Interlude
Most days it was easy to forget about the fact that Flik still wasn't over her. The captain everyone so fondly called the Blue Lightning had enough guts and wit and charm to carry himself through the day with a languid, effortless ease unique to a man with stature and similar to a woman of grace. This was how they kept their ragtag band of mercenaries together: with Viktor's boisterous, gung-ho attitude and Flik's cool, level-headed judgment.
Giving Flik a tankard of ale and a listening ear, however, changed everything. The smiles vanished right along with the younger man's voice, and it wouldn't take one very long to realize how dead those perfect blue eyes looked in the lonely candlelight of a bar table. It wasn't that Flik spilled his guts out about his life when he had a little too much to drink. It was that he shut himself away and ended up saying nothing at all, to anyone.
Viktor never told Flik that he knew about the latter's rituals, or how he sometimes saw the younger man alone in his room, looking down at a sword untouched by her spirit but branded with her name. Too late to call it love, some in Warrior's Village would declare, but the tradition no longer held for dead people, and no one had the balls to tell Flik that he couldn't etch her name on it because he had been too late to tell her that he loved her. The last man who had tried nearly ended up tossed from the fort's highest point and down onto the emptiness of sky and the rocks beneath it.
Whenever they fucked it was an escape from the ghosts and both of them knew it, but there were secrets to keep and dreams to pretend to live in, so in the end they decided without ever having to decide that somehow, things were better off that way.