Guarded Love (COMPLETED)

Misery

People were quick to notice two things about their King: that his bodyguard was no longer hovering close to his elbow, and asking him about it was liable to get them thrown into the dungeon. Alistair insisted he was only kidding the first time, but no one was willing to test just how far his kidding would stretch before snapping. The throbbing jaw from gritted teeth and eyes that looked as if he spent the night drinking were enough of a hint.

He tried sleeping that night, but staying in his room so close to her only made him want to rip apart every dummy in the castle with his bare hands. Instead, the King paced up and down through his battlements while dressed in a long white robe he "borrowed" out of a laundry basket when it grew cold. Unbeknownst to Alistair, more than a few whispers grew that night that King Maric was haunting their very halls. Probably looking for revenge for his murder, as all ghost Kings did. Alistair never stopped long enough to hear anything or to see anything. He feared that if he stopped moving he'd start thinking, and then crying, and never stop.

By dawn's light, a few of the servants -- while pumping out the well -- stumbled across their King half jammed inside the stable window speaking to the horses like his peers. He was a mess, the stubble that gave him more of a cavalier look was brittle as grass after a flash frost, and nearly as white. The bags under his eyes went and bought themselves an entire castle's worth of furniture just to put in storage, and the less said about the hue of his putrid skin the better. A few people even threatened to send for a healer which Alistair responded to by saying he'd get changed and maybe shave for once.

Charles did his best, but there wasn't much saving a man who had his heart crushed inside his chest. It was rather impressive Alistair was even upright. His mind kept tricking over the stupidest thing it could find to save him. From the hours of two in the morning until four, or whenever the Sister's sang, he kept trying to remember the exact lyrics to a bawdy pub tune Oghren tried to teach him. It was in dwarven, which Alistair didn't know, and apparently full of double entendres. The task took nearly all of his brain power and he dug elbows into it, doing his best to not think of...

A vase of daises sat perched upon the table beside the window. How did he not see them when he walked in? Alistair plucked up one of the flowers, its yellow color fading to a dull red-orange as time came for them. His fingers dusted over the fragile petals, stricken by the urge to rip each one off the stem, but...

Returning the flower back to its vase, he groaned, his head falling to his chest. His hollow, ransacked, stomped and spat on chest. It'd never hurt this bad before, not with the other mages. Most of them either drifted away or turned on their heel and ran for the hills. A few were legendary shouting matches with Alistair trying to come up with even more outlandish things to finally get her to go away. But with each he'd feel a moment of loss, a pang of regret, and then move on after drinking heavy for a night. This was different, an accidentally swallow a dagger then realize it's gonna have to come back out kind of different.

All he wanted to do was curl up into a ball and never come out. But he couldn't do that, because there was an entire country wanting his attention and a full castle that knew nothing about how badly he fell for his bodyguard. He had to finish this, the right way. She'd blindsided him yesterday, leaving Alistair stuttering in his room alone and trying to scrape his brains off the floor. After adjusting the knots along his biceps, he nodded to the broken man in the mirror. Just one more talk. Despite his best efforts to drown it out, hope circled his legs like the minnows in a stream. Maybe if they were lucky, food would fall from the sky. And maybe, if he was lucky, Reiss would realize that she didn't want to turn her back on him, on everything he offered to her.

Alistair was never lucky.

Raising his fist, he got one solid knock on their shared door before it crumpled against the wood. Maker's sake, what was he doing? How could he do this? He was going to just waltz in there and let her go with his heart as if it was a matter of signing off on some paperwork. Shouldn't he fight or at least argue that she was wrong, that he deserved another chance to...to do what? What did he even do wrong?