At Your Side (A Dragon Age fanfiction)

Escape

"Evelyn!"

"Yes, Mother?" She halted in the doorway, but didn't turn. This conversation was only going one place, and Evelyn really didn't want to go with it.

"What are you doing on Thursday?"

"Busy. Why?" She wasn't, but her mother didn't need to know that.

"I'm trying to schedule a dinner for you and the Dumar boy, but he's terribly hard to book, as you might imagine. Can't you change your plans?"

"Saemus Dumar?! Please tell me you aren't considering him as a potential husband candidate?" Her mother's guilty look confirmed her suspicions, and Hawke groaned. "Mother, Saemus Dumar is nineteen."

Leandra blinked at her daughter innocently. "Is that a problem?"

"I'd eat that sweet boy for breakfast," Evelyn snapped. "Assuming his father would let me get within ten paces of him. I'm hired muscle, and the Viscount knows it. Good enough to save his son, but definitely not good enough to date him."

"You could change that. We could dress you up and—"

"No."

"There is someone, isn't there? I'm sure he's entirely unsuitable."

It crossed Evelyn's mind to mention Fenris, but what was there to say? A strange attraction she had finally decided to do something about, one passionate embrace in the garden? If anything, her mother would use that as an extra reason to get Evelyn married off. "Wake up, Mother!" she snapped. "I'm no noble! You can put me in this big fancy house, but I'm still just a fighter. No idealistic dreamer like Saemus Dumar could ever understand me, and I'd make him miserable."

Tears flooded her mother's eyes. "I just want to see you settled," she sniffed. "To hold a grandchild on my lap."

Grandchild? There was no way Hawke was having children in Kirkwall. In her mind, marriage and children were somewhere far down the road, in another place, somewhere that she didn't have to be a blade and could be ... some vague other thing she'd never really thought about.

"Mother, there's plenty of time for grandchildren. You're still a young woman ..." Eureka! Evelyn thought. She smiled at her mother. "You're also far more acceptable in society than I am. Why don't you stop worrying about me and look for companionship yourself?"

"Me? Oh, no, I couldn't," Leandra protested.

"You could! Father wouldn't want you to live alone, you know that. He'd want you to be happy!"

Her mother's eyes softened. "I suppose you may have a point. But wouldn't it look foolish, a woman my age ...?"

"Not at all! Besides, you're an Amell! Your family used to be trend-setters. You can be one again, by proving that a woman can still be attractive and, um, desirable, even if she has grown children." Evelyn thought she might be laying it on a bit thick, but her mother was nodding thoughtfully.

"I'll have to think about that. Thank you, dear." She patted Evelyn's arm. "Perhaps we can get you settled later. When things in Kirkwall calm down a little."

Evelyn breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe that was all it would take to get her mother off her back. After all, 'things in Kirkwall' didn't look likely to calm down any time soon!