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Yasuo, he has come to learn, does not fare well at sea.
He'd been on fishing trips as a boy, on occasion—day-long in late autumn for food, when game was scarcest—but never for quite as long, on any vessel quite as large. He’d spent the better part of the voyage to Bilgewater curled over the gunwale trying not to be sick, sucked in by the feeling of the ship's titanic presence around him, menacing; he lies in his berth with an arm slung over his screwed-shut eyes, now, nausea rolling over him in waves. No one around to protect, anymore.
It’s quiet—suppertime, just about, and the deck is nearly empty—but he would know the heavy sound of Braum’s boot-cut gait anywhere. Loud enough to hear even in a frenzy; finesse is not a virtue he possesses in abundance.
Then again—the same is true for Yasuo.
“Still sick?”
He comes to a halt next to where Yasuo rests. He’s just been to the kitchen, evidently; the light scent of dinner—beef tonight, it seems—lingers on his person. This—together with the ship tilting a shade, then, just enough to be noticeable—catalyzes another wash of illness. Yasuo groans, a little, clenching his jaw; inhales slowly as he murmurs: “Trying not to be.”
Braum’s feet scuff on the floor as his body shifts. “I grabbed some ginger for you. If you’d like it.”
Yasuo glances at him—long enough to see a root and jackknife clutched in one of his big, calloused palms—until the light becomes too much for his still-sensitive vision. He nods, terse—up and down, just once—before closing his eyes again.
A moment later he feels a rough wedge pressing against his closed fingers. He slips it past his lips; the warm taste floods his mouth, his nose, almost immediately after he starts chewing. He sighs, shallow, sucking on the fibers. Helpful.
“Thank you,” he says, in earnest.
“Of course.”
They lapse into silence, comfortable, for a few moments. Yasuo had been too quick to label Braum as excitable; he, it has become clear, is of a much gentler disposition than his appearance suggests. Yasuo thinks he understands, sometimes, why it is that he is such a reassurance to his people.
“It will be easier to Noxus.”
An unpleasant feeling in Yasuo’s chest, when Braum says this, remembering why he is to go; the buzzing feeling of nerves. Upsetting, despite Braum’s best attempt. He sucks down on the root, running his tongue over his gums—chasing the earthy taste there, languidly, as he thinks. When he speaks, it's very slowly.
“I’d only left Ionia once.”
It's apropos of nothing—a pitiful sort of an explanation, out of the blue, for the way that he’s acted all this time—and doesn’t quite know what to say after that.
Braum lets out a quiet, understanding sort of noise, and it’s easy for Yasuo to picture him, by now; brows scrunched just so, teeth worrying his lip, looking down at him. Those concerned eyes of his, always reminding him of someone else's. There's hair tickling his cheek that he can't brush away, lest he show Braum the sunkenness of his cheeks, the exhaustion in his face; he hasn’t been eating. Mugginess in his mouth and something painful beating away at his chest when he recalls—not for the first time—that, in the end, it’s only been a handful of weeks.
“You miss her,” Braum says. Like it’s the simplest thing in the world.
Yasuo can hear the smile in his voice as he says it. A drawn-up pressure behind his ribcage, suddenly; painful. Just a few days, since they’d left, and Ahri’s absence has already carved a chasm deep into his heart—the piece of him she’d stolen away on the wooden gangway when she’d pulled him in by the tunic and kissed him, tasting of sea salt and summer air, disappearing in the next breath. Leaving him alone, there, hands curled around nothing—wind whipping his hair, stinging in his eyes. A cavity, carved out in her shape.
He remembers the feeling of her claws on the back of his neck—of her mouth on his, more teeth than lips. She’d said, then, with a grin: Something for next time.
“Maybe,” he mumbles, still avoiding Braum’s gaze.
The truth is that he possesses a devastatingly uncharacteristic sort of desperation, when it comes to her; humiliating, the hold she came to have over him. Even before they’d parted he’d dreamt of her—touching him, sleeping by his side, her open-mouthed breath against his bare chest. Restless fantasies from which he wakes disconcerted, heartbeat rabbit-quick in his throat; a trembling in his fingers, as they brush over the pattern that her nails had traced across his skin. Him caged in the palm of her open hand, powerless. Like a treasure.
“You’ll see her again,” Braum says. As though he knows it to be true.
“Braum.”
A whisper, desperate. He digs the heels of his hands into his closed eyelids; stars explode in the space behind them, cosmos of his own making. Multicolored multiverse of infinite possibilities. He stays like that, unmoving; silent, suspended in time.
(A bowstring, drawn taut; his brother’s fingers, ghosting over his morin khuur. He’d bled sometimes, Yasuo remembers—calluses cracked open like quails' eggs in the dry wintertime. Love had been the ugly thing to kill him.)
He continues, weakly, when Braum doesn't answer: “She deserves far better than I."
A chuckle; Yasuo swallows. Feels another piece of ginger at his knuckles, when he does—a partner to the lump in his throat. Braum, inarcane, who finds a way to work his own kind of magic. He says, fondly: “If you emphasize merit so, my friend, I'm afraid you won’t be happy a day in your life.”
There is a certain irony at play, here: Yasuo—dark and terrible as the void that had looked back at him with Yone’s eyes—next to Braum, invariably beloved, cradling in his breastpocket the savior of a people. Miracle cure. He meets Braum’s eyes, then—looks at him properly, for the first time today—and feels entirely undeserving of the compassion that lies there, that which he fights so desperately to push away. Like he’d done with her.
Thoughtlessly, he asks: “Would you mind staying?"
Braum looks shocked; Yasuo's voice drops to a murmur, ashamed altogether. "Just—until I fall asleep."
A beat. Then—crow’s feet in Braum’s eyes as they wrinkle up, inconceivably soft look on his face. A kind-hearted expression—one that Yasuo has not had the privilege of being graced with often, in his lifetime. "Not at all," he says; drags a crate to lean up against the beam from where Yasuo's hammock hangs, and sits to keep him company.
Yasuo smiles at him, much as he can muster—a tiny flutter of the corners of his lips. Closes his eyes, and hopes that Braum understands what it is he wishes he could say.
Tonight he drifts off to the sound of water lapping on wood and Braum’s breathing, blood pumping slow and steady in his ears. He imagines the setting sun, maple seeds; amber eyes and cloud-white fur skimming over the bridge of his nose as he inhales, exhales. Slips out of consciousness slowly, waning summer wind, in this transitory moment of peace.
(Sometimes, in the darkness, there passes by him a moment wherein he is everywhere all at once: Rat Town; the Shadow Isles; frostbitten meeting Taliyah knee-deep in powder atop Shon-Xan’s rime-lined, snowy peaks; dinner with Yone, back home in Navori. Rice soup burning his tongue; too-big sandals on his dirty feet.
Tonight when he dreams he is together with Ahri somewhere entirely gentle: a field of orange tulips, tangled in lotuses and pond water, springtime dozing swallowed by the chest-high yellow grass that had lined the road to his village before war had come, click beetles snapping in his ears. Here where it is warm, the lines of his body stand out jagged and sharp against the soft-sloped, sunlit world; here where it is kinder she takes his hand, and he sees that she is much the same way. Here she kisses him again and—nothing tearing them apart, anymore—they find their own place, hidden away, to know each other very well indeed.
“Don’t forget,” she whispers to him, now, blade of gold slicing her features in two, and he wraps his fingers around her wrist, keeps her close, red of her lips stark against his dark hair; he tucks her chin into the crook of his neck, skin on skin, pressing his mouth to the night-black crown of her head. Only in his dreamscape will he breathe to her his secret, sweetness unbecoming of a creature such as himself; his softest whisper against her skin, for her ears only.)