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Tarquin’s got the routine down.
Nod to Hector. Nod to Huxley. In through the door (fingers brush the frame, right side only, wood worn smoother and shinier there, where he touches it every day). Hand raised in greeting to whoever’s behind the counter (better if it’s Lorelei, but Bren will do). Right, left, door (don’t touch), up, door (turn the handle, touch the frame), and he’s in.
Then he can wave to Mae and snark at Dorian and lean over the piles of notes and papers and everything will be all right.
He’s not stupid, of course. None of this is necessary and none of it has anything to do with whether or not everything is all right.
But if it does, if one day Tarquin doesn’t do it properly and something goes wrong and Ashur—
He won’t tempt fate.
Ashur is already here, and Mae, and Dorian, and everyone is all right and things quiet down a little in Tarquin’s mind. He doesn’t have to worry so much when he can see everyone and things are as they should be. Not today, at least. He’s had worse days.
He goes straight to Mae and gets a rundown of the day’s news. It’s the usual—slavers here, Venatori there, a hideout that might be at risk of discovery near the docks, nothing that would signal any immediate concern. After Mae, it’s Ashur; the two of them bend low over a series of notes Ashur has been making and start to put together a plan for dealing with things one by one. One by one works for Tarquin. One by one makes sense. Things can’t go wrong one by one like they can when a hundred things are happening all at once.
The evening passes. They work, they sit, they talk. Huxley goes to the Nevarran flatbread seller down the street and brings back soft, thick bread and tangy goats’ milk yoghurt dip for everyone. Tarquin sits at the edge of the table, on the right, and tears pieces off his flatbread to dip. Ashur, mask off when it’s only the innermost circle sat around the table, watches him with a faint sort of smile on his face, but anytime Tarquin looks straight at him instead of pretending like he isn’t, Ashur’s eyes dart off elsewhere or drop down to his mask, a flat, lifeless thing beside him when it isn’t on his face.
Tarquin taps his fingers against the side of the table. Here, too, there is a spot worn smooth and pale, one he can now find without looking. He knows there’s no need to worry, knows that Ashur wouldn’t remove his mask unless he trusted the people around him absolutely, but it’s one less layer—one less thing to keep him safe. And for every layer Ashur removes, Tarquin has to add another.
Strictly speaking, he doesn’t. Strictly speaking, it’s stupid. The whole thing is stupid. Tarquin is no mage. This is no ritual. It has no bearing on Ashur’s safety. He knows this. And yet, if one day he lets that be true—if one day he doesn’t do these things—and if that’s the day something happens—
He won’t tempt fate.
They’re the last two left at headquarters that night. They often are. Tarquin doesn’t leave until he’s seen Ashur go and Ashur stays late more often than not. Mae and Dorian probably have their own theories about what’s going on—Dorian, at least, certainly does and he delights in making his views known—and Tarquin isn’t sure how he feels about that, but he knows it’s better than trying to explain the truth.
(It’s complicated. Dorian’s wrong, or at least, Tarquin thinks he’s wrong, but he can’t be sure and it’s another one of those things. If he says anything to Dorian, he’ll break something in the fragile strings of the universe and then it will be wrong and he’ll never know what might have happened. So he brushes his hand against the side of the table, the bench, the bookcase, against the places in the wood that know his fingers, and says nothing.)
When Ashur gets up to leave, Tarquin follows. Fingers on the doorframe, door locked behind him, down the stairs, right, left, hand on the doorframe as he walks through, and then that door locked as well. He and Ashur nod to one another and separate, Ashur walking one way down the street toward the glittering magelights of the high districts, toward the Divine’s manor and the Argent Spire, toward the center of the universe, and Tarquin making as if to walk in the other direction.
And when Ashur is far enough away, Tarquin turns back. Checks the door (locked), unlocks it, fingers on the frame, a greeting to no one, right, left, up, checks the door (locked), touches the frame, checks again, touches, down again, right, left, taps the frame, locks the door, turns back, checks the door (locked), taps the frame again, and then, finally, he can go.
It’s easier when they’re not the last to leave, but that happens less and less often these days. Tarquin sometimes gets the feeling that Ashur delays on purpose, but he doesn’t know whether or why that’s true and he’d rather not pull too hard on strings he doesn’t want to unravel. Instead, he walks home in the dark, gripping the edge of his heavy shoulder cape, fingers of his right hand rubbing over the mark he’s already left on the side, the leather cracking under the pad of his thumb as he tries to concentrate on that and not the thoughts he doesn’t want to be having.
It’s the same every afternoon. Nod to Hector, nod to Huxley, in, up, get started on the day’s real work. The finger-burnished spots on the wood are silk-smooth under his hands; there’s a hole in his Shadow Dragon armor, at the edge of the leather, and a space where there was once an embellishment until he worried it off. And every day he gets in and Mae has the day’s updates for him and Dorian is speaking to the new recruits and Ashur is there, is alive, is warm and steady and breathing behind the mask, and it’s working. (It’s not working. It’s fucking stupid is what it is and the fact that Mae is safe and Dorian is alive and Ashur is whole has fuck-all to do with it and he knows that, but he also knows that if he ever didn’t and then—)
One day, he stumbles at the top of the stairs, catches hold of the wall to steady himself, then has to go back down and start again, except that’s going to look really fucking weird, so he walks all the way down the street until he’s surrounded by market stalls and can’t see the front door of the shop anymore, then tries to guess what a reasonable amount of time is before going back. Some errand, maybe, or something he forgot and had to fetch. He knows he doesn’t need a cover story—no one will ask—but he needs it not to be a thing when he gets back and acts like it’s the first time he’s been at headquarters all day.
He’s tense the whole time, because he should be there. Should be at the table in the room over the shop, should have the day’s news and the evening’s plans and Ashur’s steady gaze on him, and every minute that he doesn’t—
There’s a memory he has of working a job with Ashur. Not their usual kind of job, but one that involved breaking into an estate (though Tarquin always remembers it as a fortress because it was one) to free a high dragon ritual’s worth of slaves destined for bleeding. It was the kind of job that had to be done quickly, so there was none of their usual planning and all the more need for people who were very, very good at what they did. Tarquin fell into that category. So, despite Mae’s protests, did Ashur.
When Tarquin thinks about it now, he doesn’t remember the slaves or the magisters or even the dragon. He remembers the blood that trickled from the corner of Ashur’s mouth, the shocking red against his ash-grey skin and the way everything else around him became just a ringing in his ears as he focused on the blood, the blood, the blood.
He remembers the unnatural angle of Ashur’s arm, bent in a direction it should never have gone. He remembers the sickening shadow over Ashur’s ribs where his chest went in instead of out the way it should have. He remembers, through the ringing and the haze, the bubbling sound of Ashur’s breath as he struggled to draw it in, over and over and over again until something flipped in Tarquin’s head and he could think again and move again and try to remember how he was supposed to breathe again when help finally came.
That’s where it starts every minute he isn’t at the shop, every minute he spends pacing back and forth on the street and counting his footsteps just in case. With Ashur’s death-pale face and the bright bead of the blood and that awful bubbling gasp. And even that isn’t enough for Tarquin’s traitorous brain because from there it goes in a thousand different directions, each one worse than the last, each one twisting Ashur into new and horrible shapes like tendrils of blood magic in his mind.
He finishes counting when he reaches the pawn shop door again, setting his right foot on the step as he falls into familiar patterns. Nod to Hector. Nod to Huxley. Run the fingers of his right hand along the doorframe…
He gets the day’s news from Mae. He delights Dorian with a rude joke he overheard one of the templars at the Arcanist Hall telling another. He leans in close to Ashur, listening to the sound of his quiet breathing—in, out, in, out—and the way his mask swells slightly with each exhalation and his coat sits exactly the way it should and there are no shadows that shouldn’t be there, no hints of broken and torn things beneath. His fingers rub into the hollow he’s slowly wearing at the edge of the table and he counts Ashur’s steady breaths and he tells himself it didn’t matter, those five minutes didn’t make a difference, he hasn’t broken whatever fragile tension keeps the world in place.
Ashur breathes and Tarquin counts and nobody dies and Tarquin blinks the blood out of his eyes and out of his mind and tries to focus on the reports in front of him.
It’s Mae who eventually puts the pieces together. Mae—sharply observant, always, because it’s her job to keep an eye on all of them (except when it’s not, except when Ashur takes it on himself and there’s just something about that that’s never sat well with Tarquin, like it’s all right somehow when it’s Mae, but Ashur shouldn’t be that; Ashur should be something else).
It’s Mae who nods at the lighter spot on the doorframe into the shop, the dip in the finish on the table, and says, “Was that you?”
He’s not sure what to say, but the fact that Mae is asking means she already knows the answer, so he shrugs belligerently. “Suppose so.”
“Try wearing a hole in the other side,” she says. There’s a smile on her face, but a curiously sharp look in her eye, like she knows there’s something more going on and she’s trying to work out exactly what it is.
He has tried. It doesn’t work.
He doesn’t say that to her, wouldn’t say it to anyone; he just rolls his eyes like he’s buying the smile, very funny, and turns away. Ashur is looking at him curiously, too, but with genuine curiosity, not thinly veiled examination. Tarquin brushes the look off and dives almost aggressively into the plan he, Ashur, and Marisa are trying to put together. Mae ought to know better than to distract him while they’re working. When Tarquin is distracted—
blood on pale skin, sharp edge of pinkish bone, terrible gurgling cough
When Tarquin is distracted, people die.
His fingers beat a silent tattoo on the side of his right leg, faster and faster until it’s not enough and he abruptly stands, pushing his chair back with a screech that makes Marisa jump. “Need some air,” he says. “Back in a minute.”
He hangs a hard left as soon as he gets out the door, fingers barely brushing the frame as he passes. He can feel Hector and Huxley watching him as he goes (or maybe he’s imagining it; he doesn’t know and doesn’t care). He’s not going far, just enough to put the tall buildings of Minrathous’ busy streets between himself and the shop so he can’t see it anymore, so he can lose himself in the crowd and be just another person. Someone who doesn’t matter. Someone who doesn’t hold anyone’s life in his hands.
All his life, Tarquin has been someone who doesn’t matter.
Fucking stupid that he matters here, now, in this way. Fucking stupid that the thing that makes him matter is the blood that’s already on his hands—and the blood he might still put there tomorrow, or the next day, or the next.
There’s a quiet tearing sound as the embroidered edge of his robe separates from the rest, a long, loose string of heavy fabric still attached at both ends, but frayed and gaping in the middle. Tarquin’s answer is to pull a dagger out from his belt and hack off both ends, not caring about the ragged edge he leaves behind. That accomplished, he shifts his grip from the robe to the edge of his shoulder cape and goes on trying not to think.
He ought to go back, but he’s still lost in his head and that’s no good to anyone.
Still, he said a minute and now it’s been—longer; he doesn’t know—and someone will say something and Mae will send Bren or one of the recruits out to find him and none of this sounds like something Tarquin wants to deal with right now, so he bites down hard on the inside of his cheek and scrapes a thumbnail over the once-smooth surface of the leather and turns around.
And almost runs straight into Ashur, who is probably the person he least wants to see in the world right now.
“Quin?” says Ashur. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Of fucking course he has. “Mae could’ve sent anyone,” he mutters. It didn’t have to be Ashur.
“Mae didn’t send anyone,” he says. “I thought…”
He trails off, probably waiting for Tarquin to interrupt, but Tarquin doesn’t. Ashur’s explanation isn’t welcome. He doesn’t want to know why Ashur’s come. He shouldn’t be out here. Anything could happen.
Which is also stupid, because Ashur’s out here every day. He walks the streets. He patrols the rooftops. He makes his way back to the manor alone in the dark and Tarquin (fingers clenched around a fold of fabric, teeth digging into his lip) never worries. But this time, he’s come out here because of Tarquin—because Tarquin’s inconsiderate, because Tarquin’s incapable of just doing what everyone else does, because Tarquin’s a fucking idiot—and if something happens to him now, it’s because of Tarquin. Because of something Tarquin did.
Now is not the time (the time is never), but it slips out anyway because he’s thinking too much about too many things at once and none of them is what not to say to Ashur right now.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Ashur blinks like he’s been hit. They walk in silence for a moment before he asks, “Why not?”
Tarquin hasn’t got a good answer, but he’s already in too deep, so he doubles down anyway. “What if something happened? You can’t just come running after me like—”
Like they’re responsible for each other. Like Tarquin’s worth sending the Viper—the Divine—Ashur Vesperian, who has already laid his life on the line for Tarquin more times than should be allowed, after.
Ashur, more than anything, looks confused. “You looked like—” But he cuts himself off, clearly thinking better of it. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Tarquin still has no good answer for him. “You just—don’t, all right?”
It’s the Shadow Dragons’ job to keep the Viper safe. (It’s Tarquin’s job to keep Ashur safe.) It’s not right for Ashur to feel like he’s got to look after them, any of them, and especially not Tarquin.
Tarquin shouldn’t matter.
They come to a stop within sight of the shop’s front door. Tarquin can just about make out Hector and Huxley. Hector is leaning against the wall, Huxley shifting from one foot to the other and fiddling with the hilt of the sword someone’s given him. Tarquin isn’t sure he trusts Huxley with a sword. He isn’t sure he trusts any of the Shadow Dragons with a sword.
Ashur gives Tarquin an appraising look. “Come with me.”
Tarquin wants to ask where, why, but he doesn’t. He just goes, dragging his fingertips along the bricks as Ashur leads him down a narrow alleyway off to the side.
“Is something wrong?” Ashur asks as soon as they’re out of sight and earshot. And that’s the thing—nothing is wrong. Unless Mae has said something to Ashur, but Tarquin knows Mae, actually likes Mae, and he doesn’t think she’d do that. Not without talking to him properly first.
Tarquin glares at him. “Nothing’s wrong. Why are we here?”
“Privacy,” Ashur says simply.
“We should be working.”
Ashur does him the courtesy of not mentioning the fact that it’s Tarquin who left. Instead, he shrugs, hands palm up, eyes never leaving Tarquin’s. “It’ll keep.”
“I’m fine.”
“All right.” Ashur sounds—Tarquin isn’t sure. He thinks maybe there’s disapproval in there somewhere, or disappointment. The words are calm, neutral, but there’s a distinct note of unhappiness. “If that’s…”
They make it two steps toward the alley entrance before Tarquin cracks. “I just—worry,” he mutters into the space ahead of them, half hoping it won’t be loud enough for Ashur to hear, but of course it is.
“I know,” Ashur says like it’s nothing. Like Tarquin doesn’t spend all his time thinking about keeping (Ashur) everyone safe and about what will happen if he doesn’t and about the hole in his armor and the locks on the doors and the way Ashur gasped in his breaths, eyes wild—
He nods to Hector. Nods to Huxley. Forces his fingers to loosen their grip on his armor so they can touch the edge of the doorframe like a blessing, like a curse. He sees Ashur watching him and doesn’t care, giving Lorelei the smallest of waves and heading up the stairs (turn the handle, touch the frame) to get back to work. Ashur doesn’t miss that either, eyes lingering on the place where Tarquin’s fingertips have worn down the wood.
But he’s here and he’s safe and it’s enough—for now, at least.
Later, he sees Ashur talking quietly to Mae and sits at the table, reading the same three lines over and over, biting his lip until it splits and running his fingers over the spot on the side of the table where he’s gone all the way through the varnish to the grain of the wood itself.
They’re the last to leave again, after Mae, after Dorian, after Lorelei and Bren have closed up the shop and Hector and Huxley have locked the doors and Marisa has doused the lamps so that there’s only the candle in front of Tarquin and the magelight above Ashur’s head to penetrate the dark. And when Ashur finishes, summoning the little light to himself, Tarquin pushes the reports away with a sigh and stands as well. He’s got nowhere, but sitting here another hour or two or five won’t change that, so he may as well stop.
Like always, he puts the candle out and, like always, follows Ashur down the stairs—touching the frame, locking the door, waiting—but, this time, Ashur doesn’t turn toward the Argent Spire. This time, he stands at the edge of the street, just outside the glow of a nearby lantern, and watches Tarquin.
And Tarquin doesn’t know what kind of game this is, but he’s not playing. He checks the door (locked), touches the frame, checks the door (still locked), and resolutely turns his back. Ashur is still there, still watching, and Tarquin doesn’t know what to do with that, so he starts walking, fingers worrying the frayed ends of the robe he cut up earlier, and Ashur follows.
“D’you mind?” he says.
Ashur says, “We should talk.”
Tarquin’s teeth catch on his lip and he tastes blood where it’s split. His thumbnail digs into the shredded edge of his robe. He doesn’t want to talk and he doesn’t know what Ashur is thinking and he isn’t sure he wants to find out, either. But he’s here and Ashur’s here and they’re heading for his place (where Ashur’s never been, but he knows where it is because of course he does and he’s striding along like he owns the place—which he sort of does, being Altus and all—like it’s familiar, like he’s done it a hundred times, but Ashur has never been to Tarquin’s place, unless)…
He remembers Ashur talking to Mae and swallows down the sudden, sick feeling that rises at the thought of acknowledging it, his fingers twisting and tugging at the threads he’s slowly separating from the cut fabric. It’s already a mess; what difference does it make? But he feels guilty about that, too, because he’s pretty sure the armor he wears comes out of Ashur’s coffers as well and it’s just one more thing. There’s always one more thing.
He doesn’t want to think about it, about any of it, and so of course it’s like it always is when he doesn’t want to think about things. He starts thinking about not thinking about things and then his mind starts suggesting all sorts of new and horrible things for him not to want to think about (the blood, the bone, the breathing) and it’s all he can see and all he can taste and his fingers clench uselessly around the ragged strips of cloth because if he doesn’t do something, if he doesn’t try to stop it—
“Quin?” says Ashur and Tarquin realizes he’s stopped walking. He starts again, so quickly he almost overbalances, and wonders—Ashur can’t read minds, can he? That’s blood magic, isn’t it, and Ashur—well, he wouldn’t. Would he?
(At this point, Tarquin’s brain helpfully provides a series of increasingly shocking images he’d never want Ashur to see, images he’s never even wanted to see himself, just in case he can read minds, and Tarquin has never wanted so badly to be someone Ashur has never met, but it’s too fucking late for that now, isn’t it?)
At the door to his house, he flashes Ashur a grin he doesn’t feel. “Don’t know what you’re expecting,” he says, “but I probably haven’t got it.” He means the box he calls a flat, with a rickety bedframe and a table and chair fashioned from leftover wood and not much else, but it strikes him that he could say it about a lot of things, himself included. On another day, he’d find that funny.
Today, he unlocks the door and lets his fingers trail over the side of the frame as he leads the way inside. Ashur closes it gently behind him, shutting them into the darkness of Tarquin’s single room, and conjures a small, unobtrusive light to hang over them. Between that and the window, they can just about make out the edges of the furniture, the wrinkled bedclothes, the empty mug perched precariously on the corner of the table.
He sits on the bed. He’s about to gesture Ashur toward the chair, because it’s the only one he’s got, but before he can, Ashur sits down heavily beside him. (Tarquin’s bed is low to the ground. He’s used to it, but Ashur isn’t.)
“Go on, then,” he says, tired of waiting and worrying and trying to keep Ashur from knowing about it. “Why are you here?”
Ashur, apparently, is not afraid to speak plainly. “Mae was worried.”
“She can tell me herself.” Mae has definitely never been afraid to speak plainly.
“I was worried.”
“Nothing to worry about.”
Ashur sighs and reaches up, unbuckling the strap of his mask so that he can drop it onto the bed beside him. Then he touches a finger to Tarquin’s face—gently, but Tarquin flinches in surprise anyway, because they don’t do this, this isn’t something they do—and takes it away again, holding it up for Tarquin to see. There’s blood on it and Tarquin’s still biting his lip, still fiddling with the ragged edge of the fabric.
“It’s fine,” says Tarquin. “Long day.” It has been. There’ve been a lot of long days lately.
“I could—”
“No,” says Tarquin. “Thanks. But you stay in your world and I’ll keep to mine.”
“That’s,” says Ashur, but stops with a sigh of frustration.
Tarquin isn’t a fan of people who won’t say what they mean and that’s never been one of Ashur’s flaws, so he waits.
Another sigh, deeper this time, but not frustration, not exactly. Something else.
“That’s not what I want, Quin.”
“Oh?” says Tarquin. “Came all the way here just to tell me Mae worries and you want to be nosy, did you?”
It’s uncharitable. He knows that. He’s making this difficult. He knows that, too.
“If you want me to go, you can say so,” Ashur says.
Tarquin says nothing. He doesn’t want Ashur to go—he never wants Ashur to leave again; he wants Ashur where he can see keen blue eyes and hear even, steady breaths and feel the warmth that radiates from his smooth, unbroken skin—but he can’t say that. Not to Ashur, who has followed him home (I was worried) and who is sitting here next to Tarquin on his old, broken bed with its grim sheets and its wobbly leg and its spot worn thin and glossy in the soft wood where Tarquin’s fingers grip it in the night.
Ashur says, “You worry about me.”
“Fuck off.”
He chuckles, soft, but somehow still warm and rich. If he were that easy to offend, he wouldn’t be here now. “If you want.”
He doesn’t.
Ashur’s fingers find his, gently unfolding them from the tangle of strings that was once a neat hem. Immediately, Tarquin tenses. He wants to pull his hand back, wants to ground himself against something he can feel, but he also knows Ashur will take that as a—what? a rejection? is someone like him even allowed to reject someone like Ashur?—and that’s not what it is and Ashur’s hand—
Ashur’s hand is strong, but soft; firm, but gentle; he enfolds Tarquin’s fingers in his, but leaves his thumb free to brush against warm skin and it’s… oddly reassuring somehow. It’s not right, not exactly, and it won’t fix things and it won’t keep Ashur safe and it won’t make anything any less his fault, but it means Ashur is alive here, now. It means Ashur is safe here, now. And if he’s safe now, then (Tarquin’s thumb moves over Ashur’s knuckles) maybe everything else can wait.
He can hear Ashur’s breathing—in, out, in, out—more clearly without the mask, a kind of catch in it when Tarquin brushes his thumb over the back of Ashur’s hand, and he suddenly wishes he knew exactly what was going on in Ashur’s head the way Ashur always seems to know what’s going on in his. (He can’t know, not really, and things are calmer in Tarquin’s head now and he isn’t worried. About that, at any rate.)
“You don’t need to worry about me,” Ashur says quietly, and can he read minds?
“Yeah, well,” Tarquin says, voice made gruff by the desire not to be having this conversation right now. “Someone’s got to, haven’t they?”
He’s expecting a protest, but Ashur just smiles. “Maybe we can worry about each other.”
Now it’s Tarquin who wants to protest—not because that doesn’t make sense, but because it does. What he does instead is bring his thumb to rest on the back of Ashur’s hand and focus on the way he’s breathing in the dark. In. Out. In. Out.
He’s looking at Ashur without really seeing him, concentrating on the sound and the feeling and the strange, unfamiliar quiet in his mind, and so he’s startled when Ashur is closer than he’s expecting, close enough that Tarquin can feel him breathing and see the thread of his pulse just below his jaw.
Tarquin recalls the last time he watched Ashur’s pulse, willing him to be alive, the smell of blood and ozone, and what if it happened again, what if it happened right here in the dark and Tarquin—
tightens his grip on Ashur’s hand and rubs his thumb over the knuckles and doesn’t think about it, doesn’t think about it.
It feels like something should happen, but nothing does. They just sit on Tarquin’s bed, close enough that Tarquin’s sure Ashur can hear the hammer of his heart and the rush of his thoughts, and Ashur doesn’t let go of his hand and Tarquin doesn’t take it away and the tiny magelight in the corner of the room slowly dims to nothing.
In the morning, Ashur is still there, mask and hat beside him, blinking in the sunlight that filters in through the narrow window. Tarquin’s stiff from a night spent sat on the edge of his bed, leaning against Ashur and drifting into half-sleep.
Ashur does kiss him then. It feels like it should be some monumental thing, the Viper—the Divine—Ashur Vesperian here, lips pressed softly to Tarquin’s (he can feel the roughness of his own, the place where the bottom lip is split), like the universe should change in some subtle way because their worlds have collided, but it isn’t; it doesn’t. Nothing changes at all except that Tarquin’s free hand comes to rest against Ashur’s side, in the place where he knows the leather hides a jagged, twisted scar, and Ashur kisses him again and it’s like this is the direction they’ve always been going. Like he’s leapt from a cliff edge and landed, somehow, on the familiar rooftops of Minrathous.
“You should…” he says. He means to go on, something about the Chantry or the Magisterium or any of the dozen jobs Ashur has when he’s not the Viper, when he’s not at the shop or on a roof or here on the edge of Tarquin’s shitty bed in his shitty flat kissing him in the morning light. But Ashur hums in understanding. It’s still early enough that the sun is barely rising and the noise of the city is a low rumble; he may be unmasked and unshielded now, but by the time the sun is high, he’ll have to be the Divine or, at best, Magister Vesperian, and Tarquin will have to be that nobody in the archives who hasn’t a hope of ever being noticed by his betters and that’s fine—it’s a job, it buys him food and a roof over his head—but it’s not standing at Ashur’s side and knowing the world hasn’t shattered around him.
Ashur lifts his hand from where it’s gone back to picking apart the threads of his robe. “You’ll need a new one of these,” he says, but Tarquin shakes his head. He’ll only do the same thing to it and he’s not spending the Shadow Dragons’ limited funds on his own shit.
“I’ll mend it,” he says and, for once, Ashur doesn’t argue.
“And then maybe we’ll talk,” is all he says.
Tarquin doesn’t want to talk. But Ashur watches him drop his Shadow Dragons armor and pull on the robes of his station instead, watches him lock the door behind them and run his fingers down the side of it (for luck, he almost says, but doesn’t, because that’s not what it is and he won’t lie to Ashur), watches him close his eyes briefly and recenter his thoughts because they’ve never done this before; he’s never had to worry about leaving Ashur like this and he can think of a thousand new ways he might find Ashur here when he returns, broken and alone because Tarquin wasn’t here, wasn’t enough. And he grips the edge of his Chantry robes between his fingers and twists, feeling the texture of the embroidery against his fingertips, and concentrates on anything else, anything at all, and thinks, maybe they can talk.
Maybe Tarquin would do just about anything to know that there will be more nights like these when he can keep Ashur safe in a different way, a new way, a way that quiets everything in his mind so that they can just be here together in the dark.
Maybe he can lock the door and leave the shop and walk home with Ashur through back alleys and across rooftops and never wonder if he’s done everything right, if he needs to check again, if he’s the reason Ashur won’t be here in the morning.
Maybe things can change and, when he thinks of Ashur, it doesn’t have to be the blood and the dust and the bubbling, sucking sound of his life leaking away. Maybe, instead, it can be warm hands and thoughtful eyes and a soft, private smile.
He won’t tempt fate, but—it could happen.