[1] WEEPING MONK // you're not what I was looking for

33| Where The Heart Is {Part Three}

Ari opens up to Lancelot about something that has been troubling her and they both make a decision regarding their futures in the camp.

Scouts had been out hunting through the morning and Lancelot had spent the afternoon fixing what they had broken. His hands were covered with powder from the sharpening stone, dust from where he had stripped the wood for shafts and wax from where he had bound the feathers and sharpened heads to produce new arrows.

He was stood in his tent trying to wash it all away, a carved out bowl of water laying over his cot as he scrubbed at his hands with a dampened and darkening cloth with the more that he managed to remove. He could barely see what he was doing seeing as the sun was fading into the evening sky and he hadn't been bothered to light his lantern. He squeezed the cloth over his fingers, letting the droplets of water run off into the ground at his boots.

Lancelot wasn't really focussing on anything else but then something caught his attention and his heart stuttered. He didn't know why it happened every time but unlike the last evening when she approached him in his tent, there was no rain to dampen off her scent. He breathed in the strengthening notes of wood violet which drifted on the gentle breeze into his open-ended tent and the familiar rush of calmness washed over him. He caught himself smiling.

"The tunic does suit you," Ari complemented from where she had halted in the open entrance, taking in his appearance as if he were a sunset over an ocean which she so longed to see again. She found herself blushing with the admission but also of the memory of him doing the same thing when she wore her new cloak. Her mind shifted to what had happened after that and it was rather bittersweet. The kiss which she gave him that turned into something more sour.

They had not spoken of what had almost happened before his binding, how their lips dusted over one another's so delicately. She didn't quite know what she would say to him. Her feelings were bubbling away and only being fuelled further with each little smile, each little touch that he gave her.

"May I come in?" She asked him gently, not moving further until he said so. There had been a line before between them but now she had no idea where it was, or if it even existed anymore. She could see that within this new clarity of the storm of his eyes, there was still some doubt. Some kind of restraint. And it wasn't too difficult to guess why.