So this is what he does now, apparently. Fall asleep in front of the fire like a very large dog. Very heroic. The Wardens would be proud.
In his defense, it had been a long day. That was always the defense. It held up less well every time he used it.
The ground was… tolerable. If you ignored the roots. And the cold. And the thing digging into his back like it had a personal grudge.
Leliana was playing something soft and meandering. Morrigan was explaining something about flooding patterns in the Korcari Wilds with the kind of focus that suggested she expected him to take notes. He did, briefly. Mentally. Then less so.
At some point, his eyes stopped participating.
What he does remember is waking up disoriented, fire half-dead. Leliana had packed her lute away at some point. Morrigan was gone. His back still hurt.
There was a blanket over him. He didn’t know where it had come from. He had suspicions.
Emma was sitting exactly where she had been, reading by the fire’s last light angled toward the page.
“You drool,” she said, without looking up.
“Was I?” he said, because he had to say something. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Leliana moved your legs at some point.”
“Kind of her.”
“She was tripping on them.”
“Right. Yes.” He pushed himself upright. The fire spat. He rubbed his face and regretted adding soot to the situation.
She turned a page.
“Go to bed, Alistair.”
He didn’t want to. He sat there stubbornly for another minute, then got up and went to his tent.
It had been a long day. A real one this time, not the usual excuse. A bear trap. A chantry Mother who communicated primarily through eyebrow positioning. Approximately sixty darkspawn and then more darkspawn and then, for variety, Morrigan had said something about him being a liability. His response was probably unwise. Sten had watched the exchange like it was a puzzle he intended to solve later.
He found Emma by the fire and sat down next to her. They were talking about the route to Denerim. He meant to stay awake. He was awake, and then—
He was leaning against her. He became aware of it slowly. The weight first, then the angle, then the realization that his head was somewhere it absolutely had not been when he sat down.
He stayed where he was for another moment. Emma didn’t move. She must have decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
“Comfortable?” she asked.
He sat up properly, which took more effort than it should have.
“Sorry,” he said.
“You’re fine.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“You’re heavy,” she added, still reading. “If you’re going to do that, at least commit. Half of you was sliding off.”
“I was sliding?”
She flicked a glance at him. Brief. Assessing. Back to the page.
“You were.”
Alistair opened his mouth, then stopped. He hadn’t gotten past how she hadn’t moved for some time while he slept on her.
He stared at the coals.
“You’re going to fall asleep again,” she said.
“Em, I’m not—” He caught himself. The fire had gone blurry. “Right. I might.”
She didn’t look triumphant about this. That was somehow worse.
“Go to bed.”
“Fine. Fine.”
“You can’t stay out here,” Emma said.
“I’m not.”
“The weather is getting worse,” she continued.
He considered arguing that point, realized he couldn’t, but tried anyway. “The ground is fine.”
“You said that yesterday.”
“And I meant it.”
“You woke up complaining about your back.”
“I always wake up complaining about my back. That’s not new.”
She watched him for a second. Not skeptical, exactly.
“You keep passing out next to an open flame.”
“I’ve yet to fall into the open flame.”
“I’m going to my tent,” she said slowly. “If you want, you can sleep there.”
“With you?” He blinked. He glanced at the tent, then back at her.
“Yes,” she nodded. “We can just talk. And sleep. If we’re lucky.”
“This is—there are certain—”
“You’ve been in there before.”
“Briefly. Under entirely different circumstances. That was a tactical conversation.”
“This is also tactical. The tactic is you stop trying to prove you can function on three hours of sleep.”
“I am not proving anything, here. I’m very aware of that.”
She didn’t push it. Just held his gaze, waiting him out.
He sighed. “I’ll be awkward.”
“You already are.”
“Is that supposed to be helpful?”
“A canvas over your head at night might be helpful.”
He looked at the tent again.
“…I take up a lot of space.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“And you have a lot of books.”
“They won’t mind.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“Alistair.”
There it was. His name in the tone she used when she’d decided and was waiting for him to catch up.
The tent was warmer than outside. It was smaller than he remembered. Or he was larger. Possibly both. He crouched inside it feeling approximately the size of a siege engine.
Emma followed, settled across from him with her lamp and her book, and proceeded to ignore the situation completely.
He sat and they talked. Or he talked, mostly. Redcliffe came up. It tended to. He found himself explaining things he hadn’t planned to, small details about the castle that didn’t matter and somehow did. She asked questions just often enough to keep him going. At some point he ran out of words.
“I’m going to fall asleep,” he said.
“I know.”
“…is that alright?”
She turned a page. “You’re still asking?”
“I’m not asking for—I’m not implying—”
“Go to sleep.”
He lay down before he could think too hard about it. The canvas was close. Everything was close. Emma kept reading. The space was warmer than his own tent would have been.
Alistair listened to the sound of pages turning, the exhale when something she read surprised or annoyed her. He could not have said what the difference was, but he was learning it anyway.
He slept.
And woke to rain. Real rain. The kind that would have soaked straight through him and left him miserable and pretending he wasn’t.
Muffin curled over his face. Emma was asleep, turned away from him, still clutching that book.
He didn’t move. It seemed like a poor decision to disturb anything.
Some nights he makes it to his own tent. Some nights he doesn’t. Sometimes Emma covers him or redirects him depending on some private calculation. Sometimes she doesn’t bother.
And sometimes she taps his boot and points at the tent flap, which is her version of a conversation.
He goes in. She follows when she’s ready.
He sleeps better, which is the part he refuses to think about. There are reasons for that, presumably.
The nightmares of about a hundred darkspawn arguing in his skull never stopped. But there’s a difference between waking up to cold canvas and his own heartbeat, and waking up to Emma two feet away, occasionally saying “go back to sleep”.
They’re heading toward Denerim. Eventually. There are detours. There are always detours.
Morrigan said something, once. About a tether. The way she’d said it made it sound like a weakness. Or a threat. Possibly both.
He thinks about that sometimes. Usually when he wakes up and doesn’t immediately remember where he is.
The ground is dry. The fire’s still going. Emma turns a page.