He didn't care about the cold. He didn't care about the way snow had melted and started to run in icy rivulets through a tear in the collar of his gambeson. Henry didn't even notice these things, as his eyes were fixed on a dark point on the other side of the battlefield. A very still, dark point, surrounded by crimson. Every step felt too slow, like walking hip-deep through a marsh, and faintly Henry registered that at some point he must have had a pretty big blow to the side because the left side of his ribcage throbbed with every breath. But none of that mattered.
The dark point became a dark blob, suddenly fuzzy around the edges. Reflexively, Henry wiped tears from his eyes and trudged on against the sleet that seemed to fall horizontally, as though pushing him away from his goal.
"Please," as the shape of a man in armour becomes clearer, Henry says one of the shortest but most heartfelt prayers of his life. "Please lord, don't take him."
Henry stops at the feet of Bartosch. He is completely still, but there is nothing peaceful about him. Small trickles of blood run from his nose, mouth and ear, and around him is a mess of footprints in blood and mud. Henry had watched him fall from far away. Much too far away to do anything but scream and pray.
The battle, one in a string of many the two of them had fought shoulder-to-shoulder, had been all but over. As Henry caught his breath and looked out across the field, he saw Bartosch in a clinch with a brute a full head taller. Bartosch must have dealt him a fatal blow, because the man was lying dead next to him now - but before he fell he swung his club one last time and Bartosch had gone down; stayed down.
Kneeling over Bartosch now, in what felt like a mockery of the position that had become familiar to both of them off the battlefield, Henry clasped Bartosch's breastplate. Seeing the blood on his much-too-pale face sent waves of panic through him. Tears began rolling down his nose, dripping onto the other man's face. The sobbing tore through his body like a rolling tidal wave, crashing through him and tearing up every loss and near-loss he'd been through in the past ten years. His parents in Skalitz, Radzig in Kutna Hora... Hans falling in battle not three months earlier. He hadn't been there to stop it. He couldn't save any of them. Not his parents, not his father, not his best friend and... and now not even Bartosch.
"I can't lose you too," Henry dropped down and rested his forehead against Bartosch's shoulder, letting the grief out as his muscles stopped holding him up.
How long he lay there atop Bartosch he couldn't say. A minute or an hour was all the same. But just as his breathing finally started to slow down, he felt a hand on his arm.
A raspy, laboured voice, very close to his ear said "Hey Hal, could you get your knee off my groin, please?"
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jacobvanloon
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