At night, when Alistair snores loudly from his bedroll and Morrigan recedes to her separate campfire, Alim lies awake and stares at the top of his tent. The question he is turning over in his mind is the same as that which has plagued him since leaving the Tower.
Why?
Why would Jowan risk losing everything—his best friend, his lover, even his life—for a forbidden power? He had never been the ambitious type; he was the bumbling one, the complaining one who always managed to scrape by on a combination of natural talent, luck, and help from his best friend.
That last point is a particularly contentious internal debate in Alim's mind, now. All those times Jowan had remarked on his friend's talent, his skill, how he was the top of the class... Alim had taken it as praise and allowed himself to revel in Jowan's admiration, but it is only now, separated from Jowan for the first time since coming to the Tower, that he notices the undercurrent of jealousy that had always been present in his best friend's compliments.
Jowan had always been terrified of failure, of being cut down by the Templars for not making the cut. And when his best friend was the apple of the First Enchanter's eye…
He turns around in his bedroll, face buried in his pillow. As much as he hates it, he is much closer to his answer than he would care to admit.
He stays at a polite distance from his other companions, laughing occasionally at Alistair's bad jokes, suffering Morrigan's ranting about the Circle and Leliana's preaching about the Maker. Sten speaks rarely, and for that Alim is glad, but he feels a strange kinship with the big Qunari. They've both been broken in some irrevocable, crucial way, though they do not speak of their pasts.
It is as the broken doll Duncan took under his wing that Alim unthinkingly follows the traveler asking for help to her wagons, so glad he is to help someone for once, after all the harm he's done…
And then he is fighting, summoning the powers within him that he despises for what they've caused. The assassins fall twitching to the bolts of electricity emanating from the storm cloud he has cast, and soon they are interrogating the elven leader of the ambush.
With dizzying suddenness Zevran pledges his oath and joins their party, but Alim thinks nothing of it. Another mouth to feed, another set of blades to kill, another pair of eyes to avoid meeting over the campfire.
What he doesn't expect is how hard it is to avoid Zevran's eyes. And hands.
Zevran seeks him out like a beacon, spouting all sorts of nonsense about "the benevolent mark" and wanting to get to know him better. Hopefully on a bedroll.
He gapes at this last bit, mind not processing meaning. It's rather jarring to hear spoken of so casually that which had been the subject of embarrassing fantasies alone in his bed in the Tower.
Seeing his surprise, Zevran relents and instead regales him with tales of his homeland, of Antiva and its strange lazy warmness and corruption that smells like leather and sickly rotting sweet decadence. His mind relaxes: he finds himself laughing with the assassin, the constant pressure in his chest lessening for just a moment.
Soon enough they share a bedroll; eventually a tent. The others in their party react with according amounts of surprise, amusement, and disgust, but he finds himself talking more even with them, at long last emerging from the bars the Circle Tower had placed around him.
He realizes that he has not thought about Jowan in a long time. Hours, days, even weeks without a thought. So much has happened since he left the Tower, a broken doll stolen away under Duncan's wing.
Zevran has happened.
It isn't love; at least, it's nothing like what he felt—feels—for Jowan. It's something less, and perhaps something more. The assassin woke him to needs he hadn't even realized he possessed, desires he never dreamed of having, the pure raw sensation that leaves his head spinning and his mouth gaping, gasping for more.
Morrigan points out that he smiles much more these days: irritatingly so, in fact, though she admits that it is an improvement from his state at the start of their journey.
"You were such a typical Chantry-bred pawn. So glum and sensitive, like you felt guilty for existing," she had told him. "Zevran is revolting, to be sure, but at least you're growing a backbone. Just keep the… noise level down."
He thinks perhaps that is the biggest change: the guilt is buried. It will never be truly gone, but he can breathe without its shackles on his chest, can live selfishly and delight in that. And in the wild whirl of events and adventures, he almost forgets it.
But the guilt comes crashing back to the surface in a way he never expected.
They are creeping through the dungeon of Redcliffe castle, and the undead corpses cluster around a cell. Almost on reflex, he blasts them into oblivion with a well-aimed blast of flame, and as their ashes scatter to the ground, he hears the voice that he loves and curses.
"Who's there?" He hasn't heard him in months, but the pleading tenor is still there, more frantic and haggard than he remembered it yet still unmistakable.
"Jowan?"