Chapter Text
The memory of pain lingered. Searing flame and the bite of hot steel. More than that, though, he remembers the hand that touched him, and burned through his armour and into his bones. He could not forget that touch tearing out his soul—
But now he was back in himself, not cradled in the breast of his compatriot. One day, perhaps, there would be nothing to put back.
(He remembered, in flashes, dragon wings beating the sky and the kiss of lighting at his fingertips, the vivid white of the Firstborn’s hair, and a furious burning — love and loyalty and anger set to tend the sky asunder. Ornstein would not settle for scraps; he would burn the world around him to win the war the gods were waging.)
Smough did not remember himself at first. It was a messy, disorienting thing, death. Messier when your compatriot insisted on plucking the life essence from your chest and absorbing it a while so he could… borrow your gifts.
(Smough had done it to Ornstein, too; the memory made his hands clench and his brow sweat. Taking Ornstein’s spirit into himself was like drinking rich wine spiked with deathly poison. He couldn’t manage it for long, not unless he wanted the humiliation of a man who wasn’t even there forcing him to his knees.)
“You’re awake, I see.”
Smough made himself open his eyes.
He was in a sickbed, somewhere in one of the towers — not the dark place Gwyn had kept executions relegated to.
This room had windows, and a fire burning behind the grate to keep warm. The curtains were open to let the sun in.
Ornstein stood by the wall with his back to Smough, arms crossed, half in the window light. His helm was off, and his hair loose.
Smough stared at it, grateful to have something to focus on. For a moment it was his, then he remembered — he’d never had hair so long, and his wasn’t red. He was himself. He was.
(How couldn’t he give the soul back? Ornstein threatened to consume him utterly whenever Smough held him. Being made small made Ornstein more dangerous, not less.)
Smough wasn’t wearing armour. He turned his hands over in front of him, counted the scars on his knuckles and tried to puzzle through why that was. Then, why he thought it should be otherwise. It took longer than he wished.
If he’d been in Ornstein’s grip so long it must have been a brutal fight, after Smough gone down. “… where’s my set?” (After they’d gone down? No. There was nothing collaborative about what happened after one of them went down. The other just… took.)
Ornstein shifted and turned enough to look over his shoulder at Smough with his brows arched. “The hall. Your armour is heavy; I divested you of it to drag you here.”
Smough gave him a narrow-eyed look. “And you dragged me here out of the goodness of your heart?” He knew Ornstein didn’t like him. Did Ornstein think he didn’t?
Ornstein tilted his head, then turned back to the window. “Of course not.”
“Then why?” Smough was at least wearing the clothes he had for layering beneath his armour. Ornstein hadn’t seen him naked. (Covered in whip weals and firebrands, scarred from common battle. Marks of failure.)
Ornstein glanced at him, brows arched. “I thought that was obvious. I was given an assignment.”
Yeah. Trust Ornstein to not even take the chance to off a guy he hated because of honour. “Just leave me in the hall next time.” Smough muttered. “I don’t need to be in here.” He’d have got up on his own eventually, and Ornstein wouldn’t have to handle him while he was unconscious.
Ornstein turned and crossed his arms. “You’re injured. Get back in bed.”
Unbelievable. Smough snarled at him.
Ornstein stared at him until Smough, a little sheepish feeling, slunk backwards and settled on the mattress again. He didn’t really want to die again so quickly. “Okay. Okay! I’m goin’, stop lookin’ at me like that.”
Ornstein stopped. In the shadows he looked stranger — his eyes glittered, and Smough almost thought he looked relieved. It was strange, and he told himself he was wrong — it was only that seeing Ornstein look at him without the Leo helm was so rare at all.
#
After the end he wanted blood.
The sense-memory of flesh splitting under his fingers wasn’t new to him, nor the satisfaction what chased it. What changed was the craving. Ornstein, himself, had never wanted to lick the blood he spilt. But Smough was a different man.
(Once this had been foreign. Once, the satisfaction had startled him. Now it was… he didn’t want to call it anticipatory. Power felt good. That was the problem. Smough had power, whatever faults and fears he carried with it.
Sometimes, he worried; maybe one day he wouldn’t let go of that soul the way he’d promised. Maybe he’d swallow it whole and turn into someone new, someone without the tethers of duty or knighthood or base ambition. But he made himself let go each time before now. Surely he could keep going.)
An undead appeared — a pyromancer, Ornstein thought, though his memory was hazy. They fought. Smough fell. Ornstein touched his side long enough to snatch what he should have never touched — his most grisly prize, the shining mote of gold that belonged to Smough. And he consumed it, and he struck a death blow on the feeble undead. He stood over the corpse after, and fought back such an ugly and foreign longing that he lacked the words to describe it.
He wanted to lick the blood from his gauntlets. He wanted, then, to never give anything back — to crack open the undead like a prawn and draw out its innards for his meal. He wanted to forget Smough’s corpse lying on the golden floor. He tripped on it, and that sent something else up inside of him — revulsion and anger chased each other through the Dragonslayer, his bloody fists clenched, and he stopped over the body.
The instincts warred. Ornstein did not want to look at it — he did not want to remember — he wanted blood on his mouth and the simple pleasure of felling weaker opponents—
—no. He’d never craved weakness.
He looked at Smough.
Ornstein’s armour chafed at him. He couldn’t stand it. It was wrong — everything was wrong, this festering body wasn’t what he was meant to be—
He clawed himself in his haste to remove it, the cuirass and the faulds and everything else, he needed it off; he needed to be in his own skin and not a metal shell. Ornstein’s blood dripped on the floor. He wanted to lick—
No. That wasn’t him. But he understood the pleasure of blood painting the floor, even if everything that flooded him after was foreign. How could Smough live like this? How could anyone?
He looked at Smough, and took a breath, and unclenched his hands. Violence surged through him, but this was not a foreign sort. This was the sense of his own soul asserting itself: that is mine, and we don’t leave ours laying on the ground.
He forced himself to his knee, and he dug the claws of his gloves under the seams of Smough’s armour til he could find catches and buckles. He peeled it off bit by bit, and thought of dragons on their mountaintops as he discarded the pieces.
The body inside was scarred. Ornstein knew that, in the absent way he knew that trees changed in winter. When had he first seen these scars? When Smough had come to the castle for work?
… before, maybe, when Ornstein had fished him from the rubble of a burning village. Smough had been little more than a half-grown whelp, except for the hatred in his eyes. Ornstein understood that. It was, perhaps, why he’d offered his hand back then.
Now he was bigger — bigger than Ornstein, and yet hiding in a suit which made him seem monstrous in scale.
Fear was the undercurrent of his soul, and fear was how Ornstein picked out what was and wasn’t his. He wasn’t afraid. He had never been afraid, not like this.
He drew the disparate pieces out of him. That fear and love was not his. That longing — not his. The taste of blood on his mouth, that was harder… the duty… no, not his…
The hatred was the hardest to sort. Ornstein found himself relying on what it wished.
Smough wanted to be seen. Ornstein — when he was himself, he didn’t care. He knew he didn’t care, even if it wasn’t true then. If the hatred had that, any thread of acknowledgment over the bodies of his enemies, he plucked it away from his heart. The soul he’d sculpted from stolen thoughts and disparate pieces, painted a world Ornstein could only glimpse. Misery and cold winter, heart-pounding terror wrapped with exhilaration. Joy, and the drive to chase. And hunger. Ornstein could not ever recall being so hungry — like his insides would claw their way out, like he would do anything. The furious assurance that Smough would live and the world would pay for it.
Ornstein took off his gauntlet. He reached up, and shut Smough’s eyes. He felt ragged — he did not wish to be seen, after taking what he had, and especially not sitting still mired in the aftermath.
He pressed the soul back into Smough’s hand, and watched golden light slither up his veins. Smough lay terribly still, then gasped and arched off the floor.
Ornstein shifted to draw him off the tile. He gathered the man — ungainly and heavy — and slung him over one shoulder, the only way Ornstein could carry him. And he turned to leave the hall.
(Maybe one day he couldn’t separate it out, the loathing and the wanting and the bloodlust. Maybe Smough would kill him first. Why hadn’t Smough kept it, he wondered, the first time he’d held Ornstein’s soul, the way Ornstein kept his?)
Ornstein thought about dragging him down to the Executioner's Block. But that weighed on him. Echoes of Smough stayed in his mind; Ornstein wanted to go down to the dark and lurk there. He forced himself up into the sunlight, the better to burn it out. No. Smough would live. It would be too easy, now, to kill him. Besides that; he was Ornstein’s. Ornstein would not cede the field to anyone. Certainly not to the lingering vestige of Smough’s wanton tastes. No. He would live and they would fight again together. And Ornstein would dread the next time that bloodlust encroached on his mind.