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Every other night, Jord carefully selects the maps, choosing sheaths of parchment that are small enough they’ll have to stand close together. He carefully avoids the castle where Aimeric was revealed and tried to hurt himself, as well as the territory that was striped from his father. Fortunately between Vere and Akelion, there's plenty of other territory to pour over. He spreads them out over the table and waits. The invitation was clear when they would review map reading, although Jord feels strange having servants scurry about to deliver letters for him. Jord would wait for Aimeric though, wait for hours and pay to keep the candles and fireplace burning. Aimeric shows up to the first meetings running late, the high collar barely hiding the bruising on his neck.Jord's heard the rumors. The soldiers outside of his regiment keep talking about getting the pretty noble on his back. He’d heard, but couldn’t believe the laughter. Why would Aimeric would go to these other men, low born and disrespectful, who fuck him roughly and then shame him for it? The terms the men used were cruel, grating on the honor of a noble’s son. Aimeric pulls his sleeve down and explains to him the maps and markings. He’s good at pushing past a feint, still stubborn enough to ignore Jord’s roving eyes. His explanations are clear and his methods patient. Jord asks stupid questions to make him stay longer. A few weeks in Jord compliments Aimeric, tells him that even Damen has praised Jord's new strategies. It’s true: Damen had implemented a suggestion Jord was merely parroting from Aimeric. The new terms feel cumbersome on his tongue even in repetition, but Damen had clapped him on the back proudly. “I still think of you and hold you in regard, Aimeric,” Jord says and tries to reach across the distance to touch him. “I’m sure if your work was credited -”He draws back, almost knocking over an inkpot. His eyes flash in the candlelight.“You shouldn't.” Aimeric spits. “Don’t mention our assignations in court.”Jord looks up ‘assignation’ with the guidance of the court librarian when he next requests maps. Even if Jord has spent years guarding King Laurent, his lack of education still troubles him. The evening after next, Aimeric limps into Jord's outer rooms. Jord grabs his wrist and pushes him to a chair; the boy can barely stand. He holds himself the way he had slinking away from the Regent’s soldiers after losing a fight. Tense and hunched. Except there’s no reason for him to be starting fights, and no one would hurt a noble’s son in this fortress, even one as peripheral as Aimeric. Aimeric flinches back at the touch. Jord can see the familiar bruising of fingertips but also the scratches of rope at the strip of flesh revealed under his sleeve. Pink indents thread around his wrists. Someone had bound him, hurt him. “Who did this to you? I'll kill them.”Aimeric collapses further in the chair on the other side of the table. “I asked for it. I don't even remember his name.” He unlaces his sleeves, revealing the red marks left by the winding imprint of the rope. “Well, their names. You can't kill a whole enomotia.” Aimeric peels open his jacket. His neck is bruised too: red bruises at his neck and collarbone, almost high enough to peek out. Jord puts a hand on the table to keep himself upright. Two nights ago, Aimeric had almost laughed as he corrected Jord's placement of horses on a map. Now the braided laces of his jacket reveal layered bruises as he sighs deeply. Some bruises are faded from past weeks, past times Aimeric has let other men peel open his clothes and touch him before coming to Jord’s quarters. Jord’s sword calloused fingers clasp tightly the edge of the table. “This is who you hold in regard, Captain.”Jord can't tell if the roughness in Aimeric’s voice is from emotion or from the bruises or from cock sucking so many men. Jord storms around the table. Aimeric steels himself for the blow, glaring at him under his curls. It will hurt, hurt so well on top of the other fresh and deep brown-green bruises. His fingers dig into the chair, making the splotchy color more livid. Jord kneels at Aimeric’s chair, clutches at his hands to feel the delicate wrists and the strength in his hands.“Even now, if you’d have me, I would regard you highly,” Jord kisses his fingertips. Aimeric stares down at him, wild eyed and disbelieving. “I have had better than you, Jord. I’ve had a king. As you said, you are not worthy of my blood nor what I’m used to in bed.” He pulls his hand away. “I wish I were worthy of you, Aimeric, so stubborn and educated,” Jord drops his head to Aimeric’s knee. “Please.”He feels long fingers brush through his short hair, press against his scalp. When he closes his eyes, he can see those fingers around a quill, marking borders. Then wrapped around another soldier's cock, neat nails and strong fingers just the same. Aimeric wrenches his head up, and Jord blinks up at him.“You’d get on your knees for the regent’s sloppy seconds? Beg for what that boy fucker left behind in Fortaine?” The words are harsh, and the diction perfect. Aimeric’s anger has gone cold in a way he hadn’t learned at nineteen. Jord shudders between Aimeric’s legs.“Aimeric, please.” Jord tries. His hand tightens on Aimeric’s thighs and the young man gasps in pain. Some other man - men - have left bruises on him. Under the dark trousers are injuries and hurts from rough bedsport that Aimeric has submitted himself to, probably for weeks. “Prove it, Captain, that you would subject yourself to -” Aimeric says a word that Jord remembers from Laurent’s confrontation. His elegant aristocratic fingers claw into the closely shorn hair at Jord’s neck. “You were just a boy,” Jord insists. He strains against the hold to press his face to Aimeric’s knee, but the nails hurt too much. “You’re lower than my boot, low born, barely able to read, laboring,” Aimeric shoves his head down. “I was more than you at eleven years.”He lowers his head further, slow and deliberate, down below Aimeric’s clenching hands. Jord presses a kiss to Aimeric’s boot. It’s barely anything. Aimeric’s shoes are soft leather today. Dirtier than the court shoes he wears sometimes but still expensive, polished leather with burnished oil to bring them to shine.“Do you know how many men have fucked me?” Fucked: It’s a word soldiers use for women in captured territory, worse than what they say for camp followers. Jord presses an open mouthed kiss on the ankle of the boot and another to the front. The leather is a buttery brown, soft and expensive.“It doesn’t matter, Aimeric.” Jord murmurs to the tiles, “Your value isn’t based on how many men you’ve slept with.”“Well I don’t know anyway,” he snaps. “There have been so many since...” His boot taps an unsteady rhythm, the hard sole making a dull noise. Jord looks up. He wouldn’t say his name. It would break them both to hear his name. In Aimeric’s eyes is the same cornered ferocity Jord remembers in Ravenel. The same willingness to fight past exhaustion and pain to spit the next words and flay himself. “I’ve been used like a whore. You wasted your good will with Laurent to keep me from being passed around camp, because I’ve been on the bed and pallet and floor of every soldier but you since then.”Aimeric has always liked a fight, knows how to start one, and enjoys the pleasure of hits from men’s hands. It’s something Jord adores, his stubbornness. Aimeric presses his foot forward, almost kicking Jord back from between his legs. They might both have matching bruises on their ribs. “I’m good at it, good enough my father bet my family’s fortune on my virgin ass,” Aimeric heaves, the words thrown out in the space between them as a challenge. The dark brown leather toe presses hard against Jord’s stomach then lower to his groin. Two kicks knock him back. Jord crawls back.“No, no,” Aimeric shakes his head, brushed curls bouncing. “You don’t want me.”Jord licks the sole of his shoe. It’s not a good taste. Dirt, leather, stone, filthy. Jord kisses the toe of the sole open mouthed. The pink of his tongue scrapes over the material, leaving a wet stripe. The material so supple Jord can feel the press of the leather against Aimeric’s foot. “Jord,” the faint drawl on his name belies Aimeric’s emotion. “You debase yourself being with me. I don’t deserve you. You’re the best man I’ve ever known.” Aimeric curls over Jord’s head as he over the boot. Jord brushes his face against the top of the shoe. The smell of leather and oil is strong in his nose so close to the ground and the boots.“If you -” and another unfamiliar word in Akelion “peder me, you will see the mark of all those men on me, how they’ve fucked me open and loose.” The heel of the other boot grinds into his leg.Jord has seen the bruises, the mark of cords, the limp that he tries to hide. For weeks, he’s ignored the way Aimeric’s curls have been tousled by other men’s hands when he bows his head over the maps. How conversation stops when he enters the barracks: men who fucked Aimeric are scared their captain will send them to the post. “I’m still wet with their come inside. I sit here and teach you how to read maps while men’s come is in my ass,” Aimeric kicks Jord’s kneeling legs open. “Is that what you want, Jord?”That: object aspect. Jord squeezes his hand around his thigh. Aimeric shudders, feeling it over the boots. The material is almost skin warm, tightly fit to his leg. The bruises too are under Jord’s fingers, dug into with his clutching as a reminder of the truth Aimeric has spat onto the floor. Jord wants more than an object, that, a thing Aimeric refers to himself as. “What would King Laurent say if he knew you learned war planning from me?” Aimeric presses the advantage, presses the heel into Jord’s groin. “What would the snake say to see you with me?”Harder, digging in. The toe might step on his cock. Jord gasps, dark eyes pleading with Aimeric. "Will you fuck me like the snake's father? Make me cry and beg for it? Like the pain hungry slut the army knows I am?"Jord holds tight to Aimeric's shapely leg, the stretch of leather over his calves. He doesn’t resist the hard pressure against him, the whole weight of Aimeric’s leg pressing against his cock and the sole leaving an imprint of dirt on his trousers. "I would cherish and love you if you would permit it?" Jord cries out and Aimeric presses down and to the center. Jord gasped, because he can't deny he's hard here on the floor between Aimeric's knees with his green eyes glaring down at him. "What did you say?""I would love you!""What does that mean? 'Would love.'" Aimeric's aristocratic tones stumble over the repeated words. "I've never heard that before. Is that some slang for fucking?"Jord can't process it. Aimeric has never heard love conjugated, the familiar tense, seeking permission. Not from his ambassador father nor the regent. Nor even the absent mother who'd tried to escape Guion. And Jord, sadly realized, not even from himself in the stolen hours in woods behind the camp. "No," Jord gaped as Aimeric ground his heel into his thigh. "It is love."The noun Aimeric recognizes. Jord can see the brightness in his green eyes. Aimeric leaned forward, stomped down with every strength in his bruised body and twisted a clawed hand at Jord’s nape."Shut up, you stupid fucking captain.""I would love you," Jord held on tightly.Aimeric grasped at Jord's neck, drawing him up to his knees. He’s strong even with the soreness in his arms, determined enough to carry half of Jord’s weight and shake him as a disobedient dog. “You’re lying, like everyone else.” Jord rose up higher, despite the resistance of the boot, let one hand stroke the chestnut leather shoe. He wrapped his other sword strong arm around Aimeric's neck. He holds the two points of contact, the spit-cool leather and warm skin. "I would love you, Aimeric, if you would have me" and the pleading wasn't just his voice, it was the condition of the phrase and the formal tense. Aimeric searched his face, cautious but hopeful. Jord hasn’t seen hope in his green eyes for years."You have been my captain since I met you,” he met him, half falling out the chair to kiss him. The two men kneel by the desk, legs tangled together and arms wrapped close. Sagging, crumpled together, they hold each other. He wants the stubborn young man who survived. “If we do this, you have to stop.” Jord kisses the junction of Aimeric’s shoulder under the loosened collar. “Stop what?” Aimeric voice thick and wet, poison caught at the back of his throat. He tenses a little in Jord’s hold. “Hurting yourself. Getting other people to hurt you.” Jord insists. He pets Aimeric’s curls. He’s grown out his hair in the past year, a concession to the court style set by Laurent. Jord brushes his nose into the hair, scenting the familiar smell underneath the herbs and perfumes of aristocracy. Aimeric slumps against him again. “Yes, captain,” he murmurs. Jord kisses the bruises that necklace his throat, soft. They will fade with time. The two of them have survived years, and will now survive together. It won’t be easy or immediate, but Jord is sure they will walk together.