feasgar replied to your post:
well i’m currently playing inquisition. since he’s in it and plays a big part in the story do you have any hcs regarding his role or his mindset or why he kinda hid after kirkwall ?
whew ok this was a big thing i know i needed to write about so Thank You
the second hawke finds out the seekers are heading for kirkwall, which was probably no longer than a couple days, he knows he’s leaving. and, for me, no regardless of romance, he leaves alone with nothing but notes left behind. one for a romance ( if any ), and one for varric specifically. for the romance, he apologizes for what he’s doing / has done. for varric, he does the same, but explains more what he intends to do ( wander ). he and dog vanish quietly in the middle of the night.
he hoped that, as the one being blamed and held responsible for kirkwall ( which he agrees with ), that the seekers would only look for him and leave his companions alone. which, aside from varric, seems to be relatively true. even merrill was in kirkwall for a while after but she was left alone. it rlly seems everyone just knows that if hawke was going to tell anyone anything, it would be varric, and they would be right. however, he doesn’t really... have a plan in mind.
initially, all he wants is to disappear. yes, eventually he looks into red lyrium, but at first it was more of a self-exile. he, strongly, believes that everyone is safer if he isn’t around. which proves to be at least somewhat true. he’s depressed. he blames himself and is incapable of forgiving himself for anything that happened. he wanted to be alone ( save dog ) and thought that’s the very least he deserved.
while gone, he wandered. no thought behind where he went. essentially just following the wind. it let him create a long, winding path if anyone was able to follow him. over the time he went back to ferelden, into orlais, up to antiva. everywhere. he rarely stayed put for long. he stopped wearing his armour and wore regular clothes. he kept the blood streak as a sole reminder of who he is because... by the end, he really didn’t have a sense of self anymore. i think somewhere either in dai he admits that. if people recognized him, it didn’t matter. he’d be gone before the whispers started travelling too far.
i’ve tried to think of a feasible way for varric to always seem to know how to contact hawke and that usually boils down to either extremely well trained messenger birds or magic tracking shit. i don’t know. who knows. bioware won’t give me anything solid to work with. varric is the only person hawke maintains contact with. he thinks it’s risky for anyone to contact him, and varric is the exception to prove the rule.
canon doesn’t give us a reason why mage-aligned hawke started looking into red lyrium, but it does mention for templar-aligned hawke that eventually the templars in kirkwall started using it and it became an issue. i imagine that would still happen, and varric would eventually pass that along, possibly only a matter of months before dai begins. hearing that would not help his mental state. he is empty, repressed, and lonely. he is far from in-tune with his emotions and very poor at handling stressors by then. that kind of news might very well trigger an anxiety attack.
it’s... hard to put into words how exactly he goes from that to investigating red lyrium, but personally i have reached points in my anxiety where suddenly i have an overwhelming need to do something. anything productive. that sudden inability to sit still because it causes more anxiety — that is where i see his mindset shifting to. it becomes an outlet, but a double-edged one. he struggles facing the events of kirkwall, but those events are exactly what made him grow accustom to doing what other people can’t / won’t.
