Okay, so...yeah. This is my first Dragon Age II fic. It was honestly inspired by the fact that my team all died seconds apart from each other in my most recent playthrough on the mission, "Alone," and I started to contemplate what would happen if the game allowed failure.
I own nothing. Bioware does. But reviews are always welcome!
"Fine," a thick Nevvaran accent drawled in the darkness of the room. "So the Champion didn't deliberately incite the Tevinter mages into open conflict. I can accept that," she paused a moment, stepping closer to the dwarven rogue that occupied the lone chair in the sparsely lit space. "...If," she emphasized with a subtle lean toward his eye level. "You can explain what other reason she her entourage of misfits were in Tevinter in the first place, Varric." She eyed him challengingly, as if daring him to come up with yet another contradiction to the reports she had gathered.
The dwarf glared at her, mildly annoyed that she had interrupted what he would have much preferred was a brief glancing over that particular piece of his recount of his travels with the Champion. "Must you be so rude, my dear Seeker? I was in the middle of finishing that sentence!" He chastised sardonically, barely repressing a grin of triumph as she snarled at him most unbecomingly for a Chantry Seeker. He made no point to lie to her; even he knew when to come clean about the truth of a tale, especially with what was at stake. But that didn't mean he wasn't going to test her patience to no end before hand. 'If Datria were here to see this...' he shook his head; such thoughts would help neither the situation nor his mood.
"You were trying to avoid speaking directly of her involvement in Tevinter. We need all of the facts to understand what happened. Facts that I do not appreciate being withheld from me!" She slammed her open palms on the armrests of the chair he was sitting on with such a force he heard the stone chip under the steel of her gauntlets. "What business did a newly renowned Champion and noble of Kirkwall have in Tevinter almost a year before the city fell?" Her voice lowered to an almost whisper as she stood upright again. "I need to understand."
Varric leaned his elbows on his knees and groaned, head in his hands as he began to collect the words to repeat the story. "Hate to contradict your reports, but not all of us went to Tevinter," his grin fell. "It...it isn't exactly something any of us were proud of, Cassandra," that he used her first name and didn't refer to her as merely, 'Seeker,' had her spine going rigid. The defeated tone of his voice certainly wasn't helping in the sense that, this was going to be a far cry from the fantastic exploits that Varric's adopted sister had accomplished. "We...all of us...we had a pretty damned good streak of luck for almost eight years at that point, all things considered. None of us had died, none of us had succumbed to demons, no one had taken up arms against someone in the group over philosophical differences. It was...better than we had anticipated." He ended with a shrug.
The Seeker took a moment to take in Varric's countenance. His outfit of dark and neutral browns, an overcoat, and an unholy amount of chest hair hadn't changed in the days that they had been interrogating him, but with the mention of one incident, he became a new person inside those clothes. Where he had been a gallant storyteller, animatedly speaking of the adopted family that had been forced to split because of awful circumstance and even worse judgment of one of their own, adding a muted sense of his emotions on the topic at hand to emphasize a point or drive this particular chapter home, this man was undone. His eyes averted hers in a way they hadn't since he'd tried to gloss over the events with his brother. His posture, normally languid and dominating the space of that chair, suddenly hunched, almost curling in on itself in an attempt to take up less space in the hope he disappeared. This was not the Varric that had been brought kicking and screaming to their Keep. This man was a stranger in her prisoner's clothing, and it unnerved her more than she was comfortable admitting.
"Barring the deaths of loved ones," he paused and thought fondly of Leandra Hawke, always eager to dote and take all of them in as the children she never had, remembered the stories of dear sweet Bethany and wondered not for the first time how much she resembled her siblings, of the boorish and enraged Carver, ever the one with a chip on his shoulder until he called out for his sister in the throes of the Darkspawn taint in his veins, pleading softly for his big sister one last time, and thought of Bartrand, the brother who still breathed but had died in a way that seemed much more cruel than a stilled heartbeat. "...We were lucky. For a long while." He grimaced at the break in his voice. He was no where near tears, but the emotion strangled his throat and make speech oddly difficult for the otherwise talkative dwarf. It might have been a trick of what little light flitted into the room, but he thought that he saw something briefly soften in the Seeker's eyes before they resumed their steely gaze.
"What happened?" She enunciated slowly. Unbidden, memories of that day surfaced in his head; lying on the floor of the tavern, grasping at Bianca feebly, trying to ignore that for the first time in a long time, more of his blood was on her than that of his enemies. Scanning the room, desperate for Anders' healing to at least hit someone, but seeing his crumpled body dashing that hope. What blood remained in his body drained from his face as he saw the Elf, eyes wide and silently pleading, kneeling beside a writing body wrapped in deep sapphire robes, pale hands with blackened veins reaching for her staff, still trying to heal someone when no words could pass her lips. In a voice that didn't even feel his own, he responded after pulling out of his reverie.
"We ran out of luck."
