You could say that Hawke was born angry.
Varric certainly does. Hawke doesn’t care enough to tell him to shove it, and Aveline has a list so long of things she wants Varric to stop saying, that whether or not Hawke emerged from the womb holding Glandivalis itself is very low on her priorities. Clearly anyone who’s met her could believe it—and anyone who’s hung around the Hanged Man long enough to have their head filled with drivel would think that a woman who tore out a slaver’s heart and ate it raw was probably unhinged from the start. (Now that one is the most blatant fabrication of all, no matter how many I shit you nots Varric puts in front of it. While, yes, Hawke did technically rip out a man’s heart, he was well dead by that point: it was only after a) discovering the organ was the focal point of a still ongoing ritual and b) a lot of intensive hacking, that Hawke tore it from his chest. And, Aveline while will admit that Hawke did bite the man, it was when he was still alive and attempting to strangle her. She swears, the thing that dwarf gets away with.)
So yes, Hawke is someone ruthless, some one who drinks blood and slaughters Coterie, who’s so easy to believe she was born that way and will die that way. But it wouldn’t be the whole truth.
“Flames,” Varric curses.
He’s as close to fussing as he’ll ever be. If he had a little more familial instinct instilled in him at a young age, he’d probably be wiping a cloth at Hawke’s bruised lip like a fretful husband.
“Eloquent,” Hawke belies. “Anything else, or are you two willing to let me go to sleep?”
Aveline just crosses her arms. Varric can mumble Maker Hawke all he wants but he’s not actually going to find a well thought-out way to blame Hawke for this one. He’ll certainly try though, especially when you made me worried andI don’t have the emotional aptitude to express it properly except by grousing at something is too much for him to handle. He pinches his brow. “Fine. I’ve said my piece. Just get some rest.”
“Act in accordance with one’s own commands,” Hawke recites dryly. Leave it to her to only know the Chant when she’s being sardonic.
Varric sighs. “Two redheads are going to be death of me. One I could handle, but two?” He sighs again and exits the room.
Aveline used to sleep in here too, what feels like lifetimes ago. A half-year in the barracks and its already fading from memory, but she can still remember the heat of four bodies crammed together, the echo of Leandra’s snore in the west cot.
Hawke blinks up sullenly from her own bed. “The invitation to leave did include you.”
This is the first time Hawke’s ever been held in the cells overnight, and it shows it. Beside her lip, she’s got a bruise the size of a sovereign on her cheek, and a smear of blood across her nose. Aveline’s pretty sure it’s not hers.
Hawke’s toed the line before, close enough that Aveline’s had to consider arresting her and threatened her as much, but Meeran knows how to keep his people just un-troublesome enough that the Guard considers it best to just let fools kill each other. So, after all those months of mercenary work, it’s ironic that her first official run-in with the law isn’t even when she was on the job.
It’s come down to a fight in Lowtown. An argument over fair prices, the word doglord thrown around, and Aveline hears that a family name Hawke has been tossed into holding in order to sleep it off.
The only upside was that Bethany wasn’t with her. A busted face is a poor dividend, but there were no Templars for Jeven to call.
“The merchant you over ended,” Aveline says. “Who was he.”
“Kirkwaller,” Hawke says like it’s the end of the conversation. When Aveline just wait expectantly, she groans. “Mouthbreather whose run his gob a few too many times. Been gouging too long and too openly—doesn’t even bother to pretend it’s because he hates the people he’s selling too.”
“You were sick of it.”
Her fingers curl around the thin sheet, her knuckles showing white underneath the purple. “I’m sick of everything.” She looks up to Aveline, arms still folded and staring right back at her. “So what is it Guardswoman? A lecture on ill-timed revenge? The benefits of withholding beatings from deserving street scum?”
“I think you know me better than that.” Aveline uncrosses her arms. A hand finds away to her back pouch, carefully withdrawing the vial so she can sit without having to worry about squashing itit. The mixture in hand, she sits at the end of Hawke’s bed. “For you.”
“No poultices,” Hawke replies tersely.
“It’s not for healing,” Aveline tells her. “Not your face anyway.” She shakes the bottle. “Blend of wormwood, elfroot, crushed senna and rue.”
Hawke eyes her dully. “I’m not pregnant Aveline.”
The guard draws her hand back. She looks to the ceiling, wonders if there are words to convince her, and finds herself saying, “I hadn’t wanted to be a soldier. Not a soldier, not a chevalier, not a knight. I was to busy convinced the world hated me, too tired for what I wanted, let alone whatever my father had planned. I started making this stuff when I was fourteen.”
She swirls the herbs inside she can’t see, remember putting senna under a mortar and pestle, adding things little by little until she was happy. The smell of embrium blotting it all out. The honeyed water to make it go down easier.
She says, “Maker knows you won’t let anyone help you. But I thought I’d at least offer the opportunity.”
Hawke stares at her, but for once doesn’t look like she’s one snarl away from some choice words. She releases the edge of her dirty blanket. “Alright. Give it here.”
Hawke drinks, Aveline watches. Years later she’ll make her own blend, but when Bloomingtide comes there’s already relief in her shoulder, exultation that things maybe can get the smallest bit better. Aveline watches her from the corner of here eye and around her shield—even though she may be the front line, she still knows to duck when a giant cleaver come swinging over head. The two them can ram through nearly anything when they put their blades together: blood mages, guard pretenders, slavers, cultists (so, so many cultists.) Hawke is not tempered. Tempered is not the word.
But she is focused. Honed, Aveline thinks. There are people in this city who need to pay, and Hawke will not let herself (or her Guard Captain) tire.
It is with a splash of blood that Hawke tears a serial killer nearly in two. In Varric’s story later, it will be clean, effortless, and she will shout, this is the elves you murdered, monster. But in truth it is ragged, sudden, the blade stuck in his spine before she drags it out.
In the now, she does not speak until after, when blood has doused a nearby torch and leaves the room in a hissing half-light. At first, Aveline thinks she is praying—she kneels, sword tip pressed to the tile as she bends her head over it, much like a Templar would. The visions of Wesley have faded over the years, reflections every time she enters the gallows and sees a man in uniform that is not him, but they are not so far gone that she does not see him now in the righteousness of Hawke’s silhouette.
Merrill goes to relight the torch. Varric recollects his bolts, and Aveline feels the moment in between fights undo the knots in her shoulders. She goes to stand by the kneeling woman.
“Hawke?”
“Do you know what justice is, Aveline?” Hawke asks after a moment.
“Maybe you should ask the abomination. He’s more of an expert than I.”
Hawke purses her lips. Eyes closed, fresh kill running down her cheek to gather in drips off her chin. “This was for those children. For those elves. For all of us.”
“Us?” Last Aveline checked, Hawke was neither a child nor an elf.
“All of us that are going to die without the world giving a damn,” Hawke whispers. She raises one glove to wipe at her face.
“I would give a damn.”
Hawke turns her head to the side. Her eyes are set like hot fire, emerald green and endless like open field of grass. She rises. “I know. You would. That’s what justice is. It’s killing every bandit, slaver, and murder this side of the Waking Sea and always knowing there will be more to take their place. Knowing that you can’t change the world but not stopping the fight. It’s giving a damn.”
That is the moment Aveline chooses to believe in her. She has believed before, in her father for a time, in King Cailan: but now even her shadows of doubts are gone, and she loves Hawke as much as she trusts her.
The stories around her grow until Aveline can only find a glimmer of the woman she knows. In them she is equal parts terror and savior, the underlying anxiety to each one ringing, ‘well, at least she’s on our side.’ Hawke tears the head off the Arishok’s head and tosses it down the Keep’s steps. Hawke turns the Knight-Commander to stone with her eyes gaze alone.
They never stop, and only after she leaves Kirkwall do they show that every fable has two edges. Tales of Hawke gathering blood mages for her rebellion, of barricading farmers inside their home and burning the place to the ground. Of tearing hearts out again, but this time of children to feast on their innocent flesh. Aveline grits her teeth—how quickly they chose to turn on their supposed Champion. But, she also understands. They were always terrified of her. One may call for the Maker’s love, but it is always his wrath you worry about as you fall asleep at night.
Varric sends Aveline a letter. She’s glad she reads that one first, and not the sealed on that comes tumbling out when she opens the wax. She wonders if Varric took the time to snoop and reseal it, but then discovers she doesn’t actually care.
The letter from Varric is short, full of apology and his too-careful words. The letter from Hawke is shorter.
Aveline
If you’re reading this, I am beyond you. But I will not die angry. I will die righteous. I will die loved, and I will have loved in return. Victoria 1:3
She doesn’t look for the verse at first. She merely holds Hawke’s letter, rereads it late at night even when here eyes are sore from gazing at endless reports. She burns the words into her minds, until she couldn’t forget them if she wanted.
Only when she sets foot in the docks while investigating a few smugglers—looks up at the statue with a sword of fire and her back against the horizon—does Aveline remember they used to come down here together. It was hardly a destination, but Hawke would wander beneath the swaying booms anyway anyway, back when they were still a scrappy young mercenary and a simple Guardswoman. The surf splashed along the piers, and Aveline thought the only reason Hawke could possibly like it was because she had no sense of smell. Maybe she didn’t. Aveline had never inquired, and now never could.
Now people come to look at the cursed statue. It’s like Hawke in a lot of ways: abstracted to the point of uselessness, simplified until it could be anyone behind that helmet. The armor is too simple, the shoulders too narrow, and Hawke never carried a single-handed sword. It is there to stand on the enemy, and nothing more.
That night, Aveline leafs through a booklet tucked in her bedside table, thumb turning until it finds Victoria 1:3.
Now her hand is raised,
A sword to pierce the sun
With iron shield she defends the faithful
Let chaos be undone