Archive of Our Own ^beta

There were few things that Sylvain hated more than the Lance of Ruin. The damned thing had dominated his life ever since he was born. Sooner than that, even— he had no doubt that Miklan would have been an only child if he’d had the fortune to be born with the right Crest. There was a certain level of nobility where the usual strategy of pumping out as many spare heirs as possible stopped being useful and started threatening the unity of the family, and while Gautier wasn’t anywhere near the top of that level, they were close enough that “heir is killed by sibling” outweighed “heir is killed in Srengi raid.”

Sylvain had to agree. One Miklan had been bad enough. He wouldn’t have survived two.

The problem was this: while Sylvain hated the Lance, the Lance loved him. He could feel it in the back of his mind at times, projecting feelings of warmth and obsession at him. It was like having a stalker he couldn’t escape, and it had only gotten worse after Miklan…

(The first time he’d ever seen his brother show fear was when the Lance swallowed him.)

He didn’t want to think about it, but it was impossible not to. The Lance never left him alone. It liked him, but it didn’t understand him. He felt it radiating jealousy every time he brought a woman to his dorm, growling in the back of his mind like a dog. It moved sometimes, horrible little spikes fluttering back and forth in a mockery of life, but not when there was company over. He got the feeling that the twitching and the shuddering and the rustling was supposed to be friendly and not awful in every way, but he wanted to retch every time he saw it.

It was even worse if he tried to keep the Lance covered. He could somewhat turn off his eyes and ignore the twitching. He couldn’t ignore the mindless beat of lonely lonely lonely that poured into his brain.

So instead, he did his best to drown it out, in any way he could. Alcohol helped. So did sex. And so did, oddly enough, Seteth’s lectures on propriety. Sneaking someone into his dorm got him double the escape, and all he had to do was deliberately let his guard down. The women were less than happy about it, but it wasn’t like he ever planned to sleep with them twice.

Friendship didn’t work nearly as well. He looked at Felix and the Lance screamed loneliness. He looked at Ingrid and it cried in pain. He looked at Dimitri and it roared sorrow. He didn’t know why— were his feelings for them affecting the Lance as much as the Lance affected him?— but it definitely had opinions about them.

He had already somewhat come to terms with the fact that their friendship wouldn’t survive the school year, so all this did was make the end come faster. They’d be happier without him, anyway. It was time for them to grow out of the need for a substitute brother figure. He wasn’t Glenn and never would be, and it was about time they accepted it. They needed to stop pretending he was something other than an empty shell with the Gautier name.

But they didn’t. They kept pestering and bothering and acting like what he felt and thought mattered. They wanted him to take care of himself. They wanted him to look to his future. They wanted him to be social, as if he could ever interact with someone without hurting them.

So he started freezing them out. He’d avoid them on free days, stay strictly businesslike in class. He’d speak to them when spoken to, but he wouldn’t start conversations himself. They’d get the message eventually.

It was halfway through the school year that he finally found someone who understood what he was going through.

Yuri was a rascal, a rake, and a fiend, recruited into the Blue Lions by way of the sewers, which was such a bizarre way to join the school that Sylvain had to learn more. He had a Relic of his own, a set of bracers and chains that sometimes seemed to move his hands for him. During training, he’d move to parry a blow he couldn’t possibly see. He’d react to strikes far faster than any normal human could. It wasn’t flashy, not like more aggressive Relics like Luin or Areadbhar, but it didn’t need to be.

He knew what it was like for all of his worth to come from his Crest, having been adopted by a hot-tempered Count for what was in his blood and thrown away as soon as the detriments outweighed the benefits. He wasn’t like Ingrid, whose family was still supportive enough not to force her into a hated marriage. He wasn’t like Dimitri, whose status was based on being the only son of the late king instead of his Crest. And he wasn’t like Felix, or Annette, or anyone else who could pretend they didn’t even have one.

He still would have passed the other man by, if it weren’t for one thing:

The Lance of Ruin hated him. It hissed disgust and jealousy into his brain whenever they spoke. On the rare occasions he could pinpoint an exact word to put to the emotions, they were things like turncoat and fake.

And, well, look. Sylvain was pretty damn tired of the Lance invading his mind, and he was perfectly capable of spite when the opportunity rose. And since Yuri was prettier than many of the women he’d seen, it didn’t take much for him to begin shamelessly flirting with him.

He did have to admit it was a bit surprising when Yuri began shamelessly flirting back.

As the school year passed, the two of them started running into each other more and more often. Naked. Crotch first. Metaphorically-speaking, because it was much more common for Sylvain’s mouth to run into Yuri’s crotch, or for Yuri’s mouth to run into Sylvain’s crotch, or for one of Yuri’s cronies or possibly friends to have their own ideas for what those crotches could do, or…

Well, Sylvain wasn’t about to complain about the sheer variety of ways he was getting laid.

While his friends-with-benefits relationship with Yuri was more benefits than friends, it came with some perks. There was an entire library in Abyss (which, to his relief, was in more storm sewers than sewer sewers) full of books that didn’t exist on the surface, and he spent many an hour absorbing the knowledge and baseless rumors inside it.

(It was somewhat disturbing to recognize one of the books, an innocent-looking tome containing detailed and not at all innocent accounts of the Four Saints, enhanced by various authors with accounts of various Relic-wielders, from his father’s personal library.)

After a while, the people of Abyss came to accept him enough to ignore him, which was good enough as far as he was concerned. Yuri sometimes like to play games, and tracking the other man down was hard even when the residents weren’t going out of their way to get in his.

When the war came, the residents were all he had left. He fell off his horse and broke his leg during the battle for Garreg Mach, and by the time he’d recovered enough to travel, his country was at war with itself and his friends were either dead or scattered. He didn’t have a reason to leave, not when he could help here.

The people of Abyss, as it turned out, needed food and didn’t have anywhere else to go to get it. Sylvain, as it turned out, knew enough about magic to keep the spells on the greenhouse running, and enough about rivers and weirs to keep the fish pond stocked (growing up in the frozen north had its perks, it turned out). He wouldn’t take the Lance into battle when stragglers and deserters came sniffing around for treasure and refugees, not when the slightest whisper of a Relic would bring Imperial scouts running like cats after mice, but he still did his part to keep them safe.

It wasn’t a comfortable existence, but it was better than playing a role in the eternal back and forth between Gautier and Sreng as his father ignored the civil war to the west.

One night, Yuri came to him. Well, he came to him a lot of nights. Sometimes he even came in him. Or the other way around.

This time, though, it wasn’t for sex or for work or even to discuss the most recent set of looters. They had swept through the Monastery, broken some of the stained glass trying to pry it out, carried off some ancient school supplies, and had finally resorted to stripping all the pumpkins from the greenhouse before leaving with their meager find. No one was happy about the loss of food, but at least the Abyssians hadn’t been discovered.

No, this time he was there for the Lance of Ruin.

Yuri cooed at the Lance, petting the blade like a cat. It rattled its spikes and sent out a pulse of… something. A demand, he thought. Whatever it was made his head hurt.

“I know,” he said to it, tweaking one of the spikes. It hissed. “I know. You’ve been so neglected, haven’t you?”

The Lance rattled its spikes again.

“He’s possessive of you,” Yuri explained. “You keep seeing other men, and that bothers him.”

Sylvain gave both the man and the weapon a flat look. “I’m not fucking a lance.”

“I’m not expecting you to. Or well, not this one.”

He crossed his arms. “Those words just fill me with confidence.”

“I aim to please,” Yuri said, giving him a short bow. “Really, though, I have an idea,” The other man flashed him the sharp schemer’s smile that had attracted Sylvain to him in the first place. “Do you trust me?”

Sylvain raised an eyebrow. “Not when you have that grin on your face.”

Yuri laughed once, twice, and then stopped smiling completely. “There’s a newcomer in Abyss. Some poor bastard who stole a Relic and ran.”

Sylvain sat upright in his seat, gut churning. “Is he…”

“He’s alive, though not exactly well. His Relic has been troubling him, much like yours does to you. Unlike you, however, he talks back to his.”

Sylvain blinked.

“It unnerves people. And the man himself is, well…” Yuri made a face. “The war hit him hard, and his Relic’s hitting him harder. I don’t even know how much of him is left underneath it all. But between you and him, there are two noisy Relic-related problems, and I think that between you and him, we have a solution.”

Sylvain raised both eyebrows this time. “You want the Lance to meet this mystery Relic.”

It wasn’t a question. Yuri had a Relic of his own, sure, but as far as he could tell the Fetters of Dromi were completely dead. Yuri never mentioned them emoting at him, and they certainly didn’t move like the Lance did. Even if they were alive, the Lance had had many a chance to ‘meet’ them before.

Yuri nodded. “It will be rough. I’ve heard stories about what happens when they meet when they’re this worked up…”

“I’ve also heard them.” Some of those stories had been in that little unassuming book about the Four Saints. The authors had been very imaginative, yes, but had also cited sources. Sources that, unfortunately, had been corrobated in much more recent times by old soldiers’ accounts of post-battle excitement, as it were. That by itself would have been fine, if those accounts hadn’t also involved his father.

He shove that thought aside. No, he was not thinking about his father’s self-insert battlefield porn when Yuri was trying to talk him into getting laid. By an entity controlling his body. Very roughly, and likely with a lot of biting and scratching and that sort of thing. He was fine with that. Not so much with the loss of control (he hated losing control), but if it meant the Lance would shut up for once…

Well, it was worth a try.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it. But I need you here to make sure nothing…”

He still had nightmares about what the Lance of Ruin had done to Miklan. About being absorbed by his own weapon, turned into a monster. About being set on his friends, his comrades, with no way to control the reins of the beast he was.

Yuri took his hands in his own. “I wouldn’t leave you alone for this.”

Good. That was good. The Fetters may be dead, but they still had a lot of magic in them. He’d once seen Yuri use them to disarm someone and be a block away before his target had even noticed. He had the skill to take the Lance and throw it away before it could consume him, and the will to kill him if he turned into a monster anyway.

Not that he was going to say the latter part out loud.

“I’ll do it, then,” Sylvain said instead. “Just, give me time to prepare.”

“I’ll need to ask the newcomer if he’s amenable, anyway. He might even say no.”

“You don’t think that.”

“I truly don’t.”

The Lance of Ruin was in his hand, as twitchy and disgusting as ever. It hummed in his head with anticipation, or perhaps impatience, as he drummed his fingers along the shaft. He’d dressed simply, in clothing that was one step away from rags and wouldn’t be missed if it was torn. He’d considered just sitting in his room naked, but that sort of vulerability just wasn’t his thing.

The door opened. Sylvain turned, mouth open for a greeting.

He saw.

His eyes saw a human man. Tall. Blond. Unimportant. His self saw—

Dearest friend, sister-in-arms, comrade, lover!

Delight crashed through his mind, stirring it into a drunken fervor. He started to leap out of the bed, but she- Areadbhar (wrong name, always the wrong name, what was her name? He didn’t even know his own anymore) got there first. Hands, strong hands, gnarled and scarred and ragged from trauma and years of abuse, shoved him back down, cupped his face (they scraped across the beard he shouldn’t have), pulled his hair back. Teeth on his neck, dull human teeth, disappointing and disgusting, but all she had, biting down so hard just to draw a little blood.

He bit back, sinking his own foul teeth into her bare shoulder, hands clawing down her back. He needed to get closer, sink deeper into her body. He wanted to reach into his chest and pull out his heart, show it to her, cup her own heart in his hands. Her fingernails, so small and umimpressive, nothing like the claws she should have, scraped down his chest. Hands tugged at his shirt, a growl rattled in her throat.

The human, the stupid purple-haired human that wanted to claim his host, reached in between them and started undoing the buttons on his shirt. He glowered at the pitiful thing, but allowed it. Clothes were a barrier, and he couldn’t trust these tiny hands and nonexistent claws to do anything about it. The human was impersonal, at least, unwilling or unable to share in their passion, as he carefully undressed them.

Then they could safely ignore him. Skin rubbed against skin, chest against chest, trying to burrow into each other. Hands ran down backs, sides, felt for dorsal spines that hadn’t existed in a thousand years, wings that had long ago been broken and stolen—

He wanted to talk, wanted to cry affirmations and praise and delight to his comrade, his wife’s third, but his throat was wrong wrong wrong. Wrong shape, wrong size, wrong everything. He was lucky if he managed to get out a single word at a time. All he could do was growl, and groan, and run his tiny human hands across every part of her that he could reach.

He wanted more. He wanted—

A blade, dragonbone and more his lover than the fleshy form she was acting in, slashed his shoulder. Blood gushed, her head dipped, took it in her mouth. His own blade, once the tip of his keelbone, stabbed into her chest. Not deep enough to kill, no, that would lock her within herself, blind and enraged, until another wielder came. But deep enough for her blood, her crest, the deepest part of herself that wasn’t her beating heart (too fragile now, too exposed, too dangerous to try), to flow so he could drink deep of her.

And then it stopped. He was pulled away from himself, his essence flowing out to try to cling to his body. He—

Sylvain startled, reached out a hand—

Ok, that was a mistake. Ow. He was bloody, torn up, and naked, and everything hurt.

Yuri was between him and the other man, a hand on the other’s chest. The Lance of Ruin was clenched in his other hand, writhing like a snake and dripping ichor.

“No,” he was saying as the Lance raged. “This was not part of the deal.”

The man screamed wordlessly at him.

“We had an agreement,” Yuri insisted. “You can meet, get reacquainted, talk it out if you can, but no harming your hosts.”

The Lance’s ichor, red and black and thick as mucus, piled on the floor. Tendrils shot out, seeking something to grab on to. Seeking him.

Sylvain scooted back on the bed, suddenly aware of how vulnerable he was and how dangerous of a situation he was in. Relics weren’t human. They were aware, yes, and somewhat alive, but they were weapons. Made to kill and uncaring of their victims. He shivered, as much from fear as from blood loss.

This was a mistake. This whole thing was a mistake. He never should have agreed to it in the first place. He should have laughed in Yuri’s face and refused, but that sly smile was so good at talking him out of common sense and—

A hand, gentle, brushed the hair from his face. A second pressed something against his lips. “Sylvain?” Yuri was asking. “How are you feeling?”

He looked up. Vulnerary. He drank it eagerly. “Pretty bad,” he admitted after the first gulp, the stretch of flesh knitting together a welcome distraction from his anxiety. “I didn’t expect—”

He looked over Yuri’s shoulder. The other man held the Lance of Ruin in his arms, the stone on its blade pressed tightly against the stone on his own Relic. He tried again. “I expected the loss of control. It happens in battle, sometimes.” Yet another reason to hate the thing. “But…”

“We can stop this right here,” Yuri said. “Just say the word.”

He shook his head. “No, we can’t. They’re blue-balled now, and they’ll only get worse if we throw them out. Even if we manage to separate…” That was Areadbhar, he recognized it from the time before the Tragedy, when he visited Fhirdiad once a month with his father, and that was Dimitri, the friend he’d tried to shove aside and managed to throw away. Even missing the eye, missing the fake gentle expression on his face, it was him. He was dead. He was supposed to be dead.

Sylvain needed to have that panic attack later.

“It’s just going to hound him,” he whispered. “Like the Lance hounds me. Even if we throw them in the river and let them wash downstream, they always return to their blood.”

A thousand years, and all of the Heroes’ Relics were accounted for. It wasn’t a coincidence, or even a case of care and caution. Whenever the countries warred, even in just the minor skirmishes that never made history books, there were always attempts to dispose of or hide away the other’s Relics. Luin had been hurled into a gorge when Galatea tried to defect from Leicester, the Lance of Ruin had been stolen by Sreng more times than anyone cared to admit (and had even once been presented as a wedding gift), and the Sword of the Creator…

Well, everyone had seen that one’s recovery.

The point was, they always came back. There was a pull between weapon and wielder. If they locked up Areadbhar and the Lance of Ruin, they would make sure that their wielders regretted it.

Sylvain took another gulp of vulnerary. “Give the rest to Dimitri. He needs it,” he said.

“I have a second one for him,” Yuri promised.

Sylvain made him give it to him before he drank the other half of his own bottle. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust him. It was that he didn’t really trust anything. If he didn’t see it with his own eyes, he had doubts. About himself, about the friends he’d tried to avoid making in Abyss, about anything and everything and all in between.

“If you’re sure…” Yuri said as not-Dimitri approached, Lance in hand.

Sylvain reached out a hand. “Give it to me.”

The Lance of Ruin surged to meet him, ichor flowing over his arms and chest and—

He glowered with anger and disgust at the human interloper. Keeping him from his host! Pulling him into the deep, dark void where nothing existed and nothing could exist, trapped inside himself with nothing but the slow sleep. Betrayer! Fake face, fake bones, fake heart. Mannequin pretending to be human, stealing his host, stealing him. Should eat him, easy in old times, one bite and gone. Harder now.

He ran a tongue along his teeth. Much harder now.

His lover grabbed him by the face. No more distractions. No time for distractions; they only had the night to know each other again, and taking each other and running would only kill their bodies in the end. It had happened before, he thought, many slow sleeps ago, but he couldn’t remember when or who their bodies had been. He hadn’t had a dick then, he remembered that.

He had one now, even if it was too small, too smooth, and only just the one, and some long-forgotten memory prodded him to nudge his hand between him and his lover and press their dicks together. It was a nice feeling, adequate and only mildly mediocre, but far nicer was the pleasured cry his beloved let out.

(Had he ever done this as a human, in the before times? He thought he might have preferred being big, but he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember most things. Just glimpses and flashes of walking and flying and laying under the stars and dying. Most of all the dying. They took his heart and twisted him into something he was never meant to be and he hated hated hated them. If the purple-haired creature was one of them he would have eaten him even if it meant using these tiny teeth for it.)

His lover flicked him in the forehead. Too much thinking. She was here, and she was not going to be here forever. He pressed his face against hers, cheek against cheek, as they bucked against each other, friction just the right side of painful. Her breath was hot against his ear, reeking and ugly but wholy hers.

He missed her, needed her, wanted to hear her sing too early in the morning, wanted to watch her, his wife, her husband, all together again as a family. Wanted to eat together, fight together, fuck together, laugh and cry and argue, dance in the skies over the canyon. This tiny piece of before couldn’t be enough, but it was all he was going to get.

His ugly human dick was leaking. He wiped up the drop of fluid with his thumb and spread it around his lover’s. She purred into his ear and held onto him even the more tightly, chin tucked into his shoulder. Her breath, short and sharp with need and pleasure, puffed against his ear. Her arms wrapped around his back to dig nails into his flesh, drawing tiny pinpricks of pain. Not enough, but adequate.

He could accept adequate. It was far better than nothing.

She came, liquid splashing on his belly. He didn’t. He needed more in a way that he was never going to get, not while they were trapped in these tiny forms. Not while their kin were gone and either dead or trapped with them. Not while the— the other one, the guardian, his wife was out of reach.

He missed her terribly. His lover missed her too. She was not offended by his lack of pleasure, only sad. Her hand wiped the sweat from his brow and held him to her chest, scarred and rough with battle.

He wanted to rest. Not the slow sleep, the deep sleep that never ended, but the fast sleep like in the before times, where he would doze off tucked against the frames of people he no longer knew the names of. He thought he could manage it, if his beloved was there to watch over him. He thought…

Sylvain woke up, hours later, to the sounds of a hissed argument. He blinked— once bright, the candlelight was now faint. Craning his head, he noticed the lantern was mostly covered by its hood. Yuri must have done it to keep him from waking. The Lance of Ruin was still across his chest, preciously quiet, but Yuri and his guest had retreated to the corner by his desk.

He looked at the guest and his Relic again. Yeah. That was still Areadbhar. And that was definitely still Dimitri.

Areadbhar still shouldn’t be here. It should be in Fhirdiad castle, under lock and key, wrapped in thick canvas to keep it from striking anyone. Areadbhar was notoriously bloodthirsty, eager to slash and rend and maim. King Lambert had once joked that he could close his eyes mid-battle and the spear would win for him. Maids didn’t dare clean it. Knights didn’t dare brush against it.

It was as prickly as it was infamous, only accepting one wielder at a time. Not even Dimitri had dared touch it until after his father’s death, and even then it had given him a cut on his hand deep enough to require dedicated healers to fix.

Dimitri was supposed to be dead, executed in Fhirdiad. But there was no one else Areadbhar would accept, no other wielders of the Crest of Blaiddyd, and certainly no others in the throne’s line of succession. He had to be alive. Somehow. Maybe Areadbhar saved him, outraged that someone would try to kill what belonged to it. He didn’t know.

When the figure spoke, it became very clear that whatever this person may look like, they were not Dimitri right now. The Relic was still tightly in control.

“Fake,” hissed the figure, tapping the Crest Stone on the fetters. “Where?”

“Alive, last time I saw him,” Yuri said. “I don’t think he’ll want to see you in this state.”

Not-Dimitri shrugged. Areadbhar gleamed in the candlelight.

“Neither will your husband.”

The hulking form jerked in surprise. “Alive?”

Yuri nodded. “As far as I know. There is a war.”

The figure shrugged again. What else was new? Sylvain imagined it saying.

He sat up in his bed, moving the Lance of Ruin down to his lap. The figure spun around, grasping Areadbhar possessively, and—

Dimitri had seen better days. He was bigger, now, with more scars. A bandage covered one of his eyes, and the visible one was dull and exhausted. What had happened to him?

“Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said, letting his mouth wander as he sized up the situation in the room. This… introduction between Relics was interesting and all, but he really wanted Dimitri back. He wanted Dimitri back in his right mind, or as close to it as he ever got. “You must be—”

“Don’t remember,” whispered the figure.

Surely Areadbhar should know its own name? It was an interesting wrinkle that it didn’t. Sylvain made a mental note to investigate that later. “I’m Sylvain. I belong to the Lance of Ruin.”

The statement was more true than he wanted it to be, and he was going to think about it sometime never.

Not-Dimitri— Areadbhar— growled at him. “Useless.”

Ouch. “You wound me. I thought we were friends.”

“Sylvain, shut up,” hissed Yuri.

He was on too much of a roll to shut up now. “The way I see it is this: you want your friend back—” He patted the Lance, which mumbled something indistinct at him. Good, it was still mostly asleep; he didn’t want to be possessed again. “And I want my friend back. You’re running him ragged, you know.”

Areadbhar glared at him.

Ugh, why was he doing this anyway? He’d just about gotten to the point where he didn’t care about Dimitri at all. But then he’d heard about the execution, and the collapse of the Kingdom, and he’d realized too late that he really did care. And now that he was somehow alive again…

Friendship was still worthless, so why did he care? Damned nostalgic brain of his.

“So why don’t we switch off? You leave him alone, and in return you get quality time with my nightmare here?”

Yuri pinched the bridge of his nose. “Sylvain, stop. You’re in no condition to negotiate right now.”

“No one else is going to do it for me,” he snapped, cranky from stress and lingering pain. The vulnerary might have healed him earlier, but his body hadn’t gotten the message yet. “If you told me your newcomer was Dimitri before we started—”

“I didn’t know,” Yuri said.

“Bullshit.”

“No, seriously. I met him all of once during the school year, and then he came back like this. Worse than this; you should have seen him before Hapi fixed him up. I did think he looked familiar, I’ll admit that, but as far as any of us knew, Dimitri was dead. It couldn’t be him.” Yuri shook his head. “And you, stop that.”

Not-Dimitri stopped, hand a breath away from the Lance of Ruin. “Promised,” the Relic hissed.

“You will get your night. Be patient.” Yuri turned his focus back to Sylvain. “You’re exhausted, still sore from earlier, and angry.”

“And it’s tired, angry, and desperate,” Sylvain countered. “I couldn’t feel much of the Lance’s thoughts, but I got enough. They hate not having a window into the world. It’ll take a lot to draw Areadbhar away from Dimitri, but the Lance will jump at a chance to not be wrapped up and left in my room.”

The Lance in question rustled its spines, pricking his legs like a too-friendly cat. The three of them watched it as it slowly faded back into slumber.

“Regardless,” Yuri said once it was still again. “This is neither the time nor place for negotiating. The Relics need their night and you need some rest. And so, I believe, does Dimitri.”

Areadbhar bared Dimitri’s teeth, but didn’t contradict him.

“Sleep for now. We’ll discuss it in the morning.”

He didn’t want to. He wanted to talk things out now, when he had mind to. But he was tired, and it was the middle of the night, and he had the chance to get some sleep now, when the Lance was too tired to provoke his usual nightmares.

Maybe he’d even wake up to find Dimitri himself. He doubted it. But maybe.