Chapter Text
They’d just emerged from the Deep Roads, ready to start the long trip to Weisshaupt. They’d accomplished much – though perhaps not as much as she’d have liked, but it would be enough for now. There was fatigue – exhaustion, really – and relief. Despite the current tension with Weisshaupt, there was good news to share, and a lead on where to go next for her research into the Calling.
They could see the explosion from the Wounded Coast.
Her eyes went wide, and her gaze flashed directly to Carver, who’d gone pale.
“Bloody fuckin’ ‘ell,” Claude hissed as they watched the red beam shoot into the sky, followed closely by the earth literally shaking.
Without another word, she turned to her lieutenant.
“Get started toward Weisshaupt,” she told him. “Hawke and I will investigate this, just in case.”
“Yes, Commander,” he said with a nod.
***
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d traveled so fast, and if it were possible, Kirkwall was in even more chaos than it had been the last time.
They’d found the elder Hawke, and Carver had the Champion locked in an embrace she couldn’t have expected, though it made her smile.
“Hello, Hawke,” she said breathlessly, still smiling as the siblings released each other. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Indeed, Warden-Commander,” Hawke replied with a reciprocal grin.
“Oh, please, call me Raina, or at least Surana,” she said with a wave of her hand as they moved toward the Gallows. “It just doesn’t feel right to stand on formality.”
“Ugh, please stop flirting,” Carver said as they moved. “Fenris won’t like it.”
“Oh hush,” Surana said with a grin. “Fenris knows I’m utterly harmless, isn’t that right, Fenris?”
“I’m not sure harmless is the word I would use,” the strangely tattooed elf replied dourly. Pulling her hair into a tight knot at the back of her head, a few errant curls escaping as they always did, she laughed even as she took the stairs down to the skiff two at a time.
“Well, I suppose I should say Fenris knows I’m just being friendly, and so is Hawke,” she amended.
“Interminably so,” the tattooed warrior acknowledged.
“See?” she said, turning to Carver as they got onto the boat. “Friendly. And there’s no better time to make and reaffirm friendships than during an unmitigated disaster, am I right?”
“Of course,” Hawke replied with a little grin. “Besides, Fenris knows he has nothing to fear.”
The taciturn warrior grunted, but when Hawke touched his hand, the corners of his lips did curve slightly.
“Is he smiling?” Raina murmured to Hawke, eyes wide as she grinned broadly. Carver, for his part, was blinking.
“I believe he is,” he said, disbelief in his own voice.
Raina gave him a grin, though her eyes were on the Gallows. Though pleased she’d managed to lighten the mood a bit, it was only a brief reprieve; the wheels in her head were turning about the repercussions of this act. Anders sat on the boat mute and brooding, and Fenris’ eyes did not leave him. The rest of the party was either silent or in conversations too low to overhear; she took a space off to the side, letting the Hawkes speak for what she knew was the first time in entirely too long.
There was clear affection between them now; it wasn’t as lighthearted as last time, but not as cautious, either. In times of calamity, she noted, the siblings were there for each other without reservation.
There was an unexpected pang in her chest as she watched, something bittersweet as she appreciated the way they bent their heads. It made her think of Tomas, whom she’d barely had the chance to write to since she’d left the Circle, and who had nowhere to reach her if he wanted to. She also thought of her own family, of her mother and the Dalish clan that had taken her back in, how she was a stranger to them all. No shared experiences, no unerring confidence… they were in her thoughts often, but it was not the same, she knew.
She knew.
“Nice of you to let him come,” Varric told her, nodding toward Carver as he leaned against the side of the boat, the wind lifting their hair a bit.
“Pish, such a massive explosion seemed likely to be relevant to Grey Warden interests,” she said easily, looking at the Gallows instead of the dwarf. She could still see his smirk out of the corner of her eye.
“Right,” he replied. “That was the only reason for your detour, huh?”
His eyes went from Carver, who cast her a smile as he spoke to Hawke, to Surana.
Now her gaze fell on him, her lips curving.
“And just what are you implying, Ser Dwarf?”
“Just that you probably could have sent a scout to report from a distance, or at the very least, sent someone besides you to go with him,” he said. Now she grinned.
“You think I’m sweet on Warden Hawke?” she asked, canting her head to one side. He looked at her for a minute, a smirk of his own curving his lips.
“Nah,” he said. “You’ve never so much as glanced at him sideways for the hangdog looks he’s usually sending Daisy’s way. So maybe even nicer of you, in that case. You’re not just trying to get in his pants.”
She gasped, putting a hand over her chest in affront.
“How dare you, sir! I’ll have you know I’m perfectly capable of getting into whomever’s pants I want.”
He laughed – a low sound, under the radar, as though the events of the day were weighing it down, preventing it from carrying.
“I have no doubt of that, Warden. No doubt of that at all. But Carver Hawke is not among that number.”
She looked at the younger Hawke, tall and broad and handsome, and half-smiled.
“Not that he’d say no,” Varric added thoughtfully.
She arched a brow, looking back at the dwarf.
“Few men whose interest trends that way would say no to a willing woman who wasn’t a genlock.”
“True enough. But you’ve thought about it.”
She cast him a narrow, skeptical look.
“So now you’re a mind-reader?”
Varric grinned.
“Not minds, bodies. Eyes. Words. Silences. You’d fuck him. You’d also fuck me. Except you wouldn’t.”
“I suppose you have an explanation for this?” she asked, more curious than put out.
“Not yet; we don’t know each other that well. But if I had to guess, I’d say it has something to do with being a little softer than you think you should be, and maybe being burned before.”
She pursed her lips, narrowing her eyes.
“That’s enough out of you, dwarf. And I promise, if I see any such nonsense in any books involving thin pseudonyms for me, I will come for you.”
He gave her an enigmatic smile.
“We write what we know.”