Prompt: plaid

Originally Written: 9/16/10

Notes: This is a Quark prompt! It's also what made me first realize that I should maybe post these. The original version was going to be about how Zevran's clothes in the final scene offend my sensibilities, but I like this one better. Originally written in gchat.

Leliana clapped her hands as she considered herself in the mirror. The latest fashions in Denerim weren't quite up to Orlesians standards, but the city had recently suffered the march of a Blight. Allowances could be made.

(Although she had no doubt that the Empress would have continued holding court in Val Royeaux, archdemon on the roof or no. But the Fereldens were in turmoil, and their queen busy on the battlefield-not one of Celene's strong points.)

She was so enthused with her own appearance that she almost missed the shadow that passed behind her, slipping from one of the side chambers towards the side doors to the Great Hall. Her subconscious, however, had switched from "travel-and-battle" mode to "intrigues of court" mode, and as such she was turning and addressing the shadow before she was wholly aware of its existence.

"Why hello there-my lord!" Her flirtatious I've-caught-you-now voice changed as she recognized the man who wasn't really a lord and certainly had never been one of hers, but nevertheless deserved, she thought, some respect. He had killed the archdemon, after all, and if he had disappointingly refused to die afterward, well, that couldn't precisely be called his fault.

"Leliana," he said, his voice curt but courteous. "You'll be late for the coronation."

"Ah, yes," she said. "I was just making a few adjustments to my outfit. You know how ladies are."

"Fastidious, in their sensitivities," he said dryly, which was when she actually looked away from his face to glance at what he was wearing.

An "oh my" escaped her lips before she was fully able to contain it-certainly she had heard of such outfits, but never before had she seen one on a human being before, and it certainly...

"You have something to say?" he said, and she tore her eyes away from the fact that the man was wearing a skirt, and not only that, but a skirt so short it would be considered scandalous even in Orlais if a lady had dared to wear it.

"Oh!" she said, but her mind was still stuck on the fact that his knees were almost knobbly and shockingly pale-though it was silly to be shocked, considering the man spent so much time in full armor. And it was equally silly that a bard of Orlais was so speechless in the face of Ferelden fashion, and yet-

"It's traditional," he said, and the gruffness of his tone might have been hiding embarrassment, and that anomaly was enough to snap sense into her speech.

"I've never seen such an interesting pattern!" she said, dimpling her smile. "All those little lines, it must be terribly difficult to weave, no?"

"Yes," he said. "The pattern has been in my family for years. My wife wove it."

She looked at him, thinking of his wife-dead or simply gone or perhaps even still in Gwaren, she didn't know-and his daughter to be crowned a queen in her own right, and he the shadowed unwanted thing to be shipped quietly away yet standing proud in the garb of peasants, and she thought it was a sight to match the finery of the Empress of Orlais on her proudest day. "It is lovely," she said.

He inclined his head. "We shall be late," he said, and opened the door, holding it for her.

She passed through the entry and took her place among the courtiers of Denerim, all airing their fashions for the first time in months, free to celebrate safety and serenity with gold and jewels and trains and feathers, vestigial lingerings of an occupation some would never forget. They were familiar, if muted in comparison to her memories; the queen outshone them all, of course, but Leliana thought perhaps it was because edging her skirt, so close to the ground as to be invisible, was the woven pattern of her blood.