At Your Side (A Dragon Age fanfiction)

No Place Like Kirkwall

An unusual flurry of movement on the deck above her head woke Evelyn Hawke. Curled up near her, clinging to sleep—one of the few distractions from the monotony of the long voyage—lay her companions: her sister Bethany, their mother Leandra, and their friend Aveline.

The hold was crowded with refugees from the Blight. The odors of unwashed people, poorly cooked food, and the fluids emitting from bodies both healthy and sick permeated everything on the ship. Hawke looked forward to getting to Kirkwall if only to smell something else. She worried particularly about Bethany, who had always been delicate, and her mother, whose age made her an easy target for all the ailments shared by their fellow refugees.

She lay listening to the shouting abovedecks for a few minutes before the repeated word "Land" sank in through the fog of sleep. Land! Were they finally arriving in Kirkwall? She got to her feet, careful not to wake the others. Treading carefully in the darkness so as not to step on anyone, she picked her way through the hold and climbed the ladder up to the top deck.

Normally it was a tightly run routine on deck, but today everyone was rushing. The captain shouted orders from the quarterdeck, the men shouted at each other as they got in one another's way. Hawke shrank back against the wall of the captain's cabin, trying to stay unnoticed. She stared up at the cliffs on either side, at the great bronze statues that hung from them. All the statues were of slaves. Cringing, frightened slaves. Not a particularly welcoming sight.

A sailor came over to Hawke. "You should be below."

She looked up into the black eyes she'd come to know so well over the course of the journey, smiling. "I just want to watch, Bram."

But Bram's eyes didn't change. He looked on her as though she was a stranger. "You'll see soon enough, dog-lord. Meanwhile, stay out of the way." And he walked off without another word.

So that's the way it was to be. Hot words and intimacy on the passage across, but here she was just another Fereldan refugee. Well, despite Bram's many attractions—he was a muscle-bound giant of a man about whom hung an almost palpable darkness, just the way Hawke liked it—she hadn't intended on a long-term affair with the sailor. He knew a lot about the fine art of taking a woman hard and fast in whatever corner was handy, but when it came to matters beyond the ship he didn't have two brains to rub together.

Hawke made herself as small as possible as the ship pulled the rest of the way into Kirkwall Harbor. By the time it bumped the dock, the others were awake, and a crowd of refugees waited with them on the deck.

"Kirkwall," Hawke's mother sighed. "I can't wait to be home."

"You still think of it as home, Mother, after all this time?" Bethany asked.

"It's where I was born. It will always be home to me. Just as Ferelden will always be for you," Mother said. She put her arm around Bethany's waist.

Hawke said nothing, but privately she disagreed. As far as she was concerned, home would be when they were all safe, with enough money to keep the Templars from taking Bethany away. Whether that home was in Ferelden or Kirkwall mattered little to her. All that lay behind was the Blighted land in which her father and her brother were buried. Without them, it could never truly be 'home' again.

"Look, Hawke," Aveline said quietly in her ear. "Look how many of them there are." She pointed to the docks, where a giant tent city sprawled wherever the eye could see. Fereldan refugees, one and all.