#codex entry: hawke

[aglaecan]

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[aglaecan]

#i think a part of him wants this and a part of him believes when all is said and done and his (neverending) war is over he can adjust

Ok like re: this part of your tags @immobiliter I feel like Hawke and Flint would be spidermanpointingmeme.jpg because she always thinks she wants the quiet comfortable house somewhere small and rural and boring where no one ever needs her help and she can just stitch dirty words into her love interest's underclothes and throw a stick for her dog but the fact is there is no way she could ever let it go, she would always be helping everyone even to her own active detriment, she is not built for quiet and peaceful and as much as it's her trauma it's also her driving force. Nods.

[brightflight]

it’s been a while since i posted dogcanons but i’m feelin’ the dogcanons today so!!

mar’s mabari is named huan. she got the name from an old storybook about a famously loyal and intelligent dog;*

he’s the grey shade often called “blue,” with a white belly and feet; his ears and tail were never docked;

she found huan as an abandoned pup wandering the back alleys of lothering. the dog has heterochromia, one eye blue and one eye brown, and an old superstition claims that’s bad luck;

huan was also the runt of the litter and was very small (but still fierce in that squeaky puppy way) when she found him;

he didn’t at all trust hawke at first, but she fed him and he was willing enough to follow her home for that;

eventually real trust was formed between them and the tiny “bad luck” puppy has turned into a bloody giant animal who’s as fiercely loyal to her as he is ridiculous and playful when there’s no battle to be joined;

she only ever uses the “kaddis of the courser” on him because the pattern’s easy to remember, and then adds a single red stripe of the paint to her own face, across her nose (it was blood the first time she made that mark; now it’s kaddis paint)

*tolkien fans might recognize the name. yes, he’s named for that Huan; I pretty much always name the dog Huan and didn’t bother changing it for the blog. let’s just all pretend the Silm exists in thedas in some form or other, why not

[aglaecan]

one day i will finally do a thread which really explores the degree to which Hawke is struggling with survivor’s guilt after Kirkwall, particularly because of the guilt of having been made complicit, by Anders, in the chantry explosion. she helped him, helped her friend, and he used that help to kill others. because he lied, didn’t tell her what he was doing, betrayed her trust.

he knew she couldn’t say no. he was prepared to die for it, and she might never forgive him for that, especially. for putting his life, the choice about whether or not he lived or died, into her hands. she held the knife and looked at him and maker help her, in her furious pain she considered it. she can still remember the weight of that hilt against her palm.

all she ever tried to do was help, and people died when she wasn’t good enough. and in the end, her city wound up in flames and her friend’s blood might have been spilled by her hand. she is very much Not Okay.

[aglaecan]

Mar Hawke + reactions to/relationships with the DAI Companions/Advisors:

Sera: So. Many. Pranks.

Cassandra: Initially hostile; Hawke is not happy with how Cassandra treated Varric. But also Cassandra would remind her enough of Aveline that she can get over it, after they’ve screamed at each other a few times.

Blackwall: New drinking buddy. They can tell each other raunchy stories while whittling/carving in the stables.

Iron Bull: Watchful and cautious. She’s known and liked the real hellfire-and-blood Qunari before, and she’s known and liked Tal-Vashoth before, and there’s something about Bull which doesn’t feel quite like either. She likes him but she’s keeping an eye.

Dorian: Uncertain. He’s funny and pretty, but Fenris’s years of talking about mages in Tevinter just has her careful of him.

Cole: This Is My New Little Brother Cole.

Vivienne: Mark me down as scared and horny.

Solas: Probably sits down with him for hours listening to the stories of stuff he’s seen in the Fade, fascinated but trying to pretend she isn’t.

Varric: Duh.

Cullen: She spends the first two weeks trolling him hard and then ignores him completely.

Leliana: A little bit of “mark me down as scared and horny” and a little bit of wistful nostalgia, for having known Leliana back in Ostagar, in another life.

Josephine: Listens to all of Josie’s gossip with delight, but also gets her to pass on a few Orlesian bard techniques because, well, one can never know too many ways to shank someone.

[aglaecan]

Hawke stacks her enchantments. per game mechanics, of course, you can only have one pendant, one belt, two rings... but realistically speaking, she’d stack her enchantments, several pendants on one chain, several rings on each finger. she has to be the best, after all. she has to be fastest, strongest, most able to help her friends, protect her city. she has a responsibility. so she needs every edge she can give herself, every way to stay a little ahead.

it’s actually pretty addictive, in a sense. feeling so much stronger, so much more capable. feeling like nothing can hurt her, that she can just keep going as long as she needs to, that her reflexes are so fast and her muscles are lifting weights far beyond what they should be capable of doing.

which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that all those buffs are temporary. they go away as soon as she takes off the enchantments. and then she falls right back down to earth and realizes that she’s pushed herself beyond what her body can actually handle. the enchantment is temporary and that feeling of invulnerability and power is an illusion.

so she just doesn’t take them off.

[brightflight]

you know hawke really cares about you when she starts telling you truly terrible jokes and puns. her own life is hard and dangerous and scary and she laughs as a rebellion, to refuse to let life break her. so she tries to make the ones loves about laugh too, to lighten their loads just a little. it’s how she shows she cares.

[brightflight]

my perfect-life end game for hawke is retiring to a stone farmhouse somewhere in northern ferelden, near the sea, with her LI and her dog, and just being a little small-town hero if she’s any sort of hero at all... just helping sort out the type of not-earth-shattering problems small towns have. she’d be willing to go with rural southern marches, far enough from kirkwall not to be immediately recognized, too, if needed. easier to see varric that way, anyway.  she’ll just have a garden for her herbs and an apple tree and try to live quietly... but will get caught up in everyone’s problems anyway, of course, she can’t help it. but her neighbors all love her and probably have some idea who she might be and so they protect her too, keeping people away who might be looking for her with bad intentions.

[brightflight]

there's this one line that Cole says in Inquisition if Hawke is left in the Fade at Adamant. something like, "the hawk would have been safe if it stayed, but that's not what hawks do." that line fucks me up every time because it's so true, especially to how i've written my girl here. even given how long she stays, in the sense of living in kirkwall the entire span of the game timeline, you can't ever call her tamed or at all domesticated. like a hawk, she's been hooded and jessed by her responsibilities, to her friends and her family and to her city. she might come and perch on a gloved wrist for a while. but she always takes off again, hunting, seeking, looking for the next thing. she has tasks, she cannot confine herself to a small and quiet life. someone calls for aid and she answers. 

she thinks, by the time of Inquisition, that all she wants is that quiet life, to settle down with her LI and her dog in a cottage or farmhouse in the countryside somewhere not so far from the sea that she can't still smell brine. maybe she’ll keep chickens, or maybe she’ll grow herbs...but the thing is, even if she got that life? she’d only end up running around solving the problems of all the nearby villagers and farmers at need, just like she always has. she’d go stir crazy otherwise. the hawk would be safe if it stayed, if it perched on that wrist, but that isn’t what hawks do.