Prompt: Thistle and Bethany. Something?
Originally Written: 12/12/13
Notes: Same Hawke as the last one. Eventually I will post my DARBB fic here; it's up on AO3, and you can read more about her there.
She tries not to remember Bethany. Father she can't escape, and Mother and Carver are too tied up in Kirkwall, in the bloody life she's made for herself, but Bethany lies dead in Ferelden, her body hastily cremated with a blast of fire from her sister's hands. She and Wesley have the dubious honor of being the first human bodies her sister's fire had touched—the first, but far from the last.
And so dead and gone, not as quietly as Father but not so mangled as Mother, she stays in Ferelden, under the same cloudy skies where they'd practiced their magic, close to the fallow fields far from prying eyes where she'd traced frost patterns on the cold earth as Father tried to show her that magic could be beautiful.
Thistle had taken easily to her magic, taking books from Father's library and curling up in her nook by the window, learning caution as a matter of discipline, taking spells apart and putting them together again; Bethany had to be coaxed to the art, but she perfected it in a way Thistle's technical expertise could never have managed. Where Thistle could satisfy the height and depth and breadth of her father's instructions, Bethany invented solutions; where Thistle terrorized Carver with thunder, Bethany illumined the house with a thousand twinkling stars. Thistle's magic was a tool; Bethany's was an art.
Bethany never lit the estate in Kirkwall; Thistle doubts she would have made a difference, and yet the estate is darker all the same for the lack. But it's better this way. Bethany wasn't tough; Bethany was afraid; Bethany loved, and Kirkwall spares not such weakness.
Bethany lies died in Ferelden, where there is no smog to block the sun; and lying dead in Ferelden, Bethany is safe.