A/N: As always, thanks to CJK for beta and hand-holding. All remaining mistakes belong to me.
The heavy breath of incessant rain accompanies them as they set off, a sensation of breaking into the city. Which is what they do. They break into it and wrestle the streets from the darkspawn, the invaders, the beasts stealing their home. They make it sound simple. War, any war, requires simplicity and blind eyes to overlook the crimes not explained by mere necessity. Anyone who is too weak or too decent to blind himself will find that war hollows you, cuts to the bone and leaves empty shell-ruins of your insides.
Loghain knows this a little too well by now.
He rides in front of the army without commanding it; occasionally, if the Warden needs an extra pair of lungs, he barks orders but they are not his own. This is the strangest thing in a long time, this unfamiliar position of being either a Warden or merely Loghain. To have that choice.
He opts for being a Grey Warden.
And, as a Grey Warden, he enters the city of Denerim again. Their absence has not been long but the city is, of course, utterly changed. Layer upon layer of time, of people and battles and rulers all lending their hands to reform or destroy it takes its toll, it wears a city down in the end. It seems this has finally happened to Denerim and if they still stand afterwards, the newly appointed King and his Queen will be having their hands full. And they won't be the only ones, Loghain knows, looking around at the odd group of soldiers following them.
They stand in front of the gates and draw up plans. Even now, plans offers an imaginary comfort. The Orlesian has assumed the role of their temporary leader, with the Warden close behind.
"I suggest taking Loghain and no more than two of your companions to the city," the Orlesian says, sheathing his sword. He looks around, waiting for more enemies, but the scenery is calm again and they are alone here. "The rest of you stay here."
The Warden nods.
"I want Morrigan by my side," she says, distinctly. No surprises there. "And Wynne, if you would?"
"It is an honour, dear."
Then the Warden looks in his direction and a for a moment he almost suspects, with a dread he cannot begin to describe nor understand, that she is going to tell him to remain at the gates. She lets her gaze travel between Loghain and the Orlesian, and he is certain she is going to find an answer in that silent communication telling her to leave him here as a final, twisted punishment.
"Loghain," she says finally, simply.
"Yes."
As he walks up to the group, the marsh witch is observing him curiously. He quells the impulse to say something.
"Very well," the Orlesian sums it up. He sounds satisfied, for reasons that go beyond Loghain's comprehension. His battle plan is inane at best. There is scarcely anything that can go well with it and even less anyone can do to improve it, since there is no way to actually improve the outcome of these matters. But Loghain can, he supposes, grasp the sense of relief at the end of this long road; they have both spent thirty years fighting and this is enough – much more than enough - for anyone.
Tucking away that odd strand of empathy for a bastard who deserves none, Loghain prepares for departure by cleaning his sword and tightening the breastplate. A general under his command once told him the surest sign of having spent too long on the road is when you reach a point where your armour needs refitting.
"If it returns and she does not," the golem informs Loghain right before they part, speaking for the assassin and the bard as well, he can see by the way their gazes fall on him, "I shall crush its arrogant little head."
"Believe me," Loghain says, adjusting his gauntlets over his fingers that feel cold and stiff in this temporary stillness. "That is not the outcome I am aiming for."
"Ah, this is good to hear," the assassin interjects, his tone entirely stripped of the inane lechery he normally uses. He glances sideways at the Warden who is approaching, looking ready to be off. "She is not expendable."
"Who is not expendable?" The Warden frowns, straightening her shoulders. Her pace is hurried but she still pauses among them, flanked by the mage and the witch who both wear ill-fitting reinforcements to their robes tonight.
"You, of course," the bard offers. Loghain wonders briefly what it is there, between them, the quiet flow of something that seems unspoken but that at least the Orlesian woman takes very seriously. Her pleading looks in his direction only underlines this further. He averts his eyes.
"We will return," the Warden says, looking from one face to another.
And everyone pretends momentarily to believe her.
.
.
.
.
It's a long night.
Almost against Riordan's suggestions, she has made the decision to take out the Archdemon's generals, a choice based as much on a desire to save what's left to save, as anything else. She doesn't tell anyone. But they know. Sewn tightly together like pieces in a large patch-work they are one, and they are everywhere at once.
And every time she falls, someone is there.
There's a secret, ancient form of magic to it, to this steady flow of moving bodies; Elissa stumbles and Loghain's blade is there to cut down the emissary headed for her; moments later Loghain is cornered by ogres and Elissa shouts at Morrigan to blast them; Morrigan is flat on the ground, bleeding heavily and Elissa pulls her up and pushes her towards Wynne's healing spell, cast only because a shield quickly gets in the way of three rapidly fired arrows.
It's a rhythm in the way they survive, because that is the only order, the one command: evade death.
It's a rhythm in the way they fight.
In Wynne's unbroken strength and the sheer power of her magic, the precise focus and deep control over every direction she channels it in, the way in which she manages to stand without armour and blade in the ugly crowd of their enemies and never seeming the slightest bit out of place. A rhythm in Morrigan's aggressive force, the lightness of her seamless shifts between human and animal, in the hopelessly clumsy hands reaching for Elissa's without knowing how or why.
Elissa fights with the last bloody year in her body, begging for someone to wring it out of her wide-open arms and erase her own name from its records. She fights with her heart shut to everything else and her memories hardened to metal around her, with hands curled into fists and a hint of metal in her mouth, raw fury in her throat.
It's a rhythm in the way she always must.
And in Loghain's refined brutality on the battlefield she finds something that mirrors herself, in the measured strokes of his blade and the unforgiving hits of his shield there are depths she is afraid to look into because they are her own depths; she knows, because their eyes meet briefly, that he isn't fighting for his life – he is fighting to the death.
It seems neither of them will succeed.
.
.
.
.
The battle misses him, time and time again.
Death does seem to flow off him, brushing against his shield and darting to the ground without hurting him – at least not his physical form and he has long since given up on the soul.
They spill many lives. The price of one general is as high as ever.
Loghain finds himself uncomfortably used to it, the bargaining, the finality of each step, the unrelenting ever-pressing force of war that wreaks itself into every corner of the country, laying it bare. There is nothing human about war and therefore they are not humans tonight. They perform their deeds and carry out their missions according to plan; however haphazard and undefined that plan may be, it is a plan and it directs their hands, the force of their aggression, because it must.
But they slip. The best of them slip.
For thirty years, Loghain has worked hard and unrelentingly on never thinking of them as the innocents they are; Maric always did. He would ask Loghain sometimes, his jaw set and eyes swimming in ale and that particular form of pathetic bitterness he had developed over the last ten years of his life, how it could be worth it.
It isn't.
You allow yourself a moment or two, Loghain has learned, before you continue. You forget the price and the corpses, wash their blood off your hands. It's as monstrous as war itself, and it's the only way.
In the alienage after it all but burns to the ground, he finds the Warden in between moments; granting herself a second to breathe, a faltering confidence and the ghost of grief around her slumped shoulders.
He finds her resting against the back of a shop, her hands clutching the wood so hard her bare fingers whiten. She wipes blood off her cheek and looks at him for the longest time, her face unreadable under the marks of battle and pain, her lips moving but he cannot hear what she is saying, her words nothing but low hissing sound he only afterwards recognise as prayers.
"Let's go," she mutters eventually. He cannot tell if she's irritated or thankful he stands with her, watching her doubts. It hardly matters. He won't speak of them and he is quite certain she knows this by now. Silence has always been his vice and his curse; both Maric and Rowan would alternately seek it out and wish to destroy it and not much has changed in that aspect because he is, he fears, set in stone.
"Of course," he says, following her lead out of the market district and into the once lavish streets leading to the Palace.
The Warden.
If he wasn't already impressed with her skills in battle, he would be now, he thinks to himself. She has something – and he cannot say what, precisely – that stands out, that separates her from other skilled soldiers and strategists he has met, that raises her above comparison. It's not merely because she bested him - he isn't vain enough to base his respect for her entirely on that occasion – or because he finds himself accepting her command without taking any blow to his dignity, although this is no small feat on her part, and it's not because she is young, because Maker knows they were younger than that when they drove the Orlesians out.
He knows little of why and scarcely more of how, but there it is, all the same.
.
.
.
.
She wakes up in a fire.
At first she is standing behind the Archdemon with her sword raised and she has Wynne by her side and she has Loghain further ahead, the thrash of his hands keeping the last, desperate hordes at bay; she is standing on its demon-back, sword buried in filthy flesh and that stench, thick of decay and already perished life slicing the sky above them; she is standing on the ground again, struggling to catch her breath. There is a moment when all stills around them, melts down to bone-hard resolve and unforgiving need and she tilts her head up, sucks breath into her lungs and rushes, before anyone has time to say anything, headlong towards the fallen creature. And it's not dead, when she cuts her blade into its neck, it is not dead but it speaks to her, screams to her in a language she understands by now and that unfolds itself to her in a terribly beautiful sound of release and freedom.
Then she wakes up in a fire.
She understands it is her body that is burning, not the rest of the world, and even this seems odd considering what she must have done, the massive fire-spitting demon that she destroyed in a blaze; grimacing she makes an attempt at looking around once her eyelids obey her command of opening.
"She's not dead."
Isn't she?
Elissa. She is Elissa and the one who is speaking near her face is Loghain. Things slowly fall back into place, like a great shift in her mind as the darkspawn song pulls back, relenting somewhat. Loghain observes her intently. He seems very injured, almost as badly as her. She wonders if he is burning as well.
"The... arch-ouch-demon?" Her voice. It sounds strange. Detached and from a distance, like she is shouting at herself from a great height.
"It will make a handful of very nice scale armours one of these days. Don't move." His voice is raspy.
As though half-way into the Fade, her thoughts blurry and unfocused she can feel him press something to her side.
"What... are you doing?" she ask because she knows she is dying and he ought to leave her. Cut the losses and run for his life. Secure the tower and the Archdemon remains. Fight his way back to the gates and oh, she can feel her own blood leave her body and it makes her head spin. For all the people she has seen die over the past months, she is still weak-hearted. Or perhaps nobody can quite face their own demise. "Go."
"If you think I'm going to put up with another inane title to my name, you're sadly mistaken," Loghain says, pulling back his hands and wincing when he notices they are full of her blood. "This one is yours, Warden."
In the corner of her eye she sees Wynne sitting on the ground, face torn in pain and exhaustion and she sees the scant remains of the dwarf army at her disposal, walking around among their fallen. She wants to shout at them to stop and to leave, tries to sit up again, but at this moment Loghain is so much stronger even with a face pale as snow and an arm that seems to be broken, and he is holding her down firmly.
Elissa tries to take a deep breath, steady herself. It fails. Oh dear Maker.
"I... oh."
And what was a little stream of blood is now something more, something that seems to pour out of her body and she isn't calm any longer but terrified, because for all her bravery and half-buried death wish, this is happening now and she doesn't want to die. Her hands try to grab hold of something but she cannot lift them.
"Mage!" She thinks for a confused period of time that she is the one shouting, but her lips feel numb and as she opens her mouth there is no sound coming from it. "Get over here!"
"Loghain?" This is her voice, only not because it's barely audible. She hears her own pulse in her ears, like a waterfall.
"Don't speak."
"...demon... it's really dead?"
"Yes."
"M-morrigan?"
"She's gone." He looks over his shoulder. "She left."
"Loghain," she says again, tearing at the lines between them, the faded borders of where one Warden ends and another one begins, the darkspawn land they share. A Warden always dies alone but surrounded, consumed by its likes, someone says bitterly in her head. "Loghain."
His gaze find hers even though he seems unwilling, seems to find it more important to look down on her wounds and Elissa knows perfectly well why but she still forces him to look at her face.
"Yes?"
"We... did well."
"We did," he says grimly.
Elissa attempts a smile, means it as a soothing gesture but it becomes a drawn-out grimace as another wave of weakness flushes over her, leaving next to nothing behind.
And the next thing she knows is the dreamlike image of Wynne stooping low, eyes so infinitely tired, but her hands two blazing lights of restful sleep and it carries Elissa away, finally.
