Birthday fic for velithya. Short, unashamedly clichéd and silly, but hopefully good for a little amusement.
So naturally, there was that incident where a surprise attack lead to him and Sol getting separated from the rest of the regiment and hopelessly lost in the wilderness, days from civilisation with only each other to blame for it. And inevitably, after fighting tooth and nail for hours and crawling through the mud to escape, then tracking through a few miles of undergrowth in uniforms which might as well have been designed to catch on every loose twig they passed, they were both much the worse for wear. So just as naturally, when the third day dawned uncomfortably warm and they found themselves needing to cross a wide, slow flowing river, and with no pressing need to rush past, the last thing Ky could afford to do was to prove himself less interested in basic hygiene than Sol by objecting to the idea they stop there long enough to bathe. But it really wasn't the hygiene that was the issue.
It didn't help at all that Sol had no inhibitions about stripping out of his clothes and wading out into the water in front of him like it was nothing out of the ordinary, with no more than one throwaway comment about a naked male body being, "nothing you haven't seen before". What Ky wanted to say was that, thanks to Sol's infuriating habit of coming back from battle caked in gear blood and ash but without anything below the outermost layer of his uniform even singed, anything below hisneckline was more than Ky had seen before. Even the part of Sol's face covered by his forehead protector would have been more than Ky had seen before, which was ironic considering it was the one piece of clothing Sol hadn't seen fit to remove. No-one else but Sol had quite the same way of reminding him that, even if he was responsible for several thousand men and a hair's breadth away from being made commander of the Holy Order, he was also a sixteen year old boy who'd achieved his unnatural maturity for his age by bypassing puberty on the way. But the only thing worse than feeling this self-conscious would be to let Sol know he was, so all he could do was to find a large rock to get undressed behind, and just hope that the way he was turning red as a tomato was something he'd be able to pass off as sunburn.
From there, there was nothing else for it but to wade out into the deepest water he could find without going any closer to Sol than he could avoid, and then stand there trying to remember the basic muscle movements it took to remove dirt from one's body using water. He tried very hard not to glance over his shoulder. He had to try even harder not to wonder how on earth Sol had managed to get a tan like that when Ky knew for a fact he'd worn that uniform 365 days of the last year, or whether that much toned muscle could be remotely normal or human. He failed completely not to imagine he could feel Sol's eyes on his back every moment of the process, or not to hear the low chuckle carrying over the water. The latter also destroyed any remaining hope he might have had that Sol hadn't noticed his behaviour.
The one redeeming point of the whole exercise was that by the time he got out of the water again, he really had gotten himself sunburned so badly that if he went on blushing constantly for the next couple of days, Sol would be none the wiser.