Chapter Text
Living in the forest is well and good, until it rains.
Hans chose the best campsite he could. He was careful; he thought ahead. His camp is invisible from the nearest trail, sheltered from the biting Trosky winds by towering rock walls. Hans sleeps under an overhang with his back to the cliffside, where he can see in both directions anyone might approach his camp on foot.
There’s a clear-running stream nearby. Plenty of wood for his fire. The local gamekeepers–fools, both of them–don’t seem to know the terrain; Hans hasn’t found any snares or blinds or anything in the woods he didn’t put there himself.
It’s a good camp.
And still, it’s miserable in the rain. It doesn’t matter that he sleeps under an overhang; Hans still gets wet. His fire goes out. He can’t cook any food. His boots stick in the mud, and the shitty hunting bow he bought from those ne’er-do-wells in Zhelejov isn’t properly waxed, so it swells up after a few hours in the damp and becomes fucking useless. Hans can’t hunt, he has nothing to eat, and he’s freezing cold.
On the other hand, he has all the fresh water he can drink.
If it rained on a hunting trip in Rattay, Hans would pack up and go home. If the clouds looked remotely forboding on the morning he was set to leave, he wouldn’t ride out at all. He’d ignore the itch under his skin, the want to be out there under a wide, fair sky, and he’d go to the tavern (where he’d hopefully meet a wide, fair lass) instead.
But here in Trosky?
Here, if Hans goes to the tavern, he’ll hear that fucking song.
Henry, our hero Henry. The fellow who helps his fellow man.
“Don’t,” Hans orders the trickle of water inching closer across the soil. A handspan more and it’ll be under his bedroll. “Don’t you dare.”
He’s talking to himself, too. To the little musicians in their stupid hats plucking a lute in the undisciplined wilds of Hans’s own brain. Sakra, he caught himself humming the tune yesterday while he was skinning a doe.
It’s no use telling himself that the words are about some other Henry, a stand-up fellow who’s reliable as iron and enjoys yanking sheepgut out of livestock’s arses. Even if Hans could believe it, it wouldn’t matter.
Henry is everywhere in Trosky. He’s in Zhelejov, winning fistfighting tournaments. He’s killing wolves in Tachau. He’s bedding every girl at the baths, or at least he must be based on the fact that not a one can shut up about him.
Between that, the song, and the disheartening lightness of Hans’s coin purse, Hans hasn’t had a proper bath in weeks. Not since they left Rattay.
Which means that’s the last time he had a proper fuck, too.
When Hans is crouched in the undergrowth, stalking prey, or up to his elbows in deer viscera, or gathering brushwood for his fire, he doesn’t think about it. There’s too much work to be done as long as the sun is above the horizon. But when it goes down, the woods are pitch black and the night is long and there are too many hours for Hans to spend all of them asleep.
So he thinks about it, and the itch gets worse.
How do hermits handle it? That fellow living a bit south and west of Hans’s camp, the odd male herbalist whose name Hans can’t remember: he isn’t married. He lives quite a trek away from the village, and even farther from the nearest baths. Surely he has needs like any other man, so what does he do to satisfy them?
There are goats about, Hans supposes. Hardly a pleasant thought, but neither is the thought of shoveling shit. Peasants survive however they must, and it ill becomes a nobleman to judge them for it.
Which is an irritatingly sanctimonious sentiment, like something Henry would spout when he’s in one of his moods. Hans grinds his teeth.
He’s a loaded crossbow, cocked and left to rot, and the tension is growing unbearable.
The trickle of water reaches his bedroll and Hans watches it disappear underneath. He’s already plastered against the far wall of the tiny cave under the overhang; he can’t move back any further. All he can do is resign himself to his fate.
Five minutes later, his bedroll is completely soaked through.
Hans snaps.
“There! Can’t get any wetter now, can I?”
Rain pours down like a waterfall. A thousand icy blows that saturate every last fiber of his clothing and soak down through his skin to the bone. Hans stands in the middle of his camp with his arms spread, face raised to the sky.
All the fresh water he can drink.
“Do your fucking worst, I won’t feel it! Piss all over me if you dare. I’m Sir Hans Capon of Pirkstein and I eat buckets of shit for breakfast.”
The sky rumbles and unleashes a new deluge. Hans truly can’t get any wetter, nor can he get any colder, but still, he feels the weight of the water as it hits him. Like strong hands pushing down on his head and shoulders, trying to root him in the mud.
Another groan of distant thunder, and Hans screams back, wordless, mimicking the sound by timbre and rhythm.
He hasn’t spoken to another living soul in three days.
How long does it take to go mad?
Can he make it go faster?
Tremors–uncontrollable teeth chattering–those are signs of madness, aren’t they? Screaming into an uncaring sky certainly qualifies. By Christ, it’s working. Soon Hans won’t care that every last man he called a friend is either buried in a shallow grave or galumphing around the countryside, solving other people’s problems with a smile on his face. He’ll be a raving lunatic–and he’ll be simply, gloriously free.
Or Hans isn’t going mad at all, and he’s just shivering from cold.
There are no dry clothes for him to change into. Nothing in his camp is dry, not even the bow he hung from a thick root looping down from the roof of his cave in a desperate effort to keep it safe from the wet. There’s absolutely nothing Hans can do to get warm. Death seems likely.
Operating on a faint, uncertain notion that he’ll be colder in soaking wet clothes than nothing at all, Hans strips down to his undergarments. Then he curls up on top of his bedroll, which is so saturated with rainwater that if he tries to wriggle his way inside, he might as well go for a swim in the nearest pond.
The only way this could be worse is if he were dead.
At least, that’s what Oats, Konrad, Tankard, and Nicholas keep telling Hans when he closes his eyes.
Just keep breathing, lad, Oats says, absently fingering the bloody gash in his throat.
Behind him, Nicholas nods, but his jaw is broken by a blow from a mace and his tongue too ravaged to add any remarks of his own. Konrad and Tankard are locked in a strange kind of embrace, bellies pressed together and arms clasped over the rents in their mail to keep their insides from spilling through.
As long as you’re breathing, Oats rasps, all the rest can be fixed.
Hans watches Oats’s gnarled fingers disappear up to the knuckle between grinning flaps of flesh, and the itch starts again. It crawls through him, prickling hot, lighting a fire everywhere it touches. He can’t feel his numb limbs anymore. Just the fire.
He opens his eyes to nothing. Black.
It’s still pissing down rain outside the overhang, that much Hans can hear, but the daylight’s had its last gasp. Hans won’t see a thing until the sun rises again. He’s blind to the world, and the world is blind to him.
Inevitability settles into him then: a resignation tinged with disgust.
Lying on his back, Hans palms himself between the legs. There’s a flicker of feeling when he touches his stiffened prick through his braies: a flash of something amidst the numbness. He used to spend whole evenings chasing that flicker back in Rattay. Hans learned a long time ago that any kind of feeling is better than none.
When he takes his prick out, the cold nips at his sensitive flesh in a way he finds unpleasant. Hans turns to face the wall, hunched around a pocket of almost-warm air with his back to the world, and that’s better.
His hands are so numb that they feel like a stranger’s hands, especially since Hans can’t see them. Like a girl who won’t talk, won’t touch him anywhere above the belt.
Just a pair of hands. That’s all he needs.
Pleasure is elusive. It keeps slipping away; his cock stays hard, but the flicker comes and goes. Hans chases it for long enough that a wiser man would declare the whole venture pointless–until finally, finally, the scales tip, and it becomes easier to keep going than to stop.
Then it’s just rhythm: every stroke a bit better than the last, an inch closer to the peak. This is a contest Hans can win. No one will seize this prize from him or send him to his knees in the mud; it’s a nice feeling. He isn’t shivering anymore.
His prick throbs and drools a little in his fist. That feels nice, too.
Christ, he wants to come. It won’t upend his world, but it’ll make it easier to sleep. Hans always sleeps like a log after he’s had a good fuck; that’s half the reason he likes the bathhouse so much. His hand is a piss-poor substitute for a warm cunt, but he’s almost there. Almost… almost…
Henry, our hero Henry…
Hans is going to smash every lute in Trosky. When he inherits Rattay, he’ll ban minstrels from the entire surrounding region on pain of death. If anyone so much as hums a single note in his presence, it’ll be the pillory.
But he’s not going to turn away from his prize after so hard-fought a battle, so he grips himself tighter, stroking faster, breathing shallowly through his nose–until the tension in his gut finally unspools. A burst of warmth with his release; a moment of genuine relief from the cold. Hans stops breathing.
His cock twitches wetly in his fist for a good while after the pleasure fades. The jerks are satisfying, even if they don’t feel like much. Hans can’t see where his seed landed, but as long as he doesn’t roll into the mess before morning, he doesn’t care.
He tucks himself back into his braies, mostly because it’s too cold to sleep with his prick out. It’s not as if anyone’s going to shriek over his indecency here.
Sleep comes quickly after he does.
By the time Hans stirs awake, it’s stopped raining. All he can hear is birdsong and a slow, steady drip from the overhang. His bedroll is still unpleasantly damp.
Hans rolls over with a painful groan, stiff as an old man, and freezes.
From his bedroll, he has a good view of the entirety of his little camp, as well as both footpaths leading into it. He can see his cold, dead fire and the empty stewpot perched above it. He can see the log he rolled up to the fire (slowly, swearing up a storm the entire time) to serve as a bench and keep his arse out of the mud.
Seated on the log next to Hans’s cold, dead fire is Henry.
They look at each other in silence. Hans isn’t sure if his heart is beating or if he’s breathing at all. He’s finding it hard to take in Henry’s entire person at once, but his brain makes note of a few useless details here and there.
New sword belt; new (well-battered, probably stolen) brigandine; new shortsword in a scuffed scabbard. Mud all the way up to his knees. A smudge of dirt near Henry’s unsmiling lips.
“Henry,” Hans chokes out at last. “I never expected to see you here.”
Henry’s throat works. “Likewise.”
“How did you…”
Hans trails off as Henry rises to his feet, every movement taut as stretched leather. The birds screech in the trees; Henry turns his back to the fire, to Hans, and gazes across the overlook into the forest below. His gloved hands are in fists by his sides. Morning light glints faintly on the rusted rivets of his brigandine.
Here it comes, whispers a faint voice in the back of Hans’s head.
Henry had God knows how long to look through Hans’s camp while he slept. It’s not as if Hans bothered to put anything away; it’s beyond obvious what he’s been up to. There’s a red deer hide drying (ha) on a wooden frame just over there.
Finally, Henry turns.
And Hans despises the way his gut clenches and his whole body goes cold on that turn; he despises being afraid of the way Henry will look at him. He’s been living in the woods for two weeks so he won’t have to see that expression on Henry’s face again. On anyone’s face.
There it is. Right there.
“What the fuck,” Henry says, “were you thinking?”