ombranera | Open RP Post

There's the usual dull ache that radiates from palm to elbow- not quite so intense that he needs to grind his teeth against it but not so insubstantial the subtle tells Alistair might remember are entirely absent. An edge to his smile, a stillness to his hand, a slow, measured exhale. He won't tell Alistair to let go, won't make a fuss. "I honestly could not remember. It makes for a marvelous nightlight, however."

"If you find eerie green light soothing, sure," Alistair says. He does read the signs, does relinquish the hand—with an air of apology, for the poking, but not too much of one. He won't fuss. Not so blatantly, at least. After a moment he decides, "This would happen to you."

Wrong place, wrong time, big names and luck that could either be very good or very bad depending on the angle it's viewed from. It fits right in with his other stories, really, even if the scope is a bit more—monumental. Maybe Zevran will wind up with a statue of his own somewhere. Maybe. They might round the ears off.

He puts his hand on Zevran's shoulder—the other one, the one not attached to anything that glows, subtle fussing—to give it a bracing squeeze. "So," he says, "can you protect me, if I need it, or should I be asking someone else?"

Zevran is momentarily caught offguard by that- and has his mouth open to ask 'what do you mean' before the meaning sinks in and he simply must laugh. Louder, realer- far more honest for the thready edge of hysteria that coils through the mass of it, rough and weary and slightly helpless before he drags himself back to some somber measure of composure. Even then? It does not laugh. "You know, now that I think of it? I cannot imagine anyone else having this sort of luck."

Terrible luck. To be Spared, to drive out the Crows, to survive against all odds. And now he is the one making the difficult choices.

Impossible ones.

It'd been easier when Jonas made them, but Jonas is not here. Zevran slips a hand up to squeeze Alistair's wrist, smile less pained. "Have I not always kept an eye on your flank, Alistair?"

Alistair doesn't wiggle his eyebrows, because that would require energy and levity and a comfort for that sort of joking that he doesn't currently possess, but he does quirk them up, just once, as if to convey that the possibility of wiggling has been considered. "You are good at that," he says. "I've been declared a traitor and so on. Again. I think I managed to lose the Wardens who were following me—I know these mountains better than they do—but if they find out I'm here, I'm."

In trouble. But not nearly as much trouble as Zevran seems to be in. That's almost comforting.

"Again? Whatever have you done this time- eat the Wardens out of house and home?" It had to be serious, whatever it is. Wardens do not often call one another traitor- but they have all apparently gone missing.

Except for Alistair.

Something else to add to his increasing pile of everyone else's problems only he can solve. Maker's breath, when will it end?

"If they come for you, they will not find you. I am not about to hand you off to just anyone, especially when we've got so much to catch up on."

"Thank you," Alistair says. There's no relief, because he wouldn't have expected otherwise from Zevran, but it is earnest. He knows he's bringing nothing but bad news and trouble. Or almost nothing but that. Bad news, trouble, and a hand for Zev's trouble. And witty one liners. And—

The point is that he's grateful.

"It's a long story," he says, releasing his grip on Zevran's shoulder. "I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."

"Wrong place, wrong time. There is an explosion I do not quite remember and then? I am in chains and accused of causing said explosion." So- honestly? The usual. He motions for Alistair to join him at the table, a half decent bottle of wine waiting for them and scullery maid on the way to the kitchens for something more substantial to eat.

"More than that is terribly dull, to be honest. What of you?"

"Doubt that," Alistair mutters, because nothing is ever dull when Zevran is involved, but he's sitting, he's being asked about—he shakes his head with a rueful little smile and rubs his eyes with one hand, pinching toward the bridge of his nose.

Does Thedas have adhesives? Whatever. Bandage, ripping.

"Warden-Commander Clarel called every Warden in the South to Orlais. We're all hearing the Calling. There was something about blood magic, and I... yelled." It was a lot like the Landsmeet, except he wasn't trying to leave. He tried to stay. He was going to fix it. But then—"then there were guards. Swords. Dead or alive. I made it out by pretending to be you."

It's easy enough to consider this no great concern- Wardens gathering, that's not unusual. He's pouring himself a glass of wine when he hears that damning word.

The Calling.

Most others wouldn't know what it is if they weren't a Warden but Zevran...saw what it made of men. That explains the bruising under Alsitair's eyes, the pale tint to his skin, the exhaustion. He can't sleep. He only manages to keep himself from overfilling his cup by a hair before he sets the bottle aside, all threads of humor gone. "You...pretended to be me?"

"In my head. Sneak sneak."

He holds his hands out in cartoonish mimicry of a person sneaking around a corner. Bruised eyes, pale, a little ragged, yes, but he's not dead yet. And still in less trouble than Zevran, whose wine glass he steals. That's probably against some sort of rule, stealing wine from the Herald of Andraste.

It shouldn't make him laugh. It shouldn't- but it does. A halfhearted crackling thing that stops a breath after it starts- his hand slipping out to catch Alistair's shoulder. "How bad?"

The dreams, the lack of sleep, the song. How much longer did they have?

"Not bad," Alistair says quickly, shrinking against the concern. Maybe this is why Wardens don't have many friends outside the Order. "It's quiet. I could have a year." He drinks his stolen wine, unrepentant. "Or it could have something to do with—I don't know. It shouldn't happen this way. Not to all of us at once. I know Wardens who haven't been with us six months yet who are still hearing it. And you have your Breach. Maybe the weakness in the Veil, or."

Something.

"If I can stay here, I can keep looking into it." He nudges his shoulder up under Zevran's hand. "You have to promise not to do the sad eyes."

It prompts Zevran to actually pour himself a glass. Not quite so full, but more than your average draught of wine. Antivan. Josephine tries to help him feel comfortable however she can, even if he has no idea how she managed to find it and bring it back down this far South. 'Not Bad'. All of them.

It could be whatever's made the breach. Maybe closing it will help?

"This does prove one thing." Zev's hand slips from Alistair's shoulder to his hair, petting it gently like he would a dog. "And you are welcome to stay as long as you like, though I make no promises about the sad eyes. If I must promise? You must promise not to make the sad eyebrows."

"I can't help it," Alistair says. That isn't completely true. He can control his face by emptying it of anything at all, stand there looking blank and stupid, but then Zevran will know, anyway, that Alistair's eyebrows are sad in his heart. Zevran can do masks. That's usually aggravating, but in this case, maybe good. No sad eyes.

Possibly-sad hair petting, on the other hand, is fine. Alistair wrinkles his nose for a moment, like a child having its face cleaned, but at the same time he's leaning into it. Like a dog.

"What does it prove?"

"You really can't." He cracks a laugh, idle petting twisting into combing and this is why he had the guards leave. What would they say to see their herald petting a Fereldan Warden like a particularly well behaved mabari? "I make no promises, but I shall try."

It is more than he can offer, truly.

"Mmm? Ah- among my inner circle as they are called there is a man that claims to be a Warden by the name of Blackwall. I had my suspicions of course. He sleeps far too well and does not eat near enough- and he speaks of the Wardens with such brightened, fairy tale idealism it made me wonder if he was fucking with me or actually bought the idea. Apparently? He does buy it because he's lying. Curious, that."

Alistair—like a particularly well-behaved mabari, yes, or like a man who wasn't sleeping well even before he spent a few weeks sneaking across Thedas and sleeping sitting up with a sword in his hand—closes his eyes and lists sideways against Zevran's combing, though not enough to make continuing to drink the wine impractical. He stays that way for a bit, eyebrows pinching together at Blackwall but otherwise unresponsive until he finally pries his eyes back open and straightens his neck to frown thoughtfully at Zevran.

"There is a Blackwall," he says. "I've never met him, but Duncan—maybe there's some other—"

Explanation. No. There's not.

Alistair puts the glass down and says, wryly, "I hope he isn't using his name because he killed him. I'd have to do something about that."

"Whatever it is I'm certain it will come back around to bite us in the ass sooner or later. We've already laid claim to some resources using the Grey Warden Treaties. Not much, not yet, but enough to make it very embarrassing that we did not, in fact, have a Grey Warden among us at the time." Leliana would have a field day with that but...Zevran gets the idea he's running from something different than the casual murder of a Warden.

Such things are not done casually, after all.

"We will work it out sooner or later. For now all I must worry about is sealing the great hole in the sky. Compared to that everything else is just details."

"Is that all," Alistair says, and leans forward, conspiratorial. There is a brief moment when he looks like he might lean all the way--not like that. All the way over to fall onto the floor and fall asleep. But he doesn't. "We could sneak out in the middle of the night. Be in Antiva before the month is out."

He'd never. And neither would Zevran. Alistair has known that about him possibly longer than Zevran has known it about himself.

"That'd be a marvelous idea- except the Crows are still thick in Antiva and wish me dead." He may have been killing them off in his free time, of which he had plenty, the past few years. Still- There is that wavering moment and Zevran is glad for their privacy, the faint softness around his eyes when he reaches up to rest a hand on Alistair's shoulder could be...misinterpreted.

As something more than friendly concern.

Which is all it was.

"Alas, no. I am stuck seeing this through to the end- for which I blame you. How dare you offer such a sterling example of how one doesn't go mad, drink themselves into a stupor, and flee the country." Most of what he'd cobbled together so far was, more or less, patterned after how they'd handled things during the Blight. Zevran has no idea what he's doing- but is half certain he won't survive long enough for the fallout to make him look bad.

"Save that for the very end," Alistair agrees, very wise and experienced in these matters, and drinks half his wine.

***

The end almost comes too soon, with far too much fleeing and not nearly enough drinking. And too much divine providence. Alistair isn't given to mystical thinking, but he saw what everyone else saw—Zevran facing down a dragon and Zevran buried with Haven and Zevran cresting the ridge of the mountain path, frosty but alive, with his blighted glowing hand—and it's mystifying.

So there's a wary distance, when he finds Zevran by a fire in the pass. (It's the first time he's seen him alone, or close to, without any rapturous singing or weird bald elves swooping in for his attention.) The wariness is one third what even are you, two thirds how dare you. Alistair had wanted to go back, an impulse Leliana shared but quieted. Too many enemy combatants still there. Too many people here who needed defending. Too small a chance of survival. It turns out that it is possible for tears (only a few, very quiet and manly) to freeze to one's face, which is something Alistair could have lived without knowing for multiple reasons.

Anyway. There's a fire. No one is singing. He holds out a blanket, at arm's length.

Close the breach, save the world, move on. Except it did not remove the glow from his hand. It did not stop those massive, monstrous templars from tearing through the camps. It did not stop that creature with its dragon and its words. At least the ultimate enemy did so like to go on and Zevran did, in fact, have an inkling as to what the future might hold- though running right from Redcliffe and all its horrors directly to seal the breach might have been rash.

He had not even had a moment to spare to check in with Alistair. To make certain that he was here and alive and not grown into a part of a cell wall for the sin of trying to protect his childhood home.

But all this, dragons, the future, avalanches- and he'd still managed to save his people because- that is what Jonas would have done. He stayed behind to try and buy time because that is what Alistair would have done. He sits alone after the singing, after the strange, enigmatic conference with Alistair to process that much blood on his hands, the odd detachment from guilt that only truly slams into him when he looks up and sees Alistair. His face does not crumple, exactly, but it does shift. No longer half so numb or chilled and it is undignified to stand so suddenly and stumble over- he will blame the cold. Blame the snow for tripping into the blanket and against him. Blame exhaustion for how he clung afterward. "I did not know if you made it out."

He manages, eventually.

For a moment Alistair holds his arms out, hands hovering. Normally he wouldn't hesitate. But normally Zevran hasn't so recently come back from the apparent dead, and normally there's no image for either of them to worry about maintaining. (Alistair would never admit having a mind for that sort of thing, and will discard said mind whenever it suits him better to be publicly loud and unmanageable, but he does. A peculiarity of his upbringing.)

"I'm very durable," he says as he relents and wraps his arms around Zevran's shoulders. However little people might want to see the Herald clinging to anyone else for comfort, it's probably worse if it doesn't look mutual. Anyway, he wants to. "You know that. Thick skull."

A beat. A squeeze. A thorough confirmation that Zevran is solid and—not really warm, but not reanimated corpse-cold, and not going to dissipate in a strong wind. Then Alistair pushes him back by the shoulders to look him in the face.

"Don't do that again." The freed blanket falls into the snow. "You're out of luck. You have to be. That's all the luck there is. There's no way—"

"I told Leliana to be sure." Whatever happened to him, they needed to live. If he failed, they could rally the rest, could pull this forward into something else. She'd understood. However strange he might find her now- she understands. For that there are no words he can say to express his gratitude.

Though it probably isn't what Alistair wants to hear.

He sags where he stands for a moment, for two, out this far he's sure most aren't lingering for some manner of glimpse of him, and if they saw this? He wouldn't care. He is allowed a few moments to be mortal. To be Zevran. Of course as soon as he's comfortable Alistair pushes him back and the blanket falls, wracking Zevran with minute tremors he fights to suppress out of habit. "Do what?"

Oh. "I was out of luck a decade ago. This is all just...extra."

"That is not comforting."

And it's Zevran's job to comfort him. Clearly. In addition to carrying the hopes of all of Thedas in his freaky glowing hand. The moment when Alistair realizes he's being an unfair bastard is visible, eyes unnarrowing and gaze shifting vaguely toward his shoulder, where Alistair still has a firm grip on him.

Something shakes. It takes him a second to realize it's Zevran and not his own hands.

He lets go. Fetches the blanket. Drops it over Zevran, head and all, like an unfitted cloak.

"If you do it again, I'm going to sing," he threatens.

"I do not know what you want me to say." It is unfair- and Alistair knows he is being unfair and Zevran is too cold, too overwhelmed, too afraid of this thing in his hand and the rather sudden enormity of what's before him that needs to be done to try to think of the most soothing words for Alistair's distress.

It should be easy but- it isn't. Just this once he wishes the tables turned- that he might lean and Alistair might hold fast. Perhaps that, too, is unfair of him and his shoulder slump, curling in against the cold. The thought occurs that he should return to the fire when the blanket is dumped upon him again- tugging it so he can peer through the makeshift hood as he wraps it tight about himself takes but a moment. "...That is not nearly as terrifying as you might think."

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