Work Text:
“I chose well, don’t you think? ‘Tis somewhat secluded, I’ll grant, but you were never one for crowds,” he mumbles as he stoops low to sit cross-legged in the sun-scorched grass. Warm, even for Flamescale. “I thought you’d like a place near the water. Greuza will be with you here.”
There is no response, only a rustling of leaves.
Denam breathes a small sigh into the breeze. He knows better by now than to expect an answer. The stone sits silent, slick surface shining against the sun’s reflection on the sea, its grim grey glimmering in the evening’s gold. A thing of fine craftsmanship; it was well to leave the matter of finding a master mason with Olivya, careful as she was not to ask questions despite her clear concern. Denam was grateful to her then, for what could he have said that would have seemed a right reason for his actions? He does not know, and sighs again.
“I don’t know my reasons, do I not?” he asks himself, voice low. “Fie. Of course I do.”
He would make this effort for none other. He has not the heart, he knows, to mourn so deeply each loss levied against him. How many are there now? Thousands, surely. Thousands and thousands. He stopped keeping count after learning of what happened following the fall of Phidoch; someone else, somewhere else, has looked after the list of casualties since then, has handled harrying the news home to those who had homes and seeing to the burials of those who did not. Denam does not know who it is that oversees this – he left it to Mirdyn to find a suitable substitute, he feels, though can’t be sure.
He has little certainty of anything save the grave these days.
To move his mind from such thoughts he raises his hands from his side and holds them to the sky, the skin stuck with small stones that he brushes away against his pant leg; his palms are left littered with dips and dimples that look lonesome for want of the pebbles. Callouses kiss the crevices between each of his fingers. The hands of a man much older, and he just barely a boy. Vyce would often chastise him for being so careless with himself – such sores could cost them a battle, he would say, and what kind of death would that make?
Denam thinks now of how he would relinquish the weight of his hands to Vyce’s care nightly, of how he would leave them laying in his lap, of how Vyce would take each one in turn to spread a salve of his own making over the skin, measured and methodical, working from the centre of the palm outwards without a word. How soft his touch, how sweet his scent, fresh, faintly floral, as though he had always but recently come in from the cold.
“We lingered too long, then. I reckon the others knew what you and I would not say for our own cowardice.” He shuffles forwards on his knees towards the gravestone, ignoring the dust and dirt digging into his pants, his palms, and rests his shoulder against the stone. “These hands are worse than when last you looked on them. I fear I may find myself wanting for your care once more.”
The sea sways softly in the background.
“You…you would give it to me, wouldn’t you, Vyce? You would yet take these hands?”
At his back the stone stands steady and silent, hot to the touch.
“Soon – soon, I will return these hands to you, but until then you must remain here with yours outstretched. I’ll not know where to go elsewise,” he says softly. “The waves will hie me hither when all is as it should be.”
This Denam believes wholeheartedly, and has since the first sound of Vyce’s fate came forth from Heim: he would wage the war unto its end and then he would wash ashore here, his homeland of Golyat, his homeplace of the seaside grave, as he has come to consider it in his grief. Naught else is there for him, and what use is there in wishing against the Wheel? None, none. He would take the hand he has drawn with grace and gratitude. The conflict would be seen to its rightful conclusion, and promptly thereafter Denam would be seen to his.
In the distance a wave breaks against the shore, pulling Denam to the present; he hardly hears it for the sound of his own heart beating, a terrible thudding and thumping, restless and relentless. Only a little while longer before it sits still as the sea when the tireless tide resigns itself to retiring along the sandy shores. His heart aches at the thought of such stillness – he wants Vyce here in the sun, not himself there in the earth – but it will soon right itself once more, the dull pain nothing more than a symptom of this sorrow that sinks and soars in time with the waves.