her, trying to puzzle out if she’d suddenly gotten good at lying, or just lost her mind. 

“I’m tired, Varric. And I don’t want to start over again. And I’d miss you,” she said, reaching for the bottle as he passed it.
“Yeah, well. There’s a taste of your own medicine. Welcome back, you asshole.”

Chapter Text

The first thing Hawke felt after the explosion was something hot and wet dripping onto the back of her hand. 

It took her mind a second to understand that she was still, in fact, alive. Her ears were ringing, and everything around her except for the spot where Fenris’ blood dripped onto her hand was covered in gray dust. 

The blood shocked her back into action. The elf had grabbed her and braced his back against his giant sword to shield them from debris. She broke from his grip and turned to him in a panic, relieved to see that it was just a cut on his cheek. He asked her something, but she couldn't understand. She just shook her head. 

The relief was short-lived as her attention widened.  Hightown was fucking flattened.  

She knew she screamed Bethany’s name but the sound came from so deep within her that it hardly sounded like a call at all. Then something caught her attention out of the corner of her eye – Varric waving frantically, and pointing at her sister rising from underneath Aveline’s shield, all three of them in similar condition to her and Fenris: Dusty, mostly unscathed, with stray streaks of crimson cutting through the gray. Slowly, other figures rose too, the dust pouring off them in rivers: Meredith and her Templars, Orsino, the other mages. Fucking Anders. 

Hawke stared at him from across the square, trembling. 

“There can be no half-measures?” She threw his own words back at him through her teeth. Now that the ringing in her ears had subsided, she was surprised at how far her voice carried. It’s not necessarily that she couldn’t hear after the explosion, it was just that quiet now. “Half of this wouldn’t be enough for you?” 

The end of her sentence had escalated to a shout without her intent. The sound of it bounced around the debris, and echoed. Anders received each wave in perfect stillness. Underneath the thick layer of grime were dark circles rimming his eyes, hollow cheekbones, grown-out stubble. When was the last time she had seen him, spoken to him? Three months? Six? Was this what he’d been working on in his seclusion? 

“No more compromise, Hawke. No more toeing the line.”
Hawke opened her mouth to speak but found herself at a loss for words. Meredith happily filled the gap, though she tried her best to look distraught. “Look,” she said, gesturing to the ruins around them. “The Chantry, destroyed. The Grand Cleric, slain. Countless innocents, caught up in the destruction of one rogue maleficar.”

Hawke’s stomach dropped. Anders was not a blood mage at all, which meant – 

“And to think our own Circle may be harboring even more of these dangers. As the Knight-Commander of Kirkwall, I hereby invoke the Right of Annulment.” 

It was like another shockwave from the explosion went off. Everyone froze. 

“Every mage in the Circle is to be executed, immediately.”
Orsino balked. “The Circle was not even involved! Champion! You cannot let them do this!”
“You will not interfere, Hawke. Your reckless vigilanteism was what allowed this to happen in the first place.” 

Without taking her eyes off Meredith, Hawke reached a hand out toward her sister, who quickly scuffled over rock and broken brick to come to her. “You are not touching my sister. You are not touching any of these mages.”
Meredith’s eyes slid around the courtyard, assessing the situation. Her Templars were still getting their bearings, as were many of the mages, and no one was standing close enough to make a quick move. Eventually, she steeled her cold gaze back against Hawke’s, and sneered. “If you wish to side with the mages, then you shall be cut down along with them. You, and all your friends. I shall rouse the rest of the Order. Templars!” 

Hawke pushed Bethany tighter behind her. A pair of footsteps came from behind and she turned, ready to strike, but it was just Fenris taking up the other flank as the Templars marched around them and followed Meredith back towards the barracks. Orsino took a breath in to rally the mages to the Gallows, but someone shouted his name first. 

They all turned to look at three of the young mages trying to push a column. Bethany inhaled sharply and broke away from behind her sister’s extended arm to go help, but judging by the mournful wailing, it was too late for whoever got caught. 

Anders stared at them all from where he’d perched down on a ruined stairs, looking sad, but resolute. 

Hawke, too, felt something inside her harden. She looked at her friends as they gathered around her. “Find Isabela,” she said. “And a boat. Any boat.”
“Finally,” Varric said, “some sense. Leave these guys to fight it –”
“I can’t leave until Bethany’s phylactery is destroyed. They’ll keep coming after her. And she won’t leave them,” she said, nodding towards the grieving gaggle of mages. “Neither would our father. Neither will I.” 

Before anyone could interject, she started making her way towards Anders. It was strange – just a minute ago she was so, so angry, and now… nothing. Now there was just stillness, settling dust, and the fight in front of her. And all he did in response was look at her out of the corner of his eye, exhausted. 

“I could not sit by and watch this any longer, Hawke,” he said.
She stopped just a stride’s length away from him. “When you called on me out of the blue two months ago, to run around the sewers and gather some mineral. Not for medicine?”
“No.”
“So not only did you do the one fucking thing I begged you to not do, but you made me complicit in it. You put my last living relative’s life in danger, and I would have been at fault.”

That, at least, made him wince. But still, he said, “There was no other way.”
Hawke felt her mind crack as her exhale turned half-hysterical, almost a laugh. “No other way? You –”
“I know why you did what you did. You were just biding your time, protecting your sister, waiting for a shot at the phylacteries. And I know where you came from. I remember the small-town Templars too, you know. I know some of them could be bribed, or cajoled. Some would just look the other way if they had bigger fish to fry. I remember.” 

A cold comfort, that. 

“Besides, if I told you what I was doing, you would have dropped everything to try to stop me, even if it killed you. You can’t help it. You want to fix everything for everyone. But,” he continued, “this is bigger than all of us. The world needs to see that the Circles are not the way. The Chantry has not heard pleading, or reason. Perhaps they will hear this.”
Hawke hummed. “It’s bigger than all of us now, for sure. This’ll be war.”
“I know.” Hawke took a long, slow, deep breath. Anders closed his eyes. “I am surprised you have not killed me yet.”
“Me too, if we’re being honest.”
“And yet something tells me you won’t let me go.”

Hawke turned to look at the mages being shepherded by Orsino and Bethany towards the ruins of their tower, a group of them entirely inconsolable. One of them, carrying a body. 

“Well, I certainly won’t protect you anymore,” she sighed, unsheathing a blade. “And if the Chantry gets a hold of you, they’ll want to make an example of you.”
Anders smiled grimly. “Would it be too much to ask to let me die a martyr?”
“It would.”

Resigned, he sat up a little straighter and smiled at her. “I deserve that. For what it’s worth, Hawke … you were a good friend, when you could be. I wish this city hadn’t taken you.”
Tears threatened to run over Hawke’s lashes. Hard to tell if from rage or sadness. “Goodbye, Anders.” 

As a last favor, she made it quick, and lowered his body to the ground when it went limp. 

Behind her, the crowd dispersed, save for Aveline who fell into lock-step with her once she started heading towards the Gallows. She was glad that the others took her advice and fled, though sad she did not get to say goodbye. Perhaps for the best. Maybe she'd live to grieve it. “Are you alright?”
“Hah. No. Sorry for dragging you into trouble again.”
The Guard-Captain sighed. “I think we were both kidding ourselves, thinking we could wrangle this situation without it coming to a head. But no matter how much I wrote to the Chantry or how much you kept biting at Meredith’s heels to try to keep her in line … if not Anders, then she would have found another reason.”
“So that’s why the Guard-Captain is going to side with the mage’s revolt, huh?”
“Hawke,” she chided. “This is our home now. And I’m done leaving you to fight to save it alone.”

Chapter Text

Aveline had put a few of her guards (only a few of whom defected to fight for the Templars, thankfully) on door duty. Hawke busied herself helping the mages and remaining guards barricade the other entrances — they would be easily overpowered if they couldn't bottleneck the Templars. There were plenty of places to do so, given the mazes of long hallways where mages could be set up for ambush, but still. Most of them had never seen battle and never planned to. Even Bethany had only really run with the Red Irons for a year, even then mostly as a healer.

That was Hesta's doing, ironically. She tried so hard to keep Bethany out of harm's way, and now that left her less experienced when she needed to fight. Someday one of her good deeds would go unpunished. Maybe.

Luckily, her fretting was cut short by a commotion at the door. Hawke bolted back towards the entryway, daggers drawn, but quickly found herself sheathing her weapons and throwing her hands up in frustration. “You were all supposed to go!” 

Varric leveled her with a look. Isabela pressed a hand to her chest, feigning offense. “And here I thought you would be proud of me for sticking around.”

It was Merrill who did not buy into this pointless back-and-forth for a second, and ran over to throw her arms around Hawke. “Oh, we were so worried!” she said. “There are so many people in Lowtown now, terrified. It’s awful.”
“We saw your house staff,” Varric said as he approached. “And your dog. They made it out. But Daisy’s underselling it, it’s fucking chaos out there.”
“Yeah, no shit.”

Aveline, happy for the extra hands, quickly called Isabela over to help with something and the pirate was not about to leave without dragging Merrill into the mess. Varric sighed as he watched them make their way down the hall, and scratched at the back of his head. “So this is it, huh? Mage revolt?”
Hawke snorted, crossed her arms over her chest. “Sure. Why not?”
“I guess Blondie didn’t leave us a whole lot of options.”
"No, he didn't."
Varric glanced up at her, trying to measure her mood. "I'm surprised you took him out. You're usually the patron saint of second chances. And third. And fourth."
"Like you said. Didn't leave a whole lot of options."
The dwarf shook his head. "This is gonna get real fucked up real fast."
Fenris was the last to approach, looking consternated. Even more so when Hawke said, “You could still go, you know.”
Before Varric could respond, the elf cut in. “Can I speak with you, Hawke?”

At his tone, Varric’s mouth flattened, and he near scampered away.

Hawke watched the dwarf and his crossbow disappear around a corner, and then turned her attention to the man staring her down. He nodded towards Orsino’s open office, and stalked off in that direction. She followed, and once they were both inside, leaned back on the door as she closed it. 

“As I said, you don’t have to fight in a mage revolt,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “I’d actually really prefer you live another day.” On the last word, her voice cracked, and her valiant attempt was ruined. Maybe she was finally losing her mind: One second, she was strangely calm and the next, all the worry in the world crashed over her head like a wave. 

Fenris whirled around on her, clearly exasperated. “Stop telling me to leave. I am not leaving you.”
“Fenris, listen to me. I have been running from Templars all my life, the Chantry will not let this slide. If we survive this – bigger if than usual – they are going to look for someone to blame. Anders is dead, but I’m the one who kept him safe from the Circle. They will chase me to the ends of the earth.”
“So I will go with you to the ends of the earth. I will not allow anything to keep me from you. Not even you, apparently.” 

Silent seconds stretched between them. Hawke hoped he'd relent, but once again found herself selfishly wanting his company for whatever came next, and he knew too well that he would win if he just leaned into being the stubborn ox that he was.

Eventually, the rogue peeled herself away from the door and forced herself to take the two sluggish steps it took to get to him, defeated. She laid her forehead in the crook of his neck, and before she could manage to wind her arms around him he pressed her wholly into his chest, like he was hoping their ribs would cut through their respective breastplates and knit together. With every breath she was able to chip away at her own arguments, and find some relief buried underneath all the fretting and the vividly-imagined worst-case-scenarios. 

Once she memorized the feeling of his pulse against her temple, she lifted her head. “You’re right. Maybe it’ll be fun.”
Fenris’ face dropped, and he rolled his eyes. “You are – unbelievable, as always. Promise you will not try to leave me behind. Swear it.”
“You know I love you, right? I don’t think I’ve said it in as many words.”
“You – stop trying to distract me. Swear it.”
“Was it working?”
“Hawke!”
Hawke, resigned to the fact that she would never be able to deny him a single thing, cupped his cheek with her hand and pressed a kiss against the other. “Alright, alright. I swear it.”
“Finally, some sense from you,” he said, and then somehow managed to hold her and all the metal between them even tighter so that he could kiss her, hopefully not for the last time. 

Someone in the other room yelled Champion! and broke the brief spell of peace that had fallen over them, but before Hawke could fly back out the door, Fenris grabbed her by the wrist. “You promised,” he said, his eyes locked on hers. “Do not abandon me, Hawke.”
Despite the circumstances, she couldn’t help but smile. “It’ll be you and me and at the end of the world.” 

Finally convinced, he let her go. 

Outside, the door guards stood with their weapons pointed at the new arrivals: three of the younger Templars, blades on the floor, hands in the air. Two of them she only half-remembered, but Keran was the one in the lead.
“Champion,” he said, “The Knight-Comm – Meredith’s gone mad. Please, let us in.”
Hawke surveyed the three of them. Kids, still. Hardly initiates, and they’d been wary of Meredith for months. She wasn’t entirely without her suspicions, but if anyone was most likely to defect, it was them. 

“Alright. But if you cause any trouble, I won’t hesitate.” Not that she'd kill them unless they really forced her hand, but considering the circumstances it was best to keep it vague.

The boy standing behind Keran swallowed hard; the other two just nodded. At Hawke's signal, the door guards lowered their weapons and moved aside to let them through. “You can take your swords, but keep them sheathed. Go find the Guard-Captain and something to do.”
“Yes Serah,” they mumbled, picked up their weapons, and shuffled awkwardly past.

Hawke, too, turned to make herself useful elsewhere, but she hardly made it halfway across the entryway before Orsino caught sight of her.

“Champion!” 

She took a deep breath in and a slow, slow exhale out, which was frankly more patience than Orsino was owed. The elf caught up to her and fell into step as she marched back towards their makeshift barricades, where the three Templars were already hard at work under Merrill’s watchful eye. 

“What are you doing?” he said, gesturing to the teenagers she’d just let in.
“Getting us three able swordsmen.” Though maybe able was a little bit of an overstatement. 

Orsino stepped in front of her, hands up in front of his chest to stop her. “Champion, please. I know how hard you have worked to keep the peace but even you have to understand when to stop extending your good graces.”

Something in her demeanor must have changed, because Orsino’s eyes gently widened and he took a half-step away from her. Hawke, at the end of her rope, leaned in to close that distance and lowered her voice. “Then maybe I ought to come clean, First Enchanter, and let you know that you continue to breathe air thanks to those same graces.” The elf paled. “Next time you supply a murderer with the means to make a corpse quilt out of my mother, don't write him in your own hand.”

The elf paled, but said nothing else.

Chapter Text

The assault went to hell in a handbasket quick.

Once again, Hawke found herself in the position to cut down someone who was supposedly on their side, though to be honest she felt worse about ending Anders’ life than she did … whatever became of Orsino, all things considered. Anders she felt some remorse about – not remorse about ending his life, but about not seeing it earlier. Not intervening. Maybe she could have saved him, and all the people who died because of him. Maybe she could have prevented this.

Though, a small voice in the back of her head asked: to what end?

When the tide of battle shifted against the mages, Orsino had called the corpses of all those who were cut down to him. He turned himself into a lumbering flesh monster, both unrecognizable from the parts that made it and indiscriminate in its destruction. The Templars had retreated once a few of them fell to the beast, but that just left Hawke and her party defending the mages from its blind wrath. A waste of time, sweat, and blood.

When the beast fell, it fell heavy, one of Hawke’s daggers in its head. As soon as she pulled her blade it lolled to the side and oozed blood and other viscera, and just the smell called bile to her throat. 

She did not get the chance to vomit though, because one of the surviving mages started wailing. She couldn’t have been older than twenty – just fell to her knees, and somehow managed to yell that they were all going to die between heaving sobs breaking each word into syllables. Bethany and one of the others ran to her to calm her down as she cried, curling more and more tightly into herself as she did so. 

In the meanwhile, Hawke hopped off the corpse monster; Isabela came to meet her, looking grim. “The Templars are regrouping outside,” she said. “If I were you, I’d go throw down the gauntlet at Meredith. They took don’t look great, but these mages won’t last much longer. Look at them." She nodded at the source of the commotion.
Hawke felt all her strength slowly leak out of her body, even though she knew Isabela was right, and that she needed to rally. “It's about time we ended this.”
The pirate sighed, shaking her head. “Never thought I’d be here playing the hero. You’re about the worst influence I ever met. And you owe me a drink.”
“I owe you every drink, if we make it through this.”
“That’s right,” she said, and pat her friend on the back, sending her off. "Don't get skewered this time, or I'll kill you."

Hawke made it only a few strides down the long hallway to the nearest beaten-down entrance when a few more sets of footfalls joined her from behind. She could have guessed Varric and Fenris were there, but she was surprised to see her sister. “Bethany? You –”
“Do not even try to stop me,” said the younger Hawke. “It’s my own freedom I’m fighting for.”
Varric laughed. “That’s our girl, Sunshine! Time for revenge.”
“Time to do what our father did,” she corrected. “This tower will not hold a Hawke.”

Outside, Meredith was waiting for her, backed by the remaining Templars. Just at the sight of her, Hawke felt a heat in the very depths of her throat. She imagined the feeling was mutual, given the way that blonde menace locked onto her with murder in her eyes. 

“Champion,” she spat. “At long last.”
“Been dreaming of putting me out of my misery for a while?”
“I never bore you any ill will. I know what you’ve done for this city. I even invited you to help us, I gave you a litany of chances. It is you who continues to bear witness to what these mages are capable of, and stand beside them. You have aligned your fate with theirs, not I.”

Hawke drew her daggers then, and felt the rest of her party shift into position behind her. Meredith dragged her eyes slowly over each of them, and back along the ruins that they came from. Hawke spared a glance in that direction too: Mages and archers lined the windows, and Aveline was already leading the rest of the able and willing to the courtyard. This would be their last stand.

She heard Meredith draw her blade, but caught Varric’s expression first, and heard the gasps around them. When she turned back around and saw the glowing red blade in the Knight-Commander's hands, Hawke's blood ran cold. The other woman reveled in the long, tense silence she'd caused.

Hawke broke it. “Where did you get that?”
“You know just as well as I. The dwarf charged quite the price for this,” Meredith said, brandishing her prize. Hawke heard Varric curse Bartrand under his breath. Perhaps more interestingly, the Templars surrounding Meredith took a step back. Even her second-in-command, who had hardly ever shown a sign of life other than a twitch of paranoia now and again, stared at her with mouth agape. “Knight-Captain,” he said, “you cannot – that blade is –”
“It is what will finally end the scourge of blood magic!” Meredith’s voice rang across the courtyard, a new edge to it. One Hawke and her crew knew too well. “All of you. It is time to relieve the Champion of her post. I want her dead.”  

But no one moved. Not even Hawke, who could feel the red lyrium buzzing just in front of her face. 

Meredith looked around at her Templars, her breathing louder. More shallow. Hawke couldn't imagine what that thing had been doing as she carried it around with her for – Maker blast it all, for years – to make her react like this to unsheathing it. She watched in horror as the mad Knight swung around and pointed the blade at all of her men, and each soldier took a step back in turn. “You’re all weak,” she growled. “You’ve all allowed these mages to control your minds. To turn you against me! I said, I want that traitor dead!”
Her Knight-Captain, ever faithful, seemed to be looking at her as if for the first time. “The plan was to arrest the Champion,” he said. “This is not – this is not what the Order stands for. This cannot be what the –”
“Silence. If you do not stand with me, you stand against me.” 

Cullen shuddered, looked around, looked to Hawke. It took her a second to realize he was looking to be told what to do. 

“The phylacteries,” she blurted.
“I - I can’t,” he stammered. “The mages, they – they cannot – I cannot –”
“They are people, just like us, and they need help.”
“Silence,” Meredith commanded. “Insolence!”
Hawke ignored her. “They are civilians. Some of them children. They don't even know how to fight, they're just scared!”

Cullen looked between her and Meredith, who seemed about as likely to attack him as she was to attack Hawke. He looked at the red lyrium sword she was holding, clearly trying to swallow a panic. Whatever he had been thinking, however he came to his judgement, it seemed to pain him. He cried out, and relented. 

“Fine! Templars – with the Champion. I will – I will go find the phylacteries.”
“Bela, go with him,” Hawke called over her shoulder. “Make sure he doesn’t change his mind.”
“I’ll go too,” Bethany said, and the three of them bolted back towards the Gallows.

Meredith howled and raised her blade, ready to strike at the defecting Templar, but Hawke took the opening and lunged at her. She kept her occupied for a good two rounds, though fighting against that blade felt awful. Every time it met her daggers, her bones … rang. She felt heady and strange. Her movements became faster but somehow, sloppier, which is how the Knight-Commander managed to push her back to where she started. 

Panting, Meredith allowed the blade to sink to her side and once again surveyed her Templars in disbelief. None of them had moved, save to get further away from her. “I see. Once again, I am the only one who will do what must be done. I will save this city myself.” 

For a second, Hawke thought that Meredith was about to come at her again, and so snapped to defend. Instead, she sank the lyrium blade into the crack between the cobblestones and gripped it with both hands. The shockwave that came from it felt like standing too close to a campfire, the heat of it prickling her skin and somehow sinking into her chest. A horrid, powerful urge to rip Meredith apart right then and there reared its ugly head just seconds before Varric grabbed her around the waist and yanked her back. 

Meredith, hood and hair flying from the way the magic was rippling through the air, prayed over what became of that accursed idol. “Blessed are those who stand before the corrupt and the wicked and do not falter!” 

One would think that all the mages, the Templars, the guards, and the ragtag vigilantes would be enough to take down one mad Knight-Commander, but it seemed like Meredith’s prayer wasn’t just a light show. The ground trembled and the looming statues in the Gallows courtyard began to vibrate so loud they rang like bells. Hawke blocked one hit, then two, tried to lunge at Meredith, and then nearly lost her head gaping at the fact that the giant constructs seemed to have come to life.

Chaos was an understatement for what began to happen. Bodies scrambled, crushed and skewered indiscriminately by giant steel weapons as everyone tried to figure out how to combat this new horror. Mages rushed out of the Gallows blasting them with ice and fire in turn, trying to crack the metal.

Hawke did not have the time to look at what was happening any more than what the very edges of her gaze allowed, and that was narrowing quickly. Meredith was coming at her with everything she had, and the longer they stayed locked in combat, the more Hawke felt herself slipping in and out of focus and become determined to rip the older woman apart with her teeth, if she had to.  Some part of her half-remembered this buzzing feeling from when Bartrand had the idol and left them behind in the Deep Roads, but this was different. This was so much more intense. It had been festering for six years.

Their duel was broken up only when Meredith appeared fed up with being on the defensive, and her will was apparenly strong enough to compel one of the giant walking statue backhand Hawke all the way across the courtyard. Luckily she did not slam into the ruined wall too hard, but the impact still rattled her insides. For a long while everything was too loud: Metal on metal, too-familiar cracks of bone and tearing of flesh, the pounding of her own heart. She must have only been turned around for seconds, but when she turned to re-enter the fray, far too many of the people fighting were left sprawled on the ground. Somewhere across the din, Aveline was yelling to rally them. 

Fenris and Varric, on the other hand, were engaged with Meredith, and Hawke came back around just in time to watch the Knight-Captain get the elf off his footing. Without missing a beat, Meredith flung her arm around Fenris’s neck and had the point of her blade already pressed into his back, keeping her eyes locked on Hawke’s across the ruined square. 

“Strike by strike, I will end your forsaken influence on this town!” 

Time slowed. Hawke willed her legs to move, but her body and her mind had been through this twice before: she would be too slow. She watched Meredith’s arm tense and start to drive the blade into the elf’s back, but then she screamed and flung both him and the sword away from herself, clutching her scorched hand. Hawke had no idea what just happened – she wasn't even sure it was real.

And then, Bethany raced out of the tower, the hem of her skirts covered in blood that was hopefully not her own, and put herself bodily between Fenris and Meredith. With a sweeping gesture, she erected a wall of fire between the two of them and the Knight-Commander. 

The elder Hawke crashed back into her body just then, and found the strength to push herself back up to her feet. Just as Meredith howled and picked up her weapon again, the Champion of Kirkwall took the opening for an all-out assault. She ran across the courtyard and vaulted over debris, nothing but the ringing of clashing steel in her head as she unleashed seven years of grief and rage on Meredith. She swung at her and let every hit be the momentum for the second, harder one, and found every opening to use the Templar’s own training against her. She got her dominant shoulder, and had nearly sliced across her neck when Meredith found her footing again and slammed her gauntleted fist across Hawke’s face. 

Hawke fumbled backwards, the pain of having her nose broken and face torn open so blinding that she couldn’t help but close her eyes against it. 

The next and last thing she remembered was the scrape of Meredith’s sword as she picked it up, the heat of its approach, and seeing red.

Chapter Text

Hawke woke up with her hands bound behind her back, a dry mouth, and a mean headache. Her eyes stayed bleary and unfocused into the darkness for some time, until she remembered that she had just been in the middle of a battle for her and her sister’s life, and took a panicked inhale, which turned into a yelp. Her side had apparently been bludgeoned, and anything beyond a regular breath sent a shooting pain all the way from her hip to her shoulder. 

Something next to her creaked and then, a dim lantern lit. Fenris rolled up from the pile of blankets on the floor next to her cot but did not approach her; instead staring at her and waiting for her to make the first move. Not that she could. “Why –” Her mouth was so dry she had to stop and try to wet it with her own spit before continuing. “Why are my hands bound?”

She tried to wiggle upright but the same sharp pain in her side stopped her and left her flopping on the firm, itchy mattress like a fish out of water in its final throes for air. Fenris, finally convinced that she was safe to approach, cursed and came to her her aid. Only once she was seated did she realize that the room they were in was rocking.

“Are we on a boat?” And then, panic. “Where’s Beth –”
“Upstairs,” the elf said as he poured her water from a jug he seemingly pulled out of nowhere. “With Isabela.”
“And the rest?”
He glanced at her, but did not answer. “Drink this.”
“Fenris, where is everyone else?” she insisted.
“They're alive. Drink first.”

Alive was good enough, so she drank; slowly at first, and then greedily. Fenris kept the jug on him as he settled down next to her, sitting so that his leg was pressed against hers, and leaned back against the wall. Just as she was done drinking, he refilled her cup. “I thought you were gone.”

Something about the way he said it reminded Hawke that the last time she saw him, which felt like both a blink and an eternity ago, he’d been on the end of Meredith’s sword. All at once her body went through the shock-fear-relief reaction, like it was just catching up to what had happened, so in the semi-dark she reached for his hand. He squeezed hers in return, and for a moment that contact was the only thing keeping them grounded in the room they were in. 

Eventually Hawke forced herself to drink some more, but when she turned to ask Fenris about what happened after she apparently blacked out, she found him fully focused on a point in the middle-distance and clenching his jaw to keep the wetness in his eyes from overflowing. 

Injured ribcage be damned, she set the empty cup aside and let go of the elf’s hand so she could pull him into her chest and curl around him instead. He melted into her on contact and wound his free arm around her middle, more mindful of her injury than she was. When he heard her sniffle, he said, “Don’t,” into her shoulder. 
“Then you don’t either.”
“I am trying.” 

Through her wet eyes and in the semi-dark, she caught sight of the skin on her wrists shining where it had been rubbed raw. More questions bubbled up: How long had she been bound? If Bethany had healed her, how much had been healed? Her nose – Meredith had smashed her nose in just before she went dark. It certainly wasn’t broken now. But, when she lifted her hand from Fenris’ back to touch the spot where the Knight-Commander’s gauntlet made impact, she felt a scar. 

Fenris eventually let her go and left her to get cleaned up, giving her time to become even more confused. Where were they? What happened? What of the rest of their friends, and Meredith, and the other mages? Kirkwall? Was anyone in pursuit? Not to mention, the things her body was doing without the immediate distraction of someone else in the room were just … strange. She felt like she’d been ripped out of time and unceremoniously tossed back in at random. Changing into fresh clothes and washing up turned into a cycle of being wrecked by latent fear and then unnatural calm. 

Above deck, it was night. Hawke popped the hatch at the top of the ladder open just enough to see the midnight-colored sky, but stopped herself from emerging when she heard the other three chattering quietly. 

“ – not going to try to bite me again?” Isabela’s tone was light, but Hawke winced.
“No. She’s herself again.” One of the girls sighed – Bethany, probably. 

Over the voices, Hawke heard hefty paw pads and loud sniffing. Nug’s thick nose appeared from behind her and the Mabari tried to nudge the hatch open, but caught his owner’s eye just as she pressed a finger to her lips. Unfortunately, like mother like son, her dog was a terrible liar and even worse at acting inconspicuous.

From across the deck, Bethany sighed loudly. “My sister must be terribly confused about what’s happening.”
And in response, Isabela said, “Well, she could either come up and ask about how she ended up here, or keep eavesdropping and hope we say something relevant.” 

Hawke allowed herself a moment to roll her eyes in the relative safety of the ladder hatch, and then popped it open fully so she could finish climbing up the rickety ladder. It was a warm, clear night on the deck of the sailboat Isabela had apparently commandeered. All breezes and starry skies, silver lined clouds low to the horizon. Wherever they were, they were far from a city that had collapsed in on itself. 

Isabela looked best-off among the four of them, but either they had gotten extremely lucky or Bethany had been working hard to keep them quickly on the mend. More importantly, her sister was in plainclothes for the first time in six years, her hair tied in a low ponytail at the nape of her neck. And the moment the elder Hawke found her footing on deck, she broke away from the other two and ran to give her a tight hug. Both of them started crying before they even made contact. Save for the time they had to take an emergency trip to a Warden prison, the sisters hadn’t been able to exchange anything but cordial pats on the shoulder in six years, and even those got them dirty looks from Templars. And now, here they were. 

Before Hawke could point out the lack of Circle robes, Bethany sniffled and said, “I can’t remember the last time I saw you without armor.”
The elder laughed into her hair, and squeezed. She'd dressed herself in a linen tunic and a pair of too-big slacks, a giant moth-eaten shawl draped over her shoulders to keep the breeze at bay. "I can't remember the last time I saw you out of your robes."

A weight fell away, though a different one had already taken its place. Not counting the fact that their dog was already leaning into their legs and wagging his tail so hard it was hitting the back of Hawke’s knees and threatening to knock her to the floor.

Once they separated, it was time for the barrage of questions. As the answers came, pieces of the last few days started to come back to Hawke in flashes, sometimes in bits of feeling more than anything else. 

The fight against Meredith had gone on for some time after she lost track of it. Merrill was the first to notice something was wrong, that the two of them weren’t just taking out seven years of pent-up aggression but were acting afflicted. When the Knight-Commander began to crystallize into a human-sized red lyrium idol, Hawke had been busy trying to grapple her to the ground and had to be pulled off before she became part of the sculpture. 

It took the combined efforts of Aveline and Varric to remove her, restrain her, and carry her quite literally kicking and screaming to the docks. Hearing this again, Hawke flushed – some of the things she’d said under the influence of the idol came back while she listened to the description of the scene. Her stomach bubbled with shame. 

Isabela just grinned at her, catlike and self-satisfied. “Looks like someone just remembered they ought to be groveling.”
Bethany smacked her upper arm. “Isabela!”
“Do that again a little harder, and I might forgive her.” 

The pirate laughed loud and clear over the sounds of protest from the rest of them. The only comfort Hawke took was that if she had the gumption to be a pervert, she wasn’t actually mad about being called a pathetic coward and bitten at. Among other things. 

Once back on track, the rest of the story went quite quick: Merrill, Varric, and Aveline stayed behind. Merrill would not abandon that mirror, Aveline would not abandon Kirkwall, and Varric knew he had the best shot at covering their trail. The surviving mages and some of the now-former Templars scattered to the winds and, yes, the phylacteries had been destroyed. Hawke caught her throat tightening again and stood there braced, forcing the urge to break down into sobs away once again. Isabela, seemingly catching the glint in her eyes, pointed an accusing finger in her direction. "If you cry, I'm telling Varric. He'll put it in his books and you'll never live it down."

And as for what was next, Bethany cleared her throat. “Sister, I need to ask you one last favor.”

Chapter Text

Hawke did end up crying.

She cried a lot. The people around her only noticed a few times, her dog a few more. The couple of nights Bethany caught her, she cried too. Fenris just sat quietly and kept her company until she came down from whatever late-arriving emotion gripped her. Isabela, luckily, had just dropped them off at the very same port the Hawkes had fled from all those years ago so she could mind the boat while she waited for them, so at least that bit of bullying could be avoided.

The feeling of being on the road west to Lothering was … surreal. On one hand, she and Bethany knew the main highways, having traveled along all of them at least once. On the other, it had been years and when they were headed in the opposite direction, they traveled on the back of a dragon. To make things even stranger, the maps were different. There were roads where there had not been roads before, cutting around places the Blight and the civil war had made inaccessible.

Even worse, the land had changed. At first, Hawke thought she was just finally losing her mind, but then Bethany pointed out that the color of the grass was different. It was yellower than before, and the landscape bore scars. Lush, leafy trees grew next to shriveled husks that had either died because the land was Blighted or because they somehow got destroyed in battle. There were swaths of land that Hawke in theory knew to be forest, but had been cut down almost entirely for war efforts. Little farm towns that she knew the names of were now ruins, and new settlements popped up along the new roads to replace them.

The walking and chatting helped the out-of-body feeling. Bethany had plenty to say now that Templars weren't looming over her shoulder, and Hawke was happy to be a walking pincushion when she and Fenris would gang up on her about some reckless or irresponsible thing she'd done that one or the other was learning about in real-time. Bethany had plenty of childhood stories to enlighten the elf with, and he was happy to verify whatever crazy thing had breached the walls of the Circle and gone through the rumor mill. It was the nights that were the problem.

They stopped to eat and rest just a day’s travel away from their destination. The news of what happened to Kirkwall and its unfortunate Champion hadn’t spread this far yet, and so as long as they kept Fenris and his markings concealed they could take advantage of some hospitality. When Hawke ordered drinks from the barman, he asked about her accent to make small talk. And then, like any great barman, noticed that the question made the strange and scarred traveler misty-eyed, and got the transaction over with as quickly as he could.

Hawke cried outside alone that night while everyone else slept.

The South had changed so much that Hawke could have been convinced they had read the map wrong and were going in the wrong direction, full-stop, but at some point in the late morning of the final day of their travels, she started to recognize the way the way boulders littered the land, and the hills rolled.

Hawke didn’t say anything when she suddenly stopped, just picked up the nearest sharp-edged rock in the clearing, and approached one of those boulders. She tried to put herself in exactly the spot she had been standing in on the day they fled, but couldn’t be sure, and so turned to Bethany to consult. “It was here, right?”
Bethany walked over too, and examined the stone. She laid a hand on it, and tried her best to remember. “Yes. It must have been."

It was Nug that confirmed it for them with a sniff and a hearty paw at the base. Bethany did the courtesy of turning to Fenris to explain. “This is where Aveline’s first husband died. Wesley.” 

Despite the sun and lovely weather, the mood turned grim. Hawke did her best to carve Wesley’s initials into the side of the stone – it was a bare-minimum gesture, and yet more than most other victims of the Blight got. If she did not get a chance to say goodbye to her friend, then at least she could do this for her. 

The second grave marker that needed making was just a short walk uphill, but each step felt a mile long. As they approached, Hawke could feel her heart quicken in her chest and beat into her throat. Suddenly every crack of a twig underfoot was the sound of her brother’s skull cracking, and she could hear her mother’s wailing on the wind. 

How could you let him charge off like that?  

Bethany insisted on doing the work that time – it was her twin brother, after all – which left Hesta to stand there helpless and watch. Fenris stood next to her, arms crossed, unsure of what to say or do other than be there. For some Maker-forsaken reason, she ended up quietly walking him through her recollection. 

“It came up from there,” she said, pointing to where the hill began to slope downwards. “I think we all felt it underfoot before we saw it. For a second I thought it hadn’t noticed us at all and was just going to run past, but then …” 

Her hand continued tracing the path the Ogre had taken, leading to where it had crested the hill and then stopped. There was a strange groove in the earth there, as if the way its foot dug in when it turned on them left a mark that lasted all this time. Maybe it had. The soil here was still dry and strange, a far cry from the fertile land she remembered, so perhaps that was the mark it left and it had never washed away.

“You know, honestly, I think Carver saw the way Wesley took charge. Maybe he wanted to impress him, or spite me, or … make up for our father not being here. But he rushed in, and that – that beast picked him up like he was nothing.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper, like she herself couldn’t bear to hear it. “My baby brother, all eighteen years of him just – smashed and gone. I can’t get the sound of it out of my head.” It was the first time she told the story out loud. All this time she feared that if she put words to it, something would change. He’d really be gone. 

But the words faded on the breeze, and nothing changed. Her chest still hurt. She still carried that day with her, just finally showed someone else the depth of the scar.

Before she could dwell on it, she noticed Bethany slump and press her head to the boulder she was carving into. Nug went to her immediately, sticking his giant snout into her side and her shoulder, trying to get her attention. The mage lifted her hand and draped it around the dog without looking at him, and then tensed. The sob rocked her and the elder Hawke’s body moved without her bidding it. She too, started weeping before her knees hit the ground. She cried so hard she thought she’d choke, and some distant part of her felt like she’d deserve it.

They walked a little ways away to take a break, trying not to think too hard about how strange it felt to sit and snack just downhill from their brother's newly-marked grave, so soon after they both faced that grief in earnest for the first time. There had always been something curbing it: Not wanting to upset their mother, Gamlen's antics, trying to make ends meet, trying to keep themselves safe. Or, well, trying to keep Bethany safe. Hawke had heard more than her share about her own sense of self-preservation on this family trip.

But, life was relentless and time waited for no man. Once they were ready, they continued onwards towards their last home.

Needless to say Lothering was in ruins; less of a town and more of a cautionary tale. The creek, dry; the land, cracked; the buildings, hardly standing. And yet still they vaguely remembered where things ought to be, and saw the half-burned skeleton of their farmhouse in the distance. They both stood, pointing out landmarks to Fenris as if he, too, could picture what the village had been or make any use of the information.

“You really think father's grimoire is still there?” Hawke asked, kicking a pebble and with it, a little cloud of dust.
Bethany sighed, squinting against the sun. “I suppose it depends on our luck —"
"Oh, don't say that."
"— and how smart the looters have been over the last seven years. But it’s worth it to look. It’s not just his spells, you know – it’s all his contacts. And all of them owe him at least enough of a debt to help hide me.”
Hawke hummed. “Getting crafty in your old age,” she joked.
Bethany shrugged. “One of us has to be. Come, Fenris, I’ll show you the house.”
Hawke squawked to stop them. “Remember – old man Barlin set all those traps out around his fields. Watch your footing.”
Fenris, who had been solemn and silent on their grave tour all morning, finally opened his mouth. “Are you not coming?”

Hawke would eventually learn to fake a facial expression, but not this time. She was well aware her smile didn't reach her eyes. “I’m gonna go see the old man,” she said, jerking her thumb towards the somehow-thriving patch of woods to the south where she had set fire to his body. “You two go on ahead.” 

Bethany, knowing better than to argue or caution about the types of things that could happen in the woods, looped her arm through Fenris’ and began to march them both towards what remained of a past life, Nug hot on their tail. Hesta lingered on the hill for a moment, if only to appreciate the sight of the two of them marching arm-in-arm, so far away from all the times when the elf would practically hiss at her sister and just call her ‘mage.’ Unfortunately she knew she was stalling, and so as soon as she could manage, Hawke convinced herself to cut south.

In a way, it was heartening to see that the town itself seemed to be most afflicted, and the closer she came to the Wilds the more nature seemed to run its course and reclaim what the Blight had destroyed. She could only appreciate that feeling once the gut-wrenching panic of not knowing where her father’s body had been went away, though. The grass had grown tall everywhere, and new tree sprouts littered themselves among dead and rotting roots. She had to criss-cross the area a couple of times before she was completely sure she found it. Once she did, she dropped her pack and set off to find a large-enough rock to wrangle from the mud and dirt of a swamp, upsetting several large bugs, to use as the gravestone.

It was a pretty pathetic endeavor that both made her glad that she'd separated from the other two, and yet wishing she had the help. She was still weak from the final battle against Meredith and while Bethany was doing her best to heal what must have been a pretty nasty break in her ribs (from getting smacked full-force by one of those statues, she'd learned the day before), the wound still hurt. Every time she tried to lift the stone she chose, the shooting pain up her side came back. Eventually, she figured out how to get enough leverage with her legs to get the Maker-forsaken thing up, but then she was up against the feeling of cold, slick mud between her fingers. Hawke tried her best to remind herself that no matter how damp and cold her hands felt now, she'd rather lift a thousand swamp rocks before she ever plunged her arm into wyvern shit again.

There was a thick-yet-wet splat-thump when she dropped the stone barely a half-inch from her left big toe, right above where she remembered her father's head having been. Once it was down, she realized she finally had something to talk at. 

“Well,” she started, looking around desperately for something to wipe her hands on. “Here I am, just like I promised.” There was no response. Not that she was expecting his ghostly voice again, but it’d have been nice to hear the timely flap of a bird’s wings or something like that. People told her they found that kind of thing comforting, and she would have liked the opportunity to find out if she felt the same. As things were, she just felt a little bit insane for standing there and lecturing a rock while rubbing her hands against trees and eventually, the hem of her shirt.

“A lot happened. I, uh. I can’t tell if I fucked up or not? Or I maybe I did fuck up, I just can’t tell how badly.” Once again, her voice cracked, and her already-puffy eyes felt hot. All she wanted to do was stop crying. “I keep thinking that maybe if you were there, Carver wouldn’t have died and Bethany wouldn’t have gotten caught, mother would have never gone to Quentin, and maybe we could have just – come home. ” She’d gone down all these rabbit holes countless times, all the many ways she could have avoided being the Hawke. Just Hesta. She revisited them almost without feeling, they were just the background to all her thoughts now. "Instead I got stuck there and caught in the middle of everything, and now the whole city is ... who knows? Maybe the Chantry is already there razing the whole thing to the ground to start over."

One raspy, steadying breath later, she went on. “I just — I kept asking myself what you would have done. And then everything kept going to shit." 

The only thing keeping her from taking a leap into the deep hole of guilt in her gut was that her eyes genuinely hurt from having wept almost nonstop for days. She was sure that if she closed her eyes to weep one more time, they'd just swell shut and she'd never be able to open them again. And so, she changed the topic. "Suppose it wasn't all bad. I think you would have liked Varric a lot. And Merrill. Fenris, you're stuck with either way. And all the trouble all of those idiots got me into would have probably just made you laugh. I really don’t know if there was anyone else who could have survived Varric’s stupid Deep Roads expedition.”

The padding of paws announced Bethany and Nug as they made their way through the tall grass and over to Malcolm Hawke's resting place. “I don’t think there was anyone else delusional enough to agree to it in the first place.” When Hesta turned her head over her shoulder, she saw that Bethany clutched a worn, dark-leather journal to her chest.
"You found it?"
"I did, and it's intact. Looks like father knew how to pick a hiding place."
"So what now?" she asked. "Back to Gwaren?"
Bethany sighed, and visibly tried to steel herself. She lifted her chin, and Hesta couldn't help but think she learned some of this posturing from the handful of Hightown-born mages she'd lived with. "Actually, one of his contacts is in South Reach. They run mages up and down the highways as it is. By the time the three —" Nug leaned into her thigh, causing her to sway. "— Sorry, four of us get back to Gwaren... I think the coast will be on alert for the Champion of Kirkwall. If you still insist on parting ways —"
"I do."
"Then we'd better do it before Gwaren."

The elder racked her brain for any reason to object, but Bethany's argument was sound. Maybe if she was by herself she could risk it, but she wasn't. And she'd tasted enough fear of losing Fenris when Meredith had him on the tip of her blade.

"Alright," she finally said. "South Reach it is, then." Bethany immediately deflated, as if that had taken all of her energy. While she recovered, Hesta looked to Nug. "You realize you're going with her, right?" The Mabari barked, and planted himself next to the younger Hawke. "That's right. Good dog."
Bethany leaned down to scratch him behind the ears. "If you're done scolding Father for dying, I'd like a minute to say goodbye."
"I did no such thing. I guilted him for dying. But yes, I'm finished." She dragged her fingers along the soft moss atop the makeshift gravestone, just to let him know. "You hear that? Goodbye, old man."

In the distance, there was a loud caw. She had to admit, it wasn't not comforting.

Hawke took her time meandering towards the farm, so in her own head that she forgot to look for any of Barlin's still-remaining traps until she was halfway through cutting across his overgrown field. Luckily, it looked like all of them had been set off already and so she was spared the embarrassment of walking right into one, though she supposed she could still step on a rake and re-break her nose. She found Fenris sitting on what remained of the steps to their old farmhouse, looking idly around the landscape. Once she was close enough he turned and instead searched her for signs of distress. When she smiled, he released the breath he'd apparently been holding.

"So this is my house," she said, gesturing to a surprisingly intact foundation and a lot of rotting, scorched wood. The steps to the little attic nook where she used to sleep had been destroyed, but strangely, it seemed like the actual loft and the upside-down crate she used as a side table remained intact. If she wasn't sure that it would break under her weight, she'd have tried to climb up just for nostalgia's sake.
"Welcome home," he said just as she took a seat next to him. "How was — did you find your father's ..."
Hesta was quick to relieve him. "His grave, yes. Sort of. I found the spot and marked it, but his body is long gone." Fenris watched her for another second, just to make sure she wasn't on the verge of another breakdown. Thankfully she was almost certain there was not another spare drop of liquid in her. "Don't worry, I won't burden you with another extremely depressing story."
"That is not what I'm worried about."
"I know."

Hesta's side was still achy, but she leaned her head on the elf's shoulder despite its protests and let herself exhale. He kissed her forehead, and then scoot a little closer. "What next?"
Hawke made some noise between a groan and a sigh. “We're to hand Bethany and Nug off at South Reach. If our old family contact is still there, then you and I are on our own."
“Hm. I had an idea, if you’re willing to hear it.”
“No, we are not burning down Minrathous.”
“That was my next idea.”
“What was the first?”
“There are some … popular slaver routes along the northern border of Orlais. I don’t think anyone would look too closely at a couple of anonymous vagabonds making trouble for them. And if the Chantry comes looking for us there, we can lay low in Nevarra.”
“And then burn down Minrathous?”
He laughed from deep in his chest, and for a moment Hesta felt a little better. “If we’re feeling up to it.” She tried to picture it. Not a life on the run so much as a life chasing down slavers and making their life a living hell. It certainly wasn't the peaceful retirement she probably needed, but it was one way to work off all that nervous energy that plagued her constantly.

Maybe it was the proximity to her old home, but she suddenly remembered how often her father used to find creative ways for her and the dog to run themselves ragged. Him, Isabela. Aveline. Was everyone constantly plotting to tire her out?

"We don't have to do this," Fenris added. "I meant it when I said I would follow you anywhere. I know I'm asking you to leave home again, after you just got back."
"Why would I not want to torment slavers?"
"You just looked like you smelled something sour."
"Ah." She laughed. "No, you just reminded me of something my father used to do to bully me." The emphasis was directed back in the direction she'd come from, towards the woods. She half-hoped a bird would caw a little too loud again.

When she was greeted with silence, she sat up and let herself slump back against the soft wood of the next step. Fenris watched her stare off at her feet, and then crane her neck to look at what was left of the house. Even if she wasn't a fugitive now, it was hard to imagine re-building a life here. Every single thing she'd seen since being ashore seemed determined to remind her that nothing in this country spent seven years waiting for her to come home. She and her homeland spent all that time growing apart, and everything that bound her to the memory was gone now. She felt like she ought to have been sad about that, but maybe she didn't have any more sad left in her. Or, maybe the feeling was blunted because even as displaced as she was, she wasn't alone.

"I think I'm ready to be the one doing the following," she said after a stretch. "Let's go to Orlais."
Fenris couldn't help but smirk, likely just at the thought of making slavers' lives a living hell as a full-time occupation. Still, it made the hole in her chest stopped ringing, and she realized she was home enough. "Orlais it is, then."