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Drinking with Hawke in the Herald's Rest was good, like drinking with Hawke at the Hanged Man. He felt younger that night than he had since the Chantry. Like things were okay, messy but would turn out, back to being the roguish sidekick in an adventure story with an inevitable happy ending. Or a bittersweet one at the worst, well-earned and satisfying. Bull and the Chargers carrying on and Maryden strumming and ale flowing and a fire and a scarred wood table and a chair he didn't quite fit in, everything a comfortable backdrop, warmly lit, a hero's restpause. Hawke smelled like sweat and ozone and blood and the stale stink of a beer spilled on her hours ago, like always, and she sat close as ever, and the air around her was hot like she was supposed to be the one crackling behind a grate. Her face was ruddy with drink, and after losing a companionable amount of gold at cards, she was telling old stories (his versions but with her spin, she always liked his adjustments to events better than what happened), and still mostly not too drunk to tell them, at least well enough that he didn't have to interrupt. Or at least, he interrupted because he liked to, not because she was telling it wrong, or losing the audience. And it was good and familiar too, as she got drunker and he got drunker and she let his interruptions become his storytelling and fell smilingly silent, leaned barely on his shoulder, and he didn't even tell her to get out of his space and stop making him too hot with her freakishly long furnace-hands, or protest that her fingers were sticky when she touched the hair at the nape of his neck. She was his best friend and she was here and real and alive, and he was alive. When he heard the Inquisitor remark that this was a different Varric than she'd ever seen, he laughed and had not told her to fuck off or glared at the Seeker or anything.
They were the last two leaving the tavern, after the barkeep cut them off and pointed out that everyone else was gone. Hawke swayed when she stood, like a great wobbly tree, and he threw an arm around her waist and steadied her, and she gripped his shoulder like she was steadying him, and he stumbled out into the chill of the night with Hawke, real alive Hawke, here at his side, best friend he's ever had, towering above him against the clear cold sky, head wreathed with stars, grinning and rambling. And now he was going to make sure she made it to her bed unstabbed, crunching snow and then contending with Skyhold’s many hallways and staircases, almost like Hightown in miniature.
“Did you take the best room or did you have a fight with Ruffles?”
“I let her show it to me, and then I threatened to go to the barracks if she didn’t give me something less regal.”
“You wouldn’t have, you’re a proper lady with a manor, you love a creature comfort.”
“No, of course I wouldn’t have, but it was ridiculous in there. Same fabric as her—” She mimed Josephine’s sleeves, clownishly exaggerated. “Even the bedding!”
He dutifully made a disgusted noise. “Ridiculous, gold silk bedding. Who would live like that?”
“I think she had it decorated hoping the king of Ferelden would come, honestly. But I’ve been away from home too long for that, it feels a bit weird now. Worse being a stinking, grimy creature of camps and roads now that I’ve been a creature of feather pillows and daily baths, even if the grime’s where I came from.” Her voice was somewhere between bitter and wistful. She got like this sometimes, deep enough in her cups. He’d write down the contemplative stuff, let the Champion in the books say the really good words, so people would know she had depth, but he kept the mood for himself. Hawke not joking, for a change. Well, never not joking, but the jokes would get darker, biting. Solid and brotherly and maudlin Hawke, post-last-call Hawke, she was too real for him to spin into a grand hero. No, that wasn’t true, he could absolutely have worked this angle, he was a damn writer. But he was also selfish. She was his friend.
It wasn’t too long, both of them saying nothing else of substance, thinking each their own thoughts, talking the occasional shit about the decor, shushing each other, and she’d guided them to a door not too far from his own.
“Here I am, then.” She looked down at him, a lazy smile on her face, reminiscence behind her eyes. Fond and drunk and feeling her age, he thought, just like him. Her hand was at the back of his neck and her fingers in his hair, and her hip was firm under his palm.
“It is too bad you’re this sloshed, Chuckles, I was going to offer to tuck you in with a good fuck, for old times’ sake.”
And her smile took a brittle edge. Ah. Finally she was going to say she’d met someone on the road, maybe even a family at one port or another, and their friendly fooling around would have to be over. He was ready for that, he’d always been ready for it, a speech he’d had written in case of Broody or Blondie or even Daisy. No need for her to apologize, this has always been casual, and his heart's always been with Bianca. He used to worry she'd expect him to be heartbroken. He waited for her to say it. Her hand came up and curled through his hair for a moment, then she pushed off his shoulder and straightened herself, weight all on her own feet again.
“That's alright, Varric. Everyone’s always known you don’t want me like I want you.” She sounded sober, suddenly, and she was smiling still but didn’t look him in the face while she said it, just opened the door and slid through it, and he was alone in the hallway.
Into the dark he uttered a single baffled "Huh." Then he went to his own bed.
The next day when he dragged himself down to his usual spot in the main hall, hungover and regretting his entire life up this moment, he learned she'd already gone. There was a note, at least.
Gone to deal with the red lyrium thing. Obviously you can't come with. I swear on the Sainted Mabari of the Maker's Bride, on my honor as a Fereldan mutt myself, that I will not go mad, become an abomination, or start a dark organization of sycophantic followers bent on the destruction of Thedas.
Your friend always.
No signature, of course, but he'd know her loopy half-legible hand anywhere. He had no way to write back, but he had other letters to write.
The first time he and Hawke had fucked had been a bit like last night. Her flirtations knew no limits of sex or species, and she was largely successful at bagging who she wanted, when she wanted to be, which was not nearly as often as she wanted to flirt. Her reputation had preceded her here, but she was of course also appallingly effective if you wanted a job done, and he assumed he’d have no issue managing a too-friendly apostate. He’d settled into a comfortable level of suggestive patter with her almost straight away, and was reassured each time a new face was pulled into their coterie and they got the same treatment. She was handsy with everyone who would let her get away with it. He’d made it clear that he wasn’t interested in humans, and every time he mentioned it she’d have some wonderful cutting remark. It was fun.
So, there had been a night they’d been drinking and playing cards, and she’d been telling her bullshit stories and leaning against him and smelling like weather and beer, and a hand on his back crept into his hair and for some reason he didn’t mind so much. This was before the Deep Roads, before he knew he could trust her with anything, and frankly their relationship was already inappropriate for a businessman and his mercenary-slash-investor. But he was uncommonly wasted, and the Hanged Man’s crowd had thinned to nothing but the lumps who have to be levered off their stools, and he’d never seen anything get complicated with her before. So. When she held the back of his skull and pressed her sloppy clever mouth to his, he went along with it. It had been a while. And when she ended up straddling his lap and he had a double handful of her ass, it seemed obvious that he should take her upstairs. For propriety’s sake at least. At one point he'd breathed, "Hawke," and she'd pulled her mouth off of him to say, "Who?" with a smile he'd call demonic now, having killed plenty of them since then. So he'd corrected himself and said, "Marian," and she'd gone back to it. Even after Carver was left with the Wardens, even after she was the only Hawke left in Kirkwall, she still expected that. But the rest of the time she was just Hawke, or Chuckles, or Waffles if she was trying to be nice, or Killer when she really wasn't.
And all of that was what, ten years ago? He wasn’t writing his letters. He’d wandered up to the wall, where he’d introduced her to the Inquisitor. The air around Skyhold was always fresh and clean, the kind of air people breathe who live to die in their beds. He went back to the table by the fire, where at least there was a little soot to line his lungs, and wrote his letters.
Card night came and he attended, his weekly concession to companionship when he wasn’t being dragged from one end of Thedas to the other. He made a point not to win too much or cheat too much or drink too much, usually. When the Seeker opened her mouth, he emptied his pint.
“The Champion isn’t what I expected,” she said, the question obvious. All the subtlety of a warhammer, this one.
“Some liberties have to be taken for the purpose of print. Don’t tell me after all the time and effort and torture trying to get in the same room as her, you’re disappointed.”
“Disappointed, no. She’s every bit as formidable in a fight as I was lead to believe, and as powerful a presence in a room. I just didn’t expect…” Cassandra’s cheeks went just a little pink.
Josephine laughed. “You didn’t expect her to turn the charm on you.”
“Not just me!” Defensive already. “She brought me a flower, who knows where she got it in this weather—”
“Conjured, certainly. And nice work,” the Inquisitor added, helpful as always.
“—But then to turn and give another to Cullen the next breath? It’s not just audacious, it’s improper.”
Varric waved his empty mug dismissively. “Don’t take it personally, Seeker, she’s always been like that. Isn’t that right, Curly?”
Cullen scowled, but Cassandra’s interest was piqued.
“That’s right, you knew her in Kirkwall. Can you confirm this?”
“I wouldn’t say I knew her. But no, it was not the first time she’d approached me in that manner.”
And that had the whole table’s attention. Lavellan’s fair brows arched in amusement, and she gave Cullen a look that demanded elaboration. He groaned.
“Fine. Yes. She was always coming to taunt me at my post. I doubt she was serious, she never seemed to be serious about anything, though if I didn’t drive her off fast enough or bore her with silence the goading could get rather, well, explicit.”
“I did always tell her that bullying Templars wouldn’t benefit our position, but she insisted that if you ever did crack and come to her bed then you’d be a great asset. Personally, I think she just did it for fun. But maybe she was right that she had a chance with you. ‘Pretty apostate with ostentatious facial tattoos’ does seem to be your type.”
Cullen’s scowl deepened even as he went red at the ears, but the delight on Lavellan’s face was like the sun. “To think you might have had the Champion!”
Cullen scoffed and muttered under his breath.
“Sorry, Curly, what was that?”
“Yes, Cullen, can you speak more clearly?” The Seeker was eating this up. If Varric had known that he could have strung her along indefinitely with mildly salacious gossip, he probably could have spared himself some of the more enthusiastic interrogation techniques.
“I said, having had the Champion was a far from exclusive honor.” And then as if remembering he was supposed to be a gentleman, he looked embarrassed. “I mean, not to say she was, ah. But. Well.”
“Don’t worry, she doesn’t need me to defend her honor. You're right, anyway. Never let it be said that Hawke was all bark and no bite.”
“How much biting precisely?” Even Ruffles was leaning in, though knowing her she’d consider every liaison a strategic victory.
“Well, Fenris, at least once. I don’t think he was very much fun. Isabela whenever they were both bored enough. Anders,” and he moved on from that one before there could be any questions, “Not Aveline, though not for a lack of trying. Always going on about how she loves a redhead with nice arms. Or a blond or a brunette, she is really not that picky. And there was an assortment of nobles of lower quality, and ne’er-do-wells of higher quality. None of the Circle mages, I think they creeped her out, but I think she always wanted to try a Templar. Hard to balance the potential threat, especially earlier on.”
“She was infuriating,” Cullen said, re-energized with indignation. “I tried to turn a blind eye to apostates who weren’t obviously mad, for kindness’s sake, but she went around with a ‘walking stick’ and refused to do me the courtesy of staying out of my sight. She chatted freely with other Templars that I knew were less lenient than me, but I suppose they must also have been stupider. Pretty soon it was a known thing that she was a mage to anyone with sense, not even Circle trained to begin with, and she didn’t even bother carrying a proper weapon to provide a hint of deniability. Everyone always talking about how good she was in a fight, how she took down a dragon—”
The Seeker gasped. “I assumed that was a fabrication!”
“—and at her belt, nothing but a little dagger, and on her back, a great long pole with some kind of,” he gestured, looking for the word, “gewgaw, always reeking of magic, and the temerity of it, to talk to Templars like that, like we were employed by the Rose for her to pick and choose from. She may have been untouchable after the Arishok, but before that?” He shook his head.
Cassandra was refilling their mugs from the pitcher, a wrinkle of confusion between her eyes. “But what about Merrill? I know that the Dalish have different attitudes towards… these things, but surely at some point it becomes concerning.”
Cullen’s confused reply was, “The blood mage? What about her?” Ah shit.
And cue the Seeker’s shock next. “The Champion’s beloved is a blood mage?” Ah shit.
“Her 'beloved'? That odd little thing?”
“Have you not read The Tale of the Champion?”
“No, of course I haven’t. I was there, why would I read it?”
“For the joy of the prose, Curly, don’t be a cretin.”
“I will lend you my copy, Cullen—”
“There’s really no need—”
“I insist—”
Josephine, Maker bless her, reached across the table for the pitcher again and spoke over the building bickering. “And what about you, Varric?”
“No litany of conquests here I’m afraid, your humble narrator has only one love.” He patted Bianca, leaned up against the back of his chair.
“And what about you and Hawke, Varric?” Blessings revoked, Maker take her. This would require a sacrifice to make a good enough distraction. He turned away from Josephine to interrupt the argument.
“Alright, Seeker, you’ve caught me. Hawke and Merrill’s romance may have been a bit of an embellishment.”
True to form, Cassandra looked affronted. “Embellishment? From you, that means lie!”
Josephine gave him a knowing look, but subsided.
"A bestseller needs a romance, you know that. But Hawke never had a lot of time to court."
"She had time to destabilize all the traditional institutions of a city-state, blow up the Chantry, and have countless dalliances."
"Yeah, all of that kept her pretty busy."
“But they had such lovely symmetry! Two apostates driven from their homelands, one outcast from her clan, one fleeing the Blight, forced to create a new home for themselves in a place that was hostile to them, all the while saving it! And they, did they never?”
“Sorry, Seeker. Never. Daisy was more a surrogate little sister, after Hawke’s died. I don’t think she’d’ve bedded her for all the gold in Hightown.”
Cassandra was so clearly disgusted with this knowledge that she didn’t speak to him the rest of the evening, which suited him fine. Unfortunately, it’s never been his luck to have a good thing last. Two days later she cornered him after a briefing.
“Varric, I need to speak with you.”
He sighed heavily. “I suppose I’d better let you, spare you the time spent oiling your thumbscrews.”
She gave him that typical, ‘You don’t need to bring that up every time,’ glare, but continued.
“I have been thinking about your… embellishments in The Tale of the Champion.”
“If this is about how they had perfect ‘symmetry’ and you’d like them to get together for real, you’re just going to disappoint yourself again.”
“No. I’ve been thinking that it never was quite right. There was a missing passion in their narrative, which is unlike you.”
“I’m not sure if I should take that as an insult or a compliment.”
“At first I assumed it was because you were writing a history, of a sort, rather than a fiction, and you were reticent to bring the same passion to the true story of your friend that you would to a story purely of your own invention. But there is plenty of passion elsewhere in The Tale of the Champion. So I thought that perhaps you were less comfortable writing a romance without a man’s perspective, being less certain of the fires of a woman’s heart.”
“Andraste’s ass, ‘the fires of a woman’s heart’?”
“However, you have written competently from the perspective of a woman many times, and I did discover that you had written a serial I was unfamiliar with that was centered on the romance between two women of rival Orlesian noble houses. I was unable to locate the text, but reviews indicate that it was competently written regarding the logistics of such a coupling, and,” she looked uncomfortable for a moment, but rallied, “And that it was more than sufficiently inspiring to readers of that inclination.”
“So, what, you think that because I wrote a little girl-on-girl smut for a paycheck I should have done a better job writing the romance in The Tale of the Champion? You’re revising your glowing review?”
“No. Well, yes. You probably could have done better. But that’s not the point.”
“Please, Seeker, before we’re gray, what is the point?”
“The point is that you chose incorrectly for the romantic subplot. Merrill was never going to be a good fit. She required too much sanitization, and there was no real life chemistry for you to draw upon. With her objectionable parts scrubbed away and no spark, it was doomed from the start.”
He really did not want to listen to any more of this, but he’d worked with and fought beside Cassandra enough now to see from the set of her face that she wouldn’t rest, wouldn’t let him rest, until she’d worried her prey to its final breath.
“If I’m going to be subjected to your armchair literary analysis, you’re going to buy me a pint. You’re going to buy me as many pints as I want for as long as you’re doing this.”
“Fine.”
Ensconced at a table in a corner upstairs at the Herald’s Rest, Cassandra started in.
“Obviously it couldn’t have been the abomination.”
“No, obviously not. Though I did consider a second edition that includes the explosion and Hawke murdering him, and it would have been very dramatic if he’d been the love interest in that version. But I thought that would have put too much heat on her.”
She looked aghast. “That would have been so tragic!”
“It was tragic enough. They were friends, even if things were… strained, towards the end.”
“What about Fenris? He seemed like a traditional leading man type, dark past, foreign origins, mysterious abilities. And the tension, with his mistrust of mages. The slow warming of their friendship into romance, culminating with when she declines to betray him.”
He shook his head. “Too much heat on him. As it stands, I think most readers outside of Kirkwall assume that Fenris is a made up person, which is fair enough, he seemed pretty made up to me when I knew him. Safer this way, easier for him to do… whatever he’s doing, without the additional fame of being ‘the Champion’s beloved’. Besides, he would have hated hearing about it.”
“Very considerate of you.”
Her tone said it was a genuine compliment, and the Inquisitor had worked so hard to get them on friendly terms, and so it was with great effort that he avoided spitting in her face for daring to seem surprised that he cared about the wellbeing of his friends. If she noticed his internal struggle, he couldn’t tell. She made a little eureka noise.
“What about the guard-captain? You mentioned Hawke fancied her. It would be satisfying for the story to play against type, two strong and powerful women, direly independent, yet hopelessly in love.”
“Aveline had Donnic. That whole subplot was true. Hawke would have been pissed if I ruined that after she went to all the trouble to set it up.” Cassandra’s eyes got all soft. “And anyway, Aveline would have made my life in Kirkwall really fucking difficult if I’d wrote that Hawke had gotten into her pants after she spent so many years telling her no.”
“That leaves only the pirate. Always a romantic choice, a lover away on the high seas, and wouldn’t leave Hawke tied down to domesticity in a sequel. And from your descriptions, she was very appealing.”
“I almost wrote it with Isabela. It was near done and I mentioned it to her and she told me she’d gut me if I published it like that. I thought she’d love it, but she said that seeming to be in some grand love story with the great hero of Kirkwall would ‘limit her options’.”
The Seeker sat back, holding her own untouched pint. “Was there really no other suitor?”
“I didn’t like it either, to be honest. But I was always going to leave out the blood mage thing—”
“Cullen was right about that? Maker.”
“—So it wasn’t too difficult to clean her up a bit. She wasn’t nearly so naive, and she was weirder by far. I leaned into her sweetness and her kindness, the lack of worldliness. Country mouse but apostate. And as you mentioned, the symmetry was good.”
“But there was no passion.”
“But no other option, aside from inventing someone wholecloth. Locals would have seen right through that. Hawke was well-known within the first few years, and even if people didn’t know her crew by name, they knew the faces.”
Cassandra spent the next hour still holding one beer, buying him several more, offering more reasons that one friend or another would have been a more compelling choice, workshopping half to herself a made up person for Hawke to have fallen for. When a runner came to call her away, he thought it must be mercy from Cole, sensing that he was suffering on the edge of a very boring death, or maybe Lady Nightingale herself intervening to prevent him from losing it and them ending up back at blows.
Then he was alone, night having finally fallen, a little tipsy on an empty stomach, and he couldn’t help but pick at it still in his head. She was right, unfortunately. It was a lackluster romance. He remembered having nearly this same conversation with Hawke, though it didn’t take nearly as long and wasn’t nearly as big a pain in the ass to have with someone who knew them all as well as he did. Him at the writing desk at Hawke’s estate, her lounging across an armchair, in her hand a bottle of something appallingly old and expensive to sip from directly.
“Does it have to be Merrill? Really?”
“You know it does, we’ve been through everyone else. She doesn’t mind, she thinks it’s fun. Even if it is going to be a bit… staid. I can make it satisfying enough. Anyway, it’s an adventure story, not a romance novel. It’s fine if that part doesn’t set hearts aflame.”
She’d taken a drink and made a weird little face, at the time he thought maybe the bottle was vinegar. “There is technically one more person to consider in our band of scoundrels.”
He’d been stumped for a moment, and then cracked up. “Hawke, you can’t possibly mean Junior? Even I’m not so low, I’m not writing an incestuous romance separated by the cruel bonds of a Warden’s oath, Andraste’s knickers, that’s fucked.”
She’d laughed right along with him and then spent several minutes trying to horrify him with worse suggestions, every damn person they’d met in Kirkwall it felt like by the end, and he’d been wheezing as she remembered specific street thugs down to their straining boils and insisted he would make them sound lovely.
A bit of time passed since Hawke had left for Weisshaupt and there’d been no word. That seemed okay. Not great, but nothing to lose his shit about. He wrote a letter to Aveline mentioning that he’d met with one of their mutual friends and she was well enough, and gave a pretty reasonable run-down of the situation from the Inquisition’s abstract bird’s eye view, like this was normal correspondence, unworthy of inclusion in any epistolary. He reached the end of a sheet. Now, he could write another question on another sheet, or he could sign it. He signed it.
The Inquisitor pressganged him into a trip that kept him busy, another one of those diplomatic missions that ended with him firing bolts like his life depended on it, funny how it always did seem to. That took nearly a month, and the stack of mail for him when he got back about made him wish he’d been just a little slower with his trigger finger. A reply from Aveline, exactly the sort of response he’d expected from her, disapproving and efficacious as always, and curt. She didn’t ask any questions about their mutual friend, but said she was glad he’d got to catch up. He didn’t fucking feel caught up.
Dwarves don’t dream when they sleep, which Varric always thought was for the best. Dreams sounded like a nasty bit of business he didn’t want to get involved in, and every experience he’d had in the Fade only reinforced that idea. Daydreams, though, that’s where all the best writing happens. Lately he’d been thinking about doing the other half of The Tale of the Champion. Might be easier now, with a little more perspective on the whole mages’ rebellion situation, and the hole in the sky, might make it a little easier for an audience to swallow the hero turning a blind eye while her abomination friend built some kind of magic bomb, and he might do an okay job now of writing the end, with her knife going easy between ribs, and the way Anders didn’t do anything about it, and the way the rest of them just stood there and watched her do it, like it was any bandit or slaver or oxman who crossed them, and not Blondie who’d patched them up so many times. He’d tried to write it once and couldn’t make himself be honest. Or at least, authentic. It kept coming out with a rosy or golden or red red wash, and none of that was right. But thinking about it too much made him feel like shit. For some stupid fucking reason, his guts always reacted to remembering it like he should have done something different, but for every holy shit that could fall from the Maker’s ass he couldn’t think of what. So he just wrote his fucking letters. Tried to daydream about the other times instead. When he couldn’t justify what he was writing by reminiscing about Hawke spitting in his beer to punish him for cheating at cards, he avoided the issue by writing it down anyway. Sometimes you don’t know where a scene goes until long after you’ve written it, and maybe if he wrote them down he’d stop thinking about them.
It took him a real long time to get around to writing down the night before Hawke left for Weisshaupt. Months. It was a long fucking way to get there, he kept reminding himself, and she’d had one of those weird fast lizard horse things the Inquisitor kept, but still, it was a long fucking way. And who knows how long it would take her to sort out whatever she found there. She was smart enough to wait weeks camped outside a place like that, hanging tight for the right opportunity. She knew how to be outnumbered. She was patient. She was good at keeping herself entertained. So anyway, some months had passed. His memory wasn’t perfect when he was drunk, but he was a professional at filling in the gaps. He set the scene, so familiar, wrote a lightly polished version of the evening, just a bit snappier on the dialog, everyone a little quicker on the draw, made the Inquisitor look cool off to the side with Cullen, wrote Cassandra like this was going to be a turning point for her character where she slides just a few inches of stick out of her ass, pretty solid stuff. He was setting up for the butt of the joke at the end of the night to be him, the sidekick’s rejection, and then he had to write the punchline. What had she said?
“Everyone’s always known you don’t want me like I want you.”
Shit. He was an idiot. Shit fucking balls. Andraste’s anointed asshole, all the Maker’s chanting lackeys, every Old God or magister or whatever the fuck in the Black City, the whole fucking thing. He was so fucking stupid.
The first thing he needed to know was if she was right. He wrote another fucking letter. If Aveline noticed, then everybody fucking knew. Except the dwarf whose entire schtick was knowing things, fuck he was stupid. He could tell he was an asshole to everyone in the weeks while he waited for her reply, but he really couldn’t bring himself to care. When it came, he actually bothered to take it to his room before he opened it, as if there was any real privacy at Skyhold, as if the Spy Master hadn’t already read it herself.
Varric,
If this is a joke, I can’t say it’s funny. I thought you had an understanding, she knew things were one-sided and you didn’t rub her nose in it. It would have been polite if you weren’t both who you are. Whatever this is about, I don’t think I need to threaten you. She can take care of herself.
Guard Captain Vallen
Nice signature, so much for not threatening. Maker, he was so fucked. He didn’t reply to Aveline, but he tried not to give himself time to sit idle and think. Lavellan did him the service of bringing him on another horrible mission where he could have the brain-silencing experience of nearly dying, but that could only last so long. He hated to admit it, but Cassandra had been right: Hawke absolutely had enough time to court, if she’d wanted to. She spent it all with him instead. She could have been shacked up in that manor with anyone she wanted, and instead he was the one who was always there. And he was always single, but always unavailable, despite the fucking. That part had been great, once he got over how weird it was to be doing it with a human. Everything about her was so long. She was thorough and sharp and tasted like metal all the time, though that was probably a mage thing and not a human thing. Shit. She was just taking what she could get. He was such a piece of shit. He had a crystal-clear memory, faux-jealous Hawke, leaning over the table to rub at his stubble in a parody of a lover’s caress, glaring at a crossbow, Isabela hooting her encouragement, Anders’s eyes rolling as he laughed into his pint, and the shit she was always saying to him.
“Truly too bad there’s ‘only one woman’ for you, Tethras. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want your finger on their trigger?”
Real-jealous faux-jealous Hawke. Really actually jealous, faking fake-jealous. What an incredible bullshitter.
“I heard you're being fixed up with one of the Helmi daughters.” That look on her face like she was setting him up to deliver the line that gets the pop from the room, perfect co-conspirator. Really for real jealous. He didn’t realize he was putting her at ease that way, but he did it automatically. Like he knew. But he must have thought she was just worried she’d lose her trusty dwarf to domesticity. He didn’t remember anymore what he’d been thinking. Maybe he thought she just didn’t want to lose out on an uncomplicated lay. That’s what he had been worried about, when he started to feel something like jealous, before Justice had been a wedge between her and Anders, or when he saw her talking to Isabela in a way that looked maybe tender, or the times he caught Fenris giving her the pathetic kitten eyes. He’d had a long enough dry spell before, he was going to be disappointed to go back to it. He was never real-jealous faking fake-jealous. He had a speech ready for when she found someone else. He worried she would expect him to be heartbroken. But when a day went bad, after it was over it didn’t really feel over until they were putting hands on each other. After the Arishok, she might as well have still been dying right up until she was well enough to drag him into the bed and get her hand into his smallclothes. Some kind of fear thing, he would have said. Something about near-death experiences and blood flow. In Orlais, they call that moment of climax “the little death”. That’s what he would have said, that it had something to do with all that. It was just sex. She was a flirt and he was in love with his crossbow and it had just been a couple of friends blowing off steam. Maker, he was fucked.
Some more time passed, and he was still turning shit over in his head, a decade of misread signs, and he was starting to unravel a little at the edges. When Lavellan came to chat with him, like she did sometimes, though less frequently lately, he told her he thought Hawke had been gone too long. She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed and didn’t say anything, just gave him one of those understanding looks that left it totally unclear what she understood but was weirdly inspiring of confidence in her anyway. And then she walked off. Okay. So he went to Cullen and posed it like it was chess, and the Commander was only too happy to tell him everything they knew about Weisshaupt, likely scenarios of what Hawke might have found there (because she certainly should have arrived by now) and less likely scenarios, and how a single interloper might deal with them. He’d briefed her himself, Varric learned, and she’d seemed to have reasonable expectations for herself as a lone, if formidable, mage. She had maybe not a silver tongue, but fool’s gold. She wasn’t stupid. She’d told Cullen that if there were too many to deal with and she couldn’t talk the situation out of being a problem, she’d shift the mission goal, reconnoiter and return. She’d even had plans for capture, which was more realistic than Varric typically knew her to be. Time on the road without backup had made her cautious, he guessed. The next week he met with Josephine, to see if her plan to communicate in case of capture had been tripped. He played happy to hear they had no reason to think she was being held for ransom, or under any official charges from the Wardens. The week after, he went to Leliana, who told him almost as soon as he walked into her rookery that no one had heard from the Champion, and yes she had taken a bird, and no it hadn’t come back, and no they couldn’t spare one for a journey that long with the Inquisition’s business as tense in the darkness as it was.
He went back to his own work. There was always enough of it. He let time pass. When he wasn’t working, he was writing more of those scenes that he wasn’t sure what they were for, yet. Manuscript daydream memories. Weird looks she used to give him, Maker she was fucking weird, but maybe a little less weird if he admitted he understood the kind of story she was in. Unrequited love was fucked up. He’d written it, sure, but his thing was usually more star-crossed, or comedic miscommunication, or shit, he just let characters get to it. Build enough tension for the payoff, not enough for that cosmic-scale frustration.
This was a stupid fucking story, really. No real sexual tension, since the lovers were already going for it in Act 1. There was dramatic irony, sure, the audience would get that perverse enjoyment that they do from yelling at the love interest for being blind as a nug’s back end in mud. But there was no satisfying confession scene. Just a lot of humiliations for the Champion, increasingly unsubtle implications going completely unnoticed. Shit, she’d asked him to move in with her once, and he’d said he’d stay at his suite at the Hanged Man so the manor wouldn’t be clogged up with his meetings. He thought he was avoiding using her clout as a bludgeon, he thought he was doing it because he respected their friendship for itself more than he needed the Champion for a tool. Turns out he got the genre wrong and he’s either one of the dumbest dwarves this side of the soil, or.
Or he’s a coward.
Fuck it.
It didn’t take him much time to do routine maintenance on Bianca and pack his shit for a fucking long fucking awful journey, and then he barged into the War Room like he thought they were waiting for him.
“We need to go to Weisshaupt.”
The Inquisitor looked startled behind all the root-like blue stuff on her face, but then smiled warmly.
“Your timing couldn’t be better. I was just making precisely that point.”
So when he said, “She’s been gone too long,” he didn’t sound like a wounded idiot. Everyone agreed, though there was naturally disagreement about what to do about that. He thanked the Maker that the Inquisitor agreed they should go at once, and talked himself back from arguing when “at once” turned out to mean “in two days”. It would be her, and him, and Cassandra, and she was insisting Cullen come too. Two days was exactly the right amount of time for him to run out of tasks to complete that were plausibly urgent or needed done knowing he’d be away for months, exactly the right amount of time for him to start thinking that he and Cassandra and Cullen were exactly the right people to bring if they were either recovering Hawke’s corpse or putting her down. He didn’t need dreams to imagine red lyrium sprouting from her body, and he’d seen enough abominations to be pretty sure she’d have to be a particularly fucked up one, and particularly powerful, and if the Inquisitor figured he’d want to be there for that she was both deranged and right.
The problem with really long journeys is that you have a lot of time to think. He liked the Inquisitor well enough, and the Seeker wasn’t too bad these days, and Cullen was decent in a way that made him think that his bones were made of some kind of pure elemental Decent-ness. But the three got along better with each other. He threw in the occasional joke, an anecdote a day to show willing. After the first week Cassandra stopped saying he was being too quiet, enough dirty looks from Lavellan finally getting through to her.
The problem with really long journeys is that you have a lot of time to think. Hawke made this trip without even the distraction of three friends, or friendly colleagues, or whatever. He was afraid she was dead, or worse, but he had enough time to think to admit he was more afraid that she took care of things at Weisshaupt ages ago and then just… fucked off. Thought the whole way there, then went off into the world and didn’t tell anyone. Maybe she was somewhere beyond Thedas by now. Perfectly healthy, not crazy or anything, just like she promised.
It was easy to tell when they were getting close. It was summer now, at least, but that meant they could see the ground no problem. Blasted and scorched. The forest more stumps than trees. Lots of singed and blackened crystal, no longer gleaming red. Varric wasn’t the only quiet one at that point. They crested what Cullen said should be the last hill stopping them from seeing the fort, and there it was. Weisshaupt looked dead in the distance, but there was smoke rising from it in a few places. The wind brought a smell that said some of it was a pyre. Two of the spires were heavily damaged, like a huge bolt had been shot through them, a testament to the workmanship of the place that they stood. But no red lyrium visible from here, and no movement of Wardens on the walls, or anyone else.
The approach was uneventful. Varric took them into the remains of the trees and showed them the route he thought she would have taken through them, off the road and out of sight while the wood was still here. And then the bittersweet vindication when they came across where she must have set camp, marks from traps set into the ground that would have been made invisible in the snow. Cullen looked at the scab of the fire pit and said she was probably here for weeks. Patient, waiting. Of course she was. They stayed in sight of Weisshaupt for the night, even dared to set their own fire, and no one came out, and nothing seemed to happen inside of it, but the next morning at dawn they woke to a sound like a mountain being ripped open. Cullen and the Inquisitor came out of their tent in a panic, and the four of them had stood half-armored and stared at the steaming wreck, but it didn’t collapse. The sound continued for a couple hours, crack after shuddering crack, and then finally stopped in the full light of the morning. One of the trails of smoke coming from Weisshaupt was a pillar now of reddish darkness, and sometimes he thought he could see flames leaping inside of it, cinders all shards of red rock. He was certainly imagining it. It was too far for anyone to see something like that.
“We need to get in there today,” Cassandra said. “I don’t know what that was, but I don’t trust our safety from whatever it is.”
“Agreed.” The Inquisitor poured the last of the water in her canteen on her face and he watched as it rearranged itself from tension to determination.
They walked right in through the front gate uncontested. Not a single Warden was to be seen, nor any lyrium, of any color. The place smelled of old death and fire, lye more than rot. Cullen settled into doing his job, an autopsy of a fortress. Hawke had come in through a culvert, probably in the night, and picked lyrium-sick Wardens off in groups, probably over several days. Guard records, changes to rosters, a lot of seriously weird crazy-person paperwork all seemed to confirm the Wardens had been hunting someone inside the walls. They didn’t find anything that looked like it was more than a couple weeks after when Hawke must have first got in. They did find a huge pit in the courtyard, a mass grave dozens of feet deep, burning actively.
“This isn’t the largest fire. It’s got to be further back, maybe on the other side of the wall,” said the Inquisitor, leaning hard on her staff.
Cassandra covered her mouth as she looked down. “She can’t have done all this, can she?”
“Maybe not. Some of the rosters seemed— Well, they seemed like someone had written them out of nostalgia. There were signs in a lot of the rooms that bodies had been left for long enough to make a mess. This may be clean up.” Cullen pointed toward one of the half-ruined spires. “If I were making a long term project of this place, that’s where I would set up.”
As they picked their way in, Varric recognized more of her traps, set months ago by the dust and mud, and a few trip wires like he’d taught her to make, mechanisms rusty but still functional. The latter he disabled, but the former the Inquisitor had to take care of, and some of them she didn’t know and they had to avoid. Once they were inside of the spire, the traps stopped, and a sound began.
“Do you hear that? Do you think it’s a spirit?”
“No, I don’t,” Varric said, taking the lead back from Cassandra. Up two flights of stairs, the only sound in the fortress that wasn’t crumbling structures or crackling fire got louder. Humming, and splashing water. The door into the room wasn’t even closed. There she was. In a tub.
“Hawke?”
She went still, and after a few ticks passed, returned to her ablutions, back to them, but not humming any more.
He cleared his throat, tried again. “Marian.”
She turned, deliberate, and he could see that she was herself still. Hair a bit ragged where she’d done a piss poor job on cutting it, a new scar on her shoulder, but eyes their normal earthen color and not red or crazed at all. He watched while she looked him over, and then looked to the others, Inquisitor and Commander and Seeker, and then met his eyes.
“This is a better trick than I usually get in dreams. Smart this time, he wouldn’t come alone, but you fucked up because Cullen never goes anywhere. Stood in one spot in Kirkwall for years, picked a new spot at Skyhold, the man’s a consummate guard.” Flippant, of course, Maker, she was herself still.
“I made him, for his relevant expertise,” Lavellan interjected, “And now we’re going to go somewhere else and let you two talk about some things, right?” The other two nodded and may as well have evaporated.
“Hmm, awkward,” she said, in the tone for talking over plays, and all the fear that had built in Varric transmuted to frustration.
“Why didn’t you come back? Cullen said there’s no sign of any fighting here for months. Months, Hawke. What the fuck are you doing?”
“Having a bath, obviously.”
“Sure, fine. You know what, I don’t actually care what you’ve been doing here, because it doesn’t matter. Whatever the fuck it is, whatever you’re telling yourself is important work, it doesn’t fucking matter because you know the Inquisition should be doing it instead. You know you should have come back and let her send a crew to deal with this, you don’t need to be doing it, they’d do whatever it is faster and safer and probably better. So, fuck what you’re doing, Hawke. Why are you here?”
He could see on her face the moment she decided she was awake. A crack in the playful facade, and she seemed to physically shrink in the tub, before pushing her wet hair from her face and sunning him with a familiar grin.
“It was a little awkward, wasn’t it? I stayed up all night working the odds that you might have forgotten what I said, but you always have such a good memory, especially when I say something you think is weird. But you’re my best friend, it doesn’t have to be weird. Easier I let it air out. Like a scab. Do some good work here, stay busy, come back when everything’s flaked off. Skip the itchy phase.” She stood and waved an arm, and all the water steamed off of her and out of the bath in an instant, and she was pulling her clothes back on. What the fuck? He decided that was a good point to make.
“What the fuck?”
She ignored the interrogative, ignored his tone and his aggravated face and his whole posture that he knew had to have been livid and worried and she just carried right on. “I’ve made good progress, maybe not efficient but a good system. Let’s see how far the others have gone and I’ll catch the Inquisition up.”
He followed her out of the room, force of habit to follow her anywhere, and at the bottom of the stairs were Lavellan and Cassandra and Cullen, and he watched, aghast, as she pointed that Champion of Kirkwall smile at them and offered them a tour. She walked them around the courtyard, confirmed Cullen’s theories, made a few corrections, pointed out the obvious landmarks (near-ruined towers, stains of long dead Wardens, burning mass grave) and provided a bit of context, and then with a clap of her hands announced that she would show them the “real work”. It made sense to Varric that Curly could be all business, and Cassandra could be distracted from drama with sufficiently important-seeming tasks, but the Inquisitor was listening to her describe the situation as if it wasn’t completely fucking insane, maybe not fully interested but pretending at least, ready to be quizzed if necessary.
“Hawke, have you gone totally mad?”
“Of course not. Not that the lyrium is totally without its pull on me, I am only a woman of flesh even as I am a living legend,” that fake-fake-modest tone, layering the irony like he was a stranger, how were the others surviving this poison, “But I limit my exposure and minimize contact. Let me show you the process and I’ll explain the system of practical and magical protections, I think they can be replicated by a small team of reasonably competent mages, especially if they have Templar assistance.” She laughed. “Ex-Templar, I suppose!”
“Are you fucking kidding?”
She didn’t even look at him, just walked towards the rear of the fortress, chatting all the way. Lecturing, he realized. The other three were intent, asking questions and getting detailed answers and Varric became more bored than angry, and then more tired, weary in his bones. He let her act like a maniac, didn’t interrupt while she went on detailing with a bit of pride what she’d been doing. With none of a mage’s or Templar’s knowledge of magic, all he gathered was that if you put enough distance between yourself and red lyrium, you can use magic to move it, a long enough lever to break it, a spell to keep the dust down, and if you’re strong enough you can do all those things at once and keep your distance the whole time, and then you can put the lyrium into another, less meaty (though not completely meatless) pyre and when it burns, it becomes a useless scorched crystal. There was a huge area of cleared forest behind Weisshaupt, a crater Hawke had excavated to incinerate shard after shard of red lyrium, pieces the size of boulders. The sounds they’d heard from the burnt out wood, her ripping it out of the walls, the ground. She’d burned already tons of it, and he’d always known she had a lot of power, but the Seeker looked concerned, and even Curly seemed a little put off, but Lavellan only nodded along and made estimates for how many mages it would take to pick up what Hawke had been managing and maintain the same rate. A decent number. The three strategists took to a table in the tower Hawke had set up in, drawing up plans, making lists. Varric felt incredibly dull, brain ringing like a bomb had gone off too close. But he seemed to be the only one who noticed how fucked up this was.
And Hawke was just standing by, watching the machine of the Inquisition start to spin its main cogs, face fixed like she was satisfied to have handed off a big job to the Viscount. Like she wasn’t clearly mad.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Hawke?” He said it half under his breath, and heard a little laugh.
“My mother always told me not to pick at things. You remember Leandra, for some reason she was concerned that I shouldn’t have too many scars. Her upbringing, I assume. Foregone conclusion with me, but she tried anyway.” There was too much distance in her voice and it made him feel sick. He put his hand on her arm and drew her away, out of the tower and into the courtyard, and to his surprise she let him. He had to hit the right note for this, but he couldn’t fuck around too much. Too direct and she’d make a joke, not direct enough and she’d make a joke. Maker’s cock, why’d she have to be the same sort of fucked up as him.
“What you said the night before you left.”
“Do we really have to do this, Varric? Not every punchline lands, you can write a better one for me to have said. A true friend and biographer would do me the kindness.”
“You meant it. Everyone knew. You were right.”
“And?” Her voice was tight. “It worked fine while it worked, but I didn’t have the gumption right then. Right now. Maybe I will someday, and we can fool around again and it will be fine.”
“That’s fucked up, and you know it.”
“Is it? You don’t think it was fine?” Half ready to fight him, half flirtatious, all bravado, a little bit of storm on the air, but they were both keeping their voices conversational. No reason to draw anyone’s attention. But he wasn’t going to let her laugh it off.
“I fucked you over. I was stupid. I should have seen it, I shouldn’t have let you carry on like that. I’m a shit friend after all. You kept trying to tell me and I just—”
She waved her hand dismissively. “You’re forgiven already. I should have managed better myself. It’s just the itchy phase. It’ll work out.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He tried not to raise his voice. “You always have to make it your problem, like you’re the only one who can fuck up and the only one who can fix things.”
“This is very acutely my problem.”
“No, Hawke, I’m trying to tell you I fucked up. I’m, I was the only one who didn’t know. Of everyone who really knew you. I just let myself believe the story I was telling, about you, about myself. I told myself it wasn’t complicated, I told myself you were the kind of person and I was the kind of person where we could just do that, I told everyone I couldn’t love anyone but Bianca, I told myself I couldn’t love anyone but Bianca, I made myself into, just, a fucking character in my head, sidekick, charming rogue, best friend, someone who had a type that you weren’t, and so long as that was true and I was in that story, and you were in your story, then it could be easy and everything would stay the same. But any con should know better than to buy his own bullshit. I fucked up.”
“Do you need me to set myself on fire to end this conversation because I think the Inquisitor will probably have follow up questions about the reclamation of Weisshaupt and it will be easier for her to get answers if I haven’t self-immolated.”
“Just shut up for once in your life. I get it, you’re a little bit insane, you’ve been out here alone, you’re ashamed, you think you ruined our friendship by making it weird, you think that if you could have just said something else or just fucked me and not cared then everything would be alright, but that’s stupid and you’re not stupid. It’s not that you were too weak to pretend and come back in time to keep anyone from worrying about you, it’s that I wasted too much time in denial. You know what I’ve been thinking about? The whole time you’ve been away, the whole shitting way here, I’ve been thinking: What if she goes away and spends the rest of her life thinking she fucked this up. What if she’s dead or worse. What if I had one good thing in front of me for once and I was too much of a liar to let it happen. What if I’ve been in love with you for ten years and I was too deluded, too far up my own ass, so stupid that I wrote a book where you were in love with someone else, so blind I couldn’t see what I was doing, so deaf I didn’t hear you, and all of it my own choice, just year after year cooking up a lie and eating it myself.”
She was staring at him, face stone. But no jokes.
“The truth is I’m a coward. I’ve always been a coward. That’s why you’re the hero and I’m the writer. But I’m trying not to be, because this is too important. Andraste’s cunt, I came out here to make sure it wasn’t too late. I’m getting old for this kind of kid shit, love declarations, miscommunication, pretending. Please, Hawke.” He had no idea what he was asking for.
“I don’t think we’re that old yet.”