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I.
It wasn’t bravery that brought him there—not selflessness, not altruism, not guilt, not sympathy, none of the stuff that made you want to root for a guy. Instead, it’d been a wrong turn. A misstep. An accident. The very confrontation he’d been avoiding all day, and, wouldn’t you know it, he’d been so wrapped up in his own self-pitying bullshit that he’d walked right into it with his brow furrowed and his back teeth worrying the inside of his cheek. Shit, he’d been so oblivious, he’d very nearly tripped over her.
Didn’t that just figure.
But he was in it now, all exits as good as lost to him as she glanced up from the space between her boots to meet his gaze. He would be a real asshole to turn tail after that, a real coward, and though he normally didn’t give those words the same sort of weight others might’ve, today it felt different; today, Maker help him, they’d lost Sunshine.
Hawke went back to staring at the ground. He hadn’t known her long, not in the grand scheme of things, but there was something about the eyes-downcast-and-shoulders-stooped-low look that weighed on him, prickling his skin like the air just before a storm. It wasn’t a frightening thing, wasn’t threatening, just unsettling. Wrong. Even when the darkspawn had swarmed thickest around them, there’d been a grin behind her grimace and a laugh tangled up in her shouts.
She was good at that, he’d learned early on, turning injuries into insults and finding levity in loss—he’d figured it was a skillset plenty of Ferelden refugees had honed on the boat ride over, and shit, it was why he’d asked her to partner up in the first place! It was how he played the game, how he’d managed to scrape his way into every backroom negotiation or protection shakedown the fine city-state of Kirkwall had to offer, but this…this was where the similarities stopped being advantageous. This was where the flickers of himself he saw in her lost their charm.
He knew how he was feeling there in the crumbling wreckage of the thaig (sick with grief, claustrophobic and crawling out of his skin, hungry, tired, helpless, hopeless). It seemed only too likely Hawke was feeling worse. Because whatever else Bartrand was, a liar and a cheat and a backstabbing bastard who’d traded them all for a chunk of lyrium, he was out there, somewhere, alive.
They’d had to leave Bethany where she’d fallen.
When the awkwardness of the moment overstayed its welcome and graciously moved aside to let tension come creeping in, he willed himself to move. He joined her on the outcropping of ancient marble, sinking into his aching bones as he sat beside her. Last night, they’d been sprawled around a fire swapping stories of jobs gone wrong, the stakes growing more and more ridiculous with each passing hour; the night before, they’d plotted how to buy the Hanged Man out from under Corff, drawing the others into their schemes with hypothetical after hypothetical until Aveline had huffed and begun throwing rocks. The longer he sat with her, the hazier the rest of the expedition became, the harder it was to remember why they’d set out to do this in the first place.
“I’ll get it, you know,” and flames, he hadn’t realized he’d even opened his mouth, “if you want me to keep a wide berth after this. I know I would.” And this was what he’d been avoiding, this was what he’d been trying to delay, not an argument or a fight or finding out firsthand what it felt like when Hawke turned that razor wit of hers back on him but the things he’d say once the exhaustion won out.
Chin in hand, she turned, regarding him with an expression so blank as to call to mind the reliefs carved into the walls of the idol’s chamber. She took a breath, let it out, but whatever she’d been gearing herself up to say, she had to swallow just as quickly. He wasn’t done yet.
Apparently.
“Kirkwall’s not that big a place, not really, especially not the circles we move in, but…I’ll get it. We can keep moving the way we were before—you can tell Athenril this whole thing was some kind of quarter-life crisis or a bet that broke bad, I’ll go back to low-level extortions and lower-level Diamondback fixes, and in six months, shit, who knows? Maybe we’ll be in Hightown. Maybe we’ll be exactly where we were before we climbed into this miserable pit. What I do know is all you have to do is say the word, kid, say the word and I won’t even nod your way in the market square once we’re out. You won’t have to worry about me darkening your doorstep, or showing up unannounced, or—”
“Andraste’s ass,” Hawke interrupted, her voice little more than a sigh. “Do you ever stop talking?” As the last of her breath went out of her, her body slumped, her weight resting against his side as her head came to rest on his shoulder.
Startled, relieved, compensating for the sudden shift in gravity, he brought his arm up around her shoulders. With a jolt, he realized he was still half expecting her to pull away. “Hawke.”
“Varric,” she replied, leaning further into him all the while, suggesting she knew.
Suggesting a few things, really.
“I’m just saying. If you want me to disappear once we’re topside, I can do that. I don’t want to,” he quickly added, alarmed at the way his stomach twisted at the thought, “but I can.”
“Sorry,” she said after a beat, “but where I’m from, partners stick together through thick and thin. If you Marchers have a different definition of the word, well, I hardly see how that’s my problem. I won’t tell you to piss off, Varric…but I will ask you to keep holding me for a while. And maybe shut up, while you’re at it.”
That, it turned out, he could do.
And that’s where it started, if he had to put his finger on it. That’s where it all began.
II.
“I…can…go,” he said slowly, the pleasant buzz he’d been working on gone in the blink of an eye. Around them, the Hanged Man snapped into focus, all its hazy edges and blurred colors sharpening to a fine point. The fire crackling in the hearth, Rivaini’s low coo as she wheedled some poor sap into paying for another drink, Norah shouting at someone near the door, the song Corff was always whistling two octaves out of note, and somehow—somehow—the feeling of Hawke’s face in his hands, her skin impossibly soft against his fingertips.
There was a peculiar expression there, smoothing the usual crinkle of her nose. Her eyes were wide, gem-like, surprised. They’d been working together for a while now, their reputations and coffers growing like rashvine thanks to what they’d been able to drag out from underground, but even so, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her so taken aback. She expected everything, Hawke; she was the only person he’d ever met who could match his improvisation beat-for-beat.
Now she just blinked.
“I…should…go,” he said instead, forcing himself to breathe when his head began to spin. “Just pretend I never—”
She pulled him right back into the kiss he’d broken, the sickle-shape of her mouth leaving little room for debate. Their bodies flush together, her fingers threading through his hair, it was almost enough to convince him…but she was a hero, the hero, a force of nature that’d blown into his life like a thunderhead, and he was an unreliable narrator at best. This wasn’t how it worked, not in this story, not in any story.
So he pulled away again, his voice stutter-stopping when she merely followed, their lips still brushing, their every breath still shared. “Tell me you’re too drunk to think right now,” he managed, “and I’ll do all the thinking for you. I’ll get up, we can act like none of this happened, and in the morning, if anyone asks…”
“In the morning, if anyone asks,” she teased, lowering her voice into a dreadful mockery of his own as she shifted her weight, sliding out of her seat and onto his lap, “we’ll just say what everyone’s been thinking.” She brought her lips to his again, her weight above him both familiar and strange, a possibility and a promise. “It was about damn time.”
And it was.
III.
“Wait! You shouldn’t go in there,” she said, and when he turned from the door, Orana’s already large eyes seemed to him the size of dessert plates. She didn’t offer any further explanation, not when he raised his eyebrows, not when he motioned for her to continue, but only shook her head, her mouth hidden behind her knuckles. “You…shouldn’t go in there,” she repeated, and that was all.
As if to punctuate the warning, something shattered on the other side of the door. He felt the impact through the handle, but it was Hawke’s scream that shook his bones; enraged, despondent, jagged, and so, so tired. Varric cast one last glance over the balustrade, marking the wreckage of the rest of the estate, and braced himself for whatever he was about to walk into.
“I’ll be all right,” he reassured her, but something about it rang hollow in his head. He chose his words more carefully and tried again. “Everything’ll be fine.”
He had seen Hawke’s bedroom in disarray before—it came with the territory of working the jobs they did. Bloody clothes, bedsheets stripped and never replaced, contracts scattered and notes burnt to ash, merchandise hidden as they waited for a willing fence, goods kept in plain sight to tempt lesser thieves’ eyes, that he had grown accustomed to. Not this, though. Never this.
She’d overturned her bookcase. She’d pushed her armoire on its side. There were spiderwebs of cracks in the windows made only more impressive by how high they sat in the wall, looming far above the canopy of her bed. There were shards of ceramic where once there had been art, and in all the places she’d managed to dislodge the runner, there were frantic scrapes and furrows in the tiles of the floor.
“Shit,” he said, mostly to himself, and softly shut the door behind him as the strength seemed to go out of her and he watched Hawke drop to her knees.
What was left of the drapery she held balled in her hands, the fabric too thick, too expensive, to shred. She buried her face in it, screamed again, and though it swallowed most of the sound, he was close enough by then to see her shaking was worse. Her shoulders heaved—her whole body heaved—her fingers going white against the rich red velvet, her hair a dark halo over the once-immaculate grouting of the tiles. Before he could sit, she collapsed like that, her muscles rictus-tight and her voice going to gravel in the folds of the drapes.
It was hard to see her like that, but he couldn’t look away. Couldn’t blame her, either, couldn’t find it in himself to stare wide-eyed the way Orana had. He’d lost his mind a little after his mother had died, too. Maybe more than a little. Maybe more than a lot.
Varric pushed a roll of the runner aside and sat on the ground next her, lifting her head onto his lap such that he could card his fingers through her hair. He did nothing else, said nothing else, just held her as the sobs wracked her frame in tidal wave surges.
Slowly, impossibly so, she went quiet, and slowly, impossibly so, she went mostly still. The effort left her shivering, shuddering, her breath coming in great, hiccupping gasps. When she finally dropped the fabric from her face, her skin was flushed and splotchy. Her eyes were swollen terribly red. He tucked her hair behind her ear and gingerly brushed away the tears he could reach.
She didn’t look at him. Didn’t look anywhere, really, her gaze going distant, as though she could see Leandra’s room through the walls, as though, through sheer force of will, she could put her—keep her—back where she was meant to be.
He tipped his chin down, keeping his voice low and even and (Maker above, he hoped) soothing. “If you want to be alone, just tell me,” he said, resuming the slow, steady work of stroking her hair. “Won’t hurt my feelings, Hawke, not even a little.”
“I hate when you do that,” she snapped, or tried to, anyway. Her throat sounded full of broken glass, slicing her words to pieces long before they reached her tongue; it took some of the sting out, but only just.
His fingers stopped right where they were. “Do you…not want me to—”
Clearly, though, she hadn’t heard him. Hawke pressed on, pushing herself up into an abrupt, unsteady sit. “Stop asking me to make you leave! Maker’s breath, Varric, I can’t take it! I can’t handle it! I don’t want you to leave! I don’t want you to go away! My whole fucking life has been people leaving, you know that, so stop insisting I must want you to go, too!” Her lip was quivering too much to call her expression a snarl, the tears gathering in her eyes were too fat to allow her a proper glare, but the sentiment was there, and he felt it in every shaking breath she took. “I don’t,” she snapped again, “I don’t want to be alone! I don’t want you to go! But if you keep asking me that, I might just take you up on it, so stop it!”
A moment passed with them like that—two, three—and part of him wondered, if that next tear hadn’t spilled over, whether they might’ve sat there forever, her chin jutting in defiance, his shoulders high in surprise. But she blinked in just the right (or wrong) way, and another tear went rolling down her cheek, giving him an opening to cup her face in his hand, to brush her fevered skin with his thumb.
“No, you won’t,” he said, a desperate, foolhardy bid to lighten the moment.
“No,” she agreed, still frowning, still furious, but letting herself close her eyes at his touch, “I won’t. But don’t press your fucking luck.”
He gathered her up into his arms then, tucking her head against his shoulder so he could steady more of her weight, and it didn’t make her stop crying, didn’t make the broken things surrounding them any more whole, but it did something. She clung to him with all her strength, he clung to her with all of his. As they sat in the hateful new silence of the estate, the only Hawke left, the only Tethras left, all that remained, he let himself believe her.
“I won’t, sweetheart,” he murmured into her hair, his own eyes suddenly heavy, “I won’t.”
IV.
To his credit, he thought he’d been handling the whole thing pretty well. Subtly. Smoothly. Holding his cards close to his chest to lessen the impact of the blows that just kept coming.
(Choir Boy, his eyes alight and Chantry dust gathering in his perfect hair. An arrow trained at Blondie’s throat, steady until Hawke stepped in front of it.
Rivaini, her shame bubbling out of her in the form of promises—visits, baubles, fancy hats from faraway lands, and stories, stories, stories, of course there will be stories! Her smile only slipping when she stepped off the dock and onto the deck, her hair blowing in the wind.
The elf, unsure of where any of them stood anymore, his eyes tired as he filled the doorway of what had once been Danarius’s mansion. The occupation was over, the uprising past its point of no return; if his lot in life was to fight until his bones gave out, then he’d spend the rest of it hunting the ones who’d hunted him, not those incensed—rightfully, he’d add, never one to pull his punches—by what had happened at the Gallows.
And Blondie. Blondie, Blondie, Blondie. Blondie, who’d sat waiting for a blow that never came; Blondie, who’d looked out at them all with defiance and nausea as the smoke and the screams billowed through Hightown; Blondie, who was currently holed up a couple rooms over because Hawke had knelt before him and taken his hands in hers and sworn with what little breath she’d had left that if the Templars wanted him, they’d have to kill her first; Blondie, who couldn’t stay in Kirkwall; Blondie, who didn’t want to stay in Kirkwall; Blondie, who, at first light, would be setting out for parts unknown to help the mages’ efforts or make them worse or some other third, horrible option Varric couldn’t imagine tonight.)
“I know you’re thinking it,” Hawke sighed, giving up on feigning sleep. With a huff of effort, she rolled onto her side, tucking her body close to his as she draped an arm across his chest. She kept her voice light, flippant, but it was hard to buy when they both still smelled so heavily of fire and copper. It seemed to him that after all the scrubbing they’d done, they must’ve been sick with the stuff for it to keep holding on like that, it must’ve gotten into them somehow, settling into the spaces between their bones. “We might as well get it over with, don’t you think? That way we won’t waste the rest of the night sitting here bracing for it. Who knows—we might even get a few minutes of sleep!”
His hand found hers. He traced the shape of it without needing to look down. “Hawke.”
“Or maybe we won’t,” she added coyly, letting her breath taper off in a playful hum before she pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “My, my, but you are a smooth talker, aren’t you? I suppose we could always—”
Varric shut his eyes, searching not for stillness but strength. He drew a long, steadying breath. Let it out. “Tell me to go with you. Tell me to go, or else I’m going to stay.”
Her fingers drummed lightly at his breastbone. Her pillows rustled as she readjusted herself. “I know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“You didn’t ask a question. I can’t give you an answer if there isn’t a question involved.” Soft as a whisper, her hand slid up to his necklace, toying with the chain as he’d only just toyed with her fingers, desperate for something—anything—to focus on instead of what they both knew came next. “If Anders goes alone, someone will try to kill him. Many someones, probably. It’s even possible one of those someones will succeed.”
“I know.”
“And if I don’t go, well…how does it look, really, when the Chantry comes calling? The Champion of the city with the Grand Cleric’s blood still crusting beneath her nails, what am I meant to say? ‘Oh, hello there, Revered Mother. What’s that? You’re looking for Elthina? Ah, sorry, you just missed her. What, this? Oh no, nonono! That isn’t her blood, it’s the First Enchanter’s. Hmm? No, this isn’t hers either, don’t be silly! It’s the Knight-Commander’s. You know what? Why don’t I just point you to the right splotch to set your mind at ease, hmm?’” She huffed a little breath that tried to be a laugh and failed. “Not especially endearing, is it?”
“I know.”
For a beat, she was quiet. “It’ll just be for a while.”
“Mhm.”
“Until cooler heads prevail.”
“That long, huh?”
That time, when she huffed, there wasn’t a trace of laughter to be found. Only exhaustion, only resignation, the stuff that reared up when you realized all that cheering from the stands had been conditional at best. “This is your home, Varric. I can’t ask you to leave it. I won’t.”
“Last I checked, it was your home, too,” he said, and there he opened his eyes again, searching her face for something he knew he wouldn’t find. When he didn’t, when it became clear that she meant to stand by her word, he reacted the only way he knew how: He twisted a lock of her hair around his finger and teased, “I’m going to rearrange every last piece of furniture in here while you’re gone, I hope you know that.”
“You’d better not,” she tittered, leaning in to press a kiss to his forehead, the bridge of his nose, his lips. “I just got everything back the way I like it.”
V.
He should’ve been in a bad mood. Shit, he should’ve been miserable—everything about this setup seemed tailor-made to leave a bad taste in his mouth, from the pretense to the guest list to the stiff, tacky uniform that itched like his skin was covered in ants. It was a nightmare, a punishment, some kind of…bureaucratic retribution for all the horrible things he’d done in his life.
And yet.
“How many children do you think these charming little alcoves are responsible for?” Hawke asked, glancing up through the trellis arch above them before lifting her hand to pluck a flower from a low-hanging vine. She tucked it behind her ear, gave it a gentle fluff, then went back to sampling from the tray they’d oh-so-sweetly taken off one of the serving girls when she’d had her back turned. Through a bite of something that might’ve been cheese, she added, “Annually, that is,” as though the addition might sway his answer.
“Not a very dignified question, messere,” he chuckled, then just as quickly grimaced, turning his head away to spit. “Don’t eat the green things. I don’t know what they are, but it’s not worth finding out.”
She shifted on the bench, resuming her preposterous lounge. “‘Dignified?’ Who said anything about dignity?” Smirking, she lifted her champagne flute from the grass below, playfully raising it in his direction. “You didn’t ask, but I think the number’s in the low to mid-thirties. At least.”
He should’ve been in a bad mood, yeah. He really, really should’ve been. But out there, hidden away in the twilight gloam of the Winter Palace’s gardens with a tray of stolen hors d’oeuvres and a collection of bottles each worth more than both of them combined, the nostalgia was too strong. His relief was too great. It was impossible to give into the doom and gloom of ancient magisters and royal assassination plots when Hawke was right there, her hair a bit longer but the rest of her the same, smirking and wiggling her eyebrows and catching his gaze in a silent promise of jokes yet to come.
The gown helped, too. Just, you know, if he was being honest.
Somehow (she refused to divulge even the tiniest detail of how she’d done it), she’d managed to wriggle her way into Ruffles’ heart, earning herself the distinct privilege of not having to wear the horrendous military dress the rest of the Inquisition was suffering through. Now, he knew her, so he had his theories—‘Oh, but my dear Lady Montilyet, surely mine is too controversial a name for an event like this! It would only hurt the Inquisition to count me among their number! Better to keep me distinct from the rest of the pack, don’t you agree?’ or ‘You flatter me, truly, but alas, as Champion of Kirkwall, I’m afraid wearing any colors but hers would seem a betrayal to the already-suffering citizenry,’ or, much more likely, ‘I don’t think any of you quite understand how very, very badly I can and will behave if I put my mind to it.’—but no matter how she’d done it, the result was the same. She’d said black, and the tailor had nodded; she’d demanded a neckline bordering on scandalous, and the tailor had furrowed his brow but agreed; she’d pointed to show how high the slit in the skirt would need to be if she were to hide her daggers from prying eyes, and the tailor’s mouth had twisted unpleasantly, but he’d acquiesced; when asked whether there were any other requests the Champion had in mind, she’d shrugged, grinned. ‘Is there a way you can make it fun to take off at the end of the night?’ she’d asked, and maybe the tailor hadn’t known what to make of that, but Varric was rather looking forward to judging how successful the attempt had been once they were somewhere a little more private.
“Oh dear,” Hawke sighed over the rim of her glass, drawing his attention to a flicker of movement up ahead. Through the gaps of the flowering vines around them, it was impossible to miss the glow of the Inquisitor’s Anchor, to say nothing of the footsteps or the shouts. With her free hand, she pried a few stems further apart, tilting her head in such a way that she could keep her line of sight while improving his. Despite the wicked curve of her mouth, she tutted like a disappointed Chantry sister as the brawl intensified. “Now who isn’t very dignified, messere? Well, that’s simply dreadful, what they’re doing to those poor, hapless…what are they, you think? Sellswords? Probably sellswords. Certainly not come in off the streets.”
He hummed, though only momentarily glanced between the lattice slats. “Venatori?”
“Ooh, you’re right, they could be Venatori. Poor things! Cultists never get to enjoy lavish parties like these…you’d think they’d at least let them throw a caprice or two before bashing their skulls in.” She held her glass out to him once he’d opened the next bottle, giving it a jaunty shake when he didn’t pour to her liking. “…that isn’t what we looked like, was it?” she asked suddenly, covering her a face a moment too late when her next laugh came out as a snort. “Running to and fro, all in a lather, weapons waving hither and yon? …no, no. Nononono…we never looked like that.”
“What are you talking about?” he laughed. “That’s exactly what we looked like, Hawke! I mean, don’t get me wrong, there was significantly more glowing involved—”
She nodded pensively. “Blue, though. Calming.”
“—and Aveline was always throwing that shield around—”
“Hers was bigger than your Warden friend’s, I think. Well, not that size matters.”
“—we had a little more blood magic happening in the background—”
“I really should write to Merrill, now that you mention it…”
“—there was usually a dog tearing into some poor sod’s calf-meat—”
“Awww, he was always the best of us.”
“—but that,” and there he paused, using the excuse of pointing out into the gardens to move closer, to bring his arm around her shoulders, “that’s what we looked like, sorry to say. A little dirtier, maybe. Considerably drunker.”
Hawke rolled her eyes to his, her expression unreadable. “We,” she began, taking on a stiff, serious cadence meant to hide just how tipsy she was, “never looked like that. I never ran around in something as hideous, as grotesque, as unforgivable as—”
Varric lifted his own glass to his mouth, raising his eyebrows. Just before the champagne reached his lips, he muttered, “Chateau Haine,” and nearly choked when she reeled away from him, gasping.
“You promised we’d never speak of that again!”
“No,” he laughed, still coughing, “you just threatened to kill me if I ever did.”
Her eyes narrowed. She set her drink back down into the grass. “Ah. Right you are. Well. You’ve left me no choice, I suppose. Try not to take it personally—this isn’t how I wanted it to end, you know,” she menaced, but there was no hiding her own laughter. As though she meant to throttle him, Hawke grabbed the collar of his (terrible) uniform and pulled him instead into a kiss. The sort, the writerly voice in the back of his head insisted, perfectly suited to such a clandestine tete-a-tete; devious, excited, and, perhaps, just a little bit hungry.
Until, that was, someone shouted farther off and the gardens were suddenly awash in the pale green light of a Fade tear giving way.
“…are we…obligated to go help them?” Hawke asked, her fingers still buried in the fabric of his doublet, her mouth still a hair’s width from his. “Is that…I mean, that’s not our responsibility, right?”
“I’m not going unless you are,” he scoffed, shaking his head at the prospect even as he slid his lips to her jaw, her throat.
“Well, that settles it, I guess.” Tipping her head back to give him more room, Hawke laughed. The sound vibrated against his mouth, bringing him out of Orlais and back into the Marches, to Kirkwall, to the Hanged Man on an especially rowdy night.
Bringing him back home.
VI.
A flash of green against the rotting-flesh sky of the Fade, and everything inside of him unclenched. There it was—by some miracle, there it was! A way out, a way back, hardly a way home, but a fighting chance at getting there someday.
The Inquisitor was breathless as she bellowed, “Move!” an order Buttercup barely stuck around to hear before her bow was down and her feet were flying, but there was something else in her voice, too, something a lifetime of experience had taught him meant they weren’t out of the woods just yet.
As though on cue, the air grew suddenly thick with the sounds of a night terror, shrieks and moans and the wet, meaty rip of skin rending from bone, and above it all, a voice. An impossible, indescribable voice.
“Now, now…where were we?”
The Nightmare’s laughter leached the relief from his bones like ice water leached warmth, slowing his step. The damn thing couldn’t be moving again, not after what they’d done to it, but the way the ground had taken to quaking beneath his feet said otherwise.
“We’re not going to make it,” said a gruff voice beside him, and had the Inquisitor not cut in when she had, Varric would’ve shot him down for her; he had the quip ready and everything, a sidelong smirk, a raised eyebrow, and something to the tune of ‘Gee, I’d expect something a little more heroic coming from you, Hero,’ to exorcise the dread filling his lungs like seawater.
But she did speak up, the Inquisitor, that mysterious second note rising up in her tone until it was the only thing he could hear. “Yes, we are! Just keep moving!”
Resolve, he thought.
Confidence, he thought.
Surety, he thought.
She knows what she’s talking about, he thought.
Why are there only four of us? he thought.
“Ah. Yes. I remember now…the Champion of Nothing. Hello again, Marian.”
“Hawke,” he breathed, but in his heart, Varric already knew he wouldn’t find her there beside him. He whirled anyway, his stomach sinking farther and farther as he saw the distance between them, the steel glinting coldly in her hands. “Hawke!”
“Did you think it mattered? Did you think any of it mattered? You couldn’t any of them, Hawke, you couldn’t save your father, your brother, your sister, your mother…you couldn’t keep your friends, couldn’t satisfy your legions of adoring fans…you couldn’t save any of them, why would you ever think you could save yourself? And what would the point be? You don’t have a home to return to—you let Lothering rot. You let Kirkwall burn. You ruined it all. You destroy everything you touch.”
He started for her with his heart in his throat and his pulse in his ears, but the ground refused to move beneath him. He was frozen, stuck, wrought to the spot in a way that didn’t make sense—until he caught a flash of Warden silvers and Warden blues.
Standing before the Nightmare, Hawke looked at once larger than life and oh so very, very small. She threw wide her arms the way he’d seen her do a million times before, already circling in the deviously strategic way she’d perfected (all swagger, no stress), and when she spoke, it was in the bright, clear tones of a consummate professional in the art of dirty dealing and dirtier fighting. “You wound me! My list of accomplishments is so much longer than that! If we’re listing my many terrible and unforgivable crimes, you’re forgetting the murder of at least one Duke, the poisoning of one wyvern, the general disintegration of twenty to thirty abominations, cooking most of Kirkwall’s Chantry sisters, and…mmm…oh! Right, ghasts! Wiped them out altogether! As a species, I believe! You certainly don’t hear about them anymore, do you?”
“Hawke!” he called again, straining against both of the Inquisitor’s Wardens, the ones whose lives apparently outweighed hers. His. And why was that? How was that? “What are you doing?! The Fade tear’s closing, it’s—”
A hundred things happened at once, collapsing and coalescing into a blur he’d only be able to pick apart later.
The Nightmare lunged.
Hawke turned around.
The Inquisitor grabbed him from behind.
Hawke smiled, beaming the way she did whenever a scheme worked out juuust right.
The sky flared with sickly grey lightning.
The Wardens heaved.
Hawke called back.
“Sorry, Varric,” she said, pressing her fingertips to her lips before letting the kiss fly. “But I told you I’d have to take you up on it, one of these days.”
“What?” he asked, his voice cracking in his throat. Could she even hear him anymore? Was he making any sound at all? “What?!”
Hawke raised her daggers. Gave them a cheeky little twirl like this was any other bar fight back home, like it was just another one of Corff’s drunks raising his fists after he caught her cheating at cards. “It’s time for you to go,” she said, and then she turned her back on him and met the Nightmare in earnest.
The Wardens pushed.
The Inquisitor pulled.
Adamant Fortress rose up to catch them, and just that simply, just that quick, life as Varric knew it ended.
Forever.