Fic: The Blood More Stirs
Title: The Blood More Stirs
Authors: gileonnen and speak_me_fair
Fandom: 1 Henry IV
Pairings: Hotspur/Kate
Rating/Warnings: R (sexualized vampire violence)
Summary: Spirits from the vasty deep: four perspectives. Vampire AU.
Author's note: Utter crack. Not even kidding.
When he was a boy, Hotspur would ride wild along the Tweed, screeching at the Scottish patrols and then laughing and bolting when they caught sight of him. His skin had burned red as an apple and freckled brown at the shoulders and over the bridge of his nose, and he'd scratched the thin flakes off of his cheeks when the skin had peeled badly. He'd been a fay-child, a witch-child, his nurse had told him, and he'd been switched for it more times than he could count -- but still he'd ridden with the wind aslant his breast and his elflocked hair tumbling down his brow, and he'd been more a creature of sun than of shadow.
He found himself disinclined to take the sun, of late. Going to get pale as a maggot, he told himself, and laughed ... and yet he kept in on sunlit days and rode out only into the tempest.
There were few to torment in passing, in the wilder weather; nothing to cry out defiance to, save the wind that could burn as savage and harsh as any sun, redden him as deeply and batter against him with as much strength as any sword-blow caught on an armoured shoulder. He fought the elements now, nothing to prove his innate rebellion to but a grey and lowering sky and the lash of peat-laden rain.
It suited him well, to play Elric, to imagine the Wild Hunt at his back that would sweep up from Berwick, clamouring at his heels for the love of battle and the taste of real war, hounds for souls and lives and reckless with knowing the cost of it all.
"You keep strange hours," huffed Kate, when he arrived home at the peak of midnight -- he only grinned and shook out his rain-drenched hair, making her flinch and laugh against the spray. "Well, don't say anything," she said, "And keep to your moonlit rides, if it makes you laugh. It's better than seeing you dream."
"You should ride with me," he answered, which wasn't an answer at all. They both knew that dreams plagued him, although she did not know what dreams they were -- not dreams of battlefields, for to him those were sweet as maidens' dreams. She could not name what made him blanch in the cold pre-dawn, when his skin was like ice against her hands and no touching could warm him. "Have a boy saddle you a horse, sweet Kate, and we'll ride back into the storm --"
"And be struck by lightning, like as not."
"Aye, lightning-struck lovers, we," he said, and kissed her sharp and hungry.
She was Kate, his Kate, who would bite back with tongue and teeth and words like knives and with knives for their own sake, were she given them. His border bride, gently nurtured and the more ungentle for it, and he gloried in her; joyous as any hunt's quarrel, as any madness of past slaughter, his bed was a bower of skinned triumphs where they both could conquer.
He thought sometimes that they could tear each other to pieces and be glad of the flaying, for their flesh could only be the closer for it.
He never meant to sink his teeth into her throat and lap at the free-flowing blood -- only to nip her in play, tangle his fingers in her hair and have her bite the tip of his nose and laugh and call him her merry madcap -- but with his lips against her skin he could feel a pulse like thunder, and his eyes closed and his hand was rough against her cheek as he tore at flesh.
She latched on like a hound onto a boar, whimpering against his throat; they were enough like pleasure-sounds that he didn't realize she'd broken skin in turn until she was whispering yes, give it to me at the angle of his jaw.
Give it to me -- he'd begged for it in the same small voice, for he'd been too far gone to shatter the air with cries, had been unaware of what he was pleading for save life, life, let me live.
Not Kate, though, not his Kate who rode the storm, never such poltroon tawdry whimpers for the woman whose pulse slowed and thickened to match his, whose veins crowded his mind with a promise that was more than blood. The beat of her heart was his own, and the wildness of her opened eyes was his own unshuttered gaze from the days of sun. She was the eye of every beating tempest and the kindly rage of his murmuring pulse, and what he had not been given, he gave her in full faith and love.
Yours, and yours, and yours.
*
When the dawn broke over their gloomy Northumbrian keep, Kate only drew the covers over their heads and kissed her husband beneath them; their bedding smelled of blood, but their tender, early kisses were coloured by neither fear nor urgency.
They broke their fast together, at high noon, and dined on sweet breads and nuts and salted fish. "It tastes --" Kate shook her head, as though to clear it. "I don't know what it tastes of. If you've ruined fish for me, Harry, I'll --"
"Tastes dead, doesn't it?" He grinned; his gums had drawn back over his teeth, and it made those teeth look longer. It seemed he took pleasure in having found a word that she could not uncover.
"But I can still eat it? Even dead?"
"Spent every Lent of your life eating dead fish; if it should hurt you now, I'll turn butcher to please you --"
"Away, you jackanapes!" she laughed. "You have ruined it, and no butcher will find me meat fresh enough."
It was a mistake to say that, she knew it, too close to a challenge (even this new-made Harry, unstrangered to her and yet made all the more strange to the world that had once been hers for the sweet new familiarity of it, even he would be unable to do anything but take up her contestation as a torn guerdon of intent and wear it for his own; she knew that as she knew what she had become) and tainted by the suspicion that one or the other of them might regret what had been done -- but it was done, and she would not allow either of them to consider anything so base as even the passing thought that it might have been different.
*
Henry Percy the elder kept a cheerless house; Warkworth Castle had grown grim since the fall of Richard II. Once, there had been eager hunting dogs winding between the feet of many guests, begging for scraps from the table -- once there had been all the pageantry of war, performed as much for Northumberland as for Scotland.
Today, he sat alone at his great table, and he coughed until thick, black blood trickled down his lower lip. There was never blood enough in his body, he often thought, and he could hardly bleed himself for a cure.
Dead blood, rejecting of its own volition what should have long since been a dead body, and all his wishes that some man or other might rot in hell had rebounded on him, though it was his own flesh that was hell, and the world he had loved that had become his torment; the lashes of endurance were no light chastisement, no quietly stinging reminder, but hard and thick and dull in their endless deep pain.
He was sometimes glad there were no dogs. He had loved them in his own way; had he cared to remember what had been before, when there had been a sun to relish, he would have thought of Harry as a child, asprawl amongst them, the endless curiosity of the young in his eyes as he listened to his elders.
Now he would note nothing of them but the rush of blood in their veins, and he could not, even knowing what he was, what he needed, what he must be, he could not take his past and the length of days that now seemed a kind of veiled paradise, and tear it asunder in such a way.
Now and then, a rumor found its way through networks of spies and captives, filtering in from the wild lands of Ireland or the Bohemian wastes; he caught the stories of fairies drinking milk mixed with blood and of the ill-buried who walked anew, listening to each tale with a queer hunger for a cure. The priests knew imprecations to cast out devils, and housewives spoke of hanging flowers at the windows and doors to keep evil out; rough men knew the virtue of cold iron and sharp wood.
There were other legends, too, of thirsts such as his -- but if he had hoped to quench his thirst with blood-royal, shutting the old king away in a castle Yorkshire with his wrists and ankles chained ... that, too, had come to nothing.
He was dying, he was dead; he was every nightmare born of the dark, and he found no glory in it; he had made his son more his blood than any child of his seeding could have laid claim to, and still he decayed.
Their crescent moon no longer rose, but waned; they were falling towards the eclipse of the blood-moon, portents made fleshly banners that cast no light or hope.
Soon, the house of Northumberland would have a second king to taste; already his son's blood was fired with more ancient blood, and he would not long restrain his ire at his family's treatment.
When Henry IV fell, it would be with the teeth of the Percys at his throat. The Marches would be theirs again, no longer lorded over by a boy with no more than name to make his claim good, and the legends would be theirs to own, the gwrachen theirs to summon, and the mountains their echo-chambers and their walls.
Henry Percy the elder wiped his lips on the back of his hand, and drank from the goblet by his elbow.
It was only wine -- but wine, at least, was meant to taste of decay.
*
The absolute worst thing about being intrinsically amazing, destined for greatness, and able to sharpen any piece of wood into a highly useful weapon, the Prince of Wales sometimes thought, was the fact that along with said abilities came a whole family who knew about them, and even if not possessing them, felt it incumbent upon themselves to be endlessly critical of style, speed, and general demeanour-in-movement.
Sometimes, he found himself wishing his brothers would get themselves turned, just so he could demonstrate how very good he was at all points. Pun very much intended.
Fortunately, the townspeople of London were somewhat more receptive to his talents. They showed proper gratitude when he'd cut down that shaggy wolf that had prowled the edges of the city (and it had only been a wolf, he was sure of that, but he wasn't about to let on); they'd made appropriate noises of awe when he'd chased the spirit from Mistress Quickly's looking-glass and made it take the shape of a cat.
The spirit had been real, and the cat had screamed like a woman when he'd twisted its neck.
He could make himself useful among the common people, the way his brothers never could. John always had that prissy insistence upon the correct colours for the handles of his daggers, and Humphrey was always begging them to practise their damn Latin, because what sort of demon listened to a man speaking court French, let alone English? Even little Blanche was forever tugging at his sleeve and asking him to teach her to carve a stake properly, and honestly, any woodsman could do that, couldn't he?
They were all incredibly good, and all so damned obsessed with form that they'd never scared up anything worse than a soppy poltergeist.
Of course, he had to admit (if only to himself, very quietly somewhere in the back of his mind in case he happened to overhear what he was thinking, which would never do) that sometimes looking showy or actually knowing the right words in the right order for a decent effective exorcism, or even a childish attention to detail that made you look more efficient than you had any right to be when you were still young enough to get away with a (deliberate, he was bloody sure it was deliberate and cultivated) lisp, could all come in ... useful.
Not that he was ever going to tell them that, because keeping them severely in awe of his prowess was essential to scathing put-downs, and he certainly wasn't about to relinquish that particular pleasure while he could still lay some kind of claim to it.
Even if he still hadn't found the right comeback to John bowing him in through doors with the false and highly annoying adulation of 'O Mighty Cat-Killer'.
No, it didn't pay to give away the game too soon -- and so as he watched John and Humphrey falling all over themselves to befriend the young Northumbrian lordling, he only hid a laugh behind his hand.
They looked on their guest and saw only Harry Percy, the wind-touched, golden Hotspur of the North. Their father commended his prowess against the Scots and looked with disdain upon his eldest son; Hal was the boy who could not show himself to advantage, the boy who did not know the forms, the boy who could not recognize evil even when he was lying in its excrement.
Not a one of them could see Harry Percy for what he was, and Hal damned near laughed himself sick at it.
He had a stake ready-sharpened for that once-great heart, and at the right moment, the moment that showed him to best advantage -- he would use it.
Authors: gileonnen and speak_me_fair
Fandom: 1 Henry IV
Pairings: Hotspur/Kate
Rating/Warnings: R (sexualized vampire violence)
Summary: Spirits from the vasty deep: four perspectives. Vampire AU.
Author's note: Utter crack. Not even kidding.
When he was a boy, Hotspur would ride wild along the Tweed, screeching at the Scottish patrols and then laughing and bolting when they caught sight of him. His skin had burned red as an apple and freckled brown at the shoulders and over the bridge of his nose, and he'd scratched the thin flakes off of his cheeks when the skin had peeled badly. He'd been a fay-child, a witch-child, his nurse had told him, and he'd been switched for it more times than he could count -- but still he'd ridden with the wind aslant his breast and his elflocked hair tumbling down his brow, and he'd been more a creature of sun than of shadow.
He found himself disinclined to take the sun, of late. Going to get pale as a maggot, he told himself, and laughed ... and yet he kept in on sunlit days and rode out only into the tempest.
There were few to torment in passing, in the wilder weather; nothing to cry out defiance to, save the wind that could burn as savage and harsh as any sun, redden him as deeply and batter against him with as much strength as any sword-blow caught on an armoured shoulder. He fought the elements now, nothing to prove his innate rebellion to but a grey and lowering sky and the lash of peat-laden rain.
It suited him well, to play Elric, to imagine the Wild Hunt at his back that would sweep up from Berwick, clamouring at his heels for the love of battle and the taste of real war, hounds for souls and lives and reckless with knowing the cost of it all.
"You keep strange hours," huffed Kate, when he arrived home at the peak of midnight -- he only grinned and shook out his rain-drenched hair, making her flinch and laugh against the spray. "Well, don't say anything," she said, "And keep to your moonlit rides, if it makes you laugh. It's better than seeing you dream."
"You should ride with me," he answered, which wasn't an answer at all. They both knew that dreams plagued him, although she did not know what dreams they were -- not dreams of battlefields, for to him those were sweet as maidens' dreams. She could not name what made him blanch in the cold pre-dawn, when his skin was like ice against her hands and no touching could warm him. "Have a boy saddle you a horse, sweet Kate, and we'll ride back into the storm --"
"And be struck by lightning, like as not."
"Aye, lightning-struck lovers, we," he said, and kissed her sharp and hungry.
She was Kate, his Kate, who would bite back with tongue and teeth and words like knives and with knives for their own sake, were she given them. His border bride, gently nurtured and the more ungentle for it, and he gloried in her; joyous as any hunt's quarrel, as any madness of past slaughter, his bed was a bower of skinned triumphs where they both could conquer.
He thought sometimes that they could tear each other to pieces and be glad of the flaying, for their flesh could only be the closer for it.
He never meant to sink his teeth into her throat and lap at the free-flowing blood -- only to nip her in play, tangle his fingers in her hair and have her bite the tip of his nose and laugh and call him her merry madcap -- but with his lips against her skin he could feel a pulse like thunder, and his eyes closed and his hand was rough against her cheek as he tore at flesh.
She latched on like a hound onto a boar, whimpering against his throat; they were enough like pleasure-sounds that he didn't realize she'd broken skin in turn until she was whispering yes, give it to me at the angle of his jaw.
Give it to me -- he'd begged for it in the same small voice, for he'd been too far gone to shatter the air with cries, had been unaware of what he was pleading for save life, life, let me live.
Not Kate, though, not his Kate who rode the storm, never such poltroon tawdry whimpers for the woman whose pulse slowed and thickened to match his, whose veins crowded his mind with a promise that was more than blood. The beat of her heart was his own, and the wildness of her opened eyes was his own unshuttered gaze from the days of sun. She was the eye of every beating tempest and the kindly rage of his murmuring pulse, and what he had not been given, he gave her in full faith and love.
Yours, and yours, and yours.
*
When the dawn broke over their gloomy Northumbrian keep, Kate only drew the covers over their heads and kissed her husband beneath them; their bedding smelled of blood, but their tender, early kisses were coloured by neither fear nor urgency.
They broke their fast together, at high noon, and dined on sweet breads and nuts and salted fish. "It tastes --" Kate shook her head, as though to clear it. "I don't know what it tastes of. If you've ruined fish for me, Harry, I'll --"
"Tastes dead, doesn't it?" He grinned; his gums had drawn back over his teeth, and it made those teeth look longer. It seemed he took pleasure in having found a word that she could not uncover.
"But I can still eat it? Even dead?"
"Spent every Lent of your life eating dead fish; if it should hurt you now, I'll turn butcher to please you --"
"Away, you jackanapes!" she laughed. "You have ruined it, and no butcher will find me meat fresh enough."
It was a mistake to say that, she knew it, too close to a challenge (even this new-made Harry, unstrangered to her and yet made all the more strange to the world that had once been hers for the sweet new familiarity of it, even he would be unable to do anything but take up her contestation as a torn guerdon of intent and wear it for his own; she knew that as she knew what she had become) and tainted by the suspicion that one or the other of them might regret what had been done -- but it was done, and she would not allow either of them to consider anything so base as even the passing thought that it might have been different.
*
Henry Percy the elder kept a cheerless house; Warkworth Castle had grown grim since the fall of Richard II. Once, there had been eager hunting dogs winding between the feet of many guests, begging for scraps from the table -- once there had been all the pageantry of war, performed as much for Northumberland as for Scotland.
Today, he sat alone at his great table, and he coughed until thick, black blood trickled down his lower lip. There was never blood enough in his body, he often thought, and he could hardly bleed himself for a cure.
Dead blood, rejecting of its own volition what should have long since been a dead body, and all his wishes that some man or other might rot in hell had rebounded on him, though it was his own flesh that was hell, and the world he had loved that had become his torment; the lashes of endurance were no light chastisement, no quietly stinging reminder, but hard and thick and dull in their endless deep pain.
He was sometimes glad there were no dogs. He had loved them in his own way; had he cared to remember what had been before, when there had been a sun to relish, he would have thought of Harry as a child, asprawl amongst them, the endless curiosity of the young in his eyes as he listened to his elders.
Now he would note nothing of them but the rush of blood in their veins, and he could not, even knowing what he was, what he needed, what he must be, he could not take his past and the length of days that now seemed a kind of veiled paradise, and tear it asunder in such a way.
Now and then, a rumor found its way through networks of spies and captives, filtering in from the wild lands of Ireland or the Bohemian wastes; he caught the stories of fairies drinking milk mixed with blood and of the ill-buried who walked anew, listening to each tale with a queer hunger for a cure. The priests knew imprecations to cast out devils, and housewives spoke of hanging flowers at the windows and doors to keep evil out; rough men knew the virtue of cold iron and sharp wood.
There were other legends, too, of thirsts such as his -- but if he had hoped to quench his thirst with blood-royal, shutting the old king away in a castle Yorkshire with his wrists and ankles chained ... that, too, had come to nothing.
He was dying, he was dead; he was every nightmare born of the dark, and he found no glory in it; he had made his son more his blood than any child of his seeding could have laid claim to, and still he decayed.
Their crescent moon no longer rose, but waned; they were falling towards the eclipse of the blood-moon, portents made fleshly banners that cast no light or hope.
Soon, the house of Northumberland would have a second king to taste; already his son's blood was fired with more ancient blood, and he would not long restrain his ire at his family's treatment.
When Henry IV fell, it would be with the teeth of the Percys at his throat. The Marches would be theirs again, no longer lorded over by a boy with no more than name to make his claim good, and the legends would be theirs to own, the gwrachen theirs to summon, and the mountains their echo-chambers and their walls.
Henry Percy the elder wiped his lips on the back of his hand, and drank from the goblet by his elbow.
It was only wine -- but wine, at least, was meant to taste of decay.
*
The absolute worst thing about being intrinsically amazing, destined for greatness, and able to sharpen any piece of wood into a highly useful weapon, the Prince of Wales sometimes thought, was the fact that along with said abilities came a whole family who knew about them, and even if not possessing them, felt it incumbent upon themselves to be endlessly critical of style, speed, and general demeanour-in-movement.
Sometimes, he found himself wishing his brothers would get themselves turned, just so he could demonstrate how very good he was at all points. Pun very much intended.
Fortunately, the townspeople of London were somewhat more receptive to his talents. They showed proper gratitude when he'd cut down that shaggy wolf that had prowled the edges of the city (and it had only been a wolf, he was sure of that, but he wasn't about to let on); they'd made appropriate noises of awe when he'd chased the spirit from Mistress Quickly's looking-glass and made it take the shape of a cat.
The spirit had been real, and the cat had screamed like a woman when he'd twisted its neck.
He could make himself useful among the common people, the way his brothers never could. John always had that prissy insistence upon the correct colours for the handles of his daggers, and Humphrey was always begging them to practise their damn Latin, because what sort of demon listened to a man speaking court French, let alone English? Even little Blanche was forever tugging at his sleeve and asking him to teach her to carve a stake properly, and honestly, any woodsman could do that, couldn't he?
They were all incredibly good, and all so damned obsessed with form that they'd never scared up anything worse than a soppy poltergeist.
Of course, he had to admit (if only to himself, very quietly somewhere in the back of his mind in case he happened to overhear what he was thinking, which would never do) that sometimes looking showy or actually knowing the right words in the right order for a decent effective exorcism, or even a childish attention to detail that made you look more efficient than you had any right to be when you were still young enough to get away with a (deliberate, he was bloody sure it was deliberate and cultivated) lisp, could all come in ... useful.
Not that he was ever going to tell them that, because keeping them severely in awe of his prowess was essential to scathing put-downs, and he certainly wasn't about to relinquish that particular pleasure while he could still lay some kind of claim to it.
Even if he still hadn't found the right comeback to John bowing him in through doors with the false and highly annoying adulation of 'O Mighty Cat-Killer'.
No, it didn't pay to give away the game too soon -- and so as he watched John and Humphrey falling all over themselves to befriend the young Northumbrian lordling, he only hid a laugh behind his hand.
They looked on their guest and saw only Harry Percy, the wind-touched, golden Hotspur of the North. Their father commended his prowess against the Scots and looked with disdain upon his eldest son; Hal was the boy who could not show himself to advantage, the boy who did not know the forms, the boy who could not recognize evil even when he was lying in its excrement.
Not a one of them could see Harry Percy for what he was, and Hal damned near laughed himself sick at it.
He had a stake ready-sharpened for that once-great heart, and at the right moment, the moment that showed him to best advantage -- he would use it.