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WIP Wednesday
Thanks for the tag @greypetrel 🥰
OPE today I have some Kiss Me Moonstruck for the first time in ages (for the uninitiated it is a ridiculous romantic comedy set during DA2, Act 2 where Leandra Hawke and Alsatia Trevelyan attempt to fix up their children Garrett and Rose over Satinalia week). I whipped this scene up this morning and I'm still working on it, but godddd it is so fun to write. BELOW THE CUT 👇
WIP Wednesday
Thank you for the tag @greypetrel
YES I am still working on Kiss Me Moonstruck. It's at 30k words now! Short summary: Two old friends conspire to fix up their incorrigible children over Satinalia week in 9:35 Dragon in Kirkwall. Rose Trevelyan and Garrett Hawke really don't want to be fixed up. 😏 Here Rose Trevelyan is having a fish out of water experience walking into the Hanged Man behind Garrett Hawke for the first time. She'd sneaked out of the estate to wander around Hightown and catching her in the act, Garrett instead convinces her to come to the Hanged Man with him. Excerpt below the cut 👇
The Nug King? Hello????
FINALLY I shall answer this.
Context for people who didn't see my WIP Title Game post: This is for my Matchmakingmoms!AU WIP Kiss Me Moonstruck in which Leandra Hawke and Alsatia Trevelyan try to fix up their incorrigible children Garrett and Rose over Satinalia during DA2: Act 2. After a disastrous introduction and some awkward time spent together doing chaperoned activities, Rose decides with her big brain that she's going to sneak out of the Hawke Estate to wander around Hightown at night. Shortly after descending the downspout and hopping to the ground she walks straight into Garrett's chest (he was watching her in great amusement). He warns her against wandering around and she said she'd overheard she was going somewhere called The Hanged Man, so she asks if she can come. Hawke is generally a pretty generous guy, even with the fussy noblewomen angling after his fortune, so he lets her tag along. Turns out they have great chemistry. They banter all the way to Lowtown, pick up an armful of Satinalia crowns on the way in to the tavern and head inside. The Hanged Man is chaos. Everyone cheers when Hawke arrives, (he's that kind of guy) and he starts tossing crowns out to people, announcing the next round is on him (popularity!). Rose meets Isabela (again) and then Varric. While she's sitting with Hawke and Varric in his suite chatting, more chaos sounds below. The tradition of releasing a nug in the tavern to be wrangled by the end of the night is ON. Hawke is after the Nug King title so naturally he leaves and watches everyone foolishly scramble around trying to catch it. He thinks he's going to be clever and lure the Nug with cheese. I HAVE NOT YET DECIDED WHO GETS TO BE THE NUG KING. I think it would be kind of fun if Hawke's cheese trick fails and Rose steals his thunder, but he can't help but respect her. Of course there is a lot of dancing and shenanigans and one Antivan Sip-Sip fueled kiss. But the scene is going to be a lot of fun. 🥰
The gallows visit? 👀👀 say more
So this is for matchmakingmoms!AU set during DA2: Act 2 which also happens to be a 'both twins live AU'. Bethany has been arrested and taken to the Circle and Carver decides to join the Templar Order to look out for her 🥺
So this is one section I have not plotted and planned much yet, but the basic gist of it is that Leandra is kind of deluding herself about the Gallows (I mean she only spent her entire adult life dodging the Templars so having two children in the Gallows probably hits hard enough that she's in denial about how bad it could be). Leandra suggests to Garrett that they bring Rose to the Gallows to have a visit with Carver and Bethany. Garrett isn't aware yet that Rose's older brother was a mage and that he'd become an abomination as a youth. He'd never made it to a Circle and he died at the hands of a Templar. So it's primed to be a bit of a clusterfuck. There's Rose's anxious, complicated feelings about how mages are treated, there's meeting the siblings of the man you're being fixed up with and coping with their scrutiny.
The idea is that the Gallows becomes a point of vulnerability between Garrett and Rose, something else they can bond over. I'm also hoping to weave in a bunch of class commentary, such as Garrett telling his mom he could just pay for a templar escort to bring Bethany home for a supervised visit. ughhh I am so pumped about this part of the story. I JUST NEED TO WRITE IT. Thanks for asking Ro! 🥰
WIP title game
Thanks for the tags @rowanisawriter and @nirikeehan!
Since my long fic is mostly just chapter numbers, I'll do the various WIP scenes from my fic Kiss Me Moonstruck (Leandra Hawke and Alsatia Trevelyan attempt to fix up Hawke and Rose during DA:2, Act 2) I've got:
Bracing for Impact
A Peculiar Introduction
Dougal
Sexy Stitchery
Sneaking Out
The Nug King
Pour One out for Zazikel
Gallows Visit
Tagging @delicatefade, @melisusthewee, @zenstrike, @greypetrel, @leggywillow, @rosella-writes, @rakshadow, @ammoniteflesh to see what you have! 👀
Happy friday lucky!! For some Rose Backstory, "We were always meant to say goodbye" (could be with her old fiance or the gamemaster or some other tryst)
Maybe not the backstory you were expecting, but here's another random chunk of distraction fic I cooked up last Friday! For @dadrunkwriting
WC: 892 Ship: Rose Trevelyan x Garrett Hawke Characters: Rose Trevelyan, Garrett Hawke, Bethany, Varric, Bann and Lady Trevelyan. Leandra Hawke 🥺
CW: Major character death (canon)
Rose weeps for him. Still unclear about the details other than that they were too dark to share in any sort of public announcement, she watches him through the hungry flames of the pyre and lets her tears wash her cheeks. Bethany stands beside him, and her Templar escort behind her.
And Garrett watches Rose.
His look is carried on more than a year of their letters. Thick ones with words and doodles crammed up the margins. Letters that had taken all the embers they’d left behind and fanned them into a steady blaze. Ones her parents tolerated with worn out hopes that she might come around to the idea of marriage after all. But the news of Leandra’s death had reached the Trevelyans and they’d departed for Kirkwall before Garrett's own letter would have arrived.
All the color and spunk is banished from his gaze, leaving behind an agonized, depleted look that reaches desperately across for hers. It pleads with her for a thousand things and hers offers them all, bare before him in all her stiff Wintermarch finery.
Kirkwall’s first families make a show of mourning her while Hawke’s friends hang back behind him in a mix of armor and formalwear. The Chantry’s high cleric, Mother Elthina reads from the chant.
I shall not be left to wander the drifting roads of the Fade
For there is no darkness, nor death either, in the Maker's Light
And nothing that He has wrought shall be lost.
Rose lets her words slip into a hum in the back of her mind as she focuses on Garrett through the pyre, working out how she might slip from her family later to see him. What could she possibly say? Their reunion was never supposed be like this. They’d joked in letters that he’d make the ride and they’d steal away to some secret corner of Fenwick to forget about everything for an afternoon. The undercurrent of more flowed steadily under their exchange
Rose moves along with the rest of the Trevelyans in the receiving line, her parents leading her. The line lumbers to a simple dirge, a lone chantry sister singing to the soft, hollow tones of a tom. She hurries to gather the right words, ones that might capture the morass of feeling that twists inside her, but she’s suffocated by them. And when he touches her hand would everyone see what lies between them?
First her father shakes Garrett's hand in his and then her mother clasps his in both of hers. And then she steps before him, her cheeks shining in the mute light of an overcast winter day. He accepts her hand but then reaches up to brush a tear of hers aside with his thumb. The curious looks of his friends and others present bear down upon them, pressing their time together.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he murmurs, hanging on to her gloved hand with his.
“I know,” she says, observing that his hair is cut much shorter than it had been the last time she saw him. His eyes were somehow bluer than she remembered, but all around them is creased and darkened by exhaustion. An incipient beard adorns his jaw, evidence he’s been too preoccupied to care for himself since his mother passed.
“Where are you staying?”
“The Flying Harp.”
He nods. “I’ll come visit.”
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Rose tells him. The protest in his eyes is immediate. He’d had her for a week last time.
“So soon?” Bethany asks, her cheeks mottled and lashes sticky. “I was hoping you might get to spend some time here.” She glances up at her brother and then back at her Templar keeper behind her. Rose presses Bethany’s hands between hers like they’ve known each other longer than the scant few hours they’d sat together the last time.
“Fenwick is but two days’ ride,” Rose tells her and then flicks a meaningful look back to Garrett.
“You’re holding the line, dear,” says Alsatia over her shoulder, tugging on Rose’s elbow.
Varric hurries after her in such a way that he draws sharp looks from each of her parents.
“Lady Rose, wait,” he says. “You’re not really leaving tomorrow, are you?”
“I’m at the mercy of my parents,” Rose explains.
“He needs you,” says the dwarf. “I mean— I could use the back up. He hasn’t taken any visitors.”
“I’ll try to see him. No guarantees. They’re not easy to escape,” she says softly, glancing back at them.
“You know if you’d stayed last time, things would be different,” mutters the dwarf. “You know that right?”
Rose feels her indignance rise against such an obvious conclusion. “Maybe. But even you know he and I were always meant to say goodbye. It was a mutual decision.”
Varric looks admonished, troubled by the whole affair, Rose suspects. If it hadn’t been obvious from her first visit, Garrett's letters confirmed that Leandra was their a mother hen, welcoming and attending to Garrett's odd gang in spite of the antiquated judgments she’d unleash when they weren’t around. The dwarf pleads with her again. “You gotta try, Freckles.”
The nickname takes her back— Garrett Hawke the Nug King and his lady friend Freckles. She flushes at the remembrance and flicks her eyes back to his.
“The Flying Harp, Varric. Tell him to find me there.”
Happy dadwc! Let's have "You cannot stain a black coat. -Nicholas Nickelby" from the Dickens prompts, for Kirkwall-era Garrett Hawke?
Thank youuuu! I also incorporated these twin prompts from @about2dance and @bluewren for @dadrunkwriting
This inspired a scene in my MatchmakingMoms!AU where Leandra Hawke and Alsatia Trevelyan are trying to fix up Garrett and Rose, their incorrigible adult children who have no interest in getting fixed up. Context: Dougal is coming to extort more money and effectively interrupted Hawke's introduction to Rose. Hawke is off to deal with him with his friends. WC: 2,211 Characters: Garrett Hawke, Isabela, Fenris, Merrill, Varric, Dougal, Aveline, Anders. Rose Trevelyan, Alsatia Trevelyan and Leandra Hawke are implied. Ship: Garrett Hawke x Aveline Vallen (unrequited)
Striding along the snow dusted streets of Hightown in the clink of his armor and mail, Hawke’s mind bounces between the impertinence of Dougal and the ill-fated introduction he’d just endured. His friends all seem to be waiting for him to say something, unusually short on quips considering everything going on. He glances at them, testing his theory and in spite of their varying moods, their brows all lift inquiringly.
“I don’t know. I mean you saw her. She looked as pinched as every other blazing noblewoman I’ve met, but there was something about her expression—” Hawke says starting right in, swinging along the tidy streets of Hightown toward the lower market where Fenris says Varric is running interference. “She— smirked.”
“She smirked.” Fenris’ flat tone is somehow flatter. Hawke thinks back on her momentarily. Truthfully he couldn’t see well beyond the severity of her coif and gown, but she had pleasant enough face he supposes. He hadn’t been paying much attention until she smirked. And then his friends foisted themselves upon them all.
“Yeah, her smirk. I mean I can’t blame her. I am me. But it was— nice. And… weirdly familiar.”
“Pinched she may be, but that girl’s been plucked,” remarks Isabela with a wry twist of her lips.
“What do you mean she’s been plucked?” asks Merrill. “Because she’s a Rose?”
“Yes, because she’s a Rose,” answers Hawke, grinning stupidly.
“She’s had sex,” hisses Isabela to Merrill.
“Ohhh. How do you know she’s— well— been plucked?” asks Merrill.
“I just know,” smiles the Rivaini.
“Anyway. Surely she and her enterprising mother will take a hint after another day or two and flee back to Ostwick,” says Hawke, rather eager to be rid of the intrusion this first holiday alone. They’re certainly in no need of the audience as he and his mother feel out how to be fabulously wealthy and normal all at once.
“You are humoring your mother,” observes Fenris like it’s the strangest thing. “Couldn’t you tell her no?
“Not this time. The mother’s an old friend. And I’m a sucker for seeing my mother rekindling old friendships after everything. The aren’t many who will associate with her after her infamous flight to Ferelden. Even all these years later. And no amount of gilding will cover up that stain.”
“You’re a good son, Hawke,” says Merrill. “I thought she looked lovely.”
“Yes, my mother is a delight,” teases Hawke.
Merrill smacks him with the back of her hand. “That Rose girl.”
“She was fine I suppose. Nothing that could tempt me outright I don’t think. But fine.”
Dougal and his horde of unwashed brutes loiter restlessly in the Guild Quarter, heavily armed and bearing torches. Varric wisely stands to one side with enough space between him and the gang that he can’t be jumped without pulling Bianca first. Dougal himself is cursed with an unearned sense of confidence, eyes glittering over the warped smile on his face
“You’re only missing pitchforks,” Hawke says with an affable smile.
“We’re missing a little more than that.”
“Says you. We had an agreement,” says Hawke, reaching casually for the weapon of one of Dougal’s henchmen. The young dwarf, not knowing what to do with such a bold, unconcerned incursion, allows it. Hawke inspects it and hands it back to him, ruffling his hand in the hair of the dwarf.
“I’ve seen the spoils of your expedition,” says Dougal. “The lavish estate. The fine furnishings. I think I deserve a larger share of your fortune. Fair is fair, right?”
“I’ll be the last one to say we should have listened to Bartrand,” interjects Varric. “But we should have listened to Bartrand.”
“Isn’t this a conversation we should have had— say— eight months ago?” asks Hawke.
“What can I say. Things have gone poorly for me and I’m a bitter man,” says Dougal, inspecting his stubby fingers.
“So you admit to being a shit investor and then come slithering my way thinking you can make me cough up more?” asks Hawke, his amusement supreme.
“Now you’re getting it,” says Dougal.
“And if I say no?” says Hawke, crossing his arms. He’s already counted the opposition— twelve excluding the man himself who would doubtlessly hide behind his muscle. Daggers and hammers and crossbows. Leather armor at least. He feels a swell of pity for the goons that have fallen in with this slimeball. Most of them are just trying to make it in this town the same way he was. And Maker, he’d really rather not kill anyone tonight of all nights.
“Let’s just say that I’d hate to see something happen to that lovely mother of yours who spends all together too much time alone. A hundred sovereigns and you can make this go away.”
“Extortion’s never really been a favorite of mine, you know,” says Hawke cheerfully, drawing his sword from its sheath on his back. He tosses it lightly in a little show, admiring how the brazier light flashes on each side of the fuller. “But shameless creature that I am, I suppose I’m tough to blackmail. You can’t stain a black coat.”
“A man does what he must,” says Dougal, easy amongst his squad of stabby goobers.
“You’ve already interrupted Hawke’s special day,” says Isabela with her usual wry grin. “Now you’re threatening to kill his mother?”
“Special day?” asks Dougal.
Hawke rolls his eyes lightly. “It’s not that special.”
“Well now you have to tell me,” says the rat.
“If you must know—” Hawke begins.
“Hawke’s mother is trying to set him up with a wife,” finishes Merrill, utterly delighted.
“Oh?” Dougal’s brow arches high and then he laughs, a pitying one that echoes off the cornices and columns until it devolves into wheezes. He clutches his side, recovering himself while his men chuckle along dutifully. “Well it’s a good thing I’m claiming my due now. She’ll drain your coffers dry and run off with the stable boy.”
Hawke snorts at the man's confident advice. “Today is not your day,” he says, smiling as he slips his shield onto his left arm. “Why don’t you let all these nice people head along home to their lovely spouses and fight me head to head like the Maker intended?”
“You and I both know I pay good coin for this back up.”
“Good, is it?” Hawke asks. He turns to the men. “I’ll pay you double this month’s wages to fuck right off right now! Toss in a wheel of cheese for your trouble!”
“You can’t buy their loyalty. They’re all family!” laughs Dougal. “Though maybe you don’t quite understand. I heard you notoriously lost your family during your little expedition.”
“Bold blazing words from an actual turkey. Come on then. Let’s get this over with,” says Hawke stretching his neck and rolling his shoulders in preparation before flipping down his visor. He sees the faint the shimmer of Merrill’s barrier hugging him as he invites the onslaught, pounding on his shield to draw them upon him.
By now his crew is well aware of his distaste for outright murder. He’d seen Varric and Isabela’s precision— pinning culprits to walls with bolts and removing armor with surgical slashes of blades. And Fenris had mercifully learned to execute a relatively delicate little pop on the head when needed. Merrill summons her fantastically freaky tendrils and wraps them up as needed. Hawke is appreciative of their restraint considering.
“I don’t suppose anyone had the forethought to fetch Aveline?” asks Hawke, sending assailants tumbling back with aggravated nudges of his elbow and bashes of his shield.
“Blondie went for her,” says Varric, ducking under a triplet.
“I wish he’d hurry the blazes up,” says Hawke, glancing down at the blood pooling in his mail under his gauntlet. “Fuck.” He shakes his arm out like it might make it feel better and then gets right back to it.
It's Dougal’s numbers versus the eclectic capabilities of Hawke’s crew. The clash carries on long enough that everyone involved starts getting loose and careless in their movements, the early snap of battle settling into a languor as everyone starts hankering after stamina pots and lyrium draughts. Hawke flips his visor up to swipe sweat from his brow.
“So how’d you know this girl anyhow?” asks Dougal, sashaying lightly away from one of Merrill’s grabby vines.
“Daughter of a family friend,” grunts Hawke, shoving one back with the flat of his foot against the poor sod’s stomach. Convenient to be so tall in a fight against dwarves.
“Does she have a nice set of badonkers, at least?” inquires Dougal.
“Acceptable,” remarks Isabela, stepping on her unconscious quarry as she binds his wrists behind him. “Hard to tell underneath those bloody stays that are getting so popular these days.”
“She was perfectly prim,” insists Merrill, cracking the head of a cheeky bastard with her staff.
“You’re all getting ahead of yourselves,” says Hawke, hovering somewhere between exasperation and unbridled laughter. “I have about as much chance of settling down with her as I have sprinting up Viscount’s court in my birthday suit.”
“Hawke,” says Fenris in the simplest challenge.
“Well all right, through the Chantry then.”
“Hawke,” says Isabela, eyebrow raised as she disarms another assailant, kicking their blade far across the stones.
“You don’t really believe that I’d—“
“Hawke,” says Varric, tilting his head in amazement.
“You do something one time!” he grumbles, knocking back the last goon between him and Dougal hard enough that the blighter doesn’t even get up.
“You’re not going to kill me,” says Dougal, backed against a wall. “You’re soft. Effective but soft.”
“You don’t know that,” says Hawke. “Maybe I want to get back to future wife with the badonkers. I’d get there faster if I stuck you with my sword.”
“Everybody knows your soft, Hawke,” says Dougal, dodging the admittedly lazy thrusts of Hawke’s blade. “Maybe if you’d been quicker to kill you wouldn’t have had to make a deal with me.”
“For Maker’s sake,” mutters Hawke, deftly cornering Dougal with renewed fire and squashing him against the wall with the flat of his blade. “Do I talk this much?”
“Yes!” comes the hollered chorus.
“You can’t get rid of me so easy,” says Dougal, glancing at his subdued henchmen. “There’s only two ways to make me go away.”
“Three, actually,” comes a blessed voice from across the yard. The shuffling sound says she came with reinforcements. Dougal’s head falls back in annoyance.
“It’s my word against yours, Hawke,” he spits.
“When’s the last time you did a favor for the Viscount?” Hawke asks with a grin. “Or are you going to extort him too?”
“Not a bad bit of rescuing, if I do say so myself,” says Anders, attending to Fenris who mutters a string of Tevinter curses while a laceration in his side gets a dose of luminescent relief.
Aveline’s guards shackle the ones writhing in pain and check those who have already been trussed up. Hawke asks Anders to work on the most dire of Dougal’s injured goons, eager to relish in being the bigger man.
“Well, Hawke. Can’t say I’ll shed any tears about this one,” says Aveline come alongside Hawke.
He feels a shadow of the same thrill he once got when she came around, but her indifference to him has at last settled permanently within him, the disappointment sticking like a splinter too deep.
“He threatened Mother," says Hawke, "Like a common hoodlum."
“The worst crime of all,” says Aveline with a wry little smile. “Give my best to Leandra.”
“Didn’t you hear? Leandra is hosting Hawke’s future wife,” chimes in Isabela.
“And she’s lovely!” adds Merrill, earnestly excited.
“Future wife, Hawke?” asks Aveline. “Leandra must be beside herself.”
Hawke’s eyes roll deeply back into their sockets. “They’re visiting for the week. An old friend and her daughter. Figure I’ll spend a little extra time down in Lowtown this week.”
“Aw, Hawke. What if she’s nice? You could use a nice girl,” says Aveline
“Like a singing, dancing bogfisher,” gazing at Aveline doubtfully.
She shakes her head at him in that same Maker-forsaken sisterly way she always has, but he has to acknowledge there’s some truth to it. His romantic heart has too long been preoccupied and alone, fixating on an impractical mirage. He daydreams of something. A secret intimacy of terrible jokes and favorite touches. Of lazy mornings and shared investigations. But he doubts the finicky creature who smirked at him once would be the woman for the job. There isn’t space in this life of his for anyone who can’t keep pace with his nonsense.
Hawke glances around at the carnage— a rather tidy victory, he admits— barely a mess for the street sweeps to cope with, and little more than a sweat broken. He remembers the stab wound near his elbow and shakes out his forearm and hand again before downing a mild healing pot and making a note to dress it at home.
“Watch your coffers, Hawke,” warns Dougal with a smirk as he’s hauled away.
“Better hurry on back,” says Aveline again with that same teasing diffidence.
Hawke snorts softly and thanks her for her timely aid. He makes everyone promise to bother him at the Hanged Man later where he’ll be taking refuge from the machinations of his mother and the elder Trevelyan woman.
Varric comes up alongside him and pats his back, fully aware of the long misery that’s in the midst of flickering out at last. “Come on, Chuckles. I’ll walk you home.”
