Well. Your Arms Feel Like Home was supposed to be a Brooklyn 99 AU, so clearly my associates and I are very good at Sticking To A Plan.
(If you're unfamiliar with that work, it is uh. very much not a Brooklyn 99 AU 😅)
I honestly didn't know where I was taking Journey when I started The Place Where I Belong. I knew a handful of things I wanted: she's bisexual, she was going to be married to Anders at the start of the fic, she was very strongly invested in the mage revolution. I was actually originally assuming she was going to end up on the red side of purple, if not fully red, personality wise. This was a Hawke who started the entire blow up the Chantry idea and encouraged Anders to follow through with it, and that seemed kind of a natural progression. She's fiercely protective of Anders, she doesn't hesitate to throw down for him and steps up when his own sense of self preservation goes down the drain.
I'm apparently incapable of writing a Hawke who isn't a sarcastic little shithead more than once, and I guess I used up all my red!Hawke juice on Rylee in YAFLH. Yeah. That's my bad. 😅
Some other things I didn't start out with in mind that sort of developed on their own: her anxiety disorder, the fact that she's a cat person, she's an avid sports fan, she's Very Chill about weird shit (like the cute doctor she just picked up a crate of vaccines from turning blue and glowy and yelling at her) but will absolutely lose her mind if the store is out of the one scent of laundry detergent she uses. She likes to read despite not having had the time to do so in a while, and she particularly enjoys nineteenth century Orlesian literature where the women bang. She's not a math person. She's very physically expressive, and she and Anders communicate a lot of different things with physical intimacy.
I didn't start out intending their relationship to be super casual about sex with other people, but given that's how mine tend to be in real life, that one didn't surprise me a whole lot.
She's uh. Really short for a Hawke. She's 5'3, and that was just me brainstorming ways to make her different from Rylee and going ‼️what if short!Hawke??? and that's how we ended up with an eleven inch height difference between her and Anders that I have never once regretted writing. 😌
If I had to pick one major thing that sort of wrote itself and became a huge part of the narrative though, it's her relationship with her father. Which. If you've read any of this series...yeah. Surprise! That wasn't intentional! He was supposed to be a two chapter plot device, and actually the phone call from him at the end of chapter 2 was supposed to be from an estranged associate of Anders'.
Anyone who knows me at all irl knows I have a very rocky relationship with my family and typically tend to dislike writing parent-child relationships, focus more on chosen family instead of blood ties, etc. because I don't have very good associations with the concept of being stuck with blood family.
And then I started writing Malcolm, and he really had the audacity to start writing himself into this fucking story. I fought it for four chapters and he kept looping back up in my brainstorming outlines and I finally went OK FINE FUCK IT YOU'RE IN YOU ABSOLUTE BASTARD.
Anyway the moral of the story is, uh. Sometimes writing is chaos and you really learn new shit about yourself every goddamn day. 😅
