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Ashur is… not a measured man, no matter what his father told the Grand Clerics to get him the position of the Imperial Divine, no matter his reputation for fairness and respect, no matter how it may otherwise appear. He feels quickly, and strongly, and while he has learned with years and experience to temper his emotions to the point of stoicism, it does not mean he feels them any less.
It’s no real surprise when he develops an immediate interest in the handsome templar who helps distract his patrol when they almost happen upon an operation Ashur is running with Lorelei. It’s not out of character that Ashur then seeks him out, finds him demoted to the archives, and recruits him, either.
Anything for the cause, Ashur tells himself sternly, and those dark eyes that seem to see straight through him are just a nice bonus, one which Ashur will take care not to become too hung up on.
Nor is it strange that a man with such a head for numbers and organizational matters should rise quickly to become Ashur’s trusted second-in-command among the rank and file. If Ashur has to ignore the occasional flutter in his chest, the creeping tendrils of hope that wind around his heart the first time he makes Tarquin laugh, well—
It’s of no matter.
The collection begins as an accident.
They’re down in the catacombs below the Archon’s Palace, which are well-explored and guarded, and not expecting any trouble, only an abandoned Venatori meeting place that may have information yet to be discovered. Certainly, the twisting tunnels go deeper than has been entirely explored, but—the deepstalker is a surprise, barreling out of a narrow crevice in the stone and straight at Ashur’s head. He’s too surprised even to raise a barrier; its talons slice at his face, through his mask, draw a ragged line down through the flesh of his cheek. He staggers back with a gasp, and then Tarquin is there, slicing its head neatly off.
“Fucking nasty piece of—shit, you couldn’t dodge faster?” Tarquin snaps, flicking blood off of his blade and stepping towards Ashur. Ashur stares back at him, wide-eyed and deeply conscious that his injured face has been laid bare to Tarquin for the first time ever. He prepares himself for the surprise, the anger and the distrust, and instead—receives a rough-spun handkerchief.
“Better put pressure—well, you know the drill. Won’t be what you’re used to but it’ll help keep the blood in until we get back to the surface and find you a healer. Andraste’s ass, we need to spar more often if that’s your response time,” Tarquin says, already scanning their surroundings for more threats. Once a soldier, always a soldier, Ashur thinks fondly, and something clicks neatly and quietly into place inside his heart.
Oh, he thinks, and he smiles, just a little.
He has the handkerchief laundered, but he always seems to forget to return it to Tarquin, and finally it’s been so long it would be awkward to do so now. Instead it migrates to a new home in one of the elegant cases on Ashur’s desk at the Spire, meant more for decoration than storage, and the perfect place to keep something he takes out to look at more often than he should.
***
The boat scuds along the shoreline and Ashur watches with a vague sense of boredom and itching irritation as the shore road passes by. They’re making good time with magically-enhanced wind pushing them along, but it’s still a day to Alam at least, and all Ashur has to occupy his interest is a dingy copy of a popular serial he’s too afraid to read in this rain.
Tarquin, ever practical, is knitting. Ashur had only been vaguely aware of the art as something people did, and now he turns his gaze to watch Tarquin’s nimble fingers maneuver the needles with clumsy care.
“Where did you learn to knit?” he asks, after a moment of admiring the long taper of Tarquin’s hands, the fine veins threading through the pale skin. He’s taken off his gloves, even in the cold, to work.
“You think they don’t teach every little Soporatus at least enough sewing and knitting to mend their own things? Never could figure out crochet or embroidery, though, to my mother’s despair. Could’ve brought in money if I’d been any good at it.”
“What are you knitting?” Ashur asks after a long, slightly awkward pause. He has never mended an item in his life, his things whisked away and tended to the moment they are dropped on the floor. Of course any Soporatus would learn such a skill, and Tarquin is a very capable man.
“Would you teach me?” he asks when Tarquin doesn’t answer, tentatively eyeing the long rectangle Tarquin is producing. It looks as if it may be destined for life as a scarf, though it’s more than a bit unevenly knit.
“No,” Tarquin says with a little barking laugh. “I’m shit at it, and you’d be even more shit at it, and what’s the use?”
Ashur flushes a little beneath his mask, caught out in his excuse to spend more time with Tarquin, maybe touch him, and looks away, back towards the shore. Beside him, Tarquin hums and steers the rudder, sending the magically-propelled boat turning away from the shore of No-Man’s Island and on towards Alam.
“Huh,” Tarquin says thoughtfully, and Ashur turns back, raising a questioning eyebrow.
“Matches your eyes,” Tarquin says, holding up the yarn. “Well, must be meant to be yours in that case.”
“What?” Ashur asks, taken aback, “Surely you’re making it for—”
“It’s just something to keep my hands busy,” Tarquin says, shrugging. “Ought to be finished before we dock. It’ll add a nice bit of flare to your Viper getup.”
Ashur snorts quietly under his breath, envisioning the untidy rectangle wrapped around his neck above the fine leather collar of his robes. Even so, the thought of wearing something Tarquin made for him fills him with delight.
“Alam gets chilly when there’s fog,” Tarquin adds. “Can’t have the Imperial Divine catching cold, can we?”
Ashur snorts again, but when Tarquin finishes the scarf, ties off the ends, and hands it to him just as the jagged buildings of Alam come into view, Ashur accepts it with a private smile, and wraps it around his neck. Tarquin’s hands made this; Tarquin’s skin touched the fine wool it’s woven from; Tarquin gave it to Ashur to keep him warm.
He doesn’t have opportunity to wear it often after that; it’s too easily caught or hung up on something when he’s engaging as the Viper, too obviously inferior an item of apparel for the Imperial Divine. So it joins the handkerchief in the box, and sometimes he takes it out and runs the fine wool through his hands, and tries not to think too hard about what it is exactly he’s doing here, and how far he’s setting himself up to fall.
***
“What’s this?” Ashur asks, as Tarquin tosses papers onto the desk in front of him.
“Last issue of A Magister’s Forbidden Affection came out earlier this week,” Tarquin says, tapping what Ashur now recognizes as a cover for the serial. “Told you I’d loan you the complete set once it wrapped up, didn’t I? Just your sort of thing,” he adds, grinning a little. Ashur fights the urge to scowl, or blush, or maybe reach up and wrap his hand around Tarquin’s wrist and hold him nearby, for just a little while longer.
“I had forgotten you offered to loan that to me. Remind me what it’s about?” Ashur asks, hoping Tarquin will linger and talk a little more before moving on to other business.
“The one where a Grand Cleric in the Towers age falls in love with a southern templar accompanying the diplomats and is forced to choose between his love and his country when the schism happens,” Tarquin says absently. He’s peering at something across the room, so Ashur follows his gaze.
“Is Lyric… flirting?” Ashur asks, after he processes the movement in the shadows in the corner of the room.
Tarquin sighs heavily.
“Yeah, and Elene’s girlfriend has already spotted them. That’s going to be drama. Someone ought to write a serial about it, at least make some money off the trouble these kids cause…” he mumbles.
“I’d read it,” Ashur teases softly, looking back down at the small collection of serials Tarquin has given him. “When do you need these back?”
Tarquin gives him an odd look, and then shakes his head. “Whenever you get time to finish them—I know you’re busy. I’m in no hurry to re-read it.”
Ashur smiles, and tucks the papers inside his cloak, and mentally clears his calendar for the following day. There’s nothing so important planned that the Imperial Divine can’t declare he will retreat for a day of quiet meditation—and have something to talk about with Tarquin when he makes his way to the Shop in the evening.
Later, he will sit in the armchair in his office, lit by a dying fire, and tell himself that it doesn’t mean anything that Tarquin gave him that serial. That the characters had been the Grand Cleric of Asariel and a Southern Templar who bonded over their shared passion for ending slavery in the Imperium… well.
It’s a coincidence, surely it is, Ashur knows better, and yet…
He wants to believe that maybe, just maybe, Tarquin was saying something with his choice of literature. His mind knows it’s likely untrue, but his heart…
Well.
The serial goes unreturned, instead wrapped neatly in the scarf Tarquin knit for him and placed in the box.
***
Other things come to rest in the box.
A small belt knife Tarquin had loaned him—Ashur had chipped the blade triggering a magical trap, and replaced it with a better one, but he’d kept the original.
A sachet of tea Tarquin had given him, pointedly suggesting that it was good for sleep. It smells softly of chamomile and magnolia.
A key to slave manacles that Tarquin had handed him after their largest operation, the one that had freed nearly two hundred slaves destined for the oars of Naval ships off Seheron.
A clipping from one of the conspiracy rags claiming in bold print that the Imperial Divine was behind the recent surge in slave rebellions and escapes in Minrathous, which Tarquin had presented to him with a knowing grin.
A scrap of paper from the corner of the accounts book, on which Tarquin had scribbled a little stick figure with a beard throwing a little stick figure with a distinctive mustache out of a window. Dorian had deserved that one and more, in Ashur’s opinion.
A collection of notes Tarquin has left him, nearly every one, no matter how banal or mundane. His favorites feature more of Tarquin’s little drawings.
Ashur keeps these treasures quietly, little things of no value to anyone but him, and looks at them all from time to time, and tries in vain not to hope for a future Tarquin has shown no sign of wanting.
***
The lead is a weak one, Ashur is willing to admit, but… well, it’s an excuse to spend time with Tarquin, after all. And it’s not totally worthless, and Mae has things well in hand, and… it’s all excuses, of course it’s all excuses, but Ashur finds he’s willing to forgive himself any folly if it buys him more time in Tarquin’s company.
“The fuck is a Venatori agent doing wandering around a street festival?” Tarquin says. His tone is grouchy, but when Ashur glances over, he finds that Tarquin’s eyes are bright and interested, darting from stall to stall. They land, interested, on a booth selling honey candy shaped like little dragons.
Ashur smiles, and steers them closer.
“We need to blend in,” he murmurs, and Tarquin raises a brow but takes him at his word as Ashur buys them each a candy. He tries not to watch too obviously as Tarquin sucks thoughtfully on his.
“Hey, they’ve got—hah,” Tarquin barks, his candy dropping away from his lips. Ashur follows him, distracted, as he darts between a giggling pair of teenagers to a booth selling festival masks.
Smugly, Tarquin holds up a surprisingly accurate reproduction of Ashur’s hat and mask, with a coiled snake figurine further concealing the eyeholes. Tarquin holds it up to his face while the stall owner watches from the corner of his eye and makes change for a young mother.
“You hate being responsible for things too much for me to worry you’re after my job,” Ashur teases as Tarquin’s eyes gleam out from behind the mask. Ashur’s heart feels tight and too-large in his chest, and he’s grateful for the mask that hides his blushing smile.
“Dunno, reckon I could ponce about on a stage giving sermons about as well as the next man,” Tarquin teases back, but he moves to set the mask back on the table.
Ashur’s hand is reaching for his coin pouch before he even gives it conscious thought.
“Planning to stack a little disguise on your disguise?” Tarquin teases as money changes hands.
“I thought you might like to match,” Ashur teases back.
“Fuck off,” Tarquin laughs, and snaps the last of his honey candy off its skewer, cracking the swirls with his teeth. Ashur watches fondly, and slips the mask inside his cloak.
“In case you need a disguise later,” he teases again, which makes Tarquin roll his eyes.
Much later, as the grey light of dawn filters in through the thick glass of his office windows and Ashur changes his Viper robes for his vestments, he settles the mask in the box as well.
***
It’s not the first time Ashur has re-read the note, one of many he’s collected over the years, nor will it be the last. It’s his favorite, as demonstrated by the creases worn from being unfolded and refolded time and time again. It sits apart from the others, wedged up against the edge of the box, where he can find it without even needing to look. It’s not long, really just a few words scribbled on a torn scrap of paper.
Hey, next time: maybe dodge, you miserable fuck. The Shadows need you too much for you to die.
It had arrived after a nasty blow to the head had sent Ashur from triage at Bel’s healing hands to his more experienced personal healer at the Spire, a worried frown creasing Bel’s mouth the entire way.
And it’s wishful thinking, Ashur knows it is, but he thinks the “T” in “The Shadows” is curled the way Tarquin writes his “I”s, as if the note had been about to say something else, as if Tarquin had changed his mind and tried to cover up for it. It’s probably just a quirk of post-mission exhaustion, a note scribbled and handed off to their go-between to be delivered to Ashur when he woke up the following morning, but—
Ashur likes to wonder, in his more fanciful moments, those rare times he allows himself to daydream of a world where Tarquin returns his regard—Ashur likes to wonder what Tarquin might have been planning to write, if it were something different.
I was worried I’d lose you.
I need you.
I lo—
But not even in his head does Ashur really let himself imagine that. If he hopes too much, he may come to believe it, and if he comes to believe it only to be proven too optimistic, well…
There is enough sorrow in this world. He will not borrow more of it. Better to have Tarquin’s companionship, his friendship, than nothing at all.
So Ashur will keep his heart in the box, along with his collection, and allow himself only the occasional daydream in the privacy of his own mind. And if someday, by some miracle, Tarquin does show signs of returning his feelings, well…
His heart will be safe and ready to hand over for Tarquin’s care and keeping.