To Tell the Truth (Bartrand & Varric, Bartrand POV)
It’s tough to be the eldest. Especially when your little brother’s name is Varric. 2000+ words.
***
Bartrand lied to Varric about... a lot of things.
Like Orzammar. He didn’t really remember it all that well. How could he? Their father had thrown everything away over lousy rigged Provings, and they’d lost it all when Bartrand was practically an infant.
All he remembered of the city itself was glow, warm golden light of the carefully tamed magma far below their feet, and vast, the nearly endless stone ceilings far above him.
In the Tethras home in the Diamond Quarter, he remembered glimpses of books bound in bronto leather, thick blocky dwarven script marking the pages with neat patterns. He remembered Father in his finery, Mother in angular gold jewelry. Back then he did not remember her drinking. He never knew the smell of mosswine.
Later, he knew wine and whisky all too well.
She started drinking up on the surface. She slurred when she talked, the harsh edges to her words softened by the alcohol, and sometimes she sat on her bed with huge tears in her eyes in yesterday’s clothes. She missed Father, and she missed Orzammar, and the sky dizzied her.
Bartrand felt the same. But Varric -- he barely remembered Father at all, and he’d only ever known the sun.
Bartrand knew his duty, and he tried to teach his brother what he should know. At first it was the things Father had shown him, about how to be clever, how to watch out for things that felt wrong. And it was the things Mother had told him, about counting, about money, about leverage.
But he ran out of those things to tell him soon enough, and Varric filled the space between with his own stories. It made Bartrand uneasy. If he wasn’t careful, Varric would start to make up the wrong things. He felt very deeply, very sternly, that an older brother should not let a younger brother become an idiot.
So Bartrand talked of Orzammar, and he strove to pull stories and legends out of half-remembered glow and vast , out of bronto leather and finery and the stories Mother used to tell him, and he thought that even if he’d made some of it up, he’d done pretty well as an older brother. He thought he’d taught him what mattered. He thought he’d done what his father would have done, should have done.
… Except that Varric was a little shit.
***
Varric only got worse the bigger he got. Once Bartrand had been excited about the idea of a younger brother, someone to share in the Tethras name with him. Instead he discovered younger brothers were an exercise in pure frustration.
Varric teased him when his beard finally came in, snide little comments about old Paragons and making fashion statements. Bartrand’s fingers twisted jerkily at the clumsily woven braids he’d made. At the look in his eyes Varric threw back his head and laughed, then ran as fast as he could when Bartrand raised his fist. Later Bartrand stared at himself in the mirror and undid the little braids, one by one.
Varric ignored him when Bartrand showed him old accounts and ancestors’ names written finely on delicate deepwood parchment, trying to make him understand where they’d come from, filling in the details as best he could remember. Maybe some of it was lies. Just a little, just enough to make his obnoxious brother pay attention. The lies didn’t work, though, and Varric would pull out pages of human-made vellum scribbled on with child-sized handwriting, grinning from ear to ear.
I made it more interesting, he’d laugh, building scaffolds of bigger lies and wild fantasy on top of Bartrand’s dusty foundations. More than once the lessons ended with Bartrand threatening a black eye, and Varric sullen and kicking his chair with his feet.
But then there was the time Varric broke the dish, one of the last from Orzammar that hadn’t broken or been sold off when they’d first come to the surface. At first Varric looked like he would burst into nervous laughter. Before Bartrand could work up the anger to start yelling, Varric crumbled. Fell on his knees, started sweeping up the shattered pieces, said he was sorry, all right, I didn’t mean it, honest.
Bartrand still yelled, but he was strangely gratified when Varric left a glued and scarred plate on the kitchen table for him to find a day later. It broke apart when he touched it, gold filigree forever cracked in half, a useless repair job.
It was the best thing Varric had ever done.
When Varric asked Bartrand if the glue had held, later that night, Bartrand lied to him. Sure it did, brother. You fixed it, in the end.
He wondered what Varric thought when the plate was never displayed again. He wondered, but never asked.
***
Bartrand was fifteen when he entered the meeting house of the Merchants’ Guild for the first time as the head of House Tethras. He’d trained hard the past three years under older members of the Guild, cut his eyeteeth on smaller, safer trades until he started to see the patterns, sense them in a way that was hard to describe and easier to feel. Parchment and coin felt at times like an extension of his hands, a medium he instinctively knew how to manipulate. He wasn’t much for imagination, but when he allowed it a place in his head, he imagined a painter or a sculptor felt much the same way.
He tried to include Varric, ancestors knew he did. It got harder and harder to try and teach him, but he kept it up, gruffly trying to explain the patterns and their intricacies. Especially since Ilsa had grown more and more isolated, keeping to herself in her bedroom, rarely interacting with them.
It was up to Bartrand now. And he could rise to the challenge. So he thought, anyway.
He tried to drag Varric along to meetings at the Guild. He pointed out who was a useful contact, who would stab you in the back, who was broke and pretending he wasn’t, who was drowning in coin and pretending he was broke. He hired bodyguards after the first time Varric insulted a particularly violent house, and temporarily kicked his brother out of the Guild after the third round of insults ended with a knife to Bartrand’s throat, a dead fourth son of a minor family, and an arrow in Varric’s leg. The night was a blur but Bartrand clearly remembered his coinpurse emptying out by half, his brother’s face white and sweating, and his hands sticky with Varric’s blood. Not something he ever wanted to relive.
After that Bartrand broke down and started paying for dueling training for his mouthy little brother. Bastard might as well fight his own fights, if he was going to start them. He showed little promise with daggers or swords, but the tutors said he had a fine eye with a bow.
***
Years on, Bartrand still worried about Varric. Oh, sure, in some ways he was making progress. He’d become downright skilled in archery, both in shortbows and crossbows. He was developing some side proficiencies in setting traps and lockpicking, neither of which was respectable, exactly, but at least they were useful. And he’d started making contacts here and there, working on developing a little spy network of people who didn’t run their mouths off nearly as much as Varric himself. He wasn’t entirely hopeless.
But he still didn’t seem to understand what it was to be a Tethras. Bartrand wondered if he’d gotten too influenced by surfacers and the sun, the way he went on so about novels and publishing and other crap the humans had invented.
He took Varric aside one day, pulling him into the kitchen. Ilsa slumbered in the sitting room, already drunk despite the early morning hour. Bartrand had long since accepted that queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach her stupors gave him, but something new was happening, something worse.
“You said you wanted to talk to me, brother?” Varric asked.
Bartrand nodded gruffly, tending the kitchen fire in preparation for breakfast. Bacon and the last of the eggs. He knew he could have hired a scullery maid, but he preferred the money staying in their coffers, and besides, he was a pretty good cook himself. The coals flared, flame dancing merrily above them.
“Mother’s getting worse,” said Bartrand baldly. “I brought a healer in to see her.”
“When was this?” Varric asked.
“You were out. Sources say you were meeting up with a smith? Could be a good alliance.”
“Right,” said Varric, looking away. “It can never hurt to know a good smith. And she’s the best this side of the surface.” He gave Bartrand an uneasy chuckle.
“Anyway, the healer said Mother….” He grimaced. “It’s only a matter of time now, Varric.”
Varric crossed his arms, letting out a deep breath. “But she’s still so young, Bartrand.”
“Maybe so, but she’s poisoned herself. You had to know she couldn’t drink like that for years without it catching up to her.” He stoked the fire, harder than he meant to. The poker sent sparks to the back of the fireplace.
“I guess that’s true.” He sighed. “Does... she know?”
“No. I didn’t see a reason to make it worse for her, understand? The healer thinks months. Maybe a year, if things go well.” He rummaged with the bacon. “But she shouldn’t be alone here anymore. Not all day, like before.” He hesitated. “I was thinking of hiring someone.”
“I can take care of her,” said Varric.
Bartrand closed his eyes, hoping this wasn’t one of Varric’s fancies. “Huh.”
“It makes sense. You’re busy. You have Guild crap, and this venture, and that venture… I can work on my writing while I’m here with her. It’ll save you having to pay for someone,” Varric said. “And Mom never liked surfacers in the house, anyway.” He smiled at Bartrand, but it lacked the usual attempt at charm.
Bartrand nodded, fighting back something unfamiliar. Was it pride? Maybe? He wasn’t sure. “That sounds fine, brother. I think it’s for the best.”
***
Bartrand watched the funeral procession pass, laborer dwarves taking their mother away to be interred in the finest stone he could afford. Steam puffed out from their breath in the cold winter air. Bartrand couldn’t help a sense of relief, knowing she would finally be reunited with their father in a beautiful crypt on the edges of the dwarven quarter.
He turned to see Varric coming out of the front door, his face blotchy, eyelids swollen. Bartrand glanced around worriedly, hoping none of their neighbors would see. Some of the other houses could make use of such a display.
It wasn’t that Bartrand didn’t grieve their mother; she was their last connection to the past, the one who had kept them going after Father died, as best as she could. But Varric still needed to learn the difference between a public face and a private one. Public grief could be showed in careful visits to the crypt, composed and calm and cool. This — the snot glistening at the edge of Varric’s nose, the red cheeks, the puffy eyes — was utterly private.
“I guess that’s what she wanted, isn’t it,” said Varric dully at Bartrand’s side. The wagon passed out of sight, the sound of the wheels faint on the riven stone. “She never got over leaving Orzammar.”
Bartrand swallowed, uncomfortable. He’d never get used to Varric saying out loud the shit that should have stayed quiet. “She was a fine woman. She did what she had to for this family, as best as she could.”
“She shouldn’t have had to,” said Varric. “You ever wonder if it was exile that did it? And not the alcohol?”
Bartrand bristled. “Come on. Let’s get inside,” he muttered. “Walls have ears.”
They sat in the sitting room where Ilsa had spent most of her days in the end, drinking enough to fight off the shakes and the terrors, being sick as a dog when her body started rejecting even that. Bartrand leaned back against the settee, thinking hard.
“Look,” said Bartrand. “Now that Mother’s gone, we’re gonna have different priorities. You’re freed up again. And I’ll be honest, Varric, I think you might finally be getting the hang of being a Tethras. You stepped up, when you had to.”
Varric snorted. “Was that a compliment?”
Bartrand glowered at him. “It was, but I can take it back if you’re going to be smart about it.”
“You know me, brother. I’ve never not been a smartass.”
“That’s true enough,” he grumbled. “But I think you’re figuring it out. A silver tongue can get you out of trouble just as much as it can get you into it, you know.”
“That’s what I hear,” said Varric. He lifted up the blanket from the settee, pulling out a flask of whisky, Mother’s favorite. “Huh. Guess we can get rid of this now, can’t we.” His face crumpled, but he recovered quickly, putting on a twisted smile before he could start crying again.
“Pour a glass,” said Bartrand.
“If you insist.”
“And I do. As eldest, it’s my right.”
“Is that a little sass I detect, brother?”
“It’s been a trying day,” Bartrand admitted. He watched as Varric rustled up some glasses and poured them two large measures of whisky. For a moment, both stared at the amber liquid. He could almost hear Ilsa’s voice again, parchment-thin and rustling by the end, begging for just a little more.
Varric picked up his glass, holding it so that the firelight caught the curves. “To Mom.”
“To Mother,” Bartrand echoed. Their glasses clinked. He took a sip, whisky burning his throat, and swallowed the bitterness down.
Varric took a drink, shuddering. “Burns, doesn’t it.”
“No gains without a little pain.” He stared into the fire.
“It’s rude to call me that, Bartrand.”
Bartrand turned to his brother, raising an eyebrow. “I’d say you’re a bastard for that remark, but technically, I’d be lying.”
“And you’d never lie to your own brother, would you?” Varric asked, nudging him in the shoulder.
Bartrand considered. The Tethras clan, starting to make their way in the world. The Tethras brothers, coming into their own.
So, I’ve recently gotten back on a Dragon Age kick, so here’s something I have to say: the red lyrium did not cause Bartrand and Meredith’s actions.
Let me explain. In DAO, it is mentioned (I think it was Alistair but I’m not sure) that it is possible to use Templar abilities without lyrium, but that the lyrium makes those abilities far stronger. The same applies to magical abilities. This means that lyrium is essentially a booster, raising the power of something or someone, but not being what allows those abilities to be used. Red lyrium, obviously, works the same way.
What makes red lyrium unique is two things: first, it does not have to be consumed, meaning that it can be used repeatedly, without worry. Second, it’s boosting ability also applies to the user/holder’s minds.
Exhibit A: Bartrand was naturally a pretty greedy person. When he held the idol, it exacerbated that greed, which led him to acting on thoughts he’d probably already had. What happened to him in Act 2 was interesting: he’s obsessed with trying to recreate the “singing” he heard from the idol, and is almost in a constant daze. My theory is that this was him going through withdrawal, as the piece of red lyrium he had was so small, it could barely quench his need. Any paranoia Bartrand was dealing with was likely the fact that he knew multiple people were or would be out for his head.
Exhibit B: Varric is a naturally curious person. When he held the sliver for those few minutes, he was intrigued by it, and wanted to study it more. As unchecked and unending curiosity has the potential to be dangerous, it’s probably for the best that Hawke noted it, and convinced Varric to pass it to Sandal, who safely altered it.
Exhibit C: Meredith. From the start, Varric mentioned that “the Templars had grown very powerful, under Knight-Commander Meredith.” Meredith was a zealot. She was an extremist from the start. You think she wouldn’t know anything about what was going on in the Gallows? Meredith of all people? What the idol did was accelerate the path she was going down. I would not have been surprised if, in a world where the idol never came into Meredith’s possession, she would have eventually called for the Right of Annulment anyway. The red lyrium didn’t give her zealotry and paranoia. She already had those qualities. The red lyrium just pushed her to go faster with it.
One last thing: I highly suspect that in addition to everything else, red lyrium’s addictive properties were also enhanced.
