AN: I've some notion to make this into a multi-chapter if you guys feel so inclined to want more, but right now it remains a short story.
Enjoy.
Davinia sat in the firelight of the room. The last light of day wandered through the window pane and lost itself through the glass. It'd already died before it could stumble out the other side. It was only now, when twilight closed into the absence of night, that Davinia became her own woman. Music and voices wove stories of the tavern downstairs, but they ceased to pertain to Davinia once she'd stripped off the Warden's armor, which left only tangled thoughts and vague traces of traits that had once belonged to the girl she'd been in Highever. These things that preoccupied her also pulled her deep beneath their surface, and she sank into a solemn sea within herself until she blew out the candle for the night.
She sat, tonight, with her fingers in a reverent steeple against her voiceless lips and fixed glass eyes on dancing flames– the heat of which didn't warm her skin. When the door to her room creaked open on protesting hinges, Davinia too did not absorb this, although she had been aware of its occurrence.
The man who had entered paused briefly and looked at her troubled countenance, then quietly shut the door.
"La Belleza," he said quietly as he sealed the world back out, "I am surprised that you are still up. I usually come back to a less awake Davinia – who has already stolen off to the Fade. Since you are up, would you perhaps like to hear a story?" he continued on to say after closing the door and on his way to the chest at the end of his bed, "Play a card game? Preferably versions where our clothes come off, but I'm up for anything."
His voice was as warm and gentle as the crackle of the fire in the hearth, and it dried the sea she was adrift in and pulled her back to the living shore he stood on. She turned herself from her bed to face him on his own – where he was taking off his armor - and smiled at him, but it did not span the gap between them to reach him the way his voice reached her.
"Aren't you taking your clothes off now, Zevran?" she rasped.
Zevran chuckled softly and pulled off his shoulder pads. "Ah! So I am! You don't miss a trick." He laughed again, but this time it was deep, dark, and alluring. "But I've never done it where you could see."
Davinia only returned the same aloof smile and shook her head. "You are naked in the same vicinity as I at least once a night. Is that not enough?"
"If a tree falls does it make a sound? As it goes, then am I naked if nobody sees me?"
When Davinia finally laughed, it sounded like ice cracking through a dead silence. Underneath all of those shelves there was still warm blood. And after ten years, with neither rhyme nor reason - other than a long drawn out concern - Zevran finally reached below her surface and grasped at her ruined heart.
"When you left on your quest to save Ferelden, I did not believe that you came back. It is heartening to be reminded that I'm wrong."
Davinia whipped around to Zevran. Alarm was clearly evident on her face, but upon regarding his naked torso framed in the firelight she turned away to the wall. But the rustle of Zevran's clothes had since grown into a stillness that augmented the empty crackling from the fireplace and the chatter downstairs. To answer him immediately with a rebuke was the Warden's first thought, but Davinia shut her mouth and spoke to the floor instead.
"Sometimes people have to be changed for the better."
Her voice ached with the pains of the girl inside yet unhealed, and Zevran's calloused hand closed tenderly on the bare skin of her arm. The place where he touched grew hot because of the entrapped heat, and she was aware of it in so many ways she couldn't have been before. And as you do when someone shows you unsolicited kindness, she felt all too much. The unrequited regrets of her past found their way to the present inconsolably despite the fact that they didn't belong there in that room, in that tavern, in Antiva, in the Warden she had been for so long. She felt the world pouring in, so she stemmed it by closing her hand over his.
"This is not change, Davinia," Zevran murmured lowly. She felt his thumb stroke down her skin underneath the palm of her hand, "this is grief, and it is swallowing you, and I— I am afraid you will succumb to it one day. I would not like to think that the woman I've come to call my friend could be lost to me one day. Selfish, I know – but nonetheless a tragedy."
Davinia swallowed hard and stared at the ground for a long span of time.
"Zevran, why don't you let me go to bed?" was what she finally whispered above the sound of her own heart pulsing in her ears.
"When Taliesin came for me, although you could not have stopped me from doing so, - you did not give me the option of running away. You faced me in front of my inevitable problem and the only way out you gave me was to clean it up. I will not let you run away from me now."
His voice held a firm edge in it, and the conviction behind it dug deep into her skin until it took strong root inside her and, after a second's pause, made her grab Zevran – who was still unclothed - firmly around the waist and haul him over the span of both of their beds into her arms. He squawked, and laughed, and teased, in that exact order, but eventually he settled quietly around her waist – where he encircled her with his legs – and she held him.
He smelled fresh in a familiar earthy way. He smelled like the road, and toil, and what was assumedly Antiva. It was a living scent, both reminiscent and full of unexplored promise, and bore an extraordinary resemblance to sliced cucumbers and leather. He smelled like Zevran – the closest thing to a dogged constant in her life – and therefore, quite strangely for how unbidden it was, like home.
Her nose brushed over his collarbone, and he buried his fingers into her tunic to keep ahold of reality, which was tenuously laid in that quiet room; the only solid thing was the two of them somehow holding each other now after sleeping at least ten feet apart for ten years.
Davinia's encircling arms rose to Zevran's back and pulled him into her tightly. When she pulled away she looked into Zevran's eyes and said with a voice that was rough and low, "You have been a good friend to me, Zevran. You have been more than I deserved of late."
"A—'friend.'" Zevran repeated suggestively, "Nothing more?"
A hint of humor danced across the corner of Davinia's mouth as she smirked up at him.
"My best friend," she insisted cheekily.
Zevran laughed humorlessly. "My dear lady, I can understand being rebuffed, but I am naked on your lap."
"Platonically naked on my lap, Zevran," she insisted again and bumped his rear with her knee, but despite the casual ease of her words a purpling blush spread clearly through her dark cheeks and dusted down the sides of her neck.
"You aren't still holding out on Alistair; are you?" he deadpanned.
When Davinia laughed again, it shook the both her chest and Zevran, and when she spoke – the sonorous depth of her voice rumbled against Zevran's stomach. "He'll come around someday. He'll be in court; bored and dreary. And he will realize that without me his life has been utterly empty, and he will jump to his feet in the middle of all of his dignitaries and proclaim his undying love to me and the mad desire to wed me at all costs. Yes. I await that day eagerly."
"Then, I must redouble my efforts to sit upon your lap in other ways, my Queen. You will need a dashing prince consort as well. Although," he remarked as though the idea had just occurred to him, "it would perhaps work better if you sat upon mine."
Davinia ignored the lewd suggestion and hummed at length with playfully narrowed eyes. "Bodyguard, I think."
"Oh?" Zevran drawled, "How about both?" he suggested dangerously. "The romance writes itself at this point. The Queen longing after the very man she trusts with her life, consumed with secret uncourtly lust, gazing at his round posterior when he walks in front of her. We're one for the romance epics, truly."
She hummed again and smiled at him in earnest. On an impulse that she did not seek to understand, her fingers reached up to touch Zevran's hair. It was not the first time, and it would not be the last – but time had robbed them of physical gestures of affection, which she had used to give indiscriminately to those she called her friends. With Zevran in particular, the gestures had become more endeared than what she spared for others through the years, so their absence was especially glaring – where he was concerned. It felt again as it had used to when she caressed through his tangled blond hair still done up in its braids. Then some with some semantic descriptor that lies between "carefully" and "gently", she slid him from her lap to the space beside her on the bed. Again she turned her gaze to the floor to give him some measure of modesty. She somberly tucked a few loose strands of her own hair behind an ear and pulled Zevran's sheet from behind them, harassed and spilling onto the floor, from his bed into his lap without looking at him.
He chuckled softly at her reluctance, but she heard, saw, and felt the movements of him obligingly wrapping it around his lower body. "Why so shy, La Belleza? You never struck me as a woman who was uncomfortable with nudity," Zevran probed through amicable phrasing, "especially not just now."
Davinia glanced down prolongingly. An uncomfortable smile sat upon her lips. "I have never really seen a man naked."
"Never?" Zevran asked dubiously.
"Pictures and the like of course, but not until I joined the Wardens, no. And even then, I was not in the habit of letting my eyes linger," she explained as she finally raked her eyes up to his face, "So I cannot say that I'm very acquainted with your—body, I suppose." Davinia reached over to pull Zevran's hand from his lap and shifted closer to him, "I am not uncomfortable with you Zevran," she continued lowly as though she were telling him her many secrets, "But I retain a fantasy of reserving some innocence for my husband, if there should be one." Davinia spread Zevran's fingers open and touched her own to the back of his hand for support, while her thumb held his wrist steady, so she could bush the fingers of her other hand over his palm. Callouses snagged at her thumb roughly.
"You Fereldans are so strange," he murmured as he watched her trace the deep lines.
When she was satisfied in discerning whatever mystery that Zevran's hands held, the hand that had been following lines in his palm blossomed open next to his. Zevran's hands were harder than when she had first met him. The tough skin was shaped to the handles of his daggers. They had a weathered flatness to them and were widened from vigorous and persistent bladework. Even his callouses were smooth. Her hands were much larger and easily looked as though they could break bones, despite the elegant build of her fingers. They were sturdier than Zevran's and yet more blistered and peeled where her gauntlets kicked harshly into the flesh.
She remembered vividly doing this in camp with Alistair when she had been a teenager and Zevran closer to thirty than forty. They would sit and compare the day's cuts with each other and then traced the imprinted scars of the journey yet passed. Their grubby fingers pressed clumsily into each other's palm. Sometimes there was ale or wine. They swigged then trickled the alcohol onto their spread blisters in a game of chicken - all the while lamenting the end of their youth only half-seriously into the low embers of the fire.
She saw more scars than raw lines now on her hand, even less on Zevran's cradled in her other.
"Not everybody could be raised by whores, Zevran. Who I bedded was very important, especially since my brother did not marry very politically."
"I understand political marriage – you've seen where I come from." She smiled wryly at that. "But nobility separates business from pleasure."
"And you say Fereldans are strange."
"Very."
"I used to get angry about not being able to undress with the guards despite training with them. I was very upset that I had so many burdens placed on my personal freedoms even though I bore them willingly." Davinia sighed.
"And what happened?"
"And I realized when my family died," she murmured, "that there were things worth holding on to from my old life. It's a personal desire that I keep for myself; I have so few these days."
"I have some regrets about my vapid indulgency," Zevran admitted and stretched his fingers against hers before dropping his hand. He chuckled darkly. "Not the sex. The sex was amazing, but I have some lament over doing it simply to not anticipate the next day or by thinking it somehow made me a better assassin. I feel… this discipline of yours has rubbed off on me, but it doesn't feel like discipline so much really. It seems more self-evaluative—"
"—Which you are nothing but."
"Is that sarcasm?"
"No."
So simple and serious was the answer that it could not be masqueraded as anything but the truth.
"Is it a good thing?" Zevran asked hesitantly.
A smile played on her lips. "Yes."
"Did I do something wrong?"
Her smile widened. "You were rambling."
Zevran scoffed. "It appears you are not the only one with a lot on your mind. All that I am trying to say is that I know what it is to rebuild a life. You know what kind of place I was in before."
Davinia's eyes softened heartfeltly. "'You can find your family in the people around you; you can love your work and find fulfillment in duty. There can be joy in sacrifice. If you put others before yourself, then their happiness is your happiness.'"
She had had a grand nonlinear point to make that would have connected Zevran's grief to hers and gently eased whatever burdens he carried over a love squandered and left to die in the dirt, if only for a little while. It would've been something he could perhaps water in the quiet moments of his life and eventually sprout into acceptance, but the Warden's wisdom lost its way to her mouth when an epiphany so strong covertly but violently overwhelmed her being. It had been her experience that things denied could very strongly ingrain themselves into someone until their personalities grew around the malformation and warped the wood. It had been her that had patiently cut the gnarls away from the companions that sought her over the long years, and so she had been so assured of her self-awareness that she thought she had had the foresight to divert her path before such thoughts became a part of her. She had been wrong. A keen longing stoked to life in her soul in the sudden presence of clarity that burned away the impurities of excuse, and denial, and sadness. All that was left was a realization that burned bright. Zevran's voice had to pull her back to where they sat.
"That's good advice until the whole portion about sacrifice. Where did you hear that?"
"Wynne actually," she answered bemusedly.
A shadow of disapproving surprise fell over Zevran's face, which was quickly overtaken by a well and truly evil smile. "Dear old Wynne, mmm?"
"Oh, Zevran," Davinia crooned sympathetically for Wynne's pain at Zevran's hands, despite her present distraction from the topic at hand.
Zevran smiled indulgently at what appeared to be a very self-satisfied memory playing before his eyes, which were tipping up to the ceiling with the corners of his Cheshire smile.
"Dear old Wynne with her luscious titties."
"Zevran!" Davinia squawked and shoved at his arm.
He threw his head back and laughed. His whole body sagged onto on elbow between crows of heartless mirth, and Davinia was forced to scoot away at an odd angle to see him properly. Shadows lapped at his chest and jawline, even against the corners of his grin. His eyes glowed like burning amber in the firelight when he turned them on Davinia.
"You see? I've found your problem right there. You're listening to Wynne and her bags of air."
"Zevran—" Davinia groaned.
"—Ah, ah - no," Zevran cut her off as he propped himself higher, "Don't make yourself a slave to desire, Davinia; the Crows had controlled every aspect of my life until I met you. Let me just say that it's no way to live, especially since you have the option not to be such."
"It wasn't always like that."
Zevran raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"No, no – you're right, Zevran;" she shook her head, "I'm not doubting you, but it used to mean something different to me once. It meant learning to love your life, rather than dwelling on your hardships. It meant, to me, finding solace in the companion who would be at my side, my best friend. Because it meant that though my road would be hard, it would never be alone."
"And then?"
Davinia gazed openly at Zevran's amused if impassive face for a while longer, and she wondered again if this guarded state of existence wasn't natural for him. He painted a heart on his sleeve and spoke in subtext, and while she didn't wish for cloying sentimentality from him, she was constantly scrutinized, although not unpleasantly, in his presence. He coaxed details from her with his clever mouth because he was mistrustful of the Warden to show him her heart of her own accord.
"And then—I got jaded," she finally explained after a while. "You don't need to ask, Zevran. You offered to soothe my pain more than once."
"Did I? Oh, yes," He smirked and his eyes twinkled mischeviously. "You needed a little bit of fun, but I only offered the massage once; I don't know where you're getting your notions of there being another time."
"The sex poetry."
He sniggered nostalgically and wiggled his eyebrows. "All in good fun, mi Amor. I think it's always good to cast one's burdens aside. One need not dwell, like you said."
She read his subtext and the impartings in his eyes. "Thank you, Zevran."
"You're welcome. You've given me much useful advice over the years, yes? I am only happy to return the favor. And also, Davinia, I—"
Zevran tipped his head and looked at her gaugingly. The gesture, the sweet torture of his hesitation held so much weight behind it that wings tickled the walls of Davinia's stomach in anticipation for his words. She looked at the assassin. Really looked at him. He had been an experience for her when they had first met. It had been almost indecent the way she had been drawn to him, but she had never been particularly interested in infatuation and bid her time in better places. Zevran had lost his appeal along the way when he'd become just a man, although a man very close to her heart.
But desire snagged Davinia's stomach again, and she really couldn't just say it was because of the sheet. (That, rather, embodied how intimate she'd felt with him through years on the road together). She realized in that second that she wanted him to say something that would make her feel sublime and novel. It was a powerful swell of longing drudged out by the sequential thoughts that, once unearthed, dragged one out after the other from the muck her self-imposed solitude had sealed them in.
"—Yes?" Davinia interrupted Zevran quickly before he could decide whether he still wanted to keep to his train of thought or not.
He raised his eyes so that he looked at her under his lashes. "Eager are we? I had something I wanted to give you after—after everything, but I didn't find that I had the heart to do it when you were so—"
"-Up my own ass?"
He chuckled quietly. "Not quite the words I would have used. 'Upset', maybe?"
Zevran's comfortable weight then left the bed, and Davinia didn't realize she'd missed it until it was gone. The sheet swathed around his hips bustled out behind him almost elegantly, if one pretended it did so. She smiled at it as Zevran bent over the chest at the end of his bed and rummaged for a length of time that Davinia used to spread out over her own bed. The silence was comfortable between them. The room was warm, strains of a melancholic song drifted up from the tavern that murmured and stuttered melodically in Antivan, and her heart beat palpably close to the surface of her chest.
Finally Zevran scooped what he was looking for into his hands and paced back to Davinia on the bed – where he perched beside her.
"Here. Better late than never, as they say," he chuckled, and it sounded suspiciously nervous for the swaggering assassin. No matter the tone of his voice, his fingers opened to reveal a spark of fire in his palm. It was only through closer inspection and looking past the crystalline reflections of the dancing fire that one saw it was an elaborate drop of diamonds crusted over an emerald inlaid earring.
"Oh?" Davinia choked on trying to sound playfully nonchalant. "Will that mean we're married in Antiva?" she managed to say very breathily.
Zevran's laugh seemed half-caught between surprise and delight. "Let's hope not. I acquired it on my very first job for the Crows," he said as he looked at Davinia's wide eyes that reflected the earring's dazzling fire, "A Rivaini merchant prince," he explained smoothly, "and he was wearing a single jeweled earring when I killed him. In fact," he paused wantonly, "that was about all he was wearing. I thought it was beautiful and took it to mark the occasion; I've kept it since." He paused thoughtfully for a second then, but so inconspicuously one might have missed it, the rest of his words then poured quickly and eagerly from his lips. "And I'd like you to have it."
"It's—beautiful, Zevran," Davinia finally said in the very pregnant pause between them, "but why?" she asked guardedly. It had been abrupt to find herself endeared to Zevran, and although she was not opposed to pursuing him, she was wary of what it might bring. There were politics between them underlying the moments of intense intimacy. Too many things had been left unsaid for so long, and for so long she had neither felt so much nor so indulgently.
"Don't get the wrong idea about it; besides it matching your eyes, I had wanted to give it to you for freeing me from my gilded bonds, and I offer it now for how much you've continued to give me. Feel free to sell it, wear it, whatever you like; it's yours," he explained in his very practical way and proffered it forward once more, "It's really the least I could give you in return for all that you've done for me."
I take my pleasures where I can find them, purred uninvited through her head at the practiced detachment in his voice, and she nearly shuddered. She possessed none of Zevran's winking tolerance for love, and so she would be forthright when presented with what she wanted without cynicality.
"So," Davinia quipped; her voice danced on light toes. "not…" She paused and deliberately fixed her eyes on Zevran's. "…a token of affection then?"
"I—" Zevran's mask cracked, and his eyebrows arched in an all too vulnerable way, "—Look," he tried again, "just—just take it; i-it's meant a lot to me, but so have—" Davinia found nuances of denial in the way the assassin sharply sucked in breath to stopper his clumsy flow of words. "-so has what you've done," he finished lamely. Davinia's eyebrows arched fraught with unapologetic disbelief. "Please, take it," Zevran pleaded softly with them.
"Aren't you naked in my bed Zevran?" she pressed.
Zevran's eyes flashed in the firelight again when he looked away from her. "Platonically naked, I thought we established." He punctuated the forcedly friendly statement with an equally unconvincing laugh. "I may flirt with you, La Belleza, but most of it is in good fun, and while it is also no secret that I find you appealing... You're usually -" He looked at her pointedly. "- not of a mind however. I don't see what has changed."
"Maybe you've awakened something in me," she deadpanned in jest but leaned forward into the cusp of Zevran's personal space and focused intently on his bright whiskey eyes, as if to take another draught, "I'll only take it if it means something, my Crow."
Zevran's eyes cut, like glass, in the gleaming firelight, and his mouth twisted bitterly underneath sharply pointed eyebrows had had broken through his air of restraint. "You are a very frustrating woman to deal with," the assassin purred underneath a measure of imposed calm, "Do you know that?" Davinia, despite her reservations smiled wryly at him because his anger meant something despite itself, but the curve of her mouth made his eyebrows pull down completely over his eyes. "You'll forage around for every bit of treasure you can find but not this," he accused rather venomously.
"Those are health poultices, "Saf," Davinia replied somewhat chidingly but quietly.
"You don't want earring, you don't get earring. Very simple," he hissed with an amazing rapidity for someone with a locked jaw and an exponentially thicker accent than had been had a few seconds earlier. "Braska!" was hissed under his breath as he got up with the small webbing of jewels clutched in his palm and sheet ruffled primly out behind him.
"Zevran," she called to him sharply, and he turned to look at her rather distastefully. One of his braids had been partially undone in the span of time it'd taken him to get up, and it hung softly around his face, which - despite his gaze – Davinia found created a soft feeling in the pit of her stomach. "We leave at first light. You'll start off to Perivantium alone; I'm running to the Free Marches."
"Why?" he asked a clipedly, although civilly.
"It's the closest Alistair is going to be to Antiva in a predictable while."
"A simple message couldn't do? You must go and see him?"
"No, but what I need to send him is urgent, and I want to get as close as I can to the Free Marches to do so. I'll still be able to meet you in Perivantium – just -" She gazed at him intently. "- just wait for me, alright?"
Zevran nodded tersely but obligingly all the same. "Where are we going after that?"
"The Anderfels."
Oh Grey Warden/, drifted up to them in the silence, The Oath you've taken…
The Warden looked at the Crow, and, in that moment, they understood a painful similarity. Davinia waited on Zevran. The Crow turned away.