fic title: do you like my dress? it's got pockets [chapter 1]
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Summary: 9:19 Dragon – Varric Tethras loses his virginity to a pretty dwarf girl at the bar. 9:41 Dragon - The consequence walks through the gates of Skyhold. - In my childish fantasies, I used to dream of being the Champion; going places, meeting people, loving them and being loved in return, never discarded nor kicked nor beaten; love, in perpetuity, the likes of which a girl under the heavy and forceful hand of a mother could not begin to dream of, because she could not dream at all. - aka, the fic where varric has a daughter that he didn't know about until five minutes ago.
My father was not what I expected him to be.
What had I expected? I knew his name first from the books in the local library, then later from whispers in back alleys or drunken merchants.
So––a sleazy businessman? A corrupt merchant prince who’d sold his soul for sovereigns? He was a dwarf. He was a womaniser. He wrote books, and I wasn’t allowed to read them, but I would stare at his author’s portrait with an intense vigour in the middle of the night when mother was asleep.
Seeing my face in that man––the hooked nose that was flat against my face, the underbite that made my teeth ache, the red hair that mother made me cover––him, all him. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like looking like the man that mother sneered at when she heard his name, a name I was forbidden from uttering aloud.
Varric Tethras. A merchant prince, a famous author, a rogue with a crossbow that could take down the carta.
My father.
Skyhold was much too grand for a man like that. I sneered passing through the gates, accidentally offending the human woman who took our names. Was I staying long, she asked? I told her I was here to deliver a message, nothing more, and it was the truth, but really, I didn’t know how long I would be staying. There was nothing for me in Kirkwall. Mother was dead, and the dwarves who killed her were after me, too. If Tethras was safe here, why couldn’t I be?
Something kept him here. It wasn’t the goodness of his heart. Security, coin, business, an opportunity to cosy up to important people like the Inquisitor or the Lady Ambassador.
But that vision––that imagined man, sneering in the back of my mind, shaking a bag of coin in his palm––wasn’t what I saw when I climbed the stairs to the main hall.
He was older. Wrinkly around the eyes, rosacea flaring on his cheeks. Pay an artist enough and you could have them paint you however you liked, such as surrounded by scantily clad dwarven women, but this was… I didn’t know.
He hunched over a desk next to a roaring fireplace, scribbling fiercely on hastily torn parchment; his hands were stained in ink, and there was dirt under his nails, on his clothes, and in his hair. A muddy coat, which probably used to be hanging over the back of the chair, was splayed out on the stone tile.
He didn’t notice my shadowing presence. I was inclined to keep watching, in silence, until the sun set and he retired to bed.
What was that? Fear? My heart clenched at the sight of him, and I didn’t know why. What was so fearful about passing on a letter? I was a messenger, and he didn’t raise me; there was no reason for my throat to tighten, but it did.
I cleared my throat.
He looked up.
My hands shook as I held mother’s letter, but I held it nonetheless.
“Varric Tethras?” I asked, finding my voice weak.
“Yeah?”
If my voice was raspy, his was worse. It broke, and he winced, and licked his dry, cracked lips.
“I’m to deliver this message to you.” No. Too formal. Too distant. He was my father, whatever that meant, and he––he––
He had bloodshot eyes.
Ancestors, I had the worst timing.
I tried again.
“My mother,” I said, deciding that if I was going to do this, I would do it properly, “wrote you a letter before she died.”
It was actually many years ago. The parchment was old and torn by now, wrinkled then flattened again, stained with coffee and dried tears. Mother held onto it, and now here I was, her messenger after death. Her will forbade me from reading it. It felt wrong to give it to a stranger.
“Uh, yeah, sure.” He took it, and put it on his desk, unopened. “Thanks.”
I stifled a sudden flash of anger. “I think you should read it. Messere.”
The honorific was an afterthought. Perhaps it would endear him to me, I thought, if I pretended to respect him… but he flinched instead.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but it’s very important,” I said, feeling quite sorry after all. He looked down at what he was writing, then at the unbroken wax seal of mother’s letter, and picked it up with a sigh.
The crack of the wax snapping in two was like the dam that floods the river.
It didn’t belong to him––it belonged to mother! I should’ve buried it with her, the secret dying when she did, and with her gone, I’d pretend to live a normal, happy dwarf life with a caste boy husband and a dozen dwarf children.
How many bastards did Tethras have running around Kirkwall? How many were unwanted daughters? My mother could not have been the only whore he fucked. She was not special, I was not unqiue, and she made sure I knew it in my heart, body, and soul.
And yet; a letter.
A letter that he could read, but I could not.
How was that fair?
The wax seal broke. He thumbed open the letter. My head was heavy and my arms weak, or I’d have snatched it from him, because if there was anyone in this world who deserved my mother, it would not be him––
“Varric…”
Both of our heads snapped up. A human woman in Inquisition armour hovered over the desk, her expression taut and her hands linked together.
I watched many emotions sequentially pass through Tethras’s eyes, until a mask fell over them, and he grinned. “Seeker?”
Seeker. Seeker?
He dropped the letter, folding it again and using it as a cover what what he’d been writing. That was all it was to him.
“Varric,” she said again. She was blushing, but not in the romance way; I knew delicate, flushed glances, and this was something else. She shifted her feet. “I have come to… express my condolences.”
Tethras’s grin turned into more of a grimace. “Ah. Well. That’s…”
“And to apologise, for how I have treated you.”
“Uh.” He gave a stinted thumbs up. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“I should not have blamed you. You have been a good friend, Varric, and…” She paused. I didn’t realise why until I caught her eye––staring me down, like the templars in the streets at night. “You have company. I will come back later.”
He looked at me, surprised––had he already forgotten I was here?
Of course he had.
What a fool I was.
A Maker-damned fool, clinging to the end of a rope that severed when mother’s blood ran rivers through the grout between the stones. She was gone, and this man, just as much a stranger to me as he was to any bastard child, was not my family, and could never become one.
Knowing this, accepting it, feeling it in my heart and allowing it to sink into my bones, did not stop the bitter tears when I lifted my hood and turned away.
-
What had I expected?
He didn’t know me. What I knew of him was imagined from long nights of rumination, roaming the back alleys in the aftermath of one of mother’s rages.
I met the Champion that way, once. He was not the Champion then, only Hawke, if you knew his name at all. I didn’t, as a child of yet twelve, but I remembered his face, the glint in his eye and the kind smile as he draped a blanket over my shoulders and ushered me into the warmth of the tavern.
I remembered red hair like mine, catching the light of the candles, and being struck with a fear so deep that I fled back into the streets, the blanket cocooning me from the wind.
This was not unlike that night. Though the magicks of its walls kept the snow at bay, Skyhold was imbued in a bitter cold, a chill that ran deep. And here I was again, fleeing from the warmth and the light, back into the fog to freeze, fearing what might await me when I stopped to breathe.
I still had that blanket.
It had smelled of alcohol, and smoke, and sex, but a child knew nothing of these things, and it was softer than mother’s hand.
Most things were softer than mother’s hand.
Skyhold’s tavern bustled, and that was where my stout legs carried me, with my mind wandering. I stared at the plaque on the door as it came into focus, feeling again like that child of twelve, gazing at The Hanged Man and wondering what it meant.
“Hey, Varric!”
My breath snagged against my ribs. The woman laughed when I turned my head.
“You’re not Varric. Sorry!”
Another dwarf. Red-haired, like me, but a darker shade. She had a kind smile, a pretty voice, and freckles like constellations amidst the stars. Did she know him? Were they friends? Were they…
“Hey, you okay?”
I had been staring, and though her smile still lingered, she stepped close with concern. Her eyes crinkled in the corners, and I didn’t realise how near she was until her hand grazed my elbow and her breath tickled my jaw.
“You’re freezing! Here,” she guided me to the door, shoving it open with her boot, “let’s get you warm. Not really dressed for the mountains, are you?”
“I couldn’t afford much better,” I admitted quietly. It was a half-truth. Kirkwall’s weather was mild, if you excused hurricane season, and merchants didn’t sell clothes built for the snow. I had spent most of the journey on the back of a cart, huddled between a dozen elven refugees who took it upon themselves to keep the ‘shivering dwarf girl’ warm.
It was more than humans had ever done for me. It was no surprise, then, that a dwarf such as her, saw a dwarf such as me, and thought; I want to protect her.
“I’m alright.” I stopped walking. The bar was warm, rowdy, smoky with the stench of alcohol, and at any moment I felt like Tethras might burst through the door still ajar behind me. “I lost my way. Do you know who I talk to about boarding?”
“You weren’t assigned quarters?”
I knew should’ve stuck around at the gate.
“Harding!”
A booming voice echoed above the noise and the music. I couldn’t imagine the type of man who could make that noise––until I looked up, and my legs went numb.
Horns like a dragon’s, peering over the crowds and the tables; attached to them, a grinning grey head, teeth glinting. In Kirkwall, the roar of the oxmen, mother’s hand clutched over my mouth, the closet’s spider crawling up my leg.
“Save my seat!” Harding called, so close yet far and muffled, and guided me to a far table closest to the bar, where the crowd was thin. Her warm smile as she tapped the bar shielded the qunari from my sight.
A Tal-Vashoth. Nothing more.
Nothing more.
“Cabot,” she signalled the bartender, who barely looked at me, but when he did, it was with a passing concern, “something warm?”
I failed to stifle my temor. “Is there something special about me in particular, or do you buy drinks for every passing dwarf girl?”
She smiled. “Just the half-dead ones. No offense, you know, if that’s what you’re going for.”
“Not typically.” But I wasn’t surprised. “I’m fine, I was just… delivering a message.”
“Oh yeah? Long-lost lover?”
“No! No.”
I knew flirting when I saw it, and Harding––flushed in the cheeks and smelling faintly of alcohol––was batting her eyelashes. It was not the first time a stranger had dragged me from one end of a bar to another in search of a tryst or a public rut, it’s just––usually they were men. And human. And old.
Harding was none of these, and she wasn’t grinding against me yet, either. I took small victories where I could find them.
Cabot thunked down an appropriately-sized dwarven mug that sloshed with the force of it. It was steaming and smelled like chocolate.
It was rude to reject gifts. I used it to warm my hands.
“Your accent’s familiar,” Harding said. “Reminds me of–hmmm. Free Marches?”
“Kirkwall,” I affirmed.
“How funny!”
“Is it?”
“Mm, you remind me of a friend, that’s all.”
My throat tightened again. I sipped the hot drink to burn the knot away. “The one who you mistook me for?”
“Mmm-hm. Sorry.” She looked sheepish. “Just from the side, you know––”
I did know. There was a bitter reminder of it hidden in the bottom of my pack, sketch after sketch that I would compare to myself in the mirror. I could never get my face right, but I always knew his.
“Who is he?” I asked, against my better judgement. Harding leaned forward, and I regretted it immediately, but it was too late to take it back just as it was always too late for anything else.
But she laughed. “Varric? He writes books––I didn’t have much time for reading, as a farm girl in Ferelden, but––when we first met, he said… what was it?” She paused, then with a deep breath and her best gruff, grumbly voice, “ ‘You ever been to Kirkwall’s Hightown?’ I said; no, why? And he said, ‘Because you’d be Harding in Hightown!’ I didn’t get it, though.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
“The Seeker thought so too.” Harding shrugged. “We struck a good rapport though. You look a lot like him!”
I sipped my drink. “How funny.”
“It is.”
And to her it was. To me––a roiling, boiling sensation in the pit of my stomach. The burn of my drink, the pain as it grazed my already scarred throat, not even that could distract me from it.
I felt sick.
“So––” She leaned back again, elbow against the bar, lightly tipsy. “You boated all the way from Kirkwall just for a message?”
“I suppose I did.”
“And you’re gonna go back to Kirkwall?”
I hesitated. “I suppose I will.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.” After that––I didn’t know. It wouldn’t be safe there, but I didn’t want to stay here either. Either way, I wouldn’t miss mother’s funeral; I needed to be there when she was returned to the Stone.
Harding nodded, kohl smudged just below her eye where she’d rubbed at it. “I’ve never been to Kirkwall. I’ve heard it’s… well, in the words of Dorian Pavus, ‘a bit of a shithole’.”
I chuckled. “The understatement of the century. I grew up in Lowtown, which was…” No. Wait, what was I doing? About to spill my guts to this stranger, by virtue of our shared race? She was pretty, but nothing suggested trustworthy, and I knew enough about my kind to know you couldn’t trust a dwarf as far as you could throw one, which was not as far as most humans tend to think.
Harding looked lithe, though. I could probably pick her up.
I shook my head. “You know. Muddy.”
“Just like Ferelden, then,” she smiled. Then, before she could open her mouth again––
“Harding!” That booming voice. A deep growl that vibrated inside my skull, like a bug crawling into my ear. If I didn’t look, if I didn’t see, I could pretend it wasn’t–– “You joining us, or what?!”
“Just a minute!” She faced my again, sheepishly flustered. “I should go, or he’ll have me by the ear. Unless you wanna––”
One of the human men from the qunari’s table landed a heavy hand on her shoulder. The qunari’s horns shadowed him from far behind.
“Who’s your friend?” he asked. Harding grinned up at him. “She joining us?”
“No,” I said, too quickly.
“Shame. Lace and Rocky could use the competition.”
“Is Rocky…” I squinted, “a dwarf?” What kind of backwards, offensive to the point of non-offensive, ridiculous sort of nickname was that? The human chuckled.
“It’s not what you think. We all get nicknames. Part of the job. Lace, come on, Chief’s cracking open a new cask!”
“Didn’t you already burn through the last one?” She paused. “Literally?”
“Sacrifices had to be made.”
I stared incredulously between them. “You set your alcohol on fire?”
“Not me. Dalish did. With her––khm––bow.”
“...And I suppose Dalish is Dalish?”
“Well, yeah, she’s got the––tattoos, right?”
“That’s not a very creative nickname.” I was understanding ‘Rocky’ more now.
“Yeah, well, makes it easier for the Chief. Not like Varric’s. Half of his doesn’t even make sense.”
I couldn’t escape him. Varric this, Varric that. I turned away, suddenly bitter. The human dragged Harding away, and under his breath murmured to her, who’s she?
Damn, I forgot to ask, she said.
Most people did.
“Harding! Harding, hey have you seen––”
In my childish fantasies, I used to dream of being the Champion; going places, meeting people, loving them and being loved in return, never discarded nor kicked nor beaten; love, in perpetuity, the likes of which a girl under the heavy and forceful hand of a mother could not begin to dream of, because she could not dream at all.
“––red corset? Yeah, I was just––”
I downed the last of my drink.
“––thanks, I’ll catch up with––”
Some dreams were unattainable. I would never be the champion of anything; that was fine. But to beg and plead, my knees in the mud, for someone to want me for some reason other than pity…
“Isana?”
Why was that too much to ask?
A finger grazed my shoulder. I yelped like I was burned, and with my empty mug, snapped around and smashed it over their head.
One arm flung out to the bar, the other flew to catch a chair––I didn’t realise who it was until him, the chair, and several peoples’ drinks were askew on the tile floor, and a steady stream of blood began to soak his red hair.
I slammed my hands over my mouth.
No, no! I hadn’t meant to! Alive?! Yes, he was groaning and grasping at his skull, his gloves coming away red, the stone below him slowly stained––dying?! No, but breathing too fast, yes, and surrounding patrons rushed to him, closed in, panicked shouts that turned into whispers, whatever I’d done, it was bad.
Ancestors, I had truly done it now. Even if I hadn’t killed him––Maker fucking forbid––I had still lost him forever.
“Argh!” The qunari, high above the crowd, cut through it like butter, lumbering like one of the horned beasts I’d seen when coming up the mountainside, “Give the guy some air or you’ll trample him, fucks sake!”
I reached him when Harding did, and she helped him stand. With glazed eyes, blood caking his hair and streaming down the side of his face, Varric––he grinned at me.
“You… you hit hard, kid!”
