Chapter 16 #2
Eskil pauses. Indrie's chest is rising and falling too fast and there is a flush beginning beneath the blood, pink warming the grey-white of shock, spreading across his cheeks and down his neck, and Eskil knows that flush.
He saw it on the ship, in his cabin, when he pulled Indrie into his lap and the man went scarlet from hairline to navel.
Not now. Not tonight. Not while he is shaking.
He continues. Down the chest, following the stain, careful around the ribs, and across the flat of his stomach where a spray of red has dried in a pattern that makes something in Eskil go cold when he works out the proximity required to produce it.
Indrie is staring at his hands. At the wringing and the rinsing, at the other hand bracketing the skin to steady it. He stares as though he cannot comprehend what they are doing.
"You shouldn't —" Indrie starts again, and his voice cracks.
Eskil does not look up. "What shouldn't I do?"
"This. Any of this. You're the king. And I'm just a servant of the kingdom. You shouldn't be on your knees cleaning blood off someone who —"
Indrie does not finish. His mouth works around the words and nothing comes out, and then he presses his lips together and looks away, and the war on his face is no longer about accepting care. It is about something older, and Eskil knows better than to name it out loud.
Indrie is quiet for a long moment. His fingers have not moved from Eskil's forearm.
"I said something to you," he says. "In the study."
"You said a great many things in the study. Most of them were right."
"You have been ruling for more than half my life and I've been here a week and I presumed to tell you what you did wrong while you were protecting your people." He is not looking at Eskil now. He is looking at the basin, at the water gone pink. "While you were protecting me."
Eskil says nothing, because he has no idea what to say.
"You carry a great burden and I cannot possibly comprehend it," Indrie says. He swallows. "I am sorry. For what I said, and for how I said it. The asking was right. That part I will not take back. But the rest of it was cruel, and I chose it, and I would take it back if I could."
Something in Eskil's chest turns over.
He reaches forward and pulls Indrie into his arms.
Not gently. Not tentatively. He gathers him, one arm across his back with his hand splayed between the shoulder blades, the other curling around his waist, and pulls him forward off the couch and into his chest, and Indrie comes with a startled sound, a sharp intake of breath, bare skin against Eskil's clothed chest.
He is so slight. The thought ambushes Eskil every time they are this close. The way he fits. The way his head tucks under Eskil's chin. He smells of blood and copper and underneath it, faintly, of chamomile, and Eskil holds him and does not let go.
Indrie resists. Not physically, he does not push or struggle, but his body is rigid, locked tight, every muscle braced. He is holding himself together the way he has always held himself together. Alone. Contained. Folded inward.
Then, by degrees so small Eskil can count them, Indrie softens.
The shoulders unlock first. Then the arms, clamped across his own chest, ease outward, and his hands find the fabric of Eskil's shirt and close around fistfuls of it.
Then his weight shifts, leaning in instead of bracing against, and the rigid line of his spine begins to curve, to give, settling into Eskil until there is no space left anywhere between them.
Indrie presses his face into Eskil's chest. And he breathes.
Hard and ragged, the kind of breathing that comes before tears or instead of them, lungs working to process what the rest of the body cannot, and Eskil holds him through it.
Holds him and does not move and does not speak, because the speaking is done and what is left is only this.
The weight of him. The sound of his breathing evening out.
The tremor running down and down until it stops.
Then Indrie pulls back.
Not far. Just far enough to look at him, and his face is not the calm of someone coming through to the other side.
It is raw and open and wrecked, and his eyes are bright with something that is not quite tears, and there is a crease between his brows that Eskil wants to press his thumb against until it smooths.
"You killed a man because of me," Indrie says.
His voice is quiet. Devastated. Not horror at the violence, Eskil has learned to read the difference, but horror at the cost. At the idea that someone died for him.
That his life was weighed against another's and found heavier, and that the weighing was done by the man in front of him without hesitation.
Eskil shakes his head. "Not because of you."
"He's dead because I —"
"He is dead because he was a spy who killed one of my men and escaped custody and took a hostage." Eskil keeps his voice level. The voice he uses when he needs someone to hear the words and not the feeling behind them. "His death is on his own choices, Indrie. Not yours."
Indrie's brow creases deeper. He does not believe it. Eskil can see him not believing it, and he knows from experience that guilt of that kind does not respond to reason. It responds to time, if anything. Sometimes not even that.
But something else is moving behind his eyes. Something that is not guilt and not grief and not the distant blankness of shock. Something urgent and reckless and afraid of itself.
Indrie's hands, still fisted in Eskil's shirt, tighten. Not pulling. Gathering.
And then he leans forward and kisses him.
It is tentative. Barely there. Indrie's mouth against his, dry and trembling and so uncertain that for a fraction of a heartbeat Eskil's mind does not register what is happening. He kisses him braced for rejection, giving everything and steeling himself to receive nothing.
Eskil's mind goes blank.
Not quiet. Not still. Blank. Every thought in his skull, the spy and the blood and the body in the street and the guards and the clinic, wiped off the slate in one stroke, and what is left is only sensation.
The warmth of Indrie's mouth. The faint taste of copper where the blood on his jaw has smeared between them.
The pressure of his hands in Eskil's shirt, knuckles against his sternum.
The small sound Indrie makes against his lips, something between a breath and a plea, and it goes through Eskil like steel.
His hand is on the back of Indrie's neck before he knows it has moved.
His fingers slide into the hair at the nape and grip, and his mouth opens against Indrie's, and Indrie gasps, and the sound undoes something structural in him.
He feels Indrie's body arch toward him, the bare chest pressing flush against his, the narrow hips shifting closer, and every nerve he owns catches at once.
He tilts Indrie's head back with the hand in his hair, deepening the angle, and Indrie lets him.
Goes pliable and willing and makes another sound, higher, breathier, and Eskil swallows it and wants more, wants every sound this man is capable of producing, wants to lay him back on this couch and press him into the cushions and find out what else that mouth can —
Stop.
He is in shock.
Eskil's hand stills in Indrie's hair. His mouth slows. The want fights back, clawing at the edges of his restraint, because Indrie is warm and half-dressed in his lap and kissing him, and every instinct he has is telling him to take what is being offered.
He feels indebted to you. The thought goes in between his ribs and stays there.
You saved his life. Again. You carried him through the streets and cleaned the blood off him with your own hands, and he is frightened and grateful and confused, and he does not know the difference between what he feels and what he owes.
Eskil has been here before. Never with anyone who matters like this, but close enough to know the shape of it.
The aftermath of violence makes people desperate for contact, for proof of living, for the animal reassurance of another body against theirs.
He has seen soldiers fall into each other after a battle with an urgency that has nothing to do with desire.
And Indrie has never once in his life been allowed to want a thing for himself.
Eskil would sooner burn in the afterlife than add his name to the list of men who took from this man under the guise of something gentler.
He pulls away.
It takes everything he has. The breaking of the kiss tears something living, and the cool air that rushes in between their mouths is a cruelty he will remember for a long time. He eases his hand out of Indrie's hair and brings both hands to his shoulders and holds him at arm's length.
The mortification comes into Indrie's face and spreads through it.
His lips are still parted, flushed and wet where Eskil's mouth has been, and his eyes are wide and horrified.
Not at Eskil. At himself. The color drains and then rushes back in a violent tide of red, blotching across his cheeks and down his throat, and Eskil watches the shame crash through him and knows Indrie is reading this as rejection.
As confirmation of every miserable thing he has ever believed about himself.
Indrie pulls back sharply, trying to withdraw, and Eskil does not let him go.