What am I doing?! This is the opposite of what I should be doing!

Loads and loads of apologies to everybody who reads Days of Service. I actually have ever chapter planned out, I just have to write them! RL is kicking my butt. This wouldn't leave me alone tonight, though, and even though I don't foresee a Balinor/Hunith fic being that popular, I can't not post it. So here. Have this. Because midnight is the only time I have to write anything, apparently.

Hunith, Part Two: Before

Nothing had happened to the Dragonlord Balinor in twenty years.

And actually, twenty years was a rough estimate at best. After the first five, it had bothered him less and less to keep track. This was his life now, and who was left to care how long it lasted? He certainly didn't.

Balinor's life consisted of the following three parts: Before Hunith, Hunith, and After Hunith.

Before Hunith was good. Great, actually. He'd had no idea then how great he had it, with a friend like Gaius, a king who admired him, and even a girl that he might have been happy enough marrying had things worked out differently. Nimueh had been pretty enough, clever enough, and more than magical enough to suit someone like him.

But then came the death of Ygraine, the Purge, the burnings, the fear, the running away. And then Ealdor. Hunith.

The best weeks of his life followed one of the worst. He was never sure which was worse; the period right after Ygraine's death, when everything was havoc and Uther went positively mad with grief, or the exact moment that Uther coldly told him he was not an exception. In that moment, Balinor's whole life was ripped away.

And in less than three days, he found it again. There he'd been, squelching into the village with the rain soaking him to the core, nothing to keep him warm since he'd left his fine cloak of Camelot red in the city where it belonged. There she'd been, throwing her door wide open, letting the rain splash onto her floor while she urged a completely stranger to take shelter.

Balinor had been so, so happy to discover that she was the one to whom Gaius had sent him.

The three weeks of bliss that followed were paid for by the agony of separation. The night that red-clad knights of Camelot began kicking down doors in the village was the last night of Balinor's life. He'd made her stay; of course he had. He couldn't condemn the woman he loved so much to a life of this.

But damn it if it wouldn't have made it more bearable.

So began After Hunith: life in the wild. Strange how the wild became so very boring, despite its name. Part of Balinor was always going to miss the busy streets of the citadel, teeming with traders and soldiers and children, always something going on, always something to do. The rest of him resented the whole lot of it, the whole system of people and their disloyalty to anything and everything.

Yes, he thought it was only fair that he shouldn't have to remember the exact number of years that had gone by. Life owed him the luxury of not knowing. Life owed him the luxury of forgetting how long it had been since he'd seen Hunith's face.

Life owed him one more thing, but it wasn't something he expected it to give him. It owed him the luxury of seeing her again. It owed him the chance to start the tally over, from twenty-ish years to zero. It owed him Hunith, Part Two.

Nothing had happened to the Dragonlord Balinor in approximately twenty years, but something was about to.

Because one night, in the rain, this time with him standing dry inside and her so thoroughly soaked that the water rolled right off of surfaces too soaked to take anymore, he met Hunith again.