Cavalier

Chapter Twenty-Three

He doesn't get any sleep after that.

If David's completely honest, he hasn't been getting a decent amount of sleep in awhile, but he needs to be strong—for his men for their families for his wives—and he really has no interest in admitting he has a weakness so he doesn't, keeping the three hours of sleep a night or less a pretty good secret, even to his girls.

He's up and out of bed before Ahinoam and Abigail and anybody else in camp are, sun just peeking over the horizon in the east. He pulls on shorts and a t-shirt and his feet thud against the dirt as he runs without a goal, without even meaning to, going down into the valley and then up to where Saul's camp had been just a day before and back again. He stops near the spot where Abner and the President had been standing during the confrontation, if David's got his angles right, and he thinks about how this is what they saw as something deeper in him searches for— anything, really.

David's been hoping the night before was a fluke, that he's not as far from God as the thinks (knows) he is. He feels sweat beading on his skin as it's touched by the breeze, making his shirt stick to his chest and his back. His throat is parched with a need for water and nothing except fear and distrust and nausea whirl in the pit of his stomach. He's afraid, and a little confused, and there's poison thoughts still whispering to him and he doesn't know where God is. This place, this country, it's home to him. To his men and their families. David knows, without a doubt, that it's not safe for them. Not right now.

Surely, one of these days I will be destroyed by the hand of Saul.

When he gets back to camp, Eleazar's outside of his tent, washing his face and rummaging around in a bag. David claps him on the shoulder. Eleazar turns slightly so he can see his face. "David?"

"Meeting in fifteen. Comm tent."

"About what?"

"New developments. We need to move. If you could round up the crew, that'd be great."

David turns to leave, because that should be it because he's in charge and he's already come to a decision and this is all a formality, but Eleazar's hand is a sudden iron grip on his arm.

"David," he says, and Eleazar looks...troubled, to say the least, the emotion written on his face and in his posture to the point where David half expects there to be a little rain cloud hanging over him. "The President's gone. Nobody on point has come across any evidence that he's planning on turning around."

"Eleazar."

"Maybe—maybe this time he means it, y'know? Maybe it was the shock that he needed. Maybe he's back to...well, not as deadly."

David wrenches his arm away. He tries to be careful about it but he's tired and the adrenaline is wearing off and Eleazar's right; Saul had sounded nothing short of sincere. But David has heard Saul's sincere before. And it didn't stop Saul from wiping out an entire unit of the peacekeepers because they harboured him, didn't stop Saul from burying a knife in the wall where his head had been, didn't stop him from resuming his search for David even after he said he'd call it off the first time.

"Fifteen minutes," David says, playing dirty and pulling out the captain voice, and Eleazar hates it and there's about a million questions swimming in his brain from what David can tell but he still nods slowly.

"Yes, sir," he says. David doesn't miss the distinction.

Maybe this is how everything's supposed to fall apart.

-

David gets to the communications tent first, after indulging in a quick rinse and slipping into a change of clothes. The three officers on duty in the tent look up when he walks through the tent's flaps and panic immediately when they realize who it is. They start to look feverishly over the readouts of the past few hours like David's noticed something that they've missed and that he's here to ream them out about it, and as inspired as their dedication to not getting in trouble is it's kind of...annoying.