This One Love

Disclaimer: Starting with this chapter and continuing to the end of this story, any character that I do not state as ‘original’ or ‘of my creation’ is a game character and is not owned by me, but by Koei games.

Mayu: Thank you for the nice review. Sorry about the grammatical errors, lol. I use the auto check on MS Word and sometimes it rebells against me. There are several chapters before the lemon comes up, but it will be here eventually, so no worries. Thanks again


Chapter 2

Zhuge rubbed his right temple absently as he tried to listen to the reports being made after the recent battle. Zhang Fei, when he wasn’t drunk, was painfully long winded, and it was Zhuge’s misfortune that he was the one addressing Lord Liu Bei at present. He wished the man forgot as much of the human language sober as he did drunk.

And while he wished for the gods to suddenly strike the man mute, he started thinking on what happened the day before. He hadn’t gotten to talk with his wife after dinner yesterday because the units were sent on the march for the enemy camp and his unit and Ying’s weren’t close enough together. The battlefield wasn’t the place for that kind of talk anyway. He couldn’t help but wonder, though, what she had wanted to say but seemed so hesitant about.

He was snapped out of his musings by a new voice and looked up to find Zhang Fei had finished his tirade and it was his wife’s second in command delivering her report, not her. He was just starting to wonder where she had disappeared to when the sub-general started the report, and the statement almost had him bolting out of his chair to go find her.

“General Yue Ying was injured during the battle and is with the doctors presently and unable to make her report herself, so I was sent in her stead.”

Zhuge lost everything else the man said in the panic that took his mind and body at the mention of his wife getting hurt. How could something like this happen? Besides being a remarkable warrior, she wore so many layers of clothing and armor it would be almost impossible for someone to get through that to actually manage a blow to her body. He wondered what she’d been doing and whom she’d been protecting to make herself that vulnerable. He was brought out of his new reverie when he almost jumped in surprise as a hand squeezed his shoulder and he looked over to see Liu Bei watching him.

“Go ahead and check on your wife, Master Liang, I rode with your unit so there’s no need to receive a report from you.”
“Thank you, my lord.” Zhuge replied as he bowed his head slightly then stood to head out of the council room to go find his wife.

Yue Ying resisted the urge to punch the doctor that was presently digging the pieces of spear metal out of her shoulder while she debated on whether or not to go kill her sub-general herself for getting himself stuck in that ambush in the first place. The oaf had decided to separate from the unit to cut behind the one they were going after, and was more than overwhelmed with enemy ambush soldiers by the time she found out where he had went and caught up to him. He lost his entire unit in the fray and would have lost his own life if she hadn’t charged her horse through the crowd and jumped in to help him.

Unfortunately for her, there were so many of them and the general was so badly wounded that she almost got overwhelmed herself, and one soldier managed to get a cheap shot in on her and ended up spearing her shoulder and snapping his spear blade flush with her skin when she countered the attack …

Which put her at the mercy of a doctor she was beginning to believe was slightly masochistic considering how he was still poking and prodding. She almost caused him to drive his tools farther into her arm when her husbands voice startled her out of her thoughts.

“Do you have to be so brutal with those things?” Zhuge asked after watching the doctor dig in her arm for a few minutes.
“Oh, Master Liang! I was just making sure I didn’t stitch the wound with metal pieces still in her arm. It would mean having to go in and remove them after she’s already healed, which would increase the chance of scarring and damaging muscles she would need in battle.”
“Did you bother asking her if she still felt metal in her arm? I’m sure that would be feasible since its obvious by the look on her face she definitely feels you stabbing her with your doctors toys.”

Ying gave her husband a grateful half-smile as the doctor took away his torture tools spluttering apologies. So he had been still prodding to make her more uncomfortable, the bastard. Oh well, as long as the wound didn’t scar too much she didn’t really care, it kept her from worrying about the coming conversation with her husband, which she was still nervous about. A thought that was quickly brought back to the surface of her mind as he sat beside the bed and watched the doctor work.

“What happened?” Zhuge asked gently, hoping his wife didn’t assume the question was implying that she had done something wrong.
“One of my subs broke off without notice and ran into an ambush trying to get around the unit we were engaging … I went to assist when I learned about it and ran into several ambush units converging on him at once … he was incapable of helping me fight them off at the time, so I was almost overwhelmed and got this as a reward for my intentions.”
“You did a great thing, going after one from your unit alone like that. You were lucky a spear wound is all you came out of it with … you could have lost a lot more.”
“Well, we’re all safe and I’ll probably come out of this without even a scar,” she replied quietly, then almost forgot to breath when her husband smiled at her.
Sure, she’d seen him smile, but this was different. This smile spread across his whole face and into his eyes, and if she thought he was gorgeous before, this made him completely stunning. It took a few seconds for what he was saying to sink in because of this fact, and she blinked in surprise when she realized what he’d been saying.
“And I’m thanking the gods that you all are, especially you. I don’t know what I’d do without you here,” Zhuge said, praying he wasn’t going too far with this and scaring her with his admission.
“Y-you what?” Ying stammered, still not believing her ears.
Zhuge couldn’t help smiling at his wife again. This stammering and the not quite blushing that accompanied it were just too adorable.
“I said I don’t know what I would do without you here with me. Is that so hard to believe?”
“Well … it’s just that … you haven’t ever …” Ying let her voice trail off as she fought the blush that his statement threatened to bring out. The stammering was bad enough, she didn’t need to add to her embarrassment by blushing like a naïve little girl.
“I know, Ying, I know … look, we’ll talk about this when we’re in a more private place, okay?” At her nod he refocused his attention on the doctor, a faint smile still playing on his lips as he thought about what had just happened. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to get closer to his wife as he had thought.