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The dawn did not break; it bled, a slow and bruised violet seeping through the jagged gaps of the timber.
Inside the shed, the air was thick with the scent of quenched iron and horse's hay. An old smithy's store room, fashioned now into a haphazard excuse for a room and board. To the left of the door, a stack of rusted iron hoops leaned against the timber like skeletal ribs, weeping orange oxidation onto the floorboards. Adjacent, an anvil sat shrouded in a moth-eaten canvas: its massive, silent silhouette looming in the dimness like a pagan altar. The floor was a patchwork of hard-packed earth and warped planks that groaned under the slightest shift of weight, revealing gaps where the damp breath of the night's unexpected events still clung to the soil beneath.
High above, the rafters were festooned with the brittle lace of cobwebs, thick with the black dust of the forge. They shivered in the draft, ghostly banners for a fiefdom of sin. A single, rickety workbench had been cleared of its oily rags to make room for a cracked ceramic pitcher and a hunk of tallow that had guttered out hours ago, leaving a frozen spill of wax like a white scar on the wood.
Hans lay pinned to the mattress, the heavy, furnace-warmth of a body pressed against his side was more apparent than the distant bell toll of the morning's early mass. He watched the dust motes drift in the shafts of light like falling stars, recalling the tales his wet nurse had recited about making wishes behind tightly squeezed eyes, keeping them locked closely and secretly to his heart to ensure that they would one day come to fruition.
His breath hitched slightly, watching the swirling dust as though entranced. A secret close to his heart. A wish, that he did not even know he had been wishing on, coming - finally, agonizingly - to fruition.
Beside him, the picture of a man was naught short of a landscape of devasting beauty, the very mountains and valleys of his shape, imprinted against the dawn's glow, enough to dampen the doubts at the fringes of his mind. A calloused hand lay open on the coarse linens, palm upturned as if in a silent, unconscious prayer. The skin there was mapped with the scars of the forge: small, pale reminders of fire and labor that Hans had traced with his own soft, unblemished fingers in the dark mere hours before.
Henry slept with the profound, unburdened gravity of the earth itself. His breath was a slow tide against Hans' collarbone, a pulse that ignored the frantic, jagged heartbeat of the lord beside him.
In that moment, he was so oblivious to this inner turmoil. Hell, he currently had no bearing of the world at large and how it would look upon this act as something vile, ungodly.
But how could it be? How could something so tender and gentle as what they had done be anything other than love?
Love? No, desire. Hans knew it to be a fleeting moment of passion. For his sanity, it had to be.
Henry didn't stir. Completely and entirely unburdened by the acts they had partaken in the night before, his eyelashes framing those closed eyes, his lips very slightly parted to allow for his next breath. Christ, he was a picture. He truly was. Hans knew that to be sure by the sheer amount of women who would gladly throw themselves and their friends (and likely their mothers) at him at any given chance.
It was almost aggravating to think about, the handsomeness that Henry had grown into. The once bumbling, tripping-over-his-own-feet blacksmith's son, transcending into, well, this.
Did he have any idea how easy he was to need?
After all, it was Henry who had initiated all of this nonsense. If he hadn't grabbed for Hans' arm and pulled him towards him during that siege, crashing his helmet against his where their foreheads and eyes would surely meet, he wouldn't have so easily guided him into bed with the same finesse. Those eyes, gazing unwaveringly out of the grill of his visor, so round and soft with concern for Hans' wellbeing, despite the sheer cacophony of a battle obliterating around them, would remain etched on the side of his brain like a burned brand for eternity, or perhaps longer.
Hans stared back at the rafters, his mind a choir of discordant warnings towards his irritatingly bleeding heart. He was a creature of silken banners and silvered spurs, a man whose very blood was a debt to a lineage of kings. Yet here, stripped of doublet and dignity, he was merely a man of feverish pleasures. Simple, raw pleasures. With another man, not just any man: his page, his escort, his friend, his soul (if he were able to admit to that damning realization).
The word sodomy hissed in the back of his mind, a serpent slithering through the garden of his nobility. It did not feel like a mere concept; it felt like a physical weight, a stone rolled over the mouth of a tomb. To the world beyond these warped wooden walls, this was a rot: a transgression that demanded the rope or the pyre. It was more than a breach of etiquette; it was a crime against the very soil he was meant to rule.
He looked at the curve of Henry’s sun-browned shoulder, at the vulnerability of a throat exposed to the morning chill, and felt a terrifying, sacrilegious urge to press his lips to the pulse there. He should have felt the sting of revulsion. He should have been scrubbing the memory of the night from his skin until it bled, purging the ghost of a blacksmith’s touch from his ribs.
Instead, he felt a quiet, ruinous holiness. Henry, his fair hair haloed by the rising sun, lay before him like an angel, tempting Hans' hunger. It was a hunger that made a mockery of titles and tenures; he was a king of ashes if this was the price of his crown. Henry stirred. A soft, guttural sound escaping him as he pulled closer, seeking the warmth of Hans' skin in the encroaching cold. Hans did not flinch. He stayed frozen, caught in the cripplingly beautiful space between the divine judgment of the rising sun and the mercy of the narrow bed.
In a meager attempt to stamp out the whirring thoughts in his head, the iron-wrought teachings of sin, Hans leaned into him, their bodies bare and warm against one another. He let his cheek rest against the rough heat of Henry’s shoulder, an internal rebellion against every sermon he had ever endured.
The weight of his lineage and the unyielding expectations of his blood all seemed to dissolve in the proximity of the man's pulse. It was as though God had brought Henry here not to save Hans, but to ruin him. And as the violet light of the dawn turned to a blinding gold, Hans realized with a jarring clarity that he would gladly burn in that wreckage.