Author: aimorai

Word count: 3,546

A/N: Part 2 of 2 parts to Chapter 27 – This chapter was difficult to write, as I find myself trying to reconcile canon of how jealous characters behave with the unique circumstances of the characters here in this fiction. My quandary comes from this fiction being a bit different from in-game, as here, this Zevran/Warden pairing developed a relationship outside of normal romantic bounds (and the course of the romance in the game). While Zevran would normally not compete with Alistair, I hope that his reasons in this storyline make sense. Let me know if they don't!

As always, I appreciate comments, questions, and criticisms – and I promise to stop giving Nell near-death experiences!

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Nell nodded to Alistair at his prompt, contemplative. She didn't want to remain quiet, but she had to think of how to compose what she'd say next. Her mind was running in a thousand directions and her heart was galloping along for the ride.

Alistair made laying himself emotionally bare look relatively easy. He'd done it when he gave her the rose, and when he came to her at the Pearl. She knew his feelings about Zevran, about the Blight, about her. Such emotional honesty never came so easily to Nell – she usually had to be in quite a state, crying, or angry— and even then, things never came out quite right. She licked her lips, laying her cheek on top of her knees momentarily.

Alistair was still tense – waiting for her response as though she were wielding a blade and deciding where to cut him with it.

"I…sorry, I suppose I'm not sure where to begin."

Alistair's brow crinkled. "The beginning is usually a good spot."

True enough. Where had it begun, and what was it, anyway? Nell blew out a breath, letting it lengthen as she emptied her lungs.

Zevran.

Had it begun that night at the Pearl, when she'd given him those gloves – the Dalish ones she'd bought weeks prior, waiting for a good opportunity – and he'd proclaimed that he wished he could sleep with her in thanks?

He'd surprised her completely when he'd made that known, and that moment in the hallway of the whorehouse was as charged and clear in her mind as if it had just happened. She'd been drinking that night, yes, but she'd almost wanted him to bed her right then. His eyes had been so sure, his face clear and honest and conflicted. She'd felt powerful attraction to him, and a keen sense of closeness.

That was also the night she'd first slept with Alistair.

The one had little to do with the other – she hadn't been thinking of the elf as Alistair had claimed her body and heart – but was that when things had begun to be different? It did seem like a waypoint in her mind, but…

Was it really before that, in the forest, when he'd given her that look – when he'd thanked her for going after the Dalish? A man who requires your tears to understand your needs is not a man. She remembered that, too. The way he'd cradled her head so gently, with so much fear and anger and sadness gripping his features when he thought her dead…

Was it even earlier? Was it when she'd met him?

Perhaps she'd start there. Perhaps it was the beginning. Nell picked her head back up and laid her chin on her knees once the decision was made

She had to be honest, right? Her heart quaked at the word. She wasn't sure how much she could be, how much she really knew, but she'd try. For Alistair. But Maker, what am I doing? What have I done? Nell wasn't even sure she knew.

"I suppose – the thing I want you to understand, from the very beginning, is that I've felt a… kinship with Zevran. Even there… on the road, when we met him, when I was deciding to keep him alive. There was something about him – behind… behind all the easy flirting and the way he seemed to be so sure of himself. I remember…" Nell flicked her eyes towards the torchlight, letting herself back into that moment. "I remember thinking that he really didn't seem to care if he lived or died. He proclaimed wanting life, but… he was so casual about the whole thing, that I thought… well, I remember pitying him."

"Pity?" Alistair's surprise brought her back to the present, away from the spectre of Zevran laying in the middle of the road, bloodied and proud. "All I remember was his sales pitch-"

"Mmm." Nell nodded a bit. "But – well – you didn't think it was odd that he talked about dying so casually?"

Alistair snorted and shrugged, and Nell tried to return to her story. She felt a chill coming into the air – idly, she wondered for a moment if it was night beyond the walls, and the cold was seeping through the stone.

"Anyway." Nell picked at a piece of hay, letting her fingers break and mold it into a ball. Her energy felt both depleted and aroused. "You know as much as I do that he was a slave. He wasn't a Crow by choice and I- I don't know, I understood that. Mage in a tower. Crow in a cage. I don't know – it was just kinship." She shrugged gently.

"Sooo… what you're telling me is that it's complicated because of a feeling of kinship?" Alistair sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. "That doesn't seem complicated."

"Well-" Nell reached up a hand, lightly laying her fingers on Alistair's forearm. "That's not all of it. It's just the place where I started from. And it was fine. We were friends – we are friends. But at some point something happened. I can't… I don't pretend to know when it was. I gave him a present – some gloves – and he just… started acting differently. Around that time, anyway. At first I thought he was just vulnerable, and I pushed him, and he…"

Nell trailed off. Her voice had gotten fast as she went through months of time, trying to glaze over the inward feelings which jolted to life at the thought of Zevran, the Pearl, the mountaintop. Her heart was also starting to hammer, because she knew she was about to tell Alistair about what had happened in the house. In Haven. It was as inevitable as an avalanche.

But yet, she didn't know if she could. Really could. There were simple words to describe it, yes, but all the words in Thedas wouldn't really do it justice. The remembrance of Zevran's kiss and the fallout made her throat go dry. The heat of it. The passion. The hatred, the lust, the something.

How much of it could she tell? Should she tell? What was honesty? What was her duty towards Alistair in this moment – how could she answer his question in the kindest way possible? Was she supposed to be kind? How could she love him and yet be true with him, utterly true, all at once?

"He what?" Alistair sounded broken, strained.

Nell closed her eyes.

"It was months ago now. He kissed me."

Three little words. He kissed me. They were nothing and everything. They could not describe at all what the kiss meant, but yet implied an outcome that Nell wasn't sure she was ready to face.

"What-? I…." Alistair's voice exploded and then quieted. Nell didn't know what she had expected, or hoped for—but Alistair's slow drawing in to himself, the way his head hung, the way he eventually stood and walked to the bars of the cage, was certainly not it.

Yelling would have been preferable, or tears. The stoniness of his posture undid her.

"It was in Haven." She continued, somehow, some way, though her throat was closed and her heart was bleeding. "It – I…This is going to sound crazy, Alistair, but it was not – he was not trying to seduce me. It was – I had confronted him after he broke into a house, and… and there was blood everywhere, and he was upset, and I tried to get him to tell me what was wrong, and then he kissed me. And I…" Her head throbbed –sharply, a warning. Her blood was pumping hard through her ears, and must have been coursing with similar pressure through her wounded skull. She tried to breathe, tried to slow it. Fainting was out of the question. Zevran had kissed her so deeply. She'd kissed him back so hard. Maker, could she say it?

"You what?" His voice was quiet, so quiet.

"Well – well I was shocked, and I…"

I kissed him back.

No. She couldn't say it. The words closed off in her throat, and the voice in her head laughed with glee. Lying, wicked mage. Liar. Liar.

"I stood there while he did it." She licked her lips, hating herself, but continued quickly.

"And then I slapped him. And I told him never to do it again. He hasn't. Done it again, I mean. Just… just so you know. He said…" She closed her eyes, reliving that day in her room, when he'd comforted her after they'd returned from the temple. That day. "He said 'life is too short for unwilling lovers.' And he and I have… tried to navigate past that. But the thing is – the more I think about it, I don't think he kissed me romantically, I think… I think it was about power and trying to… trying to, in some strange way, get me to leave him alone. By making me uncomfortable or… or taking me down a peg. Something."

Alistair remained unmoving, which was terrible for Nell to see, and worse, feel. He was staring beyond the bars. There was a guard a dozen paces or so away, perhaps listening to their conversation – perhaps not. She couldn't tell, it was far too dark and there were impediments to her view. Alistair's hands were at his side, fingers bunched, but not quite fisted.

She didn't know what to do. She just kept talking.

"Anyway – I…the reason I say it's complicated is because despite all of that…whatever it was, I do care about Zevran. It's not in the way that I care about you, but I find myself… I mean him, I find him…like a person who is just waking up from a very long nightmare. I told him long ago that I don't hold him to his vow about…serving me and all that nonsense. But he's stayed here. He says he does not wish to go. And it's… and it's the first decision he's gotten to make, don't you see?"

Alistair made a breathy sound then – not quite a sigh, not quite a gasp, not quite a whisper. He finally turned his head so that Nell could see his profile. The outline of his face was touched with the reddish-orange tone of dirty torchlight. She had no idea if he was looking at her or the floor.

"I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see."

She licked her split lip, letting the gentle pain of it keep her focused. Her head felt terrible, but her stomach and heart felt far worse. "I don't know about supposed to…just… what do you see? Or think you see?"

He tipped his head back. Alistair's hair had gotten somewhat longish over the past month – they'd all hardly had time to groom themselves beyond keeping clean; his normally short-clipped hair was messy and unkempt, some of it shadowing the tops of his ears. She didn't know why she focused on that one detail, but she did. Nell itched to feel the texture of it sliding between her fingers as he lay his head down next to her, or tweak it when he made a bad joke.

"What's I've seen is ever since… yes… round about that night in Denerim, he's wanted you. He flirts with everyone, but – while you don't think it's romantic… it is….intimate, the way he looks at you. The way he acts when he's around you. And you're not like that with Leliana, or Wynne." He made that strange, breathy sound again. "Perhaps it's because he's a man, I don't know. Perhaps it's not romantic with you. But is it with him?"

Nell was floored. Intimate. Romantic?

"You think Zevran is… what, is in love with me?"

"I don't know. Maybe not. But it sounds like…there's something too much."

Something too much.

The phrase was, really, an eloquent way of putting it. That, and the word intimate. Nell rolled it around in her mind and let it settle as she shifted atop the hay. She'd been sitting with her knees squeezed to her chest – a somewhat defensive posture. She had to move, so she settled for letting her legs stretch forward, heels sliding onto the unforgiving stone of the floor. Hay was poking into her bottom and the backs of her thighs, but it was a welcome distraction from the rush of her head, the pounding of her heart.

"Maybe." She acknowledged him, finally, perhaps a few heartbeats later than she should have. Something too much. "But it doesn't matter. I'm in love with you."

"I think it does matter." Alistair finally turned the rest of his body towards Nell, the tense line of his shoulders more evident as he settled them against the prison bars. His lips were tight, seeming to make his mouth too small for his face. "If there's something, enough to –enough to make him say what he said-"

"What did he say?" Nell blurted out her interruption, to Alistair's clear annoyance.

"That I shouldn't trust you." He slayed her with it – his eyes locked with hers like the deadliest arrow. "He might have been right."

"Shouldn't…?" She lost her breath, lost the sentence, completely overwhelmed with the sentiment. Nell found herself surging to her feet, fast enough to make the yellow noise roar to life in her head. She quickly put an arm to the wall to balance herself at the last moment – but unfortunately, she ended up crumpled against the stone as her elbow wobbled and knees sank; she was lucky to prop herself up against the wall in the end, bare thighs and ribs breaking out in goose-flesh from the contact to the cold.

Alistair fumbled in his response – he took two rapid steps towards her and then stopped abruptly once she didn't outright fall.

They each stood there for a moment – he was seemingly winded in front of her, and Nell shook as she slowly pulled herself up to her full height, mindful not to straighten too quickly. The trembles were not necessarily in pain or weakness – though those were there – but with emotion.

"You can trust me. I'd never hurt you." She said it with as much conviction as she could muster. She had never meant to hurt him. She'd known, in the back of her mind that it was something, but she'd hoped that it would fade. That it would remain in the shadows of her heart, blind to everyone else's conscious awareness.

"…But you didn't tell me about him kissing you. Why wouldn't you?" Alistair, as usual, asked the pertinent question, but Nell didn't have the grace to respond as gently as he'd asked it.

"Because I didn't want to hurt you!" Nell closed her eyes, her jaw feeling clenched. "All it would have done… it just would have upset you. You would have been at Zevran's throat. Maker, you were even… later that day, without knowing about any kissing. You two weren't getting along at all and…I didn't feel it was a threat to… to anything between us."

Alistair's face took on a vein of mingled thoughtfulness and agitation, as though he logically understood the answer but wasn't satisfied with it. He shook his head as he responded. "Alright, alright, I get that you didn't want us fighting, but if it was nothing, you could have told me anytime. Any day. Before now. Once it had all settled."

"Well – why bring it up, then? It was over. Done. Zevran and I talked about it. It's not going to happen again."

"You told him it was nothing?"

Nell shook her head, though stopped quickly – it made her dizzy. "He knows it was nothing."

"Are you certain? Perhaps you're leading him on."

Nell's throat clenched. She thought back to the alleyway, back to the moments in the past few days – the burning in her chest, the fear she had of Zevran leaving. Maker, Alistair didn't know the half of it. At this point, perhaps she was leading herself on. Zevran was, apparently, wiser than her about the depths to which they'd fallen. He had to be – or he wouldn't have felt the smugness to comment to Alistair.

"I don't think so. About leading him on, I mean."

Alistair rubbed his face again, palms itching hard into his hair. "Maker's Breath – look – Nell – between what he said, and what I've seen – there's… there's something, and if you're leading him on, or if there's… I think he should go. Or, you need to tell him, completely, that whatever made him feel confident enough to tell me… what he said… is not real."

Alistair had the insight to read her mind and the bravery to demand a course of action that was both reasonable and fair. Nell bit her lip. There was, unfortunately, one small flaw to his plan.

But Alistair - it is real.

In that moment of clarity, Nell had three crystalline thoughts.

The first thought was that she was going to murder Zevran. One of the most interesting things about the elf, in Nell's mind, was that nearly everyone in their group thought he was a liar. In point of fact, he wasn't. Zevran told shades of the truth, but it was very rare that he told a complete falsehood. Alistair knew it enough to take Zevran at his word in this, even if he elsewise didn't trust anything that came out of the assassin's mouth.

That Zevran would have challenged Alistair at all was worrisome. If life was too short for unwilling lovers, then why was he pressing his case? Nell thought that Zevran, for all his faults, wouldn't have wanted to cause complications in the matter. She had the sneaking suspicion that Zev would have, at some other time, advised her to choose her lover for just that reason. Why would he complicate it now, then?

The second thought was that she was going to resurrect the assassin after she thoroughly murdered him and demand the answer to that question.

The third and most powerful thought was that Alistair was far too good for either her or Zevran's ilk. Because despite how she might wail and thrash, he somehow knew more about the realness of love and duty than Nell ever would. She could not articulate in the moment the guilty way that such knowledge slinked through her blood – how close she came in the moment to telling him he'd be better off without her.

But in the end, she was far too selfish a woman, and far too in love with her knight, to tell him the truth of her heart.

Thus, in response to his question, she croaked out only gentle, guilty words. "You're probably right. I will…make it plain that nothing is there. I never considered that I would need to."

Her heart wept. Despite how much she meant the words as she said them – she would do it, as soon as she could—she knew that she would be lying to Zevran when she did, much as she was concealing part of the truth from Alistair now.

Her feeling were real. She could only hope that Zevran didn't know it.

Nell didn't know what Zevran knew, or Zevran felt. She only knew that she was dangerously close to hurting both of them, irrevocably. She had no one to blame but herself.

Perhaps… I should simply hurt myself. Somehow.

The last thought lingered, and Nell swallowed it.

Yes, perhaps that would be best. Not physically, of course. But if someone were going to be hurt… it should be her. There should be a way. She would find it, if she could.

"Alright." Alistair's voice broke her from the dark train of her mind. It seemed to confirm her conclusion, even though Alistair was in reality leaning towards her, reaching out a hand to snake around her ribs with a loving tenderness she didn't deserve. "So can I – stop standing up for myself now? Because it's exhausting, and if you don't sit down soon, Maker, I might not stop worrying about your head for days."

He drew her close, and Nell felt tears brim as her traitorous body leaned into his chest, cheek over his collarbone. "If I sit again, I might not get up – and we need to get out of here, figure out what happened…"

"No, no, I actually have an idea for that. But you'll need to be ghastly ill. Like…writhing and vomiting and blight-y. That guard…over there, has the key…" He'd come up with a plan – while it wasn't a first, she was happy to see his confidence back. Maker knew, hers was gone.

She chuckled once she understood the plan. It felt hollow to her, but she sensed Alistair's smile in response. So much for not trusting her. "As long as you're not going to actually hit me over the head again, I think I can play dead."

"Right, then. I'm going to put you down, and you're going to…not hurt yourself while you're injured. Alright?"

"Alright. Be careful."

"Right." He lowered her to the ground, and Nell attempted to make a gruesome posture, arms and legs flung at angles. Quickly, he kissed her cheek, before rising up and making a hell of a racket.

"I think she's dying! Spasms! Come quickly!"