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In the dim torchlight, she can just see Varric’s outline where he’s sitting up in his bedroll. He’d drawn first watch but Fallwyn knows that’s not the only reason he isn’t sleeping. They all look pale and sallow after two weeks underground, but the darkness hangs on Varric in ways it doesn’t touch the others.
She’s met more dwarves over the last months with the Inquisition than she’s ever known in her entire life and she knows, better than anyone else here, that he doesn’t have much in common with other dwarves.
“You don’t like being underground, do you?” she whispers into the space between them. There isn’t much, they’ve bedded down into a handy alcove for what Fallwyn has called the night, even though there’s no difference down here.
He doesn’t startle but then, he never has with her. Somehow, he always seems to be aware of exactly where she is. “I’m not a very good dwarf,” he whispers back, cognizant of the others sleeping around them. “But no, I never have.”
She scootches even closer, propping herself up on her elbow and curling around his back to give him something to lean against, if he chooses. He does. “Have you spent a lot of time down here?”
“In Orzammar?”
“Anywhere.”
“No. To both questions, actually. I was born on the surface, I like sunlight and a cool breeze as much as the rest of you. The long dark makes my skin crawl.”
“‘The long dark’ sounds like a story.”
He’s quiet for a long moment and Fallwyn wonders if she’s wandered into a tale he doesn’t want to tell.
“Well,” he finally says, so quietly she has to lean in closer still. “There was the time my brother tried to kill me in the deep roads.”
“What?” she says, slightly louder than a normal volume in her shock, then cringes as Sera starts to stir. They both hold their breath until she stills again.
“Geez, Sunshine. These aren’t state secrets. I told you about when we found the red lyrium.”
“You did, but not the rest of it.”
“I hate the stuff.” He shudders but takes a deep breath and starts again. “Bartrand and I were never very close. He was born in Orzammar, still remembered life down there and would have given anything to go back.”
“Wait, your parents weren’t surface dwarves? Why did they ever leave?”
“That,” he says slowly, “is another story for another time. I will tell you, just, let me get this one out first.”
She doesn’t say anything, giving him space, but she does reach out her free hand, unsure of its reception.
Her heart flips over—just a little—when he turns his hand palm up under hers and threads their fingers together. His hand engulfs hers, the calluses from Bianca catching on the calluses from her knives, but it’s real and comforting. For them both, she hopes.
“It was how I met Hawke, actually. She and her brother signed on for an expedition to loot a thaig. He wasn’t always like this, but by the time my mother died, there were few things Bartrand wouldn’t do for gold.”
Varric spins the tale of deception and betrayal for her, quietly as he can. He sometimes punctuates the story with gestures she can just make out in the dim torchlight (none of them had wanted to sleep in the pitch black).
He never drops her hand, though he does sometimes take it with his as he sketches out Hawke casting a spell with her staff, or Carver’s slashes with his long sword.
By the time the tale ends with his triumphant return to Kirkwall, richer than Bartrand could have imagined getting on this expedition, Fallwyn can almost forget the quiet whisper where it began: with Varric watching helplessly as his brother locks him in a room in the deep roads to die.
She’s quiet for a moment and he laughs softly into the dark. “Have I actually rendered you speechless with my tale?”
She squeezes his hand. “Hardly,” she says. “I’m sorry I brought you down here.”
Varric pulls her hand up to his mouth and his lips press a kiss to her palm before he tugs further, pulling her face up to his. She catches her breath but all he does is lean his forehead against hers. In the quiet space between them, he whispers what she’s known for a while. “Come on, Sunshine. You’ve gotta know by now that I’d follow you anywhere.”
It’s up to her to cup his cheek with her free hand, to pull that clever mouth that spins such tales to hers, to kiss him in the quiet, deep dark.