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1.
“The question should be regarding his mobility onward.”
A stretch of silence fell and it was made greater in the consideration that there were three people present there and none the more willing to talk. Laurent’s eyes lifted from the man face down in front of him.
“Speak plainly.”
“The costs of badly healed skin can be dreadful for swordsmen. Mobility can be compromised for life.” Paschal’s voice was calm and slow, used to talk to the weak and the dying.
Still, Laurent could not fully make sense of it in the way that he could clearly grasp the fact of somebody being nearly killed on his command. He fixed his gaze on the body in front of him, shaking with the tremors of the feverish aftermath of his flaying, a body protesting it’s violation. A body punishing, never forgiving. Never forgetting.
He could feel the weight of memories of better people lying down in white-sheeted beds, blurry traces of the same stale air getting in his lungs. Laurent’s back ached at the strain of keeping himself straight, but that one he could understand. He could manage.
“Can we avoid that?”
Paschal's eyes landed on him for too long a second. Whatever he was looking for, he hoped he couldn’t find it.
“I can try, your Highness.”
Laurent didn’t linger for any longer than this assurance required. He stepped through the door, and as he walked out and away, he carried the stench of sick and iron and cinnamon with him.
2.
They were not open but many looked a furious pink. Not really fresh but not quite scabbed yet.
Laurent cleaned the skin tapping lightly with a soft cotton cloth so it could dry faster and be bandaged. Wounds oozed other things than blood, he had learned that night.
He breathed in and out, as steady and quietly as he could manage with his fingers generously coated in honey running along the deeper gashes like one would refill in cracks on a wall.
We’ll make do, he had said as he ordered Damianos to strip to change his bandages. We’ll make do, as he put on the earring back again and went to the kitchen of the inn to get what he could use as a makeshift salve.
He’d make do. He always did.
Damianos did not lay on his back that night and that image tipped him into nothingness more soothingly than the certainty that everything was moving according to his calculations. Almost everything.
He fell asleep like that, with tingling hands, firelight playing in his closed lids and an unmoored ache for sweetness hanging from his lips.
3.
Laurent smelled the blood on his fingertips and thought, for a long disturbing second, that it was the first time that it was not his own or Auguste’s on him.
And there was a heavy truth to be held in that, a reckless picture he could not make out initially but was now getting through the blur of his hazy mind: the blood of his brother's killers was for once, truly, on his hands.
It should have not felt like a joke, but it did. Because scratching a man's back as he lost himself in the throes of ecstasy did not ring as vengeance at all, or at least not one he recognized as justice demanded and rewritten in the blood of his enemy, the blood of Damianos.
“Leave it. Come back to bed.” came the rumble from across the room, voice face down on rumpled sheets and tossed clothing, “They will have scabbed by the morning.”
Laurent ignored him just enough to commit the image to memory, to see himself whole and standing while Damianos lay spent, waiting for him, a perfect picture of surrender, and he indulged himself in the fleeting fantasy of this moment being something other than a reminder of all the foul things that he had under his nails, gone too deep to be completely free of them.
He turned and went to get a jug of water and a towel to clean the red away.
4.
The ice had numbed his fingers down to the point of hurting. He slid it again, past the bruise, a little further into his side, and the trickling of water fell down his back this time.
There was some poetic meaning in the measuring of time in how much water you held where ice used to be. Of things changing if you held them tight enough. Long enough.
There was no pain to relieve there, the wounds were almost completely closed up, but it felt like something to be done, still. A sign to remind himself that yes, he had taken a beating for him that night, but also no, that had not been the first time he’d been damaged at Laurent’s bidding.
When they fell silent again, he searched for his face and saw he was staring back at him, an indecipherable word to be said but not spoken, forever caught in that space between one and the other.
Damianos didn't mention the gesture. The rock of ice kept melting down his back and he just let it happen.
5.
“Admiring your handiwork?”
Yes he almost replied, because lies were easier.
Because it wasn’t as remotely a lie as he wanted it to be.
Laurent thought of tea stains on scroll paper. The wounds were healed enough not to drip at that point, but the skin had torn in places it shouldn’t have, and the rolling around against the Akielon wrestler had made the blood spread like a stamp. Blood dusted on dirt and streaks of sweat washing trails across it. Laurent wanted to chastise him. Grab him by the side of the neck and scream to his face for him to be careful with it, demand so many things, demand him to stop looking at him like that and go back to the other way, the one he woke up to, that only time.
He wanted to hurt him into obedience and that was what scared him the most.
Something wavered in Damens expression as Laurent approached, his a face not meant for deception or holding contempt toward him— and he just stood there, rigid and uncomfortable, as Laurent gathered the edges of the stained garment to hold them over his shoulder without a word. There was no less anger, no less spite toward each other, but this terrain was not part of it. It had always been something else, ever since the whip fell for the first time.
He had never consciously touched the wounds with his fingers bare — morbid curiosity was something he could not allow himself in this. But because he was now not allowed to touch, he pinned the chiton in place to keep everyone else away along with him.
+1.
“Do they still hurt?”
Laurent stopped midway into his motion to rub at his shoulders. The cuts that climbed there were still the most frail, the skin too taut to allow them to gather the tissue back together. They had kept coming open up until recently with the swing of his arms. The rub against the mattress when they had been careless. The fall on the baths after Kastor’s betrayal.
“Why would you ask me that.” Laurent's voice was soft.
But he knew why. Laurent felt the change in the silence around them like a physical thing, an immersion of another kind. He breathed in the heavy air of the baths, the floral scent of the oils on them, and with it came the unbidden thought of trimmed gardens in bloom, a fine, golden chain around his hand. He recoiled inwardly. His body was steady everywhere but in the frantic thud against his chest.
Damen didn't answer, seemingly lost in the same dance of avoidance they’d learned to follow unthinkingly.
They did hurt. They hurt Laurent so much. Damen had never seen his own back, he just carried the marks with him, unconcerned, blessedly unaware. The witnessing was only for the rest of the world — for Laurent to bear.
He found himself sliding his arms around Damen's waist and pressing his body flush against his, hiding his face in the space between his shoulder blades.
“I don't think they will come open again.” Damen said, after a while, his voice rumbling against Laurent’s whole body.
“How can you know?” Laurent breathed out.
“I just do.”
But if they do, he wanted to ask, what am I to do then? but there was something missing where once was bile thickening his tongue, no longer the dizzying edge of ruination threatening to overcome him. They’d make do was, perhaps, the answer. He wished that was more a certainty than a blinking hope.
But if blinking hopes were the best he could grasp with his arms full of so many good new things, he’d gladly take them.
He washed his back with his naked hands, feeling and mapping and caressing and asking questions that were met with answers, sometimes silence, sometimes a shift in pulse and muscles that spoke like a mouthful of venom. He cradled it inside his chest, as well as the words, as well as the slowness he dreaded so dearly— the painstakingly imperceptible process of recognizing and allowing the hurt to settle— to accommodate. He was eager for a future in which this was old enough to be ignored, a painting so familiar you no longer saw it on the wall. But until then, Laurent welcomed it, regardless, probing at it like you would approach the edge of a sharpened blade and taking everything that came with it.
You trust us so much he wanted to say, too, like he was grateful for it and not choking on the weight of that immeasurable notion. You trust me, spoken like a question, slipped out as Damen turned around to hold his arms still and close and so very tender that his skin itched for a release, a dip in frozen water.
When Damianos took his palms in his to kiss, they were clean of everything else.