oblivion [druig]

9

TENOCHTITLAN 1521 AD

AURORA

The first thing I remember is Thena. 

The second thing I remember is Druig. 

It takes me a moment to grasp what happened. My hands fly directly to my stomach, trying to feel for any sort of dent or sign that Thena's sword had stabbed me.

Thankfully, there's nothing except the stain of the blood around my suit.

I sit up straight, looking around me. It was still dark outside from what I could see, so I must have been out for only a short time.  I'm laid in a small bed on the floor, a dim array of candles casting a warm glow in the room. 

My mind goes back to the moments before I passed out. How Druig had looked at me when he'd seen the blood on my hands. 

How he'd caught me when I fell, how he'd soothed me with his words and called me Rory. 

That man was so different from the man I had known the past seven thousand years. 

 I had never seen him look so worried as he had right there. 

It confused me to think that it had been me he was worried about. 

In the past couple of hours, our relationship had developed more than it had in the past thousand years. I found it strange more than anything else, really. 

Why now? Why had he cared so little until now? Why had it taken us years to agree on something? 

Why did I hate him to begin with? 

Regret sprung inside me, ricocheting in my brain like a loose ball. We had spent all these years fighting and hating each other when maybe we had just been misunderstanding everything. 

Well, maybe I had. 

I thought back to what he'd said before I passed out. It seemed wierd that he had said it with such security; such confidence. 

Still, as much as I tried to figure it out, I couldn't really understand. Contact between us had been at a minimum after Gupta, and I had been far too scared to reach out. 

Even more so because I knew he didn't like me. We were supposed to have this archnemesis thing going on. It confused me to think that I was supposed to hate him. 

And yet hating him was the farthest thing away from what I was doing.

He annoyed me, of course. I hated that I liked him so much. I hated that every time he walked in the room my heart would skip a beat, or how I sometimes would go out to watch the sunset and leave some room for if he wanted to join me just as he had all those years ago in Babylon. 

I hated liking him, yes. 

I didn't hate him. 

Still, I made sure to stay indifferent to my feelings. I had seen how love worked. How relationships destroyed entire civilizations. How love was so complex and complicated. 

Also, he hadn't given me any signs that he even so much as liked me. 

There was no way he would ever think of me as I thought of him. 

And yet... why had he acted like that? 

Could it be...

no.