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Wings (Крылья, 1906) by Mikhail Kuzmin - Part One

It was becoming brighter and brighter inside the somewhat empty train carriage with the morning; through the fogged-up window, the green of the grass, almost venomously vivid despite it being the end of August, the waterlogged roads, the milkmaids’ little carts in front of the lowered barrier, the guard huts, the women at their dachas wandering under colourful umbrellas could all be seen. At the frequent, identical stations, the carriage took on new local passengers with briefcases and it was obvious that the carriage, the railway – for them, these were neither an era, nor even an episode in their lives, but a normal part of daily routine, and the bench upon which Nikolai Ivanovich Smurov was sitting with Vanya seemed like the most solid and significant in the whole carriage. The tightly-fastened suitcases, the cushioned straps, the old gentleman sitting opposite with long hair and an out-of-fashion bag strung over his shoulder – all this spoke to a prolonged journey, less familiar and more era-defining.

Looking now at the reddish sunbeam that blazed intermittently through the clouds of locomotive steam, then at Nikolai Ivanovich’s face, which had taken on a stupid look as he slept, Vanya recalled the rasping voice of this brother of his when, in the hall back there, far away, ‘at home’, he had said to him, “There’s nothing left out of that money of yours from mama; you know, we’re not rich ourselves, but, as a brother, I’m prepared to help you out; you’ve still got a lot of school ahead of you and I can’t take you in, but I’ll settle you in round Aleksei Vasilyevich’s and come and see you; it’s happy there, you can meet a lot of proper people. You keep on trying; Natasha and I would be happy to take you, but it’s decidedly impossible; indeed, you’d be happy at the Kazansky’s: there’s always young people there. I’ll pay for you; when we split up – I’ll take it away.” Vanya had listened, sitting at the window in the hall and watching how the sun lit up the corner of his trunk, Nikolai Ivanovich’s grey and lilac-striped trousers, and the painted floor. He did not attempt to pick up on the meaning of the words, lost in thought about how mama had died, how the house had suddenly filled up with old women, once strangers and now unusually close; he remembered the hassle, the funeral service, the burial, and the abrupt emptiness and solitude after all of this , and, without looking at Nikolai Ivanovich, he simply said mechanically, “Yes, uncle Kolya,” even though Nikolai Ivanovich was not his uncle, only his cousin.

It seemed strange to him now to journey as a pair together with this person who was nevertheless altogether alien to him, to be so close to him for so long, to talk about business and make plans with him. He was also somewhat disappointed, even though he had known this in advance, that they would not arrive immediately in the centre of Saint Petersburg, with its palaces and large buildings filled with sun, people and martial music, coming in through a big archway, and instead, vegetable gardens visible through grey fences, along with graveyards that seemed from afar like romantic groves, and chill, damp multi-storey workers’ tenements set amongst tumbledown shacks all stretched long and far through the smoke and soot. So, this is it – Petersburg! thought Vanya with disappointment and curiosity as he looked at the unwelcoming faces of the porters.

“Have you finished reading them, Kostya? May I?” said Anna Nikolaevna as she stood up from the table and took a bundle of Russian newspapers off Konstantin Vasilyevich with her long fingers, decorated with cheap rings despite the early hour.

“Yes; there’s nothing interesting.”

“What could be interesting in our newspapers? I understand it overseas. You can write anything over there, answering for it in court, if necessary. We’ve got something awful – you don’t know what to believe in. The reports and dispatches from the government are untrue or meaningless, there’s no kind of inner life besides wasting money – just special correspondents’ rumours.”

“But even abroad, there’s only sensationalised rumours and they’re not held accountable before the law for telling half-truths.”

Koka and Boba idly chatted with spoons in their glasses and ate bread with bad butter.

“Whereabouts are you going to be today, Nata? Do you have much to do?” asked Anna Nikolaevna with a slightly affected tone.

Nata – all freckly, with a vulgar, pouting mouth and auburn hair – said something in response through the roll of bread stuffed in her cheek. Uncle Kostya, formerly a cashier at some shady club before being caught with his hand in the till, had been living at his brother’s without a place or business of his own after getting out of prison and was indignant at his trial for embezzlement.

“Now that everything is waking up, new forces are emerging, everything is awakening,” Aleksei Vasilyevich contested hotly.

“I’m not for any awakenings at all; for example, I prefer Sonya’s aunt asleep.”

Students and simply young people of some sort or another were coming and going in their jackets, sharing amongst themselves their impressions, taken from the newspapers, of the horse races that had just been; uncle Kostya called for vodka; Anna Nikolaevna, already in her hat and pulling on gloves, spoke about an exhibition while looking askance at uncle Kostya, who was pouring shots with slightly shaking hands. He cast his kindly, red-tinged eyes about the room and said, “A strike, my friends, this, you know, this, you know…”

“Larion Dmitriyevich!” announced the maid as she quickly went through to the kitchen, picking up a tray with glasses and a dirty, crumpled tablecloth on the way.

Vanya turned away from the window where he was standing and saw coming in through the door the long, well-familiar and baggy-clothed figure of Larion Dmitriyevich Stroop.

Vanya started to comb his hair and spent considerable time occupying himself with his toilette. Examining his reflection in a little mirror on the wall, he looked on with detachment at the somewhat indifferent, round face there, with its flushed colour, big, grey eyes, handsome, but still childishly puckered mouth, and light hair, which, not having been cut short, curled slightly. He neither liked nor disliked this tall, thin boy with thin eyebrows, wearing a loose black shirt. Out the window was the courtyard with its paving slabs slick with water, along with the windows of the opposite wing and peddlers with matches. It was a holiday, and everyone was still asleep. Having risen early out of habit, Vanya sat by the window to await some tea, listening to the sounds of the nearby church and the murmurings of the servants as they put the neighbouring room in order. He remembered holiday mornings there, ‘at home’, in an old quarter of the village, their tidy little rooms with muslin curtains and icon lamps, liturgies, pirogi for lunch – everything all nice and simple, bright and sweet, and he began to grow tired of the rainy weather, of the street organs in the yards, of newspapers over morning tea, of this hazy and uncomfortable life, of warm bedrooms.

Konstantin Vasilyevich, who sometimes dropped by to see Vanya, stuck his head in the door.

“Are you alone, Vanya?”

“Yes, uncle Kostya. Hello! What is it?”

“Nothing. Are you waiting for some tea?”

“Yes. Has auntie not gotten up yet?”

“She’s up, but she hasn’t left, though. She’s in a foul mood, which I suppose means there’s no money. The first sign is how she’s been sitting in the bedroom for two hours – this means that there’s no money. And for what? She’ll have to come out anyway.”

“Does uncle Aleksei Vasilyevich earn a lot? Don’t you know?”

“As much as I need to. And what do you mean, “a lot”? Nobody ever has ‘a lot’ of money.”

Konstantin Vasilyevich sighed and fell silent; Vanya was silent too as looked out of the window.

“What I wanted to ask you, my dear Ivan,” Konstantin Vasilyevich began again, “was whether you had money to spare ‘til the middle of the week; I’ll return it on Wednesday, straight away.”

“Where on earth would I get money from? No, of course not.”

“What does it matter where it comes from? Maybe you know someone who…”

“Really, uncle! Who, exactly, would give me money?”

“So, you don’t have any, then, I take it?”

“No.”

“What a poor state of affairs!”

“And how much were you looking for?”

“Five roubles, not a lot, not a lot at all,” Konstantin Vasilyevich lit back up again. “Maybe it will turn up, eh? Just until Wednesday, how’s about it?!”

“I don’t have five roubles.”

Konstantin Vasilyevich looked on at Vanya with disappointment and conniving and fell silent. Vanya fell deeper into ennui.

“Well, what’s to be done, huh? There’s already a touch of rain… Tell you what, my dearest Ivan, ask Larion Dmitriyevich for money for me.”

“Stroop?”

“Yes, ask him, my dear lad!”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

“He won’t give it to me.”

“Why would he give me some, if he won’t give you any?”

“He will give it to you, believe me; please, my lad, just don’t mention that it’s for me; ask as though you needed the 20 roubles for yourself.”

“I thought it was only 5?!”

“Does it make a difference, how much you ask for? Please, Vanya!”

“Okay, fine. But what if he asks me why?”

“He won’t ask, he’s a clever one.”

“Just be sure to return it, you see.”

“I won’t let you down, I won’t.”

“And why do you think, uncle, that Stroop will give me money?”

“Because I think so!” Konstantin Vasilyevich, smiling, tiptoed out of the room, abashed, yet satisfied. Vanya stood a long time by the window, neither turning around nor looking at the rainy yard, and when he was called to tea, before going into the dining room, he once again took a look in the mirror at his blushing face with its grey eyes and thin eyebrows.

In Greek, Nikolaev and Spielevsky kept Vanya entertained the whole time, turning around and snickering at the desk in front. Before the holidays, lessons would go along on any old lines, and the little aging teacher, sitting on his leg, talked about Greek life without setting any tasks; the windows were open and the tops of the trees, coming into their foliage, and the red façade of some building were visible. Vanya’s urge to get out of Petersburg and into the open air, somewhere far away, grew stronger and stronger. The copper door handles and window latches, the spittoons, all polished to brightness, the cards on the walls, the chalkboard, the yellow paper drawer, the backs of his comrades’ heads, some short-cropped, some curly – all this seemed unbearable to him.

“Sycophantic informers, spies – literally, bearers of figs; when it was still forbidden on pain of a fine to export these products from Attica, these people, blackmailers, as we would have it, showed from under their cloaks a fig to the suspect, as a threat, in case he didn’t pay a bribe…” And Daniil Ivanovich, without moving from his chair, demonstrated by gestures and mimicry the informers and the defamed and the cloak and the fig; then, leaping from his seat, he walked about the classroom anxiously repeating the same thing, something along the lines of, “Sycophants … yes, sycophants … yes, gentlemen, sycophants!”, applying a different, yet entirely unexpected, inflection on each word.

I’ll try and ask Stroop for that money today, thought Vanya, looking out the window.

Spielevsky, finally reddened, arose from the desk:

“Why’s Nikolaev molesting me?!”

“Nikolaev, why are you molesting Spielevsky?”

“I’m not molesting him.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“I’m tickling him.”

“Sit down. And you, Master Spielevsky, I advise you to be more precise in your verbiage. Taking into consideration that you are not a woman, Master Nikolaev cannot molest you, being a young man, already of age and of rather limited notions.

“I put the question like this: if you want to work, work; if not, then don’t!” said Anna Nikolaevna with such airs as if the interest of the entire world were fixed upon how she put the question. In the parlour, decorated length and breadth with period furniture in the image of seated bathtubs, Bath chairs and drawers for papers, it was loud with four female voices: those of Anna Nikolaevna, Nata and the Speier sisters – artists.

“I really love this cupboard, but the bench doesn’t do anything for me. I would always prefer a wardrobe.”

“Even if you needed furniture for sitting on?”

“They rail against how the maid is overworked: she goes for a walk more than we do! Sometimes I go days without leaving the house, while our dear Anna, how many times does she manage to go out to the store? Never mind whether it’s for bread or boots. And besides, interacting with people is too big a task. I find all these commiserators’ complaints exaggerated.”

“Imagine, he postures about in such a mood that the girl students are afraid to sit near him. And he’s a most interesting personality, besides: a Russian gypsy from Munich; he’s been to the Gymnasium, the ballet, he’s done modelling; he has some very amusing details about Stuck.”

“It would be too bright in pink foulard. I’d prefer a pale yellow.”

“We should ask Stroop about this.”

“But he left yesterday, did Stroop, you poor things!” cried the elder Speier.

“What, Stroop left? Where to? What for?”

“Well, that I can’t really tell you: as usual, it’s a secret.”

“Who did you hear this from?”

“I heard it from he himself; he said three weeks.”

“Well, that’s not too frightful.”

“Today, Vanya Smurov was also asking when Stroop would be here with us.”

“But what does he have to do with it?”

“I don’t know, business of some kind.”

“Vanya has business with Stroop? How original!”

“Well, Nata, it’s time for us to go,” Anna Nikolaevna tried to chirp up, and both ladies, with skirts rustling, withdrew, convinced that they very much resembled the high-society ladies of the novels by Prévost and Ohnet which they read in translation.

In April, the question of the dacha was raised. Aleksei Vasilyevich needed to be in city frequently, almost daily; Koka and Boba as well, and Anna Nikolaevna and Nata’s plans with regards to the Volga hung in the air. They were vacillating between Terijoki and Sestroretsk, but, regardless of the location of the dacha, they were all concerned about their summer dresses. Dust floated in the open window and the hum of traffic and the sounds of horse-drawn trams could be heard.

Vanya sometimes left for the Summer Garden to do his preparatory reading for his classes. Sitting on the outermost path to the Field of Mars with his little yellow-pink volume of Teubner’s publications laying open, cover side up and already grown slightly and pale from his spring tan, he watched the passers-by in the garden and on the other side of the Lebyazhoi ditch. The laughter of the children in the Krylovskaya playground reached him from the other end of the garden and he didn’t hear the sound of Stroop’s footsteps in the sand as he approached.

“Studying?” said the latter as he lowered himself onto the bench next to Vanya, who thought to limit himself to a bow.

“Yes, I’m studying. You know how boring this is, it’s simply a nightmare!”

“What is it, Homer?”

“It’s Homer. This Greek especially.”

“You don’t enjoy Greek?”

“Who does enjoy it?” smiled Vanya.

“That’s a terrible shame!”

“What is?”

“That you don’t enjoy languages.”

“Living ones I enjoy, you can read something, but who’s going to read them in Greek, this antediluvian stuff?”

“What a child you are, Vanya. The whole world, worlds are closed off to you; besides, to not only know, but love the world of beauty – that is the foundation of any education.”

“But it takes so much time to learn grammar, when you could just read the translations!”

Stroop regarded Vanya with an infinite regret.

“Instead of a person made of flesh and blood, smiling or frowning, who you could love, kiss, hate, in whose veins you could see the blood flowing and the natural grace of the nude body, to have a soulless doll, usually made by a craftsman’s hands – that’s what translations are. And it really doesn’t take much time to learn the preparatory grammar. You just need to read, read, read. Read while looking up each word in the dictionary, picking your way through like a thicket of trees and you will find a pleasure you have never experienced. And it seems to me that you have in yourself the potential to remake yourself into a real, new person, Vanya.”

Vanya remained silent in discontent.

“You are poorly surrounded, but this could be for the best, depriving you of the prejudices of any normal life, and you could make yourself a completely modern person, if you wanted,” added Stroop, who had been silent a moment.

“I don’t know, I’d like to get somewhere away from all of this: away from the Gymnasium, and Homer, and Anna Nikolaevna – that’s all.”

“Into the bosom of nature?”

“Exactly.”

“But, sweet friend of mine, if you living in the bosom of nature means eating more, drinking milk, bathing and not getting up to much, then of course that’s very simple; but to take pleasure in nature may as well be harder than Greek grammar, and, like all pleasures, wears out. And I will not believe a person, who, looking in the city upon the best parts of nature – the sky and the water – with indifference goes to look for nature on Mont Blanc; I will not believe that he loves nature.

Uncle Kostya offered Vanya a ride in the cab.

The proximity of summer could already be felt in the heat of the morning and the streets were half-obstructed with obstacles. Uncle Kostya, taking up three quarters of the cab, sat down assertively, with his legs apart.

“Uncle Kostya, wait a little bit and I’ll just found whether the priest has come, and if he hasn’t, I’ll go with you as far as it suits you and then I’ll go the rest of the way on foot, rather than sit in the Gymnasium. Is that alright?”

“But why shouldn’t your priest have come?”

“He’s been ill for a week.”

“Ah, well alright, go ask.”

Within a minute, Vanya had left and having gone around the cab, sat on the other side, next to Konstantin Vasilyevich:

“It’s as if Larion Dmitriyevich had a feeling, brother, about the kinds of plans we were drawing for him – he left and he never came back, either.”

“He might have come back.”

“Then he would come to Anna Nikolaevna.”

“Who is he exactly, Uncle Kostya?”

“Who’s who, exactly?”

“Larion Dmitriyevich.”

“Stroop – and nothing more. Half-English, a rich man, he doesn’t serve anywhere, he lives well, excellently even, both educated and well-read to the highest degree, so I don’t understand at all why he’s at the Kazanskys’.”

“He’s not married, right, Uncle?”

“It’s the complete opposite, in fact, and if Nata thinks that he’d be tempted by her, she’s sorely mistaken; and anyway, I absolutely do not understand what he has to do round the Kazanskys’? Yesterday was a great laugh: Anna Nikolaevna went to battle with Aleksei!”

They crossed the bridge over the Fontanka. Muzhiki were hoisting fish out of hatches in the fishponds, the steamboats smoked, and the crowd stood idly by around the stone rampart. An ice cream seller was grunting as he pushed his blue container.

“So, did you perhaps hear from somebody that Stroop returned, or did you see him yourself?” said Uncle Kostya at the moment of their farewell.

“No, where could I even have got that from, since you said he hasn’t arrived” said Vanya, blushing.

“And here you said it wasn’t hot and you’re so red yourself,” and Konstantin Vasilyevich’s corpulent body hid itself within the entryway.

Why did I hide my meeting with Stroop from him? thought Vanya, glad that he was keeping some kind of secret.

The staffroom was hazy with cigarette smoke and the cups of weak tea were becoming slightly scummy in the dim ground-floor room. To a person coming in, it appeared as though the figures were moving about as in an aquarium. The torrential rain pouring outside the opaque windows strengthened this impression. The sound of voices, the chink of little teaspoons mingled with the muffled din of the breaktime that reached the room from the hall and, with time, from even closer – the corridor.

“Orlov is being given a hard time by sixth class again; he really doesn’t know how to apply himself.”

“Well, ok, let’s suppose you give him a bad grade, he stays around – do you think that that will fix him?”

“I’m not at all looking to set corrective targets, I’m trying to give a proper judgement of their knowledge.”

“Our students would be terrified if they saw the programmes for French colleges, let alone the seminars.”

“I doubt Ivan Petrovich would be satisfied with that.”

“Incomparable, I tell you, incomparable; yesterday his speech was outstanding.”

“You’re good as well, going for the small in clubs while you have a king, jack and two small ones.”

“Spielevsky is a little reprobate, and I don’t understand why you stand up for him like this.”

All voices were silenced by the sharp tenor of the inspector, a Czech man with pince-nez and a grey, pointed beard.

“Then I will remind you, gentlemen, to pay attention to the ventilation window; never above fourteen degrees, draught and ventilation.”

They gradually went their different ways and only the quiet bass of the Russian teacher chatting with the Greek resounded through the emptying staffroom.

“You come across some interesting types here. In summer, before enrolment, they had some reading to do, a fair amount, and, for example, The Demon[1] – here’s how they render it ex abrupto: ‘The Devil was flying over the earth and saw a girl’ – What was the girl called? – ‘Liza’ – Let’s say Tamara. – ‘Fine, Tamara.’ – Well, what then? – ‘He wanted to marry her, but her husband intervened, then the husband was killed by Tatars.’ – So did the Demon go on to marry Tamara? – ‘There was no way, an angel got in the way, crossing the road, so the Devil remained single and hated everything.’”

“Magnificent, in my opinion…”

“Or this review of Rudin:[2] ‘There was this rubbish guy, who said a lot and didn’t do anything, then he got mixed up with some shallow people who killed him.’ – So why, I ask, do you think the workers, and in general all the members of the people’s movement in which Rudin died, are shallow people? – ‘That’s right,’ he answers, ‘he suffered for the truth.’”

“You’re trying in vain to get a personal opinion out of this young person about what he’s read. Military service, like a monastery, like almost any preconfigured doctrine, has a huge appeal in the availability of ready-made and fixed attitudes to any kind of phenomena or concepts. For weak people, this is a big support, and life becomes unusually easy, lacking in ethical creativity.”

In the corridor, Vanya was laying in wait for Daniil Ivanovich.

“What can I do for you, Smurov?”

“I’d like to speak with you, Daniil Ivanovich, in private.”

“What about?”

“About Greek.”

“Aren’t you doing well?”

“No, I have a 3+.”

“So what do you want?”

“No, I’d rather like to speak with you about Greek, and please, Daniil Ivanovich, let me come to your apartment.”

“Yes, of course, of course. You know my address. Although, this is more than noteworthy: someone who’s got it all going well and wants to speak in private about Greek. I live alone, please, I’m at your service from seven till eleven.”

Daniil Ivanovich started to climb the stairs, but stopped and shouted after Vanya, “Hey, Smurov, just to say: I’m still at home after eleven but I’ll have gone to bed and am only capable of the most private explanations which I’m sure you don’t need.”

Vanya met with Stroop in the Summer Garden more than once and, without realising himself, came to lay in wait for him, always sitting by the same path and leaving when he could not abide the wait with an easy, albeit deliberately slow, gait, carefully scrutinising the male figures which resembled Stroop. One time, however, after not meeting Stroop, he went for a walk around part of the garden where he had never been before and met Koka, who was going for a walk in an unbuttoned coat over a mess jacket.

“There you are, Ivan! What are you doing, going for a walk?”

“Yes, I’m here fairly often. What of it?”

“Why do I never see you then? Do you sit somewhere on the other side, is that it?”

“Wherever possible.”

“Whenever I bump into Stroop, it’s over there and I wonder – is it not for the same thing that we come here?”

“Stroop’s arrived?”

“A little while ago. Nata and all the rest know, and however a fool Nata may be, it’s still swinish of him to not have come to visit us, as though we were some kind of trash.”

“What does Nata have to do with it?”

“She’s trying to reel him in, but she’s barking up completely the wrong tree: he’s not one to get married, not to Nata, anyway; I think with one Ida Golberg he has purely aesthetic discussions and that I’m worrying for nothing.”

“You’re worried?”

“Since I’m in love!” Forgetting that he was talking with Vanya, who did not know his affairs, Koka burst into life, “A strange girl, educated, a musician, a beauty, and how rich! It’s just that she’s lame. And so, I come here every day to see her; she walks here from three to four and I worry whether Stroop’s not here for the same reason.”

“You think Stroop could also be in love with her?”

“Stroop? Well, you can stop right there, he wouldn’t know his head from a hole in the ground! All he does is talk, while she practically worships him. Being in love for Stroop is an utterly, completely different realm.”

“You’re just angry, Koka!”

“Stupid!”

They had just turned by the bed of red germaniums when Koka pronounced, “There they are!” Vanya saw a tall girl, with a pale, round face, lustrous hair, an Aphrodisiacal cut of grey eyes, now blue with excitement, a mouth from a Botticelli painting, in a dark dress; she walked, limping and holding onto an old lady’s arm, while from the other side Stroop was saying, “and the people saw that any beauty, any love from the gods and they became free and courageous and grew wings.”

In the end, Koka and Boba procured a box for Samson and Delilah, but the first showing was replaced by Carmen, and Nata, on whose insistence this activity had been decided upon in the hopes of meeting Stroop on neutral ground, tossed and turned in the knowledge that he would not come to such a well-known opera as this without a good reason. She let Vanya have her place in the box, such that if she arrived at the theatre in the middle of the performance, he would go home. Anna Nikolaevna together with the Speier sisters and Aleksei Vasilyevich set off in cabs while the young people went forth on foot.

Carmen and her friends were already folk dancing with Lillas Pastia when Nata, finding out as though by divine inspiration that Stroop was in the theatre, appeared all in blue, powdered and agitated.

“You’re dismissed then, Vanya.”

“I’ll stay until the end of the act.”

“Is Stroop here?” asked Nata in a whisper, sitting next to Anna Nikolaevna. The latter silently shifted her gaze to the box where Ida Golberg was sitting with an old lady, an officer rather on the young side, and Stroop.

“It’s just a premonition, a premonition!” said Nata, opening and closing her fan.

“You poor creature!” sighed Anna Nikolaevna.

During the entr’acte, Vanya was getting ready to go when Nata stopped him and called him into the foyer.

“Nata, Nata!” Anna Nikolaevna’s voice rang out from the depths of the box, “Would that be proper?”

Nata rushed tempestuously down below, carrying Vanya away with her. Before going into the foyer, she stopped by a mirror to fix her hair and then went into the hall, which was not yet fully populated by audience members. They met Stroop: he entered into discussion with the same young officer who had been in the box, not noticing Smurov or Nata, and even exited straight after for a neighbouring passageway, where a frizzy-haired saleswoman was bored behind a desk with photographs.

“Let’s get out of here, it’s frightfully stuffy!” said Nata, dragging Vanya after Stroop.

“We’re closer to the spot from that exit.”

“I don’t care!” the girl raised her voice as she quickened her pace and almost pushed the audience members aside.

Stroop saw them and stooped over the photographs. Drawing even with him, Vanya loudly hailed, “Larion Dmitriyevich!”

“Ah, Vanya!” The latter man turned around, “Natalya Alekseevna, forgive me, I did not notice you at first.”

“I didn’t expect you to be here,” began Nata.

“Why not? I dearly love Carmen, and it never bores me: there is a deep and true pulse of life in it, all filled with sunlight; I understand that Nietzsche might have been interested in this music.”

Nata listened silently, regarding the speaker with spiteful, red eyes, and pronounced:

“I’m not surprised by meeting you at Carmen, but by the fact that I saw you in Petersburg and not round ours.”

“Yes, I arrived two weeks ago.”

“That’s very nice.”

They began to walk along the empty corridor past drowsing footmen, and Vanya, stood by the staircase, watched with interest Nata’s face, the way it became increasingly covered in the red blemishes, and the gruff physiognomy of her cavalier. The entr’acte ended and Vanya quietly began to climb the staircase to the balcony in order to dress and go home when suddenly he was overtaken by Nata, almost running, with her handkerchief to her mouth.

“It’s disgraceful, you hear, Ivan, disgraceful the way that person spoke to me,” she whispered to Vanya and ran upstairs. Vanya wanted to say goodbye to Stroop and after having stood around on the staircase for some time, he descended to the lower corridor; there, by the door to the box, stood Stroop with the officer.

“Excuse me, Larion Dmitriyevich,” said Vanya, making as though he were going upstairs to his room.

“You can’t be leaving?”

“Well, it wasn’t my own seat, you see; Nata arrived, I was the excess.”

“What’s with this silliness, come to us in our box, we have a free spot. The next act is one of the best.”

“Is it not a problem if I go to the box? I’m a stranger.”

“Of course, it’s nothing: Golberg is a simple person and you are still a boy, Vanya.”

As they entered the box, Stroop bent down to Vanya, who listened to him without turning his head:

“And then, Vanya, I may not be around the Kazanskys’; so, if you don’t mind, I would always be very happy to see you round mine. You could say that you’re studying your English with me; nobody will ask where and why you’re going. Please, Vanya, come.”

“Very well. Did you really break things off with Nata? You’re not going to marry her?” asked Vanya without turning his head.

“No,” said Stroop seriously.

“That’s very good, you know, that you’re not marrying her, because she’s terribly repulsive, a complete frog!” Vanya suddenly burst into laughter, turned to face Stroop fully and for some reason unknown to him, took his hand.

“It’s interesting, how much we see what we want to see and understand what it is we look for. As with the Greek tragedians, the Romans and the Romance peoples of the 17th century saw only three unities, the 18th century – stentorian tirades and ideas of liberation, the Romantics – deeds of the highest heroism and our century – a sharp tinge of primitiveness and Klinger’s illumination of the distances…”

Vanya listened while looking around the room still flooded with evening sunlight. On the walls were shelves upon shelves of unbound books, books on the tables and the chairs, a cage with a thrush, a paralysed kitten on the leather sofa and in the corner, a small bust of Antinoös standing alone, like a household deity of this abode. Daniil Ivanovich, in low felt shoes, fussed over the tea and took cheese and butter in little papers out of the iron stove, and the kitten, without moving its head, followed the movements of its owner with green eyes. And where did we get the idea that he’s old, when he’s really quite young, thought Vanya, examining the bald head of the young Greek with wonder.

“In the 15th century, an enduring view of Achilles’ friendship with Patroclus, and Orestes’ with Pylades as sodomitic love had already been established, whereas there is no direct reference to this in Homer.”

“What, so the Italians thought this up themselves?”

“No, they were right, but the point is that it’s only a cynical attitude towards love of any kind which turns it into debauchery. Am I acting morally or immorally when I sneeze, wipe away dust or stroke a kitten? However, these actions could be criminal, if, say, I warn a murderer by a sneeze of a suitable time for the murder and so on. Committing the murder in cold blood, without malice, deprives the act of any ethical nuance, save the mystical communion between murder and victim, lovers, mother and child.”

It was getting altogether dark and out the window, the rooves of the houses and the faraway Isaac cathedral could hardly be seen in the dingy pink sky, obscured by smoke.

Vanya began to get ready to go home; the kitten began to hobble about on its crippled front paws, disturbed by Vanya’s cap, upon which it had been sleeping.

“You must be a kind man, Daniil Ivanovich: you take care of different cripples.”

“He likes me, and I enjoy having him. If doing what brings me satisfaction means I’m kind, then so I am.”

“Tell me, please, Smurov,” said Daniil Ivanovich, shaking Vanya’s hand farewell, “did you come up with idea to come to me for Greek discussions all by yourself?”

“Yes, that is, the thought perhaps came to me from another person.”

“Who was it, if it’s not a secret?”

“No, why would it be? It’s just that you don’t know him.”

“And what if I did?”

“A certain Mr Stroop.”

“Larion Dmitriyevich?”

“You really know him?”

“Very well, even,” answered the Greek, lighting the way Vanya’s way to the staircase with a lamp.

Nobody was in the locked cabin on the Finnish steamboat, but Nata, worried about a draught, led the whole company there anyway.

“Absolutely, absolutely no dachas!” said Anna Nikolaevna, exhausted. “There’s such foulness everywhere: holes in the walls, the wind blowing!”

“The wind always blows at dachas – what did you expect? You weren’t born yesterday!”

“Do you want one?” Koka offered Boba his open cigar case, open, with a nude woman on it.

“It’s not the dacha itself being foul that makes it foul there, it’s because you feel like you’re on bivouac, temporarily surviving without an established life, while in the city you always know what needs doing and when.”

“And what if you were to live at the dacha all the time, summer and winter?”

“Then it would not be disgusting; I’d establish a routine.”

“True,” Anna Nikolaevna picked up the thread, “I wouldn’t want to get settled down for a while. For example, the summer before last we put new wallpaper up – so that it was all pristine when it came to give it back to the landlord; not to tear it all down!”

“Do you wish, then, that you hadn’t smeared it?”

Nata looked out of the window with a grimace at the palaces and golden-pink, wide and smoothly spreading waves, all burning in the sunset.

“And then there’s a mass of people, everyone knows about each other, what they cook, how much they pay the servants.”

“How abominable!”

“What are you going for?”

“What do you mean, what for? Where else should I disappear off to? Should I stay in the city, or what?”

“And what of it? At least, when it’s sunny, you can walk on the shaded side.”

“Uncle Kostya’s always making things up.”

“Mama,” Nata suddenly turned around, “my dear, let’s go to the Volga; there’s little towns there, Plyos, Vasilsursk, where you can set yourself up for not a lot of money. Varvara Nikolaevna Speier was saying… They lived in Plyos with a whole entourage, you know, Levitan also lived there; they in Ugilch as well.”

“Well, as it seems, they were thrown out of Ugilch,” responded Koka.

“Well then, they were thrown out, what of it? They won’t throw us out! Of course, the landlords said to them: ‘you have a whole entourage, young ladies, suitors, ours is a quiet town, nobody goes travelling around, we’re afraid: if you’ll forgive us, but clear out the apartment.’”

They were approaching the Aleksandrovsky Garden. In the lower windows of the wharf, a brightly lit kitchen was visible, a sculleryman, all in white, past the cleaning sailor, a blazing stove in the depths.

“Auntie, I’ll be going from here to Larion Dmitriyevich,” said Vanya.

“Go on, then; you’ve found a comrade here as well!” grumbled Anna Nikolaevna.

“So he’s a bad person?”

“I didn’t say that he’s a bad person, just that he’s not a comrade.”

“I’m practising English with him.”

“It’s all rubbish, you’d do better to prepare for your lessons…”

“No, I’m still going, you know, Auntie.”

“Well go, who’s keeping you?”

“Make sure to give your Stroop a kiss,” added Nata.

“Maybe I will, no-one’s bothered about it.”

“Perhaps we should,” started Boba, but Vanya interrupted him, flying at Nata:

“I bet you’d love to kiss him, while he doesn’t want you because you’re a ginger little frog, you’re an imbecile! Yeah!”

“Ivan, pack it in!” Aleksei Vasilyevich’s voice rang out.

“Why do they have it in for me? Why don’t they let me go? Because I’m small? I will write to uncle Kolya tomorrow!”

“Ivan, stop it,” exclaimed Aleksei Vasilyevich with a higher tone.

“Such a little boy, you pig, daring to behave like that!” Anna Nikolaevna was alarmed.

“And Stroop will never, ever, ever marry you!” blurted Vanya, besides himself.

Nata immediately abated and, almost calmly, said quietly:

“Will he marry Ida Golberg then?”

“I don’t know,” simply answered Vanya, also quietly. “It’s not likely, I don’t think,” he added, almost tenderly.

“Here’s another argument kicking off!” cried Anna Nikolaevna.

“What, do you mean you believe that boy?”

“Perhaps I do believe him,” grumbled Nata, turning to the window.

“Hey, you, Ivan, you mustn’t think they’re such little idiots as they want to appear,” Boba urged Vanya. “They’re overjoyed that through you they get to have dealings with Stroop and updates on Golberg; only, if you really are attached to Larion Dmitriyevich, be careful not to betray yourself.”

“In what way would I betray myself?” Vanya was surprised.

“My advice has been taken on board so quickly?!” Boba began to laugh and stepped onto the wharf.

When Vanya entered Stroop’s apartment, he could hear singing and piano. He quietly went to the study on the left of the hallway, without going into the parlour, and began to listen. A male voice, unknown to him, sang:

The piano shrouded the agonising phrases of the voice with low chords, like a thick fog. An intermittent discussion between masculine voices broke out, and Vanya went out into the hall. How he loved this spacious, green room, resounding with the sounds of Rameau and Debussy, and these friends of Stroop’s, so unlike the people he met at the Kazanskys’; the debates; the late dinners with men with wine and light discussion; the study with books up to the ceiling where they read Marlow and Swinburne, the bedroom with the washbasin, where dark red fauns danced around with a garland on the bright green background; the dining room, all in red copper; the tales about Italy, Egypt, India; the rapturous delights borne from the poignant beauty of all countries and all times; the walks around the island; the confusing but enticing reasonings; this smile on this unattractive face; the smell of peau d’Espagne, wafting putrefaction; these thin, strong fingers in signet rings, boots on an unusually wide sole – how he loved all of this, engrossed vaguely without understanding.

The evening gloom over a hot sea,

The fires of lighthouses in the darkening sky,

The scent of vervain at the end of the banquet,

A fresh morning after long vigils,

A walk along the paths of a springtime park,

The cries and laughter of bathing women,

Sacred peacocks at the temple of Juno,

Merchants of violets, pomegranates and lemons,

The doves coo, the sun shines,

When I see you, my native town!

“We are Hellenes: the intolerable monotheism of the Judaeans is alien to us, as is their turning their backs on the visual arts, together with their attachment to the flesh, to offspring, to family. In the whole Bible, there is no indication of a doctrine of bliss in the afterlife, and the only reward mentioned in the commandments (and specifically in honour of those who have given life) is to live long years upon the earth. A childless marriage is a stain, a curse, depriving one of the right to participation in public worship, as though forgetting that in Jewish legend, the childbed and labour are punishments for sin, not the point of life. And the further people are from sin, the further they will be from childbirth and physical labour. This is vaguely understood by Christians, when a woman cleanses herself with prayer after birth, but not after marriage, and a man is not subject to anything similar. Love has no purpose besides itself; nature is also free from any shadows of an idea of finality. The laws of nature are an entirely separate category than the so-called divine laws and the human ones. The law of nature is not that a given tree must bear fruit, but that under certain conditions, it will bear fruit and under others, it will not and will even perish as justly and simply as it would have borne fruit. Upon the entry of a knife, the heart stops beating: there is no finality here, nor good, nor evil. And the laws of nature can only be broken by he who can kiss his own eyes without tearing them from their sockets, and can see the nape of his neck without a mirror. And when they say ‘unnatural’ to you, you just look at the blind person speaking and pass on by, without becoming one of those sparrows that flies from the scarecrow in the vegetable patch. People go about like blind beggars, like corpses, when they could be creating the most ardently bright lives, where all pleasures would be so intense that it would be as though you had just been born and now, you’re dying. Everything must be perceived with this kind of greed. Miracles are around us at every step: there are muscles, ligaments in the human body, that it’s impossible to look upon without awe! And connecting the notion of beauty to the beauty of a woman to a man is nothing but vulgar lust, and far, far away indeed from a true idea of beauty. We are Hellenes, lovers of the beautiful, bacchantes of the coming life. Like Tannhauser’s visions in Venus’ grotto, like the premonitions of Klinger and Thomas, there is a primeval homeland, flooded with sun and free, with beautiful and courageous people, and there, beyond the sea, through shadow and fog, we go, Argonauts! And in this unheard-of novelty itself, we shall discover the most ancient roots, and in the unseen radiances themselves we shall feel our homeland!”

“Vanya, could you take a look in the living room and see what the time is, please?” said Ida Golberg, laying some kind of colourful needlework down on her knee.

The big room in the new house resembled a brightly lit cabin on the deck of a ship and was scantly furnished with simple furniture: a yellow curtain that covered the whole wall was drawn across three windows at once, and on the leather trunk; suitcases yet to be packed, lined with little brass nails; a chest with late hyacinths fell an unsettling yellow light. Vanya put down the Dante that he had been reading aloud and went into the neighbouring room.

“Half past five,” he said, returning. “Larion Dmitriyevich has been gone a long time,” he declared, as though responding to the girl’s thoughts. “Are we going to stop studying?”

“It’s not worth starting a new canto, Vanya. And so:

And he saw how with smiles they listened to the final conclusion, then turned towards the beautiful lady.

E vidi con riso

Udito havevan l’ultimo construtto;

Poi a la bella donna tornai il viso’’[3]

“Is a beautiful lady the contemplation of an active life?”

“Vanya, you must never fully believe the commentary, besides the historical information; understand simply and beautifully – that’s all; otherwise, to tell the truth, some kind of mathematics emerges instead of Dante.”

She finally put away her work and sat as though waiting for something, tapping a split knife on the handle of the table.

“Larion Dmitriyevich will arrive soon, most likely,” declared Vanya almost patronisingly, again catching the girl’s thoughts.

“You saw him yesterday?”

“No, I didn’t see him yesterday, nor three days ago. Yesterday, he went to Tsarskoe in the day, and in the evening, he was at the club, while three days ago he went somewhere on Vyborgskaya, I don’t know where," revealed Vanya respectfully and proudly.

“To see whom?”

“I don’t know, business of some kind.”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Listen, Vanya,” the girl started, looking at the little knife, “I’m asking you – not for me alone, for you, for Larion Dmitriyevich, for us all – find out what that address is? It’s very important, very important for all three of us,” and she passed Vanya a scrap of paper where, in Stroop’s sprawling, sharp handwriting, it was written: “Vyborgskaya, Simbirskaya St. No. 36, Apt. 103, Fyodor Vasilyevich Solovyov.”

No-one was particularly surprised that, besides his other interests, Stroop also took up the study of Russian antiquity; that he began to be visited by either loquacious men in German dress, or by old “by God!”-types in full-length half-kaftans, but all the same, crafty merchants with manuscripts, icons, antique fabrics, a counterfeit mould; that he began to take an interest in ancient singing, to read Smolensky, Razumovsky and Metallov, to sometimes go listen to Nikolaevskaya’s singing and, finally, under the direction of some pockmarked chorister, learned his hooks.[4]

“I’ve been completely unaware of this little backstreet of the world’s soul,” repeated Stroop, trying to infect Vanya as well with this hobby, who, to his surprise, was susceptible to this particular direction.

Once, Stroop announced over tea:

“Well, Vanya, you must see this without delay: an authentic Raskolnik[5] from the Volga, of an old breed, imagine: 18 years old, and he goes about in a long coat, cinched at the wait, he doesn’t drink tea; his sisters live in a monastery hermitage; a house on the Volga with a tall fence and chained-up dogs, where they go to sleep at 9 P.M. – something in the Vein of Pechersky, only less saccharine. You must see this, without delay. Let us go to Zasadin tomorrow, he has an interesting “Apotheosis”; our man will arrive there, and I’ll introduce you. Oh, by the way, write down the address just in case; maybe I’ll go straight there from the exhibition and it’ll pass to you to find him yourself.” And Stroop, without looking in his notebook, as it was already well-known to him, dictated, “Simbirskaya, No. 36, Apt. 103, the furnished rooms – ask there.”

The muffled sound of two voices speaking was audible from behind the door; a clock with weights quietly ticked; dark icons and leatherbound books were piled on the tables, the chairs and the windowsills; it was musty and dusty, and from the corridor, through the ventilation window above the door came the putrid odour of sour shchi.[6] Zasadin, standing in front of Vanya and putting on a kaftan, said:

“Larion Dmitriyevich won’t be here for at least forty minutes, perhaps even an hour; I need to go and get an icon, but, well, I don’t know how it will turn out? Will you wait here, or are going to go somewhere?”

“I’ll wait here.”

“Well, well, I’ll be back right away. Here are some books to interest yourself with until then,” and Zasadin, after giving Vanya a dusty Leimonarion, hurriedly secreted himself through the door, whence came the strong stench of sour shchi. Vanya, stood by the window, opened on a tale, recounting how a certain old man, after a chance meeting with a woman who lived alone in the same desert, kept returning to lascivious thoughts about that same woman, and, not being able to endure it, took up a staff in the scorching heat and set out, stumbling like a blind man out of lust, to the place where he thought to find this woman; and, as in a delirium, he saw the earth open up and there, within it, were three decomposing bodies: a woman, a man, and a child; and there was a voice, “Here is a woman, here a man, here a child – who now can distinguish them? Go and enjoy your lust.”[7] Everyone, everyone is equal before death, love and beauty, all bodies are wonderfully identical and only lust drives a man to chase after women, and a woman to wait for a man.

On the other side of the wall, a young, quite hoarse voice continued:

“Well, I’ll leave, uncle Yermolai, why do you keep calling me names?”

“How could I not, you slacker! Taking it into your head to fool around!”

“Uh-huh, Vaska might have told you a load of lies; what have you heard about him?”

“Why would Vaska lie? Well, tell me yourself, deny it yourself: you don’t really fool around?”

“And what of it? Yeah, I fool around! But Vaska doesn’t? Near enough everyone fools around round ours, except Dmitri Pavlovich,” and it was audible how the one speaking started to laugh. Having quietened down, he began again with a more intimate tone, sotto voce, “It was Vaska himself who taught me; a young master arrived once and he says to Dmitri Pavlovich: ‘I wish to be washed by the one who let me in,’ and it was me who let him in; but as Dmitri Pavlovich knew that this master was one who liked to play around and it was always Vasily who took care of him before, he says, ‘I’m afraid that it won’t be possible, your grace, to go with him alone: he’s not a regular and does not understand any of this.’ – Well, to Hell with you, make a pair with Vasily! – that’s how Vaska came in and he says, ‘How much are you proposing us?’ – Besides the beer, ten roubles. – We have a rule: whoever draws the curtain across the doorway will be fooling around, and the monitor is not allowed to take out less than five roubles; Vasily said, ‘No, your excellency, we can’t shake hands on that.’ – He offered another tenner. Vasya went to go and get the water ready, and I started to get undressed, while the master said, ‘Hey, what’s that you have there on your cheek, Fyodor? A birthmark, or some dirt?’ – He laughs and reaches his hand out. And I just stand there? Like an idiot, I don’t know myself whether or not I’ve got a birthmark on my cheek. However, here’s Vasily, so angry, he comes and says to the master, ‘Please, sir.’ And we all went.”

“Does Matvei live with you?”

“No, he’s got into a place.”

“With whom, though? The colonel?”

“With him, he offered 30 roubles, all expenses paid.”

“He didn’t get married, did Matvei?”

“He’s married, the same man gave him the money for the wedding, had a coat made for 80 roubles, but what about the wife? She lives in the countryside – is it allowed to live with a woman in a place like that? I’ve also thought about getting a place,” declared the speaker, having fallen quiet.

“How is Matvei, anyway?”

“A good gentleman, single, 30 roubles also, that’s how Matvei is.”

“You’ll be done for, Fyodor, just you see!”

“But maybe not.”

“And who is this gentleman, an acquaintance or what?”

“That one lives on Furstadtskaya, where Dmitri still serves in the junior ranks, on the first floor. He’s sometimes here as well, at Stepan Stepanovich’s.”

“An Old Believer, huh?”

“No way! He’s not even Russian, it seems. An Englishman, or something.”

“Is he well-regarded?”

“Yes, they say he’s a good, kind gentleman.”

“Well then, good day to you!”

“Farewell, uncle Yermolai, thank you for the food.”

“Drop by when you need to, Fedya.”

“I’ll come round,” and with a light step, clacking his heels, Fyodor went into the corridor, slamming the door. Vanya quickly went out and, without fully understanding why he did it, cried after the lad passing by in a jacket above a Russian shirt, out from under which hung the tassels of a thin corded belt, low patent leather boots and a peaked cap, cocked to one side, “Listen, you don’t happen to know how long Stepan Stepanovich Zasadin will be, do you?”

The latter man turned around and in the light penetrating from the numbered door, Vanya saw quick, thievish-looking grey eyes on a face, pale like those of people who live locked up or in a perpetual vapour, dark hair in a clip and a wonderfully defined mouth. Despite the somewhat coarse lines, there was some kind of spoiled nature in the face, and although Vanya looked on these thievish, tender eyes and shamelessly smirking mouth with prejudice, there was something in the face and the whole tall figure, the slimness of which struck the eye even while hidden beneath the jacket, that captivated him and led to a sense of confusion.

“And you would like to wait him?”

“Yes, it’s almost seven o’clock.”

“Half past six,” corrected Fyodor, taking out a pocket watch. “And here we thought that there was nobody in our room… He’ll probably be here soon,” he added, so as to say something.

“Yes. Thank you. Forgive me for bothering you,” said Vanya, not moving from his spot.

“Pardon me, sir,” responded the latter with a grimace.

A loud ring resounded and Stroop, Zasadin and a young, tall person in a long coat entered. Stroop took a quick look at Fyodor and Vanya, standing facing off against each other.

“I apologise for making you wait,” spoke he to Vanya at the same time that Fyodor threw himself to take off his coat.

Vanya saw all of this as though in a dream, feeling that he was falling into some abyss, and everything was clouding over with fog.

When Vanya entered the parlour, Anna Nikolaevna was finishing saying, “And it’s a shame, you know, that such a man is compromising himself like that.” Konstantin Vasilyevich silently shifted his eyes to Vanya, who was taking a book and sitting by the window, and said:

“They say ‘sophisticated, unnatural, excessive’, but if you restrict yourself to the uses of our bodies deemed natural, then all that’s left is to tear things apart with your hands and stuff raw meat into your mouth and fight with enemies; using your legs for chasing hares or running away from wolves and so on. It reminds me of a tale from The 1001 Nights, where a girl, tortured by the idea of finality, asks everyone what this or that was made for. And when she asks about a particular part of the body, her mother whips her, damning her: ‘Now you see what that was made for.’ Of course, this mum proved clearly the righteousness of her explanation, but that was hardly the limit of the capacity of the given place. All moral explanations of the naturalness of actions come back to the fact that the nose was made to be tinted with green dye. A person of full capabilities of body and soul must develop to the best of their abilities and search for the application of their abilities, if they don’t want to remain a Caliban.”

“Well now the students will get that into their heads…”

“’Well, this is in any case a positive and maybe it can be very pleasant,’ Larion Dmitriyevich would say,” and uncle Kostya, challenging Vanya, who did not stop reading.

“What does Larion Dmitriyevich have to do with it?” remarked even Anna Nikolaevna.

“Don’t you think it was his own view that I was putting forth?”

“I’ll go to Nata,” announced Anna Nikolaevna, rising.

“Ah, so she’s well? I haven’t seen her at all,” Vanya recalled for some reason.

“I’ll say, you’ve been disappearing for entire days.”

“Where have I been disappearing?”

“That’s for you to answer,” said the auntie, leaving the room.

Uncle Kostya drank down the remaining coffee and the room strongly smelt of mothballs.

“Were you talking about Stroop when I came in, uncle?” Vanya decided to ask.

“About Stroop? Truth be told, I don’t remember, it’s something Aneta was telling me.”

“I thought it was about him.”

“No, what would I have about him to talk about with her?”

“And you really suppose that Stroop is of such persuasions as you expressed?”

“That’s how he talks; I don’t know how he acts, and the persuasions of a different person are a dark and subtle thing.”

“So do you think his actions differ from his words?”

“I don’t know; I don’t know his affairs, and then it’s not always possible to act in accordance with your desires. For example, we were going to be at the dacha for a long time, and in the meantime…”

“You know, uncle, that Old Believer, Sorokin, invited me to his on the Volga: ‘Come,’ he said, ‘daddy won’t scold you; come see how we live, if that interests you.’ He proposed it to me so suddenly, I don’t know why.”

“Well, what of it, go set off.”

“Auntie won’t give me money, and it’s not worth it anyway.”

“Why isn’t it worth it?”

“It’s all so disgusting, so disgusting!”

“Hey, why has it all suddenly become disgusting?”

“I don’t really know,” said Vanya and he covered his face with his hands.

Konstantin Vasilyevich looked at Vanya’s bowed head and softly left the room.

There was no doorman, the doors to the staircase were open and a furious voice reached the hallway from a closed office, interspersed with silence, when some kind of quiet, seemingly female voice could vaguely be heard. Vanya stopped in the hallway without taking off his overcoat or cap. The handle of the door to the cabinet turned and someone’s hand, visible up to the shoulder dressed in a red Russian-style shirt, appeared, clutching the handle. Stroop’s words came through clearly:

“I will not allow someone to mention that, let alone a woman! I forbid you, you hear, forbid you to speak of this!”

The door closed again and the voices were dulled once again; Vanya took a wistful look around the hallway, so familiar: the electric light in from of the mirror and over the table, the clothing on the pegs; damask gloves were strewn over the table, but hats and upper-body clothing were nowhere to be seen. The door once again flew open with a crash and without noticing Vanya, Stroop went out into the corridor with a face white with fury; after a second, Fyodor followed after him almost running, in a red silk shirt, no belt and with a decanter in hand.

“How may I help you?” he turned to Vanya, evidently not recognising him. Fyodor’s face was feverishly red, like a drunkard’s, or as though rouged, his shirt was without belt, his hair was thoroughly combed and perhaps slightly crimped, and he smelt strongly of Stroop’s perfumes.

“How may I help you?” he repeated as Vanya stared him in the eye.

“Larion Dmitriyevich?”

“He’s not here, sir.”

“Then how did I see him just now?”

“Forgive me, he is very busy at the moment, sir, and there’s no way he can host you.”

“You will announce me, go.”

“No, really, it would be better to come back some other time: there’s no way it’s possible for him to host you at the moment. He’s not alone,” Fyodor lowered his voice.

“Fyodor!” called Stroop from the depths of the corridor, and Fyodor broke off to run down the corridor with a noiseless gait.

After standing around for a few minutes, Vanya went out onto the staircase, pulling closed the door behind which once again rang out the dulled, but still loud and furious voices. In the doorman’s room, her face in the mirror, stood a short woman in a grey-green dress and black knitted cardigan, correcting her veil. Approaching her from behind, Vanya saw clearly with a glance in the mirror that it was Nata. Having sorted her veil out, she unhurriedly went up the staircase and called to Stroop’s apartment, while in the meantime, the doorman had arrived just in time to let Vanya out onto the street.

“What’s this?” paused Aleksei Vasilyevich as he read the morning newspaper: “Mysterious suicide. Yesterday, the 21st of May, a young woman, full of hope and strength, Ida Golberg ended her own life in the apartment of an English subject, L.D. Stroop, on Furstadtskaya Street, building number —. The youthful self-murderer requested in her suicide note to not blame anyone for this death, but the conditions in which this grievous event took place push one to suppose a Romanesque undercurrent. According to the landlord of the apartment, in the midst of a heated discussion, the deceased wrote something on a scrap of paper, then quickly took Stroop’s revolver, which had been prepared for travel, and, before those present were able to intercede, emptied a round into her right temple. The solution to this mystery is complicated by the fact that Mr Stroop’s servant, Fyodor Vasilyevich Solovyov, of Orlovskaya Province, disappeared without a trace the same day, and that the identity of a lady who arrived at Stroop’s apartment half an hour before the fatal event remains unclear, as does the degree of her involvement in the tragic outcome. An investigation is in progress.”

Everyone around the tea table was silent, and all that could be heard in the room , awash with the odour of naphthalene, was the ticking of the clock.

“What on earth was that? Nata? Nata? Did you know about this?” said Vanya at last, with some voice not his own, but Nata continued tracing her fork around her empty plate, with not a single word in response.

[1] A poem by Lermontov

[2] A novel by Turgenev

[3] “…And saw that with a smile/They had been listening to these closing words/Then to the beautiful lady turned mine eyes” Dante, Purgatorio Canto XXVIII, tr. Longfellow (1867)

[4] A form of music notation without staves or notes used in the Russian Orthodox Church.

[5] Religious dissenter; look up Old Believers

[6] A type of Russian cabbage soup

[7] Quoting John Wortley’s 1992 translation, ““Look carefully, this is the fate of man, woman, and child. Enjoy your lust but remember: Your sin will deprive you of your place in the Kingdom of Heaven. How pathetic are the lives of humans! And you would forfeit the reward of all your struggles for just one hour of pleasure!”

#my translations

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sardonic-sprite · 2 years

Text

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

“Ok, but like, does it stack, or is it just a song thing?”

“I mean, if you take it literally, it stacks.”

“That’s crazy outrageous. How much shit is this girl getting?”

“Or guy.”

“Or guy?”

Tim whipped out his phone and tapped his calculator. “Let’s see. Twelve, plus the quantity eleven times two, plus the quantity ten times three, plus the quantity—”

“Why the hell would you do it that way?” Damian grimaced.

“Well, how would you do it, then?” Tim snipped.

“One, plus one plus two, plus one plus two plus three…”

“No, no, no.” Dick shook his head. “Just go in order of the lyrics. One, plus two plus one, plus three plus two plus one, plus four…”

“The word plus has become utterly meaningless to me,” Duke announced.

Cass exchanged a look with Jason. He raised his eyes to the heavens; she hid a giggle.

“Wait a second, I’m an idiot!” Tim yelped.

“Correct,” said Damian.

Tim ignored him. “It all parallels. Ok, two times each quantity of twelve times one, eleven times two, ten times three, nine times four…”

Damian and Dick were both still furiously jabbing at their calculators.

“Three hundred and sixty-four!” Tim cried in triumph, holding up the phone.

“Dammit,” Damian muttered.

“Holy shit,” said Duke.

“True love, more like sugar daddy,” Dick mused. “How much does all that cost?”

“Now or when the song was written?”

“What are even the ethics of buying someone dancers and milkmaids?” Duke wondered “Like, animals are one thing, but are all the people, just, like, hired or were they actually enslaved?”

“Let’s go with hired. But how do you hire a lord?”

“Shouldn’t it be three hundred and sixty-five, Drake?” Damian asked, still determined to prove Tim wrong, “Since the partridge line is repeated one more time?”

“But that one is just musical flare.”

“How can you call that musical flare, but not all the other repeats?”

“Fine!” Tim threw up his hands. “Three hundred and sixty-five. My calculations were still faster, brat.”

“This is what we’ve come to,” Jason muttered, too soft for anyone but Cass to hear. “This is our semblance of sanity?”

She giggled again, shrugging at him to say she didn’t mind. Her brothers were crazy and funny and she liked it that way. But the pinch between Jason’s eyes meant he couldn’t handle the conversation much longer, so she took his hand and tugged, saying, “Dance with me.”

“Gladly.”

The other four didn’t even notice them leave, too busy arguing whether the true love had had to pay delivery fees for all the gifts.

Cass didn’t usually enjoy galas. In fact, she, like her siblings, tried to get out of them every other time of the year. But for some reason, Christmas galas hit different, as Tim would say. She loved all the green boughs and glittery lights and pretty painted ornaments. The various shades of the same six colors (white, green, red, gold, silver, black) were calming to process compared to all the bright neons and pastels that she’d see other times of the year. Eggnog was also much tastier than champagne, and there was usually gingerbread, her favorite kind of cookie.

But the best thing about Christmas galas was the music.

Ordinary galas had bland, benign background pianos or violins. They played songs Cass could dance to, but not songs that were fun to dance to. But not at Christmas. At Christmas, they played lots of big, broad songs, with brass and sleigh bells and quick beats that she could swing to, and dramatic, full, swooping songs for a waltz. Cass could fly to Christmas music.

She didn’t know the tune the band had just struck up, but she could feel that it was already quick and fun, and was beaming even before she and Jason started to dance. The trumpets were loud and proud, showing her the music’s heartbeat so she could step in time.

Jason was very fun to dance with. He enjoyed it almost as much as Cass did, and knew lots of fancy twists and turns. He also wasn’t afraid to lift her off the ground and spin with her, and she’d laugh in delight, and he’d grin right back. He also sang along under his breath if he knew the song, not even aware that he was doing it, but teaching Cass the words nevertheless.

They danced three songs together, working up a good sweat and making Cass’s neat bun fall out, before the fourth song began with a series of high, tiny chimes, and Jason groaned.

“Not this one,” he said, leading her off the floor towards the others. “I love you, Cassie, but not this fucking song.”

A middle aged woman with a sprig of holly in her hair shot Jason a horrified look as they passed. Cass hid her giggle behind her hand.

Halfway to the table, Dick came running up to them, crying, “Cass! Cass, come on, I gotta dance this one with you!”

“You’re a menace, Grayson,” Jason called, trading her off with a shake of his head. “One too many concussions.”

“Bah humbug to you too, Scrooge!” Dick shot back, pulling Cass back to the dance floor right as the music really got going.

It was another swing, one that most people were taking half-time, so naturally she and Dick took it double. Towards the end, he started spinning her and spinning her, so much that her skirt stayed out in a bright green plume, no time to settle until the very end, when, rather than a graceful dip, she stumbled dizzily into his arms, both of them laughing too hard to speak.

“Whoo!” Dick cheered as Cass got her balance back. “That was fun.”

“Very fun,” Cass beamed, breathless. “But need a drink now.”

“Then shall we, my lady?” Dick bowed at the waist and offered her his arm.

“We shall,” she grinned, taking it.

They headed over to the refreshments table, Dick ladling a cup of punch for himself, and Cass taking a flute of eggnog. Plus a few gingerbread cookies. To share. Probably. Maybe.

Not, it turned out.

They made their way back to the others to see the argument still ongoing. Damian was in Tim’s face over the particulars of each species of bird, and how the price of doves was not equivalent or even indicative of the price of turtle doves, and Tim was shouting right back that if he couldn’t find the answers, he had no choice but to extrapolate. Duke was trying to get between them and calm them down, and Jason had given up, dropping his forehead against the table.

“Are you gonna tell me what type of dancer, too, brat?” Tim was saying. “Whether the pipes were metal or wood? What kind of drum? Just chill about the particulars!”

“I will not settle for a subpar answer when you have the ability to give me an accurate one!”

“I’m telling you, I don’t have the ability to—”

“Tim, Dami, you’re both beautiful,” Dick said, accomplishing what Duke could not and pushing them apart. “It’s hypothetical anyway, so as long as Tim gets close enough in his comparisons, I’m sure the rounded total won’t be far off.”

Cass cocked her head and signed, What are you actually doing?

“Trying to figure out exactly how much it costs if you’re the true love from Twelve Days of Christmas,” Tim answered, completely casual although Cass was certain it was not a very normal activity.

“I hate to even ask,” Duke interjected, “but do we include the value of the laid eggs and the milk?”

“I don’t think so,” Dick said. “He probably wasn’t paying to make sure the geese were actually laying eggs at the time they were received, so the fact that they can lay eggs is just covered by the cost of each goose.”

Jason lifted his head and banged it against the table. “It’s. Just. One. Stupid. Song.”

“Come on, Jay, aren’t you even a little bit curious?”

Jason turned his head to squint at Tim. “If I ever was, all your nonsense has completely ruined the answer for me.”

“Do you have a better way to pass the time?”

“No,” he admitted reluctantly.

“Then shut up or help us figure this out. If the swans are swimming, we assume the receiver already owned whatever they were swimming in, or was that purchased too?”

Cass ruffled Jason’s hair as she started away, ignoring his whine of Take me with you! and smiling to herself. She wandered through the ballroom, admiring the gowns and suits, until she spotted the tall figure she was looking for.

Bruce turned before she reached him, as if he had sensed her presence. He smiled, excused himself from the group he was speaking with, and closed the distance to give her a hug.

“Enjoying yourself?”

“I am. Jay’s not.”

Bruce scanned the crowd, and Cass knew he’d seen her brothers when his mouth twisted into a wry grin.

“We’ll head home soon. What are they going on about this time?”

“The Twelve Days of Christmas song.”

He winced, obviously recognizing just how absurd and detailed a conversation his sons could spark on that topic.

“At least it’s kept them from pranking anyone.”

Cass giggled. Tim and Jason could come up with very good pranks when they put their minds to it. She thought they were very funny, but the fancy people at the balls rarely did, and Bruce didn’t like to make them too mad. Still, it would have been fun if one of them had put mistletoe in Dick’s hair again.

The music changed from a quick song to a slow one, in three-quarter time, and Cass beamed up at her father, holding out her hands.

He smiled and took them, leading her out to the floor and starting to dance.

Of all the people in her family, Cass loved dancing with Bruce the most. He wasn’t as energetic as Dick, or as showy as Jason, but she could see in his posture and his smile that he was dancing just for her. It made her feel special and loved, that he always made sure to dance with her, and always was so happy to do so. She had to share him so often, with her brothers, with Steph and Harper and Cullen, with Selina and soon their new baby, with all his friends. Dancing was the one time she could have him all to herself.

The dance ended, as dances always did, but that was alright. Cass beamed at her dad, and he smiled back, soft and warm. Then he winked and told her to gather her brothers. She had to stand on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, then skipped off back to the table, snatching more gingerbread on her way.

This time she saved one cookie, giving it to Jason as she told them, “Go home now.”

Everyone cheered, except Damian who asked Tim three times whether or not he’d factored in what region of France the hens had come from, as he’d found there was a wide variation of price.

“Yes, Dami, I just took the mean, calm down.”

They continued discussing things until they were out in the cold air, and had to stop to run to the car, where Alfred and Bruce already sat waiting.

“I see you all found a way to entertain yourselves,” Bruce said mildly.

Jason pointed a finger at him, gesture as threating as if he held a knife.

“If you make me go to a party with these hooligans ever again, Bruce,” he warned, “you owe me reparations equal to whatever the hell crazy total Timbit figures out, adjusted for inflation.”

“I…”

“Adjusted for inflation?” Tim looked up from his phone in shock, tapped a few more keys, and slowly shook his head. “Yeah, no, B, Jason’s definitely not worth that much to have around.”

“Tim,” Dick started, “be ni—oh.”

Bruce shook his head, smiling fondly. “I’ll figure it out,” he promised. “You’re priceless to me, Jaylad.”

“Shut up,” Jason muttered, turning pink.

#christmas countdown playlist #day 2 #christmas party #cassandra cain #dick grayson #jason todd #duke thomas #damian wayne #tim drake #bruce wayne #fic #also on ao3

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the-world-is-spinning-round · 2 years

Text

Hunger - Emerson Barrett fan fiction (Spooktober Writing Challenge)

Sequel to Beastly

The winter dragged on.

January and February were expectedly cold and snowy, but when there was ice on the ground in March, Gwendoline knew that it was going to be a hard year.

April had brought little change. The weather was still cold and wet, and although the ground was no longer frozen, it was constantly waterlogged: sending splashes of bitterly cold water into the air with every step. Everyone was doing their best to carry on as normal, but the tension in the village was thick enough to be cut by a knife…

…And the newcomers weren’t making it any easier.

The three brothers were a little too strange for the villagers to be comfortable around. There was nothing specific that anyone could put their fingers on, but they were just…unsettling.

Only Gwendoline had a specific reason to be wary of the brothers.

They were wolves.

Or, at least, the youngest one was.

Gwendoline remembered every detail of her encounter with the wolf - Emerson - under the Wolf Moon with perfect clarity: she had recognised the wolf who had wanted to eat her instantly. And he had recognised her too, directing a sly smile in her direction, his hazel eyes flashing yellow while looking at her, just for a second, before he looked away.

She’d almost screamed. She had turned straight back into her house and slammed the door shut behind her, locking it with shaking hands.

All night she’d been convinced that the wolf was going to come for her in the night, and kill her like he’d intended to, but there had been nothing. Neither had she even seen him during the week after that day. Then a fortnight had dragged on and the only time she had seen the wolf was in passing in the village, and he never even looked at her.

It had honestly felt like a horrible game. Gwendoline was sure that she was being lulled into a false sense of security before the wolf moved in for the kill…but that had quickly become the least of her concerns.

The end of April came around, and the ice returned.

The farmers swore and the milkmaids gossiped about witches’ hexes and the housewives muttered about keeping their children inside (to protect them both from the cold and the theoretical witches) and Gwendoline started to panic. Her job as a seamstress was enough for her to get by on normally, but food was getting more expensive by the day, as was the price of everything else. On top of that, everyone else was facing the same problem, and having clothes made or repaired was quickly becoming a luxury that few could afford at the moment.

Gwendoline’s fears of being eaten were quickly being replaced by fears of how she was going to eat.

She was so distracted by those fears that she didn’t notice the wolf following her until he cleared his throat, just about making Gwendoline jump out of her skin. She turned to glare at the person who had scared her so rudely at this time of early evening, when the setting sun filled the village with unsettlingly deep shadows, only to take a sharp step back when she saw who it was. And another when she realised that they were all alone in the half-light.

“You’re thinner.” he remarked bluntly: “Are you not eating?”

“I’m…you’re asking…” Gwendoline stuttered, taken aback not just by the bluntness of the wolf’s words, but also by the open concern on his face: “Why are you asking if I’ve been eating?”

“Because you’re thinner.” the wolf replied, as if it was obvious: “You were already thin, and now you’re thinner. So are you not eating?”

Gwendoline was so confused…confused enough that she couldn’t think of anything else to do except answer: “I’m eating as much as I can afford to.”

“But it’s not enough.” he nodded in understanding…of what, Gwendoline wasn’t sure: “I’ll fix that, don’t worry.”

He loped away before Gwendoline could come up with a response for that, disappearing from view quicker than she could think anything other than ‘I probably should be worrying…’

The wolf was long gone by the time Gwendoline had ordered her thoughts, and by that point she just felt…tired. She was hungry and anxious and so, so tired: she couldn’t bring herself to care about whatever the wolf was planning. She felt like there was no point fighting it; whatever would happen would happen, and all Gwendoline could do was just wait for things to unfold.

She went home, climbed into bed, and waited for the wolf to come barreling through her door…only for his intrusion to come in the form of a light knock at her kitchen window.

She dragged herself out of bed and forced herself into the kitchen to see the wolf waiting patiently at the window, wearing a small - and sincere looking - smile and…holding a basket:

“I brought you some food.” he said the second she opened the window, pulling it open further so he could pass it through to her: “I didn’t know what you liked, so I got some of everything.”

“Some of everything…” Gwendoline trailed off, feeling the weight of the basket, and looking down to see…everything.

The basket was full to bursting with apples, pears, a jar of honey, another of jam, bread, a pot of berries, carrots and parsnips, potatoes, cheese, some salted meat, even a freshly caught rabbit. It was a huge amount of food - enough to feed her for a week. Maybe longer, if she was careful.

And the wolf had just…handed it over.

Like it was nothing to him.

“I can’t take this; it’s too much.” she whispered, looking up at the wolf and pushing the basket back towards him: “This must be enough to feed you and your brothers for days, please.”

The wolf looked oddly pleased by her denial: “My brothers and I have plenty, even without this. You need it more than we do, so please, take it.”

Gwendoline still felt uneasy about taking so much food, even if the wolves really did have plenty, even if it was from the same wolf who’d terrified her just a few months ago…she felt like she couldn’t take so much without offering anything in return.

Perhaps it was a ploy, but the wolf looked so sincere that Gwendoline just…didn’t think it was. The wolf didn’t give off any impression that he had achieved something or got one over on her, he seemed genuinely and sincerely pleased that she was accepting his kindness. An act of kindness that Gwendoline had been raised better than to take for granted.

“I’ll accept the food, but only if you come round to share whatever I cook from it.” she bartered.

“Deal.” the wolf agreed instantly, nodding his head enthusiastically: “I look forward to seeing you!”

Before Gwendoline could respond, the wolf bolted off, a bright grin covering the bottom half of his face, leaving Gwendoline with a basket full of food and a feeling of mild confusion.

She wasn’t upset though. If anything…she was actually strangely excited. Truth be told, she was more worried about what she was going to cook that the wolf might like over the fact she had just invited him into her home.

And she couldn’t really bring herself to care about that.

#Emerson Barrett #Emerson Barrett fan fiction #Emerson Barrett fan fic #Emerson Barrett fanfic #Emerson Barrett imagine #Emerson Barrett drabble #Spooktober #mine

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inber · 4 years

Text

“S’play,” Lambert said, squinting at the bottom of his empty cup, “S’play truth or dare.”

“What are we, little milkmaids on... a supper break?” Eskel snarked, leaning back on one hand. And then, “I wanna go first.”

“’Kay, Eskel, I dare—” Geralt began.

“No, no, y’gotta ask him if he wants dare. Or the other one.” Lambert said authoritatively, pouring more vodka into his cup, only half-missing.

“Fine,” Geralt conceded, “Dare or, or the other one, Eskel?”

“Dare.” Eskel said, accepting the flask of liquor from Lambert.

“See?” Geralt crowed, “See, he picked dare anyways—”

“You gotta play the game proper though!” Lambert pointed a finger, “Else—”

“I dare myself to punch both of you.” Eskel said, throwing back more of the rough-distilled drink.

“That’s not how ‘dare or the other one’ works!” Lambert said, glowering.

“Eskel, dare you to... take Vesemir’s favourite shirt from laundry, n’ wear it to breakfast.” Geralt said, effectively derailing Lambert’s protest train.

The two witchers giggled together as Eskel rose on wobbly feet, zig-zagging his way towards the line where clothes dried. When he returned, the pale grey shirt was buttoned over his clothing, ill-fitting across the shoulders and too baggy at the front.

The three of them guffawed at the hearth. More drink was poured and sunk. Eskel nudged Geralt.

“Y’go. Truth, or the other one.”

“Truth.” Geralt said, purely because he’d forgotten what the other option was.

“Pssff, chicken.” Lambert accused.

“That fancy bard y’talk about. Do you miss him in winter?” Eskel asked.

“Oh, oh, good!” Lambert clapped his hands together. “Do you, Geralt? D’you write him letters? Dear—dear fancy bard—”

“Jaskier, he’s called.” Eskel helpfully supplied.

“Dear Jaskier,” Lambert’s voice had gone squeaky falsetto, “Without you to warm my beefy buttocks, this season is—”

“Dare.” Geralt snapped, glaring at his brothers, “Dare, then. Fuckers.”

“Fine,” Eskel said, “Dare you to bring the bard next winter.”

Lambert burst into laughter. “Oh, fuck off, Eskel. He can’t even get over himself enough to say he cares for the fop, let alone bring him t'meet us.”

Geralt crossed his arms sulkily. “Only ‘cause, 'cause you’d scare him, both of you. And you smell.”

“You smell!” Lambert deflected.

“Listen, shut up,” Eskel said, and paused for a long moment with his tongue poking out, “Shut up. Maybe we smell, but we’d never scare him. On purpose.”

Geralt flicked lazy-hazy drunk eyes between the two men sat in front of him. Idiots, the both of them, he decided. Even if there was something soft and eager about their expressions.

It occurred to him with a sudden clarity that maybe they were curious about the lark that sung their praises; the human that Geralt had mentioned in passing so many times that a fondness could not be mistaken.

“’Kay.” Geralt said, reluctant, “I’ll ask him. But don’t be mad when he doesn’t want to spend months freezing his balls off with us. He’s very, y’know. Fine. Likes soft things. Good food.”

“Ohhh,” Lambert breathed, “Geralt’s scared we’re not fancy enough.”

“I’m not scared!”

“Yeah, y’are.” Eskel grinned.

“I hate both of you.” Geralt said, drinking so he wouldn’t have to talk, or think.

“Lambert, dare or... truth?” Eskel nudged the youngest wolf.

“It’s called truth or dare.” Lambert burst, exasperated. “And dare, obviously.”

“Dare you... to take a shot of black gull.”

---------------

Vesemir had seen his fair share of nonsense in the long winters spent with his pups. Opening the larder door to find them tangled in a pile beside the potatoes, unconscious and reeking of booze and tomfoolery, was unfortunately not wholly unusual. Geralt’s eyes creaked half-open at the intrusion.

“Can—can Jaskier stay, next year?” Geralt slurred.

“Why the fuck is Eskel wearing my best shirt?” Vesemir barked.

“Truth or... the other one.” Lambert’s voice was muffled against Geralt’s thigh.

They all startled like stray cats when Vesemir bashed a spoon against the back of a saucepan.

Training that year was rather brutal. Eskel was lumped with laundry duty until the snow began to melt.

But the year after that, there was music.

#the witcher fandom #drabble #nonsense #fortune writes #tw drinking #inber

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iwriteromancenovels · 2 years

Text

chapter one

Genre: fiction, romance

Word Count: 1,522

Warnings: none

If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives.

- Lemony Snicket

“Roses are red, violets are blue. Summer is hot, and so are you.” Callie McKinney glared down at the basin full of steaming, soapy water and flicked it irritatedly with her free hand. “If I had my way, I’d wash these dishes out in the pond,” she told the basin, vigorously scrubbing a plate, “but it seems that pond water isn’t very clean. Therefore, I must redden and chap and practically scald my hands in order to wash them.” She paused, almost as if waiting for a response.

The basin didn’t reply, and Callie plunged another plate into the water, perhaps a little too hard. “There! That’s what you get for ignoring me.”

Through the open window, Callie’s oldest brother Allen paused his garden work and leaned on the windowsill, grinning at his sister. “Talking to inanimate objects again?”

Callie gave her brother a knowing look. “Aren’t you the one who told me to talk nicely to my plants so they’d grow well?”

Allen laughed. “Ah, but that’s a different story. See, that basin isn’t even alive.”

“So?”

“Plants are. Haven’t you noticed that your garden and houseplants are doing a lot better since you stopped practicing sarcasm on them?” Allen pointed towards the basin. “And that basin hasn’t done a thing but sit there.”

Callie laughed ruefully. “I suppose so. Still, it’s surprisingly refreshing to talk to inanimate objects.” She set aside the last dish and dried her hands. “I need to dump this out, do you mind coming in and helping?”

Allen sighed in mock disappointment, but he left the window and Callie soon heard him come into the kitchen. “Still can’t carry the basin,” he said sadly, standing behind her and lifting it over her head with ease. A stray drop of water splashed onto Callie’s nose. “And here I thought carrying laundry all these years had made you stronger than that.”

“Laundry isn’t exactly an equal weight to a big bucket full of water,” said Callie, following her tall brother from the kitchen and out to the grass. “Five pounds of laundry and five pounds of water are very different things.”

“Yes, especially when you’ve got it backwards,” teased Allen, systematically dumping the dishwater on Callie’s prized vegetable garden. “I hope your future husband doesn’t mind doing this, because honestly, if anyone outside of our family was around, I’d not be carrying out my little sister’s woman’s work.” Allen grinned at Callie to show her he was kidding, and handed her the empty basin. “I believe I can think of a certain young man who wouldn’t mind this task.”

Callie blushed. “Allen!”

Allen laughed. “Tucker Wills certainly wouldn’t mind, now, would he? Seeing as how he’s head over heels in love with you.”

“Leo wants me to marry Jonathan, and you know it.” Callie perched the bucket atop her head like a milkmaid and balanced it with her hands all the way to the house, Allen following.

“But you don’t love either of them.”

Callie spun, the basin toppling off her head and onto the floor. “Allen McKinney!”

Allen held his hands up innocently, still laughing. “I’m just laying out the foundation of facts. Building the walls of decision is up to you.”

“The walls have already been built, and my answer to any marriage is a solid No.” Callie picked up the basin and headed for the kitchen, Allen trailing behind her like a mischievous puppy. “I’m perfectly happy staying with you guys, there’s no need for me to marry.”

“We want little nieces and nephews,” coaxed Allen.

“Then one of you guys go find a girl, marry her, get your nieces and nephews, and leave me out of it!” Callie set the basin back in its place with a finality and turned to face her brother, a rare fire in her brown eyes.

Allen backed off. “That won’t fly with Leo or Justin,” he told her. “I’d much rather not lose you to someone else. But girls are kind of supposed to get married… and I’d really hate to disappoint either of those Wills brothers.”

“Not yet.” Callie turned back to the wooden counter and began putting the dishes in the cupboards, closing off the conversation.

__________________

The sizzling smell of beef fresh from the kitchen filled the dining room as Callie lit the wall sconces and shook out the match. The table was set, the dinner was ready- the only thing missing was her brothers.

Callie turned from the wall to survey her table once more, and nodded in satisfaction. She would have liked to have been able to present a strawberry shortcake tonight, but her strawberry vines weren’t bearing fruit yet. Well, Justin would just have to wait a bit longer for his favorite dessert, and make do with the chocolate chip cookies she had substituted for the shortcake.

“Mmm, I smell beef.”

Speak of the angel, thought Callie in delight, purposely modifying the saying to better fit the person it currently referred to. “Don’t forget to eat the potatoes and carrots,” she reminded Justin as he sat down, eyes locked on the pile of browned, well-seasoned steaks.

Justin wrinkled his nose at the mention of carrots. “I hate carrots.”

“You won’t get chocolate chip cookies if you neglect that colorful part of dinner,” Callie warned, knowing full well he’d find a way to finagle some cookies from her whether he ate his carrots or not. But Justin- and all her brothers, for that matter- usually obeyed Callie on the aspect of meals, simply because they knew she would worry herself sick over their health if she didn’t oversee every morsel that they consumed.

“Oh, Callie, this looks great.” Leo came in next, still dusty from the day’s work, and sat down next to Justin after hanging his hat on the hat rack by the door. “I can’t wait to get at those carrots.”

Justin made a choking sound, and Callie couldn’t resist smirking. “I guess even the mere mention of carrots is enough to gross Justin out,” she said, purposely emphasizing the word carrots to tease him further.

“Ugh!” Justin clutched his throat dramatically and slumped backwards in his chair, drawing smiles from his siblings: Callie’s impishly pleased, and Leo’s purely amused.

Allen came in last, taking his place at the head of the table and whistling in appreciation when he got a good look at the dinner. “Man, maybe we don’t want Callie to marry off. We won’t get spoiled like this anymore!”

Callie didn’t find the joke funny, although Justin and Leo chuckled merrily. “It’s gonna get cold, so let me dish up the food,” she scolded good-naturedly, moving quickly to arrange portions of food on each of their plates. “Justin, didn’t I hear you saying earlier that you wanted a double portion of carrots?”

After the laughter had died down, and Justin had seated Callie across from Leo, Allen held out his hands to his siblings for the blessing. Heads bowed, each of the four took a turn with their part of the blessing, and ended with a unanimous “Amen!”

For the next few moments everyone was too focused on preparing their own plates the way they liked them. When that was mostly taken care of, Allen mentioned that he had gone into town that evening to pick up the new harness he had ordered. “Coming out of the shop, I ran into the younger Alistair boy,” he said, slicing off a bite-sized chunk of meat. “Callie, he said you didn’t come into work today.”

Callie, who had initially frozen at the mention of Ben Alistair, now relaxed a little. “Saturday’s my day off, he should know that by now.”

“Well, maybe you should consider reminding him. He seemed pretty disappointed that you didn’t show up.”

“Not a chance.” Callie stabbed her fork into her meat and picked up her knife. “I don’t want anything to do with Ben Alistair.”

“Ben’s nothing like his brother,” Leo reminded her, spearing a carrot. “He’s said many times that he suspects something fishy about Parker’s way of doing business.”

“How about smoky?” Callie snapped out her napkin a touch vehemently.

“Why smoky?”

“Because the second someone finds out that he’s been less than honest, his ranch is going to go up in flames.”

“Accurate,” Justin muttered under his breath, tentatively poking at a carrot with only a slightly wrinkled nose as compared to earlier.

“But that has nothing to do with Ben himself,” Leo reminded Callie. “Ben has proven to be a fine, upstanding citizen of Prairie Hills, and there’s been nothing incriminating him of anything shady.”

“Yet,” muttered Callie, splitting a roll in half and buttering both sides.

“I highly doubt that Ben will decide to go down the wrong path,” said Allen, taking a sip of water. “He works at a bank, for goodness’ sake- there’s no room to be dishonest at a bank.”

“Bank robber,” said Callie after a moment, with a mysterious glee to the words.

“Okay, change of subject,” proposed Leo, sensing that Callie wasn’t going to change her mind, at least not tonight. “How’s the garden doing, Callie?”

#western romance #romance #original writing #original character #love story #cattle ranching #1800s

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parsley-sage-rosemary-n-thyme · 2 years

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July for Loki using 30 Days of Deity Devotion prompts, Day 18 • How does Loki stand in terms of gender and sexuality? (Historical and/or UPG)

“A heart ate Loki,-- | in the embers it lay,

And half-cooked found he | the woman's heart;--

With child from the woman | Lopt soon was,

And thence among men | came the monsters all.”*

Loki is famous for being a shapeshifter, and shifting through genders is one of his abilities for sure. In the myths he is usually described as male, and a very handsome one too, but there are a few exceptions. In Þrymskviða (“The Lay of Thrym”), Thor and Loki pretend to be Freyja and her handmaiden to get Mjölnir back from Jötunn king Thrym. Thor is in disguise and keeps his pronouns, but for Loki the text uses female pronouns when in disguise, which suggests a slightly deeper transformation on his (her) behalf. Another famous example you might be familiar with: in Gylfaginning (“The Beguiling of Gylfi”), Loki turns himself into a mare to lure the stallion Svaðilfœri away from his work. They run away together, and when Loki returns to Ásgarðr he is pregnant with Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse destined to become Óðinn’s steed. Speaking of Óðinn, it’s good ol’ Grímnir himself to reveal, in the Lokasenna, that Loki spent 8 years in a cave as a milkmaid tending cows, and there gave birth to a number of children while in female form. Curiously enough, Loki reminds Óðinn that he spent quite some time among men “in witch’s guise” as well. So you see, even the mighty Óðinn is not strictly male, according to such myths. What does it tell us? That these two are blood brothers for a reason, just for a start. Then, it gives us lots of food for thought.

Last but not least, the one that for me is among the most fascinating episodes in all of Norse mythology. In the above mentioned Hyndluljóð, Loki eats the heart of a woman and then gives birth to monstrous children. As the story goes, an evil woman (a “witch”) had been burnt (three times?) by the Æsir. Is she Gullveig? Is Gullveig Angrboða? Not the place to discuss this. What matters here is, her heart survived, half-burnt. Loki finds it and eats it - but why? Is it a metaphor of the crematory Fire? Maybe there is a deeper reason in the fact that the heart was considered the home of the principle of life and of the soul itself, so by eating the woman’s heart Loki was probably able to absorb her female magic and wisdom… So much so that he then gives birth to children, monstrous ones of course - much like their siblings born from him and Angrboða. Or maybe, just maybe, such monstrous children are a metaphor for magical powers and actions that were believed to be evil as the tales were being written down later in time? Who knows… who knows…

In my personal experience, Loki remains mainly male. I call him Faðir (father), and refer to him with male pronouns, but as you can see using female or neutral ones is not wrong at all.

I’m sorry there’s not enough space here to discuss these themes in a more elaborate ways, there would be plenty to say, but I hope I gave you some interesting hints to think about.

Art: The God of Mischief by NickRoblesArt

#loki #norse loki #livin la vida loka #30 days of deity devotion #july for loki #lokean

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nothingbutimagines · 4 years

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Betrothed (Peter Parker)

Pairing: Knight!Peter Parker x Princess!Reader

Warning: Cursing and lots of angst

Summary: The young Princess Y/n is, on the outside, perfect in every way. She is high society, beautiful, educated, and cherished by all. However, the seemingly perfect princess is hiding a secret with that of a young knight, Peter Parker. Peter is upset, angry with Y/n when she is forced to choose between revealing the secret to stay out of an arranged marriage to a prince, or stay silent.

Author: Dizzy

A/N: This is the second part to Arranged. As always, requests are open and I’d love some new ideas from you all!

Masterlist Request Any Of These Peter Parker/Tom Holland Masterlist

__________________

“Why the long face, Princess? You shouldn’t be so sad on your wedding day.” Marceline asked softly, already knowing the answer.

“He is not coming, is he?” You asked, looking up at Marceline.

The older woman shook her head, her light grey hair falling into her face as her eyes grew somber.

“I don’t believe so, darling. Sir Peter told the king that he was too ill to help with the wedding and training the cavalry to be ushers. He’s been holed up in that little cabin for about a week.”

You sighed softly, your eyes looking deep into your reflection as you frowned, the tears prickling your eyes. You knew it was a foolish idea, to think that Peter would somehow wake up one day and forgive you for sending him away, for so easily throwing him away like a love letter from an old lover.

You had done everything to get him to speak to you, sending him letters, having some of the younger maids walk down to send him gifts since Marceline had trouble walking that far. You had even showed up at his door, teary-eyed and remorseful, begging for forgiveness only to be told to leave, to never come back.

Peter had done everything in his power to keep you away, and you knew it was wrong to be torn up over it, since you had done the same thing first.

“I don’t want to get married, Marceline.” You whispered, looking at the woman in the mirror.

“I know, Princess, but there’s nothing we can do about it now. I wish it were different, but we mustn’t hold such pain in our hearts. We must look on the bright side, you do not have to leave the kingdom to be with your betrothed.”

“Yes, I suppose so. However, I would see Peter everyday. I would rather leave the kingdom than see Peter for even a moment.”

“Sir Peter told me he may leave the kingdom and live with his brother, the sheep herder, in Astoria.”

“Marceline, why wouldn’t you tell me this?” You snapped, turning fully to face the older woman as she took a step back.

“Princess, I didn’t tell you because I thought it would ruin your wedding day. Sir Peter also told me to wait to tell you until he was already gone, when the wedding bells tolled.”

“Why must you always follow the orders of Sir Peter?” You cried, the tears you were holding back finally flooding out. “Anything Sir Peter tells you should be told to me, we went over this before! God, I need to go, I need to find Peter.”

You pushed yourself up off of the chair using the vanity before you for leverage, your tears blurring your vision as you made your way to the other side of the room and slipping on your shoes. You were fueled by your anger, not just at the poor old milkmaid, but Peter as well.

“Princess, wait!” Marceline called out as you past her, her hand grasping for your arm as you turned to her, yanking your arm away. “You cannot leave. You are in your wedding gown and your father, the king, will be here any moment to give you away.”

“You can tell him I am on a walk.”

“It is not that simple, you know that, he is pacing up and down the hall, you will never be able to pass him.”

“Then I will outrun him. He cannot stop me.”

“Princess, he knows your distaste for this arrangement. That is why he wanted Sir Peter and the cavalry to be here, to keep you in the castle.”

“Then he shouldn’t have given me a dagger.” You replied simply, turning on your heel and opening the chamber door to come face to face with your father.

You cursed yourself for being so rude to Marceline as she was right, he was pacing in the corridor and now standing before him, you never felt so small.

“Y/n, my love, we must go. You were supposed to be upon the altar at three o’clock sharp and it is three-o-two.” Your father spoke softly, linking your arm in his before resting his hand upon yours.

“Father, I-”

“I know, love, you wish your mother was here. Believe me, I wish for that as well, but do not fret, I will be there for you.”

“Father, I don’t know if I can do this, get married.” You admitted, causing the older man to fall silent, leaving the sound of your footsteps as the only echo in the silent corridor.

“Y/n,” Your father’s voice was stern as he finally spoke, “you will be getting married. I will not allow you to ruin the sanctity of this kingdom and our good name just because you are infatuated with a knight.”

“W-what are you talking about?”

“You know who I am speaking about, do not pretend you do not.” He snapped back at you as you finally reached the entrance to the cathedral. “I have known about you sneaking away to see Sir Peter Parker all these years. I had hoped it was nothing but a teenage romance, but it seems as though I was wrong.”

“How had you known and yet never told me?” You attempted to pull away, but his hold was tight on your arm.

“Do not speak back to me!”

You bowed your head in sorrow and shame, attempting to hide the look of fear that had fallen upon your face.

“I have heard the whispers between the housemaids, the way they snickered about you using their entrances and stairways and how it was almost romantic the way you had begun to see the handsome boy. Almost romantic! You knew I would never allow such a thing, yet you had done it anyway.”

“Father, I’m s-”

“Let me finish! I kept tabs on you, having that old milkmaid tell me what the housemaids were saying, what they were saying about you and Sir Peter Parker. That’s when I decided that it would be best to marry you off before you ruined this family’s name further. I had that boy help with the wedding in hopes it would tear you apart, and it had.” Your father sighed, leaning forward and knocking on the door for the ushers to open it. “Now, put on a smile. It is your wedding day.”

You swallowed harshly, unsure of what to say as you allowed him to drag you down the aisle.

“Smile.” Your father hissed, only moments after you started walking.

You complied, a faint smile now stretching on your face as you gazed down the aisle and to the altar, to where the prince stood, stoic.

When you were a young girl, you’d always imagined that when you got married, seeing your betrothed at the end of the aisle would have you feeling joy, warming your cold feet and filling you with the utter glee of marriage. You pictured your betrothed teary-eyed and smiling in a way that showed true love.

However, as you gazed into the blue eyes of the prince, you couldn’t feel anything but despair and could only feel your cold feet growing colder.

You allowed your father to kiss you, give you away as he handed over your numb fingers and palm to the prince, who guided you up the small altar stairs.

You gave the prince a small smile before sighing, your eyes moving around the chapel, trying to find Peter as if he would be there. As if he would show up and confess his love for you.

You felt foolish, so lost in your own thoughts and your quest to find the familiar brown curls and warm eyes of the knight, the prince of your heart, that you hadn’t realized the pause in the priest’s sermon.

“...if anyone can show just cause why this couple cannot lawfully be joined together in matrimony, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.” The Father announced, allowing for a moment of silence to fall upon the witnesses.

You held your breath, glancing up at the man before you, your husband to be before gazing back into the crowd. You allowed yourself to let go of the tension in your lungs as you saw the familiar brown curls peek out from behind the cathedral doors.

“I object.” You declared before you’d even realized the words had come from your own mouth and not the opened mouth of the young knight. “I cannot go through with this arrangement when my heart is in the hands of another. I’m sorry, I must go.”

You quickly stepped out of your heels, gathering your dress in your arms before rushing down the aisle, your eyes never breaking from Peter’s gaze.

“Sir Peter!” You called out his name, a hand raising to wave for him as he fully emerged from behind the door.

“What do you think I have assigned you to do?!” Your father bellowed from far behind you. “Retrieve her!”

Knights began to rise from their seats as your ran, hands reaching our to grab you from the sides of the aisle.

You slipped from their grasps, your dress tearing at the seams they attempted to pull you with and the sounds of your bare feet on marble filling your ears. You could only focus on Peter, brown eyed and soft faced Peter.

Your arm reached out for him, his hand grasping yours as he pulled you into the foyer.

“Peter, I-”

“There is no time for words. We must go.” Peter interjected, his grip firming on your hand as he pulled you down the corridor.

You both erupted in laughter, hands still gripping the other as you ran into the street and towards Peter’s horse.

“Princess, would you like to run away with me?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” You grinned, throwing your arms around his neck before kissing him with the passion you wished you had had in the first place.

You pulled away from him as the screams and howls of your father and his knights erupted from the church, the men running towards you.

“I believe that is our cue to leave.” Peter chuckled, quickly picking you up and helping you on the horse before getting on himself.

You wrapped your arms around him as he guided his horse down the street, going as fast as he could away from the crowd that had started to gather in the street.

“Peter, I am sorry.” You finally spoke up, as the kingdom had disappeared into the background and you could no longer hear the howling of the crowd.

“No, Bug, I am sorry. I should have been more sympathetic to your situation and I should have never made it about myself. It was you that was forced into a marriage, not I.”

“Peter, you have no reason to apologize. I was the selfish one here. I did not think of you, not once. And I should have done so. I should have considered you before I made my decision.”

“It is alright, Bug. We both have things to feel sorrow for.”

His hand rested on yours, his thumb running over your fingers as silence fell upon you once again.

“Why did you come to my wedding? I had believed you were not going to come.” You finally asked, the question mulling over in your mind once again.

“I could not go another day without loving you.” Peter stated simply. “I could not go another day without you knowing that I loved you, even if you would spend your life with another.”

“You will never have to go another day without being by my side. I swear to you.”

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honestsycrets · 4 years

Text

The Milkmaid VII: Bright Lights

❛ pairing | ivar x reader, harald & ivar (friend?ship)

❛ type | multi

❛ summary | reader finds her way while ivar argues with a dog.

❛ tags | pregnancy themes, supernatural intervention, ivar being a bad dog owner, he’s a pet boy okay, just not today, angst, but not dark?, i’m not @lisinfleur 😂

❛ sy’s notes | no really he argues with a dog. i was gonna post a gif of ivar on this but my 5B gifs are real s h i t t y. redo.

He should throw your stupid dog down a well. Maybe, if he were lucky, Mimir would shake the knowledge out of the damn thing. But no, instead, he has no more leads to go on than he originally had. The kings stand considering from which direction the dog came from.

“He came from behind the barn,” says Harald.

“He came from the barn,” Ivar scoffs, jerking his finger in the direction. “You think my slave was hiding away in some barn in the cold of night?”

“Maybe if she were hiding from you.”

“That is so helpful,” Ivar snaps at the other king. His men, deep in the woods, shout: there is nothing here! Ivar then turns to Harald with that knowing, all too cocky scowl. He hates it, when he is right. “Do you know what is back there? Brush. Woods and wolves.”

“I’m sure you know what is back there.”

Ivar leers back to the other king confident of his astringent purpose for saying that. Ivar grips his crutch, hobbling a bit closer. “What are you saying, hm?”

“I am saying these things have a way of recurring.”

These things, Harald suggested, is the death of royal children. His child, Freydis’s child, and now… Ivar holds Harald’s gaze for a stubborn few moments before he hisses, not bearing to waste his time with the old king.

“I don’t know why I brought you Harald,” Ivar walks away from the other kind. Harald, now dressed, follows Ivar toward the line of trees. “You have no faith in the gods, no faith in anything.”

“Here I am,” Harald’s expression smooths over from bunched up wrinkles to a state of relaxation, despite his companion’s jabs. After this many years, he became used to the constant jeer of kinds underestimating him. “Are we checking in the brush?”

“If we have to.”

The woods hold their own secrets. Deep in their hearth, past the arching trees and branches that nipped the sky, there had to be something. At the very least, all it could hold, is a vast amount of nothing. He has nothing to gain from continuing to deny Harald. They find themselves following Vala’s tiny steps that carry them deeper and deeper before they stop. Vala turns in a circle. Then sits.

Stupid dog.

“The dog doesn’t know,” Harald grumbles. “Look at him, he is confused.”

Ivar glares at the dog, wondering why, why hadn’t he picked a grown and well-trained dog. He had to pick this thing. Because you wanted him so much. He shouldn’t have let you pick the dog-- you knew good, domestic things. Things of war, protection, and-- this, not so much.

The pup scratches the grown, sniffing and turning, whining and whimpering. And Ivar wants nothing more than to boot him with the butt of his crutch. The dog yips and Ivar’s about had it. He whirls around-- and finds the dog sitting there looking right back at him.

Pest.

If he had been smart, he would have chosen a well-trained hound. But no-- because his heart is weak when it comes to the complaints of his woman, he chose a creature that was as useless as it was cute.

The sun disappeared behind the fjord. You were left with the chill of night as Kattegat’s temperature plummeted below comfortable levels. Too cold to move but too afraid to let the fire run out, you chucked remnants of wood you gathered into the dismal fire until there was nothing but scraps that the fire would snap apart, cracking into its dying breaths. With nothing else to give to the greedy flames, you fold your hands into your woolen dress and pray tight lipped prayers to Frigg.

A small light, barely a flicker, caught your attention out of your peripheral vision. At first you thought it was nothing, perhaps the flicker of an animal’s eyes. If you stayed very still, the wild beast would leave you be, or you so you hoped. It would be tragic, you thought, for the wolves to have two of Ivar’s children. You your legs in a little tighter and curl into the Asvaldr’s plump belly, even as he whines impatiently for your attention.

“Shh, what if it is a beast?” you smooth your hand over his muscular body. “We shouldn’t worry about it, morning will come soon enough.”

Despite your pleads, Asvaldr’s limbs flailed with his attempt to get up. When he does, he effectively thrusts you to the dirt floor. Your hand snaps to your stomach with precaution, resting on your hip. “Asvaldr what is it?”

It was then you saw it for what it was.

A whimsical bouncy flourish of light between the wall of thick trees over a prominent rock. You swing your legs around, using the ground to shove yourself up. Asvaldr clopped closer so that you might hold his reins to support your stance.

“A wisp?”

Asvaldr clops a closer, dragging you along with. It had been some time since you had seen one of these things. The bouncy lights that dragged you, so you heard, to your fate. You chase the wisps into the untraveled path of the forest that way, hanging onto your master’s horse, and praying to the gods the wisps path is a good one.

Well, chase is being kind, when you walk like that.

Ivar’s eyes chase the edges of old trees. They are tall, well grown, wild. All the good plants are wild and free to hold spirits that are just as wild and free. He moistens his cracked lips for the fifth time, debating--

Perhaps Harald had been right. Perhaps you wanted to run to get away from him. Everyone else shared that sentiment. Margrethe, ran from him. Freydis then-- she tried to run from him.

At least he took care of that one. He made sure she didn’t run.

“Ivar!” Harald paces until he finds something, lackadaisically whistling at Ivar. Ivar takes his crutch and jabs it into the hard dirt, carefully scaling the mountain side to where the other king was. He stood about the crispy remains that weren’t yet cool. “Ashes. She was here.”

The stupid little shit yips at his feet. They scan the surrounding area for clues that you had been there. Moist poignantly, he finds, is an overlooked trail leading away from the campsite. He realizes that there is something there-- better than a burnt out campsite or sweep of luck.

A bouncy red flame.

It held his attention for longer than it should have. “Thank the gods,” he finds himself raising the hammer of Thor to his lips, placing a kiss to it, before setting it back upon his sturdy chest.

In looking at Harald, he realized that the old man did not see what he saw. But it was there, jovial and light. “And where are you going?” Harald called out to him. Harald growls a half hearted response and disappears into the trees behind his so called friend. It had better been a lead.

“Come on, old man. You’re falling behind!”

Ivar believes in the ways of the gods and the norns. There is not a fate that lay before man that was not woven from their fingertips. From the strong standing trees to the ones that have collapsed and bore their craggly roots, the trees have an understanding with the nine worlds that humans did not. Humans unlike Ivar, whose faith was uncrackable.

He pressed down from the rolling hill down toward the fjord, scaling with a curse behind every step, because his crutch was complaining as he moved down the hillside. How he could walk the battlefield freely, like a titan, and now plummet to the ground with sand was beyond him. He breaks his fall on his elbows, and to his surprise, his bones don’t crack. He knows Harald is watching him agape as he hurries on his forearms.

“What are those?” Harald at last sees it with that dumb, lost expression splattered across his face. “Is there a Valkyrie here?”

“Do you see a Valkyrie?” he looks to the sky, then across the streaming waters that washed by, searching for the sight of a swan. There was none. He can’t help tease. “Perhaps its all that ale you’ve been drinking.”

Harald’s face is flat and free from a response, just the small, scoffing laugh as he looks about.

At least, Ivar knows, it isn’t in his head this time. Last time-- as it were -- was Freydis’s lies. At least now, here, he knows that Harald sees exactly what he sees. The wisps, fireballs of the norn’s might, leads down from Norway’s rise and drop to the lapsing waves of the water to the grainy shore.

“Hold this,” he hands the crutch he’s been crawling with to Harald.

The scouts he’s gathered fall in a defensive position around the kings. Harald stuffs the crutch under his arm, following Ivar, who now snakes over the ground toward the rocky bend of the beach like he’s fifteen again and innocent to the world despite the men around him. He can see his brother’s long bodies splashing in the cool water against the warm orange that reflected on the sun. Then Hvitserk and Ubbe would come with their spears and Ubbe would show him a feast of fish while Hvitserk had none. Sigurd would have one.

Nostalgia isn’t a good taste on his tongue. That boy-- the one who dreamed of being able to hunt with his big brothers? He’s not a boy he wants to know. He doesn’t want to know the boy that would have rathered slit his throat if only it wouldn’t destroy his mother. So he turns his head across from the still waters and looks toward the forest. At the banks of the waters, he recognizes a decrepit sight-- not from anything he’s ever seen, but something he’s always felt.

“As much as I hate to break up a good moment,” Harald kneels down, holding the crutch over his trousers, “We were hunting your very pregnant slave.”

“Shht,” Ivar snaps back to Harald. “Look there.”

“Look where?” He lurches then, grasping Harald’s wrinkled face and jerks it into the right direction across the waters. A long, grated sigh breaks free from his lips. The waters do not look deep, no. It strikes Harald as strange, as he knows he’s passed by here with his warships, and they’ve been deeper still than the crystal clear waters before. He turns toward his men to shrill something-- when he finds the only company they have is the cold chill of the sea.

Ivar looks back at him, reclining on the palms of his hands, before his head tilts-- and a shit eating smile makes its way up his face. He clicks his tongue like a man would after a lost animal.

“...I’m the donkey then.”

There is a cabin.

It is a thin looking thing that would make anyone question why it was still standing. It’s heavy brown wood stands, but it has clearly been burned by the crispness of its black edges. Someone did not want it to stand. But there it was, proudly displaying a shield that spun above the top of the double doors. Pure blood red with one lone symbol: a raven soars the expanse of the shield.

“This must be your father’s cabin,” Harald says, verging on a dry laughter. Ten years, and here he was, static in the same position he’s always been-- behind Ragnar’s legacy. He sets his hand over a twig like fence that reflects Ragnar and Lagertha’s condition prior to taking up raiding once again. Ivar cradles the crutch, using it like a horse’s bit, over Harald’s throat.

The farm’s gate is shaky at best. When he looks out to the fencing, he recognizes a wispy figure dashing into the gate. That handsome, cut jawline with curls. Inquisitive eyes free of any exhaustion. If he were asked, he knew it could never be.

But it looks like him. It’s his father’s whimsical young figure that dashes in, kissing the soft cheeks of a girl he’s never known, and a brother he wish he never had. Another figure stands at the gate; his energy wispy and white. Athelstan, he recognizes the name, not the body.

“So it seems. Have you been here before?”

The girl stops from watching her father and her brother. Harald pauses, helping Ivar off his sodden wet back, and onto the ground. Ivar upright, the crutch fit under his arm. He’s taller than he’s ever been. More handsome than he’s ever felt.

She offers her hand, and Ivar can’t help look up to it in question. The girl-- he’s never known her name. Only that she was at the midpoint between girlhood and crossing into womanhood.

“You’re my brother, Ivar. I am Gyda,” her voice, it’s softer than the waves that lapse the shoreline. “Have you come here to look for someone?”

“My w--” Ivar stops himself. “My slave. She’s with child.”

“I see.” She hovers there, transparent, but defined in features that paint her energy a rich gold. She was radiant. “I sent Baldur after you to help you find her.”

His heart catches in his throat. A quick glance around reveals nothing. There is no boy next to Harald and he. Harald, sensing the discomfort, glances around the farm to the cooing animals. To the handsome visage of Ragnar and Bjorn, ducking and weaving. Ivar recognizes a pang of longing across his friend’s face. Harald steps over the wooden gate.

“I don’t understand.”

She smiles. “My nephew.”

Somewhere, through the mist, he spots the fireball of light. Something in the deep of his mind reminds him of that cursed little soul: Baldur.

@tephi101 @alicedopey @supernaturalvikingwhore @tootie-fruity @titty-teetee @queen-see-ya-in-valhalla @ethereallysimple @deathbyarabbit @deathbyarabbit @readsalot73 @natalie-rdr @lol-haha-joke @lisinfleur @hissouthernprincess @marvelousse @dangerous-like-a-loaded-pistol @vikingsmania @wish-i-was-a-mermaid @lif3snotouttogetyou @gruffle1 @cris101071 @gold-dragon-slayer @babypink224221 @wonderwoman292 @naaladareia @beyond-the-ashes @generic-fangirl @chinduda @laketaj24, @peaceisadirtyword, @ly–canthrope @cris101071 @daughterofthenight117 @unassumingviking @ladyofsoa, @inforapound @winchesterwife27 @feyrearcheron44@readsalot73 @squirrelacorngliterfarts @gold-dragon-slayer @medievalfangirl @sallydelys @bluearchersstuff @affectionrabbitt @whatamood13 @notyouraveragegirl17 @igetcarriedawaywithyou @unacceptabletatertots @ivarandersen @stra-vage @tgrrose @cookies186 @learninglemni-blog @theleeshanotlouise @soiproclaim @msmorganforever

#Ivar x Reader #Ivar/Reader #Ivar & Harald #ivar the boneless/reader #ivar the boneless x reader #vikings imagines #vikings imagine #vikings/reader #vikings x reader #honestsycrets fics

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thereluctantinquisitor · 4 years

Text

WIP Whenever

Thank you for the tag @captainsaku! At the moment, I’m still limping through the opening chapters of Stonebreaker, trying to get a feel for the story and work on strengthening my atrophied writing muscles. Anyway, I figured I’d share what I have so far of Adiran’s introductory chapter. It’s basically just an awkward, descriptive mess, but at least it’s something. At this point, I’ll count that as a win!

I also put a short glossary at the end in case some terms were confusing. <3

Chapter 3 - A Scene

Be present. Do not cause a scene.

They were simple enough requests, Adiran supposed, as he braced himself and drained his third flute of wine. He knew it was poor form to cringe after swallowing, but the dry white was about as pleasant as a mouthful of sand and only went down half as well. If he was the paranoid type, he’d think the servers were offering him the worst vintages on purpose.

Then again, the celebration had stretched into its ninth day, now. Even the royal cellars had a limit.

Despite overstaying its welcome, the event remained at a predictably lofty height of splendour. In the ballroom - Vetrose’s famed Silver Font - delicate rivulets of water, no wider than the span of a hand, curled their way across the marble floor, draining into a shallow pool at the base of the royal thrones. Above their heads, weavelight strings were draped elegantly between pillars and across wide arches, their glowing pinpricks joining the blazing chandelier to bathe the room a honey-gold.

Beneath that radiant light, the Talveran nobility moved like swans, jewellery glittering, ankle-length gowns and embroidered jackets flashing enough to catch the attention of nesting crows. Hundreds packed the Font that night - an entirely different crowd to the evening prior, and likely the one prior to that. Attending Talveran court, with its litany of demands and expectations, was an exhausting and expensive affair. Every evening demanded a new outfit. A new glittering showpiece. A new plan for navigating the treacherous waters of social interaction, careful not to show too much interest in any one person. One night was difficult enough to survive. Very few could afford to be present for an entire turn’s worth of celebration.

Unfortunately, Adiran had no choice in the matter. It just had to be his brother returning from the northern border. As if no one else had ever come back from that waste of a campaign.

Another mouthful. Another weary swallow of something half as strong as it needed to be. Honestly, he’d almost rather be swallowing sand. At least that meant he’d be in the arena, getting his ass kicked practicing for something that mattered, instead of wasting his time decorating the wall. Divider’s Own, Lorvain was meant to have arrived by the third day! Adiran might have been able to slip away if he had been around to soak up the attentions of the lords and ladies. But no. The beloved Crown Prince had probably stopped to fawn over milkmaids and shepherds at every town between here and Morgate. Really, they should have accounted for that before throwing such a ridiculous event...

A prince should want to know his people, Adiran. I thought you understood that?

Threading paths expertly between the nobility were almost three dozen servers dressed in vibrant Volise green. Silver trays were held aloft on the pads of their gloved fingers as they moved in rehearsed patterns around the room, making sure every hand that sought a glass found a delicate stem. It was a different sort of dance; the kind that typically went unnoticed, the same way a clock’s hands are appreciated more than the mechanism behind the face. They knew the position of every crack in the stone; every rivulet.

None of them ever looked down.

Speaking of timing, the only reason Adiran paid the servers any heed was to make sure he got his right. On cue, he finished his wine with a grimace and thrust it towards a well-groomed young woman, her dark hair braided and pinned neatly around her head. Without so much as an errant blink, she bobbed carefully at the knees, accepted the glass, and replaced it with a new one from her tray.

“Careful not to drop that,” Adiran said, taking the drink and giving it an experimental sniff. Sweeter. Thank the Divider for that.

The server hesitated. They always did. Every night. “Your Highness?” she asked, and her lilt was perfection. Just the right amount of simpering, blended with polite curiosity. Someone had taken her training seriously.

“Am I slurring already? What I’m saying is that if the Crown Prince finally shows up and you’re in the middle of mopping a puddle, the King will have your hide for saddle leather. So...” He extended one bored finger towards the tray, a smirk curling the corner of his lips. “Tread lightly.”

The server’s mouth opened, and for a moment no sound followed. For just one blissful, fleeting second, Adiran thought he’d finally done it. He’d finally won.

Then, like underappreciated clockwork, her lips shaped themselves into a beatific smile, and she dipped into a curtsy. The tray never even wobbled. “Thank you for your concern, Your Highness. On my word, I will remain diligent. I would not dare bring shame on our King’s house.”

Damn it. The smile Adiran flashed back - half a sneer - could cut glass. But the server had already completed her parting bob and returned to her dance, weaving and gliding among the gaggle of silver-bloods with her tray of weak wine. Expression turning brittle, Adiran huffed and leaned back against one of the massive marble pillars - just one of fifteen lining the room. He’d claimed it on the first evening, like a hound staking its territory. Most people knew better than to bother him once he’d found his haunt, but the serving staff simply didn’t have that luxury. He supposed it was probably unkind, to force them to speak to him. But Divider, he was just so bored...

Scowling, he took a long swallow of his new drink, the chilled, sweet liquid a welcome enough sensation as it ran down the back of his throat.

So he was unkind. So what?

“Are you finished losing to the servers for tonight, or should I come back later?”

A familiar voice, and right on time. Adiran gave no indication of surprise, barely even turning to acknowledge the man. After all, this was just another ritual for them; a way to take a knife to long hours of affluent, barely drunk loitering. “Yeah, I’m done. An earthquake couldn’t shake them.” His gaze finally cut across, delivering what he hoped was a scathing look as Riin settled against the pillar beside him. “Took you long enough. Get distracted by all the pretty gowns and pouting lips?”

Folding his arms across his broad chest, Riin chuckled softly, utterly immune to Adiran’s glare. “Could you blame me if I was? Everyone looks appealing under this light.”

“That’s generous of you.” Sniffing, Adiran glanced up. Even with the smoke-glass covers encasing each glowing orb, he still had to squint against the brightness of the weavelights. “Guess it could be worse. We looked more like corpses before the covers were put on.”

“Really? I’m glad I missed it.”

“Yeah. Being dead inside is more than enough.”

Riin laughed, and a faint smile curved Adiran’s lips. He quickly hid it behind his glass. Truthfully, the entire ‘weavelight saga’ had been ridiculous. The King and Queen had commissioned hundreds of them from Tel Shival, purely because no one else had ever done it. Even the wealthiest families only ever had a few per household, usually kept in a lantern or a sconce in the most frequented rooms. After two seasons of painstaking arrangement that nearly killed two of their staff, the Silver Font soon found itself bathed in a thematically violent silver light. It had been an exciting novelty, at first; nobility flooded in from all over Talvera just to bask in the glow of thousands of wasted sicets. But then they quickly realised that colours didn’t behave the same way. Their favourite jewellery didn’t catch the eye. Their skin didn’t appear as youthful and rosy. Instead, every flaw - every stray hair or unpolished button - was placed on stark display for the vultures to pick at.

The weavelights were as bleak and clinical as a physicker’s ward. They sucked the warmth out of everything they touched.

In Adiran’s mind, the wash of corpse-light over each soiree was a perfectly fitting thing. But, as was typical, no one else agreed. So, they decided to encase each of the weavelights in honey-tinted glass and returned the room to almost exactly how it looked before. Back when it was lit by oil and flame.

That was how things were in Talvera. Decisions were made, sicets were spent, and then everyone just wanted to go back to how things used to be. Like nothing had ever happened.

GLOSSARY

Weavelight - spheres of crystal or glass, with a light-bearing glyphstring engraved by a thaumist specialising in Weaving. Maintains a bright, steady silver light. Cannot be dimmed or turned off at will. Thaumist - a well-trained practitioner of the thaumic arts, capable of manipulating thaumic essence. Turn - ten days. Tel Shival - An independent, famously insular city dedicated to the training and cultivation of thaumists and thaumaturgical study. Sicet - Currency used in the Allied Kingdoms.

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Tagging: @frenchy-and-the-sea, @leothelionsaysgrrrr, @bladeverbena, @thefluffynug, @rufinagertrude, @arduyn, @anarchyduck, and anyone else who has a WIP they’d like to share!

#wip whenever #(because i always miss wednesday lol)#reluctant memes #stonebreaker series #adiran #riin #the more i read it the more i dont really like it but #just... gotta... MOVE ON....#hURGH #reluctant writes

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iimaginebts · 5 years

Text

The Milkmaid // pt. 1

+ Paring/ Wolf! Jungkook x reader ( milkmaid )

+ Genre/ Fluff , romance, eventual smut :)

+ Summary/ Having milk in your breast ever since you were born got you outcast from the human world but accepted in another. When you met Jungkook, your life was completely flipped over, would you choose to stay with Jungkook or part ways with him.....?

Since young you’ve had a special ability. You had milk in your breast ever since you were born. Everyone in the village stayed away from you thinking that you are a freak. Whenever you go out , you and your mother will be cast strange and disgust glances from the villagers. Unable to take the stress, your mother took you to live at the top of the mountain, where it was near the forest and far away from people. Ever since then, your live was more peaceful and quiet.

However, the nice life didn’t live long. Not long later, your mother died, leaving you all alone at the young age of 7. You were a quick-witted girl since young, you soon learnt to cook, wash, clean and survive on your own. You didn't expect some prince in the shining armor to fall in love with you and take you away to keep you safe, although it has secretly been your dream. You realized that reality is in fact much different.

Years passed and you’ve grow into a beautiful young lady with fair skin. However rough hands due to all the cooking and cleaning. You were almost sure that you would live your entire life alone until one day, there was a knock on your door. It was a windy and rainy night, with loud thunderstorms. You have decided to stay in bed all day to avoid the cold. You didn't hear the knock until there was loud banging. Surprised, you carefully walked towards the door with an axe on your right hand.

You open the door but there was no one in sight. Just as you were about to close the door, you saw a basket with a baby inside wrapped with thick blankets. Confused, you look around and took the baby in when you confirm there was no one in sight. In the basket, you saw a note: Please take care of my child, let him stay with you forever, please don’t let anyone take him away. Thank you.

More than bewildered, you took the baby in your hands, only to realize he was not a usual baby. He has a tail and ears that resemble the wolf. He also had a locket pendant that has an unusual shape to it, it looks like a flower but also has a sharp end to it. Opening it, you see the word “ Jungkook “. Assuming that it is the baby’s name, you took the necklace off thinking that it would be too dangerous for a baby to be wearing it and kept it below your pillow.

Suddenly, the baby started wailing loudly. Startled, you tried everything to calm him down, but to no avail. Could he be.... hungry? You took out your breast and warm it, massaging before putting into the baby’s mouth. He immediately latched onto your breast tightly and sucked on it needily. It hurts a little as this is the first time you’ve ever fed someone but you soon got used to it.

Days and weeks passed, the baby was growing so fast that he could already talk. You’re pretty sure he is still at the age where he would pee in bed, but he never once did that. Little do you know that every month is equivalent to every year for the him. After a year of taking care of Jungkook, you now know his every habit and every meaning of his move. He is now a young boy ( although he hates to be called that ) and calls you noona. You treat him like a little brother and can’t help to feel a little more for him. Maybe it is because he is the only human that you have ever interacted with in years?

One thing for sure, no matter how old he has grown, he still sucks your breast every day. He loves your milk, so much. As months passed, you have two permanent bites on your breast. Both caused by Jungkook’s growing fangs. It hurts when he accidentally bites on it but he tries to be extra careful. You tried to suggest pumping out your milk into a cup so he can have it whenever he wants but he refused. He would only drink it fresh out of you.

Now that Jungkook is a fully grown man, both you and him started to feel more sexually aroused around each other. You felt wrong, as he practically grown from drinking your milk, but after losing contact with the human world, you were needy. Needy for body contact and warmth. Which is exactly what Jungkook is providing you with. On days where you and Jungkook just lay in bed, you would often tease him by not letting him drink your milk. Of course, this made Jungkook feel more than irritated. It isn't like he wanted your milk, he needed it. But you just don’t seem to understand.

This will often escalate to him pinning you down on the bed and roughly tearing your clothes away and harshly sucking on to your breast, causing you to gasp and whimper. Immediately followed by your strong arousal, he will growl and latch onto you more. You will then rub yourself against him , making yourself wetter and wetter. Knowing your style, Jungkook place both his strong arms on either side of your waist and bend down for a kiss. However, just before it gets too heated, you would always pull away from him, leaving both of you breathless.

Of-course, you enjoyed it so much and wanted his entire member inside you, but you can’t seem to get rid of the thought that you raised him from a child. It felt too wrong to have sex with someone you took care of since he was a baby.

“ Noonaaaaa, pleaseeeeeee I know you want me too “ Jungkook said, arms fully secured around your waist. His tail swing excitedly from side to side.

“ Kookie I can’t, I’m sorry “ you looked at him with sincere apology.

Disappointed, Jungkook’s arms loosen around you as he slipped off the bed and went to the bathroom. You hated to make him disappointed or upset. It breaks your heart seeing his tail swinging from side to side aimlessly. But you just can’t find the courage to let him fuck you. One day, you tell yourself, I will let him do whatever he wants with me. I will do it for kookie.

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Hope you guys enjoyed! Feel free to comment or dm me if you think I can improve in any areas!

Part. 2

#bts #bts smut #bangtan #hybrid bts #kpop #jk fanfic #btsxreader #bts x reader #btsimagines #smut #kpop smut #jungkook #kookie #milkmaid #the milkmaid

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st-just · 4 years

Note

Top five Wildbow characters

Oh, that's just cruel!

Okay, I'm actually going to divide this into three.

Protagonists (I still haven't read Twig I'm sorry.) 5-Avera 4-Lucy 3-Blake 2-Taylor 1-Verona (Honorable Mention: Look, I’m sorry Victoria, it’s really very close!)

Major Secondary Characters:

5-Miss 4-Contessa 3-Evan 2-Rose Jr. 1-Lisa/Tattletale (Honorable Mentions: Sveta, Number Man, Faysal, Aisha, Johannes, Mags...)

Throwaway Characters I really like due to aesthetic/Vibes

5-James Corvidae 4-The Milkmaid 3-Shadow of the Hecatomb 2-Switch Hitter 1-Accord (Honorable Mentions: The face-stealing boogeyman form the one Pact interlude, Fell’s hero brother form the Maggie Holt interlude, Tinker 15 guy, roughly a third of side characters that are never mentioned again)

#reply #anon #parahumans #wildbow #ask meme #Anonymous

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junie-bugg · 4 years

Text

The Heartrender - Chapter Four: Flames

Here it is! The last chapter of ‘The Heartrender’!

In which I finally post the Everlark smut, lmao.

You can read here on Tumblr or here on AO3.

Happy reading💕

Rating: Explicit

Warning: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Sexual Content

Relationship: Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark

Tags: Enemies to Lovers, witch!Katniss, witch-hunter!Peeta, AU - Shipwrecked, AU - Fantasy, Sexual Tension, Explicit Sexual Content, Furs and Fires, Angst and Fluff and Smut, sexually experienced Katniss, virgin Peeta, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Loss of Virginity, Laughter During Sex, Blood and Injury, Imprisonment, Peeta has some prejudices to work out, Peeta also has an accent, Inspired by Six of Crows

Summary:

He hated her. He hated her for what she was: an abomination, a demon sent to tear at the fabric of the natural world. He hated her for making him want to laugh. He hated her for being so brazen and sensuous and everything the women of his country were never allowed to be. But mostly he hated her because he realized he didn’t hate her. Not even a little bit.

After a shipwreck has left an abducted witch and a member of the ominous Order bent on wiping out her kind stranded on the icy shores of an uninhabited land, the two must work together to survive or face tearing each other apart in the process.

Chapters: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04

Chapter Four: Flames

He was shivering on the front stoop when she brought him a cup of nettle tea. The smell was similar to that of the tea he’d had back home, though in his mother’s house they made sure to only steep birch bark and angelica root. Giving a guest nettle tea was a sign of poverty and god forbid the Mellarks confirm what the entire town already knew to be true. He sloshed the steaming gray-green liquid around, eyeing it warily. The ceramic felt rough against his palm. The heat was welcome after so long outside, but instead of accepting her peace offering, he set it down on the stone step.

“It’s not poisoned,” she said sharply. “I wouldn’t do that.”

He scratched at his beard, a bitter laugh bubbled out of his throat. The perfect picture of forced nonchalance. “But you’d burst my heart. So much for that truce.” He had tried to avoid looking at her but couldn’t help but glance up when she didn’t respond.

Her eyes were rimmed with red and she had changed out of her nightgown. She now wore a simple white and blue frock. It was the kind that milkmaids wore in the Sjorkden countrysides during the summertime, though this one lacked the swirling embroidery and was made of a warmer, thicker cloth. The sleeves shone white against her deep skin and her hair floated loosely about her face, the inky color of obsidian pulled from the depths of the very earth. She crossed her arms over her chest protectively.

“You have no idea…” she started but then trailed off.

“No idea of what?” he pressed.

“You have no idea how much you scare me.” She wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand and then turned away from him, looking out into the mountainous distance. He was struck with how young she looked in that moment. Just a girl really. Frightened and cold and half a world away from home.

“At first I was scared of…” Her eyes darted back to his. “Well, look at you. You’re massive. But also the fact that you despise me without even knowing me. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

Peeta didn’t respond. From infancy, he had been taught to fear her kind. Witches were monsters. Demons. Barely even human. First instilled in him by his mother and after he ran away from home, the masters. Those fears were settled as deep as his very bone marrow and wouldn’t be so easily uprooted. But as he watched the breeze play with her hair and the subtle movement of her skirts as she shifted from foot to foot, the hateful voices of his kin quieted ever so slightly.

“Say something,” she said weakly.

“You could have killed me…but you stopped yourself… ” He was trying to make sense of it all, and once again, the only conclusion he came to was that he owed her. He had owed her the moment she pulled him from the sea and perhaps he would never stop. She was always sparing his life. What had he done in return?

She stared down at her feet and Peeta realized with a start that he was admiring the slender curve of her neck, the same soft stretch of skin he made a habit of caressing at night when she wasn’t aware of him. This wasn’t right. He bit the inside of his cheek, summoning his anger back up. It wasn’t as readily equipped as it had once been.

“If you had drawn a sword on me a few days ago, I think I would have killed you. But now I… I don’t want you to…” She swallowed, the words were as thick as a paste in her mouth. “I don’t want to be alone.”

Her confession made him uncomfortable. It was like she had rolled over and was showing him her soft underbelly. It wasn’t like her.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I want us to trust each other.”

“That might prove to be a mistake,” he pointed out. “We haven’t had the best track record.”

“I know,” she said, the corners of her mouth twitching upwards. “But I’m tired of being afraid.”

She had spared him, more than once, even when it could prove dangerous for her to do so. She had kept his heart beating and his blood warm even when it would have been easy to let him freeze to death. She said she was tired, Peeta realized that he was too, and without him even meaning for it, the iron chains of his preconceptions shifted.

“No matter what you paint me to be, I’m no monster,” she said as she bent down to pick up the tea. Her hair brushed the stone step.

“Then what are you?” Peeta asked.

“A survivor. Just like you.” At that moment, her face was unreadable, stone-like, as if she carried a whole uncharted world inside herself that Peeta would never touch. But there, if you looked closely as she placed a gentle hand to his shoulder and pressed the tea back into his palm, there was a chink in the armor. Like when she had allowed him to listen to her heartbeat, something so intimate and out of place between the bickering and long stretches of wary silence between them.

It was a softening of sorts, a slivered glimpse through branches and into the clearing beyond, as if all other encounters he had witnessed before were of shifting leaves, ripples in a lake, half versions of a girl, and this was the first time Peeta had the courage to look closely and really see her.

He wondered what she saw in him.

There was a tenderness in her eyes, and in response to the pressure of her hand, a blooming warmth opened in Peeta’s chest the same way a door opens on rusted, unused hinges. Slowly and with great difficulty, as if out of practice, but open all the same.

That was until her eyes narrowed, her lips twisted unpleasantly, and she said: “Don’t ever point your sword at me again, or I swear to god I’ll make you piss yourself.”

They followed the coastline, sleeping in abandoned whaling lodges some nights and huddled together behind boulders on others. The times when they had no lodge were the toughest on the witch since she felt it her duty to stay up to keep them warm. She’d be drained and sleep-deprived the next day and their speed would be greatly diminished.

Peeta offered to carry her. It was the least he could do in exchange for all she had done for him, and she was so light it’d be no burden at all, but her pride was a delicate thing and she refused every time. That was until they hadn’t set foot in a lodge in three days and she was on the verge of collapsing. Peeta didn’t ask this time, he just scooped her up and let her sleep with her face pressed into his chest.

“You’ve started smiling in your sleep. Did you know that?” she mumbled groggily one day as Peeta walked with her in his arms.

He chuckled, the crystallized mist of his breath swirling around his head. “How would I know that? I’m the one sleeping.”

She laughed lightly and curled her hand in the wolf’s fur of his cloak. He could hear a smile tinging her voice when she responded. “What do you dream about?”

He lied. “Home. Sjorkden.”

“Do you have a family, lieutenant?”

“I do,” Peeta said solemnly. “Or I did.” He wasn’t thinking of his blood. Older brothers with a taste for cruelty. A timid father who retreated into a mixing bowl whenever trouble brewed. A mother with a short temper and an even shorter supply of love for her youngest son. She had called him ‘runt’ before he worked up the courage to run away and enroll in the academy.

Whoever first said “blood is thicker than water” was a fool. Peeta had seen barrels worth of blood wash away in water. He had seen his home town swallowed up by mists from the deck of a ship. He had seen his mother weeping over another lost child running down her legs and then turn to beat her living, breathing sons the same day. Blood meant nothing.

No, he did not think of his blood. He was thinking instead of his brothers in arms, the men he’d known as boys, the sparring circles and the holiday feasts, the proud slaps on the back, the dirty inside jokes, and the secret drunken parties held when the masters went to bed. He felt a hollow ache deep in his chest when he remembered most of his friends were dead, lost in a never-ending crusade that had been handed down to them like a dusty, blood-soaked artifact of another time.

And then he thought of her and with no magic involved, his heartbeat quickened.

She was all he had left.

“I had a family too,” she whispered and Peeta heard the words she wouldn’t say out loud.

A raid.

“When?” he pressed cautiously, afraid of pushing her to open up to him again. It happened so rarely that she would let a scrap of her life from before The Bloody Rose loose. He knew she had lived in Ellsworth for a few years, the merchant town where the commander had found her, working off a steep indenture in a pleasure house. But she was a Heartrender, originally from the southeastern country of Krell, a land thick with forest and swamp. She was a girl of humid summers and wooden houses, not the chilled stone harbors of a trading port.

“I was eleven when they took my father, thirteen when my mother disappeared, and-” her voice trembled, though she tried to hide it. “They burned Primrose last year.”

The witch said they but all Peeta could hear was you. He wanted to console her but what could he say when he and his people were the cause of her suffering? Peeta had turned in plenty of young women to the council. What if one of them had been her sister? Guilt gripped his throat, his stomach, his lungs. He felt heavy with self-loathing.

Perhaps it wasn’t her that was the monster. Perhaps it was him.

Perhaps it had been him all along.

With words stuck in his throat, he walked with just the wind and the crunching of his own steps to break up the silence.

“It’s nice that you’ll have somewhere to go if we get out of this,” she said in an attempt to change the subject.

Peeta had flashed her a small smile, but his insides withered like flowers in a frost.

He didn’t really. Not anymore.

At least, not in Sjorkden.

The witch walked near the cliffside, peering down at the black sand beach every once in a while. Peeta knew she stepped lightly and was careful with her footing, but still, he didn’t like her so close to the edge. He pulled her away.

“Stop,” she grumbled, twisting her arm out of his grasp.

Peeta clenched his jaw but didn’t try touching her again.

She narrowed her eyes at his sour expression. “I’m being careful, I swear.”

“What are you looking for?” he demanded.

“A way down. I’m sick of this cliffside,” she said as she returned to the edge.

“We don’t have time for a stroll on the beach.”

She scowled. “The last time I checked, we have all the time in the world.”

“We need to stay on course or we’ll never get to Fjordhingă.”

“About that…” The witch pursed her lips, suddenly unable to look him in the eye. “I’m not going.”

“What?” he sputtered. When had she decided this?

“There’s nothing for me there. It’s just another merchant town and I’ve had my fill of those.”

Peeta scrubbed a hand over his face. His fingers grazed the thick stubble on his jaw. “We’re not going to be staying there.”

“Then where will we be going?”

His lips started forming the word Sjorkden, but that wasn’t right. His homeland was no place for her. So what was he going to do when they arrived in Fjordhingă? He couldn’t bring her back to Sjorkden and turn her in. She’d be imprisoned, tried, and then burned. That was no longer an option. But if he let her go…

He couldn’t bear the thought. Not being with her. If he watched her board a ship and stowaway to her homeland, a raid ravaged country she didn’t even seem to want to return to, he knew a piece of himself would be carried off with her. A piece he’d never get back. But what choice did he have?

A small part of him missed when she had just been ‘the witch’ and not something more. He missed when things were black and white, not muddled shades of gray. Nothing made sense now. Not the golden warmth that passed through him when she smiled. Not the sickening, vengeful bottoming out of his heart when she cried. He found himself hating the men that had touched her, used her body for their own lustful releases. He daydreamed of hunting each and every one of them down and cutting off their fingers, one by one. But why stop at the fingers? Why not make a brilliant bloodbath out of it? A final crusade.

Perhaps that’s what they would do.

But just as Peeta opened his mouth to answer, unsure of what exactly was going to come out, the rock gave and the witch plummeted down the cliffside.

The masters had taught Peeta not to give in to panic, to take danger in both hands and bend it to his will, until what he had wasn’t a dangerous situation, but a controlled one, preferably in his favor.

All those lessons went out the window as he watched her scrabbling to find purchase on the cliff face.

Instead of eerily calm, he felt the world tilting in and out of focus. A fiery rush of adrenaline alighted his nerves as if he were made of oil-soaked paper and someone had thrown a match at him.

He wrenched his pack off and dove, just barely managing to grab onto her wrists before she lost her grip on a loose root, but not before he cut the inside of his forearm on a jutting rock ledge. The rock sliced through fabric and flesh, the hot, tearing pain erupting up his arm as the weight of the witch and her pack pulled him down. His screams echoed out across the sea.

“Don’t let go,” she whimpered. Below her dangling body was a six-hundred-foot drop, more than enough to shatter her bones and dash her brains from her skull if she slipped. He thought she had been cut as well when he saw dark red seeping into her skirts, but as his vision blurred and blackened around the edges he realized it was his own blood running down her body. His hand and her wrist were slickened with it and soon she only clung to him by one arm. Peeta braced himself and slowly lifted her up the cliff, digging the tops of his feet into the ground to keep himself anchored.

She was shaking like a leaf, her heart beating so hard Peeta could feel it under his palms as he hauled her onto stable ground. When her legs cleared the edge, she crawled on hands and knees to vomit into a dead bush while Peeta rolled onto his back to cradle the throbbing, torn flesh of his arm against his chest. Perhaps it was only a minute or perhaps it had been many when the witch finally crawled to his side, her face swimming above him. She lifted shaking hands to his wound, her fingers slipping over muscle and blood as she began chanting lowly in Krellian.

There was a tingling warmth, an emerald green light, the feeling of flesh slowly knitting itself back together, fiber by fiber. He lifted his good hand to caress her cheek, wiping the tears away. He hated when she cried.

“Stay still,” she ordered tremulously. “Please, just stay still.” As the edges of his vision blackened and he was pulled down into unconsciousness, only one thought registered.

What a terrible hunter he must be to have fallen in love with his prey.

Before the shipwreck and the nights spent pressed against the witch, Peeta rarely had good dreams. He had nightmares or he had nothing, so when he dreamed of the sound of her footsteps at the door after a long day, the thrumming heat of her body in a moonlight bathed bed, or of the fluttering of two heartbeats underneath his palms, he thought perhaps he had died and this vision was his reward for one good act in a lifetime drenched in blood.

He had saved her. They were even.

He could die with that.

But all too soon the dream ended and he sank into a shallow realm between sleep and consciousness.

Animal skin walls. Ashwood beams. The fragrant smoke of a cooking fire. The press of warm lips to a cool forehead.

The passing of time blurred. The only constant he was aware of were hands. Gentle caresses to his brow, his cheeks, the pad of a thumb caught on his chapped bottom lip, knuckles against his jaw, a single fingertip running along the slope of his nose. She sang Krellian lullabies in husky tones, whispered prayers against his throat, traced cool runes into his skin with water, rubbed the warmth back into his numb feet.

Trӕvani ᶌala ką.

Stay with me.

“Always,” he mumbled in his mother tongue.

“You need a haircut,” she said accusingly as she lifted the knife above his head. Her silver eyes flashed dangerously, a warning, that if he didn’t cooperate, she’d make him.

The shipwreck had been nearly two months ago, his injury about a week, and in that time his hair had grown in waves well past his ears. He’d had close shaves when he was in training, a clean face too, but he liked the feel of shagginess on his neck and a thickening beard. Though apparently, the witch liked when his hair was more manageable.

“You need a bath too,” she grumbled as she swatted his hands away and carefully started trimming.

“You offering?” he quipped.

The witch snorted, undeterred from her task. “You wash my back, I wash yours. That’s how it works around here.”

Peeta wasn’t sure if that was a yes or a no.

They sat together by the fire. She was perched upon her knees, a ring of blond forming soundlessly on the hard-packed dirt. As she worked, Peeta traced a finger over the jagged, pink scar on his forearm.

The witch had saved his life. Again. If it wasn’t for her and that spell, Peeta would have bled out. The cut was deep, almost to the bone, and had severed many nerves and arteries. The muscle tissue would normally be beyond repair, but now, besides the scar which the Heartrender had sheepishly admitted she wasn’t skilled enough to erase, there was no trace of injury. No pain when he circled his wrist, no twinge when he flexed his fingers. Almost as if nothing had happened. But something had happened. He felt the shift almost as soon as he was conscious enough to sit up and drink on his own.

This was no longer a game of survival, a cease-fire between warring parties. They had come to cross some invisible threshold. The first truce had been borne through words alone, the second through her restraint, but this partnership was borne through Peeta’s actions, the risk he took in that dive, almost dying in her stead.

She wouldn’t forget that.

The witch came to kneel in front of him and set the knife down, brushing the remaining strands of hair from his shoulders. Peeta watched her thoughtfully. Her lashes were as dark as dried ink on parchment paper and her face looked fuller than it had on the ship, her cheeks glowing like polished bronze medallions in the firelight. Peeta admired her lips the most. Pink, full, and slightly parted. Plump as a dew crusted rose in spring. Her tongue danced behind her teeth when she opened her mouth to speak.

“You should kiss me.”

Peeta’s mind went blank. “What?”

“Or don’t. It’s up to you.” She had shrugged then, a small smile curling her lips as if she knew a secret he didn’t. “I’m a very good kisser though.”

Peeta had never kissed a woman before, and she had worked in a pleasure house. Surely she was used to men with more experience than him. Though that had been a job to her, a means to get by, an indenture she had been forced to agree to.

This was something entirely different.

His cheeks flushed as his body responded, his mind going fuzzy with desire. He wasn’t just thinking of kissing when he said: “I don’t know how.”

“I’m a good teacher. Besides, I like that you’ve never known another woman. That means I have no competition,” she said lowly as she leaned into him.

“You wouldn’t have competition even if I had,” he breathed, and then she closed the scrap of space between their bodies.

If he was back in Sjorkden, if he had completed his blood cull and turned in fifty witches, if he had been granted his talisman, a polished stone artifact that would symbolize his ascent from soldier to honored veteran, he would be spending the winter in fruition. He would have chosen a noblewoman to court, dined with her family, brought her gifts of ice wine and shimmery sapphire cloth, and only after their intertwined hands had been bound by silken Siyana ribbons, only after her golden bridal plaits were undone and left to fall loosely across her shrouded shoulders, only after they burned a winter rose and let the fragrant smoke settle upon their skin, would he be permitted to kiss her for the first time, under the eyes of god and before the eyes of her father. As was proper.

This was not that kiss.

It was better.

The witch’s lips were soft and tasted of salt, though something deeper lay beneath the remains of their last meal. Drops of amber honey, the bittersweet juice of frukkala berries, the earthy notes of pine bark.

Her mouth guided his as she twined her arms around his neck. Slowly at first, and then something snapped and she pressed her tongue into his mouth with a desperation bordering on hunger.

Peeta trembled where he held her, running his fingers down the soft fabrics of her dress, circling the dip of her hips and then climbing up the even bumps of her rib cage. He didn’t want to break the kiss but he was suddenly overcome with the urge to brush his lips against the hollow of her collarbone. She sighed in appreciation when he did just that.

Her skin was flawless, smooth, pliable. Heat radiated from her like coals, the silky steadiness licking at his flesh as he undid the ties of her dress. The fabric fell away and Peeta’s eyes slowly raked over her nakedness. She was small but she was stunning, her body lean and sinewy like a willow nymph from a fairytale. Her breasts were pert and Peeta watched firelight dance over her pebbling nipples. The sight sent heat straight to his groin until the building pressure was almost painful.

“Your turn,” she said as she lifted his tunic over his head, lightly tracing silvery white scars across his collarbones, chasing them down his chest, his navel, until she reached the line of dark blond hair that disappeared past his trousers. Her fingers stilled, her gaze flickered up to his, and Peeta took the opportunity to wind his hand into her hair and pull her down for another kiss.

He remembered the press of her naked body the first night they’d slept against one another. His desire then had been shameful, sprung up from some twisted part of him he had tried to hide behind hatred and mistrust. But this. This desire roared unchecked through his body, burning infinitely hotter now that he knew she wanted him as desperately as he wanted her.

“Maybe we should move away from the fire,” Peeta suggested breathlessly in between kisses.

“No,” she murmured huskily. “I’m going to take you right here.” She pushed him down onto his back into their nest of furs and lifted her legs to straddle him, grinning when she felt the press of his hardened erection under her hips. She pinned his wrists up by his ears as she lay her body on top of his, rubbing her core against him in slow, even circles. His cock throbbed, straining to get out from the confines of his pants.

“You’re such a tease,” he groaned.

“It’s more fun that way,” she whispered cheekily, and then she released his wrists and clasped his face between her palms, kissing him ever so slowly, worrying his bottom lip between her teeth. The sensation made him dizzy.

“Have you ever felt this good before?” she asked in a sigh.

“Only in dreams,” he responded as he chased her lips and pressed his palms into the small of her back.

She pulled away, an intense curiosity alighting her eyes. “What do you really dream about?”

“You,” he whispered. “And me.”

Her lips curled into a sultry grin as she softened and leaned down to press her mouth to the hollow below his ear. He turned his head to give her more room. “And what do we do together in these dreams?” she purred as she sucked on his neck.

“Everything.”

She laughed against his skin. “You’re being cheesy.”

“It’s the truth,” he said defensively, but the smile threatening to crack his face open seeped into his voice and made him sound as if he were joking.

She moved away again and Peeta was about to object, pull her back, crash those beautiful lips against his own once more, but there was no need as she ran a gentle hand down the line of his abdomen and then slowly, inch by inch, pulled his pants down his thighs. He hissed when his cock sprang free and bounced onto his stomach. She was so close he could feel the wet heat of her breath fanning over his skin.

The witch raised a brow, admiring his size. Peeta knew from spending nearly a decade at the academy and then a number of years on witching vessels that he was… well endowed. You don’t spend that much time among men without seeing something, and to compare one’s self to others was human nature.

He pulsed in her soft hand as she pulled his foreskin down, revealing the glistening pink head. She ran a gentle thumb along the ridge. Then she leaned down and slowly took him into her mouth.

Peeta had never felt so vulnerable.

It was like she commanded full control of him. She simply had to twirl her tongue around the head and he would groan and buck his hips without even meaning to. She worked the base with her hands and hollowed out her cheeks, flicking the ridge with her tongue, caressing the slit, tasting him as no woman had before.

Peeta moaned loudly and clenched his abdomen. His thighs trembled. Suddenly, she stalled, squeezed the base in her hands, and then lewdly popped his length out from between her lips.

“Eager aren’t we?” she purred.

Another moan escaped him as she began pumping, using her saliva as a lubricant. The delicious feeling of her hands rucking up his skin was almost enough to make him unravel. The wet sounds of her attentions filled the lodge as his nerves kindled, blazing like a wick burning from both ends.

“Slow down,” he begged, embarrassed by how ragged and breathy his voice had become. He felt weakened from being wrapped in her hands but he realized he didn’t mind. It was a good weakness, the kind that left you warm and a little watery in the knees. The tight pleasure coiling in his body was mounting past anything he had ever reached on his own. It was agony when he stalled her hands and his pleasure plummeted.

“I don’t want to come yet,” he panted, lifting his head to look at her. She still grasped him in her hands. His rounded tip was blush red where her tongue had been. It was perhaps the most deliciously erotic sight he had ever witnessed.

She drew her eyebrows together, revealing that cute little brow crease.

“I want to make you feel good too,” he said, brushing the hair off her shoulder.

“What do you have in mind?” she challenged before running the tip of her tongue up along a bulging vein of his shaft. It was wholly distracting.

“You… you’re going to have to stop that first.” He lifted his eyes upwards.

“Are you praying?”

“Maybe.”

She picked up on his nervousness, folding her tongue back into her mouth. “Look, if you’re not ready, you’re not ready,” she said, but that wasn’t it at all. He was ready, he was just hesitant. He didn’t know the workings of a woman’s body. He knew only his own, the strength he possessed and the burdens he could bear, the battles he could wage and the soaring pleasures he could summon using his own two hands. He knew her, he just didn’t know how she was put together, and therefore, he didn’t know how to make her fall apart. But that would all change if he could just swallow his insecurities.

“Come here,” he beckoned, wetting his lips nervously.

He had grown up surrounded by boys of all ages, and though they were never permitted to indulge in the union of flesh, both because there were no girls at the academy and because it was forbidden for witch hunters to do so, he had still heard raunchy tales of all the things men and women could do in bed together.

And he had one particular act in mind.

She softly tapped the head of his cock against her lips as if deep in thought. Each brush sent sparks traveling down his shaft. “That’s a tad ambitious for your first time,” she murmured, but Peeta could tell she was happily surprised at his offer. He had fingers and lips and tongue. Peeta was unpracticed, but he knew with her guidance he could satisfy her.

“You said you were a good teacher,” he reminded her, the timbre of his voice taking on a gravelly deepness. “Teach me how to please you.”

She set him down and then slowly, with back arched and eyes hooded, climbed over his body. Her long black hair fell from her shoulders like a spill of water.

“Higher,” he instructed, allowing the pads of his fingertips to stroke the springy flesh of her breasts and then the planes of her bare stomach as she continued climbing. She settled her thighs on either side of his head allowing Peeta a good view. He looped his arms under her legs to anchor her in place and splayed his hands over her lower back. Underneath a thick tuft of hair was her core, pink, swollen, and blooming like a flower in spring. Peeta’s cock jumped at the sight.

“If you want to please me you’re going to have to do more than stare at me, lieutenant,” she laughed.

Peeta steeled himself and swept a finger along her folds. It was a shallow caress, a tentative touch, but his fingertips came away glistening with her essence.

He exhaled slowly, watching as the witch’s slit leaked her arousal. There was a heavy moment, the air pregnant with the crackle of potential, until eventually, Peeta gathered the courage to flatten his tongue and taste her.

She tasted sweet. Musky.

She tasted human.

Her body tensed, responding to his touch. “Right here,” she breathed as she pressed a set of fingers to a small bud at the apex of her entrance. He lifted a thumb to the spot, thankful when she guided him in slow circles. With her instruction, he used his tongue to gently caress her lips and his thumb to circle her clit, humming appreciatively whenever he felt her flutter.

“Your beard tickles,” she laughed when she determined he had gotten the hang of it. She leaned back to rest her hands on the corded muscles of his thighs, thrusting her chest up to the ceiling and bucking her hips slowly along with his rhythm. He was moving more on instinct than anything else when he dipped his tongue inside of her.

It took time and he knew he was being clumsy, but the witch wouldn’t let him stop. His tongue was heavy and jaw sore when she replaced his fingers with her own, increasing the pressure and riding his mouth to release.

Her spine snapped, her eyes slid closed, curses fell from her lips, and something primal within Peeta awakened. He found himself desperately pulling her closer, lapping at her entrance, milking her release, and swallowing her arousal.

When it was over her core pulsed faintly and she opened her eyes to smile languidly down at him. Peeta’s tongue slowed. “You have something…” She broke into giggles and then brushed at his lips with her fingers, managing to smear even more of herself on him. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he smiled, lips tingling. He liked this view. Her dewy skin seemed to glow like the very embers smoldering not three feet away.

“Before we do this,” she said, unhooking her legs from around his head and coming to once again grasp him firmly in her hands, “I need you to promise you won’t finish inside of me.”

His breath caught as he imagined it.

Being inside of her.

“I won’t.”

“Promise me,” she pressed, pumping him idly.

It was an absurd situation. Surely a man would promise anything to a vixen grasping his very manhood in her hands. But to Peeta, it was more than that. He had her trust and here was a chance to prove he deserved it.

“I promise.”

With their deal struck, the witch mounted him. Peeta admired her figure in the gilded firelight once more, brushing his fingers against her peaked nipples and kneading the comely flesh as he watched the shadows dance and pool in the dip of her navel. This was a sight he would never be sick of.

She positioned the head of his shaft at her entrance and slid the tip along her slit to gather slickness, earning a few strangled sounds from Peeta. Her folds were soaked after her orgasm and he slid his hands down her body, gripping the backs of her knees in anticipation.

“I want you to watch my face as I take you in,” she whispered. “Every last inch.”

There was a tight, building pressure that suddenly broke into a slide. He slid past her folds, embedded within her. The feeling of the witch’s hot, silky heat molding around him, squeezing his shaft and cradling the head, was unlike anything he had ever experienced.

Her core fluttered. So did her eyelids.

“Watch me, lieutenant,” she reminded him as she raised her hips to slam down on him. The wet slap of skin on skin rang through the air.

“Peeta,” he grunted.

“What?”

“My name. It’s Peeta.”

“Peeta.” She sighed his name like a prayer, letting the vowels roll off her tongue as if she were tasting them, and Peeta thought he had never heard it spoken so sweetly. “Nice to meet you, Peeta.”

His laugh melted into a groan as she clenched around him. He looked down between her legs at where their bodies overlapped. He was embedded to the hilt. She was taking it all.

Her breasts bounced with her body, and as she pressed down on him, Peeta raised his hips to meet her.

“Harder,” she begged.

Peeta slid his hands up her thighs, squeezing the flesh through his fingers like clay and rolling his hips sharply upwards. The head of his cock bumped her cervix. “Like that?”

The witch gasped, her body clenching with his thrust, and let out a little giggle. “Yes,” she moaned, allowing Peeta to take control of their rhythm. She leaned down to kiss him as he palmed her ass, spreading her open so he could set a faster tempo.

The small lodge filled with the lewd sounds of slapping skin and heavy grunts. It was ecstasy, being inside of her, and with each thrust Peeta felt warmer. His skin burned against hers.

Peeta wanted it to last longer, but as his thrusts stuttered and he felt that familiar tingle in his balls, he knew he couldn’t hold on. The witch started grinding on top of him, tuned into his body’s tells; the increasing cadence of his breath, the tremors in his hands, the intensity of his thrusts. It was time to keep his promise.

With a toe-curling shudder and a string of unintelligible curses in his mother tongue, Peeta pulled out and finished onto his own stomach, his hot seed quickly cooling on his skin. The witch panted above him, one hand splayed over his chest, another by his head, supporting her weight. Her skin shone with sweat and the loose hairs on her nape were damp.

“Let me clean you up,” the witch purred and Peeta watched in disbelief as she unhooked her legs from around him and shifted down. Her pink tongue darted out to lick the spend off his skin, and then she slowly traced up the ridges of his cock to capture the last pearlescent dribbles off the hypersensitive head, licking that clean too as if she were finishing something delicious. She stuck out her tongue to show him.

She had swallowed it all.

“You are something else,” he laughed giddily. He had never felt so satisfied and tired at the same time. He laid his head back on the pelts as the witch gently toyed with him softening in her hand. Her palm glided slowly, slickened by her arousal.

“I knew you were a virgin but I didn’t know you were a virgin,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Peeta asked, suddenly embarrassed. Had he done something wrong?

“You never got a blow job when you were younger? Not even a handy?”

He wasn’t sure how she could possibly have known that, but perhaps he had been too loud. Was that possible? His face flushed with heat. “No. I… I was never really around girls. Not until now at least.”

She smiled softly, carefully placed him down, and then crawled up his body to rest her head on his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and stroked her hair, tugging gently on her scalp. The strands were slightly knotted, but after Peeta had run his fingers through the tresses a few times, they felt as soft as silk. A spill of ebony satin. Any fabric that wasn’t the rough spun texture of his tunics.

“That was rather good for your first time,” she said. “I thought you’d be more… instantaneous.”

He chuckled. “I’m a soldier, not a priest.”

She smiled into his chest hair. “So you’ve satiated your urges all on your own?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I am. I thought all Sjorkden witch hunters were pious and pleasure starved.”

“Perhaps not pleasure starved but pleasure...hungry. It’s not as fulfilling when you’re alone.”

There was a pause as they listened to the soft crackling of the fire, felt it’s comforting heat on their skin, and watched it’s muted light dance across the walls.

“Is it bad that I’m happy? That I’m your first, I mean,” she mumbled softly. “I know we don’t owe each other anything, but I’ve wanted this. At least once.”

“Only once?” he asked, trying to keep the hurt out of his voice.

He could never go back. Not to his country. Not to his old ways. Not to a life without her. Did she think after they made it back to civilization that he would abandon her? After everything they had been through? After everything she had made him feel? And what was this about him not owing her? He didn’t even know her name but he owed her everything.

Absolutely everything.

She lifted her head off his chest and met his eyes. She was searching for something in his expression and the raw intensity of her gaze made him gulp.

“I don’t want this to have just been once,” he whispered, coming to cup her cheek in his palm and running a calloused thumb over the delicate skin under her eye.

“Any sane woman of my talent would be afraid of you, valkrӕlla,” she said lowly, her lips parting delicately with her words. She raised her hand to hold his palm against her cheek. “Instead, I find myself unable to let you go.”

A fierce rush of affection crashed through Peeta’s body. He understood because he felt the same way.

She was his.

He was hers.

Anything else was unthinkable.

He traced his fingers down the dip of her spine, catching small droplets of sweat. “You must know you have nothing to fear from me,” he insisted, pleading with his eyes, trying to make her understand that he felt it too. That he had been wrong before. That perhaps he didn’t deserve her forgiveness for the way he had let himself despise her, for the way he had treated her. Perhaps he didn’t deserve her at all. But maybe…

Maybe she would still have him.

“I’m sorry I was so cruel to you, valjakka.”

Beloved.

Her breath hitched. “I know,” she whispered, and then she drew closer, tipping her mouth to his.

He tasted himself on her tongue.

Peeta gathered her up and pressed her closer, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her slender body atop his chest. The other kisses had been lustful, desperate in the same way a flame sucks the oxygen from a room. But this one kindled hope. Life.

It was as if she was air, and he, a drowning man.

When they had exhausted themselves their lips broke apart and they lay on top of the furs, lapsing into a comfortable silence as Peeta grabbed one to cover their naked bodies. The fire was nearby but the bitter air from outside still managed to creep through the walls, slowly cooling their sweat-slicked skin.

“Peeta,” she breathed, a small sound of happiness escaping her lips. “Peeta, Peeta, Peeta.”

“Don’t wear it out,” he joked, but the sound of his name rolling off her tongue and languishing past her lips was like a shot of pure energy. He was keenly aware of how it affected his body, reawakening his lust as he shifted uncomfortably on the floor beneath her.

“My name is Katniss,” she offered shyly.

Katniss.

He let the name caress the inside of his skull. The syllables fell from his lips and tangled in her hair. It suited her, hard and soft at the same time. Just like the way she made love.

He told her so and she laughed.

Epilogue

Peeta’s old hatreds finally died as he looked into her eyes and saw humanity reflected back at him. He thought of her as precious and wondered how he had never seen it before. She was a blizzard, an earthquake, a monsoon, all at once. What a beautiful thing it would be to succumb to her power.

She may have looked all hard planes and edges, but when she made love, she didn’t act like it. Her body was soft, flexible, willing to bend to any shape Peeta pushed her into. In the accompanying weeks, they trekked further north and found shelter not only within lodges but within each other. She had particular tastes and wasn’t afraid to tell him so, and she always claimed ultimate control of what was done to her.

She was quivering beneath him, legs spread, clawing at his body for dear life when he uttered the ultimate promise against her skin:

When they arrived in Fjordhingă, he would find honest work as a laborer to pay for their passage onto a ship. They’d sail south past the Narubi Canal, away from the waters of the Undersea and to Xenen or Prӕna Gaul or Caɦn, someplace hot and out of Sjorkden’s reach. They’d make a living off the land and build a house with their own two hands, with walls of salt-aged wood and pink marbled stone, not animal skin and ash. They’d thatch the roof with golden grasses, paint the wooden slats orange or yellow, something bright, and fill the deep window boxes with heavily scented wisteria blossoms and honeysuckle. The garden would be overridden with dragon fruit and mangoes and persimmons which they’d slice and eat for breakfast. They’d dry the salt from seawater and keep a pen full of pigs. Wear the light cotton clothes best suited for heat and humidity and tear them off each other to make love on the beach. Every night, they’d watch the sky catch fire, a brilliant dying world of smoldering citrine and blood blush clouds. They’d carve out a new life away from the titles of ‘witch’ and ‘witch hunter’. A fresh start without the black shadow of Sjorkden or the bleak memories of Krell to hang over the domestic and companionable goings-on of each day.

And when she allowed it, any child they created together, any seed of his that sprung from the wet earth of her womb and wailed itself into existence, he promised, just like her, would wield dominion over his heart for as long as he lived, and perhaps even after that.

THE END

#The Heartrender #everlark fanfiction #everlark fanfic #everlark smut #witch!Katniss #witch-hunter!Peeta #last chapter

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