missl0nelyhearts:

FOR SHIMMY -

“I say we find another way around.”  Isabela crosses her arms, the toe of her boot shuffling in the soft moss.  To Varric, though, it sounds more like heels digging-in.

“Come on, Rivaini, it’ll be like old times.”  He offers.  But these aren’t Kirkwall’s wide, flat stairs.  And this isn’t a Marcher spring.  She refuses to look at the steep curve of it.

Hawke coughs, claw twanging on the railing in an impatient rhythm. “Maybe if we stare at it long enough it’ll become a dragon.”

“A friendly dragon.”  Anders says quietly.  The first words, bright and clear, in countless miles.  And it’s such a brilliant mimicry of Merrill that Varric sort of wheels on the mage, gaping just a little too long.  Because he’s not really there.  Or anywhere inside his tatters and his boots.  He’s just waiting on the utterance of direction, like the rest of them.

Varric can’t stand it.  If he’s going to be lollygagging, he’d like it to be somewhere less…obnoxiously verdant.  And preferably with a beer.  “Let’s ponder the merits of travel-by-dragon as we go, what say?”

With that, he lurches onto the stairs, the ones that have no visible ending in the loamy press of earth and stone.  And the others follow in a fashion Varric refuses to acknowledge.  It was okay for one set of miles, and the few that followed, over terrain none of them could fathom.  But this was untenable.  It shouldn’t be this way.

Before rounding the first stone landing, he looks back to find the pirate watching them from the bottom.   Leather clad fingers go to her eyes, downcast, seeming to examine the deep drifts of burgundy leaves at her feet.  She catches him watching, and slowly, as if her legs were mutinous, Isabela takes the stairs.

What the fuck girl.

“as if her legs were mutinous”

AUGH AUGH AUGH