. x . X . x .

"Urh..." Aen is curled on the dark slate of the dungeon floor, the sharp stink of piss and old hay thickening in the back of his throat. The first thing he notices on waking is the draft across his skin. "Did they have to take my trousers? Honestly."

Alistair is unsurprised that, despite the bruised muffle, Aen's first words are a precise, full sentence.

Head trauma usually gave grammar back as the last thing, but even though Aen does not yet stir he seems able to very compassionately dialogue. "Not like the trousers were enchanted. The tunic, I understand; all manner of weapons to be hidden in a tunic," he says with a dreamy sort of detachment. "Read about it once; you can piss on a linen tunic to strengthen it and use it to twist open prison bars." Rolling at last to his side, Aen's eyes focus beneath an impressively bruised forehead. The wound maps half of his face, a mottled purple and angry red under the dark brown of dried blood.

Alistair hisses air in through his teeth, but does not move from his corner. He is sat, ribs cracked and aching, helpless in his ignorance of the attention a thrashed elven body might need and doubtful he could do anything if there were any broken bones. "Are we awake now?"

"No." Aen's eyes close. He coughs, and groans with all the bitterness of old blood caking the corner of his mouth.

"Well, good! Keep yourself asleep; it's only going to get worse from here on out."

Aen curls in on himself, and shivers."You're in a mood."

"Yes. If you haven't noticed, we're in a dungeon."

"Naked."

"Naked. Bloodied. Soon to be tortured, starved to death, or if we've any luck, killed without further humiliation."

Silence falls between the Wardens, interrupted only by the fidgeting of a nearby prisoner in his own cell. Aen's shoulders hitch up with a long, rattling breath before he speaks. "You can't die soon from starvation. The whole point of it is that it takes a long time."

"You know what I meant."

"Yes." Aen's head jerks up, ears pricked back in a posture that reminds Alistair of a hound at hearthside who's just heard a knock at the door. "Is that the change in guard patrol?"

"Er," Alistair pulls himself to a stand, dusting clammy bits of hay chaff from his thighs before hobbling forward to peer as best as he can through the bars. "Yes. Why? Planning something?"

"Oh... wow, that's. Hn. You are very naked."

Alistair turns on heel to peer down at Aen (who has covered his face with both hands and rolled with a groan to his side, ears red). "No more than you." He can't help the bristle of superiority, because yes, they were both naked but there was really no helping it and sometimes it amazed him, how someone as clever and practical as Aen could at once be so... immature. "Are you laughing?"

"No." A suspicious hiccough.

"They must have hit you harder than I thought. You are laughing."

"I'm... weeping, truly."

"Uh-huh. Overcome with emotion at our predicament, are you?"

Like a snap, as quickly as the autumn winds change, Aen sobers. "Alistair," His ears remain pink at the tips, but that could just as easily be from cold as it could from residual embarrassment. "When the guard makes his third round, I want you facing the stone wall, asleep."

Alistair drops his voice and crouches near Aen's bony back. "What, you mean pretending to sleep? What are you planning?"

"No, I mean asleep. Or at least as still and quiet as you can manage." Aen struggles to an elbow, gingerly curling upright to a sit. "Maybe stuff some hay into your ears. Make certain you are facing the stone."

"Are you going to cast?"

Aen's limbs tense in the crouch, and he still doesn't meet Alistair's eyes. "What? No, the bars are enchanted against that sort of thing. Just do as I say."

"I trust you, but I'd still like to know what you're planning. In case something goes badly wrong, I'd like to be prepared." Alistair crosses their small cage to settle once more against the grimy stone floor, stretching his legs out and bunching the limp pile of hay under his head as if to nap.

Tentatively, Aen uncurls into a stand, arm propped on cell bars to wait for the world to cease lurching around him. "I just can't do this with you watching."

"What," Alistair protests, glancing over his shoulder at Aen's willowy and pale nudity. "I've seen you kill people before."

"To the wall, Warden."

"Wow, okay, sheesh." Alistair had felt a small lurch inside of him at Aen's tone, a hard knot settling in his stomach. "Shy, are we?"

"Just follow the orders you've been given, and we'll be free of this place soon enough."

Petulantly, Alistair does not follow orders. He slows his breathing and pretends to sleep, attentive. On the second clanking pass of the guard, Alistair chances another peek over his shoulder.

Aen is leaning against the bars by the hip, arms crossed as if he were simply at a street vendor waiting on an ordered pasty. By the third pass of the guard, Aen has reached a hand up to support a lithe stretch against the iron bands of the door, and lets out small groans of appreciation as his joints pop and crack in relief. The noise, quiet as it is, seems to echo in the vast stone dungeon, and Alistair's breath catches in his chest.

Nose to the wall once more, Alistair suddenly knows why he should have followed orders. The hard knot in him tightens, burns. He ought to put a stop to it, but it isn't his place to doom their escape attempt. Even their decrepit neighboring prisoner was keeping silent and still.

The Guard does not bark his order so much as deliver it like a Mornmas greeting. "Oy, away from the door, you."

There is an apology, a shuffle, and Alistair can only imagine Aen repositioning himself and - ugh. Ugh... was it too late to stuff his ears with straw?

Aen honeys his voice. "Bit bored. Blondie over there hasn't woken up yet. Blighter's probably dead; I know how fierce you uniformed men can be when you've been ordered to take the boot to someone."

Alistair's spine prickles as the guard's eyes passed over him. "Looks like he's still breathing... but I'll send a healer around tomorrow if he ain't perked up yet."

"Can you do that?" Aen sounded dazed by the very offer.

"'Course I can."

"Hnn." Aen's bare foot slapped gently against the stone floor, and every bit of Alistair recoiled. "What to do in the meanwhile, though? I am dreadfully bored."

"No helping that, sorry." The guard is whistling as his footsteps carry fainter down the passage.

Alistair hisses to the stone, "Laying it on a bit thick, aren't we?"

"Not thick enough I'd fear, and silence yourself or else you ruin my concentration."

"They change the guard every three patrols," Alistair insists. "You've missed your chance."

"No," Aen's whisper is triumphant. "The next guard to take duty will have been from a room of idle reserves, and he or she will have volunteered their shift because they just heard the funniest story of this flirty little elf down in the cells with nothing on his hands but time and nothing on his bones but his own skin."

Their bearded neighbor chimes in helpfully, "He's right, you know. Lotsa military rejects end up in guard reserve - this Fort happens ter be where criminals and careers are put to die, and I ain't never met a dying career what didn't come along with its own set of degen'rations."

Aen extends a long finger, "Plus, I'm an elf."

The prisoner grunts, "Right, elves is always gettin' fucked afore they go. Watch yer skin, though. If it's Coris what comes back he'll knock ya dead and have at the corpse."

Alistair scoffs, voice tight. "Oh, thanks for that." He rolls to a sit. "I'm convinced. You aren't doing this. We'll find another way to - " standing, he pauses. "Why are you... please don't look at me like that."

Aen is studying Alistair, and it is almost to Alistair's relief to see that familiar cold regard back in Aen's expression - even if it was dragged across Alistair's skin from head to toe. Alistair returns the scrutiny, checking for scrapes and broken bones and finding relief that, aside from the head wound and the mild case of insanity for which it seemed responsible, Aen was in good health.

One of Aen's nicked ears twitch, and a flicker of anxiety crosses his already pinched expression. "We haven't time to argue."

With that, Alistair finds a hand on his throat, dry and cool and slim, and a hard thin leg behind his own, and a steely band of strength around his arm, and then he is on his back and all the breath has left him and all the stars in the Maker's sky are bursting just behind his eyes, burning through his very bones - for all the world, that had hurt. The floor shifts under Alistair and he realizes that he had just been disabled and that Aen is rolling him back into position against the wall and every inch of him feels ill and what if something happens and he is too incapacitated to help - after all he was the Templar, the Shield, he was -

"What's he groaning about?" Their guard. The one whose shift was supposed to be over.

Alistair stills, fury quelled in the fragile moment of opportunity.

Aen pads quickly to the cell door. "No idea. You think he'll wake up soon?"

"Flaming hell, I hope not. Stand away from the door, quick like."

"Hn."

Alistair wills his ears to close, to fill up with blood or bile or by any small miracle simply shrivel up within themselves. The creak of the cell door, the clank of divesting armor, the breathy encouragement and slap of skin against leather. What was taking so long? Couldn't Aen just zap the guy? Did he need help? Hating the necessity of it, Alistair turns his head to blearily review the situation.

Aen is trying to get into a position to break the man's neck, that much is clear. The guard is a large man, though, and his blissfully ignorant passion was interfering, as he would grab first one of Aen's arms and then the other, trying to guide Aen's hands to his trouser fronts. Alistair squeezes his eyes shut, willing his mind to clear in preparation of a swift assault. Maker, but he nearly blacked out again just thinking about rolling to a stand. Sparing another glance, Alistair finds that Aen has his legs around the guard's bucking hips, had freed his hands at last, and - within a blink, at the wet crack of bone - the man is dead.

"Could think of worse ways to go," Their neighbor muses. Alistair kicks the bars against which the dirty stranger is leaning, bruising his heel at no disruption of the prisoner's bald appreciation.

Alistair turns his bad mood back to Aen, attempting to sit. "Couldn't you have just zapped him?"

Aen is caught half-hidden between the guard's bulk and the cell bars, breathless. "Dungeon. Still enchanted. Arse." The guard tips backward and Aen lowers the body as quietly as he can, then crouches to deftly unfasten the uniform. "Put this on as soon as you can stand." Aen's movements slow, chest flushed and heaving, the gash on his brow bleeding anew from the exertion. Half of his drawn face is streaked by the stark and glistening red of new blood, shades of dirt and lust coloring whatever skin fear and stress had not painted white. A drop of the blood falls to Aen's collarbone, and Alistair cannot look away as the red bead rolls down the gentle valley of skin. Aen snaps his fingers. "Alistair? Are you injured?"

Alistair blinks, eyes gritty. "I... I think I must be."

"Oh. Er. Sorry about that, then." Aen stands with an iron key in hand. "In all fairness, we didn't have time to argue."

"Serves me right for questioning orders." The acidity of Alistair's sarcasm is diluted considerably by the fact that Aen's plan had actually worked, but - "So where do we go from here, fearless leader?"

"You get that armor on, first. No, leave the smallclothes. You know what happens to a man's bowels when he dies."

x . X . x

Alistair now studies his fellow warden in the late gloom of the evening, wordless and still a bit stunned. Properly healed, properly disguised, the two had hitched a ride with an empty potato cart returning to Denerim on its shipping sojourn. They relaxed now at the insistence of the rocking cart beneath them, of the open night sky that held its peace above them. They were free. It had worked, all of it, the bluffing and the flattery and the theft and the distractions... Picking their way cautiously through lie after lie only to collapse, woozy and exhausted and starving, here where they were to regather their thoughts and sort through their Officially Confiscated (stolen) equipment. Alistair's armor had been too heavy to sneak out, but they had two guardsman's incentives between them to buy something new at the first glance of a Quartermaster.

"Are you all right?" Those hadn't been the words that Alistair had been practicing in his head, no, he had intended to say something with a fair degree more scorn - but he was plenty used to blurting out the unintended and made no correction against himself.

Aen scoffs. "You aren't the only one who's played witness to murder before."

"What! That wasn't murder, you were - "

"I was saving your life."

That gives Alistair pause. He turns his helmet between his hands, studying the play of shadows and reflections in the polished metal. "You were saving the lives of the only two Grey Wardens Ferelden has left, and ensuring that your country does not fall to the Blight."

"Yes..." Aen drawls. "But I was foremost saving your life." A heavy silence. Aen scoffs impatiently, heavily put-upon by the silent nag of intense curiosity Alistair is particularly talented at radiating. "The guard's name is stitched on the inside of his tunic. It reads Coris."

A stunned heartbeat, Alistair unsure if he should laugh or not. "You're a bloody liar!"

"Check it yourself. You are still wearing it, aren't you?"

"How is that saving my life?"

"He wouldn't have underestimated you."

Alistair huffs, "I - you - "

Aen does not turn from his position at the cart's end, legs dangling out over the road. "Kindly retrieve your eyebrows from the heavens, lest they injure a bird."

"I... Look, I apologize, all right? It's not as if I thought you incapable, or anything. I only - I mean - there could have been a better means of escape. Something safer, for you. You were hurt much worse than I at the start, and I - " An incoherent grunt of frustration, "We could have done something different." The trundling mule-pulled cart passes over a cobbled bridge, and the insects of the waterway throw their chorus up between the gaps in conversation.

Aen argues, gently - stubbornly - "I knew the guard's type at first glance, Alistair. Even if I had been wrong about our Coris and his leering, well -" Aen echoes Alistair's frustrated incoherent grumble, "You weren't exactly forthcoming with any alternative plans, yourself."

"Maker, Aen, what do you suppose I had been doing the whole while before you woke up? Praying? I had ideas, you just didn't care to hear me out at the time and, argh, honestly, you speak as if you're turning into Morrigan with every passing day - as though you think I'm just some idle idiot who's only holding you back - " Alistair's voice cracks at this, betraying his fear.

Aen is a tense silhouette just out of reach, swaying with the rocking cart at every bump.

Alistair coughs, palming the back of his neck. "And maybe I am? I would never have done what you did, I would never have been able to even - "

"Seduce, Alistair. The word you're looking for is 'seduce'." With that, Aen turns and pulls his legs up to his chest, stretching first one bent knee and then the other. The armor is elven issue, but his skinny limbs seem lost in all the leather and chain. "Do you hear a Mabari barking?"

"Don't change the subject. I'm wallowing, over here."

Aen draws in a sigh. "I did tell you to keep your eyes averted. You can't unsee it, can you?"

"If there was any way I could take my memory out and scrub it against a washboard, I would."

Rather than blanch, Aen smiles. Rabbity teeth flash through the gloom and the hard sick thing inside of Alistair releases, finally, just disappeares like a knot of dry twine in a campfire. Aen laughs, stretching his legs out in front of himself. They are very long, those legs, putting Aen that much taller than most elves, and Alistair has to look away the moment his memory strips the limbs of their armor and sets one hard, skinny knee behind his own as the soft, long fingers gently and expertly choke-slam him into the unyielding dungeon flagstones -

"However did you learn to throw someone over your hip like that, anyway?"

It takes a moment for Aen to process the question, and he waves it away. "Oh, you know. Training. Just in case I'm ever caught on the dry."

"What," Alistair's own lighthearted tone is still shaky. "You mean whenever you and Zevran disappear from camp, it actually is just to teach you close-quarters combat?"

"Er. Yes. Are you sure you don't hear that? It sounds like Hound."

"There are plenty of Mabari in Ferelden, and don't change the subject." Alistair shuffles to join Aen against the wooden clapboard, stuffing their effects securely under his head and locking his fingers over his chest as if to doze. "With all the innuendo that Antivan keeps throwing about, I'm not the only one who thinks you two are always just trotting off to have a tumble in the underbrush."

"Saints ablaze, Alistair. That's a bit uncharacteristic of you, isn't it? To suggest such a thing."

Alistair yawns, slouching down, getting comfortable. "It's plenny charact'ristic. Not my fault we never get to talk like manly men anymore." Alistair's stomach lets out a small murmur of discontent, which evolves into a loud growl, and he turns to his side with a frustrated sigh. "Andraste's arse, I'd slay the Arch Demon just for a decent meal and a good night's rest. Saving the realm would merely be a happy bonus."

"You should sleep, then." A dry, cool hand falls to Alistair's head, stroking down and back through the short bristles of hair at the nape of his neck. Alistair thinks perhaps he's just been sorceled into sleep, when something heavy and barking tips the potato cart sharply to the left and he springs upright, weapon drawn. Aen is a set of limbs splayed under the mountainous wiggle of an anxious Hound, laughing.

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