He says, “What do you need?” and above him, she shakes her head. He understands this for what it is: an admission that there is no strength left in her to care for her body. She is giving the responsibility for it over to him.
He stands, cleans his hands with water from the ewer on her washstand, and wets a flannel for her. With enormous delicacy, he washes what remains of the blood from her face and neck; he washes her fingers, her palms, and wrists. He pulls the loose shirt she wears—plastered, still, to her skin where the straps of her armor pressed it into her body—free from her breeches and draws it over her head; he unlaces the band that binds flat her breasts. Standing behind her now, he washes her shoulders and back, her chest and the dip at her sternum, her stomach—each of these achingly familiar to him in their planes and hollows, their scars, freckles. He undoes the laces of her breeches and smalls and eases them down her thighs, crouches to draw first one leg free, then the other, runs the flannel over this soft geometry of her as well. He is not unaffected by this, the nearness and immediacy of her nakedness, but his own desire is a low noise he can easily ignore. When he feels that she has wandered too far from her body, he bends to bite the swell of her hip, hard enough that one limp hand tenses briefly against the fabric of his tunic, then releases.
He lets the flannel fall to the floor also, stoops to bring his arm behind her knees, and lifts her easily against himself, carrying her to the bed and laying her down atop the counterpane. There is, he notices, a bruise forming along the ridge of bone down her forearm, as though from a blow stopped by her bracers; he wishes he could wash it away as easily as he removes the other evidence of her work. Later, he knows, it will be tender, livid colors. Now, however, he stands beside the bed, looking down at her body, waiting for some sign from her—some desire in the hollows of her expression. She is so beautiful like this that it is unbearable to him; the thing he feels for her would level cities.
Tagging @luzial, @littleglowingwolf, @gefionne, @elf-trash, @cursedhaglette and anyone else who would like to participate!
