sixthiterationlogs | [MINGLE] One-Man Show

"It would not do to have you freeze." He has his coat, he has the fire- ill-suited for the cold as he might be? He is at least dressed for it. Shiro has nothing, though he could probably warm himself quite well if he sidled up next to Altair.

He isn't bitter, he has no reason to feel anything about this development. Sentiment is dangerous, sentiment is a weakness. Friends are enough of a risk as it stands and there is no reason he and Shiro cannot continue to be friendly. Though he might advise against it, considering the tension whenever he and Altair are in the same space. Different lives, different attitudes. The man is so handsome, it is a shame he continues to open his mouth-

Not bitter. Not bothered. Not, at least, by that development. What they saw?

Oh, he is bothered. More than he'd like.

More than he'll admit.

Keeping an eye on the fire, their surroundings? Keeps his mind off of it for the most part.

"I appreciate it."

He settles into the quiet for a while, not feeling pressed to fill it, knowing attempting to will make things worse.

There's nothing he can say that's a comfort, there's nothing he can ask that isn't a gross reminder of how much he just learned that he was never supposed to.

After a considerable length of silence, Shiro murmurs, "Most of the people I met on other worlds weren't like that. Most of the universe, it isn't like that. Hard to remember sometimes. But."

Apparently, they are talking about it. Joy of joys.

"You mentioned encouraging rebellion through the use of theater." Which continues to strike Zevran not only as odd, but whimsical. Whatever works works- operettas proposing political change are not so unfamiliar to him, but skits? He leans forward, stirring the fire, one eye on the dripping fat from the rabbit roasting on it's spit.

"I assume that did not happen with the people that made a toy of you."

Shiro's eyes widen and his jaw goes tight but he doesn't look away from the fire, or react in any other way to the word toy. It's not inaccurate, after all. After a moment he shakes his head, slowly.

"Mmno, it did not." He looks down, shrugging faintly. "It happened with the people living across the thousands of worlds the Galra had subjugated over the course of their reign. I was pretty skeptical, but you've got to remember it wasn't just... some scarred up, one-armed human reciting lines poorly." He smiles a little, more tired than anything. Too weary to be properly dry.

"I had a team. We had... a symbol of hope, that was what people really cared about. That was why it worked."

"Figureheads." A beat, and he adjusts to something...kinder. "Heros. We have tales of the like in Antiva- a band of warriors fighting against tyranny, righting wrongs, bringing light to a world lost to blood and death and shadow. They are the subject of a great many operas. Such a tale would not be compelling if there wasn't some hope to it."

He can be kind, it seems. Even if he is slowly winding himself tighter and tighter, waiting for the tangential comment that would poke into his memory.

His shame, his sins.

"Paladins," Shiro says.

"We were paladins."

He frowns a little at the fire, debating if it's too much, or unfair. The concession in word choice is enough to signify that Zevran isn't nearly as removed as he could be. As he probably wishes he were.

"...I failed," he says. "I died."

He shouldn't laugh- but he does. A crackling, dry snap of a thing, not entirely unlike shattering bone. "Aaah. I should have known."

It's bittersweet, the smile he digs up. No true grief, not really, he cannot morn a death that predates his knowing Shiro. "The hero? Always dies."

Such is the way of things. "Usually at the end of the second act. The third-"

He reaches forward, now, cutting a hunk of rabbit off the spit, offering it over. "Is where the memory of the hero's deeds, code, desires inspires the rest of their party to finish the mission. To save the world, the princess, slay the dragon."

Shiro looks over at him then, eyebrows lifted, and accepts the skewer with no hesitation.

"Our princess picked up a weapon and took her place as a paladin once there was a vacancy, but otherwise that's not far off."

Except for the part where they brought him back.

He turns the rabbit over in his fingers, watching the steam curl off the meat, not seeing it, not really. His fingers slow, stop, before he's gone to take a bite, gaze a million miles away, before he starts, slightly, wincing. Forces himself to eat the rabbit, get it down against the roiling of his stomach.

"It's good."

It's not something to discuss. Death happens. In war? Death happens slightly more often. To know that those that have died can appear here? He's had his quiet fears that, perhaps, his ghosts might crawl from the ashes to gut him once more. And they have.

But the fear that they might, perhaps, arrive through the fountain?

It has kept him up at night.

"...I'd known him all my life." A thread, perhaps. Vague details. Not...explaining himself so much as- he doesn't know why he says it. "We grew up together."

That surprises Shiro. He wasn't angling to get Zevran talking about what they'd seen. Really, after the day's taut silence, he was happy to get anything, caustic, cynical, cryptic or otherwise.

Just those few words paint a picture, though, one that makes his chest ache a little. The person you trusted most. The person you were closest to. The person you thought you owed your loyalty to.

"...there's a lot of power in that," he says softly.

"She came later. For a time? We fit. It wasn't...all bad." It was. When he looks back on it, on every jealous moment, every bruise he didn't ask for, every threat simply because Tali had been displeased or felt neglected?

It was.

But when that is all you know? How can you hope for better? Slowly, as it still aches somewhat- Tali had been a friend. The one thing the Crows couldn't take from him, the one constant he'd had since they'd bought him. No matter the abuse it was as Shiro says. A great power in having known him for so long. "If it counts for anything- I avenged her. They sent him to find me. One last offer to come back. Go home. Pretend the venture aiding the wardens had never been."

"Of course it counts," Shiro says, watching Zevran's profile, keeping his voice pitched low. It only counts to Zevran, which Shiro thinks Zev knows. He doesn't owe anyone an explanation, and no one here can grant him forgiveness. It's just not their place.

"You were confronted with... that, all over again, and you made a choice. It... counts for everything."

"Does it truly? You saw. Not ten minutes before we had been planning- she'd asked, as Tali said." Even now, he was Tali. With some shreds of affection, with some bare echo of warmth. "To leave. She and I and we'd fly to Rivian. Start a new life without the killing, without the blood. She asked if I would and I said yes."

It is difficult to hold onto the distance, now. To push back the grief, the self-loathing. "Not ten words from his lips and I slit her throat."

"...it can be easier to believe the worst," Shiro says slowly, "and give in to that, than to believe there's something better. Something more. That you could have."

He's afraid he's about to overstep, but it's too important not to say.

"The people around you, the people who raised you, it seems like they did everything in their power to make sure you couldn't conceive of... better. Let alone think you could have it. Or deserved to. It doesn't undo what you did, nothing can, but. It just." He stifles a sigh, dropping his hand after briefly scrubbing it through the messy fall of white across his forehead.

"It looked like there were two victims in that alley. To me."

He does not cry. Assassins do not weep but-

You don't have to be a Crow anymore.

What is he if not the thing they made him? He cannot banish the knowledge they poured into his bones, forget the venom they put in his veins. Forget how his first thought upon meeting anyone is how he could endear himself to them for safety and how would be the best way to kill them as his second. It's not something he can carve out of himself like so much rot.

Zevran does not weep, but he does hunch inward. Massage the bridge of his nose, eyes tightly shut. "Is that what I am?"

Shiro stands, crossing the few steps' worth of distance between them to sit beside Zevran, though still not touching him. Close enough that the fur brushes Zevran's coat.

"A victim?" he asks. "No. I don't know, am I?"

He tilts his head where it hangs, elbow dug against his knee, feeling weary for a million reasons.

"I don't believe we're what other people make us. I think we're the choices we make for ourselves. Or I hope, anyway," he adds quietly, a tone too dark to be humorous but baring an echo of uncharacteristically caustic dryness, nevertheless.

"You had your arm carved against you while in captivity. I am fairly certain that is what most would call you." Zevran-

Endured. Survived. Traded what he knew to be desirable in himself to the strongest boy in the cell as a child and continued it well onward into adulthood. An exchange of company, of his skin so he would not be bothered at the cost of what few shreds of himself he might have owned honestly.

What word in common, Antivan, or Orlesian is there for this? "...the first thing I chose for myself, well and truly?"

He needs a moment to think about that. "...I bargained for my life. The very thing you know I was attempting to throw away. I...I do not know why."

Why is a tricky one. Shiro's spent the last few months struggling with questions of why, himself.

"...They took my arm in I think the... third month? It was hard to keep track of time." Shiro lifts the hand he has left, flexing the fingers, looking at the callouses across his palm.

"I didn't escape for... Eight or nine more, maybe." Escape was putting it generously. Turned loose by a spy. Nothing of his own doing.

"They had me there for a year. Give or take." His fingertips unerringly find their way up, like a nervous tic, to push absently at the white forelock. He'd almost forgotten what he'd looked like without it. Without his scar. Seeing himself so vividly had been distressing in and of itself.

"And I never lost. I hated fighting. Had never really done it before, hated doing it for a crowd. I could have just stopped, given up, let it be over. I had to choose not to. Every time."

He drops his hand again, watching the delicate crack of the flames off their small fire.

"Maybe you saw an opportunity. Maybe you didn't even recognize it, but in your gut, you knew it was the first real chance you had. So you took it."

"...It has been little over a year. Perhaps a year and a few months, for me." Since that day. Since his choice to die- his failure to see it through. The bargaining afterward. Whatever it was that stayed Jonas' hand initially, whatever it was that had him and Alistair keep him on even with the risks...

The need must have been universal for Alistair's Warden to have made the same choice. Their ragged, merry band facing off against the Blight.

"...But it was a year of following, I suppose. A different set of handlers but handlers none the less. Orders. Missions. Though they were no longer 'find this man and kill him' though we did do our fair share of killing- it was more 'find this gemstone and put it on this pillar or smear blood on this altar or slay a nest of darkspawn.' Whatever job needed doing to raise money for the armies. Whatever good Jonas saw that needed doing, whether or not it was directly connected to the war effort." He turns his slice of rabbit over in his fingers, eyes on the fire. "You do not have them on your world, Darkspawn. I am uncertain how to...describe them, to you."

A beat, a long moment.

"But- perhaps I could show you. If you wanted." Something he could choose to share. Something he could offer that they both...wanted. Instead of having it torn from their minds and lives and pasted on display.

The offer, the gesture of it, is staggering given what they've just been through. Shiro looks staggered, but he also nods, fractionally. If Zevran wants this, wants to share this piece, Shiro considers it a gift, and he won't refuse it.

"Show me."

How was it with Alistair, again? Touching, yes but...He does not wish to remove the fur from Shiro's shoulders, to expose him to the chill of the night. He pops his slice of rabbit in his mouth before peeling off his gloves, turning to reach up and hold Shiro's face much as he had for Alistair.

When in doubt- do exactly the same as before. Like this it is-

He remembers all too well, the First Night. The warmth of wine in their bellies and how sweetly Shiro sighed. Remembers well the tenderness, the affection between Altair and Shiro not long ago. So he does not lean in. He simply cradles Shiro's jaw in one hand and lets his eyes focus on the middle distance- for a moment? Nothing. Just the warmth of the fire crackling, the stillness of the night-

That becomes the muck and oppressive darkness of the Deep Roads. The skittering patter of Genlock's feet, the dull groan of Hurlocks lurching from all sides. The scrape of a shirek's blades against stone, the searing acid and rage of Emissary's hurling their blackened magics about.

The ground shaking force of an Ogre's blow, the rancid puff of its breath, the crushing grip about his ribs before he's able to twist free. Slogging through their endless hordes over the bridge with the Legion of the Dead at their back-

Flickers of memory of the fields surrounding Loathering, once full of life and color, burnt and blackened, reeking of blood and death.

The inhuman wail and roar of the Archdemon, a tainted dragon flying high above, urging onward a massive wave of twisted, tainted bodies swarming the walls of Denerim like locusts.

The noise that leaves Shiro's mouth is low, guttural, and entirely unbidden. He recoils from the images, turning his face away but into Zevran's hand, not breaking the connection, even if he wants to.

"Oh my God," he gasps.

"They die like anything else but-" The taint lies thick on the land, destroys crops- he recalls a few thralls, those he's seen that were touched by the gore and blood, the illness they bring with them. The madness.

The destruction they bring simply by existing aboveground where they were never meant to see the light of day. Zevran lets the knowledge go, thumb swiping against Shiro's cheek out of habit born of doing the same to Alistair. "For the past year- that is what I fought. We win in the end. Slay the dragon, stop the Blight, become great heros, as I said."

Shiro pulls in a ragged breath, and exhales it just as shakily, meeting Zevran's eyes.

"That's... That's insane. Those creatures- that's the result of... of magic, in your world?"

He wants to understand, even if everything in his rational mind wants to reject it. Even if his skin is still crawling.

"The short answer? Yes. Magic. The long answer...we are certain it is some manner of magic but- it happened so long ago? And when a Blight rolls through the continent it takes everything with it. Crops. People. Knowledge. They last years, decades sometimes- but this one in Fereldan? A single year. We were quick to squash it- so not much was lost comparatively speaking."

He lets his hands fall away, pulling his gloves back on to stave off the chill. "I am not certain how it is they came to be- but they come from underground, digging up the old gods and feeding them tainted blood- the dragons. Creating archdemons to guide them to the surface and sweep over the continent like a wave of fire, blood, and death."

[MINGLE] One-Man Show

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