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"Could you — "
"No, I couldn't."
Erik proceeds chewing his miniscule share of bread slowly.
Charles eyes a protruding wine bottleneck with painful longing. Or whatever passes for it on his drawn face.
Erik snatched the basket when they were escaping that village. Hardly a lucky catch: some wrapped up bread, a wine bottle, a knife and a set of oil paints and canvas. Well, that's what you get when you steal from a local painter.
"Drinking when hungry is not a good idea," points out Erik.
He thinks that Charles knows it too, because he heaves a sigh and curls up on his flat stone, staring in the depth of their fire moodily.
Oh, the power of pathos.
"It's so unfair," he mumbles and awaits Erik's retort.
"Life is unfair. More so, I suggest you dwell on it while you're trying to fall asleep outside, hungry, injured and exhausted, all after saving that Scrumville."
His own words made his blood boil anew. Those ungrateful bastards. Blaming Charles and him for everything what happened. And though Erik couldn't deny, that they just might have come across as rather suspicious. Perhaps. Still, peasants could have listened to their side of story.
Erik puts two more rods into fire. It crackles amicably and a sheaf of red sparks surges up, towards midnight sky.
Asleep, he discovers, Charles is very still and quiet.
Erik doesn't actually fall asleep, despite that he needs his bloody rest. He follows down a road where sleep and awareness bleed into each other, because someone has to stay on guard. Thus, night passes both too quickly and too slowly for him.
Morning sneaks up on them with thick patches of fog. Their barely smoldering campfire is on the edge of the cliff, comfortably hidden within ruins of some ancient shrine. Fog dares not slide closer, lurking across lowland, milky and entirely blanketing.
"Wow… looks like you can't tell sky and land apart anymore," comes a dreamy murmur.
Erik blames the combination of sleep deprivation and lulling meditative quality of this particular sunrise for not noticing that Charles is awake. Charles, meanwhile, rubs at his eyes and stretches, before sitting cross-legged on his stone bed and smiling at him. Erik fights the urge to give himself a pinch or say something sarcastic, because there is no way someone can look so radiant and well rested after reclining on the almost bare stone.
"You should have slept too, Erik. It is safe here," softly reprimands him Charles. There's an air of sadness around him. "We're on the holy land blessed by elves themselves: spirits can guide you through the most wonderful of dreamscapes," he gently pats the stone he is sitting on and a keen sense of loss pierces through Erik. Like an arrow would.
He can see Charles watching him strangely.
Erik shakes it off.
"How are you?" he asks, regardless of his previous intention to sweep the issue of strangling Charles under the rug.
"You mean? Ah. I'm quite alright, considering," Charles lapses into silence, cautiously prodding at dark bruising around his throat. To his credit, his face is carefully impassive.
Of course.
As if Erik doesn't know how much it hurts.
Charles' hands are shaking when he is healing Erik's already half-adhesioned wounds. Yesterday, Charles lamented that he was too exhausted to do anything but stop the bleeding.
"Should be fine, now," he attempts to stand and Erik lends him a hand to clutch.
When they trot down the path leading to the river, something compels Erik to look back.
He doesn't know what he expects to see, but certainly not the mirage of a small white shrine with elegant silvery spires, looking more beautiful than any artistic reproduction. He feels as if an impossibly gentle hand sweeps away his frown. Wind and stardust brush past him and words of goodbye die in the distance.
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Charles couldn't climb onto a cart on the first try. Erik, on the contrary, vaults up and over the broad planks as if it is nothing, and smirks back at him. Charles cheats a little then, and uses a levitation spell, which, again, makes his heartbeat uneven.
"Are you two in?" cries an elderly man, Oliver, from the front, where he tugs at the reins of a baldy horse so old, that she may as well be his age-mate.
"Yes, thank you!" Charles strains to be louder and, predictably, fails.
"Yes! Move on!"
Erik is definitely the audible one among two of them right now.
After sitting down and stretching his legs, Charles takes in their temporary haven. The cart is only partially covered with thick grey linen. The outline of lumps and shapes suggests that there are sacks underneath. As for Erik and him, they are sitting in the unoccupied space, dusted with soft hay and dry leaves.
Charles leans back against the piled sacks and briefly closes his eyes. Sun is unbelievably warm and breeze is just that right kind of fresh he adores.
"What is wrong with you? I mean, apart from great fondness for meddlesome stalking."
"Surely you can find a better way to express your proficiency in acerbic, Erik."
Even with his eyes shut, he feels Erik's insistent gaze on him. It takes some willpower to ward off the urge to shudder. He confirms his suspicions when he opens his eyes after a sufficient pause.
Charles can't remember ever going through so much intense staring as he is doing with Erik.
Erik doesn't say anything else, but his former question is still hanging in the air, so…
"That last spell I used should have rendered me powerless for weeks, at least," quietly says Charles. "In order to banish demon from our realm I had to cut through velum. It's a barrier that separates our worlds."
Erik nods, wordlessly.
"The spell itself was discovered by my father. Well, to be fair, only the initial fragment could be restored and translated later."
One thought of his father and Charles is unsurprised to find childhood memories, all that eager excitement, floating to the surface in increments. Charles caves into a smile, before putting a lid on them.
"You developed it."
"And then exercised," Charles huffs. "Nearly killed myself. And that valley is now called Dark Valley for a very good reason."
Erik can't help but smirk.
"Backlash?"
The question is crisp, though, so Erik is fully aware that he's not entertaining an absurd bragging contest here.
"The worst," Charles concedes.
By Charles' standards Erik has gone back to lazy disinterest too fast.
"What's on your mind, Erik?" he asks conversationally, after they stay silent for long enough that Charles starts getting faintly cart-sick.
"Only you, lately," retorts Erik blankly.
"Well," he mimics Erik's tone, "I'm really flattered."
"Don't be."
Their cart jerks back and then forward, and Charles nearly ends up sprawled, if not for Erik's steading grip, who is certainly getting better at catching him.
Erik gives him a perfunctory once-over, before relaxing his grip and jumping out of the cart. Charles takes his time to slide down cautiously. It appears, they have stopped on the fairly tricky turn. A tree had fallen right across the track. None too soon.
Old Oliver is fussing over the horse, which, truth be told, seems completely unperturbed by this turn of events.
Charles steps up closer to the poor man and looks at Erik sidelong.
Erik stops, raising an eyebrow.
Bandits. Again.
Turning slowly in place, Charles sees bandits popping out of the bushes and surrounding them in tight circle. That must be their leader, in the center. A young girl: unruly black hair, a sparkling cheap headband, ragged cloak. The headband is there for image's sake, guesses Charles, assessing the rest of the beat-up audience.
Charles glares. He starts before he can second-guess himself:
"Please, get out of our way this instant."
His stomach started to growl loudly and to cover that Charles forms a sphere of bright white light in his outstretched hand. Should be intimidating, he hopes.
"Hey, folks," exclaims the girl to her backing comrades, "this is just a lame illumination spell! Fear not! I'll teach him what a true magician can do."
Her overexcited voice gets a little high and funny in the end.
From the corner of his eye Charles notices, that Erik actually has a nerve to lean against the side of the cart, arms folded across his chest.
He already looks bored.
She throws a lightning bolt at Charles. And, he admits, it's rather strong for a rogue. It bounces off his shield and Charles sends his own lightning into the enemy, power tripled. He also burns the tree barricading the track to the crisp.
"I do hope, you can treat my friend and me to a decent dinner," he calmly turns to old Oliver, "since I've just saved you from them," Charles tilts his head to indicate that he means unconscious bandits lying around them. And bandits currently running away as well.
Old Oliver gapes at him for a while, until he finally gives a nod and an almost toothless grin.
Fine.
His heart is now pounding in his throat. This time the inevitable spell of fatigue is accompanied by excruciating chest pain. But it was worth it, decides Charles. There is something about a good climax, they say.
Well, it's so true.
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###
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After a plain, but nevertheless substantial meal, old Oliver uncovers a barrel of honey ale. They are lucky, he explains, that his mistress is visiting a cousin in the neighborhood. Such occasion needs to be celebrated by rising alcoholic content, so, once ale ran out, old Oliver presents the fruits of his own distillation technique.
"It prolongs good health and youth," he slurs, sticking out his bony chest.
"You must have imbibed regularly to maintain such juvenility," drily observes Erik and Charles tries to hiss him down.
"What!? What did you say?"
"Erik says that it is working great," steps in Charles.
Old Oliver cackles, goodnaturedly, and pours cloudy liquid into their mugs standing in a triangle in the center of the kitchen table. He misses and splashes most of it, but eventually the mugs are filled and Erik takes a careful sip.
Gods almighty!
He has drunk his fair share of strong nasty stuff. However, this has just scraped his mouth and throat raw. Hell!
Next to him Charles is happily guzzling down his drink. He looks like he's enjoying himself in the company of one rather deaf geezer and one rather brusque mercenary. He breaks into a laugh at something old Oliver is saying. And then he turns to Erik.
"We can spend a night here! Fancy that!"
Erik just shrugs. Noncommittally. All his senses are very, very numb.
"Go to sleep," suggests Charles all of the sudden and pats him on the shoulder.
To his own dubious amazement, Erik does go deeper into the house, following old Oliver's befuddling instructions, and drops dead in the room with two narrow beds.
He wakes up with a jolt.
Since nobody cared to close window shutters the night before, the entire room is sunlit. As usual, Erik checks his surroundings with eagle eye. Quietly, so as not to disturb sleeping Charles, he gets up.
There is less than a brief moment of him looking at pillow-snuggling Charles, before he chuckles, soundlessly, and turns around to leave. For good, he assumes.
As soon as he opens the door, his almost decent mood evaporates.
"How?" he grinds out a single word.
There is Charles on the doorstep. Charles and his little cocky smile is all that he can focus on due to sudden tunnel vision.
"But, Erik, I anticipated that you'd attempt to escape," he illuminates, unrepentant. "Therefore, I left an active astral projection just in case."
True to his words, this version of Charles seems to be glowing around the edges.
Erik just slaps his forehead and draws his palm to cover his eyes.
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