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barbecuedphoenix · 7 years

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I have a feeling that Valkyon doesn't know very well how attractive he is... Like when he was so surprised when Gardienne told he is cute, or when he said he is not interesting. Do you think it too? How do you think it would be if Gardienne was first in love with Nevra, and later fall madly in love for him? (Sorry, English isn't my first language...)

*sneaks into Tumblr* .> ||

…I really shouldn’t be herethis week. But a lucky break at work today gave me a couple of hours to finishthis piece.

Anyway, dear Anon., Valkyonis a cutie precisely because he’soblivious to his own charms. That, and he always carries an 80% chance ofshooting himself in the foot whenever someone asks him out for a drink.

Example. *throws themanuscript to the ground and bolts*

To Serve and Protect

It had been a cold Yule and the coming yeardidn’t look like an improvement.

Already, the streets were frozen from twoback-to-back bouts of chill rain that chose exactly the wrong month to fall onEl, their brief career ending in a slick double layer of ice over cobblestoneand brick, marbling the tessellated roads like candy glaze. Sweet enough toresult in seventeen accidents so far from the citizenry: two-legged,four-legged, and on wheels. Next year would be seeing a lot of people withodd-numbered legs.

Valkyon would know. His people had to haul awayall the injured and the worse off this week, including themselves. In fact, hewas taking care of Accident Number Seventeen right now.

“Does your ankle still hurt?” theObsidian Guard commander asked the woman he was carrying, now wrapped double inhis arms.

“Not really. I can’t feel muchanymore,” his corporal replied. From inside the folds of his cloak, sheexperimentally wagged her ankle, wrapped in a soggy, makeshift splint mademostly out of Valkyon’s hat, her scarf, firewood, and several handfuls of freshice that he broke from the road outside the tavern. She didn’t so much asflinch.

“Good. Because it won’t be easy gettingover that last wall.”

The Guardian twisted and peeked over hershoulder at the construct in question looming out of the gloom: a pale,man-high stone wall, about as battered by the freezing rain as the street thattook her ankle. With no doorway to speak of, from where they were coming from.Her face sagged. “…Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to sneak back through thegardens.”

“You were concerned though about runninginto Nevra at the foyer,” Valkyon reminded her.

He meant no offense—he rarely did whenrefreshing someone’s memory— but her face promptly turned a shade darker,visible even in the deep shadows of HQ’s honeyfruit orchard, where the blackbranches split apart the cold stars overhead like webs of cracks in the sky.

Biting his tongue, Valkyon’s eyes flickered awayfrom her expression, and fell on one spot on the wall ahead. Soon he added,more carefully, “Though I didn’t say it would be impossible toget past that wall. Just not easy. Can I put you down for a moment?”

Four quick knots later, they had a working fullbody sling from his cloak: big enough to carry a grown woman with a bad ankleon his back. Frankly, his friend didn’t look thrilled when he explained thatshe would be sitting knees-up in the sling, like a baby satchel sized up abouttwelve times, but she made no protest once he swung her onto his back andtightened the cloak’s knots around his shoulders. She had packed on some muscleover the last two years, but with her back pressing snug against his, her heelsswinging gently in the air somewhere above his kidneys, he barely felt theweight.

With a practiced eye, Valkyon found the sectionof the wall shot through with tendrils of dead ivy nearly as thick as hiswrist. One bout of overdue weeding finally exposed the fractured stonework. Hewent on to ruin it further by kicking at the largest crack he could find withthe sharp steel toe of his winter boot, about two feet above the ground.

“I don’t know what you’re doingthere,” came the voice from his back, in between the clanks of steelversus stone. “But it sounds expensive.”

In answer, the slate block gave way in twopieces on the ground, and a newborn step gaped in the open air. Perfectly dry.

“No more than it’ll take to repair the restof the wall,” Valkyon remarked with a wry smile at his footwork.“Which they were supposed to do this summer. Besides, I’m helping yousneak in, aren’t I?”

Whatever the Guardian had to say was lost whenhe put one boot onto the makeshift step, reached up, found the top of the stonewall with his hands, and pulled them both up with barely a grunt. Instead,there was a soft squeak from his back as they suddenly gained an extra sevenfeet in altitude from the black ground. Then again when he brought his legsover the wall and leapt clear into the last of the gardens, thestomach-lurching distance rushing back to greet them in reverse. Triumph camewith a massive, wet-sounding crunch that rattled them both to the teeth.

Valkyon, for the most part, was just glad thathe missed the wooden stakes that once supported the luminescent squash, and thefrozen Crowmero still stuck there, instead landing ankle- and wrist-deep in thefrozen mud just a hair next to them.

“Are you all right?”, he whispered,shaking the mud off his hands and wiping the splatter of slush off his cheek.

“… …Yes,” came the little voice frombehind his head, eventually. “Nice work. But let’s not do that again. I’mnot of fan of jumping down heights I can’t see. Especially not after a tavernrun.”

“Fair enough,” Valkyon smiled in thedark. He shrugged one arm out of the makeshift sling, and with a few deft turnsbrought the Guardian back against his chest. “Is this better?” heasked, locking his arms around her again.

For some reason, she looked up at him, colored,and made a strange coughing sound in her throat.

He frowned. “We better get you out of thecold. You had plenty to drink earlier.”

“You’re one to talk: I downed two pintsless than you,” she snorted as Valkyon crossed the length of the darkvegetable garden, sticking to the nigh-invisible dirt path that wound throughthe dormant squash beds to the backdoor of the kitchen. The snapping andcrunching of half-frozen ground informed him that he was on the right course,more or less.

“That was enough to try a rain dance on thesidewalk, wasn’t it?” he smiled back at his smuggled cargo.

The cargo in question answered with a scowl, aflush, and a quick turn of her head to the direction of the kitchens. “Itwasn’t a rain dance,” she muttered into her shoulder. “Not until thekids started asking, at least. They were a good audience though.”

“You are an excellentdancer,” he agreed mildly. When she didn’t say anything else, Valkyon letthe matter drop and treated himself to a full re-enactment in his mind’s eye.Humans were a funny race. The ceremony must be special all right, if itstraditional dance involved bouncing a sword off the tips of the boots andswinging around a lamp-post. The Guardian had finally slipped when she tried tokick an icicle. The kids all agreed that it was pretty spectacular.

How did that verse go again? Something aboutsinging in the—

“Is Karuto still awake?”

Valkyon snapped out of his reverie at theworried note to her voice and squinted at the light shining through the kitchenwindow ahead. Then he frowned as well. “He must have left the fire in thegrate. But either way, that’s our only way into the fort from here.” Quickas a thought, his tawny eyes glanced down at the Guardian and saw herexpression pinch under the warm amber glow from the window. “It’ll befine,” he added as reassuringly as he could, stepping onto the porch.“I don’t hear anything from inside.”

Still, he cautiously eased open the kitchen’sbackdoor with the toe of his boot. And was rewarded with the sight of the oldsatyr dressed in only a padded bathrobe, reading a book with his stout hoovespropped up on the corner of the counter. Parted, and pointing in theirdirection.

Fortunately, Valkyon learnt long ago that therewas nothing embarrassing about the physical body. Unfortunately, the Guardianseemed to have been taught differently. She glanced once into the fire-litkitchen, winced immediately, and shielded her eyes with her hand.

Karuto glanced up over the book he was reading,and his craggy expression fell from profound shock to embarrassment to the sourrighteousness of an old man interrupted in his private time in the space of onepoint five seconds.

“What are you two idiots doing in my kitchen?!”he bellowed from the counter, quickly swinging his hooves back to the floor andtightening his bathrobe around his hips. In one fluid movement, he snapped thebook shut and tucked it under his arm.

“Just getting out of the cold,”Valkyon replied with as straight a face as he could muster. He could outstare alive dragon if he wanted, but here he knew that he had reached the limit of hiscreative fibs.

Thankfully, the Guardian spoke up for them.“I twisted my ankle on the street walking back, and I just didn’t want towake anyone else at this hour. Sorry for walking in like this.”

The satyr puffed rudely through his nostrils,but his eyebrows had rearranged themselves into a tamer glower. “What doyou think this place is? The backdoor for hook-ups?”

His corporal flushed to the approximate color ofbeetroot, but Karuto didn’t wait for an answer; he gestured one-handed to thefront door of the kitchen, his book still tucked under one hammy arm.“Well I don’t care what you two do in your off-time. Just don’t bring itinto my kitchen without knocking!” Then he glared evilly at Valkyon’sboots, crusted to the tops with winter mud, steel spikes already sinking intothe floorboards. “And take your filthy rock-splitters with you!”

“All right, then.” Valkyon saidsimply, crossing the pantry as lightly as an armored man of six-foot-two couldwith a lady-friend in his arms. He waited until he was halfway out the doorbefore shooting back over his shoulder, “That’s a good book, by the way.Ykhar told me that it’s really steamy.”

The door shut before the first volley ofexpletives could follow them into the hall.

“What an ass…” the Guardian scowledinto her chest, arms folded tightly enough to bunch her shoulders up.

“It looked like he was really enjoying thatbook though,” her captain remarked, still smiling faintly to himself.

He meant that as another joke, but the Guardiankept her moody silence as they crossed the deserted foyer and down the corridorleading to the officer’s barracks, the floor lit clearly by the cold moonlightslipping through the high windows and the coruscating glass skylight at theapex of the ceiling.

The fort slept on as they made their way downthe barracks, his footsteps barely muffled by the threadbare crimson carpet.They stopped before a plain door near the end of the hall, still undecoratedafter two years. The Guardian fished out her keys from her coat and leaned outof Valkyon’s arms to unlock the door.

“Keep an eye out. Please, Valk.”

He blinked at the note of desperation in hervoice. Something was definitely wrong. But he duly peered left and right,seeing no curious faces popping out of the doors to stare their way.“Nothing. We’re clear.”

The Guardian decided not to answer and turnedthe catch, then the handle. At the answering click, Valkyon pivoted sidewaysand smoothly stepped inside when the door swung open, the blackness beyond litby the lambent light from a handful of bronze oil lamps. He shut the door againwith a neat kick from the back of his boot, hoping that when morning arrived,she wouldn’t notice the likely dent at the base.

Nestled in his arms, the Guardian sighed, allthe tension of the past hour leaving her body in one long, liquid breath thatleft a knot in his stomach.

He needed to say something to make her feelbetter, on a night like this.

“Even though it didn’t end like we planned,I really did enjoy that drink,” he confessed quietly as he stooped downand laid her gently onto the bed. “It’s nice to be able to see the townwith a friend.”

She kept her face turned away from him, and herusual smile far inside. “Karuto’s little joke didn’t bother you?”

“I reckon it’s less to do with us and moreabout the chapter he reached when we dropped in.”

Finally, a little twitch escaped from the cornerof her lips. The Guardian sat up straighter on the bed, propping herself upwith her hands, gingerly curling her legs to the side like a siren. When hereyes lingered resolutely at the level of his chin, Valkyon sat down on the bednext to her, elbows resting on knees, so that she no longer had to look at himstraight in the eye. Her shoulders relaxed infinitesimally, though her handcontinued to crumple the wine-colored satin sheets. He just waited.

It was often like this with them: the reading ofminute movements; a little gesture, timed just right, to calm the other andgive space to breathe; a tacit, patient silence in place of invitation orquestion. They never needed to speak to let each other know that they cared.

“What he said bothers me, because I know Ishouldn’t be spending time with you like this.”

Though sometimes, all the body languageexpertise in the world couldn’t predict what would fall from a friend’s mouth.Valkyon’s snowy eyebrows arched high. “Why should this be a problem? We’veknown each other for two years now. It’s not a stretch to act like goodfriends.”

“Too good,” she cut himoff shortly, still staring down at the bed. Suddenly, in the silence, eventhough her expression hadn’t moved, she looked ready to cry.

He quickly laid his hand over hers, enclosingher fingers in the warm span of his own. “There is nothing that I haveever regretted doing for you. Not tonight. Not any time since. Don’t ever thinkyourself unworthy. As I see it, nothing can be further from the truth.”

Her head shot up and her eyes finally caughthis. “Well what if I told you that I loved you?”

Silence never rang louder in his ears.

After some moments, Valkyon tried to swallow,but it seemed that what moisture remained in his throat was transmuted intoglue in the space of ten words. The body knew some cruel alchemy.

What was there to be said, when a woman yourfriend said he was in love with turned around and flung those same words atyou?

She was right about one thing. He reallyshouldn’t be here.

The bed groaned as Valkyon shot to his feet.“You could use some sleep,” he said mechanically, locking hisexpression into the epitome of a stone wall. Anything more was… not going tohelp this situation. “You’ll feel better in the morning. I’ll bring somewillow bark tea from Ewelein and a new splint to–”

Her face crumpled like a violet at the firstbite of winter. But her voice when it came, was furious. “You really thinkI said all that because I'm drunk?!” She started laughing,soundlessly. “Good god, you think I'm…! Have you ever looked atyourself in a mirror, Valkyon? For more than two seconds? Do you ever look atthe other tables in the mess when you walk by?”

His ears were burning like live coals now.“That’s irrelevant,” he snapped back, shutting his mind to moreimages along that vein. “The point is that you’re asking for something Ican’t-” But his tongue failed him right before it shaped those last,crucial words.

His mistake was that he chose to look right ather at that very moment. And saw just how wide her eyes had opened. Enough tosee the new shine to them, obvious and fierce even under the smoky light of theoil lamps.

Valkyon knew, beyond the shadow of the doubt,what he needed to do tonight as a friend. But when his mind was flying asstraight as an arrow to its destination, his heart lagged behind, anchored tothis pregnant silence between him and the woman who earned more than just thename of comrade in the last year.

He shouldn’t have looked at her at all at thatmoment.

With an effort, Valkyon shut his eyes andunclenched his jaw, then the muscles of his neck, upper back, and shoulders,knot-by-knot, counting down the seconds in his mind until he felt the rictus ofpanic lift from his body. When he spoke again, his voice was soft, low, andweighed with stone, as though the mere sound of his murmur could wake the floorto what was happening here. He was half-afraid that it would.

“Nevra’s a good man. And with you, Ibelieve he’s showing himself to be an admirable one. Don’t give up on him. Whatyou both share is… rare enough that it deserves to be protected. Take it fromme.”

“Have you tried datinghim?” she quipped tiredly, with none of the same reserve rooting him towhere he was on the floor. Her face remained mercifully dry as she curled herinjured leg tighter against herself, fingers fiddling with the slush-stainedfold of her trousers. “I’ve been telling myself that for the last threemonths, but… there are many kinds of good men out there. Not just the one. Andif they’re still not a good fit after a year, then… that’s something no oneneeds to be afraid to admit.”

He was getting the uncanny feeling that they hadarrived at uncharted territory. And it deserved to remain that way, from wherehe stood. With one foot already on the wrong side of the fence. “Thismight be something he needs to hear from you,” Valkyon attempted.

“And he never lets go ofan argument easily,” the Guardian cut in, throwing up one hand, butwithout much conviction. She looked too drained. “He’ll try to work aroundit. Plant a Beriflore trap by asking me what I mean by another kind of ‘goodman’. What if I tell him that I don’t want someone who’ll wave me aside or dishout orders when trouble hits, but will just stand nearby and let me take careof myself for a change, until I do ask him for help? What if I tell him I’mtired of snappy wit and mind-games? That I prefer someone who’ll give hishonest opinions and feelings as they are, with no other motive but to just layout the facts and confirm that yes, he heard me? Not every conversation needsto be a duel, or some kind of… courtship dance! And think about what Nev willsay if I tell him I want someone who can appreciate the little gestures—likeholding hands—without joking about it, or trying to top it until it snowballsinto something bigger. That I respect a man who doesn’t put himself at the axisof the world—much less my world—even as a joke. Someone who,no matter how skilled he is, can step aside and let others take their shots,then congratulate them when they do succeed, no matter how small.”

Just moments ago, his ears felt like they hadbeen pulled fresh from a fire. Now, they were probably cinder.

She turned those red-rimmed eyes to him again.“He’ll say that he’s hurt that I can’t accept him as he is. That I’ve beenreading too many romances. That I’m reaching too far. When I can see, plain asday, that I’m not.”

His corporal was right when she guessed that henever tried inspecting himself in the mirror; that each day he would walkacross the mess without trying to make extra eye contact with the femalerecruits. Because there was the ever-present question of: why bother?

Over the last several years, Valkyon recognizedthat there were two general reactions whenever he opened his mouth for astranger: they would flinch, as though they were one wrong word away from gettingan axe to the neck, or they would stare like he was an exotic new import forthe menagerie. Sometimes, to shake things up, they would laugh at a gesturehe’d made, which later queries would show was completely inappropriate for thesituation.

The problem was never the people he chose totalk to. It was himself. Unknown, borderline-dangerous, inscrutable, unsmiling,unsocial, blunt, out-of-place; these were the words he overheard others usewhen talking about him, and he still couldn’t deny them. He was no charmer.Some days, he returned the sentiment and barely understood the people he spoketo.

But what sealed his decision to keep his headdown every time he crossed the mess was that, after all these years, even aftertaking the helm of the Obsidian Guard and earning the—at least pro forma– trustof this city, he never fitted in once the bell rang to relieve him from hispost. When others recounted the day’s highlights and pitfalls, he had virtuallynone to add from his corner of the table. When they swapped stories from theirhometowns, gossiped about mutual friends, traded in-jokes, bickered overpolitics, argued over the finer nuances of art and shared hobbies, he couldonly keep his silence.

He had started too young in the field of war,and spent too long in it to learn to be anything else. What could he say abouthimself to reel in someone’s interest? Or keep it?

So if the call was sent out for an attractiveman, Valkyon would recommend one or two of his colleagues. He made his peacelong ago with the fact that he wasn’t in the running for 'El’s most eligiblebachelor’. And if there was a woman who could appreciate his company, he wouldnever dare ask for more than her friendship. Because what else could he offerin return?

Apparently, more than he knew. Based on what hewas hearing now from his corporal.

Under those eyes, Valkyon felt his jaw lock onceagain, the pulse hammering in his throat as his stomach contracted and sent awave of heat smoldering across his skin up to his hairline. The seams of hisheart stretched taut. Now, he was the one who couldn’t meet her gaze. The soundof her breathing filled the dark.

What was strange about love was how contagiousit was. Just moments ago, he saw a dear friend with a leaden heart he needed tounburden. Now, in the space of ten critical words, in the span of one argumentthat shook down the doors holding back a season’s worth of hurt and longing, hesaw someone else in her place.

If it wasn’t for that tiny, telltale scar on theside of her neck, he would have joined her there on the bed and sated hiscuriosities. About the taste of her mouth, the fit of her curves against him,the warmth of her breath against his neck, the feel of her hard-won laughterreverberating through his chest as she lay with him, hair, fingers, limbs,hopes intertwined.

But there were some battles that he couldn’tafford to join.

“…I am so sorry,” he heard his voicebreak the murk. “But you know that I can’t stay any longer. If there’sanyone who needs to hear this, it’s him. And you should be able to do it. Goodnight. And look after yourself.”

With that, he turned away from the woman on thebed and walked out the door. Even when he heard that hitch of breath, thewhisper of sheets over sheets, the hurried creaking of the mattress, he didn’tdare to turn around.

In all his years alone, Valkyon held onto onetruth: no matter what others chose to see in him, he knew he was made to be aprotector. It didn’t matter then if he returned each night to an empty bed, ifhe was the only one who knew what his laughter sounded like. The happiness ofthose he looked after became his happiness.

Tonight, of all nights, he needed to convincehimself of that.

FIN

>_> || _> *sneaks back in to scribble a note*

This blog needs to start anew mission: the “Save Valkyon!” project.

To join the cause, just typein the keywords ‘Valkyon’ and ‘fluff’ in the ask box.

This is Barbed-Phoenix,signing off until Friday. So long, my lovelies.

*runs again*

#request #one-shot #Eldarya #Valkyon #shy! Guardian

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