The din of bar patrons was an ever-present cacophony that lent itself perfectly for anyone who might want to slip away unnoticed during another sleepless night.
Creeping through the shared room, Kalya winced as her leathers scrunched more audibly than she'd anticipated, then glared at the rude door groaning on its hinges. When it was securely latched at her back, she finally let out a sigh of relief. Reason dictated that her last night in the tavern - last night in a fucking bed - should have been savored without question. But ever since her… return, sleep hadn't come easily. And when it did, it brought with it the monstrous melodic nightmares Riordan had known all too well.
Beneath a window across the hall, a lip of loosened floorboard stuck up like a cowlick. Kalya silently lifted the board and removed the satchel inside no one had missed. The heavy bottles within clanked angrily off each other. Hoisting it onto her back, Kalya winced again, but when no sound on the other side of the door indicated movement, she crept down the creaking stairs and into the night.
:::
Zevran took a steadying breath before striding confidently into the quiet shop. A dwarf stood with her arms tented on the counter across from him. The deep breath she drew as she drank in the sight of him put his battering heart to ease. He'd been ready to slip into a deadly mask of threat, but it appeared his much-preferred mask of flirtation would do the trick tonight.
"Evening, messere," she said with a demure dip of her eyelids.
"I've always wondered," he said, pretending to peruse the gleaming alloy contraptions lining the shop's cluttered shelves, "if it gives one a complex to refer to every middling patron as 'messere.' I could be a servant elf for all you know. I could be in the employ of a family member of yours."
The dwarf's dark bangs occluded her eyes, but their spark of mischief set his heart hammering.
"My family doesn't own slaves for one. And for two, I'd call you the King of Ferelden if I thought it would lead to a sale."
Zevran grinned as he made his way to her counter.
"How can I help you, my liege?" she said, performing a sweet curtsy. Zevran chuckled low as he slid a slip of paper before her.
When her eyes broke from his to the looping script, she squinted. Flirtation deflated from the room as she jerked her head back up to take him in again, suddenly in a different light.
"Who told you about this?" she demanded.
He gulped, an intense gaze belying the fear beneath his surface. "I hate to step on our tease by cutting to the chase, but can you get it or not?"
The dwarf rolled her tongue across the front of her teeth, and, important as this purchase was, his thoughts… drifted. He was still a man. Did his very pores emanate how long it had been?
She curled the scrap in her fist, raising it to his eye-line. "There are two types of people who ask for this, and since I'm pretty sure you're not the worst of them, I'm guessing you're with the guard-captain and this is entrapment. So no thanks. Never heard of it."
With that, she spun and headed towards an illuminated back room.
"Wait!" shouted Zevran, a little too much desperation in his voice. "How can I prove I'm not with the guard captain?"
"Or the other type?"
Zev took a gamble and flashed a winning smile. "Do I look like a slaver?"
The dwarf turned back around, chewing on the corner of her lip, peering again at him beneath her curtain of black bangs. She took a deep breath. "I have a few ideas."
:::
It wasn't until the evening of the third day that il tremore finally caught up to Kalya. She'd felt the shaking of her hand during the day's sparring with Alistair, then again more violently while cleaning the tavern's latrines, but she'd written both times off to unspent Warden energy.
By the time she emerged from the hot baths underneath the tavern, she could barely keep the shivers from pitching her off-balance. She awoke barely an hour into sleep drenched in sweat with her throat parched and her pale skin itching as if her blood were tiny, squirming bugs.
Every inch of her bed seemed soaked, too cold, too hot. Kalya writhed violently, the itchy longing inside her becoming too much to bear. Elissa now slept in the captain's quarters, so tonight, Kalya's moans mingled with loud snores in the larger shared room. After a particularly sharp gasp, Morrigan pitched a boot in Kalya's direction, spurring the elf to curl off the edge of her bed, stumbling over herself in her night linens.
With the door closed at her back, Kalya lunged for the door of the connecting room - empty, she knew, from cleaning it earlier that evening.
Moonlight cast the room in a bright blue glow as Kalya tiptoed in. She closed the door silently, but when she collapsed onto the bed with a groan, a metal object in the room's dark corner clattered to the ground. A shape stirred suddenly.
Kalya's pounding head cast pulsating azure haloes behind her eyes, and she squeezed them shut painfully. In her last round of il tremore, she knew the migraines didn't let up until sunrise or vomiting, or often, both.
She prayed that whoever stirred in the other twin bed wasn't a guest, and if they were a murderer, well, at the moment, they'd be doing her a favor.
A groan escaped her cracked lips.
"Kalya?" A hoarse voice whispered.
"Zevran?" She gulped away a lump in her throat. Too early to be sick. "What're you… doing here?"
More rustling. She was distantly aware of the item being retrieved from the ground with a metallic scrape.
He blew out a breath. "I could ask you the same."
The wave of nausea subsided, but the pounding in her head, the bright spots behind her eyes, and the fact that every joint seemed primed to snap, yanked moans from Kalya's throat. She was partly grateful to have left the shared room, partly resentful that Morrigan's boot hadn't knocked her clean out.
"You know," Zevran purred, "you keep moaning like that, and I might need to find another empty room. Unless you'd like to join me over here…"
Gross. Kalya bore down, riding out a spike of agony. "Get off on others' pain, do you?"
Zev sniffed. "How quickly you forget our short time together."
"How quickly you forget," Kalya groaned, ignoring the word "short." "Not being able to finish till I yanked your hair."
"Touché," Zevran growled. Were they seriously having this discussion?
He balled something up under the covers with a cough as Kalya's eyes slowly adjusted to the dark. She could now see him silhouetted by the blue moonlight, hunched on the side of the other small bed.
Zev fidgeted as if he wanted nothing more than to leave, but instead he blew out a long breath of resolve.
"Kalya, I… don't know how to put this without sounding indelicate, so I'll just say it."
Kalya grimaced, as much steeling herself as pushing back against the pain. "Mm-hmm?"
Zevran turned to face her, bracing one arm on the dingy, thin mattress. His unbraided hair gathered on his shoulders and spilled down one side.
"Remember this feeling. Savor it down to your bones. Think about how it will pass and how you've survived it before."
"…Okay? Thanks?"
"And think about how badly you never want to go through it again. What do you think the Kalya who survived il tremore a year ago would do if she saw you stumbling back down the same path, never changing, never learning. If not for me, at least do this for yourself."
The sting in her bones and parch in her throat almost sapped the fight from Kalya. Almost.
"I'll trade an indelicate comment for an indelicate question," she said, through gritted teeth. "You said you've been here? Hmm? A recovering drunk who survived… this to became greatest Crow Antiva had ever seen?"
"And Ferelden," he muttered.
Kalya propped herself up on an elbow, much to her pulsing head's dismay.
"Why study the Drunken Orlesian? Hmm? Didn't we meet in a bar? Weren't you just trashed with the rest of us at Castle Redcliffe?"
Kalya had more to say, but a fit of coughing ripped from her chest stopped her short. She collapsed back on the bed.
"You're right. About it all. I still wish to atone for my mistakes. It's… exactly what I'm doing here."
Now the fight was truly gone from her. There was nothing left to bicker over. They lay together - separately - for several minutes, as Kalya stared at the swimming ceiling above.
"You know," she rolled her head to face him, the most energy she could muster, "part of me was hoping that because I was a Warden, I wouldn't suffer as completely as last time."
Zev shifted his gaze to look out the window. "If I've heard correctly, Wardens do feel it for a shorter duration, but with heightened intensity." He idly scratched the cuff of his pant leg as the moonlight broke free of a passing cloud.
"I… must mention something else," he added. "Not about Wardens, but those who have suffered through il tremore. I've never heard tell of surviving it thrice. Once is common. Twice is admirable but rare. I… don't know what it is about the third time. Maybe the person just gives up. Maybe they never truly overcame either of the first two times."
His hand moved quickly to his knee.
"You still have a fighting chance, but… I'm afraid this is your last one."
Unbidden anger flared through Kalya's sweltering cheeks. "And what is the point in telling me that?"
"To impress upon you how important this is."
"Yeah, and I'm lying here, fucking ejected from the other room, shivering and sweating this out, when I could easily quiet the pain with a single gulp. But I'm here. Trying… Trying to fix my mess, only to bear the shame of everyone's judgment and walking-on-eggshells day in and day out stone sober. What more do you want from me?"
"Your word. That the days of self-destruction are behind you. That you understand just how important you are to us. To me."
Tears gathered in Kalya's eyes, and she squeezed them shut tight. When she was a girl and tears threatened to spill into sobs, she'd shut her eyes so tight, it felt as if she could cloak herself from the world.
Here, in this bed, she hoped the cloak of darkness might do something similar. She wished she could hurl his words back at him - to make him promise the same. Or at least make him apologize for trying so hard to commit Suicide-By-Warden without so much as informing her of his anguish. But deep down, she owned a significant share of the guilt for not seeing his self-destruction when it was right in front of her.
With the pain spiking, pride and foolishness clouded Kalya's thinking and kept her mouth squeezed as tightly as her eyes.
Maybe if she'd said something then - if she'd have told him how much his own promise would have meant to her - things mightn't have ended up the way they did.
:::
Kalya hoped the tavern's barkeep could hear her stomach growling as she shined away nothingness on one of the spotless tables. It was near the end of their "free" week's stay in the Tavern, and, having taken grown adept at shining the latrines during the day, she was now covering for Morrigan by pulling some waitressing duty opposite Alistair. Dinner wouldn't be prepared for the Help until much later in the evening, even though the chilled winds during the change of seasons was keeping travelers to a minimum. That and the Maker-forsaken blight.
So the two cleaned a nearly empty house - with Oghren in the kitchen - while the others were granted some rare downtime.
Zevran sat in a back corner booth, sketching in a small leather-bound notebook, nursing a mug of hot tea, and scratching idly at one calf. He looked up when the bell to the tavern rang and Morrigan walked in from the chill. She beelined for his table, anger flaring behind her eyes. An odd smirk crossed Zev's features as she approached.
"Is it strange?"
Kalya's head popped up to see Alistair staring as he rubbed a small circle into another spotless table with his rag. The movement sent throbs of pain spiking through her head. Il tremore was always worse in the evenings.
"To be back, I mean."
"Alive?" she said, probably a little too sharply.
"No!" he barked. "Well, yes, I mean, definitely that. But I was talking about being back here… in a Tavern. Though I… suppose it's not wise to talk about that, is it?"
Because she's a drunk, right? Here it was again, being stroked with kid gloves and then slapped with resentment that she'd brought everyone along on one of the worst decisions of her life.
Well, she was a drunk. That wasn't anyone's fault but hers.
She was an almost-former-drunk whose only thought at the moment was to get out of this conversation by dulling her senses and memories with - oops! - the one thing she could never have again.
"It seems like another lifetime ago," he continued. "So much has -"
Alistair's thought was interrupted by the harsh squeak of a chair, when Morrigan forcefully pushed herself back from the opposite side of Zevran's table.
"You have no idea!" Morrigan spat. "None!"
"And you do?" Zev asked, head cocked and voice even.
"Bloody more than you." Morrigan spun on her heel and marched up the stairs.
Zevran raised his eyebrows to the room, then returned attention to his sketchbook.
It took several minutes for the quiet murmurs of the scant tavern crowd to fill the air again. So many thoughts swam through Kayla's still-aching head, it was difficult to grab onto any while she could still concentrate.
The awkward silence finally dragged on long enough for Alistair to clear his throat, just to have something to do. It gave Kalya the in she needed.
"Why did you do it?" she said, her eyes suddenly snapping to his. "Change me into a Grey Warden."
"Well, I had to, didn't I? It's the Blight." Alistair wrapped his hand around the back of his neck, scratching at nothing, the way he always did. "Kalya, you know I didn't have any other choice."
Kalya nodded slowly. His meaning was clear. Because Elissa needed the help. Because they needed more Warden Cannon Fodder. Because Elissa had decided it was easier if Kalya kept on living - the same way a journey over a mountain is easier if you have a mule.
The weight of guilt and disappointment sat so hard on her chest, it felt as if it were about to crush her. She looped the dirty apron over her head and weaved back to the stockroom, daring the tavern owner to notice her exit.
With pulsing-hot pain bubbling down from her head to her limbs, she decided against dinner tonight.
Back in the stockroom, Kalya tossed the apron onto a laundry pile she was supposed to have cleaned earlier in the day. As she bent over to scoop them up and bring them to the warm baths downstairs, she saw three unopened bottles of mouthwatering amber liquid - clearly left behind from some restock on accident. Definitely not potentially missed.
With a quick glance to verify she was truly alone, she carefully slipped each of them below the unlaundered aprons and made her way upstairs to the loosened floorboard.
