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He woke, as he so often did, with a start.
It would be long past the hour of the Wolf, he knew. It always was. Sometime when the veil of night hung thin, and the morn threatened its course across the blackened sky any minute now. It was ever thus that he might wake to bear witness to every wretched sunrise and sunset, the unwilling vigilant, condemned to sit this terrible watch sleepless and forlorn.
He was not alone in his vigil this night, though. There were very few who found the will to sleep beside him, even among whores who he would pay well for the company would leave him oft long before dawn. It felt impossible how the heat of your side bore into him, warming his blankets that may otherwise have laid over him cold and damp drenched in his own filth, his only bedfellow with which he was doomed eternally to lie. Why anyone would choose to lie in it with him, he still could not reconcile. He could not decide whether it were better or worse whether the Gods pitied him to send him a companion to rot in his filth with him, condemning them as well, or that he might be damned by his selfishness for dragging another into his miserable existence.
In his dreams, he often found the wretched truth of it. The flames of dragon fire consuming most- if not all who stood in his path. Mothers, Brothers, Fathers, Sons, Daughters, Sisters, Lovers. None too often did he dream of survivors in these flames. What few there were wrought a doom of their own, and did not last long in their victory without some other dread consuming them.
And now, he knew with certainty that you could be numbered among them, and for that he could not help but become suddenly wracked with guilt and pity.
He left your gentle grasp slowly, sitting upright, the sheets clinging to his sweat dampened skin. He began to shake, as he often did in waking. From what he felt, the wretched empty tying of his stomach in endless knots, or from the hunger for a libation that might untangle it, he could not tell.
"Daeron?"
Your voice soft beside him, weary from sleep, shocked him like cold lightning. He felt the mattress sink as you slowly sat up beside him, arm reaching behind his back and sending a sharp shiver through him.
"Was it another dream?" you soothed, a thumb rubbing gentle circles against his spine. It made him shake all the more, a terrible trembling breath passing his lips.
"I'm sorry..." he utters, a hopeless quiver lacing his words. He makes some sound between a hiccup and a sniffle as he turns to face you- as much as he'd dreaded doing so until now. But it by needs had to be said, and he knew he had to look into your face to do it or forever regret sparing you what little honor he might have in this.
"I'm sorry I love you."
He waited. Breath held firmly in his lungs, though it threatened to shake out of him with every aching second that passed. Your eyes held nothing but pity- a far cry from the looks his father or brothers might give him for saying such a thing. But it didn't hurt his heart to bear near so much as when your other hand held his face, and that bated breath rattled out of him.
"It's all right. It's all right... they are only dreams..."
The look he cast at you was pointed, mocking, but sad. You knew the truth as well as he- these were no mere dreams. These were portents and prophecies and none bode well for what all his morrows might bring.
Nor yours. And this thought made tears sting in his eyes, but if they fell, he could not feel it for how his cheeks remained as damp as they had been when he first awoke, and whatever salt lingered on his skin would mask the bitter taste of tears if they too whet his lips now.
He could collapse into himself and he would be all the better for it. He tried again, as he so often did now, drawing himself tight and shaking, as though he might escape you if he drew himself in . But even as he tried to make himself smaller, your hands kept on him, steady as earth and ground and all things that grew in it.
Perhaps it was a sin for him to reach out as he did then; to cling to you as you held him, as your lips met his without hunger or want, without intent to take, only to give. Perhaps he should not whet his lips and return each caress with a desperation of a man long parched of his cups, a sensation which he, of all men, would never know. But with each press of you against him, his damnation itself seemed to ease for just a moment. If there was nothing else for him, after all, then at the very least there could be this- a great love that perhaps he did not deserve, but possessed nonetheless, a salve against the barrage of dragon fire that haunted his dreams.
And what a cruel irony, he thought, that only here, in waking, in these small hours before dawn, tired and wracked with grief and spent, he might know something of the peace that only dreams promised to the common man. Only here in your arms as your lips kissed his tears away might he even begin to imagine himself neither the drunken wretch who shamed himself and his family, nor the dreamer doomed to sleepless grief, but only the man that you loved, if only a little while before the dawn struck the morrow anew.