faderift | II. CLOSED.

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II. CLOSED.

WHO: Dorian Pavus and Beneventa Thevenet
WHAT: Dorian and Benevenuta investigate the matter of Magister Pavus's retainer in Redcliffe, and then ride back to Skyhold.
WHEN: Haring 10
WHERE: On the road from Redcliffe.
NOTES: Feelings.

They'd left Redcliffe at a brisk canter, bordering on gallop. Kicking dust and frightening peasants, Dorian had set the pace. There would be no drinking at the tavern.

Which is a damn shame, because there's fuck all between Redcliffe and the ride back up the Frostback Mountains. Not that Dorian is completely unprepared; he hadn't touched his flagon of wine all this journey, as if miraculously sensing he might want it for the trip up. This probably still holds true, even if he rides with the sort of grim determination of a man who is content with the thought of forcing his steed (a spirited gelding by the name of Bucks) at a steady trot for the next two days.

His composure had shattered as soon as his father had appeared at the bottom of the tavern staircase. Halward Pavus, here, in the south, with his immaculate enchanter robes, his east Tevene accent that Dorian himself had lost somewhere around his fourth Circle. It was impossible, and he'd shouted some things he'd rather not have shouted in Benevenuta's presence. After she'd left, and after he'd exited the tavern -- an optimistic half an hour -- he hadn't shouted anything at all, and only spoken the necessary amount to convey he was well and they would be leaving, after all, his expression stormy.

The wind is coming down cold off the Frostbacks and night is beginning to paint the sky, around when his horse stubbornly slows into a walk. He curses under his breath in a swift hiss of Tevene; "Fasta vass."

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Dorian, who wouldn't mind risking life or limb to drink on his way up the Frostback Mountains if left unattended, resigns himself to practicality when he sees Benevenuta go to tie the horses, giving up the reins on his as he regards the location that Bucks has chosen for them. It could be worse, as far as nature goes. It will only get colder from here.

He uncaps his flagon and moves to sit, where the thick roots of a dark-barked tree create a space to do so between them. Resting a foot against where root ripples up from the hard-packed earth, Dorian glances up to where he expects Benevenuta to join him.

Time to get super drunk probably.

"I can only imagine what you must think," he says. "A nobleman's scion, running away from home to escape unwanted marriage and responsibility. Some hack romantic's likely written my story before I ever got to enact it."

It's about all that was heard, too, before Benevenuta exercised discretion. Probably for the best. It had only gotten uglier.

It is cold. All the glyphs and carefully lined clothes and preparation do little to properly detract from this. Her nose is cold and her fingers ache and Dorian is mad if he thinks for a moment she'd have let him wobble drunk through the dark with or without her, draped over his poor horse - so when she joins him, she nestles herself into the side of him that no frowning, maternal Orlesian mage could induce him to properly cover. They might be here for some time. She is not explaining to Adelaide why she's brought him back less a nipple.

"I have read it," she tells him, struggling for a moment with her own flagon before her chilled fingers can prise it open. "A bit saucy. The ending left a bit to be desired. I would rather know it from the horse's own smart mouth."

Dorian, resigned already to practicality, resigns himself now to affection and companionship, feeling a little of his own edge wear down on its own. Good wine sloshes about in leather as he takes a long pull from it, leaning back and into the warmth produced by Benevenuta's slight shape nestled into his side.

"Neigh," is sighed, leaning his head back against rough tree bark. "It's not the least bit saucy, I'm afraid -- at least, not from where I was standing. If you're of the Imperium, the scandal, I'm given to understand, was particularly delectable. Except that they never even knew the half of it."

And it's that, the half of it, that seems to make it all so much worse.

He edges his thumbnail against the lip of the drinking container. "I don't have to explain to you the importance of lineage in Tevinter, yes? It's not just a matter of names and wealth, but breeding."

"My mother was Tevinter," she says, by way of agreement; her mother is alive, not gone, but she is also not what she once was, remade by her own choice in the image of her choosing. Benevenuta knows little of that history - enough, she thinks. Her father was not a rebellion, or at least not purposefully, but probably it wouldn't displease either of them to be defiant.

She doesn't think of them as defiant. But they were young once. It is, she reflects, as silly a tale. She has no such story of herself to tell - she listens to their stories, in Skyhold, in Redcliffe. Here.

It is different.

It isn't that she can see no benefit in listening to Dorian; she can. She implied as much to Stannis, last they spoke before he left - a pang, unexpected - to soothe him, with mixed results, but -

She would listen if she couldn't. It would matter, if the only thing it meant would be that she had heard him speak his piece.

Her statement is just that, a statement. It doesn't preface some answering tale. It speaks to her grasp of the situation, and that he may speak on without stopping to explain the simplest things. Let him worry about the complicated ones. She tilts her flagon at him, invitation to continue, and rests her head against his shoulder. The hard press of her tightly woven crown of braids will probably get uncomfortable.

A little numb to the discomfort of the pattern of hard braids against bare skin, among other things, Dorian offers no complaint, eyes hooded as he regards the flagon he holds. Thoughtful.

"It isn't uncommon. Men who like men, marrying women for the sake of bloodline. I grew up watching my parents loathe one another, but as far as I know, their proclivities matched. It wasn't a life I wanted, nor one I could stand. It threatened everything my father cared for. The Pavus lineage. Generations of careful breed and legacy and wealth, and they got me."

That earns a touch of a laugh in his tone, as if the joke were on someone else.

"He had me dragged back home, some few years ago, and attempted to perform a blood magic ritual. One that would alter what I am, to make me as something he wanted better. Perhaps it would have worked, but just as likely would have killed me. A chance he was willing to take." His fingers work tighter around the flagon. "I hadn't seen him since. Today, he desired my forgiveness."

A breath sucked in - the description is sparse, but the picture it paints is clear and horrifying in an immediate way she isn't entirely prepared for.

It is a thoughtful question that she asks, though, when the wine has softened the way a little:

"Is it his act or your anger he so regrets?"

"I'm not sure he can separate the two from one another."

The wine again sloshes in its container as he sips from it, wetting his voice that had felt like it was becoming thick in his throat. "He'd always loathed blood magic, and I grew up to share in that loathing -- not only of the act itself, but of the mage who would wield it. I'm not sure what he expected."

But hatred hasn't entered his tone. There still exists a few embers of anger, the old kind that won't wink out any time soon, but muffled in other dampening effects, his tone sooty with simpler sadness.

Not to be heard, she thinks. In his place - she would never be in his place - it is an act of desperate resignation. She believes now as she didn't before, the things he wrote to her; her pity is more distant than Dorian's pain. Whichever he regrets for its cause, what he grieves is the loss of his son.

"If he has learned anything, nothing," she says, curving her hands around her wineskin as if it might warm her. (It does not.) "And if he expects nothing and reaches regardless ... all of these mistakes people make, the terrible things done that we shake our heads and say, there is no coming back. Maybe only, no one has tried."

After a moment,

"I can't abide that sort of fatalistic laziness."

Dorian hefts his wine in a broad sort of gesture, as if indicating-- Tevinter, the past, the direction they just came from, who can really say. He isn't drunk enough. He is working on it. "And even with his regret, I will always be the one who drove him to such measures."

So, cheers. He drinks deeply, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His knuckles press there for a little longer, face turning away, before his hand drops again. He settles more comfortably against her.

"Apologies, that you bore witness to that whole display. But I'm glad you brought me out. It was-- something."

"No apology," she waves it away (with the wine; many things can be dismissed with liberal application thereof). "I'm sorry if I saw more than you'd have chosen, but I thought - that you should see, at least. And not be alone."

And have a friend with him, specifically, but for one reason or another - for lots of reasons - she shies away from using the word. Not from presuming it; no, this is friendship, she thinks. He didn't have to accept her company or confide in her. In Skyhold she is but one more mage, for all that the new council lends weight to her voice; she thinks that were he so ruthless, she wouldn't be quite valuable enough to cultivate with his own soft underbelly. There are higher prizes, here. Less ambitious, likely, but higher.

(She thinks he is not so ruthless. He won't have to be - she can be ruthless for him. It's nice, a little, to want to protect a person instead of the whole world. It feels eminently achievable.)

"You would have ridden back drunk and our Lady of Orlais would have gestured at you. Orlesianly. It would be undignified. You need me."

To protect him from Adelaide. Yes.

Dorian huffs a laugh at that.

"Well. I can't deny that."

And so begins a few minutes of companionable silence (wherein they drink), wherein Dorian can loosely circle the notion of friendship himself. He doesn't have many, and he might have confessed that he considers her to be one if he thought she'd welcome it, or that it was necessary, but he's not so sure she would, and he's not so sure it is.

It's getting darker, steadily. Soon, a fire is in order. Fortunately, they're magic, so it won't be hard, and the wine releasing its warmth into his blood staves off this responsibility a little longer. "No one else knows," he says, finally. A little contemplative for all that he thinks it is also not unimportant that she's made aware. "Not even Felix understands exactly what happened."

Distracted with dying slowly of the Blight, as he is.

Mathematically and logically and by any measure she cares to use, Dorian Pavus is her friend. She might admit it out loud, if she has to - but this is fine, for now. It pleases her to be trusted and she treasures, unexpectedly, that trust for its own sake and not for what she might yet use it for. (She might yet use it - she knows herself too well to tell that pretty lie. But she holds it to her because it is hers.)

"It is no small thing to speak of if you speak not of retribution."

Even in Tevinter, Halward Pavus crossed a line. It interests her that he doesn't. She isn't sure she would, in his place. Then - she isn't sure she wouldn't have submitted, where he did not.

On that thought -

"You are perhaps the boldest man I know."

There's a small sound at that, like the beginnings of a scoff, before it dies in his throat and Dorian is left with his own silence. Warmer, then, and the curl of an almost smile twinges at the corner of his mouth.

Retribution. There's nothing in him that wants that.

"Thank you for saying so." He allows that to stand, before he continues with, "And if we're truly set to camp here, I might as well work on being the drunkest man you know. It's been that sort of day."

Her laugh is a bit of warmth in all of this winter around them - literally, a cuff of air that solidifies for a moment, the way heat does in weather like this. "I have every faith in you," she says, tilting her head back to smile up at him. "Even," magnanimous, "had you any competition here."

A moment later, with some asperity, "In the fucking southern mountains. Could the Inquisition not have been established to the north, Dorian? I think they spite us. I told Adelaide I would be gone a while and she told me to dress warmly," as if this is a terrible offense.

"Though I see you did not receive the same advice."

"Perhaps she thinks there's hope for you yet. She's accepted me as I am, you see. Which is, ostensibly, perpetually underdressed."

Here seems like a good time to adjust enough so as to fit a companionable arm across her shoulders, slotting comfortable between the back of her neck and rough tree bark. Her braids printing into his skin is becoming a bit tiresome, but in a distant sort of way that he is hoping to continue to stave off by drinking more, along with the damp, biting chill of the Ferelden forest.

"Ah, well, I am only Nevarran," she concedes, "whereas you, of course, are the most terrifying thing in Ferelden bar only the breach."

A Tevinter, Maker forbid.

With some amusement, "Knight-Commander Baratheon gave me such a warning as to your company, do you recall? I think had I told him my own parentage he would have liked me much less."

Not, granted, that he'd ever have admitted to liking her in the slightest before that.

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II. CLOSED.

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