siujerkjai
in
zevran
Fanfic: Reunion
Pairing: Zevran/Tabris
Rating: M (mildly NSFW)
Word count: 2,671
Notes: Contains Awakening spoilers. Also, my Zevran speaks Spanish because so do I. Or at least, I speak Spanish better than I speak Italian. Apologies for any language errors.
Summary: Kallian catches up with Zevran in Antiva.
At the first creak of floorboards, Zevran bolted upright in the bed; the second sent him diving for the dagger beneath his pillow and rolling into a crouch on the floor. Every day he had waited for the Crows to find this hidden place, but as the months passed, he’d started to hope that he could outpace them, that he would carve through enough of their ranks to gain the attention of the Guildmaster before discovery.
He cursed himself for whatever slip had led them here and backed toward the window. The fit was tight-he had tried it, of course, before taking the room-and most passing on the street beneath the small square of glass would not believe a grown man could squeeze through. But most passing were human and not living on whatever they could acquire quietly from vendors too greedy or desperate for coin to hand over a fugitive.
The fresh oil he applied to the window’s frame every night ensured the glass slid with no sound. Glancing down, he saw no one waiting in the alley below. He wasn’t sure whether to be grateful for small mercies or insulted that he had been underestimated.
He hopped onto the sill, then clutched awkwardly at the tattered curtain when his foot slipped on the rain-slicked wood. Droplets peppered his face and bare chest and dampened his hair as he lowered himself to his knees. Sliding the dagger between his teeth, he gripped the sill with both hands and swung his legs out into the wet night. He hung there, waiting, as the door knob turned, wanting to catch a glimpse of who had come to collect him. Assuming he survived the escape, he would know which Master he had most angered, which Master had ferreted him out.
The door swung open, and Zevran squinted at the slight, solitary figure silhouetted in the light from the hall. He could make out a pale complexion-too pale for most Antivans-and the pointed tips of ears peeking through long dark hair. The figure’s gaze swept over the bed, then turned unerringly to the window. Shadows concealed the figure’s eyes, but Zevran knew the moment they met his own.
“Going somewhere?” Kallian asked in a voice with less humor and more heat than he remembered. She opened her mouth to speak again, but he had already hoisted himself up and scrambled over the sill with a lack of grace that would have embarrassed him at any other time. He spat his dagger to the floor and swallowed whatever she had been about to say as his mouth descended on hers.
She stiffened for a moment, then her fingertips grazed his waist. Warmth suffused him, as if he had suffered a chill for months that had only just abated. His own hands raked through her thick hair, the wet strands clinging to his wrists and twining around his fingers. His nose and lungs filled with a scent he had only experienced in dreams-the unique and intoxicating scent of her overlaid with the smells of his Antiva City. When she pulled away, palms lightly pushing against his chest, he felt half-drunk with it.
“How…?” he began, not sure which of a dozen questions would follow. A shift of light caught a gleam off his dagger, and he remembered who he had thought was at his door. “How did you find me?”
“I’ve been staking out tanneries,” she said. “This was the third I tried.” She gestured toward the still-open door and the staircase that led to the lower floor and the vats of curing leather stored there.
He hurried across the room, only ducking his head out long enough to scan for anyone else in the building. He pulled the door shut, leaving them in the half-light of his single candle, and shook his head against the fear welling inside him, a fear far greater than any he’d had for his own discovery, a fear that curled his hands into fists and felt not so far from anger. “You should not be here.”
She strode toward him. He could have caught the strike-he was confident he was still quicker than she-but years of Crow training forced him to accept the slap, turning his head only enough to defuse and not deflect. Stinging pain bloomed across his cheek. Before her, such a blow had been a simple fact of life.
He grabbed her wrist, holding it against his chest as he met narrowed gray eyes. “Nunca más.”
Kallian tugged her arm away. “You left me,” she hissed. “Disappeared in the night like I was a mark you’d tumbled and decided wasn’t worth the killing.”
For most of his life, his success, his survival had depended upon the coldness of his heart. The flames of passion and of pleasure were the only fire he’d allowed himself until Rinna. After that regret, he was all but ice. Ironically he had found warmth in the chilly backwoods of Ferelden and an angry fire in Redcliffe Castle, the night she had refused Morrigan’s offer. He had tried to tamp it down while in Antiva-it could do no good here-but it flared in her presence and he felt no desire to suppress it.
“Lo sabaste! Yo te conté… sangre de Andraste…” He forced himself to breathe deeply, searching his muddled mind, groping, if not for control, then at least for words she would understand.
“You knew this,” he ground from behind clenched teeth. “The poison was a warning, as I said.”
“Bait, you mean,” she shot back. “And you took it. Without thought to what I would feel, without discussing it with me.”
“For your safety, I did this!” he snapped.
“Safety?” she scoffed. A bitter laugh escaped her as she tugged down her collar, exposing the full expanse of a scar he’d never seen-a starburst the width of her palm that reflected the lone candle’s light. Her other hand hiked the shirt from her trousers, and he saw the scar had a mate sitting just above her opposite hip.
Zevran frowned, trying to imagine the weapon that would leave such a mark. “What…?”
“Lightning,” Kallian replied in a flat voice. “I was struck by lightning.”
A new chill descended, as his mind tried and failed to resist the image of her body shocked and smoking. “A mage?”
“A dragon.” She laughed again, hollow and cold. “A dragon made of lightning, Zev. Can you imagine? I had a mage with me or I doubt my heart would have started again.” Without a pause for him to collect his splintering thoughts, she shoved the sleeve of her shirt up past her elbow to display a splotch of angry red flesh. “And this is from a broodmother’s venom. Remember the one we fought in the Deep Roads? I’ve killed five since you left. The last one could talk.”
Her eyes held his as she pulled her shirt higher, so he caught only a glimpse of a long pale line that slashed across her ribs. “And this is from an assassin. A Crow.”
Somehow the word thundered louder in his ears than more distant terms like “dragon” and “broodmother.” No darkspawn sought her on his account. Any mistake that would have killed him was nothing to a mistake that endangered her. A mistake that endangered her was the unraveling of everything he had hoped to accomplish. Time, effort, risk. The longing that throbbed like a diseased tooth but that he endured to protect her. All wasted. All ruined.
And somehow, somewhere, he had made exactly that mistake.
Kallian looked up at him, and the fist that squeezed his heart must have shown on his face for her expression softened a bit. “It had nothing to do with you,” she said. “Some of the nobles of Amaranthine decided they didn’t care for the king and queen’s choice of arlessa. Arlessa!” she scoffed, sounding almost as if she were choking. “As if I knew anything of such things.” An accusing finger dug into his chest. “But you do. You know how to play the games and say the right words and maybe if you’d been there I wouldn’t have made such a mess of it.” She pulled away from him, the heel of her hand pressing between her eyes.
His mind fumbled for any words, of any language. “I… did not…”
Her head snapped up, venom in her gaze returned. “What? Didn’t think I’d care? Didn’t think it would bother me to wake up alone?”
“I have never…” He shook his head to dispel the seemingly endless series of shocks the night had brought. “From the beginning I said I would have to deal with the Crows.”
“I wasn’t surprised,” she muttered, turning her head away. “I was disappointed.”
The sting penetrated even the clenching in his chest. “The Crows should not be your concern.”
“You are my concern!” she snapped. She reached out to finger the earring that dangled from his ear, the earring she had bought him while they traveled to meet with the Wardens of Orlais. “Or does this mean nothing to you?”
He jerked his head from her grasp, anger surging again. “If it meant nothing, you would not have found me. I would have disappeared far from Antiva.”
“Instead you returned to eat fish and smell leather and enjoy the dark-haired beauties.” She crossed her arms under her breasts, and her gaze fell away from his again, toward the narrow cot in the corner.
He stalked toward her, grabbing her by the shoulders with a force that brought wide eyes back to his. “This is what you think?” he murmured in a dangerous voice. “You think I have laughed and made love and forgotten? You think I have not lain awake, alone and empty and aching for the want of you?”
She blinked up at him, looking startled out of her righteous indignation for the first time. She licked her lips, then opened them to speak, but he did not give her the chance. He shoved her backward, and she stumbled, her legs banging against the edge of the cot. The moment she sprawled across the thin mattress, he was upon her. Even if he had wanted to stop, he doubted he would have been able to. Never before in his life had he even attempted to be faithful to a lover, to deny himself convenient pleasure for the sake of some distant and uncertain future bliss. For her, he had done this. Now she would quench the new fire rising in him, threatening to burn him from the inside out.
His hands shook as he tore the clothes from her body. Distantly he was aware of a sharp sting of fingernails biting into his skin as she clawed at his trousers. There was no teasing, no slow build-up, not when the fire already raged so hot. They came together quickly, and soon cries of too long denied pleasure and release filled the small room.
Afterward they lay tangled in each other, covered in sweat and silence. Kallian was the first to raise her head. A fierce determination had replaced the anger in her eyes.
“No more Grey Wardens,” she declared. “No more Crows. We belong to no one but each other.”
He smiled. For all her practicality, for all her weariness of the world, a hidden earnestness he envied lay beneath, an unquestioned sense of how the world should be. “That may take some doing.”
“We’ll do what we have to.” Her fingertips trailed down his chest, then up again, following the swirling inked designs. If they were going to discuss the crucial matter of their own survival, he should tell her to stop, but the distracting feeling of her nearness filled every hollow part of him. “How close are you to meeting with the Guildmaster?”
“Any day now.”
“We tell him to leave us alone or we’ll destroy the Crows.” Always the impossible fell from her lips as easily as the mundane, as if only speaking the words could make them so. Then again, she had promised to fight the archdemon and return to him, and here she was.
His own hands roved across smooth skin, even as he tried to uncover the answer to their problem. “He will know we are bluffing. Even if it were possible, the Crows are a part of Antiva. Destroy them and you destroy the nation.”
She shrugged. “Then we agree not to take over.”
Zevran laughed. “And is this a bluff as well? Or do you fancy yourself queen of assassins?”
She had serious eyes, he’d once told her. It was no less true now in his bed than it had been then. “We’ll do what we have to.”
Her reputation had spread to Antiva. Once convinced she truly was who she said, the Guildmaster would treat this as no idle threat. She would force the open confrontation that the Crows so studiously avoided. They would agree, simply to avoid it ever happening again.
A life of their own stretched out before them and threatened to make him giddy on its promise but for the one regret that pricked his heart. “He will not let us remain in Antiva.” They would be all but chased to the border, he had no doubt, and from there, no return would be allowed. He had said his good-byes to his city once before, and he would say them again, awaiting not death but exile.
“Then we travel. Maybe go to Tevinter, try to track down the elves taken from the alienage. Go to Denerim or Amaranthine when we want a roof over our heads.” Kallian’s hand came to rest on the center of his chest, just covering the small pain there. “Except for Satinalia.”
His brow furrowed. “Satinalia?”
Despite the seriousness of her eyes, an almost unnoticeable shift of her lips tilted up one corner. “We return to Antiva for one week every year. We’ll even go masked so no one will know. He agrees to this or everything he has is ours.”
Surprise first, then affection and something like relief flooded him, and he pressed his lips to hers, laughing against her mouth. He pulled back, grinning. “You are still quite the strategist, my Grey Warden.”
She jabbed a fingernail into his shoulder. “We could have done this from the beginning if you’d just talked to me.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You would not have left with darkspawn still underfoot.”
“Maybe not. But you could have asked.” Her hinted smile had vanished. “You don’t get to make decisions for me. I’ve had enough of that in my life. We both have.”
Pulling her more firmly atop him, he swept up her stabbing hand and kissed the knuckles. “How shall I beg absolution, amora?”
She traced the tattooed lines of his face with her other hand. “Say you shouldn’t have left me.”
“No debería haberte dejado.” He tilted his head and kissed the underside of her jaw, then grinned as a shiver slid down her spine.
“Say you’ll never leave me again,” she murmured, the words slightly breathless.
Turning his head again, he breathed against her ear, “Nunca. Nunca más.” The earring he had given her brushed against his lips.
She pulled back, gray eyes seeking gold. “You said that before. What does it mean?”
“Never again.”
A strand of hair slipped over her eyes as she nodded. “Nunca más,” she repeated. As she smoothed the wayward lock behind her ear, a sly smile spread her lips. “You know the window was open, right?” she asked, nodding toward it.
He glanced to where a mischievous breeze was setting the curtain dancing. His panic over her appearance, over the open door seemed so distant now, another lifetime from the cries of passion they had not bothered nor wanted to muffle. He met her gaze again, rolling his hips beneath her and grinning as she gasped.
“Let them come.”
I've created an archive of sorts on fanfiction.net if anyone is interested in what came before.
Rating: M (mildly NSFW)
Word count: 2,671
Notes: Contains Awakening spoilers. Also, my Zevran speaks Spanish because so do I. Or at least, I speak Spanish better than I speak Italian. Apologies for any language errors.
Summary: Kallian catches up with Zevran in Antiva.
At the first creak of floorboards, Zevran bolted upright in the bed; the second sent him diving for the dagger beneath his pillow and rolling into a crouch on the floor. Every day he had waited for the Crows to find this hidden place, but as the months passed, he’d started to hope that he could outpace them, that he would carve through enough of their ranks to gain the attention of the Guildmaster before discovery.
He cursed himself for whatever slip had led them here and backed toward the window. The fit was tight-he had tried it, of course, before taking the room-and most passing on the street beneath the small square of glass would not believe a grown man could squeeze through. But most passing were human and not living on whatever they could acquire quietly from vendors too greedy or desperate for coin to hand over a fugitive.
The fresh oil he applied to the window’s frame every night ensured the glass slid with no sound. Glancing down, he saw no one waiting in the alley below. He wasn’t sure whether to be grateful for small mercies or insulted that he had been underestimated.
He hopped onto the sill, then clutched awkwardly at the tattered curtain when his foot slipped on the rain-slicked wood. Droplets peppered his face and bare chest and dampened his hair as he lowered himself to his knees. Sliding the dagger between his teeth, he gripped the sill with both hands and swung his legs out into the wet night. He hung there, waiting, as the door knob turned, wanting to catch a glimpse of who had come to collect him. Assuming he survived the escape, he would know which Master he had most angered, which Master had ferreted him out.
The door swung open, and Zevran squinted at the slight, solitary figure silhouetted in the light from the hall. He could make out a pale complexion-too pale for most Antivans-and the pointed tips of ears peeking through long dark hair. The figure’s gaze swept over the bed, then turned unerringly to the window. Shadows concealed the figure’s eyes, but Zevran knew the moment they met his own.
“Going somewhere?” Kallian asked in a voice with less humor and more heat than he remembered. She opened her mouth to speak again, but he had already hoisted himself up and scrambled over the sill with a lack of grace that would have embarrassed him at any other time. He spat his dagger to the floor and swallowed whatever she had been about to say as his mouth descended on hers.
She stiffened for a moment, then her fingertips grazed his waist. Warmth suffused him, as if he had suffered a chill for months that had only just abated. His own hands raked through her thick hair, the wet strands clinging to his wrists and twining around his fingers. His nose and lungs filled with a scent he had only experienced in dreams-the unique and intoxicating scent of her overlaid with the smells of his Antiva City. When she pulled away, palms lightly pushing against his chest, he felt half-drunk with it.
“How…?” he began, not sure which of a dozen questions would follow. A shift of light caught a gleam off his dagger, and he remembered who he had thought was at his door. “How did you find me?”
“I’ve been staking out tanneries,” she said. “This was the third I tried.” She gestured toward the still-open door and the staircase that led to the lower floor and the vats of curing leather stored there.
He hurried across the room, only ducking his head out long enough to scan for anyone else in the building. He pulled the door shut, leaving them in the half-light of his single candle, and shook his head against the fear welling inside him, a fear far greater than any he’d had for his own discovery, a fear that curled his hands into fists and felt not so far from anger. “You should not be here.”
She strode toward him. He could have caught the strike-he was confident he was still quicker than she-but years of Crow training forced him to accept the slap, turning his head only enough to defuse and not deflect. Stinging pain bloomed across his cheek. Before her, such a blow had been a simple fact of life.
He grabbed her wrist, holding it against his chest as he met narrowed gray eyes. “Nunca más.”
Kallian tugged her arm away. “You left me,” she hissed. “Disappeared in the night like I was a mark you’d tumbled and decided wasn’t worth the killing.”
For most of his life, his success, his survival had depended upon the coldness of his heart. The flames of passion and of pleasure were the only fire he’d allowed himself until Rinna. After that regret, he was all but ice. Ironically he had found warmth in the chilly backwoods of Ferelden and an angry fire in Redcliffe Castle, the night she had refused Morrigan’s offer. He had tried to tamp it down while in Antiva-it could do no good here-but it flared in her presence and he felt no desire to suppress it.
“Lo sabaste! Yo te conté… sangre de Andraste…” He forced himself to breathe deeply, searching his muddled mind, groping, if not for control, then at least for words she would understand.
“You knew this,” he ground from behind clenched teeth. “The poison was a warning, as I said.”
“Bait, you mean,” she shot back. “And you took it. Without thought to what I would feel, without discussing it with me.”
“For your safety, I did this!” he snapped.
“Safety?” she scoffed. A bitter laugh escaped her as she tugged down her collar, exposing the full expanse of a scar he’d never seen-a starburst the width of her palm that reflected the lone candle’s light. Her other hand hiked the shirt from her trousers, and he saw the scar had a mate sitting just above her opposite hip.
Zevran frowned, trying to imagine the weapon that would leave such a mark. “What…?”
“Lightning,” Kallian replied in a flat voice. “I was struck by lightning.”
A new chill descended, as his mind tried and failed to resist the image of her body shocked and smoking. “A mage?”
“A dragon.” She laughed again, hollow and cold. “A dragon made of lightning, Zev. Can you imagine? I had a mage with me or I doubt my heart would have started again.” Without a pause for him to collect his splintering thoughts, she shoved the sleeve of her shirt up past her elbow to display a splotch of angry red flesh. “And this is from a broodmother’s venom. Remember the one we fought in the Deep Roads? I’ve killed five since you left. The last one could talk.”
Her eyes held his as she pulled her shirt higher, so he caught only a glimpse of a long pale line that slashed across her ribs. “And this is from an assassin. A Crow.”
Somehow the word thundered louder in his ears than more distant terms like “dragon” and “broodmother.” No darkspawn sought her on his account. Any mistake that would have killed him was nothing to a mistake that endangered her. A mistake that endangered her was the unraveling of everything he had hoped to accomplish. Time, effort, risk. The longing that throbbed like a diseased tooth but that he endured to protect her. All wasted. All ruined.
And somehow, somewhere, he had made exactly that mistake.
Kallian looked up at him, and the fist that squeezed his heart must have shown on his face for her expression softened a bit. “It had nothing to do with you,” she said. “Some of the nobles of Amaranthine decided they didn’t care for the king and queen’s choice of arlessa. Arlessa!” she scoffed, sounding almost as if she were choking. “As if I knew anything of such things.” An accusing finger dug into his chest. “But you do. You know how to play the games and say the right words and maybe if you’d been there I wouldn’t have made such a mess of it.” She pulled away from him, the heel of her hand pressing between her eyes.
His mind fumbled for any words, of any language. “I… did not…”
Her head snapped up, venom in her gaze returned. “What? Didn’t think I’d care? Didn’t think it would bother me to wake up alone?”
“I have never…” He shook his head to dispel the seemingly endless series of shocks the night had brought. “From the beginning I said I would have to deal with the Crows.”
“I wasn’t surprised,” she muttered, turning her head away. “I was disappointed.”
The sting penetrated even the clenching in his chest. “The Crows should not be your concern.”
“You are my concern!” she snapped. She reached out to finger the earring that dangled from his ear, the earring she had bought him while they traveled to meet with the Wardens of Orlais. “Or does this mean nothing to you?”
He jerked his head from her grasp, anger surging again. “If it meant nothing, you would not have found me. I would have disappeared far from Antiva.”
“Instead you returned to eat fish and smell leather and enjoy the dark-haired beauties.” She crossed her arms under her breasts, and her gaze fell away from his again, toward the narrow cot in the corner.
He stalked toward her, grabbing her by the shoulders with a force that brought wide eyes back to his. “This is what you think?” he murmured in a dangerous voice. “You think I have laughed and made love and forgotten? You think I have not lain awake, alone and empty and aching for the want of you?”
She blinked up at him, looking startled out of her righteous indignation for the first time. She licked her lips, then opened them to speak, but he did not give her the chance. He shoved her backward, and she stumbled, her legs banging against the edge of the cot. The moment she sprawled across the thin mattress, he was upon her. Even if he had wanted to stop, he doubted he would have been able to. Never before in his life had he even attempted to be faithful to a lover, to deny himself convenient pleasure for the sake of some distant and uncertain future bliss. For her, he had done this. Now she would quench the new fire rising in him, threatening to burn him from the inside out.
His hands shook as he tore the clothes from her body. Distantly he was aware of a sharp sting of fingernails biting into his skin as she clawed at his trousers. There was no teasing, no slow build-up, not when the fire already raged so hot. They came together quickly, and soon cries of too long denied pleasure and release filled the small room.
Afterward they lay tangled in each other, covered in sweat and silence. Kallian was the first to raise her head. A fierce determination had replaced the anger in her eyes.
“No more Grey Wardens,” she declared. “No more Crows. We belong to no one but each other.”
He smiled. For all her practicality, for all her weariness of the world, a hidden earnestness he envied lay beneath, an unquestioned sense of how the world should be. “That may take some doing.”
“We’ll do what we have to.” Her fingertips trailed down his chest, then up again, following the swirling inked designs. If they were going to discuss the crucial matter of their own survival, he should tell her to stop, but the distracting feeling of her nearness filled every hollow part of him. “How close are you to meeting with the Guildmaster?”
“Any day now.”
“We tell him to leave us alone or we’ll destroy the Crows.” Always the impossible fell from her lips as easily as the mundane, as if only speaking the words could make them so. Then again, she had promised to fight the archdemon and return to him, and here she was.
His own hands roved across smooth skin, even as he tried to uncover the answer to their problem. “He will know we are bluffing. Even if it were possible, the Crows are a part of Antiva. Destroy them and you destroy the nation.”
She shrugged. “Then we agree not to take over.”
Zevran laughed. “And is this a bluff as well? Or do you fancy yourself queen of assassins?”
She had serious eyes, he’d once told her. It was no less true now in his bed than it had been then. “We’ll do what we have to.”
Her reputation had spread to Antiva. Once convinced she truly was who she said, the Guildmaster would treat this as no idle threat. She would force the open confrontation that the Crows so studiously avoided. They would agree, simply to avoid it ever happening again.
A life of their own stretched out before them and threatened to make him giddy on its promise but for the one regret that pricked his heart. “He will not let us remain in Antiva.” They would be all but chased to the border, he had no doubt, and from there, no return would be allowed. He had said his good-byes to his city once before, and he would say them again, awaiting not death but exile.
“Then we travel. Maybe go to Tevinter, try to track down the elves taken from the alienage. Go to Denerim or Amaranthine when we want a roof over our heads.” Kallian’s hand came to rest on the center of his chest, just covering the small pain there. “Except for Satinalia.”
His brow furrowed. “Satinalia?”
Despite the seriousness of her eyes, an almost unnoticeable shift of her lips tilted up one corner. “We return to Antiva for one week every year. We’ll even go masked so no one will know. He agrees to this or everything he has is ours.”
Surprise first, then affection and something like relief flooded him, and he pressed his lips to hers, laughing against her mouth. He pulled back, grinning. “You are still quite the strategist, my Grey Warden.”
She jabbed a fingernail into his shoulder. “We could have done this from the beginning if you’d just talked to me.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You would not have left with darkspawn still underfoot.”
“Maybe not. But you could have asked.” Her hinted smile had vanished. “You don’t get to make decisions for me. I’ve had enough of that in my life. We both have.”
Pulling her more firmly atop him, he swept up her stabbing hand and kissed the knuckles. “How shall I beg absolution, amora?”
She traced the tattooed lines of his face with her other hand. “Say you shouldn’t have left me.”
“No debería haberte dejado.” He tilted his head and kissed the underside of her jaw, then grinned as a shiver slid down her spine.
“Say you’ll never leave me again,” she murmured, the words slightly breathless.
Turning his head again, he breathed against her ear, “Nunca. Nunca más.” The earring he had given her brushed against his lips.
She pulled back, gray eyes seeking gold. “You said that before. What does it mean?”
“Never again.”
A strand of hair slipped over her eyes as she nodded. “Nunca más,” she repeated. As she smoothed the wayward lock behind her ear, a sly smile spread her lips. “You know the window was open, right?” she asked, nodding toward it.
He glanced to where a mischievous breeze was setting the curtain dancing. His panic over her appearance, over the open door seemed so distant now, another lifetime from the cries of passion they had not bothered nor wanted to muffle. He met her gaze again, rolling his hips beneath her and grinning as she gasped.
“Let them come.”
I've created an archive of sorts on fanfiction.net if anyone is interested in what came before.