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Varric met Hawke after valiantly saving her hard-earned money from a petty thief.
That was, for the most part, true. He had been aware of Hawke’s existence for some time before that, even if they had never spoken. She was often discussed in mercenary circles, and it was hard to ignore the loud arguments she had with her brother on various illegal things in the Hanged Man. He shadowed her for a bit, to see if she was a good investment, and it was plain within a week that she was, once he’d seen her fight a group of five men with nothing but her fists and come out on top.
He wanted to buy her a drink then, but he waited.
Bartrand wanted nothing to do with Hawke, like the absolute fool he was, but luck did often seem to be on Varric’s side. It presented itself in Hawke’s bad habit of storing her money on her belt, for the whole city to see, and in the most useless thief Hightown had to offer.
So Varric met Hawke, officially, while she was carrying a dangerous-looking staff around, after watching her bicker with her brother about her magic so loudly that he could hear her a street over. Her money, definitely gained courtesy of mercenaries, was promptly stolen. He stopped the thief, but that was more of a mercy for the kid than anything. Better to take an arrow to the shoulder than face Hawke, staff in hand with the blade out for blood, with her brick wall of a brother close behind. Varric cracked a few jokes, Hawke flirted as she was wont to do, Junior ground through the top layer of his back teeth in frustration.
And when Varric made his offer, Hawke opened her mouth and nearly split her face with a grin that filled Varric with equal parts fear and awe. The most obvious choice, then, was for him to stick around.
Varric found himself running into Hawke on a regular basis. That was not particularly surprising: they slummed about in the same areas, the bad parts of Lowtown and the worse parts of Darktown, so he was bound to see her on his ventures outside of the Hanged Man. And there were the “adventures” (Hawke’s words; Varric thought of them as reasons added to the list he lovingly called Maybe I Don’t Want to Live in Kirkwall After All), where Hawke collected the strays of Kirkwall at every available opportunity and then set them loose on people who (mostly) deserved it. Sometimes things ended in bloodshed; they always ended with money pocketed.
Not that he was complaining, exactly. Seeing Hawke was like getting a jolt of adrenaline in his chest. Her larger-than-life attitude was infectious in a way that appealed to the roguish manner in which he tried to live his life.
The money was an added bonus.
“Is that Hawke?” Isabela asked, drawing Varric’s attention away from the elegant daggers he was twirling between his hands. The Lowtown shops often had nicer weapons that those in Hightown; thieves wouldn’t sell near the Chantry or the Viscount, after all, especially when the weapons were heirlooms stolen from the houses up here.
He looked up, distracted, and nicked himself through his gloves. A drop of blood welled up, and he dropped the daggers to the merchant’s table with an annoyed noise, then dropped a silver down with them to stop the merchant from squawking angrily at him.
Varric almost didn’t recognize Hawke without a smear of red on her face, hiding the jagged scar than ran over her cheekbones in a flash of dusky pink. That was, of course, ridiculous: Hawke could never hide in a crowd, regardless of her appearance, especially not with Rabbit at her side, barking at the seagulls overhead while she handed a sovereign to an older woman in exchange for a small red jar.
“Do you know anything else who dresses like that?” Varric asked. Like that, in this instance, meant gaudy armor with tufts of fur around her shoulders and peaking out from beneath the thin metal plates. Lightweight, so she could move easily, and just enough not-mage in appearance to avoid any suspicion from templars and ugly enough for it to be part of the Hawke wardrobe.
“Anders,” Isabela said immediately, but she scrunched up her face slightly while considering. She tilted her head to the side. “Actually, no. He’s going for the more obvious oh, can’t you see I’m an apostate? look. Hawke looks like she dresses in the dark.”
“At least she isn’t wearing three birds worth of feathers.” Not that the fur was much better, Varric considered, but it was, at least, different from Blondie.
“Oh, she’d look good with feathers too,” Isabela pointed out. She gave an exaggerated sigh, and placed a hand over her chest while she swooned backwards over the table of daggers.
Varric opened his mouth to respond—to agree, because who could deny Hawke’s charm?—but a woman’s high-pitched shriek pulled his attention away from Isabela and to Rabbit, who had just noticed Varric and began bounding toward him, slobbery mouth and everything, knocking people out of the way with a focused determination that rivaled his owner’s.
He only had time to put his hands up into a halfway-defensive position before the mabari leapt onto him and sent him tumbling backward, landing heavily onto Bianca. That nearly sent a jolt of fear through him, but she was sturdy. Truly, Bianca could handle anything, but she was pressing into his back and leaving bruises along his spine.
More concerning was his chest, which felt like it was caving in under Rabbit’s sheer mass, as he licked at Varric’s stubble.
“Rivaini,” he wheezed. It came out as a whisper. His body protested his attempt at speech and made him feel tremendously light-headed. “A little help?”
“Hello, Rabbit,” Isabela said instead. She scratched right below one of his ears. “Who’s a good boy? I haven’t seen you in weeks. Is Hawke treating you right?”
“Maker,” Varric said, and he resigned himself to an embarrassing death by large dog.
A high-pitched, swooping whistle cut through Isabela’s cooing, and suddenly the weight on his chest was lifted. Varric sucked in a deep breath of air and winced when his ribs creaked.
“Rabbit, I’ve told you to stop jumping on people who aren’t Carver.” Hawke grinned down at Varric, patting Rabbit’s head affectionately. She blocked out the sun, and so he could barely make out the features of her face. “It’s funnier when he goes down, but I suppose this is funny as well.”
“Hilarious.” Varric groaned as he stood up and began to dust himself off. His gloves, rich and high-quality leather, were covered in tacky red. Even worse, his chest hair was colored a bright crimson that bled into the fabric of his open shirt.
“Is this—paint?” Varric asked. His voice ticked up at the end, a high-pitched tone that made Hawke quirk her eyebrow. “Rivaini, check to make sure Bianca isn’t covered in paint for me.”
“You know I love to check Bianca out,” Isabela purred. She set to running her hands across Bianca and laughed when Varric shooed her away.
“It’s kaddis,” Hawke said. “Warpaint for mabaris, and for me.” She dipped a finger into the paint and smeared a thick line across the bridge of her nose, then wiped the rest onto Rabbit’s head in a swirl above his eye. There were, Varric noticed, streaks of red across his body, incomplete lines that were only haphazardly applied.
“That’s not blood?” Varric asked. Isabela gave him a funny look from where she was kneeling on the ground next to Rabbit.
“Did you think I was running around with blood on my face?”
“It seemed like something you would do,” Varric pointed out. He smelled his gloves gingerly; the paint was more acrid than typical, and it burned his nose until he moved his hand away.
Hawke rubbed her chin thoughtfully, leaving a light smudge of paint on her jaw. “Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, I have done that quite a few times.”
“A true Ferelden,” Isabela added fondly, though she wasn’t quite looking at Hawke so much as a point somewhere over her shoulder, like she was remembering something else entirely.
Hawke laughed loudly, and then said, after considering the sun’s position in the sky, “Have either of you seen Carver around? Short dark hair, about this tall—” She leveled her hand at shoulder level, and Isabela began to giggle. “—keeps telling people he’s my brother for some, what I assume is a very tragic, reason?”
“I assume he’s off sulking somewhere,” Varric said. “Perhaps telling a stranger about the woes of being a younger brother. That seems to be a hobby of his.”
“Dreadful,” Hawke said, and she set off, Rabbit trailing behind and bumping into her leg every few seconds. Varric watched her until she rounded a corner, disappearing into the crowds of Lowtown, and then he returned his attention to the merchant’s table.
If Isabela noticed his long stare, she at least had the decency not to mention it.
Hawke flirted like her life depended on it. That might have actually been true; Varric had encountered weirder things at Hawke’s side, and she certainly couldn’t be sustaining herself on cheap beer and tavern food alone. It was almost compulsive, the way she smiled and winked at people, suggestive in the way she lounged on any and all available furniture. She had perfected her lines long before she reached Kirkwall, so now they were second-nature, slipping off her tongue without a moment’s thought.
Sometimes, while watching Junior stumble over his words when talking to Merrill, Varric wondered if Hawke stole her brother’s charisma at an early age, or if this was just natural to her. Gamlen certainly didn’t have the trait.
“Can you believe these were free?” Hawke asked, as she rejoined their table with drinks in hand after making moves on the new barkeep. The woman in question was still staring after Hawke, even as someone seated on a nearby stool tried to get her attention, tapping his empty glass on the counter at an annoying pace.
The rest of the table simultaneously rolled their eyes, except for Isabela, who flashed a wicked grin at Hawke and winked.
“Don’t ruin this bar for me,” Varric said. He glared at her over the rim of his glass. “I don’t want to move out of my room upstairs just because my friend is an idiot. Where would I live, Hawke?”
Hawke snorted and nearly spilled beer onto the table. “We wouldn’t want you to have to live in a real home, would we? I was only chatting, Varric, no need to worry so much.”
“Chatting,” Carver said mulishly under his breath. He always appeared to be in a foul mood when joining them at the Hanged Man, but he still showed up every night without fail, and made sure to sit next to Merrill, despite Isabela’s knowing looks that made the tips of his ears burn hot.
Hawke elbowed his side with enough force to make him wheeze and clutch at his ribs.
“Carver, is that judgment I hear in your tone?” He stared at her, rubbing at his side, and when he said nothing, Hawke continued, “We can be judgmental, if you’d like. I do miss our sessions of sibling ribbing, you know, and I suppose we are overdue. I can start: Peaches, perhaps?”
She puffed up with a self-satisfied smirk when Carver flushed red and stuttered.
“Peaches?” Isabela said, immediately at attention. On Merrill’s other side, she leaned over to force eye contact with Junior. When he didn’t look over at her, she repeated, loudly, “Peaches?”
“I hope we’re talking about something more exciting than fruit,” Varric said. He finished off the dregs of his drink, then reached for one of Hawke’s. Without sparing him a glance, she swatted his hand away. “Though, based on Junior’s reaction, it must be a good story, even if we are just talking about actual peaches.”
“Perhaps exciting isn’t the right word,” Hawke said. Her voice had taken on a nearly sing-song quality, and Carver dropped his head into his hands.
Sometimes she reminded Varric of a cat that played with its food. Junior never really stood a chance against her; he could sympathize, as a younger brother, but honestly Carver made it hard to not go along with the joke. He had a permanent petulant look on his face, and it was tremendously entertaining to make it worse.
“Sister, please,” Carver said, muffled through his fingers. It didn’t sound like he was begging; rather, he seemed tired, resigned, completely aware that Hawke would say whatever she wanted because she was Marian Hawke, Kirkwall’s most annoying mage.
Hawke hooked an arm around his neck and forced him closer to her, nearly upending the table in the process, and she messed up his hair with more force than necessary, based on Carver’s subtle wince. The dark strands stuck up at odd angles, and she kept her hand there to keep him from escaping whatever she was about to say.
“You all have to understand that Lothering was, quite frankly, boring,” she started, and continuing, over Carver’s groans, “And, by some miracle, Carver was one of the only competent fighters there—”
Varric had realized, during the past few months of saving up for this expedition, that Hawke didn’t particularly believe in thinking for more than a few seconds before acting or in the benefits of shutting up on occasion or even in her own mortality—but it was fun, to be around someone with as quick of a wit as him. They were kindred spirits, almost, two fools in Lowtown with a troubling group of friends.
Well, Hawke’s group of friends, who, depending on the person, either got along swimmingly with Varric or barely tolerated his presence. He would take what he could get.
“Have you ever sailed before, Varric?” Daisy asked. She was perhaps a bit too chatty, but Varric could feel himself softening up whenever she was around, smoothing out his rough and abrasive edges to indulge her strange conversations. “I didn’t much like it myself, but Isabela told me it’s wonderful if you sail correctly.”
“A little bit.” He glanced up at Merrill as she walked beside him, slightly out of step so as to be closer to Hawke and marginally further away from Fenris. “It was all right. Getting from Point A to Point B, that was the important part.”
“I suppose,” she said, and she seemed doubtful. “But I do love walking, and traveling with halla. Of course, reaching a new campsite was exciting, but I quite liked getting there too. We would pass by so many different kinds of trees and flowers—”
Varric hummed in reply. Sometimes it was best to let Daisy speak, and she would eventually get to a point where he would have something to say. In the meantime, Hawke was beginning to get antsy in her search, turning over boxes and barrels to look behind them, kicking rocks in frustration when she didn’t find their man. Comical almost, except for the white-knuckled grip she had on her staff and the deep scowl on her face.
“Oh, have you ever sailed Fenris?” Daisy said, interrupting her own chatter. Varric could hear the slight nervous tremor in her voice, but she was trying to make friends, even though Broody never wanted to so much as glance in her direction.
“Yes,” Fenris said, flat, and it sounded as harsh as a no, end of conversation, never speak to me again, and all that. It was funny, how much disdain he could convey in so few words.
“Play nice,” Hawke said, without looking at them over her shoulder. She sounded distracted. Her head kept moving so she could scan the area again.
Fenris paused and then added, quietly, “I enjoyed it.”
That made Varric perk up. “Really? Doesn’t seem like your style, if I’m honest.”
Daisy looked like she wanted to say something, mouth opening slightly, but she seemed to think better of it a moment later. Her lips still curled into a small and self-satisfied smile when she glanced down at Varric, and he winked up at her.
“The air smelled—good,” Fenris said. It took him time to go through the words, like he was considering each one carefully before speaking, and the hesitation in his voice was tangible.
“Like salt,” Hawke added. Her words were almost lost in a clatter of wood hitting the stone ground as she tipped over more debris.
The Deep Roads had taken Varric by surprise, in more ways than one. There were tunnels where the darkness felt tangible, pressing down on him solidly and weakening his bones, and others where magma lit up the way. He hadn’t expected the heat of it; the tunnel air was still and unbearably warm, even in the darker parts, and it was made worse by the anger that simmered in his veins.
He hadn’t expected Bartrand to seal them into the thaig, either. Hence, the anger.
They set up camp, four days into their return trip, in a small tunnel that branched away from the main road and ended in rubble. Varric’s bag, loaded with treasure and rations, sank into the dirt beside him.
At the edge of his sight, Carver appeared pallid, face turned far enough down that the sweat rolled off of his nose and dripped onto the sword in his lap.
“Hey,” Varric said, and then when Carver didn’t look up from his steel, “Junior. You all right?”
Carver grunted, low and strained, but it sounded mostly like an affirmation, so he figured he could let it drop. Varric almost missed the quick look Hawke shot her brother, something like worry hidden in the furrow of her brow, before she returned her attention to Blondie.
“It’s the taint,” he was saying. He clung to his staff restlessly, running his hands along the red steel at a nervous, erratic pace. “It feels so thick down here. I had forgotten.”
They sat close together, Anders angled in toward Hawke, shoulders curved into an tense hunch. Hawke sat mostly angled away from him, to keep herself facing the perimeter of their little resting place, except for her face, still tilted in his direction to listen. Varric wondered, not for the first time, if something was happening there.
The uneasy feeling in his stomach flared again, and he set about polishing Bianca for the third time since they paused for food, water, and some semblance of rest. Something to do with his hands, so he could think of all the ways he was going to maim Bartrand once he found him on the surface. The list was long at this point, with a few extra suggestions taken from Hawke.
“Can’t be worse than Kirkwall,” Hawke said lowly. She gave a mirthless chuckle. “I’ve been there for almost two years, and I’m not yet used to the Veil feeling so—strange. Like I could touch it if I only reach out with my hand.”
Anders shrugged and gave a wan smile. “The Fade is, at least, familiar. I feel as though a dark rot is pressing into my skin down here. I actually miss that cursed city,” he admitted with a short laugh. It came out sharp and strained, and he glanced down at his staff as the noise died out.
“Do you? I’m not sure I could ever miss Kirkwall.”
Varric opened to his mouth to cut in, to defend his admittedly terrible city maybe, but there was a ragged gasp to his left and a harsh thud as Carver collapsed on the ground.
Hawke strolled into the Hanged Man to thunderous applause, which was to say that Isabela forced Fenris to clap with her, and Merrill happily joined, while they trailed in after Hawke. The tavern was mostly empty, save for Varric, who had picked out a nice corner table near the fire for writing, and a few other regulars who were used to Hawke’s merry gang of idiots at this point.
The four of them were, as usual, splattered with a fair amount of blood. Kirkwall’s criminals couldn’t get enough of Hawke these days. Admittedly, there was a decent chance that Hawke sought them out personally; she did love fighting, and as much as she tried to hide it, she had a soft spot for doing (relative) good for the city. It was easier now that she had a home to return to at night, not some hovel in Lowtown.
“That was—surprising,” Fenris said. Distracted by alcohol, Isabela darted away from his side, and so he stopped his half-hearted clapping. “I was not aware that you could fight so well.”
Hawke, for her part, looked immensely smug. Her lip was split and still bleeding sluggishly, and Varric could see the beginnings of a nasty bruise around her right eye that spilled onto a sharp cheekbone.
“Thank you, Fenris, I’m so glad that I’ve inspired your confidence in me over the years,” she said dryly, patting her hand over her chest. “Don’t worry; I’m quite good at killing people.”
Fenris made a face. It was one that Varric (privately, of course; he valued all of his limbs attached to his body equally) thought ranked quite low on the broody scale, as he looked simultaneously like he wanted to laugh and hit Hawke.
On Hawke’s other side, Merrill giggled. “I think he means that we’ve never seen you fight with your staff like that before, Hawke.” She swung her own around. A thin staff made from wood, it presented a less terrifying picture than Hawke’s steel monstrosity, but she almost knocked a few empty glasses off a nearby table all the same.
“It has a blade for a reason, and it’s very satisfying to hit people with the little orb. Sometimes they pop.” Hawke glanced sidelong at Daisy, and when she smiled, a broad grin that made her look more like a dragon than anything, Varric could see blood beginning to dry on her teeth. “You should try it some time.”
“Oh, I think my staff would break,” Merrill said. She sounded truly concerned, and held her staff closer to her chest as she spoke. Mages, Varric thought, with a good amount of humor and just a little bit of exasperation.
“And I don’t think I want people, um,” she paused, considering the word, “popping on me.”
Hawke laughed, and she wrapped an arm around Merrill’s shoulder. That always made Daisy puff up a little, with her smile just a touch wider and her cheeks a bit rosier, and she looked at Hawke with the adoration only a younger sibling could feel. Sometimes Varric wondered if Hawke and Bethany were the same way, back in Ferelden, but he stifled that thought immediately; bad feelings would sour his writing tonight, and he need to be in a certain kind of mood for Swords and Shields.
That mood was drunk, more often than not, and his drink was starting to get a little low, unfortunately.
“Let Fenris and me handle the popping,” Hawke said. “I think the blood makes me look rather dashing.”
“It’s very intimidating,” Merrill agreed, even though she was drenched in blood herself and was, in Varric’s mind, unbelievably terrible pretending not to be a blood mage on a regular basis. He’d spent a large sum of money keeping people in Lowtown quiet about her, and these late-night brawls on the street didn’t help.
The sound of a chair scraping loudly on the floor startled Varric, and he turned to see Isabela sitting down with a happy sigh next to him, drinks in hand. She dropped them onto the table, using her hands instead to shift the twin daggers at her side into a more comfortable position that didn’t involve the pointy bits pressing into her thighs. Beer splashed from her glass, and Varric immediately picked up his papers to save them from being drenched and wasting the last few hours of work.
“Do you mind?” he said, without much bite. “I’m trying to write here, Rivaini.”
Isabela gave him a look that she usually reserved for games of Wicked Grace when Varric cheated in a particularly sloppy way, a look that said you’re a fucking fool in the most obnoxiously condescending way she could muster while maintaining an amused air.
“Were you?” she said more than asked, in a lilting voice, after taking a deep drink. She looked at Hawke while she spoke, then turned back to Varric with a smirk barely visible over the edge of her golden pint.
That stumped him, and before he could answer, Fenris pulled out the seat next to Isabela and said, “I don’t think that book of yours counts as writing.”
“Keep it to yourself, elf,” Varric said. He mopped up the beer in front of him with a loose sleeve, then set his papers back down, taking care to move slightly away from Isabela. “You just don’t appreciate fine literature.”
“Both of those are very strong words for what I suspect is smut starring our dear friend Aveline,” Isabela said. She tried to look at the topmost page, and Varric shielded it out of habit. “Speaking of: when’s the next chapter of Shields coming out? The last one ended before the fun parts.”
“Astounding,” Fenris muttered under his breath.
Hawke and Merrill joined them before Varric could say anything to defend his writing. Not that he personally thought Swords and Shields was a masterpiece by any means. His best work was still a secret, and it mostly involved retellings of his adventures with Hawke; that, he might never publish. Still, it was the principle of the matter. He was a writer, after all.
“I’ll have you know I’m stronger than Fenris,” Hawke was saying to Merrill, a captive audience if there ever was one. She flexed her left arm to demonstrate. It was an impressive sight, admittedly, and Varric stared at the muscles of her arm for a few moments longer than was strictly necessary.
“Excuse me?” Fenris fixed Hawke with an irritable look, but she avoided so much as glancing in his general direction, though the edges of her lips tugged up all the same.
Hawke lowered herself into the empty seat on Varric’s other side. Even in the dim lighting at the Hanged Man, Varric could see that her knuckles, wrapped around a full glass of beer, were red and raw.
“The beer here is so terrible,” Hawke said to him, and she took a long swig of her drink. Hawke drank almost as much as himself and Isabela, which was in itself an impressive feat, but her cheeks always flushed red from the moment she started drinking. It was an endearing quality.
The conversation took a turn after that, as it usually did when Hawke and Isabela were in the same room. Varric focused on his writing; his editor wanted a draft soon, and he wasn’t one to disappoint, though the sound of Hawke cackling next to him was immensely distracting, as was the sound of Merrill giggling whenever Isabela explained a dirty joke to her.
“Varric,” Hawke said, during a pause in the talk some time and multiple drinks later, when Isabela and Fenris clumsily made their way to the bar for more beer. “What on earth are you writing about? You’ve missed some of my best material, by the way. Surely you’d like to re-purpose some of these stories for your work? The people deserve to know.”
Her words were slightly slurred. When Varric looked up at her, pausing a scene he was having quite a lot of fun writing, featuring not-Aveline and not-Donnic in an alleyway, she was swaying in her seat. Her knees brushed against his, and she put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself. A warm flush rose on the back of his neck.
“Does Aveline know you’re writing about her—” Hawke paused to read for a moment, and laughed delightedly before continuing, “About her bosom heaving under the torchlight, her red hair becoming undone from its tight braid as the guard leans forward with a strong hand outstretched?”
“Of course not,” Varric said. He dipped his quill briefly into an ornate inkpot. He curved himself over the paper slightly, and Hawke shifted to continue reading it. “It hasn’t been published yet.”
“Don’t hold out on us!” Isabela said loudly, suddenly back at her seat. “I let you read my friend-fiction. You owe me this.” Fenris let out a short noise that sounded remarkably like a giggle next to her, but his face remained stoic.
“You know, Varric, you use far too many adverbs,” Hawke said smartly. She tapped a finger against her cheek like she was thinking, and added, “Maybe you should let me write for you. A guest appearance!”
“Hawke, I’m not entirely convinced that you have the ability to write at all,” Varric said, and she shoved at his shoulder with a bark of laughter.
There was nothing Hawke loved more than a show. It was a sentiment they shared; who didn’t love to have a crowd hanging onto your every word? She had a knack for telling stories (of course, she wasn’t as good as Varric, but he was quite sure no one could be), but she was truly gifted at turning her fights into spectacles, when the air around her crackled with electricity and her eyes took on an unnaturally blue quality.
It helped that Hawke liked flashy close combat more than most mages. The sight of someone wreathed in lightning was terrifying enough, but it was even worse when the mage was a foot away, armed with wickedly sharp steel gauntlets and a staff that looked more like a polearm than anything.
“One more for me!” Hawke called out. She spun her staff overhead, and then it made a terrible squelching noise as she stabbed it blade-first into the man at her feet. “We’re keeping score, right?”
“Absolutely not,” Aveline said, exasperated, just as Varric shouted back: “Yeah, but you’re still losing!”
Hawke growled and ripped her staff free, and muttered a curse under her breath when the motion splattered more blood on her boots. When she fired off another spell, Varric felt the earth shudder beneath his feet for a moment from the force of the magic.
“I’m just getting warmed up,” she said with a wild grin, and Varric was distracted by the curl of her lips just long enough for a hand to wind itself around his neck.
Varric kicked a foot out backwards, knocking the cloaked woman away with a grunt, and whirled around to put an arrow between her eyes. Embarrassing, to be caught off-guard like that, but no one else seemed to have noticed. Aveline was busy beating a man into the ground with her shield, and Anders was focused entirely on Hawke, hands raised and already lit up with a healing spell as she charged recklessly into a group of bandits.
“We don’t have to do this this,” Anders said some ten feet behind Varric. Even with his eyes glowing a blindingly bright white, he managed to convey an expression of disappointment. It was almost impressive. Almost, except for how inhuman he looked and, frankly, sounded. “You can fight without turning it into a competition, you realize?”
“You only say that because you’re losing, Blondie.” Varric winked at him, and at the same moment fired Bianca at a man slowly approaching Anders with curved knives.
A beautiful shot, truly, but not one he could focus on, as he planted his feet more firmly on the ground. The salty wind was starting to pick up, and he moved his arm an inch to the right to compensate, letting out a low chuckle as he downed another bandit and Hawke whirled around to give him a look of outrage as his score went up.
The aftermath of the fight was familiar: Aveline cleaned her bloody sword with an old cloth, Varric tinkered with Bianca, and Hawke whined spectacularly as Anders tended to the nasty gash on her arm the traditional way, as they were low on lyrium potions as usual. It helped that Hawke, perhaps out of courtesy for Aveline, minimized her own magic use out of a fight, and the rest of their mage friends followed her lead.
Hawke couldn’t heal herself very well. Once, while stumbling drunk after a poorly thought-out bet with Isabela, Hawke revealed that as a teenager she had broken her nose by accident, something involving three goats and the roof of a barn. Her attempt to heal it left her with the characteristic scar across the bridge of her nose, still crooked and incorrectly mended.
“Watch it,” Hawke hissed, sucking in air between her teeth as Anders tightened the bandage on her arm. She placed her free hand over her heart, and sighed dramatically. “I’m delicate, Anders.”
Aveline snorted, and Hawke shot her a dirty look that didn’t carry much bite.
“Forgive me,” Aveline said, though it didn’t sound like she particularly meant it. She gave Hawke a teasing smile. “I’ve never heard you associated with the word ‘delicate’ is all, Hawke.”
Blondie laughed quietly, and gave Hawke’s arm another look, to make sure it was properly wrapped. “She has a point. When have you ever been delicate?”
“I have my moments,” she said, evasive, and she snatched her arm back to look at the bandages herself.
Anders didn’t say anything to that, but he glanced down at his hands, fidgeting now that he had nothing to do with them, before tilting his face back up to Hawke. Blondie looked at her like she had all of the answers in the world. Varric used to wonder if Hawke would do something about it, back before he really knew her, the way she fled from real attachment and the way she regarded him with something that more closely resembled pity than love.
She looked instead to Varric.
“Well,” Hawke said. “Surely you’ll come to my defense Varric, since these two,” she shot a wounded glance at the others, “doubt me.”
Varric looked at her face, considering. The curve of Hawke’s lips certainly seemed delicate, as did the funny look in her eyes she had whenever she joked around with him. But he liked how indelicate Hawke was too, the way her face would twist into a snarl whenever she fought someone and the shape of her rough and calloused hands.
“Well?” Hawke repeated.
Varric was the familiar with this feeling, the way that looking at Hawke was like a punch to the gut that left him completely winded. And he was familiar with the process of clamping it down until he almost forgot that he was more than a little bit in love. That didn’t make it any easier. Neither did the passing of time, to his annoyance, but he could at least hide his feelings when he spoke.
“As delicate as a dragon,” he replied after a moment. Not his best line, certainly, but good enough for the moment. Hawke puffed up instantly, ignoring Aveline’s immediate insistence that it’s not a compliment, Hawke, and gave Varric a toothy grin that made him look down at Bianca in his hands.
He had a pile of letters on his desk meant for Bianca. Sometime during a particularly hot summer, Varric noticed that they were shorter than they used to be, less chatty and more succinct, more likely to be forgotten halfway through writing them when Hawke poked her head into his room and asked him down for drinks and cards.
Most of them weren’t finished, and only a few of them made it very near the closing line. That, strangely, was the hardest part. The letters were a collection of crossed-out love and sincerely and warmest regards that all left a bitter taste in Varric’s mouth when he wrote them. Perhaps it didn’t matter; the last one he sent didn’t receive a response anyway.
Bianca,
Can’t make our meeting tomorrow.
- Varric
Hawke, blank-faced, caved in on herself like her bones couldn’t keep her up properly, sat on the edge of her bed and didn’t look up from the fireplace when Varric walked into her room. Her eyes were red and puffy and completely dry by this point, though he could see tear tracks on her cheeks, smudged by a clumsy hand. Varric realized he’d never seen her like this before. Even when Junior was nearly lifeless in the Deep Roads, she’d masked her fear with bravado; it was the Hawke way of life, and it had served her well up until this point.
“Hawke,” Varric said. She didn’t move, so he tried again, with a soft, “Marian.”
“My mother was the only one who called me that, you know.” Her voice was flat, affectless, and Varric felt unsettled hearing it. “Father did too, but he’s been dead for quite some time now. The twins never bothered with anything other than sister, unless they were angry with me.”
He put a broad hand on her arm and squeezed tightly, until she shrugged his hand off. He let it fall limply to his side. The flames, he noticed, seemed to rise and fall in time with Hawke’s unsteady breathing.
Leandra’s body was ash by now. Hawke was Ferelden, born and raised, but she gave her mother a Kirkwall funeral and scattered her ashes to the sea, keeping some for herself in a small jar sat on the fireplace mantle. Freedom by the current and waves, instead of a body trapped underground in the City of Chains.
“Maker knows where Carver is these days. I can’t even send him a letter.”
The fire flared until it threatened to spill out of the hearth, and the room became so bright that Varric had to blink to clear his eyes. The hairs on his arms curled from the heat of it. Hawke finally turned her face up to look at him.
All Varric could see was her sorrow, her frustration and anger and helplessness, so visceral and shockingly intense that he nearly took a step back from the force of it. And then Hawke looked back down at the fire. It collapsed into embers and left the room almost entirely dark. He could barely make out the curvature of her sharp cheek, colored orange from the flickers of light that remained.
“My uncle was right,” she said, and now her voice had some semblance of emotion. She sounded raw, scraped out from the inside and left with nothing but emptiness. It was awful, and Varric took a step closer instinctively. “If I were faster, or stronger perhaps, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“Fuck Gamlen,” Varric said, vicious and reflexive before he could stop himself from speaking. His hands, he realized, were curled into fists at his side.
Hawke laughed, a terrible sound that was a grimace given voice. “It doesn’t matter. She’s gone.”
Varric could wax poetic about Hawke for years; he had waxed poetic about her for years. He was a writer after all, and for someone who claimed to dislike romance novels, he happened to write quite a lot himself. Most of them were trashy and amounted to little more than friend fiction that started from a place of pettiness, but some—the unpublished ones, that he would rather burn than let out of the Hanged Man—were perhaps better written than the rest of his books.
Not that he would let them fall into anyone else’s hands, of course.
He wanted her badly, wanted to know the feel of her hips under his hands and the taste of her skin. It was maddening, having his thoughts consumed so entirely by Hawke.
There was a moment, when Varric finally made eye contact with Hawke as she leapt away from the Arishok, his sword sinking a good three or four inches into the ground beside her, that he thought she was worried. Her eyes were narrowed with concentration and framed with sweat mingled with a few spots of blood, and she only gave Varric a moment’s glance before she moved away again, mouth set into a thin and grim line.
It struck him with a sudden sense of fear. Sure, watching her engage the Arishok alone was concerning, but this was Hawke: she had escaped the darkspawn horde in Ferelden on the back of a dragon, she had laughed in the face of an ancient rock wraith in the Deep Roads, she had faced demons in someone else’s dream and emerged untainted. There was a small part of him that believed, that had felt certain and right for years, that maybe Hawke truly was unkillable. Hawke never believed in her own mortality, and her disbelief has infected him too.
Varric’s hands began to tremble, just enough for him to barely notice, so he clenched them into fists and then crossed his arms for good measure. He imagined he could hear his teeth grinding to dust in his mouth.
Hawke didn’t cut a small figure, but next to the Arishok she looked almost frail. She circled him like a snake about to strike, changing her grip on her staff every few moments to alternate between the blade and the orb pointing at him. The Arishok watched without walking, but his weapons, a greatsword and a wickedly curved axe, twitched at his sides and followed Hawke’s movement.
“He is toying with her,” Fenris said. His words were stiff and strained, and from the corner of his eye Varric could see his hand hovering in the air, reaching up toward his sword.
Isabela shifted and put a hand on Fenris’ shoulder, wordless.
“Oh, she’ll be fine,” Varric said. The words sounded hollow even to his own ears. “You know how Hawke is.”
“Is that a good thing here?” Fenris asked quietly.
Varric said nothing. Across the room, Hawke let off a blast of ice that filled the room with a thin, cold fog. It missed the Arishok, mostly, but left frost woven into the strands of his hair. Some ice stuck to his horn and made his head tilt a little to the left.
It didn’t stop him from charging at Hawke while she tried to catch her breath, the sound of her deep inhales and exhales audible even across the room.
His sword slid into Hawke’s stomach before she could dart away again. She let out a pained grunt as her eyes widened in shock. For a moment, neither of them moved, and then the Arishok lifted Hawke into the air with a roar.
She didn’t scream, even as gravity made the blade sink deeper into her gut, but Varric felt all of the air leave his chest in a rough exhale that left him hollow.
Hawke’s hand grasped the sword tightly, slipping a little on the blood pouring out from her stomach and running down the steel. For a moment, her palm seemed to glow with a dull, crimson light, but it faded almost as quickly as it had appeared.
That, Varric was certain, was blood magic, or at least the beginnings of blood magic cut off before it could fully manifest, and the realization made his heart start beating erratically in his chest. Around him, there was no reaction, except for Daisy: she narrowed her eyes, and there was the faintest hint of surprised recognition on her face.
The nobles in the room didn’t see anything, or at least they didn’t know any better, and it seemed that none of his companions were focused on Hawke’s hands as much as they were her face, twisted and pained, or the now gaping wound in her abdomen.
Hawke grimaced, closed her eyes tightly for a moment, and then with her other hand she swung her staff around, blade out at the Arishok, and attempted to swipe his shoulders. He flicked his greatsword down before she could reach him, and she slipped off the blade—with a soft groan that made Varric take half a step forward before he could stop himself—and crumpled onto the ground in a heap.
There was a loaded pause, and then the Arishok took a step forward, dragging his sword on the ornate rug and leaving a trail of Hawke’s blood in the weave. “You fought well,” he said. “But the Qun demands this.”
His voice, deep and commanding, carried across the room. Some of the nobles were beginning to turn away, clasping hands over their eyes or simply looking intently at corners and walls of the room far away from Hawke’s body and the blood pooling around her form.
“Know that your death was the only one in this city with any meaning,” the Arishok was saying to her, but he sounded very muffled against the thudding sound of Varric’s heartbeat in his ears. Distantly, he could hear others yelling, but he couldn’t quite make out the words.
“Thanks,” Hawke said, and suddenly her bloody hand was picking her staff from the ground next to her and driving it into the Arishok.
Her grin stretched wide across her face, tense at the edges but vicious in true Hawke fashion. “Same to you, of course,” she added, as she twisted the blade in his chest.
The Arishok doubled over, coughing out dark blood onto the floor and against Hawke’s upturned face. She paid it no mind, fixated on him as he drew in a ragged gasp.
“You,” he snarled, and he began to say more, but the words were cut off by another savage twist of Hawke’s staff. He collapsed to his knees in front of her.
“Yes, yes, I know.” She sounded very weak, nearly out of breath, but she laughed anyway. “How dare I, and all that. Sorry, but I don’t think I have the time, or the essential organs, for more of this.”
The Arishok fell backwards, taking Hawke’s staff with him, still stuck in his flesh. He looked up at the ceiling blankly, and after a moment his chest stopped its rise and fall.
The rest of the room faded away as Varric ran to Hawke’s side, slipping a little in the blood smeared across the floor. He wanted to kiss her soundly. He settled instead of placing a shaking hand on one of hers, squeezing tightly around her fingers.
“How sweet,” she said, and then she passed out.
“You know, that wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be,” Hawke said conversationally, and Varric instantly felt very bitter when he realized she wasn’t even winded. If anything, she sounded a little bit giddy, chipper in the way she was after winning game after game of Wicked Grace.
Nearby, he could hear Blondie groaning wordlessly, and the sound of armor scraping against the dirt as Fenris rolled onto his side with a grunt. Varric’s ribcage hurt tremendously. Actually, quite a lot of his body hurt, sprawled out on the ground like this, and he could feel bruises darkening to deep purples and blues with every breath.
“Do you think it had a hoard?” Hawke asked, oblivious. “Dragons should have hoards, or so I’ve been led to believe. Oh, you’re all still on the ground. Here, I think I have salves, or elfroot, or something. Perhaps—no, not there, where do I keep these things?” She made an annoyed noise as she rifled through the numerous pockets scattered across her outfit. “Ah, yes, here!”
There was a soft thud somewhere to the right of his head, and Varric cracked open an eye to see some poultices in the dirt. He huffed out something that could have passed for a thank you or a wonderful or perhaps a fuck you, Hawke.
“Please stop inviting me on outings with you,” Fenris said. His voice sounded a little wet, like he had a mouthful of blood, which he immediately spat out onto the ground. “Your need to find and hunt nearby dragons will be the end of me.”
“I can’t leave you all alone in your mansion,” Hawke replied cheerfully. “You’d be terribly bored, and Isabela would blame me for your mood swings because of it.”
“Would you rather be bored or dead, elf?” Varric said. His hand fumbled around with the poultices for a moment, as he decided which of his his cuts and bruises needed mending first.
“No one died,” Hawke said defensively, just as Fenris replied, “Bored.”
“No one has died yet, you mean,” Blondie wheezed. “My bruises have bruises, Hawke.” There was a brief burst of light as his mana slowly returned to him, and he began to mumble healing spells under his breath.
“Get me next,” Varric called out. “I think my arm might be falling off.”
“You’re an ungrateful lot, you know that?” Hawke asked. “And here I’ve allowed you to help me clear out a dragon infestation, saving Kirkwall from certain fiery doom, and given you the opportunity to loot a dragon’s hoard.”
Fenris let out a low laugh. “You have my thanks,” he said dryly.
“Fiery doom?” Varric sat up, wincing, and pressed a hand to his side. “If anyone is going to make Kirkwall go up in flames, it’ll be you Hawke, and probably by accident.”
“Maybe,” Hawke said with a laugh, and Varric looked up to see her, tall and imposing and beautiful, perched on the neck of a dead high dragon with her staff, still covered in frost and swung up to rest on her shoulder. The red smear on her face was larger than usual, like she’d taken some of the dragon’s after it had died. Actually, she might have. Hawke was funny about dragons like that.
“Well, I’m going to find its treasure hoard,” she declared, and then she leapt from the dragon’s neck and landed on the ground with a loud metal thud of her boots. “You can all join me later, but, I must warn you: I will be taking the best items for myself, as I technically own half of this property.”
“I don’t think the partnership entitles you to the property itself,” Varric said.
“Shush,” said Hawke as she passed by him. “I’ll be discussing that with Hubert when we return.”
The docks had a distinctly foul smell that Varric should have been used to at this point in his life, having only ever lived in Kirkwall. The air always made his nose wrinkle in disgust and gave him a slight headache. It didn’t smell like fish and saltwater so much as dead fish and rot and mold, and what was probably a fair number of corpses stashed about the place.
Varric tried to avoid the area as much as he could, but Hawke was strangely fond of it. She liked to sit at the end of rickety piers, on old wood that creaked with every movement, and let the wind tousle her messy hair as she ate street food. Years ago, Varric would find Carver sitting nearby, close enough for conversation but far enough away that Hawke couldn’t tip him into the water when he wasn’t paying attention; these days, Varric mostly found her sitting alone and watching ships leave and enter the port. Sometimes Isabela joined, but the sight of ships made her mood dwindle, and she ended up at the Hanged Man soon after.
The tension was almost entirely gone from Hawke’s shoulders. Her slouch, forced as of late to maintain the appearance of Hightown’s worst noble during the day, seemed genuine this time. Not one of exhaustion, but something easy and casual, like she was four years younger and still slumming about in Lowtown while saving up for an expedition.
“Oh, Varric!” Hawke said, shooting him a wide grin over her shoulder as he approached—gingerly, to avoid breaking the wood planks under his feet. He wasn’t one for swimming. “Fancy seeing you here, out among the common folk.”
He sat down next to her and took some of the charred, slightly burnt, completely indiscernible food from her hand before she could protest.
“You asked me to come out here.” It had the approximate texture of overcooked fish, but the flavor was unlike anything Varric had eaten before, and he handed the skewer back to her with a grimace. “And you’re probably more noble than I am, with that fancy new title, Champion.”
Hawke raised her eyebrows in faux surprise. “That’s perhaps the kindest thing you’ve ever said to me, Varric.”
“Is it?” Varric asked. “I’m sure I’ve said nicer things. Just give me a minute to think of them.”
“No, I’ve kept a list, you see, of the wonderful things you’ve said about me. I’m certain this makes the top of it. Right above ‘you’ve got the prettiest smear of blood on your face I’ve ever seen on someone.’”
“That might have been Rivaini,” Varric said mildly.
She laughed loudly, and then she winced and moved her hand over her stomach. It never healed properly, after being gored by the Arishok. Surrounded by nobility and templars, Hawke had waved Anders off and silenced his protests with a withering look. Never let it be said that she didn’t look out for her friends, especially the foolish ones who tried to show off their healing magic in front of Meredith, of all people. At least Hawke had saved the city, so her own apostate ways could be ignored for a time.
The seabirds screamed overhead. They could be heard across Kirkwall, but here the noise was overwhelmingly loud. Varric could feel a headache coming on.
“Perhaps,” Hawke said through a mouthful of food, twirling the empty skewer in her hand. She shrugged, and the end of the skewer burst into a small flame. Before the embers could reach her fingertips, still glowing slightly from her magic, she tossed it into the sea, and it went out with a small hiss of smoke.
“Don’t you think you should be more careful?”
Hawke snorted. “What does it matter?”
“You don’t exactly blend in, Champion.” Varric said, with quite a lot more vitriol than he meant to let out. He was trying for sarcastic, flippant as usual, but his voice came out tense and angry.
If Hawke got swept up into this mess, there was a good chance that Varric would lose her. She was walking a fine line now, Champion and apostate, savior of Kirkwall and a little misstep away from being accused of blood magic (perhaps, Varric thought darkly, correctly). Meredith would kill her, if given the opportunity, and then he would never hear her crack a bad joke and then laugh at it herself again, never talk to her while they were both stumbling drunk and playing Wicked Grace until the sun rose again, never—
“Well?” Hawke asked waspishly. Impatient, Varric realized, because he hadn’t been listening to what she was saying. He shook his head slowly.
“Do what you want, Hawke. I can’t stop you.”
Varric did not like trekking through the wilderness. He had made this abundantly clear to Hawke countless times over the years, and yet here he was on Sundermount, sitting across a campfire from her as they quietly talked, letting Isabela and Merrill sleep nearby.
His hair was littered with leaves and twigs, and he was reasonably certain that the underside of nails might never be clean again (strange, considering that he was wearing gloves). Truthfully, Varric wasn’t entirely sure why he was here; he never really kept up with Hawke’s ventures and their purposes, but he tagged along more often than not. Hawke never needed to ask.
“Something on your mind, Champion?” Hawke didn’t look down from the stars, pitch-black except for Kios, which peaked out from behind the clouds. That seemed fitting for Kirkwall, chaos set against an overcast night sky.
“Do you ever get tired of living here?” Hawke asked. She sounded bone-tired, more so than their day-long hike would make her.
“In the woods?” Varric fiddled with one of his golden earrings and wiped the dirt off of it. Hearing a serious question from Hawke was always a strange thing and made him more likely to respond with something flippant. He was far more used to asking the serious questions himself.
Hawke tapped her fingers on her staff and said nothing.
Time for honesty then. “Sometimes.” He had a lot of bad memories in Kirkwall, most having to do with his brother. He chuckled under his breath. “But it’s my home. I don’t think I could live anywhere else. I could use a little less crazy in my life though.”
That got a laugh from Hawke, but it sounded more hollow than usual. The circles under her eyes were very dark. She’d always had them, the marks of an insomniac, but they were worse now, dark enough to look purple under the right lighting. Lit up by the dwindling fire, they looked like smudges of charcoal.
“We contribute a lot to that crazy,” she said. “A bunch of apostates and thieves running about, keeping people awake at all hours.”
“You’re forgetting about our guard-captain friend,” Varric pointed out.
“Aveline,” Hawke said, after a pause, “is an anomaly. She’s trying to make us, oh, what’s the phrase—better people.”
“She’s trying, which counts for something.”
Hawke glanced at him briefly, before turning her gaze to their sleeping companions. “I hate this place,” she admitted, quietly. “You know, it’s terrible. I can’t really remember Lothering anymore. It was quiet, smelled like shit. Just a bunch of fields, but that’s all I can recall. Kirkwall’s been more of a home; it’s fucked up, isn’t it?”
“How long have you been here, Hawke? Ten years?” Varric found himself fiddling with his necklace, as he did during conversations that made the considerable hair on his arms stand on edge.
“I used to wonder why so many people turned to blood magic, but the city was built for it.” Hawke scowled and looked intently at the fire. She seemed determined to ignore what he was saying, or at least she couldn’t focus on a single train of thought at a time. “The Veil is weak here. The Fade feels constantly present, even though I’m not dreaming. It would be so easy to just—open the door.”
Varric glanced at where Merrill was curled up in a small ball, pressed against Isabela’s front, face nestled against her neck. No one would think she dealt with demons, looking at her small frame, snoring out little snuffling noises.
“I’m already losing a fortune on one blood mage,” he said, careful, unsure of where Hawke was going with this. He thought back to her fight with the Arishok; he had never bothered asking her about it, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know what really happened. “I’m not sure I can afford another.”
Hawke’s grin resembled a predator’s. “The whole city would know if you had another blood mage on your hands,” she said darkly. “But I’m not one for slicing my hands open for magic.”
Arms, Varric thought immediately. Daisy always cut her arms first; easier to bandage than her hands, a more reliable source of a lot of blood.
“No, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me, Varric,” she said.
Varric found Hawke outside of Kirkwall, letting the water wash the blood off her boots as she watched a boat leave from the shore. She didn’t turn around as he ran up to her, panting, hair loose and falling into his face and making his vision a little blurry. It was always hot in Kirkwall, but now it felt unbearable, and his hair stuck to his cheek in a sticky mess of sweat and blood.
The air smelled vaguely of sulfur. It made his nose itch. Varric could distantly hear the rumble of Kirkwall at his back, a low hum of screams, feet thudding on the ground as people panicked. The city was too crowded, had been fit to burst with people for years, and now they were all trying to run as ash rained down from the sky.
“That Isabela?” he asked, hoarse, after a moment when it was clear that Hawke wasn’t going to say anything. He pointed at the boat with Bianca, even though Hawke wasn’t looking at him, and was surprised to find his arms were steady even with his heart thudding in his chest.
“She’s taking Fenris and Merrill somewhere safer,” Hawke said. Her shoulders rose and fell marginally as she shrugged, and her armor clinked softly. “I’m not sure where. Ferelden, maybe. I don’t think Fenris will like it much; it’s too cold. He’ll complain the whole time.”
“Sounds like a fun boat ride,” Varric said, without humor. His voice was somehow steady too.
He didn’t like the way Hawke was standing, back straight and stiff, with her hand wrapped around her staff firmly, still facing away from him. It was purposeful, the way the main character held themselves in the final act, when everything was just about to end. He couldn’t think straight, so he waited for Hawke to keep talking.
“Isabela will keep them from fighting. She’s always been quite good at that.” Hawke’s staff was at the water’s edge, and it briefly dipped in whenever a wave made its way to land, setting off a crackle of electricity in the water.
“Yes,” Varric said. He focused on the outrageous shoulder piece Hawke insisted on wearing since pilfering it from a dragon’s den. The metal gleamed a dull orange, reflecting embers as if they were right outside the city.
“Carver’s already left with Rabbit,” she continued. “Fortunately for him, Rabbit’s always had a good sense of direction, else they’d be lost on Sundermount for years. The Wardens weren’t able to shape him up much. Figures.”
Varric hated this, not being able to say anything, or at least not knowing what to say. He had a whole list of things to choose from—don’t leave me was on the tip of his tongue, and it left a burnt, acrid taste in his mouth—and he couldn’t bring himself to voice any of them.
“Hawke,” he started, without being certain of where the sentence was going to end.
“I didn’t know,” Hawke said, cutting him off. There was a sudden burst of lightning from her staff, and it dissipated across the water’s surface in blue sparks. “I mean, clearly I didn’t, since I helped him blow up the Chantry through sheer stupidity on my part. What’s the point of being the Champion if I can’t even save some stupid building?”
“None of us knew.” His mouth felt very dry. Anders was long gone by now, but his presence still hung over them like a dark cloud. Varric wondered how far he would make it. He wasn’t sure how far he wanted that distance to be, and that made his stomach churn.
“Well, I should have,” Hawke said savagely. “That’s the whole damn point, Varric.” She picked up her stabbed and stabbed it, blade-first, into the soil beside her.
“Blondie,” Varric started, and then he stopped, shaking his head. “Anders, for all of his wild tendencies, was good at keeping secrets. There was no way to know. Hawke, you have to realize that.”
“No, I don’t think I do,” Hawke replied. Her hands were shaking, he noticed, trembling at her side and on her staff.
“Marian,” Varric said. It came out placating, like he was speaking to a feral animal. Her name always had a funny taste to it, somehow both unfamiliar and natural on his tongue. “We have to go now.”
The where was left unsaid. Varric was sure that they were on different pages about the specifics of where they’d need to go, but he didn’t want to give that thought a voice. He didn’t want to hear Hawke say it either.
“Well, we should start walking, Varric,” Hawke finally said. He could hear the tremor in her words, under the bravado she always loaded into her speech whenever she was nervous or upset. “Wouldn’t want to get caught up in the mass back there. I hear Ostwick can be fun in the summer. Not as hot as Kirkwall, but I think I’m quite done with this city, anyway.”
Varric’s knuckles were white from gripping Bianca so hard, but he needed something to hold onto. He wouldn’t know what to do with his hands otherwise. They still weren’t shaking, for some strange reason; the rest of him felt like it was, like he was about to fall apart at the seams.
“I can’t leave,” he said. Ash was starting to stick to his eyelashes, and he blinked furiously to try to clear his vision. That was, obviously, the only reason he was blinking, he told himself.
The stars were drowned out by the fire still swirling in Kirkwall, but Hawke looked up at the sky anyway. The boat had already disappeared beyond the light of the burning city behind them and left them truly alone on the shore.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. Hawke had a commanding voice. It echoed in his bones whenever she spoke. Now it felt like distant thunder, rumbling into his marrow and carving him up from the inside out. “Figured I’d try, though.”
She reached for her staff, and Varric jumped forward to wrap his hand around her wrist. Through his leather glove, he could feel Hawke’s rapid pulse. She stopped breathing so abruptly that he heard it, and then she fixed him with an inscrutable look.
“Tell Aveline I said goodbye, Varric. You know how she worries.” She ripped her hand away from him with enough force to make him stumble a step forward, hand still outstretched.
“I’ll see you around,” Hawke said, softly, and then she walked away.