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Mina woke before the dawn. Not that there were any windows to tell by in Varric's rooms—or if they were, they were carefully covered and masked. It was the most dwarven thing about him, his aversion to sunlight. But the noises below her in the Hanged Man were as familiar to her as the sounds out her own bedroom window. More, probably. And they told her that the hour was somewhere between last call and Corff awaking to make the greasy stew that so many of Lowtown's denizens relied on for their daily sustenance.

Gently, she moved Varric's arm off of her, rolling over in the bed to look at him. He was asleep, his face relaxed. It was so rare to see him this way, unguarded and vulnerable. She wanted to stay. To rub her face in his chest hair, to wake him up and hold him and kiss him and while away the hours talking about nothing, to make love and laugh and, yes, even face the daunting task of rebuilding Kirkwall together.

But it wouldn't be like that. She knew it; so did he. If she was still here when he awoke, he would backpedal. He would pretend none of it had ever happened, and if she tried to bring it up, he would cut her off with a look and her name. Her last name. Always her last name.

No, she wasn't going to wait around to let him break her heart with her own hopes. Reluctantly, she slid out of the warm—and unsurprisingly, sinfully comfortable—bed and started retrieving her clothes on the floor, moving with a softness and a quiet that would have surprised Varric if he'd been awake to remark on it.

With a last look around to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything, Hawke picked up her pack and slung it over her shoulders. Over it, she put the thick nondescript grey cloak Aveline had produced for her when they said goodbye, pulling it well over the pack and the telltale sword, and turning the hood up to cover her face.

She let herself out of Varric's rooms, taking the back stairs to avoid being seen by anyone sleeping it off in the tavern downstairs. By mutual agreement, no one who frequented the Hanged Man ever investigated a cloaked figure on the back stairs. Some secrets were too dangerous to know.

By the time the sun was fully up, Mina Hawke was safely out of Kirkwall, trudging on her way. In her pocket she had a message from a Grey Warden she had stumbled across once or twice, asking her if she knew anything about red lyrium. He'd given the name of a town deep in the wilds of upper Orlais, and so she was heading that way, in hopes that this Warden Alistair might still be there. From that point on, she had no idea what she would do.

Glancing back, she could see the heights of Kirkwall—now without the iconic spire of the Chantry rising above it—in the distance. Her heart lay there. Parts of it buried, parts of it burnt. Part of it held hostage by someone else's fear. But Hawke wasn't entirely sure she'd miss it. Having a heart had brought her nothing but pain. She was willing to try life without one for a while. Maybe someday she would run across the part of it still in Varric's keeping again, but by that point, maybe neither of them would be something the other one recognized any longer.

Turning her back on Kirkwall for the last time, she kept moving.

Varric woke alone. He wasn't surprised by this. He'd had a dream about someone moving around his rooms, or perhaps he had stirred just enough to be aware of Hawke getting dressed and leaving without being awake enough to do anything about it. Either way, he'd expected her to leave before he woke, before there could be any awkwrd morning-after conversations in which she looked for something from him that he couldn't offer.

But maybe he could. That was the nightmare of it—for the first time, Varric thought he might feel something so strong for someone that it could overcome the fear, the decades-old faded love for another woman, the sheer inertia that kept him holed up here in these dark, dingy rooms. It wouldn't have been easy, but he liked to think that for Hawke—for Mina—he could have made the effort.

He could imagine her snort of disbelief had he been bold enough to make such a statement to her, the roll of the eyes and the exhortation not to be ridiculous. And she'd be right. He wasn't capable of being the man she deserved. Probably he never had been.

Across the room, he saw his manuscript, the one he'd been working on in secret for months. "The Tale of the Hawke", he'd been thinking of calling it. But maybe writing the truth was the wrong way to go. She needed to become a legend, because only legends were truly allowed to fade away into history and be left alone. Yes. Instead, he'd play up all the most improbable, if not impossible, things they had done together. He'd actually have the statues in the courtyard come to life. And he'd remove any hint of a romance between the two of them and add one with … Fenris, maybe. The Rivaini would get a kick out of that, and it could be a suitably passionate pairing to make the readers happy.

And instead of "The Tale of the Hawke" he'd call it "The Tale of the Champion". The title she had never wanted, given to her by the city that had taken so much from her, would be the thing to cloak her true self in shadow, to hide her away and let her start again.

It was the only thing Varric had ever truly been able to give her.