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There is only one chair at Samothes' desk, and it has long since been enough – for Samothes to sit on as Samot sits on the edge of the desk, for Samot to sit in sideways and smirk at Samothes who has to stand and bend over Samot to look at his blueprints and kiss Samot because he's right there, for Samothes to sit and Samot to be on his lap and all over him and in his arms and radiant and laughing and holding Samothes' face in both hands like something precious.
History unravels and rewrites around them, they rewrite it and it is ever-new and ever-strange and it goes wrong and they change it again, but this is a constant, and it is the only thing Samothes needs to be constant:
He loves Samot, and Samot loves him.
The day of their wedding the sun was bright and Samot was even brighter, and they were both deliriously happy, and Samol was smiling and everyone was laughing and glad to see their gods, their kings, united finally as one could see they were meant to.
In all the changing and all the building-and-tearing-down, this is what Samothes is sure of.
(He wasn't always, he wasn't when he first saw a defiant boy shaped out of a wolf stepped out of a shadow sent to kill, but oh, he is now.)
If he hadn't made the sun already, Samothes thinks idly, in the last sunrays of a day somewhere in this golden age of their love, he would have to forge it for this moment of seeing Samot caught up in its light; he is beautiful, and he loves Samothes, and he tells Samothes to be better in ways noone else would dare.
"My love," Samothes says, and then he stops, because he can't think of any other words, and Samot leans his forehead against the side of Samothes' head and laughs, softly.
(Samothes remembers how they fell in love, over years and years, and he remembers how they fell into each other on a day as sunny as this one, and his heart aches with how much he still loves Samot, Samot with all his ideas and the way he tilts his chin up challenging Samothes, with his hands quick flipping through blueprints, with his eyes shining because he wants more, always more. Samot is many things Samothes thought he could never allow, but somehow he can forgive them all when it is Samot.)
"My love," Samot whispers back, teasing, but he means it, Samothes knows, he knows because he has meant it for a long, long time.
When Samol tells them, when he tells them of the worst of all oncoming endings and says that this they can't rewrite, Samothes holds onto Samot, wraps his arms around him as tight as he can, and Samot buries his face in Samothes' shoulder and digs his nails into Samothes' back, but neither of them cries just yet; it takes them a day, or two, or three, it's hazy in the rewriting they do, desperate, hopeful, until there are papers all over the floor and all torn apart, and Samot, hands shaking, knocks over the inkwell without meaning to, and as they see the ink spill dark and spread inevitably on the hastily-written futures that will never be, Samothes reaches for Samot and they cry.
They cry for long enough that they lose track of how long it has been.
This, too, does not change anything.
They are too old to be unsure, but in the face of this new, insurmountable thing, Samothes feels young and clumsy and helpless, and he can't say this, but he doesn't need to say it to see in Samot's eyes that he feels the same way.
Neither of them has ever hesitated before striding forward, before taking up a tool or a weapon or their courage and doing what they felt was right to do, but they don't know what's right anymore. Any steady certainty has disappeared from Samothes' hands on hammer on anvil, any glimmer of knowing his victory before he has won has disappeared from Samot's eyes, there is only trying, and then there isn't trying anymore for fear of making everything worse.
Samol sighs at them, sadly.
He is resigned. Samothes doesn't know how.
Samothes stops being able to say "we will fix this" and not feel like he's lying.
Samothes stops being able to forgive Samot for telling him things he does not want to hear, very gradually.
He feels so, so alone already, even as noone has left him just yet.
(He hasn't told Samot, but he has given up on a solution to the Heat and the Dark, nearly, almost, mostly. There are things he can do. This, he knows he can't, and he has never been as much for taking risks as his husband, and even Samot is doubting more and more while he tries more and more desperately.)
Confidence Alive, in hindsight, is the natural outcome.
Confidence Alive is very small and very blond and very freckled, and he is just tall enough to run, to wreak havoc in an already-chaotic study, and Samothes sees Samot smile for the first time in... a while.
Confidence Alive is Maelgwyn is their son, their son, and maybe there is hope yet, Samothes thinks, when he lifts little Maelgwyn into the air and Maelgwyn shrieks in delight and indignation, and kicks, determined, and is already running before he is quite back on the ground.
Maelgwyn is running on his short toddler legs, wobbling and flailing, through the garden, pell-mell, running because he can't walk yet, and Samot is standing in the thick green grass, hands on his hips, looking at their son and smiling and still for once, and Samothes knows he is smiling just as widely.
There is so much breaking, unfixable, in the world and in their family, and so much to be worried about, and so much to keep having whispered arguments about at night, but here is their son, and he is Confidence Alive, and he is bright and golden and happy and yesterday he got mud and worse all over the kitchen floor, and Samothes hopes, he hopes so desperately, that if he just looks at his son and his husband radiant in the sun he made, and he doesn't look away, nothing bad will happen.
Bad things do happen, of course.
The world isn't ending more than it has been for a while now, but on the slope of that slow, steady dying, before the millennia they still have are even starting to be over, Samothes and Samot fall apart.
It's a slow fall, but much faster than it has to be; in the face of a crisis, they both fall back into the kinds of flaws they've been trying to leave behind and negotiate each other out of, and Samot thinks bigger and bigger as Samothes seeks refuge in small problems, and they don't try as much to lead and follow each other as they should, and they are petty, and they don't have the energy, they are supposed to be all-powerful but they don't have the energy to be less mean, less sharp, less stubborn.
They disagree more about everything else, too, now that they are afraid and unsure and once more unable to see each other clearly, is the long and short of it.
Maelgwyn isn't supposed to see any of this.
Maelgwyn is their hope, Maelgwyn is where they can see each other most clearly, Maelgwyn is all the promises of new things and futures and healing and rebuilding and fighting back and being victorious and stepping surely.
Maelgwyn has both of their hopes and both of their ideals and both of their despair on his shoulders, without any of them meaning for it to happen.
(It is going to be one of Samothes' greatest regrets, but he doesn't know that yet. Not just yet. They are still, for now, whole, if fissuring.)
Maelgwyn is growing up like gods grow up, all jumbled, and his fathers are arguing behind closed doors like gods argue, all-encompassing ideological petty old grievances dug up to dig deeper into new disagreements.
"You're hurting them. I know you have never listened to me and will never listen to me, but you can build and gift as much as you want, denying them the means to help themselves and each other hurts them," Samot says, once more. He says it sharp and unpleasant, his words coming quick and clear as always, and Samothes loves him so, and Samothes cannot listen to him when he gets like this, and Samothes considers, for the first time, telling him to leave and meaning "forever" instead of just "until dinner, when we will both apologize." They haven't had dinner together the past few days, because they've been busy, working on things the other disapproves of. They haven't apologized for anything for... longer than that. Much longer.
Samot thinks Samothes is a fool, and Samothes catches himself doubting if he can trust Samot, and Samol calls both of them fools, and Maelgwyn has started doubting both of them.
There is nothing Samothes can do about any of this.
He goes to his forge and thinks about smaller problems and mindlessly sketches out benign inventions, and he singes his shirt, and he doesn't finish anything of substance, and hot metal burns a small mark into his arm that he doesn't bother doing anything about.
He wishes he could talk to Samot, he wishes he could pull Samot into his arms and breathe slowly and talk as best as he can about all of this, but that is not what they are anymore, that is not what they have been for a long time, that is not something they will be again before the world ends.
They break.
Maelgwyn, who is still a boy but a boy now of the kind that insists on already being a young man, keeps his head high and doesn't ask questions and stays with Samothes.
Samothes feels like a heavy shadow of himself, and he can't do anything, and he doesn't want to move and he doesn't want to try at all, he doesn't want to do anything, now that Samot and his fruitless, reckless trying are gone and everything is still and empty.
Samothes remembers the day he and Samot were married. The day of their wedding, when the sun was bright and Samot was even brighter, the only perfect day of their lives, a glorious triumphant end to disagreement, a high place from which to fall. And fall they did, he thinks.
Fall they did.
Fall they did and they took everything with them and they will wage war sooner than Samothes wants to think of, he knows this as sure as he knows his husband, he knows this as sure as he knows he still loves Samot and he knows it as sure as he knows he will never see him again unless it is across a battlefield.
He can't know for sure what his husband is planning, but he knows that Samot is a ruthless thing, first and foremost a shadow and a wolf and a thing with teeth that will charge before thinking.
Samot was conceived as a deathly solution to a problem. And he isn't, he wasn't that anymore, or at the very least not just that, but it's there still inside him, and Samothes remembers it well.
He met the wolf, he did, before the wolf became a boy that argued with him and then a man he loved.
There is much to do, if there will be a war, and Samothes is too tired to do it, but Maelgwyn is looking to him and his people need him and he has to do something, and so he goes to his forge and he searches through his notes and he clears up some of his tools and he goes, reluctant, to his desk, and he sits down in his chair that has been empty for too long.
(There is only one chair at Samothes' desk, and it has long since been enough.)