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Rook had often tried to picture the kind of home Varric had, back where he called home. There were some things that were obvious; there needed to be a big desk for a start, with lots of ink stains and nicks from a knife when writer's block hit or a letter came bearing the kind of news where the only answer was to stab something. There would be bookshelves everywhere, a mantel in pride of place for Bianca, vast wardrobe space for all his vast collection of ridiculous clothing, a big hearth for a crackling fire to sit in front of recounting stories. It would be warm and inviting, filled with character, just like the man himself.
“I’ve got two of them,” Varric had said when Rook had asked him, as subtle as she was able. “One is on top of a hill with lots of gaudy marble and gold. There’s a portrait of me wearing a crown somewhere in the attic under a dust sheet. The other is in the worst tavern in the city, in the back where the smell is almost tolerable and the drink never runs out. Which do you think suits me best?”
Rook had her answer, but she didn’t think he’d like it.
She could easily picture him in either. She’d never met anyone so adaptable without changing a thing about himself. He was a man who could fit into any crowd, any room, sit at any table and belong there just as he was.
But the one place he absolutely did not belong was an infirmary.
The one in the Lighthouse was alright enough. As pleasant as one could hope from a dilapidated hideout of an ancient god-cum-heretic that had been abandoned for centuries. But Rook would hate it regardless because there were no comforts or amenities enough to fix the fact it was where Varric was laid up, pieced back together, breathing rattling and heavy, face grey and wan. He’d never seemed small, not in all the time Rook had known him, despite the fact she had over a foot on him, yet in that narrow bed, limbs bent awkwardly, stripped of all the usual trappings that made him larger than life, he finally looked it.
“I told you about the room I found, yeah? With the fish in the window? It’s pretty comfortable. Could even put one of these beds in there for you.” Rook gives the leg of Varric’s bed a little tap with the toe of her boot. She’d dragged one of the large chairs up the stairs from the living area that first day to stubbornly stick at his bedside, creating an ungodly (ha) amount of noise, and leaving a trail of deep gouges in the floors that she insisted she could buff out. “Bet there’s tons of inspiration to be had staring at shoals of trout all day. Might even get a start on a new serial.”
“Thanks, but I’m fine here.” Varric smiles at her because that’s what he’s supposed to do. It looks more like a wince these days. “You keep the room, Rook. I don’t think these floors could handle any more of your rearranging.”
Rook shrugs, brushing off her disappointment. “Suit yourself.” She doesn’t know how he stands it, looking at these same four walls all day, nothing to occupy him but the broken pieces of Bianca on his bedside. She would have gone mad. Maybe he’s sleeping more than he’s letting on. She bites on the edges of her thumb, knee bouncing with ceaseless energy, making a mental note to pick up some new reading material for him next time they’re in civilization. Something trashy and light, the sort he pretends to be above but she’s seen him inhale to unwind. “Offers open, if you change your mind. Wouldn't mind having a roommate.”
“Think I’m a little old for that. You don’t want an old man’s groaning keeping you up.”
“Oh, I don't know, groans are sometimes the best things to be kept up by.”
Varric chuckles, like he always does, shaking his head in disbelief like he always does. Rook removes her thumb and pushes on her knee to stop it moving.
“We’ll probably be eating soon. Bellara’s making something dubious with equally dubious ingredients. I heard her mention something concerning about fade cheese. Will you eat in here or shall I…” she trails off, hopeful.
“Yeah, in here will be great, thanks.”
Rook nods. She wants to shake him by the shoulders and scream, and she doesn’t know why. He doesn’t want to be stuck in here any more than she does. Her eyes land on the leg brace, where it digs in at the bare skin of his vulnerably bare ankle. She’d have clawed it off by now but Varric always had the restraint of a cleric.
“Look, why don’t you go help Bellara out?” Varric says, prodding gently. “I know you’re no chef yourself, but maybe a second pair of hands might get us something less… Dalish.”
She sees what he’s doing, pushing her into being the responsible one, the leader, the one who checks in rather than needing to be checked on. The guard dog let off its leash now expected to do more than just bite. He knows what it’s like to have everyone looking at him for answers, but the difference was he always had them. “Neve’s with her,” Rook says with a dismissive wave of her hand, “and I believe there’s an expression about too many cooks.”
“There’s probably also one about not wasting your evening with an old invalid.”
“Never heard that one, must be one of your Southern sayings. Sounds a bit shit to me.” It’s stupid that the one place she currently hates more than anything is the only place she wants to be right now, but things stopped making sense a while ago, right about the time Varric crumpled and the god popped up in her head.
She drags a hand through her hair, snagging on knots. She’s tired, so tired it's wrapped back around to a strange energy, like electrical vibrations, but she’s not allowed to sleep in here anymore and she can't find another bed in this place she can stand.
“When you were sick back in Kirkwall, what did you do?” she asks. She wants a story, to be taken with him anywhere but here.
“Depends.” Varric grunts as he lifts his strapped leg, tugging it to sit a little straighter. “If I was hungover, I’d go back to the Hanged Man, hair of the dog and all that. Hearing the tales of woe from the other sad sacks who frequented it was the best way to feel better about yourself. If I was really injured, there was a clinic that used to run out of the very worst pit in town. Had a former friend who ran it, would treat anyone who needed it. Never asked for anything in return. Used to give me potions to ward off hay fever every spring.”
“The grey warden mage,” Rook says, nodding. There’s a very large, very incomplete puzzle in her head compiled of all the people, places, and stories Varric has told her about his life. She has to swap pieces out frequently, deciding what was fanciful truth and what was one of his truthful lies. “The… troubled one.”
Varric chuckles again. “Yeah, that’s one way of describing him. One hell of a healer. A damn shame…” He falls quiet again, staring off into one of those four walls and beyond it. He's been getting lost in the past a lot lately. Rook bites her lip until she tastes copper.
“Was there no one there to… you know. To take care of you?”
“There was always someone, Rook. I had my friends.”
She nods again. Of course there were friends; a rich, endless supply. She thought she'd had them before, but now she's not sure she even knew the meaning of the word before him. She pictures a dining table in that grand marble home of his, over a dozen chairs all filled with warm bodies and warmer laughter, Varric at the head of the table, risen on stable feet for a toast. There’d be one space left, just to the right of him. He’d wink at her when he’d finished, right before he took his drink, some private thing even in a room so large.
She blinks, smiling, and realises her eyes sting.
“I know there’s more,” she says. “The one you never talk about.” He’s not looking at her, rubbing at his chest, where the knife at her hip went in. “Why won’t you ever talk about the one who loves you?”
“Shit, kid.” Varric scrubs a hand down his face. “Can we not do this tonight? Or whatever time it is. Can’t tell in this sodding place.” He sounds so old, too old. She doesn’t know his age, she’s heard three different numbers from two different people and one book sleeve, but she can’t have him any older than mid fifty. Too young to act like you’re already dead.
“Yeah, yeah okay.” Rook blinks hard and fast. “Thing is, I kinda need to know. Need to know the person who’s probably going to kill me when all this is done for getting you hurt. If I’m… well, if there’s anything left to kill.”
Varric lets out a huff of laughter, more sad than amused. He pats Rook’s knee companionably and she resists the urge to grab his hand and keep it. “No one’s coming after you, kid. Shit, if anyone’s getting killed for nearly dying, it’s me.”
It’s the closest he’s come to admitting there was a someone at all. “Would… they do that?”
“Oh yeah.” A slow grin spreads over Varric’s face. Rook has seen hints of that smile whenever they danced around this subject; the cavernous hole in the puzzle that could only be filled by one remarkable, absent person. There was a spark to that smile she never saw anywhere else and desperately wants to.
“Varric, just… just tell me. Please? The truth, just this once.” Rook asks too much of him, always has, but he’s always just given it to her anyway. He'd nearly died and she wouldn't even have known who to crawl to to beg forgiveness, to see the same grief reflected back at her and to understand. “Who loves you?”
Varric looks at her and for a long time says nothing. And maybe it speaks of how deeply tired he looks or just how brittle Rook’s voice had gotten that he finally says, “I ever tell you how I joined the Inquisition?”
Rook shakes her head, hair spilling over her shoulder. “No. Said something about happening to be at a tavern in Haven when the temple went up. Something about the wrong place at the wrong time.” She tilts her head. “Always assumed that was a lie.”
Varric laughs. “Good instincts, though that part was true, technically. How I got there however, was a far longer story. Too long to really get into without better atmosphere and something stronger to drink.” He takes up his cup of water from his bedside and drains half of it, wetting his throat that only ever sounds dry lately. Rook waits, gripping the arms of her chair, nails digging into the grooves of the wood. “See, I never would have been there at all if it wasn’t for a certain Seeker of Truth.” Varric sets down his cup, turned away from her. “The Seekers of the south are a little different from yours in Tevinter, more about keeping order, protecting innocents, wringing out the truth out of hard to reach places—not that they were all that good at it—but she was. She wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met. A force of nature, incorruptible, unstoppable, unrelenting, and I just happened to be in her way.” There’s that smile again, wider now. Rook is smiling too, though it's of a different kind.
“A Seeker of Truth and a professional liar? That’s an interesting combination.”
“Isn’t it? I’ve been told it’d make a good book, but I’m not sure even my most generous reader would believe it. You remind me of her sometimes, she also likes to punch things first and then check if they can still talk after.” Rook blinks, a flush of warmth filling her, pinkening her cheeks. Varric folds his arms, relaxing back into his stacked pillows, getting too lost in the story to notice. “She dragged my ass with her to Haven to meet the Divine when the war between the mages and templars really got going. Thought I could do some good, you believe that?” Rook wants to answer but he’s already continuing. “I stuck around when the world really went to shit, felt rude not to. Not that she’d’ve let me leave. I hated her, she despised me. We made a good show of it. Three years we fought together in the Inquisition, most of it spent fighting each other. She was stubborn, hot-headed, righteous to a fault, endlessly easy to tease.” Rook rests her chin in her hand, watching him come alive in her description. “Has a laugh like chantry bells and legs that went up to Mount Ambrosia. I was an ass about it all, of course. She was like a hornet's nest I couldn’t help but poke at just to hear the hum.”
“I can’t imagine you prickly, you’re so…” Rook struggles for a description before giving up—she doesn’t have his way with words, “you.”
“Oh, never underestimate my ability to shove my head up my own ass,” Varric says. “Especially over things I really care about.”
“So when you start treating me like shit, I’ll know you really care?” Rook says, mouth lifting at the corners.
“Yeah, how about taking you to a world ending ritual then expecting you to pick up the pieces when it all goes to piss for starters? Can’t think of shittier than that.” There’s a bitterness to Varric’s tone but Rook’s stomach still does a pathetic flip.
“So, your Seeker…?”
“Right. Well, we got the bad guy, the world was saved for all of five minutes, and it was all over. No reason to ever see each other again. It was only then I realised I didn’t much care for spending my life without her.” Varric shakes his head, eyes cast upwards. “I always did have a knack for remarkably bad timing.”
“And she… she felt the same?”
“Yeah.” Varric is very far away, smile distant but so tender Rook can barely look at it. “Yeah, she did.”
“It’s so… romantic.” Rook stares down at the plainness of his sage sheets. She can see him in his seedy tavern, arm slung possessively over the back of his Seeker’s chair, the room crowded but with eyes for no one but her.
She'd like to see that, in person one day if she were able, even if it wasn't aimed at her.
Varric blinks, coming back to himself. “You wanna see her?”
“What, like now?” Rook asks, startled. She glances at the door, half expecting a woman to come barging in, his force of nature, brilliant and dazzling enough to keep him.
“Here.” Varric gropes under his pillow for his battered leather journal where he keeps everything that can’t fit in his head. He opens it right at the back, slides a wedge of papers from the wallet, flicks through it, then hands Rook a thick piece of vellum. She takes it very delicately, only with the tips of her fingers.
It’s an ink portrait of a woman, turned slightly to the side, looking off somewhere in the distance, amateurish but skilled enough to capture a decent likeness. She is remarkably striking; a rare beauty that suits the sparse, bold lines of ink. The scars, short crop of hair, dark eyes, and hint of a smile that softens her hard features all paint such a picture, Rook feels like she already knows her, could pick her out of any room. She fits the puzzle well, she thinks. Here was a woman that could pin Varric down, hold him in place while he seemed to slip through so many others.
“Shit, Varric you are punching,” Rook says with a laugh. “I wouldn’t leave the room if I had her back home, and you left the entire hemisphere.”
“Yeah.” Varric grins in that almost boyish way of his that comes out when they’ve done something truly stupid and somehow got away with it. Rook is so pleased to see it, she almost forgets that they hadn’t. “Don’t know what I was thinking. The world must have been ending or something.”
Rook hands the portrait back reluctantly, trying to look at it for as long as possible. She is pleased she now knows even if the knowing felt strange, invasive, though to whom she doesn’t know. It’s like gaining something, the missing piece she was always always looking for, while losing something else. There was someone who loved Varric very far away from here, who’d loved him longer and deeper than Rook had, who had far more of him than she ever would, yet she wasn’t here now. Here, there was only Rook, these four walls, and a broken crossbow.
“Is she waiting? For you, I mean.”
Varric sighs heavily, tucking the papers carefully back away. His fingers run along the top sheet, before he closes it. “She doesn’t wait for anything or anyone.” He keeps the journal in his lap, hand resting protectively over it. “If you’re asking if we’ll see each other again, if she wants to, I can’t imagine there’s much in this world or the next that’ll stop her.”
“And you, do you want to?”
She sees the line of Varric’s throat swallow, sees the effort it takes. “Think that’s why I'm here, really. To get back.”
Rook nods. There's a sickly gnawing feeling in her gut. It had never really been real for her, the stakes that they’d been fighting for, the threats they’d been up against, not like it had been for him. Gods and monsters, they weren’t real, not until she was face to face with them. Varric was real. The shady meetings and dark alleys where they watched each other’s backs, fighting side by side, shoulder to shoulder, Varric hanging back to watch her destruction, their eyes meeting over shared grins. The nights together in one grotty inn after the next, the twin rooms side by side, the one more drink after one more drink, knees knocking together under the table. His gentle encouragement and warm jokes, the easy touches that came as freely as his smiles, the name he gave her that was the only one she’d ever go by again. That had all been real to her. Nothing had ever felt as real as that.
There was no before for her, only this, the here and the now at his side. The future was just as grey, nothing to return to even if by some miracle she survived to see it. For Varric, there was only the before and the after, what you fight for and what you return to. The home that was an estate and a tavern and a woman.
“Rook.” She turns to look at him, and starts when she feels his large hand on her cheek, gently wiping away the wet she didn’t realise she’d shed.
“Shit, sorry,” she mutters, knocking his hand away to scrub at her eyes with the heel of her sleeve, shame burning her skin.
“It’s alright. It’s late, you’re exhausted. Why don’t you—” She interrupts him, unable to hear his kind dismissal that was there to spare them both, sliding off her chair and down onto her knees at his side. Taking the hand that had touched her, and clutching it between her own. It’s still wet with her tears.
“Varric, I swear I’ll get you home,” she says fiercely. “I swear I will.” She squeezes him tight, hands clasped together as though in prayer. He’s looking down at her like it’s the saddest thing he’s ever seen.
“I know you will, kid,” he says softly. “We’ll both get home.”
Her face crumples a little. He didn’t know she was already there, the best she’s ever had, and she can barely stand to be in it.
Before she’s given it much thought, if any, she’s leaning up, straining on her knees, his hand still trapped in hers, and kissing him.
He lets out a little noise of surprise, mouth moving against hers. His beard is rough and his touch soft. Her eyes slide closed, committing the feel of it to memory. She wants to be able to walk it again like how they walk the fragments of the past in the fade, to relive the brief moment when he was hers.
He eases her back with a hand at her neck, thumb at her jaw. Insistent and unquestionable, but far more gentle than she deserves. “Hey, don’t go giving me too much excitement now,” he says, so, so lightly. “I’m an old invalid, remember?”
She swallows hard, eyes darting about his face. There’s nothing there but a sad sort of fondness. No blame, no anger, no disgust.
“It’s going to sound pathetic, beyond pathetic, you just need to… just.” Her breath shakes in her chest, jolting out of her like bile. “I am pleased you have her. So sodding relieved you have something after this, a life that’s not just this shit, and it’s not just me you’re relying on for any of it. I want you happy, Varric. I want you whole and well and settled somewhere safe.” His hand twists in hers, easily breaking free of her hold, and she thinks he’s pulling away but he’s taking one of hers, squeezing it right back. “But right now I don’t think I can do this without you. There’s not enough of me that’s anything without what you made of me. I need you.”
“I’m here,” he says simply, as if it was anything but. “I’ll always be right here.”
“It’s not enough,” she says, selfish and ugly. She wants what the ones that came before had, wants him undivided and at her side, always. “I-I don’t even know what I’m asking for here. But it’s not enough.”
His hand slides to the back of her neck, tangling in her hair. Her eyes fall closed again. “Rook, there are others here, your team. Far more capable than I think I’ve ever been. And they’re here because they trust you, trust what you can do. I’ve seen them around you, they want to help, are tripping over themselves to help. You can lean on them.”
“I don’t want them.” She opens her eyes, brow drawn hard, unleashing twin tears that slice down her cheeks. “I want you.”
The night she’d met him, she’d thought she was going to die. There was slavers’ blood on her coat, her hair, her hands, so thick she could barely keep a hold of her staff. So many of them still surrounding her, it was almost funny. She’d almost wanted it; one last job, done her way. Freeing countless people who’d’ve died if they’d waited and done it the right way—there was a certain smug satisfaction to that. It was a better end than she’d ever thought she’d get. But then he’d been there, materialising like she’d summoned him, dropping bodies faster than she could count. He’d held out his hand to her after, uncaring of the blood, as he greeted her with the same introduction she’d heard dozens of times now, Varric Tethras, sometimes author, sometimes Inquisition, always professional interferer. Heard you had a bit of a slaver problem?
She’d asked him if he had anyone that night, all brash, flimsy swagger, over drinks in an interesting bar she said was her local, and he’d laughed and called her Rook for the first time, making her forget whatever it was she’d asked. It must have just been another night for him, one of thousands. Nothing special at all.
“Alright, kid,” he says, quiet enough she might have missed it if they weren’t so close. “It’s all alright.”
He brings her closer to press a dry kiss to her forehead. She grips the hand at her neck, clutching at him tight, wet eyes screwed shut. Then he moves lower, pressing another to her mouth, chaste and sweet, so very sweet. She lets out a whimper like a sob and opens her mouth for more. The journal slides to the floor.
She would rebuild the world for him, set it all right, claw back everything that had been taken from them, from him, for him, so he'd have somewhere to return to.