Dragon Age Fic: You will climb till you find places you'll never let go; M
TITLE:You will climb till you find places you'll never let go
PAIRING: Fem!Brosca/Zevran
RATING: M so in other words NSFW
WORDS: 6000-ish
SUMMARY: He doesn't love her because she is brave and would love her even if she wasn't.
NOTES: Eh. I needed to get this Zev!love out of the system during the holidays, apparently. I've poked around in it forever now.
you will climb till you find places you'll never let go
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul
(pablo neruda / sonnet xvii)
x.
It is not difficult to spare him.
Brosca watches him crawl in the surface dirt and - slithering like a snake - he offers a deal that she pretends not to consider at first while he persists in his mission, adding texture to the promise. She has no thirst for blood, not anymore, not after Ostagar. (Had she ever?) So she shrugs and stretches out a hand and he swears to be her man until she decides he is no longer useful.
Of course, the others have scant praise for her that night.
Of course, the others don't realise how only a shell of a body and an Antivan accent separates him from her. So few things, small things.
“Why?” Alistair demands to know, frenetically scrubbing plates over a pail of dirty water.
And he would never understand so she makes up a lie about always finding a use for a skilled assassin. He is no fool but lets it pass, adopting a new kind of posture around the elf as though he observes him with his entire body, deeming mere eyesight inefficient.
x.
“Why?” Zevran asks conversationally when he has been allowed in their camp for many nights already. His only duty, Wynne has decided through pursed lips, is to clean their equipment and he does this gracefully without complaints. Brosca finds that her leather armour has a brand new shine to it and it feels supple over her body, resembling a seamless layer of skin.
He has asked before and she has told him on those occasions that he's useful, that allies are few and far between, that she prefers to keep assassins where she can see them. Not lies, but at the same time no more than bits of truth. He has accepted the answers but she knows he is still awaiting the truthful one, the reason.
“Birds of a feather,” she offers tonight.
“Ah. I see.” Zevran nods and something softens in his expression at that, something else appearing in its somewhat new structure: a smile replacing the usual smirk.
x
He instantly calls her Natia.
After months with travelling companions who have no idea it's her given name, who takes Brosca in their mouths without asking if it is a family name or something she has merely decided to call herself, it feels strange to hear it. A chill down her spine, wine-breaths and sour dreams shattering around them in the dirt. Leske used to call her that in the beginning, too, before they became Leske and Brosca. Leske-and-Brosca and a handful of sodding delusions.
Natia. And it rolls off his tongue like pleasantries and improper suggestions blended with a trace of familiarity, of intimacy.
x.
They find a rhythm. All of them, moving together and apart, heading towards the same faded spot in the distant future that appears more elusive each day of their quest.
They find their roles, play their parts.
Brosca commands and she is rarely questioned; Alistair is her second, her shadow; Morrigan keeps a disdainful distance but sweeps through the camp's surrounding at night, mumbling protective wards; Leliana and Wynne keep everyone's spirits up and Sten guards them in silence.
And Zevran find his way into Brosca's tent on more occasions than one, earning himself a place as her confidant or something close enough, at least for those moments when she allows herself the luxury of forgetting history and hoping to better it at the same time.
x.
“Duel me,” she orders a foggy morning outside Redcliffe. It has been a frustrating day - many of those in a row, as a matter of fact - and her mood demands simple obedience. Before, when they were fewer, she would spar with Alistair who taught her how to avoid his shield and she catches him in the corner of her eye even now, crossing their camp with Zevran.
Big, strong Alistair who bashes a shield-full of iron into her side and pierces her armour in an off-hand attack and he lets her win because he thinks it's a nice thing to do. (It's patronising but she never tells, it might not even be his fault.)
Zevran is smooth, fast on his feet and deadly. His slim contours appear everywhere at once and nowhere to be found; he fights nothing like a dwarf but resembles one all the same, his determination mirroring a proud warrior's while his skills are those of a backstabbing Antivan. Brosca is stronger. Zevran is faster. She overpowers him and he slips away, her twin blades soar in the air above him as he's on the ground, seemingly defeated but before she can finish he has climbed on top of her, grinning as he holds a vial of blood red poison in his left hand.
“Now this, my dear, would go very well in your little wound there,” he drags a gloved hand across her upper arm where their duel has left its mark. “All it takes is two drops-”
“Jequirity,” she says, still breathless. “Interesting. I would have used snakeroot, myself.”
“Tsk, tsk, such crudeness does not become you,” he comments as he leaps off her body and helps her to her feet.
x.
“Indulge me,” he mock-orders with a curl to his lips that could be mistaken for cruelty but that Brosca recognises as anticipation. He stands in front of her with a bottle of wine and she folds her arms, watching him.
“Did you rob Wynne's secret pack?”
“Now, now,” he places the bottle on the ground, then swiftly breaks the seal and picks it up again. “There is no reason to suspect foul play every time I happen to stumble upon-” he squints to read the hand-written label, “-home made strawberry wine.”
She sighs. A weariness tears at her tonight, small tugs at the orderly mind she must keep, tiny tears at the tightly woven fabric. Zevran holds the bottle against her mouth, waiting. When she doesn't drink, he shrugs and takes a mouthful.
“Here I thought I might lure a smile out of you, my friend. And a tale or two.”
Brosca watches her feet in the flickering shadows. There is trust between them - oaths even - and he would never, but she cannot be too certain and there are lines they would do best never to cross, paths leading to that very spot inside her that reminds her of the essence of him. The brutal physicality of him wrestling itself inside her head until she cannot walk without feeling him, cannot touch herself without doing it with his hands guiding her own, cannot dream without his features appearing, rubbing against the frail edges of her sleeping reality. Sodding elf.
“A tale?”
The lines are thin and she is beginning to feel afraid.
“I find myself curious of how life was in Orzammar.” He smiles brightly, handing her the bottle again. “Surely it could not hurt to tell me?”
“You will see for yourself all too soon,” she mutters, but eventually the too-sweet swirls of wine rotating in her mouth and trickling down her spine break her silence, like he planned.
x.
On their journey through the Brecilian Passage, five days away from Gwaren and en eternity from everything else, they are ambushed. A horde led by fifteen sodding darkspawn emissaries and Natia fights, shouting commands to the others she fights and she runs and she has the breath smashed out of her as a hurlock fells her to the wet, cold ground and then she remembers nothing else.
“--little reason to doubt my healing potions...pester me about this day and night, Zevran!”
“--do not pester you, my darling Wynne, I merely-”
“She needs rest!”
All is darkness. Throbbing hammer blows in her head, a smithy of dark, heavy things and pain. Everything is pain. She breathes it, breathes the blows and floats away on the waves of torment where nothing can reach her. Voices outside of her prison brush against her walls, but they carry no directions, no solutions.
Forever, she is lost. She dreams of darkspawn, hears the archdemon preach to his hordes and wakes up, feverish and terrified in a tent she does not recognise as her own. There is incense in the air, candles around her body and she gasps as her balance momentarily crumbles as though she is about to fall. Then she is firmly in place again, two hands on her shoulders and a flat, hard body of safety behind her own.
“I've got you, my dear Warden,” Zevran whispers in her ear and perhaps she ought to be surprised that it's him, but the truth is that she isn't.
x.
When Zevran first kisses her he kneels like an improbable knight in a storybook.
The banter leading up to that moment, his well-versed coyness that she doesn't know if she loathes or finds curiously endearing and his filthy mouth, promising adventure. It all cracks - or does it? - as he stands before her, pulling her down and she must not think of Rica's stone-forsaken romantic tales and she does not because this is a chapter in his own tome of ancient knowledge, probably planned every step of the way.
And he is down on his knees and she falls into him, like a chord snapping.
x.
Easy come, easy go, he assures her.
She nods. It is for the best. Truly.
Before dawn, as Alistair and Sten put more wood on the fire and pretend they can't spot her in the dusk, she walks the scant steps over to his tent again and he looks up, decidedly not asleep, as if he has been waiting.
x.
There are things that everybody knows about Zevran. That he would do almost anything to bed a desired object; that he serves himself before others; that he is the bastard son of a whore; that he lies and steals and poisons and knows nothing about love. That he knows everything about sex.
There are things about him that the others wouldn’t believe if she told them, things that seem to belong in a different realm buried within the fade itself but do not because they, too, are part of him.
Things like a glass of wine beside her bedroll after a long day, a stone-faced recitation of the most horrendous lush poetry imaginable to make her smile and oh the notes he scribbles for her and leaves around, tucked into her belongings so she never knows if the sheath to her sword will contain a vivid description of what he promises to do to her later. The fact that he, for all his flirting and inappropriate suggestions, is a good friend to those who give him the opportunity.
And the rest: his pleased smile when she’s in his arms; his sharp intelligence that must have served him badly considering how well he hides the greater part of it; the way he laughs when something catches him off-guard and he has no time for pretence; his hands in her hair, stroking it absently when he thinks she’s fallen asleep.
Zevran, unarmed.
x.
The elf has a thousand ways of suggesting sex and at least a hundred ways of performing it. It's enough to make anyone's head spin.
He lets her come to him for the first months, always waiting for her first step. She prefers it this way. She learns that he takes pride in that, in being sought out, being capable of self-restraint and a discipline few other hot-blooded beings would ever muster up. She has seen the hunger in his eyes, felt his passion close around her body but not a word out of place, not a breath to betray him while she is struggling to even remember how to breathe, how to stand upright. For months now it has fascinated her to a point of shivering want just thinking about breaking his composure, twisting their game and raising the stakes.
But their play is so perfectly rehearsed by now it's almost a shame altering it.
She asks if he wants to join her in her tent and he responds by jumping straight into a routine of tricks and seduction, adding and subtracting details every time until she can't keep score of what he has already showed her and what he has held back and none of it matters because stone be damned it's him regardless and he drives her insane.
It might very well be a part of his grand master plan - his eyes flash cold and his hands immediately leave her body the one time she suggests this - or a part of his duties.
It is more than enough and never just what she wants.
x.
On their long journey to find the ashes of the Sacred Urn she tires.
“You don't have to do that, you know,” she mutters as she unbuckles the armour, fingers blunt and insensitive from the cold outside the tent. He reaches for her hands and warms them against his own body while he undoes the knots and bindings very slowly because he knows it infuriates and thrills her all at the same time. Patience, fearless leader. He always teases her about being too quick, too eager, too unrefined to live up to the reputation of her fellow dwarves. And the fact that she's a helpless mess in his arms, struggling against his techniques and experience, only makes him more determined, the glint in his eyes burning even stronger. He loves how useless he can render her strength and willpower, how unimportant her role as the leader.
“Do what now, my dear Warden?” he purrs, warm-hot breathing in her ear.
“S-seduce me,” she manages.
“Ah, but you have not yet been subjected to the very finest of the Antivan arts,” he says, his mouth travelling over her breast. A little flick of his tongue across her nipple, kisses all over the softest, most sensitive spots of her skin and she has to close her eyes. “I would not recommend you forgo those.”
She's at a disadvantage and she feels it, aches it, the impossibility of evening the score.
“I want you,” she hisses with her nails digging into his back as he motions them towards the her bedroll, one deft hand trailing the path of light curls of hair beginning underneath her navel while the other cradles the back of her head, fingers threading the braids and strands. “Not your sodding Antivan arts.”
And for a moment Zevran seems to pause, come to a an unexpected halt as he searches through his collection of roles and responses for something that will fit this. He falls apart, if only slightly, his re-composition resembling the old but not precisely and the thought of it sucks the breath out of her lungs.
She catches his gaze at that, soaks it up with her own and when he slides into her she knows she sees through him; curling her feet into the curve of his back she pushes him deeper and he responds by letting out a loud moan that reverberates against her neck where his mouth is buried and they find release faster than she expected, faster than than he probably would like to think about, because the imperfectness of it makes her shiver with sheer pleasure.
x.
The following evening and she lies on her stomach, propped up on her elbows reading one of the tomes they dragged with them from the ruined temple. She still considers it practice, even if she has decoded the language of letters and symbols years ago. Once, it was her sister who made her bend over the books, forced the alphabet out of her, step by step. Claimed it would be useful.
“Intellectual pursuits in the middle of the night,” Zevran remarks, filling up the opening in the canvas. “I wish I could say it reminds me of my childhood home but alas, no such luck in the whorehouses of Antiva.”
“Was there something you wanted?”
“Yes,” he says uncharacteristically simply, leaning down to kiss her. The thick scent of leather and fire and smoke on his skin and clothes tickles in her nostrils and she wraps her arms around him, allowing herself to be dragged to her feet. “I would like you to do a thousand naughty things to me, for a change.”
“That so?”
“Ah, yes.” He has the softest twitch in the corner of his mouth when he looks at her, smiling. “Very much so.”
“Well,” she buries her hands in his hair, combs through it as she kisses him. “Would you like me to get my book on Dwarven erotica for this occasion?”
Zevran chuckles. “No need, I think.”
In a way it's the first time. A mark in a new calender, one they build over nights and mornings and battles where he slips in between enemies to defend her and she rehashes strategy to keep him safe. Rules of flesh and blood and -
He comes to her.
And there is nothing he has learned, nothing else in his wide arsenal of massages and erotic flights of fancy and knowledge of various stimulus that has quite managed to bring her to her knees as effectively and desperately as that.
x.
Orzammar.
Brosca hoped the light that plagues the surface would have burned away her past during her long absence from it. The stories she was told growing up, surfacers disappearing forever, losing their stone-sense and their names. Vainly she has hoped the same thing would happen to memories and history, to genealogies.
Of course it does not.
The merchants refuse her their goods, the commoners spit on the ground as she walks by and her mother, her stone-forsaken sod of a mother is blind-drunk in different clothes, different rooms.
Even Leske is the same, that gentle sneer playing on his lips as he greets her without warmth, without a touch. She should have known sooner. Would have, had he not been Leske-and-Brosca of the nightly visits and occasional rebukes to her mother's tirades. Leske who gave her a new path, a way forward that was empty of grunting nobles riding her and sodding dresses that smelled of imprisonment and murky herbs.
Her Leske.
And in front of everyone, he betrays her.
x.
“Were you lovers? You and this charming man who smelled bad even for a dwarf - present company excluded, naturally?”
Zevran's hair is silvery in the light from the fire and his skin seems a different shade of light-brown down here, like he is covered in a veil of surface dust. She wonders if he misses the stars. He rubs a piece of cloth over the tip of his dagger, frowning. Fighting has been dire these past few days and they are all suffering from it. Bhelen, the damned fool, has promised them gold and supplies and most other things within reach but that is - naturally - later, later, later.
“No. Well... Not most of the time.”
“Occasionally?” he offers.
“Occasionally.” She looks at her hands. “Yeah. It was… we were partners. Had each other’s backs. Friends, I thought.”
“From what you have told me of Dust Town, I rather think he would have been in need of protection when you left,” Zevran points out. He sheaths his weapon and turns to her.
Around them, all is as still as it gets just outside the place she once called home.
“I know, I know.”
Orzammar feels too tight around her heart, her throat. Like the brand on her skin it stifles her, confines her. Surfacers are fools and stone-forsaken dusters and among them she is alien and free and lonely and she will never go back. They teach her how to breathe up there. She rubs the stone off her body, cleanses herself in different speech, different clothes, different world.
But here she is the same dirty brand.
“Perhaps they’re right. I’ve become a sodding cloudhead. Can’t even remember why you work for someone like Jarvia.”
“Because you want to survive.” Zevran's hands travel up her back. She tips her head back slightly, looks into his eyes.
“Why did I want that? To watch the drunken wretch who’s supposed to be my mother steal all our coin to buy wine? Forcing her daughters to…” she interrupts herself, biting down on her lower lip until it hurts. Her mother. Dragging her spawn deep, deep into the shame.
She feels hands stroking her arms and the warmth of another beating heart against her body; the taste of bitterness mitigated by the understanding in his voice, how he takes the filth and gives it a spin until it resembles something bearable.
“We want to live, my dear Warden, because it is utterly boring being dead.”
And there are lies in that, dark and soaring lies, but as Zevran puts a gentle finger under Brosca's chin, she is willing to believe him.
x.
Leske dies from a poisoned blade in his gut.
A quick, ignoble death deep down in the heart of the city; he topples over as he falls, drags her with him so for a horrific minute or two, Brosca dies too, in a bloodied lump on the floor. She screams as he covers her, screams and kicks his limp body because both Zevran and Alistair are too busy chasing Jarvia to hear and it's not until Morrigan tears the corpse away and Brosca can sit up that she realises she is still breathing.
Afterwards, she can't feel herself in her own body and it's like she is no longer there.
She doesn't cry.
They bring the news to Bhelen and are sent off again on new missions and she does not cry.
She draws blood from Zevran as she slams into him, fists and teeth and nails over and over but she doesn't cry.
x.
Dwarven broodmothers birth genlocks.
A scattered phrase from a book she stole from the shapers (this was after he told her she does not exist, she tells herself, as if it matters) rings through the stench of the Deep Roads, through her exhausted limbs that tremble with the effort of rising up from the smeary mess on the ground.
Brosca faces what she might become and it looks down on her with the hunger that creates the world. It dies. Slow and terrible in its death as in its life, and the breaths and shrieks and the restless insatiable flesh never leaves them, resounds against the dog's barking and Morrigan's flames that burn their enemies away.
The image of the monster is what makes Brosca cry, at long last, face pressed against Zevran's back in the dead of the night, against his chest as he wakes up to take her in his arms and he doesn't say anything at all because she won't ever speak of this and he would never ask.
x.
“I don't think I will return again,” she says to her sister.
Rica nods. It is expected, her departure has always been scripted into their story and the question has always been whether it happens through death or escape. They must both cherish this outcome.
These gilded halls and golden chambers. So lush and bright it hurts the eyes worse than any sunlight but down here, they are unaware. Bhelen's hands on Rica's arm, her quick smile up at him that breathes familiarity and perhaps he is not her tyrant after all.
“The elf,” Rica says as they are embracing one last time. “He is a good man, yes? The way he looks at you... is he yours?”
“He is a good man,” she responds because it is the only question to which she has the answer. “Far better than he even knows.”
“So are you.” Rica has trembling warm words and her hair smells of spices and fruit when it entangles with Brosca's own that seems to always have clots of blood and dirt. They bathe as often as they can, though never as often as Wynne demands, and it is never enough. Rica must smell it too. Yet she smiles.
“My brave little sister,” she says.
x.
On an evening laced with storm clouds they reach Denerim again.
And they all talk of it as though there is only the small matter of throne-politics before they can gather their armies and march towards where the archdemon is no-longer sleeping. As though there is anything as important as the Blight.
And they pretend Alistair is a willing king nevermind the glint of terror behind his gaze as he nods his approval before Arl Eamon and walks away with shoulders slumped or tense beyond belief.
And the incursion of never-cleansed pasts as the Crows reappear, breaking their unspoken truce in pieces.
x.
There are these things about Zevran, these simple facts:
He has a faint swirl of ink on his lower back, stretching over his spine and up towards his shoulders. Underneath it there are scars whose stories she has been told over the past year.
He braids strands of his hair every morning, rubs oils into it to make it shine.
He adores the way she pronounces Antivan words, claims her accent is too thick but that she would learn the language if she put her mind to it. (And for some reason, she can imagine wanting it.)
In his pack he keeps a large box of herbs to spice up Wynne's draughts (they taste the same but Zevran's versions grants a better, sounder sleep).
He enjoys reading but doesn't admit it.
He sleeps on his back, arms spread out like they are burning him on a cross.
He doesn't love her because she is brave and he would love her even if she wasn't.
If freedom is a lack of bonds, a lack of oaths sworn in the heat of passion or in the wake of a stillness around dawn, when all is skin and warmth, then he does not truly desire it.
If you grant him his freedom, he will stay forever.
x.
There are these things about Grey Wardens, these simple facts:
A joining ritual is over in a few minutes and defines the rest of your life, the choices you will make and the way you will make them.
When faced with a choice between saving the ones they love and saving the world, a Warden can no longer pretend she is an ordinary person with an ordinary person's desires. She isn't.
In war, victory. In peace, vigilance. In death, sacrifice.
x.
It's the longest night of her life.
It's the longest night of her life and it seems to happen to someone else, the events barely noticeable to her eyes, their facts almost denied by her body. (Riordan. Morrigan. Alistair.)
Brosca is certain she doesn't even breathe until she reaches Zevran's room. He sits in a chair, holding a small, empty glass in his right hand and a book in his left. It's such an odd picture on the eve of battle and the domesticity of it quietly breaks her heart. This is how evenings should be. The thought floats by, gracing the corners of her mind where she stores her seldom-acknowledged desires.
“I almost started to worry you had acquired a taste for Chantry boys, after all,” he says, bravely light-hearted to the end.
“Alistair's downstairs.” She walks up to the window, folding her arms, unfolding them again. Her chest feels too tight even without extra pressure. “There's... Morrigan has left.”
“Tell me.” Zevran empties his hands and gets to his feet.
She explains the ritual without looking at him; he listens without interrupting.
“What else?” he asks, gently stroking her back.
“An archdemon is eternal. When it's slain, it seeks the nearest body of a darkspawn - or one with tainted blood. Only a Warden can kill an archdemon,” she recites from her memory. “And that Warden dies with the demon. I am not meant to tell you but...”
“You learned this tonight?”
“Yes.”
Zevran inhales sharply right beside her, his arms sliding around her waist. She can feel heartbeats and skin against the back of her head and the scent of him rises in her nostrils, warm and sweet from leather and strange herbs and traces of liquor.
“Riordan is older, he has offered to be the one who... But we must not rely on it, anything can happen.” Her voice sounds like someone else's voice, calm and detached.
“Alistair.” It's not a question, nor truly a statement. It's a word spoken in such a broken, terrified voice that she barely recognises it as Zevran's but it has to be, because her own lips are pressed together, biting down hard on what she would like to scream. She turns in his arms so they look at each other.
“Alistair?” he asks now, as though they can stand here and order their friend to die. But they can and Natia buries her face in Zevran's neck, shaking her head.
“I said I'd... if one of us have to-”
“Damn you!”
He tenses, pushes her away but she clings to him and when he tries to pull away and her arms remain wrapped around him their eyes meet. It makes her gasp. Where he is normally masks and carefully hidden emotions she sees nothing but honest, gut-wrenching vulnerability: pain, fear, grief. Anger and bitterness too, as he kisses her with a violent force that sends jolts down her spine and causes to claw at his back, like a furious animal refusing to let go of her prey. They are bound, locked together and she knows when he presses her up against the wall that he tries to fasten the invisible ropes around them, tie her to him.
She can't apologise and he doesn't expect it; there are no lies between them, but his tongue is harsh and desperate in her mouth and she bites down on his lower lip, drawing a moan from him.
When she lets go, he immediately finds his way under her tunic and the space between them decreases as his hands move up over her stomach, cupping her breasts that harden in the cold air. Brosca arches her back, scraping roughly against the surface of the wall but it doesn't matter because Zevran's hot, slick mouth sinks down over her nipples, sucking, licking, biting - hard. Her fingernails in the whirl of faded tattoos on his back as she drags him closer, as close as possible and he undoes his own trousers while she's helping him out of his shirt and finally they're skin-to-skin.
“By the ancestors-” she gasps as he suddenly lifts her up, wrapping her legs around his waist and pressing up against the wall, one finger inside her and his mouth locked on her own, kissing her deeply.
Zevran, the Zevran who has been hers for many months, is warm pleasure and strong muscles relenting under her touch, supple and wonderful and always willing to bend to her desires. Tonight the feel of his body beneath her fingertips is altered, morphed into something that burns her down. It could be sweet, she knows, it could be a last time but it isn't because she has promised him a future and taken it away already and he didn't fall in love with a hero, he never wanted her to die for him. He would love her if she ran away tonight and never came back.
But I can't, why don't you see that? She presses her palms against the wall, allowing her legs to slide down his sides until she stands upright again and he's still inside her, moving slowly but steadily as they approach the bed. Zevran's body covers her own among the pillows; his long legs framing her.
She's impatient under his touch, swollen and ready and hissing when his thumb finds her most sensitive spot but then he stops for a moment and turns them both around so she's straddling him. Without grace she sinks down over his erection, causing him to let out a low, throaty sound. One hand firmly planted on her hip, the other rubbing her, teasing her nipples and holding her in place, Zevran is spread out on the sheet. She leans down to kiss him, but he denies her this by digging his fingers into her thighs, keeping them apart and her rhythm intact. Then he stops. Locks her range of movement while still allowing himself a slow, taunting motion inside her.
She tries to rock against him but his command of her hips forbid it and it lights a fire inside her, sends throbbing waves of hot, pulsating want through her body and she screams when he thrusts beneath her, reaches deep into her, pressing her down against him and relenting, briefly. Stone take him she has never needed release so badly, thinks sod off, elf and worse things than that when he thrusts again, suddenly taking his hands off her so she can ride on the motion and she does and she loses herself inside his orgasm, inside the way she makes him feel and the way he drags her down on top of him afterwards, wordlessly claiming her.
I am yours. His fingers half-gently, half-callously around her arms, circling her shoulders and cupping them as if he's trying to measure her. As if he's drawing borderlines. Morphing her into a map, a country, something to conquer and rule in the same way she rules him. Evening the scores.
And I am a Grey Warden, she thinks incoherently, kissing the taut line of his chin and neck, down to his collarbones and wondering, with a sudden overwhelming grief, if she raised the stakes too high.
And as the darkness gives way to the sun outside the castle, allowing light to have its way, Brosca counts the heartbeats inside Zevran's chest, realising she isn't the only one who is crying.
x.
We will never forget your sacrifice. Now you join our brothers and sister, Maker guide your steps until we meet again.
Those are the words spoken as a Grey Warden dies, Riordan tells her in Redcliffe. The Wardens memorise death but accept it, honour it in an almost joyous fashion because death means victory.
Brosca dutifully speaks the words, the dark echo from too many deaths, then she puts her bloody lips to Alistair's mouth and kisses him.
(Love is ultimately selfish, Wynne snaps at her once, a long time ago now.)
She will never never again claim to know nothing of love.
PAIRING: Fem!Brosca/Zevran
RATING: M so in other words NSFW
WORDS: 6000-ish
SUMMARY: He doesn't love her because she is brave and would love her even if she wasn't.
NOTES: Eh. I needed to get this Zev!love out of the system during the holidays, apparently. I've poked around in it forever now.
you will climb till you find places you'll never let go
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul
(pablo neruda / sonnet xvii)
x.
It is not difficult to spare him.
Brosca watches him crawl in the surface dirt and - slithering like a snake - he offers a deal that she pretends not to consider at first while he persists in his mission, adding texture to the promise. She has no thirst for blood, not anymore, not after Ostagar. (Had she ever?) So she shrugs and stretches out a hand and he swears to be her man until she decides he is no longer useful.
Of course, the others have scant praise for her that night.
Of course, the others don't realise how only a shell of a body and an Antivan accent separates him from her. So few things, small things.
“Why?” Alistair demands to know, frenetically scrubbing plates over a pail of dirty water.
And he would never understand so she makes up a lie about always finding a use for a skilled assassin. He is no fool but lets it pass, adopting a new kind of posture around the elf as though he observes him with his entire body, deeming mere eyesight inefficient.
x.
“Why?” Zevran asks conversationally when he has been allowed in their camp for many nights already. His only duty, Wynne has decided through pursed lips, is to clean their equipment and he does this gracefully without complaints. Brosca finds that her leather armour has a brand new shine to it and it feels supple over her body, resembling a seamless layer of skin.
He has asked before and she has told him on those occasions that he's useful, that allies are few and far between, that she prefers to keep assassins where she can see them. Not lies, but at the same time no more than bits of truth. He has accepted the answers but she knows he is still awaiting the truthful one, the reason.
“Birds of a feather,” she offers tonight.
“Ah. I see.” Zevran nods and something softens in his expression at that, something else appearing in its somewhat new structure: a smile replacing the usual smirk.
x
He instantly calls her Natia.
After months with travelling companions who have no idea it's her given name, who takes Brosca in their mouths without asking if it is a family name or something she has merely decided to call herself, it feels strange to hear it. A chill down her spine, wine-breaths and sour dreams shattering around them in the dirt. Leske used to call her that in the beginning, too, before they became Leske and Brosca. Leske-and-Brosca and a handful of sodding delusions.
Natia. And it rolls off his tongue like pleasantries and improper suggestions blended with a trace of familiarity, of intimacy.
x.
They find a rhythm. All of them, moving together and apart, heading towards the same faded spot in the distant future that appears more elusive each day of their quest.
They find their roles, play their parts.
Brosca commands and she is rarely questioned; Alistair is her second, her shadow; Morrigan keeps a disdainful distance but sweeps through the camp's surrounding at night, mumbling protective wards; Leliana and Wynne keep everyone's spirits up and Sten guards them in silence.
And Zevran find his way into Brosca's tent on more occasions than one, earning himself a place as her confidant or something close enough, at least for those moments when she allows herself the luxury of forgetting history and hoping to better it at the same time.
x.
“Duel me,” she orders a foggy morning outside Redcliffe. It has been a frustrating day - many of those in a row, as a matter of fact - and her mood demands simple obedience. Before, when they were fewer, she would spar with Alistair who taught her how to avoid his shield and she catches him in the corner of her eye even now, crossing their camp with Zevran.
Big, strong Alistair who bashes a shield-full of iron into her side and pierces her armour in an off-hand attack and he lets her win because he thinks it's a nice thing to do. (It's patronising but she never tells, it might not even be his fault.)
Zevran is smooth, fast on his feet and deadly. His slim contours appear everywhere at once and nowhere to be found; he fights nothing like a dwarf but resembles one all the same, his determination mirroring a proud warrior's while his skills are those of a backstabbing Antivan. Brosca is stronger. Zevran is faster. She overpowers him and he slips away, her twin blades soar in the air above him as he's on the ground, seemingly defeated but before she can finish he has climbed on top of her, grinning as he holds a vial of blood red poison in his left hand.
“Now this, my dear, would go very well in your little wound there,” he drags a gloved hand across her upper arm where their duel has left its mark. “All it takes is two drops-”
“Jequirity,” she says, still breathless. “Interesting. I would have used snakeroot, myself.”
“Tsk, tsk, such crudeness does not become you,” he comments as he leaps off her body and helps her to her feet.
x.
“Indulge me,” he mock-orders with a curl to his lips that could be mistaken for cruelty but that Brosca recognises as anticipation. He stands in front of her with a bottle of wine and she folds her arms, watching him.
“Did you rob Wynne's secret pack?”
“Now, now,” he places the bottle on the ground, then swiftly breaks the seal and picks it up again. “There is no reason to suspect foul play every time I happen to stumble upon-” he squints to read the hand-written label, “-home made strawberry wine.”
She sighs. A weariness tears at her tonight, small tugs at the orderly mind she must keep, tiny tears at the tightly woven fabric. Zevran holds the bottle against her mouth, waiting. When she doesn't drink, he shrugs and takes a mouthful.
“Here I thought I might lure a smile out of you, my friend. And a tale or two.”
Brosca watches her feet in the flickering shadows. There is trust between them - oaths even - and he would never, but she cannot be too certain and there are lines they would do best never to cross, paths leading to that very spot inside her that reminds her of the essence of him. The brutal physicality of him wrestling itself inside her head until she cannot walk without feeling him, cannot touch herself without doing it with his hands guiding her own, cannot dream without his features appearing, rubbing against the frail edges of her sleeping reality. Sodding elf.
“A tale?”
The lines are thin and she is beginning to feel afraid.
“I find myself curious of how life was in Orzammar.” He smiles brightly, handing her the bottle again. “Surely it could not hurt to tell me?”
“You will see for yourself all too soon,” she mutters, but eventually the too-sweet swirls of wine rotating in her mouth and trickling down her spine break her silence, like he planned.
x.
On their journey through the Brecilian Passage, five days away from Gwaren and en eternity from everything else, they are ambushed. A horde led by fifteen sodding darkspawn emissaries and Natia fights, shouting commands to the others she fights and she runs and she has the breath smashed out of her as a hurlock fells her to the wet, cold ground and then she remembers nothing else.
“--little reason to doubt my healing potions...pester me about this day and night, Zevran!”
“--do not pester you, my darling Wynne, I merely-”
“She needs rest!”
All is darkness. Throbbing hammer blows in her head, a smithy of dark, heavy things and pain. Everything is pain. She breathes it, breathes the blows and floats away on the waves of torment where nothing can reach her. Voices outside of her prison brush against her walls, but they carry no directions, no solutions.
Forever, she is lost. She dreams of darkspawn, hears the archdemon preach to his hordes and wakes up, feverish and terrified in a tent she does not recognise as her own. There is incense in the air, candles around her body and she gasps as her balance momentarily crumbles as though she is about to fall. Then she is firmly in place again, two hands on her shoulders and a flat, hard body of safety behind her own.
“I've got you, my dear Warden,” Zevran whispers in her ear and perhaps she ought to be surprised that it's him, but the truth is that she isn't.
x.
When Zevran first kisses her he kneels like an improbable knight in a storybook.
The banter leading up to that moment, his well-versed coyness that she doesn't know if she loathes or finds curiously endearing and his filthy mouth, promising adventure. It all cracks - or does it? - as he stands before her, pulling her down and she must not think of Rica's stone-forsaken romantic tales and she does not because this is a chapter in his own tome of ancient knowledge, probably planned every step of the way.
And he is down on his knees and she falls into him, like a chord snapping.
x.
Easy come, easy go, he assures her.
She nods. It is for the best. Truly.
Before dawn, as Alistair and Sten put more wood on the fire and pretend they can't spot her in the dusk, she walks the scant steps over to his tent again and he looks up, decidedly not asleep, as if he has been waiting.
x.
There are things that everybody knows about Zevran. That he would do almost anything to bed a desired object; that he serves himself before others; that he is the bastard son of a whore; that he lies and steals and poisons and knows nothing about love. That he knows everything about sex.
There are things about him that the others wouldn’t believe if she told them, things that seem to belong in a different realm buried within the fade itself but do not because they, too, are part of him.
Things like a glass of wine beside her bedroll after a long day, a stone-faced recitation of the most horrendous lush poetry imaginable to make her smile and oh the notes he scribbles for her and leaves around, tucked into her belongings so she never knows if the sheath to her sword will contain a vivid description of what he promises to do to her later. The fact that he, for all his flirting and inappropriate suggestions, is a good friend to those who give him the opportunity.
And the rest: his pleased smile when she’s in his arms; his sharp intelligence that must have served him badly considering how well he hides the greater part of it; the way he laughs when something catches him off-guard and he has no time for pretence; his hands in her hair, stroking it absently when he thinks she’s fallen asleep.
Zevran, unarmed.
x.
The elf has a thousand ways of suggesting sex and at least a hundred ways of performing it. It's enough to make anyone's head spin.
He lets her come to him for the first months, always waiting for her first step. She prefers it this way. She learns that he takes pride in that, in being sought out, being capable of self-restraint and a discipline few other hot-blooded beings would ever muster up. She has seen the hunger in his eyes, felt his passion close around her body but not a word out of place, not a breath to betray him while she is struggling to even remember how to breathe, how to stand upright. For months now it has fascinated her to a point of shivering want just thinking about breaking his composure, twisting their game and raising the stakes.
But their play is so perfectly rehearsed by now it's almost a shame altering it.
She asks if he wants to join her in her tent and he responds by jumping straight into a routine of tricks and seduction, adding and subtracting details every time until she can't keep score of what he has already showed her and what he has held back and none of it matters because stone be damned it's him regardless and he drives her insane.
It might very well be a part of his grand master plan - his eyes flash cold and his hands immediately leave her body the one time she suggests this - or a part of his duties.
It is more than enough and never just what she wants.
x.
On their long journey to find the ashes of the Sacred Urn she tires.
“You don't have to do that, you know,” she mutters as she unbuckles the armour, fingers blunt and insensitive from the cold outside the tent. He reaches for her hands and warms them against his own body while he undoes the knots and bindings very slowly because he knows it infuriates and thrills her all at the same time. Patience, fearless leader. He always teases her about being too quick, too eager, too unrefined to live up to the reputation of her fellow dwarves. And the fact that she's a helpless mess in his arms, struggling against his techniques and experience, only makes him more determined, the glint in his eyes burning even stronger. He loves how useless he can render her strength and willpower, how unimportant her role as the leader.
“Do what now, my dear Warden?” he purrs, warm-hot breathing in her ear.
“S-seduce me,” she manages.
“Ah, but you have not yet been subjected to the very finest of the Antivan arts,” he says, his mouth travelling over her breast. A little flick of his tongue across her nipple, kisses all over the softest, most sensitive spots of her skin and she has to close her eyes. “I would not recommend you forgo those.”
She's at a disadvantage and she feels it, aches it, the impossibility of evening the score.
“I want you,” she hisses with her nails digging into his back as he motions them towards the her bedroll, one deft hand trailing the path of light curls of hair beginning underneath her navel while the other cradles the back of her head, fingers threading the braids and strands. “Not your sodding Antivan arts.”
And for a moment Zevran seems to pause, come to a an unexpected halt as he searches through his collection of roles and responses for something that will fit this. He falls apart, if only slightly, his re-composition resembling the old but not precisely and the thought of it sucks the breath out of her lungs.
She catches his gaze at that, soaks it up with her own and when he slides into her she knows she sees through him; curling her feet into the curve of his back she pushes him deeper and he responds by letting out a loud moan that reverberates against her neck where his mouth is buried and they find release faster than she expected, faster than than he probably would like to think about, because the imperfectness of it makes her shiver with sheer pleasure.
x.
The following evening and she lies on her stomach, propped up on her elbows reading one of the tomes they dragged with them from the ruined temple. She still considers it practice, even if she has decoded the language of letters and symbols years ago. Once, it was her sister who made her bend over the books, forced the alphabet out of her, step by step. Claimed it would be useful.
“Intellectual pursuits in the middle of the night,” Zevran remarks, filling up the opening in the canvas. “I wish I could say it reminds me of my childhood home but alas, no such luck in the whorehouses of Antiva.”
“Was there something you wanted?”
“Yes,” he says uncharacteristically simply, leaning down to kiss her. The thick scent of leather and fire and smoke on his skin and clothes tickles in her nostrils and she wraps her arms around him, allowing herself to be dragged to her feet. “I would like you to do a thousand naughty things to me, for a change.”
“That so?”
“Ah, yes.” He has the softest twitch in the corner of his mouth when he looks at her, smiling. “Very much so.”
“Well,” she buries her hands in his hair, combs through it as she kisses him. “Would you like me to get my book on Dwarven erotica for this occasion?”
Zevran chuckles. “No need, I think.”
In a way it's the first time. A mark in a new calender, one they build over nights and mornings and battles where he slips in between enemies to defend her and she rehashes strategy to keep him safe. Rules of flesh and blood and -
He comes to her.
And there is nothing he has learned, nothing else in his wide arsenal of massages and erotic flights of fancy and knowledge of various stimulus that has quite managed to bring her to her knees as effectively and desperately as that.
x.
Orzammar.
Brosca hoped the light that plagues the surface would have burned away her past during her long absence from it. The stories she was told growing up, surfacers disappearing forever, losing their stone-sense and their names. Vainly she has hoped the same thing would happen to memories and history, to genealogies.
Of course it does not.
The merchants refuse her their goods, the commoners spit on the ground as she walks by and her mother, her stone-forsaken sod of a mother is blind-drunk in different clothes, different rooms.
Even Leske is the same, that gentle sneer playing on his lips as he greets her without warmth, without a touch. She should have known sooner. Would have, had he not been Leske-and-Brosca of the nightly visits and occasional rebukes to her mother's tirades. Leske who gave her a new path, a way forward that was empty of grunting nobles riding her and sodding dresses that smelled of imprisonment and murky herbs.
Her Leske.
And in front of everyone, he betrays her.
x.
“Were you lovers? You and this charming man who smelled bad even for a dwarf - present company excluded, naturally?”
Zevran's hair is silvery in the light from the fire and his skin seems a different shade of light-brown down here, like he is covered in a veil of surface dust. She wonders if he misses the stars. He rubs a piece of cloth over the tip of his dagger, frowning. Fighting has been dire these past few days and they are all suffering from it. Bhelen, the damned fool, has promised them gold and supplies and most other things within reach but that is - naturally - later, later, later.
“No. Well... Not most of the time.”
“Occasionally?” he offers.
“Occasionally.” She looks at her hands. “Yeah. It was… we were partners. Had each other’s backs. Friends, I thought.”
“From what you have told me of Dust Town, I rather think he would have been in need of protection when you left,” Zevran points out. He sheaths his weapon and turns to her.
Around them, all is as still as it gets just outside the place she once called home.
“I know, I know.”
Orzammar feels too tight around her heart, her throat. Like the brand on her skin it stifles her, confines her. Surfacers are fools and stone-forsaken dusters and among them she is alien and free and lonely and she will never go back. They teach her how to breathe up there. She rubs the stone off her body, cleanses herself in different speech, different clothes, different world.
But here she is the same dirty brand.
“Perhaps they’re right. I’ve become a sodding cloudhead. Can’t even remember why you work for someone like Jarvia.”
“Because you want to survive.” Zevran's hands travel up her back. She tips her head back slightly, looks into his eyes.
“Why did I want that? To watch the drunken wretch who’s supposed to be my mother steal all our coin to buy wine? Forcing her daughters to…” she interrupts herself, biting down on her lower lip until it hurts. Her mother. Dragging her spawn deep, deep into the shame.
She feels hands stroking her arms and the warmth of another beating heart against her body; the taste of bitterness mitigated by the understanding in his voice, how he takes the filth and gives it a spin until it resembles something bearable.
“We want to live, my dear Warden, because it is utterly boring being dead.”
And there are lies in that, dark and soaring lies, but as Zevran puts a gentle finger under Brosca's chin, she is willing to believe him.
x.
Leske dies from a poisoned blade in his gut.
A quick, ignoble death deep down in the heart of the city; he topples over as he falls, drags her with him so for a horrific minute or two, Brosca dies too, in a bloodied lump on the floor. She screams as he covers her, screams and kicks his limp body because both Zevran and Alistair are too busy chasing Jarvia to hear and it's not until Morrigan tears the corpse away and Brosca can sit up that she realises she is still breathing.
Afterwards, she can't feel herself in her own body and it's like she is no longer there.
She doesn't cry.
They bring the news to Bhelen and are sent off again on new missions and she does not cry.
She draws blood from Zevran as she slams into him, fists and teeth and nails over and over but she doesn't cry.
x.
Dwarven broodmothers birth genlocks.
A scattered phrase from a book she stole from the shapers (this was after he told her she does not exist, she tells herself, as if it matters) rings through the stench of the Deep Roads, through her exhausted limbs that tremble with the effort of rising up from the smeary mess on the ground.
Brosca faces what she might become and it looks down on her with the hunger that creates the world. It dies. Slow and terrible in its death as in its life, and the breaths and shrieks and the restless insatiable flesh never leaves them, resounds against the dog's barking and Morrigan's flames that burn their enemies away.
The image of the monster is what makes Brosca cry, at long last, face pressed against Zevran's back in the dead of the night, against his chest as he wakes up to take her in his arms and he doesn't say anything at all because she won't ever speak of this and he would never ask.
x.
“I don't think I will return again,” she says to her sister.
Rica nods. It is expected, her departure has always been scripted into their story and the question has always been whether it happens through death or escape. They must both cherish this outcome.
These gilded halls and golden chambers. So lush and bright it hurts the eyes worse than any sunlight but down here, they are unaware. Bhelen's hands on Rica's arm, her quick smile up at him that breathes familiarity and perhaps he is not her tyrant after all.
“The elf,” Rica says as they are embracing one last time. “He is a good man, yes? The way he looks at you... is he yours?”
“He is a good man,” she responds because it is the only question to which she has the answer. “Far better than he even knows.”
“So are you.” Rica has trembling warm words and her hair smells of spices and fruit when it entangles with Brosca's own that seems to always have clots of blood and dirt. They bathe as often as they can, though never as often as Wynne demands, and it is never enough. Rica must smell it too. Yet she smiles.
“My brave little sister,” she says.
x.
On an evening laced with storm clouds they reach Denerim again.
And they all talk of it as though there is only the small matter of throne-politics before they can gather their armies and march towards where the archdemon is no-longer sleeping. As though there is anything as important as the Blight.
And they pretend Alistair is a willing king nevermind the glint of terror behind his gaze as he nods his approval before Arl Eamon and walks away with shoulders slumped or tense beyond belief.
And the incursion of never-cleansed pasts as the Crows reappear, breaking their unspoken truce in pieces.
x.
There are these things about Zevran, these simple facts:
He has a faint swirl of ink on his lower back, stretching over his spine and up towards his shoulders. Underneath it there are scars whose stories she has been told over the past year.
He braids strands of his hair every morning, rubs oils into it to make it shine.
He adores the way she pronounces Antivan words, claims her accent is too thick but that she would learn the language if she put her mind to it. (And for some reason, she can imagine wanting it.)
In his pack he keeps a large box of herbs to spice up Wynne's draughts (they taste the same but Zevran's versions grants a better, sounder sleep).
He enjoys reading but doesn't admit it.
He sleeps on his back, arms spread out like they are burning him on a cross.
He doesn't love her because she is brave and he would love her even if she wasn't.
If freedom is a lack of bonds, a lack of oaths sworn in the heat of passion or in the wake of a stillness around dawn, when all is skin and warmth, then he does not truly desire it.
If you grant him his freedom, he will stay forever.
x.
There are these things about Grey Wardens, these simple facts:
A joining ritual is over in a few minutes and defines the rest of your life, the choices you will make and the way you will make them.
When faced with a choice between saving the ones they love and saving the world, a Warden can no longer pretend she is an ordinary person with an ordinary person's desires. She isn't.
In war, victory. In peace, vigilance. In death, sacrifice.
x.
It's the longest night of her life.
It's the longest night of her life and it seems to happen to someone else, the events barely noticeable to her eyes, their facts almost denied by her body. (Riordan. Morrigan. Alistair.)
Brosca is certain she doesn't even breathe until she reaches Zevran's room. He sits in a chair, holding a small, empty glass in his right hand and a book in his left. It's such an odd picture on the eve of battle and the domesticity of it quietly breaks her heart. This is how evenings should be. The thought floats by, gracing the corners of her mind where she stores her seldom-acknowledged desires.
“I almost started to worry you had acquired a taste for Chantry boys, after all,” he says, bravely light-hearted to the end.
“Alistair's downstairs.” She walks up to the window, folding her arms, unfolding them again. Her chest feels too tight even without extra pressure. “There's... Morrigan has left.”
“Tell me.” Zevran empties his hands and gets to his feet.
She explains the ritual without looking at him; he listens without interrupting.
“What else?” he asks, gently stroking her back.
“An archdemon is eternal. When it's slain, it seeks the nearest body of a darkspawn - or one with tainted blood. Only a Warden can kill an archdemon,” she recites from her memory. “And that Warden dies with the demon. I am not meant to tell you but...”
“You learned this tonight?”
“Yes.”
Zevran inhales sharply right beside her, his arms sliding around her waist. She can feel heartbeats and skin against the back of her head and the scent of him rises in her nostrils, warm and sweet from leather and strange herbs and traces of liquor.
“Riordan is older, he has offered to be the one who... But we must not rely on it, anything can happen.” Her voice sounds like someone else's voice, calm and detached.
“Alistair.” It's not a question, nor truly a statement. It's a word spoken in such a broken, terrified voice that she barely recognises it as Zevran's but it has to be, because her own lips are pressed together, biting down hard on what she would like to scream. She turns in his arms so they look at each other.
“Alistair?” he asks now, as though they can stand here and order their friend to die. But they can and Natia buries her face in Zevran's neck, shaking her head.
“I said I'd... if one of us have to-”
“Damn you!”
He tenses, pushes her away but she clings to him and when he tries to pull away and her arms remain wrapped around him their eyes meet. It makes her gasp. Where he is normally masks and carefully hidden emotions she sees nothing but honest, gut-wrenching vulnerability: pain, fear, grief. Anger and bitterness too, as he kisses her with a violent force that sends jolts down her spine and causes to claw at his back, like a furious animal refusing to let go of her prey. They are bound, locked together and she knows when he presses her up against the wall that he tries to fasten the invisible ropes around them, tie her to him.
She can't apologise and he doesn't expect it; there are no lies between them, but his tongue is harsh and desperate in her mouth and she bites down on his lower lip, drawing a moan from him.
When she lets go, he immediately finds his way under her tunic and the space between them decreases as his hands move up over her stomach, cupping her breasts that harden in the cold air. Brosca arches her back, scraping roughly against the surface of the wall but it doesn't matter because Zevran's hot, slick mouth sinks down over her nipples, sucking, licking, biting - hard. Her fingernails in the whirl of faded tattoos on his back as she drags him closer, as close as possible and he undoes his own trousers while she's helping him out of his shirt and finally they're skin-to-skin.
“By the ancestors-” she gasps as he suddenly lifts her up, wrapping her legs around his waist and pressing up against the wall, one finger inside her and his mouth locked on her own, kissing her deeply.
Zevran, the Zevran who has been hers for many months, is warm pleasure and strong muscles relenting under her touch, supple and wonderful and always willing to bend to her desires. Tonight the feel of his body beneath her fingertips is altered, morphed into something that burns her down. It could be sweet, she knows, it could be a last time but it isn't because she has promised him a future and taken it away already and he didn't fall in love with a hero, he never wanted her to die for him. He would love her if she ran away tonight and never came back.
But I can't, why don't you see that? She presses her palms against the wall, allowing her legs to slide down his sides until she stands upright again and he's still inside her, moving slowly but steadily as they approach the bed. Zevran's body covers her own among the pillows; his long legs framing her.
She's impatient under his touch, swollen and ready and hissing when his thumb finds her most sensitive spot but then he stops for a moment and turns them both around so she's straddling him. Without grace she sinks down over his erection, causing him to let out a low, throaty sound. One hand firmly planted on her hip, the other rubbing her, teasing her nipples and holding her in place, Zevran is spread out on the sheet. She leans down to kiss him, but he denies her this by digging his fingers into her thighs, keeping them apart and her rhythm intact. Then he stops. Locks her range of movement while still allowing himself a slow, taunting motion inside her.
She tries to rock against him but his command of her hips forbid it and it lights a fire inside her, sends throbbing waves of hot, pulsating want through her body and she screams when he thrusts beneath her, reaches deep into her, pressing her down against him and relenting, briefly. Stone take him she has never needed release so badly, thinks sod off, elf and worse things than that when he thrusts again, suddenly taking his hands off her so she can ride on the motion and she does and she loses herself inside his orgasm, inside the way she makes him feel and the way he drags her down on top of him afterwards, wordlessly claiming her.
I am yours. His fingers half-gently, half-callously around her arms, circling her shoulders and cupping them as if he's trying to measure her. As if he's drawing borderlines. Morphing her into a map, a country, something to conquer and rule in the same way she rules him. Evening the scores.
And I am a Grey Warden, she thinks incoherently, kissing the taut line of his chin and neck, down to his collarbones and wondering, with a sudden overwhelming grief, if she raised the stakes too high.
And as the darkness gives way to the sun outside the castle, allowing light to have its way, Brosca counts the heartbeats inside Zevran's chest, realising she isn't the only one who is crying.
x.
We will never forget your sacrifice. Now you join our brothers and sister, Maker guide your steps until we meet again.
Those are the words spoken as a Grey Warden dies, Riordan tells her in Redcliffe. The Wardens memorise death but accept it, honour it in an almost joyous fashion because death means victory.
Brosca dutifully speaks the words, the dark echo from too many deaths, then she puts her bloody lips to Alistair's mouth and kisses him.
(Love is ultimately selfish, Wynne snaps at her once, a long time ago now.)
She will never never again claim to know nothing of love.