#the great fanfic

[likesomekindofcheese]

Promised- Finale (Grigor Dymov x fem! Reader, Arranged Marriage AU series)

Series Summary: When Emperor Peter's behavior towards your family threatens the alliance between them and Russia, the only way to solve it from breaking is through an arranged marriage with his friend, the handsome but heartbroken Count Grigor Dymov. A man you barely know.

Previous Chapters: One//Two//Three//Four//Five//Six//Seven//Eight//Nine//Ten//Eleven

Chapter Summary: You and Grigor enjoy a long-denied honeymoon

Content Warnings: Some discussions of sex and cursing and mentions of pregnancy and babies- don't worry, Y/N isn't pregnant. But VERY fluffy!

Word Count: 1584

A/N: Thank you guys so much for supporting this series throughout! Now I thought was the best time to conclude it! When season 3 of The Great comes out and should I get inspired, there might be a season 2 of this fic like what @ladystrallan did with I Really Wish I Hated You (which, btw, highly recommend if you love The Great Fanfics). Who knows?! But I hope all of you loved reading it as much as I loved writing this series!

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Taglist:

General Taglist: @stardust-killer-queen​ @queenlover05​ @seraphicmercury

Promised Taglist: Taglist: @itsametaphorgwil​ @bluesfortheredj​ @grigorlee​ @retropetalss @queenlover05 @joeslee   @grigorlee @itsametaphorgwil @always-a-fairycat @foxinaforestofstars @simonedk @i-wished-upon-a-star-one-night @queenlover05 @xviiarez @kiainspace @gwilymleeisbae @writeroutoftime @staradorned @iwritefanficnotprophecies @panagiasikelia @marshmxllowfluf @jamesbuckybarns​ @yourlocalmusicalprostitute​ @rhapsodyrecs​ @ladystrallan​​ ​

You and Grigor were planning on returning to court. You both just wanted something denied to you when you were rushed to be married and when there was a coup- a honeymoon. Three whole months of a honeymoon.

The days were never more lovely- lovemaking at night, awakening when one felt like it, the most sumptuous meals, playing cards by the fireside, reading to each other, and you showing off the various songs you knew how to play. You were starting to teach Grigor chords and his clumsy practicing of scales with mutters of “fuck!” at a mistake could be heard. You still kept shooting practice, but you were relaxed, not caring if you missed the odd target.

It was quite warm for Russia the past two weeks. Flowers were deep in their bloom in the gardens, and it was green everywhere. The vineyards seemed to be a far brighter green than you expected. Perhaps springtime was arriving sooner than you expected or maybe it was a warm spot for a few days. You had to wear your lighter silks as opposed to the warm furs to keep one safe from your new home country’s notorious chill.

As you and your husband toured the grounds together that afternoon, there were fruits of light green and dark purple. You would both look at each other, pluck the small fruits, and try bites of them yourself, feeling the juicy sweetness burst on your tongues, as if only briefly. Grigor would wipe the juice off of his sleeve and give you a kiss and you would taste the grape in his breath as if combined with yours you made your own special wine. Grigor was in his favorite deep green. You had insisted he keep a few buttons down so you could see some of his chest hair. You insisted it was absolutely sexy of him when he wore shirts (especially white ones) with a few buttons undone and he took note. Yes, it was the wrong color today, but you didn’t care. Perhaps that could wait for later tonight when you would hop on him like a rabbit until you screamed each other’s names, not caring about disturbing the servants sleeping below. You were in a bright red dress with golden floral patterns all over it and you perfumed yourself with rose water.

You matched and complimented in your dress as had your souls on the inside- each perfect and making only the other look better when beside it.

You emerged from the kiss and wiped your hand on your skirt.

“Could you hold my hand, my dear?” you asked, presenting your hand out.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Oh abso-fucking-lutely,” he replied, eagerly taking yours.

It was warm and encompassing, the fingers intertwined within each other to feel the pulse of each other. As you both walked back home, the day was fading. The sky turned into a mix of orange and pink and the crispness of evening etched around you. Once you approached back to the manor, the housekeeper greeted you both and assured you that dinner would be ready in one or two hours. Olga, the little servant girl, handed you back your beloved dog and both of you cooed over her.

“Oh and Madame Dymova! Here! Messenger said it’s from Paris! And it’s for you and the master!” she added on, handing over a letter with a familiar wax seal.

Before you could comment on it, Sonya let out a bright bark for want of attention.

“Here Sonya- found this! Here- Good girl!” Grigor offered.

From his pocket, he pulled out a truffle and fed it to the eager and always hungry pup.

“Would you like some wine? There’s a new one they just made here and it’s fucking astounding,” he offered.

“Oh, yes! And ask the kitchen for a plate of bread and cheese and fruit, perhaps?” you asked.

“I don’t see why not!” he replied, giving you a peck on your forehead before going down to the kitchen.

You made your way to the back porch area outside on your white seats and white chairs. You found it had not grown so chilly that you would require heaps of blankets as you have in the past. Sonya lay happily on your lap panting away. Though grown, she still saw herself as a puppy who had to have every last of her needs attended to, or else her mistress would hear her barking and mischief. But you loved her more for it.

You pulled from your reticule an unopened letter from the dress of your pocket. It couldn’t be your family- you heard just yesterday that you were an aunt to a beautiful little niece. Both you and Grigor were already making plans to travel and visit your family and for you to be introduced and be acquainted with his own. So, who could it be? Was it Catherine about her baby or the new education laws? Orlo recommending a new philosophy book to you? Who? You saw the name on it and gasped.

“It’s George! George wrote to us!” you told Sonya, who only tilted her head.

You then ripped it open and smiled, your heart touched by the contents. From the corner, you saw Grigor come out to approach the table. He smiled, holding two glasses of wine, and giving one to you.

“Why thank you, darling!” you chirruped at him.

“No problem at all,” he answered.

A servant immediately arrived behind and held a platter of cheeses, slices of bread, and apples. His blue eyes went to the letter.

“What is that? Who is it?” he asked.

You smiled, handing him the papers.

“Why, it’s George!? Can’t you believe it? She’s in Paris of all places! Oh, that must be wonderful! And here…she said she met someone who she truly loves and who loves her! Oh, I’m so happy for her! We must write back and ask her more about this!” you squealed.

“Why- how good for her! I’m glad!” Grigor wished genuinely with a shrug and a relaxed smile.

Both of you held up your glasses of wine.

“Should we toast to her?” you asked.

Grigor shook his head.

“I have a better one. To what brought us together in the first place. Here, Y/N-to the alliance!”

“To the alliance!” you agreed, daintily clinking your glasses.

Both of you took a first sip.

“It won’t be too long before we return- so much will be different…” Grigor began.

“I’m just glad Marial is in prison…I’ve slept better at night since then…” you sighed.

He did frown briefly. He took a deep drink and set down his glass.

“Well…part of me is eager. Been worried sick over Peter.”

“But you always are, you silly shit!” you teased, setting your own glass down.

He smiled at the words. You thought there was never a more beautiful smile than that of Grigor Dymov when he was well and truly happy. Your heart would always burst with love for him at the sight.

His letters seem fine and happy though…he’s thrilled about the baby. Got a name picked out and everything!”

“What if we have a baby- will we be even ready for that?” you suggested.

So far, your courses were like clockwork and Grigor would spoil you with bedrest and vodka and embraces when the cramps tormented you. But that doesn’t mean the time would never come. In fact, with all the fucking you had been doing it was a pure miracle it hadn’t happened yet!

“I don’t know if we’ll ever be, Y/N…but what about life after the coup? Things will be so…so different. Peter’s not in charge as much. There’s a royal baby on the way. George is in France. Catherine’s changing all the laws to what she wants. Everything is upside down…” he muttered.

“But we can take it…” you assured him.

He clutched his hand onto yours in response and you used your other hand to rest it on his cheek. He relaxed into it, using a hand to touch yours.

“We can take anything as long as we’re together, darling,” he replied.

“Of course, we can, my dear husband…” you cooed.

"Oh, say that again!” he insisted.

You crawled on his lap, kissing his face- his freckles, his forehead, his cheekbones, his chin.

“Dear husband, dear husband, my Grigor, my darling…” you mumbled between the kisses.

“Fuck, you make me hard. Keep it up and I might have to have you on this table before dinner!” he confessed.

“Wait until after dinner!” you insisted with a joking slap on his arm.

“If Countess Dymova requests it, who am I to deny her that!” he gave in.

You giggled and paused. Both of you breathe deeply the warmth of each other and the closeness.

He kissed you with soft lips again, but there was a chasteness- a tenderness to how he cupped your cheek when it happened. You cuddled into his chest as the sun set and he placed an arm around you to draw circles on your back as the dog lay contentedly smiling on the floor with her pink tongue out.

You were happy. After such chaos you had been through- you were completely happy. Dinner was about to be served. You had a home in court and out. You had a precious pup. You had friends. And most of all, you had found a happy, faithful marriage. And a husband who you loved and who loved you.

And this time the wine did in fact not taste like shit.

[aquitainequeen]

All Is Bliss (Until Someone Loses An Eye): Chapter 8: But First: TEA BREAK

I know. I know. I keep saying that Alina's going to meet Catherine and Peter, and then I give you something completely different. But these two were crying out for a scene together, and one of them in particular refused to sit back and shut up until later in the story - and then fittingly was an absolute nightmare to write.

Because of the immense struggle I had with this chapter, it's dedicated to the Writer's Guild of America, in their strike to protect their livelihoods and skills. Protect the writers!!!

As Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'

Thus: when Aleksander met Baghra.

***

Hundreds of years ago her son would have brought his supposed triumph to her like a hound bringing her its prey. Decades ago, he would’ve hefted it as a club and smashed her in the face with it. Today he might have rubbed it in her face like. Like.

Fuck it. It’s too early in the morning. Something lingering and sticky, he’d have done that; save that having to bend his neck to Peter first thing upon his return seems to have burned any smug satisfaction out of him. He actually wants to lean against the fireplace to rest and allow her to see that he’s wearied, rather than playing the all-powerful Black General, even and especially in front of his own mother.

He’s grown his hair out. Once more he looks like that absolutely dire painting; the one whose artist should have been flogged for having committed such crimes against art and, yes, against her boy. He looks good. Healthy, powerful, fresh from using his power and - despite having come almost directly from seeing Peter - it seems to be one of the days where he’s actually happy to exist.

It’ll be best not to hit the ground snapping and putting him on his guard already. Civil. She can be civil. She can ask something they can both agree is right and proper: ‘Killed plenty of drüskelle on the road?’

‘Several. They’re getting far too confident, lately. Naturally Peter refuses to recognise Zlatan’s hand in such raids; he’s too busy ranting about Fjerdan fucks.’

‘Did you make them suffer?’

‘Do you know, you’re the second person who’s asked me that in the past few hours?’

‘Please tell me the first wasn’t Peter.’

‘It was.’

‘Ugggh.’ Well, that’s one safe topic sullied.

If they were any other sort of mother and son, this is where she’d make him sit down and feed and water him and listen to all his tedious troubles. But they aren’t anyone else, just themselves, and they have to live with that every day. Besides which, when she very graciously and generously offers the boy some tea, he looks at her out of the corner of his eye and asks ‘Is it drugged?’

‘Now, would I do that, right when you need your wits about you the most?’

He gives her the look that means he’s imagining slicing bits and pieces off her.

‘Really, you’re bad enough when you’re in what counts for your right mind; I shudder to think what you’d be like while off your head on mushrooms.’

The look continues.

‘All right, you’re in a mood. How about some water?’ She even points him towards the ice box where the vodka nestles, to be helpful.

‘It is eight in the morning!’ He says, as if he doesn’t carry around that fancy hip flask for his own nips of vodka when it suits.

‘So? It’s also the only way I can put up with the brats you persist in foisting upon me.’

‘…Mother, are you deliberately teaching the young ones while drunk?’

She considers. She takes her sweet time. ’Hmmm. No, I am not. Calm yourself; I wouldn’t get sloshed around the children. There wouldn’t be many of them left if I did.’

It’s been a while since she’s driven him to shut his eyes and breathe through his nose like that. ‘That. Actually makes your choice of teaching methods even worse. You do realise that makes them worse?’

‘Still effective, though.’ Fine, if there’s to be no vodka, she can try her luck elsewhere. ‘I don’t suppose lessons will be cancelled today? A feast day to celebrate this momentous occasion?’

He considers. He takes his sweet time. ‘Hmmm. No, we shan’t do that. It is a joyous day, but we must not teach the young ones to neglect their studies.’

It was an immensely long shot. Nevertheless, he must pay for this. ‘Then a small toast, if nothing else?’

‘Fuck, no. I endured enough toasts last night. So much smashed glass.’

‘Enough for you to make sand for a whole new desert beneath a new Fold?’

Ah, he could cleave her in two with that look, no need for the Cut! ‘Why are you so surprised? Did you expect an actual toast? Applause? As if you’d done something really clever?’

Elbowing himself upright off the fireplace, her boy stands so formal and offended. ‘I was hoping for perhaps a touch more genuine enthusiasm at the coming of the Sun Summoner.’

‘Well. That would depend very much on what you intend to do with her. If you’re not having any tea, you can at least make me a glass.’

He rolls his eyes at the utterly arduous task before him; nonetheless, he goes to unearth a glass. Make that glasses; evidently the sildroher-call of freshly steeped tea is just too strong to resist after all, even on the off chance that it contains mushrooms.

‘So,’ she says, once she’s got her brew, ‘how is the Fold?’

‘As much of a scar upon Ravka as ever.’ He laughs in delight as he roots out the cherry jam; it’s fleeting but still the first laugh she’s heard from him in possibly years. ‘How are your students?’

‘Fucking irritating as ever. How’s the court?’

‘Same drunk, disorderly, inbred fuckwits as ever. I had to drag some of my Healers out of their beds for numerous idiots who persisted in treading on broken glass in bare feet; in addition to several snatched scalps, a broken back and a popped testicle.’

Why? Why has she lived to a point where she has to hear sentences like this? ‘Exciting evening.’

He hums agreement through his second mouthful of jam, and swallows immediately to allow for further ranting. ‘And Peter was egging them on, of course. “In honour of the Sun Summoner!”’ He was so excited that he even started throwing glasses at the servants, as opposed to the floor. Such a child.’

This, from the man eating his mother’s cherry jam from the jar by the spoonful, barely even trying to disguise it with the occasional sip of tea. She sticks to observing, ‘It seems you’ll have some stiff competition for her time and attention.’ And likely her allegiance as well. Her boy has no doubt charmed the stockings off Alina Starkova by now and has a whole bevy of material comforts ready to woo her with; still, the girl would have to be the dumbest wench alive not to at least somewhat throw her lot in with the Emperor of Ravka, be he the dumbest cunt alive.

Her boy, in the meantime, shrugs and licks the spoon in the face of danger. ‘I quiver with fear.’

‘Remind me; what happened the last time you underestimated a monarch?’

While he struggles to swallow his rage and her jam, she gulps down some tea and still gets a word in before him: ‘Peter may be a miserable little runt compared to Old Peter or Anastas, but he’s still got your future soldiers within easy massacring distance, and your balls firmly in a vice. If he wants Starkova for his own, who are you to stop him?’

‘I am - and I cannot believe the words are coming out of my mouth - his Uncle Vanya. I am one of his grandfather’s most trusted generals, and now one of his most trusted generals. I am a person whom he wants, desperately, to be proud of him.’ Raising his glass to toast himself, looking her dead in the eye, he concludes: ‘Most certainly I can stop him.’

She’s about to ask if that’s why he was able to delay trotting Starkova out in front of Peter and begging to be allowed to keep her until this morning, but he continues, which is probably just as well: ‘In any case, Peter has decided to take a somewhat novel route. He wants the Sun Summoner to…love him.’

Their eyes meet again and for once they are in perfect agreement: the horror. The horror.

‘Which means he’ll try to be charming. Likeable. Wise and beneficent, for possibly the first time in his life. It should be both hilarious and harrowing to witness.’

‘He might yet surprise you.’ And her boy might wrinkle his nose in derision, but he’s spent so long around his boy that perhaps he thinks he’s safe, that the leopard eating people’s faces would never eat his face.

‘When last I saw the Emperor, he was raring to play with his toy soldiers and plan how precisely he’d rescue the Sun Summoner from the drüskelle. He wanted to include some wolves.’

‘…he said that to your face?’

‘Oh, yes.’

As she said just now, and much as he’ll deny it: balls. Vice. And yet: ‘And you still haven’t killed him yet?’

‘Careful, mother; that almost sounds like treason. You know, the thing you periodically counsel me against?’

‘Hnh. I am a myth. Myths cannot plot treason. More tea.’

While he’s taking her glass for a refill, he asks out of curiosity rather than concern, ‘Speaking of which, I hope Baghra Yaga hasn’t incapacitated anyone too vital to the running of the country lately?’

‘If she has, then it’s their own fucking fault for blundering around bear-infested woods for days on end. And by the way, Aleksander, pet. I’d hate to think you had anything to do with this sudden craze that half the court has, for trying to invade my home and ask for a light, of all things.’

‘Of course not, mother. It was Peter who restarted that idiotic tradition of seeking out the witch in the woods.’

A tradition which her boy seized upon and squirreled into Peter’s head. He’s doing this just to piss her off. She should call his bluff by flaying and fileting the very next drunk fuckwit that she finds near her house or in one of her traps, skewering the pieces on the Grand Palace lawns, and strewing their hair and teeth all over the place; let’s see if anyone still wants to go into the woods to find ‘the Baghra Witch’ after that. The boy thinks he can wear her down into summoning again by annoying the ever-loving shit out of her? There are many ways to skin a nosy and terminally stupid aristocrat.

Her boy, aware of her plotting but with no idea of the downfall she is weaving for him, returns her glass. ‘Just think, if you lived in the Little Palace, you wouldn’t have to put up with their attempts at rude intrusions.’

‘If I moved into your Little Palace, I would end up killing someone you would actually miss.’ He opens his mouth to protest. ‘Am I wrong?’ He shuts his mouth. ‘Best for me to stay out here, eh? Safer.’

Perhaps with visions of bisected children dancing in his head, he nods to show she’s won this round.

‘Now. Peter may be utterly lacking in charm, but Elizabeth is another matter entirely.’ She makes a show of a good long sip of this new glass before continuing. ‘What will you do if the Emperor sends his aunt as a go-between to Starkova, or if she decides to take the initiative? Volunteer yourself to distract her again? Another seduction?’

‘At present, I fancy Elizabeth’s far too busy trying to make sure Peter impregnates his wife. There’ll be no humouring his whims when it comes to other women. Likely she’ll say he’s already got a mistress and an Empress; he shouldn’t be getting greedy.’ With that out of the way, he gets that scolding look when he despairs of her wits and thinks they’re on the way out.  ‘Also, you do her a grave disservice by thinking her cock-struck. She’d cut my throat in a heartbeat if she thought I was threatening him.’

‘Oh, good for her.’ She raises her glass to the Grand Duchess: a woman who knows what is going on. ‘Though it does make me wonder what you plan to do with her, in the event all your scheming actually pays off. Or with little Catherine, for that matter.’

That irritating smile of his, perhaps from thinking of past romps with Elizabeth, fizzles out. ‘I’ve literally just got back; I’ve barely had my tea, and you ask me to pass judgement on the new Empress? Before I’ve even had a chance to properly see her in action?’

‘You’d better get a move on, then, before it’s too late. The brats have been on fire about how she’s picked a fight with Countess Svenska, you might not even have to trouble yourself. She’ll be discovered face down in a fountain soon enough.’

Shockingly, he doesn’t look tempted by the prospect. ‘That won’t do; I need her alive for now. Zlatan might not have wanted her as Empress, but he’ll adore her as a martyr of East Ravka’s growing degeneracy.’

‘Well, then she lives. And what will you do if she tries to outshine Starkova?’

She waits for him to finish laughing, ducking his head and actually showing his teeth. The first time she’s seen that in years as well; today is turning out to be just full of surprises. ‘She’s not a complete fool, boy. She’s nowhere near powerful enough to steal Starkova from you and take her under her own wing, so either she tries to win her favour or attempts to blot out her light. Such as it is. What then?’

‘Then she still lives.’ Her boy plays about with his glass for really far too long before setting it aside. ‘But she won’t enjoy it.’ With that oh so dramatic threat, he starts his pacing; he’s probably eager to be heading back to his Little Palace and collect his pet, but he had to stop and gossip with her for a spell. ‘I want Alina-’

The first time that he’s spoken the girl’s name. He likes her, and he doesn’t even know it.

‘-ready to shock and amaze by the Winter Fete. She must dazzle Peter, Elizabeth, the Apparat. All the ambassadors, Zlatan and his minions, anyone who thinks that Ravka is ready to be butchered for her meat.’

Now comes the list of demands and commands. She sets her glass aside as well and prepares for battle. ‘But?

‘But there will be no cause for complaint on her part during her training. That means no fire. No unscheduled dips in the lake. No drugged tea without Alina’s explicit consent. No bear traps, no snares, and definitely no bees. Where did you even find a bee hive?’

‘Get your own.’ While he gapes at being interrupted – what, should she have stuck her hand up and waited to be permitted a word? - she strikes back. ‘Why even send her to me, then? I’ve given hundreds of your little worshippers the kick up the arse that they desperately needed; you liked the results well enough then. If you’re fretting that she’ll mewl and quit at the prospect of a few hard knocks, train her yourself. Take all the others, while you’re at it.’

‘What, when I might be sent to the furthest reaches of the empire on Peter’s whim and at a moment’s notice?’ Oh, thank Maker there’s no hesitation in his reply, so he likely won’t be calling her bluff! ‘Should I teach Alina via letters from the front? Communicate with her via some mystical bond that permits us to share our minds? She needs stability and structure to unlock her full potential, and I know I can always rely upon you to be as constant and uncompromising as the Permafrost.’

‘Flatterer.’

‘I do my best. In any case, I can hardly inflict you upon every student and then turn around and say “Except for Alina Starkova.” I won’t have any whispers of favouritism.’

Maker, the boy exhausts her sometimes. She settles back into the ideal position for deploying her perfected and devasting sidelong stare. ‘You’ve installed her in the Vezda suite, you had special crockery made for her and you demanded twenty different designs for her kefta. Definitely no favouritism there.’

‘By which you mean, I’ve installed her in the safest location in the Little Palace. And I demanded nothing; those were all tributes from the Artificers.’ He has the effrontery to look innocent. ‘I’m told there was quite a scuffle over who would get the honour of making her kefta. Even one or two duels.’

‘Regardless of whoever got their eyes scratched out, you’re the one who’s having a golden chair - yes, I know about the chair - installed next to yours in the dining hall. You realise that once the novelty wears off, they’ll bitch and moan?’ The boy’s no doubt ready to babble more about how long they have waited for their saviour, so she drowns him out once more: ‘You’ve got your latest sighthound eating out of your hand, but Zoya Nazyalenskaya has not spent years working her way up the ranks, only to be outstripped by a scrap from the provinces. Even if the sun does shine out of her arse.’

Has he only just thought of this himself? Surely not. Surely he’s not grown so soft in his palace and position that he’s forgotten self-interest and spite are also eternal. Surely - ecstatic though he is at finally having a Sun Summoner in his clutches - he’s at least considered that Zoya is not going to welcome Alina Starkova with open arms, but might rather desire to rip the very breath from her lungs and make her eyes explode in their sockets for good measure.

Well, he clearly has now. ‘Zoya will understand.’ And when she simply stares at him, he adds: ‘If not now, then soon enough. She’ll know which way the wind is blowing.’

‘…just for that, you absolutely deserve to be stabbed in the back.’

‘Fair point. But she has more than earned her rightful place for when the time comes.’

‘Even if it’s not by your side? You think that spot should go to Starkova? Can she even use her powers yet, outside of getting pricked with that ridiculous talon of yours? What exactly are you giving me to work with?’

'Why not come and see her for yourself?’ He spreads his arms, palms to the heavens, asking the universe why he has to plead again with such a stubborn old bag. 'You asked for a holiday? Quit your fireside and actually bestir your bones. Peel yourself out of your chair, always assuming you haven’t fused with it by now, and join us in our procession to the Grand Palace.’

‘And what would I do there? Is Baghra Yaga going to make a surprise appearance to curse the Emperor? The Sun Summoner? Both? Maybe even you?’

‘You could attend incognito. We’d throw a kefta on you as a disguise, stick you right in the middle of the throng, hidden amidst the Materialki. It wouldn’t precisely be a front row view, but as good as.’

There are probably more quips that he’s only making because he knows she’ll refuse and which she doesn’t bother to listen to. He can act the dutiful son rebuffed once more by his termagant mother, the sacrifices he’s made for her, the kind and generous offers she spurns! But now he must go, sighing how she is always so unreasonable, and proceed to wrangle the Emperor and mark Alina Starkova as his territory.

These are the days she almost feels some faint vestige of being well-disposed towards Peter; miserable murderous little runt with delusions of divine right though he might be, at least he isn’t plotting to take over the world.

Well, bugger all that. ‘Then we’d better get moving, if we don’t want to hold up your procession.’

He laughs – three times in one visit, such a miracle finding Starkova seems to have worked! – and then belief hits hard as she starts levering herself up from the chair. ‘You’re. You’re actually coming?’

‘Did I stutter? Really. You, the Sun Summoner and the Emperor, trying to be charming, all in the same room? I need to see what happens next.’

***

I find Baghra, and especially her teaching methods, makes a lot more sense if she's stuck into the plot of The Great. Funny old world.

Listing all the nods to other works in this chapter here, because I am not a data-scraping language generator.

Next chapter really, really is When Alina Met Catherine and Peter. I swear.

[ladystrallan]

New G&G fic!

Happiness

A G&G modern AU

Grigor packs up his stuff as he prepares to move out of their apartment.

Check it out here

[jetpack]

The blade is imbued with great power. I can feel it course through my hands as I unsheathe it. I do not know if I can sate its hunger. Read more on my blog.

[gleafer]

“You’re running? Why are we running?!!”

Crowley’s gonna Crowley.

[ao3-crack]

(x)

[turtleblogatlast]

AU where Leo is trapped in the Prison Dimension for months instead of minutes and the only way he gets by with his sanity intact is through recording himself talking to his wrist comm.

When they finally manage to get Leo back and make him rest up to heal, Donnie can’t help but listen to the recordings left behind.

He’s not sure what exactly he’s expecting, only that his subconscious is screaming at him that it has to be heartbreaking, that it has to be torturous.

Instead, what Donnie is subject to is a full thousand hours’ worth of Jupiter Jim and Lou Jitsu crossover fanfiction. More than one part in the series. Spanning well over a million words.

(The worst part is that it’s actually good.)

[messrsbyler]

ao3 authors who have no social media are are so mystical. they really be writing and posting some of the most perfectly crafted pieces of media and then disappearing without a trace

[greykolla-art]

I’ve been brushing up on my anatomy for…reasons….🖤🙏

Man that teaser! I won’t be right in the head until October!

Im also reading just an ungodly amount of smut while I wait. Send help.

[mingwrites]

tits, ass, pussy or thighs

seonghwa ~ tits ALL the way. his most favorite thing in the world is to sit curled up in your lap and suck on them. alternatively, likes to hold on to them as you ride him. there is something very innocent about his fascination with your breasts, something innate and child-like. he treats them delicately and, while he does want to make you feel good, he mostly just likes the way your nipples feel in his mouth.

hongjoong ~ thighs. his preferred sleeping position is to lay his head in your lap so he can always feel the plush and squishy flesh of your thighs. during intercourse, he loves to throw one or both of them over his shoulder, and when he eats you out, he prefers to have you sit on his face so he can feel utterly surrounded by your powerful thighs. he'll also cover them in bites and scratches, so look out.

yunho ~ an ass man til death. in yunho's life, there will never be anything more important than your ass. it's on his mind day and night, and always the part of you he can't help but stare at. he also has a hard time not touching it. whether he's grabbing two giant handfuls during sex, or feeling you up in front of all your friends, your ass always belongs to him. also, he likes to eat it too.

yeosang ~ thighs. nothing gets yeosang going like the sight of you in a pair of short shorts, walking around confidently, your powerful thighs commanding each movement. he loves the shape of them, the softness of your skin, the strong muscles inside. he loves to hold, knead, massage, caress, tickle. and similar to hongjoong, he loves feeling trapped and helpless beneath the strength of your thighs when you sit on his face.

san ~ it's hard to say, because he truly adores all of them. but san has a weak spot for your tits. he goes crazy watching them bounce every time he fucks into you. he loves using them to tease you, keeping you on the edge of ecstasy by pinching, rubbing, and licking them, never touching you anywhere else. he loves being rough with them, squeezing and pulling at them, and nibbling mercilessly on your nipples.

mingi ~ pussy, pussy, pussy. mingi forgets about literally everything else in the world when your pussy is in the question. you can use it to get him to do anything; he'll beg and cry, or eat you out for hours, or otherwise stop at no means just to get his dick inside your warm, wet pussy. he loves the way it squeezes him, loves watching himself disappear inside of you, and loves doing whatever you want him to do to it.

wooyoung ~ a tie between ass and pussy. he basically just loves the lower half of you. he loves watching your hips when you dance, or simply just walk across the room, while he mentally undresses you. he equally enjoys fucking both of your holes, and loves filling them both up. whether that's with a dildo, his fingers, or a third partner (san), seeing you completely full makes him melt.

jongho ~ thighs and ass. he likes to show off his strength by holding you up by your thighs as he fucks you against a wall. and he loves to slap your ass when he gets you on all fours. he becomes instantly horny when you wear yoga pants, watching your ass jiggle and bounce, all the while getting off on knowing that he's the only person who gets to see you out of those pants.

[aquitainequeen]

All Is Bliss (Until Someone Loses An Eye): Chapter 7: Bet You Wish You'd Stayed In Bed

Thank you so, so much to the beautiful @ellynneversweet and @fairy-anon-godmother, for putting up with all my random pinging of ideas to them, and for helping me get this monster upright and off the slab after over a year!!!

Alina wakes up to the first day of the rest of her life.

It's a short sentence, but contains a lot of incidence.

***

It is a lovely morning in Os Alta, and Alina is a horrible malingerer.

She is also a woman who has been up at the crack of sparrow fart since time immemorial, and for the first time since she and Mal were dumped in Keramzin she could perhaps just lie here for just a little longer; experiencing soft sheets, this soft bed, this beautiful room full of beautiful things, the sheer utter luxury of knowing she has absolutely nothing to do.

No chores or lessons. No marching! No sketching in the cart and dreading bumps and jolts, no ever-lasting calculations and estimates of distance, no long stretches of sinking into the mud and holding the tools and tapes for the real cartographers. No camp fire to build back up or resurrect while choking on the ashes, no breakfast to reheat, no fucking freezing dew, and joy, oh joy! No more horseback riding. 

There’s just this bed. Just this.

She could do all of that, but her body thinks it’s time she should be getting to work. She begs her flesh to let her rest and it only wants to be back on the horse once again, more and more confused at how Alina continues to resist any large movements.

Stupid body. She gets dragged over quite literally two thirds of Ravka, it feels like the feet of the entire First Army have been churning her thighs and arse into mud despite all of Fedyor’s salves, and yet her flesh also still thinks she should be getting up and doing jobs that don’t even exist any longer. From the way the General was acting during the last few days, Alina will probably never again have to wake up to freezing darkness while being soaked by fucking freezing dew; or to build, feed and grow a fire, or to bring it back to life from the embers; or to skin and joint a rabbit. She might still do those things, nothing’s ever certain, but she’ll probably never have to do them again.

She’ll never have to be at the beck and call of Petya, taking notes and calculations and scrambling to churn out drafts, having to compete with Alexei. She’ll never have to hear Raisa getting up first and being so maddeningly loud while doing it, calling them all ‘malingerers!’ while ironically lingering on the middle part of the insult.

She’ll never get to hear Raisa again. Oh, she’ll never see Alexei again.

Well. Alina’s definitely not going back to sleep after that, and nor does she deserve to. Horrible woman. Malingerer. Cursed. Backwater Buryat bitch. No man or woman should look at the side of the road she walks on!

The gauzy linings of the bed’s canopy are so nice to look at. Alina could lie here all heavy with the sheets and pillows sucking her down, watching them forever. Only forever will be a very long time if her ears are filled up with these new tears, creeping and tickling down either side of her head. If she bawls every time that she thinks of them all screaming and dying in the Fold, or Mal running after the carriage shouting and trying to keep up but slowing down, slowing down, she won’t be able to see or breathe for swollen eyes and blocked pipes. She’ll die, smothered by her own snot! Death by malingering, Raisa would definitely say.

She needs to get the grief and guilt for today out of the way. Right. Boris, the stupid prick who couldn’t follow a simple command like don’t light a fucking lantern in the Fold, is dead because he wouldn’t have lit the lantern if he hadn’t been in the Fold to begin with, because of her. Raisa, always picking at her, pick pick pick, she is dead because of Alina; she was so terrified just before the volcra grabbed her and if she was lucky she died right away. Please the saints that she died right away! What a fucking mess Alina is; the best prayer she can manage for someone who’s dead because of her is that they died quickly. Alexei is.

Nope. She’s had a fortnight to think and she’s decided: Alexei’s not dead. Alina didn’t see a body. She only saw him jumping off the skiff into the darkness. The Inferni lady said that if you leave the skiff you die, but that doesn’t mean Alexei died! He’s so fast. So fast! He could have run and kept running and none of the volcra would have been able to catch him. He could easily have followed the tracks the skiff made and got back to Kribirsk, and been there when she was being hauled away in the coach. Or, maybe he ran all the way over to West Ravka!

No, that’s just stupid. Fucking mad.

Although. Would it really be any more fucking mad than her being the Sun Summoner? That happened, so, why shouldn’t Alexei have made it out of the Fold, either on the East side or the West?

So that’s it. Alina’s got something to do after all. She’s got a plan! She needs to: survive today and all the days after, find a way out of this mess and this palace, find a way back to Kribirsk, find out what happened to Alexei and Mal, find them again and never, ever leave them again. Simple!

Right.

It is a fucking terrible plan. Why is she so terrible at plans? Clearly, she must never plan anything ever again.

Start smaller. She could begin with a letter to Mal. I’m sorry, I never would have left, they had to drag me into the carriage or I would have run to you. Also, sorry that I turned out to be Grisha and the Sun Summoner, but that doesn’t matter because I will find you again. And then she can write to Boris and Raisa’s families, Sorry I accidentally got your child horribly killed. It was because of love, which is a romantic motive, but it was still kind of murder.

Yes, that’s just the thing to make even more people want her dead. Repeat; Alina must never plan anything again. After this plan that she’s making right now at this very moment, no more plans! And no letters.

What she could do instead is, she could send them all the money that the Grisha would have paid if they’d found her back when she was little. And the Sun Summoner must be worth an absolute fortune! Yeah, they’ll still hate her, but probably not enough to refuse truly obscene amounts of cash. Mal could even get to leave the army! He can buy the farm like he’s always wanted, the nicest greenest richest farm, and he can stay safe and well and hundreds of miles away from the front lines or any possible border raids!

But the problem is: in order to find out about the reward and get it sent out, she’ll have to get up and face the day, everything beyond that door, and herself. For this she will give in to her body’s whinging, and get up. 

Naturally every muscle in her body immediately starts shrilling with the pain and clamoring for her to stop moving at once and lie back down, how can she be so heartless? How can she be so cruel?! Stupid body.

So.

What’s she got to work with?

There was no Fedyor or Ivan to conveniently stand near her while she dozed off last night, and yet she’s somehow managed to get a full night’s sleep once more. She has the letter opener she stashed under her pillow, it didn’t fall to the floor during the night, hooray! And it has a sharp enough point. She has fancy light powers…

…that she has no idea how to actually use.

Perhaps now that she’s in the Little Palace, the lair of all Ravkan Grisha, it might happen this time? Might there be something in the air, if she tried again?

Alina sucks in a big breath and tries it again. And - nope. Yet a-fucking-gain, shaking her hands doesn’t do the trick. Nor does clasping her palms together in various curious ways like she’s seen the Summoners do, and then shaking them. Nor does saying ‘Let there be light!’ and wiggling her fingers.

Right. New plan! Another new plan, one more new plan before no more plans! Looking under the pillow, she has the letter opener she stashed last night. Anyone trying to sneak up on her will surely tremble at the sharp enough point of her trusty weapon! Yes, all she has to do is threaten to stick them with the pointy end. What else does she have? Her cartography kit, also still under the pillow; that and the clothes she’s standing up in are really all she has.

Ah.  

It seems that she doesn’t even have the clothes she was standing up in. Someone must have come in during the night and taken her stuff and the kefta that she knows she left at the foot of the bed.

Someone was in here while she was asleep, watching her. Someone, some thing. Staring at her, and she didn’t hear them.

If they’d felt inclined towards a bit of bloody murder, she’d have been a daft snoozing sheep with her belly and throat and all her other soft places on display. All ready for a stabbing, and never mind the pointy end under her pillow.

Alina can’t think like this. It doesn’t do any good to think like this! Someone came in, they saw, they conquered their revulsion and took her clothes, they left, and she’s still alive.

If someone is hiding under the bed. If they’re down there, they surely won’t suspect anything while Alina’s very carefully getting on her front to lean through the curtains without jostling them and looking at the mattress, and then the bed frame, and then not under the bed frame, not just yet. She should wait a moment before looking. She should wait a minute. 

This is stupid. So stupid. If there is actually someone under there, what the hells is she going to do? Start trying to stab them? Attempt to get off the bed and over to the door, without getting grabbed by the ankle or hamstrung and being pulled down to dusty death? Sit quite still and wait desperately for someone outside to come and check on her, and find some way to communicate what’s going on before they get hamstrung and the assassin comes wriggling out to start slaughtering her? 

Stop it, stop it! If she keeps thinking then she’ll be stuck with blood rushing into her head and her back and backside on display this time, ready for a stabbing, staring at the bedframe forever. She has to do something. So. Do something, do something!

Beyond the bedframe is the floor. There’s floorboards. They’re a bit dusty. No one’s lying under the bed, staring right at her. Nobody on the far side of the bed, getting to their feet and about to strike at her legs and backside up top. Wait, be sure! All right, no one crouched at the bottom of the bed, ready to pounce. Just floorboards. Oh, thank saints.

By craning her neck to look around the bedroom again that it’s light and getting lighter, Alina does another estimate of the distance, even after walking the route several times yesterday. Still fifteen paces to get from the bed to the door, or for someone outside to reach the bed. Less, of course, if she or someone were in a hurry.  

Forget wiggling her fingers for any measly light powers; Alina should dig her nails into her palms until her heart settles down and all the terror sweat she’s accumulated starts cooling. Once she’s got herself up right again and is sitting comfortably among the pillows, then she’ll begin. She squeezes for the old reliable pain to flare up. There’s the familiar feel of her skin so tight and ready to burst under her fingernails. In her right hand it seems as if her age-old scar is going to split open all the way across her palm, to her thumb! It’s like when Kirigan was just starting to scratch her with his creepy ring blade. 

Of course, it’s only now that she thinks: is it breaking her skin that lets the light out? Would her nails do the trick, or does it need a sharp enough point?

Alina’s gut squirms when she looks down to her lap and the letter opener nestled within. It politely, firmly says no.

Her gut is very wise. It far outstrips her brain. If breaking the skin was all it took then she would have blinded the drüskelle right after he cracked her forehead open. She’d have been bleeding light every time she nicked a finger with her pen knife or scratched herself. Hells, she stuck a bit of broken crockery into her palm to fox the Grisha testers and squeezed, for fuck’s sake, and that did nothing.

Alina relaxes at last and sets her palms free, so as to let the pain burn itself up and out. The warmth built under her skin stays, that faint throbbing ache, throbbing – saints, it’s the first time Alina’s thought of this in years, why does it come to mind now? Those evenings when she was tiny, chasing the flickering fireflies and making her own little lights! She’d thought she imagined or dreamed those times but now in the, ha, the light of day, she clearly hadn’t.

Why’s she wasted so much time on this? This thing inside her she doesn’t trust, that she does not want? This isn’t helping her.

The key in the door clicks, which is bad, and it opens which is, oh, so much worse. 

Remember, fifteen paces from the door to the bed. There’s a whole gaggle of them advancing. Hopefully assassins don’t come in gaggles? There’s time enough to grab a pillow and hide her lap and any glimpse of the letter opener or everything that might show beneath her shift, then the drapes are pulled back by please not a drüskelle, please not a drüskelle.

By a woman. Who, if she isn’t Godmother Fox from the stories, is clearly trying very hard to look like she is, with that hair and those eyes that Alina is sure could turn yellow in a blink, and that tilt of her head like she’s considering whether to snap and bite.

Everything that’s happened to Alina since she dragged everyone into the Fold and only she and Mal came out has been so utterly insane, so. Fine. Godmother Fox, trotting about the Little Palace, might as well show up at this point.

‘Good, you’re up.’ Godmother Fox’s head tilts a little further, looking more confused than likely to snap. ‘Are you all right?’

‘You startled me.’ And the women beyond Godmother Fox worry her. At least this fox lady has some colour in her, her eyes and that glorious blazing hair, but six more women in a row, all done up in identical white gowns with their heads wrapped up like corpses, and all of them staring dead at her? This is how horror stories begin. The point of the letter opener is digging into Alina’s thigh and she expects at any moment for it to poke a way into the meat of her. Maybe they’ll get to see whether she actually bleeds light after all.

‘Well, I’ll be certain not to make any more sudden movements. Up, up.’

Two of the other women in white get Alina fast by the arms. The pillow slides off her lap and just as she gets one foot on the floor so they can’t outright drag her off the bed something bangs right next to that foot, a rat, a Fjerdan assassin who was hiding really hard under the bed all along?!

Or, it could be the letter opener. Landing on the floor. Alina tries to force some spit back into her mouth.

There’s the slightest curl at the corner of Fox-lady’s mouth while she looks at the sodding letter opener and then meets Alina’s eyes again.‘That’s certainly a first.’

‘It was in case anyone attacked me during the night.’

‘A very sensible precaution, but thankfully no longer necessary. The Little Palace is the safest place in all of Ravka.’

Alina decides to test that, and also test how much the women in women are inclined to keep hold of her. She jerks her arms and they let go right away, so, all right! This is reassuring! Already a massive improvement over previous moments of captivity and being sent to the brig. Except: ‘Someone came in while I was sleeping and stole my clothes.’

‘That would have been me.’

There’s surely several ways to respond to that at this very moment, but Alina sticks with the safest. ‘What?’

‘I came to take your measurements last evening, but you were sound asleep and I hated to wake you.’

So...is it still creepy if she was being watched by someone like Fox-lady?

…yes. Yes, it is. ‘So you took my clothes?’

‘Would you rather that I’d measured you while you were asleep?’

‘No!’

‘Well, then. Get the bath started.’ As two women in white dart off and Fox-lady judges Alina’s face, she clearly decides on a different tack. ‘There have been oprichniki at your door since you first entered this room. Anyone who wishes to reach you has to go through several ranks of guards to get this far. And all that I did with your clothes was pass them along to someone who had far more need of them.’

‘Right, but need them for what?’ Since there are lots of things someone can need a person’s dress for. Alina is so very glad she kept her drawers on under her shift.

‘You’ll see, very shortly. However, I still need to take your true measurements, so keep quite still.’

Which is not the most reassuring thing a woman can hear when she’s outnumbered four to one and standing in only her shift.

She tries not to breathe while Godmother Fox walks about her and makes various soft noises that could mean anything from approval to disbelief to despair. She’s so glad that she crossed her arms over her breasts, right until Fox-lady tells her to uncross and extend them, like a scarecrow or a saint in an icon. It feels like she’s surrendering, or making herself a prime target for a sharp shooter, all her goods on full display in very convenient and unprotected stabbing positions once again. Then Godmother Fox whips out a long marked ribbon and starts with the measuring of various bits of her body, dividing her up like she’s a stretch of land to be charted and calling out the distances to her attendants.

It seems that, despite her bearing and her voice and all the embroidery and gold thread in her clothes, Fox-lady might not be an actual noble born lady; what with all this measuring and how close her hands are getting to Alina’s armpits and feet, none of which have had much of a wash during the journey to get here. Or before the Fold, either. Might she be General Kirigan’s housekeeper, the holder of the keys for the Little Palace? Fox-lady tells Alina to raise her arms a little higher, passing the ribbon around her back and then holding it tight about her breasts. Somehow this is the moment when she gets the nerve to ask: ‘What’s this all for?’

‘I’m simply making sure my estimates were correct. Which naturally they were, give or take a tiny amount, but I always like to make absolutely certain. Get my records to the team so they can make the final adjustments. Now, time for your bath.’

As they hurry Alina through the curtains to the next room, there’s a moment to see the huge bath has been filled to brimming while she was distracted, then either side of her a woman ducks down, grasps the hem of her shift and yanks it up over her breasts and face, whoop, it’s suddenly very chilly in here and it’s a struggle to get her hands back to her sides and not slap at another woman pulling down her drawers. There’s no need to cover her breasts and cleft like she’s ashamed. It’s just being naked. Not like she chose to whip her kit off to shock and appall all the fully clothed people.

Actually, with all of the women closing in now, perhaps she should have crossed her arms; it’d give them fewer handholds to seize and drag her towards the tub. Saints! Is this how it’s going to be from now on? Pulled from room to room, in and out of beds and shifts and fuck that’s hot baths, by women who clearly don’t like having to touch her and will hurt her in their attempts to get it over and done with? She’ll go mad before the day is out and stab someone after all, or at least bite them.

They’re very efficient, though, this lot. She can feel layers of skin coming off with each scrape of the sponge. The First Army would want them to help with handling and moving canons! And bloody saints, are they going to wash her hair??? Immediately, completely worth it. Yes, even worth having this particular attendant trying to pull her scalp off in the effort of undoing her braid, and before that having her goods on display to the whole room. Totally worth it. She doesn’t know what they’re slathering in her hair, what’s in it, what it smells of, but she loves all of it. She’s going to be so clean!

There’s a brush on her thigh which surely this time is a rat. Not on your life!

It is not a rat. It is one of the women, caught with her hand trapped tight between Alina’s thighs. She does also look like a drowned rat; she probably got the brunt of the water when Alina slammed her legs together and caused a massive wave. On the one hand, thank fuck and Sankt Mattheus that there isn’t actually a rat popping up between her legs like that time in the latrines. On the other hand: ‘What, what, what are you doing?’

‘Washing you.’ The woman rescues her hand from between Alina’s legs to show off the wash cloth. She even does a sarcastic little wave with it, with an air of (be charitable, be charitable!) stupid girl.

‘Thanks, but I can do that bit myself.’

The woman says nothing else to Alina; she does say to one of her fellow scrubbers, in Old Ravkan for some reason, ‘I heard all the wenches in the First walk stark naked to the bath tents and back, on offer for all the world to see.’ Oh, there’s the reason. ‘Guess she decided to be a prissy prude and guard her snatch with her life.’

We didn’t do anything like that, thanks, and in the First we also don’t just go around sticking our fingers up each other without so much as asking first…is what Alina wants to say, which means she probably shouldn’t. So instead she braces herself against the side of the tub, kicks her left leg up and, hooray! She manages not to flash everyone in the attempt and doesn’t nail the bitch in the chin or take her eye out with a toenail, but the key thing here is that she could have and the bitch clearly knows it. ‘Give me a cloth or something, I can wash myself.’

‘Please, do not trouble yourself. It is the duty and the pleasure of these women to attend upon you.’ So says Godmother Fox, watching the proceedings from a chair, with great interest and without amusement. ‘And Tatiana especially will attend upon your feet.’

Alina considers this, lowering her foot because it’s hard to hold it in this position for long and looking back up at the woman formerly known as bitch and now known as Tatiana, in time for their eyes to meet. It is evidently not Tatiana’s pleasure to attend upon Alina’s feet. Who can blame her? She might actually be better off scrubbing Alina’s cleft; she’s at least been managing to keep that somewhat clean even despite the saddle sores collected over two thirds of Ravka, and it doesn’t have these toenails. But she’s not letting this woman anywhere near her privates, and Tatiana’s not going to clean Alina’s feet, so it seems they’ve reached an impasse.

‘Oh? Or might it be that you do not wish to touch the Sun Summoner’s feet? Surely not, Tatiana? Surely instead, you do not feel worthy of touching her feet?’ There’s that tilt of Godmother Fox’s head again. Fox-lady is not at all quizzical despite her questioning, she already knows the answer and she’s deciding whether to bite. ‘In which case, you had better go and make yourself worthy. I find we have no further need for you.’

Fox-lady does a very good scathing stare. Alina’s not even the one being flayed by those eyes, and she half wants to hide under the water and not come up for air.

‘Out.’ Godmother Fox literally sounds like a fox barking. The wash rag drops into the water and Alina feels the breeze of Tatiana fleeing like a rabbit.

‘Now, please. Do pick up the pace. We don’t want to keep the Emperor waiting.’

There is a great stillness of women. Somehow there is a cold sweat starting up all over Alina, under the hot bath water. In the dead silence, her toes tingle and her toe nails fall off.

Alina says ‘What the fuck’ and everyone immediately tries to drown her for it, water dumped over and over her head, driving her further into the tub, her hair’s surely clean enough, soaking, tangling and strangling and it’s smothering her but they won’t let her free to pull it out of her nose, they’re going to take her fingernails next before she drowns! There is no fucking way she’s drowning in a bathtub and never getting back to Mal! ‘The fuck you will, get off!’

‘Leave her nails to me.’

They retreat to her shoulders and armpits, thankfully avoiding her breasts and she can get her hair off her face. Someone squishes her hand around a sponge, so she’d better get busy washing. Can’t go to see the Emperor fuck she’s going to see the Emperor all sticky and sour. There goes the grime and what might be most of her skin, floating all scummy upon the water. She feels quite peeled and fully boiled but she still has her fingernails.

Hoisted out of the bath like wet laundry but instead of being wrung out, they’re patting her dry as if she’s a newly finished letter. Isn’t she supposed to be in bleeding agony from her fallen toenails? Did the heat of the water kill the pain? Because there they still are, shiny, short and neat and utterly unbloodied. Are they still the same nails and she mistook, or did new ones shoot up to replace them?  

While she’s contemplating her toes, the women launch a sneak attack and wrap her up in what must be some kind of cloth, but it honestly feels like cool water that’s yet somehow dry. It feels like she’s inside the General’s special flask when it turns vodka into water. She’d love to have some vodka right now. More than half a flask, cups and cups of it, then she’ll be pleasantly numb for when she’s trotted out in front of the Emperor and probably at least a few nobles, with her luck, all expecting a Sun Summoner straight out of The Lives of Saints and getting her instead. And it’s all going to be very terrible but she won’t care because she’ll be drunk off her tits!

Yet another woman comes forward without attacking, only holding up a towel. ‘For your hair, Sun Summoner; we’ll need to get it dry.’ Very true, she can’t just be dripping all over the place. She scrapes the hair back from her forehead and temples to help, just as she spots a gleam of light at the edge of her sight. Did she do that? Please let her have done that, then they’ll have something more to show the Emperor than a Buryat girl with nothing more to her than magically regrowing toenails! But no. It’s just the light catching in a cut glass, held out on a tray by one more woman.

This is her life now too, people waiting to offer things to her. No more Petya holding instruments out without even looking at Alina, knowing she’ll take them, or Alexei handing her a cup of milk, or Raisa shoving tent canvases into her arms, or Boris telling her to pick that up, we need to move, or that bastard cook refusing to give her any supper. No more of that. Now it’s curtsies and trays bearing glasses full of what turns out to be ice cold water, not vodka, which on the one hand dammit and on the other hand huzzah, because showing up in front of the Emperor even slightly off her tits is a fun fantasy but if she actually did it for real, it would put a decided crimp in her plan to stay alive long enough to find Alexei and Mal and Alexei.

It’s incredible how every part of her is sodden but her throat, which is so dry that the sides of it are sticking together. The water’s oh so cold, every single time she swallows some she has to gasp for more air and thaw her throat out again for another swig but she can’t stop because it’s such lovely, lovely cold water, how do they get it so cold?!

When Alina can think beyond the lovely cold again, there are only three women in white left about her; Godmother Fox, the woman who gave her the water and is waiting for her to give the glass back, and a woman setting out loads of dishes on the main table near the bed, who might also be the one who wrapped up her hair. Looking back from the door, perhaps after having watched the other women leave, Fox-lady seems a tad softer about her mouth and eyes. ‘I deeply apologise for Tatiana.’

Right, right. Tatiana and her bitchiness. ‘I’ve heard a lot worse.’ If things were ordinary Alina might still be upset about that for a while, but today fuck they’re dragging me before the Emperor and he’s expecting me to show off my supposed light powers that I have no idea how to actually fucking use it seems very small in the grand scheme of things.

‘But it was an exceedingly poor welcome for you, and I am truly sorry for it. Thankfully, it means we have ample reason for her never to be allowed in your presence again. Were you otherwise pleased with your attendants?’

‘They were all right? I suppose? Except for the dragging and the shoving. I liked it when they washed my hair, but I’d much rather have done the rest by myself.’

‘Good, good; then we can safely release them from your service as well. Olga and Tasiya will suffice.’

Olga bobs behind the tray, Tasiya bobs while placing the last dish and both of them duck their heads when Alina says ‘Thank you.’ Only two names to keep track of, then, thank saints, and they’re easy to tell apart even when they’re both all muffled up in white. That leaves Fox Lady, whom Alina can’t really go on calling Fox Lady or Godmother Fox; and Fox Lady clearly spots her moment and seizes it in her jaws, positioning herself front and centre. ‘For myself, I am Yevgeniya. But you must call me Genya. And you must also eat.’

How could this image of a woman possibly think that Alina would ever address her so intimately, or that she could eat at a time like this? She couldn’t even chew a bite of oh, oh wow. Not even a bite of salted salmon, blini, rye bread with sour cream, smoked fish, chicken noodle soup, pickled cucumber, herring salad, beef tongue with horseradish, dumpling, buttermilk pancakes with fish eggs, honey cake, or cottage cheese pancakes!

Well, perhaps one blini. With a spoonful of jam, why not?

As soon as she’s sat down someone pushes the chair closer to the table, so there’s less need to reach. So much choice! It’s bizarre how Alina’s suddenly craving that one particular blini just within spearing range. How can she be so hungry at a time like this? But the bath was incredibly hot, and when is she going to get another chance to try all these beautiful jams in their dishes, shining like jewels in an icon? Someone, Olga, it’s Olga, scoops up Alina’s prize just as she’s about to reach it and puts it on her plate, and seems ready to start piling more things onto it as well, only she stops and withdraws at a soft word from Fox-lady. Both she and Tasiya leave in a hurry, but they certainly got a better dismissal than Tatiana. Possibly better than the other women as well; Alina really was dead to the world while downing her lovely cold water.

‘They’re good girls,’ Fox-lady, Yevgeniya, says as she watches her subordinates go. ‘I have them very well trained.’ She seems pleased by that, and she keeps seeming pleased when she gets back to looking at Alina. Once again it feels like she’s walked into some kingdom beneath the earth where people other than Mal and Alexei are happy to see her, and Alina doesn’t like it. She wants her letter opener back. While trying to plan how best to divide and conquer her steaming blini, it’s now she notices that they gave her a spoon with all these dishes, but no knife. What, so she took a blade of sorts to bed one time, and suddenly she can’t be trusted with sharp objects?

‘I’m curious; after stabbing me, what was it you were planning on doing next?’

At this rate Alina might as well have not had a bath at all, with all the terror sweat and now this hot flash of stupid girl rushing through her and lingering in all her crannies. Stupid, sweaty body. It isn’t even as if she actually stabbed anybody! If she looks up right now and sees that Yevgeniya finds this situation funny, deeming her to be cute and adorable, Alina will really want to stab her. She wouldn’t, physically she can’t (unless she wants to try cutting the lady’s heart out with a spoon) but she’ll want to, and Yevgeniya, with all her You must call me Genya, will know it.

However, while Alina’s quelling all the stabby desires raging in her breast by slicing up the unoffending blini, she does have to concede that, after all, the letter opener was yet another stupid plan. If anyone managed to infiltrate this building and get to her while she was asleep, they definitely weren’t going to be held at bay with a letter opener. In which case Yevgeniya has just cause to find her funny, but! She does not have the right!

With the blini quite savaged in place of Yevgeniya’s breast and the flood of embarrassment receding because, again, fuck they’re dragging me before the Emperor, Alina’s ready to look back up at Yevgeniya. ‘Not sure. Probably I’d start bitching about how I got dragged across half of Ravka to keep me ‘safe’, and then literally the first morning here I had to shank someone.’

Yevgeniya snorts. Actually snorts! She does put her hand up right quick to cover her mouth and the offending nose, but perhaps it’s more in shock that such a noise came out of a nose such as hers than because she wants to hide how she’s smiling.

‘Apologies. That was quite an image. And I shouldn’t make fun.’

‘Yes, you really shouldn’t.’ But Yevgeniya has been laughing at Alina’s words rather than Alina herself - she’s almost certain - so: ‘I wasn’t really planning to stab you. Or anyone. I’ve just been seeing assassins with axes everywhere-’ gesturing to the spot where the drüskelle smashed her head open, ‘-for some odd reason.’

‘Entirely understandable. Forgive me, but-’ Yevegeniya pulls up the towel to get a better look at the aftermath. ‘Fedyor’s work?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And Ivan didn’t heal the scar?’

‘He did not.’

‘Did you ask him to?’

‘I did not.’

‘Saints’ sake. Right.’ Yevgeniya rubs her thumb over the offending scar, without quite touching skin to skin. This time the pressure isn’t a twist; more like Alina’s own fingers wiping a dirty mark off her skin, or Kirigan’s handkerchief mopping up all that dried blood.

All right. In fairness, it did take Alina far too long to realise, but! Up until a few minutes ago she was being mobbed by six women in white and also in dread fear for her goods, her skin, her cleft, her toenails and her life. Pardon her for not paying full heed to Yevgeniya’s gown that is not actually a gown, with white gold embroidery that is gorgeous but doesn’t exactly pop. Are those needles on the shoulders???

‘I’ve never seen a white kefta before. Is it another rank of Healer?’

‘Not precisely. I’m a Tailor.’

Yevegeniya moves away to another table by the window, leaving Alina to ponder this particular title. Where’s she heard that word? Let’s see; the quarter master’s tent, being given her apportioned shirts and sarafan, that man in the far end with the massive scissors. ‘…Isn’t that someone who cuts up cloth?’

‘It is, but don’t tell the court ladies. They think they’re being really clever.’

‘So your power is cutting things? Cloth? People?’ Because if it’s the last one and if Yevgeniya does it anything like Kirigan wielding the Cut, then white is a terrible choice for garments, the blood gets everywhere and Alina should know it must be murder to get it out-

‘Quite the opposite, in fact. I fix, and I also modify.’ Out of nowhere Yevgeniya swoops in and takes Alina by the hand as if she’s about to go to one knee and kiss it like they’re in a story, passing her free hand over Alina’s fingertips and letting go before Alina can so much as go oi! and snatch her hand away. ‘Like so.’

Those are her fingernails? Before, clean after having the dirt scraped out of them but still so raggedy and torn; now, neatly trimmed and shiny and a subtle shade of pink. ‘Oh. Wow.’ And then, on reflection: ‘Did. Did you do that with my toenails as well? In the bath?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry for the shock, but they were really driving me insane.’

It’s fine. This is fine. It’s fine. It’s all done now. They were gone, they grew back, it isn’t as if they can stick the bits that got shaved off back on, and her nails do look lovely, so Alina lets Yevegeniya have her other hand for the same treatment. ‘Thank you. A bit of warning would have been nice, though. I thought for a second I’d caught leprosy.’

‘As if your day couldn’t have gotten any worse.’

It’s not funny. Really it isn’t. Alina shouldn’t laugh.

‘I’ve never met a Tailor before.’

‘At present my talents aren’t called for much among the Second, but they are very much in demand amongst the court. My main duties are tied between serving Elizabeth and occasionally Peter, and saving various court ladies from sagging bosoms. Honestly, there are days I’d rather be facing the Fjerdans.’

‘Elizabeth. And Peter.’

‘Yes?’

‘You mean the Grand Duchess Elizabeth?’

‘Yes.’

Every which way Alina looks there is painted across her sight O fuck, I fantasised about stabbing the Grand Duchess’ handmaid in the tits.

Well. Shit.

[ladystrallan]

New chapter of This Love!

Read chapter 9 (Back to December) here

[ao3-shenanigans]

In my (very nerodivergent, very queer) dnd group, we have a singular neurotypical cishet guy who plays a character that’s just him- very much Just Some Guy™️ energy, he likes horses.

Each week we are blessed with teaching him a new aspect of queer culture, last week it was the word ‘Twink’ (“oh! I thought you were talking about twinkie’s!”), this week it’s Ru Paul’s Drag Race (“like with cars??”)

What we talk about next week? No clue, but it sure won’t be the session that I had carefully and meticulously planned

[chronically-ghosted]

iron and charcoal

rating: explicit 18+ pairing: pero tovar x f!reader word count: 6.9K summary: Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. But there would be no tomorrow. No future, no light of dawn – not without –  Her. He’d never heal because tomorrow would never come.  OR Pero falls hard for a princess and doesn’t know what to do with himself on your wedding night. warnings: angst, brief classism/xenophobia two very stubborn people, pero experiences one Human Emotion and cannot fully process it, arranged marriage, yearning, smut LIKE WOW, soft!pero that i broke my own heart with a/n: Thank you so much to @perotovar for this request: "congrats on your milestone, my love! so happy for you <33 i'm sending a little astrology 💫 + pero & #6 on the fluffy list OR #1 on the smutty list (whichever is speaking to you), because i wanna see your take on him 👀” – of course I chose the slutty one, just for you 😉 I’m actually pretty proud of this one - please consider reblogging if you like it too!

*the image in the header is for aesthetic purposes only and does not reflect the appearance of the reader*

🤍Masterlist 🤍Pero Tovar Masterlist

💜come see what else we've done to celebrate 1K followers

Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 

Sometimes before battle, the clatter inside Pero’s head goes silent. It listens. It waits. 

Other times, it roars. Memories of family, of dead amigos, of mujeres he fucked – they all buck and scratch for a chance to blaze across his mind like a dust storm kicked up by an unbroken mustang. 

He doesn’t know which one he prefers or which one will win out. They both have their uses, necessary states of mind to survive whatever is barreling towards him – an ax, a monster out of legend, some other drunken mercenary he intentionally pissed off. It’s an unconscious decision, yet one that has served him well so far. He wouldn’t be alive today if some deep, primal part of him knew what he needed to live through another battle. 

And yet, his own trunk knocking against his hips as he climbed the sickly ostentatious stone steps to the top of the parapet, the handles starting to pinch his fingers, the barest – nearly invisible – tremor in his knees, he cannot fathom, for the life of him, why that singular phrase from his abuela played in his head like water swirling around and around a cenote. 

Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 

Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 

His inner voice, taking on a myriad of forms, of sounds and voices, never quite standing still, the one companion he could always rely on. 

Maybe it was warning him. Dust yourself off, boy, you know exactly how this was going to end. 

Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 

But there would be no tomorrow. No future, no light of dawn – not without –

Her.

He’d never heal because tomorrow would never come.

He feels sweat escape from the nape of curls at his neck, his cheeks warm and chest hot. Two more flights, he can manage two more flights. 

His abuela also liked to tell him something else: if hell doesn’t get him, his pride certainly will. 

It’s certainly what got him into this ridiculous farce in the first place. Because he can’t alchemize whatever is in his gut into vocalized syllables, he instead has to climb a truly incalculable amount of stairs, while carrying a ragged, torn trunk that weighs as much as his armor. 

Because he can’t form the right words, any words, about what he carries lodged beneath his breastbone for her. What draws him up and up and up and up because it’s lighter than hope, makes him lighter than air, and yet it clogs him up, chokes him out all the same. His pride, his vanity, cuts through it, through her – enough to keep him tongueless and dry but not enough to offer this lightness in his chest to her, for her. He can’t take the light out of him or else he fears what he will truly become.

So, he walks, he goes around and around on unforgiving stone steps until finally there is a door. He thinks about waiting, to catch his breath, but he knows he will just as easily turn around and go back the way he came, trunk still heavy and knocking against his hips, and that pride will be the death of him. So he keeps going, opens the handle, and makes abrupt eye contact with the two guards outside her door. They seem uninterested and unamused in his sweaty, stilted breathing, but by his less-than-royal attire, they easily clock him as one of their own; a man who fights to make his way in the world. The one on the left nods jerkily at him. 

What they see him as, what he will always be, is nearly the reason he kicks that fucking trunk all the way back down. Instead, he nods back, shoulders rounded, eyes down. 

“The princesa - the princess - is requesting the last of her things, to be b-brought up from the stables –,” he clears his throat, “drop this off for her and –,”

“Can’t let you in. King’s orders.” The one on the right sees him as something else – a foreigner first and foremost, their similar stations in life irrelevant. His bright blue eyes rove over Pero’s dark skin, dark hair, jagged scar, distaste and disgust smearing his already ugly features. But he had been dealing with men like these all his life.

“Bueno, you can explain to the King himself why his daughter’s belongings were lost and disregarded. I hear she’s very fond of the Italian prints at the bottom of this . . .”

The guards glance at each other, calculating way above their paygrade. Pero jostles the trunk as if to show he is not above throwing it out the window. 

“Fine.” The second one snaps. “Drop it inside and come back immediately.”

He drops his head, a good little foreign boy. “Gracias, señor.” 

The heavy wooden door opens beneath the iron lock and the instant he is through, he bolts it behind him. Waits to see if the guards notice. They don’t. Perfectamente – all the time in the world. 

All in the time in the world – for what? 

To fail? Again?

He stows the trunk in front of the door, extra time, a few seconds maybe – as if she wouldn’t just tell him to get out the instant she laid eyes on him. Only time will tell. 

Out of the atrium, another door, this one set deep into the wall. A last line of defense. He knocks, once, then twice, then waits. El orgullo chokes him again but fuck it, he’s come this far. He knocks again, knocks something in his chest free and, with it, spill the words:

“Princesa? It’s me. I –,” it throttles him, “princesa, can you open the door?” 

Silence. His heart sits, buried in that trunk. Then –

“It’s unlocked, Pero.” 

His heart in his throat, he opens the door to presumably what will be your marriage bed. And yet, by the state of things, you could have been moving out of it. Trunks and bags stack high against the far wall – those fucking trunks he made such a scene over because the unnecessary weight would slow them all down remain untouched, arranged as they had been when they had been first brought in. He didn’t quite know what to make of that, his thumb absently pressing into the callus of his other hand as he glanced around. It is a beautiful room – tall windows, etched in scarlet drapes, to match the scarlet curtains around the bed. With gold thread and impossibly detailed paintings of the countryside, it is fit for a princess, a some-day queen. This is where someone with royal blood deserved to be, not in the back of a hot carriage for weeks on end, surrounded by dirty, loud, rough men. 

And yet, with your hair down, expansive gown from the ball tonight replaced with a simple cotton dress, you could not have been more out of place. Pero’s heart lurches briefly, moisture seeping from his mouth, as he realizes this is the same dress he bought you when the two of you had been accidentally separated by the caravan and your previous dress had been ruined in the mud. He had no idea you still kept it, much less wore it ever again. 

But if anyone asked him, you look more beautiful in this than any silk or velvet. 

Instead of unpacking, settling into your new home and eventual role as wife, you sit hunched over at the intricately carved mahogany desk, eagle feather quill scratching against parchment. You finish with a flourish and look over your shoulder at him, your eyes annoyingly unreadable. 

“Yes?”

A stupid brute some may call him, but he wasn’t entirely without awareness. Observation of your customs and what you considered inappropriate only encouraged him: if you really didn’t want him here, you would never have let him see you in this state.

But it’s hard to remember that under your icy stare. 

“Y-your things, Princesa. The last from the caravan.”

Your eyes slide over him, to the trunk in the shadows of the atrium. He can tell from a single glance that you know as well as he that trunk is not yours, that no one told him to come here with it, and yet he did it all the same. Something flashes over your eyes but it’s gone by the time you meet his gaze again. 

“Thank you. I am, as always, indebted to you.” 

He hates your words, but warmth spreads in his gut at the way you say it. That’s how it’s always been between you and him – saying one thing but meaning another. He’d never appreciated a sharp mind like yours until he realized you wield it as he wields a sharp sword. 

There are many things he’d never even dreamed of before he met you.

“Then, this means you’re leaving, I suppose.” You draw your sword against him. The metal flashes in your eyes as you stand, one hand against the curved tip of your chair. A bronze halo rims your outline, the fire behind you burning bright and hot. He knows if he touched your shoulder, your neck, your skin would be wonderfully warm. 

He wets his lips. “Si. Our contract with your father is done.” 

You drop his gaze, your lips tightening for a minute, your fingers running through the carvings of wood on the chair. “Even with William in his state? Would it not be better for him to stay and recover? The journey home is –,” you pause, as though someone had thrown a hand over your mouth, “– the journey back east is long.” 

All the longer without you.

“William, he is not an idle man. Two days of bedrest is often all he can take.” 

You grin, in spite of this thing circling you both. “Unless he finds the nun attending to him beautiful.

“He finds them all beautiful.” 

Your smile expands wide across your bright face when you find him smiling at you too. 

This – if this is to be his last memory of you (his heart wrenches at the thought) – this is the you he wants imprinted on his soul: smiling and glowing by firelight. 

But as quickly as it came, that grin that warms him down to his bones, fades. In an instant, your eyes grow soft, your mouth twisted, jaw tight.

“Where will you go?” you ask, in the quietest voice you’d ever addressed him with. 

It pains him, physically aches within him, to hear the distress in your voice. He hasn’t even thought about the next contract, the next royal cabrón who intends to yank him all across God’s green earth to perform a task he can’t be fucked to take on himself. How can he possibly answer you? Nowhere, without you. To rot in a dark hole in the ground? Off a cliff? What answer would provide you or him any sort of satisfaction?

“Wherever the coin goes,” he says and the words scrape his tongue like bile. That ache in his chest spiraling rapidly, deep into his gut – like a poisoned limb he cannot amputate – he does the same thing he always does when he’s hurt: he makes others hurt until they leave him alone. “You do not have to worry, princesa, your new husband will keep you in such comfort you will never wonder where the coin comes from.”

He must be a truly sick man, for the knife-sharp glare you throw at him only knots arousal around the base of his spine. It tugs on something attached directly to his groin which, in turn, yanks the next words out of his mouth.

“He looked especially happy with you in his arms on the dance floor tonight.”

The icy shards in your eyes go brittle and crack. His heart races; he’s overplayed his hand. 

“You watched me dance?”

“All guardsmen were required to –,”

You shake your head, eyes bright and searing through him. “No. It was only the King’s Knights there in attendance.” 

Your hand trailing off the edge of the chair, you take a step forward and he feels his weight shift back onto his heels. But he remains firm. 

Sana, sana.

“Pero, why did you come here tonight?”

“To return the last of your things, princesa. What else is there?”

You flinch, as if he had raised his voice to you. What else is there indeed?

“Not even to . . .  say goodbye? Sixteen weeks on the road is an awfully long time to be around someone, only for them to . . . leave so soon.”

He locks his knees to keep them from shaking. “Do you wish for me to tell you goodbye, princesa?” 

There’s something painfully sad about the way you smile at him. “I wish for whatever would make you happiest.” 

Anger roars within him, hungry and hot, like a burn from a white flame. Why can’t you just admit it? Why do you avoid it time and time again? He knows he hasn’t misread anything you’ve sent his way, so why? Why are you so vested in torturing him this way? 

“Coin makes me happy and, now that I have it, there’s nothing to keep me here.”

There, that hurts you too, just as he meant it.

“Then leave.” They could make ice fortresses out of the strength of your bone-cold stare. “If you have nothing else to say, then take your goddamn trunk and get out of my sight.” 

The flame scorches him, ripping him apart and in his anger, making him cruel.

He bows to you.

“I imagine you will be very happy with your new husband, ranita.”

The term slips from his lips before he can stop it, but his throat and cheeks blister so badly, he physically can’t open his mouth to correct his mistake. Instead, he turns and strides towards the door.

He thinks he hears a gasp from behind him, a sharp sound like breaking glass – small, tinkling, tragic. It spears him through his chest, pierces his heart. 

He gets to the door and pauses.

If you have nothing else to say . . .

Of course he has something to say – words in English and Spanish and broken dialects gathered like poisonous lichen all churning in the boiling cauldron of his mind, but nothing will suffice – nothing reflects or compares to the grief he is already feeling, the despair, the anguish that has settled into all the fleshy joints in his body. Not his pride, but this, saying goodbye to you, this is what actually will kill him.

Every word imaginable crawls up his throat and rages in his mouth, presses up against his teeth, begging for something, anything to be let out, to be free, to tell you that he cannot fucking live without you–

Nothing comes through, but one single word.

“Don’t.” 

The fire crackles in the silence, a wicked god pleased at the display of carnage.

“What did you say?”

A dull thud echoes from where he drops his forehead against the wood of the door, all anger flooding out of his system. Do you have any idea the power you hold over him? One request, one tremor in your voice and his knees all but buckle at your altar. 

Fuck it. 

He always thought he’d go out in a blaze of bloody glory, but he’d never expected to be so exposed, so flayed like this.

“Don’t,” he repeats, his throat as dry as sand. “Do not . . . marry him. Please.” 

The vision of your great warrior slumped against the door frame, his neck bent, shoulders curled up to his ears has your already pounding heart leaping forward into a gallop. He is defeated, laid low. You watch his guts all but pool out on your hearth. 

He looks about as hopeless and anguished as you feel. 

Your soldier, your man of iron and charcoal, goes blurry in your eyes.

“And what would you have me do, Pero?” Your plea is damp, malleable at the edges. You press your hand flat against your chest, near your throat, as if you could pull the grief lodged there with your fingers. “I have been engaged to this man before I was even born. How can I stop this?” 

“Fight.” The word snarls against his bare teeth. He turns, his eyes liquid ink, and suddenly he has you by the shoulders. His thumbs nervously skitter around the curve of your shoulder, gaze just as unsteady and unfocused as it wavers between your hands, your earlobe, your neck. "Where is my brave girl who fights for what she wants, hm? Fight – for me, please.”

Fight, he asks – but in spite of him or because of him?

You lay your hands on the silver shine of his breastplate, watch as they rise and fall with his steady flow of breath. How many nights had you woken up against that shine, in the crook of his arm for warmth, or protection? You didn’t cherish it at the time because you never knew when it would be your last. 

“Why won’t you fight, princesa?” His voice is low, strained, the groan of a wagon wheel before it breaks. You meet his gaze and the exposed look on his face, softening every line on his mouth and around his eyes, nearly sends you into hysterics. You swallow the tears, swallow the hook in your throat as your fingers curl around the clasps of his cape. 

"Because if I don't fight then I can't lose.” His fingers slip from your shoulders, to your elbows, to your waist. You inhale and the scents of warm leather, oil, and ash flood your mouth. The tip of your nose is inches from the scruff of beard against his cheek, the ruddy brown of his sun-drenched skin. He has curled you into him and this, you do not fight either. His massive palms map your back, against your skin, but without any urgency or control. “If I can’t lose, that means I don’t lose you. You'll just be . . . gone."

That last word is a lie. It hangs in the air like a sweltering humid rain and you both know you’re lying. He has you wrapped up in his arms, you didn’t stop him even for a second, and you are all too aware that it would take some great, insidious alchemy to ever truly tear him out of you. 

You stare at his silver collar, defiant against the waves you had managed to shackle down until this very moment: a wave of hopeless crashes into you, a wave of heartbreak, a wave of helpless that fills your eyes to the point of spilling with that very same salt water.

He touches your cheek delicately, fingers rough with callouses, and the floodgates break open with a sob. 

“Preciosa,” he rumbles softly against your hairline, “hush. You break my heart with your tears.” 

“Do not mock me, Tovar. Not now.” you sniff, trying to turn your face but his wide hands catch you around the cheeks.

“You are beyond mocking. I’d show you my heavy heart but I do not wish that weight on anyone.” The snag of his rough thumbs against your cheek draws your watery gaze to him. His mouth is a flat line, barred against whatever climbs his throat, but his eyes move like mercury across your nose, your eyelashes, the arch of your cheek. Your fingers wrap themselves around his wrists, a grounding agent against the waves that threaten to pull you under. 

“Pero, I –,”

“I have fought you, tooth and nail, for days without end. Every favor, every breath, you have forced them from me. I fight my own mind when I sleep at night. Sueños, always of the same woman.” He smears away the tears with his thumbs, gently, sweetly, before pressing his lips to your wet flesh by his knuckle. He inhales deeply, eyes closed, mouth hovering stationary above the skin of your cheek. “You fight me every step of the way . . . and I am so tired of fighting.” 

For all your struggling, for all your tearing and clawing and snarling against the blooming in your chest, nothing is as easy as it is to turn your head and press your lips to his. 

The brush of his bristled mustache against your upper lip. His warm, rough palms holding you steady. His lips soft and hot. You are overwhelmed by the scent of him.

There is nothing like, and nothing will ever be like, finally kissing Pero Tovar. 

All it takes is the movement of his hands from your cheeks to your lower back, the light trace of his tongue against your lips, and the yearning you’d been smothering for weeks now roars to life. His hands squeeze your hips and you can suddenly barely breathe. 

“Pero–,” the noise in the shape of his name that escapes you is near a whine, begging. He nips at your lips, hand firmly at the cup of your jaw, mouth now rough and insistent, and your fingers claw up his neck, wrapping themselves in his dark curls. You tug, nails scratching his scalp, and he groans into your mouth as if you’d just kneed him in the gut.

A thread-bare gasp of your name from his lips splits you from him, then his hand on your hip and the back of your neck pushing you backwards gives you enough air to breathe – to think.

"Your husband will know you're not a virgin,” Pero warns, breathing hard and fast, his eyes like black flints, “if we go on." 

You curl your fingers around his neck, dragging your mouth near his jaw, the soft skin at the edge of his ear.

"Then he will also know my heart is not his either.” You ask everything of him with this. His armor blocks his warm body from you – you want to sink inside his hard shell. “If you’ll have it.”

He is not himself, half-human with an inhuman want, with the snarl that leaves him. 

“Don’t make such promises, dulzura –,” A threat, a dog forced to expose its underbelly, fear radiating like the pain from a broken bone. Your fingers dig into the buckles of his cape, steadying you against a sudden terrible awareness that bloomed, purple-bruised. 

“Unless you don’t want –,” 

The desk rattles when your hips break against it, the force of his kiss enough to topple over your inkwell, spill rolls of parchment to the floor. The wood groans under your weight when he gathers the thick swell of your thighs in his hands, heaves you onto the flat surface, and spreads your knees around his waist. He is as hard as the iron on his chest. 

“Can you feel how much I want you?”

A frantic sigh of relief, a groan shared between two pairs of lips, seeking skin and warmth and other hungry places. 

He drags you onto his chest, your skirt bunched up around your hips, the rings of his armor digging into the soft flesh of your thighs, his mouth covering yours in wet pulls, and he stands up right, as though you weighed less than his sword. 

A stumble, and he spreads you out on the velvet covers of your marriage bed, his hands imprinting on your hips, your knees, the supple meat of your calves. The touch of him on your bare skin feels like the licks of flames, the smoke of arousal blurring your awareness and dragging your eyelids half-closed. On his heels at the edge of the bed, the flint shards of his eyes drift over the bones of your ankles, the bend of your knee, your heaving chest, hair in snarls around your neck and caught behind your back, and finally to your cunt, hidden by the folds of your dress. 

Velvet hums as you slide your ankles to the curve of your ass, widening your legs, parting your knees. His lips part open, dark want etching every line of his face. You feel the wet linen of your dress cling to your achy cunt. He swallows, unbuckling his cape one latch at a time, his eyes nowhere else. The metal clatters as it falls to the floor.

Piece by piece, the chinks in his armor fall away. Piece by piece, he is revealed to you. Your hands rise up, up your thighs to your knees, your thumbs rubbing soft circles. He watches, never tears his gaze away from your sticky hole, his nimble fingers working away the buckles and knots with practiced precision. You can see it in his eyes – memories of bedrolls by firelight, of such a deep painful, yearning ache, separated only by thin tarp, they are a physical weight beside you in this marriage bed. 

You see them because they’re there for you too. You see them because you've been here a dozen times, on your back, legs spread wide, your hands circling but never dipping, waiting. Wanting. For him. 

His bare chest is warm, the wings of his ribs expanding around short, half-drawn breaths, as he crawls up into your pliant mouth. The kisses are slow, like before, with a crackle of heat just beyond them, his hips slipping into the cradle of your thighs, the wet warmth of you separated by the thin linen of your dress. He sucks the tendon below your ear, a whine slipping out of your mouth, fingers spreading over the harsh planes of his back, and his cock bobs against your thigh. 

Pero is bare and warm and entirely yours. All man beneath the sweltering armor. 

“Amorcita,” he drips into your ear, kisses smeared against your collarbone, your mouth, your earlobe, “amorcita, amorcita . . . ranita, let me take you.” 

He starts to use teeth, a harder nip behind his kisses, when he dips down to your chest. A wide palm with stocky fingers grasps at your breast and it’s a startling sensation for you both. 

“Soft,” he moans before licking up under the supple curve of your breast, mouthing at what his tongue missed. He slips your erect nipple into his mouth and twists it between his teeth. “Sweet,” he murmurs with your nipple firmly between his lips. 

This is unlike anything you’ve felt before. You deliriously thank the gods that he hadn’t touched you like this on the road; you would have kept him, your own wild animal, in bed without rest for days on end.

Pero plucks just as aggressively at your other breast, the spit-wet nipple that preoccupied his mouth verging on purple and aching. He cups you from the outside this time, squeezing and massaging, ringing your nipple with his tongue until your back bows and you let out a whine that has his eyes flickering up to you, the scent of wounded prey filling his nostrils. 

That whine of pleasure elongates into a whimper: “please.”

“Tranquila, ranita.” His touch is softer around your bruised tits, but he keeps one hand bagging the weight of your breast while the other slips beneath your skirt.

The pads of his fingers brush your creamy cunt and with a yelp, you grab him by the wrist, your eyes open with a familiar emotion he draws out of you: rage.

“Pero Tovar, if you value your life you will take me under the covers and put your —,”

He chuckles, his cheek against yours, nose rimming the velvet hairs on the ridges of your ear. The vibrations liquify the tension in your bones, loosening your grip. Your eyes flutter, slick obviously running down his fingers. “Ranita, I don’t think you know how you want to end that sentence..”

His words roll like honey over the heat of your skin. It makes your skin tremble. Your grip tightens on his wrist and you roll your hips, your swollen clit finally relieved by the pressure of his palm. 

“Oh, oh, Pero—,” 

With a grunt, he shuffled closer, elbow by your shoulder and he cups your entire wet cunt in his hand, pushing the heel of his palm flatter against you. You cry out, a sparkling kind of pleasure radiating out from where his hand rests. You buck your hips faster, complete release flickering through your outstretched hand. 

“Can you come like this?” You nod, eyes squeezed shut as you barrel towards escape, and you feel him shudder next to you. You are intimately aware that he’s rubbing his cock on the crease of your hip bone but that only drags you faster towards the light. “Then come, ranita, come and I’ll fuck you.” 

The wet, curling heat growing between your legs descends, then in a bright snap, explodes across your body. 

“Fuck!” You tear open your eyes to find them damp, Pero’s massive hand cupping your cheek towards him, his stallion eyes dark as his fingers drag on the soaked material of your dress, your hips slowing. 

“Amorcita, breathe.” The words are torn from his chest, all cock-suredness gone from his frantic gaze. You gulp in air, the weight of his body over yours grounding and smothering you all at once. He pulls his hand away from you, rides it up your thigh to your waist, looking for something to hold onto. He strokes his thumb once against your overheated skin and you’re wriggling up out of your dress. 

“Help,” you hiss and his fingers nearly tear the fabric off you.

With a few undone buttons, you shiver out of your dress, the slick-drenched spots catching on your warm skin. He flings it behind him, near the fireplace. 

He takes you barely beneath the thick covers before you welcome him back to the heat of your open legs. 

But instead of reeling back and plunging his aching cock into you, he takes the time to kiss you. To praise you in all the ways he fears his mouth will end up short. He kisses you, grateful, reverent – wonderful to be swallowed by but also a distraction.

When he lifts your knees by his waist, your hips automatically tilt towards him and for the first time, you feel his red, sore cock between your tacky lips. The dual sensation nearly drags you over the rack of delectably delicious pleasure, as does his worn, broken groan in your ear. 

“More, please, don’t stop.” You cry against the bristles of his beard, his hand dropping between your sweat-slick bodies, finding yours already there to guide him. The press of him spreads you open, filling you one sinking notch at a time. The sensation of your pink, dripping walls moving to take more of him in has you arching up into his chest, nails dragging into his back. His dry lips stifle the moans escaping from your mouth. 

Pero takes both of your hands in his, dragging them above your head, his fingers locking your palms together as his hips roll forward. “Cálmate, amorcita, cálmate,” he murmurs between distracted presses of his mouth against your chin, your cheek, his breathing heavy and stunted. You writhe, pinned open by his hips and his hands, his cock filling you all too slowly and not fast enough. 

With the last few inches, you take him completely, your cunt throbbing, heart pounding, intoxicated by the sensation of being so maddeningly full. Pero drapes over you, his head tucked into your neck, forearms straining with the tension of gripping your hands tightly. 

“Santa madre . . .” He is not a warrior right now. He is but a man, cunt-drunk and heaving. 

His name is pushed out of the bottom of your lungs with the first swing of his hips. You cling to him, knees at his ribs, unwilling to let even an inch of space between your bodies. But this becomes increasingly difficult as his thrusts gain speed. His flushed lips stain a sticky line against your jaw, down to your throat, and he releases your hands, the oak of the bed creaking beneath the force of him drilling down into you, he props himself up on his palms, his shoulders bent and curled over you, biceps straining, hairline damp, eyelids fluttering. The scar on his cheek is flushed pink.

“Look, amorcita, look how well you take me.”

His words tear you from your nebulous high, the grit of them forcing your head down to the obscene squelch beneath the sheets. The thatch of rough curls over his groin is drenched in slick, his thick cock soaked to the point of shine as it drives into you again and again. The heavy draft of breath the sight steals from him, the tap of his cock against a place so deep you didn’t know your body possessed, draws the spooling bliss as tight as a wire. 

Your trembling thighs squeeze him tighter, that hot pressure rendering you speechless, except for the most pathetic whine. Please, Pero, please, you think, you mutter, you whisper, your body rocking damp against the sheets. 

With a sudden snarl, he takes the chunk of your hair at the base of your head flat in his fists and tugs. A shoot of bright pain sparks bliss down to your tight and bruised nipples, and you cry out again. 

“Stop fighting, puedo sentir cuanto la quieres. Let me have it.” It is the following word that splits you open like lighting carving apart a tree. “Please.”

The wail that you release is the rush of gooseflesh over your skin alchemized into audible sound. Heat radiates through you, sucking the air from your lungs, your vision going blurry, then black as you clamp your eyes shut against the rush, the final release, that curls you into his arms. His warm, flushed arms, shaking with strain. A final wobbly thrust or two and his elbows are buckling, sweat-drenched chest pressing into your own.

Distantly, you are aware of the warm, slick drip down your thighs, his cock pulsing the last drops into your cum-flecked cunt, and the dangers this sort of intimacy poses. You can’t gather enough breath, enough sense to settle the spinning room, to worry or even care. 

Your his, and he is yours. That is all that will ever matter. 

The crackle of wood burning is the only other sound than your ragged breaths, the silent roll of sweat from sticky hot skins into the bedsheets. The stone walls of the castle’s room entomb you together for a brief stretch of infinity.

Pero moves and you think he’s going to back out of you, but instead, he merely adjusts, his head fully on your chest, thick fingers clutching your bruised waist, the shift of his cock pushing more of his release out of your oversensitive cunt. But you’ll take overstimulation over his absence every time. You run your fingers through his damp curls and he hums. 

“I’m sorry,” he huffs into your humid skin. “I’m sorry I let my pride keep us apart for so long.” 

You grin lazily to the ceiling, your breath settling as affection takes its place in your chest. 

“You were not the only one blinded by vanity.” 

“But I’m not blind. Not anymore.” He lifts his head, eyes as dark as your spilled inkwell. “I am never letting you go.” 

You smile at him, fingers soft against the back of his neck. “I don’t plan on wandering away.” 

His oil-black gaze drops to your lips and he leans forward to take your mouth against his. Gentle, but with the promise of more. 

“Mi ranita,” he purrs to break the kiss. 

“You call me that all the time, Pero. What does it mean?”

At that, a nearly shy expression crosses his face. He shakes his head, shifting onto his elbows to lift off you. “I can’t tell you. It will ruin your good mood.” 

You gasp, offended, and you grab him by the ear and twist. He chuckles through a grimace. “You will tell me what that means, Pero Tovar, if you value your appendages.” 

“Órale, princesa, retract your claws and I will tell you.” 

You release your grip and settle against your pillow. Grinning bashfully, he kisses your neck briefly.

“Remember that I love you after I tell you this.” 

Your heart nearly stops, the absence of a steady beat nearly drawing tears to your eyes but you hold firm. You breathe deeply against the fluttering in your stomach and pin him with your glare. Of course, this is how he would profess his love to you – when he’s trying to get out of trouble. 

“Tell me, Tovar!”

He chuckles again and preemptively picks up your hands. He kisses the inside of your palms, settling himself between your thighs. 

“It means little frog.” Your mouth falls open in a gasp and you struggle to yank your hands back from him, hissing like a tea kettle, but he uses his weight to press down on you. He nips at your nose. “I call you that because when you’re upset with me, much like you are now, you puff up like a bullfrog, your cheeks like this–,”

He rounds his cheeks full of air, crossing his eyes, and you simply cannot take the slight anymore. You push roughly against his gut, the breath trapped in his mouth escaping in a hot puff, and you twist him onto his back. He lets you, of course, his bold, full laughter rendering him defenseless. His body shakes beneath you, his beautiful eyes squeezed shut, his mouth open wide as he laughs and laughs and laughs. You take him by the wrists and push his limp hands over his head, pinning him as he had you. You pinch his chin with your teeth, your messy cunt over his stomach, as his laughter subsides. 

“Have you had your fun yet?” 

“Barely,” he chuckles, turning his big nose against your cheek and inhaling. He hums.

“Is that all I am to you? A joke?”

Pero opens his eyes, sober as death rattle. He takes you in, not in a hungry, all-consuming way, but in a look that speaks of awe and rapture.

“You are everything to me.”

You sigh, releasing his hands and curling into his chest. He kisses the top of your head, your eyes on the roaring fire. His thumbs rub your shoulder blades, trace the lines of your spine.

“You’re so very lucky I love you too.” 

His wandering against the expanse of your back stills, just for a moment, before his fingers slide into your hair, around the nape of your neck, holding you to him with the intention of keeping you there forever.

“I know, ranita, I know.” 

He watches you sleep as the sky lightens beyond the tall windows on the opposite side of the bedroom. The dying fire traces your edges in gold, settling heat in the curve of your lips. 

His heart lurches with the wanting of you.

There’s more terrible things to come, he knows that. The plan the two of you concocted in the early morning hours will be dangerous, deadly even. But dying together instead of living apart would be much more tolerable, you told him earlier that night, your hand on his chest. 

He would kill if you asked. He would kill, even if you didn’t, to keep you safe and by his side. You’ve proven yourself capable of living a life away from this spectacular opulence, but it pains him to know he will never be able to give you anything nearly as lovely as the velvet dresses in the closet, the gold jewelry in your trunks. 

Instead, all he has to offer is himself. His strength, his hands, his heart. It’s his own fear that tells him that’s not enough, because you remind him again and again that’s more than you ever wanted. 

He traces the curve of your cheek with the hovering pad of his finger, brushing your hair away from your face. How he ended up so lucky with your love, he’ll never know, but he will spend the rest of his days proving that he’s earned it. 

You stir in your sleep, sensing him above you, and he hates to steal even a few minutes of blissful sleep from you, knowing the endless nights that are coming. When he steals you away from all that you’ve ever known. 

The sleepy grumble in your throat resembles his name as he curls around you, but your eyes remain gently closed. He pulls you against him, the air that leaves your mouth and sits between your chest and his something he covets with his whole heart. 

I love you and I’m disgustingly lucky and I love you. 

He is a man made of dust, serving men made of silver. He is a man of dust, loving a woman made of gold.

El orgullo? No, Abuela, his ranita will get him first, last, and every time.

+

Translations:

Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. - This rhyme is typically said to children when they have just hurt themselves. The parent (or grandparent) usually rubs the part that is sore and sings this little tune. Literally translates to: "heal, heal, little frog’s tail. If you don’t heal today, you will heal tomorrow."

el orgullo - pride

dulzura - sweetness, romantic connotation

amorcita - little love, romantic connotation

Tranquila - quiet, as in "be quiet" or "relax"

Cálmate - take it easy, or take it slow

puedo sentir cuanto la quieres - I can feel how much you want it/love it

Órale - okay, or an exclamation expressing approval or encouragement.

ranita - little frog, but you knew that already ;)

the rest are cognates (or familiar words) which you can probably guess the meaning of, but feel free to message me if you don't know!

[ao3-crack]

(x)