FUTURE
Written on October 17, 2024 (♎︎)
Author's Notes: Written for Whumptober 2024 for prompt No. 17: Nowhere Else to Go ("We had a good run").
Rad had not really thought much of it, not until he was at the castle gates and Gaffgarion was drawing steel. He had never–he supposed–thought much of anything. He was not a man who made any choices if he could afford to do so.
Gaff and he had a long and illustrious history. From Rad’s boyhood days polishing armor on the Viuran front to fairer seasons spent as soldiers of fortune, Rad had enjoyed the luxury of having a thoughtful master who managed thinking for him. Gaff, for all his foibles, knew which way the wind blew. Rad, for all his passivity, had been glad to be blown about.
When fate blew him over to Ramza's side, he'd accepted it, he supposed, just as he would have accepted it had he been on the other side of the falls.
Until the moment Gaffgarion fell, choking on his breath and blood, Rad was by no means sure he still wouldn't come if called. He did not approach the dying man, but there was a glance shared between them, a look that acknowledged that nothing had really changed from months past, even if there were to be no months future.
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