#mov1ngparts: varric tethras

[soulcluster]

It should have been her left in the fade. Hawke had volunteered to stay and though it appeared to all the world as if she was doing so for noble reasons, in truth it was a sacrifice she wanted to make. Her life for... she didn't know, but it had to even out the scales somewhere. Her dying wouldn't bring back her father or her mother or Bethany but maybe it would make things right somewhere. Maybe it'd make her stop hating herself.

But she was still alive, sitting now in the room she shared with Varric and withering under his stare. He had pulled her out of the fade, literally, not allowing her to sacrifice herself just because she also hated herself.

She loved Varric. She had stopped denying that about herself. But there were many days she hated herself more than she loved him and Adamant had been a very fine line to tread.

Her eyes were cast downward to her lap, dark hair falling in her face.

"...I'm sorry."

What else could she say?

@mov1ngparts !

[soulcluster]

Kaitlyn wished with all her heart and every fiber of her being that she could tell him that she was only sorry that she had ever thought about throwing her life away, about giving up on never waking next to him on lazy sunny mornings again or spending the rest of their life together until they were old and gray.

The truth was that some part of her was also sorry that she was still around.

Falling in love and getting married hadn't erased the darkness that lurked in her heart, trying its best to consume her if she was ever not vigilant against it.

She didn't answer his question but was relieved when he sat down next to her. Yet she still couldn't meet his gaze. Not yet.

At least it was still true that she knew she could always talk to him.

"That place, being in the Fade, it was...too much for me. What that demon was saying and—" she stopped short, feeling tears well in her eyes. "Varric, those things that attacked us," her fingers tightened around the fabric of her pants, "that took the form of our fears. What...what were they for you?"

Beyond every layer he'd crafted for himself, and past the heart too big for his already barrel of a chest, Varric was a selfish man. Who was he to say whether she was doing it for the right reason or not? That certainly hadn't been the first thought to run through his mind when he'd locked his fingers around her wrist and pulled.

But he knew her. He knew Kait better than anyone. If she'd wanted to truly do the heroic thing, maybe he would have left her go -- though that's something he's not so sure about, that selfishness boiling in the pit of his stomach at the thought of losing her when he'd just got her -- but he wasn't going to let her kill herself, just because of the shit hand she'd been dealt in life.

"Sorry that you're still around, or sorry that you were going to give this up, just like that?" He was teeming with anger, but that anger was barely concealed fear and a touch of grief. It was a possibility, that they didn't understand each other anymore in the ways they had in the past, with how much he'd been caught up in the Inquisition. A possibility he damned.

Varric pushed off from his desk to sit next to her. "You can talk to me, Blossom. You've always been good at that."