If pain birthed from the mere absence of familial affection was the vilest feeling she could've experienced, Octavia was wrong. It wasn't physical affection that shook the very bones of her petite body. It wasn't the weighty force that sunk her core deeper into a hearth of misery. Yet, she anticipated this to happen, before being an Imperial Strategist, before being a purely basic soldier. This world, which Octavia found has carved a path to its own demise, was evidence enough that your life would be short, useless and even less memorable, unless you contributed to its self ruin.

Octavia tossed to her left and clenched her burning shoulder on the right. This was it; the literal product of herself succumbing to her fears. And yet, she anticipated it. Despite hope igniting from Gaelic company, from an alliance of once rival nations; she had foreseen it- a certain immense agony that her body would endure, dictating how much it could bear. The petrified sensation that would bring tears from the rim of her sapphire eyes to the sheets of untainted white.

She has shamed herself.

Ultimately, she has fooled herself.

She stared at what seemed to be a wooden chair sitting nicely beside her small bed. Her vision was vague. Her body was starting to give away; shaking, burning, perspiring, and prickling all at once.

She blinked a few times, slowly, closing her eyes shut as though to shut the world with it.

Creak.

She fluttered her eyes open. She squinted. "How long have I been asleep?"

Now that her shoulder wasn't hurting as much as it did, god knew how, perhaps Rhiannon had given her one of her usual strange flavoured remedies; she started to realize that she hadn't actually taken full notice of how her room looked.

She took a deep breath and carefully tried to lie on her back again. She felt her shoulder blade touching the sheets before slowly placing her right shoulder on a small pillow. Then, she huffed cripplingly at the sensation of letting her weight rest precariously on her shoulder again. Bending her knees, a small whimper slipped out of her lips.

"What horrid bed…" she mumbled under her pants. Letting go of her right shoulder, her left hand slipped under her thin yet heavy ragged blanket as its finger tips danced lightly on the bed, trying to figure what kind of mattress she was lying on. It was soft at first when she scrunched in her grasps what felt like layers of every type of fabric she could think of; woollen, cotton, thin, thick, torn and sewn. Then, she knocked on the mattress and was shocked to hear hard solid thumps reverberating throughout the whole bed. "This is… not a bed…"

Dazed, she turned her head to the right, and almost squeaked to find a grey stonewall inches by her right shoulder. She was right at the corner of the room, she realized. Had she moved her head up by force, she would've inevitably banged herself against a concrete wall, asking for even more devastating injury. Not that it bothered her much at this point.

She sighed.

Above her was a wooden landing stretching across exactly half of the room, by width and length, stabilized upon a row of thin stone columns beneath, blocking the sunlight that came through the second floor. Though, in between the cracks of the timber flooring, the bright sunlight was able to pierce through and form lines of light against dark shadows that formed underneath.

Octavia squinted again.

They had yet to reach the city, Octavia thought. They were very well much in the eastern part of the empire, notorious for being a home to dust and sand and people that cared less about hygiene than they were about coitus. Underneath the flooring were cobwebs flapping against the steady flow of breeze, wheezing its way in through a broken set of windows that dented the wall on her right. Sniffing, the blonde smelled a blend of fiery sandstones, damp cloths and post-copulate sweat.

Octavia looked to down to see, from her strained vision, a big table surrounded by dirty chairs of differing heights and pillows torn and emptied of its grain. On that furniture, however, were scrolls by baskets of fruits, of which some, the blonde could notice from this distance, were rotten and bruised in all parts she could imagine.

She grunted. Here she was, certain that her days of disrupted slumber would've at least rewarded her by waking up in the house of an Aurelia. Sluggishly, she turned to her left and found a flight of stairs and a few slabs of beds, or so it seemed, propped against the wall like how it was during her training as an imperial soldier. Except these beds, or so it seemed, did not comprise of proper mattresses and bed frames, they were none other than wooden crates and planks stacked upon each other, with some of them covered with bear hide or sewn together clothing worthy of an imperial homeless.

Everything in this room was either costing next to nothing, tear jerking or the colour of dirt and dung. She blinked, silently. That meant that she had the best bed out of all of them…

Creak. Creak.

Octavia shot a glare above her and saw the rays of sunlight flickering from the second floor. Someone was upstairs. Suddenly, the blonde pursed her lips. In this dark room, she was alone; in a town she barely knew, with little to no memory of how she got her wound ever since exploring the Forest of Dean. For all she knew, she could've been kidnapped along the way to this part of the Empire.

Carefully, she sat up, never letting go of her right shoulder. When she finally got to hear a small crackle from her spine, she smiled, triumphant as to not feel a single burn from her wound. Looking down, she blinked at a huge dark cape that spanned strangely across her lap. She touched its furry edges, amused at its softness and warmth. Squinting harder in the dark, she noticed a faint trace of blood stained on both sides of the thick cloak.

Footsteps thumped gently on the squeaky floor, sounding softer and softer as it distanced itself from the blonde. Finally, the mysterious individual reached the thin flight of stairs on the blonde's far left. Upon the highest step, a large brown boot emerged and paced down, at the presumable speed of a sea turtle.

Octavia stared. She knew it was a man by this point from the size of his shoes. However, ardently, she wondered how he was able to walk almost inaudibly considering his weight and the meagre construction of the second floor.

In fact, the people of East did not even have the decency to install a railing by the open side of this steep staircase. So, instead, this poor man was teetering down, cautiously grazing against the wall. Gradually, she found a man with a perfectly clean white shirt hanging lose above black trousers, with boots that went up to his knees.

It was imperial clothing, she thought. But it couldn't be Emperor Nero. Her vain cousin wouldn't consider such a slack of fashion worthy of his donning, not when he attempts to expose himself to the public at least. She sighed.

"Antony?" Octavia called. Abruptly, she coughed. Her throat felt like it was lined with a thin sheet of dust and sand. She must've been unconscious for a good couple of days or so from how parched her mouth was. She swallowed and wheezed. Then, the pain on her shoulder came back again. Lazily, she clenched it like she always had and stared at the odd cape on her lap with teary eyes. "Oh, for Mars' sake…"

"Dear heavens," a low voice spoke. Rushed stomps neared and within an instant, Octavia found herself gently pulled into a meek embrace. Tenderly, a large hand fanned out and sited itself comfortably against the small of the blonde's back. He patted, ever so softly, before quickly lifting the cape above the noble's shoulders when she realized that there she was, upright, in none other than loosely ravelled bandages and a pair of knickers. Cheeks reddened. "You shouldn't be up! Your- your- your wound! What are you doing up?"

By the mere sound of his kind voice, the young strategist forgot considering looking up to his face when she very well knew it was the King of Elves who had crept as quietly as he could so as to not disturb her sleep. The blonde froze. Of all the things he could've uttered, the first to come out was a scolding. It was hereditary, she claimed. Like brother and sister, a nagging was almost always a starter for a conversation.

Finally, she turned. "Your Majesty?"

His violet eyes darted from her eyes to her wound, and back up to her eyes. He blinked, registering her words, her voice, her expression, her eyes. By a fraction of an inch, their noses were apart. Octavia tilted her head, tugging onto the cape, his cape, tainted with her blood. Breath hitched, her lips pursed at the sensation of his pants brushing against her pink cheeks.

He sat down beside her on the bed or so it was, not leaving her eyes for a second. This wasn't a dream, he reminded himself. She was as alive as he was, up and breathing and talking to him. After a long moment, staring still, the blonde's words had fully sunk in. He swallowed and licked his lips in a hurry.

"Arthur…" he said, velvety. "Call me by my name,"

A pause.

"Arthur…"

Her voice was silk.

As though he had held a breath for too long, haltingly, he pulled the blonde again, sighing deeply; hand tenderly placed by the blonde's head, snugging her by the crook of his neck.

Octavia shut her eyes. This embrace, no, his neck, his shoulder, her eyes… hauntingly, they reminded her of something dark. She quietly whined.

"You're alive," he whispered, giggling. "OH-"

Immediately, he dislodged himself from her, looking at her up and down.

"F-forgive me," he sputtered. "Are you hurt? Does it hurt? Did I hurt you?"

Octavia was still in a daze. She recalled being stabbed on her shoulder but her face was planted into Arthur's right shoulder or his neck or his chest or all together. She couldn't tell. It was vague, her memory was. Her recollection of the incident was either flashing or blurred from how fast it had all transpired.

She stared at the King's shoulder as he did with hers. From under his cape, a petite hand reached out and traced his clavicle underneath the lapels of his shirt. Being Arthur, he didn't button his shirt. She looked down to the ripples of muscle he had etched on his stomach before looking up to his chest again that bore faint strands of hair.

She blinked. "You're bleeding," she whispered, placing a hand over his chest.

He quickly looked down at her pale fingers touching his tanned body. He shook his head and lightly gripped her wrist. "No, there's nothing," he mumbled back and further examined himself. He was perfectly spotless. In fact, he just had his bath. He was squeaky clean.

Octavia's brows furrowed. "I saw it," She stared again but saw nothing this time. "There was blood, I saw it,"

Tilting his head, Arthur simply gave a concerned look at the blonde. "Octavia," he called and waited for her to look at him in the eye. "Do you… Do you remember what happened?"

She shook her head. "I remembered being stabbed and I was with you when it happened," She placed her hand on his right shoulder again, before gripping it slightly. "I was here. I remember this part of you, before everything turned…. dark,"

"How about after that?"

Octavia's brows furrowed. "No… I don't remember anything after that,"

Arthur nodded his head, pulling his cape over her shoulders again. It kept slipping off when her shoulders proved to be significantly smaller than his. The brunet looked at her again. This time to her wound and to her legs, as though to realize how feeble and small she was in this state. He had never thought of it properly. She was just another soldier to him before. Yet, now, he looked and, deeply, he tried to remind himself how much he was in great debt of her sacrifice, despite knowing how much of a blow it would be to her body with all its spatial disparities to his own.

This woman, this soldier, this imperial strategist, he thought, reminiscing, was one of the only things in life that Arthur could truly call the physical embodiment of bewilderment.

"Lie down," he said, lightly lowering her down to the bed, with an arch of his arm running along her back and head. He felt the indistinct shift of her shoulder blades before she tugged onto his shirt, appearing perplexed. "I need you to rest,"

She nodded, content at the pillow beneath her. Arthur removed his arm, but he was still there, one hand tenderly brushing away stray hair while the other seemed to pat right above her navel. "Arthur, where are we?" she whispered. "Where are the others?"

"The eastern side of the Divine Empire, Octavia," he responded; voice deeper than it was a few months ago. "Emperor Nero and Mark Antony have rushed home to central city. They have to tend to urgent meetings and announcements. But… we're still here with Atia to investigate these citizens' encounter with the Black Being," He averted his eyes. "We're under strict orders by Nero to not reveal our true identity, considering how the people here behave. I assume you know better than I do. Thus, why… " He shrugged, looking down at his imperial clothing. Octavia smiled.

"You wear it handsomely," Octavia slurred dreamily.

With a curt giggle, the King grinned. He swallowed. "I don't believe you,"

"Suit yourself," She snickered, baring white teeth. The King gave another light laugh. He stared, still patting her by the side. "So the others?"

"Oh yes!" Arthur stammered. "The others… Actually, some have started on interrogating, again, this whole city. Rhiannon and Arawn are waiting for me downstairs, having breakfast again, I presume," He bared a simper. A pause. And his smile died down a bit. "Listen, I need you to rest. You've been wonderful. I mean y-you've been doing wonderfully. So, we plan to set for the central empire by tomorrow noon… If that's fine with you,"

Octavia blinked. "Wonderful,"

"Yes," Arthur said, as that word hanged precariously out of his mouth. "It is, isn't it? It… sounds wonderful," He curved his lips into a genuine smile and fluttered his eyes at the sight of her radiant face. "Promise me you'll rest,"

Octavia simply smiled back.

Arthur gave his last chuckle. "Fine then," he said. "It's an order,"