Preamble: randomly wrote this in one sitting a couple of months ago, although my subconscious has been trying to attack this angle for quite a while now. Sort of a companion piece to Mercy. Hope you enjoy!
He was a dead man walking anyway.
Finally admitting it to himself was almost liberating. If the shadows won, he'd be swallowed up in the darkness; if she won, this dungeon would drag all of them down into the mere. He wouldn't make it out in time, that was certain.
He'd turned himself on this path, and damn if he wasn't a fool. He could have stolen past the army of undead.
As if; with Black Garius's hand around your heart, he would have found you and killed you.
He could have taken her somewhere away from the Sword Coast and thrice-cursed Neverwinter.
Sometimes all you can do is stand and fight. If I cannot win from inside a fortified keep with an army at my back, what will my chances be when I am caught fleeing?
He almost had reached out to touch her in that summoning hall, almost pulled her to him to run his lips over her hair her tears her mouth...
And again she was blue in the face, Lorne Starling's massive hand crushing her throat as he rises to his feet, cursing but his dagger is in her hand and clever girl, she slashes with purpose at the thick wrist, severing tendons. Her sharp gasp of sweet breath as she tumbles away from suddenly limp fingers.
Her voice is hoarse as she meets his eyes and says, "Lorne Starling is dead." And he hates that he is right about Luskan mercy.
The bruising on her neck will take months to fade despite the healers' efforts, and the faintest trace is still there the first time he makes love to her, tracing the outlines with fingers and lips.
Torio is slyly saying, "And that's why the ranger tries not to watch you."
The tightness in her jaw as he walked away through the broken gate, and the arrow missing its mark, a flare of her magic diverting it. "Stand down," she says in the commander's voice, then more quietly, more raggedly, "The mistake was mine."
He had nothing to lose for the first time in his life. Nothing, but everything.
Her smile. Her half smile. Her not-a-smile smile.
Her in firelight, humming quietly and gods, he can smell her, taste her, feel her under his hands.
How did he become so vulnerable? Somewhere between wanting to use her as revenge on Duncan and now, somewhere in between she had slipped in, cradled in his arms and listening to him talk about-everything. Life in Luskan. The lay of the land around Neverwinter. How he found Karnwyr, and where his name came from.
Everything except what he had told her just then, and how he wanted so badly for her to forgive him.
Maybe there was time enough for this dead man.
He turned and looked at his footprints in the dust, barely perceptible in the gloom. The huge doors to the summoning hall lay ahead, with a few stragglers between him and her. And then the King of Shadows. And then death, probably for all of them.
But not for her. Not if he could help it.
Bishop smiled.