Chapter Text
The worst part is: she can remember everything.
Hawke sits trembling, her back pressed against a slight dimple in the rough stone wall. The crevice she’s hiding in can’t even be called a cave— the fissure in the rock is no more than an arm’s length wide, even though she’s barely a dozen paces from the entrance. A narrow band of sickly green light pulses high above, sending pale shadows wavering across the stone. If she stares, the lights almost look like faces.
She closes her eyes.
Please, let this be far enough. Rubble blocks any deeper exploration of the cracked cliff. But around the corner, outside her shelter and out of sight, something large and lumbering slowly heaves itself nearer.
Not here, she thinks to herself, don’t look here don’t come closer don’t—
Hawke crams her hand between her teeth, biting down on the first knuckle. She takes a slow, shuddering breath, certain it must hear her, smell her, it knows, it’s coming—
A splash, farther off. The demon—she isn’t sure what kind—is leaving. She listens to it go, heart pounding like a war drum. Long minutes stretch by after the echoes of its passing fade away, and still she can’t move. She should be out there, fighting—she knows this. She’s faced templars and abominations and even an Andraste-forsaken dragon in that cursed bone-pit. She once scared off a gang of mercenaries with nothing but her barbed tongue. But one a throaty roar from behind a cliff and she’s spooked into hiding. Frustration grows, dimming the panic still coiled in her chest. It’s irrational. It’s stupid.
She can’t make it stop.
“I am in control,” she whispers. If she says it often enough, it might stop being a lie.
With agonizing slowness, Hawke drags herself to her feet, one white-knuckled hand clutching her ruined staff. The bottom third of the stave has snapped off, blade lodged somewhere in the curled-up husk that is all that remains of the Nightmare’s Spider demon, left miles behind her already.
She hadn’t expected to win that fight, not really. She’d thrown herself in with little enough regard for her own safety, recklessly diving under its engorged belly to shoot fireballs at the joints of its clattering legs. It almost crushed her as it collapsed to one side, twisting underneath itself to reach for her with groping pincers while a dozen wet, black eyes fixed her in an emotionless stare. The rest happened in a blur, to be honest—she knows she gouged out one of those horrible glistening eyes, and can recall the feel of her staff blade sinking into the unexpectedly soft skin under its abdomen. The acrid taste of the monster’s acid venom in the air still stings on her tongue. The rest is falling rocks and her own snarling rage. Instinct alone made her throw up a barrier at the end as the monster finally toppled, death-spasms sending great shudders through the stone underfoot, knocking her off her feet.
Her ward had faded by the time it finished dying. A creature stuffed fat on all the twisted fears its master had fed it.
The worst part is: she can remember everything.
A half-choked sob escapes through her clenched jaw, muffled by the hand still clamped across her mouth. She sways on her feet, and they come:
The sound of bandits outside of the caravan, laughing as they gut the last guard. The pain of an arrow piercing her lung, and the slow bubbling of blood behind every ragged breath. The smell of smoke, waking too late, the air already tainted with the char of singed flesh before the children’s screams even began. A single, trembling voice, in a dark room: “O Maker, hear my cry: Guide me through the blackest nights—“
“Not me,” Hawke whispers, digging her fingers into the unyielding stone to steady herself. “Not me.” She has to remind herself constantly. Not her pain, not really. Not her life.
She should have guessed. When they killed the wisps, the Inquisitor found her missing memories again.
When Hawke killed the Spider demon, she got the rest of everyone else’s.