A/N: I'm not getting better at this timing thing. I'm so sorry.

…

"Dalamus, come on!"

But the Dunmer keeps walking, marching quickly down the wooden walkway and ignoring him the whole while. Marcurio has to rush to keep up, and no matter how fast he goes Dal is always too many steps ahead. He thinks they're heading back to their room at the Bee and Barb, but they walk right past it, heading for the gate to the city instead.

"Dal, please, just let me—"

But he yanks the gate closed behind him, and the Imperial has to jump through the last little bit of space to make it out. On the other side Dalamus is walking faster, his fists balled at his sides, practically stomping down the hill away from the city to the north. Marc opens his mouth, taking a breath to try and get him to stop again, but the minute he goes to say the first word he's interrupted by the roar of a shout ripping through the air.

It isn't aimed at him, but the force of it knocks him on his ass anyway. The guard at the gate starts to protest—he just clears his throat, really—but the Dragonborn just stares him down, red eyes hard, until he quietly returns to his post. The gaze shifts to Marcurio.

"Let's talk about this, okay?" he tries, quietly, as if speaking too loud might set him off.

"I asked you," the Dunmer growls, not only because his voice is still roughened from the shout. "I asked you if it was safe and you said yes!"

"I didn't know! I made an educated guess based on the information we had. How was I supposed to know you'd get pregnant? You're a man!"

"I wasn't a man then! You c—" he breaks off suddenly, eyeing the nosy guard at the gate, and when he starts again, his voice is significantly lower, a rough whisper. "You came insideme. You came inside my…" he searches for a more dignified word, discovers that he doesn't know one, "my cunt, and now we have these fucking consequences to deal with."

"It doesn't have to be just 'consequences'," Marc murmurs, pushing himself up to his feet. He takes the other's hands in his own, thumbs brushing over the racing pulse at the insides of his wrists. "I think… I think we could do this, don't you?"

Dal squints up at him, disbelief written across his face, before he tears away. "I can't talk about this right now."

"Where are you going?" he's moving down the hill so fast that the Imperial has to call after him, still deliberating on whether to follow after or not.

"To clear that dungeon." the Dragonborn doesn't even turn around to answer, making his steady way northward.

"Wh— right now? All of our things are still at the inn."

A navy-grey hand lifts to tap the bow at his back. "I've got everything I need with me."

Marcurio chooses to be one of those things.

…

Dalamus holds his breath, stilling his body and shifting his aim just slightly, and is just about to let fly when purple-blue lighting flares in his peripheral, arcing toward his mark. It surges through the bandit, rippling through his body before bouncing off onto another, and another after that. The archer drops his arms, slowly releasing the tension on the bowstring and in his bicep with a forced peace, taking a deep breath to try and oust the fire growing behind his sternum.

"Marcurio," he says lowly, and his voice sounds like thunder in the wide, open space of the room the mage has just single-handedly emptied. "Why are you doing this?"

"Doing what?" oh, he tries it. He really does, feigning innocence as he kills the bright twinkling at his fingertips, but the Dunmer exhales a low, rumbly growl right in the middle of his 'what'.

"Stealing my fucking kills!" Dal roars back, "I had that guy; you just walked up and chained lightning through him—all of them—by yourself!"

"It just seemed obvious," the mage murmurs, still hanging onto that fake blamelessness. "I could leave you be and then we'd have to fight all three of them, or I could take them all out at once. This way you didn't have to expend yourself."

"When did having to fight become a problem to you?"

But he doesn't get an answer, because their volume had alerted the final occupants of the fort to come rushing in their direction. They fall into their usual positions, each keeping his eyes open for things the other's missed, as the five or six bandits of varying experience approach. Marc keeps them from getting too close while Dalamus picks them off from afar. The magic is messy, widespread in its destruction, but the Dunmer's kills are clean; an arrow in the neck, one in the side of the head, one in the chest, right in between the ribs. The last one standing is the Chief, a towering Nord woman cloaked head to toe in thick metal armor. But her face… oh, the poor, deluded thing. Dal puts an arrow through her eye and is done with it.

The loot isn't great, but it's fine for this little, two-level fort. The final chest is in a tiny alcove to the side of the room where the Chief must have come from; the Dragonborn is about to dive for it when Marcurio grabs his arm, holding him back.

"What?"

"You might want to be a little more careful," the mage says, and Dalamus yanks away from him at the words.

"Get off," he snarls, taking a step back. "Stop treating me like a gods-damned woman!"

"I'm not treating you like a w—"

"You are! And it's suffocating."

"I'm sorry my trying to keep you alive feels suffocating," it's grumbled, not quite under his breath but lower than they had been speaking, and the Dunmer rolls his eyes.

"You never acted like this before you caught me retching in a bucket. Relax, I can handle myself."

So he goes for it, diving lockpick-first into the chest, and gets right to it. The latch opens with a heavy snap, and right as he lifts the lid there's the sharp sound of metal sliding against metal; a shard of hot pain burrows into the flesh between his shoulder blades, just below the base of the long scar he'd gotten at Skuldafn. He doesn't even have time to say anything before his body grows dozens of pounds heavier, his eyes roll back into his head, and he falls forward, his top half landing inside the chest.

…

Everything is fuzzy when Dal tries opening his eyes, and tinted golden, like it was inside the Hall of Valor.

His heartbeat immediately triples.

He's dead? There's no way he's dead; he can't be dead. No way that was enough to kill him. He's gone through too much more than that stupid chest trap and lived to die this way. And he'd thought he'd be with his ancestors when he finally kicked the bucket, not here in this castle full of Nords; what gives?

He still can't really see but someone's standing above him, beside the bed he's on, and he has to ask— "... Am I dead?"

"You're not dead," the voice of the person sounds annoyed that he'd even asked the question, and it sounds a lot like Marc's. "Go back to sleep."

And, really, he's happy to oblige; the relief of not being dead soothes away his adrenaline rush, and he's left feeling kind of empty, and exhausted. He could swear all he does is blink, but when his eyes open they're not blurry anymore, and Marcurio is no longer standing above him. Instead the mage is seated at the foot of the bed, legs crossed, hair released from its ever-present horsetail, trying again at the telekinesis spell.

"How long has it been?" he tries, and the way his voice cracks speaks to how much time has passed.

The book that had been floating at the level of Marc's lap sinks to the ground with a resounding thud. He sighs, closing his eyes when he answers. "A few hours. It's the middle of the night."

"Oh."

"I hope you enjoyed not suffocating while you were unconscious," he says, and Dalamus isn't standing, but his stomach drops to his feet anyway.

"Why's that?"

"Because you're grounded," it's said simply, but the words carry weight, and the Dunmer immediately wants to protest, but Marcurio's still talking. "I don't know if anything like this has happened to anyone before, so we have no way of knowing how this is going to go. It would make me feel a lot better if you could just be careful while we figure it out."

"Wh— when am I not careful?" because out of all the things the mage said, that's the one that insulted him the most.

"You just got stabbed in the back, and poisoned, by the way, by a trap you ignored!" Marc takes a deep breath, running his hands back through his hair, and lets it out as a long groan of frustration. "No. No dungeons, no dragons, no forts or caves or ruins. You know what? No Harbinger, no Dragonborn. For the next seven months, you're just Dal."

Now onto the second most insulting thing. "Marc, fighting is literally my entire life, how could you ask me to give that up?"

"There are other things, don't you see that?" he shifts, turning to face his husband, and leans forward to take his hands. "Dalamus, look. This is my fault; I know that. I got you pregnant being careless and, really, a little selfish, and I'm sorry. But now that it's happened, there's nothing else I'd rather do than raise a child with you. And I want to do everything I can to keep you and that child out of harm's way; I'm sorry it feels suffocating, but I need you to relax."

For a moment, all Dal can hear is his heartbeat. These kinds of moments always throw him off guard; he's so used to light-hearted, playful Marcurio that he doesn't know what to do with such a heavy topic. But they were going to have to talk about this eventually. "… I don't know how to do this."

"What, relax? It's easy, you just stop doing dangerous things. You'll get the hang of it." Ah, there it is.

"I mean being pregnant," Dalamus keeps his eyes down on their hands, thumbs busy brushing over the tan skin between his palms. "Should we find Sheogorath again? Ask him to turn me back?"

Marc squints. "… That's probably not a good idea. You've met him twice now and escaped mostly unscathed; I don't think we should press your luck."

"So, what, I just stay pregnant? Won't that be a problem?"

"I don't know. But we'll just take it a day at a time," he pauses, meeting Dal's eyes. "But you have to calm down, Dal, you have to. Can you do that?"

And he has no choice but to be as honest as he can in his reply. "I'll do my best."

…

A/N: wow, I'm really and truly awful at this. I'm trying, I promise. I have no idea how these fanfic artists churn out 15-page chapters reliably every week, they're gods. Here's to having the next joint up in a reasonable amount of time. /clink

xo