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Zevran figured Aedan Cousland would be the death of him; if not felled by the Warden’s own blade, surely their relentless pursuit of darkspawn would leave him a shredded puddle of flesh and blood on the battlefield.
What he hadn’t expected to put an end to his miserable little existence was hypothermia, of all things. Yet there he lay, shivering in a tight ball underneath as many blankets as the Grey Wardens could spare—which actually wasn’t all that many, woefully thin when faced with the bite of the aptly-named Frostback Mountains. And he had neither a full stomach nor a particularly pleasing bedfellow to lull him into a fitful sleep, thanks to a certain Grey Warden incapable of distinguishing onion from potato—or even understanding why such a distinction would matter in the first place—and his stalwart refusal to take any of Zevran’s flirtations seriously. He didn’t have to put up with any of this nonsense as a Crow; nevertheless, he continued to freeze to death night after night, instead of stealing away under the cover of darkness, back to Antiva where he belonged.
The Maker certainly had a cruel sense of irony.
Another gust of wolfish wind rattled his supposedly watertight tent, and Zevran could swear that this time, a fat snowflake fluttered through the tent flaps and melted into his socks. He cursed the Maker, cursed the Crows, cursed Loghain, cursed the whole stupid lot of Grey Wardens and not-exactly-Grey-Wardens, then slipped his boots on his feet. Surely a run through the woods would warm him up, or at least tire him out. With any luck, he’d catch a fever, too.
Outside, the cold nipped at his exposed cheeks, the tips of his ears, the skin around his fingernails. Large evergreens rose high above the campsite, blocking out most of the star-lit sky, but enough of the moon shone through that he could make it to the edge of the campsite unharmed.
Mostly.
“Ow!”
Zevran’s boot connected with a solid form on the ground, and he careened forward, just barely managing to stay upright. His shoulder smarted on the harsh bark of the tree he caught himself with, but he’d braved worse. The body on the ground scrambled to stand, placing two warm, steadying hands on Zevran’s shoulders. Belated, but a thoughtful gesture nonetheless.
“Zev! You alright?”
A couple of blinks, and Aedan came into view, brows furrowed in concern as he scanned Zevran up and down for signs of injury.
A very shirtless Aedan.
Already the night felt warmer.
“Nothing a lengthy massage could not fix,” Zevran replied, bait in a trap for anyone willing to be caught, the words layered with just enough of a teasing lilt that they could be misconstrued as a joke. It was difficult to tell where he stood with Aedan, how far he could push until the other man did something about it, one way or another. The others scowled, rolled their eyes, stalked off, always a firm rejection of both the joke and its underlying truth. But Aedan would only ever laugh, give him a firm pat on the shoulder, take it for nothing more than a joke when Zevran was, perhaps, most truthful when it came to him. Never a ‘no’, but certainly not a ‘yes’ either, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with that.
Because sometimes, sometimes, Zevran caught him staring.
Yet again, Aedan laughed that sickeningly good-natured laugh of his as he released his hold on Zevran’s shoulders. Zevran would’ve bemoaned the loss of warmth, except Aedan opted to cross his arms, defining the sculpted musculature of his broad chest and framing a delicious smattering of golden hair and criss-crossed scars that Zevran wanted to trace with his tongue (by the Maker, he needed to get his thoughts under control). He forced his gaze back up to Aedan’s face—no less gorgeous but at the very least, appropriate to stare at—and asked, “Might I inquire as to the reason you’re half-naked in this frigid weather? Have the darkspawn made off with your nightclothes when your back was turned?”
“Frigid? I’m positively sweltering in my tent. Came outside to cool down.”
Zevran had the singular experience of his brain melting out of his ears, then freezing back to solid at the base of his jaw. Fereldens, he swore in the name of all that was holy.
“It must be the dog, then,” Zevran decided. “Another body to share heat with. If you were half as chivalrous as you pretended to be, you’d loan him out to the rest of us.”
“You’re interested in a sleepover with Dog?” Aedan cocked his head, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, the same one that briefly flickered across his lips whenever he spoke about his older brother, his mother or his father, before it withdrew into that sullen sadness as he neared his story’s end. “All you had to do was ask him. Morrigan’s got him tonight, though—not that she’d ever admit it—but he makes his rounds. I could put in a good word for you?”
“You wound me, Warden. The notion that I would need anyone’s help in securing a bedfellow is, quite frankly, insulting.”
“My deepest apologies; I’m certain you are more than capable, in that regard. Perhaps you’ll allow me to make it up to you?”
Zevran suppressed a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold—surely Aedan was not so blind as to miss the insinuation in his own words—then drew on his slyest honeyed smirk, the trap that always, always, ensnared his mark. “My dear Warden, are you offering to… warm me up, as it were?”
Another chuckle. “I meant only to offer you my blanket,” Aedan said, and blast it all, Zevran wished he found the man’s bullheaded earnestness less endearing. “It’s not yet cold enough for me to use it.”
“I dread the day you Fereldens deem the temperature ‘cold enough’ to warrant one. You might wake to find your favorite Antivan encased in a block of ice.” As if to emphasize his point, Zevran closed his arms around himself, trying to rub some of the heat back into his body. While a shirtless Aedan was certainly a pleasure he seldom experienced, it wasn’t quite worth the frostbite seeping into his extremities, and his eyelids threatened to droop with each passing moment.
“Well, I certainly cannot abide that.” Aedan started for his tent, Zevran close behind, steadfastly ignoring his heart’s sudden lurch at the thought that he was Aedan’s favorite anything, because that would mean acknowledging that his attraction ran a little deeper than mere skin. And when one faced imminent death every waking day, it was best not to get too attached, or so he’d been telling himself in his years since being sold to the Crows.
“Is Ferelden truly that much colder than Antiva?” Aedan asked, shaking Zevran from his thoughts.
“Not even winters near these temperatures, and I am not in the habit of sleeping outside for that time.”
They reached his tent, where Aedan stooped down on all fours to pull the blanket from inside, providing Zevran with an absolutely decadent view of his arse and all the flexing back muscles leading up to it. From anyone else, he might consider it a bid for attention, but as far as he could tell, Aedan seemed utterly oblivious to his many, many assets. Not that such obliviousness ever stopped him from accidentally using them.
Aedan’s head popped back into view, wavy golden locks framing his marble-carved face, his normally warm brown eyes rendered pools of midnight. He offered a single folded blanket to Zevran like a knight knelt before his king, sword proffered in steadfast duty. A sudden, glaring reminder that it was supposed to be Zevran serving Aedan, not the other way around. That he should steal three blankets away for himself, leaving Aedan, the man to whom he’d pledged his life, with zero, when a thin layer of frost crunched the grass beneath their boots—some gratitude that was.
He closed his fingers around the thin sheet of wool, but didn’t allow himself to take it, not yet. “Are you certain you won’t need this? It’s snowing.”
“Hardly,” Aedan scoffed. “I've seen maybe a handful of snowflakes since sunset.”
“The ground has frozen solid.”
“I run hot.” Aedan shrugged, rising to his feet. The man was nearly a head taller than Zevran, and Zevran was showing remarkable restraint in keeping his gaze on Aedan’s face when it would be so much easier—and result in much less neck pain—to stare at his chest instead. Aedan held an arm wrist-up between them. “Here, feel.”
If there ever came a time when Zevran refused an excuse to touch Aedan Cousland, he hoped the group would slay the imposter and free the true Zevran from imprisonment. He wrapped long fingers around the swell of Aedan’s strong, scarred forearm, and—by the Maker, the man’s skin raged like an inferno.
“Are you running a fever?” Worry took shape in the crease of Zevran’s brows. “If you’re ill, perhaps I should not stand quite so close.”
Aedan’s pout was nearly impressive enough for Zevran to believe it, save for the slight quiver where Aedan fought back a grin. “You mean to tell me you wouldn’t lovingly nurse me back to health?”
“Ah, but why choose me to nurse you, when Wynne is clearly far more capable, and possesses a far more impressive bosom upon which to lay your head while she wipes the sweat from your feverish brow?”
Aedan’s nose scrunched up in the most adorably repulsed fashion, like a puppy biting into citrus, as he swatted Zevran’s arm. “She’s old enough to be your grandmother! And—”
“There is no finer delicacy than a woman with experience, I have come to find.”
“—and,” he continued, an exasperated laugh escaping with the word. “Do you think she’d appreciate your talk of her—erm, body, behind her back like this? Like she’s a prized cut of meat at the market?”
Zevran nearly gagged at the respectful-knightly-chivalry of it all, held back only by the small, absolutely infuriating part of him that found it adorable, along with the rest of Aedan’s pouting and nose-scrunching and blindingly brilliant smiling. There was something just so uniquely… good about the Grey Warden—something he’d thought humanity had previously driven to extinction—and it tugged on heartstrings he hadn’t realized he still possessed. Refused to possess, because that would mean facing all those uncomfortable, sticky feelings simmering beneath the surface head-on, and quite frankly, he was an assassin for a reason.
No, much better to shamelessly flirt and tease and hope all that goodness wouldn’t prevent Aedan from indulging in a night or two of meaningless pleasure.
“Very well, Warden,” he acquiesced. “I shall reserve my talk of her bosom for when she is present, and can weigh in on the discussion.”
“That’s better. At least, I think it’s better?” He pressed the blanket firmly into Zevran’s grasp, and only then did Zevran realize that he hadn’t yet released Aedan’s wrist, and now that it had been freed, his fingers burned with renewed frostbite. “Regardless, you’re cold, and I hope this will be enough to help you warm up.”
“Thank you. Though it seems that, if I truly wished to stay warm tonight, you would make a far more effective blanket, no? Steal some of your heat for myself.”
The corners of Aedan’s mouth kicked up like a reflex, before an expression almost like realization dawned on his face. His cheeks took on an unmistakable pink hue even in the soft glow of moonlight half-shadowed by trees, eyes darting everywhere but Zevran’s face. “I—! If that’s something you—I mean, uh…” One hand scratched awkwardly at the back of his head, fingers tangled in silk-spun gold. Zevran’s own fingers ached to caress, to comb, to tug and twist and touch; to know if Aedan’s hair was truly as soft as it looked, if it held a braid or slipped through curious fingers like water (by the Maker, he really needed to get his thoughts under control). “If you think that’d help, I’m, erm… always willing to be of service.”
Well, wasn’t that unexpected?
“Oh?” Zevran practically purred, taking a step closer. Even from a distance, he could feel the blessed heat radiating off him; it couldn’t possibly be natural. Some kind of Grey Warden side effect, like sensing Darkspawn or eating inhuman amounts of barely-palatable gruel. “Is the impenetrable Aedan Cousland finally taking me up on my offer for a night of pleasure?”
Blush deepening, Aedan sputtered, “Not like that! I… If you’re cold, I’ve plenty of heat to go around. And it…” He inhaled sharply, squared his posture, and held Zevran’s gaze with resolute determination. “It might help me sleep through the night, too, if I had someone to soak up all the excess.”
Zevran’s heart pounded in his chest like a clap of thunder as he got caught up in that look , the one that made Aedan promise impossible things, made people believe in impossibilities, made him inexplicably, impossibly, deliver. Yes, he will free the Arl’s son from demonic influence, he will traverse the Fade, he will recover a sacred relic lost to time. He will save everyone, simply because he promised that he would.
What, then, was the promise in the words he spoke now?
“As you wish.”
Aedan fetched his bedroll and followed Zevran back to his tent, loudly clamoring in behind him; truly, the man had the grace of a rabid dog escaping a river. As Zevran tucked himself into his own bedroll, heart hammering in a way he hadn’t experienced since his first mission as a Crow—by the Maker, when was the last time he’d been nervous to share a bed with someone—he shivered beneath the layers, drawing his arms around himself, his knees to his chest. In the time he’d spent outside, his blankets had turned to ice, the blood in his veins slogging through his body half-frozen. He tried cupping his hands over his ears, but they burned before they warmed, so he let them remain numb. Meanwhile, Aedan had tucked himself into the opposite side of the tent, as far from Zevran as physically possible—some blanket he turned out to be.
“I thought the point of sharing body heat was to actually share it,” Zevran griped through chattering teeth. At least he could blame the gooseflesh running up his arms on the cold.
“Maker, I kept you outside far too long, didn’t I?” A pang of regret wilted Aedan’s voice. “Here, may I—?”
Shuffling, then a warm, hot, burning hand came to rest on Zevran’s shoulder. It stroked down to his elbow, then back up, over and over again, faster and faster, like the rubbing of two sticks to start a fire. But the only firestarter in this tent was the too-hot wrenching in his gut, a pang of relief, of anxiety for what that relief might mean, of drawing one step nearer to what he truly wanted, of remaining still so distant, of not knowing. Of being close, but not close enough.
“You may do much more than that, Warden.”
His voice came out far lower, rougher than he’d intended, almost strained with the weight of the truth in his words. The hand stilled. He couldn’t see Aedan’s face in the darkness, but the exact shade of his rosy cheeks had branded itself behind his eyes, and it sang to him now.
Two scorching arms crushed Zevran against Aedan’s chest. The sudden inferno ravaged his icy skin, and Zevran sucked in a sharp, involuntary breath—too much warmth too quickly hurt, his flesh fizzling like water in a hot pan. Aedan’s heart danced beneath Zevran’s fingertips, stuttering out of time with his own rapidly accelerating pulse. A nose buried itself in Zevran’s hair, lips a whisper against his forehead, and Aedan inhaled like he wanted to memorize this scent.
“Is—is this okay, Zev?”
He’d never sounded so uncertain.
“Yes,” he assured. The burgeoning innuendo on his tongue tasted like ash, and the truth was a bone-deep burn too fresh, too raw to expose, so he swallowed them both back down. Instead, he yawned, and Aedan echoed the sound, heartbeat slowing to a strong, steady rhythm that lulled Zevran into gentle sleep.