This was born from thinking of what it'd be like in practice to love someone who is living like 10 different lives and selves at once in a world that was literally built for them. Please enjoy!
"Just a little farther," she said, eyes fixed forward, gloved hand curled lightly around a branch.
He didn't glare, because she wasn't facing his direction and it would be pointless if she didn't see it. Instead he let out a short, sharp sigh, leaning against the trunk. She touched delicately, left no trace, while almost out of pettiness he crushed the moss trailing over the bark, smudged the trickle of sap. She could sneak all she liked. He wasn't here to chase down anything, information or people or whatever it was they were here for. He could care less if they were seen.
"What," she said, not asked.
"Why are we here," he answered, also not asking, because he knew why he was here — she had come home after being gone for days, eyes wild and arm bandaged (only a scratch, she'd said, but she'd rewrapped it when she thought he was asleep and it had bled black). She'd handed one son a flower and ruffled the other's hair, pressed a distracted kiss to his mouth when it had been opened with questions she didn't answer or perhaps even hear.
"Sorry," she had said. It was always what she said, and she always sounded as if she meant it, but he thought that she would try a little harder to not have a reason to say it if she truly meant it so much.
For a few glorious days, nothing had happened. His sort of nothing, where he went to the market in the morning with the boys, they learned their letters after, and he sat all afternoon with a book he had no intention of reading, watching her restring bows, teaching the younger son how to fletch and the older how to shoot.
But it had been less than a week before she was up, putting her boots on at three in the morning, her fingers dragging up his back, tracing around his ear. Her kiss was sudden, far more tongue than anyone half-asleep could expect — though not unwelcome, ever, if he was being honest — at least not from her. He'd kept traveling with her for many reasons, but at the beginning it was for that.
"Let's go," she had said, hands not able to stay still even for the time it took him to sit up, fiddling with the quiver she'd slung on the bed.
He had been too tired to protest. His boots were next to hers, but his fingers were half-useless with sleep, and she pushed them aside and laced the leather twice as quickly as he ever had. "Where?" he wondered.
"I can't stay here," she had said, and she couldn't. He could tell. Not just in how fast her fingers moved, the nervous energy at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were desperate in a way that was too familiar, something he'd tried to leave behind in abandoned crypts and far more populated sewers, a hunger he thought someone with a house and children and a title shouldn't feed.
She was starving with it. Always. They had spent years indulging themselves together, and now she was forced to partake of her danger alone.
Well. Mostly alone. He was bad at saying no, and he always had been. She knew it, too, and when she had handed him his staff, tugged him out the door with only another kiss to soothe his objections, he thought that perhaps if he were the sort of person who said no more often, she might not have married him in the first place.
So here they were. Miles and miles from their lovely home with its nice fireplaces and the flowers in little pots and its two children who could barely remember the war or the families they'd lost.
"You remember what we're here for," she responded. "I told you everything this morning. Or were you thinking of other things?"
Her glance was devious. Her mouth had been quite busy, with all the talking and licking, and her hands even more so, and honestly he didn't remember much of anything beyond the thought that they'd besmirched the exact same church attic five years before, and that her lips felt, if anything, even better than they had then.
He just stared back at her. After a second, her fist clenched. Her mouth pinched, a tiny bit, just at the side with the scar, and her voice was quieter. Heavier. "You didn't have to come."
"You didn't have to go," he answered.
She looked away. It had all been said too many times.
He realized, with a sick sort of pang in the pit of his stomach, the spot right where he missed home the most and loved her the most and hated this the most and regretted the most, that whether she couldn't change or wouldn't change, either way it wasn't going to happen. It would be like this forever. They could abandon their children or he could abandon her or the gods she claimed she spoke with could crack open the sky and tell her to stay at home, to settle down and be happy, and still she would be filled with nothing but hunger.
Maybe she knew it, even. Maybe she hated it. Maybe she wished that the sound of their sons' voices in the morning felt quieting, the way sunrises do, the way bright vegetables in their warm garden felt, the way churchyards feel at night when the dead are sleeping exactly as they ought — the way he felt all those things. Maybe she'd never felt quieted, once ever, and that was what she searched for. Not gold or things or memories or dreams. Quiet.
The forest was not silent, ever, because no forest has ever been silent. But in that moment, it felt that it was. It hurt him almost to break it, that his voice was tangible beyond sound, a hand waving through an utterly perfect spiderweb.
"I'm going home," he said.
The pause lengthened, grew. Aged softly between them as she stared and he stared and the forest whispered. "Alright," she said finally. But really she said I'm not. Really she said goodbye — for now. It was what she always said. What she always meant. She would always come back, until someday she wouldn't.
He thought maybe that day was soon. He thought, if he listened to the quiet anxious practical voice he had and she didn't, that maybe that day was today, was right now.
"I love you," she said. She always said it first, except for the very first time, when he had held her shaking besides bodies upon bodies, covered in blood that was and wasn't theirs, sobs retching out from her, stretched as if pulled.
"I love you too," he said. It was always true.
She stepped back. The trees almost seemed to swallow her, to welcome her back. The times she was with him she couldn't be with them, and they knew it. The world hungered for her the way she hungered for it.
He hungered for home. He watched her slip between the trees, but he didn't hear her leave. He never once had.