Work Text:
Azune stands just to the side of Bolaire, while Occtis tells his story.
He knows Bolaire has noticed. He’s a good soldier, but he has never been good at being anything other than that. He would say other than who he is, but the soldier is a character just like any other, and it is simply that Azune is unable to step away from that man and into the skin of any other. Thus, he is a soldier, and he stands next to Bolaire, and he is regarded.
Bolaire doesn’t say anything until the group begins to disperse a little more, preparations for the next stage underway, and then he turns to look straight at Azune.
Azune stands tall, and meets Bolaire’s eyes.
He hasn’t really spoken to the man (the mask?) before all of this. Azune was aware of Hal’s- friendship- with the other, but they’ve never crossed paths more than as professional acquaintances. He had been happy to steer clear, in truth, because the nobles were typically far more trouble than help, and Azune doesn’t need to be conspicuous.
Bolaire the museum curator wasn’t a man who Azune wanted to talk with. Bolaire the- Bolaire as he is now?
Azune can’t imagine stepping away.
“Keeping an eye on me now, are you? Don’t worry, I’m not about to go on a murderous rampage, not unless absolutely necessary,” Bolaire smiles thinly, standing upright and holding Azune’s gaze.
His eyes are pretty, really. The pinpricks of light were a little unnerving at first, but the luminescence of them is unique against the unending black void. And it was only half an hour ago that Azune saw them all but welled up with tears in sincere confession. No, he knows that Bolaire is capable of strong emotion, and what that looks like on his face, and so the eyes are not as scary as they once were.
“I’m not worried,” Azune says.
Bolaire scoffs, and steps closer, tilting his head sharply and letting his red curls tumble down the side of his neck. They are the same height.
“Then why,” if a mask had teeth to grit, that is what would make this tone. “Are you watching, me,”
It is a question, but it sounds like a threat. Azune absorbs the metaphorical blow, mulling it over, because sometimes a punch to the face is the easiest response. Anger is simple and uncomplicated, unneeding of further contemplation, and so it is no surprise that Bolaire would wield it against him now.
“I believe you,” Azune says simply.
“Well that’s quite a weight off my shoulders, what’s next, the Sundered Houses are actually good and have changed their ways?” Bolaire pointedly remarks, the sarcasm not lost on even Azune.
“And I’m sorry they did that to you,”
It’s then that the proverbial mask cracks, just a little bit, because Azune is sure that nobody has said that to Bolaire before. He doesn’t need permission to feel anger and hatred towards his creators, but Azune knows that it is hard to place the blame squarely at the feet of the ones who have made you, when they have also made all the good things that you have become as well.
“Well, they did own me, after all. Who’s to say they weren’t right?” Bolaire responds, but there isn’t as much heat in his tone as the words would suggest.
“Me,” Azune states, standing still for a moment and then slowly reaching out and placing his hand on Bolaire’s arm. When he isn’t instantly shaken off, he reaches up further, and traces a careful fingertip across the cheek of the mask, as he had done so before, and marvels anew at the cold that radiates off the surface, even as Bolaire stills beneath his touch.
“You don’t owe anything to the people that brought you here,” he murmurs. Bolaire hasn’t said anything about that, but Azune can read between the lines. “They had a hand in who you are today, but you are alive regardless of what you were made for,”
Living despite what one’s purpose is? Living beyond what you were set out to do, past the deadline of a world that has suddenly changed without place for you, forced to change the clothes you were from a being of violence into a being of peace? Perhaps Bolaire, who chose to forsake his reason for existence, has found his new cloth comfortable and well-fitting, but Azune even now barely remembers to call his skin his.
Something I can do that I was not made for, that’s what Bolaire had said. He thinks that the man had forgotten that anyone was in the room other than Hal, but Azune had been there too. And he knows, intimately, how it feels to turn the skills gained from bloodshed and hurt into something that helps others. Otherwise, why is he still here, alone, when his brothers have ridden off to a brewing war up North without him?
Azune has a purpose too, and though he knows that he was thrust into it young, that doesn’t mean that he isn’t well-suited to it. For all that Bolaire has always felt a world away, today Azune knows that they have been forged of the same kiln.
“There you are again, with that word. Alive. I think you actually believe that,”
“I do, Bolaire, I do. I think anyone can be more than what they were designed to be,” he says, a little fast, perhaps even a little desperate, because there are flashes of images of familiar faces in his mind, of familial resemblance but scarce memory. He will always be a soldier, but he is trying to remember sometimes that life can be more than that.
“Thank you,” Bolaire says, and it is unusually soft and genuine. He sounds almost bewildered, and it makes Azune smile slightly.
There is a list in Azune’s mind, and it runs in the background, like white noise that he cannot ever fully turn off. Mostly, he tries not to add to it. He doesn’t think any of the others have this, this buzzing in their ears that grows every time the next person falls or walks or runs away, and he is left behind to do his duty. Nobody has known him for a long time, and he has been left to guess at whether he too can know anyone in turn, because how does one live without that list?
Bolaire doesn’t have that list, Azune is sure. He is selfish in most of the ways that count, whereas Azune knows only how to tear pieces of himself out to put in the palms of others. But they have both been moulded into being in the fires of battle, abandoned, and then left to carve out a new way after those flames have been all but extinguished.
Azune won’t forget Bolaire’s story. And he is going to keep him safe.