"Hawke? Are you home?"

That level of exasperation could really only mean one person. Hawke obligingly tilted his chair back on its spindly legs and poked his head out the kitchen door. "In here, Aveline!" he called, and waved his pencil jauntily at her before letting the chair down with a clatter. He hunched over his notes once more, adding, "There's a fresh pot of tea, Bodahn just made it."

It was a strong dark tea which was Aveline's favorite, because she was the entire reason his show ran at all smoothly and he didn't get assassinated in the middle of it. Hawke had long ago learned that when her texts started getting terse, it was time to put the kettle on. And anyway, it was good tea, even if he liked his with a bit more kick.

He barely noticed as she sat down at the table with a steaming mug in her hands, engrossed in deciding which joke about Templars would be the funniest without also getting him arrested, though he did pause briefly to shuffle some of his scraps of paper out of the way. They sat quietly for a while, Aveline probably wishing she'd brought ear plugs to block out the sound of every single cog in Hawke's head turning at once, until finally the pencil was put down and the mage was up making his own tea.

"Figure it out?" Aveline asked mildly, reaching down to pat Marigold. The mabari whuffed and licked her hand, hoping for the usual scraps of mutton that Aveline didn't think Hawke knew about.

"Pretty much!" said Hawke brightly, adding a generous splash of brandy to his cup. "I'm going to text it to Varric, see what he thinks. I, personally, am of the opinion that it rates a dragon taking a massive shit on a Qunari ship." The emoji system he, Varric, and Isabela had going was very complex, very detailed, and very annoying to everyone who wasn't them. One day, it was going to be in a museum and studied by linguistics experts everywhere. Merrill, in between her actual work on Mysterious Elfy Things and running the various social media for Hawke's show, was still valiantly trying to lay out a dictionary of it. No one had had the heart to tell her that about half the meanings had changed since she'd started.

Slurping loudly, Hawke returned to the table and slid the joke over to Aveline, who had been craning her neck trying to read it upside-down. "Think it'll get me arrested?"

"Probably," Aveline said, more out of habit than anything; she hadn't finished reading yet.

When she uttered a distinctly amused snort, Hawke sat back in his chair and allowed himself a moment of smugness. You may not be a fancy novelist like a certain dwarf, he thought to himself, but you're no slouch. He reached up with the hand not holding his mug and patted himself on the back.

"Maybe not too arrested," she conceded, returning the page of notes. "Listen, I did come over for a reason."

"You finally asked Donnic out," said Hawke knowingly, and watched with relish as she turned scarlet under her freckles.

"No!" she said, rather more loudly than was strictly necessary, then set her mug down with a thunk. "No, I- listen. Hawke. You need to start bringing guests onto the show who aren't your friends. People are starting to complain that it's turning into the Hanged Man."

"The Hanged Man is a fine establishment! Full of criminals and bad food, mind you, but fine nonetheless."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Hawke."

Hawke squinted back at her for a moment before sighing loudly and sitting back in his chair. "All right, all right, I'll bring someone else on. Who do you suggest? That chantry boy-turned-actor everyone's going on about lately, wossname?"

"Sebastian... Vael?"

"Yeah, that's the one. Could ask him some great questions," Hawke said, warming to the idea. "Like, hey, how's it feel to have your nose so far up Elthina's arse-"

Aveline sputtered, hastily setting her cup down. "Hawke!" she shouted, but there was reluctant laughter in her voice, not imminent death, so he only grinned back.

In Hawke's experience, everyone had a breaking point, at which time they either asked for a favor or tried to kill him, and his friends were no exceptions. So when - much later, after they'd hashed out a list of guests and composed the standard invite emails - his friend's fingers tightened on her mug and she began to look sort of queasy, Hawke was unsurprised.

"Hawke," she began, nervously, "I need you to help me woo Donnic."

He blinked slowly. "Aveline, I'm pretty sure no one says that anymore."

"Court, then?"

"Maker's breath."

Giving Donnic a gift sounded like an all right idea, except for the bit where Hawke realized he ought to have asked what was in the package before agreeing to deliver it. Neither he nor the poor security guard-slash-lights technician had any idea what to make of a box full of shiny bronze marigolds. Where did she even get those?

"They're... nice?" said Donnic uncertainly. "...Isn't your dog named Marigold?"

"Er, yes?" Hawke replied. "Um. So hey, wow, look at the time, I'd better- I gotta go-"

A couple weeks into their campaign to woo Donnic, which honestly weirded Hawke out every time he thought it, Aveline moved into a new apartment.

"This is perfect, actually," decided Hawke as he shoved The Complete People's Laws of Kirkwall into a box with a touch more aggression than was strictly necessary.

"How d'you mean?" Aveline asked from the distant corner of her kitchen where she was trying to fold her ancient card table without breaking it. It creaked in protest, and Hawke wondered idly if it ought to mysteriously disappear during the move, only to be just as mysteriously replaced by one that wasn't old enough to play someone's TV grandmother.

"Well," he said aloud, "we invite him over to help you move boxes, and then all of us bail for one reason or another, and it's all nice and intimate and everything."

"You know," she grunted, "I'd actually like to get this done today."

"Oh, Aveline, Aveline." Hawke shook his head in mock disgust. "It's like you've never seen any romance movies in your life. Just think, your hands accidentally touching as he hands you a box, maybe a little flirting, and then if all goes well, you get to break in the new apartment with enthusiastic sex-"

There was a resounding snap from the poor table.

"So what happened?" Isabela asked over a pint. An emergency card game had been called at the Hanged Man, but she and Merrill had been the only ones to show, because all the others were horrible traitors.

Hawke sighed heavily. "Donnic called his friends from the security team and they had her stuff moved in, like, an hour." He groaned, ruffling his hair. "It could've been so perfect!"

Varric helped by contributing to the cause two tickets to Bergen's Honor, a new, incredibly popular movie. Aveline managed to successfully invite Donnic, who gladly accepted, and Hawke and Varric settled down to bask in their success for a while.

They had got halfway down a bottle of something utterly foul and most of the way finished with a new script for Hawke Talk when Aveline turned up looking like she'd been put through a shredder.

"Templar raid," she said through gritted teeth. "Got a call about blood mages, but it was just some little shit playing a prank." She swiped the bottle and chugged it, then stomped back out.

"Donnic," said Hawke one night, fresh off the set and buzzed out of his mind with energy drinks and sleep deprivation and maybe a touch of actual electricity, "listen."

"Yes?" asked Donnic, rightfully wary, and only flinched a little when a crumpled check was abruptly thrust at him.

"I will literally pay you to go on a date with Aveline."

Donnic stared at the check, then at Hawke. "Wow," he said, "no?"

Aveline, despite herself, snorted. "Well," she muttered into her tub of ice cream, "at least he doesn't think I work for the Blooming Rose."

"I don' unnerstamf," complained Hawke around a mouthful of sherbet. "'y 'oes noffin work?"

"It's for the best anyway," said Isabela, who had invited herself. "All Hawke managed to write on it was some gibberish about cheese."

There was a lull as they all considered this before Aveline asked, "Were you going to try and get Hubert to pay Donnic?"

Hawke shrugged. "I mean, he gave up on Hawke Talk to invest in Nevarran cheese, he can stand to pay to help out my friends."

"Thanks, Hawke. I think."

"You know," said Varric later that month, stealing a spoonful of Hawke's latest ice cream flavor, which was supposed to be mead but was mostly just weird, "I hear communication is pretty vital to relationships."

"What's there to communicate? I can take a hint," Aveline said mournfully, taking advantage of Hawke's distraction to scoop the last few jello shots into the relative safety of her bowl.

The front door slammed, and Hawke jerked awake with a shrill scream and flung himself to the floor.

"Hawke!" shouted Aveline from the foyer. With a groan, Hawke wrapped himself in his blanket and staggered to the bedroom door, wiping drool off his chin.

"Wossat?" he asked blurrily, squinting down at her.

"You'll never believe this!" she cried, and next thing he knew, had taken the stairs at what seemed like a single bound but was probably more like two steps at a time and suddenly he had a face-full of Aveline's coat.

"Ump?" he inquired around a mouthful of oilcloth, and wished he hadn't.

Aveline pulled back from the hug and beamed at him. "Donnic asked me out!" she said, and Hawke was immediately wide awake.

"He did what?" he demanded.

"Asked me out," she repeated blissfully. "He came up to my office as I was leaving and asked if I'd like to go out to dinner. As a date. He has feelings! For me," she added, in case she hadn't made it clear enough.

Hawke flung his arms around her. "That's great!" he shouted, and they danced a little jig of delight that almost ended in disaster when they tripped on the blanket.

In all honesty, Hawke wasn't sure how he'd talked them all into it, but he was sure that his friends were absolutely the best, and this was why they were all camped out at a cafe across the street from Vincento's.

"Does she even like Antivan food?" asked Brennan, who had brought most of Donnic's friends along. She made an odd face, then scratched under her fake mustache.

"I think so?" said Hawke, who was fighting the urge to scratch under the enormous, curly, butterfly-adorned wig on his head.

"She likes the sweets," Merrill offered, her eyes magnified to a comic size by the enormous glasses perched carefully on her nose. She was tiny and endearing and Hawke had already had to silently lay down the law on one of Donnic's friends who looked like she wanted to put Merrill in her pocket and run away, presumably to adopt her and put her in cute clothing. It was a course of action Hawke was generally not opposed to, except that he and Varric had adopted her first. Er. Sort of.

The point was they had all decided, after some very serious thought and equally serious drinks, that they ought to go in disguise, because it wouldn't do to have their quarry recognize them, and they all wanted to know what happened during the date because they had multiple bets going and no one could agree on how the night might end.

The trouble was, wherever Donnic and Aveline were in the restaurant, it wasn't near any of the windows - or at least, it wasn't near any of the windows that faced the cafe. A great amount of their time was spent, therefore, drinking large amounts of coffee and playing Wicked Grace.

Brennan, it turned out, played much dirtier than most of her friends. Still, her group turned out to be great fun, and the lot of them almost forgot what they were even doing out in public until Varric, bless him, brought them back on task.

"They've just left the building," he said.

"Who?" asked Hawke absently, preoccupied with arranging his imminent win.

"Aveline and Donnic."

"Aveline and- oh! Where are they going?" Hawke craned his neck, trying to see, as everyone immediately began handing their cards back to the dealer, a dour-faced security guard whose name no one seemed capable of remembering. There was a great flurry of limbs as the awkward looking group heaved itself up as a single being, leaving a generous tip in its wake as they made a mad dash for the door.

It should probably have been a little harder for a group of eleven people to follow two people around without, say, getting arrested. Come to that, it should've been harder to blend into the Kirkwall crowds which, though generous, weren't exactly packed into the streets like sardines.

Turns out, however, that they were all pretty well used to not getting noticed, except maybe for Hawke, who had the advantage of being best friends with Varric. So they crept along, doing their best to be inconspicuous, and when they ran out of crowds to hide in, they scattered.

"Is Brennan on the roof?" Hawke wondered aloud as he and Varric crouched behind a dumpster.

"I'm not sure why you're surprised," said the dwarf at his side, a little sarcastically. "You saw her climb that wall instead of taking the stairs like the rest of us."

Hawke graciously elected to ignore his tone. "A little parkour is a bit different from moonlighting as a gargoyle."

Aveline and Donnic wandered a bit aimlessly, though they did stop at a nice, quiet little park outside of Hightown that had an excellent view of the city and the sea beyond. It was disgustingly romantic, and Varric wouldn't stop grumbling about how his shoulder was numb from Hawke hitting it excitedly, the giant baby. They had both taken a great many pictures on their phones, though this had nearly gotten them caught initially as Hawke had forgotten to turn the flash off on his.

The only thing was that romantic walks through the city were not nearly as interesting for the people watching. It was a testament to their stubbornness that the entire group of them stuck through it, though several of them got turned around a few times. Hawke, bored after the first half hour, had corralled the others into a group text and bombarded them with emojis until he'd gotten responses, and now they were discussing Lowtown cuisine. As he posted a long rant defending Lady Elegant's smoothie stall, he wriggled to get comfortable, breath puffing out in the chilly night air. The asphalt was still a bit warm from the sun, and he was wedged against a low stone wall between Varric and a wilting hedge. Given these choices, he therefore leaned into his best friend. Strictly platonically, of course.

"Are we cuddling?" the dwarf asked absently. He was on his knees and staring over the wall at the romantic couple, because he was the only one present who had an attention span.

"Yes," Hawke replied, and sucked his teeth as he read Brennan's reply, staunchly ignoring the flip in his stomach. "Your own fault for being so comfortable."

A large, warm hand patted his head, a little condescendingly, so Hawke reached up and vaguely patted at Varric's face in turn, making him sputter. Grinning, the talk show host snuggled a little closer, stretching his legs out. It was a nice night, all things considered. It wasn't hot, which was a nice change, and it wasn't too cold yet, and the noise of the city had begun to die down, turning into a distant buzz against the background noise of the sea.

"Huh," said Varric.

"Hmm?"

"I just realized we're near Aveline's new apartment."

"...Are we?" Hawke twisted, trying to peek over the wall, and managed to get most of one eye and the entirety of his nose over it. "How d'you know?"

Varric glanced down at him, amused, before saying, "Because they're standing right in front of it."

"What?" Trying not to drop his phone, Hawke heaved himself up and looked around frantically for Aveline and Donnic. Finally, he spotted them beneath a street light, and carefully held out his phone, zooming in with the camera and hitting record. "Ohh, here it is."

Aveline was just a few inches to the left of furious and coming up on mortified. She'd expected a bit of spying, because Hawke was incapable of leaving well enough alone, but she hadn't expected him to wrangle a small army into following them around. She'd had to steer Donnic around them all night, and if he hadn't already been convinced she was crazy, he probably was now.

Still, she thought, Donnic's warm jacket around her shoulders and his hand in hers, could be worse.

They finally slowed in front of her new apartment building, and she said aloud, "Well, this is me."

"I know," Donnic said, gently teasing. He smiled warmly, making he heart flutter.

"Right." Feeling a little sheepish, Aveline tucked her hair nervously behind her ear.

"Um, say-"

"Listen, Aveline-"

They stopped, and laughed quietly. "You go first," Aveline said, giving his hand a light, encouraging squeeze.

"If you insist," Donnic said, eyes bright, and stepped a little closer, bringing his free hand up to her cheek. "Aveline," he continued, "may I kiss you?"

"Absolutely," she replied without even a sliver of hesitation, and met him halfway. The kiss was chaste, but soft and comfortable and everything she'd hoped for.

At least it was until there was a loud wolf whistle from across the street.

"That's my girl!" Hawke hooted, and Aveline reared back to glare at him.

"Hawke!" she shouted, then blinked in surprise as the rest of the group emerged from their hiding places, presumably to drag Hawke and - was that Varric? of course it was - back into them.

At her side, Donnic began to laugh. "Is that why we took the long way here?" he asked.

"It might be," Aveline admitted. "I thought we'd lost them."

Donnic drew her close, still chuckling, and kissed her cheek. "You are a wonder. I didn't see them at all."

Flushing, she couldn't help the slow smile on her face. "Donnic," she said, "would you like to come up for coffee?"

"Did you do the do?"

"Hawke, I am going to feed you to nugs."

He grinned at her from the other side of her desk, looking all together too cheerful for someone who had gotten up at five in the morning. "Av-e-liiiine," he sang, spinning the chair he was sat on, "give me the gooods!"

"I'm sorry," she said, a little too brightly, "you're right. I will immediately tell you, in detail, about how we cuddled on my sofa watching movies until we fell asleep."

"That's all I ask," Hawke replied breezily, then stopped his spinning and rested his elbows on her desk, looking a bit more serious than usual. "Really, though, did you have fun?" Less seriously, he added, "Do I get to give him the shovel talk?"

At this, Aveline eyed him, softening, and nodded before saying, "Stop trying to pretend you haven't already."

Laughing, he made finger guns at her and kicked away, scooting his chair out of her office and down the hall to his own.

Not a bad first date, all in all, Aveline thought, and returned to her paperwork.