#while sparrow is often akin to a scared and corned dog in my mind; biting and snapping

[thisisntreaver]

Hammer is one of the biggest heartbreaks in all the games to me.

She yearned for freedom, felt suffocated in her life as a monk, by her fathers love and desire to keep her safe, by how isolated and different she is. She feels out of place, and when she meets Sparrow there is a spark, because they're an outsider who knows of a world she can only imagine. She likes watching them fight imagines if she could do the same but brushes the idea away.

And then, she is dragged into the very life she idolized. And she hates it.

She was not raised as Sparrow was, because while Sparrow was left to fester, and let their anger grow, having the love of the camp but with Theresa in their ear, Hammer was raised in love. Her father loved her,as stifling as she may have found it at times, she had that love from a young age, her discontent in life wasn't from a trauma, and it wasn't stoked in order to set her down a path.

So for as much as she wanted that same life that Sparrow had, she as not built for it. Sparrow has had an anger brewing in them, has had one goal entirely in mind for decades, but Hammer has known peace. Its no wonder Theresa is unable to light that same fire.

The decision she made in a moment of grief, breaking her vow and then joining our hero, isn't really her, and I think she realizes that sooner rather than later. She goes back to the temple, and while that also isn't her, maybe it never really was, it brings her back to where her father once stood, with his beliefs and how he raised her, and I can only imagine the guilt and the grief ate at her.

She waits for Sparrow, hoping that seeing her friend will help her, will recommit her to the cause and it doesn't. Because while Hammer has started to heal and is beginning to move towards who she becomes later, any healing Sparrow has done has been ripped apart. The wounds left by Lucien have been reopened and made worse, they've come back more burdened than ever before and.

And so, when the work is done, Lucien is dead, Sparrow is not healed by it like they had hoped, but Hammer is less grief ridden and more yearning to find who she is, to find the real her for the first time maybe ever, so she leaves. Even if it hurts, even if she'll miss her friend even if they're so different than they were, for the first time in her life, she is her own priority. Even if its lonely.