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In the dark of the night, Ardyn watched Cor sleep.
Tonight Cor had left the bedroom window curtains open, so slivers of the simulated-nighttime lighting of Lestallum shone through the glass, yellow and amber casting heavy chiaroscuro over his face, highlighting the silver in his hair and the hollows beneath his cheekbones.
Once upon a time, Ardyn had assumed Cor would sleep like the dead, like every other soldier on the long march of campaign—he’d lay down, shut his eyes, and then wake up like clockwork at dawn.
He did not do that.
Cor Leonis slept fitfully, constantly on the verge of waking. When they shared a bed properly, Ardyn would lay pressed to his back until he stilled, the reassuring promise of heat and touch settling his restless motion. He would roll over, shushing the other man, until Cor dozed off once more. Some nights Ardyn dozed, some nights he read or otherwise entertained himself. Often he would simply lay there and study Cor’s face by the light of a myriad darknesses.
But, on nights like these, when Ardyn was supposed to be far away, doing something surely terrible, there was no-one for Cor to roll back into, no-one to run a hand down his hip. He slept, alone, on-edge, on his side of the bed.
Well, Ardyn amended, as Cor sighed, shifted, rolled, and settled once more, face buried in the pillow that had more red hairs than he’d like to honestly admit stuck to it, perhaps not on his side of the bed. It took the Marshal a long moment to settle back down, sidling uncomfortably back and forth, trying to find a spot that eased off of old wounds, tender scars, training bruises—and, a moment later, Cor sat up and wiggled for a moment until he wrenched a spoon out from under his back, staring at it sleepily with a vague sort of confused look. Too tired to process.
“Stop eating in bed,” Cor muttered, to nobody. Tossed the spoon onto the floor with a clunk, rolled further over, and tugged Ardyn’s pillow into his arms.
Perched where he was, leaned in the doorway, invisible and unbreathing, Ardyn felt a tension he hadn’t known he was carrying ease out of his shoulders as Cor settled, once more, down into sleep. Watched him yawn, stubble rippling over the muscle of his jaw and neck, the crack of the joint as he buried his face deeper into Ardyn’s pillow, one of his ankles settling, caught behind his knee.
For once, he was in no hurry to go anywhere, do anything. Ardyn had no pots boiling—literal or metaphorical. The world had ended. Most of what he did these days was sulk, listen to the voices in his head scream, or suck dick, and not necessarily in that order. He had been sulking for the better part of a week and would be back at it sooner than later; the voices were mercifully silent for the first time in days; he would have sucked dick but he couldn’t stay. If he sucked dick he would have to stay.
Instead, he simply watched: Cor settling again, twitching his shoulder to tug the blanket up, pressing his face down into the pillow until only the edge of his eyelashes were visible, a dark smudge against his cheekbone. He needed a haircut—it was getting long, tangling in little loose tufts of curls behind his ears. He needed more sleep—his eyes were pressed into dark hollows, the kind of old exhaustion that never really, truly left him, no matter how much Ardyn tried to will it. He needed to eat more. He needed to sleep more. He needed to worry less.
In the light of day, he looked older than his years, but when he slept, truly slept, Cor Leonis looked not like n old man, but like a hard man who had lived a hard life . It did no such poetic, trite thing as take twenty years off of him, but when he was awake, Cor carried Lucis constantly around his neck, a millstone grinding him down ever further.
Cor could not carry Lucis in his sleep. He could carry only himself.
In the silence of that dark bedroom, beneath the golden streetlight, all Ardyn could see in his lover’s face was the inexorable, slow death of the end of the world. All he could see was a man who struggled, desperately, to cling to something like hope. Who loved him. Who loved him, and Ardyn still didn’t know what to do about that, too terrified to hold it up to the light, as if it might vanish. Cor looked exactly forty-seven when he slept, precisely his age and not a day more, the unmistakable wrinkles, the silver in his hair, the softening of his lips and the hard line of his jaw.
That was why Ardyn watched him sleep: he watched him to see Cor, bare and true and tired and sore and perfect.
His weight hardly shifted the mattress; Cor did not stir. His kiss was feather-light, a brush of the breeze, not of actual flesh, a specter that whispered into his ear, “Happy birthday, Marshal.”