A/N: Also posted on AO3 and Tumblr, this is week three of the Redwall Fic Month. Also I'm frickety fracking excited. If life and other fandoms don't get in the way this'll be part of a longer Luke/Sayna fic. Enjoy!
'Twixt Thorn and Crimson Roses
In far gone days, the warriormouse bowed his head to one weight and one alone. The other young males may have laughed- once or twice, early on- at him, at the flowers skewed crossways, hanging lazily from one ear. But he was Luke. The warrior's son. He had won the lady's favor, and those that laughed did not laugh long.
Here he could dream of those bygone days- here, on the deck of the big ship, where the past was dim to him and the creatures long gone, and only the waves to whisper of her beauty.
Here, he could see them still.
Young the warrior, and younger still the maiden- the one dancing with a sword not quite his own, and the other dusting him in her favorite colors: blue columbines and wild yellow dogroses, and humming a summer's song to the music of his movement.
Seasons of petals kissing his skin.
Seasons wishing they were her lips.
Summer.
Invasion.
Fire.
And in the doorway, his father. Martin. The warrior. The gatekeeper of Luke's own destiny, with his arms folded over his chest and his eyes dark with disapproval. If the belt at his waist felt empty before it was a flat, black void now- mirror to the one festering in his heart.
A slender paw touched his own. He was half afraid to look at her. Afraid to find an echo of his father's eyes.
She was a vision- clothed in the airiest seafoam, or the wings of the whitest dove. His cape was too long for her and dragged the floor but she wore it, and she wore it well- half shrouded in it like the favored lover of some old god of war. Gentle Sayna, a war goddess- the thought shamed him. His ears flushed crimson as the cape and he fought but failed to tear his gaze away.
The old seer murmured a few words, and Luke may have caught one in three but the others didn't matter. He heard Sayna, and Luke, and bond, and he heard his own heart beating hard in his ears. A low cheer went up from the assembly- weak perhaps, but full of heart- and Luke realized they were wed. Sayna held her paws up to him clasped around a thick woven bramble, braided between thorns with crimson roses and lily of the valley.
Luke felt the life return to him.
He knelt, and continued to kneel- as the crowd rose. As brambles and roses fell light on his head, and the thorns bit at his ears. He knelt, his head bowed low until a pair of tender paws traced a tear, or two, from his cheeks and the whisper of her voice bade him rise. For the first time since the last day's dawning, Luke allowed himself to smile.
And they stood before the assembly.
And they stood before his father.
Both whispers of white and bloody crimson: the warrior without a sword, in half a set of roughened armor, smelling of blood and acrid smoke beneath the flowers; the maiden in a smoke stained dress, a little burnt around the edges. She in his cape. He crowned in her flowers.
And they stood. In the wake of battle. Before the last of Mossflower's defenders.
The dusky smear of color across the western horizon was like her eyes, but not how he wished to remember them. Not blue-grey and laughing on a summer morn, and he beside her wearing a smile and a flower crown wove by her own paw- but faintly red, reflecting candlelight and a distance between them. Reflecting the sadness of defeat, and a longing for what had been but was no more.
Luke's paws tightened on the ship's wheel. He wondered how she'd greet him.
An alternate title would be "I gave Luke a frickety fracking flower crown." In fact, I think that title is better. IT'S A FLOWER CROWN EVERYONE. MADE BY SAYNA.