Ink Quisition

Ink-Quisition

By: CaptainXeno

***

D

Dragon Age fanfic, Cross-posted from AO3

Cullen/Dorian romantic pairing.

Same-sex relationship.

Rated Teen for mild (offscreen) sexual situations, nudity, and language.

Disclaimer: Bioware owns everything except for the stuff I made up, & I make no money from this work.

Summary:

The Inquisitor is off doing her job in the Western Approach and the Hissing Wastes, leaving her trusted advisors and friends to hold down various forts, keeps, and camps.

Varric finds himself at Griffon Wing Keep with Sera, Dorian, and Cullen. It's hot, sunburny, covered in sand, everything is poisonous, or venomous, and wants to kill them.

And worst of all, the mood of the camp is turning ugly and mean as vicious rumors and gossip start getting passed around. The target for the worst of the trash talk is Varric's favorite Altus, Dorian Pavus. It's just talk and a few mean pranks at first, but things start to escalate.

It's like some of the bad times in Kirkwall all over again, and Varric isn't having it! He figures if you can fight fire with fire, maybe you can fight stories with better stories. Varric to the rescue!

Ink Quisition:

***

Varric never intentionally eavesdropped. So he told himself. He thought of it more as being accosted by stories too good to pass up. The smithy at Griffon Wing was shady, at least, not much hotter than the rest of the blasted desert, and nobody would look for him in a place where actual manual labor happened.

Besides, sooner or later everyone stopped by the smithy, the baths, and the cook tents. So, any time he wanted to know what was going on, he emulated a good hunter setting up a blind; parked himself on an upturned crate, pulled up a half barrel as a desk, and looked busy answering fan letters. This hot afternoon in late spring, he'd actually gotten distracted by a particularly steamy and personal missive. Lots of material there for scenes. In books, that was. Scenes in books, of course, he reminded himself.

He lifted his quill, dipped it, and underlined a few passages that had potential. The two closest workers had been arguing, in friendly but intense tones, for the last few minutes.

"You can't have!" The blonde smith's apprentice from Redcliffe scoffed at her friend, loudly enough that Varric's concentration was broken.

"I did, though," her work partner retorted, and handed her a crate of broken scraps of salvaged metal parts.

The older girl dumped them out on a table made from planks laid over sawhorses. The clash of tumbled metal made Varric wince and rub his temples. He'd won a few too many drinks in rounds of Liar's Dice the previous night.

The apprentice began sorting through them, separating steel from pot metal. "Right," she mocked her friend, "And what were you doing exactly, that you got a good look at the Vint's arse?"

The teenaged courier gave her a surly look. "Hey, there. Watch it with talk like that. It weren't no sort of thing."

The metal sorter snorted and shook her head. "Dennar Margett! I never figured you to get judgy about whether a man likes danglies or innies in the breeches of a bedmate."