doscartha
Written for my April Fic Challenge 2021, Prompt: Sand. AU. Could be Gen or Pre-Slash. Totally didn't forget about de Merville' archer friend when I was writing this. Title is 'inseparable' in Irish. Comments and kudos would be awesome. Enjoy!
No.
This isn't right.
This isn't how it's supposed to go.
Nothing about this pilgrimage has gone the way it was meant to since they left the monastery. Between the questionable alliances Geraldus arranged for this journey and Raymond de Merville's greedy betrayal of those arrangements, there is little hope of it succeeding at all. Their escorts are dead (at least the ones that were disinclined to kill them). Ciarán is dead. Rua is dead. The mute soldier is currently in the process of buying them as much time as possible, but even with his sacrifice, chances are the rest of them will be dead, too, so long as they're in the wake of de Merville's relentless pursuit.
Still, something is pulling him back to the beach. Something is telling him that he should be there. He should be with him, however this ends. He will not leave his friend behind to die alone.
So Diarmuid stops his desperate forward progress, gives up entirely on getting the boat out into the deep water with the others, where it will only serve to take them further away from the battle on shore.
"Boy!" Geraldus shouts after him, tries to reach out and stop him, but he breaks away before the Cistercian can catch hold. Cathal and the ferrymen shout protests, as well, but Diarmuid does not hear them and even if the words did register somewhere beyond the ringing in his ears, he would not heed them.
He runs, slogs back through the surf and the shells and the sand as fast as he can manage. Back to the fight. Back to where de Merville and the mute soldier are still at it, still parrying blows and dodging swings, but neither man seems aware of his return, too focused on each other to register his presence. Diarmuid has absolutely no idea what he's doing, but when he gets close he sees the metallic glint of that damned spiked arrow and he cannot let his friend fall to it, cannot watch another person he cares about suffer that fate. He launches himself off the ground and onto de Merville's back, wraps his arms tight around the unsuspecting man's neck and holds on with every ounce of strength and adrenaline he possesses.
The mute's eyes blow wide at the sight of him, but he takes swift advantage of de Merville's distraction even as the knight fights back, stabbing at Diarmuid with his arrow wherever he can in his desperation to regain the upper hand.
It isn't easy, but he manages to maintain his hold in spite of the wounds the arrow leaves as it rakes at his arms. Eventually, it embeds itself deep in his shoulder and he cries out in pain, and his hold falters just the smallest bit. It's enough for de Merville to shake him free, to fling him aside – he keeps his hold on the arrow, though, and it rips free from Diarmuid's shoulder as he falls away.
But it's not enough to turn the tide of battle back in his favor, it's too late for that now.
Diarmuid catches sight of the steel glint of a sword, the red spurt of blood from de Merville's neck as his friend swings a killing blow and their tormentor falls, unmoving, to the ground.
He hits the ground, too, though, and the last thing he sees before the world goes dark is the steady flow of his own blood straining the wet sand crimson before it swirls away into the seawater.
Diarmuid stirs, some considerable amount of time later, to find that he's… floating?
His head feels heavy and it lulls to one side, settles against warm skin. Confused, he slowly blinks his eyes open to find his mute friend staring down at him, relief clear in his eyes when he realizes Diarmuid's looking back at him. He's in the man's arms, being carried through the lush forest, the bloodstained beach nowhere in sight as darkness falls around them.
They pause, and Diarmuid finds himself carefully set down upon the forest floor, leaned against a tree.
He's grateful to be on steady ground for the moment - he feels vaguely dizzy and light-headed and every part of him hurts, nothing moreso than his shoulder, which is throbbing with pain. It radiates down into his fingers and up into his neck, and his arm dangles uncooperative and useless at his side. He touches the place where the arrow was - there's a bandage there now, a haphazard piece of cloth that's saturated through with blood.
"What happened?" Diarmuid manages to force the words out, for all the good they'll do. He's hardly capable of puzzling out an answer from his mute friend right now. Easier questions, then. "Are you hurt?"
The man sits in front of him, reaches out and holds tight to Diarmuid's good hand in an attempt to distract him from the pain. In answer, though, he shakes his head. Diarmuid's sure that isn't entirely true, though, and at his skeptical glance, the mute sighs and reveals his injuries - bloodied knuckles, some bruises from what had to be a brutal fight before his interruption, and a shallow cut on his side that appears like it may have been from the arrow, as well, before it found a home in Diarmuid's shoulder. Diarmuid trusts that there's nothing else, nothing worse.
"The others," he says, dimly aware that it's just the two of them out here in the woods. "Did they get the boat out to sea?"
A nod.
"They're going on without us?"
Another nod. Diarmuid knows the relic was in the boat when he left it and at the moment he's perfectly willing to let Geraldus and Cathal handle the rest of the trek to deliver it to the Pope. Let them finish the pilgrimage.
"And us?" Diarmuid asks, "Where do we go now?"
In answer, his friend merely gestures to him, and that message, at least requires little effort to translate – wherever they go, they will go together.