The Templar is, infuriatingly, even more attractive up close.
Which is a problem, because he'd been plenty attractive during the fight, and Dimitri had been actively burning alive at the time, so the fact that he'd noticed at all is a personal failing he'd like to set on fire and never speak of again. But up close, it's worse. The blond hair has come half loose from its ponytail, pale gold strands falling across a face that belongs in a stained glass window. High cheekbones. A jaw that could cut paper. Dark lashes fanned against skin that practically glows with the residual holy energy the Templar Order pumps into its soldiers, all that consecrated light simmering just beneath the surface, and it makes Dimitri's teeth ache in a way that is not entirely unpleasant. He's small. Compact. Built with a wiry, efficient strength that had been far more effective against those creatures than a man his size had any right to be, and he is unfairly, absurdly pretty in a way that makes Dimitri want to break things.
He nudges the Templar with his boot. Not gently.
"Hey. Wake up."
The Templar stirs. A low groan, barely conscious, and he shifts on the concrete with his brow creasing.
And Dimitri is hit by a wave of confusion so sudden and so complete that it nearly takes his legs out from under him.
It's disorienting in a way that has nothing to do with the warehouse or the aftermath of the spell. One moment he's standing over an unconscious Templar with a clear head and a foul mood, and the next he doesn't know where he is. Can'tpiece together the sequence of events that led him here. Can't hold a thought long enough to examine it before it comes apart in his hands. His mind scatters, fragments, becomes a handful of shards he can't reassemble, and for three terrible seconds Dimitri, who has never once in lost control of his own mind, does not know who he is.
Then the Templar opens his eyes, vivid green, and the confusion sharpens, and Dimitri understands.
It's not his.
The confusion is not his. It's the Templar's. Pouring off the man and bleeding into Dimitri's chest through that insistent, violent pull beneath his sternum, so seamless and so complete that for a moment Dimitri couldn't tell the difference between the Templar's mind and his own. The Templar's disorientation had become his disorientation. The Templar's confusion had overwritten his thoughts. And the implications of that are so catastrophically, unspeakably awful that Dimitri needs to stand here for a moment and let the full scope of his hatred settle into his bones.
"Fuck," Dimitri says, with feeling.
A soul binding. The little witch, with his shaking hands and his stolen book and his crude chalk circle, has managed to perform a soul binding. On a demon. And a Templar. By accident. Using the Templar's freely given blood as the anchor. The sheer improbability of it is almost impressive, in the same way that it's impressive when you accidentally shoot someone even though you’ve never used a gun. It shouldn't be possible, but the universe has a sense of humor, and it is not a kind one.
The Templar's green eyes focus. They land on Dimitri. They widen.
What happens next happens very fast.
The Templar rolls onto his knees and lunges. His left hand comes up, blessing rings blazing white across his knuckles, fourbands of consecrated silver flaring with holy light, and he drives his palm flat against Dimitri's chest.
Dimitri sees it coming. He has time to think don't, to think stop, to think you stupid fucking—
The blessing erupts.
It is holy energy in its purest form, searing through every nerve in Dimitri's body with the concentrated fury of a thousand years of divine wrath compressed into a single point. He's thrown backward, boots leaving the ground, spine hitting concrete hard enough to crack it. The pain is immense. Blinding. It whites out his vision and turns his thoughts to static and he is going to kill this man, he is going to wrap his hands around that pale throat and squeeze until those green eyes—
The Templar cries out in pain.
He collapses to the floor clutching his chest, his back arching off the concrete as the same holy energy that just tore through Dimitri rips back through him with nowhere else to go. His blessing rings sputter and die. His eyes go wide and blank with shock, and Dimitri can feel the Templar's pain layered on top of his own, doubling it, an echo chamber of agony bouncing back and forth between them through the bond, and he cannot tell where his ends and the Templar's begins, and this, he thinks with a viciousness that is almost clarifying, is the worst day of his very long life.
They both lie there, gasping, staring at the ceiling. The concrete is cold beneath Dimitri's back and the blisters on his chest are screaming and he can feel the Templar's pain and his own pain and the bond between them humming with the shared trauma of it like a wire pulled taut between two posts.
Dimitri kicks his foot out and catches the Templar in the shoulder.
Pain lances down his own shoulder. Dull, throbbing, a sympathetic echo that makes him grit his teeth. But it makes him feel better. Marginally.
"You're so fucking stupid," Dimitri snarls. He drags himself upright, one hand pressed to his chest where the blessing hit him. The skin beneath his shirt is blistered, and it's going to heal ugly, if it heals at all. "You absolute brain-dead holy moron. Have you not noticed we are bound together?"
The Templar is still on his back, one hand pressed to his sternum, breathing in short ragged bursts. His green eyes are glassy with pain, and even wrecked, even gasping on the floor of a filthy warehouse in what is clearly some of the worst agony of his life, he looks like something Dimitri wants to consume, and Dimitri resents it with every fiber of his being.
"We're not—" The Templar swallows. "That's not—"
“What a fantastic rhetoric. Just exactly what I’ve come to expect from someone who hits things with a stick and who offered himself up as a blood sacrifice to a witch not even old enough to drink.”
"It's a mace." The Templar grits the words through clenched teeth, and the fact that this is the hill he chooses to die on, correcting Dimitri's terminology while lying on a filthy floor with a chest full of his own reflected blessing, tells Dimitri everything he needs to know about this man.
"I don't care if it's the cock of God himself. That witch bound us together, and you just tried to bless me, and the blessing went through me and came back to you, because whatever you do to me you do to yourself now. So congratulations. You are the first Templar in recorded history to exorcise himself. I hope it was everything you dreamed."
The Templar's jaw tightens. "This is not possible."
