I blame this on Twitterrr
Title: Myths of Anastasia
Author: magicdragonomg
Fandom: Havemercy by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett
Overall Rating: (at the moment, estimated to be) NC-17 - violence, some minor sexual situations, language
Characters/Pairings: Balfour, Adamo, a few OCs, general mentions/appearances from the cast, and a few surprise characters too!; Balfour/Adamo and a side order of canon pairings
Genre: fantasy, adventure/romance, action, slash
Summary: A dragon breathes a secret from the depths, and the receiver, Balfour, ensnared by the secret's possibilities, follows a path into the one place he cannot return to: the Ke-Han territory. During the travel he makes with Adamo to the remote Western villages, however, a sliver of power is tapped, and the accident allows for a startling transformation.
Warnings: Metal dragons :(, gay magicians (and Airmen), explosions, and huge spoilers for HM
Chapters: Prologue | Chapter I
Chapter Rating: PG - ew scars and yay cursing and hints toward man-lovin'
Words: 986
Comments: This is mostly an experiment - no, it really feels like that. I have tons of ideas for this thing, but they'll only happen if there's a decent desire to read this. I'll be working on Chapter I (which should be much longer), but afterward, if total interest appears very low, then there's a great chance I'll abandon the fic - at least for a while. This is why I need feedback! Please comment with anything: critique, capslock, spewing, recommendations, etc.. It helps me to know who's reading and what could be changed and yadda-yadda, I'm writing too much again, aren't I? Enjoy the "teaser" Prologue!
Balfour liked to think it began from the moment he heard Thom ask, “After adding the influence of Sophie’s ideas of consequentialism into the new order of thinking, what does the Reddam principle become?”
For the count of three, the room remained silent. Then, never moving his eyes an inch from Thom’s face, he raised his hand into the air. He watched the one small moment where Thom’s mouth fell a little agape and his brows lifted before a plainer, academic expression swept suddenly like a mask over his surprise.
“Balfour?” Thom said.
The heads of fifty students shifted behind them to the second-to-last row of desks, where he, Balfour, paused. He felt some sort of affirmation in the action of raising what he knew to be one of his prosthetic hands, gleaming in the yellowed light like a dark bronze column in the Pantheon of his body. That morning, Rook had taken away his gloves.
He did not dare glance away from Thom’s formal, encouraging gaze.
“Is it…the p-principle of the greatest good for the greatest number of people?”
But in truth, it probably began when he heard Anastasia’s voice breathing into the edges of his mind in his sleep, her words at times indistinct, and her sounds disappearing into the black like the edges of a withering husk:
“Amery is alive.”
He wished he had his journal so he could write this all down. Alas, the Lan Que-Qi stripped him of everything but the essentials - and he blushed, remembering the cold wall on his bare back and the muscled, half-naked mass of Adamo sitting across from him. Cold air permeated within the slates of the room; without memories to occupy him, Balfour shuddered and crossed his arms around his bent knees, struggling to keep his body warmth compacted.
Then he shifted, trying to manage some comfort while his hindquarters ached from sitting on the hard floor for so long, and as did so, his hand happened to skim across his knee. Immediately, he hissed and jerked his hand away.
“Th’hell happened? You alright?”
Balfour, for the first time in an hour, lifted up his eyes to match Adamo’s, and what he found there, after all that had happened, made his breath hitch in his throat. Adamo, sitting and leaning against the opposite wall, his torso a sculpted, ball-like form in its massive muscle, bore a concerned pinch in his face. When his mouth dipped into a frown at receiving no answer, Balfour hurried to explain: “The…the hands. I brushed one of my hands against my knee.” He added with obvious irrelevance, “They’re cold. Because, you know, they’re made of metal.”
“You’re alright?” Adamo asked, leaning a little forward in preparation to rush to Balfour’s side. “You’re sure?”
“Yes. I’m not hurt, really. You needn’t worry,” Balfour said.
After a moment, Adamo slammed his fist into the wall space next to him, startling Balfour to death, and the former yelled, “Bastion!”
For incapability to say anything remotely on his tongue, Balfour gaped.
“Ke-Han rat cowards didn’t even bother finishing us off. This is how it’s going to end, huh?”
Much earlier, the same notion had nestled into Balfour’s brain like a coiled snake, and its possibility revisited made him helpless to squirm, a butterfly pinned on the end of a needle. Nobody in this situation wanted to die, much less here, but it perplexed him to know that he had done little with his life. Saving Volstov and surviving the attack on the Ke-Han gave his life some meaning, maybe more than he could ever imagine, but the other, unfulfilled parts he wanted - badly, before he lost the chance to do them. He needed to finish the rest of his classes and graduate from the ‘Versity, and damned if it was silly, but he needed to fall in love.
Despite these desires, he couldn’t make himself regret how these series of circumstances happened. Perhaps he understood, from the instant he walked into the Airman, that his death would occur in these exact conditions. He accepted it long ago. They had manuscripts in a store by the ‘Versity library once that the clerk called Choose Your Own Adventure or some such - though most had gone out of print a decade ago. He wondered if the events leading up to this belonged to one such manuscript, and somewhere in his life, he had chosen the absolute wrong option - he’d made a death sentence.
A just audible, strange noise emerged from Adamo’s throat, and Balfour peered at him, noting the animalistic, unbearable frustration written in his slouch. A rectangle of weak afternoon sun landed on the space beside him, beyond the boundary of the cage. From its light, a faint glow emerged across the hills and valleys of his bear-like width, glazing his skin in pale violet mid-tones. Balfour’s eyes, enraptured by the sight all the more because this might be his last and final chance, traced the taut flesh. There, the shoulder smoothing into the junction, undulating spherically into the upper arm, rising into the hill of the bicep. The muscle leading down, dipping like a sharp point into an elbow joint before widening again. The forearm, underneath the layer of lightened hair, sloping, narrowing, narrowing…
The fresh, palm-sized, starburst-shaped scar, colored brown and pink and red, surrounded by torn skin.
“Fuck it, I don’t even remember how this whole thing began,” Adamo said, his head in the palm of his healthy hand.
Balfour imagined, replayed the blue spear tip piercing through the layers of tissue and muscle and nerve composing Adamo’s hand like a knife puncturing through the layers of a hard cake. Bile crept up Balfour’s throat; his heart gave great lurches of pain as it sank into his stomach.
Balfour remembered how it began. He once wrote it down in his journal, and how could he forget?
Author: magicdragonomg
Fandom: Havemercy by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett
Overall Rating: (at the moment, estimated to be) NC-17 - violence, some minor sexual situations, language
Characters/Pairings: Balfour, Adamo, a few OCs, general mentions/appearances from the cast, and a few surprise characters too!; Balfour/Adamo and a side order of canon pairings
Genre: fantasy, adventure/romance, action, slash
Summary: A dragon breathes a secret from the depths, and the receiver, Balfour, ensnared by the secret's possibilities, follows a path into the one place he cannot return to: the Ke-Han territory. During the travel he makes with Adamo to the remote Western villages, however, a sliver of power is tapped, and the accident allows for a startling transformation.
Warnings: Metal dragons :(, gay magicians (and Airmen), explosions, and huge spoilers for HM
Chapters: Prologue | Chapter I
Chapter Rating: PG - ew scars and yay cursing and hints toward man-lovin'
Words: 986
Comments: This is mostly an experiment - no, it really feels like that. I have tons of ideas for this thing, but they'll only happen if there's a decent desire to read this. I'll be working on Chapter I (which should be much longer), but afterward, if total interest appears very low, then there's a great chance I'll abandon the fic - at least for a while. This is why I need feedback! Please comment with anything: critique, capslock, spewing, recommendations, etc.. It helps me to know who's reading and what could be changed and yadda-yadda, I'm writing too much again, aren't I? Enjoy the "teaser" Prologue!
Balfour liked to think it began from the moment he heard Thom ask, “After adding the influence of Sophie’s ideas of consequentialism into the new order of thinking, what does the Reddam principle become?”
For the count of three, the room remained silent. Then, never moving his eyes an inch from Thom’s face, he raised his hand into the air. He watched the one small moment where Thom’s mouth fell a little agape and his brows lifted before a plainer, academic expression swept suddenly like a mask over his surprise.
“Balfour?” Thom said.
The heads of fifty students shifted behind them to the second-to-last row of desks, where he, Balfour, paused. He felt some sort of affirmation in the action of raising what he knew to be one of his prosthetic hands, gleaming in the yellowed light like a dark bronze column in the Pantheon of his body. That morning, Rook had taken away his gloves.
He did not dare glance away from Thom’s formal, encouraging gaze.
“Is it…the p-principle of the greatest good for the greatest number of people?”
But in truth, it probably began when he heard Anastasia’s voice breathing into the edges of his mind in his sleep, her words at times indistinct, and her sounds disappearing into the black like the edges of a withering husk:
“Amery is alive.”
He wished he had his journal so he could write this all down. Alas, the Lan Que-Qi stripped him of everything but the essentials - and he blushed, remembering the cold wall on his bare back and the muscled, half-naked mass of Adamo sitting across from him. Cold air permeated within the slates of the room; without memories to occupy him, Balfour shuddered and crossed his arms around his bent knees, struggling to keep his body warmth compacted.
Then he shifted, trying to manage some comfort while his hindquarters ached from sitting on the hard floor for so long, and as did so, his hand happened to skim across his knee. Immediately, he hissed and jerked his hand away.
“Th’hell happened? You alright?”
Balfour, for the first time in an hour, lifted up his eyes to match Adamo’s, and what he found there, after all that had happened, made his breath hitch in his throat. Adamo, sitting and leaning against the opposite wall, his torso a sculpted, ball-like form in its massive muscle, bore a concerned pinch in his face. When his mouth dipped into a frown at receiving no answer, Balfour hurried to explain: “The…the hands. I brushed one of my hands against my knee.” He added with obvious irrelevance, “They’re cold. Because, you know, they’re made of metal.”
“You’re alright?” Adamo asked, leaning a little forward in preparation to rush to Balfour’s side. “You’re sure?”
“Yes. I’m not hurt, really. You needn’t worry,” Balfour said.
After a moment, Adamo slammed his fist into the wall space next to him, startling Balfour to death, and the former yelled, “Bastion!”
For incapability to say anything remotely on his tongue, Balfour gaped.
“Ke-Han rat cowards didn’t even bother finishing us off. This is how it’s going to end, huh?”
Much earlier, the same notion had nestled into Balfour’s brain like a coiled snake, and its possibility revisited made him helpless to squirm, a butterfly pinned on the end of a needle. Nobody in this situation wanted to die, much less here, but it perplexed him to know that he had done little with his life. Saving Volstov and surviving the attack on the Ke-Han gave his life some meaning, maybe more than he could ever imagine, but the other, unfulfilled parts he wanted - badly, before he lost the chance to do them. He needed to finish the rest of his classes and graduate from the ‘Versity, and damned if it was silly, but he needed to fall in love.
Despite these desires, he couldn’t make himself regret how these series of circumstances happened. Perhaps he understood, from the instant he walked into the Airman, that his death would occur in these exact conditions. He accepted it long ago. They had manuscripts in a store by the ‘Versity library once that the clerk called Choose Your Own Adventure or some such - though most had gone out of print a decade ago. He wondered if the events leading up to this belonged to one such manuscript, and somewhere in his life, he had chosen the absolute wrong option - he’d made a death sentence.
A just audible, strange noise emerged from Adamo’s throat, and Balfour peered at him, noting the animalistic, unbearable frustration written in his slouch. A rectangle of weak afternoon sun landed on the space beside him, beyond the boundary of the cage. From its light, a faint glow emerged across the hills and valleys of his bear-like width, glazing his skin in pale violet mid-tones. Balfour’s eyes, enraptured by the sight all the more because this might be his last and final chance, traced the taut flesh. There, the shoulder smoothing into the junction, undulating spherically into the upper arm, rising into the hill of the bicep. The muscle leading down, dipping like a sharp point into an elbow joint before widening again. The forearm, underneath the layer of lightened hair, sloping, narrowing, narrowing…
The fresh, palm-sized, starburst-shaped scar, colored brown and pink and red, surrounded by torn skin.
“Fuck it, I don’t even remember how this whole thing began,” Adamo said, his head in the palm of his healthy hand.
Balfour imagined, replayed the blue spear tip piercing through the layers of tissue and muscle and nerve composing Adamo’s hand like a knife puncturing through the layers of a hard cake. Bile crept up Balfour’s throat; his heart gave great lurches of pain as it sank into his stomach.
Balfour remembered how it began. He once wrote it down in his journal, and how could he forget?