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Time had no meaning as Ambrosius ran for his life. The combination of the pain and shock he was in along with the perpetual darkness of the tunnels made sure of that. He ran with no destination, no plan, nothing in his mind but the desperate need to get away. As though if he ran far enough and fast enough, he could outrun reality. The queen was dead, and everyone thought it was his fault.
Every so often, his route took him close enough to the surface or an exit that he could hear the news reports blaring. The words sounded muddled to him, but he could still make some out. “Murderer”. “Queen killer”. “Traitor”. They burned almost as badly as the pain in his arm. All he could do was block them out, focus on the sound of his own laboured breathing, the jolt of pain springing from his broken arm with every step. It wasn’t exactly enjoyable, but it kept his mind focused on escaping.
More time passed, and his steps gradually became sluggish and uncoordinated. The initial boost of adrenaline had long since faded, and the combination of pain and exhaustion weighed down his every movement. His arm wasn’t actively bleeding any more, but it was coated in a thick layer of sticky, drying blood and he knew that if he didn’t set and clean it soon it would just get worse. The next exit from the tunnels was almost rusted shut from disuse, and he had to throw his good shoulder against it to get it open. The force of the impact jarred his whole body, and he hissed as the pain made his vision swim. As he staggered out, he found himself squinting in the pale early morning light. Had he really run until sunrise?
Looking around, it didn’t take long for him to realise that he was in the forest which had taken over the practically abandoned old sector of the city. There was a set of emergency equipment hanging next to the door, placed there long ago in the event that a worker in the tunnels lost their way or found themselves in trouble out on the outskirts. There was a phone which connected directly to the emergency services, a power pack for charging any devices and, blessedly, a first aid kit. It looked a little worse for wear and it was impossible to tell how long it had been there, but Ambrosius was hardly in a place to complain.
Grabbing the medkit, he made a beeline for the nearest mostly-intact structure he could see, a crumbling tower made of grey stone. The door was surprisingly both intact and unlocked, and inside he found what seemed to have once been a hideout for someone else. A tattered old sofa and low table stood in the centre of the crumbling place, and there seemed to be a pretty decent place to cook over to the side. A handful of tools and pieces of workshop equipment were scattered around, and his heart squeezed painfully at the flood of memories of Ballister tinkering away with some project or another in his spare time. “ Don’t think about it ” he told himself, pushing back both the memories and the tears. “ Get your arm set, there’ll be time to feel sorry for yourself later. ”
Removing his armour one-handed was harder than he expected, but doing so without jostling his injury was flat out impossible. A couple of times he found his vision swimming, barely able to hold on to consciousness after everything. Powering through and not giving himself a chance to pass out, he examined the injury.
This turned out to be a bad idea as the sight of it nearly made him faint all over again.
Okay. Okay, that was a lot worse than he had realised. Was that bone he could see through the gash, or was he just seeing white spots because his brain was trying to shut down? It was impossible to say and frankly, he didn’t want to know. His brief examination did, at least, reveal that the fall seemed to have made a single clean break. It meant that setting it had a chance to work if he did it right. It also meant that he was out of excuses to not do so.
If he thought the pain of the initial break was bad, resetting it was somehow worse. Just as he got it aligned properly, his body and mind finally gave up and he passed out. Somehow though, the worst part was waking up a little later and finding that he was still there. It wasn’t all some sort of horrible nightmare. It was all real.
Dragging himself through the motions of the rest of his treatment was difficult, but not a monumental task in the same way that the first step had been. These were movements he was more familiar with from training injuries. Disinfecting his wounds, stitching up the slash, bandaging it all and creating a makeshift splint from his remaining vambrace, he’d either been through it all before or practised it, just to be safe.
Eventually, he’d done all he could. There was a moment of satisfaction at having treated his injuries, even if they would take a long time to heal properly. That satisfaction lasted all of three seconds before reality started to creep back in at the edges. With nothing left to distract him and nowhere left to go, Ambrosius finally let himself collapse back onto the sofa and think everything through.
The queen was dead, and literally everyone else in the kingdom who had functioning eyes would tell you that he was the obvious culprit. Someone had set him up. And he had to have been specifically targeted, none of the other knights used a sword like his, and his was the only one that had seemingly been sabotaged. That sword was one of the many dubious honours of being a descendant of Gloreth, along with the shining golden armour now lying discarded on the floor. Someone had specifically done this to make it look like he was the one who had killed the queen, which brought up three obvious questions. Why kill her, why target him and, perhaps most importantly, who did it?
His first thought was Todd. The guy was an ass, and had always been competitive. Maybe he had done this to get Ambrosius out of the way, to claim his place as the face of the knights? Killing the queen would be a lot though, even for Todd, and if it was about competition or reputation then surely top-of-the-class first-ever-commoner-knight Ballister would have made a better victim. His mind reeled for a moment at the thought of Ballister being in his place, and he took a moment to be grateful that he wasn't the target. He didn’t deserve this. Ambrosius placed Todd firmly in the “maybe” column and moved on.
Maybe it was a political thing, someone trying to get the queen out of the way. Why, though? Who truly stood to gain from her death? The queen was a monarch in title only, the next ruler would be decided by council nomination and popular election, and with the queen being so popular there was no-one slated to be the obvious next monarch.
Perhaps it was just some enemy of his family, doing their best to tarnish their oh-so-important reputation by painting him as a vicious murderer. Wouldn’t that be just his luck, a thousand years of his family being untouchable and admired and he’s stuck as the one unlucky enough to be in the spotlight when someone finally came for them.
As he lay there, exhausted and lost in thought, the mental walls he had put up around the most sensitive issue in his head started to crack and fall away. Ambrosius tried to focus, tried to push it back down, but nothing could stop it - stop him from finally rushing to the forefront of his mind.
Ballister.
With the walls gone, all Ambrosius could see in his head was Bal’s expression. Like he was questioning everything he’d ever done. Like he was questioning Ambrosius. Like it was Ambrosius who had carved into his arm and not the other way around.
Ambrosius shifted over to his side on the sofa, leaning on his good arm and trying not to shift his bad one.
What was Bal doing at that moment? Was he asleep? Was he lying awake in bed, staring at the ceiling like he always did when there was too much on his mind to convince his eyes to shut? Was he still out with the other knights, just another faceless figure in the manhunt for the queen killer?
Ambrosius’ eyes started to slip shut again, this time dragged down by exhaustion rather than sheer pain. The last thought he had before surrendering to sleep was that he just hoped that Ballister was okay.
Ballister Boldheart was decidedly not okay.
How had the best day of his life turned to the worst so suddenly? One moment, he was a knight, the first commoner to ever be knighted in a thousand years. One moment, he was standing to the side, proudly watching his boyfriend be gifted with the same honour as the crowd cheered.
The next, it was all gone.
The queen was dead, Ambrosius was missing with a badly injured arm (badly injured by him , by his sword), and he was simply being handed that same sword and assigned to a team to hunt him down. As though this wasn’t somehow even worse than the darkest of his nightmares.
Ambrosius’ blood was still on the blade.
Ballister found himself falling into robotic motions, movements he had drilled himself on and practised a hundred times, a thousand times. Stand to attention. Secure a perimeter. Search for a fugitive. The thought that he had woken up next to that fugitive that very morning, that he had been leaning on the fugitive’s shoulder as they looked out over the arena not two hours ago, that that fugitive was Ambrosius? That level of understanding and processing was pushed from his mind, replaced by a single-minded devotion to his duty. They would find Am- the fugitive, they would get him medical care as they would for any criminal, and they would get to the bottom of what had happened.
Nothing about this made sense after all, so there had to be some sort of explanation. Why kill the queen in such a public setting? To do such a thing would imply a death wish, but the fugitive’s mad scramble to get away implied the exact opposite. Maybe his adrenaline simply kicked in, but already things weren’t adding up.
On top of that, why kill the queen at all? It was a thought that made Ballister’s heart ache as he recalled the gentle, proud smile she had given him as he was knighted. The queen was a good person, a good ruler, someone truly dedicated to changing the kingdom for the better. Ballister himself was proof of that. The fugitive had never shown signs of having an issue with that, had always been supportive of it even, so why? It didn’t make sense, there had to be something else-
Ballister sighed.
Or maybe he was just desperate for there to be an explanation. Maybe he was desperate to avoid the obvious answer. Ambrosius murdered the queen. Why, he couldn’t say, he couldn’t even imagine with what he knew of the other, but if he was truly responsible for all this?
Maybe Ballister never really knew him at all.