. x . X . x .

Castle Redcliffe's underbelly is quiet, the lightless dungeons cluttered with the remains of a gruesome battle. A condemned man huddles in his cell, privately soothing what the Teyrna's interrogation had cost in skin and muscle. He twitches at the sound of footsteps, wipes the sting of sweat from his eyes and pulls reluctant limbs to a stand as a torchlight's glimmer approaches. "So I assume you're the one going to perform the execution. That's... fitting."

The newcomer is an elf, not much younger than the prisoner, who speaks with the same nasal inflection of Tower schooling. "I knew you'd enjoy the irony." Cell bars interrupt Aen's approach, and the two men regard each other with wariness.

The prisoner scoffs, "The only thing I want to enjoy at this point is a good night's sleep."

"Going a bit easy on me, aren't you?" Aen bends to drag a corpse this way, another that way, sizing up and dissembling. He works quickly, trading the castle's precious silence for the determined clang and skitter of bones divested their armor.

Warily, the prisoner drifts to his cell door to puzzle through the scene. "I only wish you'd get it over with. I'm sick with hunger and can't feel my feet in this chill."

Aen's tone is deep and quiet, words quipped by uncertainty. "I know of a rune to lure the Phylactery, so that Templars might find their way to a corpse."

The prisoner throws his hands forward, forearms pale and bruised in their flash through the gloom. "Oh, excellent! Good bloody riddance to you as well."

"You don't mean that, Jowan. Stand back."

Jowan flashes a defiant eye through the bars. His voice turns flinty, spun form its usual plaintive drawl into something adult in its exhaustion. "Going to break the door in? Wanted to end this face-to-face?"

"Kindly put your teeth away and do as I bid."

"You never give in, do you? Not even for what you know is right?" A hard whisper, "Not even for me?" Calling out, "Was it worth it, in the end? Did Irving promote you for your Loyalist accord?" Jowan pulls his arms from the barred door and begins to pace, shaking with pain and agitation, raking matted black hair from bruised eyes. "Nevermind anyway, all of it. I'm glad that it's you. I'm glad this will all be over, and that you're the one to end it."

The cell door is wrenched open on its old hinges. A helmet lands at Jowan's bare feet, rocking idly in the terse silence as the mages regard each other over the open threshold. Aen pockets the heavy iron cell key and gestures at Jowan with his staff. "I'll need those robes off you."

"Oh. We're ending me out of uniform, are we? Still a bit of a righteous git, are you? Thought the real world would have knocked all that idealism clean out of that rat-faced little skull of yours."

"Like it knocked all the sense from your donkey head? Maker, have you even the strength left to strip your own stinking carcass? I don't have to come in there and undress you, do I?"

"What the nine hells does it matter! Take all the clothing you need once you've melted or exploded or charred me or whatever it is you've deemed the most justified for this occasion. And good bloody luck with your own nightma -" Jowan stops short as a pair of greaves joins the helmet at his feet.

Aen bends to tug the rest of his collection into view. "Keep your voice down and put this damn armor on or by Andraste's flaming tits, I shall come in there and dress you myself."

Jowan blinks. Slowly, gingerly, he manages to drag his protesting body from one uniform to the other. Leather and maille rest heavy on bruises and swollen cuts, the armor cumbersome and stiff as he works in stunned silence. Then, a quiet revelation, "Don't believe I've ever heard you blaspheme in all the years we've known each other."

"Let's just say I've been keeping some rather colorful company." Aen gathers Jowan's discarded robes, pale fingers glancing over the redressed corpse to tug the robes into place and complete their ruse. "We can fool the Phylactery to a certain extent, but in order to do as much I'm going to need some of your blood to draw a beacon."

"Don't bother, I know the rune." Jowan waves Aen away and crouches to the task, slipping a gauntlet off to pull a belted knife over his fingertips. "Is this goodbye, then?" Jowan doesn't look up from his work, doesn't meet Aen's flinty blue eyes - sharp, foreign, intelligent, at once fascinating and foreboding and altogether so very elven.

"No." Aen crosses his arms, bearing held fast despite the sorrow passing the line of his shoulders. "The last I saw you, it was goodbye. This is a debt between us."

Jowan scoffs, shaking his head. He stands but makes no move to drag the replacement corpse back into the cell, already intoxicated by the idea of true freedom and woozy from relief, pain, confusion. All things to be sorted in their time, and this was not that time, leaning heavily against gore-speckled brick under the weak sputter of a wall torch. "All right, next time I'm in a position to kill you, you can call on this debt. Because that's completely likely. Sure. What do you really want from me?"

Aen uncrosses his arms, stepping forward to lopsidedly drag Jowan's replacement corpse into the empty cell.

Jowan readjusts a gauntlet, mentally preparing himself for the long trek away from the castle. "Don't you dare suggest a kiss."

Aen draws his staff from its resting place against the wall, tapping the cobblestones thrice before lunging forward with both arms, wringing an unearthly blaze into the cramped cell, charring any discernible features off the corpse. He steps back to watch the flames snap and feed, smokeless and oily. "Would you honestly deny me, at this point?"

Unsteadily toeing a path through the dungeon's carnage toward the storage exit, Jowan laughs. "Here you've gone and found a sense of humor, and at the most appropriate moment, too."

Aen grunts noiselessly. "I have a good mentor, skilled in the art of cynicism." The blaze lessens behind them, sizzling, sputtering, the dark following on their heels. "You would like him; the both of you might engage in whiny, sarcastic luncheons - whole tea parties dedicated to rants of entitlement and contests of self-pity." Aen keeps himself close behind Jowan, arms crossed behind his back, cradling his staff. Tick, clack, the wood narrates a slight limp against the cobblestone.

"Sounds lovely," Jowan pants, pausing to readjust the armor, tugging the helmet on. "What's the catch?"

"He was a Templar, of a sorts."

Jowan's laugh is loud, and seems to take most of his remaining strength. He bends to one knee to catch his breath, a metallic rasp through the helmet. "Just your type!"

"Sshhh," Aen warns, palms tamping down the air between them, glancing over his shoulder.

"I bet he's tall and blond and dumber than a sack of clay bricks, too." Jowan rights himself, holding an arm out for support.

A tense moment of silence grips the pair before Aen lends his shoulder in wordless consent. "I wouldn't say tall."

. x .

"You've been awfully quiet." Alistair's cautious observation interrupts the crackle of the sitting-room's hearth, pulling Aen out of his daze.

Aen blinks, running fingertips over the recent scar reaching from eyebrow to the crest of his skull, smoothing down the bright red hair kept short-cropped in case of just such an injury. "Never considered 'quiet' an awful thing."

"Riiight, I guess that means I should leave you alone, then. It's just, I got the impression that you knew that mage, the one you - er... Just thought you might need an ear to bend. About that."

"It's different than killing darkspawn, isn't it?" Aen agrees noncommittally, "Or a bear. Or a demon-possessed maleficar. Have you ever killed a man?"

"No more than you, out on the field. Nobody I knew or had to speak with face-to-face, that is. But I attended a Harrowing as part of my training, once. An, er, unsuccessful one." Alistair claims a stuffed bench opposite Aen, clad in tunic and breeches, a rare state considering all the travel and fighting they usually saw with no rest from armor. "She was just a girl, and suddenly wasn't, and they had to run her through." Alistair pauses, apprehensive over the rivalry they often referenced in jest, Templar and Mage. "I could have done that for you, you know. He was a blood mage and I've already been trained against that sort of thing, been prepared and then, well, then, maybe, you wouldn't have had to."

"I think you already know why I volunteered."

"Oh, sure, I have my guesses. Either you had a score to settle, or," Alistair cracks his knuckles, elbows on knees set apart with both hands a bridge, and bows his head to regard Aen from under heavy eyebrows. "Or you cared for him, very much."

Aen levels his stare, unblinking. "Which do you think it was, I wonder?"

"Both? Please don't say both." Alistair suffers through a hard sigh, head dropping in a nod. "It is both, isn't it. Maker, we can't go two bloody days without running into a betrayer, or assassin, or ancient arch-rival of indeterminable intent that has to be put to final rest, or -"

Aen snorts, "The last is Flemeth, is it? The Crows have yet to pursue our newest recruit, to be fair about the assassins."

"Right, but how many mercenaries have been sent after us outside of the Loghain conflict?"

Aen counts from his fingers, eyes to the ceiling, "Leliana's Orlesian problem, Templars after Morrigan, or the people who just don't like Sten's face?"

Alistair chuckles darkly, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Hang it all. I didn't come here to whine. We'll be leaving at dawn for Denerim to find this Genitivi fellow, and I wanted to make sure you were all right. If you needed to be left alone, or, or not. Sorry, I'm terrible at this."

"It's all right, Alistair. People die." Aen delivers a leveling stare. Though he had come around to be the reassurance in the middle of being reassured, as was common enough, still he tilted his head and could bring no further words on the matter.

Alistair gives Aen time to speak further, before clapping both hands against his knees and straightening in his seat. "You're taking this pretty well. So, he wasn't a friend?"

"Alistair," Aen searches the air between them, mouth working over a few false starts. "Jowan was, ah, a classmate, of mine. I brought him to execution for the crime of blood magic, and on suspicion that he might have played some hand in the Kinloch massacre we recently overturned." Aen shrugs a shoulder to dislodge the heavy weight of anger, mouth pulled back in distaste. "Not to mention the havoc we have faced securing Redcliffe. I'd have hanged the bugger for this whole mess alone, with or without the added grief of knowing him."

Alistair interrupts quietly, "But you did know him."

"Aye. I also knew one of the garden-cows kept for the Sommersday feast. Still enjoyed the roast."

"Hm. I don't know if you're serious about that or not. Welp," Alistair rises slowly, as if still clad in plate-maille, reluctant to take his leave too soon. "I'm always here to talk, if you need it." At Aen's return silence, "Right. Get some rest, then."

Aen had hunched toward the fire, thumbnail at his bottom lip. "Aye. Set Hound to the yard on your way out."

. x .

Alistair mops the back of his neck, taking up a heavy oaken chair in the dim library hall. "He's joking easily enough, so it can't be too bad."

"Yet still I wonder," Wynne purses her lips, eyes narrow as she closes the volume before her. She regards Alistair as if just noting his presence, smiling in apology. "Regardless, I appreciate your indulgence on the matter. A mage knows only the Circle in which he or she is raised, until they are skilled enough and old enough to leave, to be sent with Templar escort to a town in which they might utilize their talents. Aen may have passed his Harrowing, but he was still young yet to have left Irving's guidance."

Alistair leans back, chair creaking under his weight. "That your professional opinion, is it?"

"I didn't directly tutor the boy and haven't much recall of his youth, but I do remember Irving's headache over a certain red-headed upstart that had squirreled himself away in the rafters after they took his Phylactery sample." Wynne's chuckle is warm and reproachful at the same time. "He may not sound it, but our grand Ser Warden Surana only just turned nineteen this autumn." Wynne takes a contemplative stand from her high-backed chair, hands folding placidly one in the other as she nears an oil lamp to brighten its flame. "Despite all his arrogance and bravado, Aen is still very young indeed to be a Mage without a tower."

"I've got an uncomfortable feeling about where you're going with this." Alistair stands to join Wynne nearer the lamp, crossing his arms as he seeks a comfortable position against a bookshelf. "Without a tower, but not without a Templar, is that it?"

"Very astute, young man."

"You honestly think that could happen, Wynne? Honestly? Aen; the never-say-demon, stone-cold maleficar slayer; the Grey Warden; submit to abominable possession? And I'd have to be the one to cut him down?"

"No, Alistair," Wynne scoffs. "Maker's sake, try to pay attention." Wynne dusts the front of her skirts as she takes up her previous rest at the tableside. "It is to my understanding, that Templars are to protect their charges from the outside world as much as they protect the outside world from their charges. Is this not a thing of which you are aware?"

Alistair chuckles, cold and dry, "Have you talked to that man, like, ever? He's not someone who really needs protecting. If anything I'd do better to act as a buffer on behalf of the poor 'outside world'."

"Oh, dash it all," Wynne is shaking her head, bright eyes soft and sad. "Would it be any clue to my point, that Aen never answers me with the same sort of brevity with which he addresses you?"

"Well of course not, you're only this very, er, matronly, can't-curse-around-you, someone or another. To him. I'm guessing."

"Nor Morrigan? Nor Leliana, for that matter? That in fact he meets sarcasm with sarcasm, and genuity with genuity?"

Alistair makes a face as if he's sampled bad stew. "I don't know what to say to that. Other than maybe suggest you give any future counsel yourself and you're welcome for the favor by the way?"

Wynne hums, and her mouth pinches up in thought, conceding with a nod. "Such a hardship you've faced on my account. I wager you were called on to discuss feelings. I wager it was unbearable."

"It was, really." Alistair turns his head, working a crick free of his neck, "I even might have sprained something."

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