Deva Victrix (4/?)
Title: Deva Victrix (4/?)
Rating: PG-13
Character(s): (so far) femAmerica, England, France, Northern Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, Wales
Pairing(s): (so far) mentions of England/Portugal
Warning(s): None
Word Count: 2335
Summary: It’s raining when they find the body, but then it usually is in Deva.
A fantasy AU murder mystery.
_____________________________________________
The first hour of Alasdair’s patrol passes in a silence that is near absolute excepting the wind’s incessant howl, and the thud and splash of his and Angus’ thick-soled work boots as they pound across cobbles and through the shallow puddles that lie between them.
The rain had been lashing down when his shift started, and though the storm has quietened somewhat since then, the thick clouds overhead, blocking out all but the faintest anaemic slivers of moonlight, suggest that the current lull is likely to be of very short duration.
Faced with dark skies and fierce weather, Old Town’s inhabitants seem to have thought better of venturing out from their homes, or whatever other sheltered spots they had found for themselves when night fell, and the streets are all but deserted. Save for himself and Angus, the only living thing Alasdair has seen for the past twenty minutes at least is a single bedraggled stray dog, nosing around the empty crates in front of Ludwig’s shop in search of scraps.
The overnight shift is Alasdair’s least favourite at the best of times, as it tends to be cold, dull and uneventful apart from the flurry of activity around midnight, when the inns close. From the looks of things, though, even the Lost Antler is mostly empty, and the odds of a fight breaking out that needs the guards’ intervention are very slim.
It’s not often that Alasdair finds himself ruing his partner’s taciturn nature, but thanks to his early start visiting the palace that morning, he’s already exhausted, and without even a little conversation to help occupy his mind, he’s not certain how he’s going to keep himself awake and moving for yet another seven hours.
He tries his best to distract himself - counting their steps; lighted windows, broken street lamps and the like that they pass - but his thoughts eventually return to how heavy his legs feel, regardless, and inextricably thence to his bed, with its warm, thick quilt and the heated brick Dylan will have slipped between the sheets before retiring to his own room.
Temporary relief comes with the tinny ringing of the Pauper’s Temple bell, sounding almost apologetic about announcing the arrival of eleven o’clock, which prompts Angus to suggest, via a series of eloquent hand gestures, that they stop for a moment to have a smoke.
They duck into the doorway of Isabelle’s bakery because it’s the only place in sight that’s sufficiently sheltered that they have any hope of keeping a match burning for long enough to light their pipes, and then shuffle around until they find a way of positioning themselves in the narrow space that results in the least amount of physical contact between the two of them. Alasdair’s shoulder still ends up brushing against the top of Angus’ right arm every time he shifts even slightly, but it’s far preferable for the both of them, he thinks, than the chest to chest press they started out in.
Angus takes a long drag on his pipe, and then breathes out a question along with the smoke. “Any luck with that flower today?”
“Aye, not that Arthur was any help, though,” Alasdair says, taking care to pitch his voice as low and as quiet as he possibly can. If he were to accidentally wake Isabelle, then he doubts she’d feel inclined to save them a couple of rolls from her first batch as she usually does, to take as an early breakfast when they finish their patrol. “I had to go above his head.”
Angus’ eyebrows rise interrogatively.
“Straight to the governor himself, in fact. He told me that it was a Gallian rose.”
His words are met with only a slight widening of Angus’ eyes, and a soft exhalation which whistles through his teeth, which are clenched with a sudden tightness about his pipe’s stem. On anyone else, the reaction would appear subdued almost to the point of non-existence, but for Angus, it’s practically tantamount to passing out from pure shock.
“So, you just so happened to run into him out in the gardens and took it upon yourself to ask?” he asks after a moment’s quiet.
“Naw,” Alasdair says, grinning, “I asked him when he caught me trespassing in his conservatory.”
A chuckle rumbles deep in Angus’ barrel chest. “I’m surprised he didn’t get his guards to come and shoot you on sight.”
“Perhaps he just wanted to do his civic duty; aiding the Town Guard in the pursuit of justice and all that. I doubt it, though. He didn’t seem particularly bothered when I told him there’d been a murder, though he had a good go at acting like he was.” The memory of the prince’s melodramatic behaviour had annoyed Alasdair more and more as the day wore on. He’s since come to the conclusion that he would have preferred to see the complete indifference he’s sure was the man’s true reaction as the feigned sentiments feel patronising, almost insulting somehow; as though the prince had immediately judged Alasdair to be the type of man who’d be easily fooled and thus think them real. “Likely he hasn’t given me or the poor dead man another thought since I left.”
Angus puffs contemplatively on his pipe. “So, what did you think of him, then?”
“Supercilious. Flashy. So far up his own arse it’s a wonder he can still breathe. Pretty much what you’d expect of a noble, really.” Alasdair shrugs. “Can’t say I was impressed.”
“Impressive or not, he’ll still be able to get you into a whole heap of shit if he decides to report you to the commander,” Angus says with a small grimace.
“As I said, I imagine he forgot I was ever there as soon as I left his sight. I’m not going to lose sleep worrying about it, in any case.”
Alasdair’s return to the guardhouse is met with a reprimand from the duty sergeant, but thankfully one that is wholly unconnected to matters palatial.
He and Angus had, it appears, not taken satisfactory care of their armour whilst trudging around Old Town for eight hours at the mercy of the intermittent downpours of rain and, later, sleet, and they were tasked with polishing their breastplates until the sergeant could see his idiotic, demanding, cauliflower-eared face in them before they were allowed to take their leave.
Consequently, it’s almost seven o’clock by the time Alasdair comes into sight of the apothecary, and his head feels like someone has scooped out all of its contents and replaced them with straw. From the taste lying thick at the back of his parched and gritty mouth, it isn’t even clean straw, but akin to the foetid, steaming stuff he’s sometimes helped Claire shovel out of her cow byre in the past.
His focus has narrowed down to a pinpoint whose limits are defined by the number of stumbling paces lay between him and his bedroom; how many minutes it will take him to strip, scrub his face and teeth, and fall into the welcoming embrace of his lumpy mattress afterwards. He’s vaguely aware that several people call out to him in greeting as he passes them by, but he hasn’t enough attention to spare that he can offer them any more than a tired wave of acknowledgment in return.
Twenty paces take him to the door, two through it - with one back to glare up at the bell, whose dejected clonking makes something pound in sympathetic rhythm against the inside of his skull - and then eight more take him across the shop floor and into the kitchen behind. From there, there are only nine steps up, one forward and one across remaining to carry him to his room at last, but the sight of Dylan, slumped across the kitchen table with a mug of tea at his elbow and head in his hands, stops him dead in his tracks.
“You’re up early, Dyl,” he says, the roughness of his throat wearing his voice down to little more than a dry wheeze.
“I haven’t been to bed yet.” Dylan raises his head just far enough so that their gazes can make contact, bloodshot eye to bloodshot eye. Even that seems like a struggle, though, given how violently it makes his shoulders shake. “I’ve been up all night running tests on that blood Gabs gave me. Oh,” he adds, smiling weakly, “and worrying about you, of course.”
It’s been a long time since Dylan last fretted himself sleepless whilst Alasdair was out on patrol. Alasdair would perhaps be a little touched if he wasn’t so tired, but he has only sufficient energy to feel one emotion at the moment, and mild irritation wins out. “Why the fuck
were you worrying about me? The most excitement we had was when Angus thought he spotted someone sneaking around the back of Gabs’ clinic, but even that turned out to be an unusually large fox. Everyone apart from the guards had the good sense to stay indoors last night, including the thieves.”
“I thought you might have been arrested for treason.” Dylan picks up a piece of crumpled piece of paper and then holds it out between two trembling fingers. “I received this at the crack of dawn. Arthur sent it along with a young girl who was running errands from the palace.”
Alasdair snatches the paper and then tries to make sense of the terse lines Arthur has scrawled there. He was clearly angry when he wrote it, slashing so hard with his pen that he’d sent ink spraying every which way, and drips of it have obscured some letters entirely. It would be difficult enough to decipher normally, but Alasdair’s straw-filled mind has not the resources to glean anything from it beyond the fact that the blame for Arthur’s still hypothetical sacking is still being laid firmly at his feet.
“He’s overreacting, as per usual,” Alasdair says, tossing the note down onto the table. “The prince hasn’t gone whinging about me to the guard’s top brass, so I doubt he’ll be troubling himself to go looking for a servant who might or might not have been there with me and he probably didn’t even catch a glimpse of, regardless.”
“So you did speak to the prince, then?” Dylan says with absent wonder. “I thought Art was probably exaggerating about that, too.”
“Aye, I made inquiries,” Alasdair says. “And, truth be told, I’d be tempted to complain right back if he made an issue of it. Technically, the governor’s head of the Deva Guard - it’s right there alongside all the other fucking useless titles he’s got and does nothing about - so he should be supporting me in my work, at the end of the day.”
Surprisingly, Dylan accepts this with nothing more than a placid nod. Clearly, his energy has almost run out, too; even the anxious kind that he usually has an unhealthy excess of.
“I should see about setting up the shop, I suppose. It’s nearly opening time,” he says, pushing himseld to his feet.
Almost immediately, he starts to sway, and Alasdair grabs hold of his arm to steady him. Close to, Dylan’s skin looks ashen, and Alasdair can feel the heat radiating out from it even through the thick material of his brother’s shirt. He always starts running a low-grade fever whenever he’s reached the point of true exhaustion, so it’s a troubling sign.
“Don’t bother with the shop today,” Alasdair says, and when Dylan makes a wordless noise of protest, quickly adds, “How much do you make on a good day? Four or five silvers, at most, and I can pick up another couple of shifts at work to make up for that.”
At the moment, the mere prospect of doing so makes Alasdair feel sick to the stomach, but he’s sure it won’t seem quite so onerous after he’s had himself a decent sleep.
It feels like nothing more than a handful of minutes have passed since Alasdair closed his eyes when he’s startled awake by a knocking on the apothecary’s door below.
He lies very still for a little while, hoping that he might yet be dreaming or, failing that, either Michael or Dylan will go and answer the increasingly urgent summons, instead.
But Michael can only ever be roused by a good, hard shake of the shoulders come morning, and could probably sleep through the entire building falling down around his ears with ease, and Dylan is liable to make himself ill if he doesn’t get the rest he needs.
So, Alasdair drags himself out of his cosy quilt nest, curses the cold floorboards underfoot, curses again when he happens to catch sight of the open pocket watch on top of his chest of drawers and notices it’s not quite eleven o’clock, and then proceeds to get so tangled up in his shirt and trousers that it takes him three attempts to get them on the right way around and buttoned up straight.
He stumbles twice in his haste to get down the stairs, only saving himself from pitching headfirst into a broken neck the second time by a desperate grab at the banister, stubs his toe on the edge of the kitchen dresser, and finally limps into the front of the shop just in time to see the weathered wood of the door start bowing inwards as their visitor’s patience starts to run out, and their knocking turns into a determined pounding with what sounds like a closed fist.
When Alasdair finally overcomes the confounding intricacies of the single bolt and wrenches open the door at last, he’s confronted with the sight of Corporal Amelia Jones, her face wan and expression desperate. “The captain sent me to bring you up to Pauper’s,” she says without preamble. Her clenched hand flattens out, and she gives Alasdair a quick and unnecessary salute. “The governor’s there, and he says he won’t speak to anyone but you.”
Rating: PG-13
Character(s): (so far) femAmerica, England, France, Northern Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, Wales
Pairing(s): (so far) mentions of England/Portugal
Warning(s): None
Word Count: 2335
Summary: It’s raining when they find the body, but then it usually is in Deva.
A fantasy AU murder mystery.
_____________________________________________
The first hour of Alasdair’s patrol passes in a silence that is near absolute excepting the wind’s incessant howl, and the thud and splash of his and Angus’ thick-soled work boots as they pound across cobbles and through the shallow puddles that lie between them.
The rain had been lashing down when his shift started, and though the storm has quietened somewhat since then, the thick clouds overhead, blocking out all but the faintest anaemic slivers of moonlight, suggest that the current lull is likely to be of very short duration.
Faced with dark skies and fierce weather, Old Town’s inhabitants seem to have thought better of venturing out from their homes, or whatever other sheltered spots they had found for themselves when night fell, and the streets are all but deserted. Save for himself and Angus, the only living thing Alasdair has seen for the past twenty minutes at least is a single bedraggled stray dog, nosing around the empty crates in front of Ludwig’s shop in search of scraps.
The overnight shift is Alasdair’s least favourite at the best of times, as it tends to be cold, dull and uneventful apart from the flurry of activity around midnight, when the inns close. From the looks of things, though, even the Lost Antler is mostly empty, and the odds of a fight breaking out that needs the guards’ intervention are very slim.
It’s not often that Alasdair finds himself ruing his partner’s taciturn nature, but thanks to his early start visiting the palace that morning, he’s already exhausted, and without even a little conversation to help occupy his mind, he’s not certain how he’s going to keep himself awake and moving for yet another seven hours.
He tries his best to distract himself - counting their steps; lighted windows, broken street lamps and the like that they pass - but his thoughts eventually return to how heavy his legs feel, regardless, and inextricably thence to his bed, with its warm, thick quilt and the heated brick Dylan will have slipped between the sheets before retiring to his own room.
Temporary relief comes with the tinny ringing of the Pauper’s Temple bell, sounding almost apologetic about announcing the arrival of eleven o’clock, which prompts Angus to suggest, via a series of eloquent hand gestures, that they stop for a moment to have a smoke.
They duck into the doorway of Isabelle’s bakery because it’s the only place in sight that’s sufficiently sheltered that they have any hope of keeping a match burning for long enough to light their pipes, and then shuffle around until they find a way of positioning themselves in the narrow space that results in the least amount of physical contact between the two of them. Alasdair’s shoulder still ends up brushing against the top of Angus’ right arm every time he shifts even slightly, but it’s far preferable for the both of them, he thinks, than the chest to chest press they started out in.
Angus takes a long drag on his pipe, and then breathes out a question along with the smoke. “Any luck with that flower today?”
“Aye, not that Arthur was any help, though,” Alasdair says, taking care to pitch his voice as low and as quiet as he possibly can. If he were to accidentally wake Isabelle, then he doubts she’d feel inclined to save them a couple of rolls from her first batch as she usually does, to take as an early breakfast when they finish their patrol. “I had to go above his head.”
Angus’ eyebrows rise interrogatively.
“Straight to the governor himself, in fact. He told me that it was a Gallian rose.”
His words are met with only a slight widening of Angus’ eyes, and a soft exhalation which whistles through his teeth, which are clenched with a sudden tightness about his pipe’s stem. On anyone else, the reaction would appear subdued almost to the point of non-existence, but for Angus, it’s practically tantamount to passing out from pure shock.
“So, you just so happened to run into him out in the gardens and took it upon yourself to ask?” he asks after a moment’s quiet.
“Naw,” Alasdair says, grinning, “I asked him when he caught me trespassing in his conservatory.”
A chuckle rumbles deep in Angus’ barrel chest. “I’m surprised he didn’t get his guards to come and shoot you on sight.”
“Perhaps he just wanted to do his civic duty; aiding the Town Guard in the pursuit of justice and all that. I doubt it, though. He didn’t seem particularly bothered when I told him there’d been a murder, though he had a good go at acting like he was.” The memory of the prince’s melodramatic behaviour had annoyed Alasdair more and more as the day wore on. He’s since come to the conclusion that he would have preferred to see the complete indifference he’s sure was the man’s true reaction as the feigned sentiments feel patronising, almost insulting somehow; as though the prince had immediately judged Alasdair to be the type of man who’d be easily fooled and thus think them real. “Likely he hasn’t given me or the poor dead man another thought since I left.”
Angus puffs contemplatively on his pipe. “So, what did you think of him, then?”
“Supercilious. Flashy. So far up his own arse it’s a wonder he can still breathe. Pretty much what you’d expect of a noble, really.” Alasdair shrugs. “Can’t say I was impressed.”
“Impressive or not, he’ll still be able to get you into a whole heap of shit if he decides to report you to the commander,” Angus says with a small grimace.
“As I said, I imagine he forgot I was ever there as soon as I left his sight. I’m not going to lose sleep worrying about it, in any case.”
Alasdair’s return to the guardhouse is met with a reprimand from the duty sergeant, but thankfully one that is wholly unconnected to matters palatial.
He and Angus had, it appears, not taken satisfactory care of their armour whilst trudging around Old Town for eight hours at the mercy of the intermittent downpours of rain and, later, sleet, and they were tasked with polishing their breastplates until the sergeant could see his idiotic, demanding, cauliflower-eared face in them before they were allowed to take their leave.
Consequently, it’s almost seven o’clock by the time Alasdair comes into sight of the apothecary, and his head feels like someone has scooped out all of its contents and replaced them with straw. From the taste lying thick at the back of his parched and gritty mouth, it isn’t even clean straw, but akin to the foetid, steaming stuff he’s sometimes helped Claire shovel out of her cow byre in the past.
His focus has narrowed down to a pinpoint whose limits are defined by the number of stumbling paces lay between him and his bedroom; how many minutes it will take him to strip, scrub his face and teeth, and fall into the welcoming embrace of his lumpy mattress afterwards. He’s vaguely aware that several people call out to him in greeting as he passes them by, but he hasn’t enough attention to spare that he can offer them any more than a tired wave of acknowledgment in return.
Twenty paces take him to the door, two through it - with one back to glare up at the bell, whose dejected clonking makes something pound in sympathetic rhythm against the inside of his skull - and then eight more take him across the shop floor and into the kitchen behind. From there, there are only nine steps up, one forward and one across remaining to carry him to his room at last, but the sight of Dylan, slumped across the kitchen table with a mug of tea at his elbow and head in his hands, stops him dead in his tracks.
“You’re up early, Dyl,” he says, the roughness of his throat wearing his voice down to little more than a dry wheeze.
“I haven’t been to bed yet.” Dylan raises his head just far enough so that their gazes can make contact, bloodshot eye to bloodshot eye. Even that seems like a struggle, though, given how violently it makes his shoulders shake. “I’ve been up all night running tests on that blood Gabs gave me. Oh,” he adds, smiling weakly, “and worrying about you, of course.”
It’s been a long time since Dylan last fretted himself sleepless whilst Alasdair was out on patrol. Alasdair would perhaps be a little touched if he wasn’t so tired, but he has only sufficient energy to feel one emotion at the moment, and mild irritation wins out. “Why the fuck
were you worrying about me? The most excitement we had was when Angus thought he spotted someone sneaking around the back of Gabs’ clinic, but even that turned out to be an unusually large fox. Everyone apart from the guards had the good sense to stay indoors last night, including the thieves.”
“I thought you might have been arrested for treason.” Dylan picks up a piece of crumpled piece of paper and then holds it out between two trembling fingers. “I received this at the crack of dawn. Arthur sent it along with a young girl who was running errands from the palace.”
Alasdair snatches the paper and then tries to make sense of the terse lines Arthur has scrawled there. He was clearly angry when he wrote it, slashing so hard with his pen that he’d sent ink spraying every which way, and drips of it have obscured some letters entirely. It would be difficult enough to decipher normally, but Alasdair’s straw-filled mind has not the resources to glean anything from it beyond the fact that the blame for Arthur’s still hypothetical sacking is still being laid firmly at his feet.
“He’s overreacting, as per usual,” Alasdair says, tossing the note down onto the table. “The prince hasn’t gone whinging about me to the guard’s top brass, so I doubt he’ll be troubling himself to go looking for a servant who might or might not have been there with me and he probably didn’t even catch a glimpse of, regardless.”
“So you did speak to the prince, then?” Dylan says with absent wonder. “I thought Art was probably exaggerating about that, too.”
“Aye, I made inquiries,” Alasdair says. “And, truth be told, I’d be tempted to complain right back if he made an issue of it. Technically, the governor’s head of the Deva Guard - it’s right there alongside all the other fucking useless titles he’s got and does nothing about - so he should be supporting me in my work, at the end of the day.”
Surprisingly, Dylan accepts this with nothing more than a placid nod. Clearly, his energy has almost run out, too; even the anxious kind that he usually has an unhealthy excess of.
“I should see about setting up the shop, I suppose. It’s nearly opening time,” he says, pushing himseld to his feet.
Almost immediately, he starts to sway, and Alasdair grabs hold of his arm to steady him. Close to, Dylan’s skin looks ashen, and Alasdair can feel the heat radiating out from it even through the thick material of his brother’s shirt. He always starts running a low-grade fever whenever he’s reached the point of true exhaustion, so it’s a troubling sign.
“Don’t bother with the shop today,” Alasdair says, and when Dylan makes a wordless noise of protest, quickly adds, “How much do you make on a good day? Four or five silvers, at most, and I can pick up another couple of shifts at work to make up for that.”
At the moment, the mere prospect of doing so makes Alasdair feel sick to the stomach, but he’s sure it won’t seem quite so onerous after he’s had himself a decent sleep.
It feels like nothing more than a handful of minutes have passed since Alasdair closed his eyes when he’s startled awake by a knocking on the apothecary’s door below.
He lies very still for a little while, hoping that he might yet be dreaming or, failing that, either Michael or Dylan will go and answer the increasingly urgent summons, instead.
But Michael can only ever be roused by a good, hard shake of the shoulders come morning, and could probably sleep through the entire building falling down around his ears with ease, and Dylan is liable to make himself ill if he doesn’t get the rest he needs.
So, Alasdair drags himself out of his cosy quilt nest, curses the cold floorboards underfoot, curses again when he happens to catch sight of the open pocket watch on top of his chest of drawers and notices it’s not quite eleven o’clock, and then proceeds to get so tangled up in his shirt and trousers that it takes him three attempts to get them on the right way around and buttoned up straight.
He stumbles twice in his haste to get down the stairs, only saving himself from pitching headfirst into a broken neck the second time by a desperate grab at the banister, stubs his toe on the edge of the kitchen dresser, and finally limps into the front of the shop just in time to see the weathered wood of the door start bowing inwards as their visitor’s patience starts to run out, and their knocking turns into a determined pounding with what sounds like a closed fist.
When Alasdair finally overcomes the confounding intricacies of the single bolt and wrenches open the door at last, he’s confronted with the sight of Corporal Amelia Jones, her face wan and expression desperate. “The captain sent me to bring you up to Pauper’s,” she says without preamble. Her clenched hand flattens out, and she gives Alasdair a quick and unnecessary salute. “The governor’s there, and he says he won’t speak to anyone but you.”