❝ They don’t know who we are. Not really. ❞ for hawke from anders sent from my deadpool blog bc im a Mess laksdjh bUT I HAD TO , KATY
crooked kingdom
“Maybe that comforts you,” she said. Her eyes didn’t flick towards him, but remained fixed on the city spreading out in its tiers below her. High, high above it all, sitting crosslegged and barefoot upon the roof of her family’s estate, she could see everything of Kirkwall. Everything, of course, except the undercity, darktown… the sewers in which people made their homes. “Sometimes it comforts me.”
He had found her up here somehow. Maybe Bodahn had told him where to find her. She had heard him coming, and hadn’t looked back to watch the lanky mage clambering through the little trap between the attic and the roof, even though she thought it might have been an amusing sight.
The things that Fereldan woman, the blood mage, had said to Hawke earlier had gotten to her. It didn’t matter anymore that Hawke had given money, time, effort, literal blood… all to aid the refugees and the poor, to do for them what they could do not for themselves. All that she could see right now was the fine old house in the exclusive neighborhood called the Garden for its thorn-vined walls and mossy paving stones. So high above everything else that those who lived here couldn’t even see Lowtown, let alone Darktown. If she climbed to the roof, vertiginous and wind-whipped, she could crane her neck and just make out a slice of the lower city. If she looked hard enough, she could even convince herself she saw the tossing leaves of the alienage tree.
But see the under city? Not that. Not even here. The only way to see it was to go there, and she had, again and again she had gone, and it hadn’t been enough.
Finally, she looked at Anders. His hair was a pale corona in the moonlight, his sharp nose and sharp jaw could have been cut from paper, so finely etched did they seem in the darkness. “They expect so much from me, Anders,” she said. “How can I ever do it all?”
