Author's Note: Written for the lovely thinkdragonage (formerly known as Clafount), with a nod to her wonderful "Have a Little Faith" (FFN id: 9950765), for Suilven's CMDA Secret Santa 2014 exchange. Posted abysmally late, edited and embellished with a new scene, as per tradition.
Warning: Blanket spoiler warning for events of DA:O and DA2.
The Almost-Templar and the Former Apostate: A Wardening Story
It was the last thing that anyone had expected.
Stroud was almost a fortnight overdue when he finally returned from his lone ranging into the Deep Roads; that, in itself, was out of the ordinary, or so Alistair had gathered from the dark mutterings around the camp. The other Orlesian Grey Wardens had been talking about moving on without him. Dead, they had assumed; Stroud was never late. You would have thought that being a Grey Warden in the wake of a Blight would have taught them a thing or two about flexibility, especially since the only way to get word out of the Deep Roads was to strap a message to a nug and hope for the best, but alas, that was not the case.
No one had expected the senior Warden to return at all, after the fool's errand he'd gone on, and alone. That he came back with a stray Ferelden apostate in tow took his fellow Wardens completely by surprise, Alistair most of all.
Perhaps it was a bit of an understatement, the surprise. It jarred him, he didn't mind saying. He was still only a year out of Denerim, and all his bits of heart and soul remained mangled and broken, oozing blood and tears at the most inopportune of moments. Watching this girl stumble into their camp, newly Joined and still weak from the Taint, he felt an echo stirring somewhere inside him, somewhere deep and dark that still ached when it rained, somewhere in the wreckage that was his humanity. The whole thing smacked of before, the dark camp and the strange girl and the secrecy that followed her like dusty footprints. But she was nothing like Elissa, and he took a shamefully small measure of comfort in that.
He still watched her closely, this new Warden. She looked so lost and alone.
The story came out in bits and pieces that night by the fireside, told with hesitance and great looming gaps in the narrative. Alistair, only half listening, was stuck in another time and place; his only thought was that another could have told the story much better, beside another fire on another night, a grand, hours-long affair, sung with a passion that rose and fell like the tide. Not that he'd ever listened, or watched, or enjoyed. He'd never much understood them, giggling late into the night like that, two grown women far too old for fairy stories, but he missed it all the same. Missed them, missed her.
He felt no such sense of camaraderie with his fellow Wardens now. He did not miss them when they left, nor did he look forward to their inevitable returns or worry after their safety. Not after Ostagar, or Redcliffe, or Denerim. Perhaps all that had ruined him for life. Growing close, caring, that was for people who wanted to hurt, people who wanted to ache from the inside out for all the long days of their life.
Elissa would have scolded him for thinking like that, ignoring hope, losing himself in despair. She'd never been one to allow him, or anyone, to wallow. It just wasn't in her nature. But she was gone now, dead on the battlements of Fort Drakon. She couldn't scold him anymore, and he was far too lenient with himself. Always had been.
It was a long night, that first one. Alistair was the only one awake, watching the embers burn away to nothing as the others slept peacefully on. It was a common occurrence; his ghosts were noisy ones, and never content to leave him alone. But on that night, he was reminded that he was not the only one with ghosts as the newest to their ranks tossed fitfully on her bedroll. She'd set herself apart from the rest of them the moment she'd arrived, turned her back and gone to sleep, while Stroud had recounted just how it was that he'd stumbled across her and a motley of companions in the Deep Roads; he'd drunk deeply from a bottle of whiskey as if the whole thing had left him a bit unhinged, making it seem like the whole story was much more interesting than he was letting on.
...
The recruit's name was Bethany, and she was from a small village called Lothering, had he ever heard of it? She was a Blight refugee with a deep dislike of Kirkwall and the Marches as a whole. She liked to keep to herself, but tended to stray a little closer to him than to the others because of this common ground of nationality. She was quiet, she rarely smiled, and she never said much, though if she did, it was usually to him. Again, it might have been the homesickness. Or perhaps he just had one of those faces, friendly and non-threatening.
She also happened to be an apostate.
Alistair had thought this would bother him more. After all, his history with apostates was woefully troubled. He needed only think of the witch, of She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, before his hands began to shake and his heart to pound. It might just have been the shock and trauma of Denerim talking... her, with her darkness and promises and arcane secrets, and Elissa, with her honour and her pride and her sacrifice. Damn them both, damn, damn, damn...
But raven-haired Bethany was nothing like either of them and maybe a little bit like both of them, but it didn't truly matter because she was never a part of any of that and he needed to stop making his endless comparisons before he drove himself mad.
He couldn't figure out why it bothered him so. He wished Elissa was there to talk to... but then again, he had to remind himself, if she was, none of it would have mattered in the first place.
...
Something about the new recruit troubled Alistair deeply.
It wasn't, as one might have guessed, the fact that she was a girl, and smarter than he was, and almost too pretty to be a Warden – or at least, not one that had anything to do with the men he'd been assigned to serve under since Denerim and that, he supposed, certainly included himself, though he didn't speak with the funny accent or twirl his mustache or have oh-so-high-and-mighty opinions about anything and everything, and no, he had did not feel inferior to the Orlesians, really. In fact, he was quite sure he was looked down upon for his distinct lack of mustache more than he was looked down upon for his very rugged Ferelden chin and questionable blood, but that was another matter entirely.
No, it was none of that nonsense that nagged at him like a particularly persistent itch in his brain. It wasn't even her, he realized as he sat and tried to pin down his thoughts, flitting through his head like drunken butterflies and him with a net full of holes. It was something about Stroud's story, the finding of this strange girl in the Deep Roads, and the harried Joining that had followed.
Or, rather, the lack thereof.
That was it. She hadn't had a proper Joining. No hushed words spoken, no chalice in pride of place, no token of remembrance. Just an old and tired Warden and a dying girl, a bit of foul blood in a flask meant for water but smelling of whiskey. Scarcely out of the Deep Roads, the entrance a maw of rock and growth behind them, ready to swallow them up again. The rain beating down on them as Stroud had forced the flask to her lips and she'd fought it with the last of her strength. A promise, Stroud had said. A debt owed.
It was terrifying just to think on, and Alistair had his imagination to fill in the gaps. No kindness, that. He stewed on it for days, watching as Bethany continued to keep her distance from the other Wardens. There were times when her eyes would find his across the fire, and burn into him, full of loneliness and unanswered questions before skipping away like the frightened rabbit she was.
Finally one day he could take it no more. He couldn't stand the thought of her living on the edge of what it meant to be a Warden for as long as they served together, no one willing to draw her in, no one giving her a reason to stay. Alone in his tent, he rummaged through his pack until he found what he sought, wrapped in a fine linen handkerchief, edged with lace that had gone dirty and slack, embroidered with the initials that made his heart skip beats like a stone across still water. The pendant he'd placed around her neck the day she'd walked away from her Joining, alone, head held high, marching off to face her doom. She'd long abandoned wearing it before she died at Fort Drakon, and he'd found it later amidst her belongings, tucked away safe and sound, a memory kept, a moment in time preserved. He cleaned it up as best he could, buffed the chain until it gleamed, polished the tempered glass pendant until the drop of black blood captured within shone like a dark star.
He waited until a night when they were alone by the fire; the watch was his, and all the others had bedded down for the night. Bethany never knew such peace, and would stay awake staring into the flames until exhaustion forced her sleep upon her as if she were a willful child. He moved to sit beside her; she watched him approach, wary, weary. He removed his glove, and pulled the pendant from the pouch on his belt, and for a long time held it out in the flat of his palm so they could both see it, so unassuming, glinting in the firelight. The weight of its purpose, of its history was lost on the girl, but Alistair feared it might drag him down to the depths of the earth, so heavy does it make him in his sorrow.
"When Wardens are newly Joined," he began in a voice that did not sound his own, "they are given a pendant to mark the sacrifice they have made. It's meant to serve as a reminder of those who were lost before, and those we lose along the way."
Bethany took a deep, shivering breath. "I scarcely remember the–" She stopped herself short, unable, unwilling to speak of her ordeal. "I scarcely remember all that," she said instead, turning her face away from him, her arms going about herself, a meagre, forlorn comfort.
He cannot blame her for her reticence. She did not know, hadn't been made to understand the significance the trial she underwent, the unlikelihood of her survival, the outright miracle that she was, sitting next to him, talking, breathing, living. There was nothing he could do to make her see, nothing he could say to change her mind. He missed Duncan fiercely then, wishing he had the words, cursing himself a fool. He swore under his breath; Bethany turned to him, stared blankly, uncomprehending.
"This belonged to someone very special to me," he said, closing his fingers around the pendant. He held his hand out, and nodded toward her. "I want you to have it." She looked at him, surprised, and he feared for a moment that she would refuse the gift, but after a very long, uncomfortable silence and more than one friendly, encouraging smile from him, she took the pendant. "To remember those you lost," he said gently, as she stared at the bit of gold and glass in her hand. "And all you suffered to get here. Welcome to the Grey Wardens."
"Thank you," she said stiffly. When she looked up at him, the firelight danced in her light brown eyes, and she made no attempt to hide her tears.
...
As time went on, Bethany settled into her new life with reluctant grace.
It came as a surprise that she could fight, and what was more, she could do it well. It impressed the other Wardens; no, she impressed them. She knew when to press her advantage and when to keep her head down. She knew her place on the field of battle, never straying too far from her comrades, but was never underfoot. And what was more, she seemed to have a little knowledge of the healing arts, which Alistair had not even known he missed until the day he felt the cool touch of magic running over his skin during a skirmish with an overly-bold group of bandits that was not going in their favour. She'd turned the tide of the battle, giving them an edge, keeping their warriors in the fray long enough to dispatch of the bandits and save the day.
He'd fought alongside mages before, but never one who was also a fellow Warden. He didn't quite know what to make of that.
Later that evening, Alistair sat alone, sleeves turned up, examining the slash that marked his arm by the light of the setting sun. The cut was deep and should have rendered his sword arm useless, perhaps indefinitely, but all there was to show he'd been hurt at all was an ugly red scar, one of many that mapped his years as a Grey Warden. It was still tender to the touch, and it stung with a mighty fury when he turned his arm the wrong way, but he couldn't help poking at it to test the seams of magic that had knit him back together. It wasn't the neatest work he'd ever seen; the girl was no educated healer, only someone who knew a thing or two about mending minor flesh wounds and nursing fevers. He thought of Wynne, the way the blue light of her magic had webbed over the wounds like needle and thread, a beauty to behold, sometimes leaving no trace of mark or scar at all, and with it, no memory of the injury. This was nowhere near as pretty, but it would do, and it would always be there to remind him to be more vigilant – and ever there to remind him who it was that had helped him when he'd needed it.
Bethany found him there, long after the stars had come out, still contemplating his arm like a fool. She sat down on the ground beside him, laying her staff carefully across her lap.
"I was told you were a templar," she said, as if it were so insignificant a thing, but the wariness in her voice gave her away.
"Who, me?" he asked, and laughed; he remembered being told once that his laugh always put people at ease. "No, I was an initiate, but I was never inducted into the Order. I doubt they would have had me, anyway. A damn serious lot, those templars."
"Why did you choose to become a Grey Warden, then?"
Alistair thought on that a moment. "I can't say that I chose to become a Grey Warden," he said. "More that it chose me, really. A friend helped me in that regard. I would have been doomed to the life of a templar if not for her."
"You sound as though you consider it a kindness," said Bethany.
"The greatest kindness anyone has ever shown me."
They sat in silence for a time, as he watched the stars and she picked at the grass in front of her, both lost in thought, though he was certain her thoughts were much darker than his. Finally, she sighed, and looked to him.
"What happened to your friend after you became a Grey Warden?"
He shrugged, and a sadness came over him. "I don't know, exactly. I never saw her again."
...
Life as a Grey Warden was all about moving forward, even if there was nowhere to go. Bethany seemed to understand this much better than he had when he was first recruited. Then again, murmurs of the Blight, and the dreams that followed, had begun shortly after for him, and with it, all the drive and purpose that showed him what it truly meant to be a Grey Warden. For her, there was no such catalyst; no purpose, no Archdemon, only aimless wandering. As an apostate, and a refugee, she understood what that meant better than most people. Perhaps it gave her comfort. He never thought to ask.
Although, he did find himself needing reminding time and again that she was no longer an apostate. She was a Grey Warden. The rules of the Chantry no longer applied to her status as a mage living outside the Circle. And, there were times when she seemed to need reminding of this, as well.
Still, the darkspawn they faced did not care whether she'd ever been through the Harrowing or not. Mindless and cruel, a genlock was not about to stop long enough to pass judgment upon anyone. Whether you were an apostate, a farmer, or the bloody king of Ferelden, it didn't really matter; it would try to chew your face off all the same.
Fortunately, Bethany already knew something about fighting darkspawn. The journey out of Ferelden during the Blight had not been without its trouble, she'd said, but she had little else to share on the matter. But surviving a single fight with darkspawn was better than months of training with the Wardens could do. It was fear that got to most people, fear of the Taint that turned their legs to water and kept their blades stuck in their scabbards until it was too late. Bethany had fought the blighted creatures, knew that they bled and died like other men, and she did not balk.
That didn't stop her from freezing up the first time they came face-to-face with an ogre.
Bethany had been with them over a year by that point. They were in the Deep Roads, only a day or so down, following a rumour of darkspawn lingering in the mountains. Alistair had never encountered an ogre so close to the surface before, except during the year of the Blight. He had only a moment to contemplate what it was doing there before it was upon them. The battle was hard-fought; it was only when they had the beast flagged and bleeding that Alistair realized he wasn't standing in a storm of magical light, that he could not taste electricity in the air, and that the wounds at his temple were still oozing blood.
The ogre, possibly with the last of its true strength, charged with a fury toward Bethany, whom Alistair realized only just in time was standing her ground instead of rushing out of the way like she was supposed to. It didn't cross his mind to act, he just did; he barrelled toward her, shouldering her out of the way, only to be launched twenty feet backward as he bore the full brunt of the ogre's charge. He spent the remainder of the battle in a dazed heap, trying and failing to get back on his feet.
By the time the beast was down, Alistair was quite sure he'd forever forgotten how to do his sums properly, with the amount of damage his crown had sustained. Bethany was shaken and pale, and completely rebuffed one of her senior Wardens when he came over to rebuke her. Alistair watched the whole thing, quietly nursing his own sore shoulder and keeping his mouth very firmly shut.
Bethany came to find him later, as she was often in the habit of doing. He was sitting close to the fire, watching the flames with a stubborn determination; she did not greet him, nor wait for permission before she put her bare hands on his shoulder. Immediately, he felt the warmth of her healing, and the strange kind of soothing, stinging pain that only magic could bring.
"Thank you," she said, keeping her voice down, "for today."
"You're welcome," he said, rotating his shoulder and putting himself through considerably less agony than even a moment before. It wasn't at all an attempt to shrug off her hand; really, he didn't mind that she hadn't bothered asking. Her concern was touching. After all, it was not her place to be their healer; they'd brought potions and bandages as a good part of their supplies. Still, she could not bear to see another in discomfort or pain. It reminded him of Elissa, though she'd never had any skill with healing; her usual method had been to nag at him until he went to see Wynne just to appease her.
After she'd tended to him, ignorant of his thoughts, Bethany made to rise, but he reached out and touched her elbow, and she stopped.
"About today," he said. "What happened? I've never seen you so – so –" He struggled to find the right word, but ended up just letting his sentence linger there, neither an observation nor a question.
She considered him a long while before she answered. "My twin brother was killed by an ogre after we fled Lothering," she said. "His name was Carver."
"I'm sorry," said Alistair, very distinctly uncomfortable all of a sudden.
"It's all right," she said, and sounded as if she meant it. "He died saving our mother from it. For a very long time, I thought it should have been me who had the nerve to face it. He had plans for himself, and me..." She did not finish either, but not because she could not find the words. She just couldn't bring herself to say them.
He nodded, unsure of what to say. Her sadness was very much like his own; he understood the burden, the weight she carried. The should have, the why didn't, the if only. There was no way to assuage her guilty heart, and he knew it.
So he reached out to take her hand, and said nothing at all.
...
Her mother died the following winter. Word came by letter, which had been sent to one of their crumbling outposts; it had been sitting there waiting for some months. It was only by chance that they passed through that way. Word had spread fast out of the Marches long before their arrival, however, and the men who were stationed there were solemn and respectful as they gave Bethany the letter.
Alistair happened upon her later, in a sorry excuse for a courtyard near the outer wall of the ancient fortress. It was snowing, and there was so much of it caught in her uncovered hair that he realized she must have been out there for some time. She had been crying, judging by the faint, icy gossamer tracks that wound their way down her cheeks, but she wasn't crying then; her jaw was set, her mouth a hard line, and her eyes gazing at something far off, as if she could see past the wall and off into the mountains.
He sat down on the stone bench beside her, pulling down his own hood, feeling the gentle cold nip at his cheeks and the back of his neck. It was a mild night, overcast, and the snow was soft, fluffy, and never-ending. His footprints across the courtyard were almost completely covered over before he finally managed the courage to speak to her. He knew little about what happened, but he had heard just enough to know the anger burning in her golden-brown eyes was meant for someone specific, someone who was lucky they were far out of her reach.
She had barely seemed to notice his arrival, such was the distant look in her eyes, but after he'd sighed and shifted uncomfortably for what was probably the third or fourth time, his mere presence the only thing he had to offer, she sighed herself and looked up at the dark, cloudy sky.
"The last time I saw my mother, she was crying," she said with a bone-deep sorrow that broke his heart to hear. "She begged me not to go into the Deep Roads with my sister, but I didn't listen. I told her everything would be fine, and I walked away."
"You didn't know what was going to happen," he said, a futile attempt at comfort. Everything he could think of to tell her seemed to fall woefully short.
"It was my sister's choice to seek out the Grey Wardens," she said. "Sometimes – sometimes I wonder if I'd have been better off –"
"No," he said quickly, and harshly, though he did not mean for it to come out that way. Death was never an answer, or an alternative. "You're better off here," he added, wanting to soften his immediate reaction. "You're stuck with us, and don't forget it. Who else is going to keep us from bleeding to death?"
A bit of a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, but she lowered her chin and hid her face behind her snowy hair before it could manifest. "Did your mother approve of your decision to become a Warden?"
"My mother died giving birth to me," he said, and he heard a bit of her sorrow in his own voice now. "But she was an Andrastian. I think she would have rather me become a templar. A relatively safe occupation, compared to becoming a Warden. Demons are much more preferable to darkspawn, at least in the more civilized circles."
"Oh, I agree. At least you don't have to worry about both." Bethany gave a breathy laugh, and looked up at him with a faint smile. She shifted a little closer to him and laid her head down upon his shoulder. He didn't think it could be all that comfortable, as armour generally is not made that way, but she voiced no complaint, only slowly relaxed beside him, and in the snowy silence they sat together, mourning those they had lost along the way.
...
Stroud returned from his lone wardening in Orlais that spring, and he sent word for Alistair and Bethany, along with a few others, to join him in the Free Marches. It was there, somewhere in the Vimmark Mountains, that word reached them of the political unrest in Kirkwall, where Bethany's sister still lived.
Predictably, Stroud waved it off. The Wardens had no interest in the political squabbles of Thedas, and their stance was the same whether it was blood feud or Exalted March. In fact, Alistair's somewhat meddlesome involvement in the Ferelden civil war of years past was still frowned upon so deeply by his senior Wardens that sometimes it was hard to look them in the face, knowing they were judging him still behind narrowed eyes.
So when Stroud put him in charge of a mission of vital importance, he was more than a little surprised, but he couldn't just turn down the honour. He chose the men who were to follow him and made ready to leave.
That was where Bethany found him.
"Please," she begged him, following behind him like a particularly persistent puppy. "Take me with you."
"We can't get involved," he said, shaking his head. "I have my orders, and nowhere in there does it say 'travel two days out of the way to stick your nose into Qunari business'. I think I'd remember that. Have you ever met a Qunari?"
Bethany stuck her chin out. "If you don't take me with you, I'll go on my own."
"You wouldn't dare." He looked at her plaintively, recognizing that obstinate glow in her eyes, that willful set of jaw. "Oh Maker, please don't dare." She said nothing, only shrugged her shoulders. He sighed, and put a hand to his temple. "You would, wouldn't you? Just to spite me."
In the end, he lost the battle he hadn't realized he was fighting until it was too late, and though he tried his damnedest to dissuade her, he found himself two days out of the way just the same, passing through the city gates to fight through the throngs of fleeing, terrified people, refugees turned to running again. But in the end, they only got involved a little bit, which was enough to put his mind at ease. And in the end, he met Bethany's sister, and discovered very quickly where the fire in her heart and quick tongue came from.
As for the sweet disposition, it was anyone's guess.
After they left Kirkwall, Alistair waited a day and a night before he even attempted to talk to her about it, wanting to put enough distance between them and the city before he brought it up, but it didn't seem to him that the smoke on the horizon was ever going to clear. Finally, though, he pulled his courage together and sought her out after they had made camp and darkness had fallen. It was a familiar pattern to him, and it echoed faintly of a sweeter, simpler time in his life. It was a warm memory, but it did not weigh on him as it once had. And the present was much more pressing.
"I know you took a great risk, getting so close to the city," Bethany said before he'd even had a chance to open his mouth. She looked up at him, and her wide eyes burned like candles. "And I wanted to thank you for taking that risk for me."
"Oh, well, you know," he said, running a hand through his hair. "What can I say? My day just wouldn't have been complete if I hadn't helped thwart an invasion."
Bethany laughed lightly; she did that a lot more now, laughed at him when he was trying to be funny, and he liked that.
"You're a good man, Alistair," she said, and she leaned over to kiss his cheek.
"Thank you, my dear," he said, his face flooding with warmth. Belatedly, he realized the sentiment that had slipped past his lips, and he blushed all the harder as she linked her arm through his and nestled her cheek upon his shoulder as if it belonged there.
And who was he to tell her that it did not?