Who: Dar, Melora, and anyone else who happens to be in the house and wants to wander in. It's a big house. What: Cookie distractions and company. Where: Varric's place. When: Not long after this post. Warnings: Highly unlikely.
Dar, still in her mabari form, wandered slowly up the drive to Merrill's house. Well, Varric's house. She still hadn't met Varric. She still hadn't met most of the people who lived there, just Merrill and Melora and Stefan. But apparently it was a place where she'd spend a lot of time in the future. Did that mean she should make an effort to spend more time here, or could she just take it for granted?
Silly question. Dar didn't take much of anything for granted. You couldn't, when you were an apostate or lived in an alienage, and old habits stuck.
But approaching that door was...difficult. Why? Those same old habits of be careful of trusting anyone, they might turn you over to the Templars? That hardly applied anymore, and she'd always been rather foolhardy about it anyway, confident in her ability to run or fly out of trouble. Fear of connecting with more people who might later disappear? Maybe, but it didn't seem like the whole answer. Just plain nerves? She wasn't usually nervous. She wasn't usually shy either, but she felt it now, felt it often in this world. In Thedas she'd been grounded by Theo and the Collective, who were a family of sorts; it didn't matter what anyone else thought of her because she had something to be part of. And she'd met Nuriko just after arriving here, and he'd been the same even when he hadn't been around, and it wasn't just the grief of missing him that had left her floundering so much once she realized he was gone. Now what?
Now you stand on your own two feet, that's what. Or four, or whatever.
But first there can be cookies.
Dar shifted back into her elven-self, took all those worrying thoughts, and pushed them down inside somewhere. She didn't want to mope around here the way she had at Corinth's earlier. It'd helped, it'd helped a lot, but she'd done enough of that for one day. Besides, her curiosity was beginning to reassert itself. What sort of cookies? What were they like out here?