'We slept in the same bed for space reasons but now we’re just waking up and there’s something about your bleary eyes and mussed hair' for Merrill/Carver or Varric/Marian, whichever you prefer! :)
thank you so much for the prompt!! I’ve done this one for Varric/Marian before but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write one from Marian’s POV
for @dadrunkwriting
from this list
Hawke cracked an eye open and groaned. Her body screamed at her as she shifted in bed.
Hang on, she was in a bed? Her bed, if the smell of wet dog was anything to go by. The last thing she remembered…the last thing she remembered was the fight with the Arishok. Ouch. Lots of very pointy stabby spears. Not a very fun time for Marian.
A light snore drew her attention, and she glanced over to the side. There was a plush chair pulled up close to the bed, and Varric was gently snoring, half in the chair and half sprawled across the bed.
His hand, she realized belatedly, was holding onto hers. Maybe it was the pain talking, but there was something almost angelic about the way the candlelight reflected off of his face, dancing across his golden hair.
Andraste’s sacred knickers, it was definitely the pain talking. Marian was to romance what oil was to water. Dancing across his hair? That was the kind of thing Varric would put in Swords & Shields.
Her stomach loudly announced that it had been too long since she’d last had something to eat. She was strangely reluctant to remove her hand from his, but holy Maker she was hungry. As she pulled away, Varric’s head shot up, his eyes unfocused.
“Hawke?” he rasped. Parts of his hair were sticking up in odd directions and his face was creased from lying on the sheets. A very small part of Marian thought oh.
“In the flesh,” she managed.
“Don’t-- don’t you ever do that again, you understand?” he said. He was holding onto her hand again.
“But Varric, think of the book sales,” she said weakly. She was interrupted by a hacking coughing fit. “Although maybe don’t include the bit where I got turned into a kebab. Not a very glorious hero moment, is it?”
“Hawke…”
“Alright, alright, I pinky-promise I won’t get stabbed through the stomach again. Probably. Not anytime soon, at least.”
“Marian.”
Oh.
He’d never called her that before. She was always just Hawke to him. But there was something about the half-desperate way that he called her name that brought the blood rushing to her face.
He was close now, close enough that she could see the dark flecks of brown in his warm, amber eyes. Was wanting to kiss your best friend a symptom of getting stabbed? Was that a thing? She didn’t think so, and she was Kirkwall’s leading expert on being stabbed.
“How long was I out?” she asked instead, endeavouring not to stare at his lips.
“A week,” Varric said, his voice strained. His eyes hadn’t left her face. To her immense surprise, she realized she was blushing. She hadn’t blushed since she turned 15, despite Isabela’s best efforts.
“Ah, well, you need a lot of beauty sleep if you want to look this fantastic,” Hawke replied.
“Marian,” he said again, and then he was kissing her. Soft, and warm, and wonderful, and why hadn’t they started doing this years ago?
When they finally broke apart, breathless, she rested her forehead against his.
“Do you think I could go get a sandwich first? I’m starving,” she whispered. His answering laughter, rich and warm, was something she’d treasure for years.
Chapter: 1/6 - The Question
Words: 2,604
Rating: T
Summary: There are plenty of things Varric and Hawke are good at: snide remarks, drinking the swill served at the Hanged Man, getting into trouble, nearly dying but still managing not to, witty one-liners…but sitting down and talking about their feelings? Eh, not so much. That goes double when the feelings in question are of a, uh, complicated nature. Or romantic. Or both. And Maker help them, but things have absolutely entered ‘both’ territory. Surely they’ll figure it out, right? Right. …right?
Author’s note: My PLAN had been to write a little one-shot about Hawke and Varric after talking about these two and their F E E L I N G S with @serphena but...as is usually the case with me...things rapidly got out of hand. Hence the, uh, multiple chapters. Whoops.
Next
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It wasn’t strange to find Hawke passing the time around the Hanged Man those days—which, of course, wasn’t to say it was ever strange to find her there, it had just become more of a regular thing was all. From what he could gather, Leandra hadn’t been half as thrilled at the sight of all the gold they’d managed to haul back topside as she’d been furious and heartbroken at losing Carver to the Wardens, and knowing what he knew about the strain that had existed between the two of them before…well, Varric thought he could piece together why Hawke might’ve preferred to spend her time among Kirkwall’s finest instead.
So no, it wasn’t strange to find Hawke passing her time around the Hanged Man, but it was strange to find her in one of its rooms. At first he thought he must’ve misheard Corff, that when he’d said “Eh, she’s in the back,” he’d actually meant out back, like outside, maybe searching for an alley clean enough to vomit into instead of using the gutter like the tavern’s baser clientele…only she hadn’t been outside.
It was about that time he began to suspect that Hawke’s home life wasn’t the only thing that had been fundamentally changed by their time in the Deep Roads. Not by a long shot.
He found her in one of the rooms after all, her back against the wall, the buckles of her armor half-undone, an empty tankard held in both hands like a child might hold a warm mug of cocoa. She hadn’t looked up at him when he’d first entered the dingy little room, and she didn’t look over to him then. Her eyes were wrought on the grate of the fireplace in the corner, and horrid as it was to admit, he was having a hell of a time deciding whether it was her gaze or that grate that was the emptiest thing in the room—the coldest thing.
After a long while, she pulled in a breath to speak, and had it not been for that, hell, he might’ve gone the rest of the night thinking she hadn’t noticed him at all. When she asked her question, there was a moment where he almost (almost) wished she hadn’t. “Are we still friends?”
There really wasn’t any describing what happened to his insides at that. “I—wh—of course we’re friends! Maker’s…Hawke, why wouldn’t we be?” Without wasting his time on things as pointless as pretense he joined her on the floor, all hope of maintaining his usual façade thrown by the wayside. In one fell swoop, with four little words, she’d somehow managed to stick him right between the ribs where everything was soft and vulnerable. By then the worst of the surprise was wearing off, and he was appalled at what he found lurking just beneath it: Fear. Bald-faced fear. Fear that he’d missed some sign, some cue; fear that he’d said the wrong thing at the wrong time; fear that Bartrand’s betrayal would cost him even more than it already had; but above everything else, it was fear of something he’d never before considered.
It was fear of losing her.
There’d been…so much he’d pushed to the side during the expedition, especially after watching Carver limp away with the other Wardens. He’d told himself that he’d deal with piecing it all together once they hit topside again, but deep down, he had to wonder if he’d ever actually intended to do any of that. Sitting down and taking stock of his feelings? That had never really been his strongest suit…but now here was Hawke, cutting him to the quick with barely a sentence. Were they still friends? Were they still friends?
He’d known from the moment Corff nodded him towards the back rooms that something was wrong, that maybe he’d find her drunk or beaten up or robbed blind but this? There wasn’t a thing in the world that could’ve prepared him for this, a hurt so…fundamental.
Next to him she shrugged, her eyes still blank and distant, the shadow of her hair making them dark as night in the ill-lit room as she turned the empty flagon round and round in her hands. “The expedition’s over,” she said after a pause so long he’d considered repeating himself. “Contract’s over. Just wasn’t sure if that’d be the end of it…” Her voice trailed off again, and the discomfort in his gut grew duller but somehow worse, reaching out through the rest of him with greedy, searching fingers.
This was the part where he’d say something clever. He’d fire off a witty retort and she would smile, the smile would become a laugh, and then things would return to normal. She would laugh and then they could be their usual selves again, all nudging shoulders and sarcastic asides, and once they managed that, they could do anything. Go fleece the public in a few hands of Wicked Grace or Diamondback, maybe. Hassle Norah until she threatened to kick them out. Make up story after story to keep themselves occupied and pretend that they had never, ever let their masks slip away to show what lay beneath the grins they wore so well. Any second now he’d set that plan into motion…any second now…any second…
“We’re still friends,” is what he actually said, neither clever nor witty, just an echo of himself and nothing more. “The expedition’s got nothing to do with it.” How could she ever think it had?
But…but just for a moment—just for an instant—he felt his stomach drop.
How could she have thought it? Well that was actually easy enough to answer. A couple months ago, shit, maybe even a few weeks ago, he might’ve thought the same. After all, hadn’t his original offer been one of business? He hadn’t approached Hawke that day in Hightown because he’d wanted a friend, he’d sauntered over with one hand out and a shyster’s grin because she’d been Athenril’s miraculous Fereldan wunderkind, the refugee who’d come tumbling in off the Waking Sea with a chip on her shoulder and bruises on her knuckles, and he’d heard the stories of the shit she’d pulled off and the scores she’d landed and the heads she’d bashed in, and shit! If her contract with the elf was almost up, then it was only a matter of time before someone else swooped in and made her an offer, and why shouldn’t that have been him? So when it’d turned out she’d been interested in Bartrand’s expedition—their expedition—it had felt as though the stars had aligned and he’d been presented the greatest business opportunity of his life.
Then, though…well then he’d actually met her, and Maker, all that bullshit had flown right out the window.
The ghost of a smile tugged at Hawke’s lips and it was somehow so much worse than the blank expression she’d worn before. “Okay,” she said, not sounding terribly convinced. There was a quality to her voice that he couldn’t immediately place, something that wasn’t quite maudlin but wasn’t not, and for the first time he found himself doubting she’d been in her cups tonight at all. He thought, perhaps, she’d been crying just before he’d found her.
The thought twisted something in his chest that he’d never noticed there before.
She shifted against him then, if only slightly, her boots scraping the hard-packed floor as she pulled her legs up under herself. Like that, she felt deceptively small and exceedingly vulnerable; less a hawk and more a sparrow, fighting not to be blown off-course by the slightest puff of wind. Maybe the others would’ve found it difficult to reconcile all of that with what they knew about her—the toothiness of her grin, the swagger in her step, the ever-flowing font of wisecracks and witty one-liners—but not him. Not Varric. No, no, all at once, that side of her, that quiet, secret part…it made too much sense. It was familiar. He recognized it as clearly as he might’ve recognized the sight of himself in a looking glass, and why not? If anything, he only wondered how he hadn’t noticed it before. Then again…maybe he had.
Maybe he had.
Hawke swallowed hard enough for him to hear it. “I miss Carver,” she said after a long while, her cheek warm even through his duster.
“I know.” For someone who took so much pride in his wit, Varric couldn’t for the life of him think of anything else to say. It wasn’t enough, it wasn’t nearly enough, so he put his arm about her shoulders and drew her closer to him instead, hoping that might help where his words had failed.
“I miss Bethany. I miss Ferelden. I miss the farm, I miss…” She drew in a breath that shook like leaves in a storm, and without fully realizing what he was doing, Varric lifted the hand that had been on her shoulder to instead gently rest on her head. “I miss Father. I just…I just miss it all, and there’s no going back now, is there? None at all. There’s no fixing any of it, no getting them back.”
“I know.”
She sniffled wetly, and while he didn’t turn to openly confirm his suspicion, he thought the hand she brought to her face was meant to wipe away her tears before they could fall. “And I’m just…I don’t know. I wanted to be sure, I guess. To know we’re…” Her voice trailed off then, one of her shoulders slouching in a shrug. But that was fine. As it turned out, that was just fine indeed.
He knew what she was getting at. Again, why shouldn’t he? It was an ache he knew all too well; he missed his mother, there were days where he thought he missed the idea of his father if nothing else, and much as he was loath to admit it, in his own sort of way, he almost missed Bartrand too. Almost. Things had a funny way of seeming prettier, seeming kinder, when you were looking back on them.
It took him a moment to realize the hand he’d set comfortingly on her head had taken to stroking her hair, and there was something to be said about that, but Hawke didn’t seem to mind so he saw no reason to stop. Instead, he cleared his throat once (unsure of precisely when it had grown so tight) and tried to do what he did best: crack wise.
“Well I have news for you, serah Hawke,” Varric joked, surprised at how easily the words came to him that time. “Not only are we friends—I’m getting rid of that ‘still,’ if you don’t mind, because quite honestly I don’t much care for your ridiculous insinuation that something as run-of-the-mill and banal as nearly dying down in the Deep Roads could somehow impact this relationship of ours—” at that, Hawke laughed, and it was soft and sad but it was perfect all the same. “Not only are we friends, but I regret to inform you that you are irrefutably the best friend I’ve ever had. So.” It was his turn to shrug a shoulder, though he was careful to make sure it wasn’t the one she was resting on. “Looks like you’re stuck with me.”
Hawke lifted her head and turned her face up to his, and as he got his first good look at her, he realized how off he’d been before. He thought maybe she hadn’t just been crying earlier, but weeping. All of that seemed very far away then, because while her eyes were still red and ringed and her cheeks were dewy with tears, he could see that smile—her smile—doing its damnedest to buoy up through it all, and as always, it was proving positively contagious.
“I mean it,” he said in that same tone, jovial and lighthearted, the verbal equivalent of an elbow-nudge. “Sorry to say it, but you’re the exact sort of ne’er-do-well that appeals to House Tethras…good at cards, bad at everything else—”
“Hey!”
“—willing to sacrifice anything, including your own physical well-being, for the sake of a joke—”
“These really don’t feel like compliments, Varric.”
He pretended not to hear, carrying on in that same vein, taking to making grand, sweeping gestures with his other hand. “—you drink like both of your legs are hollow, you always know when someone’s trying to cheat you, you’re…eh, let’s say fairly good-looking—”
“Fairly?”
“—for a human.”
Hawke snorted and dropped her head into her hands as her shoulders shook—that time not with tears but laughter.
Varric, for his part, couldn’t help but laugh right along with her, letting his arm drape around her shoulders again. “Precisely the sort of rapscallion that appeals to my very, very exacting sensibilities as a seedy back-room grifter, you understand. So I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but yes, we are friends, Hawke, and no, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Without a word of warning, Hawke moved against him, sitting up on her knees and throwing her arms around him in the tightest, most bone-crushing hug of his life. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had clung to him like that, and so it didn’t come as a shock to find he was hugging her back just as tightly, squeezing and squeezing until he swore he could feel her heart in his chest.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re pretty okay, as far as seedy back-room grifters go?” Hawke asked, her voice slightly muffled as her cheek rested on his shoulder. She made no sign that she was ready to let go of him, much less pull away, but he thought he could hear a full-blown smile shaping her words.
“Well, you just did,” he snickered. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re pretty okay, as far as Fereldans go?”
“They have. But you know, I wouldn’t mind being told again.” That time she did loosen her grip to pull away; if she noticed that it took him a moment to do the same, to let go of her, Hawke certainly didn’t show it. “Thank you, Varric,” she said after a beat, her smile genuine though her voice threatened to break as it had before. “For what it’s worth…and it may not be worth much…you’re the best friend I’ve ever had, too.”
“Don’t say it like it’s a surprise.” Once she let go of him he took to his feet, and after dusting himself off he offered her his hand. “C’mon,” he said when she only furrowed her brow in response. “Seedy or not, I think you’ll find my room has a warmer fire and significantly better booze.”
She took his hand and heaved herself up off the ground, her smile softening at the edges. He felt that unknown, unfamiliar thing in his chest give another lurch at the sight of it. “You trust me not to muddy the floors or stain the fine linens, then?” And oh, that time it was almost like normal, almost like she was all right. “Fereldans and mud…you know how it just clings to us.”
“Hawke, my palatial suite in the Hanged Man is your palatial suite in the Hanged Man. Muddy whatever the hell you want,” he chuckled, giving her hand a little squeeze before letting go. He found it harder to do than he might’ve anticipated even ten minutes ago. Something had changed, all right. Or perhaps he’d just finally noticed it.
I was tagged in this by the lovely @inquisitoracorn (here) and @serphena (here)! Thanks for tagging me guys - sorry I’m late as I was on a social media break for the last 8 days LOL.
These aren’t my favourites, just some of the songs I’ve listened to most recently (and yes, a shocking number of them are either related to The Masked Singer UK, or to an online pub quiz we did most recently):
甜蜜蜜 (Tian Mi Mi) -- 邓丽君 (Teresa Teng)
Dance Monkey -- Tones and I
Thong Song -- Sisqó
So Sick -- Ne-Yo
Black Hole Sun -- Soundgarden
Someone Like You -- Adele
Take On Me -- A-Ha
Hotel Room Service -- Pitbull
Whenever, Wherever -- Shakira
Sexy Bitch -- David Guetta feat. Akon
Not sure who to tag for this one, so I’ll try @cartadwarfwithaheartofgold, @elveny, @lesetoilesfous, @varghaxa, @charlatron, @gremlinquisitor, @heartsyhawk, @norageonlypancakes, @misssowinski, @tearsofwinter, @hechizero-emplumado
