Chapter Text
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Gawin is dying.
The taste of blood in his mouth tells him that much.
The wet, gurgling warmth spills down his chin as he coughs, trying to clear his airway. His fingertips come away coated in it when his shaking hand touches his mouth.
The sky is overcast and grey. Big raindrops fall occasionally, splattering against his armour. It chafes, he’s pretty sure his leg is broken, and he’s terrified.
Bottom lip wobbling, hot tears pooling, he fumbles around for his sword and instead finds something else.
Something softer… more human.
He cranes his head, struggling to sit despite the mace handle buried between the broken plates of his armour, driven deep into his ribs. The screams of battle fade into distant noise as the pain washes over him, near overwhelming.
Joss -- Ser Joss, his closest companion and the leader of his father’s army -- lies motionless in the mud. His beautiful face is splattered with blood and dirt. If not for the unnatural angle of his neck, Gawin might have believed he was only resting, as they had done when they were younger, staring up at the endless cornflower blue sky in Gawin’s family fields.
“J-Joss,” Gawin chokes out, sobbing, as he crawls closer, shaking him. “Joss, no.”
This battle was pointless. Gawin curses himself for his rash decision, made in the heat of emotion. Their fathers were noncommittal about participating, but Gawin was heartbroken and furious, and Joss was his protector in all things, and now they are both dead on this forsaken battlefield.
“Joss, I am sorry,” Gawin gasps, fingers digging into Joss’s sleeve, the rich burgundy and navy of his house pairing so perfectly with the forest green and navy of Gawin’s. “I should… I should have listened to you…”
He coughs again, blood splattering on Joss’s chest plate, the same colour as his livery, sliding along the cold metal. He sobs hopelessly, sinking against Joss’s lifeless body, the wet mud cold against his overheated skin as the rain increases in frequency.
“What a waste… for our story to end this way…” Gawin hiccoughs, bringing a shaking hand up to stroke at Joss’s jawline, his finger sliding along his bottom lip.
Gawin has spent his whole life at Joss’s side, and he has never once been brave enough to do this. So, with the last of his strength and a dying man’s courage, Gawin leans forward and presses a soft, trembling kiss to Joss’s lips.
For years, he had imagined this moment.
He just never thought it would happen like this.
“Joss. I love you, Joss…” Gawin collapses as he takes his final breath, draped across him, following him into the great beyond.
*
Tala walks through the battlefield with her retinue and her father, the lord of their house, behind her as they search for Gawin.
She has been crying ever since they heard the news that they had won the war, despite heavy losses, and that nobody had seen Ser Joss or Lord Gawin, sensing deep in her bones that her little brother was with them no longer.
She knows it’s him before she even gets close enough to be sure, and falls to her knees.
“Gawin,” she cries, her voice echoing out across the stillness of the scene, crawling through the mud and viscera to get to him.
She grabs Gawin and hauls him into her arms, his body lifeless and rigid, ice cold and clammy to the touch.
Her baby brother, her pride and joy, gone where she cannot follow.
“Gawin, no, please,” she begs, her wails devastating, making her maids in waiting shiver from afar, clutching at each other. She looks down to see Joss, her betrothed -- the man her father had promised her to -- in a similar state, and who Gawin had been lying on top of.
“Oh…” she whispers, fingers digging into Gawin’s side, as she brings him closer. “No, no, no.”
Sobbing, weeping desperately, the memories flood through her of them both as children, then teenagers, living and growing together, companions in every way.
Tala has known for years how Gawin felt about Joss. Has seen the way Gawin looked at Joss when he thought no one was watching.
The night of her betrothal announcement, he had come to her chambers, confessing the truth he could never say to anyone else. “Tala, I love him. I can’t watch you marry him. I’ll die.” And how Tala had held him while they both wept, helpless in their situations.
Now, now they were both dead, gone from her, but together at last.
One of her ladies in waiting, Viv, appears by her side, sombre and staid. “My lady,” she says, her accent rounding the vowels, soothing and sweet.
Tala looks up at her. Dangling between her outstretched fingers is a red thread.
“You must tie it now, for the chance to meet again,” she says.
Tala keens, squeezing Gawin’s body tighter. “I cannot,” she sobs. “I cannot do that to him.”
“I did not say you had to tie it to you,” Viv says.
Her father is still far enough away that she has time to give her brother one last gift. She looks down at their hands, Gawin’s curled toward Joss, even in death.
Fumbling in the slick earth, Tala loops the red thread around his finger.
Then she reaches for Joss.
The words come to her unbidden, old and sacred, as she begins to wrap the thread around Joss’s pinkie. She speaks in old Thai, spilling from her, erupting from her very core.
“May this red thread bind you together,
not by fate alone,
but by your own willing hearts.
If this life cannot belong to you both,
may the next one give you another chance…”
The final knot is completed, and she lays her pride and joy down next to his beloved, tucking their hands together, staggering to her feet, Viv holding out her arms for Tala to collapse into.
“I hope I’ve done enough, my sweet baby brother. I love you.”