You Can't Save the Spider *and* the Butterfly

I’ve already been beaten to the best Varric head canon ever, and I’m not sure what I can really add after remembering that post. I’m sitting hear tearing up like my Ariel gif in that post just rereading it all now, having trouble thinking of anything else. These are probably going to be pretty lame compared to my last few posts, unfortunately…

1. I’ve heard others mention this idea and others very, very similar to it in the past, but there’s no story behind Bianca in the sense that everyone assumes there must be. She’s certainly not representative of some lost or unrequited love. She may or may not be a good luck charm a la Indiana Jones’ hat, though if so, that sentiment likely developed after very carefully building a sense of mystery around her—around them—through deliberate story-telling in a “life imitates art” kind of way.
2. He secretly fears that someday he’ll begin to believe his own stories. At the same time, he wishes that he could believe them, because even in the worst stories he tells, he typically finds an “up” note to end them on.
3. One night shortly after meeting Hawke and Bethany, Ria gets drunk and tells him pretty much every detail of their lives up to that point—scraped knees when she and the twins were children, first loves, Carver, everything. Varric notices a look on Ria’s face when she mentions Malcolm’s nickname for Bethany, Sunshine, that more or less sums up everything happy that Hawke had ever known. She doesn’t remember telling him any of this, but he uses the nickname for Bethany very specifically when they’re all together to see that same tiny smile on both women’s faces.