Work Text:
It took April three weeks to crack. Three weeks of eating bread with weevils, of living in damp dusty castles where bathing was nonexistent, of being groped by large smelly men who wouldn’t let go of her until she kneed them in the groin or David held a sword to their throat, where half-wild dogs were acceptable dinner companions. She couldn’t live in a world where it was an acceptable medical practice to chop off limbs with a claymore, where the literacy rate hovered at two percent, where women popped out a baby each year until they died, and men came back from a great war not every other generation but every other month.
Three weeks, and that was it, she could take it no more.
It took Christopher seven months, give or take, and that was only because he was having so much fun he didn’t realize he was miserable.
Christopher was used to fighting by then. They all were. Though war itself never quite lost it potency, that sheer knee-knocking terror that tripped through your veins. You never quite got over the uneasy feeling that it could have been a sword through your stomach or an arrow through your eye. But that fear? Ultimately containable. Manageable. If you’ve got something to come back to. He’d been following the Viking guide to life – war, women, and beer. It worked. It was cool. The Vikings were all about getting drunk off their asses and then throwing themselves into gloriously sweaty acres of women. Like it would make them forget the war came first.
For a while Christopher thought the thing he was coming back to was Etain. Perfect and fragile like hand-blown glass, beautiful even when the light hits one of the natural imperfections. But as beautiful as Etain was and as much as Christopher loved her, he couldn’t have her. He could only watch her, untouchable, sitting next to her toady husband. He and Baldwin aren’t friends, aren’t enemies, but either way he won’t play Lancelot to her Guinevere.
So there were whores and stable girls and serving wenches galore. Blondes, brunettes, red-heads. Girls who looked like Magda and April and Pretty Little Flower.
Oh, God, he was miserable.
It took Jalil a year, nearly, because he isn’t the type to throw in the towel at the first sign of trouble. But even he knows when to cut his losses. Everworld is too big for him, too much. He’s a tiny drop in a very large ocean. A human drop.
He’s smart, he knows, and these are the times he hated it. The times he wished he didn’t understand. He could bring Everworld from the Dark Ages to the technological age in six months flat. But no one will listen. He can’t make them understand. He can’t use hybridization, can get the villagers to use crop rotation or proper irrigation because they’re so damn intent on doing it the way their father did it, the way his father did it. He watches their children starve, bones brittle and eyes too bright.
It feels like everything around his is dying. He teaches men to make gunpowder and Molotov cocktails, to structure their arrows more aerodynamically, to put a groove in the sides of their swords so they don’t stick in bodies quite so often. He has a thousand ways to improve on death, a thousand new ways to kill. Guerrilla tactics, false surrenders, even sending diseased men into enemy camps and letting nature take its course. Jalil knows the one rule of war – there are no rules as long as you win.
It makes his skin crawl. Not in the way he’s used to, but terrifying just the same.
She couldn’t see the way out – she grew thinner, frailer. She looked more beautiful than ever, smooth and luminescent, a bone picked clean and left to bleach in the sun.
He drank. He let his hair grown long, he didn’t bathe. He drifted into something like oblivion, and he dreamed that Huitzilopochtli ripped out his heart and ate it whole.
He kept leather bound books filled with tiny, precise handwriting. He talked to Merlin, a steady rein on his tongue the whole time. He thought about Egypt. And gateways. And finding a way out.
David watched.