Chapter Text
“How do you feel about kids?”
Varric was so entirely used to Hawke’s odd, inane questions that he didn’t bother lifting his gaze from the latest draft of his romance - not that there was much left to see on the half-blotted page scratched through thoroughly with a series of dark, damning lines.
Perhaps it was terrible because nothing - truly nothing - could compare to the love that burned like a trapped sun in his chest for Hawke, words utterly failing to capture the vibrant beauty of the relationship he’d half-stumbled into by sheer luck. A terrifying amount of it, frankly.
Or maybe it was because this stupid little venture was about Aveline, just about the least romantic creature he could picture. The idea had been a brainchild between Rivaini and himself, starting out more as a colorful exercise in order to wrap their minds around the fact that the guard captain had not only fallen for someone, but had - with no small amount of help from the group, admittedly - managed to land the sorry bastard.
Or maybe Varric Tethras was just a shit romance writer.
He left that determination to the Stone and went back to workshopping the latest scene involving the redhead, the mutton-chopped lothario, and a well-placed pineapple.
In response to Hawke's question, he said, “A few make for deviously good spies if you start teaching them young enough. Why?”
He caught a flutter of movement out of the corner of his eye and his gaze instinctively followed. A pair of shockingly dainty feet - save for the thick layer of calluses along the soles - swung back and forth in the air above the mage lying atop his bed, propped on her elbows. Fanned out in front of her across his brocaded duvet were the scrawled pages of his recently finished chapters.
Hawke was ignoring him now, seemingly immersed in the smut-ridden ramblings.
She gave a quick, nearly-nonchalant shrug. The only thing that gave her away was the single fingernail she raked up the bone in her forearm - a familiar tell of hers that usually meant she had a middling hand. One that might win, if she was lucky.
“If there's a cute orphan on the street begging for a home, I was wondering if I should send them back to the estate like I did for Orana. Now that you and I are involved, I thought you should have a say,” she answered simply, blue eyes glued to the text in front of her like it was the fucking Chant and she was the Grand Cleric.
His heart did that little flip it had become accustomed to doing every time Hawke hinted at building a life together. This was… still new. And as much as it felt so perfectly right, so strangely inevitable, he still spent most of his time wandering around in a daze, unable to believe she wanted him this way. Wanted to make room - well, more room - for him in her life.
At the end of the flip was an extra, painful little twist that didn’t quite surprise him.
Marian Hawke was notorious for bringing home strays. The Feddics and the elven girl were just the examples that were closest to home - literally. But every last one of their friends counted themselves amongst her collection of misfits, himself included. He may have been the one to come to her proposing a business deal, but it was she who had taken him by the lapels and yanked him into a circle of what he hoped would be lifelong bonds with people he genuinely cared about. Even Apawstate, prestigious warhound though he might be, had been rescued from the wheat fields of Lothering and taken under the Amell-Hawke roof by one little mage girl with piercing blue eyes and a quivering lip.
Varric hadn’t quite gotten around to working out how that might affect him yet, though. In all the hours he’d spent fantasizing about their future - the only kind of dreaming a dwarf could manage - he had somehow failed to consider just who he might share that future with in its entirety.
A second dog, sure. Honestly, if Marian didn’t adopt another pup at some point, he’d owe at least three different people good coin.
Another servant… Well, she - they? - really didn’t need one, but she’d likely ask them to feed the mabari once a day for a king’s salary. At that point, it was really just having roommates with extra steps, but Varric was known to be a bit overly charitable himself, so how could he blame her?
He’d even accept a cat so long as it earned a good nickname and didn’t knock over his inkwell too often.
But a kid?
Varric suppressed a shudder as she crossed her ankles and continued swinging her feet, now in tandem. She drew another line down her arm. Slowly, eyes narrowing, he said skeptically, “Uh-huh…”
She said nothing. Didn’t even look up as she scanned the same page she’d been supposedly reading for nearly five minutes now. Waiting, it seemed, for him to offer a more substantial response.
So he kept his mouth shut, just to see how long she’d wait.
Forty-three seconds, by his count.
Loudly, she let out a huff that set her roughly-cut bangs fluttering and finally pinned him with a look that was all petulant impatience. “So. Kids. Thoughts?”
He’d… never given it a thought. Living together, obviously. Traveling, of course. The cat-dog combination that would likely destroy her - their? - estate, probably. Marriage, if he could con her into saying yes. Or maybe that one was the other way around…
But a kid?
After a long, deliberate pause, his brow now creased in amused, judgmental befuddlement, he said, “Kids? You and me? You realize half the city wants to kill us, right?”
Her hand drifted to tug at the finger she’d broken in a bar fight two years prior that was always just the tiniest bit stiff, she’d once admitted. Her losing-hand tell… “We've survived this long. We must be doing something right,” she argued with an exasperated grin, rolling her eyes.
“Or we're just the luckiest sods in Thedas. You really want to orphan this poor hypothetical street urchin a second time?” he asked, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms across his broad chest.
“Oh, come on, Var. We've handled everything else the Void has thrown at us. How hard could one child be?”
She was ignoring his point outright, leaping over it like a fleeing hare.
There was a hint of something in her crystalline eyes that sent a skittering jolt of terror up his spine. Varric rather prided himself on being able to read people, Marian Hawke most of all. But whatever lurked in her eyes remained an elusive, nerve-wracking enigma.
Secretive, almost.
Shit.
Oh, fucking shit…
“Hawke... It sounds like you want a kid. But surely I'm mistaken…” he ventured slowly, as if he were trying to appease an ogre into letting him walk away unscathed. It was incredibly difficult to strike a balance between 'I don’t want to be insultingly insensitive' and 'please, Maker, please no.'
“We've just never really discussed it. I thought now would be a good time.” It was a simple answer, deceptively so. She sounded the way she did when she was bluffing, not that anyone but him tended to notice.
No. No, he was being ridiculous. Hawke wasn’t asking him to… His damned, novel-churning imagination was just getting the better of him. Not an uncommon occurrence. She just wanted to know if maybe someday, in the future…
Andraste’s breastband, that did not make it better.
Sitting still as a halla caught in the sites of a bow, he tried to soothe his hammering heart and twisting stomach as he hedged, “I suppose we haven't... May I ask what brought this on?”
“I saw a cute orphan in the street. Keep up.”
Hawke said it so flippantly, finally turning the sheet of paper in front of her, that for a moment, Varric’s mind reeled. Maybe this was just one of her meandering rabbit trails with no point or natural conclusion.
Bleeding Ancestors, please let that be it.
It wasn’t as if… the idea of Hawke… being…
Well, it wasn’t a horrifically repugnant idea, in isolation. If she’d thrown in her lot with Blondie or Broody and announced that there would be an addition to their motley little family - alright, it made his heart sting a bit, but she had chosen him, so it didn’t really matter - then he’d have been…
Happy. Happy for Hawke. He’d have been happy for this hypothetical version of the woman he loved, joyously carrying some other bastard’s kid that Varric would inevitably love and spoil as the world’s best uncle like he was poised to be, even if it made him want to die a little.
But… She had chosen him. Him, former bachelor and still rogue Varric Tethras. So… Surely she’d known - nay, decided that…
“Right, of course, my mistake. But... Forgive me for making an ass of myself, but I kind of assumed we were on the same page here. My family was a brewery fire of fuck-ups clinging to a lost legacy. I didn't exactly have an army of stellar role models growing up. And... I mean, come on, Hawke... We take down bandits and face Tal-Vashoth on a weekly basis. I live in a tavern, and your ass is practically glued to a barstool whenever I'm here. Our favorite pastimes are drinking, gambling, fucking, and fighting, or reading filthy novels about any or all of those things. We're not exactly prime parenting material. Well, I'm not. You'd probably clean up pretty nicely, but you might have to stop hanging out with me. Which might put a damper on the whole idea of parenting together, if you think about it.”
Her face was guarded as she answered. Not cold or furious - Maker, Bianca had given him so many of those looks - but… almost cautious. “So... That's a no, then.”
Shit shit shit.
Hawke wanted kids. With him.
He suddenly found himself combing through every memorable conversation they’d had in the last two and half years, desperately searching for some hint she might’ve dropped that this was a lifelong dream of hers.
But she was Hawke. It wasn’t just that she slayed dragons and tried - stupidly but adorably - to drink dwarves and pirates under the table. It was that she enjoyed it. She was built for it, craved it, the same as he did. She had said out loud that the last several months with him - with its record-breaking tallies for the aforementioned fucking, fighting, drinking, and gambling - were the best of her life.
A sentiment he’d unabashedly shared.
They liked their life as it was.
He’d thought.
How could he not have noticed Hawke pining for a stab at parenthood?
“You actually want a kid? With me? Maker's breath, Hawke, why? What about me screams father figure to you?”
Hawke rose off the bed, giving him a pout he could just convince himself was playful. Or maybe she was the one doing the convincing. Her wicked grace face was better than most. She could even fool him a decent chunk of the time. The trouble was, he couldn’t quite decipher why she would be bluffing.
Either she was, in fact, entirely laid-back about the subject material they were discussing, or she was trying very hard to seem like she was.
Varric didn’t have to guess which one he was hoping for.
It was the pout - definitely meant to be playful, if nothing else - that kept him from worrying that she was about to walk out, deeply offended by his balking protestation at fathering her children. That and the fact that once she was up, she stalked across the room like a jungle cat to wrap her long arms around his neck from behind. He half-expected her to strangle him, but welcomed the sloppy kiss she planted on his temple.
“I think we'd make cute babies. Our combined good looks and charm? They'd take over half of Thedas by the time they can walk,” she sighed into his ear.
It was a flash, there and gone, and for one aching moment the child seemed as real as the adrenaline racing through his veins.
Perfect. A child like that would be perfect, if he did say so himself.
Too bad it would be his.
“What happened to the street orphan?” he muttered gruffly, eyes rolling to no one but his inkwell.
“Switching hypotheticals. Keep up.”
He laughed, a genuine chuckle that made him shake his head. “That poor orphan.”
“You don't want to know how amazing a kid like that would be?” Hawke said softly, skipping right over his rather excellent joke. An unexpected note of sincerity laced her voice that made his heart ache.
Fucking hell.
He’d figured out pretty quickly that this wasn’t about a street orphan. They’d helped dozens, maybe hundreds, during their many odd jobs throughout the city, and had passed by as many more. They dropped coin, alerted chantry sisters, left bits of bread and cheese. But not once had she grabbed his arm and said, “Varric, look! Can we keep it?”
Which, granted, would’ve been a very Hawke thing to do.
But no. Marian wanted his baby. Possibly right now, given the way she was winding herself around him like a marsupial.
You don't want to know how amazing a kid like that would be?
The words rang in his head like a damned bell he couldn’t unring.
“I mean, we can go down to the street corner and ask,” he joked, keeping his eyes trained on the inkpot.
“Varric.”
“Okay. Fine,” he sighed, rubbing his eyes. Maybe, maybe, he could cut this off at the pass with some good, old-fashioned logic. Of course, when had that ever worked on Marian Hawke? “Suppose I put all of my well-founded reservations aside and threw caution to the wind. Say I want to ravish you senseless until you're completely miserable with child. What are the odds I could even make good? Dwarven fertility is notoriously low, and half-dwarves are so rare some people still swear they're a myth. We'd probably be better off with the street urchin.”
He loved the way he could hear just in her tone that she was scrunching her nose, warmth curling in his core despite his mounting dread.
“I always assumed that was because dwarven culture is so insular. Even outside of Orzammar, the... What did you call them? Kalnas? Aren't they still very particular about matrimony and lineages? Doesn't leave a lot of opportunity for extracurricular breeding, I imagine.”
He tried not to wince at the reminder. It was old news, Bianca leaving him. And it wasn’t as if his current arrangement wasn’t vastly superior in every conceivable way. But some wounds ran deep, and the thought that even on the surface one couldn’t escape the clutches of the dwarven breeding programs and political alliances of old was enough to make him shudder.
Hawke’s arms tightened around him, a gentle kiss finding the crook of his neck.
Varric sighed and leaned into her touch. It was, at least, an intriguing point. And dwarven fertility did seem to experience a slight uptick amongst the surfacers. Maybe it was being away from all the blight, or lyrium, or hell, maybe they were all just sentient plants that hadn’t been getting enough sunlight.
“Alright, fine. Say I take you right now and a month from now you're vomiting into a chamber pot. You still haven't told me why you'd even want to have a little Hawke-Tethras terror running around.”
“Because I love you. And you love me. And because you're so amazing at taking care of everyone.”
The snort that tore from him was as self-deprecating as it was unbecoming. “I pay off a few guards here and there. It's not particularly comparable to midnight feedings and nursery rhymes.”
“You sang a dwarven lullaby for Daisy just last week,” she countered. And then to strengthen her case, she began humming a few bars, as if she’d heard it often enough to commit it to memory.
The image of her singing that song - once meant for a smithing dwarfess, now mostly just for his crossbow - to a mewling babe with her blue eyes was so vivid it almost took his breath away.
“Hawke…”
“How many times have you cleaned me up in the middle of a particularly gruesome hangover?” she pressed, running her fingers through his chest hair in a shameless bid to distract him.
“Too many.”
She refused to dignify that with a retort, opting simply to tug on a sprig of hair. “And how many times have you stitched one of us up after a barroom brawl?”
“That reminds me, I need more thread,” he muttered, running a thumb over a scar on her hand that he knew by feel.
“And who does everyone go to when they need cheering up or a bit of advice?”
“Not that they ever take it.”
“Varric.”
He squirmed. He knew he should take this seriously. List his very valid concerns like a fucking adult. But that would mean cracking the lid on a chest of unholy bullshit from his past that he was absolutely not prepared to open. “Hawke... That's different. They're our friends. It's a different sort of family to take care of. None of them wear diapers, for one. Except maybe Choir Boy. I'll have to ask.”
“Alright, fine. Then we'll just have to stick to what we know. Treat it like we do the group.”
Huh. She appeared to be feinting into baffle them with bullshit territory…
“Meaning…?”
“I'll just have to be the father, and you'll just extend your role as den mother.”
“Now that's an image,” he managed to chuckle. Her hair tickled his cheek as his bobbing shoulders jostled her.
“After the kid is out, you ass.” She twisted another curl of hair reprimandingly, and then bit his earlobe for good measure. He, in turn, bit back a groan that might've sent this conversation spiraling into the sphere of being much more immediately prevalent.
“Nope, still thinking about it. And I am not the den mother.”
“Want me to list off your maternal traits again?” she crooned evilly.
Varric grumbled something unintelligible that earned him a kiss to that warm place beneath the hinge of his jaw. Blight take him, she was playing dirty.
“And who in the group gives the orders and keeps everyone protected and out of trouble? Mostly.”
“Fine,” he finally conceded, catching her fingers to stop them tracing circles around one of his nipples. “I would kiss the scraped knees and you’d handle spankings. I'm still not sure you have a compelling enough case on your hands to convince me that you should take down your mystical anti-baby wards.”
But she would make her case, if she wanted it badly enough. Making a mockery of all things serious was a talent they happily shared, but he'd seen her turn into the very picture of responsible maturity when the cause was important enough. He liked to think he knew when the hell to dial back, but Hawke could turn it off and on when she wanted, and all signs were boldly and glaringly indicating that she wanted this.
Fine. Fine, they would talk. He could talk. Tell her the idea of having a child gave him hives - when he deigned to torture himself with the thought at all - and that it was at the very bottom of his to-do list, right next to climbing back into the deep roads and digging up red lyrium to encrust all of his jewelry with.
He would… break her heart. Dash all her pretty dreams with his sour, anxious snubbing.
He had to tell her, make himself clear and heard. It was the right thing to do. Honorable. Good.
Most importantly, it was the only fair thing for Hawke.
“Marian-”
“You want a compelling reason to have a kid?” she said bluntly, cutting him off. Her tone was bright, but there was a strain to it that belied an undercurrent of nerves. “Alright. Here's one. I'm late.”
Late.
“For what?” he asked without hesitation, so quickly he wasn't sure if it had been a genuine question or a stalling tactic. It had crossed his lips on pure instinct. But his blood was already running cold as the words leapt from his tongue.
“For an incredibly important date with the Maker's eternal joke at the expense of all women,” she clarified, oh-so-helpfully.
Varric wasn't an idiot. Sure, he was no midwife, nor had he come with the standard equipment that would've made him naturally privy to the plights of womankind. But he was worldly and well-read and had been enough of an inamorato to know the basics, maybe a bit more. And, well, there didn't tend to be a lot of grey area with late.
The panic started between his eyes, his face going utterly blank. Then a second flare radiated from his chest like a Chantry sunburst. The word dissolved into his mind, into his blood, until his whole body was an impossible combination of numb and lit with prickly pain. “Late…?”
“Late,” she confirmed resolutely, her arms disappearing from around his neck. He imagined her squaring her shoulders like she did before a tough mission, donning the tough-as-nails Hawke persona like she did when she was feeling just a bit too Marian.
Maker's breath…
It clicked hard and fast in his mind, like the well-oiled gears in his crossbow. The coy run-around, the hypotheticals... She wasn't asking him to father her children. She was asking him to give a shit about the one he already had…
Might.
Hawke only might be….
There was no room in his head for anything but fear and a string of his most colorful curses.
It took him a moment to find his voice and two inoffensive words to rub together, by which point Hawke had circled him and taken up a perch on the corner of his desk. Her card-honed mask was polished to perfection, and he was suddenly incredibly aware of just how much he was fucking this up.
“How…” His voice was a hoarse rasp and he had to clear his throat before he could start again. “How long?”
“A week and some change,” she replied easily, but her eyes strayed from his face to where she was toying with a wobbly button on the front of her dress. Right over her stomach.
A thrill of terror lashed through Varric, and in a moment of blind desperation, he reached out to still her hand. But his heart gave an uneven thud the instant his fingers brushed the smooth stretch of stomach he’d grown rather familiar with in recent months.
For now. Smooth for now.
His tricky, beautiful mind couldn’t form a single coherent thought. All he could do was stare at the flat plane beneath the tunic she’d stolen, trying to remember how to breathe.
Hawke laughed. It was a pained, nervous thing. Awkward. “Maker, I've finally struck you speechless. That almost makes the idea of grueling labor worth it.”
The word sent another stab of fear lancing through his core, but understanding followed hot on its heels. Maker’s ass, Hawke was scared.
He swallowed.
Well, at least that made two of them.
“Hawke, sweetheart... Are you sure?”
It felt like an idiotic question - who announced that just to shock the shit out of someone? - but this was Hawke. She was chaotic and forgetful and a living, breathing storm. Nevermind that she thought she was dying every time she caught a cold and invented whole internal lives for assholes that passed them on the street. Exaggeration was one of their favorite games, so maybe…
She toyed with the rings on his fingers, a gesture so utterly normal that it made the entire conversation seem comically absurd. One found its way from his finger to hers, the one sporting the healed break. It was laughably large, forcing her other fingers to splay in opposite directions to accommodate its width.
Then she smiled confidently and shrugged.
His heart lurched. She was bluffing. Grinning like a madwoman in the face of her fear, like always. It made him love her almost as much as he loathed himself at the moment.
“That I'm late? Definitely. That it means we have to begin thinking up baby names? Not yet. I’ll need to see Anders for that.”
Names… Andraste’s flaming knickers…
“How?” was all he could think to say. Of all creative ways they’d found to be reckless in their lovemaking, contraception hadn’t been one of them, so far as he could recall.
Hawke’s expression turned sheepish and she gave a soft sigh. “Remember that revenant we fought at the Harimann estate? Followed immediately by that fucking desire demon?”
Varric raised an eyebrow, trying and failing to follow. Still, he gave her a nod to continue.
“Well, it seems I may have… blown through all of my magic reserves in the effort to take the bastards out.”
His brow furrowed. He was decidedly not well-versed in magic and all of its associated weirdness. But he was finding it difficult to even try to make the connection. “If you’re saying you’re carrying some Fade abomination from unprotected demon exposure, I’m not sure I want to be there for the birth,” he quipped, his voice still tight.
“I would also prefer to opt out of that scenario,” she muttered, grimacing, but there was mild amusement dancing in her eyes. “Thankfully, I have every reason to believe I’m carrying - if I’m carrying anything at all - the dual heir to Houses Amell and Tethras.”
A shiver snaked down Varric’s spine that made his hair stand on end. “Oh?”
“Indeed. Just a totally normal human-dwarf hybrid. No demons involved, just a good, old-fashioned oops.”
“How do you figure?” he questioned, chest constricting.
She raised an eyebrow and pinned him with a look, seeming surprised and a little put out that he hadn’t gotten it yet. “The wards, Var.”
Oh.
“Oh…”
Shit.
No magic, no wards. No wards, nothing to stand between them and his worst nightmare.
Alright, so there were worse nightmares. But this at least made the list.
She watched him as carefully as her namesake, flipping the ring on her finger nearly sideways like she was going to leverage it to snap the digit clean off her hand.
Waiting. She was waiting for him to be his usual, unflappable self.
She needed him. Needed him to joke, to soothe, to wipe away her nerves with a laugh and gentle touch.
He opened his mouth, and for once in his fucking life, nothing emerged.
Fucking say something, Tethras!
“Well… Shit.”
Hawke smirked, as if that was the exact response she’d been expecting. “Seconded.”
Varric relaxed the tiniest fraction and drew in a shaking breath.
Fuck, there was so much to say and no good words to be had. Where was that damned thesaurus Daisy had bought him?
He licked his dry lips, capturing her fidgeting hand and stealing back his ring before she lost one of those lovely fingers. “I… Um… Shit.”
She hummed her second agreement of the past two minutes.
“Do you… If you’re… Would you… want it?” he finally managed. His normally silvered tongue suddenly felt like an unwieldy slug in his mouth.
Hawke tried to pull her hand away, but Varric threaded his meaty fingers through her long, slender ones. She stared at the pair of hands resting in her lap, that grin still plastered to her face. He wanted to make it genuine, or at least peel back that layer of carefully-crafted protection and poke at the heart of the issue. But he was barely keeping it together himself. At the moment, his mind was nothing more than a blank sheet of paper mocking him with its harsh emptiness.
“No, I figured we’d just drop it off at the chantry with a note saying, ‘One half-dwarf baby, good stock, free to the first bidder.’”
The corner of his mouth quirked upward for the first time. “You don’t bid on free shit, Hawke.”
She blew her dark fringe out of her face. “Fine. ‘Free to the first couple that doesn’t live in the slums.’ Being from Lowtown is one thing, but we’re already abandoning the poor little sot. No need to give them Gamlen as a neighbor.”
His stomach twisted. “Hawke, we’re not dumping the kid at the chantry. And if we did, I would be writing the note.”
This earned him a small grin - a true one, near as he could tell. He drew another breath, the only time he could get air proving to be when the tension eased in his chest enough to let his lungs expand.
But her smile quickly faded, and she was back to staring at their interlaced hands.
“Anders has… methods. Tonics. I’ve helped him mix them before, volunteering at the clinic. He probably wouldn’t notice if I nicked one from his cabinet.”
Shit…
Before he could think of a suitably groveling reply, the door to his room rattled nearly off its hinges.
Head whipping around in perturbed dissatisfaction, he shouted, “Go away, Rivaini. I’ve lost enough coin to you this week.”
The knocking persisted.
Disgruntled, Varric groaned and crossed the room, flinging open the door. “I’m also fresh out of the oil you keep stealing from my closet. You’ll have to find another way to grease up your raider friends.”
Aveline’s face screwed up in just about the purest expression of disgust the dwarf had ever seen. He’d have laughed about it if he didn’t feel like the floor had very recently dropped out from under him.
“Captain…” he greeted blankly. “I don’t have any oil for you, either. Apologies to Sideburns.”
Oh, he was definitely going to get punched for that one.
“Don’t kill him, Av,” came his favorite voice from inside the room. “I have a very distinct need of him at the moment.”
When he turned back to Hawke, she had hopped off the desk and was unbuttoning the shirt she’d purloined. Varric stared, trying desperately to grasp what about this situation made her feel the need to disrobe. It wasn’t until she tied the tailed ends into a knot around her waist that he realized she was getting ready to leave. Loose clothing made for dangerous battle gear, and all of Kirkwall was a permanent battlefield as far as Hawke was concerned.
Aveline glared at the reeling father-to-be before her - not that she knew that - and crossed her arms. “You owe me for this, Hawke.”
Marian only patted the guard captain’s arm on her way out the door, planting a kiss atop Varric’s head as she passed. To the redhead, she said, “Trouble with Bran again?”
Fucking hell, she was actually leaving?
“Hawke! We still have… pressing business here, don’t you think?” he flailed helplessly, following them out into the hall.
She smiled sympathetically from the top of the stairs. “Don’t worry, Varric. If I pass any suffering orphans in the street, I’ll be sure to tell them we’re full up on strays.”
Varric’s stomach felt like it was plummeting through the floor and straight to the deep roads. “That’s not what I… Hawke, come on. Let’s have a drink and work this out.”
“Oh, give it a rest, dwarf,” Aveline scolded, a wry twist to her lips. “You already announced that you were out of oil.”
He was too stunned by the straight-laced captain making a raunchy - if only by implication - joke that the pair managed to make it all the way down the stairs and out the tavern door before his feet began moving again. But he had already lost them, damned by his shorter-than-human legs.