Chapter Text
The battle had no elegance to it.
It never did, no matter what the poets wrote, all their talk about gleaming swords and noble causes, as if war was something that could be made beautiful with the right words. Shane had been a knight long enough to know better. Long enough to know that battle was smoke and noise and mud and the particular way your arms burned after the fourth hour of fighting. Long enough to stop flinching at the sounds men made when they fell.
He cut through the flank with two of his soldiers at his back, keeping formation, keeping his head clear. The enemy -a neighboring kingdom-, third incursion this season, had pushed further than anticipated. Too far. The fighting had spilled into open ground, which meant no more strategy, just survival and coordination and the deep, practiced instinct of a man who had been doing this since he was seventeen years old.
He didn't notice the prince until he nearly ran into him.
"Watch it," said a voice to his left – low and weirdly unbothered given the situation- and Shane turned to find Ilya Rozanov, second son of King Georgi, fighting three men at once with the kind of fluid aggression that made Shane's jaw tighten.
He was not supposed to be here.
The council had been explicit. The prince does not engage. The prince observes from the ridge. The prince—
One of the three men suddenly lunged at Ilya; the latter grabbed his opponent's armed arm at the elbow and turned his own momentum against him. It was elegant. Brutal, but elegant. It infuriated Shane.
Shane killed the second man before he could bring his blade down on Ilya's exposed back.
"I had that," Ilya said, breathing hard.
"You had three of them and no one watching your six," Shane said flatly. He moved to Ilya's left without thinking, filling the gap. "The council—"
"The council is on the ridge," Ilya said. "My people are here."
Shane didn't have an answer for that. Not a good one. He turned back to the fight.
They moved together for the next hour like they had done it before, which they hadn't - Shane had been assigned to the prince's guard rotation two months ago, and most of that had been standing in hallways and escorting him to council meetings where Ilya radiated boredom. But this was different. This was the prince in the only place, Shane was beginning to understand, where he was entirely himself.
He was good. Genuinely, dangerously good. Strong and fast and smarter than he looked, which was saying something because he looked very smart.
They communicated without words – a glance, a shift of weight , once a single raised eyebrow. They moved in perfect sync, as though they’d fought side-by-side for years, moving as one across the battlefield .
Which made no sense.
They had only just met, yet they trusted each other without hesitation.
That was the problem with what happened next.
Shane have been keeping an eye on an archer for a while now. Something about the man had caught his attention.
Then he saw the man draw, and Shane knew exactly who he was aiming for. Ilya couldn’t have seen it.
He moved to intercept but another soldier forced himself into his path. Shane turned to meet the attack, forced to defend himself.
He still managed to shout a warning, but it came too late.
The arrow clipped Ilya at the side of his neck, beneath the helmet’s edge, and the force of it, combined with the uneven footing, sent him down hard.
Shane was there before Ilya hit the ground. He didn't think. His hand was on Ilya's arm, and then he was crouching over him, and the archer was already dead behind him because one of Shane's men had seen, and then there was the helmets in his hands because he needed to see if it was serious, needed to see if Ilya was conscious, needed—
He pulled the helmets off. His and the prince’s.
___
The noise of the battlefield didn't stop. The smoke didn't clear. Nothing poetic happened, technically.
But Ilya stopped breathing for a moment.
The knight above him had dark hair damp with sweat, strands falling into his eyes and sticking to his forehead. Freckles stood out against his flushed skin, all across his nose and cheeks. His eyes - dark brown and sharp - were fixed on him.
His face was softer than most soldiers, his features fine but no less striking for it. A bruise was already forming along his jaw, and a smear of dirt streaked one cheek. His mouth was slightly parted, his chest still rising too quickly from the fight.
He looked at Shane the way no one had ever looked at Shane. Like he was finding something he hadn't known he was looking for.
"You're bleeding," Shane said. Also noticing a wound on his forehead.
"I've bled before," Ilya said. His voice was lower than usual. He hadn't moved, still looking at Shane.
"It doesn’t look serious.” Shane declared. “Can you stand ?”
"Yes." Ilya didn't try to immediately. He said, "What's your name?"
Shane blinked. “ Sir Sha-"
He was cut off as several soldiers rushed over, quickly moving in around Ilya and shielding him from the fighting still raging around them.
“Your Highness!”
They helped him to his feet at once, moving to pull him away before he could protest, leaving Shane little choice but to step back and let them take over.
The battle continued . Shane put his helmet back on and returned to the fight, and if his pulse was unsteady for the next twenty minutes he credited it to the physical exertion.
He was very good at crediting things to the wrong source.
By the time the fighting ceased, the sun hung low and red, and the battlefield presented a chaos familiar to Shane , an organized chaos born of exhaustion. The kind that follows the struggle. Men were tending to the wounded. Officers were calling the roll. Fires were being lit.
The next morning - or rather, a few hours later, given that the battle lasted all evening. Shane was cleaning his sword, writing his report, and checking on his two slightly wounded soldiers; he was in the middle of a conversation about supplies when he noticed the commotion.
It began with a murmur spreading through the camp in that peculiar way news travels: fast, yet slightly distorted each time it passed from one mouth to another.
"The prince is looking for someone."
Shane assumed it was a missing officer. He returned to his conversation.
"He's asking everyone."
Still. A missing officer wasn't unusual after a messy engagement like this one.
"He's been at it all morning . JJ told him who it was. He went and looked and said that wasn't right. He described the person differently. Comeau thought he meant the tall one from the northern garrison. He said no. He's very specific about what he's looking for."
Shane looked up now.
"What is he looking for?" he asked.
The soldier he was talking to shrugged. "No idea. Dark eyes. Some freckles, apparently. He was told to rest but he told them he would rest when he finds what he was looking for. Can u believe that ?”
Shane thought about that for exactly one second, and then decided it had nothing to do with him, because why would it ? The prince probably already forgot about him.
He found out later that day, via his sister.
Elara had been working in the medical tent since mid-afternoon - she was a medical officer in charge of coordination, which in practice meant she moved between the surgeons and the officers, making sure neither group made bad decisions in isolation, and deciding who needed evacuation first when things got overwhelming.
She was calm in a way that unnerved people who didn’t know her and was deeply comforting to people who did, and she had the particular gift of being invisible in a room full of people paying attention to other things.
She had been in the medical tent when they'd brought Ilya, and she had been there when he'd sat still for exactly as long as the physician required and then stood up and started asking questions.
She found Shane at the edge of camp and said, simply, "I think the prince is looking for you."
Shane stared at her.
She was small and precise in her movements, with their mother's look and their father's temper and an expression now that was entirely her own - gentle, watchful, and currently containing a great deal that she wasn't saying. Their parents were somewhere in the eastern territories, a negotiation that had stretched three weeks past its expected end, and it had always been this way - the two of them, more or less, figuring it out.
"Why would he be looking for me," Shane said.
"I don't know," she said, in the tone of someone who had an idea but was choosing not to share it. "He described someone. Dark eyes. Freckles. Medium height, he said, and then he said compact and then the physician told him to sit back down." She paused. "He was very specific."
"He was hit on the head."
"Lightly. He's completely coherent." Another pause. "He asked me directly, actually. When I was handing the physician the suture thread. He said, do you know who pulled off my helmet." She looked at Shane with her very calm, very patient eyes. "I told him your name."
Shane said nothing.
"He left immediately," Elara added. "Very purposefully."
"He probably just wants to—" Shane started.
"To what?"
He didn't finish the sentence. Partly because he didn't have an ending for it. Partly because Ilya Rozanov had just emerged from between two supply tents and stopped when he saw Shane, and the focused, satisfied expression on his face was not the expression of a man who wanted to discuss battlefield protocol.
Elara said, very quietly, next to his ear: "I'm going back to the medical tent."
She was gone before Shane could respond.
Ilya crossed the distance between them with the same unhurried certainty he'd had on the battlefield. There was a bandage above his brow now, a little clumsy where he'd probably redone it himself after the physician's version. His hair was a mess of damp curls. He was very tall, standing this close. Shane had noticed his height in abstract before. He noticed it differently now.
"Hollander," Ilya said.
"Your Highness," Shane said. The formal address. The correct one.
Something flickered in Ilya's eyes. Not offense. More like amusement.
"You pulled off my helmet," he said.
"I needed to assess - "
"I know why you did it." He wasn't dismissive. Just clear. "I'm not questioning the action." He looked at Shane in the same way he had on the ground, that same deliberate attention, like he was memorizing something. "It was very hard to find you."
"I’m sorry your highness " Shane said. "How can I help you ?"
"Maybe." Ilya agreed. "I like your freckles ." He said it simply, without drama, in the way some people stated facts. The sky is blue. The wind is from the north. I like your freckles . Then the corner of his mouth lifted, slow and crooked. "You are so boring, Hollander. It’s a compliment."
Shane remained silent for sometimes before Ilya asked him “You look like you need to sleep.”
"I'm fine," Shane said, reflexively.
Ilya's smile widened by a fraction. "You've been awake since before the dawn watch. Your left arm is compensating for something — muscle fatigue, I think, from how you were holding your sword by the end." He tilted his head. "I think you are tired."
Shane had no idea what to do with any of that. He was just doing his job?
"You should go rest, Shane." Ilya said, and turned and walked back the way he'd come, and Shane stood in the cooling evening air and watched him go still puzzled.
The medical tent was quieter by the time Elara finished her last rounds for the evening. She found Shane waiting for her outside, sitting with his elbows on his knees, not doing anything in particular.
She sat down next to him.
It had always been the two of them, more or less. Elara who saw everything and said what was necessary. Shane who always felt too much and learned to act like not.
"He found you," she said.
"Yes."
"And?"
Shane picked up a small stone from the ground and turned it over in his fingers. "He said I looked tired."
Elara was quiet for a moment. "Just that?"
"Just that."
She nodded slowly, and the expression on her face was the one she'd had since she was twelve years old and three steps ahead of everyone around her - waiting for her brother to arrive.
"Okay," she said.
They sat there as the camp settled into night around them, the fires low and the voices distant, and Shane turned the stone in his fingers and didn't ask her what she meant by okay, because he suspected, in some part of himself, that he already knew.
Ilya lay in his tent with the bandage pulling slightly above his brow and stared at the ceiling.
He had spent the better part of the evening searching for a man whose name he hadn't known, which was not something he had ever done before. He had asked knights , and servants, and the senior captain who had looked at him like he'd grown a second head, and a very quiet woman in the medical tent with dark eyes who had given him the answer without asking why he needed it, which he appreciated.
He had found Shane Hollander standing at the edge of camp looking like a man who had just done an honest day's work and expected nothing in return for it, which was - for Ilya - a new experience. Most people expected something. Most people positioned themselves and watched him to see if he'd noticed.
Shane had called him his highness in the careful way of a man defaulting to protocol when something unexpected had happened, and Ilya had found it genuinely funny, which was also new.
He closed his eyes.
He could still see it precisely; the moment the helmet had come off, the moment Shane Hollander had been crouching over him with his dark eyes and his freckles and his jaw set in controlled panic, and the absolute certainty that had settled in Ilya's chest like something sliding into the place it was meant to go.
He was going to have to be patient. Shane Hollander had the look of someone who would need time.
Ilya was, in most things, not a patient man.
He thought he could probably manage it, just this once.
He fell asleep quickly, a skill the battlefield had given him early, and he did not dream about anything in particular, but when he woke up the next morning, his first thought was very clear.
Shane Hollander.
He allowed himself a moment with that. Then he got up and started the day.