ombranera | Open RP Post

Alistair stays on the boulder—colder now himself, but that's all right. He's hardy. "I'm staying with Master Dennet," he says. It's true. When he sleeps, which he may not for a while, Dennet isn't afraid to kick him awake if he gets noisy. Maybe because he remembers when Alistair was small enough to be picked up by the scruff of the neck and troublesome enough to need it. "You go on. Pavus is probably frozen solid."

"All the more reason to thaw him out, yes? We shall commiserate about the unforgiving southern winter." There's a moment when he looks back over his shoulder and considers remaining. Sleep does not come easily to either of them- there is the same understanding of why. Alistair the dreams, Zevran the ache. But...it would invite things best left alone. Thoughts he'd laid to rest a decade ago that were easier to put from his mind when the only contact he had with Alistair was through letters or the odd visit.

He could remain, and it would be foolish. A knife that cuts. He knows better. With a wave and dip of his head, he slips into the shadows to, indeed, find Pavus and his tent and his bedroll. There is more wine drunk and idle chatter than anything truly sordid but- well. Assumptions shall be made.

***

He scouts to the north as expected of him. Keeps ahead and guides even though anyone that knows him (Alistair and everyone that followed him across the Hinterlands and Fallow Mire) knows full well he is a terrible scout and tracker. Give him a city, that is what he knows. All this endless white is blinding- but he walks through the days and makes the rounds at night, going from fire to fire to speak with The Bull, to flirt with Dorian, to make certain Sera isn't bored outside of her mind and causing mischief. Conferring with the Advisors, listening to Mother Giselle. Finding quiet moments to, perhaps, revisit his broken and distant relationship with the Maker privately, going over the old canticles in Antivan that he learned as a child.

Not avoiding Alistair but not lingering either. Until they have somewhere safe? He cannot rest easily and that would worry the Warden. A week they spend traveling north and 'soon, I promise, son' Solas whispers at this last meeting before he peels away in the pre dawn and gawks at the perfectly formed (albeit in need of some repair) fortress. Marvelous luck. Highly suspicious. But he is too grateful to have somewhere, to glad to have a destination to think on it for the moment. They set up stalls, claim rooms, light dusty hearths. The advisors mumbling and glancing at him emphatically, the murmurs of 'savior' skittering along his skin until he feels fit to fling himself from the battlements just to free himself of the weight of their expectation.

He hides in the stables, finally. Tucks himself up in the rafters with a bottle of pilfered Antivan Brandy and tries very hard not to think of what this will mean. What more they could possibly want from him.

Alistair doesn't look up, at first; he comes in with heavy boots and carelessly slammed doors, an Alistair in its natural unobserved state—humming, too, absentminded and melancholy, but there's nothing sad to match it about his movements. The Wardens are still fucked, but the Inquisition is safe. He's been fed recently. He's sweaty. He's been helping clear rubble out of the fortress. He rubs a horse's nose in passing, strips out of his shirt without pausing his walk, and tosses himself face-down onto a well-used blanket on a pile of hay in the back corner. It all happens very quickly and noisily.

But then he rolls over, trying to get comfortable, and sees Zevran. The sight makes him flinch, but once he's done that and briefly pressed an overdramatic hand to his chest to demonstrate that Zevran scared him, he takes better stock of the scene—Zevran perched up in the rafters—and says, "C-caw."

"...?" Zevran peers down over the rafters at Alistair- he'd known who it was from the moment he'd slammed the door open and shut and dismissed any potential threat. Or being found. But apparently he is being cawed at and there he is, flopped down on a blanket in the hay-

"Why do you not have a proper room?" Save the world, get a bedroom. That should be a rule of some sort. "I will speak to Josephine about this."

Which means dropping down and finding her but...later. For now he lounges like a cat, sipping his brandy, squinting down at Alistair.

"Ooh, will I get the proper room without a floor or the proper room without a ceiling? Or the one overgrown with ivy? I want that one. It'd be like camping."

He props himself up on his elbows, head craned back to smile at him.

"Not to insult your castle," he says. Or a little to insult his castle, so he doesn't get a big head, but Alistair is here because he likes it, regardless—it's like home, especially when Dennet is wandering around talking to the horses in the morning, and the animals mean he's never alone and therefore that much less at risk of going mad and beating his head against a wall to get the sound out.

But maybe Zevran wanted to be alone. Hiding in the rafters and drinking seems like definite want-to-be-alone behavior.

"Who are you hiding from? If it's me, I can go."

"Well if you're going to be an ass about it." He rolls his eyes, propping his chin on a hand while sipping straight from the bottle, wincing only when Alistair calls it 'his' castle. "It is not mine. It is the Inquisition's."

Which he is a part of and apparently holds some manner of vital key to but he is trying very hard not to think about that. All he wishes to think about is the warm sands of Antiva, the fish chowder, the familiar and comforting call of whores at work, the smell of leather in the tanneries. Instead he is here. On top of a mountain in the middle of the maker forsaken south, trying to cobble an army together.

"I am not hiding from anyone." Well, no, that is a lie compounded by a call of his name from outside the barn that has him scrabbling back into shadow. Cassandra pokes her head in, peering about for a moment before slipping back outside to continue the search. "...everyone. I am hiding from everyone."

Ass makes Alistair grin, proud of himself, but it doesn't last in the face of Zevran's grouchiness. Or his backwards slide into the shadows at Cassandra's call. Alistair holds still and silent, too, until she leaves, just to be careful.

Then—"that's a lot of people."

He decides, presumptuously, that everyone doesn't include him, and he hoists himself and his sweaty bulk back up out of the hay to look for a way up to where Zevran is. He doesn't genuinely expect to find one. Not one he can actually climb. But for the principle of it, to say I care about you enough to look like a clumsy idiot, he'll try.

"Have you tried throwing them out of your castle?" Just to be obnoxious. Meanwhile he's climbing precariously to balance on a stable door and grab for the beams overhead. "I bet you could."

"No shit." Comes from the shadows. Perhaps he should live here, in the quiet, where no one can find him. Perhaps he can learn to be invisible again, small and silent and demure enough that people will stop looking for him, looking to him for answers. For guidance. He is an assassin, no great hero. No Jonas Cousland, no Marian Hawke. This is not his life and yet, somehow, it is.

He'd rather it wasn't.

Zevran's voice is only slightly sullen when he repeats. "It is not my castle."

Even if it was, he wouldn't want it. A manor where it was warm, with beaches and lovely men and women naked and glistening under the sun- that is what he wants. Not this.

Alistair misses the beam. He doesn't fall—he's prepared for the miss—but he does have to jump heavily back down onto the floor to avoid it. "Gardiens échosondeurs," he says, with his terrible Orlesian accent. "Chateau Zevran, zey weel call eet."

He climbs back up. Catches the beam, this time, and he's easily strong enough to hoist himself up and get his arms over the top of it, and then—dangle there. It isn't actually large enough a beam for him to sit on. If he gets a leg over he'll fall off the other side. But he isn't ready to give up, so dangle there he does.

"Why are you avoiding everyone? You saved them. They love you."

"You are going to fall and hurt yourself." He mutters. "And I am going to laugh."

He should drop down before that happens, he knows, but he was here first. He has a right to sulk and hide and drink and not face this weighty reality for a little while longer but no, he isn't permitted that and it makes his jaw ache for how he clenches his teeth against it. "Get down, Alistair."

Rolling off, like a cat, he lands near that soft, worn blanket over hay. Settles there instead. If it'll keep Alistair from hurting himself. "They love an idea. They do not know me. They don't care to know me."

"No, I've got it, I just need to—"

Zevran hops down. That's well enough, since Alistair still hadn't thought of a plan or an end to that sentence. With Zevran on the ground he shuts up and drops obediently to join him, to sit in the hay next to the blanket and begin picking out the handful of tiny splinters he managed to get stuck in his arms. It doesn't hurt.

"It's a good idea," he says, but he does understand, sort of. Even if his own role was very much hero's sidekick, now with a side of quiet disgrace, he doesn't like the way people look at him sometimes. He can't be what they want. He flicks one of the splinters away and reaches for Zevran's glowing hand instead. Aiming to inspect it. As if he'd be able to tell if it's getting worse.

"It's a lie." A role he'd taken, a mask he'd put on for the sake of the Inquisition- to play the part of the noble hero. It is something he can somewhat manage, pretending to be Jonas. To be Alistair. It's a terrible idea but they love it all the same and he wants. He wants his life back. he wants his hand back.

The hand he lets Alistair take without question or anything more than a faint glare- but there is no heat in it. Not really. "I have thought about cutting it off."

He says, drunk enough to be honest but not so much to actually do this thing. "I could give it to Solas. He could put it on a stick and use it however he wanted."

"Do you think that would work?"

Alistair flattens his hand to look at his palm, head bent. He doesn't touch it again. If anything he's almost comically ginger, overcompensating for his blunt, callused fingers and previous prodding.

"I think I am running out of my ability to care if it does or not." They do not need him, they need his hand. He never asked for this. He never wanted a life like this. Grand adventure is more grand without people relying upon you for more than a dagger to an enemy's throat.

His fingers twitch faintly, the glow brighter, perhaps, for sealing the breach.

After a moment of contemplation, Alistair releases his hand and grabs his bottle away, eyebrows slanted—that's enough, but he's not serious, and he holds it back out once he's stolen a swig.

"I hear Rivain is nice," he says, temporarily indulgent, "for a certain definition of nice. You could get a hook."

"Well what are we waiting for? Find me a cleaver and have done with it. I can find us a ship in less than an hour once we reach the coast." Maker knows they've horses enough-

Be it the Brandy or the exhaustion or the distinct lack of a playful smirk as he flexes his glowing palm- Zevran sounds entirely serious. Cut the damn thing off and let him be finished with this part of the tale.

Alistair cranes his neck around, searching for a cleaver he knows isn't there, before slumping back in surrender on the hay, low on his elbows. Low enough to knock his temple against Zevran's shoulder. "Later," he says. "I'm tired."

If he's cutting off hands, he needs a nap first.

After a moment, more seriously, he says, "I couldn't go with you. If you really want to go. I have—" A few months to live, if things don't change. Or, less depressingly: "—the Wardens to worry about. Someone has to shout at them, when this is over, and if Pentaghast does it they'll cry."

"And why is that?" Angry, now, and he sounds it. Bitter and sullen and frustrated and even his attempts to flee somehow thwarted by the world at large. "What more could you possibly owe them? Have you not given enough?"

Is a decade of service, is not ending a blight more than enough to offer him something good and warm and not terrible for however long he has left?

"You're drunk," Alistair says, in place of anything serious—that he owes them everything, that they get his life, that he wants to die fighting like he's supposed to. "And you're not leaving."

"I am." He will. He needs to. "Before they force me to do anything else."

Close the breach, they'd said, and he'd done it. He owes them nothing. "I am not going to stay and become a pawn in their crusade. Elves die in such crusades. If I am going to be killed I'd rather it be something personal instead of being made a bullshit martyr for whatever cause they see to paint as mine."

Do it for me, Alistair doesn't say—or does say, possibly, in the way he glances up at Zevran's face and then puts his cheek against Zevran's shoulder, like a dog's needy lean. But he can't say it. The best he could say is do it for the Wardens. Do it for Thedas. Do it so there's an Antiva left to retire to afterwards.

"Why did you stay to help with the Archdemon?" he asks instead. "You couldn't have liked us that much."

He doesn't look. If he doesn't look he won't see what Alistair does not say- but he knows him. He can feel his eyes imploring, can hear his eyebrows doing the sad, somber angling. His hand slips up all the same, combing through his hair and his-

This is a reason to remain. To see this through. These quiet moments. This infuriatingly charming man. "I swore an oath."

And he kept those, as few of them that he made. "You and Jonas are shit at minding your flank. Someone needed to watch it for you."

That makes him grin, mention of Jonas and all, cheek stretching and swelling against Zevran's arm. "Stick it out for a while and I'll watch yours," he offers. His eyes are shut. The only reason Zevran's petting won't put him to sleep is that he's still holding himself up on his elbows. After a moment he manages to muster up some selfishness: "Just until we sort out the Wardens, Zev. Please? Leliana cares. I don't know if anyone else does."

"If I stay now I will not be able to leave later." He knows what that murmuring means, the glances, the hope. Political plotting, mentions of faith. of needing a leader. He'd thought nothing of scouting ahead and now? now he sees it for what it was. A ploy to make him indispensable. To make him important. "Either I leave tomorrow at dusk or I am shackled to this Inquisition until it kills me."

And it would. He has no doubt of that.

That's enough to make Alistair sit up, open his eyes, and insist on Zevran looking him in the face. "I won't let it," he says. That isn't his to promise—it's too big, the mark on Zevran's hand is too strange, he might not live long himself—but he does, anyway, because he cares too much and too stubbornly to admit it isn't possible. "Zev."

He chews the inside of his mouth for a moment, then lies down, head and shoulders beyond Zevran's back but a heavy arm sliding around his waist so he can't just slip away if Alistair dozes.

"If you want to go, you should go. But stay with me for a few minutes."

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