It's been a week. Maybe two. Maybe it's only been a couple days and Hawke is finally starting to go completely batty, which she thinks is probably long overdue.
The Deep Roads are endless, sprawling from claustrophobic, ominously slippery tunnels to massive dwarven highways flanked by lazily pulsing streams of lava, then back to more tunnels, on and on and on until her boots are filled with rocks and she's sweating and covered in dust and slime and spider guts. She joked early on that she was thinking of summering here, after they were richer than the Maker. She hasn't made as many jokes, lately.
She has no idea how Bartrand determines when it's time to make camp and bunker down for the night. At first, she thinks it must be some innate dwarven sense, something that tingles in his nose or his ears start ringing. But Varric seems just as muddled up about it as she is, so it can't be that. Still, she wills herself to have faith that they're not all flying by the seats of their very very dirty pants.
Hawke feels like she's been awake for a year when Bartrand finally barks that it's time to stop for today, tonight, whatever. She finds the nearest rock to sit on and flings her boots off, groaning. Huge Dog snuffles at her feet a moment, then lays down right on top of them. He's a good boy.
"Well, shit." Varric sighs, plopping unceremoniously on the ground next to her.
"I hope you know I could kill you right now." She says, giving him her sunniest smile. She will remind him of this until they see sunlight.
"Yeah, well, you'll have to fight me for it." He says, same as always. He pulls his hair free from its tie, scattering dust and little chips of stone from a rather surprising and almost deadly cave-in earlier.
"Too much work, then." Hawke says, sullen, leaning back and slouching against the cave wall. As far as caverns go, this certainly isn't the worst they've stayed in. The first one Bartrand had deemed suitable was actually a deepstalker nest. They had been, quite rudely, she thinks, awoken by a pack of the horrid little beasts nipping at their toes and Huge Dog slinging one around by the neck. Maker, the sound of it. The worst part, truly, was trying to wrangle the damn thing out of the mabari's mouth after he'd quite taken to it as a chew toy.
She watches as everyone sets to work bunking down for the night. Bodahn's boy dutifully, with unabashed delight, sets up the little rune circles around the cave that serve as their fires. It hadn't taken long at all to figure out that burning firewood in an enclosed cavern was terribly ill-advised, what with the ventilation systems engineered by the ancient dwarves long crumbled and shut. Anders wanders through the huddled groups, healing bumps and scrapes and twisted ankles until all is mended and he can slump on his bedroll and grumble under his breath that this is exactly why he left the Wardens in the first place. Carver sits by himself, drawing a whetstone over his blade, when it is perfectly sharp and he's going to have a rapier before long, as if that would do anything to help his crushing inferiority complex.
Wordlessly, Varric heaves himself to his feet with a grunt that sounds like he's undertaking a task of positively mythic proportions and trundles off toward her brother. Huge Dog casts a look at her that says he would like to go to where there is heat and ample begging for scraps to be done. She is loath to disappoint her dog, which is something she would never dare say to a single soul, because she hates to be a walking stereotype. She pats his big, slobbery jowls and says "Alright, alright, go on, then" and he bounds off, overtaking Varric and making straight for Bodahn. The old, fussy dwarf had a particular fondness for her dog that none of the other hirelings shared. He'd said that he'd spent most of his life mystified by the Fereldan attachment to mabari and more than a little scared of them, until he started travelling with the Wardens during the Blight. The dog was good with his boy and he came around to thinking they're an alright sort after that, he'd explained. More than once they'd had to tell Sandal that he couldn't give all his rations to the dog.
Hawke rises to her aching, old womanly feet and follows Varric toward Carver and Anders, boots in hand. The stone beneath her feet is cold, ancient, and she gets the feeling a dozen times a day that they shouldn't be here. Some places are made sacred because they were supposed to stay lost, she thinks. To walk here feels like violating something old and archaic and too-big to begin to fathom. Something in the shape of an apology forms in her mind, and she hopes the sentiment is enough.
She drops her pack on the ground and fusses with the strapping of her bedroll, the hiss of Carver's whetstone over his blade rhythmic and shrill, echoing around the cavern. She thinks she should probably see what flavor of glue is being doled out from the cook's tent this evening, because she's decided that it simply must be evening, but right now the sole demand of her body is to be prone, to lay on her back and look at the jagged ceiling of the earth and think pretty thoughts.
She thinks of Aveline's freckles. Her stern jaw and sparkling, mossy eyes. The way she forcefully shoves a cup of tea at Hawke midway through an argument over her desk in the small hours of the morning. Sitting silent on Gamlen's front steps, pushing tears away from the corners of their eyes for Bethany, for Wesley, for a home that never felt like home, for the helpless swell of violence that gave them each other and bore them, inextricably tangled, over the sea.
She thinks of Fenris and his smile like a shark, tugging the cork out of a wine bottle and spitting it into the fireplace. Their hours-long conversations that devolve into shouting matches that end with him snarling that she's not like other mages and never having an answer when she presses him on how he could possibly think that, but she knows exactly why he does. The way he never offers an apology, never ever, but never carries it with him, and they're back to drunkenly sparring in the foyer of his mansion, scattering dust and broken china and their pointiest laughs.
She thinks of Merrill and her bandaged hands, fluttering through water-damaged tomes and balls of yarn and pressed flowers, always hungry and hunting for something to share. She is the quickest thing Hawke has ever seen, and it scares her to death, but trying to keep pace with her is joy and astonished laughter and splitting a scone in the Hightown markets. She is still learning what it is to not ever have to be alone, how to tear her skin and spill her blood without hurting more than herself.
She thinks of her mother and how her eyes changed when they came to Kirkwall. She carries herself with a calculating cleverness that she must have once shed, having no place for it in the life of a common apostate's wife. Her back is straighter, her words are sharper, she darns holes in their clothes with a vengeance, as if she was stitching them closer to herself, to keep them safe and whole and alive and together. Smoothing Hawke and Carver's hair and faces and smiling sorrowful and proud down at their scraped cheekbones and black eyes the same as when they were six and nine and falling into dry creek beds and fighting the neighbor's sons. She knows she will never contain them, and she's waging war against herself to make peace with it.
She thinks of Isabela. Maker, does she think of Isabela. She thinks of nights soaked through with rum and grenade smoke and sweat cutting through the soot on the pirate's face, letting loose the laugh that shivers Hawke to her very timbers. She thinks of divvying up their shares of the coin from jobs, the purple dawn rising to greet them as they make their sleepless plans on how to spend it as soon as the market is open. She thinks of her hair and jewelry and endless legs and wonders every spare minute what it would feel like to be caged under all of her and to learn what it is to be held by something that cannot be held itself. She thinks about the night Isabela let her stay, how every point of contact burned Hawke, blistering bright and forming a constellation between them. She thinks about the morning after, waking up to a dusty bottle of wine and stale biscuits and something tentative and ponderous and awkward and skittish weaving through their words. She doesn't think about what it all means, that the pirate has wound a knot around something at the root of her that isn't supposed to belong to anyone. She thinks that if she doesn't kiss her the moment she's back, something horrible and tragic will befall her. She'll get the pox or scurvy or a truly heinous rash on her ass. If they don't fuck, she might simply combust. She wouldn't be the first mage to go out that way.
"Stop making doe-eyes at the ceiling and eat something, Hawke." Anders says, putting a tin plate heaped with globbish grey stuff on her chest. "Maker, it's tragic. Between you and Carver, you'll both end up falling ass-end into a hole and I'm not going to help you. Good luck figuring that out."
Hawke curls and pivots to sit up, facing Carver.
"Oooooh, Carver's making doe-eyes, is he?" She coos, spooning slop into her mouth. At least they salted it, today. "Is it the short, beardy one that threw a hammer at him for insolence? Or the short, beardy one that keeps spitting every time he looks at him?"
"Shut it." Carver says, looking like a wet cat.
"If I was a betting man, and you all know that I am, I'd wager he's thinking about a little Daisy." Varric says without looking up from the latest installment of whatever filth Isabela supplied him with for the trip.
Anders hums at that.
"Carver and Merrill, eh? I wouldn't have thought."
"There's nothing to think about!" Carver protests, giving his best impression of a beet. "There's nothing going on, there."
Hawke scoffs and Varris sets his book down.
"Oh, come off it, Junior." He tuts. "If you're having girl problems, now's as good a time as any to work through it. And we knew. We all already knew. Well, except Blondie, I guess."
Carver has stopped his incessant sharpening, finally.
"Merrill doesn't know, does she?"
"Not that I can tell." Hawke offers, hoping it's the right thing to say. Carver looks at her, then at Varric, who shrugs.
"Maybe I'm a bit out of touch, is it considered gauche to just tell someone that you like them?" Anders asks, rubbing his chin as he contemplates his gruel.
"Ah, but where's the fun in that? Where's the angst?" Varric says. The warm glow of the runes dances in his eyes. A hopeless romantic, that one. Also probably hoping to mine them for content for a new serial. Carver huffs, folding his arms.
"I don't want angst! I just think she's pretty and kind and I'd like to spend more time with her. She's just… I feel like I've been saying things, the right things, the things that always worked before." He quiets at the end.
His eyes flicker toward Hawke, just for a moment, but it's enough to make her heart seize, because she knows. She knows it was easy for him, once. Everything was easier for him, once. It was all hammering fence posts and carrying wayward lambs from ravines and going off to war and being a strapping young man in a town that needed him to be exactly what he is. Kirkwall has plenty of men like him. In his worst moments, he spits his fire at her like it's supposed to make him impressive, like Hawke doesn't remember the tears on his face and the dirt on his knees when his favorite barn cat died.
"Carver, she isn't Peaches." She says, setting her plate on the ground. She's had plenty. "You can't just waggle your muscles about until she drags you off for a snog behind the barn."
His brow knits and he looks like he swallowed hot coals. She continues before he can start.
"Merrill is, well you said it, she's kind. She'll see your kindness before she sees how many highwaymen you cut through to get to her. Try that. You'll get… I don't know, somewhere, maybe."
He is looking at her again, and he's seven years old, holding Dusty Old Tom's little body in his arms, begging for her to use her magic to do something, bring him back. Fix it. Make it right. She couldn't, then, and she can't now. She can push the tired cat's corpse out on a raft made of tree branches into the river and set it on fire with her will. She can tell him how to woo a girl she knows better than he does. She can't take things that are and make them in the shape of the way things were and she wishes he would stop looking at her like she could. Maybe he'd resent her less.
"Listen to your sister, Junior." Varric says, flipping to where he left off reading. "Maker knows she'll never take her own advice, but that doesn't mean it's bad."
"Varric, I wish you'd ravish me. I want the nugs to squeal at the splendor of our union." She says, all breathy and fluttering in the way she knows he finds spectacularly annoying. "I simply don't know how I could possibly make the turgidity of my loins more apparent to you."
Anders whistles low and waggles his eyebrows.
"Great, now try it on Rivaini." The dwarf grumbles. Hawke harrumphs, flicking her hair out of her eyes in a way that she hopes is appropriately haughty and aristocratic. With any luck, she'll need to have mastered it, soon.
"My greatest passion, rebuffed again!" She cries, throwing herself back upon her bedroll. "What else is a lovelorn dame to do but rot here, among the rubble and bones and ominous goo?"
"Well, that hardly seems like my business."
Hawke snorts, throwing a pebble at him and missing spectacularly.
Carver is sharpening his blade again. But the hisses come slower now, further between.
"Maybe you're right, sister." He says, and she hears the furrow in his brow more than she'd ever need to see it.
"Maybe I am, brother." She says. She doesn't say it, but for whatever it might be worth to him, she hopes she is.
They all fall into themselves, then, out of habit and necessity. Varric rolls onto his stomach and scribbles notes in the margins of his naughty book, looking rather precious, she thinks. Maybe it's for Isabela, maybe it's for reference, maybe he hates it enough that he'll send his heavily edited copy to the author with a rather obtuse threat to do better next time. It wouldn't be the first time he's done it. Anders whistles a quiet little ditty for them, his hands knotted behind his head, looking for all the world like he's perfectly dandy. She always wonders what he was like, before he made room in himself for more than he could carry. Maybe this is it. She is full of fondness and so deeply sorry that she didn't know him sooner.
Carver keeps sharpening his blade, the rasp of stone against steel grating and familiar, like he is. She wants to tear them from his hands and tell him there's nothing else to do, now. It's time to wait. He has to wait or he'll make himself too sharp and one day he'll be careless and she won't be able to help him like big sisters are supposed to, because he made it impossible by expecting her to stop him from having done it in the first place. He doesn't get to take that from her.
Her eyes are hot, so she closes them.
The darkness swells and chitters around them, never a welcome friend, but no longer something she doesn't understand. It, like anything, just is. Whether there's gold or their collective ruin sleeping in the dark they haven't touched yet, well, that also just is. She insists up and down that she believes that with all her breath until she sees golden eyes dancing with hers under her eyelids. Sometimes they're Flemeth's. Most times, they're Isabela's.
You're not done. Hurry home, girl.