This fic is based on my utter annoyance at how, when Morrigan offers the Dark Ritual, there is no way you can go to your romance option and say "yo can i do this thing", you just DO IT, with no input for the other person. So that sucks. Anyway, mentioned Zevran/M!elfWarden throughout. Hope you like it!

It was the night before battle, and Zevran was sharpening his blades.

Leliana wished she was making an innuendo. Any other night, she would be. Any other night, they would be at camp, not a stuffy castle, and Zevran could forgo sharpening his real blades for a different sort, grasping the hand of his Warden and letting himself be pulled into his tent.

Not this night. This night the Warden had disappeared into his room with Morrigan at his heels. She had watched it happened, and realized too late that Zevran had too. Too late for what, she didn't know.

Zevran's door was open, but she knocked anyway. It was only polite.

He didn't reply, not looking up from the blade he was balancing between his knees. She had never really noticed, but he was small. Maybe it was because he exuded a mixed sense of purposeful sensuality and unwitting danger, but his size had never sunk in before. He was much smaller than the Warden even, though he was also an elf.

He'd always been small, but she didn't think he'd always been this sad.

"What do you wish of me?" he said finally, eyes never leaving the dagger.

Leliana sat next to him on the bed, half afraid he would snap at her for it. But Zevran didn't snap. He teased and joked and leered, but he never snapped.

Leliana decided right there to drop any pretense. "Are you okay?"

"Hm? With what?"

Apparently he hadn't decided the same thing.

"Do I have to spell it out for you?" she said. "How are you feeling, what with the Warden and Morrigan?"

"You are blunt, aren't you?" replied Zevran, chuckling. "I am feeling many things, few of which I wish to share."

Leliana didn't reply, and Zevran lost his smile, staring blankly at his blades.

"If you want to," said Leliana. "I'm here."

"That is very kind of you," said Zevran, running a finger across the flat surface of the blade. "I am not accustomed to kindness from people I am not sleeping with."

It was a harsh truth, one Leliana had never expected him to lay out for her. He glanced up from his blades and met her eyes, his eyes dark brown and beautiful and sad. Was a night with Morrigan really worth losing those eyes?

"We are friends," she said. "We have both led hard lives, and we have both suffered. We've both found salvation, in different ways."

Zevran smirked. "Are you suggesting my salvation is the Warden?"

She giggled. "I didn't mean it like that."

"Perhaps that is not so far from the truth," he mused. "Or at least, I thought so. Just today, he said..."

Zevran trailed off, biting his lips so alluringly Leliana momentarily thought it was on purpose. But for one, Zevran was not flirting. He was more handsome when he dropped all the flirting, she thought.

"You said we were friends, yes?" he said, accent strangely thicker than normal. "And that friends tell each other the truth?"

"Yes," she said, inching herself closer to him on the bed.

"Today I asked the Warden if we had a future," he said, so quietly Leliana almost didn't catch it. "He said yes, although he didn't know what. He took my earring and I watched him put it in his ear. He kissed me, and told me he loved me."

Leliana had watched Zevran shut the Warden down when he'd asked to share their tent. She'd watched with the quiet eyes of a bard as the Warden, a huge man, elf or no, slunk back to his own tent. She'd seen Zevran turn away and angrily kick a tree stump, only to swear in Antivan as he nearly broke his toe. She'd understood it; they'd lived a similar life, and she could imagine the turmoil he was going through, only double, for Zevran's life has been doubly as harsh (until the betrayal and the torture, but she didn't think about that now, she couldn't).

How could the Warden do that to him? How could he let Zevran bare his soul and then tell him he loved him, only to sleep with Morrigan the same night?

Zevran was looking at her, reading her expression easily. Her years in the Chantry had let certain skills slip, she supposed. Right now she didn't mind.

"You know what really gets to me?" said Zevran, a note of hysteria rising as he began to laugh. "The Warden, he...he's told me how much he dislikes women, sexually. The horror in his voice as he discussed his only time with a woman! I could not stop laughing, it was so funny. I have never seen him flirt with any woman, ever."

"I have never seen him flirt with anyone but you," said Leliana.

Zevran looked away from her and let out a small, choked noise. It took a moment before she realized it was a sob. Carefully placing his blades on the bed, she pulled him in for a hug, and he cried on her shoulder.

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