Darling

Author's note: This is the companion piece to "In Fragile Hands", and can be taken as a sequel of sorts to "Restoration". So if you're looking for more, you know where to go.

He could shield her from the spears of deranged enemies with his body and carry her, sobbing, away from the wreckage of her home. He could spare her the visions of bodies torn asunder by his blade, wipe his armor clean of crimson before she had a chance to spot it. He could hold her shaking body and stroke her hair as she sobbed for her friends, her family, her country at the edge of a battlefield none of them wanted to face. He was her knight, her protector, her shield against the world and the chaos it had been thrown into. As he watched her chest rise and slowly fall with each labored breath, Seth knew he could protect Eirika from this, no matter what the clerics said.

He reached down and stroked her withered hand, resisting the urge to flinch at the chill against his calloused skin. Her eyes fluttered open, the same clear blue he'd gazed upon with adoration since she flashed him that smile on the practice fields, begged him to help her the same way with the sword as he'd helped her brother with the spear. The same smile lingered on her face for a moment as she croaked his name.

"Yes, Eirika. I'm right here." Her fingers, still slim and dainty, worked their way between his and traced the bones through the back of his hand.

"You need to sleep," she chided softly, the lines at her mouth growing darker as the smile he loved so well turned into a frown. She silenced his rising objection with a squeeze of his hand. "No excuses. I'll still be here when you wake up. It's only a fever, Seth. I've lived through worse."

Only because I was there to protect you.

He didn't say it, because he knew she'd purse her lips and remind him of the times she protected him, those awful times when he saw red splattered across her face, when he watched her stare at bodies torn asunder by her own blade and shake. Sometimes, she was cruel. She always had been – in the old days, smiling at foreign courtiers and accepting their offers to dance, after that, sobbing the names of men her knights had given so much to kill.

"If you insist, my love." He pulled his hand from hers to stroke her hollow cheeks, caress her moonlight hair, and despite the stench of bile and sweat, press a kiss to her cracked lips. "Good night."

She was crueler than he ever imagined, to leave him in the dead of night while, at her insistence, he slept. Crueler still, the clerics insisting on moving her, on tending to their meaningless rites and prayers. He clung to her pale, limp hands, wove his fingers through the mess of her hair and down the side of her slim neck.

"Eirika. Eirika."

Perhaps if he said it enough, her eyes would flutter open again, framed by butterfly lashes and full of that smile he knew so well. He knew that wasn't how it worked, but it wouldn't stop him from trying. He felt a cleric's hand on his shoulder and responded with a bellow.

"Get out!"

For once, they obeyed.

His lips were on her face, breathing her name, cursing his own, even as he felt another hand grasp his shoulder, a hand he dared not swat away. He heard whispered apologies, twinged with a grief he couldn't condone. Where had the king been when his sister collapsed in the stairwell? Where had he been when her fits of coughing had stained her lips red, when the rhythm of her wheezes trailed down the halls? What right did he have to grieve?

Seth turned and saw his wife's eyes set in his king's face, heard the whisper of her voice dancing in his apologies. What was it worth, this loyalty? Nothing. For the sound of his name on her lips, he would throw Renais to the dogs in a second. With his own hands, he would shove the slender king to the cold stone floor, smash fair-haired head into harsh white marble, draw the sword that hadn't left his side in decades and drive it between fragile ribs. He would lie prostrate before mad princes, raise his blade against his fellows, align himself with anything, everything –

It was impossible. Such things existed no longer. There was no one to contract with, no one to deliver what he so dearly desired. Beneath his king's solemn stare, Seth crumpled and sobbed.