This is pretty hurt-heavy. Part 2 will have rescue and comfort.
*
Nicolò surges awake, gasping, choking on a scream that doesn’t belong to him. He claws at his throat, overwhelmed, until Andromache’s voice says, sharply, “Stop that. It’s not you. You can breathe.”
She’s up already. They were sleeping back-to-back, and she’s still close enough that he can feel the warmth of her body through both their clothes. Her head is tilted toward the moonlight, a blade gleaming in one hand. As Nicolò watches, she sets it aside, pushes her hair out of her face with both hands, then drives her fists into the packed dirt hard enough to break bone. “Fuck.”
“What—” Nicolò clears his throat. The images are disjointed and horrible, and horribly vivid in a way that’s entirely too familiar. That he remembers from waking up on a battlefield to the smell of death and the shriek of the crows, dreaming of Andromache across hundreds of leagues.
This dream was of a man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, naked and struggling beneath the weight of several other bodies. Lashing out and being struck hard, and the echo of terrible, mocking laughter as one of them wound a scarf around his neck and pulled—
“That was another one like us. I felt him die.” He shakes his head, rubs his throat, the phantom echo of that ache. “I felt him come back.”
She nods shortly without looking up or speaking. Nicolò closes his eyes. He almost considers asking what happened to him, but he knows. He’s been in war; he knows that for all the atrocities of the battlefield, what befalls the conquered afterward is often worse.
“We need to get to him. To save him.”
“He’s like us. He’ll heal,” Andromache says. She sounds indifferent, but she’s already packing, scuffing dirt over the embers of the fire and rolling up the bedclothes, checking her boots for scorpions before pulling them on. Nicolò follows more slowly, still disoriented. He doesn’t know how she can be so steady with herself when he still feels like he’s ringing with the echo of a dying man’s last breaths. His pain and fear and fury.
Andromache is like a force of nature when it suits her; he’s never asked how old she is, mostly because he knows she wouldn’t answer, but he knows that she was living and dying and living again long before his father’s father first drew breath. Long before.
He knows that she’s calloused against the hurts of the world, but not numb to them. “They’ll hurt him again.”
“And he’ll heal again.” She’s unhobbling the horses, stroking an absent hand over the flank of her dun mare as it lips affectionately at her hair. “Think. What did you see?”
Nicolò breathes out, scrubs a hand through his hair and over his beard, trying to think. To focus on the details beyond the horror of it. “It was… a dark room. Oil lamps. Zellīj tiles on the floor. Painted walls.” A fine torture chamber, its luxury a hideous contrast to the brutality he’d seen. “I saw no windows.”
“They spoke Frankish,” Andromache says, strapping down her pack with quick motions. “The men who were raping him.”
Nicolò flinches slightly to hear her say it so baldly, but he rallies nonetheless. “That doesn’t narrow it down much.”
“It gives us a direction, at least. One of them wore the cross.”
“The Holy Land, really?”
She snorts and starts on his pack. “You died at the gates of Jerusalem, Nicolò. Did you see anything holy there?”
What he saw was blood and grief and men gutted like livestock to rot in the summer heat, and he knows that what went on behind those walls afterward was worse. But still. “Don’t, Andromache. Not now.”
“Jerusalem,” she says again, firmly, and tosses him his pack. “Come on. If we ride hard, we can make Constantinople in three days. We’ll get passage from there. I know a man.” She shrugs contemplatively. “Or I did. It’s been a while. If he’s dead, we’ll find another way.”
She swings up onto her horse without another word, and Nicolò shakes off the remnants of the dream and follows suit.
It takes them two days to make Constantinople. Nicolò dreams of six more deaths in that time, each one worse than the one that preceded it.
“They know what he is,” Andromache says on the third morning, cleaning her nails by the fish market and waiting for her man to arrive. She looks unaffected, but Nicolò suspects that it’s a mask. His own gut churns with sickened memory: coin changing hands, the dark-haired man spitting blood and defiance before he was pinned down with steel through his shoulders and chest and thighs and fucked savagely as he bled to death.
And then woke up again. Healed again. Nicolò knows that lasting death is a mercy, but dear God that truth has never been so clear. There’s something like grief in him at the fact that this is their first meeting. There’s no clean death to be had on a battlefield, but at least on a battlefield he had a blade in his hand. At least he could fight.
This man, this new immortal who haunts his dreams—he’d fight. Nicolò has watched him kill two of his captors while still in chains, and die two ugly deaths in reward; with steel and shield in hand he’d be unstoppable. An angel of death.
We’re coming, he thinks, shaping the words in his mind as if the man could hear them, as if he could understand them when every curse Nicolò has heard from him was in an unfamiliar tongue. We’re coming, please hold on.
The truth, of course, the terrible truth, is that he will hold on, because there is no other choice.
We're coming for you, I promise, Nicolò whispers, and closes his eyes to the salt breeze.
FILL: even on the darkest nights [Joe/others, forced prostitution, non-con & rescue] 1/
https://theoldguardkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/1106.html?thread=132946#cmt132946
This is pretty hurt-heavy. Part 2 will have rescue and comfort.
*
Nicolò surges awake, gasping, choking on a scream that doesn’t belong to him. He claws at his throat, overwhelmed, until Andromache’s voice says, sharply, “Stop that. It’s not you. You can breathe.”
She’s up already. They were sleeping back-to-back, and she’s still close enough that he can feel the warmth of her body through both their clothes. Her head is tilted toward the moonlight, a blade gleaming in one hand. As Nicolò watches, she sets it aside, pushes her hair out of her face with both hands, then drives her fists into the packed dirt hard enough to break bone. “Fuck.”
“What—” Nicolò clears his throat. The images are disjointed and horrible, and horribly vivid in a way that’s entirely too familiar. That he remembers from waking up on a battlefield to the smell of death and the shriek of the crows, dreaming of Andromache across hundreds of leagues.
This dream was of a man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, naked and struggling beneath the weight of several other bodies. Lashing out and being struck hard, and the echo of terrible, mocking laughter as one of them wound a scarf around his neck and pulled—
“That was another one like us. I felt him die.” He shakes his head, rubs his throat, the phantom echo of that ache. “I felt him come back.”
She nods shortly without looking up or speaking. Nicolò closes his eyes. He almost considers asking what happened to him, but he knows. He’s been in war; he knows that for all the atrocities of the battlefield, what befalls the conquered afterward is often worse.
“We need to get to him. To save him.”
“He’s like us. He’ll heal,” Andromache says. She sounds indifferent, but she’s already packing, scuffing dirt over the embers of the fire and rolling up the bedclothes, checking her boots for scorpions before pulling them on. Nicolò follows more slowly, still disoriented. He doesn’t know how she can be so steady with herself when he still feels like he’s ringing with the echo of a dying man’s last breaths. His pain and fear and fury.
Andromache is like a force of nature when it suits her; he’s never asked how old she is, mostly because he knows she wouldn’t answer, but he knows that she was living and dying and living again long before his father’s father first drew breath. Long before.
He knows that she’s calloused against the hurts of the world, but not numb to them. “They’ll hurt him again.”
“And he’ll heal again.” She’s unhobbling the horses, stroking an absent hand over the flank of her dun mare as it lips affectionately at her hair. “Think. What did you see?”
Nicolò breathes out, scrubs a hand through his hair and over his beard, trying to think. To focus on the details beyond the horror of it. “It was… a dark room. Oil lamps. Zellīj tiles on the floor. Painted walls.” A fine torture chamber, its luxury a hideous contrast to the brutality he’d seen. “I saw no windows.”
“They spoke Frankish,” Andromache says, strapping down her pack with quick motions. “The men who were raping him.”
Nicolò flinches slightly to hear her say it so baldly, but he rallies nonetheless. “That doesn’t narrow it down much.”
“It gives us a direction, at least. One of them wore the cross.”
“The Holy Land, really?”
She snorts and starts on his pack. “You died at the gates of Jerusalem, Nicolò. Did you see anything holy there?”
What he saw was blood and grief and men gutted like livestock to rot in the summer heat, and he knows that what went on behind those walls afterward was worse. But still. “Don’t, Andromache. Not now.”
“Jerusalem,” she says again, firmly, and tosses him his pack. “Come on. If we ride hard, we can make Constantinople in three days. We’ll get passage from there. I know a man.” She shrugs contemplatively. “Or I did. It’s been a while. If he’s dead, we’ll find another way.”
She swings up onto her horse without another word, and Nicolò shakes off the remnants of the dream and follows suit.
It takes them two days to make Constantinople. Nicolò dreams of six more deaths in that time, each one worse than the one that preceded it.
“They know what he is,” Andromache says on the third morning, cleaning her nails by the fish market and waiting for her man to arrive. She looks unaffected, but Nicolò suspects that it’s a mask. His own gut churns with sickened memory: coin changing hands, the dark-haired man spitting blood and defiance before he was pinned down with steel through his shoulders and chest and thighs and fucked savagely as he bled to death.
And then woke up again. Healed again. Nicolò knows that lasting death is a mercy, but dear God that truth has never been so clear. There’s something like grief in him at the fact that this is their first meeting. There’s no clean death to be had on a battlefield, but at least on a battlefield he had a blade in his hand. At least he could fight.
This man, this new immortal who haunts his dreams—he’d fight. Nicolò has watched him kill two of his captors while still in chains, and die two ugly deaths in reward; with steel and shield in hand he’d be unstoppable. An angel of death.
We’re coming, he thinks, shaping the words in his mind as if the man could hear them, as if he could understand them when every curse Nicolò has heard from him was in an unfamiliar tongue. We’re coming, please hold on.
The truth, of course, the terrible truth, is that he will hold on, because there is no other choice.
We're coming for you, I promise, Nicolò whispers, and closes his eyes to the salt breeze.