Ashley wasn't an idiot.
Willfully ignorant when it suited her, sure, but not an idiot, not stupid. Definitely not stupid enough to think the only thing going on between Leon and Luis was fist pumping, back slapping, macho guy friendship.
It wasn't love either. Love was sweet whispers and flowers, candlelit dinners and walks on the beach.
This was gun smoke and rusted metal, the red bloom of blood and the white of shattered bone. If they danced it was back to back against the enemy, shouting banter over their shoulders when the rifle retorts left them deafened and giddy.
No, not love. This was fiercer, a thing of edges. They would die for each other.
But they would die for her first, and that shamed her because she had not earned it.
At night, as now, she lay awake and listened to their breathing, the reassuring tidal sweep of life at arm's reach. Listened to their mumbles, their grunts as wounds and scars pulled when they shifted. It filled her with both tenderness and guilt, to know even their small pains were for her, she who did nothing but slow them down and whine when faced with ladders. It made her hate her father, for loving his brat of a child enough to send Leon after her, dooming him and by association Luis as well.
Leon. When she thought of him she thought of the church, the way the door had splintered, the kindness in his voice when he'd tried to calm her. The way he had broken the window pane with his body to spare her the shock of it.
If first impressions were everything, she thought she could be forgiven for seeing him still as a white knight. A hero, but one who ate without grace and wiped his fingers on his shirt when he was finished. Who taunted and teased and managed always to looked shocked when she exploded and stomped her feet.
By contrast Luis had been rude and arrogant from the start, insulting first her chest and then her station. But he had stood with them against the tide, had thrown herbs to Leon to stem his bleeding even as the hordes pressed in.
Ashley could tend Leon's wounds after the battle was won, could oil his guns and keep watch out windows. But she could never be to him what Luis was, a fellow soldier baptized by fire.
And she resented that, in that soft inner core where the girl she had been still lived. But the woman she was becoming understood, accepted perhaps too easily that she had no place between them.
Would she trade safety, to stand beside them at the front line, shoulder to shoulder? The girl said no, but the woman said that it was she who should be protecting them, that the roles should not be just shared but reversed.
'I love you,' she thought, looking at them now as they slept. Leon, curling on his side with gun close at hand. Luis, his face hidden by a ragged fall of hair, lanky legs drawn up in the cramped confines of their bolt hole. 'It doesn't count for much, but there it is. I love you, both of you, and it's a child's love, a girl's love, and I hate it. I hate myself for feeling it, but God, don't you know how much I love you?"