timptoe

“What?”

He pushes himself to his feet, toeing his blade into the ice. “Book of Genesis, chapter nine, verses twelve through sixteen. It’s a Bible verse,” he says again flatly.

Haasy blanches. “Tonight?”

“Par for the fucking course,” Troy grimaces.

They’ve faced Montreal any number of times over the last few years since Hollander joined them—well, since Hollander was outed, ostracized, and exiled from the Metros—and the Centaurs come up on top more often than not. But it’s always a slog, and it’s only gotten worse since Ottawa won the Stanley Cup the same year Montreal finished dead last. You’d think the Metros’ hatred for Hollander’s new team would cool at some point. You’d be wrong. When the front office announced that the Centaurs’ Pride Night would be during a Metros game, well…maybe that’s why Harris pushed so hard for such showy jerseys this year.

“But what’s it mean?” Haas asks.

Troy shakes his head. “No idea. We never really went to church. Probably something homophobic, though.”

“It’s about the fucking rainbow.” Rozy’s face is a mask of cold fury as he skates up to them. “That fucking asshole.”

Haas blinks.

“Noah!” Rozy says angrily, gesturing in a loop over his head. “When the rain came down and flooded everything and then there was a rainbow? Do you not know the story about the two-by-two animals?”

“Ohh,” Haasy says, “yeah, okay.”

Troy raises an eyebrow. “You knew that off the top of your—“

“Yes, yes.” Rozy exasperatedly shakes the chain around his neck. “Is not just pretty decoration, you know.”

“But that’s a nice story—“

“Genocide of humanity aside,” Rozy grumbles under his breath.

“—with cute animals and a happy ending,” Haasy continues, while Troy goggles at Rozanov knowing how to translate genocide, “and a rainbow. Is Comeau really being an asshole?”

“Yes.”

“Of fucking course.”

Joker dives back through Earth’s atmosphere for the second time in an hour, for much the same reason, with one crucial difference: last time, he wasn’t flying directly toward Harbinger. Flames lick the edges of the viewport, the combination of the Normandy’s speed and the oxygen in the atmo creating a fireball around the ship that would be beautiful if it didn’t also paint them as Target One for the Reaper currently guarding the conduit.

“GARDIAN 2 now offline!” Sparks explode in the CIC corridor behind him. “Shit, and 5 too!”

Joker hates atmo because it creates heat, the enemy of most starship systems. Heat melts the ablative armor keeping the ship together. Heat turns their weapons turrets into inoperative hull decorations. Heat is what their stealth system is supposed to counteract to keep them hidden from enemy radars, but you can’t hide a fucking fireball in the sky.

“Joker! Harbinger’s firing—“

“Shit, I see it!”

He barrel-rolls to the left, just in time to avoid the searing heat of the Reaper’s beam weapon, the sound of the blast vibrating through the atmosphere and into the Normandy’s deckplates, rattling Joker’s porcelain bones like the toll of a bell.

One more thing to hate about atmo. You can’t hear a Reaper’s beam weapon in space.

“Jeff, I do not see how we can get close enough to the conduit to assist Major Alenko without risking major damage to the Normandy.” EDI’s voice through the speakers is tense, the haptic feedback in his chair minimal. She clearly thinks this is a bad idea.

“Sir, the fighters can’t cover us under this kind of fire. I know what the commander said, but there’s nothing we can do right now!” Cortez’s voice is just as tense, layered with the thick grief of memory. He also thinks this is a bad idea.

Because it is. Way worse than rescuing Beta Team.

(At any and all cost. A pause. Consider it my final order.)

But Joker doesn’t have a choice.

“Then give me options, people!” he shouts back over the din in the cockpit. “Your commander called for an evac!”

“But Joker—“

Joker looks over at Tali, eyes tight, and snaps, “Shepard’s not gonna focus on anything else until we get Alenko out of there.” You know this as well as I do, he doesn’t add.

She nods slowly, turning back to the bridge’s engineering console, fingers flying furiously over her haptic panels.

“Joker- Sir,” Cortez says again, silencing the chatter from the remnants of the squadron he’s supposed to be coordinating, “with all due respect, Shepard’s not in command right now. You are. Regulation 0803.1: an officer who accedes to command shall not—“

“Well, I’m not very good with regs, Cortez,” Joker bites back, rolling to the left to dodge Harbinger’s next strike, “so let me get a second opinion. Tali, who do we know who’s good with regs around here?”

“Kaidan,” she says, a little trill of mirth weaving through the tightness in her vocoder.

Joker just shrugs at Cortez.

Cortez, in turn, rolls his eyes. “Major Alenko knows just as well as I do that you can’t evac in the middle of a dogfight. He’d be on my side.”

“Probably.” Joker’s eyes flick to the panel tracking Alpha Team. “But from the look of his blood pressure, he’s not really in a position to overrule me, so give me some fucking options.”

Cortez blows out a frustrated breath. “They can see us! We can’t exactly hide!”

Joker’s just swiping an additional sensor panel into existence when EDI beats him to the punch. “The Normandy is not taking fire from Reaper ground troops. I suspect they are occupied with our own ground forces.”

Cortez waves his hands fruitlessly around the bridge. “We’re the biggest fucking heat source in the sky! Harbinger can track us. We can’t hide.”

He’s right, of course, and Joker knows it. The lithium heat-storage tanks were nearing capacity even before Vega’s evac call, and they’re all but useless at this point. Not to mention the dozen inoperative GARDIAN turrets that might as well be giant neon signs, and the fireball of friction surrounding them.

But it gives him an idea.

“Cortez,” he says, hands spinning up a suggested flight path over the top of the Normandy, “can you get your guys to do this for me?”

“Joker—“

“That’s an order, lieutenant.” Joker stares Cortez down. He can count the number of times he’s ever pulled rank on one hand.

(At any and all cost.)

But he knows the fucking regulations as well as anyone.

Cortez relents, turning back to his console to scramble the squadron, while Tali murmurs, “That’s not gonna make the ship any less hot.”

“No, but it gives him something else to focus on,” Joker mutters back, leaving the him open to interpretation as he swipes yet another panel into existence.

“I heard that,” Cortez calls over. Okay, so not that open.

“Joker,” Tali says with a little more urgency in her voice, “the closer we get, the easier—“

“Can you rig this?” He swipes the panel over to her.

There’s a beat of silence that somehow cuts through the chaos of the cockpit as she processes what he’s asking. Then, with a sharp intake of breath, she whispers, “Keelah.”

“It’ll work.”

“Once.” EDI’s single word reverberates ominously, not unlike Harbinger’s weapon, before she adds, “The stealth drive will then be rendered permanently inoperable.”

“As will a half-dozen tertiary systems,” Tali breathes.

 “If Shepard doesn’t get to that beam, it won’t matter.” Joker looks over at Tali again. “And he won’t go if we don’t get Alenko.”

Another beat of silence. Then, wordlessly, she turns back to the engineering console, raising Donnelly on comms as she makes her preparations.

He turns his chair back, too. As he begins programming the next maneuver, he subvocalizes, “I’m sorry.”

“I am not my parts, Jeff,” EDI responds in his ear, a soft thread of haptic movement traveling up his back.

He gives a soft smile.

In seconds, he’s made the necessary adjustments. He hates atmo, but this one time, it might be their saving grace.

“Ready Tali?”

“Ready.” Her voice is tense. But this is gonna work.

“Cortez?”

“Squadron in position.”

“On my mark.”

The fireball that is the Normandy descends through the atmosphere toward London, toward the beam, like a moth to flame. Even without sensors, Joker can see Harbinger below them. As big as a skyscraper. Its red light pulsing like a boil.

“Now.”

His haptic panels suddenly bloom with a hundred warning lights as the lithium tanks explode out the port side of the hull, propelled by the explosions of the hundred different power conduits that Tali rigged to overload.

“We’ve lost primary and secondary access to the hologrid!”

“Rerouting power to the port fields through the comms bypass lines.”

As the Normandy decreases its speed, the fireball of friction surrounding the ship dissipates—right at the moment the inoperative GARDIANs also jettison away from the ship, colliding with the tanks and ripping them open. The overheated lithium inside shatters into dust, igniting on contact with the water vapor in the atmosphere in a flash of white light that lingers.

Harbinger’s next shot flies right past the Normandy, shooting into and through the cloud of superheated particles. And when Cortez’s fighters fly through it, their wake spreads the particles in contrails over all of southern London.

Harbinger’s following shot is almost a kilometer off.

It worked. For the moment, the Normandy is free and clear.

“Silaris ablative down to 32%!”

“All aft GARDIANs unresponsive, Jeff.”

“Red 5 and 17 downed, sir!”

For the moment.

He races down towards the place where he can picture Shepard holding Kaidan’s crushed hardsuit together with his bare hands, the chaos around him be damned. Meters from Harbinger. Meters from the conduit. Meters from the end of everything. Focused on one man and one man only.

(You know what to do.)

Because fuck the rulebook.

This trick wouldn’t work with any other ship. Sure, you might be able to arrest your descent by flipping a 180 and using your thrusters, but you’d fry everything on the ground below you. Antiproton thrusters, like the ones the Normandy uses for standard propulsion, give off incredible amounts of heat—the kind of heat you might use to surgically remove the engines from an enemy batarian ship, for example. Conventional FTL drive cores work in much the same way, utilizing mass effect fields to lighten the mass of the ship and then employing standard thrusters to provide the propulsion.

But the Normandy’s different. Better. Her Tantalus drive core doesn’t use thrusters at FTL speeds. Instead, it continuously deploys tiny mass effect fields that the ship falls into—pulling the ship, rather than pushing it. And pulling is exactly how Joker’s going to pull this off.

Well, that or pull the ship into pieces, but EDI’s gotten that risk down to—he checks the panel—15%. No sweat.

“Ready, EDI?”

“Spinning up the drive core now,” she answers. “Reversing the fields on your mark.”

“Eighteen seconds…”

London expands in front of them as they dive toward the city, nose pointed directly at Beta Team’s location. Joker relaxes a little. He’s found them, they’re alive, and in another…fifteen seconds, they’ll be safe. He’s got this.

He’s got them.

“Should we inform Chief Engineer Adams?” The playful flit of haptic touches across his shoulders makes him chuckle.

“Fuck no,” he says cheerfully, “because he’d tell us not to do it. Ten seconds.”

The ground rushes up to meet them. He can see the hole in the center of the plaza now, courtesy of Tali and Cortez’s earlier last-ditch effort to collapse the horde into the London Underground. He can see movement on the ground around it, not individual combatants but movement, like the collective churning of whitecaps on water. He can see the flashes of gunfire, of grenades and biotic-powered explosions.

He can’t see his friends yet. But he will.

He will.

Joker’s hands fly over his haptic panels for another moment, rigging some final calculations, then rest above one single button. All he has to do is push it; if it doesn’t work, no amount of maneuvering will save them. He hears a squawk of surprise in the CIC hallway from the gunnery corporal. “Holy— holy shit! We’re gonna—“

“Now.”

Joker presses the button.

In a single instant, three things happen. First, the aft antiproton thrusters stop firing. Their descent is now in the hands of momentum, gravity, and that son of a bitch Isaac Newton. Second, the Tantalus core flares to life, a field of blue energy surrounding the Normandy, reducing her mass as if preparing to jump to FTL. And last, but most importantly, a series of mass effect fields begin to cycle, faster than the eye can see, right behind the ship—precisely counteracting first the ship’s momentum and then Earth’s gravity itself.

The Normandy is now hovering, nose-down-tail-up, between the buildings in the centre of London.

Except it’s even better than that. Because to get his friends—the team—inside, the cockpit airlock has to be reachable. So the nose of the ship is actually several meters below street level, poking straight through the hole into the Underground.

Joker takes a moment to process everything: the darkness of the Underground outside the viewport, the haptic panel displaying the word NORMAL underneath schematics of the Tantalus core, the yelling in the CIC hallway, the thudding of his heart inside of his chest.

Holy shit, it actually worked.

“EDI?”

“All systems normal, Jeff,” EDI says, measured relief in her mechanical voice. “Transverse hull stress currently within acceptable parameters. Hull integrity holding. It worked.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I figured it would,” Joker says as nonchalantly as possible. The haptic flutter on his back tells him EDI knows he’s full of shit, but she stays silent.

“EDI—“

“Joker, what the hell?” Adams shouts through the comm. “Did you just spin up the Tantalus inside atmo? Are you trying to get us—“

“Sorry, Chief, can’t talk right now, someone’s at the door!” Joker blithely interrupts. “EDI, could you get that, please?”

“Dammit Joker—“

“Opening airlock.”

Joker busies himself programming the next stage of the plan—escape—as the sounds of shouting and shooting suddenly become audible. He glances over his shoulder just in time to see Tali dive into the hallway, the ship’s mass effect fields pulling her perpendicular to Earth’s gravity. He calls back, “Hey, could you keep it down back there? Some of us are trying to work.”

In a flash, Tali is on her feet. She leaps over Javik as he dives in next carrying an injured Liara, and sprints into the cockpit to throw her arms around Joker’s chair. “You came for us!”

Joker grins as the quarian squeezes him. “For you. The others, eh.”

She looks him straight in the eye, opaque faceplate streaked in blood and goo and grime, her head tilted in a recognizable sign of gratitude. “Thank you.”

“Of course I was gonna come for you guys,” he responds, thunking his head against her helmet. “You’re my team, right?”

Cortez dives in next, followed last by Vega, who’s got EDI’s chassis slung over one shoulder. Cortez shoots from his prone position out the door as Vega shouts, “Close it! Close it now!”

“Closing airlock.”

The cacophony outside is abruptly silenced with a loud kachunk. For a moment, the CIC is still.

And then Vega starts chuckling. As does Cortez. Which sets off a cascade of laughter, the hooting and hollering and cheering echoing up and down the CIC right on into the cockpit.

“You crazy bastard,” Vega yells, still tangled up with Steve and EDI’s chassis on the floor. “Fucking idiot-ass comodín!”

“You are absolutely gonna have to show me how you did that sometime,” Cortez says, pushing himself up. “Landing on the nose like that? Never seen anything like it.”

“Reckless,” Javik grumbles. “Foolish to risk an asset like the Normandy on a rescue such as this.”

“Only foolish if it doesn’t work,” Cortez responds.

“EDI, are you alright?” Liara says as Javik helps her to her feet. Of the whole ground team, she looks the worst, blood pouring down her paler-than-usual face, arm bent at an odd angle.

“While my mobile platform is currently non-functional, I myself am fine, Dr. T’Soni,” EDI says through the speakers in the cabin.

“Good to hear your voice, EDI,” Vega calls out, hoisting her chassis back over his shoulder. “Where do you want, uh, you?”

“My mobile platform can be stored in the AI Core until it can be repaired,” she responds.

“Are the others…?” Tali says in a low voice to Joker.

He swipes the haptic panel with Alpha Team’s information on it over so she can see. The three transponders representing Shepard, Alenko, and Vakarian are traveling at the head of a column of Alliance blue, about half a click from the Conduit. More blue dots seem to be converging on a point some hundred meters from the beam. He points and says with more confidence than he feels, “They’re okay.” She just squeezes his shoulder.

“Worried about your boyfriend, Sparks?” Vega catcalls as he turns to take EDI’s chassis below deck, shit-eating grin on his face.

“Don’t make me regret saving you from that brute just now, bosh’tet,” she yells after him, amusement in her voice as she sits lightly on the arm of Joker’s chair.

Joker finds himself looking around the cockpit for a moment, silently watching the controlled chaos, the bantering and cajoling, the concern and the care of the people around him. The team. His friends. In no universe did he ever think he’d have this. What normal people have. What everyone except him seemed to have for so long. He smiles to himself.

“Jeff, transverse stress on the hull is beginning to increase,” EDI says in his ear as he takes in the scene. “We have to move.”

He turns back to the panels and begins prepping for departure, staying silent so he can bask in the cheerful noise around him.

In no universe.

The afternoon sun streams through the picture window at the rear of the viscount’s office, the wet streaks on her face catching the light. She closes her eyes and listens to the faint hustle and bustle of the western quarter of the city, the sounds of merchants and nobles and guardsmen and life. He’d always been fond of this window. How many times had she walked in here to raise some concern or other about security in the city, and he’d been standing right here, half-smile on his face? She can almost see him pointing out at Sundermount standing tall in the distance, saying something like, Hey, remember that time Hawke popped a witch out of an amulet? We should go see if that altar’s still there. You know, for old times’ sake.

Oh, for the chance. 

He’d hated being stuck in this office, she knew he did. Loved the city, and even—though he’d rarely admit it—loved the work. But the keep itself felt like a prison to him. Especially with the guard barracked just over there, he’d told her once with a glare. No wonder Orsino went crazy, having someone with a big sword watching his every movement.

Somebody has to, she’d replied with a smile, adjusting the pommel of her greatsword against her pauldron.

She knew he would’ve rather been out adventuring. He missed it more than she ever did. His stories from his time with the Inquisition never failed to remind her of those years with Hawke, traipsing around, solving people’s problems, trading barbs with Isabela. But where the memories filled her with a pleasant nostalgia she’d take home to Donnic and the little ones, they’d fill him with a restlessness. An ache, to be out there again. There was always some new problem in the city cropping up, though, a rebuilding project gone awry or a funding issue or bandits in Darktown again, and the time slipped away.

Perhaps that was why he jumped at the chance to travel again when that scout from the Inquisition stopped by all those months ago, Harding. Easy to remember her name, because Varric had burst into laughter the moment she walked into his office, repeating over and over You did it! You’re Harding in Hightown!

The long-suffering look that passed between the two women said all she needed to know about the scout.

The message Harding had brought from the remnants of the Inquisition quelled his laughter fast. He’d filled Aveline in on everything that had happened in the original Inquisition and then in Halamshiral when he’d returned from the Winter Palace. In the intervening years, while managing the chaos of Kirkwall, he’d kept her updated on the search for this Solas and the various theories on what he was trying to do. So when Harding showed up with instructions from the now-former Inquisitor to recruit a new, unknown group of people to stop the would-be god, Varric was gone the next day.

Back soon, Aveline, he’d said, Bianca strapped to his pack, bemused smile scrawled across his weathered face. Tell little Belle to keep a pot of tea warm for storytime.

She glances back at the message on the desk. Short, tidy scrawl, the neat and practiced hand of a veteran scout trained to deliver news efficiently. Varric died defending us. Veil in danger. I’m so, so sorry.

She wishes he’d stayed to climb Sundermount instead.

A sharp knock at the door interrupts her reverie. She takes a moment to compose herself before saying, “Enter.”

Joker looks over at Shepard one final time. “You’re sure?”

Shepard gives him a single nod. Good enough.

Joker toggles the outside comm. “Vancouver-1, this is Normandy. Good to be home. We—“

“You will be escorted on the provided vector. Deviation from this vector will constitute an act of aggression.”

“Touchy, touchy,” Joker mutters off-comm, entering the provided course into the navigational haptic panel. The two interceptor pings on the sensor panel become visible outside the viewport.

He’s not surprised, really. Shepard, after filling Hackett in about the shitshow at Project Rho and the Alpha Relay, had negotiated a fairly generous surrender of the Normandy to the Alliance. They’d been allowed to drop almost the entire ship's complement off on Omega first—leading to one of the wildest going away parties Joker’s ever seen—leaving behind a skeleton crew, all former Alliance. It was only then that Shepard had ordered Joker to take them to Earth to, quoting Hackett, “face the music.”

Joker’s not sure what kind of music plays over the trial of the guy who’s stopped the Reapers from getting a foothold in the galaxy three separate times, but he sure fucking hates it.

The mood in the cockpit is tense for the rest of the ride down to Vancouver. Joker’s responses to ground control’s guidance are terse, perfunctory. EDI’s responses to his commands are nearly silent. And Shepard…

He glances over at Shepard while executing a near-perfect landing on Pad 5 at Vancouver Base. (He absolutely could’ve made it perfect, of course, except that while landing, he knocked one of the landing struts against a perfectly-balanced stack of equipment; in response to the squawk from ground control, he just said, “Oh did I hit that oh nooooo,” and turned the comm channel completely off.) By all rights, Shepard should be pissed. Or scared. Or disillusioned. But if anything, he looks determined—more determined even than when he stepped off the ship at the Collector Base. The set of his jaw, the squareness of his shoulders, his laser-like stare at the building outside the viewport. It’s why he’s allowing the Alliance to impound the Normandy in the first place: to give himself a chance to convince Command to do something about the Reapers.

Joker would be intimidated, if he didn’t respect the man so damn much.

The Normandy finishes landing, EDI powering the engines first down, then off. For a moment, the cockpit is as still as dark space.

“Do you think we’ll make it, Commander?” Joker asks quietly.

Shepard takes a long moment to respond. “It all depends on who we have around us,” he says at last. He puts his hand on the back of Joker’s chair, finally meets Joker’s gaze, and with a small nod, says, “Take care of her, Joker.”

“Fuck ‘em up, Commander,” Joker replies, same steel in his voice, warmth flooding his chest.

The corners of Shepard’s mouth twitch upward, and he walks calmly, but purposefully, to the airlock door, and palms it open.

“What do you think they’re gonna do to him?” Joker mutters to EDI, watching a big jarhead lieutenant salute (which feels weird, given that Shepard isn’t technically Alliance anymore?) and formally read the charges against him.

EDI’s orb pulses slightly, but the audio comes through his aural implant instead of the cockpit speakers. “Alliance standard protocol would be interrogation, followed by incarceration and a court martial.” Joker nods. The same awaits him, he’s sure. EDI continues, “But the demeanor of Shepard’s arresting officer seems unusual.”

She’s right. The jarhead who saluted Shepard has made no move to cuff him, and—despite being several centimeters taller and a couple dozen kilos more muscular—he seems to be much more deferential to Shepard than any MP Joker’s ever known. “Hmm,” is all he says out loud.

Which is when a team of techs swarm inside, brandishing tools and probes and devices, heading straight to consoles and ductwork as they chatter to each other.

“Hey!” Joker snaps. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He swats a tech away from his station like a particularly annoying gnat. “Get your—”

“Mr. Moreau,” says a sharp voice behind him. Joker swivels his chair angrily around to find a short, balding man holding a pad in front of him like a shield, flanked by two more MPs. “I am Lieutenant Commander Durlin. These gentlemen are here to escort you.”

Joker bristles, standing up. “Pretty sure I don’t work for you, so you can get your vorcha-looking assholes off my ship right—“

“Mr. Moreau,” the man repeats, closing the distance between them with a scowl. “This is not your ship. You are charged with dereliction of duty, desertion, conduct unbecoming, theft, and treason. Do you really want to add assault to that list?”

Joker just glares.

“I thought not,” the small man smirks. He gestures toward the waiting MPs.

Joker grabs his crutches from their holder. “I can fucking walk myself,” he says to the MP who reaches for his arm, stalking past them both.

“Oh, and Mr. Moreau?”

Joker looks over his shoulder. The smirk on Durlin’s face grows wider. “Thanks so much for bringing it back to us.”

Joker barely bites back his response. The last thing he sees as he crutches out of the airlock is EDI’s silent orb fading out.

The woman next to him puts a finger in the liquid dribbling from his chin down onto his chest, wipes it off, and smirks. “Looks like you got a little akantha on your uniform there. Not very…boy-scout-y.”

It’s not that he didn’t know she was going to be at the party—Shepard invited literally everyone he’s ever known—but Kaidan had hoped they might just…avoid each other, like satellites rotating around opposite sides of a gravity well. For the whole night. In an apartment. With an open floor plan.

He’s normally better at threat assessments than this.

Still, generations of Canadian conditioning asserts itself, and he gives her a warm smile his mother would be proud of. “You must be Jack. It’s nice to meet you.“

Jack gives him a look, leaning with her back against the railing. “Yeah,” she responds, decidedly not returning the greeting.

They stand there awkwardly for a few moments. Well, he stands there awkwardly; she sips her drink, cool as a cucumber, looking him up and down. His eyes flick back down to Shepard, who’s now gleefully cajoling Wrex and Vega into an arm wrestling contest. What would Shepard do?

Go for the joke.

He follows her eyeline down to his uniform and, smiling self-effacingly, says, “See any more akantha? That stuff’s murder to get out of synth fabric.”

“No,” she says with a long, slow drawl. “I’m trying to figure out what the fuck he sees in you.”

“I really didn’t think I was going to, to be honest,” he continued, the squelching of his muddy footsteps stopping five paces behind me.

I wiped the gore and rain off my face and growled without turning around. “You weren’t meant to, dwarf.” I stepped over the body in front of me, intending to run. Again.

“I really think you ought to hear me out. Might make your day a little better.”

I spun around before I knew I was doing it, successfully goaded, and there he stood. Varric Tethras. Author of half a dozen books. Author of my living nightmare. The greatsword in my hands shook, not with fear or fatigue but rather grief transmuted to rage, as I leveled it at him. “You dare to show your face after what you did?”

Varric, as ever, seemed wholly unconcerned with the knife’s edge on which he was perched. Bianca strapped to his back, no allies in sight, just his perpetually bemused expression as a defense. “I can see that you’re mad, but—“

With a roar, I lunged at him, dropping the greatsword and grabbing his neck in one hand, tattoos flaring blue as I lifted him high in the air. I screamed again, “You fucking dare show your face to me?”

His hands scrabbled at my wrist. “What—“ he gasped, “what did— I—“

“You FUCKING MURDERED HIM!” I bellowed in his face, shaking his small body like a rag. The blue light wreathing my arm intensified as I prepared to phase through his neck and collapse his windpipe.

But he was just barely able to squeak out, “He’s— not— dead—“

My hand went slack in shock.

Varric rolled around in the mud for a full minute hacking and coughing, but I barely registered it. I couldn’t. I stared at the space where his head had been, at the splay of my bone white fingers, not quite understanding why my heart was beating so fast, why my arm didn’t seem to want to move.

“That’s not funny,” I whispered, knowing it wasn’t a joke.

“It’s not a joke,” Varric replied with another cough, standing back up. “Fuck, Broody, remind me never to—“

“It’s not funny!” I yelled, a different sort of yell now, and this time, he didn’t back off.

“It’s not a joke. Look at me.” He grabbed my arm. “Look at me!“

I did.

And I saw a grief like mine. Not as big. Not as sour. But still the same. The whole time I’d been running, it had never once occurred to me that this was a feeling I could share. And it wasn’t all that I saw.

I also saw the faintest glimmer of hope.