Vir Lath Sa'vunin: Chapters Thirty-One and Thirty-Two

[twist_shimmy]

A Dalish-centric AU gen fic featuring two Mahariel Wardens, one bastard prince, and lingering ghosts.

Title: Vir Lath Sa'vunin (We Love One More Day)
Rating: T (Language and Violence)
Authors: twist_shimmy and lenna_nightrunner
Post Word Count: 3500
Summary: When their parents died, Tesni Mahariel was left to raise her brother Caerwyn with the help of the rest of their clan. True to their penchant for getting into trouble, Caerwyn and Tamlen went hunting one day and ran afoul of a mirror, of all things. The next thing Tesni knew, Caerwyn had been recruited by the Grey Wardens. As if she’d let some shemlen just take her brother away! Determined to keep Caerwyn safe, Tesni goes after them, and antics ensue. She’ll stop the Blight to protect her family, Caerwyn will help--grumbling all the while--and Alistair will do his best to bond with his tattooed and bristly new brethren. When all is said and done, the blurred lines between friendship and blood bonds will draw them down a path that will change all three of them forever.

In which Zevran takes a big risk, and the rest of the party is left to sort out the aftermath.

Thirty-One: Break the Mirror Sweet So We Shall Be Together (The Cure)

ZEVRAN
(Day Two)

A second night passed, and still my Warden did not leave her tent. I knew her brother well enough to realize that he would not come around until she did, but every time I entered her tent the next day to check on her, her eyes were closed.

Not sleeping. Simply not there.

At first it was sad. But then, as Alistair became more and more worried and began panicking about taking control of the party, and her brother continued to drift, it became infuriating. There were things that needed to be done. And she was certainly allowed to grieve, but she had no right to just lie there while everyone else tried to fill in for jobs only she could handle.

She was our leader. But it took me all of the morning to realize how to remind her of it. She was trying to give up, that much was certain, but she was too strong to actually do so. All I needed to do was prove it to her.

Tesni had saved my life. It was time for me to return the favor. I drew my knives and slipped into the tent when the others weren’t watching.

She was atop the blankets, curled into a ball once more. When I entered, her eyes opened, and she glanced at my face, then my knives....

Nothing. Her knives were an arm’s reach from her, but her eyes closed again. My Warden was better than this. I sighed and looked down at her in disappointment.

“What, no fight? You were so fun the first time I tried to kill you.”

“I’m doing you a favor.”

“I fear I must disagree.” Her eyes came open again, and I crouched beside her and flicked a braid out of her face with the blade of a dagger so that I could clearly see her eyes. “If I kill you, where does that leave me? I will not be able to stay here, with these people, after doing such a thing.”

“So go back to the Crows.” She closed her eyes again.

“You forget that you are not the only Warden I was tasked to kill.”

There. A tension in the shoulders that had not been there before. “No. Just me.”

“No, not just you. I am an assassin, not a murderer, and I do not kill for free. If you want to die, I will certainly kill you, but then I shall leave this tent and kill both your brothers, your mabari, and your bear for good measure.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“And why not? You are in no condition to stop me, after all.” I rose again and smiled down at her. “If you like, I can start with them, so you know I kept my end of the bargain.”

“Don’t you dare go near them.” Her lip curled, and I forced my admiration not to show on my face. My Warden, the mother bear. She would use her last breath to keep her clan safe, no matter how badly it hurt.

I had never met anyone with that much passion or dedication to a thing. I wanted to hug her and tell her I’d never hurt any of our companions, but that would be counter-productive, so I moved toward the entrance to the tent.

“Try and stop me, if you can.” I smiled over my shoulder and pretended not to hear her hiss of rage. “Though I doubt I will go down as easily as I did the first time, now that I know how you fight.”

I turned my back, left the tent, and was instantly in the dirt, ears ringing. She had launched herself after me with a shriek, burying one knife into the dirt beside my left ear and the other into my right tricep. I rolled before she could pin me and kicked her away, then spun and waited, knives crossed before my chest.

Various party members had been having lunch until we made our entrance into their line of sight. I had been worried that they would instantly join the fight, but I appeared to have won their trust, because they simply stopped eating and stared, mouths open. Blood flowed freely from my arm as my pulse quickened, and for one moment everyone was silent.

Tesni took her weapons and lunged again, screaming something in elvish. I parried her next three blows and then dodged the fourth, kicking her back into the dirt when she came at me again. I had no wish to hurt her, but she needed to be angry. She needed to get her blood pumping and remember what she was supposed to be doing.

I just needed to stay alive until she did.

Another howl, and a leap. My teeth ached as I deflected her blades again, and I wished I had put on armor before putting my plan into action. I was too slow to dodge the next strike, and her knife arced across my chest, cutting a long, shallow slash through my shirt and skin. I hit her in the back of the head with the hilt of a dagger and ducked away again, circling nervously as she recovered.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alistair and Caerwyn outside of my tent, eyes wide with shock. “What in the Maker’s name--”

But Tesni was moving again. I parried three more strikes, hissed as the fourth contacted my shoulder, and broke away again, but this time she gave me no reprieve. Her arms swung and she followed my retreat with great, wild slashes that would have decapitated a less limber man.

Think. Think, my Warden, I willed her as I panted. Why have I not attacked you?

I was almost out of time. Caerwyn had found his knives and was running for me, and he was faster than Tesni. He threw himself in front of her, dagger seeking my throat, but his momentum faltered when he realized that I was only parrying. His eyes scanned my cuts, then took in his sister.

“Tesni!” He spun and dropped his weapons. “Ma halam!ⁱ” She tried to lunge around him to get to me, but he stepped with her and shouted again. “Zevran na dar’falon!ⁱⁱ”

“Isala nanⁱⁱⁱ!”

“Nan’din! Zevran na dar’falon! Na lin’din, Zevran tu irlin!^iv”

Tesni dropped her daggers and fell to her knees. I immediately sheathed mine and moved to sit beside her, breathing heavily. The rest of the camp looked on, more confused than they had been while we were fighting.

“Are you insane?” Tesni asked me quietly.

Caerwyn sat down on my other side and muttered, “Yes.”

I ignored him. “Now you are moving again. I think this is a good thing, no?”

“I could have killed you.” She sagged against my shoulder, and I gritted my teeth as she put weight on my injuries.

“You give yourself too much credit, my Warden,” I managed.

“Alistair, get me some water. I need to clean his cuts so Wynne can heal him.”

“Y-yes.” He practically ran for the river, radiating relief, as Tesni pulled my shirt off over my head.

“I hardly need coddling, my Warden.” All the same, I leaned back and smiled up at her. “The injuries are not bad.”

“Shut up. I haven’t really cleaned my knives since the fight, and you haven’t bothered to take a bath. I don’t want you getting sick because I accidentally stabbed you with a darkspawn-coated blade.”

Such an unappealing thought. “Next time I am going to make sure my plan is more cleverly executed, I think.”

“There had better not be a ‘next time,’” she replied, then began the painful process of flushing and cleaning my new wounds while the rest of the camp looked on.

By the time Wynne had healed me for the second time in two days, Caerwyn was forcing Tesni to eat. Once she had finished and downed most of a waterskin, I turned her to face me. “I took the liberty of burying your friend. It simply seemed wrong to leave him lying there.”

She pressed her lips together. “Thank you. Where... where is he?”

I took her and her brother to his grave and breathed a quiet sigh of relief when they thanked me and told me I had buried him properly. There were tight lines around Tesni’s eyes, but as soon as her brother started crying, they faded and she forgot all about her own pain.

“Ma dar’numin, da’vhenan^v?” She pulled him against her chest. “No, little brother, don’t cry.”

He wrapped his arms around her waist and pressed his face into her shoulder. “Tamlen’din tu emma numin^vi.”

She closed her eyes, and I began to walk back toward the camp to give them privacy. “He would be sad to hear you cry.”

“Emma ir abelas, mamae^vii.”

They were gone for nearly an hour, but when they returned, my mother bear was herself again, though her cub’s face was splotchy on its pale side from crying.

“We’re moving on in the morning,” she told us in a voice that sounded almost normal. “Caerwyn and Leliana have first watch, Zev and I second, and Alistair and Sten third.”

No one played, or sang, but the atmosphere of the camp was still lighter, and more than one of our companions gave me a quiet “thank you” before I went to bed.

Alas, I had a tent to myself again, but at least my plan had worked.

---

Thirty-Two: Despair Could Ravage You if You Turn Your Head Around and Look Down the Path That’s Led You Here. ’Cause What Can You Change? (Saves the Day)

ALISTAIR
(Meanwhile)

When Zevran woke me for my turn to watch, Caerwyn was curled up so tightly against my side that his face was hidden in my shoulder and his knees were at my hipbone. He didn’t exactly make it easy not to feel awkward; in human culture even brothers definitely weren’t this close. Especially not brothers. And if any of my brothers-in-arms had done this at the monastery during his Templar training, the revered mother would have frothed and spit in rage.

But I’d figured out by now that he needed to feel close to someone, so I let him press against my side, even though his determination made me have nightmares about him wearing me like a suit of armor. Creepy.

I’d never been so glad it was time for a watch shift. I tried to sit up as carefully as I could so I wouldn’t wake him. Caerwyn whimpered and cringed in his sleep, and both of us looked down at him.

“One of your Warden nightmares?” Zevran asked.

I shook my head. That was the last thing we needed.

“Let us hope that continues to be so,” Zevran said, smiling at my brother sadly.

He lay down, pulled Caerwyn to his chest, and started running his fingers through his hair until he stopped twitching and thrashing. When I left the tent Zevran was whispering to him in Antivan.

As I joined Wynne by the fire I decided that I was done trying to figure out who felt what way about anyone else. Either I was an idiot or this party would make a chantry catch fire if we so much as set foot in it. Neither option made me happy, exactly.



Morning came and Caerwyn’s sleep still looked restless, and it didn’t seem like he’d be waking up anytime soon. I didn’t know what Tesni was doing, but I hoped she was sleeping, too. Maybe they just needed rest. I couldn’t imagine what they were going through; at least I hadn’t had to kill Duncan.

Maker. Those first few days in the Wilds at Flemeth’s hut.... If I had felt as bad as I did, how were they feeling now? The entrance to Tesni’s tent got a lot more intimidating after I thought about that for a while.

When everyone but Caerwyn and Tesni was up, Wynne started making breakfast. I was starving after the long night and the stress, but Leliana didn’t eat anything. She was staring at Zevran’s tent while everyone else--well, me--pretended not to notice that she was doing it. Finally, after looking around at the rest of us shyly, she got up and went to see Caerwyn.

A few minutes later we could hear her singing from the tent.

Blast it. My promise to myself not to try to figure out everyone’s feelings had lasted all of six hours. I had to ask someone, and I might as well ask the elf who’d know, as awkward as he was bound to make it. After everyone had parted ways to go about their morning routines, I pulled Zev aside. I nodded toward his tent, where Leliana was still singing, and said, "Do you think she--"

"Oh, yes. There is no doubt of it."

I frowned. "Do you think he knows?"

"No. Your brother is not a man of subtlety," Zevran said with a smile.

That was one way of putting it. And at least I had proof that I wasn’t a complete idiot when it came to body language after all, but...

I sighed. "Poor Leliana."

"Why do you say so?"

...Wasn’t it obvious? “She's human."

He patted my shoulder and gave me a significant look. "As are you, my friend."

I spent my morning doing what anyone who suddenly found himself in charge of a group of warriors did: sit by the fire and see how long I could draw out the process of sharpening my sword before I had to admit it could cut a fly in half and go find something actually useful to do. Anything to put off any leader-y duties for as long as possible would be ideal.

Leliana emerged from Zev’s tent mid-afternoon looking very tired. She took up a nearby waterskin and drank the rest of the water in it in great gulps.

“Any change?” I asked her.

She shook her head sadly. “I think perhaps my singing helped, but....”

“But he’s still asleep.”

“Yes.”

“Get something to eat,” I said to her. “I’ll stay with him for a bit.”

When I went back into the tent I found Caerwyn shivering again. I sat down next to him and pulled his blankets up over his shoulders. He looked pale and sick, like he had when I’d first met him before the Joining. That seemed so long ago.

I closed my eyes and focused on the feeling of his blood near mine. Ellin. My little, older brother. He needed me and I had absolutely no idea what to do. So I sat and watched him and hoped he could feel that I was there.

I was still sitting next to Caerwyn in silence when Zev came back.

“How long will he sleep?” I asked him.

“As long as he needs to.”

“I-I....” I rubbed at my face. “I don’t know what to do.”

He shook his head. “We must be patient.”

“Good. I’m brilliant at that. Top marks at the monastery.”

Zevran sat on Caerwyn’s other side and began running his hand over his back, arms, and hair. When he noticed me staring at him, he smiled.

“You are confused about my feelings for him.”

“Well, er....” And here we had the awkward. Conversations with Zev were always so fun. “Yes.”

Zevran chuckled. “One day you will perhaps become used to this aspect of Dalish culture. If his sister were... able, she would do this.”

I’d given up counting the ways Tesni would cause the heads of my mentors in the Chantry to explode a long time ago, but this would definitely make it on the list. I looked down at Caerwyn, then thought about my nightmare again. “Does that mean I should....”

“I think they understand that your ways are different. They will not fault you for that.”

I looked down at Caerwyn’s pale face and sighed. “Hang on, brother.”

Zevran studied Caerwyn’s face for a moment too, then looked up at mine. “Come,” he said. “There is one thing we can do for them while we wait.”



There he was. I smelled his darkspawn blood and tried to see in him the man Tesni and Caerwyn had been shown in the Gauntlet. Zevran had closed his eyes, but there was something in his face that was still Tamlen underneath all the corruption.

This could be Caerwyn, if he hadn’t been made a Warden. The thought seemed to make my breakfast suddenly less happy about where I’d put it.

“I wished to wait,” Zevran said quietly, “but your fellow Wardens are not ready.”

I nodded and picked up the shovel I’d borrowed from Levi Dryden. The Dalish didn’t burn their dead; they buried them. So I began digging. At first it seemed strange to me, and wrong, to bury a body in the ground. Then it just seemed like a lot of work. Levi’s shovel was getting heavier with each heave of dirt out of the hole. When we lowered Tamlen in, part of me was wailing at how weird a dead body was, even though we were around them all the time.

Darkspawn. Bandits. Strangers. Not people who mattered to my sister and brother.

Zevran had to tell me three times that it was okay to throw dirt over Tamlen’s face. But then I was finished, and Zevr took a sapling out of the ground and brought it over to the grave while I drank all of our water.

“They are buried under a sapling, you see,” he said. “So that they become part of the forest.”

As we planted the tree in the dirt covering Tamlen’s body, I decided that the practice was beautiful in some ways, even if the idea of walking over a body in the ground made me uneasy.

“Should we say something?” I asked, looking down at the grave.

“No,” said Zevran. “That is a task for Tamlen's clan.”



Caerwyn had woken up during the night, but except that his eyes were open he didn’t seem much different. Well, he’d gotten creepier, as bad as that made me feel to admit. He stared in front of him as if he couldn’t see anything, and he didn’t respond to us. Zevran and I looked after him between our watch shifts again.

By the second morning I was beginning to panic. Nothing Zev or I did seemed to have any effect on Tesni or Caerwyn, and if they didn’t come out of it soon then I’d have to start making decisions that weren’t about setting watch schedules or moving dirt around or hiding in a tent and keeping my brother company so I’d feel better about myself. Tesni made decisions about fighting dragons, and I couldn’t even decide who should cook our meals.

It was my own personal nightmare, looming before me, only this time I was awake and Duncan wasn’t alive to save me from responsibility.

After breakfast I went back into the tent to see if Caerwyn would eat something, but he was still the same. I wasn’t sure if he even knew I was there. I was just about to give up and give his food to Elgar’nan when I heard Tesni’s unmistakable battle shriek.

Caerwyn snapped out of his daze and looked toward the source of the sound.

“Tesni,” he said in a scratchy voice. Another shriek, and he was on his feet. “Tesni!”

He ducked out of the tent and I followed him. I was expecting more mercenaries or some of Loghain’s men, but I found her fighting Zevran.

“What in the Maker’s name--”

We apparently weren’t the only ones who had no idea what was going on, because everyone was just sitting and watching the fight. Zevran was bleeding from more than one cut and Tesni looked like she was trying to take his head off.

“Tesni!” Caerwyn shouted. He reached into the tent and grabbed his knives, and then he was running toward the fight.

“Caerwyn, no!” I shouted, but he was already lunging at Zev, his knife aimed at his throat--

But then he pulled back. He looked at Zevran, dropped his knives, and turned to face Tesni. Caerwyn protecting Zevran from Tesni? I couldn’t believe it. He was yelling at her in Elvish while Zevran stood bleeding behind him.

And then it was over. Somehow everyone was friends again and the three of them were practically hugging on the ground. Trying to grasp what had just happened made me feel weak-kneed and fuzzy-brained. Watching a fight shouldn’t be that draining. I felt like I’d fought Tesni off myself.

Then Tesni realized what I didn’t--her blades hadn’t been cleaned after the fight with the shrieks.

“Alistair, get me some water. I need to clean his cuts so Wynne can heal him.”

“Y-yes.”

As I rushed to the river I felt a wave of relief wash over me. I had my brother and sister back

i“Ma halam!” Stop!

ii“Zevran na dar'falon!” Zevran is your friend!

iii“Isala nan!” I need vengeance!

iv“Nan’din! Zevran na dar’falon! Na lin’din, Zevran tu irlin!” No, you don't! Zevran's your friend! You're not bleeding, but he's covered in it!

v“Ma dar'numin, da'vhenan?” Why are you crying, little heart?

vi“Tamlen’din tu emma numin.” I'm crying because of Tamlen.

vii“Emma ir abelas, mamae.” I'm so sorry, mother.

Brilliant.