Work Text:
The dagger balances in his hand like it materialized from the ether into his palm, unreal and unbelievably perfect. He twirls, tosses it, loosely juggling it through his fingers. It never slips, never falters.
“Gilmore,” he breathes. “This is incredible, this is -- it’s like it was made for me.”
Gilmore touches a delicate hand to his own clavicle, fingers spread. “My darling Vax’ildan. It was, indeed.”
“But how did you --”
“Now, now,” Gilmore laughs, waving his hand in a lighthearted dismissal. “Can’t tell you all my tricks, now, or you’ll never come back. Let’s just say… I have a keen eye for these sorts of things.”
Something on Gilmore’s skin leaves a shimmer on his cheek where he presses to him, but nothing so much as blinding as the smile on the man’s face when he pulls away from the kiss.
“You beautiful, glorious bastard.”
His laughter sits tight around his chest, and Vax loses the room for breath behind his heart.
There’s dust on his palms, golden and stubborn under the frantic attempts to rub it off on the inside of his cloak. It lingers, still, like the warmth under his skin where he slid his palms up Gilmore’s bare side, the feel of his voice reverberating under his ribs.
With a huff, he pulls his gloves back on, flexing his hands to set the seams and rid himself of the sensation.
“How was lunch?”
“Good, good. Gilmore thinks he might be able to fashion a belt…”
Something in his sister’s smile says she’s not listening, not really, and she raises her eyebrow in self-satisfied acknowledgement.
“You’ve got a little something on your neck. Right there. No, lower. There, there you are.”
The gold smears over the back of his glove, disappearing in the stitches of the material.
The memory of Gilmore’s face in the crook of his shoulder settles in his stomach like the glow in his face and the sound of Vex’s laughter, hot and bright and golden.
“Cover your shame, brother!” She says as she leaves, face open and wide in the exaggerated scandalized expression she carries out the door.
He wonders, if maybe he should be ashamed.
The wine looks like the night sky and Gilmore looks like a particular tapestry he saw in some temple somewhere, through his fuzzy memory. The low light of the bar dances over his skin, making him softer, somehow less and somehow not, as if the candlelight simply could not illuminate the entirety of the man before him.
He tastes like wine when he kisses him, slow and savoring, his hair silken spun and tight in his fingers.
Gilmore looks at him with something sparkling behind his eyes that makes him want to kiss him again, to apologize. He settles on the former, hoping to hide that shine behind his teeth and under his tongue instead, where it’s safer, soft and quiet.
Disappointment is an armored bear and a dramatic entrance.
Pike is radiant, beaming and beautiful, and though her magic knits him back into one piece, even her light can’t seem to break the gray of near-death settled into Gilmore’s skin.
His face is cold, sweat-covered and dark, lax and expression blank. A shell, drained of life and vigor.
“It’s okay,” he whispers, and he hopes it isn’t a lie, heart in his throat. Gilmore’s weight is heavy and suffocating against his chest, in his lap, in a way it never was, in a way that makes his humanity feel all too real and all too empty.
He doesn’t kiss him again, not there in the hiding space, not with Keyleth standing just there, not before he tears off after Vex to follow her to the hoarded cache of goods, not like his muscles burned and wanted him to, so desperately.
He notices, in the shadows on the return to the keep, that all that lingers on the skin of his palms is the rust-brown of blood and the black of the mud, and he aches.
When the storm breaks, dead in the night, and the moon falls, and Vax finds himself curled in the shadows on the floor of the Sanctuary, he can’t help but notice, there in the rows of sleeping Emonites, one soft, swath of gold in the gauze of light.
He smells like spice and magic, leaves his lips thrumming under the kiss to his forehead.
“We should have gone back,” he says, syllables catching in his throat as he can’t bring himself to voice them any louder. “We should have stayed, we should have found you. I’m so sorry, my friend. I’m so sorry.”
Even in sleep, Gilmore sighs, dramatic and low, and rolls away from his apology.
He licks his lips and returns to the shadows, the taste of gold lingering at the tip of his tongue.
He savors it.