What if I wrote a modern AU where Hawke is a newbie actress with only community theatre experience from her small hometown. Varric is a decently published writer, but not to the degree he could live off his writing alone. He and Bartrand are trying to make their first movie and launch a production company. It's based on Varric's script. They don't have the money to fund it, so they need the actors to go in on the funding (and get a % of the profits if it sells). They audition so many people. They stop being able to tell the humans apart. Everything is a blur.
And then SHE comes in. The one. And she's poor af. She can't afford to buy in. But it HAS to be her. Varric will strangle Bartrand in his sleep if that's what it takes. Instead, he helps her get the money together by referring her to people he knows for modelling work. Maybe even a sexy maid service. He thinks she'll kill him for suggesting it, but she just cracks her knuckles and tells him, "Let's do this."
He's in love. He knows he's in love, but he CAN'T be in love, because everyone knows he's still in love with the ex that left him years ago. So he's not in love. He just recognises raw talent when he sees it. That's all.
They get the money together. The film gets made. It's a runaway success. They get filthy rich off the profits. Hawke gets swamped with new offers. Varric starts writing again. He spends a decade telling himself he's not in love with his best friend and it doesn't kill him to see her with all those classically handsome film stars on screen and on the red carpet, their hands on her lower back. He's not jealous when she gushes about other scripts and how great her love interest is in this one. He doesn't care at all.
He cares so little, in fact, that he DOESN'T end up writing a script of their lives in a haze where the character that's definitely not him confesses to loving the girl on the last page, and there's nothing after. He doesn't forget that he wrote that dreck and left it out on his coffee table when Hawke comes over. He can't, because that would mean she'd know, and then what? He's kept the secret for so long, what are a few years more?
He's lucky Hawke is a fast reader and always skips to the end.
The luckiest man alive.
