wip wednesday/whenever: wip excerpt edition! i was tagged by @ocean-in-my-rebel-soul, and i'm tagging @autobot-scout-riella, @wildercrow, @wild-houseplant, and @jonbinary (and also @pen99 because the focus is your hawke :>)
Rules: If you're tagged, please give an excerpt of your WIP! Tag and share! (And tag me back, I wanna read what you share!)
this wip is the sequel to a previous fic of mine from several years ago that was called believe it's easier for you, which was a modern day hawke/varric au that explored what would happen if varric left for several years and his relationships with the da2 characters became strained:
The Tethras family home was old and large ('stately and grand,' Bartrand had called it in one of his more snobbish moments, to which Varric had replied, 'It's fuckoff huge, Barty') and perhaps most importantly, the Tethras family home was stuffed full of furniture and mementoes and dust covered hope.
Almost every inch of the place echoed with ghosts. He felt shades of himself running down the halls and scrawling words underneath wallpaper that had been chosen specifically to cover up his indiscretions. He slid a hand down a lintel, feeling the bumps covered up with layers of paint until you could barely tell where Bartrand had carved out lines to measure how tall Varric had gotten.
He sighed, leaned against the doorway, and scrubbed a hand down his face. He almost laughed when it didn't come away caked with dust, after spending the late morning and the entirety of the afternoon packing away some of the lower floor of the house into boxes. Some would go into storage, the rest to be sold or donated to thrift stores. And⊠now that he had sealed the most recent box with packing tape, he was unable to ignore anymore the weight of what he was doing, which had been settling down upon his shoulders one piece at a time like drifting snow, cold and heavy and merciless.
His mother was in that box, and so was Bartrand, and himself. Everyone, he realized, except for his father.
Almost without his being aware of it, his head slowly tilted up and up, towards the sealed room that had been his father's study when he'd been alive. He hadn't been inside in almost a decade and a half, let alone now when he was closing up the house and had a proper excuse to do so. He hesitated even to broach the thought. That was his father's space. His sanctuary. And leaving it closed up had become⊠more than a family habit or way of honoring the dead, it had become a responsibility.
Varric swallowed heavily. Without looking away from that section of the ceiling, he pulled out his phone and entered in the code to unlock it. He glanced down only to pull up Hawke With An E, which he had only recently edited to say Hewk.
The phone rang only once, and then there was a click. "What?"
The words he'd been planning to say dried up on his tongue.
"Varric?" There was a shift of fabric on the other end of the phone. He could almost see Edyiss Hawke shifting the phone from ear to ear as if that would somehow allow her to better hear what he hadn't been able to bring himself to say.
He laughed humorlessly, and raked the hand not holding his phone through his hair. "I need you, Ed. Here," he clarified, clearing his throat. "I need⊠Shit, I don't even know. A sounding board? Someone to witness my descent into madness?"
"You aren't going mad, Varric," Hawke said. The determination in her voice was thin and crackly. She must have driven to the base of Sundermount to go hiking again. Always said it cleared her head.
He looked away from the chair his mother had always sat in by the window, and towards Bartrand's room. "How do you know?" He asked hollowly. "If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has family history like a duckâŠ"
