#ty audrey - from the MOMENT this ask came in its been ALL IVE BEEN ABLE TO THINK ABOUT AHHHHH

[queenofbaws]

Bed sharing 15 Hakwe and Varric GOSH GUYS WHAT CHANGED HMM I WONDER

definitely more than six sentence sat(or)sunday!!!

“So?”

“Oh, it’s not so bad! I mean…as far as burnt-out husks of ancient war forts go, anyway.”

“A ringing endorsement!”

“I’m just saying we’ve slept in worse.”

Varric stepped aside with a gentlemanly wave of the hand, allowing Hawke to saunter her way into the room before him; and saunter she did, her stride the familiar rolling bounce it had been back in Hightown, Lowtown, the docks, the Gallows, everywhere in between. She stood in the middle of the room he’d claimed as his own, her arms akimbo, her stance loose beneath the gleam of her Champion’s regalia—and then he pulled the door shut behind him, and all that posturing fell away.

“Maker’s tits, I forgot how exhausting being the Champion of Kirkwall was!” she groaned, rolling her eyes up towards the ceiling even as she tore her gauntlets off and let them drop to the ground.

“I forgot how complicated that awful armor of yours is,” he snorted, latching the door and testing its hold before similarly allowing the performance to drop from his shoulders. “Why do I remember it being pointier than that?”

“Ah, that. Yes, well. Time makes fools of us all, Varric, I am no exception.” She paused in undoing a buckle to flash him a look through her eyelashes, her grin wry but warm. “As it turns out, fleeing the Chantry isn’t quite as exciting as the stories would have you believe. Sometimes, during those long, cold nights in the middle of absolutely nowhere, a girl finds she has no way to amuse herself but to file away the edges of her dress armor. Just…rasping a single rock against those hard edges over and over again, dwelling on the myriad mistakes which brought her to that singular moment.”

His eyebrow went up.

She raised both of hers in return.

“So it just always looked like that, huh?”

“Pretty much. Maybe your memory’s going in your old age. Here, will you help me with these?”

Something had happened that morning, when they’d met in Skyhold’s courtyard—out in the open, of course, in broad daylight, because that was how clandestine rendezvous actually happened. It wasn’t something either could put words to, which was something of a miracle in and of itself, considering who they were, but it had happened all the same: Things had simply picked up where they’d left off. As though time hadn’t passed, like the only thing that’d changed was where they were and what flag flew in the ramparts over their heads. Everything else had slotted back into its proper place, and they were themselves again.

Or at least that was what they’d thought.

Because then Varric took hold of one of the leather straps wrapped around Hawke’s back and something else happened. Something they could’ve put words to. Something they chose not to, all the same.  

Hawke cleared her throat slightly, hoping to draw attention away from how abruptly her laughter had stopped, making a grand show of tying her hair back out of her face as Varric went about unfastening her armor as he’d done countless times before back in Kirkwall. “I thought Cullen was going to burst into flame when I first walked out this morning. I never really understood the phrase ‘He looked like he’d seen a ghost’ until then, know what I mean?”

“Curly’s who you were looking at, huh?” he joked, willing his fingers to keep working as he undid the first of the belts securing her chestpiece and moved to the second, so much of the day already forgotten, pushed out of place by the bone-deep familiarity of the moment they found themselves in just then. “You want to talk about bursting into flame, I thought the Seeker was going to ascend to the Golden City when you looked at her.”

“That wasn’t her normal face, then?”

“Oh, sure. The Divine’s biggest, scariest guard-dog usually walks around blushing up to the roots of her hair and stammering like a Templar recruit passing by a brothel for the first time—you wouldn’t believe how much it intimidates the political prisoners.”

“I’ll bet. Could you imagine if Meredith had gone around giggling like a little girl all the time? Terrifying. Literally the stuff of nightmares.”

They snickered at that, and the snickering turned to laughter, and the laughter threatened to become guffaws, and there in the half-dark of the drafty old room, they might well have been in the Hanged Man again, congratulating themselves on another scam that broke in their favor. The déjà vu of it all was palpable, especially as Hawke pressed her hands to her chest to keep her armor from clattering to floor as Varric loosened that final belt and he turned away to start a fire in the grate to give the place some measure of warmth. They’d been there a million times before, done it all to the point where it’d become routine.

Only they hadn’t. And it wasn’t. And still neither said anything about it.

Hawke let out a groan of relief much too loud to be anything but a joke as she stripped the rest of her regalia off, shedding the Champion’s skin so she could slip back into her own. “Much better,” she sighed, stretching this way and that until her spine popped. “While we’re on the topic, I must admit, Varric…few things prepared me to walk in here and find you wearing something other than that duster of yours.”

Once the fire had caught, he glanced over his shoulder and then glanced away just as quickly, trying in vain to convince himself that it was that same familiarity, that same sense of being back in another time and place, that caused his heart to stutter in his chest at the sight of her. “We weren’t on the topic, but far be it from me to—”

“Sure we were! You said my armor was terrible, I agreed, you asked if it’d always looked like that, I made a witty joke…”

“Uh huh,” he smirked, beginning the (much less familiar) process of slipping out of his own armor as Hawke paced around, getting an eyeful of his quarters. “Yeah, well, as it turns out, her Inquisitorialness just really gets a kick out of dragging all of us out into the middle of nowhere to stare through skulls and pick up shards of who-knows-what, and a guy can only handle so many bug bites before enough is enough.”

She hummed in acknowledgement, then languidly waved towards him. “Does the, uh…lack of sleeves help? With the bug bites, I mean?”

“Ha ha.”

“No, I’m curious. Riveted, even.” She turned down a corner of the bed’s sheets and considered herself for a moment, running through silent reminders of all the bedrolls they’d shared back home, not to mention the number of times his palatial suite had acted as her palatial suite. There was no reason for this to be any different, none whatsoever, so she climbed in before her traitorous mind could speak up in a voice louder than her exhaustion. “It’s been a long while since we’ve spoken face-to-face, so I’ll grant that you may have forgotten, but I’m Fereldan, Varric, and my people sort of invented slumming through the mud, you understand. I’m just wondering whether the bugs in Orlais are different, that’s all.”

“Wait, you’re Fereldan?” he joked. “Since when? I’ve never heard you talk about that before! Are you sure you’ve mentioned it to me?”

She sank down into the pillow, hugging it close to her face, and when she felt the mattress dip beside her, she willed herself to shut her eyes. Pretending he hadn’t interrupted at all, she continued, “Are they intimidated by your muscles?”

“Hilarious.”

“Well, are they?”

Varric pulled the blankets up against Skyhold’s usual chill, yanking especially hard near Hawke’s side to jokingly cover her face. “Goodnight, Hawke,” he said flatly, though the laugh that punctuated it robbed it of any finality. “So glad to have you back.”

“Glad to be back,” she hummed into her pillow, turning the covers down just enough that they came up to her chin. “I did so miss my trusty dwarf,” she laughed, then pitched her voice down lower to add, “And his arms, my word!”

When their chuckling tapered off, there was only the sound of the fire crackling low in the grate. No raucous drunks hollered from just beyond the wall, none of their friends’ heated arguments snuck in through the cracks of the door, and all at once it became perfectly obvious that for all the things that’d stayed the same during their time apart, something bigger had changed. This wasn’t Kirkwall, and it wasn’t the Hanged Man, and this wasn’t how it had felt to fall asleep beside one another after a day of doing someone else’s dirtywork.

It wasn’t even close.

“I did miss you,” Hawke said after a beat, when it became obvious neither of them was about to fall asleep. “Jokes aside.”

“Yeah, I…I missed you too, Hawke.” Again the feeling of first seeing her in the courtyard rose up fresh in his chest, the relief so thick, so palpable, that even with the warmth of her beside him, it was a little difficult to accept she was actually there. That she wasn’t just a memory, a handful of coded words scrawled on an old piece of parchment carried across Thedas and back. He hadn’t been able to react the way he’d wanted to then, not with all of the Inquisition milling about, and he wondered why now, away from all those prying eyes, he still felt that same need to hold back.

Probably, he thought, because of that unspoken thing lingering between them; because he had the strangest suspicion that if he reached out and touched her at all, for even a moment longer than it had taken him to undo her armor, he wouldn’t be able to let go, that once he had her in his arms there’d be no going back. And wasn’t that a frightening thing to be thinking about your friend?

Hawke’s arms only tightened around the pillow, proof positive the fear wasn’t his alone. “I mean…I really missed you, Varric,” she admitted, her voice muffled by down but plenty loud enough to hear in Skyhold’s silence. “I guess I didn’t realize how much time we spent together until…well, we weren’t.”

“Preaching to the choir.” It was all he could think to say. It didn’t feel like enough. Probably because it wasn’t. “But here we are again, huh? Different boss, same bullshit, slightly better booze…”

“Anything is better than what Corff served.”

“…and unfortunately for a certain magister who shan’t be named, we’re back together.”

“Close enough to pick the same pocket.”

“Damn right. Nothing to do now but make up for lost time.”

There was a beat where it hung between them thicker than ever, the thing they’d been avoiding…and then Hawke, the one who always made a point to jump when an abyss presented itself if only to see whether this would finally be the time she figured out how to fly, let go of her pillow and slid her arm across Varric’s chest instead, shifting to nestle her chin against his shoulder and remove what remained of the space where that silent, changed thing had been hiding.

Varric turned to her, and she met his eyes, and then their foreheads were touching, and there was a hand in her hair, and neither could say who had started it, but their lips came together and Skyhold melted away for a moment.

“It’s a lot of time to make up for,” Hawke said when they pulled apart, her lips curved in a wicked smirk as they brushed his, her voice equal parts whisper and taunt.

“Eh,” Varric chuckled, his thumb tracing slow circles along the back of her neck as he brought her close again, “We’re pretty good team, you and me. I think we’ll figure it out.”