A Moment on the Road (Skyrim, F!DB & Erandur)

I have a list of 40 prompts (and I'm not sure where I got it.) This was for #15, "After the incident..."

Post Waking Nightmare.

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“After the incident, I secluded myself. For a while. Took the odd job on freighters, in the kitchens of taverns. It was at one of the inns I met the priest of Mara who took me in, gave me stability, safety... A home.”

Danae rolled on her pallet near the fire, looked up at Erandur, brow furrowed. The firelight played across her face, curving along her cheekbones, her jaw, pooling in the hollow of her throat.

“Is Erandur your real name?”

“No,” he said, after a moment. “It was the name the priest gave me.”

“Was Casimir?”

He started slightly, unused to hearing that name from anyone save the voices in his memory. “No, I took that name in service to Vaermina.”

“Would you tell me your real name?”

Erandur smiled. She was guileless. When she’d walked through the door of the Windpeak Inn, he’d known, thought not quite how, that she would be the one to lead him through the miasma, to put right what he’d helped to wrong. He probably could have been forthright with her and still gotten her help, but so many years of skirting the truth had left their mark.

He was just thankful she had taken his subterfuge in stride.

She blinked sleepily up at him. Her pink tongue darted out to wet her lips and she sighed deeply, as she always did when she was about to fall asleep. Sharing close quarters on the road made him aware of all sorts of little intimacies… Two weeks they’d been traveling together and already he knew many of her noises, the sighs that preceded sleep, the quick inhales of shock or surprise, the light bubble of laughter at the unexpectedly humorous. He knew the way she liked to sleep, limbs splayed out like a trama root. He knew how she took her tea, berry or honey sweetened and with milk when available.

It was more years than he’d like to count since he had this kind of intimate knowledge of anyone, let alone a woman. Let alone a woman he’d felt himself drawn to from the first moment he saw her.

The firelight turned her snow colored hair yellow, made her skin glow rose-gold. She wrinkled her nose, opened her great grey eyes. Her voice was soft, on the edge of sleep. “Erandur?”

Guileless. And stubborn.

“Yes,” he said, at last. “I think, one day, I’ll tell you.”