Work Text:
Kravitz is young, and kind, and dreams of a future of black suits and orchestra pits, coaxing wonder from collections of wood and metal and skilled hands.
Kravitz laughs often, trading songs and stories for bread and butter and a place to lay his head at night. He travels some, alone and with caravans, entertaining the little ones with impressions and accents, building a reputation of skill, humor, and brightness.
Kravitz is young, and kind, and desperately in love.
He follows him out into the woods, deeper than he should.
He is betrayed.
There is darkness, and pain, and blood.
Kravitz is young, and kind, and dead.
*
Kravitz is grown, and kind, and tired.
He has become his Queen’s top bounty hunter, Her most trusted reaper. He fights necromantic cults and takes down liches, and does not visit the Prime Material Plane more than he has to.
He hasn’t gone back to the place where he was betrayed. His mentor, a young and ancient boy named Keats, took care of the necromantic cult that killed him in the first place, while Kravitz huddled in the kind embrace of death and wept, wept for the life he would never live.
He has another assignment, in the depths of a strange city of a kind never seen before.
The city is vast, encompassing most of the north of the continent. Machinery grinds underneath the arcing towers, splitting the sky with their pointed tops, gilded sides glimmering in the indifferent sun, hard iron sturdy and cold underneath.
His targets do not occupy the towers.
He swirls past, a shadow of darkness slipping among the stark edges and sharp points, hunting the circle that is responsible for the unnatural nature of this vast, moving city.
He only stops once, at a child’s cry.
It wails within the confines of one tower, accompanied by a woman, anxiously hushing. He comes to a stop on the windowsill, letting flesh fold over his skeletal form, towering over the woman – a girl, really – huddled on the floor. She gasps and shields the child, fear pulsating through her every breath.
Kravitz is grown, and kind, and he smiles for them.
She is trapped, this woman, and has only been able to hide her child by the smallest of margins. The city will consume her, she tells the stranger at the window, fear melting away as she talks.
After all. She has nothing left to lose.
She will be sacrificed to the gears, come nightfall.
Kravitz is grown, and kind, and angry.
He promises the mother, too young for such a fate, that she will not die this night.
He dives, scythe out, deep into the bowels of this city, away from the gilded towers reflecting the light, into the darkness, stinking of wet metal and machine oil and blood.
It does not take him long to find the circle of black cloaks and greed.
He just has to follow the screaming.
He flies around corners, dodging sharp edges and pitiful traps, slashing through the occasional thrall with ease. He blows through the spelled gate guarding the ritual and the circle members, who shriek and scramble for cover, for defense, for spells.
It is for nothing.
Kravitz is grown, and kind, and enraged.
He grinds the vast metal city to a halt.
The woman and her child die, in the destruction of the city.
Kravitz is grown, and kind, and he mourns.
*
Kravitz is old, and kind, and winning a bet.
He darts through the tunnel, laughing to himself and at Keats in his ear. The much older elf had challenged him to investigate the strange reports of an impossible creature without being seen, but Kravitz has a trick up his sleeve.
He is invisible, and building a construct for his spirit to fit into, a construct of stone and gold, with glistening crystal eyes. He skids to a halt just outside the inner chamber, and puts the finishing touches on the construct.
At the last moment, before confronting the arcane cult, he slips into one of his old accents, the one that always made the children in the long-ago caravans shriek with laughter.
They have not laughed, those children, in hundreds of years, but then, Kravitz doesn’t really pay attention to time anymore.
The cultists shriek, when his monster bursts through the wall, but not with laughter.
Kravitz is old, and kind, and having the time of his undead life.
For an arcane cult, they can’t take a lot of hits.
Of course, the thing they worship reveals itself to be a dragon, of all things, made of light and shimmering with incandescent rage at the slaughter of its worshippers.
It doesn’t take well to Kravitz pointing out, in his new work accent, that it doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on, when its cultists were draining the life from the land for miles around.
It also doesn’t take well to Kravitz making that statement rather more literal.
Dragons made of light have a disadvantage to a construct made of stone.
Keats scoffs, when he returns, but has to admit that Kravitz technically stuck to the stricutres of the bet, and pays up in the form of vacation days that Kravitz will never use.
Kravitz is old, and kind, and laughing.
*
Kravitz is ancient, and kind, and dumbstruck by the sheer number of deaths these three nerds have accrued.
He is glad for the construct when the beautiful elf flirts with him, however much of a death criminal he is. He focuses on the dwarf, the worst offender of them all, relishing in the chance to engage with his targets for once.
The elf in particular is clever, and they all three laugh at him, in a way that warms him as he hasn’t felt in centuries.
He lets the human win with little guilt.
Kravitz is ancient, and kind, and more than a little in love.
It doesn’t hurt that Taako is so easy to love. He’s vulnerable, unexpectedly so, and far better at pottery than Kravitz is.
His hand tingles for days after Taako touches him, and not even a powerful undead presence around the elf can distract him.
Kravitz is ancient, and kind, and in love, and he is drowning.
The slick blackness pulls him down, down, growling, screaming, chanting, biting. It wishes to consume, this darkness, even more so than the darkness that killed him once before. He gasps, punching through the surface of the water, to see Taako pulling at Magnus’s arm.
They make eye contact, the reaper and the elf, and Kravitz sends him joy, sends him gratitude, sends him overwhelming love, and then he is pulled back under.
Kravitz is ancient, and kind, and in love, and the best goddamn reaper the Astral Plane has ever seen.
He surges above the sea, summoning his scythe at last, slashing through the filmy arms and sucking slime, and fights his way to the Eternal Stockade. The prison is still and silent, and so is his Queen. He falls to his knees when the ritual doesn’t work, for a moment taken by sorrow and fear and desperate love for an elf he can’t reach.
And then he straightens.
Kravitz is ancient, and kind, and in love, and making a deal.
He is pulled into the Prime Material Plane by the elf he loves, and he is kissing Taako, and crying tears he thought he lost long ago, in gratitude and joy.
They fight.
And they win.
*
Kravitz is ancient, and kind, and in love, and in the strangest family he’s ever known.
He has two new coworkers who are everything he stands against, and are also the best friends he’s ever had. He comes home every night to a house in the Prime Material Plane, where his husband and their adoptive son wait with food and stories and laughter and light.
Kravitz is ancient, and kind, and happy at last.