The only good thing about the desert, Varric decides, is the color it turns Cassandra's skin.
He shakes out his other boot and watches yet another scorpion scuttle away. After the weeks of travel through the sand and heat, he's no longer worried about being stung. He's not even sure he'd noticed amid all the other discomforts. Each morning he suffers Trevelyan to slather him with the noxious blend of elf and numbroots that keeps most of his skin intact; each evening he tries unsuccessfully to get the grit out of his hair, his pants, his tonsils. He's burning, peeling, itching.
But Cassandra seems impervious.
He shakes the boot again but nothing else falls out so he decides to risk it, jamming it onto his foot and wiggling his toes. So far, so good. Standing, he stretches, rolls his shoulders as if working out the kinks. Ties his hair back, slow fingers digging through the rough strands. Drags out the moment as long as he can.
She's breaking camp easily, methodically. She already has her gear packed on her dracolisk, tent half rolled, poles laid out in neat precision waiting for the others to finish or start. She works without haste, moving, bending, sorting. In the mornings, her sleeves are rolled unevenly past her elbows, her shirt gapes at the throat and he loves both details equally because while the Seeker is always in control, he has discovered that Cassandra is not.
In the mornings she is slim and sleepy, burned bronze and black and silent as she moves through the rising world, intent only on the things she must do.
In the mornings, Varric watches for as long as he can, storing it up like water for the shimmering day ahead.
The only good thing about deserts, Cassandra decides, is the color it paints Varric's hair.
He sits on a camp stool by his tent, still waking up, disheveled and unfinished as he always is before life finds him again. He holds one boot as if still unsure what to do with it, a ritual she enjoys more than she ought. Sometimes he finds things. Sometimes he does not. She watches without watching, waiting for the tally.
Powdered mica bites at the corners of her eyes. Her leg itches fierce and raw from a score of trailing bites. She sets everything into order while she counts his heartbeats because the world does not stop simply because she wishes for it to stand still.
In Skyhold he is copper and chestnut, dark under damp stone and flickering lamps, shivering in the cold, his words often as biting. He stays next to fireplaces and wood when he can and she wonders if he knows that about himself.
Here, the heat has melted nearly all his edges. Never pliable, never soft, she does not make that mistake, but as the days have trudged into weeks, she has felt his complaints warm even as the burr of his voice has smoothed. She wonders sometimes if she will ever be ready to go back.
Here, he is not copper, but gold. Cast in metal, dipped in sun. He puts on his boots, stands, wakes up a little more. Light dusts his arms molten, threads like ribbons through his hair, thick and bright.
His fair skin takes badly to it and she suffers Trevelyan to touch him in the mornings before they set out, slathering his skin with cooling protection. She wants to offer, wonders if there is enough courage in the world to say she wants to touch, wants to brush her fingers over that color, wants to blister in that fire.
In the mornings, Cassandra watches for as long as she can, holding memory close to her heart like a coal.