#'your death belongs to me' is a crow wedding vow caterina dellamorte herself told me

[the-rebel-archivist]

39 ILLARIO AND AMADIS THIS ISN'T SPIRITS

This one's for you, not-spirits, and it is glorious. It changed my whole canon and I've never been happier. While Illario languishes in the crow prison of Velabanchel, Amadis finds herself in her own prison in the fade. Their reunion is very Antivan - dramatic, violent, and passionate. The crow mating rituals are intricate.

Prompt: A kiss because time's run out

Amadis de Riva / Illario Dellamorte | 3446 words

Seven steps. That was how many it took to cross the dark, dank cell Illario had been confined in all these weeks. Nine if he took very small steps. Five if he took very large ones or if he walked to the raised wooden pallet that might be called a bed, not that he granted it the honour of that name. Once he had managed to make it in six perfect steps, heel against the starting wall, toes against the end, and had spent the next few hours replicating it. But seven, seven was comfortable.

The steps took a little longer today, weighted by the blossoming bruises over his abdomen that forced a wince from him with each movement. He had discovered very quickly that a little light treason wasn’t appreciated by the crows of Velabanchel. Still, he wouldn’t want anyone to think that he’d lost his edge while in prison and so he paced, took whatever exercise he could, and tried to keep his mind occupied the way his training had conditioned him to.

The way he’d unwittingly forced Lucanis to live for a year. Would he be as sane after his own year had passed?

Illario shook his head to clear it. That was not a useful thought. File it down.

Heavy steps thudded against the flagstones of the hall outside of his cell door and from a distance torches on the wall were lit one by one, gradually spilling warm light into the room that had previously only been lit by a narrow slit of the moon reflecting off the sea below the prison’s cliff. One set of noisy, wide-set footsteps, the night guard’s, he knew by now… and one lighter, one barely imperceptible, whispers kissing the floor, but footsteps that would rouse him from sleep even if he were dead.

He was conscious then of his stained clothing and unwashed hair that hung limply about his face, deprived as he was of his hair tie for fear that he’d use it as a makeshift garrotte. He probably would have. He smoothed his hair back as best he could and leaned as nonchalantly as his aching body would allow against one salt-brined wall, crossing his arms in front of himself.

The flame from the torchlight appearing beyond the bars of his cell door burned his eyes, now attuned to the darkness, and so his first view of the figure that haunted his dreams was glimpsed through squinted eyelids, his careful attempt at composure hindered by his need to shield his eyes with his hand.

With the sharp scrape of metal on metal the door creaked open and in she stepped, skirting around the broad-shouldered guard like liquid metal and giving him a small nod.

“Ten minutes,” the guard growled, locking the door behind her and seating the torch in its bracket in the hallway. Ten minutes in which he was at her mercy, ten in which he could speak his last words.

Only he and his true jailor remained, his beautiful, infuriating jailor, who stood glaring daggers at him but who stood when she should have been dead.

“You’re brave to come alone again, and without bars between us this time,” he said in what would in any other situation have been a drawled implicit threat but which emerged from his mouth neutered and toothless. 

Amadis stepped toward him with those stealthy feet, those quiet killer’s footfalls that he knew too well. Anyone else with her dark hair, dark eyes, and dark leathers might have blended in to the gloom but not her, never her. Her black curls glowed in the halo of the torchlight and shadows traced her form like lovers’ hands while his own seemed suddenly empty.

“Has your ability to threaten atrophied so much already?” she asked with a sarcastic narrow of her eyebrows at his verbal gracelessness, tucking her hair behind her shoulder and exposing her neck with a dare nestled deep in the blackness of her eyes.

Oh, but the bait was tempting. Off the top of his head he could list ten different ways to crush a windpipe, all of which required his skin to make contact with hers and in which he would hold her again for a few glorious seconds as the life drained from her body.

He put his hands down at his sides and stretched them open to clear the thought.

“You left me here to die, Adi. You left me to the damp and the rats and the humiliation. I could kill you now. I should kill you now.” He took a step, biting back the grimace from the weakness of his wounded flesh, channeling it into the fire-flash of anger. “They told me you were gone,” he said accusingly, drawing himself up to his full height before her. “You were dead and it was not me who did it.”

“And that’s what matters, is it?” she asked with a scornful twist of her mouth.

“Yes!” Exasperated, he kept from resisting the offered throat and framed it with his hand, ignoring the thrill that ran down his arm from the contact point of their flesh. “Of course it matters! No matter how far I go you dog my steps, and you left me.”

“Oh, well I’m so very sorry that I inconvenienced you by not dying at your hand,” she sneered, looking up and daring him to tighten his grip. His fingers flexed; he considered, and then felt a flush of satisfaction as her eyes widened when he shifted his grip to the side of her face. The curls at the back of her neck were threaded through his fingers, her cheek cupped and held insistently.

“You don’t understand, you were dead. For weeks you were dead.” 

When she was gone from this world he had learned what it meant to live where she was not. Their last meetings had been marked by antipathy - not indifference but passion, chaos and emotion and hatred all intermingled with the knowledge that there would be a next encounter. And then there was not. There never would be. 

But she had returned from the dead. 

“What does it matter to you, Illario?” she asked bitterly, taking his hand to lift it away from her and letting go like it was some diseased, distasteful thing. “What makes this time so different from the last time you pointed a blade at my neck?”

She wiped every trace of his hand from her body as she spoke and his stomach turned that she would be so repulsed by him.

“It does matter. It did matter. I never told you.”

“Is there anything you could possibly tell me that I don’t already know?” She asked with her dagger-sharp tongue, heedless of the jagged wounds she left behind. “That you betrayed your own family to death and torture, failed and failed again no matter what traitorous heights you set your sights on? You betrayed me but I knew what you were when I took you into my bed.” 

Pausing, she looked away and felt her next words in her mouth before giving voice to them, testing the shape of them. When she spoke again the sound was raw and cracked. “I would have forgiven you for that. I won’t for Antiva. I can only be glad that you failed like you failed at everything else. You keep failing over and over.” 

“Stop it,” he said quietly, an echo of a parentless boy four feet tall and eight years old. “Stop it. They’re already ripping out my nails, isn’t that enough for you?” He gestured toward her with the left hand pinky finger that barely stung now. “They made me what I am, like they did you. The difference between us is that I am twice defeated by my House and you are the victor.”

She had no answer, only a long exhale as she broke her gaze to look away at the floor in the corner of his cell and blinked a few times in quick succession. “Your justifications will leave you bound up in knots,” she said wearily. When she looked back there was an uncertain, nearly pleading look in her eyes that he didn’t recognize. She didn’t look at him that way. She simply did not. Where his suave confidence ended, hers began, not… this. Not the questioning vulnerability that he saw now.

“If you don’t tell me we can forget I was here. We can pretend that we will never wound each other again and I will forget you,” she said, and her pleading eyes begged for silence.

“Even if you could, I could not.”

Illario took a breath in and held it for one, two, three paces-lengths. He willed the prison to open up and swallow him. To swallow them both. Then, exhaling softly, he slipped his hand to the back of her neck and leaned close to her, looking down into those deep, dark eyes that had bewitched him with their passion and spark so long before he knew how to feel. 

“Please,” he said quietly, and he could have sworn that for the briefest of seconds she leaned in to his hand before nodding, resigned to her fate.

“Amadis, I didn’t know until you were gone that a world without you in it would feel like the stars had gone out.” 

They froze in time, interlocked and unmoving for what seemed like minutes, hours, millennia. She blinked; he imitated the motion. Her chest rose and fell with a breath; his did the same. Her skin was warm to the touch, burning his damp-chilled fingers, and since she seemed to permit his hand to linger he pushed his luck and ran his thumb under her jaw. Her eyelids fluttered closed, scrunched together once, and then reopened.

“You would try to kill me and then tell me what, that you love me?” The sound of her voice came out low and scratched, edged by bitter and false amusement.

“Yes- no. I don’t know. Love is too shallow a word. Love is supposed to be kind but this rends me open and leaves me raw. They say love is patient but this is a hungry thing that wants to eat me whole. Every second I spend here I curse your name and every second I know that there is no one else I would wish to curse for an eternity.”

It was embarrassing, exposing his vitals to her when she could execute him on the spot and the other crows would thank her. He was conscious again of the dirt and dried blood on his skin, the odour of his unwashed body, and the clothing that had not stood up to the rigours of being the prison’s punching bag. He was also painfully, sharply aware that despite all of that she had not pulled away from him.

“You are three betrayals too late, mio caro,” she told him, but told him softly, nearly wistfully, as she removed his hand from her face - but allowed her fingers to rest for just a moment over his before letting go. 

A pit of lead grew in his stomach but he smiled through it; if that smile was cruel it was only to himself for allowing himself to believe even for a moment that he might be someone’s first choice. He thought he had crushed that hope long ago but she had coaxed it out of him, dug it up where it lay buried and exposed it to the light while he screamed, all without her ever knowing. If the prison collapsed into the sea at that moment it would have been a true mercy, a miracle sparing him the need to debase himself further. 

“Nothing would have changed, even if you had known,” she said. She knew him, knew his inner workings, knew him as well as she knew her own hands. And he knew that on that night in the opera house had things gone differently he would have seen her dead himself even had he known his feelings, but at least as she gasped her last it would have been his face she saw before her eyes went dark. 

“No, it wouldn’t have. You would still have chosen my cousin’s side.”

“Then how can you love me?”

“If it was possible not to, I wouldn’t,” he said with an acerbic huff through his nose. “You’re asking me how I’m able to keep my heart beating. I could sooner stop that than I could destroy this beast that wants to devour me. Did you know that when you walk into a room everything around you glows? Are you aware of the effort it takes to numb myself when you put your hand on my skin and set it on fire? I wish I didn’t know, but I do now.”

With a deftness that made his aching limbs scream he put one hand on her waist and the other around her back, slipping his fingers into the back of her waistband and searching for the hidden pocket where he was certain her dagger would sit. The guards would have taken her weapons, but that single needle-thin blade was one she would have been loath to give up - and he was right, it was there, the finely made hilt sliding easily out into his palm. 

Amadis drew back, a warning in her glance as she caught his wrist at an awkward angle, but loosened her grasp when he knelt down on the cold stone of the prison floor.

On his knees in front of her he slowly, unthreateningly, brought the dagger close. Like any assassin, he knew the exact position and depth of his heart; the little blade would be enough. He pointed the tip directly over that spot and pressed the weapon into her grip, curling his fingers over hers on the handle.

All she had to do was press down. 

“I spilled your blood once. Take mine, it’s yours.”

It had to be her. Not this place, not these people who cared nothing about his fate except to hope he suffered. Not even his cousin, the playmate and rival he’d followed after his whole life but who had never truly understood him. Not even the grandmother who’d withheld her approval to the last.

Her. The one person who looked at him and never flinched.

Amadis rolled the handle softly in her fingers, tightening and loosening her hold on it as she considered. Her face was unreadable, a conflux of emotions that he was too focused to untangle. The rhythm of his heartbeat pounded in his ears and yet he could not count them by step-lengths of breath while he waited for her answer.

She set her mouth, bit the corner of her bottom lip, and pushed the razor-sharp point forward. He inhaled sharply as his skin broke; yet another red stain spread over the threads of his shirt, fresh and bright against the old splotches of brown, and she stared down at him intensely. 

“Do not lie to me again.”

“Not to you.”

With a sharp inhale and something akin to a sob she pulled her dagger back and wiped the tip against her side before seating it back in her waistband. He said nothing and moved only to let his hands fall in front of him.

“Void take you, Illario Dellamorte,” she said as she sunk both hands into his horrible, prison-filthy hair and smoothed it behind his ears. A quick twist and his neck would crack; it wouldn’t be so bad, it would be quick. His head was tilted back, the eye contact between them unbreakable. 

“You said that I didn’t understand, but I was dead and you weren’t there. Some terrible, rotten fragment of your soul is lodged inside of mine and will not come loose.” Her eyes flashed with an intensity incongruous with the delicacy with which she brushed away the wispy hairs over his ear with her thumb and then knelt down at his level.

“One day I may yet end your life. Until then I demand all of you.”

All of… nothing. A man with no House, no family, no reputation except that of a traitor. A man battered and bruised and broken, the skills beaten into him left to fall into decay and disuse all these weeks. Not an assassin of House Dellamorte. Only a man.

“Even now, when I am this?”

“Especially now,” she said, and she kissed him and the cold, salty cell above the sea came alive with warmth. Her lips were soft where his were cracked and broken but they met hungrily, her arms curling around his neck, his hands grasping at her upper back and pulling her tightly against him.

“This doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you,” she whispered in between kisses.

“Good,” he said with a wicked smile against her lips. “I haven’t forgiven you either.”

In the hall, the heavy footsteps of the guard thudded against the stones. It was twenty steps for him usually, though Illario had missed their beginning. Amadis moved away from him and began to untangle herself; it would be embarrassing, after all, to be found in such a compromising position with a would-be enemy of the state.

Naturally then, he did not let her go, no matter how she glared.

“You will be the death of me,” she huffed, but there was no bite to the words. 

“Is that a promise?” he asked, a smile growing on his face when she laughed against his mouth. 

“Yes, it is.”

Leaning forward, their foreheads met and they knelt in silence for three step-lengths, their eyes closed, their hearts beating in unison.

“Your death belongs to me, Adi.”

“And yours to me.”

They whispered; it seemed wrong to speak out loud or permit anyone else to hear such a vow. It was for them alone. The footsteps in the hallway grew louder as the guard approached nearer and nearer but neither of them could find it in them to give notice to it.

He kissed her once more, deeply, unheeding of the clatter of dense iron keys rapping at the cell door, filing the smell of her and the feel of her in his arms away deep within his mind. The rapping became more and more insistent, less easy to ignore, and Amadis broke first, loosening her hold around his neck and stroking his cheek.

“You have to let me go.”

“Oh.” It had been so easy to forget when she was in his arms that she would leave. Even the return of the guard had not quite driven it home that in a moment she would disappear and he would be left alone to his days of step counting and nights on the wooden plank he continued to refuse to call a bed, existing at the whim of his guards. 

They had allowed him a few minutes’ hope only to destroy it again as some new torture in a long string of cruel and unusual new ways to cause suffering. Frankly he would have preferred the honesty of the rack.

“Right,” he said distantly, holding his side as he brought himself to his feet and stood against the back wall, bile gathering at the back of his throat.

File it down. File it all down. Make it useful.

Useful for what? Useful for whom? Not for him, not anymore.

He hadn’t seen Amadis get up in his haze of despair but she was standing too, her clothing smoothed out and mouth wiped clean, all trace of him gone from her person. She nodded to the guard. Half of him longed to watch her disappear down the hall until she was no more, to imprint the image of her in his mind to remember in the empty days to come, while another half hoped to forget everything in the last few minutes for his own sanity.

He jumped when he heard her voice again and blinked uncomprehendingly at her where she stood facing him in the open doorway.

“I asked if you were coming.”

“Coming where?” he asked stupidly.

“To fight with us rather than against us.”

With a smile that lit the entire cell she reached out to him, her palm upturned and open. Still unsure, he glanced between her and the guard, a stolid gentleman who gave him nothing back in response to his nonverbal inquiry but who also didn’t seem inclined to stop him. Going where? It didn’t matter. It wasn’t here, and it was with her, and it was a start.

He took the outstretched hand and they stepped forward together.