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Ballister was born right-handed, but he learned to use both hands equally well because knights are expected to be the best possible version of themselves they can be. His soulmate words are on his right, though, in cursive golden script that curls around the inner arm right in the joint of his elbow.
“Oh my Gloreth, are you bleeding?”
In the orphanage, a girl had looked upon his limb with wide eyes and a small smile, grubby hands hovering but not touching the words. “Your soulmate must be really caring,” she had said, dark words wrapped around her ankle like a cuff which read ‘Sup babe’ in a blocky font.
Everyone in the kingdom has the first words that their eternal match will say to them written somewhere on their body. It is a gift from a god that precedes the history books and Ballister was never the religious type, but he also couldn’t deny that he trusted the inevitability of the words just like everybody else.
He didn’t know his own parents, but he liked to imagine that they had been soulmates. Probably not, though, for him to end up in an orphanage. Ballister had sworn at a young age that he would wait for his soulmate, no matter how long it took. Call him a romantic.
At the moment, Ballister was lying in bed next to his soulmate and if he concentrated, he could pretend that everything was fine. He laid on his side, flesh hand mashed against his cheek as he propped his head, staring at Ambrosius’s sleeping face.
It was too early for light to filter through the thin curtains of their apartment, and it was too early for even a morning person like Ambrosius to be awake. The room wasn’t quite dark, illuminated dimly by a slowly rising sun.
He hadn’t slept a bit.
Of course, Ballister had tried to sleep. He had nearly everything he wanted: his boyfriend, a shared apartment, a healthy and repaired relationship that was thriving in the wake of the mess that had been the past few months. Hypothetically, there should be nothing keeping him awake except thoughts of Nimona. Even thinking about the shapeshifter made his heart twinge in pain and he heaved a quiet sigh.
He was brooding at the glorious hour of five in the morning. It had to be a new record of some sort. Even observing Ambrosius’s relaxed face and adorable bed hair couldn’t put his heart at ease because he couldn’t stop staring at the dark chicken scratch sprawled across the blond’s collarbone.
“I’m fine,” Ambrosius’s soul words read, words that Ballister had spat out twenty odd years ago when they had first met as children at the Institute.
“I’m fine,” Ballister mouthed now, trying out the phrase to see if it felt any different now. They were meaningless now, just half of a pair.
“Did they let you keep the old one?” Nimona had asked carelessly, bouncing around their evil lair with childlike curiosity.
Ballister didn’t know what had happened to the arm, probably burned or otherwise disposed of, gone to the void, and with it, the words that assured him that Ambrosius was his soulmate. The worst irony of it was that the other knight had cut it off himself.
The ex-kind-of villain sighed, rolling out of bed quietly so as to not disturb the sleeping man, pulling on pants and walking into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. “I’m fine,” he said out loud once he had closed the bedroom door behind him. He didn’t need the universe to tell him that he belonged with Ambrosius.
He was so tired, and part of him told him to just try to climb back into bed, but he couldn’t. Still, Ballister was a problem solver, and he knew what the issue was. So, like a strong independent knight, he went to find something to write with.
Two hours later, Ambrosius found his boyfriend sitting in the living room with a whole coffee pot on the table, trying to use a silver Sharpie to write something on his arm.
“Bal?” he asked with a yawn from the doorway, leaning against the wall as he squinted at the dark figure of the other knight on the couch. “When did you get up?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Bal replied distractedly, setting the marker down to take a long sip straight from the coffee pot.
“You’ve been up all night?” Ambrosius blinked awake now, turning to look at the clock and then walking closer to Bal so that he could sit down on the couch next to him. “What’re you doing, hon? Something wrong with the arm?”
At the lack of reply and a close observation of the dark circles that seemed to swallow Ballister’s beautiful brown eyes, Ambrosius came to the quick conclusion that something was wrong. It was always like pulling teeth with the man when it came to talking about problems, something that they had both sworn to work on but after their break (or so they had come to call it), it felt like Ballister pulled away more than he used to.
Their physical wounds may have just healed from the Incident, but Ambrosius still found himself staring at the gaps in their relationship. “Bal,” he said, reaching out to take the marker from the other man and found him unresisting, head drooping against his chest as Bal settled into him more like a cat than a person on the couch.
Ambrosius smiled at the touch, shifting so that he could let the other man lay more comfortably on him. He wrapped his arms around Bal, thumb rubbing comforting circular motions on the other’s bare back, carefully avoiding the scars that marred his torso. Still, as sweet as Bal was suddenly being, it didn’t explain the strange behavior.
“Babe,” he started to say, and stopped when Bal tensed. He breathed deeply, falling silent and instead letting his eyes wander to the prosthetic arm. Another touchy subject, one that they hadn’t addressed and probably needed to go to therapy for, but it was hard to find somebody considering their publicity. The last thing they needed was to air their dirty laundry to the wrong person who would go straight to the gossip sites.
He would have to figure this one out himself, like a good soulmate. He shifted minutely and when Bal relaxed again, already lightly dozing in his arms, he took the opportunity to gently hold the bionic arm and move it closer.
Ambrosius had never actually taken the time to sit down and look at the piece of machinery, mostly because Bal would never let him and he had always been too awkward to ask. Now, though, he admired the wires and plates that comprised his boyfriend’s new limb even if he winced at the visceral memory of what had happened to the original arm.
Nothing seemed amiss though, at least until he subtly turned the limb over, frowning as he saw strange, swooping lines of silver Sharpie where the elbow joint was. It took an embarrassingly long period of time to realize that the lines weren't an unusual art piece but rather poorly written cursive.
“Oh Bal,” Ambrosius breathed as he took in the clumsy recreation of his handwriting. The other man must not have been as asleep as he had seemed because he pressed his forehead firmly under Ambrosius’s collarbone, right where the surviving half of their soulmate words were divinely inked into his skin.
“I mean,” Bal whispered, and Ambrosius wished desperately that he could see his face but he let Bal hide against his chest, “It’s stupid, right?”
Not for the first time, Ambrosius wished that he had been a better soulmate. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t thought about it sooner, but then again, the circumstances at the time had been hectic, to say the least. “It’s not stupid,” he replied firmly, embrace tightening ever so slightly around the smaller man.
He wanted to say something like “I’m sorry” or “I wish I hadn’t cut off the arm that had my words on it,” but they all sounded too trite.
He wanted to say something like “I understand,” but he couldn’t. Trapped in the taxi with the Director, emotions and conflict roiling in his stomach, he had relied on the words tattooed on his chest to help him. “I’m fine,” he had told the lady, and it was Ballister who had said it to him first. With the physical reminder that no matter what happened, he would be fine.
For a man with such a big heart, he sounded terribly small in Ambrosius’s arms. “They’re just words,” he said, and Ambrosius wondered how much of this insecurity Bal had been hiding and for how long. Probably the only reason this was even coming to light at the moment was because Bal was too tired to keep his usual filter from working. “I just felt, for a long time, that since I had lost them, it meant that I didn’t deserve you.” He mumbled in the past tense, but Ambrosius could hear the raw hurt in his voice.
Oh my Gloreth, you’re bleeding, the words had said. When he had cut off the arm, there hadn’t been any blood, and maybe that was the sick irony of it all. Bal had wandered alone, nobody to trust, nobody to worry about whether he was bleeding or not.
It made him sick to think about.
“You didn’t lose them,” Ambrosius replied immediately, the words feeling like they were going to explode out of him. In their relationship, Bal was good at keeping things inside for a long time, and Ambrosius was more prone to speaking straight from his heart without thinking too hard about what would happen after. They completed each other, even if Bal couldn’t see it right now.
“You didn’t lose them because I cut them off, and I will never be able to apologize enough for it,” he continued, steamrolling over whatever protest Bal was already about to say. The man looked up in surprise, wide brown eyes an ocean of doubt and Ambrosius boldly met the gaze with a sad smile. “But I love you, Bal, it doesn’t matter if there are words or not.”
He went to sit up, and Bal slid obligingly onto the couch cushion next to him, still staring at him with that vulnerable expression that made him want to tuck the man away so that nobody could ever hurt him again. He took the metal hand in his, bringing the cold knuckles to his lips and pressing a gentle kiss against them.
When Ambrosius kissed the prosthetic, it kind of made Ballister feel like running away. He was vulnerable, exposed, a man without words.
“You don’t have words, and neither do I!” Nimona had exclaimed cheerfully because she had thought she had finally found somebody like her. Somebody who was destined to be alone, somebody who wandered the world without their perfect other half.
“I did,” Ballister had replied, and maybe that was worse.
The pink haired girl had tilted her head, those intelligent eyes boring into him. “Where did they go, then?”
They were gone forever, but feelings were not constrained to the flesh.
Now, his words were missing, but Ambrosius was still here. They had found each other again, stayed in each other’s arms as the fires burned themselves out.
“I will love you in every world, whether we’re soulmates or not,” Ambrosius told him fiercely, and it was moments like these when Ballister could see the knightly strength in his lover, radiating protectively from every inch of the man like a nearly corporeal aura of warmth. “I know I failed once, but you’ll never bleed alone again.”
“My soulmate is a poet.” He smiled weakly, letting his hands rest on Ambrosius’s legs, smiling as the other’s hands came to rest on top of his.
“My soulmate needs to go the fuck to sleep,” Ambrosius replied, mimicking his tone perfectly, smiling back and leaning forward to press their foreheads together. This close, Ballister could smell the lavender.
“Fair enough.” Before Ballister could go to stand up, though, Ambrosius was sweeping him off his feet. The quick motion jostled his sleep-deprived brain cells and he blinked in shock, much too slow to react as the blond held him in the most cliche bridal carry. A blush worked its way furiously onto his cheeks and he let out a surprised laugh. “Ambrosius!”
“Come back to bed, my love,” Ambrosius sing-songed unapologetically as he turned sideways to ensure that he didn’t accidentally bang his lover’s head into the doorframe. Ballister wasn’t above admiring the other’s strength and he wrapped his arms loosely around Ambrosius’s neck, his heart warmer and fuller than it had been a few hours ago.
“I don’t have much of a choice!” he chuckled, staring up at Ambrosius adoringly as he was laid down onto the bed he had left earlier. “Ambrosius, I–”
“The knight doth protest too much.” Ambrosius sat on the side of the bed, the mattress dipping a little at the added weight. “Go to sleep, Bal. I’ll call in for you at work.”
He was too tired to protest so he nodded tiredly, closing his eyes. “Thanks,” he mumbled. “Love you.”
A kiss against his forehead. “Love you too.”
When Ballister woke up later, it was dark outside. He stretched, turning on the lamp on the nightstand, blinking in confusion as he took in the writing on his arm. The silvery familiar script curled around his elbow, practically glowing against the dark metal: “Property of Ambrosius Goldenloin.”
Ballister felt his face flush darkly and he shot to his feet, slamming open the bedroom door. “Ambrosius!” he shouted, swallowing the smile that threatened to bloom on his face as he stalked towards the laughter that ensued from the kitchen.