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Vyce wakes to the tickling of something tremulous across his cheek; he needs not open his eyes to identify what exactly it is for he could never mistake the object or its owner, the scent of skin stuck with the sweet smell of sweat and steel. This is a hand he knows well. He lays in wait as frigid fingers feel along the length of his jawline, beginning beneath his ear and working slowly but steadily towards his chin, a softer touch as they skim the scar his father left before moving now for his mouth – at the last he catches the palm with a quick kiss and earns a quiet hiss of surprise from the boy beside him.
A little victory. He feels himself smile.
“Vyce?” Denam’s hand drops back beneath the covers in an instant; Vyce is left lonely for its absence, the night air chill against his exposed skin. “I thought you sleeping. Did I – did I disturb you?”
He ignores the question entirely. “What are you doing, still up?”
“Did I wake you?”
“Of course you did. Why are you not yet asleep?”
“I woke with the wind. I–”
“–Oh, do spare me. Only the dead enjoy a deeper slumber.” Vyce sighs as he rolls onto his side, careful of the stitches keeping the worst of the wounds closed. Denam does not know of them, nor does he need to. “What is it now?”
“Pardon?”
“What.” A peck to his shoulder. “Is.” And another. “It.” And another. “Now.”
“W-what is the matter with you?”
“Asks he who hasn’t slept but sat shaking like some sorrowful sook?”
“Says he who woke and will now sleep – if you’d like to let me.”
This foul temper is unlike him – where is the commander who chastises each kiss only to come closer for more? That Denam does not falter and fluster as he usually would speaks to something being amiss, but what, exactly? The day passed without remark, little more than light-footed trench trekking through the wildwood, the last of which they should clear tomorrow. No cause for concern in any aspect. He glances up at Denam to find his eyes distant and dream-like, a vacant and void stare at nothing in particular. Vyce mislikes the mystery.
Though, it is hardly a mystery at all, is it?
Loathe though he may be to admit it, he has a fair idea as to what it is that plagues Denam so – how could he not when the other’s trembling has woken him every night since they began this tentative ‘thing’ of theirs? The first few incidents came and went without comment, neither willing to speak on such strange happenings, but then there came the night where he woke to coughing and choking and crashing, where he scrambled in the dim-dark for the boy beside him to find the space empty, a sweat silhouette in his stead, where he called out loud for him, not caring that the others may hear him in the dead dullness of the hours before dawn; he heard the moaning and in the same instant caught the bitter scent of bile, felt its warmth seep through the sheets next his knee. Denam was curled up, creased, crumpled beside the bed, was in no fit state for a fight but was made to have one nevertheless – through his teeth there was talk of turning and unturning the Wheel, of having witnessed and walked other paths, of knowing now which to tread and which to trample. Vyce understood none of it. He cleaned him, clothed him, kissed him, slow, then, and sweet.
“Ill dreams, Denam?”
“What? No, I – I told you, I–”
“–You speak in your sleep,” Vyce says, cutting him short, “on the rare occasion you deign to. Always the same, always apologies.” He does not mention that he knows now that his proud commander cries very gently, tries to pray but forgets his verses part-way through. “No different, tonight?”
A quiet moment passes; Denam seems to consider staying silent but sighs, shuffling closer to rest his chin on Vyce’s head, obscuring, occluding his view. So thoughtful a tactician, hurrying to hide his face. “You hear too much.”
“Who, this time? Myself?”
Now he is quiet.
“Myself, then. That same dream? Heim?”
“No dream,” he mumbles. “A memory.”
“That visited you in your sleep – a dream and no more. What worries you so? A mirage of what might have been, in some other time, some other place? You dwell overmuch on trivial things. Are you still such a child?”
“You cannot know of what you speak.”
“But I can and do know of what you speak. You fear for me, and I here, hale?”
“Such is now, Vyce. It was not always so. You cannot know of…of any of it. You cannot hope to understand the ways in which I saw you, the wounds” – Denam’s hands fumble, one to Vyce’s neck, reaching to rest three cold fingers on his cheek; the other wraps around his back, bringing him near – “that were borne between us.”
Hanged, he was, at Heim; it has become habit for his neck to be held when they lay like this, the younger of them tapping in time with the two-step beat of his heart. “Those words and wounds were those of an ogre. Think not of that man as me.” Vyce leans, presses his lips to the top of Denam’s tunic where cotton gives way to collarbone; he stiffens, stammers, strengthens his hold, shy as ever at the so-called shamelessness of it all. “I am as I am. Words and wounds of another wearing my face and name are to be left with that poor fool. Let that past be the past.”
“It is only past if it cannot be so again. Naught ends, only encircles.”
What can he say? What might he have said before that he should not say now?
“The Wheel turns as it must. You know this better than any.”
“You have no love of the Wheel.”
“You must have less so, spinning it as you do.”
This all seems familiar, as though something remembered, relived. Such a feeling has followed Vyce with increasing ferocity since the trio’s going from Golyat. If he were given to such fancies he might even say – but no, it could not be so. He has listened too long to Denam and his laments, nothing more. If he could call to mind those days he has heard of, days he sometimes sees himself in, people and places he does not know and has not been, a dark place, underground, Denam, Denam in search of Catiua, always Catiua, the itch in his hands, a punch thrown, the other would not draw his sword, no, would not bear the blade, flashes of light and dark, days passing, emissary, emboldened, embittered he would show him up, he would take all, and then tight, tight, tight, his throat, none of these memories his, none of these words, wounds, none of it, none of it–
No, no more of it. Vyce burrows his head into Denam’s chest, bundling into it kisses that only barely touch the cloth. He knows this much to be his for certain and puts all other thoughts from his mind as he allows his head to rise and fall with his commander’s breathing. Careless circles are caressed around the scar on his cheek. Denam mutters something sweet, then swears he’ll not say it again; Vyce’s response, short, two words instead of Denam’s three, comes as instinct, the words tumbling forth before the thought, though the order hardly matters, he thinks, when the sentiment is the same.