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Jowy stamped the snow from his boots as he pushed open the door to the cabin and hurried inside, shutting the door quickly against the gust of winter wind that followed him through.
“Any luck?” Nanami asked from where she was seated at the makeshift table they’d erected in the middle of the room, her eyes trained on the vegetables she was slicing and tossing into the stewpot.
“I’m afraid not. Seems like the rabbits don’t like the cold anymore than I do. Maybe Riou will have more luck?”
Nanami did look at him then, “I think you and I both know how likely that is.”
“True enough,” Jowy replied, offering a wry smile. “He’s always been a soft touch.”
Nanami hummed her agreement and went back to cutting up carrots.
Funny how no matter what the season, she always managed to find carrots for their meals. He sometimes wondered if she had stumbled upon a true rune herself or some other sort of unlikely magic that enabled her to generate them at will.
It wasn’t likely, of course, but always, always there were carrots. Much to his dismay.
He’d just finished pulling off his boots and hanging up his coat when the door fell open once more to bang loudly against the wall. Riou’s return was accompanied by another blast of icy air and a flurry of freshly fallen snow as he stumbled through with an armful of wood and a dusting of snow in his hair.
Jowy dropped his boots and rushed to help, closing the door behind him and taking the pile of wood from his arms. Riou smiled at him, that same sheepish smile he’d been giving him since they were children, fingers weaving a thank you between them now that he was freed of his burden.
As it always did, that smile kindled a warmth in his belly, and he returned it with one of his own, somehow resisting the urge to take those fingers in his own and squeeze them.
The desire to do so had become a vaguely uncomfortable feeling in recent years as he was quite certain he didn’t deserve to be the recipient of such an expression after all that had passed between them. However, no matter how uncertain it made him feel, Riou still looked at him the same way nonetheless and he couldn’t help but be glad of it. Whether he deserved it or not, part of him clung to that smile greedily, proof perhaps that not everything was spoiled between them by all he had done. A proof greater even than the life they’d lived together for the last two years.
“Don’t mention it,” Jowy replied, offering his own unsteady smile in return as he hefted the heavy bundle higher in his arms and wobbled nearer the hearth. There he dropped it to join the precarious pile they’d built up, near enough the heat of the hearth that it might dry out a bit before being used to feed the fire within.
“I see firewood, but you know we can’t eat firewood, right?” Nanami asked, clearly amused.
Riou turned his sheepish grin on her and offered a bag that he’d had slung over his shoulder, fingers dancing between them, “I found some nuts and berries.”
Nanami sniffed, but took the bag, opening it and nodding approvingly, “Fine, good enough, I suppose, and better than the nothing Jowy brought. I forgive you.”
Jowy felt heat warm his cheeks as Riou glanced his way, that bashful smile turned knowing as he hiked an eyebrow in feigned surprise.
”Shut up,” he murmured, forcing his attention back to the wood pile, where he could fuss with the small logs and branches that stuck out at odd angles and pretend he couldn’t see Riou’s teasing hands as they inquired about the baby rabbit he’d seen him entangling from the snare that morning.
”Okay, this is ready to go,” Nanami called banging the back of her knife against the lip of the stew pot.
Together they hauled the massive pot to the hearth and hung it there before stoking the fire once more.
While the stew simmered, they made plans for the following days, trips to the nearest town for supplies and then a day’s journey out to to the pass to help clear it and aid any travelers that had gotten caught in the storm.
During the spring and summer they traveled often, preferring to be on the move, but travel grew challenging in the winter months. Old war wounds ached and sleeping on the ground became less and less comfortable with each passed day.
It was a large part of the reason they’d made a habit of settling for the season in remote places where they could do good works and keep to themselves and no one asked too many questions about the strange trio of visitors who looked perhaps a bit too much like the heroes and villains in a series of ballads that had become increasingly popular in the aftermath of the war.
Dinner complete, they ate some of the nuts and berries for dessert as they played a few card games to pass the time. Winter storms made for long days and none of them did well with too much time left to their own thoughts without something to occupy their hands and minds.
As night came on, Nanami turned in, retiring to the single bedroom as they laid out their bedrolls upon the floor, side by side. If she ever noticed how close the bedrolls were laid to one another or how often the mornings found them tangled together, she never mentioned it, for which Jowy was grateful.
They’d never quite managed to define this thing between them. A thing that had been barely a glimmer of potential when they’d been children. Something of held hands in the dark and hugs that lingered too long. Never discussed and easily buried beneath the camaraderie of long friendship.
In the years since their duel on the mountainside, however, it had become something else, something more, something bolder and more urgent.
The first time they’d kissed had been in a forest like any other they’d traveled, somewhere near the Harmonian border. They’d spent the day trying and failing at catching fish in a creek near the cabin in which they were staying and had tumbled into the water more than once, ruining any chance of making a catch long before they’d decided to finally give up for the day. So as they made their way back to their cabin, their steps had been slow and lazy and their clothes damp and clinging, sandals squelching as they meandered along the path home.
There had been no need to hurry, Nanami was in town helping children through their training at a local dojo while their instructor was recovering after a bad fall the month before. They’d been helping out a bit as well, but Nanami had insisted they both needed a day of doing nothing productive and refused to allow them to come to town with her that day.
Which was how they’d ended up going fishing with some old gear that Riou had brought with him when they’d set out on this journey together, leaving all their responsibilities and mistakes behind them.
The path back to the cabin had been a winding one and they’d weaved together along it, shoulders brushing, and Riou doing most of the talking, his fingers a whirl of familiar motion between them as they walked.
Conversation between them had been getting easier in recent months, becoming something closer to what it had been between them when they’d been in the Unicorn Brigade and all the years before it, but Jowy still found himself on the back foot more often than not, scrambling to keep up with Riou’s enthusiasm. With Riou’s desire to know everything that had passed while they were apart, no matter how gruesome or how trivial.
He supposed it was always inevitable that such conversation would come around to his… marriage.
”It’s not weird,” he laughed as Riou made a face at him that told him very clearly that he didn’t believe a word he said. “We were married you know… are married still, I guess?”
And wasn’t that a strange thought?
That, somehow, half a world away, he had a wife… or perhaps a widow would be a more accurate term since he’d heard quite a few rumors about his own horrible fate as they’d traveled. Each tale was more murderous, terrible, and bloody, each rumored end worse than the last, though no story could seem to agree on whether he was beloved or hated by the kingdom he had once ruled.
”Still can’t quite picture it,” Riou offered, a strange wry expression on his face.
In truth, he couldn’t either.
Everything about that day was a blur, of emotion and thoughts turning end over end, his insides twisted up in knots, as he’d endured the rush of attendants around him. Strange, impersonal hands on him as he was cleaned and styled and dressed and ushered to the church for the ceremony.
He remembered vaguely speaking the words, making promises, the cool drape of the linen he’d worn to the ceremony over his skin, a finer fabric than any other he’d ever worn.
When the kiss that had sealed all those promises had come, and he was sure it had even if he could not remember it well. It had been dry and brief and done as soon as it had begun.
“Is it really so difficult to picture me kissing someone?” The thought stung a little, though he was quite certain it shouldn’t.
Riou shook his head, a quick jerk of motion, face flushed. An emphatic no that was not further explained, at least not immediately.
”I don’t even really remember it,” he confessed, sighing. “That day was….” He wasn’t certain how to talk about it, even after so much time had passed.
“Did you ever…” He trailed off, uncertain what he wished to ask or how to ask it. The idea of Riou in a relationship, of Riou married, of Riou kissing some anonymous someone made him feel… vaguely ill, as if he’d eaten something rotten.
Riou’s laughter was a bark of sound, sudden and loud in the quiet forest, startling Jowy from the dark turn of his thoughts. He scoffed, giving Riou a gentle push, “Oh, shut up.”
He was about to continue down the road, when Riou’s fingers caught his, pulling him to a stop before crowding closer and pressing him off the road, into the forest, into a thick copse of trees that ran alongside it and through to the other side. The little clearing he found himself in was thick with undergrowth and fallen logs, beautiful and secret.
Riou released his hand almost the moment they stepped free of and he found himself immediately grabbing for it again, breath catching in his throat as Riou’s fingers reached to meet his grasp, tangling with his own until their fingers entwined, threading together in a hold somehow infinitely more intimate than any they’d had previously. It made his legs feel strangely weak and his stomach roil.
He knew, even before Riou turned to smile at him, bright and sly, that something was going to happen. That the queasy feeling in his belly was not unlike the anticipation he felt before a battle.
Riou made the first move, stepping forward, and he fell back before him, back pressing into one of the massive trees that ringed the clearing around him.
Even months later, he could recall the way the trunk of a great tree felt pressed against him, the scratch of bark against his bare shoulders as Riou leaned into him, brown hair edged in gold by sunlight that pierced the thick tree cover overhead.
The kiss, when it happened, felt inevitable. As if there was never a world in which it wouldn’t happen. Like it might have happened a hundred thousand different ways, but it was always going to happen. Riou’s lips were a little chapped by the wind and sun, but they were warm when they’d met his own.
The sky was noticeably darker when they finally broke apart, clothes still damp though considerably more rumpled from where questing, curious fingers had gone exploring and their lips were swollen and warm and their faces burned by the scuff of late afternoon stubble.
They returned to the cabin well after nightfall to find Nanami had already turned in for the night, having left them a loaf of bread and wedge of cheese she’d picked up in town for supper alongside a note that she expected they would take care of dinner the next night.
That hadn’t been the first night they’d slept beside each other before the dying fire, but it was the first night he’d dared to wind an arm around Riou’s waist and pulled him close, pressed his face into his hair and breathed him in. And the first time he’d allowed himself to think that, even if he didn’t deserve their love and forgiveness, maybe he would get to keep it after all.
“Doing okay?” Riou asked, as they settled in for the night, his brow knit with concern.
“Well enough,” he answered, his fingers weaving through the signs, slow and awkward in a way Riou’s fingers never were. “Some days I don’t think about it at all.”
Warm skin brushed across his forehead in the dark, sweeping his hair aside before tracing down his cheek before darting away to weave the words between him that he’d told him so very, very many times since they’d run away together again.
I’m glad you’re alive.
I’m glad you’re here with us.
The words were a double-edged sword, like the twin runes they had wielded, like every moment between them since they’d jumped from the falls.
They healed and they hurt in equal measure and he never tired of them and never wanted to see or hear them again.
He caught Riou’s fingers with his own and squeezed them tight, pulling them close and holding them against his chest beneath the fire-warmed blankets.
It was the closest he had yet managed to get to all the conflicted things he wanted to say to him in response.
How grateful he was that he had come for him and how sometimes he loathed him for saving him. How much he loved them for being here with him, for still caring for him after everything he had done and how much he hated them and himself for running away, for surviving.
Some day he would manage to say all these things. To be brave enough to trust their bonds to hold no matter what he said or did as they’d already proven to him time and time again that they would.
Until then he had Riou’s hand in his.
“You’re certain this is all right?” He whispered, because while he knew by now what the answer would be since it was the same answer Riou had given him every night for the last two years as they’d lain together in the fading lights of fires in hundreds of different inns and campsites and temporary homes, he always needed to ask.
He felt more than saw Riou nod in reply, the hint of a smile on his lips as they brushed over his own and the fingers of Riou’s free hand shaped the letters of an affirmation over his chest.
Something inside him unclenched and he kissed Riou back before curling in against him and whispering a soft good night.