Work Text:
Sometimes, Arthur still can’t believe his luck.
Even as you shelter from the rain together under a rocky ledge, soaked to the bone and shivering, he looks at you and wonders how someone like you could ever want someone like him.
“You were right,” you say, brushing your wet hair out of your face as you look at him - even now, you’re smiling. “There was gonna be gonna rain.”
He can’t help but laugh at that, and you laugh with him, even as you wrap your arms around yourself to try and seep a bit of warmth back into your frozen bones. Without thinking, he opens his arms, and before he knows it, you’re stepping into his embrace, burying your face in his chest with a relieved sigh. His heart skips a beat, and he feels himself smile, but as he holds you close, he can’t help but wonder how you ever came to choose to allow him to be in your presence, to know you, touch you, love you.
Love .
Simply thinking the word is enough t send his mind into a frenzy of doubt and denial - a viscera reaction to the memory of the pain that leaving himself so vulnerable had caused him. His heart had hardened after that - after Mary, after Eliza, after Isaac -, and, for a long time, he had thought himself too broken to ever love again - until you’d come along, and torn down every wall that he’d ever put up.
He can admit to himself that he’s still afraid to be hurt again, to find himself alone again; but when he thinks of every kiss that you’d ever graced him with, of every night that you’d fallen asleep next to him, he finds that it doesn’t matter - he is where he wants to be, and even though the path to had been long and painful, there is nothing he isn’t prepared to go through again if it means finding himself back here, with you.
“Looks like we gonna be here a while,” you say softly, pulling him from his thoughts. He turns his head to look outside your little shelter; the rain is still falling in sheets, the horses huffing nervously from under a nearby tree as they try to squeeze themselves as close to the trunk as they can manage to try and escape the most of the downpour. He sighs.
“Sure seems so,” he answers. “C’mere.”
He draws you down with him as he sits, resting his back against the rock behind the both of you - the ground is hard and cold, but dry, and you tuck yourself against Arthur’s side, humming contentedly when you feel his arm around your shoulder. He sees you close your eyes, one of your hands finding his and bringing it into your lap, your fingers tracing aimless patterns on the skin of his palm as you sit in silence, listening to the steady beating of the rain falling around you.
Love .
Yes, the word scares him, and as he looks at you, sitting against him like this, seemingly perfectly content to wait out the storm in companionable silence, he can’t help but remember that this - you - could be ripped away from him at any moment, leaving behind ‘what-ifs’ and things unsaid. It’s a heavy word, a hard word that, very time he had used it, had only brought him pain and hardship - but he knows he needs to say it, if only for himself, if only to ease the weight of the regrets that would overcome him if he leaves it there, hanging between the two of you, unsaid and immaterial.
So he takes a deep breath, turns his head to press his lips to your hair, and whispers teh words, so low that even he can barely hear himself over the sound of the raging rain, half of him hoping that you wouldn’t hear him - and the other half desperately praying that you would .
“I love you.”
You don’t react, and the world goes on - the rain is still falling, the wind still howling. He thought he’d feel lighter, more at ease - but his heart feels just as heavy as before. Until he feels you shift against him as you bring his hand up to your mouth, pressing your lips to his knuckles in a gentle kiss. He feels your breath against his skin as you whisper something, and he can’t hear you over the storm, but the weight in his chest is suddenly lifted, and he closes his eyes as he kisses the top of your head.
I love you too.