A/N: Hello there! So here is a very angsty piece for you! It will contain approximately 5-7 chapters. It's very drabble-ish with almost no dialogue. It was just an idea that refused to leave my mind until I wrote it down. I've been having angsty feels lately, and add DA:O to the mix, along with an exceptionally sad poem I read (Death is Nothing At All by Henry Scott Holland) and this thing was produced. It is almost too angsty and it sort of makes me sick, but oh well. It is my first DA:O fic, but I'm sure plenty more will come. I am slightly obsessed with the game at the moment. Anyways, read on! And please review with any suggestions! Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I do not own Dragon Age: Origins. If I did, I would not be writing crappy fanfiction about it for shits and giggles.
He couldn't entirely say when it had first started. It might have been the first time he looked into her grey eyes as she rounded the corner and approached him in Ostagar, or maybe when she sliced through the darkspawn horde in the Korcari Wilds with grief and hate-fueled passion such as he had never seen. Maybe it was the time she saved the corrupted beasts in the Brecilian forests from a fate worse than death, or when she gave Caridin what he most desired, despite having ultimate power within her reach. Perhaps it was because she had taken in misfits, people with nothing left, and had accepted them into her party without question.
Whatever the reason, wherever it had started, Alistair had fallen in love with Elissa Cousland.
She was bold, impulsive, stubborn, and shrewd, with the sharpest tongue and the most silent step. She was not mean, per se, but she would not hesitate to criticise you when you deserved it. She was exceptionally unpredictable and always kept him on his toes. Some times she would laugh at one of his jokes, and others she would berate him, and tell him he was childish. He never knew what to do or say around her, but that kept him interested.
She intrigued him beyond recognition. He wanted to know how she worked, and what she thought, and why she did the things she did. It was sort of a game for him. He opened up to her, trying to get her to do the same. He teased her, annoyed her, laughed around her, cried around her. He never lied (after the 'I'm a royal bastard' scenario), and he never pretended to be anyone other than who he truly was. He really put everything he had into finding her out.
She was one stubborn victim. She would, at first, entertain him with small talk, and they would jest. It took him a long while to get her to reveal anything about her or her past. And when she did, she only exposed her family name, revealing she was a noble. And almost an entire year later, he finally got to her.
Inch by inch, she told him small bits about herself. It was only in passing or during light conversation. But he remembered every detail and filed it away in his mind for future use. He essentially put her together like a puzzle, piece by piece.
He would mull over her and the pieces he had collected during their long walks in the wilds, to and from towns and landmarks. It kept him occupied while he was not fishing for fragments of her personality, or arguing with that damned witch, or preparing some horrible concoction only he would call 'food'. And when the puzzle was complete, he was left with a woman who was far more complicated than he ever imagined.
She had grown up as a noble in a castle in Highever. Her father was Teyrn, and her mother was the daughter of some Ferelden Bann. She was an adventurous and rebellious child who refused to act the part of a proper noblewoman. She spent her childhood enjoying long romps in the vast grasslands and hills surrounding Highever with her Mabari puppy Kylo and her brother Fergus, and was apparently a nightmare when it came to getting her in a dress and greeting visiting nobles with womanly grace.
She was a carefree spirit, one who was as stubborn as the adult Elissa Alistair had known, but one with a certain content innocence that the king had rarely seen. She refused to not be taught how to fight with sword and bow, and later the dagger, and her mother eventually, albeit unwillingly, allowed her ecstatic father to teach her. For her mother was the one who wished her to behave properly. Elissa had never really got along with her, for they were complete opposites in every sense. She respected her, though, and sometimes grudgingly acted the part of a young noblewoman just to sate her wishes.
It was her father who had her heart, however. Bryce loved his little Mabari, as he called her, for she was just as fierce as the famed wardogs, and one had even chosen her to be his master while she was but a toddler, and he a puppy. To be chosen by a Mabari, her father had said, was a great honour, and showed the worth of the master. He knew his Elissa was unusual and exceptional and would do great deeds. He let her get away with murder, as his wife would say, and maybe that was true. He cherished her and taught her to fight, and she was as important to him as his only son.
And his son, Elissa's brother Fergus, loved her perhaps even more than their father. They were not close in age, but they were close in heart. You could not separate the two if you tried, and indeed, the only other being that had possibly spent more time around her was her Mabari. They played together, trained together, fought together, and adventured together. For there were no other children to play with in the castle, only the visiting ones who seldom travelled with their parents. In their earlier days, the sight of the two young dirt-smudged nobles and their bouncing wardog racing and laughing through the castle halls was a familiar sight. And in later times, the young man and woman could be found practicing their fighting skills together in the training grounds, and jesting with each other down the same halls as they walked. They knew the other better than themselves. And no one was more happy and proud for Fergus than she when he took a wife and sired a son.
Elissa Cousland loved her family and her homeland with all her heart, and they were taken from her in an instant, in one long, horrifying night. She never went into detail concerning her parent's death and her coming to Ostagar, except that Duncan had forced her to leave, and she felt she should have stayed behind to protect them. Alistair knew she blamed their deaths on herself, and try as he might, he could never convince her otherwise.
It was this guilt that sat there and ate away at her soul like a bitter poison, crushing her, exposing her to the deepest and darkest parts of humanity, allowing her a glimpse at what could have been, what should have been, but was never to be.
She couldn't take any more loss, any more pain, and so she had shut herself up, closed herself off to the world, and only dealt with others when absolutely necessary. Her heart, which had loved freely, turned cold and hard. She had sealed it up with a thousand locks and had destroyed every key. Never again would she let her heart get close, to care, to love as it once had. Love was a weakness in her eyes, a weakness that caused you to care too deeply for others. And when that happened, they left you and you could do nothing about it, even though you should have, even though you could have, done something, anything, despite knowing that nothing really could be done.
It was a paradox of sorts, a pattern, an infinite loop of despair and helplessness and fault that sent you wheeling and following it's path until you became a ghost, forever ensnared. To break the loop, in her mind, was to break part of the chain. Break that part, and the loop would stop, and no more grief and weakness would befall. And that's exactly what she did.
The change in her went below the skin. She had lost her content innocence, and had fashioned a hollowed heart for herself. The stubborn girl who had once danced and laughed and loved had turned into a stalwart, experienced rogue who now pushed and sneered and hated. Who was as hard as the toughest of rocks.
But rocks can crack, Alistair had thought, and he aimed to do just that. And he managed it.