Archive of Our Own

The trouble, as far as Gilgamesh was concerned, began with a string of lanterns.

Not even good lanterns. Squat things, strung between the outer columns of the palace courtyard by servants who kept casting nervous glances at him as though he might object to the aesthetic. As if he, King of Uruk, One-Half God, Owner Of Everything Worth Owning In The Known World, had ever once in his life cared about lantern placement.

He didn't.

He cared about the fact that Enkidu had stopped walking three times in the last hour to look at them.

"They're for the Kish delegation," Gilgamesh said, to no one, draped across his throne in the particular boneless slouch he reserved for occasions of supreme tedium. "A festivity. A gathering. Sumerian tribesmen wandering my courtyard, eating my food, admiring my walls, and then going home to tell lesser kings how generous I am, which I already know, which means the entire affair teaches me nothing and costs me a great deal of very good wine."

"You sound thrilled," said Siduri, who had the audacity to be amused by this, arranging temple offerings nearby with the serene unbothered competence of a woman who had long ago stopped being surprised by him.

"I am a king. Thrill is beneath my schedule."

"Mm." She didn't look up. "Enkidu seems thrilled enough for the both of you."

Gilgamesh's eyes found Enkidu without his permission; they did that, lately, with an embarrassing frequency he refused to examine and yes. There. Across the courtyard, crouched by the fountain in a way that was going to ruin what they were wearing, Enkidu was watching one of the dancers practice, utterly transfixed, mouthing the rhythm of her footwork like they meant to memorize it with their whole body.

Something happened in Gilgamesh's chest that he did not have a name for and was not going to go looking for one.

"They've never seen a festival before," Gilgamesh said, with the tone of a man explaining something obvious to someone slow. "Of course they're curious. Cattle are curious about fire too, until they understand it."

"Enkidu is not cattle."

"I am aware of what Enkidu is," Gilgamesh said, with more heat than the sentence required, and stood up rather abruptly, because apparently his legs had opinions before his pride had finished forming a position.

By the time the sun dipped low enough to turn the houses the colour of beaten copper, the reviewing of decorations was done. So was Gilgamesh with his patience for the day.

His eyes happened to land on Enkidu across the courtyard again.

Enkidu was wearing white.

A stark contrast to the elegant decorations.

It was not even good white. The same plain, undyed linen they'd been wearing since the day the gods had finished shaping them out of river clay and set loose on the world with no instructions and somehow even less fashion sense. Simple, practical, the sort of garment a person wears when nobody has ever once asked them what they'd like to wear, only what would suffice.

It had been fine before. Gilgamesh had never thought twice about it. White was honest. White suited a creation who'd spent their early days running with lions and arguing with herd animals about grazing rights.

But white, Gilgamesh thought, with the sudden and irrational fury of a man discovering a structural flaw in something he'd assumed was finished, was going to look plain next to chieftains' sons in good dyed wool and traders dripping in foreign beads. White was going to make Enkidu look like a servant.

"Unacceptable," Gilgamesh announced, to absolutely no one, and stood up so fast his own attendants startled.

Not even minutes later. He had been gathering all weaver's worthy of mention to present the finest fabrics to him.

Gilgamesh paced a furious circle around a length of fabric the colour of his own garments.

"My king is preparing his friend's wardrobe?" Siduri commented on the sight. Unsure if she had been hallucinating from stress.

"I am preparing my court," Gilgamesh corrected, with enormous dignity, "to present itself appropriately. Enkidu is a part of my court. Therefore Enkidu requires appropriate dress. This is governance, Siduri. You of all people should understand governance."

"Mm," said Siduri, in the exact tone she used when she had decided not to argue with him purely because watching him dig the hole deeper himself was more entertaining. "And it must be gold, specifically."

"Gold is the colour of Uruk."

"Gold is the colour of you."

"Same thing," Gilgamesh said, with the serene confidence of a man who had never once in his life seen the difference and did not intend to start now.

"A king does not scramble at the last moment. A king prepares."

"Mm. And the rest of your household; does it require preparing too?"

"The household's robes are perfectly serviceable as they are," Gilgamesh said, with the absolute, unblinking confidence of a man who had not noticed the hole he'd just dug himself even deeper into. "Enkidu is …different. Enkidu requires appropriate dress."

"Different how?"

"They simply do."

"Mm," Siduri hummed again and said nothing further as Gilgamesh clapped his hands for the weaver before she could say anything else that might require him to examine his own motives, which he had absolutely no intention of doing, today or any other day, ever.

"I don't understand," Enkidu said, standing very still in the middle of their chambers while two attendants measured the span of their shoulders with lengths of knotted string, "why I need new clothes. Nobody's even arrived yet."

"They arrive tomorrow."

"So? I have clothes for tomorrow. I'm wearing them right now."

"Those," Gilgamesh said, circling them slowly, arms crossed, examining them with the focused scrutiny of a man pricing livestock, "are not clothes worthy of standing beside a king during a state occasion. Those are clothes worthy of … Wandering a riverbank making friends with snakes."

"I do like the snakes."

"That is not the point I am making."

Enkidu tilted his head, patient in the way only Enkidu ever managed to be patient with him, like Gilgamesh's nonsense was simply weather, something to be waited out rather than fought. "What is the point you're making?"

Gilgamesh opened his mouth.

Closed it.

"The point," he said, after a pause just slightly too long to be casual, "is that you are… part of my household. And my household does not appear before foreign chieftains looking as though it dressed itself out of a beggar's cart."

"I did dress myself," Enkidu said, mildly. "There wasn't a cart involved."

"Lift your arms."

Enkidu, ever obliging, ever far too kind to point out that Gilgamesh had just very visibly panicked and was now steamrolling past it at considerable volume, lifted their arms.

The cloth that settled over their shoulders a moment later was gold; not pale, not modest, but the same deep, unmistakable, sun-caught gold that every soul in Uruk had spent years learning to associate with exactly one man. The cut mirrored Gilgamesh's own ceremonial robes nearly stitch for stitch: the wider collar, the banded sleeves, the darker embroidered trim that framed the whole thing like a sentence nobody had needed to write down, because the colour said it loud enough on its own.

Gilgamesh looked at the result and felt something unclench in his chest that he had not, until that exact moment, realized was clenched.

"There," he said, with enormous and entirely unearned satisfaction. "Acceptable."

Enkidu turned in place, testing the weight of the sleeve, running their thumb along the gold thread with the same open delight they gave every new thing the world handed them. "It's so soft," they said. "Gilgamesh. Feel this."

"I am aware of how it feels. I own the loom."

"Will the rest of the household get new robes too? Seems like a lot of cloth, just for me."

For one bright, terrible heartbeat, Gilgamesh thought; "here it is, they noticed, they're about to ask why it's only them" and braced for it.

"The household's robes," Gilgamesh said carefully, "are fine."

"Even Ninshubur's? He's been wearing the same sash since before I arrived."

"Ninshubur's sash is not the matter at hand."

"What is the matter at hand?"

"The matter at hand," Gilgamesh said, drawing himself up with the air of a man producing reinforcements from thin air, "is that you are standing here arguing about sashes instead of admiring what is, objectively, an extremely fine piece of weaving."

Enkidu, who had apparently decided this answer was sufficient or simply found the gold more interesting than the question: let it go, smoothing both hands down the front of the robe and beaming at him, sun-bright, uncomplicated, the particular smile Enkidu seemed to keep in reserve for exactly one person. "Well. I like it. Thank you, Gilgamesh."

And that, Gilgamesh thought, with the distinct sensation of a man walking face-first into a wall he had personally built, was precisely why he'd done any of this in the first place, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with looms, or governance, or the structural dignity of his court.

He was simply not going to examine that thought any further. Ever. To anyone.

Siduri found him an hour later, still loitering outside Enkidu's chambers with no clear excuse for doing so, watching through the doorway as Enkidu admired their own reflection in a polished bronze mirror with the focused wonder of a person who had just discovered they had a reflection worth admiring.

"It's not the timing I find interesting," she said, arriving at his elbow without invitation, the way she always did. "Kings commission robes early. That's simply sense."

"Thank you. Finally, someone with—"

"What I find interesting," Siduri continued, entirely unbothered by his interruption, "is that out of an entire palace household, you commissioned exactly one robe. In your colour. For one person."

Gilgamesh said nothing.

"Ninshubur's sash is older than some of your treaties," she went on, pleasantly, like she was discussing the weather. "Your own cupbearer wears the same plain wool he's worn for a decade. But Enkidu… Enkidu gets gold. Your gold. The exact shade no one else in Uruk is permitted to wear without your express permission."

Not that any one else could effort an entire set of golden Robes either, even with permission.

"It suits them," Gilgamesh said, which was true, and also not remotely an answer.

"It does," Siduri agreed, far too kindly for the situation.

Gilgamesh found something extremely important to examine on the opposite wall.

He decided, settling into motion with the practiced nonchalance of a man who had absolutely not just been caught red-handed by his own High Priestess.

The banquet, arrived exactly the way Gilgamesh had been dreading and exactly the way he refused to admit he'd been looking forward to.

He dressed for it with more care than he gave himself credit for; gold layered over gold, the heavy collar settling against his collarbone like an old, familiar weight, attendants fussing over the drape of his cloak while he stood there pretending to be bored by the entire process and absolutely not glancing toward the door every few minutes to see if Enkidu had arrived yet.

"You've had that sleeve adjusted three times," his attendant murmured.

"It was crooked three times."Gilgamesh said, with the tone of a man closing a debate that had never actually been open, and turned just as Enkidu stepped through the doorway, and every clever, dismissive thing Gilgamesh had been planning to say about punctuality simply evaporated out of his skull.

Because Enkidu, dressed in gold, Gilgamesh's gold, fitted now, settled properly across their shoulders the way it hadn't quite been during the fitting, looked like something the river itself had decided to polish.

"Well?" Enkidu said, turning once, arms slightly out, entirely unselfconscious. "Acceptable?"

"...Adequate," Gilgamesh managed, which was, for him, practically a love poem.

The courtyard, by the time the Sumerian delegations arrived in full, had transformed into something almost worthy of the lanterns Gilgamesh had spent so much energy pretending not to notice.

Torches lined the walls in long orange ribbons of light. Musicians filled the air with the low, insistent pulse of drums and reed flutes. Chieftains arrived in procession; Kish, Lagash, a handful of smaller river settlements whose names Gilgamesh had memorized purely so he could forget them again later, each trailing sons and daughters dressed in their finest, each casting the appropriate amount of awe at the walls of Uruk, exactly as intended.

Gilgamesh accepted all of it the way he accepted everything: as his due.

It was Enkidu who drew the room sideways.

It happened gradually, then all at once. Like a current pulls a boat off course without the boat ever quite noticing it's drifting.

A young woman from the Lagash delegation paused mid-sentence to stare. A chieftain's son forgot, briefly, that he was holding a cup, and tipped wine onto his own sandals. Conversations near the fountain kept trailing off into a particular hush whenever Enkidu passed through them, gold catching torchlight, moving with the easy, unhurried grace of someone built, quite literally, by hands that had taken their time.

Because that was the maddening truth of it, and Gilgamesh knew it better than anyone: the gods did not make mistakes when they wanted something beautiful, and they had clearly wanted Enkidu very beautiful, beautiful in the specific, devastating way that made every queen and dancing girl in three kingdoms look, by comparison, like a hag. And it would have been simple enough , survivable, even if that had been the whole of it.

It was not the whole of it.

Because Enkidu was also strong. Not court-strong, not the soft, decorative strength of men who lifted nothing heavier than a cup. Real strength, mountain strength, the kind that had gone toe to toe with Gilgamesh himself for days straight and left both of them breathing heavy. It showed in the set of their shoulders under the gold, in the easy way they moved like a creation who had never once needed permission to occupy space.

Beauty alone drew glances. Beauty paired with that drew people in like gravity.

Gilgamesh stood, cup untouched, watching an increasingly long line of nobility find increasingly thin excuses to drift toward the fountain, and felt his mood curdle in real time.

"You look," Siduri observed, materializing at his side with her customary lack of warning, "like a man watching his favourite hunting dog wander off the leash at a market."

"I do not have a favourite hunting dog."

"No. You have Enkidu."

Gilgamesh did not dignify this with a response, mostly because he didn't have one ready.

Enkidu had never quite gotten used to being looked at.

It wasn't unpleasant, exactly.

Simply strange, the way most human customs were strange, the way bread was strange the first time someone explained that you had to grow the wheat first, as though anyone had asked it to take that long.

People's eyes seemed to catch on them the way light catches on water, and they had stopped trying to work out why a long time ago.

They knew, in the distant, secondhand way one knows a fact about oneself without ever quite feeling it, that they were beautiful. They had been told so often enough, by enough different people, in enough different tones, that it had simply become a true thing about the world, the way the river was wet or the sky was far away.

Tonight, their hair was braided.

They didn't often wear it that way. Usually it caught on things, tangled in branches, moved with the wind when running , but the attendants had brushed it out before the banquet with an almost reverent care, tied it together with some beads, catching torchlight the way deep water catches moonlight.

A Lagash noble; Itur-something, Enkidu hadn't quite caught the rest, seemed to find this fascinating in a way that made him talk a great deal.

"It's the colour of the marsh reeds at dusk," he was saying, swirling a cup of wine he had not yet offered to actually drink, watching Enkidu's hair the way some men watched dice mid-roll. "I've never seen anything quite like you. Are all your people so…"

"I don't have people," Enkidu said, not unkindly, taking the cup that had been pressed into their hands and turning it once, watching the wine catch light along its surface. "I was made. There's only one of me."

"Made," the noble repeated, delighted rather than deterred, in the particular way certain men found mystery more attractive than explanation. "By whom?"

"The gods, naturally," Enkidu said, with the easy, unbothered honesty of someone who had simply never learned that this was meant to be either a secret or a seduction technique, and lifted the wine to their mouth.

They drank slowly; not out of restraint, they had no restraint to exercise, no haze waiting to catch them no matter how much they poured down their own throat, a fact that had disappointed several festival drinking games and delighted exactly no one quite as much as it delighted Enkidu themself, but out of genuine interest.

The wine was dark, heavy on the tongue, sweet at the front and bitter underneath, like fruit left slightly too long in the sun.

"Dates," Enkidu said, half to themself, eyes narrowing in concentration. "And something darker. Pomegranate, maybe. And the vessel's clay… I can taste that too, a little. Earthy. Like rain on a riverbank."

The noble blinked. "...You can taste the clay?"

"I notice things," Enkidu said simply, and took another sip, turning the flavour over with the same careful attention they gave everything new; a sound, a season, a person, filing it away somewhere alongside the hundred other small specific joys they'd catalogued since the day they'd first opened their eyes by the river and discovered, with something like wonder, that the world had texture.

They liked this. Not the noble particularly, pleasant enough, talkative, harmless but the wine, the act of discovering it, the long unhurried pleasure of paying close attention to something simply because it existed and they were allowed to simply notice it without anyone asking what use the noticing served.

Enkidu had no idea, none whatsoever, that the noble had stopped watching the wine several sips ago and was watching them instead.

And Gilgamesh had watched that noble ever since he had approached Enkidu by the fountain with the particular loose-limbed confidence of a man who had never once been told no and had no intention of starting tonight. Watched him say something, Gilgamesh was too far away to hear, which only made it worse, his imagination filling the silence with increasingly intolerable possibilities.

He made Enkidu laugh, easy and unguarded, head tipping back.

"They are laughing," Gilgamesh said, to Siduri, to the air, to whatever god happened to be listening.

"People do that. When they're enjoying themselves."

"At my festival. In my colours."

"Funny," Siduri said, sipping her own drink, "I don't recall the gold robe coming with exclusive conversational rights."

Gilgamesh did not honour this with so much as a glance.

The Lagash noble leaned in closer, not improperly, not in any way Gilgamesh could have actually objected to with words, which was somehow the most infuriating part of all— and said something else, and gestured toward a low table set with wine.

The good wine, the wine reserved for honoured guests.

Enkidu, gracious and curious and utterly, catastrophically unaware that anything about this exchange carried weight beyond two people enjoying a pleasant conversation, let themself be led, toward the table.

Gold catching torchlight, completely oblivious to the fact that somewhere behind them, the King of Uruk had gone very, very still in the specific way a man goes still right before doing something he will later, at great length, insist was entirely reasonable.

"They said yes," Gilgamesh said, faintly, as though reporting a natural disaster.

"To wine."

"To him."

"My king—"

But Gilgamesh was already moving, cup abandoned, gold sweeping behind him like a verdict, cutting across the courtyard with the unmistakable gait of a king who had just remembered, with great and sudden clarity, that he had urgent royal business requiring his immediate and personal attention at exactly that table, at exactly that moment.

Siduri, watching him go, watching every head in the courtyard turn to track the King of Uruk's very dignified, very unhurried, very obviously not-at-all-jealous march directly toward his closest friend simply lifted her cup to her lips to hide the smile she made absolutely no effort to actually hide.

Gilgamesh arrived the way a flood arrived with no warning a person could reasonably have prepared for, and an absolute certainty that nothing in its path was going to remain exactly where it had been standing.

He did not run. Kings do not run.

What he did could most generously be described as an extremely purposeful walk that happened to cover the length of the courtyard in roughly the time it would have taken most men to jog it. While his expression set in the particular, carefully neutral mask he wore whenever he had decided, somewhere below the level of conscious thought, that a situation required his personal intervention and had not yet bothered inventing a reason why.

"Enkidu," he said, arriving at the table with the breathless composure of a man who had absolutely not just crossed forty feet of courtyard at speed, "there you are."

Enkidu turned, wine still in hand, entirely pleased to see him. "Gil! Try this, it tastes like clay and pomegranate. I think I can taste the date harvest in it. Isn't that strange?"

"Fascinating," Gilgamesh said, in a voice that suggested he had heard absolutely none of it, eyes flicking instead to the noble, who had gone very still, the particular stillness of a man recalculating, in real time, exactly how much trouble he might be in. "And you are?"

"Itur-Anum. Of Lagash," the noble said, straightening, attempting bravely, foolishly — to recover his footing. "Your Majesty. I was admiring…"

"The wine," Gilgamesh said. "Yes. I heard."

A silence followed that had nothing whatsoever to do with comfort.

"I require Enkidu," Gilgamesh said, already setting a hand; light, casual, entirely unhurried, a hand that was absolutely not staking any kind of claim, that was purely administrative in nature at the small of Enkidu's back. "Royal Court business."

Enkidu blinked at him, wine still in hand, genuinely puzzled. "What business?"

Gilgamesh opened his mouth.

Found, he had not actually prepared an answer for this question, on account of having decided to interrupt the conversation roughly four seconds before he'd done it.

"The business," he said, recovering with the speed of a man who had built an entire kingdom out of recovering from worse, "of me wanting to introduce you to the Kish delegation. Before it grows later. They have asked after you specifically."

This was not, strictly speaking, true. Nobody from Kish had asked after Enkidu at all, mostly because Gilgamesh had not yet given anyone from Kish the opportunity.

"Oh," Enkidu said, brightening immediately, already setting the cup down, already entirely willing to be steered, because this was simply how it worked between them and had been since the riverbank, since the very beginning; Gilgamesh decided, and Enkidu, more often than not, simply followed, trusting the decision before they'd even heard the reasoning. Simply curious where it would lead. "Alright. It was nice talking to you, Itur-Anum."

"...Likewise," the noble managed, watching them go; the King of Uruk's hand still resting, light and unmistakable, against the small of his companion's back.

Siduri, watching from a discreet distance with her cup once again raised to hide absolutely nothing, decided this was, without question, the best banquet Uruk had hosted in years.

Gilgamesh did not sigh.

He came extremely close; a long, slow breath in through the nose that anyone who knew him less well might have mistaken for patience, and anyone who knew him exactly as well as Enkidu did would have correctly identified as a king holding the absolute outer edge of his composure together with willpower alone.

But a sigh, he told himself, was a thing weak men did, and he was not a weak man, he was simply a man currently being walked across his own courtyard by someone chattering, with great and uncomplicated enthusiasm, about another man's wine cellar.

"—and the second cup was different," Enkidu was saying, hands moving as they talked, the way they always did when something had genuinely delighted them, "lighter, I think they'd cut it with something. Honey, maybe, or… Gil, are you listening?"

"Riveted," Gilgamesh said, in the flat tone of a man who was, in fact, listening to every single word with the focused intensity of a court scribe transcribing testimony for later use against the accused.

"I told him I could taste the clay of the vessel and he looked at me like I'd grown a second head."

"Understandable. Most people cannot taste clay of the vessel."

"I can taste clay," Enkidu said, entirely matter-of-fact, like this was simply a known and unremarkable feature of the world, the way some people could whistle and some couldn't. "It's not difficult. You just have to pay attention."

"I am sure it is a rare and treasured gift," Gilgamesh said, and meant, beneath the words, "I am going to think about this conversation at length later, alone, and form several opinions about Itur-Anum of Lagash that I will not be sharing with anyone," which was, he felt, a perfectly reasonable and proportionate response to the events of the evening.

They walked on. The courtyard had not gotten any quieter around them if anything, it had gotten louder, the particular hush-then-murmur that followed wherever the two of them went, heads turning, conversations dipping into that low, speculative register reserved for the kind of gossip people knew better than to say above a whisper while the King himself was within earshot.

Because there was no mistaking it. Side by side, matched stride for stride, the gold caught the torchlight identically off both of them; same deep shade, same cut, same dark embroidered trim, the King of Uruk and the person who'd walked out of the wilderness three years ago dressed now as though they'd been carved from the same block of sun. Nobody in that courtyard needed it explained to them. It explained itself, the way a brand explains ownership, the way a seal pressed into wax explains a treaty before a single word of it is read aloud.

Gilgamesh was aware of every single eye doing the arithmetic.

He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he did enjoy it.

"You're doing the thing," Enkidu said, glancing sideways at him.

"I am not doing a thing."

"You get a look. When you're trying very hard not to have an opinion about something." Enkidu studied him with open, unhurried curiosity, head tilted, exactly the way they studied unfamiliar birds or new constellations: like Gilgamesh was a puzzle worth the time it took to actually look at it. "You had it just now. At the fountain too."

"I have no idea what you mean."

"You went very stiff. Like a heron."

"I do not go stiff like a heron," Gilgamesh said, with the wounded dignity of a man who absolutely had, at some point this evening, gone stiff like a heron, and intended to take that information to his grave. "I was attending to royal matters."

"Mm," said Enkidu, which was, infuriatingly, the exact sound Siduri made, and Gilgamesh wondered, not for the first time, whether the two of them had been comparing notes on him behind his back, possibly for months, possibly with diagrams.

"Speaking of royal matters," Enkidu said, brightening, "where's the Kish delegation? You said they asked after me."

Gilgamesh's smile did not waver.

His internal state, however, underwent something closer to a structural collapse.

Because here was the singularly inconvenient truth of the matter:

Nobody from Kish had asked after Enkidu. Nobody from Kish had asked after anyone. Nobody from Kish, as far as Gilgamesh was currently aware, even knew this conversation was supposed to be happening, on account of the entire premise having been invented on the spot, four seconds into a tactical retreat, by a king whose only actual plan at the time had been: "Get them away from that Lagash mongrel and his terrible, charming teeth."

"They're—" Gilgamesh said, eyes sweeping the courtyard with the desperate, unhurried calm of a man buying time he did not have, "—around. Somewhere. Mingling. As delegations do."

"You said they asked specifically."

"They did."

"What did they ask?"

"They asked," Gilgamesh said, the words arriving roughly a half-second before he had any idea what would follow them, "whether it was true that the King of Uruk kept the strongest man in the river valley at his side. Naturally I confirmed this. Naturally they wished to verify it themselves."

This was, Gilgamesh felt, an extremely strong recovery for a lie improvised entirely in real time, and he allowed himself one small private moment of pride in it before Enkidu's face lit up with such genuine, uncomplicated delight that the pride curdled instantly into something closer to guilt.

"Truly? They said that?"

"Word for word," Gilgamesh said, committing now, fully, the way a man commits to jumping a gap he has already started running toward. "Practically wept with admiration."

"Well, where are they, then? I'd like to meet them."

And this was the precise moment Gilgamesh understood, with the dawning horror of a man watching his own trap close around his own foot, that he was now contractually obligated, by a lie he had told minutes ago to a person who trusted him without question, to locate an actual delegation from Kish and produce an actual conversation about Enkidu's strength, on the spot, with no preparation, no advance warning to the Kish delegation that this was their evening's assignment, and absolutely no graceful way to back out of it without Enkidu noticing that something didn't add up.

"There," Gilgamesh said, spotting the Kish ambassador near the wine table with the relief of a drowning man spotting shore, and steered Enkidu toward him with the brisk, businesslike energy of a man who had planned this entire interaction from the start and was not, in fact, assembling it from nothing in real time.

The Kish ambassador: an older man named Lugal-something, heavyset, perfectly pleasant, entirely unaware that he was about to be drafted into a scheme he had no part in writing, looked up as they approached with the polite confusion of a man being addressed by royalty he hadn't expected to speak to him twice in one evening.

"Ambassador," Gilgamesh said, with enormous warmth, "I believe you wished to meet Enkidu."

A pause.

"...Did I?" the ambassador said.

"You did," Gilgamesh said, with the unshakable confidence of a man who had simply decided, by sheer force of will, that history would agree with him. "Earlier. You mentioned hearing tales of their strength all the way from Kish and expressed great interest in confirming them."

The ambassador, who had in fact said nothing of the kind, looked between the King of Uruk's pleasantly threatening smile and the extremely beautiful, extremely strong, extremely earnest person now looking at him with open, hopeful curiosity, and made the only reasonable decision available to a man in his position.

"Ah — yes," he said. "Of course. The… tales. Remarkable, truly."

"They once held the city gates shut against a flood with their bare hands," Gilgamesh added, which was true, and which he delivered with the particular relish of a man reading off a list of someone's accomplishments purely because he enjoyed saying them out loud.

"It wasn't that severe" Enkidu corrected, modest, pleased. "The hinges had just rusted."

"You held them shut for six hours."

"It was an interesting problem."

The ambassador, now thoroughly committed to a conversation he had not asked for, found himself spending the next several minutes asking increasingly genuine questions about gate hinges, river currents, and the tensile strength of bronze fittings, while Gilgamesh stood at Enkidu's shoulder with the deeply satisfied posture of a man who had, through pure improvisational nerve, converted an outright lie into an entirely true and rather flattering anecdote, and had done so specifically to keep Enkidu occupied, charmed, and crucially nowhere near anyone with good teeth and a wine cellar.

Siduri, watching from a polite distance, decided this was, genuinely, the single most elaborate thing she had ever seen a man do to avoid admitting he liked someone.

It was well past the hour when most of the delegations had drifted toward sleep or stupor that Gilgamesh found himself, finally, blessedly alone with Enkidu again; away from the noise, away from the torches, out along the low wall overlooking the dark sweep of the City of Uruk, where the music from the courtyard reached them only as a soft, distant pulse beneath the river's own quieter sound.

Enkidu had taken their sandals off somewhere along the way. Their feet dangled over the wall's edge, gold robe pooled around them, hair now loose and catching what little moonlight made it through the haze of torch smoke behind them.

"You lied to the ambassador," Enkidu said, without any particular accusation in it, simply an observation, turning the fact over the way they turned over a new flavour of wine.

Gilgamesh, who had assumed this conversation was either never coming or coming far later than tonight, took a moment longer than he would have liked to answer. "I embellished."

"You said he asked to meet me. He very clearly hadn't."

"The end result was the same. He met you. He was impressed. No harm came to anyone's dignity, excepting possibly mine, and only slightly."

Enkidu was quiet for a moment, swinging their feet, watching the town below. "Why, though?"

And there it was: The question Gilgamesh had been dodging in increasingly creative shapes for the better part of the last days, asked now in the plain, unguarded way Enkidu asked everything, with no malice in it and no agenda, simply genuine want of an answer.

Gilgamesh looked at the buildings instead of at them.

"Strategy," he said, after a beat just slightly too long to be convincing. "Pure strategy. You're a valuable asset to Uruk, Enkidu. The strongest being, next to me, as I so generously informed the Kish ambassador this evening. It would reflect poorly on the crown if some lesser chieftain mistook you for available recruitment. Better they understand, plainly, who you stand with."

Enkidu blinked at him. "Recruitment."

"Mercenary work. Marriage alliances. There are kingdoms that would offer a great deal for a person of your... particular qualities." Gilgamesh gestured vaguely, warming to the lie the way he warmed to most lies, which was instantly and with complete conviction. "Dressing you to match the throne removes any ambiguity. It is a matter of territory, Enkidu. Borders. The gold marks you as Uruk's, the same as a boundary stone marks a field."

"...A boundary stone."

"Precisely."

"You compare me to a rock."

"An extremely important rock."

Enkidu was quiet for a moment, swinging their feet over the wall, and Gilgamesh allowed himself the brief, treacherous hope that this explanation; invented in real time, somewhat shakily constructed, leaning rather more heavily on metaphor than any of his previous excuses, might actually be permitted to stand unchallenged.

"That doesn't really explain why you went and stood between me and Itur-Anum like you meant to start a war over a cup of wine," Enkidu said.

"That was diplomacy."

"You called him a mongrel under your breath. I heard you."

"I call everyone a mongrel. It is simply how I address people."

"You don't call Siduri a mongrel."

"Siduri has earned an exemption through years of loyal service."

"You don't call me a mongrel."

Gilgamesh opened his mouth. Found, with some alarm, that he did not have an immediate rebuttal prepared for this one, and covered the gap by reaching for his wine cup, discovering it empty, and setting it back down with the deliberate unhurried air of a man who had simply finished it on purpose and not at all because his hands needed something to do.

"You are exempt for different reasons," he said finally.

"What reasons?"

"Strategic ones."

"You said that already. About the robe."

"They are layered strategic reasons, Enkidu, governance is rarely simple…"

"Gilgamesh." Enkidu turned fully toward him now, moonlight catching the long fall of green hair over their shoulder, expression caught somewhere between fond and exasperated, the particular look they reserved for watching Gilgamesh build an increasingly elaborate structure out of nothing rather than say one short, simple thing. "You don't have to make something up."

"I am not making anything up."

Enkidu hummed, low, unconvinced, the particular sound they made when they'd decided not to argue a point directly but had every intention of circling back to it later, the same sound they made at lions who thought they could out-stubborn them. They let it sit a moment, swinging their feet against the wall, turning the explanation over, looking for the seam in it.

He found one.

Slowly and Gilgamesh watched it happen, watched the shift cross Enkidu's face like a cloud finding the moon, and felt his stomach drop somewhere down toward the riverbank. Enkidu's expression changed from amused to something quieter. Stiller.

"Gil."

"What."

"Is this about you thinking I'd leave?"

Gilgamesh blinked. "What?"

"The robe. The ambassador. Pulling me away from Itur-Anum like the wine itself was about to abduct me." Enkidu's voice stayed even, careful, the way it always did when they were working through something that actually mattered to them rather than something that merely puzzled them.

"Boundary stones. Marking territory so no one mistakes me for available. You keep talking like you're worried someone's going to walk off with me over a pleasant conversation and a cup of wine."

"That is not—"

"Do you think my loyalty is that thin?" Enkidu asked, and there it was, plain and unguarded and entirely without anger, which was somehow so much worse than anger would have been.

"That a stranger with good teeth says a few kind things about my hair and I simply go? After everything?"

"No," Gilgamesh said, too fast, too loud, the word coming out of him before he'd given it permission to.

"No. Enkidu— no. I have never once doubted you. Not for a single day since the day we stopped trying to kill each other. You are the only soul on this earth whose word I have never once had cause to question."

"Then why?"

Gilgamesh opened his mouth to answer with something else; some third, even less convincing invention than strategy and territory.

But the words refused to arrive. Not because he couldn't think of a lie. He could always think of a lie. He had spent the entire festival proving exactly how many he could think of, on demand, under pressure, with admirable speed.

It was that Enkidu was looking at him like this; wounded in that small, honest way, worried not that Gilgamesh wanted something he hadn't said, but that Gilgamesh thought so little of what already existed between them that he'd felt the need to brand it onto cloth just to keep it safe and Gilgamesh found he would rather walk into an enemy army unarmed than let that particular misunderstanding stand for one more second.

"It was never about doubting you," he said, low, and made himself hold Enkidu's eyes instead of the walls. "I have never doubted you. Not once. Not even tonight, watching half of the court trip over their own sandals trying to get near you."

"Then what was it?"

Gilgamesh exhaled not quite a sigh, still not a sigh, he would maintain that distinction to his last breath and looked, for one unguarded moment, entirely unlike a king.

"It wasn't you I didn't trust," he said. "It was them. Looking. As though they had any right to."

The words came out wrong the first time, the way most true things did when Gilgamesh tried to say them rather than declare them. He was a man built for declarations; for proclamations carved into stone, for sentences with verdicts already baked into them and entirely, hopelessly unpracticed at anything that required this level of emotional understanding.

"It is not that I think you are a thing to be kept," he corrected, too quickly, the words tripping over each other on their way out. "That is not — I am not extending my treasury and putting you in it, Enkidu, do not mistake me for that."

"I didn't think you were."

"I know what that looks like. The robe. The hand at your back. I am not blind to how it reads." Gilgamesh dragged a hand down his own face, gold sleeve catching moonlight, and for one unguarded second looked less like a king mid-speech and more like a man trying to wring water from stone.

"I have spent months correcting anyone fool enough to call you a weapon in my hearing. Do you understand that? Every time you say it about yourself — I was made to destroy you, I was made to be used — I want to correct. You are not a thing that exists to be used. You never were. I would not survive watching myself become one more person who treats you like an object simply because the object happens to be beautiful enough to want."

He stopped. Heard himself. Pressed on anyway, because stopping now would mean letting the half-built thought collapse before it found its shape.

"And yet." A breath. "Tonight. Watching them look at you the way men look at gold they didn't mine themselves; easy, hungry, already imagining the weight of you in their hands I felt something I do not have a clean name for, and it sat far too close to wanting you kept, and I hated it, and I dressed you in my own colour anyway, which means whatever I am feeling is not so far removed from exactly the thing I claim to despise in every one of them."

The river moved on below them, indifferent, the way rivers were.

"So. There it is." Gilgamesh exhaled and finally let himself look at Enkidu directly, jaw tight, ears faintly, mortifyingly warm. "I do not know what to call a feeling I am ashamed of and unwilling to surrender in the same breath. I am told kings are not meant to fumble words."

Enkidu didn't answer right away. They sat with it, patient in a way that made the silence feel less like punishment and more like care.

"You're saying," they said finally, careful, "that it isn't that you think I belong to you."

"No."

Enkidu turned the denial over too, same as everything else, and somewhere in the turning, the actual shape of it clicked into place: not "I think I own you", never that, Gilgamesh had made that distinction too carefully, too painfully, for it to be anything else.

"You're afraid someone else will," Enkidu said slowly. "That's it, isn't it. Not that you'd claim me. That someone… Itur-Anum, or the next one, or the one after that— might try, and somehow manage it, and you'd simply have to stand there and watch it happen."

Gilgamesh's silence answered for him, which was, in its own way, the loudest admission he'd made all night.

Enkidu laughed , they couldn't help it, a short startled huff of breath that came out before they could stop it, not unkind, just genuinely, helplessly amused at the sheer scale of the worry. "Gilgamesh. King of Uruk. Afraid of a man with nice teeth and a cup of wine."

"It is not funny."

"It's a little funny."

"I am the strongest mortal alive and I spent an entire evening rehearsing lies about flood gates because I could not simply say stay near me."

Gilgamesh said it with such wounded, genuine indignity that Enkidu laughed harder, helpless, shoulders shaking against them, and after a moment; after the absurdity of it settled somewhere warm instead of stinging, Gilgamesh found he didn't entirely mind being laughed at, not by this particular mouth, not tonight.

"It is funny," Enkidu admitted, once the laugh had softened into something quieter, "because you'd have known. If you'd just asked instead of plotting." They turned, properly, hair sliding over their shoulder, and looked at Gilgamesh with none of the teasing left in their face now, only that same patient, unhurried honesty they gave to rivers and stars and everything else they'd decided was worth looking at closely.

"I don't open like that for just anyone, you know. People mistake me for easy because I'm friendly. I'm not easy. I simply don't see the use in cruelty when kindness costs the same."

"I am aware."

"But what I feel — that's different. That, I keep." They pressed two fingers, briefly, lightly, against their own chest, like marking the place where the thing actually lived. "There's exactly one person I've ever shown that to. Exactly one person I've let see past the friendliness into whatever's underneath it."

They didn't say the name.

They didn't have to.

Gilgamesh sat very still, the city sleeping below them, and felt beneath the gold, beneath the crown, beneath every wall he'd spent a lifetime building so carefully that he'd nearly convinced himself loneliness was simply the shape of being him; something settle, quiet and absolute, like a door finally easing shut against a wind that had been pushing at it for years.

"Say it," Gilgamesh said, low, almost unwilling, the way a man asks for something he is fairly certain will undo him.

Enkidu smiled small, certain, gold-lit. "You already know."

"I want it said."

"Then ask properly. No flood gates this time."

Gilgamesh huffed something that was nearly a laugh, nearly a surrender, and turned his hand over beneath Enkidu's on the stone, palm to palm, no ambassador to invent, no lie left worth telling.

"Enkidu," he said, and stopped.

Found, to his own enormous and lasting humiliation, that the rest of the sentence had simply vanished on his lips. Gone the way courage tends to go right at the threshold of the thing it was meant for, leaving him sitting there, King of Uruk, Greatest Warrior and King alike, utterly incapable of finishing one short question to the one person who had ever made him want to ask it.

"Go on," Enkidu said, entirely too pleased with themself, chin propped on one hand, watching Gilgamesh flounder with the unhurried delight of a man who had waited for exactly this and intended to enjoy every second of collecting on it. "I'm listening."

"You are enjoying this."

"Immensely."

"This is cruel."

"You made an helpless ambassador believe a flood gate nearly drowned a city. I think I'm owed a little cruelty." Enkidu's mouth curved, sly and warm at once, the particular look that always made Gilgamesh feel simultaneously like a king and like a man who'd just been caught somewhere he had no business being. "Ask, Gil. Properly. I want to hear you fumble it."

"I do not fumble."

"You've fumbled all evening. It's been the best part of the festival."

Gilgamesh exhaled through his nose, long-suffering, as he straightened, gathering up whatever scraps of royal dignity still remained to him after a night that had cost him most of it already.

"Fine," he said. "Fine. Enkidu…who is it. The one you keep your heart for. Say the name."

For one breath, Enkidu let the silence stretch just long enough to be unbearable, just long enough that Gilgamesh's pulse did something undignified in his throat, before the teasing finally softened out of their face, leaving only the truth underneath it, plain and unguarded as moonlight on water.

"You, Gil," he said. "Obviously you. Who else would it be."

It was the softness of the name that undid him.

Not Gilgamesh; Gilgamesh belonged to the whole world, carved into walls, shouted by heralds, owned by every mongrel with a tongue to say it. Gil in that soft tone belonged to no one. Gil had never once been spoken by anyone but the one person sitting beside him now, soft and certain in the dark, like a door only one hand in the world had ever been given the key to.

Gilgamesh didn't answer with words. Words had failed him enough times tonight to have earned a rest.

He leaned in instead, slow, giving Enkidu every chance to laugh again, to tease him one more time before letting him close the distance— but Enkidu only watched him come, steady, unflinching, that small private smile still curved at the corner of their mouth right up until Gilgamesh's forehead came to rest against theirs, breath shared between them, gold pooled together where their hands still hadn't let go.

"There," Enkidu murmured, eyes half-closed, sass softening into something quieter without quite disappearing. "Was that so terrible, my king?"

"Insufferable," Gilgamesh said, against their mouth, not moving away. "Utterly insufferable."

"You like it."

"I am beginning to suspect," Gilgamesh said, "that I like a great many things about you that I have spent considerable effort pretending not to," and closed the last small distance between them, slow and certain, gold catching the moonlight, the river moving on below them exactly as it always had, indifferent to kings, indifferent to gods, entirely unbothered by the small, quiet miracle happening at its edge.

The kiss, when it finally came, was nothing like the speeches Gilgamesh had spent half a lifetime perfecting.

It wasn't grand. It wasn't declared. There was no one to announce it, no crowd to witness it, nothing carved anywhere that would outlast the night; only the low hush of the river below them and the distant, fading pulse of drums from an ending banquet neither of them had any intention of returning to.

Enkidu kissed back softly, unhurried, fully present, paying the kind of close attention they gave to new constellations and the particular sound rain made on a riverbank, as though this too were something worth noticing all the way down to its texture. Their hand came up to rest against the side of Gilgamesh's jaw, light, certain, thumb tracing once along his cheekbone like they meant to memorize the shape of it the same way they'd memorized everything else that had ever struck them as beautiful.

Gilgamesh, who had conquered cities, who had stared down gods and called them tedious, found that he had absolutely no idea what to do with his own hands.

That was the part nobody prepared you for, he supposed. The texts didn't cover it. The epics left it out. There was no campaign strategy for this, no arrangement of forces, no positioning that gave you the advantage; only two people on a wall above the city, figuring something out at the same speed, which was slow, and slightly wrong at first.

His hands settled at Enkidu's jaw. Too formal. He adjusted. Better.

Enkidu made a soft sound against his mouth, not quite a laugh, not quite surprise, somewhere between the two and the hand they had on Gilgamesh's face hesitated once before it steadied, like even Enkidu, who had never once in their life shown uncertainty about a physical thing, wasn't entirely sure of the permission level here.

"You can—" Gilgamesh started.

"I know," Enkidu said. "I was just—"

"So was I."

They tried again.

It was clumsy in a way that nothing Gilgamesh did was ever clumsy. He who had never once fumbled a blade. But this was no battle.

It was clumsy in the specific way of two people trying to do something at the same time without rehearsal, two wills equally matched, neither accustomed to yielding even in small things, both yielding anyway, slightly, in rotation, because this was the shape of them and had always been.

Enkidu's nose pressed briefly against his cheek. Not graceful.

"Sorry," Enkidu murmured.

"Don't apologise," Gilgamesh said, roughly, "just—" and tilted his head and found the angle, finally, and whatever else he'd been about to say dissolved into the quiet.

This was the part that settled him.

Not the wanting; he had known the shape of wanting his whole life, had wanted things across half the known world and simply gone and taken them. This was different. This was warm where wanting was usually sharp.

Enkidu's hand finally coming to rest, fingers slow and careful, against the side of his face, and the warmth of it travelling somewhere deeper than skin, and Gilgamesh thinking, with the dim and distracted quality of a man thinking through water, oh

So this is what this is.

He'd had no name for it. That was the truth of it. Months of carrying something that had no clean edges, no clean name, something he'd kept insisting was simply the particular regard of a king for his only equal, dressed up in strategy and boundary stones and gold cloth commissioned for reasons he'd been absolutely certain were administrative and here, finally, with the festival guttering out behind them and the river going on below them the same way it always had, it simply became itself.

He pulled back first. Not far.

The distance between them was nothing. A breath. The place where two people pause to make sure the other is still there.

Enkidu's eyes opened slowly. Their hair had come loose around their face, green against the fair akin, and he looked,— not undone, Enkidu was never undone, they were too solidly built inside themself for that; but soft. Present in a way that was different from their usual presence.

They were always here, but tonight they were here specifically, looking at Gilgamesh like the only interesting thing in a world that had no shortage of interesting things.

"You were clumsy," Enkidu said, soft and not unkind.

"I was not."

"You knocked my nose."

"Your nose was in the wrong place."

"My nose was—" Enkidu laughed again, the good kind, the full kind, tipping their head back slightly so the moonlight caught the long line of their throat. "You're used to winning a kiss before it starts."

"I was not trying to win anything."

"I know," Enkidu said, and the laughing settled into something quieter, "That's why it was clumsy. You didn't know what to do when there wasn't a fight to win Gil."

The accuracy of this landed somewhere it shouldn't have, gentle and exact as a thumb pressing a bruise not to hurt it but simply to know where it lived.

"No," Gilgamesh admitted. "I didn't."

"It was still good though," Enkidu offered, unprompted, head finding the familiar rest of Gilgamesh's shoulder. "In case you were going to ask."

"I wasn't going to ask."

"You were going to make a face and pretend it wasn't a question."

"I do not make faces."

"You've made six tonight." Enkidu tucked both hands between them, warm between the layers of gold, utterly comfortable in a way that looked effortless and was a kind of trust made physical, reserved for Gilgamesh only.

The ease of a person who had decided, somewhere quiet and unannounced, that this was safe. "I've been counting."

Gilgamesh, who had been reaching without quite deciding to, found his hand already in Enkidu's hair, fingers finding one of the remaining plaits, half-undone now, the green strands loosening from whatever the attendants had done with them hours ago. He worked at it slowly, not pulling, just unraveling what was already coming apart anyway, the way you unravel something that was only ever held together for the occasion.

"I was not making faces," he said. "I was having thoughts."

"Loudly."

"Thoughts are silent by definition."

"Not yours." Enkidu tilted their head, just slightly, just enough; the unconscious adjustment of an animal that has decided the hand near it is not a threat and might in fact be pleasant. "You think at full volume. You always have."

The braid came loose between his fingers. Gilgamesh smoothed the freed strands out with the same absent care he gave it, not making anything of the gesture, simply doing it, the way you do things you've wanted to do for long enough that when the moment finally allows them, they arrive without ceremony.

"I think," Gilgamesh said, wounded, mocking, not remotely actually wounded, "that you have spent enough time cataloguing my most undignified moments and have been waiting for precisely this opportunity."

"I'd have needed more than one hand to count if I'd started from the beginning."

"Enkidu.."

"Yes Gil?"

Gilgamesh tugged once at a strand of hair, gently, the reprimand of a man who has run entirely out of genuine indignation and is now simply performing it for the pleasure of the audience.

Enkidu laughed; not a big laugh, a quiet one, the one that lived closer to the surface, the one Gilgamesh had learned to recognise as the real one precisely because it made no effort to be charming.

"For someone who spent all evening pretending not to care about the festival," Enkidu said, "you noticed a great deal."

"I notice everything."

"You noticed me."

"I always notice you," Gilgamesh said, and the teasing dropped out of it entirely before he'd finished saying it, leaving just the fact, plain in the dark, not a confession exactly but close to one.

Enkidu was quiet a moment.

"I know," they said, softly. "I noticed that too. From the beginning."

The last of the braid came undone under Gilgamesh's fingers. All of it loose now, spilling green across gold, across their own shoulder, the two colours together strange and right in the same breath, the way most things between them had always managed to be. He didn't stop touching it. There was no reason to stop. His thumb traced once, slow, from Enkidu's temple down the length of a strand, more reflex than decision.

Enkidu turned their face slightly into it, barely perceptible, the same way they turned toward warmth, toward good things, toward anything the world offered that was worth receiving.

"You're doing it again," Enkidu murmured.

"What now."

"The seventh face."

"There is no seventh face."

"There is. It's the best one." A pause, fond and unhurried. "It's the one you make when you have something and aren't sure yet that you're allowed to keep it."

Gilgamesh's hand stilled in his hair.

Below them the river moved, dark and slow and thoroughly unbothered, and the last torches behind them surrendered finally and the night settled into the particular quiet that only comes when all the noise has spent itself and what remains is simply what was always there underneath it.

"And are you going to tell me," Gilgamesh said, very carefully, "whether I am."

Enkidu looked up at him, gold and moonlit and entirely, insufferably calm.

"Gil," he said. "Yes. Obviously yes. You enormous fool."

Gilgamesh smiled.

Not the smile he gave courts, or dignitaries, or men he was about to defeat at something ; that smile had edges to it, was designed to be noticed, worked as hard as any weapon he owned. This was different. Smaller. The smile of a man who has just been told yes by the only person whose yes had ever mattered, and is trying, with limited success, to not let it show quite how much.

He failed, completely, and didn't particularly mind.

"Obviously," he repeated, tasting the word. Before he laughed; short and real, and closed the space between them again, and this time there was none of the careful tentativeness of before, none of the fumbling uncertainty of two people trying to learn an angle in real time.

This time his hand came up to the back of Enkidu's neck to hold, and the kiss arrived less like something discovered and more like something claimed; not brutal, not demanding, but with weight behind it, the same way a hand placed on a sword hilt carries weight before anything is drawn, simply by the certainty of it resting there.

Enkidu made a sound that was not quite surprise and not quite protest and then his hands found Gilgamesh's collar, curling into the gold cloth without pulling, simply gripping.

This was, Gilgamesh understood, their language.

Had always been. From the riverbank, from the first day, when they had found each other the only way two people who had never met their equal knew how to find anything; by pushing at it, hard, until it pushed back. Fighting had been their introduction, their conversation, their longest argument and most honest one. The fight had said "I see you" before either of them had words for it.

It had said "you are real to me, more real than anything else in this world," in the only language they'd shared before they'd learned to share any other.

This was simply the same meaning.

Just different words.

When they broke apart Enkidu's hair was thoroughly disheveled, which was, Gilgamesh felt, an improvement on most things he'd accomplished this evening. There was also, unmistakably, a flush along their cheekbones that the moonlight caught with what Gilgamesh could only describe as excellent timing.

"You could have led with that," Enkidu said, slightly breathless, which Gilgamesh was going to be quietly pleased about for the rest of his natural life.

Enkidu looked at him with the expression of someone reviewing a very long list of evidence

But instead of embarassing the King of Uruk more, he instead decided to instead straighten Gilgamesh's collar with the brisk efficiency of a person who has decided, somewhere in the last five minutes, that this is simply something they do now.

The gesture undid Gilgamesh more than the kiss had.

He caught Enkidu's hand mid-adjustment. Held it there, against his chest, over the gold, over whatever was underneath the gold.

"Stay," he said, quiet. Not a king's order. Something much simpler and much harder to say.

Enkidu looked at the hand. Looked at him.

"I already told you," they said, mouth curving, fond and unbearable, "I'm not going anywhere."

"I know." Gilgamesh turned their hand over, threaded their fingers together with a careful deliberateness:"I wanted to ask anyway. Properly. No flood gates."

Enkidu's smile broke wide open, helpless and bright, and he tipped his forehead against Gilgamesh's shoulder and laughed again.

"Yes, Gil," he said, into the gold. "Obviously yes. You enormous, ridiculous—"

"King," Gilgamesh supplied. "Extraordinary."

"Of course," Enkidu giggled, still laughing, and didn't move away.