Page 61 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Morgan wants more. He wants to climb into Bohdi's lap and get his hands under the bloodied shirt and press himself against every inch of available skin. He wants to feel the tattoos under his palms and the heartbeat under his fingertips and the solid, overwhelming weight of this man against him, over him, around him. He kisses harder, tilting his head, changing the angle, and Bohdi follows him, responsive, attuned, answering every shift with a counter-shift, and the coordination of it is effortless.

Bohdi's other hand comes up. It frames Morgan's jaw, carefully, so carefully, the fingers curving around the bone and the thumb resting against the corner of his mouth where their lips meet. The tenderness of that gesture alongside the ferocity of the kiss is so contradictory and so perfectly him that Morgan's eyes burn behind his closed lids and the sound that comes out of him is closer to a sob than anything that should exist inside a kiss.

Then Morgan tastes the blood on Bohdi's lip.

He pulls back.

Bohdi follows him forward an inch before catching himself, the involuntary pursuit, the body moving toward what it wants before the mind can intervene. The look on his face when Morgan puts distance between them is raw and confused and so unguarded that Morgan has to look away from it before it finishes him.

"You're injured," Morgan says. His voice is strained and doesn't sound like his own. Hoarse, practical, putting one foot in front of the other because the alternative is standing still, and standing still means looking at Bohdi's face, and looking at Bohdi's face means falling into it and never coming out. "You're bleeding. That wound on your thigh is deep and you need tending."

Bohdi stares at him. His hand is still on the back of Morgan's neck and his mouth is still red from the kiss and he looks, for possibly the first time since Morgan has known him, completely off balance.

"Morgan—"

"Sit down, Bohdi."

Bohdi sits.

Whether from the tone, the non-negotiable authority Morgan has learned from a lifetime of watching his brother issue commands and that he deploys so rarely it carries the force of a thunderclap when he does, or from the blood loss, Morgan doesn't know and doesn't care. Bohdi drops from his knees to a sitting position on the bank, legs stretched in front of him, and Morgan moves to his side.

The shoulder is badly bruised. The swelling is visible even under the tattoos, a dark, angry mound of displaced fluid and traumatized tissue that extends from the joint to the base of his neck. It might be worse than bruised. It might be fractured or dislocated or cracked in some way that Morgan doesn't have the training to identify, and the knowledge of that, the limit of his usefulness, the place where his competence ends and Indrie's begins, sits in his throat and will not move.

The thigh is the problem. The sword went through the muscle above the knee, in on the outside, out on the inside, a through-and-through that missed the bone by luck or divine intervention. It's deep. It's still weeping, not the bright arterial red that means death but the steady, dark ooze that means damage, sustained and unaddressed. It needs stitching and pressure and half a dozen things Morgan does not have.

He goes through the dead men's supplies.

He moves among the bodies with a grim resourcefulness that would have been impossible two days ago and is merely unpleasant now. He searches saddlebags and belt pouches and the rolled packs lashed behind saddles, looking for the cleanest fabric available, and finds a linen shirt in one man's pack that is relatively unworn and a length of cotton bandaging in another's, a warrior's field kit, basic but functional. He tears the shirt into strips. He soaks the cotton in river water and wrings it out. He kneels beside Bohdi in the mud and wraps the thigh with steady, careful hands.

He does not think about whose blood is dried under his fingernails while he does it. He thinks about the knot. He thinks about the pressure. He thinks about the placement of the bandage and the angle of the wrap and whether the edges of the wound are aligned, and the thinking is a mercy because it keeps out everything else.

Bohdi is quiet the whole time. Watching him. Morgan can feel those eyes on the side of his face, steady, unwavering, the focused attention Bohdi gives to things he considers precious, and he does not look up.

Because if he looks up he is going to kiss him again and he will not be able to stop a second time.

He ties off the bandage. He checks the tension, firm, not tight enough to restrict circulation, distributed evenly across the wound. He sits back on his heels and puts his hands on his own knees and grips until his knuckles go white.

"I understand your position," Morgan says. His voice is very controlled. The composure is back, not the false composure of performing calm, but the real composure of having decided what he needs to say and committing to saying it clearly and without flinching. He looks at his own white knuckles and not at Bohdi's face. "I have always understood it. And I am not asking for something you can't give me."

Bohdi is quiet. The river runs over its stones. A horse stamps and blows somewhere behind them.

Then his hand comes up and touches Morgan's face.

His thumb traces the bruise on Morgan's cheekbone, gently, so gently, the calloused pad moving across the discolored skin with a care so profound it barely qualifies as touch. And the expression he's wearing is nothing Morgan has ever seen on him. Not in all of the years of looking. Not in all his time of studying this man's face for clues and tells and the smallest flicker of reciprocation.

"You and Eskil," Bohdi says.

And the way he says both names together, as a unit, as one single thing, bound by a conjunction that carries the weight of everything Bohdi has ever valued, tells Morgan everything about how Bohdi thinks of them. Not separately. Not the king and the prince, the ruler and the ruled, the protector and the protected. Together. A pair. The brother who grew up beside a silent, frightened boy and the prince who was born into the family that took him in, the two people who have been the center of Bohdi's world ever since.

"You are my family," Bohdi says. His voice is low and stripped of everything that usually protects it. "Both of you. You're the only family I've had in a long time. And I can't lose you. I won't survive it, Morgan."

Morgan swallows. "It wouldn't be losing us."

"You can't know that."

"I could talk to Eskil. He would listen to me. He might⁠—"

Bohdi takes his hand and laces their fingers together, Bohdi's tattooed hand threading through Morgan's pale one, knuckle against knuckle, palm against palm.