Running On Empty: Nothing's Impossible To He Who Tries


Note: Hello everyone! Still job hunting. Thanks for your patience and the influx of reviews and tips. Once again, this work is COMPLETELY unbeta'ed and any mistakes are my own. This work is also written mostly for fun and completely in my own free time, so if you spot any inconsistencies, PLEASE let me know. Sometimes even my notes aren't enough to remember what Jaime's done. Hope everyone enjoys this next chapter, largely filler and fuzzy, but a nice break from all the chaos.


Varric had me bundled up near his tent and campfire with a mug of who-the-fuck-knows-what in my hands. The aroma was painfully sharp and peppered the inside of my nostrils like mace. One tentative sip told me to drink carefully, as the fluid had slithered down my throat like poison and scorched everything in its path. If I hadn't known better, I would have most definitely mistaken it for poison.

The dwarf was finishing up the last of his business. Another runner from Orzammar had returned with another small shipment of lyrium for our collection of mages and Templars, but the supply was running thin and we would be out by month's end, if I overheard correctly. Just another thing to fuck up on, where am I supposed to get lyrium without pissing off the Chantry? We needed allies, enough to warrant the need of such a high demand without scaring merchants.

Varric's shadowed crept over the toes of my boots and I looked up from my place on the log. He sighed and rubbed at the back of his head before taking the seat next to me. Hesitantly, I leaned against his arm and relief flooded my stomach as he leaned back into my weight. I wanted to vomit, I was so happy to have the connection.

"You wanna talk about what happened with you and the Warden there?" Varric offered. He waved off another courier and pointed them up to the church of Haven. It would seem I had earned the dwarf's full attention for the time being. More hesitation curdled the walls of my stomach, the warm drink of what-have-you doing nothing to settle it.

"I don't know what happened." I replied quietly, honesty colored my words. My gaze was glued to my mug, the tips of my thumbs played over the lip of it. "I wanted to talk to him about... something personal, and I think he kinda just rushed me."

Varric's brow rose, but he said nothing. People continued to mull around us, jumping from one place to another, trading their wares and supplies to better the forces of the Inquisition. Superficially, it appeared as everything was working, every cog in place and pulling its gear, but damn did I feel like the wrench in the whole operation.

"I think I derailed the conversation." I murmured, my thumbs petting my mug absently. "I wanted to explain something personal, but not that kind of personal. I know I have cracks, doesn't mean I want someone seein' 'em."

"Bit late for that, I think." Varric kept his voice low and his gaze turned to the fire in front of us. He leaned forward and dropped a log onto it, shifting it with his foot for a moment. "From what we've heard of the Fallow Mire, it was... pretty dire."

"I had to get through it quick." My words rushed past my tongue. "Once I realized there was a plague, time was -"

"Shh, hey, hey. I'm on your side, remember?" Varric smiled and his hand came to rest at the small of my back and rubbed horizontally along my spine. My muscles betrayed me and slumped slightly into the touch. He chuckled and continued, nodding his head for me to reply.

"Yeah, I know. It's just bad. I guess. Fuck." A heel of my palm rubbed at my eye and I balanced my mug on a knee. "I guess from his point of view, okay yeah, I was probably looking pretty fucking nuts just running headfirst pillar after pillar, but... I don't know, I wasn't looking to die."

Varric blinked and pulled back momentarily. "Well, I don't remember hearing that part."

I winced. "Blackwall thinks I was on a suicidal run, trying to 'divest' myself of the responsibility of being Herald. Like." A snort escaped me and my gaze let a glare flicker between Varric and my mug, my voice tight. "I'm not the most stable person in the world, I get that, and I'm not the best at being Herald, but... I'm not gonna up and fucking leave you all with no Mark."

There was a heavy pause between us, but it felt far from awkward. Varric was a quick study, though he took his time chewing through the details of a story to better understand theme and plot. He was no Iron Bull when it came to being covert or trained in the art of deceptions, but he was just as good at analyzing people as the Qunari.

"He has a bit of a point." Varric replied softly, hand still on my back. "You've gone non-stop for a while. Some of us are just a bit afraid of losing you. I think that's fair, that we're worried." Icy guilt flooded my lungs and an inhale shuddered through me. Of course they were allowed to feel worried, but I had no way to cope with their stress and my own. I couldn't stop or slow down, because then it would give me time to think.

To remember.

"That's fair," I agreed lamely, "I just... wish he wasn't so aggressive about it."

"Well..." Varric started, and then ended with a wince. "Well, no. Never mind. I was going to say Cassandra was the same, but she cared more about you doing the job rather than the job killing you. I don't... think it ever occurred to us that you could die." There was a silence that blanketed us after that statement and for a moment, we paused, suspended in the reality that we had forgotten that I was mortal.

"Holy shit," I groused with the heel of my right hand rubbing my eyes, "now I get it."

"You know, it's hard, sometimes." Varric muttered with a sour glance across at me. "It's hard remembering that you're just a girl, just snatched up from her bassinet and thrown into chaos. You... you just end up doing these fucking weird, impossible things and we... we forget. I'm sorry we forget." Varric's expression crumbled under his realization and I placed my mug down between my heels to hug him. My arms wrapped around his head and his arm around my back tightened. We stayed close and I could feel him shake.

"It's okay, buddy." I found myself comforting him for once. This was something I could do. It was so easy to set aside my own fears and anxieties when I had someone else to focus on, someone else that needed to be held up. My Mark was a reminder of the power I potentially possessed, but it also served as a curse to make those around me forget that I was inescapably mortal.

Blackwall didn't forget, and he worries.

Bull can't reconcile my mortality and fallibility with the Mark.

Damn it.

"Varric." I murmured in between our hug. "I've got a lot to tell you." The dwarf slowly pulled away from my arms and caught my glance. With a heavy frown of my brow and a flicker of my gaze to the people that flowed around us, I stood and retrieved my mug from between my heels. Wordlessly and worried, Varric followed my lead as I trudged back toward my little cabin beyond the thoroughfare of Haven's center of operations.

We slid through the door and with it shut behind us, the cloak I wore was tugged off my shoulders and set on the stand over my armor pieces. Varric wandered over to the fireplace and sat with a long-suffering sigh. Guilt slithered up my throat; he had so much to worry about already, keeping his people safe and helping the Inquisition with their supplies. Hesitantly, my feet took long drags toward the bed and I sat to face him.

"What was it that you have to tell me? Is this some sort of secret rest of 'em can't know?" He joked weakly with a palm to brush his forehead.

I winced. "The main heads know, as does Cassandra and Solas. You... weren't there when I awoke, so the story never got told." On a second thought, nervous now that I could spill the secrets of my world to the open, I hustled over to the windows of my cabin and shut them tight with their locks folded over. If we managed to keep our voices low and Varric didn't completely and utterly disown me by the end of it, then we wouldn't have an issue.

Hopefully.

Varric's gaze had followed me. "What do you mean? I think I know the story pretty well, it's a bit hard trying to hide what you are."

"You heard the safe, edited version of the story." I answered once I turned back to him. Slowly I wandered back to the bed, but lingered at his side before reaching the edge of the bed. My gaze was glued to the fire, but I could feel the scrutiny of his on my face.

"There's a raw version to this story?" He asked quietly, mindful now that the shutting of the windows meant something. His shoulders tensed under his coat and my fingers wound together as my nerves fired with hot anxiety.

"Isn't there always?" My words escaped meekly. Finally my ass found the bed and I sat with my legs hooked together at the ankle and my arms tightly bound around my chest. A few swallows and my voice returned but my gaze remained unfocused on the fire before us. "I just ask that you give me a chance to finish before you give an opinion, yeah?"

"Yeah," he breathed with a furrowed, wary brow.

"I feel like a damn broken record today," I muttered and rubbed my elbow, "Most of what you heard is half true. My name isn't Welton, it's Wyatt. I am twenty-six, but I'm not an orphan. I'm the middle child of three, with a mother and a father. Two brothers. All that good stuff." My gaze flickered between the fireplace and Varric's face, but the dwarf's expression had not changed from the wary frown of before.

His hand gestured for me to continue.

"I wasn't... born in Thedas. O-or anywhere here. On this planet. When... before I woke up in the jail cell here, I was actually somewhere else. I was home, back in my world. If it would make any sense to you, I'd tell you I was a computer geek, but that's a bit out of blue field." Another glance and Varric's face had morphed from wariness to a sudden exhaustion and he turned his gaze away from me, his hand slowly came up to his face and held his forehead.

Again, his hand gestured for me to continue.

"I-I couldn't tell you how I got here, b-but Solas and I have some theory that the Fade connected our worlds a-and I was just... wrong place, right time, y'know? I dunno." Once more, I rubbed at my elbow with nothing else to distract me. Varric was being uncharacteristically quiet, even when having asked him to hold his opinion (he was never one to hold back on his opinion).

"I am human," I felt the strike of fear urge me to emphasis the point, least he be like Bull and consider me something else. "I'm still young and foolish and really fucking scared, but... I dunno, this isn't exactly an excuse for my behavior but... yeah." The silence settled on us and my heels gently dragged along the floorboards as I waited. It was a good, few hot minutes before Varric sat straight in the chair with a long, deep inhale.

"Maker's balls," he exhaled and ran a hand down his face, "we never get a break, do we?"

My head tilted, suddenly curious. His voice had been distant, as if talking to someone else who was absent of the room.

"... Varric?" I prompted, worried to where this line of conversation would lead.

"Nothing good ever comes out of the fucking Fade." He grumbled tiredly. He shifted in his seat and turned to me; "My turn to tell you a story, because this... all sounds suspicious now." At his words, my brown took its turn to furrow over my eyes and my feet stopped their mindless motion as I turned my attention to listen. The deeper, hitched tone of his voice made my skin itch with alertness; this wasn't a tall-tale he was going to tell.

"Before all this went to shit, I was back in Kirkwall with Hawke and the others. You know that, you read some of the book." He gestured to the tattered leather bound book on my nightstand. "What's... not in there, is our encounter with a darkspawn by the name of Corypheus, who also claimed to be a product of the Fade's influence." Eyes wide, I leant forward with my arms on my thighs, resting my weight forward. Could there have been another like me?

"He was nothing like you," Varric spat, startling my thoughts, "He was this big, ugly, spidery looking asshole with the ego that ran the depth of the Waking Sea. We encountered him because I stupidly led Hawke into the mess after I heard some rumors flying around about some Carta hiding out in the Vimmark Mountains, intent on hunting down Hawke or his sister because someone wanted their blood."

I remained quiet, desperate to retain the information as it was a rare thing Varric told anything seriously.

He sighed, "We sent out a missive to Sunsh - Bethany. His little sister, who was with the Wardens, if you remember that chapter about the Deep Roads?" A quick nod from me to affirm that I did remember reading the misfortunate circumstance that had nearly killed Hawke's sister as they attempted to escape the underground passage. "Right, she meet us at the edge of the Vimmark Mountains, along with Hawke, myself, and Anders. It just went to shit from there."

"What happened?" I prompted after his breather.

"We were ambushed, first fucking thing." Varric groused. "Caught in the wastelands of Vimmark, distracted by a Carta messenger. They had a fucking bronto." I had no clue as to what a bronto was, but it sounded nasty, a faint recollection of the word bruto from Spanish, to mean a brute ( and I was only aware of the word because my Spanish professor used it constantly).

I shuddered to think of whatever the creature could be.

"Anyway, we manage to make our way through the wasteland and into the fortress, flinging Carta left and right as it was Hawke's pastime, and we find their hideout. Bronto and Carta bastards everywhere. Hawke and Sunshine make work of them like blowing out candles... I forgot how devastating Sunshine's magic could be, and to see it honed by her training in the Wardens... she was almost a different person."

Varric drifted into his memories for a moment and I was loathed to drag him back. I couldn't tell if the memory was a good one, but from what I had read of Bethany before Hawke had nearly lost her in the Deep Roads, she had been literal Sunshine in Varric's eyes; happy, optimistic, joyful, and teasing. Despite her magic and the need for hiding, she never lost her shine. A glance at his softened expression and my heart broken for my brotherly dwarf.

"We ended up going depths deep," he murmured with another shift in his seat, "Found a few items and we took our happy asses deeper. We found Gerav in the mines." He paused and his eyebrows stiffened over his eyes and wrinkled his forehead.

"Gerav?" I tugged tentatively at the storyline again. My thighs were numb from my weight and I shifted back to relieve them. My moment of story-time had morphed into a history lesson who's weight seemed to smother the room. I wondered what it had to do with me, but I would be patient; Varric was a storyteller through and through.

"An... old friend of mine." Varric answered softly. "He left, was doing work or some shit and it got a bit too much for him. No fucking wonder, the Carta leader Rhatigan gave us a run for our sovereigns. Said he would bring Hawke's blood to Corypheus and free him, since it was Hawke's father Malcolm that started this. Hawke and Sunshine brought the fight to an end quickly... and on Rhatigan we found a glowing dagger." The pause was a dangerous one, a memory that struggled against being told. He flashed me a worried look and I forced my eyes wide to portray innocence. I don't know what he feared from me, but it was there.

"Hawke picked it up and I should have stopped him. The thing just - it looked like it electrocuted him, straight through." Varric gripped the armrests of the chair, lips pursed momentarily over his teeth. "It was an enchantment, according to Sunshine. Triggered because of their blood, something their father left behind."

"That's a bit dark." I murmured. I hadn't read much of the Hawke family line, and I only knew of the siblings because Varric never wasted an opportunity to talk about his best friend. Their adventures had been a source of entertainment and joy for me, even with the destructive ending of Kirkwall, simply because Varric breathed so much life into his storytelling.

"It gets worse." Varric shook his head. "As we went on, we found demons - they were imprisoned, sure, but still dangerous. Hawke... released the first demon, we got echoes of Malcolm's memory and it... wasn't good. As we opened the cells and destroyed the demons, we found out that Malcolm only assisted with the whole damn thing so that Leandra could escape with their firstborn."

"Hawke." I breathed with a stuttering heart in my chest. I was bolted to that bed and the world could have shattered around me for all that I cared, the story woven through Varric's emotional retelling gripped me. A small blimp of sadness unfurled under my lungs for the family, forced into a desperate situation because of the magic that Malcolm harbored. Leliana's sharp eyes flashed through my thoughts as her voice echoed; there are mages better than I, and yet I am free?

Varric's gaze rested on me for a moment. "Yeah. Prologue to my book that started with them in Lothering, huh? Heh. In any case, as we continued, we found a man by the name of Larius and we found out that he was a wandering Grey Warden, practically trapped within this decrepit spawn pit we were in. Larius is the one that asked Hawke's father to help with the ritual that sealed Corypheus away." I frowned, thoughts tumbling over themselves as the story continued. Varric had made it sound as if Corypheus had been similar to me, but perhaps it was our connection to the Fade that tethered us.

"We had our first affirmation that what Larius said about the darkspawn Corypheus was true as we went deeper; because Anders turned on us." Varric rubbed his palms together with a shake of his head. "The Calling, as the Wardens named it, got a bit too strong for him what with being a runaway Warden himself, and Justice appeared. Struck him down fast, but we knew we were in deep shit because of it. A darkspawn powerful enough to make a Warden heel? Only the archdemon does that."

Anders. I remembered that particular name, he had been a previous friend to Hawke and ultimately led to the destruction of the Kirkwall Chantry.

"Larius found us again, warned us not to release Corypheus." Varric scratched at his chin and cleared his throat, the storytelling seemed to exhaust him, the revisited emotions eating away at the memory. "Another Warden had followed us, Janeka. She wanted to use Corypheus to tame the darkspawn or some shit. Hawke shot her down without a second look. Didn't end well for her, didn't help that she told Hawke about how Larius forced Malcolm to use blood magic for the seals; hence the need for the Hawke siblings."

"It didn't make him turn on Larius?" I asked tentatively, knowing that blood magic was frowned upon throughout most of Thedas.

Varric shook his head. "No, because by then, we had already heard most of Malcolm's memories... My magic will serve that which is best in me, not that which is most base. He had drilled that into Sunshine's head, and the siblings never forgot it. Regardless of what magic Malcolm had used, Hawke didn't believe for a second that it tainted his father."

My Mark fluttered with a sharp heat in my palm and in surprise, my hand jerked away from the bed. Varric spared me a glance, startled by my abrupt jolt, but I waved him off. My glare focused on my hand for a moment as I wondered what had triggered it. There were no rifts or demons in Haven, as far as I knew.

"Anyway," he breathed, concerned by my Mark, "Larius and Hawke brought down Janeka and her other Wardens... this is what makes me suspicious, because... Larius told us the only way to stop this chaos of the calling and corruption is to destroy Corypheus, but when we get to him..." My left hand remains clenched in my lap and my gaze steady on Varric as he inhales to smother a shudder.

"We find out he was a magister of Tevinter," Varric releases his exhale, "that he and some others were the first to enter the Golden City and if you've listened to Josephine's teachings -"

"They were the first darkspawn, holy motherfucker." My inhale shot through my throat and lungs, my exhale a gasp. "There's no fucking way, is there? H-how - how the fuck could he prove that?"

"He was the first intelligent darkspawn I've ever come across." Varric muttered darkly. "Anders also realized that he had asked for an acolyte of Dumat, an Old God that had become the first archdemon." The skin along my neck and arms flushed cold and stiff at the thought of such a creature existing. Though I was not religious myself, to have sudden proof that heaven could exist and it was corrupted into hell?

I shuddered.

"Yeah," Varric sighed, "he continued to ramble and called out to his god asking for guidance, but it was just shit. Starting talking about how they were told to get to the Golden City and how they just - just walked through the Fade. The Maker tossed them out as His City went black and thus, the first darkspawn was created."

"Does Leliana know?" I asked immediately, my molars ground together at the back of my mouth. Varric gave me a half-hearted, nonchalant shrug.

"I would assume she does, though I never told her the full story." Varric glanced at me, the wariness back in his eyes. "But you see why... look, I'm not suspicious of you, sweetheart, but the fact that you actually came through the Fade... from another world..." He struggled at the end to find his words and I sighed, the heels of my palms coming up to my eyes and pressing into them roughly.

"I know, the implications. I've had this same talk with Bull." I muttered.

Varric snorted softly. "He's not wrong. We... the Chantry can't know, ever. Last thing we need is you labeled a demon, or another Corypheus. Maker's balls, they could even go so far as to blame you as the next Blight because of it, no matter how many rifts you close or demons you kill." Each passing word seem to settle on his shoulders and weighed him heavily. He rolled his head over his neck and then gently shook it.

"What a mess..." He exhaled stiffly. "I'll... see about getting in touch with Hawke. Corypheus is dead, thank the Maker for that, but... he might have someone who can help us with this." A hard blink cleared my eyes as my hands fell into my lap; help? Help with what? What could his old friend do for me that no one else was capable of?

"What do you mean?" My question was gentle, frightened.

Varric turned to me and smiled sadly. "Sweetheart, for as much as I'm sure you love that elf, he doesn't have all the answers. We need to see if we can get you home." A low thud echoed within my organs as my heart dropped to my lap, my eyes watering at the mere thought of going back home. A smile forced its way onto my face.

"I can't," came the choked reply, "that's impossible..."

"Jaime." Varric stated my name matter-of-factly as he stood and walked over to me. "I have seen... some weird shit this side of the Free Marches. Demons, Qunari, rips in the Fade, and now a girl that dropped through the Veil into our troubles." His gloved hands came up and held my face, thumbs running along my cheekbones and clearing away the tears that slipped away. He offered me a warm, weak smile.

"I once knew an elf that sold her soul for a mirror that could show her the past, and I faced down a magister who claimed to have seen the Golden City turn black." The muscles along his jaw jumped as he swallowed and one hand left my face to brush away wisps of hair. "I saw a Champion take down an impossible Qunari foe, and I've watched a girl shoulder the burden of salvation for a world that isn't hers. I think we can try for the impossible, no?"

The tears were renewed and without a thought, I threw myself into a hug, holding him close.

Let's try for the impossible.