Under Darkness [AU]

[Marian Hawke]

You offered sex. You flirted. You played as if you were lighthearted. You loved me, despite everything that was done to you, despite everything you survived. I'm the one that's weak. I'm the one that failed.

She lets out a soft whimper, going silent as she rocks.  A long moment passes, and then another. Is that it? Is she lost now, to the depths of a bad day?

[Tethras Clan]

"Hawke, don't drift away, stay with us," Aveline says firmly, cupping the woman's face and rubbing her thumb along her cheekbone. "Hawke, back to us. Come on, talk to us. Please keep talking."

[Marian Hawke]

She shudders, pulling back from Aveline's touch. But that motion jars her, and she blinks a few times, her breath becoming irregular. She turns her attention to Zevran, fixing her gaze on his face, on his tattoos. On him. 

"Teach me?" she whispers, pleading. "Teach me how to... parry?" 

[Tethras Clan]

Zevran's eyes widen and his head bows. "...of course, my voice lost in the dark," he whispers back, slipping into elven. "Everything I know, I promise."

[Marian Hawke]

A month passes. Things improve, slowly but surely. Her bad days get less bad; she smiles now, at least once, each day, even her bad ones. She has fewer nightmares, sleeps through the night more often. She starts asking Aveline for magical aid when she can't sleep through the night, and when Varric suggests it, she readily agrees to keep a supply of sleeping tonics on hand for those nights she can't make herself stay asleep instead. She stops hurting herself, except for her very worst days. She takes the potions Anders gives her, though she resists using them when she can. Better to feel, she tells Aveline on one of her better days. Better to get it out.

But then, as Anders turns more of his attention to Merrill, she seems to stall out. Her bad days still outnumber her good ones, by a large number; the second most frequent days are the mixed ones, the ones where she is quiet and subdued but not entirely silent, where she remembers not to call Aveline 'Mistress' but still meekly follows where she leads. The days she reminds Zevran of one still enslaved, one who has lost hope. She doesn't seem so raw, so wounded... but not Hawke, either. Not even Hawke when they all first met her; even as a girl, not quite of age, she had more determination, more spunk, more willingness to reach out and grasp what could be hers. 

A second month passes, and a third is half over. Anders starts hedging his statements: Merrill's doing good, making steady improvement, but Hawke is only holding her ground, doing better than she was. It's too soon to tell if this is a temporary plateau or the extant of how you can expect her to behave from now on, he tells them, but his tone, his hedging, implies that every day she doesn't improve is a worse and worse sign.

Aveline asks Varric if he would mind spending an afternoon with her, in the hopes that a change of routine might jar her out of it...

[Tethras Clan]

Aveline hates to let her out of her sight, but at the same time... It'll be nice to change things up. And Anders was saying he wants to make sure Merrill continues to push with her interactions with females. And while I'm actually fairly light in skin color, I am pretty close to the typical drow female bulld. Well, aside from my bust anyway. Regardless, she heads after lunch, giving Varric a quick hug as he walks into the rose garden, which had become one of Hawke's favorite spots to soak in the sun.

The last month and a half had been... really hard on Varric. Sure, he'd been able to help Merrill out a fair bit. And gotten a lot closer to the young elf as well. It had... been all sorts of bittersweet last week when she'd started calling me Papa. The first time was when she was half asleep, but... well, she'd evidently recalled that I hadn't seemed to mind, as she's continued to call me that ever since. Which... is nice, despite the sting of it.
 But it'll be nice to spend some real time with my first daughter.

A flash of pain before he masks it. Hawke... Setting up a trade network, getting things changed out so I can run things from here. Gotta pay for things and all that. Plus... keeping busy is good. At least I can tell myself that I'm getting the resources for anything they might need. Seeing Hawke laying in a lounger, he grabs a stool to drag over for himself. There's a book laying on her stomach, open, but she's just gazing at the flowers, maybe watching the bird flitting about there. "Hey daughter mine," he says softly.

[Marian Hawke]

Hawke doesn't respond right away -- common enough, for the past few months, though she tries to be on her best behavior for dinner with her Papa, so he's seen it less. She shifts her head toward him a moment later, dragging herself out of her thoughts. Papa. That's Papa. He's come to spend the afternoon with me. I remember now. It's not that she's forgotten him, forgotten the timbre of his voice or the contours of his face -- it's just that it takes a moment to push aside the memories, to focus on the here and now. A bad day. You're having a bad day. You refused the tonic at breakfast, you felt it coming but thought the sunshine would drive it away. Just a bad day. Remember that.

(Jadan killed me. That's important. Remember that.)

Papa. Aveline said Papa was going to spend the afternoon with you. You need to pay attention, to focus for him. To be good for him.

(I am a good pet.)(He loves me.)

"Papa," she says quietly, lowering her gaze to the ground.

[Tethras Clan]

"None of that, daughter mine," Varric says gently. "Eyes up." Reaching out, he gently taps her chin to get her to raise it up. "What're you reading?" he asks. Sure, he could look down, but better to have her tell him.

[Marian Hawke]

"Dunderton's Tales." It's a travelogue, mostly fantastical -- it's exceedingly unlikely that one adventurer could survive so many close brushes with death. But it's a fun read, and one of her favorites. Her voice is soft, and while she lifts her eyes, she looks past him, over his shoulder, rather than at him. 

[Tethras Clan]

Progress, of a sort. Well, not so much progress as a whole, but still a good sign. "What part are you on?" he asks, trying to keep the conversation going.

[Marian Hawke]

"The--"

She starts to reply promptly, but then, she can't recall where she was when she put the book down. She stalls, her brain grinding as she desperately tries to remember. Tears spring to her eyes, and she lowers her gaze again. "I'm sorry," she whispers, flinching back as if she expects to be hit. 

[Tethras Clan]

"Why don't we take a look at the book and see where you were," Varric suggests, voice gentle and soothing.

[Marian Hawke]

She nods, mutely, looking down at the book. Turning it over. It seems she was at the beginning of a chapter when she put it down: the one where the hero has just been captured by a fiend, carted off to be tormented, and has to escape with his wits alone, which leaves him in the underdark with precious few resources... 

Oh. 

[Tethras Clan]

"Eh, that chapter was pretty weak," Varric says smoothly, flipping ahead a bit until he reaches the chapter after that one, where Dunderton has gotten to the surface along with a pair of friendly slurks that he freed during his own daring escape. "Giant slime toads with tusks and acid goo or not, I have to admit the writer makes them come off as kind of cute," he comments. "You think you could read to me for a bit?" Good to get her talking a bit, and maybe it'll be easier if she doesn't have to come up with the words herself.

[Marian Hawke]

Hawke nods, looking down at the book. She reads aloud, her voice quiet but steady, for page after page; she seems content to do so, not bored or restless, but neither does she react to the text as she normally would. She's just.. Merrill-like, really.