“so.”

varric’s voice is as loud and booming as ever, as if he’s announcing something to a crowd of invisible spectators. if she watches him closely enough she can see him piecing together the sentences behind his eyes - he’s always spinning a story, always playing along with a narrative, always using the words to match. it’s how he hooks people in. 

that damned tethras man and his charming tethras tongue. absolutely irresistible.

“tell me if you’ve heard this one before,” he begins, a playful glint in his small eyes. “there’s this woman. and she’s the loudest, wildest person anyone will ever meet - the savior of the damned, a legend in the making. and she knows too many people for her own good, and too many people know her - a golden-haired mage, a brooding elf, a wide-eyed dalish, and a dashing pirate. and, at one point or another, they all fall for her...” his hands fall to his side from where they were suspended in the air, inviting her to bask in the web he was spinning, and his face softens in earnst. “and yet she picks the humble, lowly dwarven storyteller who follows her around and notes her every movement, her every word.”

“that’s hardly a story. the only thing fictional thing about that is you insinuating that you’re in any way humble,” hawke quips, arms crossed over her chest, shoulders squared. she can’t help but play along with his little game. she couldn’t stop herself if she tried. 

“i am humble,” varric corrects. “i’ve been forced to be humble, down in the dirt after my brother betrays me... and my knight in shining armor shows up, lifts my spirits. but i’m still hesitant to tell her how i feel because i don’t want to get hurt again...”

“oh, is that why?”

“’course it is.” his nod is astute. “mutual, unspoken pining between two best friends makes for the best stories. those are the ones that sell the most. people love a good tragedy.”

“well, what just happened could definitely be described as a tragedy,” she grumbles, the gleam in her eyes suddenly cast over by a darkened expression. not even their game can distract her from the purpose of their excursion out to the coast; not even varric’s winning smile can make her forget the heavy pack on her shoulders, weighed down with all the supplies she needs to survive away from the city. “just look at the damn state i left kirkwall in.”

varric makes a move to respond - his opens his mouth, takes a step closer to her, reaches to grab her hand. and then he stops. mind going blank, shoulders sagged in defeat, he doesn’t know what to say. for the first time ever - for the first time with hawke - he doesn’t know what to say.

he’s varric. he’s always supposed to be nearby with a joke and an ambivalent shrug of his shoulders. but nothing feels like it’d fill the silence.

so he laughs - an uneasy, choked out thing, caught in his throat, cracking in the middle like a tree branch underfoot, and says with as much muster as he can manage, “well, that... wasn’t, uh, entirely your fault, you know, hawke.”

“it was.” her words are harsh and clipped and bitter. “it was, because i’m the one paying the price for it. leaving everything behind...”

she meets his gaze and her heart breaks. “leaving you behind.” 

“hawke...”

“i know we’ve never said it, but -”

“and we don’t have to,” varric interrupts, closing the distance between them and grabbing her hands in his as he directs his eyes upwards. “you’re gonna come back, hawke. ten months or ten years, you’re going to come back. and when you do, i’ll be here, waiting...”

“pining?” she suggests, sniffling and bringing her forearm up to her nose to wipe it. the tears came quickly - they don’t have enough time left for them to come slowly.

“yeah, sure, pining,” he replies, laughing as he brings a calloused thumb up to smudge a tear against her cheek, not bothering to pay attention to the ones on his own. “if that’s what you want, then yeah. pining. pining after the most beautiful, most wild woman that thedas has ever seen.”

“you promise?”

“i promise, hawke.” his voice lacks volume, lacks conviction - there’s no lies to spin, no plot twist to devise. he’s here, with hawke, open and honest and aching for her, and there’s nothing false or fictional about it. “i’ll never stop waiting for you. no matter what.”

she crumples to her knees, gathering his small frame up in her arms. “i love you,” she whispers into his ear. one of his legs is caught between hers, and her hands never stay one place too long, roaming across the plane of his back - their embrace is desperate and messy and twitchy, completely with hoarse laughter and quiet sobs and thick tears staining dusty fabric. no one likes desperate and messy, varric thinks, but he needs it. in this moment, it’s the only thing he needs. the only thing he wants. ugly. because nothing real is ever very pretty.

“i -” he chokes out a sob, catches her hair between his teeth as he opens and closes his mouth in his best attempt to reply without crying. “i l-love you, too, hawke. shit.”

when she draws away, she presses a kiss to his lips. it is bright and pure and intoxicating, and for one moment he forgets everything in the world besides her lips on his - he forgets anders, and aveline, and grand enchanter elthina and knight commander meredith and all of the shit that went wrong in kirkwall. all he thinks about - all he can think about - is the wet, soft sound hawke’s mouth makes as her lips retreat from his and then, before either one of them can say anything else, come in for another dose. 

his mind is reeling, and his thoughts are spinning. he can’t and he’ll never be able to find the words to describe how hawke feels against his body, beneath his hands. how much he’ll miss her.

when finally their kiss ends, they linger in the moment for as long as they can, eyes half-closed in a refusal to admit that a world exists outside of the two of them. then she grabs one of his hands in hers and presses a red strip of cloth into his open, empty palm and curves his fingers around it.

“take this,” she insists. “wear it everyday. in your hair, on your finger, around your neck, whatever. a token from me for my knight in shining armor.” 

varric squeezes his eyes shut. it’s too soon. it’s ending too soon. “hawke...”

“i love you,” she repeats. it sounds natural, easy, like she’s said it thousands of times before even though she hasn’t. if only she did. if only she had the chance to. “i love you,” she says again, her voice a whimper.

when he opens his eyes, she’s gone.

he takes a moment to recuperate. blinks the tears from his orange eyelashes, sucks the rest of his snot up his nostrils and swallows it. everything is ugly, and awful, and vile, and he bites down on the inside of his cheek to keep from crying again, tying the red ribbon around his right wrist as tight as he can with one hand. when he’s looped it around enough for it to hold, he takes the end of it between his teeth to secure it. but suddenly it’s close enough to his nose that a familiar scent floods his senses, and he realizes - it’s the piece of fabric that hawke uses to keep her hair out of her face.

it’s what she used to use. 

varric sighs. he bends over to grab his own pack, swings it up on his shoulders, and starts towards the speck in the distance that is what remains of kirkwall.

it’s when he gets back to the hanged man and sits down in front of his blank pages that he realizes this isn’t a story for anyone else to read. no one will want to read it. people don’t like happy endings, and this story is going to have one. so he puts his ink and quill away and for the first time, picks up the unused papers on his desk and rips them to shreds.

---  

light streams through the gap in the hallway outside the war room. hawke’s back is pressed against the wall, her sword tall and present and threatening even though it’s wedged in between her and the stone, and varric realizes she looks like a hero, like she could be on the cover of a book. but her head is tilted towards varric, a playful, loving smile on her lips, and that would draw in no one else like it draws in varric.

“so... they don’t know about... us?” she asks. her gaze flickers towards the door as she shifts uneasily, looking all too well like she’s trying to keep a dirty, shameful secret, and varric almost laughs.

but he assuages her fears instead, fears that are well-earned. “nah,” he responds with a wave of his right hand. “figured that’d be a story best kept between us. i don’t think anyone else would really enjoy it.”

“well... i think that you’re right.” 

she grins at him. though her hair is different, her skin is more tanned, her muscles are bulkier beneath her armor and her shoulders are more broad, she has the same grin she’s always had, the same one that makes him weak in the knees. he stutters for a moment, taken off-guard by her, and she takes the opportunity to snag his hand and start off down the hallway, away from the yelling between the advisers inside the war room.

“i don’t think i remember much of the last chapter,” she tells him over her shoulder, arching her eyebrow suggestively. “you might have to remind me.”

by the time they reach the great hall, she’s pulling him along only by the end of the red ribbon adorning his wrist. there’s still a long walk back to his quarters - their quarters, since the moment she arrived in skyhold this morning - and he can barely wait to touch her again and to kiss her again, to re-familiarize himself with her lips. but he’ll wait. this is something he’ll want to keep private.

“good thing i have a great memory,” he replies, saying and doing no more until she kicks open the door to his room and closes it securely behind them.

---

varric has barely passed through the veil when the vomit is already spewing from his mouth. everything is fucking backwards and upside down - his vision is blurry, his head is heavy, and his limbs ache from exertion worse than they’ve ever ached before. he’s just finished retching as the inquisitor stumbles through the tear in the fade. stroud comes out hot on their heels, his brow line with sweat, sword glinting in the pale desert moonlight.

varric blinks rapidly to clear his vision - once, twice, then three times, then four. and he stops, eventually, finally, chest still heaving as he takes a step closer to the inquisitor.

“where’s hawke?” he asks. 

the inquisitor gives him no more of an answer than a shake of their head, and varric falls to his knees, crossbow clanging to the ground and sounding all too well like the cover of a book slamming shut.

Sorry for making you cry 😅 I just got a burst of creativity and Thursday's are my free days so... -MC Anon

me, sobbing my guts out in the middle of a creative fiction course and then continuing to sob into a modern and contemporary drama course: kEEp GOIN G pROFEsSoR IM FI NE  i P ROM ISE

just,,

just the idea of him and his tiny little wonder, his miracle of miracles, his angel, holding his son in his arms and thinking that this is what it’s all been leading to

every moment of suffering has been leading to this inexplicable, unnameable joy that fills him and makes him feel more whole than he ever has before

he may be missing an arm, crookedly built, ugly and strange, but he is.... he’s whole. he’s not alone, anymore. he’s completed.

this was the final, missing piece in the pursuit of building clyde logan. the cornerstone that had yet to be found. and here he is, a man reborn, made anew through love love love love love

im red-eyed and snot nosed again with all the crying im such a dummy

On Board.

After being brought on to the ship on a beam of light, (that looked nothing like what he'd seen on Star Trek, mind you) he was confronted by honest to god aliens, big, ugly, bullies who came in all shapes and sizes and colors. Peter had appropriately screamed his head off, while they all made sounds that could have been laughter or speech, he didn't know and didn't care. That is until a bright orange thing with four arms reached out and grabbed him by his arms, terrified he struggled, but he couldn't get out of the grip. When another approached him with some type of device, reaching out for his face, he bit at the hand, making the human looking guy flinch back. This resulted in another round of grunting/growling/gurgling type of laughter from the rest of them. Peter may not have been able to understand their language but he could read body language easily enough, the man he had attempted to bite looked embarrassed and then angry, turning to Quill again. Peter stared him down doing his best impression of a dog baring its teeth, hoping to keep him away, unfortunately that just seemed to aggravate it more. The boy didn't see the alien move but he felt the sharp back hand against his cheek, his head whipping to the side from the force of it. The pain in his cheek making his eyes tear, while the black eye he had throbbed. It took advantage of this and roughly grabbed his head while he placed the device behind his ear. Before the boy could try and shake it off, a soft sinister whirring, like that of a drill started up right by his ear, and then the pain came. Sharp, consistent and digging into his head. He howled, and screamed and cried but it continued going further and further in, it felt like his head was filling with water and about to pop. Suddenly the drilling stopped and he could feel something slithering into the nicely drilled hole straight to his brain, the feeling almost as bad as the drilling. It felt like ages but must have been less than a minute before the whole thing was over. No drilling and no slithering, the boy could feel blood dribble from behind his right ear, down the side of his neck. Besides his ragged breathing the only sound he could hear was a high pitched tone so sharp it hurt until, it stopped and the noise came back from the other aliens on the ship. "grrawgli ighter arent ya' boy?" Came the teasing tone from the skinny brown haired one in front of him. It took Peter a moment to recognize that it was spoken in English. And that was the last thing he he thought before he blacked out from the confusion, shock, and pain, both emotional and physical. ******************** When he woke up, the cold metal of grating was up against his cheek and a nasty smell, somewhere between cat shit and rotten eggs assaulted his poor nose. Opening his eyes he saw he was in a small room, more like a closet really with with very bad lighting but enough to make out the bright red leather clothing, and if the smell was anything to go by, it was dirty. Crusts of blue and black and some rust colored ones that looked a lot like human blood, clung to it. Beyond terrified he could only think about getting out of there and back home to his mom. His mom. Tears sprung unbidden from Peter's eyes. His mom, his mom needed him, he needed to go back to her, he needed to take her hand. The horrible, opening, empty hole inside of him quickly filled with a bitter fiery burn as he thought about being abducted and taken from his mother. Getting up quickly his head spun and the unusual weight of the thing on his head, inside of it, made him stumble against one of the walls, well he thought it was a wall until it slid open and he was deposited yet again onto the cold grating. It looks like the inside of a submarine, Peter thought dizzily, what with the long hallway and metal everywhere. These thoughts were quickly lost when he saw the outline of boots in his line of sight, he followed them up to see the startled expression on the brown haired alien from before. The expression quickly changed from startled to sneering "Finally awake from your nap, boy?" Came the slightly young sounding voice. And the fear that was there was quickly consumed by the fiery feeling from before. With an enraged scream Quill flung himself at the shocked man. The surprise and force of his assault knocked the man on his back, Peter, taking advantage of this, scrambled over the fallen man, and dashed down the hall away from him. Peter had always been quick and small and was using all he had to round the corner and away from the alien. His eyes darted around while he ran looking desperately for an exit sign that was no where in sight. A few turns later and he stopped dead in his tracks. The hall he took had a row of windows looking out into space. Space. Stars. And colorful swirls in the distant he didn't have a name for. He was on a spaceship , in space, with a crew full of aliens, and so very very far from his mom. He crumpled up on the floor and cried. Sobs ripped from his throats along with screams of rage, snot leaked from his nose. His hands grabbed the side of his head, he felt the thing behind his ears, and grabbed it about ready to rip it out, whatever it was. "Wouldn't do that boy" said a gruff voice from above him. Startled the boys head whipped up to look at the new voice. " It's a translator, so you can understand us, connected right to yer brain, a quick yank and you'd be dead 'fore you know it." He was terrifying. Big and blue of all things, with sharp ragged teeth grinning at him. And bright red eyes that looked meaner than a cat with its tail pulled. His Head had some type of metal, light bulb, Mohawk thing. Rushed footsteps sounded behind him and before he could see who the new threat was, a voice spoke up. "Cap'n Yondu, I can explain, he.."started the brown haired alien. "No need. I can see exactly what appened' goin by the scratches all over yer face, Kraglin. A little Terran child too much of a fight fer ya'" the blue smurf guy replied. That's Captain Yondu then, Peters brain supplied, and the other one is Kraglin. "He just took meh by surprise is all." Sniffed Kraglin looking decently embarrassed. "Right, course he did." They continued talking but Peter had tuned it out. Going slowly he slunk away from the two of them and was just about to book it again when a sharp whistle split the air, in a blur of red, an arrow appeared out of no where, hovering right in between Peter's eyes. He went cross eyed trying to stare at it. "Where yea think your runnin' off to," the captain asked. " You trying to get yerself eaten?" "Eaten?" Peter squeaked. Very frightened an unable to hold back a little hiccup. "Eaten, that's right. A tiny Terran like you, my boys'll eat you right up, and still have room for dinner." Came the rather callous response. "Eaten people ain't allowed, it's against the law." Peter replied with all the conviction of an eight year old. Yondu let out an explosive bit of laughter at that, "Ain't no law on a Ravager ship boy, ain't no right or wrong, and certainly no one but me keeping my crew from cooking you up." Peter visible shook with fear at that past, earning another laugh the Captain and Kraglin. Afew short whistles had the arrow moving closer and closer to the boys face, forcing him to step back to avoid having his eye poked out. His steps brought him right back to the two adults, Kraglin quickly grabbing his arm to keep him there when the arrow flew back to Yondu. "Let go of me!" He snarled at the pair of them, trying his best not to look scared, like when he stuck up to those bullies at school."Bring me back home, back to Earth! You can't do this!" He practically screamed. "Quiet you!" Kraglin snarled giving him a little shake for good measure. The Captain lost the grin that had been on his face for most of the conservation so far. Leaning down to Peter's height, he gave him a cold look and with a voice like frosted steel said "Lets get one thing atta the way boy, I'm the captain here, ain't no one giving orders but me," and here he grabbed Quills jaw in his big blue hands, " and no one tells me what I can an can't do, specially some runt. Got it?" Shaking from how scared he was he gave a little nod, wanting to look away from him but afraid to at the same time. "When I ask a question, I spect to be answered." "Yes." Peter shakily replied, quickly adding "Sir." "That's better. Now you probably have questions, but I don't care. So here's the run down, Kraglin here is gonna show you to your duties and your bunk, and your gonnna listen or else I feed you to my crew for an appetizer." Yondu said matter-of-faculty like feeding people to people was a usual thing. With that Yondu walked off, leaving The boy and Kraglin to themselves. Once the captain was out of sight, the man holding his arm and started to walk off, pulling Peter along with him. Too many thoughts were crowding his mind to really think straight. His mom was gone. He was never gonna see her again, and never have her hold him, or hear her singing again. He was never gonna see earth or go to school or be there for her funeral. He was probably gonna get eaten. So lost in his thoughts he hadn't noticed that Kraglin had stopped walking and banged right into him, jumping back with a little yip. "Watch it, kid." The alien hissed "You'll be doing the laundry, clean em' and shine em' and make em' look pretty huh? I'll be back later ta show yea to your bunk. Stay put, got it?" "Yes sir." Peter answered, realizing he was back where he had woken up at. The door opened and Kraglin pushed him in and flicked on another pair of lights that illuminated the room. After that he left too. Peter wanted to curl up and cry, and scream again, but it hadn't helped him last time and it certainly wasn't gonna help this time. Instead he took stock of his surroundings, noticing things he hadn't seen last time in the dim light, like how the room was about ten feet by ten feet , a basket of the red leathers in one corner and a basket of boots right next to, along with what looked like a sink, with what he assumed was soap and boot shine on top of it. A vent opening was just above the sink, and lines hung from the ceiling a good fifteen feet up for drying clothes. And his back pack was a few feet away tucked in another corner. He ran over to it quickly and dug though hoping beyond hope his Walkman was still there. Finding it he could have cried with joy at the sight. He quickly climbed up on to the sink and careful removed the vent cover, pushing his back pack inside he squeezed in after it, and replaced the vent cover on the outside, feeling a little bit better now that he was hidden. He threw on his head phones and fell asleep imagining he was still on Earth and his mother was singing to him.

On Board