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maderrNo idea if you'll like it. Also, this comes from that section of my brain referred to as Left Field. My apologies to those of you who may be fans of this...mythology, story, whathaveyou. I've butchered it quite thoroughly.
Hope it cheers you some, Sweets. *loves you muchly*
“If I were you,” a voice said, interrupting Florence’s troubled thoughts. “I’d just bail and go home.”
Florence looked up, and suddenly wished he could think of something to say.
The campus was a small one. How the heck had he never seen this guy before? Because yow. He looked like something that had stepped out of the pages of one of his fantasy books and assumed a modern guise.
Obviously the guy had a thing for jewelry. High on his right ear was a silver cuff, and three jewels – red, green, blue – punctured the lob. On his left, a dragon curled along the top of his ear, and a jewel in the dragons mouth attached to a silver chain, which trailed down to fasten to a sword puncturing the left lobe.
There were tons of rings on his fingers, and three chains around his neck, all of them strung with a rainbow of jewels.
Of course, they were just icing on the cake. The guy was hot hot hot. His eyes made the blue gems he wore look like poor imitations, set against pale skin that did everything for his looks. His hair was black; it looked like the real version of the fine, feathery stuff his stepsister used to make wigs for her porcelain dolls.
He was as pretty as all the marble statues Florence had ogled on his trip to France, when he’d done his best to get lost in the Louvre. Whoever had carved this fine specimen had been stupid to let him go.
His clothes, strangely, didn’t really seem to suit him. He wore a long-sleeved navy blue t-shirt and loose, faded jeans. Old, brown sandals.
Florence felt pretty damn sad-looking next to this specimen – the kindest anyone had ever described him was ‘misplaced roman soldier.’ Gray eyes looked rather boring next to those amazing blue, and his brown hair was boring no matter what. But he could kick anyone’s ass if he felt like it – his build and eccentric stepfather had seen to that.
Plus, he realized slowly he wasn’t actually upset by their glaring differences as he thought. More, it felt like habit to get upset. Like he knew he shouldn’t. That he had no need to worry about or prove anything.
Florence shook off the strange thought as he realized the hottie was giving him an amused look.
Fucking duh. He’d talked. Talk back. “What?” Florence mentally kicked himself.
“You’ll save yourself a great deal of pain and trouble if you just turn around and go home,” the hottie said. “Trust me.”
Florence cocked an eyebrow. “Dude, it’s just a midterm. I’ve got it beat. Cake and pie. Did you forget to study?” Not that he’d ever noticed the guy in the class.
The man snorted. “I’m not in the class. Nor was that stupid midterm what I meant. Just…go back to your room. Skip the test. You can make it up next week, trust me. You’ll be sorry if you don’t go home now.”
“What are you, a fortune teller?” Florence frowned, somewhat amused but also sort of creeped out. It was the blue eyes, he decided. It felt like they were sucking out his soul or something. Man, he really needed to get some sleep. Too bad that was nigh on impossible these days.
The man made a face. “No. But I do tell a prophecy from time to time.” He stood up and slung a beat-up looking messenger bag over his right shoulder and moved toward him. Suddenly Florence knew what it was like to be loomed over. Well, sort of. They were exactly the same height. The guy just had a looming sort of presence or something. He wondered if he’d get punched, kicked, or gutted if he leaned forward and found out what those pale lips tasted like.
Whoa. Maybe his dorm mates were right. He needed to get out more. But he’d never known anyone to get to him like this.
“Look,” the man said. “You’ve got two choices here. If you leave now, things will be crazy for a bit. But they’ll settle down and next week you’ll take your exam. You’ll shine all through school, and your thesis will be the start of your fame and fortune. You’ll retire happy, healthy, and relatively whole.”
“Or?” Okay, he was completely weirded out now. And why was he encouraging the guy? Those blue eyes were deadly.
“Or you can go in that classroom, try to take your exam, and your world will shatter.” The mouth speaking those words was close enough that actually listening was difficult. Blue eyes stared into Florence’s gray. “You won’t find your books terribly interesting, you probably won’t see your family ever again. It’ll be a hard, unrewarding life.”
“But the second option includes you, doesn’t it?” Florence asked the question before he could even really think it, startled – though not as startled as Mr. Mystery.
“Yes,” mystery man said, voice going soft – but from something like defeat, or weariness. “Take the first option.” He leaned forward, making the remaining space between them disappear – but pulled away at the last. He turned and fled.
Florence felt cheated, though he wasn’t sure why he should feel that way. Shaking his head, he stood in the hallway as it began to fill with students going to and from their classes, and remained there as they began to empty again.
He wasn’t sure what was dumber. That he was actually believing what the hottie had said…or that he was about to make what was obviously the dumber of the two choices.
Shrugging, Florence wandered into his British History 203 class just as the bell rang. He sat down, pulled out a pencil, and waited for the professor to show up.
Ten minutes later, there was still no professor. The classroom was a mixture of confusion, concern, and abject relief that they were obviously not going to have to take the midterm after all.
Florence put his pencil away and lay his book bag across his desk. He had a bad, bad feeling suddenly. Where was Professor Rumsford?”
Another ten minutes passed, and then the door suddenly banged open, startling everyone into a dead silence.
But it wasn’t their professor. It was Professor Hammell, who normally taught French and Spanish Lit. She moved to stand behind Rumsford’s desk, spreading her hands out on it. “I’m afraid, students, that there has been an incident.” She held up a hand to stop their questions. “I ask that you leave promptly, quietly, and with haste. Information will be released later. Now, please – go.” She waited at the front of the room as the students filed out. “Mr. Rexx, a moment please.”
“What?” Florence paused by the door and turned back.
“Just stay a moment, I have to have a word with you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Florence moved to the desk and waited while the room emptied. He looked at her expectantly.
“You’ve been having bad dreams lately, haven’t you?”
“What?” It felt like something cold crawled across the back of Florence’s neck. He should have taken door number one. Too late now. And crawling sensation or not, he wanted a name to go with the hottie. Stupid reason to ruin his life. He’d heard of dumber. But first. “How do you know about that? Why do you care?”
“That’s too bad,” Professor Rumsford said. “See – we weren’t sure it was you. It could have been several other boys. That stupid bitch is doing a good job of confusing things. But he can’t change fate, and fate said you’d reveal yourself to us today. Of course – now you die.”
Florence was moving before his brain even told him to, something he was used to after all the years of practice with his stepfather – a man who took role-playing to disturbing levels. As in he actually knew how to use all those weapons best left to rot in museums.
He ran for the door, dropping his book bag, not wanting to know what the flash of silver had been that had nearly ended his life. He scrambled to open the door, realized it wasn’t going to open, and turned just in time to avoid a second blow. “Fuck!” He ran for the windows, but knew it was futile. “Fuck fuck fuck—WHOA!” He missed the third attack, and noticed the professor – fucking hell, a goddamn professor was trying to kill him with a sword. He bit back a strange urge to ask why not a gun and instead worked on putting space between them.
She was starting to look pissed.
“What’s going on here?” he asked, realizing he’d trapped himself. He always trapped himself. His step-dad was always berating him for that.
“Dreams but no memories. You always were an idiot.” The professor’s face contorted, filled with hate. Real, genuine, unadulterated hate. Florence suddenly wanted to cry. Why should anyone hate him? What had he done wrong? “For once we got to you in time. And now I’ll kill you, Arthur.”
Not fair. “You’ve got the wrong person. My name isn’t Arthur.” Of course, he was going to have to die anyway. Because yeah, he was going to motherfucking tell the cops about this one.
The woman laughed, and stayed her hand. “I almost feel bad. You’re still just a kid, and so completely ignorant. And everyone thinks you were once a king!” She reached out and yanked him close by his hair. Florence bit back a cry of pain. “But you were never a king, and you’ll never be anything but dead now. We bested you, we bested that stupid wizard. Next we’ll kill your men. One by one. And Mordred too. Very slowly. Just for you.”
“I will not let you have him again!” The words were out of Florence’s mouth before he realized he’d spoken. They stared at each other in shock. That cold sensation spread through his body. He felt like he wanted to scream or cry. His head felt heavy. Dense. Like there was a black fog in it that was slowly clearing.
Florence moved first, shoving hard, sending the professor – or whatever she was – crashing into the desks. He turned to the teacher’s desk and grabbed a heavy paperweight – it was made from marble, and carved with the school’s seal.
More of the fog cleared away. “Born from the Lake, gifted to the Land, hidden in Stone, Excalibur come to my hand!” In his right hand, the marble blurred, seemed to melt, turned to light. When it faded, Florence held a sword that seemed to make the world around it dull.
It was a plain sword, lacking any ornamentation. Where it caught the light, undistinguishable words seemed to shimmer on the blade. For all its unassuming appearance, however, the sword had a presence.
From the floor, where she’d fallen, the woman trembled. She no longer tried to fight, but bowed her head.
Florence killed her quickly and as painlessly as possible. “Here we go again,” he said softly. He muttered a quiet word, and Excalibur vanished.
Around him the room seemed to blur a moment, then all was normal. The dead professor’s body was gone. Florence looked up slowly as the door opened. “Lynn,” he said softly to the man who entered.
“I tried,” the man said miserably. Sunlight from the windows caught the jewels he wore in such profusion and set them aflame, casting rainbows of light across the room. “I told you to go away. If you had, they would have stopped suspecting you as a possibility. I made sure of it.”
Florence reached out as Lynn came toward him and dragged him close enough to kiss. Lynn tasted the same now as he always did; bitter like magic, with a metallic tang, but sweet as honey and as rich as cloves. And he was, no matter how many times they were forced to do this, what Florence considered home. “Fool,” he said gently. “Like I would ever choose anything but you.”
“I didn’t want to reveal myself to you, but I had to give you a choice,” Lynn said miserably. “There must always be a choice. I had mine, you had yours. Once more the tale begins.”
Florence leaned in to give him another kiss. “I made my vows, and they remain unbroken. To my king, to my men, to you. Especially to you. The day the earth dies, that vow will remain unbroken.” He sighed softly, and forced his thoughts to where they should be. “We should get going.”
“Yes,” Lynn said softly. He led the way from the classroom and then outside to the oddly deserted field of the academic quad, Florence’s hand held firmly in his own.
“Have you any knowledge of where my knights reside? My nephew?”
“Most, and Mordred is not too far from one of them,” Lynn said. “The rest will not be too hard to locate.”
Florence frowned in thought. “Let us get to Mordred first then. This time, we’ll save him. I can feel it.”
Lynn nodded. “Let us hope.” He let go of Florence’s hand to slide an arm around his shoulders, stopping them and drawing Florence against him. “I am sorry. I wanted you to have a happy life this time.”
“Our fate is a hard one, but I do not regret it. I would have been content, but never happy. You, no matter the price, are what makes me happy. You are the reason my heart beats.”
Lynn brushed strands of hair from Florence’s eyes before giving him a soft, slow kiss. “You are the reason I breathe.” Reluctantly he pulled away. “We must hurry. It will not take them long to realize their plan failed.”
Florence stole another kiss, taking strength as he always had in simply having Lynn at his side. “Lead the way.”
Hope it cheers you some, Sweets. *loves you muchly*
Vows Unbroken
“If I were you,” a voice said, interrupting Florence’s troubled thoughts. “I’d just bail and go home.”
Florence looked up, and suddenly wished he could think of something to say.
The campus was a small one. How the heck had he never seen this guy before? Because yow. He looked like something that had stepped out of the pages of one of his fantasy books and assumed a modern guise.
Obviously the guy had a thing for jewelry. High on his right ear was a silver cuff, and three jewels – red, green, blue – punctured the lob. On his left, a dragon curled along the top of his ear, and a jewel in the dragons mouth attached to a silver chain, which trailed down to fasten to a sword puncturing the left lobe.
There were tons of rings on his fingers, and three chains around his neck, all of them strung with a rainbow of jewels.
Of course, they were just icing on the cake. The guy was hot hot hot. His eyes made the blue gems he wore look like poor imitations, set against pale skin that did everything for his looks. His hair was black; it looked like the real version of the fine, feathery stuff his stepsister used to make wigs for her porcelain dolls.
He was as pretty as all the marble statues Florence had ogled on his trip to France, when he’d done his best to get lost in the Louvre. Whoever had carved this fine specimen had been stupid to let him go.
His clothes, strangely, didn’t really seem to suit him. He wore a long-sleeved navy blue t-shirt and loose, faded jeans. Old, brown sandals.
Florence felt pretty damn sad-looking next to this specimen – the kindest anyone had ever described him was ‘misplaced roman soldier.’ Gray eyes looked rather boring next to those amazing blue, and his brown hair was boring no matter what. But he could kick anyone’s ass if he felt like it – his build and eccentric stepfather had seen to that.
Plus, he realized slowly he wasn’t actually upset by their glaring differences as he thought. More, it felt like habit to get upset. Like he knew he shouldn’t. That he had no need to worry about or prove anything.
Florence shook off the strange thought as he realized the hottie was giving him an amused look.
Fucking duh. He’d talked. Talk back. “What?” Florence mentally kicked himself.
“You’ll save yourself a great deal of pain and trouble if you just turn around and go home,” the hottie said. “Trust me.”
Florence cocked an eyebrow. “Dude, it’s just a midterm. I’ve got it beat. Cake and pie. Did you forget to study?” Not that he’d ever noticed the guy in the class.
The man snorted. “I’m not in the class. Nor was that stupid midterm what I meant. Just…go back to your room. Skip the test. You can make it up next week, trust me. You’ll be sorry if you don’t go home now.”
“What are you, a fortune teller?” Florence frowned, somewhat amused but also sort of creeped out. It was the blue eyes, he decided. It felt like they were sucking out his soul or something. Man, he really needed to get some sleep. Too bad that was nigh on impossible these days.
The man made a face. “No. But I do tell a prophecy from time to time.” He stood up and slung a beat-up looking messenger bag over his right shoulder and moved toward him. Suddenly Florence knew what it was like to be loomed over. Well, sort of. They were exactly the same height. The guy just had a looming sort of presence or something. He wondered if he’d get punched, kicked, or gutted if he leaned forward and found out what those pale lips tasted like.
Whoa. Maybe his dorm mates were right. He needed to get out more. But he’d never known anyone to get to him like this.
“Look,” the man said. “You’ve got two choices here. If you leave now, things will be crazy for a bit. But they’ll settle down and next week you’ll take your exam. You’ll shine all through school, and your thesis will be the start of your fame and fortune. You’ll retire happy, healthy, and relatively whole.”
“Or?” Okay, he was completely weirded out now. And why was he encouraging the guy? Those blue eyes were deadly.
“Or you can go in that classroom, try to take your exam, and your world will shatter.” The mouth speaking those words was close enough that actually listening was difficult. Blue eyes stared into Florence’s gray. “You won’t find your books terribly interesting, you probably won’t see your family ever again. It’ll be a hard, unrewarding life.”
“But the second option includes you, doesn’t it?” Florence asked the question before he could even really think it, startled – though not as startled as Mr. Mystery.
“Yes,” mystery man said, voice going soft – but from something like defeat, or weariness. “Take the first option.” He leaned forward, making the remaining space between them disappear – but pulled away at the last. He turned and fled.
Florence felt cheated, though he wasn’t sure why he should feel that way. Shaking his head, he stood in the hallway as it began to fill with students going to and from their classes, and remained there as they began to empty again.
He wasn’t sure what was dumber. That he was actually believing what the hottie had said…or that he was about to make what was obviously the dumber of the two choices.
Shrugging, Florence wandered into his British History 203 class just as the bell rang. He sat down, pulled out a pencil, and waited for the professor to show up.
Ten minutes later, there was still no professor. The classroom was a mixture of confusion, concern, and abject relief that they were obviously not going to have to take the midterm after all.
Florence put his pencil away and lay his book bag across his desk. He had a bad, bad feeling suddenly. Where was Professor Rumsford?”
Another ten minutes passed, and then the door suddenly banged open, startling everyone into a dead silence.
But it wasn’t their professor. It was Professor Hammell, who normally taught French and Spanish Lit. She moved to stand behind Rumsford’s desk, spreading her hands out on it. “I’m afraid, students, that there has been an incident.” She held up a hand to stop their questions. “I ask that you leave promptly, quietly, and with haste. Information will be released later. Now, please – go.” She waited at the front of the room as the students filed out. “Mr. Rexx, a moment please.”
“What?” Florence paused by the door and turned back.
“Just stay a moment, I have to have a word with you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Florence moved to the desk and waited while the room emptied. He looked at her expectantly.
“You’ve been having bad dreams lately, haven’t you?”
“What?” It felt like something cold crawled across the back of Florence’s neck. He should have taken door number one. Too late now. And crawling sensation or not, he wanted a name to go with the hottie. Stupid reason to ruin his life. He’d heard of dumber. But first. “How do you know about that? Why do you care?”
“That’s too bad,” Professor Rumsford said. “See – we weren’t sure it was you. It could have been several other boys. That stupid bitch is doing a good job of confusing things. But he can’t change fate, and fate said you’d reveal yourself to us today. Of course – now you die.”
Florence was moving before his brain even told him to, something he was used to after all the years of practice with his stepfather – a man who took role-playing to disturbing levels. As in he actually knew how to use all those weapons best left to rot in museums.
He ran for the door, dropping his book bag, not wanting to know what the flash of silver had been that had nearly ended his life. He scrambled to open the door, realized it wasn’t going to open, and turned just in time to avoid a second blow. “Fuck!” He ran for the windows, but knew it was futile. “Fuck fuck fuck—WHOA!” He missed the third attack, and noticed the professor – fucking hell, a goddamn professor was trying to kill him with a sword. He bit back a strange urge to ask why not a gun and instead worked on putting space between them.
She was starting to look pissed.
“What’s going on here?” he asked, realizing he’d trapped himself. He always trapped himself. His step-dad was always berating him for that.
“Dreams but no memories. You always were an idiot.” The professor’s face contorted, filled with hate. Real, genuine, unadulterated hate. Florence suddenly wanted to cry. Why should anyone hate him? What had he done wrong? “For once we got to you in time. And now I’ll kill you, Arthur.”
Not fair. “You’ve got the wrong person. My name isn’t Arthur.” Of course, he was going to have to die anyway. Because yeah, he was going to motherfucking tell the cops about this one.
The woman laughed, and stayed her hand. “I almost feel bad. You’re still just a kid, and so completely ignorant. And everyone thinks you were once a king!” She reached out and yanked him close by his hair. Florence bit back a cry of pain. “But you were never a king, and you’ll never be anything but dead now. We bested you, we bested that stupid wizard. Next we’ll kill your men. One by one. And Mordred too. Very slowly. Just for you.”
“I will not let you have him again!” The words were out of Florence’s mouth before he realized he’d spoken. They stared at each other in shock. That cold sensation spread through his body. He felt like he wanted to scream or cry. His head felt heavy. Dense. Like there was a black fog in it that was slowly clearing.
Florence moved first, shoving hard, sending the professor – or whatever she was – crashing into the desks. He turned to the teacher’s desk and grabbed a heavy paperweight – it was made from marble, and carved with the school’s seal.
More of the fog cleared away. “Born from the Lake, gifted to the Land, hidden in Stone, Excalibur come to my hand!” In his right hand, the marble blurred, seemed to melt, turned to light. When it faded, Florence held a sword that seemed to make the world around it dull.
It was a plain sword, lacking any ornamentation. Where it caught the light, undistinguishable words seemed to shimmer on the blade. For all its unassuming appearance, however, the sword had a presence.
From the floor, where she’d fallen, the woman trembled. She no longer tried to fight, but bowed her head.
Florence killed her quickly and as painlessly as possible. “Here we go again,” he said softly. He muttered a quiet word, and Excalibur vanished.
Around him the room seemed to blur a moment, then all was normal. The dead professor’s body was gone. Florence looked up slowly as the door opened. “Lynn,” he said softly to the man who entered.
“I tried,” the man said miserably. Sunlight from the windows caught the jewels he wore in such profusion and set them aflame, casting rainbows of light across the room. “I told you to go away. If you had, they would have stopped suspecting you as a possibility. I made sure of it.”
Florence reached out as Lynn came toward him and dragged him close enough to kiss. Lynn tasted the same now as he always did; bitter like magic, with a metallic tang, but sweet as honey and as rich as cloves. And he was, no matter how many times they were forced to do this, what Florence considered home. “Fool,” he said gently. “Like I would ever choose anything but you.”
“I didn’t want to reveal myself to you, but I had to give you a choice,” Lynn said miserably. “There must always be a choice. I had mine, you had yours. Once more the tale begins.”
Florence leaned in to give him another kiss. “I made my vows, and they remain unbroken. To my king, to my men, to you. Especially to you. The day the earth dies, that vow will remain unbroken.” He sighed softly, and forced his thoughts to where they should be. “We should get going.”
“Yes,” Lynn said softly. He led the way from the classroom and then outside to the oddly deserted field of the academic quad, Florence’s hand held firmly in his own.
“Have you any knowledge of where my knights reside? My nephew?”
“Most, and Mordred is not too far from one of them,” Lynn said. “The rest will not be too hard to locate.”
Florence frowned in thought. “Let us get to Mordred first then. This time, we’ll save him. I can feel it.”
Lynn nodded. “Let us hope.” He let go of Florence’s hand to slide an arm around his shoulders, stopping them and drawing Florence against him. “I am sorry. I wanted you to have a happy life this time.”
“Our fate is a hard one, but I do not regret it. I would have been content, but never happy. You, no matter the price, are what makes me happy. You are the reason my heart beats.”
Lynn brushed strands of hair from Florence’s eyes before giving him a soft, slow kiss. “You are the reason I breathe.” Reluctantly he pulled away. “We must hurry. It will not take them long to realize their plan failed.”
Florence stole another kiss, taking strength as he always had in simply having Lynn at his side. “Lead the way.”
