"Hey Hawke?" said Varric as he knocked his friend's bedroom door. "You got a minute?"

"Of course, come in," Hawke's silvery voice poured from out the door's cracks. The dwarf storyteller nudged it open with one hand, his other pressed against the small of his back, holding a loosely wrapped parcel.

"How are you this evening?" he said as he entered the room. He was greeted with the sight of meticulously tucked bed sheets and sorted paper piles on tables. A faint wisp of burning cedar and vanilla tickled his nose.

"I am well, thank you," replied Hawke, face still glued to the careful arrangement of letters, long brown locks of hair spilled down her cheeks and onto the desk. One hand gripped a quill, while the other scratched the scalp of a massive, paw-thumping mabari. "And you?"

"Good, thanks... hey there, Gallant!" he cheered as the dog ran towards him. "Easy now, big boy, watch the merchandise," he said as he gave the dog a heavy patting while he walked further in. "Your mother says you were in here for most of the day."

"I was. Kirkwall was unusually quiet today, so I thought I'd take care of some paperwork."

"Ah, that's Judy Hawke for you," Varric chuckled, "even when there's no work to be done, she's still working."

"There's always work to be done," she said as she craned up her long neck and shifted her gaze toward the dwarf. "And if I'm ever to make a difference here, I have to keep at it."

"Sure, but every day? Even Aveline knows when her shifts end. Of course, Donnic probably helps with that. Hey! How about we take you to..."

"No."

"Aww, you don't even know what I was going to suggest!"

"Varric," Hawke said coolly, turning herself in her wooden chair, "did you need something?"

"Well, I was in Lowtown, on my way to the Hanged Man, when who should turn up but Gamlen. Turns out he did get the money you sent him-money that he's already spent-but he still doesn't want to move into the estate."

Hawke shook her head. "So he's too proud to move in but not beneath my charity? I suppose I can't be all that surprised."

"Hawke, you don't really want him living with you, do you?"

"He's not...so bad... not entirely," she said as she flicked away her feathered bangs from her face, as if to distract herself from the uncomfortable sentence. "But he's family. I don't understand why he wouldn't want to live with his sister..."

Varric shrugged. "I didn't come to talk about him, Hawke. He was doing some 'airing out', and he threw something I thought looked important. I figured it was yours, and it got left behind in the move."

"The move?" Hawke cocked her head. "We were hardly able to take anything to Kirkwall, what could..."

Judith Hawke's bottom lip-plush and rosy flesh with a cut that split it and traversed down her chin-dropped as Varric approached, lifting the hand from behind his back and lifted the paper wraps. Stubby fingers unfurled to reveal a toy sword. It was made of an old and darkened wood, with scorch marks claiming the entire hilt and reaching to the base of the blade. The dwarf smiled as Hawke lifted the sword from him with delicate precision. "This is... I can't believe I almost left it there! How careless of me! I never would have forgiven myself."

"I thought it might have sentimental importance. Looks like there's a story behind it. Care to share? Some insight to the rise of Hawke, fierce warrior queen of Kirkwall, perhaps?"

"Varric, please..." Hawke's dark eyes drifted away from the dwarf and down at the sword, her fingers made a rough and bumpy journey across the charred and warped wood. Gallant sat beside her and licked her hand, whimpering. "My father made this for Carver."

"...Oh," Varric choked, "I'm sorry, Hawke. I didn't even think... shit. I know you don't like talking about your brother." With a shrug, he began pedaling backwards. "I'll just... leave you to your work. I'm really sorry."

The dwarf was underneath the door's framing when a soft, "...Wait," pulled him back in. "It's all right, Varric. I've dealt with it, at least to the best of my ability."

"You sure? I don't want to impose."

"No, it's fine. You've been a dear friend. Maybe it would help to tell someone." The Ferelden warrior gave the wooden sword a squeeze and sighed as she lifted her head again. "Ever since I was young, I wanted to be a knight, so my mother would read me stories, and my father made a toy sword for me. For years, I took it with me wherever I went. Then Carver had to have one, too, so father made this identical one, and we would spar. Sometimes we'd pretend we were both knights, and we'd fight for Bethany, who pretended to be a princess, locked in a tower."

"You three must've been a handful," said Varric with a wide grin.

"Indeed. I was so hard on him, though. I'd get annoyed when he copied me. I always beat him at our games, too, and he'd get so frustrated."

"What was he like, if you don't mind my asking? Sunshine mentioned him a few times before... she got sent to the Circle. Made him seem like a little terror, but she clearly missed him."

"Oh, he was. Put mud in our shoes, freed all the livestock, got in fights with children three times his size... I wasn't the best influence, I suppose. I even remember...oftentimes people would assume he and I were the twins, not he and Bethany. When we were still very small, people even thought us brothers. I was always just as dirty and violent as him, you see. I usually punched them for it, but it never upset him..."

"If I may be so bold, Hawke, it sounds like he was your biggest fan."

The Ferelden paused, fingers clenched on the blade. "I... suppose that might have been true. He... he even joined the King's Army after me, when he was of age. Even used the same weapons. Maker, if Carver were here with us... the Hawke family would have owned Kirkwall by now. Or at least we would have, if his personality weren't so big an obstacle. He could never stay out of trouble. And he wasn't as warm and fuzzy as I am."

"Hey now, you're warm when you want to be...maybe not so much fuzzy, but you try."

"He just... needed time getting used to things, getting used to people. The moves from town to town were hard on him. But he had his soft side, and a big heart. You and Isabela would have driven him up the wall, I bet, but I could see him getting along with Fenris and Sebastian... eventually." She looked up sighed wistfully, as though the words and memories were lifted burden as they passed through her mind and out her scarred lips . "That would have been so wonderful. All my boys here with me, together."

The dwarf raised a brow. "Your boys, Hawke?"

"Varric, come on, now. You're all kind of my boys."

"Yeah, I guess we are." Varric stepped closer, a firm grip on Hawke's shoulder. "You know, Hawke, in a way... you are a knight, to all of us. You're always protecting people, being charitable and courteous. You even fought that dragon in the Bone Pit!"

"That's true. I guess all that's left on my knightly to-do list is to rescue a prince from a tower."

"Huh, well... next time I need to avoid to Guild, I could put on a crown while you carry me away."

"Oh, Varric," Hawke laughed softly, "thank you. This... this helped."

"Hey, anytime," he said as he looked at the sword and ran a finger through the hilt. "I can feel some indentations here, like someone wrote on it, but it's all burned up."

"Remember how I said we each had one? Father carved our names into them so we wouldn't fight. But when we returned to Lothering, the house was already catching fire. I tried to save what I could, what we needed... I only happened upon this one." Varric squinted at the hilt, trying to find a letter, any small character to imply the remnants of a name. Meeting his confused glance as he looked up, she loosened her shoulder, breathed deeply, and continued, "I... choose to believe this one is Carver's. We could barely take anything with us when the Darkspawn attacked, and we had to leave his bo... it's all I have left of him. I like to bring it with me when I travel. It's like... I have some small piece of him with me. I suppose that's rather silly."

"No, Hawke, that's not silly at all."

"How could you even tell this held any value? I'm grateful, but to anyone else, it's just a burned up old toy. Anyone else would have thrown it out, as Gamlen would have."

The light in the fireplace flickered, and Bianca's shadow crept farther along Varric's shoulder. "I just have an eye for these things."