peopleofthedas | One Thousand Dead

I wrote this as a celebration fic for reaching 1000 page views on Deviant Art.

Title: One Thousand Dead
Words: 700ish
Characters: Zevran/Sigrun
Summary: Zevran like likes Sigrun!

He kept count of the people he killed. It was important to him. Every mark, every bandit, every innocent that died by his hand was tallied in his mind.

For the first hundred, he even remembered their faces.

During the Blight it began to be difficult. Not only was his count climbing higher than it had ever been before, it started being important to keep track of who killed who. He could never explain to the warden why it was he preferred to fight with his sword and dagger and not his bow, despite being a perfectly good archer. If he was out of melee it was harder to keep track of who he killed. The lives he took became impersonal. He did not wish his count to be clouded with uncertainty.

Luckily they were so desperate for coin once the battles were done they nearly always looted the corpses. So it was easy enough to tell who killed who. The Templar and the Qunari left bloodied messes behind them - as did the dwarf when he finally joined them. Leliana's kills were precise and delicate - the mark of a true professional. The mages - well - magic did things to a body that often meant there was no body left to find.

The warden killed with controlled fury. Her dead were the hardest to distinguish from his own. It was lucky, therefore, that they were rarely in the same part of the battlefield. She fought side by side with the Templar - a practiced dance that he could not intrude upon. It had been well established when he first met them.

Unfortunately.

Still, Zevran was nothing if not used to disappointment, and there were plenty of other diversions to be had during the Blight.

After the Blight was more difficult.

He noticed her when he first came to the Vigil. He'd been in Antiva, sorting out the Crows... several people were dead who richly deserved to be and he was as free as he would ever be. His count stood in the nine hundreds - although it was Commander Cousland called him to the Vigil to ask him to look after her husband for her while she was away.

The offer had its appeal and he took it. But more appealing were the companions she had chosen to surround herself with. The woman attracted the strangest types. Delectable, these new wardens. The apostate and the archer - light and dark to flank her - but it was the dwarf who captured his attention.

She was marked, as he was, by her past, with ink and needle. Yet she bore none of it in her demeanor. He'd seen enough, in Orzammar, to know precisely where she had come from - what she must have gone through - yet she joked with them as though she were a child, taking delight in the simplest things.

It was enchanting.

It was too many years - and nearly forty more dead (killing had once again become a more precise art for him, quality rather than quantity as his old mentor would have said) before he saw her again. Still sunny, but now burdened with command. Lines around her tattooed blue eyes that had not been there. Experience. Maturity.

When he began the dance he thought it would simply be for amusement. He had been wrong.

A simple trip to Amaranthine, to visit her vassals. They walked through the market place, her eyes twinkling as they lighted on the wares displayed, joking about her duster past. "I know I can afford to buy it... but don't you just get the urge sometimes to test..."

The cry came from behind them. Something stupid and racist and utterly predictable and he saw her eyes harden. Anger flared in him and he drew his weapons. Another voice joined the first - oh wonderful, there was more than one total fool in Amaranthine today - and suddenly a fight was joined.

As his thousandth kill fell to his blades and Sigrun, her back to him, her own blades flashing shouted something obscene at the fleeing attackers he felt the laughter bubbling up inside him - simple, pure, joy at being alive and next to this woman who took each day as though it were her last because, to her, each day she was given was one day more than she should have had.

All this time, he had thought he was seducing her. Instead she had infected him.

One thousand dead at his hands. But here, now, the two of them were alive.

One Thousand Dead

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