Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

+++

There hadn’t been much time for rest since they’d escaped the dungeons together.

There’d been too much to do, even without the ever present risk of being caught, to truly relax even after they’d left Helidor behind and set out towards Cobblestone.

It had seemed they’d have no problem reaching Cobblestone before nightfall even when they’d realized they’d need to take the longer route through the Manglegrove.

Of course, neither of them could have anticipated the bridge being out. The Manglegrove, which had been dark and distinctly unsettling during the day, had been little improved by the fall of night.

He’d been grateful to Erik for the sudden and unexpected distraction of the forge. It had made it easier to keep his mind from lingering on home, so close and yet so very distant. Having something to do with his hands, something to focus his mind on a task rather than on all the worries that hounded him, made the night considerably more pleasant than it would otherwise have been.

Late into the night he had worked, occasionally standing to stretch aching muscles and wipe sweat from his eyes. A curious glance towards Erik always found him the same, leaning back against a stump, glowering balefully at the fire as he tossed bits of leaves and twigs in to burn. He sighed, unable to think of anything to say, and went back to making himself useful by banging out a tidy pile of weapons and armor to upgrade and augment what little they’d been able to afford in the way of gear while they’d been in Helidor. He’d had no idea clothing could be so expensive.

It was late and the moon was high by the time he’d finished his work and staggered back over to where Eric was sprawled to offer him the finest of the weapons he’d managed to create: a dagger that the recipe book had called divine. Upon actually seeing the finished product, he rather thought the book had been overselling it, but he was at least pretty proud of the particularly fine edge he’d managed to put on it so, hopefully, it’d do well enough.

”Aw, you made me something sharp and pointy,” Erik commented, grinning up at him, obviously pleased. He’d taken the dagger from him and whistled approvingly as he examined it before finally slipping it into his boot. “I knew there was a reason I liked you. Come sit down and eat something before you fall over, eh?”

He smiled, dropping the rest of his creations into a haphazard pile near the fire before coming over to flop down next to Erik and take the bag of jerky he offered.

They ate in companionable silence, passing the bag back and forth until it was empty. By then the fire was low and the hopeful merchant, who’d set up shop by the holy reliquary, had given up on them and turned in for the night, vanishing into the cabin with his wares as the dog on the porch gave a half-hearted whine of protest.

Erik shoved a few sticks into the guttering campfire, stirring the ashes until the wood crackled and caught, flames flaring to life once more beneath his careful attention.

The moon was high, just barely visible through the tangled canopy of branches overhead, by the time they’d finally settled in to sleep. They’d lain together, back to back, as close to the fire as they dared, their cloaks pulled tight against the heavy damp chill of the night.

Yet, even though exhaustion had weighed heavily in his limbs, he’d still lain awake for a long time, staring into the fire, watching the embers shift and glow as the night crept by.

He’d felt Erik startle awake beside him again and again as the hours passed.

It reminded him of the nights he and Gemma had spent pretending at camp outs in the village commons. They’d staked their oft-patched, well-loved makeshift tent out beneath the trees near the church or by the riverbank and huddled beneath it in a nest of blankets and told each spooky stories until it became too dark to see.

Once the light was gone and the world was dark, they’d lay down to sleep and Gemma would jump at every little noise even though every one had been familiar and easily identifiable. Even though most had been drowned out or made ridiculous by Sandy, snoring near their feet, fluffy and warm, and completely oblivious to the encroaching danger of scurrying squirrels and eager crickets.

”Oh, you. Do shut up,” she’d grouched before trying to smother his smile with her pillow as he shivered and shook with laughter the time she’d nearly jumped out of skin and almost taken the tent down with her when Henri - an old, half-blind goat that belonged to the old man who owned the item shop - had wandered over and tried to make a snack of their tent flaps. 

He’d ended up having to lead the goat home twice before it finally gave in and stayed there.

“I always thought the Luminary would be a serious bloke, bit of a stick in the mud," Erik commented, huffing and pulling his cloak tighter around him, reeling him back from distant memories into the present. "Don't know what you're dreaming about, but it must be nice.”

”Not dreaming. Remembering,” he replied, turning over to trace the answering words against Erik’s back with slow deliberate strokes.

He could hear Erik's smile in his response, ”Ah, hey, can't sleep either I take it?”

He shrugged, curling closer and burying his own answering smile against Erik's shoulder thoughtlessly.

He could feel him tense at the touch, but when he tried to draw away and put more space between them, Erik was quick to catch his arm and draw it over his waist to force him close once more.

"No! There’s... no need for that. It’s... a cold night. Wouldn’t want either of us to freeze to death. Me... ah... me and Dirk used to bunk up like this all the time. To keep warm, ya know?" Erik commented, fingers resting against his forearm, tension lingering in his spine. "It’s just... been a while since I’ve been close to someone like this. That’s all. Takes some getting used to is all."

He nodded quickly, more to put Erik at ease than because he understood. He’d spent his whole life surrounded by a whole village full of people who jostled and hugged and ruffled his hair all the time. He couldn’t imagine how lonely it would be to live his life so rarely touched by those around him. It seemed to him to be a very sad way to live.

Unaware of the sober turn of his thoughts, Erik sank back against him with a heavy sigh as if to prove he could or maybe just that he would. He wasn’t sure and couldn’t quite bring himself to ask. Whatever the reason, it was... nice and it seemed maybe Erik thought so too, because it seemed only moments before His breathing evened out and the fingers that had lingered against his forearm fell away.

This time when he closed his eyes, he could feel the exhaustion of their flight from the capital in his bones and with the fire at his back and Erik’s warmth tucked against his chest, he finally drifted, reluctantly, to sleep.

He'd woken the following morning to find the sun glittering along the horizon to Erik shaking his shoulder with surprising gentleness. When he squinted up at him, he found him offering him a cup of something strong and bitter and a pouch of dried fruit with a lopsided grin, "Best eat quickly, we still need to figure out a solution to our bridge problem.” 

That morning Erik had seemed... different, lighter, telling stories of his days in Helidor  with a sort of giddy enthusiasm as the waited for the woodcutter to patch the bridge and afterwards as they fought their way through the last of the Manglegrove, as if every step they took away from Helidor served to lighten his spirits the further. 

It was early afternoon by the time they emerged from the caves that stood between the Manglegrove and the rolling hills that lay between Cobblestone and Helidor.

”Pretty country,” Erik called, clamoring up the hillside around the ruins of the old outpost near the tunnel that led through to Cobblestone. He picked up and pocketed a shiny bobble from the grass before hopping back down again. “Ready to go home?”

He was. 

He was ready to introduce his new friend to his family, to tell them all that had happened, to ask their advice, and sleep in his own bed.

He was ready to forget all the strangeness of the last few days and, perhaps, even forget for a very short while that he was the Luminary and that they were fugitives from the King’s justice.

Just for a day.

Or a night.

Just long enough to hug his mum and Gemma and say a proper good-bye, because who knew when he’d be able to return?

And then, when that was done and he could put it off no longer, he would tell them all that had happened and, with any luck, perhaps they would be able to give him an idea of what to do after he’d gone with Erik to retrieve that orb from the Kingsburrow.

Chapter Text

”Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)

+++

There was a pew sitting on the grass outside the church.

"So, tragic," the Clergyman commented somewhere behind him, his voice deep with remorse. "If only I had arrived a bit sooner, I'm certain I could have reasoned with them."

Sitting there just neat as you please, as if it had just been moved outside so it could get a bit of fresh air.

"Yeah, no doubt all those soldiers would've been happy to let bygones be bygones if only someone had been there to tell them that all this burning and pillaging was a bit much," Erik remarked, the weight of his gaze heavy against Eleven’s back as he stood, silently staring at that lonely pew and the way the varnish they'd put on it over the summer glistening beneath the late afternoon sun.

Just sitting there as if it were a perfectly normal place for a pew to be.

As if the doors of the church hadn't been knocked clear off their hinges. 

As if his home wasn't char and rubble, the air filled with ash and smoke.

Cobblestone had never been a quiet place and yet now he could hear the rustling of leaves in the breeze and the crackle of guttering fires and Erik and the clergyman chatting and it felt like they were the only people left in the whole wide world.

”I am quite certain cooler heads would have prevailed if only they’d been reminded that kindness and generosity are not sins to be punished. Not even if their good intentions did benefit a being of evil. How were they to know? I’ve heard the babe is a strapping lad, no more foul to behold than either of you fine lads.”

A loose stone tumbled free from the crumbling wall of Gemma's home, rolling to a stop against the toe of his boot, as if the house itself were mourning all that had been lost.

“Imagine that,” Erik replied, a vague hint of amusement in his voice as he clapped a hand against his shoulder, “I’d have thought for certain he’d be covered in boils or wearing some innocent villager’s head as a hat or somewhat.”

”No, no, that is a common misunderstanding. One can never know true evil just by looking upon it. No, no, one can only know it by the havoc it has wrought.”

”Thanks for the lesson, we’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” Erik commented dryly.

He hadn’t noticed how the air reeked of smoke as they'd passed through the narrow canyon and into the cavern that marked the northern entrance to Cobblestone. Perhaps he’d been too busy worrying about how he was going to explain all that had happened or too focused on how eager he was to be home again.

Or perhaps it was simply that the World Tree had already wrapped him in its gentle grip even then, blinding him to the heartbreak of the present as it provided him with what he would need to carry out the will of the world. Ferrying him back into a past made strange and malleable by a power he felt he might never truly understand.

He wasn’t certain when he’d no longer heard the crunch of Erik’s boots against the dirt of the road echoing his own steps. One moment he’d been there and the next he’d been alone looking out over the bustling village, just the same as it ever was.

Only it hadn’t been.

How many times had Gemma's scarf been whisked away by the wind, been caught upon that same branch? How many times had he gone to find Chalky at the river's edge? How often had he borrowed ladders before he'd been tall enough and strong enough to climb the tree himself? Had all those events truly been such a constant in his life that all those times had blurred together? It seemed, looking back at it now, that it must have happened a hundred times.

A hundred times lost, a hundred times found, a hundred times returned that headscarf had been.

It had been an endless cycle in his childhood that he'd never thought to question, a blur of action and reaction barely worthy of remark even in its constancy. It didn’t seem so far-fetched to believe that somewhere, lost within that repetition, buried and dismissed as unimportant, there could exist this vague memory of the one time he hadn't needed to retrieve it at all, alongside the blurry memory of a faceless man standing at the end of the pier.

Of thanking that same man later, beneath the boughs of what he always thought of as Gemma’s tree. The pull of a sudden gust of wind that had sent his dark hair fluttering and how one moment the man had been standing there before him only to be gone in the next. How easily he’d dismissed such a strange occurrence, falling back into the habits of childhood as Gemma dragged him off to play in the stables.

A series of faded memories that seemed as if they must have been summoned into existence by this new memory of the child he'd once been running past him without a care in the world.

A vague paper thin recollection of thanking and being thanked overlaid one atop the other, painful and bittersweet with the reality of all he had lost still smoldering around him.

Had those memories always been there? Lost beneath the layers of constant repetition? Or were they newly formed? Birthed by necessity and the whim of the world tree?  

He was certain only that he would never know the truth of any of it and that he ached in the silence, ached with missing almost everyone he had ever known as if their unexpected absence had left a hole carved in his soul.

Even the loss of Grandad felt new and fresh once more, the scars ripped asunder by the faded warmth of his smile. 

"El?" Erik inquired, summoning him from his thoughts by sliding in front of him, the grip on his shoulder tightening briefly before releasing him so he could stand before him. Erik’s brow was furrowed with worry, making it clear he'd been lost too long in his own head. “I know this is... I know, but lingering here won’t make it better.”

There was a gravity to his words, a desperation in his expression, that made it seem as if he had spoken those words before, as if there were some terrible shadow looming over him, leaning a great weight upon his narrow shoulders. 

“Fortunately,” the clergyman called, oblivious to their conversation, “the Heliodorian forces did not destroy the church. That is something at least. And inside, you will find a bed where a traveler may yet rest his weary bones.”

Such a wonderful and terrible thought.

The idea of sleeping here with the lingering stench of smoke and charred wood in the air at war with the thought of a proper bed.

A proper night’s sleep was something they both desperately needed.

If they didn't both get some rest, they'd be in a world of trouble when the King's men came for them.

And they would come.

There could be no doubt now that those knights would keep pursuing him until he’d been caught and stuffed back into that dungeon once more along with any who had ever heard his name.

They had destroyed Cobblestone just for daring to have sheltered him. 

Had they even bothered to tell them why they were setting their homes aflame?

Did he dare to hope they'd been imprisoned? That their homes were the only casualties?

The very idea seemed almost too much to hope for.

Erik's fingers tightened around his own, slowly, as if he thought he might startle him if he moved too fast. His expression was so carefully shuttered that it could barely be called an expression at all. "Listen, I know it’s tough, but we can’t just hang around here. If what your grandad said was right, we need to head east, to Cobblestone Falls. I mean, if that tree showed you stuff from the past, I guess it must be pretty important, right? You should go check out whatever it is your grandad wanted you to find.”

“I know, but not yet,” he replied, rousing himself enough to shake free of Erik’s hold, throat aching. “We should stay the night.”

”You’re joking, right?” Erik asked incredulously, glancing at the church like it might turn into a monster and eat him at any moment. “I know he said there was a bed in there, but....”

Charred, empty and broken as it was... Cobblestone was still his home. 

Erik scrubbed a hand over his face and stepped in close, his voice hushed, “We could just keep going, you know? Make camp outside of town, near the Falls maybe? It can't be so far we couldn't make it there before nightfall.”

It was a thoughtful offer.

And Erik kind for making it when he looked as if he’d like nothing better than to stumble inside and collapse face-first into the bed the traveling clergyman had told them about.

Not that he himself felt much better.

His limbs felt heavy and every time he moved it felt as if he were walking upstream, fighting the current with ever step. His eyes ached, though whether that owed to grief or exhaustion or the lingering smoke, he did not know.

All the more reason to get what rest they could when they could.

It was that more than anything else that made him smile weakly and shake his head, gesturing past the fallen doors to the church beyond.

The church had been drafty long before the King's men had crashed through the doors, but it had always been a cheerful. It had been a place where children hid behind pews and dogs were always welcomed, where people came as much to say their prayers as they did to sit and chat with their neighbors.

It wasn't the heart of the Cobblestone, not exactly, but it was a good place, warm and bustling and noisy and as full of life as any place in Helidor had been.

And now... now it was just empty.

The pews had all been shoved aside by careless hands and one of the tall candelabrum that had flanked the alter had been cast to the floor and bent beneath the tread of heavy, armored boots. The alter itself had been pushed aside, the book and the block on which it had sat cast to the floor like so much rubbish.

“You really think you’ll be able to sleep here?” Erik inquired, threading a hand back through his hair as he stepped gingerly over and around the scattered pews and fallen debris. 

He shrugged helplessly, uncertain.

Cobblestone was the only home he'd ever truly known. Before the cor and all that happened there, he had thought to spend his whole life sitting in the pews of its church, running over its hills, catching frogs in the stream that ran through its heart.

The reek of smoke was not so heavy within the church, but it still lingered in the air brought by the breeze and along with occasional flurries of ash. The fading afternoon sunlight was warm against his back, but he knew it would be gone soon enough, leaving only the deepening shadows and chill of night.

He wasn't quite sure how best to explain his desire to linger, he just knew that it felt… right, perhaps even necessary, to let it shelter him one last time before they set out for Cobblestone Falls and whatever lay beyond. He couldn’t help but feel that, once they left, it would be a long, long time before he returned, if he ever did.

He stood in the aisle, the beginnings of a dozen explanations frozen in his throat, eyes stinging as the emptiness that had lingered since the moment Yggdrasil had dropped him unceremoniously from the comfort of memory into the cold reality of what Cobblestone had become threatened to swallow him whole. 

Erik leaned in to look into his face and whatever he saw there must have been answer enough as he looked exasperated when he turned away, throwing his hands in the air, “Fine, I give up! Far be it for me to be telling anyone how to mourn their losses.”

It seemed inappropriate to laugh, but laughter still shook through him as Erik stomped away towards the rooms behind where the lector had once stood, grumbling something about candles and seers which he couldn’t quite hear and probably wouldn’t have understood even if he could have. 

"Well, they might not have put the place to the torch on account of all the stone, but they sure made a mess of it knocked a great chunk out of it. He was right though... there’s a bed alright," Erik called back to him as he forced himself to take one step and then another past the scattered furniture. He stepped into the priest’s room to find the bed and floor scattered liberally with ash that had drifted in through the high windows.

When he came in Erik was crouched beside a bookcase that had been tipped over, its books scattered across the floor, pages and covers bent at strange angles. He shook one of the books out, smoothing it’s pages before closing it and setting it upon the table. He stood back up with a sigh, dusting ash-stained fingers against his trousers, “It’s all a bit worse for wear, but it should be alright for the night if you’re determined to spend it here.”

The candles were still burning in their place upon the room's only table, a single stool overturned beside it as if the priest had been seated when they came. 

How long had those candles been burning? It couldn’t have been long, could it?

Would they have been in time if they'd pushed through the night? If they'd discovered the woodcutter's fate earlier maybe....

"Don't think about what could have been," Erik advised, as if reading the thoughts racing across his mind. "It doesn't help and it won’t change anything."

There was something about the way he said it, a certain gravity to his expression or some sadness to the wry smile that turned up his lips, that made the words ring with the authority of experience.

"You lost someone?" He asked hesitantly, fingers weaving uncertainly through the air between them.

"Something like that," Erik replied, turning away deliberately, his voice brisk but not unkind. "But that’s my business and it seems to me like you've got enough worry to be getting on with without looking to mine. Why don’t you go ahead and get settled in while I take a look around, eh?”

He didn't leave any room for argument, ducking out of the room before he could even begin to form a protest.

Some wounds took longer to heal than others.

And maybe some never healed at all.

Eleven sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face and setting his bag down one the table beside those still burning candles.

Gemma had always said he could be a real dunderhead sometimes. Erik had already made it clear enough in Helidor that he didn’t want him poking his nose in where it didn’t belong. It was his own fault for not taking the hint.

He’d have to apologize when Erik came back.

Growing up in such a small village he’d always felt like he’d known everything there was to know about everyone in his life. It hadn’t been true, of course, the last few days had made that clear enough, but it had always felt like that. And even though they’d only been together a short time, it had felt like he and Erik had that same sort of connection.

Perhaps that was the way of all partnerships formed beneath such dire circumstances.

He wished he had someone he could ask.

Someone who would tell him it was okay to want Erik to stay with him even if it might have been safer for them to go their separate ways once Erik found that orb of his.

Leaving his bag behind, he made his way over to examine the bed. It was neatly made for all that it had been liberally covered with ash and dust. He made an effort to brush the worst of it off, but he was relatively certain all he managed to actually do was smear it around a bit as when he sat down on the edge it still sent a great puff of dust into the air around him that made him wince and cough.

In the distance, he could hear Erik striking up another conversation with the clergyman though he can't quite make out what they're saying.

He took off his sword and leaned it against the  bed before removing his boots and setting them neatly beside it.

His stomach grumbled a brief gurgling complaint, but there’s nothing to be done for it as they’d eaten the last of their food that morning before they’d set off for Cobblestone. Sighing, Eleven flopped back against the bed, sending another cloud of dust into the air.

The priest would have hated to see it like this. He’d always been so meticulous in keeping the church tidy and clean. 

So much was gone.

Perhaps later he would be sad or angry or… something, but for now all he feels is that same vast sea of emptiness within him where all those feelings should be.

It was so quiet that, if not for the sound of Erik’s voice, his laugh, it would have been intolerable.

As it was, if he closed his eyes, he could almost pretend he was back in that inn in Heliodor listening to Erik joke around with the woman who’d run it.

It's not a comfort, exactly, but it makes it easier to let go and fall into an uneasy slumber.

+++

When they'd been young, Gemma used to sleep over often, creeping into his house and his bed in the dead of night to tuck her cold toes against his shins and her face against his chest. And, when he’d complained, she’d told him she was doing him a favor since she knew he had nightmares sometimes and it was only fair that he pay her back in kind since she had nightmares sometimes too.

So he had.

He’d almost very slept alone.

As they'd gotten older, their parents had put a stop to it, smiling and making coy chuckling remarks about the future to which Gemma had always huffed and rolled her eyes, “It's like they don’t wanna see it, eh? You could jus’ tell ‘im, you know.”

He did know, but there'd never seemed a right moment for it and as they'd gotten older there hadn't seemed much point. They’d outgrown their nightmares and learned to sleep alone and then it had just seemed... easier not to say anything at all. He hadn't ever planned to leave Cobblestone, why would he?

Everyone he knew lived in Cobblestone, everyone he loved, and even if he didn’t fancy  Gemma the way his Mum and the others seemed to think he should... he still loved her.  And if one day she decided she wanted him to marry her, he could have done that. There were certainly worse reasons than friendship.

His whole life had stretched out before him as a narrow, well-trodden path that circled back on itself again and again and he’d never thought to question it, never dreamed of wanting anything else at all.

In his dreams he is an old man he’d always imagined he’d become and he’s fishing in the same river he’d been fishing in his whole life, watching the village children hunt through the shallows for frogs.

Nothing smells like smoke and everyone is happy and he is satisfied with that.

+++

When he woke the air had grown cool and the sky dark. Beyond the high windows he could see the drifting grey of clouds obscuring the moon beyond the windows above him. The threat of a storm was only a distant rumbling possibility as he laid there watching the clouds bunch and drift overhead as they cast the room into shadow again and again.

Would the storm break as he slept?

Would he wake to the patter of raindrops across his cheeks? Blown in by the same breeze that had scattered ash and dust across the whole of the room.

At least a little rain might finally extinguish the last of the fires he could still scent in the air.

It had been raining that day as well. 

The day they'd climbed the Cor and everything had changed. It had all happened so fast; so much faster than anything had ever happened in their whole lives. The fall and the glow and all those long buried truths and that letter and the necklace. Before he'd really even had time to think on it he'd been out on the road on his own with Gemma's good luck charm clutched in his hand and a sturdy, well-trainer horse at his side.

Helidor had been everything he was expecting and somehow so much different than he’d imagined all at once.

It had been big and crowded and a little frightening and nothing like Cobblestone. No one had known him and it had been nice and also terrible and he’d felt... so small and so different, like he’d become a stranger in his own skin.

He'd stopped over at the inn after he’d rescued a cat from a roof and the boy behind the bar had winked at him as he brought him his drink and he'd wanted to bury his burning face in his hands and never look at anyone ever again. He wasn’t the sort of person people winked at. Gemma would have laughed herself sick if she could have seen him.

Afterwards he'd wandered through town aimlessly. He’d helped people with their errands, watched musicians play and then, eventually, he'd finally gone to the castle and he'd gotten nothing for his trouble but more trouble.

He remembered thinking, as they held him fast and marched him through the castle that he never should have left home in the first place. 

It had almost been a relief when he'd been tossed unceremoniously into the castle dungeons.

He scrubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes and swallowed hard on the beginnings of a sob.

The soft crunch and scrap of broken gravel against stone is all the warning he gets before the mattress dips beneath him and he sits up, reaching for his sword as moonlight slips through an opening in the clouds above to cast Erik's features into sharp relief.

“Hey, whoa there, it’s only me,” Erik’s Hans lands atop his own, stilling it before he can draw the sword, but it does little to still his racing heart. “Sorry, thought you knew I was there.”

He shook his head, trying to force his breath to slow. Erik’s hand was warm where it lingered against his own.

”Bad dreams?” He asked, teeth flashing sudden and white, eyes bright as if they'd caught all the moon's light within them.

Strange the tricks that shadows play.

He shrugged, relaxing his grip on the sword’s hilt at last, heart still racing in his chest.

Erik didn’t seem to mind, replying as if he'd given him a proper response rather than just that single meaningless gesture, “Makes sense that you would have. You've got a lot on your mind just now. Big day tomorrow and all.”

He can feel the beginnings of heat burning in his cheeks.

Erik would probably be terribly disappointed to discover the Luminary in whom he put so much faith had been trying his best not to think about tomorrow at all. Even with all the new knowledge and revelations he'd been given, all he had were more questions and precious few leads as to where he might find answers. The path ahead was dark and the idea that Erik might opt not to walk it with him made it seem terribly lonely.

“Budge over,” Erik murmured, barely waiting for him to clear a space for him before he flopped down on the bed beside him, folding an arm behind his head and crossing his legs at the ankle, neat as you please, as if he wasn't clearing his throat in an likely ill fated attempt to fight off a cough because of the new cloud of ash he’d sent into the air around them.

He can’t help the laugh that bubbles up when Erik finally loses the battle and chokes out a dry, hacking cough.

“Oh? Think that’s funny do you?” Erik’s elbow landed against his side, digging into his ribs and it only made him laugh harder until Erik was chuckling right along with him, their mirth making the room feel warmer.

When he turned to look at him he found Erik was looking up and his face brushes against his hair.

Soft.

”I’m sorry about earlier,” he murmured and Erik’s shoulders lifted in a gentle shrug. 

“Nah, it’s my fault. You might not have noticed, but I’m not good at this sort of thing. Tell you what, how about I just go steal something for you instead, hm? I'm actually good at that. Want me to lift something off that clergyman loitering about out there? Fancy a cross or a… what else do you reckon they carry about? Healing Slave? Extra pair of pants?”

The question made him smile, weak though it may have been.

“So, what do you think? Wafers? Holy book, maybe?”

He chuckled and shook his head.

”Fine, have it your way. No stealing from the clergy. Who knew the Luminary was such a stick in the mud, hm? Ah, well, can’t say I didn’t offer. Gets real dark out here, doesn't it? Can’t say I much like the look of those clouds. I’ve never much cared for the rain.”

If he closed his eyes just now while their laughter still lingered in the air, he might almost be able to pretend their arrival in Cobblestone was all just some awful dream and they were still on the road.

So he does.

He closed his eyes and buried his face against the shoulder of Erik’s tunic and listens as he rambles on, filling the unnatural silence of the night with reflections on the sky and some creature they'd slain on their way from Helidor, before eventually settling into a series of vaguely interconnected stories of mishaps on jobs he'd pulled with Dirk back when they'd been partners and, like all of Erik’s stories, they tell him nothing much about Erik himself other than to reaffirm the fact that Erik doesn't like to talk about himself much at all.

Still he's grateful for it.

For him.

Eventually he must have fallen back to sleep, for the next time he opens his eyes, his face was pressed against Erik's neck, his fingers lodged in his belt as if to anchor him in place and the light streaming in from above is already bright.

Erik’s fingers stroked idly through the length of his hair as he sang some strange lilting ballad in a language he does not know.

It seemed sad.

The sort of song that was meant to stir thoughts of love lost and regret and it made his chest ache. Painful, but also… nice in a way, like a reminder that he's not the first to feel such things.

That he was not alone.

He must have made some noise without meaning to as too soon the song trails off unfinished and Erik’s hand drops away from his hair as he clears his throat and shifts as if to put distance between them, “Hey there.”

“Hey,” he echoed, letting him go reluctantly and scooting back to put enough space between them that he can look into his face. “Morning.”

The smile that greets him is lopsided and fond, “Barely. I was beginning to think you might sleep the whole day away. Not that I'd blame ya, but I can't imagine it’ll take them too long to think to double back and look for us here.”

“You're probably right about that,” he answered, reluctantly leveraging himself up, freeing Erik who sat up, stretched and immediately turned his attention to working out the kinks in his shoulder with a grimace. “Sorry.”

Erik’s smirk set his stomach to flopping about like a landed fish, “I'm the one who should be apologizing to you. Stealing into your bed unasked in the middle of the night. Least I probably deserve is a sore shoulder.”

“Hardly stealing. Where else were you going to sleep? I should be thanking you, I doubt I'd have slept half so well alone,” he replied, unable to contain a pleased smile as color bloomed across Erik’s cheeks.

“You're an odd one,” Erik replied, huffing a laugh as he stood still stretching. “I'll go have a quick look around while you get ready, make sure his holiness didn’t decide to sell us out while we slept.”

“He wouldn't.”

“You're far too trusting,” Erik huffed.

The careless words struck an unexpected blow that left him gasping as Erik stood, jarring the bed enough to send stone dust rising softly around him once more, an inescapable reminder of the cost of misplaced trust.

“Sorry,” Erik murmured, hand catching at the doorframe, fingers pale against the stone. “That wasn't… it’s not a bad thing, wanting to give folks the benefit of the doubt. I mean, if you weren't so willing to trust folks you shouldn't, we'd never have met.”

“I know.”

And he did, of course he did, the people he loved wouldn't want him to lose faith in himself or others because of one bad experience.

Even if the cost of that experience was far too steep.

“Besides," Erik commented, breaking through the dark turn of his thoughts as he turned back to offer him a smile. "I'm still looking forward to tasting your Ma's cooking someday."

And for the first time since he'd opened his eyes to find Cobblestone empty and broken around him, it felt like everything might turn out all right.

"Thank you," he replied, meaning it.

“Anytime,” Erik called back before disappearing out the door as he turned his attention back to pulling his boots on and readying himself to face the day knowing that, whatever it might bring, at least he did not have to greet it alone.