And I'll Love You All the Way
There are nights when he ventures out and away from camp because the emptiness wakes him up and his wife is not by his side, yet he knows where she's ran off to.
Away. She has to get away.
His feet carry him over small spots of wet earth, though it hasn't rained for weeks. It's like he's following a trail of bitter tears that do not dry but glisten under the light of a cold, distant moon.
When he finds her she's shaking and pitifully small under that cloak of hers. She keeps staring at her hands, as if the red still clings, as if the vile warmth of liquid crimson from her dreams will never leave her skin. Near delirious, she scratches and tries to wash herself with water that is midnight cold from a pond dark as a pit of nightmares. He envelops her because there is nothing he can offer but his presence. She won't talk and he doesn't know what to say.
In his arms she's even smaller, even more fragile and breakable and so much like his wretched visions that keep him toiling and tossing without respite - It's her, bathed in the scorching purple flames, writhing in pain, consumed by a hellish beast that would have her be its doll, humanity's one natural enemy. She becomes a vessel with all-powerful hands tangled in destiny's strings, hands that used to make him shiver and groan under the covers, but now he shivers for different reasons and screams his heart out. Her tender mouth, red and ripe for the taking, cuts across her face like a scythe bestowed upon an agent of death, a bringer of chaos.
A perversion of Robin - that is his vision, the nightmare that stalks his every step every second of the day like a growling demon, eager with sharp claws to snatch his love from his hands and tear away half of his already weary soul.
Lon'qu speaks to her with the voice of, not a friend, not a lover, and not a husband, rather he lets her into that bit of him that he's not given her yet because he thought it made him weak. He thought it made him unworthy, reducing him to less than the warrior he strives to become. Here he is nude to the core. Nothing more than a man. Scared to death.
He tells her with words that are not delicate, but are true and desperate, that he will not lose her to any fell beast. It's not a promise; it's a statement. He will not stop fighting until the last of his breaths has been stolen to the grave and he will not let her hand go, even if it's through mud and the enemy's rotten guts. He'll open a path with his sword, and his sword has never let him down. If he's ever failed it's not because his sword was lacking, it's because he was not strong enough. Not skilled enough. Didn't have a reason like the one he has now.
This time he's seen into the future inside their son's eyes and it's so bright in there. There is a place where he is a father and she is a mother and their son wakes every morning with a smile, not fear that he will fight his final battle when he's yet to experience his deepest regrets or his deepest of loves.
"Let us get there, together."
With her heart tattooed on her very face, churning and raw and troubled, she relays to him the message of her despair with only glances because that's how things have been since the day she closed the gap. Ever since he gathered the courage to look into a woman's eyes, not just any woman, Robin's, he knows what it's like to be connected beyond the comprehensible. Beyond the tangible.
She's trapped inside a fog of her own making, stumbles inside her own head and always crashes against a barrier where her past should be and the not knowing and wanting to know makes her mad. She wishes she had a clue, because then she might be able to orient herself. She feels only a few years old and it's been nothing but war after war, one too close to the other and not enough time to stop and think and just... breathe something other than the heat of battle.
She tells him the rivers of blood have not stopped flowing since the day she woke up. The fire and the ashes still burn her lungs. The smell of death is all around and it's terrifying how she knows it so well. Like an old friend. It sticks to the food she eats and even him. She cuts her way through the day with a blade and thunder, since the day she awakened on that field, in the middle of nowhere.
She wonders, and wonders, if maybe she truly was born and meant to be a thing that exhales ruin.
"You are you, Robin. You are, and always will be, the one I love, the mother of my future child. The one that makes me complete..."
She's not a dragon with inferno in her mouth. She's his woman, with honeyed nectar on her tongue, and she better believe him - he's tasted it himself. Touching her is exhilarating, like ecstasy dancing through his veins. Like the one thing he's been longing for his entire life.
In her, he finds himself.
"Don't leave me... don't leave us now."
Inside, a part that has been and could be Grima once more has a constricting grip on her heart, tugging, expectant, salivating at the mere idea of its vessel's final shred of consciousness fading into thin air. It wants her cold breath and her limp body growing pale... but she's not giving up. Not yet. Not while there is hope and the man she's tied to for eternity or until the universe dies out. She's not alone and he'll follow her, through this cruel world of theirs.
"And I'll love you all the way."
I just wanted to write something that included Lon'qu. Because I love his character. This turned out rather short, but I'm very happy with it.
And OH MY GOD I cannot believe I forgot to thank OrangeStreakedStar, because her encouraging and kind words gave me that extra bit of confidence to post. Thanks a million, you! You're my best proofreader!