Ficathon Fic: Midnight Hour
title: Midnight Hour
rating: T
word count: 1500+
characters: Zevran, Tabris, Leliana (mentioned)
summary: He always falls for the unattainable ones.
request: "fem!Tabris+Zevran sis-bromance: Tabris is gay (how that influences your story, if at all, is up to you), and by extension, her relationship with Zevran is platonic, not romantic or sexual."
a/n: written for will_o_whisper for the DA:O Ficathon. Due to an assignment hand-out bungle, I had to write for will_o_whisper. Hope you enjoy; it was a very fun prompt! :)
He asks her about herself one evening; sitting around the campfire, her face is a bathed in the dull, red glow of flames and embers. She's idly sharpening the end of a branch to a point with one of her daggers, honing a makeshift spear.
They're on the watch together, well past the midnight hour. Winter in Ferelden, and it's freezing; when it starts to snow, white, teardrop shaped flecks of ice that float serenely down from the sky, he takes his flask off his belt. There's mezzaluna in it, popular among the Crows, a liquor said to be distilled - as the fishwives love to claim - from the blood of virgins.
He offers it to her, telling her the story: made from the blood of chaste Antivan princesses, he embellishes, with a smile, and she laughs and drinks.
When she laughs, she's beautiful and, tonight, she's especially so. She's wrapped in furs, and her long hair is loose, coiling down around her shoulders in a lush veil of dark gold. Her eyes glow in the firelight, picking up the sparks from the fire and reflecting the heat of the blaze back at him.
He has to avert his eyes, then, because the pain he feels is sharp, familiar, unwanted.
"There's nothing to tell." She answers his earlier question while she takes another sip from his flask, before handing it back to him. Liquor trickles down from the corners of her mouth, and their fingers brush, his rough skin over her softness. "My life is nothing exciting, especially as compared to yours."
She plays with his fingers, gently, before he flicks her off, feigning annoyance, and she makes a soft, amused-sounding sigh.
Her eyes, lovely and blue, he notices, though, are on Leliana's tent and not, as he would prefer, on him.
"Ah, yes, but we have another long while together," he says, trying to coax her, to gather her attention back on him, "and I have already told you all of my stories."
She reaches out to him, and traces the line of his jaw with the pad of her index finger. She's smiling, affectionately, sisterly - or, at least, like Zevran imagines a sister would smile at her brother, had he ever had any sisters, or known any.
"All right," and her voice is friendly. Alas, Zevran sighs inwardly, only friendly. "Should we start, like all good things, with the beginning?"
She tells him everything, in her warm, honey-lovely voice: that she is born in an autumn that is twenty years past; an unwanted baby, a cast-off. Later, years later, she hears something, a quote from a book maybe, something slipped by her, off hand, at the house where she's a servant: no one wanted her, she was cast off from life's feast. It resonates inside of her, deeply; she thinks about it all the time, that quote, and how like her it really is and, like some things in life, it eventually becomes a part of her, burrowing underneath her skin, like a bear hibernating in a winter that never ends.
"Like a bear in winter? So...poetic," he interrupts her, and he silently mouths the phrase to himself, repeating it, mocking her, meaning to provoke. "Unexpected for...you."
She tilts her head towards him, a sly and amused smirk curling on her lips. "You want to hear the rest of it, or no?"
He makes a dramatic, sweeping motion through the air, a clean slice with the sharp edge of his fingers. "By all means, my dear."
Her confidence in him is unexpected, and he relishes this sign of trust from her. He doesn't know why, and he doesn't want to examine it, but he wants... Her. Her trust, her affection, her...
Don't, he reminds himself, savagely, and he forces himself to pay attention to her words, her story - not her lips, her eyes, the smooth, pearly-colored skin of her neck, trailing lusciously down...
He learns about her mother, a ghost of the past whose shadow stretches ominously across the length of her childhood; Adaia teaches her how to wield a dagger when she's six, and how to pluck the strings of a short bow, how to finesse an arrow into the twain and let it fly, high over the wooden gates that separate the Alienage from the real world. Her hands are little and clumsy; she doesn't have Adaia's slender, long fingers, so elegant and beautiful. Her fingers are stubby, childish and ugly - broken fingernails and mottled skin - and she wishes she was more like her mother, in every possible way.
There are whispers even then, she says to him, and a visible weight settles over her shoulders like a mantle. Whispers about Adaia Tabris and her beauty and her wildness; like a spirit, something too dark and beautiful to live in this world, her Aunt Velara tells her before they hang Adaia, before they march her mother to gallows in irons and leave her body to rot, like a dog's carcass, by the King's orders, at the entrance of the Alienage. When Adaia becomes bones, pale and bleached by the sun, Her father takes the bones and buries them underneath their doorstep. Weeds grow around the morbid, makeshift doormat and, slowly, day by day, people begin to forget about the laughing, silver-tongued hoyden of the Denerim Alienage, and that's when Adaia really, truly dies.
But she never forgets. Six, and her mother is curling her fingers over her own, whispering in her ear - look straight, shoot straight. At ten, her father tells her that she is to stay at home, for the love of the Maker, Velara watch her, and she watches the beetles and lice crawl comfortably around her straw-filled mattress while the hangman slips a noose around Adaia's slender neck. Eventually, she loses her baby fat (but not the stubby fingers, sadly, and he laughs) and the prominent bones in her face settle, an exact copy of Adaia's, as she ages.
High cheekbones and the same eyes, skin and long, curling hair... Every time she looks into the mirror after the age of thirteen and it's as if she's not even her own person anymore - she's...Adaia. She's always looked like her mother, but the older that she gets, the more she can't seem to escape her mother; Adaia's eyes stare at her, watchful and waiting, from any reflective surface - a puddle, a mirror, a glass window.
Her father looks at her and sees his dead wife - she knows it - and their relationship becomes tenuous, distant, strained. Things fall apart. She masters the short bow, and then the long bow. She slices trees, bed posts and the walls of her bedroom with her mother's old daggers (she keeps them hidden under her pillow, her father can never know). She learns bitterness and hatred and anger at the hands some of human lordlings, and she learns, perhaps the best skill of all, how to forget, how to push things away, how to pretend.
When she tells him that last part, she turns her face away from him; her voice trembles. He can tell she hadn't meant to tell him, lost in the past, and it's just come out, unbidden.
"But that...that..." She grimaces, and he tries to touch her, to say the expected things: life, such as it is, I understand. She's rigid, but she lets his fingers circle the column of her neck; her clavicle, and the corded tendons there are all distressingly prominent. She feels fragile, achingly vulnerable, and her head drops, her forehead grazes the woolen blanket draped over his armor.
They stay like that for a long time, in silence. The fire crackles and hisses, and he passes the time by fantasizing about her naked body (high, firm breasts, and taut, smooth muscles everywhere, he imagines), because if he thinks about her last words to him, the anger starts building inside of him - a fiery, explosive thing that threatens to burn outward and scorch him and her both.
When their watch is over, and Sten and Alistair come to relieve them, she unravels herself from him, and his fingers grasp only air where solid flesh has been.
"Thank you," and her face is turned up to his, earnest, ridiculously so, "who would have thought? You, a good friend."
She kisses his cheek, a chaste peck. He imagines what would happen if she turned, what her small, full mouth would feel like against his own, and his goodbye is husky, full of a need that he can't quite conceal.
But, like always, she leaves him, her friend, to go sleep within the cozy, silken confines of Leliana's tent.
He watches the tilt and pitch of her shapely hips as she walks away; he pictures her in the bard's tent, undressing, curling up next to her lover, folding herself into Leliana's warm, willing arms...
He sighs, a harsh push of breath that he can see in the air, white, curling rivulets that spike out away from him. He lingers out in the cold, unable to sleep, hoping the winter air will cool the unwanted, unsated desire that burns through him, freezing away any feelings for her that aren't pure, friendly or virtuous.
A hopeless case, he thinks, as the snow continues to fall around him, hopeless and damned.
rating: T
word count: 1500+
characters: Zevran, Tabris, Leliana (mentioned)
summary: He always falls for the unattainable ones.
request: "fem!Tabris+Zevran sis-bromance: Tabris is gay (how that influences your story, if at all, is up to you), and by extension, her relationship with Zevran is platonic, not romantic or sexual."
a/n: written for will_o_whisper for the DA:O Ficathon. Due to an assignment hand-out bungle, I had to write for will_o_whisper. Hope you enjoy; it was a very fun prompt! :)
He asks her about herself one evening; sitting around the campfire, her face is a bathed in the dull, red glow of flames and embers. She's idly sharpening the end of a branch to a point with one of her daggers, honing a makeshift spear.
They're on the watch together, well past the midnight hour. Winter in Ferelden, and it's freezing; when it starts to snow, white, teardrop shaped flecks of ice that float serenely down from the sky, he takes his flask off his belt. There's mezzaluna in it, popular among the Crows, a liquor said to be distilled - as the fishwives love to claim - from the blood of virgins.
He offers it to her, telling her the story: made from the blood of chaste Antivan princesses, he embellishes, with a smile, and she laughs and drinks.
When she laughs, she's beautiful and, tonight, she's especially so. She's wrapped in furs, and her long hair is loose, coiling down around her shoulders in a lush veil of dark gold. Her eyes glow in the firelight, picking up the sparks from the fire and reflecting the heat of the blaze back at him.
He has to avert his eyes, then, because the pain he feels is sharp, familiar, unwanted.
"There's nothing to tell." She answers his earlier question while she takes another sip from his flask, before handing it back to him. Liquor trickles down from the corners of her mouth, and their fingers brush, his rough skin over her softness. "My life is nothing exciting, especially as compared to yours."
She plays with his fingers, gently, before he flicks her off, feigning annoyance, and she makes a soft, amused-sounding sigh.
Her eyes, lovely and blue, he notices, though, are on Leliana's tent and not, as he would prefer, on him.
"Ah, yes, but we have another long while together," he says, trying to coax her, to gather her attention back on him, "and I have already told you all of my stories."
She reaches out to him, and traces the line of his jaw with the pad of her index finger. She's smiling, affectionately, sisterly - or, at least, like Zevran imagines a sister would smile at her brother, had he ever had any sisters, or known any.
"All right," and her voice is friendly. Alas, Zevran sighs inwardly, only friendly. "Should we start, like all good things, with the beginning?"
She tells him everything, in her warm, honey-lovely voice: that she is born in an autumn that is twenty years past; an unwanted baby, a cast-off. Later, years later, she hears something, a quote from a book maybe, something slipped by her, off hand, at the house where she's a servant: no one wanted her, she was cast off from life's feast. It resonates inside of her, deeply; she thinks about it all the time, that quote, and how like her it really is and, like some things in life, it eventually becomes a part of her, burrowing underneath her skin, like a bear hibernating in a winter that never ends.
"Like a bear in winter? So...poetic," he interrupts her, and he silently mouths the phrase to himself, repeating it, mocking her, meaning to provoke. "Unexpected for...you."
She tilts her head towards him, a sly and amused smirk curling on her lips. "You want to hear the rest of it, or no?"
He makes a dramatic, sweeping motion through the air, a clean slice with the sharp edge of his fingers. "By all means, my dear."
Her confidence in him is unexpected, and he relishes this sign of trust from her. He doesn't know why, and he doesn't want to examine it, but he wants... Her. Her trust, her affection, her...
Don't, he reminds himself, savagely, and he forces himself to pay attention to her words, her story - not her lips, her eyes, the smooth, pearly-colored skin of her neck, trailing lusciously down...
He learns about her mother, a ghost of the past whose shadow stretches ominously across the length of her childhood; Adaia teaches her how to wield a dagger when she's six, and how to pluck the strings of a short bow, how to finesse an arrow into the twain and let it fly, high over the wooden gates that separate the Alienage from the real world. Her hands are little and clumsy; she doesn't have Adaia's slender, long fingers, so elegant and beautiful. Her fingers are stubby, childish and ugly - broken fingernails and mottled skin - and she wishes she was more like her mother, in every possible way.
There are whispers even then, she says to him, and a visible weight settles over her shoulders like a mantle. Whispers about Adaia Tabris and her beauty and her wildness; like a spirit, something too dark and beautiful to live in this world, her Aunt Velara tells her before they hang Adaia, before they march her mother to gallows in irons and leave her body to rot, like a dog's carcass, by the King's orders, at the entrance of the Alienage. When Adaia becomes bones, pale and bleached by the sun, Her father takes the bones and buries them underneath their doorstep. Weeds grow around the morbid, makeshift doormat and, slowly, day by day, people begin to forget about the laughing, silver-tongued hoyden of the Denerim Alienage, and that's when Adaia really, truly dies.
But she never forgets. Six, and her mother is curling her fingers over her own, whispering in her ear - look straight, shoot straight. At ten, her father tells her that she is to stay at home, for the love of the Maker, Velara watch her, and she watches the beetles and lice crawl comfortably around her straw-filled mattress while the hangman slips a noose around Adaia's slender neck. Eventually, she loses her baby fat (but not the stubby fingers, sadly, and he laughs) and the prominent bones in her face settle, an exact copy of Adaia's, as she ages.
High cheekbones and the same eyes, skin and long, curling hair... Every time she looks into the mirror after the age of thirteen and it's as if she's not even her own person anymore - she's...Adaia. She's always looked like her mother, but the older that she gets, the more she can't seem to escape her mother; Adaia's eyes stare at her, watchful and waiting, from any reflective surface - a puddle, a mirror, a glass window.
Her father looks at her and sees his dead wife - she knows it - and their relationship becomes tenuous, distant, strained. Things fall apart. She masters the short bow, and then the long bow. She slices trees, bed posts and the walls of her bedroom with her mother's old daggers (she keeps them hidden under her pillow, her father can never know). She learns bitterness and hatred and anger at the hands some of human lordlings, and she learns, perhaps the best skill of all, how to forget, how to push things away, how to pretend.
When she tells him that last part, she turns her face away from him; her voice trembles. He can tell she hadn't meant to tell him, lost in the past, and it's just come out, unbidden.
"But that...that..." She grimaces, and he tries to touch her, to say the expected things: life, such as it is, I understand. She's rigid, but she lets his fingers circle the column of her neck; her clavicle, and the corded tendons there are all distressingly prominent. She feels fragile, achingly vulnerable, and her head drops, her forehead grazes the woolen blanket draped over his armor.
They stay like that for a long time, in silence. The fire crackles and hisses, and he passes the time by fantasizing about her naked body (high, firm breasts, and taut, smooth muscles everywhere, he imagines), because if he thinks about her last words to him, the anger starts building inside of him - a fiery, explosive thing that threatens to burn outward and scorch him and her both.
When their watch is over, and Sten and Alistair come to relieve them, she unravels herself from him, and his fingers grasp only air where solid flesh has been.
"Thank you," and her face is turned up to his, earnest, ridiculously so, "who would have thought? You, a good friend."
She kisses his cheek, a chaste peck. He imagines what would happen if she turned, what her small, full mouth would feel like against his own, and his goodbye is husky, full of a need that he can't quite conceal.
But, like always, she leaves him, her friend, to go sleep within the cozy, silken confines of Leliana's tent.
He watches the tilt and pitch of her shapely hips as she walks away; he pictures her in the bard's tent, undressing, curling up next to her lover, folding herself into Leliana's warm, willing arms...
He sighs, a harsh push of breath that he can see in the air, white, curling rivulets that spike out away from him. He lingers out in the cold, unable to sleep, hoping the winter air will cool the unwanted, unsated desire that burns through him, freezing away any feelings for her that aren't pure, friendly or virtuous.
A hopeless case, he thinks, as the snow continues to fall around him, hopeless and damned.