Chapter Text
It is midday when the King comes to visit him.
Snake is used to living alone. It has been a long time since he has even attempted to integrate himself into society— he was almost proud of how self-sustaining he was now. A cabin near the Blackwood, a pack of loyal and adorable hunting hounds, and a small plot of farmland to provide him with the vegetables he needed to keep healthy. The only reason he had to go down the beat-up dirt road that led eventually to the nearest village was to get more ale, and he was working on brewing his own moonshine so he could close that connection forever.
The truth is that Snake wants to be alone. He wants to spend his days in his own little cabin, dipping into the woods to hunt and caring for his dogs until the arrow of sickness or cold or some other malady pierced his heart and he was allowed to rot away in the home he had built.
But fate has never left Dark Snake be, not years ago and not now, and he is in his garden, gathering the early summer squash, when the convoy arrives at his door.
His dogs barrel around from behind the house first, a rolling pack of fur and snapping teeth, standing their ground and protecting their territory. The horse at the front of the line rears at their barking, settling with its rider tapping its side with their heels. Snake stands and watches, eyes shaded.
It’s a shiny, important sort of convoy, the riders wearing armor that had never seen combat and horses bred for show, not war. He does not make any move to quiet his dogs, nor does he bow when he sees the royal crest embroidered on the tassets of the saddles.
The four horses at the side— each a gleaming white— step back, pulling away for the one at the back, and it’s this steed that makes Snake’s back stiffen somewhat. The smooth black hide of the beast was characteristic of only one thing, and Snake knew it well.
Only the king could ride a black horse.
The king is wearing a helm, something useless and carved in gold that looked too big for him, but it shades his face and makes him hard to see. Snake spots a few errant flips of hair from under the helm shining silver in the midday sun.
The dogs keep barking, and the horses stay their line, and the king looks down at Snake and Snake looks up at him, and his knights fidget in their shiny armor.
“Are you Dark Snake?” comes the first break in their awkward silence, and Snake does not respond. The king’s voice is shaky, nervous, almost like he was unused to public speaking. Instead, he bends down and keeps picking his harvest, ignoring them all.
One of the knights— the one to the king’s left— shifts in their saddle, clearly drawing themself up in offense.
“Your king is speaking!” they say, and Snake quirks an eyebrow up at their voice. It doesn’t sound like a man’s voice, but he had known plenty of female knights in his time.
“Vixen!” snaps the king, and there was that command born of royalty and privilege seeping through his voice. The knight— Vixen— settles back down, and though Snake could not see behind her mask, she looked annoyed.
They wait as he finishes picking his vegetables, brushes his hands off of the dirt and nettle-stings, and carefully opens the gate and latches it shut. They watch in silence as Snake soothes his dogs and places the basket of vegetables on the bench by his door, strips off his working gloves, and finally stands to face them, his pack at his sides.
“I am,” he says, finally. The king visibly deflates, and he faintly hears a sigh of relief, the monarch stepping down from his steed and pulling off his helm in an almost-elegant movement.
The king is a skinny man, wiry, with broad shoulders and a shock of silver hair that seemed to have tangled in his helm. He squints at Snake, a good inch or so shorter than him, with heavy bags under his grey eyes and a slightly trembling grip on his carved golden headpiece. If he had appeared to Snake without the golden shoulderguards, the fine boots, the high-quality rings, he would have assumed him a young merchant’s son who had just started his own firm. He looks nothing like a king.
“Dark Snake,” he begins, eyes looking everywhere but his face, “I have come to ask you for a deed.”
“I’m not a knight anymore. Go away and ask someone else.”
The king’s entourage collectively flinches, armor clanging together in a cacophony of stiffening backs and clenched weapons. Snake knows that a crueler king would have him punished for his rudeness, of speaking to royalty so flippantly, but he wasn’t fond of their sort on a general basis. Call it experience.
“You are the only one I can ask, Sir Snake.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
The king sighs. For the first time, Snake sees how pronounced the bags under his eyes were, how his hair was tangled and his skin ashen.
“If I had any other option I would have taken it, Sir Snake,” he murmurs. “Know that I come to you with my head bowed and my palms open. You are the only man in the kingdom who has ever achieved what you achieved. You are the man who had saved us from evil once before, and I have faith you can do it again.”
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong, and Snake now reads the fatigue and stress in the king’s eyes, in his shaking hands. So he stays silent.
“So I ask of you again: I have come to you for a deed.”
Snake doesn’t want to say this.
“What deed?”
The king sighs again, rubs his eye with one hand. Every moment Snake spends looking at him, he seems less like a monarch and more like a tired young man, just like him. “A monster has been terrorizing the country. A construct of iron and magic called Sahelanthropus.”
“Sahelanthropus...” Snake unconsciously parrots. He hasn’t heard of it, but then again, he didn’t hear of much nowadays.
“It’s bigger than a mountain, they say, and has fire in its belly...” pipes up the young knight from earlier- Vixen. The king looks back, annoyed, but does not tell her to stand down.
“Indeed. We have no choice but to take the best of the best, Sir Snake, and you—”
“I know who you think I am.” Snake thinks to the dusty room in his cabin behind them, dark and untended. Inside, his armor gleams, taunting him even from here. Could he don it again?
“The monster is in the mountains now, but at any moment it could go into the countryside, attack towns and villages, cause mass hysteria. I can offer you whatever you want. I just— I need your help, Sir Snake,” pleaded the king. “Please.”
Very few men ever heard that word from a king.
And Snake had never before heard a king beg.
He looks down at him, looks at the fidgeting knights, hears the desperation in his voice and the fatigue in his eyes. Something was wrong here, and whether Snake likes it or not, it would have come crashing to his door eventually. Better to face it head-on than ignore it and drink himself to damnation.
“I will return with you,” he says, and King Hal’s eyes shine with relief.