Page 52 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Morgan

The room is small but infinitely superior to one shared bedroll on cold ground beside a dying fire.

There's one bed. Adequately sized, a wooden frame with a straw mattress and a wool blanket and a pillow that is more suggestion than substance, but it's a bed, in a room, with walls and a door and a ceiling that isn't the sky. It isn't as though they didn't share this morning. Morgan's body remembers the warmth of the bedroll and Bohdi's hand on his waist and the slow rhythm of Bohdi's breathing carrying him under, and the memory is close enough to touch and dangerous enough that he doesn't.

Someone has also drawn a bath.

A tin tub in the corner, filled from the kitchen by a procession of serving boys who hauled buckets up the stairs and poured them in with the world-weary efficiency of people who do this every day for travelers who are usually less blood-covered than the current guests. The water steams. The surface catches the lamplight from the single oil lamp on the bedside table. And the sight of it, plain, practical, unremarkable in every way, is more tempting than anything Morgan can remember.

He doesn't think he'll ever be able to scrub off the stink of Ivan's intentions, but he's willing to make the attempt.

Bohdi leaves to get them dinner and to give him privacy, and Morgan takes ruthless advantage. He strips out of the filthy, bloodstained clothes and lowers himself into the water and the heat hits his battered body and undoes him.

He sits in the tub and the water turns gray-pink around him and he scrubs. He scrubs his hands first, because his hands are the worst, the dried blood under his fingernails, in the creases of his palms, worked into the lines of his knuckles. He uses the coarse soap from the tray beside the tub and scrubs until his skin is raw and the water is dark and his hands are pink and clean and shaking. Then he scrubs his arms and his chest and his face and the back of his neck and every other part of him that Ivan touched or looked at or thought about touching.

He washes his hair. He dunks his head and rakes his fingers through it and works the soap into the roots and rinses and repeats, and the blond strands float around him in the dirty water. He washes himself with meticulous, compulsive thoroughness, knowing that no amount of soap will remove what he's actually trying to remove, and does it anyway, because the alternative is sitting in the dark with the smell of blood in his nostrils and Ivan's voice in his head.

The water is still warm when he's out and dried and dressed in the second set of clothes Bohdi bought him.

He has his own body back.

He's combing his hair out with his fingers, working through the tangles, separating the wet strands, when Bohdi comes back. The door opens and Bohdi steps through with a canvas bag in one hand that he drops on the table, and then Bohdi starts undressing.

Morgan flushes and turns away.

The heat comes fast and total, cheeks, neck, the tips of his ears, and he keeps his back to the room and his fingers in his hair and does not turn around. Then he hears the heavy displacement of a large body entering a small tub, and a sigh so deep and so weary it comes from somewhere far down in Bohdi.

Morgan does not turn back until he hears the water settle.

When he does look it's still a mistake.

Bohdi has both arms hooked over the rim of the tub, draped along the edges, hands hanging loose on either side. His head is tipped back against the rounded lip and his eyes are shut and the lamplight plays across the tattoos on his arms and his chest and the wet skin of his shoulders. The water laps at his collarbones. His braided hair is dark with water, the red gone rust-brown, dripping onto the wood floor. The claw marks on his shoulder, three parallel gouges, swollen and angry, the bear's parting gift, stand out red against the inked skin. And his face is slack. Open. The grin is gone and the charm is gone and the performance is gone and what's left is a man who looks exactly as exhausted and exactly as battered and exactly as human as Morgan feels. The vulnerability of it, the rare, unguarded sight of Bohdi at rest, is so devastating that Morgan has to look away.

He looks back.

He looks back because he has been looking at this man for years and the habit is stronger than the sense, and Bohdi in a tin tub in a rented room with his defenses down is a sight Morgan's body will not allow him to turn away from regardless of what his mind thinks about it.

Bohdi cracks one eye open. "There's food," he says.

Morgan bites his tongue. The words that are trying to come out are I'd rather have you. They are true and they help no one, least of all the exhausted man in the bathtub who has spent the last twenty-four hours keeping Morgan alive and does not need to be propositioned by the person he's protecting.

He goes to the table and takes an apple from the canvas bag and eats it in small bites. He should be starving. His body hasn't had real food since yesterday morning's breakfast in the Wolfe hall, and the crayfish by the stream were barely enough to take the edge off. He isn't hungry. His stomach is in knots. The apple is crisp and tart, the flavor sharp and clean after days of Wolfe cooking, and he chews and swallows and tastes almost nothing.

He inventories their situation with a clerk's precision, because that's how he processes fear. When the world becomes unmanageable, Morgan manages what he can, and what he can manage is information. He arranges the facts in his head, neat, ordered, each item assessed for its value and its risk.

They are being hunted by the Wolfe clan. Ivan is dead and the men who killed him escaped through the front gate, and the stronghold knows their faces and their direction of travel and has riders faster and fresher than anything Bohdi and Morgan can field. The Wolfe territory extends another half day's ride to the north, and the contested land beyond it runs nearly to the Rengaran border.

They're two days out from Valen. Since the forest they've added a second set of clothes, a small bag of food, and the coin left over from the bear payment. Bohdi has Ivan's sword. Morgan has a sharp tongue.

He does not know how useful any of it will prove.

"I can hear you fretting from over here, your highness," Bohdi calls without opening his eyes. "You're going to get wrinkles."

"Would you have me smile and pretend our situation is not as dire as it is?" Morgan says.

"I'd have you let me worry about it."

Morgan huffs. The sound is involuntary and expressive and communicates, without words, that the idea of letting someone else worry about anything on his behalf is so foreign to his nature that it barely registers as a concept. He finishes the apple. He tears off a piece of bread from the loaf in the bag, looks at it for a long moment, and puts it back.