Chapter Text
“I've been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn't listen. Every time you said, 'Farm Boy do this' you thought I was answering 'As you wish' but that's only because you were hearing wrong. 'I love you' was what it was, but you never heard, and you never heard.' ~ William Goldman, The Princess Bride
“Well, obviously, they have to kill her.” Cassandra was distressed. “It’s self defense!”
“Is it?” Varric asked skeptically. “She’s tied to a chair.”
“Well, self-preservation, at least,” Cassandra sniffed. “Besides. She is an asshole.”
“Not everyone has as well-honed a sense of self-preservation as you do, Princess.”
“And not everyone is as dangerously soft-hearted as you, either!”
“Not everyone,” said Varric slyly, “but you are.”
“I--ugh. Just keep reading, you pest. I’ll pour the tea.”
“As you wish.”
“Murder.” Bull and Cullen chorused.
“Do I get a say in this?” Humperdink muttered. “Because my vote is in favour of clemency and forgiveness. In fact, if you don’t kill me, I’ll give a full minute’s head start before I call the guards.”
Dorian looked at her with disdain. “You are an extremely ineffectual villain. Honestly, if you were the best ally my father could find, I did him a favor putting him out of his misery. Can you even cackle maniacally?”
“She really can’t.” Cullen supplied. “I heard her try once. I’m pretty sure I could do better.”
Humperdink looked extremely offended. “I should have killed you myself!” She raged.
“There, that’s much better!” Dorian looked a little proud. “I think with a bit of time she could be a decent --”
“That’s really not the point.” Cullen rubbed the bridge of his nose. “The point is, if we don’t kill her, she’ll be out for revenge. She’ll hunt us to the ends of the earth, she’ll never give up.”
“Yeah, Cullen has a point,” Bull grunted. “Tying up loose ends and all that shit.”
“As loathe as I am to abandon my truly wonderful plan for dismemberment, it would mean living the rest of our lives with Humperdink breathing down our necks.”
Cullen and Bull nodded. Dorian’s mouth twisted into something oddly like regret.
“So what?” He snapped.
“Excuse me?” Buttercup said.
“So what?” Dorian repeated.
“What are you talking about, kadan?” Bull asked him.
“So what if she follows us?” Dorian demanded. “We beat her once--more than once, come to think of it--we can do it again if we have to. And you want to kill her for what? Vengeance? Convenience?”
“Yes?” said Buttercup.
“Bullshit,” said Dorian.
“So what’s your plan? Leave me tied up here like a coward?” Humperdink sneered.
“Are you... arguing against us letting you go?” Cullen asked.
“Er... I well, there was an opportunity and I...” Meredink cleared her throat. “Carry on.”
“I’m saying,” Dorian glared daggers at the interruption, “that perhaps brutality is an act of cowardice; perhaps bravery is about learning to live with the uncertainty and the regret, bearing them so someone else doesn’t have to. Maybe being merciful is the bravest decision.”
“It was a lovely speech, Dorian, really,” said Cullen, “but Humperdith is a crazy lady and I think it’s really best for all involved if we just kill her.”
“I agree with Cullen,” Buttercup was flopped over her lover, a certain ostentatious possessiveness in her demeanor. Dorian supposed she had earned it; she had died twice for the man, after all. Maker only knew why.
Bull gave Dorian a considering look, taking in his bloodied robes, his tall gory staff, the gray-green eyes that looked so old and so young at the same time. “We do nothing,” he said, finality in his tone.
Buttercup shrugged. “Well, we’re out of time.” She could hear the footsteps of approaching guards in the hallway. “Let’s get on those horses.”
Humperdink gathered breath to shout to her troops, but Dorian cast a sleeping spell on her. “Why didn’t you do that sooner?” Asked Cullen.
The Bull, tired of waiting, swung out the window and climbed swiftly down the tower. “No guards yet!” He called back to them. “Come on down, Princess, I’ll catch you!”
“If this is how I die,” Cullen told Buttercup, “I will come back from the Fade and haunt you.” He jumped out the window, praying to the Maker that he made it into the Bull’s outstretched arms. The fall seemed to take an eternity, but the Bull caught him. Cullen disguised his shaking legs by taking to bridles of two of the horses.
Bull shrugged. “Apparently, coming back from the dead isn’t as hard as you’d think. I’m counting on that when the crazy lady knifes, us, anyways.”
Buttercup paused on the window ledge, and looked back at Dorian. He looked a little lost. Their true loves were on the ground below, but he hadn’t moved since Cullen leapt out the window.
“Having second thoughts?” She asked. “I’m sure if you wait long enough Humperdink’s soldiers will behave towards you in a cowardly and brutal fashion.”
He rolled his eyes and refused to rise to the bait. He did finally step towards the window. “What’s next?” He asked.
“Running?” Buttercup suggested. “Fleeing? Catching the tide and getting out before the coast guard is alerted?”
“And after that?” His hands were tight on the windowsill as he stared out into the uncertain night. “I’ve been in the revenge business so long, I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life.”
Buttercup glanced down at Cullen and The Iron Bull, each waiting for the two of them under the window, then up to Dorian and smiled. “Have you ever considered piracy? You’d make a wonderful first mate for the Dread Pirate Isabela.” With that, she toppled out of the window, suspended above her future and her true love waiting below.
The end.
“Varric, what sort of ending is that?” Cassandra cried.
“What do you mean what kind of ending is that? It’s the ending. The only one. That’s why it has a definite article. The end.”
“I mean that is not how you are supposed to end a book! Humperdink is alive and we don’t know if Cullen and Buttercup made it to the ship. Does Dorian recover from his wounds? Is he with Bull now? Who is the Dread Pirate Isabela?”
Varric sighed. He had forgotten, had no idea how he had forgotten, but he had forgotten that Cassandra believed in happy endings. The author could work all they wanted to make her sweat and perhaps sometimes some of the wrong people would die, but in Cassandra’s world justice would win the day when all was said and done. The Right Hand of the Divine believed in happy endings with the sort of fervor that the Chantry normally reserved for the pyre of Andraste.
“Look, Princess, I’m just a writer. When the ink runs out, I’m not in charge of what the characters do after. I don’t know if they make it. I couldn’t even tell you if the Iron Bull catches Buttercup when she jumps out of the tower.” He looked at her face, so crestfallen and blazing still with a painful sort of hope and the kind of honesty Varric could never, ever understand. She had looked at him in just the same way when he had finished the story of Kirkwall. That tale was long since gone but perhaps he could give her this. Perhaps he owed it to her.
She watched him, anxious. “I don’t know,” he told her, “but I’m certainly allowed to guess. So, did they make it? Was the pirate ship there? You can decide for yourself if you want, but I say yes. I say it was, and they got away, and Cullen and Buttercup got married and Dorian and Buttercup healed and got their strength back and the four of them had their share of adventures and more than their share of laughs. But that doesn’t mean they got a happy ending, either. Because Dorian and Bull bicker a lot and Curly’s gonna lose his good looks eventually. And maybe one day Tiny loses the other eye in a fight or some brat apostate whips Dorian with magic and Buttercup never quite sleeps as soundly as she lets on because maybe the sky cracks open and there’s this crazy magister or maybe she’s just worried because Humperdink might be on their trail. I’m not trying to make their wedding gift have a sad ending, here. I’m just saying, for the umpity-umpth time, that life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all. And the important thing is that you have someone to share that crapfest with. That’s all a happy ending is, when you come down to it.” The entire time he spoke, he refused to look at her.
Gently, Cassandra took his hand. Varric thought about all that nonsense on bravery he put into the last chapter. He would have to rewrite every last sodding word of it.
“I think that is a wonderful ending,” She told him. “I just don’t understand why you didn’t write any of it down.”
“Well, there’s a kissing part I didn’t read you because you wanted me to skip over that.”
Cassandra flushed. “Perhaps... Perhaps I do not mind if you describe it a little. It’s the last kiss, I suppose it must be a decent one.”
Varric looked unaccountably nervous and for reasons that mystified Cassandra, he leaned forwards, setting the book aside. “Well,” he told her, his breath stirring the air around her lips, “I’m still working out the exact description, but I think it goes something like this.” And he showed her what he meant.
Since the invention of the kiss, there have been five that were rated the most passionate, the most pure.
This one, in Cassandra’s admittedly biased opinion at least, left them all behind.
From the instant their lips broke apart to the moment in which Varric’s warm brown eyes met hers, there were approximately one thousand years in which Cassandra thought about the right thing to say. When she opened her mouth, she asked a question instead. “Varric… Will you come back tomorrow? Perhaps tell me another story?”
Varric smiled as though he knew what she meant.
“As you wish, Princess. As you wish.”
“It appears to me as if we’re doomed, then,” Buttercup said.
Westley looked at her. “Doomed, madam?”
“To be together. Until one of us dies.”
“I’ve done that already, and I haven’t the slightest intention of ever doing it again,” Westley said.
Buttercup looked at him. “Don’t we sort of have to sometime?”
“Not if we promise to outlive each other, and I make that promise now.”
Buttercup looked at him. “Oh my Westley, so do I.”