“i love bran because he treats hawke the way a stressed administrator would treat a local cryptid. like you can hear him filing “champion of kirkwall” under “unavoidable incident.” every time you show up it’s probably to ask for something insane, and he has to stand there and pretend this is normal civic business.”
In which Seneschal Bran Cavin becomes Kirkwall’s Viscount-by-default. Again.
DRAGON AGE | BRAN & AVELINE | WORDS: 774 | RATED: T
(AO3 LINK)
The news arrives in a scroll sealed with the Inquisition’s insignia, because of course it does. Ten years—ten!—since the organisation had officially disbanded, but symbols remain eternal.
It is also the first indication that something is terribly amiss. If this were one of the Viscount’s communiques from his so-called ‘field mission’, Seneschal Bran Cavin would expect the embossed emblem in the wax to be the Kirkwall heraldry, not the Inquisition’s. Or perhaps something even subtler, still.
And if it had been one of Tethras’s more, ah, personal missives, Bran would have expected the message to be stamped with the official seal of his House. Or perhaps accompanied by a signed copy of one of his more recent publications, with their audacious illustrations of the author, exaggerated like no dwarf Bran had ever seen before.
“C’mon, Bran,” the Viscount had cajoled him during their most recent meeting—the one where Bran had tried to talk him out of this affair entirely, mind you—before fixing him with a rakish grin. “You’ve gotta live a little.”
But Bran had reminded Varric—the Viscount—that this was what he lived for. Remembering the history of this great city with all the honour and disdain it deserved, the only man brave (or insane) enough to commit such vast annals of process and procedure to his mind.
It brought Bran no small measure of pride that if there was ever an event which necessitated the emergency evacuation of the city, he was near-certain he could recall all of the required civic requirements to restore appropriate governance from memory alone.
The scroll continues to taunt him, though. He notices, too late, how his palms have begun to sweat. With clumsy fingers, he cuts open the seal and begins to read.
Dear Seneschal Bran Cavin,
It is with the utmost regret that I inform you—
A fist thumps against his desk, upsetting the inkpot. He’s surprised to find it to be his own.
“Seneschal?” a familiar voice calls from the doorway.
He immediately regrets not locking his door. “What?” His voice is too loud, too sharp, to his own ears.
Guard-Captain Aveline, leaning against the door frame, can’t help but notice. Of course she can’t. “Heard the disturbance. Thought you could use some assistance.”
Bran blinks quickly. All of a sudden, his eyes hurt. A lot. “How good are you with paperwork?” he asks.
“Not very,” she admits, before brokering him a tentative smile. “But I’ll have some of my guardsmen work on the less … sensitive files.”
His headache is already starting. He can feel it behind his sinuses. And the crown?
Oh, the crown is an anchor. Just upside down.
He slumps back in his chair. Realises he’ll have to move offices soon. Again. “All right,” he agrees. “None of this old elven god nonsense.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Only Viscount Tethras could possibly be so obtuse as to think a self-proclaimed god could be dissuaded from destroying the world by polite request.” His voice rises, bordering on hysterical . “And I say this as a consummate believer in the power of proper escalation pathways!”
Aveline arches an eyebrow and takes a step into the room properly at last. “Thinking you’ll have to get me up to speed. Are you saying Varric’s—”
Bran cradles his head in his hands. “I think I need a brandy. And a pay rise.”
The Guard-Captain circles around his desk and after a moment’s hesitation, lays a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry,” she says, and Bran’s not even sure what she’s apologising for at first: for Varric (her friend, Bran’s boss), for the state of the world, for the whole sad sorry lot of it.
But then her fingers press down more firmly, and she asks, “We’re going to have the same problem as last time, aren’t we?”
He looks up at her with wild, haunted eyes. He’s the only one who remembers all the protocols, the procedures.
It’s nearly enough to make him cry, or wail, or drag Varric’s body from whatever backwater it had expired in, or see to pulling the Champion from the Fade, or perhaps even interviewing the ghost of Knight-Commander Meredith, who was still rumoured to haunt the Gallows. In fact, why not stitch Marlowe’s head back on while they were at it? Unpulp Perrin and plump him back up again?
But there is no returning from the dead, and no shirking from responsibility.
The only avenue left to Bran is complaint, one of which he intends to partake in frequently.
“Nobody, nobody, wants this job,” he mutters, as Aveline leaves to retrieve the brandy.
fic title: do you like my dress? it's got pockets [chapter 10]
[previous chapter]
[next chapter]
[ao3 link]
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.
I had been in the private chambers of only one other man in my life.
I’d touched his face with my hands, felt his rough stubble, always somewhere between grown and bare. I’d watched him stand in his mirror and scrape the fine hairs with a sharpened blade, with the care and precision of a painter hovering over his canvas. He’d smiled at me through his reflection and I couldn’t smile back, but didn’t know why. He mimed cutting his throat with the blade, and laughed at my disgust, and flashed the point of it in the light as if to say, ha-ha, I got you, as though I were a naive enough little girl to believe it was real.
Perhaps I was. Perhaps that was the point.
In Varric’s suite, as I plaited my hair, a glint of light caught the corner of my eye, and through the reflection of Varric’s handheld mirror, he slowly scraped away the week’s worth of patchy stubble. Hovering over the washbasin, his eyes met with mine through the mirror, and his blade stilled against his jaw.
“Has anyone ever told you that you look like a kicked puppy?”
My face warmed. “You’re shaving.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
His reflection raised a brow. Confused. Judgemental? “ ‘Cause I want to?”
Human men shaved. A dwarf without his beard? Perhaps I had assumed that it was a defect of his genetics, but watching him… I realised this wasn’t true at all.
“Why?” I prodded again.
“I just said.”
My instinct was to be angry. But maybe he was just as ashamed. Maybe he should be, the quiet part of my mind provided.
He cleaned his jaw with a wet cloth, careful with where he’d nicked the skin, and wiped the blade. When he faced me again, bare-faced and hair pulled into a low bun, he looked ten years younger.
“You ready?”
I tied a ribbon to my plait and threw it over my shoulder. Ready? No. Presentable? I didn’t feel like it. I nodded anyway, tying my blanket around my shoulders like a shawl, and trying not to stare too close at Varric’s naked jaw as he folded an unread letter into his pocket.
“You sure you wanna take that?” he asked me, gesturing to my shoulders.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well. You know, it’s—” He shut his mouth on an unfinished sentence. “Never mind. I’ll let Harding know that we’re going.”
-
“Do you not want to be a dwarf?”
He stopped on a street corner, Lowtown stretching far beyond us, tall houses blocking out the sun. The faintest slither of light reflected in his eyes, and on his necklace.
I expected anger from him, some part of me wanted it, but he only gave a confused frown.
“I’m sorry?”
“You act like you’re ashamed.”
A flash of hurt crossed his clean-shaven face. His lips parted before he spoke again. “Where the hell is this coming from?”
I kicked the ground, dispersing pebbles under my foot, and avoiding his eyes. “Nowhere. Nevermind.”
There was a beat. His boots crept into my vision and I raised my head just enough to glare at his chin, while overhead clouds plunged that tiny slither of light into the shade again.
“This ‘cause I shaved?”
“...You look naked.”
The light chuckle he gave me was genuine, despite the hurt still on his face. “You’ll get used to it. Let’s go.”
-
Through an unremarkable doorway on the northernmost side of the Viscount’s Keep, was the Viscount’s office. Red curtains and gold heraldry made up its rich interior; neat, arranged, and just as still and breathless as a baby born with the cord caught around its neck.
Provisional Viscount Cavin, a stern, reserved man hidden away in the dark, stood to greet us from a long desk and a mountain of parchment. He walked around the red rug, rather than over it, and stopped us from treading further into the room.
With Harding left behind, the side of me she would have stood on was cold and exposed. On my other; Varric, whose smug and toothy grin contrasted the Viscount’s sour expression, like a man who sucked a lemon.
“Serah Tethras.” He hid his hands behind his back, while a range of emotions battled for dominance on his face.
“Let’s—let’s just skip the whole pleasantries thing.” Varric spread out his arms, inviting a hug that would never come. “We’re friends!”
Any suppression of annoyance abruptly lifted. “That’s not how I would describe it.”
“And friends help each other! Right, Bran?”
“You can’t call me that.” With a sigh, his eyes flicked briefly to mine, judgemental and harsh under dark red hair. “If this is about the Merchant’s Guild, I told you a year ago, I can’t—”
“It’s not about the Guild. Promise.” He gestured to me, with his hand behind my spine but never actually touching. “This is Isana’s. She’s… a friend.”
If the Viscount noticed, or cared, about the hesitation, it was unclear. Whatever formalities he’d been presenting were gone in an instant, and he tugged his fingers through his hair in visible exasperation.
“Maker, tell me he’s not holding you hostage. I have enough to do today already.”
Varric scoffed. He followed the Viscount back to his desk, tracking dirt on the rug. “You think so little of me, Bran?”
“I do my very best not to think of you at all.” The Viscount’s intricate wood chair creaked under the shift of his weight. He plucked a quill from the desk and a roll of parchment from a pile beneath it. “Are you going to stop wasting my time?”
The curtains behind him blocked out the sun and cast a red hue over his desk and his hands, already engrossed in work far more enticing to him than two dwarves on the other side of the room. Varric knew him enough to tease him, but not enough to not hesitate now; his shoulders slumped, but with the crossbow weighing him down, were still tense and rigid, like his jaw as it set.
His hesitation lasted a moment too long.
“My mother was murdered.”
Varric and the Viscount stared up at me with equal measures of surprise. I hid my trembling hands beneath my blanket, having surprised myself by speaking at all, and bowing my head.
“I—I want to return her to the Stone,” I said.
I wouldn’t describe the Viscount’s stare as scrutiny, yet I couldn’t think of any other word. I was small under his gaze, and the longer the silence stretched on, the more I shrunk into my blanket.
“The Revered Mother handles these affairs.”
Varric interjected while I forced myself to breathe.
“Yeah. She’s not here.”
“Not—?” The Viscount suppressed the confusion that crossed his features, something that was still present in the downward twitch in his mouth.
“She’s in Ostwick, apparently.” Varric dug his thumbs into his belt. A perfect picture of faux nonchalance. “Maker knows why.”
“...I wasn’t informed.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
The Viscount set down his quill, thin lips pressed into a serious line. “I will inquire into this matter.”
“Well, sure, if you want, but that’s not why we’re here.”
“Ah… yes.” Sighing to himself, he rolled up his parchment again, resigned to not finishing it today. “I can’t help you. But I can write to the Revered Mother, and let her know.”
No. This was just going in circles, round and round again until it was too late. The few remaining Chantry mages couldn’t preserve her forever, and when the body starts to rot—they don’t sit around and wait for a fucking letter to slide under the door.
“The Revered Mother,” I warbled, speaking as loud as I dared over Varric, “has already denied my request.”
The pointed look in the Viscount’s eye definitely was scrutiny, this time. “Then I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.”
Every woman, child, elf, and lowly dwarf knew those select words well. The rich and the powerful, in their cushioned chairs and red offices with the city smog behind them, staring up at you with a sad little pout, telling you how sorry they are that your life is worthless to them—at the end of all things, these words could always be condensed into the most basic of sentiments; useless, powerless, bastard.
He was no better than Dumar.
“Because… because I can’t afford it?” I tried.
“Because I’m swamped in paperwork as it is, and it’s not my responsibility.”
“Ah, damn.” Varric shook his head, stepping out in front of me, and resting his hands behind his back, where a knuckle rapped against his palm. “That’s a shame. Guess we’ll have to figure something else out.”
I whipped my head to glare at him. He continued, not even sparing a glance,
“Before we head out though, I just remembered, we haven’t had the chance to catch up! How’s whatshername?”
The Viscount’s dour expression moved away from me, and I felt I could breathe in. “She’s fine. Thank you. Good day, Serah.”
“You sure? I mean, hell, the situation she’s in… shit, if I were you, I’d be worried sick.”
“What are you implying?”
“Me? Nothing at all. Hey, I’ll let the Nightingale know you said hi, yeah?”
“I didn’t—“
“Isana. Let’s go.”
No sooner were we out the door did the Viscount suddenly stand from his chair, pushing it back with a terrible scrape against the stone. Varric looked back with a small, patient smile, and I stared at him, failing to decipher what in the Ancestors’ good names he was doing.
The Viscount’s fists rested in tight balls against his desk. A hunched posture greeted us now on the opposite side of his rich little desk and towers of parchment, and a flushed face, embarrassed by his own demeanour, and… afraid.
“Maker’s—fine.” He dragged slender fingers through his hair. “I’ll talk to the Mothers and get ir arranged, but I can’t organise it for you, or cover the fees!”
“Not a problem, Bran. Thanks.”
The door slammed behind us, and I collapsed against the wall. Varric’s smug, proud grin spread into a toothy smile, exposing a tooth gap I never noticed before.
“Said he owed me a favour, didn’t I?”
I stared, my palm to my chest, still tight. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ll explain later. Not really a conversation for listening ears. All good?” He offered his hand to pull me to my feet, and I let him. My legs were jelly and my heart beat like a heavy drum against my ribs, but I managed to follow him out of the Keep without stumbling.
“I thought—” I began, then faltered. Varric waited, patient, walking in line with me down the stairs. “When you turned to leave…”
“You think I’d give up? Nah. Bran acts tough, but he’s easy, and there’s a heart underneath all that bluster.”
There was a light skip in his step, and a brief return of that wild look in his eye which I had grown accustomed to in Skyhold. “Lucky for us,” he said. “Once he sorts everything out with the Chantry, you got plans for how you wanna go about this?”
Varric, using his power and connections to get something he wanted, something I could only ever have dreamed of, and now…
I felt dirty.
“Oh.”
Maybe some part of me believed I would never get this far. I had to visit the cemetery, a long ride from the city, then pick a stone for her to be buried beneath, and commission the casket, of course, and the engravings, and I would need to organise the invitations soon, or it would be too short notice, and—
Varric nudged me with his shoulder. “Earth to Isana?”
“I’m sorry, I—I’m thinking.”
—and Maker. The dress. I needed fabric. What about flowers? She never cared for them, for nature and pretty green things, but should I get them anyway? Did it even matter? Would anyone even care?
What if nobody came?
“You don’t seem very happy.”
“Don’t I?” I mumbled.
He sighed, long and dejected, and walked a little faster.
-
We passed through the Hightown Market, busy at this time of day, and I stopped to buy herbs for my pains and cycles with the little coin remaining from my time with Cabot. Through there, at a line of storefronts, I halted just beyond the threshold of a mercerie, and Varric, realising I’d stopped part way down the street, recounted his steps.
“Need something else?” He glanced up at the sign. “Huh. This place is a bit…”
“Rich?” I know, I said in my mind, but it’s the only place that will have what I need. I clutched the red coinpurse that clung tight to my belt, an uneven weight on my hips.
I swallowed, throat tighter than it was moments ago. Suddenly I was a child again, stood outside in the cold and the damp and begging mother to let me look at the toys, a time when I was small enough for the handles to be level to my eyes.
“Just for a minute?” I asked. “Please?”
Varric raised an eyebrow. . “Why’re you asking me?” Then, perhaps seeing something in my expression, stepped up toward the door. “Hey, you know, I’ve been wanting to take a look, anyway. Might find something my tailor would like. Let’s look around.”
The richest parts of Hightown could be condensed into the same three architectural layouts, designed for the comfort of the human nobles who resided in them, and to keep the servants just out of sight. The few buildings which remained that were older than Kirkwall’s liberation, were built by the dwarves.
I felt that, as I stepped over the threshold, a bell ringing far above my head. Large structures like the Viscount’s Keep which had been rebuilt and renovated time and time again had long since lost all sense of the dwarves who constructed it, however many centuries ago. Down here, sandwiched between bakeries and smithies, a textiles shop, running hot with the metaphysical flames of my Ancestors.
That it was not a dwarf, but a human man, who greeted us at the door with a curt and tight smile, made my heart and my hands clench.
What would our Ancestors think of us now?
“Is there anything I can help you with, Serah?” the Mercer offered, heavily Orlesian with a tone that said he didn’t much want to help us at all, and a wandering eye over what were, to him, my tattered rags. With his hands pressed together, he hummed. “I’m afraid my wife can only take human measurements, however—”
“Who says we’re not human?”
He blinked at Varric. So did I, both at what he’d said, and the accent in which he’d said it—a stronger, richer form of his underlying Kirkwall drawl. An imitation of mine.
“I’m sorry?”
Varric scoffed. “Maker’s breath. It’s not our fault our father’s father’s father was cursed by a Chasind.”
“Ah.” The polite facade dissipated. “My apologies, Serah, I meant no offense…”
“Yeah, sure, whatever. We’re just looking, anyway.”
As he left, his shoes clicking on the stone, I shoved Varric’s arm. “Why did you do that?”
“To prove a point. Mostly.”
“What point?”
“That his wife probably doesn’t measure elves, either.”
He stepped onto the centre floor, hands in his pockets and his neck craned to gaze at the unreachable high shelves. Cottons, silks, all manner of textiles. A crackling fireplace and soft murmurs from a back room made up for an otherwise stifling silence.
Varric swore quietly, shrugging off his coat. “It’s hot in here.”
He looked so much smaller without the padding in the shoulders. “It’s dwarven. It’s supposed to hold heat.”
“Yeah. I noticed that too. Can’t imagine living like this.”
I ran my fingers over a roll of dyed cotton. “I always thought it sounded…”
“Mm, suffocating?”
“...No.” A cocoon, a baby’s swaddle… or a blanket, heavy around my shoulders. All encompassing. “I hate the cold.”
“You and me both, but it’s better than being stuck in some humid cave with a hundred other sweaty dwarves. With the beards, too? Euch.”
I glanced at him, found him staring back, and tore my eyes away again. “Is that why you shave, then?”
“ ‘Cause they’re hot and itchy? That’s part of it, sure.”
He can. He just doesn’t want to. “And the other part?”
A shift of fabric and boots against the stone told me he’d turned away again. “You’re awfully interested in this topic.”
Deciding I didn’t like the texture of the cotton anymore, I moved along the shelf. “You’re awfully interested in not answering the question.”
I walked along the wall, sick of the pretense and done with the back and forth. I barely knew what I was looking at before I felt it, in a smaller corner of the shop; silk—soft, shining, coloured in both bright and dark hues, some in more quantities than others, and an excess of black for a city that never stops mourning.
How many widows and maids of widows came into this store and touched this very same silk? I wasn’t a widow, and I didn’t have a maid, but I was an orphan, and that mattered all the same to an expectant outstretched hand on the other side of a countertop.
Varric, mourning a different death, hummed a simple tune to himself on the other side of the room.
I didn’t know how he did it. How he lived his day to day, pretending nothing was wrong, little jokes and sly smiles like he would ever see Hawke again.
Why wasn’t he in as much pain as I was? Why didn’t he suffer as much as I did? Why did I want him to?
I carried my silk to the counter, where the Mecer smiled as he told me a price that I paid, unflinching, from my blood-red coinpurse. I watched the coin disappear into an unseen drawer, spending more in that one moment than I’d ever owned in my entire life, and with leftovers still in the purse, acid rose to my throat, and with it an acrid taste of bile.
Was this how much my mother’s life was worth? Barely enough to buy a half yard of silk?
Varric was strangely quiet as we stepped back out onto the street, and I knew it was coming before he even opened his mouth.
“I’m not gonna ask,” he said.
I clutched the silk under my blanket, hidden, protected. “I wouldn’t answer.”
“Hm.”
After deliberation, Varric continued.
“How about a trade?”
I kept my eyes level to the horizon, not daring to glance his way, fearing I might catch him already staring.
“What for?”
“Questions for questions.”
“I don’t see the point in that.”
“Well, there doesn’t need to be a point for everything.” He slowed his stride a bit, forcing me to trail beside him. “Here. You can go first.”
I huffed. Three weeks of nonsense and bullshit, and now he wanted to play twenty-questions?
Fine.
“Why do you shave your beard?”
He deflated. “You’re stubborn, you know that?”
“You suggested this.”
He mumbled something unintelligible under his breath, then, kicking his feet as he walked, “The beard makes me look like my dad. My turn. How’d you know where to find me, back before all this? I didn’t tell anyone I left the city.”
His father? But what was the shame in that? “When Haven was destroyed, word got out you were caught in the middle.” Mother’d laughed and prayed he was dead.
“So you followed the trail to Skyhold. Okay, I get it.”
“My turn again. How did you meet mother?”
He hummed. “I snuck out of one of Bartrand’s parties. Met her at a bar. She’d done the same thing.”
“So you spent the night together…?”
“Not so fast. In that little sketchbook of yours, I saw some guy, all crossed out. What’s the story there?”
I swallowed around the sensation stuck in my throat. “He’s… he’s who got mother killed. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Hm. Okay.”
“So you and mother, did… was it just… did you love her?”
He gave me a pity-filled look. “I only knew her a few hours, kid.”
Stop calling me that. How many times do I have to say it? “But…”
“It wasn’t some true love at first sight story, no. I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry, he says. “But you’re not married to anyone else?”
I’d already broken the rules of the game. He just sighed. “No.”
“So if she’d asked—”
“It’s my turn. The coin. Where’d you get it?”
I took a sharp turn around a corner, nearly walking into him, forcing him behind me. Why not? Why wouldn’t you marry her?! “I thought you weren’t going to ask.”
He caught up, now on the other side of me. He smiled. “Maybe I changed my mind.”
I’d made him angry, I thought. Or just sad. I thought I was prepared, that I knew what I was going to say, how to say it. After three steadying breaths, I didn’t feel any better.
“I went back to his house. My friend who betrayed me.”
He glanced at my belt. “Uh-huh.”
“I took his coin. That’s all.”
“Can I see it?”
“...Why?”
“You said the Carta killed him too, right? Maybe their coin’s poisoned, or cursed, or… I don’t know, something. Wouldn’t be the first time. Would explain why they didn’t take it back.”
“He wasn’t poisoned, I—”
—snapped my mouth shut. Varric stared and blinked like some clueless hound, head tilted, just slightly.
“He,” I said. “He. He was strangled.”
There was a silence, before Varric gave a low and quiet hum, then more after that, where his footsteps and mine were the only sounds as we turned in to Lowtown.
“Think it’s your turn,” he murmured, gruff and grating voice strangely soft and grim. I pushed out the air from my lungs.
“...Favourite colour?”
He chuckled. “Would you believe me if I told you it isn’t red?”
Bran: Wow. If I had a copper for every viscount Kirkwall lost over some random bullshit with a foreign culture's ancient artifacts, I'd have two coppers.
Bran: Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?
BE is still in the anon period so I will no doubt be reccing these again after creator reveals 😉 but I received three AMAZING gifts that I love very much and must share so that you can go give them some love too!
a friend in need. Sera & Slim Couldry, 3000 words, rated T. A fic that captures everything I love to imagine about Sera's early life in Denerim and how she could have known one of my favorite minor characters! Really gets at the sense of rejection that hit her so hard in childhood and shaped who she becomes.
Letters to the Office of the Viscount. Varric Tethras & Bran Cavin, 1399 words, rated T. The very entertaining story of Viscount Varric, his unanswered mail, his approach to diplomatic relations, and his very put-upon seneschal.
gold dust woman. Branka/Hespith, 3000 words, rated M. A beautiful and atmospheric fic exploring the relationship from Hespith's perspective, from their early lives to the tragic Deep Roads expedition.
Happy Black Emporium reveals, friends, and happy reading!
