#basiliskdragon

Ares is sitting up in his cot by the time Seliph has finished his after-meetings with Lewyn and Shanan. Nanna sits on a wooden stool and tends to a cut on his cheek with a needle and thread while he looks up at the tent’s canvas ceiling like enduring it is nothing but a chore. She is doting more than anything else, Seliph supposes. In the face of all the other wounds Ares had sustained, so many that he hadn’t had the breath to protest when Leif dragged him off the field, the sluggishly-bleeding line on his face, though deep, had been inconsequential.

He musters the stomach to look lower. Bandages cover Ares’s right arm and chest and stomach so thickly that hardly any skin is showing. Seliph’s cheeks heat regardless. It’s mostly anger, he reasons to himself. He has every right to be angry.

Nanna ties her last stitch and nods at Seliph when she notices him approaching. She goes quietly to another patient’s bed and Ares glares at her back when he realizes she’s left him to his fate. The full force of that glare, the Black Knight’s silent and infamous wrath, hits Seliph next, but he purses his lips and busies himself with removing his gloves, making a show of being unfazed.

“I suppose you know why I’m here,” he says.

“I’ve nothing to say to you.”

“You were too reckless, Ares.”

“I’m not in the mood for a lecture.”

“I can’t keep putting you in the ranks if all you do is break them.”

“So I was supposed to just leave your right flank open. Just let someone pincer in and slay the only hope we have.”

Seliph doesn’t retort, though he’d had no intention of giving over the argument when he is in the right. It’s just that Ares speaks so rarely of hope. He sits on the stool at his bedside and takes his chin to study Nanna’s handiwork. The stitches are clean and tidy, though the black thread against Ares’s pale skin seems instinctively wrong, somehow; makes Seliph’s gut twist like he’d eaten something too raw. Though Ares doesn’t pull away, he still finds a way to look at Seliph like his chin is jutted high and Seliph is at the end of his long Nordion nose.

“We’ve been over this,” Ares says.

“Yes, we have. And I said I didn’t, under any circumstance, want you behaving this way.”

“And it’s still irrelevant. Every foe I kill, every blow I take, is one less for you.”

Seliph sighs. The main problem with being with Ares, he’s found, is that they’re equally stubborn. They agree on most everything, but when they don’t, the impasse seems insurmountable. He glides his thumb gingerly over the cut, which almost parallels his sharp cheekbone.

“This could’ve been your eye,” he says. “Could you fight as fiercely with just one eye?”

“After some practice. Besides, it would make me look fearsome – rugged. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“No. I like your eyes.”

They’re the only telling part of him. They smile when his lips don’t, mourn when his voice is steady, fill with love when his tongue won’t shape the word. It has never been so hard for Seliph to speak or to show. If anyone can lose an eye, it can be him. He leans forward and kisses the lid of Ares’s, and then the skin just beneath it, and then each of his stitches, as gently as he can. Ares huffs: a small laugh.  

“This is hardly an admonishment.”

“I was never here to punish you. I’m here because you worried me so much.”

The ever-present confidence fades from Ares’s eyes. Seliph can see from their sudden emptiness, from the slight furrowing of his brow, that he’s confused. It’s not the first time Seliph has suspected that Ares is new to love without punishment, that he is unaccustomed to a touch not given out of possessiveness or anger. The thought makes Seliph press another kiss to his temple.

“I just want to talk you out of any future sallies,” he explains. “If I were to lose you…”

“That’s exactly the thought that led me here in the first place,” Ares argues, but the heat drops from his voice and he lowers his eyes. He mutters, “But I’ll consider being more careful. At your side, maybe, rather than dashing ahead.”