Inspired by the Lady Gaga song of the same title - something about the line "this time I'm not leaving without you" said Varric to me. Thanks for reading!

Varric paused a moment, thinking of just the wrong phrasing, and scribbled it down, a smile crossing his face. This was going to be the worst chapter yet, and he couldn't help imagining the look on the Seeker's face when she read it. It was truly magnificently bad.

A shadow fell across his table, and he looked up, ready to frown at whoever was interrupting him just when the words were flowing—and the words died on his lips as he looked up and up some more to the last face he had expected to see here.

"There you are."

"Hello, Hawke."

"Don't you 'hello, Hawke' me. You were supposed to come home after you were all done playing hero again with the Inquisition."

He shrugged uncomfortably. "They made me an offer I couldn't refuse."

She narrowed her eyes. "I seem to recall making you an offer myself."

Varric looked away, not daring to meet those piercing green eyes that had always seen right through every facade he put up in front of himself. "Hawke ..."

"I have a name, Varric."

"Everyone does."

The eyes were boring right into him now, and he felt uncomfortably like a butterfly on a pin. Then, in a swift, viciously precise movement, she hooked her leg around the chair across the table from him and pulled it out. She sat down, crossing her arms over her chest, and glared at him, planting her booted feet firmly on the table, right on top of the chapter-in-progress of Swords & Shields. "This time I'm not leaving without you."

Not for the first time, Varric wondered how he had gotten himself hooked up with such a downright scary woman. Possibly it had something to do with how she made him feel—ten feet tall and able to leap over the mansions of Hightown in a single bound. One look from those green eyes was more potent than the finest Antivan brandy, and more sure to land him in some kind of trouble he'd never imagined before.

There was a long silence while he pretended to still be able to concentrate on writing, and she sat there and stared at him pointedly. At last, in a softer voice, she said, "What are you afraid of, Varric? It's not me, that much I'm sure of. You know me. And I think we both know that you've missed me as much as I've missed you. Which is a lot. But you're going to sit here and write other people's stories instead of coming home with me, and that tells me that something has you scared shitless."

"Take your pick, Hawke. Red lyrium, thousand-year-old darkspawn, witches who can turn into dragons, friends who blow people up, green-eyed women who ask too many damn questions."

The eyes softened at that one, turning vulnerable, almost hurt, and he could have kicked himself. "It's only one question, Varric, and that's won't you please come home?"

"Sometimes one is too many."

"So you won't even answer? You'll just let your life—our lives—flow by unnoticed because it's easier to sit here?"

"When I get up and get moving, things have a tendency to go to shit, in case you haven't noticed, Hawke. I think everyone's better off if I stay here and write my stories, don't you?"

"No, I don't, and you know it."

He went back to the page in front of him, trying to decipher the chicken scratches there and turn them into words, but it was no use.

"Varric."

He looked up, his eyes catching on her wide, sensual mouth, remembering ... No, he wasn't remembering anything. That never happened; he had the book to prove it. "Hawke."

She took her boots off his work, and he couldn't help noticing that the Darktown mud that still clung to them had deposited itself on the pages—her not-so-subtle commentary on how he spent his time. Leaning forward, she said, "You think this has been fun for me? Having to leave you here, knowing the kind of danger you were in, without my sword in between you and all the things that could kill you? Weisshaupt was pretty much exactly as cold, and as far away, and as boring as it sounds, and the Wardens there tedious and out of touch. But I went, and I did my bit for Thedas, and you took down Corypheus for real this time, the way we both should have done in the first place, and if I want to spend the rest of my life in front of a fireplace with my fingers buried in your chest hair, I've damned well earned it—and so have you."

It was a pretty picture she painted. He could almost feel those strong calloused fingers tangled in his chest hair, touching him in places no one had touched in a long time, and he didn't need a fireplace to feel plenty warm. "I think there's something I should tell you."

"Is it about Bianca?"

"One of them."

Hawke leaned forward, folding her arms on the table."This is the one where you've worn your heart in a sling on your back for fifteen years pining for a woman who chose caste and forge and an arranged, loveless marriage over you? Fuck her, Varric." Her mouth twisted. "I mean, I'm sorry if that hurts you, but if she was worthy of you, of you letting your heart go to waste, she'd be sitting here right now. She isn't, though, and she's not going to be. But I'm here—I've fought next to you for a decade, I've sat up all night drinking with you, I've fucking thrown myself at you time and again ... but I still can't stand up to someone who doesn't care enough to be here." There were tears glimmering in those green eyes now, and Varric wanted to be sick. He hated to see her cry—it always made him think of that night after her mother had died, when she'd needed him and he ... had been too afraid to go to her. He'd let Aveline go, instead.

"Hawke," he said hoarsely.

"Say my name, damn it. Stop hiding behind this nickname nonsense that you use to push everyone away, and tell me what in the Void I've done wrong that you're sending me away again." She shook her head impatiently. "Not even sending me away—that would require the effort of making a decision."

"It's not you."

"Then what is it? Talk to me, Varric. Please."

"Everything I touch turns to shit, Hawke. Look at this—" He gestured around them at the bustling hall. "You think all this would have happened if I hadn't been so greedy? If Bartrand and I had never found that thaig? Look at what happened to you because of that, what happened to the world. And then ... Bianca ... I trusted her with that information, and she turned around and ..." He heard his voice crack and stopped while he was ahead, before he could embarrass himself.

"You've had some bad luck, I'll grant you that. But you're still here, and I'm still here, and the world is still standing—and that's because of you, because you put aside what mattered to you to follow the Inquisitor and fix the mess we made, between that thaig and Corypheus. And so did I. And now the world has peace, more peace than it's had in the best part of an age. Maybe longer. Tell me why you and I can't enjoy that peace together. Make me understand what you're so afraid of."

He studied the paper in front of him, noticing that the last few words he had written were her name—her first name—again and again. Varric could feel himself blushing. "Look, it's been ... years, of this thing with Bianca, of keeping that to myself and seeing her occasionally when she could get away, and I—I got used to it. It's what I know how to do. No one expecting anything from me, no one counting on me, no one ... no one looking at me." Looking at him the way Hawke was looking at him right now, the way that made him feel as if no one deserved to have a woman like that look at them that way, and certainly he sure as shit didn't. "I'm used to my space."

"I have a fucking mansion, Varric. For the Maker's sake, you can live at the Hanged Man and I'll live in Hightown and we'll see each other on alternate Tuesdays—as long as we see each other." Her face twisted, like she was trying not to cry. "I need you, Varric."

He hated when she cried. To distract her, to deflect the note of pleading that had crept into her voice, he asked, "Why me?"

"What?"

"Why me? What is it about me? I mean, Blondie and Broody—sorry, Anders and Fenris," he corrected, when her green eyes narrowed, flashing fire at him. "They fought over you for years. Cullen's upstairs, he'd be happy to fill whatever needs you have. What are you doing here with a washed-up excuse for a dwarf merchant?"

"How can you ask me that?" She was on her feet now, leaning across the table toward him. "When, in all the time we've known each other, have you ever known me to look at someone else? It's been you since the moment I met you, Varric, and you know it."

"I ... you say that, but ..."

And then those long, strong fingers caught his jaw, holding his head still as her soft lips met his, the pressure of her mouth on his insistent, undeniable, irresistible. Varric heard himself groan, his mouth opening for her, and he realized that she had leaned the rest of the way across the table and was basically lying on his chest now, kissing him, her tongue exploring his mouth with the same thoroughness she devoted to everything she did. Her body was stretched across the table, his papers crushed underneath her, but that seemed unimportant in the face of holding her there against him, tasting her mouth and trying to believe that this was really Hawke making a spectacle of herself in the middle of the main hall of Skyhold, and not yet another long-drawn-out impossible fantasy he couldn't allow himself to have.

Slowly, tantalizingly, she drew away, looking at him, her eyes a vivid deep green. "How about it, Tethras?"

"Hawke ..." Why was he still holding back? It was like the words were locked in a vault somewhere deep inside him, and he didn't know what he had done with the key. He wanted to tell her everything that he had spent the last decade and more thinking about her, all the things he had never even been able to bring himself to write about her, but he just couldn't ... quite ... reach the words.

When no words were forthcoming, he saw her falter; the strength in her that he had always—yes, always loved flickered for a moment as though it was nothing but a facade. There was a flash in those green eyes of a hurt and a loss so deep they took Varric's breath away. Then she straightened, the bravado back again in her face and in her eyes. "Look, this is the way it's going to be. I'm not leaving without you ... but I'm not going to keep throwing myself at you, either. So I'm going to find the Inquisitor, get her to give me something to do, and when you come to your senses, I'll be here. Or we can both get old and wither and die here while you wait around and watch our lives go by. It's your call."

She left the hall, her back straight and her head held high, and Varric sat there, stunned, not sure if what had just happened could possibly have just happened. Hawke—his Hawke—had come for him. But why? What was there in him for her? She could have anyone in Thedas at a snap of her fingers, and she was here for a beardless dwarf from Kirkwall who had spent the best part of his life fondling a crossbow.

He supposed in the end, he could sit here trying to find a reason for the next age and it still wouldn't touch the real question, which was less why and more what now? He loved Hawke. He knew it and somehow she knew it—and the fact that she could see through him and know his heart made her all the more astonishing. But look what had happened with Bianca. He'd held on to her in his heart long after anything that had been between them when they were both young and foolish had faded into another bad habit they were too lazy to get rid of. Losing Hawke that way, both of them wearying of each other, would kill him.

Varric sighed, brushing his hands across the dusty papers on the table. Better never to have her at all than have her and lose her.

Then again. His eye fell on Bianca, and he thought about her namesake. He'd done both with Bianca—he'd had her and lost her over and over again, and had never really had her at all. And what had that done for either of them? Bianca and her husband had never had a real chance at a relationship, not with half her mind on Varric; Varric had never pursued anything with another woman because it suited him to have Bianca in his mind and in his heart. Now here they were, twenty years later and with nothing to show for it, no life together, no love, no home, no family. He didn't even think they were still together anymore. How could they be, when she had betrayed his trust and given the secrets of the red lyrium to Corypheus? She hadn't known it was Corypheus ... but she had known she was betraying Varric's faith in her.

Meanwhile ... Hawke had been there to clean up the mess. Again. In all the time he had known her, she had never faltered. She'd stayed by his side as much as he would allow, she had made her feelings plain, she had accepted him pushing away all her overtures and stuck with him anyway. And how had he repaid her? By sitting here and scribbling these stories and hiding. What the fuck was he, anyway?

With a growl, Varric stood up, overturning the table and letting papers scatter everywhere. Oblivious to the shocked looks and the whispers that followed him, he stalked out of the keep in the direction Hawke had gone.

He scanned the courtyard for her, finding the familiar dark head and the equally familiar scarred armor halfway across the training ground heading for the Inquisitor. Tipping his head back, Varric shouted it at his top volume. "ELOISE!"

She stopped, turning, and even across the space between them he could see the way her green eyes brightened and began to glow.

He shouted again. "ELOISE!"

And then she was running, and he was running, praying to Andraste or whatever deity was listening that he wouldn't trip on the stairs and break his neck, and the next thing he knew he was being knocked to the ground with all her considerable force and she was straddling him, her face so close to his, both of them completely unconcerned by the mud and the people surrounding them.

"Say it again," she whispered.

He tried, he really did, but it was hard to say anything with her tongue in his mouth.