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extravagantliar · 2 months ago

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Varric.

Varric?

We can run away! (No, we can’t; this is just a memory, Bianca… )

Tethras!

Does it haunt you, Child of the Stone? ( yes, doesn’t it haunt you, chuckles? ) @hoboblaidd

Varric?

Hey, Varric!

I’ll stay, you know that. ( But we never get it right, Hawke, do we? )

Varric?

Are you just going to sleep it all away? ( No, I’m coming, I’ll never stop; there is somewhere to return to…home. )

Hey, Varric! Wake up!

He opens his eyes.

The voices ring in his head, clattering and clamouring; blindly, he reaches for something not there, hand running through the air and knocking things off the table next to him, clattering to the floor and waking the aid in the room. Always someone with him, always someone to watch him - but he can’t finish that thought, his head aches and the room begins to spin. There is a deep sickness that stirs within him, and he lurches, much to the dismay of the healer who is now in the room with him. Sweat pours down his face, a bead pooling and matting in his beard. He feels coated in it, overwhelmed by it, and it makes his thoughts swirl. None of this makes sense - the visions, the dreams?

Hallucinations.

A body, rotting somewhere as the soul grappled with something - that’s what someone long ago would have summoned about this. He doesn’t know the thoughts to summon as his stomach turns, and now there are two healers and a shadow in the doorframe. A taller figure as the healers obscure the shadow, the long-drawn faceless shadow holds the same presence as the man who would once lean over his desk, paint his cards, and debate thought with him.

Solas?

He blinks, and it is not him - someone else, another new face acting on behalf of Mae, Dorian, and the Inquisitor. He doesn’t know how many people are in the room; it’s too many whatever it is, and his voice is awash among them, him yelling at them, anger that has not been his since a time in the crossroads in the Winter Palace, maybe since he was Viscount. They don’t listen, he doesn’t recognise the faces, and the fever has settled in his head, half lucid from the terror and half caught by the resting world, never letting him fully into the waking; it’s as if he’s stuck in some limbo, some great magic half keeping him in two places.

It’s bullshit he settles on, no longer thrashing at them. It doesn’t matter that they are something that his brain summoned up as some comfort as he navigates some fresh hell, debating the things still rattling in his head, the dream currently playing out before him, if it was one.

You are not dreaming, Varric.

That shadow divulges in his head as someone else slips into the room, into his vision. Maybe it is a hallucination. If it was, why couldn’t it have been somewhere dry, somewhere with cards? The healers ignore him, but they choose to talk to this new figure, telling them that he is feverish, dream-deluded, and likely needs new sutures.

Ah, the iron smell. That harsh smell of life, almost lost.

So he closes his eyes, and it calms the sick in the pit of his stomach. The clamouring in his head roars to life, summoning bits of his life. Rich, like earth, like the spot in his mind. Loam, like the house lost to the trees. Lime on the walls, acrid and followed by a hint of honey. There is Kirkwall, fry bread in the streets, the pale ale in the Hanged Man, the moment he makes a choice that puts him on this path.

Kirkwall roars to existence, a bustle of people he remembers from twenty years ago. Yet, everything is the same, mostly the same. He’s outside himself, looking from the top down, watching himself preen and talk to a merchant, until someone slips past him and tries to put their hands on his belt - well, Varric remembers this story; he knows the next steps before the version of him in the below completes them. Varric turns the man away in one motion, pushing him without thought into another and causing a sudden shift in the square.

Of course, the man above isn’t watching the fight he caused; he’s always causing one, and he’s watching the entrance on the west side.

He’s looking for lightning to strike. He’s waiting, actually, as if he gives it thirty more seconds, Hawke will appear in his vision for the first time in ten years. If he waits thirty more moments, but his vision blurs and he only hears the laugh of Hawke, and he finds himself clawing at the edge of that memory, the edges of that top down, to only see them, to hear their voice one more time that’s not a memory. His eyes burn, and his voice is raw, screaming for it, just one last time - that’s all he begs. Yet his voice falls on deaf ears, blind eyes, and an empty throne.

What is the point of dreaming if you can’t even see the things you want? Solas is an idiot, he decides, floating along and waiting for his body to respond. Instead, it is grey, a grey that bleeds over his body and saps the pain from his bones.

Dwarves don’t dream.

Yeah, yeah. He knows this. Half waving the thought away with a hand. He can move again; he’s no longer locked to the water; he’s just back flat on sand and gravel looking up, and there are no stars, no lyrium, just the pitch-dark black.

Just the peppering black and grey and a presence he can feel but cannot see just yet. “Yeah, yeah, I know. We don’t dream. This is a hallucination.”

“Correct. I am glad my words do not fall on deaf ears.”

“No, just myopic, I’m afraid; it came with age.” Like other things, bad knees, grey hair, the inability to scale a building like one once could. He doesn’t move; he remains on that shore, pinned somehow. “Hey, Chuckles…”

“Varric?”

“I wrote to you about Kirkwall, about everything.” There is silence that meets him here, just his body reacting to the memory of his friend.

Maybe he is dead.

“Did you get any of them?”

There is no answer; he knows that he won’t get one. He remembers a fire, and the world shifts, summoning that memory around them. He is no longer pinned to the shore, no longer pinned to some rock for someone to peck at him enterally. “I figured you didn’t. I sent them into the world, and nothing else.” Just a bird sent off, the same hope he had sending that raven out of Haven. “Told you how Kirkwall was doing, Sid, the girls. Two of them, by the way.” He doesn’t mention their names, doesn’t mention one is an elf, doesn’t mention that they’re the ones at stake with all of this. He doesn’t mention Rook; the other piece is played wide against his heart.

A fire pops in the middle of the Hinterlands, somewhere in Haven, somewhere in the middle of Crestwood, a fire pops, and he’s back on that stairwell, lying in the remains of Bianca and his own blood, lyrium taking over his body bit by bit.

He’s hallucinating, after all.

“Varric!” It’s the distant shout of Solas, mixed between the Approach and the Winter Palace. It is also Sid; it is also Hawke, Rook, Solas; it is also his mother…and Bianca. The song of the knife is everyone he’s ever loved, lost, ever had and ever found.

He’s hallucinating, after all.

He’s not alive after all. He died on those stairs; all of this is a chain reaction, his body trying to leave his family one last gift, a spirit trying not to leave its body.

He is not allowed to leave his body, fuck fate.

Fuck Solas, he decides. Fuck those words and what they stand for. He picks himself up out of the darkness, he forces it to. He makes himself. There is no try; there is only strength clawing its way past those words. He’s not hallucinating; he’s dreaming.

He’s dreaming.

As he’d heard Bartrand’s laugh, seen Hawke’s walk - the strut, but it’s a dream. He refuses it to be anything but.

He’s dreaming, after all.

He summons the words others had about dreams, how they could be moulded and crafted into the next; he’s a wordsmith, not a dreamer, and he ends back up on that stairwell, back at the bottom, looking from the top down as the him below shouts at Solas, a final plea for something that will not come. He curses his own idealism, being the advocate of the man holding the knife, not about the veil - but about the way one moves through the world and that people are always dying.

He laughs, dying by degrees.

“You find this humorous?” Solas interjects, next to him, somehow.

He’s long past the point of jumping, “Just starting to root for you this time.”

“You always did have a sick sense of irony.”

“I still do; you’d know that if you’d been listening.” The dwarf states.

“I have been, Varric.”

“Sometimes I wonder.” Varric starts, half unfocused, “It’s like we only get this in pieces.” He expects some smarmy answer, about how he is a novice to all this and how it’s expected for someone so unpracticed in dreaming, but it does not come. Rather, they just stand there; they watch the great ugly thing play out, a great breath out of Varric and a look that he cannot place on Solas’s features - not of the one above and not of the one below.

The scene fades, like a curtain over a play, and he’s not the one who dims it. There are only two of them, so he wonders if it could be real after all. It could be - could it be? And he is cast back wide into that floating ocean, where that green light beacons him home.

Is he hallucinating?

He’s dreaming. He’s already decided he’s alive, and he is dreaming. He has to be as a voice - another voice pulls at him; he doesn’t have to wallow; he can make his amends if he needs to. There are still grains in that hourglass. He can still follow that great light.

Who cares what it is?

Who cares?

He does, clawing back towards the light.

He opens his eyes. He gasps for that breath, and his hand goes to his chest; the bandages are dry, but he’s met with concern from around the room. He thinks he’s still dreaming, half hallucinating as he moves.

He is alive.

He reminds himself this as Sidri throws arms around him and tells him again he’s not allowed to leave. Those words barely sound like her; there’s an echo to them. There’s a shadow that looks a lot like Solas in the doorframe again. He blinks, and the man is gone.

Sidri remains.

He’s alive, he states, broken in a voice that doesn’t sound like his.

“You’re alive.” She confirms. The same voice she used to silence court, Cullen, and other clowns.

He’s alive.

Just haunted.

#.from the desk of: v. tethras ( headcanon )#.you were never a regret ( HOBOBLAIDD )#.datv swerve #i have played with this for days #.a tale untold ( MARTYRMARKED )#we in this house like to call this the great haunting of varric tethras #my apologies mainly to tepid as they knew this was loaded for days and they will see the rook line and shoot out of their office to KILL ME #anyway i am very sorry that this is very scattered and introspective but welcome to the mind of someone who shouldnt dream

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