CONTENT WARNING:

This fic is DARKFIC. It explores the characters as they might behave when they are taken to a VERY DARK PLACE. Namely, it explores who Alistair might become married to Anora with Loghain redeemed, and how that would affect the Warden who helped shape his circumstances.

It depicts acts of alcoholism, substance abuse, RAPE, coerced sex, prostitution, and MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH. Content may be triggering and/or offensive to your sensibilities. If any or all of these themes disturbs you, please hit the back button on your browser now.

"My lady? You have a visitor."

Solona blinked at her butler as though he'd unexpectedly begun to speak the Tevinter tongue.

"A visitor. For me? Here?"

"And why should this surprise you?" an all too familiar voice asked. "If you will not write to your old friends, Guardiana, then they must seek you out, yes?"

"Zevran!" For an instant, one swift, shining flare of hope. And then...

"You must leave."

It was as though Alistair were many different men, now.

"Hold me."

"Oh, Maker." She winced. His voice was heavily slurred; tonight would not be one of those nights when he was nearly himself. "Your majesty, please. Let's just... get you to bed and you can rest. You'll feel better tomorrow." It was a lie, but it was all she knew to say that would get them through the night.

Those were the nights when he was so far gone, nothing was left but self-pity. Sometimes he could even admit his sins, amidst guilt-wracked sobs. He could admit what a wreck his life had become, how horrible he'd been to her. Those were the times she blamed herself as well, for the role she had played in creating this situation.

It was easy to remember she wasn't to blame when he was angry and raving, making her feel defensive. But his tears were her undoing. She would say anything, do anything, to comfort him. She'd lost count of the times she'd extracted fervent promises that he would change, that he would do better, stop drinking so much, stop wallowing. But it never lasted. The next time he came to her, he'd be drunk again, with an excuse ready on his lips, how it was because of something Anora had done, or something that had happened with this nobleman or that.

Nothing was ever his fault.

Sometimes he was practically a lost and hurt child and all she had to do was coddle him, pour him into her bed and let him sleep it off. More than anything, he seemed to want someone to touch him with kindness and tell him he wasn't alone, wasn't unwanted.

"Please, Solona. You don't know what it's like." Tears shone in his red-rimmed eyes, his expression somewhere between confused and desolate. "You don't know how it is there. I have no one. I'm all alone. This... you... this is all I have."

"I do know," she murmured, as he leaned on her and began to weep softly. "I swear to you, I know."

She did.

It was nearly two years now she'd been in Denerim, ensconced at court as his mistress. Two years since Alistair had blackmailed her into giving up everything she'd worked to accomplish. It wasn't entirely awful, all the time. She was free from all the crushing duties and responsibilities she'd shouldered since the Blight. She had whole days now to devote to no other occupation than her one true passion: learning.

She had a modest townhouse just outside the palace district, comfortable and quaint, paid for with the pension she and Nathaniel Howe had negotiated when she "retired" as Commander of the Grey and left Vigil's Keep. Each week she filled it a little more with books and scrolls. She'd brought wagons full of them from the Vigil, and kept adding to the collection.

Not just scrolls and tomes about magic, either. History. Art. Politics. Archeology, even. Ever since the Blight, trudging through the Deep Roads and the elven ruins in the Brecilian Forest, she'd been fascinated by old, lost places. Before she'd been tapped on the shoulder to take command of the Grey Wardens at Vigil's Keep, she had imagined she might leave Ferelden and go to study them. Now, however, all she had were her books.

That was the not-so-bad part of the "arrangement" (and really, it could only be called so by the most optimistic stretch of an eagerly charitable mind) Alistair had proposed. The other part involved waiting, and that was agony. Worse than anything that happened between she and Alistair was the fact that she never knew when he would come to her, or what state he would be in when he arrived.

She kept a small staff of competent and discreet servants, brought with her from the Vigil because she knew she had their loyalty. Early on, she impressed upon them that anything that passed within the walls of her home with the king was to be regarded as a state secret, and spreading tales tantamount to high treason. It didn't stop court gossip, of course, but it did prevent the gossip from taking on any hint of truth.

Only recently had she begun to realize, that was worse.

"I know," she whispered again, stroking his face while he began to grow heavy where he leaned upon her as his limbs relaxed in sleep, and ignored the tears that came to her own eyes.

"Were you aware, my Warden, that your lady's maid is the sister of the head groom at Vigil's Keep?" Zevran asked as her butler brought them tea. He would have to leave, certainly, but she'd indulge in his company for a few moments.

Something icy took root in her chest.

"My staff doesn't talk," she said, wishing she sounded more certain.

"No, you are absolutely correct in that," Zevran agreed, sipping his tea and choosing a pastry. "They are the very souls of discretion. Noble families have spent fortunes and not managed to find servants half so trustworthy."

"Then why are you here?" Solona asked guardedly.

"It is what they do not say that is so very troubling," the assassin answered thoughtfully. "Two years, and your maid barely mentions her mistress to her family back home? Nor does your housekeeper, who is the daughter of the head cook at the Vigil. In fact, no one back in Amaranthine seems to have any idea what it is you've been doing here in Denerim these past two years. So the head groom and the cook, they make mention of this odd lack of information to the seneschal, who often wonders about you, also."

"Varel."

Zevran nodded. "Just so. And he mentions the matter to the new arl, who has not heard from you either. But he has heard rumors, circulated amongst the nobility, and he grows more concerned with each one."

Solona bowed her head in resignation, knowing the rumors to which Zevran referred. No one knew that she was a virtual prisoner. They all thought she had come to Denerim willingly to be by Alistair's side. And now rumors were circulating that the king's erratic behavior weren't due to a fondness for spirits at all, but to something the mage had done to him. After all, how else could a horse-faced bluestocking like Solona Amell keep the handsome king coming back to her, again and again?

That hurt worse than anything Alistair did in his drunkenness. More than the roughness, more than lying with him whether she willed it or not, more than his fits of melancholy or his spite and tirades, it hurt. She could accept some of the blame he heaped upon her, because she knew there was a kernel of truth at the bottom of it all. She was not entirely guiltless in the matter of his downfall. But to be accused of using magic, possibly even blood magic, to ensorcel the king when she had done nothing of the sort? That galled.

"And so, when one of your very old companions comes to visit all the way from Antiva, they are able to give him no word of you, save that you are here." Zevran gave a dismayed hiss. "And here you are, indeed. But why?"

Moist lips on her neck, an eager hand freeing her breast from her bodice.

"You want me."

Another hand, between her thighs, where she was growing wet in spite of herself. Even after all he had done, sometimes she did still want him, if only to be reminded of what it felt like to be wanted at all.

"Please, Alistair."

She was ashamed. Ashamed of being the one to blame. Ashamed of not intervening years earlier, before his decline reached its nadir. She'd seen him periodically throughout those five years; how could she not, at the Landsmeet and various noble functions. Surely she could have done something!

She was ashamed of not knowing how to stop him now that he had become a disaster. Ashamed for still loving him, despite everything. Ashamed that sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes—he could still give her pleasure, despite her misery.

It didn't happen as frequently these days as it had when she first came back to Denerim to be his mistress. Then, he'd used her pleasure like a weapon against her. He used it to taunt her, to lord over her how very well he knew her and her responses, to gloat about how she still wanted him.

Those early times had been the worst, full of rage and hate and degradation. But it hadn't remained that way. The longer she was in Denerim, the more often he seemed to forget that he was angry with her. In some ways, it became like she was his mistress in truth, rather than an unwilling concubine. Alistair began coming to her when he wasn't angry. It appeared he came to her because he simply didn't have anywhere else where he was needed, or wanted.

And that, she came to understand, was true. Despite his declaration that he wouldn't let Anora override him and run the country without his input, that was precisely what had happened. He hadn't the defenses to stand against Anora's disdain when he'd tried to put himself forward. So he'd done precisely what he'd always done, since his earliest childhood, whenever he felt rejected; he'd retreated and sulked, hurt and confused and more certain than ever that no one wanted him and no one would ever want him.

She hadn't understood the devastation her choice to marry him to Anora would wreak.

She understood now.

There was never a time when he wasn't drinking. But sometimes he wasn't quite so drunk when he came to her. Those times, he was almost himself again. Just Alistair, only... slightly more ridiculous. His once-charming silliness was now a drunken jester's foolery, loud and sloppy. But even then, he was unpredictable, his temper more prone to sudden surges of anger. He had excuses and justifications for everything.

The Alistair she'd once known had been self-deprecating to a fault, all too eager to assume he was in the wrong, to be talked down from his opinions. This new Alistair, the king and sot, would never admit to being wrong, and was quick to become argumentative, no matter how incorrect his assertions were.

She'd been sucked down that futile path more than once, even on ridiculously trivial subjects such as what color Leliana's armor had been, or where the Magi encampment at Ostagar had been located. Any contradiction was cause for a quarrel.

These were the facts of her life. She was always wrong, and she was always to blame. He'd told himself that so many times, she wasn't sure he remembered there was any other way to look at the matter.

If she had known how to heal him, she would have done so. But there was no spell for this, no incantation she could utter that would bring back the innocent, gentle templar who had been and drive away the rage-filled king who now was.

She'd tried, once. His guards were a lackadaisical lot. Sometimes she wondered about that, wondered if Anora was intentionally leaving the door open for assassins by not ascertaining he had better guardsmen. The men assigned to him were used to his drunkenness and resigned to the fact that, more often than not, their duties were to keep him from causing harm to himself rather than protecting him from threats. It was no great feat to get him out from under their gaze.

"Stay with me," she'd murmured one night, nuzzling him with an ardor she didn't actually feel. "Send your guards back to the palace and stay with me. Not just for tonight. Tell them you're staying... for a week. Tell them you're taking a holiday."

Flattered by her suddenly eager attention, he did as she bade. Two of his guards had remained, housed in the servant's quarters with the rest of her staff, complacent in the knowledge that nothing could harm the king so long as he dallied with his mistress, who had, after all, led Ferelden against the Blight.

Alistair awoke the next morning to find himself immobilized. Not by magic, which he could dispel, but by good old-fashioned ropes at his wrists and ankles. His head throbbed with the previous day's excesses, and his temper had been ugly when he discovered himself bound.

"This is treason!" he spat, as his skin grew pale and took on a sickly hue, and his breathing grew heavy and ragged. Perspiration poured down his face and made the bedclothes cling wetly to his body. Even his sweat smelled of spirits. "I'll have you hanged, you traitorous bitch!"

She did her best to close her ears to his threats and ranting as his imprecations grew ever more caustic. It was useless to try to explain to him that she was trying to make him better. She cleaned up the vomit when he began retching uncontrollably and wiped his face as he heaped invective upon her and even tried to bite her.

By the end of the first day, he was disoriented and prone to hearing things she hadn't said. Once he lapsed into a fitful state of unconsciousness, Solona approached his guards to tell them the king had developed a serious fever, but that she was a skilled healer and was treating it, and that they were not to worry. On the third day, they demanded entrance anyway when Alistair began howling, shrieking that the ropes were serpents trying to devour him.

"Why is he bound, mage?" one of them asked, his hand hovering over the hilt of his sword when she opened the door to admit them.

"So he doesn't injure himself, you fool!" Solona snapped. Her hair stuck out in wild wisps and tendrils about her face; she'd not bathed or gotten out of her dressing gown for three days, had barely eaten or slept. She imagined she looked very much like a witch to them. "As you can see, he's very ill. I can treat the fever, but it's going to take time."

The two guards looked uncertainly at one another, and though her manners had never been polished, she tried her best to achieve a soothing, cajoling tone. "Come now. If I were going to harm the king, I could have done so virtually at will any time he's been here. He's safe here." Desperate tears sprang to her eyes. That, she suspected, was what actually convinced them. "I swear to you, I'm doing my best to help him."

Alistair's confusion and delusions persisted for two more days beyond that, punctuated by periods of violent ranting and, most terrifying of all, convulsions so severe she feared he might choke and suffocate. Grimly, Solona healed his wrists and ankles with her magic when the ropes wore them raw. She drizzled water from a clean rag down his throat, only to have him heave it up along with a thin, foaming trickle of bile. She bathed his fevered skin when the sweat rolled off him and buried him in coverlets when he began to shiver so fiercely the bed quaked.

Nearly a week passed before he was himself again, clear-eyed and lucid. The devastation on his face as he thought about the things he had done in his drunkenness was horrific to behold. Without the numbness of spirits to cushion him from his guilt, he wanted to die. He sobbed and begged her to kill him. And then he sobbed and begged her to forgive him.

"I don't know if I can ever forgive what you've done, even though I know it wasn't really you," she said hollowly. "I'll stay, until I know you're well again. And then I need you to let me leave. That's all I ask."

"Some wine, Solona," he asked, pushing the platter of food she offered him away with a sickened grimace. Though at least some of it was the result of his ordeal, she was startled to realize just how old he looked. In the six years since the Blight, he'd aged twenty. "Please."

"You mustn't," she answered, shaking her head. "Please, Alistair. It's killing you. Please don't make this all have been for nothing. If you ever loved me, please stop."

Though his hand trembled as he brought the cup of weak tea to his lips, he nodded.

His guards sent word to the palace that all was well while he lingered two more days, regaining his strength until his appetite returned and his longing for spirits didn't seem so severe. But he had to go back to the palace, and she had to let him go.

He came staggering back three nights later, reeking of whiskey, his voice slurred and his posture defeated.

"I'm sorry, my love," he said, sinking to his knees in the middle of her sitting room. "I tried."

Tears spilled down her cheeks as she clenched her shaking hand into a fist and pressed it to her mouth to silence the sobs that wanted to escape.

"I know."

"You must go, Zevran."

She tried to imagine what might happen if Alistair came and found Zevran here, and she couldn't, for she didn't know which Alistair it would be who came. He might be jolly and gregarious, embracing Zevran like a long-lost friend, or he might fly into a jealous rage and accuse her of all manner of depravity.

One was as horrific to contemplate as the other.

"You must tell me, what has happened here?" Zevran insisted.

Adamantly, she shook her head. "I can't."

She didn't want their former companions to know what Alistair had become. She didn't want them to know what she had become, trapped in his sphere.

It was too shameful. She had defeated a Blight. She had stopped a civil war. She had rescued the Circle of Magi, pulled together an army, and saved a nation.

But she couldn't save one man, a man she had once loved, a man she sometimes still loved, when she didn't despise him. She couldn't save him from the ruin she'd helped make of his life.

Tears began to burn her eyes. She didn't weep often, now. Not since she'd failed to heal him.

She'd wept nearly constantly after that fateful morning she had requested an audience with him, the morning he'd raped her. She'd wept all the way back to Vigil's Keep in the aftermath of his dictum, the leather shades of her carriage pulled tightly shut to prevent anyone seeing her tears. She'd wept as she'd not done since those first days after the Landsmeet in which she had recruited Loghain, after Alistair had confronted her with such harsh, hateful words, when she knew she had lost her love to save him.

She'd never told him, because he'd never given her the chance. Throughout those months of the Blight, as they'd gathered their army to battle the archdemon, Solona had done what she did best. She'd studied. Every tome and scroll and bit of lore that came her way. Mostly, she read about the Blights and the Grey Wardens, trying to understand this threat she was meant to defeat. And in all her studies, two facts stood out.

First, each Blight ended with a Grey Warden killing the archdemon. Even though massive armies from multiple nations were gathered to battle the Blight, it was always a Grey Warden who was credited with defeating the archdemon.

And second, that Grey Warden was never mentioned in history again, except in reference to where and how he or she was entombed.

It would have stood to reason, that a hero who ended a Blight would have made some mark in history thereafter. As a ruler, or general, perhaps. But no. That was never the case. Four Blights ended, four archdemons slain, four Grey Wardens never heard from again.

It became clear to Solona that the Grey Warden who killed the archdemon invariably died in the process. She didn't know why. In the end, she didn't really care why. She knew what was coming. Riordan's revelation in Redcliffe, after the fact, had only filled in the gaps in her surmise.

And so when Riordan had proposed his solution at the Landsmeet, though she hadn't been inclined to show Loghain any mercy, she'd leapt at the opportunity.

More Grey Wardens meant a better chance that she and Alistair would survive. It was as basic as that. She had no grand and glorious plan for a bright future for Ferelden, no patriotism, no real desire to do anything other than live. Alistair would live and she would live. It all seemed so perfectly simple and sensible.

She hadn't been prepared for Alistair's outrage. She hadn't stopped to think what her decision would mean, when logic was cast aside and emotions ruled. Maker! Her whole life, that had been her weakness. She always assumed what made perfect sense to her would make sense to everyone around her. It was why she had been so disliked in the Circle Tower by the other apprentices, why they considered her callous and odd. When she went into her academic mindset, she saw things in terms of what was logical to her and not in terms of how they made other people feel.

But people were much more than facts and figures on a sheet of parchment, and Alistair even more so, for so much of the time he was ruled by his feelings. Sometimes all the reason in the world mattered naught.

In the end, she did what she set out to do. She and Alistair both survived. But in all her reasoning and calculation and deduction, she hadn't reckoned the cost. Alistair's life had been saved, but his soul had been destroyed. His goodness, his sweetness, all that bumbling eagerness to do what was right rather than what made sense. All of it had been lost.

She bore at least some of the burden of responsibility for that. Not all of it, no. Despite his drunken rantings, she knew she hadn't betrayed him. She'd tried to save him. He was a grown man. Ultimately, it had been his decision to stop trying to make the best of his situation. He had let the drink take control, let himself begin to wallow in his misery rather than trying to rise above it. But she had helped set him on the path; she could accept that portion of the blame. It was fair and logical.

Sometimes she thought Alistair was like a wounded man who refused to bind his wound or seek healing. Left open and untreated, his wound festered and putrefied and became much worse than it should ever have been. Sooner or later it would kill him, but still he wouldn't do what he needed to do to save himself. The decision not to bind his wounds and be healed was his, and his death would be his fault and no one else's. It could be prevented, and he wasn't doing so.

She had dealt him that initial wound, or at least one of them. Not intentionally, no. But she had done it nonetheless.

In her bleakest moments, she could no longer think rationally about it. When she was hurting, hurting from seeing him so destroyed, hurting from his cruel words and touches, it felt much different. In those moments, what she knew as a point of logic didn't matter. It felt like it was all her fault. She should have known how he would react, should have known better than to choose the course she'd set them on. She, who was so smart, that she could reason her way through any dilemma. Irving's star pupil. How had she not known this would happen?

In those moments, she felt she deserved everything she was getting.

She was being sucked down with him.

"I'm sorry, Zevran," Solona whispered, hanging her head. "Just go. You can't help us. No one can."

There were times when he was nearly himself, practically the Alistair she had once known. Then she could almost—almost—forget that he was the same man who had raped her on the floor of his study. Those times, she could love him, take him to her willingly, and it was so close to the way it once had been. She lived for those moments, because it was then that she didn't feel so utterly isolated.

But there were also nights when he was the arrogant, hateful, rage-filled man who had raped her. Sometimes she fought him. Sometimes, she even won. Though entropic magic had always been her weakest field, its principles anathema to her very logical and methodical mind, she learned a sleep spell specifically for that purpose, so that she might incapacitate him with the least chance of inflicting harm.

When she didn't win, she endured, healing herself in the morning so her maid wouldn't see the bruises he'd left behind.

Usually it wasn't bad. He was more careless than actually abusive. She'd sustained far worse during the Blight, and the siege at Amaranthine. For that matter, she'd been bruised nearly as bad by Alistair himself during the Blight, long before he began drinking. He'd always been a vigorous lover. Once his virginal insecurities had melted away, once she'd convinced him she didn't mind a little rough handling and wouldn't break, once she began to encourage him to let go and give in to his more savage desires now and then, there had been times he'd left marks on her flesh almost identical to the ones he left now.

She'd thanked him for it, then.

Now she simply tried to find her way between love and loathing, between fear and anger, between shame and self-respect. She felt the woman she had once been slipping away with each passing month, becoming more and more mired in the ruin of the man she had once loved.

She could flee, she sometimes thought. She didn't believe—usually—that he would truly punish the Grey Wardens, or the mages, if she left him. But something kept her there. The shadow of the man she'd once loved, those hints of him that sometimes peeked through, perhaps. Or possibly the challenge of solving the problem, her accursed pride telling her she could yet find a way to make it all better. Or maybe it was her own guilt, grown wildly out of proportion the more enmeshed she became.

She could flee. But instead she stayed, and waited for something to change.

As she begged him to do, Zevran went.

She waited alone.