#i just loved how the deleted scene gave a slightly different context to this exchange

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DVD Fic Commentary for For Lancashire

@calysto1395 asked: “oh while we are at it! this one from For Lancashire? ive been curious about what made you put hawke in hufflepuff”

Cal I love you for this <3  For Lancashire was a Harry Potter/Dragon Age crossover fic I wrote for @meggannn​ for the 2016 @hightown-funk fic exchange. Cal helped me with researching some of the landscape and it is one of my favorite pieces–I love all things Harry Potter, and taking Megan’s initial premise and working it in and researching Squibs and Magizoology was just fantastic. Anyway, if you want to read it, follow the link! If you already have, read on:

Before I get to my favorite part (the Sorting), I’ll go through the rest of the scene <3

“Thanks for trusting me.” She settled around the pile of wood Merrill had gathered, lighting it with the tip of her wand.

“Any friend of Rivaini’s.” She shrugged. “And I miss the outdoors.”

“It’s nice out here.” Hawke considered the quiet stillness of the snow. “Almost makes you forget the rest of the world’s gone to shit.”

Merrill coughed, and Hawke filled a cup of tea for her. “Do you know what’s happened exactly? Why do we need to run?”

“Relocate.”

“Relocate, sorry,” Merrill corrected quietly. 

Sometimes I found it a little difficult to work information into a spy narrative without oversharing. Merrill–and her handle, Daisy–was one of those instances. Varric’s essentially running an operation where he’s the only one who knows everything, so while Hawke knows about Merrill/Daisy, Merrill may not know about her. A lot of their early interaction is spent feeling one another out. “Ah, so you know this code name, Rivaini, which means you know my friend, I see!” etc. The above was more to show that, what they have in common is that they’re spies, but they view things slightly differently (this whole scene breaks this down, in fact). Where Hawke sees ‘relocate to wait for instructions’, Merrill sees ‘get the hell out of dodge’.

She eyed Gregorovitch’s cot over Hawke’s shoulder. “Is it…was You-Know-Who really looking for him?”

“I don’t know about that.” Hawke bit her lip. “Stage Six is something else entirely. Full Ministry takeover. Do not Floo into official channels. Abandon first wave safe houses.”

Merrill’s eyes widened, her cup shaking between her hands.

“I made that face when Varric suggested it.” She chuckled. “Do you really think it could happen? I think those were my exact words. Silly.”

And clearly Hawke knows a little bit more than Merrill about what’s going on, which begs the question of how far down Merrill is as a contact. How far in over her head is she, haha.

The other witch set her cup down. “Do you have any family who…?”

“A sister. Varric. Some friends.” She stared at the flames. “You?”

“No. No, none.” She sat up a little straighter. “Actually, there is someone if Varric could get a message out?”

“I don’t know when we’ll talk to him.”

“That’s fine. Just…if he can.” She was blushing. She pulled out a signed picture of a woman Hawke recognised immediately as the Beater for the Tarapoto Tree-Skimmers, Isabela Prieto.  “She’s Muggle-born, you know?”

“I had heard.” Hawke handed the photograph back; it winked at her as it traded hands.

And here we have how Merrill gets tied into Varric’s network :D Through Isabela-codename Rivaini.

“I went to school with her.” Merrill smiled, tucking the picture to her stomach. “Castelobruxo.”

“No offense, but I wouldn’t have you pegged as a Castelbruxo girl.” Hawke narrowed her eyes, waving a hand. “Then again you don’t sound like you’re from these parts, either.” 

Merrill laughed. “My family traveled a lot. We were closer to Mahoutokoro when I was of age, but I always knew I wanted to work with animals. Castelobruxo has the highest placement rate for magizoologists.”

As much as I turn my nose up at the new schools (massive eye rolls all around), I did what I could with the information they gave us–I imagined a young globe-trotting Merrill until she forced her parents, around age 14 or 15 to send her to Castelbruxo to get a more in-depth of magical creatures.

Hawke was left stunned, imagining eleven year old Merrill weighing the pros and cons of different schools across the globe based on only a potential career. “Well,” she said, “You’re staring at one of the finest Beaters Hufflepuff House has ever seen.”

Merrill tilted her head.

“It’s…it’s in Hogwarts,” Hawke explained, and Merrill made a noise of understanding. “It seemed really important at the time, I have to say.”

AND HUFFLEPUFF HAWKE. I have a lot of feelings about this. I can’t remember everything I said at the time, but reading what I’ve written in my notes I can tell you I based my decision off of her unshakable loyalty to her family (regardless of who that becomes and what that means) and a willingness to work hard…which is putting both things very mildly. I wrote her very much as a Hufflepuff leader. Someone who is loyal certainly, but equally inspires loyalty in others.

She leaves the complicated spy work to Varric, but she’s more than willing to hit the pavement and get her hands dirty. She doesn’t delight in battles or rush in because it feels like it’s the right thing to do (remember, she didn’t go into save Fenris’ sister, that just happened to be a pit stop–she’s not a monster, though, she won’t abandon a little girl haha). From the beginning there is ‘a plan’ that she follows because she trusts the small group she has placed her loyalty with. At the beginning of the story, a more Slytherin-minded character might have taken Varric up on his offer of a ‘honeymoon’ or a more Gryffindor-minded character may have rejected him solely for the reason of it “not feeling right”. She is, for the most part, patient and hard-working–climbing back up the ranks of the Ministry after Lancashire–but you can see the cracks come in when she is unable to do anything but wait (definitely more hardworking than patient).

I rambled a bit there, but TLDR: I flip-flopped between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff and, at the end of it all went with Hufflepuff because I see Gryffindors more as a “go with your gut” house and Hawke has “PROTECT FAMILY AND FRIENDS AT ALL COSTS” on a loop in her head that overrides all gut feelings at any point. 

Thank you, I seriously loved writing this story <3

Writing Meme!

Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any fanfic I’ve written, and stick that selection in my ask/fan mail. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what’s going on in the character’s heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Addendum: Deleted Scenes! If there are scenes where you wondered what was going on with the other characters or threads you felt were left hanging, who knows maybe it’s just a deleted scene (those happen on DVDs too :P)

My Fic Ask Submissions (for longer snippets)