Work Text:
The night after Bethany Hawke’s magic manifested, her family met in the garden of a cottage that was more idyllic in memory. Her mother’s face blurred with the flowering trees, Carver’s scuffing feet blending with birdsong. She had looked somewhere past her father as he spoke, but in recollection she saw a glassy sheen in his deep kind eyes. She didn’t know if Marian’s grin had grown more jester-like over the years, but the fist threatening to choke Bethany’s insides was a permanent feature of the memory, unchanging in the face of rewriting.
As Bethany took her turn in the Wardens’ cart bumping across the landscape, she remembered leaving town that night, idyllic curtains left behind to flutter in the moonlight. She’d wondered then if her heart would sync with the bumping of that cart as she’d laid pressed to one corner, wondered if it would burst out of her chest and take the magic with it, leaving her family with the body of a good daughter. The thought had permeated her remaining childhood and then her teen years. By the time she was looking into the choppy sea on their voyage to Kirkwall, she knew her legacy was set in stone whether or not a wave tipped her over the rail. Back inside, Marian’s golden laugh had drawn the refugees into a meager game of Wicked Grace. Her mother stared at the wall, haunted by the dying gasps of her only son who’d died for her broken angel daughter. If Bethany didn’t fall back overboard, she’d go back inside and smile softly, sitting cross-legged in the hay.
She hadn’t fallen overboard. She didn’t succumb to the illness that took a dozen refugees. She hadn’t fallen on the blade of a rival smuggler. And deep below the earth, even with the Blight pooling in her veins, she had still lived. A hard-won death, and there was Marian with so much fear in her voice that Bethany almost forgave her. Almost. As she’d left the Deep Roads with the Wardens, she’d imagined what Marian would tell their mother and what the tone of her first letter might be, and she’d let herself hate her sister with every drop of the new poison in her blood.
Tonight, the air was muggy, and the clouds threatened rain. Bethany turned her face to the sky. The moon was identifiable as a white blur behind a cloud.
“Can you change the weather?” Marian had asked on the third night in that first wagon. “Can you make a flower grow? Can you magically influence Carver to give me half of his breakfast?”
“Stop,” Bethany had said, cross because she hadn’t yet learned to not complain.
“I wish I was a mage.” Marian had expressed the sentiment to Bethany 206 times between that night and the day they’d parted. An even 205 until Marian had held her as the world had darkened and whispered “Not you. You could heal me. I can’t--”
It was the wish of someone so self-centered they couldn’t quite be selfish. It was the wish of someone who could charm the last gold bracelet off an old woman’s wrist for the pot of a game on a ship and receive warm praise for returning it when she won.
It was the wish of someone who thought sending Bethany away was a kindness, who thought of only the heroic splash of blood and not the ghosts that lingered behind. There were many such unwanted kindnesses. The warden who had handed her off to make a second voyage across the sea so she could serve in her own homeland. The old sailor who’d sat with her on the ship because she’d seen in Bethany’s eyes that the deep still called her. The seneschal of Vigil’s Keep holding out a gleaming staff because she’d never have to hide again. Did she even know what she’d been hiding from?
Bethany had grown used to Ferelden again. The scars on the landscape hardly mattered to her memory--they reflected in her and who she’d become to return here. The wardens had a mabari and he’d bit her only once. She’d withdrawn her hand slowly from his mouth, smoothing the shallow puncture with magic, leaving this dog awake but blinking, lip curled from whatever it had tasted.
“I’m sorry,” said a figure more than a person, and Bethany had always imagined the Hero as someone like Marian, not someone who faded to the shadows, who studied before she spoke, not someone who moved from beyond anyone’s grasp to correct a mistake that wasn’t her own.
It didn’t make for a strong leader. But what did? Marian needed people to orbit her like the sun. She saw it still in the letters Marian wrote, most going unanswered.
“When you visit…”
“...I let her keep...”
“Mother doesn’t mean…”
“...he needs me to…but I’ll think…”
“...take a break..”
“Don’t ignore me Bethany. You’re my only sister.”
“We’ll be there by sunrise.” Joan--her senior warden’s--voice broke over the hypnotic shaking of the cart and clop of hooves. Bethany brushed the hair from her eyes and knew she couldn’t sleep. She could forgo her rest--she was all muscle now, shaped into a body that didn’t feel like hers. But she’d been told to knock off that sort of kindness, and nobody saw through it to the unkindness, so she rolled over and watched the half-snuffed lantern.
Had Andraste felt like she was liberating herself alongside her people? Or had she craved the fire even then?
They were approaching Lothering. Bethany would rise. She’d spin her muddy staff and dispatch lingering darkspawn and heal the scrapes and bruises of the townsfolk. It was muscle memory now, so she’d see the silvery outline of what was lost and wouldn’t waver.
The post by the chantry where she’d listened to the sisters’ tales. The path where she’d sent a dog to sleep and a boy had told her she was too nice to be a mage. The shack that had replaced the idyllic cottage. The trees she’d climb unseen. The butcher’s shop where Marian had said “It’s impossible for us not to love you Bethany” as if everyone had tried.
Her sister had been silent for a while, but now the envelope in her bag was thick. Three pages, at least, with something sealed inside. A ribbon, maybe, like she was a child whose affections could be bought with scarlet silk. It had arrived from Kirkwall last week.
If Bethany lived through the next battle, maybe she’d open it in the ashes of their childhood home and pretend that Marian was speaking the words aloud like she had as a child.
I am in Lothering, Bethany might write back, because Marian would want to know. It is empty without you, but I am learning to fill the space.
Pretty words. Marian would like them, would read them to her companions with a proud sigh. Better then, the truth:
Ferelden is bloody and scarred. It is learning to live again.
“Here.” Joan had noticed her awake. She tossed Bethany a strip of salted meat. “You come from Lothering, don't you?”
Bethany nodded, wordless.
“It’ll be rough, kid,” she said, keeping pace with the wagon. “But you’ll be okay. “ Joan smiled, lopsided in the dim light. “You’re a tough one.”
Take this as you will.