Ghosts of the Borderland Outtake: Part 6

[guardiansverse]

No other than Amika herself came in, just as freshly bathed under an enormous coat of wool and fur, her heavy damp hair in a haphazard braid she had no doubt just about managed to make herself. As he stared, she drifted to the bed and fell down next to him with a deeply emphatic "ugh."

"Hm?" He wasn't sure he was being addressed until she turned a half-lidded scowl his way. Slow and at least attempting deliberate, Hyem's Land's Own Guardian plucked a handkerchief from the pile and crumpled it in a fist before she raised it to her face.

"I do believe I've caught your cold.”

She looked it, awkwardly over her spun-silver beauty, the same look of sickly exhaustion he'd glimpsed of himself in the mirror: pale, wan and drooping, eyes bloodshot, nose red. Her voice held the barest note of imperious accusation.

Saul shrugged. Nothing for him to do, and yet somehow unable to feel entirely guiltless. "At least you won't be taking it up into the Eisenhorn for a week."

"You look much better than I feel."

"Do I really?"

"No." She sniffed, morose, and slumped back against the wall. "My order to you stands. Now I only wish there was someone to order me to stay in bed. I do not at all feel like being diplomatic."

"I don't suppose you want me to kill them all."

"Don't start with me, Captain," Amika groused.

He wasn't quite at the point of saying he did not feel like any killing, either. But he let it drop into an oddly easy silence, the two of them sitting there in their respective yet common fog, sharing the stack of handkerchiefs and the resolve to move as little as possible. Before he quite knew out, something about the sight of her here and now - triumphant and careworn, accomplished and surrendered - chased the recurring images from his mind's eye, the questions that drifted around them. In her presence, at last, truly none of it seemed to matter.

He didn't understand it any more than he did the uncertainty itself, but he embraced that calm centredness. He could almost be content, to have it of her.

The silence stretched on. Abruptly she sneezed. A moment later he followed. Their groans of misery sounded together. They exchanged glances.

"Look at us," she said.

"Look at us."

And they laughed. Sudden, unexpected, strange and raw and companionable. Saul turned the feeling of that word in his mind, sank his teeth into it. Us.

"I'll be diplomatic tomorrow," Amika mumbled after another moment. She was listing bit by bit where she sat, like a great ship going under. A few more muscles going slack and she would be drooping onto his shoulder, at least for lack of a better place to rest her head. "Tomorrow I'll be Land's Own Guardian. Today I shall be human and pitifully sick. I trust you'll do the same. In fact I expect it. Do you understand?"

"I understand." It was a very different order to the one she'd issued him up on the mountain. He would obey it nonetheless. "Go on, doma. Sleep."

He did not think she strictly meant to slump against him, but that was what happened. She gave a small cough and a whimper, shifting a little closer to the heat of his body. Pitiful indeed. It occurred to him just how fragile she truly was, for all her ambition to soldierhood, how much still a young girl, noble-born, raised to light and tenderness. He could have killed her with no recourse to power or even weapons, snapped her like a bird's wing, back in the hut when she hit him - she'd dared. And he knew it had not been because she was willing to chance his wrath, but because she'd been certain he would never turn it on her.

Now he watched her sleep, done and spent, very human - as human as he felt, still bone-tired and aching, and somehow lost. The strange weight of it pulled, turned his face to a frown of something almost like sadness. He couldn't parse the emotion. He didn't know if he'd ever felt it before.

"What are you to me?" he asked softly of her sleeping form.

To his alarm, she stirred as though waking. In a moment she relaxed. But his relief was premature, as soon he needed very badly to sneeze again, and could not fathom jarring her awake. He held it back until tears blurred his vision, though it made him feel ridiculous and annoyed. Familiar feelings, at least.

It was a little while before he realised her eyes had opened. She was staring at him - staring in utter bafflement at the tears. He succumbed almost before she'd pulled back, and saw that quirk of restrained amusement at one corner of her lips again. Sun's blood, but he could kill her. Not wake her, though, evidently not that.

"I didn't want to - "

"I know."

She waited patiently for him to wipe his nose and dry his eyes, then lay her head right back down on his shoulder. His turn to stare now. When she did smile up at him, it was a different expression altogether.

"Be human tonight," she said.

She closed her eyes without waiting for his response. Left him sitting with her small warmth against him, and that feeling, that there was no uncertainty in her presence. No questions. She had commanded him, mocked him, trusted him. And he was content.

He lay his head against her crown and followed her into sleep.