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Denam lays as the dead.
He has always been like this, Vyce thinks: he recalls a fey child, fair and fine, a flintstone who shone only with the force of friction. Never one to command anything with any kind of comfort, be it armies or affections or aught else. Vyce envies him his nature. The night has cleared since they came here, a high hill some ways above their staggered auxiliary sentries, and yet the elder of the two has done naught but toss and turn this way and that atop their shared terrycloth, poked and prodded by broken branches and burnt blades of grass. How can one who would look so proper in palatial dress be so at ease in a place such as this? He hardly stirs save the soaring and sinking of his broad chest with his breathing – truly, he lays as the dead.
It unnerves Vyce, ushers him to speak. “Asleep, Denam?”
“With you twisting about as a spinning top? Not likely.”
“Well, we can’t all be blessed with such thick skin.”
“No, I suppose not – besides, if Sir Canopus is to be believed you’re already ‘thick of skull,’ aren’t you? ‘Twould be unfair to have every advantage.” Denam laughs, a light sound. He is in fine form despite what the dawn is fit to bring. “He says with the sort of head you’ve got you’ve no need of a helmet.”
“Hasn’t he less so, mighty Vartan he is? And yet he hides his mug like a maiden hugging her virtue to her,” Vyce huffs, though there is no hurt in him; each word spoken serves to set his mind at ease: there could be no horror on the horizon if they have it in them to jest as they do now. There is no need to look, only listen – he keeps his eyes closed, but loosens the muscles, lets them limp. “No need of a helmet…I’ll show him who has need of what.”
“You have need of restraint,” he says, chuckling still.
“Aye, and rest besides – tell me, is this tomorrow to be the last for a time?”
The sensation of sheets shifting; in the next instant, the weight of a body against his.
And no sound at all.
He must have said something amiss…ought he not have mentioned the morrow? But they – they spoke on the subject earlier, and all had been well, had it not? There had been much to hear and more to heed, of course, yet he had heard and he had heeded, abstract as the agonies had been to him, talk and talk and talk of the Wheel and its workings, as though anyone anywhere could ever know anything of any of it. In truth were it any other the words would not have worried him so, but Denam is Denam and speaks only when sure, asks only when acquiescing.
And gods, had he not sounded so certain? Of all of it – of what Leonar would ask, of what Vyce would answer. He knew word for word the tirade and its tone. The voice that came from him in his bivvy this evening may as well have been Vyce’s own. How could he have known without having heard the speech in some other strange place? Though no, not strange at all, the same place as now, the same sleepy town, but another time, another turn – is that it? Is that how it is? The same, but not the same? Denam had said so much and had said it so gently, so gravely, that it felt almost unkind to question him, but now Vyce’s heart stirs, unsure of itself. He does not understand any of this. How can it be the same and yet not the same at all? How can it matter now if this moment came to pass who knows how many moons ago?
Denam says it matters. Denam says there is no choice. Denam says there is only one way to keep them from parting, and that is if Vyce surrenders himself fully to him. A laughable thought, that – has he not always been entirely at his beck and call? And all the more so now, now that they are…well, that they are what they are. He holds his heart wholly in his hands, though Vyce worries for those hands, soft still but soon to scar, and what then? Denam says that this is old hat, that the stains will not sink so swiftly into skin so time-thickened, but Vyce knows him, he knows him, and if he turned and unturned the Wheel until spoke by spoke it came free and crushed him flat him beneath its weight there is no turning in which he could ever be at peace with what he says he must do come morning.
So how now does he lay as the dead? How now does he sit so silent in the night so still?
“You are ill at ease,” he mutters, as if on cue. “You wonder why I am not so.”
“I wonder a great deal more than that.”
“Beg pardon?”
“I wonder a great deal more than that,” he mumbles. “I wonder if it is you at all.”
“If what is me?”
“This – any of this.”
“What do you mean?”
“You would sleep now, would you not? You would sleep if I would. You are not worried in the least. You would sleep,” he says again, his voice climbing, “and you would hie the morn hither in spite of what it is set to bring. Of course I wonder if it is you at all to whom I speak, to whom I am supposed to swear – of course I wonder. To lay like this–” Vyce moves to make some inelegant gesture to the pair of them but is stilled in an instant by a press of Denam’s bare hand to the small of his back; he scoffs even as his skin warms through the cloth, though he does not try to turn any further. “And now you will not even allow me to look on you.”
Denam does not make a sound for a long moment, his breaths breaking in uneven bursts against the back of Vyce’s neck. A faint scent of something sweet, floral, almost: a sip of something stolen from the Xenobians, most like. Would that it were the wine, and that Vyce could think all he had spoken of earlier as naught more than the delirium of a drunkard – would that Vyce could chastise him now, and could come dawn chuckle at him holding his heavy head, bleary-eyed with apologies for having spouted such nonsense at such odd hours.
Would that the damp dew at the nape of his neck were only breath.
“I cannot let you look on me,” he says weakly. “Not now. Not tonight.”
“You would keep yourself from me?”
“Only if and when I must.”
“And what right have you alone to decide if and when that may be?”
“Come, now. Do not quarrel with me.” A sigh. “Can’t you be kind?”
“Kind? You think it kind? What queer kindness is it to–”
“–Be kind to me, Vyce.” Close, now, though the words are caught, as though the effort of any more might be the breaking of him. “Be kind to me. Ask no more.” The hand on his back twitches, trembles, tangles itself in the rough cotton of the his tunic, tugging the hem as it does so that the wrist may rest on his hip. “Be kind, and please, ask no more.”
As though a deliberate act of defiance against the sad shape at his back question after question after question cascade through his mind, idle, idiotic things, ideas that they could run from Ronwey, or run him through, or run to the good knight Hamilton and have him make a good night of the whole bastard lot of Balmamusa. Gods, who gives a fig in the end? A bunch of goggle-eyed Galgastani bootlickers putrefying in some pissy-bed province – so far removed from the boy behind him, so far removed from him himself, and yet they two are now judge and jury? Vyce wishes to ask again if there might not be some way around it and yet in his heart of hearts knows that if there were, Denam would have found it.
And that, too, he wonders about – how many times now it is that Denam has made this decision, and how many times now it is that Denam has tried to spare him the sorrow of having to do the same. He said he had lived more than half his life over. He said he had told him before, or tried to, and thick-headed and thin-hearted as he is, or was, he would not hear him. He said he had hoped always that if he persisted he might prevail. Thinking back, it occurs to him dimly, drowsily, almost, that Denam seemed to sense his acceptance this evening before ever he uttered a word of it; he imagines that he must have made some minute sound or signal of assent that he had not previously made, though it must have been so small, so subtle, for nothing in particular comes to mind when he tries to think of what it might have been. Denam knew his heart before he knew it himself. To notice something in another before they themselves know of it…how many times had he tried to tell him? How many times had Vyce turned a deaf ear? How many times had he thought himself righteous and the other wretched, with no idea, no inkling whatsoever of all that was done for him?
His heart aches at the answers those questions beg.
“You…you know me yet, don’t you?” Denam asks, his voice thick. “You were – you did not mean to say you would not know me, did you? Only that–”
“–Only that this business missuits you. Of course I know you.”
“You do?”
“I do.”
He swallows. He has come so close that Vyce can feel the movement as if it were his own. “You know I would never do such things had I but a choice, don’t you?” A pause here; he hesitates. “And you know I would never ask such things of you – you above anyone, you whose hatred I haven’t the heart to bear. You know I would never had I recourse, don’t you?”
“I know. I know.” Vyce does know: he knows him to be clear-headed and kind-hearted, and he knows him to shoulder what every other would so swiftly shrug, himself included. He wishes he had left well enough alone. “You need not appeal to me.” How could I ever do aught besides adore you? Vyce wants to ask. “I hold you above any other,” he manages instead, “and myself to the same standard. My actions are mine and mine alone.”
“Even if it is that my hand guides yours?”
“Yours is the only hand I would take.”
Denam makes some strange sound, a cough, perhaps, or a cry, though quiet.
“It's alright. I understand.”
“You don’t,” he says quickly, choked still. “You can’t. You’ve not seen it…you’ve not seen me as I’ve seen myself. Did you know I could be so cold and so cruel as to let you lonesome to the Knights Loslorien? And when that ill-fate befalls you at Heim I’ve not once had the strength to stop it. You fall, or I fall, or the both of us, together – it never matters, never makes a blind bit of difference, for once one goes the other is fast to follow–”
“–Hush, Denam. No matter now.”
“I see them still,” he whispers, lips brushing the elder’s shoulder, not quite a kiss but something somehow bolder for its tenderness, “you, or I, or the both of us, together…I see our shadows in all these unreal places, as though a dream, a – a nightmare.”
Vyce gropes blindly for the other boy’s hand and brings it to his breast, folding his fingers tightly overtop to form a fist, his own hand outermost: there are scars here he cannot account for, scraps of lives lived without him. He cannot allow it to be so again. A damned fool he must be, to have thought for even a moment that Denam could be carefree in the face of all that is to befall them; a disastrous, disastrous fool.
And as fools do, he will rush headlong into what awaits. He skims the skin of cut knuckles with a mouth so full of foul words, cursing all that is not the creature curled into his side. “I will be with you, nightmare or no,” he says. His words are simple but sound enough to still Denam a second. “We will go – the both of us, together.”