Chapter Text
Gravel crunches underfoot as Alistair picks his way across one of the better-used corridors of Skyhold.
It’s funny, in a sense, the different ways the world can be saved.
When he did it, they hardly had enough tents for the lot of them. When he did it, they’d spent nights curled miserably on the ground, stars spread out above them as the hard, rain-frozen earth sapped the heat from their bodies until they’d shivered and shook themselves awake.
A proper bedroom was a luxury, let alone a crumbling palace.
The toe of a boot meets a larger piece of fallen stone, sending it skittering across the floor and tumbling down the hall—clicking and scraping its way over stonework floors.
The moment Alistair had reached Skyhold, Hawke had disappeared—all but climbing into the rafters to keep from being spotted—and Inquisitor Trevelyan had been whisked away on some sort of important business.
Some things are different—a castle in the mountains and an army training in the courtyards—and some things are the same. Some men still hold their chins high, some men still bear the weight of the world on their shoulders as if there is no one else that could dare take it from them. Hawke and Trevelyan are much the same.
Alistair pretends he doesn’t see the trappings of a martyr in them both. It’s easier that way. (Some things never change).
Someone had grabbed his arm, pointed him in the direction of the ramparts, and told him to find Cullen’s office and Alistair had gone, ever-the-follower. Somewhere, in the back of his head, a ghost that sounds a terrifying amount like Morrigan whispers something about dogs and masters.
He hears her voice, sometimes, when he drops his sword because one of those bastard gnarled roots in the forest clamber out to swipe at his feet, or when he’s gone so long on the road he can smell himself—sharp and pungent in the name of lack of rivers. But he hears Sten when he fights, Oghren when he drinks, Wynne when he’s watching the leaves rustle in the wind, Zevran when he’s watching the women wandering through the streets.
Alistair thinks of him when he’s alone. He thinks of the weight of a hand on his shoulder—heavy and strong like the shield tossed over his back. He thinks of the heat that bled from his palm into the skin and flesh, the way he branded him there with nothing but an affectionate gesture.
On the longest nights, Alistair thinks of the way their blood sang to one another—the same taint beating through their veins and reaching out like children, hands linking across chasms. The way Alistair always knew where he was, always knew the way his feet would scrape across stone floors, the way they moved in perfect unison alongside one another—a dance over the battlefield if Alistair ever properly learned how to dance. If he didn’t stumble over his own two left feet every time he tried, awkward and childish even as he creeps towards his thirties.
On the longest nights, he thinks about the emptiness. The song in his blood unfinished, calling out for an echo that silenced itself on the towers of Fort Drakon.
Once, Alistair thought it was the pain of losing a brother.
Zevran had sat beside him, when Alistair said that—his knuckles split and raw from losing yet another fight with a wall over letting someone else take the killing blow. No, my friend, Zevran hummed, offering a soaked rag to wash the blood from his hands. You’ll see eventually. You do not mourn a brother so fiercely.
Alistair rolls the past through his mind, like palming a stone, as he wanders through the halls.
The Commander hadn’t been in his office. According to a hurried, panting courier, that was uncommon.
I can check the Chantry for you, ser, she’d said, pushing sweat-dampened hair back behind a pointed ear.
You seem busy, he’d said. I can go looking for him. Believe it or not, I have some experience in looking for things that don’t want to be found. Not always a lot of success in that, though. But as long as the Chantry isn’t through a bunch of weird nightmare mirrors, I think I might have a chance.
Her face had screwed up into a mask of confusion, but with a crumpled missive in hand she bolted away from him and down the steps.
And, as it turns out, the Chantry in Skyhold isn’t through a series of mirrors, or arse-deep in bog water, or in the confounding and twisting alleys of Denerim.
It’s down a hall, two lefts from the broken statue plinth that Alistair had found two lefts ago.
Makes it easier to find it.
Idiot proof, one might even say.
All the better for him.
And, if the clattering sound from inside the room is anything to go by, Alistair’s also found—if not the Commander, than someone else who might know more about the little scavenger hunt he’s been sent on.
There’s a large stone archway to his left, light pooling and pouring out over the cracked flooring outside of it. On the right side of the hall is a pile of broken stones and splintered piece of wood. He watches, hands resting on his hips, as a piece of stone flies out from the doorway and lands with perfect aim on the pile of stones before gravity takes root and drags it, clattering, down the pile.
It rolls a few inches towards Alistair before settling, chipped and broken, at his feet.
He waits for the second rock to clear the doorway before he slips into the space, leaning his shoulder onto the smooth stone arch.
The Chantry isn’t so much a Chantry as it is a room. Three tall glass windows permit a soft golden light to wash down over an ancient and weathered statue. Additional light bleeds from the candles set into the wall, a soothing glow radiating down off the stone and pooling like a honey-sweet syrup onto the ragged flooring. There are candles stuck with melted wax before the statue, but little else marks the room as a place of worship.
There are no seats, no quiet corners for Sworn Brother’s to take confession, no places of respite for the mournful.
There’s no bloody rags beside piles of donated cloth that once held the whimpering and writhing injured masses that come with warfare. Only broken stone, a wrought-iron lighting fixture taken down from the ceiling and laid out against the wall, and a man digging the broken stone from a pile near the foot of the risen platform for the statue.
Alistair watches for a moment as a tremendous fur collar shifts around him. There’s a shield leaning beside a sword within grabbing distance.
Smart man.
Smart, but not particularly observant, it seems.
“Maker, if they’re sending the Commander of their forces to clean up rocks maybe there isn’t much of a war on. Am I in the right spot? People trying to fix the big hole in the sky, fight the demons pouring through…that sort of thing?”
And maybe it was stupid, startling the soldier cleaning up a Chantry room—but no one has ever accused Alistair of being clever. Unless they were calling him clever with that same intonation Morrigan used to when his biting wit would match hers long enough to turn the harpy’s tongue into her own cheek.
The soldier rises like muscle memory, movement born into his bones as he whips and turns and draws a hidden dagger to point down at Alistair’s direction—one foot facing him, his body sweeping around, shoulder first then the other leg to ensure stability and speed.
Alistair doesn’t blink. Not the first time someone’s jabbed something pointy his direction. Certainly won’t be the last.
Zevran used to make a game of it.
(Until Wynne made them stop, of course. Around the third or fourth time she mended the tear in Alistair’s sleeve and the nick in his forearm from when he’d flinch.)
“Is that the famous Inquisition greeting, then?” He asks, eyes flickering down to the blade before slipping back up to the man’s face. He’s handsome, in the sort of classical Ferelden way. With proper-blond hair swept back off his forehead, the sort of scruffy facial hair that Alistair knows he’d probably shaved that morning and has been fighting the constant re-growth ever since. A scar on his lip pulls it up in the corner, enough to match the perpetual snarl of a proper Mabari, but there isn’t any malice in his face beyond that. “Senior Warden Alistair, at your service.”
Alistair tips his head as the dagger drops.
“My apologies. I hadn’t heard anyone coming. Commander Cullen Rutherford,” Cullen stows his dagger and offers a gauntleted hand instead. Alistair shakes it—cool leather on cool leather. It feels somehow colder when he drops it. “The couriers make a tremendous amount of noise coming down these halls.”
“I wasn’t aware there was a minimum noise requirement to avoid getting stabbed. I’ll make sure to start clattering my shield against the walls to let you know I’m coming next time,” Alistair says. “Is this where you’re readying the plans for Adamant?”
Cullen winces, glancing back where his shield rests against the wall. “I was taking a moment to clear my mind. It’s good to get some work done on the Chantry rooms—we’ve been focusing so much on repairing and fixing the rooms here that I’m afraid we’ve neglected some of the other necessities.”
“I wasn’t aware a Chantry was a necessity for a war,” Alistair points out. Cullen has cleared out what appears to be about a quarter of the debris. He wonders if he’s the only one who’s been doing it. “We didn’t have one during the Blight, but we were lucky when we had weapons.”
Cullen pauses, his face pale for the briefest of flashes as he looks to Alistair. “You’re the Ferelden Warden, aren’t you?”
“You know, just once I’d wish someone wouldn’t say it like that,” Alistair says, using his heel to kick a rock towards the pile outside the room. “It’s always oh, you’re one of the Ferelden Wardens, aren’t you? What happened at Ostagar, did you see Cailan fall? What was the Hero like, was he as handsome and striking as the tales? It’s never, oh you’re a Warden from Ferelden, tell me do you miss the food, or how about the weather? Oh, you’re a Warden from Ferelden, is that why you smell of wet dog?”
The paleness is replaced at once by a dusting of color over Cullen’s cheeks. “I assure you, I meant no offense, Ser.” He turns, crossing over the small room to collect his things. He fastens his sword back to his belt, letting it hang in perfect balance. “I…I briefly…we’ve met, before. Once. At Kinloch Hold.”
Alistair’s brows knit. He nearly asks for clarification, scouring his memory for this man’s face, but Cullen collects his shield next. Tilted down.
And at once, Alistair is nineteen years old, in a hall that stinks of death and rot.
He’s standing there, with blood smeared across his face and horror building along his spine watching a wounded animal clawing at the walls of his cage. He’d picked his way over the bodies of Cullen’s fallen brother’s, once. He’d watched a man his own age broken in two by the horrors of blood magic—pleading in a nameless, faceless rage to devastate the mages upstairs, innocent or not.
Alistair had felt his anger, in that moment. He’d known it as readily as he knew the boys he’d trained with at the Chantry Eamon sent him to. He’d known the anger as hot and molten as he would later know the rage he felt once he laid his friend’s cold body out on the pyre.
But Cousland hadn’t let him. He’d touched Alistair’s shoulder, knelt before the prison, and told Cullen that they’d see the situation for themselves, that they’d see reason above all else. That above the anger, and the rage, they’d find hope in the power of people.
Well—he didn’t say all of that. He never said much of what he meant, Alistair found. He let the pointed quiet do his speaking for him, pulling the words out of Alistair’s chest and arranging them just so, so that no one could ever argue they meant things they didn’t mean, or they didn’t mean the things they meant, or any of the strange and twisted middle bits.
Alistair’s eyes drop as he searches for something, anything, to say.
“I heard the Templars all went crazy,” is what he picks. “But then again I am a Warden right now so…maybe I shouldn’t be passing too much judgment on that one.”
Cullen doesn’t smile, but it’s close.
“I’m not a Templar anymore,” he says, and Alistair understands more than he cares to admit. “I’ll walk with you to my office and we can review the plans for Adamant.”
###
On Alistair’s second night in Skyhold, he wakes sweat-slick and panting.
There are a lot of things about the Wardens that Alistair loves. The whole heroes saving the day thing was always fairly high on the list.
The taint overtaking him is low.
The nightmares are lower.
The Calling is the lowest.
Alistair knows it isn’t real. He didn’t, once. The first time he woke up, thrashing and sweating, he thought he was dying.
Knowing it isn’t real, somehow, doesn’t always make it better. It buzzes around him like a particularly irritating gnat—or the memory of Morrigan’s voice—that he can’t seem to swat it.
The bedclothes are soaked in sweat by the time he picks himself up off the hay-stuffed mattress and scrubs his hands over his face. His mouth tastes like bile and the bitter-sharp tang of Darkspawn blood. It used to be enough to make him gag when the nightmares came, the sense-memory of his own joining leaving him retching over the side of his bedroll as the other recruits teased and jeered his weak stomach.
There are a handful of things to clear the head—tried and true and tested in the bounds of war. Though, of course he doesn’t have his hand puppet anymore.
Tragically lost to time, age, and one encounter with a particularly vicious Mabari pup who wanted to teethe on anything Alistair’s hands were in.
Worst loss of Wardens since Ostagar, Alistair would say, if there were anyone there who would find it funny instead of horrifying.
Sparring was the other one. It was how all recruits bled the stress from their bones and worked themselves to the point of a dreamless exhaustion. Sword and shields clashing against one another, blades against blades and armor against armor.
As far as Alistair knows, Cullen isn’t running his men through drills past midnight. But he is fairly certain he’d spotted a handful of dummies made of canvas sacks and bucket helmets on his way in. That would do the trick.
He doesn’t bother bringing his Warden armor out with him. It seems too formal, too official to be strutting around in the blue and silver. Even when it’s more comfortable.
Alistair makes his way down to the training dummies, his sword hanging from his belt.
This feels natural. This feels right.
He draws. And he swings. And he practices.
There are few things in this world that Alistair could thank the Templar Order for. Well—sure he could thank the Order for generations of stilted, repressed young men foaming at the mouth for a sliver of a chance to be a hero to their superiors. He could thank them for the blisters on his palms and the nagging voice of holy women echoing around the back of his mind. He could thank them for the sweat under his collar every time the sun blistered down onto his armor, he could thank them for the half-blind legions that haunt the edges of Redcliff, gnawing on red-rock and lapping up spilled lyrium from the dirt.
And he could thank them for this.
His footwork is quick and precise, hammered into his bones by the Order and honed under Duncan’s careful gaze.
A side-step into a blow with a borrowed shield, tilted down just enough to bounce magic off the curve and shield his face from the blow. His shield arm swings out, striking the stationary bundle of straw-stuffed canvas. The reverberation rattles through the delicate bones in his wrist and up into his elbow and shoulder. It rings and plucks at his ulnar nerve, jostling down with little mercy before he steps back into a perfect defensive position—sword twisting in his palm and striking down across the chest.
One slide back—on his non-dominant foot, feint left then left then right then switch feet then again. Strike at the chest, at the shoulder, meeting the rush of the enemy—use their momentum against him.
Alistair was never very clever but he was always good at this.
It’s simple physics, really. A Genlock running full-tilt with its spittle-frothing maw open versus Alistair’s shield, braced by his weight and the coil of muscle from his arms down to his core where he locks himself against hard-packed dirt—Genlock meets shield, Genlock bounces. Genlock hits the floor, Genlock becomes Darkspawn paste on Alistair’s heel.
The end.
Sometimes, at least.
Normally fights are a bit longer than that, in Alistair’s experience at least.
He practices until he feels the sweat starting to plaster the fine, soft hairs of his temple down against flushed skin. The nape of his neck is already starting to bead, running down into the collar of his linen under-shirt and staining the already yellow-rimmed fabric.
Alistair doesn’t stop, of course. He pushes through. He pushes, sword swinging again and again until he feels his shirt starting to stick to his skin and—
Wynne is going to be so cross if she has to wash it again.
—and he misses. His sword clears the air over top of the dummy, scraping the tip over stone hard enough to cut a scar through the grime and muck staining in near-black. The tip comes to rest in the dirt beside the unyielding test dummy, scattering dirt and rock haphazardly.
He blinks twice as he clears the thought from his mind.
Wynne’s been dead for years now.
Second to go, all things considered.
“Do the Grey Wardens usually train at half-past midnight?”
A nearly amused voice breaks through Alistair’s nostalgic lamenting. He examines his sword with a wince before he looks up. “Believe it or not, yes. Though not for any official reasons—mostly because we never sleep.”
In the moonlight, Commander Cullen looks remarkably similar to the way he did in the Chantry. His hair is just as well-kept and idly Alistair wonders at what point of tentative friendship would be acceptable to ask him what product he uses. He’s wearing the same heavy fur cloak pinned to his shoulders and the same breastplate it seems he always wears. Not that Alistair is judging, of course. He’s rarely seen outside of his Warden armor these days.
“Never?” Cullen asks, one pale brow lifted.
Alistair sheathes his blade. “Never. Once you partake in the Joining you lose your need for sleep. One of the perks of being a Warden—actually now that I think about it, it’s all perks. All perks all the way down. If you discount the whole sometimes an ancient Magister makes you feel like you’re dying bit. And also the fact that I’m lying about not needing sleep.”
The other brow lifts to meet the first.
Alistair clears his throat. “Did your Inquisitor not tell you about that?”
“I was informed,” Cullen says, glancing down to the grass beside them. “I—” he clears his throat. “From what I understand, the Wardens prefer to keep their secrets close to their chest.”
“Oh, Maker, do we keep our secrets. But then again, I’m sort of being hunted by a lot of the Wardens at the moment so—not feeling too inclined to keep them. Besides it’s—there’s more to keep than that.”
“Is that why you’re assaulting my training dummies in the dead of night?”
“Thought there was a Darkspawn in it,” Alistair says, pointing the shield in the dummy’s direction. He doesn’t unlatch it from his arm. Not yet, at least.
The weight is comfortable—familiar in the way the bedding at Redcliff Castle is, or the feeling of freezing earth under his back. Or the smell of blood fresh on steel.
Cullen’s arms cross over his chest, his weight shifting from leg to leg as he takes in Alistair’s stance. “You were a Templar.”
Alistair looks down at his shirt, as if he’d left a stain of religious shame down the front of it. “How can you tell?”
“Your shieldwork. It’s how we were taught to wield them in the Order.”
Alistair’s gaze shifts to his shield. “Ah. Right. It’s effective. Never known when an emissary is going to be spraying a gout of flame at you. Once I deflected it right into a Hurdock—sent it a good ten, fifteen feet back. Should’ve seen the look on its face.”
He laughs, just a little. Cullen takes on the expression of someone who can’t tell if it’s more funny or concerning. Alistair clears his throat as he stops laughing.
“Right. I forget sometimes that Darkspawn aren’t as funny to other people.”
Cullen clears his throat. “It’s funny.”
“You can say I’m not funny. You’d hardly be the first. Actually—during the Blight I heard it quite a bit.”
If Cullen has any idea what to say to that, he keeps it to himself with another little cough. “I’d hate to keep you from your Warden schedule.”
Alistair blinks three times in rapid succession. “My what?”
“Your training—you said Wardens train at night.”
“Oh—Maker I was—” Alistair sighs and drops his hand to the hilt of his blade. “Nightmares. Warden’s train at night because they get nightmares. It’s not a schedule it’s a—”
They come in waves—the memories of the Blight. The writhing pain that crept into his subconscious, wrenching him to and fro in the dead of night—the sound of Cousland whimpering in his bedroll a scant few feet away from him. Alistair bolting awake in a cold sweat just a few bleary, disorientating moments before Cousland rolled himself into the grass and retched up the frothy contents of his stomach.
Puker, huh? Alistair had teased. They both ignored the tremor in his voice.
Cousland laughed, curled around his stomach as if trying to protect it. You cry out.
Cousland vomited twice that night, before Alistair had picked up both their swords.
They sparred until the winter-bite sun had broken across the trees, spilling a honey-sweet dawn over their wretched little camp. Until Alistair collapsed onto his back in an exhausted sprawl, and Cousland found himself draped over his stomach—battered, bruised, and sore.
“If you exhaust yourself enough physically, you don’t dream,” Cullen says.
“Exactly,” Alistair says, finishing as lame as he feels.
“I understand. It—” Cullen clears his throat. “As a Templar, we had lyrium to stop the nightmares. Since leaving the Order, I no longer take it.”
Cullen says it like it’s a confession. Like Alistair is some sweet, soft-robed Brother in a quiet Chantry in the countryside. Like the watchful gazes of the statues couldn’t reach them in the darkened corners, like Alistair could be the one to extend a hand and brush the sin from his forehead and replace it with an order for penance.
Alistair nods, regardless, as the knot ties itself up in the pit of his stomach. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“War is dangerous,” Cullen says, his jaw tight. “It means I am more…present for what I need to be present for.”
“Right.” Alistair shifts. “What do you do now? For the nightmares?”
Cullen looks pointedly to the dummy behind Alistair.
“Shit, am I in your way?”
“I was debating a few rounds myself but if you’re in more need of it—it’s not like you’re taking valuable practice time away from my men.”
Alistair looks to the dummy, then back at Cullen. “You’re welcome to join me, you know.”
“To spar with?” Cullen asks brows raising as if Alistair had just asked him to drop down and have a shag in the grass.
Not that Alistair wouldn’t. Well—not in the grass. Bloody cold, isn’t it? And the idea of rocks bruising up his back as he lets Cullen sink down—no. No. Not the thoughts he’s entertaining as his lips quirk into a faint grin. “Oh, see I thought we could both fight the dummy. That way one of us will win for certain.”
Cullen’s gaze shifts to the scar that Alistair’s blade left in the wall.
Alistair shrugs. “Warden training. You never know where Darkspawn are hiding.”
Cullen doesn’t seem unimpressed by Alistair’s humor. In fact, quite the opposite. An amused noise escapes the esteemed Commander as he draws his longsword—gleaming in the cold-slick moonlight and flashing with a battle-weary sharpness not tremendously unlike Cullen’s wit.
“To touch?” Cullen asks.
Alistair draws again and nudges his blade up beneath Cullen’s, feeling the sure weight bowing his arm just faintly. “To touch.”