A/N: Written for the lovely Iapetus! Just for her, an AU where Nathaniel came home before the Blight ended, was knighted, and served under Cauthrien in Maric's Shield. Set just after the events of Ostagar.

Beta'd by Smaragdina on LJ.

Crawl Into Your Shadow

Where did doubt come from?

It couldn't come from within herself; she had always been steady and loyal and that, that she was sure had not changed one bit. She looked upon her lord and felt, Yes, this is the man I will follow into the Void and back, this is the man I would be burned for. His every word made a resonating kind of sense that sent her soul singing, that set her jaw and shoulders for whatever laid ahead. She was his sword. She did not mind being a finely honed living blade, and would not have sacrificed it for the world.

So how, then, could she still doubt him?

If she faced herself and was honest, it wasn't him she doubted. It was herself. She was the one who had given the order to retreat, and it was she who passed his orders to the men and women they actually affected. He was not wrong. He could never be wrong.

But she could be.

She had taken to making large circuits around the border of their camp each night as what was left of the army made its way back north to Denerim. Loghain had ridden ahead, racing back to the capital along with the news of the king's death, and she had been left to guide everybody home. Home. Her own home was up on the outermost edges of what could be called Amaranthine, and she hadn't seen it in years. Almost a decade, if she tried to count. Was she still a farmer's daughter, racing across failing fields to aid a man who would become her shining beacon of truth and glory? Or had she lost that somewhere along the line these last seventeen years? Had she lost it that night at Ostagar when the protests had died in her throat and she had turned to pull her troops out?

She stopped long enough to drive her armored fist into a tree trunk and wait out the ensuing ache and angry, panted breaths.

"Something wrong, commander?"

Cauthrien spun around, startled; she hadn't heard his approach, but there was Nathaniel Howe, newly appointed and arrived head of the archery corps of Maric's Shield. She didn't trust him, not when his father had so quickly insinuated himself against Loghain's side, not when he was untested within the army and was just another Arl's son with an unearned title. Ser Nathaniel, indeed - but a squired knight, not a forged one.

She had been twenty-eight when she had been knighted, young but proven by her clawing climb to the fore of the military, no matter what Loghain's detractors had always whispered about favoritism. He was only twenty-four now, eight years younger than she was, and while he was her subordinate, it was only by a matter of formality. She commanded the whole of the force; he commanded a large portion of it. He took orders directly from her, and she did not know or trust him.

She was glad he hadn't been there for Ostagar, especially if he kept up that habit of sneaking around silently.

"It's none of your business," she said, roughly, the muscles of her throat and jaw tight as she regarded him. Rendon Howe's son, and though she had only met the arl a few times in passing, she easily recognized the nose.

"It is if you're too tired in the morning to get everybody going."

Her frown deepened and she glanced up through the sparse canopy of trees. The moon was already high. It was far later than she'd thought.

"Shit," she muttered under her breath, but he was close enough to hear and chuckle at it.

"Lose track of time?"

"Again, none of your business." She was tempted to add churl, but to call an arl's son that would have been less than brilliant.

He at least had the decency not to grin, despite his amusement. She could only see it in the tightening and lifting of the muscles around his mouth, a crinkling around his eyes. He had the barest growth of beard, a patch beneath his lower lip. Young men, she thought. Idiots, all of them.

She had guided too many of them, disciplined too many, for her to really care what he thought. And yet-

"Some of the others under your command," Nathaniel said, settling against the tree she was still grinding her fist against, "mentioned that you didn't take these walks before Ostagar. They're... concerned."

"And so they sent you."

He shook his head. "No, I came on my own. Their concern does not outstrip their nerves at the thought of approaching you. You are..."

Her gaze was cold and level, but he didn't flinch.

"Truly formidable?" he suggested, finally. "At least, the stories of you that reach the Free Marches don't seem to have exaggerated much."

"I don't care what your stories say about me. My walks are none of your business, Howe."

She expected him to correct her, remind her of his title, but he didn't. Instead, he shrugged again, the motion rolling and bringing attention to his archer's arms and back. For all she doubted his ability to command or be a decent, well-rounded person, he was capable. She had watched him practice at midday camp.

"Probably not," he agreed, to her surprise. "But I am here, commander. If you need to confide."

"I do not confide in my subordinates."

"Of course not," he said, and she watched as he almost bowed. He quickly interrupted the motion and turned it into a serviceable, yet awkward, salute. "Well, then. If instead you would like to rant at the empty air, I can pretend to not exist whenever you need me to, Ser Cauthrien."

She searched his face for any hint of mockery or malice, and found none. Still, she could not shake the worry that he might be a spy for his father, or worse, simply detest her. There was none of that where she could see it, but if he could walk silently, she wouldn't put it past him to mask his thoughts.

Finally, she pushed away from the tree. "You had better not be on watch, Ser Nathaniel. Or I'll have your hide for leaving your post."

"Just finished my watch," he responded easily, remaining leaning against the trunk. "Remember my offer, though. I will be the most attentive nothing you have ever not heard."

She rolled her eyes and turned from him for just a moment. She took one step away, then looked back to order him away.

He was gone.

He was insufferable.

It wasn't that he was doing anything. In fact, he was doing next to nothing outside of his duties, and as her attention on him intensified with each passing day, she could find nothing wrong. Well, nothing beyond cosmetic differences in their approaches to training, and while she barked orders at him during midday practice, he always appeared to take it in stride. And he always responded to her corrections.

He didn't follow her on her walks again, at least as far as she could tell, and when she would come back to camp and he was on watch he would merely lift two fingers to his temple in a quiet salute and then turn back to his post.

She wanted desperately to forget his offer. He was giving her every change to, acting as if he had never tracked her down that evening. And yet she could still not shake her doubts and fears, her dreams plagued by Ostagar every night. Every day, they drew closer to Denerim and her lord and the chaos they had no doubt created, and every evening she heard whispers of what have we done? in the ranks.

And every night she was back walking the perimeter of camp, praying and raging for clarity and confidence. They had done the right thing. They had done the right thing.

"We did the right thing," she whispered to the empty air.

He wouldn't be listening, couldn't. He didn't have watch right now, but it was madness to think he actually followed her on her nightly rambles when he was able to. And if he did- well, perhaps she could present it in a way that made him receiving twenty lashes seem reasonable, despite his heritage and rank.

So no, he would not be listening. But speaking to nothing had its appeal.

"If we had charged, the king would have still died. And we would have, too; Ferelden, without its strongest army, against a Blight or an Orlesian invasion or both. It was the only thing we could do. It was right."

Her voice sounded awkward and too soft on the breeze, a woman's voice, a girl's voice; not a soldier's. Maybe that was why she felt guilt for the first time in so long; her armor was falling away. Loghain's grip on her wrist on the battlefield, just before they had quit it- it had shattered something. Cracked it.

She fell silent again, and it wasn't until just before she turned back towards camp that she spoke once more. And then, it was only to repeat,

"We did the right thing."

"You did the right thing."

Her head jerked up and she stared at Nathaniel, who was perched in a crouch by the fire, repairing and replacing the fletching on arrows damaged during practice. They had taken a break for the entire afternoon to run drills. The whispers of treason had begun to take too much shape for Cauthrien's comfort, and she had worked the nerves out of all of them with competition and exhaustion.

"Excuse me?"

It had been two nights ago that she had spoken to nothing and gotten no response except the strained sound of her own words. Nathaniel had acted no differently around her in that time, and she had begun to assume that whatever wild idea she had had about him following just out of sight was just that - a fever dream.

And yet-

"In that last skirmish, the way you took down Manning. I know he cried foul, but you did the right thing."

"Of course I did," she said, more of a mutter than a properly enunciated defense, and when he glanced up at her again, she thought she saw a smirk. "If he's not prepared to fight with everything he has, darkspawn will be the least of his problems. This preoccupation of knights these days that brawling is uncivilized-"

"A preoccupation I do not share, I feel I should state," Nathaniel interrupted.

She looked at him with something less than a glare, more curious, more surprised. "Good. It speaks of not knowing war. Or real fighting."

She had only lived two years under the occupation, two years she could have no hope of remembering, but she had been raised to know how to claw for her life, been trained to hone that skill. She had not been a city urchin, grubbing for food, but she had trapped and killed her dinner and had been willing to protect a man beset by bandits on her father's land. Ser Harrod Manning could boast none of that, just a bann for an uncle and expensive training. He fought like it was sport.

Now, Cauthrien looked Nathaniel over where he was sitting in his leathers, fingers working carefully even as he kept an eye on her. He was built like an archer, yes, but one who was flexible in how he worked, and she knew he kept long daggers at his belt for emergencies.

"... One day, I will have you show me exactly how you see fighting," she said, head canted thoughtfully to one side. And then she leaves him to his work.

"He is a good man," she said to the empty late-spring air. The moon was high and she should have been sleeping in her tent, but she had been exhausted by the time the sun set and had only woken for her watch. Another hour more and the grey of dawn would begin to creep in, with its odd quiet punctuated by bird cries that were heard no other time during the day. She needed to sleep more, and her eyes were heavy, but the call of quiet had lured her out.

She made these walks more out of habit, now, than need.

"And he will continue to be a good man, even as regent."

The news had reached them the day before. The army's march was slow, with all the equipment they brought behind on oxen and all the refugees that clamored to come with them. Their numbers were swollen to where Cauthrien was afraid they would have to begin imposing on the farmers whose land they passed by for food. Their supplies were running low.

"He doesn't want power. He never has. When we used to talk about my father's farm, he would get this look in his eyes - nostalgia and longing and such deep respect. He wants only the power of a freeholder. But if Ferelden needs him, he's there. And Ferelden needs him now. Will need him, for what's about to come."

She knew, though, even as she listened to her own words, that she was afraid. That perhaps she did not know him as well as she thought. She would never have predicted he would take power as he had, making the queen retreat to the background. She tried to imagine how he would explain it to her.

Anora was not of Theirin blood and so could not yet rule on her own, not until Ferelden was ready. But neither was Loghain. Perhaps that was why he claimed only the title of regent?

She hoped desperately that this would all make sense when she reached the capital.

Still, speaking her thoughts aloud helped her place them in order and stilled the sharpest peaks of fear. He was a good man. She believed that with all of her heart, and hearing it on unresponsive air was like hearing it spoken back to her.

Ferelden would be safe. Loghain - and she at his side - would make sure of it.

"You grew up on a farm?"

Nathaniel so rarely spoke to her that the sound of his voice could make her jump even when she had heard his approach or stood looking at him, as she did now. They had just finished a brief sparring match and he knelt, panting, in the dirt, disarmed and disheveled. Instead of laughing off how thoroughly she had just beaten him into the ground with nothing more than a wooden one-handed practice sword, not even her preferred weapon, he instead asked- what? A harmless question?

But the night before she had told nothing and nobody that she and Loghain had used to talk of her family's farm, and that knowledge echoes and throbs along with her pulse in her ears.

"How do you know that?" she asked, voice brusque as always and a little reedy from being just the slightest bit out of breath. Nathaniel was no match for her, not in close combat, but that didn't mean he wasn't fast and clever. He'd nearly tripped her a few times, almost disarmed her another.

Now, he just shrugged before pushing himself up to his feet, and she watched the muscles of his legs flex. He wore his leathers without the common trousers beneath them, and she found herself glancing at those exposed pieces of skin more frequently these days. In a strange way, it was as if she expected that he was following her in the evenings, and that her confiding in him had brought her closer to him.

A foolish thought. He didn't follow; the night before, he'd been on watch while she walked.

"Those stories that reached the Free Marches," he said, his voice (rich, faintly gravelly) drawing her attention back to his face. "Some of them include rather extravagant tales of your childhood. Apparently, you fought off twenty bandits with only a rake."

"It was an axe, actually, and only five bandits. And our lord regent did much of the work," she corrected without thinking, crossing her arms. She was without her mail or plate, in only her arming jacket and trousers for the bout, and she suddenly felt more unprotected and vulnerable than she had with his wooden practice dagger inches from her ribs.

That earned her a soft chuckle from the younger man, the first in many weeks. She found that, this time, she liked the sound of it.

"That sounds much more reasonable, and still impressive, if you don't mind my saying so."

She shouldn't have blushed at such obvious flattery, but she did, just a little, and so she dismissed him a sharp wave of her hand. "I do."

They were less than a week outside of Denerim, and the news that was reaching them sooner and sooner with each mile crossed was leaving her anxious and snapping. Camp was miserable once more. Whatever ease she'd created by having them all drill each day was disappearing with more and more 'accidental' injuries. There were lines forming between various contingents. The word was that the Bannorn was readying itself for war and that Loghain's leadership and explanations were not being accepted so easily.

If this continued, Maric's Shield would be no doubt turned against the heartland of the entire country.

Cauthrien's pace was faster and harder than normal. She had gone out further from camp than normal, making her own path with the tension and fear coiled within her. It was just before dawn, the sky that odd grey lightened non-color that spoke of brilliance to come, birds and animals stirring but not in full chorus yet. When the dawn came, it would be too bright and loud. But now, now she could speak and unburden herself to the nothing around her.

"I will be his shield. And his guidance. If power truly begins to change him, I will be there to remind him, because I know him. And I-" she claimed, voice starting out strident and firm, before it faltered and she had to take a shuddering, shaking breath.

"I have not failed my country. And I will not," she finished in a whisper.

And then she sat down and cried.

They weren't a girl's tears, or a woman's, or a soldier's. They were quiet and burned trails down her cheeks, and she sat impassive except for the tightening of her brow and jaw. Her throat ached.

Where did doubt come from?

It had plagued her from that night at Ostagar when the beacon had remained unlit and unlit and unlit, and she had looked to Loghain and seen only stoic patience. That hadn't been all that was there, she knew it couldn't have been, because when the beacon finally went up bright and horrible and too-late, he turned to her with barely contained rage and ordered the retreat.

It had not been a betrayal. A betrayal he would have set in motion long before the beacon was lit. But she still didn't know if they had done the right thing. The best thing for their lives, for the army, perhaps, but the rightness of the act eluded her and had for all these weeks marching north. Their king had died. The incarnation of every symbol of their land had been broken to pieces, by the few accounts trickling back from deserters, and part of her whispered that the army should have died with him.

But the land was still here beneath their feet, even if in the Bannorn it rose up in broken rebellion, and that was the reason the retreat had been necessary. There were people who were not symbols but were the country itself. Her father, her mother, her cousins- and she would protect them.

She would serve.

She would-

"You won't fail them." Nathaniel's voice came from the darkness just in front of her, and he seemed to melt out of the shadows as he came to crouch before her, looking up at her without censure or amusement or anything but calm sympathy. He reached out a hand and let it hover just by one of hers for a moment. When she said nothing and simply watched, he touched one calloused finger to the back of her hand, then pulled it into his.

His grip was warm and light and she could have pulled away if she wanted to. Instead, she just focused on where his darker skin covered hers, pale from years under armor. His thumb stroked over the back of her hand.

Ser Nathaniel Howe, too young for his post and yet wise enough to understand tactics, battle, and exactly what his commander needed. Her tears were interrupted by a low, broken laugh.

"You won't," he repeated, his grip tightening for just a moment.

"And why should I believe you?" she murmured. "Don't tell me it is because of Marcher stories, Nathaniel."

"Not Howe?" he questioned, and she shrugged. He shifted closer, a creak of leathers and a shifting of skin, before he spoke again. "Not the stories, commander. The reality that I've seen from the first moment I arrived. You are dedicated and thoughtful and conflicted."

"Being troubled does not help."

"It does not make things easy," he said, voice dropping to a soft murmur. "But it means you consider your decisions. And that, when called upon, you have a greater chance of making the right one. I would have nobody else at- the regent's side."

There was a flicker of something dark in his eyes and Cauthrien had to think only a moment before she laughed again, this time the tears full gone in the face of his trust and praise. It was, if nothing else, sincere. Weeks working together, even with few words passed between them, had taught her that if Nathaniel wore a mask, it was only over the extremes of his emotions and thoughts, never over the substance. If he said something, he meant it. He was more honest of a subordinate as she could have hoped for.

Young, yes, and untried, and the son of a man she did not trust near the power Loghain now held, but it didn't feel at all wrong to shift her fingers in his until they were interlaced.

"At his side and slightly behind him," she corrected, carefully.

He frowned at their entwined hands and then glanced up to her, searchingly. "Then-"

"Those stories are just rumors."

That dark something disappeared and he shifted closer still. She knew that he could have moved silently, could have continued to be nothing in the shadows, but he let her hear every whisper. He touched her cheek with his free hand.

She swallowed, eyes falling half-lidded as he leaned in the last few inches between them and fit his lips against hers.

It was a quick kiss, light and subtle, and then he pulled back as if expecting her to cuff him across the jaw. She supposed that she could have, for daring to treat her as a person instead of a rank, a sword. But instead, she just bowed her head until her forehead touched his, and breathed in the air they shared.

"You," she finally said, "were supposed to be on watch the night I talked about growing up on a farm."

"I was," he admitted with a curling smirk she could barely catch the edges of in the dim light at the angle she was at.

"Didn't I tell you once that if I found you were abandoning your post in order to listen to me, I would have your hide?"

"You did. Though I'll point out that it's been two weeks since I shirked duty last."

"And should we not punish deserters even if we only catch up to them after a month?" Her voice had dropped to low and nearly silent, and she felt a shiver run through him.

"You're right," he finally said, after a deep inhale and a stroke of his thumb over her hand. "So, my hide. How will you have it?"

They had been building to this, she thought in the moment before she moved, since the night he first followed her. He had offered an ear and when she had rejected it, he had offered silence. She had taken the silence gratefully and he had listened and given her, discreetly and without pressure, the words she'd needed to hear. Acknowledgment, with only the slightest lies about why he was saying it. And a part of her had known and wanted him to be listening and doing just as he had done.

They had been building to this with every sparring match, every brief, terse discussion of marching orders and training plans, every instance where he had become less a young arl's son and more a quickly learning and growing knight with a knack for archery and the acuity and observation to go with it.

She sat up and onto her knees, catching his lips with hers again and pushing him to the uneven ground beneath them, onto a litter of leaves and roots that broke the grassy surface of the earth.

They were a tangle of limbs for what seemed like hours and also like no time at all, her hands finding the laces and buckles of his armor with the ease of long exposure, his fingers slipping up beneath the bottom hem of her arming jacket and undershirt, splaying over skin that hadn't been touched in too long. She had always kept her short trysts confined to towns she'd passed through on small excursions, men who didn't know who she was and had no role in her life, and the last time she'd had an opportunity like that had been before she had taken command of Maric's Shield, before she'd been knighted four years before.

Now she arched into his touch as he rose up and let her cast aside his breastplate, lifted her arms as he tugged off her jacket and tunic, let him roll her onto her back and trail kisses down her throat and across her shoulders. He tugged her boots off and once the laces of his were undone, she caught his against the bottoms of her feet so he could pull his legs free. His fingers were nimble on the laces closing her leather leggings and the belts holding up the skirt of his armor were easily undone. They lost all of their clothing in fumbling slides of skin on skin, kisses trailed without thought to endpoint or to any fear of intimacy.

"I want to hear you," she whispered against his jawline as she dragged her lips over stubble towards the shell of his ear, and he groaned in response, his hand sliding between them, over her stomach, between her legs. She answered him with a whimpered gasp.

She could feel him grin as he returned, "Only if I can listen, too."

They'd sparred several times since the first, and she had learned moves that unbalanced him every time. She hooked her leg around one of his and pulled, then pushed off the ground to move him onto his back once more. She straddled him, bending down to steal kisses and breaths, her lips and tongue and teeth drawing needy, low sounds from him that broke the silence he'd so effectively constructed on his side of their odd dance.

"Cauthrien-" he breathed, and it was the first time he had ever said her name without a title.

She took him into herself at the sound.

When he reached for her hips, she caught his hands in hers, and while she did not bear them back to the earth, she pushed against them for support, sitting up and watching him in the growing dawn as she moved, all flexing muscles and trembling need, cheeks flushed. By the third thrust of her down to him and him up into her, she was making low keening noises, and by the fifth, they were loud enough that, had they been closer to camp, she would have smothered the noise somehow, with leather between her teeth or his mouth on hers. Her skin was flushed and her head was spinning, but the honesty of skin on skin and voices in the dark was rich and welcoming and desperately needed. There was no room for doubt. He wanted her and she wanted him; he listened and she listened and when she found just the right angle that made her head fall back in ecstasy, he slipped his grip from her suddenly-loose fingers to take her hips and keep her there.

She bent forward over him then, overwhelmed hands skimming over his chest and coming to rest on the ground beneath his shoulders. She whispered his name and he growled hers, and then he clutched her close to him as he shifted their position again, once more above her. He covered her body with his and she raked her short-clipped nails down her back. He nipped at her pulse as he drove into her with increasing speed and force, and she tangled her legs around his hips, pushing back against him, consuming him.

When she came, it was with his name and thank you on her lips. She shuddered around him and he buried his face against her throat in response, riding it out with a steady but slowed pace. One of his hands rose to her hair, the other gripping her hip painfully until she relaxed around him, the vice of her legs broken in spent exhaustion. He sped up again then, a few fast, hard thrusts, and then he pulled out from her, the hand on her hip leaving so that he could work himself those last few moments to ecstasy.

She groaned as he settled back on top of her, the sweat on her skin and his already beginning to cool. He trailed lazy kisses up to her lips, then nuzzled lightly against her cheek.

It was intimate, this entwining and quiet rest, but it was exactly what she had needed ever since Ostagar, an understanding, a forgiving, a release.

She stroked along his spine and he shuddered against her.

"Nathaniel," she murmured.

He lifted his head to meet her eyes, now tracing the curve of her jaw with his thumb. "Will you reconsider confiding in your subordinates, now?" he asked after a moment of simply seeing her.

"Is it so hard to work your reassurances into normal conversation?"

"Maker, yes," he confessed with a quiet laugh.

"You did a fine job of it," she assured him, sliding a hand through his hair, undoing completely one of his thin braids that had come loose. "But I won't confide in a subordinate."

His expression fell a little and he ducked his head.

"But you- yes. I'll confide in you. Just tell me again that I've done the right thing."

He slid a hand up along her side and watched and felt her shudder against him. "Having my hide taken off of me was the right thing to do," he murmured. He lifted his head again and smiled.

She smiled back without the faintest trace of doubt; that could wait until Denerim.