"Look at me."
"I am looking at you," she grits out, trying and failing to keep ahold of her own temper. If he'd just listen, for once.
"No, Seeker, you're not. Look at me."
She glares down, her hand flexing in agitation on the pommel of her sword which is ridiculous, she's not going to draw the thing on him in the Great Hall, even if Maker knows somewhere she wants to. As if beating some actual sense into his thick skull would be as easy as that.
He's glaring right back at her though and something, she doesn't even know what in that moment, shifts, changes, and it's like her vision clarifies somehow. It's not like she hasn't been angry with Varric before and he with her but it's not heat this time, not frustration and mocking sarcasm or even disappointment on his face. She sees something new in the lines around his eyes, harshly prominent with his wide, normally expressive mouth compressed into a thin slash. And it's cold, as he never is, and it freezes the rest of the words in her throat.
He nods abruptly and his stance widens, grounding itself somehow in front of her. His hands spread, flick in a gesture that seems to indicate everything and nothing and he suddenly radiates a solidity she's never really acknowledged before. He hasn't changed but suddenly he has.
"This is what I am. I'm a dwarf, Seeker. Better yet, I'm a surface dwarf which according to a lot of people who care about these things means I'm the lowest of the socially low; no caste, no particular prospects, second son as well because I couldn't even get the birth order right of a disgraced House. Absolutely zero people from Orzammar even want to look at my face, let alone have a civil conversation with me even assuming I'd want to go there to, I don't know, embrace my roots." He hooks his thumbs into the silk sash around his waist and she all but see the flex in his shoulders. "So here I am, stuck where everything around me is built for people at least three feet taller than I am and I can't ignore that even if I tried. I don't smith, I don't mine, I fucking hate darkness and caves and all that other approved dwarvish bullshit. I don't even care for sparkly jewelry which is right out of the Dwarf Manual of Dwarf Things, although I gotta say, I look great in gold."
It might be a joke, the words are right, but the way he says them and the steady, unwavering lock of his eyes on hers says otherwise. And worse yet, his voice hasn't risen at all, still low and rumbling and completely Varric. As far as anyone else around them is concerned, they're still just having a conversation. Albeit one with her hand clenched around a hilt but that's not exactly uncommon now, is it?
"But let me tell you something. I know exactly how much weight I can pick up, how long I can hold it and how far I can throw it and none of those numbers, Seeker, are small. I have never lost my grip on anything, not once. My bones are dense as hell; I had a fucking wall fall on me once and I was beat up, let me tell you, but nothing broke whereas your human body would have been so much paste on the ground." His nostrils flare once as he takes a deep breath, she can see him trying to hold onto something, something that still hasn't escaped. It feels like she's forgotten to breathe herself, staring into his eyes. She had not expected this, this reaction, whatever it is, to her completely justified order. "You don't want to know how many metal cups I've crushed before I figured out how delicately I have to hold 'em so the beer doesn't get wasted. I'm careful all the time because I know exactly what I'm capable of."
It's a trick of the light or the imagination, the way his words are so raw but she can all but see it, the roots of his body curling into the ground as if drawing strength from the stone paving he stands on. She blinks and blinks again, but the impression stays. She's never looked at Varric through the lens of this before, the power of his body that she's just accepted, taken for granted, filed into the box called dwarf; cheat, thief, liar.
"And you know what, Seeker?" He rocks forward on his toes, his hot gaze still locked on hers.
"What?"
"I know who I am. And that's better than the rest put together." There's something deep and mocking in his eyes and she is horribly aware of how her thoughtless words have transgressed, to put that light there. But he shifts his shoulders then, as if shaking off water or an ill-fitting cloak and while something hooks his mouth into something that in a different moment might be a smile, his voice is suddenly deep and calm as he rocks back on his heels, away from her. "Now, I'm going to go wash the taste of this out of my mouth. Let's not do this ever again, okay?"
She watches him walk away, completely at a loss.