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“When this is over,” Hawke says, “I’m finished. I’ll be done for real.”
That’s what they always said.
“You say that as if you know for sure that there will be an ending,” Varric says. Or an ending that isn’t your own end.
Hawke just smiles. The look tired and old, their dark hair shorn short, their grip on their mage’s staff familiar yet rough-knuckled, hard worn. “You’re the writer, Varric,” they say. “Don’t you know by now that stories never have an end? Someone always has to carry on the story.”
“And your story, Hawke?” Varric asks them. He almost doesn’t want to hear their answer.
“Like I said.” Hawke tugs their hood up over their hair, then low on their brow. “When this is over, I’m done. Maybe I’ll even go home.”
Varric doesn’t ask them where that is—he’s not sure Hawke even knows. It has been a long time since either of them has had anywhere to call home.
“Give the Inquisitor my best,” Varric says. “Don’t know why she seems to think I can’t be of help with a bunch of Grey Wardens. You’re certainly sure to muck things up without me.”
“Indeed,” Hawke says; “a very important detail often left out of your retellings, that is—all the ways you’ve made sure my story keeps on.” They lean down and kiss Varric on the cheek before they go.
“See you soon, Varric,” they say before they turn and leave.
That’s what they always said.
-
Do they need me? Hawke’s letter had read—meaning the Inquisition, meaning the Seeker and Inquisitor and all the others they have arrayed on this strange quest of theirs.
And Varric had considered. It would be so easy to lie. It was what he was best at. Hawke had already walked off the stage: exeunt left, pursued by no one, everyone too afraid to follow the Champion of Kirkwall into the dark places that they have always tread. The statue-corpse of Meredith still smoking in the Gallows, center stage.
Everyone knows that sequels are never as good as the original: bringing back beloved characters in a new story is so hit-or-miss that usually it’s better just not to even try.
But Varric is not everyone; and neither is Hawke. And this is not a question Hawke ever would have asked before.
If only he could have made the story right.
-
“Why,” Hawke says, flicking blood and shit off their boots and gloves and looking extremely put out, “did I have to do this again, exactly?”
“Because you’re getting paid for it,” Isabela reminds them. “All the rest will wash out.”
“Doubt it,” Hawke grumps. “And I don’t need to be paid to do things anymore. I’m fucking rich, remember?”
Isabela shrugs. “I like getting paid.”
“We’ve gone too far,” Fenris says from a distance away. Deep under the city, in tunnels and corridors long since abandoned, long since tread. His posture is markedly poor here, and he hunches over himself. Varric thinks maybe Hawke could have thought twice before dragging Fenris down here into the heart of the Imperium’s slaving dens underneath Kirkwall. But Fenris had wanted to come.
And Merrill, barefoot, exhausted and looking as if she hoped someone might offer to carry her on their back at any moment. “Surely we’ve gone far enough.”
“Not until we find what we’re looking for,” Hawke says.
“I thought you wanted to turn round already.” Isabela is peering down one passageway as if she stares hard enough she can decipher the pitch blackness. Both her blades are held, not loosely, at her sides.
“Well,” Hawke says; “we’ve come this far.”
They don’t find what they’re looking for—that night or any night after. Kirkwall keeps its secrets well, and the rivers of blood that run beneath its streets have long since ever been dry. Strange, Hawke would say, running their fingertips over the carvings in the walls of the dark passageways. Varric hated the underground, hated this part of the city that did not make sense to him, that he could not charm with a story and a mug of ale. It wasn’t right. Strange, Hawke said, their fingertips pressed hard against the stone: this incantation. I can’t read it.
Slavers' magic, Fenris would say. The pale of his tattoos just visible in the darkness.
Hawke left their fingertips there nonetheless. Older than that, they said, and let it be.
They never once asked before, am I needed? Varric is surprised he never noticed this sooner. You think you know your hero so well, and all along they’re unspooling in front of you like thread, like twine, wrapped around the walls and carts and shops in Lowtown, all the alleyways pointing home.
-
But it was not, perhaps, the question they should have asked.
Maybe instead: will what I do matter?
-
It is easy for the rest of Thedas to forget about Kirkwall. The place where it all began, sure—in a sense. Where Anders the apostate destroyed half a city and sent a storm across Thedas. But the storm had already been there: the thunder and lightning that indicate the rain’s approach. Anders had just told the sky when to break. It would have eventually done so with or without him.
That is what Kirkwall becomes to the rest of the world: a footnote, a far-off strangeness. The Inquisitor has never been there; Cassandra seems to think it of no importance now that Hawke is no longer there. The rest of the Inquisition has their eyes forward: on the Breach, on Corypheus, on doom falling upon all the world.
Varric has his eyes set behind him: on beginnings, on middles, on stories that have no end. On cities that keep burning long after the fires have been put out. He left the city but the city has not left him. Varric thinks of Kirkwall and is dissatisfied to find that he misses it. Nostalgia does not make for an exciting drama. Nostalgia and grief and mourning: all that he has learned in this lifetime.
He wonders if it’s a lyrium thing; if there is something in the water there, in the air, that tugs at him long after he’s gone. Or some other weird magic shit. The Veil is thin here, Hawke used to say of Kirkwall, their eyes faraway and their open left hand grasping at nothing. The Veil is thin here, and it cannot be remade.
At Skyhold, Hawke has said nothing about the Fade, the Veil. Or Kirkwall. Has not mentioned any of the people they left behind—any of the people who followed them out of the city but whose paths took different courses afterwards. Varric wonders how they are. His last letter from Merrill had been short and unlike her. Isabela and Fenris never write. Aveline has nothing to say, anymore. She is the only one left inside the hexes of Kirkwall’s streets. Varric wonders if she can smell the burning, still.
They will all be together again someday. This is what Varric tells himself. That’s how he would write it, at least; one last hurrah, before the end. They would smile, and drink. They would go out in a flash of glory or a flash of light, obscuring everything. Happiness or legacy. Cheesiness or heroism. Both, maybe.
He wonders if Hawke is right—if life has no endings; if it simply goes on. He doesn’t know what to do with that. None of the words sound right. This, and this, and this. You get tired of turning the pages. After a while, you need to put the book down. But Varric can’t let go of the pen.
-
“You know,” Fenris says, “not everything is a song or tale. I hate to disappoint you.”
“You say that like you think I don’t know it,” Varric says. “I’m well aware my stories aren’t the truth.”
“I never said they weren’t truth,” Fenris says. His hands curled around a mug, his gaze cast low. He’d come to the Hanged Man late and alone and covered in dirt and what Varric thinks is probably blood. He’s used to it. “Just that life isn’t a story.”
“Maybe we’d like it better if it were,” Varric says, and Fenris’ smile comes as a wry afterthought.
“Hardly. I’ve seen the way your stories end.”
-
“When this is over,” Hawke says, “I’m finished. I’ll be done for real.” They’re putting on their boots in front of the fire. Their staff leans against the wall besides the door.
“You said that about the Arishok,” Varric tells them. “And the Deep Roads.”
“Yes,” Hawke says; “but this time either I’ll be right or the entire city will burn down, so, either way, really. That’s me finished.”
“I think maybe you’re afraid of endings,” Varric says.
Hawke’s smile is crooked and sharp. “Who, me?” They tug the last of their laces. Their champion’s armor a cutting figure against the space around them. “Endings are my favorite part. That’s why I take so long trying to get to them.”
“If Meredith murders you,” Varric says, “which I’m pretty convinced she will, can I write a poem about it? I’ve been thinking of trying something other than prose these days.”
“That’s sweet of you to say,” Hawke says.
-
Everyone forgets Kirkwall, but Varric can’t.
A footnote in Thedas’ history. In a hundred years, a thousand years, will anyone even remember its name? It is infamous but infamy only lasts for so long. And the city might crumble long before its legacy is anything other than darkness.
Kirkwall. Hawke. The stories that last. The rest of the Inquisition thinks about immediacy: their current plan, the next mission. Varric has never been one for foresight. Storytelling is all about looking back after the fact and seeing the way everything slid into place when you weren’t looking. Oh, and how it all certainly did.
“I swear to the Maker,” Hawke says, stamping their feet in the short brown grass. Behind them, Kirkwall is burning. No one wants to look back. “I’m fucking finished. It’s over, and I’m done.”
-
Hawke, after the Fade. Packing up their things to leave the Inquisition behind for good. Their staff is not leaning against the wall, but tossed aside onto the floor. “It didn’t matter,” they say. “Not a single fucking thing I ever did, Varric.” Their voice is choked and strained and they don’t sound like themself, not for a second.
“You helped, Hawke,” Varric says. “You helped people.”
Hawke laughs, bitter and angry. “Name one.”
Varric thinks about saying, well, me, for starters—but it doesn’t fit the genre. Not quite. Never has.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says instead. “There’s Daisy, Fenris, ‘Bela...and more than a few people in Kirkwall who owe their lives to you.”
“They shouldn’t thank me in that city,” Hawke says. “They’re all going to rot there from the inside out.”
Varric doesn’t know what to say to that. He remembers the Deep Roads, the light of the red lyrium. He remembers the sewers, and the passageways that ended in steep drop-offs at random, where magisters used to throw the corpses of slaves into the depths of the city below. The long hollow echoing response when Varric had once dropped a stone off the edge and waited for it to fall.
“Corypheus is my fault,” Hawke says. Tightly buckling the straps of their bag. “Quentin was my fault. Even Meredith was my fault, in the end....what’s that you always say, about all the best stories, Varric? That they might as well be yours?” They sling their pack over their shoulders, and fetch their staff from the floor. “Take mine, then. I know you’ve always had it, but here’s me handing it over anyway. Change what you will. Keep the rest. But I’m done.”
They close the door behind them. And Varric doesn’t know where Hawke goes: not for a long, long time.
But, then again: isn’t that what Hawke always said?
-
The Tale of the Champion is his most famous work. Varric wonders, later in life, why this is so. Surely he has told larger tales: even penned a few volumes about the Inquisitor and how she saved all of Thedas. Hawke was only the caretaker of a single city, and Kirkwall was hardly saved in the end, but changed, rotting on its foundations. Everything afterwards was a mere salve pressed against an open wound. Useless.
The chapters of the Inquisitor’s story where Hawke appears sell the fastest. Varric gets plenty of criticism—why bring back such an iconic character only to give them so small a role, so inconsequential a part?—and yet enough praise to make up for all of it.
Tell us what happens next, his readers beg. Tell us where Hawke went next.
As if Varric knows.
Perhaps it is better that Hawke never asked will what I do matter? Kirkwall was certainly not a point in their favor. The remains of their family there, left buried and forgotten by all but a few in the crumbling halls of that city. Only Hawke remains. And as for the Inquisition—for all that the Seeker insisted that Hawke was crucial and that Varric could never be forgiven for hiding them—for all of that, Hawke’s role was never anything more than minor. A bit piece. Could have been played by any other number of actors.
Exit stage left. If you’re lucky enough to escape without being pursued, perhaps you should never try to get back on the stage. But it turns out that once you start asking am I needed?, it’s almost impossible to stop.
Varric had thought he was telling Hawke the truth at the time when he had said yes, the Inquisition needs you. Now he thinks, maybe not. Now he thinks, not quite.
But maybe that’s just regret. They always say you need to learn to live with it. Varric has never quite managed to figure out how.
You would think the rest of the world would move on. But he gets letters, still; tell us more about Hawke and the city, Hawke and their family, Hawke and what came after.
And what is there to say to that?