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Imagine for a moment Laurent and Damen, a few months past the Trial. They’ve been apart through necessity, regaining their lands fully and slowly bringing Vere and Akielos together into one kingdom under the two of them and finally, finally after too long apart they reconnect (a day would be too long, now). Able to be together without the weight of old deaths and new ones at times even a moment feels like torture, most especially to Damen, who never had Laurent’s patience.
They spend hours relearning each other, trading between fevered, needy kisses and slow touches. Damen’s fingers now twice as reverent as he maps out the world of Laurent’s body. Careful, too, suddenly aware of the ways in which he was broken as a boy, until Laurent snaps at him about not being unbroken catamite (Damen thinks with a sharp pang that he once had been used as exactly that - he doesn’t correct him). He has to force himself to release his caution. He notices more, now, the sudden tightness Laurent affects, the tension and the pauses. Damen understands more deeply the internal war he always seems to be waging before he releases (sometimes he thinks the Regent died too quickly, too painlessly. Most of the time he is simply glad the monster is slain).
They have a lifetime, now, to take down Laurent’s walls and soothe the hurts both have dealt each other, and they start with this.
With kisses pressed to shoulder scars (a matching set, now) and temples. With fingers carding through golden hair and tangling in dark curls. With panting breaths in heated moments and, on one memorable occasion, ringing laughter falling unabashed from Laurent’s lips, for once not trapped into their tightly controlled lines.
They start with this - with joy, and love, and the beginnings of honesty and trust.
And one morning, basking in the glow of the rising sun, Laurent’s fingers trace over a mark on Damen’s abdomen - the one left by Kastor’s last betrayal. A look of quiet thought across his features in one of his unguarded moments that are slowly becoming less rare, and when Damen shifts slightly under his touch in question Laurent’s lips twitch up in some private amusement and he says, almost reverently,
“You have a scar.”