Cobra Starship Fic: Merry We Are
We've been having a blustery few days, strangely warm but windy, and I keep coming inside from biking feeling like I've been tossed around by the weather as I battled my way through wet streets and up and down hills. Exciting and exhausting.
The popoffacork authors have been revealed, and I can now share the story I wrote for secrethappiness, for a pairing I've never written before. I tend to use gift exchanges to experiment, though I'm not sure why. Maybe because writing to someone else's specifications gives me a chance to break free of my usual writing habits.
Merry We Are
Fandom: Cobra Starship
Pairing: Alex/Ryland
Size: ~6000 words
Summary: A troubadour AU, as sinsense put it, and I quite liked.
It starts out slowly as they roll across the dusty plains and farmlands separating the city of Verun from the coast. Alex says, "Do you hear that?"
Ryland, who has been sprawled on his back, his considerable height sandwiched between lumpy packages in as best as possible a way to encompass comfort as well as safety, doesn't even lift his head.
"No," he says. "I hear the wind. I hear the wagon. I hear - no, that's just my brain, shriveling in this god-awful heat."
"Drink more water," Alex says and passes over their water bottle. "I don't think you can afford your brain getting smaller. What's smaller than a pea, anyway?"
"I don't know," Ryland says. "I can't think."
A drum pulse starts up again, just barely audible underneath the constant saw of the wind, just loud enough to throb in the back of Alex's skull. It is joined by a skirl of horns and fiddling, fainter than the faded colors on Ryland's favored once-striped shirt.
"Well, I hear something," Alex mutters to the wind, but the wind, and Ryland, don't bother to answer.
Alex isn't surprised. Ryland doesn't listen in the same way Alex does, though every once in a while Alex tries to bring it to Ryland's attention, just to see if he'd picked up the knack while Alex wasn't paying attention. It's not so much that the music is unfamiliar, no, but the last time Alex heard this particular tune, he found Ryland entertaining custom in the dining room of the inn where Alex worked. Last time he heard this music, it brought him Ryland.
The afternoon sun is strong on his face. Alex covers his head with his abandoned straw hat, leans back against his rucksack, and closes his eyes. He wonders what the music will bring him this time.
*
The farmer they hitched a ride with takes them as far as the rolling hills of her homestead before she turns off the main road. They almost part then, but she promises a meal and a free night's stay in the barn if they come and entertain her family for an evening. They hardly even need to exchange glances before Ryland is smiling and saying, "We'd be delighted," in that overly-florid way he gets sometimes. His brain would have to be shriveled far smaller than the size of a pea to forgo an (almost) free meal.
The house is surrounded on all sides by wheat and corn fields. It's late enough in the season that the wheat heads are bleached white and nodding in the wind, and pale tassels of cornsilk peek out from heavy-looking sheaths of green. The farm looks healthy and prosperous, which is a relief.
Children begin spilling out of the house and barn and running in from the fields before they've even come to a stop, calling excitedly to each other in raucous shouts like the cawing of birds, and for a moment that's what Alex hears, quick, quick, come quick, home home home! The farm-wife, Borwynn, neatly brakes the wagon and manages to avoid crushing any of the children. Alex can only assume she expected this.
"All right, all right," she says, and hops down from the bench, and the cawing changes to: what, bring, presents, home! Borwynn deciphers the children's excitement with ease, and casts a look over her shoulder at Alex and Ryland, who pick up their packs and their instruments from the back of the wagon and step down. Alex moves slowly and with exaggerated care for his poor, stiffened muscles. Ryland, he notices, is stepping equally gingerly.
"Once more into the breach, my friend," Ryland says softly, clapping Alex on the shoulder. Ryland, interestingly, doesn't particularly care for children.
"Who wants to hear a story?" Alex says to the wider audience, stepping forward. The children shout, excited, and Alex holds up his hands. "Later, only if you are very good and your mothers say it's okay," he adds, because he caught sight of the other farm-wife standing in the doorway. She has flour on her hands and looks akin to the first farm-wife. The people in this area have brown hair and eyes and round faces, short and broad-shouldered and browned from the sun, and Alex and Ryland stand out from them like pine trees in a meadow.
The two farm-wives confer in the doorway, and then Borwynn presses a kiss to the other farm-wife's cheek and receives a pat on the cheek in return, and comes back towards them bearing a floury smudge on the side of her face.
"Kylla will show you where to put your belongings," Borwynn says, and then sends the children flying off on different trajectories with pats and words. The larger ones begin helping her unload the wagon. The most uncomfortable lump to try and sleep on turns out to have been a burlap-wrapped iron plow. He and Ryland are loaded down with packages and bid to follow Kylla into the kitchen, and then Kylla leads them through a back door and outside, across a packed-dirt yard into the haying barn. She is more talkative than Borwynn was, wanting to know where they came from and where they're going, what news they've heard, how long they've been traveling. Alex lets Ryland handle most of the conversation, because entertaining grown-ups is what he's good at, though Alex does step in to add relevant details when necessary.
The third time they trade the conversational gambit back and forth with ease, Kylla says, "Goodness. You've been traveling together for a while, haven't you?"
Ryland laughs and Alex smiles and shifts into the hand Ryland throws across his shoulder.
"I could probably hold each side of our conversation myself," Ryland confesses.
"But mine is the only side worth listening to," Alex says.
"I'd appreciate it if you'd let him believe that," Ryland says to Kylla, and plays with an exaggerated wink toward the audience of two other little children who have snuck up close to hang on the seam of Kylla's gray trousers. The children giggle, and Kylla places a fond hand each on the upside-down brown bowls of their heads. Ryland doesn't like children, but he's not bad with them when he has to be.
They go back inside the house, and Alex can see Kylla trying to decide what to do with them. The kitchen is halfway through being prepared for the evening meal. Alex stops her and says, "If you have cooking that needs doing, I can help out. That one -" he jabs a thumb at Ryland, "- can't cook for love or money, but I worked in the kitchen of an inn for years."
"Hey now," Ryland says, but lets himself get shuffled into a corner, while Alex is handed a knife and a heap of potatoes. Behind Kylla's back, he raises his eyes to the dusty ceiling at Ryland and Ryland raises an eyebrow in return. It's always potatoes. He's not tired, though, not in the bone-deep way that comes from walking all day with a load on your back, and that's enough of a thing to be grateful for that he peels potatoes with more than just an imitation of willingness, to be a good guest.
"Play something for the lady, Ryland," he says.
"Yessir," Ryland says, and unslings his guitar and tunes it quickly. The kitchen is hot and getting hotter, and the strings won't stay in-tune long, but no one here will likely notice. "What's your pleasure, lady?"
"Oh," Kylla says, and Alex watches color rise in her cheeks and then fall as she turns her attention back to laying out pie crusts. He's wondering whether there are any farm-husbands in this homestead and if she wants there to be one more, and if so whether he should warn Ryland or just watch the whole thing play out and laugh, when she says, "Play me something foreign."
"Something foreign, eh?" Ryland says. He plays a few idle notes and then launches into a bright and jaunty tune they learned back last winter when they were staying over the cold season at a theater in a city so far from Kylla's farm that no one she knows would ever go there, or if they did, would ever come back. He launches into the chorus with Ryland, keeping the low harmonies easily as his hands move automatically with the knife. There's a good rhythm here, in this place. Singing always makes work go more quickly. He sheds brown potato peels into a little hill, then a small mountain. The children run in and out of the room, and Borwynn comes in and stays through one and a half songs, feet tapping in time on the worn stone floor, before leaving to water the fields.
Ryland plays five more songs before he has to stop and beg water. While he is gone fetching some from the well outside, Kylla asks, again, "How long have you two traveled together?"
"A few years now," Alex says, and has to pause and think, before confessing, "I don't quite rightly know how many, though."
"How did you come to do what you do?" Kylla says, and Alex thinks, ahah, searching for a farm-husband, because it could be an innocent question, but she sounds like she cares too much what his answer is.
"We grew up in the same town," Alex says easily, "went away from the same town to the same city without knowing it, and then met each other again when we were older." It's a very confounding tale, full of more coincidences than Alex really likes to think about, so he doesn't tell it. "We found that there were other parallels in our lives, too, and here we are."
She looks confused at that, and he says, "We both live for music."
"Oh," she says. The conversation dies, then, and Alex starts whistling under his breath. Then she asks, "Why did you leave your hometown?" and Alex sighs, but just in his head, where she can't hear.
"Well, I'm afraid," he says gently, "that neither of us are really looking to settle down."
"Who's asking you to?" she says, cranky, rolling out another pie with an emphatic slam of the pin, and then Ryland returns with timing that is a little too good to be above suspicion, but he's carrying a bucket of cold water and he dips into it with one of the farm's solid, earthenware mugs and leaves it near Alex's elbow, so Alex forgives him.
"And now for something a little different?" Ryland asks brightly with a charming smile, and sets his fingers to the strings again. This time, he plays something without words, and it is unfamiliar even to Alex until the bridge, when Alex's hands stop on the knife and he turns and looks at Ryland, who is playing with his eyes closed and his face turned down toward the belly of his guitar. It's the song that has been playing in the back of his head where he cannot hear with his ears.
When Ryland stops playing, Alex stays unmoving for a long time before he forces himself to attend to his work again. This is how it was all over again, when he realized he had to leave his safe and comfortable position at that kitchen to follow Ryland around the country. This is it again, because Ryland makes him want to follow the music too much to do anything else. He thought he'd grown accustomed enough, but perhaps it was just a callous like the ones he's gotten on his fingers, and now Ryland's playing a different instrument and he's touching fresh skin.
"When did you learn that one?" Alex asks, and Ryland looks at him in sudden surprise, like he'd forgotten anyone was there.
"It's a little something I've been playing with," Ryland says.
"You wrote it?" Alex says, and Ryland shrugs.
Kylla is looking between the two of them with open curiosity and so Alex closes his mouth on the other questions gracing his tongue, and Ryland segues into another song. The next time Ryland takes a break, Alex asks about the condition of the road ahead, and the frequency with which their priest sanctifies it.
"I've never heard trouble with the road," Kylla says, a frown creasing her forehead. "No, no trouble. Priest sanctifies it 'bout every summer solstice, though. Mostly it's stopped raining by then and firmed up."
"Good, that's good," Alex says, and smiles at her. "We like easy travel."
She grins back, and it gives her a sudden, pretty charm. "Like your ride with Borwynn, then."
"Fit for princes," he says, and gets back to work.
At supper, the rest of the children and the other farm-wives and farm-husbands return to sit at the table in a loud and cheerful throng. There are two other women and three men aside from Borwynn and Kylla, and Alex loses track of the number of children, especially when they are squirming down from their seats or being passed arm to arm from one adult to another to be fed, but they are all brown and round like their siblings and parents, which makes them easy to lump together. As Alex had thought, the farm is a prosperous place, and it shows in the bounty of the table and their mostly un-patched clothing.
After the supper dishes have been cleared and washed and the leftovers covered and placed in the cold-cellar, Alex fetches his small skin drum and his guitar from outside, and he and Ryland gather in one corner of the main room with the family spread around them. The babies are redistributed and knitting and mending taken out from baskets and down from shelves. The children huddle on the ground to watch with breathless attention as Alex and Ryland tune their instruments.
They sing songs about shepherds and dairymaids that make the children giggle, about the sun and the moon taking a trip across the sky that makes their eyes go wide with wonder. They sing fast songs so that the adults' toes get tapping in their chairs and the children jump up and dance up together up and down the confines of the room, and funny songs so that everyone laughs when they get to the end. When the children tire and look like they're tempted to start squabbling, they sing slower songs, prettier songs. They sing songs about old heroes and battles, about magic-makers and kings, about famous lovers who die tragically, about the stories of the sea that they've never seen but are aiming to get to. They end on a quiet harmony with twilight fading into night outside the open windows and the children mostly asleep on the floor in front of them, though every once in a while an eye blinks open to shine in the dark before sagging closed again.
They switch to not playing anything with words at all, then, and Borwynn stands up and lights a precious oil lamp so the adults can continue their work in the dark, past the time when the farm would normally go to bed. Although he and Ryland have played together more times than Alex can count over the years, and in more different types of places than he can count on his fingers and toes put together, he feels different this evening, as though they're casting a spell over this household, he and Ryland together. He isn't surprised when at the end of one song, Ryland's fingers wander and he starts playing the song Alex heard before, the song Alex doesn't know except in the way that Alex knows it down to his bones. He taps a rhythm out on his drum, softly, soft and steady as a heartbeat while Ryland plays around him. They get to the end and neither one moves to play again, in a moment of wordless understanding that has wrapped them up and left Alex feeling that he could never speak again and Ryland would still know what he wanted. They are left looking at each other, because somehow at the end they had shifted so that they are facing mostly each other. It feels like perhaps Alex hasn't ever seen Ryland before, despite the years they've known one another, like perhaps he's never looked clearly, because in the flickering shine of the single lamp, Ryland's face is shaped of light and shadow and its expression is unfamiliar and mysterious. His eyes are light and clear and dominate his face. They are Ryland's finest assets, and Alex has known that, but perhaps he'd never truly seen it.
Finally, a chair creaks and breaks the spell of silence laid over the room, and as quickly as that, the room erupts in movement and noise as the adults put away their tasks and begin chivvying the children to bed. A baby awakes and starts fussing, and is quietly shushed.
Alex and Ryland put away their instruments. Alex's arms and back are tired now, and he's happy to make his bed in the straw. The night is cool but not cold when they step outside, and he stops just outside the barn door, looking up at the clear sky overhead. It's a nice night, and nicer still for not having to sleep out of doors.
Ryland says, "Alex?" from inside the darkness of the barn, and Alex realizes it's the first time they've truly been alone since reaching the farm that afternoon.
"I'm right here," he says.
"Well, come inside, then," Ryland says. "Or are you communing with the mysteries?"
"Communing..." Alex muses, and Ryland comes out of the barn and takes Alex's instruments from his arms and disappears back into the barn. "Thank you," Alex says, but he's been lost in playing for so long that he's doing it still in his mind and he can't quite sort his way back out enough to decide whether to move toward the barn and his bed or not, not until Ryland comes back and takes his elbow.
"Bedtime, bedtime," Ryland croons in a rising three-note major chord, and Alex pulls himself together enough to sing the last "bedtime," moving to follow Ryland's hand on his arm.
"When did you write that song?" Alex asks sleepily after they settle into their separate blankets. The straw makes just as nice a mattress as he'd hoped. He shuffles his feet for the sheer joy of it.
"Not so long ago," Ryland replies. He sounds tired, and yawns a second later. The straw rustles as he turns over, but Alex can't see him in the dark.
"Will you write words for it?" Alex asks.
"Maybe," Ryland mumbles. Then, in a dying sigh, "When I know how the story ends."
"What story?" Alex says, but not loudly, and Ryland doesn't answer. His breathing evens out, and soon, Alex is following him into sleep.
*
"Will we find luck with another friendly farmer, do you think?" Alex says the next morning. They had woken up with the dawn and given quick goodbyes before the sun could rise above the horizon, leaving to walk on the road with the sun angled low and blinding in their eyes the way it was at early morning and late afternoon. But the day is still cool, yet, for at least a few hours.
"Maybe," Ryland says. "Don't want to use up all our luck for the week, though, what will we have at the end?"
"Hm," Alex says. "Bad luck?"
Ryland points at him and nods. Alex raises his shoulders, digs his fingers under the straps of his pack in a fruitless attempt to shift the weight.
"At least we got fresh water," he says practically.
"This is a valid and relevant point," Ryland says.
"Anyway," Alex says, "the next batch of friendly farmer luck, they might not let you leave. I guess it's better to stay clear of that." Ryland snorts at that, and Alex says, "Thank you for abandoning me with that line of inquiry, in case I hadn't mentioned it."
"I didn't abandon you," Ryland says. "The line had not been, er, inquired, before I left to get a drink. I think you should give me that."
"Hm!" Alex says. It isn't an agreement.
They walk on. The sun is slanting, still, low over the rolling hills. In the distance, if Alex squints against the glare, he can see a darker shadow on the horizon where the land begins to rise and forest creeps down into the edges of the valley. They are, at long last, getting to the end of the unwooded plains. The end of the day, he thinks, should see them into the shadow of the forest.
They keep walking through the morning long enough that the familiar ache that started in Alex's right shoulder centers itself and then spreads down to his low back. They stop to drink water, then stop again to eat one of the slightly-stale sweet rolls Borwynn had given them when they left that morning. Insects drone from the long grasses at the side of the road . They've stopped speaking over the course of the morning. Alex has settled into his walking pace, a long-striding thing that he can manage without paying attention to much of anything, and it's an easy way to pass the hours of walking while his mind wanders elsewhere. As a consequence, it's not until their second break that Alex shakes himself awake enough to realize that the sun is still slanting in his eyes and the air is still cool and hours should have passed that haven't.
"Ryland," Alex says.
"Mm hm," Ryland says. He has his eyes closed and is sitting on the ground leaning on his pack with his legs stretched in front of him and stacked at the ankle. His guitar in its travel case is resting on its side, nearby.
"Ryland, wake up," Alex says, and kicks him in the shin.
"'M awake," Ryland mutters with his eyes closed, and the insects' hum drones louder in Alex's ears. He feels almost blind in the light and it makes him want to shut his eyes like Ryland and just sink into the rhythm of the insects singing. The wind starts rustling the grasses and it sounds like the tinkling of running water, something soft and soothing.
He pries his eyes open with an effort he almost hears, a burst of fear driving the fatigue away, and snatches Ryland's guitar up from the ground, hands fumbling on the case. He drags his fingers across the string in a loud, out of tune jangle that jolts Ryland awake.
"Ryland, get up," Alex says loudly, and Ryland scrambles to his feet. They stare at each other for along moment and then the insects sing louder and Ryland's eyes start to droop closed again, and Alex rips his fingers across the guitar strings again and Ryland's eyes fly open again.
"What's going on?" he says.
"I don't know," Alex says. "I think. Something's wrong. The sun hasn't moved all day." Already Ryland is starting to sag, though, and Alex shouts, "Keep your damned eyes open!" and Ryland lurches upward.
"Goddamn," Ryland says.
"We're magicked," Alex says. It's there in the song Alex can hear under the suddenly-ominous wilderness sounds that rise up on either side of them.
"Keep moving," Ryland says, and fumbles his pack up off the ground. He moves like he's drunk, almost overbalancing, staggering. "If I stop moving 'm gone."
"Shit," Alex whispers, and a cold sweat breaks out on the back of his neck, under his arms, in the small of his back.
Ryland puts one grim step in front of the other, and Alex drops back enough that he can make sure he watches Ryland's progress, still cradling Ryland's guitar. For some reason, he is less susceptible to whatever enchantment is being worked against them, and Alex can't help but wonder if it is that difference between them, that other sensitivity Alex has mostly ignored in his life.
"I don't. understand," Ryland grits out after a time. The sun still dazzles Alex's eyes, and now that he is properly paying attention, he notices that the land is no longer changes around them. They are walking through a perpetual golden haze of sunbleached yellow grass and the dusty brown road, and the dark shadows of trees on the hills ahead of them come no closer as they walk. In Alex's ears and in the back of his skull, that nasty melody plays, soft and beguiling if he focuses on it, so he tries to ignore it.
Walking isn't working, though, it's obvious. Whatever this is, either they're trapped, or it's keeping pace with them.
"We're probably walking in circles," Alex says.
"This road is safe," Ryland says. Their many years of travel, and they always avoid the cursed places, the unsanctified roads. Magic begets magic, and he and Ryland have always avoided that, too.
"Oh, God," Alex says, and he's not swearing, he's praying. Something has unsanctified the road. The hum in his skull rises in volume as if in response, and Ryland stumbles. Trying to walk out of it isn't working, and Alex can't think beyond the buzzing in his ears and his own rapid, rasping breath.
In songs, the heroes fight with swords or magic or song. "Song," Alex says, but Ryland can't play. Ryland can barely walk. Alex, though, is holding Ryland's guitar in his hands. He plays a badly out of tune chord and for one moment the golden morning shivers around them.
"Ryland!" Alex says sharply. "Can you whistle?"
"What?" Ryland says.
"Whistle me a goddamn tune," Alex says, and tries to tune the guitar faster than he's ever done in his life. Ryland, after a too-long silence, starts whistling the simplest tune they know, a children's song Alex learned so young he can't even remember learning it. He joins Ryland on the second phrase, and he can see by Ryland's straightening gait that it's helping. Not enough, though, they're still trapped in an endless golden morning and that evil tune is still running underneath it all, and he redoubles his efforts with Ryland's guitar.
"Follow me," Alex says, and positions his fingers on the strings. It's not good playing, not their best efforts by any means; Alex's fingers fumble chord changes and Ryland's voice sharps and flats across the scale, but they get through one song, then two, and Alex can feel the magicking losing strength around him. The sun is slowly rising toward midday and he is starting to see through the haze and hear through the humming. He starts a third song and thinks, three for making, three for breaking, but Ryland doesn't start singing, and when Alex looks up, he sees that Ryland is standing stock-still in the road, eyes focused on nothing.
"Ryland?" he says, and behind him, someone laughs, low and nasty.
"Someone's not magic enough," a woman says, and he turns around so fast he overbalances and almost falls. She laughs again, and it isn't prettier the second time. She is, though, pretty like a summer morning, with curly golden hair tumbled down her back and a sweet oval face and a fine figure. She has a beheaded rabbit in one hand, and its blood drips down her hand and onto the dirt of the road in drops Alex can almost hear as they hit the ground. She smiles at him, then, quick and charming. "You are, though. Aren't you lovely?"
"What did you do?" Alex says. He forces himself to keep playing. It's the only thing he can think of, to keep his fingers moving across the strings of his borrowed guitar. The woman gives a disdainful glance at his guitar.
"Are you going to play me a little tune?" she asks. "I enjoyed them so much last night."
"I never played for you," Alex says, low.
"You shouldn't have been so loud if you didn't want to attract attention," she scolds. "Anyway, you will now, won't you? Don't you want your friend back? He's mine now."
"Give him back," Alex says fiercely.
"Make me," she says, taunting as a child at play.
Alex's hands tighten on the strings, and then he starts again. It's even harder without Ryland, with Ryland at his back as still as a statue. His voice sounds thin and like nothing at all, nowhere strong enough to break a curse like the one this lass has laid against them. But he wants Ryland back desperately.
He starts out trying to ignore her, to focus on the music and nothing else, but he can't do that without ignoring Ryland, and that feels both impossible and foolhardy besides. When he tries to pay attention to the music and Ryland both, she's unable to overlook. Pretty as a picture and with malice through to her core, and the more desperately he plays, the more she smiles. It isn't working, and he feels Ryland slipping farther and farther away. Her toe taps in time with his song. He realizes, to his horror, that somehow while he was distracted, his song slipped to accompany hers, humming underneath everything. It's the opposite of the heartbeat he played last night, the furthest sound possible from the rhythm of his and Ryland's life together.
He slashes his hand down the strings again in a cruel cacophony, then slams his palm down to still the strings, leaving an instant of silence that he lets sit before diving into the first song he can remember playing with Ryland, the first song they played where he thought he might want to do this forever and that even leaving his home would be worth what they could make together. It's almost directly opposite the enchantress's melody and the dissonance makes him grit his teeth. The enchantress is no longer smiling, when he casts a cautious look in her direction. He launches directly from that song into another one, then another, and he picks all the songs he can remember that the two of them have particularly treasured. He sings the song he made up when Ryland tripped over his own two feet and fell into a stream, he sings the song Ryland sang for his birthday one year, he sings the song that always reminds him of home. He sings anything and everything he can think of, guided by some deep instinct that sends him away, away, away from that horrible creeping enchantress's spell, and toward everything about Ryland and his life that he loves, everything that it has brought him. The air around him lightens as the haze disperses, but Ryland is still an unmoving shape behind him. He knows somehow without knowing why that to repeat himself would be to lose this desperate battle, that to stop playing would call forfeit, and so he pushes past weariness in his voice, his hands, his arms, his shoulders that are still burdened with his pack.
As he plays, the enchantress's song waxes and wanes like the moon as she clenches her fists, and he plays louder to drown her out. Finally, when he has nothing left, he finds his finger moving on the strings in a pattern he knows, though he's never played it before. He plays their song, the song Ryland wrote for them, and for the first time since this nightmare began, he hears something in his mind that isn't made of spite and the droning of the insects and the hammering heat of a drought-filled summer day. He hears a drum like a heartbeat, the skirl of horns and the sighing of violins, and his own guitar-playing over it all, perfectly one.
He stops playing with his eyes closed, his hair dampened flat against his forehead with sweat, the sun beating down on his bare head. He breathes in with a huge gasp of air and opens his eyes. The woman is gone. Dried blood scattered across the road is the only sign she existed anywhere than Alex's nightmares. When he spins around, heart in his throat, Ryland is blinking dazedly up at the sun, directly overhead.
"Oh, God," Alex says, throat so dry he can hardly speak, voice cracking with his relief, and then he sits down in the dirt.
"Alex?" Ryland says.
His feet enter Alex's field of vision, and Alex reaches out like one of Kylla's children, and grabs onto the cloth of Ryland's trouser leg. He tips forward and ends up with his forehead pressing against Ryland's bony knee. It hurts, a little, and that helps.
"All right, all right now," Ryland says soothingly. "I'm right here." His hand comes down and sweeps Alex's hair away from his face.
Alex sits still and lets him, once, twice, three times, and then he mumbles, "We should go. We're still on unconsecrated ground."
"Well, I would," Ryland says with gentle affection, "but you're sitting on my foot."
"Oh," Alex says, and shifts back and tries to stand up. Ryland grabs onto his elbow and hoists, and they end up roughly upright, though Alex teeters for one precarious second.
"Ready?" Ryland asks, and Alex nods.
He concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other until they turn a bend in the road that's at least a mile from where they were trapped, and then he staggers into the barely-adequate shade of a high bush and sits down.
"We're stopping, then," Ryland says, and sits down next to him. He passes over a water bottle that Alex takes gratefully, and waits until Alex has lowered and capped it to say, "Thank you."
"God, that was awful," Alex says, and Ryland nods emphatically.
"I don't know what to say, really," he says, sounding frustrated, and angry underneath it.
"God, that was awful," Alex repeats, and Ryland barks out a laugh.
"I hate that I couldn't do anything," he says.
"You did, though," Alex says. Ryland shakes his head, but Alex presses on. "Who's song do you think I was playing at the end?"
Ryland frowns. "I didn't - I couldn't hear or see anything, you know. Last thing I remember is you telling me to whistle a pretty tune."
"Oh," Alex says.
"Yes," Ryland says. "Oh."
And, oh, it would have been easier, Alex thinks, if he had. Instead, he can feel his face heat up as he says, "I had to play things to break her spell. Things that reminded me of you. Of. Us. I, uh." He's looking at Ryland's left shoulder, and so he focuses on Ryland's face. "I played that song you wrote, at the end," he says, and watches as Ryland's mouth quirks in a smile that spreads slowly across his face.
"Did you?" Ryland says lightly.
"Mm," Alex says.
"Well. Good," Ryland says, and then he laughs, sounding almost like he's laughing despite himself, like it's been surprised out of him.
*
"You know," Alex says, after Ryland has carefully reclaimed and resecured his guitar, they've started walking again, and he's had time to talk himself into it and out of it several times over. "Traditionally, after a hero defeats an evil enchantress, he gets to do something else. We've neglected something."
"Oh, really?" Ryland says.
"Well, yes. He should get to kiss the heroine."
"Alex," Ryland says, and he sounds reproving and amused. "Did you just call me a woman?"
"Not...precisely," Alex says, already formulating an argument to defend his case, but then Ryland is reaching over and stopping him, cupping his head between his two hands, and then he leans in and kisses him.
In the back of Alex's head, he hears a drum-beat start, low and steady as a heartbeat.
[END] (at AO3)
Note: Many thanks to sinsense for shortening my dreadfully run-on sentences and betaing for me in literally the last minutes before the submission deadline.
The popoffacork authors have been revealed, and I can now share the story I wrote for secrethappiness, for a pairing I've never written before. I tend to use gift exchanges to experiment, though I'm not sure why. Maybe because writing to someone else's specifications gives me a chance to break free of my usual writing habits.
Merry We Are
Fandom: Cobra Starship
Pairing: Alex/Ryland
Size: ~6000 words
Summary: A troubadour AU, as sinsense put it, and I quite liked.
It starts out slowly as they roll across the dusty plains and farmlands separating the city of Verun from the coast. Alex says, "Do you hear that?"
Ryland, who has been sprawled on his back, his considerable height sandwiched between lumpy packages in as best as possible a way to encompass comfort as well as safety, doesn't even lift his head.
"No," he says. "I hear the wind. I hear the wagon. I hear - no, that's just my brain, shriveling in this god-awful heat."
"Drink more water," Alex says and passes over their water bottle. "I don't think you can afford your brain getting smaller. What's smaller than a pea, anyway?"
"I don't know," Ryland says. "I can't think."
A drum pulse starts up again, just barely audible underneath the constant saw of the wind, just loud enough to throb in the back of Alex's skull. It is joined by a skirl of horns and fiddling, fainter than the faded colors on Ryland's favored once-striped shirt.
"Well, I hear something," Alex mutters to the wind, but the wind, and Ryland, don't bother to answer.
Alex isn't surprised. Ryland doesn't listen in the same way Alex does, though every once in a while Alex tries to bring it to Ryland's attention, just to see if he'd picked up the knack while Alex wasn't paying attention. It's not so much that the music is unfamiliar, no, but the last time Alex heard this particular tune, he found Ryland entertaining custom in the dining room of the inn where Alex worked. Last time he heard this music, it brought him Ryland.
The afternoon sun is strong on his face. Alex covers his head with his abandoned straw hat, leans back against his rucksack, and closes his eyes. He wonders what the music will bring him this time.
*
The farmer they hitched a ride with takes them as far as the rolling hills of her homestead before she turns off the main road. They almost part then, but she promises a meal and a free night's stay in the barn if they come and entertain her family for an evening. They hardly even need to exchange glances before Ryland is smiling and saying, "We'd be delighted," in that overly-florid way he gets sometimes. His brain would have to be shriveled far smaller than the size of a pea to forgo an (almost) free meal.
The house is surrounded on all sides by wheat and corn fields. It's late enough in the season that the wheat heads are bleached white and nodding in the wind, and pale tassels of cornsilk peek out from heavy-looking sheaths of green. The farm looks healthy and prosperous, which is a relief.
Children begin spilling out of the house and barn and running in from the fields before they've even come to a stop, calling excitedly to each other in raucous shouts like the cawing of birds, and for a moment that's what Alex hears, quick, quick, come quick, home home home! The farm-wife, Borwynn, neatly brakes the wagon and manages to avoid crushing any of the children. Alex can only assume she expected this.
"All right, all right," she says, and hops down from the bench, and the cawing changes to: what, bring, presents, home! Borwynn deciphers the children's excitement with ease, and casts a look over her shoulder at Alex and Ryland, who pick up their packs and their instruments from the back of the wagon and step down. Alex moves slowly and with exaggerated care for his poor, stiffened muscles. Ryland, he notices, is stepping equally gingerly.
"Once more into the breach, my friend," Ryland says softly, clapping Alex on the shoulder. Ryland, interestingly, doesn't particularly care for children.
"Who wants to hear a story?" Alex says to the wider audience, stepping forward. The children shout, excited, and Alex holds up his hands. "Later, only if you are very good and your mothers say it's okay," he adds, because he caught sight of the other farm-wife standing in the doorway. She has flour on her hands and looks akin to the first farm-wife. The people in this area have brown hair and eyes and round faces, short and broad-shouldered and browned from the sun, and Alex and Ryland stand out from them like pine trees in a meadow.
The two farm-wives confer in the doorway, and then Borwynn presses a kiss to the other farm-wife's cheek and receives a pat on the cheek in return, and comes back towards them bearing a floury smudge on the side of her face.
"Kylla will show you where to put your belongings," Borwynn says, and then sends the children flying off on different trajectories with pats and words. The larger ones begin helping her unload the wagon. The most uncomfortable lump to try and sleep on turns out to have been a burlap-wrapped iron plow. He and Ryland are loaded down with packages and bid to follow Kylla into the kitchen, and then Kylla leads them through a back door and outside, across a packed-dirt yard into the haying barn. She is more talkative than Borwynn was, wanting to know where they came from and where they're going, what news they've heard, how long they've been traveling. Alex lets Ryland handle most of the conversation, because entertaining grown-ups is what he's good at, though Alex does step in to add relevant details when necessary.
The third time they trade the conversational gambit back and forth with ease, Kylla says, "Goodness. You've been traveling together for a while, haven't you?"
Ryland laughs and Alex smiles and shifts into the hand Ryland throws across his shoulder.
"I could probably hold each side of our conversation myself," Ryland confesses.
"But mine is the only side worth listening to," Alex says.
"I'd appreciate it if you'd let him believe that," Ryland says to Kylla, and plays with an exaggerated wink toward the audience of two other little children who have snuck up close to hang on the seam of Kylla's gray trousers. The children giggle, and Kylla places a fond hand each on the upside-down brown bowls of their heads. Ryland doesn't like children, but he's not bad with them when he has to be.
They go back inside the house, and Alex can see Kylla trying to decide what to do with them. The kitchen is halfway through being prepared for the evening meal. Alex stops her and says, "If you have cooking that needs doing, I can help out. That one -" he jabs a thumb at Ryland, "- can't cook for love or money, but I worked in the kitchen of an inn for years."
"Hey now," Ryland says, but lets himself get shuffled into a corner, while Alex is handed a knife and a heap of potatoes. Behind Kylla's back, he raises his eyes to the dusty ceiling at Ryland and Ryland raises an eyebrow in return. It's always potatoes. He's not tired, though, not in the bone-deep way that comes from walking all day with a load on your back, and that's enough of a thing to be grateful for that he peels potatoes with more than just an imitation of willingness, to be a good guest.
"Play something for the lady, Ryland," he says.
"Yessir," Ryland says, and unslings his guitar and tunes it quickly. The kitchen is hot and getting hotter, and the strings won't stay in-tune long, but no one here will likely notice. "What's your pleasure, lady?"
"Oh," Kylla says, and Alex watches color rise in her cheeks and then fall as she turns her attention back to laying out pie crusts. He's wondering whether there are any farm-husbands in this homestead and if she wants there to be one more, and if so whether he should warn Ryland or just watch the whole thing play out and laugh, when she says, "Play me something foreign."
"Something foreign, eh?" Ryland says. He plays a few idle notes and then launches into a bright and jaunty tune they learned back last winter when they were staying over the cold season at a theater in a city so far from Kylla's farm that no one she knows would ever go there, or if they did, would ever come back. He launches into the chorus with Ryland, keeping the low harmonies easily as his hands move automatically with the knife. There's a good rhythm here, in this place. Singing always makes work go more quickly. He sheds brown potato peels into a little hill, then a small mountain. The children run in and out of the room, and Borwynn comes in and stays through one and a half songs, feet tapping in time on the worn stone floor, before leaving to water the fields.
Ryland plays five more songs before he has to stop and beg water. While he is gone fetching some from the well outside, Kylla asks, again, "How long have you two traveled together?"
"A few years now," Alex says, and has to pause and think, before confessing, "I don't quite rightly know how many, though."
"How did you come to do what you do?" Kylla says, and Alex thinks, ahah, searching for a farm-husband, because it could be an innocent question, but she sounds like she cares too much what his answer is.
"We grew up in the same town," Alex says easily, "went away from the same town to the same city without knowing it, and then met each other again when we were older." It's a very confounding tale, full of more coincidences than Alex really likes to think about, so he doesn't tell it. "We found that there were other parallels in our lives, too, and here we are."
She looks confused at that, and he says, "We both live for music."
"Oh," she says. The conversation dies, then, and Alex starts whistling under his breath. Then she asks, "Why did you leave your hometown?" and Alex sighs, but just in his head, where she can't hear.
"Well, I'm afraid," he says gently, "that neither of us are really looking to settle down."
"Who's asking you to?" she says, cranky, rolling out another pie with an emphatic slam of the pin, and then Ryland returns with timing that is a little too good to be above suspicion, but he's carrying a bucket of cold water and he dips into it with one of the farm's solid, earthenware mugs and leaves it near Alex's elbow, so Alex forgives him.
"And now for something a little different?" Ryland asks brightly with a charming smile, and sets his fingers to the strings again. This time, he plays something without words, and it is unfamiliar even to Alex until the bridge, when Alex's hands stop on the knife and he turns and looks at Ryland, who is playing with his eyes closed and his face turned down toward the belly of his guitar. It's the song that has been playing in the back of his head where he cannot hear with his ears.
When Ryland stops playing, Alex stays unmoving for a long time before he forces himself to attend to his work again. This is how it was all over again, when he realized he had to leave his safe and comfortable position at that kitchen to follow Ryland around the country. This is it again, because Ryland makes him want to follow the music too much to do anything else. He thought he'd grown accustomed enough, but perhaps it was just a callous like the ones he's gotten on his fingers, and now Ryland's playing a different instrument and he's touching fresh skin.
"When did you learn that one?" Alex asks, and Ryland looks at him in sudden surprise, like he'd forgotten anyone was there.
"It's a little something I've been playing with," Ryland says.
"You wrote it?" Alex says, and Ryland shrugs.
Kylla is looking between the two of them with open curiosity and so Alex closes his mouth on the other questions gracing his tongue, and Ryland segues into another song. The next time Ryland takes a break, Alex asks about the condition of the road ahead, and the frequency with which their priest sanctifies it.
"I've never heard trouble with the road," Kylla says, a frown creasing her forehead. "No, no trouble. Priest sanctifies it 'bout every summer solstice, though. Mostly it's stopped raining by then and firmed up."
"Good, that's good," Alex says, and smiles at her. "We like easy travel."
She grins back, and it gives her a sudden, pretty charm. "Like your ride with Borwynn, then."
"Fit for princes," he says, and gets back to work.
At supper, the rest of the children and the other farm-wives and farm-husbands return to sit at the table in a loud and cheerful throng. There are two other women and three men aside from Borwynn and Kylla, and Alex loses track of the number of children, especially when they are squirming down from their seats or being passed arm to arm from one adult to another to be fed, but they are all brown and round like their siblings and parents, which makes them easy to lump together. As Alex had thought, the farm is a prosperous place, and it shows in the bounty of the table and their mostly un-patched clothing.
After the supper dishes have been cleared and washed and the leftovers covered and placed in the cold-cellar, Alex fetches his small skin drum and his guitar from outside, and he and Ryland gather in one corner of the main room with the family spread around them. The babies are redistributed and knitting and mending taken out from baskets and down from shelves. The children huddle on the ground to watch with breathless attention as Alex and Ryland tune their instruments.
They sing songs about shepherds and dairymaids that make the children giggle, about the sun and the moon taking a trip across the sky that makes their eyes go wide with wonder. They sing fast songs so that the adults' toes get tapping in their chairs and the children jump up and dance up together up and down the confines of the room, and funny songs so that everyone laughs when they get to the end. When the children tire and look like they're tempted to start squabbling, they sing slower songs, prettier songs. They sing songs about old heroes and battles, about magic-makers and kings, about famous lovers who die tragically, about the stories of the sea that they've never seen but are aiming to get to. They end on a quiet harmony with twilight fading into night outside the open windows and the children mostly asleep on the floor in front of them, though every once in a while an eye blinks open to shine in the dark before sagging closed again.
They switch to not playing anything with words at all, then, and Borwynn stands up and lights a precious oil lamp so the adults can continue their work in the dark, past the time when the farm would normally go to bed. Although he and Ryland have played together more times than Alex can count over the years, and in more different types of places than he can count on his fingers and toes put together, he feels different this evening, as though they're casting a spell over this household, he and Ryland together. He isn't surprised when at the end of one song, Ryland's fingers wander and he starts playing the song Alex heard before, the song Alex doesn't know except in the way that Alex knows it down to his bones. He taps a rhythm out on his drum, softly, soft and steady as a heartbeat while Ryland plays around him. They get to the end and neither one moves to play again, in a moment of wordless understanding that has wrapped them up and left Alex feeling that he could never speak again and Ryland would still know what he wanted. They are left looking at each other, because somehow at the end they had shifted so that they are facing mostly each other. It feels like perhaps Alex hasn't ever seen Ryland before, despite the years they've known one another, like perhaps he's never looked clearly, because in the flickering shine of the single lamp, Ryland's face is shaped of light and shadow and its expression is unfamiliar and mysterious. His eyes are light and clear and dominate his face. They are Ryland's finest assets, and Alex has known that, but perhaps he'd never truly seen it.
Finally, a chair creaks and breaks the spell of silence laid over the room, and as quickly as that, the room erupts in movement and noise as the adults put away their tasks and begin chivvying the children to bed. A baby awakes and starts fussing, and is quietly shushed.
Alex and Ryland put away their instruments. Alex's arms and back are tired now, and he's happy to make his bed in the straw. The night is cool but not cold when they step outside, and he stops just outside the barn door, looking up at the clear sky overhead. It's a nice night, and nicer still for not having to sleep out of doors.
Ryland says, "Alex?" from inside the darkness of the barn, and Alex realizes it's the first time they've truly been alone since reaching the farm that afternoon.
"I'm right here," he says.
"Well, come inside, then," Ryland says. "Or are you communing with the mysteries?"
"Communing..." Alex muses, and Ryland comes out of the barn and takes Alex's instruments from his arms and disappears back into the barn. "Thank you," Alex says, but he's been lost in playing for so long that he's doing it still in his mind and he can't quite sort his way back out enough to decide whether to move toward the barn and his bed or not, not until Ryland comes back and takes his elbow.
"Bedtime, bedtime," Ryland croons in a rising three-note major chord, and Alex pulls himself together enough to sing the last "bedtime," moving to follow Ryland's hand on his arm.
"When did you write that song?" Alex asks sleepily after they settle into their separate blankets. The straw makes just as nice a mattress as he'd hoped. He shuffles his feet for the sheer joy of it.
"Not so long ago," Ryland replies. He sounds tired, and yawns a second later. The straw rustles as he turns over, but Alex can't see him in the dark.
"Will you write words for it?" Alex asks.
"Maybe," Ryland mumbles. Then, in a dying sigh, "When I know how the story ends."
"What story?" Alex says, but not loudly, and Ryland doesn't answer. His breathing evens out, and soon, Alex is following him into sleep.
*
"Will we find luck with another friendly farmer, do you think?" Alex says the next morning. They had woken up with the dawn and given quick goodbyes before the sun could rise above the horizon, leaving to walk on the road with the sun angled low and blinding in their eyes the way it was at early morning and late afternoon. But the day is still cool, yet, for at least a few hours.
"Maybe," Ryland says. "Don't want to use up all our luck for the week, though, what will we have at the end?"
"Hm," Alex says. "Bad luck?"
Ryland points at him and nods. Alex raises his shoulders, digs his fingers under the straps of his pack in a fruitless attempt to shift the weight.
"At least we got fresh water," he says practically.
"This is a valid and relevant point," Ryland says.
"Anyway," Alex says, "the next batch of friendly farmer luck, they might not let you leave. I guess it's better to stay clear of that." Ryland snorts at that, and Alex says, "Thank you for abandoning me with that line of inquiry, in case I hadn't mentioned it."
"I didn't abandon you," Ryland says. "The line had not been, er, inquired, before I left to get a drink. I think you should give me that."
"Hm!" Alex says. It isn't an agreement.
They walk on. The sun is slanting, still, low over the rolling hills. In the distance, if Alex squints against the glare, he can see a darker shadow on the horizon where the land begins to rise and forest creeps down into the edges of the valley. They are, at long last, getting to the end of the unwooded plains. The end of the day, he thinks, should see them into the shadow of the forest.
They keep walking through the morning long enough that the familiar ache that started in Alex's right shoulder centers itself and then spreads down to his low back. They stop to drink water, then stop again to eat one of the slightly-stale sweet rolls Borwynn had given them when they left that morning. Insects drone from the long grasses at the side of the road . They've stopped speaking over the course of the morning. Alex has settled into his walking pace, a long-striding thing that he can manage without paying attention to much of anything, and it's an easy way to pass the hours of walking while his mind wanders elsewhere. As a consequence, it's not until their second break that Alex shakes himself awake enough to realize that the sun is still slanting in his eyes and the air is still cool and hours should have passed that haven't.
"Ryland," Alex says.
"Mm hm," Ryland says. He has his eyes closed and is sitting on the ground leaning on his pack with his legs stretched in front of him and stacked at the ankle. His guitar in its travel case is resting on its side, nearby.
"Ryland, wake up," Alex says, and kicks him in the shin.
"'M awake," Ryland mutters with his eyes closed, and the insects' hum drones louder in Alex's ears. He feels almost blind in the light and it makes him want to shut his eyes like Ryland and just sink into the rhythm of the insects singing. The wind starts rustling the grasses and it sounds like the tinkling of running water, something soft and soothing.
He pries his eyes open with an effort he almost hears, a burst of fear driving the fatigue away, and snatches Ryland's guitar up from the ground, hands fumbling on the case. He drags his fingers across the string in a loud, out of tune jangle that jolts Ryland awake.
"Ryland, get up," Alex says loudly, and Ryland scrambles to his feet. They stare at each other for along moment and then the insects sing louder and Ryland's eyes start to droop closed again, and Alex rips his fingers across the guitar strings again and Ryland's eyes fly open again.
"What's going on?" he says.
"I don't know," Alex says. "I think. Something's wrong. The sun hasn't moved all day." Already Ryland is starting to sag, though, and Alex shouts, "Keep your damned eyes open!" and Ryland lurches upward.
"Goddamn," Ryland says.
"We're magicked," Alex says. It's there in the song Alex can hear under the suddenly-ominous wilderness sounds that rise up on either side of them.
"Keep moving," Ryland says, and fumbles his pack up off the ground. He moves like he's drunk, almost overbalancing, staggering. "If I stop moving 'm gone."
"Shit," Alex whispers, and a cold sweat breaks out on the back of his neck, under his arms, in the small of his back.
Ryland puts one grim step in front of the other, and Alex drops back enough that he can make sure he watches Ryland's progress, still cradling Ryland's guitar. For some reason, he is less susceptible to whatever enchantment is being worked against them, and Alex can't help but wonder if it is that difference between them, that other sensitivity Alex has mostly ignored in his life.
"I don't. understand," Ryland grits out after a time. The sun still dazzles Alex's eyes, and now that he is properly paying attention, he notices that the land is no longer changes around them. They are walking through a perpetual golden haze of sunbleached yellow grass and the dusty brown road, and the dark shadows of trees on the hills ahead of them come no closer as they walk. In Alex's ears and in the back of his skull, that nasty melody plays, soft and beguiling if he focuses on it, so he tries to ignore it.
Walking isn't working, though, it's obvious. Whatever this is, either they're trapped, or it's keeping pace with them.
"We're probably walking in circles," Alex says.
"This road is safe," Ryland says. Their many years of travel, and they always avoid the cursed places, the unsanctified roads. Magic begets magic, and he and Ryland have always avoided that, too.
"Oh, God," Alex says, and he's not swearing, he's praying. Something has unsanctified the road. The hum in his skull rises in volume as if in response, and Ryland stumbles. Trying to walk out of it isn't working, and Alex can't think beyond the buzzing in his ears and his own rapid, rasping breath.
In songs, the heroes fight with swords or magic or song. "Song," Alex says, but Ryland can't play. Ryland can barely walk. Alex, though, is holding Ryland's guitar in his hands. He plays a badly out of tune chord and for one moment the golden morning shivers around them.
"Ryland!" Alex says sharply. "Can you whistle?"
"What?" Ryland says.
"Whistle me a goddamn tune," Alex says, and tries to tune the guitar faster than he's ever done in his life. Ryland, after a too-long silence, starts whistling the simplest tune they know, a children's song Alex learned so young he can't even remember learning it. He joins Ryland on the second phrase, and he can see by Ryland's straightening gait that it's helping. Not enough, though, they're still trapped in an endless golden morning and that evil tune is still running underneath it all, and he redoubles his efforts with Ryland's guitar.
"Follow me," Alex says, and positions his fingers on the strings. It's not good playing, not their best efforts by any means; Alex's fingers fumble chord changes and Ryland's voice sharps and flats across the scale, but they get through one song, then two, and Alex can feel the magicking losing strength around him. The sun is slowly rising toward midday and he is starting to see through the haze and hear through the humming. He starts a third song and thinks, three for making, three for breaking, but Ryland doesn't start singing, and when Alex looks up, he sees that Ryland is standing stock-still in the road, eyes focused on nothing.
"Ryland?" he says, and behind him, someone laughs, low and nasty.
"Someone's not magic enough," a woman says, and he turns around so fast he overbalances and almost falls. She laughs again, and it isn't prettier the second time. She is, though, pretty like a summer morning, with curly golden hair tumbled down her back and a sweet oval face and a fine figure. She has a beheaded rabbit in one hand, and its blood drips down her hand and onto the dirt of the road in drops Alex can almost hear as they hit the ground. She smiles at him, then, quick and charming. "You are, though. Aren't you lovely?"
"What did you do?" Alex says. He forces himself to keep playing. It's the only thing he can think of, to keep his fingers moving across the strings of his borrowed guitar. The woman gives a disdainful glance at his guitar.
"Are you going to play me a little tune?" she asks. "I enjoyed them so much last night."
"I never played for you," Alex says, low.
"You shouldn't have been so loud if you didn't want to attract attention," she scolds. "Anyway, you will now, won't you? Don't you want your friend back? He's mine now."
"Give him back," Alex says fiercely.
"Make me," she says, taunting as a child at play.
Alex's hands tighten on the strings, and then he starts again. It's even harder without Ryland, with Ryland at his back as still as a statue. His voice sounds thin and like nothing at all, nowhere strong enough to break a curse like the one this lass has laid against them. But he wants Ryland back desperately.
He starts out trying to ignore her, to focus on the music and nothing else, but he can't do that without ignoring Ryland, and that feels both impossible and foolhardy besides. When he tries to pay attention to the music and Ryland both, she's unable to overlook. Pretty as a picture and with malice through to her core, and the more desperately he plays, the more she smiles. It isn't working, and he feels Ryland slipping farther and farther away. Her toe taps in time with his song. He realizes, to his horror, that somehow while he was distracted, his song slipped to accompany hers, humming underneath everything. It's the opposite of the heartbeat he played last night, the furthest sound possible from the rhythm of his and Ryland's life together.
He slashes his hand down the strings again in a cruel cacophony, then slams his palm down to still the strings, leaving an instant of silence that he lets sit before diving into the first song he can remember playing with Ryland, the first song they played where he thought he might want to do this forever and that even leaving his home would be worth what they could make together. It's almost directly opposite the enchantress's melody and the dissonance makes him grit his teeth. The enchantress is no longer smiling, when he casts a cautious look in her direction. He launches directly from that song into another one, then another, and he picks all the songs he can remember that the two of them have particularly treasured. He sings the song he made up when Ryland tripped over his own two feet and fell into a stream, he sings the song Ryland sang for his birthday one year, he sings the song that always reminds him of home. He sings anything and everything he can think of, guided by some deep instinct that sends him away, away, away from that horrible creeping enchantress's spell, and toward everything about Ryland and his life that he loves, everything that it has brought him. The air around him lightens as the haze disperses, but Ryland is still an unmoving shape behind him. He knows somehow without knowing why that to repeat himself would be to lose this desperate battle, that to stop playing would call forfeit, and so he pushes past weariness in his voice, his hands, his arms, his shoulders that are still burdened with his pack.
As he plays, the enchantress's song waxes and wanes like the moon as she clenches her fists, and he plays louder to drown her out. Finally, when he has nothing left, he finds his finger moving on the strings in a pattern he knows, though he's never played it before. He plays their song, the song Ryland wrote for them, and for the first time since this nightmare began, he hears something in his mind that isn't made of spite and the droning of the insects and the hammering heat of a drought-filled summer day. He hears a drum like a heartbeat, the skirl of horns and the sighing of violins, and his own guitar-playing over it all, perfectly one.
He stops playing with his eyes closed, his hair dampened flat against his forehead with sweat, the sun beating down on his bare head. He breathes in with a huge gasp of air and opens his eyes. The woman is gone. Dried blood scattered across the road is the only sign she existed anywhere than Alex's nightmares. When he spins around, heart in his throat, Ryland is blinking dazedly up at the sun, directly overhead.
"Oh, God," Alex says, throat so dry he can hardly speak, voice cracking with his relief, and then he sits down in the dirt.
"Alex?" Ryland says.
His feet enter Alex's field of vision, and Alex reaches out like one of Kylla's children, and grabs onto the cloth of Ryland's trouser leg. He tips forward and ends up with his forehead pressing against Ryland's bony knee. It hurts, a little, and that helps.
"All right, all right now," Ryland says soothingly. "I'm right here." His hand comes down and sweeps Alex's hair away from his face.
Alex sits still and lets him, once, twice, three times, and then he mumbles, "We should go. We're still on unconsecrated ground."
"Well, I would," Ryland says with gentle affection, "but you're sitting on my foot."
"Oh," Alex says, and shifts back and tries to stand up. Ryland grabs onto his elbow and hoists, and they end up roughly upright, though Alex teeters for one precarious second.
"Ready?" Ryland asks, and Alex nods.
He concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other until they turn a bend in the road that's at least a mile from where they were trapped, and then he staggers into the barely-adequate shade of a high bush and sits down.
"We're stopping, then," Ryland says, and sits down next to him. He passes over a water bottle that Alex takes gratefully, and waits until Alex has lowered and capped it to say, "Thank you."
"God, that was awful," Alex says, and Ryland nods emphatically.
"I don't know what to say, really," he says, sounding frustrated, and angry underneath it.
"God, that was awful," Alex repeats, and Ryland barks out a laugh.
"I hate that I couldn't do anything," he says.
"You did, though," Alex says. Ryland shakes his head, but Alex presses on. "Who's song do you think I was playing at the end?"
Ryland frowns. "I didn't - I couldn't hear or see anything, you know. Last thing I remember is you telling me to whistle a pretty tune."
"Oh," Alex says.
"Yes," Ryland says. "Oh."
And, oh, it would have been easier, Alex thinks, if he had. Instead, he can feel his face heat up as he says, "I had to play things to break her spell. Things that reminded me of you. Of. Us. I, uh." He's looking at Ryland's left shoulder, and so he focuses on Ryland's face. "I played that song you wrote, at the end," he says, and watches as Ryland's mouth quirks in a smile that spreads slowly across his face.
"Did you?" Ryland says lightly.
"Mm," Alex says.
"Well. Good," Ryland says, and then he laughs, sounding almost like he's laughing despite himself, like it's been surprised out of him.
*
"You know," Alex says, after Ryland has carefully reclaimed and resecured his guitar, they've started walking again, and he's had time to talk himself into it and out of it several times over. "Traditionally, after a hero defeats an evil enchantress, he gets to do something else. We've neglected something."
"Oh, really?" Ryland says.
"Well, yes. He should get to kiss the heroine."
"Alex," Ryland says, and he sounds reproving and amused. "Did you just call me a woman?"
"Not...precisely," Alex says, already formulating an argument to defend his case, but then Ryland is reaching over and stopping him, cupping his head between his two hands, and then he leans in and kisses him.
In the back of Alex's head, he hears a drum-beat start, low and steady as a heartbeat.
[END] (at AO3)
Note: Many thanks to sinsense for shortening my dreadfully run-on sentences and betaing for me in literally the last minutes before the submission deadline.