Work Text:
The room is bare and empty of anything but a bed. The bed is a mat on the floor. Dim light drips in through a small window in the western wall. Their host, a round old woman, offers an apologetic smile with the unlit lantern she holds out to Marcoh's companion.
When Marcoh lies down that night the floor presses up hard against his healing ribs through the mat. The cold from the ground and the drafty door seeps into him and takes deep, aching root in his chest and in the stiff muscles of his face, but he is too tired to really feel it. He is asleep almost at once, even before Scar puts out the lantern and lies down beside him.
Scar is already gone when Marcoh wakes early the next morning, pulled uneasily from sleep by the wisps of a dream he is forgetting. The only trace of his companion is the pack leaned against the wall and the faint impression of a body on the other side of the mat; it's cold when Marcoh touches it.
Voices rise outside, hushed in the cold dark air. The lantern rests unlit on the floor beside him, an invitation. He slept in his coat, so there is no need to do anything but light the lantern and take it up and go out under the gray sky among the people.
He catches sight of Scar from time to time throughout the day; he isn't hard to pick out from a distance, even among a crowd. It's not just his height or his formidable build — here, among his people, he carries himself with an air that commands Marcoh's attention. More than once Marcoh looks up from taking a pulse or administering an injection to see Scar pass by him with the elder men and women of this settlement, shoulders relaxed more than usual and limbs looser, closer to peace than Marcoh has seen him before. The look of him makes it harder for Marcoh to set his mind back to his work.
All day he receives the people outside the door of the little room that he and Scar were given, and in their houses when they cannot come to him. The work is easy, the people kind, and regret and bitter yearning rise together in the back of his throat. It seems a simple thing, to heal a wound.
The sky is dark all day. Clouds gather and roll furiously over the settlement and disperse and gather again as the wind gathers strength. Marcoh's face hurts with sharp little twinges and his back begins to ache when he bends down or stands up, but no snow falls. As the day gives way to the night, the wind grows loud in the rafters of the room and whistles below the door.
Marcoh finishes with the list he is writing of the supplies these people will need and sets it aside. The lantern flame leaps and dips wildly. He goes over to the window and looks out.
A few people still stand around the firepit down the road, beside a neighboring shack. Someone flings a log onto the fire. Sparks fly up and die in the air. A man moves away from the group and turns toward Marcoh and the room, silhouetted dimly against the hungry fire. Marcoh knows the set of his shoulders.
They sleep in their coats again that night with the wind shrieking outside and overhead. This time Marcoh feels the creeping cold beneath him, how it soaks up into his back and sore ribs and settles in the furrows of his face. The mat is small enough that he can sense the warmth of his companion too, close enough to touch if he reached out his left hand.
The last place they stayed, almost a week ago, there was not space enough to give them a room alone; they slept in the warm, well-occupied hut of an extended family. Yesterday night he was too exhausted to notice the quiet here. Below the furious wind, the quiet in the room lingers in the air, and Scar is breathing next to him.
Marcoh takes a dry, shallow breath.
Something is aching in him like the cold but not it, something he cannot name prickling in his hands and the back of his neck and deep in his chest. He closes both his hands and lets out the breath he took. It mingles with the wind.
He hears Scar fall asleep, a shift in his breathing as subtle as the shift and loosening of his shoulders in the day, with the elders around him. Below the wind, Scar breathes, slow and deep and quiet. Marcoh has seen Scar wake from nightmares before, wild-eyed and breathless, but he hears no nightmares in this steady sound in the dark, sure and quiet as the wind is angry.
By the next morning the angry wind has chased the clouds away and swept the old snow up into tumbling piles against the walls of shacks and sheds. The roads and walkways are slick with ice.
Though Marcoh barely slept last night, he sets himself to his work with renewed vigor. There are supplies to scrounge up and children to heal and nurses and healers to train, and the thing that itched and ached in him in the night dulls its insistent prickling when he turns his mind and hands to this good work.
Today he fixes his eyes on his hands when Scar and the elders pass by him. His breath steams in the air.
.
In a week's time they leave that place and go on to a new one. It would take three days to walk the distance between this town and the slums on the outskirts of West City, so they go out in the afternoon to the railroad tracks and wait there in the dusk.
Scar grips Marcoh's arm when they clamber onto the slowing train, pulling him up and setting him on his feet. The warmth of the touch lingers for a long time after, the memory of the firmness of that grasp.
The train rocks and creaks beneath them. Light flashes through the slats of the empty boxcar: a station where they do not stop. The train sways through the night, whistling as it slows over the crossings of wide country roads.
Marcoh watches the land spill out behind them in the dark, the looming farmhouses that slide past with candles in the windows. Far away he sees a town, the lights of the buildings like a thousand little candles out of reach. His companion stays behind him, in the dark.
He breathes in and out again, slowly. His chest aches. It is late.
.
In the next town there is no room to spare, and they lay out their bedrolls where they can find the space in a hayloft among fellow travelers and new arrivals. A young family is among them. The baby's cries each night and the snoring of strangers are welcome alternatives to the silence; Marcoh is not sure he likes how he has begun to be used to that silence, to want it, even.
In the town after that they are given a separate room again with a big window and a soft bed that belonged to the daughter of the man who owns this house until she went away to the south to look for her mother, after the war.
This room is quiet every night. The house has thick walls and the soft bed has warm blankets. They don't need their coats anymore to sleep, and in the soft bed beside him under the covers, Marcoh feels the heat of his companion's body less than an arm's length away, touching his own skin into flame.
On their last night in that room a terrible dream wakes Marcoh in the night. When he claws his way back into awareness, gasping for air, he finds he is alone in the bed. He reaches out a shaking hand for the lamp on the table beside him. The room is empty too. He touches the bed beside him gingerly. It is warm.
He goes over to the window. An icicle is dripping just outside it, catching lamplight in the shimmer of its melting, solid become liquid not from an alchemist's touch, but from nature's own hand. Perhaps his companion would say God's.
When they set out, it hurt his chest and sides to breathe the slightest breath. Tonight the bed is soft, the air gentle with the coming spring, his ribs healed and whole. There is no reason he should hurt this way.
.
The snow melts on the long road before them, leaving it a mess of mud, and in the fields and meadows at either side of them green shoots push up and out of the earth where long brown winter grass is rooted. The tender green of small new leaves flourishes in the trees around them.
One morning they go out on foot before the sun. The soft dawn bleeds rosy grayish light from behind the clouds. The air of early spring is cool and sharp, catching in Marcoh's throat and awakening a twinge of an ache in his chest. He pushes it back, swallowing. Ahead of him, his companion slows.
They walk side by side through a budding forest. Birds rustle overhead as the sky pushes back the night. Scar stops them for a brief rest when it is light, and Marcoh looks up to see a dove peering down at them from her half-finished nest in the crook of a tree. While he watches there is a flurry of wings and her partner comes, bearing grass.
Doves nest in the eaves of his house in the village every year at springtime, low enough for him to put a ladder up so the children can climb and see the eggs hatch. On this winding forest path, so far from the place that was never quite his home, something about the sight tugs at his chest with a sharper ache than a breath of morning air.
Look, Marcoh almost says, the word already forming in his mouth before he turns, but it dissolves away into silence when he turns to find Scar's eyes on him, narrow with an odd intensity. Their eyes meet and he cannot pretend he doesn't feel the shock of it, the bright burst of yes in his heart and the terror leaping up in his stomach.
"Look," Marcoh says weakly an instant too late, and pushes himself to his feet too quickly. His back protests. His heart is beating fast, and he nearly forgets to look back up at the doves, who continue their work undisturbed. If Scar says something in response, his own heartbeat in his ears drowns it out.
"Turtledoves," he replies to himself after a moment. It is high time they were moving on. He turns quickly without looking at Scar, and his back protests again as he sets off down the path. "They nest on my roof every year. The children like to see them. It's nice, don't you think?" He is aware that he must sound totally inane, but he will take anything to fill the silence.
There are footsteps on the road behind him, then beside him, but his companion doesn't reply.
He doesn't know what Scar was thinking, looking at him. He doesn't want to think about it, about what he fears he would have allowed himself to say, to do, had they sat there any longer.
.
Between places where they are known — for they have begun to be known — there is silence, and when it doesn't rain, a fire. Rain is the thing to worry about now, not snow. The southern air is mild with the warmth of spring; they left their winter coats behind them in the last town.
They replenish their supplies in every settlement they stay, without effort or request: a loaf of bread here, a lump of cheese there, potatoes or cured meat from someone's small makeshift cellar. Two towns ago, a little girl gave him two eggs warm from under her mother's hens. He never feels right, taking these people's livelihoods. For their sake, he would gladly go without, but he knows they don't think of it like that, and Scar would not want him to think of it like that. Two towns ago, he made an omelette from the eggs and winter vegetables, and they ate together.
Tonight they have potatoes, nestled in the ashes of a fire Marcoh built on the bank of a little laughing brook. While they cook, Scar goes over to the edge of the brook and kneels there and takes off his shirt. Marcoh watches the potatoes carefully, to make sure that they won't burn.
He looks over out of simple curiosity when he first hears the splashing of water above the rushing of the brook. Scar is washing himself carefully with a sliver of soap and a rag cloth, wet skin glistening like copper in the firelight as his muscles shift beneath it.
The fire seems too hot. Marcoh looks back down with deep concern for the potatoes.
.
Marcoh is no stranger to dreams that shake him, sleepless, from his bed, but the dreams he has now wake him too gently, leave him lying still and straight in the bed beside his companion until their memory fades from his mind and body.
The dreams show him Scar again beside the brook, the easy slope of Scar's shoulders when he relaxes. He feels at once the harsh strength of Scar's hands at his throat beneath Central and the gentle strength of Scar's hand on his arm, pulling him forward and up after him onto the lurching train.
In one dream Marcoh is kneeling again in the dungeon in Central, cold stone against his knees, and Scar towers over him, warm with blood and anger, standing too close by. In another he stands once more at the window watching spring wash the ice away and there are quiet footsteps behind him, strong hands on his wrists and hot breath against the side of his neck. Sometimes he is in the forest again at dawn and Scar catches hold of him before he can pull away and has him there on his back in the road until he wakes gasping for breath.
The worst of the dreams are the ones that seem almost real, the hazy quiet ones where a hand comes to rest questioningly on him in the dark, or where he reaches out into the same dark and finds Scar ready and eager for his touch. No matter where they sleep he comes up from those dreams in a furious panic, hands clutching at the sheets or blanket over him, terrified that his treacherous body has moved him in his sleep to follow his mind.
He can never go back to sleep after those dreams; he thinks of waking to his bloodstained hands on Scar's body, and how Scar would look at him then, and mere exhaustion seems a small price to pay.
.
On Scar's skin the ink furls out in curves and angles and takes shape in words and symbols, dark and light. It is better for them to be together in the night like this, with good honest work for Marcoh to set his mind to and a light in the room. He holds Scar's wrist with careful fingers, and is grateful: it is nothing like the inviting dark and silence of a bed, where dreams can find him.
They do go to bed eventually, the nights they finish early; he wraps a clean bandage around Scar's arm and they walk back to the room together.
Since Scar's master joined them they have stayed here on the outskirts of South City, in a little one-room shack deserted by a couple when they lost their young child to some unknown coughing illness several months ago. Nobody among the neighbors knows where they went. Marcoh wonders sometimes, lying in the dark, if he had been here, if they had come earlier — but then of course, it was his own hands that condemned that child to death, perhaps before it was even born.
There are stories all Amestrian children read of the chivalrous men who guarded the people of this land before it was Amestris, who carried holiness and healing in their hands. At night, half waking and half dreaming, Marcoh thinks of his companion and sees those men, far off and unattainable, shining with God's own light. Were he to speak or reach out in the dark, he knows pity is all Scar could return. That thought brings up a sharp taste in his mouth, more repugnant than the possibility of disdain or outright rejection. Those, at least, he would deserve.
In the songs and stories, Marcoh remembers wildly in the dark, when one of those holy men lay down beside a maiden, he placed a sword between them on the bed, to save her from the dishonor of his presence. Marcoh is no holy man, and there is no question that his touch would bring dishonor.
No one has set a sword here where Marcoh and his companion lie beside each other, but still they lie together, and the past hangs between them like a knife.