I WAS ONCE VERY CLOSE

*RULES BRIEF please do not use heavy additional spacing between words / characters or gradient-coloured text when writing with me. in general, heavy formatting is hard for me to read. blog is exclusively 21+. all triggers are tagged with #trigger cw and i try to be diligent in tagging everything. i do sometimes write non-explicit smut but it's very rare and will always be tagged. please note that theo's backstory and arcs contain frequent mentions of his emotionally abusive mother and the loss of his father and siblings. i will not exploit these themes, but they will be mentioned / discussed, but always tagged. minors will be hard blocked. mutuals only, all mutuals are welcome / invited to im me or ask for discord. if i don’t like you / the things you post, i will soft / hard block as i see fit. to see examples of my writing before following, feel free to browse my ic writing tag

*MAINS & AFFILIATES affiliated with (and exclusive to) ryan's bethany, more tba

*CHARACTER BASICS   theo hawke (often called just hawke by his friends/associates, sometimes called tay by his sister), cis, he/him, bi with a slight preference for feminine presenting people, born in 9:7 in denerim to the runaway noblewoman leandra amell and her apostate lover malcolm hawke, raised in denerim where he attended the free chantry school for city children from ages 8 to 12 until the labour of caring for his twin siblings and helping support the family required him to quit school and begin work (as was common for lower class children in denerim, especially eldest children), moves with his family to the remote village of lothering at the age of sixteen when his younger sister's magick begins to manifest in order to conceal her and their apostate father from templar detection, becomes the family's primary earner when their father disappears abruptly a year and a half later, leaning into illegal work on top of farm work that he conceals from his mother in order to make enough for their survival and the hope of one day lifting them out of poverty, works primarily as a smuggler and hired knife on top of his front work as a ranch hand until the fifth blight begins and lothering is destroyed by the horde, forcing the family to flee as refugees to their mother's home city of kirkwall, a journey on which theo's younger brother is killed, theo turns 23 sleeping on the docks of the gallows until he and his sister are able to buy a way into the city by being indentured by their uncle to the smuggler athenril, for whom they work without pay for a year in order to repay their family's debts

*APPEARANCE fc danny ramirez, older fc gabriel luna, theo is 6'1 and strong-shouldered, muscular but soft and thick though not quite bulky, his hair is thick and dark, shiny and curly, he grows hardly any beard at all apart from a decent mustache and dusting along his jawline and a thicker thatch at his chin, his body hair is a similar sort of dusting, he has very dark and expressive brown eyes, soft and concerned in shape, laughing and sweet, his good looks are ever-boyish in quality, his handsomeness is not rugged or hard but that of a younger man in feeling even as his hair begins to go silver at the temples and his eyes and forehead grow lined with age, he has smooth, even skin that spots with age and sun and is dotted here and there with small, dark moles, thick, straight eyebrows, a strong jaw, pleasant mouth, and a long, strong, straight nose that is visibly crooked at the humped bridge from a break in his teenage years

*NOTABLE QUALITIES purple & blue, funny, a little immature, sweet and accommodating, genuine but avoidant, especially of confronting his own needs / unprocessed emotions, a pleaser, your ride or die, charming and sly when he's on his feet so to speak but can be awkward and stumbling when knocked off them, ultimately internally unsure of his worth, slightly insecure about his lack of education, projects a pride in his place and his role that is partly genuine and partly a defense mechanism, much like his humor and nonchalance, shrewd, laid back, and extremely capable of retaining and projecting calm in high stakes situations, deeply intertwined with his sister emotionally and though he would not label himself a mage sympathizer necessarily (he takes people case by case) he does have strong anti-templar prejudice and deep mistrust for people in positions of authority overall, he's an underdog who habitually sides with other underdogs even in the face of their.. questionable methods

   the door opens and theo glances up. there in the doorway, limned in the syrup-heady dusklight, cullen cuts an impressive figure. expensive armour. fur mantle. high-backed leather chair and a heavy wooden desk. world's light on power-happy choir boys, apparently—given the way they keep promoting from within.

   the silence seems to tick like a clock. they stare at one another and hawke lets it stretch, taking the time to wonder if cullen is more or less impressive now than he'd been the day bethany had looked up, just like this, to see him standing in the doorway of their uncle's hovel on the reeking end of lowtown. hawke hadn't been there that day. if he had—

then, when the twins were born, malcolm was convinced that one of them, at least, would manifest magick—and from the time they could toddle he was passionate about educating them in all he knew (much of his advanced education was of course magickal scholarship), eventually his focus shifted to bethany because he correctly sensed her aptitude, and he spent almost all of his free time educating his daughter one on one, giving her almost all of his attention

carver developed a deep resentment over this—theo i don’t think ever resented it so much as it fucked up his sense of self worth further, he just internalized the idea that he hadn’t been intelligent enough to really warrant his fathers focus the same way, of course it would have been a waste to pass all that onto him, it also gave him this inherent idea that mages are, in general, more intelligent than him, more educated, of a higher strata in a class-based way, the hawkes grew up in extreme poverty and theo only attended a few years of the paltry free schooling the chantry offered before leaving to take work to make money—carver attended for much longer, and attached himself to the chantry much for the reason that the sisters there seemed willing to show him the special attention that his father reserved for their sister in their little private school at home