His fourth mistake was not keeping mum.
"Why are you following me?" Leliana asked him waspishly, not deigning to look over her shoulder. Even her tone was cold. Everything about her was closed-off. "I don't need you clanking about me, and neither do I need a bodyguard."
"I know," Alistair replied. "I'm not following you, Leli. I just… I want to know what's been going on."
That was when he knew he'd made a mistake. From the way she stopped and whipped around, her ghoulish face turned up towards him, Alistair knew he'd misspoken. This Leliana was not his Leliana. Not the same woman he'd left behind at Haven. It was evident from her eyes itself–cold steel, glinting with fury aimed at him.
"You do not." Leliana bit her words out, venom dripping from every syllable. "You only feel uncomfortable and want to fill the silence. It is better to not try, Alistair. I cannot give you the companionship you seek, and this is not the time to look for such things." So saying, Leliana turned away and started walking. "Least of all, from me."
It was no less than a tight slap to the face, her words. Alistair had been chewed out by Leliana before. They'd been in a relationship for more than a decade. No couple made it together that long without some battle scars. But even when they fought, Leliana made sure to remind him that she loved him, that she always would, that the argument did not change things between them.
This woman was not concerned with such things. Feelings didn't seem to matter. As she stole away, Alistair was left wondering whether he should not have stayed with the Inquisitor.
After rescuing Leliana, the party had split. The main group had splintered off to find a way and make Dorian's wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey magic work. Leliana had gone off on her own to scout and he, naturally, followed her. Now, as he stood in the wake of her devastating words, Alistair caught himself responding with anger. Directed mostly at himself.
He didn't blame Leliana. Whatever she had gone through over the past year, it had changed her fundamentally as a human being. Or had it? Maybe it had stripped away all except what remained at her core. Maybe the storm she had weathered had exposed the Bard, the ruthless Nightingale he'd only heard stories of. And it made him angry. It angered him to have expected things out of her, it angered him to have put himself in this situation to begin with. His bones shook with fury when he recounted her words and found himself guilty of expecting answers and companionship from the woman he loved.
More than anything, it angered him to have doubted, even for a second, that this was Leliana at her truest. Alistair knew better than that.
It was a mistake. He had erred in his judgement and that was not likely to be repeated. Though his heart broke for this Leliana, he needed to get back to the past by hook or by crook. And he could only do that if he turned off his head and focused only on the work at hand. So, Alistair raised his hands and squeezed his temples with the heels of his palms, trying to squeeze out the feelings and defeatist thoughts that had quickly taken root in his exposed wounds, expelling them like bile.
"Right," he whispered to himself, taking a deep breath. "What would Aedan do?"
Check for information. Leliaana was the biggest source of information for him now, and he wouldn't let feelings–hers or his–stop him from getting some actionable information back to the present. Instead of backing away from Leliana, he instead sped up to catch up with her. The clanking of his sabatons against the stone floor had carried to her ears, for Leliana turned towards him wearing an irritated scowl.
"I need to bloody know what to expect," Alistair told her before she could say anything. "You're wrong. I do want to know what happened. If I don't know what's coming, how in the fuck am I going to stop it from happening?" He overtook her and came to a stop, facing her and meeting her incensed gaze. "Because it's on me to make sure that whatever happened to you does not happen again. I don't know what they did to you, Leli, but if ever you loved me even a little bit, you need to tell me what's going on." A pause. "Hell, give me code and I'll relay it back to you in the past. I don't need to know. I just need to prevent it."
"You make it sound so easy." She scoffed and stepped into his space, surprising him. "The day you disappeared into the portal along with the Inquisitor, we all refused to believe that you were dead. I looked everywhere I could for you but I couldn't find a trace. People said you abandoned us all. That the Inquisitor wasn't a Herald of Andraste but of something far more sinister and that this was the Maker's way of finishing His work."
Sucking in a quiet breath, Leliana continued. "I loved you. But love did not save me. It did not save anybody. You really want to know what happened? Go up the steps ahead and take a right. You will find a room with many tomes and rolls of paper. Read through the dossiers they kept and you'll find out. Bring them with you if you can. But I can't waste time now telling you a story you think you deserve to know. The things I have to do require stealth and I can't have that so long as you're with me, ALisirar, so get out of my way."
He didn't have to. Leliana walked around him and hurried ahead. ONly this time, Alistair did not follow. He stood rooted to the spot, fists clenched and jaws working. Not only did she not tell him anything useful, but she also slapped him with the most hurtful three words to ever be constructed.
I loved you.
WIthout a word, he slammed his har=nd into the stone wall to quell some of his frustration. The reinforced steel gauntlet punctured the stone, chipping off a bit, causing Alistair to chuckle and squeeze his temples again. Clearly stealth wasn't his strong suit. Leliana knew that. The best way he could help… was by not helping. Which was fine. He could do that.
Instead, he chose to follow her directions. Up the stairs and to the right used to be a room where Connor kept his toys. ALl sorts of things from all kinds of countries and shops. Things AListair had never seen since. Now, as he kicked the door off its hinges and stepped inside, there was nothing of that childlike wonder preset. Shelves full of books and things was all there was to take in. Leliana was right. How she knew, he didn't know. Didn't care. They had told her, possibly, during torture and interrogation, what exactly it was all in aid of.
That thought made him chuckle darkly. Leave it to Leliana to extract information out of people who were doing Maker knew what to her. She was truly unbreakable in that regard.
Some things never changed.
Walking through the aisles of shelves, Alistair kept seeing ledgers full of writing, all labelled. Lots of names. Some he recognised: Fergus Cousland, Marian Hawke. Others he did not. Every person had at least five leather-bound volumes dedicated to them. However, there was one shelf that contained only a thin book. Only one. The spine contained the name, 'Nightingale' on it.
She had not given them much, if at all. That was good to see. In reaching for the book, Alistair felt his hands quake. Felt his fingers pause of their own accord. He needed to know what was in it, but did he want to? The age-old debate between his head and his heart was on the verge of starting again, but he managed to push through it and pick it up.
And then he committed the fifth mistake. Reading it.
Of course, it was not the record of gleeful celebration of violence he had expected. Which was good. It was a biography of Leliana, containing mostly cursory information that he knew already: name, age, sex, affiliations… the very beginnings of a profile. Evidently, she had given them nothing.
"Bloody well done," Alistair found himself saying, finding an odd sense of pride in Leliana's continued defiance. He flipped through the volume, finding mostly blank pages. However, there was a footnote which cited that this volume had been used as a source in another paper titled Studies on the Blight. This one, too, Alistair found with some work, and it proved more enlightening.
'Introduction of blight to prisoners yields no discernible pattern,' read one of the entries. 'Disease progresses erratically; some subjects die within hours despite all efforts, others show no symptoms at all. Subjects may harbour some natural resistance, which makes isolation and testing a priority.'
Alistair knitted his brows together. Mages researching the Blight was nothing new. Avernus, Sophia Dryden's pet blood mage, still resided at Soldier's Peak. Aedan had kept him around and Alistair had, too. His research into the Blight had enhanced Aedan's physicality back several fold and he himself had sought out the mad mage to see if a solution for the Calling could be found.
Among other things.
However, these fools were playing at creating red lyrium by infecting people with the Blight. It was what had happened to Fiona and the other Grey Warden corpses he'd seen littered about. The only question was whether the state of red lyrium-hood was magically induced, or whether it was the natural end state for anyone with the taint.
He read on.
'Six more subjects died. Transfusions of blood from resistant prisoners slow the rate of corruption only slightly. Healthy flesh taken from live subjects and implanted in the infected will often die even before corruption spreads to it. In cases where implantation is successful, blight corruption spreads across donor flesh faster than host flesh. Prisoner Leliana has been the most useful source of resistant blood and skin to date.'
There it was. That was where Leliana was mentioned. A donor of healthy skin and tissue? An experiment? They were… they were carving holes in her face to take her tissue out? It was… horrible. Of course, he knew that Leliana was more resistant to the Blight: they'd been in an intimate relationship for a decade, of course she was resistant to his… stuff. She used to get a little sick in the beginning months, and Aedan had told him that the same was true of Morrigan, too.
But the takeaway here was that Leliana was a valuable target. Why? Because she was resistant to the taint. Why was she resistant? Because of him. He'd done this to her. It was all his fault.
No wonder she hated him.