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I wonder how far into the Deep Roads I’d need to go to get eaten by a genlock.
“Hey, Hero? Any idea how close we are to the nearest entrance to the Deep Roads?”
Blackwall turns his head to face him. His brows are drawn close and the vague impression of a mouth that his beard allows is twisted in distaste. “You’re even more of a surfacer than I am, ‘dwarf,’ so I don’t believe you’re looking to connect with the Stone — ah.”
The Grey Warden’s expression changes quickly from broad and mocking concern to something sly and, frankly, filthy. (His face gives him away every time, Varric notes to himself. He plays at being stony but he’s mercurial — something silverite metaphor something? Hm.)
“Thing is, Varric” and oh, Void, the mountain man thinks he’s funny. “I wouldn’t want to send you into any truly deep chasms. The Deep Roads can give any man a rough time, if you follow.” (He follows, because he’s not a choirboy.) “I just couldn’t — as a man of honour — send you into such a tight spot. A, uh, hard predicament .”
“All right, Ser Beardrington, you made your point. Should have known better than to expect sympathy.”
Blackwall laughs at him. “Oh, yes, you suffer!”
The problem is that he is, in fact, suffering. Exquisitely, if he’s honest. (He indulges in a little honesty, in private.) His predicament is going to become quite hard, imminently, if something doesn’t change.
For some Maker-forsaken reason, the famously shapely ass of the Champion of Kirkwall is settled quite comfortably in his lap.
***
“Bon appétit, monsieur Tethras!” Aurélie — his cheesemonger’s daughter — was a charming young girl who hadn’t yet had the gleam of her Montsimmard manners dulled by too many years of Kirkwall grime. It was too early for all that gleam, though, especially for a dwarf who preferred to stay indoors and be less hungover.
Varric managed a nod and tucked the soft, cloth-wrapped cheese in beside the glass jar of gleaming red preserves and the loaf of bread he’d already bought. Maker, he was a good host. If a bit selfish: who could blame him for not wanting to eat the daily swill at the Hanged Man on a sour stomach (the cause of which was swilling too much at the Hanged Man, the day before).
A half-decent meal will do us both good, he thought, unlocking the door to his rooms (with the key, quietly). Soak up the dregs of the ale. And the whisky, if we’re lucky.
He could never really decide if his luck was excellent or terrible, but this morning he seemed to have its favour: Marian Hawke was in his bed, still sleeping.
She was unguarded in sleep, black hair mussed and breath slow. There was a light flush on her pale cheeks, and her mouth carried a hint of the stain Isabela had dared her to apply the night before. Her leggings, boots, and robes were in a pile near the foot of the bed, and the toes of her right foot were poking out from beneath the covers.
She stirred. The fine wool blanket that covered her bunched up her hip and down her chest, gathering at the curve of her waist. A strong, smooth-skinned arm curled toward her chin. She sighed, and her breath carried the smallest hint of a moan with it.
Varric stared as the collar of her chemise moved a hair’s-breadth away from her skin. The loose laces were undone; the collar fluttered open. He did not move, or breathe, or (in a historic first) open his damned mouth to say anything.
He didn’t plan to be a creep and a lecher, but he spent all of his time with a woman who was objectively beautiful and subjectively equal parts wonderful and terrible. He wasn’t entirely sure what else was mixed up with it, but he liked her. Was impressed by her. Laughed at half of what came out of her smart, wide mouth, and paid attention to all of it.
She was a refugee, and an apostate, and flat broke more often than not. He’d never seen anyone that people were so eager to fight, or fuck, or follow. In any order.
In 9:32 Dragon Hawke was already enough to make Varric drag his sorry, hungover ass halfway through Kirkwall to buy her good cheese. After he’d slept in an armchair all night. Oh sure, he was impressed, all right.
She woke when he placed a heavy mug of tea next to the bed.
“Rise and shine, Hawke!”
“ Must I? Can’t I lay back and moan, Varric?”
(Shit.)
“Suit yourself, Chuckles. I’ve got no problem taking care of your half of the cheese.”
She had a way of smiling when she was pleased about something, slow and broad. She opened one eye, then both. When she sat up, she put her hands behind her on the mattress and pushed, arching her back up and stretching her neck from side to side. She reached both arms above her head, all long limbs and strong wrists, the clear muscles of a staff-wielder, and breathed deep.
The chemise that had been floating over her sternum minutes earlier was not skimming over anything anymore; he watched her chest press out against it and, unlaced as it was, stared plainly at the softness threatening to spill out.
“Varric! Is that the Orlesian one that I like? Turn around so I can make myself halfway decent —”
“ — Hawke said, not understanding the futility of the situation —”
“ — yes, ha ha, now look away. Or not, I suppose it’s your choice, but I am getting breakfast in the next half a minute.”
He looked a little longer, and Hawke looked back at him. By the time he’d turned away she was already stretched over the side of his bed, reaching for her robes.
***
Krem shows his cards and swears loudly. “Venhedis! Chief, you want to explain where you’re hiding cards under that complete absence of shirt you’re wearing?”
“You wish, Krem-de-la-crème . No need to cheat when I’m just this good,” replies the big qunari. “The trick is to pay at least as much attention to the cards as you are to the pretty bard on the other side of the room. Sound about right, Varric?”
Varric has not been paying as much attention to his cards as he should have, and he’s been caught. At least he’s finished the round with some dignity and no less coin than he started with, unlike the poor lieutenant. He knows Krem is one of the bravest people at the table, which isn’t anything to sniff at, but the kid’s still blushing and casting worried looks past the fireplace where the pretty bard is strumming.
Hawke is evidently feeling helpful. “Varric is usually paying a terrible amount of attention to his cards, The Iron Bull, but there’s always something up his sleeve or down his shirt. Potentially — I’ve heard rumours — in his trousers.” He chooses not to see the half-wink she points at him. The batting of dark eyelashes, the sharp crease at the corner of her eye. They’re both older than they used to be, and she’s got a very faint hint of crow’s feet coming through. He likes them, because of course he does. He’s sure he would like any of her sharp corners, her soft creases.
(Varric is forty years old, and in the privacy of his own mind he’s resigned to being a little embarrassing.)
“Hmm,” says Bull with mock thoughtfulness. “That’s a different problem, then. The cards are only half the game.”
The Iron Bull has all the subtlety of, well. He’s seven feet tall if Varric’s an inch, and has a voice to match. And he’s supposed to be a spy.
Because the Maker loves the world (or wants a favour), the dealer takes this moment to speak up. “All right, everyone, cards back to me, please. Who will play another round with us?”
The lieutenant of the Chargers and their eponymous Bull bow out. Varric’s reaching a hand up to tap Hawke on the thigh — he’s selfish, and a fool, but he’s got some self-preservation instincts and two seats have just come open — when Krem ducks back and takes the chairs with him.
Hawke twists around to face him, as well as she can. It’s amazing how well they line up, when they’re sitting or lying down. “Looks like you’re stuck with me here for a bit longer. Is the view okay?”
He returns the smirk he’s sure she’s expecting. “No complaints here. Besides, we’ve survived closer quarters than this.”
Fuck the Iron fucking Bull. Varric’s hand connects with Hawke’s thigh anyway. He tries to play it casual. He’s sure they’d had that easy physicality once, before everything got weird.
***
For instance:
The Coterie boss was something of a fashion connoisseur. Varric could respect a dwarf with style and an appreciation for the finer things. He’d even seen a couple of tunics with the sheen of fine sea-silk as he was climbing up behind Hawke into the imported garderobe. If they made it out of here alive and with a free hand he might consider liberating them from one of Kirkwall’s most mediocre criminals.
At the moment he had more pressing concerns.
“Hawke,” he murmured into his best friend’s heavily reinforced bosom. “I have to admit, this escapade has brought me face to, uh, not face with some parts of you I’m not sure if I can handle.”
He had no choice but to feel her laugh silently. Selfish of her, using up any of the warm air. It was hot enough outside, sweltering in that late spring way that reminded every Kirkwaller that summer would be much, much worse, and Varric was crammed into an overstuffed clothes closet with his head all full of her.
He thought about giving up their hiding spot by shooting himself in the foot. He contemplated the Chant of Light.
“Gasp!” whispered Hawke. She said “gasp” almost every time. It was incredibly annoying, and he loved it. “My virtue!”
“Your what now?”
“Don’t be too funny, Varric. It’s hard for me to hear the punchlines from up here.”
He pinched her hip, a wordless reminder that short jokes were entirely off-limits. “Okay, now you have to be quiet or they’re definitely going to find us, they might succeed in killing us, and then I’ll never get to make Rivaini jealous that I had this — phwa , are your robes enchanted to try to crawl into my mouth, or is that just my good luck? — intimate encounter with you.”
“...Varric?”
“Mmph?”
“Shut up before I smother you to death with my tits on purpose.”
“Mmph.”
He stayed quiet for long enough to get out. And then he talked, at length, about the experience to anyone who would listen. Talk was purgative, for Varric.
***
“Snacks!” shouts the woman on his lap. “Snacks! ” It’s not a demand, but an exultation. She’s celebrating the arrival of two serving girls with large, well-laden boards covered in dried fruit and nuts, cured meats and pickled vegetables. Several cheeses, and not only the hard, crumbling kinds the Fereldans prefer.
“Gasp!” says Hawke. Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast looks at the Champion of Kirkwall in a way that indicates she’s not sure she believes any of this is happening. “Excuse me, I said ‘gasp?’ What I mean is that that one” and here she gestures in the direction of a large, slumping cheese with a soft white rind “is my favourite. ” She shifts her torso around to open up the space between Varric and his sight-line on the table. “In Kirkwall, Varric used to get it for me, sometimes. Before I’d gotten my feet under me, I mean.”
The Seeker is now looking at Varric with a familiar and troubling intensity. He’s not in her good books right now, and she’s never in his, but he’d prefer to sit through a friendly night of cards without getting interrogated about his motivations for buying cheese ten years ago.
“You were new in town, you didn’t know where to find the good stuff! It was a professional courtesy, from one ne’er-do-well to another.”
Now Hawke is looking at him with a rare but no less troubling intensity, and she’s grinning . It’s a concern, if he’s being honest. “A professional courtesy! That’s what we’re calling it?” She wiggles a little on his lap. She seems to be making a point of it.
“A goodwill gesture?” She smiles even wider. “A, uh, hospitality custom?” Her eyes are wide, and bright, and blue, blue, blue. “A nutritional supplement?” She loses it, there, sputtering out her laugh and throwing her arms around his neck.
“I missed you, trusty dwarf.” She can speak very quietly, when she wants to.
“...I missed you too, Hawke.”
She adjusts herself a bit in her seat, taking some of the pressure off of him for the time being, and seems almost demure as she turns back around.
***
“All right, troublemakers and ne’er-do-wells! Who wants to lose some money to the Queen of the Eastern Seas?”
Isabela was in perfect form, pun halfway intended. It had been a good day — a good week, even. They’d run off (or down) some slavers, and caused a good amount of trouble for the Knight-Commander’s worst and dullest. Letters had come from the twins, as safe and as well as they could be, off with the Grey Wardens. Hawke’s greatest worry, for the moment, appeared to be more social in nature.
“Please take my money, Bela. Please. If I can gamble away my fortune then maybe mother will stop trying to present me as a beautiful woman of means, still young enough to start a family. If I can stall for another ten or so years I can wait out at least one of those things, and giving away the farm will take care of the ‘means’ problem.”
“Sweet thing,” cooed Isabela, insinuating herself into a space on the bench next to Hawke that definitely did not exist there a moment earlier. “You know I’d like nothing more than to unburden you. Of your gold, or anything else you fancy.”
They were stunning next to each other, both of them brilliant, powerful, and beautiful in their own ways. Varric saw the way Hawke’s gaze flickered down the plunge of the pirate’s neckline, up the length of her bare, brown leg to the slit in her tunic. Rivaini usually looked at her conquests head-on, but he caught the subtle movement of her glances towards Hawke’s mouth, her calloused hands, the curve of her throat.
He watched the two women collapse into each other, cackling.
The lump in Varric’s throat was likely jealousy, he was beginning to understand. The lump threatening to form much lower was not.
"Andraste’s holy knickers,” muttered Anders from where he sat at the end of the table nearest the back door to the tavern. "Let me never forget that there's more types of tension than the running for your life kind."
Even Fenris snickered at that, though he was already ready with a goad or a barb for the tall apostate. “Careful, mage. I’m not sure those kinds of feelings are righteous enough for your abomination.”
“Hush, elf. I’m trying to pay attention.”
They played cards until after the main room of the Hanged Man had cleared for the night of anyone who didn’t also live there. Hawke relaxed over the evening, turned half-boneless and comfortable.
She was tactile on these evenings that came after good days. Varric saw the way her shoulders lowered, and how her smile went soft and hazy in the lamplight. Hawke didn’t have any regular lovers, to his knowledge, but he saw the way she craved touch. She held Merrill’s hand and threw an arm around Fenris’ shoulders, leaned into Aveline and made Anders start when she tucked a piece of his hair behind his ear. But she returned, every time, to her spot on the bench between Varric and Isabela.
Hawke was sprawled, somehow taking up more space than should have rightly existed at their table. Varric was sure that was a metaphor, but the legs that tangled in his direction and threatened to close behind his calves were not. She leaned the other way back against Isabela who had, at some point, started tracing aimless patterns on the inside of her forearm.
It was fine.
It was, until the Rivaini woman leaned in and muttered something directly into Hawke’s ear. He didn’t need to hear what she had said; the offer was clear. He watched the smile on Hawke’s face, the way her eyebrows jumped up underneath her haphazard fringe.
And then she sat up. Varric tried not to flinch.
“Friends, it’s come to my attention that I’m falling asleep in my cards. Which is a surefire way to lose all my money to the likes of you — not you, Merrill — and to find myself pitched into the alley in the morning. Upon reflection I believe I would like to re-impoverish myself over a longer period of time. So! I believe I will” she pronounced, in the exaggerated tones of grandeur she sometimes put on “retire for the evening.”
It was no surprise that everyone drained their drinks and gathered what coin they had remaining. She was their leader, after all.
Something hot and sharp sat in Varric’s gut, and he couldn’t even pretend it was the house stew as Isabela swayed to the bottom of the stairs to led the inn’s private rooms and said “coming, Hawke?” in a tone so doubly intended it was about to become a polygamist.
“Ohhh, thanks as always, beautiful Bela, but I was going to kick Varric out of his bed tonight. He’s got that lovely feather mattress, and his complaints about sleeping in an armchair are always exceptional over morning tea. If that’s all right with my trusty dwarf, of course?”
Rivaini was a good sport in almost everything, which didn’t stop her from leaning in to kiss Hawke just to the side of her mouth before bidding them goodnight and returning to her room on her own.
In retrospect, that was probably the moment that things got weird.
***
The game at the Herald’s Rest is more subdued, now, the hour late and the fires burning low. The last round had just been Varric and Hawke, Lady Montilyet, the Warden, and the Seeker. Varric’s lap has been empty for a while.
Blackwall stands with a muffed grunt and makes his excuses. “Well past the hour for tired soldiers to be to their bedrolls,” and that’s the impetus to break up their small group of stragglers for the night. He and Hawke both stay seated and he recognizes the feeling of waiting for someone else to leave as the others say goodnight.
“Ready to turn in, Hawke? I heard something about how it’s past the hour for tired soldiers to be to their bedrolls .”
She laughs at his mimicry. “I know it’s been a while, but please tell me you haven’t confused me with a soldier. I'm hardly good material for the rank and file. Someone wrote a book about me, you should read it sometime. I’m exceptional, Varric, including being exceptionally bad at doing what I’m told.”
“You? Contrary? Nah.”
There’s a universality to the way a low-burning flame lights up a room in the small hours. He’s in an enchanted keep hidden in the mountains, somehow a fixture of a heretical crusade to save the world; he’s in an dockside inn on the last, tense night that Hawke had been in Kirkwall, before she ran away from the destruction Anders wrought; and he’s in the Amell estate with Hawke as she lay on the floor of her bedchamber, holding her mabari and mourning her mother without words.
Part of him, insistent and over-large and never fully quiet, is by the hearth in his old rooms at the Hanged Man with his hands in Hawke’s hair and the taste of his best brandy on her lips. (It hadn’t seemed weird at all, in the moment, but they’d been tipsy, and tired, and so he said best you take the bed for yourself, and that had been the end of it. People drunkenly kissed their closest friends all the time. It wasn’t like the weight of that near-miss had hung over them for years after, like the pebble that starts the avalanche. Not at all.)
“Thank you, Varric,” Hawke says, in the real firelight of the present. “I thought I remembered hearing somewhere that I’m very agreeable.”
“Do you see yourself agreeing to a game of Diamondback? And maybe one for the road?”
The way the orange of the firelight hits the blue-black of her hair has her shining. Radiant, he thinks, because he’s a fool. He wants to cup her in his hands the way he’s seen soldiers in the camps hold embers in small bowls of sand, to keep warm by a dangerous glow.
They play.
***
Hawke’s last hours in Kirkwall had been drenched in smoke and ashes. It was good to have a friend who was the Guard-Captain, if only because he could tell her exactly where the patrols shouldn’t go. Namely to one of the sadder dockside inns favoured almost exclusively by bottom-rung sailors. It was out of the range of the worst of the damage from the explosion at the Chantry, and if the Templars and the Guard were distracted with clean-up and relief, then Varric could focus on getting enough letters of credit and coin together to keep his friends — and Hawke — safe on their flight.
She sat down beside him, while he worried at his quill. “I think you’re supposed to eat the fowl attached to the feather, not the quill removed from the bird.”
“Oh,” he said, and it came out heavier than he intended. “Is that where everything went wrong?”
They were quiet for some time. “I need to tell you something, Hawke,” he started, and she stared at him in unconcealed panic. “Not — not that. Andraste, do you think I — no.” He scrubbed a hand down his face and started again, very quietly. “It’s Anders. I know you let him go. You were merciful, it’s very big of you. I respect your reasons for doing that, whatever they are. But if you want the option of changing your mind, well. I think I know where he’s headed. At least to start.”
He looked straight ahead, not into the flames but at the plain, worn wood of the walls. As if he was interested in the knots and splinters there and hadn’t just told Hawke that he could help, if she wanted to change her mind about not murdering their friend and companion of the last many years.
She didn’t reply, just looked away and into the fire. Eventually, he went back to his letters and signatures. When she walked away she placed a hand on his shoulder. “Goodbye for now, Varric. I think I would have rather you told me the other.”
He looked up when he heard her walk away. As always, his eyes always followed her out of the room.
***
“Ha ha! Tell me, Varric, what does it mean when I have the high cards and you have the low, measly, losing cards? I don’t know if I remember how to play this game.”
“Funny, Chuckles, real funny.”
“Chuckles! Maker, I haven’t heard that from you in an age.”
He makes an apologetic face. “Ah, yeah, I maybe reassigned that one? To, uh, Solas? You know, tall elf, dresses like a forest hobo, absolutely massive ego?”
Hawke makes a face in turn that looks a lot like when her mabari used to dry by the fire after three days spent tromping through seaweed on the Wounded Coast. “Urgh. Please, take it back. I’m sure Solas is fine, but I do not want you thinking of me like that.”
It’s late, so he laughs but doesn’t stop himself from saying “I swear on my honour as a writer” so she knows he’s serious, from within the joke “that I don’t think of you in the same way I think of Solas.”
Marian Hawke is a living legend in half of Thedas. A powerful mage, even without the connections and reputation. An accomplished trouble-maker, and a terrifying opponent. Shit, she’s a terrifying friend, sometimes.
But there’s a way of looking at her, in a quieter, softer light, when she’s tilted her sharp features just so, and her blue eyes (he’d have to forgive himself the cliché, but: like sapphires) sparkle at him with good fun, but no guile. He loves seeing her like this, not as a story but as herself.
It’s one of the greatest gifts of his strange, remarkable life that he gets to.
Her voice is not loud and very sweet when she takes his hand over the table and says “let’s settle up, Varric. Take me home. ”
They’ve been sipping their ale for hours now, splitting wins of Diamondback between them. His head’s fairly clear but his mouth is strangely dry when he swallows and, without saying much stands, still holding her hand. He leaves an overly large collection of coins on the bar, and they walk out into honest starlight together.
***
He takes her home, which is the place where he sleeps and where she fills up all the empty spaces in him.
In his rooms she lights all the candles at once with a flick of her fingers, and he lights up all over at the touch of her skin.