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“W-Why are you yelling at me?” Lilin slurs. Viago falls silent, his dark eyes flitting from the bottle of antiseptic in his hands (he thinks it’s antiseptic, at least—Teia is always switching the labels on his supplies, which is “funny” right up until he accidentally kills someone while trying to rinse out their wounds) to Lilin’s face. Her left eye is almost swollen shut, the result of attempting to stop a sword pommel… with her skull.
“I wasn’t yelling.” He says, which is technically true. He hadn’t been yelling—though he’d very much wanted to. But Lilin… well, if she could walk away from that severe of a blow to the head without a concussion, then she was a bloody miracle worker. And a concussion would make her overly sensitive to light, sound… pretty much everything.
“I completed my contract.” She says, like that’s the problem here. Like Viago gives two shits about a contract when, fifteen minutes ago, he’d been all but certain she was dead.
“Stop talking.” He says, which only seems to make her more upset. “You need to conserve your energy.”
“I’m fine.” She tries—even tries to get to her feet, to demonstrate how “fine” she is. But her ankle is fucked—not broken, but badly sprained and swollen to nearly twice its size—and won’t support her weight, so she abandons the idea rather quickly. “I’ve had worse.”
“Stop talking.” He repeats, and when she wilts like a flower, he swears he feels something inside of him break. “No puedo… no ahora mismo.”
The contract should’ve been simple… but the intel was bad. Very bad. By the time Teia had alerted him to the fact that the bar were Lilin was supposed to meet her mark was sympathetic to rogue templars, it was too late to pull her back. He knew very little of her life, prior to joining the Crows—just that she had escaped from one of the Antivan circles during the mage rebellion. (How she’d wound up in an Antivan circle is very much a mystery, seeing as she is most definitely not Antivan herself). She’d been heavily traumatized, avoiding eye contact like the plague and only speaking when absolutely necessary. Despite this (or, perhaps, in part, because of it), she proved to be a skilled assassin—which, as far as the Crows were concerned, was all that really mattered.
Over the years, she’d grown close to Teia… and then, to Viago. And slowly but surely, she’d begun to come out of her shell. Sharp as a tack and wittier than a bard, it wasn’t long before one of her favorite pastimes became pushing all of Viago’s buttons to see how long it would take for him to explode. She was absolutely infuriating—and he loved her more than words could say.
Which was why seeing her like this, and knowing he had a part—however small—in causing it, hit him so hard.
Teia would be furious if she heard Lilin talking like this, now—like she can’t imagine why Viago would be upset, because even after all this time, the only thing that matters to him is the contract. But then… he’s told her that so many times, why would she think otherwise? This—none of this—is a failure on her part. That she thinks it is only makes Viago’s own failure all the more obvious.
Wetting a bit of gauze with what he has now confirmed is antiseptic, he dabs gently at the wound that bisects her once blonde brow and thinks.
Words fail him, as they so often do… and his mounting frustration is just making Lilin more and more uneasy. He sighs.
“¿Tienes idea de lo mucho que significas para mí?” Lilin looks at him helplessly—she’d never been particularly good at Antivan, and knowing that… helps. Makes it easier for him to say what he needs to, without fear. Maker, but he is a coward… “Te amo más que a la vida en sí.”
“…Viago?” She looks at him helplessly. With the eye that’s still able to be opened, that is. Tears stream constantly from the one that’s swollen shut, leaving streaks on her ruddy, freckled cheek. She is unfairly pretty… and he finds himself suddenly overcome with the urge to take her home and draw her a bath, to rinse the dirt and blood and all manner of unmentionable things from her curls, to hold her and care for her until the pain goes away.
He settles for kissing her… and this, at long last, she finally understands.