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jsmn_kinkmeme2015-08-30 12:20 pm
jsmn_kink) wrote in jsmn_kinkmeme2015-08-30 12:20 pm
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☆ Round Two!
Welcome to the second round of the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Kink Meme at jsmn_kinkmeme!
Below are some basic guidelines, but please make sure you also check out our complete Rules & Guidelines.
Guidelines:
■ Anonymously comment with your request – a character/pairing/nthsome, and a kink or prompt.
■ Only one prompt per post.
■ Fillers please link your fills in the Fills Post!
■ Have fun! :)
Keep in mind:
■ Any kinks welcomed!
■ The fill/request does not need to be sexual or porny.
■ Multiple fills are allowed.
■ Fills can be any sort of creative work: fic, art, song, photomanip, etc.
■ Beware of spoilers! Prompters and requesters are encouraged to warn for spoilers, but this rule is not enforced.
■ Warning for non-con, dub-con, abuse, slurs/language, and other potentially disturbing subjects is encouraged but be aware we do not enforce this.
■ Would fillers please make sure when posting a fill in multiple parts that they thread their comments by replying to previous parts.
Links:
☆ Mod Post
☆ Fills Post
☆ Discussion Post
☆ Misfire deletion requests
☆ Previous Rounds: Round One
jsmn_kinkmeme!Below are some basic guidelines, but please make sure you also check out our complete Rules & Guidelines.
Guidelines:
■ Anonymously comment with your request – a character/pairing/nthsome, and a kink or prompt.
■ Only one prompt per post.
■ Fillers please link your fills in the Fills Post!
■ Have fun! :)
Keep in mind:
■ Any kinks welcomed!
■ The fill/request does not need to be sexual or porny.
■ Multiple fills are allowed.
■ Fills can be any sort of creative work: fic, art, song, photomanip, etc.
■ Beware of spoilers! Prompters and requesters are encouraged to warn for spoilers, but this rule is not enforced.
■ Warning for non-con, dub-con, abuse, slurs/language, and other potentially disturbing subjects is encouraged but be aware we do not enforce this.
■ Would fillers please make sure when posting a fill in multiple parts that they thread their comments by replying to previous parts.
Links:
☆ Mod Post
☆ Fills Post
☆ Discussion Post
☆ Misfire deletion requests
☆ Previous Rounds: Round One
FILL: On the March, Part 4/?
(Anonymous) 2015-09-10 01:12 am (UTC)(link)Not that he'd have preferred to meet the thing in the dark of night, either. He'd prefer not to meet it at all. It just felt unfair, that things like that could exist in daylight too.
"... Major Grant," Childermass called softly in front of him. He turned slightly, his arm quivering a bit in Grant's grasp, and there was something of a pale, unholy light in his eyes when they met Grant's own. He was shaking again, as much from a terrified exuberance as from weakness, and his grin wasn't really a daylight thing either. "I've just had a very foolish notion, Major Grant. Would you like to hear it?"
Grant stared at him in a distant sort of amusement. "I had an idea you might have," he said wryly. "Is it the sort of notion that will get us killed?"
Childermass chuckled. "If it goes wrong, most certainly," he said, shrugging awkwardly around Grant's hand. "Even if it goes right it'll not exactly be a pleasant journey. I'm about to ask you to take a very great risk, Major. Will you come with me? Will you follow?"
Grant had to laugh at that. Looking around them, looking at the bloody great monster looming behind the man. Would he follow? He'd already answered that, surely, or he wouldn't have ended up here in the first place. Yet there was something very serious in Childermass' expression, when he looked back at him. There was an earnest question on his face, and Grant sobered a little in the face of it.
"... To hell and back, sir," he said eventually, and entirely serious himself. He changed his grip on Childermass' arm, moved his hand down to the wrist to hold more in a brotherly clasp than a restraining grip. Childermass blinked at him, somewhat startled, and very cautiously turned his hand to return the gesture. "I'll follow you to hell and back by this stage. If only because we look to have already made it most of the way there."
Childermass smiled faintly, a little flicker of amusement, but there was still something deep and somewhat startled in his eyes. There was a very strange expression as he looked at Grant, and Grant didn't entirely know what to make of it.
It hardly mattered, after a moment. Childermass shook it off, and Grant's hand as well, and looked back across the hollow towards the barghest. A group of hounds ran past them suddenly, off to one side, and seemed only barely turned aside by Childermass' magic. It was subtle, just the slightest veering off of their course, but Grant flinched a little anyway, certain that the creature had to notice it. Surely it had to notice them sooner or later, by one means or another. They couldn't hope to hold out for much longer, standing right out in the open.
"It wasn't quite hell I had in mind," Childermass said softly, recalling his attention. Grant looked back at him, and found him staring quite intently across the hollow, towards something at the back of it. A rock, it looked like. A rock that rested just a few feet beyond the barghest itself. Oh god. Not quite hell, eh? But near as damn it nonetheless.
"You want us to walk past that thing," he said. It wasn't a question. He'd had enough experience of this day so far to not even be surprised. "Your magic is barely holding out as it is, and you want us to walk right past the monster itself. That is your plan?"
He tried a little question at the end, there. He tried to make it a little less than a certainty. He was, apparently, to be sorely disappointed. Childermass only looked at him, wan and pale and so wryly determined, and grinned a condemned man's grin. So yes, then. Yes, that was apparently the plan. All right. Grant could ... He could probably manage that.
"I think you'll need to hold me up," Childermass admitted, very quietly. "It's magic is ... There'll be a great deal, that close to it. I'm not sure I'll be able to keep my feet. Will you ...?"
"Don't be stupid," Grant said, though gently enough. "I'll carry you past it, if I have to. Just try to keep it from noticing us in the process, will you? I don't fancy being torn to shreds this afternoon. I haven't even had dinner yet."
The jest didn't quite wring the reaction he'd hoped, only the barest flicker of a smile. Childermass had turned his attention fully to the problem at hand, and he didn't exactly look that optimistic about it. Determined, most certainly, but not optimistic. Grant stepped up beside him quietly. He drew his sword, perhaps uselessly, and took a place beside the man.
"Put your arm around my shoulder," he said to him softly. Childermass looked at him, with a grim sort of anticipation, and Grant smiled carefully at him. "Put your arm across my shoulder, Mr Childermass, and let us walk."
Childermass closed his eyes, and nodded faintly. "There'll be a moment at the rock where I'll have to switch spells," he said, when he'd opened them again and carefully slung one arm across Grant's shoulders. "It'll see us. With luck, we'll be beyond it by that time. Without luck ..."
"Without luck we won't have to worry about it for very long," Grant finished, and set one arm around the man's waist, ready to take his weight at a moment's notice. "No time like the present, sir. I'm ready if you are."
Childermass did chuckle at that, grim and strained. "I'm not ready at all," he said blithely. "Walk anyway, Major. It'll work or it won't."
And with that ringing endorsement, they set out across the hollow, right beneath the very teeth of the monster itself.
It didn't take long for the toll to become visible on Childermass. Barely two steps, even. Grant felt the weight start to pull on that shoulder, felt it try to tug them both off balance, and braced himself against it grimly. They were fortunate, in one sense. With all the dogs out hunting them around the hollow, there were very few obstacles left within the thing itself. Besides the obvious one, of course. There was a sort of bleak humour to that. The way was mostly clear, because only the most hare-brained or absolutely desperate of idiots would have tried walking closer to the nightmare in front of them.
Childermass made a small noise, beside him. Pain, it sounded like, or very deep strain. The same kind of noises he'd been making earlier, when he'd fainted at the rock outcrop somewhere above them. He didn't fall, though. He leaned very heavily on Grant, but he stubbornly kept putting one foot in front of the other, his dark eyes fixed defiantly on the creature. It was focused outside the hollow, still. It hadn't noticed them at all, even as they passed less a yard to one side of it. Grant felt a surge of vicious, absurd anger at that. The damned thing was that stupid, yet it could kill Childermass just by existing. That definitely did not seem fair.
They came clear of it. They walked right under its nose to the rock behind it, and Childermass fairly staggered the last few steps to the boulder. Grant slung him up against it, getting ready to turn and face the thing for the moment of truth, but Childermass snagged his sleeve pointedly. Grant looked at him, silent and with his sword in hand, ready for anything. Childermass smiled up at him through his exhaustion, a wild, magician-like sort of a look.
"No," the man said softly. His free hand was pressed against the stone, and there was an eerie, vaguely inhuman sort of triumph to his smile. "You don't need that. It won't have time. Stay with me, Major. Stay beside me."
Grant meant to ask why. He meant to ask what the man planned. There wasn't time, however. Childermass pressed his clawed fingers against the rock, pressed them suddenly and impossibly into the rock, and suddenly all the magic in the air about them changed.
The barghest spun, a high, terrifying snarl escaping it as it noticed them, a howl of absolute fury as it summoned its animals to itself, and Childermass pulled violently on Grant's arm. Grant staggered, felt himself hang in the air for what seemed like an endless second, and then Childermass' arms came about him and the man pulled him, in his entirety, into the boulder behind him. Into more than the boulder. They sank into a sudden, absolute darkness, and Grant only distantly heard the barghest scream in thwarted fury behind them.
He didn't understand what was happening, at first. There didn't seem to be a reference point. They were moving, he could feel that, but they were moving by no means he understood. It didn't feel like Merlin's descriptions of the King's Roads, the way he'd described travelling through the mirrors. That had been on foot, after the initial transfer. This ... was not. He'd no idea what it was. Childermass' arms around him seemed to be the one fixed point in a suddenly very formless world, and he clung to them without shame, awkwardly around the sword hilt still held in one hand. He hoped he hadn't accidentally stabbed the man mid-spell. He had an idea that would be very unfortunate. Very unfortunate indeed.
He didn't know how long they spent like that. It felt like an eternity, a dark and shapeless length of time without any measure at all, but then abruptly there was light again, a great wall of it slamming across them, and it felt like no time at all had passed. He staggered, pulling Childermass close against him as his feet encountered something that felt like the ground once more, and he blinked his eyes desperately until he could see around him once again.
Then he stared. Across from him, tied to their tree, two horses blinked myopically at him, seemingly wondering where the hell he'd sprung from. Grant couldn't blame them. He was busy wondering how the bloody hell they'd ended up back on the road himself.
Before he could ask, however, Childermass finally collapsed out from under him. Grant grabbed at him clumsily, dropping his sword with a harsh clatter and hoping neither of them landed on it, and then followed the man down to the ground. Childermass flopped limply against him, his head landing with a small thump against Grant's chest. Grant caught it, once they were safely seated on the ground. He cupped one hand around it, the other arm cradling Childermass' back, and pressed that brown head shakily into his chest.
They didn't move, for a minute. Childermass had faded completely, and Grant was busy trying to regulate his heartbeat in the wake of all that had just happened. They held still. Grant cradled the other man in his arms, and took a little moment to wonder at how familiar a sensation that was becoming. He wondered, a little ashamedly, at how right it was beginning to feel.
Childermass stirred, eventually. He came aware and stirred fitfully in Grant's arms, protesting the hand holding his head in particular. Grant let that one drop, but kept the arm around the man's shoulders. After all that, he wasn't letting Childermass fall now.
"... It worked, then," Childermass rasped at last. He sounded quite surprised by this, which did not at all help Grant's spate of nerves diminish. "Huh."
That was helpful, Grant thought. That was a damned bloody helpful thing to be saying. He shook his head, a confused jumble of anger and amazement and lingering terror bubbling through him, and somehow they settled out into humour instead. They settled out into a laughing sort of joy, as he hugged the bewildered man to his chest.
"What the bloody hell was that?" he asked, grinning wildly and apparently somewhat alarming the man. "What the hell did you do?"
Childermass blinked at him in consternation. Merlin wouldn't have, Grant thought. Jonathan Strange had gotten used to any variety of reactions to his magic. Apparently Childermass had not had the same depth of experience yet. Though if all his magic was as secretive as the bulk of this encounter, maybe that wasn't that surprising. He caught up eventually anyway. He sat up, very slowly and achingly, and to be honest only successfully because Grant helped him, and blinked cautiously into Grant's amazement.
"... 'Twas the rock," he said at last, oddly stiff and hesitant about it. "It let us through, to the bedrock beneath. Bedrock carried us up here. These are my moors, you see. This is my country. I told you it'd stand beside me."
Grant blinked at him. Childermass sat in a heap in the roadway, his face gaunt and white still, his brown hair in tangle around his face. The moors rolled out around him, vast and purple and wild, and suddenly Grant could almost feel it. Not the magic, exactly, but the belonging. The man in front of him was a half-wild thing, for all his neat waistcoat and the white cloth at his throat. His aspect wasn't entirely human, in a way that Merlin's hadn't become until the very end. There was no madness to him, though. There was only a calm, steady defiance, and that cool insolence forever in his gaze.
He was a beautiful thing, Grant thought distantly. In his own way, Childermass was a very beautiful thing indeed.
"... So you did," he said softly. "I remember. You did tell me that." He paused, tried to shake himself. For God's sake, man, now was not the time to be falling for another man's charms! Especially when said man was more than half-dead and very, very wary. "That is. Ah. I'm glad they saw fit to stand with us, then."
Childermass looked at him oddly for that. Like he wished to say something cutting, but couldn't quite manage it. A strange expression crossed his face, something between pain and gratitude and outright suspicion, and then abruptly the man held out a hand to him, palm up and forearm bared. An offer of a clasp, and of something else as well.
"And you," Childermass said, very quietly. "You stood fast as well. I'll thank you for it."
Grant stared at him. He gripped the hand that was offered, because it was nothing he could willingly let fall, but still he stared in some distant bemusement at the man. Tallying up a lot of things, the way Childermass had paused to check his willingness at every step of the way, the half-wary stance the man had never quite lost throughout their little adventure, and coming to something of a very cold conclusion.
"You don't have a lot of experience with that, do you," he said softly. "People standing by you. It's something very strange to you, isn't it."
Anger came back to Childermass' expression, anger and that cold defiance yet again, but before he could say anything, a bloodcurdling sound tore out across the moors beneath them. The baying of a thousand dogs, and the roar of one incredibly angry barghest ripped out through the afternoon air, and just like that there was no time for suspicion once again.
Childermass' head dropped back onto his shoulders, an expression of purest aggravated despair crossing his still-white face. "Bloody buggering hell," he snarled out, almost more exasperated than afraid, and Grant near laughed at him once again.
"Come on," he said, leaning down to thread his arm around the man's shoulders and help him wearily to his feet once again. "I think we may need to get off this moor, don't you? And quickly, perhaps."
To hell and back, he thought lightly. They'd been to hell and back, and they were ahead of the game so far. To be honest, they weren't doing so bad at all.
Re: FILL: On the March, Part 4/?
(Anonymous) 2015-09-10 08:00 am (UTC)(link)Re: FILL: On the March, Part 4/?
(Anonymous) 2015-09-10 12:51 pm (UTC)(link)FILL: On the March, Part 5/?
(Anonymous) 2015-09-10 09:51 pm (UTC)(link)Childermass was clearly in no fit state to ride. Stubborn might get him a certain distance, but given how often he'd collapsed already, there was no way he'd be able to hold on at a gallop or even a fast trot while they fled the moor. He'd fall off his horse before they'd gone five miles, and that would be a fine cap to the afternoon. To get so far only to be murdered by his own trampling beast of a horse. No. That wouldn't do at all.
He gave some brief thought to simply throwing the man across his own saddle horn and riding for it, but if his attempt to throw the man across his shoulder had been anything to go by, that would earn him an honest fight, and they could hardly afford that either. He'd have to sit the man in front of him in the saddle, across his knees so he could keep a hold of him. That was hardly going to be either comfortable or dignified, and he had some suspicion that Childermass' abused dignity had already reached the end of its rope, but there was just no bloody helping it.
"Will your horse follow mine?" he asked, while they stumbled over to the animals. Childermass, who'd obviously been thinking along similar lines to him, and not liking the results any better, grimaced viciously. He conceded the necessity, however. He could apparently be a very practical man in places.
"Brewer knows how to get home," he agreed sourly. "He'll follow where I go. If you think I'm going across your saddle horn, though, you can damn well think again."
Grant blinked at him, mildly sheepish to have been caught out, and the glare Childermass sent him when he realised that was a true champion. Grant shrugged, trying to hide his smile, and was helpfully reminded by the howling from the bottom of the ridge that they should really hurry up about things.
"Wouldn't dream of it," he said, and pulled the man over to help get him up onto the horse. It was going to take some pushing. Childermass was weak as a babe, and whether he'd have the strength to pull himself up was an honest question. "Sit up on the horn for a minute, let me get in behind you. You can rest back against me once I've got my feet in the stirrups, all right?"
Childermass only snarled, and then tried, honestly and desperately, to pull himself up into the saddle. The horse shifted, startled and uneasy, and Grant had to hastily reach out and steady it. It looked for a minute that Childermass was going to fall back down, his dignity finally killed at last, when suddenly ...
When suddenly the tree the horses had been tied to, the tree itself, reached down with its branches and grabbed Childermass by his caped shoulders. It plucked him up into the air, Grant stumbling back a step which a shocked cry, and dropped him entirely artlessly into the saddle. Childermass landed with a thump, clinging wild-eyed while the horse shied beneath him, and Grant could tell by his stunned, white face that that had most definitely not been a planned part of the proceedings. Which, given that a tree had just come to life, was not at all a reassuring thing to be realising.
"... What?" he asked, stepping close again cautiously. "Did you just ...?" Somewhat hoping, you see, despite all evidence of the day so far.
"No," Childermass said, still wild-eyed. He calmed quickly, though. He turned to his head to study the tree with sharp, only mildly panicked eyes. Grant blinked up at him, itchily aware of the howling still drawing ever closer. Moving trees that plucked people in and out of saddles were something of a pressing problem as well, though. He allowed that.
"Well?" he asked, after a long second. Not hurriedly. He'd no very pressing need to be elsewhere at the moment, of course not. Childermass glanced down at him, but both his shock and his aggravation seemed to have vanished, suddenly. In their place, there was something that looked ... almost like awe. Like wonder.
"It's the moor," the man said softly, with something of a dazed expression. "It's still listening. All of it, not just the rock. It's ... It's gone and woken up."
Grant blinked rapidly, the prickling sensation on the back of his neck suddenly becoming very pressing indeed. He glanced warily around him, wondering what that meant exactly. The rocks had carried them up half a mile of ridge, and a tree had just picked a man up and dropped him where it wanted him. The moors were vast around them, and judging by the man in front of him they were not a tame place at all. He wasn't sure he was happy with the idea that they'd gone and taken an interest in the somewhat vulnerable men atop them.
But then ... then they had helped, so far. Everything they'd done, even putting Childermass up on the horse, had been aimed to help them. Childermass believed in them. He believed with utter surety that the moors would stand by him against his enemies, and they certainly had a very pressing one of those right now. They'd not been let down so far. So ... maybe that faith wasn't such an unfounded thing for the man to have.
"... Do you think they'd be willing to help us, then?" he asked the man softly. Childermass blinked down at him, a fey sort of look about him, and Grant swallowed faintly but continued on. He stepped back in close to the horse, rested his hand just behind the man's leg, and asked it of him in lieu of the moors themselves. "Do you think they might try and waylay that thing for us, just until we get clear? We'd not be leaving it with them long. When we know how to deal with it, we'll come back and do so. But if they could help us now, just to get away from it ...?"
Childermass blinked slowly at him. There was a strange expression on his face. Not an alien one, not as though something other than himself was looking out through his eyes, though there was perhaps a hint of that. He was a half-wild thing, even still, and the moors apparently spoke to him. But no. This was Childermass' own expression, and Grant couldn't quite interpret it.
".. You'll give them your word, will you?" the man asked him quietly, heavily, after a thoughtful second. "You'll promise them to return and deal with it when the time comes?"
And oh. Oh, Grant understood that, all right. That wasn't a question the moors were asking. It was a question Childermass, the man who had been so surprised that Grant would actually stand fast beside him, was asking yet again, for about the fourth time so far this day. The lack of trust might have wearied him, save that Grant had only really noticed it a few minutes before, and save that it wasn't quite distrust that he was seeing now. It was more ... a search for confirmation. It was that Childermass quite nearly did trust him, and was only holding out for one last sign that it might be warranted.
Grant wanted to give him that sign. Almost more than anything he'd wanted in quite a while, he wanted to earn the trust of this odd, defiant man, who did not flinch in the face of monsters. And it wasn't much he was being asked for. Only the completion of a job Grant had already begun, and would be damned if he didn't see finished now. So. So then indeed.
"I will," he said, calmly and honestly as he looked up at the man. "I'll give them my word to return, once we have a hope of winning this fight. I won't leave them to face a monster alone. I promise that, and please believe me when I say that I am a man of my word, Mr Childermass."
There was a small, thoughtful pause, and then Childermass said, slowly and with equal honesty: "I don't doubt it, Major Grant. I don't doubt it at all."
He held out his hand then, as though to pull Grant up onto the horse in open spite of the fact that he hadn't even had the strength to get himself up there. Before Grant could say anything about that, though, before he could give in to the urge to knock the stubborn idiot upside the head, the very earth beneath Grant's feet moved. He gave a startled yelp, nearly panicking, but then the tree reached out to him as well, steadied his shoulder with its branches, and the earth beneath Grant's feet rose up and held him comfortably level with the saddle, so that he might just casually sling his leg across it. Grant stared at Childermass, and Childermass stared right on back at him, apparently equally startled. A burst of humour bubbled up through Grant. It looked, after a second, to be entirely mutual.
"I think the moors accept your bargain, sir," Childermass said to him wryly, and balanced up on the saddle horn for a second to let Grant slide in behind him. The effort clearly damaged him, his arms shaking with the strain, and Grant was sure to settle himself quickly behind the man. He eased Childermass gently back down and then dropped his own forehead against the man's back, just for the smallest of seconds.
"I'm glad of it," he said, honestly enough, but then felt compelled to add: "Do you think we might be allowed to leave them now? This has been an interesting day, and I do not wish to finish it as barghest food. We've come close enough to that already for one lifetime."
Childermass chuckled tiredly and leaned back against him, an exhausted weight against Grant's legs and chest. "You are in command of the horse, not I," he noted quietly, but gripped Grant's hands in his own gloved ones for a second. "We will come back, when we're ready. It's promised now. This is not entirely over, sir."
"No," Grant agreed, as he twitched the reins to lead them cautiously back out onto the road, Childermass' wicked beast following warily along behind them. He wrapped one arm firmly around Childermass' waist, bound and determined that the man should not be taken away from him. "It's over for now, though, and I think it's past time for us to leave. Hold on as long you can, sir. This will not be a pleasant ride, even with all the help the moors may give."
Childermass did not answer. He merely gripped the saddle horn in front of him with fading strength, and set his jaw once more against necessity. Grant spurred the horse slowly but surely to walk, then a trot, then a gallop. Behind them, seeming to hear them as they fled, the barghest raised a furious, eerie howl, a sound that seemed to shake the very skies above them and the moors around them. Grant swallowed, leaning forward and forcing Childermass ahead of him, lying protectively across the man and the horse's back. The wind picked up, roaring past them back across the moor, and a sudden whispering rose through the heather around them, over the thunder of the hooves. The moor grew bleak and menacing, moreso even than usual, and Childermass groaned in sudden strain in front of him. The man's back went stiff, for the tiniest of seconds, and then fell limp again. The tautness fled from his arms, strength and consciousness along with it, and Childermass fainted away for the last time as the entirety of the Yorkshire moors seemed to come to sudden, vengeful life around them.
Grant, by far too inured to such occurrences by now, merely kept his head down, kept a firm, bruising grip on the unconscious man's waist, and drove them determinedly onward across the moorland's back. There were howls behind him, baying hounds, screams of fury and the incongruous clanking of chains above the wind, but they never again came close. Indeed, they faded in and out, cut off by the snarling of the wind and thrown from one end of the moors to the other, and he reflected grimly that he had best not renege on his promise, for it seemed that the Yorkshire moors were very much creatures of their word as well, and would take any betrayal on his part very badly amiss.
He'd not intended to, anyway. Childermass would not, and Grant was damned sure never letting the man back up here alone again. He was far too willing to get himself killed.
Evening fell, as they came down out of the moorlands, galloping across lower, gentler countryside at last. Grant pushed them onwards, only slowing his pace to spare the horses. He turned them on towards Starecross, towards Mrs Strange and safety. He felt a need for it, suddenly. The growing twilight fell itchily across still-raw nerves, and while he did not doubt that the moors would keep the barghest caged behind them, he had no current fondness for darkness and all that might lurk in it. He needed them to be home, or as close as came to it for now.
Childermass stirred once they cleared the moors. He groaned, scrunched painfully and awkwardly between Grant and the saddle, and blinked blearily around them as Grant slowed the horses to a panting, exhausted walk a few miles off from Starecross. He almost wished they might transfer to Brewer, spare his own animal now that the need wasn't so great, but he'd never get Childermass down and up again at this point. They'd have to settle for limping the last few miles in thoroughly exhausted fashion.
Half the house was waiting for them, when they finally made it to the gate. More than that. Every magician currently in Northern England seemed to be gathered in the yard, though how they'd known to expect an arrival now Grant couldn't have said. Mrs Strange was in the lead, though, with Lady Pole, Mr Segundus and Mr Honeyfoot right behind her. At the sight of them, Childermass very, very painfully straightened in his seat. Pride. Even to the last, the man was ruled by a certain damnable, impossible pride.
"What on earth happened up there?" Mr Segundus cried, running out to meet them and looking them worriedly over for ... wounds, maybe. Death, for all Grant knew. "The whole North must have felt that, Mr Childermass! You've woken half the moor! What happened?!"
Grant was in no mood for questions, however, and he was more than happy to say so. He pulled himself awkwardly out from beneath Childermass, leaving the man hunched and panting in the saddle, and dismounted to glare pointedly at all around them.
"In the morning," he said curtly, though he offered Arabella an apologetic bow at the same time. "Please. The matter is safely corralled for now, and we are dead on our feet. We will report to you all in the morning, but right now I must get Mr Childermass inside. The damn thing's almost killed him."
"Thing?" Segundus asked warily, though he stepped back in neat order and did not protest as Grant turned to help Childermass gingerly to the ground. Childermass protested, right enough, bitterly determined not to be weak in front of them, but his exhaustion betrayed him at the last. He half-fell down into Grant's arms, hiding his face for half a second in shame before glaring defiantly out at them, and Segundus reacted with instant, genuine gentility. "Oh, of course. Follow me, Mr Grant. If we can be assured of our safety, we will naturally deal with the rest in the morning."
"We're safe," Childermass growled, leaning weakly on Grant despite his best wishes. "'Tis a barghest, but the moors have trapped it for us for now. We've time to plan, John Segundus. Don't worry about that."
At the word 'barghest', Mr Segundus gave a little squeak, and looked as if he very much intended to worry about it, but to his eternal credit he pestered them no more. He led them past the rest, guiding them up and into the house, and left them at Childermass' room with a hurried word about seeing to it that they had water and food sent up to them at once. Grant liked him, he decided. He was a fussy sort of a creature, but he was a deeply, genuinely good man behind it. And, more to the point, he had finally led them to safety.
After the day he'd just had, there was nothing in the world that Grant was currently more grateful for.
FILL: On the March, Part 6/6
(Anonymous) 2015-09-10 11:12 pm (UTC)(link)Grant ignored it, with something like good grace. Childermass was probably owed a chance to regain his pride, after everything both up on the moor and down here. He could hardly begrudge the man that, provided he didn't do anything completely stupid because of it.
"You should get undressed," he said quietly. He'd no notion of propriety at this point, or much of privacy either when set against the need to see the man safe, and it seemed Childermass didn't much either. The man squinted warily at him for a second, but set about wrestling himself out of his coat in good enough order. Grant helped him, and with the waistcoat as well, and the shoes. Childermass definitely looked him askance for that, wondering at the man kneeling in front of him, but Grant was by this stage well past caring. He stood up carefully, more than a little achey and exhausted himself, and nodded down at the man.
"You should take that shirt off as well," he said tiredly. "It's perfectly sodden, you'll never sleep in it. Do you have a spare one around here somewhere?"
He glanced around, although the room was rather too bare and spartan looking to really allow much hope. Childermass only grunted in exasperation behind him, and pulled the sweat-soaked shirt over his head with stiff, angry motions.
"I'll be fine," he growled, balling the article up in his fists. "Just soak it in the wash basin and hang it by the window. It'll be fine by morning."
Grant would have answered that, some gentleman's instinct decrying the abuse of clothing that way, but he found himself mildly distracted by the sight of the man's chest. Or, more specifically, by the sight of a round, puckered scar high up on it, by the left shoulder.
"You really were shot," he wondered absently, recalling the story from what felt like absolutely aeons ago. He reached out, touched the mark gently. "By a woman? That was what you said, was it not? Was that true also?"
Childermass glanced down at his hand, and then back up, a rather wry expression on his face. "Technically, her grudge was with my master," he said, grimacing faintly at Grant, who was somehow not surprised by this. He'd heard enough rants about Norrell from Merlin. "She came for him with a pistol, I got between them, and this was my reward for it."
He brushed Grant's hand aside, while Grant was busy digesting that, and stood very slowly and carefully to his feet, angling himself towards the wash basin with the shirt in his hands. Grant woke up again at that, opening his mouth to protest, to say that he could bloody well manage soaking a shirt so that the man needn't fall down in yet another bloody heap on the floor, but he got such a fulminating glare for his troubles that the words never quite passed his lips.
"I'm not bloody dead yet, thank you," Childermass growled, as he turned his back on Grant to stalk stiffly to the wash stand. Grant meant to answer it, truly he did, but something caught him up short yet again. He saw something in the candlelight, another aspect of the man's body, and it silenced him all over again. It was not a happy aspect, you see. Even less so than the bullet scar had been.
Childermass' back was riddled with lash marks. Great silver weals of them, criss-crossing his shoulder blades and running sharply across his left hip and side. A right-handed man, Grant realised distantly. A right-handed man wielding a short lash or a crop, somewhat inexpertly, but very, very violently. The man's back looked to have been half torn apart.
"... Great god," he whispered, staring at the marks in dull, stupefied horror, and Childermass glanced back at him sharply. In confusion, for a moment, and then in thick, unhappy amusement once he realised what the problem had to be. A tiny, bitter smirk crossed his lips, and he turned back to the basin to start shoving his shirt somewhat forcefully beneath the water.
"I told you I'd no great love for the army," he said quietly, a light and casual humour in his voice. "Very fond of flogging, you lot. Doesn't incline a man to like you very much."
Grant stared at him, in distant horror and confusion. "But," he said, somewhat stupidly. He was too tired by far to understand this. "But you're not a soldier. I'd have sworn ..."
"No," Childermass agreed, thumping the cloth in his hand with some force. "I was a sailor once, for a little bit, but never a soldier, aye."
He paused, cut himself off and held himself trembling over the wash basin for a moment. He seemed to be thinking, to struggle momentarily with himself. Then, slowly, he turned back around to face Grant properly. He leaned heavily on the wash stand, his strength nowhere near up to this, but he turned anyway. There was a calm, fixed defiance on his face.
"I was a pickpocket," he admitted quietly, though in defiance rather than shame. "When I was younger. I picked the wrong target. A retired officer. The man had me beaten damn near half to death for it. Tied me up against his carriage wheel. I couldn't stand up for a week afterwards. It was not my finest moment, I admit. It was a bit of a clumsy lift."
He raised an eyebrow at Grant's sick expression, a twist of challenge to his mouth, daring Grant to say something about this. Grant couldn't. He couldn't even begin, and Childermass only smirked faintly in response to his silence.
"You can't tell me you're surprised, sir," he challenged softly. Despite everything that had happened today, he managed to be icily cold. The trust Grant had thought they shared fell away, and raw challenge lay beneath it. "Don't tell me you never thought at any point that I could use a good lashing for my insolence."
Grant stared at him, a sick, gnawing thing in his gut. He remembered a wild smirk, up on the moors. He remembered thinking idly, and in humour, that there wasn't an officer in the army who wouldn't have had him flogged for it on the spot. It hadn't been ... It hadn't been real, though. The man wasn't a soldier. It wouldn't have come to pass. It had been humorous, because it would never have really come to pass.
"I," he said, shaking his head thickly. "No. No, not ... Not as something that could happen. Not as something real." He moved towards the man, drawn to him as though by a string, and angled himself sideways to try and catch a glimpse of the marks once again, to prove to himself that they were real. Childermass stared at him for a second, looked up at him with something wild and angry in his eyes, before he deliberately turned himself to bare his scarred shoulders to Grant's gaze.
Grant reached out to them. He didn't mean to, his hand seemed to move all by itself. He rested his trembling fingers across the uppermost marks, and felt the man flinch beneath them. Grant felt him shake violently, half in weakness and half in rage, and he remembered the barghest all of a sudden. He remembered Childermass flinching in his arms, over and over again, as the creature lashed at him with its magic. He imagined a man, in place of it. He imagined that it had not been a monster but a human being, one of his fellow officers, striking blow after blow at this man's back. To his somewhat distant surprise, he felt a thick, molten surge of fury rise within him at the thought. Inexplicably, he felt a rush of something very hotly murderous.
"... I would kill him," he said quietly, with that strange fury in his tone. "A man who did this now. I think I would kill him where he stood."
Childermass looked at him at that. He looked back across his shoulder at Grant, a vicious, boiling sort of suspicion in his eyes. It was very plain, far more so than anything Grant had seen on the moors, though he vaguely realised that there had been small signs of it even then. Small flinches away from his boots, and stiff wariness when he came near. They'd barely shown. Childermass had challenged Grant's obvious dislike openly and with visible humour. The darkness beneath it had been barely noticeable at all.
"... If I may say, sir," Childermass said very softly. "You seem to change your opinions very rapidly. To go from disliking me to ..." He faltered, momentarily uncertain. Perhaps he had not forgotten his trust after all, for all he seemed prepared to have it forfeited. "From disliking me to not, in only the course of a single afternoon? That is a sharp turn, sir. For anyone."
Grant blinked at him, a blank, cracked-open sort of sensation in his chest. A strange emptiness, as the fury fell back a bit, and then ... then a sort of a humour. The bleak kind of laughing that had carried the pair of them all through this absolute hell of a day.
"In my defence," he said, with a wry sort of a look that Childermass, somehow, still softened to, "this was not an ordinary afternoon. By anyone's standards. And, if I may say, you are not a ordinary man. I don't think you're even an ordinary magician. It is very hard to maintain a dislike for you, when you have been so very determined to bleed for what you believe in, and myself not least of all."
Childermass only stared at him, breathing hard and shallow. His expression, in that moment, was about as tangled as his hair, and defied interpretation. Then it calmed, suddenly. Then that wild, soft determination came back across it, and Childermass turned to him fully once again. He pressed his lips together, the kind of daring that walked right beneath a monster's teeth to escape it, and he raised one hand carefully to Grant's still clothed shoulder.
"If I am wrong about this," he requested quietly, while Grant merely stared at him. "If I am reading this wrongly, I would ask that you refuse me gently, if you can. I don't think I'm up to much violence right now."
And then, without even a pause for an answer, he brought his hand from Grant's shoulder to his face. He brushed it up across Grant's cheek, held it pale and trembling there, and looked Grant askance for the smallest of moments. Grant leaned into him, without a thought. He stepped closer, and brought his arms very carefully around Childermass' waist. Tension flooded from the man, abruptly. The hard defiance fell away, and only a very tentative hope remained, as Childermass finally leaned in and pressed cracked lips to Grant's own.
He tasted of magic. Of pain, and magic, and exhaustion, of adrenalin and battle, and shaking comfort in the aftermath. He tasted so familiar, for a second, a echo back to another time and another magician, that it was almost too painful to bear. But it was not entirely familiar. There were other things in it too, other tastes and sensations. Heather and moors, a cool, steady insolence, a taste of earth and stone and laughing. A half-wild thing, a bitter thing, held shaking in Grant's arms. This was not Jonathan Strange. This was Childermass, instead, and in truth there was nothing else he could be mistaken for.
He had no strength, however. Childermass. He'd been done in before they ever left the moors, and all the strength he'd poured into this last, stubborn defiance had worn him through. He slipped down out of the kiss, his eyes a little glassy and faint, and dropped his head exhaustedly onto Grant's shoulder. Grant, with some ease of habit by now, caught him. He took the man's weight casually in his arms.
"... I'd say you're not up to much of anything right now," he said gently, and with some humour. "I'd be insulted, but I was there when you woke half of North Yorkshire to fight a faerie monster. I suppose I shall have to let it pass this time."
"Thank you," Childermass managed, with thick amusement against Grant's neck. "Most generous of you, sir." He sighed, though, and slumped inside Grant's arms. Not only tired, but disappointed. "Just my bloody luck. First bit of pleasant company I've had in ages, and I can't so much as stand up to kiss him properly."
Grant laughed, dancing them backwards towards the bed, a much happier two-step than any other so far this day. "It's not as though you won't have another chance," he noted, while he managed to get Childermass seated beneath him and then knelt down in front of him. He gripped the man's knee, smiling happily up at him. "We should get you to bed, my friend. We should let you get rested up a bit, and then perhaps we might revisit this conversation at a later date. Tomorrow morning, perhaps? Early tomorrow morning. If you're up to it, of course."
Childermass shook his head at him, a calm, happy insolence in his face, and a sly little smile on his lips. There was no more distrust in his eyes, Grant realised. Not even a lingering shadow. It would seem that, somehow, he had passed the last test of it. It made him ... more than pleased, he thought. Something strange, some heavy, aching feeling in his chest. It made him feel something very strange indeed, and he was almost half-inclined to thank the barghest for having given it to him. This chance, this opportunity. As terrible a day as it had been, he thought it nearly worth it, nearly more than that, just for that.
"I shall see what I can do, sir," Childermass said, smiling faintly at him. "Get some rest yourself, leave the matter with me, and I shall certainly see what I can do."
Well. That was a promise, then. That was a promise and, as he had found beyond doubt today, Childermass was ever a man of his word.
The day was looking up at last, he thought. This day, and tomorrow even better again.
A/N: Finished at last. I combined this last part with another prompt a bit, the one about Childermass having whipping scars and his lover freaking out about them, because we were already in hurt/comfort territory and I thought why not. I, ah, I hope nobody minds?
Re: FILL: On the March, Part 6/6
(Anonymous) 2015-09-11 08:20 am (UTC)(link)Re: FILL: On the March, Part 6/6
(Anonymous) 2015-09-11 11:58 am (UTC)(link)Re: FILL: On the March, Part 6/6
(Anonymous) 2016-09-05 12:49 am (UTC)(link)Protective Grant and vulnerable Childermass make my toes curl, and the scene with the dogs sitting and waiting was creepy as hell. Childermass waking the moors was the hot fudge on the whole thing.
Loved this.