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There’s a ruined castle in the Pyrenees.
Wout assumes it must have been a castle, anyway. All that remains is two weathered towers and a crumbling wall. The pollard trees offer little shade, no relief from the heat that hits him as soon as he steps out of the car. The view is still as beautiful as it must’ve been when the castle was built, but that isn’t what draws him here.
Behind him, a car door slams. It takes two tries before Jonas gets it to shut properly, too gentle the first time around. He looks distracted, like he’s still processing that Wout was actually being serious about wanting to spend precious free time here. Wout can’t blame him. They both know he's not the type to care about ruins. All the so-called points of interest along the route they’ve raced end up as background noise no matter how much the French like to hype up their history.
But it's been long enough.
Several years he’s raced past this place, each time feeling a pull.
While he doesn’t have an interest in history, he does have an interest in himself. He sleeps badly in these mountains. Vivid dreams. In daytime, he gets an urge to avert his eyes from the road, looking up instead, searching for something here. That has to be dealt with before it causes him to lose focus when it matters. For his own sake, and for Jonas’, too, though Jonas doesn't know about any of it.
Wout continues forward, trespassing while the ruin is closed for visitors.
What am I even doing?
He’s asked himself that many times already. Jonas has asked him, and today Wout just said the view was nice. He didn’t mention that he’s seen that view already in his dreams, because that's just too weird. The same thing each time. He watches the valley, knowing the way one just knows things in dreams that he is tired and worn. He's been blaming it on going to bed with sore legs, but nothing changed last night. He's been hoping something might change if he came here.
And now it’s quiet. Jonas catches up to him by the wall, asking, “Is this the view you talked about?”
Yes, there are the French mountains, this time without the usual rush of wind in his ears, engines running or crowds making noise. Just clouds moving in, shadows flowing like water over the slopes. There's not too much time for admiring it. Jonas carved these hours from a busy schedule.
With a glance towards the most intact tower, Wout says, “I'm going to see what it looks like inside. Then we can go somewhere less boring.”
A place that won’t give him this feeling of slight vertigo.
Jonas doesn’t seem to mind, going dutifully away to read an informational plaque. Something about the age of it all.
Wout steps inside the building looking for the rest of his dream, and by the time the door falls shut behind him, he’s lost in it.
This is the exact place.
His hands trace the grooves in the walls and the edges of the arrow slits, finding them rough, worn through centuries. Even though dreams should not let him remember something so tactile, the stone feels familiar. His eyes get used to the dim light, but it's barely needed. His feet know the cracked tiles and the location of the heath where a fire could warm a tired body.
This floor, this slab in front of the heath, is where he kneels down in his dreams. Sometimes the dreams end here, in the sound of the metal against stone when he drops his sword and -
Wout leans against the wall with crossed arms. Nausea joins the vertigo. He reaches for something to steady himself and finds the handrail bolted to the stairs. Maybe he didn't drink enough water, maybe it's the lack of sleep. He could just turn around now and get back to the car, see if that bottle of iso drink left in the backseat will fix him. Head off again. But there’s that pull again, and at least Wout feels confident in his ability to push through. He can bear whatever it is that's come over him until he comes out on the other side, hopefully feeling like himself again.
He doesn’t have the vocabulary for the kind of room he enters on the second floor. Here, the air is cold and damp, the shadows deeper. A window lets Wout see how the grey weather settles over winding roads below. I’ve been there, Wout thinks, there are birch trees in that valley. Then he furrows his brows. No race has ever taken him exactly there. The feeling of recognition nevertheless presses itself onto him, unwanted. He wants to go back down the mountain and find the next clear goal to follow. That’s how he is, and that’s who Jonas is waiting for outside.
He closes his eyes a moment, dizzy again.
It feels like he's in that state between dreaming and awake, thinking of things that are not real, but also not entirely his imagination. Wet wool against his skin. The breeze carrying the smell of rain and fire-smoke. A field of yellow flowers bloom in the dark behind his eyelids, Jonas wandering through them. A wealth of bright-dyed fabrics hang from his shoulders, and the wind carries petals past his outstretched arms.
Wout’s eyes snap open. His fingertips trace the uneven edge of the windowsill to anchor him to the here and now. He finds carved lines, distinct like letters – runes, Wout thinks.
And then everything begins to come back in a rush, a descent with no brakes.
Rain begins to fall.
He remembers the knife glinting, the small, precise movements shaping the heathen alphabet his companion should’ve abandoned when he left his home country. Something done in the evening when they were alone together. They rested here. Before and after, Wout remembers adrenaline-soaked outlines of some sort of violence, but fealty meant staying even then. Especially then. Wout wore another’s banner like a warm cloak, an oath on his lips like a kiss.
He runs a hand through his hair, modern wax sticking to his fingers as he wonders if he hit his head a bit too hard last time he crashed. It feels right that he is here, but without an explanation, the steady sense of belonging unsettles him. His pulse is rising, and he becomes aware that he’s been standing the window too long. He hears Jonas coming inside as well, probably to look for him, footsteps resounding from below.
Wout goes down to meet him, trying to find the right words on the way.
What he finds in front of the heath is something else.
Thunder rattles the windows, and then the modern glass-sound ceases; only the low rumbling of the storm remains as it courses through the mountains. Lightning flashes, the glint of it yellow on the rough walls - when did it get so dark? – and it illuminates the figure sitting by the heath. Some part of Wout wonders who lit the fire, some part does not. And he feels himself dissolving when he kneels down in front of the sitting person. He is playing the role of someone else who did this before. He half expects to wake up in his bed.
On the rare occasion the dream goes on for longer, this is where it always ends: The hooded cloak falling away. Wout has never mentioned to another soul that this part of the dream only started coming to him after Jonas joined the team.
The soft firelight just barely makes it to Jonas’ face. Ochre tones caress his brow, barely reaching those eyes that are neither really blue or gray, but sea-like, Wout’s decided. He sees Jonas’ smile, wide and sincere, but his Jonas doesn’t have that scar along his cheek. Those arms are just a bit more muscular. This Jonas takes one of Wout's hands between both of his own, and the calluses Wout is used to feeling are in the wrong places.
“This isn’t real,” Wout says.
Jonas looks at him fondly. "It was real once, min ridder.”
Ridder, rider and chevalier, cavalier, knight, a cascade of words that turn to images. Coursing blood and a puncture wound, a dot on the map on a journey far from home. The sunflower field downtrodden and burnt, pain blooming in Wout’s body. The unwinding of a bandage and the ever-tightening red string. It strangles his throat and lets no words come out.
That’s how Jonas finds him - the real one, his Jonas - mute in the dust, sitting with his back to the empty heath.
"I think something's wrong with me," he says, and pauses, waiting for a reply that doesn’t come. “It feels like I’m remembering...“
Jonas sits down beside him. A sheen of sweat on his skin. He draws up his shoulders. Wout takes in the tension in his jaw, the restless sea in his eyes -
“You, too?”
“Yes," Jonas replies.
A yes to what, Wout wonders. Their hands find each other on the floor, and Wout gives in to the vertigo, following the urge to lie down. Right now, the world is particularly weighty. It hurts where his bones press against the hard, cold tile. He worries that it hurts Jonas more when the other man follows suit, awkwardly positioning himself so that they're side by side.
Jonas rests his head on the arm Wout offers.
Wout wants to somehow protect Jonas from the rush of impressions, this awful feeling of being more than just himself, filled with foreign memories that nevertheless fit him. He can’t. It washes over both of them on the stone floor; Wout is suddenly aware of how it was the last time Jonas held his hand in this place, interlacing their fingers.
Wout remembers the red blood under the bandage. Skarlagen dripping down his forearm, Jonas watching with strange calm. Memories of combat become blurs of movement and eyes meeting, but he’s unsure if he’s mixing his memories of crashing against asphalt with whatever this is, this sudden knowledge of how it feels to be struck to the ground in rattling chain mail.
What he remembers more clearly is getting up to put himself in front of Jonas, again and again. Words like courage and duty rang in his ears like the tinnitus tones that are all that’s left when the wind is done howling on the descent.
Afterwards, they came here.
And Wout remembers a fragile sort of happiness in the firelight.
People were talking about them elsewhere, in rooms this ruin no longer has, calling Wout brutal and Jonas unnerving. Jonas was tireless and too strong for his lithe body, all strange northern witchcraft in the eyes of others. All Wout cared about was that by the fire, Jonas took his hand and held it like he never wanted to let go. Blood dripped from the fresh wound, staining the floor. The exact wording of the promises they made is lost, but the sentiment remains. I'm on your side. I'll stay beside you.
They had not yet had much softness between them. They would not get much more. There were rules to their kind of combat, but not all swords were the blunt things of tournaments.
In the now, Wout can hear his own pulse beat and feel Jonas’ under his fingers, equally fast like they’ve sped away to somewhere nobody else can ever follow.
This is a kinder world, he thinks, as Jonas’ fingers ghost along his wrist to find the beating vein.
Jonas speaks, voice low as his head nestles against Wout’s chest: “I have no idea what this is either.”
“We can talk about it,” Wout says, “but not here.”
It's all too close. He feels beside himself. Emotions seep from the memories, glimpses of determination, pride and pain. Echoes of what his sport has given him in this life. Or is it the other way around? He doesn't want to be a reflection or a reiteration. He doesn't want the story telling itself inside his head. Jonas lies closer to him now than he ever did back then, but Wout longs for a bed, not the ruin floor.
Wout gets up. He pulls Jonas with him.
When they emerge into sunlight, Wout’s head is still full of visions of dew on heather and other skies, but slowly, there starts to be some sort of order. Jonas follows just behind him, as he would when he wore the bright hues of a noble house. Easy, slowly, they make their way downhill, two vassals wandering. The memories sort themselves out. The worst parts fade, the important ones become clearer.
They saw so much together: The sea in the low countries and realms in the north whose names have not survived. Summers, winters. Then this summer, when Wout watched the smoke rise from the battlefield as they rode away in the morning. They had survived; someone else had not. Perhaps some enemy had crawled away to find them again at a later time. For now, it was still raining, but Jonas seemed tireless in the saddle. Wout was at the end of the gradual realization that there was nobody else he’d rather serve. And the worse realization that this was not the end of his feelings.
He did have a choice. He could bury his urges deep and force them into a different shape. Knights were praised for loyalty and self-sacrifice: He could let the wounds he took for Jonas make up for the kisses he could not give. Let the battles they won together outweigh the one he’d have lost against himself. He could call that chivalry and honor.
But as the battlefield became more distant, Wout slowed his pace, rode next to Jonas, and saw a hint of a smile on his face when he marveled at a view. So rare, those smiles. And Wout said everything, because next time there might not come another night by the fire or a morning in the dew-covered heather.
He never wanted Jonas to let go of his hand.
“What’s wrong?” Jonas asks.
Wout could lie and say it was nothing, but he’s not in the habit of denying Jonas when he asks. Still, they're gotten back to the car before he finds it in him to ask the question at the root of his unease.
“How do I compare?”
Jonas doesn’t reply at once, standing there like he’s suddenly been put on trial. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. How do you think I compare to… how I was then?”
“That’s not important.”
Wout doesn’t agree. The memories seem larger than life, like a movie. Knights conjure images of romance, simplicity, vivid colors. People say cycling is dangerous, but there's no life and death the way there was when this castle was built. The version of him leaning against the car roof has done less to earn - well, everything. Jonas being beside him, for example. His duels and rivalries carry less risk. Instead, there are complicating factors, all the contractual oaths. The damned schedule.
“You can say it,” he encourages, sure that he can take whatever comes.
“You were there for me then,” Jonas then says, voice flat like someone shocked, but still certain, honest. “You’re there for me now. It’s the same for me.”
Wout opens the door and waits to let the hot air out of the car. Takes a deep breath.
As Jonas drives, the landscape sends fewer and fewer sparks of recollection through Wout’s tired brain. The memories continue to settle, and he’s only dizzy in the downhill turns. At the same time, he wants to know everything kicking around Jonas’ brain and to be only here and now in the hairpin bend. Neither of them bother turning off the radio. Rock music plays at low volume.
“Maybe we can’t really talk about it,” Jonas finally says. “I’ve been trying to figure something out for the last half hour.”
“Can you tell me what the runes were?” Wout asks, forcing down a mouthful of lukewarm, disgustingly sweet iso drink.
”No. I don't know.” Jonas says, and Wout passes him the bottle. Jonas sips on it for a while despite the taste and the temperature, probably as an excuse to not talk. Then he sits up straighter in his seat. “…Do you know any Danish slang for bicycle?”
“No...?” Wout replies. He can't tell what Jonas is trying to get at, setup for a joke or an earnest attempt at a terrible change of subject. “Why would I?”
“I was just thinking about something kind of funny," Jonas clarifies. "Jernhest. That’s one of the words for it. An iron horse.”
"After all that's happened, that's what you're thinking about?" Wout asks, incredulous.
"We have time." Jonas sighs. "The rest can come later."
Not all of it. Wout knows some things will be left unsaid. There are things he doesn't want to relive. And the things that matter most, the good parts - those they already have and need no words for.
But they do have time. He's right about that.
Then let it be now, Wout thinks. It'll be better this time around. Complicated, busy and light-polluted, with media instead of mythology. Sunflowers and sport instead of violence does not make his love lesser.
There’s a ruined castle in the Pyrenees. There is nothing new under the sun.