Chapter Text
It was far past midnight. Everyone who was even a bit sane would’ve long gone to sleep by now, but Martyn couldn’t fall asleep. Not while the blanket was weighing heavy on his body, not while the wind was howling through the walls of his quarters. Not while those rumbling sounds let his eyes snap open again when they had almost closed shut. Ren would probably tell him to drink some chamomile tea and do breathing exercises, but that was just stupid.
Martyn just didn’t say it to his face because he cared about Ren. Sweet, sweet Ren who cared about others more than himself, who took in stray dogs because he pitied them when they were out in the rain without a home, who had taken in Martyn when they were just kids. Ren who only put on an authoritative facade because he knew he wouldn’t be taken seriously as leader of the Red Kingdom otherwise.
Ren who, apparently, was in his observatory again, reorganizing his stuff. He couldn’t explain the strange noises otherwise. He heard another thump. Martyn sighed and decided to go complain to Ren about him waking everyone up because of his habit of tidying up his chambers in the middle of the night. As if he had the right to annoy the heck out of everyone like he was the king of the area.
Out of habit, he took his bandana and tied it around his head to keep the hair out of his face. He didn’t like it when it got in the way of his eye, as even a small blind spot could cause a potential enemy to have an advantage in a fight. As the guard of the king, he couldn’t give an attacker an ever-so-slight benefit. There were more reasons he would cling onto wearing that bandana every single day, but he would never admit it. He wasn’t supposed to be an emotional person.
Martyn was still slightly drowsy from the half-asleep state he had been in for the last couple of hours, so he didn’t really watch where he was going. As a result, he stubbed his toe on his doorframe for the third time in the past week and cussed loudly. He really couldn’t stand when that happened, yet he didn’t bother paying more attention to his steps.
Suddenly, the wooden panels on the floor creaked. Martyn immediately snapped out of his annoyance. He couldn’t let himself be carried away. He felt the presence of another person like he did so often in battles or on patrols. The feeling someone was in his vicinity kept growing when he heard a familiar sniffle. It was the kind of sniffle someone with a cold makes when they breathe in. He relaxed slightly at the sound, as he knew exactly who this person was.
Finally, he heard a familiar voice whispering: “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be asleep?”. It was Ren. Martyn answered, grinning: “I could say the same thing about you”. Ren stepped out of the door of his observatory. When he saw Martyn, he smiled tiredly. Then, he frowned, “Did I wake you?” He began shaking his head so Ren wouldn’t feel bad, but then felt bad for lying and nodded slowly, “Yeah, uh, kind of. But don’t worry about it! It’s alright!”
Ren looked like he felt guilty about keeping him awake, but then changed his mind and beckoned Martyn to the observatory: “I really need to show you a constellation, it’s visible very clearly!” Ren walked back into the observatory, suddenly looking much more animated. Martyn almost laughed about his child-like behavior over everything and anything related to space, but he caught himself in time. He didn’t want to upset Ren, after all.
In the middle of the observatory, there was a huge telescope. It was painted a deep burgundy red, the king’s favorite color, and adorned with golden stars and moons. Ren loved the thing ever since he’d gotten it for his thirteenth birthday. It had been the first of Ren's birthdays Martyn had witnessed. He was waiting for Martyn next to the telescope. He had already adjusted the thing to Martyn's height - while Ren was older, Martyn was over fifteen centimeters taller - and gestured for him to kneel in front of it and look at whatever he wanted to show him.
When he looked through the lens of the telescope, he saw a gigantic amount of glowing white stars, some relatively big, others so small you really needed to focus on them to see them well. Ren told him to wait a moment while he found an image of the constellation in one of his books. After a while, Ren told him: “Here, search for this one!”, and gave him a sketch of a constellation which looked just like an axe, “That’s the Red Winter Axe constellation. You see, that’s where the fairytale came from.”
Martyn nodded. He knew that tale. It was about a soldier who finds an axe in the woods which would make him invincible. To let the axe become invincible, he would have to kill the person most dear to him, though. The fairytale ends with the soldier refusing to kill that person - his best friend - and then the axe attacks the sanity of the citizens of the kingdom. The sanity of the people was hidden in the palace of the king of the kingdom. There was one strand of sanity per person and the length of the strand depended on the amount of sanity the person had left. When those strands were broken by the wrath of the axe, the people turned insane.
What most people didn’t know was that the sanity being stored in strands in the palace wasn’t a fairytale at all.
Only a few people in the entire kingdom knew about it. The rulers of when the kingdom got built were scared that if it’d be common knowledge, everyone would try to cut the thread of their enemies.
Martyn used to have the picture perfect family, with two loving parents and two cats in a cottage in the woods. Then the war swooped in and took everything he’d loved. His home, his parents, everything. The once happy life he’d led was in tatters. From that moment on, he’d lived as a refugee. That was, until Ren took him in. Ren was twelve, he was thirteen. They hadn’t known that they’d become inseparable from that moment on.
Ren’s soft voice pulled him out of his thoughts. He said: “The Red Winter Axe constellation being visible this clearly is rare. It is said that it means that something bad is about to happen.”, he paused for a moment to look at Martyn with an amused expression on his face, “but I also saw it with my old telescope a few days before I met you, me hand” Ren always liked to mention that. Martyn grimaced, both about his sentence and his use of the nickname ‘me hand’, the latter was a long-running inside joke. He seemed to notice the grimace, because he chuckled and shrugged: “Yet you’re still one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met, me hand.”
Martyn didn’t really know what to do with that information. He wasn’t the type of person to be all sweet and nice, not like Ren was. And Ren knew him very well, so he laughed, a bright, genuine sound, “Alright, I suppose I annoyed you again. I’ll shut up.” Martyn shook his head. “No, really, I don’t mind. Don’t worry about me. At all. Do you think the weather tomorrow is going to be all rainy again? I wouldn’t like that, but you know what they say, after rain comes sunshine.” He chuckled awkwardly and spiraled into babbling about irrelevant things. It was one of his habits when he got into an awkward situation, and no matter how annoyed he was by himself, he wasn’t able to change it.
Ren had walked to the window while Martyn had been holding one-sided smalltalk with himself. He pointed to the horizon. “The sun is rising. Maybe we should get some sleep. Tomorrow - or should I say today - is going to be an eventful day. I’m afraid we might be going into war soon.” Upon hearing this, Martyn refrained from his nervous rambling and asked him: “What do you mean, we might be going to war soon?” Ren sighed: “I’m not sure either. But the nomads from the desert in the west of the kingdom have been causing some trouble. We can’t let them claim the land.”
Ren looked at Martyn, who now had tensed up, as if he was ready for a fight this instant. Ren sighed again: “Shouldn’t have told you that yet, should I? Now you’re most definitely going to have a sleepless night.” He looked at Martyn with a guilty expression in his eyes. “I could make you a chamomile tea and we could do some breathing exercises?” Martyn snorted. Ren was so predictable. He replied amused: “No, thank you, I’m good.”
He stood up and began walking back to his quarters. He looked over his shoulder to smile at Ren: “Goodnight, Ren.”, Ren smiled back: “Night, me hand.”