#SLIGHTLY old prose but like 1.5 years instead of 4

[angrennufuin]

100 Ways to say "I Love You:" Maeve and Sûl

Ravnica campaign, nonspecific eldritch battle Prompt 4 from here.

Sûl ricochets off the wall and directly into six feet of irritated legionnaire.

“How many times,” says Maeve, with clearly fraying patience, “do I have to tell you? Stay out of the frontline if you’re not going to wear armor!”

She hauls Sûl’s arm across her own shoulders, which is good because little concepts like standing and balancing are looking somewhat improbable at the moment. Sûl coughs and then winces when the movement jostles their ribs. “Aw, Sergeant, you don’t think this dress is battlefield-appropriate? I’m--” they pause for effect-- “crushed.”

Maeve makes a strangled huff instead of just laughing like she clearly should. Her eyebrows are drawn down dramatically, turning her striking face into a caricature; evidently she does not appreciate her hard shielding work going to waste.

In Sûl’s defense, they were doing an excellent job of dodging one monstrous, alarmingly wiggly tentacle. They dodged it so excellently, in fact, that they dodged directly into the path of another tentacle -- this beast seems to have an infinite supply --  and got smacked across the room for their trouble. Hence the ribs, which are probably only cracked and not crushed, but come on. The joke was right there. 

“Can you stand on your own?” asks Maeve, clearly not appreciating Sûl’s rapier wit and admirable comedy under pressure. 

“Oh, sure,” says Sûl amiably. They try, and then promptly fail, to get their legs beneath themself again. Embarrassing. 

Maeve catches them around the waist before they can land in a heap on the floor. “O-kay, apparently not. Jud’s taking care of the, uh-- thing--” Squelching noises, stage left, probably Jud taking care of the thing with extreme prejudice-- “So are you healin’ yourself or are we gettin’ you over to Penny?”

Sûl blinks back some of the dark spots in their vision and considers, briefly, the fact that Maeve came over to check on them; that without her intervention in the attack, Sûl was likely to be a Sûl-shaped smear on the wall instead of just feeling like one; that she is fully prepared to haul their slime-begrimed and currently not-very-sexy self over to Penny for healing, probably bridal-style, despite being wounded herself.  

Then they identify the slow-growing warmth under the steady ache of their ribs as an emotional sensation rather than a physical one, and promptly stop considering all of that, for their own sanity.

Maeve’s hair is all askew, her forelock straggling even further into her eyes than usual and matted with blood besides. It looks objectively terrible. It does not make the warm feeling in Sûl’s chest go away.  “You look like a hooligan, Mae-mae. Come here, let me fix it.”

“Wha-” she starts, but Sûl is already humming a soft note to magically whisk the blood out of her hair, already propping themself up between her and the wall to finger-comb the forelock into its accustomed shape. They straighten out a strap on her pauldron, too, and shake the mostly-clean sleeve of their dress down over their hand to buff the surface shiny. 

“There,” they say, with satisfaction, into her perplexed face, and let themself pass out. Maeve will probably catch them again, anyway.