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Ren strides the length of Dogwarts’ cellar, back and forth, back and forth. His footsteps fall in time with the clanking of the great metal automata patrolling the courtyards overhead. Each step in the constructs’ patrol makes the timbers of Dogwarts tremble, dirt shaking loose from the ceiling and swirling in motes around the prowling king.
I should shore up the roof , is the thought on loop in Martyn’s head.
Instead, he hovers.
He can't seem to tear his eyes from the king, despite the dull ache in his head, the desperate over-strain of vigilance pushed too far. The afterimages of the explosion still dance in his eyes, neon against the lamplight shadows of the cellar. The world has shrunk to Ren and the trembling walls of Dogwarts.
It seemed it was the king’s footsteps shaking the world around him, each frantic circuit of the cellar bringing their refuge that much closer to collapse.
A test, Ren had said.
Your king will be a red king. Behind the dark lens of his glasses, Ren’s eyes - yellow like a warning - have a fanatical gleam. The gift of second-chances, of the-universe-reassembled-what-was-wrought-asunder, in the shiny, raw new skin of Ren’s face and hands. There’s a gash across jaw and brow from the fall, bisecting the place where fire scorched his face, and a trickle of blood gleams against his cheek.
Martyn sets aside the implication of Ren’s words, ignores the sense there, the part of his mind that draws up Ren’s calculations and balances them. Today proved Grian and Scar’s teeth. What would tomorrow bring?
More blood. Martyn would just have to make sure it wasn’t theirs.
“My liege,” Martyn says, finally finding his voice again. “You’re bleeding.”
Ren lifts a hand to his brow, and squints at his blood-smeared fingers for a beat too long. “Ah.” He blinks dizzily and presses clawed fingers against his temple.
(Martyn couldn’t have respawned before; none of them could have, not green-eyed and green-named as they had been on the first day. But he feels that ache, somewhere behind his teeth, a borrowing malaise that makes his jaw twinge in sympathy.)
“You should sit,” Martyn says. He hasn’t missed Ren’s limp, or the way he’s kept his sword hand cradled to his side since they reached the safety of Dogwarts’ walls. Ren’s head snaps up, his ears flicking backwards.
“Sit, my liege” Martyn says, gesturing to the bed. “You’ll wear the floorboards out at this pace.”
Ren huffs at that, and sits. As soon as he’s not pacing, he folds in on himself, cradling his sword arm to his chest and closing his eyes.
Martyn kneels down before him, knees meeting the hard stone of the floor with more force than he meant. He reaches up and pulls the glasses from Ren’s face, carefully not to snag his hair; when he reaches for the crown, Ren catches his wrist.
He lifts an eyebrow, his eyes burning dreadful warning-yellow. “Thinking of uncrowning your king? Taking it for your own?” His voice rasps from his throat, hollow and cold.
“Thinking that this looks like a pain in the neck, my liege,” Martyn says, steady, folding the way his heart jumps into a nervous laugh.
The ghost of suspicion vanishes from Ren’s face, replaced by fondness that only just eases the bite of mistrust. His hand slips from Martyn's wrist, and clasps Martyn's instead. “Forgive me,” he whispers, almost too soft to hear.
Nothing to forgive. But that’s not quite true, is it? Martyn had everything well in hand and if everyone had stayed clear of the trap like he had told them-
“I wouldn’t want it, personally. Dreadfully impractical things, crowns. Never in style.”
That gets a proper laugh from Ren, though it dissolves into an exhale of pain.
After a moment, Martyn leans forward again, and reaches for the crown.
The metal is cold against his fingers; ice cold, in contrast to Ren’s fevered skin. It seems to turn only colder as he holds it. He pulls it free and sets it aside with a little, pained hiss and turning back to Ren.
Uncrowned, Ren looks-
A mess. His hair hangs in his fair, blood is still trickling from the wound at his temple, and his ears are turned down. At his wrist, the half-blackened hearts of his life shiver in time with his shoulders.
Too close to death, a second time over. A second time over.
Martyn holds a cloth to his brow until the bleeding stops; the tremor in his hands is the fading adrenaline, and nothing more.
What’s the use in healing what you will only break tomorrow? A treacherous part of his mind whispers.
Near blasphemy, so he sets aside the thought, focuses on what’s in front of him; Ren and his fever-bright eyes and shaking shoulders, the way he ducks his head dizzily and breathes out through gritted teeth.
“Rest,” Martyn says. Despite his earlier snappishness, he lets Martyn push him back onto the bed, watches with a bleary sort of fondness as Martyn tangles with the many-knotted laces of his boots. Ren's clothes are smoke-stained and bloody, Martyn’s hardly better, but they’ll face that in the morning.
(In his mind’s eye, Ren goes up in smoke, molten gold and bone. In his mind’s eye, Ren is blackened and burned. In his mind’s eye, Ren slips from the edge.)
Ren is here . Martyn pushes himself up from his knees and sits on the edge, partially so Ren will be less likely to get up and start pacing the length of Dogwarts again.
He pulls a golden apple from his inventory and carves slices of the enchanted fruit carefully, handing it to Ren piece by piece, in intervals measured by the rasp of Ren’s breathing and the heavy steps of the iron constructs overhead.
“That’s the way of it, my hand,” Ren murmurs, halfway between sleep and delirium. “Silks and fruits for the sacrifice. Ceremony, my hand. It’s all about ceremony.”
Sacrifice. The word curdles on Martyn’s tongue, pulling a thread anchored deep in his stomach.
It’s not ceremony , he wants to insist, it’s the practicality of death still clinging to him, shadowing his now-yellow eyes and the hollows of his cheeks.
But he’s learned the best thing to do is listen to Ren, the wide swath of his idealism and the gleam in his smile, and then do the practical anyway. That’s the part of a right hand man, isn’t it?
Over and over he turns the thought, worrying away at it as he carves fragments of cold fruit flesh and watches the magic bring a bit of color back to Ren’s cheeks. Slowly; not too much at once. Healing, even magical healing, was a tricky thing, and too much would be like to make him sick.
In the heat of a fight, a potion would be downed with no thought to that; but for this moment, hidden away beneath earth and stone, at least, they had the luxury of care.
This is the care given to someone who respawns; it’s instilled somewhere in the steady core of Martyn’s being. It was necessary, it was logical, it was right. Martyn knows this with the same reflexive knowledge that lets him land on his feet in the tumble of confusion that was waking up in this strange place, the same well-trod feeling as when he opens his mouth to spin a sales pitch or strategy, that compels him to duck and weave and look out for his own interests-
Which meant looking out for Ren, now. That felt familiar too. Or he thought it felt familiar, though perhaps he just wanted it to, wanted the confirmation of a choice made if not with practicality, with truth. Trying to pin the feeling in place with a memory, a person, a face was impossible.
In some ways, every interaction felt like a shadow dance with the man he had been before; was this step the right one, did the hazy-memory shade of whoever Martyn had been before walk in step with him?
Some moments, he could forget the emptiness entirely. Easiest when he was with Ren.
“Your hand,” he says, holding out his.
A smile curls up the corners of Ren’s mouth. “Awfully forward way to ask-“
“You hurt it in the fall,” Martyn snaps.
Ren grims, his ears flicking back in a bashful show - you caught me . He grits his teeth and uncoils, withdrawing his sword hand from where he had held tucked it against his side. Two of the fingers are bent wrong, purpling and bruised from catching himself after Scar pushed him from the edge.
Martyn takes Ren’s hand in his. The skin of his fingers is shiny, faint burn scars marking the new flesh; still marked by the gnarled, ropey scars of a life-long swordsman, but now lacking the corresponding knicks and calluses of the fights and mishaps here.
The Ren who earned these scars, who learned to cut down mobs and to build the walls high and weave the ancient magics had been a different man. As lost to Martyn as his own past. But the king of Dogwarts-
Well, Martyn had no way of knowing, but he has a hunch that the king is new. Forged of these circumstances; the server walls that held them in place, the timbers of Dogwarts, the scorn with which the others had received his kindness.
And Martyn, of course. Martyn had a hand in it, too.
“Tomorrow,” Ren says. “Tomorrow we’ll taste death on our own terms.” It rings like a promise.
“You’ve drunken from death’s cup once,” Martyn says. “Should be enough of a taste for anyone, shouldn’t it, milord?” He laughs, but it comes out more nerves than he would like.
“Aye,” Ren rasps. For once, he doesn’t concede to Martin’s teasing; doesn’t even acknowledge it. “But a good king shoulders what he fears most, hand.” He tips his head back, and even shadowed, even pale and trembling with the strain of respawn, there’s something regal to his bearing, something effortless.
Following wasn’t a familiar tune to Martyn; neither was fanaticism. it was survival, survival above all else. But the feeling burning like whiskey through his chest stretches wings too large to be just named loyalty.
Yeah. That’s fair. Fair for Ren to name himself a king; fair for him to swagger into Dogwarts with a crown spirited up from earth and data, as if the code of the universe itself already knew the truth those words had pulled from Martyn’s heart.
Tomorrow, he will ask terrible things of you. Martyn winds the bandage once, and then again, binding the little bones tightly so Ren’s hand wouldn’t heal crooked.
Tomorrow, this binding won’t matter.
Tomorrow, he will ask terrible things of you and you will do them.
Tonight, Martyn could pretend.