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Isabela has no memories of her life before the age of twenty. Drink and sex have wiped them and she’s happy that way. She tells them this defiantly – it’s possibly the first time any of them have heard her sound legitimately annoyed with them.
Hawke eyes her over his pint, and she meets his gaze, daring him to call her out on what he alone knows is a lie.
But he just turns his head and changes the subject before Aveline can finish scoffing. Some things shouldn’t be questioned.
The first memory Hawke has is looking down at the twins – new and wrinkly and gross. He can’t remember what he thought of them, but he remembers his father whispering in his ear.
“You’re a big brother now. That means it’s your job to look after them. Keep them safe. Can you do that?”
Five and full of bravado, he nodded, and made a promise he never thought he couldn’t keep. “I will.”
“Other children used to make fun of me for having ginger hair,” Aveline admits as they walk through the Hightown market.
Hawke’s attention is more on the stalls as he debates who to sell loot to, so he misses most of the conversation. He hears Isabela give a response that almost sounds genuine, but both he and Aveline can sense a set up, so he tunes it out, eyes lingering on Hubert as he wonders how the Bone Pit is doing. He should visit.
“Shut up, whore,” Aveline snaps, breaking Hawke out of his reverie. He glances back to see Isabela smirking, Sebastian rubbing the bridge of his nose, and Aveline looking slightly upset. Given how rarely Isabela can rile her up these days, that’s saying something, so he pauses until she looks up and meets his gaze.
They talk about it later, passing time in her office. She tells him how few friends she had growing up. Her father kept her too busy to play much with dolls, and by the time dolls were done, she was too strong, too physical for the girls worrying over ribbons and rouge. But she was still a girl who could beat them, so the boys never had time for her either.
Hawke has his feet up on her desk, only two legs of his chair on the ground. He smiles at her, tired-drunk. “It doesn’t make it better, but I would like to remind you that you could kick my arse six ways to Sunday, and you’re the one who doesn’t have time for me, most days.”
She chuckles, letting her head hang over her folded arms. “Perhaps. But where were you when I was twelve?”
“So this is the Little Hawke!” the man said, leaning on his carriage with a broad smirk. “Your father told us a great deal about you, lad!”
Garrett straightened his shoulders and tried to look older than he was. He’d learned, these last few years, that a first impression mattered. Back in South Reach, it didn’t matter that he’d been able to scale a tree in two minutes and pick every apple from it in an hour, everyone always remembered him as the little boy hiding behind his father’s leg. In Rivergate, they hadn’t cared that he’d learned to haul nets like an expert in less than a day, and repair them in two – he’d been the little water imp they found fighting with Carver. He was determined to be treated like a fellow worker in Lothering.
“Didn’t mention how skinny you are,” the man’s partner noted. “How old are you?”
“Twelve summers,” he said. His voice cracked on the second word, making him wish he’d kept monosyllabic.
“Thought so. Look at ’em hands – we’ve got us a mabari pup, Caden.”
“Right you are, Orlen; right you are,” the first man agreed. “Well, Little Hawke, your father says you know how to husband a field. He lyin’ to me?”
Garrett shook his head. “I can care for crops in my sleep.”
“Not on my coin, you won’t,” the man said with a grin. “Cut your teeth on the cabbage fields yonder. You got ’til lunch bell a’fore I decide if you’re wasting my time.”
They’re all not looking at him. Especially Anders.
It should be unusual. Hawke isn’t stupid or blind – he’s fully aware that several members of the group want him in more ways than one. Honestly, he’s surprised Anders at least hasn’t made a move, no matter what nonsense he says about breaking Hawke’s heart. A man only has so much self control. Hawke wonders if Justice has something to do with it.
But the subject has been brought up, and the sudden regret is palpable, even from Isabela.
First times.
Isabela clearly wishes she hadn’t mentioned it, because it reveals that she probably does remember her first time. Merrill, Hawke suddenly realises, may not yet have had one. He isn’t sure how romance works with the Dalish, since they all consider each other family. Aveline hates getting personal, as does Fenris. Hawke is vitally aware that Anders simply doesn’t want to hear about Hawke’s first time. He doesn’t want to know who or what or how Hawke has sex, unless it’s with him, probably.
Sebastian, amazingly, saves them all. “I was fourteen, and it was with a kitchen maid that wanted to get pregnant with a prince. I think it lasted all of two minutes.”
Varric actually spits out his ale. “You what, choir boy?”
He continues as if he hasn’t heard, voice light and careless. “In my defence, she had been working me up to it for most of the night. She wore her uniform most scandalously, and poured my wine one handed, so that her breasts brushed my shoulder each time,” he says, miming it surprisingly well. “In the end, my mother scolded her, and she was banished to the kitchen. I followed her, telling myself it was to comfort the poor thing. We ended up in a sack of flour.” His brow furrows, eyes widening as if it’s only just occurred to him. “Dear Maker, I don’t remember… I hope we threw it out, after…”
For a long time, no one can do anything but stare, until they all suddenly burst out laughing.
Sebastian and his childhood whoring are immediately the topic of conversation from then on. He tolerates it in that pious way he has, but Hawke meets his gaze across the table and knows the man knew exactly what he was doing.
Her name was Shandra.
She was an elf, a few years older than him, who lived with her parents in a shack on the other side of the Imperial Highway. Back then, he told himself he had no idea how they survived, but now he can admit they were thieves, all three of them. Shandra had originally come to the farm he worked on to steal chickens, but he’d been there, so she’d pretended to just be passing by.
Every day, she passed by the farm. Eventually, she stopped and leaned on the fence, and watched, waiting for him to run her off like the other farmers would have done to a nosy elf. But Hawke thought it was lousy how the elves were treated, and so just smiled at her and kept working.
The next day, she asked him for his name.
The day after, he offered her some cheese from his lunch. She gave him a kiss in return. Just a small one, on the side of his mouth. He grinned like a fool all afternoon.
One night, after six months and a lifetime, he met her by the river at midnight. She was older, but he was taller. He was eager, but she was firm. She guided him through it, forced him to be slow. Forced him to remember patience, and encouraged his habits of giving over receiving. Taught him to watch for what he did well, and search out better.
“Quality over quantity,” she’d teased as he groaned at her pulling away for the hundredth time, “gets you a far greater quantity.”
“What?”
“Shut up, and kiss me here.”
Another month, just one glorious month, and she was gone. He still isn’t sure why. He’s sure he did nothing wrong, nothing to make her suspicious or scared or even feel something too deep.
Maybe it was just time for her family to move on.
He still thinks of her, sometimes.
Fenris is playing with Hawke’s daggers.
There are three blades Hawke keeps in the belt at his waist, hidden behind his back. Dark metal, tied with red. They were irritating a bruise he’d gotten fighting Tal-Vashoth, so he’d tossed them on the table before sitting down, and Fenris had eventually picked them up.
He knows Fenris is more graceful than his two-hander would imply, but it’s amazing to watch him now. Even with the gauntlets, his fingers flicker, twisting the blades in ways that would make Isabela envious. They roll around his wrists like snakes, and each time they fall into his palms he grips them, firm as a rogue, before sending them flying again.
The movement is absent, unconscious. Fenris doesn’t seem to notice what he’s doing. Hawke wonders if the movement could continue if he did.
Not for the first time, Hawke wonders who Fenris was, before Danarius and the lyrium.
Watching him now, he thinks he must have been spectacular.
He can’t remember how old he was, when he cut his hand on his father’s knives.
They weren’t in Lothering yet, he’s sure. But he’d been in a fight with Carver, who’d been baiting him because he’d recently realised Garrett always got the blame when trouble came up between the Hawke children. So it can’t have been long before.
He was sitting at his father’s desk in the shed, or the barn, or wherever it was. Hands folded in front of his mouth, eyes dark as he didn’t think much of anything. Father’s knives were out on the desk. He can’t remember why. Maybe he was supposed to be sharpening them.
He knows he wasn’t thinking much of anything. He can remember that – his mind was dull. He was frustrated. Angry, really. But anger was a weakness. Anger brought demons, to mages and not. So he wasn’t focussed on it. He was just… sitting.
He picked up one of the knives and just… sat there. Looking at it. He turned it over in his hands, ran his finger down the edge. He flipped it, once. Threw it by the blade and caught it by the hilt. He’s always been good with knives.
And then he calmly turned his palm over and sliced it open. Right along the life line.
Maker, he wishes he could remember why that had felt like a good idea. What in Andraste’s bloody name he had been thinking.
He didn’t cry out. Just a hitched breath, because it did hurt. He remembers that. But for a long time, he just sat there, staring at his bleeding palm, and thinking. Thinking about the house, where his mother was fussing over the twins. Bethany was crying, yelling at Carver, and Carver was pretending to cry back, while still blaming him. There was a rat under Hawke’s bed. Spiders in the ceiling. His father was coming home from wherever he’d been. Running, actually. He seemed upset. There were chickens and cows and dogs and life was everywhere out in the village, just teeming with life and love and freedom and –
“What are you doing?”
He flinched as his father slammed him back against the desk, strong hands gripping his biceps so tightly they bruised.
It was the only time Malcolm ever beat him.
Varric has not had a good day. He couldn’t avoid the Merchant’s Guild, and received letters from Orzammar. Notes from his family, notes from the Shaperate. A short letter he keeps reading like he hopes it will change.
He’s drinking from the good stuff, pouring it into a crystal glass and sipping it.
“You know, my mother never really got over my father’s death,” he says finally. “Drank herself to death, the doctors said. But I always figured she died of a broken heart. She was a big believer in that whole one-true-love deal.”
Hawke looks at his friend, judges the pain in his eyes and decides it’s not the time for jokes. “Life separates people. Souls have a way of finding their way back together.”
Varric lifts his gaze from the amber liquid to Hawke’s eyes. “You know, that almost sounded sincere. Think you’ve been spending too much time with the choir boy, though,” he says, and then loses his humour as he sinks down in his chair with a sigh. “Life’s a piece of shit, Hawke.”
“And occasionally profitable,” he points out, and is rewarded with a throaty laugh.
“True. So here’s to the far and few between,” Varric salutes, lifting his glass in Hawke’s direction. Hawke clinks his own against it, and they drink to ward off the days.
Hawke never cried for his father. His mother needed him to be strong – to work with the chantry, arrange the cremation, thank those who had tried to help while his father wasted away. She certainly couldn’t do it, lost in her grief as she was.
And even if she could have, he needed to stand tall for Bethany, whose sadness wrecked what little control she had over ice and flame. He needed to be big, larger than life, so people would see only him, not her. Keep her hidden and safe.
And even if she’d been calm and controlled, Carver wasn’t. Carver wanted to hurt and hit and break, and he needed someone—anyone—to hate.
Hawke could do that.
He didn’t cry for his siblings, either. He didn’t have time. He had to keep everyone else safe.
Aveline cried. On the boat to Kirkwall. She curled up on the back of the boat, pretending to be sick, and cried for everything she’d lost from Ostagar onward. Dry, heaving sobs so deep Hawke wouldn’t have been surprised if she really did get sick.
He was—is—irrationally grateful for it.
Anders heals quickly and efficiently, but sometimes he gets frustrated.
“You don’t understand,” he says, shoving a hand through his hair only to get it tangled in the tie. He rips it out and stalks away, knotting and unknotting it until he can come back, hair back in its usual messy half-tail. “You don’t know the power I used to have.”
“What do you mean?” Hawke asks. And if it comes out somewhat cautious, he tells himself, it’s because Anders is clearly in a manic phase and the smallest things can set him off.
“I used to…” He holds out his hands, magic bristling from his fingertips. “I could rain fire from the sky, trap them in prisons made of their own minds, rend them from the inside out and turn them on each other. I could slow time itself.”
Hawke swallows. He’s not sure why. He also isn’t sure what to say, so he asks, “But you can’t anymore?”
“Justice took all that away,” he says, arms dropping like they’re lead. “Just as I took his sword and shield. I had to start again.”
Hawke watches him walk away, and thinks nothing much at all.
He’s killed so many people.
It bothered him, when he first realised he’d lost count. More than he suspects people think, but certainly less than he feels it should have.
He’s never been hung up about it, the way some people are. He didn’t get sick after his first kill, just stared down at the man for several long, panicked seconds before turning to make sure Carver was alright. He was used to death by then – he’d seen his father kill more than Malcolm knew. He understood that as long as it was for the right reasons, killing was… well, it was something you sometimes had to do.
But he used to count. Tried to remember their faces, tried to… tried to make sure they mattered.
He realises now that he stopped doing that when he fought Darkspawn for the first time. He didn’t want to look at them; didn’t want to think about it. It was only months later that he realised he’d slaughtered an entire human gang without looking even one of them in the eye.
He went to a bookseller, found a trashy adventure novel he later discovered was one of Varric’s early works. He took it home, went to bed, and didn’t stop reading until the numbers he hadn’t counted stopped pounding against his head.
In another world, another time, Hawke thinks he would be good at baking. And he feels like Merrill would be good at cooking. Together, they would make an unstoppable kitchen team, and he tells her this, just to see her laugh.
“I always kind of wanted to learn, though,” she says. “I used to watch Mahariel at the fire. He was so clever! He knew how to add all these spices and things. Tamlen used to tease him, but it was very impressive.”
“How did he learn?”
“Oh, I think he just decided to try it one day and see if it worked,” she says, and a sad smile creeps over her face, the way it always does when she talks about Mahariel and Tamlen. “He did that a lot, you know. Just… tried things and hoped for the best. They usually worked out, too – I could never figure out if it was luck.”
“You were close, weren’t you?”
“Closer than anyone else,” she admits. “As much as anyone could be. He was always distant, really. Meant for more than our clan, I think.”
She tells him about him in fits and starts, over the years. They speak more of Tamlen, and Hawke discovers it’s because Tamlen wasn’t as important to her. Mahariel was Merrill’s first love – the one she thought she would be joined with. But they’d had an argument only days before he and Tamlen discovered the eluvian. He was gone on bad terms.
And so was Tamlen, just in a different way. Her two friends in the clan, gone. It was only her and a shard that she didn’t know how to fix.
It’s the small things, Hawke thinks, that break us.
If he’s honest, Hawke never idolised his father the way Carver and Bethany did.
He admired the man; thought him larger than life. But they were so similar. Too similar. Not just in looks, but in personality. He didn’t resent Malcolm, not then and not now, but… but he knows there are things he does now that would have infuriated him if he saw it in his father. Things he tries so hard not to do.
Bethany was six when she discovered her magic. She burned herself on Mother’s tea and wound up freezing the whole table. She’d been in a right panic, of course, made worse by Mother’s panic at having another mage in the family. Father had sat her down and explained she was just special, told her they would train together. She would become something amazing.
Garrett looked at Carver, and wondered at the odd expression on his face.
It wasn’t until a year later, and many strange accidents, that he worked it out, and told Father. Carver was upset because he wasn’t special. He couldn’t freeze tables, or blast people with his mind, or heal sick animals, or do anything much at all.
All Carver needed was some reassurance. Even Garrett could see that. Just someone to say he didn’t need magic to be special. That he would be amazing in his own way. That he had a chance to find a path that Father had never been allowed to even dream of.
But Father, the utter bastard, just laughed. “Just as well. I don’t think I could handle keeping you from the templars as well!”
Anders doesn’t really like Hawke’s dog. He’s a cat person, he reminds them both. Big, slobbering messes with as much brain as muscle remind him of the Circle Templars.
Hawke raises an eyebrow, unimpressed with the comparison, and Anders smirks.
“You really do remind me of that friend I had – absolutely loved mabari,” he says. “In fact, the Commander used to have this saying: ‘I am a cat. Really.’ Usually meant something was hiding evil behind an innocent face.”
“Sounds about right,” Hawke drawls, and this time Anders is the one to raise an eyebrow.
“You know, sometimes I think the same of you. Pure evil behind a pretty face, just hidden under a solid layer of heroism.”
“Maybe. But at least when I catch rats and bring them to you, I have the decency to make sure they’re skinned and roasted, not just headless,” he points out. “I admit, there are better gifts, but I like to think my charm and good looks make up for it.”
“Hawke,” old man Barlin said, gesturing him over. “Got a package for your old man.”
“Of course,” he replied, and took it without thinking. It wasn’t until he was halfway home that he realised what Barlin had called him.
He can’t remember the first time he went out to work with his father, but he’d been called ‘the Little Hawke’ for years before then. No matter the village, it was rare for anyone to call him by given name. Even the family usually only did it in writing. So he’d been used to it.
But Barlin had left off the ‘Little’. For a moment, he’d just been ‘Hawke’.
“You’ve got the Hawke working your fields? Half your luck,” he overheard one day. “Is it true he can lift two sheep?”
“Only if there’s a pretty thing walking by to see it,” his most recent employer quipped. Hawke had flushed and hurried on. He hadn’t thought much of not being ‘Little’ anymore.
A year later, a templar stopped him in the market. “Easy, lad, you’re not in trouble. I just want you to pass on a message to Old Hawke,” he said, and grinned. “Your brother came by the chantry today; showed us a thing or two with that sword of his. Your father trained him up well.”
Hawke blinked, startled, then smiled. “Carver’s shaping up to be a fine warrior. Too bad his head’ll be too big to fit in the helmet.”
The templar laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Well, given he ended up falling over the sword and landing in the mud, I’d say it got a solid deflating today. But the Old Hawke did a good job – almost makes me wonder how you’d be in a fight.”
He shrugged vaguely, and the templar took his reluctance with a knowing smile.
“But I suppose the boy does need something of his own, doesn’t he? Don’t worry; we’ll keep him straight,” he promised, and then lifted a gauntleted hand in farewell. “You have a good evening, Hawke.”
Old Hawke, he remembers thinking as the man walked away. He lingered over it. Lingers over it now.
He’s not really sure when he became the Hawke in the eyes of Lothering.
Isabela sets down her bottle, and just looks at him. He looks back, waiting.
“I loved my mother, once,” she says. “After it happened… you know, I told myself I still loved her, even as I hated her. I got the two so confused, until I didn’t know what love and hate were. In the end, I decided neither were much use.”
“Well, all things considered…” he drawls, and her mouth curves slightly. He shrugs and sits back in his chair. “I think Carver was like that. We were brothers, and would have done anything for each other, but he hated me, all the same.”
She fiddles with her rings. “Did you hate him?”
“He was an annoying, self entitled little prick,” he says immediately, because he was. But he smiles warmly. “I couldn’t have asked for a better brother.”
Isabela looks at the table for a long time. They don’t often spend time in her room. He suspects most people only see Isabela’s room from the bed. But she’s clearly been working up to this conversation, and refuses to have it where Varric can hear.
“I miss her sometimes. I don’t know why.”
He nods, once. Her next words are so quiet, so far away, that they sound more like a confession.
“My name isn’t really Isabela.”
He blinks, but the non-sequitor is the only real surprise. He considers all possible responses for a moment, then says, “Do you know what my name is? My given name?”
She looks up, then frowns, her head tilting as she realises that despite four years and a thousand lifetimes, she doesn’t. He smirks at her bewildered stare.
“Do you think it matters?”
After a few moments, she gets the meaning, and laughs. “Oh, you. Get out of here before all that sap stains my table.”
The last clear memory he has of his father—not the sick old man, spluttering weakly into bloody rags, but his father, tall and strong and handsome—is of him coming down to sit beside him at the riverside.
He was in trouble at home – Bethany had snuck out to meet a boy, and Hawke had helped. Leandra had been furious. He was twenty and the one who kept them all fed and safe, yet she’d slapped him across the neck with a wet towel and banished him from her kitchen. Carver had smirked as he stormed out.
When his father came to the river, Hawke wasn’t really thinking much of anything, except of a boy that had passed through town recently. A travelling minstrel with clever hands and wind-chapped lips. He’d whispered against sun-roughened skin that the road could always take another pair of boots.
“You know why she’s angry,” Malcolm said as he sat down, grunting with the effort.
“Yes, I do,” he agreed. “But I’ll do it again. Bethany deserves to live her life, not be shut up like some prize doll.”
“You’re right, of course,” he sighed. “I didn’t leave the Circle just to make another for my children.”
Hawke didn’t react, though he felt his father’s gaze on him, heavier than usual. He wasn’t sure what was coming now. It could go either way.
But somehow, he still wasn’t surprised.
“It’s good that you take care of them the way you do,” Malcolm said quietly. “Your mother doesn’t always see them as anything but her babies. But Carver is becoming a man, Bethany a woman. They need someone who can see them for who and what they are, and look after them.”
Hawke lowered his eyes to the river, and let it wash away the image of his smiling minstrel. The memory of his laugh, and the way his fingers flickered in the evening light. The offer he’d made and the life not chosen.
“Hawke,” he says now, effortlessly, thoughtlessly. “My name is Hawke.”
Because some choices aren’t really choices at all.