Title: Golden If You Let Me
Summary: Marian Hawke learns how to live with it, and then she learns how to find her way home.
Rating: T
Words: 8k
Notes: Originally written for damalur in the Hightown Funk exchange in June 2016. She wanted the repercussions of Hawke left behind in the Fade in HLTA. The prompt mostly implied asking for Varric's POV but I'm a toddler who can't draw within the lines.
Recommended listening: "Meet Me in the Woods" by Lord Huron
"You tried to save the world, pup," Malcolm Hawke says to his oldest daughter after it's all over. "Look where it's gotten you."
Wildly, the only thing Marian can gather the concentration to focus on is how the sovereign-sized bruises on her knees and arms are shades of purple and orange, sluggishly oozing blood, and yet — no pain. She doesn't feel a thing.
"You've broken my staff," Malcolm observes. Indeed, her — his — weapon of choice is lying several feet from her right hand in pieces, splintered wood scattered and sparking from mana residue. "It's been in my family for seven generations. You've ruined it within a decade."
"Leave me," Hawke rasps, and she puts all her anger into the command to avoid feeling anything else — grief or hatred or — Maker forbid, actual shame. "Leave me be."
"Wishing won't make it so, love."
Guide me through the blackest nights. Steel my heart against the temptations of the wicked. Make me to rest —
Do you expect that to help? You've ignored the Maker for near thirty years.
Malcolm crouches into her line of sight. She ignores it, staring at the ground, concentrates on the dirt underneath her fingernails, observes the way it all seems to shift every few moments into new terrain beneath her knees — anything else.
Have a look around. He's long forgot about you, sweetheart.
"Your mother and sister say hello," her father says finally. She hears air in his voice, like a phantom, like she might scatter the illusion to the winds with a single breath. "I'll let them know what's happened to you, shall I?"
She stays still there, knelt on the ground with the rocks digging into her palms and breaths coming in quiet gasps, until she manages to convince herself the demon is no longer lingering. There will be others soon, keeping to the outskirts of her awareness, waiting for the next opportunity to swoop down and finish her off. Eventually the fog rises slowly, tendrils creeping around her ankles and knees, her waist and shoulders, and then it rises to her ears and swallows her whole.
"You all right, Hawke?" Varric plunks himself down in the chair next to her with a heavy grunt, ale sloshing over the sides of the mugs he drops to the table. "Take a nap upstairs, we've got a game running here."
Marian blinks awake to find her head pillowed on her arms. She'd dozed off. Isabela has twenty-three sovereigns to her seven. Fenris is on his third beer, and at the end of the table, Merrill is giggling with Carver over something, her brother looking flustered, but pleased — happier than she's seen him in years.
Hawke snatches her cards from the table. She remembers: she's seven cards up. Fenris is about to put down two serpents. She knows how this one ends. Varric will win the last of her silver, and he'll treat them all to another round, make everyone at the table promise to pay him back, and never collect on the debt. "I'm in."
Fenris tosses his two serpents to the center of the pile.
She plays to socialize, always, never for real winnings. The gods of fortune and gambling have never smiled on either the Hawkes nor the Amells, as Gamlen and Carver have proven countless times over. But Varric is her lucky charm if such things do exist, so she sticks close to his side on these types of nights, moreso than usual, and if he realizes what she's doing — well. He never seems to mind.
A curse from Fenris and a screech of laughter from Isabela as the cards are revealed. Varric will be walking upstairs tonight with a heavier coin-purse.
She'll join him. In the morning they won't talk about it.
"Now that's a play," Varric laughs in that throaty way of his that always makes her want to join in. His shoulder bumps into her arm as he reaches forward to collect; as soon as he's settled, without further ado, one of his hands yanks her neck down and he plants one unceremoniously onto her mouth — and instantaneously, the familiar contented feeling of home blows out like a candle.
Varric's mouth is warm and skilled and everything she'd imagined it to be. He knows what she likes and wants without needing to hear it vocalized or expressed — a predictable result of their years of easy familiarity and oversharing. Their kiss feels as natural as his companionship itself — but what she hadn't expected is the sickeningly hollow feeling that now expands within her, overwhelming enough to make her want to scream, suddenly, like a child.
It hits her like the force of a bomb: this isn't Varric, and she suddenly wants to cry. Because how could she forget — where she is, what she had done?
It didn't happen like this.
"Hawke?"
It didn't happen at all.
She doesn't realize the force with which she's shoved him away until Isabela says her name. Varric is flushed, brows raised in mild surprise, but he doesn't look offended. Of course he's not — it'd take a total war and two apocalypses to bother Varric enough to get him to move from his chair — but still, she's —
Mortified, suddenly. She can't stay here. She doesn't even know where here is.
"Take over for me." She shoves her cards across the table at Anders, and Carver shouts from down the table "You're leaving your luck withhim?" as she pushes her chair back, shoving her way up the stairs to Varric's suite. She'll be able to tell what's real and what's not there — she knows it as well as the pattern of her father's staff, has ran her presence through that room like her fingers have the grooves of her weapon —
She climbs the stairs, but it doesn't matter what she finds there.
Dwarves can't dream. She won't be seeing Varric ever again.
Where's Hawke?
Varric —
She was right behind us. Where is she?
The smell of burning flesh wakes her, and she snaps to in the middle of a dusty plateau. Fires are burning on the hills in the distance, the same hills she'd picnicked on as a child, the ones she'd led Bethany and Carver up and down when Father was too sick to join, when Mother was avoiding telling the twins just a little longer.
They're surrounded now. She has enough to process to realize there is a they at all, a we. A we that she would die for, a we that she'd move mountains to protect. And a large, hulking shadow erupts from the ground like a tower shooting up from the earth — an ogre looming overhead —
Five becomes four faster than time has any right to move, and then suddenly — suddenly her sister's not an is, but a was.
…Bethany?
The beast roars, and Marian — Hawke roars back. She's running.
Bethany. Don't be dead. Maker, please, PLEASE, don't be de —
When they'd all joked about dying around candlelight or campfire, death by dragonbreath or a stray bolt in the midst of battle, or death by their own folly, even —
When they'd talked about dying, she doubted any of them ever imagined it like this.
On quiet evenings in Lothering, when the harvest was good and winds from the west weren't too chilly for cloaks, Malcolm would take Marian up to the hill in the north, where they would watch the sun set over the fields.
The climb was her favorite part. It took an hour, on average, to reach the top from their farm; Marian always ran as fast as she could. Malcolm would carry his worn staff, passable enough as a walking stick in the dark, and take his eldest out of the house to let Leandra and the babes have their sleep. He always let her reach the top first, though she had only realized that after he was gone. Later, he wouldn't need to pretend; she'd hold her father's hand as she led him, frailer but no less determined, to what had become her favorite place in their small world.
"Bethany and Carver smell," she'd told him once, after he'd promised never to tell anyone what she was about to tell him, crossed his heart, and hoped to die. "They're little and they can't do anything. And they take up Momma's time. I miss when it was just us."
"Ah, Little Mary. You know it's not — "
"Don't call me that!"
Malcolm had grinned at that. She had never really been angry, ever, at the twins, not even at her mother's divided attention; but she cherished the time they had alone and felt, maybe, if Father understood just how lonely she got when Momma and he were busy with the twins and she was left alone, where the tall men in silver armor sometimes passed by and gave her curious looks as she played outside — maybe he could make things better.
"Mer," he'd said, which she tolerated only sometimes, and only when he wouldn't preface it with little, "Beth and Carver are part of the family now. Do you know what that means?"
"They're brother and sister."
"Very true. But it also means they're part of our team now."
"We're not a team."
"No? We work together to gather the wheat and shuck the corn. You help your mother milk the cows every morning. We team up to practice magic every dawn." He spread his arms wide, nearly unsettling her from where she sat on his lap, but she hung tight. "Now our team's just a little bit bigger."
"I don't want it so big," she'd insisted. "I like it before."
"I think," Malcolm said, and when his voice went low and soft, she knew it was time to be quieter: "that you'll like them well enough if you give it a chance, sweetheart. I know they like you."
No longer feeling so petulant, she looked down at the ground and, for lack of another complaint, pulled out a handful of grass from the earth. It was getting harder to see; the sun was low over the horizon, but she knew he would lead her back safe. She always hoped that maybe he'd let her light the path back home with her own fire, this time, but he never did. "No they don't," she finally managed. "Carver spit up on me this morning."
"Yes, I saw. I think he was trying to share his breakfast with you."
"Gross! Da!" she'd shrieked, and he laughed. She used to think it must be the best sound for miles around, on that hill. Her father always lit up the room with his laughter.
"They're little now. You were once that small."
"That's not true."
"It is so! I could hold you in one hand." He grinned and tweaked her nose. "They'll get bigger, sweetheart. But we need to take care of them until they can take care of themselves. Like Ma and I take care of you. That's what having a brother and sister means. Do you understand?
"I don't want a brother or sister," she'd whispered. He leaned down close to hear her. "I want a friend."
Her dad always gave the best hugs. She was certain. "I'm your friend." He pressed a kiss to her forehead, her hair, her nose. "And so is Ma. And Carver and Beth. But you can be a sister too."
"And a team."
"And we're a team. The best one there is."
When she fell asleep on that hill, he'd carry her home, when she was still small enough to fit on his back. Later, she would learn how to lead him home instead, and he'd lean on her in return, the entire way down.
You're a failure. And your family died knowing it.
Hawke revisits that night several times. Perhaps it revisits her. Perhaps she hasn't left the spot she'd first fallen, mana flaring, charging into the Nightmare, and now she's only ash and rubble in the remains of that monster's lair. Perhaps scattered memories in the Fade, barely held together through sheer will and waning magic, are all that's left of the Champion of Kirkwall.
It can't be her father himself. It can't be Varric, or Carver, or any of them. She knows it, but it needs reminding, so she tells herself again and again, and once more, to prevent herself from hoping. For what, she doesn't know. Contact, or communication, or —
(Unbidden, her imagination runs wild at the thought of an impossible rescue — )
— No matter the time and distance, she cannot reach any of them again. She's given the Inquisition all she could already. Fenris and Isabela will wait for her at the rendezvous for two weeks, and then they will understand. Carver will just have to make do on his own now.
Malcolm Hawke does not exist here. And Hawke no longer exists at all.
When she moved to Hightown, she had continued the tradition. The hills surrounding Kirkwall were bigger, the dangers of traveling alone more threatening; the city was walled in by mountains and valleys that might kill her as surely as the bandits and beasts that roamed them. She traveled alone anyway.
One evening, Fenris joined her.
She was on the southwestern edge of the Wounded Coast, camped on a ledge overlooking the main road by several meters. To her left lay the winding, rocky path back into the city; to the right, the road flattened between the mountainside and lead out into the wilderness, to the Planasene Forest and Cumberland and farther still, to the chapels and castles of Orlais, and what lay in the no-man's-land beyond.
She could go.
Malcolm was six feet beneath the smoldering debris they'd once called home. Bethany was bones and dust on an anonymous mountain that she'll never see again. Carver was dead, or as near it as any living thing had any right to be.
Leandra was —
She couldn't even look at her mother's body, after — after. That's what this was, just the after.
Marian knew she wasn't an Amell; she wouldn't pretend nearly so well as Bethany could have. She had already made a name as Hawke by the end of their first year in Kirkwall — Hawke, singular. A strong name, more than one stranger had remarked. Very Fereldan. Symbolic, it seemed, though it always felt like her father's title, never hers.
She'd fought for family, for legacy, and both of their names. She'd lost. She'd led them all into Kirkwall, risked all of their lives on rumors and strangers' coin, and she'd walk out with more gold than she could ever need. Alone.
A figure was coming up the mountainside.
Despite common assumption, she knew very well how to stay still and quiet when she needed to be. Living on the run had developed into several natural talents Kirkwall valued in its thieves, mercenaries, and scavengers. She was none of the above, not any longer, though habits died hard, and Hightown had hardly made a noblewoman out of her yet.
She grasped her staff tighter. Two hidden blades were stuffed within the backs of her boots.
The traveler moved silently at a steady pace, neither strolling nor under chase. They carried a tall staff or broadsword — it was hard to make out the handle in the dimming sunset — and no pack. As they grew closer, she frowned at the sound of those footsteps; they weren't the sound of leather or rubber crunching on sand and gravel.
In the dying light, she suddenly recognized pale, shaggy hair —
"Fenris?"
He drew his sword so fast she would've startled if she weren't so used to his warrior's reflexes in battle. "Show yourself."
She found it in herself to smile, suddenly, though she knew he couldn't see. "Relax. I'm friendly."
"…Hawke?"
"There's room if you'd like to come up."
There was a long pause in which Fenris didn't move. She suspected he was weighing the likelihood of being attacked or mugged; she supposed, briefly, that she could be a demon disguising herself as a friendly voice in the dark, though in her opinion, a malevolent being from the Fade springing a trap on innocent passersby surely would have tried a little harder.
He finally sheathed his sword and climbed up the steep hillside, around to her left. She offered her hand to help him reach up.
As he settled, exhaling a heavy breath of air, she took her canteen from her bag. The ale was days old, the Hanged Man's would-be finest, and she had already downed most of it, but Fenris took it anyway. "Where are you headed so late in the evening?"
He took a large swig, and seemed to debate telling her. Eventually, he said, "Away."
Hawke glanced at him. She could barely make out his profile any better with him sat next to her. On any other evening, she mused, she might have pressed him for specifics, tried to convince a change of heart, questioned his decision to travel alone in the dark. She was too tired to attempt any of them. Instead, she heard herself saying, "Anywhere in particular?"
Fenris was quiet for an even longer moment. She would've been surprised if he had an answer for her, and sure enough: "You tell me, Hawke." But the low sound of his chuckle surprised her. "Where are you headed?"
"Over the side of this cliff, the rate I've been drinking."
"I'd invite you to join me, though I would not volunteer myself to carry you."
"Rather unfair of you. I am not that drunk."
"You haven't yet realized you called me 'Carver' just now."
A beat. "No, I didn't," she said slowly. "I said 'Fen - '"
Quietly: "You didn't, Hawke."
Silence seemed the only appropriate response.
They sat in a calm, though not quite peaceful sort of silence. Fenris, when he chose to surprise or entertain her visits, was always strange but welcome company. She could count on one hand the number of people who had asked how she had felt leaving Lothering, and he was one of the few she had ever confessed to aloud that she occasionally thought of leaving Kirkwall for older roots.
Or perhaps new ones, this time.
"I… received word from my sister."
Hawke startled enough to forget her somber thoughts of the past few hours. "Varania?" She frowned. "I didn't realize you were in contact."
More shifting; she had sense left in the haze of alcohol to tell he was uncomfortable. "Not until recently."
"You're leaving to meet her."
"…No," he said at last in a sigh. "But I cannot stay here regardless."
"I'd be greatly interested to hear your reasoning behind this."
"Danarius hunts for me still," Fenris said sternly, as though she'd forgotten. She had a flash of guilt upon realizing that it might have seemed to him that way, traipsing about the city as they did, with far less care for subtlety and as they once had. Half of the city had heard of the foreign, tattooed elf that the Champion kept company with by now.
Then I go to him, Fenris had told her, the very first night they'd met. I will not live with a wolf at my back.
"And you are aware I have no family," Fenris began suddenly, and the tone of his voice sounded too little like personal narration and far too much like sympathy for her liking. "But you — "
"I've got people counting on me, is that right?"
There was the sound of movement; she figured he probably gestured, or moved his arm to better grip the pommel of his broadsword lying across his knees. "There is nothing for me here." Another shift. "But you should return home, Hawke."
She couldn't see him in the dark, but she looked over anyway. She had a funny suspicion he was looking right back at her. "So should you."
"I have nothing keeping me in Kirkwall, or anywhere. Danarius is — " The sound of a swallow. "We've discussed this. The longer I stay — "
He didn't finish. But Hawke knew, or she thought she did. She recalled the Fog Warriors, the events of his past they hadn't spoken of since, and she doubted he would again. If Danarius arrived to take him, asked him to turn his blade on his companions, and he found himself unable to resist as he'd been resisting these last seven years, she might —
No, she wouldn't run from the fight. She'd never willingly entered a war in her life, and she'd sworn she never would, but for family — she would be there.
"I know why you'd think there's nothing for you here," she said, or wishes she had said. She can't remember anymore. What had come next? "But I hope you know that's not true." She put a hand on his shoulder, and felt touched when it isn't shaken off. "My dog would miss you."
A pause, and then a breath of incredulous snorting. "…I would miss you too, Hawke."
"I do hope it never comes to that."
Eventually — and this part she remembers less clearly, through touch and muscle memory only — Fenris gathered his sword and rose. She thought he had been leaving for good when he easily reached down, clasped her hand, and pulled her upright. He let her lean on his arm, the entire way back.
" — not how I expected, but it's written down now," Varric grunts. "Publisher's already approved the manuscript." He closes the book on his lap as a large feather quill scratches away at the parchment on his desk. Hawke watches it move without a hand or guidance, and notices the ink — a deep, dark red. Blood.
Behind her, Varric is bare-chested, and she knows without looking that he is staring up at her from the comfort of his bed, waiting for a response. His suite at the Hanged Man. The lights are very low and she's dressed in full armor, clutching her staff. It's broken; the top is nowhere to be found. Had she left it in Darktown? The Deep Roads? Her father's grave?
"Carver's the last Hawke, now. D'you think he'll fail too?"
Come home, Hawke.
She has none. She doesn't know the meaning of the word.
Come home.
The Champion of Kirkwall is alone on a moonless night. She walks through a ruined cobbled street; of what long-lost city, it seems difficult to say. She sees fire at Ostagar, all its spiraling towers and trenches carved from the rugged landscape, set ablaze the day she'd arrived to pull her brother from the war; a moment later, she's walking through the rubble at Lothering, and dust on the far horizon foretells the darkspawn horde stampeding ever closer; and now she's walking through Kirkwall alight, the most familiar, the most painful. The Amell mansion is dust, the Chantry and Viscount's Keep and hundreds of familiar alleys, roads, and names along with it.
Now the ruined stones might be Skyhold. Does it matter?
The storyteller isn't anywhere to be found.
Damn you, Hawke. You were meant to be the one to outlast me.
Once, she finds herself in the captain's cabin. Isabela's tour, like she always promised. The admiral herself is lying over her bed, laughing at Hawke's newest bag of souvenirs from her travels. Isabela shares her Orlesisan sweetcakes and tosses coins from out of her new feathered hat across the room. Most roll across the wooden floor; some land across the map that spans the length of the desk — where she'll go next. "Want to pick our next locale, Hawke?"
"Carver always wanted to see Nevarra," Hawke's voice says.
"I didn't ask what Carver wanted," Isabela would reply. "I asked where you're going next."
"Wherever it all takes me next, Bela. That's how it works."
"There's a world out there, Hawke. Pick one place you haven't seen." Isabela crosses the room to stand by Hawke's side; she puts her arms around her neck from behind, interlocking her fingers, and Hawke leans back against her. She misses her desperately. "Cross the Amaranthine Ocean? We'll hunt Fenris's magister friend down in Minrathous and string him by his ears. We'll take Merrill to the Dales. I'll take you to Rivain. Close your eyes and put your finger down. It's that simple, sweetheart."
Hawke stands over the map. The wide expanse of Ferelden, scattered with small trees and miniature mountains, stretching into the unknown lands below the border; the rolling hills of Orlais, all castles and grandeur even in its farmland; the craggy hills of the Anderfels; the jagged landscape and spiraling towers of Tevinter. She closes her eyes, flips her coin onto the page, and then opens them again.
The map is gone. Isabela, and the cabin, and the seas themselves, are gone.
Did I ever tell you about the time when —
Wait. Shit. You were there for that one, too. I can't believe I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel for you, Hawke.
My favorite's always been that time we managed to sweet-talk those assassins out of their contract. That night they came calling to your estate, past the twelfth bell. Nearly gave Bodahn a heart attack when he walked in that next morning, saw us all gathered 'round your mother's entertaining room. You know they became regulars at our table in the Hanged Man later, but did you know three of them joined my network later? All 'cause you decided to put your knife down to exchange pleasantries when they burst in through the windows. You just had that effect on people.
I wish I'd said something.
On her last night in Skyhold, after fighting off demons and templars and the Seeker herself, in the midst of a bizarre adrenaline high that she believed, strongly, could lead them to fighting off the whole damn world, they had lounged in his suite and downed a bottle and a half of whiskey between them. They had sat in the dark and silently wondered for how much longer this all would go on.
"Let me know when you're heading out to the Approach," he had said. She couldn't see him from her position; she was sprawled on his bed, facing the dark ceiling, and his voice came from the armchair. She'd thought he was asleep. "We'll do this again before you go. Make it a party. I'll invite Buttercup." His speech was slurred beyond what most would deem a recognizable language, but not for her. "Or the Sparkler. He can hold his liquor." A pause. "Or just the two of us. S'nice like this."
"Varric — " Hawke tried to push herself up on her elbows to look at him, but the effort was too much. She flopped back down, and now her head was spinning. "I thought you — tomorrow." She stumbled over the words, hesitating with the headache. "Change of plans. We're going tomorrow."
"What?" A scuffle of movement across the room told her he was struggling to get up too, but soon there were footsteps; he was apparently successful, and after a few moments of shuffling, his voice was above her head. "Hey. Hey. Haw — Champion."
"Mm." She opened her eyes, but couldn't see him in the dark; just a familiar shape looming over the edge of the bed, looking down at her. A calloused hand touched her face, casually at first at her cheek, then searching — it found her nose, rubbed the bridge. "What in the blazes are you doing?"
"That scar," his voice said from above her. "From the Arishok. You still have it."
"That's the… the thing about scars." A moment. "You can see it even in the dark?"
"First thing I noticed when you showed up," he said quietly, as if to himself. "I mean." A whumph of motion down by her hip shifted her position on the bed; he had sat down heavily. She could tell he was barely keeping himself upright. "We've got good healers here. Th'best. Get it… healed. By the healers."
"Varric," she laughed, and suddenly it was so funny, because she'd had it for years now, and of all the things she was ashamed to carry around with her, a bloody scar of a nose that had never quite healed right was not one of them. "It's a part of my lmage now. I look fuckingformidable."
"You looked — fucking dead, is what you looked like."
Her laughter died immediately. She tried to look up at him again; this time, her elbows were steadier, but she still couldn't make him out. Just a presence at the edge of her hip. His hand had relocated to her knee, she suspected not out of comfort for her, but for himself.
"That day, Hawke. I started… Andraste's ass. I started — I was halfway through writing up your damn eulogy. Blondie didn't — he didn't think you'd make it either. There was… there's nothing else for it. The story was over."
She had no worldly idea what he was talking about anymore, other than a lingering weight of private guilt that he seemed to have carried since the day she became the Champion of his wicked, rotten, beloved hometown. How he still managed to convince himself of his culpability for that mess, for all her best efforts at convincing him otherwise, she was at a loss. It reminded her, if she was honest with herself — and she rarely tried to be — it reminded her of the times he had argued back at her, once called her childish. It had been one of their few fights in the entirety of their companionship, those later years in the city when everyone's nerves were fast to catch fire out of the simmering fears and threats that began to engulf all of Kirkwall. How could the fall of a city be the fault of a single scoundrel? he'd said. A city's civil war the sole trigger for the end of the world? Don't be stupid. Stay safe, for an evening. Come back.
"Don't go to Adamant," he said. "The Inquisitor… fuck it, Hawke. She has that warden. Be selfish. Stay here."
He'd make the request at the time, the real Varric; she's certain he had, but not aloud. Never for her to hear.
"The story's over, Hawke. Stay for a little while longer."
"No," she says here now, in this moment, and nearly chokes on it. "I think it's far past time I take my leave, thank you."
The Seeker suggested I come. I nearly told her to — well, to piss off, to be honest. Then Ruffles, ah — she said she was going to the service, and she'd be thinking of you, and I didn't really think about it. I just… followed.
I don't know if I believe in this shit. It's a great story, the Andraste thing, but you couldn't catch me praying dead in the water. But I believe in favors, you know, and in keeping your word.
It occurs to her that she must have long escaped the Nightmare. These visions aren't tormenting, or monstrous, or hurtful any longer; not any more than time alone in her own mind is, or was. Had been.
It must have let me go, is her first thought on this epiphany.
It might actually be dead, is her second.
I've survived it this long, is her third, and the one that brings her to her knees — that she still has knees at all in this place is a surprise, and she knows it shouldn't be. She's been alive longer than she's realized.
She opens her eyes and looks up.
Hawke stands in the ruins of a monstrous corpse. The ribs of the beast reach toward the sky like a cavernous mouth, black limbs against the Fade's emerald hues, dripping the landscape in filth and gore. Spider legs the size of tree trunks are crumbling to dust. Above, there's the familiar fog of the sky, or what passes for it in this Maker-forsaken place — she's reminded of how they arrived: tumbling from above, landing upside-down.
Up. Up and out. Up and through.
When feeling returns to her fingertips, she realizes: her father's staff is clutched in her right hand. Intact.
And then: I've life enough in me to survive this yet.
In her mind's eye, she sees dimming flashes of Corypheus taunting —
You've struck me down once, Champion, and I've risen again, greater. How do you expect to survive me next?
She hears Meredith declaring —
Mages are a threat to those we hold dear. Observe this one's efforts. Look at what she's done to her family.
She hears Anders pleading —
We can achieve real change. Just five minutes of your time. Please.
She sees her family —
We'll show them, Hawke. We always do.
She sees —
In the depths of the Fade, the last vestiges of the long-dead demon begin to rot. Marian Hawke begins to pull her mind back together.
Look. We owe each other more than two idiots should be allowed. I'll write the rest of it off if you just —
One last favor, Hawke. For me.
She travels.
Hawke is a wanderer here, even now: to Lothering, in search of refuge; to Kirkwall, in search of safety; to the wilderness, in search of freedom; to Skyhold, in search of answers. Yet she's never traveled a map so profound as the Fade, with its shifting scenery and the silent, furtive spectators, undoubtedly watching her from all sides, waiting for another crack to appear.
She is approached several times by spirits in animal form. Quiet August rams and curious fennecs that seek her out; what she suspects are spirits of friendship, or maybe kindness. Once, a halla, and she resolves to tell Merrill about it, if she ever gets the chance. She turns them all away, grateful for the company. But she's seen where that path leads.
Hawke recalls the elven apostate that had accompanied them from Skyhold, the Fade specialist. He'd long gone through the portal with Varric by the time the Inquisitor had made her choice — but his words find her again now, rattle around in her head, float through the fog:
The Inquisitor opened a rift. We came through — and survived.
Doors can be used from both ends.
"I don't need you to die for me, Hawke," Varric had told her, only a week before the Chantry went up in flames. He says it again now. "I want you to live for me. Shit," he mutters, as if to himself, "Bet nobody's ever asked you that before — do you even know how?"
"Not sure," she had replied, or maybe she hadn't. It's as real as anything else now, this memory, which is to say, perhaps not at all. It doesn't matter anymore. It's what she needs to hear. "You?"
"I've kept a candle lit from the day we met," Varric says quietly, and she's too caught up in the moment, attempting to parse the meaning of his metaphor, to notice that her heart beats a little faster, after that. "That's as good as you're getting out of me tonight."
"Mhm. And the night after that?"
"Maybe if you buy me a round and ask very nicely two nights in a row, I'll be in more of a sharing mood."
"Perhaps I should bring over that bottle of Gordon Brandy I nicked from Fenris's cellar and let you win three rounds of Grace, instead?"
"Now you're talking."
"Master Tethras, Mister Storyteller, Head of the Esteemedly Exiled House Tethras — "
"Yes, Hawke?"
"I seem to have forgotten in which direction my house is located."
"Bed's over there, sweetheart."
Dwarves don't dream.
I heal the hurt, the boy at Skyhold had muttered to her one evening in the rafters. She had been pleasantly tipsy, waiting for the Red Jenny archer to tromp back upstairs with another round of ale, and Varric had disappeared somewhere downstairs to gather that mage from Tevinter for a couple of games —
But that boy…
Varric is… kind. He calls me "kid." Ink like salve for a wound, his stories comfort. He helps like I can't.
Do you have any dreams of your own, Cole?
Dreams are real, and not real. The Fade is real, and… not. I listen to the others, what they want. Home. Forgiveness. Help. Love. I try to help.
"I know, Cole," Hawke says aloud in this place, where the light shines from the sky itself, where her dreams are real, too. Where she's at her strongest, and hadn't even realized. "Thank you."
If the spirit is there — if he ever was — he doesn't respond.
The Witch finds her.
"Well, well," says a familiar figure, and Hawke's memories interlock with the present; she is standing on the edge of the Wilds near the fresh corpse of an ogre, near Bethany's final resting place, just as she is standing here in the Fade now, a decade later, in a hell of her own design. "What have we here?"
"Nothing I'm sure you haven't expected." Hawke stands a little straighter, leaning against her father's staff. Her staff. It's somehow easier to feel like herself, like a living, breathing person again with this woman who she barely knows, who saved her and tricked her and disappeared into the sky. She had been there at the beginning, as much as there could be one, of how her life had come to be; she had been there at the end of Lothering.
Hawke refuses to think of this as an ending. That leaves one option.
"Little insight into a writer's mind, Hawke. Endings are always the hardest part," Varric had told her once. She was sprawled across the bed in his suite, himself at his writing desk, scribbling away at his latest chapter — of his latest serial, or a new romance, she never bothered to discover. It seemed as though he'd been working on it since the day they met. Like most things with Varric, it was one particular evening and somehow all of them at once.
"I'd've thought the opening would be the most difficult," Hawke replied, voice muffled from his sheets. "Never know where to start."
"You start at the beginning, of course," Varric drawled, and she threw a pillow across the room at him. Laughing, he knocked it aside. "Beginnings are flexible. We don't really have beginnings. You know, as people. The only thing a beginning needs is a hook. It's the middle that matters."
"But the endings are the hardest?"
"Well, they should be." The sound of a quill scratching out several lines. The tinkering of the inkwell as he dipped the nib inside. "Middles are the best part of a story, anyway. It's where all the juicy bits happen. Nobody gives a shit about your ending if they haven't wet their pants by the middle."
"Fascinating imagery. Are you writing a ballad about someone's bowel movements, perchance? Aveline's?"
"A true comedian you were never, Hawke. My point stands." He was silent for several moments, and the scratch of his quill told her he was simply busy writing his latest down. She let herself go back to dozing lazily, spread-eagle across his small mattress. Her hands and feet reached just over the edge of his dwarven king-size bed, a fact that she never let him forget, and one she'd never minded, still, in all the years he's let her sleep in it.
"There. Now, I wasn't done with my point."
"The ending there's been giving you that much trouble, has it?"
"What, this?" He looked back at her. "Nah. I won't reach the end of this one for a good long while. But that's the reason why they're so hard — because people don't really end. Understand? Not even after we're dead."
"One can't be more finis than dead, Varric."
"I'll take that bet," he said, and he was laughing, but with the type of hardened edge that told her to sit up and pay attention; his voice said seriousness in a way that she felt she wouldn't understand, but he didn't expect her to. "What do you think I've been working on these past few years?"
He finished his line, rolled up the parchment, and turned around in his chair to smile at her, like he always looked at her when they were alone together: as if they had stumbled across each other one rainy day in the marketplace after several long years apart. Far from home, finding it again. "You deserve to live forever."
"You surely knew it wouldn't be simple," the Witch tells her as they've been walking for — for several minutes now, or hours, at least. "As you must know it's hardly a matter of my plucking you from here, and dropping you over there."
"I'd be surprised if you'd be so helpful," Hawke replies, to which her companion laughs: a sharp, crying sound, that reminds her wild of a bird of prey. "I don't think that's why you're here, though."
"No?"
Hawke stops walking. They're standing on a thin path carved into a vast, forest-green alp, looking down over a broad valley of farmland and lost spirits. It reminds her of the southern hills of Ferelden, the dusty border between the Hinterlands and the plains of Lothering. It's as real as you want it to be, Marian, she tells herself.
For a minute she lets herself believe it's real — that she's back on that familiar hill, and that one familiar face, just someone, anyone, might be waiting for her at the bottom, when she comes across to the other side.
"Has your moment come yet?" Hawke turns to look up at the mountain. The tip disappears above, into the green skies. "Or am I still leaping?"
Flemeth chuckles and doesn't respond.
They continue for several miles, yet Hawke doesn't feel fatigued. The Witch is waiting for her to say it, but Hawke lets herself be selfish — desperate for company, another real presence, for just a few moments longer. She thinks maybe this woman — this mother, she remembers — she would understand.
Hawke says finally, "I should find my own way back, I think."
"I knew there was something about you." Her form changes once again. Her black wings grow long and spread across the width of the mountainside. "Perhaps, if you've truly paid such close attention, you'll find I've left behind a trail to lead you back."
"You don't miss Lothering," Carver had told her, not unkindly, back when they were living at Gamlen's. "I know you. You're enjoying this."
"Sleeping on straw mats and scrounging for pennies on the streets? You know me so well, brother. I'm chuffed at all of this" — She gestured to the inside of what's now the Amell family home — "Really."
"That's not what I meant. The — friends you've made, here." He said the word like a Templar might say blood magic. Marian had to remind herself that they weren't his friends, not yet, and he was the youngest of them all. She was his older sister, and that meant protecting him emotionally, too. "They follow you like geese."
"Like herding cats, more like. Geese don't take a swipe or steal each other's toys as often."
"Sister, please." Carver narrowed his eyes. "You know this is only temporary. We're going back, soon as Ferelden's up on its feet."
Her hands paused where they'd been polishing her staff. She was seated by the edge of the fire; he was standing against the bedroom doorway, arms crossed, looking uncomfortably large for the small space. My warrior's all grown up, their mother liked to say (and Bethany always used to make a mocking face behind his back, and Marian would stifle a laugh — Maker, she missed her, she missed the both of them so much it hurt).
You've done your father so well, Leandra would say. Both of you. I'm the proudest mother in the world.
(Hawke almost wants to hear it aloud, even if the voice wouldn't be — couldn't be — real, not in this place.
She doesn't voice it aloud. She keeps her desires and pride and temptation to herself, and she puts one foot in front of the other.)
"Home is where family is, Carver," Marian had said to him then, to his predictable scoff. Before he turned and left, however, she made sure to add, "Family's who you want it to be."
He looked up at her from where his gaze had lingered at the floor. "You can't possibly — you barely know them."
"Like we barely know Gamlen?"
Carver did turn at that, and stomp out the door into the dusty Lowtown afternoon. Offended, no doubt, at some slight she had made at the honor of the Hawke-Amell family, or a misunderstanding of his attachment to either branch of their tree — something she'd likely have to smoothen over later, yet she couldn't be sorry for saying it.
For all their mother's efforts, she knew Kirkwall wouldn't be an ending, or at least not hers. When she envisioned her life after the expedition was over, with all the gold Varric assured them would be theirs in time, she came up empty. Five years, ten years from now; it was all too easy to imagine herself still searching for that one place to do it, to stick her roots into the ground decisively, definitively, and build after a lifetime of running. Of leaving.
She'd stepped into someone else's home by coming to Kirkwall. Her mother's. Gamlen's. Varric's. It was hard to imagine ever being so attached to a place that it became prioritized over things like safety, or freedom, or — or doing the right thing, the kind thing, say for instance for your mother, who missed her birthplace desperately and hadn't seen it in two decades.
She didn't regret coming to Kirkwall, not really. Not even here, living like this, somehow managing to go on in this world without words like father and sister in her life anymore. Words that somehow had so much more weight, now that she had none.
It wasn't that her mother and brother weren't enough.
It was just that sometimes —
A flare of magic sparked at the end of her staff; she snatched her fingers away from the tip, mana catching. Across the room, lying in front of the fireplace, the dog lifted his head and whined at the air crackling. She was lucky the house was otherwise empty; Marian didn't quite feel like putting up with an afternoon of muttering and sharp looks from her uncle.
Her brother was correct about one thing, however: they wouldn't stay here forever. Couldn't, really, though not for the reasons he believed. She just simply wasn't made for this.
Until she found her answer, her spare bag would always be packed, and waiting by the door.
And sometimes, she sees Isabela's ship in the distance.
When it's spotted, it disappears in a flash of green light just over the horizon.
Now, Hawke staggers. Malcolm would tell her to keep going, keep making it happen, it's just over the hill, but Maker. Maker have mercy. It's still so far away.
(She's so tired.)
And nobody would blame her if she didn't make it back. Nobody was staying the night up, listening for her knock on the door. To rest, here, for a minute — the Maker would understand. They'd all understand, if they could ever know.
(Imagine the sequel, Champion, Varric would say to her. He had taken to call her that occasionally, even — or perhaps especially — when he knew it would only serve to piss her off. I'd write this chapter. You'd tell me I'm full of shit. I'd revise. You'd editorialize. But when I send the manuscript to my publisher in ten or thirty or fifty years, do you want this chapter to divide critics, or do you want it to sell ten thousand copies across lower Thedas?)
The road is still long, stretch into that dark and murky distance, and the hill has begun to flatten.
She must believe there's someone waiting at the end.
Hey.
I'm sorry. I haven't written in a while.
I wrote to Bartrand, after he
I've written to the others. I haven't heard back yet, but I'm sure they know. Just have that feeling.
Like this feeling I have that tells me
I don't feel as though it's over, Hawke. Or maybe I just don't want it to be. I can't think about how long it's been. It doesn't seem right that I'm here and you're not. So I have to believe that you're out there, somewhere, doing whatever you need to do. I don't need to know where. You don't ever have to tell me. That's probably most likely. Just like I'm probably going to set this parchment afire not long after I finish this bottle.
This is making me look bad. I don't write drunk. It's nothing more than usual, promise. Some nights I just need it.
(I'm fine, by the way. Thank you for asking.)
The world hasn't really noticed you're not in it anymore. But don't take it personally — I suppose I'll just have to remember enough for the rest of them. It's less of a burden than you might think, carrying someone's legacy, the weight of their narrative, entirely on your own shoulders. Hell, with you, it's an honor. I wish I'd told you that.
There are a lot of things I wish.
Ah, fuck it. Spilled beer on the page.
Here's what I suppose I've been skirting around for the entirety of this letter, plus an entire bestselling book:
I'm sure I'm not the same as I was when we first met, and all of that rubbish, so thank you. I'm not so far gone to start reminiscing on the good old days, because
I don't miss the good old days. I just miss you.
My point. My point is that I've learned a lot with you, even though you never tried to teach anybody anything. But maybe the most important thing I've learned is this: That joke of a demon can't keep you for long, because I can't stand the thought of you locked away forever. Not in the Gallows, not in the Fade. You'll find a way out, even if it's not here. Even if it's moving on.
Don't take too long, wherever you're going. I know you'll get where you need to be. You always do.
Safe travels.
Varric
Take care of the Hawkes, her father had told her, and she had tried. Bring us home, Carver had said, and she had failed. Defend our city from evil, the Knight-Captain had demanded, and she had done her best.
Do not be afraid to leap, an old woman had suggested. She couldn't be certain of that one, not yet.
Hawke, Varric had said — not in words, never aloud, but often enough that she can imagine it so clearly, so vividly, along with his trademark scent of leather and ink and the way he'd hold his pen like a royal staff: Hawke. There's a chair for you. There's room at the hearth for you. Come home.
She's still not sure what that word means. But it does have a name.
Hawke stumbles close to the end, catching her weight on her hands amongst a path of scattered stones. Several blow around the dusty landscape from the wind howling through the glowing green rift that's spitting and crackling several feet above the ground. In the space between it and the vast emptiness of the Fade, she catches brief glimpses of howling snow and swaying trees; or is it sandstorm picking up across the barren deserts out west? When she tries to make them out, they disappear.
The impact with the ground has drawn blood across her palms; cuts that hurt. The old, familiar scar on her nose begins to ache again.
Where she'll arrive, the state she'll be in after passing through to the other side —
She doesn't patch herself up. She stands. She doesn't wait for a sign or signal, and Hawke walks out of the Fade, alone.
"…Hawke? Is that you?"