HA

whether their relationship was romantic in nature is unclear, even to them. they were very bad about speaking to each other with actual words, let alone about ~feelings~

Conan/Coyote took off because he’d had a crisis of conscience, but was ashamed of these traitorous thoughts and was afraid that they would turn on him. he found faking his death preferable to being branded a traitor, partially because it would spare his partners a brutal interrogation but mostly because he was a coward.

had he brought it up to Enok/Knox, he would have found an ally, and between the two of them they likely could have convinced Njall to leave. they’d have gone to ground somewhere and lived happily ever after. oh well.

Enok’s intention was to ask Njall to settle down with him, leave their brutal occupation behind, and spend some time looking into the circumstances of their partner’s death. he was not suspicious or accusing, mostly just in denial.

Njall thought for sure that Conan was dead, and took Enok’s statement as posthumously accusing him of being a traitor. he reacted as one would to the person you trust most in the world bashing on your recently deceased loved-one.

basically: they’re all morons in various stages of the “are we the baddies???” realization. think stormtroopers.

because Enok took off and didn’t bother to cover his tracks, the higher ups are aware that he is at large. Njall is actively hunting him, with orders to bring him in. Conan was never officially declared dead, but he was famously slippery and even if he was alive, they’ve written him off as a lost cause.

They are Coyote, and Knox, and Njall. They are on the run from the third-or-fourth-best bounty hunter the Fortress of Ends has to offer, and he grows tired of chasing.

part one | part two (here)

They are the Quick and the Hollow and the Barely-Hanging-On, and they survive but they do not live.

He takes every trick he ever learned and perverts them, fills his pockets breaking the wealthy and the desperate from the prisons he once served. He is incorporeal, everywhere and nowhere all at once. They call him Coyote. He becomes the laughing trickster in the night, though his teeth are too sharp, his smile too hollow.

He is a warrior, a thug, and he does not know how to hide. He meets a woman who promises to take him away and he is too tired and too desperate to turn her down. She puts a hand on his shoulder and the thunder drowns his screams, as she takes what he was and warps him into something small and trembling. She calls him Knox, and revels in the way he shudders.

He is still Njall, but a Njall who cannot bear to return home, where they look at him with suspicion or, worse, pity. He hunts. He doesn’t know how to be anyone else. His heart, what shard remains, is far, far away.