torch, flambeau@strangeplaces.net
May 2019
Disclaimer: I'm not very good at the whole h/c thing. Do not archive without permission.
This story is a sequel to a finger's worth.
Fereldan Wordless Noises
"He made it through the whole of that stupid temple without a scratch!" Lyna said, aggrieved. "I had bruises from here to here after the Gauntlet -- stop looking, Zevran -- but Alistair was fine! The only scratch was on his shield."
A scratch he'd given himself, in a sense, when they fought their doubles. That had been an intriguing encounter, to say the least. Zevran had known he relied a great deal on stealth to outmanoeuver his opponents, but he'd never considered the difficulties he'd run into when faced with an opponent whose ability to both use and detect stealth was identical to his own.
"Indeed, if he had handled himself only half as well in this fight, we would have had little difficulty with it," Morrigan said. Her right arm would probably be black and blue tomorrow, even with healing. "I was not expecting him to trip on a rock and fall face-first into an entropy spell."
"From his own side, no less." Zevran had seen that much.
"I did mention that he tripped on a rock, yes?" Morrigan never looked flustered, and she certainly tried her hardest never to sound flustered, either. "'Tis not as though I aimed for him."
"You should have left that bandit to me." Lyna had, indeed, put an arrow in the man's eye just moments later.
"I do not wait around to see if others will strike in my stead," Morrigan said, voice sharpening. "That kind of behavior is best left to fluttery innocents, who have no place among your followers."
Lyna sighed. "Are you still mad about the arlessa being such a weepy little thing?"
"Certainly not." Morrigan crossed her arms. "I'm delighted to hear you say that we must hurry back to her to ease her worried mind. She would doubtless expire from the strain without our help."
Alistair was lying at their feet, and someone had removed his armor and straightened him out from the heap he'd fallen in -- with the best of intentions, no doubt, but now he looked like a corpse waiting for the fire. Zevran crouched down by his side and saw that his breathing was regular, if a bit fast, and his eyes were moving restlessly under the closed lids. One finger twitched.
"We need to hurry back before the arl dies. The whole point of carting a mess of ashes around the country is to keep him alive so he can fix this Loghain problem." Lyna crossed her arms right back. "I'd say the arlessa's got nothing to do with it, but it seems like her religion-obsession at least got us to the ashes, so I hope she's right about what they do, too."
"To be sure, anyone as pious as that," Morrigan managed to say the word as if it represented the worst moral failing in the world, "could not possibly be wrong. I would not have expected a Dalish elf to believe in her affectations so quickly. Her vaunted beauty must have distracted you."
"I just said she was pretty," Lyna said, even more aggrieved. "Once. I also said she was annoying at least fifteen times. Do you even listen to me?"
"When you say things worth listening to, certainly."
It was not the first time Zevran had heard some variation on this argumentative theme, and he was getting a little tired of it. Morrigan's dislike of the arlessa was perfectly understandable, given that the two women had very different views on Andrastianism, magic, couture, and proper behavior. Constantly bringing the discussion back to Lyna's opinion of the arlessa's personal charms was not going to help Morrigan win anything, though.
Zevran sat back on his heels. "As fascinating as this discussion is, perhaps removing the spell from Alistair is a more urgent matter. Once that is taken care of, I would be delighted to discuss the hypothetical prettiness of--"
"Be quiet," Morrigan said.
"This should not bother you, my dear Morrigan." Zevran turned his most earnest face on her. "A beauty such as yours will stand out against any competition, I assure you."
"One more fulsome compliment, and I will singe your hair off, elf."
"Then it is fortunate for me that I speak only the truth." Zevran judged that he had caused as much irritation as he could manage before risking personal injury. He dropped the subject. "And surely a mage as knowledgeable as yourself knows how to remove a spell as easily as inflicting one."
Unfortunately, that just made Morrigan scowl all the more. "No," she said shortly.
"But I've seen people do it." Lyna leaned forward and poked at Alistair. He muttered something incoherent without opening his eyes. "Don't you just do the same thing backwards, or something?"
"Yes, of course," Morrigan said. "Precisely as you know how to fire your bow backwards so that the arrow returns to your quiver."
"Oh." Lyna poked Alistair again. This time he flailed an arm, but only weakly.
"'Tis a school of magic I have not studied." Morrigan sounded as if she'd never even considered it. "Besides, Alistair is a templar, is he not? He should share in their vaunted ability to dispel magic himself, and be immune to such minor inconveniences as this."
Lyna poked Alistair a third time. "He doesn't look immune. What did you hit him with?"
"A spell of confusion." Morrigan tapped her fingers on her elbow. "Not a weapon meant to injure, merely to disorient and distract. I have never seen such a reaction before."
"I hope he's able to walk tomorrow. We have to get going. I don't like it up here in the mountains."
"He should be able to walk right now." If Morrigan kept glaring like that, she would get a permanent wrinkle between her eyebrows. Zevran considered telling her that, and decided he preferred to be un-singed. "'Tis a minor spell, and if he is nothing else, he is naturally hard-headed."
Lyna turned to Zevran. "You'd better keep an eye on him overnight. Wake me up if he does anything weird. We're meeting up with the others tomorrow -- maybe Wynne knows this spell removal thing."
"She does not." There was a trace of smugness in Morrigan's voice.
"Great. Maybe one of you should learn it."
Lyna went to deal with the rest of their improvised little camp, and Morrigan went with her, explaining with a very Morriganesque aggressive disinterest that learning a new spell was not such an instantaneous matter, and Lyna could not make it happen just because she said so. (She probably could, though. Lyna had a way of making things happen at her word.) Zevran looked at the man lying in front of him.
"They are gone now, my friend. You can stop pretending, and open your eyes."
Alistair did open his eyes at once, hearing those words, but only a narrow slit. "You're not my friend," he said.
"Oh? And I thought we were getting to be quite close." Zevran pushed at Alistair's nearest shoulder. "Perhaps you'd better get into the tent and sleep this off."
Alistair tried to get up. Zevran watched this for a while, because it was quite an entertaining spectacle, and also showed off Alistair's abdominal muscles to great advantage. But the Frostback mountains were cold, and eventually he suggested, "Perhaps you should consider crawling. I will hold the tent flap for you."
Alistair crawled, moving in a way that made it quite clear that he was bodily uninjured. He just seemed to have difficulties remembering which way was up. Zevran crawled into the tent after him, and found Alistair burrowed in under all the available blankets. When Zevran tried to pull a blanket away for himself, Alistair clung tighter. "Come, now." Zevran did not want to get into a tug-of-war that he would have to resort to underhanded tricks to win. Alistair was not in any shape to handle underhanded tricks. "This is not very friendly behavior."
"Not my friend," Alistair said again. One slitted eye gleamed through the blanket folds.
Zevran shook his head. "And here I thought you had come to trust me. While it is quite true that I would not be opposed to being more than just your friend, it is also--"
"I had a friend." Alistair stared at the canvas over his head, but not as if he actually saw it. "He died."
"Ah." Zevran suspected this was a matter from another conversation he ought not to have listened to, but when people kept talking in camp right in front of him, what was a practically-minded elf to do? "This was your Duncan, yes?"
Rather to his surprise, Alistair made a noise like the dog choking on a piece of used-up leather. "No. Duncan wasn't my friend."
"No?" Zevran said, surprised and intrigued, but before he could raise the salacious eyebrow that the situation seemed to call for, he remembered that this was Alistair, and Alistair would never sound so certain and matter-of-fact, spell or no spell, if he did indeed mean that the way Zevran couldn't help but hear it. Zevran recalibrated. "Your... father-figure, then? Mentor? Teacher?"
The blanket-cover as well as the lingering spell made it difficult to interpret Alistair's facial expressions, and as for the sound he made in response, Zevran did not claim to be an expert in Fereldan Wordless Noises.
For all of Morrigan's insistence that this was a minor spell and nothing that should affect Alistair for more than a short time, the confusion in his mind seemed to have become deeply rooted. He came out of the blankets enough to look at Zevran with eyes that were at least half open and all grief. "He died, too, you know."
"Yes," Zevran said. "I do know." This Duncan had died at Ostagar. Everyone who had known Alistair for more than five minutes probably knew that, at least if they had no scruples about listening to other people's conversations. Zevran had come to respect Alistair's grief, though, as stubbornly persistent as the man himself. "So this friend you spoke of--"
"He wasn't really my friend." Alistair retreated into the blankets.
"Very well." Zevran saw no point in arguing about it.
"They were my comrades in arms," the blankets said. "The other wardens. There was this one fellow from Gwaren who actually laughed at my jokes. I thought maybe-- But he died. They all died. All the wardens."
"Lyna isn't dead," Zevran pointed out. The blankets were silent. "She is very tough, your fellow warden."
More silence from the blankets. Then Alistair peeked out at him. "Who's Lyna?"
That was a question Zevran had not been expecting. "Minor spell," he muttered. "This is not a minor spell." Resolving to have a few words with Morrigan tomorrow, he raised his voice and said, "The leader of this company. The other warden who survived Ostagar." Alistair's eyes were dark with disbelief. "The charming redheaded Dalish woman with the bow." Nothing. "The one who poked you when you were lying outside this tent."
"She was annoyed with me," Alistair said quietly. "And friends with Morrigan."
"Oh, so you remember Morrigan, do you?" That was probably a good sign. Zevran shifted his position, as the elbow pressed against the ground was beginning to go numb. "It's true that she is quite memorable, but I would have thought Lyna came before her, in your mind. The things I learn about you, my friend Alistair."
"I don't trust Morrigan." Alistair sounded much older when he said that, tired and oddly reasonable. "She has secrets."
"Everyone has secrets," Zevran said, because in his experience, everyone did, even if they were sometimes very small and uninteresting ones of no importance to anyone except the secret-havers themselves.
"I don't," Alistair said, which was blatantly untrue. He was bespelled, though, and Zevran could not tell how much he remembered.
The tent was small, and they were already close. Zevran tugged carefully at a corner of the blankets. "And do you remember me?" The look in Alistair's eyes was hard to interpret. "Zevran Arainai of the Crows, at your service."
"He's dead," Alistair informed him.
"Ah, no." Zevran leaned a little closer and breathed on Alistair. "See? I am he, and I am very much alive, I assure you."
Alistair shook his head. "We were attacked by Crow assassins," he said, as if telling the story over beer at an inn, instead of huddled under blankets with a strange look in his eyes. "The leader wanted to surrender and come with us, but who thinks taking an assassin along is a good idea?"
"Lyna does, and for that I will always be grateful. You killed me, then?" Zevran asked politely, fascinated by this alternate version of history being told.
"Yes." Alistair definitely had a tone of weren't-you-listening-just-now. "I always regretted it, though. He sounded as if he was baiting us, there at the end, challenging us to do it."
That really was not how Zevran would have described his own words and actions. He had felt, on the contrary, quite astonishingly alive for the first time since-- Well, for the first time in a long time, and his insouciant repartee with Lyna had come out of a deep and unexpected joy at these remaining moments of existence, however few they might turn out to be.
He took a deep breath, though he didn't blow it out at Alistair, this time. "Tell me, my friend," he said invitingly, "who do you think I am?"
"You're not my friend," Alistair said again. He didn't say it in an unfriendly way, though. "You're probably dead, too. You're that assassin, Zevran. He's dead. You're dead. But you're warm and comfortable to sleep next to."
Zevran smiled. "Corpses usually are not," he said. "Since I am, as you say, warm and comfortable, perhaps we can agree that I am alive?"
A hand came out of the blankets to poke at him, much in the way that Lyna had poked at Alistair. "I dunno. If you are, you should get away from me."
"But then who would you sleep with? Next to, I mean." At least for the time being. "Besides, you heard our charming leader order me to look after you."
"Everyone dies." After this solemn summary of the way of the world, Alistair shoved the blankets down around his waist, tried to sit up, failed once more to remember which direction was up and which was down, and fell sideways. "All the wardens died. My brother died." He shook his head. "The king died."
"Ah, those were the same person, yes?" Zevran knew as much, really, he just wanted to make sure that Alistair's litany of death hadn't suddenly started to expand across generations. The king his father had died, after all, but Alistair might not include it among his personal sorrows.
"I don't know," Alistair said unhelpfully, but then he went on, "No, he was a king, to me. Not a brother." Zevran nodded, not pointing out that this was not a choice that most people even had to make. "Don't have a family. My mother died giving birth to me."
"So did mine," Zevran said, and there was the cross-generation element after all, but this was not something he would have chosen for them to bond over. He looked more closely. The tent was dark. "Are you crying?"
"No," Alistair said, swiping at his eyes. "What would I have to cry over. Duncan died. The arl is dying."
In Zevran's experience, everyone did indeed die, sooner or later, sometimes after considerable sums of money had been exchanged, to make sure it was sooner rather than later, but he thought this was not the right time to agree with Alistair. "Ah, but we are bringing him a cure, are we not? The arl will be fine. And I assure you, I am not dead, Lyna is not dead, and Morrigan, as you have noticed for yourself, is not dead." Alistair didn't answer. "As an assassin, I am in fact very highly qualified to tell the dead from the living. There is a considerable difference, you know."
"I liked you," Alistair said.
"I like you too, my friend," Zevran said, trying to ignore that disturbing past tense. "And I believe we should--"
"But I thought it made more sense to kill you," Alistair went on, as if Zevran hadn't spoken.
"You are not the first to harbor such sentiments, alas." Zevran patted Alistair's arm. "Perhaps I should change the way I wear my hair. Would that improve the situation?"
"I liked your hair." Alistair raised his arm and managed, after three tries, to touch the ends. "Then there was blood in it."
"Ah, yes, that is better avoided." Zevran caught Alistair's arm before he got his hair yanked some more. "Fortunate for me that it was Lyna who made the decision, not you, or you would have missed out on my invigorating company, and then who would have looked after you in this sorry state?"
Alistair frowned at him. That was probably too complicated a sentence for him to deal with at the moment. "You're dead."
"You do seem to return to that idea with a disturbing regularity," Zevran said. He picked up Alistair's hand and, with only a slight hesitation, put it on his throat, right where the pulse beat. "Do you feel that?"
"No."
Zevran lifted the hand higher and breathed on it. "How about that, my friend?" Not that it had seemed to make much of an impression the first time he had tried it.
"Yes, but you're dead," Alistair shook his head. "Of course you're breathing, otherwise you couldn't talk."
"You do not make a great deal of sense," Zevran informed him. Of course, it was foolish to expect a man with a head full of entropy magic to make sense. Reasoning with him clearly did not have any effect. "This will wear off with time, I'm told. Perhaps we should simply go to sleep."
Alistair made another attempt to grab at Zevran's hair. "You'd think this would be easier," he said, looking at his disobedient hand as if it had personally insulted him.
"It will be." Zevran tucked Alistair's hand and arm away, and tugged one corner of the blankets over himself as well. If he could only persuade Alistair to lie still and be less morbid, or at least less suspicious, they could be wrapped up together in a cosy little nest of wool and wooziness. "Things will be clearer tomorrow."
Alistair made another of those Fereldan noises that might equally well mean I don't believe a word you're saying as I want my team of oxen to turn left up ahead."Maybe I'll be dead tomorrow."
"That's the way, my friend, look on the bright side!"
"You're making fun of me."
"Why yes, Alistair, yes, I am." It was either that or cry over him, and Zevran was not the crying kind, unlike Alistair himself. He wondered for a moment if he should learn to be, if some artfully placed tears would help him be a more efficient assassin.
Alistair tried to catch at Zevran's hair again, and managed to catch his ear between two fingers. "Sorry."
Zevran moved Alistair's hand away, because there was a time and a place for ear-touching, and this was most certainly not it. "My hair will still be there tomorrow, too. Unless I suffer a tragic sudden onset of baldness. Or the dog eats it. Or the tent catches fire."
"Or I'm dead," Alistair said, but not as if he were getting into the spirit of things.
"Of course you won't be dead. You are going to start a successful organization for tea salt assassins, I hear. This will be much easier if you aren't dead." Zevran got a little too caught up in teasing out the possibilities. "Although since I seem to be able to do a great many things even though I'm dead, I'm sure you could, too."
"You're holding my hand," Alistair said.
Zevran had, indeed, kept his light clasp of Alistair's hand, not wanting to get his ears grabbed again, or his eyes poked out, or whatever Alistair's next flailing attempt to touch his hair might result in. He would not, himself, have said that he was holding Alistair's hand, precisely. Holding on to it, perhaps. He shifted his grip a little.
"I will let go if you promise to wait until tomorrow to touch my hair again."
"Ye~es," Alistair said. "Well. I thought."
Zevran was quite sure he had better night vision than Alistair, so he could see Alistair better than Alistair could see him here in the tent, even at such close range. He thought Alistair might be blushing, but it could also be the effect of being covered up in all those blankets. He himself, less well-wrapped, was beginning to feel a little cold. "Yes?"
"I thought. Maybe we could." Alistair tried to gesture with his hand even though Zevran was holding it, and managed to hit his own chin with Zevran's knuckles, although not hard at all. "You know."
After spending so much time resolutely trying not to hear innuendo in everything Alistair said, Zevran was unsurprised by the way Alistair completely failed at managing it on purpose. Even the tone of his voice was more suffocating embarrassment than suggestiveness.
Of course, Zevran could usually manage enough innuendo for two. Usually.
"Yes, but not now," he said with some regret. "For one thing, you think I am dead, which is a level of perversity I would not have expected from you."
Alistair made more wordless noises, and these were easier to interpret. "That's not-- I mean, it's--"
"I would, however, happily join you beneath your blankets to ward off the cold."
Alistair, somewhere between embarrassed and suspicious, said, "Maybe I don't want dead people under my blankets."
"I really do not understand you, my dearest Alistair," Zevran said with fond exasperation. "You only just now said you do."
"You're not corpse dead," Alistair said, moving his hand in Zevran's as if he wanted to try lifting it again. "You're breathing dead. Everyone dies. I'm going to die. I just wanted."
"Oh, Alistair." That knowledge, that matter-of-fact everyone dies, I'm going to die, was so much a part of growing up a Crow that Zevran often failed to remember other people did not have it tattooed into their skin. Alistair was a warrior. He had to know death waited just across the edge of his blade. Everyone who wielded a weapon had to know.
But Alistair spoke the words as if he spent most of his time ignoring the truth of them.
"And I thought you wanted."
"Yes," Zevran said again, because he most certainly did, "but not here and now. After all, it would be a shame if you could not remember it."
"I'm not going to remember anything," Alistair said. "You're dead. I'll be dead, too."
"Eventually we will both be dead, yes, and then we will rest in the Maker's bosom as good Andrastians should. But allow me to reiterate for what I hope is the last time that right now, I am not dead, and in the interests of continuing with not being dead for the next few hours, I would like to join you under your blankets. To sleep, nothing else. I suspect you would regret it if you woke up tomorrow and found me actually dead from frostbite. It's ridiculously cold, this country of yours."
"Fingers and toes," Alistair muttered, as if reminding himself of something. Then he reached out, tearing his hand free, and managed to punch Zevran in the chest. It probably wasn't meant in an unfriendly fashion, though.
"Please lie still," Zevran said. He wiggled his way into the Alistair-nest, sighing with relief at the warmth. Alistair's eyes looked a little clearer, which had to be a good sign. "Sleep, my friend. Tomorrow we can start over again with trying to determine who is alive and who is not."
"What if I wake up dead," Alistair said.
He sounded at least halfway serious. Making a heroic effort, Zevran did not laugh. "I assure you, you will not," he said with perfect honesty. "I will protect you. You can sleep safely." He took Alistair's face in both hands and looked at him, and the longer he looked, the less he wanted to laugh. Alistair was ridiculous in so many ways, and annoying in so many more, even when he wasn't dazed by entropy magic. And his outspoken, self-centered grief was a comfort to Zevran. He lived his feelings instead of hiding them.
Right now, Alistair looked sleepily confused, which was an improvement on just confused. "Why do I trust you when you're dead?"
Zevran tugged Alistair's face down and kissed his forehead.
"You are an absurd young man," he said, "and I look forward to the face you will make when I tell you it is time for us to talk about sex."