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‘Varric,’ Anders said, chin leaned comfortably in both hands as he gazed across the breadth of Varric’s dining table, ‘I’ve never felt this close to you before.’
‘That’s because neither of us has left this room in three days, Blondie,’ Varric replied. Then, he tipped back in his chair, pretending to take a nap.
Sleep was his only escape now. If he couldn’t get some the old fashioned way, then he wasn’t above faking it.
It wasn’t that he minded company—or spending time with his favorite apostate. Anders often visited once, sometimes twice a day, whenever he remembered there was life outside the clinic, with The Hanged Man being the perfect way-station between the depths of Darktown and Hawke’s Hightown estate. They’d play a few hands of Diamondback, Anders losing sooner and sooner each round, and Varric would pump him for stories from his Wardening days; if they weren’t pressed for time, about to embark on a hopeless mission to the peaks or to the Pit, they might even share a drink before Anders was on his way again. And so life in Kirkwall marched ever forward, heedless of dwarves and their quills—and a storyteller who needed some time alone to perfect his word choice.
But winter had come early to the City of Chains that year, and it had brought with it the worst blizzard Varric cared to remember. The road to Darktown was buried under twenty feet of snow; while Anders’s first thoughts had been for his patients, Varric’s were on Anders—who’ll heal the healer and all that—incapable of missing the finer details: like the new hollows in his cheeks, or how a spirit couldn’t possibly understand a mortal body’s need for a steaming bowl of soup.
‘You’ll lose your fingers to frostbite, Blondie,’ Varric had said, ‘and it just so happens I like them right where they are.’
Me and my big mouth, Varric thought later, clearing crumpled pages of Anders’s manifesto from the floor and tossing them into the fire.
At least they weren’t likely to run out of kindling anytime soon.
That manifesto had a lot of pages.
It hadn’t been so bad at first, not when they could still spend their hours in the taproom. But no one was rowdier than a roomful of drunks forced to sober up and cohabitate—and even if Varric could’ve dealt with the random violence, the smell was too much for his delicate dwarven sensibilities.
‘No worries,’ Varric had said, locking the door to his private domain behind him. The shouting down below had calmed to a dull roar, at least for the time being. Somebody’d lost an eyeball, fashioning an eyepatch out of boot-leather. All was right with Thedas, or at least this corner of it, even if there were white drifts piled high against the windows and Varric’s nose itched—all along the left side of the bridge, which it generally did before a fresh snowfall.
‘Are these…your slippers?’ Anders had asked, holding up the footwear in question, one in each hand. ‘They look so cozy.’
They’d decided on writing together—both of them having work to do, Varric a chapter and Anders a thesis statement—with Anders’s feet tucked up snug as two nugs in a dwarven rug, wearing Varric’s house slippers.
Varric had waited for something more, a This is homey or a You don’t happen to have a matching house-coat, do you? But Blondie was Blondie—and from the looks of him he’d already forgotten all about being cold. The sound of his quill scraping vellum was almost companionable, the idea that maybe writing didn’t have to be so lonely—that it could happen with somebody else in the room; that Varric could soothe Anders to sleep like a baby later with the newest exploits of the Champion.
But—like so many other things, including an ill-fated romance between one dwarven storyteller and his favorite tragic hero—it just wasn’t meant to be.
‘Varric, what’s another word for ‘oppressed?’’ Anders asked.
There’d been a long string of similar questions: What’s another word for ‘injustice’ and What’s another word for ‘merciless’ and What’s another word for ‘dire wretches wallowing in systematically imposed misery?’
‘I don’t know, Blondie,’ Varric had replied. ‘I think ‘Dire wretches wallowing in systematically imposed misery’ gets the point across just fine.’
‘Never mind,’ Anders said, chewing the tip of his quill. ‘I’ve used that one already, but I don’t think you can use the word oppressed too often. Self-censorship is part of the problem. Oppression is key.’
‘…Right,’ Varric agreed. ‘Exactly.’
He glanced down at the pages before him, thoughts and metaphors scattered in his usually impeccable handwriting. The last sentences read, Hawke approached the sewer door, ready to liberate it from its oppression, dire wretches wallowing in systematically imposed misery.
‘Shit,’ Varric said.
‘Oh-presh-shun,’ Anders agreed, quill-tip rubbing vellum so raw Varric noticed the moment it pierced the paper and stuck into his writing desk.
‘Now, don’t worry about that,’ he said, although Anders didn’t seem worried. In fact, he didn’t seem to have noticed the mark in the first place, the limits of the desk and the paper and the quill and the ink not meaning much in the face of all the dire wretches he had to think about.
Some people wrote their manifestos on moldering old crates in a Darktown clinic—so it made sense when they weren’t concerned about punching through the paper. Anyway, it wasn’t like Varric had the desk imported from Antiva—some people got too fancy once they moved up to Hightown—or carved from a relative of ironbark to shine bright as a mirror when you polished it just right.
Despite the tear in the sentence, Anders kept going, quill flying across the page in what Varric had come to discover was a rare moment of totally silent inspiration. He let Anders enjoy it—and let himself enjoy it—by balling up his latest page and reaching for a fresh piece of vellum.
At the end of the day, the desk was just a piece of furniture and the extra marks gave it character. If anyone knew how to put a good spin on a bad situation, it was Varric Tethras, at your service—and the desk, unlike certain Champions he knew, wouldn’t have any smart remarks to make later if he rewrote its history just a little for the sake of good storytelling.
*
Varric’s work suffered while Anders’s mood flourished—like a splash of ink at the end of a paragraph or in the bottom corner of a finished page. He watched it snow at night out the cold window, breath hot and white on the glass, his chin in his hands and a chill in his feathers.
At least Varric’s rooms had a window to look out of. Stinking old clinics in Darktown didn’t. After all, there was no point in having those underground; living so close to the sewers meant they let in no sunlight but plenty of rats.
‘Varric,’ Anders asked, ‘have you ever thought about taking up knitting? You have such clever hands.’
‘Uh uh,’ Varric said, drumming his fingers where they’d wanted to remain: laced together comfortably right over his belly, rising with every full breath. ‘These hands are for storytelling and card games and pulling Bianca’s trigger. Anything else has always felt like the waste of a perfectly good gift.’
‘But if you learned to knit, you could make scarves.’ Anders’s hands were already at his throat, imagining Varric’s results in all their woolen glory. ‘I don’t think I’d mind a scarf. Not in this weather.’
‘Would a scarf match the feathers, though?’ Varric asked.
‘What doesn’t match the feathers?’ Anders replied.
Varric thought about the inventory he took of Hawke’s collected detritus, mostly trash and sometimes not, seasoned with the occasional useful or dangerous artifact he could pawn off at the Black Emporium—so it’d be somebody else’s problem for once instead of theirs. ‘You know, I think Hawke picked one of those things up in a barrel a couple weeks back.’
‘For all the good it does me now,’ Anders agreed, with a sigh that seemed downright forlorn.
There were two possibilities for why that was, and the first was that Anders missed the scarf.
The second was that he missed Hawke.
Varric knew a little something about everything—you had to if you wanted to write even the shortest of stories—and what he knew the most about was people. People who liked other people, for one thing, and people who got red noses even while they were wearing somebody else’s house slippers, all cozy by a roaring fire, flames fed by dry paper and fresh ink. He knew too much about apostates, how they forgot to shave before breakfast and forgot breakfast before getting into a mood or picking up a quill, or noticing—like it was the first time—that they’d chosen to patch their sleeves with rolls of bandage and not something else more sensible.
‘At least you always have some to hand,’ Varric said. ‘Literally.’ He blew on his soup, waiting for Anders to blow on his, and both of them burned their tongues at exactly the same moment. ‘…And I’m starting to wonder if Corff’s using patrons to season his broth. Doesn’t this taste as salty as a pirate’s backside to you?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Anders replied. ‘I never had the chance to lick one.’
‘If you ask all polite, I’m sure Isabela would oblige,’ Varric said. ‘You know—since she actually likes you.’
Anders finished his soup and Varric had to hope it wasn’t just because of the way he looked when he forgot to take off his reading glasses. Not like a mother hen, Hawke called it, but more like a mother pigeon.
Technically, they were writing glasses—then proofreading glasses, then Hawke-that’s-a-terrible-idea glasses, or more rarely, Why-didn’t-I-think-of-that glasses. Sometimes they were Trust-me glasses, but he’d used up all those points on a couple of sour deals between Feastday and the cold snap, and now he had to wait for Hawke’s faith in his good judgment to replenish like daises growing in the fields come spring.
Varric hooked the frame off his nose and polished one lens on the edge of his napkin. Anders patted his chest with a delicate hand, then burped.
‘Still can’t convince you to move out of that rat’s nest in Darktown and live in a real place—one that has walls and windows and town drunks and everything?’ Varric asked. He got a rustle of feathers in reply. ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘but you’re gonna have to hand over that coat.’
‘Finally,’ Anders replied. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’
*
One of the things Varric had learned on the road—because it helped keep a guy looking like he hadn’t just crawled out of the back-end of a broken smuggler’s crate—was darning holes. His glasses were Threading-the-needle glasses even more than they were proofreading glasses, both only when they had to be, and Anders sat in his bed with the covers drawn over his shoulders, bare wrists poking out from underneath the fold of a blanket that’d been spun on an Orzammar loom by Varric’s mother herself.
‘But about the scarf—’ Anders began. ‘You said—’
‘This is a regular needle, not one for knitting,’ Varric explained. ‘Come on, tell me honestly: have you ever seen a dwarf knit before?’
‘Actually, I have.’ Anders wrapped his arms around his knees. ‘I just…think he was doing it by accident. With spider’s silk and genlock bones. We were both drunk at the time—and there’s the very real possibility I might have hallucinated the entire thing.’
‘Sometimes I wonder why you left the Wardens,’ Varric said.
Anders dropped his chin to his knees. ‘I don’t.’
Varric sighed, not above a little indulgence on his own terms. He was moving slow, especially for him, but the time was right and the hearth was still and Anders was cold, not something that could be warmed from without, something that had to come from within.
They didn’t have a water bottle handy, so Varric had to offer the next best thing.
It was pretty anticlimactic when he finally climbed into the bed. But Anders was obviously using the covers all wrong, like a cloak instead of what they were meant for—as though apostates and free clinic healers had a habit of using sheets for robes when there was nothing else available, same as they used bandages for patchwork.
On top of that, he was letting out all the body-heat.
Anders didn’t shift when Varric hauled ass in next to him or when he spread the tattered coat out over his short legs—then returned to mending the hole worn through the elbow, where not even a bandage bothered to hide the frays in the fabric.
‘Well, you won’t find me singing any praises for the Deep Roads, either,’ Varric said, tongue in his cheek as he worked. ‘Some people are just made for sunshine and clear skies.’
‘Or…a roaring fire and a comfortable bed?’ Anders gave a tentative stretch, resettling the blankets around him so they covered his slippered toes. And Varric’s toes, too, which didn’t have slippers at all.
The detail didn’t go unnoticed. For a healer, Anders could be downright thoughtful.
‘No shame in that, Blondie,’ Varric said. ‘Come to think of it, I can’t really see you as a sunshine and clear skies kind of guy.’
They sat together in silence, Varric working and Anders staring into the depths of the hearth, glimmering orange light reflected in his eyes. Varric’s eyelids started to droop when Anders started to lean a little closer—and by the time they were pressed together at the center of his bed, Varric had just enough presence of mind to take off his glasses before the heat dragged him under, into sweet sleep at last.
More importantly than that, it was respite. Rest. He told himself to make the distinction in his next chapter—then lost it all to snoring.
*
On the fourth day, the cold broke. That was when Hawke cleared a path from Hightown directly to The Hanged Man.
‘I couldn’t leave my best ale-master to starve,’ he explained, trapping Corff in a fond headlock as he stamped the snow from his boots.
Hawke never looked more Fereldan than when he was wet, pink-cheeked from stubborn exertion and smelling faintly of ruined leather and dog. Anders was still sleeping in Varric’s bed when Hawke bounded up the stairs, taking them two by two like a much younger man, and he paused at the threshold, eyebrows disappearing beneath the melting frost that coated his dark fringe.
‘Varric,’ he began, in a tone Varric knew all too well. ‘Should I be worried about this? You and Anders, together at last?’
‘Oh, Hawke,’ Varric said, ‘jealousy’s no trait for a hero.’
They played three hands of Wicked Grace before Anders ever stirred. The look that passed over his face when he noticed Hawke in the room was liable to give Varric three chapters’ worth of material, if not more.
Even better, he had all the time—and quiet—in the world to write them down once Anders cleared out, a room no longer crowded by other authors.
‘You’ve been a wonderful host,’ Anders said. Hawke pretended to yawn, tugging him closer with an arm around his feathers.
‘Keep the slippers,’ Varric told him. ‘You can leave them at Hawke’s place if you’re worried about sticky Darktown fingers.’
They left. Everybody did eventually. A taproom was for people who passed through, who told the stories they’d lived somewhere else. If Varric knew Hawke—and he did, better than anyone—he and Anders would be having a romantic dinner up in the estate soon enough, only they’d skip the first course and go straight to dessert, keeping each other warm within and without in a tangle of velvet sheets and private whispers.
Varric settled himself in his favorite chair, a stack of unused vellum beside him and his best quill in his hand. He touched the ink-stain on his table, a narrow groove made from a sharpened nib, then covered it up with a fresh sheet of paper.
If somebody asked, he’d tell them it was a Rivaini dagger that’d gouged the wood, or a poison-tipped arrow all the way from Tevinter.
’Hawke,’ he wrote, writing glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose, ’what’s another word for oppression?’
END