Menage 14: The Language of Flowers
(It's not going to keep being months between chapters, promise. Index is linked at the bottom if you need to refresh your memory!)
Title: The Language of Flowers (Ménage 14)
Words: 2469
Rating: PG-13 for dwarven sexual harassment
Characters: Alistair/f!Surana (Philoméne) (/Zevran?) featuring Sigrun, Oghren, Anders, Nathaniel, and the Keep peeps
Summary: Seriously, Nathaniel, what’s with all this crap in your basement?
<-Previous: The Best Laid Plans of Men and Rats
The walk back to the Keep was slow, because of the dwarves. For one thing, they had those short legs, but that wasn’t the only issue. Sigrun, for all her assertions that this was her third time seeing the surface, was clearly disoriented, practically dizzy. And then she had to keep rejecting Oghren’s attempts to “help” her stay on her feet, since they all involved lewdness, ale, or both. Alistair was too tall to be a good stabilizing prop for her, which left petite Philoméne to struggle along with a densely-made dwarf on her arm.
They really had to stop leaving Bouche behind, Alistair thought. Maybe Sigrun would have been able to ride him.
What they had of support at the Keep was waiting for them eagerly. Wade fell upon Philoméne with plans for elaborate armor she would never wear, pleas for expensive and obscure working materials, and complaints about the working conditions. Maverlies and Voldrik wanted to know when someone would be free to venture into the underground passages beyond the cave-in to look for a more defensible point, because naturally there was no one else capable ofthat. Philoméne promised to see to it the next morning, waving them off with a suddenly tired look as she started up the steps outside the main door. She stopped when the guard posted there handed her a letter.
Alistair peeked at it over her shoulder and raised an eyebrow: it was completely blank. But Philoméne sprang up the rest of the stairs, barreling past Varel without a word as she ran straight toward her room.
Interesting, but it did seem as if Varel shouldn’t be left just standing there bewildered. “There were darkspawn,” he said matter-of-factly. “Another one talked. We killed them. And Sigrun here is up for the Joining. How’ve you been?”
“Oh, quite well. Merchants disappearing off the roads before they can reach town, politically volatile prisoners awaiting the Arlessa’s judgment in what we’ve got left of a dungeon, no sign of any surviving Wardens, including the one we know wasn’t here when we were attacked.”
“Ah, who doesn’t love the spring?” Alistair drawled.
“I don’t get it,” Sigrun said behind him. “What’s jumping got to do with the rest of it?”
“It’s a name for the time of year,” Oghren told her. “Everything changes around up here every so often. Hotter or colder, darker or brighter. It’s confusing for a while. Right now it’s getting brighter and warmer, and they call it “spring” because it’s a good time to jump in the sack with a new comrade.” He emphasized this point by wagging his eyebrows.
“Uch. Alistair?” Her eyes rolled up and met his, pleading for a better answer.
He chuckled a little and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, not exactly. As I’m sure you’ve guessed. I mean, it is getting warmer, and days get longer. Plants are green and flowering - they’re not always. Did you know that? Have you even seen - anyway. And it is true that a lot of animals are, well, rutting.” He felt a hint of warmth in his cheeks as he realized he was close to supporting Oghren’s claim. “But that doesn’t mean you have to! Certainly not with, um.”
Oghren scoffed. “Way to back me up, brother. Thanks.”
Philoméne reappeared with a more contented look on her face, and a small bouquet of flowers in her hands. That called the blank letter back into Alistair’s mind, and he thought he remembered… yes. That would make sense.
With a furtive glance toward the others, he urged her a few steps away from them and asked quietly, “So it was from Zev?” When she nodded, he added with a smirk, “I hope you remember better than I do what the arrangement means.”
“Assignment completed, several people dead, and he expects to return shortly.” She looked up at him with a slightly bewildered smile. “I’m anxious to see him. Or… nervous. I don’t know. Is that odd?”
“No.” After all, so was he. He pulled her as close as he could without crushing the flowers. “I think it’s a good thing. We know he’s safe, and you’re going to be safe. And once he’s here, we… hmm.” He stroked her hair as he drifted into thought. “We decide how we want to proceed. You’ve never spoken to him about this, right? Not in so many words.”
“Not in any. I didn’t really recognize what ‘this’ even was until you and I talked about it.”
“That’s what I thought. I have, to an extent. That puts me at a bit of an advantage, but it also - ” His hand shifted from stroking to massaging. “I think you should talk to him without me. I think - it would be good for all three of us to be sure I’m not just putting words in your mouth. You’ve never even - ” He stopped short again, this time blushing, unsure of how the rest was going to go over.
But she clearly wasn’t going to put it together without him. “Never what?”
He looked down very intently at the flowers. “Kissed him. Never kissed him.”
That was enough for her to understand. “Ah. And you have.” She considered this silently for a moment that felt much longer than it probably was. “Or he kissed you. I suppose you never forbade him quite as starkly as I did.”
He laughed a little. “No, I didn’t. He still speaks of that with awe, you know. I’m not sure anyone ever has forbidden him that clearly without actually sending him away.”
Her brow furrowed. “And you’re sure he’d still be open to my changing my mind? I mean. I’m not sure what to do.”
“Hmm. I don’t know how much you’ll need to do. I think the important part will be impressing on him that he’s allowed to do something.” He smiled warmly as he brought one hand forward to stroke her jaw. “Just be the same mind-bendingly honest person you were when you told him no.”
“Soooo,” Sigrun interjected loudly, “what’s with this Joining thing? Are we going to do that today, or are we turning in early? This is a nice hallway as hallways go, but I’m sure the place is more interesting when you get to rooms.”
Philoméne grimaced. “Right,” she said, “I don’t suppose there’s any reason to put it off.” She stepped away from Alistair and toward Varel, speaking to him. “Prepare for the Joining. One candidate.”
That was the end of pleasant conversation for a while; but Sigrun survived the ritual, and that called for a few rounds of ale before bed, as well as a tour of the kitchen for when the first wave of Warden-sized hunger hit her in the wee hours of the morning. Once Oghren had drunk himself into enough of a stupor to stop flirting with Sigrun, Alistair and Philoméne retreated to their bedroom, where he draped himself around her warm body and sank into the restful sleep he only got when he had both a partner and a bed.
The new day brought a return to the basement to reveal what had been found behind the rubble: an entrance onto the Deep Roads. Marvelous. No wonder the Keep had been overrun. What excellent planning - well, maybe it had been, at one time. It would have made sense to post Wardens over a place where the Deep Roads came near the surface, if the Wardens had actually known about it once. And after all, the Keep itself was supposed to be very old, so who could know which had come first or why. Still, sodding inconvenient now.
Not long after they began the descent, Philoméne began to comment on the odd convergence of Avaar and dwarven elements in the architecture and the things they were finding. Oghren agreed. Not long after that, Philoméne found an inscription, translated it, and with a grimace, announced the reason: “There is something imprisoned down here.”
Alistair groaned. “Of course there is. Something demonic, I take it? Under the Keep! Right next to the Deep Roads. I’m one mad Templar away from missing Orzammar.” He bit his tongue immediately. By some great luck Philoméne didn’t wince, but Alistair winced at himself.
Sigrun took the joke and ran in another direction with it, not knowing what it meant to the rest of them. “Oh, me too. What duster doesn’t miss Orzammar? The scorn, the squalor - ”
The demons, as promised. They cut the conversation short at a cluster of Avaar statues that must have been part of the failing ward system. They were apparently a new source of adventure for Sigrun, who squawked and glowed red with some power unfamiliar to Alistair. She told him afterward that it was a thing the Legion had taught her.
The demon, however, turned out to be a wraith trapped in something that looked like an ancillary sphere - that was, until their arrival released it. It led them a fine chase back through tunnels they’d already seen into one they hadn’t, where they were momentarily distracted by a patrol of darkspawn. That wouldn’t have been too inconvenient had it not been for the ogre - Alistair still, even now, had a strong visceral memory of his first ogre, the one that had tried to crush his bones when he and Philoméne were at Ostagar - and even the ogre would have been less of a problem had it not, in its death throes, been possessed by the wraith.
That did take some time to sort out, especially considering that the combined form seemed able to completely ignore Philoméne’s staff. Fortunately she had other spells to fall back on, and the rest of them had a varied array of pointy things.
Afterward, while they all caught their breath, Sigrun and Oghren both took notice of the place where they’d found themselves and pointed out its distinction. Here, the mixed influence fell away and the architecture was pure dwarf: the passage opened out onto one of the sorts of outposts that was not uncommon in the Deep Roads proper, and between that and the place where they stood was a set of large, imposing gates such as they had also seen before, except that these were open.
“Send that Voldrik down here,” Oghren said. “I’d bet these weren’t too far from done. A few dwarves could get them fixed and shut.”
Philoméne nodded, but within a few minutes there proved to be no need for that: Voldrik and Maverlies were coming down toward them, along with Zevran’s returning party.
Zev beamed at the sight of them and strode forward quickly. Philoméne reached him first and was already squeezing him tight before it occurred to her to be self-conscious, by which time Zev’s arms were around her shoulders, not tootightly, weighing the response. Alistair wrapped his wider embrace around the both of them, hoping to be warm enough to encourage them both without being so warm that it was improper with matters not yet settled and a crowd of gawkers.
Still, he was quite happy with an arm around each of them, and he couldn’t keep himself from just a little testing of the waters. He greeted Zev with a light kiss to the edge of his mouth, eyes on Philoméne for her reaction. The signs were good: the look on her face seemed much more curious than jealous. It might have even included a bare hint of a smile - but this was not the time or the place to pursue the question further. If anything, he was surer than ever that the best course was to leave them to themselves for a little while, so they could find their connection to each other without him interfering.
Which was going to be a little depressing, and perhaps not easy to arrange. But there it was, right was right.
Zev covered his bewildered grin with a joke. “My dear Wardens! I will have to leave you more often if this is how I am welcomed home.”
Nathaniel’s greeting was much less enthusiastic, and Anders’s was slightly sulky for having been left out of the hugging. Conversation turned toward business, at which point several things were established quickly. The conspiracy was indeed put down; it had been led by a handful of nobles whose political currency had already been weakened, and was unlikely to rise again. Meanwhile, Voldrik confirmed that the gates they’d found could be finished quickly and would then secure the Keep from further assaults below for a good while. He and Maverlies stayed behind to discuss the logistics while the rest of them returned to the surface.
“And still no sign of the Warden who went off to Blackmarsh when all this was happening,” Philoméne mused aloud. “Kristoff. I don’t see how that can mean anything good. We need to find out what became of him.”
There it was, an opportunity to execute his plan, right at his feet. How… fortunate. “Then I’ll go,” he said, giving her what he hoped was a meaningful look. “Varel needs you here for a bit, but not me. Zev can stay with you.”
“But I - oh,” she interrupted herself, eyes widening just a hair as she caught on to the reason for the division. “Yes, that will give me a chance to, um. Work with Varel on other matters. Won’t it?”
“Exactly.” He dropped his voice a bit and took her by the shoulders, punctuating his agreement with a firm kiss. “I’ll miss you, but it’s for the best. Which ones of the new lot should I take with me, do you think?”
“Take Nathaniel,” Zev answered at once, his face the sort of neutral that tended to mean that his real feelings were something quite else. “We will not need his talents here.”
Nathaniel shifted his weight a little, his face in the mask nobles often used around objectionable people. “I do have some familiarity with the marsh,” he agreed. “You could make quicker work of a search with me along.”
Philoméne nodded at the logic, either missing or ignoring whatever else was going on between Nathaniel and Zevran. “Right, good. And you should have Anders in case you need a mage. Hmm. And Oghren. He’s worked with them both before, so he’ll keep them in line for you.”
“Oghren will?” Alistair grinned. “You think so?”
“Hey there,” Oghren growled cheerfully. “It’s my best thing besides drinking and bronto-busting.”
Sigrun rolled her eyes. “Ooh, am I going to be left behind with the other people? Curse my bad luck! Well, off you go, Oggy, bye!”
Oghren smirked up at Alistair. “See? Called me Oggy. I’m gettin’ to her. Just you wait.”
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Title: The Language of Flowers (Ménage 14)
Words: 2469
Rating: PG-13 for dwarven sexual harassment
Characters: Alistair/f!Surana (Philoméne) (/Zevran?) featuring Sigrun, Oghren, Anders, Nathaniel, and the Keep peeps
Summary: Seriously, Nathaniel, what’s with all this crap in your basement?
<-Previous: The Best Laid Plans of Men and Rats
The walk back to the Keep was slow, because of the dwarves. For one thing, they had those short legs, but that wasn’t the only issue. Sigrun, for all her assertions that this was her third time seeing the surface, was clearly disoriented, practically dizzy. And then she had to keep rejecting Oghren’s attempts to “help” her stay on her feet, since they all involved lewdness, ale, or both. Alistair was too tall to be a good stabilizing prop for her, which left petite Philoméne to struggle along with a densely-made dwarf on her arm.
They really had to stop leaving Bouche behind, Alistair thought. Maybe Sigrun would have been able to ride him.
What they had of support at the Keep was waiting for them eagerly. Wade fell upon Philoméne with plans for elaborate armor she would never wear, pleas for expensive and obscure working materials, and complaints about the working conditions. Maverlies and Voldrik wanted to know when someone would be free to venture into the underground passages beyond the cave-in to look for a more defensible point, because naturally there was no one else capable ofthat. Philoméne promised to see to it the next morning, waving them off with a suddenly tired look as she started up the steps outside the main door. She stopped when the guard posted there handed her a letter.
Alistair peeked at it over her shoulder and raised an eyebrow: it was completely blank. But Philoméne sprang up the rest of the stairs, barreling past Varel without a word as she ran straight toward her room.
Interesting, but it did seem as if Varel shouldn’t be left just standing there bewildered. “There were darkspawn,” he said matter-of-factly. “Another one talked. We killed them. And Sigrun here is up for the Joining. How’ve you been?”
“Oh, quite well. Merchants disappearing off the roads before they can reach town, politically volatile prisoners awaiting the Arlessa’s judgment in what we’ve got left of a dungeon, no sign of any surviving Wardens, including the one we know wasn’t here when we were attacked.”
“Ah, who doesn’t love the spring?” Alistair drawled.
“I don’t get it,” Sigrun said behind him. “What’s jumping got to do with the rest of it?”
“It’s a name for the time of year,” Oghren told her. “Everything changes around up here every so often. Hotter or colder, darker or brighter. It’s confusing for a while. Right now it’s getting brighter and warmer, and they call it “spring” because it’s a good time to jump in the sack with a new comrade.” He emphasized this point by wagging his eyebrows.
“Uch. Alistair?” Her eyes rolled up and met his, pleading for a better answer.
He chuckled a little and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, not exactly. As I’m sure you’ve guessed. I mean, it is getting warmer, and days get longer. Plants are green and flowering - they’re not always. Did you know that? Have you even seen - anyway. And it is true that a lot of animals are, well, rutting.” He felt a hint of warmth in his cheeks as he realized he was close to supporting Oghren’s claim. “But that doesn’t mean you have to! Certainly not with, um.”
Oghren scoffed. “Way to back me up, brother. Thanks.”
Philoméne reappeared with a more contented look on her face, and a small bouquet of flowers in her hands. That called the blank letter back into Alistair’s mind, and he thought he remembered… yes. That would make sense.
With a furtive glance toward the others, he urged her a few steps away from them and asked quietly, “So it was from Zev?” When she nodded, he added with a smirk, “I hope you remember better than I do what the arrangement means.”
“Assignment completed, several people dead, and he expects to return shortly.” She looked up at him with a slightly bewildered smile. “I’m anxious to see him. Or… nervous. I don’t know. Is that odd?”
“No.” After all, so was he. He pulled her as close as he could without crushing the flowers. “I think it’s a good thing. We know he’s safe, and you’re going to be safe. And once he’s here, we… hmm.” He stroked her hair as he drifted into thought. “We decide how we want to proceed. You’ve never spoken to him about this, right? Not in so many words.”
“Not in any. I didn’t really recognize what ‘this’ even was until you and I talked about it.”
“That’s what I thought. I have, to an extent. That puts me at a bit of an advantage, but it also - ” His hand shifted from stroking to massaging. “I think you should talk to him without me. I think - it would be good for all three of us to be sure I’m not just putting words in your mouth. You’ve never even - ” He stopped short again, this time blushing, unsure of how the rest was going to go over.
But she clearly wasn’t going to put it together without him. “Never what?”
He looked down very intently at the flowers. “Kissed him. Never kissed him.”
That was enough for her to understand. “Ah. And you have.” She considered this silently for a moment that felt much longer than it probably was. “Or he kissed you. I suppose you never forbade him quite as starkly as I did.”
He laughed a little. “No, I didn’t. He still speaks of that with awe, you know. I’m not sure anyone ever has forbidden him that clearly without actually sending him away.”
Her brow furrowed. “And you’re sure he’d still be open to my changing my mind? I mean. I’m not sure what to do.”
“Hmm. I don’t know how much you’ll need to do. I think the important part will be impressing on him that he’s allowed to do something.” He smiled warmly as he brought one hand forward to stroke her jaw. “Just be the same mind-bendingly honest person you were when you told him no.”
“Soooo,” Sigrun interjected loudly, “what’s with this Joining thing? Are we going to do that today, or are we turning in early? This is a nice hallway as hallways go, but I’m sure the place is more interesting when you get to rooms.”
Philoméne grimaced. “Right,” she said, “I don’t suppose there’s any reason to put it off.” She stepped away from Alistair and toward Varel, speaking to him. “Prepare for the Joining. One candidate.”
That was the end of pleasant conversation for a while; but Sigrun survived the ritual, and that called for a few rounds of ale before bed, as well as a tour of the kitchen for when the first wave of Warden-sized hunger hit her in the wee hours of the morning. Once Oghren had drunk himself into enough of a stupor to stop flirting with Sigrun, Alistair and Philoméne retreated to their bedroom, where he draped himself around her warm body and sank into the restful sleep he only got when he had both a partner and a bed.
The new day brought a return to the basement to reveal what had been found behind the rubble: an entrance onto the Deep Roads. Marvelous. No wonder the Keep had been overrun. What excellent planning - well, maybe it had been, at one time. It would have made sense to post Wardens over a place where the Deep Roads came near the surface, if the Wardens had actually known about it once. And after all, the Keep itself was supposed to be very old, so who could know which had come first or why. Still, sodding inconvenient now.
Not long after they began the descent, Philoméne began to comment on the odd convergence of Avaar and dwarven elements in the architecture and the things they were finding. Oghren agreed. Not long after that, Philoméne found an inscription, translated it, and with a grimace, announced the reason: “There is something imprisoned down here.”
Alistair groaned. “Of course there is. Something demonic, I take it? Under the Keep! Right next to the Deep Roads. I’m one mad Templar away from missing Orzammar.” He bit his tongue immediately. By some great luck Philoméne didn’t wince, but Alistair winced at himself.
Sigrun took the joke and ran in another direction with it, not knowing what it meant to the rest of them. “Oh, me too. What duster doesn’t miss Orzammar? The scorn, the squalor - ”
The demons, as promised. They cut the conversation short at a cluster of Avaar statues that must have been part of the failing ward system. They were apparently a new source of adventure for Sigrun, who squawked and glowed red with some power unfamiliar to Alistair. She told him afterward that it was a thing the Legion had taught her.
The demon, however, turned out to be a wraith trapped in something that looked like an ancillary sphere - that was, until their arrival released it. It led them a fine chase back through tunnels they’d already seen into one they hadn’t, where they were momentarily distracted by a patrol of darkspawn. That wouldn’t have been too inconvenient had it not been for the ogre - Alistair still, even now, had a strong visceral memory of his first ogre, the one that had tried to crush his bones when he and Philoméne were at Ostagar - and even the ogre would have been less of a problem had it not, in its death throes, been possessed by the wraith.
That did take some time to sort out, especially considering that the combined form seemed able to completely ignore Philoméne’s staff. Fortunately she had other spells to fall back on, and the rest of them had a varied array of pointy things.
Afterward, while they all caught their breath, Sigrun and Oghren both took notice of the place where they’d found themselves and pointed out its distinction. Here, the mixed influence fell away and the architecture was pure dwarf: the passage opened out onto one of the sorts of outposts that was not uncommon in the Deep Roads proper, and between that and the place where they stood was a set of large, imposing gates such as they had also seen before, except that these were open.
“Send that Voldrik down here,” Oghren said. “I’d bet these weren’t too far from done. A few dwarves could get them fixed and shut.”
Philoméne nodded, but within a few minutes there proved to be no need for that: Voldrik and Maverlies were coming down toward them, along with Zevran’s returning party.
Zev beamed at the sight of them and strode forward quickly. Philoméne reached him first and was already squeezing him tight before it occurred to her to be self-conscious, by which time Zev’s arms were around her shoulders, not tootightly, weighing the response. Alistair wrapped his wider embrace around the both of them, hoping to be warm enough to encourage them both without being so warm that it was improper with matters not yet settled and a crowd of gawkers.
Still, he was quite happy with an arm around each of them, and he couldn’t keep himself from just a little testing of the waters. He greeted Zev with a light kiss to the edge of his mouth, eyes on Philoméne for her reaction. The signs were good: the look on her face seemed much more curious than jealous. It might have even included a bare hint of a smile - but this was not the time or the place to pursue the question further. If anything, he was surer than ever that the best course was to leave them to themselves for a little while, so they could find their connection to each other without him interfering.
Which was going to be a little depressing, and perhaps not easy to arrange. But there it was, right was right.
Zev covered his bewildered grin with a joke. “My dear Wardens! I will have to leave you more often if this is how I am welcomed home.”
Nathaniel’s greeting was much less enthusiastic, and Anders’s was slightly sulky for having been left out of the hugging. Conversation turned toward business, at which point several things were established quickly. The conspiracy was indeed put down; it had been led by a handful of nobles whose political currency had already been weakened, and was unlikely to rise again. Meanwhile, Voldrik confirmed that the gates they’d found could be finished quickly and would then secure the Keep from further assaults below for a good while. He and Maverlies stayed behind to discuss the logistics while the rest of them returned to the surface.
“And still no sign of the Warden who went off to Blackmarsh when all this was happening,” Philoméne mused aloud. “Kristoff. I don’t see how that can mean anything good. We need to find out what became of him.”
There it was, an opportunity to execute his plan, right at his feet. How… fortunate. “Then I’ll go,” he said, giving her what he hoped was a meaningful look. “Varel needs you here for a bit, but not me. Zev can stay with you.”
“But I - oh,” she interrupted herself, eyes widening just a hair as she caught on to the reason for the division. “Yes, that will give me a chance to, um. Work with Varel on other matters. Won’t it?”
“Exactly.” He dropped his voice a bit and took her by the shoulders, punctuating his agreement with a firm kiss. “I’ll miss you, but it’s for the best. Which ones of the new lot should I take with me, do you think?”
“Take Nathaniel,” Zev answered at once, his face the sort of neutral that tended to mean that his real feelings were something quite else. “We will not need his talents here.”
Nathaniel shifted his weight a little, his face in the mask nobles often used around objectionable people. “I do have some familiarity with the marsh,” he agreed. “You could make quicker work of a search with me along.”
Philoméne nodded at the logic, either missing or ignoring whatever else was going on between Nathaniel and Zevran. “Right, good. And you should have Anders in case you need a mage. Hmm. And Oghren. He’s worked with them both before, so he’ll keep them in line for you.”
“Oghren will?” Alistair grinned. “You think so?”
“Hey there,” Oghren growled cheerfully. “It’s my best thing besides drinking and bronto-busting.”
Sigrun rolled her eyes. “Ooh, am I going to be left behind with the other people? Curse my bad luck! Well, off you go, Oggy, bye!”
Oghren smirked up at Alistair. “See? Called me Oggy. I’m gettin’ to her. Just you wait.”
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