An important detail about my FenHawke daughter Eshana I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly mentioned: She looks exactly like Fenris
The only details she has from her mom are the shape of her eyes (but they’re still green like Fenris’), and the point of her chin. Otherwise, she’s Fenris’ spitting image. She gets mistaken for an elf all the time because she looks so much like her dad, her ears even have a slight point.
No deeper reasoning for this other than I just think daughters that look exactly like their fathers are cute. I also think sons that look exactly like their mothers are cute. It’s cute!
But- I am me so... I have this thought.
I’ve said this before but Eshana’s mom, my Hawke Avis, dies in the Fade. How she died is its own story but it wasn’t that she just ran at the Nightmare and accepted it. She fought to get back till the bitter end. I have this mental image of her horribly wounded trying to claw her way up to the Fade portal fully believing even then that she’s going to make it out, she’s going to survive this-
She doesn’t.
Fenris is of course, devastated, he takes their daughter and returns to Kirkwall, where he lives in Hawke’s estate. Alone. Just him and Eshana and Kirkwall.
Fenris isn’t the only one devastated, all of her friends feel it. Varric, Isabela, Merrill, Aveline- they all spend years feeling it.
But Anders? Anders doesn’t know.
Anders and Avis loved each other, that was the root of the problem. They loved each other, but never in the way the other needed, and never said what it was they needed. They just guessed, and were always wrong. Their relationship crumbled and crumbled, going from lovers, to friends, to almost used to be friends, and then nothing at all.
Avis moved onto Fenris when she and Anders were just over being lovers and trying to be friends. A decision that did not help. Anders took it very personally.
Still, it was Anders who saved her and Eshana’s life when Avis gave birth to her nearly six years later. For a moment that looked like it would fix things, until he destroyed the chantry. Then that was it. She finally had enough. She refused to kill him. Instead, she looked him in the eye and told him “I never want to see you again.”
She didn’t.
It took him two years to find out. No one tracked him down to tell him. He found out from a town crier in Markham “Kirkwall celebrates the Festival of the Champion! Two years after her death.”
He doesn’t believe it at first. He must’ve heard wrong. Perhaps there is a different “Her” being spoken of here. It’s not Avis. It’s not Avis. It’s not Avis-
He finds out.
Anders is horrible at keeping promises, he’s standing at the door of the Hawke estate within a month. He could just go in. He kept the key. That isn’t how it works though, there’s a ritual to entering the Hawke estate. You knock, always after dark, you wait as the mabari barks, and you’ve got a hand of cards and a cheap glass of wine in your hand the moment Avis opens the door.
It’s quiet after he knocks. It takes so much time for any sound to be made inside. There is no ritual this time. The door is opened silently and quickly like it had only been the wind, and Anders goes in. He stands in that entrance hall below all those banisters and waits.
Avis would greet him here. She’d stand up behind the center banister in the perfect middle of the house. Leaning over the glossy marble in her house robe, the silk holding the firelight against her. She’d grin like a red-lipped cat and tell him he’s late. It would be night and they would drink.
It’s dark on the other side of the banister now. Dark as the rest of the house. The Hawke Estate was never a place allowed to be dark. Anders’ hands will stay empty every moment he’s in this house.
“Anders,” growled the dark.
Anders had half-forgotten the house wasn’t empty. That the door hadn’t opened by merely wind. This was a haunted place now, and he turns to face the ghost.
Fenris was not dead. Anders had learned, long ago, that death never made real ghosts.
The night he’d helped Avis give birth Fenris had stopped him on his way out. Exhausted, with bliss trying to rise out of still half-expected grief he’d said to him, “You saved my family tonight. I will not forget that.”
Fenris wore no armor, just red silk garments entirely aware of how poorly they fit him, and he bore no weapon. But he was more dangerous now than he’d been in years. When their eyes meet for the first time in nearly a decade, Anders sees just how much else he’s forgotten.
Fenris does not say anything, not because he doesn’t want to. He’s staring at Anders with an intense focus in his eyes, like a starving animal. It strikes Anders that he’s waiting. Like a wolf has to wait for the deer to run.
So the deer runs.
“You-” Anders’ throat closes on itself, and lets him feel that pain before it opens again- “You didn’t tell me.”
“I’m sorry,” Fenris says with humor, bitter as dry wine. “Next time the world ends, I’ll dig you out of the dirt and tell you first.”
“Did any of you try?” He’d come here wanting to be wrong, or angry, he was neither now. “She was my friend.”
“No she wasn’t,” Fenris said. “You saw to that yourself.”
Finally, a spark of fire lit in Anders’ chest. He clung to it. “How dare you speak for her-”
“How dare you,” Fenris growled with his eyes so still. “Just what did you want, coming here?”
Now there’s a rare thing from Fenris’ mouth: A good question. What had he wanted? Did he really believe Avis had faked it all, and would come back and live in her estate in Kirkwall? Did he?
“To see it for myself,” Anders said, finally. “A Kirkwall without her.” Which proved to be empty grey streets, and wet summer evenings, with nothing to warm it with laughter, games, and bad rum.
“And maybe...” That spark in his chest, Anders knuckles would be white around it. “Pull the tiniest satisfaction seeing you like-”
And Fenris charges.
There’s a flash of blue light and Anders’ back is cracking the paint on the wall. His lungs freezing for a moment in shock. Fenris with his arm pressed into his collarbone, eyes and lines glowing.
“Finish that remark, mage-”
Then there’s a scream, and everything stops.
Anders looks. Now in that space behind the center banister, in the exact middle of the house, two small hands grip the white pillars that hold up the railings and sharp green eyes stare down at him like things in the forest watch travelers on the road.
Anders doesn’t understand what he’s looking at, until he does.
“Maker...” The first true prayer of his life. “Is that-?”
“Eshana!”
Fenris leaves Anders there. He begins to run up the left staircase of the entrance hall. The child- Eshana- runs towards the top of the steps, and she throws herself into his arms when they meet in a way that tells Anders they’ve done that many, many times before.
“What are you doing?” Fenris whispers.
“It was loud I-”
“Shhh.” Fenris pressed his lips to the top of her head. “I’m sorry I woke you.” He combs his fingers through her hair. Hair that is long, shiny, and black and not Avis’. The child’s hair is black like feathers. Avis’ hair is black like midnight.
But, for just that moment, Anders sees the man who forgave and promised not to forget him in the threshold. There he is. Risen from the dead. Solid as flesh.
Eshana looks at him again. “Who is that?”
Fenris turns back to Anders. There’s confusion in his face now. He doesn’t know what to be.
“Papa?”
Timidly, Anders does something stupid.
“Hello-” he says to Eshana. Careful to keep his voice light and his. “People call me Anders.” He placed one foot on the bottom stair. “I was a good friend of your mother-”
And that man dies again.
“No.” Fenris turns his body from him, half-hiding Eshana from his view. “You will stay away from my daughter and get out of my house.”
Ah.
So that’s what’s left.
He does start to leave, but as he gets to the door, he turns around. One last time. He will never see the inside of this house again. He looks at Fenris, who he will never see again. He looks at Eshana, who peers at him from over her father’s shoulder. He’d saved her, but he’d never truly seen her before. Avis’ only child. One of her names was Hawke.
Anders hadn’t read Tale of the Champion. Hadn’t read all of it, at least. He’d read bits. Pieces that would feed the curiosity held by the surviving younger part of himself still alive in his chest. He’d read how Varric had written Avis. What he’d said she looked like. He described her eyes as “The morning sun burning through the waves of the sea” followed with “I’d usually just call them blue.”
Anders hadn’t liked it. There was only one way to describe Avis’ eyes: hers. Maybe that was boring, but it was true. There was no color, no place, light, sea, sun, that would ever get close. They were simply her eyes. There was nothing else like them in the world.
Anders looked at the sharp green eyes staring at him. Old eyes. Eyes that looked so unfitting on the face of a child and matched perfectly the eyes of the man who had forgotten everything that wasn’t her.
I never want to see you again.
The spark died. His heart cracked. Somewhere, Avis was dead.
Anders turns away from Fenris, from the girl, the city, the house, and he speaks the last words he will ever say in Kirkwall.
