Chapter Text
"This is either the stupidest or craziest shit we've ever done. "
Varric shifted uncomfortably, ready to move the moment the Inquisitor gave the signal. The two of them were crouched in a set of bushes and the leaves were pricking him every time he shifted. The Emerald Graves was lush and green and lovely, and unless you knew what you were looking for, that flash of green that signaled a rift would go entirely unnoticed.
"I don't know, I'm sure I've done dumber things than this. " Lavellan huffed a quiet laugh.
"Just touch an elven artifact without knowing what it does, just walk into a clear assassination attempt in progress, outnumbered, unprepared, can't leave her to die alone, die with her instead. " Cole murmured, crouching beside them in the bushes.
"Yes, that was very dumb of me. I’d do it again, but it was very dumb." the Inquisitor said wryly.
“Yeah well, ‘dumb’ and ‘heroic as shit’ often go hand in hand.” Varric grumbled, thinking, for the millionth time that week, about Hawke. She and Lavellan were frighteningly alike.
There was that familiar thwump and a snap to the air that told them a rift was opening.
"Aaand GO!"
The three rogues shifted into the shadows, creeping up on the tendrils of vivid chartreuse as demons exploded out of them. Bolts flew. Cole dashed out of the leafy shade to slit throats and puncture kidneys before dancing away again. Lavellan stepped in the middle and raised her glowing hand.
Closing the rifts was one thing. Selectively opening little ones so she could push demons back through them was entirely another. And this time, Lavellan reached into her hunter coat with one hand, pulling out a scrap of paper, folded and sealed. She slapped it into the robes of a despair demon and stepped back to watch as it squished and was pulled back into the fade, like a handkerchief being sucked into a pipe.
Dispatching the rest of the demons and sealing the rift did not take long after that.
The normal sounds of the forest filled the ensuing silence, as they stood there, catching their breath.
“Did it work?” Varric asked.
“Halfway hoping, afraid to move for fear it’ll be worse, like boots stuck in the mud.”
“Yeah, kid.” Varric grumbled. Cole was toeing the line, but Varric was in no mood to put salt in his metaphorical wounds any more than they already were with this stupid stunt.
“I guess we’ll know if we get a response.” Lavellan said, giving Varric’s shoulder a brief squeeze. “Let’s get back to cam - oohhhh hi Cassandra! Solas! Fancy seeing you here!”
The Inquisitor smiled, but Varric could see the look of a kid about to get grounded.
“What were you doing?” Cassandra asked, hands on her hips.
“Um….closing a rift?” Lavellan gestured vaguely to the now-clear glade behind them.
“Without a full complement of fighters?” Solas raised an eyebrow.
“We managed.” Lavellan shrugged, too innocently. “It was just a small one.”
Neither Cassandra or Solas looked particularly satisfied with this explanation.
“You followed us from camp, huh?” Lavellan grimaced sheepishly.
“Three rogues sneaking off by themselves without informing their companions is cause for concern, in my experience.” Cassandra folded her arms across her chest. “So I’ll ask you again: What were you three doing?”
“Helping.” Cole said, with a gentle smile.
Varric grit his teeth, regretting once again that he was out in the field right now, and especially so that with them was Cassandra sodding Pentaghast, seeker of every goddamn thing Hawke had ever touched in life or death. Well Varric wasn’t chained to a chair anymore. “Might as well tell her, lucky. She won’t leave it alone until you do.” He grumbled to Lavellan, and stalked off past the Seeker back towards camp.
Lavellan’s problem was this: They had left Hawke in the fade. She had made the call - an excruciating choice - and some nights the guilt was nigh unbearable.
Varric was a different dwarf with Hawke gone. He was grieving, and he’d had to be the one - at his own insistence - to let Hawke’s extended circle know that Hawke was gone. There was always a little touch of venom to Varric’s more pointed quips, especially with Cassandra (for obvious reasons) but these days they were especially spicy.
Cassandra, for her part, was doing her best not to rise to the occasion. No doubt she was experiencing some guilty feelings of her own. But Varric was an expert at picking a fight with her, and sometimes the Seeker could not help but respond.
So now on top of her own guilt, she was dealing with infighting in her circle, and wounded friends whose hurts she could not mend.
The worst part of it all was the lack of closure, Lavellan thought. Surely, it could be assumed that Hawke was dead. But what if she’d gotten away from that Fear demon? What if she’d distracted it long enough to see them all through the rift and then legged it? Could someone survive in the Fade? How would one know?
Cole had given her the idea, in a roundabout way. He said something about Varric writing letters, “only the one response he really wants is from a letter he’ll never get to send.”
And that got Lavellan thinking. She did, after all, have the ability to open a miniature kind of rift and send smaller demons and creatures back into the fade, from whence most of them came. So what if she could send other things, too?
Like, just for example you see, a letter?
“Hence…an experiment.” Lavellan gestured back at the glade they left behind, as the remaining four walked slowly back to the nearest camp. “Varric writes a letter to Hawke, and I see if I can send it through. No knowing if it’ll even go through. If it does, no knowing if Hawke is even alive to find it. No guarantees that Hawke would find it even if she is alive. No real way to know if Hawke can send anything back even if she finds it and if she is alive. So maybe the letter just helps Varric work through things. That’s fine. Cole still thinks it’ll help.” she smiled sadly at the spirit-boy.
“So you are using the Anchor…as a courier service.” Solas grit his teeth.
“Well not all…willy-nilly.” Lavellan waved away the idea with a gesture. “I’m still using it for its real function - closing rifts and such. Which is why we needed to go find one.”
“And what if what responds is not Hawke, but a demon?” Cassandra asked.
“Then we end up with a really messed-up penpal for a while until we figure out how to deal with it?”
Cassandra made a disgusted noise.
“I mean, look, between Varric and all his friends, eventually we’re going to figure out whether its really Hawke - again, assuming we get any response at all.”
“And you didn’t think to tell us any of this plan, because…?” Solas asked.
Lavellan squirmed. “I didn’t think you’d approve.”
Their expressions told Lavellan that her instincts had been right on that score.
“Nothing will probably come of it. Odds are that we’re just being hopeful fools.” Lavellan admitted, kicking a pebble with her foot. “But I…I felt like I needed to try. For Varric.”
Cassandra pursed her lips and said nothing. Solas too was dubious about the likelihood of success, but let the matter drop.
Varric’s letter had gone like this.
Dear Hawke -
Shit. I don’t know what to say. And you know me, I never shut up.
I miss you. We all miss you.
You may never get this. It might just be a waste of ink and paper.
But if you are alive, hang in there you magnificent bastard. If you can send us any kind of sign, I’ll fight the Maker themselves to bring you home.
Love,
Varric
It was the last of many drafts. There was so much more to say, but some of it made Varric squeeze tears out of his eyes and some drafts went straight into the fire with his anger and the whole thing made him exhausted.
But he gave it to Lavellan anyway. Because some idiot part of him wanted a reply more than Varric could stand.
As it happened, a few days later, they received a response.
They’d closed another rift, this one that they’d had to fight past giants to get to. Lavellan was nearly dead on her feet and almost missed it. After the rift was closed, she’d lazily sauntered over to pick through the demon pellet -
-”The what?” Cassandra had raised an eyebrow.
“You know, like an owl pellet, where it regurgitates all the bones and things it can’t properly digest into these dry pellet things? It’s like that, but with demons.” Lavellan explained. “Its the mushy little pile of essences and stuff they leave behind after a rift closes! You’ve seen them!.” The Inquisitor turned to Solas in appeal, ‘back me up here’ clearly written in her expression. The elven apostate was too busy pinching the bridge of his nose.
“...demon…pellet…” Solas muttered to himself.
“You know what I mean.” Lavellan grumbled, stalking off to pick up another sprig of elfroot. -
And in that demon pellet was…a piece of paper? Lavellan’s eyes widened as she unfolded it. It was…sticky and gross and the writing was barely legible - the page looked like it had been written on one side already.
Lavellan recognized the damp shapes of the handwriting. It had been written on a scrap of Varric’s letter to Hawke, though now it was much worse for wear. And the new ink….well, Lavellan didn’t want to try too hard to identify what it was written with, but still! A response!
“Varric!” Lavellan called out to the dwarf, wild-eyed. Her companions all gathered around as she thrust the messy, crumpled scrap at him.
“Andraste’s ass,” Varric breathed, shaken. “What’s it say?”
“It’s hard to make out…” Lavellan murmured, turning the page a little. What she could register as legible looked a little like this:
V-
Maker’s Ballsa-
Send paper.
XOXOXO
-H