Simon Basset One Shots

man of honour

The smooth hardwood felt startlingly cold beneath the soft patter of your bare feet, the pads of your toes pressing flat against the foyer with each passing step. The atmosphere inside of the house was rather humid, as you inhaled a deep breath in the darkness of the night, but somehow managed a faint chill when it touched down upon your exposed flesh. For thin cotton trailed down your body, a pale white nightgown that did little to keep you warm, but kept you comfortable in the bed you had long ago abandoned. A dressing gown, a thin material of it's own, concealed your arms and flowed down on top of your nightgown, layering the pale fabric in an effort for hopeful warmth and to keep your modesty as you ventured down the short front hallway.   

Night fell heavy on the other side of the drawn curtains, it's dark shadows swallowing the vast exterior of the estate, managing to seep it's bright moonlight in through the material, bathing the hardwood in a whiteish glow that melded with the deep orange radiating from the lantern set up in the drawing room. The night was quiet and somehow still, even as a gentle rain washed over the streets of London in soft sheets of cold November precipitation. It was barely perceptible against the roof itself, silently gliding down the siding of the house, but you couldn't miss the sight of lonely raindrops trailing slowly down the windowpanes. It was not an angry rain, one that descended upon the Earth with a sought vengeance. It was not even a melancholy rain, one that fell from the heavy clouds in the form of lost tears. This soft rainfall, starting in the late hours of the evening, was calm. It was nearly comforting, the way it's gentle droplets sprinkled against the cobblestone with care, washing away the traces of the day as though to prepare for the raising sun in the hours to come. 

But even as it fell from the dark indigo sky, the delicate droplets illuminated by the sharp glow of the nearly full moon, it remained a cold precipitation. One drenched in the bitter temperatures of the night, winter steadily on the heels of a not quite finished autumn season. It was gentle and beautiful in it's own right, but you still wished for no soul to be stuck out in the rainfall. It was with that emotion, rooted in the base of your compassionate heart, that Simon Basset, The Duke of Hastings, sat in your drawing room at nearly midnight on a Saturday night. 

Your fingers gripped tighter to the small metal bowl held securely in your palms, careful not to splash the lukewarm liquid out of it's confines, as a thin blue rag sat in the center absorbing the water, as you made your way through the threshold to the drawing room. Leaving the bright and raw moonlight streaks dancing against the tall walls and hardwood flooring behind, entering a space bathed in a rich and saturated glow of warm flaming orange. It casted shadows against the portraits hung with care all around you, in delicate golden frames that seemed to sparkle in the cast of dim lantern light. The intricate fabric that lined the many pieces of furniture, the shades of dark burgundy and soft cream, seeming to deepen in it's color tones and exposure. 

Your feet guided you towards the only inhabited chair in the room, beside the end table that housed the flickering lantern, and rested the metal bowl down beside it with a gentle clink resounding in the space. The room was quite vast, stretching far with more pieces of furniture ever to be filled all at once, and more art than anyone ever truly cared to look at, and yet the room had never felt more intimate and small as it did in that very moment. As your attention drifted from the bowl of water that rippled softly from it's placement against the mahogany table, to the man who sat in the chair mere inches from you. Your shadow casted down upon his frame, his height no longer towering above you as it always seemed to when in his company, this time your small features managing to hover above him as though he was caught in the shade of a sycamore tree. He sat with poise and complete composure, his back firmly against the soft cushion of the chair, as his hands rested loosely over his thighs. 

His face was still, his expression even and obscured any possible detail of the thoughts or emotions found in the depth of his mind in that moment. His hands were relaxed against the swell of his thighs, but the flesh against his knuckles were torn and bloody. A deepening shade of something on it's way to becoming blue gathered around the site, blood caked across the cuts as fresh still seeped slowly from the ripped flesh at the base of his fingers. His lip adorned a cut deeper than those scattered against his hands, swelling the bottom right corner of his lip into an inflamed laceration. Blood trickled as it dried against the smooth dark skin of his temple, as a slash through his right eyebrow screamed with the same profound redness found in the other torn parts of his flesh. He had taken a beating, that much you knew, but you hated to think of what his opposition looked like now that the fight was over, the damage done to him.