#for him compassion is a greater impetus than logistics

[arcstral]

[ SUPPORT ]:     the sender encourages the wounded receiver to lean against them for physical support.

          𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆   𝐀𝐑𝐌𝐎𝐑   𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐓𝐒.

No battle and no war shared the same reasons, yet they would always end the same way. A sweet potion of clarity and relief handed to the weary soldiers that still stood where others had fallen. As the pallor of an early autumnal morning came down in wan shafts, threading through the stratus clouds with a weak light but a bright and priceless hope, that fledgling warmth dug beneath the matte streaks of dirt on Marth’s cheeks and parted his lips like a promise of rain.

He closed his eyes into that feeling, an unmoving cask untouched by action or saturnalia. A statue. Survival often brought with it an appreciation for even the simplest privileges that defined life in a body- breathing, walking, standing, the clench of all ten retained fingers and toes, as well as the feeling of revelry that tomorrow even if unpromising and bleak, was still tomorrow. There was no room to doubt the price they’d paid because the conundrums of a moral man were wealthy freedom for another hour. Barely standing upright, they couldn’t yet afford to squander this one. Neither made any remark of the bodies that lined their way to safety.

“I’m sorry,” Marth grunted to him as they cleared the dead war zone and entered the copse, almost without explanation, but whatever complicated menagerie of reasons he nursed could be read well enough in his low-set brows. His quiet contrition. I’m sorry- for what- dragging Roy into this? A fight waged on foreign grounds to which neither definitively belonged? Most kings thought with their heads but Marth did it with his heart; he always would. It didn’t matter if it was an Archanean urchin dying in the streets or a Fòdlan one, a bandit plague here or one over there- all terrors on the population were his responsibility.

It didn’t matter if it wasn’t his fight. The ‘Hero-King’ made it his.

At Roy’s encouragement, he reluctantly leaned against the Elibean boy as they dragged themselves through the mud but stumbled along the way. His fall brought them down together, sputtering on his second apology. They still surfaced to their feet in twos to Marth’s soaring shame. “You aren’t uninjured yourself, yet you’re carrying my feet as well as yours.”

The hang of his hair tickled the bridge of his nose, then the bone of Roy’s shoulder as he slumped. The flow of blood quickened through the gaps between his fingers yet to congeal. “ I can pick myself up after I’ve recovered my strength, Roy,” he lied. “Don’t hesitate to leave me behind.”

Roy never did.