maradeux wrote...
(banner by Minaleth)
Prompt: "Do you stare at everyone like that?" - Zevran's eyes, Zevran's gazes.
Draw, paint, write, knit... - everything is allowed as long as you do not need longer than 60 minutes for the realization.
Deadline: Sunday, 31th Oct. 2010, 10:00 CET
Prize: Poem or short story about a topic of your choice. 
“Do you stare at everyone like that?” the Warden asked quietly. Zevran could certainly understand her hesitance. Caunira Surana had spent most of her life in a dank, isolated tower and had no memories of the outside from before she had been recruited into the Grey Wardens. She wouldn’t talk about what had happened but he had gathered that it involved some sort of blood magic scandal although he’d yet to see any evidence that she possessed any such talents.
At the Circle Tower, there had been only templars who were not supposed to get involved with mages and her fellow mages that she could gotten involved with. Of the mages, there was only one who had stood out to her as being at all spirited enough to be worth considering. Tragically – well, for her – he was a human which was a deal-breaker in and of itself and he was prone to chronically escaping so getting too close to him would have made her life there difficult so she had made sure to keep her distance and not allow herself to become too attached. Caunira was not at all experienced when it came to flirting and sex (although quite adept at turning people down if what he’d seen with Alistair and Leliana was any indication) and it showed in her question.
Most of the people he had known and been with would stare back unabashedly and begin to move towards sex or even simply jump him if they weren’t the patient sort. Something told him that that wouldn’t go over very well with Caunira and he did not wish to anger her for several reasons. She was his only protection against the Crows now that he had failed to kill her, of course, as well as the fact that she was a powerful mage and virgins were rarely interested in angry sex.
Did he stare at everybody the way he stared at her? It wasn’t like he had a mirror with him so he could see how, exactly, he stared at her and he hadn’t had to practice his stare for quite some time and so he wasn’t entirely sure though he rather doubted it. When he was a child growing up in an Antivan ****house, he had had just one stare: that of a resigned boy who watched other boys only a little older than him being sold off to many anonymous men and, occasionally, broken by them. He had seen the stares that they and many of the women of the ****house had used to entice their customers but, unlike with the massages he’d been taught, he had simply absorbed it and made no effort to make it his own.
When Zevran was seven he was sold himself but not to horny men – and sometimes women – but rather to the illustrious Antivan Crows. Zevran had been terrified at the prospect of being an assassin but he had seen them around sometimes, oftentimes in the very ****house he had grown up in, and they were all confident, powerful men. He had truly been lucky to escape the fate of the other ****-bred boys. Of course, such power and prestige did not come easily and the Crows training started to produce their first casualties in a little less than a year. That was when Zevran learned his second stare. The Crows didn’t want horror at death or weepy sentimentalism. They didn’t want fear and they didn’t want individualism. They had taught him to gaze impassively no matter what new sight lay before his eyes. It was a very useful skill, that, and it had saved his life on more than one occasion.
The years passed and Zevran had excelled in his training. He had thrown himself into it, naturally, desperate to survive and eager to excel at something other than looks which, given his species, were something that had always drawn people to him. Just because he wanted to be recognized for something besides that was no reason not to cultivate his innate talents, however, especially seeing as how seduction was such a useful tool for an assassin. That was when he developed his third stare. It had taken him more hours than he cared to admit practicing in front of a mirror and feeling very foolish and not at all enticed but eventually he had managed to take his half-forgotten memories from his years in the ****house and turn it into the kind of stare that almost without exception lured whoever he used it on into his bed. His targets, his superiors, Taliesin, Rinna…
Zevran was afraid that if he tried his usual alluring gaze on Caunira then she’d become spooked and he’d miss his chance with her. She looked a little like Rinna which both made him even more eager to pursue her and yet strangely reluctant. Caunira was
not Rinna, he sternly reminded himself, and she would not meet the same fate. If nothing else, she had proven the ability to best him so even if he tried to kill her (again) she would be able to survive it. The Warden was his newest master but, unlike all of his previous ones, she didn’t seem to know what to do with him. If she had asked, Zevran would have had plenty of suggestions but she never did. She just talked to him for hours on end about his past and hers and genuinely seemed interested in getting to know him. If only for the sake of making sure that he wasn’t planning on trying his hand at killing her again, Zevran could understand the use of that.
How did he stare at her? He had caught himself staring several times – notably, right before she had asked him that question – and though he lacked the ability to see how it appeared to her, his gaze felt different than it ever had before. Almost
everything with her felt different than it had before. A new country, a new and nobler purpose, a new game to play…he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it yet. But he did know one thing, at least.
“Not everyone.”
Like I think someone pointed out about other Wardens, he's pretty young, and a bit naive -- he took Zevran's explanation about the Crows at face value, and he definitely felt sympathy for someone who had been enslaved and forced to become an assassin to survive. It kind of appealed to him that Zev didn't beg or grovel or whatever to be spared, and his matter-of-factness about everything made Alessar feel like he was less likely to be lying. He was also kind of intrigued by the fact that Zevran seemed to be in charge of the attack -- an armed elf leading a group of humans was a novel idea to him... well, besides his own situation 
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