#fenario

You’re sitting up in bed, his head rested in your lap and arms around your waist, thin blankets tucked around him. It’s heartbreaking, how soft this scene in your little corner of hell is. A lump of coal falls from the fireplace onto the stone hearth, and your eyes follow it, watching for a while as it renders down to ash.

There’s nothing else you can think to do as the night slides by, deceivingly protective in its velvet darkness. You think you finally understand why Ymir made a deal with the Devil; if you could do the same to make this night last forever, you would.

When the last of the glow blinks from the coal, you turn to the window. It’s still only waning moonlight which filters in through rippling glass, but you know there’s not much time left. You take a shuddering breath and trace the curve of your love’s jaw with your thumb, memorizing the feel of scratchy stubble and the dip of a scar. He shifts, nuzzling his face into the pudge of your stomach and your heart flips.

“Shhh,” you soothe and return your hand to his blond hair.

In the morning, he’ll be leaving you, and you’ll be damned if you can’t spend every second until then with him in your arms.

In the morning, you’ll have to wake him, and he’ll leave you cold and aching in your bed.

In the morning, he’ll rub the sleep from his eyes, kiss you desperately, and be brave.

In the morning, he’ll go to war.

It’s always the same when he leaves you: cruel and heartbreaking and hopeless. For the hundredth time since becoming involved with Reiner, you curse the callousness of his circumstances. A child warrior trusted with the weight of an entire war, witness to the capture and death of his friends, doomed to die young. It’s no longer the chest-sucking anguish it had been when you first fell in love, instead settling into your bones as an aching sorrow. You wish, desperately, you could take the burden for him, reach into his soul and pull every last bit of hurt from him, get up in the morning and put on his red armband and march off to war.

Instead, you’re resigned to this soft hell. This quiet waiting.

Words come to you like a prayer, pushing from your throat and into the relentless night.

“Darkness, darkness, bind him to me, hide him in your velvet cloak. Come the dawn, he’ll rise and go a-marching to Fenario.” The familiar lullaby feels reedy and thin in your quivering notes, desperate and irrational. It’s taken on a different meaning since your mother sang it to you in her husky alto. Back then, it lulled you into dreams of everlasting love and romantic sacrifice. Now, you see it for what it is: a woman’s invocation, a plea, a bargain, meant for the witching hour and only the sickle moon to hear.

The next line is whispered into his skin, your head bent low to brush lips against his temple. “Brave my love, but false the King. False his wars, and false his dawn. Damn the grey that gains the sky, damn the sun, the King’s cold eye.”

As though summoned to spite you, the first grey light of dawn breaks through the window. You squeeze your eyes tight against it and curl further into your love, pressing trembling lips to his hairline. You should wake him now - a military man’s day starts at sunrise - but you selfishly hold him several minutes more.

When the glow of the fireplace is no longer brighter than the sunlight, diffuse through clouds, you take a shaky breath, smooth a hand down his broad back, and kiss him awake.