Temple desperately wanted to go meet Gilbert when he left the palisade because there would be others there and Gilbert couldn’t just start yelling at him. But he knew it was cowardly, and Gilbert had specifically said he should return when he was done being a coward, so…
He drew a deep breath to still his thundering heart. He was scared. Terrified, actually. What if Gilbert just took a look at him and told him to go away? What if it was over and he was tired of it? Maybe he had simply carried on and forgotten him? That scared him far worse than the darkness ever had.
Temple clenched his fists and fought to control his breathing. He had been sitting on the stairs partway up to Gilbert’s place in the pre-dawn darkness, but now he jumped to his feet again and stood there for a while, not knowing what to do with himself. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other to let the pain where he’d had to dig for shards and splinters in his feet occupy his thoughts, when he saw Gilbert turn the corner.
Temple froze. His heart thundered in his chest, and he felt almost nauseous with fear. The second Gilbert saw him, the Watcher sprinted towards him, reaching the stairs a few seconds later. He ran up the steps and before Temple could react, Gilbert had his arms around him and hauled him into the darkness of the stairwell, where he pressed him up against the wall. The kiss that followed was rough, furious, demanding, and Gilbert held his face while he pinned him in place with his body.
The kiss turned hot and possessive and overwhelming, and Temple barely had time to react before Gilbert let go and withdrew. “If you ever fucking do that to me again, I will not forgive you! Do you understand?” he shouted furiously. “Do you have any idea what you put me through?”
Temple gasped and looked away, overwhelmed by his anger. He searched desperately for something to say or do, but he didn’t know what, so he just kept standing there.
“You are going to tell me exactly what the hells went through your mind and why you keep running away from me! Are you scared of me? Have I given you any reason to fear me? Did I abuse your trust? Look at me!”
Temple clenched his shaking hands and slowly, tentatively, looked up, very, very careful not to look at the door as though he wanted to flee, even though looking for escape routes was his instinct. He just had to live through this.
The only light came from a window further up the stairs, so Gilbert was painted in grey and silver nuances. Temple didn’t need light to see his anger, though. He met Gilbert’s dark gaze and then his eyes flickered away, scared by the intensity.
Gilbert didn’t move but, finally, he relaxed his angry stance a little and Temple looked at him again, a little braver this time. Gilbert slowly reached out to open the door to the outside stairs and let it swing wide open. “I love you,” he said quietly, not moving.
Temple didn’t know what to say or do, so he just nodded.
“I love you,” Gilbert repeated and took a step back, so it would be even easier for Temple to flee out the door. “I love you, and when you run from me, you hurt me more than I think you realise. Because I want you. I want to share my life with you. When you are ready,” he added.
Temple nodded again. He wasn’t sure if he could even speak. Maybe he had gotten through it? He wasn’t sure.
Finally, Gilbert huffed a little laugh. “I love you with all your strangeness. But please, please, don’t–“
“I’m done running away!” Temple finally managed, almost scared of his own voice. But he could move again, so he quickly grabbed Gilbert’s hand and took a few steps out the door, dragging him along.
“Wh–“
“Come with me. Please,” Temple said and took another step.
“Where to?” Gilbert asked.
“My home.”
“Your home,” Gilbert repeated gently.
“I don’t know how else…” Temple faltered. “If I do this, I will…” He wasn’t sure how to explain it, so it didn’t seem insincere or worthless. He desperately searched his mind for some kind of way to make Gilbert understand what this meant to him. He looked up and saw Gilbert staring at him with a small smile in the corner of his mouth. “…Gods damn it,” Temple sighed. Gilbert could read him as if he had somehow spoken his chaos aloud, and it was humiliating when he was trying to finally make things right.
Gilbert stepped closer and calmly put an arm around him. Gratefully, Temple gave in and leaned against him, letting his warmth seep into him and slowly dispel the terror he had felt for the last week and a half.
“I’m sorry about everything,” Temple whispered.
“I’ve missed you,” Gilbert just responded.
Finally, Temple freed himself from the embrace and stepped back. If he didn’t go through with it, he wasn’t sure he would ever get the courage to try again.
“Wait,” Gilbert reached out and drew him close again. “Are you sure? I love you, and I don’t want you to think there is a price to it. You can even run away; just please, please promise me you will come back. I don’t want to take something from you that you are not ready to give.”
“I promise,” Temple said. “But I’m done running. Now come with me.” He was happy to see Gilbert nod and follow.
*
Temple didn’t say anything on the way. There was a touch of something grim and determined in his face that made Gilbert think he wasn’t exactly at ease with this, as though he was battling his instincts. The moment Gilbert knew where to find him, he would have lost his last shield against the world. His impulse was always to flee when he felt cornered, but this time, he had actually returned for the fight and seemed determined to see it through.
It was probably the biggest compliment Gilbert had ever gotten, but he also wasn’t sure if he should accept it. Temple had looked terrified when Gilbert shouted at him, and though he would gladly have kept shouting at anyone else that had hurt him that badly, he had forced himself to stop. He didn’t think the thief would have run again, but it felt as if he were close to doing actual damage to Temple, who was determined to force himself to stay and weather the blows. For a few seconds, it had felt close to abuse and Gilbert’s anger had immediately ended.
They made their way to the eastern docks and came to a dilapidated building, leaning on the easternmost cliffside in perpetual shadow from the plateau above. Temple unlocked the door with a key and took him upstairs to the attic of the empty house, where a hatch in the ceiling led to an upwards tunnel through the cliffside above. A sturdy, knotted rope was hanging down from the dark.
Temple looked expectantly at him.
“This leads up to the plateau? To the Burning?” Gilbert asked doubtfully, referring to the city district that had been up there, but which had burned down one night about fifty years ago and had never been rebuilt. Supposedly, the spirits of those that died in the blaze still roamed the high plateau. “You live there?”
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Temple nodded, and then he shrugged. “I have other access points, but I don’t feel comfortable leaving by Eastgate and waving at the Watchers there every time I go back and forth.”
Gilbert tugged the rope. The tunnel itself was quite narrow. “Alright,” he said and began climbing in the dark. “Isn’t the Burning supposed to be haunted?” he asked, hearing Temple below him as he hauled himself up.
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Well, yes. I’m haunting it.”
Gilbert laughed at the matter-of-fact tone. “That sounds cumbersome,” he commented. “So the ghost-lights and smoke and sounds the stories speak of are really you?”
“Yes. I set up green-flames if anyone goes near; and if I can’t scare them off, I drug them and carry them away. It’s quite annoying, but luckily, I don’t have to do it very often. The house we’ll emerge in is one of the sites where I drop people,” he explained. “You should be nine or ten knots from the hatch now. Mind your head.”
Gilbert felt the space above him with one hand and, shortly after, felt rough planks against his fingertips. He pushed, and a ray of sunlight hit him square in the face.
The Burning was truly desolate, he learned when they emerged into the village of burned-out houses, like skeletons, built upon the plateau overlooking the city. The pair stood in what had been a large house, among the burned and charred remains of the walls and support pillars were placed about a dozen, creepily draped, human-sized mannequins as one would find in a tailor’s workshop. The heads were different kinds of deformed-looking stuffed cloth bags.
On the horizon, a bright orange sunrise made the sea blaze golden, but the dolls were still incredibly disturbing and lopsided. The breeze from the ocean that toyed with the fabric draped over them made the things seem like they were constantly on the verge of moving. Temple shut the trapdoor and kicked some debris over it. Then he stood still, staring emptily at the ground.
His silence was telling, and Gilbert turned to look at him. “I want to know everything about you,” he said softly, “…that you are willing to tell. There is no rush. You don’t have to do this. We can just go home. Now I know the area and that’s more than enough. You don’t have to prove anything.”
“You know where to find me now.” Temple looked up at him, grey gaze serious. “Nobody has ever known before.”
“Nobody?” It seemed …terrifying. That he hadn’t had one, single person to lean on ever.
“I’m…” Temple faltered, clearly not sure how to phrase it. “I’m scared because I want you to know it,” he said, frowning. Then he shook his head to dismiss the thought and reached out to take Gilbert’s hand.
They walked through the burned-out desolation of the debris-filled streets that had wound through the tiny town up here. Finally, Temple stopped, though Gilbert couldn’t see any entrances anywhere.
“Let me just disarm some traps…” he said and pushed a blackened board away to reveal a set of stairs, leading into what would have been a cellar under the house they stood inside. Or rather the burned-out skeleton of it.
Temple’s home was both exceptionally impressive and incredibly desolate. The underground complex was large and sprawling, seeming to combine and link the various cellars under the entire plateau village into one large place, with concealed air vents and chimneys. It must have taken years to set up, requiring a lot of specialised knowledge.
The first room they entered was a large, empty, and dark space that led to a well-stocked workshop through a barely visible door, where several more or less incomprehensible projects were in progress. There was a large room full of overflowing bookshelves, and a full forge accessible down a long corridor with several vents to the upstairs. A room was locked by a door that simply looked like fallen debris; it turned out to be halfway open to the elements and full of plants. Another room held materials for working with leather and cloth and wood. The last room was a spacious bedroom with a large bed and a wall lined with wardrobes of all kinds of make and sizes.
And all the way through, Temple would stop him at the entrance to each new room and spend several minutes disarming a myriad of different traps, powerfully displaying how jealously he guarded his safety and solitude.
Gilbert was still trying to absorb all the details of what this place told him about the thief. Although there was a lonely atmosphere to everything, Temple clearly had a well-organised life here. The materials for his different crafts were meticulously ordered, and so was everything else. Well, except for the appalling pantry that explained why he had scoffed at the concept of cooking. It seemed Temple had never learned to enjoy a meal before they met.
The traps were many and varied, but none had been lethal so far. Some worked in concert with each other to exacerbate the effects of one poison or another until an attacker would be extremely hard-pressed to continue. But an intruder capable of learning from their mistakes would be able to leave alive to threaten Temple’s privacy again in the future.
On the one hand, this mercy surprised him, but on the other… he had seen the horror in Temple’s eyes when the painter had died right in front of him. Though using violence would have been an easy feat for him, since he could probably sneak up on anybody, the Magpie King had never harmed anyone, neither guard, hound, nor resident. Violence seemed to be appalling to him.
At the entrance to the bedroom, Gilbert stood still until Temple said, “Last one,” and took a long step over some invisible barrier in the floor between the row of wardrobes and the bed. He disarmed a trap somewhere in the corner of the shadowy end wall.
“What was that one, then?” Gilbert asked and approached slowly.
“That one…” Temple gestured to the wall behind him. “It shoots a metal spear at whoever steps there.” He pointed to the floor where Gilbert was moments from stepping. Then he smiled when Gilbert froze. “Well, right now, it would hit and kill me first, and then probably hurt you a bit, but not much else,” he said. “But it’s disarmed. You can go wherever you want now.”
Gilbert looked to his right at the bed and then wrinkled his brow. “Why are you protecting a row of wardrobes with lethal force and not the bed you sleep in?”
Temple stared at him blankly for a moment. Then he opened the latch of the wardrobe nearest to the end wall, followed by the four others as he approached and passed Gilbert. After that, he silently stood aside and watched him.
Gilbert stared. And stared. And then he sat down on the end of the bed and kept staring, not able to fully process the sight of that much wealth in one place.
Every wardrobe was reinforced with metal bars on the inside and stacked halfway up with gold ingots below. Above, it was lined with all kinds of jewellery and precious stones, richly decorated books, lavishly painted wooden tablets, what looked like… a collection of gold and ivory sex toys, bolts of jewelled, gold-woven cloth, and various statuettes in precious metals. A large shelf was full of what looked like meticulously kept folders with different papers and small items.
Finally, Gilbert’s brain woke up again. “Temple,” he said.
“Yes?” came the hesitant, wary answer.
“Please don’t spend all this at once, because that will literally cause an inflation that will leave people homeless and cause abject, city-wide misery,” Gilbert said blankly.
“I…” Temple looked at all of it and shrugged, “I don’t spend it. I just sort of put in a new wardrobe when I need it.”
Gilbert stared at him. “Then why do you steal things?”
“I don’t just steal things, I… well…” He pointed to the row of folders and then carelessly closed the wardrobes again.
“Well?” Gilbert asked, confused.
“Blackmail. In case I need it. Or I can sell it. All the items are non-commissioned things that I will funnel onto the market when it makes sense and then melt the gost down.” He closed the last wardrobe and leaned his back on it, self-consciously crossing his arms as he avoided Gilbert’s gaze.
Gilbert got to his feet and slowly approached him, holding out his hands in the Temple-calming gesture. It drew a little smile from the thief, who pushed off the wardrobe and came closer.
“Gilbert, I have nowhere left to run but that corner,” he nodded at the corner between the bed and the end wall a few metres away. “You don’t have to take care not to aggravate me.”
“Aggravate isn’t the right word,” he grinned and gently pulled Temple close. “It’s more like… I don’t want you to think I’m attacking you in any way.”
“I don’t think that. You wouldn’t be here if I thought that.”
“Or if you did, you wouldn’t have disarmed the last trap?” he nodded to the spot on the floor that held the unseen pressure plate, which would trigger the lethal trap.
Temple grinned. “That would perhaps be a bit too elaborate a way to dispose of you after five months of near-constant opportunity, don’t you think?”
Gilbert smiled. He still had so many questions. But they could wait. Temple had the Watcher’s arms around him and softly bit his lip to tease him, and the entire world seemed to fall into place again, beginning to mend itself. The last of the fear and grief he had been through in the last ten days evaporated, and he happily followed when Temple dragged him to the bed.
“The first time I admitted to myself that I wanted you, I woke up from a dream about you and was ready to come,” Temple whispered between kisses, breath fast in his chest as his nimble fingers quickly unbuckled Gilbert’s sword belt, tossing the weapon on the ground.
“Right here in this bed?” Gilbert asked, pushing Temple’s jacket open and vest off and pulling at his shirt to get his hands flat on his skin.
The “yes,” Temple gave him was almost just a moan, and Gilbert gently pushed him onto the bed and climbed after him, stealing a kiss.
“Tell me all about the dream, then,” he insisted.