Private Roleplay from our wounds

[Image: triceemblem_by_akascratch-dcdeugq.png]

He feels older, these days. He’s not sure when it set in – the stiffness in his injured shoulder has been with him for some time, and the phantom ringing in his long-dead ear has been reduced to little more than background noise for half his life; neither add up to the weariness he senses creeping at the periphery of his consciousness – and Cockatrice contests the notion with as much stubborn defiance as he has any other inconvenience in his life. There are patrols to run each morning. There are recruits to check on – sentinels to train. Soon, he hopes, there will be pups again, the King’s or the kingdom’s, and Inaria will not feel as though it has aged alongside him. There is—

There is her. Cockatrice is not so foolish, for all that his suppsoed wisdom is drawn in his grizzled muzzle and watchful gaze, to not understand the purpose of fear. To think he has not felt it. With her, though – Elizabeth, even now, and Haven in more ways than a name could imply – Cockatrice has never thought to be afraid. He lifts his great head in the dark, and feels only the same reckless loyalty she has ever inspired, her golden scruff illuminated like a halo and the rendered the same gold as her eyes. If there is concern in his heart at her voice, her soft and unusual utterance of his name, it does not approach fear. He rises for her as he has each morning (before he knew her, hadn’t he risen for her? For Inaria, and so she who has become it—?), crouching in the dark, ready to shoulder the worst of her news with the same weathered perseverance as ever.

For her.

“Haven,” Cockatrice replies, voice rumbling and ever so softened by sleep, as he steps out from the den to greet her. “Of course.” It is a simple response, one made without question, but complicated by how he pauses in the new day’s sun. He has never been a creature of hesitance, but there is a thoughtful beat before he reaches forward to touch her, as though waiting for rebuke, or for confirmation. Whether Haven has come to him as Queen or as friend, in the brief moment where he touches the soft line of her cheek with his nose, she is something like his before she is her crown.

What weight would he not bear for her?

Trice feels her in all the core of his bones and the cords of his muscles. He feels her in the ache in his shoulder, and the twinge in his long-gone ear. He feels her in the memory of Dragon beneath his paws – of that monster, pinned and snarling, her blood on his teeth and his final blow stayed – and he feels her in the wind in his heavy coat as he emerges into the dawning sun, the breeze smelling of the jacarandas even still. Whatever news Haven brings with her furrowed brow and her heavy countenance, Cockatrice prepares to weather it with a lift of his chin and a slow, patient blink of his green eyes, still clear despite his years. He is not eloquent. He is unable to articulate that twisting ache in his chest when he looks at her, nor process it entirely; he conflates duty with love, and in many ways, his displays of each are the same. Dedication. Loyalty. Protection. The things he can offer – and offer Haven before any other.

(He had not been bred, all those seasons ago, to understand a thing like love. In his quieter, more pensive moments, the guard thinks he can understand how failure must have burned in his sister so long ago, when success was all they had ever been taught to know, though he does not approach thinking of her as justified. Then, perhaps. Once, a very long time ago. Not since. Not now. Not again.

There are choices that cannot be unmade, and deeds which cannot be forgiven.)

And where another lover might speak – pregnant?, he might say, incredulous, or excited, or shocked – Cockatrice is silent. His head tips to one side just so, the barest hint of recognition, and in the set of her jaw and the squaring of her shoulders, he knows two things: they are his, and she would die for them. There is an unexpected dryness to his mouth, and though he is never a creature of many words, Trice usually has an inkling of how to reply. Here, his linear pragmatism is suddenly waylaid by each but, and each what if, and the sudden impossibility of being a father when he himself has little idea of what family has ever meant to mean, he who hates his sister and could not kill her, he who returned to a kingdom that had shunned him—

But they are his. And he would die for them.

“We’ll have to prepare,” then, is the practical answer, if said more quickly than he is used to speaking. “How long?” To hunt, to line the den, to come to terms with the little lives that even now quicken in Haven’s belly. Cockatrice lifts his great head to meet his Queen’s eyes, green on gold, and there is an instant where he is not only the soldier prepared to carry this out as any other task, or as any other order – where some curious softness in his eyes belies his stoicism. Where he doubts – and he tastes something like fear. “If you would have me,” Trice adds, wondering over his presumption, over being a guard and never a King – when he would give the world to simply lay at the mouth of her den each night and want for nothing else, when he is suddenly struck by how profoundly he does not want to be cast out from this, “—I would protect them either way.”