Title: Five Times Alistair Wasn't Kissed
Author: Jade Sabre
Notes: Dear Dragon Age fandom, y'all are the nicest, most welcoming people ever, and I am so glad to have finally joined you. I hope you like the update, and I always love to here from my readers. :-)
Disclaimer: Dragon Age: Origins and all of its content belongs to the geniuses at Bioware, of whom I am sadly not one, though maybe I will run away to Canada and try my luck.
two
"I don't like this," thirteen-year-old Alistair said, but Garrott waved in his general direction from where he crouched, his eye peering through the hole in the wooden wall.
"You'll like it more once it's your turn to look," his friend and fellow potscrubber—otherwise known as a miserably-failing templar-in-training—said. Garrott wasn't an Andraste-humper so much as an admirer of the female form due to its being the one that Andraste inhabited during her earthly life. He claimed he was just doing as the Maker had done, although Alistair sincerely hoped, for the sake of the Andrastian Chantry, that the Maker had never reduced Himself to watching through peepholes while Andraste bathed.
"I don't want a turn," Alistair said for the hundredth time, and Garrott took his eye off whatever was on the other side of the wall long enough to shush him. He lowered his voice, looking up and down the narrow alley in which they stood, sandwiched between the wooden fence for the women's baths and the wooden wall of the women's dormitory. "We're going to get caught."
"Only if you keep making such a racket," Garrott said. "Relax. I've done this plenty of times—it's the best way to pick out which of the initiates to talk to during prayers."
Alistair couldn't deny that it would be nice to have someone new to talk to—most of the other templars-in-training were serious about Andraste and the Maker and the idea that All Mages Were Evil or at least Prone To Evilness, and they didn't appreciate Garrott's musings on Andraste's smallclothes or Alistair's penchant for off-key chanting. Three years in the Chantry had taught him that they didn't actually care so much for his singing ability as for his ability to memorize the Chant, but that, too, he found boring. Combat training was much more exciting, but it was always interrupted by lectures about keeping the Maker's will in mind whilst striking down abominations. Chanting off-key was a minor offense, but it was his revenge for making him sit through so many boring activities. Garrott, being older, had promised to teach him more ways to cause trouble, but Alistair had hoped they would be interesting, not…dirty.
"Maker's prick, take a look at this one," Garrott breathed, tugging at Alistair's trousers. "I didn't think they let girls with those kinds of—"
"I don't want to look," Alistair hissed, yanking his leg away.
"Are you a man or not?" Garrott asked, and Alistair opened his mouth to protest when he looked up and she was standing ten feet away from them, hands on naked he looked from her feet to her face and skipped the in-between bits and said, "I—beg your pardon?"
"I thought I saw an eye in the old peephole," the girl-no-woman-young-woman? shut up shut up shut up said, and thank the Lady she sounded amused, not angry, and anyway he wasn't the one peeping. "Ah, Garrott, corrupting the young recruits again? Tell me boy," and her smiling brown eyes were measuring his face and he concentrated on her nose, "is everyone that color in your homeland?"
"He is from Redcliffe," Garrott said, standing slowly, probably not skipping from her feet to her face but Alistair didn't want to look to check. "Ingra, may I present to you Alistair? Alistair, this is Ingra, the most free-thinking initiate the sisterhood has to offer."
"Pleased to meet you," Alistair said, still staring at her nose, and she laughed.
"He's cute," she said, and a drop of water on her nose fell to the ground and his traitorous eyes thought it would be okay to watch its progress, but it was not okay, and he stared at the ground instead. "He'll be quite the heartbreaker in a few years."
"I thought I'd take him under my wing early," Garrott said cheerfully. "Ingra could teach you a great deal, Alistair, if you'd care to learn."
"Um," Alistair said, and Ingra laughed again, and he thought wildly that she was doing a very good job of teaching him all sorts of things he would have to sort out with—a cold bath? Was that what the Master Chanter had advised? He thought perhaps that would be a good idea, much better than standing here while she took his chin in her hand and lifted his head until their eyes met.
"A little young yet, I think," Ingra said, releasing his chin. She pressed her fingertips to her lips and then to his forehead, and said, "Maker's breath, but you're a lovely shade of red."
"It's just a—blush," he blurted, but now his entire body was on fire, and it had little to do with the fact that there was a naked woman standing in front of him and more to do with his desire to curl into a tiny ball and die.
"Yes well, go cool off," Garrott said. "I'll see you later, all right?"
Ingra made a—noise—Alistair fled without saying goodbye, running in a blind panic towards the ice water in the bathhouse, and slowing down only when he realized the screams meant he had run into the women's baths instead. Shouts for the Revered Mother accompanied a large number of wet towels covering his head, and when the screaming stopped he dared to lift a towel off his head, only to discover that the Revered Mother's prompt appearance was due entirely to the fact that she had been in the baths as well.