#&. ‛ i love when you go all hotheaded revolutionary.︐ › ( margo & anders | general )

[mercyburned-aa]

ok ok fine this is just extremely self-indulgent margo/anders content that i have had the idea of for forever and i wanted to write it out kldjfgdfksh

“Honey,  go get your brother and sister and bring them inside for supper,  would you?  Your father’s almost done cooking.” 

Leandra set down five bowls on the table that separated the kitchen from the rest of the living area on the first floor of the Hawke family’s farmhouse.  Malcolm had built it just for the two of them at first; then came the additions for their eldest daughter.  Six years later, the twins were born and so more rooms were packed in here and there.  Beth and Carver hadn’t minded sharing a room when they were younger, but they were growing more individual these days and insisted on their own spaces, like Margo had.  

She looked over at the waif-like girl sat before the fireplace,  knees drawn into her chest,  arms wrapped around her calves,  still as silence.  Margo  —  no longer Margaret or Maggie  — had tied her dark hair into a long braid tonight, though the thick fringe she’d worn for the past few years was neatly in place, as always.

“Margo?”  Leandra tried again. 

“Margo,”  Malcolm,  this time.

A sudden clang came from in between Margo and the fireplace.  She’d been levitating one of the fire pokers again,  stroking the fire with magic so she didn’t have to move and attend to it as constantly.  Margo stood up,  stretched out her long legs,  nodded to her mother.  The door creaked as she stepped outside into the night air.  The lace sleeves she’d sewn into her black dress reached her elbows,  but they didn’t do much to keep the evening chill out.

The farm was safe.  Margo reminded herself of that frequently,  every time she moved past the threshold separating inside from outside.  Betsy the cow was sleeping in the barn.  A few chickens scuttled around her feet;  she gently shooed them off and made her way towards the little pond where Bethany and Carver were catching frogs.  Nearby,  Macduff the Mabari was resting but keeping an eye on the twins.

“Mother says to come inside for supper.” 

“But we’re not done,”  Carver protested.  “We only caught two so far.”  Carver was twelve,  but nearly as tall as his older sister already,  and she was coming up quickly on Father,  though she thought she was mostly done growing by now.

Margo raised her eyebrows and they disappeared beneath her thick dark fringe.  “That’s plenty.  You can catch more tomorrow.  Come on.” 

“What’s Father made for supper?”  Bethany had gotten the hem of her dress wet but didn’t seem to mind as she moseyed about in a circle.  “I hope it’s the good stew.” 

“I don’t know.”  Margo reached over to put her arm around Beth’s shoulders and begin guiding her towards the house.  “You won’t find out unless you go inside.” 

Carver humphed and released the frogs back into the pond.  Whistling to Macduff,  the two of them scampered back inside the house as Margo coaxed Bethany out of the water.  They took the long way back to the front door,  though it was more like a walk of the farm itself,  saying good night to Frank Henry,  Queen Asha,  Eggatha, and the other roosters and chickens inside the coop.  Something out of place caught Margo’s attention by the barn,  though Betsy didn’t seem to notice it. 

The sisters exchanged a glance and stepped a little closer.  Margo released her hands from Bethany’s shoulders and took a few more steps inside the barn,  glancing here and there until she found the disturbance.  A pair of eyes  —  human eyes  — looked back out at her from the shadows.  She recognized the robes in the flickering light from the magical torches that hung on the entrance.  An uncomfortable chill shot down her spine.

“Go inside,”  she called over her shoulder, firmly this time. 

Bethany came running over to look at the mysterious thing.  “What is it?”  

Margo gripped Beth’s shoulders again and turned her around.  “Just go inside.  I’ll be there in a minute.”  Relieved when her sister finally did as she was told and began walking back up to the house,  Margo folded her arms over her chest as she gave the stranger her attention.  

“You’re a mage,”  she said,  “from the Circle.  I saw your robes.” 

The person was a man.  Thin.  Blonde.  A bit older than herself,  but not by too much.  He didn’t answer.  

Margo remembered the Circle,  though it was blurry.  The lyrium scar on her forehead had made the year she spent there feel more like a waking dream,  abundantly pleasant but suffocating in the never-ending serenity.  The Faceless Men lived there,  stalked people like herself and Father and Bethany.  Maybe this man,  too.

She held one hand out towards him at shoulder-height.  A moment later,  she’d conjured a wisp of a flame that briefly illuminated this corner of the barn.  His eyes were brown,  sort of golden.  With a flick of her wrist,  the flame disappeared from Margo’s palm.  

“You escaped?” 

He still looked uncomfortable.  Carver hadn’t mucked out the barn today,  if Margo were to guess.   “Yes.” 

The templars would be following him,  no doubt.  If he stayed too long,  he’d bring them here.  Maybe they’d kill her and Father.  Maybe they’d take Bethany.  Or maybe they’d just kill everyone including Frank Henry the rooster.  But if a mage couldn’t trust another mage to help them,  then what was the point?  

“Are you hungry?” 

From what she could see in the flickering light,  he didn’t seem to believe that was a real question.  

“My parents made supper,”  she explained.  “If you wait,  I’ll bring you some.  But you need to leave before dawn.”  

“I — thank you.  I will.  I won’t bring the templars here,  I swear it.  They’re two days behind me,  at least.”  

She believed him. 

At the table,  Margo shrugged off queries about what she’d seen.  Just a fox,  nothing more.  Supper was a warm and hearty stew, Fereldan to the core,  and it eased most of her worries about the stranger in the shadows.  Father had used vegetables and potatoes that the two of them had grown together in the garden; Margo took after him in most ways,  including much greener thumbs than her mother had.  He’d even tossed in some beef from the butcher.  By the time everyone had had their fill,  there wasn’t much left.  

Margo helped Mother with the dishes.  She and Bethany weren’t allowed to use magic for chores,  their parents had decided.  Carver wasn’t a mage,  and it wouldn’t be fair to him.  As she dried her hands on the kitchen towel,  Margo volunteered to clean up the rest of the meal so Mother and Father could go upstairs and rest.  

Malcolm did a fair job of hiding it,  but Margo could tell that something was wrong with him,  and growing worse by the day.  He was hardly even grey yet.  But she didn’t know what else it could have been.  Sometimes she wondered if he’d used all his strength and power as a mage to bring her back from the void.  Was that what had started weakening him?  She was afraid to ask. 

Once her parents were upstairs,  and once Beth and Carver had begun arguing about who had gotten to the bath first,  Margo scooped the rest of the stew into a small bowl and dropped a dinner roll in the center.  It wasn’t much,  but it would have to do.  A subtle spell radiating out from her palms into her fingertips warmed it back up.  She ducked outside,  pocketing a spoon before she passed through the threshold.  

Quiet,  but not the eerie kind.  The frogs that the twins had caught and released here ribbiting from somewhere around the pond.  Crickets and fireflies were enjoying the cool night air.  And neither Betsy nor any of the roosters and chickens seemed disturbed.  Maybe the mage had told the truth about how far ahead he was of the Faceless Men. 

She didn’t know what she’d do if it turned out that he’d lied.

He was still there in the barn when she reappeared,  silently as snowfall.  Margo handed him the bowl and the spoon.  “There’s not much,  but it’ll warm you up.”  

“Thank you,”  said the man as he took the bowl.  He closed his eyes and savored the smell wafting up from the stew inside.  After a pause to blow a bit of steam away,  he began all but devouring his meal. “I’m so hungry I could faint dead away.”  

Margo watched for a moment,  crunching the heels of her boots against the red and yellow leaves that had blown in from the trees outside.  You’d have to be mad to want to stay in the Circle,  but not everyone had a father like she did to help them escape.  She wondered,  then,  how this person had escaped on his own.  

“Don’t forget.  Before dawn.”  

“Before dawn,”  the man confirmed. 

She was halfway up the stairs to her room when Malcolm appeared at the top of the stairwell.  “Who were you talking to outside?”  He looked tired,  thinner than she could recall from just a few months ago.  Carver had said something about Father wanting to hire a farmhand.  Some boy named Jed.  She had the feeling it was more Carver’s idea than Father’s. 

“Nobody,”  she said,  regaining her composure.  Her grey eyes glanced to the side and downwards where the blonde man was sleeping in the barn.  “Just a fox.”  

#&. ‛ lori's stuff.︐ › short stories. #even tho this isn't shippy but w/e #&. ‛ i love when you go all hotheaded revolutionary.︐ › ( margo & anders | general )

[mercyburned-aa]

ALSO, Anders’ quests are massively fucking triggering for her,  but she realizes that he didn’t ask her along while already knowing what was going to happen with Karl and Alrik.   She needs some time and space to herself — and some compassion is nice too — after those, but she doesn’t blame him for what happened.  With Dissent, she thought she could handle going along. She was wrong.

#&. ‛ i am the juxtaposition of chaos and fury.︐ › margo hawke. #&. ‛ i love when you go all hotheaded revolutionary.︐ › ( margo & anders | general )

[mercyburned-aa]

please talk about anders and margo. (in your writing, nelaros and tabris seem more like tentative friends)

I definitely take a different approach to Margo/Anders than Nelaros/Tabris, at least partly because A/M choose to enter into a relationship from the start, and N/T are an arranged marriage that canonically ends with him dead. So, Nel tends to hold back from expressing anything or making any grand gestures until he’s gotten to know a given tabris a lot more, because in my AU he survives, but doesn’t meet her again until almost the end of the game/blight. They’ve had almost a year to become very different people than they were that first day, and he doesn’t expect her to be with him just because that was the “original plan.” He’s kind and compassionate and definitely willing to give it a try with her, but he’s going in without expectations and genuinely just happy to be her friend and see that she’s alive and okay.

With A/M, it’s … a lot more intense. They’re codependent, both strong but traumatized people who have coped differently from what they endured by the same / similar abusers. He’s got a spirit of justice inside of him and corrupting him as he corrupts it ; she’s a one in a thousand “recovered” lobotomy survivor who’s over emotional and impulsive and learned that people will leave her alone if she lashes out enough, but might still hurt her if she’s too nice. It’s not all rainbows and kittens. They’re both mentally ill although it presents very differently between them. The difference imo is that Margo had a loving and supportive family and that helped at least give her a safe and stable place where she was never abandoned. Anders got taken away in chains and locked up in solitary for a year and spent years being blown off by people who didn’t take him seriously. They’ve both lost people they loved in horribly unfair ways. They both have experience with depression and mood swings and everything else that comes with it. They’re both mages who want to be free and have goddamn suffered for it. And they’re both trying to do their best even so.

But for Margo at least, in her perspective, he’s the only person who can understand her. He’s the only person who can love her because out of the entire group, he’s the only one who’s suffered like she has. Is she right? Maybe, maybe not. But I’ve said before that Margo believes things that might not be true, but it makes sense in her worldview (which is, like her, damaged) and so she’s less flexible than she would have maybe been otherwise. Anyway, while those are the things that initially connect them (at least on her end), Margo genuinely loves the person who Anders is. She loves that he’s selfless (running the clinic for FREE while at great personal risk), brave (fighting for the rights of mages and trying to escape so many times), wildly intelligent and articulate (putting his thoughts into words and publishing his manifesto), compassionate, sensitive, thoughtful, kind to animals, sense of humor, everything else that he is. Her initial attraction may have sparked from “oh no he’s cute and he likes cats and he’s a free mage and he Gets It” but it’s very real and very deep, especially the longer they know each other.

She realizes he’s not perfect. She notices and calls it out when he’s parroting what the circle taught him about demons to Merrill or when he says crass things to Isabela or being unfair to Fenris (even though she doesn’t agree with Fenris on much, she’s not so blind as to ignore that he’s traumatized too). She realizes he’s also a damaged person, she realizes justice isn’t going away, she realizes that there’s no going back from the Kirkwall chantry, but none of that stops her from thinking he’s worth it and that she wants to spend the rest of her life with him. She sees SO MUCH GOOD in this one person and wants to be partners in life with him and thinks she’s so incredibly lucky to have that opportunity.

It’s when she meets Anders that her anger and pain begins to shift from “I wanna fuck everything up because I’m hurting” towards “I, too, can take these experiences and fight for people like myself.”

At the same time, he gives her somewhere safe to be raw. She doesn’t have to explain her trauma to him or justify how she feels towards tranquility / the chantry / the circles because he already understands. He’s soft with her and vocal about caring. But also, he’s the first mage she’s MET outside of her own family, and also the first PERSON outside of her family who fights for people like herself. Margo feels very safe around Anders. “I’d drown us all in blood to keep you safe” might sound a bit unhinged to someone else, but tbh, it makes her feel safe BECAUSE it’s so extreme and dramatic. That’s her language. He doesn’t treat her like a freak because of her former tranquility, he sees her as a person and makes her feel wanted, loved, appreciated, protected. She trusts him so explicitly.

They’re not perfect, but they love each other and are willing to put in the work to make it work. That’s what matters.

#I could go on and on…. #obvs this is all my own headcanons #and I’m open to other ships as well !!! even if it doesn’t look like it #but Anders is so crucial to her #no matter how you skew it #&. ‛ i am the juxtaposition of chaos and fury.︐ › margo hawke. #&. ‛ i love when you go all hotheaded revolutionary.︐ › ( margo & anders | general )

[mercyburned-aa]

I know everyone you’ve ever trusted has let you down, and you don’t wanna come out. you know every part of me, I let you in and let you see all the dark in every corner of my room. Let me do that for you. Baby it’s all right, you’re safe in here with me.

#it them #&. ‛ i love when you go all hotheaded revolutionary.︐ › ( margo & anders | general )

[mercyburned-aa]

actually no i’m redoing all my ship tags lmao rip i just think these look better

&.  ‛  my love，my love，my love  ;  she keeps me warm.︐  ›   ( val & judy | general ) &.  ‛  it starts just where the light exists.︐  ›   ( clare & alistair | general )  &.  ‛  i love when you go all hotheaded revolutionary.︐  ›   ( margo & anders | general ) &.  ‛  i would do more for you and worse.︐  ›   ( finn & raven | general ) &.  ‛  i wanted it to be you︐  ›   ( finn & clarke | general ) &.  ‛  i look at you and i’m home︐  ›   ( maya & clarke | general ) &.  ‛  the world is ugly but you’re beautiful to me.︐  ›   ( ships | general ) &.  ‛  now that we know each other，our hearts are connected.︐  ›   ( byleth & claude | armatization. ) &.  ‛  i realize now that love was right in front of me all along.︐  ›   ( hilda & claude | armatization. ) &.  ‛  i flew like a moth to you  ;  sunlight oh sunlight !︐  ›   ( sahar & cullen | pcrseverance. ) &.  ‛  i will be your sword and shield，and you will be mine.︐  ›   ( clare & francis | starfalled. ) &.  ‛  i lay my eyes on you，down where we grew lost.︐  ›   ( clare & alistair | starfalled )

#tagdrop #&. ‛ my love，my love，my love ; she keeps me warm.︐ › ( val & judy | general ) #&. ‛ it starts just where the light exists.︐ › ( clare & alistair | general ) #&. ‛ i would do more for you and worse.︐ › ( finn & raven | general ) #&. ‛ i wanted it to be you︐ › ( finn & clarke | general ) #&. ‛ i love when you go all hotheaded revolutionary.︐ › ( margo & anders | general ) #&. ‛ the world is ugly but you’re beautiful to me.︐ › ( ships | general ) #&. ‛ now that we know each other，our hearts are connected.︐ › ( byleth & claude | armatization. ) #&. ‛ i realize now that love was right in front of me all along.︐ › ( hilda & claude | armatization. ) #&. ‛ i flew like a moth to you ; sunlight oh sunlight !︐ › ( sahar & cullen | pcrseverance. ) #&. ‛ i will be your sword and shield，and you will be mine.︐ › ( clare & francis | starfalled. ) #&. ‛ i lay my eyes on you，down where we grew lost.︐ › ( clare & alistair | starfalled )

[mercyburned-aa]

#I’m in my feelings #&. ‛ i love when you go all hotheaded revolutionary.︐ › ( margo & anders | general )

[mercyburned-aa]

&.  ‛  you’re pretty ... pretty.︐   ›  kaylee / simon. &.  ‛  i’ll be the artist，you’ll be my muse.︐   ›  clarke / lexa. &.  ‛  i love when you go all hotheaded revolutionary.︐   ›  margo / anders.

#&. ‛ i’ll be the artist，you’ll be my muse.︐ › clarke / lexa. #&. ‛ you’re pretty ... pretty.︐ › kaylee / simon. #tagdrop #&. ‛ i love when you go all hotheaded revolutionary.︐ › ( margo & anders | general )