Fills Post
Jul. 22nd, 2020 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theoldguardkinkmemeThis Fills Post is now closed to new fills. New fills should go in Fills Post #2.
Fills can but don't need to be anonymous.
Start a new comment for each fill. Don't use threaded comments for new fills. Threaded comments are for fills that take up more than one comment field, or for feedback/squee/praise.
In your fill, please mention the prompt you are responding to, and provide a link to the prompt in the body of the text.
Please use a header with your character(s)/pairing and a title and/or keyword or short phrase. (For example: "Just you and me: Andy/Quynh, Make-up sex" or "Between a Rock and A Hard Place: Nicky/Joe/Booker, first time DP").
Please also comment with a link to your fill in the prompt post, under the prompt you are responding to. Your comment header should include the word "Fill" or "Filled", so that those checking out the thread can find your fic/art more easily (For example: "FILL: Re: Any/Quynh, Make-up sex").
If you end up cleaning up your fill and posting it elsewhere (AO3, your personal journal), feel free to link the posted fic/art here as well.
Fills on Pinboard: For a list of filled prompts on Pinboard, go here.
Re: FILL: even on the darkest nights [Joe/others, forced prostitution, non-con & rescue] 2/3
Date: 2020-08-11 02:15 am (UTC)They seem endless, and endlessly creative in their cruelty. One well-dressed man doesn’t even disrobe; he simply spends hours flaying Yusuf alive, peeling back strips of skin and watching as the flesh beneath them heals. He questions Yusuf from time to time, idly curious, and Yusuf doesn’t answer. He understands the Sabir that these Franks speak to one another, but he’s kept that fact to himself. He has few enough advantages already.
Instead he spits the foulest Derja curses he can think of and fights in his chains until the man finally grows bored and slits his throat. Yusuf bleeds out hoping, as he always does now, that this death will be his last.
He wakes in chains, clean of blood, as always without a single mark on him. Often there is already another torturer at hand, always there are guards, but for now the room is empty.
There are shouts coming from the floor below. Shouts, and the clash of steel, and the part of Yusuf that was a warrior in another life has him sitting up, a swift movement aborted by the pull of his chains. They’ve learned their lesson since he strangled a man with them; there’s enough give for his torturers to reposition him to their liking, but not nearly enough to allow him free movement.
Yusuf swears under his breath, grits his teeth, and breaks his right thumb. Even so, it’s a grindingly painful effort to get the cuff off. He’s tried this before and never managed to get himself completely free before someone put a blade through his throat or worse, but from the sounds of carnage below, he thinks his captors must be distracted. Distracted enough, perhaps, to grant him this one precious chance at escape.
He frees his other hand and is struggling with the iron cuffs around his feet when he hears footsteps on the stairs, a man’s voice cursing in a tongue he doesn’t speak, and no, no, not now, not when he’s so close. Yusuf yanks frantically at the metal, grinding it painfully into his flesh.
There’s a clash of steel, a scream. The door swings open, and a corpse falls to the floor. A moment later, it’s kicked aside and a man steps through.
He’s tall, fair-haired and handsome with a blooded sword in his hand. As Yusuf watches, he stoops to clean it on the dead man’s tabard, smearing blood over the cross, then lifts his head. His eyes are wide and pale, and familiar, an apparition of dreams stepping into the waking world.
“I’m going mad,” Yusuf says out loud. The man blinks at him, then sheaths his sword and starts across the room, moving with deadly purpose. There are more footsteps on the stairs, and then the woman appears behind him, stepping over the corpse without a second glance. There’s an axe in her hand, dripping gore.
The man reaches for Yusuf and Yusuf kicks out hard, feeling bone crunch beneath his foot. He renews his struggles to free himself, desperate now. These two can certainly kill him, but if they don’t know he can come back he may have the element of surprise.
“Stop that, you fool, we’re rescuing you,” the woman says in Arabic, thickly accented.
It’s enough of a shock that Yusuf stills for a moment, and the man kneels down beside him, keeping a wise distance this time. His expression is earnest even with blood flowing from his broken nose down over his chin. He pats his chest. “Nicolò. My name. Nicolò di Genova.”
His accent is even worse than the woman’s. Yusuf stares between them for a moment, then says, in Sabir, “What do a pair of Franks want with me? And why should I trust you?”
The man starts when he speaks. The woman laughs, roughly and without humor. “I’m no Frank. You can call me Andromache.”
“As far as the rest,” the man who called himself Nicolò says, still so wide-eyed and earnest. “We are—like you. We’ve dreamed of you, since—”
“Since you died for the first time,” the woman finishes bluntly, ignoring Yusuf’s flinch. “Hold still. I’ll get those cuffs off of you.”
“Andromache,” says the man, sounding wary, but it’s too late. Steel flashes, and an instant later Yusuf’s lower legs explode into agony, the sickening feeling of flesh and bone coming cleanly apart. He howls, and cannot even fight against the hands that grip his legs, pulling at him. When he blinks his streaming eyes open, blood is soaking into the sheets beneath him, and the Frank is holding his amputated feet back against the ankles. The chains have been tossed aside. Yusuf gasps at the ceiling, feeling his flesh begin to knit itself back together, as the man says reproachfully to his companion, “That wasn’t kind.”
“It was efficient,” she retorts, unapologetic. “We need to move. There’ll be more of them soon.”
“Give him a moment.”
“Don’t speak for me,” Yusuf snarls, pulling away. Pain stabs up his shins, then subsides as the bones snap into place. The man sits back on his heels, wiping blood from his face with the back of his sleeve; sure enough, his nose has already healed, the bleeding stopped.
“Forgive me,” he says carefully.
Yusuf sneers at him, swinging his legs off the bed. Standing like this, he’s more aware of his nakedness than he has been in weeks. More aware than he wants to be that these two strangers have been dreaming of every violation and humiliation he’s endured since this nightmare started. He wants to cover himself; instead he squares his shoulders and glares.
The woman meets his eyes evenly. “You don’t have to come with us. But we can get you out of the city, if you want.”
Her steady, unsympathetic calm is in some ways easier to take in this moment than the man’s gentleness. And anyway, it's not like he has much choice. He nods jerkily. “Fine.”
The man straightens up and takes a step back, out of Yusuf’s space. Quietly, he says, “What should we call you?”
“Yusuf.” He has already decided to trust them, he realizes with an odd jolt. Maybe it’s just that even the dreams of them were the only things for so long that didn’t hurt. “My name is Yusuf.”
Re: FILL: even on the darkest nights [Joe/others, forced prostitution, non-con & rescue] 2/3
Date: 2020-08-11 03:23 am (UTC)Standing like this, he’s more aware of his nakedness than he has been in weeks. More aware than he wants to be that these two strangers have been dreaming of every violation and humiliation he’s endured since this nightmare started. He wants to cover himself; instead he squares his shoulders and glares. This description is perfect. My poor Joe, so hurt but so brave and so strong.
Nicky WOULD try to be too friendly with him straightaway, but also instantly understand that it's overstepping and apologize for it. Even though it's an AU everyone is so perfectly canonically *them* in this. Thank you so much for this.
Re: FILL: even on the darkest nights [Joe/others, forced prostitution, non-con & rescue] 2/3
Date: 2020-08-11 08:33 am (UTC)Re: FILL: even on the darkest nights [Joe/others, forced prostitution, non-con & rescue] 2/3
Date: 2020-08-11 12:53 pm (UTC)Re: FILL: even on the darkest nights [Joe/others, forced prostitution, non-con & rescue] 2/3
Date: 2020-08-12 05:42 pm (UTC)Re: FILL: even on the darkest nights [Joe/others, forced prostitution, non-con & rescue] 2/3
Date: 2020-08-18 06:32 am (UTC)Re: FILL: even on the darkest nights [Joe/others, forced prostitution, non-con & rescue] 2/3
Date: 2020-08-20 01:53 am (UTC)FILL: even on the darkest nights [Joe/others, forced prostitution, non-con & rescue] 3/3
Date: 2020-08-21 02:56 am (UTC)He trades the sword he took from a Genoese corpse for a curving one of Persian make at the first marketplace they come across. Nicolò watches him with the armorer, exchanging pleasantries with a broad smile that transforms his handsome face. He watches the smile slide away like water as Yusuf returns to them. Andromache is haggling in Greek with an old woman selling olives, so it’s only Nicolò watching him: his strong shoulders and his dark curls uncovered in the hot sun, the blade at his hip and the sureness of his stride. Even the resigned wariness in his eyes. He could be wrong—he has been so terribly wrong about so many things in recent years—but Nicolò thinks that it’s a more honest expression than the smile was.
He rubs at his chest. There’s an ache there like he’s been struck.
They’re heading back toward Constantinople. There’s a fourth immortal who has begun to haunt Nicolò’s dreams. Probably Yusuf’s as well, although he hasn’t spoken of it in the rare times he chooses to speak at all.
“Quynh,” Andromache says when he gasps awake for the first time to the dream of a dark-eyed woman on horseback, standing in the stirrups to fire a bow again and again, as smoothly and flawlessly as if it’s a part of her body. “Her name is Quynh. She’ll meet us in the mountains.”
Her voice is softer than he’s known it to be in the months of their acquaintance, her eyes faraway and fond.
“You know her,” Nicolò says.
“I’ve known her for a very long time,” Andromache agrees, and there’s a secret warmth to her smile as she leans down to rake back the coals over the coney they’re roasting. Nicolò looks at her and then, suddenly, he understands.
On the other side of the fire, Yusuf watches them silently, his eyes shadowed. As far as Nicolò can tell, he doesn’t sleep. Nicolò wakes every morning expecting him to have vanished in the night. Every morning, though, he’s still there: pacing the camp or praying on the small mat he carries with him, facing to the west; sometimes just sitting with his arms draped across his knees and a faraway expression on his face. Nicolò wonders what he’s thinking of in those moments, but he doesn’t ask.
He rides with them, he eats with them. He circles them warily, as though he’s always on guard for a betrayal or a blow, but he does not leave.
*
Yusuf cannot explain, even to himself, why he continues to ride with the two Franks after they carve their bloody path out of al-Quds. For the first three nights he sleeps not at all, expecting some kind of terrible duplicity. There is none. The woman Andromache sleeps heavily, seemingly indifferent to her thin bed roll and the rocky soil beneath it, to the possibility of an attack in the night. The Genoan is more restless—less accustomed to rough travel, Yusuf thinks, though the man is deadly in a fight—but he, too, sleeps. There are no raiders in the night. No slave traders with bags of gold to trade for Yusuf and his body that will bleed and break again and again for an inventive torturer.
He dreamed of them. They heal like he does. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything; Yusuf is familiar with the sorts of betrayals that people will inflict on their own kin for the right price.
He cannot stay awake forever, though. Whatever has happened to him to keep him living when Allah should have seen him dead dozens of times over, he is still only a man. On the fourth night, the dying coals of the fire swim before his eyes as his companions’ snores rise up through the dark. In the far distance, Yusuf can hear the high clear voice of a young shepherd calling his flock home. Above them stars prick the night sky, and the smell of asphodel is in the air.
He isn’t aware of slipping away into sleep.
He wakes in the thin dawn to the echoes of a fading dream and the Genoan who calls himself Nicolò watching him carefully from across the fire, which has been coaxed to a flickering flame. Andromache is already by the horses, packing with the quick surety of a woman who could do the task blindfolded.
“Are you alright?” Nicolò asks in his atrocious Arabic. His eyes, Yusuf notices, are the exact same shade of pale blue as the early morning sky above them.
Yusuf nods sharply. His heart is beating fast. From the dream, perhaps. “Yes. Fine.”
Nicolò nods as well. He shifts as if he means to stand, then settles back down. In his dusty leathers, he looks tired. Young. Yusuf wonders, for the first time, how long it’s been since he first died. He knows without asking that Andromache is older than either of them by several lifetimes, but Nicolò—
Nicolò seems young. Especially now. He looks away for a moment, then clears his throat, then says, “In Constantinople—we mean to seek the other one. Quynh. Andromache knows her.”
The archer from his dreams. Yusuf nods sharply. Of course they do. Andromache loves her, in the rough way that a woman like Andromache is able to love anyone. Yusuf hasn’t inserted himself into their conversations, but he isn’t deaf. And he isn’t oblivious to the fact that they both speak Arabic around him, although it’s abundantly clear that it is neither of their native tongue. It’s as though they’re inviting him to eavesdrop. He doesn’t know what to make of that.
“Yes,” he says, when it becomes clear that Nicolò is waiting for a response.
“Yes,” Nicolò echoes. “But you—if you want to find passage somewhere else, if you want to go home, wherever home is for you—” he breaks off, then says, “You don’t have to come with us if you don’t want to. That’s all.”
“What he means,” Andromache says dryly from above them, “is that we’re not slavers, and we don’t mean to keep you captive. If there’s somewhere else you want to go, we’ll pay your passage. Assuming we can afford it.”
Yusuf considers that for a moment. Tunis, that grand metropolis that he hasn’t seen in five years; he could go back there and seek whatever kind of home he can find. There’s not much left for him there now, to be honest, with his mother dead and his living brothers scattered across the Maghreb. But that’s not what makes him shake his head. He’s not sure what does, exactly.
Andromache’s steadiness, Nicolò’s earnest, handsome face. The fact that they rode for weeks across the desert on the strength of dreams alone to save him. The fact that he’s trusted them enough to sleep for the first time in weeks.
“No,” he says finally. “No. I’ll come with you, if you’ll have me.”
Andromache knocks Nicolò’s shoulder ungently.
“Told you,” she says, and offers Yusuf a broad grin. “Good. We’ll be glad to have you.”
She turns back to the horses. Nicolò ducks his head, but it’s not enough to hide his smile. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Yusuf says, and feels—for the first time in months, maybe the first time since he died in horror and humiliation on a finely tiled floor and woke to find himself in an unending nightmare—as though he’s found some kind of surety. Some kind of steadiness beneath his feet.
He waits until Nicolò lifts his eyes, then says again, deliberately, “I’m sure. I’ll stay with you.”
*
(A thousand years from now, in a cool green country across the sea, a woman who is like them but so very young will ask him about his first death, and Yusuf will say without any grief at all, “Like Nicky, I died in the Crusades. But that’s a long and unpleasant story for another time. Really, you should ask Andy about the time in Medina in 1431, with the poisoned dates—”
“We agreed not to mention that,” Andromache will say, and Yusuf will laugh and say that he agreed to nothing, and on the other side of the table Nicolò will watch him with that same lovely, secret smile.)
Re: FILL: even on the darkest nights [Joe/others, forced prostitution, non-con & rescue] 3/3
Date: 2020-08-21 04:20 am (UTC)Re: FILL: even on the darkest nights [Joe/others, forced prostitution, non-con & rescue] 3/3
Date: 2020-08-23 01:58 am (UTC)