Work Text:
Ankles. These are the easiest, but probably the most important. Tyril wraps his foot starting at the arch, winding up to about halfway up his calves. He remembers watching some of his clan do the same, one explaining to him when he’d asked why that it prevented any twisting on the run.
Chest. Something he’s always done himself, even if it gets a bit difficult towards the top. The compression feels like an old friend, comforting even though the need for it is long gone. It’s meditative, allowing him to put everything else out of his mind. At least, that’s what he tells himself—it’s more about control, if he’s really being honest.
Waist. Padding for stability at Zenn’s suggestion. For all his reluctance to actually fight, his advice was solid. Tyril’s been able to tank some hits he wouldn’t have before without falling over. He passes the roll behind his back from one hand to the other trying to pull it back to the front when the air shifts.
“Ah, the prodigal perv returns,” he drawls, not even needing to turn around. He does, however, move a bit more quickly in tucking the ends of the bandages at his lower back.
“I was actually going to offer to help. You look like you’re about to strain that arm of yours. It’s pitiful. I feel bad for you.”
“Well, aren’t you just gallant?”
“That is what knights are for, no?”
“Oh yeah?” Tyril finally turns around, hand on his hip. “Show me your job description. I wanna read the line about watching people change.”
“Just keeping a careful eye on a national security risk.”
“Wandering eye, more like.” He tosses the roll of bandages. “Think fast.”
Crius catches it with ease. “Don’t need to. C’mere.”
Tyril’s hesitant, but he trusts him enough to take a few paces forward. While he was definitely joking earlier, he can now see Crius drinking in the expanse of his bandaged trunk—or, more accurately, the exposed skin that didn’t get wrapped up.
“Hey, my eyes are up here,” he reprimands. “And get that look off your face. It’s gross.”
He sees it for an instant, and only an instant, but it’s long enough. Crius—the unshakable vice commander, the flawless gem of House Castlerock—cracks. His eyes shoot open like game caught in the eyes of a hunter, and something about watching him try and fail miserably to keep his composure sends a quiver of amusement to the tips of Tyril’s fingers.
Crius clears his throat, tilting his chin away. “Where did you need these?”
“Hands,” Tyril answers, holding one out, tattoos exposed. Equal parts practical and symbolic. He remembers another conversation from his childhood.
“Extremities can get crushed, so you have to wrap between them. But it also keeps you from feeling just how cold the handle of a blade can be, keeps your hands soft.”
Tyril remembers the picked scabs on his knees and arms, pulled off to keep them soft, too. He nods with understanding.
“Tyr?” Crius calls softly. “You still with me?”
The truth is, he’s not. He’s somewhere in the past, and his eyes are locked on the calluses across the fleshier part of his palm. Despite years of carefully protecting it from the elements, the rough leather of his whip and blades’ grips have toughened it up. He feels the tendons in his arms pulling his hand away.
Crius continues to reach out, though, to give chase. Tyril looks up and finds their eyes finally meeting, but there’s something different from the glazed-over roaming from earlier. The way Crius looks at him now is gentle, but not without resolve. Trusting brown eyes, stable and dark as oak in the forest’s shadows, bring Tyril back.
He holds out his hand again. “You gonna hurry it up? Zenn’s going to think I finally offed you.”
“You’d never,” Crius says confidently. He takes Tyril’s hand, sending a deep, unexpected shiver through his body again, one he can only describe this time around as a low-level euphoria. He starts wrapping it at the wrist, working his way around Tyril’s thumb right after. “Not before the job’s done, at least.”
“Eh, what can I say? I can never overlook human rights violations.”
A chuckle, so low that Tyril can feel it through their joined hands. “Good one.”
He can feel a crooked smirk pulling at his lips, held in place by the irony of the entire situation. “Hey, I mean it.”
“I know. The funny part is you thinking I assumed otherwise.”
There’s not much funny about it to Tyril, not really. He’s not sure how much Crius has figured out about his moonlighting as Conrad’s hound, but he has to have figured out something at this point. He’s too smart not to. Something about the certainty he seems to have in his assessment of Tyril’s character—and Tyril himself—in spite of it all, though, is like a balm that soothes the spark he feels whenever Crius’ fingers graze the back of his hand from underneath.
Conrad takes excellent care of his tools when all is said and done; he says it’s a reward for good behavior. But Crius treats Tyril like something precious—but not fragile—the entire time as he finishes one hand and starts with the other, snug enough to be grounding but not too tight. It feels right.
It feels… good.
The distance between them, Tyril notices, has closed significantly. Crius’ touch lingers—probably as a result of his complete lack of spatial awareness when he’s not swinging a sword—as he tucks the last of the bandages into the gap left at his forearm. “Good?” he asks.
Tyril opens and closes his fists, testing the tension and relishing the pull a little bit more than he probably should. “Good,” he confirms.
He takes the opportunity to check everything else. Ankles, chest, waist, hands, in that order. Ankles, chest, waist, hands. Ankles—
Something is out of order.
Crius’ hands are on his waist. Or, at least, near it.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Getting a bit concerned, actually.” He waves a dagger—the one from the now empty scabbard on his belt—in his hand. “You’re distracted. What’s going on, Tyr?”
“Nothing,” he answers, probably a little too quickly. He turns to the side, crossing his arms. “Just making sure everything’s secure.”
“Let me help, then.”
And this is what makes Crius so hard to push away, even though Tyril’s aware that keeping him at an arm’s distance is probably for the best. He’s insistent, pushy even, but never so much that it feels like coercion. He possesses an immutable, earnest, disgustingly charming kindness, one that can stand stalwart against the maelstrom of compulsion and will that drives everything Tyril does. But it’s never without acceptance and flexibility that feels more like a safety net for the tightrope he’s forced to walk than a brick wall.
It’s a safety that gives Tyril the courage to say, “Okay.”
Crius pushes the dagger back into the scabbard, fingers brushing against the bandages next to it. It’s the first time that anyone else has done so, and the dulled sensation sparking underneath from the dampened touch feels like too much and not enough.
“Is this what it’s like for you?” Tyril finds himself asking.
“Probably,” Crius says, understanding the question with a disappointed smile on his face. “Want me to get a few licks in with that whip of yours and see what happens?”
He better watch his mouth, or he might actually end up on the receiving end of the whip he loves to joke about one day.
“No, but you can move your hands now.”
“Away? Or more?”
More, obviously. Tyril blinks in irritation. “You really piss me off, you know that?”
“Away or more, Tyr?”
The bastard won’t take a nonverbal answer, will he? For all his capabilities in reading a room, he refuses to do it now. Instead, he continues to stretch the tension between them, waiting to see who’ll snap first, even though they both already know the answer.
Tyril mumbles, wanting his due gratification but almost scared to look up, “More.”
Crius’ hands, with their wide grip, pull Tyril just a little closer as they roam upwards towards the bandages on his chest.
“You can skip those,” he says.
“I can,” Crius affirms. “Do you want me to?”
“I don’t care,” Tyril says, and he means it. “Not like I can feel it anyway.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Make up your mind, Cas,” he chides. “Do it, or don’t.”
Without a word in reply—what a hypocrite—Crius’ eyes travel the rest of the way with his hands, thumbs sliding over the edges of each layer. At this point, the pretense of checking their soundness has all but evaporated, and, oddly enough, so has Tyril’s urge to retighten them again. Instead, it’s replaced with a distraction—no, that’s not right; a refocusing—warmth that permeates even the extra padding to sear into his skin and work its way down to his bones.
He can feel his breath rattling in his chest. He stills it the best he can.
It’s a stark contrast to the clinical care that Conrad obliges him with, which consists of throwing him a pouch containing just enough money for a trip to the apothecary. Not that he wants to imagine Conrad touching him like this. He doesn’t want to imagine anyone else touching him like this, actually.
Crius’ hands still, one on his shoulder, and the other flat against his chest. “Are you going to be alright tonight?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Taking down a whole criminal underworld in a weekend. It’s a bit ambitious, even for us, don’t you think?”
“Don’t tell me you’re backing out now,” Tyril says. He knows he’s not. It’s just a challenge to make sure he gets what’s at stake, even if he doesn’t have the full picture.
Crius might not know the real extent of Tyril’s own role in all this, but Tyril is sure that Crius knows the aristocracy enough to understand that Conrad is not the type of person to leave meddlers alive. If he didn’t, he and Zenn wouldn’t have gotten him involved, even with Zenn’s knack for coverups. Whether they admit it or not, it’s a risk to involve an inquisitor in foiling the royal family’s designs—especially him in particular, but they might not be aware of that.
Not that it would matter anyway. He’d still do everything in his power to help, just out of spite, if not because he doesn’t want to see Crius or Zenn dead, much less by his own hands at Conrad’s behest.
Besides, it’s not like he had any other plans this weekend.
“Not a chance,” Crius says, steadfast. “But I am worried about you.”
“You worried me, too,” Zenn calls from a few feet away, voice uncharacteristically nasally, and it only takes a few moments for Tyril to realize he’s poking fun at him. Another moment later, he feels Crius’ hands shooting back to his side, repelled by the all-consuming force of being interrupted in the middle of… well, whatever this is.
Zenn seems to find it funny, if not a little repulsive. “I expected to find you two either fighting to the death or fucking each other into the dirt. Maybe both. Guess I should be thankful I checked on you before anything happened.”
“Why?” Tyril asks, trying to mask his own embarrassment with a snide, “Did you want to join us?”
“Hell no.” He looks between the two of them. “Are you done ogling each other? We need to get going.”
“Oh,” Tyril drawls. He faces Crius. “Do you hear that, Cas? The voyeur’s trying to claim the moral high ground.”
“I think your mind is just in the gutter,” Crius mutters just above an audible volume, stepping away, but there’s a playful fondness laced into his words. He turns to Zenn. “Is everything ready?”
“If you mean the MacGyvered smoke bomb, yeah.”
“The what?”
“The—uh, never mind. Don’t worry about it. It’ll buy us the time we need to level the playing field.” Zenn turns around, yelling back as he departs, “Meet me back at the fire in ten.”
Tyril turns back to Crius, smirking. “Well, go on. Daddy’s waiting,” he taunts.
“I still have ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes to do what, exactly?” He can’t help but scoff, but it’s more out of frustrated resignation at Crius’ refusal to do anything other than be coy in what he wants—in what they both want. There’s nothing more they can do, not without having to actually have a conversation about what all of this is, which is pointless. They’re both on borrowed time.
Crius sighs. He probably understands that he has to let this go, but he’s always been stubborn.
Tyril looks down and turns around to hide the frown on his face.
He starts to walk away, and Crius doesn’t stop him. That’s how the former knows that keeping up this act is just a futile exercise in denial. One day, Crius will surely find someone who’ll be able to make him truly feel even without his senses, someone who’ll stay at his side even as his time runs out. When that day comes, if it hasn’t already, Tyril will keep walking, keeping a respectable distance and taking comfort in knowing that when he finally collapses, it’ll be a fitting atonement.
But he’ll be able to take solace in the looks on their faces now. They can’t see each other, but Tyril can sense that he’s not the only one wearing an expression of grief for a future that’ll never pan out. That shared longing for their forever unspoken something that will only ever find a liminal existence in shadows and half-truths, in the moments before the ends of bandages are tucked away, means enough to be comforting.
A more well-adjusted person might think their story a tragedy, but as Tyril continues back towards their makeshift camp, his body carefully bound, he can’t help but feel like he’s been cut free.