zev/isabela in alpha state and more of the Everything Goes Back To Estel
aka "it takes like 13 years but zevran DOES get a happy ending", ft mentions of The Kids and like. it is a Really happy ending. i tried to make up for the zev/estel misery??
yeah...... gods ok
ok so first you have to understand that in my alpha world state zevran was involved with my warden and estel died to kill the archdemon, and that isabela was involved with my hawke but petra ultimately wound up with merrill and isabela stayed with the two of them together for a while before she moved on bc she never stays put long
also isabela was friends with estel and like they did the threesome thing soooo. yeah zev and isabela have all that history AND zevran's dead lover (arguably the only true love of his life up to that point and they were just starting to be like. happy and safe and think about building some kind of life together even if the calling was hanging over their heads and life is full of dangerous surprises but neither of them thought it would end that soon and not like that haha i love to die) so they have that between them to boot
they love and understand each other fiercely in a way literally no one else in the world will ever be able to and they wind up travelling together after da2 after isabela leaves merrill and petra and varric and then at some point or another after they've been together for quite some time they just realize that like. they're going to stay together for the rest of their lives and they're both ok with that idea. they're never going to get tired of each other. they're never going to feel unsafe with each other. they'll never feel lonely or like they're just drifting aimlessly place to place if they have each other, because they make life an adventure to live, so long as they live it together
and like isabela is bad at love and zevran had finally gotten it after all that time but wounds like that don't heal all the way really ever and besides he kind of didnt let himself get over it? like estel has been dead for a dozen years at that point but he is really like. he doesn't WANT to get over them he doesn't WANT to move on he really doesn't want to risk falling in love again because he loved them so much and they were so good for him and he lost them so soon and so hard and some part of him whether or not that's something he admits to himself really hasn't given up blaming himself in this twisted around way for their death
literally both isabela and zevran kind of have this idea that they're both like. cursed. if they love someone that person will ultimately get hurt. and they'll lose them in the long run and they won't be able to keep them safe and they can't deal with that
so it takes them a long time to realize that they're kind of in love with each other and that it happened so slowly and accidentally that they never had the butterflies or the awkwardness of courtship they just slipped somehow into the place where they share everything effortlessly and they trust each other implicitly and they'll be happy no matter what as long as they stay together. and they've always been attracted to each other obviously and neither of them cares if they other has other sorts of affairs obviously but they both know that at the end of the day they're for each other now and that's. ridiculous. they have a stable life together (as stable as you can be when you go around sailing and travelling and getting into tons of trouble i mean).
when they visit hawke and their family, the kids call them aunt isabela and uncle zevran
at some point when they're extremely drunk they even wind up somehow getting married. neither of them remember the wedding and both suspect foul play but no one present will fess up to being instigator, but its on the records at the chantry in denerim and that means it must have actually happened, so, well, that actually happened
(it was a complicated prank idea worked out between hawke, varric, and leliana, actually, though its unclear whether the original prank idea that varric and hawke came up with was to have a fake wedding that they did remember or a real wedding that they didn't. so they also suspect foul play, which is completely dead on, because it was pretty much all leliana pulling the strings there, unsurprisingly. she had some kind of idea that this might just wind up sitting in the back of zev and isabela's heads and like. it would help finish healing the wound they'd all suffered. and she should know. she'd loved their warden too.)
they never have kids of their own, but they visit hawke, merrill, and varric's kids a lot. to a slightly lesser extent, they're involved in aveline and donnic's kids lives too, just with aveline supervising a little more strictly for their visits than hawke's family does, especially after one of her twins declares at dinner during a visit that she wants to be a pirate queen when she grows up too!
they see all the kids grow up, see the circles dissolved, leliana crowned divine, see the world change, finally, for the better.
they're both a little staggered when they meet the inquisitor for the first time at one point, on invitation to a banquet in skyhold by varric and hawke and leliana, because this tiny redhead dalish elf reminds them both Way Too Much of estel.
zevran later comments on it and leliana's like "i suppose it takes a very particular kind of person to save the world, doesn't it?"
(everyone glances over to where petra is stuffing an entire turkey leg in their mouth, and they stop and go "what" and leliana laughs and is like "nothing". petra is an entire inch and a half shorter than ruivë, and they both share their complexion, hair colour, and eye colour - the same estel had. a very particular kind of person indeed. apparently having strong ties to the dalish helps too, being as the only one of the three of them who wasn't dalish went on to marry one and become sort of an honorary elf more or less to several of the clans at least and to have two elvhen children)
and perhaps most unexpected of all for the both of them, they both live a long time. neither expected to cross much past thirty, if that, but they both somehow manage to grow old together.