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Varric doesn’t have the knack for romances, he knows it. It hasn’t prevented him from trying his hand at the stuff – big mistake, one he would happily rectify if he could, maybe by making every volume of his series Swords & Shields disappear in some deep chasm or burn them all on a giant pyre. He has even asked Hawke once if she knew a spell that would simply erase them out of the rest of Thedas’ memory. By closing his eyes he can still hear her laughing the question away.
But Hawke is no longer here and Varric is travelling with the Inquisition now. It’s not as bad as he feared, actually. Well, it’s not great either – he misses Kirkwall, he misses his friends, he misses his old life, but there are some highlights to the whole situation – the Seeker to be one of them is not something he had expected, though. Yet, as he watches her quietly discussing with Cadash on the other side of the campfire during a trip in the Hinterlands, Varric can feel inspiration kicking in.
He writes late into the night, the only sound in the tent the scratching of the feather on paper. Words flow from his mind to his hand to the paper, and Varric can see the story unfold as he writes; he sees the brash, violent, prompt-to-stab-people-in-the-book Seeker of Truth (he names her Sandrine) slowly falling for the dashing, charming lyrium smuggler from the Carta (Varric doesn’t have a name for him yet, but the character will have a handsome hat) as they’re trying to stop a hole in the sky from destroying the world (any similarities to actual persons or situations is merely coincidental and the product of a feverish imagination, or not). The first draft is done by the morning and by the time they return to Haven, the first chapter is ready. He sends it discreetly off with a courier and begins working on the rest.
The answer reaches him four days later and it makes his heart clench in anguish for one second or two – Hawke is too close – but the quip makes him laugh anyway. “What have those two people done to you for deserving such a punishment?” The funny thing is, he’s not even sure he hates Cassandra anymore. Well, he still hasn’t forgiven her for the way she has treated him back in Kirkwall but she may have one or two redeeming qualities: firstly, she’s a gullible listener – which is pretty amazing giving her job, but it makes lying to her all the easier; and secondly, she’s good at hitting things. Like, almost at the level of Aveline; if the two of them ever met and decided to do a hitting contest, Varric honestly doesn’t know on who he’d bet. And Fjalar is a good boy, though his taste in women is obviously questionable.
The attack on Haven doesn’t drain his inspiration. It’s actually quite the contrary. Varric writes for hours, until his wrist aches or until the cold wind blows his candle off. He writes so he’ll stop thinking for a while of the familiar tall dark figure on the snowy hill, outlined against the moon (Corypheus is dead, he saw it – damn, he helped Hawke kill him in the first place!), of the corrupted dragon (the kid with the weird hat said it was an archdemon, of all things!), of the sound of the avalanche destroying the village (like a thunderstorm), of the harrowing wait for Cadash. Then the boy finally shows up, wounded and exhausted and cold but alive, and there is no doubt left in Varric’s mind: he’s really sent by Andraste. But Andraste cares little for mortal bodies as it turns out, and Varric works twice as hard on his story so he’ll not listen to Fjalar’s screams of agony as the healers meticulously break his bones again to set them back in place. He tries to pays him a visit later but finds the boy asleep, resting from his ordeal, with the Seeker sitting by his side. Her eyes are so red that Varric can’t tell if she’s exhausted or if she’s been crying for hours, but the glare she throws him is as deadly as always, if not more. Still, he scampers away with some new writing material.
By the time they move in Skyhold, the Seeker Sandrine and her smuggler (he still has no name – what kind of parents give their son a name that starts with the letter F anyway?) are living a passionate and, well, graphical, love story. Like romance, Varric doesn’t have the knack for smut, but in that case he’s willing to give it a try. And it’s not like he’s planning to let anyone except Hawke to read it. However, finding out that the Seeker is actually one of his fans after the whole Swords and Shields affair does change his mind, and he leaves the first chapter by the training dummies one time Cassandra is away. And waits.
She enters the Great Hall the day after with the face she used to wear during the interrogation in Kirkwall and she slams the book so hard on his excuse of a table that the dwarf fears for a moment a stone will come away from the roof and crush the two of them. A painful death for sure but not as terrible as the one she’s planning for him, if the look in her eyes is anything to go by. But then she asks under her breath if he has written more of it, and he can’t help but smirk. Totally worth it.
So he keeps writing for Cassandra Pentaghast, even after she and Fjalar get together (though he asks her to hide his work when the Inquisitor is around). In return, the Seeker agrees to give him details to make the story “as believable as possible” (some of them give him a new, unexpected outlook about both Cassandra and Fjalar). The well-oiled affair meets its end one afternoon, when the Inquisitor enters the hall with the last chapter in his hand and an abashed look on his face. He waves Varric’s explanations away, simply asking him not to print the story once it’ll be done, and Varric is more than happy to agree. But as Cadash walks away with a shake of his head, he already knows he’s going to break his word: Varric will print that book, an only copy, which he’ll offer to the two lovebirds on their wedding day.