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When we met, I couldn’t see any part of you beneath the mud you’d earned trying to kill me. I don’t know why I took you with us, except that you were an elf without anywhere to go, and in Ferelden an elf with no home was good as dead, and we just don’t do that to each other. Naturally none of the shems understood. I bound up your wounds alone, thinking it would’ve been easier if you’d just fucking died.
The first prick of sympathy came when we arrived at the Dalish camp. You called me my dear warden, mocking the double-meaning of my title and your technical captivity. You flirted shamelessly with me the whole way, undeterred by my gender or my cold silence, and put me in a bad mood because I couldn’t tell if it was genuine interest, or something you felt you had to do, offer yourself to me, to stay in my good graces. With a man for sale it could go either way. But I saw how your ears went red and your tongue fell silent, when our wilder cousins sniggered at your tattoos, your so-called “city vallaslin”. It’s horrible to be an in-between, unwanted alike by the society that spawned you and the one you live with, to be lumped in with those who keep you in squalor and kill you at will. Watching their whispers subdue you angered me more than all the flirting put together. And fuck, wasn’t that annoying.
I bought you a pair of gloves. I don’t know why. They didn’t deserve my money, you didn’t deserve my kindness, but you looked at their tooled leather like you were reading a secret map, and I had to know what you saw written there. You didn’t say thank you. But you told me your mother was Dalish. I told you mine had died. I told you how she died, even though that’s a thing I don’t tell anyone, because my mouth moved before my mind could scream stop.
You made a joke. I shoved you hard into the underbrush and stalked away before I killed you. We never talked about it again.
In fact, we barely spoke at all, the whole long, rainy road to Orzammar. We didn’t speak through the political battle, we didn’t speak cooped up for days in a king’s mansion, and we didn’t speak as the heavy stone gates of the deep roads clanged shut behind us.
I had been a Warden for all of eight weeks. Alistair warned me that Wardens Joined in a Blight always were more sensitive, and all my newfound awareness remained raw as a fresh-hewn board. In the deep, I could hear them everywhere. Feel them, crawling through my skin like worms; smell them in the still and sour air. I could fucking taste them when we stopped to rest and I had no distraction.
The dwarves told me this was where Wardens went to die. I hugged my knees in the weak torchlight of our camp, feeling myself lost in the dark with them pressing in all around me, until they tore me apart, and for the first time, I hoped the Blight would kill me. Sleep was a fantasy. It showed, more and more, the deeper we went.
I didn’t notice the first time you offered to carry my knapsack, so tired I gave it over without question, numb to anything but the need to keep walking. The occasional darkspawn nest was a respite. Better to fight them than sense them waiting, a constant pressure of millions of eyes on the back of my neck.
I didn’t notice when you started staying up with me. I figured you weren’t tired, either. I still wasn’t speaking. But you rambled, about your childhood, about your exploits with the Crows, reciting snippets of awful Antivan poetry and singing bawdy songs you couldn’t quite remember. But it came as a shock when I woke up, the first I’d slept since we entered the roads, curled up against the cave wall, beside you. You smiled, still awake. Wished me good morning.
We fucked for the first time the first night we camped above ground again, drunk on dwarven ale and being out of that thrice-damned hole, that endless crushing darkness. In the morning we agreed it didn’t mean anything. Just the mindless choice of two bodies almost sick with relief.
You flirted less, after that. I talked more. I told you about coming up to the sealed gates of the Denerim alienage, hearing the word purge from the indifferent shem guard, and how I still didn’t know if my father or Shianni or any one of these people who’d been my entire world were alive. The ridiculous story I made up for those two kids, because elves survive on hope. My absolute disaster of a wedding, doomed long before the kidnapping; I was all my father had left, and the truth, that my inclinations were not reproductively compatible, would have crushed him. That if I closed my eyes, I could still feel a ghost of euphoria remembering my sword plunging into Vaughan’s gut, that I was only sorry I only got to do it once.
I don’t know why you listened. Put together, the whole thing rang absurd, not very sane and certainly not much like a Warden.
I do know that when the sloth demon snared us in nightmares, and I saw you stretched on that rack, my vision went red. When I came back to myself, your brother Crows were in pieces and you were gone. A little of whatever-the-fuck that was lingered when we woke; I took two running steps toward you, so damn happy to see you without joints popped and bruised. You stumbled one step back, on instinct, a portrait of humiliation. I faltered and the moment died.
You moved back to your own tent. We’d taken to sleeping side-by-side. The nights grew colder as the season waned, and the Blight spread, and the presence of another body in the night was an affordable comfort. I stared at the large space you left behind, startled to miss you this much.
Things stayed like that as we marched back to Denerim for the Landsmeet. Cordial, but distant. Hurt without reason and annoyed over it, to the point that Leliana warned me that compelling a Landsmeet as an elf would be hard enough without a pissy attitude. Maybe that was why it was so easy for Anora to betray us, because irritation makes me impatient and rude. But you snuck and charmed your way through the most heavily fortified prison in Ferelden to get us out— to get me out. And somehow I was still annoyed.
I said you must be really hard up for protection. You crowded me into the wall. For a wild moment I thought you’d shank me, and then for an even more terrifying one, that you’d kiss me. Instead, you told me to consider your blood debt paid, and shoved off down the street. Angry as I’d ever seen you.
And what was worse, you stayed angry, and I stayed on edge, and maybe that’s how we got jumped by a dozen Crows in a dead-end alley, one of your bad decisions come home to roost in earnest. Their leader offered to wipe your slate, to take you back to Antiva, make up a story and let you go home. Not like an order, but like a friend, offering you a way out.
You looked at me. Months on the road, and I couldn’t read your face. And what I remember isn’t thinking I was about to die, but that I was about to lose you to this smug shem jackass, of all people.
Then you said no. And the shit hit the wall.
We lived, somehow. Your old friend went down last, and hard, your Crow-hilted dagger quivering between his ribs as his heart pumped itself out. You fell down beside him. Uninjured beyond a few nasty scratches, curled into a ball on the cobbles like you were dying, too.
I asked something that amounted to what the fuck. And it all came pouring out. You grew up together, you and him and some girl named Rinna, a little family inside the unending terror of Crow education. If you couldn’t love the Crows, you could love them, and for a time the comfortable rewards of your harsh training were made sweeter by their sharing. Until Rinna betrayed you to a mark.
He killed her while you watched, you told me, your head in my lap. While she begged your help, you taunted her. She died with her love for you on her lips. You both went forward with the job, a loose end to clean up, and discovered there proof of Rinna’s honesty, her fidelity. You killed her together and now you’d killed him, too.
The silence stretched as the torrent of words finally stopped. Feeling your face damp on my leg. There was nothing to say, but that silence was a wounding kind, so I told you the stupid story about the bluebird in the vhenadahl. Recited rhymes we used to sing as kids, playing hopscotch and tag in the dirt. On and on, until the sun slipped below the buildings, and you were able to sit up, and we left.
It never came up between us again. In fact, very little had changed. A mild thaw in an undercurrent neither of us wanted to address. It seemed impossible we’d be able to swim it; diving in could only lead to drowning.
Returning to the alienage put it out of my mind. My family spared by the purge, but still not safe. Murder and disease and hints of darker things make good distractions. When we discovered elves were disappearing, you volunteered to scout, as you had so many times before. I thought nothing of it. Until I was sitting up alone at my childhood dinner table, more than a day past when you should have returned, too paralyzed to do more than stare at the door and plead with the Maker or the gods or whoever might be listening for you to walk through it.
Sometime after midnight, you finally did. You caught sight of me, and tendered a look of exasperation. My dear warden, you said again, chiding this time, and before you could continue I flung my arms around your neck, too tight for you to get anything else out. And we stood still there, like that, because if I let go I’d slap you. I hated you. You were the most important person in my world, and if you died it would change me, and I hated you for it.
We went into that warehouse together, and pulled people— my people— out of cages together. We read the manifest of those already sold away. You put your arms around me, when I stepped into an alley after it was done and screamed and screamed and screamed into my own hands, because even if we somehow got justice this time, there was no undoing it, and no way to stop it happening again. Because this was the Black City we all had to live in. You told me then that you’d been sold, too, into a different fate but one ugly in its own way. And my hand slipped into yours where it wrapped around my chest, just for a moment, until someone called us back to the mess we’d made.
You watched as I took the bastard Loghain’s head, and if it didn’t feel like justice for my kin, it did feel good. You stood beside me as I promised a collection of the most powerful people in Ferelden, shems all, that I could save their country, and hours later, when I was sick back at the manor where we stayed.
You weren’t there when Riordan told me I was going to die. It’s hard to remember now how out-of-our-minds, slap-happy with relief Alistair and I were when he showed up, fucking finally a senior warden who knew what he was doing. That went up like a matchstick when he explained a grey warden giving their life to contain the archdemon was the only way to end the Blight. He said some other things after that, but I didn’t hear them over the sound of one solitary thought: I cannot put Zev through that again. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…
And you weren’t there when Morrigan caught me as I shambled from that room, weak with shock and grief. You weren’t there when she told me there was a way out. You weren’t there to see my revulsion— not at what she suggested, but at myself, because I knew my answer immediately. I could not do that to you, not even with the entire world in the balance. That whatever the consequences, whatever pain this brought on me or on the child to come, if it spared you another heartbreak, the price felt fair.
I stumbled to your room no more than half-dressed. You smelled the sex on me immediately. Your face twisting with hurt and rage, until I fell down at your feet, my head on your knees, and told you everything. What waited for us in the heart of the Blight. The blood magic Morrigan wrought. That I’d done it for you, that I begged your forgiveness, that if you left now I’d never be the same and please, please, Maker, please stay.
Your hand lifted my chin. Your expression like I’d never seen before, tender and fond and something else. Something electric. Your voice a whisper. “My dear warden…”
“I love you,” I said. It was what I’d been trying to say through all the incoherent babble. Maybe for a lot longer than just that night.
You bent and kissed me. And in the softness of your mouth, every worry and doubt melted away.
We’d seen each other many times before. But you never trailed your thumb slowly across my every scar, from the faded wounds of Ostagar to the scrape from just this morning. I never traced over the swirls of your tattoos with my tongue. We never drifted back to each other every other moment for a lingering wet kiss, never burrowed a face into a neck or tangled our legs or clung so close together that we seemed more one person than two. It never felt right, not like this.
And as I looked into your face in the dying firelight, brushing my fingers over your cheek, I thought about you covered in mud and pain and waiting to die. Maybe the world didn’t care about us, but if in its making, there was just enough serendipity to let me find you, maybe that was all the care I needed.