AN: Elissa story, but from Ali's POV. Why can't I QUIT HIM?
During one of his first conversations with her, he had grabbed the trailing end of her messy braid and proclaimed, "We'll need to do something about this!" That was before, where there were Grey Wardens of Ferelden who weren't them, and military order and protocol, and he hadn't known she had just spent the last week as a fugitive, leaving behind a murdered family and an aristocratic title. He'd felt like an ass later when he found out, but at that moment she had just looked at him wearily and said nothing.
He waited anxiously for the braids catch on her helm, and maybe even her sword pommel, and though it never happened he finally dared to question the practicality of it once more. She answered pertly, "If you can fight in a skirt, I can fight with long hair."
"Well I don't now," he emphasizes, and she shakes her head vigorously. He almost suspects she's whipping her braids around like that on purpose.
"You did before, Templar. You might again," she waggles her brows comically. "Don't forget about the pretty dress".
And so she held on to her hair as long as she could. He watched her out of the corner of his eye every night as she brushed out the luxuriant length of it, and again each morning as she wound it into coils at the nape of her neck in preparation for a day of battling darkspawn. He was finally starting to understand the ritual of it, and what it means: a reminder of better times and a previous life mourned.
But inevitably she finally lost the fight. One night her dog had closed his jaws gently but firmly around Alistair's wrist and led him away from the campsite. When Alistair came upon her, she was seated in a clearing on a rock, with a ruined hairbrush beside her and her camp knife clutched in her hand. Ragged chestnut tresses clotted with darkspawn gore were strewn around her, and she was weeping as though her heart had broken. Her anguished gaze catches his and she chokes on a sob. "It's stupid". And it's not, but he can't get that out.
Instead, propriety be damned, he wrapped his arms around her shivering form and buried his nose in the sharp stubble of what was left of her hair. By some Maker-given insight he sent the dog back for Leliana, and held Elissa in an awkward embrace until the bard slipped into the clearing and briskly took charge of the situation. Though every fiber in his being wanted to stay by the Warden's side, Leliana's glance at him clearly stated leave, and he did.
When she emerges from Leliana's tent the next day looking haggard but calm, with a neat little cropped haircut that makes him think of fairy stories, he knows he did the right thing.
"It is quite the thing in Orlais," Leliana purred, running her fingers along the Warden's scalp in a proprietary fashion that Alistair doesn't like at all.
The meticulously feathered locks accentuate the subtle elegance of her features, and bring out the color of her eyes. He thinks she's beautiful.
"You look like a boy!" is what comes out, and he feels like an ass again but hopes she knows him well enough by now to catch his intent.
"Thank you," she says gravely, as if it's the nicest compliment she's ever received.