it didn't sing, it didn't dance

"Have a drink," Fergus says from the fireplace, rising from Cat's chair. "Better yet, have a seat."

What Zevran would like to say is, I had forgotten you were here, and I would like for you to leave. What he says instead is nothing, and he accepts the proffered cup of wine and sinks into Cat's chair while Fergus leans against the mantle of the fireplace.

"They set her up to fail," Fergus says grimly. "The Wardens. Weisshaupt. Whoever."

It's something that has occurred to Zevran, yes, something he has been loath to give too much credence, newly mistrustful of institutions as he is, and attempting, for once in his life, moderation. Or maybe he just hadn't wanted to think about it. Fergus must sense some of this in his glum silence.

"I won't go as far as to say this is all my fault," he says, somewhat gruffly. "I'm not the martyr of the family. But I knew she wasn't doing well when she left Highever. I didn't . . . want to interfere. I didn't want to acknowledge it at all. She's not a child anymore. I had my own grief to manage." 

He looks, abruptly, so guilty that Zevran can see the little boy in him. More than that, Fergus resembles Cat so much with that expression on his face that Zevran has the ill-advised impulse to laugh. 

"I suppose she told you all about that," Fergus sighs.

There isn't any resentment in this declaration, only resignation, and Zevran considers the strange position he now finds himself in, drinking in his lover's bedroom with his lover's bear of a brother, who is perhaps more loose-lipped than he meant to be at the start of the evening. Not that Zevran can begrudge him the drink.

"In truth," he says honestly but carefully, "she has not been as forthcoming with me as you might assume. I know being at Highever was difficult. She also wished to give me the impression that she shouldered it with her accustomed rigor, and in the time we spent together during the Blight, your sister was not a woman given to despair if she could find something else to do."

Fergus chuckles at that, an unexpectedly warm sound, made all the warmer by the silence that comes after it, a slow spiral back into gloom.

"I am a man given to despair," he admits, tilting his cup from side to side, examining the way the liquid conforms to the movement. "My wife and my boy . . . " 

He visibly chokes up, eyes watering. Zevran allows himself a single moment of impatience, callous though it may be. He has had his fill of tears and not nearly enough sleep to suffer more. 

"I was not at my best then," Fergus concludes at last, blessedly sedate. "Cat bore the brunt of it. I might have spared her a little more grief. She might have asked for help sooner than I realized she needed it."

"Perhaps," Zevran says, enough of an agreement that it won't prompt an argument, enough of a potential disavowal that he can avoid another argument, too. Unfortunately, his mouth keeps going. "Or perhaps she would have been too stubborn either way."

"You'll have to get used to it," Fergus agrees, still divining his drink.

Abruptly, he transfers his attention to Zevran, unnervingly focused. 

"I suppose we haven't had the opportunity to really get to know each other," he points out, and Zevran once more swallows a laugh that would surely earn him little favor. 

"What would you like to know?" he asks, deciding that if this takes a turn for the unpleasant, it will not vary with what has occurred so far, and so selfishly, he'd rather just get it over with. 

Fergus rubs the tips over his fingers over his lips, but his cheeks give away the smile he's attempting to suppress.

"Should I interrogate you?" he quips. "Crows don't break under torture, or so I've heard."

"No, we have that habit beaten out of us," Zevran replies bluntly, and again that mortified guilt rearranges the shape of Cat's brother's face until the likeness is unmistakable. "Forgive me, Your Lordship, it has been a long day. So, ironically, I am a perfect candidate for interrogation."

"Don't call me 'Your Lordship,'" Fergus replies. "Out there, I'll be a teyrn, but in here, I'd appreciate less formality. Cat would kill me, for one. Or add it to the list of reasons why she'd be justified." 

"Fergus, then," Zevran agrees.

"Zevran," Fergus concurs, and it shouldn't surprise him that Fergus, like Cat, pronounces his name in the Antivan way, but it's nevertheless a jolt. "What do you do now that you're no longer a Crow?"

Zevran wishes desperately that Cat had given him the details of what, exactly, she'd relayed to her brother about him, and in retrospect, sort of shocking that he didn't pump her for information when he'd had the chance, enamored as he is of hearing how others describe him. She surely must have assured Fergus that her lover no longer honors any contract stipulating her death, and it follows that she would have emphasized his relatively newfound liberation from an organization that Fergus' departed Antivan wife had perhaps mentioned. 

"I remain an assassin, but I am more of an independent man now," he says. "I am in Antiva more than Ferelden, though I travel. Generally, people do not retire from the Crows, but thus far, I have managed it." 

He smiles briefly, humorlessly. A stupid joke, but Fergus looks thoughtful.

"Which of the Houses did you belong to?" he asks. 

"Arainai," Zevran answers, searching the other man's face, but this name doesn't seem to spark any recognition.

"My wife's family made a deal with House Gegar," Fergus explains. "It's the only one I know of."

House Gegar. It would make sense. A merchant's house, largely a joke. The seat of their power is in Genellan, where trade is robust. He can remember Taliesen complaining every time he was sent to guard a shipment, but all the Houses benefited from the commerce of House Gegar, and so they were a joke only in private. Kiss the ring, Taliesen had always muttered, but he'd been as awed as anyone else at the wealth they had been permitted to see, knowing as they all did that whatever was shipped down the River Volo was a fraction of the whole.

"Your wife was from the provinces, if I recall correctly," Zevran says, and at Fergus' raised eyebrows, he adds, "Cat mentioned it once. Genellan."

"Did she tell you much about my wife?" Fergus asks curiously. "Any of her family, really?"

"Not until after Arl Eamon guessed who she was." His drink long since forgotten, he sets the cup on the floor in front of him. He needs no other incentive to doze off, and the warmth from the fire makes it difficult to keep his head upright as it is. "She takes her Wardening very seriously, you know."

"Yes," Fergus says, unease clear. 

"She mentioned you threw her slipper down a well once," Zevran recalls suddenly. He can remember the weight of Cat's skull on his belly, the bizarre comfort of being used as a pillow. His fingers in her hair as if he could sift through her thoughts that way, puzzle her out. "And she — "

" — went into the well after it," Fergus finishes for him, eyes bright with a wonder that Zevran doesn't want to look at directly. "Maker. She bullied me into lowering her into that well, and I told her, over and over again, it won't work, you'll only get hurt, but she could talk a stone into singing. Our father was furious." 

He trails off, caught in the memory like a spider web, and even as he comes back to the present, Zevran imagines he can see the wisps of it still clinging to him.

"It was things like that," Zevran says after a moment. "Small things. We did not have time to," he waves a hand, "truly, you know. There was the Blight." There was being ambushed by Taliesen. There was the mad rush to Redcliffe only to turn right back around. 

"How long do you think it will take for you to finish your business in Antiva?" Fergus asks, and now there is a more definite sense of a conversational direction. 

"I cannot rightly say, Fergus," Zevran replies, a little dryly.

"I see," Fergus says. Zevran shrugs. "Do you two have . . . plans?" 

Zevran regards the other man for a moment. He has no idea what Cat has told her brother about him, and neither does he know what, if anything, she has divulged about what being a Warden means. That she will never have children, that she should have died when she killed the archdemon. That becoming a Warden shortened her lifespan beyond the surface assumptions, a hazy and uncertain mortality. For that matter, Zevran himself cannot say he is an expert in what being a Warden truly means, for Cat specifically or for them as a couple, beyond that she can no more walk away from her life than he from his. He opts for purposeful cluelessness.

"What plans do you mean?" he asks.

"To be married," Fergus replies with a bracing frankness, and this time, Zevran cannot contain his laugh, a quiet, breathy, and altogether skeptical noise. 

Fergus' brow furrows. Zevran winces.

"Let neither of us pretend that we do not know that Cat and I are hardly the first human and the first elf to ever — " Brasca. " — enter into a romantic relationship with each other, but the rules of the Chantry did not change overmuch during your time in the Wilds. Such a marriage would not be sanctioned in most chantries."

"We can procure a willing priest," Fergus says easily, nigh dismissively in the way of powerful men, and for all that he handwaves formality in the hopes of appeasing his sister, he is still a teyrn. "Such marriages have happened before. In Highever, even."

Zevran has a brief, disorienting vision of himself and Cat before an altar, a benevolent Revered Mother passing her hands above their heads. It is as ridiculous as the ensuing pang of longing in his chest. 

"Well, don't let me rush you," Fergus adds, misinterpreting whatever expression had crossed Zevran's face. 

"I am not sure marriages are even allowed amongst Grey Wardens," Zevran says after a moment. He imagines they would be more akin to suicide pacts. And granted, they've sort of already covered that. "The Maker smiles sadly, as the saying goes."

Fergus falls silent at that, sipping his wine. Zevran allows himself to rest his eyes under the pretext of massaging them.

"They've set her up to fail," Fergus says again after a moment. "But I haven't figured out why."

Because she survived where she should have died killing the archdemon, Zevran could say, but that would require mentioning, at the very least, a ritual ensuring Cat's survival, and Fergus seems the type to follow up. He suspects the Wardens have grown accustomed to letting Ferelden manage Ferelden, that if at any point in the many intervening years between the Wardens' expulsion and the Fifth Blight, Weisshaupt had felt it truly imperative to reestablish the Fereldan arm of the order, they would have. There is much at play here, none of it easily explained even assuming a full night's rest and an appropriate hour. 

"Well," Cat's brother says, and he drains his cup. "Forgive me. I should let you sleep. Let's not make a show of pretending you're off to your room," he adds, somewhat benevolently, and while Zevran had not realized that that was something they might have still been pretending, at least with Fergus, he supposes he's glad they definitely aren't now.

"Things will be better in the morning," Zevran says, because it's the sort of thing people say. 

Fergus chuckles.

"An optimist, are you?" He stretches with a groan. "Well. I must say, it's not every day I watch a man poison my sister."

"I do not intend to make it a regular occurrence," Zevran says tiredly.

Fergus chuckles again, somewhat sadly.

"Goodnight, Zevran," he says, and he claps him on the shoulder before nabbing the bottle of wine from where he'd placed it on Cat's desk and departing, easing the door closed behind him with a conscientious restraint.

Zevran looks at the bed. Tavish looks back at him, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. He makes a harrumphing noise, then lays his head back down as if to say, I think that went all right.