Fic: The Loneliness Of You Mighty Men
Title: The Loneliness Of You Mighty Men
Author: metacheese
Team: angst
Prompt: Lies, Highway
Word count: 300
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: genderswap (girl!Arthur)
Author's Note: Title from "Go Long" by Joanna Newsom.
Summary: This drabble is all I managed to write from a longer fic I was planning at the beginning of the match--which I will probably never actually finish--where 18th-century girl!Arthur is a witch married to necromancer!Cobb and she runs away after he brings his wife back from the dead. Then, in disguise as a boy, she meets Jacobite rebel and highwayman!Eames.
❝ Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. ❞
- A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway thank you climb
As always, he kisses her where her clothes end. Pushing the loose dirty sleeves up, pressing his lips to the blue branch of her veins. Hiking up the trousers and taking each ankle in his hands, rubbing his unshaven cheek against it, marking it.
He rises and sits in the chair opposite her. She sits in his lap. The forest birds croak. The light creeps down like spider legs through the broad cracks between the cabin’s planks.
“Oh, is it another kiss you want? Allright, soldier boy.” He feigns irritation. Her back arches against his rough, blackened palm, which still trembles when it touches her.
I’ll tell him tonight, she thinks.
And he will say, Arthur--Agnes, darling, it doesn’t matter. We’re alone against all the others. I can’t afford to let you go.
Or he’ll fling the stolen uniform at her back, call her a whore, or worse. She’ll go back to Cobb, who surely did not miss her, at least not as a wife. She’ll mix his potions, watch his enemies in their dreams. That is, if he’s still alive. She’ll try to pretend that she didn’t see what she’d seen the night she ran away: a woman prying open the latch of the shed door with fingers both stumbling and nimble. A woman who should not be walking or breathing, yet walked and breathed.
“Shh.” He pauses against her lips. “Do you hear that?”
There is a hard, direct crack, something heavy coming down on the forest floor.
“Is it an animal?”
Then a brutal smack rattles the door. His eyes widen. A thief would know that sound, she thinks, beginning to shake in her baggy clothing.
A thief would know the sound of the butt of a rifle against wood.
Author: metacheese
Team: angst
Prompt: Lies, Highway
Word count: 300
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: genderswap (girl!Arthur)
Author's Note: Title from "Go Long" by Joanna Newsom.
Summary: This drabble is all I managed to write from a longer fic I was planning at the beginning of the match--which I will probably never actually finish--where 18th-century girl!Arthur is a witch married to necromancer!Cobb and she runs away after he brings his wife back from the dead. Then, in disguise as a boy, she meets Jacobite rebel and highwayman!Eames.
❝ Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. ❞
- A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway thank you climb
As always, he kisses her where her clothes end. Pushing the loose dirty sleeves up, pressing his lips to the blue branch of her veins. Hiking up the trousers and taking each ankle in his hands, rubbing his unshaven cheek against it, marking it.
He rises and sits in the chair opposite her. She sits in his lap. The forest birds croak. The light creeps down like spider legs through the broad cracks between the cabin’s planks.
“Oh, is it another kiss you want? Allright, soldier boy.” He feigns irritation. Her back arches against his rough, blackened palm, which still trembles when it touches her.
I’ll tell him tonight, she thinks.
And he will say, Arthur--Agnes, darling, it doesn’t matter. We’re alone against all the others. I can’t afford to let you go.
Or he’ll fling the stolen uniform at her back, call her a whore, or worse. She’ll go back to Cobb, who surely did not miss her, at least not as a wife. She’ll mix his potions, watch his enemies in their dreams. That is, if he’s still alive. She’ll try to pretend that she didn’t see what she’d seen the night she ran away: a woman prying open the latch of the shed door with fingers both stumbling and nimble. A woman who should not be walking or breathing, yet walked and breathed.
“Shh.” He pauses against her lips. “Do you hear that?”
There is a hard, direct crack, something heavy coming down on the forest floor.
“Is it an animal?”
Then a brutal smack rattles the door. His eyes widen. A thief would know that sound, she thinks, beginning to shake in her baggy clothing.
A thief would know the sound of the butt of a rifle against wood.