His lover’s pain had roiled in the pit of Gilbert’s stomach for so long that he almost didn’t feel it anymore. That was the one strength humanity had above the others, he thought, hand pressed to his abdomen. Given a short amount of time, they could adapt to almost any uncomfortability. In the beginning, it had felt like a fist around his lungs, and Gil had tried desperately to send love and comfort across the bond, but that had only made things worse. As the months trudged on, the feeling faded. Often, Gil laid in bed and wondered if that meant Arvas no longer loved him, and, if so, that was a blessing or a curse. A blessing that the man he loved was no longer in pain, a curse that he was the only one still carrying this flame.
After the riots, though, that ache had flared back into life with an edge Gil had only a few tastes of before. Arvas was angry, a rage so powerful it blasted away the hazy malaise of sorrow. The pain was almost welcome, bittersweet in the nights it kept Gil up to relish in the proof their bond yet lived.
He hadn’t expected the dragon himself to follow it.
Arvas appeared at the edge of Gilbert’s firelight like a shadow, so quickly that he was almost sure he had imagined it. Gil froze, squeezing the firewood in his hand until splinters dug under his nails. Arvas’s anger surged within him, but his own traitorous heart could not help but swell with hope.
Gilbert did not dare stand and could not think of words to say. Everything he wanted to say was foolish, and everything he needed to say was impossible. He could only stare up at Arvas, wanting nothing more than to be pulled into the man’s arms once again.
A foolish fantasy, to be sure, but one he had never quite seemed to outgrow.“‘Vas…”
He forgets himself when he sees him, sitting there with only the flickering light of a fire to break the shadows. Years of isolation, of obsessively covering what track or mark which might tell of his presence to a hunter who did not pursue in the flesh yet hounded his every waking hour, and all it took was the flare of the sudden, innate knowledge that the one who was once his other lingered within reach, and it was Arvas who bridged that gap.
It was the anger, he told himself. The error he had made in thinking he was safe to feel in his solitude, to allow all that righteous fury sparked off the attack on Glasswater to finally overwhelm him, cloud his senses, his judgement, just long enough to get wrapped up chasing the first trail that had appeared to him not knowing what he sought to find at the other end. Comfort? A scapegoat?
Whatever it was it had vanished at the sight that greeted him, replaced by a dull void as he stood, frozen, at the edges of his camp only half a step emerged from the shelter of the trees. Based on his expression, the man on the ground is no less shocked than he at this confrontation, and for a long moment there is naught but a heavy silence between them. In it hangs a history of so deep with love and loyalty and devotion that for a second he could almost forget how abruptly it had ended and remember what had once been. Their bond. Their glory.
But the moment Gil speaks, the spell is broken.
“Don’t.” Arvas all but growls in turn, stance immediately steeled and his voice gritted through the barely contained rage now rushing back to him. He should’ve know. He should have known he would have been there. The whims of fate had always been far too cruel to grant him any better.
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