Fatalism would dog him until the day he died. And that was thanks to the Crows. Although Zevran had never considered the Crows an enslaver, until they had made him dance, flutter, and flap until his daggers had ended up in Rinna's heart and he had crashed into the bars of his wide and elaborate cage. And he knew that dead birds at the bottom of cages were removed from them. In death, his body would be allowed a final freedom to fly away. The irony that leaving the cage required the sacrifice of his life was too bitter to swallow without a grin to sweeten it. But in seeking death, the true irony was that he accidentally found a way to have both freedom and life – not stolen with greedy guilt-numbed fingers (Life was a luxury. It was something he had never been meant to have, so like the rest of the elves, he took it from the maws of a society of overabundance) but earned through redemption.
In truth, Zevran had been free once before, but poverty had shackles of its own, and, objectively, living like that was wasn't truly living. He didn't object to it, he was not angered by the injustices of being poor and elvish; his life had happened, but he had always found ways, small ways to take back the narrative from fatalism's fingers and to weave in sections of his own.
When he had been little he had had gloves. They were beautiful works of soft gray leather, and by some small kindness, he had been given them. He remembered staring down at them - his volumous blond hair lank with soil and falling unkemptly into his eyes – and tracing the simple blue but elegant swirling stitching of a bow knocked with an arrow as though it were inlaid with precious stones. The voice of the, rather pretty, whore in front of him soothed into an unfocused mosaic of different shades of earthy-toned brown and lulled words.
"This is your inheritance, Zevran," she said, and as he looked up at her he knew that she was giving him a moment of tenderness that was neither lie nor truth but said many things in between.
"Thank you," he said in a voice that wasn't deep and sultry, but still with the pure resonance of childhood and hesitance.
Zevran's brown eyes, too big for his slight face, searched hers openly, and unsure of how to convey the proper gratitude for such an allowance of such a magnitude hugged her.
She held him firmly and rubbed his back roughly without any conviction of love, then sent him on his way.
When he took them out from his chest of things and wore them, although circumstances had not changed, he could be something else – last of the Elvhenan. Never again would he submit. His small hands, although not formed to full capability and yet untempered by blood, were particular with his gloves so that they would not wear, or crease, or stain with grease. He laid them apart from the rest of his things because they were something he'd never had before: something to be prized.
When his master took it – "What are these? Gloves? Where did you steal them from?" "I didn't." "Don't you lie to me, Zevran." – he hadn't mourned the loss. Although it had been great, it was too inevitable that he'd be caught, that life would take as it would give.
So when he told her that he had never been given a gift before, he, like the woman that had given him his gloves, hadn't completely lied; her gift was, to him, the same as his mother's – the first gift he'd ever been given and something to be taken care of. But these ones, unlike the first pair, he was sure would have permanence.