Pavane
For D, who sent me peace from a prompt meme, for a quiet moment between two characters, and then gave me Milathos even if she hasn't watched the show because she loves me. XD
There should not be something quiet and very nearly comfortable about this – not with what lies ahead, and the possibility that either or both of them may die looming very real. His head should be full of plans for what may happen rather than thoughts of her, but he watches out of the corner of his eye as she straps that now-familiar blade to her thigh before concealing steel and milk-white skin beneath the fluttering layers of her skirts and finds himself wondering instead not how they have come to this, but why it should feel so right.
The tools of his own trade are laid out on the table before him, and his hands move blindly, with the familiar precision born of years. Lead shot into pouches, powder-horn refilled, pan and flint and springs on his guns checked: it's all a rhythm he knows well, could do while half asleep. Loading, too, is something he can do blind, and he tends to it as he watches her check her own weapons.
They've never done this before, and yet as he buckles on his belts he thinks it could easily have been the hundredth time; even now, after years apart and months of adversity and only these scant days of tentative rapprochement, they move around each other as if they had never parted, each aware of the other's presence. She is the curl of jasmine with every indrawn breath, the soft whisper of skirts against the floor, the not-unwelcome tingle of his skin whenever they brush past each other without quite touching; she is in his bones, his blood, his heart, and she always has been, and he marvels at what a disaster his mind must be, to fix on that now of all possible times.
He is glad she will be with them, with what today may bring. It is an altogether unnerving realisation, almost as unsettling as it is to realise that, somewhere in the chaos of all that has happened, he trusts her – not just with his own life, because that has little worth (and is hers, has been hers from the first, has never ceased to be hers, but he dares not dwell on that), but with the lives of those dearest to him. (Does she trust him with her own? He thinks she might, when she came to them, when she has made her choice, when she is here with him now carefully hiding a pistol at the small of her back, but that thought is too much like hope and though he wants to believe she does, hope is a fearsome thing.)
She looks at him, brows quirked in silent question, and he almost smiles at the familiar challenge. Perhaps if they survive the day he can learn what else is still familiar.
She brushes past him, a swirl of jasmine and a rustle of taphata, and he follows her (not for the first time, surely not for the last) out the door.