The Three Loves of Varric Tethras
I.
The first time Varric fell in love it felt like lyrium, or what he thought lyrium would feel like if he’d ever been stupid enough to drink it-hot, bright, and ultimately poisonous. He and Bianca had been so young, and each time they’d met to discuss business they’d found more and more excuses to linger, to touch, to tease.
She’d already been betrothed to Bogdan when she’d first sat down across from him at The Hanged Man.
“Heard you needed a mechanist.”
Even at the start she’d been testing the waters, tactically feeling around his defenses with her smiles and innuendos.
And he’d been happy to be tested, especially after she’d revealed her attachment to House Vasca and her surname. Varric learned an early contempt for anything remotely resembling Dwarven tradition, and, arrogant little shit that he was, he was sure he could get Bianca into his arms and away from her impending marriage with little to no effort.
He was half right.
The longer they danced around each other in the shadiest, dank hidey holes in Kirkwall, the more desperate his touches became, the faster her kisses, the more terrified he grew that this was the last meeting. Each time they parted, it felt like his heart was being dragged through a sewer grate in Darktown, scraped raw and left bleeding.
He’d never met a more intelligent person who could match him quip for quip, make him question his views on the world, his assumptions about her and about himself.
Varric had waited for her at the Docks for twelve hours past their agreed upon meeting time, all the while making excuse after excuse for her absence even as he knew she’d decided to marry the Vasca.
After her marriage, their couplings had been no less heated but were tempered with a sourness that left Varric brooding, and sometimes blind drunk, for days afterward.
Her life got easier as she was given any resource she wanted to prove her genius to the kalnas and Orzammar alike, while he was left in the cold, occasionally allowed to touch her when she had the time and the inclination.
Bianca had already written the tragedy in her head, though she’d never been the storyteller of the two. Sad dwarf boy in a sad merchant town that she could sigh over occasionally over a glass of expensive wine as she designed her next invention.
After a decade, some of the pain began to ebb away, though the anger never did. It festered and molded itself into the hard lines of the grins that most scared his debtors and kept his business partners in line.
Even her periodic visits, for business or pleasure, no longer left him wheeling. Only tired.
II
The second time Varric fell in love it felt like steel, and it took him completely by surprise. In his late thirties, his passion had cooled somewhat, and he no longer wasted half his time subtly ogling the odd dwarven woman who managed to catch his eye, rare in Kirkwall as they tended to be anyway.
Then there’d been Hawke.
The first time he’d seen her, a bedraggled, half-starved human with a smart mouth and a quick wit, he saw her potential even as he pitied her. Tough situation, abandoning your home and everything you knew to start fresh in a completely different country. And she still wore her muted grief with grace. True, it was behind a mask of sarcasm, but he knew where to look. He wore one himself after all.
Every year he got to know her a little more, pulled into the gravity of her friendship. Hawke was astounding. Even as she replaced her old armor with new pieces, upgraded her daggers, and moved into Hightown, she always did so after ensuring her friends’ equipment was better, making sure Blondie had enough medical supplies and double checking that Daisy was eating.
Once she made him laugh so hard he shot ale out of his nose straight into Broody’s face, and the elf didn’t even mind, his shoulders shaking with silent mirth as he hid himself behind the spiked gauntlets he always wore. Maker forbid he show any sign of his sense of humor.
Varric had never thought he was into humans. They were so stretchy and thin, and he hated craning his neck to look up during standing conversations. But after year three, he began to catch his eyes lingering on Hawke’s long legs as she leaned against the bar, as she ran quick as lighting around a battlefield, as he followed her time and time again up the stairs to Viscount’s Keep, tracing an arc up from her calves to her thighs to her pert ass.
This time he kept it to himself. He’d fallen in love with Hawke, but he also loved Hawke. He loved her in a way that was so strong it felt like it must have originated from the woman in a thick braided cord of loyalty and affection that branched out to each of the people she traveled with, each of the lives she’d touched. He certainly had never felt this from his parents or his brother. Varric had never felt it from Bianca either, though he was still reluctant to take her off the emotional statue he’d erected to his own tragic love life. Poison.
After the Chantry had been destroyed, he’d had every intention to uproot his life and abandon his hometown to follow Hawke to the ends of Thedas. His best friend and the woman he loved, though he’d be damned if he ever burdened her with that unasked for affection.
But while he was getting his affairs in order and trying to pick up a few last-minute necessities from the Hawke Estate, he’d been captured by a no-nonsense woman who, even compared to Hawke, had the best damn ass he’d ever seen. And then she’d beat the shit out of him and tried to get to his best friend, which completely erased any attraction he might have held for Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast.
Then, at least.
When Hawke, the Inquisitor, and Stroud had all disappeared into the fade and Hawke hadn’t returned, he’d lost himself. Completely. Between blackouts and sleepless nights and waking from a nightmare with a scream on his lips, there were months he could barely remember, blurred together as he’d tried to help the Inquisitor defeat Corypheus and save the world even as his brittle soul had screamed that it wasn’t worth saving if Hawke wasn’t in it.
After Chuckles disappeared, Varric had become the next-best expert in Fade magic, as much as he could as a dwarf. He’d spent months digging into every obscure magical resource he could find, from Dagna’s lab to the deepest forbidden libraries of Tevinter, trying to find his way into the fade or a way to drag Hawke’s late ass back out of it.
He'd found nothing.
III.
The third time Varric fell in love it felt like home. In his mid-fifties, his hair graying at the temples and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes a little more pronounced, he recognized it as it came and was grateful.
He was tired. There was never any shortage of chaos and mayhem, even after he had helped seal the breach. But so was she. Time had softened the edges of them both and turned their animosity to respect then friendship. Mutual interests kept them fighting on the same side, sleeping at the same camps, eating at the same fires, and celebrating the same wins. You can’t spend that much time with a person without getting to know who they are at the heart of them.
And Cassandra Pentaghast was beautiful, inside and out.
Varric would never have admitted it, but when he found out she’d been a fan of Swords and Shields he’d been flattered. Truly. And in addition to feeling his ego stroked, it had also told him something about her he’d never known-she was a romantic.
As a perpetual outcast and an artist, of course he was also a romantic. It was why he had allowed himself to pine after Bianca for so long. It was why, despite being over-the-moon in love with Hawke, he’d almost destroyed himself after he watched her disappear into the Fade never having told her how he felt.
Cassandra had been one of the people to help pull him back from the edge of that darkness. Even as he drank himself into oblivion for months at The Herald’s Rest, she kept him company, sometimes writing a report while sipping on a glass of wine, sometimes reading to him quietly from a new romance novel of hers, and always one of the visitors to his bedside when his liver had needed a healer.
It took almost five years for him to feel like smiling again. When he finally cracked a joke at one of the terrible lines in Cassandra’s novels, she’d looked at him and then at the ceiling as she tried to pretend she just had a “mote of dust in her eyes.”
The Inquisition still sent them on various missions, but Lucky had started sending them together more often. Varric had started writing another procedural series based on their adventures-Cassandra the scary, hardened bad interrogator and Varric the charming sympathetic good interrogator. They just worked. After several successful missions, they became one of the Inquisition’s best detectives.
Varric found himself laughing easily again, especially after he started listening to the little dry asides Cassandra muttered to herself when she thought no one was listening, started to notice and enjoy the subtle humor the woman favored that belied the bluntness with which she lived her life in many other ways.
During their travels, they always picked a book to read aloud by the fireside. Sometimes it was a romance, sometimes it was a mystery, sometimes it was an adventure. Really good novels they found were all of the above.
Varric enjoyed how enraptured Cassandra would get when they read, hanging on his words as the characters succeeded or failed. She gasped in suspense and, to her embarrassment, sighed when lovers had a happily ever after. His favorite was when he found a book that could make her laugh outright, something he tried to get her to do often with mixed success.
During year ten after the start of the Inquisition, Varric and Cassandra had just completed a mission and were ordered by Lucky to take a month off to “Rest, for Andraste’s sake.” They were in Orlais, and Lucky had sent them to a modestly comfortable inn-not so fancy that they had to be on guard, but nice enough that it had a spa.
It was a two-person mission, so they were the only ones at the dinner table that evening, both relaxed and hair wet after a thorough soak to wash the weeks’ worth of travel dust off their bodies.
Varric was full and satisfied and for the first time since Hawke disappeared into that cursed rift, he felt happy. Across from him, Cassandra was scratching notes onto parchment next to her, the line between her eyebrows deepening as she concentrated. She scowled as she made an error and scratched the offending word out. She smelled of lavender and something Varric couldn’t identify, something spicy and edible.
He stared at her for a moment, identifying something familiar but completely unique unfurling in his chest. She was beginning to go gray at the temples. The lines around her scowling mouth lingered even when her expression was neutral. She had more scars than when they’d first met, including one on her temple he’d seen her acquire as a Venatori cultist had gotten a lucky strike before Varric had pierced the man through the heart.
Making a decision, he reached over the table to swipe the quill out of her fingers with a smirk. She looked up at him with narrowed eyes, but he held up a finger to stop her. “We’re supposed to be taking a break, Seeker.”
She let out a huff. “I don’t take breaks.”
“I think that’s part of the problem.”
Cassandra scowled at him, but it was edged with playfulness, something Varric had begun to see more over the years. He loved her humor.
“Tell you what. I’ll make you a bet.” Varric leaned forward, his chin on his hand as he gave Cassandra a smirk.
She mimicked his pose and raised her eyebrows sarcastically. “What kind of bet?”
“A fun one. You know fun. I’ve seen you have it on occasion,” Varric mocked her gently. Cassandra rolled her eyes. “I bet you I can take you out on a date that goes so well you’ll completely forget to finish that report.”
Cassandra’s spine straightened and her eyes grew larger than he’d ever seen them. “I-what?”
“What do you say, Seeker? I have a whole plan. Flowers, candles, a minstrel that I’ll pay to subtly leave if he thinks things are going well.”
Her cheeks redden as she stares at him, obviously flustered. Varric keeps his eyes on her, calm and enjoying her sudden shyness. After a moment, she composes herself and with a deep breath she surprises him with a small smirk, “I will take that bet.”
The first time Varric fell in love it felt like lyrium, or what he thought lyrium would feel like if he’d ever been stupid enough to drink it-hot, bright, and ultimately poisonous. He and Bianca had been so young, and each time they’d met to discuss business they’d found more and more excuses to linger, to touch, to tease.
She’d already been betrothed to Bogdan when she’d first sat down across from him at The Hanged Man.
“Heard you needed a mechanist.”
Even at the start she’d been testing the waters, tactically feeling around his defenses with her smiles and innuendos.
And he’d been happy to be tested, especially after she’d revealed her attachment to House Vasca and her surname. Varric learned an early contempt for anything remotely resembling Dwarven tradition, and, arrogant little shit that he was, he was sure he could get Bianca into his arms and away from her impending marriage with little to no effort.
He was half right.
The longer they danced around each other in the shadiest, dank hidey holes in Kirkwall, the more desperate his touches became, the faster her kisses, the more terrified he grew that this was the last meeting. Each time they parted, it felt like his heart was being dragged through a sewer grate in Darktown, scraped raw and left bleeding.
He’d never met a more intelligent person who could match him quip for quip, make him question his views on the world, his assumptions about her and about himself.
Varric had waited for her at the Docks for twelve hours past their agreed upon meeting time, all the while making excuse after excuse for her absence even as he knew she’d decided to marry the Vasca.
After her marriage, their couplings had been no less heated but were tempered with a sourness that left Varric brooding, and sometimes blind drunk, for days afterward.
Her life got easier as she was given any resource she wanted to prove her genius to the kalnas and Orzammar alike, while he was left in the cold, occasionally allowed to touch her when she had the time and the inclination.
Bianca had already written the tragedy in her head, though she’d never been the storyteller of the two. Sad dwarf boy in a sad merchant town that she could sigh over occasionally over a glass of expensive wine as she designed her next invention.
After a decade, some of the pain began to ebb away, though the anger never did. It festered and molded itself into the hard lines of the grins that most scared his debtors and kept his business partners in line.
Even her periodic visits, for business or pleasure, no longer left him wheeling. Only tired.
II
The second time Varric fell in love it felt like steel, and it took him completely by surprise. In his late thirties, his passion had cooled somewhat, and he no longer wasted half his time subtly ogling the odd dwarven woman who managed to catch his eye, rare in Kirkwall as they tended to be anyway.
Then there’d been Hawke.
The first time he’d seen her, a bedraggled, half-starved human with a smart mouth and a quick wit, he saw her potential even as he pitied her. Tough situation, abandoning your home and everything you knew to start fresh in a completely different country. And she still wore her muted grief with grace. True, it was behind a mask of sarcasm, but he knew where to look. He wore one himself after all.
Every year he got to know her a little more, pulled into the gravity of her friendship. Hawke was astounding. Even as she replaced her old armor with new pieces, upgraded her daggers, and moved into Hightown, she always did so after ensuring her friends’ equipment was better, making sure Blondie had enough medical supplies and double checking that Daisy was eating.
Once she made him laugh so hard he shot ale out of his nose straight into Broody’s face, and the elf didn’t even mind, his shoulders shaking with silent mirth as he hid himself behind the spiked gauntlets he always wore. Maker forbid he show any sign of his sense of humor.
Varric had never thought he was into humans. They were so stretchy and thin, and he hated craning his neck to look up during standing conversations. But after year three, he began to catch his eyes lingering on Hawke’s long legs as she leaned against the bar, as she ran quick as lighting around a battlefield, as he followed her time and time again up the stairs to Viscount’s Keep, tracing an arc up from her calves to her thighs to her pert ass.
This time he kept it to himself. He’d fallen in love with Hawke, but he also loved Hawke. He loved her in a way that was so strong it felt like it must have originated from the woman in a thick braided cord of loyalty and affection that branched out to each of the people she traveled with, each of the lives she’d touched. He certainly had never felt this from his parents or his brother. Varric had never felt it from Bianca either, though he was still reluctant to take her off the emotional statue he’d erected to his own tragic love life. Poison.
After the Chantry had been destroyed, he’d had every intention to uproot his life and abandon his hometown to follow Hawke to the ends of Thedas. His best friend and the woman he loved, though he’d be damned if he ever burdened her with that unasked for affection.
But while he was getting his affairs in order and trying to pick up a few last-minute necessities from the Hawke Estate, he’d been captured by a no-nonsense woman who, even compared to Hawke, had the best damn ass he’d ever seen. And then she’d beat the shit out of him and tried to get to his best friend, which completely erased any attraction he might have held for Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast.
Then, at least.
When Hawke, the Inquisitor, and Stroud had all disappeared into the fade and Hawke hadn’t returned, he’d lost himself. Completely. Between blackouts and sleepless nights and waking from a nightmare with a scream on his lips, there were months he could barely remember, blurred together as he’d tried to help the Inquisitor defeat Corypheus and save the world even as his brittle soul had screamed that it wasn’t worth saving if Hawke wasn’t in it.
After Chuckles disappeared, Varric had become the next-best expert in Fade magic, as much as he could as a dwarf. He’d spent months digging into every obscure magical resource he could find, from Dagna’s lab to the deepest forbidden libraries of Tevinter, trying to find his way into the fade or a way to drag Hawke’s late ass back out of it.
He'd found nothing.
III.
The third time Varric fell in love it felt like home. In his mid-fifties, his hair graying at the temples and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes a little more pronounced, he recognized it as it came and was grateful.
He was tired. There was never any shortage of chaos and mayhem, even after he had helped seal the breach. But so was she. Time had softened the edges of them both and turned their animosity to respect then friendship. Mutual interests kept them fighting on the same side, sleeping at the same camps, eating at the same fires, and celebrating the same wins. You can’t spend that much time with a person without getting to know who they are at the heart of them.
And Cassandra Pentaghast was beautiful, inside and out.
Varric would never have admitted it, but when he found out she’d been a fan of Swords and Shields he’d been flattered. Truly. And in addition to feeling his ego stroked, it had also told him something about her he’d never known-she was a romantic.
As a perpetual outcast and an artist, of course he was also a romantic. It was why he had allowed himself to pine after Bianca for so long. It was why, despite being over-the-moon in love with Hawke, he’d almost destroyed himself after he watched her disappear into the Fade never having told her how he felt.
Cassandra had been one of the people to help pull him back from the edge of that darkness. Even as he drank himself into oblivion for months at The Herald’s Rest, she kept him company, sometimes writing a report while sipping on a glass of wine, sometimes reading to him quietly from a new romance novel of hers, and always one of the visitors to his bedside when his liver had needed a healer.
It took almost five years for him to feel like smiling again. When he finally cracked a joke at one of the terrible lines in Cassandra’s novels, she’d looked at him and then at the ceiling as she tried to pretend she just had a “mote of dust in her eyes.”
The Inquisition still sent them on various missions, but Lucky had started sending them together more often. Varric had started writing another procedural series based on their adventures-Cassandra the scary, hardened bad interrogator and Varric the charming sympathetic good interrogator. They just worked. After several successful missions, they became one of the Inquisition’s best detectives.
Varric found himself laughing easily again, especially after he started listening to the little dry asides Cassandra muttered to herself when she thought no one was listening, started to notice and enjoy the subtle humor the woman favored that belied the bluntness with which she lived her life in many other ways.
During their travels, they always picked a book to read aloud by the fireside. Sometimes it was a romance, sometimes it was a mystery, sometimes it was an adventure. Really good novels they found were all of the above.
Varric enjoyed how enraptured Cassandra would get when they read, hanging on his words as the characters succeeded or failed. She gasped in suspense and, to her embarrassment, sighed when lovers had a happily ever after. His favorite was when he found a book that could make her laugh outright, something he tried to get her to do often with mixed success.
During year ten after the start of the Inquisition, Varric and Cassandra had just completed a mission and were ordered by Lucky to take a month off to “Rest, for Andraste’s sake.” They were in Orlais, and Lucky had sent them to a modestly comfortable inn-not so fancy that they had to be on guard, but nice enough that it had a spa.
It was a two-person mission, so they were the only ones at the dinner table that evening, both relaxed and hair wet after a thorough soak to wash the weeks’ worth of travel dust off their bodies.
Varric was full and satisfied and for the first time since Hawke disappeared into that cursed rift, he felt happy. Across from him, Cassandra was scratching notes onto parchment next to her, the line between her eyebrows deepening as she concentrated. She scowled as she made an error and scratched the offending word out. She smelled of lavender and something Varric couldn’t identify, something spicy and edible.
He stared at her for a moment, identifying something familiar but completely unique unfurling in his chest. She was beginning to go gray at the temples. The lines around her scowling mouth lingered even when her expression was neutral. She had more scars than when they’d first met, including one on her temple he’d seen her acquire as a Venatori cultist had gotten a lucky strike before Varric had pierced the man through the heart.
Making a decision, he reached over the table to swipe the quill out of her fingers with a smirk. She looked up at him with narrowed eyes, but he held up a finger to stop her. “We’re supposed to be taking a break, Seeker.”
She let out a huff. “I don’t take breaks.”
“I think that’s part of the problem.”
Cassandra scowled at him, but it was edged with playfulness, something Varric had begun to see more over the years. He loved her humor.
“Tell you what. I’ll make you a bet.” Varric leaned forward, his chin on his hand as he gave Cassandra a smirk.
She mimicked his pose and raised her eyebrows sarcastically. “What kind of bet?”
“A fun one. You know fun. I’ve seen you have it on occasion,” Varric mocked her gently. Cassandra rolled her eyes. “I bet you I can take you out on a date that goes so well you’ll completely forget to finish that report.”
Cassandra’s spine straightened and her eyes grew larger than he’d ever seen them. “I-what?”
“What do you say, Seeker? I have a whole plan. Flowers, candles, a minstrel that I’ll pay to subtly leave if he thinks things are going well.”
Her cheeks redden as she stares at him, obviously flustered. Varric keeps his eyes on her, calm and enjoying her sudden shyness. After a moment, she composes herself and with a deep breath she surprises him with a small smirk, “I will take that bet.”