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Varric doesn’t know when it started. It sneaks up on him, like… like a sunrise, or… well, like Cole.
And then it just hits him, like the first sliver of the sun peeking over the horizon, or the less-poetic comparison of Cole suddenly stabbing someone.
It happens like this: they’ve stopped to rest for the evening after a long day of trekking through the Hinterlands, climbing up sheer cliff faces (Ellana), punching bears (Cassandra), trying not to trip over his shoelaces (Cole), and trying not to get tripped on (Varric).
Ellana and Cassandra are talking about— about— something. It involves too much giggling for him to be comfortable with listening too closely. But then, right then, the fire flickers and Ellana tilts her head a little towards it, catching the light in her eyes just so.
And Varric, being Varric, immediately starts constructing the paragraph in his head: Her eyes shone in the firelight, like gemstones, like an ancient treasure hidden in plain sight in the landscape of her face—
When he realizes what he's doing – when he realizes why he's doing it – Varric thinks: Well, shit.
And then, half a second after that, Cole says, loud and clear: “Well, shit.”
Ellana turns her head abruptly at Cole's outburst, scrutinizing his face, before her puzzled gaze moves deliberately to Varric.
“Is something the matter, Varric?” she asks, blinking in the firelight.
And Cole says: “A treasure in the landscape of her face—”
“Alright,” Varric says, swiftly shutting down that particular ramble. “Kid, what have I told you about peeking into a writer’s ideas?”
“But you weren’t planning on writing it down,” Cole protests. “It's just a story you tell yourself, when you forget to be sad—”
“A story's a story, Kid. I'd appreciate it if you left them well enough alone.”
“But you're you!” Cole says. “Everything’s a story with you! I can’t leave all of them alone.”
“Yeah, well,” Varric says, with a distinct sinking feeling in his stomach. “Tough break, Kid.”
---
Once, Varric thinks to himself dejectedly. He notices it once, and suddenly they’re upon him like so many wasps, stinging him into painful pining realizations as they trek halfway across the Hinterlands and back.
The curling strands of her untamable hair escaping her braid. The color of her skin in the sunlight versus the color of her skin in the shade. Her laughter, a sound like water in a brook. Her despairing little smile when it’s Cassandra's turn to cook—
—shit.
Shit.
She’s got him rhyming, like… like… like some blighted poet.
Cassandra notices his dejected expression as he stares unseeing into his bowl of congealed unmentionables.
“It’s not that bad,” she insists, swallowing a mouthful of her own, as if to lead by example.
“It is,” he says, foreseeing his own miserable denouement. “It’s terrible.”
“You haven't even tried it!”
“I’m a celebrated author, Seeker; of course I’ve tried it!”
“You— what?” Cassandra says.
“What?” Varric says.
She blinks. “What are we talking about?”
Varric rouses himself from his stupor and replays the conversation in his head. And then, slowly, deliberately, he takes a spoonful to his mouth, swallows it as fast as he can to avoid tasting it, and says: “I don't know, what did you think we were talking about?”
Cassandra grunts in disgust before digging into her supper. In between her mouthfuls he catches something that sounds suspiciously like stupid dwarf.
Yeah, he thinks, as he subjects himself to the unnecessarily painful process of not going hungry, courtesy of Cassandra. Stupid dwarf indeed.
---
Cole has gotten into the habit of saying, “Well, shit,” approximately every half-hour.
To be more precise, he’s gotten into the habit of paying more attention to Varric’s musings rather than the others’, hence his picking up of Varric’s mental well-shits every half-hour.
Which is the approximate interval between the moment Varric realizes he’s been daydreaming about the Inquisitor and snaps out of it, and the moment he realizes he’s doing it again and that he’s trapped in a never-ending cycle.
After Cole’s thirteenth well-shit – or maybe it's his eighteenth? Well, shit, he’s lost count – Ellana sighs and says: “Varric, I do wish you’d avoid swearing so much around Cole.”
And Varric looks at her incredulously and says: “Swearing? Swearing? Well, shit, Inquisitor. The kid’s a lean, mean, murder machine who reads people’s minds, and you’re worried about him swearing?”
She frowns. “I just don't think it’s good for him, that's all.”
“Am I really mean?” Cole asks worriedly.
“No, Cole, of course you aren’t,” Ellana assures him, throwing the kid a warm smile over her shoulder.
Varric sees it and his heart does a funny little tumble, and he thinks: Well, shit.
And Cole says, for the second time in fifteen minutes: “Well, shit.”
Ellana sighs, resigned, as they forge ever onward through the Hinterlands.
---
The Inquisitor, he’s just noticed, is very touchy.
She ruffles Cole’s hair often, despite the kid having at least half a foot on her. She shakes hands with the soldiers, clasps the requisition officer’s shoulder, leans into Scout Harding when they sit together by the fire. She hugs Cassandra, which is— she hugs Cassandra.
And then one day Varric saves her life by taking down a Red Templar that had been sneaking up on her, and she kisses him.
On the cheek, mind you.
But. She kisses him, and Varric freezes for all of five seconds before Cole asks, genuinely curious: “Did she break you, Varric?”
Fortunately, Ellana is already occupied with searching the bodies, so she doesn’t hear the kid’s remark.
She kissed him.
She kissed him.
“Yes,” Cole says. “She did.”
Well, shit.
---
Cole appears at his side that night, a spray of violets clutched in his hands.
“Here,” Cole says.
Varric looks up from his notebook and eyes the offering with suspicion before he says, carefully: “That’s nice, Kid, but I’m not a flower kind of person. Or a… you-kind of person, come to think. No offense.”
“It’s not for you,” Cole says, unfazed. “Ellana likes violets. You should give these to her.”
“Scream it to the world, why don’t you,” Varric mutters darkly, snatching the flowers, before his gaze flicks over to Cole in a panic and he hastily adds: “Don’t take that literally!”
Cole pauses, looking surprised, before he says, instead: “Oh. Well, alright,” and vanishes during the half-second Varric turns away to press the violets between the pages of his journal, for safekeeping.
Or luck, maybe.
And then, seeing as he’s more or less alone, Varric lets his head repeatedly thump against the leather cover, lamenting his sorry mistake of catching feelings.
This trip just couldn’t end soon enough.
---
Varric can’t stop thinking about the kiss.
It comes to him, unbidden, at the most inopportune moments – like when he sees her get that glint in her eye in the middle of a skirmish, or when they’re crossing a river and she turns to see how he’s doing, and he has to pause for a couple of heartbeats so he doesn’t trip and drown in the three-feet-deep water.
And so, like all writers who can’t get an idea out of their brain, Varric stops in the middle of oiling Bianca’s hinges one night, gets out his journal, and writes it down.
Or attempts to, anyway.
He sits by the fire for an indeterminate length of time, tapping his quill against the heavy cream parchment, and grovels at the feet of his muse – his writing muse, not the mental Ellana-muse that has since taken up residence in his head – to give him some ideas.
Nothing comes.
It’s a terrible thing, to be a writer and find all your words inadequate.
The splotch of ink that bleeds from where he repeatedly presses the tip of his quill grows steadily with each tap, until it grows to the size of a fingertip and stares at him from the page like a black, unblinking eye.
“Kid,” he calls, catching Cole’s return just as Cassandra leaves to take over for the second watch. “Do you want to help?”
“Yes!” Cole says brightly, plops down beside him, and gets right to work.
One of the good things about Cole is that when you need something – really need something – you don’t have to bother explaining. He knows.
Another good thing is that the kid has a pretty impressive vocabulary for someone who spent his metaphorical tender years on the other side of the Veil. Varric thinks he could make a decent writer of him yet, if he can get him to sit still long enough to hold a quill and stop mixing up his p’s and q’s.
But alas, even Cole’s talent – his unusual, slightly skewed, but still remarkable talent – doesn’t seem to be up to par with the bright, staggering images in Varric’s head.
“—lips like velvet, no, like satin, like silk, brushing feather-light against a weathered cheek. Her lashes flutter, flicking against your skin; when she pulls back, her mouth is still pursed and pink and you wish, you want, stay a little longer, don’t go, don’t go, shit—”
Varric listens, his journal opened to the pressed violets, which have left a stain on the opposite page, like a purple kiss mark.
After a while he sighs, fingering the purple smudge, and shakes his head. “Nope. Sorry, Kid, this isn’t working.”
“I’m sorry,” Cole says as Varric buries his head in his hands. “It’s just that you feel like too many words at once and none of them fit right.”
That makes Varric look up, and he sees Cole wringing his hands in a kind of second-hand despair. “What did you say?”
“Too tremulous, too thrilled, too everything. Delight and despair and doubt, all tangled together in your head. I don’t have a word for all of it.”
And right then, a single word pierces Varric’s consciousness, lodging in his brain like a crossbow bolt in a corpse.
He writes it down.
Varric looks at it, at the careful line of letters marching deliberately across the page, just above the purple smudge on the otherwise empty space. And then he nods, smiling with great satisfaction.
“Thanks, Kid,” he says.
Cole beams, seemingly in response to Varric’s own contagious happiness. “I helped,” he says, delighted.
“Yeah,” Varric says. “Yeah, you did.”
He stares at the word until it stops looking like a word, until it just glows with the image of her lips on his cheek, until it burns with the memory of a serendipitous kiss that he hadn’t thought to ask for but can’t imagine now being without.
i n e f f a b l e .
---
Despite all that, it takes three more days of trekking, tripping, and bear-punching before Varric works up the nerve to give her the flowers.
To be more precise, it takes three more days for him to work up the nerve to leave the page with the pressed flowers on her bedroll, anonymously, while she and Cassandra have gone to wash down by the river.
He smooths out the page, careful not to dislodge the flattened violets, and contemplates them until the colors blur together into indistinct blobs. He’s suddenly seized by the idea that maybe this is too much, or too little, or too vague—
He lets out a frustrated noise, shaking his head as if it could clear away his doubts, and all but thrusts the page onto her pillow, before storming out of the girls’ tent and crossing back over to the one he shares with Cole, hopefully to regain some sense of composure before Ellana gets back.
He slips into a light doze, stirring a bit when he hears Cassandra return. Through a kind of dream-haze he hears Cassandra enter her tent, and then, moments later, come back out with a harsh rustle of the canvas flaps. He hears her whispering tersely to Cole, who’d been sharpening his daggers, and hears, with the slow-dawning horror peculiar to people not yet fully awake: “They’re from Varric.”
“Varric!” Cassandra yells, her cry piercing through the otherwise still camp. “Varric!”
He only has enough time to sit up before he’s blinded by the light coming through the suddenly-open tent flaps. And then Cassandra is there, a hulking, menacing figure silhouetted in the firelight.
“What is this?” she demands, shaking the page, and one of the violets slowly peels itself off the paper and falls to the ground in a sad heap.
“The torn remnants of my hopes and dreams,” Varric says dejectedly, his gaze focusing on the sorry flower, which has the grace to look like a trampled and lonely metaphor on the cold, hard ground.
“Oh, stop being so dramatic,” Cassandra says with disgust.
“I’ll be as dramatic as my sad dwarven heart wants, Seeker,” he retorts bitterly. “Why were you going through the Inquisitor’s things, anyway?”
She gives him a withering look. “It was on my pillow,” she growls.
Really, Varric thinks. You can’t make this kind of shit up.
He blinks. “You mean the bedroll with the pink floral blanket was yours?” Varric asks with a kind of terrified incredulity.
Cassandra blushes, which would have been funny if she wasn’t also glaring daggers at him. “Well?” she asks. “What of it?”
“I—” Varric says, before he groans, rubbing a hand over his throbbing forehead. “Well, shit.”
“Are you two fighting again?” Ellana’s voice calls, and they turn to see her entering the camp, her damp hair hanging over one shoulder as she dries it with a towel.
“Varric left weeds on my bedroll,” Cassandra says accusingly.
And Varric, who has since decided that he is completely and utterly done with this shit, says, in the defeated tones of a man about to be summarily executed: “They’re flowers.”
“Oh,” Ellana says, her expression unreadable. “Well, that’s nice, isn’t it, Cassandra?”
“They’re dead!” she complains.
“They’re pressed,” Varric protests, “and not meant for you!”
“Oh!” Ellana says, brightening. “Were they for me, then?”
“Yes,” Varric says tiredly. “Cole says you like violets.”
“Then what were they doing on my bedroll?” Cassandra demands.
“How was I supposed to know you like your blankets pink and floral?” Varric shouts back. “I mean, the other blanket was plain green! It looked military!”
Ellana laughs, hiding her grin behind a slim hand. “Cassandra,” she says, appeasing, “I think Varric is very sorry for his mistake. Isn’t that right, Varric?”
“Yeah,” he says dejectedly. “Definitely.”
Cassandra glares at both of them, before she says, “Fine!” and thrusts the page into Ellana’s hands, dislodging the last two flowers. And then she stalks off, muttering angrily about something that sounds like stupid unromantic dwarves and their dead flowers.
Ellana laughs softly as she gently picks up the fallen violets, holding them delicately by their flimsy stems. They dangle at right angles from her fist, and Varric watches with the far-away look of a dying man as one flower sways gently before all its petals fall off like suicides from a bridge.
He’s got half a mind to cover them with dirt and erect a headstone. Here lies Varric Tethras’ Sad Romantic Attempt, it would read. May he never try anything like that again.
But Ellana laughs again – a soft, secret sound, and when he glances at her she looks… happy.
“Thank you for the flowers, Varric,” she says, smiling. “It’s very sweet of you.”
“I— yeah, sure.”
“Could I beg a fresh page off of you to wrap these in? Cassandra seems to have torn the other one a bit.”
“Ah— sure,” he says, tearing a page from his journal without looking. Too late, he realizes as he’s handing it to her that there’s a purple splotch on it shaped like a kiss mark, with the word ineffable scrawled above it in his blocky handwriting.
Ellana looks at the paper curiously, and he follows her eyes as she reads the only word he can think of to describe the feeling of her lips on his cheek.
“What is?” she asks, tracing the letters with a fingertip, the forlorn violets flopping about in her hand.
Varric laughs, only slightly hysterical, and says: “Everything. All of it.” A pause. “Especially Cassandra’s preference for pink, floral blankets.”
Ellana laughs, the sound echoing through the camp like music, and she clutches her sad little bouquet as if she never means to let them go.
---
In the days after he gives her the sorry excuse for a present, Varric wonders if it was a mistake, because now Ellana won’t stop touching him and it’s driving him crazy.
It’s not, as these things go, a terrible turn of events, it’s just—
A dwarf can only take so much teasing before he snaps. There’s just not enough room in their tiny, compact physiologies for endless patience.
It starts off subtly – a clasp on the shoulder after a fight, fingers brushing against each other’s when passing bowls around the fire.
And then she presses two fingers against his wrist when he tells a joke, and then she nudges his knee when they’re sitting together in camp, and then she props her chin on his shoulder when he’s jotting down notes on the day’s events.
And after all that, she has the gall to fall asleep while leaning on his shoulder.
That’s unnecessary cruelty, that is.
And Cassandra is already asleep, and Cole has gone off to keep watch, so Varric tucks his notebook into his jacket pocket and takes it upon himself to hoist her small frame three feet off the ground and carry her into her tent.
Which she shares with Cassandra.
Clearly, the old adage ‘love makes you stupid’ is completely true.
Cassandra is a light sleeper, in that she wakes up at the slightest noise. The problem is that her wits seem to stay asleep while her instincts kick into overdrive, and Varric only barely manages to pull Ellana’s – green! – blanket over her before a pink floral mound tackles him, screaming bloody murder.
He stumbles, flails, and then kicks, hard, before he manages to crawl out of the tent, bleeding from the bite marks on his left forearm.
He sits on the ground, breathing raggedly, and contemplates delving back inside to make sure Ellana doesn’t get likewise brutally savaged.
He’s disabused of the notion when his journal comes flying out of the tent and smacks his face, courtesy of Cassandra’s unerring aim.
“And stay out!” she growls, before breaking into angry muttering as he hears her slip back into her bedroll.
He doesn’t wait to be told twice.
He picks himself up and dusts himself off, stuffs his journal back into his pocket before he trudges toward the nearby brook, grumbling about barbaric Seekers as he pokes and prods the wounds on his arm.
Varric’s just about done washing off most of the blood when he hears Ellana’s voice calling his name.
“She bit me,” he tells her incredulously as she pads closer, her bare feet barely making a whisper on the soft earth. “She actually bit me. Is it infectious? Will I turn into a raging woman-shaped battering ram during a full moon?”
Ellana laughs softly, the sound blending seamlessly into the harmony of the quiet forest evening.
“Think of it this way,” she says, drawing closer still. “Maybe you’ll also get the ability to punch bears.”
Varric thinks about it, and then he says, glumly: “It just doesn’t seem like a fair trade.”
She laughs again, her white teeth flashing in the dappled moonlight filtering through the canopy.
“Suit yourself,” she says, and he feels her fingertips brushing lightly across his arm, trailing a healing spell in their wake.
When she’s done, Varric shakes his arm, partly to get the blood flowing again, partly in an attempt to dislodge the lingering feeling of her fingers ghosting along on his skin.
“Thanks, Inquisitor,” he says, not looking her in the eye.
“Thanks, Ellana,” she says, and the tone of her voice makes him look up, only to find her leaning down – only slightly, because she’s an elf and he’s a dwarf and the height difference is pretty negligible, really – so that they’re face to face.
Her eyes are doing that thing they do that chases all thought from his mind. He says: “Yeah. That’s what I said.”
She tilts her chin up, imperious, and her nose brushes his. “No it wasn’t,” she whispers, an impetuous grin on her face.
She broke me, Varric thinks. She really broke me, this time.
He blinks, once, twice. His thoughts churn sluggishly in his head, until the proper neurons fire and he opens his mouth, slowly, and says: “Thanks, Ellana.”
She grins, and then she kisses him.
For real, this time.
Alright, so it’s just a swift peck, but the fact remains that, for one brief, shining moment, her lips are on his lips and she’s kissing him.
And just like that, he’s fixed.