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He could count on a single hand the number of times he had shared bed with the Chosen of Bhaal and each time had been an uneasy and untrusting affair even as the other slept soundly.
This time Gortash knew that something was different.
From the moment he opened the window to Sumi's polite taps, he knew something was different. Even before he got out the box of potions and politices and so many unused scrolls lining the bottom.
Coming to him injured was not an unfamiliar sight; it was a risk that came with the favored pasttimes of bhaalspawn, stalking the darkness for prey. Sometimes a fox was found instead of a rabbit. Sometimes a returning blade bit almost as deep as his own. All those times Sumi would come to him with a smile, languid and blood-drunk, and fuck him into the sheets while his own life soaked through the down and feather mattress long before he'd allow the Chosen of Bane to patch him up.
The thrill of dying.
That was what was absent this time.
This time, Sumi was quiet.
This was the kind of Sumi the Silence he was unfamiliar with.
Under the light of Selune that poured through massive windows, Gortash allowed his eyes to trail to the dark shape on the other side of his canopy bed, familiar charcoal grey skin interrupted by the sterile white of bandages that bound his side and back, a long braid of strands of obsidian silk pooled between them like a dead snake.
Something was different.
Something had happened.
And a fine shiver in his nearest and dearest's muscles told him he was right.
"Tell me something beautiful," Sumi's voice had bid of him as his hands carefully smoothed potion soaked gauze to the stabs his latest victim had achieved, the first words he had spoken in over thirty minutes.
Tell me something beautiful.
Eyes like Selune hung in the midnight sky wouldn't look at him, not at any of the injuries either that he was so prone to doing as though begging him to press a little harder, to make it hurt. It had made his fingers cautious, hesitant as he had wrapped Sumi's shoulder, uncertain of the demand.
Requested, he corrected himself as he watched the moonlit figure in his bed.
Sumi's every word had always an order, steady, level, and exact, but not this time.
Not this Sumi, whose voice had trembled barely above a whisper beneath his hands.
The question had stunned his mind silent for long seconds before he focused on the task of mending the dark tiefling before him, all the while chewing on what to respond. He had not made it as far as he had to stumble over his words, always carefully chosing each one to present like a gift.
Tell me something beautiful.
Had he known at the time that watching Sumi's shoulders tremble would make his chest ache, perhaps he would have said something different. Something that wasn't the entire city of Baldur's Gate bowed before their thrones, followed by the entire world.
They had known each other a long time.
Gortash recognized disappointment in his nearest and dearest when he saw it, the subtle tilt of his jaw and droop of those long tipped ears, even if nothing else touched his face. But Sumi had said nothing, just let the silence echo between them until the last bandage had been set and then his full lips drew a wet breath.
And Sumi gave his own answer.
"The desperation to live."
That answer reverberated in the chambers of his mind as Gortash watched another shiver run through the lean muscles of Sumi's back, shadows cast by each sharp bump of his infernal spine and stillborn wings.
What had happened to Sumi to make him give that answer, to be shaking in his bed?
Gortash dared a sleepy inhale before allowing his hand to fall away, to casually brush against Sumi's back and he watched every ripcord muscle in Sumi's body stiffen to the touch.
They knew the touch of one another unlike anything else, intimately familiar with all things except for the taste of each other's mouths, the only thing his favorite assassin never allowed, but somehow this moment felt more intimate than every whispered word in the darkness, every bruising press of flesh, every time they had ever danced together for the luxury of the show all put together.
And Gortash closed his eyes.
This Chosen of Bhaal he could dare himself to rest beside, this one with so many thousands of thoughts revolving in his tumultuous mind so loudly they had been plain as day through the marble mask of flesh Sumi had masterfully crafted of himself.
Just when he thought sleep was about to claim him, there was the softest rustle of sheets, just barely there, like the flutter of a bird's wing, and for a moment Gortash wondered if he was wrong, if he still couldn't trust this man.
But that was changed when the heavy linen slid against his skin in a way that was familiar, the recognizable roll of movement on the mattress, and the familiar heat of Sumi's body coming to rest against him in the most unfamiliar way: head heavily resting against his breast and a hand hesitating before settling at his hip.
He dared not move.
There was something incredibly sacred about this moment, endlessly foreign of them both but.... to disturb it would be a grave sin in the eyes of every god, even his.
What would Sumi's beloved bloodied Father think, for his favored son to lay his ear over Gortash's heart without a drop of blood spilt between them?
He savored the realization that this moment might be the first of many and as his heart calmed, he thanked whatever moment had driven Sumi away from his usual taste of blood and murder to be... this.
Enver Gortash didn't even stir as the softest whisper of, "Forgive me, Father," was uttered into the black of the night.
And though Sumi was gone before he woke, the bed still warm with the memory.