It takes very little prompting from Alistair to keep Marian in bed all day. He'd caught her napping in the sun, so she can't pretend she's not still tired down to her bones, and every time she thinks of something she absolutely has to do, he distracts her.
Sometimes there's kissing. That is, in fact, very distracting.
Alistair fetches lunch for all three of them – Marian is getting more than tired of endless soft food, but at least it's tasty – and she takes the opportunity to slip into her room and fetch a book and some paper with the vague idea of doing something productive, like getting ahead on her planning, or studying, or something. But instead of doing any of the thousand things she needs to do, Marian finds herself reading out loud to Alistair from her book.
How that happened, she has no idea. Alistair is trickier than she gives him credit for sometimes.
Marian lays on her back, with Alistair a heavy limpet draped over her right side, and picks one of her favorite chapters, a tricky and complex treatise on energy magics. Alistair falls asleep somewhere between mana manipulation and force field theory. Marian herself finds it fascinating, but if she's telling the truth, she finds it hard to blame him. This is dense and heavy theoretical magic, and even if he really is interested in magic, he surely can't mean this kind. Unfortunately for her, she's read this book so many times that she nearly has it memorized, and she's trapped with no way of getting out of bed without waking him. She closes the book and drops it off the side of the bed to retrieve later, and turns her face into Alistair's chest.
She should catch up on her sleep while they're safe. She knows that. But the far-distant part of Marian that is tired is the least of her priorities right now. Alistair has buried his face in the corner created by the pillow and the top of her head, nearly suffocating himself in her hair – not that anyone could tell, with the way that he's faintly snoring. He's slung his arm over her waist in the most casual way he could manage, but his fingers are clenched tight in the back of her nightshirt.
Marian can't think of any way to convince him that she's not going anywhere except in the same way that she's trying to convince Cú – by coming back every time, by being there when they wake, by reassuring them in every small action and gesture that she's here to stay.
If there are things happening to them that are out of her control –
That's not her fault, is it?
Her hair catches a little in his stubble once in a while when Alistair shifts in his sleep or when she takes a deeper breath than normal, when she moves even a little bit. It makes her think of Alistair's morning shave, his ritual, with the razor he can strop without fully opening his eyes; more than once the water he used to lather up was ice cold, and he'd shocked himself awake with a shout.
Marian shouldn't laugh. It's very unkind of her. But his grumbling had been so funny she couldn't help it – and then, the time Zevran offered to help –
She bites her lip, but that doesn't stop her body from shaking with her laughter. Alistair's snoring fades into quicker breathing – Oh, don't wake up, she pleads inside her head, belatedly holding her breath to still her body. He needs his sleep.
Alistair grumbles a little and turns his head further into the pillow, but Marian stays calm, and breathes, and in the end he sighs and relaxes back into deeper sleep.
She should follow him. Sleep is the best medicine right now, or so Wynne would tell her... but if Marian allows herself to sleep, she loses this. She spreads the hand that lies on his chest, feeling his heart beat beneath her fingers, and closes her eyes and tries to convince herself that all of their enemies are far, far outside of this room. That they're safe here.
Arguing with her instincts has always been like arguing with an avalanche that wants to fall. She can convince herself in the moment – but every time she turns her back, all of her progress is wiped clean under tons and tons of crushing snow, and she has to begin again, every time more tired, sadder, wiser but no stronger.
But Alistair is warm under her hand, and he stirs her hair very faintly with his every breath, and his heart beats slow and so steady that it tempts her into that dark space behind her eyes...
Morning dawns too soon. She wakes to Alistair playing with one of the curls that are forever escaping her braid in her sleep. She'd slept the whole evening through – and all night, too? How tired was she?
"Do you really wake up at dawn every day?" she mutters, burying her face in his shoulder. The light shining through the window is pale gold and it pierces directly into the back of her head.
"You try sleeping through Chantry service, my dear," Alistair says, noticeably more awake than she is. He tugs on the curl wrapped around his fingers. "Do you really never let your hair down?"
"Just – " Marian has to stop for a yawn that she muffles in his shoulder. She rubs her nose in his shirt before she comes back up. "Just when I'm washing it, or putting it up or taking it down to braid for bed. It's annoying. It gets everywhere."
"You never thought about cutting it?" Alistair suggests, running his hand down the rope of her thick braid. "If it's that annoying, I mean."
"It's not that annoying. My mother used to brush it for me every night before bed when I was quite small," she says with a shrug. "She had to learn how to take care of it right alongside of me – her hair is as straight as a stick, I get this stuff from my father's side."
Marian hasn't cut her hair since she went to the Circle. Lissette would take an inch off for her every spring, but otherwise, she's left it alone. The sense memories of her mother tugging a comb through her hair are too precious to her. Her hair feels like a link to her past, and she has so few of those left.
She rolls to lie on her back and look up at Alistair's face, his eyes lidded, his hair flattened on the left, where he'd been sleeping on it. They've been in close company for months, and of course she's seen him in the morning and in his sleeping clothes and unshaven and all the rest, but somehow this feels more vulnerable, like he's stripped away all of his walls and given her the keys to the person who lives inside of them.
Marian reaches up and touches his cheek, dragging her fingers down his skin to feel the stubble prickling against her fingers. "Can I shave you sometime?"
He lifts both eyebrows at her. "There are easier ways to slit my throat, if that's what you're after."
"I don't need a knife to kill you, darling," she says, looking up at him with a smile.
Alistair laughs. "I don't suppose you do. All right. Why not?" He looks down at her, his eyes glowing with humor and fond affection, and Marian can't help the slow fading of her smile, nor the softness that she can feel coming over her face like the water seeping up the beach toward high tide...
And then he tweaks her curl again. "Are you ever going to let me see you with your hair down?" he asks, lifting one challenging eyebrow.
Marian blinks at him. "Have you never – " She stops herself when she thinks about the possible answers to that question. Their time down there and the way they'd smelled when they finally made it back up isn't something she ever wants to think about again. It's entirely possible that she hadn't let her hair down at all the entire time.
Her scalp starts to crawl. Is it too early to go take another bath?
She reaches up to run her fingers over her braid and reassure herself that her hair isn't greasy. "Of course you can," she says, looking up at Alistair with a slightly sheepish smile. "Actually, you could... If you wanted... You could brush it for me? I have to do it anyway, and unless you were just going to lie there and watch..."
Alistair grins at her with that lazy, glowing pleasure reflected so deep in his eyes that she feels him everywhere, like he's drowning her in what he's feeling, like every square inch of her body needs to know how deep his contentment goes in this moment. "You make it sound like the worst of torments to watch you do anything."
Marian nudges him in the ribs, perhaps a little harder than necessary. He gives no sign that he even felt it. "I can't imagine it's interesting, no."
He looks at her, raising one perfectly dubious eyebrow, and then he rolls over and scans his packs for a minute before he gets out of bed and rummages through one, emerging from it with a wooden comb in his hand. He holds it out to her. "Good enough?"
The teeth are a little thin, but it'll do. It's not like he can ruin her hair any more than she already did with the laundry soap. Marian smiles at Alistair and sits up, wiggling her way to the edge of the bed so he can reach her, and then she turns her back to him and flips her braid over her shoulder. His hands are very gentle as he picks at the leather tie she uses at the end of her braid.
Marian could do this faster, of course, but that's not the point of this, is it?
She bows her head slightly and closes her eyes, interlacing her fingers, and waits, as passive and pliant as she can make herself. Eventually Alistair unpicks the hairtie and tosses it somewhere behind him – she can hear the impact of its landing – and then he starts to untangle the end of the braid. This involves more tugging on her scalp, but it's still gentle, and the stimulation feels so good. Marian sighs quietly, slouching a little further, and lets the rhythmic tugging lull her into a waking dream, lets it turn off her mind, allowing her to simply feel.
Alistair slows down as he hits a section near the nape of her neck that's too tangled to simply unbraid. Marian bites her lip, waiting for the tugging to grow sharper, for the stinging-sharp-pain of someone trying to work real knots out of her thick and unruly hair, but he's even more careful now than he was before, if that's possible.
Her mother had been this gentle. Well, most of the time. If the twins weren't running her ragged, or if Father hadn't been teasing her to distraction. And if she pulled too hard, she always apologized and gave Marian a cuddle before she continued...
When had that stopped? Was she four? Or five? Or was it earlier, when the twins were tiny and helpless and screaming, and suddenly her parents had less time for her than before?
That was so long ago. Is that really one of her happiest memories? Even now?
"Hey," comes Alistair's voice into the crashing whirlpool of her thoughts, and then he lays a brief kiss on the crown of her head. Marian makes a soft, wordless, questioning noise, turning her head to show she'd heard him. "What's going on in there?"
She reaches up to touch her hair, which is loose and wild and making a nuisance of itself already. He's done with the braid and running his fingers through some of the parts of her hair that aren't at risk of tangling. "Just thinking," she says with a shrug.
"You should stop that," Alistair says, amusement in his voice. "You'll hurt yourself one of these days."
Who's to say she hasn't already?
When she doesn't answer, he takes the comb and begins to work it through her hair from the ends up. Marian can only imagine her hair turning into a thick, fluffy black cloud. It's not too far off from the truth. She's only ruined her hair this badly once in her life and it took ages to get it to relax again. She needs to find some kind of oil that's not what they use on their armor.
She doesn't regret the way in which she'd scrubbed the darkspawn from her skin, but in retrospect, it might have been smarter to cut all her hair off and start over.
His movements are careful and gentle. She lets herself fall back into that floating place where she doesn't have to think, where all that exists is feeling – his hands in her hair, the warmth of his body behind her, the sheets under her fingers and the morning sun drifting through the air like the motes of dust that make the room sparkle. He works his way up to her shoulders without hitting anything major, and when he gets there, Alistair says, "I have to admit, I hadn't pictured you looking quite so bushy."
In revenge, Marian shakes her head, hard, to make her hair bounce. His startled laughter is worth it.
"Now I have to do that all over again," he says with an exaggerated sigh.
"You're welcome to stop anytime. I can do the rest of it," Marian says mildly.
"Not on your life," Alistair says, his grin apparent in his voice. True to his word, he combs through it again, which goes far faster this time, and she talks him through brushing the whole length of it from root to end to spread the natural oils from her scalp where they're needed.
"Done," he announces, stepping back to take her in.
Marian twists around to look up at him from her seated position on the bed and smile at him. "Thank you."
Alistair touches her chin and bends down to kiss her. "I feel like I should be thanking you," he murmurs, his eyes very soft on hers. The light leaves them pale and mellow, like gold and pale green mixed together. "You're beautiful, you know."
"I did know," Marian teases back. "But thank you – for noticing."
She leans in and kisses him again, just as gently as he'd kissed her, but for far, far longer.
After several very satisfying minutes, she leans back with a sigh. "And now, if I don't eat something soon, I'm probably going to eat you. Breakfast?"
"We should probably go down so they know I don't have you tied to my bed," Alistair agrees, straightening to his full height and then reaching hard for the ceiling, stretching out his back and shoulders and arms. There's a gleam in his eyes as he watches her, a smirk curling just the corner of his mouth.
She can't help but picture it – and he knows that.
Marian sucks in a breath through her teeth. "I deserved that, didn't I," she's forced to admit.
Alistair laughs and drops his arms to lean over and kiss her forehead. "Yes, you did," he tells her, grinning. "Now, do you want some of my clothes, or are you going back to your room?"
Marian's tempted to make Alistair think about her in his clothes all day long, but that's a game that could go very, very wrong before it goes right. Instead, she elects to go back to hers and find something clean to wear. She gathers her book and her dog and kisses Alistair on her way out the door – luckily, there isn't anyone in the hallway to see her in her night-clothes. Marian closes the door behind her, drops her things on the bed, and follows behind them, landing on the bed face-first with a poomf of air.
She'd just spent the better part of two days in his company and she's not tired of him. That has to mean something, doesn't it? After ten hours of Jowan's company, Marian usually wanted to scream and claw at the walls to get a breath of fresh air, and he'd been one of her best friends.
At the thought of him, Marian sighs, nuzzling further into the counterpane. Her feelings about Jowan are... complicated, and she doesn't want to think complicated thoughts right now. If something can be put off, or side-stepped or simply avoided, that's how she wants it to be.
Avoidant, maybe, but right now, Marian is clinging to whatever gets her through the day.
She heaves herself off the bed, to Cú's displeasure, and digs through her clothing. Her old Circle robes, a shirt that's fit for the rag bag and a spare that doesn't fit but is at least clean, two pairs of trousers that don't fit her now but might if she ever gains the weight back – she may be able to wear them today, if she can find or borrow a belt. Socks she has to spare, but no shoes other than the slippers that go with her Circle robes. She took her hoard of smalls and breastbands down there with her and came back with no more than what she's wearing. Three night-gowns, and one very soft and worn shirt that all but swallows her and falls to her knees; she suspects she might have stolen it from Alistair at some point. Marian gives it a cautious sniff, but it doesn't smell like anything except laundry soap.
Oh, well. It's hers now.
Marian looks down at the piles of clothes that she's sorted out on her bed. The pile that's destined to be passed down or sold is much larger than what she's keeping, which is little more than one day's worth of clothes.
She needs to go shopping. Marian groans at the idea.
Maybe Leliana can help?
Marian tucks the nightshirt into the pair of trousers that fits closest at the waist and twists her hair up into her habitual bun. "Come on, dog," she says while her hands are still in her hair, sliding her feet into her slippers and taking quick steps toward the door. "We're going out."
The innkeeper has a single pie left over from breakfast and Marian snags it on her way to find Leliana. "She's out in the town, I suppose," Wynne says, casting a critical glance over Marian's body. Marian suffers the look, torn between resentment and the knowledge that Wynne is only ever trying to help. "She usually is at this time of day. She and Zevran are as thick as thieves, these days, and where you find one, you'll often find the other."
Marian raises both of her eyebrows, surprised. "All right," she says slowly. "Thanks."
She goes out into the sunlight, past the goats and the chickens and up the short path into the town that springs up around the gates of Orzammar. The day is late in spring, bright with warmth twining through the breeze, and she lifts her face to the sky and feels the sun on her skin and smiles. She should sleep outside. Would Alistair come with her? It's gorgeous, even here at the top of the mountains, so close to the sky that Marian feels like she could reach out and touch it; it's a waste to be inside. And she feels better out here, anyway. It's worth asking.
Maker, no wonder Morrigan likes to sleep under the open sky.
She takes another deep, deep breath, and laughs – it smells like the animals here. Lovely. She goes on, Cú following at her heels and whisking his way through the taller grasses at the sides of the path, until the town spreads out before her.
The buildings themselves are a mixture of human materials and dwarven design ethos. They're wooden beam and wattle and daub, with sloped roofs to dump the snow as it falls; this high up, they must get a ton of it every winter. But the dwarven influence is there in the carved posts at the corner of every building, in the intricate metal-work on gates and doors and window-latches, in the warding statues beside every door, which are the image of the Paragons she'd seen in the heart of the mountain. The houses are severe, but they still have a sort of charm to them in the way that they seem to huddle together against the looming mountainside.
Beeches and pines line the paths that lead from one end of the town to the other, where the merchant caravans are quartered. There are huge stables there for animals of every size, from the kind of oxen that Bodahn uses through cart horses large and small, all the way down to small mules no taller than Marian is at the shoulder. That side of town is the commercial and trading side, and they have their own living quarters for the caravan workers and traders. Marian and her friends are lodged on the other side of town, where the residents live, near a stream that plunges down the mountain and vanishes into a cleft in the rock.
"Now," Marian says out loud; Cú stops and looks at her, and she looks back, just like she was talking to him all along. "Where do you suppose we'll find Leliana in all of this?"
Cú barks very softly, tilting his head and staring at her, like she's confused him.
Marian grins and rubs his face with rough affection. "Leliana? You remember Leliana, don't you?"
That prompts a rough, rumbling noise that scales up and ends in a whine. Cú lifts his head and sniffs the air once, twice, and then he takes off down the path into the town without even a glance back to see if she's following. Marian laughs, lifting her hand to shade her face and watch him go – but he's not stopping, and she's in danger of losing sight of her mabari between the cottages.
Is he actually tracking Leliana?
Marian laughs again, drops her hand, and follows him.
She finds Leliana leaning casually against one of the stalls on the human side of the trading posts, chatting amiably with a woman who sounds like she might be Nevarran. Not wanting to interrupt, Marian signals Cú to heel and he leans against her thigh while they wait for Leliana to finish her conversation.
The day is breezy and warm, and there's just a whiff that makes it easy to tell where the stables are. Marian's standing at the side of the broad packed-dirt road; there are a few people walking up and down the length of the stalls, comparing what's being offered. There are a few clusters of people, too, which Marian imagines are deals being made trader-to-trader, rather than trader-to-buyer. She's not quite sure how the business of commerce works when it's not simple shops and wandering traders, truth be told. Maybe Bodahn would explain it to her?
At considerable length, of course. She expects nothing less. Marian grins, dropping her hand to scratch Cú's head.
"Marian!"
Marian glances up to see Leliana's bright smile aimed at her. "Hi," she says, smiling back. Then Leliana leans in to hug her, and Marian's skin starts crawling.
She doesn't like that.
She manages to return the hug without hesitating too much, but she's nothing but relieved when Leliana releases her and moves back to a more comfortable distance at the edge of her personal space.
What was that? She's never reacted to Leliana like that before, like the touch of her skin sent chills down Marian's spine and shivers all over her body. Somehow, Marian works up a smile to ward off Leliana's eyes. She's always seen too much that Marian wants to keep inside.
"So... Wynne said I could find you here," Marian says, tucking her hands into the overly-large waist of her trousers. "I have a small problem."
"A large problem, I think you mean," Leliana says, pinching the excess of fabric around Marian's arm and making a face. "This isn't yours, is it?"
Marian shrugs. "Must have gotten mixed up in the wash. It was clean and in my things, so I threw it on, but I feel less than dressed right now."
Leliana laughs. "You look charming," she says. "But I take your meaning. There's a woman down the row who sells good, plain clothing for reasonable prices, if you'd like to look at them." Marian nods, and then Leliana lights up. "Oh, but you must let me get you something pretty!"
Marian takes one look at Leliana's pleading eyes and groans. She already knows she's going to give in. "I'm a Grey Warden," she hisses as quietly as she can. There isn't anyone very close, but they're still near enough to the stalls that someone could overhear them. "I can't exactly lug around a court dress."
In the wrench of readjusting to the real world, being forced to remember that there's a price on their heads had hit her all over again like it was that first time learning it, in Lothering, along with all of the rest of the world collapsing down on them...
So saying that out loud, even here, buried in the Frostbacks, is a risk she'd rather not take.
"Not to fight in, of course," Leliana says, tucking her arm into Marian's and turning them down the dusty road. Marian shudders, her other hand clenching tight. "But every woman should have something pretty – and Loghain's men are looking for a man and a woman in fighting gear, in armor and Grey Warden colors. Perhaps a different sort of disguise is in order?"
Marian would agree to anything if it meant Leliana would stop touching her. Her touch is physically uncomfortable, a dull burning that waxes and wanes, growing worse every time it surges. Marian struggles between that and the sure knowledge that withdrawing like Leliana's diseased would hurt her feelings quite badly –
"Oh, here it is," Leliana says, drawing up next to a slightly larger booth with shelving against all three walls. She steps forward into the square room, letting go of Marian's arm so casually that she knows, in her bones, that Leliana's noticed something is wrong.
Shit.
Tears rise behind her nose and she suppresses them with savage force. She's tired of crying. "I'm sorry," Marian says quietly, her voice thick.
Can Leliana even hear her?
Marian wraps her arms around her waist, her shoulders raised, bracing herself to go into the booth after Leliana. She has to explain. Somehow. When she doesn't know what's wrong with her, when she feels like she's cracking apart at the seams to expose Maker-knows-what congealing in her heart.
But the stall looks like a little cave, a little pool of shadow hidden away from the brightness of the late morning sun, and though she can see Leliana and the trader cloaked in the dim duskiness of the stall, she feels like crossing the threshold is like stepping back into that living nightmare she's only just escaped. She bites her lip, shuffling her foot in the dirt, and tries to convince herself that this is fine, that this is safe.
Cú grumbles, pushing his head into her thigh. He pushes her weight slightly off balance, too. Marian looks down at him and swallows. "What is it?" she asks.
He just looks at her, his narrow eyes expectant, and then he barks very softly, more a huff of air than anything. Marian laughs, a bit damply, and crouches down to take his huge head in her hands. She scratches him all over his face, runs her hands over the velvet softness of his hears, kisses him on the head. "Hi," she whispers. He accepts the attention like it's his due, letting his eyes fall nearly closed in bliss.
And that's how Leliana finds them a few minutes later.
"Aww," she says from behind Marian, her voice both crooning and amused. "How adorable."
Marian twists around and looks up at her. The sun is bright in her eyes, making her squint, lighting Leliana's hair to a beautiful bright red-gold. "I'm sorry," she says, all in a rush. "I didn't mean to – to – "
She doesn't know what to call it. She doesn't understand what's wrong with her, or why her body's acting like Leliana's a threat.
"It's all right," Leliana says softly. She crouches down to stroke her hand down Cú's side. Cú rumbles, deep in his chest, but he lets his eyes fall the rest of the way shut, just like the hedonist he really is. "You have not been back two days. You need time. I, of all people, understand that. I should not have assumed that you were all right simply because you were pretending you were."
"I didn't think I was pretending," Marian murmurs. She lowers her eyes to look at her hands locked in Cú's fur. By rights, she should have scars. It feels strange to look at her hands and know that they're the same hands she had six months ago, that they haven't changed at all, even though she's been through so much.
"Sometimes lying to yourself is the only way to make it through the day," Leliana says quietly. "Take your comfort where you can, Marian. There's no shame in it." She stands, and the sun casts a halo around her body as Marian looks up at her again. "I bought one or two things for you and Alistair," she says in a louder, more cheerful voice. "They'll be delivered to the inn later. What shall we look for next?"
Marian squints at her. "One or two things?" she repeats dubiously.
Leliana just smiles. "You'll have to wait and see, I suppose."
Why does that feel like a threat?