Chapter Text
Nine months later.
The bed was soft, clean, and comfortable. And that meant nothing to Ismene Cousland-Theirin’s subconscious mind, which would always lead her back to somehow being sprawled on top of her husband, as she had been for every morning of their marriage so far. The only time she hadn’t covered him like a blanket was when her injuries sustained from a very ill advised one-on-one with an archdemon prevented her from doing so. And on those nights, as she lay on her back and stared up at the ceiling, unable to quite believe she was still alive, Alistair had curled up against her side, his arms encasing her and anchoring her down during the nightmares.
When she felt so safe and so deliciously warm, it was always a slow, ponderous process to rouse to full consciousness. At the sound of birdsong, she peeled open her eyelids to spot a fresh patch of drool on Alistair’s collar. She wiped her mouth with only the barest twinge of shame, and when she glanced up at his face, she saw that he was already awake. He’d been watching her sleep again. Not that he really had much choice in that. Given the way she always pinned him down, his only options if he wanted to get out of bed were to either wake her up or wait until she got there herself. He nearly always picked the latter.
“Good morning, Warden-Commander,” he murmured, brushing a snagged strand of hair out of her face.
“Good morning, Warden-Commander,” she mumbled drowsily back, leaning down and pressing a kiss to the hollow of his throat that made his body jump a little beneath her. When they'd restarted the Fereldan Grey Wardens, they’d felt like they were completely within their rights to create a co-chaired position . They’d both been leading the Ferelden faction for over two years at that point - they were perfectly and equally qualified.
She leveraged herself up into all fours on top of him, head flopping with a groan as aching muscles protested. “Andraste’s flaming tits,” she grunted, as she rolled off and out of the bed in just her button-down, cold air brushing over her bare legs. Her inelegant dismount woke Lady Imelda from where she’d been sleeping on a blanket at the foot of the bed.
“Why are you so sore? We didn’t even…” Ali trailed off suggestively, with an obnoxious waggle of his eyebrows.
Izzy rolled her eyes at him. “You can keep making sex jokes if you want, but it was Sigrun who did this to me, so that rather backfires on you, don’t you think?” She found a pair of discarded breeches puddled on the floor. They’d lasted two days, they could last another - she started yanking them on. “I thought fighting Zevran was bad. Try someone half his size, twice as fast, who’s been taking tea with darkspawn and already attended her own fucking funeral.”
“I still think Velanna is the scariest. She makes Morrigan look chipper,” Alistair sighed, before getting out of bed as well.
“And somehow fully clothed,” Iz added with a smirk.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alistair lied valiantly. He leant down and kissed her, with a mouth still sour from sleep. “I never even noticed.”
“Mmmhmm?” she replied, unconvinced, and kissed him again for good measure.
Then they left the castle and walked out to the Amaranthine shore, to let Lady Imelda sprint down the beach at full pelt while the waves roared and spray battered their face, come sun or rain.
And so began another day, ruling the Grey Wardens out of Amaranthine. Ismene would’ve paid good money to see Leonie and her mother Bann Esmerelle’s faces when they were informed by the newly re-crowned Queen Anora that all their lands were ceded to the Wardens. But unfortunately she’d been absent on her honeymoon at the time - or rather, a three week long vacation getting drunk with her friends, as they saw Leliana and Zevran off to the port in Jader - which meant she'd only been able to deal with the messy aftermath.
When she’d found out that, despite reneging their claim to the throne, her best friend had still deliberately landed her with a castle and all its wonderful admin, Izzy had laughed at how much of a bitch Anora really was.
But there were worse things to do, she supposed, than to sit opposite Alistair on a desk, eating breakfast one-handedly and sorting through their paperwork. In amongst all their correspondences, detailing the scars left on the land by the Fifth Blight, a few bright spots: a letter from Zevran gloating over the quality of this year’s Antivan summer; a message from Wynne informing her of conditions in the Circle, with a few hints towards improvements that Ismene guessed she not-so-subtly wanted passed on to the Royal Council; an update from Anora on the five proposals she’d spurned this month, and the blonde Orlesian actor she’d taken as a lover to fill in her spare time.
A letter from Fergus Cousland, new Teyrn of Highever, informing her on how the restoration of their family home was going. They’d not really been that close before. But they’d both lost so much in the last two years, and so Ismene kept up a consistent correspondence, to monitor how her brother was coping with the grief of losing not only his family, but a child, and a wife who he might not have loved, but had cared about a lot as a companion and best friend.
As a postscript, he'd included a new verse that the local Highever bard had added to her version of ‘The Fortress Besieged’. It’s not every day one is forced to listen to the deflowering of his sister in detail, Fergus wrote, but I found the forced rhymes with ‘knickers’ particularly charming.
“The Chasind should’ve smothered him in his sleep,” she muttered, but she found that she couldn’t stop smiling.
That was a recurrent problem for Ismene this year: happiness. She didn’t know what to do with it. Yes, she was dealing with a worrying bout of sentience in the darkspawn community, but that was the sort of problem she… dare she say it?... enjoyed trying to fix. She woke up every morning, and she faced a day filled with purpose. She fought constantly, every day, and yet it was somehow effortless compared to the struggle of trying to fit herself into the tidy neat confines of the noblewoman’s life she’d had before.
Love, too. That was something she’d once felt she had to guard against, something she’d reserved for delivering lukewarm to her father, and to Anora. Now her heart was so full of it, she worried it was making her soft even as it gave her newfound ferocity. She saw Nathanial Howe watching her during their training sessions with the other recruits, looking for weaknesses, and no doubt the remnants of the angry, vengeful monster who’d killed his father. Possibly he was even searching for the girl who’d gotten him drunk and laid, while cowering in a corner, sipping ale, and desperately trying to take in what little she could of the world. He couldn't seem to find either in the woman presented to him now. Often, she’d say something off-hand to Anders, some corny or filthy joke that the mage seemed to encourage her to come up with, and Nathanial would do a double take, like he was seeing a stranger who wore a familiar looking face.
Izzy kept trying to be serious and intimidating - if only to have some hope of controlling her new ragtag bunch of Wardens - but then Alistair would also tell her joke to make her laugh, and the veneer would shatter.
It was not just her love for Alistair, either, that was undermining parts of her personality that she had once thought fixed. That was a fresh wave she crested every morning, sometimes climbing to heights she thought she wasn't really capable of. But the rest of her heart was still filled with affection: for her friends, now flung afield across the continent; for Morrigan, hiding somewhere in the wilderness; and even for the people who followed them and trusted them, who loved them in return for the heroic ideal they imagined them to be.
These days, when Ismene said something, people listened. Autonomy and power - she’d been given it, after all those years of dreaming , and she actually knew what to do with it as well. She held a position as an advisor on Anora’s council - “the Grey Wardens don’t mess in politics, Goldie!” “What utter bollocks, tell me again how King Bhelen is doing these days?” - and was even allotted a portion of Cailan’s once precious military budget for rebuilding the Warden forces. And what was more... no one questioned it. Ismene and Alistair were both the smallest Warden chapter, and the only one in living memory to defeat an archdemon: no one saw her in armour and reacted scornfully. All she faced now, from the men she’d once feared and resented, was deep, deep respect (and, she had to admit, a healthy dose of fear, particularly if they were one of her former suitors).
She loved it. She was… happy.
“What’s that face for?” Alistair asked her from across the table. When she blinked and came back to the room, he already had a conspiratorial smile on his face, like they’d shared the secret before she’d even replied.
“Oh, you know,” she grinned. “Just thinking about menacing people with my sword.”
“Aww, and it’s not even noon!”
Izzy got out of her chair and stretched her arms up above her head, languidly. When Alistair’s eyes dropped pointedly to the band of pale skin under her shirt hem that was exposed as she did so, it was not lost on her, and so she let the stretch last a few seconds longer than needed. His eyes remained pinned to her, as she walked around the table to stand next to him, a head taller than him in respective height, and looked down at his beautiful face. She placed a hand on each of his cheeks, tilting him away from his papers to face her. On her left hand, the silver wedding band glinted.
“I love you, husband,” she told him, very seriously.
“I love you too, my scary, stabby wife,” he replied.
And then she kissed him, and what followed after meant that all their paperwork ended up falling off the table, and scattering across the floor.