This was written for another anonymous request on Tumblr, and originally published back in May 2, 2017.

The prompt was... an interesting one. ^_^ Essentially, the Anon. wanted to know how it would play out if the Guardian hopped off the Nevra bandwagon and boarded Valkyon's. In a romantic sense. And how complicated that might be considering that the latter knows zilch about his own charms.

I decided to make the scenario a tad more complicated still. Apologies to Valkyon (and Nevra) fans for the angst below.

To Serve and Protect

It had been a cold Yule and the coming year didn't look like an improvement.

Already, the streets were frozen from two back-to-back bouts of chill rain that chose exactly the wrong month to fall on El, their brief career ending in a slick double layer of ice over cobblestone and brick, marbling the tessellated roads like candy glaze. Sweet enough to result in seventeen accidents so far from the citizenry: two-legged, four-legged, and on wheels. Next year would be seeing a lot of people with odd-numbered legs.

Valkyon would know. His people had to haul away all the injured and the worse off this week, including themselves. In fact, he was taking care of Accident Number Seventeen right now.

"Does your ankle still hurt?" the Obsidian Guard commander asked the woman he was carrying, now wrapped double in his arms.

"Not really. I can't feel much anymore," his corporal replied. From inside the folds of his cloak, she experimentally wagged her ankle, wrapped in a soggy, makeshift splint made mostly out of Valkyon's hat, her scarf, firewood, and several handfuls of fresh ice that he broke from the road outside the tavern. She didn't so much as flinch.

"Good. Because it won't be easy getting over that last wall."

The Guardian twisted and peeked over her shoulder at the construct in question looming out of the gloom: a pale, man-high stone wall, about as battered by the freezing rain as the street that took her ankle. With no doorway to speak of, from where they were coming from. Her face sagged. "…Maybe it wasn't a good idea to sneak back through the gardens."

"You were concerned though about running into Nevra at the foyer," Valkyon reminded her.

He meant no offense—he rarely did when refreshing someone's memory— but her face promptly turned a shade darker, visible even in the deep shadows of HQ's honeyfruit orchard, where the black branches split apart the cold stars overhead like webs of cracks in the sky.

Biting his tongue, Valkyon's eyes flickered away from her expression, and fell on one spot on the wall ahead. Soon he added, more carefully, "Though I didn't say it would be impossible to get past that wall. Just not easy. Can I put you down for a moment?"

Four quick knots later, they had a working full body sling from his cloak: big enough to carry a grown woman with a bad ankle on his back. Frankly, his friend didn't look thrilled when he explained that she would be sitting knees-up in the sling, like a baby satchel sized up about twelve times, but she made no protest once he swung her onto his back and tightened the cloak's knots around his shoulders. She had packed on some muscle over the last two years, but with her back pressing snug against his, her heels swinging gently in the air somewhere above his kidneys, he barely felt the weight.

With a practiced eye, Valkyon found the section of the wall shot through with tendrils of dead ivy nearly as thick as his wrist. One bout of overdue weeding finally exposed the fractured stonework. He went on to ruin it further by kicking at the largest crack he could find with the sharp steel toe of his winter boot, about two feet above the ground.

"I don't know what you're doing there," came the voice from his back, in between the clanks of steel versus stone. "But it sounds expensive."

In answer, the slate block gave way in two pieces on the ground, and a newborn step gaped in the open air. Perfectly dry.

"No more than it'll take to repair the rest of the wall," Valkyon remarked with a wry smile at his footwork. "Which they were supposed to do this summer. Besides, I'm helping you sneak in, aren't I?"

Whatever the Guardian had to say was lost when he put one boot onto the makeshift step, reached up, found the top of the stone wall with his hands, and pulled them both up with barely a grunt. Instead, there was a soft squeak from his back as they suddenly gained an extra seven feet in altitude from the black ground. Then again when he brought his legs over the wall and leapt clear into the last of the gardens, the stomach-lurching distance rushing back to greet them in reverse. Triumph came with a massive, wet-sounding crunch that rattled them both to the teeth.

Valkyon, for the most part, was just glad that he missed the wooden stakes that once supported the luminescent squash, and the frozen Crowmero still stuck there, instead landing ankle- and wrist-deep in the frozen mud just a hair next to them.

"Are you all right?", he whispered, shaking the mud off his hands and wiping the splatter of slush off his cheek.

"… …Yes," came the little voice from behind his head, eventually. "Nice work. But let's not do that again. I'm not of fan of jumping down heights I can't see. Especially not after a tavern run."

"Fair enough," Valkyon smiled in the dark. He shrugged one arm out of the makeshift sling, and with a few deft turns brought the Guardian back against his chest. "Is this better?" he asked, locking his arms around her again.

For some reason, she looked up at him, colored, and made a strange coughing sound in her throat.

He frowned. "We better get you out of the cold. You had plenty to drink earlier."

"You're one to talk: I downed two pints less than you," she snorted as Valkyon crossed the length of the dark vegetable garden, sticking to the nigh-invisible dirt path that wound through the dormant squash beds to the backdoor of the kitchen. The snapping and crunching of half-frozen ground informed him that he was on the right course, more or less.

"That was enough to try a rain dance on the sidewalk, wasn't it?" he smiled back at his smuggled cargo.

The cargo in question answered with a scowl, a flush, and a quick turn of her head to the direction of the kitchens. "It wasn't a rain dance," she muttered into her shoulder. "Not until the kids started asking, at least. They were a good audience though."

"You are an excellent dancer," he agreed mildly. When she didn't say anything else, Valkyon let the matter drop and treated himself to a full re-enactment in his mind's eye. Humans were a funny race. The ceremony must be special all right, if its traditional dance involved bouncing a sword off the tips of the boots and swinging around a lamp-post. The Guardian had finally slipped when she tried to kick an icicle. The kids all agreed that it was pretty spectacular.

How did that verse go again? Something about singing in the—

"Is Karuto still awake?"

Valkyon snapped out of his reverie at the worried note to her voice and squinted at the light shining through the kitchen window ahead. Then he frowned as well. "He must have left the fire in the grate. But either way, that's our only way into the fort from here." Quick as a thought, his tawny eyes glanced down at the Guardian and saw her expression pinch under the warm amber glow from the window. "It'll be fine," he added as reassuringly as he could, stepping onto the porch. "I don't hear anything from inside."

Still, he cautiously eased open the kitchen's backdoor with the toe of his boot. And was rewarded with the sight of the old satyr dressed in only a padded bathrobe, reading a book with his stout hooves propped up on the corner of the counter. Parted, and pointing in their direction.

Fortunately, Valkyon learnt long ago that there was nothing embarrassing about the physical body. Unfortunately, the Guardian seemed to have been taught differently. She glanced once into the fire-lit kitchen, winced immediately, and shielded her eyes with her hand.

Karuto glanced up over the book he was reading, and his craggy expression fell from profound shock to embarrassment to the sour righteousness of an old man interrupted in his private time in the space of one point five seconds.

"What are you two idiots doing in my kitchen?!" he bellowed from the counter, quickly swinging his hooves back to the floor and tightening his bathrobe around his hips. In one fluid movement, he snapped the book shut and tucked it under his arm.

"Just getting out of the cold," Valkyon replied with as straight a face as he could muster. He could outstare a live dragon if he wanted, but here he knew that he had reached the limit of his creative fibs.

Thankfully, the Guardian spoke up for them. "I twisted my ankle on the street walking back, and I just didn't want to wake anyone else at this hour. Sorry for walking in like this."

The satyr puffed rudely through his nostrils, but his eyebrows had rearranged themselves into a tamer glower. "What do you think this place is? The backdoor for hook-ups?"

His corporal flushed to the approximate color of beetroot, but Karuto didn't wait for an answer; he gestured one-handed to the front door of the kitchen, his book still tucked under one hammy arm. "Well I don't care what you two do in your off-time. Just don't bring it into my kitchen without knocking!" Then he glared evilly at Valkyon's boots, crusted to the tops with winter mud, steel spikes already sinking into the floorboards. "And take your filthy rock-splitters with you!"

"All right, then." Valkyon said simply, crossing the pantry as lightly as an armored man of six-foot-two could with a lady-friend in his arms. He waited until he was halfway out the door before shooting back over his shoulder, "That's a good book, by the way. Ykhar told me that it's really steamy."

The door shut before the first volley of expletives could follow them into the hall.

"What an ass…" the Guardian scowled into her chest, arms folded tightly enough to bunch her shoulders up.

"It looked like he was really enjoying that book though," her captain remarked, still smiling faintly to himself.

He meant that as another joke, but the Guardian kept her moody silence as they crossed the deserted foyer and down the corridor leading to the officer's barracks, the floor lit clearly by the cold moonlight slipping through the high windows and the coruscating glass skylight at the apex of the ceiling.

The fort slept on as they made their way down the barracks, his footsteps barely muffled by the threadbare crimson carpet. They stopped before a plain door near the end of the hall, still undecorated after two years. The Guardian fished out her keys from her coat and leaned out of Valkyon's arms to unlock the door.

"Keep an eye out. Please, Valk."

He blinked at the note of desperation in her voice. Something was definitely wrong. But he duly peered left and right, seeing no curious faces popping out of the doors to stare their way. "Nothing. We're clear."

The Guardian decided not to answer and turned the catch, then the handle. At the answering click, Valkyon pivoted sideways and smoothly stepped inside when the door swung open, the blackness beyond lit by the lambent light from a handful of bronze oil lamps. He shut the door again with a neat kick from the back of his boot, hoping that when morning arrived, she wouldn't notice the likely dent at the base.

Nestled in his arms, the Guardian sighed, all the tension of the past hour leaving her body in one long, liquid breath that left a knot in his stomach.

He needed to say something to make her feel better, on a night like this.

"Even though it didn't end like we planned, I really did enjoy that drink," he confessed quietly as he stooped down and laid her gently onto the bed. "It's nice to be able to see the town with a friend."

She kept her face turned away from him, and her usual smile far inside. "Karuto's little joke didn't bother you?"

"I reckon it's less to do with us and more about the chapter he reached when we dropped in."

Finally, a little twitch escaped from the corner of her lips. The Guardian sat up straighter on the bed, propping herself up with her hands, gingerly curling her legs to the side like a siren. When her eyes lingered resolutely at the level of his chin, Valkyon sat down on the bed next to her, elbows resting on knees, so that she no longer had to look at him straight in the eye. Her shoulders relaxed infinitesimally, though her hand continued to crumple the wine-colored satin sheets. He just waited.

It was often like this with them: the reading of minute movements; a little gesture, timed just right, to calm the other and give space to breathe; a tacit, patient silence in place of invitation or question. They never needed to speak to let each other know that they cared.

"What he said bothers me, because I know I shouldn't be spending time with you like this."

Though sometimes, all the body language expertise in the world couldn't predict what would fall from a friend's mouth. Valkyon's snowy eyebrows arched high. "Why should this be a problem? We've known each other for two years now. It's not a stretch to act like good friends."

"Too good," she cut him off shortly, still staring down at the bed. Suddenly, in the silence, even though her expression hadn't moved, she looked ready to cry.

He quickly laid his hand over hers, enclosing her fingers in the warm span of his own. "There is nothing that I have ever regretted doing for you. Not tonight. Not any time since. Don't ever think yourself unworthy. As I see it, nothing can be further from the truth."

Her head shot up and her eyes finally caught his. "Well what if I told you that I loved you?"

Silence never rang louder in his ears.

After some moments, Valkyon tried to swallow, but it seemed that what moisture remained in his throat was transmuted into glue in the space of ten words. The body knew some cruel alchemy.

What was there to be said, when a woman your friend said he was in love with turned around and flung those same words at you?

She was right about one thing. He really shouldn't be here.

The bed groaned as Valkyon shot to his feet. "You could use some sleep," he said mechanically, locking his expression into the epitome of a stone wall. Anything more was… not going to help this situation. "You'll feel better in the morning. I'll bring some willow bark tea from Ewelein and a new splint to–"

Her face crumpled like a violet at the first bite of winter. But her voice when it came, was furious. "You really think I said all that because I'm drunk?!" She started laughing, soundlessly. "Good god, you think I'm…! Have you ever looked at yourself in a mirror, Valkyon? For more than two seconds? Do you ever look at the other tables in the mess when you walk by?"

His ears were burning like live coals now. "That's irrelevant," he snapped back, shutting his mind to more images along that vein. "The point is that you're asking for something I can't-" But his tongue failed him right before it shaped those last, crucial words.

His mistake was that he chose to look right at her at that very moment. And saw just how wide her eyes had opened. Enough to see the new shine to them, obvious and fierce even under the smoky light of the oil lamps.

Valkyon knew, beyond the shadow of the doubt, what he needed to do tonight as a friend. But when his mind was flying as straight as an arrow to its destination, his heart lagged behind, anchored to this pregnant silence between him and the woman who earned more than just the name of comrade in the last year.

He shouldn't have looked at her at all at that moment.

With an effort, Valkyon shut his eyes and unclenched his jaw, then the muscles of his neck, upper back, and shoulders, knot-by-knot, counting down the seconds in his mind until he felt the rictus of panic lift from his body. When he spoke again, his voice was soft, low, and weighed with stone, as though the mere sound of his murmur could wake the floor to what was happening here. He was half-afraid that it would.

"Nevra's a good man. And with you, I believe he's showing himself to be an admirable one. Don't give up on him. What you both share is… rare enough that it deserves to be protected. Take it from me."

"Have you tried dating him?" she quipped tiredly, with none of the same reserve rooting him to where he was on the floor. Her face remained mercifully dry as she curled her injured leg tighter against herself, fingers fiddling with the slush-stained fold of her trousers. "I've been telling myself that for the last three months, but… there are many kinds of good men out there. Not just the one. And if they're still not a good fit after a year, then… that's something no one needs to be afraid to admit."

He was getting the uncanny feeling that they had arrived at uncharted territory. And it deserved to remain that way, from where he stood. With one foot already on the wrong side of the fence. "This might be something he needs to hear from you," Valkyon attempted.

"And he never lets go of an argument easily," the Guardian cut in, throwing up one hand, but without much conviction. She looked too drained. "He'll try to work around it. Plant a Beriflore trap by asking me what I mean by another kind of 'good man'. What if I tell him that I don't want someone who'll wave me aside or dish out orders when trouble hits, but will just stand nearby and let me take care of myself for a change, until I do ask him for help? What if I tell him I'm tired of snappy wit and mind-games? That I prefer someone who'll give his honest opinions and feelings as they are, with no other motive but to just lay out the facts and confirm that yes, he heard me? Not every conversation needs to be a duel, or some kind of… courtship dance! And think about what Nev will say if I tell him I want someone who can appreciate the little gestures—like holding hands—without joking about it, or trying to top it until it snowballs into something bigger. That I respect a man who doesn't put himself at the axis of the world—much less my world—even as a joke. Someone who, no matter how skilled he is, can step aside and let others take their shots, then congratulate them when they do succeed, no matter how small."

Just moments ago, his ears felt like they had been pulled fresh from a fire. Now, they were probably cinder.

She turned those red-rimmed eyes to him again. "He'll say that he's hurt that I can't accept him as he is. That I've been reading too many romances. That I'm reaching too far. When I can see, plain as day, that I'm not."

His corporal was right when she guessed that he never tried inspecting himself in the mirror; that each day he would walk across the mess without trying to make extra eye contact with the female recruits. Because there was the ever-present question of: why bother?

Over the last several years, Valkyon recognized that there were two general reactions whenever he opened his mouth for a stranger: they would flinch, as though they were one wrong word away from getting an axe to the neck, or they would stare like he was an exotic new import for the menagerie. Sometimes, to shake things up, they would laugh at a gesture he'd made, which later queries would show was completely inappropriate for the situation.

The problem was never the people he chose to talk to. It was himself. Unknown, borderline-dangerous, inscrutable, unsmiling, unsocial, blunt, out-of-place; these were the words he overheard others use when talking about him, and he still couldn't deny them. He was no charmer. Some days, he returned the sentiment and barely understood the people he spoke to.

But what sealed his decision to keep his head down every time he crossed the mess was that, after all these years, even after taking the helm of the Obsidian Guard and earning the—at least pro forma– trust of this city, he never fitted in once the bell rang to relieve him from his post. When others recounted the day's highlights and pitfalls, he had virtually none to add from his corner of the table. When they swapped stories from their hometowns, gossiped about mutual friends, traded in-jokes, bickered over politics, argued over the finer nuances of art and shared hobbies, he could only keep his silence.

He had started too young in the field of war, and spent too long in it to learn to be anything else. What could he say about himself to reel in someone's interest? Or keep it?

So if the call was sent out for an attractive man, Valkyon would recommend one or two of his colleagues. He made his peace long ago with the fact that he wasn't in the running for 'El's most eligible bachelor'. And if there was a woman who could appreciate his company, he would never dare ask for more than her friendship. Because what else could he offer in return?

Apparently, more than he knew. Based on what he was hearing now from his corporal.

Under those eyes, Valkyon felt his jaw lock once again, the pulse hammering in his throat as his stomach contracted and sent a wave of heat smoldering across his skin up to his hairline. The seams of his heart stretched taut. Now, he was the one who couldn't meet her gaze. The sound of her breathing filled the dark.

What was strange about love was how contagious it was. Just moments ago, he saw a dear friend with a leaden heart he needed to unburden. Now, in the space of ten critical words, in the span of one argument that shook down the doors holding back a season's worth of hurt and longing, he saw someone else in her place.

If it wasn't for that tiny, telltale scar on the side of her neck, he would have joined her there on the bed and sated his curiosities. About the taste of her mouth, the fit of her curves against him, the warmth of her breath against his neck, the feel of her hard-won laughter reverberating through his chest as she lay with him, hair, fingers, limbs, hopes intertwined.

But there were some battles that he couldn't afford to join.

"…I am so sorry," he heard his voice break the murk. "But you know that I can't stay any longer. If there's anyone who needs to hear this, it's him. And you should be able to do it. Good night. And look after yourself."

With that, he turned away from the woman on the bed and walked out the door. Even when he heard that hitch of breath, the whisper of sheets over sheets, the hurried creaking of the mattress, he didn't dare to turn around.

In all his years alone, Valkyon held onto one truth: no matter what others chose to see in him, he knew he was made to be a protector. It didn't matter then if he returned each night to an empty bed, if he was the only one who knew what his laughter sounded like. The happiness of those he looked after became his happiness.

Tonight, of all nights, he needed to convince himself of that.

FIN

Disclaimers:

- In the game, there aren't any honeyfruit groves in HQ's gardens (so far), and the bioluminescent squash was something I made up (considering the wacky-looking vegetables that grow there). You can find Crowmeros in the gardens though, and not necessarily frozen.

- Karuto may or may not be a closet romantic. It's still early too say. ;)

- Valkyon's past is still a healthy mystery to us fans. But in my headcanon, he started his career as a warrior very, very young. Even for a healthier individual, that lifestyle fosters a very particular mindset, unfortunately.

- One of the bombshells dropped in Episode 17 is that Valkyon has a substantial history of flings in the Guard... and so is well aware of his own unique charms. Unfortunately, this particular request was written back when the fandom was convinced he was pure, I mean, more romantically-isolated. We can call this an alternate scenario in which Valkyon never realized his own charisma in the Guard (poor fellow).

Anyway, if you enjoyed reading this piece (and even if you didn't), feel free to leave a review. I'm always open to feedback. :)