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It starts – as so many misadventures have for him – with a seemingly harmless quip.
Sure, another round couldn’t hurt.
I think you can take him, Hawke.
What’s the worst that could happen?
Except that this time, it is neither the Champion of Kirkwall nor their merry band of misfits who happen to overhear him, but the Seeker.
They’re out dealing with Rifts on the Storm Coast when he lets it slip, a complaint amongst many against the salty sea smell, the perpetual damp that’s worked its way into his boots, the unpleasant gusts of wind.
“I did mention that I can’t swim, right?”
Cassandra actually stops in her tracks, fixes him with an incredulous look, brows raised over eyes trapped somewhere between the colour of smoke and spice. Then the line of her mouth hardens into something resembling a sneer, and she says,
“Something you cannot do, Varric? I can hardly believe my ears.”
Perhaps he deserved that – between his role as a merchant prince, his connections with the Coterie, working as a writer, and his apparent penchant for getting involved in other people’s wars, Varric knew he painted a rather accomplished portrait of himself. And he so loved to rub his competencies in the Seeker’s face, especially if it happened to contradict something he’d sworn up and down could not be done, just to vex her.
This was no matter of jest, however. He really couldn’t.
Ever the curious creature, Solas comes to join the conversation by way of staring over Cassandra’s shoulder. Leaning against his staff, the elf apostate asks in a tone of academic neutrality:
“Is it because of your kind’s affinity for the Stone? Do your feet naturally seek out the earth’s surface, regardless of depth?”
“What? Sodding – no, Chuckles! I just never bothered to learn.”
The elf’s rejoinder is altogether too smooth.
“Yet you grew up and lived in a port city. One that – if your books are to be believed – often saw disagreements resolved by throwing an offending party off the docks.”
“How lucky for me, then, that none of the bastards could lift my marvelous dwarfy figure. Let’s go, we’re holding up the Herald.”
He makes to brush past them both, but the Seeker catches him by the lapel of his duster, her grip so sure and so strong that he can hear the leather creaking in her grasp.
“This isn’t over, Varric.”
True to her word, Cassandra revisits the issue some weeks later when they have returned to Haven.
“It is a matter of success for the Inquisition,” she declares, and Andraste’s starched knickers, when he demands justification for that claim, she gives it.
They often encounter bodies of water in their travels. A simple accident needn’t become an avoidable tragedy if he knows how to swim. Likewise, there may come a time when swimming is the best – or only – route away from an opponent, and if he cannot do so, then he puts the rest of their party at risk. Despite his steady stream of grousing, he has managed to traverse every other environment they have asked of him, and this ought to be no different.
“All of which is well and good, Seeker, but you can’t just throw me into the sea and hope I’ll float!”
Cassandra blinks, bemused.
“I have no intention of doing so.”
The relief of this revelation is stolen almost immediately by the realization that she nonetheless intends to do something.
And so Varric finds himself standing on the edge of Haven’s frozen lake one morning, waving away a curtain of steam that has risen from the melted cap of ice. A mage’s doing, clearly.
The Seeker is already neck-deep in the water, eyes closed and a smile on her face as though enjoying an enormous bath. If you look past the lack of soap and the high likelihood of fish, he supposes it isn’t all that far off the mark.
That, and the fact she isn’t naked.
The thought strikes him like a bolt from a mage’s staff – bright and clear and unexpected as all hell – and he has to blink several times before he is certain the image has erased itself from his mind. He scrubs his hand across his face for good measure, and when he looks back towards the water, Cassandra’s eyes are no longer closed, but fixed upon him.
“Well? Get in the water, dwarf.”
His duster hits the ground and he kicks his way out of his boots wondering, not for the first time, just what authority it is he’s answering to whenever the Seeker makes a request of him these days. It’s not as though he is her prisoner anymore – no longer under suspicion or detained for interrogation – and since he hasn’t technically sworn any kind of oath or declared any allegiance with the Inquisition, he doesn’t have to do shit for her.
And yet.
His shirt is a matter of a few buttons and untying the sash at his waist. His pants are shucked down to his ankles. As if of their own accord, his thick and heavy feet propel him forward – a momentary pause as he adjusts to the utterly unnatural temperature of the water – and then he is knee-deep. Then waist-high and wading. The water rises to his underarms, wetting the wealth of coppery hair on his chest, and with his next step the lakebed suddenly drops away.
Varric inhales out of reflex, sucking in more water than air, and flounders. A panic seizes him unlike anything he has ever known – a primal, immediate, unreasonable thing – and he needs to touch ground, he doesn’t like this, he’s dying –
Something soft and slick presses against his face. He coughs, spluttering, and then realizes that something else has shifted down to grasp his thighs. He is hoisted, jostled, his next breath bringing with it actual air.
“Maker’s breath!” Cassandra curses above him, her grip tightening on his legs as she bobs gently up and down in the lake, making sure his chin stays above water. “You were serious! You damnable little fool – I thought you were bluffing!”
There might be anger lurking in her tone – exasperation, more likely, knowing the Seeker – but over the rapid hammering of his own heartbeat and his gasping breaths, Varric can hear concern, too.
The Seeker is solid and warm between his thighs – they’ve wrapped around her instinctively – and he realizes his face is more or less pressed against the sodden cotton wrappings used to bind down her breasts. It’s not the Stone or even a reassuringly flat patch of grass, but after his moment of drowning terror, it’s certainly better than nothing.
“Seeker,” he rasps out after a moment, and Cassandra responds accordingly: “What?”
“You can let go now.”
She doesn’t until after she has taken several steps back towards the shore and can be certain Varric will be able to stand with his shoulders out of the water.
Before the sun falls, Cassandra does manage to teach him how to float and tread water – more than either of them had expected, in truth – but when he finally sloshes his way back to the edge of the lake and his dry clothes, his toes and fingertips wrinkled, Varric still feels like a part of him is sinking, very slowly. Into what, he does not know.