Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Imagine a land far, far away, with fields of green grass dotted with yellow and gold flowers, with thatch roofed cottages and cobbled roads that lead to a castle of polished stone, gleaming under the bright sun.

Now look away from that castle and follow one such cobbled road, on which two travelers on horseback now…uh…travel. These travelers are alone – not a soul to be seen for miles, but the sky is clear and birds fly in the air and so everything is fine.

How do these travelers look like, you ask? Well, the one on the great white stallion is full encased in chain mail armor, wearing a surcoat on which there is no coat of arms, with a sword belted at the hip and a plain shield resting by the saddle. That one is the knight. The other one wears no armor, but a simple doublet and breeches, riding a placid mare with little interest in the joys of galloping. This one is the squire.

“Forgive me, my…uh, lord,” the squire says hesitantly, “But I still do not see why we should be the ones to undertake this quest. Surely there are others who are better suited to undertake such a…uh…noble quest.”

The knight turns towards him. “Because,” she says testily, “We are being paid in gold for this. And really,” her expression turns scathing, “How hard can it be? Go to the tower, rescue the princess and bring her back to the Prince. Entirely simple.”

“A quest is not supposed to be simple,” Squire Clint Barton replied. “It’s supposed to be difficult and fraught with danger, encounters with dragons and black knights that guard the crossroads. There might even be witches involved. And besides,” he adds hurriedly, “A quest is not supposed to be something that you pay someone else to do. I don’t see why the great Prince should enjoy the ‘hospitality’ of King Alexei and Queen Melina while we do all the hard work.”

Ah…you are confused, yes? Allow me to enlighten you. The situation is simple, you see. A prince, especially a great Prince (with a capital P) has many duties, and one such duty requires him to undertake a great quest so as to prove his royal lineage and divine right to rule. It also gives minstrels something to sing about on his coronation. Such a duty, however, conflicts with the equally arduous duty of sitting in a comfortable castle, eating rich and expensive foods that peasants have no access to – a duty that the great Prince takes most seriously.

So what is a Prince to do, when faced with such a dilemma? On one hand, he has his entire future to think about – the quest, the glory, and the princess he will inevitably bring back to be his wife. On the other hand, King Alexei and Queen Melina should not be denied the pleasure of his esteemed company simply because some old court mage saw something in his crystal ball, should she?

A wise ruler simply cannot undertake all things on his shoulders. He must delegate. And so the Prince has chosen to delegate the relatively simple undertaking of the quest to a certain Sir Cate Bishop, a knight with no lands to speak of, who also happens to have a rather nasty habit of losing at cards.

But now you’re wondering – did the author not specifically call Sir Cate Bishop a woman? How, you ask, can a woman be a knight? Should she not be wearing silk gowns and mooning over romantic poetry in a room somewhere, while rejecting suitors and encouraging others? Of course she should – if such a woman was noble born. If she is not…if she happens to be the daughter of wandering actors who live in a cart and travel from town to town, the best prospects she can hope for is sunny weather and a crowd bored enough to go through another bad rendition of some depressing epic where everyone dies in the end.

And so one day she realizes that if she changed the spelling of her name from Kate to Cate, it became ambiguous enough that she could maybe pass of as a man.

The tightly winded cloth around her chest and chain mail hood and pins also helps, of course.

The weather was perfect – blue skies, a light breeze accompanied by the rustle of leaves and birdsong. The company, however, was not.

“I still don’t think that this quest is going to be as easy as you say it is.” Clint Barton was the sort of squire that no knight would touch with a ten foot long lance, but he was cheap and he held no qualms about serving a woman masquerading as a knight. “I just have a bad feeling about this.”

“You have a bad feeling about everything,” she replied, attempting to ignore his voice, which was quite frankly impossible because then there would be nothing else to occupy her attention and would thus leave her quite bored.

“I am usually right,” he countered. “Remember that time when you decided to join the quest to free the Darklands from the clutches of their evil King?”

“It was a noble cause!”

“We waded through swamps and marshlands filled with creatures hell bent on eating us, and for what? Turns out the people we were supposed to free did not actually want to be freed!”

“Heretics,” Kate muttered under her breath. “The very notion of electing your own evil King by popular vote once every four years is despicable.” Kate was not in fact against democracy – she was very much a firm believer of ‘One Man, One Vote.” Her version, however, differed slightly from the more mainstream version – the King was the Man, and he had the Vote.

“And then there was the quest to search for the treasure in the Lost Forest,” Clint continued relentlessly. “We wasted an entire year on that!”

“The name Lost Forest was not lightly given,” Kate allowed. She brightened. “But what about the War of the Two Kings? We got out of that one pretty well off, even if I do say so myself.”

“You do. In fact, you’re the only one who says that.”

“We got two horses out of that one. That counts as a win!”

“Kate,” Clint replied testily, “Stealing two horses and riding like hell before anyone figured out we switched sides in the middle of the battle does not count as winning.”

“You’re being pessimistic, Barton,” she said. “Look. We’re supposed to go to a tower and free a princess from the clutches of an evil wizard, right? How hard can that be?”

“How hard?” Clint’s voice rose in fair imitation of an opera singer singing falsetto. “How hard? Evil wizard, Kate. Evil. Wizard. Master of the Dark Arts. Consort to Demons. Pillager of the Dead…no, wait, that’s you, isn’t it?”

“One more word out of you and I’ll have your head off with a sweep of my sword,” said Sir Kate Bishop, who had come across her armor in pieces by relieving scraps of dented metal from dead men who surely had no further use for it.

“Oh, yes. Do that. Go ahead. Kill me. Then you’ll have to scour your own mail, cook your own food, tend to your own horses. Go on – kill me! I dare you.”

She was the princess. And she was in the tower.

And she was bored.

Being a princess was not all that it was cut out to be. For one, she had to wear a crown that was heavy and chafed at her head, not to mention the fact that her hair smelled like a curling iron. Two, she secretly suspected that she was not actually cut out to be a princess. She had read the stories – a princess was supposed to sleep on a hundred beds with a pea underneath and toss and turn the entire night. She had placed two peas under her single mattress, slept soundly, and woke up to find them both squashed into green paste.

The part where she pricked a finger on a needle and slept for a thousand years had held some appeal, but she had pricked her fingers a thousand times already (she was particularly bad at sewing) and the pain had only made her feel much more awake.

No. Yelena Belova was not Princess material.

What was she the Princess of, anyway? Sure, she had a crown, but that was that. A Princess was supposed to be from Somewhere, that much she was sure of. Just having a crown does not qualify one for princess-hood, else any country girl with access to a smithy and a particularly helpful blacksmith could fashion a crown and start calling herself a Princess as well.

Yelena Belova was definitely not Princess material at all. But then again, neither was Rick Mason, B.Wiz (Hons) really Dark Wizard material either.

Dark Wizards were supposed to be, well, Dark with a capital D. They were supposed to have sinister laughs and long flowing beards and curled fingernails and yellowing teeth, with faces as wrinkled as parchment and eyes that glinted with evil.

Mason did not have a sinister laugh. He had made an attempt to grow a beard, but it had itched and he decided to shave it off the next day. He maintained excellent personal hygiene, and he was quite young. After all, why would you choose to be immortal if all it gets you is a longer lifetime in a rapidly aging body, with pains and aches that were guaranteed to only get worse as time passed?

No – if Mason was going to live forever, or at least for a very long time, he would do so in a body that did not creak every time he got out of bed.

And then there was the inescapable fact that he was not so much a practitioner of bad magic, but rather a bad practitioner of magic. It was not that he did not study – he did have a degree with honors on it. He was, theoretically, an excellent wizard. He lacked, however, a certain practical and important aspect – actual talent.

He could work spells. The problem was his spells never actually worked, at least not in the way that he had wanted them to. A simple spell to boil water would cause the pot to freeze solid. Summoning rain would mean that they spent their days wearing as little clothes as modesty would permit because of the heat. And then there had been the touchy subject of brightening the garden with some magically grown shrubs…

“Don’t,” she had said. “There’s no telling what will happen.”

“You worry too much,” he replied airily. “It’s a really simple spell. What could go wrong?” And so he had turned to the ground around the tower and waved his hands in a gesture that he thought made him look positively occult when in actuality it made him look a bit of a prat.

And for once, the spell had worked. Only this time, it worked a little too well…

“I’m bored.” Now, if she were really a Princess, that statement would have sent servants scurrying to her side in an attempt to entertain her. Minstrels would string their harps, jesters would bounce and leap, and court ladies would regale her with the very latest in court gossip.

Her comment barely stirred Mason, who remained engrossed in his book.

“Did you hear me? I’m bored,” she said, and her eyes narrowed. This time, he grunted in reply.

“Mason…”

“Why don’t you sew something?” he asked. “Sewing occupies the hands and leaves the mind free to wander.” He looked up. “I read that somewhere,” he added with a smile, before his eyes returned to his reading.

“We’re out of thread,” she replied. That was broadly true. Thread and needle now lay somewhere in the forest below after one final prick had proven too much for the much vaunted patience (at least to herself – Mason, with whom she had been cohabitating for a few months now, would vigorously disagree) of Yelena Belova.

“Do you want me to make some?” he asked, briefly lifting his head in time to catch the look she gave him. “No,” he amended quickly, “Probably not the best idea.”

Silence followed – Mason was perfectly content to let it linger, but Yelena would have none of it. She was bored, and she would be entertained, one way or another.

“What are you reading anyway?” she asked, not particularly interested in any case, but the swiftness of his reaction was impressive to say the least – he jolted out of his habitual slouch, snapping the book shut (the outer cover said, in bold lettering, ‘The Principles of Necromancy”, because the shop he had purchased said book from was very discreet indeed).

“Well…” His mind cast around quickly for something…anything…to distract her from pursuing that most alarming path which he did not want pursued. He brightened suddenly.

His smile turned leery. “We could…”

She caught the look he was giving her and the narrow set of her eyes was discouraging enough for him to not complete the sentence. He sat back in a huff, and crossed his arms over his chest.

“I want to go out,” she said suddenly. “I want to explore the world, see sights, meet people. What I do not want to be,” she added, her voice slowly rising, “is stuck here, surrounded by…” she looked around at the accumulated mess helplessly, “…all this!”

“I offered to clean it,” Mason, Dark Wizard extraordinaire said sullenly. “You wouldn’t let me.”

“Because you intended to clean it by magic,” came the reply. A finger jabbed in his general direction. “You know what happens when you use magic.”

“Then you clean it.”

She pulled herself up to her full height, which considering that she was shorter than him, was less than impressive in its effect.

“All I’m saying is that while you may be moderately good at swinging a sword and chopping people,” Kate Bishop was not particularly good at that, but Clint Barton firmly believed in the power of flattery in getting what he wanted, “Swords aren’t much use against a dark wizard who could turn you into dust before you even got within a hundred yards of him.”

Mason could not, in fact, even turn dust into dust, but of course they were unaware of that.

“So what are you suggesting?” asked Kate.

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere, Clint thought. “Well…” he sidled up beside her, which was a remarkable feat considering that he was using his horse to sidle, “I was thinking that we meet this dark wizard on equal ground. Fight fire with fire, as it were.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think we should get a wizard of our own. Someone who can match the evil dark wizard in a battle of sorcery while you sneak up behind him and chop his head off.”

“I do not sneak,” Kate replied, moderately offended.

“Skulk, then.”

“No. Knights do not skulk. We are valiant warriors, noble in the field of battle. We do not sneak up or skulk. We engage.”

Fine. “How does engaging the enemy’s flanks sound to you?”

Kate Bishop, tactical genius, considered it for a moment before nodding.

“So we get a wizard of our own to distract him while you come up his back – ”

“His flank,” she corrected meticulously.

“His flank,” Clint agreed hastily, “And chop off his head.”

“That’s a good plan,” Kate nodded. “Where do we find a wizard?”

“I don’t know,” Clint admitted. “They usually appear by themselves, you know. In quests, I mean. The knight will be standing by the side of a river and then he’ll turn around and lo and behold there’ll be an old man behind him. And the knight may try to attack the old man but the old man will reveal himself to be an ancient wizard come to show the knight the way.”

Kate paused, reining the stallion in, her face locked in intense consideration. “We are on a quest,” she said tentatively.

“But it’s not our quest, is it? It’s the great Prince’s,” Clint replied.

…A great distance away, an old man magically appeared by the side of a river, and was treated to the sight of a certain young prince happily engaging in intimate discussions of a physical nature with a young chambermaid on the grassy banks. Being an old man, he wondered briefly about the actual nature of this quest, decided to forget the whole thing, but stayed to watch all the same…

“We’ll just have to find ourselves a wizard then,” Kate decided. “Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Where? Where exactly are we going to find a wizard? What are we going to do? Wait beside a river somewhere until an old man shows up and hope he’s a wizard?” Clint asked, and regretted the words the moment they left his mouth.

“That’s an excellent idea,” Kate said happily. “Let’s do that.”

Mason was seriously reconsidering his career choice of Dark Wizard. It was not all that it was cut out to be.

He often wondered where he went wrong. Graduated with Honors from University of Dark Wizardry? Check. Built an isolated tower somewhere far away? Check. Possess tome after tome filled with dark and unspeakable magic spells? Check. Employ minions of varying levels of intelligence? Well, he had tried there, but there had been a sudden spike in the number of heroes lately and so the turnover rate of minions had risen as well, and Mason could not afford the rather ridiculous fees some of these minions were asking nowadays, and besides, most of these minions were supposed to be incompetent, were they not? Try as he might, he could not see the point behind paying ludicrous prices for the services of halfwits who ended up screwing up whatever nefarious scheme you had in mind.

No. Better to do things yourself.

He sighed, reaching for The Principles of Necromancy and turning a stealthy gaze to see where Princess Yelena was. And where she was…was out of his sight.

He groaned, tossing the book aside and standing up. “Yelena?” he called. “Where are you?”

In retrospect, kidnapping a Princess and holding her captive had not been a good idea. He wasn’t precisely sure why he did it, but he was vaguely aware that this was something that Dark Wizards did and who was he to argue, right? It had been all well and good, but most of the epic stories had moved on to focus on the hero and his quest and had rather summarily left out what the Dark Wizard was to do with the Princess once he had her safely ensconced in his dark tower. That had left Mason in a muddle, and he was forced to make do.

He could, he supposed, have chained her up in the dungeon, but his tower did not have a dungeon (he had forgotten to specify it in the construction plans) and besides, locking young women up in dungeons seemed morally wrong, somehow. He liked to think that his mother had raised him to know better than that.

His eyes swept the room, but Yelena was nowhere to be found. He considered actually moving out of the room to look for her, but there was only one room in the tower which was surrounded by a dark forbidden forest and so where could she possibly go, right? It’s not like she could get lost in here, he thought. No matter how hard she tried.

“This is possibly one of your worst ideas,” Sir Kate Bishop said.

“It wasn’t even mine!” Clint replied in a strangled voice.

The plan, in Kate’s view, had been faultless. Everyone knew that old men wizards often appeared by river banks to offer assistance to questing knights off to rescue damsels in distress. So here they were, by the side of a mighty flowing river…with no old man wizard in sight. And they had been waiting for a full day now.

So where the hell was the wizard?

Clint Barton, resident expert on folklore and epics, had mentioned that perhaps the wizard would come in a vision. Such a vision would have to be experienced by the questing knight himself (or herself, as the case may be) and so Kate had spent two hours on her knees with her hands clasped around the hilt of her sword, awaiting the arrival of the vision.

The only thing that arrived was an ache in her knees that still refused to depart, and a nagging suspicion that Clint Barton was laughing at her behind her back.

“That’s it,” she decided suddenly. “We’re not waiting any more. Let’s just go.”

“Without a wizard?” asked Clint, who was not so much dismayed about not finding a wizard than he was about the prospect of actually continuing the quest, which he considered to be filled with impending danger. Why she would not listen to him – why she flatly refused to consider the possibility that this quest may not be one that they (meaning him) particularly wanted to undertake, he did not know.

“Quests are inherently dangerous,” he had said.

“And how would you know? You wouldn’t know a quest if it hit you on the head with an axe!” she countered.

“Have you ever heard of a quest where the knight sets out, gets the princess and comes back home in time for tea and cakes? Have you? You haven’t! In every quest, the knight has to fight and slay monsters and overcome great odds! Quests are not easy!” Privately, in the back of his mind (because saying this out loud went against every grain of manliness in him – although admittedly his masculinity was already called into question by the fact that he was squire to a woman who happened to be a knight) what he really wanted to say was “In every damn quest someone dies. It’s never the bloody knight, because knights don’t bloody die in bloody quests! It’s always someone else. And do you see anyone else here? There’s only me! So this means that I’m going to be the one who dies!”

No. He could not say that. And whether Kate Bishop would listen to him even if he did have the courage to say it was another question altogether.

“Without a wizard,” Kate said firmly. “Wizard or no wizard, we’re leaving. Now.”

I’m doomed, Clint thought. Doomed, doomed, doomed.

“Well…” he said desperately, his mind working as fast as it could. “It doesn’t have to be a wizard, you know.”

“It doesn’t?” Kate asked, puzzled.

“Obviously having a wizard along would not be the best idea,” he continued.

“I thought you wanted to have a wizard along,” she said.

“It’s a bad idea,” he said again. “I mean…wizards, right? They probably stick together. Like a brotherhood of sorcerers thing, right? Who is to say that the wizard we find would even help us? He might even betray us, right? Maybe the Dark Wizard is a friend of his. Maybe they went to school together. So having a wizard along is like leading a wolf to the flock!”

“So we go on without a wizard,” Kate said, and then paused. “The way I wanted to in the first place.”

“We-ell…” Kate Bishop was not, in Clint Barton’s opinion, the brightest of people. Knights generally were not all bright, he thought. Spending a day encased in heavy armor and hitting each other off horses for fun did not suggest a great deal of intelligence in the first place. Still, he had to be careful here, or even she might smell a rat.

“We need someone else,” he said.

“Someone else?”

“Ye-ess…” Clint continued quickly. “A minstrel.”

“A minstrel,” Kate said flatly. “We need a minstrel.”

“Yes.” Don’t ask don’t ask don’t ask.

“Why do we need a minstrel?” she asked.

“Because…” His frantic brain saw a chance and seized it eagerly. “Songs!”

“Songs?”

“Every quest has to be turned into a song, right? So that people know that it was a quest. It’s not a proper quest if no one composes a song about it. Well known fact,” Clint nodded, impressed with himself.

“That’s…true,” Kate said, frowning as she tried to find something wrong with that little piece of logic.

“I’m a minstrel,” a new voice entered the discussion.

Heads turned quickly to see a fair headed young man join them. He was fairly decent looking, and carried a harp slung across his back, along with a flute that bounced against his hip as he walked. “Hi. Peter Parker, Bard and Minstrel, at your service.” And then he bowed.

“Where did you come from?” Kate asked.

“I was walking the riverside looking for inspiration when I could not help but overhear your conversation,” Peter said. “And I thought to myself…a quest? Inspiration!” he grinned. “So here I am, at your service…ready to depart immediately!”

Clint stared at him. Tall, fair, young, and he wanted to join the quest? Perfect. He smiled.

Mason was, at the moment, content. And the reason for his contentment was in fact not here, which only added to the sense of tranquility he was feeling.

It was difficult, you see. Dark Wizards were many things – cruel, vindictive, and ready to unleash darkness upon unsuspecting villagers – but one thing they were not was capable of feeling anything other than greed and anger and hate. None of the stories ever spoke of a Dark Wizard who wanted nothing more than to drop his pants and practice forbidden esoteric practices on the object of his captivity – possibly because while blood and betrayal and murder was fine for the ears of children, anything of a sexual nature was considered a big no no in such tales.

Hence The Principles of Necromancy, as well as Magic: Ethics and Morality, just to name a few of his collection of discreetly labeled books. And his overwhelming need for privacy.

Still, his brow furrowed, there had been ample gifts of privacy lately. Princess Yelena had seemed a little too absent in the last few days for his liking.

“Yelena?” he called, and got no answer in return. “Ye…le…na?” he tried again, as if extending the three syllables of her name would bring about a different result this time.

Still nothing.

At the very edge of his hearing, he could hear a steady thumping sound. Sighing, he stood up and went to investigate. He walked down the winding steps, and was greeted by the sight of the tower door thrown wide open, and a crudely hacked path leading out through the wooded forest around the tower.

“What the bloody hell…” he muttered.

“Oh, there you are.”

He turned quickly, and his eyes widened. Yelena was there, wearing a tight fitting shirt with the sleeves torn off, and a pair of his old underpants (cleanly washed, because his mother taught him to be independent from a young age) that for some reason clung tightly to her bottom. The result was Princess Yelena displaying an obscene amount of flesh (meaning that she was displaying some amount of flesh).

Mason swallowed. Loudly.

“Well?” she asked, and he was distracted from the sight of the shirt clinging to her chest. “Aren’t you going to help me?”

“With what, exactly?” he asked breathlessly.

“This, of course,” she gestured, and he tried not to watch how the movement made her chest bounce up and down in a singularly intriguing motion. “I’ve been chopping a path out of here,” she said when he made no reply.

“Uh.” His mind was temporarily filled with images of Yelena bending forward, Yelena bending backward, Yelena’s hand curled around the smooth shaft of the axe handle… “Why?”

“Because I am bored and your company is no fun, and I want to get out of here,” she said firmly. “Now come over here and help me carry this pile of wood out of the way.”

Mason, Dark Wizard extraordinaire, obeyed silently. It gave his hands something to do. Something else to do.

Still, something was nagging at the back of his head. He paused, a pile of splintered wood in his hands, and then it hit him.

“Uh,” he said, approaching Yelena as she bent over and swung the axe up and down, which of course made interesting things bounce and jiggle up and down as well, “Correct me if I’m wrong here…”

“Yes?” she asked, straightening and flashing him a wide smile. A hand rose to wipe across her forehead.

Mason, Dark Wizard, Graduate of the University of Dark Wizardry (No such place. Keep out. Go away!) has wrestled demons in pentagrams. He has known the Great Unknown and the creatures that inhabit it. He has seen things.

He has however never seen anything hotter than the sight of Yelena Belova wiping her forehead, her body slick with sweat, her skin flushed by exertion.

His brain attempted to muster some semblance of normalcy.

“Aren’t you the captive? I mean, and I could be wrong here, but shouldn’t you NOT be trying to escape? And shouldn’t I NOT be helping you?”

She flashed him a sweet smile. “I don’t know,” she replied, an innocent cast appearing over her face. “Shouldn’t you?” A pink tongue slid out and licked her lips.

Mason stared, riveted by the sight as all his thoughts scattered into a million different directions.

“I’ll get another axe,” he said quickly.

“You do that,” she smiled.

His plan, Clint concluded, had hit an unforeseen snag. Said unforeseen snag could be summarized as such:

Every epic story has a hero who will emerge victorious and very much alive at the end. Said hero will, however, lose certain members of his party along the way, because any story where all the members of the fellowship emerge alive is unrealistic. Now, said party consisted of Kate (the hero, or heroine), Peter Parker (the minstrel) and himself, Clint Barton (the ever faithful squire).

All epic stories must be chronicled, or else they would not be epic. That was a well established fact of life. The hero could not be expected to chronicle his/her own story, because no one would believe him/her if they spoke of their own great deeds. Fact. This was why the minstrel had to come along, so that people knew that the story was in fact true.

What that meant was that the minstrel, contrary to Clint’s original plan, would not be the one to die. Which left…well, Clint.

It had seemed perfect – Peter Parker, handsome but not THAT handsome, seemingly insignificant to the plot. Kate was central to the story, and Clint would provide those comedic moments and one liners that people remember so that the story would not be all doom and gloom. So Peter, who served no plot purpose whatsoever, would die to remind the general populace that quests were dangerous and should not be attempted at home.

Except that if Peter died, there would be no one to tell the damned story, which meant that Peter would not die and that unwanted responsibility would revert back upon Clint.

There was no actual requirement that quests needed a comedic foil, and that left Clint Barton with no other part to play except to die, preferably in a particularly horrific and painful way so as to make whatever character development expanded on him worth the effort.

Clint Barton, Clint Barton concluded, was a dead man walking.

“Behold,” Kate Bishop said, pointing ahead dramatically, “The Dark Forest.”

The forest was dark, Clint admitted. And it loomed. He stared at the tall trees with bark as black as night and leaves as sharp as needles, and he could feel a million eyes staring back at him.

Doomed. Doomed doomed doomed.

The scratchy sound of a feather pen on parchment derailed his train of thought, which was now rapidly approaching the stop where all kinds of horrifying death scenes played in the cinema of his mind.

“What are you doing?” he asked Peter, who looked up from his paper.

“Taking notes,” the minstrel replied. “If I am to sing about this,” he said loftily, “I will have to remember every single detail.” He paused for a moment, and then added, “Such is the nature of my art.”

Doomed. I’m doomed, and why? Because of this damned minstrel. How exactly this had become Peter Parker’s fault and not Kate Bishop’s in the wildly gyrating thoughts of Clint Barton will never be fully explained.

“Let us go forth,” Kate said, speaking slowly so that Peter could write down every word, “So that I may rescue the fair princess from the clutches of the evil wizard.”

There was an awkward pause as Peter misspelled ‘clutches’, and then it was Clint’s turn to talk.

“Uh…Verily, Sir Knight,” he said, briefly wondering what the word ‘verily’ meant but using it nonetheless because it was the sort of word you heard in epics, after all. “We shall go forward bravely into the dark forest beyond.”

He watched as Peter painstakingly copied every word, and then inspiration hit him. Hard.

“And you may lead the way,” he added quickly, “For are you not the bravest knight in the land?”

The itchy sound of the pen tip over parchment was accompanied by Kate’s eyes widening when she realized precisely what Clint was up to.

“I think not, squire,” she proclaimed, “For as befitting one of my martial skill and prowess, would it not be best for me to guard our flanks?”

“Surely not, Sir Knight,” Clint tried desperately, “For is it not within the very nature of all knights to engage in battle head on?”

The sight of Kate Bishop gaping at him wordlessly was almost worth the trouble he knew he was walking into.

“You didn’t have to come, you know,” Yelena said.

“And let you walk in this dark forest alone?” Mason asked. “What kind of man do you take me for?”

“An evil man? You know…Dark Wizard? Evil?”

He paused as she walked ahead, and while realization that yes, he was supposed to be an evil Dark Wizard may have hit him at that moment, his eyes chose that very second to become firmly entranced by the smooth swaying motion of Yelena’s hips.

“Do you even know where you’re going?” he asked, hurrying to catch up (though not so fast, because that was a sight he did not particularly want to miss).

“Not a clue,” she said cheerily.

“So you’re walking on through a dark forest with absolutely no idea where you’re going?”

“That would be correct, yes.”

“Are you mad?”

She stopped, and turned around to face him, her blonde hair whipping through the air in the process and temporarily demolishing any wall that his sanity may have built.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “There’s bound to be a woodcutter’s path somewhere that we can follow, or at least a cottage inhabited by seven dwarves or something.”

“There might be a cottage, yes,” Mason retorted, “But maybe a wolf ate the dwarves and is now sleeping in their bed, pretending to be their grandmother. Did you think of that?”

“That’s why I have you with me. I’m sure a big strong man like you can handle a wolf. And if it has just eaten seven dwarves, I don’t think it’ll want to eat us, right?”

He could not argue against that.

“So you think I’m strong?” he asked, moving in closer beside her.

“Well,” she flashed him a winning smile, “You do exercise one hand a lot.”

…Dark was the forest wherein the hero entered, filled with unnamable beasts that lurked in shadow, out of sight and beyond the light. Yet onward did she press, for in her chest breasted heart she knew well the prize that awaited her, though great were the challenges that were to come…

Peter Parker looked up from his manuscript to where Kate and Clint had stopped.

“What’s up?” he asked, peering over their shoulder.

Clint pointed wordlessly ahead.

It was a clearing, but not the sort where deer and rabbits prance in joyful ignorance of the hardships of life. No – this was the sort of clearing where deer and rabbits get torn into shreds and eaten. It boded. There was no other word for it. It just boded, and radiated gloom and doom and all other things ending in –oom.

In the middle of the clearing was a huge tree with roots that tore the ground and reached for the sky, clawing up to the heavens like the final frenzied throes of a man nearing death. The roots were huge, and lichen and moss grew in curtains over it, hanging down to cover the space beneath – the same space from which there now came a faint groaning sound.

“Someone should investigate,” Kate whispered, as softly as she could.

“Well, go on then,” Clint hissed.

“I’ll go,” said Peter suddenly, and for one moment there, he thought that Clint looked frighteningly happy.

“That’s a good idea,” Kate said. “Clint, you go with him.”

“What? No!” But by then, it occurred to Kate that if Peter and Clint went forward to investigate, that would leave her, Kate Bishop, completely alone.

“No,” she decided. “We’ll all go.”

“Or I could stay and…uh…watch your flank,” Clint added hastily.

‘That’s a good idea,” Kate replied. “Peter, you go.”

He went.

“Die die die die die,” Clint muttered, over and over again.

“What?” Kate asked.

“Nothing,” he replied.

They were whispering, since both understood that whispering was a good thing, while Peter Parker inched forward slowly to the sound to find out precisely what was causing it.

“This is your fault, you know.”

Mason stopped and drew himself up. “How,” he started, “Is this my fault?”

“It was your spell,” Yelena replied. “If it wasn’t for Mr. I Can Do This No Problem At All Dark Wizard, there wouldn’t be a Dark Forest in the first place.”

“And if it wasn’t for you wanting to escape, we wouldn’t be lost, would we?”

Yelena smiled at him, and just like that, all his irritation vanished to be replaced by a vague sense of hopefulness.

It must be magic, Mason thought sourly. There was no other explanation for it. Yelena had some latent magic power of mind control and bodily control (which would explain the inexplicable stirrings he felt whenever she paused to examine something, bending down so that her bottom thrust obscenely high in the air).

“This forest,” she observed, “Is strangely lacking in woodcutter trails or cottages inhabited by dwarves and their grandmothers.”

“And I suppose that’s my fault as well?” Mason asked. He was walking into another argument with her, he knew, but he could not help himself. Arguing with Yelena about nonsensical matters seemed much, much more fun now.

“Possibly,” she replied. “What do we do now?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Of course I am,” she said. “You’re the Dark Wizard, and this is a Dark Forest. You should feel right at home.”

“Uh…of course,” Mason said, preening like a peacock who has just discovered his tailfeathers. “I have occult senses, you know. It comes with the territory.”

“Really?” Yelena looked interested, and Mason did not have the heart to tell her that he was lying through his teeth.

“Yeah.”

“So…what are your occult senses telling you now?”

“It’s…uh…” It occurred to Mason that occult senses required something…occulty in order to make it all the more impressive and convincing. He screwed his face up in a fair imitation of someone in intense concentration, and allowed his eyes to roll up to the back of his head.

“I sense…” His voice dropped an octave, sounding suitably occult to his ears... “ I sense that we should go…that way.” He pointed to a direction at random.

“Let’s go then,” Yelena said.

And so they went.

“Well?” Kate hissed out from where she waited in a huddle of arms and legs with Clint Barton, whose look of intense concentration mingled with hope seemed rather out of place.

Peter Parker, Bard and Minstrel who was not supposed to serve any discernable purpose to the story but was now the very focus of attention, shrugged.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

“Nothing?” Clint sounded very disappointed. “No monster with sharp teeth and razor claws? No foul beast with a breath like a thousand male toilets?”

Peter bent over and checked again. “Nope. Nothing. Just a hole in the ground spewing natural gas.” He sniffed, and wrinkled his nose. “If it helps, it does smell like a thousand male toilets.”

Clint brightened. “Maybe you should check inside the hole.”

“Why?”

“Because…uh…because…” His remarkable intellect, however, had deserted him.

Peter looked faintly smug. Clint longed to wipe that look of his face.

“Let’s keep going,” Kate said.

“Wait,” Clint hissed out. “There may be something hiding inside that hole.”

“Peter just said that there was nothing there,” Kate replied.

“It could be hiding! It could be lying in wait to ambush us and just when you think the danger has passed a huge head will rise up from the ground and snatch me in its jaws!”

Clint, Kate decided, was being positively weird today.

So engrossed were they by their discussion that neither one of them saw the huge head snapping out of the ground and snatch Peter Parker in its jaws.

Yelena stopped. “Did you hear that?” she asked, a hand coming to grip tightly at Mason’s forearm.

“Hear what? I didn’t hear anything,” he replied, lying with rattlesnake speed.

“There! It sounds like…a scream!”

“A scream?” Mason said helplessly. “Really? Because the forest does tend to magnify small sounds and turn them into something else entirely.”

“It was a scream,” Yelena said insistently. “A bloodcurdling scream.”

“Was it?” Mason tried, but she was already running.

“Where are we going?” he moaned out as he struggled to keep up. “We’re going towards the scream, aren’t we? Why are we going towards the scream? Why do people always go running straight for the bloodcurdling scream? Shouldn’t we be running AWAY from the bloodcurdling scream?”

“Come on!” Yelena said, ignoring him completely. Whimpering, the Dark Wizard followed.

“Where did he go? Where did he go?”

“I don’t know,” said Clint, and he tried not to sound too pleased about it. “But we should probably get away from here as far as we…why are you going THERE?”

“We have to rescue him!” Kate shouted, drawing her sword. “Come on!”

“But…but…” Clint stuttered. “We don’t even know what took him!”

A determined look came about Kate Bishop’s face. “Then we shall find out! To arms!” she cried out, while Clint fervently hoped that the cry she issued was something along the lines of “To legs!”

They ran into the clearing, and Kate paused in front of the growth of upturned roots. “Release our friend, foul beast, or taste the edge of my sword!” she said, gripping the hilt tightly while Clint tried to edge away and indicate by his body language that he did not know her and had absolutely nothing to do with her.

The only response was the very unpleasant sound of something happily crunching on something else.

There was a sound coming from behind them. Clint turned around and screamed at the sight of a warrior woman rushing at him, an axe held high in her hand. Still screaming, he stumbled back right into Kate, and they fell in a tangle of arms and legs. Kate tried to sit up immediately, and succeeded in driving a knee in between Clint’s legs. With a pitiful moan, he curled up around himself, and unfortunately, owing to their extreme close proximity at the moment, Kate Bishop as well.

Princess Yelena Belova and Dark Wizard Mason watched in bemused silence as Kate tried to get free.

“Clint?” Kate whispered urgently.

“What?” he moaned, lost in his own private pain.

“Get off,” she hissed.

“I don’t think that will ever be possible any more,” he mumbled, and was rewarded with a sharp elbow to his side.

Sir Kate Bishop stood up, distinctly aware of how she looked. She brushed some dirt off her front, and stared at the young woman now facing her. Damn, but she was hot…

Yelena, for her part, was more than a little interested in the young man who now stood before her, looking oddly feminine and unbelievably sexy in the rumpled chain mail.

“Hi,” Kate said, taking care to keep her voice a little lower.

“Hi,” said Yelena, whose voice had somehow turned coquettish. She tried for a winsome smile. “Are you a knight?”

“I am,” Kate said proudly. “Sir Cate Bishop, at your service, my lady.” She made a florid bow. “And who do I have the honor of addressing?”

Mason, who had been watching the exchange with scarcely contained irritation, stepped forward but was fried into silence by a stern look from Yelena.

“I am but a young maiden lost in this forest,” she said. “This…” she turned to Mason, who had a faint smirk on his face, “is my halfwit brother.” His smirk slid away immediately.

“He’s black.”

“He’s adopted.”

“Oh.”

“And this,” Kate said, the sensitive nuances of race relations successfully negotiated, giving Clint a pointed look that just dared him to argue, “is my squire, Clint Barton. We are on a quest to free the princess in the tower from the clutches of the evil wizard.”

“A quest?” Yelena trilled. “How exciting! Isn’t it exciting, brother dear?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Mason said, who had not missed the implications of Kate’s words and now found himself staring at the sword she carried. “Exciting.”

“So…” Clint had managed to get himself up, and was trying not to whimper as he spoke. “You’re lost, are you?” he asked suspiciously.

“Very,” Mason replied helpfully. “As lost as lost can be.”

“Where are you from?” Clint asked.

“Uh…we’re…uh…from…” Mason glanced at Yelena, who was lost in intense examination of Kate’s face, and decided that no help was forthcoming. He tried to think quickly. “A cottage. Yeah. A cottage. In the middle of these woods.” He paused. “We live with our grandmother and her dwarf.”

“Really?” Clint narrowed his eyes, and turned to give a knowing look at Kate. Said look, however, was wasted, for she was too busy gazing in rapt adoration of Yelena Belova. Sighing, Clint turned away. “So if you live around here, why are you lost?”

This newcomer, Mason decided, was too clever by half. But two can play that game, he sneered privately.

“The wizard,” he said by way of explanation. Aware that this was not enough, he continued. “He came in a cloud of darkness, surrounded by lightning and thunder, and chased my sister. I of course came to her rescue, but this Dark Wizard proved to be too cunning and powerful, and chased me as well.”

“Really?” Clint sounded skeptical, but Mason was flying now.

“Oh yes indeed,” Mason said. “He unleashed a bolt of lightning at us, but we managed to duck and it hit our cottage instead.” He shook his head sadly. “Poor granny, and poor dwarf.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Clint replied. He did not sound sorry at all.

“And then the Dark Wizard summoned evil ghouls from the ground to find us,” he continued. “They’re still hunting us, in fact.”

“Are they?” asked Clint, and to Mason’s delight he sounded nervous.

“Oh yes. But we were tired of running away, and when we heard the scream, we thought that the ghouls had found someone else, and so we came right away to the rescue.” All in all, that did sound very convincing, Mason thought.

“But why was the Dark Wizard chasing your sister in the first place? She’s not a princess, is she?”

“Her? No! No…” Mason said hurriedly. “Not a princess. Definitely not a princess. The Dark Wizard was…uh…hungry. They eat virgins, you know,” he said knowingly. “Those bastards,” he added, with considerable feeling.

“They do?” asked Clint. “I thought that was dragons.”

“Dark Wizards eat dragons?” Now that was new.

“No,” Clint said patiently. “Dragons eat virgins.”

“Do they?” Mason shook his head. “Can’t be. How would dragons know if a girl was a virgin or not?”

“Flavor, maybe?”

“Nah. Can’t be dragons. They don’t have the brains for it. It’s Dark Wizards that eat virgins.”

“And how would a Dark Wizard know if a girl was a virgin or not?” asked Clint, but Mason had anticipated the question and was ready for it.

“Same way you and I know,” he replied.

“Ah…” said Clint, who did not in fact know, but liked to pretend like he did so as to give the impression that he was a man of the world.

“Yes…” said Mason, who also did not know, but he had read books and thought he had a pretty good idea.

“I don’t get it,” Clint said.

“You don’t have to get it,” Kate Bishop replied. She glared at her squire. “Just promise me that you will not mention to anyone…” her eyes darted to where Yelena was sitting beside Mason, “…that I’m…”

“A girl,” Clint supplied helpfully.

“Yes,” Kate said. “That.”

“But I still don’t understand why…”

“Just do it, all right?” she hissed.

“Fine,” Clint replied. He glanced at Yelena, and then turned an appraising gaze at Kate Bishop. “She is pretty, isn’t she?” he asked tentatively.

“Is she?” Kate Bishop embarked on an over extended inspection of her chain mail. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Oh god. “You’re not falling for her, are you?” Clint asked, the suspicion evident in his voice.

“I’m not!” Kate replied, a little too defensively, he thought. “Besides,” she continued, and now her face was positively flaming, “It’s not like it’s proper, you know? Girl and girl together?”

“Yeah,” said Clint Barton, who had an excellent imagination. “I can see that.”

A small distance away, definitely-not-a-Princess-at-all Yelena Belova and Dark-Wizard-Who-Me? Mason were having a similar conversation.

“I don’t want them to know who we are,” Yelena said urgently. “All right?”

“For once,” Mason muttered under his breath, “We are in complete agreement.” He looked at her sharply. “But why don’t you want Sir Cate to know that you’re a princess?”

“I…I…” To his complete and utter surprise, Yelena blushed. “It’s not me,” she said hurriedly. “It’s you.”

“Me.” His tone was flat and dripping with skepticism.

“Obviously he’s on a quest to rescue me,” There was a light at the end of the tunnel, and Yelena hurried towards it. “From you,” she said pointedly.

“So you’re protecting me.” It was impossible for his tone to get any flatter, but it did.

“Yes.”

“I see…” He most definitely did not see, but he had his suspicions. “All right. I promise.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Brother dear.”

Inspiration struck Mason, and he smiled disarmingly. “But obviously now I’ll have to stick even closer to you,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s obvious,” he continued smoothly. “A young beautiful maiden in the company of a knight? People would talk!”

“Only if you tell them,” she said darkly. He ignored it.

“It befalls upon me, as your brother,” his smile grew wider, “To make sure that you are not left alone in his presence.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she said…a little too quickly, he thought.

“Oh, dear sister…” His smile grew positively lecherous. “I assure you that it will.”

It was suggested and decided that they travel together. Why exactly this was so was not precisely known, but since it allowed for more interaction between the characters, there were no complaints.

Not many, anyway.

“I really don’t see why we should allow them to tag along,” Clint said.

This was to be expected. A common plot thread in any epic is that one character would object to the addition of new members to the fellowship. This character would usually be morally ambiguous, so as to allow for the possibility of subsequent betrayal to arise in the minds of the audience. Of course, things will turn out fine in the end, but the thing is…you’ll never know, will you?

“There’s safety in numbers,” came Kate’s reply.

“Safety in numbers?” Clint echoed. “When has there ever been safety in numbers? If anything, there’s now more of us for them to attack!” His ears caught up with his mouth, and he paused.

“Safety in numbers,” he said. “Right.”

Kate gave him a puzzled look. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“Me?” Clint said innocently. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.” The precise thoughts of Clint Barton, squire and morally ambiguous character, cannot be easily defined, but the current reasoning went something along the lines of this: More of us to attack means that the chances of me dying is slimmer. Besides, with Peter gone, I’m the only remaining member of the original fellowship, right? So I can’t die, can I?

This reasoning was possibly as holey as Swiss cheese, but this is Clint Barton we’re talking about.

It must be noted that neither Kate nor Clint were feeling particularly depressed by the untimely death of Peter Parker. This is not because they were cold hearted by nature, but because very little was invested in Peter Parker and so his disappearance from the epic would not be missed.

Now we turn to Mason and Yelena, because Mason was keeping true to his promise to stick close to her.

“We’re in deep trouble,” he moaned. “Deep, deep trouble.”

“Will you relax?” she asked. “They have no idea who we are. Who you are.”

“But what if they find out? They always find out! The hero always finds out who the Dark Wizard is in the end! It always happens!”

“We’ll deal with it when that comes,” Yelena said firmly. She turned away from him, eager to resume her discreet contemplation of Sir Cate Bishop.

Mason sighed. That was the problem with being a Dark Wizard – heroes. A fairly lethal job hazard, categorized in the same chapter as Light Wizards and occasionally other Dark Wizards.

He decided that he needed a plan. Preferably a dastardly wicked plan that no one would expect.

Unfortunately, he was not very good at planning.

The fellowship made their way through the Dark Forest with no end in sight. The trees stared down at them, and leaves rustled threateningly. Once or twice, they heard sounds of animalistic screaming and howling, because every Dark Forest needs such sounds to complete the mood.

As would invariably follow, not-a-woman-at-all Sir Cate Bishop and certainly-not-a-princess Yelena Belova exchanged very few words during the day, because that is how this sort of thing works.

Nightfall descended, and a curtain of stars was drawn across the sky, although it made little difference to them since they saw very little of the sky to begin with. They settled in a clearing beside a stream (there’s always a clearing in forests, complete with a complimentary stream, for the convenience of travelers and visitors to the area) to make camp. It was there that Yelena decided that she needed a bath.

“A bath.” Mason sounded doubtful.

“Yes.” The look she gave him brooked no argument. “It’s been a long day, and I’m sticky. I’m going to take a bath.”

“That’s a good idea,” Clint said suddenly, with a sidelong glance at Kate. “I think we could all use a bath.”

“What?” Clint, Kate was beginning to realize, was taking a certain perverse pleasure in her discomfort. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“Why not?” Yelena sounded petulant to Kate, but to Clint, she just came off as adorable.

“I’m with Yelena,” Mason chimed in, surprisingly enough (but not so surprising considering the fact that he always washed before sleeping, and brushed his teeth three times a day). “We need to bathe, and get some rest.” He too had joined Yelena in contemplation of Sir Cate Bishop, though without the rose tinted lenses through which the Princess was looking.

He had formed certain suspicions.

Kate realized that she was outnumbered, but there was such a thing as going down fighting.

“The Dark Wizard may attack us if we stop now,” she tried.

“We’ll have to stop eventually,” Clint countered.

“There might be things in the water,” she said triumphantly. The strange gleam in Clint’s eye made her realize, belatedly, that she had made a fatal tactical error.

“Then I’m sure that you, my lord, would be courteous enough to guard the lady as she bathes,” Clint said.

“And of course,” Mason added with a faint smirk, “We can trust in your knightly honor to prevent any infringement of my sister’s…modesty.” He was particularly pleased to note that Yelena was blushing as bright as day.

“I…I…” she stammered. “I don’t think…”

“Or would you rather have me watch over you as you bathe, dear sister?” he asked. That shut her up immediately.

If looks could kill, Mason would be dead in a million small pieces, and Clint Barton would be burning in hell.

Kate and Yelena left, leaving the two men alone by the fire. They stared at each other slowly, silently assessing, each wondering who would be the first to speak.

Clint broke the silence first.

“You know.” It was not a question, just an observation.

“That Sir Cate Bishop is not Sir Cate Bishop?” Mason asked. “I had my suspicions.”

They walked in silence, both being very careful not to be seen by the other person looking at the other person. The silence dragged on, until they were at the side of the stream, at which point silence no longer became a viable option.                                                                                  

Kate Bishop decided to break it first.

“So,” she said. “We’re here.” And then cringed inwardly at how dumb those words were.

“Yes,” said Yelena, who could not come up with anything original either.

The awkward pause grew pregnant, had kids, and watched them grow up and go to college.

“I should bathe,” Yelena said, at about the same time that Kate said, “You should bathe.” They stared at each other, faintly embarrassed.

This is a common occurrence in moments such as this. The would be couple will inevitably be caught up in uncomfortable situations, usually at the connivance of the other members of the fellowship; in this case the sly fellow and the morally ambiguous one, much to the hilarity of the world at large.

“So…” Yelena said, hesitating.

“What?” Kate asked, and then blushed. “Uh. Yes. Right,” she said, turning around. Her face was the color of the setting sun.

“I won’t peek,” she said hurriedly.

“All right,” Yelena said, and Kate could not tell if she sounded pleased, disappointed, or worse – non-committal.

Yelena stripped (a sight that Mason would have sold his soul to see) and squealed as she entered the water. “It’s cold,” she said, teeth chattering.

“Told you it was a bad idea,” Kate replied, trying and failing not to sound smug. Her amusement faded quickly when her brain told her in no uncertain terms that Yelena (hot) was now completely naked behind her, and wouldn’t it be an excellent idea to turn around right about now?

Yelena waded in the water, careful to keep only her neck and head visible, for while it was dark, she was pretty sure that the blush on her face would light everything up as bright as day. She watched as Kate kept his (her) back firmly turned, and the silence only grew once more.

There was the sound of raucous laughter in the distance – Mason and Clint were evidently getting along very well.

“They’re laughing at us,” Kate said indignantly from her post.

“They’re idiots,” Yelena replied. She hesitated, and then plunged onwards. “You can turn around, you know,” she said, a little timidly.

Yelena turned, and kept her eyes firmly averted, beginning a mental dissertation on trees and how they look.

“So,” she said to the tree, mind casting around for something witty to say and failing miserably. She settled for a generic “You and Mason, huh?”

“What about us?”

“He’s not really your brother, is he?”

“No,” Yelena admitted.

“Oh,” said Kate, and she sounded so crestfallen that Yelena was compelled to add, “We’re just…friends. Just friends.”

“Oh.” Kate sounded a little happier now.

Sir Kate Bishop had, hitherto, little experience talking to women. Other women, that is. She talked to herself quite often. This inexperience would therefore explain why she was being reduced to monosyllable replies.

She was also aware of the faint sensation in her chest whenever she watched Yelena, of the way her heart fluttered whenever Yelena smiled or laughed. And the stirring in her stomach every time Yelena looked her way.

It was, in her opinion, unnatural.

She was vaguely aware of what you would call the mechanics of the situation. Knight rescues damsel, and things develop between them, culminating in a kiss and a happily ever after. That was the way things were supposed to happen. Of course, in those stories, the knight was as male as male could be, wearing testosterone and machismo like cheap aftershave.

The problem here was that she was not a man. She was a woman, and therefore should not be feeling like this towards another woman.

Unnatural.

The real problem, Kate Bishop thought, was Yelena Belova. She was beautiful. There was something almost ethereal about the way the water clung to her body, every droplet outlined like a diamond shard against her pale skin, captured in the soft silvery glow of moonlight. Each movement she made was as soft as silk, as gentle as a breeze, and yet the effect they had on Kate Bishop were like hammer blows to her heart.

She found herself staring as Yelena wiped her hair. The full moon shone bright in the sky, lending a gauzy otherworldly glow to the other woman’s face, half hidden by shadow that only served to accentuate the features that glistened under the light. Fair skin, unblemished by scar or wrinkle, lips that glowed like red velvet, just begging to be…

She froze, finding herself in very close proximity with a towel clad Yelena Belova, whose eyes were for some reason trained directly on Kate Bishop’s mouth.

“I…I’m sorry…” Kate whispered, and yet as she spoke, her eyes did not stop their constant staring.

And Yelena, who was just as surprised to find herself standing toe to toe with Sir Kate Bishop, surprised herself further when she found her mouth forming words on their own accord.

“Don’t be,” her lips said, and then leaned up just a little to meet Kate Bishop midway.

The forest was silent, and the air was still, while moonlight glittered like fairy dust, bathing the stream and all that surrounded it in silvery grey light. The world stood stock-still and watched in silent envy as lips pressed together for the first time, and for Kate Bishop and Yelena Belova, the ground shifted under their feet.

It was, all in all, a perfect fade to black moment.

The night was cold, and every breath misted in the air. Moonlight caressed the ground, and the flickering flames of the small fire cast dancing shadows against the rocks. Even burrowed within their blankets, the cold found them still, with phantom fingers of ice teasing indeterminate shapes over their skin, chilling them to the very bone.

Yelena Belova was, however, feeling unaccountably warm.

Every time she closed her eyes, a single image played across the darkness – Sir Cate Bishop leaning in with half lidded eyes, his lips parted. And then she could feel his lips pressing against hers, his cheek brushing against her own – soft, gentle, not the way she imagined it would be: with rough unshaven hairs tickling her skin. No…this was indescribably gentle, almost achingly chaste, though it was so positively scandalous she was sure that the bushes would rustle and out would appear Mason with his hand pointed at them accusingly, a triumphant smirk on his face.

A soft kiss that lingered, and so did the taste of Sir Cate on her tongue. It tasted sweet like summer wine, as smooth as clarified butter, and there was a hint of something…something else. Whatever it was, Yelena was horrified to find that she wanted more.

She opened her eyes, a blush tinting her cheeks bright red, thankful for the blankets that covered her face, hiding her shame out of sight.

It was just a kiss, she told herself furiously. And it was just a kiss, if a kiss could just be…just. Their lips had met, and she had felt a warmth kindle against her mouth, rushing through her throat, down her neck, where it spread like wildfire through her chest until finally settling in her heart. Settled, and stayed.

It filled her with longing and want that seemed so inappropriate and yet seemed so damned…right.

Sleep was proving elusive tonight, despite the rigors of the day. Every time she closed her eyes, she could feel Kate’s lips ghosting over her own, like an ember that just refused to die. Her mind was not helping – replaying every single moment in perfect detail, over and over and over again.

She sighed and surrendered to the inevitability of going the entire night without sleep. Shrugging the covers off, she sat up, and predictably her roaming eyes searched and found Kate, huddled under a blanket, staring into the fire.

“Sir Knight,” she said softly.

“My lady,” Kate said with a start. “I did not hear you behind me.”

“How remiss of you, Sir Knight,” Yelena replied archly. “It is your watch, after all. Where would we all be if the brave Sir Cate Bishop did not hear a thief sneaking up behind him?”

“Are you a thief then?” asked Kate with a smile.

“Perhaps I am.”

“And what would you steal?”

“A kiss,” Yelena said, surprised at her own daring, and she smiled impishly before shrugging. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Because of…” Kate trailed off uncertainly. She didn’t have to say it. They both knew what it was.

“Possibly,” Yelena admitted.

They stared at each other, the memory of the kiss proving to be a subject that neither was willing to discuss at the moment.

“Weee-ell,” Kate said slowly, shifting on the log she was sitting on and patting the empty space beside her, “I’ll be happy to bore you until you fall asleep.”

“You’re too kind,” Yelena replied, sitting down. “So…” she started, “What’s it like being a knight?”

“Oh, you know…gallantry and valiant acts on the battlefield and all that,” Kate said. “Being noble does get boring after a while.” She caught Yelena’s gaze, and then shrugged. “I’m not too sure, to be honest. I’m not a very good knight to begin with. Clint’s always pointing that out to me.”

“Why do you say that?” Yelena asked, moving closer.

Kate glanced at the fire, unsure of what to say without revealing too much. “A good knight has to do great things, you know,” she said. “Complete a quest, slay a dragon, win a battle…things like that. I’ve done nothing so far.” She grinned, but there was no humor in it. “Every quest I’ve been to has ended in complete and utter failure.”

“Well, maybe this one will be different,” Yelena offered, reaching out to place a reassuring hand on Kate’s arm.

“Probably,” Kate replied, not noticing the arm, or at least pretending not to. “I don’t think it will though.” She glanced at the young woman beside her, wondering how much to tell.  

“It’s not even my quest to begin with,” she admitted.

“It’s not?”

Kate shook her head. “The Prince paid me to go on this quest for him. Paid me. Can you imagine that? A knight hiring himself out for quests?”

“Well…” Yelena searched for something positive to say. “The Prince must have seen something special in you to single you out for this quest.”

“Probably not,” Kate said. “I don’t think he particularly cares if I succeed or not.”

“Why would he send you if he didn’t care?”

“Because it’s a quest,” Kate replied, looking surprised at the question. “It has to be done.” She shook her head, as if trying to get rid of whatever bad thoughts floating in her mind. “What about you? What’s it like…being, you know…common?”

“It’s not bad,” Yelena said airily, very much aware that she knew very little about being common. “There’s no responsibilities, for one thing. Just…uh…watching sheep on pastures green, and milking cows. Things like that.”

“No responsibilities,” Kate said. “Must be fun.”

“I don’t know,” Yelena replied. “Would be nice to have some actual responsibility once in a while.” Instead of just sitting around in a tower and waiting for someone to rescue me, she added silently.

They slipped into silence, each regarding the other carefully, both acutely aware that the mood had spiraled from inquisitive talk to morose chatter. Kate stared at the fire, and Yelena studied the shadows crouching around them.

“Why did you kiss me?” Yelena asked suddenly.

“Me?” Kate glanced at her. “You kissed me!” She caught the look on Yelena’s face, and smirked. “And even if I did, you kissed me back.”

“I most certainly did not!”

“Oh really?” Kate asked, raising an eyebrow, and grinned in delight as Yelena blushed furiously.

The day went on with no end to the forest, which only grew thicker around them. The trees closed in, like an impenetrable wall of brown and black bark, which was certainly not what Mason had intended when he uttered those fateful words.

Kate and Yelena spent the day exchanging little glances and whispered words, and their interaction went smoothly unobserved by both the men, because everyone knew that men were completely oblivious to those small little things. This of course explains why Mason allowed Kate to walk closer to Yelena, and hung back with Clint – the both of them wearing faintly smug smiles on their faces.

“So tell me more about your quests,” Yelena said, stepping beside the faintly jingling Kate Bishop. “Regale me with tales of your complete and utter failures.”

“Well,” Kate drawled, “There was the time when Clint and I went out in search for the treasure of the Great Dragon.”

“Which Great Dragon?”

“You know…” Kate trailed off uncertainly, “The Great one.”

“I think most dragons are pretty great, you know. Being dragons and all.”

“Well…this one was greater than most, all right?”

“What made him greater than most?” Yelena asked wonderingly.

“Listen – do you want to hear the story or not?”

“Sorry,” Yelena said, sounding absolutely contrite and still not fooling anyone one bit. “Do continue.”

“Well, there we were, climbing up the Great Mountain – don’t you even think about saying it!”

“What?” She even sounded innocent, but the faint tugging at the corners of her mouth gave her away.

“You were going to ask ‘What made the mountain great?’, weren’t you?” Kate huffed. “Don’t deny it!”

“I was not!”

“You were!”

“I wasn’t,” Yelena replied primly. “Do continue.”

“Fine,” Kate said, glancing at Yelena suspiciously. “So we were climbing the Gre – the mountain, and we reach the dragon’s cave. We went in, and there he was, the Dragon.”

“What?” For a Great Dragon, he sounded remarkably petulant.

“Ho…fell beast,” said Sir Kate Bishop, who instinctively felt the need to speak as if the epic was already written at times like this. “We have come hither in search of thy treasure.” Clint, she could not help but notice, had taken to cowering behind a huge rock.

“Well…” the dragon rumbled. It stood, and Kate Bishop suddenly became aware that this was a very big dragon, with claws the size of her arm, and teeth with blackened edges that could only mean that this was not just a very big dragon, but a very big, fire breathing dragon. The beast lifted a wing, revealing a pile of gold. “You’ve found it,” it said.

“Uh. Yes,” Kate replied, who could not think of anything else to say.

“So now what?” it asked.

“Now…” She glanced at Clint for support, but he was studiously pretending to not be there at the moment.

“Well?” the dragon prompted. “What are you going to do about it, now that you’ve found it?”

“Er…take it from you?” Kate asked. “By force?”

“No need for that.” The dragon shook its head. “I’ll give it to you, provided, of course, you have a…”

“A what?” Kate asked suspiciously.

“A receipt.” The dragon smiled unpleasantly.

“A receipt?”

“Obviously.” It looked vaguely offended, which was usually a prelude to the person doing the offending being turned into a small pile of charcoal. “Got to have a receipt.”

“Why?”

“Tax purposes,” the dragon said promptly.

“Tax?”

“Well…yes. It all has to be done good and proper. You take the treasure, you give me the receipt, the tax collectors come to me, I show them the receipt, and they go to you. So you can pay the tax on it.”

“They do say that dragons are silver tongued,” Yelena said sympathetically, patting the knight on the arm.

“Do they pay taxes on it?” Kate asked, and frowned. “You can see why I’m not exactly the best knight in the world. Most knights…they get stories told about them. Songs, even. Me? I can’t even keep my minstrel alive!”

“I’m sure you’ll get your song someday,” Yelena replied. “And ladies throughout the realm shall swoon at the mere thought of brave Sir Kate Bishop.”

“So long as one fair lady swoons,” Kate said, “I shall be content.”

“And who shall that lady be, Sir Knight?” Yelena asked, a smile playing on her lips.

“I think you know,” Kate replied, and grinned when Yelena blushed.

A few days later…

Night fell, and with it came the cold, and the travelers decided to halt in another conveniently located clearing to rest for the day (no stream, but complimentary pool included).

And Sir Kate Bishop stood by a tree, watching Yelena fuss over Mason’s pathetic attempts at tent pitching.

She was beautiful, Kate thought. Beautiful, and smart, and wonderful, with a smile that dimpled her cheeks and brought a sparkle to her eyes. Even in contemplative silence, Yelena could not look less than divine – her face took on a neutral cast, and something oddly soulful came about her eyes. Yelena, to Kate Bishop, was perfect, except for one glaring flaw.

She was a woman. And what Kate Bishop now found herself feeling was definitely not what a woman should be feeling for another woman.

It was quite simply unnatural. She should not be having these feelings, and yet she was. And this was becoming quite unmanageable. For one thing, she could not help but want to kiss Yelena Belova again. And that was just to start things off. Oh, the things she wanted to do to Yelena Belova…

Wrapped up in her thoughts, Kate did not realize Yelena walk up beside her, until the familiar sound of the other woman’s voice intruded (most pleasantly, it must be admitted) upon her consciousness.

“Hey there,” Yelena smiled.

“Hey back,” Kate whispered, shifting slightly to turn and look at her.

That was, Kate realized, just another facet of why what she was feeling for a certain Yelena Belova went beyond that of normal friendship. She was pretty certain that she should not be feeling a glowing sort of warmth spread across her chest each time Yelena spoke to her, nor should her heart be beating just a little faster every time the other woman came into close proximity with her.

“You’re quiet,” Yelena observed.

“Just thinking,” Kate replied. “You’re not sleepy?” she asked.

“Thought you could use the company,” Yelena replied. She shivered slightly. “Cold night.”

“Come here,” Kate said, reaching for her cloak and wrapping it around Yelena’s shoulders. “Better?”

“Now you’ll be cold.”

“I can handle it,” Kate said laconically. “A knight fears not the cold.”

“A knight may not fear it,” Yelena said in a matter of fact kind of voice, “But there’s no need to experience it if you can help it. Come here,” she commanded, holding the cloak open, in a tone that brooked no argument.

Kate complied, sliding in beside the smaller woman and feeling the warm press of Yelena’s body against her own. The cloak closed, and they huddled together, gazing at the fire as the flames made shadows leap and dance.

“What were you thinking about?” Yelena asked.

“You,” Kate admitted softly.

“Really?” She turned, and Kate was struck at just how young and innocent she appeared, with a faint hopeful cast about her face, highlighted by the amber glow of the fire upon her fair skin. “And were they good thoughts, Sir Knight?”

“The very best,” Kate smiled, and felt Yelena press closer to her. The warmth in her chest spread, and she felt her heart grow lighter, as if it was floating inside her, ready to leap out and soar and reach for the stars.

They lapsed into silence, but it was not the awkward silence of before. It was instead the kind of comfortable silence you get after spending a day in another’s company and having very little to say to each other now, but not wanting to part just yet. It was a companionable silence – the sort best enjoyed in each other’s presence.

There are times when more things get said with silence than with words. And in the silence between them, as the forest grew still, a great many things were said.

Smoldering wood cracked and splintered, sending sparks up into the air. The sound startled Yelena, who pressed herself closer to Kate. The blonde drew back as if she had been burned, and then like a moth to a flame, drew close again. She turned, and found a pair of deep green eyes staring at her, glittering against the shadows cast across Yelena’s face.

Lips met once more, pressed against one another, rekindling a spark that had been dormant for but a few hours, igniting the flame of want again. Yelena’s hand rose, her fingertips lightly stroking Kate’s cheek, drawing down the line of her jaw…only for Kate’s hand to come up and capture Yelena’s wrist.

“We shouldn’t…” Kate whispered, her lips moving against Yelena’s.

“They’re asleep,” Yelena replied, her voice just as soft. “They won’t see.” She leaned forward, deepening the kiss, feeling her body slowly melting against Kate’s.

“No.” Kate’s breathing was ragged, coming out in short pants as she pushed Yelena away. “We shouldn’t. This…this isn’t right.”

“What?” Yelena drew back, her mouth pressed in a thin line of disappointment. “Why not?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer, leaned forward once more.

“No!” Kate pushed her away, a little more roughly this time. “We can’t do this. It’s not…” she paused, struggling to find the words. “We just can’t,” she said lamely.

“But…” The sudden flash of hurt on Yelena’s face was like a knife blow to Kate’s heart. She turned away, keeping her face hidden in shadow.

“Goodnight, my lady.” It was a struggle to get the words out.

Silence greeted her words, and when she turned, Yelena was under her blankets once more.

The day begun just like any other day – the sky remained hidden by the dark leaves that hung overhead, oppressive in sheer numbers, weighing down upon the travelers who navigated the forest ground.

Roots twisted in a myriad of shapes, each as ghastly as the last one. No animals were seen, because the budget would not allow for it, and besides, there was no guarantee that no animals would be harmed during the production of this epic.

Yelena walked beside Mason, who was surprised at how willing she was to bear his company, though her mood was, needless to say, not good. Kate kept her distance, preferring Clint Barton’s company as well. The company was divided, which is an integral part of any epic, to allow for more character development and whatnot, as well as to keep the audience entranced by the realism.

Kate and Yelena were not talking. Of course, you guessed that already.

“So you kissed,” Clint said, trying to keep his imagination under control.

“Yes.”

“And then you kissed again.” It was a curse, Clint decided, to be blessed with such an avid imagination that provided every single detail in the cinema of his mind, and then provided just a bit more for good measure.

“Yes,” Kate replied, gritting her teeth together.

“And then you pushed her away. So now she refuses to talk to you.”

Kate’s groan was answer enough.

“Women,” Clint said, clicking his tongue as if he knew what he was talking about – he didn’t, but it would not do to say so. “Who can say what goes on in the mind of a woman?” Clint asked rhetorically, and then paused. “Actually, you can. You’re a woman, after all.”

“That’s precisely it,” Kate muttered.

“Beg your pardon?”

She stared at him, debating whether to continue or not. Her gaze flickered to Yelena, who was walking beside Mason, and then back to Clint. The other woman had studiously avoided looking at Kate Bishop, and that was really quite discomforting, since Kate really really wanted Yelena Belova to look at her and smile and talk and ki – no! She sighed, glancing at Clint, her decision made.

“I’m a woman,” Kate said, a little unsure of how to say this. “So is she.”

“Ahh…” The light of comprehension failed to shine on Clint Barton’s face. “Right.”

“It’s not natural, you know. I mean…man, and woman, right? It’s not woman and woman, is it?”

“Uh, no,” said Clint, who it must be said was desperately trying to concentrate on the subject at hand and not allow his inquisitive imagination to wander.

“This…this isn’t how things are supposed to be. It…it just seems wrong, you know? It doesn’t feel wrong, but it seems wrong. It isn’t normal at all. She feels something – I know that much. But she thinks that I’m a man, you know? And just because I’m pretending to be a man doesn’t mean that I am supposed to feel like a man, right?”

“Uh…” Clint Barton was acutely aware that this was a discussion that should not be taken lightly. He struggled to get some order in his thoughts, thinking quickly of something to say. “I don’t think you’re feeling like a man,” he said carefully. I so do not need to be dealing with this, he thought.

“Really?” The sudden hopeful look on Kate’s face made him cringe. Moral ambiguity shifted.

“I think…” he paused, trying to phrase this in a way that would not mean that he, Clint Barton, would be responsible for ruining anything that would cause him to be the most hated character in the epic (because such characters inevitably die, due to popular vote). “I think it’s just called feeling,” he said.

“After all,” he continued, “Feelings aren’t perfectly divided between the sexes, are they? We can all feel anger and hate towards each other, can’t we? I mean…we don’t discriminate by gender in deciding whom we hate, do we? So why should we discriminate in who we like?”

It sounded like complete bullshit to him, but apparently Kate Bishop thought otherwise, judging from the grateful look and the faint contemplative gaze on her face.

Clint Barton wasn’t entirely sure what he did, but he was pretty sure he did something right.

Night fell like a hammer blow to the earth, and the stars took hold of the sky. The company made camp in a clearing beside another stream (because you can’t make camp in trees).

Yelena had studiously avoided Kate Bishop like the plague. She had elected to spend the time with Mason instead. And she certainly did not constantly steal glances in the direction of a certain knight, in the hopes of detecting any sign of suffering.

So they had kissed. Yelena had not wanted that first kiss to happen, but it did and there was no denying it. There was also no denying that the first kiss had been very enjoyable, and after much debate, she had gathered enough courage to try for a second kiss.

Which had turned out well enough…up to a certain point.

“How dare he?” she whispered to Mason for what seemed (to him) to be the hundredth time today. “He kisses me and then when I try to kiss him, he pushes me away. How dare he?”

Mason sighed, knowing precisely what to say to that, having had much practice already.

“Perhaps he felt that you were moving too fast,” he suggested.

“Do you think so?” It was quite remarkable, he thought, how Yelena could transform from angry woman to anxious woman after one sentence.

“Probably, probably,” he said. “Knights are known for their propriety, you know.”

“But the knight in every epic always sweeps the princess off her feet and gives her a kiss and then they live happily ever after.”

“Yes, yes,” Mason said hastily. “But they never actually say that they live happily ever after immediately, do they? Obviously the knight and the princess have to get to know each other for a while. You can’t build a lasting relationship based on just one kiss.”

“You can’t?”

“No,” he said patiently. “A relationship does not consist of kissing. It also involves talking to the other person, and living with that other person. You have to learn these things about each other before you decide to be in a relationship.”

“Get to know each other, you mean.”

“Exactly. Like…what are his habits? Does he like to leave the toilet seat up? Does he sleep on the right or left side of the bed?”

“And then you kiss?” Her preoccupation with kissing, Mason thought, was very discomforting, because it stirred images in his head. He wished, not for the first time today, for a discreetly labeled book and some privacy.

“Possibly,” he said carefully.

Yelena sighed and sat down on a conveniently located fallen tree trunk. She had moved too fast, she thought. You simply do not meet a person and start kissing and making out immediately. Well, some women do, but Yelena suspected that those women who did so belonged to the category of women who were not so much waiting for Mr. Right but rather Mr. Right Amount In His Pocket.

The kissing, she decided, was a problem. And not the biggest problem.

The biggest problem was tall, beautiful, expressive face that stole her breath and set her heart fluttering every time she caught their gaze. The problem was a pair of lips that, when kissed, parted willingly, allowing her to melt into them. The problem was that she found kissing Kate Bishop to be something that she wanted to do very often indeed.

“And besides,” Mason was saying, “a part of this getting to know each other process involves you telling a certain person that you happen to be a princess.” And, he added silently, that other person telling you that he happens to be a she.

“In due time,” Yelena replied.

“I don’t know why you don’t just come out and say it,” he said.

“You know why.”

“To protect me?” Mason’s gaze turned penetrating. “Really?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, and turned away.

To be entirely honest, Yelena was not sure why she did not come out and just say it. For some reason though, stepping forward and saying, “Hey – guess what? I’m a princess. And not just any princess. I’m the princess you’ve been looking for!” did not seem to roll off the tongue.

If she could find some order in her thoughts, however, Yelena would find that the reason behind her little charade would be something along the lines of this: She had always been a Princess. That was who she was – Princess Yelena Belova. Mason had kidnapped her (admittedly, allowing her time to pack, then doubling back because she had forgotten to pack something else, did not exactly count as kidnapping) not because she was particularly smart or pretty or talented but because she happened to be the only Princess around.

Being a Princess had defined her.

She had already known how things were supposed to turn out – get kidnapped by a Dark Wizard or Dragon or whatever evil villain happened to have nothing on his hands at the present moment., look forlornly out the tower window as she waited to be rescued, get rescued, and then marry her rescuer and live happily ever after. It was charted and had been charted many times over.

And so, just for once, Yelena Belova had decided not to be defined by her Princess-hood. She had decided to be defined by who she was.

And who she was was a Princess. Which was precisely why she was pretending to not be a Princess.

Give it time. You’ll get there. Eventually.

Sleep was but a distant dream. Her eyelids were heavy and her body felt sluggish, but every time she closed her eyes her mind would spring awake and tantalize her with various thoughts, most of which involved a certain Sir Cate Bishop and a pair of soft, delectable lips.

Yelena Belova simply could not sleep. Every time she tried, she found herself haunted by the ghost of that first kiss, and the shade of that second one. She found herself wanting to kiss a person she had just met but a few days ago, and that was nothing if not improper.

She could not explain it. Really. All she knew was that she felt herself invariably drawn to Sir Cate Bishop. It was almost physical attraction – a sort of pull in the knight’s direction. He wasn’t even particularly handsome, she thought. There was no rugged masculinity on his face – even Mason had a jaw, and Clint with his chiseled lantern jaw should have proved to be a greater attraction. But Sir Cate Bishop had an elfin face, strangely feminine, yet compelling all the same. Beautiful – that was the word. Sir Cate Bishop was beautiful.

And the feeling of their lips meeting, of the utter softness that threatened to swallow her up, and how very right it felt…

Frustrated, she threw the covers off, and found herself staring eye to eye with Kate Bishop.

With long, flowing brown hair that fell all the way down to the side.

Kate froze, hands halfway through her hair, in the middle of retying it for the night. And then she fled.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! The words raged in her head, pounding against the sides of her skull and bouncing around as she fled.

She had not meant for Yelena to see her. Certainly not. All Kate Bishop remembered was walking away from the camp to wash and tie her hair down again, and then the clouds had parted and moonlight shined down and even from the distance she had seen the sleeping form of Yelena Belova, and before she knew it, her treacherous feet had carried her without her even realizing.

And then Yelena had seen her.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, she berated herself mentally. A sudden fear rose in her chest, wrapping skeletal fingers around her heart, and began squeezing. Yelena knew. Yelena knew her secret, and it was now over. Yelena knew that she, Kate Bishop, was a woman, and now Yelena would not want to see her ever again.

And that thought scared her even more than the realization of being found out. Yelena not wanting to see her, Yelena not wanting to talk to her – Yelena thinking that she, Kate Bishop, was as unnatural as sunset during daytime. Yelena would think that she was a freak and a deviant and the very sight of Kate Bishop would sicken her to the core.

She stopped suddenly, her chest heaving up and down. Fear and panic and regret bubbled, and she found herself doubled over, clutching at a fallen tree trunk for support. Her face twisted in a grimace, and her stomach churned. Tears stung her eyes, blurring her vision.

Stupid!

“Kate?”

She froze again, turning around, looking for all the world like a deer caught in the headlights – an expression that she would have been unfamiliar with because of the fact that there are no headlights in existence in that world. Not even a lamppost in the middle of the forest.

Yelena walked into the clearing, and try as she might, Kate Bishop could not get her legs to move.

The brunette paused, and they stared at each other wordlessly for a few moments. Then Yelena took a step forward, and then another, until she was right in front of Kate Bishop.

A hand reached forward hesitantly, and fingers touched a lock of brown hair, as if needing proof that they were really there.

“You…you’re a…a…” Yelena could not seem to say the word.

“A girl,” Kate finished for her, the bitterness dripping from that last word, as thick as treacle. “I’m a girl.” And then, like a person admitting their own guilt in the dock, she said, “Like you.”

“Oh,” was all Yelena could muster, and Kate found herself wishing that she would say more.

“Listen,” Kate said, stepping forward suddenly. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I – ”

What she wanted to say next would never be revealed, because Yelena chose that precise moment to back away and flee.

Kate stared at the rapidly retreating figure of Yelena Belova, and then crumpled to her knees, her face in her hands, tears running free down her cheeks.

Somehow, without talking, without even looking at each other, they had come to the unspoken agreement to not talk about it.

And they were not talking about it quite well.

“You’re awfully quiet today,” Mason observed. All he received in reply was a half hearted shrug from Yelena. He stared at her, and then narrowed his eyes speculatively at the bowed figure of Kate Bishop.

Several feet away and walking beside the forlornly trudging Kate, Clint Barton caught his eye and lifted his shoulders and hands in the universal “I have no idea what the hell is going on” gesture.

“So…” Mason moved beside Yelena again. “You and Kate still not talking?”

The stricken expression on her face when she lifted her head up at the mention of the knight’s name told him that something else had happened last night when he was dreaming of…well, stuff.

“What happened?” he asked, and was surprised to find out that he really was concerned about her. “Are you all right?”

“No,” came her reply. Her voice was rough, a little hoarse, as if she had been crying. In fact, Mason realized, her eyes looked a little red rimmed.

“What the hell happened?” he asked again.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Mason wondered whether this was the sort of time where the words “I don’t want to talk about it” meant that the person saying them really did not want to talk about it, whatever it was, or wanted to talk about it. It was almost impossible to tell, especially when the person not talking about it happened to be of the fairer sex, because if there is one thing women love, it is talking about it. No matter what it happened to be.

He decided, wisely, to wait and see.

“It’s just…” she started, and he waited patiently. “He…” Yelena struggled. “He’s a she,” she finished lamely.

“I know.”

“You know? You…you knew?”

He cringed at the tone of her voice. “I suspected it,” he said. “Well, it is pretty obvious. He…she…doesn’t exactly look like a man. Even the way she walks is a dead giveaway.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“Wasn’t my place to tell,” he replied simply, walking ahead. When he realized that she wasn’t following, he sighed and walked back.

“So Sir Kate’s a girl. So what?” he asked.

“So what? So what?” Her voice rose another octave, or would have, if she had not been consciously trying to keep her voice down. “She’s a girl!”

“You’re a girl too,” Mason observed. “Nothing wrong with being a girl, in my opinion. More people should be girls.”

“But…but…” Mason, in Yelena’s opinion, was being remarkably thick today. On purpose, she suspected. “You know what’s wrong,” she said accusingly. “Do you want me to say it out loud?”

“Fine…” Mason relented. “So she’s a girl. And you’re a girl. What’s wrong with that?”

“Everything!”

“Everything?” he asked, smiling disarmingly. “Well, if everything’s wrong, you wouldn’t mind pointing out a specific thing or two out of everything that’s wrong, right?”

Yelena glared at him. “It’s not natural,” she said. “It’s…I…it’s not supposed to happen!”

“What’s not supposed to happen?”

“She’s not supposed to be a girl! She’s supposed to be a man!”

“Why?”

“What do you mean ‘why’? It’s just supposed to be the way things are supposed to be, of course.”

“The way things are supposed to be,” Mason repeated, scratching his chin. “Maybe it is,” he said, and then glanced at her. “But this is the way things are. So you have to deal with it, regardless.” And then he walked away, leaving her speechless.

Clint Barton was one of those people who, when confronted with the misery of others, would sit down, have a beer, and observe with malevolent glee, offering cutting remarks whenever required.

It came as something of a shock to him, therefore, to find himself sitting down beside Kate Bishop, edging ever closer, and then bringing a companionable hand up to her shoulder as she wallowed in misery.

Briefly, he wondered what to say at moments like this. ‘There, there,’ seemed somewhat trite, and asking whether she was all right when she was so obviously not all right seemed to be an exercise in stupidity.

He therefore settled for a “So things did not go so well with you and her,” said in a neutral tone of voice that did not antagonize in any way, because antagonizing the miserable lady with a sword belted on her hip was probably not the way to go if he was looking to not die in this epic.

Kate shook her head numbly. He waited in silence, until she finally spoke. “Yelena knows,” she said.

“Oh,” was what he said. He flirted with the idea of saying ‘there, there’ and rejected it almost immediately.

“So she found out…last night?” he asked instead.

Kate nodded. “She saw me…with my hair down.”

“And she did not react to it that well?” She had her chain mail hood up, he noticed, even though Yelena and Mason had gone some ways away in search for something or another – berries, maybe. You did get berries in forests and woods.

“She ran,” Kate said, and choked back a sob. And Clint Barton, who had not so much as had a feeling of singular dislike towards someone in his life (unless that person happened to have a sword or crossbow pointed directly at him) now felt a singular dislike towards Yelena Belova.

“I thought it would be all right, you know?” Kate spoke suddenly, the words coming out in a quick rush. “I thought it would be fine. After what you said yesterday about me liking her being all right, I thought that maybe I could apologize and things would go back to normal again. But now…” another sob wracked through her body, and Clint felt his heart go out for her. “She knows, and she thinks I’m a freak, and she doesn’t want to see me again.”

“She said that?” The feeling of singular dislike intensified, and Clint Barton found himself beset with what could only be called indignant anger.

“No, but she might as well have said it,” Kate replied. “She ran and now she won’t even talk to me. She won’t even look at me!” That was to say, of course, that every time Kate Bishop turned her gaze towards Yelena Belova, the girl would always be looking someplace else.

“So she didn’t say those things,” he observed. “That’s good, right?”

“She hasn’t said them…yet,” Kate countered. “It’s only a matter of time. She won’t even come close to me now!”

“Maybe she’s in shock,” Clint said. “Maybe all she needs is time.”

“I hope so,” Kate Bishop said sincerely. “I really do.”

Clint stared at her. He had never heard her talking like this before. Not even when they were faced with certain death had she sounded so abjectly broken like this.

“You really like her, don’t you?” he asked incredulously.

Kate looked up at him, strands of brown hair trailing down the front of her face, and then she nodded silently.

“Oh,” he said. That’s not good, he thought. The reason for this thought will soon become apparent.

“I know it’s sudden and quick,” Kate said. “But when I saw her – that very first time, it just felt like I had to get to know this girl. I can’t explain it. It’s like I wanted to get to know her, and I wanted her to get to know me. I want to talk to her, to walk beside her, to watch her smile when I tell her stories, and listen to her when she sings and hums as she walks.” She laughed, but it was a bitter sounding laugh, not at all like her usual spirited self. “It sounds crazy.”

“No it doesn’t,” Clint heard himself say, wondering what the hell was happening to him. “It sounds like...” He hesitated.

“Like what?” Kate asked.

“Like love at first sight,” he finished. “It sounds exactly like love…at first sight.”

Quests. What are they? Quests are journeys of self discovery, fraught with obvious dangers like dragons and black knights and bandits and creatures that pop out of the ground and eat people. But there are other dangers – dangers that are not as blatantly obvious as flesh eating monsters or Dark Wizards or tax collectors. There are dangers that afflict not the flesh but the soul, wounding not skin but something beyond bone. Dangers that affect not the body, but the self.

There is a reason why knights spend a night in solitude and prayer before every quest, kneeling before altars and holding swords and looking at crosses. It is not simply to show dutifulness, not just so that the camera can pan round and the audience can look at every single feature of the knight and his armor. It is not simply an excuse for dramatic music and a filler between the scene where the knight receives the quest and the scene where he sets out. It’s there for a reason.

Clint Barton is wrong. Knights do die in quests. Bodily death…well, that happens only once, and if you were someone pretty popular and famous in life, then you get a state funeral and people say nice things about you.

But the death of the self happens many times, because the self is constantly being reborn, time and again. It’s a testament to the immortality of the soul – every time it dies, it returns again, and with any luck, what returns is better than the old self. No one celebrates the death of the self, nor does anyone throw a feast to herald the rebirth of it. It happens privately, and most people don’t make an issue of it, but that’s beside the point. The point is that it does happen.

What kills the self? Not swords, although they do make a strong case for it. No…what kills the self is something else. Betrayal, for one. Greed, for another. And quite possibly, the biggest self killer out there is love.

What is love? There are a lot of answers to this, and it is entirely possible that while all of them hold a grain of truth within the words and dissertations and poems that surround them, none of the explanations propounded by men ever really suffices. That’s because no one actually understands love.

Love is not some magical thing. It’s not just a mere emotion, because calling it an emotion is like calling God an alien – He is after all an extra terrestrial, but imagining God with rounded eyes and an enlarged head just seems wrong for some reason. Love can be nice and fluffy, but it can also hurt. And when it does – it hurts so fucking bad.

So how exactly, you ask, does love kill the self? That’s easy. Take a human being who has never actually known love. Oh, he has known lust and greed and selfishness, all of which may often seem like love but are in fact mere baser emotions. Love is in the barbarian who, after razing a town and burning its inhabitants, returns to his tent in the middle of the forsaken wilderness and holds his child in his arms and swears that the small innocent babe will never know hardship like he did. Love is in the condemned murderer who, as he steps on the gallows, looks into his mother’s face and mouths out the words “I’m sorry” to her, knowing that it will never be enough. Love is the dog who will not leave his master’s side even though said master is in a coffin buried six feet under ground.

Love, quite simply, makes you hate the person you are, and strive to be the person you should be. Love makes you shed the old and aim for the new. The greatest expression of love is when you would willingly die from your old self and become someone better, all because someone else deserves it. There are a lot of people out there who say that they are in love, and maybe they are, but unless they would willingly sacrifice their very souls for the person they purportedly love, then they are not in love at all. It’s easy to sacrifice your life, to take a bullet for someone else, but it’s very difficult to sacrifice your soul…your self, because the self is an ever changing thing, and if you’re not careful, it might revert back to the old instead of sticking it out to the new.

Love kills. To love, you must die, and die again.

A knight goes out on a quest, and finds someone to love. And then he gets to thinking that maybe he isn’t exactly worthy of that other person. Maybe, just maybe, he’s been a little too callous with human life, for example. He would willingly walk into a castle filled with bad people and kill them just simply because they are bad, i.e swinging a sword in his direction, which immediately places them in the category of people who, to the knight, are bad. He doesn’t think of the lives he is ending with the sweep of his sword. He doesn’t consider that those people he is so happily killing much to the enjoyment of the audience all have a wife, a child, a mother or a father. He just kills and kills and kills. But then he finds someone to love and he realizes that maybe, just maybe, he’s not exactly been a good person to begin with.

Maybe that knight happens to be one obsessed with finding glory, that he, or she, as the case may be, would willingly sacrifice others and lead her friends into certain danger just because she wants glory. Maybe she’ll even stoop so low that she’ll solicit payment for going on a quest, because of the glory and songs that it promises. And then she meets someone – someone who will attract her and compel her and make her want to know. And the quest just falls to pieces as she looks only at that other person, forgetting all else that has taken her to that point in time.

And then shit happens. And maybe the knight will die from her old glory seeking self in search for something else…something better. Or maybe she’ll decide that love just isn’t worth it – that she should just continue with the quest and damn all else. In both scenarios, she dies – in the first, she becomes something better, something nobler. Something…knightly. In the other…well, most people forget that all Black Knights start off as Knights first before their armor gets tarnished and the word ‘Black’ gets added to the front of it.

If that made you pause and think, well…good. If it sounded like a load of crap, then forget it. But ultimately, what I really want is for you to just read on.

“We have a problem,” Clint Barton said to Mason. The other man glanced at where Kate and Yelena were sitting, as far away from each other as possible, without actually being too far away so that they escaped the camera shot.

“Actually,” Mason said, smiling smoothly, “They have a problem, and we have to deal with it.”

Clint was already shaking his head. “A bigger problem,” he said. “A much bigger and less enjoyable problem than those two.”

“Which is?”

“I know who you are. Who the both of you are,” Clint said quietly.

Mason was a smart man, and so did not react instantly to Clint’s words. Instead, he took a deep breath and glanced at the squire carefully.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play coy with me,” Clint snapped. “I know who Yelena is…who she’s pretending not to be, anyway. And it doesn’t take a genius to guess who you are.”

Mason wondered whether he should risk a fireball or maybe some lightning. Elemental magic was really quite a difficult piece of work for any wizard with any magical skill, and Mason lacked even any semblance of magical skill to begin with.

“And who do you think Yelena is?” he asked neutrally, as his feet slowly prepared to flee the scene as quickly as they possibly could.

“A princess,” Clint replied promptly. “The princess, as a matter of fact. The princess we were supposed to rescue, to be precise. And of course, you are…”

“Yes?” asked Mason quickly, while he mentally mapped all possible escape routes.

“You’re obviously a protector of some sort.”

“Me?” Relief rose like steam from Mason. “Yes. A protector. Precisely. That’s who I am. A protector.”

“You’re not a knight, are you?” Clint asked suspiciously, glancing at Mason. The man did not look like a knight, but this epic was not exactly turning out the way he had expected it to.

“No. Not a knight. Not me,” said Mason hurriedly. “Definitely not a knight, and definitely not anyone else but a protector of some sort.”

“And you rescued Yelena from the Dark Wizard?”

“Yes!” Mason grasped at the straw like it was a life preserver. “I rescued her from the clutches of the nefarious Dark Wizard and his infernal hellish magic!”

“Neat!” Clint looked impressed. “Can you do magic?”

Now that was a sticky question, especially for someone in Mason’s position. Still, he rallied. Years of bullshitting answers to impromptu quizzes by lecturers came to his rescue.

“Well…” he said slowly, “The question of whether I can do magic is really quite a good one, because if I were to have the ability to do magic, that would explain how I managed to rescue Yelena from the Dark Wizard. But whether I can do magic or not does not however detract from the fact that I have, by dint of some unspeakable skill that I dare not speak of because of ancient traditions and rules, rescued Yelena from said clutches of said Dark Wizard.” He smiled happily, rather proud of himself. Saying something without really saying anything at all was a gift very few people have mastered.

“Er…right,” said Clint, who could be very single minded when he wanted to. “So can you do magic?”

“What is magic?” asked Mason rhetorically. “Because there are several schools of thought with regards to that. For instance, the scholars of the University of Buggeritall believe that the mere act of humanity surviving in a world so fraught with danger must be by some innate magical skill within all men, and – ”

“Can you?” Clint interrupted him. There are some people in the world who are unable to appreciate a well crapped out answer.

“No,” Mason said. “I can’t do magic.”

“Then how did you rescue Yelena from the Dark Wizard?”

Mason contrived to look offended. “Are you saying that I, Rick Mason, seem incapable of rescuing a Princess without the aid of supernatural forces of any kind?”

“Yes,” said Clint, and the discussion would have continued a little longer were it not for the fact that Kate Bishop had just tried to move over to Yelena Belova, only for the other woman to stand up and walk away without a single word.

Both men watched as Kate sat down in the recently vacated space now sadly bereft of a certain blonde, with a sad expression on her face.

“You said we had a bigger problem than those two,” Mason ventured after a while.

“Yes,” Clint replied, sounding a little uncertain. Something was nagging at him – an unfinished discussion about magic and someone’s ability to do things without it. He shrugged it off. “A bigger problem.”

“Which would be…?”

“The quest,” said Clint. At the blank look that Mason was giving him, he continued. “We were supposed to rescue Yelena from the clutches of the Dark Wizard, and then bring her back to the Prince so that he could wed her and they would live happily ever after, ruling over the kingdom with fairness and justice and mercy.” He paused, and glanced at where Kate was sitting down, twiddling her fingers together. Even from the short distance, the unmistakable glint of unshed tears in her eyes could be seen.

“And now Kate’s gone and fallen in love with Yelena, and I think Yelena’s probably in love with Kate, which means that she can’t very well marry the Prince, can she?”

“Probably not,” Mason replied. “I still don’t see the problem.”

“You don’t?” It seemed pretty obvious to Clint Barton.

“Well, if Kate and Yelena are in love, then all Kate has to do is not bring Yelena to the Prince. They could elope, they could live in the forest, they could…uh…” He tried to think of something else they could do. “Steal a ship and live as pirates?” he tried.

“Kate can’t sail. Can Yelena?”

“Don’t know,” Mason replied.

“And I think you’re forgetting the more pressing question,” Clint continued.

“Which is?”

“What would happen to us when the Prnice finds out that Sir Kate Bishop just ran off with the Princess of his dreams?”

“Something bad, I trust,” Mason frowned, and then smiled again. “If he finds out, that is.”

Clint gave him a dirty look. “He’ll find out. Trust me on this. They always do.”

Not for the first time, Kate Bishop entertained the idea of getting up and going after Yelena again, and then apologizing until she turned blue in the face and fell flat on the ground. The brief memory of the look on Yelena’s face when she had tried to talk to her earlier stopped her, however.

It was a look that tore at Kate’s heart and pounded it to the dust, just for good measure.

There was contempt in that look, Kate imagined. Hatred too, probably. And disgust. And even if there wasn’t…even if there was just hurt and confusion instead, Kate Bishop’s overactive imagination certainly furnished the rest.

“It’s not like I can help it,” she whispered to herself. “It’s not like I wanted to fall in love with her.”

Her self did not make any reply. Maybe it was too busy to talk to her.

She sighed again, and took a deep breath. But no matter how deep a breath she took, or how hard she exhaled, she could not get rid of the heaviness pressing over her chest, like a ton of bricks that refused to abate and in fact grew heavier each time she tried to talk to Yelena and had received silence in reply.

If this really was love, Kate Bishop did not like it. Not one bit.

“So if the Prince does find out, what do you think we should do?” Mason asked.

“I don’t know,” Clint admitted. “I was hoping you could come up with some ideas.”

“We could run,” Mason suggested. “As far away as we possibly can.”

“And hide?” Clint asked. “Know any good places to hide?”

“There’s an entire world out there for us to hide in,” Mason said expansively, sweeping his arms out. “He can’t search everywhere. He’s just a Prince.”

“With an army.”

“Oh.”

“And spies.”

“All right.”

“And gold to get more spies.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“And he can hire a wizard or an entire cadre of sorcerers to hunt us down.”

“Enough, all right?” Mason snapped, because talking about other wizards who had more magical skill than he did (although admittedly there were things growing on old bread with possibly more magical skill than he did) was a touchy subject.

“You make this Prince sound like a Tyrant,” he muttered.

“What’s that?” Clint asked.

“I said,” Mason said loudly, “You make this Prince sound like a Tyrant.”

“I do, don’t I?” Clint said slowly, a smile breaking on his face. “A Tyrant!”

“That’s what I said.” Mason glanced at the squire. “What is it?” he asked suspiciously.

“The Prince is a Tyrant,” Clint said excitedly. “Do you know what that means?”

“Not particularly.”

“It means that he won’t win!” Clint looked absolutely convinced. “Love conquers all. Even Tyrants! Tyranny and evil fall at the face of love!”

“It’s tyranny and evil falling in love that’s worrying me,” muttered Mason, as he prepared to crush the sudden joy on the face of Clint Barton.

She stopped, glancing behind her and noting that no one was following, and by no one, she meant that Kate Bishop was not following her. She was alone.

She sighed, wondering whether she wanted Kate to follow her, or whether she really wanted to be left alone.

It was a little cruel, she would admit, to have just walked off like that when Kate so obviously wanted to talk. Cruel, but also satisfying – the look of pain on Kate’s face as she left her in her wake had been just that, but it had also hurt her, just a little, knowing that she was causing Kate pain as well.

It was all very confusing.

So now, alone, she forced herself to confront the truth she was somewhat dreading. Kate Bishop was a woman, and once you got around that rather difficult fact, there was a part of her that still wanted to kiss Kate Bishop. And that meant that she, a woman, wanted very much to kiss another woman.

It should have felt wrong, but the memory of those two kisses still lingered, and as much as she did not want to admit it, she did want to do it again. More than kiss, of course. She wanted to get to know Kate Bishop in an intimate fashion – not just the intimate fashion that Mason probably entertained in the solace of his mind when he thought no one was looking, but in other ways. She wanted to talk to Kate, to listen to Kate, to have Kate beside her.

She wanted all that, but the realization that Kate was a woman kept on coming as well, and that was one thing she could not seem to get around. It ate at her, knowing that while it should feel wrong to her, abhorrent even, she still wanted it regardless.

Even if she should not still be wanting it.

Yes, she thought. Confusing.

So why was she punishing Kate? And she was – she knew that. She knew that Kate felt horrible – all she had to do was glance at the brunette and she could see and feel the suffering the other woman was going through. And still she kept at it – kept her distance from Kate, kept her silence, because a part of her also wanted to punish the brunette for being a woman and for leading Yelena on, making Yelena think that she was a man, and worst of all, for making Yelena feel like this.

It’s a female thing. Not even they understand it.

“You are assuming too many things, is all I’m saying,” Mason said patiently. He raised a hand, curling fingers in as he ticked off a list. “First, there’s no actual guarantee that the Prince knows about Kate and Yelena, and secondly, there’s no actual guarantee that he would get angry and decide to chop our heads off or something.”

“Or torture us first, before chopping our heads off,” Clint replied gloomily. “Or maybe hanging us. Or…maybe he’ll hang us, then chop our heads off later.”

“What I’m trying to say is that you are worrying too much,” Masno continued, pretending as if he did not hear that last bit. “Maybe the Prince won’t even care. There are other princesses around.”

“You think so?”

“Do I think there are other princesses around?”

“No,” Clint said. “Do you think he won’t care at all?”

“He won’t care if he doesn’t actually know about this, will he?”

“But he’ll find out!”

“What makes you think he’ll find out? He’s not here!”

“They always find out,” Clint said again. “The bad guys always do.”

Mason knew that there was something wrong with Clint’s entire argument, and maybe you’ve already spotted one of the many holes in his logic, but Mason could not, at the present moment, spot even one, because Kate Bishop was now walking towards them.

“She won’t even talk to me,” Kate said dully.

“Give her time,” Clint said, looking to Mason for support. The Dark Wizard turned non-magical Protector shrugged. “She needs time to take this in, to process…right?”

“Right,” Mason said.

“And then, when she’s calmed down, that’s when you talk to her. And she’ll talk back.”

“Right,” Mason said again. He felt like a parrot.

“These things always have a way of working themselves out,” Clint continued.

“Right,” said poor Mason, who really did not seem able to contribute much to this conversation.

“I hope so,” Kate said. “I just…” She paused, and looked around without looking for anything at all. “I hate this,” she muttered.

“Just give it time,” said Mason, to whom the closest thing to a love life was organizing his collection of discreetly labeled books. “She’ll come around. Trust me on this.”

“Could you talk to her?” asked Kate, suddenly hopeful. “Maybe calm her down faster?”

“I suppose,” he said uncertainly. The look of hopefulness on Kate’s face faded, and he shrugged. “I’ll do it.”

“Really?” Kate brightened again.

“Yes,” said Mason, who did not actually know what he would say to Yelena, but telling Kate that would probably not be the best thing to do, considering the circumstances. He brightened. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to knock some sense into her head.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Mason smiled, “I have something you don’t.” At the puzzled look on her face, he grinned wider. “Leverage.”

“So…”

“So what?” Yelena snapped, because Mason had this look where he just stared at you for a few moments without saying a single thing, and it was really very discomforting. It was a very penetrating look, and the word ‘penetrating’ when used in relation to Mason was not one that inspired confidence in anyone.

“Kate’s hurting, you know,” he said, and she detected a faint accusatory note in his tone.

“Good,” she said spitefully. “She deserves it.”

“Why?”

Yelena whirled down on him. “Because she lied to me. Because she did not tell me that she was actually a girl, and she lied to me. Because she kissed me first, knowing that she was actually a girl, and knowing that if I knew that she was a girl, I would not have kissed her!”

“Wouldn’t you?” he asked, and that was another discomforting habit of Mason’s that she was just discovering – the habit of asking the correct questions. “If you knew she was a girl, wouldn’t you have kissed her?”

“No!” Yelena said, and even she knew that she was probably lying. “I mean…” she stuttered, when faced with another dose of Mason’s penetrative gaze, “I don’t know.”

She lapsed into silence.

“Would I?” she asked helplessly.

“I don’t know,” Mason said slowly. “That’s a question for you to answer, not me. And besides,” he shrugged, “It’s not like you weren’t hiding something as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you consider that maybe this is your fault?”

“How exactly is this my fault?” she asked, and he winced as her voice rose another octave or two.

“Well…” he said, “Maybe she would not have kissed you if you had told her that you were a Princess, and not just any princess – that you were the Princess she was supposed to rescue?”

She could not answer that.

“You could have told her, but you didn’t, did you? You did not want her to know that you were a princess, same as her not wanting you to know that she was actually a woman. The way I see it, you were both hiding something, but you found out her little secret, and she hasn’t discovered your little act. Yet.”

Something about the way he said that last word hinted that her secret was not really a secret any more.

“Clint knows,” Mason confirmed. “And he may be telling Kate right this very moment. In fact…I’m pretty sure that’s her coming to confront you right now.”

Yelena turned around, panic on her face, but there was no one there. She turned again to see a faint smirk on Mason’s smarmy face.

“So Kate lied to you about something,” he said. “It’s not like you’re completely innocent in this as well.”

“She lied about her own gender!”

“And you lied about your station in life. What makes her lie worse?”

She could not answer that either, but Mason was not done.

“Knights don’t go around kissing Princesses, especially not Princesses that they were supposed to rescue on behalf of someone else. If a knight fell in love with a Princess who was supposed to marry his King, that causes problems.”

He leaned forward, and delivered his coup de grace.

“Are you really angry at her for being a woman, or are you angry at her for lying?” he asked. “Because if it’s the second one…you really don’t have a moral ground to stand on, do you?”

“Or…” Mason said slowly, “Are you angry because you still like her, even though she’s not who you thought she was?”

Leaves embraced each other on branches like lovers under sheets, blanketed by the night and the nocturnal whispers of the forest. A soft breeze blew, carrying with it the perfume of darkness, and shadows reached out with clinging fingers over every tree and rock.

Mason and Clint were asleep, and the sound of their snores resounded through the night. Kate stared at the fire, poking at the glowing embers with the end of a stick, her thoughts consumed with misery and suffering, as is good and proper whenever one is confronted with difficulties in one’s love life. Yelena was standing some ways behind her, staring out at the small visible patches of the night sky in a pose intended to convey deep contemplation and suffering as well.

The conditions were ideal for a nice long talk, if only either one of them knew what to say.

“So you’re a Princess,” Kate said suddenly, her words sounding loud in the night.

“And you’re a girl,” Yelena replied, moving and then sitting down without looking at the blonde. “Clint guessed, did he?”

“He may be smarter than he looks,” Kate said, also keeping her gaze averted.

“That’s not exactly hard to be,” Yelena grinned at her own joke, but it disappeared as quickly as it came. Tentatively, she moved closer to the other woman.

“Talking to me now, are you?” asked Kate dully, still keeping her eyes on the flickering flames. “Mason got through to you, I see,” she observed, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw a brief flash of guilt passing over the blonde’s face.

“You lied.” The way she said it wasn’t an accusation, just a statement.

“So did you.” No defensiveness in her tone, either.

Yelena took a deep breath, and then sighed, dropping her hands to her lap and twiddling her fingers. “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly, the words tumbling over each other in their haste to leave her mouth.

Kate shifted in her seat, and briefly considered standing up and leaving Yelena behind, just to give the smaller woman a taste of her own medicine. It would have been darkly satisfying, she felt. Petty, but satisfying.

Instead, she turned around and glanced at Yelena. “Me too,” she replied, hesitantly. “I…I shouldn’t have…” Kate paused, struggling to find the words she had rehearsed in her head so many times in the hope that Yelena would just start talking to her again. “It’s just…” she tried, and again found it impossible to just put to words what she was thinking (which really is harder than it looks at times). “I’m sorry,” she said again, lamely.

Beside her, Yelena took a deep breath. She was acutely aware of her heart pounding in her chest, of the nervousness that was enveloping her. Forcing herself to lift her head up to meet Kate’s gaze, she bit her lip in an effort to get her words out. “I…” She kept her eyes fixed on a pair of shimmering blue ones. “I’m not.”

“But you just said that you were,” Kate pointed out.

“I’m sorry for what I did – lying to you, and…you know…not talking to you and all.” It was quite astonishing how admitting your own mistakes out loud to someone else could be so embarrassing. “But I’m not sorry for, you know…that other thing.”

“That other thing?” Kate asked, trying her best to stop herself from grinning at Yelena’s discomfort, because this was supposed to be a heartfelt conversation and not just plain flirting…but Yelena Belova embarrassed looked so very cute. “What other thing?”

Yelena flushed, and even in the shadowy light, Kate could tell that the other girl’s cheeks were flaming. Green eyes stared at everything and anything except for Kate Bishop, and the brunette imagined that she could see the little wheels turn in Yelena’s head as she seemed to struggle with some inner turmoil of her own.

Yelena closed her eyes, sighing as if defeated, and then she straightened and looked at Kate, her eyes glinting with sudden determination, decision reached and made. “This,” Yelena said, and leaned forward to kiss Kate Bishop full on the lips again.

The sounds of snoring had stopped, but both Kate and Yelena were far too occupied to notice.

“I…I…” Kate was vaguely aware that she was stammering, in the same way that she was aware the moon was not made out of blue cheese. She stared at the blonde, feeling the warm flush on her cheeks spreading down to her chest, liberating the heaviness she had been feeling for the past couple of days. It was like a wall had been breached there, crumbling down into a million tiny pieces and allowing her heart to float free again.

It was quite remarkable what one simple kiss could do. Of course, there are some who would argue that there is nothing simple about a kiss at all.

“So you guys made up?” Clint asked.

“Yes. Maybe. I think so,” Kate replied. “I don’t actually know,” she said. “I mean, I think we did.”

“I think a kiss means that you’ve made up,” Clint observed knowingly. “Kisses don’t exactly leave things ambiguous, do they?”

“Probably not,” Kate agreed. She smiled brightly. It was remarkable how easy it was to smile now that Yelena and her were on talking terms again. On more than just talking terms again, if she was going to be quite honest about it.

“Just in time too,” Clint said unfeelingly, not sharing in Kate’s newfound bouncy spirit. “We’re reaching the end of the Dark Forest.”

“We are, aren’t we?” Kate replied excitedly. “No more dark trees looming on top of us, no more scary sounds at night. Just bright sunshine and birds flying in the air and blue sky and fluffy clouds!”

“And people,” Clint added.

“And people!” Kate echoed eagerly.

“And cottages and roads.”

“And cottages and roads too!”

“And the Prince’s castle with the Prince inside waiting for you to bring him his beloved bride.”

“And the…oh.” Happy thoughts came to a screeching halt. This may involve a screechy braking sound effect to give the scene that added bit of humor. A look of consternation passed over Kate’s Bishop face. “That’s not good,” she said.

“No,” Clint agreed. “It’s not.” He fixed her with what could only be called A Look – and it was a Look that earned its capital letters. “What are you going to do now?”

“This really is not good,” Kate said, shaking her head. “I hadn’t thought about this at all.”

“Obviously,” Clint said heartlessly. “You were too busy pining over Princess Yelena over there. A Princess who, I might add, was the object of this quest that just doesn’t happen to be yours.”

“So what now?” asked Kate. “What do I do?”

“You’re asking me? You’re asking me?” The tone of incredulity rose higher and higher, like a symphony building up to a crescendo finale. “How the hell am I supposed to know what to do now? You’re the knight!”

“And you’re the squire!” As far as repartees went, Kate Bishop was aware that hers had just fallen flat on its face and broken its nose.

“I’m serious, Kate,” Clint said. “What do we do now?”

“Uh…” Kate Bishop turned around to look for Yelena, who was too busy conversing with the ever curious Mason. “Hide?”

“Hide.” Clint’s tone could not be flatter. You could use it to iron clothes. “Your big plan is to hide.”

“It’s not a bad plan, is it?” she asked, a tad defensively, she thought.

“No…” Clint said. “Not a bad plan at all. It will continue to NOT be a bad plan, up to the point where the Prince finds us and hangs us all, at which point it WILL be a bad plan.”

“And how do you know he’ll find us?”

“Because they always do!” he nearly screamed. “That’s how these things work!”

“You’re such a pessimist, Clint,” she said, shaking her head.

“So people keep telling me,” he replied gloomily. “But in my experience, I’m always right. Even when I don’t want to be. Especially when I don’t want to be.”

Mason was not a man of ideas, but when he did have an idea, it usually was a good one with only one flaw – it had a tendency of not being the most thought out plan in the world. Take his plan for kidnapping Yelena – he had kidnapped her, because it seemed like an excellent plan at the time, up to the point where he realized that he did not know why he had kidnapped her, or what he was going to do after he kidnapped her.

Like every good Dark Wizard, however, he had failed to learn from history and still went on to make other plans that would turn out to be not as well thought out as all the others.

By those standards, his current plan had turned out to be absolutely brilliant, in his own opinion – meaning that it would fall flat as soon as it hit the ground running.

“The way I see it,” he said, “What you need is leverage of your own.”

“Meaning what exactly?” asked Clint, who knew that Kate had a tendency of her own to take plans at face value, which usually resulted in him, Clint Barton, being put in a position of great difficulty in which his life and limbs would be placed at great risk.

“You need to accomplish something that will show the Prince that you, Kate Bishop, should not be hanged and should in fact be rewarded by being allowed to keep Princess Yelena.” Mason was starting to become aware that this plan may not be as good as he thought it once was. Being a Dark Wizard, however, he pressed on relentlessly.

“That’s a good idea,” said Kate Bishop, who was at the moment holding hands with Yelena, because this is what all new couples should do – hold hands and stay in constant contact with each other for as long as possible.

“And what would that accomplishment be?” asked Clint.

“Well…” Something was going to go wrong here, Mason knew. His occult senses, or what passed for occult senses in Mason, were screaming at him to shut up. He ignored them. “You could…do a great and valiant deed!”

“That’s a very good idea,” said Kate, to whom the words ‘great’ and ‘valiant’ were of significant importance, regardless of what the plan actually was. This is a shortcoming shared by all knights in general – possibly attributed to the constant jousting and knocking each other off horses, the repeated impacts of which may seriously inhibit mental development.

“What kind of a great and valiant deed?” asked Clint Barton, who was not at all a jouster and did not intend to ever put himself in a position where he may be knocked off his horse by another person holding a long stick.

Mason paused, suddenly realizing that he had not actually thought this far ahead. Oh shit, he thought, catching the sudden gleam on Kate Bishop’s face.

“I know!” she exclaimed suddenly. “We could slay the Dark Wizard that captured Yelena in the first place!” She looked at Yelena eagerly, searching for support and oddly enough, finding none.

Yelena slowly pulled her hand away from Kate’s, giving the brunette a smile. “Excuse me a moment,” she said sweetly. “Mason? May I talk to you for a second?” She reached for his hand, and bodily pulled the newly-reminded-Dark-Wizard to the side.

“What are you doing?” she hissed.

“I’m…” Mason frantically searched for an avenue to escape the mental hole he had pushed himself into. “I have no idea,” he confessed.

“You do realize that YOU are the Dark Wizard who captured me in the first place, don’t you?” she asked.

“I have recently come to terms with that fact,” Mason allowed.

“And now Kate wants to go after you,” Yelena continued.

“That thought had crossed my mind,” he admitted. “Not good, is it?”

“Not good for you,” Yelena said pointedly. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking of you, actually,” he replied, obviously offended. “I was trying to help.”

“By putting yourself at risk?” she asked. “I’m touched.”

“You don’t look touched,” he said accusingly.

“I’m being touched inside,” she replied. “Have you gone mad?”

Mason would privately admit that yes, he may have been a little mad. But he would never admit that out loud. No Dark Wizard worth his salt would ever admit to being anything but right.

“What now?” he asked desperately. “What am I going to do?”

“Come clean, I suppose,” Yelena replied after thinking for a few moments. It was an amazing thing, Mason thought. What a novel idea – to think before you actually give an opinion. Maybe I should try that sometime. He rejected it almost immediately – if people went around thinking before saying something, nothing would ever get done.

“You know,” Clint said slowly, “That’s actually quite a good plan.”

“You think so?” asked Kate Bishop, who was currently looking at Mason and Yelena whispering some distance away through narrowed eyes. This is also to be expected of newly established couples – jealousy must be shown the moment the other person is talking to someone other than the person with whom that person is in a relationship with. It’s not merely a female thing too – guys are just as good at being jealous over nothing as girls are.

“I do,” said Clint. “If you slay the Dark Wizard, then the Prince is sure to be grateful. A grateful Prince is an indebted Prince, and he’ll forgive the fact that you’ve just stolen his bride to be.” And if he doesn’t, Clint thought, we’re all doomed. Well, except Yelena, of course, because she is the bride to be. And possibly Mason, because he did rescue Yelena from the Dark Wizard.

“She’ll cut my head off,” Mason moaned. “The moment she finds out that I’m the Dark Wizard, she’ll cut my head right off. And I’ll be dead!”

“Maybe she won’t,” Yelena said soothingly. “If she does, I’ll be very cross with her.”

“That’ll do me a world of good, won’t it? I’ll still be dead!”

“That’s true,” Yelena said. “So I’ll tell her not to cut your head off first, and then you tell her that you’re the Dark Wizard.”

“And if she decides to cut my head off regardless?” he asked.

“She won’t,” Yelena said confidently.

“But are you sure?” he asked desperately. “Because that’s an awfully sharp sword!”

“It is, isn’t it?” Yelena said, glancing at where Kate was staring at her with undisguised jealousy. Despite everything, she felt herself warm at that blatant show of possessiveness. Some girls like that, oddly enough.

“All right,” she said, taking a deep breath and trying to dispel any thoughts of Kate Bishop from her head. Mason was the object of concern now. “We need a new plan. And no,” she said, when he looked like he was about to suggest something else. “We need a plan that will actually work.”

“Right,” said Mason. “I’m glad you care.”

“It’s not just you,” she said with a smile. “I don’t think I’d care to marry the Prince either.”

“Will you stop looking at them?” Clint asked irritably. “You look like you’ve got  a bad case of constipation.”

“They seem awfully cosy,” said Kate. “You don’t think…” He cut her off with a withering glance.

“He’s not interested in Yelena, all right? Yelena is yours, and you belong to Yelena. I thought we’ve established that.”

They had, or at least the epic had established that Yelena and Kate would be the main couple in the story, but part of being in a relationship was the feeling of insecurity that hounded you every day of your life.

“Fine,” said Kate, although her tone made it clear that while she wasn’t going to approach the subject any longer, at least not right now, anyway, she would continue to think about it regardless of what anybody said.

Clint ignored her. “I’ve just realized something,” he said.

“What?” she asked.

“If we want to slay the Dark Wizard, we’re going to have to go back into the Dark Forest and search for his tower again,” he said, with an apprehensive glance backwards.

As if on cue, a low moan revebrated through the forest, making the leaves rustle threateningly in reply.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Kate admitted. “I don’t really want to go back into the forest,” she continued. “It’s…scary.”

“Precisely!” said Clint Barton. “It’s a Dark Forest. It’s supposed to be scary and…uh, dark.”

“And the Dark Wizard could be anywhere,” Yelena chirped up suddenly. Clint jumped -  he had not heard her approaching.

“She’s right,” Mason said. “The Dark Wizard could be listening in on us right this very moment!”

Clint and Kate glanced around. Clint was suddenly reminded that the forest had eyes. Everywhere. And some of them blinked.

“So…” he said uncomfortably. “Let’s not hunt the Dark Wizard.”

“Yeah,” said Kate. “He’s probably sorry for kidnapping Yelena anyway.”

“He is,” Mason said truthfully, with a glance at the sword. “Very sorry, in fact.” He caught them staring at him. “I taught him a very good lesson,” he added quickly.

“I thought you said that you were fleeing from him.” Clint had a treacherously good memory at times.

“And I don’t want to go back into his clutches,” Yelena interrupted. She could think quickly on her feet when she wanted to.

“That’s true,” Kate agreed. “Lets not risk it.”

“So what now?” asked Mason, who wanted to head any discussion on what to do next away from any possibility of hunting the Dark Wizard down.

“Back to the original plan, I suppose,” said Clint. “We run, and hide as far away as we can.”

“Until they find us,” Kate added gloomily. “They always do, or so Clint says.”

“You know,” the Prince said thoughtfully, “Sir Cate Bishop should have been back by now.”

“With the princess, you mean.” The Prince winced at the tone, and turned to look at the chambermaid he had recently deflowered.

“You know that I’m not interested in her at all,” he said placatingly. “I’ve decided to marry you, after all. I’m just concerned about Sir Cate, that’s all. He has been gone for quite some time.”

“Well, stop being concerned about him and start being concerned about me.” She stretched, and smiled winsomely at him.

“Whatever is the matter, o beauty most fair?” he asked.

“I have an itch,” she said, her smile turning suggestive. “And only you can scratch it.”

“If I must,” he sighed, and leaned forward again.