Chapter Text
Leandra would never known pain as she had endured during the birth of her first child. Holed up in the small shack- a hovel really- that Malcolm had purchased with the little coin he had to his name, the Hawkes prepared for the fight of their lives. Their first child, a small thing with wisps of her father’s dark hair and inky bottle-green eyes to match, came into the world with a symphony of her mother's screams and the torrent of yet another Ferelden storm that would eventually leak though the roof to greet the first Hawke child.
The mewling infant was small, impossibly small, in Malcolm’s hands. Drawing in ragged breath, Leandra took her child from her husband, grinning like a fool at the resemblance between the two. The new father sat beside his wife, pressing a kiss to her sweat-dampened forehead, fingers slicking aside the soft honey-brown stands plastered to Leandra’s skin. “Lets hope she takes after you, love,” his chest rumbled against her with his words.
The runaway noble woman couldn't help but chuckle in the arms of her apostate husband, the infant she had bleed countless hours for squirming in her arms. “Look at her, Malcolm. She’ll prove to be exactly like you in every way just to spite us.”
Katia Hawke was barley into her second winter when her brother was born. She did not understand why Mama looked so grey, in the days following, keeping to her bed. She did not eat, not for days, and when she finally gave into Papa's pleading, it was only a small trickle of soup poured down cracked and parted lips before her mother turned her face into his shoulder, whole body shaking.
She did not understand why what had been nine months of excitement had turned into weeks pressed under the weight of her parents' silent grief. What she knew of death came from the Mama's Chantry stories of the Maker's side and the Golden City, not of the little lives taken far too young and those left behind.
At two years of age, she was too young to understand what had become of her new brother, only that his name had been Garrett for all of two days.
They were ready the next time, when the twins arrived a little over a year later.
Safely in the Hawke family's new home, the midwife had Katia hold her mother’s hand for luck. Mama squeezed until the little girl’s teeth clamped down upon her bottom lip to keep her eyes from stinging and the cry of pain buried beneath her tongue, but she kept still and took the crush of her mother's grip without protest. Mama needed her to be strong; her brother and sister would need her to be strong.
The twins entered the world minuets apart. They were small and wrinkled, seemingly dried up, and the incessant wailing was without mercy or match. But mama smiled all the same, checks quickly growing wet when the two newest Hawkes found their place in her outstretched arms, her eldest’s hand quickly forgotten.