Work Text:
Follow me between the jaws of fate,
So I can have you to myself for once.
Aries was having a fucking awful day.
The full-bodied whiskey sitting in a crystal glass that wept condensation upon his fingertips was telling of his mood. He was not a heavy drinker by any standards, only breaking into his (admittedly expensive) cache when his urge to staunch his rising anger grew uncontrollable. The smoky undertones of his drink soothed even the tautest of muscles in his shoulders, his anger waning into something more controllable, although it did not crest into anything enjoyable.
If anything, the whiskey simply numbed.
An easy solution, one far better than giving into the rage that wanted to swallow him horns-first. It’s why, he supposed, that anger does not flood his veins when there’s an unwelcome rapt at his door. The whiskey was doing its job, then, because he despised unsolicited visitors.
Actually, he just hated visitors in general. But all he can muster is a flicker of fleeting annoyance as he pushes off the countertop he was perched upon to pad to his foyer. Whoever it was he would simply just turn away; tell them he was busy and to not bother coming back. He wasn’t some woodside sanctuary, people couldn’t come to his door seeking solstice and be prepared for him to accept them.
He was deemed unapproachable by those who knew him, anyone living nearby warned travelers to avoid his cabin, for he was not keen on adventurers looking to seek free handouts from him.
If he was left alone, it would benefit everyone. Mostly him.
Luckily his bitter reputation meant not a soul whispered past his home, now more than any other time of the year. The peak of winter season put a snug cap on travelers, the weather and snow too perilous in the unpaved territories that he nestled himself in.
It was silent. Perfect. Quiet.
The knock on his door echoed again.
He opens it with as much disdain as one can muster while opening a door, his right arm propped above his head upon the doorframe, letting his knuckles press against his forehead as he leaned.
“What-” He begins to say, only to silence himself, his fair eyebrows narrowing into something like wariness when he assesses the person before him. It’s a man that stands in the mouth of his home, hands pressed into the pockets of his fur-lined black coat as he poses so…casually in the doorway. Nothing reminiscent of the anxious, tired travelers that Aries turns away every year.
His hair is unkempt, likely from the tossing's of the winter wind but there’s a striking streak of white that colors a quarter of his otherwise dark hair, that particular slice of silver drifting just right above his eyes.
Sanguine,
hungry
eyes that rake over Aries in one quick, observant glance.
It’s strange how utterly naked this stranger’s gaze makes Aries feel, although the sweater he is swaddled in was transparent, or perhaps he himself was made of crystalline glass.
“You look cold,” The man’s voice is velvet, a curl of his tongue indicating an elvish accent. “I can only imagine us gawking at one another is not going to warm you.”
Great, so he was a stranger and a smartass. Gods help him.
“Who are you?” Aries grinds out through clenched teeth, even angrier because the devil was right, he was cold.
“Invite me in and perhaps we can formally introduce one another.”
“You pin me a fool? I’m not bringing in an unfamiliar outsider. Better yet, don’t answer me at all and leave instead. I could do without this unwarranted visit.” He makes a move to shut the door, noting that the stranger’s face does pinch in slight annoyance. However, he’s stopped by a steel-tipped boot wedging itself between the wall and door, preventing its close. A deep hiss slides from his bared teeth and he rips the door back, his knuckles clenched to white around its brass handle.
“What do you want?”
“Temper, temper,” The man croons, his hands that were previously nestled in his coat pocket coming to rest upon the door, furthering its inability to close. “I wasn’t aware Diotrephes acquainted himself with such pissy company.”
Aries’ hand flexes on the doorknob. A hitch locks up his chest.
…Diotrephes sent this man?
Why send someone instead of just coming himself? Was Aries so much of a disgrace that his former elven mentor refused to risk lacerating his pristine reputation?
The man would have seemed to catch onto Aries’ sudden foggy hesitance, and he speaks again but his voice is a touch gentler.
“Let us talk. I know my word means nothing to you, but I swear to you I am not here to harm you.”
“And I suppose I’m just required to take your empty promise? You may know Diotrephes by name, but how do I know he really sent you? Anyone could pretend to know him.” Aries says, although he was beginning to realize with a sliver of unease that regardless of how many “no’s” he could possibly say, this man was refusing to waver.
“You seem to be a creature of immense paranoia,” The stranger replies with clear frustration, whatever previous gentleness suddenly gone. “Diotrephes did not send me. I have not arrived on his behalf, nor have I come to hurt you. I just have…questions. Questions I cannot leave this forest without knowing the answers to.”
Paranoia? That’s rich. A total and utter stranger happens across Aries’ door, isolated in miles of uninhabited forest, in the dead of winter, who also on happenstance knows Aries’ familiarity with Diotrephes…and he calls his skepticism and hesitance paranoia? What an empty-headed, uncouth bastard.
But…his shoulders slump from their raised hackles just a bit, and he pins the man before him with one last, wary glance.
“What questions?”
-
It takes only takes a mere hour before Aries comes to the dreadful conclusion that this stranger wasn’t just some lost wanderer that spiraled off his traveling path by the bitter winter, but instead a man of very high status with mighty influence in the city east of this darkened woodland. The catch was, however, that he -Hadria, he later told him his name- for two hundred years had been sealed off from this current world, becoming forcefully trapped in another realm so far out of the reach of his home world.
From what Aries could gather from Hadria’s lamenting sob story, the plane of reality he had been trapped in was devoid of much life. He was also simply assuming it had been two hundred years, Hadria stated that after a while time molds and blurs into an undecipherable smear. With a realm that lacked anything living, there was no way for him to keep constant track of the years as they trickled by, so he was only going based off his own memory which he unwillingly admitted was since faded.
He explains how he knows Diotrephes, but that conversation remained short and blunt. Both because Aries’ unwillingness to hear about a mentor he left after a bitter fallout and because Hadria himself appeared to also have some harsh resentment for the elder elf.
Diotrephes and Hadria were partners at one point. Not romantically, but the two of them worked for one another. Something had happened, Hadria’s explanation remaining stiff and vague, and they no longer speak. That was it.
Aries could not find it within himself to give a damn about any acquaintance Diotrephes had; past or present. Once he broke off from Diotrephes’ influence and secluded himself in his intentional isolation was when he officially bit through and snapped the metaphorical ribbon that was his bond with him.
No, what concerned him the most about all of this is why Hadria came here...and how he knew of his involvement with Diotrephes. For a man who had been sealed away for two centuries he obviously knew of something, or someone, that tipped him of Aries’ location.
But why ?
“What is your interest in me?” He asks, not bothering to mask the irritated lilt in his voice.
Regret claws hot and rapid through his chest as soon as he asks, however, because a carnivorous grin splits Hadria’s handsome face in two.
“Oh, would you like to find out?”
-
Aries hisses, quick, sharp and feline.
Hadria has effortlessly pushed and pinned him back against a wooden countertop, an infuriatingly lax hand pressing on the center of his chest to ease him upon the surface.
“Strange,” He says, a vaguely sardonic note in his words as he hovers above a successfully pinned-down Aries. “It is clear to me that you are Elven, I feel it in your magic, I see it in your pointed ears. But you are no elf I have ever met before. What are you? Are you a hybrid?” As if to make his point even sharper, his offhand that wasn’t forcing Aries against the counter flits upwards to wrap fingers around the antler-like horns that protrude from his skull.
“Elves, as far as I’m aware, have never had horns.” His thumb slides languidly up the thicker stem of Aries’ horns, eventually following the branches that taper off to a point.
Aries twitches, a muscle in his thigh spasming as his horns are stroked. Hundreds of little nerve endings are rocketing a likable sensation throughout the span of his skull, tickling the very nape of his neck.
He’s being pet. And he likes it.
“I am,” He replies and wills his voice not to shiver. “An unholy amalgamation of unwanted races in a single body. Two centuries of being denied any loyalty by any race I match myself to.”
Hadria does frown at this information, a shadow of…something, Aries can’t quite read it, darkening those bright sanguine eyes.
“Two hundred years ago you were born...and I still lie trapped in another plane of existence?” The question is rhetorical, musings of a man scorned by time.
Aries doesn’t answer him, but the sneer that lifts his lips above his teeth does fade, the empathetic part of him not yet dead and gone like he pretended it to be. Hadria was a complete stranger to this world, in a manner of speaking. This current timeline held no former comforts of the world he explored when he was in his prime and was not keen on ever giving it back to him.
What was it like to come back to a world that was now so alien? The world that claimed you were so important, so crucial to it, only to see it had thrived without you?
Would that sensation be humbling? Scary? Enraging?
Aries would be spitting mad.
“Stop giving me those pathetic puppy eyes, babyelf.” Hadria says with a light chuckle, his sonder mood vanishing under the smile that quirked the edges of his lips upwards.
Aries opens his mouth to hiss that he doesn’t have
puppy eyes
and gods forgive him if he felt
sympathy-
Hadria blinks, a quiet and curious little “oh” echoing from him. For some reason, that makes Aries extremely self-conscious, and he snaps his jaws shut with a snarl wrinkling his nose. Oh?
What does “oh” mean?
“You have fangs.”
“Yes,” Aries rolls and stretches each syllable slowly, cautiously. “Astute observation.”
“Let me see again.”
Aries almost, almost, laughs. It’s such a simple but bewildering request, he’s certain Hadria is jesting. What would he want with his teeth?
“What?”
Hadria presses that firm hand tighter against the center of his chest, his fingers spidering across Aries' galloping heartbeat.
“You heard me.” He murmurs, there's a sharp lilt to his tone, a shadow of utter authority reaching clawed fingertips through his lips. But Aries balks, both due to his overwhelming embarrassment and because he's not keen on listening to some fucking guy who happened to be someone of high caliber two hundred years ago.
Not wanting this to go any further than it already has -his personal space boundaries stretched far and thin- he makes a move to push Hadria up and off of him, but the squirm of his body is futile against the stony resistance that is trapping him between countertop and wall.
Hadria is unmovable, his legs completely locking Aries’ own between them, and his arm is braced upon the counter surface, the lean muscles in his bicep and forearm feathering along his arm as he steadies himself against the movement. But Aries has leverage from behind him, if he could get his arms in position in front of himself, he could give one good heave to Hadria’s chest and make him stumble-
“You're such a squirmy little pup, you know that?” Hadria chides in a breathy whisper and there's a carnivorous glitter to his eye when he speaks. A wolf’s gaze.
Aries swears isn't afraid. He isn't.
Fingers wrap alongside the bottom of Aries' jaw, a pull and a tug forcing his head into submission.
There's no panic that constricts his heart. The shiver in his lungs is not fear, he lies to himself.
“All of that resistance only to inevitably surrender. Such a common fate for those who encounter me,” Hadria’s voice holds a faint echo of heartache and…regret perhaps? His wolfish expression dulling into something more distant, a delirious sort of fog Aries had only seen on people sick with fever replacing the once-predatory arrogance.
What…just happened? To have such contrasting switch ups of one's mood? Aries couldn't pinpoint whether Hadria wanted to kill him or taunt him, with his temperament being so unpredictable.
Then Hadria blinks once, twice, and the expression evaporates.
His fingers shift alongside the warmed skin of Aries’ jaw and cheek, like he's stroking the face of a lover, before four of his fingers slide beneath his jaw to brush his throat, his thumb pressing against his sealed lips.
“I won't ask again. Open up.”
Aries bristles in pent frustration, an angry little hiss escaping his clenched teeth but he's quickly muffled when Hadria’s thumb snakes into his mouth, glazing over one of his elongated canines. His head jerks to free himself from this
awfully
intrusive gesture, but Hadria's other hand has curled fingers around his nape, pulling him down and rendering his head immobile.
Like a scuffed kitten.
“Only your top canines seem to be so unnaturally pointed. Is your species carnivorous? Or are you-" Hadria huffs a breath through his parted lips right after Aries' upper canine slices a perfect, clean cut directly through the thick center of his thumb.
The scent of blood immediately hits Aries, the coppery, red
deliciousness
laying heavy on the back of his tongue. His blood
sings
to him, completely jarring him from his former frustration.
What
, he feverishly thinks,
is this
? He did crave blood, but only like one bearing a sweet tooth would crave a dessert. It was a want. A fading desire that could be ignored.
This was a need
. The blood that beaded mere centimeters from his tongue was wailing to be drank, to be drained.
Oh,
oh
, how his teeth
hurt
.
Hadria didn't remove his now-leaking digit either, just continued to observe the sudden cause for Aries to salivate so heavily.
"Vampiric." He mused at last. "Curious."
He then shifted his fingers, so his thumb was facing downwards, and dragged his thin wound along the wet dripping mess that was Aries' tongue.
Every single bitter cell in him awakens .
“Oh, little elf,” Hadria’s hushed voice murmurs. “You’re quivering. ”
Grow back your sharpest teeth,
You know my desire.