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It would have been easy to get lost in the first days after being added to the Wardens’ company. Not physically – though he could have snuck off and let his lack of supplies and local knowledge finish him off – but lost metaphorically. He could have been ignored, tolerated but not accepted. He wouldn’t have fought it. It was less regard than the Crows had given him, but the circumstances were a bit more pleasant. It would have made sense for them not to trust him, after all, and he could live through worse than being politely disregarded.

Though he found himself wishing, often, that the Wardens would end it already. The human clearly didn’t trust him still, and while Zevran didn’t think that he’d be one to try a knife in the back, he wasn’t sure that he’d try that hard to avoid the man’s sword in his gut, either. It would be an honest enough death. Maybe not quick or painless, but he’d be capable of finishing himself off once the group had moved on from whatever roadside mud they decided to leave him in.

Actually, he was almost hoping that it would be the human who killed him. The Dalish was kind, and Zevran felt sick and bitter with disgust at himself for the way he wildly craved more of it, all the time, after that first night with the company when he’d bought another bedroll and tent from the merchant that was following them around, and draped the thickest blanket around Zevran’s shoulders when he came to join him on watch. The Dalish had taken the extra seconds to tuck the corners of the blanket in firmly so it wouldn’t slip off right away, and it had reminded him of vague memories before the Crows – more a feeling of contentment and warmth than anything concrete – but the surprise of it had left him wrong-footed for the rest of watch. It hadn’t helped that the Warden had been peeling bits off a still-warm roasted potato from dinner and insisted on sharing.

Kindness was one of the slower ways to kill someone. Zevran had learned to do his best to keep his dangerously-easy susceptibility to it hidden away, but his best in this area was not very good. It always flared up and came back to hurt him. Pain was the best teacher, but somehow, this most important of lessons had never stuck. Even now, with Rinna’s memory fresh, he was falling right back into the same trap.

No one was nice to Crows without wanting something, and no one was kind to someone who’d been hired to kill them unless they were trying to break them, or use them.

The first flirting had been pure reflex on his part. The promise of sex had been enough to avoid other threats often enough before, and it wasn’t like he wasn’t used to it. He could deliver on his promises of expertise – twelve years of practice and training had made him very, very good at sex.

But the subsequent flirting, he was finding, had a frisson of desperation and fear behind it. If they weren’t going to kill him right away, very well; but if the Dalish was going to toy with him beforehand Zevran would much rather have the man use him for his body. Surely whatever satisfaction he got from this emotional manipulation would have to be outweighed by the sheer physical ecstasy Zevran knew he could induce.

But the Warden didn’t seem to want to give him an opening. He’d smile fleetingly when he flirted, and maybe thank him for the compliments – more of that kindness and his own mind had the temerity to betray him by being pleased that the other elf had liked something he’d done – but never act interested.

Zevran was trying not to be afraid of what that meant for him, in the long term. Sometimes he succeeded.

It was easier to monitor the tone of the rest of the party. When the Dalish had returned with him and introduced him to the human Warden who had been missing on the Long Road, the human had scowled and glared and gotten a very pinched look at the end of the Dalish’s explanation of what a Crow was before turning away.

They didn’t seem to be a very coherent group. The human Warden spent his time on one side of camp, the Wilds witch stayed on the other with her own fire, and the lay Sister who moved wrongly for what she claimed to be minded the main fire. The Dalish one moved between them all, but his interactions with the other Warden were short and terse. The human would snap, and the Dalish would move off, retreating to the witch.

Or to him. The Dalish liked asking questions. About the Crows, about his history, about his opinions-

It had seemed a safe enough thing to admit to fleeing to a clan for a time. To admit to his mother, and the single thing he had kept of her for some time.

The Dalish had gone digging around in their bags and come up with a pair of embroidered Dalish gloves, like some kind of perverse miracle.

Zevran would have silently accused him of setting that up, except for that there was no way for the Warden to have done so.

Instead he had said something about gifts, and the Warden had smiled, and Zevran’s stomach had flipped over and he’d flirted on reflex, and the Dalish had thanked him for the compliment and squeezed his hand and gone to speak with the witch.

He had attacked them on the road from Redcliffe, where he’d picked up their trail, and tracked them past Sulcher’s Pass until he’d managed to find a useful portion of the Long Road to set the ambush. It was a trek still to Orzammar, through spring snows and bitter winds and angry silences through the night.

Everyone was tense, and Zevran was used to a certain level of wariness and distrust but this was not exactly that, but the others were losing sleep over it and he was resting just as well as he always had.

Well, allowing for the snow and the wind and the cold.

He kept waiting for the Dalish to call him to his bed.

He kept not doing so.

Finally, they came to Gherlen’s Pass, and followed it west to the gates of Orzammar. They were briefly delayed by bounty hunters, but made good time.

And then had to kill a messenger from Loghain and his guard, but that was merely incidental compared to the political situation they were presented with once inside the city.

The entire south was falling apart, it seemed. Zevran was rather unimpressed with both options, and less impressed again with the Dalish Warden’s choice to back a man who could have his fighters bought out from under him. Why bother trying to install such a man, if you wished to have things out of him later? He would be betrayed and killed too quickly to be of any use.

The Dalish had spent an inordinate amount of time in the Memories in the Shaperate. Zevran was compiling a list about it him, and it was ‘reserved’ and ‘polite’ and ‘inquisitive’ and ‘naïve’, perhaps ‘idealistic’. Definitely ‘scholarly’. This man was no great planner, nor was he particularly cunning.

Nor was he ruthless.

But yet, politics.

…the Wardens might very well get themselves killed without any contract or bounty involved at all.

Case in point: the Dalish one entered the Provings to replace the fighters Harrowmont had lost to Bhelen, despite having no idea how they worked or really what they were.

And then he won, and he won, and he won-

“Zevran,” was what he chose, when the Proving Master informed him that the fourth bout was a pair one, and Zevran went cold all over and smiled because him? Him? What kind of test was this? Why chose him, when he had the other Warden-

They won.

Harrowmont put them up for the night, on the understanding that they would be going after a Jarvia woman in the Carta in the morning.

In the morning, the witch acted particularly friendly towards the Dalish. Outright pleasant. Practically familial.

It was with an eased mind and true cheer that Zevran was able to recommend to the Dalish to bribe the Dust Town beggar for information, and overlook the truly egregious amount of ten silver he paid for it, because there was a reason that was not toying with him that the Warden was not having sex with him – he was having sex with the witch, which should have been obvious. They were the friendliest to each other of the entire group, and she was not one to share.

He needed to pay better attention, stop being distracted by his own problems.

So it was that he was in place to pick up where the Warden left off, when after most of the day working through the Carta hideout, Jarvia managed to knock him out. Zevran landed the killing blow, and tried to feel confident about his place in the group, but instead ended up fearing what retribution would come, for having let harm befall the man.

They returned to Harrowmount’s and the aspiring king told the Warden that he had to go find Branka in the Deep Roads, and Zevran could not bring himself to be grateful for the distraction from his impending punishment. He’d seen the way that the Wardens would always glance uneasily at the Roads entrance whenever they were going back to the Diamond Quarter. They didn’t want to go back there; and if the Wardens didn’t want to, he certainly had no desire to.

The Wardens disappeared together after that announcement, and he waited for one to emerge and seek him out.

He waited.

He waited.

The Wardens emerged together and they were friendly, somehow, the Dalish kept stepping into the human’s personal space and the human was shooting looks at him again but they were amusement or concern-

Reconciliation had not been something Zevran had been expecting this night but a few moments’ reflection showed him the sense in it. They had been fighting ever since the Dalish had brought him back to camp.

It made sense that they were reconciled once the Dalish had decided he’d made a mistake, taking him in, and agreed to be rid of him. Another Warden was a better ally than a Crow.

Zevran stood frozen in the hall and cursed himself and his stupid easy weakness to kindness and the mild sense of security he only just now realized he’d lost.

The Dalish spotted him and titled his head slightly in question.

Zevran panicked.

“The three of us and Morrigan,” he said, for some reason falling back on the rumination on party composition he’d been trying to distract himself with. A split-second and no, no, this could work- “It is the Deep Roads, so you the two of you must go of course; and if you have the opportunity to take someone who can heal it is unwise not to do so.”

The human Warden was looking at him askance.

“You want to go? What are you, suicidal?”

Zevran put on his best smile. The Dalish’s expression was still his melancholy calm resting face when he asked: “Why you?”

“Every compliments to Fen,” he said smoothly, because he’d found his footing, now. If he volunteered for something so vile, perhaps it would count enough as punishment for his failure, earlier. It not, it wasn’t like the Deep Roads wasn’t an easy way to dispose of someone. This could very well have been their plan in the first place. “But I have the feeling that neither of you want to risk a mabari in the Roads, no?”

He ticked the dog off on his fingers.

“Leliana is still at her best with a bow and underground does not seem the ideal environment for that. Morrigan however has no such limitations, and as I said, can heal besides.”

The human looked particularly pained as he admitted: “He’s not wrong.”

“No,” the Dalish said. “Alistair, there has to be one Warden that survives this. There are other treaties-”

“And you-”

“You’re human,” he said. “You were going to be a Templar. We’ve already been to the Dalish, but we haven’t been to the Circle yet, and who knows how Eamon will feel about me, when he wakes up. Isolde may not like you but I’m pretty sure she hates me more. You’ll have more luck getting Fereldans to work together than I will. I’m the expendable one.”

He still looked so sad and calm as he said it-

“No! We just made up-”

His fellow Warden took his hands in his and said very sincerely: “I couldn’t leave it undone, Alistair. We’re friends, and if this goes badly, I want us to part that way. I don’t want Redcliffe hanging over us. I took what I think was the best option, and now you know my reasons, and I’m sorry it hurt you and I’m glad you forgave me for them.”

Zevran stood there looking between the two of them feeling like an intruder, realizing that he might have been wrong about why the Wardens had been fighting ever since he’d arrived. They hadn’t been together on the road, after all, had they? When it would have made more sense to stick together?

Not that either of them had necessarily shown much sense in the time that he’d known them, but still.

“Anyway we’re supposed to find the Urn of Sacred Ashes and I’m not even Andrastean, I feel like that might not go well?”

“We are to what?”

The Wardens looked at him, then back at each other.

“Did you tell him…?”

“No, I- Zevran, we’re supposed to find the Urn of Sacred Ashes to wake up Arl Eamon, because he was poisoned and then there was demon and they can’t figure out anything else to do.”

“Andraste’s ashes are lost,” Zevran felt compelled to point out.

The Dalish Warden shrugged, as though this wasn’t actually a problem.

“So’s Branka.”

His fellow Warden shot him an exasperated, worried look, and retired to bed, leaving the two of them alone with a warning not to leave in the morning without saying goodbye.

“It was a good idea,” the Dalish said, once he was gone. “That was what I’d thought, too, except for bringing Alistair. One of us needs to be alive and it will be easier for him.”

He’d heard that before, but this time, Zevran was just far enough away from his surprise to actually notice.

‘Not ruthless’, he’d thought of the man. Perhaps not in the way he would have expected, but if his true aim really was mitigating the Blight and not his own survival-

“I’ve a question,” Zevran said, because if it was the Blight and not his own survival perhaps he wasn’t particularly angry about earlier, with Jarvia; or at least not as much as he’d thought. “If I may.”

“Of course.”

“Well here is the thing,” he began, and then his doubts found him again. He rambled. “I swore an oath to serve you, yes? And I understand the quest you’re on and this is all very fine and well.”

He’d begun. He couldn’t back out now.

“My question pertains to what you intend to do with me once this business is over with,” which wasn’t actually asking the question at all but what if he was wrong? What if the Wardens did still intend to be rid of him? “As a point of curiosity.”

Even if they weren’t, the answer could be enlightening. He still didn’t know what the Dalish wanted with him, if it wasn’t sex.

“You could go, if you wanted,” the Warden said. It had just the faintest hint of unhappiness about it, and oh, this he knew.

“Could I?” Zevran asked, because this was the game. No, he couldn’t, but he was supposed to know that without being told, without truly asking, because questioning was wrong. “And what if I did not wish to leave?”

“I could always use a friend,” the Warden said, and this time he could detect no hint of anything in it, to tell him what the correct answer was.

“Oh?” he said, because flirting always, always worked; or at least when it didn’t it was better than failing with other options. “Not more than friends?”

“We’ll have to see, won’t we?” was the answer, and what did the Warden want.

He reached out, and for a moment Zevran thought that this time he’d misunderstood the Warden’s tone, that he was finally being called on-

“Thank you,” Theron told him, and Zevran told himself that the reason he was feeling shaky with the other man hugging him was because it prevented him from easily grabbing his weapons, or responding to a sudden threat. “For volunteering. I had reasons to give, to the people I was going to ask to come, but I didn’t want to. It’s going to be the most danger we’ve been in, and I didn’t want to ask. I want to keep you and everyone else safe, as much as I can.”

At first, the Roads weren’t so bad. It helped that they’d picked up the wayward Paragon’s disgraced but battle-experience husband who actually knew where he was going, and had been in the Roads before.

But things got steadily worse the further in they went, and they went fairly far. They’d passed Caridin’s Cross and were on their way to Ortan thaig when Zevran woke in the night to find their Warden huddled up, his back to the fire.

He paused as he got up silently, and then grabbed his blanket. If he couldn’t tuck it around Theron’s shoulders as securely as Theron once had his, the Warden didn’t seem to mind.

“Thank you,” he said, and huddled into the wool.

“It is a bit too cold in all this stone to be this far from the fire.”

“I’ll ruin my night vision if I look at it.”

“Still. You could be closer.”

They sat in silence for a while. Eventually Zevran noticed that Theron had stopped just glancing at and was actively looking at him. This was a new development, and he shifted his posture to best show off his muscles without really meaning to.

Theron’s hand came out of the blanket.

“That one,” he said, pointing to one of the matching set of tattoos that were inked on the inner side of his upper arms. “It looks sort of familiar.”

“The tattoos that go here are out personal marks,” Zevran told him. “They help identify bodies, should the need arise, and also verify names, though that can be much trickier. The Crows and Antiva are quite good at archiving, but there is no good retrieval system for pictures. These are the only ones whose design you get to choose. I based mine off of what I remembered from my mother’s vallas’lin.”

Theron’s eyes widened and the firelight glinted off them, making them flash flat, bright orangey-gold for a second.

“I thought you went to the Dalish because we’re where city elves run to,” he said. “What clan was she?”

Zevran shrugged.

“I do not remember her ever saying,” he told him. “I remember very little of her. The Crows did not encourage remembering things from before- her face only stayed with me because vallas’lin are so distinctive.”

“There aren’t many clans in Antiva,” Theron offered. “It’s too close to Tevinter. There’s Ghananel, and Dadhase’lin, and Revasina, and Vemari was going there from the Free Marches an Arlathvehn or two ago, and Ralaferin-”

“It was not Ralaferin,” Zevran cut in. “That is the clan I ran to, and they said that they had no women who had left for the cities.”

“It might have been Dadhase’lin,” Theron said. “They’re the biggest, and not as worried about meeting humans. They get close enough to cities for your mother to decide that she liked one.”

“She left the clan for my father. Apparently he was a woodcutter.”

“Could still be Dadhase’lin. They even go out into the wilderness near Tevinter sometimes, and hunt slavers. Marethari told us a story that there was this hunter fifteen years ago or so, Eraghilan Taran Dadhase’lin, who actually caught and killed a Magister. Dadhase’lin’s Keeper brought the Magister’s robes and things to the next Arlathvhen and they had a sacrificial ceremony to thank Elgar’nan.”

“Marethari?”

“The Keeper for Sabrae,” Theron said. “My clan. I could tell you about them, if you’d like.”

He did like.

The next ‘day’, as it were, when they came upon a large cavern full of darkspawn and Zevran found himself alone face-to-face with an ogre, in his terror he thought: ‘At least I may die knowing the name of my mother’s clan’.

He didn’t die, and after he’d drawn his blades from the ogre and the rest of the darkspawn had been dispatched his hands were shaking so badly that the training masters of the Crows would have just killed him outright for the weakness.

Theron took his sword and his knife, and sat shoulder-to-shoulder with him on a clean rock, and passed him a flask that smelled strongly of home.

“It’s sweet,” the Warden said of the Antivan brandy he’d somehow found and now handed over. “I’ve been rationing it but you need it more.”

By the time Zevran was done, Theron had cleaned his blades for him.

It was hard not to bond in the Deep Roads. Theron was easiest, for all of them, but it was a long way to the Dead Trenches and they’d found Ruck on the way out of Ortain thaig.

Some things, horror and fear will accomplish faster than anything. They all knew, now, that without a group to rely on for protection while scavenging, they’d all eventually be forced to turn to darkspawn meat and secure their own slow slide into becoming monsters themselves.

Zevran knows how the Crows weed out the children not motivated enough to survive, and tried not to contemplate how the Taint would change the taste of people.

The Dead Trenches were- it was the first time he had seen a dragon and he would be very happy for it to be his last. Looking at the army marching below the bridge, and then living through the assault to capture it so they could continue onwards, through his second ogre kill and watching it take down Theron and Oghren and having to finish taking the bridge with only Morrigan, he understood how the Wardens could sometimes wake up screaming. He’d already known he’d have dreams enough of his own about simply the Roads, without having seen the horde.

"First day they come and catch everyone-”

‘Ruthless’, Zevran thought of Branka, as Theron chased her down more for what she’d done to her House and family than to return her to get his treaty validated, and felt oddly nauseous about it where he should be respecting the lengths she’d gone to to secure her own life and success.

He was still feeling wrong when they finally came to Caridin, still alive, and Theron agreed to destroy the Anvil. They needed it, surely, for what it could do. They’d fought some golems in these lost depths of the world, they knew how effective they were, and with a Blight on-

The Warden looked him in the eyes and for the first time Zevran saw fire there, true steel, and Theron was right. It would be abused by those who cared only for power.

Still, they could have used it on Branka first.

The Legion of the Dead was flabbergasted when they turned up again. Zevran could have found it amusing, even heartening, if he hadn’t been longing so badly for sunlight and real food by that point. The Legion provided a guide and escort back along the quickest path to Orzammar, everyone was suitably impressed with the story they’d made up about Caridin, the dwarven nobility attacked each other, Bhelen died, and the only reason they didn’t go camping in the Frostbacks that night was because Oghren had nearly passed out from exhaustion while fighting Bhelen’s guards. They went back to Harrowmont’s estate, where Zevran acquired some heated wine, surface-imported vegetables, and sat as close to the fireplace as physically possible. He wanted light and heat tonight, and tomorrow he could deal with the cold against so long as it came with open air and evergreens.

Theron came to him after an hour or so. Zevran had seen him reunite with Alistair, and hadn’t expected to see him until the morning.

“I need to have someone else with me,” he admitted quietly. “I need to- it’s so dark in these rooms with the fire out and it’s all stone. I kept thinking that- that you were all dead, and-”

Before the Roads, he would have chosen to do something different. What, he wasn’t sure. But they’d been weeks that felt like months fighting through darkspawn and slogging in putrid waste and tunnels coated in flesh like the intestines of some behemoth monster and it would have been so easy, if not perhaps the safest or wisest decision given their location, for the Warden to have taken him before now.

Theron wasn’t sleeping with Morrigan. He never had been.

Zevran pulled him to the bed, and shoved him down to the mattress when he hesitated.

“This means nothing you do not wish it to,” he said, getting into bed himself and arranging the sheets around both of them, fulling expecting something to come of this. “If you need someone nearby, then you need someone nearby.”

“Thank you,” Theron told him, and nothing happened but sleep.

When Zevran woke up in the morning it was to find Theron clinging to him, face plastered to his chest, where Theron could hear heartbeat and feel him breathing.

He caught himself with his hand halfway towards petting Theron’s hair, with a little smile on his face, feeling- he was sort of tight under breastbone and he didn’t want to not smile and he wasn’t sure what this was but he remembered it from Rinna.

His only thought was a wild panicky ‘I don’t want to hurt like that again’ before Theron woke up. Some of the thought must have shown on his face before he could hide it, because a spark of unease flared in Theron’s eyes and he started to pull back.

Zevran wanted to grab his shoulders and pull him back down but that was- that was too something. Something bad. Too needy, yes, that was it, he didn’t need this feeling and he probably shouldn’t want it either.

“Ah, what a morning,” he said, the wink coming as easily and automatically as the tone. “Civilization, the prospect of cooked food and surface air, and a handsome warrior for a blanket.”

Theron stopped moving away- he hadn’t gotten very far, just enough to prop himself up on his arms and look Zevran in the eyes.

“You like hugs?” he asked, and Zevran was trying to figure out where that had come from so he’d know how to respond when the door opened.

“Holy-”

“Alistair,” Theron greeted him.

“Yes, you are quite correct, there is little in this sad and sinful world as close to the divine as the prolonged ecstasy a thorough-”

“Zevran,” Theron said mildly, cutting him off, and sat up in bed. “I couldn’t sleep without someone else around, Alistair, it was- I couldn’t help thinking I was alone because everyone else was gone.”

“You could have asked me.”

“You were already asleep,” Theron told him. “I didn’t want to wake you up and it wouldn’t have been right to presume.”

“Okay, well, fine, permission perpetually granted, everyone else is awake already and Morrigan wants to talk to you or something.”

He was just so, so flustered by the implication of sex, and it would never not be funny to Zevran. For Theron’s sake he tried to keep the chuckling silent as the Warden got up and left for his own room again.

Surprisingly, Alistair didn’t follow him. He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.

“Interested?” Zevran asked, and stretched out across the bed, dragging the sheet down with a foot to show off.

“If you,” Alistair said. He was red all over and almost not looking at him, but that could be embarrassed interest or just simple embarrassment. “I know what he said but if you- took advantage of him-”

Fury threaded ice-cold through his blood. Zevran sat up sharply, and he noted with no little satisfaction Alistair’s slight flinch at the sudden change from ‘flirty and friendly’ to ‘trained Crow’.

“There is a difference, Warden,” he said, low and threatening. “Between murder and rape, and that is while both are crimes people claim to despise, one who is killed no longer has to live with the hurt or the fear of the event. I will not say that I have not broken my own word before but I can say with honesty that the other? I will never do.”

He slid out of bed and was standing in from of Alistair before the man could react to his movement. Zevran reached up and grabbed the bottom half of his face with one hand, yanking down so Alistair was forced to look at him. He was a large human and large humans never expected elves to be strong or forward, and Zevran was feeling vindictive.

“Look at me,” he demanded when Alistair’s gaze slid away from him to the floor. “Look at me, Warden, because you will see the truth in this- I will not harm Theron.”

Alistair did finally look at him, and after a few seconds of eye contact Zevran shoved him away. His shoulders hit the door and he turned and left.

Zevran stood there glaring at the enamel-patterned and molded metal of the door and evened out his breathing, purging anger, and realized that he wasn’t angry because of the slight against his character, but because it had been about Theron.

Apparently he had meant that oath of loyalty and protection more than he’d thought.

They headed back east, Orzammar’s treaty secured. Theron spent their first few days of travel focused on Oghren, which seemed entirely typical of him based on Zevran’s experience of being brought into his group, and so the rest of them were left more or less to their own entertainments.

Zevran took the opportunity to resolve a suspicion that he hadn’t felt secure enough acting on before, and waited until he was left alone with Leliana to mind the camp. Morrigan was out hunting, and Alistair had gone to do laundry, and Theron was out acclimating Oghren to some new facet of the surface world. The Chantry sister moved wrong for what she claimed to be, and-

Sure enough, Leliana dodged the rock he threw at her head and came up ready to attack on reflex. She was probably quite good, but also out of practice. Zevran threw her over his hip and held his hands up when she rolled back to her feet.

“I just had to be certain,” he told her. “Bard.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and he waited to see what her reaction would be.

Her shoulders dropped, she relaxed- a reassuring smile.

“Crow,” she said. “Though names are more pleasant than titles, don’t you think?”

“Leliana, then,” Zevran said, and they sat in companionable silence until Morrigan returned with rabbit and pheasant, the fruit of her labors; and the two of them began cooking dinner together.

Leliana watched their preparations for a few minutes before arching an eyebrow at their resident mage.

“You trust him not to poison you now, Morrigan, after all your warnings?”

Zevran placed a hand over his heart as though wounded.

“My dear Leliana, how could you believe such of me! That I would deprive the world of such a vision of beauty, of such a goddess among mortals-”

“Your prattling flattery will gain you nothing,” Morrigan cut him off testily- but not as testily as she could have. They’d survived the Roads together, after all.

“As you wish, but it is neither prattle nor flattery. I have seen many images of Andraste in my time and while I can agree that she is of no figure comparable to your own, you, alas, have not had the opportunity to see the images of the goddess Iashtivar we still trade in in Antiva.”

“False gods,” Leliana put in.

“So the Chantry says,” Zevran said with an elaborate shrug. “But truly, my dear Morrigan- Iashtivar Queen of the Heavens, Beauty of the Desert and Mistress of Storm and Sea. She is shown always crowned in stars and flanked by her dammashari guardians, fierce beings with lions’ bodies and birds’ wings.”

“What manner of bird?” Morrigan asked.

“Ah, it depends on who is doing the telling,” Zevran said, and settled in for a long round of stories. Morrigan could act uninterested and unconcerned all she liked- he and Leliana were trained in reading faces and bodies, and she wouldn’t trick them. “I have heard of owls, of ravens, crows, falcons and eagles; though I am fond of the one with vultures, myself. No, no! Do not look that like, it is a good story! I shall tell it.”

Once he’d finished with the tales he knew of Iashtivar, Leliana offered the Canticle of Shartan, which he’d never heard before. Morrigan followed up with Avvar and Chasind myths that the Fereldans had held before the coming of the Chantry, and shared her mother’s commentaries on the more common stories about Flemeth. Before they’d really noticed, dinner was almost finished and everyone else had returned to camp.

Theron gave his tent to Oghren the next evening. No one complained, because it was a relief to everyone else to not have to share with him, but-

It left their Warden with no set place to sleep. As they made their way towards the Circle, sometimes he stayed with Morrigan, and sometimes with Alistair, but most often, he came to Zevran.

Nights of this, and still he didn’t ask-

“You look so tired, my dear,” he finally said, the evening after a surprise find of one of Maric’s escaped men-at-arms. Another desperate man, another plea for help that Theron was sure to take up eventually. “It is all this constant walking and fighting. I think I know what you need."

“A horse?”

Zevran knew Theron better now, but still not quite so well to be able to consistently tell when he was joking. He was too deadpan about it.

“Hm, no,” he replied, watching him through his eyelashes. He’d laid himself out enticingly on his bedroll and was fully prepared to take advantage of his strategically-disheveled post-wash state.

“A good night’s rest then,” Theron decided, and bundled up in his blankets and went to sleep.

Zevran was left a second time with the disconcerting feeling that he’d read his Warden entirely wrong.

It was possible Theron hadn’t been ignoring his overtures. It was quite possible that Theron hadn’t noticed he was being flirted with at all.

They left Kinloch Hold with the occasion of Theron gifting Morrigan her mother’s grimoire despite the ancient and terrible magics it was sure to contain, because he really was just as nice as he acted.

This man needed saving from himself. Zevran did actually trust Morrigan not to turn on any of them, but it was the general principle of the thing.

It was east again, on the road, and every night they drew closer to Denerim Theron looked more and more haggard, until the night finally came when he approached Zevran, and-

He was not talking about what happened in the Circle, and no one could make him.

Zevran knew that was what Theron had been doing, spending time with their new healer Wynne and checking back in with Oghren now that he’d had more time away from Orzammar and the Roads, and last night he’d spent the night with Alistair, so the logic was clearly that it was him and his time in the Fade that was next, and Zevran was not talking about it.

“You wish to talk?” he asked as Theron got close enough to initiate conversation. “Ah, good! I have a question for you. How well-versed are you in poetry? Antivan poetry specifically.”

Because Theron was polite, and liked listening to people, he sat through a truly terrible example of amateur verse.

His response was simply: “Oh dear.”

Zevran sighed theatrically, intent on drawing out the moment until Theron either forgot to ask him about the Fade or became distracted with someone else.

“Here I thought you might be cheered up by some naughty poetry,” he said. “You simply look so… grim. Such an unflattering expression on such a handsome face.”

“You think I’m handsome, do you?” Theron asked in that infuriatingly inscrutable way of his. Surely he was making his intent obvious-

“Ah, who wouldn’t?” Zevran countered- and suddenly, he was done with this, with the game they might or might not be playing. They had been months in each other’s company now. They had braved the Roads together, gone deeper and further than even the Legion of the Dead’s furthest lines, further than anyone sane had ever tried. Theron had been in his dreams, seen an example of the part of the Crows he’d tried to keep away from this man who was too trusting and too kind.

He wanted an answer, and Theron who asked so many questions would not mind directness, nor bluntness.

“Burn me in the Chantry if you must, but you're a man to stoke the lust in women and other men alike. Surely you know this and are playing with me. Me, I tend to make the best of whatever situation I find myself in, stealing what moments I can. It's served me well, most days. You might learn to do the same."

Theron still hadn’t answered them when they took their detour to Soldier’s Peak, some promise he’d made to one of their camp hangers-on before Zevran had joined. There was more weakened Veil here, and the undead, and a blood mage doing things others might call ‘unspeakable’ but that didn’t particularly surprise him.

It also showed quite clearly what the Wardens had once been in this country, and what they should have been. There had been dedicated scouts in addition to mages and fighters, enough of them to justify this castle fortress. An archive, that Theron had looked particularly sad about learning was gone. Wrecked evidence of comfortable living if not outright wealth, of good furniture and wall decorations and fully-staffed supporting outbuildings.

Now all it was abandoned, or the next best thing to. The Drydens were moving back in, and they’d secured themselves an actual base they could retreat to, when the horde made it this far north or if they had to flee Denerim.

Because they were going to Denerim next, straight into the stronghold of the man who’d hired the contract that had brought Zevran to Ferelden in the first place, because that was where this Brother Genitivi who they needed to speak to about the Ashes was.

They were risking discovery – because it wasn’t as if any of them were inconspicuous – for a legend, something that was thoroughly lost if it had even ever existed at all.

Zevran got drunk with the rest of them on the celebratory liquor the Drydens provided more to keep himself from going out of his mind with stress than as a reward for their victory. It made him warm and loose in the way he liked, and waited for Theron, because surely the alcohol would do what obliviousness or uncertainty had so far prevented.

Theron got drunk, and took Alistair’s hands and told him very earnestly how amazing he was, and kissed him.

Hm, wrong friend, Zevran thought muzzily. Alistair was his fellow Warden, after all. Theron had more to share with him than he had with Morrigan. This arrangement made sense. He’d been pining this entire time.

In the morning, Alistair was the only one without a hangover. Without the haze of alcohol in the way it was clear that the Wardens were also not sleeping with each other, and that the kiss had changed nothing between them, and that Theron was very obviously not heartbroken over this.

He might never understand this man.

They went to Denerim, which was only not a disaster because they spent so little time there- just long enough to find Brother Genitivi’s place and meet his assistant.

Denerim sent them to Kinloch Hold’s docks and they had just been here and Zevran was annoyed about that right up until the point where they were ambushed.

Then, instead of leaving well alone and finding some other noble to agree to the treaty, they went back to Denerim to confront the man who’d set them up.

At least they got proper instructions out of it, this second time.

This time in Denerim, Theron introduced him to furs. They hadn’t gotten any special equipment for going to Orzammar, and they’d all thoroughly regretted it. Traveling south to more mountains necessitated winter clothing.

Zevran had only a vague idea of how that worked. You made things of heavier fabric, he knew that. And then you layered them? Perhaps something with hats, as well. He’d seen woodcut prints of ‘Fereldan barbarians’ in great fur cloaks and long wool coats, and some sort of cylindrical head coverings? Or perhaps just an entire dead animal, the prints had not been clear on this matter.

When he broached the subject in the marketplace, Theron’s mouth thinned out with the effort of trying not to smile in amusement, though his eyes betrayed him by sparkling.

“They’re hats,” he said. “If you can kill a couple of foxes and stiffen the inside of the furs, they stand up straight. You turn the fur in on the top and then dye the leather colors, or embroider or bead it. I’ve seen them before with strings of porcupine quill beads hanging off the top, or feathers or braided cords. They look nice. They’re called papaghi.”

“Oh, Avvari hats,” Alistair said, when Theron described papaghi to him. “Those are really traditional and really southern. I remember some of the people in Redcliffe had them, but they’re more of a peasant farmers’ or trappers’ thing. You make yours out of foxfur? Our are usually sheepskin. The fancy ones are made of bear fur, with some silver charms or something.”

Alistair managed to find a shop that had winter clothing it was willing to part with cheap- refugees’ former belongings, brought north and then sold for food. There were an assortment of Avvari hats, and Theron contemplated them while Alistair found coats or cloaks for them all.

“They’re better in fox,” Theron finally decided. “They’re fluffier that way. These look a bit sad. Not as warm.”

He fingered the delicate silver chains hanging off one with a sort of longing, though, and Zevran wondered.

“If you want cloaks I’ve got bear and wolf,” Alistair said, returning with the purchases. “Everything else is wool coats, we’ll have to try somewhere else for more fur.”

“I’ll have bear,” Theron said, and took a very heavy looking mass of fabric-backed dark fur.

“That will be big on you,” Alistair warned.

“I can cut it down. The scraps can be used for lining something else if I do it right.”

Zevran took the wolf cloak of curiosity, and immediately vowed never to give it up. Fur against skin was absolute bliss, and his hedonistic soul was suddenly perfectly fine with staying in Ferelden forever, so long as everything he owned was made of fur. Well, perhaps some silk and fine leather as well, and certainly with more colors than the Fereldans thought necessary, but fur.

They were glad of the fur cloaks and wool coats and felt boot linings when they reached the mountains around Haven, and then again in the ruined Temple and the passages through the mountain. The Deep Roads, at least, had had good engineering and lava-born heat in their favor. Here there were just more dragons.

And spirits claiming to be contemporaries of Andraste, and who knew entirely too much of his personal business. The dragons were better.

Though it was… something, to finally come to the Urn of Sacred Ashes. To have passed all the tests of worth. He hadn’t done it alone of course, and surely whatever force that truly guarded this place, Andraste or no, had found Theron and Alistair and Leliana to be more worthy, but- still. Here he was, in the presence of one of the most holy relics in all of Thedas. Him. Allowed within arm’s length of Andraste’s mortal remains.

He was still feeling oddly giddy about it when they returned to Brother Genitivi, and it hadn’t totally gone away by the time they’d gotten back down to the Haven Chantry, where Wynne insisted on taking the scholar inside for another healing.

“And away from your grumbling,” was her parting shot at Oghren, who muttered something ill-tempered about freezing danglers.

“Hey, come on,” Alistair told him. “It’s snow!”

“Freakish unnatural-” Oghren muttered. “You can’t walk in this sodding sky dandruff!”

“That’s because you haven’t gotten up close and personal with it,” Alistair informed him, and without warning shoved him into a snowbank. Oghren came up sputtering as Morrigan laughed and Fen darted forward, tail wagging furiously in recognition of a fun game he’d played before.

Zevran watched Theron lean down, unnoticed, thoughtfully pack two handfuls of snow into a ball, and chuck it at the back of Alistair’s head. It exploded neatly against his hair and the other Warden yelped at the sudden cold.

“Oh, it is on,” the man vowed, and some time later they all tramped into the chantry with melting snow, flushed with cold and the ache of laughing so much in their ribs. Wynne smiled and shook her head a little, and parceled out hot water from what she’d warmed to make a tisane for Genitivi.

Theron found him after dinner, sitting away from where the others were laying out bedrolls, poking at the memory of how passing the Gauntlet had felt. It was so strange, and he wanted to be sure he understood it. He’d had so many emotions since coming to Ferelden that had taken him by surprise.

The other elf sat down next to him.

“Did you want to talk?” Theron asked. “When the guardian spirit asked you, it sounded like it was something that- really hurt.”

“I would ask you the same,” Zevran said, because today had been a good day and the mention of Rinna again should have ruined it, but instead it was- all right. “Your ghost friend was very friendly.”

“Well,” Theron said. His smile was fragile. “He always was.”

Theron told him about Tamlen and the ruins.

“My clan acted like being a Grey Warden meant I was already dead.”

Zevran told him about Rinna and Rosso Noche.

“I came here hoping the Grey Wardens would kill me.”

Theron slipped their hands together and leaned into him, resting his head on Zevran’s shoulder.

“I’m glad it didn’t happen like that.”

He fell asleep there, and this time, Zevran let himself reach up and stroke Theron’s hair out of his face.

He still didn’t have an answer from his Warden, about whether or not he’d seek his pleasure in him. But Zevran found he didn’t mind, so much. Not when the other option was this.

Everyone in Redcliffe was astounded and exceedingly grateful to see them, barring the assassination attempt on their way up to the castle, but that was about Leliana’s past, not their efforts against the Blight. The arl even acted understanding about the dead demon-possessed son situation. He asked them to come to Denerim right away, but Theron declined and said that they had other business to take care of first.

That business turned out to be killing Morrigan’s mother. Zevran was not invited, which he found surprising, given his profession; but Theron had decided to try subtlety.

Unfortunately his idea of subtlety was to turn up with Alistair, Oghren, and Leliana. His reasoning was that if Flemeth could aspire to use Morrigan for a nefarious scheme, she might have some other special power she could bring to bear on Wynne.

So Theron and the others trooped off into the Korcari Wilds to find Flemeth. Wynne took the opportunity to relax in camp and do mending. Zevran kept Fen company for a time until he realized that Morrigan had slipped off.

He found her not very far away from where they’d set up camp.

“Concerned?” she sneered.

“No, not particularly,” he said truthfully. “Theron is a Warden surviving the Blight, and lived through the Deep Roads, and will put his best effort into keeping anyone he cares for from being hurt. They will be perfectly safe.”

“My mother is more powerful than even a horde of darkspawn.”

“So you are the one who is concerned.”

“No more than is reasonable!” Morrigan snapped, and why must she always be this difficult?

“It is as our dear bard says- there is no shame in being concerned for your friends.”

“I am not hiding my feelings!”

“Oh?” Zevran asked dryly. “Perhaps you should take a closer look at yourself, then.”

There was venom in her voice and eyes when she spoke next.

“If you insist that we speak of lying about our emotions, then perhaps our time would be better spent discussing your hopelessly pathetic little love affair for Theron.”

“I do not love him,” Zevran told her immediately. “Quite possibly the only person I have ever loved in my life was my mother.”

“Ha!” was Morrigan’s response to that. “‘Tis obvious how you love him, and sickening besides! Such talk about being easy, about escaping the Crows and living free, and yet you would hang on his every wish and whim and follow him about with as much blind loyalty as that dog! Weeks in the Deep Roads with him, and then you come out you are the one he goes to, and not his fool of a brother-in-arms, and you give him fleeting little tendernesses when you think no one is looking, and you expect me to believe that you do not love him? It is in the way you move, the way you speak to him, the way you sit together and the look in your eyes! You love him, Zevran Arainai, and he is much too nice a person to ever look at someone like you twice. How long have you been trying to get him to your bed- and when he does come, it is only for some comfort against the dark!”

Well if she wasn’t in the mood for company, she should have just said. Zevran walked away and picked a branch in one the scraggly, low-growing trees around camp to sit on and wait for Theron and the others to arrive. There was a joke in here somewhere about elves and Crows and trees, and he was going to find it before they got back.

...‘Pathetic’. ‘Pathetic’! And ‘love’!

The only thing she was right about was that it would never happen, not with him. He didn’t know how, and no one would want to. He and Theron might be… friends? Could he say that they were friends? He- he trusted Theron, quite surprisingly, and was that enough grounds? Rinna and Taliesin were his friends as well, and he’d trusted them with his life and his body.

Yes, friends. He trusted Theron with the same, and he had a creeping hope that Theron would take better care of both than Rinna and Taliesin had been able to.

They made two detours on their way back to Denerim – a return to Ostagar, and stopping by a little darkspawn-wrecked town called Honnleath to pick up a golem. Everyone was silently a little put out that they hadn’t come by the town before, once they’d realized that their prize was a golem, and Zevran heard Alistair mutter ‘the entire Deep Roads!’ on their way out of town.

In Denerim, the arl put them to finding concrete evidence of Teyrn Loghain’s wrongdoings. They finally got into the alienage, which Theron had been quietly curious about on their last trips to the city, and it did something strange to Zevran’s chest to see his reaction to the place. The obvious poverty, the state of the sanitation, the crowdedness, the falling-down buildings and the haunted orphanage-

And the Tevenes.

To think that he’d believed that they’d seen the extent of Theron’s anger when they’d learned what Branka had done to her House. The front room of the ‘clinic’ was splashed with blood when they walked in, and Theron was kicking the corpse of the head mage repeatedly in the ribs, yelling fragments of enraged El’vhen.

“He is quite dead, my dear Warden,” Zevran said after a moment, and Theron kicked the corpse once more and growled at it in wordless fury.

Sudden carnage from the nicest person he’d ever met really should not have been so alluring, but Zevran spent the rest of the rescue thinking up and discarding seduction scenarios for implementation later that evening anyway. Not that they’d work, nothing ever had. But they were entertaining fantasies.

They all came to naught in the end. The arl was very pleased to be shown the slaver’s papers and Theron was acting calm again, but Zevran had noticed the way that his newest friend’s fingers twitched, like he wanted to clench them, and kept an eye on him for the rest of the afternoon, in case he decided to abandon good sense and actually punch Eamon Guerrin.

Zevran understood. It had been a stressful span of months, and the arl had just presented himself as an unfortunately easy target.

His friendly surveillance paid off when he was the only one to spot Theron slipping off the estate and into the market before dinner. Zevran followed. If Theron was going looking for a fight, he’d need backup, whether it be another challenge or a duel or a barfight or a back-alley gang scuffle.

“Where are we going?” he asked halfway through the market, when he’d caught up to his friend, and Theron jumped violently in surprise. Zevran reached out a hand to steady him. “It is only me, Theron.”

“Back to the alienage,” Theron said. “I was too angry to make sure everyone was all right. And they need more money, so I’m bringing my share from what we’ve found and earned.”

Of course he was. He felt a little stutter of warmth in his heart, and what- was this pride? It had been a while since he’d felt pride, and certainly he’d never been proud of someone else. And to be proud of someone being kind? It sounded absolutely absurd, yet here he was.

“How like you, Theron,” Zevran said, which he felt adequately encompassed the warm feeling, somehow. “But tell me- is this money gold pieces?”

“Yes?” Theron told him. “They’re worth the most, and I’m not great at values but they probably need a lot.”

“They do,” Zevran agreed. “But it one thing for you to trek across the countryside, armed and armored with your fearsome Dalish face and followed by your own personal warband, to spend gold; and another thing entirely for alienage elves who many have never held a gold piece in their life to walk into market and attempt to buy food. The humans will be suspicious, and feel somehow that they have been cheated, and elves will be hurt- or at the very least their money will be stolen.”

“But they need it,” Theron said.

“And I did not say that they shall not get it,” Zevran assured him. “Come, we shall solve this problem of yours.”

He took him to the docks, and found a shady character who was happy to change gold for copper and a bit of silver and a bag to muffle the chime of coin, because that was the way of cities. On the way back towards the market square Zevran stopped them at food houses and shutting-down stalls to buy their extras for the day at closing prices, as much as they could feasibly carry.

At the market, he waved away Theron’s defeated look at the closed and guarded alienage gates and snuck them around to a side wall, lower than the others, that had the look of an official secret entrance. He climbed to the top of the wall and tossed down a rope oh-so-conveniently left there – he’d been right! – for Theron to tie the handles of the food baskets to, and then to climb up himself.

“Hello, yes, it is us again,” he said cheerfully when Shianni answered her door. “We have brought donations!”

“For everyone,” Theron put in, and Shianni just stared at them for a few seconds before telling them to take it all to the vhenadahl. She roused the rest of the alienage, and soon enough they were surrounded by curious elves. Shianni returned with an elderly elf she introduced as Cyrion, who was acting as the new Hahren until one could be elected.

“Is there enough space for everyone?” Theron asked, looking around at the people who were hanging out of windows or perching on bits of ruined houses.

“There has to be,” Cyrion told him. “The Tevenes took over our meeting hall. We would be in there, but-”

“It is inconveniently full of corpses?” Zevran suggested. “I can fix that. Do you happen to have a few roguish or legally-flexible types hanging about?”

“You’re looking at one of them,” Shianni said. “I’ll go get the others.”

“We will need many, many buckets of water, all the lye you can find, some large metal tubs and something to cover them!” Zevran called after her. “And vitriolic acid, if anyone has any!”

Cyrion gave him and Theron a long look, and muttered something about being glad that he had sent his daughter to Highever months ago.

“I will be back,” Zevran told Theron, clapping him on the shoulder as he saw someone approaching with buckets of water and leaning in so Cyrion couldn’t hear him. “Do not mention the money until then.”

Theron clearly didn’t understand why, but nodded, and Zevran directed Shianni’s group into taking the metal tubs out behind the meeting house and arranging for the basis of a fire set under them.

“Now we must fill these tubs with water and mix in the lye,” he told the volunteers. “Anyone who does not wish to carry water may come assist me in dismembering bodies.”

A number of the elves looked a bit green at that, but some deep-seated rage flared in Shianni’s eyes, and Zevran smiled at her.

“It is just like boning chickens, or pigs,” he told her, and lent her a knife.

“Why can’t we just bury them?” someone asked faintly, as he and Shianni started bringing bits out to the tubs and dumping them in. “Or burn them?”

“Burning flesh has a distinct smell, no?” Zevran said. “It will bring the guards. And buried bodies are always dug up, and I quite doubt you wish to come up with an explanation for human bones in your own ground, or leave the explanation to your children.”

“And stewing them is supposed to make this better?”

“We are not stewing them,” Zevran said, and Shianni brought the last bits: two heads, dangling from her hands by the hair. “We are melting them.”

“Um.”

“Now,” Zevran told them, washing his hands and putting his gloves back on. “You all know what lye will do to your skin if you do not wear gloves with it, yes? Or are not careful to keep cloth between you and it? There is a deeper reason for this caution and that is that lye in hot water in sufficient quantities with sufficient time will dissolve flesh. Thankfully corpses do not usually move much, and dismembering makes it easier to fit more into less space. Now, we will cover these tubs with the length of wood that you have brought along, so that the water cannot boil off, and light the fires beneath the tubs, and in a day, two days, so long as the fires are kept up, you will be left with a truly disgusting sludge, and bones. The sludge may be dumped in any trash pit, and the bones cracked and fed to any local pigs. It will not hurt them.”

The elves were staring at him.

“How do you know this?” one of them finally asked.

“I am Antivan.”

“Okay?”

Everyone but Shianni drifted off uneasily once the fires were going. Zevran checked the tub coverings one last time.

“Can we use the tubs after this, or should we sell them for scrap?” she asked.

“Well I would not recommend bathing in them, but they will be perfectly suited for laundry.”

“Laundry,” Shianni breathed, eyes going wide with understanding. “Laundry. We can- lye in boiling water, metal tubs- any shems get nosy, and we can just say we’re doing our laundry! No one ever stands close to laundry lye-tubs unless they have to!”

“Ah,” Zevran said, pleased. “Now you understand why I am sharing this. But do try not to kill any more humans than absolutely necessary, caution will save more lives than bloody vengeance, no matter how appealing it is.”

“This is better than the free food!”

“Oh, we are not done with the presents yet,” Zevran told her. “Come, one more surprise.”

Shianni and Cyrion just about cried when Theron brought out the bag of money. It was quite a large bag. Some of the other elves did cry, when they came to get their share from the piles Cyrion had the three of them count out. The prospect of guaranteed food in the near future turned the alienage into an impromptu party, people bringing out what they’d cooked for dinner to share.

Someone brought out chairs and Theron sat at the base of the vhenadahl. Zevran stood next to him, leaning up against the trunk with his arms crossed. People brought food and thanks, and Theron smiled and held hands and gave them Dalish blessings, words in El’vhen and kisses on the cheek or forehead. He almost expected Theron to go for the lips instead, but perhaps that was reserved for friends, not strangers.

He was very friendly to strangers, though.

Eventually, they acquired a gaggle of children, from too young to be up this late to teenagers waiting impatiently for adulthood. A younger one screwed up the courage to actually say something, and soon enough Theron was answering questions about the Dalish for their parents, as well.

“We do have Hahrens,” Theron told the alienage elves. “But I don’t think it means the same thing as it does to you. Our Hahrens aren’t the leaders of the clan. They’re our historians, for the clan and for The People as a whole, and our…”

He trailed off, thinking.

“They’re not like your Chantry Sisters, but it’s the closest thing I can think of,” he said. “We have religious functions as well.”

“‘We’?” Cyrion spoke up. “You’re a Hahren?”

“Oh- well, I was going to be,” Theron said. “But then there were darkspawn. I passed my apprenticeship-”

He touched his vallas’lin. Zevran didn’t think that he was aware he’d done it.

“-I’m an adult of the clans. I don’t know everything, but no Hahren ever knows everything, no matter how hard we try. When Hahren Paivel died, I would have take his position. Until then I was supposed to be his assistant.”

“But you know them,” Shianni said. “The stories.”

“I do,” Theron said, and paused. There was a distinct hush over the vhenadahl square. He looked at Cyrion and Shianni, and then at Zevran.

Zevran nodded.

“The history common to The People is called ‘Samelana de da’melava’, because that is how it starts: ‘Once when time was young’,” Theron told them. He’d done something with his voice – it carried across the square, and it had a certain cadence, a strength and a beat and sort of rising-falling weight Zevran associated with Chanters. “No one knows any longer how long it takes to recite it in its entirety, because that will not happen until we have a home of our own again, and can add to it. The Arlathvhen, the meeting of clans every ten years, lasts an entire week because that is how long it takes the Hahren honored with the duty of reciting it by the Hahren’al to finish the summary of it: ‘Enare vhen’an ide alas’, ‘The sun’s home was the land’. But I think I can cut it down again.”

Seven days to recite the summary of the entirety of known, shared elvhen history. Zevran knew, from Clan Ralaferin and what Theron had told him, that each individual clan had their own extensive set of histories of their members that weren’t included in the shared history, and that there were even more histories – instructions and codes, more like – that were shared but not considered part of the linear cycle, like the Vavir, the philosophical foundations of life in the clans. As a city elf looking to join Clan Ralaferin, Keeper Gisharel had recited them for him: the Vir Tanadhal for the hunters, the Vir Atish’an for the healers and crafters, the Vir Shal’elan for the scouts and few trained guards, the Vir Era’mana for the Hahrens, and the Vir Eralan for Keepers and Firsts. She’d done one an evening, and the recitation was tenets, interpretation, and commentary all in one. They’d taken hours, and he’d been ready to fall asleep sitting up at the end of them.

Theron’s summary of the summary took four hours. He covered the birth and ascendance of the Evanuris, the casting out of the Forgotten Ones, the mytho-historical Lords of Arlathan, the coming of humans and Fen’harel’s betrayal, and the fall of Arlathan. He skipped the stories Zevran had heard hinted at of the elves during the height of the Imperium and went straight to the Dalish version of Shartan, which was much less interested in the ‘Champion of Andraste’ part of things in favor of the ‘Leader of the Successful Elvhen Uprising’. Shartan’s story was actually quite short, and served more as the introduction for his daughter Sulahnera, who led the march to the Dales and became the first Lord of Halam’shiral. There was a lingering reverence and awe in Theron’s tone when he talked about her, and about Halam’shiral.

He ended the night with a loving description of the second city of the El’vhen, never once mentioning the Exalted March.

They snuck out of the alienage in the dark and got a few hours’ sleep in the estate. In the morning, they all went out to the market together, and around town, getting weapons and armor repaired, exchanged, and improved; and doing more local help. Out of sympathy, Zevran took them to the Pearl after Alistair’s failed talk with his sister, and was surprised and delighted to meet Isabela there. He hadn’t expected to run into any old friends in Denerim, and it was nice to talk and laugh with someone who both knew him before the Wardens, and knew Antivan.

And then-

“And so here are the mighty Grey Wardens at long last.”

He knew that voice.

“The Crows send their regards, once again.”

Why him.

Maybe he’d come alone. Rinna had been his friend too, and maybe it had been too much to think that he’d lost both of them in such sort a time-

Theron was the only one who knew about him and Rinna and Taliesin, and he’d shifted a little to the side, getting between the two of them, and no why would he think it was a good idea to get in the way of a Crow-

“So they sent you, Taliesin?” he called to his oldest friend. “Or did you volunteer?”

“I volunteered, of course,” Taliesin said. “When I heard that the great Zevran had gone rogue, I simply had to see it for myself.”

He wasn’t imagining the fondness there, Zevran knew he wasn’t. It was a little hint in his tone, the quirk of the lips at ‘the great Zevran’ – an old teasing epithet – and the bit of wordplay in ‘gone rogue’.

There was a chance. He still cared and that meant something, between Crows.

“Is that so?” Zevran asked, tone light with more than old comradery. There was hope. He could escape the Crows and take the last good thing about it with him- “Well here I am, in the flesh.”

Come with me, come with me, come with me.

“You can return with me, Zevran. I know why you did this, and I don’t blame you. It’s not too late. Come back and we’ll make up a story. Anyone can make a mistake.”

No.

Involuntarily, his eyes flicked over to everyone else. Fen was staring up at Taliesin, hackles raised but not growling. Alistair was looking between him and Taliesin, anxiety and uneasy doubt written all over his face, and Theron-

Theron had been looking at him steadily all this time, and caught his gaze. Zevran was stuck looking at him, calm and unruffled and just observing him in that quietly understanding way he had; and he was stuck between these Wardens who had offered him something away from the Crows he never wanted to return to and Taliesin, his last friend, and Rinna was already gone and-

Theron turned away, put his back to Zevran again and drew his sword. It hung loosely at his side.

“Zevran doesn’t need the Crows any longer,” he told Taliesin.

It was a nice and inoffensive answer. Not forcing anyone to commit to anything.

Taliesin didn’t look at Theron when he spoke.

“Oh? Does Zevran need to live?”

That was such a clear plea: come back with me, we lost Rinna, I would lie to the Crows for you I don’t want to see you dead don’t make us do this.

If he didn’t turn on Theron and Alistair, Taliesin would kill him – a final act of mercy to his only remaining friend, a quick death on his feet so the Crows could not give him a slow one after they’d broken him.

Months ago, Zevran would have taken it. Before the Deep Roads, certainly; but too much had happened since then.

He wasn’t sure when things had changed so that now he would rather die than return to the Crows, but even more than that he wanted to be rid of the Crows and have something to live for afterwards. He’d had his taste of freedom, and friendship that didn’t have to be hidden or guarded, and kindness and acceptance given even where it wasn’t deserved.

But if he didn’t let Taliesin kill him, Taliesin would have to die. He wouldn’t leave the Crows. If Rinna hadn’t convinced him and seeing him now hadn’t convinced him, he’d never do it. Taliesin would go back, and alone he wouldn’t be able to lie to the Crows.

No, whispered his heart, but it was all in vain because Zevran knew how this had to end, one last cruel twist of fate. At this point, it was no good fighting it.

“I suspect I will manage just fine, Taliesin,” Zevran said, and let the emotion through, this time. One last chance Taliesin, please. “I’m sorry, my old friend. But the answer is no. I’m not coming back… and you should have stayed in Antiva.”

Maybe he should have stayed at the bottom of the stairs with Theron and Alistair and Fen, and helped them fight Taliesin’s accompanying muscle off, but there were some things that had to be done in person. He charged up the stairs, blades out, and Taliesin met him move for move, strike for strike, and it felt so much like any sparring match they’d ever had.

It was so easy, too easy.

“Tali, please,” Zevran begged him in Antivan. “Leave the Crows, leave the contract right now. Help us kill the others – the Wardens took me, Theron trusts me, they’ll take you as well. We can do this.”

“I can’t, Zev, I can’t.”

“You can, it isn’t so hard-”

“No, it’s- fuck, how can you live like this?” Taliesin asked, voice cracking. They didn’t even have to focus on fighting, it was all automatic and they could deadlock like this for hours, they knew each other too well. “Rinna’s gone and we killed her, and it was just some fucking Crow power play, it was all Master Valisti playing Master Arainai, and we were just the compradi trash they could throw away on it-”

“I know, I know,” Zevran told him. “But we never have to be that again-”

Taliesin’s single laugh was more of a sob.

“I don’t know if I want to be angry at you or jealous of you, Zev,” he said. “You- you could do this. You could live like this-”

“You can too!”

“No I can’t,” Taliesin said, and Zevran had to pull his knife abruptly when Taliesin’s wasn’t there to block it. He wasn’t- he was barely blocking anything now.

“Please don’t make me do this,” Zevran begged. “Taliesin-”

“I’m not making you,” his friend told him. “I’m just asking. If you don’t, I’ve got two angry Wardens.”

“They won’t do it! Not if I ask them-”

“Then I’ll have my own knife, Zev – I’m the one who believed Master Arainai, I’m the one who pushed so hard to convince you that Rinna was lying. Please. I’d rather it was you. You’re the only one who deserves to.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I want it to be you. I want you to be there when I- I don’t want to go alone, or without anyone to care.”

Zevran stopped fighting, and so did Taliesin. Zevran didn’t get out of his crouch, but Taliesin straightened, dropped his guard, left himself completely open to a knife in the gut or a sword through the chest.

“I hate you,” Zevran hissed at him after a moment. “Right at this moment I hate you more than anything else in this world.”

“I’m sorry it couldn’t end another way-”

“It could you stupid, stubborn-”

He was going to do it. Taliesin was asking him and he was going to do it.

He dropped his sword and reached out with his now-free hand to drag Taliesin to him.

“I’ll tell Rinna you’re sorry,” his friend said, and Zevran snarled wordlessly at him and pulled him into a fierce kiss and drove his knife up through Taliesin’s heart. The man relaxed when he felt the stab and for one furious moment Zevran truly wished that he’d do the opposite, that he’d raise his arms and slip his knives between his ribs so that they’d be going together. He caught Taliesin’s weight and lowered him carefully.

By the time he’d gotten to his knees, Taliesin was dead.

“I love you, you great hulking buffoon of a human,” Zevran told his corpse angrily, because it was that or cry and he was not going to sink to crying in the streets. “Andraste help me I love you both and it was me both times.”

Theron came to the top of the stairs after he’d laid Taliesin out on the ground- nothing so nice as a peaceful repose, no. He had to look properly killed for whenever the city guard found him.

“And here it is,” Zevran said to Theron, not looking up from the corpse. “Taliesin is dead, and I am free of the Crows.”

It was a bitter parting gift. He wanted to force Taliesin to take it back.

“They will believe that I am dead along with him. So long as I do not make my presence known to them, they will not seek me out.”

“So what does this mean?” Theron asked, and he had no idea if he meant the Crows or Taliesin or Zevran’s answer to the offer to go back.

“I do not know,” Zevran told him, because he truly did not. He’d wanted to be free of the Crows, but at this price, how much was that really worth? What was he supposed to do, now that he’d killed both of the people who’d kept him alive through those years of training and murder? “It seems that I have options now, whereas once I had none.”

Theron had seen plenty of bodies in these last months. He had to know that Zevran had killed him on purpose, and not even in the heat of the moment. What was he thinking, to know that of the three friends he’d had in his entire life, he was the last one Zevran hadn’t killed?

“I suppose it would be possible for me to leave,” he said, because wouldn’t they want that? “Now, if I wished, I could go far away, somewhere where the Crows would never find me.”

No such place existed.

Theron wasn’t saying anything. If only he’d just-

“I think, however, I could also stay here.” Theron cared about his people, he knew that. He had too much evidence not to believe it. If he could just prompt him into saying something, to telling him what he wanted- what to do now. “I made an oath to help you, after all. And saving the world seems a worthy task to see through to the end, yes?”

“If you want to go, you should go,” Theron told him, and could he not be so reasonable and considerate for once.

“But that is what I am asking you,” Zevran snapped at him, angrier than he’d meant to. “Do you want me to go? Do you need me here?”

“I want you to do what’s best for you.”

Like he’d ever known what that was; like he hadn’t spent these many months in the man’s company constantly wrong-footed and misreading his intentions and inclinations. Surely by now he’d proven how very poor he was at being responsible for himself.

“I… am not sure how to respond to that,” he said, because he didn’t, there were a lot of things he could say but this wasn’t the place and he didn’t want to end this with yelling. “Nobody has ever… I mean, normally, these things are decided by others.”

Now only if Theron would make it. He trusted Theron. If he said they were better off with him gone, it would be the truth; and if he said they still needed his help, he would stay to the bitter end.

Theron didn’t say anything. Of course he didn’t.

But he placed a hand on Zevran’s head and stroked his hair. A shudder rippled down his body and his throat closed up and dogshit, he’d already promised himself he wouldn’t cry in the street!

“Ah,” he said, and tried to get the words out around the tears that could not happen here. “Then I suppose I shall… stay? Is that… good?”

Tell me, he asked silently. Can’t you see what I am asking of you? I cannot read you, I cannot understand you, tell me what you want-

“If that’s what you want,” Theron said. “Then yes.”

Braska.

Theron got them back to the arl’s estate, somehow. Riordan had made it back as well and the arl wanted something and- Zevran didn’t know what else, he’d left for his room when it became clear Theron and Alistair were going to get swept up in the politics of the situation again. He stripped off his armor and his weapons. He cleaned his sword and spent too long lingering over his knife, convinced that there was just one more speck of blood somewhere that he couldn’t get off. He had a bath, and counted out how long he could stay submerged under the warm water. He got to just over two minutes.

He was dry and searching for the tears that had been so insistent earlier when Theron turned up. He’d divested himself of his own armor and weapons, and hadn’t bothered with boots either, just socks and the loose pants and shirt that his plate strapped over.

“Do you want company?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Zevran asked savagely, and Theron came over and knelt in front of him and in any other situation he could have a made a joke, Theron down on his knees and himself sitting on the edge of the bed, but nothing was funny today.

Theron took his hands and he wanted to snatch them back.

“I asked him,” he said instead. “I begged him, I told him that he could walk away from the Crows and I would help and he just wouldn’t. He wanted to die and he wanted me to do it and he kept asking until I did and now they’re both dead and it is all because of me!”

Theron pushed himself back up enough to kiss him, gently, right in the center of the forehead the way he had when he’d been giving Dalish blessings in the alienage the night before, and that was what finally the ripped the sobs from him. He let Theron crowd him down onto the bed with more kisses, forehead and hair and cheeks, and soft murmuring in El’vhen and a close embrace and yes, yes, physical contact, he’d take even a weak orgasm over all of this-

He grabbed Theron’s face and pulled him into a kiss on the lips, a proper heated one, close-mouthed but full of promise, and hooked a leg over Theron’s to pull their hips together.

The conclusion should have been foregone at that point, except that somehow, just like all the other times, it never got anywhere. Theron pulled him even closer, with no concern for awkwardness, and pet his hair and stroked down his back and across his ribs, and didn’t stop kissing him, and made no move towards anything else.

Zevran fell asleep crying, and woke to Theron still holding him, ready with one final kiss, tentative and gentle and sweet.

Void take Morrigan for being right.

Theron left and came back with a tray of hot breakfast and warmed water. He put the tray on Zevran’s knees and sat down next to him on the bed, stirring tiny chunks of crystalized honey into the water while quietly urging him to eat. Zevran didn’t feel very hungry but the heat in his stomach was nice, and he drank the water when Theron handed him the cup.

The brush of fingers as he took it set off an ache deep inside him. He wanted Theron to hold him again- and to hold him back, to run his hands all over Theron’s body and take his clothes off and find out what would make his mind go blank with wanting for the sheer physicality of it, to have that contact and something concrete to hold on to and an outlet for the morass of emotionality tangling him up.

But Theron wasn’t touching him. Just sitting there on the bed with him, a few insurmountable inches away.

“You kissed me,” Zevran eventually said, because he couldn’t stand the silence.

“Yes I did,” Theron said. There was a momentary pause, and then he added: “A lot.”

“You did.”

“You seemed like you needed it.”

“I…”

He didn’t know how to say what he wanted. He didn’t know what he wanted to say.

No, he was lying to himself. He knew. It was kiss me again, and make me forget, and don’t leave me, and everyone else is dead you’re all I have left and your kindness is killing me and I don’t care I will never have enough of it and yes, I did need it, I still need it I need-

No? No, he didn’t need any of this, it was just… nice to have. He’d lived without it before and he could do it again, he could keep doing it, he-

He’d felt like this with Rinna and Taliesin and it was never going to be all right. There was panic rising behind the need and when Theron leaned in and kissed him again he could feel the sweetness but not taste it. He reached up and fisted a hand in the hair at the base of Theron’s neck and used the leverage to keep Theron from moving away and changed the angle, just enough to turn it from something more about comfort to something more like what he’d tried the night before – heat and promise. Theron inhaled sharply in surprise and Zevran used the opportunity to deepen the kiss and it took the edge off the panic. The shaking that had been threatening to climb up his throat and betray itself in his fingers subsided, his chest unclenched, and he made himself relax his fist in Theron’s hair and let the heat die, and he wanted to let it go back to the gentleness he was being offered but it made the shaky feeling come back.

Theron pulled away and it scared him how hard it was to keep himself from chasing his touch again.

“You seem like you still need it,” he said.

“Is there ever a time when I could not use kisses from such an accomplished and good-looking exemplar of an elvhen man?”

It sounded forced and flat to him, but perhaps it convinced Theron. He smiled warm and truly, at least, and seeing it felt like a kick to his ribs.

“If you’re done,” Theron said, inclining his head towards the breakfast tray. “I think the arl wants us for something again.”

“As you wish.”

Morrigan had to hex him with a paralyze spell three times before they were able to drag him away from Ser Cauthrian and her men, and then had to hit him with misdirection so he wouldn’t kill anyone in his desperate raging to go back right now they had Theron they’d taken Theron.

When he tried to claw Oghren’s eyes out, she cast sleep.

He woke up in his room in the arl’s estate with his mouth full of the dry, dusty taste of deep mushroom and the flowery sickly-sweetness of cave spider venom in distiller agent. He’d been dosed with Soldier’s Bane and Adder’s Kiss to keep him down, and for any of them to resort to digging out the poisons they always just sold because Zevran kept forgetting to use them- yes, Leliana and Wynne were in the room with him.

“How long?” he asked.

“Just the day,” Leliana told him. “It’s evening now.”

“And when are we making our rescue?”

“We’re not,” she said, and then shoved him back onto the mattress with both hands and most of her weight when he tried to get up. The poisons were muddling his reflexes and his own strength, otherwise he would have struggled more. Right now, the room was spinning. “The queen came with us, Zevran, she slipped out in the confusion. Arl Eamon is hosting her, and the Landsmeet will be soon. She has her own supporters, and time enough to get them out of Fort Drakon.”

“Told her one of the Wardens is the bastard prince, has he?”

“Probably not,” Leliana allowed, and leaned harder when he tried to twist out from under her. “Zevran! We can’t just go attacking people! We want them to like us! Queen Anora is going to fix it!”

“What’s this you are telling me? She throws Theron to the wolves, and now she has second thoughts?”

“She believes in the Blight, not like her father. She knows Ferelden needs Wardens. She’s going to get them out.”

“I’m still waiting for a reason not to slit her throat and toss her in the river,” Zevran snapped at her. “I haven’t heard it yet.”

Leliana sighed.

“And this is why we can’t let you up.”

“I am going-”

“You will do no such thing,” Wynne told him, and entered his field of vision with a pitcher and cup, both of fine crystal – it seemed the arl was trying to bribe them into accepting the dictated status quo. “She said that it will only be two days, Zevran. You can live without him for-”

“Do not tell me: ‘only two days’!” Zevran snarled at her, and finally managed to toss Leliana off. “I have Crow training! I know about torture- I know what you can do to a person in ‘only two days’!”

“They’re not going to torture them, Zevran, really,” Wynne said disapprovingly. “This is Ferelden, not Antiva.”

“Oh, and you think human nature changes so much simply because of arbitrary borders? I envy you your faith in humanity.”

“Stop being ridiculous and drink.”

He didn’t want to, but he knew that he’d need water to flush the rest of the poisons out of his body. He swiped the cup and downed a mouthful and-

“You foul, treacherous, conniving old-”

They’d poisoned the water!

“Go back to sleep,” Wynne ordered, and there was magic behind it. “If you can’t control yourself, you’re just going to have to sleep through this.”

When he woke up again it was dark, but there was light from the fireplace and the top of the staff hovering above his head.

For one very brief moment, when Zevran’s hand was still tightening around her throat, Morrigan looked afraid; but she was back to her usual cool disinterest a few seconds after he’d realized who he was about to choke into unconsciousness.

“The old woman and the Sister have proven themselves to be even greater fools than I could have imagined,” she said. “The poisons will be out of your body shortly. I suggest the chamber pot.”

He got to the floor just in time to retch up foul bile and fluid into the porcelain bowl. It left a terrible taste in his mouth and made his throat burn, but he felt sharp and clear again.

“Thank you,” he muttered, and tried to come with something to wipe his mouth on that wasn’t his sleeve. Morrigan dropped a wet rag on his head.

“Your armor and weapons are in the corner,” she said. “I presume that you are capable of meeting me on the roof.”

When he looked up, she was gone. He dressed quickly, and scooped up the poisons and potions Wynne had left lying on the desk, and went out the window. The estate walls were easy enough to cling to, and the guards weren’t trained to watch for assassins. He was on the roof within a minute.

A crow ruffled it’s feathers and cawed at him.

“Yes, very funny,” Zevran told Morrigan. “Such wit you have. Truly a treasure in such dark times. It is a wonder your mother could bear to be parted from your company.”

Morrigan flapped up to his shoulder and pecked him hard on the head.

“Gah! Do you plan to assault the fortress such, or will I be the one doing all the work?”

Morrigan cawed angrily at him and started flying away. Zevran followed on the rooftops and almost managed to outstrip her to the walls of Fort Drakon.

He crouched on the edge of the final roof before the wall patrol corridor and observed, gauging distance and the walking speed of the perimeter patrols. Morrigan watched him, still a crow, from the parapet directly across from his position.

He backed up a few roofs to get the proper running start. As he hit the edge of the last roof he saw Morrigan change back to her human form, eyes wide with shock and fear and he actually threw himself towards the wall. She leaned over the edge and held out her hand, trying to catch him.

Zevran missed her fingers by a whole six feet. He hit the fortress wall with his side, leather peeling against the rough-faced stone, and caught the sill of the small observational window that he’d been aiming for when he’d jumped.

Morrigan glared furiously at him his entire climb up.

“What was that!” she hissed at him once he slipped over the edge and onto the ramparts next to her.

“A reasonable evaluation of distance, power, and speed.”

“You are insane!”

“Ah, no,” Zevran said, rolling out his shoulders. “Simply trained very thoroughly in not caring about my own safety.”

There had not been much call for stealth these months fighting darkspawn and demons, and Fort Drakon was exercise for this neglected skill, as laughable as it was. It was the dead of night and even the most alert guards weren’t that attentive.

They were also only expecting some to try to escape. Oh, if this had been a full frontal assault, Zevran was sure they would have been perfectly competent. But against him, and Morrigan as a swarm of hornets, they were nothing. They fell to ambushes, to sneak attacks, and yes- to the odd surprise full frontal assault, when there was no better way to clear a room.

On the last large room on the second floor, Morrigan stopped at the top of the stairs down to ground level and eyed the dead bodies behind them.

“And how just hard, in truth, were you trying on the road that day?” she asked.

“I was looking for a sword through the heart,” Zevran told her, listening at the door at the bottom of the stairs for footsteps. “It does not do to use your skills to their fullest extent in such circumstances. Come and cast some of that ice through here when I open this door, hm?”

It turned out to be a storage room, with no one in it. Morrigan’s ice was not needed. But on the other side of the door-

“That sounds like quite the commotion.”

“I do not care what you cast, simply do it high. I shall duck underneath.”

He threw the door open and dashed into the hallway, keeping low. Morrigan cast a walking nightmare over the guards and Zevran took a second to choose his targets. A guard with colonel’s armor details went down first, and then he simply took out whoever was closest. The spell wore off halfway through the killing, and lightning struck nearby, and the ambient temperature dropped again as one guard froze solid, frost and ice rime glinting off his armor. Zevran caught the last guard on his knife and whipped the man around to crash into his frozen comrade, sending both of them tumbling to the ground. The ice shattered against stone in a moment of crystalline gore, and he took the last guard’s head half off while he stared in horror at what ice could do to a body.

“You are admirably ruthless,” Morrigan told him, and surprisingly, didn’t sound grudging about it. “When you wish to be.”

There was a flash of plate around the corner and Zevran lashed out with his sword, followed the movement up with his knife-

“Divine’s bleeding heart Zevran it’s us!”

He backed away.

“You stabbed me!” Alistair exclaimed, holding his shoulder.

“You did not announce yourself,” Zevran told him.

“Yeah, well, usually rescues don’t involve trying to disembowel one of the people you came to get! Great job there!”

“Cease your whining,” Morrigan ordered, and healed his shoulder. “And where is our other wayward Warden?”

“End of the hall,” Alistair said. “There’s a big room with a lot of guards in it, and we- well, we probably wouldn’t have been able to handle it ourselves. You’ve got good timing, at least. Theron could use some of that healing. He, uh-”

His shoulders hunched.

“Well, you know,” he half-muttered. “Humans don’t like elves with swords. And city folk don’t like Dalish.”

Zevran ran past him for the end of the hall.

Theron, like Alistair, had managed to recover his equipment. He was slumped against the wall by the door, holding his sword. His shield was on his back, his shield arm held wrongly, and he was staring at the floor, hair hiding his face.

This was not nearly as bad as he could have been. He’d gotten into his armor, he could walk, it was clear that he and Alistair had been fighting already.

“Theron-” he began to say, relieved, and touched his shoulder; and Theron flinched away from the touch.

Zevran went perfectly still, then removed his hand.

“Amora?” he asked, and ducked his head to find Theron’s eyes. “Look at me? I-”

Theron’s face was a bloody mess. He hadn’t been beaten, not here- there was skin missing, in strips and patches. One edge of each wound was always clean and precise, the mark of a knife, but the sides and the far edges were rough, ragged, uneven.

“They, um,” Theron said quietly. “They tried to rip my vallas’lin off.”

“MORRIGAN!” Zevran yelled down the hallway, uncaring if the guards in the large room beyond heard or not, and then dropped his voice to match Theron’s. “Give the order, and no one will ever find the bodies.”

“I don’t even know who they were,” Theron whispered, and it was a teary, broken thing. “It hurt too much.”

Zevran stepped aside to let Morrigan look at him. She saw his face and actually hissed in affronted rage.

“You shall see Wynne when we return to the estate,” she declared, gently taking his shield arm and running healing magic over it. “I will drag her out of her bed myself.”

Theron reached for his shield, and Zevran caught his arms.

“No,” he said. “You rest. Our dear Morrigan and I can get us away from here.”

“Uh-“ Alistair started to say.

“Guard him,” Zevran ordered.

“But the next room is full of-”

“Shush,” Zevran told him. “Morrigan?”

There were no words wasted on a response. She just yanked the door open and engulfed the next room in lightning. He darted through as soon as the light died and took full advantage of the soldiers’ stunned blindness from being in the middle of the onslaught. They were going to get out of this, and he was going to see Theron to Wynne, and then he was going to make all this better.

Somehow.

“‘Only two days’,” Zevran quoted back at Wynne and Leliana with no little vindictive satisfaction when Morrigan made good on her promise and dragged both of them out of bed. Wynne was absolutely horrified to see the state of Theron’s face, and went to work immediately while Zevran hovered and tried to leave the scathing commentary to Morrigan.

The skin healed without scarring, and Zevran chased everyone else out of the room as soon as Wynne was satisfied with her work. He turned around from thanking Morrigan for her help and closing the door behind her to see Theron standing in front of the vanity mirror, staring at his face. The new skin hadn’t reproduced the vallas’lin ink, and the few dark areas where the skin hadn’t been torn away were a sharp, glaring contrast to the much fainter parts where the torturers of Fort Drakon hadn’t ripped all the layers of skin off, and the few cut-through lines where they had. Theron’s vallas’lin were an obvious disaster, and Zevran hated the fragile look in Theron’s eyes as he inspected the damage.

He'd stayed with the Dalish clan in Antiva. He knew how important they were- how sacred. He knew the rules about touching them, about talking about them, and he knew that he wasn’t at all qualified to do anything with them.

But.

“I know how to do tattoos,” Zevran said. “And I have ink and needles.”

Theron kept staring in the mirror, and Zevran wondered if he’d heard; or if he was just ignoring him because he had no right to suggest such a thing.

But after a long silence, Theron quietly said: “Okay.”

Zevran sat him down in a chair and tied both his and Theron’s hair out of their faces, so nothing would get in the way. He took off his own shirt to keep from getting tattoo ink on it, and fetched the ink, needles, and a spare cloth to catch Theron’s blood.

His vallas’lin were mostly untouched on his forehead, but someone had torn away the skin across the sensitive area of the temple on one side of his face, right down to his jawline, and Zevran started there, at the top of Theron’s cheekbone. He was halfway finished with the section before he tried to make conversation- Theron’s hands were fisted on his knees, clutching the cloth of his pants.

“It would make doing this a bit trickier,” he told Theron. “But I am not going to judge you for crying or some other such thing. Everyone feels pain.”

He didn’t answer until Zevran took his hands away from his face to re-ink the needle.

“The ritual to receive your vallas’lin must be endured in silence,” he said. “You can shed tears, but you can’t make any noise. The pain is part of it.”

“That is much like Crow tattoos,” Zevran told him. “Though we are not allowed tears. You remember that I once told you that Crow tattoos have spiritual significance? It is in the designs, like yours, but not in their meaning. The meaning are entirely mundane. I have told you already about the personal marks, but there are a great many more. The one here, for example-”

He paused long enough to touch the large, intricate one that wrapped around his shoulders curling down onto his pectorals in front and completely covering his shoulderblades in back.

“-means that I am a full member of the Crows. It takes an entire week to apply, different sections at a time to go with the particular test for the day. It is possible to fail partway through and die without passing. It is my newest one, and I will not lie- it was agony for another week or so after it was finished. We are allowed magical healing on all the other tattoos, but not this one. I did not see a vallas’lin ritual during my time with Clan Ralaferin – do you get healing afterwards?”

Again, Theron waited for him to pause the application.

“We do,” he said. “That’s part of it. The pain- all elves endure it, and our people have endured pain for so long. But just as the Dalish have the clan to comfort and protect them, someday all of us will have stone walls to call home again. The healing is the reminder that we always have hope, even if it’s a distant one, and our names may be long forgotten before our descendants are finally blessed with the realization of it.”

“Well, I cannot pretend anything so deep for the Crows’ reasonings,” Zevran said as he finished the area down by the jawbone. Besides this large section, there were a few branching lines that needed recoloring, and then on the opposite cheek lines to reconnect where someone had methodically peeled away thin strips of skin right down to the muscle. “They simply inflict pain to do so. Oh, they have some pretty words from back in the depths of the founding of the House of Crows, about the shaping of society and the breaking of things to rebuild them, but I suspect that it is meaningless now. If I did not know better, I would say that they found pain exciting.”

“And they don’t?” Theron asked. “I’ve heard you talk like it excites you.”

Ah, Andraste. He’d forgotten about Theron’s Hahren-trained memory. It was good for much besides remembering histories.

“There is nothing wrong with a little pain,” he said. “Some biting, some scratching, some hair-pulling. Sometimes… sometimes I am looking for the pain more than the pleasure. But I do not so much like being the cause of it. It is-”

How to say this.

“I have known too many people who enjoy doing so, with no care for if the other involved derives any pleasure from it, or even wants it.”

Theron reached out and placed a hand on his bare chest, over his heart, and met his eyes.

“You deserve better,” he said simply, and Zevran cracked a brief, brittle smile before switching to the other side of his face without giving a real reply.

The rest of the reapplication of Theron’s vallas’lin passed in silence. When the last line was reconnected, Zevran carefully turned Theron’s face back and forth, checking his work. His new skin was red and irritated from the tattooing, but everything seemed to be in order beyond that. He patted away the last of the blood with the spare cloth and took Theron to Morrigan’s room. The procedure had taken most of the night, but knocking on her door roused her. Her expression as she opened the door suggested that she’d been thinking of a good, choice insult; but when she saw Theron’s face she simply healed the vallas’lin in silence before closing the door again.

Theron immediately checked his reflection in the mirror again when they got back to Zevran’s room, and something in his chest eased with the other man’s heavy sigh of relief.

“My work is passable, then?” Zevran asked, checking Theron’s reflection himself. They looked fine to him, but he was far from an expert in this matter.

“They look just like they did,” Theron told him, tracing the redone lines with his fingertips. “Thank you- ma melava halani, Zevran.”

“I am afraid I don’t know that particular phrase.”

“Hm,” Theron said. “Do you want to tell me what ‘amora’ means?”

Oh no.

“Ah,” Zevran said, and hoped very hard that Theron wouldn’t press. “Perhaps another time?”

Theron turned away from the mirror to face him.

“When you tell me what ‘amora’ means, I’ll translate ‘ma melava halani’,” he said, and kissed him. It was a bit different from the last couple of times- there was no tentativeness or hesitation here, and there wasn’t heat exactly, but there was definitely intent. This was a kiss that was going somewhere.

Zevran smiled into it.

“And what’s this?” he asked. “A reward?”

Theron looked him dead in the eyes and said: “Take me to bed.”

There was little reason for such a simple statement to be so arousing, but a frisson of excitement shot down his spine regardless. It was something about the tone, and the total lack of doubt that he’d be obliged, and the way it wasn’t dressed up in flattery or talked around in embarrassment- and, yes, also the person who had said it.

And it was such a relief, to finally know so clearly what Theron wanted.

“It would be an honor and a pleasure, my Warden.”

Later, after the sun had started to rise and Zevran had learned what it took to make Theron go mindless with want and ecstasy, they had a handful of quiet, warm moments before they both dropped off into sleep, wrung out by the totality of the night.

“Cities are awful,” Theron confided to him in the dawn light. “I don’t want to be here any longer.”

“Sleep, and then I will help you slip away,” Zevran promised.

“Can we though?” Theron continued. “There’s the Landsmeet, and Loghain still; it’s just that I’m tired-”

He didn’t have to say a word about politics or other people’s problems. He snuggled a little closer and Zevran held him a little tighter.

“I am sure the others will appreciate a break. You can take a day, my Warden. Especially after yesterday.”

“The others,” Theron murmured. “I’m supposed to talk to Alistair-”

“Forget the arl,” Zevran said, and kissed him yet again. “Forget the queen, forget the Landsmeet. Sleep, and when you wake we will go out into the countryside if we must, where I am sure we will find all sorts of awful and improbable things to heroically fight, and you will be absolutely magnificent in battle, just as you always are.”

Theron smiled sleepily.

“You think I’m magnificent?”

“I do not lie when I compliment, that would make it flattery. Yes, you are magnificent.”

“Thanks,” Theron said, and let his eyes close. “That’s really nice. No one’s ever complimented me on my fighting before. I like watching you fight, too. And walking. And doing things in camp. And- I just like looking at you. I feel happier when you’re around.”

Well that was just- happy. Just to be around him.

Theron was asleep now, but that made this easier. Zevran kissed the top of his hair, quietly told him that no one had ever said they were happy just to be around him before, and started thinking about a ruby-and-gold earring tucked away in his pack.