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Let Me Steal Your Heart [BuzzingBee + Dagger]

As the knights talked amongst themselves, Crow was quickly distracted once again by a dull twinge of pain in his torso that drew his attention away from their conversation. He knitted his brow in a slightly stressed manner, wanting to pull at the bandages again to make it stop, but too weak to remove his free hand from Penelope’s. The ceaseless discomfort irritated him, and he didn’t like the fact that he wasn’t able to do anything to deal with it. If only she would just listen to him that the wrapping needed to come off, then maybe he could make the pain go away. After all, it seemed like the best idea to him.

He turned back to try and convince her again but paused as he caught what the knights were saying. It sounded like they were planning to ask him another question, although Penelope didn’t look very happy about the decision. Glancing between their somewhat-distorted faces, he tipped his head to the side confusedly. He had thought they were done playing Olivia’s game when she started talking to her comrades instead of him. Apparently, that guess had been wrong. He wondered what they would ask him next, and if the chosen question was the reason why Penelope seemed so upset.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait long to find out. As Olivia queried what secret he kept that Penelope didn’t know about, the thief had to take another moment to think it over. There were plenty of things about him that she didn’t know, but that wasn’t because the information was necessarily secret. It just hadn’t come up in conversation before. She already knew all of his deepest secrets, such as his name, who his family was, and some of the more life-changing incidents in his past. Anything else he could have shared with her would have just been stories of his childhood or more recent history.

He supposed he had sort of kept his encounters with other women a secret from her, but that was done more so out of respect for her than anything else. If she ever bothered to ask him about it, he wouldn’t hesitate to be open with her, so he didn’t think that counted as a secret either. The thief chewed on the inside of his lip for a moment as he wracked his brain to come up with something worth saying in answer to Olivia’s question. Suddenly, he blinked as he came up with a response.

“There is one thing,” Crow said slowly. He averted his gaze with a bashful expression. “I never told her, but… two years ago, I was going to ask Penelope to marry me in Farhill.” He glanced up with a sheepish smile, slightly red-faced from the confession. “And I plan to ask her as soon as this war is over… I want to spend the rest of my life with her.”

Let Me Steal Your Heart [BuzzingBee + Dagger]

Yeah, it's a good thing Layth never came back, because he'd get any answer he wanted out of Crow right now lol
Crow's wording may not have been the best xD

Let Me Steal Your Heart [BuzzingBee + Dagger]

Crow didn’t like Penelope’s accusation. Of course he knew who he was. He may have been a little disoriented, but he wouldn’t have forgotten something as important as his own identity because of that. The real question was: How could she have forgotten? It hadn’t even been that long ago since the last time he’d heard her use his name, so he didn’t understand how she’d forgotten in such a short amount of time. He’d expected her to try harder than that to remember it.

He looked up at Olivia as she even said that Penelope didn’t know his name. Somehow, hearing another person confirm out loud it made him feel a pang of disappointment. She really must not have known his name if her friend thought so too. Maybe the times he thought he remembered of her calling him Collin were just hallucinations too? That was discouraging. He let out a quiet sigh. Once they were alone, he would have to try to remember to tell her that his name really wasn’t Crow. He wanted her to know.

However, his doubts were laid to rest when Gavin suddenly joined the conversation and confirmed that Penelope really did know his name. Crow felt a wave of relief. Of course she knew. He wasn’t sure why she’d acted like she didn’t, but she really did know his name. All those times he recalled of her using it weren’t fake. The thought made him a little giddy. He was quite happy that the knight knew who he was, because he loved her and wanted her to share that part of his life with her.

As Olivia asked him her second question, Crow knitted his brow in thought. That was a difficult one to answer. There were quite a few people who had known him as Collin—his mother, of course, but also many of the people in the village of Myrefall. It was going to be difficult for him to scrounge up all of their names when it had been over a decade since he’d last seen many of them, especially when he was continually distracted by strange visions in the tent.

After a long pause, he gave up. Even if he’d been clearheaded, he doubted he would have been able to think of every single name. Besides, there was a much simpler way to answer the question.

“Just Penelope,” the thief said at last, turning to smile fondly at the knight. “Everyone else is dead.”

Let Me Steal Your Heart [BuzzingBee + Dagger]

Yep. She managed to get one of his biggest secrets out right away xD

Let Me Steal Your Heart [BuzzingBee + Dagger]

Crow’s eyes flicked between the two knights as they spoke, but he found their conversation to be boring again. He didn’t understand why they were so interested in talking to him. After all, they were in a tent that seemed like it was alive. He looked up at the canopy over his head, watching as it moved like the breathing chest of an animal. Was he the only one that found it so strange? Why were none of the knights as fascinated by it as he was? Then again, maybe living tents were normal to nobles. They were rich enough to afford plenty of things that a peasant like him had never seen before, so perhaps this was nothing new to them. Regardless, it was captivating to the thief, so he continued to watch it with childlike wonder.

After a short while, he heard Olivia say his name, so he turned back to her curiously. At the mention of a game, he perked up a bit. Staying in this place day after day with nothing to do besides lay in a bed had been so boring. Anything that would break that routine was welcomed to him, so he listened carefully as the knight explained the rules. All he had to do was answer her questions? He frowned to himself. It almost seemed too easy. Even in his hazy state, he was confident he could do that much.

“First question: What is your name?”

The thief blinked. That was an odd question to start with. He had thought Olivia was planning to go with something easy, like she had told him she would, but instead it looked like she was already digging for secrets. Well, he supposed he would just have to go along with it. After all, he didn’t want to lose her little game, and they were only one question in so far. It would have been pathetic for him to back down now.

Crow’s lip curved upward in a delirious smile as he answered truthfully: “Collin.”

Let Me Steal Your Heart [BuzzingBee + Dagger]

Naturally cx
Crow's so out of it, he won't remember anything if they do end up questioning him lol

Let Me Steal Your Heart [BuzzingBee + Dagger]

“But I don’t like them,” Crow frowned when Penelope pulled his hand away from the bandages. He tried halfheartedly to tug his hand out of hers, wanting to remove the wrapping on his own if she wouldn’t help him, but he didn’t have enough control over his body to do it, so he gave up fairly quickly. In his drugged state, he couldn’t understand why she was stopping him. If the pain was coming from the bandages, surely the best move would have been to take them off, right? It seemed logical to him.

He looked up at her as she explained that he’d gotten hurt. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he recalled something about getting wounded, but it almost seemed like a dream. “You sure?” he murmured skeptically. “I don’t feel that bad.” He was about to try and pull his hand from hers again but got distracted when he heard the knights talking amongst themselves once more. Putting a little more effort into listening to their conversation, he made out that they were talking about who would be staying with him. It wasn’t very interesting, so he stopped paying attention pretty early on to look around the tent again. However, his focus was drawn back when Olivia mentioned Penelope’s name.

The thief turned back towards the knight, who was gazing at him with a mischievous glint in her eye, and then glanced up at Penelope, who was red in the face. He wasn’t sure why she was embarrassed. It seemed like a straightforward enough question to him. However, he didn’t get a chance to question it before she began to give him a short list of instructions. “Okay,” he nodded absently, though he disliked the rules. The bandages were still bothering him, so he wanted to pull them off, and he didn’t think Olivia was being that intrusive with her question.

“Oh, come on,” Olivia groaned. “We finally have the opportunity to get some answers out of him, and you’re going to make us pass this up?” She turned to Gavin. “You must have more questions for him than any of us. Surely you agree with me, right?”

The knight shifted uncomfortably in his chair, hesitating for a moment before he replied, “I hardly think this is the right way to go about this.”

“Gods, you’re both so boring,” Olivia whined, looking between her two comrades. “You really don’t want to find out the deep, dark secrets of the most infamous thief in the kingdom? I bet he’s got some great ones to tell, don’t you, Crow?” She turned back to the thief with a sly smile.

The thief stared at her blankly. “Secrets?” he mused, narrowing his eyes slightly as her body began to distort in front of his face from the delusion. “Yeah… I’ve got lots of those.”

“Great,” Olivia clapped her hands together eagerly, glancing between Gavin and Penelope and lingering on the latter. “What should we ask him first? You’ll play along if I don’t ask anything about you, right?” She simpered pleadingly. “Please? This could be so much fun!”

Let Me Steal Your Heart [BuzzingBee + Dagger]

Of course she is xD
Crow's so high he forgot about his wound ^^;

Let Me Steal Your Heart [BuzzingBee + Dagger]

Finding it too strenuous to focus on the knights’ conversation, Crow was quickly distracted by looking around at other things in the tent. Over the course of talking to Olivia, his strange vision of trees had disappeared, but now it just felt like everything in the room was moving. He watched with his head tilted at a slight angle as the backrest of Jane’s chair seemed to twist of its own accord. The sight was intriguing, but it also made his stomach feel upset, so he turned away again.

As his eyes wandered over the tent, he eventually settled on Penelope’s face, and he smiled to himself, entranced by her beauty as he stared up at her. He wasn’t sure if it was the medicine in his system or just the low lighting of the room, but somehow, he found her even more attractive than usual. Absently, he reached out his hand, wanting to touch her to make sure she was really standing in front of him. It was hard to tell between all the other hallucinations the drug was causing. But, of course, he didn’t make it very far and just ended up with his arm hanging haphazardly off the edge of the mattress instead.

Suddenly, Crow blinked at he realized someone else was standing over him now. He looked up to see that it was Olivia. For a moment, he just stared at her, vaguely aware that she had asked him a question, until he remembered what she had just said. “’Course,” he grinned back at her. Why would she have even bothered to ask him that? He liked having them around. They may have been knights, but Penelope was a knight too, and he liked her just fine.

“See?” Olivia turned back to Gavin with a smug smirk.

“That doesn’t matter,” Gavin rolled his eyes. “He’s on a strong medicine, so he’ll say anything right now.”

As the two knights bickered, Crow grew uninterested and tuned them out again. Shifting slightly on the bed, he was aware of a mild discomfort in his torso, and he looked down to find the bandages that were wrapped around his middle. He frowned, unable to remember why they were there, but fairly certain they were the cause of his discomfort. “Hey, Penelope,” he mumbled as he brought his hand down to tug at the annoying dressing. “Help me get these off… Kind of hurts…”

Let Me Steal Your Heart [BuzzingBee + Dagger]

Oh lord xD
Olivia's entertained