Chapter Text
Dorian Pavus (recently of Minrathous) wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting of the leader of the Inquisition, but it wasn’t this. Someone bearded, perhaps. Definitely someone sober and stoic and, well, Andrastian. Blackwall, with his complete lack of humor, was the very image of someone leading an upstart band of religious fanatics. If he’d met the Inquisition party without introduction, he would in fact have pegged the dour Warden as the mysterious Herald of Andraste.
From his spot at the library window Dorian could look down into the courtyard and see what he’d gotten instead. The slim, utterly unremarkable elf who led the Inquisition was practicing archery with some recruits and laughing at his own inability to hit the target. The recruits joined in without a hint of nervousness, turning their faces to the Inquisitor like flowers following the sun. As Dorian watched, the man pulled back the bowstring again and this time the arrow hit one of the targets. The one next to the target he was facing. Weren’t elves supposed to be good with bows?
It was clear the Inquisition soldiers loved their laughing, archery-impaired leader. On the return to Haven from Redcliffe the senior members of the movement might have argued and second-guessed, but coming through the gates of Haven the soldiers, workers, and pilgrims had crowded close. Saeth had smiled despite his fatigue, greeted those he knew by name, reached out his hands to pat a shoulder or ruffle the hair of a child, and slowed his step to give everyone a chance. And possibly he’d been delaying because he’d known what was waiting at the chantry, where Cassandra and Cullen began chastising him for offering the rebel mages anything other than abject servitude.
So nondescript, this elf. Brown hair, brown eyes, skin tanned and roughened by the weather. Only the outlandish tattoos scrawled across his face made him stand out. Even his eyelids were tattooed black, which must have been painful. Dorian wondered idly if they were a fashion choice.
If you hadn’t seen the Inquisitor face down an army, an archdemon, and a darkspawn magister, you wouldn’t believe he even could. But Dorian had been there, had seen his face when the dragon made its first pass, had watched the small man will himself to be large enough to meet this new thing and overcome it. There was an undeniable brightness to Saeth, but that night in Haven it had become a flame and blazed in defiance. Dorian still didn’t know how that slender body had managed to contain it.
A week later Saeth was bloodied but laughing after a fight with one bandit archer had become a pitched battle that included four more archers, two swordsmen, one heavy infantrymen, and a pair of bears who had been attracted by the commotion. Dorian watched, mystified, as Saeth submitted to rough field first aid from Iron Bull, laughter still dancing in his eyes. “The universe,” he’d declared, “has no sense of proportion.” Dorian hadn’t been able to come up with a response, knowing at least one of the wounds the Qunari was cleaning had happened when Saeth lunged between the mage and a sword. Dorian’s barrier would have been a second too late if the elf hadn’t been there, grunting from the blow that got through his guard before slamming his shield into the bandit’s face, over and over, until there was nothing there but an unrecognizable ruin.
If he were honest with himself, he’d admit that the fact that the Inquisitor was shirtless under Bull’s enormous hands was also somewhat—no, very--distracting. It was an epiphany that so much lean, wiry muscle could fit on a frame that small, but it did explain Saeth’s ability to scale nearly sheer cliffs while wearing armor.
The man was a maddening set of contradictions, but Dorian began to realize that day alongside the revelation of the Inquisitor’s naked upper body that the laughter masked an almost frightening intensity. Iron Bull’s methodical, skilled fighting might be the dependable bulwark, but Saeth flung himself into battle with a grand disregard for danger, seeming to try to fling his sword, shield, and body between the entire world and the threat that hung over it. He went skidding down scree-covered slopes into battle, yelling something incomprehensible in the slippery elven language he spoke. What was one pariah Tevinter mage to do but follow along at his heels and try his damndest to keep the man alive?