museyboxy | Soulmate AUs

"No." Honesty, if painful. "I only know what I intend to do."

He lifted the cracked bottle, swirled the liquid inside - and when he heard no jingle of glass shards inside, he turned it up and drank the remainder before tossing it into the fire with finality. It felt good to destroy something. Something he didn't care about. Even if he was rather sure something else was about to break as well.

"I am going," he said quietly, "to let go. I am going to be alone. I have hurt enough, and I have no want to keep hurting. And since you won't kill me, and since I can't kill myself, I'll let go. In time, I will heal and I'll hate everyone slightly less."

Something about it made Varric sad, but he couldn't argue. It was the only sensible thing, really. Move on, let go. Let go of something- shit, if he were Fenris, he wouldn't wait on himself. Varric wasn't exactly projecting 'single and ready to mingle.' And there was still Bianca.

And yet. There was a still, small voice deep inside him that said Fenris deserved more than this. That Danarius couldn't have been his soulmate. Even with Bianca- even with.

He nodded, unable to conscionably to anything else. "I'm sorry, Broody."

"I know."

And from there, it started. Unless called upon by Hawke, Fenris didn't leave his mansion for a number of weeks.

After that, he began to wander through the city again. He tipped the guards off to another slave ring operating out of Darktown. He collected the bounty on a set of bandits. He even joined a foray into the blasted Bone Pit at Hawke's behest and got chewed on by a dragon.

That night was the first one he came back to the Hanged Man, taking a seat near Sebastian and Aveline rather than his usual place at Varric's side. In fact, he rarely looked at Varric through the night unless it was unavoidable. His gauntlets were hiding his wrists once more - and, more importantly, the bandages underneath. Something he didn't bother to mention that night or any of the following.

If Varric seemed unconcerned with what went on, it was an absolute fucking farce. He had his little birdies keeping an eye on Fenris, as he did for everyone in their little group. They told him when Fenris left, when Fenris hid, and what Fenris did. It was how he knew when the elf started to rejoin society, and how he knew that he'd paid a visit to Blondie's clinic one night.

There was nothing to say. He didn't treat Fenris any differently, even to avoid him: he acted exactly as he had before he knew, because that was when they had simply been friends. It was all he wanted anymore, to return to that close, easy friendship.

He knew it wasn't possible. That friendship, he now knew, only existed because Fenris had wanted something out of him. Now that Fenris had lost the hope behind his ulterior motive, apparently there was no longer any reason for them to have a friendship. Varric tried not to let bitterness color his vision, but it was difficult.

Still, they persevered. He kept treating Fenris warmly, as he always had, but with a touch more distance. If he noticed Fenris flirting with Isabela or Sebastian, he said nothing.

He hadn't only flirted. There was no such thing, he'd learned, as flirting with Isabela without more following - and with the sheer amount of wine he was consuming, some things were simply inevitable.

But once was enough. The pleasure had been fine, but little more than that. It seemed he was still too bruised to really feel what he wanted. And that was why, despite lingering glances and a few languid touches, the fling between Fenris and Isabela came to a halt.

Just in time for everything else to ignite.

What he'd expected from a confrontation of Orsino and Meredith, he wasn't sure. A battle, a fight between mage and Templar - certainly. But when the Chantry burst into searing light and flying stone, and Anders was the cause of it, it was all he could do to stare, fists clenching on nothing, feet moving as if through molasses. Meredith was quantifiably insane, but she hadn't made a building full of innocents explode.

And when Hawke took his stand with Orsino, Fenris drew his blade at Meredith's side.

Edited 2018-04-16 10:24 (UTC)

They all saw how it went down: Sebastian freaking out over Anders, Varric urging Hawke to kill him. How all the warmth left Varric's eyes whenever he looked at Anders. A friendship that had once been close and caring was now empty and crumbling to ash, and it burned whenever he looked at the mage. Varric hadn't been this angry and betrayed in a very long time- he wasn't that adept at hiding it, either.

Still. He stood with Hawke, no matter what. Which is why Fenris's choice made his heart clench and stomach lurch.

"Fenris- no!" he protested, shoving past their fearless leader before anybody could say anything stupid.

"You expect me to fight on the side of a mage?" he spat, eyes narrowed, jaw set. "A mage who would murder hundreds in a petulant fit?"

The emotion was in his eyes. It was true, then. Varric was his enemy after all. The murderer of his soulmate. And he had--

No, he would not so much as think it. His markings flickered as his grip shifted on his sword, readying for the inevitable combat. "What reason do I have to stand with any of you now? Everything I have said about mages all these years has just come true, and not a one of you listened!"

Varric saw it writ large on his face: conviction of some twisted, horrible truth, belief that they were enemies, determination to make it so.

His own conflict and emotion bled into his expression as he pleaded. Begged. "Don't do this, Broody. Don't make us fight you, please. You know Hawke always wins. Don't."

It wasn't about belief or siding with mages. But Varric couldn't bring himself to fight Fenris, not when there was a more-than-incidental chance that the elf was his soulmate. Maybe they were on opposite sides of the war right now, maybe Fenris was about to force the issue. Who knew. Maybe the next fight would fell Hawke, or Varric himself, and the question would be answered.

All he knew was that he had to do what felt right. He had to follow his instincts, and his instincts said that Fenris couldn't die here.

Edited 2018-04-16 10:49 (UTC)

There was a touch on his arm. When he looked up and saw Meredith, his eyes narrowed. But her voice was calm as she said, "Here, they may win. But my Templars wait at the Gallows. Their small force against all of my men... We will succeed, elf."

And what did it mean, Fenris thought, when insanity began to make sense.

Choice made, he stood to his full height instead of a battle-ready crouch, slid his sword into its place at his back, and turned to leave at the side of his new allies.

It broke Varric's heart a little to watch Fenris walk away, but it was all he could ask for. Fenris turned away and they turned away, and that was that... until the Gallows.

Until Meredith's nug-fucking insanity reared its entire head, and even the curly one turned against her. Until Fenris too turned his sword on the Knight-Commander.

When all was said and done, Fenris was driven out with the rest of Hawke's companions. They left Kirkwall together, purely because they only had one ship that would take them. Nobody was happy with what happened, and Aveline didn't come with them, but they left.

As they stood on the deck of the ship watching Kirkwall shrink away, Varric looked sideways at the elf. "Good to see you in one piece, Broody."

"You should go back," he said quietly. "That place is in your blood. More than it is to any of us."

Hawke, Anders, Isabela, Merrill, the absent Sebastian, and himself - all of them had been immigrants. Varric was a native. He had a home there. A network of people who would notice his absence.

Fenris, meanwhile, had been toying with the idea of leaving the place behind for months now, and found himself wishing he had. Walking away before the Chantry explosion would have made his life so much simpler. But now he was on a boat with his two greatest enemies, none of the belongings he'd gathered in the last few years, and a sense of loss that he didn't want.

"Vishante kaffas."

"Eh, me and Kirkwall will be alright. Nothing can keep us apart for too long."

He said it lazily, flicking a bitten-off nail over the ship's rail. As hard as walking away from his home was, Varric knew that any of them being in the city would only make things harder when the chickens came home to roost. Consequences were coming, and Exalted Marches (probably), and they needed to not be there. Any known associates of Anders or the Champion...

No, they needed to be gone. As angry as he was at Anders for blowing his beloved city half to hell, he accepted the need to leave with an odd zen.

Fenris was a different story. The discontent and dissatisfaction rolling off the elf made Varric's teeth hurt.

"Copper for your thoughts?"

Probably ill-advised.

"I'm thinking I should be traveling overland to Starkhaven instead of on a ship full of people who would stand against me," he said, quiet and blunt at once. And, maybe worst, honest - at least so far as he could tell. He had been content to stand alongside the Templars, but the new Knight-Commander had had a point: he had spent too long in the company of Hawke and Anders to be considered innocent, even if he had fought alongside the Chantry at the end.

He didn't doubt Sebastian's offer of Starkhaven still stood. The man was good for his word. And that made the choice easier. "I'll make my way there when we put into port. But until then, at least there's some reason for you to keep me alive."

One hand lifted toward the bow of the ship. "We're headed to the east. If we continue east and north, we pass Rivain and enter the waters of Par Vollen. I am the only one of us who speaks Qunlat."

Varric sighed deeply. So this was how it was gonna be.

"Tell me something, elf- have you ever had a friendship that didn't have an ulterior motive?"

If the question sounded a touch accusatory, it was.

"Two," he answered, just as easily as if he was saying 'we are on a boat on the ocean.' A simple statement of fact. "Though I appear to be down to one of late."

The accusation was not lost on him, but it was ignored. It wasn't surprising that Varric would see things that way, and so he wasn't offended. The best he could do was wait and tell the truth if Varric asked.

He doubted Varric would ask. More accusations would come first.

"Ugh." He scrubbed his hands through his hair, thoroughly destroying his ponytail in the process. The tie fluttered away on the wind and Varric couldn't even bring himself to care.

This was all so fucked up.

"We're keeping you alive because you're our friend, dumbass. You know, the people you spend all your time with and fought beside for seven years? The jackasses that came to defend you from your slave master and helped kill Hadriana?"

It was so endlessly frustrating to him, how willing certain people were to throw away everything over something stupid. As far as he was concerned, they didn't have to live their lives by the names on their wrists- or the mistakes of a nutjob who they would, hopefully, soon be rid of.

"The same people who threatened my life because I was one of two who vocally disapproved of the Chantry's destruction," he brought up. "Of which you were the one delivering that particular threat against my person, albeit in the form of a warning. The same people who ignored every warning I gave about the danger we faced around him."

And which 'him' Fenris spoke of was obvious. But to his credit, he didn't name Danarius as his soulmate. This time.

"I'm having a hard time seeing friendship in these actions."

"Oh, forgive me for trying to ward off the impending fight," Varric snarked. "You know as well as I how crazy Hawke is about the templars. Do you really think that conversation would have gone well? That everyone would have hashed the issue out calmly and come to a rational solution?"

Varric was still a little stunned at how up their own asses everyone was determined to be about this. Everybody, on all sides.

"I think it would've gone better if more people had had the bollocks to stand up against the fool who decided so many deaths and so much destruction were necessities!" he snapped back, teeth grit and eyes narrowed with his anger. Of everyone, no matter their viewpoint, only the two of them had dared to be outraged. Only they had dared to stand against the all-powerful Hawke who had been blinded by love.

Fenris was sure Anders' name was on Hawke's wrist. His real name. Not the epithet he'd decided to be known by. Just as his own--

Enough of that.

"Instead, I find myself surrounded by cowards who prefer comfort to conviction."

"Fuck off," he snapped, properly angry for the first time since the explosion. "Don't you dare think you have the moral high ground here. You stood by a woman who basically let her people run a Tranquil sex trafficking ring right under her nose. Do you know what she did to Viscount Threnhold? Ran him out of town and got him assassinated for trying to stand up to Orlais. That's who you allied with- the crazy, power-hungry bitch who's always been nothing more than the strong arm of the Chantry's law. All she wanted was to use the explosion as an excuse to Annul- forgive me for not wanting to slaughter every magic-having man, woman, and child in the sodding Free Marches because Anders is insane."

He turned around and kicked something hard, not caring in the slightest when the bucket in question broke into about seven pieces. One of the deckhands yelped and scurried off, but Varric was too incensed to give a shit.

Fuck them all. The mages who thought they had a right to tear the world down around them- the fearful jackasses like Fenris, who didn't see a poisonous viper when it stared them in the face. Didn't they understand that Meredith had no moral leg to stand on? That she was just as corrupted as the maleficar?

"You think I didn't know Meredith was insane?" he growled back. "Of course I did! But I saw how many mages in Kirkwall turned to blood magic as well. Even Orsino, in the end! I saw Meredith's madness for what it was, but I also saw that she was willing to stand against someone who had done a great wrong rather than let him walk away, or even welcome him back into open arms. And in case you'd not noticed, my sword was one of the first to turn against her when I realised how deep her madness ran. It was my sword that took her life."

At least his self-control was greater than kicking buckets into pieces. All he did was flare blue for a moment before he brought himself back around. "So take care which accusations you throw, dwarf."

"Oh, she was plenty willing to stand against Anders- but only after she was done standing against all the innocent mages she'd already DECIDED to slaughter," he snapped. "Was even about the explosion, or were you just looking for a chance to kill mages? And you wonder why we weren't jumping on board with your team!"

Hawke, Anders, Merrill- all mages. Aveline, Isabela- not mages, but aware of the crimes and the oppression and the bullshit. And Varric, keenly aware of how bloody and vicious magic could be, and how oppressive and hateful templars often were.

Edited 2018-04-17 02:30 (UTC)

"Just how many mages did I kill without reason?!" His hand caught at Varric's collar, fisting in the material with the strength that hefted that almost too-large sword as if it weighed nothing. "Did I kill Merrill? Did I kill Bethany? Hawke? Even the abomination? What of the tonsured De Launcet idiot? Alain, perhaps? Or Feynriel?"

A single shake and he dropped his grip to stalk away. "You paint me as a cold blooded murderer instead of a person willing to stand against a man proven dangerous when all of my so-called friends stood against me."

Just as well that Fenris let go, because Varric was about to reach for a dagger. He never thought he'd even have to, but- they'd all seen what Fenris could do when enraged. It was hardly the first time the elf had scared the piss out of him.

"We didn't stand against you, we stood behind Hawke. He's saved every single one of our asses more times than we can count- yours included. So we stood behind him. You're the one who turned away."

"So the fault is mine for expecting the lot of you to show some of the morality you've claimed to have. I see. My mistake. The mass murder of innocents is apparently fine when done by someone Hawke approves of. Everything Hawke does is fine. I'll remember that on my way to Starkhaven and the lot of you won't have to suffer my traitorous company any longer than the next port."

And that said, he walked toward the bow of the ship, now even more sure than ever. His soulmate had been a monster, and his enemy was someone he'd cared for for far too long.

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