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"Wait here, okay?"
A plea, murmured against the bleeding skin of Lohen's forehead, sealed there with the press of Varka's lips before he could even register it. It pierced through the blinding ache in his skull, morphing into something like a lifeline, as Varka slowly drew back from his prone figure.
"Please. I mean it, sweetheart," Varka repeated, his voice gentle and perhaps just a touch unsteady, though Lohen couldn't quite tell for sure. "Stay put for me. I'll be back soon."
Lohen wanted to reach out. Wanted to grasp the warmth of Varka's body before it left him. Wanted to assure the other man that he was fine, that the Grand Master didn't need to fuss over him like this. He wanted, more than anything, to insist on getting up.
His limbs refused to cooperate. The blood on his lips glued his mouth shut. His vision swam at the edges, and the state of his battered body wasn't about to convince anyone of his lies anyway. And somewhere deep within him, he wanted to listen—
At least Varka left his coat behind. It barely lasted a few minutes before it got soaked through with blood, but it did a decent job of keeping Lohen warm.
Warm enough that he could almost pretend Varka was still there.
The sounds of battle echoed from somewhere beyond his field of vision. The sounds of steel ringing against steel, something roaring low and furious, the earth trembling under blows hard enough to shake loose pebbles around him. Lohen knew he should be tracking the fight. Should be analyzing the enemy's openings, counting Varka’s movements, doing something useful instead of lying here like dead weight.
This shouldn't have happened. He'd gone up against worse than this and walked away laughing about it. There were always the ever-present Wild Hunt stragglers, corrupted beasts how many times his size, or various nightmares that would have sent other knights running. He had his reputation for a reason. But whatever this thing had been, it caught him annoyingly off guard. Its movements were off somehow, unnatural in the most inconvenient of ways. Its blows were disproportionate, bypassing every defense he’d learned before he could react. He’d barely managed to shove Varka out of harm’s way when it struck him instead in a sudden, brutal, merciless hit.
Not that the pain was what bothered him. Just as he'd faced worse foes, he’d had worse injuries, too. Plenty of times. His body felt leaden, every injury making itself thoroughly known in the most troublesome way possible now that the adrenaline had started seeping out of him. His ribs burned, his shoulder protested acutely at the slightest shift. Something warm hadn’t stopped trickling slowly down the side of his face.
Not ideal. Not fatal. Probably. Maybe. Most certainly. Under normal circumstances, that thought would have amused him. It still did amuse him a little, even now, deep down.
Lohen blinked slowly up at the gray sky. He saw clouds drifting by. Wind moved through the grass near his ear and rustled the trees. The ache settled deeper into him with every passing minute. He had no idea how many of those minutes had actually passed. Five? Ten? An hour? Time had gone strange and sluggish.
This part, he did hate. Hated feeling this weak, this useless, lying motionless while the fight went on without him. Hated the way Varka had looked at him before he left. It wasn’t annoyance. It wasn’t even remotely close to the exasperation he usually showed when Lohen did something reckless. He looked scared, instead. Like Lohen was something that might come apart if handled wrong.
A familiar annoyance flickered weakly under all the exhaustion.
He tried shifting his right arm, testing it, and immediately regretted the decision. Pain exploded white-hot through his side, and a curse died somewhere behind his teeth before it could fully form.
Idiot.
The insult sounded suspiciously like Varka's voice. Lohen frowned at nothing. The Grand Master wasn't here. The man had quite literally just walked away from him with explicit instructions. And yet, the voice lingered anyway, stitched somewhere into the back of his skull from years of being told exactly this.
Stay down.
He scowled at nothing in particular. Of course, his own head would conjure Varka's voice to nag at him even when the man himself wasn't around to do it. Typical.
"Bossy," he muttered, voice barely an exhale through gritted teeth, and the wind stole the word before it traveled more than a few inches.
Silence answered. Then, unbidden, an actual memory surfaced. Not his own head putting words in Varka's mouth this time, but something real. He recalled Varka standing over him after some mission years back, covered in dirt and somebody else's blood, looking absolutely furious. His bright eyes were blazing something fierce.
Something shaken, something terrified.
‘You could've died,’ Varka had said, barely controlling the tremor in his voice.
‘I didn't,’ Lohen had shot back in return, stubborn as ever.
‘That isn't the point.’
‘Sounds like the whole point to me.’
Varka had looked, in that exact moment, like a man trying to decide between strangling him and hugging him, and ultimately doing both, badly, at the same time. Lohen found himself smiling despite everything, despite the blood and the cold and the way his own ribs felt like they'd been rearranged. The memory didn't hurt because it was painful. It hurt because he missed him, which was a stupid thing to feel about a man who had only been gone a few minutes.
Probably. Maybe? Had it only been a few minutes? He couldn't be so sure of that anymore, either.
His eyelids felt heavy. Dangerously heavy.
No. Not yet.
‘Wait here.’
The words came back to him, simple and steady and absolute, and something about hearing them again, even just in memory, was enough to anchor him a little longer.
Lohen had never, in his entire life, been particularly good at following instructions. Varka complained about it regularly. Jean complained about it more. Half of Mondstadt probably had a list of grievances ready to go. But this time, Varka hadn't ordered him. Hadn't commanded, the way he sometimes did on the battlefield when there wasn't room for argument. He'd asked. And for reasons Lohen would never admit out loud, not even under torture, not even to Varka himself, that made it infinitely harder to ignore.
A laugh (just a faint puff of breath, really) escaped him, feeble and strained. Varka would be unbearable if he ever found out that asking nicely worked better on him than any order ever had.
The thought lingered there, comforting in a way he didn't have the strength to be embarrassed about. Warm. Like the coat. Like Varka.
Lohen let his eyes fall shut again. Just one more moment. Just long enough to listen to the wind, to imagine the sound of familiar footsteps coming back toward him, just long enough—
"Lohen."
His eyes snapped open.
For one terrible second, he thought he was imagining that too. Then he saw him, actually running with his hair disheveled, and a healer struggling to keep pace at his side. Varka dropped to his knees beside him hard enough that Lohen felt the impact through the ground.
There was relief written plainly across his face. Raw, unshielded relief, the kind Varka usually kept locked behind a reassuring grin for everyone else's sake. The kind reserved only for moments exactly like this one.
"You're still here."
The words came out rough, almost disbelieving. Not because there had ever been any real question of where Lohen would be, but because some small, frantic part of Varka had clearly spent the whole fight bracing for the worst anyway.
Still, Lohen found himself smiling. Weakly. Proudly. Through blood and pain and bone-deep exhaustion. He couldn't quite remember what it felt like to be himself anymore, but Varka was back now. Not much else mattered.
"Told you," he croaked out with strength he gathered from Varka’s presence.
Varka's hand found his cheek immediately, thumb brushing carefully and lightly over his jaw. "What?"
"You said—" Lohen swallowed, throat raw. "’Wait here’."
For a second, Varka just stared at him. Then something unbearably soft crossed his face. "Yeah?"
Lohen's smile widened, small and crooked and entirely too pleased with himself for a man who could barely move and whose brain had turned into sludge. "I did." Waited here. For you.
Varka made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. It was something rougher, caught halfway in his throat.
Behind him, the healer who'd been struggling to keep pace finally caught up, already crouching down on Lohen's other side and reaching for the worst of the bleeding.
"Let's get him sitting up, just a little. Easier on the lungs that way," the healer said, glancing at Varka. "Slow. Support his neck."
Varka didn't need telling twice. Careful hands slid beneath Lohen's shoulders, easing him up only as far as the healer indicated, slow enough that the movement barely registered as movement at all.
"Easy," Varka murmured, his voice dropping into that rare, gentle steadiness meant only for Lohen, battered and defiant in his hold. "I've got you."
Lohen tried to push up further on his own anyway (because some habits refused to die), but the pain immediately knocked the attempt right out of him. Varka's grip tightened, keeping him in place without crushing him, and Lohen finally let himself stop fighting it.
Large hands. Steady. Careful. Here.
It was only once he'd settled against Varka's chest, cheek pressed close enough to feel the man's pulse hammering too fast beneath his ear, that Lohen registered just how much of Varka's shirt was soaked dark and wet. His gut twisted before his mind finally caught up. The smell was wrong, too sharp and rancid to be anything human.
Not his blood, then. Whatever Varka had been fighting, most of this had come from it, not him. The relief crashed over Lohen hard enough that he almost exhaled a painful lung out.
Lohen wanted to say something back, wanted to tell him Varka was late, wanted to complain about it, wanted to ask if the thing that did this to him had suffered properly before it died. Instead, all that came out was a weak, useless huff of air, his mouth twisting at the corner with the ghost of whatever smart remark hadn't made it out.
It was enough, though. Varka had spent years learning the shape of every expression Lohen made before he'd even finished making it, and this one he clearly knew well: the crooked almost-smirk Lohen wore right before saying something designed to get a rise out of someone. He didn't need the actual words to know exactly what shade of trouble they would have been.
"Mm. Still got that mouth on you, somehow," Varka said, like he'd heard the whole insult anyway. "Don't worry. It didn't get to walk away. Killed it properly to avenge you and all."
Embarrassing. Lohen hated how easily this man could read him; hated that a man could spend years studying every twitch of his face the way Lohen had once studied Varka's, until there was nowhere left to hide, even half-conscious and bleeding out on a battlefield. He hated it almost as much as he loved it, which was its own exquisite misery.
“'M not worried.”
Varka's expression softened even further immediately, helplessly. “Of course you weren’t.”
Lohen could hear the unspoken ‘brat’ tacked at the end of that sentence. He grumbled something low yet fierce that the other man ignored serenely. Instead, Varka brushed the blood-matted hair back from Lohen’s forehead with a gentleness that almost hurt more than all the wounds combined.
“The rest of the healers are on their way too,” Varka said. “Anselm is bringing supplies. You took a hit deep enough that I want more than just field dressing on it before we get you back to the camp."
Lohen frowned, slow and laborious, every muscle in his face apparently requiring separate negotiation. "Waste of resources."
Varka barked out a genuine laugh at that, sudden and bright, almost surprised by its own existence despite everything. "Good. If you're being difficult, you're definitely going to live."
Lohen relaxed into the hold without really deciding to. He simply stopped holding himself apart, the way he usually did, the way he always did with everyone except this one infuriating, devoted man.
Varka noticed the moment it happened. His arms tightened, just slightly, still minding Lohen’s comfort, yet still like he couldn't quite stop himself.
"You stayed," Varka said almost absentmindedly as he watched over Lohen’s wounds being properly dressed.
Lohen blinked up at him, hazy. "What?"
"You listened." The words came out quieter than before. Almost disbelieving. Almost reverent. "I told you to wait, and you actually—"
"You told me to," Lohen mumbled, like that explained anything, like it wasn't the single most uncharacteristic thing he'd done in years.
"That's never stopped you before."
Fair. Varka had a point there, and they both knew it. Being told to stand down had never once worked on Lohen. Just in this past few months alone, he'd ignored direct orders through three (or more, certainly) separate near-death experiences, several unauthorized infiltration missions, and one extremely memorable argument about whether or not he was allowed to fight a Ruin Guard with a fractured wrist. But Varka hadn't ordered him this time. He'd asked, soft and scared and stripped of all his usual authority, and that had been the one thing Lohen had never quite built up an immunity to.
Lohen huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, mostly because actually laughing hurt too much to manage.
Varka's gaze didn't waver from his face. There was something building behind it now, something Lohen recognized but had rarely seen aimed at him with this much weight behind it. Not the easy teasing pride from before. Something slower. Heavier. Like Varka was choosing every word with the same care he'd choose his footing on unstable ground.
"Do you know what that means to me?" Varka asked, low. "You, staying still, letting someone else handle it for once?"
Lohen's pulse, already unsteady from blood loss, did something else entirely unsteady. "It's not that big of a deal."
"It is." Varka's thumb traced slowly over his cheekbone, wonderstruck, like he was committing the moment to memory with diligence. "You don't let anyone tell you what to do. Not me, not Jean, probably not even when the Anemo Archon himself asked. You walked into a den of corrupted Ruin Guards alone because someone told you not to."
"That was different."
"It wasn't." A faint, helpless smile tugged at the corner of Varka's mouth. "And you stayed here anyway. For me."
The praise was building toward something, and Lohen could feel it coming the way he felt a blade arc through the air before it landed— too late to brace properly, already certain it was going to hurt in the best possible way.
Varka leaned down, forehead resting briefly against his, the gesture brief and instinctive, like something he hadn't quite meant to do but couldn't stop himself from doing anyway.
"Good boy."
The praise hit harder than any wound Lohen had taken all day.
Lohen stared up at him, certain his face was doing something humiliating and entirely unable to stop it. Varka’s lips quirked up slowly and warmly in response, something utterly, helplessly gone. The same look he got whenever Lohen's composure slipped somewhere he couldn't drag it back from in time.
"Don't," Lohen managed.
"You listened."
"Varka."
"You stayed exactly where I left you." The smile softened further, pride now shining openly across his face. It wasn’t amusement, not the usual fond teasing. Pride. Plain and unguarded, and somehow that was infinitely worse than if he'd been laughing at him. "You did so well for me, sweetheart."
Heat flooded through Lohen despite the blood loss, despite the pain, despite every reasonable explanation his body could offer for why he absolutely should not be reacting like this right now. He was blushing from that, really now? "I was dying."
"Mm."
"You don't get to hand out points for following instructions when someone's dying."
"You do when it's you," Varka said it simply, as if it were just a fact of the world, no more debatable than gravity. "Anyone else, and I'd expect it. You, staying put through all that—" He shook his head slightly, something almost wondering in his expression. "That's not nothing. Not from you."
Lohen groaned, or tried to. The sound that actually emerged was weak and humiliatingly pathetic, and Varka looked, if anything, more delighted by it.
"Archons, you're adorable."
"I'll kill you."
"Knew you weren't going anywhere," Varka said, fond and unbothered, and bent down to press a kiss to the uninjured side of Lohen's forehead. Then another, lingering there a beat too long to be casual. The kind of kiss usually saved for quiet moments behind closed doors, not bloody fields with other healers approaching, and the current healer trying to make himself invisible to give them privacy.
"I know, sweetheart." More kisses, softer this time, deliberate and feather-light. "I'm so proud of you, too."
The words hit home with sharp precision, brushing against every tender, defenseless place Lohen had left bare.
Because that was the real problem, wasn't it? Fighting enemies was easy. Facing death, taking the hit, enduring whatever came; none of that had ever cost him anything close to this. He'd known for years, with the same bone-deep certainty he knew the weight of his own spear, that Varka would always come back, always choose him, always be exactly as devoted as he claimed. That part had stopped being a question a long time ago.
What he'd never quite let himself do was show it. Not like this. Not lying still, not staying down, not letting someone else hold all the weight while he simply… let it happen, in front of Varka, where there was nowhere to hide behind a smirk or a deflection or a well-timed insult. Whatever obedience had meant to him once, a long time ago. Staying still, staying quiet, waiting somewhere small and lightless for a rescue that was never guaranteed. It didn't just unlearn itself because he completely trusted the man kneeling over him. The trust had always been there. Letting it show, openly, without flinching away from how it looked— that was the part he'd never quite managed before today.
Varka's thumb brushed gently across his cheek again, slow and certain, like he had all the time in the world now that the worst of it was over. Blue eyes met red, steady and warm. Always so unbearably warm.
"You don't have to carry everything alone," Varka murmured.
Lohen wanted to argue. Wanted to point out that he'd carried plenty alone for most of his life and turned out fine. Mostly. More or less. But Varka's hand had moved to cradle the back of his skull, careful of the gash there, fingers threading slowly through his hair like he intended to stay exactly like this for as long as it took, and the words dissolved somewhere before they reached his mouth.
So instead, he just breathed. In, out. Let himself be held.
Varka pressed another kiss to his temple, unhurried, then one to the curve of his cheekbone, then, softest of all, one right at the corner of his mouth, careful of the split there, barely more than a graze.
"You're shaking," Varka murmured against his skin.
"Cold," Lohen lied.
"Mm." Varka didn't call him on it. Just gathered him in closer instead, tucking the ruined coat tighter around his shoulders with one hand, the other still cradling his head like something precious and easily broken. "Stay just like this a little longer."
"Bossy," Lohen mumbled, and felt rather than heard Varka's quiet warmth against his hair.
"You love it."
He did. He really, unfairly did, and he was far too tired and far too fond to deny it properly. He let his eyes drift shut again. Safely, this time, with no fear underneath it. He felt one more kiss land against his forehead, soft as a vow, right where the first one had started.
Somewhere in the distance, the healers' voices grew closer, footsteps hurrying through the grass. Neither of them moved to pull apart.
For one brief, suspended moment, with Varka's ruined coat still wrapped around his shoulders, Varka's heartbeat still steady and close enough to feel, Varka's mouth still pressed warm against his skin— Lohen let himself believe it.
That he didn't have to carry it all alone. That this man would keep coming back, every single time, for as long as Lohen let him.
Just a little. Just this once.
Just like always, apparently, if Varka had anything to say about it.