The war between frost and flame had long since left the realm of strategy. It wasn’t a campaign anymore, it was weather. The kind that settles in joints, in letters never sent, in the aching pause before an order is given. The kind you endure.

Varka, Knight of Boreas, stood among it all with a wolfish grin, like a cathedral built too fast and too wide, unaware it was half-fallen under its own weight.

You met him in another region. Another lifetime. Before Nod-Krai’s ridges iced your tears into knives. Before the expedition became something more like exile.

You were a battlefield medic then. Not with the Knights of Favonius. You were stationed with a diplomatic escort outside the Snezhnayan border, neutral colors on your shoulder and stubbornness in your jaw.

You weren’t supposed to take sides. And yet, when the hill turned red and the snow bloomed with steam, you found yourself elbow deep in the chest of a man twice your size, bark voiced and half conscious, his hand gripping your wrist.

“That all you’ve got, doctor?” he rasped.

And you, with stupidity and anger laced in your tone, snapped back. He laughed then. And you hated how much you remembered the sound.

That was the first time.

Now, in Nod-Krai, there is no war, not officially. But there’s wind deep enough to send even Stormterror away or have Barbatos shivering in his boots. There are nights so long the fires choke out.

Varka calls a break. Not because he wants to. Only because you insist, and he’s decided that whatever you want, you’ll get. He plans to keep you around. How do we feel? Rhetorical question, don’t answer.

The tents rise crooked in the wind-swept dark, pegged into earth that hates to hold. You set up your supplies inside your canvas walls. Tight and as dry as they could be. You know he won’t come immediately. He never does. But when he does, it’s always at the edge of night, always after the others have slept, and he’s always bleeding.

Tonight is no different.

The flap rustles. Snow and breath steam in together.

“Didn’t mean to drip on your floor,” he says, voice low.

You already have the cloth steeping and the salve warm. He sinks onto the bedroll you pretended wasn’t for him. Shrugs off the cloak, fur melting against the canvas walls. You catch sight of the wound on his ribs, slashing, messy, clotting wrong.

“Wolfspike,” he mutters. “Got cocky.”

You don’t comment on the scars. The ones from before you met him. The ones you left. Not from cruelty. But from saving him too many times. From when the room smelt like antiseptic and you were covered in sweat, blood and even more blood.

You should tell him to rest. To stop leading the charge. To trust someone else, because you think you’re starting to see the hat man

But you don’t.

Because the only time he breathes like a man, not a title, is here, under your hands, under your care, bleeding like everyone else. It’s a twisted ritual now. You patch him up. He stares at you too long. You pretend to not want to punch him. He pretends he doesn’t want to roll over and pass out. Neither of you say the truth.

Until tonight.

Tonight, he catches your wrist. Gently. Reverently. Like it’s not a battlefield, but a prayer.

“You should’ve never followed me here,” he murmurs.