I Know Exactly What A Person Like You is Doing In A Place Like This

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I Know Exactly What A Person Like You is Doing In A Place Like This

CHAPTER ONE: Olberic

Olberic Eisenberg, 3 Years Ago 

The great injustice of it all was that it all began when Olberic found himself back on a path to the Highlands after all these years. Even seeing the crest of the hills in the distance made his throat feel tight and dry as if choked with bile.

He intended to travel only into the low ranges that traced the edge of the mountain lands, going no farther than where grass could still grow. He had learned that, sadly, that was where much of the good work was for sellswords. Where the desperate rabble of broken Hornburg were thieving, hoarding, and slicing throats. So he stayed some extra time in a town near the edge of the desert, partially to recover his strength—the blasted freezing desert nights and burning days had taxed him more than he wanted to admit—and partially to delay his ascent.

Such desert oases were venomously attractive and relaxing. He knew why, though in his former life, the life of Sir Eisenberg, he wouldn’t have divined it. Vultures, opportunists, thieves; cut-throats, whores, and conmen; they were the population of these oases, and it was in their interest to be attractive and relaxing. Each knew that travelers like him, the gigantic foreign menace, were overwrought by the sands they had sludged through to get here and desperate for some physical comfort. The shaded, mosaic-glass lanterns that lit the tavern’s sunken floor, the gentle wafts of sandalwood and clove incense, the wool cushions woven thin with white and red and gold, and the gentle, quiet, smiling lilt that all of the workers spoke with; every ounce of it was meant to relax him to threats. Likely they would only come for his purse, but his body needed looking over too.

That said, he was enormously relaxed and hoping that basic instinct would save him, because he was categorically unable to refuse the drinks he was offered, the gentle hand leading him to a seat, and the insistence of staying a little longer, one after the other. He would have to head into the mountains tomorrow whether he liked it or not, lest he tempt himself to take a job or two in a place whose underground intrigues he knew he wasn’t sharp enough to manage. But he was going to have one fine final night, surrounded by curling herbal smoke, a drink in his hand, his back rested comfortably behind him.

It was in that mood of stubborn hedonism that he met the boy.

Young man, really. He would later do the math to discern that he would have been 18 or 19 at the time.

While the women (and men) in silken drapery tried their best to be surreptitiously tempting, Olberic had been… Not often there to call upon, these days. To put it mildly. A run-in or two had occurred, but even when his eyes insisted that someone was beautiful, his body…

…Blast. And on that subject it was most likley his garb, the hooded cloak, the dark leather and woolen under-armor, the tightly cinched belts and steel-toed boots that actually drew Olberic’s attention. In a room full of soft lies he was an inkspot of blunt paranoia, armed, posture tight, glaring the room away.

He was foreign as well, remarkably pale and pale-haired, probably only unburnt because he had walked the sands like a phantom, shrouded in black. Olberic couldn’t even see much of his person, just a smear of white marking the form of a young man under the protective dark cowl. He was compelled because he recognized the young man’s defensive posture. He was combat-trained. He could tell he was fit in form when he reached out a hand to pay for a drink. He could tell he was intelligent and world-wise when his fingers danced to slip a coin back and forth on the table, keeping it from the wrong hands trying to nick it. And he knew he was a thief when he watched him flick something off of a serving-girl’s belt as she passed behind him on the way to the kitchen. It was only a hair-pin. His brow furrowed when he saw what was in his hand.

Then he saw Olberic seeing him, and both their fates were sealed. For a thief could not just let himself be observed without silencing the witness, and a sellsword could not possibly leave a man who may attack him unaddressed. Not if either of them valued their hides.

And this young man had been a thief for some time, Olberic learned next, because after catching Olberic’s eyes he casually slid them away, returning to his drink as though nothing had happened. He would not have a confrontation in a packed tavern. Not when he had, likely, stolen from more belts than just the girl’s. He would have to find Olberic alone—or else slip away quietly, once his eyes were off of him, if he didn’t want a fight.

…But Olberic did. Want a fight. That was surely the drink talking, but his hands itched when he saw someone with those tight muscles and trained grace, those snappy, dangerous sleights of hand.

Olberic was himself a master fighter. To deny it would be not humility, but lying about his profession. To fight was—had been—his career, his life, his pride. In his youth he had spent every day with his men, sparring, challenging, testing, celebrating. And now—now he labored to badly recreate what had once implicitly given him purpose and joy, what had once connected him to others, to himself. Now he hunted like a jackal, finding prey to practice what had once been play, and his partners, the comrades-in-arms who had known and loved, him, they were—he was—

The young man looked like he could hold his own in a fight. And he moved like he had had to a fair number of times. So it was with growing interest and careful calm that he watched the thief roll his shoulders, as if realizing how stiff they were from hunching over the bar, push back his chair, and stand up off of it to glance, evenly, around the room. It was with a good forgery of chance that his eyes met Olberic’s again, at his own little table by the wall.

The thief approached him with a walk that was something of a stalk, but not too ostentatious. He was clearly a surprise striker, a cat thief, not a street gangster or a bodyguard. This was one who preferred to stay in the shadows. He clearly thought he would slide into the seat next to Olberic’s, blend in, ply his trade, drug his drink or whisper a lie to convince him to take this outside.

But that had never been Olberic Eisenberg’s game. When the thief was some five feet from his table, clearly approaching him, he put his hands down on the wood and stood to face him. The thief stopped, looking up at his height.

(Oh, yes, and he was huge. To deny that would also be just denying the obvious. No point in being too humble.)

Your move, thief, Olberic thought with a little wicked flutter in his gut. Olberic suddenly looming over the left half of the room made some others nearby tense and stare, which garnered the thief more  attention. The thief reconsidered, but did not flinch or back away. He stood as he had approached him, frozen, one hand tucked into his coat at his side, the other hanging casually, like he had not reached into any pocket whatsoever.

“… There you are,” said the thief in exactly (and he means EXACTLY) the voice he had been expecting, haughty, callous, tipped like a dagger, unkind, boyish. He could have cut the room with it but chose to keep the damage short-range. “Why you have to make me hunt for you, I don’t know. Come on.”

Olberic considered it was not impossible he ‘knew’ this person. He had never seen him, he was sure of that. But sellswords like him depended on word of mouth, and he was surprised, sometimes, by whose mouths his name ended up in. Perhaps the little thief was actually looking for hired muscle and heard he was in town. But he thought not.

Still, not a bad ploy, and he found himself considering playing along… almost. “You must have me mistaken, young master,” he said, careful to not speak over the quiet music and chatter of the tavern.

The tic of annoyance that crinkled one side of the thief’s face was slight but noticeable and it brought Olberic a certain unkind joy. He would love to believe that he had not once been so mean-spirited or malicious, that it was a consequence of his fall from grace, but he had always found a certain perverse joy in needling… the right people. “Very funny,” he snapped, and Olberic watched the story write itself in the little thief’s eyes. “We both know you’re coming with me, so come on.”

Cause a scene in the tavern, or take it outside? When he thought of it objectively, to have fewer witnesses would be better. Guards would arrest foreigners for roughhousing or disturbing the peace here, he had learned. He felt himself smile, a cold one. “Very well—though you’ll find me an unpleasant man once interrupted from my drink.”

…Not truly. He was rarely so petty to lash out at his creature comforts being disturbed. Once upon a time, he had been known for leaping up from any meal he had sat down to or bath he had sunk into the second anyone needed his assistance. He wasn’t really so different, nowadays. He still leapt to attention at all calls; but usually, now, it was to the voice of fear.

If the thief heeded his warning, he did so silently. He did not turn heel but fanned himself out, implying Olberic should walk before him and be guided.

There was not a chance he was turning his back to this thief. “Lead on, then,” he insisted, not budging an inch.

He narrowed his eyes and slid a chair out of the way so Olberic could walk out more easily.

The battle of wills that ensued was more delightful every second for Olberic, as the thief stubbornly maneuvered around Olberic’s careful walk around him. Past waitresses, tables, and lamps they danced a dance Olberic knew so well he danced it in his dreams; the circle. The circle of the combat ring.

His heart was beating, a little, when he was led to the stairs. They were taking this not outside, but upstairs. The young man already had a room here—likely trapped or installed with his own magical lock already. He was putting himself at a disadvantage, but…

…He kind of liked that.

…He had drunk too much. He was letting his. Not his guard. His. Inhibitions down, a little.

The thief had rented perhaps the smallest room in the building; less to guard, if he thought like Olberic did. Feeling maybe a little too cocksure after watching the thief glower at him for the past five minutes, he gave him a huge concession by allowing himself to be ushered into the room and have the thief enter after him; though every part of him was tensed to an attack from behind.

It did not come yet. The thief locked the door, and Olberic admired the room. An excellent choice—he might have chosen it had he chosen to stay at an inn instead of paying a housewife for her spare room. On the outer wall, so there was a window outside if he needed it. Sloped, so there were essentially three walls, not four. Minimal furniture, since the room was small; if someone were banging at his door, he had maximum exits and few directions he could be attacked from. 

“May I ask,” Olberic rumbled, turning around in the narrow way between bed and wall to face the glowering young thief, “who it is that I have made the acquaintance of tonight?” He tended to speak courtly speech mostly as sarcasm, these days.

It had the intended effect of riling up the young man. “I’m called Ari,” he snapped, voice quieter but even more sharp than it had been downstairs.

“Berg.”

He cocked his head and slightly sneered his upper lip. What a little mountain-cat , he thought, with equal amusement and derision. “I am called Berg,” he repeated. An unusual name, he knew. “And may I ask, Ari, if you truly were expecting me this evening?”

“No,” he crackled immediately, arms crossing. “And I’m sure as hell not happy to have found you.”

Olberic slipped a grin, though he tried not to. This Ari was getting too wound up, so he had better stop goading him on. He did want to hear him out first. He was a sucker for a duel over a brawl, at the end of the day. Sentimentality. “You might have settled this easily by slipping away,” he teased. “Why call me out so blatantly?”

“That’s bull and you know it,” the thief countered, and a little slide back on one foot was the only thing betraying his anxious twitch. “I know you’re a merc. A merc doesn’t let an easy hit go.”

A mercenary. Once upon a time, Olberic had thought he would slip to any lows but that. Now he had accepted miserably that he wasn’t so much better than one. There were gray distinctions, but he didn’t care to defend his honor any more. “And I know you are a cat-thief, and a cat-thief doesn’t pick a fight when he can avoid one,” he countered. “Come now, there are other solutions.”

Even he wasn’t sure where he was going with this. He liked a talk before the fight, a banter or a statement of intention, like the cute little speeches they used to give at the joust. The thief’s youthful aggression was charming, but Olberic, buzzed, interested, wasn’t sure what he was fishing for either. “What, you want a look at what I got?” asked Ari, with a sarcastic whine in his voice. “Lemme guess, you’ll let me go if you get an even cut? Fat chance, fucker.”

He did not, in fact, want some of his stolen goods. “A cut of hairpins and paste-gems? I shall pass.”

“Huh,” the thief snarled as he rolled his eyes, admitting wordlessly that, yeah, he had pilfered nothing but junk despite his efforts that night. The desert oases were rich, lavish, provocative, and slapped down on your hand like a trap once you reached for the bait. Surely Ari as a thief had been being as meticulously careful in the hands he bit as Olberic as a sellsword had been. “Wouldn’t give you shit anyway,” he growled. “So, you recruiting for a whorehouse? Running? Fencing? Whose banner do you think you can tie me up in? Cause it’s not happening.”

“And what do you think your solution is?” asked Olberic, bemused. “What were your intentions cornering a ‘mercenary’ who caught you thieving? Was I brought up here for threats? I’ll hear them.”

“I don’t threaten,” the thief said with a little bit of dark certainty. “I’m telling you to get out, right now, and leave me to my business.”

Olberic waited a moment, and then—God, he had to fight to suppress the smile that wanted to climb on his face. “That’s it?” he asked, hearing his own voice grow a little uneven despite his efforts. “And you think I’ll run? You should have left me to my drink.”

The line was even more aggressive than he intended it and the thief reacted accordingly. His stance crystallized from casual to defensive in a second, and Olberic could tell from how he pulled his left leg back that he had three seconds to stop this from being a fight. He had no intention whatsoever of using a single one of them. “Close your mouth,” Olberic insisted to him, “and shut mine if you can!”

He had a knife in his face in the next second. The glimmer of it swooping thought the air was like the glistening of the prizest gem to Olberic. He had the thief’s arm snapped out of his face and his right arm careening up to connect with his stomach before he could even feel the thrill pound into him, the fierce fire that burst to life low in his gut and set his blood to boiling. The thief adjusted to the hard and fast attack as agilely as he could in this close quarters. He was forced to take Olberic's fist, but twisted so that it hit a less debilitating spot on his side. Ari ground his teeth and growled at the hit but the way he crunched his body in response was purposeful; he was minimizing the effect of the punch and curling so that his back foot could—

Ah, Olberic thought, joy and delirium, as Ari used a horse-kick to launch himself away from the bed and Olberic at the wall. His back pounded the fired clay of the tavern. The eaves of the roof and the panes of the window clattered and shook when Ari’s momentum and Olberic’s weight hit the wall at once.

It did not wind him much, because he was well-versed in taking such hits. The thief had him at the wall, yes, and he already had a fist ready to smack onto his jaw. It didn’t quite make it. Olberic had to knock it away with a forearm instead of seize it like he would like, but he still deflected it. Next was to block a kick, then to stem a cut to his side; he managed well enough, but was still at a disadvantage because of the sheer, slick aggression Ari had turned on to him.

He found his opening when Ari wheeled an arm back to try to knock him hard; stupid move. Ari couldn't hit him hard enough to make exposing his sides worth his while. Olberic wrenched his body away from the wall and seized the young man, with one hand around his wrist and the other gripping his neck and shoulder. The thief immediately knew he had made a mistake, because he thrashed like a furious stallion, knowing that his best chance at getting away from Olberic was to throw him immediately. 

And for a half-second, it worked; Ari’s wrist slipped into and out of Olberic’s grip, wavering, gathering red finger-marks. But in the end, he had him; he used his weight to force him backward, and ended up smacking him against the edge of the bed. It was the only other thing in the room.

They locked into a force-grip that Olberic absolutely knew was in his favor. It was strength against strength, body matched against body, and Ari was maybe 150 pounds of lean muscle at the most. Olberic towered a head over him and bent him back with slow, struggling force, like pushing shut a protesting bellows. It took effort and time to lean him back, as they were both constantly thrashing; it turned out that Ari was pretty fucking adept at tossing a good kick while his arms were incapacitated. Olberic had to seize him hard and really shove to keep him still. Olberic had him pushed half-bent and—

He didn’t actually understand in the moment why Ari jolted and froze, struck still, his head blown back and muscles tight as whipcord. Olberic saw his lips pop apart and the air puff out of them as if he were watching it at a crawl, the flickering appearance of pearly teeth, the slightest lash of his eyelids unshuttering. Olberic had shoved him almost entirely onto the bed, his body was forced between his opened—

Oh, Brand’s balls. Ari had frozen because entirely without his awareness, Olberic had gotten hard, and the thief could feel it thrust between his own legs now that Olberic had slammed him against the bed. He was used to—it made him feel alive—the fight made his blood boil, but—

That hadn’t happened in a while. Not like this. Not since...

“Uh,” said the thief, an expression of shock overtaken his features though his arms were still locked fast with Olberic’s. Olberic was forced to watch his gaze slip down his body to where they were pressed against each other, as if his hips and the inside of his popped-open thigh couldn’t tell him already what had just bumped into him. When he saw it, he still he raised his eyebrows; one went easily and the other, half-hidden by a fringe of hair thrown back from his face, jolted going up—it had a nasty scar to contend with. (It wasn't an animal attack or a burn. It had obviously been done by a blade. Someone had gone out of their way to humiliate or punish him with a disfigurement. There was no other reason to slash, not stab, over someone’s eye like that.)

It didn’t affect his attractiveness to Olberic. Obviously, because he had just gotten stiff for him before even seeing half of his face.

Ari snapped his gaze back up to Olberic with a look of affronted disbelief. But as he did so, his hips shifted (perhaps involuntarily) and bumped Olberic’s; now that he was consciously aware of the heat that had boiled down him, he felt the little twitch like a shock skittering down his center, and his heaving stillness was broken by an involuntary shudder.

And watching him tremble--it could be nothing else he had done--made the thief smile, a nasty smile, creeping up one half of his face, screwing up his wrinkled scar. His eyes flared bright with a spiteful light. “Wh,” he huffed, his chest was heaving to regain what he had lost in the violence, “Wha—you fucking pervert,” he snarled, half repulsion, half delight.

“Hhm-“ Olberic honestly didn’t come up with something fast to say. He half-surrendered his grip on Ari, sliding his hands down his forearms and around the elbow to his upper arms, but not letting go. He wasn’t sure yet, with the dangerous shine in the thief’s eyes, if he was about to be pummeled half to death or not. When he traced his palms over his arms Ari went with him, to a degree, letting him push his body a just a little further backwards. “Wasn’t—” his voice was hoarser than he had meant. He felt himself twitch against Ari’s thigh as that malicious glimmer in his eyes fixed him. Swallowing did nothing to clear his throat. “Snuck up on me,” he ground out, half-abashed, but…

If he… all muscle, quick and spiteful, a knife half out of its sheath on his thigh (meant surely for Olberic’s side), pretty pale skin, venomous snarling voice, if he wanted to—

That was the thinking of stupid lust and he knew it even in the moment. He had goaded a man, attacked him, and forced him violently into a bed. That didn’t work to pick someone up, actually, Olberic. You got one Erhardt, you’re never finding another.

The thief bit his lower lip and let it roll out as a harsh grinding noise made its way out of his throat, and grew harsher and louder. And then he was laughing, a mean-spirited, chaotic, cackling laugh. His head hit the soft of the bed when he leaned it back and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his exposed throat. As his laugh climbed up and down in pitch in a couple of surreal seconds, he ripped his arms out of Olberic’s grip (he let him) and the thigh that Olberic had pushed up suddenly popped a little higher, hitched halfway up his back.

Then, still laughing, running out of air with his lungs still convulsing, the thief slid his hands right up to Olberic’s hips, gripped them, and thrust up aggressively. Olberic immediately heard himself grunt in a way that made him sound way too old; the thief was heaving with the air he had run out of and his fingers snapped at him like talons, and then he growled and thrust up his hips at Olberic again. He wasn’t even much aroused yet, not that Olberic could feel, but—

It wasn’t hard to get a grip on his sides now that he was limp with mania and press him a little further down so that he had a good place to grind into his thigh. Ari heave-cackled as they connected again, harsh, hips scraping together, and followed Olberic up when he removed himself, lifting, to grind down again. The bed jolted; he struggled to find here his feet would stand on the ground while the thief held him in sudden vice.

He was so shocked that the sensation bubbling up within him came at a strange delay, trickling, and then roaring. Suddenly Ari’s thighs split open under him, the heat in their bodies connecting, the panting, crackling lungs and the hard, sweet, raw motion it all felt goddamn good, uncomfortably good. His body snapped to life like kindling catching flame. The feeling was too intense for one thrust and took another, and three, and four, feeling the body under him get hotter and harder and tighter, each time crackling hotter in his coursing blood.

“Fuck—” the thief gasped, the hands that had sloppily snarled onto his hips digging in. Maybe because a gigantic horny bastard was suddenly dry-fucking him into the bed. He bit off his cursing with an animal noise and Olberic leaned in without a single thought to curl his face into his bared neck, pressing his teeth on the soft skin and tasting his sweat. This didn’t even feel real—how the fuck had this happened—every grind of his hips made Ari flex his back and push back, like he was swimming for his life against a sucking tide. “Shit—” he gasped, sounding overwrought, maybe a little offended, and aroused, he could hear that heady arousal that suddenly lit up his voice, “FUCK—”

A curser. As if he didn’t just bleed ‘rough fuck.’ He tensed when Olberic bit his neck, lightly even, and he didn’t think it was because he didn’t like it. Not judging by how he caught and held his breath when the teeth dug in slow. He was just reacting—Olberic had once been shocked to find those instincts in himself too, just the same as a wolf when mounted and scuffed.

They forced an uneasy rhythm on each other, both scrabbling for a sense of steadiness, soundness, a sense of what was even going on. Olberic had no idea why the hell the thief was submitting to this, until Ari twisted a fierce grip into his hair and seized his hips with his leg, thrusting aggressively quickly at him, almost bouncing pulses of his hot—

“HHH—” Olberic snap-reacted by using his grip on Ari to really shove him into the bed; away from him, in fact. Without a word he stepped back from Ari, turned around—absolutely needing to keep his hands moving, he started pulling his coat off of his shoulders.

Ari’s aggression had—by every one of the Gods. The sharp, hot pleasure that had bloomed inside him when the boy got rough grinding on his cock had gotten him close to orgasm, the kind of sudden shock orgasm that, frankly, a man his age didn’t feel any more. Forget the fact that he didn’t hardly feel that kind of pleasure at all these days.

Still facing away from the bed, ripping his sweat-soaked shirt over his head, Olberic briefly mocked the fleeting thought that he might try to walk away and cool his head. Considering he had no idea what was going on and was suddenly going lust-mad about an unknown, dangerous man.

As if he fucking could. He was about to eat him like he was starving. He hadn’t felt like this in years. He wasn’t sure what man would have the power to stop. Perhaps an Olberic who still had a king, a country, or anything to fucking live for, but it wasn’t the man ripping his sword and sheathe off of their clasp right now.

If a knife went into his naked back while he was pulling off his belt, he deserved it.

Instead, he heard a low whistle. Was he—was he just cat-called? A little incredulously, he turned around. The thief was splayed out carelessly in bed, sideways, his legs open and his erection (Olberic felt a pang of pleasure even looking) bulging in his pants, with the shirt that had been covering his chest now loose and unbuttoned. There was a certain careless masculinity to the pose, the exaggeration of his cock pushed forward, mean to be seen, the almost slutty shamelessness of it. That had always attracted him, the stupid heady masculinity of reckless young men. He considered it as leftover from his… awkward… sexual awakening in the barracks. He had hoped it was all behind him.

“You are messed up,” Ari informed him.

Ah. He would be referring to his collection of scars. They were a petrified collection, going back through his years like layers of stone. Olberic might have paused on a day when he was less drunk and aroused, might have addressed the subject. Instead he decided the gaping mouths of the scars spoke for themselves, grunted his agreement, and turned around to face him fully. He caught Ari’s eyes in a half second of reasonable disbelief—are you sure?

“Well?” snapped the thief when he was only started at, a haughty challenge.

There was never a challenge that Olberic backed down from.

--

“What—” Ari cleared his throat as Olberic lifted him by his grip on his shoulders to bite at his collarbone—“Mm—What do you like?” he growled.

They were both mostly undressed, wound on top of the bed—considering the shady business the tavern was actually involved in, it was a high, soft, comfortable bed that had been made for this. Still, Olberic was a big man and Ari was an energetic one; he had heard some anxious creaking in the wood already.

“Hm?” Olberic asked, still trying to control that little smile that kept creeping onto his face. He was not going to laugh. It just horrified people when he laughed all of the way through sex, but, when he was inebriated—distracted—like this—

“How do you like it?” Ari asked again, seething with suggestion. It felt as though Olberic’s heart had sunk into his stomach and was pounding his blood though his twisting guts like it was tying them up.

He had ‘liked’ it quite a few ways, but, the most honest answer—“Just like—” he had to paused as Ari rubbed his cock up against his, fuck—“Mm—just—locked in struggle, like this—just—pushing—“ he faltered on how to describe the act.

“Oh—” Ari breathed, struggling with words himself as he grabbed at Olberic’s hair and raked it, grabbed again. “Like frottage?—”

“Yes—“ It was both a reply and a demand, wrung out of him as Ari stung him with pain. “Mm, yes—” The struggle for dominance that didn’t end, never ended—

Ari opened his legs obscenely as his hands moved down to tug at Olberic’s pants, which were barely on his body anyway. He finished undressing; he couldn’t spare more than a half-second to be embarrassed by the wetness sticking to his thighs because Ari was trying to get himself naked too. He reached down to lift his hips completely off of the bed so he had an easier time undressing; he was rewarded with the angriest, sexiest glare he had ever received.

He went weak inside for one stupid moment, and the strange poignancy it made him feel was gone when it went but the demanding burn it fueled in his sex stung him on. “I can’t hold back,” he groaned to warn Ari.

Ari snaked a hand into his hair again and pulled.

They ground each other roughly for—God, maybe thirty seconds. Ari growled and opened his mouth on top of Olberic’s. For Olberic’s part he was panting and sweating and felt like an animal and when Ari probed his tongue at his lips he grabbed it with his teeth and sucked it. Ari’s sex was swollen and rutting on his thigh, or his stomach, or on his own erection, whether it hit next, until Olberic felt himself losing it and grabbed both of his hips to press him into one spot on the bed. He made it even—one of Ari’s legs quirked up but one of his own spread too—so that he could grab them both in one hand and—

Heard himself growling through his panting breaths as—

No way to go fast enough no way to keep up with his pounding blood and jerk—

Sexiest thing he had ever—

Must have crushed the boy with his weight as he started to—

And his stomach felt like it was spasming—

He had his eyes screwed shut on reflex as he sunk his whole body into Ari, gasping, as his hand clutched them both hard together while his seed—fuck, it had been so long—until he went slack against his will. He had to pull in a harsh breath, one that stung his throat, then another—

Then he could hear past the roaring in his ears, and smell—well. It took some time still for him to heave himself onto his elbows to look at what he’d done. His hair felt disgusting, and he could smell his own body odor. Winnehild strike him. At least he hadn’t done that to some poor, pretty girl.

Instead, he saw under him a very, very pretty boy, face flushed with heat and eyes blazing with a wicked fire. His bottom lip was hanging open, bitten red; his shoulders and even his chest were tense—

“You’d better not think,” growled the thief, a hand curling into the bedsheet beside him, “that you’re going to leave me unsatisfied.”

Olberic surprised and disappointed himself with the smile that creaked onto his exhausted, slack face. “Upon—” No, no way should he say something like—“Upon my honor, my Lord,” in the sleaziest tone of voice he had ever heard ooze out of his own mouth.

They would disgrace and exile him for that breach of propriety in the court of Royal Hornburg, if the whole court wasn’t smoldering in the unhallowed ground.

There wasn’t any need to spit-slick his hand, he was wet and sweating all over, and so was Ari. That had been—fast—enthusiastic. Everything was going to hurt in the morning. A triumphant grin melted into bliss on the thief’s face as he gripped his stone-hard and fire-hot cock in his grip, loose, and then tightening like he had a grip on his sword. A thrill that should have felt dangerous spiked his stomach, instead, in his post-coital exhaustion, it felt smug. He bit his lips against saying something else terrible and pulled his hand gently down the man’s shaft.

“No—hell you don’t,” he gasped. “Do not fucking tease me I am so close if I have a weak fucking orgasm because you want to drag this—” and his nascent tirade burst into a feral growl when Olberic pumped him all the way from base to tip and back, dragging his foreskin over and off of his head, covered every fucking inch of flesh in his grasp. His thumb twisted over the head when he hit the base again—no complaints now, he noticed—flicking over a bead of wet, white pre-cum that was seeping out of it.

There is nothing quite like watching someone else come undone. Generally. For Olberic, there’s nothing like a strong, seasoned fighter, who should be able to stand up to him just fine, turning into a cursing, drooling, stupid mess under his hands while his cock jumps and spasms.

Victory.

The thief panted like he had fallen into the hole he made in the bedsheets, wind knocked out of him and left for dead. He froze where he fell, muscles squeezing and slowly, slowly relaxing, rippling under his skin. “Fuck—” he emphasized, again. “I needed a good fuck so bad.”

Ari’s utter relief made the encounter make a little more sense to Olberic. He had seemed high-strung; Olberic had assumed it was because he was a competent thief who knew how much danger his profession put him in. Now he realized that he might have been particularly stressed, harried, and desperate in that unfortunate moment when he scanned the room for witnesses and met Olberic’s eyes.

“Hm,” muttered Olberic, who felt more tired just looking at how relaxed Ari was. “My honor to serve,” he continued, mutating and abusing the Knight’s code yet again.

It was a shame he didn’t have anyone to appreciate the perverse things he was doing to his own code. And never would again. But at least he knew how far he had sunk.

And sink he did, to the other half of the soft sheets that cradled the young man. Ari, looking like he was coming back into himself, briefly regarded the man with a look that, if he understood it correctly, was him considering if he should strike him. The afterglow whispered sense into them both and stayed their hands.

Olberic by no means intended to fall asleep next to the night’s acquisition, and by no means would he usually have. He was typically alert, aware, careful—he had learned too harsh a lesson about keeping a close eye on your bedfellows. Anything could happen. Put your guard down, you can lose everything…

--

Olberic was not hung over in the morning. He never was.

Upon realizing that he had fallen asleep in the night beside a thief he cursed himself briefly, but what did he have to steal? A couple coins, his coat, his—

Olberic shot up in bed when he thought about his sword. His sword!! If the man had stolen his sword he would tear this town apart and rain THUNDER—

It was placed against the wall, not where he had dropped it, but in residence. Just about everything had been moved or shifted. Dug through, most like, but just about everything was there.

A thorough examination of the room examined this: all of his coin was gone. The rest of his possessions, even his valuable blades, were here, but rifled through, thoroughly examined. There was only one addition: an apple, eaten all through, with only the core left to sit wetly on the endtable.

That was that.

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CHAPTER TWO: Therion

Part 2: Therion

--

Therion recognized Berg the instant he saw him.

Berg, it seemed, did not immediately recognize him. Or maybe he hadn’t seen him, considering the chaos the whole village was in.

It was his own damn fault they slipped into the town at all. Primrose had wanted to just walk by the little farmer’s village. Alfyn had shrugged and seemed pretty on the fence about it, since they had just restocked everything they needed in their second pass through Sunshade. But nooooo, no, Therion’s own dumb ass dragged his ‘companions’ into Cobbleston and set his own stupid fate.

He was only here, in general, because he had stumbled on Primrose trying to get killed stabbing a screaming condor about two feet outside of Bouldertown. To her credit, she seemed willing to go down ending it. He would learn that that was, generally, how Primrose reacted to any kind of difficulty, whether it was monster, foe, bump in the road, or broken coffeepot. Mutually assured destruction.

Therion had actually tried to swerve to AVOID the conflict. No way was he getting involved in some kind of crazy bird/bitch shenanigans, he had said to himself. He was on some fucking unholy quest to retrieve a bunch of shiny rocks for a child in a nice dress and he wanted it done with as soon as possible. Long story short, Primrose, trying at once to smack Therion out of her way and cast a high-kick black magic curse on the bird, slapped Therion delirious, mute, and poisoned in a single strike and turned him into gibbering crow’s food. 

WHY she said ‘oh shit’ and tried to get help for him he wasn’t sure; maybe pity, maybe to get him to stop screaming her ears off, maybe because she had a reasonable fear of the giant carrion birds that would come for her if he died on the cliffside right in front of her. And wasn’t it just their luck that Alfyn Greengrass, journeyman apothecary, was aggressively looking for trouble in the neighborhood?

Anyway, Therion wasn’t here for either of them, he was here with them because as it turned out, traveling with a personal apothecary and some walking boobs to charm himself into anywhere he wanted to be was incredibly useful and would eventually make his life easier once he learned how to completely tune them out. Especially Alfyn, God fuck it raw. Had there ever been a naggier redneck? What particular crime has stuck him with the particularly penal combination of 'naggy' and 'redneck' anyway?

But to wrap this little folktale around, it was literally his own damn fault they walked into Cobbleston at all, because he was getting bored and twitchy and he wanted to get a lay of the land in the hills. Literally his fault. And he wasn’t even smart enough to follow Prim’s advice and turn riiiight the hell back around when they got close enough to realize the town was under attack. Shit, after Alfyn bolted in to help, he still had a clear shot out of there and didn’t take it.

Nope. He followed his apothecary, because he wasn’t losing his personal apothecary, ran smack into that kind of mind-melting total emotional chaos only a small hickville in crisis can produce, he heard some demented farmer’s wife going on about getting them the hedge knight, and then, he faced his just desserts.

He knew it was Berg the second he saw him. He told himself he was wrong. This is what he thought: Hell, that gigantic ‘hedge knight’ reminds me of one of my one night stands from that year I can’t hardly remember. Something in his walk. He has his silhouette.

And as Berg got closer, he thought to himself, ha, wow, that guy looks A LOT like that one night stand. A lot.

And when he got in speaking distance, Therion went numb with betrayal (at a sort of nebulous fate-concept) as it became undeniable that he reminded him of Berg because he was Berg. Which was his name. Berg. This was Berg, the merc. The one he had spread his legs for like a literal whore the second he felt his dick.

It hadn’t been his best look.

It was a relief and insulting that Berg didn’t seem to notice him immediately. His tiny knightdom was in crisis, for sure; apparently they had kidnapped a kid, which was low, and the folks were counting on him to go fight a bandit horde and get the kid back. He was understandably stressed. He was focused, hawk-eyed. His hair, which had been speckled with a bit of grey three years back, was streaked with it now; the lines on his face were deep. He didn’t look elderly, he was clearly in his thirties but exhausted, a proud, fine-tuned warrior’s body that had been weighed down and down. But he hefted that sword like nothing and he snarled at the hills like he would rend them to find his enemy.

Alfyn seemed to have half a mind to stay with the panicking villagers. It was Primrose, hands on her hips and glance thrown up to the place that Berg pinned with a glare, who said, “Yeah, that’s… yeah, we’d better fix that,” as if she was talking about a sagging roof on a barn.

They both glanced at her nonchalant stare. “Probably they’re going to kill that kid, so, we’d better fix that,” she repeated, equally resigned to her fate and glamorously unconcerned.

“I—” started Berg, flummoxed, “Thank you, Lady—”

“Ha ha! No,” interrupted Prim, throwing up her palms. “Nope. It’s Primrose. Prim, Rose, and Bitch are all fine. Rosie is not. Neither is ‘Lady,’” she confirmed with a red nail slicing the air. “You?”

“Berg,” he said, a voice monumentally less confident and charged than Therion remembered in his throat, a man with no pride in his name. “I am called Berg. I—”

“Alfyn Greengrass,” said Alfyn, appearing at Berg’s side with a hand outstretched. Berg's shoulders jumped but the rest did not. “Apothecary. Good to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Berg repeated, with a glint of the automatic in his tone, and took Alfyn’s hand. Alfyn grinned at him and swung his axe from its holster to his shoulder. “And—” said Berg, turning to get his first good look at Therion.

Not surprising. Both Prim and the Good Boy were lookers. And then there was this sorry little shiteater.

Berg went quiet as his eyes met Therion’s.

A moment in the chaos stretched thin and sighed.

“You are…”

He remembered he had given Berg an alias. He didn’t remember which one. And besides, Prim and Alfyn both knew his name.

“Therion,” he muttered, feeling like he had gone weirdly empty inside, a silent pinprick of darkness in the whirling panic of the pretty little farm town. “Thief.”

“I almost killed him,” Primrose explained, like that fucking explained anything. “We’d better go, before the bandits can get too far ahead of us.”

‘Us’ it fucking was, then. Thanks, Primrose. If she wanted to blind, poison, and mentally ravage him again, she may as fucking well.

--

Not that he has anything to say about this, but ‘Berg’ the ‘Hedge Knight’ is Sir Olberic Eisenberg, the Unbending Blade, last Knight of Hornburg.

Therion’s smart, but he sure the fuck wasn’t schooled. Prim and Alfyn both reacted to the name, but he had never heard of it.

He did see every useless sniveling brigand in the cave nearly piss themselves in fear at just its sound, however.

A Knight. He felt like screaming. He felt like crying. A literal Knight, King’s appointed, master of weapons and general to an army. Nobility of blood. Shed blood. Knights had been as real to him as the dragons they fought but here he was, his sword dripping red, his body a curled, furious snarl as he glared the life out of the fallen horde around him. That he felled. All of them. Bellowing madness. And when a grinning brigand spoke fury to his face that he was nothing but a walking sword, a blood-washed gladiator turned loose on a soft world, he watched him snuff like a candle. Slackened shoulders. Honor. Duty. Enemy. Rage. “Erhardt.” Spoken like the foulest curse.

A Knight.

A fallen knight. Like a princess on a street corner. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He wasn’t supposed to be ALIVE. He was supposed to have killed himself when his King died. Instead. Half-alive, he glared out of hollow eyes at a spark in the distance, an animating flame: Erhardt.

So, that was who had pinned him to a bed and fucked him raw without even coming inside. Life is weird.

--

Olberic was indescribable.

He excelled as an enigma. As a man, a companion, someone you knew, he began to seem strange.

He often could not quite interact with everyone else. He wasn’t some raging, temperamental bull, like Therion had come to expect. Typically he was haunting the rear, keeping tabs on everyone, being a useful blade. He was neither silent nor mouthy. He spoke exactly when he intended to and what he said was typically ridiculous. He was a man who did absolutely nothing by halves. Any particular thing was either not his problem, or he was going to stalk it across Orsterra to ensure its death.

And Gods above, was he intense. When monsters abounded or he faced a man across the square, the hardwood bow of his shoulders, the arrow of his back, the heft of the spear in his hands; his body transformed into a monster, an angel, an executioner. They speak of the mercenary dealing death. Olberic gifted it, swift and segmenting.

He was not completely sure Olberic actually recognized him for some time. Or assumed he had lied to himself about who Therion was. (He wouldn’t be the first man to pretend he hadn’t fucked him.) Until on an otherwise unremarkable day, traveling across the marshy plains of the Flatlands, trying to divine the best way to avoid these fucking hordes of fucking giant armed and armored frogs, Olberic squinted down at a battle plan Tressa (who had no idea what she was talking about) was drawing in the muck, held his hand out to Therion, and said, “Ari—Therion, hand me that bag.”

No one else caught the slip. They wouldn’t think anything of it anyway. His name was foreign, and old, and people tended to stumble over the pronunciation. But he caught it, and more importantly, he caught how Olberic’s shoulders tensed, his body shuttered itself against the intruding memory.

He knew. He just wasn’t saying anything.

Therion gave him the fucking bag.

--

But did he think of him as ‘Ari?’ Was it the first name that came to his mind, Therion asked himself, compulsively destroying little flowers and leaves that he picked off of the fragile plants of a green vale. He scored their leaves and tore them in two.

It was a vocal slip. It didn’t mean shit.

But he knew. He knew who he was and he knew what they’d done.

--

And as he learned, the inscrutable, strange, dead-inside Olberic he was coming to know on their long, winding road was not some kind of drastically changed man from the grinning, aggressive Berg. It was the same guy. The man he had ‘known’ was just Olberic drunk.

The more he drank when they settled down in a tavern, or around a fire on the fields of the cold winterlands, the more he smiled, the more he laughed. Sometimes at next to nothing. Sometimes high-spirited, roaring at something Cyrus or H’aanit had said. Sometimes snickering, meanly.

It made Therion’s stomach twist a pinch, that laugh. I mean, fuck, he could only remember it ghosting over his raw-bitten, bruised neck as his heavy body pushed three hundred pounds of sweaty sex between his legs.

Sometimes it didn’t feel like the same man, but sometimes, it really did. And sometimes it felt like the gaze that came out of Olberic’s exhausted eyes was sharp again and hot again and crawling across the room to wrench chin over to look at him across the floor of a smoky, shimmering whorehouse in the desert, all the way up here in Stillsnow.

--

“What’s, like, your killcount?” asked Primrose to Olberic one day, in her signature ‘fuck it’ tone of voice that carried the question like that like it wasn’t an insane thing to ask.

He remembers Ophelia’s eyes widening to circles, Cyrus raising an eyebrow in interest.

“…Count?” asked Olberic, confused.

--

Tressa calls Therion “Bitch” as a nickname, in her signature high-on-life excited shriek. “Bitch” is, incidentally, also his nickname for her.

H’aanit calls him something like “Terriyn.” Good enough. The bitch doesn’t know Orsterran, okay? She’s trying.

Primrose vacillates between “Terror,” “you,” and “hey, SLUT.” That’s cute, because she became “Rosie” to him right fucking fast.

Ophelia cannot be broken out of calling everyone at LEAST “Mr.” and “Ms.” She calls Olberic Sir. Cyrus is full Professor Albright, H’aanit, who has no surname, is Ms. Huntress. She tried to call Primrose Lady but Prim literally wouldn’t respond until she dropped it. So, he’s “Mr. Therion.” It sounds stupid, but Ophelia is so fucking sincere, he tries not to get on her case. She’s a goddamn nun, man.

Prof, the fucking whackjob, usually calls him… long words, followed by friend. “Our… stealalicious… backasswards… jerktastic friend.” Theoretically the words Prof says are real, unlike those words that he just made up, but Therion has yet to see proof of that.

Alfyn first names him. Yeah, of… course he does.

So does Olberic.

“Therion.”

Carelessly casual. He titles the young women for a safe distance. He uses Therion’s personal name, spilled out like milk.

“Therion, look to the sky—”

“Therion, could you—”

“Therion—”

“Therion, come here.”

--

That last one was not as commanding as it might have sounded. It sounded a little commanding. Olberic often did. Sir Olberic. General Eisenberg. Beaten down, but the coals aren’t quite out.

Therion kicked himself up. Interacting with Olberic wasn’t as… weird as it had been at first. He was a consistent person. Consistently dependable, difficult, damaged. As he was still figuring out what his damage was, the man whose eyes got hard and excited when someone so much as bumped him in the street, because he might turn it into a fight. He knew his quirks—he knew he wasn’t actually a man who blew up at provocation. He didn’t hate people, he loved fighting them. He tried to provoke because he wanted a fight, not because he had any opinion one way or another about his opponent.

Therion had never distinguished the difference before, but he had never known a fighter like Olberic before. Not strictly in terms of skill. It was like he was made in a forge, had the gift of life spat on him, and turned in the direction of the nearest battle. He really fucking needed it. He could sit peacefully for an evening or two. But after enough time, his face going ashen, he needed a fight.

That was why Therion wasn’t surprised to see him standing tensely, pensively, a naked blade in his hands, tip so gently balanced on the ground it barely pierced the dirt.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you,” Olberic said.

And like that, a little ice crawled across the back of Therion’s shoulders like a windowpane. “What?”

Olberic ticked his head to one shoulder, then the next, working on a kink in his neck. The way the man slept, stick-straight like he had been packed in a box, was probably hell on shoulders his age. “Who is it that taught you swordwork?”

Darius.

He doesn’t remember not knowing how to use a knife. He remembers a few who helped him hone his skills. But Darius taught him the sword.

“Another thief.”

Olberic nodded, looking at nothing. “He used which style? Or any?”

Style? He wasn’t sure they exactly used those terms. “Dunno. He learned… a bit from assassins he knew.”

Olberic nodded more forcefully, as if it made sense. “I have noticed you have a strong style,” he said, to Therion’s surprise. He was pretty sure the unbending fucking blade had been about to (figuratively) ream him. “You play offense, so I’m not surprised to hear it’s based on assassin practice. When you get to strike someone first, you generally win.”

“…Thanks.”

“It’s not without its flaws. I’ve killed assassins before. Someone who hasn’t studied more total swordwork has a few weaknesses.”

…It kind of riled him, but he could admit he was right. Like, he hated being condescended to (and he hated the thought that Olberic was condescending to him A LOT) but Olberic knew his shit and he was right. Therion had already felt some bad, bad consequences from gaps in his defense, so obviously, he already knew Olberic was right. Who was ‘right’ did absolutely nothing to the fact that Therion was ‘fucking pissed.’ 

“Let me show you,” Olberic said, indiscriminate between request, suggestion, or command.

Therion felt like he should consider saying ‘no.’ He knew he would usually say ‘no, fuck off’ so someone who doubted his battle prowess to his face, and he felt he should be considering saying that to Olberic now. But he wasn’t even really considering it. But this felt like what he should do. It felt like what he wanted to do.

Not that he wasn’t mad. He was mad, and he wanted. Is that a fucking crime?

Dinner was well on its way to ready, with Saint Alfyn demonstrating another of his many talents in cooking digestible food. Unlike some times when the ‘travelers’ would split off into a few groups or some people would just get lost in, like, Hell and show up three months later (here’s looking at you, Prof), they had kind of a caravan gathered around. Philie, Rosie, a guy who had just kind of followed Rosie since Atlasdam, H’aanit and Linde and Hagen, Prof, Tress, Tress’s hot mom, Kit and the actors. They had the good fortune to be doubled up with some experienced wanderers on their way up to Victor’s Hollow, which was not a simple fucking trip. 

As such, there was some interest thrown his way when he unsheathed his sword and hefted it into a basic, unassuming ready position. Rosie had decided to lie down on the ground after vainly working through some more dancing lessons with these fools; Linde and H’aanit scooted her out of the way. Alfyn, frowning, looked up from his pot of stew, but didn’t say anything. Yet. Philie might’ve herself, but she was deep in distracted conversation with Kit and Tress, all bent over some books.

So there was no one to stop Therion from saying “Hit me” as he dug in his heels to face Olberic.

He expected an immediate dive. He got no such thing. Olberic’s gaze went dark like the sun just dipped down. Like some spectral beast, once you gave him permission, you sealed your fate. Therion considered himself a sensible man, but when the hairs raised on his neck like that, he got a little jumpy. Learned caution. It sparked down his spine.

For his own part, when Olberic glared, the lines of age and misery that were cut into him made him look like he had been sliced open. By no wise, unfortunately, did that make him unattractive. It did make him look bad for you, along with the hefting of the thick blade above his head like it weighed nothing to him. And held up by those half-bare bulging arms in his shirtsleeves, honestly, it did weigh nothing to him.

He seemed to be… testing. Him, or the blade. He moved it into slightly different poses like Rosie would set her feet before, behind herself to decide how she wanted to dance. He kept his even gaze on Therion, trying to seize his eyes, but he knew that trick. Don’t watch his eyes, watch his body.

He was taking small, very small steps, slow movements. Was he trying to slip to his side? To ignore the fixed gaze made his skin crawl like it was fucking tracing him. His foot—

Therion had his sword in place to block the blow. If he had been a decent fighter before this shit had started with him choosing the worst mansion ever to rob, he knew he was good now. He had watched Olberic fight and he knew he could defend himself from a surprise attack. But he had watched Olberic fight, and he knew he wasn’t quite like Olberic, in some fundamental way he found hard to even discern. It was a jump in quality level he didn’t have a word for, perhaps a matter of ten years of training, perhaps some more elusive, integral quality. How was he supposed to know?

Maybe it was the couple hundred fucking pounds slamming down on him like the ocean’s wrath. That had to help. He slashed Olberic’s blow away with considerable tension in his arm and followed it by curving the blade back in front of his body before another attack could fall down on his chest or side. Over, under; Olberic hit him first with a few predictable strikes, but they were fast. It's hard to defend simple moves when you're dealing with someone so fucking gigantic and so fucking well-oiled as a fighter. The same--but a gap in degree--indiscernible--

He had prepared decently well to take a thunderous blow from above; Olberic was forced to give him time to anticipate it. He could have not possibly expected Olberic to just drop his sword like a dead weight in one arm, giving up on the strike entirely, and thrust a clutching hand right at Therion’s neck through the gap between his upraised arms. Therion tensed; Olberic had stopped moving, for now, and he was reminded that this was sparring. Practice. Not real.

“Like this,” muttered Olberic, and cleared a little darkness out of his throat. “The weakness of assassin style, inevitably, is that they do not prepare their fighters for a long fight. I—” He stopped his sentence dead, eyes flickering to where he held Therion by his throat. He released him and pulled back his arm with a snap. “I agree,” he continued hurriedly, now gazing just a little to the side, “That most foes you will fight will give you a short fight, decided in a few blows. The small minority of seasoned fighters that can make a fight hold out, however, you are unprepared for.”

…Ugh. Therion grit his teeth against saying something inflammatory. Not because he typically had that self-control, because what to do and not do in the specific situation of standing in striking range of a man with a blade had been hammered—cut—into him. And could he really tell him to fuck off with that when he just lost out to a seasoned fighter who could make a fight hold out?

“Try this,” said Olberic, shifting low, his sword held at his side like he was on horseback with a lance. Honestly, Therion wasn’t even totally sure what that pose lent itself to—he went into basic defense and let himself be angry. Sharp-angry, the kind that clears your eyes.

Olberic came at him more slowly. At first, Therion thought he was going easy; as one slow, punishing, heavy blow became two, three, and four, he realized it was a painful illustration of his point: Therion’s stamina was not fantastic. Yes, he kept defending himself, but he found himself taking the full breath he had been trained to take between each strike, to maximize your chance to kill with each strike, and Olberic would be fucking back by the time he moved, every time.

His sword literally bounced off of a furious uppercut and as Olberic’s two-hander rose into the sky again, he saw his eyes come flashing out from under it like red stars on the horizon. Hot—

Something in him, far under surface, was prepared for the brutality of the blow that rang down on him next. He went to the ground; not enough people are willing to get in the literal dirt. He wasn’t even going to try to slash at his legs, though, not with a sword, but he could turn on a protesting heel to Olberic’s side, come back up while his sword was in its downswing, surprise him with—

Goddamn nothing, because Olberic struck him broadside with his other arm as Therion tried to rise up at his side, knocking him flat. He didn’t know if it was Olberic being overtrained or Olberic grinding in his point that led to him seizing the hair on his head as he crumpled forward and shoving him down into a posture of submission, but he did. Snarled all up in his hair and his nails just barely scraping his skull as Therion’s back prickled in expectation, his forehead almost hit his knees, and his legs felt faint.

An angry thrill prickled at his heart as Olberic’s fingers wove back out of his hair and he heard the man step back from him. Chatter in the camp had gone quiet. On the field, that little maneuver would almost certainly be followed with his head being lopped off of his shoulders. In fact, by the automatic nature of the act, Therion was damn sure Olberic had ended a life that way before.

Alright, what gives? Therion asked himself. He wasn’t this bad at dealing with overcompensating muscle. He had thrashed men Olberic’s size and attitude before. 

Therion shoved a fist into the ground to push himself back onto his feet. He saw, as he got himself up, that Olberic had come to the choice to extend him a hand. He wasn’t taking it. Partly because his air was coming back into his lungs, partly to collect himself, he turned around, purposefully turning his back to Olberic. Sir Knight wouldn’t stab him in the back, not even to illustrate a point.

“Yes, I have seen the like before,” said Olberic, with a tone of slightly—just slightly—more excited curiosity. “Though you have polished some of the failings career killers tend to have.”

“Wow, thanks,” Therion growled at the cloudy sky.

“I mean it sincerely,” Olberic protested, which Therion already knew. Olberic didn’t know to to speak anything but his mind. “Your defense is fantastic, and most assassins neglect theirs terribly. But you will benefit on learning to deflect, repurpose, and delay a blow now.”

Thank shit rankled Therion. What, he had diagnosed his every issue already? “I know how to use a guy’s weight against him,” he protested, turning back around to face his opponent again. He was surprised—unsurprised—to see the color that had bled into Olberic’s cheeks, the readiness in his posture. He looked awake. He looked like he had been given fresh blood. “I just don’t get you.”

“My style is a relic,” Olberic said easily. “You won’t face Knights often. We’re dying. I mean that I am likely to be one of the youngest still alive,” he said frankly. “Our traditional role is gone. Think not about besting me, think about besting someone prepared to wait out the fight. You won’t always have the advantage of surprise and shadows.”

Holy shit, who did he think he was to him? He didn’t even take this kind of lecturing from Darius when he was his fucking foundling. “Big fucking words for a guy who has five years left in him,” he spat. “You want an apprentice? You’ve got the wrong guy.”

A bit of glimmer swam in Olberic’s eyes again, a hand shifting over the pommel of his blade. “Hardly. I noticed your fine use of the blade. I wanted to—” He almost said something that he second guessed. “I sought to improve upon your skills. If you have no need of that—” he paused again. “Well, show me.”

Olberic usually used fewer words to challenge a stranger on the street. And something about this was starting to bring him back, the uncertainty and second-guessing cracking open Olberic’s confident speech, the alertness of his pose, how sweat was starting to bead up on his brow and his stomach, seeping through his shirtsleeves. Was he affecting him?—Prince of Thieves, that was a dangerous line of thought. It made him feel…

…Like it was time to take out at least a good month of rage on this gigantic jerk.

Assuming that what Olberic wanted was his best attempt to end his life, Therion came in without warning. He had put a couple people out of their misery with a quick slash himself; it was to Olberic’s good fortune that he was prepared for it. Still, Olberic was was forced onto his back foot, and forced back a little farther when Therion followed with a well-disguised punch to his stomach, right under the sword. Flipping it again to his left hand, he raised his right to soft-block the defense Olberic mustered, came in under with his blade.

The next minute went fast, incredibly fast, and yet every moment was like another new day to him, each sunk into his gut like a seed planted in the ground. Every blow sang at him and he returned it with two more; half from his sword, half from a grasping, unarmed hand, seeking to pluck the corners of Olberic’s defense. He kept at it like a sprint, like an elk coming for a mountain cat; yeah, you’ve got the teeth, but I can go, bitch.

He actually did cleave a chunk of skin from Olberic’s left arm. It was unintentional but deeply satisfying. Olberic, true to form, didn’t notice at first; he followed his poor block of Therion’s strike with an expert blow to his side, one Therion had to side-step to dodge; it wasn’t until Olberic was raising his arms to his side again that he flinched, finally felt the pain stinging through his skin. He started pouring blood, slow, like a jug just tipped over.

It was only for a second he paused; he should have stopped. Instead, his eyes were thrown open like shutters and fixed on Therion, bright, wide, and with a smile he could best describe as searing, Olberic snapped, “Yes.”

Then he charged him, thundering forward with his sword, shouting Therion’s name. Feeling like the blood in his body had all just dropped into his fucking feet as his face went numb Therion countered his strike and found the utter chutzpah inside him to try to use the momentum to force Olberic to the ground. Instead Olberic ended up in incredibly close quarters, sword flashing at Therion’s side, close enough that when their blades clashed, they almost cut each other’s faces. Therion—

“NO!!” bellowed sister Ophelia, at her absolute most indignant. She had already been hustling over to them, and probably had shouted at one or both of them already. Olberic froze like he had just been routed by his own mother. Therion felt himself trying to shrink as well. “Olberic, you are—” she gestured with angry disbelief at Olberic’s cut arm. “Flinging! You are flinging blood! Look at you!”

Guiltily, the knight looked down at his arm. It was, in fact, pretty blood-soaked. Therion had cut off a good few inches of skin, which laid in the dirt now, unsettlingly clean.

“Sit down, Sir!” She demanded of him, and the men unwove their swords so that Olberic could be put down on the ground by the cleric, who knelt down in the dirt immediately to rebuke the wound. A little lost, feeling his absolutely rushing blood reluctantly slowing again, and aware that, yes, everyone was staring at him now, Therion opted for just… sitting down too. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

The area around them grew warmly bright as Ophelia summoned power to mend Olberic’s arm. He watched his skin knitting back for some time, as unbothered by it as Therion himself had been (it was, honestly, fucking cool) until, after a minute of silence, his gaze slid over to Therion’s again.

Therion felt an urge almost foreign to him, it had been so long since he had felt it; to glance away. He almost never ducked away from a direct stare. He felt, for a quick, strange moment, like a person he hadn’t been in years.

“…We should do this again sometime,” Olberic rumbled, straight-faced.

But as Therion watched him, a tiny, almost repressed smile cracked one side of his face.

Then, maybe as an accident, Olberic’s gaze skittered down the front of Therion’s body, sweat-soaked, heaving, speckled with his own blood. He snapped his eyes back up immediately, staring, like that hadn’t just happened.

“I—Sir Olberic—” Ophelia said, one eye cracking open as she struggled to retain focus on spell-casting, “I don’t really think…”

“I’m free tomorrow,” Therion heard himself saying, in a voice that absolutely clawed its own way out of his throat, sleazier, lower, more intentional than he intended.

“Ah,” said Olberic, calm returned to his face except for his eyebrows quirking up. “You know, I believe I will be in the area then.”

“Great,” Therion said, with a falsely casual stretch of his arms behind his head, a falsely casual toss of his head to the side. “I’ll call you.”

--

You know, before that, he hadn’t been sure that he, himself, actually wanted Olberic. The discontent in his stomach, a little coiled rattlesnake, could have just been vexation that he’d been given the cold shoulder, it could have been a lurking, directionless sexual urge, it could have just been greed that tempted him to force Olberic to acknowledge him.

Therion had developed a… something of a mean streak.

But after that little moment— we should do this again sometime — Well. He could pretend a comfortable little fantasy about cornering Olberic in the quiet of a backroom and making him look him in the eye as he ran his hands down his hard muscles was just about getting the recognition he deserved. He could tell himself he just had a chip on his shoulder about Olberic never admitting to what they’d done and acting like he had never known him before. He could. But why waste a perfectly good boner when you could trash someone’s image in your head with quick, stabbing hand?

Fuck, that was good.

--

Sparring was a practice they should have begun sooner. Feeling a little cheated by how easy it was, it made him feeling lighter each evening. Like he had cleaved weight off of himself with his sword, or sloughed off his tension. Just like that, lighter. The clash of blades shook his bones from his wrist to his ankles with Olberic’s incredible weight, and irritations fell off like dead bark.

Olberic did literally take pieces off of him, too, much to Alfyn and Ophelia’s unhappiness. Usually just a pint of blood or two carelessly split from his skin like ripe juice. It was always boiling too near the surface, anyway.

And Olberic likely didn’t even mean to. He was a killer, yes. Made, or molded, who knew. He had a tendency to make a fresh body where H’aanit or Primrose would have made a friend. His (perhaps) natural overintensity in battle combined with the fact that he was simply more deadly than many of his companions, a hard-hitter, a blade-wielder; get in someone’s range that close with that much sharp metal, you don’t have the lofty privilege of thinking through whether you should use deadly force to get their hands off of your neck, Professor.

Therion would know. Which is why, out of all these idiots, he personally considered it most okay that Olberic took out his hits on him.

The thing was, he didn’t know if Olberic felt the same way. He didn't know that fighting made him lighter, not after the surge of blood had trickled away again; he didn't know that fighting Therion made Olberic lighter. He would glare down at Therion’s pierced skin was anger and disappointment; cut off his speech abruptly and turn his back.

What bothered him; the blood, the man it came from, how it had been spilt? Which one of them did he blame for the injuries? 

Therion would be fucking kidding himself if he thought he had riddled the intricacies of the broken mind of the fallen Knight. And he was broken. Badly. To let Olberic take the reigns in any situation was to cause a fight. Every single time. He didn’t have another way out of conflict. Hell, he didn’t have another way out of conversation. Therion realized with open-mouthed awe, watching Olberic come head-to-head with a snarling landlord who shouldn’t even have been any of his business, that Olberic didn’t just lack the tools to navigate conflict without a fight, he lacked the desire to. He wanted to get down. It would have been immensely harder for the old blade, exhausting, to just talk it out.

Running himself out of breath and spinning himself dizzy slamming himself at Olberic an inch from screaming blade helped key Therion down. It did not ‘help’ calm down Olberic and Olberic didn’t want it to. Therion was another whetstone for his blade and he was making him sharper and hungrier. He fought more, he fought better, he wore down his companions for stopping him.

He said Therion’s name a lot. It was a challenge. If they had set up camp for an evening and Olberic turned to him with his name clenched in his teeth, he wanted another round.

Therion seemed to crest and sallow between ‘we are going to fuck, and I am going to find a way’ and ‘terrible idea. Stupid man. So much baggage. Acts like a prick. Dick too big anyway’ morning and evening each day. He could lie about which impulse would win him but he knew one thing that could never be unstuck about himself: he was a scavenger, an opportunist, a vulture, a snake, a spider. It was instinct and it was fate. When Therion had a chance, he was powerless to not take it, even when the trap was closing in on him like teeth around the wrist. 

He had had plenty of chances to be annoyed with that fact about himself lately. And he was pretty sure he was about to make another.

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CHAPTER THREE: Therion

He was surprised, one evening, while sparring on the idyllic riverbeds of Saintsbridge pass, to shake the dizziness out of his head and come back to Alfyn yelling at Olberic.

‘Yelling.’ Constructively criticizing loudly. You know, an argument, but swollen to the size of his bleeding heart.

As it turned out, Olberic had broadsided Therion with his shiny new claymore on his skull. So, that was a foul move. You don’t go for headshots while sparring. But why Alfyn went mother hen for him, he wasn’t totally sure. The guy was a kindly menace; Therion would never understand why he did what he did. His thoughtful affections abounded whether Therion had fucking asked or not.

Olberic stood somewhat flummoxed at the appearance of Greengrass in the ring, eyes darting from his sharpened axe to his pointing finger, probably thinking ‘Fight? Not fight? Fight?’ in a loop. Alfyn was straight-backed, righteous, accusatory, letting Olberic have about a thousand leaves worth of his thoughts about his actions. And for some reason, Therion, just…

Honestly, he had no reasons. He got mad, he didn’t know why, and he picked a target.

He shoved his knife back in its sheath, turned Alfyn around by his shoulder, waited until he could see the whites of his eyes, and punched him. He had hit harder before, and he had definitely hit better. The backs of his fingers probably stung just as much as Alfyn’s cheekbone did when his head snapped a couple inches to the left.

Alfyn didn’t even raise a hand to cover his face. He definitely didn’t raise a hand against Therion. Therion realized he hadn’t even expected him to. He expected Alfyn to take the hit, just like he did, and say his name with a mixture of confusion and isolation, like he was opening his mouth to do just now.

Therion shoved Alfyn’s shoulder to move him farther away from him. “Fuck off,” he demanded, hearing the absolute lack of fire in his own words. Of cours eAlfyn didn't do shit to defend himself. Olberic would have already had him at the ground at—his stomach felt like it was being screatched up by bile. He shoved past both of them and started walking down the cliff, out of here, for some goddamn time alone.

--

He had been taught in his sporadic attendance in temples and churches (the ones that fed streetwalkers) that ‘one doesn’t give their finest fruits to the toothless mouth.’ That is, save your kindness for someone who can appreciate it.  

It was with that in mind that he found himself, shrouded by the shadows of the trees by the river, idly stirring unkind thoughts about teaching Alfyn that lesson while his fingers stirred the little silver leaves in circles on the water.

Everyone learns. Better for him to learn now. Things didn’t stay rosy forever. He should chew him out alone, where no one could hear him. He should give him a fight. He should just get it over with. He should just step out and wind his own way to Wellspring now. But would any of this make Alfyn stop fucking wasting his kindness on him?

It pissed him off. It made him feel lost.

He needed to just ignore him. He needed to get a grip. He needed Olberic. Olberic knew how to take a fucking punch. And how to throw one back.

--

It was utter, unfortunate coincidence they ran into each other that night at all.

Therion was winding his way back to the inn in Saintsbridge after an evening to himself. The southern sun set so late on the glimmering waves; he was sure he would be the last man out. He had chosen to enter through the back door, one which only staff had a key for, because it was darker, it was quieter, and he wasn’t going to run into any of his companions that way.

Olberic had stepped around to the back to work a nick out of the side of his blade. Bad luck fighting an armored enemy. He hadn’t wanted to fix it inside the inn or at the front step; either way invited unwanted attention. Too used to having his name equated to the sword and being bought for it. Some still recognized him as a sellsword here.

Olberic was almost in front of the door, shining the edge of the blade almost absently, running his fingers again, and again, and again over a tiny imperfection he had already smoothed over. Therion had finished the apple he plucked from a tree and was just casting the core aside when he saw—they both saw—that someone else was here.

Olberic’s eyes slid up to meet him with a look of careful control. But once they saw it was no stranger, a bit of tightness came back into them.

No need to blunt his edge around Therion.

“What,” Therion asked Olberic, pausing in mid-range, instinctively stopping a few steps out of the shimmering globes cast by the street-lanterns, “sword not polished enough yet?”

Olberic raised an eyebrow and indicated with his head the core that Therion had tossed onto the street. “Not enough apples yet?” he asked him, voice tough and tired like leather.

He continued almost nervously using the edge of a rag to tap on the edge of the blade. The sharpening was so routine to him he didn’t even put on gloves; he had his stone in his bare hands, which were wet with oil and gray grime. There was a streak of it on his forehead, melting almost into his graying hair, where he had thoughtlessly smoothed it back. Before the cobbled stone of the dingy inn’s wall and under the melted shade of the cloudy night sky, he was all grey, a couple muted tones of suggestion faded at the edges.

Therion glanced at the apple core he had discarded in the muck. Yeah, it was in the street, so what? “I eat, is that a fucking problem? Do we not do that now?”

That was a funny thing to ask Olberic, and, by his snorted laughter, he knew it. The man could pack away a fucking sheep and put it straight on his huge fucking pecs. (Goddamn, by the way.) “Then leave me my eccentricities as I leave you yours.”

There was a sort of hollowness in Olberic’s voice at its quietest, like he spoke the shells of the words and left something out from the heart of them. And even so he sounded amused, not forlorn.

“…You are seven feet of eccentricities,” Therion countered. “What the hell would be left.”

“Six foot eight,” Olberic corrected him, bending to accommodate a crick in his back while he roughly stood up from the step.

“Six— Oh, fuck you,” Therion groused, half-minded to walk right the fuck back away. “What is the point of that? You get over six foot, what the fuck do you need all that extra height for?”

“I didn’t choose it,” Olberic calmly corrected; his affected, careful calm. “I was just lucky.”

Therion scoffed expressively. “Six fucking… let me know why you fuss so much with a combat style when you could just choose knocking people over?”

Olberic’s little smile quirked again. “It’s been suggested before that I just fall over when threatened.”

“With how much you weigh? Holy shit, it’s like having a horse thrown at you.” Therion ignored the slight heat he could feel creeping up to his cheeks. Thinking about how he knew that and hating it. “Just so you know, you’re already the big guy. The posturing isn’t necessary.”

Just the sort of snappish thing he said without thinking. Though his stomach sunk for a second, the little wince that screwed up Olberic’s cheek was less like being slapped and more taking a fair hit. “Sometimes, in my own head, I’m the scraggly squire I started out as,” he rumbled, maybe amused at his younger self. “When I see the old man in the mirror I’m shocked again.”

“Ah,” said Therion, leaning back as if getting a good look at him, “so you’re saying there’s still a chance I’ll look like a fucking adult some day? Maybe by the time I’m your age?”

Olberic laughed genuinely at that one. He stored his sword on his back, in the harness he had taken to using for larger ones. “Pray for a miracle!” he laughed at him. “If you want to not be mistaken for a child, you might put back your hair, so your face could be seen,” he teased him.

Was he taking a shot at—? The bastard. “Maybe if I want to terrify children,” he groused, a little more bitter than he wanted.

“Children need terrified. Else they get uppity.”

That was another nice thing about Olberic, Therion thought, as he bit back a cackle. He was as little of a family man as Therion was himself. “Need to instill a little mortal terror in the fuckers.”

“Why else do you think we lose so many?” Olberic asked, gesturing with one palm as he made his point. “The youth of today are unprepared to kill in self-defense.”

Therion snorted, and then—well, it was half thoughtless. He smoothed back his hair from his face. It had grown long during travel--previously he had been having it hacked by a friend every few months (a stylish prostitute who ran in the same circles), but now, he hadn’t even thought about it in some time. The ends were dirty and the fringe stuck behind his ear, with only the lightest strand falling back over his cheek.

“This face, huh?” he asked quietly. He didn’t need to see it; he could feel it. The red blade that would be stuck in his face forever, twisting him up.

Olberic regarded him wordlessly. Therion had his attention; his gaze scanned that uncovered half of his face, the dark side of the moon, the pockmarks and shrouded seas. His lungs swelled but he didn’t say anything.

“Scary enough?”

“Ha,” said Olberic, a little morose, but he immediately followed it with challenge. “Ha! A single stiletto-wound,” he scoffed. “I have uglier scars older than your entire body on my back.”

Shit, maybe he did. There was, what, thirteen years between them? “Those?” asked Therion condescendingly. “The little white lines? Really ugly, Sir Berg. Can’t hardly see the man behind the horror.”

“The king’s finest stuck their blades in my back,” Olberic bragged. “They gave me no little clean cuts like that one!”

“Oh, good Sir,” Therion mocked, scraping to bow. “The lowly seeping infections the scum of the streets gave me do not compare. I’m but a delicate fucking maid.”

Olberic held up his hands as he laughed, signifying that he didn’t have any more arrows to sling at him. His loss. “In that case, thanks for the scuffs and scrapes you’ve been giving me,” Therion continued with a mean snarl. “How grateful I am you’ve taught me the ways of the world, Sir Knight.”

“Leave off—” he laughed.

“Where WOULD I be without your careful guidance? Hacking apart the unfortunate with less finesse?”

“Now, then—” Olberic tried to interrupt him again, mirthfully shaking his head.

“Maybe I should uncover myself for you again, and you can give me a few more scars.”

“Ah—” said Olberic, his eyes slipping open with a familiar shine in them. He bent forward in the lingering convulsions of his laughter, though, not quite able to just banish them. Therion also felt what he just said sink into him, in his stomach, leaping over the bounds the already risky conversation had set for itself.

‘Do you remember? Do you try not to think about it? Does it change how you see me?'

Questions like these suddenly smacked into the back of his skull. Much like the flat side of a heavy blade.

“No,” said Olberic, a hand on his hip to brace himself, his smile faltered but his mood not yet morose, “I wouldn’t want to be the man who gave you more scars. I would value that man little.”

Therion felt an angry, hurt twist in his gut. “Well, you are Sir Knight,” he muttered, a little less amused. “I wouldn’t have you debase yourself on my account.”

“Debase?” asked Olberic, incredulous. “I can’t imagine I have very far to sink. I have no desire to hurt you, is my only—”

“Holy balls, you have a fascinating way to get that message across.”

“I only—ah,” he growled, straightening all the way up, even knocking the back of his skull on the outside of the inn. (Therion was hit with a harsh memory felt in the palms of his hands, knocking Berg back to drive a knife—)“I draw my blade in hopes of instructing—and pleasing you, Therion, and because—it is my pleasure also to spar with you. To actually wound you is not—I would keep things between us… beneficial.”

“Gods each fucking damn it, Olberic,” Therion countered, a little bit less eloquent but a whole lot louder, which was what counted. He took the few purposeful steps it took to get into Olberic’s short range.

Olberic stood with his arms folded, but not too tightly, so that he wouldn’t be disadvantaged if Therion took his fists to him (which he might), and a rigidness dripped down his frame from his steely gaze as Therion stalked closer.

Therion’s stomach felt hot. He got into his face and then heaved in a harsh breath. “Go on,” he demanded.

“Ah?...”

“Keep fucking talking to me,” Therion snapped.

Olberic was understandably blown back by that one, with his back stuck to the wall and his face morphing through a couple kinds of confusion. “I don’t—”

“Could you pack any more innuendo into that??” Therion growled because his face felt as hot as a coal and he was like a kettle on the heat screaming murder inside. “How about some ‘sheathing my sword’ language to go in there? How about a threat to ‘cut me deep?’ ‘Honing each other?’ Oh,” he said, gesturing so expressively with his hands it was like he was flinging the shit from his mouth, “No, wait, ‘WHETTING each other.’ Damn, even better! Go on, fucking talk to me.”

(He recalled a time when he had been watching the mountain birds twitter to each other, their throats bulging with the force of singing their hearts out. Darius had leaned over to him and commented, “you know, those are mating calls. All of them. Birdsong is just birds screaming ‘fuck me’ really loud.”)

Olberic was not unaffected by what he had just said but Therion didn’t know how he was affected. His lips were slightly parted and the breath was coming fast through them and a look that might have been rage was filming up his eyes. “You—”

“As if I don’t see you getting hot every time we go hand to hand,” Therion growled, “and you just can’t admit how much you like getting rough with a man in front of the Gods and Sister Ophelia and everyone. How do you manage to say ‘fight me’ in front of everyone when you know what you really mean, you filthy fucking old pervert? I wonder how you even keep it together, staring at me like you do.”

Olberic continued to be soft-jawed and opened-eyed at Therion’s tirade and even Therion was feeling the mortifying effects of dirty-talking a silent man pinned to a wall in a filthy back alley. Yes, that was what he had come to.

“No…” said Olberic, slowly, voice strained like he had just had his knuckles busted under a boot, “No, you go on.”

“Excuse me?”

Olberic visibly swallowed. “You’re doing well enough, I think. You go on.”

“FFF.” Therion’s face reached maximum fucking heat as the successive realizations that he had just played his hand so desperately and offered himself so wantonly when he thought he was pinning a more anxious opponent smacked him on both cheeks. Oh, if he was going to be—fucking—this fucking old psycho. “I am going to fuck you up,” he snarled, and ground his hands into the fabric of Olberic’s shirt so he could smack him into the wall as hard as he possibly could.

And if the old bastard thought he was getting a kiss, he had another thing coming, because Therion had gone straight into some kind of furygasm, no foreplay, and was coming for his fucking face. He wheeled back for a sloppy punch, which Olberic defended just as sloppily, because, for the first time in their relationship, he hadn’t expected to be hit. Therion went for his shins, then his side, then his hair, whatever he got his hands on first to at least give him a good bruise.

Even so it only took Olberic a few seconds—snarling—to grab Therion back, seizing his entire freaking upper arms in his fists. Therion’s world spun around him like he had been pitched off of a horse and the next thing he knew he was the one whose back was hitting the cold brick wall, shoulders first and a good smack on his skull too.

He instinctively loosened his stomach to absorb the blow he wouldn’t be able to block. It didn't come; instead, he just melted inside like he had gone from flesh to soup when he felt Olberic’s teeth part over his mouth, hot, wolf-like, like he was threatening to tear up the skin of his face. The heat of his body radiated down on him from his hunched height and his sour beer-breath rolled over Therion’s lips as his face loomed close. Olberic was so fucking huge, so good at using it to his advantage, he had every part of Therion's body blocked tight, stuck to the wall like a rabbit deep in his burrow.

It took the most minuscule parting of his lips for the rough action to transform from an assault to an aggressive kiss, his hot mouth, soft under scarred lips, suddenly taken up with Olberic’s teeth and tongue. They were sour and hot and his head buzzed like he was drunk off of his ass when he felt that wet skin on his.

He ground his fist into Olberic’s back, reaching as far as he possibly could up this reeking giant, and pulled his body down to him. He wanted it to be absolutely clear that Olberic was not getting away from him, not now, not tonight, not until he was fucking satisfied. Just the heat of his body and the movement of his rough chin on his face, the jaws that parted to bite and worry his skin, flooded him with relief. This was happening. Now. Coming to terms with wanting Olberic steaming on a platter scheduled for tonight. Sorting though all the other baggage associated with that scheduled for don’t give a shit.

He could feel Olberic’s breath speeding up in harsher pants as they twisted around each other, through the pulse on his neck, the struggle of his barrel chest against him. Therion shoved a thigh suggestively between his legs, keeping his hips still (for now). He snaked a hand all the way up to the base of Olberic’s skull to force him further down, bend him like a birch, so Therion could fucking dish out what he was giving him; he grasped Olberic’s bottom lip between his teeth and rolled it.

Olberic huffed with surprise, and one of his hands went from grasping his arm to slipping, greedily, down Therion’s side, the ridges of muscle over his torso, the flat of his stomach. It felt like he had some kind of salve on his hands, the way it woke his skin up. Therion was just about to part his lips to groan something truly embarrassing when the back door opened.

A serving girl dispassionately emptied a bucket of mop water onto the road. She didn’t see them until the door swung open wide. When she did, she went still as stone and stared. Her mouth hung open and her body froze. Her arms held out the bucket, which quietly dripped.

“Oh,” said Olberic, reaching up to grasp the top corner of the door so that it didn’t swing back around and smack the serving girl. He looked up at his own hand, back at the girl. “Well, thank you,” he said, stepping around with one hand still clutched around Therion’s arm to step into the doorway.

Stupefied, the serving girl stumbled back. Olberic lumbered through the doorway into the back hall which led to the kitchen and coatroom. He half-drug Therion who, when passing the servant girl, turned to give her possibly his smuggest, meanest grin.

“Convenient,” Olberic said, with an admirably even vocal tone, “We don’t have to pick the lock.”

 We, thought Therion, with mingled pleasure and anxiety.

--

Cyrus wasn’t in his and Olberic’s room yet. (The Professor was still downstairs, reading and researching, and likely would be until half-morning. The man had no known sleep schedule and a lot of money for tea.) Therion saw Olberic literally sag with relief when he saw the empty chamber.

Two beds, two windows, several pieces of furniture. A room that would be horrible to have to defend, but, well, he was in it with Olberic, at least.

He shut and locked the door behind him with his hand behind his back. Olberic didn’t even react to the sound of the lock slipping shut; he was busy making sure the windows were tightly locked and shuttered. When Therion had Olberic cornered and Olberic had Therion cornered, every exit cut off, they both, spurred on by the sudden silence, turned to look at one another.

Olberic only looked at him for a second before his mouth quirked into that little cackle of his. Olberic was—he had never seen such a miserable man get so fucking happy when inebriated. It was a wonder to him that Olberic wasn’t just a roaring drunk. Rawing reality, all the time, with someone’s blade constantly in his face. Sweet, sexy Prince of Thieves, what a whackjob.

“Alright, I’ll fucking bite,” Therion spat, forcing down his own grin, his voice rough, “what’s funny, jackass?”

Olberic had to literally put a hand on his mouth to stifle a giggle. What a fucking weirdo. “Heavens help me,” Olberic managed, “I know not why, but I have always laughed at danger.”

Oh, fuck him. Therion meant that in an angry and in a sexy way because he had never been so effectively flattered. The only reaction he found fitting was to whip his favorite dagger off of his belt and slam it into the soft pine wood of the nearest piece of furniture (a wardrobe). “That,” he informed Olberic, pulling his hand off of the hilt, “is because you’re a fucking freak.”

“Hah,” said Olberic, crossed arms and a roll of his eyes. Therion always thought that mannerism of him was a little off-color for him. Perhaps he had adopted it from someone else. Cover-ups for insecurity were often adopted. “Is that so?”

Flirtation? His normal banter? Was there actually a solid line between those two things? Fuck it, and fuck Olberic. Therion unclipped his belt and sash and chucked them both on the floor, intending to follow that up with his shirt as he moved to peel it over his head. But he was surprised (though he shouldn’t have been) by Olberic crossing the room in the two seconds the fabric was covering his eyes to seize him around his waist.

Therion shook the rest of his shirt off, tried to shake the mussed hair out of his face, opened his mouth to say something to Olberic. But he was surprised, again, by Olberic leaning down to grace a short, gentle, closed-mouth kiss on his lips, before pulling back.

Therion was overloaded for a moment, one arm in the air, another on his hip, blinking. Olberic saw his confusion, shrugged, and leaned back down.

--

It hadn’t been easy to get Olberic pinned to the bed, but it had been worth it. Some amount of purposefully giving on Olberic’s part was involved; easy to force someone to give if they want what you’re offering to them. Still, he had, he complimented himself, played a careful game of enticement, underhanded tactics, and outright pushing to get himself on top.

Olberic looked like didn’t believe he had just fallen under Therion either, his back flat on the low bed, the thief perched on his knees over his hips.

“You…” Therion said, eyes torn between taking in his lust-softened face and his opened thighs. “You do not look bad like that.”

Is there a midpoint between stupid and sexy? That’s where his pickups were. Always had been.

Olberic snickered again, eyes rolling up to cast off a memory. “When is the last time I heard that? God’s wounds, it would have to be a lifetime ago.”

“Oh, you haven’t been topped in too long?” Therion translated, speeding up his own heartrate with his teasing. He was easing Olberic’s (third, and final) shirt over his ribs, slowly, because his skin was hot underneath it and peeling ie slow over the bumps and ridges of his ribs was fun.

“Topped?” asked Olberic incredulously, creasing the bedsheet by turning his chin. “presumptuous of you.”

“Aren’t I on top?” Therion countered, feeling his own cheeks heat up. He wasn’t embarrassed, he was fucking excited. The thing about Olberic, he thought, in a split-second muddle of concepts, that made him so fucking fun, is there was no way to go wrong. Either you got what you wanted or he got aggravated and attacked you and that was fun too. “You’re doing some moving your mouth and not much trying to change your position, here.”

Olberic laughed as causally as Therion had made a good joke at someone else’s expense in the bar. He took off the last few inches of his shirt himself, almost having to pop it up off of his shoulders because they were so fucking broad. His muscles rolled when he lifted his arms up over his head, like sea-billows. “And you are reading submission into confidence.”

Was he, though? “And you are responding to some pretty direct challenges with evasion. Think I can’t take a hint?” he asked, leaning down to put his face into the crook of Olberic’s neck and shoulder because he literally couldn’t take it anymore. The powerhouse under him radiated heat like he was trying to seize a boiling summer’s day in his hands, damp, pungent, heavy. He reacted gently but well to Therion taking in his neck with his teeth and a smile, shifting his body under him, readjusting.

“I would be so evasive to a little one who threatened my life,” Olberic teased him, albeit breathier. “Because the child is no real threat.”

“Bullshit,” Therion informed him, snapping a finger against his cheek hard enough to make him flinch. Ha, ha. “Because I’ve literally seen you fight children, and you go hard.”

“One child, because he had requested to learn—” Olberic cut off abruptly, deciding he had had enough as quick as a cat decides he’s done being stroked. Maybe Therion found a good place on his neck. One arm looped low over Therion’s back, the other held his shoulders, and practically before his nerves could prickle with warning he was being tossed in a throw-hold onto his side. He struggled to get his grip and threw out a leg but the momentum was already against him; he had been turned around, again, with hardly a warning, and his hair was tickling his face as it fluttered down while his back smarted against the rough arm that held him fast.

“…And I am not deaf to the challenge in your words either,” Olberic finished, breathless, derogatory.

“Oh,” said Therion, lost for a second, before he was being claimed. Olberic leaned in to kiss him torture-slow, like thumbscrews, opening his mouth with a slick and intentional kiss. And it was mysteriously, deeply satisfying, like having the impulse to shred a sheaf of paper or a little flower just for fun, and get it under your nails. Therion mindlessly rolled up his hips when Olberic’s full weight settled on him, choking-hot, which made him rumble into his mouth. He wasn’t even doing anything with his hands, just bracing Olberic above him so he wasn’t just crushed, clutching his skin.

The coal-hot spit-swapping Olberic was bearing down on him with reminded him somewhere dark in his mind of coaxing anxious ‘straight’ men into letting themselves enjoy it, get flushed with the feeling. There was a rawness to it, completely lacking in the flair and flash of someone self-absorbed in their own ability. Rather, Olberic in bed had the intoxicatingly insulting air of a man who knew his place, knew yours, and was going to put you into it, pinned underneath him. There was a smugness to the curl of his lips, the rough but slick pull of his fingers through Therion’s hair and down the soft of his throat. It was the difference between the polished persona of overaffected overawe he had gotten used to in Dari—nope—men who stomped around the underground like they ruled their twenty foot patch of filth and a man who had actually, seriously run an army.

That said, Mr. General wanted some cock bad, so how much of a big man was he really?

Therion decided he was going to use both hands to seize Olberic’s ass and goddamn was it satisfying, tactile fat over the tightest fucking glutes he had ever assaulted, and when he curled his hands into them Olberic’s hips flinched like he had just been told to spread ‘em. Knew it, Therion gloated to himself, and tilted his head to give Olberic a deeper, wetter kiss to distract him, pulling him down deep into that involuntary twitch, making it intentional.

Running a hand that felt so fucking empty no matter how much skin it clutched over Olberic’s ass and back and side, pushing his way into his mouth with a fervor he wouldn’t back down from, Therion was slowly slipping into a state of feeling right. Fundamentally right, perfectly warm, perfectly pushed, perfectly glutted on skin and heat. Olberic’s body rubbed over his and found the hallow of his thighs, which he parted (for now), and went into the weeds in his mind, tangled, sensual, shaded. The way Olberic ground at him slowly, the way he could feel how his sex grew swollen, harder, larger between his thighs. The way he experimented carelessly with his teeth on his face, finding some new flesh to worry at like a jackal on a bone, the way he petted and grasped at his shoulders and biceps, making little tingles curl down the soft skin of his sides. Sense-memories imprinting themselves now, a brand on his bones, to remember how his body had been changed into pleasure when he touched the right places again.

He would have to make a way to let Olberic know that he was more than just a death-dealer, he thought, and the strange thought never came back to him later. With insistence he shoved his hands at Olberic’s chest and, willing, Olberic let himself be pushed up. Therion took the time to breath for a couple seconds because moving made his head fucking skin and the cool air hitting his chest where they had been sticking themselves together made him dizzy. “Okay, babe,” he said, no thoughts, all sexy, “how’re we doing this, for real this time.”

Olberic smiled on his skin. “What is it you like?” he asked.

Well, he had ‘liked’ it quite a few ways over time, but what was on his mind right now… “Fuck me like you’ve got me at knifepoint,” he said, caution long gone.

“…Excuse me?” Olberic asked, probably with a fuck ton less appalled aggression than he usually would have. No twitches of interest, either, which was never a good sign. “Like—”

“Not like,” Therion started to explain, and literally felt sick with how long this would take to explain. Dear Gods, no. “Never mind—”

“I mean, I have done more, acting, that is, displays of force—”

“Done it before? Really?” asked Therion, running his hands up Olberic’s back again to make him move.

He did, gentle grinding, a ghost of the passion they had just been tied in. “Well—but not—that is to say—”

“You were on the other side,” Therion said, unable to help the grin that split his face and drug teeth across his skin. Now Olberic shuddered, a small tremor, kept inbetween his shoulders. “Fuck, I knew it. What have you seen, you kinky old bastard?” he asked with the reverence he would give an oracle or a sage elder of great wisdom.

“If you would—” said Olberic, and his patience with Therion’s bullshit ended abruptly once more. He literally put a hand over Therion’s mouth, tilted his head up, and curled down to bite him on the neck, sharp but quick. “No,” he told him, a sharp refusal, and then ground him into the bed like he had him at fucking knifepoint. Lifted him up and ground him down again.

Therion found himself biting his own lip, bite down so you don’t scream , and curling an arm that grappled like he was underwater over Olberic’s shoulder and into his hair. God, greasy, sweaty disgusting, just like the night he met him, and he could practically smell the smoke of the sandalwood and cloves and tobacco again. The memories ground into him as Olberic pushed his body back down. He popped a leg over Olberic’s hip because he couldn’t fucking stand it and ground him like he was in a trap between his arms and his hips. 

Olberic had Therion's sides in his hands again, fingers spread between his ribs like he was about to twitch and snap him into pieces, maybe just pummel his body into slime underneath him, holy shit. With another thrust he had Therion’s neck, his collarbone and shoulder-junction, under his mouth, and he had literally lifted Therion’s hips off of the bed with one hand. Therion growled with encouragement, tried to speak and gave it up. There was satisfaction—like nothing else—in driving someone out of their head.

His own cock was hard enough now that it rubbed against Olberic’s when they ground against each other, toothache-sweet. He impatiently slipped a hand between their bodies, so tightly bound, winding stuck in the thatch of hair that grew on Olberic’s lower stomach.

He heard the growl in Olberic’s chest and felt it through his own. He forced his hand down despite the tightness oft heir bodies, whether Olberic pulled him up and there was enough space to move, right between both of their pants, and the sharp relief on his own sex must have been nothing compared to how Olberic felt when he roughly curled his palm around the head of Olberic’s erection because he snapped his teeth on Therion’s neck like the jaws of a beartrap.

It actually did hurt, but Olberic immediately let him go again. In fact, he backed off of Therion and curled his back so that he could reach down and unhitch his belt. Therion reactively reached down to help him disrobe; with both of them it wasn’t too hard to pull them off. With a tug of s lipping palm he pulled Olberic's trousers open, letting his stiff cock literally jump into Therion’s hand. Like, it bounced, but he got it the second time. He rolled Olberic’s skin over the stiffness of his own shaft and hell, that was sexy. Sexier when he groaned into Therion’s neck and had to still his jolting hips from thrusting into Therion’s fist. In a couple of slow, dragging pumps he was pawing roughly at Therion’s hips, trying to strip him bare.

Therion was only too happy to wind his left hand under the hem of his pants, purposefully rubbing his own palm lavaciously over his dick before he pulled his pants down over it. Olberic helped him yank them off of his legs. The reciprocity of this situation was kind of getting to his head, he admitted, the greed of Olberic’s hands clutching hard at him, the control it took for him to not bite down on his skin. Olberic growled and smiled and wrapped his arms around him, hellbent on tangling up their bodies.

And for a minute Therion was swept away in sticking them together, the sweat pooling in the hollows of his hips and on his stomach, how they stuck and stretched and slipped over each other, the curved scorching heat of Olberic’s sex rolling over his abs and his stomach. He heard, to his aroused shock, a sound that began like tapping in Olberic’s throat and heightened to a rhythmic pulsing; laughing. He was laughing. Manic, brainless delight. Like he was drunk on sweat and spit.

Therion response-cackled before he could check himself, chest heaving and throat burning with it. He opened his thighs and pulled Olberic down, claws out, desperate to get his heat inside him. Olberic hard thrusted at him—pounded, he could feel it snapping on his hips--twice and then pulled himself away again, gasping, wiping his mouth dry. Therion caught his eyes as he sat hunched above him, like a sleep paralysis demon, glistening in the heated dark.

He reached down and picked Therion up wholesale, heaved him against his chest. A brief sensation of vertigo made his head spin and he surrendered to the hand that reached up between his thighs like it was meant to be there. Olberic palmed his ass as he slid an arm around to hold him up. Then, second-guessing himself, practically before Therion had regained his breath, he flipped his position again. Therion was half-dropped and fumbled around until his back was facing Olberic.

Oh, holy fucking fuck, Therion thought in a dizzy daze as he felt Olberic’s swollen cock rub against his ass. It was—he— fuck. A sick heat boiled up in Therion at his sudden manhandling, the rough domineering he had awoken in Olberic. Fuck, fuck, fuck. But even when a bit of anxiety started snapping at his chest Olberic laughed again, choked-up, oversexed, voice light as breath but furnace-hot. Something about that crazy laugh. Shit.

“You—mmmhh,” Therion tried to say, because Olberic rubbed the tips of his fingers over his hole, making his fucking knees buckle. Hair was sticking to his lips, and that’s how he knew it had gotten too fucking long. Olberic was on his back, over his shoulder, and his hand rubbed over his hole again, making him shudder. Shit, the vicious tremble that hollowed him down, compelling obedience and snarling inside him. Like he has been caught up in barbed wire. He gasped and ground his palms into his bed so that he could feel solid.

Olberic’s other hand slipped between his legs, where he was already growing damp, and palmed him with a rough stroke. Gnawing satisfaction shook him and ground his air between clenched teeth. Clenching Therion’s cock entirely, firm but careful, Olberic worked him up until he was good and distracted and then pushed a pair of fingers just into his hole.

Therion shuddered like he had dropped ice on him and went through waves clenching and unclenching. Yes, it had been a long time, but that meant that when he felt it again he was fucking hungry for it, ready to beg, ready to buck or spread it wide. They pulled out as Olberic ran his palm with careful tight catches over the length of Therion’s cock, pushed a little further back in as he released him with his other hand---oh shit, oh fucking shit.

His jaw popped open as Olberic’s fingers rubbed over the sore raw muscles inside his body, curling like he was beckoning him close. When he flinched into him, tried to sink down, his other hand pulled up his cock. Therion felt like he was going liquid under his hands, and like he was desperately toeing a tightrope he needed to stay on to live. He heaved when Olberic jerked his cock with a quick, practiced wrist, pushed himself hungrily onto his hand, clutched around the curve of ass, so that his fingers could sink inside him. The stretch was raw, sharp, hot—

“Oh, fuck,” he said, and heard himself a second later, hoarse and animalistic. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” like it was the only word he knew. “Olberic—” and he sunk halfway inside of him and parted his fingers just fucking slightly but it stretched him open hard. He was fucking coiled in pleasure, going staff-straight in Olberic’s hand, “fuck, fuck, so hot, faster faster faster—” 

Olberic took him faster and the thrusts took his breath.

He went limp and tight and lost his mind and Olberic just watched him, petting the inside of his body while Therion’s teeth clenched and his legs shook until he collapsed. Oh, fuck.

Fuck. God dammit.

He found himself heaving his breaths, mostly sunk into a bed. His mind was tingling. Big, warm hands were rested on him.

“I hope,” said Olberic, “you don’t intend to leave me unsatisfied.”

Therion’s responsive noise was half aggravation and half a plea for patience. He snuck the weakest, limpest wrist behind his back, whacking at Olberic to say hold your goddamn horses. He heard Olberic chuckle, remarkably collected for how hard he had to be.

Therion’s hips felt like they snapped as he eased himself onto his knees to slide up (purposefully flexing his ass, he wasn’t green). His skin was stinging, but stinging like swollen, bitten lips; sure, it felt ‘bad,’ but ornamentally bad, a glossy sheen of pain over blood-soaked ready flesh. Deciding he would be better to be facing Olberic he propped himself onto his elbows (pushed his legs open with tired thighs and closed again) and took his time to roll onto his back without causing either of his hips to just fucking pop out of joint. (Don’t play with being stomped on by steel-toed guards, kids. It might sound fun, but your physical and mental health will not thank you.)

Blinking the film out of his bleary eyes to see Olberic towering over him was a kind of nostalgic, like a forgotten scent, a perfume an old friend used to wear, frying food from your hometown. He was large enough to blot out the light above him, strong enough not to waver on his palms as they held up his weight, slicked with sweat and lust-eyed.

He said nothing as he watched Therion settle himself, arching up to pop his back (fucking glorious) and feel the blood trembling just under his skin as his hips lifted, their pulse heavy, and settled back down comfortably. Olberic watched the twitch and turn of his limbs as Therion settled under him with the intensity of the hunter, waiting for the moment to strike. Therion folded his arms laxly over his head, feeling remarkably lazy for what he was getting into.

“…Are you serious?” asked Olberic, not condescendingly but shocked, like he hadn’t expected this.

…Had he not? “Uh, is this not what you?” asked Therion.

Realizing he had just looked a gift horse in the… mouth, Olberic hurried to speak over him. “I thought you might—only was concerned that you—if you’re sure,” he told, not asked him.

Ha. What man showed his stomach if he wasn’t already sure? “What, not sure what to do?” he asked, swallowing the roughness in his throat.

Olberic laughed with actual amusement, his eye striking the top of their sockets as he replayed some doubtlessly hellish memory of debauchery in his head. Therion was kind of interested in whatever the hell had happened to Olberic when he was his age to turn him into… this… but he wasn’t sure he was 100% willing to hear that story. (If he was right about his suspicions on the leading man’s role, that is.) “It’s not my practice to menace a man who’s already finished! It’s up to you to throw me off if you can’t take it,” he said, lowering himself down over Therion.

Olberic’s chest hovering over him was like the embers of a fire in winter; the pleasure of the warmth curled his toes. Therion tugged his own hair back, opened his thighs as unobtrusively, subtly as possible. “Can’t take it?—Come on,” he groaned, rolling his eyes.

Olberic cracked a smile on his skin as he eased his head briefly between Therion’s cheek and shoulder while he lowered a thigh between Therion’s legs. He was so fucking huge it made Therion’s heart hammer briefly, like when you suddenly see someone in the shadow of the alley. “Then I put myself in your hands,” Olberic said, with some kind of sweet unkindness.

Therion bit his lips against groaning aloud. Put himself?—it was like the dad jokes of sex. Fucking terrible. He almost couldn’t believe he was doing this for a second, and then Olberic lifted up his hips with warm hands as easily as though he were a pillow. The surprise of it made Therion’s hips fall open; accidental, but then one of Olberic’s palms roved the junction of his leg and his pelvis, pawing him open as his teeth bared themselves on his neck.

Therion heard a crackle of thunder in his throat. Olberic’s strength and warmth enfolded him easily, like a coat, like he had so much to spare. It was overbearing—it was a kind of satisfaction between sexual and emotional, a sort of lizard-brain itch, to be so warm. And his body was going plastic as the blood continued to flow back out of his sex, as his buzzing brain seemed to sink with its own weight against the back of his skull. He just lifted a thigh and groaned when he felt Olberic slide a hand over the cleft between his legs again, a kind of pleased he wasn’t sure he had a category for.

Like he. Appreciated. How much he was. Appreciated? It didn’t make sense.

Olberic didn’t waste a lot of time slipping a few fingers inside of him again, which did make sense because he could feel the weight of Olberic’s desire, and its life in his heartbeats as his body pulsed. Therion was surprised by how easily he opened—it shouldn’t have been surprising, his whole body was going liquid with fizzing afterglow, but it was perplexing, concerning, how easy it seemed right now.

Olberic’s hand sunk into him and he groaned harshly into Therion’s neck; he twitched his own head to the side to give him more skin, smiling. “You’re so h—hot—” Olberic told him, parting his fingers inside of him.

There was the unpleasant, unbidden sting of submission—Therion’s shoulders tensed briefly before he sunk back. “Oh, yeah?” he encouraged Olberic, feeling the roughness of his voice rattling in his ribcage.

“Hot as hell—I’ll—I want to have you,” he groaned, making Therion bite down a smile. He wasn’t typically susceptible to flattery like this.

Olberic’s other hand tried to pass over Therion’s dick, and he spent the energy to whack him on the shoulder. Some guys just sprang the fuck back up for round two, but whatever they were drinking, he wasn’t. “Leave it,” he demanded, like he would to a dog, and felt incredibly confusing tingles in his stomach when Olberic growled in response.

“I’m going—”

“I know,” Therion interrupted, laying his head back on the bed. “Come on.”

Olberic slid his hands back over Therion’s hips, then moved one up to clutch him around the waist like he was holding him in a swoon and the other to hitch up his right thigh. He was parted so far open he could feel it in his shoulders, his whole core opened up. Olberic’s body was tight and tense, Therion could feel the arousal crackling in him like fire was dancing on his skin. He was held as if to be hung, half-immobile—

The strange serenity he had been experiencing burst when he felt Olberic prick him, blunt head pushing for a second and then—he heard himself make animal noise, raspy and hoarse, when he slid inside, suddenly pressing past the muscle like he was pulled in. It was—huge—his throat tightened—but his legs were still almost uncontrollably loose, bunched up like wet sand in Olberic’s hands, and the hard breath he could have pulled in fluttered like wings in and out. Olberic went silent and his teeth clenched like a gauntlet as he trembled with the effort of pushing himself into Therion slowly.

He could feel his breath rattle out of his chest. Ugh. There wasn’t even any way to settle further back, there wasn’t any way to open himself further. Olberic had him parted like a woman, his hips were clattering with it. He swore without meaning to and his voice bubbled out overwhelmed and overawed.

Olberic grunted something reassuring-sleazy; I know, baby; his whole body pressed him down like he was breaking down a door to slip inside. It made Therion sweat—his thighs were burning like he had been fighting for his life—his toes and knuckles were aching with strain and then—

“Uhhgg—” His crown snapped back on the sheets and he lost the sense of his body for a second, then Olberic was sliding back out, dragging his skin, and on the second push in he could finally feel it, obtrusively huge, close like a wrist in a bruising grip, hot. Olberic was forced to go slow, because it was literally too tight for him to move quickly, as the wet heat of his body seemed to melt him down onto Therion, barely upholding him.

“Th—Shiiittt,” Therion groaned, not even so much in pain as confused, like he was floating off the bed in a dream, like his body had started something new without him. Olberic was shivering with his own intensity, electrified. Therion could feel that he would only be able to go slow for so long, and whether or not he should like the anticipation of it all, he loves anticipation. His heart began to pick up again despite the sluggish post-coital buzz as Olberic began to move, pull out, push back in.

Neither of them were steady—Therion had to wrap a hand around Olberic’s bicep, arm, shoulder, wherever his grip slid as he pushed in and out of him, Olberic clung to him with the arm curled around his waist like he was holding him for comfort in the dark. They slid closer, Olberic’s heat and heaviness like a quilt; why Therion suddenly felt so comfortable he would never know, grappled, overborne, undone. Olberic thrust himself as far inside of him as he could possibly go, swelling, grasping, and Therion accidentally shouted, a cracking smack like the blunt of a blade against the wall across the room.

That’s why he was biting his lip when Olberic suddenly thrust hard into him and why he was now tasting blood. He opened his mouth to the copper tang, the whistling air, and felt the stretching, melting, squeezing of Olberic pulling out, and grinding in, releasing and regaining. Therion pulled Olberic’s upper body as close to him as it could go, folding them over each other, almost kissing-close in the sudden grip of passion, and felt not just his hips but his chest, his arms, his jaw, everything when he rode him up and down. He knew he was gasping, he could feel his own air come back to him when it bounced off of Olberic’s skin.

Olberic couldn’t quite thrust all the way inside of him; he strained and Therion’s legs went straight as a tight cord when he sunk too far. Therion couldn’t quite shave a high note out of the tip of his gasps when Olberic hit him all the way inside; his body was in a murky half-light of pleasure and serenity, tired, stilled, but so receptive, drinking in the attention like it was pouring honey down his throat. His face felt numb.

Olberic started speaking, sex-babbling, he told him he was tight, and hot, and he wanted him, he wanted him, and Therion’s eyes screwed up against overwhelmed tears.

He had to adjust a thigh, click his hips—Olberic went with him like commanded even though he barely nudged him out of his way. He was lost; he couldn’t see the man wrapped around him but could feel his reeking desperation, how he clutched and clung to him, the speed of his thrust and the growled depth of his voice. He bent and backed up when Therion pushed him, flowed like water and cowed because he would do anything to keep thrusting between Therion’s thighs.

Therion had screwed his hair in a snarling grip and had his right hand gripping bruises onto Olberic’s arm when he guttered like a candle, hit the back of Therion’s hole and stopped like dead.

He pulled back, gasped, and hit again—Therion told him, “yeah, that’s right, let it—”

He jolted and groaned. Therion bit back a cackle because he felt so—so—“Let it all out babe, yeah, I got you—” one more jolt, or two, and his body was melting over him, loose as if he had been lanced between his shoulders.

He felt so fucking powerful, that’s how he felt. Olberic sunk into his body like he was clinging to him for life, he breathed like it was all he could bear to do, and Therion slowly slipped his fingers over the bruises he had just given him.

His own body had more or less regulated except for his excited breaths as he re-adjusted underneath Olberic. He could do nothing but lie under him for a minute; Olberic’s blissed body couldn’t be moved, and… Therion wouldn’t have wanted it to be. He wasn’t ready for the shock of cold air on his nakedness yet.

--

“Not true,” Therion argued, more for the sake of arguing than anything.

Olberic, slouched onto his back on the bed, still as bare as the day he was born, quirked up a tired smile. He had inched open one window, despite the chill, to dissipate the scent of the room. And despite what Therion had thought, the cold, bracing, bringing him back to reality, was not unpleasant.

“It’s so,” Olberic maintained, his voice as sore as if someone had taken him with a garotte. “Not until I was a man of twenty-four. Twenty-four exactly, I can remember the day.”

“Berg,” Therion stated, decently aggravated. “You are a machine. I refuse to believe you were a virgin until the age of twenty-four.”

“I was,” he insisted, oddly smug for the statement he was making.

“You should have had. Look, men our age, like, my age now, your age then, we’re supposed to have five children and a bad back by now.”

“Ugh,” Olberic groaned, wincing. “The back is enough for me. I can’t imagine progeny as well. Or to have inconvenienced some poor woman five times for them.”

“You don’t like women at all, huh?” asked Therion, a little perplexed by the notion.

Olberic shrugged a little anxiously, an old twitch knitting into his brow for a second. “…No.” Then he looked over at Therion again. “…Though you are fond enough of them.”

“…Yeah,” said Therion, not sure if he should be uncomfortable with that. “Have you seen women?”

Olberic huffed with good humor. “Well.”

“I mean, have you seen women? Those eyes? Soft skin? Tits? Fucking soft thighs? I mean,”

“Therion, I have eyes.”

“Sure, but do they work?”

“I don’t feel it,” Olberic expressed to the ceiling, as if exhausted at explaining this to a ghost. “They simply do not stir me.” Then he looked again at Therion, his eyes skipping briefly over his stained body. “Haven’t you a reason to be glad for that?”

Therion couldn’t help a quick laugh. “Fair enough,” he admitted. Something about Olberic, had… something, it seemed, had shifted in him, as if Olberic’s thrust had unstuck it. Not a piece of flesh, but a string of the weave of him. Like a knot had been untied. An anger. And in this moment he had no conception of what it was and yet felt its absence fondly. “What the hell happened at twenty-four, then?”

Olberic hesitated a more reluctant hesitation than his coy ones earlier. His eyes seemed bright, pearl-silver, as they fixated on a blade of moonlight that cut through a gap in the curtains. “I had been…” he said, and reconsidered. “I had shut myself off from the concept, altogether. It was easier, when I felt no impulse to women, to shove off any impulse at all, rather than thinking through what it might mean. But despite myself my affections for one man, and my attraction to him, had been evolving despite my ignorance of them. Then, with no expectation from myself, one day he seized my affections, the man…” Olberic’s sentence unraveled as he yanked the subject away from it.

“…Don’t worry about it,” Therion said, sounding confident but actually concerned he was wrong. “I know who.”

Olberic said nothing.

“…I mean, I caught on,” Therion continued, “I dunno that someone would if they didn’t know your preferences—and you’re like, an okay, middle-of-the-road closet case, like, I’ve seen guys that pass better, I’ve seen worse—”

“My thanks,” Olberic sighed with utmost sarcasm, pinching his forehead with a heavy hand.

“What do you want me to say?” Therion asked, showing his palms. “You’re not OBVIOUS but you’re not a master of disguise, dude. If a guy gets really in your face, you flush. You’ve got tells. There are signs. I fucked you once. I kind of already knew!”

“—you honor me, yes, I believe that’s enough for now,” Olberic sighed. He went into some kind of… foreign speech pattern when he was put upon. Therion had, like, never met anyone else from Hornburg and probably never would, so he wasn’t sure if it was endemic or if Olberic was just cracked as an individual. “Why ask me questions about my past if you see through me, then?” Olberic asked, finally shifting his gaze to Therion.

Gods help him, he couldn’t keep it. Something did a little squishy dance in his guts and he tilted his head away with an affected huff. “I got your pursestrings on what you like, for sure. Don’t worry about that. How you got this way, though, that’s a fucking mystery.”

Olberic’s contemplative face broke into a chuckle, and Therion felt a little light. “…I was very much molded by him,” he said, without the resentment he might usually make such a confession with. “He was my only partner for years. I was infatuated. I had so many lovely thoughts about us, what we were, and what it meant. But they were only mine, I learned. What happened…” he closed his eyes. “…Does bitterness such as mine come from anywhere but a scorned woman? It’s more or less what I am.”

“…That’s a leading cause of death where I come from, don’t joke about that.”

“Bitterness?”

“Scorned women,” repeated Therion in a haunted tone. “Holy tits, Olberic,”

“’Holy tits?’”

“Sealtige’s,” Therion explained. Olberic didn’t look like it explained anything. “What, she has them out in, like, every statue but I can’t say anything about it?”

“…It’s symbolic of”

“Fuck off,” Therion counterargued. Olberic grinned immediately. “My point is…” …What was his point? What he had really wanted to know… “…Did you really… Damn. I mean, you waited until you were twenty-four for him?”

“…Not exactly,” Olberic shrugged, and his eyes, as they scanned the moonlight, gained the fixed glimmer of a man facing down his own thoughts. “I would say… After twenty-four years, it took him to break through. I was… I had frozen myself. To lay down with your brother—brother-in-arms, it was knightly parlance—it wasn’t entirely unheard of. But… it was well-known that I was no man, and would have no woman. I built up a story around myself of complete devotion to the arts of war, having no interest in matters of the heart, and it brought me far. If I would give in to a man—and a part of me always knew what I wanted though I would not hear it—then it would be the self I made crashing down around me, the claims about who I was and why that was. If I was called out for the person I was, a man’s woman, I would be considered his subordinate forever. And who I was, the man I said I was, a man at arms, wholly devoted to arms and the King—I felt he would become unreal.”

Therion’s head was spinning at the warped world Olberic opened up for him. Man’s woman? What did that even mean? “But when… he… made the suggestion to me, my brother—the man closest to my heart—well, I was helpless. And for some years we worked as one, and I scoffed at the fears that had held me back! If you’re wondering… well, any questions you have about why this, why what, why am I… what did you say?”

“Why you are this fucking way. Or something like that.”

“Yes. Why I am this fucking way,” Olberic repeated, an octave lower, with a little relish. “Such questions will lead you to the same answer, almost every time.”

“…Damn,” said Therion, and though he cast his eyes away from it the specter that had been rising in his mind’s eye as Olberic spoke—him—the man closest to my heart—the same answer, almost every time—it was unignorable. “…I think I’m the same way.”

“…How so?”

“…”

“…Surely you were no virgin until twenty-four,” he said, with a grin that cracked one side of his face. “I simply could not believe that.”

“…Olberic, I’m twenty-t—”

“I know. Yes.”

“Like, I’m not—“

“Yes. I know. That was what I was referencing.”

“Oh, man,” sighed Therion, slowly and fondly, at the man who was the worst at jokes ever. “No, dude. I meant… damn.”

He felt, to his own shame, the stinging in his face that rose up when he thought about this too hard, thought about him, that prickling in his eye sockets. Fuck this, fuck him.

“…You need not say it either,” Olberic murmured, voice low as a candleflame. “I believe I know what happened to you as well.”

Wow. Therion drug a hand down his face in mock-frustration. A thin gloss of anger lacquered the lake of misery like November’s first ice. “…Ha ha. Yeah. Damn, that’s the real shit.” He kept trying to say.. something. All that came out were empty hot words. “Anyway, it’s been a ride. I’ve done like. It’s amazing I don’t have every disease. There was a year or two where. Like. Oh man. I can barely remember. Somebody asked how many people I had fucked once, trying to get a rise out of me, and I was like…. …. Holy tits, man, I have no fucking clue. So I…” Therion found himself as if at a wall, unable to go any farther.

“…When you have had many hands on your heart,” said Olberic, the weight of his voice just carrying his two-ton words, “You find yourself held back. Or, that’s what I have seen. Honestly, I am impressed by those who can manage it.”

“You’re giving me a lot of credit, bringing hearts into the equation.”

“Is that so?” asked Olberic, near-idly. “When I was young, old wives would say, ‘hard hearts are stirred by angry words, one can’t help it.’ It meant, you can be dead to love, but you still have passion. Hatred, pride, ambition. Love’s not the only thing in a heart.”

“…I’ve never heard that one.”

“Of course not, everyone who used to say it is dead,” said Olberic. “Aggravation and frustration will stir up the blood in a man who thought he had run dry. You’re…” And now Olberic’s eyes slid to him, and for a second of terrible disconnect, like the air fractured between them, Olberic’s voice slid on a sharp line when he said “…you’re probably too young to really understand that.

“…Not at as insult,” he clarified, flicking a wrist. “Frankly, you have a passion I’m jealous of.”

Therion felt seen through, like Olberic had plucked something out of him to show it. But right then, it didn’t make him feel rancorous. It made him feel a sentiment subtler, smaller than he had the self-compassion to describe, as if pity was sweet, or fear was soft. It was a kind of recognition he wasn’t used to feeling, an empathy dug out by Olberic’s sharp cynicism, like a knee-jerk reaction; do you think we’re so fucking different? Because I don’t.

“…Don’t be so gay,” said Therion, ascending right past self-realization and smack back into stupidity.

“Oh,” said Olberic, not even cracking a smile. “My humblest apologies. It was never my intention to bring the suggestion of indecent relations into our conversation.”

“…Are you fucking with me right now.”

“Humblest, and most sincere apologies.”

“…That was a question. Are you fucking with me right now?” Therion stressed.

“Yes, Therion,” said Olberic, a point-black smack in the face in the quirk of his eyebrow.

“Well, you’re good at it,” Therion grumbled, flushing irrationally. “Whatever you see in me, I don’t get it, but I’m pretty… frustratingly jealous of your. Cool, I guess. You always seem to have control of the situation. It doesn’t get to you, when—Whatever,” he cut himself off, casting derision at the ceiling as he rolled to his side.

“…Therion?” said Olberic, a gentler voice, now floating to him from a place he couldn’t see.

Therion responded as if he was just some other warm body, just someone he picked up, someone he didn’t and wouldn’t care about, “What?”

Olberic took a minute to respond; the animals of the night skittered and called outside, the cool air began to needle at Therion in a way he ignored. He would have to put it off until he decided if he was staying here, if he was grabbing that blanket, if he was telling Olberic to fuck off or—"You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Therion felt a strange, frightened stillness inside.

“When you are angry because you have been insulted, miserable because you have been betrayed, ashamed because you fell short of your goal—you are functioning properly. You are alive, and you know you are improving because your failure galls you.”

“…You…”

“When you have yourself grasped in your hands and you want to push him down, when you hate him for his rage or his sorrow, when you have him on the ground and seek to squeeze his life out… you must find a way to take your hands off his neck. It will destroy you otherwise.

“…It isn’t too late for you.”

The absolute hollowness of his words, like a sword that rang on an empty set of armor, propped up on sticks. It rang in him, hit like in a muscle he had never felt before. He felt a response rising in him and it had absolutely no words. It churned in his throat anyway.

“…Therion?”

Therion took a breath, but it cramped at his tongue.

“…Therion,”

“For a man who’s so dead inside, you sure don’t fuck like it,” Therion snapped, turning his body to look at Olberic. “You can lighten the fuck up or you can get the hell out of here.”

Olberic was still mostly flat against the bed, slightly scrunched away from Therion by the force of his counterattack. “…You’re going to kick me out of my room?” He asked, intrigued and expectant.

“For being an insufferable sadsack? Yeah! Act like you’ve landed a pretty ass in your bed or get the hell out of it!” Therion griped, hands expressively trying to swish away his embarrassment.

“Wh—“ Quickly Therion felt a strong hand on his shoulder; it was all of the warning he had before being more or less grappled from the side. “I’ve never taken an accusation like that lightly!—”

“Mm!—” Therion was surprised by the slick teeth that nipped at the soft skin under his ear; he was just as surprised by the turn in his stomach, flipped like he was knocked on his ass. “Y—”

“Do you know what happened to the last man who said I was a bore?—”

“Oh—” gasped Therion when a warm (sticky) hand pulled its way roughly up his thigh. “Oh—”

And then a hot mouth kissed the pulse that suddenly racked up his neck, and he said, “Okay.”

--

It had been a very long time since Therion had had a night so warm.

Olberic was like a furnace gone unattended, whistling air through cracked coals. But Therion could feel the gentle glow. When Olberic went soft with sleep, he clutched at him, his body heat melting the layer of age, time, roughness, until a man emerged from underneath, as he was when he was new.

--

Olberic’s silence was as effective as it had ever been, heavy, portentous. It could stand to be less so, honestly.

To his credit, he wasn’t scanning any one person in particular; he seemed to be heavily involved with his drink, and with the past, some voice in his head. The rest of the travelers, likely, would not notice a difference. Or, they had better not.

Therion thought he knew what he was doing. Olberic had explained, once, that he had been trained to use his eyes not to focus but to scan broadly, as a goat would; keep an eye on the whole field. He was trained for armies, after all, battle vistas. Though he looked vacant, he was taking in the tavern broadly.

A good haze of tobacco smoke helped them blend into the air, so did some half-empty mugs, the draining of which cemented their places in the tavern, made them slowly invisible as their muscles relaxed. Therion, not trying too hard to monitor or mentor, was pretty preoccupied with wondering about who Olberic would choose.

Olberic had his vices. He had his reservations. More importantly, he was such a sucker for a challenge. He would surely pick a target more difficult than he had to.

Their only companions at the moment were H’aanit, Linde, Primrose; things were getting… complicated. Between the macabre urgency that was gathering around the Prof’s quest for his book, the strange forebodings Ophilia had caught rumor of in her cathedrals, the stories H’aanit and the rest of them had heard tell about her beast…

Well, they had split into a few groups, for the time being. Parallel urgencies had sent them to a few directions for now. Theoretically, they were on their way back to Stillsnow to find aid for H’aanit’s petrified master (big yikes about that one). The closer they got on the trail of this monster, the better he felt about having companions like these on the road. Especially Olberic. 

Kind of missed his personal apothecary, though. Especially when his wounds began to sting in the cold. Especially since Alfyn...

Nevermind. Forget it. Prim hadn’t been feeling well, either. She leaned now against Linde, who had taken to the dancer enormously. H’annit watched them both, with a drooping fatigue displayed not in her tight grip on her ale but in the lowering glances of her eyes. He would have questioned the wisdom of even bringing Prim back to Stillsnow; he had gathered without asking her, however, that she was avoiding Noblecourt at all costs. For as long as she had someone else to help on their road.

Therion was about through with a loaf of black bread when a little clattering alerted him. Olberic had tossed some coins on the table, back-hand, spinning to a stop at Therion’s place. And Gods help him, it took him a second.

“…When?” he asked Olberic, unable to keep a hushed delight out of his voice.

Olberic slid his eyes over to him with his stupid, smug grin. With less finesse than strength he popped one more coin out of his fist, showing it to Therion.

He had done it. He had stolen something.

Therion couldn’t help a sly glance at the room; no one was especially close by. “Who??—”

Olberic’s grin cracked further open. He handed the last coin to Therion, and their hands held fast for a second before he snatched it away. “Olberic, who?” he demanded. He held the coin to his lower lip.

Olberic’s gaze flickered down, then he finally relented, laying one arm causally on the table. “…Behold your other side.”

Therion looked with confusion to his left, and saw no one but H’aanit, still stubbornly staying awake, her eyes on the reclining dancer.

…”No,” said Therion, sotto voce, trying so hard to turn back to Olberic without getting H’aanit’s attention.

Olberic smiled.

“…You fucking jackass,” Therion hissed, leaning into Olberic to hide his snickering. “You did not! That’s too fucking good.”

“Ha!”

“Tell me you didn’t pinch—”

“If you have learned to hold your place in swordplay, and I tell you you have,” whispered Olberic, his voice as fond and close to his face as a fire in the hearth, “then I should have thieving skills that can match yours.”

“The fucking audacity!—” Therion started, and had to such himself with a mean snicker as Rosie’s incredibly fine-tuned mockery radar made her ears twitch. “I’m going to tell her…”

“You won’t,” Olberic informed him, rumbling-low.

“I won’t?” Therion asked, low and mischievous.

“Do so,” Olberic said, slipping the coin back from Therion’s lips, “and that’s the last you see of the gold, and the last touch on your lips this evening.”

Therion’s stomach flipped. “Well, I can do without one of those.”

Olberic’s smile did not falter. “Which?” he asked, gripping the coin between two fingers.

Therion struck like a viper and seized the coin, just slipping it from Olberic’s grasp.

--

Original Chapter Notes:

man I never noted that like, my 'Olberic laughs like a loon while sex' headcanon does come from the in-game skit where he admits that he compulsively laughs while drunk. A. how fucking cute and B. so he gets carefree when inebriated, instead of morose or angry? Thank God, I love Olberic, JFC.Some people can't stand a laugh-er in bed but in my book it just means everyone's having a great time lmao.

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EPILOGUE: Alfyn & Erhardt

Epilogue: Alfyn Greengrass 

Alfyn had failed as many attempts as he had made to get Therion to relax.

That was all he had wanted. Just for him to relax. Drop his guard. Trust the rest of them. Be able to rest sound.

Alfyn had always fancied himself a helper, because it helped him. He didn’t like to be alone and have the silence pressing in on him, idle hands the monsters’ work. He wasn’t blind to the fact that he had his own motives, that he craved what he felt inside when someone else smiled. He just hoped that working as hard as he could to be a help would help someone else, and that would be worthwhile.

It was a miserable irony that he finally got through to Therion by breaking down.

Each of them stayed with him for some time, in that dingy basement-tavern in Saintsbridge, far removed from the glory of the great cathedral. One by one they peeled off; everyone had to sleep some time, and the moon was already in the sky. H’aanit, with animals to tend to; Tressa, who had a pensive look on her young face. Cyrus, after a rare embrace and a lined and worried face, because he was neck-deep in unraveling a necromancer’s nefarious plot that was a thousand times more important than Alfyn’s state. Olberic, a hand on his shoulder, another mug of ale. Ophelia, wiping away her own empathetic tears, having said a prayer for him; but the hour was so late, and she had started the day early.

Primrose stayed awake messing with him, teasing, chittering, effortlessly acting lighthearted, to bring him cheer. For two hours, alone, almost until dawn.

Not quite alone. Therion stood, silent, still, across the room.

He knew Prim wasn’t really jovial either. She knew that he knew. How cheerful could she be, nursing the knife wound in her side that had bled her half to death? Worse, the betrayal of the man who had stabbed her?

Perhaps that’s why she was so determined to cheer him up after he killed Miguel, round after round, the last customers in the bar.

Even so, she admitted she had too much ale in her and too little sleep in the thin hours. She had to go. Bleary, wobbly on tired, shaking legs. She tried to take Therion’s arm to ease him upstairs. He shook her off.

Concerned, but drunk at four in the morning, Primrose patted his arm, said “g’night, Terror,” and kissed the crown of his head. He softened a little, unhappily, as Primrose took her leave of the men.

That left himself, slumped on a bench, and Therion, holding up the wall across the room, like he had been all night.

“’S Primrose sweet on you?” he asked Therion shakily, also drunk, desperately trying to latch onto the good mood that his friend had taken with her.

Therion seemed to nestle even further into his own arms. “Fucking hope not,” he muttered. “There’s a good woman that would disappoint.”

“What’s that?” asked Alfyn, interested despite himself.

“Nothing,” Therion bit back, his eyes focused on the floor.

He looked like he was holding back tears.

“…What, sweet for Primrose?” asked Therion, a bad imitation of a man who was totally fine.

“Nah,” Alfyn said, shaking his head a little too much. “Great friend. I love her. But I’m nah… ha ha,” he laughed, miserably, and tilted his swimming head forward into one of his hands.

What a fucking mess.

He had found it so hard to take himself in recently. As though he were guarding the door. At every turn, it seemed, he hurt more than helped. And causing all that hurt caused him to look inside, and… it was like another man’s house, inside him. Had he lived here all his life? Why didn’t he recognize this place? Why did he find so much spite, envy, bitterness, and exhaustion? He hadn’t noticed them walking in.

He didn’t know who this was inside of him, sick of hurting, sick of doing it wrong, tired of trying.He thought he was better than this.

...Alfyn didn’t think he liked women much. Not as a man should. He always thought he was an open-hearted, accepting guy. He never thought something like that would bother him.  He didn’t like that he saw and he was disappointed in himself for it. “Nah, I…” his own hand was rubbing his forehead, like he was trying to comfort someone else.

What a fucking mess. What a worthless healer.

He was shocked outside of himself by the feeling of warm, strong arms enclosing him. He knew by the soft scent, by the slight tremor, by the angry tightness of it, that it was Therion.

He never—he didn’t—Therion was not a very affectionate guy, was all. Alfyn didn’t know what to do, caught in an embrace he thought he would never feel.

Therion sniffed and with some prickling empathy under his skin Alfyn knew that he was crying. Rather, he was not-crying, barely holding it in. “You didn’t fucking deserve that,” Therion growled, his voice so broken it was barely comprehensible.

“Therion…” said Alfyn, blinded, gobsmacked.

“You just don’t fucking deserve this shit. You’re the best guy I’ve ever met. I should’ve kicked his ass.”

Alfyn, blearily, shook his head. “No… I told y’all to leave him be… it was my fault all through,” he protested.

Therion balked, and then he was crying, right onto Alfyn’s shoulder, tears slipping out dead silently. “I cannot fucking take it. It’s not your fault. You’re the best guy I know and the rest of us are shit. I’m sorry.”

He could feel the warmth of Therion’s face and his tears and his hitched breath bleeding misery onto his throat and he felt amazed, lovesick, fascinated to be trusted with Therion’s true feelings. For a second he had no memory of what happened today, no memory of his own struggles, his shame; he reached forward to hold him, weaving his hands over his hunched shoulders, touching his soft hair. He was warm like a curled cat and bunched like a crow in the rain.

His heart felt sore and happy to have him here, fit into the lonely curve of his body, and he couldn’t imagine letting go again. He told Therion no, he told him he wasn’t a shit person, he told him that he…

--

Alfyn had hardly ever been closer to actual rage than he had been watching that piece of shit Darius toy with Therion. And he regretted that rage watching Therion stumble silently back through the sewers under Northreach, breath ghosting out shallowly. He regretted it more watching Therion crumple suddenly into the ground in the miserable snowbanks of the world above.

Therion didn’t need Alfyn to be angry for him. He needed fucking help.

“Therion,” he heard himself saying, ignoring the stench of vomit on them both, ignoring the others distancing themselves to decide where the fuck to go from this , “Therion, hold on.”

He wasn’t responsive because he was heaving in his breath. Alfyn had him around both shoulders like it was nothing and he was just fucking tiny. And--

“--Therion, leave with me.”

“ What ?” asked Therion, fury and misery, his shimmering eyes peeking out from between his fingers when he glared up at Alfyn. Face like snow. Lips red and eyes filmed with sickness. 

“When all this is done. Once we’re safe and we don’t have to worry about this cult business any more,,” said Alfyn, feeling himself go still despite the cold, “Leave with me. Stay with me. Go home with me.”

“What??” Therion barked again, like he had been betrayed. And this was the wrong fucking time and it wasn’t what he needed but Alfyn couldn’t take what he said back. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“No,” said Alfyn, though he could have been more sure himself. “I want you to stay with me. I don’t want to lose you once this is all over. I want to keep travelling with you—”

Therion snarled like a cornered dog. “Get off of me—” he snapped, in fear.

“No, please,” Alfyn stumbled, so afraid of what might happen, “Please just hear me out—”

“I can’t fucking—Alfyn, you’re—are you serious?? You’re such. Aeber you’re like a--like a good person--and I’m a fucking mess,” he sobbed aggressively. “You know where I’ve been, what I’ve done—dude, I’m a fucking murderer, I’ve been in and out of gangs, I’ve ruined lives, I’ve ff—f—I’m a goddamn whore,” he snarled, packing more hatred into a single word than Alfyn had ever heard. “That was my lover I just dumped in the sewer to die. You know who helped me kill him?? Two other people I’ve fucked. Do you even know which two? And—”

“I don’t care,” Alfyn told him, and it was amazing his voice was so steady because he knew that wasn’t snow falling down his cheeks. “I don’t care who you’ve been with, I don’t care what’s happened to you, I don’t care who you used to be; I know who you are. Please, please give me a chance.”

Therion heaved with his breath, and—and—he didn’t say no.

He didn’t say yes.

But he didn’t say no as Alfyn rested him in his room that night, lit a fire in a hearth, and stayed up all night watching the door for Darius’s henchman. He didn’t say no the next day. He didn’t tell him to fuck off the day after that, or after that. He didn’t tell him to get out already after they pulled Kit Crossford out of the crumbling ruins of Hornburg or after they carried him (and Tressa, and Linde, and Cyrus, the poor fucking man) down the slopes of the mountains to convalesce in Stonegard.

Everyone made it, thank the Gods. It wasn’t a simple thing, not after what they’d gone through.

(Alfyn felt like his eyes were burnt, or twisted, and he would be seeing Galdera in the darkness until the day he died. But when he looked at himself they were clear and bright.)

Therion made no declaration, explicit or otherwise, to tell Alfyn that he was not saying ‘no’ to his proposition. All he did was not leave with Ophelia and Lianna to uncover the conspiracy of abuse among clergy of the Frostlands, not leave with H’aanit and Za’anta and Primrose to hunt (though Alfyn had to walk out of the building and to the street to not hear a conversation between Therion and Primrose), not stay with Cyrus and his students in the ruins of Hornburg to uncover the secrets of the ancient past (the fucking madman), not leave with Tressa, Kit, Ali, and Leon to take to the waves. And not leave with Olberic, who silently left Stonegard in the night, alone.

Rather, Therion kept walking alongside Alfyn until it was the two of them, and at no point did he say ‘no.’

--

It had been three years of not saying no to him so far.

He wonders if Therion considers it an anniversary too. He probably doesn’t like to remember the day, not considering the circumstances around it. But he liked kisses, and he liked apple pie, and he was getting both today.

…The apple pie would be missing one slice, because Alfyn ate it on the way back to the inn. Therion would have to live with that. 

Winter would be biting pretty soon; they were the last apples of the season, more or less. Alfyn was determined to make this the year he convinced Therion to wear actual sleeves during the winter. (Yeah, he had gotten some pounds on him but not many.) He felt a twinge in him as he waved to the little kids peering down at him from the windows high on the coastline; the two of them would be moving on, soon, trying to keep ahead of winter storms. But he should be keeping to the band of rough weather, where disease brewed.

Therion would be waiting in another little house, where they had bought space, where a kind wife had given them a  room for treating her father, or wherever they could find. These days he might be reading, petting a cat, cooking, even; who knows? He would stop whatever it was, still, when he saw Alfyn getting a look at him. That was why it was his solemn mission to try to SURPRISE him with the kiss hello--it was a rough job, but he wouldn’t shrink from his calling.

--

Therion had a lifetime of things to tell him, in the dark of night. Some of them Alfyn had already figured out. Some made him sick at heart. All of them he treasured, because each little chunk of the mess inside him was given as a token of his trust.

“…Olberic…” Alfyn mused, looking up at a starry sky, Therion’s head under his hands. “…I didn’t see it, honestly.”

“…It was only a few times,” Therion admitted quietly, a little guilty in his tone. Perhaps a little wistful. “There’s… kind of a history, though.”

“No shit?” asked Alfyn. He took the opportunity of the pause to run his hands through Therion’s hair a few times. It was so soft, now that he had this goblin on a bathing schedule. “I really didn’t see it. Can’t really remember any clues.”

Therion sighed with annoyance, his chest huffing out. It was cute. “You know Sir Unbending Blade. He’s not about to talk about his feelings, unless those feelings are anger or battlelust.”

“Ha ha. I miss him, honestly,” Alfyn grinned. Man, there was nothing like a good game of ‘bother Olberic’ with Tressa. He missed Tressa, too. Damn. “Not with you, either?”

“Huh?”

“No talk about what’s on his heart with you either?”

Therion was silent for a few moments, then sighed again, slowly this time. “…Once or twice.”

“Once or twice more than I think I got out of him.”

“…He was…” Therion was clearly struggling for words. “I think… no insult to you, but I think Olberic did more for me sorting my shit out than anyone else.”

“ Oh,” complained Alfyn, grinning. “Oh, I see.”

“Fuck off,” Therion said, with an audible smile. “I mean he was just about the most fucked up person inside I have never known. Baring my regular collection of criminal sociopaths. He had a foot in the grave since he lost the war and he hadn’t crawled out yet when I met him. When we knew him, I mean. Probably not until he finally got Erhardt back. This is going to sound fucking awful but… what I mean is, I saw Olberic and thought, ‘holy shit, what the hell do I need to do to not be like that by the time I’m his age?’”

“Oh, wow,” said Alfyn, honestly impressed by how awful that was.

“Yeah, whatever,” Therion agreed. He tended to agree in odd ways. “But I mean, I didn’t think I was actually going to be able to be anything but scum until… yeah,” he muttered, scrunching in on himself, and consequently, into Alfyn’s arms.

Alfyn rested his head on Therion’s crown, despite grumbles and protests from beneath. He could handle it. He was going to be handling a lot of cuddles until he got all of this out from inside.

If they were both lucky, that would take a very long time.

--

Epilogue: Erhardt

Erhardt does not have the capability to express the amount of remorse that he should. No human being could. He had taken hundreds of lives; he would have to be penitent for thousands of years to absolve himself.

He had never been a particularly remorseful man, either. Yes, that weight bore down on him during the longest of nights, a press of black dirt like the grave on his back, choking the breath away. King. Queen. The princes. Lords and Ladies. His brothers and sisters, comrades in arms. The children, the wives, the innocents. Hundreds of hands clawing on his back.

But he was a man who had learned at a young age that one doesn’t have time for regrets while living by the sword. It wasn’t that he shouldn’t feel them, but that the seconds wasted on remorse, regret, and self-doubt would cost him his life fast.

His best illustration of that truth came to him on Olberic’s face, a mask of denial and horror that left him helpless. Slipping into his blade like he was borne on the bloodtide.

Erhardt had spent many years, actually, believing he had killed him. Brother. Lover. Friend.

When one has done more harm than they can possibly absolve, what do they do? Erhardt found himself gathering innumerable apprentices. New swordsmen. Brigands. Assassins. Men with prices on their heads. He would befriend, assist, hone them. Then they would go and wreak death. And they did not themselves die. Erhardt made survivors.

He had made himself a survivor too. A couple hundred ghosts suffocating him, and he was still here.

Then the time came to take Olberic’s sword. Olberic, gone gray—God, the lines on his face, the weariness—big as the hills and as solemn. Olberic, out of the grave, dressed in royal blue and his crest like he had clawed his way up to put an end to his crimes.

None such. He spared his life. By that token he assured that he had it, forever. The wrongs Erhardt did to his brother could only be absolved by his death. In sparing his life, he seized it. Erhardt was, though he knew better than to say it to Olberic, who would become angry, property now. There was no request he could refuse.

But Olberic made no requests of him, nothing but ‘walk with me,’ ‘stay with me,’ ‘go with me.’ Erhardt waited for something, anything. He didn’t necessarily want to kill, destroy, beg, steal, or die for him, but he didn’t care if he did. Olberic asked for his presence on the road, and he went with him. He asked for his ear and he lent it. He asked for fights, and he fought them.

It took three year’s time for Erhardt to break down and take. A kiss, the softest he ever gave. And for his theft he received a debt of absolution again; having stolen from Olberic’s body, Erhardt’s body was his, never refused. Olberic would flay him if he said it aloud; ‘I will never say no to your request, ever. How I feel about it I reject entirely. It is my command now.’

But you had to keep most things inside to live the life a man like Erhardt leads. Were he determined to atone for each and every one of his crimes, he would not be alive. The only thing he can figure to do is atone the crimes he’s asked to atone for. Should another victim come his way, they’ll have their shot at him too.

And should the man whose life and love he stole ask him for any little thing, his time, his life, his body, another happy atonement was preformed.

The knight is dead. Long live the mercenary.

--

“This is it,” Olberic sighed, morosely, as he did every other day. “I can go no longer. My body has failed me. I must retire.”

“You’re not even forty,” Erhardt snipped at him, cinching the clasp of his belt back on.

Olberic submissively lifted his hands and rolled his head back as Erhardt tightened his leathers around his body. “Hardly.”

“But you’re not, and nor am I,” Erhardt insisted. “You just don’t want to face H’aanit.”

“Brand’s Thunder, would you want to?” Olberic groused.

And he had a point. How the beastmistress convinced the judges of the Arena to let her compete with her captive monsters each year was no mystery to Erhardt; she was a great show, the beautiful, powerful woodswoman, and the crowd screamed when another fool in armor was cowed by her animals. But, no, he would not personally want to go toe to toe with H’aanit. He had hardly spoke ten words to her in his life and was content to keep it that way. But she and Olberic were brother and sister in arms, Olberic was indebted to Cecily, who asked him for the same thing every year—"please please represent me in the arena again, please please please”—and LINDE was certainly delighted for another round with her most favorite chew toy.

“We’ll get a huge cut of Cecily’s earnings no matter what,” Erhardt reminded him stubbornly.

“Damn the earnings, damn Cecily, and damn this pageant, I’m not having my back thrown out by an overgrown cat again,” Olberic grumbled, picking up and inspecting his swords to decide which to take with him. “Maybe it’s about time you do go on. It may be enough years since your last round of deviancy that you won’t be massacred on the spot.”

A wince spread across Erhardt’s face. “Please do not ask that of me, my friend.”

Olberic’s mouth twitched up in a little smile.

“My brother.”

He tapped a finger on his sword, which he bounced in the air a few times.

“Love.”

Olberic crossed his arms and looked down on him. Asshole, like he hadn’t picked that gloating poise up wholesale from him.

“Olberic.”

“Ah,” Olberic sighed, “but it is a tournament. It wouldn’t be right to replace a contestant at the last moment.”

The mischief wasn’t gone from his eyes. Erhardt narrowed a glare at him.

“Rather, you should battle the winner of our duel this year, as a surprise challenger,” he continued, that awful little grin splitting his face.

“…Oh, you wouldn’t.”

“Either way, we will get a good cut of Cecily’s earnings.”

“You little…”

“It’s a shame,” Olberic sighed, turning on his heel. “At my age, I should have retired; I don’t fancy my chances against mistress H’aanit, but if you insist…”

“Olberic Eisenberg, you are the deadliest, fiercest fighter still alive on this bitch of an earth, and you’re going to win this fucking duel, damn if H’aanit brought a dragon with her,” Erhardt hissed, following his chuckling partner out of his tent, into the roar of the crowds.

--

“What, the twink?” asked Erhardt, unamused, as an equally unamused healer wrapped another layer of bandages around his arm; another layer that would probably just get blood-soaked too.

H’aanit had been in fine form.

“The young thief, yes,” Olberic replied, arms crossed, eyebrow raised. “Had you really not noticed?”

Uh, no. He had hardly noticed anyone but Olberic during that particular reunion. He still struggled to recognize most of his lover’s old companions, except Beast Bitch out there and The Professor. Gods save him from The Professor.

He hissed when the healer basically stabbed him with the pin and clenched his hands. “Lay off, would you! You won’t stop the bleeding if you stick me through.”

“Erhardt,” Olberic snapped, holding up a hand to stop the healer from dropping him that instant. “Please, milady,” he rumbled to the young woman, “Ignore his tongue. He has no control of it.”

Erhardt let that one go, just because he had a better topic to poke at. “What, may I ask, was it about young master thief?” he queried. “I can’t recall his visage well; I assumed he was fine-formed.”

“So he was,” Olberic admitted reluctantly. “More importantly, he was a sharp fighter with a fine style, but much to learn… and a terrible temper. You know my habits; I fell right into him.”

“You’re a hand at playing with fire,” Erhardt smiled. “Though you are also good at turning the cold shoulder to a hot advance.”

Olberic didn’t flush as easily as he used to, which was a shame. “He found me drunk,” he admitted bluntly, walking a circle to the medical tent, admiring the stands of broken weapons they had pulled out of fighters’ bodies.

“Ha; beautiful boy, good at handling a sword, plenty of drink? And what did he steal?”

“Only coin. I must have pleased him well enough.”

Erhardt laughed again. He couldn’t help it; all these years and Olberic’s innate innocence and shyness, which had once made him the shrinking violet of the barracks, was just as charming as the brashness, coarseness, and confidence he had developed to cover it up. Which Erhardt had helped him develop, incidentally. “Young love! Oh, how could you leave your sweet lad, Olberic?”

“Ha!” Olberic threw a not so kind look over his shoulder. “He wasn’t mine to begin with, nor I his, and we both knew that. Nor was he anything less than a man from the first I knew him. He was one who had no childhood to speak of,” he said, ending what began as a pointed speech with a sigh. “Were I a better man myself, I surely would have put him off.”

“Why do you say that?” Erhardt asked. “He was a man grown, as you were, both available, both interested, I hear no fear in your voice that you forced or coerced him; what harm was done?”

Olberic shook his head. He was looking far off now, perhaps trying to put his memories into place. “…I might have asked what he was looking for in me, a man he hardly knew. Who he was looking for.”

“Did he ask it of you?”

“Confound you, Erhardt, I know where you’re going with this,” Olberic reprimanded him, picking up a splintered knife in his hand as he turned around. “You turn around my words to insist to me I did nothing wrong.”

Erhardt only smiled at him, pleased that his good work was recognized.

“Good Sirs, I draw the line at drawn weaponry,” snapped the cleric, standing up again.

Olberic replaced the knife and put up his hands. “No offense, madam, I implore you, finish,” he begged. “I am only too used to having a weapon in hand.”

“Aren’t you all,” muttered the little healer, but she stubbornly got back to work on Erhardt’s arm, snapping on bandages and salves quicker than ever to get away from him.

“My point remains that you did not do wrong by him.”

“No, I’m sure not!” Olberic cursed, flipping a hand in the air to knock Erhardt’s point away from him. “Continue trying to convince me to revisit old beds or find new ones, Erhardt, and I might!”

“I tell you, should we find a willing matron, bored, perhaps, of a lonely bed with only one man—”

“And none of that! Have you no sense of what should or shouldn’t be said in public?” Olberic was trying so hard not to smile.

“None, and I won’t develop one at forty, so don’t hold your breath.”

“That is something I wouldn’t even hope for,” Olberic groused. “Peace, Erhardt, I beg it of you.”

“You’ll have it when you answer a simple question, which you have avoided: what did you do to the thief that you found wrong?”

“And you chose to answer it yourself, nothing. Yet I maintain I could well have done something, having known what it was like to suffer violence like he had,” Olberic said, a rush like a sudden storm. “It is well he found someone who matched him better, and I someone who matched me. When I saw Therion—what I wanted in him—I thank God I did not demand it from him, or tear him open trying to find it. If I had tried to make him into the man for me I would have wronged us both. As it is I smile to see him again, and he is pleased to see me, for we remember fighting together, traveling together, and a few good nights I didn’t ruin with my theatrics.”

“Steady, Olberic,” Erhardt smiled, hoping he kept most of the soft fondness out of his voice. “There’s no need for a speech.”

“No, and if there were, I’m delivering it to the wrong man.”

“You feel the need to apologize to him?”

“To thank, which I never did adequately,” Olberic confessed with a sigh. “To thank him for the mirror he held up to me, of my weaknesses, cowardice, failings. I didn’t like that I had become the man to take a stranger recklessly. I didn’t like that I had come to live for the fight and could not find joy in my life otherwise. I knew I had to become a better man than the one who was considering keeping a boy in my bed for my comfort.”

Olberic shook his head, not with the bitterness Erhardt so hated to see in him, but as though shaking the past away. “He never seemed to know how much he helped me then. Which is a shame.”

“Ah, then bravo, Therion, and fine work,” Erhardt sighed, leaning back, “to so deeply penetrate the mind I know to be as tight as his grip on his sword.”

The healer threw down her towel and stood to her feet. “I can bear your prattle no longer,” she snapped, directly at Olberic, not him, which Erhardt found funny. And Olberic jumped, going slightly pink. “Should your bandages need changed again, handle it yourself or find some other; I am not paid to listen to barracks-talk.”

She stormed away. Erhardt, witnessing another fine example of his normal luck with women, let her go with a nod. “Good fire, and good work,” he complimented her to Olberic.

“When your prick goes dysfunctional with age, it will not be too soon,” Olberic cursed him, voice dark with embarrassment.

“You had best enjoy the time you have with me, then,” Erhardt smiled at him, sick with the love that Olberic’s anger made blossom in his heart. “Until that day, I am at your service! The knight is dead, Olberic;”

“Long live the mercenary,” Olberic sighed, stretching his back and turning from Erhardt. “As long as either of us have in us, anyway.”

“There you go again,” sighed Erhardt, feeling a sappy smile spread on his face now that Olberic’s back was turned. “We’re not dead men yet, my love.”

“Despite our best efforts!” Olberic agreed, leaning over to take a glance through the parted entrance to the tent. “Ah, she comes for you.”

Erhardt winced, instinctively looking for cover, though there was none. “The beastwoman?”

Olberic smiled fondly, a bit of the outside light illuminating a slice of his face. “Aye. H’aanit. I’ll distract her,” he offered, disguising his eagerness to spend time with his friend as covering for his lover.

Erhardt lifted a hand to beckon to Olberic. Olberic regarded him, unwilling to follow an order. Erhardt smiled and beckoned more sweetly, softening his eyes. Finally, the man relented; with cautious steps he crossed the length of the room, his arms still crossed, suspicious glittering in his eyes.

Erhardt longed to stretch them moment—the uncertainty, Olberic’s teasing questioning; despite everything, he trusted him.  

He wasn’t going to find another Olberic, he thought, inebriated with the backlight overemphasizing the cuts and crosshatches on his skin, the trained caution in his schooled gaze. He had definitely tried, in ten years of having lost him. But he didn’t find another man he cared to keep by his side like him. And he wasn’t taking chances again.

As Olberic stood over him, Erhardt beckoned once more. Seeing the game, determined to win, Olberic bent slowly, not quite in his range. But Erhardt was not so invalid as that—in a quick swoop he leaned up to Grasp the back of Olberic’s head, and cut a kiss from his lips. He was surprised enough to gasp, in his throat, surprised and quiet.

“Love you,” said Erhardt, and felt it like a blow, like he did every time he said it. But he did it for him. 

Olberic huffed at him with a good-natured grin and knocked him back down, gently as a cat smacking down her kitten. Which is to say, not gently at all, but with good intentions.

“And keep the rabid bitch out of here, I’m injured,” Erhardt followed up, reclining back into the cushions.

“You plague,” Olberic insulted him, as lovingly as a kiss in return. He strode back to the entrance of the tent and threw it open; stunned by the light, cowering from it, Erhardt could not see him but could hear in the sudden darkness how he said “And I you,” before he walked out and shut out the light again.

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BONUS SCENE: I Know Exactly What You Did Last Night

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Originally uploaded to AO3 as its own fic, this scene is a deleted scene from the main work that should be read as if it immediately follows the sex scene in chapter three above. I loved this scene, but it interrupted the flow of the main fic really badly, so it gets its own little box.

--

“Gentlemen,” said Cyrus Albright, a hand curled under his chin.

He had a cold cup of tea in front of him, diluted with milk. The hand curled under his chin was ink-stained, his hair was ruffled by his having run a hand through it so many times. He sat at a table right at the base of the stairs, with a sheaf of paper in front of him, a fully melted candle, and, for some reason, a stick of butter on a tray. The morning sun was cheerfully illuminating the menacing aura that rose from his shoulders like a summer mirage. 

Therion felt a stab of fear that only the Professor, with a certain tone of voice, could elicit in him. It wasn’t because (and he hated admitting this) Cyrus could probably kick his ass to Marsalim with his unholy dark powers. There was a sort of inquisitive menace he could pack into his voice, a rumble of thunder that foretold an incredibly unpleasant revelation (about himself, because Cyrus had just divined and diagnosed his neuroses when he didn’t fucking ask).

Olberic, for his part, muttered something unintelligible about forgetting something and turned to walk back up the stairs. The façade came nowhere near fooling the Professor, who said, in his loudest, clearest, damn-who-hears voice, “Gentlemen, I do implore you both give me your consultation for a brief moment, only a minute of your mornings,” he began, his eyes fluttering shut and open as he spat out alliterative diction just to flex, “Because I have a mystifying case I just must unravel.”

Well, there was no getting out of this. Therion looked at Olberic, and Olberic looked at him, and they both knew this could happen now, or this could happen at lunch, in front of the Gods, Sister Ophelia, and everyone. 

They sat at the table.

“It is my great shame that I have no tea to offer my fellow travelers, for the serving-staff took their leave precisely four and a half hours ago, at the hour of three,” Cyrus informed them, taking a long dreg of the tea he had procured anyway. Likely from walking into the kitchen and making it himself. “You see, I found myself faced with a puzzling situation last night that I simply could not rest until I unpuzzled,” he explained.

“Is that so,” Olberic asked.

“Yes. I was locked outside of my room all night.”

Therion felt the world spin around him.

“Very puzzling,” Cyrus continued, voice as flat as paper, eyes as sharp as a quill.

“I must have locked the door on instinct,” Olberic muttered, looking abashed. “I—”

“And this is what I thought as well!” Cyrus interrupted him, pointing a caffeine-shaky finger into the air. “But the incurable inquisitor I am, I could not help but look into the situation. ‘My friend Sir Eisenberg,’ said I to me, ‘is not a thoughtless sort. I informed him before he took his leave in the evening that I would be up late; he told me he would leave the door abraced if I would only knock before entering. Yet even with a knock, he did not stir! ‘Has something happened to my friend?’ asked I to myself, with a healthy amount of comradely concern.”

Damn, they were fucking in for it. Therion was doing everything in his power to hold still and not meet Cyrus’s eyes. Luckily, The Professor was fixated right now on making Olberic sweat. “I am thankful for your concern,” said Olberic, trying to steer the conversation.

No dice. “It was a simple measure to take a peek through the keyhole;” Cyrus continued, fanning out the fingers of one hand with a few subconscious sparks, “I saw nothing amiss. But since it only revealed to me a small cross-section of the room, I knew this required investigation! And the skilled investigator knows his best sources are other people, whose faculties of observation can tell him things mere surroundings never can.”

No, no—“So I did go down the hall to the room rented by our friends Alfyn and Therion, to ask if they had seen Olberic retire. And when I knocked on the door, it was opened to me by Alfyn, who was, I am sorry to say, woken by this visitation. But science does not wait for sleep, as I have impounded upon you all, so I still requested his assistance in puzzling this mystery,” he declared with some smugness. “Our friend informed me straightaway, which is one great talent of his, that he had gone to bed alone, not seen Therion or Olberic retire, though he had heard some scuffling in the hall in the dead of night.

“Scuffling! Naturally I was concerned, though Alfyn said he had scanned the hall after hearing noise himself and saw naught. Scuffling, in the dead of night, but no sign of any disturbance—but then I came to a curious supposition.”

Cyrus delicately folded his hands under his chin, using it as a rest to hunch upon as he leaned just a little further into Olberic. God, he might have had a pair of lackies holding Olberic down for how effectively he was able to menace him. His wide dark eyes were as sharp as flint. “Taking another round of the late-night waitstaff below, who I had already made familiar acquaintance with, I asked after my distinctively tall friend—had he been seen to retire? And found a witness to this very moment.”

Oh, come on, thought Therion miserably, just do it, Prof. Just end the misery. Take your fucking revenge on my useless ass.

“A young lady who is apprenticed to the cook confirmed that my friend had gone to bed, to the back door—and with our other missing friend! ‘What is the meaning of this,’ I wondered, but the lady would not say. To switch rooms without informing anyone, and then to lock the way behind them—these were not usual actions from the companions I know so well.”

Olberic just closed his eyes. There was nowhere to hide. He closed his eyes, folded his hands on the table, and let Cyrus go for his throat. “So I, making use of my rational faculties, realized that my most prudent course of action would be to request to board with our friend Alfyn for the evening, but something stayed my feet—I could not rest until I had puzzled, for certain, why it was that I had been locked out of my quarters, where my clothes and my spare ink are,” he said, with admirable venom. “As such I waited all night for the door to be unlocked so I could investigate what strange circumstances led to my snubbing.”

What would it be? Therion wondered miserably. Ice? Fire? How would his life be ended? Would it be fast and merciful, or slow and painful? Would Cyrus let them beg? 

“Once it had been unlocked and I heard two pairs of feet make their exist to the washrooms, I entered the room to investigate. And here is the evidence I found:” Cyrus declared with a flourish of his hand, TERRIFYINGLY reaching under the table to pick up one of his bags.

 Oh, fuck no. FUCK no. 

“Here I have an article of clothing belonging to Therion,” he said, flicking his shirt onto the table, sweat-stained; “here the tools Olberic uses to polish his weaponry, cast carelessly aside, which is much out of his practice,” he spat, as he threw those onto the table with a clatter, “not even to mention that his treasured sword was unevenly tossed on the floor! And here,” he said, with a note of doom in his voice like the trill of an anxious violin, “HERE is the blade”—Therion’s knife—”which I found PIERCED into the WARDROBE in which I had PLACED my CLOTHING, STABBED into the side, which action had TORN my COAT.”

The knife clattered onto the table like it had been cast out of the hand of a man killed in battle. Therion felt his blood leaving his body and his heart going still.

“Aside from these things I found even more evidence which I was loathe to disturb,” Cyrus continued darkly, folding his hands again. “A purposeful shrouding of the room. The suspicious indisturbance of one half of the room, other than the molestation of my wardrobe. Stains,” he pronounced, his eyes flaring, “of a suspicious nature, which scent and appearance assaulted my senses. Have you gentlemen a clue of what conclusion I came to, faced with the WEALTH of information I uncovered?”

And with that, just as Therion feared, his eyes slipped from Olberic to himself and pinned him like a spear of ice pounded straight through his chest.

I DID IT , he screamed in his head, eyes frozen wide, I FUCKED OLBERIC IN YOUR ROOM, I RIPPED YOUR COAT, I STAINED THE BED WITH MY FUCKING SEED BECAUSE I’M SOME KIND OF FUCKING FIGHTSLUT, WHAT DO YOU WANT, YOU FUCKING DEMON?? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?? HAVE FUCKING MERCY, DREAD NERDLORD.

“I naturally concluded,” Cyrus continued, breaking the tension with a snap of his hand back to smooth his hair from his forehead, “that henceforth, I shall be shelling out the extra coin to rent my own private room for use whenever we rest in an establishment such as this. I am a salaried professional and I can do what I want. Good day to you both,” he continued, snatching up his papers but leaving the rest of the clutter on the table, “and inform our fair companions that we do no traveling this day, for Professor Albright is abed.”

And with that, he stood to take his leave.

Olberic watched Cyrus’s exit with dread silence, his hands gripping the table as though he had been preparing himself to be tortured. Therion tried to wheeze something at him as he passed by and strode to the stairs, but for the life of him, nothing came out of his mouth.

After his footsteps had fully faded away, and a door upstairs primly opened and knocked shut, Olberic and Therion finally dared to glance at each other. Olberic looked like he had just gone through the most stupid, exhausting ordeal of his life; his face was screwed up and pale.

“…Should have just told him,” he muttered, leaning forward to brace his forehead in one hand.

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BONUS SCENE: House Robbery Date

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A little while after writing the main fic, I started but did not finish a little bonus scene in which Olberic and Therion robbed a house together as a fun date idea. To wear my influences on my sleeve, this was inspired by a similar scene in Lynn Flewelling's fantastic Luck in the Dark, the first book in an old-school fantasy series which is in fact about queer men who rob houses together (among other things).

This being a little one-shot I never finished, it may have errors (spelling, grammatical, continuity), but here it is nonetheless.

--

“Looks like you’re looking for something a little more comfortable,” Therion spoke low.

Olberic, despite himself, gave him a double-take. Probably—surely no one had heard him, but if they had, his tone of voice was unmistakable. He schooled his face even as he took a deep swig of mead (heavy, fortified, fire-quick). “I simply do not fit on these bar stools.”

He didn’t. They weren’t quite made for men his size. He had been mostly managing by propping one leg on a cross-bar bracing the bar diagonally underfoot.

“Sure, that’s what I said,” said Therion in his normal tone of voice. He leaned back, smugly, and drank some of his own—a dark beer, smelling like bread even from Olberic’s seat.

Smarmy. He had made his point—he knew his innuendo had landed and he felt like he didn’t have to make another. And he wasn’t wrong. It occurred to Olberic that this might be just about the perfect night to take some time off. That was why they had scoped out a second bar for heavier drinking in the first place, they felt it was the last time they’d have in a while to do so. Having promised to wreck up a whole bunch of nearby coastal caves for a local who believed with all his heart a sea monster dwelled there, but couldn’t pinpoint where in the massive amphibious cave system it laid its head, the party just didn’t know how much time they would be out on the field(or on the water, rather).

On boats, with his fellows, getting more stressed as the hours wore on. Now that he had considered it, it would, frankly, be a mistake to not allow himself some relief ahead of time. “Hm,” he pondered. “You well know that my back has seen better days. I may be forced to find a place to lie back.”

Therion compulsively drummed his fingers on the table. He was also very skilled at hiding interest, but was a little drunk. By the sound of it, a little impatient too. “Shame its dark out, or I could get you to lie back on the beach, I think.”

Oh. While, in his past life, he had occasionally been accused of being perverse, he had always been private. “The beaches of Goldshore? Crowded, loud, dirty…”

“Mmm, and now that its late, they won’t be so warm,” Therion mused. “Expensive town, too. Not too many places to lay your head for free. But, so many tourists means so many vacant places… Why don’t we find somewhere that looks nice and sneak you in?”

Olberic blinked. He needed to make sure he understood. “Steal a room?”

“You’ve done so good swiping little things,” Therion flattered him.  “I’ve not put you through the paces of a break-in yet, though. Or any of you, because I can’t do shit in front of Philie or Tress,” he said, momentarily glowering ahead.

It was true. While just about any one of their odd party was willing to let Therion teach them fun, gimmicky little tricks, most of them shied away from more serious crimes. Who could blame them? Most had lived honestly, some still had reputations they didn’t want to risk tarnishing. Olberic, however, was a semantic step away from a sellsword, and was genuinely an enjoyer of Therion getting rough. “Ha. I’ll give you away. I might have learned how to pull a loose bag from someone’s belt, but I won’t be able to slip in through a window.”

“There are other ways,” Therion promised quietly. “Ideally, we would have been watching a mark for some time, getting their patterns in mind. A few at a time, and then strike in a line before you skip town. The way we used to do it—” he smiled nastily, paused to take a deep swill of his drink. “How we used to do it up north is we would wait until someone we had been watching left the house, just for errands. One of us would stop them right outside to chat; my thing was that I always told them I was looking for my little brother, who didn’t come home from school. Always felt so bad. Took forever to send me on my way.

“But while you’re talking, another one of the guys slips in the house. And this is crucial—you have to wait. You can’t give into the urge to swipe things while the homeowner is being distracted. Too risky. The guy who goes inside gets into a hiding spot, and waits for full dark. Then, at the witching hour, or until he’s sure everyone asleep, he sneaks out to open the door for the rest of us, and we all come in. You’ve got to be quiet—you’ve got to be ghost-quiet—but if you’ve got a group of skilled guys you can mostly trust, you can take everything you can carry and leave and they won’t know until morning.”

“It sounds complex,” Olberic said.

“Well, there are simpler methods. That’s just the fun one, being in the house all day.”

“No, it reminds me of a rather difficult battle tactic,” Olberic explained, “and I rarely saw that pulled off either.”

“Oh?”

“It takes a lot of foresight,” he reminisced. “There were certainly those who considered it unsporting. Among the warring kingdoms of the Highlands, there were kingdoms that had been in conflict for generations. They knew each other well. It was not unheard of for a general to try to pull off what we called a trick massacre. You see, one needs to have a stockpile of outfits, armor, insignia, packs, shoes, everything from the other country—usually gained or made over several years of work. And they must be perfect—absolutely indistinguishable from the actual garb of the enemy army. The one dresses one’s own soldiers in this enemy garb, and sends them slowly—SLOWLY into the enemy camp. This process should take moons of planning, of slowly swelling their ranks. Best done even as they’re gathering the army, so its rare that a man has this so well done ahead of time.

“Then, at an assigned day, all these counterfeit warriors rise up, and begin cutting the throats of those near them. No one is ever prepared—not if you’ve gotten to that point. You should have been catching spies and infiltrators much, much earlier, it only works if your enemy is disorganized enough. If it does work—” Olberic cleared some heat out of his voice. “Beautiful. An army driven to animal chaos in minutes.”

“Shit,” said Therion appraisingly. One hand was holding his beer; the other was curled over his chin and lower lip.

“It is not considered proper, of course,” Olberic promised him with a smile. “In fact, I was one of those who decried it as unmanly fighting at the time. Really, I always liked that sort of thing.”

“We had better go find somewhere,” said Therion, standing up nimbly.

Olberic cracked a smile, then downed as much mead as he could manage before standing as well. “If you’re in a rush.”

“Well, I am now. You just sound so sweet when you talk about slaughtering thousands,” he said, and turned to leave. As always, he gave Olberic the choice to follow him—and a reminder of the general unwholesome tenor of their relationship. As always, Olberic sued some assumed watching deity for patience with his misdeeds and swiftly followed.

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