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cutaepatootie · 5 years

Text

Animal - 08

Pairing: Jungkook | Reader Genre: boxer jungkook | angst | smut | tiny bits of fluff Word Count: 12k

Warnings: violence, I think there are some brief metions of drugs but literally just the word “drug”, explicit sex (really explicit please wash all my sins away), vocabulary (as usual duh)

A/N: I’m backkkk! You forgot about me? Well I’m still here!!! hehe... There’s only one chapter left kajshfagsfjah I’m nervous.

previous chapter ← 08 → next chapter (final chapter muahaha)

You thought about ignoring Jiwon brother’s words and not searching for Jungkook, but it was something that haunted you in your sleep.

Lying awake in your small dorm room wasn’t the same as lying awake in your comfortable bed in your own apartment. There were no city lights reflecting, no cool breeze slipping through your window, the ceiling wasn’t the same, the quietness wasn’t the same. It didn’t feel like home.

But it didn’t stop you from lying awake in bed, thinking – something that hadn’t happened to you since you had decided to focus on your degree.

You couldn’t just ignore everything that had happened the previous week and carry on with your routine. You wanted, but you couldn’t.

You wondered where he had been, what had he been doing all that time. Jiwon’s brother told you he had disappeared, that he wasn’t fighting anymore. You wondered if he was alright.

You clenched your teeth as you turned around, the sheets suffocating you as you tried to hide beneath them.

It hurt to worry about him like that after all, but it was something that came natural to you, something that you couldn’t choose. Embracing it was the best thing you could do if you didn’t want to drive yourself crazy.

So you let your mind wander. You let yourself wonder what he was doing, or what he was planning to do. You let yourself wonder if he was doing alright, if he missed you just as much as you missed him, or if he hated himself as much as you hated him too. You let yourself wander to that night at your apartment and those words: “I can’t love you”.

You shook your head and pulled the covers away from your body.

“Stop being stupid, Y/N,” you growled, decisively standing on your feet and marching towards your small wardrobe. You opened its doors, searching for something easy to throw on.

You were going to search for him, tell him what Jiwon’s brother had told you and finally move on. You would follow Jiwon brother’s advice and finish your degree, work until you had enough money to buy your own apartment, a place you could fully call your own. You would lead a normal life and maybe, one day, you would fall in love again. Life was that, after all, crossing all the chuckholes life put in your path, surviving and turning the page. Carrying on.

You were strong. You were going to carry on with your life, no matter how big the chuckhole was or how unforgettable.

You hated sulking, you hated feeling sad and down, you hated feeling dizzy from all the thinking and wondering. Even more when the cause of all that was someone that long ago let you know you didn’t mean as much to him as he did to you.

After washing your face and dressing yourself in something comfortable but something that wouldn’t stick out in the place you were going to, you exited your dorm building.

The taxi left you in the door of the club, and you sighed, flashbacks assaulting your mind just like you had feared they would.

You thought you would never step a foot inside that place ever again, but yet, there you were, crossing its doors and flinching at how loud the music was.

It was the only place you thought Jungkook could be on a Friday night. It was Sungho’s territory, which meant he had it covered with his men and Mr. Kang would stay away from it unless he wanted something big that would drag the attention of half the city and its police department. The boys and Evey would probably be there too, and you would have also been there if you hadn’t chosen to stay out of all that shit.

The lights blinded you as you made your way through the crowd.

Once inside, you had no idea where Jungkook could be. That was, if he was there at all.

If you were lucky, you would find him, tell him what you wanted to tell him, and you would be out of that place before midnight. If you were lucky –

But you weren’t.

“Y/N?!” you heard a high-pitched voice say from behind you. “Y/N is that you?!”

A hand placed itself on your shoulder and you turned around, not ready to face you best friend who you had been trying to avoid for the past two months.

“Y/N! Oh my god! It’s you!” Evey said happily, engulfing you in a tight hug.

“H-Hey,” you stuttered, cursing on the inside.

She grabbed you by the shoulders and pulled you away from her so she could have a look at you.

“What are you doing here?”

“I… Err… It’s nice seeing you too!” you tried to divert the topic.

She let go of you, turning serious.

“Don’t do that, not to me,” she crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t try to avoid my questions. I haven’t seen you in two months and now you’re here? What the fuck, Y/N, tell me what’s going on.”

You sighed. It was unfair to her, you couldn’t even imagine how confused she must have been. You suddenly stopped hanging out with the group, avoiding her calls and only talking with her via text once a week to ask her how she was doing with her thesis. She deserved an explanation.

“I’m looking for Jungkook, is he in here?” you asked.

Her face went blank and her eyes turned cold. You were suddenly overcome with a wave of fear.

“Why are you looking for Jungkook?” she asked, eyes narrowed.

“It’s a long story.”

She scoffed. “Everything’s a long story for you lately, isn’t it? You’ve been avoiding me for two months and you come here looking for… Jungkook?”

You pressed a hand against your forehead. You should win Worst Friend of the Year Award or something. She had nothing to do with your problems, yet, you had cut her out of your life.

“I wish I could tell you Evey… But I can’t right now. All I can do is hope that you believe me and forgive me for being the worst friend again and again, and maybe someday, when everything’s said and done, you’ll understand everything.”

She stared into your eyes. She had always been able to read you like an open book, and you hoped that time wasn’t any different. You needed her to know you were telling the truth.

“You know something I don’t,” she said. “And I don’t know what it is, but I do know that Taehyung and Jungkook are involved in it too. I’ve heard the same I can’t tell you too many times lately.”

“Trust me Evey, please.”

You pleaded her with your eyes. You were willing to sacrifice your friendship if it meant keeping the promise you made Taehyung and not telling her about the drugs or all the shit Taehyung and Jungkook were involved in.

“I trust you Y/N, I always would. But, do you trust me?”

“Of course I trust you!” you exclaimed, grabbing her hands. You were desperate for her to believe you. “I would tell you in a heartbeat if I knew you wouldn’t be at risk, but I can’t. Gosh, I let you drag me inside the underground fighting world, of course I trust you.”

She chuckled. “You’re right.”

“When everything’s over, everything will be back to how it was, I promise you.”

“I just miss you,” she pouted, eyes glassy. “You left me alone with those assholes.”

She threw herself at you and engulfed you in another hug. This time, you hugged her back.

“You can forgive everything I’ve done to you but that, I wouldn’t forgive it either.”

You both laughed and broke the hug.

“Alright, but promise me that when whatever this shit is, ends, we’ll be back to how we were, with our Pizza Planet nights and our movie marathons.”

“I promise you,” you nodded, tightening the grip you had on her hands.

“Great!” she smiled. “The boys and I are in the private booth upstairs, do you want to join us?”

“I’d love to but… I can’t,” you winced at your words. You hated that fucking I can’t. “Do you know if Jungkook’s here?”

“Yeah, I saw him earlier speaking with Tae,” she said, frowning. “I hadn’t seen him in a while. He disappeared, just like you. Stopped hanging out with us, showing up at the fights… We’re worried about him. Does this have to do with the both of you?”

“W-what?” you stuttered. “No! Of course – “

“If he hurt you in any way that made you feel as if you couldn’t be with us anymore I’ll fucking strangle him –“

“Stop, stop, stop,” you laughed. “This has nothing to do with Jungkook and I, Evey.”

“Are you still together, then?”

“No, we’ve never been together,” you said, shaking your head.

She rolled her eyes. “God damn it, Y/N, not together as in a couple, but you were –“

“No, not anymore.”

“Alright, alright,” she said, massaging her temples. “I haven’t had a proper talk with you since the end of Christmas Holidays nearly. Can you please explain to me what’s going on? The last thing I know, you were going to confess to him.”

“Another long story,” you said, and her features hardened once again. “I’m sorry, I just don’t have time tonight. I’ll tell you, I promise. Just tell me where Jungkook is.”

“Upstairs, at the owner’s office I think.”

“Okay, thank you Evey,” you smiled.

“You won’t stay with us afterwards?” she asked.

“No, I gotta go back to the dorms before midnight.”

“Hmm, true, you live at the dorms now. Whoa, there’s so many things that have changed…”

You nodded.

“How about we see each other next Friday? Our graduation is on Sunday, so we can hang out and talk about our outfits.”

She hugged you and you swore you could hear her cry in your ear.

“Yeah! That’s the kind of plan one has with her best friend! I missed you!”

“I missed you too! But I can’t say the same of your hugs!”

She laughed and punched you in the arm as she broke the hug.

“What a bitch,” she scoffed. “Anyways, go do whatever shady shit you have to do and talk to me when you arrive to your dorm. You better keep your promise about next Friday.”

You started walking away from her, towards the stairs that led upstairs.

She was pointing at you with her finger.

“I will! Don’t drink too much, Evey! We have to submit out thesis on Monday!”

She waved at you and you disappeared up the stairs. Too many memories assaulted your mind, but you tried to push the aside. When you walked past the bathrooms of the second floor and its small corridor, you pushed aside the memories of Jungkook in his turtleneck, pushing you against the wall and whispering hotly in your ear. When you walked through the corridor that lead to the main office and its bathroom, you pushed aside the memories of Jungkook dragging you inside and giving you a taste of how he could make you feel.

You pushed all the memories aside until you were standing in front of the owner’s office door.

What could Jungkook be doing up there?

Knocking once on the door, you grabbed the doorknob and opened the door. To your surprise, it wasn’t locked, and you easily opened the heavy door.

The lights inside were on, three people turning around to look at you.

“You can’t enter here, close the door,” one of them told you.

You opened the door even more, awkwardly. If Jungkook wasn’t there, you would just ask them if they knew where he was.

But before you could open your mouth, your eyes landed on the same man you were searching for. He was staring at you, eyes wide and mouth agape in a shocked expression. He was clearly not expecting you there.

“Did you hear me? You can’t – “ the same man repeated, it looked as if he was running out of patience.

“Shut up, Minho,” Jungkook said, interrupting the man. “I know her.”

You straightened your back and cleared your thoughts, you had come to find Jungkook and talk to him, you were going to do just that. Your eyes scanned the three men briefly. By Jungkook’s side, there was Sungho, staring at you with a careful expression, and sitting on the chair behind the desk, there was the Minho guy. You had never seen him before, you guessed he was the owner of the club.

“Err…” you cleared your throat. “I wanted to talk to Jungkook for a bit.”

“We’re busy, girl,” Minho scoffed.

“I can see that, but I just want to talk to him for a bit.”

Minho opened his mouth again, clearly upset about your response, but Jungkook stopped him, placing a hand on his chest as he plopped off the desk in which he had been sitting.

“Give me ten minutes, alright?” Jungkook said, walking towards the door of the office. Towards you.

“Jungkook, we need to sort everything out, this can’t –“ Sungho started to say, the first time you had seen him talking that night.

He didn’t say anything to you.

“I’ll be right back, for fucks sake,” Jungkook growled. “C’mon,” he said to you, motioning you to go out with his head.

You silently walked out of the room and waited for him to do the same, closing the door behind him.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked brusquely.

You clenched your teeth. The last thing you needed was for him to act like an asshole with you after all.

“Don’t you dare talk to me like that,” you growled. “I’m not one of your businessmen.”

He sighed, combing a hand through his hair. It had grown a lot, covering the entirety of his forehead and nearly his eyes too.

“What are you doing here?” he repeated, this time, in a softer tone.

You looked around you, the bathroom door coming into sight. You motioned him to follow you there with a nod of your head.

You tried not to think too much about what happened in that bathroom as you enter it, followed closely by Jungkook. The last time you had been there, it had been a much different situation; you on top of the bathroom sink, forehead pressed against the cold mirror as Jungkook held you in place from behind you, a tight grip on your hair stopping you from moving.

“Y/N, can you please answer me and tell me what you’re doing here?”

You snapped out of your thoughts and turned around to look at him.

“You can’t fight the final match of the Wrestling Competition.”

Jungkook blinked a few times, taken aback by your words.

“W-what? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that you can’t fight the final match, you can’t fight against Jiwon,” you said, shaking your head.

“And why is that?”

You bit your lower lip, wondering if you should tell him about the encounter with Jiwon’s brother or not.

“I can’t exactly tell you why, I just have a bad feeling. Just… Grab your mother and go away from this city.”

Jungkook scoffed, sarcasm dripping from his lips. “Alright, so you disappear for two months and only come back to tell me I can’t fight the final match because you have a bad feeling and that I should grab my mother and run away? I’m so confused right now.”

He hid his face behind his hands, caressing his temples with his fingers.

“You say it as if you weren’t the one who told me to stay away from you. I’ve been doing just that, living my life like a normal person for once.”

“I’m not in the mood for that, Y/N,” he said, narrowing his eyes.

“Have you ever been? Anyways,” you shrugged. “I just told you everything I wanted to tell you. Now I’ll go,” you said, reaching for the door.

“Wait,” he told you, grabbing your arm and forcing you to look at him. “I need some explanation. Now you appear and tell me all this? Why? You could be living your normal life right now but instead you’re here. Why don’t you want me to fight that match?”

“Because Jiwon is going to play dirty, I know, it’s a trap,” you said. “You can’t go to that match, and I’m afraid Taehyung can’t go either. It’s the perfect time for Mr. Kang to get you and Taehyung.”

Jungkook narrowed his eyes. “I already took that into account, and Sungho did too, that’s why he will have all his men prepared for the worst.”

“So you know what will happen and are willing to take the risk anyway?”

“And what do you want me to do? Run away like a coward?”

“No,” you said, gritting your teeth. “Act like a mature person for once and do what’s best. Forget about honor and all those shits, we’re talking about your life and the life of the ones you love here. You’ll put everything at risk because you don’t want to be seen as a coward? Because you don’t want to lose your title of best underground fighter? Bullshit.”

“It’s none of your business.”

You sharply pushed your arm away from his grip, glaring at him.

“No, it’s not,” you said. You knew the life of his mother or his friends shouldn’t matter to you, but somehow it did. It was unfair that, just because he wanted to make a bad decision, other people would have to pay for it.

You took a deep breath, staring at him. When did all go wrong? You were a normal student, with a normal life. Yeah, you struggled a bit to pay rent and that’s why you accepted Evey’s offer of working at the wrestling matches, but all this? The drugs, the violence, the fear, the threats… It all belonged to some episode of CSI Miami, not your life.

“That’s all?” he asked, seeing you weren’t talking.

You glared at him. He was being so passive aggressive to you, it was not fair that he treated you like that.

“Yeah, that’s all. I already told you what I wanted to tell you, now it’s up to you.”

“Cool.”

You stood there, both breathing heavily. You didn’t want to be the first one to tear their eyes away, but you had to be. So, you did, and after looking at him one last time, you turned around and exited the bathroom.

He didn’t follow you. You hadn’t expected him to.

. . .

Mondays were always the worst.

The city was in a rush, traffic was horrible, and people were always in a bad mood. The hospital was always crowded, people that had been out of the city during the weekend, returning to the city and going to the hospital if they felt bad. It was funny, how during the weekend no one had issues but they all appeared on Monday.

To sum up: Mondays sucked.

And when it was the last Monday of your degree, it sucked even more.

You had to hand your thesis on Friday, and your graduation would be on Sunday. Less than a week to finish your studies and you were more nervous than ever.

When your shift finished at the hospital, you rushed to the changing rooms and changed into your clothes, grabbing your backpack and everything you would need to go to the library. You would only be there an hour or so, not wanting to arrive home too late.

Since Jiwon brother’s visit, you didn’t like walking home too late.

Your thesis was almost done, you only needed to reread it a few times, correct any mistakes… Done.

By the time you finished, it was already ten pm.

You cursed under your breath as you got off the bus. The walk from the bus stop to your dorm building wasn’t long, but the streets were deserted and not even cars passed by.

Holding tighter the bag of take out you had bought on your way home, you began walking.

No music, no distractions, just your five senses and you.

Maybe you were being paranoid after all, but you didn’t want to risk anything. Did Jiwon’s brother know you had already spoken to Jungkook? Did he know you had told him the complete opposite of what he had told you to say?

It was just… They were insisting too much, they wanted Jungkook to fight that match too much… It gave you a bad feeling. They hadn’t seen him in months, the only way of getting him out of his hiding place was that match, and they knew it.

Without your music or your phone, you had hoped you would be more alert of everything that surrounded you, but deep in thought, you didn’t realize there were some footsteps behind you.

And when you realized, it was too late, for they sounded too close to you.

Your heart started beating wildly inside your chest, and you cursed yourself internally. Your mind started tracing some plan. If it was Jiwon’s brother, you would surprise him before he could surprise you.

Without even looking back, you started walking faster until a small park came into view.

You weren’t far from your building now, but if you just ran, you were sure he would catch you first.

As your pace fastened, you stopped hearing the footsteps. Great, he wasn’t suspecting anything.

Trying to calm your breaths, you placed your bag of take out and your backpack on the ground and hid behind a tree.

You had done it before, you had knocked that boy down, you could do it again. You just had to –

Before you could continue with your self-motivation speech, the footsteps approached and a shadow appeared right in front of you.

Growling, you threw yourself at the shadow and pushed him as you interlaced one of your legs with one of his. The boy gasped in surprise and stumbled frontwards. You passed one of your arms around your neck, so its Adam’s apple was pressing against the inner side of your elbow.

Pushing him again, you let him fall onto the ground, following the movement with your body and letting him drag you to the ground too.

With a howl of pain coming out of his lips, you both landed on the ground, your body bouncing on his as you cushioned the fall with his body.

“Thought you would surprise me again, huh?” you growled, breathless, on his ear. “Well, you should have known better.”

“Fuck, y-yeah I should have remembered you don’t like surprises.”

You frowned. The voice didn’t sound as deep as Jiwon brother’s did. Wait a minute...

You retrieved your arm from around the boy’s neck and you pushed yourself up until you were sitting on his back, your hands pressing on the expanse of it.

He wasn’t as broad and big as Jiwon’s brother either. And if he didn’t look or sound like Jiwon’s brother it meant that… He wasn’t Jiwon’s brother!

You grabbed a handful of his dark, wavy hair and forced him to turn his neck until one of his cheeks was pressed against the pavement and the other was in full display for you to see.

You had already suspected who he was when you had heard his voice, but now that you were seeing his side profile, that big round nose, his furrowed brows, the crinkles that formed by his eyes as he grimaced in pain…

“Jungkook?” you breathed, letting go of his hair and standing up quickly, moving away from him.

He just growled in response and pulled his head away from the ground, pained expression on his face.

“Fuck Jungkook,” you said, rushing to help him until he was standing on his feet. “What were you doing following me?”

“I wanted to talk to you, had been waiting for you at the bus stop but when you got off the bus you started walking really fast and I didn’t want to run to you and scare you, so I was planning to follow you until you stopped walking.”

“And you thought following me across an empty street would be a good idea?” you scoffed. You watched him shake the ground dirt from the front of his t-shirt. “I nearly had a heart attack when I heard footsteps behind me, you could have shouted my name.”

“Yeah, as if you wouldn’t have started running as soon as you saw me.”

You rolled your eyes.

“Anyways, you always knock people down when they walk behind you or what? I could have just been another student going back to their dorm.”

You sighed, pinching the bridge of your nose.

“Fuck… I know, I just…” you stopped yourself before you told him about Jiwon’s brother. The last thing you needed, was for him to act so worried and all. “It’s not cool following someone at half past ten pm, alright? And how did you know where I live now?”

Jungkook scratched the back of his neck. You wanted to be angry at him. The other day he had treated you so poorly and now he was acting all innocent.

“I went to your apartment, but there is a married couple living there now, so I called –“

“Don’t finish, I already know who told you…” you growled. “If you don’t say her name, my want to kill her won’t rise too much.”

“She didn’t want to tell me, I swear, but… I begged her a bit.”

“You? Begging? That’s new.”

“Why did you move from your apartment? You liked it a lot.”

You shrugged, grabbing your things from the ground.

“I didn’t have the money to pay for it anymore, so I moved to the campus dorms that come free with the scholarship I got last year.”

“Ah…” he nodded. “You’re not working right now?”

“Yeah, at a bookstore, but they don’t pay me enough to live on my own.”

He nodded again, understanding.

“Why are you here?”

“Wanted to talk to you,” Jungkook sighed, playing with the strands of hair that fell over his forehead. He was really letting his hair grow. “Apologize for the other day, I behaved like an asshole.”

You crossed your arms over your chest.

“I’m a bit used to you behaving like an asshole with me, to be honest.”

He narrowed his eyes at you, but softened his gaze once he realized he had no right to play the ‘staring contest’ with you in that moment.

“Can’t you just accept my apology?”

“If you wanted to just apologize, you would have texted me.”

“It’s difficult when you have my contact blocked,” he scoffed.

You smiled sarcastically. “Oh right, I had forgotten about that.”

Jungkook looked a bit desperate, your behavior pissing him off. You smirked. Good, he deserved it.

“I know I deserve it, but can you stop with all this passive-aggressive sarcasm? My head is starting to hurt.”

“None of my business, I guess,” you shrugged, starting to walk towards your dorm building.

A sense of satisfaction was filling your body. You had knocked Jungkook down, literally, thrown him to the ground and squished his face against the pavement with all your force – we’re talking about an underground fighter here, and you had knocked him down. What a queen; we stan. And now, you were acting like a real, class A bitch with him and giving him everything he deserved. That night you would sleep better than when you were five and your mother made you drink a lukewarm glass of milk before going to bed.

You walked a bit ahead of him, ignoring the calls of your name that fell from his lips.

Just when you arrived to the door of your dorm building, he grabbed your upper arm and stopped you from grabbing your keys. He turned you around, face scrunched up in anger.

“Do you forgive me or not?” he asked, like a ten-year-old boy.

You frowned, pulling your arm away from his grip.

“What the fuck, Jungkook? Are you high again or what? The last time you followed me home you were, so…”

You inspected him, trying to catch a glimpse of his pupils and his eyes in the dim light of the street.

He took a step back, running away from your scrutinizing eyes.

“What? No, I’m not high,” he protested, pushing your shoulders so you would stop trying to smell him. “I just wanted to apologize, is that so weird?”

“Yeah, it is, I would have found it more normal if you had been high.”

He rolled his eyes. “Well, I’m not. Now, do you forgive me or not?”

You scoffed. “I don’t know, I don’t care if I forgive you or not.”

“But I do.”

You were the one who rolled their eyes then.

“Too late to care, don’t you think?” you scoffed, finally inserting your keys in the lock and opening the door to your building lobby.

“Is it that difficult to give me a proper answer?”

“Is it really all that matters to you right now? The fact that I forgive you or not for how you treated me like shit last Friday, like you had done thousands of times before?” you spat, now equally as angry and frustrated as him.

Without realizing it, you were both in the elevator, you pressing the button to the fifth floor with all your strength.

“And what the fuck are you doing in my elevator?!” you raised your voice, pointing at him.

“I don’t know! I’m just following you until you start answering my questions properly!”

“Well!” you said, lifting your arms in the air. “Welcome to my world of unanswered questions!”

Jungkook growled, exasperated, and you just stood there, arms crossed waiting for the elevator to arrive at your floor. When the ‘ding’ sounded, indicating that you had arrived to the fifth floor and the doors opened, you got out of the elevator as if someone had burnt your ass.

In a rush, you grabbed back your keys and opened the door to your dorm room.

“Y/N, for fucks sake,” Jungkook protested behind you.

You walked inside your room, ready to slam the door in his face – luckily you would catch his nose in between the door and the doorframe – but he was fast and he put his foot in between the door and the doorframe so you couldn’t close it.

“Move your foot away.”

“No.”

“Alright, I’ll have to break it,” you said, pressing on the door with all your strength.

Jungkook gasped in pain and pushed the door back. You could be quick and witty, but you weren’t as strong as him.

As if he was just pushing a piece of paper, he moved the door until he was standing at the other side of it, right in front of you. He closed the door behind him and you growled.

“You’re acting like a kid,” he spat.

“You were the one who started acting like a kid, coming here to ask me to forgive you,” you scoffed. “Pff.”

“I didn’t only come here to ask you to forgive me for how I treated you the other day, I was about to tell you, but you’re not listening to me today,” he said, he sounded frustrated. You opened your mouth to say something, but he lifted a finger, signaling you to stop. “Before you can say that I was the one who never listened to you, let me speak.”

You scowled at him and let your bag of take out on top of your desk. You switched the light on and started setting all your things in their respective places.

“You asked me not to fight the final match,” he kept talking. “Told me it was none of your business, but insisted anyway. Why?”

“I already told you…”

“No, you didn’t tell me. And having a bad feeling is not enough.”

You rolled your eyes but you kept silent, placing your laptop on top of your desk and leaving the backpack on the floor.

“Why?”

You closed your eyes.

“Answer me, please. Why don’t you want me to fight? Why don’t you want Jiwon to hurt me? It’s what I deserve.”

“You deserve it, yeah,” you whispered.

“Leave your pride and all those shits aside, Y/N,” Jungkook walked closer to you. “Stop playing the tough one and just tell me why.”

You snapped, turning around and pushing him until he was stumbling backwards. He had no right to come back and mess with your head once again.

“Are you telling me to stop playing the tough one? You?” you scoffed. “Go and try to play these games with other person, it doesn’t work with me anymore! You’re asking a question again and again that you know the answer of! Why! Why! Well, because unlike you I care! I do care about you! And you know it! You’ve always known it! So stop asking because you know that I asked you not to fight because I care about you and I don’t want anyone to hurt you!”

Saying all that felt like a liberation, but you couldn’t help but blush at opening yourself so widely to him, at showing him all your feelings just so he could toy with them once again.

In the span of a second, Jungkook’s hands cupped your face and he smashed his lips against yours. It was brusque and quick, but enough to ignite fireworks inside your tummy.

You pressed your hands with strength against his chest and pushed him away, your hand unconsciously lifting up to slap his cheek with all your force.

“Don’t you dare,” you said through clenched teeth. “Get out of my fucking room.”

He took another step closer to you, trying to get a hold of you once again, but you backed away from him.

“I still care about you, too.”

“Bullshit. You never cared.”

“I cared way too much.”

“Well, you had a funny way of showing it.”

“I’ve always had.”

You nostrils flared as you stared at him.

“Is too late to tell me you care, Jungkook, I’ve moved on, carried on with my life.”

“Don’t, please,” he pleaded, placing his hands back on your cheeks.

You pushed them away from you, grabbing his wrists.

“Don’t touch me.”

He winced at your words and at the venom laced in his words.

“Y/N –“

“No,” you interrupted him. “You don’t get to tell me you can’t love me and tell me to stay away from you and then appear back as if nothing had happened.”

“I’m sorry I hurt you.”

You fought against him, trying to get away from him.

“No.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“No, Jungkook.”

“Please, I need you to forgive me,” he sounded desperate.

“You can’t mess with me like this,” you cried. “I don’t deserve it.”

“I know, forgive me please.”

You fought, trying to pull your wrist away from his strong hands, but he didn’t let go of you. He should have fought for you long ago, not now. He didn’t deserve it, didn’t deserve you after all. What had happened to the ‘I can’t love you’? To the ‘you should stay away from me’? Your head was hurting and you wanted to scream.

He pulled you closer to him until his forehead was pressed against yours.

“No…” you whispered, your voice suddenly so low and fragile that you didn’t even recognize it as yours.

“I can’t live knowing I hurt you so bad,” he whispered back. “It’s killing me, the memory of how you looked at me after I told you I couldn’t love you.”

“Let go of me, I don’t need you to remind me of the fact that you can’t love me,” you tried to pull away from him, but he had you pressed against the door of your wardrobe.

“I can’t love you, I don’t deserve someone like you and you don’t deserve someone like me, someone who can’t promise anything, who can’t give you a certain future. You don’t deserve to be put in danger just because I fell in love with you,” he said in a rush. “I can’t love you, shouldn’t love you, but I do.”

You paused for some seconds, staring into his eyes.

Tears began forming in your eyes and a shiver ran down your spine.

“If that’s true, you should have told me that night instead of just telling me ‘I can’t love you’ and making me feel unlovable.”

“Would you have let me go if I had told you that I love you?”

“Yeah?”

“No,” he shook his head. “You’re too good to do that, you wouldn’t have.”

“Stop, don’t say things you will later regret.”

“It’s what I didn’t tell you and what I didn’t do what haunts me every night, that’s the only thing I’ll ever regret.”

You moved your wrists once again, but not even making force, just wanting to move and try to make you believe that you didn’t like what he was telling you, that you didn’t believe it.

“But I did it because I had to protect you,” he sighed. “It killed me, knowing that Taehyung had told you about Mr. Kang and all the business and had put you in danger like that. It killed me, to think that someone could hurt you because of me. I would have died if something bad happened to you. I wanted to kill Tae for choosing me instead of you. It was so unfair.”

He caressed your cheek with his thumb.

“I had to push you away from me, so you were safe, so they thought you were anyone to me and they would leave you alone.”

“And what about that night at your apartment, after Christmas Holidays when I met your mother? I didn’t know about the drugs and everything and you still rejected me.”

“I was scared, so scared.”

“It isn’t enough for me, Jungkook, those explanations are not valid to me. You could have told me, and I would have understood instead of hurt.”

“I know, I know…” he closed his eyes. “Every time I’ve loved someone, I’ve hurt them. I’ve hurt my mother, I’ve hurt my friends, I’ve hurt Tae countless times, Tae who is like a brother to me. And you had that shine in your eyes… That strength inside you and that passion and strong character… And I didn’t want to ruin that, I didn’t want to stare into your eyes and see them dull one day,” he caressed the soft skin underneath your eyes. “And look at you, so sad because of me.”

“I’m not sad, I’m just angry,” you protested. He caressed your skin once again and you trembled. “Maybe a bit sad too.”

“See? I’m not good for you. You deserve someone who will let you grow, not someone like me.”

“That’s for me to decide, isn’t it? How was I going to decide if you never gave me the options in the first place. It’s up to me if I’m willing to risk being hurt or not, it’s up to me if I want to be with some delinquent asshole or with a first-class lawyer. It’s up to me.”

Jungkook shook his head.

“If I had told you how scared I am to open up to someone and give them the power of destroying me, would you have stayed?”

“Probably I would have insulted you and told you how stupid you are because we all are afraid of being vulnerable, that it’s part of life, and then, yeah, I would have stayed.”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“I’m so stupid.”

“You’re just a boy who doesn’t know healthy love, who has never seen pure and true love. It’s normal that you are scared of it, because you only know the bad kind of love.”

You brought your hands up to his, grabbing then and lowering them.

“Why are you here now telling me everything I needed to hear five months ago? You clearly still think the same.”

“Because right now I’m being selfish… And I’m just thinking of how you make me feel and how much I want to be with you.”

“If I’m being honest, I don’t know if I can forget everything you’ve done to me. You’ve hurt me, Jungkook.”

“I know, and I’ll understand…” he opened his eyes and stared at you. Did his eyes look glossy?

“I don’t want to let you in just so you can go away once again.”

“I can’t promise you anything, I can’t promise you I’ll stay.”

You clicked your tongue inside your mouth, turning your head around, trying to escape from him. From the sight of him, from his scent, from his sparkling eyes.

But if there was one thing you liked, really liked, about Jungkook was his sincerity. Maybe he was brusque, rude, sometimes too realistic borderline harsh, but he was not a liar. He had never promised you anything, had never promised you love and long walks across a beautiful park, movie nights or fun dates. He had never promised anything and yet, you had been willing to stay by his side.

Could you stay by his side once again even though he couldn’t promise you he would stay?

He grabbed your chin delicately in between his fingers, making you stare at him.

He searched your eyes with his, chasing your stare.

Slowly, he leaned closer to you until his nose was caressing yours and you could feel his breaths on your skin.

“Do you forgive me?” he breathed.

You swallowed. Of course you forgave him, but you wouldn’t forget.

You placed your hands on his chest softly, feeling the soft material of his worn-out t-shirt. Beneath it, his skin waited for you, warm and soft.

He leaned closer, lips barely grazing your upper lip.

You closed your eyes tightly.

“Huh?” he murmured.

“Don’t do this, Jungkook,” you whispered, pressing on his chest. You didn’t know if you pressed so softly because you actually didn’t want to push him away or because you simply didn’t have enough strength. “Don’t do this to me.”

He caressed your lips with his once again, hands caressing your cheeks.

“Just tell me to go away and I will, forever,” he breathed. “Just tell me, and you’ll never see me again.”

You closed your eyes even tighter.

“You can’t do this to me.”

Another caress. And other. And other.

You didn’t know how much you would be able to take before your whole body gave in and you let yourself drown in him once again.

Your hands traveled upwards until they were caressing his neck and intertwining themselves behind it, fingertips playing with the strands on the back of his head.

“Tell me.”

“I forgive you, Jungkook,” you finally said, a long whisper leaving your lips along those words.

In a swift motion, Jungkook pressed his lips against yours. He didn’t move, and nor did you. You just stayed there, in the dim lights of your room, your hands on his neck, his on your cheeks. Hearts beating to the same rhythm, lungs breathing the same air.

You wished you were in your old apartment, bathing in the moonlight that seeped through the windows, shining under the city lights, and glowing and shinning.

But in there, in that small dark room, you didn’t need the moonlight nor did you need the city lights to shine. You just needed each other.

Two young lovers making the most out of their last moments together. Enjoying their dawn before the dusk came. Enjoying their own light before it disappeared behind the cruelty of this world. They say you never forget your first love, and in that moment, you were sure you would never forget Jeon Jungkook. You had always wondered why, why people said that. But in that moment, as Jungkook kissed you, you got a glimpse of it.

Because you don’t need to worry about forgetting someone if you have them by your side for the rest of your life.

And that it’s the truth about first loves.

They’re ephemeral, like falling stars. Brief yet intense. They’re something you only experience once in life, so precious and special because they have an expiration date. They end, they come crashing down like waves against the rocks of the mountains that surround the sea. They leave and never come back. If they didn’t, if they stayed there to get corrupted by life and reality and the passing of time, becoming dull and boring, they wouldn’t be first loves and they wouldn’t be something people are afraid of forgetting about.

You were sure Jungkook was your first love, but you didn’t want to think about what those two words implied.

You just kept kissing him.

He pressed you further against the door of your wardrobe, hands falling from your cheeks and landing on your lower back, pressing your bodies impossibly closer.

He was hungry, hungry of you and everything that came with you. From the small bites your teeth gave his lower lip, to the moans that escaped from your lips and that he swallowed like a thirsty man.

His tongue played with yours and you let it, like you had let it a thousand times before.

Kissing Jungkook felt like getting lost in a maze. Uncertain, exciting and a bit scary.

You broke the kiss, taking deep breaths of hair as he hid his face in the crook of his neck, placing kisses all over the side of it.

“But don’t get too excited,” you finally gasped, in between erratic breaths. “I always forgive but never forget.”

“Resentful, huh?”

You combed your fingers through his hair and grabbed a handful of it, pushing his face away from your neck.

“I swear to God,” you spat. “If you ever make me feel like that again, I’ll chop your dick off.”

“I won’t be of any use for you anymore.”

“That’s exactly the reason why,” you smirked. “But I’m being honest, I hate feeling so lost. If you make me feel like that again –“

He shut you up with another kiss.

His hands slid down the curve of your ass, giving it a tight squeeze before traveling south, towards the back of your thighs. In a quick movement, he lifted you up and made you put your legs around his waist, back still pressed against the wardrobe.

He pushed further into you, rolling his hips against your core.

You let go of his lips and moaned loudly. Fuck your dormmates, fuck everything honestly.

“Fuck, how I missed that sound,” he breathed in your ear.

You grabbed his neck with more force and pushed your hips back against his, desperate for any friction. Your whole body was on fire, and you could already feel the material of your panties sticking to your skin.

He hid his face in the crook of your neck once again, one of his favorite places in the world. In there, he felt as if he wasn’t Venom, some boy who only knew how to beat people down, hurt them and take pride of it. In there, he was Jungkook, a boy who could feel something besides pain. Who could feel you and him. Who could breathe properly.

He pulled away from your wardrobe door and threw you on your small bed without any contemplations.

You laughed a bit, bouncing on your bed as he kneeled on the bed in between your legs.

“This reminds me of the first day we hung out.”

“What? The fact that I’m about to eat you out?” he frowned. “If I remember correctly, I didn’t eat you out until –“

You sat yourself up and grabbed the collar of his t-shirt.

“Shut up. The bounces, silly,” you scoffed.

“Ah,” he said, raising a brow. Of course he had known, he just loved teasing you. “That…”

You punched his chest and he grabbed your wrist, stopping you from landing a second punch.

He forced you to lie down again and smirked down at you.

“We could repeat some time.”

You frowned. “You? Going to Just Jump once again?” you asked. “Where is the real Jungkook and who are you?”

He leaned closer to you until he was speaking right before your mouth.

“He’s right in front of you.”

Then, he dived for your lips once again. He grabbed both of your wrists, your hands were back to playing with his hair and it was driving him crazy, and he placed them above your head, pinning them down to the mattress.

With his free hand, he grabbed the hem of your t-shirt and started riling it up, leaving warm spots all over your skin.

It was almost magical, how Jungkook, with just the stroke of his fingers could make you feel like that.

He kept assaulting you with his hungry kisses as he bunched up your t-shirt and unclasped your bra with any sort of decorum.

You moaned, feeling his cold fingertips on the soft skin of your breasts. He pinched, caressed, rounded, did everything he wanted with your skin. You felt your nipples hardening, pressing against the material of the bra that was still covering them.

Jungkook pulled away, a string of saliva still connecting his lips to yours.

He stared at you before both hands were on your t-shirt.

“Can I take this off?” he asked.

You arched a brow. “Since when do you ask for my permission when it comes to taking my clothes off?”

He gulped down.

“I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to… You said that –“

“Hey,” you said, bringing a hand to his face. “If I didn’t want this, you would already be hanging from my window.”

Jungkook chuckled.

“I want this,” you nodded.

“I want this too.”

Then, you helped him take your shirt and bra off.

As soon as the pieces of garment were off, his lips latched onto your nipples. You caressed his hair as you observed him kissing your skin, licking and softly biting it.

You moaned when he placed his teeth around your hardened nipple and bit rather harshly, throwing your head back as you closed your eyes in delight.

You could feel the wetness of his tongue working on both breasts, then starting to trail down your abdomen until it reached the hem of your jeans.

He unbuttoned them without wasting time and slid them down your legs, kicking off your sneakers in the process.

“You have no idea how much I want to taste you right now.”

You blushed at his words, biting your lower lip and focusing on his face once again. Your skin glowed in the dim light of the room where he had placed his kisses, trails of his saliva looking like a small map all around your body.

“You want me to taste you, baby?” he asked, looking up at you as his hands played with your panties.

“Yeah,” you nodded, teeth still sunk in your lower lip.

He smirked.

“Did you miss my touch?” his eyes pierced yours as he pressed the pads of his fingers against your covered clit.

You moaned softly.

“A lot,” you purred.

“A lot?” he smirked.

“A whole fucking lot,” you smirked back.

A smile escaped his lips, his tough façade crumbling a bit.

He shook his head and focused on moving the material of your panties aside to observe you. He traced the shape of your core with his fingers, adding more pressure to those spots that needed more pressure. Fuck, he really knew what he was doing to you.

“Hmm…” you moaned when his fingers encircled your entrance.

You couldn’t keep your eyes away from him and his movements, wanting to record everything with your eyes and keep it in your brain.

At your words, he looked up at you and, as he stared at you, he introduced a finger in you.

You gasped as he retreated back his finger and added one more. His movements were slow, as if he too, wanted to keep that moment with him forever.

His fingers traced patterns inside you, curling and uncurling as you moaned and became a mess. Jungkook placed his free hand on your abdomen to stop you from moving, you hadn’t even realized you had started wiggling your hips.

Humming, he dove in and placed a soft kiss on top of your clit. The next time he came closer to it, it was to place an open-mouthed kiss to it, licking it with his tongue afterwards.

After that, it all became a blur to you, a blur of pure bliss and lust.

He was eating you out slowly and sensually, when he usually was passionate and quick. It was killing you, the knots in your abdomen tying and untying with each movement of his tongue and his fingers. You wanted him so badly.

You felt the hand he had placed on your abdomen disappear, and moments later you heard the sound of a zipper.

You opened your eyes to watch him pull his length out of his jeans and starting to pump himself. It was pure sin the scene you were watching. You could feel him moan against your core as he pleased you and himself at the same time, his eyes closing each time his fist reached the head of his dick.

You could feel all the blood in your body rushing to your tummy, and, as you threw your head back in pleasure, you felt yourself unraveling underneath Jungkook’s touch.

You gripped his hair tightly and every muscle in your body clenched as you came undone. Teeth gritted, eyes closed and head resting on the sheets, you let out moans of his name, profanities you weren’t even thinking about.

He kept licking you and caressing you as you came down of your high. His moans became louder too, the sight of you cumming at his touch nearly sending him on the edge. You orgasming was a vision that accompanied him in his best dreams.

“Fuck,” he chuckled, lifting himself up and observing you.

He gave one last lick of your core to clean your juices and then, patted it lightly, making you spasm.

“Ah,” you pouted. “Don’t do that.”

He smirked, doing it once again. Overstimulation shook your body and you spasmed once again.

Pushing his hands away from you, you kneeled on the bed.

“You have too many clothes on,” you mumbled, hands playing with the hem of his t-shirt.

He just smiled at you and let you take the piece of garment off.

Your eyes traced his chest and abdomen, a piece of art not even Michelangelo could have sculpted in the finest marble. Your hands came up to his chest, softly letting them fall down towards his abdomen, caressing his hardened nipples and the soft trail of hair that went down his belly button.

You saw his scar on the left side of his abdomen, the one you had sewed up.

Your fingers traced the rosy skin, feeling rougher than the rest. You still remember that night and the dark feeling of losing him. Your chest constricts at the thought.

He grabbed your chin and lifted your head softly, making you look at him.

“I never thanked you for that,” he mumbled. “Or for any of the other times you took care of me.”

You shook your head.

“There’s no need to,” you said. “I would do it all over again.”

He leaned closer and kissed you hoping you could feel everything you had once made you feel. It was a rough kiss, teeth clashing and lip biting. But he was just like that, rough around the edges, soft in the spot he had for you.

Your hand found his dick and started caressing it up and down. It felt hot and heavy against your palm, sticky in precum.

Without parting your lips, you dragged his jeans down until they were pooling around his knees. He broke the kiss so he could stand from the bed and take the rest of his clothes off.

There, the both of you naked, was when it all felt real, when you both felt real.

“I want you to ride me tonight,” he mumbled, lips caressing yours.

Without giving you time to answer, he grabbed your hips and spun you around, lying himself on the bed on his back.

You placed your hands on his chest, trying not to fall heavily on top of him.

You bit your lip, seeing the desire in his eyes.

Passing one of your legs to the other side of his hips, you straddled him and let your lower half rest on his lower abdomen.

You started moving your hips, feeling his cock brushing against your lower lips.

He hummed in delight, head resting on the pillows and eyes never leaving you.

With each stroke of his cock against your clit, you let out a soft moan, breath rolling off your lips in what was music to Jungkook’s ears. The moment felt so intimate, the sky could have fallen on top of you and neither of you would have cared. You both were on top of the world, untouchables, the starts shinning for you, the constellations aligning for you. No matter what happened in the end, you both had that moment.

You grabbed the base of his cock and lifted yourself up a bit, aligning the tip with your entrance.

“Wait,” he murmured. “I don’t have any condoms,” he said, placing one of his hands on your wrist to stop you.

“I’m on the pill.”

He arched his brows.

“Are you sure you wanna do that?”

You nodded. “I’m clean, you?”

“I’m clean too.”

Then, you smiled at him and sunk yourself down on him, his length filling you up deliciously. He swore he could see the stars shinning in the ceiling of your room in that moment, making your skin glow.

He had never felt you like that, so raw and real around him, warm and welcoming. He felt at home. For the first time in years, since his father started being abusive, since he started being so filled with anger he didn’t enjoy the world anymore, he felt at home.

He closed his eyes, hands caressing your hips as you moved. You were soft, had always been so soft to him, even with your snarky remarks and sarcasm. He didn’t want to let go of you again, couldn’t do it.

He could feel your soft hands all over his chest, his abdomen, on his scar, on his collarbones and cheeks. You were tracing his skin just like you traced a map, but you remembered every curve, every angle.

When he opened his eyes once again, you were already looking at him, and he felt as if he could cum inside you at any moment.

He lifted his hips and placed his heels on the bed. Hands holding you in place, he started ramming his length inside you.

Not having expected the sudden change, you fell on top of his, breasts pressed against his chest and head falling to the crook of his neck.

You encircled his neck and closed your eyes, his hands caressing your back as he kept slamming in and out of you.

That was Jungkook’s way of making you feel, so overwhelmed you felt as if you were running out of breath.

“J-Jungkook,” you stuttered in his ear.

He growled, pressing you tighter against him.

He increased his pace, making you hold on tighter to him. You were clenching your teeth, moaning loudly, gasping for air. You were desperate.

“Wait, wait,” he panted, suddenly stopping his ministrations. “Don’t cum yet.”

You let him do whatever he pleased with your body. He sat on the bed, back resting against the headboard as he sat you on top of him.

“I want to see your pretty face as you cum, watch those big eyes,” he said, sounding out of breath as he caressed your cheek.

You smirked. “Who are you and what have you done with Jungkook?”

“No, the question is: what have you done with Jungkook?”

You laughed and started moving once again, the warmth that had started dissipating from your tummy, coming back once again.

You took advantage of the position to caress his face, trace every single feature on it. From the mole under his lower lip, to the thick eyebrows that adorned his eyes, to the tip of his big nose.

As the warmth felt stronger, your movements became quicker.

“That’s fuck yourself on my cock, baby,” he growled, eyes lost on the movements of your breasts. He grabbed your neck and held you tightly in place as he moved his hips at the same rhythm you moved yours.

Lost in the depths of his black, starry eyes, you came, walls clenching around his dick as you howled like a desperate wolf.

It felt so intense you thought you were going to pass out, room spinning as Jungkook helped you ride your orgasm.

When you started wincing form overstimulation, you pushed yourself up and laid before him, taking his dick coated in your juices in your mouth.

He sighed at the sight, and collected your hair into a ponytail so he could watch your face.

“I wish I could take a picture of this and keep it with me forever.”

You blinked up at him, bobbing your head up and down.

You relaxed your throat around him, taking him deeper and deeper until you could feel him against the back of your throat, heavy and warm.

“Y/N, I’m going to cum,” he mumbled.

You just nodded, encircling your lips against him with more strength.

His gasps became desperate and soon, warm spurts of hot liquid shot down your throat. You received them with a content hum and milked him until he couldn’t take it anymore.

He pulled out of your mouth and grabbed your chin. You sat up in front of him and opened your mouth for him to see his semen inside your mouth.

He growled, inserting his thumb in your mouth to stop the milky liquid from falling down your chin.

“What have you done to me?” he whispered as you swallowed everything, licking his thumb happily. “I’m crazy for you.”

You smiled and got his thumb out of your mouth, placing a soft kiss on top of it before showing Jungkook your empty mouth.

“Fuck,” he growled. “Come here.”

He laid back on the bed, dragging you with him so your side was resting on his.

He kissed you, tongue clashing against your own and tasting himself on you. You stayed like that, kissing while you waited for your breaths to clam down.

Again, the sky could fall on top of you, a meteorite could destroy the Earth, and none of you would have given a single fuck.

You placed your head on his chest and started drawing patterns all over his skin with your fingers.

“Please, don’t be mad at me,” you suddenly said.

He tensed a bit, his arms encircling your body in a comforting way.

“Why would I be?”

You lifted yourself up on one shoulder, eyes fixed on his.

“Just… Don’t be mad.”

He frowned but nodded in the end. “I won’t, what happens?” he traced your left cheek with his thumb, his palm holding the side of you face.

“A week ago, as I was walking towards the dorm, after finishing my shift at the hospital… I came across Jiwon’s brother.”

Jungkook tensed beneath you, hands grabbing your skin tighter.

“What?” he said, voice high-pitched. “You came across him?”

You averted your eyes. “He… He followed me and assaulted me.”

“He did what?!” he said, raising his voice.

He tried standing up from his lying position but you didn’t let him.

“You promised me you wouldn’t get angry, remember?”

“He hurt you?!” he said through clenched teeth. “What did he do to you? I’m gonna kill that son of a –“

“He didn’t hurt me,” you interrupted him, trying to calm himself with your soft voice. “I defended myself, but he wasn’t there to hurt me.”

“He touched you? If he touched a single strand of hair I swear to God –“

“Jungkook please, calm down, he didn’t hurt me, alright?”

You pointed at your body, showing him you were perfectly fine.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why haven’t you told me until now?”

“Because I knew how you would react and that’s the last thing we need right now.”

“How can you expect me not to react this way? That asshole followed you when you were alone and vulnerable and –“

“He wanted to tell me where you were,” you said, ignoring his words.

“I’m also going to kill Taehyung for getting you involved in this shit. What would happen if I do the same with Evey, huh? Would he like it. But then again, this is also my fault, see? It’s all my fault, if I didn’t involve you with me, then –“

“Can you stop, please? This is no one’s fault. I chose accepting the job at the wrestling fights, I chose getting involved with you, I chose answering Taehyung’s call when you needed me… I chose this, okay? It’s no one’s fault.”

He averted his eyes away from yours. You could feel his quick heartbeat and his rapid breaths.

“Please, listen to me, I’m not telling you this to get revenge on Jiwon’s brother or anything like that. I don’t want you to be mad at him or feel as if you put me in danger. I’m telling you this because you need to know why I don’t want you to fight the final match.”

He was still avoiding your eyes, but you grabbed both of his cheeks and forced him to look at you.

“He told me they were looking for you, that, if you didn’t fight that final match, they would get the people you loved the most.”

“Those…” he growled, biting his tongue before he could curse in a thousand different languages.

“They wouldn’t be insisting so much if they weren’t planning something. I think Jiwon isn’t going to play fair, I think he will hurt you.”

“But, if I don’t go, it will be worst. They will follow me… They will follow you or my mother or…” his voice broke at the end.

“Fighting and putting your life in risk is not the only way out,” you whispered.

“I’d rather let them kill me that have them touch you or my mother.”

“Don’t say that, don’t be stupid,” you said, shaking your head. “You can always go to the police, tell them about the fights and Mr. Kang and Sungho.”

“Police won’t get involved in something like that.”

“Not unless they’re sure they’ll get Mr. Kang or Sungho, or both.”

Jungkook frowned. “What are you trying to tell me? That I should work with the police? Like a rat? They will get me too.”

“Yeah, but you will be safe.”

“You know what happens to rats in jail?”

“If you reach an agreement with them, I’m sure they’ll offer you protection.”

“This is not a movie, Y/N…”

“Who else can do that, then? You know both Mr. Kang and Sungho, you know their hiddin places, their contacts… You know everything. You can help police get them, that way you’ll be able to live safely and free of any threats, problems… The people that surround you will be free too.”

He stared at the ceiling.

“I don’t know… It can go wrong… There are people in the police department that work for both Mr. Kang or Sungho.”

“Just think about it, talk with Taehyung… Do things right,” you pleaded him, bringing your face closer to his. “I just want you to be free for once, live a normal life for once. Maybe we’ll be able to move to another city, buy a small apartment, adopt a cute puppy…”

He thought about it. He thought about visiting apartments with you, hand on your waist as you both excitedly discussed where the shelves with all your Marvel movies and merchandising would go. He thought about waking up every morning to the sight of you, not weight on top of his shoulders, no chains around his heart. He thought about being able to walk freely down the streets with you, going to a place like Just Jump once again and then having four cheese pizza for dinner. It all sounded like a dream to him.

He had never been completely free, had never experienced life to the fullest.

Ever since he had been ten, he had thought he was his best self when he was on top of a ring, undefeated and tough, fists always before him. He was strong and powerful and no one dared to mess with him. He had built a tall façade that no one would be able to destroy, protecting him from the world.

But now, lying there with you on his arms, he realized he had never been his best self, that he had never experienced life freely. He had been an animal, caged his entire time. Now, he wanted, he longed, to be free. He realized, he was only his best self when he was with you because you made him feel free.

Maybe it would all be worth it. To take the risk. To choose something that wasn’t violence and power for once.

To stop behaving like Venom, like a wild animal, and start being Jeon Jungkook.

#jungkook x reader #bts x reader #bts #bts fanfic #bts scenario #bts imagine #jungkook fanfic #jungook scenario #jungkook imagine #bts angst #bts smut #bts fuff #jungkook angst #jungkook smut #jungkook fluff #jungkook boxer au #bts boxer au #animal #pt 8

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gottaread13 · 4 years

Text

ELEVEN

WAITING ON DOC’S DOORSILL AT WORK WAS A POSTCARD FROM some island he had never heard of out in the Pacific Ocean, with a lot of vowels in it’s name. The cancellation was in French and initialed by a local postmaster, along with the notation courier par lance-coco which as close as he could figure from the Petit Larousse must mean some kind of catapult mail delivery involving coconut shells, maybe as a way of dealing with an unapproachable reef. The message on the card was unsigned, but he knew it was from Shasta. “I wish you could see these waves. Its one more of these places a voice from somewhere else tells you you have to be. Remember that day with the Ouija board? I miss those days and I miss you. I wish so many things could be different… Nothing was supposed to happen this way, Doc, I’m so sorry.” Maybe she was, then again, maybe not. But what about this Ouija board? Doc went stumbling through his city dump of a memory. Oh …oh, sure, dimly… it had been during one of those prolonged times of no dope, nobody had any, everybody was desperate and suffering lapses of judgment. People were opening up cold capsules and laboriously sorting the thousands of tiny beads inside by color, in the belief that each color stood for a different belladonna alkaloid, which taken in big enough doses would get them loaded. They were snorting nutmeg, drinking cocktails of Visine and inexpensive wine, eating packets of morning-glory seeds despite rumors that the seed companies were coating them with some chemical that would make you throw up. Anything. One day when Doc and Shasta were over at Sortilege’s house, she mentioned this Ouija board she had. Doc had a brainflash. “Hey! You think it knows where we can score?” Sortilege raised her eyebrows and shrugged, but waved a go- ahead hand at the board. The usual suspicions then arose, like how could you be sure the other person wasn’t deliberately moving the planchette to make it look like some message from beyond, and so on. “Easy as pie,” Sortilege said, “just do it all by yourself.” Following her instructions, Doc breathed himself deeply and carefully into a receptive state, letting the tips of his fingers rest as lightly as possible on the planchette. “Now, make your request, and see what happens.” “Groovy,” said Doc. “Hey—where can I find some dope, man? a-and, you know, good shit?” The planchette took off like a jackrabbit, spelling out almost faster than Shasta could copy an address down Sunset somewhat east of Vermont, and even throwing in a phone number, which Doc promptly dialed. “Howdy, dopers,” cooed a female voice, “we’ve got whatever you need, and remember—the sooner you get over here, the more there’ll be left for you.” “Yeah like whom I talking to? Hello? Hey!” Doc looked at the receiver, puzzled. “She just hung up.” “Could’ve been a recording,” said Sortilege. “Did you hear what she was screaming at you? ‘Stay away! I am a police trap!’” “You want to come along, keep us out of trouble?” She looked doubtful. “I have to advise you at this point that it might not be anything. See, the problem about Ouija boards—” But Doc and Shasta were already out the door and soon rattling up the chuckholed obstacle course known as Rosecrans Boulevard under a cloudless sky, in the sort of perfect daylight you always saw on TV cop shows, unshaded even by the eucalyptus trees that had recently all been chopped down. KHJ was playing a Tommy James & the Shondells marathon. Commercial-free in fact. What could be more auspicious? Even before they reached the airport, something about the light had begun to go weird. The sun vanished behind clouds which grew thicker by the minute. Up in the hills among the oil pumps, the first raindrops began to fall, and by the time Doc and Shasta got to La Brea they were in the middle of a sustained cloudburst. This was way too unnatural. Ahead, someplace over Pasadena, black clouds had gathered, not just dark gray but midnight black, tar-pit black, hitherto- unreported-circle-of-Hell black. Lightning bolts had begun to descend across the L.A. Basin singly and in groups, followed by deep, apocalyptic peals of thunder. Everybody had turned their headlights on, though it was midday. Water came rushing down the hillsides of Hollywood, sweeping mud, trees, bushes, and many of the lighter types of vehicle on down into the flatlands. After hours of detouring for landslides and traffic jams and accidents, Doc and Shasta finally located the mystically revealed dope dealers address, which turned out to be an empty lot with a gigantic excavation in it, between a laundromat and an Orange Julius-plus-car wash, all of them closed. In the thick mist and lashing rain, you couldn’t even see to the other side of the hole. “Hey. I thought there was supposed to be a lot of dope around here.” What Sortilege had tried to point out about Ouija boards, as Doc learned later back at the beach, while wringing out his socks and looking for a hair dryer, was that concentrated around us are always mischievous spirit forces, just past the threshold of human perception, occupying both worlds, and that these critters enjoy nothing better than to mess with those of us still attached to the thick and sorrowful catalogs of human desire. “Sure!” was their attitude, “you want dope? Here’s your dope, you fucking idiot.” Doc and Shasta sat parked by the edge of the empty swamped rectangle and watched it’s edges now and then slide in, and then after a while things rotated ninety degrees, and it began to look, to Doc at least, like a doorway, a great wet temple entrance, into someplace else. The rain beat down on the car roof, lightning and thunder from time to time interrupting thoughts of the old namesake river that had once run through this town, long canalized and tapped dry, and crippled into a public and anonymous confession of the deadly sin of greed…. He imagined it filling again, up to it’s concrete rim, and then over, all the water that had not been allowed to flow here for all these years now in unrelenting return, soon beginning to occupy the arroyos and cover the flats, all the swimming pools in the backyards filling up and overflowing and flooding the lots and streets, all this karmic waterscape connecting together, as the rain went on falling and the land vanished, into a sizable inland sea that would presently become an extension of the Pacific. It was funny that of all things to mention in the limited space of a coconut-launched postcard Shasta should have picked that day in the rain. It had stuck with Doc somehow too, even though it came at a point late in their time together, when she was already halfway out the door and Doc saw it happening but was letting it happen, and despite it there they were, presently making out frantically, like kids at the drive-in, steaming up the windows and getting the seat covers wet. Forgetting for a few minutes how it was all going to develop anyway. Back at the beach, the rain continued, and every day up in the hills, another fragment of real estate came sliding down. Insurance salesmen had Brylcreem running down into their collars, and stewardii found it impossible even with half- gallon cans of hair spray purchased in duty-free zones far away to maintain their hairdos in anything close to a stylish flip. The termitic houses of Gordita Beach had all turned to the consistency of wet sponge, emergency plumbers reached in to squeeze the beams and joists, thinking of their own winter homes in Palm Springs. People began to go crazy even while on the natch. Some enthusiast, claiming to be George Harrison of the Beatles, tried to hijack the Goodyear Blimp, moored at it’s winter quarters at the intersection of the Harbor and San Diego Freeways, and make it fly him to Aspen, Colorado, in the rain. The rain had a peculiar effect on Sortilege, who was just around then beginning to get obsessed by Lemuria and it’s tragic final days. “You were there in a former life,” Doc theorized. “I dream about it, Doc. I wake up so sure sometimes. Spike feels that way, too. Maybe it’s all this rain, but we’re starting to have the same dreams. We can’t find a way to return to Lemuria, so it’s returning to us. Rising up out of the ocean—‘hi Leej, hi Spike, long time ain’t it…’” “It talked to you guys?” “I don’t know. It isn’t just a place.”

DOC TURNED OVER Shasta’s postcard now and stared at the picture on the front. It was a photo taken underwater of the ruins of some ancient city—broken columns and arches and collapsed retaining walls. The water was supernaturally clear and seemed to emit a vivid blue-green light. Fish, what Doc guessed you’d call tropical, were swimming back and forth. It all seemed familiar. He looked for a photo credit, a copyright date, a place of origin. Blank. He rolled a joint and lit up and considered. This had to be a message from someplace besides a Pacific island whose name he couldn’t pronounce. He decided to go back and visit the Ouija-board address, which, being the site of a classic dope misadventure, had remained permanently entered in his memory. Denis came along for muscle. The hole in the ground was gone, and in it’s place rose a strangely futuristic building. From the front it might have been taken at first for some kind of religious structure, smoothly narrow and conical, like a church spire only different. Whoever put it up must have had a pretty comfortable budget to work with, too, because the whole outside had been covered in gold leaf. Then Doc noticed how this tall pointed shape was also curved away from the street. He went down the block a little way and looked back to get a side view, and when he saw how dramatic the curve was and how sharp the point at the top, he finally tumbled. Aha! In the old L.A. tradition of architectural whimsy, this structure was supposed to be a six- story-high golden fang. “Denis, I’m gonna look around for a while, you want to wait in the car or come in and cover my back or something?” “I was gonna go try and find a pizza,” Denis said. Doc handed him the car keys. “And… they did have driver ed at Leuzinger High.” bure. “And you remember this is a stick, not automatic and so forth.” “I’m cool, Doc.” And Denis sped off.

THE FRONT DOOR was nearly invisible, more of a big access panel that fit snugly into the curving façade. In the lobby beneath a tasteful sign in sans-serif face reading GOLDEN FANG ENTERPRISES, INC. \ CORPORATE HQ and behind a nameplate of her own that said “Xandra, hi!” sat an Asian receptionist wearing a black vinyl jumpsuit and a distant expression, who asked him in a semi-Brit accent whether he was sure he had the right place. “This is the address they told me at the Club Asiatique in San Pedro? Just here to pick up a package for the management?” Xandra reached for a telephone, punched a button, murmured into it, listened, gave Doc another doubtful once- over, stood, and led him across the reception area to a brushed- metallic door. It took only a step or two for him to dig that she’d logged more dojo hours in the year previous than he’d spent in front of the tube in his whole life—not the sort of young lady whose displeasure you’d go looking to provoke. “Second office on the left. Dr. Blatnoyd will see you in a moment.” Doc found the office and looked around for something to check out his hair in but saw only a small yellow-framed feng shui mirror by the door. The face looking back did not seem to be his own. “This is not promising,” he muttered. Behind a titanium desk, the window revealed a stretch of lower Sunset—taquerías, low-rent hotels, pawn shops. There were beanbag chairs and a range of magazines—Foreign Affairs, Sinsemilla Tips, Modern Psychopath, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists— that gave Doc no handle on the clientele here. He started paging through 2000 Hairdos and was just getting into “That Five-Point Scissor Cut—What Your Stylist Isn’t Telling You,” when Dr. Blatnoyd came in wearing a suit in a deep, nearly ultraviolet shade of velvet, with very wide jacket lapels and bell-bottom trousers and accented with a raspberry-colored bow tie and display handkerchief. He seated himself behind the desk, reached for a weighty loose-leaf manual of some kind and began consulting it, squinting over at Doc from time to time. Finally, “So…you have some ID, I imagine.” Doc went looking through his wallet till he found a business card from a Chinese head shop on North Spring Street he thought would do the trick. “I can’t read this, it’s in some … Oriental… what is this, Chinese?” “Well, I figured that you, being Chinese—” “What? what are you talking about?” “‘The … the Golden Fang …’?” “It’s a syndicate, most of us happen to be dentists, we set it up years ago for tax purposes, all legit— Wait,” peering at Doc you’d have to say diagnostically, “where’d you tell Xandra you were from again?” “Uh…” “Why, you’re another one of those hippie dopefiends, aren’t you. My goodness. Here for a little perking up, I’ll bet—” In a jiffy he was out with a tall cylinder of brown glass sealed elaborately with globs of some bright red plastic—“Dig it! just in from Darmstadt, lab quality, maybe I’ll even have some with you...” And before Doc knew it the hectic D.D.S. had a quantity of fluffy white cocaine crystals all chopped up into snortable format and arranged in lines on a nearby copy of Guns &Ammo. Doc shrugged in apology. “I try not to do dope I can’t pay for, ‘s what it is.” “Whoo!” Dr. Blatnoyd had a soda straw and was busy snorting away. “No worries, it’s on the house, as the TV antenna man always sez…Hmm, missed a little...” He took it on his finger and rubbed it enthusiastically into his gums. Doc did half a line in either nostril, just to be sociable, but somehow could not shake the impression that all was not as innocent here as it looked. He had been in a dentist’s office or two, and there was a distinctive smell and a set of vibes that were as absent here as room echoes, which he’d also been wondering about. Like something else was going on— something… not groovy. There was a quiet but no-nonsense knock at the door, and Xandra the receptionist looked in. She had unzipped the top of the jumpsuit, and Doc could now make out this exquisite pair of no-bra tits, their nipples noticeably erect. “Oh, Doctor,” she breathed, half singing it. “Yes, Xandra,” replied Dr. Blatnoyd, moist-nosed and beaming. Xandra nodded and slid away back on out the door again, smiling over her shoulder. “And don’t forget to bring that bottle” “Be right back,” Blatnoyd assured Doc, speeding out after her, eyes frenziedly focused on where her ass had just been, his echoless footsteps soon vanishing into unknown regions of the Golden Fang Building. Doc went over and had a look at the manual on the desk. Titled Golden Fang Procedures Handbook, it was open to a chapter titled “Interpersonal Situations.” “Section Eight— Hippies. Dealing with the Hippie is generally straightforward. His childlike nature will usually respond positively to drugs, sex, and/or rock and roll, although in which order these are to be deployed must depend on conditions specific to the moment.” From the doorway came a loud, violent chirp. Doc looked up and saw a smiling young woman, blond, Californian, presentable, wearing a striped minidress of many different “psychedelic” colors and waving at him vigorously, causing enormous earrings, shaped like pagodas of some kind, to swing back and forth and actually jingle. “Here for my Smile Maintenance appointment with Dr. Rudy!” A blast from the past. “Hey! that’s at Japonica, ain’t it. Japonica Fenway! Imagine meeting you here!” This was not a moment he’d been either dreading or hoping for, though now and then somebody would remind him of the ancient American Indian belief that if you save somebody’s life, you are responsible for them from then on, forever, and he would wonder if any of that applied to his history with Japonica. It had been his first paying gig as a licensed private eye, and pay it did, for sure. The Fenways were heavy-duty South Bay money, living on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in a gated enclave located inside the already gated high-rent community of Rolling Hills. “How am I supposed to come see you,” Doc wondered when Crocker Fenway, Japonica’s dad, called him at the office. “Guess it’ll have to be outside the gates and down in the flats,” said Crocker, “like Lomita?” It was a pretty open-and-shut runaway-daughter case, hardly worth daily scale, let alone the extravagant bonus Crocker insisted on paying when Doc finally brought Japonica back, one lens missing from her wire-rim shades and vomit in her hair, making the handoff in the same parking lot where he and Crocker had met originally. It wasn’t clear if she’d ever clearly registered Doc then, or remembered him now. “So! Japonica! what’ve you been up to?” “Oh, escaping, mostly? There’s this, like, place? that my parents keep sending me to?” Which turned out to be Chryskylodon, the same nut plantation in Ojai that Doc remembered his Aunt Reet mentioning and which Sloane and Mickey had donated a wing to. Though Doc once may have rescued Japonica from a life of dark and unspecified hippie horror, apparently restoration to the bosom of her family had been enough to really drive her around the bend. Against the neutral surface of the wall opposite, Doc had a moment’s visual of an American Indian in full Indian gear, perhaps one of those warriors who wipe out Henry Fonda’s regiment in Fort Apache (1948), approaching with a menacing frown. “Doc responsible for crazy white chick now. What Doc planning to do about that? If anything.” “Excuse me, short man with strange hair? Are you all right?” And on she went without waiting for an answer, twinkling like a roomful of speed freaks hanging Christmas tinsel, about her different escapes. It was beginning to give Doc a headache. Owing to Governor Reagan’s shutdown of most of the state mental facilities, the private sector had been trying in it’s way to pick up some of the slack, soon in fact becoming a standard California child-rearing resource. The Fenways had had Japonica in and out of Chryskylodon on a sort of maintenance-contract basis, depending as always on how they themselves were feeling day to day, for both led emotional lives of unusually high density, and often incoherence. “Some days all I had to do was play the wrong kind of music, and there’s my bags already packed, down in the front hall waiting for the driver.” Soon Chryskylodon had found itself attracting a type of silent benefactor—middle-aged, male, though occasionally female, more focused than usual on the young and mentally disturbed. Freaky chicks and fun-loving dopers! Why do they call it the Love Generation? Come on up to Chryskylodon for a rockin weekend and find out! Absolute discretion guaranteed! Circa 1970, “adult” was no longer quite being defined as in times previous. Among those who could afford to, a strenuous mass denial of the passage of time itself was under way. All across a city long devoted to illusory product, clairvoyant Japonica had seen them, these travelers invisible to others, poised, gazing from smogswept mesa-tops above the boulevards, acknowledging one another across miles and years, summit to summit, in the dusk, under an obscurely enforced silence. Wingfeathers trembled along their naked backs. They knew they could fly. A moment more, an eyeblink in eternity, and they would ascend… So, Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd, out on a first blind date with Japonica at the Sound Mind Caff, a secluded eatery with a patio in back and a menu designed by a resident three-star organic chef, was not only enchanted, he was wondering if somebody hadn’t slipped some new psychedelic into his pomegranate martini. This girl was delightful! Being a little ESP-deficient, of course Rudy failed to appreciate that behind her wide sparkling gaze Japonica was not only thinking about but at this point actually visiting other worlds. The Japonica sitting with the older man in the funny velour suit was actually a Cybernetic Organism, or cyborg, programmed to eat and drink, converse and socialize, while Real Japonica tended to important business elsewhere, because she was the Kozmic Traveler, deep issues Out There awaited, galaxies wheeled, empires collapsed, karma would not be denied, and Real Japonica must always be present at some exact point in five- dimensional space, or chaos would resume it’s dominion. She returned to the Sound Mind to find that Cyborg Japonica had somehow malfunctioned and gone skipping into the kitchen and done something gross to the Soup of the Day, and now they would have to pour it all down the sink. Actually, it was the Soup of the Night, a sinister indigo liquid which probably didn’t deserve much respect, but still, Cyborg Japonica could have showed some self-control. Naughty, impulsive Cyborg Japonica. Perhaps Real Japonica should not let her have those special high-voltage batteries she had been asking for. That would show her. Dr. Blatnoyd, escorting her out through a roomful of disapproving faces, only grew more bedazzled. So this was a free-spirited hippie chick! He saw these girls on the streets of Hollywood, on the TV screen, but this was his first up-close encounter. No wonder Japonica’s parents didn’t know what to do with her—his assumption here, which he didn’t examine too closely, being that he did. “And actually, I wasn’t too sure about who he was till I came in for my first Smile Evaluation…” At which point in Japonica’s reminiscing, in popped the lecherous toothyanker himself, zipping up his fly. “Japonica? I thought we’d agreed never to—” Catching sight of Doc—”oh, you’re still here?” “I escaped again, Rudy,” she twinkled. Denis also now came lurching in. “Hey man, your ride’s in a body shop.” “It signed itself in, Denis?” “I sort of mashed the front end. I was looking at these chicks out on Little Santa Monica—” “You went to Beverly Hills for a pizza, and rear-ended somebody there.” “Needs a new … what do they call that, with the hoses, where the steam comes out—” “Radiator—Denis, you said you took driver ed in high school.” “No, no, Doc, you said did they have Driver Ed, and I said yes cause they did, this dude Eddie Ochoa, that there wasn’t a cop south of Salinas could get near him, and that’s what everybody called him—” “So, like, you … never actually… learned …” “All that stuff they wanted you to remember, man?” Xandra, visibly disheveled, now came running in after Denis, yelling, “I told you you couldn’t come up here,” then spotted Japonica and screeched to a halt. “Oh. Smile Maintenance Chick. How lovely,” while scaling tiny glares Dr. Blatnoyd’s way like the star-shaped blades in kung fu movies. “Miss Fenway,” the doctor began to explain, “may seem a little psychotic today….” “Groovy!” cried Denis. “What?” Blatnoyd blinking. “Being insane, man? it’s groovy, where are you at, man?” “Denis …” Doc murmured. “It is not ‘groovy’ to be insane. Japonica here has been institutionalized for it.” “Yep,” beamed Japonica. “Like, in the place? Psychedelic! They put those volts in your head, man?” “Volts ‘n’ volts,” twinkled Japonica. “Whoa. Bad for la cabeza, man.” “C’mon, Denis,” said Doc, “we’re gonna have to figure out how to catch a bus back to the beach.” “If you need a ride, I’m heading that way,” offered Japonica. Running a fast eyeball diagnostic, Doc could see nothing too alarming—right at the moment she was being as sane as anybody here, not too many useful remarks Doc could pass, so he settled for, “Everything cool with your brakes and lights, Japonica? license-plate lights and so forth?” “A-OK? Just had Wolfgang in for periodic maintenance?” “That’s…” “My car?” Yes, another warning buzzer, but Doc was now on to obsessing over the vast numbers of law enforcement likely to be deployed between here and the beach. “Excuse me,” wondered Xandra, who’d been staring at Denis, “is that a slice of pizza on your hat?” “Oh wow, thanks, man, I’ve been lookin all over for that…” “Mind if I tag along with you people?” asked Dr. Blatnoyd. “Contingencies of the road and so forth.” Wolfgang turned out to be a ten-year-old Mercedes sedan with a roof panel passengers could slide back, allowing them, like dogs in pickups, to stick their heads out in the wind if they wanted. Doc rode shotgun, widebrim fedora down over his eyes, trying to ignore a deep foreboding. Dr. Blatnoyd climbed in the back with Denis and then spent some time trying to push a #66 market bag full of something under the front seat on Doc’s side. “Hey,” exclaimed Denis, “what’s in that bag you’re stuffing under Doc’s seat?” “Pay no attention to that bag,” advised Dr. Blatnoyd. “It will only make everybody paranoid.” Which it did, except for Japonica, who was maneuvering them smoothly up Sunset through the late rush-hour traffic. Denis had his head out the roof. “Drive slower,” he called down after a while, “I want to dig this.” They were crossing Vine and about to go past Wallach’s Music City, where each of a long row of audition booths inside had it’s own lighted window facing the street. In every window, one by one as Japonica crept by, appeared a hippie freak or small party of hippie freaks, each listening on headphones to a different rock ‘n’ roll album and moving around at a different rhythm. Like Denis, Doc was used to outdoor concerts where thousands of people congregated to listen to music for free, and where it all got sort of blended together into a single public self, because everybody was having the same experience. But here, each person was listening in solitude, confinement and mutual silence, and some of them later at the register would actually be spending money to hear rock ‘n’ roll. It seemed to Doc like some strange kind of dues or payback. More and more lately he’d been brooding about this great collective dream that everybody was being encouraged to stay tripping around in. Only now and then would you get an unplanned glimpse at the other side. Denis waved, yelled and flashed peace signs, but nobody in any of the booths noticed. At last he slid back down into the Mercedes. “Far out. Maybe they’re all stoned. Hey! That must be why they call those things headphones!” He put his face closer to Dr. Blatnoyds than the dentist was really comfortable with. “Think about that, man! Like, headphones, right?” Japonica was driving so skillfully that it wasn’t till they were out of the white dazzle of Hollywood and across Doheny that Doc noticed (a) it was now dark and (b) the headlights weren’t on. “Ah, Japonica, like, your lights?” She was humming to herself, a tune Doc recognized, with dawning concern, as the theme from Dark Shadows. After four more bars, he tried again. “Like, it would be so groovy, Japonica, really, to have some lights working is all, seeing ‘s how Beverly Hills cops are known to lurk uphill on these different cross streets? just waiting for minor violations, like lights, to pop folks on?” Her humming was way too intense. Doc made the mistake of looking over, only to find her staring at him and not the road, eyes glittering ferally through a blond curtain of California-chick hair. No, this was not reassuring. Though hardly a connoisseur of the freakout, he did recognize a wraparound hallucination when he saw one and understood immediately that while she likely didn’t see Doc at all, whatever she was seeing was indeed physically out there, in the gathering fog, and just about to— “Everything all right, baby?” Rudy Blatnoyd rang in. “Oo-oooo” warbled Japonica, putting some vibrato onto it and stepping on the gas, “Ooo-ooo woo-oo, woo-ooo…” Cross traffic, neighborhood machinery such as Excaliburs and Ferraris, came blurring by at high speed, missing them by small clearances. Dr. Blatnoyd, as if wishing to start a therapeutic discussion, was glaring at Denis. “There. That’s just what I’ve been talking about.” “You didn’t say nothing about it happening while she’s driving, man.” Japonica had meantime decided that she must run every red light she could find, even speeding up to catch some before they could turn green. “Urn, Japonica, my dear? That was a red light?” Blatnoyd pointed out helpfully. “Ooh, I don’t think so!” she explained blithely. “I think that was one of Its eyes!” “Oh. Well, yes,n Doc soothed. “We can sure dig that, Japonica, but then again—” “No, no, there’s no It’ watching you!” Blatnoyd now in some agitation. “Those are not eyes,’ those are warnings to come to a full stop and wait till the light turns green, don’t you remember learning that in school?” “That’s what those colors are for, man?” Denis said. Suddenly, like a UFO rising over the ridgeline, the flashing lights of a police car appeared uphill and came swooping down on them, the siren screaming. “Like, shit,” Denis heading for the hatch in the roof again, “I’m outta here, man,” overlooking for the moment the streetscape rushing past. Feeling no sign of deceleration, Doc, trying not to think about the paper bag under the seat, kept reaching with his foot for the brake pedal, meantime trying gently to steer the car over to the shoulder. If he’d been in his own ride and by himself, he might have chosen to make a run for it, at least open a door an inch or two and get rid of the bag, but by the time he could bring himself to try even that, the Man was on top of them. “License and registration, miss?” The cop seemed to be focused on Japonica’s tits. She smiled back at him in high- intensity silence, occasionally glancing at the Smith & Wesson on his hip. His partner, a rookie even blonder than he was, came and leaned on the passenger side, content for the moment to watch Denis, who had paused in his effort to climb through the roof to gaze at the strobing array of colored lights on top of the cruiser, and now and then go, “Oh wow, man.” “Are you the Great Beast?” inquired rattling-mad Japonica in her sub-jailbait lilt. “No no no,” Blatnoyd droning desperately, “that’s a policeman, Japonica, who only wants to make sure you’re all right…” “Just the license and registration if you wouldn’t mind,” said the cop. “You know you were driving without your headlights, miss.” “But I can see in the dark,” Japonica nodding emphatically, “I can see real good\n “Her sister went into labor about an hour ago,” Blatnoyd imagining he was charming their way out of a ticket, “and Miss Fenway promised she’d be there in time to see the baby born, so she might’ve been a little inattentive back there?” “That case,” said the cop, “maybe somebody else ought to be driving.” Japonica promptly jumped in the back seat with Blatnoyd, while Doc slid over behind the wheel and Denis moved up front to ride shotgun. The cops looked on beaming, like instructors at an etiquette class. “Oh and we’ll need everybody’s ID, too,” the rookie announced. “Sure thing,” Doc bringing out his PI license. “What’s it about, Officer?” “New program,” shrugged the other cop, “you know how it is, another excuse for paperwork, they’re calling it Cultwatch, every gathering of three or more civilians is now defined as a potential cult.” The rookie was making checkmarks on a list attached to a clipboard. “Criteria,” the other cop continued, “include references to the book of Revelation, males with shoulder-length or longer hair, endangerment through automotive absentmindedness, all of which you folks have been exhibiting.” “Yeah man,” Denis put in, “but we’re in a Mercedes, and it’s only painted one color, beige—don’t we get points for that?” Doc noticed for the first time that both cops were... well, not trembling, the police wouldn’t tremble, but vibrating for sure, with the post-Mansonical nerves that currently ruled the area. “We’ll hand this all in, Mr. Sportello, it’ll go in some master data bank here and in Sacramento, and unless there’s wants or warrants we don’t know about, you won’t hear any more on this.” FOLLOWING DR. BLATNOYD’S directions, Doc turned off Sunset, braking almost immediately for a guard gate staffed by private heat of some kind. “Evening, Heinrich,” boomed Rudy Blatnoyd. “Nice to see you, Dr. B.,” replied the sentry, waving him through. They went winding through Bel Air, up hillsides and canyons, arriving at a mansion with another gate, low and nearly invisible inside it’s landscape gardening, seeming so much constructed of night itself that at sunrise it might all disappear. Behind the gate glimmered a pale slash through the dark, which Doc finally figured out was a moat, with a drawbridge over it. “Won’t be a minute,” Dr. Blatnoyd climbing out, grabbing the bag from under the front seat and getting into a cryptic discussion over the gate intercom with a voice Doc guessed to be female, before the gate opened and the drawbridge came down, rumbling and creaking. Then the night was very quiet again—not even the distant freeway traffic could be heard, or the footpads of coyotes, or the slither of snakes… “Way too quiet,” said Denis, “it’s freaking me out, man.” “I think we’ll wait here on this side of the moat,” Doc said. “Okay?” Denis rolled an enormous joint and lit up, and soon the interior of the Mercedes was full of smoke. After a while there was shrieking on the gate intercom. “Hey man,” said Denis, “you don’t have to yell, man.” “Dr. Blatnoyd wishes us to inform you,” announced the woman at the other end, “that he will be remaining as our guest, and there is thus no further need for you to wait.” “Yeah, and you talk like a robot, man.” It took them a while to find their way back to Sunset. “I guess I’ll crash with some friends in Pacific Palisades,” Japonica announced. “Mind letting us off at the Greyhound in Santa Monica? We can grab the midnight local.” “By the way, aren’t you the man who found me and brought me back to my dad that time?” “Just doing my job,” Doc immediately defensive. “Did he really want me back?” “I’ve worked gigs like that a couple of times since,” Doc said carefully, in case she had to drive much more tonight, “and he seemed like your standard worried parent.” “He’s an asshole,” Japonica assured him. “Here, this is my office number. I don’t have regular hours, so you may not always find me in.” She shrugged and managed a smile. “If it’s meant to be.”

THINGS WERE WEIRD for a few days with the Dart over in Beverly Hills, though Doc imagined it was having itself a nice time in the company of all those Jaguars and Porsches and so forth. When he finally went over to pick up his ride, at Resurrection of the Body, a collision emporium somewhat south of Olympic, he ran into his friend Tito Stavrou having a lively argument with Manuel the owner. Tito ran a limo service, though there was only one unit in his fleet, unfortunately not one of those limos able to Glide from the Curb, much less Insert Itself Effortlessly into Traffic—no, this one lurched from the curb percussively into traffic, being in fact garaged for at least half of any given premium period (as Tito’s latest insurance carrier had just discovered, much to it’s own, and you can imagine how much to Tito’s, dismay) or being attended to by various sand-and-fill crews around the Greater L.A. Area. One calendar year it got repainted six times. “You sure you mean limo and not limón?” suggested Manuel, as part of the recreational abuse he liked to lay on Tito whenever the vehicle showed up with a new set of dings. They stood out in the main shed, assembled from a Quonset hut first cut in half lengthwise and the two pieces then rearranged so that they met in a point high overhead to make a sort of churchlike vault. “It would be cheaper if you just pay me in front, small fee, anytime you want it painted, just bring it by, day or night, any color in stock includin the metallics, in and out in a couple hours.” “What worries me,” said Tito, “is that ‘in and out,’ you know, all these high-risk elements of the auto-parts community you deal with?” “This is Resurrection, ése! Were in the miracle business! If Jesus turned water into wine in front of your face? would you be goin, ‘What’s this I’m drinkin, I wannit Dom Perignon,’ or some shit? If I was that picky about what comes in here for a paint job? ask for what? their license and registration? Then they’re really pissed off, they go someplace else, plus I get put on a shit list I might not want to be on?” Manuel noticed Doc for the first time. “You the Bentley?” “The’64 Dodge Dart?” Manuel looked back and forth between Doc and Tito for a while. “You guys know each other?” “That would really depend,” Doc was about to say, but Manuel went on. “I was gonna charge you more, but guys like Tito here, they’re sub-sidizin guys like you.” The amount on the invoice was nevertheless a Beverly Hills type of number, and half Doc’s day got blown setting up a payment schedule. “Come on,” said Tito, “I’ll buy you lunch. I need your advice on something.” They went down to Pico and headed toward Rancho Park. This street was a chowhound’s delight. Back when Doc was still new in town, one day around sunset—the daily event, not the boulevard—he was in Santa Monica near the western end of Pico, the light over all deep L.A. softening to purple with some darker gold to it, and from this angle and hour of the day it seemed to him he could see all the way down Pico for miles into the heart of the great Megalopolis itself, having yet to discover that if he wanted to, he could also eat his way down Pico night after night for a long while before repeating an ethnic category. This did not always turn out to be good news for the indecisive doper who might know he was hungry but not necessarily how to deal with it in terms of specific food. Many was the night Doc ran out of gas, and his munchies- afflicted companions out of patience, long before settling on where to go eat. Today they ended up at a Greek restaurant called Teké, which according to Tito meant an old-time hashish parlor in Greek. “I hope this won’t be a problem,” said Tito, “but word is around you’ve been working on this Mickey Wolfmann case?” “Not how I’d put it. Nobody’s paying me. Sometimes I think all it is is guilt. Wolfmann’s girlfriend is my ex-old lady, she said she needed help, so I’ve been trying to help.” Tito, who had made a point of facing the front entrance, lowered his voice till Doc could hardly hear him. ‘“I’m taking a chance that you ain’t bent, Doc. You ain’t bent, are you?” “Not so far, but I could always use a nice envelope full of cash.” “These guys,” an unhappy look crossing Tito’s face, “don’t hand you envelopes, it’s more like, do what they want, maybe they don’t fuck you up too bad.” “You’re sayin this is mob-related—” “I only wish. I mean, I know some Family badasses who scare most people, they sure scare me, but I wouldn’t ever go to them with this, they’d just take a look at who it is and go, like, ‘Pasadena, man.’” “Not to mention you owe them money.” “No more, I kicked all that.” “What. No horses, no pan parlors? No Li’l T-Rex? No Salvatore ‘Paper Cut’ Gazzoni? No Adrian Prussia?” “Nope, even Adrian’s off my ass anymore, all paid off, the vig, everything.” “Good news cause sooner or later that fucker’d be reachin for his baseball bat, going to town on your head or somethin. Man gives loan-sharkin a bad name.” “They’re all in my sorry past now, I been twelve-steppin it, Doc. Meetings, everythin.” “Well, Inez must be happy. How long’s it been?” “Comin up on six months next weekend. We’re gonna go celebrate it in style, too, we’re takin the limo to Vegas, stayin at Caesar’s—” “Excuse me, Tito, am I confusing Las Vegas with someplace else where all they do is fucking gamble nonstop? How do you expect to—” “Avoid temptation? Hey that’s just it, how’m I ever gonna know? Thing is to jump in, see what happens.” “Oboy. This is all cool with Inez?” “Her idea.” Mike the owner and cook appeared with a huge plate of dolmadhes, Kalamata olives, and midget spanakopitas it looked like it would take a week to polish off. “You’re sure you want to eat here,” he greeted Tito. “This is Doc, he saved my life once.” “And this is how you thank him?” Mike shaking his head in reproof. “Think long and hard, my friends,” muttering back to the kitchen. “I saved your life?” Tito shrugged. “That time up on Mulholland.” “You saved mine, man, you’re the one knew where it was,” this particular “it” being a car-napped 1934 Hispano- Suiza J12 whose return Doc had been negotiating with a Lithuanian thyroid case who showed up carrying a modified AK-47 with a banana clip so oversize that he kept tripping over it, which looking back was what had saved everybody’s lives, probably. “I was doin that all for myself, man, you happened to be there when we brought it back and all that money started flyin around.” “Whatever, Doc—there’s somethin now that you’re the only one I can tell it to.” A quick look around. “Doc, I was one of the last people to talk to Mickey Wolfmann before he dropped off the screen.” “Shit,” replied Doc, encouragingly. “And no, I haven’t been near the heat with this. It would get back to these guys before I was out the door, and I’d end up a shark hors oeuvre. “D and D, Tito.” “What happened, Mickey got to where he didn’t always trust his drivers. They were most of ’em ex-cons, which meant they had their own IOUs to pay off that sometimes he didn’t know about. So once in a while he calls me on the unlisted line, and I pick him up someplace we decide on at the last minute.” “You used that limo? Not exactly a low profile.” “Nah, we’d use Falcons or Novas, I can always score one on short notice, even a VDub if it ain’t painted too funny.” “So the day Mickey disappeared… he called you? you took him someplace?” “He wanted me to pick him up. He called in the middle of the night, it sounded like a pay phone, he was talking real quiet, he was scared, like somebody was after him. He gave me an address out of town, I drove up there and waited, but he never showed. After a couple hours I was getting too much attention so I split.” “Where was this?” “Ojai, near someplace called Chryskylodon.” “I’ve been hearing about it,” Doc said, “some nuthouse for the upper brackets. Old Indian word that means ‘serenity.’” “Ha!” Tito shook his head. “Who told you that?” “It’s in their brochure?” “It ain’t Indian, it’s Greek, trust me, they talked Greek around the house all the time I was coming up.” “What’s it mean in Greek?” “Well, it’s squashed together a little, but it means like a gold tooth, this one here—” He tapped at a canine. “Oh, shit. Tang’? Could it be that?” “Yeah, close enough. Gold fang.”

§ § §

TYRION

A horse whickered impatiently behind him, from amidst the ranks of gold cloaks drawn up across the road. Tyrion could hear Lord Gyles coughing as well. He had not asked for Gyles, no more than he'd asked for Ser Addam. or Jalabhar Xho or any of the rest, but his lord father felt Doran Martell might take it ill if only a dwarf came out to escort him across the Blackwater. Joffrey should have met the Dornishmen himself, he reflected as he sat waiting, but he would have mucked it up, no doubt. Of late the king had been repeating little jests about the Dornish that he'd picked up from Mace Tyrell's men-atarms. How many Dornishmen does it take to shoe a horse? Nine. One to do the shoeing, and eight to lift the horse up. Somehow Tyrion did not think Doran Martell would find that amusing. He could see their banners flying as the riders emerged from the green of the living wood in a long dusty column. From here to the river, only bare black trees remained, a legacy of his battle. Too many banners, he thought sourly, as he watched the ashes kick up under the hooves of the approaching horses, as they had beneath the hooves of the Tyrell van as it smashed Stannis in the flank. Martell's brought half the lords of Dorne, by the look of it. He tried to think of some good that might come of that, and failed. "How many banners do you count?" he asked Brorm. The sellsword knight shaded his eyes. "Eight ... no, nine." Tyrion turned in his saddle. "Pod, come up here. Describe the arms you see, and tell me which houses they represent." Podrick Payne edged his gelding closer. He was carrying the royal standard, Joffrey's great stag-and-lion, and struggling with its weight. Bronn bore Tyrion's own banner, the lion of Lannister gold on crimson. He's getting taller, Tyrion realized as Pod stood in his stirrups for a better look. He'll soon tower over me like all the rest. The lad had been making a diligent study of Domish heraldry, at Tyrion's command, but as ever he was nervous. "I can't see. The wind is flapping them." "Bronn, tell the boy what you see." Bronn looked very much the knight today, in his new doublet and cloak, the flaming chain across his chest. "A red sun on orange," he called, "with a spear through its back." "Martell," Podrick Payne said at once, visibly relieved. "House Martell of Sunspear, my lord. The Prince of Dome." "My horse would have known that one," said Tyrion dryly. "Give him another, Bronn." "There's a purple flag with yellow balls. "Lemons?" Pod said hopefully. "A purple fleld strewn with lemons? For House Dalt? Of, of Lemonwood." "Might be. Next's a big black bird on yellow. Something pink or white in its claws, hard to say with the banner flapping." "The vulture of Blackmont grasps a baby in its talons," said Pod. "House Blackmont of Blackmont, ser." Bronn laughed. "Reading books again? Books will ruin your sword eye, boy. I see a skull too. A black banner." "The crowned skull of House Manwoody, bone and gold on black." Pod sounded more confident with every correct answer. "The Manwoodys of Kingsgrave." "Three black spiders?" "They're scorpions, ser. House Qorgyle of Sandstone, three scorpions black on red." "Red and yellow, a jagged line between." "The flames of Hellholt. House Uller." Tyrion was impressed. The boy's not half stupid, once he gets his tongue untied. "Go on, Pod," he urged. "If you get them all, I'll make you a gift." "A pie with red and black slices," said Bronn. "There's a gold hand in the middle." "House Allyrion of Godsgrace." "A red chicken eating a snake, looks like." "The Gargalens of Salt Shore. A cockatrice. Ser. Pardon. Not a chicken. Red, with a black snake in its beak." "Very good!" exclaimed Tyrion. "One more, lad." Bronn scanned the ranks of the approaching Domishmen. "The last's a golden feather on green checks." "A golden quill, ser. Jordayne of the Tor." Tyrion laughed. "Nine, and well done. I could not have named them all myself." That was a lie, but it would give the boy some pride, and that he badly needed. Martell brings some formidable companions, it would seem. Not one of the houses Pod had named was small or insignificant. Nine of the greatest lords of Dorne were coming up the kingsroad, them or their heirs, and somehow Tyrion did not think they had come all this way just to see the dancing bear. There was a message here. And not one I like. He wondered if it had been a mistake to ship Myrcella down to Sunspear. "My lord," Pod said, a little timidly, "there's no litter." Tyrion turned his head sharply. The boy was right. "Doran Martell always travels in a litter," the boy said. "A carved litter with silk hangings, and suns on the drapes." Tyrion had heard the same talk. Prince Doran was past fifty, and gouty. He may have wanted to make faster time, he told himself. He may have feared his litter would make too tempting a target for brigands, or that it would prove too cumbersome in the high passes of the Boneway. Perhaps his gout is better. So why did he have such a bad feeling about this? This waiting was intolerable. "Banners forward," he snapped. "We'll meet them." He kicked his horse. Bronn and Pod followed, one to either side. When the Dornishmen saw them coming, they spurred their own mounts, banners rippling as they rode. From their ornate saddles were slung the round metal shields they favored, and many carried bundles of short throwing spears, or the double-curved Dornish bows they used so well from horseback. There were three sorts of Dornishmen, the first King Daeron had observed. There were the salty Dornishmen who lived along the coasts, the sandy Dornishmen of the deserts and long river valleys, and the stony Dornishmen who made their fastnesses in the passes and heights of the Red Mountains. The salty Domishmen had the most Rhoynish blood, the stony Dornishmen the least. All three sorts seemed well represented in Doran's retinue. The salty Dornishmen were lithe and dark, with smooth olive skin and long black hair streaming in the wind. The sandy Dornishmen were even darker, their faces burned brown by the hot Dornish sun. They wound long bright scarfs around their helms to ward off sunstroke. The stony Dornishmen were biggest and fairest, sons of the Andals and the First Men, brownhaired or blond, with faces that freckled or burned in the sun instead of browning. The lords wore silk and satin robes with jeweled belts and flowing sleeves. Their armor was heavily enameled and inlaid with burnished copper, shining silver, and soft red gold. They came astride red horses and golden ones and a few as pale as snow, all slim and swift, with long necks and narrow beautiful heads. The fabled sand steeds of Dome were smaller than proper warhorses and could not bear such weight of armor, but it was said that they could run for a day and night and another day, and never tire. The Domish leader forked a stallion black as sin with a mane and tail the color of fire. He sat his saddle as if he'd been born there, tall, slim, graceful. A cloak of pale red silk fluttered from his shoulders, and his shirt was armored with overlapping rows of copper disks that glittered like a thousand bright new pennies as he rode. His high gilded helm displayed a copper sun on its brow, and the round shield slung behind him bore the sun- and-spear of House Martell on its polished metal surface. A Martell sun, but ten years too young, Tyrion thought as he reined up, too fit as well, and far too fierce. He knew what he must deal with by then. How many Dornishmen does it take to start a war? he asked himself. Only one. Yet he had no choice but to smile. "Well met, my lords. We had word of your approach, and His Grace King Joffrey bid me ride out to welcome you in his name. My lord father the King's Hand sends his greetings as well." He feigned an amiable confusion. "Which of you is Prince Doran?" "My brother's health requires he remain at Sunspear." The princeling removed his helm. Beneath, his face was lined and saturnine, with thin arched brows above large eyes as black and shiny as pools of coal oil. Only a few streaks of silver marred the lustrous black hair that receded from his brow in a widow's peak as sharply pointed as his nose. A salty Dornishmen for certain. "Prince Doran has sent me to join King Joffrey's council in his stead, as it please His Grace." "His Grace will be most honored to have the counsel of a warrior as renowned as Prince Oberyn of Dome," said Tyrion, thinking, This will mean blood in the gutters. "And your noble companions are most welcome as well." "Permit me to acquaint you with them, my lord of Lannister. Ser Deziel Dalt, of Lemonwood. Lord Tremond Gargalen. Lord Harmen Uller and his brother Ser Ulwyck. Ser Ryon Allyrion and his natural son Ser Daemon Sand, the Bastard of Godsgrace. Lord Dagos Manwoody, his brother Ser Myles, his sons Mors and Dickon. Ser Arron Qorgyle. And never let it be thought that I would neglect the ladies. Myria Jordayne, heir to the Tor. Lady Larra Blackmont, her daughter Jynessa, her son Perros." He raised a slender hand toward a black- haired woman to the rear, beckoning her forward. "And this is Ellaria Sand, mine own paramour." Tyrion swallowed a groan. His paramour, and bastard-born, Cersei will pitch a holy fit if he wants her at the wedding. If she consigned the woman to some dark comer below the salt, his sister would risk the Red Viper's wrath. Seat her beside him at the high table, and every other lady on the dais was like to take offense. Did Prince Doran mean to provoke a quarrel? Prince Oberyn wheeled his horse about to face his fellow Domishmen. "Ellaria, lords and ladies, sers, see how well King Joffrey loves us. His Grace has been so kind as to send his own Uncle Imp to bring us to his court. " Bronn snorted back laughter, and Tyrion perforce must feign amusement as well. "Not alone, my lords. That would be too enormous a task for a little man like me." His own party had come up on them, so it was his turn to name the names. "Let me present Ser Flement Brax, heir to Homvale. Lord Gyles of Rosby. Ser Addam Marbrand, Lord Commander of the City Watch. jalabhar Xho, Prince of the Red Flower Vale. Ser Harys Swyft, my uncle Kevan's good father by marriage. Ser Merlon Crakehall. Ser Philip Foote and Ser Bronn of the Blackwater, two heroes of our recent battle against the rebel Stannis Baratheon. And mine own squire, young Podrick of House Payne." The names had a nice ringing sound as Tyrion reeled them off, but the bearers were nowise near as distinguished nor formidable a company as those who accompanied Prince Oberyn, as both of them knew full well. "My lord of Lannister," said Lady Blackmont, "we have come a long dusty way, and rest and refreshment would be most welcome. Might we continue on to the city?" "At once, my lady." Tyrion turned his horse's head, and called to Ser Addam Marbrand. The mounted gold cloaks who formed the greatest part of his honor guard turned their horses crisply at Ser Addam's command, and the column set off for the river and King's Landing beyond. Oberyn Nymeros Martell, Tyrion muttered under his breath as he fell in beside the man. The Red Viper of Dorne. And what in the seven hells am I supposed to do with him? He knew the man only by reputation, to be sure ... but the reputation was fearsome. When he was no more than sixteen, Prince Oberyn had been found abed with the paramour of old Lord Yronwood, a huge man of fierce repute and short temper. A duel ensued, though in view of the prince's youth and high birth, it was only to first blood. Both men took cuts, and honor was satisfied. Yet Prince Oberyn soon recovered, while Lord Yronwood's wounds festered and killed him. Afterward men whispered that Oberyn had fought with a poisoned sword, and ever thereafter friends and foes alike called him the Red Viper. That was many years ago, to be sure. The boy of sixteen was a man past forty now, and his legend had grown a deal darker. He had traveled in the Free Cities, leaming the poisoner's trade and perhaps arts darker still, if rumors could be believed. He had studied at the Citadel, going so far as to forge six links of a maester's chain before he grew bored. He had soldiered in the Disputed Lands across the narrow sea, riding with the Second Sons for a time before forming his own company. His tourneys, his battles, his duels, his horses, his carnality ... it was said that he bedded men and women both, and had begotten bastard girls all over Dome. The sand snakes, men called his daughters. So far as Tyrion had heard, Prince Oberyn had never fathered a son. And of course, he had crippled the heir to Highgarden. There is no man in the Seven Kingdoms who will be less welcome at a 7)7rell wedding, thought Tyrion. To send Prince Oberyn to King's Landing while the city still hosted Lord Mace Tyrell, two of his sons, and thousands of their men-at-arms was a provocation as dangerous as Prince Oberyn himself. A wrong word, an ill-timed jest, a look, that's all it will take, and our noble allies will be at one another's throats. "We have met before," the Domish prince said lightly to Tyrion as they rode side by side along the kingsroad, past ashen fields and the skeletons of trees. "I would not expect you to remember, though. You were even smaller than you are now." There was a mocking edge to his voice that Tyrion misliked, but he was not about to let the Dornishman provoke him. "When was this, my lord?" he asked in tones of polite interest. "Oh, many and many a year ago, when my mother ruled in Dome and your lord father was Hand to a different king." Not so different as you might think, reflected Tyrion. "It was when I visited Casterly Rock with my mother, her consort, and my sister Elia. I was, oh, fourteen, fifteen, thereabouts, Elia a year older. Your brother and sister were eight or nine, as I recall, and you had just been bom." A queer time to come visiting. His mother had died giving him birth, so the Martells would have found the Rock deep in mouming. His father especially. Lord Tywin seldom spoke of his wife, but Tyrion had heard his uncles talk of the love between them. In those days, his father had been Aerys's Hand, and many people said that Lord Tywin Lannister ruled the Seven Kingdoms, but Lady Joanna ruled Lord Tywin. "He was not the same man after she died, imp," his Uncle Gery told him once. "The best part of him died with her." Gerion had been the youngest of Lord Tytos Lannister's four sons, and the uncle Tyrion liked best. But he was gone now, lost beyond the seas, and Tyrion himself had put Lady Joanna in her grave. "Did you find Casterly Rock to your liking, my lord?" "Scarcely. Your father ignored us the whole time we were there, after commanding Ser Kevan to see to our entertainment. The cell they gave me had a featherbed to sleep in and Myrish carpets on the floor, but it was dark and windowless, much like a dungeon when you come down to it, as I told Elia at the time. Your skies were too grey, your wines too sweet, your women too chaste, your food too bland ... and you yourself were the greatest disappointment of all." "I had just been born. What did you expect of me?" "Enormity," the black-haired prince replied. "You were small, but far-famed. We were in Oldtown at your birth, and all the city talked of was the monster that had been born to the King's Hand, and what such an omen might foretell for the realm." "Famine, plague, and war, no doubt." Tyrion gave a sour smile. "It's always famine, plague, and war. Oh, and winter, and the long night that never ends." "All that," said Prince Oberyn, "and your father's fall as well. Lord Tywin had made himself greater than King Aerys, I heard one begging brother preach, but only a god is meant to stand above a king. You were his curse, a punishment sent by the gods to teach him that he was no better than any other man." "I try, but he refuses to learn." Tyrion gave a sigh. "But do go on, I pray you. I love a good tale." "And well you might, since you were said to have one, a stiff curly tail like a swine's. Your head was monstrous huge, we heard, half again the size of your body, and you had been born with thick black hair and a beard besides, an evil eye, and lion's claws. Your teeth were so long you could not close your mouth, and between your legs were a girl's privates as well as a boy's." "Life would be much simpler if men could fuck themselves, don't you agree? And I can think of a few times when claws and teeth might have proved useful. Even so, I begin to see the nature of your complaint." Brorm gave out with a chuckle, but Oberyn only smiled. "We might never have seen you at all but for your sweet sister. You were never seen at table or hall, though sometimes at night we could hear a baby howling down in the depths of the Rock. You did have a monstrous great voice, I must grant you that. You would wail for hours, and nothing would quiet you but a woman's teat." "Still true, as it happens." This time Prince Oberyn did laugh. "A taste we share. Lord Gargalen once told me he hoped to die with a sword in his hand, to which I replied that I would sooner go with a breast in mine." Tyrion had to grin. "You were speaking of my sister?" "Cersei promised Elia to show you to us. The day before we were to sail, whilst my mother and your father were closeted together, she and Jaime took us down to your nursery. Your wet nurse tried to send us off, but your sister was having none of that. 'He's mine/ she said, 'and you're just a milk cow, you can't tell me what to do. Be quiet or I'll have my father cut your tongue out. A cow doesn't need a tongue, only udders."' "Her Grace learned charm at an early age," said Tyrion, amused by the notion of his sister claiming him as hers. She's never been in any rush to claim me since, the gods know. "Cersei even undid your swaddling clothes to give us a better look," the Dornish prince continued. "You did have one evil eye, and some black fuzz on your scalp. Perhaps your head was larger than most ... but there was no tail, no beard, neither teeth nor claws, and nothing between your legs but a tiny pink cock. After all the wonderful whispers, Lord Tywin's Doom turned out to be just a hideous red infant with stunted legs. Elia even made the noise that young girls make at the sight of infants, I'm sure you've heard it. The same noise they make over cute kittens and playful puppies. I believe she wanted to nurse you herself, ugly as you were. When I commented that you seemed a poor sort of monster, your sister said, 'He killed my mother/ and twisted your little cock so hard I thought she was like to pull it off. You shrieked, but it was only when your brother Jaime said, 'Leave him be, you're hurting him/ that Cersei let go of you. 'It doesn't matter/ she told us. 'Everyone says he's like to die soon. He shouldn't even have lived this long."' The sun was shining bright above them, and the day was pleasantly warm for autumn, but Tyrion Lannister went cold all over when he heard that. My sweet sister. He scratched at the scar of his nose and gave the Dornishman a taste of his "evil eye." Now why would he tell such a tale? Is he testing me, or simply twisting my cock as Cersei did, so he can hear me scream? "Be sure and tell that story to my father. It will delight him as much as it did me. The part about my tail, especially. I did have one, but he had it lopped off." Prince Oberyn had a chuckle. "You've grown more amusing since last we met." "Yes, but I meant to grow taller." "While we are speaking of amusement, I heard a curious tale from Lord Buckler's steward. He claimed that you had put a tax on women's privy purses." "It is a tax on whoring," said Tyrion, irritated all over again. And it was my bloody father's notion. "Only a penny for each, ah ... act. The King's Hand felt it might help improve the morals of the city." And pay for Joffrey's wedding besides. Needless to say, as master of coin, Tyrion had gotten all the blame for it. Brorm said they were calling it the dwarf's penny inthestreets. "Spread your legs for the Halfman, now," they were shouting in the brothels and wine sinks, if the sellsword could be believed. "I will make certain to keep my pouch full of pennies. Even a prince must pay his taxes." "Why should you need to go whoring?" He glanced back to where Ellaria Sand rode among the other women. "Did you tire of your paramour on the road?" "Never. We share too much." Prince Oberyn shrugged. "We have never shared a beautiful blonde woman, however, and Ellaria is curious. Do you know of such a creature?" "I am a man wedded." Though not yet bedded. "I no longer frequent whores." Unless I want to see them hanged. Oberyn abruptly changed the subject. "It's said there are to be seventyseven dishes served at the king's wedding feast." "Are you hungry, my prince?" "I have hungered for a long time. Though not for food. Pray tell me, when will the iustice be served?" "Justice." Yes, that is why he's here, I should have seen that at once. "You were close to your sister?" "As children Elia and I were inseparable, much like your own brother and sister." Gods, I hope not. "Wars and weddings have kept us well occupied, Prince Oberyn. I fear no one has yet had the time to look into murders sixteen years stale, dreadful as they were. We shall, of course, just as soon as we may. Any help that Dome might be able to provide to restore the king's peace would only hasten the beginning of my lord father's inquiry - " "Dwarf," said the Red Viper, in a tone grown markedly less cordial, "spare me your Lannister lies. Is it sheep you take us for, or fools? My brother is not a bloodthirsty man, but neither has he been asleep for sixteen years. Jon Arryn came to Sunspear the year after Robert took the throne, and you can be sure that he was questioned closely. Him, and a hundred more. I did not come for some mummer's show of an inquiry. I came for justice for Elia and her children, and I will have it. Starting with this lummox Gregor Clegane ... but not, I think, ending there. Before he dies, the Enormity That Rides will tell me whence came his orders, please assure your lord father of that." He smiled. "An old septon once claimed I was living proof of the goodness of the gods. Do you know why that is, Imp?" "No," Tyrion admitted warily. "Why, if the gods were cruel, they would have made me my mother's firstborn, and Doran her third. I am a bloodthirsty man, you see. And it is me you must contend with now, not my patient, prudent, and gouty brother." Tyrion could see the sun shining on the Blackwater Rush half a mile ahead, and on the walls and towers and hills of King's Landing beyond. He glanced over his shoulder, at the glittering column following them up the kingsroad. "You speak like a man with a great host at his back," he said, "yet all I see are three hundred. Do you spy that city there, north of the river?" "The midden heap you call King's Landing?" "That's the very one." "Not only do I see it, I believe I smell it now." "Then take a good sniff, my lord. Fill up your nose. Half a million people stink more than three hundred, you'll find. Do you smell the gold cloaks? There are near five thousand of them. My father's own swom swords must account for another twenty thousand. And then there are the roses. Roses smell so sweet, don't they? Especially when there are so many of them. Fifty, sixty, seventy thousand roses, in the city or camped outside it, I can't really say how many are left, but there's more than I care to count, anyway." Martell gave a shrug. "In Dome of old before we married Dacron, it was said that all flowers bow before the sun. Should the roses seek to hinder me I'll gladly trample them underfoot." "As you trampled Willas Tyrell?" The Domishman did not react as expected. "I had a letter from Willas not half a year past. We share an interest in fine horseflesh. He has never bome me any ill will for what happened in the lists. I struck his breastplate clean, but his foot caught in a stirrup as he fell and his horse came down on top of him. I sent a maester to him afterward, but it was all he could do to save the boy's leg. The knee was far past mending. If any were to blame, it was his fool of a father. Willas Tyrell was green as his surcoat and had no business riding in such company. The Fat Flower thrust him into tourneys at too tender an age, just as he did with the other two. He wanted another Leo Longthom, and made himself a cripple." "There are those who say Ser Loras is better than Leo Longthom. ever was," said Tyrion. "Renly's little rose? I doubt that." "Doubt it all you wish," said Tyrion, "but Ser Loras has defeated many good knights, including my brother Jaime." "By defeated, you mean unhorsed, in tourney. Tell me who he's slain in battle if you mean to frighten me." "Ser Robar Royce and Ser Emmon Cuy, for two. And men say he performed prodigious feats of valor on the Blackwater, fighting beside Lord Renly's ghost." "So these same men who saw the prodigious feats saw the ghost as well, yes?" The Domishman laughed lightly. Tyrion gave him a long look. "Chataya's on the Street of Silk has several girls who might suit your needs. Dancy has hair the color of honey. Marei's is pale white-gold. I would advise you to keep one or the other by your side at all times, my lord." "At all times?" Prince Oberyn lifted a thin black eyebrow. "And why is that, my good imp?" "You want to die with a breast in hand, you said." Tyrion cantered on ahead to where the ferry barges waited on the south bank of the Blackwater. He had suffered all he meant to suffer of what passed for Dornish wit. Father should have sent Joffrey after all. He could have asked Prince Oberyn if he knew how a Dornishman differed from a cowflop. That made him grin despite himself. He would have to make a point of being on hand when the Red Viper was presented to the king.

§ § §

BRAN

The tower stood upon an island, its twin reflected on the still blue waters. When the wind blew, ripples moved across the surface of the lake, chasing one another like boys at play. Oak trees grew thick along the lakeshore, a dense stand of them with a litter of fallen acorns on the ground beneath. Beyond them was the village, or what remained of it. It was the first village they had seen since leaving the foothills. Meera had scouted ahead to make certain there was no one lurking amongst the ruins. Sliding in and amongst oaks and apple trees with her net and spear in hand, she startled three red deer and sent them bounding away through?the ?rush. Summer saw the flash of motion and was after them at once. Bran watched the direwolf lope off, and for a moment wanted nothing so much as to slip his skin and run with him, but Meera was waving for them to come ahead. Reluctantly, he turned away from Summer and urged Hodor on, into the village. Jojen walked with them. The ground from here to the Wall was grasslands, Bran knew; fallow fields and low rolling hills, high meadows and lowland bogs. It would be much easier going than the mountains behind, but so much open space made Meera uneasy. "I feel naked," she confessed. "There's no place to hide." "Who holds this land?" Jojen asked Bran. "The Night's Watch," he answered. "This is the Gift. The New Gift, and north of that Brandon's Gift." Maester Luwin had taught him the history. "Brandon the Builder gave all the land south of the Wall to the black brothers, to a distance of twenty-five leagues. For their ... for their sustenance and support." He was proud that he still remembered that part. "Some maesters say it was some other Brandon, not the Builder, but it's still Brandon's Gift. Thousands of years later, Good Queen Alysanne visited the Wall on her dragon Silverwing, and she thought the Night's Watch was so brave that she had the Old King double the size of their lands, to fifty leagues. So that was the New Gift." He waved a hand. "Here. All this." No one had lived in the village for long years, Bran could see. All the houses were falling down. Even the inn. It had never been much of an inn, to look at it, but now all that remained was a stone chimney and two cracked walls, set amongst a dozen apple trees. One was growing up through the common room, where a layer of wet brown leaves and rotting apples carpeted the floor. The air was thick with the smell of them, a cloying cidery scent that was almost overwhelming. Meera stabbed a few apples with her frog spear, trying to find some still good enough to eat, but they were all too brown and wormy. It was a peaceful spot, still and tranquil and lovely to behold, but Bran thought there was something sad about an empty inn, and Hodor seemed to feel it too. "Hodor? " he said in a confused sort of way. "Hodor? Hodor? " "This is good land." Jojen picked up a handful of dirt, rubbing it between his fingers. "A village, an inn, a stout holdfast in the lake, all these apple trees ... but where are the people, Bran? Why would they leave such a place?" "They were afraid of the wildlings," said Bran. "Wildlings come over the Wall or through the mountains, to raid and steal and carry off women. If they catch you, they make your skull into a cup to drink blood, Old Nan used to say. The Night's Watch isn't so strong as it was in Brandon's day or Queen Alysanne's, so more get through. The places nearest the Wall got raided so much the smallfolk moved south, into the mountains or onto the Umber lands east of the kingsroad. The Greatjon's people get raided too, but not so much as the people who used to live in the Gift." Jojen Reed turned his head slowly, listening to music only he could hear. "We need to shelter here. There's a storm coming. A bad one." Bran looked up at the sky. It had been a beautiful crisp clear autumn day, sunny and almost warm, but there were dark clouds off to the west now, that was true, and the wind seemed to be picking up. "There's no roof on the inn and only the two walls," he pointed out. "We should go out to the holdfast." "Hodor," said Hodor. Maybe he agreed. "We have no boat, Bran." Meera poked through the leaves idly with her frog spear. "There's a causeway. A stone causeway, hidden under the water. We could walk out." They could, anyway; he would have to ride on Hodor's back, but at least he'd stay dry that way. The Reeds exchanged a look. "How do you know that?" asked Jojen. "Have you been here before, my prince?" "No. Old Nan told me. The holdfast has a golden crown, see?" He pointed across the lake. You could see patches of flaking gold paint up around the crenellations. "Queen Alysanne slept there, so they painted the merlons gold in her honor." "A causeway?" Joien studied the lake. "You are certain?" "Certain," said Bran. Meera found the foot of it easily enough, once she knew to look; a stone pathway three feet wide, leading right out into the lake. She took them out step by careful step, probing ahead with her frog spear. They could see where the path emerged again, climbing from the water onto the island and turning into a short flight of stone steps that led to the holdfast door. Path, steps, and door were in a straight line, which made you think the causeway ran straight, but that wasn't so. Under the lake it zigged and zagged, going a third of a way around the island before jagging back. The turns were treacherous, and the long path meant that anyone approaching would be exposed to arrow fire from the tower for a long time. The hidden stones were slimy and slippery too; twice Hodor almost lost his footing and shouted "HODOR!" in alarm before regaining his balance. The second time scared Bran badly. If Hodor fell into the lake with him in his basket, he could well drown, especially if the huge stableboy panicked and forgot that Bran was there, the way he did sometimes. Maybe we should have stayed at the inn, under the apple tree, he thought, but by then it was too late. Thankfully there was no third time, and the water never got up past Hodor's waist, though the Reeds were in it up to their chests. And before long they were on the island, climbing the steps to the holdfast. The door was still stout, though its heavy oak planks had warped over the years and it could no longer be closed completely. Meera shoved it open all the way, the rusted iron hinges screaming. The lintel was low. "Duck down, Hodor," Bran said, and he did, but not enough to keep Bran from hitting his head. "That hurt," he complained. "Hodor," said Hodor, straightening. They found themselves in a gloomy strongroom, barely large enough to hold the four of them. Steps built into the inner wall of the tower curved away upward to their left, downward to their right, behind iron grates. Bran looked up and saw another grate just above his head. A murder hole. He was glad there was no one up there now to pour boiling oil down on them. The grates were locked, but the iron bars were red with rust. Hodor grabbed hold of the lefthand door and gave it a pull, grunting with effort. Nothing happened. He tried pushing with no more success. He shook the bars, kicked, shoved against them and rattled them and punched the hinges with a huge hand until the air was filled with flakes of rust, but the iron door would not budge. The one down to the undervault was no more accommodating. "No way in," said Meera, shrugging. The murder hole was just above Bran's head, as he sat in his basket on Hodor's back. He reached up and grabbed the bars to give them a try. When he pulled down the grating came out of the ceiling in a cascade of rust and crumbling stone. "HODOR!" Hodor shouted. The heavy iron grate gave Bran another bang in the head, and crashed down near Jojen's feet when he shoved it off of him. Meera laughed. "Look at that, my prince," she said, "you're stronger than Hodor." Bran blushed. With the grate gone, Hodor was able to boost Meera and Jojen up through the gaping murder hole. The crannogmen took Bran by the arms and drew him up after them. Getting Hodor inside was the hard part. He was too heavy for the Reeds to lift the way they'd lifted Bran. Finally Bran told him to go look for some big rocks. The island had no lack of those, and Hodor was able to pile them high enough to grab the crumbling edges of the hole and climb through. "Hodor, " he panted happily, grinning at all of them. They found themselves in a maze of small cells, dark and empty, but Meera explored until she found the way back to the steps. The higher they climbed, the better the light; on the third story the thick outer wall was pierced by arrow slits, the fourth had actual windows, and the fifth and highest was one big round chamber with arched doors on three sides opening onto small stone balconies. On the fourth side was a privy chamber perched above a sewer chute that dropped straight down into the lake. By the time they reached the roof the sky was completely overcast, and the clouds to the west were black. The wind was blowing so strong it lifted up Bran's cloak and made it flap and snap. "Hodor," Hodor said at the noise. Meera spun in a circle. "I feel almost a giant, standing high above the world." "There are trees in the Neck that stand twice as tall as this," her brother reminded her. "Aye, but they have other trees around them just as high," said Meera. "The world presses close in the Neck, and the sky is so much smaller. Here ... feel that wind, Brother? And look how large the world has grown." It was true, you could see a long ways from up here. To the south the foothills rose, with the mountains grey and green beyond them. The rolling plains of the New Gift stretched away to all the other directions, as far as the eye could see. "I was hoping we could see the Wall from here," said Bran, disappointed. "That was stupid, we must still be fifty leagues away." just speaking of it made him feel tired, and cold as well. "Jojen, what will we do when we reach the Wall? My uncle always said how big it was. Seven hundred feet high, and so thick at the base that the gates are more like tunnels through the ice. How are we going to get past to find the three-eyed crow?" "There are abandoned castles along the Wall, I've heard," Jojen answered. "Fortresses built by the Night's Watch but now left empty. One of them may give us our way through." The ghost castles, Old Nan had called them. Maester Luwin had once made Bran learn the names of every one of the forts along the Wall. That had been hard; there were nineteen of them all told, though no more than seventeen had ever been manned at any one time. At the feast in honor of King Robert's visit to Winterfell, Bran had recited the names for his uncle Benjen, east to west and then west to east. Benjen Stark had laughed and said, "You know them better than I do, Bran. Perhaps you should be First Ranger. I'll stay here in your place." That was before Bran fell, though. Before he was broken. By the time he'd woken crippled from his sleep, his uncle had gone back to Castle Black. "My uncle said the gates were sealed with ice and stone whenever a castle had to be abandoned," said Bran. "Then we'll have to open them again," said Meera. That made him uneasy. "We shouldn't do that. Bad things might come through from the other side. We should just go to Castle Black and tell the Lord Commander to let us pass." "Your Grace," said Jojen, "we must avoid Castle Black, just as we avoided the kingsroad. There are hundreds of men there." "Men of the Night's Watch," said Bran. "They say vows, to take no part in wars and stuff." "Aye," said Jojen, "but one man willing to forswear himself would be enough to sell your secret to the ironmen or the Bastard of Bolton. And we cannot be certain that the Watch would agree to let us pass. They might decide to hold us or send us back." "But my father was a friend of the Night's Watch, and my uncle is First Ranger. He might know where the three-eyed crow lives. And Jon's at Castle Black too." Bran had been hoping to see Jon again, and their uncle too. The last black brothers to visit Winterfell said that Benjen Stark had vanished on a ranging, but surely he would have made his way back by now. "I bet the Watch would even give us horses," he went on. "Quiet." Jojen shaded his eyes with a hand and gazed off toward the setting sun. "Look. There's something ... a rider, I think. Do you see him?" Bran shaded his eyes as well, and even so he had to squint. He saw nothing at first, till some movement made him turn. At first he thought it might be Summer, but no. A man on a horse. He was too far away to see much else. "Hodor?" Hodor had put a hand over his eyes as well, only he was looking the wrong way. "Hodor?" "He is in no haste," said Meera, "but he's making for this village, it seems to me." "We had best go inside, before we're seen," said Jojen. "Summer's near the village," Bran objected. "Summer will be fine," Meera promised. "It's only one man on a tired horse." A few fat wet drops began to patter against the stone as they retreated to the floor below. That was well timed; the rain began to fall in earnest a short time later. Even through the thick walls they could hear it lashing against the surface of the lake. They sat on the floor in the round empty room, amidst gathering gloom. The north-facing balcony looked out toward the abandoned village. Meera crept out on her belly to peer across the lake and see what had become of the horseman. "He's taken shelter in the ruins of the inn," she told them when she came back. "it looks as though he's making a fire in the hearth." "I wish we could have a fire," Bran said. "I'm cold. There's broken furniture down the stairs, I saw it. We could have Hodor chop it up and get warm." Hodor liked that idea. "Hodor," he said hopefully. Jojen shook his head. "Fire means smoke. Smoke from this tower could be seen a long way off." "If there were anyone to see," his sister argued. "There's a man in the village." "One man." "One man would be enough to betray Bran to his enemies, if he's the wrong man. We still have half a duck from yesterday. We should eat and rest. Come morning the man will go on his way, and we will do the same." Jojen had his way; he always did. Meera divided the duck between the four of them. She'd caught it in her net the day before, as it tried to rise from the marsh where she'd surprised it. It wasn't as tasty cold as it had been hot and crisp from the spit, but at least they did not go hungry. Bran and Meera shared the breast while Jojen ate the thigh. Hodor devoured the wing and leg, muttering "Hodor" and licking the grease off his fingers after every bite. It was Bran's turn to tell a story, so he told them about another Brandon Stark, the one called Brandon the Shipwright, who had sailed off beyond the Sunset Sea. Dusk was settling by the time duck and tale were done, and the rain still fell. Bran wondered how far Summer had roamed and whether he had caught one of the deer. Grey gloom filled the tower, and slowly changed to darkness. Hodor grew restless and walked awhile, striding round and round the walls and stopping to peer into the privy on every circuit, as if he had forgotten what was in there. Jojen stood by the north balcony, hidden by the shadows, looking out at the night and the rain. Somewhere to the north a lightning bolt crackled across the sky, brightening the inside of the tower for an instant. Hodor jumped and made a frightened noise. Bran counted to eight, waiting for the thunder. When it came, Hodor shouted, "Hodor!" I hope Summer isn't scared too, Bran thought. The dogs in Winterfell's kennels had always been spooked by thunderstorms, just like Hodor. I should go see, to calm him ... The lightning flashed again, and this time the thunder came at six. "Hodor!" Hodor yelled again. "HODOR! HODOR!" He snatched up his sword, as if to fight the storm. Jojen said, "Be quiet, Hodor. Bran, tell him not to shout. Can you get the sword away from him, Meera?" "I can try." "Hodor, hush," said Bran. "Be quiet now. No more stupid hodoring. Sit down." "Hodor?" He gave the longsword to Meera meekly enough, but his face was a mask of confusion. Jojen turned back to the darkness, and they all heard him suck in his breath. "What is it?" Meera asked. "Men in the village." "The man we saw before?" "Other men. Armed. I saw an axe, and spears as well." Joien had never sounded so much like the boy he was. "I saw them when the lightning flashed, moving under the trees." "How many?" "Many and more. Too many to count." "Mounted? "No." "Hodor." Hodor sounded frightened. "Hodor. Hodor." Bran felt a little scared himself, though he didn't want to say so in front of Meera. "What if they come out here?" "They won't." She sat down beside him. "Why should they?" "For shelter." Jojen's voice was grim. "Unless the storm lets up. Meera, could you go down and bar the door?" "I couldn't even close it. The wood's too warped. They won't get past those iron gates, though." "They might. They could break the lock, or the hinges. Or climb up through the murder hole as we did." Lightning slashed the sky, and Hodor whimpered. Then a clap of thunder rolled across the lake. "HODOR!" he roared, clapping his hands over his ears and stumbling in a circle through the darkness. "HODOR! HODOR! HODOR!" "NO!" Bran shouted back. "NO HODORING!" It did no good. "HOOOODOR!" moaned Hodor. Meera tried to catch him and calm him, but he was too strong. He flung her aside with no more than a shrug. "HOOOOOODOOOOOOOR!" the stableboy screamed as lightning filled the sky again, and even Jojen was shouting now, shouting at Bran and Meera to shut him up. "Be quiet!" Bran said in a shrill scared voice, reaching up uselessly for Hodor's leg as he crashed past, reaching, reaching. Hodor staggered, and closed his mouth. He shook his head slowly from side to side, sank back to the floor, and sat crosslegged. When the thunder boomed, he scarcely seemed to hear it. The four of them sat in the dark tower, scarce daring to breathe. "Bran, what did you do?" Meera whispered. "Nothing." Bran shook his head. "I don't know." But he did. I reached for him, the way I reach for Summer. He had been Hodor for half a heartbeat. It scared him. "Something is happening across the lake," said Jojen. "I thought I saw a man pointing at the tower." I won't be afraid. He was the Prince of Winterfell, Eddard Stark's son, almost a man grown and a warg too, not some little baby boy like Rickon. Summer would not be afraid. "Most like they're just some Umbers," he said. "Or they could be Knotts or Norreys or Flints come down from the mountains, or even brothers from the Night's Watch. Were they wearing black cloaks, Jojen?" "By night all cloaks are black, Your Grace. And the flash came and went too fast for me to tell what they were wearing." Meera was wary. "If they were black brothers, they'd be mounted, wouldn't they?" Bran had thought of something else. "It doesn't matter," he said confidently. "They couldn't get out to us even if they wanted. Not unless they had a boat, or knew about the causeway." "The causeway!" Meera mussed Bran's hair and kissed him on the forehead. "Our sweet prince! He's right, Jojen, they won't know about the causeway. Even if they did they could never find the way across at night in the rain." "The night will end, though. If they stay till morning..." Jojen left the rest unsaid. After a few moments he said, "They are feeding the fire the first man started." Lightning crashed through the sky, and light filled the tower and etched them all in shadow. Hodor rocked back and forth, humming. Bran could feel Summer's fear in that bright instant. He closed two eyes and opened a third, and his boy's skin slipped off him like a cloak as he left the tower behind ... ... and found himself out in the rain, his belly full of deer, cringing in the brush as the sky broke and boomed above him. The smell of rotten apples and wet leaves almost drowned the scent of man, but it was there. He heard the clink and slither of hardskin, saw men moving under the trees. A man with a stick blundered by, a skin pulled up over his head to make him blind and deaf. The wolf went wide around him, behind a dripping thornbush and beneath the bare branches of an apple tree. He could hear them talking, and there beneath the scents of rain and leaves and horse came the sharp red stench of fear ...

§ § §

DAVOS

Lord Alester looked up sharply. "Voices," he said. "Do you hear, Davos? Someone is coming for us." "Lamprey," said Davos. "It's time for our supper, or near enough." Last night Lamprey had brought them half a beef-and-bacon pie, and a flagon of mead as well. Just the thought of it made his belly start to rumble. "No, there's more than one." He's right. Davos heard two voices at least, and footsteps, growing louder. He got to his feet and moved to the bars. Lord Alester brushed the straw from his clothes. "The king has sent for me. Or the queen, yes, Selyse would never let me rot here, her own blood." Outside the cell, Lamprey appeared with a ring of keys in hand. Ser Axell Florent and four guardsmen followed close behind him. They waited beneath the torch while Lamprey searched for the correct key. "Axell," Lord Alester said. "Gods be good. Is it the king who sends for me, or the queen?" "No one has sent for you, traitor," Ser Axell said. Lord Alester recoiled as if he'd been slapped. "No, I swear to you, I committed no treason. Why won't you listen? If His Grace would only let me explain-" Lamprey thrust a great iron key into the lock, turned it, and pulled open the cell. The rusted hinges screamed in protest. "You," he said to Davos. "Come." "Where?" Davos looked to Ser Axell. "Tell me true, ser, do you mean to burn me?" "You are sent for. Can you walk?" "I can walk." Davos stepped from the cell. Lord Alester gave a cry of dismay as Lamprey slammed the door shut once more. "Take the torch," Ser Axell commanded the gaoler. "Leave the traitor to the darkness." "No," his brother said. "Axell, please, don't take the light . . . gods have mercy . . . " "Gods? There is only R'hllor, and the Other." Ser Axell gestured sharply, and one of his guardsmen pulled the torch from its sconce and led the way to the stair. "Are you taking me to Melisandre?" Davos asked. "She will be there," Ser Axell said. "She is never far from the king. But it is His Grace himself who asked for you." Davos lifted his hand to his chest, where once his luck had hung in a leather bag on a thong. Gone now, he remembered, and the ends of four fingers as well. But his hands were still long enough to wrap about a woman's throat, he thought, especially a slender throat like hers. Up they went, climbing the turnpike stair in single file. The walls were rough dark stone, cool to the touch. The light of the torches went before them, and their shadows marched beside them on the walls. At the third turn they passed an iron gate that opened on blackness, and another at the fifth turn. Davos guessed that they were near the surface by then, perhaps even above it. The next door they came to was made of wood, but still they climbed. Now the walls were broken by arrow slits, but no shafts of sunlight pried their way through the thickness of the stone. It was night outside. His legs were aching by the time Ser Axell thrust open a heavy door and gestured him through. Beyond, a high stone bridge arched over emptiness to the massive central tower called the Stone Drum. A sea wind blew restlessly through the arches that supported the roof, and Davos could smell the salt water as they crossed. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the clean cold air. Wind and water, give me strength, he prayed. A huge nightfire burned in the yard below, to keep the terrors of the dark at bay, and the queen's men were gathered around it, singing praises to their new red god. They were in the center of the bridge when Ser Axell stopped suddenly. He made a brusque gesture with his hand, and his men moved out of earshot. "Were it my choice, I would burn you with my brother Alester," he told Davos. "You are both traitors." "Say what you will. I would never betray King Stannis." "You would. You will. I see it in your face. And I have seen it in the flames as well. R'hllor has blessed me with that gift. Like Lady Melisandre, he shows me the future in the fire. Stannis Baratheon will sit the Iron Throne. I have seen it. And I know what must be done. His Grace must make me his Hand, in place of my traitor brother. And you will tell him so." Will I? Davos said nothing. "The queen has urged my appointment," Ser Axell went on. "Even your old friend from Lys, the pirate Saan, he says the same. We have made a plan together, him and me. Yet His Grace does not act. The defeat gnaws inside him, a black worm in his soul. It is up to us who love him to show him what to do. If you are as devoted to his cause as you claim, smuggler, you will join your voice to ours. Tell him that I am the only Hand he needs. Tell him, and when we sail I shall see that you have a new ship." A ship. Davos studied the other man's face. Ser Axell had big Florent ears, much like the queen's. Coarse hair grew from them, as from his nostrils; more sprouted in tufts and patches beneath his double chin. His nose was broad, his brow beetled, his eyes close-set and hostile. He would sooner give me a pyre than a ship, he said as much, but if I do him this favor . . . "if you think to betray me," Ser Axell said, "pray remember that I have been castellan of Dragonstone a good long time. The garrison is mine. Perhaps I cannot burn you without the king's consent, but who is to say you might not suffer a fall." He laid a meaty hand on the back of Davos's neck and shoved him bodily against the waist-high side of the bridge, then shoved a little harder to force his face out over the yard. "Do you hear me?" "I hear," said Davos. And you dare name me traitor? Ser Axell released him. "Good." He smiled. "His Grace awaits. Best we do not keep him." At the very top of Stone Drum, within the great round room called the Chamber of the Painted Table, they found Stannis Baratheon standing behind the artifact that gave the hall its name, a massive slab of wood carved and painted in the shape of Westeros as it had been in the time of Aegon the Conqueror. An iron brazier stood beside the king, its coals glowing a ruddy orange. Four tall pointed windows looked out to north, south, east, and west. Beyond was the night and the starry sky. Davos could hear the wind moving, and fainter, the sounds of the sea. "Your Grace," Ser Axell said, "as it please you, I have brought the onion knight." "So I see." Stannis wore a grey wool tunic, a dark red mantle, and a plain black leather belt from which his sword and dagger hung. A red-gold crown with flame-shaped points encircled his brows. The look of him was a shock. He seemed ten years older than the man that Davos had left at Storm's End when he set sail for the Blackwater and the battle that would be their undoing. The king's close-cropped beard was spiderwebbed with grey hairs, and he had dropped two stone or more of weight. He had never been a fleshy man, but now the bones moved beneath his skin like spears, fighting to cut free. Even his crown seemed too large for his head. His eyes were blue pits lost in deep hollows, and the shape of a skull could be seen beneath his face. Yet when he saw Davos, a faint smile brushed his lips. "So the sea has returned me my knight of the fish and onions." "It did, Your Grace." Does he know that he had me in his dungeon? Davos went to one knee. "Rise, Ser Davos," Stannis commanded. "I have missed you, ser. I have need of good counsel, and you never gave me less. So tell me true-what is the penalty for treason?" The word hung in the air. A frightful word, thought Davos. Was he being asked to condemn his cellmate? Or himself, perchance? Kings know the penalty for treason better than any man. "Treason?" he finally managed, weakly. "What else would you call it, to deny your king and seek to steal his rightful throne. I ask you again-what is the penalty for treason under the law?" Davos had no choice but to answer. "Death," he said. "The penalty is death, Your Grace." "It has always been so. I am not . . . I am not a cruel man, Ser Davos. You know me. Have known me long. This is not my decree. It has always been so, since Aegon's day and before. Daemon Blackfyre, the brothers Toyne, the Vulture King, Grand Maester Hareth . . . traitors have always paid with their lives . . . even Rhaenyra Targaryen. She was daughter to one king and mother to two more, yet she died a traitor's death for trying to usurp her brother's crown. It is law. Law, Davos. Not cruelty." "Yes, Your Grace." He does not speak of me. Davos felt a moment's pity for his cellmate down in the dark. He knew he should keep silent, but he was tired and sick of heart, and he heard himself say, "Sire, Lord Florent meant no treason." "Do smugglers have another name for it? I made him Hand, and he would have sold my rights for a bowl of pease porridge. He would even have given them Shireen. Mine only child, he would have wed to a bastard born of incest." The king's voice was thick with anger. "My brother had a gift for inspiring loyalty. Even in his foes. At Summerhall he won three battles in a single day, and brought Lords Grandison and Cafferen back to Storm's End as prisoners. He hung their banners in the hall as trophies. Cafferen's white fawns were spotted with blood and Grandison's sleeping lion was torn near in two. Yet they would sit beneath those banners of a night, drinking and feasting with Robert. He even took them hunting. 'These men meant to deliver you to Aerys to be burned' I told him after I saw them throwing axes in the yard. 'You should not be putting axes in their hands.' Robert only laughed. I would have thrown Grandison and Cafferen into a dungeon, but he turned them into friends. Lord Cafferen died at Ashford Castle, cut down by Randyll Tarly whilst fighting for Robert. Lord Grandison was wounded on the Trident and died of it a year after. My brother made them love him, but it would seem that I inspire only betrayal. Even in mine own blood and kin. Brother, grandfather, cousins, good uncle . . . " "Your Grace," said Ser Axell, "I beg you, give me the chance to prove to you that not all Florents are so feeble." "Ser Axell would have me resume the war," King Stannis told Davos. "The Lannisters think I am done and beaten, and my sworn lords have forsaken me, near every one. Even Lord Estermont, my own mother's father, has bent his knee to Joffrey. The few loyal men who remain to me are losing heart. They waste their days drinking and gambling, and lick their wounds like beaten curs." "Battle will set their hearts ablaze once more, Your Grace," Ser Axell said. "Defeat is a disease, and victory is the cure." "Victory." The king's mouth twisted. "There are victories and victories, ser. But tell your plan to Ser Davos. I would hear his views on what you propose." Ser Axell turned to Davos, with a look on his face much like the look that proud Lord Belgrave must have worn, the day King Baelor the Blessed had commanded him to wash the beggar's ulcerous feet. Nonetheless, he obeyed. The plan Ser Axell had devised with Salladhor Saan was simple. A few hours' sail from Dragonstone lay Claw Isle, ancient sea-girt seat of House Celtigar. Lord Ardrian Celtigar had fought beneath the flery heart on the Blackwater, but once taken, he had wasted no time in going over to Joffrey. He remained in King's Landing even now. "Too frightened of His Grace's wrath to come near Dragonstone, no doubt," Ser Axell declared. "And wisely so. The man has betrayed his rightful king." Ser Axell proposed to use Salladhor Saan's fleet and the men who had escaped the Blackwater-Stannis still had some fifteen hundred on Dragonstone, more than half of them Florents-to exact retribution for Lord Celtigar's defection. Claw Isle was but lightly garrisoned, its castle reputedly stuffed with Myrish carpets, Volantene glass, gold and silver plate, jeweled cups, magnificent hawks, an axe of Valyrian steel, a horn that could summon monsters from the deep, chests of rubies, and more wines than a man could drink in a hundred years. Though Celtigar had shown the world a niggardly face, he had never stinted on his own comforts. "Put his castle to the torch and his people to the sword, I say," Ser Axell concluded. "Leave Claw Isle a desolation of ash and bone, fit only for carrion crows, so the realm might see the fate of those who bed with Lannisters." Stannis listened to Ser Axell's recitation in silence, grinding his jaw slowly from side to side. When it was done, he said, "It could be done, I believe. The risk is small. Joffrey has no strength at sea until Lord Redwyne sets sail from the Arbor. The plunder might serve to keep that Lysene pirate Salladhor Saan loyal for a time. By itself Claw Isle is worthless, but its fall would serve notice to Lord Tywin that my cause is not yet done." The king turned back to Davos. "Speak truly, ser. What do you make of Ser Axell's proposal?" Speak truly, ser. Davos remembered the dark cell he had shared with Lord Alester, remembered Lamprey and Porridge. He thought of the promises that Ser Axell had made on the bridge above the yard. A ship or a shove, what shall it be? But this was Stannis asking. "Your Grace," he said slowly, "I make it folly . . . aye, and cowardice." "Cowardice?" Ser Axell all but shouted. "No man calls me craven before my king!" "Silence," Stannis commanded. "Ser Davos, speak on, I would hear your reasons." Davos turned to face Ser Axell. "You say we ought show the realm we are not done. Strike a blow. Make war, aye . . . but on what enemy? You will find no Lannisters on Claw Isle." "We will find traitors," said Ser Axell, "though it may be I could find some closer to home. Even in this very room." Davos ignored the jibe. "I don't doubt Lord Celtigar bent the knee to the boy Joffrey. He is an old done man, who wants no more than to end his days in his castle, drinking his fine wine out of his jeweled cups." He turned back to Stannis. "Yet he came when you called, sire. Came, with his ships and swords. He stood by you at Storm's End when Lord Renly came down on us, and his ships sailed up the Blackwater. His men fought for you, killed for you, burned for you. Claw Isle is weakly held, yes. Held by women and children and old men. And why is that? Because their husbands and sons and fathers died on the Blackwater, that's why. Died at their oars, or with swords in their hands, fighting beneath our banners. Yet Ser Axell proposes we swoop down on the homes they left behind, to rape their widows and put their children to the sword. These smallfolk are no traitors . . . " "They are," insisted Ser Axell. "Not all of Celtigar's men were slain on the Blackwater. Hundreds were taken with their lord, and bent the knee when he did." "When he did," Davos repeated. "They were his men. His sworn men. What choice were they given?" "Every man has choices. They might have refused to kneel. Some did, and died for it. Yet they died true men, and loyal." "Some men are stronger than others." It was a feeble answer, and Davos knew it. Stannis Baratheon was a man of iron will who neither understood nor forgave weakness in others . I am losing, he thought, despairing. "It is every man's duty to remain loyal to his rightful king, even if the lord he serves proves false," Stannis declared in a tone that brooked no argument. A desperate folly took hold of Davos, a recklessness akin to madness. "As you remained loyal to King Aerys when your brother raised his banners?" he blurted. Shocked silence followed, until Ser Axell cried, "Treason!" and snatched his dagger from its sheath. "Your Grace, he speaks his infamy to your face!" Davos could hear Stannis grinding his teeth. A vein bulged, blue and swollen, in the king's brow. Their eyes met. "Put up your knife, Ser Axell. And leave us." "As it please Your Grace-" "It would please me for you to leave," said Stannis. "Take yourself from my presence, and send me Melisandre." "As you command." Ser Axell slid the knife away, bowed, and hurried toward the door. His boots rang against the floor, angry. "You have always presumed on my forbearance," Stannis warned Davos when they were alone. "I can shorten your tongue as easy as I did your fingers, smuggler." "I am your man, Your Grace. So it is your tongue, to do with as you please." "It is," he said, calmer. "And I would have it speak the truth. Though the truth is a bitter draught at times. Aerys? If you only knew . . . that was a hard choosing. My blood or my liege. My brother or my king." He grimaced. "Have you ever seen the Iron Throne? The barbs along the back, the ribbons of twisted steel, the jagged ends of swords and knives all tangled up and melted? It is not a comfortable seat, ser. Aerys cut himself so often men took to calling him King Scab, and Maegor the Cruel was murdered in that chair. By that chair, to hear some tell it. It is not a seat where a man can rest at ease. Ofttimes I wonder why my brothers wanted it so desperately." "Why would you want it, then?" Davos asked him. "It is not a question of wanting. The throne is mine, as Robert's heir. That is law. After me, it must pass to my daughter, unless Selyse should finally give me a son." He ran three fingers lightly down the table, over the layers of smooth hard varnish, dark with age. "I am king. Wants do not enter into it. I have a duty to my daughter. To the realm. Even to Robert. He loved me but little, I know, yet he was my brother. The Lannister woman gave him horns and made a motley fool of him. She may have murdered him as well, as she murdered Jon Arryn and Ned Stark. For such crimes there must be justice. Starting with Cersei and her abominations. But only starting. I mean to scour that court clean. As Robert should have done, after the Trident. Ser Barristan once told me that the rot in King Aerys's reign began with Varys. The eunuch should never have been pardoned. No more than the Kingslayer. At the least, Robert should have stripped the white cloak from Jaime and sent him to the Wall, as Lord Stark urged. He listened to Jon Arryn instead. I was still at Storm's End, under siege and unconsulted." He turned abruptly, to give Davos a hard shrewd look. "The truth, now. Why did you wish to murder Lady Melisandre?" So he does know. Davos could not lie to him. "Four of my sons burned on the Blackwater. She gave them to the flames." "You wrong her. Those fires were no work of hers. Curse the Imp, curse the pyromancers, curse that fool of Florent who sailed my fleet into the jaws of a trap. Or curse me for my stubborn pride, for sending her away when I needed her most. But not Melisandre. She remains my faithful servant." "Maester Cressen was your faithful servant. She slew him, as she killed Ser Cortnay Penrose and your brother Renly." "Now you sound a fool," the king complained. "She saw Renly's end in the flames, yes, but she had no more part in it than I did. The priestess was with me. Your Devan would tell you so. Ask him, if you doubt me. She would have spared Renly if she could. It was Melisandre who urged me to meet with him, and give him one last chance to amend his treason. And it was Melisandre who told me to send for you when Ser Axell wished to give you to R'hllor." He smiled thinly. "Does that surprise you?" "Yes. She knows I am no friend to her or her red god." "But you are a friend to me. She knows that as well." He beckoned Davos closer. "The boy is sick. Maester Pylos has been leeching him." "The boy?" His thoughts went to his Devan, the king's squire. "My son, sire?" "Devan? A good boy. He has much of you in him. It is Robert's bastard who is sick, the boy we took at Storm's End." Edric Storm. "I spoke with him in Aegon's Garden." "As she wished. As she saw." Stannis sighed. "Did the boy charm you? He has that gift. He got it from his father, with the blood. He knows he is a king's son, but chooses to forget that he is bastard-born. And he worships Robert, as Renly did when he was young. My royal brother played the fond father on his visits to Storm's End, and there were gifts . . . swords and ponies and fur-trimmed cloaks. The eunuch's work, every one. The boy would write the Red Keep full of thanks, and Robert would laugh and ask Varys what he'd sent this year. Renly was no better. He left the boy's upbringing to castellans and maesters, and every one fell victim to his charm. Penrose chose to die rather than give him up." The king ground his teeth together. "It still angers me. How could he think I would hurt the boy? I chose Robert, did I not? When that hard day came. I chose blood over honor." He does not use the boy's name. That made Davos very uneasy. "I hope young Edric will recover soon." Stannis waved a hand, dismissing his concern. "It is a chill, no more. He coughs, he shivers, he has a fever. Maester Pylos will soon set him right. By himself the boy is nought, you understand, but in his veins flows my brother's blood. There is power in a king's blood, she says." Davos did not have to ask who she was. Stannis touched the Painted Table. "Look at it, onion knight. My realm, by rights. My Westeros." He swept a hand across it. "This talk of Seven Kingdoms is a folly. Aegon saw that three hundred years ago when he stood where we are standing. They painted this table at his command. Rivers and bays they painted, hills and mountains, castles and cities and market towns, lakes and swamps and forests . . . but no borders. It is all one. One realm, for one king to rule alone." "One king," agreed Davos. "One king means peace." "I shall bring justice to Westeros. A thing Ser Axell understands as little as he does war. Claw Isle would gain me naught . . . and it was evil, just as you said. Celtigar must pay the traitor's price himself, in his own person. And when I come into my kingdom, he shall. Every man shall reap what he has sown, from the highest lord to the lowest gutter rat. And some will lose more than the tips off their fingers, I promise you. They have made my kingdom bleed, and I do not forget that." King Stannis turned from the table. "On your knees, Onion Knight." "Your Grace?" "For your onions and fish, I made you a knight once. For this, I am of a mind to raise you to lord." This? Davos was lost. "I am content to be your knight, Your Grace. I would not know how to begin being lordly." "Good. To be lordly is to be false. I have learned that lesson hard. Now, kneel. Your king commands." Davos knelt, and Stannis drew his longsword. Lightbringer, Melisandre had named it; the red sword of heroes, drawn from the fires where the seven gods were consumed. The room seemed to grow brighter as the blade slid from its scabbard. The steel had a glow to it; now orange, now yellow, now red. The air shimmered around it, and no jewel had ever sparkled so brilliantly. But when Stannis touched it to Davos's shoulder, it felt no different than any other longsword. "Ser Davos of House Seaworth," the king said, "are you my true and honest liege man, now and forever?" "I am, Your Grace." "And do you swear to serve me loyally all your days, to give me honest counsel and swift obedience, to defend my rights and my realm against all foes in battles great and small, to protect my people and punish my enemies?" "I do, Your Grace." "Then rise again, Davos Seaworth, and rise as Lord of the Rainwood, Admiral of the Narrow Sea, and Hand of the King." For a moment Davos was too stunned to move. I woke this morning in his dungeon. "Your Grace, you cannot . . . I am no fit man to be a King's Hand." "There is no man fitter." Stannis sheathed Lightbringer, gave Davos his hand, and pulled him to his feet. "I am lowborn," Davos reminded him. "An upjumped smuggler. Your lords will never obey me." "Then we will make new lords." "But . . . I cannot read . . . nor write . . . " "Maester Pylos can read for you. As to writing, my last Hand wrote the head off his shoulders. All I ask of you are the things you've always given me. Honesty. Loyalty. Service." "Surely there is someone better . . . some great lord . . . " Stannis snorted. "Bar Emmon, that boy? My faithless grandfather? Celtigar has abandoned me, the new Velaryon is six years old, and the new Sunglass sailed for Volantis after I burned his brother." He made an angry gesture. "A few good men remain, it's true. Ser Gilbert Farring holds Storm's End for me still, with two hundred loyal men. Lord Morrigen, the Bastard of Nightsong, young Chyttering, my cousin Andrew . . . but I trust none of them as I trust you, my lord of Rainwood. You will be my Hand. It is you I want beside me for the battle." Another battle will be the end of all of us, thought Davos. Lord Alester saw that much true enough. "Your Grace asked for honest counsel. In honesty then . . . we lack the strength for another battle against the Lannisters." "It is the great battle His Grace is speaking of," said a woman's voice, rich with the accents of the east. Melisandre stood at the door in her red silks and shimmering satins, holding a covered silver dish in her hands. "These little wars are no more than a scuffle of children before what is to come. The one whose name may not be spoken is marshaling his power, Davos Seaworth, a power fell and evil and strong beyond measure. Soon comes the cold, and the night that never ends." She placed the silver dish on the Painted Table. "Unless true men find the courage to fight it. Men whose hearts are fire." Stannis stared at the silver dish. "She has shown it to me, Lord Davos. In the flames." "You saw it, sire?" It was not like Stannis Baratheon to lie about such a thing. "With mine own eyes. After the battle, when I was lost to despair, the Lady Melisandre bid me gaze into the hearthfire. The chimney was drawing strongly, and bits of ash were rising from the fire. I stared at them, feeling half a fool, but she bid me look deeper, and . . . the ashes were white, rising in the updraft, yet all at once it seemed as if they were falling. Snow, I thought. Then the sparks in the air seemed to circle, to become a ring of torches, and I was looking through the fire down on some high hill in a forest. The cinders had become men in black behind the torches, and there were shapes moving through the snow. For all the heat of the fire, I felt a cold so terrible I shivered, and when I did the sight was gone, the fire but a fire once again. But what I saw was real, I'd stake my kingdom on it." "And have," said Melisandre. The conviction in the king's voice frightened Davos to the core. "A hill in a forest . . . shapes in the snow . . . I don't . . . " "It means that the battle is begun," said Melisandre. "The sand is running through the glass more quickly now, and man's hour on earth is almost done. We must act boldly, or all hope is lost. Westeros must unite beneath her one true king, the prince that was promised, Lord of Dragonstone and chosen of R'hllor." "R'hllor chooses queerly, then." The king grimaced, as if he'd tasted something foul. "Why me, and not my brothers? Renly and his peach. In my dreams I see the juice running from his mouth, the blood from his throat. If he had done his duty by his brother, we would have smashed Lord Tywin. A victory even Robert could be proud of. Robert . . . " His teeth ground side to side. "He is in my dreams as well. Laughing. Drinking. Boasting. Those were the things he was best at. Those, and fighting. I never bested him at anything. The Lord of Light should have made Robert his champion. Why me?" "Because you are a righteous man," said Melisandre. "A righteous man." Stannis touched the covered silver platter with a finger. "With leeches." "Yes," said Melisandre, "but I must tell you once more, this is not the way." "You swore it would work." The king looked angry. "It will . . . and it will not." "Which?" "Both." "Speak sense to me, woman." "When the fires speak more plainly, so shall I. There is truth in the flames, but it is not always easy to see." The great ruby at her throat drank fire from the glow of the brazier. "Give me the boy, Your Grace. It is the surer way. The better way. Give me the boy and I shall wake the stone dragon." "I have told you, no." "He is only one baseborn boy, against all the boys of Westeros, and all the girls as well. Against all the children that might ever be born, in all the kingdoms of the world." "The boy is innocent." "The boy defiled your marriage bed, else you would surely have sons of your own. He shamed you." "Robert did that. Not the boy. My daughter has grown fond of him. And he is mine own blood." "Your brother's blood," Melisandre said. "A king's blood. Only a king's blood can wake the stone dragon." Stannis ground his teeth. "I'll hear no more of this. The dragons are done. The Targaryens tried to bring them back half a dozen times. And made fools of themselves, or corpses. Patchface is the only fool we need on this godsforsaken rock. You have the leeches. Do your work." Melisandre bowed her head stiffly, and said, "As my king commands." Reaching up her left sleeve with her right hand, she flung a handful of powder into the brazier. The coals roared. As pale flames writhed atop them, the red woman retrieved the silver dish and brought it to the king. Davos watched her lift the lid. Beneath were three large black leeches, fat with blood. The boy's blood, Davos knew. A king's blood. Stannis stretched forth a hand, and his fingers closed around one of the leeches. "Say the name," Melisandre commanded. The leech was twisting in the king's grip, trying to attach itself to one of his fingers. "The usurper," he said. "Joffrey Baratheon." When he tossed the leech into the fire, it curled up like an autumn leaf amidst the coals, and burned. Stannis grasped the second. "The usurper," he declared, louder this time. "Balon Greyjoy." He flipped it lightly onto the brazier, and its flesh split and cracked. The blood burst from it, hissing and smoking. The last was in the king's hand. This one he studied a moment as it writhed between his fingers. "The usurper," he said at last. "Robb Stark." And he threw it on the flames.

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