Chapter Text
Wen had plenty to do; there was no reason to be stopping outside the bakery in Denerim. It was just that—well, she remembered standing here with her mother once. They hadn’t been able to afford such fine pastries then, but now…now she had a belt pouch jingling with the money of dead men and little to do with it.
Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad to…to buy just a little something? She could even share. Yes; it could be for morale. Or—
“Something you need?” Wynne asked beside her and Arianwen straightened abruptly.
“No. Nothing. Nevermind.”
“What—” the mage began, but as she spoke a lean girl erupted from the shop, quick as a fox in the woods. The baker was right on her heels, his face red, a cloth waving from one hand.
“Come back here you—!” he shouted, but it was too late. The little elven girl, yellow pigtails uneven on either side of her head, had darted around a corner and vanished.
“Agh!” the man shouted, drawing up short and propping one fist on his hip. “Wretch of a girl.”
The shopkeep noticed the four of them then, eyes narrowing at once.
“Something I can help you with?” he asked, his tone suggesting that helping them was the last thing he had any interest in doing.
All at once, Wen felt dusty and small again, as small as the girl running away. What was it about Denerim that clawed at every ounce of who she’d become? What was it about being home that forced her to remember how she’d been before she left?
“No,” she told the baker coldly, eyeing him in the way most tended to find unnerving, and turned away. The others were exchanging a look; she could tell even without looking. That was not her problem. Let them look however they wanted; she wasn’t going to explain herself.
It had been a foolish idea anyway.
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Arianwen had a headache, she wanted to go to bed, and she hadn’t seen Zevran in hours.
How annoying that she’d gotten used to finding him before she went to bed. When had that happened? How had it crept up on her? She scowled at the fire now, aware that everyone else could see her mood very plainly, and abruptly stood.
“Night,” she spat at the fire, and Alistair, who’d been sharpening his sword on the other side of the fire, winced.
“Ah—g’night! Sleep tight! Don’t let the—ow! What was that for, I was only…”
His voice trailed off as she walked away, but she’d already stopped paying attention anyway.
What was the use of a lover, she wondered sourly, if he isn’t going to be around when I have frustrations to work off?
She thrust the flap of her tent open, ducked inside, and paused. Her tent ought to have been empty. She hadn’t seen anyone go inside. And yet…
Zevran lay over her bedroll, propped on one elbow. He looked entirely too satisfied with himself, his teeth gleaming in the firelight that shone through the open tent flap, one leg propped up at an angle.
“Good evening, mi vida,” he said. “I expected you earlier than this, but do not worry; I will not hold it against you.”
Wen stared at him, outraged, and in her shock it took her a moment to realize that the dim thing set in front of him was, in fact, a platter full of tiny, frilly cakes.
The precise ones she’d been staring at earlier, actually.
“You…? How—But you weren’t even there!” Wen said, eyes skipping between his smug expression and the pile of pink and white cakes.
“I know,” he said mournfully. “Can you believe that the giant had to tell me about them?”
“Sten?” she said, perhaps a touch louder than necessary because a deep voice answered her.
“Yes? What is it?”
“Nothing—nevermind,” Wen called over her shoulder and stepped the rest of the way into the tent.
“But why?” she said, reaching out to touch the uppermost cake and thinking better of it at the last moment.
“Because you wanted them,” Zevran said, sitting up and pushing himself back on the mat, “and you did not have them.”
Wen shrugged off her leather armor, leaving her in only her leggings and tunic. When she sat across from him, legs crossed, she searched his face.
“That’s not an answer.”
In the shadows, it was harder to tell what he was thinking. That was annoying, but not unexpected. She might’ve fetched a lantern from outside, only Leliana had quietly told her that lighting the tent from within meant that everyone else could see their silhouettes quite clearly. The rest of them hearing she and Zevran was one thing—it could hardly be avoided, given the close quarters—but seeing was one step too far.
That this choice had left her in the dark now, literally and figuratively, was…unfortunate.
“Of course it is,” he told her, and moved in the shadows.
A moment later, something pressed softly against her bottom lip.
“Try,” he told her. “I am certain you will enjoy it. I ate one on my way back and I feel they were quite worth the trouble of stealing them.”
Wen breathed in through her nose. The cake smelled of berries, of honey and sugar and summertime. It smelled like all the things she’d never had as a child, all the things she’d never thought to seek for herself as an adult.
Zevran held steady when she opened her mouth and took a bite. It was sweet; almost too sweet, save the burst of tartness from the berries. She made a soft noise, which might, to the lascivious, be called a moan, and heard his answering laugh in the dark.
“Good, yes?” he asked. “I took all the different colors I could find while the man was chasing some child down the street. Any shopkeep in Antiva would tell him the foolishness of such a thing. Why, it used to be my job to annoy the—”
“Hush,” she said, and leaned over the platter to kiss him, her lips still tasting of sugar and berries. After a moment, she felt the slide of his tongue over her lower lip, licking the rest of the sweetness from her skin.
“Thank you,” she told him, “No—don’t tell me another story. Thank you; you didn’t have to do this, but you did. That means something.”
“I—” he sighed, and his breath brushed lightly over her chin. “Yes. You are…welcome.”
“Mmm,” she said in acknowledgement, and trailed her fingers down his arm to his wrist, lifting the rest of the cake to her mouth.
“One kiss for every bite,” she told him once she’d swallowed. His lips curved beneath her mouth.
“Is that the price for such things in Ferelden?” he said, his nose nudging hers, “Hmm. Perhaps I might have waited for the baker to come back, then. He did not look so horrible, after all.”
Wen snorted faintly and pressed her mouth to his again, her fingertips tracing the smile she couldn’t see on his face. It was a good kiss, a long kiss, one or the other tilting their head to go on touching whenever it might’ve ended naturally instead. When she finally broke away and both of them breathing a little harder, she felt him shift.
“You know,” he said, “there are plenty more of those right here if you would like to do that again.”
Arianwen snorted, but turned to taste the next—and he was right.
They were delicious.
