Chapter Text
Carver Hawke is born in Guardian, 9:11 Dragon, three days after Wintersend and three minutes after his sister. He is a happy, healthy, loud child, and the first time he smiles at his father, Malcolm breaks down and cries.
The twins make an odd pair, their parents quickly discover. Carver is mellow and good-natured, equally happy to amuse himself as to be held, whereas Bethany craves attention and is always happiest in her mother’s arms.
And Bethany does everything first. She speaks first, walks first, is deftly running around the house while Carver is still garbling away happily to himself on all fours. When he gets to two years and still he hasn’t spoken, Leandra worries and takes him to the local Chantry sister. There’s nothing wrong with him, the sister assures Leandra. He’s slow to learn, but he will eventually, and he does.
When the twins are five, Carver falls into Lake Calenhad and nearly drowns; Malcolm dives in after him, Leandra panicking on the shore for the few seconds that both her husband and son are out of sight. But Malcolm soon resurfaces, Carver clutched in his arms, coughing and squirming. The moment they’re on land, Malcolm checks over his son, sending pulses of magic through his palms.
Carver is fine, but Malcolm is thoughtless. They are overseen by a neighbour, and they leave their house that night. They have to be careful.
They go south, as far as Honnleath, and it’s nice. Carver spends his days running around outside with his siblings, or helping Leandra cook. He’s good with routines, they find, and enjoys tasks like peeling apples or tending to their small herb garden. He likes focus and quiet, he likes praise, and he likes having time to himself, away from his more boisterous siblings.
He becomes a different person around them; not in a bad way, only different. He has to be louder to be heard, more energetic, more rough-and-tumble. He holds his own as well as any of them, though, and his arguments with Bethany especially are tumultuous.
When he’s seven, Bethany sets his trousers on fire during one of these arguments. Carver is a prankster, the family joker, and it comes at Bethany’s expense too often for her to find enjoyment in it. Their rows have always been heated – only this time, it’s literally. It’s hard to tell who is more shocked, Carver or his twin, and then they run inside, calling for their big sister who always knows what to do.
Another mage in the family, Leandra thinks, and she’s scared; but the look in Malcolm’s eyes as he explains it all to his daughter, the excitement and pride practically radiating off her husband as he teaches his first mage child… She can’t find it within herself to regret it, any of it, for even a second.
So Malcolm teaches Bethany to harness her magic safely, and Carver sits outside in the barn for hours on end, concentrating hard on a piece of straw and trying to set it alight. Because his twin is a mage, so that means he is too – it just might take him a little longer, that’s all.
It takes him two whole years to accept this is one thing he’ll never learn.
He has a growth spurt at nine, overtaking Bethany with ease, and Leandra starts jokingly calling him ‘the man of the house’. He plays with the village children, lashing together sticks to make swords, slaying imaginary darkspawn, bandits, and pirates. One day someone suggests they play as templars, saving people from dangerous mages. Carver thinks back to his trousers on fire, to the magic that never came to him, and agrees.
Carver is ten years old when he discovers that he’s not the only Hawke son, just the younger one. So much for ‘man of the house’, so much for ‘mage’; he locks himself in his room and screams into a pillow. He’s never going to be special, he’s just one more. He wishes he’d never been born.
Then he thinks that if he has a brother now, then Carver can teach him how to do boy stuff. They can prank Bethany and get into fights, and he can have a partner to practice swordfighting with. He won’t need to be careful what he says around him, either, because his brother already knows Bethany is a mage. Maybe having a brother won’t be too bad, after all.
He emerges from his room rather sheepishly, with a peace offering of some of his old clothes; because, he figures, if his sister is a boy now then he’ll need new stuff to wear. And Carver outgrew it all anyway.
The seasons turn, and it’s Harvestmere. Carver and his brother are out in the fields, helping Malcolm move haybales, the two boys carrying each bale between them – they’re heavier than they look. Carver’s not looking where he’s going, walking backwards with the bale, and he falls, arse-first, into a ditch. As he’s lying in the mud, pinned down by the haybale, his brother laughing at him from above, he sees he’s not the only one down there: a family of foxes stares at him, looking as shocked as he feels.
The mother fox scratches the Void out of his face, but it’s worth it because on the way home his brother asks Malcolm what a baby fox is called, and it turns out the answer is a kit. A week later and Carver’s face is almost healed, and his brother bounds down the stairs to tell his family he’s decided on a name.
As the boys get older, Malcolm’s time is in more and more demand. He spends his time teaching Bethany magic, and Carver and Kit learn swordplay – the real kind, not the games the village children play. Carver feels so grown up, learning beside his brother and father. He’s taken up woodcarving, liking the feel of occupying his hands, and now he whittles out some practice blades for them to use. He beams with pride when Malcolm tells him how good they look.
All three siblings are in the village one day, when some of Carver’s friends appear to ask him to play. He asks if Kit can come too; they sneer, tell them the game is for boys only, no girls allowed. Carver punches his best friend squarely on the nose, gets a black eye for his trouble. Leandra is shocked when they return home, but Kit and Bethany explain what happened, that Carver was a hero. His parents tell Carver he’s proud of him. He wears his bruises as a badge of honour.
Carver doesn’t play with the village boys anymore, but that’s okay. He’s old enough to have a job now, and between working in the neighbouring stables, and training with Kit and Malcolm, Carver’s days are full. He’s not too busy to prank his sister, though; his title as Family Jokester was well-earned, and he isn’t about to lose it now.
He enjoys working in the stables, even if it is often literally shit work. He likes horses, he realises, and the stable owner is an agreeable man. He even gets to take the horses out, and though he falls off a couple of times he’s soon pretty good. He likes having something that’s just his; Bethany and Kit can’t ride, but he can, and it’s the only thing he’s ever done first. It’s nice.
That is, until the stabemaster glares at him one day and tells him to get on home to his witch sister, and Carver runs the two miles back to their house to tell his family they have to move again.
They pack in a whirlwind, but it’s still not enough. The Templars are knocking on their door all too soon, and Kit grabs the twins, dashes out the back door. They hide in the trees at the back of the house; hear their parents muffled voices inside, the Templars’ shouts, their mother’s cry. There’s a burst of light, several screams. And then nothing, for an eternity.
Finally – finally – their mother emerges, and tells them in a steady, steely voice that they have to leave, and that their father is dead.
Carver is fourteen.
They go to Lothering, and things are never the same again.
Their mother is quiet. Carver, for the first time ever, cannot raise his family’s spirits with a jig or a joke. He stops trying. Bethany spends the first two weeks in her room, refuses to leave, barely eats. Eventually Kit goes to her; Carver doesn’t know what his brother says, but Bethany is at breakfast the next day as if nothing had ever happened.
Kit tries to fill the void left by their father, and Carver tries not to resent him for it. But Kit will never be Malcolm, no matter how hard he wants to be, and Carver’s too angry to be generous. Between Leandra’s obvious grief, Bethany’s pretending like everything is fine, and Kit’s half-baked attempts to play house, Carver has had enough. He knows he’s being moody, sullen, bratty. He just doesn’t care.
He decides to leave, one day in Bloomingtide, when the sun is high and he’s been working all day and the thought of returning to his dreary little house, with its dreary occupants, is just too much to stomach. He’s been paid for the week, and he can make it to Redcliffe village in three days or so. He’s old enough to leave, strike out on his own. He can send a letter home once he gets there.
The thought is utterly freeing.
He walks for nearly a whole day. But it’s further to Redcliffe than he thought, and he’s getting hungry.
And then he finds the dog.
She’s a mabari, and she’s hurt. In fact, she’s lying in the middle of the road, and at first Carver thinks she’s dead. But then she looks up at him with her big brown eyes, full of love and warmth, and suddenly he’s sitting in the road beside her and crying, big wracking sobs that reverberate through his entire body, and he’s so damn tired, of everything, of it all. And the only creature in this whole world who seems to understand is some half-dead mabari.
He’s run over that day so many times in his head, because he can’t shake the idea that it’s his fault his father is dead. If only he’d run faster back from the stable – or maybe if he’d never started working there at all, then maybe Malcolm would still be alive. He must have let something slip to the stablemaster, or maybe he just acted suspicious, or… He should have known it was too good to be true.
And this dog just puts her head in his lap, licks his hand, lets him cry into her fur.
He doesn’t know how long he stays there, but eventually he realises he needs to get moving. The dog is hurt, and Maker damn him if he’s going to let her die. He can help her. He knows the only healing mage for miles around.
And so he turns around and carries the dog home.
His whole family comes alive when he appears in the door, and they’re louder and brighter than he’s seen them in weeks. They all rush to embrace him, and Bethany seems to take actual pleasure in healing the dog – who Carver names Rohan, after one of the old heroes.
And then Rohan looks up at Kit. And she imprints.
Kit tries to give the dog back to Carver, but nothing works. Rohan very clearly wants to be Kit’s dog – she curls up on his bed, she follows him around, she growls at anyone who so much as raises their voice to him. And Carver decides he hates his brother.
Years pass, and things change. But it will never be like it used to. Everyone is still distant, less a family and more a group of people who cannot bring themselves to hold a conversation with one another. Carver rises early to practice his swordplay alone.
And then word goes out that King Cailan is raising an army. He leaves without a second thought.
Kit follows him. Of course he does.
Carver is nineteen when he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with his brother and his neighbours, braced against the onslaught of the darkspawn. Nineteen, when he hacks and slashes his way through endless creatures, watches everyone around him fall; nineteen, when his king dies on that same battlefield, when the reinforcements they were promised never arrive; nineteen, when his brother finds him in the melee, drenched in blood; nineteen, when they run.
They find Bethany and Leandra, and they keep running. All the way into the ogre that takes his twin; that smashes her body into the ground like she’s nothing, and Carver chokes on his own uselessness, raises his blade with a cry. The brothers take the beast down together, turn to see Bethany.
It doesn’t even occur to him that she won’t be okay. She’s a mage; she’s always been stronger than him, better than him, she’s always done everything first, been everything he wanted to be, should have been. He’s been told more times than he can count how he should be more like his sister. She’s the good one. She has to be okay.
It is the tenth day of Drakonis, 9:30 Dragon, and Carver Hawke has been nineteen for a month when his sister dies.