Archive of Our Own

Impressive, Hans called Trotsky when he saw it crest over the horizon. Now, recently un-strung from its gallows, he realizes that “impressive” is the fool’s term for “oversized building at the top of a fuck-off big hill,” and something is wrong with his legs. 

Only his awareness of the gawping yokels, lingering in the wake of his aborted execution, keeps him upright, but he’s shaking so hard that his knees almost knock together. He didn’t know that was something that really happened to people.

So Henry takes him by the elbow, supports him with one sword-calloused palm up the hill to Trosky’s keep, and talks the same stream of steady nonsense he uses on Pebbles when she startles. Henry says, there's the forge, the blacksmith is a criminal, and, guards' quarters up there, you'll like it, there's a sparring ring and a spot to throw dice, though for a real challenge you'll have to play the priest, and, got his own baths, von Bergow does. Just here.

It’s like the last time Henry tended to him, when that goddamn Cuman archershot him in, as Henry put it later, his royal seat. When he knelt over Hans and snapped the arrow-shaft a few inches from his body. 

“You don’t pull out an arrow, sir Hans,” Henry said. “Not until you can see a surgeon. Now I’ve made it shorter, I’ll secure the shaft with a couple of bandages. That way it won’t jostle so much on the ride back.” 

The same big arms holding him up. The same voice–low, methodical, explaining each step before he took it. 

At the bathhouse door, Henry props Hans up against the wall like a rake. Which Hans has been called plenty of times, if never meant so literally.

Laughter shudders through him. Maybe laughter. Maybe he’s about to be sick. 

Something wet and firm nudges Hans’s calf. A dog, white and brown, snuffling at his leg. Hang on. “Mutt?” In response, the dog, somehow still alive, shoves his nose directly in Hans’s crotch.

Henry breaks away from the murmured conversation he’s having with the wench at the bathhouse door. “Mutt,” he says, scandalized. Another rattle of hysteria through Hans’s chest.

Taken by the arm again, Hans is led into the baths like a reticent bride. Five or six tubs are packed into the room. It’s not underground, but it is close, humid and dim, the scent of oils soaked into windowless stone walls. It’s a testament to Hans’s exhaustion and stench that he manages a foot over the threshold.

Henry gestures to a mousy, wide-eyed woman, standing in he middle of the room. “This is Magda. She'll give you a proper seeing-to. Can't have you stinking worse than I do."

To think, a handful of weeks ago, Hans wanted as much distance from Henry as possible. Now, the only thing that keeps the dank little room bearable is the way it keeps Henry close.

As the bathmaid comes forward, as Henry moves to the door, Hans reaches up and grabs him by the sleeve. 

"No." Hans puts as much hauteur into the demand as he can. Which, gratifyingly, is quite a bit. “You’ll stay here.”

Henry looks down at his arm, back to Hans. "I'm just off to get you some clothes, sir, and make sure they’ve prepared your room.”

“Make Magda do it.”

“I’ll be right back, sir Hans.” That soft tone, clearly meant to comfort him, does, with an effect likely the opposite of what Henry intends. 

Hans goes from holding Henry's sleeve to digging his fingernails into his arm. The way it used to seem impossible that his nobility would be doubted, it seems impossible that Henry will dare leave his sight.

Yet Henry doesn’t relent; he glances at the door, at Magda, and Hans feels something rise in his throat. 

He swallows once, again, hard, but it’s no good. Hans takes his hand away from Henry's arm and holds it to his throat on instinct—foolish, nothing's there, no noose anymore, but knowing that doesn't make his breath come any easier. The shaking returns in full force, so hard he has to clench his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering, along with a healthy dose of shame. Henry's seen him naked, piss-drunk, kidnapped, with an arrow in his arse, but this–

“Okay,” says Henry, “alright, it’ll be alright,” and he steps away from the door.

He sits Hans down on a stool in the corner and angles his body so the room is blocked out, so all Hans can see is him. From God knows where, Henry produces a potion, but hesitates, looking at Hans’s shaking hands.

Hans imagines, with disturbing clarity, Henry tipping back his chin, pouring the potion down his throat, wiping a stray trickle from the side of his mouth. Something like queasiness hits him, low in his stomach, and he wills his hands still enough to take the phial himself. 

Despite his recent resurrection in the herb woman’s hut, Hans still thinks of herbal remedies the way most nobles do: witchcraft, yes, but really only wine with extra bits in. He doffs the entire decoction in a couple swallows.

“A sip or two,” Henry sighs. “Not the whole bloody—ah, to hell with it. You could do with a rest.”

There's a familiar aftertaste, floral and savory. The wine base goes directly to his head, chest, legs. Even his throat relaxes minutely, enough to get the decoction down and a scoff out. “Put to sleep by a bit of glorified tea? I’m not some fainting maiden.”

Henry rolls his eyes and turns back to the bathwench.

He’s got dirt on the back of his neck, Hans thinks. On the nape, between his collar and his hairline. It’s getting shaggy, Henry’s hair, and that something, just left of nausea, hits him again, so strong he has to close his eyes against it.

And has a hard time opening them, to tell the truth.

It’s the wine. Peasant wine, too strong; peasant boy, with dirt around his collar. Someone should run a rag over that soft, sunburnt skin. Someone should hold his busy hands and get the blood out from under his nails. 

Someone should hold him still and take care of him, that ever-moving peasant boy.

A knock at the bathhouse door startles Hans awake. He hears voices without processing the words, Henry’s bass and the bath wench’s flute, and the click of a lock—it startles him, recalling the cells, but any real panic is smothered under the weight of the decoction in his belly.

Then, Henry comes into view, arranging a bundle of clothes on one of the herb-laden tables. He glances over his shoulder. “You with us?”

“Debatable.” Hans blinks and takes in the dank little room, now drenched in candlelight. Steam rises from the tub nearest him. “Are you terribly attached to life in my service, Hal? You have a future as a bathhouse wench.”

“If recent events are anything to go on, sir,” Henry says, “I could serve you til the end of your life and still have plenty of time for a second occupation.”

Hans snorts. “I’m glad my brush with death hasn’t dampened your sense of humor.”

Henry puts a bar of soap and a rag on the side of the tub, then stands over Hans, offering his arm. “Up you get.”

“They didn’t actually hang me, you know,” says Hans. “I can still move under my own power.” A statement which he disproves immediately by attempting to stand. Henry catches him when his knees buckle. “What on earth was in that decoction?”

“Wine,” says Henry tartly, as he lowers Hans back to the stool. “Quite a bit of it, actually.”

And he kneels before his lord. 

Henry removes Hans’s boots—not his, Hans stole them back in Troskowitz, but he would’ve died in them—surely that transferred ownership to him, until the executioner sold them off his body to some superstitious peasant. Henry lifts Hans’s arms one at a time and eases the tunic over Hans’s head; for a moment, he is ensconced in the reek of fear-sweat but before he can panic, Henry gently pulls him free. 

It’s not the first time Henry’s helped him undress. Every squire since time immemorial has assisted their lord with a suit of armor’s many buckles and straps. But this is certainly the first time he’s divested Hans of his trousers.

Henry throws Hans’s arm around his shoulder and walks him to the tub. This fucking decoction; he’s calm now, sleepy, but it’s done something to his skin. Hans feels everything—every point of contact between them, Henry’s scratchy prisoner’s tunic and his heat underneath, the muscles rolling under his shoulder—with an intensity bordering on pain. He’s inundated by…some smell, some scent he can’t name. It comes not from any oil or perfume but out of Henry’s pores, a sweet under his sweat. All at once, he’s reminded of the truffle oil that that traveling merchant had plied in Rattay a few years ago, its heady, full taste. 

Henry’s hair brushes Hans’s cheek, and it’s—it’s very soft. 

“Hang onto that.” He guides Hans’s hands to the edge of the bath so he can support his own weight.

He hears Henry take a deep, steadying breath, and before Hans can muster up a comment—nothing you’ve not seen before, or, is the sight of my noble pizzle really more frightening than a pack of Cumans—Henry’s tugged down his braies in one businesslike motion. 

“Can I trust you to get yourself in the tub,” he asks, “or will you tip over?” 

Hans’s hesitation is apparently enough of an answer, and with embarrassing ease, Henry lifts him off his feet and deposits him gently in the water. 

He yelps at the sudden heat. “I didn’t think it possible to have a worse death noted down in the family Bible than ‘hanged for poaching.’ Now it’s going to say, boiled alive by page.”

“Envoy,” Henry corrects him. “And count yourself lucky you’ve got hot water at all.” The liberties he takes. He’s not so bold as to look at Hans now, though, eyes fixed on the linen cloth he sluices through the bathwater. “What an ordeal. Those bathhouse wenches could probably lift me right over their heads, hauling water day in and day out.” 

“I’m not infirm.” Hans nods at the cloth. “There’s no need to bathe me.”

Henry, impertinence personified, flicks bathwater at his lord. “You’ve blood in your hair,” he says. “Might I have the honor of washing it away so I may check thine noble skull for cracks, my liege?”

He clasps his hands together like a penitent, cloth between them, and Hans gets his first good look at Henry’s fists.

“Christ.” Of course, the fight in Semine. A brawl against an entire courtyard of drunken minor nobles does not leave one in particularly good shape, even if you kick their arses. That’s probably where the blood on Hans’s scalp came from, and it’s certainly to blame for the state of Henry’s knuckles. They’re covered in a mix of blood and dirt, marred with the sort of cuts left by teeth. “You want to clean my hair with, with that gunge under your great, terrible fingernails, and open wounds on your hands?”

“I’ve had a bit of a busy day,” says Henry. “You know, hauling sacks, picking locks, rescuing lords. What is the male version of a damsel in distress, anyway? Not asking for any reason in particular.”

Lord knows what he’d do to a peasant with a mouth like that, back before Henry shambled in for an audience with Radzig and Hanush, sooty and wild-eyed. Now, the teasing warms him as much as the bathwater.  Hans can barely keep the mirth out of his voice when he tugs the bar of soap from Henry with exaggerated gingerness and says, “I’ll not get clean with your dirty paws all over me. Go on, get in.”

“Sir,” Henry says. Hans waits, but that seems to be the entirety of his protest.

“Look at him, the shrinking violet,” Hans says. “This whole setup will be a wasted effort if I feel dirty just looking at you.”

Because of course that’s what he says, when what he means is, you look exhausted. You should sit down. You should kneel and let me wash the dirt from the back of your—

“As your lordship demands,” mutters Henry. 

“Ordered into a warm bath,” Hans drawls. “Truly, life is suffering.”

Henry gets in with his braies on, a fruitless attempt at propriety in the thin linen. Hans never associated modesty with peasants. Don't they all live in one room, fucking and dressing and using their chamber pots on top of one another? 

But this is Henry, whose eyes went perfectly round the first time Hans invited him into the bath in Rattay, who's sent stern or stammering at the mention of any part of a woman between collar and ankle. Though he's building up a callus to Hans’s prolific vulgarity. He has to work much harder now to catch Henry off-guard. 

They've this…sort of rhythm in their conversation now. The more stoic Henry is, the bawdier is Hans, push and pull until that blissful moment Henry cracks, puts a hand over his smiling face and utters some bit of blasphemy.

Of course some petty spat in the stocks wouldn’t take that away. He hadn’t worried it would. Not really. Or, at least, he was foolish to.

Settled in the water, Henry takes the soap in hand. He raises an eyebrow and gestures to the space in front of him. “Can’t exactly check you from the opposite side of the bath,” he says.

This is how Hans finds himself naked and alchemically drunk, with Henry washing his hair.

Water laps at the edges of the tub as Hans scoots into the middle of he bath. Henry gets up on his knees, and Hans props himself up with his hands flat on the bottom of the tub. His index finger briefly brushes Henry's knee before Henry discreetly readjusts.

It's a far cry from the bathwenches’ treatment, Hans's back pressed to their front. Something to lean against sounds quite nice at the moment. Perhaps he should've had Magda stay?

The shock of Henry's hands on his head dispels the thought. His touch, hesitant at first, quickly turns probing, brushing aside Hans’s hair in search of a wound. Prickles radiate from Hans’s scalp, into his knees. Everything, he’s feeling everything. Henry rubs the bar of soap into his hair until it foams.

“What’s in this soap? It smells…different.”

“Better, you mean,” Hans says. “Olive oil, not tallow. It’s imported from Spain.”

“That’s an expensive way to wash your arse.”

“And what would you know about washing your arse?”

Henry laughs, and they lapse into a drowsy silence, broken only by the gutter and pop of candles. Hans lets his eyelids drop.

Dozens of people have touched him this way, from nursemaids to bathhouse girls. Hell, he was manhandled bare-arsed into a tub only moments ago without so much as blinking. There’s no reason for Henry’s touch to feel like this. To make Hans feel like this. But it’s nice, God, it’s nice, Henry’s big blacksmith’s mitts impossibly gentle as he loosens the blood from Hans’s hair.

For the first time since taking that decoction, his heart kicks in his chest, hard enough that his pulse jumps noticeably under his neck. 

And elsewhere.

It’s only natural, Hans tells himself. Only healthy. He’s a man of twenty who hasn’t had a proper fuck in ages, to the extent that you could call the disaster with the butcher’s daughter a proper fuck. Nothing cooled one’s fires quicker than Henry’s infernal singing under one’s window. Nothing, bar poaching at an adequate rate to buy one’s way into a noble wedding by day, then sleeping under a drafty bit of canvas all night. His body had made no other needs known to him but warmth, sleep and food until he was ensconced in the sunset glow of the Semine wedding. 

At which point, he robbed that pretty girl from the Chamberlain—Kvyeta of Kolin, captivating enough to draw Hans’s full attention. Attention which might’ve otherwise been wasted on anticipating a certain ungrateful peasant’s arrival. He took her straight to the loft over Semine’s barn with only a lantern and the first plate of food he could grab—more pretense than she might’ve needed, if her stories of a courtesan past were to be believed. He was half-hard just from hearing them, in that soft, lilting voice, before Henry stomped up the stairs.

Not even his interruption and the ensuing quarrel dampened Hans’s enthusiasm. If anything, the reverse was true. (Only healthy, a man of twenty with humors strong enough to permeate the body. His stiff prick jumping when Henry’s voice dipped to a growl. Fear and lust mix in the blood. Only natural.)

He was worked up enough after Henry stomped off that clever Kvyeta dropped all her courtesan’s pretext and slid a hand inside his braies. And that girl was anything but shy, dipping slender fingers past his balls to press on that spot just behind–

Not thoughts that Hans should entertain at the moment, really, though that was as far as things went with her. Someone cried out that the ceremony was starting, and Hans bolted, sure this meant that von Bergow had arrived. 

Except he hadn’t, and it turned out there was a more potent counter to arousal than living rough or peasant song: being crushed anew under the renewed specter of his uncle’s disappointment after allowing himself, briefly, to hope. Kvyeta saw that, too, and cajoled him into dancing. Maybe her tales of her travel and experience were true, after all. She certainly knew how to give a man what he needed, to adapt.

Then came the fight. Then, the gallows.

Hans has been busy, and he has been unsatisfied, and now he’s here, addled by the effects of Henry’s infernal concoction, hot water, and the relief of being not grabbed, not shoved, not hit, but touched. Touched with softness and care.  

Stronger men have surely been stirred by less. Stronger men might also tip back their head, press into the massaging fingertips, and let out…well. 

A sound. Of some sort. 

Hans’s fair skin is a source of pride and irritation in equal measure. It protests the sun with burns and freckles, goes blotchy at the application of too strong a scent, and, worst of all, announces every moment of his discomfort or excitement by going as red as von Bergow’s banners. The hot water provides some alternate explanation, but he can feel that familiar flush creeping up his neck.

He launches, albeit more slowly than usual, into that familiar calculation. Don’t pull back, he’ll notice. Can’t pretend it didn’t happen, but the silence has gone on too long already, and that’ll make a joke fall flat. Quick, quick. Maybe—

“Did.” He hears Henry swallow. (A sound—a whimper, like a maid.) “Did I hurt you? Is there…?”

Hans sighs loudly. “...a great brute trying to scour through my head? Yes, good of you to notice. You do know that when Hanush says I have a dirty mind, it’s just an expression. I do not actually need you to launder my brain.”

“I’d need an iron brush and the strength of six men to get through that thick skull.” Henry’s touch softens anyway, no longer using his nails. Which is a bit of a shame, really. Or maybe a blessing. 

Surely, Henry doesn’t notice, can’t see from this angle. Hans draws his knees to his chest anyway, grasps for something, anything, to fill the void where his—sound—echoes, but his mind drops each thought before it can make it to his mouth.

Henry’s hands still. “They gave you food in the cells, surely.”

“Hmm.” It hadn’t occurred to him. “I suppose there wasn’t much reason to. Ow.”

Henry parts his hair around the spot that stings. “That’s why, then. Rinse off. I’ll get some ointment.”

Obedient without thinking, Hans dunks his head, hears the water-muffled slosh of Henry standing up. He waits a bit longer than he might to emerge, makes a production of rubbing the soap out of his hair until he feels the slosh of Henry displacing the water once more. 

A kindness, his own gesture towards modesty. (And if a healthy young man can be confused by touch, it stands to reason the same might happen when he sees wet linen clinging to skin. The way the bathwenchs’ underthings do.  There is, too, a decent chance Henry may have to lift him out of the bath, which adds a certain amount of urgency to the situation.)

“That’s why, what?” Hans asks as soon as he resurfaces. He can’t let it get quiet again, not with Henry smoothing his hair back, daubing mint-scented salve on his scalp with a touch less medicinal and more…caring, he supposes. 

“That’s what–oh! The decoction. You took too much on an empty stomach. It’s no wonder you’ve gone a bit sleepy. Also,” he amends, hurriedly, like a confession, “I’ve been trying something with the heat. Bozhena showed me how to make chamomile brew at her hut, when you were…”

“Recovering from the aftermath of my heroic deeds?”

Henry chuckles, smoothes the last of the ointment over Hans’s scalp. “Aye, during your lordly nap. She had me roaring on the bellows the whole time the potion boiled. That was fine, for a batch of one, but when the apothecary in Troskowitz wanted more, it was hell on my shoulder. Luckily, they turned out even stronger when I  lowered the flame.”

“I expect so. Booze boils off when you heat it enough.”

Hans jolts a little when Henry squeezes his shoulder. Either it’s not as pronounced as it feels, or Henry has learned enough tact not to mention it. “Careful not to get any more water on your head,” Henry says. “That ointment needs to sit.”

With as much grace as he can manage, Hans scoots across the tub. Draws his knees up again as quickly as he can. “I thought you worked for the blacksmith, not the apothecary.”

 “My shoulder,” Henry repeats. “And a day in the stocks. I wasn’t up to the walk to Tachov, even less to swinging a hammer. So I made enough decoctions to pay for a bedroll out back of the tavern for a couple days.” There’s no self-pity in his tone. He just sniffs the fancy soap with some suspicion before he rubs it over the shoulder in question. 

The image comes to him clear as a painting—Henry, beads of sweat on his brow, curled up on a pallet of straw pressed flat from a parade of vagrants and drunks. It’s a miracle his arrow wound didn’t fester. Who cleaned it for him? Someone must’ve, Henry wouldn’t have been able to reach, and Hans hopes fervently he never finds out who they are. He hates them already, even without a face or a name, hates them because he should feel grateful and because this person, whoever they are, is better than Hans by leagues, caring for a stranger because Hans had stuck his nose in the air and marched off like a child. 

“Course, the blacksmith had me running from here to creation.” He manages to look at Henry, to remind himself that Henry is here, that Henry is fine . “I ended up all the way in Apolonia finding his damned thieving assistants.”

“Still assisting all and sundry with every petty complaint, I see.” Thank God Henry wasn’t a lord. Complaining peasants would run him ragged in a fortnight, the way he has to worry at a problem until it’s solved. 

“For coin! Which I was in desperate need of.”

“Yet you still managed to find Mutt,” Hans says.

“Pebbles, too.” Is that smugness he hears? Cheeky peasant, Hans thinks, with no rancor at all. 

Henry passes him the soap after far too brief a scrub, but Hans loses all desire to scold him when he touches the bar. Soft, slippery, expensive, something that will get him properly clean without lye scouring his skin. He’s had enough pain for a day. 

“All that effort. I’ll be curious to compare the weight of our purses once the guards bother to return them. Yes, fine,” Hans goes on, putting up a hand to stop whatever outraged sound Henry was about to make, “I can admit that my methods of earning said coin led to a certain amount of…”

“Imprisonment?” Henry suggests. “Risk of life and limb?”

"What I don't understand," says Hans, "is how they found out about my...hunting in the first place. Not from the tanners, surely; they'd be admitting they purchased illegal goods."

Henry's hands still in the water. "Well. I've had a think about that."

"My. Our time apart really has changed you."

"Not enough, clearly," Henry muttered. "Or I'd have considered the wisdom of our talking at a normal volume about your crimes with two guards at the cell door."

Hans freezes. "Surely, that isn't enough to sentence a man to death."

"Unless the Chamberlain is looking for an excuse after that man robbed him of his girl."

"Oh." Hans gawps at Henry through the steam. He looks guilty, wary, like a hound waiting for his master to discover his chewed-on slippers. "Oh, god," Hans says, and he drops his head to his hands and begins to laugh.

Henry starts up, too, a great guffaw bursting through his smile, which sets Hans off again, doubly so when Henry actually snorts. Heaven knows how long they carry on for, but by the time their shared hysteria ebbs, it's the strangest thing—Hans doesn't feel the noose anymore.

At Hans's insistence, Henry lets him walk up the endless flights of stairs to his lodgings without help. Once, Hans sways, and he feels Henry's hand bump against his back. He  must've been walking like that all along, ready to catch. The thought does not humiliate Hans as much as he would like it to.

After all, it’s only Henry. Henry, who is here, who must’ve really forgiven him, not only as a concession in the cells. Henry, who is close.

Stairs duly conquered, Hans opens the door to his room and surveys it, the embroidery half-finished in the corner and baby rocker at the end of the bed. "He gave me his wife’s quarters. Does he have a wife?”

"It's the nicest room in the place, I'd expect, aside from his. Come on, I’m starving.”

Henry goes to the long table, where someone's left a plate of cheese and meats. The food’s been there long enough to start to sweat, but Hans is hungry enough not to mind. Though not so hungry he doesn't first go for one of the rather large goblets of wine.

Only for Henry to reach over the table and bat his hand away. "Eat," he says.

Hans is grateful, really, for Henry’s care, and sorry for how he spoke to him in the stocks. But gratitude and guilt can only dampen one's nature to a point.

He looks Henry dead in the eyes—obnoxiously blue, ostentatious for a peasant—and takes a long, slow sip from his cup. Henry rolls his eyes, but they flick back down to Hans's when the goblet doesn't leave his lips. Slowly, enjoying himself, even if he isn’t sure exactly why, Hans empties it.

He sets the cup down with a clang, and Henry keeps staring at him, and Hans stares back, holding the last of the wine in his mouth. The longer Henry holds his gaze, with eyes like a rabbit in a corner, the harder it is to break, even when he swallows and a droplet escapes through the corner of his mouth. It’s an echo of the humiliation he feared in the baths, but he makes no move to dab it the wine away. He only looks, lets it run down his chin.

A small mercy, that they come to their senses together.

Henry yawns, loud and long, leans his chair back to stretch in a pantomime of exhaustion. While his eyes are screwed shut, Hans wicks away the wine with his fingertips (it would take more than the threat of death and a strong potion for Hans to wipe a Monestary red on his sleeve). The two of them busy themselves with their food, and for once, he’s almost grateful for the volume of Henry’s chewing.

"Where've you been put up, anyway?" Hans finally asks, around a mouthful of pretzel.

“Magda says they moved all my things into a room by the forge,” Henry says.

He swallows. “Well, don’t bother moving it all now. On second thought, don't bother at all. No reason to drag fifty pounds of armor up fifty flights of stairs when you can store it closer to the horses.”

"Why would I move my things? Sir,” Henry hastens to add. Which is appropriate, especially after questioning a direct order from one’s lord, but for whatever reason, the formality grates more than it placates.

"You're in a noble's service now, Henry. You sleep in your noble's quarters, or as close an approximation as we have here.” The room is really very nice, as are his new clothes and the wine currently going to his head, but Hans doesn’t feel disposed towards kindness to von Bergow at the moment. Or, perhaps, to kindness at all. (He knows the room will feel smaller without Henry inside it, somehow.) "I'm sorry, do you mean to tell me you'd rather bed down in the courtyard? With the blacksmith pounding away next door?"

Henry shrugs. Less dismissive, more like a child with no good answer. “Helps me sleep, actually. And there is a bed for me there.”

Which there isn’t here. He hadn’t thought of that. Still, Hans scoffs. “Pardon me. I had no idea a pallet or a bench was so offensive to your refined sensibilities. Don’t peasants share a bed with the whole family? Don't you let your livestock in?"

"When it's bitter cold, aye.”

“So my company is more offensive than a goat’s?” He means it to come out as a joke.

It does not.

Henry shifts, looks away. “I sleep better near the forge,” he says again. “That’s all.”

His page refuses to bite back, but Hans sees that bloody-minded stubbornness in the set of his shoulders, the steady tone of his voice. For whatever reason, this is the hill Henry chooses to die on. Of everything Hans’s has shown him tonight—his tears, his shaking, his naked body inches from Henry’s—all that, and he’s offended by Hans’s hospitality. Hans opens his mouth to argue his point, answer Henry’s bloody-mindedness with a bit of his own.

The taste of bile in his throat stops him, so familiar as to draw forth Hans’s own voice, as clearly as if he’d spoken the words over again. I don’t understand how I could have failed to see it for so long. A stupid yokel who doesn’t know the way of the world. I can’t believe I ever bothered with you.

The vitriol had felt good at the time, or at least distracted him from the backache and humiliation of being clapped in the stocks for hours. No small thing, to stoke that anger silently through a day and a night, but Hans managed it the way a seasoned huntsman can keep a campfire alive in any weather. The savage satisfaction of walking off with a flourish and no backward glance fueled his angry strides into the forest. And then?

Then, Hans was alone.

Slow and resisting as a rusty gate, Hans forces his jaw closed. He takes a breath. He manages an, “All right.”

Henry looks up from the plate of roast piglet he’s been studying. “All right?”

Christ be praised, he sounds so relieved. The guilt gets Hans’s back up all over again. Does he think I’m a monster, a brute? He doesn’t know how good he’s got it. Ungrateful wretch. Ask him again. Dare him to say no twice.

It’s not only relief on Henry’s face, though, is it? His eyes are red-rimmed, with the sort of dark circles underneath that come from weeks of bad sleep. He’s slumped over his plate as if physically weighed down by exhaustion, which anyone with half an ounce of sense would’ve noticed long ago.

Hans’s venom drains all at once. He throws his hands up and gives an exaggerated sigh. “Go on! Bed down on straw, you great ox.”

“I’ll leave the finery for the house cats, sir,” he says, with a pointed look.

“Did I say ox? I meant cow.”

Unaccountable, the affection Hans feels when a sheepish smile spreads across Henry’s face.

Hans manages to remove his own clothes, thank you very much, with no assistance from his stubborn page. The porpoint’s buttons come undone with a few unceremonious yanks, and Henry had only tied enough of the stays on Hans's hose to keep him decent up the stairs. Still, after that small exertion, he hits the mattress like a lead weight and expects sleep to come the same, quick and heavy.

Instead, Hans lies there, staring at the ceiling. Maybe it’s the solitude, the lack of distraction, that brings his bodily state to the forefront. His shoulders ache like he imagined they would after hauling sacks—from hours of unconsciously clenching his muscles in anticipation of the noose, he’d guess. He wiggles down the bed far enough to stretch his hands over his head without hitting the headboard, and the fine linen sheet catches on his nipples, and—

Much like in the baths, Hans freezes, disbelieving that the sound had come out of his own mouth. Though if he’d made that noise in front of Henry he’d have gone back to the Chamberlain and requested a resentencing. He didn’t have a particularly sensitive chest, but he was a man whose fires were stoked instead of quenched by wine on a normal day. That, the decoction, the lack of touch…

Hans palms himself over his braies. One touch, and he’s aching. Still, it’s hard to muster a rhythm, uncoordinated as he is from exhaustion. An abundance of bath wenches and village girls were afforded to him as a noble—it’s put him out of practice. Though Lord knows the practice had been abundant.

He remembers the summer before his first bathhouse visit,  the first time Klara let herself be convinced he was old enough to get through the door. Some lord or another had stayed at Rattay for a couple of months and brought his son, a boy roughly Hans’s age with moody brown eyes and a name too close to his own to remember. Jan, or Jon, or Hensch. Two teenage boys sharing a room—and it was only a matter of time before Hans heard the telltale rustling and uneven breathing from the adjacent bed.

Which of course got Hans started without fail. They never spoke of it, of course, but surely the lordling knew as well as Hans did the sounds of self-pleasure echoing between them.

What had happened to that Jan-or-Jon, Hans wonders now, toying with himself, only stroking a finger under the head. His cock jumps.

That's the problem, doing this without company. His mind wanders. It wanders with wenches, too, but at least he can always look down and find quite a diverting scene. Maybe it's the good Lord's attempt at interrupting the sin, sending thoughts of Jan—thoughts of—

He squeezes his eyes shut and thrusts into the loose ring of his fist, and it's not as good as a cunt, but it tingles, and when his thighs brush together, the friction of downy hair—it sends him gasping. He feels drugged, flayed to new skin, but good, God is it good.

Almost involuntarily, his free hand moves over his skin, chasing sensation over the line of hair up to his navel, to his stomach, to his chest. He brushes against a nipple and his entire body throbs. Something to be explored, perhaps, later. For now, he needs more, he needs touch everywhere, his fingertips brushing over his collarbone, then, feather-light, up his throat.

The fear—but it stokes his arousal, and the hand on his cock moves with purpose now, his thighs tensing, the shivers constant. He touches himself, explores himself, runs a finger over the shell of his ear. Teasing, the way he would someone else’s body. The way he’d like to.

His fingers wander to his hair, and his nails scraping his scalp feel so good that Hans is shocked into stillness, his rhythm faltering.  He thinks he might come right then and there, repeats the motion—but it’s not enough, a mockery of gentle touch. Not as good. Nowhere close.

Hans gathers his hair in his fist and pulls.

The pain jolts lightning-quick and branching down his body, straight between his legs; with a strangled gasp, Hans comes, pulsing in his fist, on and on. He’s got just enough sense left to bite his lips together before he makes another one of those humiliating noises. Under no circumstances will all of Trosky hear him debase himself. He imagines, ridiculously, Henry hearing him from the forge, and a final surge of pleasure runs through him.

At the end, he’s shivering, drenched with sweat and spend. Ought to get up. Ought not to stain the expensive sheets. But before he can follow through on either thought, the alchemical sleep that’s lain in wait for him finally pounces, drags him away.

He'd seen an execution before. Just the one—either Hanush found hangings distasteful, or Rattay had some particularly obedient peasants—and one was enough. Hanush's hand on his shoulder. A path cleared in front of Hans, so he could see. Seven, eight years old? Less? Small enough that it shouldn't have been a surprise when he cried. Still, Hanush's nails dug in through his doublet until he managed to swallow his tears. The hanged man (as Hans thought of him, even before he'd swung) cried too, a way Hans had never seen an adult cry, much less a man. Nose running into his chapped lips with every great, heaving sob.

He remembers trying in vain to imagine what the man could've done, what grave sin he had committed. His child's mind conjured heaps of bodies, great riches stolen from lords. He was a lord, almost. Maybe the man had stolen from him. He'd tried very hard to spark a flame of outrage in his tiny chest.

The man prayed. Prayed as he was hauled by his bound hands up onto the stump, as they put the rope around his neck. And his must've been a great and terrible sin, because God did not spare him. Not while he choked, while his eyes bulged in his blue face and his tongue lolled out; not in the forever it took him to die, still twitching as the smell of shit wafted through the crowd, to Hans, who could not turn away, not with Hanush at his back.

The man invaded his thoughts in the cell, his presence growing at the sound of every bell. They rang irregularly, cruelly, putting him on shaky ground before he'd even been paraded to the gallows.

And paraded he was. Up from the dungeons and through Trosky, with the guards pausing just before the gallows to assure Hans arrived at the right point in the mad chamberlain's screed. He'd seen weddings go less smoothly to plan. Though, admittedly, those involved less booing.

As he was marched closer, Hans’s mind faltered and fell silent. Spirits burn off when you heat them. All the horror, the outrage, the raw grief—after twelve bells, his humors had boiled away and left Hans empty-headed. Tears came, of course, but that had little to do with him. Only a few words of prayer, so often repeated after a youthful transgression, rose as far as his throat and died there. 

Midday sun in his eyes when the Chamberlain paced to the other side of the platform above him. He closed his eyes against the glare, but no, there was the hanged man, and when he opened them again, his vision was dotted with bruise-colored splotches. The sun, the sun, warming through the somebody-else's shirt on his back as he ascended the stairs. There was a raw edge on one of the guard's mitts, a place where a mail-chain had broken, and it scraped Hans's shoulder when he was pushed up and along. 

The wood creaked. It looked clean, new. Quickly constructed

And he heard every bit of the silence that fell when he stepped up on the log. A cough, an indistinct child's voice, quickly hushed. He felt every bristle on the rope as it was tightened around his neck.

"Stop!"

His ears rang, then roared with rushing blood, and then, God, then Hans felt, when he saw Henry. Even as he echoed Henry’s protests, I’m a lord, you can’t do this, he harbored no real hope that the interruption would save him. Like the hanged man so long ago, Hans had been as good as hanged the moment he came out of that damnable cell. It didn’t matter—looking into Henry's eyes, shining blue even from all that distance, through the haze of imminent death, Hans felt something as good as relief. Affection, and gratitude.

It didn’t work. The executioner returned his boot to the log under Hans’s feet, and Henry was frantic, still looking right into Hans’s eyes, and where before Hans could not even conjure prayer, one thought rang through his mind, clear and strong. 

Lord, thank you, that he will be the last thing I see.