Archive of Our Own

His world grinds to a nauseating halt.

A noise tears through his throat, foreign to his own ears. Aegis blinks and he's standing, anger rushing like an ocean through his ears and manifesting in a thrumming, glowing weapon through his fingertips. It's heat and blood and desperation lancing across the Great Transgressor's neck and he can't be bothered to give Aegis anything more than a lazy, drunken smile. "What, hit too close to home?"

But his eyes are bright, glittering, and far, far too sober and Aegis does something he has never wanted, dared, or despaired enough to do:

He runs away.

The half a glass of alcohol he had begrudgingly swallowed didn't account for the way the answer to Vicious' questioning had fallen out of his mouth, and he feels the words rotting on his tongue now as he retches in an alley. The air keeps stuttering out of his lungs, his hands are shaking, and a passerby pulls their child away from his frantic, blind gaze.

"So." A displeased grunt from Aegis. "Gossip makes ya wonder, and you probably know better than anyone." Vicious leans on one elbow and crooks an eyebrow at him. "It true that the queen was pulled in from a family too poor to say no and ain't nothing more than a trophy?"

"It is."

His mother told him, once, that it was bad luck to speak ill of the dead, and guilt seeps into his stomach like so much poison. Always guilt, now, always lead in his chest and cannons in his ears and her awful, awful eyes-

"Huh. And look at what she turned around and did to you."

"Hey-" and Aegis roars, turns on him with the lance back in his hands; Vicious laughs in his face. His guns blister the space between them. "All right, all right. You want a fight, you know I'm ready to go any time." His expression snaps serious and the shift is disconcerting as always. "Let's take it somewhere you're not drawing attention to yourself, though."

The walk lets ice collect on his veins and by the time Vicious leans against a tree expectantly, he's able to condense all his anger and doubt and definitely not fear into a flat, "I highly doubt I will draw attention to myself out here. You may leave."

A snort. Aegis refuses to look at the face he's making because it doesn't matter what it is, it will spark the fire he's trying to freeze over. "If I must repeat myself, I will. You. May. Leave."

"What makes you think the Great Transgressor is just gonna do what you tell him to?"

His voice is wrong, so wrong, it's softer than it should be and Aegis remembers in a panic the way the heat of his blood sin had burned through him the first time this man had told him to own it.

"You know your stain of guilt shows up on the part closest to your sin?" Aegis does and he doesn't want to think about it, doesn't want to dwell on the heart he carries that failed so catastrophically it killed someone. He makes some jerky, abortive movement with his arm and realizes the lance has long disappeared, the weight of it still leaden in his veins. Vicious circles him slowly and his skin crawls. He won't look at him.

The white of his grin still blinds Aegis from the periphery. "You ever think about that stupid salute you knight types do so often? It makes you look like a dumbass." He doesn't have to look up to see the mockery Vicious makes of it, feels hateful and furious and stripped bare. He's just about to tell him to well and truly fuck off when Vicious continues, low and deliberate and sharp. "Got your hand over your heart and everything."

This time, the edge of his blade rings against gunmetal.

Aegis lets the anger direct his movements, years of training blazing through him like electricity, scorching black through his choking lungs. The delighted laughter from his opponent spurs him on and puts a snarl on his face. "I was a knight!" The past tense comes easier each time he says it and each time comes closer to being true. "That salute was my pledge of honor, something I would never expect the likes of you to understand."

He almost misses the lack of movement, the absence of a block that would keep his blade from meeting bare flesh. Vicious would survive a stab clean through his abdomen, had survived worse right in front of his eyes. Aegis pulls the blow anyways, and will not think about it.

"Honor?" Aegis is staring at the skin that is not gutted through and instantly healing, and Vicious takes his silence as the invitation it isn't. "That's it, ain't it? Your sin wasn't love, or lack of it." His whole body feels like it's shaking apart. "Your sin was the honor that kept you there."

A knight did not lie. A knight did not refuse a request. A knight served the lonely, and the hurt, and the downtrodden. A knight turned his eyes away from tears, but never his presence. 

A knight did not walk away, no matter how stifled and cornered and trapped he felt by the expectations laid at his feet, night after night after night-

"Never said your sin was against her, either."

"Then who?!"

His voice is a ragged, desperate thing as he finally looks up and Vicious points at the brand directly over his heart. His pulse catches in his throat. "Who d'you think?"

Tears are biting the corners of his eyes and burning down his cheeks before he can respond, and Vicious doesn't look away. Doesn't smirk at him all careless and slow, doesn't say anything shitty or condescending, just: watches him. 

Aegis feels raw, flayed open. "Stop that." Vicious doesn't. "Don't just fucking- watch, you-"

"Save it." There's that tone again, one he might not even realizes he uses, the one that's too soft and serious and knowing and Aegis hates the twist in his gut, hates the tears still falling on his face. "You ain't hiding and you ain't fooling anyone."

Most of all, Aegis hates that he's right.

He cries.

Vicious sees him.