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When he meets Kallian Tabris, his first thought is that she reminds him of a cat recently drenched in ice water: prickly and likely to snap at anyone who comes near her. He asks Duncan where he found someone like her. Duncan looked at him levelly, and told him that women of her talent and background are rarer than gold.
He keeps his mouth shut, and he watches her. She looks so fragile, her knuckles white where she holds the hilts of her matching daggers, lips pressed together. His training tells him that she has never been in a battle more serious than a street scrap; she's not comfortable out in these woods. Her eyes skim over the trees, watching and waiting with obvious fear. He sees her jump when the darkspawn come staggering forward, but she surges forward with a look like cold determination glittering in her eyes. It's in the elegant dance of death that follows that Alistair realizes abruptly that he read her wrong: she's not untrained, just untried.
At the Joining, she doesn't say anything, merely drinks down the blood without flinching. Her eyes are flat, focused out on the middle distance past Duncan. It sends a chill down his spine. Kallian Tabris is the kind of woman to look death in the eyes and refuse to flinch.
Alistair's new impression is only crystallized at the battle of Ostagar. She is relentless, moving through the fury of battle with precise steps, sometimes fading out of view and reappearing only when she slits the throat of an enemy. She is cold and focused, ignoring the battle around her to make her way to the tower. He can only follow in her footsteps, dazed and somehow glad that she is there with him, that he doesn't need to go it alone.
The feeling only grows after the battle sours and they are left alone, with a world to save.
He's surprised when his taciturn and deadly companion suddenly sprouts a tongue of silver, charming the Chantry Mother and a Qunari stranger to her side. Alistair nearly kicks himself when he realizes that it's just another weapon to her, when she talks down some bandits outside of town and uses the moment when they drop their guard to slit their leader's throat. There's something like awe and fear and admiration running in his veins as he watches her lead them to Redcliffe. Storm and save a castle. Lead them to the mages, and reign in terrors that stalk the halls. Charm her way into the heart of the Dalish and free a pack of werewolves from their curse. Play the game of politics in Orzammar, and then cut her way through the Deep Roads to bring back a piece of a legend.
Then she does it again, and kills a dragon along the way, just because she needs the Arl Eamon to not die, not yet. Alistair doesn't know how she does it, dazed as he follows her around Ferelden, how she refuses to bow or break, how her mood slides from icy, focused heartlessness to charm and smiles no sooner than she can shake the blood from her blades. He makes the mistake of asking her once, and she just tilted her head, looking at him with confusion in her eyes, and said that she was just doing what needed to be done. He nodded quietly, and a conviction that she was a genuine force of nature rooted itself deep in his heart then.
He was so busy watching her, he didn't notice when admiration changed to adoration, only saw when she was looking back at him with a slight smile. She stole his heart as easily as she stole gold from the guard's pockets, without him noticing. He was already hopelessly in love by the time it occurred to him that maybe it was no longer idle curiosity keeping his eye on her. It's a surprise when he makes a fumbling confession to her, and she actually accepts it, taking the rose that he offers with a smile that actually looks genuine. Both of them stumble, and the flaws in her perfection just make her more beautiful, make her feel more real and less like an idol on some unreachable pedestal.
He's hopelessly in love by the time that the first cracks start showing through her determination. When they go to the Alienage, when she sees the slavers taking her family, her friends, he can see the desperation moving her for the first time. And Alistair tightens his grip around his sword, and vows that he will do whatever it takes to keep her smiling, to keep her safe. When they free her father, she cries, if only a few tears, and the relief that floods from her is palpable. And he would do anything to keep it safe.
The Landsmeet comes and he beheads Loghain, and he feels the rush of power that must come with making decisions like these. She makes Anora queen with a few words, and a rush of gratitude overwhelms him. He doesn't have to lose her. He doesn't have to be king. And he would fall to his knees if all of Ferelden wasn't watching the Grey Wardens, so he keeps his mouth shut and leaves at her side, only stopping her to kiss her when they stand in the hallways of Arl Eamon's estate once more. He can feel a smile curl her lips, and he knows that she did this for him. She played all the noble powers just for him. For his happiness.
And then.
And then they find out that that both of them won't make it through the battle to come.
She listens to their fate without any apparent reaction, her eyes going distant, the same way they were at her Joining. Just like then, all he can do is watch her. All he can do is watch as she nods, as she turns, as she leaves. Something happens later that night, he doesn't know what, and Morrigan leaves without a word to anyone else. Tabris doesn't say what it was, but she spends the night in his arms, withdrawn into herself even as she buries herself into his shoulder and murmurs something about how she doesn't want tomorrow to come. He runs his fingers through her hair and whispers back that maybe it won't. Maybe the sun won't rise. Maybe they won't ever need to face down an Archdemon.
But it does.
And they do.
She surprises him again at the Battle of Denerim, when he's already made up his mind that his Tabris will make it out of here, by kissing his cheek and leaving him as a rearguard. Someone to fetch the Wardens if everything goes awry. But her sad smile tells him that she just knew. And it breaks his heart when she wraps her arms around his neck, and says quiet enough that he knows he's not supposed to have heard it,
"Stay alive. I can't lose you, too."
And then she's gone, and he has a horde of darkspawn to kill without her by his side. He tries not to cry.
He only succeeds at one of those things.
Queen Anora herself gives him the Warden's Oath that belonged to Tabris. She's burned in the full regalia sent from Weisshaupt, the flower-and-vine patterned boots a break from the uniform that Alistair refused to concede. Tabris's father told him her secrets in the aftermath, tiny trickles of hidden sentimentality. The boots she always wore belonged to her mother, as did the dagger she drove into the Archdemon's skull. The simple gold band on her hand belonged to a fiancé that had died on their wedding day. Alistair puts a dried rose he found in her belongings on her pyre, and bows his head when they light it.
The Hero of Ferelden, they call her. And he becomes mentioned as an afterthought: that Alistair? Warden-Commander of Ferelden?
He always was happy being her shadow, anyway.