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The bramble path behind tannery was the safest way in, and by “safest” he meant the route where he was least likely to run into anyone who might ask questions. Illario Dellamorte had learned it two years ago and used it more nights than he wanted to admit.
And tonight the window was lit gold. He stopped at the fence line and just let himself have this first, before anything else: August… warm, safe, and unaware.
They were at the table with a shirt in their lap, needle catching firelight as it dipped and rose. Their hair was down. Though they’d taken off the arm-brace, their gloves remained on — they had become dexterous enough working with them that it barely impeded their work. While the gloves hid more of the scars that mapped their body, the lamp threw every exposed old wound into soft relief: down their jaw, across their cheek, and the long pink seam that crossed their forehead and brow. He’d kissed that one, once. He wanted, badly, to be the kind of man who got to do that again tonight.
So he let himself imagine it. Just for a moment, standing in the wet grass with his boots sinking slightly, mud climbing the stitching. He imagined pushing the door open and entering the building rather than standing before the window, peering in.
“You’re bleeding on my floor,” August would say, without even looking up, because they always knew before they looked.
“It’s not my blood.”
“Somehow that’s worse.” But they’d set the needle down. They’d cross the room in that particular way they had, weight forward, sure, like the floor owed them passage, and they’d take his face in both hands, thumbs finding his cheekbones and say something cutting because that was how August loved a person, tough but with unyielding love.
“You look like death warmed over and reheated badly.”
“Missed you too.”
“I didn’t say I missed you. I said you look terrible.” And then, because August knew when to land the real blow after the soft one: “You know, for a man who won’t tell me a damn thing about where he goes, you sure come here expecting to be fussed over often.”
“I don’t expect anything.”
“You expect everything, Illario. You just don’t ask for it out loud, because asking would mean admitting you want it.” They’d fold his hand over, examine the split knuckles like a quartermaster doing inventory. “You want to fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid, and you still won’t tell me why you keep leaving in the middle of the night like the building’s on fire.”
That was fair. That had always been fair, from the first week they’d known each other, when he’d made the mistake of thinking a warrior with a face like a war memorial would be easy to keep secrets from. They had clocked him inside of four days and called him on it inside of five.
In the version standing in his head, he’d laugh, and it would come out cracked down the middle, and August’s face would do the thing it did when they stopped performing and just looked at someone: soft around the eyes, jaw set like they were bracing for a blow they intended to take anyway.
“You’re avoiding,” they’d say, quieter now, no teasing left in it. “Something’s got its teeth in you and you’re letting it eat you alive rather than tell me what it is. I’m not going anywhere, you absolute disaster of a man. Whatever it is.”
“You’d think differently if you knew.”
“Try me.”
And in his head, he did. He told them everything: Zara’s offer, what he’d promised her, what he’d done to keep that promise and what it had cost, the ledger of it laid out plain between them on the table next to the mended shirt. In his head, August didn’t flinch. They took his face in their hands again, palms warm against his jaw, and said, “I forgive you,” like it was that simple, like a person could just set a thing like that down and walk on lighter.
Then his whole body collapsed atop of them, feeling the soft unnff as they caught his sudden weight. His arms wrapped around them for support, clinging to them desperately as he sought the comfort that his broken soul needed.
And they held him in return. Their hand across his back, the feel of gloves against his leathers, the sound of their contact intermingling with the nearby fire, Illario’s heavy breathing, and August’s soft words…
In his head, he let himself believe that.
Outside, in the actual mud, his hand had found the window frame, fingers spread flat against the cold glass like he could climb through the pane by simply wanting it enough. His breath fogged a small grey cloud over August’s bent head. They hadn’t heard him. They wouldn’t; he’d gotten good at being unheard. It was one of the skills that had ruined him, though not nearly as much as the lies.
He watched them bite the thread and knot it off, hold the shirt up to the light to check the seam, and smile at a repair no one but him would ever notice. They did that, they fixed things that weren’t theirs to fix and smiled about it like it cost them nothing. But he knew, he knew them.
He knew August better than he’d ever let himself be known back.
That was the whole crux of the problem, really. He could imagine the forgiveness in perfect, aching detail. He could hear the exact register of their voice saying I forgive you, could feel the exact weight of their arms coming around his ribs, solid as a wall that had decided to hold something up instead of keeping it out, and none of it was real, because he hadn’t said the thing that forgiveness would have to survive first.
Zara…
What he’d done. What was still, even now, unfinished, still capable of getting worse, still capable of reaching August and pouring poison into everything they had cultivated together.
He should tell them. He knew he should tell them, but the thought was not held as a decision he had to make, but as a fact already lodged in him. They deserved to hear it from him and not from the wreckage of it later, when there was no version of the conversation left that didn’t start with why didn’t you say something.
And yet, he knew, too, that he wasn’t going to do it tonight.
Inside, August set the mended shirt aside and stretched, joints cracking audibly even through the glass, and reached for the book they’d left face-down on the arm of the chair; something with a cracked spine and a ribbon marking a page. They settled in like the night belonged to them and no one was going to take it. For a moment they glanced toward the window, and his heart did something stupid, before he understood they were only checking the shutter, tugging it half-closed against the draft, entirely unaware they’d been watched at all.
He stepped back from the glass. The gold light narrowed to a seam and then almost nothing.
He would meet August again eventually. He would let them fuss over the state of him and insult him for it in the same breath, would let them press a thumb to whatever new bruise he was hiding under his sleeve. But he would not tell them about Zara. Not tonight, maybe not for a while yet. Eventually he would, but he understood, standing in the cooling dark with his coat gone damp at the shoulders, that eventually was doing a lot of work in that sentence, and that August, of all people, had never once failed to see through him when it mattered.
They would find out. Not tonight, but they would.
And even still, he left nothing but footprints by the window as he walked away.
Written by a human in Ellipsus. Drawn in Clip Studio.