Adele Tabris never took her wedding ring off. A mottled flimsy thing with traces of gold, copper and iron all dusted over with gold leaf. The human, Alistair, once said that she was deserving of something more precious with which to adorn her fingers. Adele just quickly shook her head. She wore her ring because she was deserving of her ring. She wore it because Nelaros deserved much more.
"Chester! What have you?..." Words were so hard to come by, sometimes. Especially when she had to face down a mabari who was merrily wagging that stump he called a tail. "No. Absolutely not."
Chester barked and ran a quick circle around her.
"Chester, you can't." More stammer than speech left Adele's lips. She took a deep breath. "You need to put her back, wherever you found her. She doesn't belong here."
The mabari seemed almost like a person sometimes, keenly intelligent, with the way he cocked his large head to one side. Adele certainly viewed him as more of a friend than any of her other traveling companions. Chester whined before he trotted over to the mutt he had collected from Maker knew where and sniffed at her hind quarters.
And what a mutt she was. Matted fur in tufts of cream and black swallowed up the dog's watery eyes that seemed out of place on her smashed-in face. She ignored whatever attention Chester was presently offering and idly scratched at her neck with a back leg.
Adele's mabari, however, was quite taken. He kept flashing his big brown eyes her way with such excitement that she very nearly wanted to give in and add one more mouth to feed to their band of miscreants.
She knelt down, eye level with Chester and patted him on his head. "You know what kind of journey we're on. It's too dangerous for pets." She glanced over her shoulder and shouted aimlessly to the rest of the group unwinding in their camp. "We can't afford to keep another dog, can we?"
"Oh, lovely." Morrigan's voice cut smoothly through the din of camp side chatter. "Why not add another putrid animal to the lot? The rest of us are merely counting our coppers for trivial luxuries such as armor and healing poultices. Surely what this mongrel has to offer us will outweigh any cost."
"Now, now," Alistair chided. "Haven't you ever heard that owning a pet adds years to your life?"
"I see now why you have been allowed to stay."
Adele sighed. Chester's new friend had one ear that stood erect atop her head, while the other drooped limply. Adele scratched behind the dog's floppy ear.
"Dog is good." Oghren bellowed out a laugh. The dwarf joined her side wearing a broad grin. He patted the mutt's flank. "You can get a good meal out of one, if nothing else."
Adele gaped while Chester bared his teeth. Sometimes, it was so hard to tell whether or not Oghren was joking.
Oghren chuckled at Chester. "What? You don't like that, do you? You were hoping we'd let you keep her around, eh? She'd be your sweet, little piece to tap?" He leaned forward into Chester's face and rested his hands on his thighs. "I can respect that, but everyone here's got to pull their own weight. If the only talent she's got on a battlefield is 'meat shield,' you better send her packing, before she becomes just that."
Chester snorted curtly at the dwarf before he trotted back over to his paramour. He began to bark and nip at the other dog until she snarled and left in a huff. Alone, Chester laid down in the dirt and whimpered quietly.
"You see?" With the force that Oghren used to clap Adele on her back, she was nearly sent barreling forward. "These things are easy to handle, you just got to reason with them."
Adele could find nothing to say to that. She left the dwarf laughing in favor of sitting down next to Chester and scratching between his shoulder blades.
When he'd rescued her from the Alienage, the Grey Warden, Duncan, promised her grimly that it wasn't an act of compassion. Adele had quietly assumed it meant slavery. She would accompany Duncan to Ostagar where troops of human soldiers hadn't seen a woman in months. She hadn't expected a warm meal, exchanging pleasantries with a king and least of all, being treated as a person first, elf second.
She wished she could have accepted it all more readily.
She had more restful sleep at the Alienage than she did at Ostagar. She knew everyone there, trusted them and while it was a terrible, thankless life to lead in the Alienage, her father was there. Even as a young woman, there had been bad days where she could rest her head in his lap and she would be satisfied knowing that while her father could never remove all the hurts she had endured, he loved her. So while the king and Duncan and Alistair all assured her that she would be safer with them than back home and their eyes shone with such kindness that she wanted desperately to believe them all, Adele couldn't help but stay awake at night.
What a sad Grey Warden she was turning out to be. She wasn't used to anyone being interested in what she said, so her voice had grown hoarse and airy over years of little use. Besides, if Duncan refused to leave the Alienage after she had asked him politely, she highly doubted a darkspawn would simply turn heel on account of her saying, "please don't hurt anyone." Grey Wardens were supposed to be stalwart defenders. Adele just wanted to disappear.
"Hey, you," she whispered.
All she got for her efforts was a disgruntled rumble from Chester's throat as he burrowed his snout beneath a front paw.
"You did a good thing, I think," she told him. "A brave thing. It's hard to leave people behind, especially when you care about them. But you did what was best for her."
Chester sighed, but lifted his head up long enough to rest it on her knee.
"You see this?" Adele raised her left hand in front of the dog's face and wiggled her ring finger. "I left people behind, too. People who sacrificed everything for me, even when they didn't know me, had no reason to..." She trailed off and shook her head. "Anyway, I don't want to forget that. I'll keep it with me no matter what."
Chester rolled onto his back and exposed his underside to her. It seemed he had forgiven her for the moment. Adele smiled and rubbed his belly.
"We're not really keeping the dog, are we?" Alistair's voice always shot an icy shock down her spine. He never once treated her unkindly, so she was really hoping the instinctive way her back lurched upright every time he accidentally sneaked up on her would eventually pass.
Adele shook her head. "No. I was just explaining to Chester that he is a mabari. As he is such a fine example of his breed, he owes it to himself to track down the best female mabari in all of Ferelden and produce offspring with only she."
Chester snorted and gave her a look.
Alistair shifted his weight to his other leg. He had an expression on his face she'd never seen before. "Oh, I don't know," he said. Maybe the color in her cheeks had given her away. She wasn't even sure what prompted her to lie about what one-sided conversations she chose to have with a dog, anyway. "Looks can be deceiving. Sometimes. She didn't look like much, true, but maybe his lady friend was the bastard daughter of the mightiest king the mabari had ever known. Her mother might have been some feral, back-alley mongrel, of course, but just maybe she is destined for a greatness of sorts. She just needed someone like Chester to believe in her."
Adele frowned. "I don't understand..."
"A joke." Alistair forced out a quick, barking laugh. "One that fell flat, apparently." He sat down on the ground next to her. "I must be losing my touch. So! Are we really headed to Redcliffe, now?"
"Well, yes," she said. "We could go to the Tower, first. If you want. If you think that would be better, I mean."
"Could we?"
"So the Tower, then Redcliffe, then to the Dalish..." As she rerouted their travels in her head, she was brought back to the here and now by a cold, mabari nose in the palm of her hand insisting that she continue to pet him. "Okay."
"Thank you." Alistair rested a hand on her shoulder and immediately retracted it as soon as her muscles seized up. Adele sighed.
Alistair tried so hard to understand and she wished that she had the resolve to explain it to him. If only there were some way to tell him everything that wouldn't leave her so vulnerable, that wouldn't involve her tearing out her own heart and revealing the most fragile spots to stab. It wasn't Alistair's fault that when he laughed, her entire body tensed up. It wasn't his fault that his words sent involuntary shudders down her spine. It wasn't his fault that with his easy charm and beautiful face Adele wanted to shut down and cry in a corner the more he tried to impress her.
Vaughan had a beautiful face too, with a jaw broader than any elf's. His eyes had sparkled and his smile crested as he spat out the word, "whore" and struck her down. And she had let him.
It was a horrible thing to explain to her companions that she was terrified of them, because they were human. Better that they thought she was cold and aloof. It was a personal failing of Adele's, anyhow. Alistair, Leliana and Morrigan couldn't change what they were born into any more than she could clip her ears and declare herself another race.
"Well." Alistair cleared his throat. "I had better, uh, get back." He gestured with his hand toward the cooking fire. "Leliana has seriously insulted Ferelden cuisine and insists she can do better. I need to be there to jeer at her and otherwise disrupt her concentration."
Adele watched him escape toward the fire and inwardly felt relieved. She wrapped her arms around Chester's neck and pulled him in close to her. He rewarded her with a bark directly in her ear and ran his wide, flat tongue along the length of her face.
At the end of the Joining she was the only one left alive, though she couldn't fathom why. Possibly due to Duncan ending Ser Jory so quickly for doing precisely what she had wanted to do. So with her long, tangled blonde hair hiding her face, Adele drank the darkspawn blood and awaited death.
It changed her. The taint. Doubled over in agony, steeling herself for what she was convinced were her last moments, Adele stared at Duncan and Alistair until her vision fogged. That blood was a poison burning through all her body's pathways. Maybe she screamed or whimpered at those men who had pulled her away from everything only to watch her die, maybe she only wanted to. They stood, like statues as her heart palpitations increased, drumming mercilessly at the back of her ears. As her breathing became more shallow and panicked, Adele accepted that maybe this was just what humans did to those weaker than themselves. She was a joke, a sacrificial lamb that the men would laugh about later. She only hoped that no one told her father.
All the while the taint had enveloped her body completely. It surged, probing her, looking for something. Her fingers burned and her stomach froze and she gave up pleading for it to stop when she realized how much energy was wasted begging to something that didn't listen. It was that moment, when she gave up, that it stopped. Like it had discovered all that fear and hopelessness that Adele kept constantly walled within herself. The very thing that made her who she was, it feasted upon all that paralyzing terror, gorged itself until it could no longer move, no longer harm her.
When she woke, the sun was already peeking out across the horizon and Alistair had looked disappointed.
And why shouldn't he be? The Joining had cost him his brave and dutiful knight. It had cost him a skilled cut-purse that was used to skulking about in the night and slitting throats for coppers. All it left was her. A petrified little girl who was whisked away on her wedding night. She would have been good at cleaning their modest, little home. She would have loved all the babies that Nelaros gave her. As it was, she couldn't even kill a single darkspawn without making a childish scene.
She'd always liked using a bow. It insured that she could keep her distance and still be effective. It meant that she wasn't really killing living creatures, they could just as easily be clay targets, bull's eyes painted on hay. But there were so many and she missed one. It was so hard to react when a darkspawn was charging at her, screaming spittle, with a mace raised high above his head. Adele dropped her bow and it clattered to the ground far out of reach. She fumbled for the dagger and her hip and held it out, unsure of how proper her grip was upon the hilt, squeezed her eyes shut and braced herself.
Alistair had found her on the ground, a corpse on top of her, with her arms trembling, still extended.
"It gets easier with time, you know," he told her later at the campfire. "You'll get used to it."
He'd meant it to reassure her, to comfort her. Adele shook her head. "I don't want to get used to it. Then I'll be like them."
She didn't elaborate after that and he dropped it. Alistair had thought she was talking about the darkspawn and it was just as well. Adele wasn't exactly sure who she was talking about at that point. It would probably upset him to learn that she lived in constant fear of her companions, especially when they did so little to deserve it.
Alistair was so kind. But how could she guarantee that one night he wouldn't show up to camp drunk? What was to stop Leliana from becoming jealous over an imagined look and then marking Adele's face with a dagger? Her nights at camp were spent huddled next to her dog for warmth and protection.
"I would have liked to name my first child after my father, I think," she told Chester. "Cyrion for a boy or Cyrionna for a girl. I think Nelaros would have allowed me that much."
She pulled him into a hug and squeezed until he whined. "I know it sounds weird, but I think I'd like to go back. After all this is done. If I can." She relaxed her grip on the dog so that she could look him in the eyes. "Is that sad?"
What Adele wanted was reassurance. Something that another elf or human or dwarf or qunari could give. She wanted to know that it wasn't preposterous that a person could possibly consider an Alienage home. That they could feel comfortable and at ease there. That not all elves wanted to leave and never look back and continue to better themselves and the rest of their race.
She didn't want them to pity her. She didn't want them to think her daft or worse yet, be disgusted by the fact that she'd prefer a life of obscurity to one of greatness. She wanted them to know and understand while remaining blissfully ignorant. Adele played with the ring on her finger.
All Chester could do was lick her face.