Is it raining with you? by AdmirableMonster  

It wasn’t the whooshing of the rain, the howling of the wind, or even the crash of the thunder that brought Kadarada back to consciousness from a suffocatingly heavy sleep, but the creak of the door to the adjoining chamber.  As an investigator of the King’s Men, his mind automatically filtered out natural sounds and, regardless of the depths of his exhaustion, woke him at even the slightest out-of-place noise that could be associated with a human threat.

The door to the adjoining chamber was not locked.  Drowning in weariness, Kadarada’s unconscious mind forgot this and brought him instantly back awake at the unexpected noise.  But his eyes opened into a darkness more complete than the dreams he left behind.  All he could do was sit up in bed, reach for the knife he kept underneath the pillow, and strain his ears to hear something other than the sound of the storm.

At first, nothing.  Then Urgunarû’s voice, out of the darkness, said, “Laurefion?”

Kadarada’s heart almost stopped.  Then, navigating by nothing other than that one single word, he vaulted out of the bed and reached out.  His groping hand reached out and found flesh, catching Urgunarû’s arm.  It was only forty-one years’ worth of self-discipline that kept him from giving himself away; he swallowed the initial response and said, “What are you doing out of bed?”

“You’re here.  You’re safe.”

The whole big body of him sagged against Kadarada, his muscular arms enfolding him in a tight hug.  Kadarada clutched his hand tight around the knife, holding it down at his side for safety’s sake.  He was not expecting the reaction.  He was not expecting Urgunarû to wake yet. For the past two days, he has been treating his companion for a poisoned arrow wound to the upper thigh.  Fortunately, at least the poison had its origin on the island of Númenor and not in the forests of Dunland, or he was fairly certain even Urgunarû’s evidently godlike constitution would have given out.

“Yes, Captain.  I am safe.”

“I dreamed about the end,” Urgunarû said, muffling his voice in Kadarada’s shoulder.

“The end of what?”

“Everything.  Water and fire.”  He shook his head.  “What happened?”

This was the conversation Kadarada had been dreading.  He had tried several different versions of it in his head, all of them ending when he met Urgunarû’s imagined expansive grief for the deaths of two men he barely knew.  He swallowed.  “You took an arrow to the upper thigh.  I was trying to stop you from bleeding out.  You warned me that the woman mercenary was about to attack me, and I shot first.”

“Did we lose everyone?” Urgunarû whispered, voice barely audible above the storm.  He meant the local defenders of the neighborhood, of course.  Kadarada tried to tell himself there was no reason to care about any of them, but he knew it was a lie.  It was bitter pill for two investigators thrown into the role of peacekeepers to swallow.

“Not everyone,” he said, trying to soften the blow with a gentle voice.  “Gimulthôn and Tamarkhôr.  The rest survive.  Abârtârik’s leg is broken, but he lives.”

Urgunarû was silent, face pressed into Kadarada’s shoulder.  Wetness soaked through the thin night-shirt.  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

“A blow to the head.  No severe after-effects.  I am doing as well as can be expected.”

“But I always lose my head,” Urgunarû said.  “What will I do without yours?”

It occurred to Kadarada that Urgunarû was as careful with him as he was with Urgunarû.  It did not make sense.  They barely knew one another.  Kadarada, despite the shape of his eyes and the color of his skin, was from Ondosto in the northern part of the main island, while Urgunarû was from Lond Daer.  They had only been working together for a week, the fallout of some kind of truly impressive disagreement between the central authorities and the colonial.

“Your head is fine,” Kadarada returned, which was at best a feeble response.

Urgunarû raised the object of discussion from Kadarada’s shoulder.  The sound of the wind died, leaving only the rushing of the rain.  In what should have been pitch dark, Kadarada saw golden light spilling from his eyes, like the ancient, forbidden stories of the Elves.  “I dreamed of the beginning, too,” Urgunarû said.  “The temple.  The blood.  The sacrifices.  I heard a voice calling your name.”

He didn’t mean Kadarada.  Kadarada’s breath caught.  He stepped backwards.  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“You were so small,” Urgunarû said, miserably.  “You left little red footprints on the stone.  I followed you.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about, Captain.  You’re feverish.”

“Nobody can hear us.  We’re alone.  You’re the only King’s Man here, and you could have me taken in for foresight, if you wanted.  At least, I think you could.  Don’t you think you could?”

It might not be foresight.  Kadarada might have said something to him while tending to him.  But he was right—besides this, there was Urgunarû’s uncanny hunches, the way he seemed to read stories in the scenery they investigated, the way he spoke—unguarded—of the city telling him things.

“I could.”  He gave the gift of not making Urgunarû ask.  “I won’t.”

“I didn’t think so.” Urgunarû’s powerful arms squeezed him, and Kadarada’s breath hitched out of him.  The knife dropped to the floor with a soft clang.  He didn’t need it anyway.  It was more important to cradle Urgunarû’s head with his hands.  He had done his best to clean the hair, but two days of fever had still left it greasy.  Kadarada did not care.

“I’m sorry,” Urgunarû whispered.  “I’m so sorry.  You were a child.  You didn’t deserve any of that.”

Kadarada had carried this burden for his whole life.  He had never, in any way, sought absolution for it.  For surviving.  For being raised by the same men who had consigned his parents to the Temple.  For loving those men with his whole self.  He had been a child.  He had done nothing wrong.  For what would he have sought absolution?

“Hey, hey, hey, don’t cry, it’s all right, I’m sorry,” Urgunarû whispered, scared and paternal and something else all at the same time.

“I’m not crying,” Kadarada said.  His face was wet, resting against Urgunarû’s.  The golden glow of Urgunarû’s eyes had faded.  In the sleepy darkness, he wondered if he had gotten rain on his face, but the window was closed.  

“It was your name, wasn’t it,” Urgunarû said, because he was incapable of leaving anything alone, as long as some mystery remained.  At least he didn’t speak the syllables again.

“It was the only thing my parents gave me,” Kadarada replied.  His voice, as always, sounded remote and dry to his own ears, but there was a small unusual crack on the third-from-last word.  He hoped Urgunarû wouldn’t notice.

“Fuck,” Urgunarû said, in a tone of voice that suggested he had noticed, the way he noticed everything.  Even half-dead from a poisoned wound and a debilitating wound-fever.  Kadarada did not know what do with the feelings he had for this man.  He had, for one single solitary moment, the first day they had met, entertained, for the span of about fifteen seconds, a fantasy about who they could be to one another.  It was impossible.  His whole life was the King’s.  But in the pitch darkness, with the sound of rain muffling out all others, with Urgunarû’s arms around him, it did not seem impossible.  It seemed inevitable.

“Come to bed,” he said.  “You need to rest.”

“I can—I mean, I can go back, I didn’t even mean to wake you up, I just needed to make sure I wasn’t alone in the universe,” Urgunarû said, because he was a very normal man with very normal priorities.  

“Come to my bed,” Kadarada said.  The invitation would be as clear as he could make it.  If Urgunarû said no, that was within his rights.  It was what most men would say.

Instead, Urgunarû said, shifting his weight from foot to foot, “Are you sure?”

Disgusting.  Impossible.  “I would not have said it if I was not sure.  We can just sleep, if you prefer.  You are still recovering.”

A pause.  A tiny gleam of light in the dark.  A large man saying in a very small voice, “And if I’d prefer something else?”

“Come to bed,” Kadarada said again.  

“All right.”

The rain drew a shielding curtain down around the inn, where two men from very different lives shared the same bed and learned to share each other.

Chapter End Notes

So, for those of you who are familiar with Disco Elysium, this is obviously a port of Kim Kitsuragi (Kadarada) and Harry Dubois (Urgunarú).  The name "Kim" in Vietnamese means "Gold" or "Metal"; from this I got "Laurefion," which means "golden hawk." "Kadarada" is intended to echo the overall sound of the name a bit, and as a nice bonus means "city-wards." Harry's full name, Harrier Dubois, could be (rather loosely) translated as "hunter/hound of the woods" and I used that to inspire "Urgunarû" which is kludgy Adunaic for "bear-man."

In DE, Kim's parents were killed in the Revolution when he was two years old, and he says that he was only spared because he was so young.  I took that and put a very Numenorean spin on it, in a way that set up what I felt was a very interesting dynamic between the characters.

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