when things break bad...

Bad End AU Meme

Sometimes you want a fix-it AU. You want everyone to live, to be happy, to find love, so on and so forth. You want the bad guy to lose early, for victory and triumph. Those are great things. Those are happy things. But sometimes terrible things happen to good people and you want to get catharsis through making some characters suffer. We understand. We really do. Sometimes no one wins. Sometimes the villain wins. Sometimes even if the heroes win everything is for naught. Sometimes, things just don't end happily.
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[ There are songs in the old country for keeping the wolves away - chants and charms to hang upon a wooden door to ward off the lean, prowling ghosts. Revered for their strength, perhaps, because when one man stands before another, respect is more becoming than fear. The strongest of men, of course, wore the gray and silver pelts of the beasts. Fierce hunters did not hesitate at the edge of the woods, wondering what lay inside, waiting. Brave men of hard steel did not shiver when the wolves cried from deep within the dark. The old blood of the oldest northern Houses still boasted names that bled valor; these men did not rely upon charms and prayer to keep the wolves away. It was said that these men, like the beasts in the night, had eyes that flickered and shone like angry fire.

But they are not alone in their bravery; there are others who call to the wolves instead of shunning them. There are others who keen for the wolf's strength instead of cowering before it. There remain those in the world who would drink still of the wolf's blood if it would give them animal power. There are those who see the ravaging wolf and see in its hunger their own.

The warrior-woman across the sea is one, he is told, who does not cower. She has sent for the wolf. She has cried out for blood, and she must know that there can be only one answer. There is only one name that will slake her thirst. His reward will come when the fighting is done; they will be wed when the war is won. Perhaps she thinks this a shrewd bargain: she will preserve her honor until she is certain that the wolves will fight as promised. She will see her enemies brought to ruin before she will go to her knees. On this point he does not argue - let her savor her modesty, if she will. She must know that there will be no fleeing when the fighting is done, no recanting of allegiances made. She must know herself surrounded, no matter how proud her heart may be. She must have felt, like a doe in the woods, his eyes upon her.

And the battle is won, because wolves have no taste for compromise. Their violence, as their hunger, is absolute. The feasting will not be swift and discreet; they will gnaw upon the bones of this victory for as long as they see fit to stay. Blood will continue to flow though the steel has again been sheathed. Their gloating and their revelry is voracious. The wolf's hunger is excruciating, bristling; the eldest Stark son knows that the gods look down in jealousy when the beasts feed. How could they not ache for the same raw pleasures? The savage joys, like the savage butchery, will not be mild.

But there is one death yet to make, though Edoras be theirs; one swing left for the steel before the heavier sword is drawn. Gríma, that is the name which is best spoken like a snarl - this is the man who will die. This is the rat now cornered; this will be Brandon's gift to his bride. As has ever been true in the north, there is no ceremony, or what may pass for it is little: there waits the worm-tongued man to be beheaded, here are gathered those who would watch his head fall, and beside Rohan's new king stands the woman promised. The wolf's blood surges in black anticipation: Brandon is flushed, chest heaving, shamelessly and visibly roused.

Waning light catches on teeth hard and white as fangs, a dogged grin. ]

Will you have his blood slowly or all at once, my wife?

[What is there left to lose? Her uncle is gone, perished without even the glory of combat: fallen to the slow drip of poisonous words that sapped his will, the ill health that took his strength. Her brother and her cousin, at least, had the decency of honourable deaths, with swords in hands: but they are gone, even so, like her father before them, to the war that Gríma Wormtongue will keep them from, the war that will swallow them slowly, without the blaze of a final stand.]

[She did not linger in Edoras to mourn. She was not fool enough to miss the way that Gríma had gathered to him men who will obey, given coin enough; nor how he looked at her, knowing that in her lies the truest claim to power, beyond what silver and gold can buy. She took sword and shield, and the men she held in closest trust, and she ran - but she did not flee.]

[Over time, he had consolidated his power, and though there are many true men of Rohan who will rally to her, there are many others who will not; who will not think a woman capable of rule in such dark times. The thought makes her blood boil. But she has returned, just as she planned from the beginning: and if she must buy justice with shame, then she will do it. Anything, but fade inglorious into the darkness, and see Rohan burn without ever setting flame to the beacons.]

[And here she is: and here is her enemy, at her feet. The adrenaline still surges through her, and there is a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, to have brought such bloodshed to the gates of the Golden Hall where once she and her brother played; but then she remembers how her king withered and faded before her eyes, how Éomer died in exile at the behest of the traitor before her, and she feels no guilt or dread at all. Better this, a thousand times better this, than that he should live. Whatever the price, she will pay it gladly.]

[She has no eyes for her new husband, nor, in this moment, thought for him. She has not even noticed how he pants and slavers, so entangled is she in her own hatred. Her jaw is taut enough to ache, her knuckles white on the hilt of what was once her brother's sword. Her voice is cold.]

I have waited long enough already.

[The cringing, cowering thing before her is scarcely a man. He ran, at the last: and now he crawls on his belly, wet-eyed and begging, and before this began, she had never killed a man save in her thoughts. But the sword comes so readily to her hand, and she has been blooded twenty times over in their road to this place, and she will not hesitate. There is nothing she has wanted, in all her life, so much as this moment.]

[The bone gives her only momentary resistance. She will not grant anything the chance to stay her. She swings the sword two-handed, grunting with the force of it, and the blood sprays hot and reeking, the lank-haired head of Gríma rolling a little way before it comes to rest: and to her own surprise, she laughs, a steel-ringing sound that has no warmth, but a resounding ring of triumph.]

Forþġewīt wræcsíþ, swica! [She spits.] For the Mark!

[ His is a harsh bark of laughter, but it is at once not alone in the hall - his bride, too, is mirthful. It is not a maiden's mirth: it is not blushing and kind. It is not the laughter of sweet humor, nor is it that anxious note men find when they waver. There is nothing in it that wavers. It has, instead, the hard certainty of ice; it is as solid and simple as hate.

From so fair a woman, it might have seemed strange a sound. To look at her, one would think she laughed only in deference to bolder voices. She is a woman, anyone's measuring glance would find: golden-haired, fine of face, with a body crafted for a man's pleasures. His appreciation of her make goes no farther than what his eyes can see; he has yet granted her wit no mind. All that has stayed his appetite for her is an equal gluttony for the spoils before them.

The beaten man begs, a quivering, cornered beast; where strength has failed him, he will turn to bloodless mercy. It will not come. The silver of the sword lunges, the head rolls, and his wife snarls in a brute tongue that Brandon does not know. She surely speaks in praise of their victory, for the honor of the kingdom won, a cry that thrills in this bloody glory.

She has not given her swaggering husband his due, of course - she does not come as a faithful wolfess should, to slink and plead and rain upon him worships sweet. She is held in thrall still by the beauty of all they have wrought, and for a moment he is enchanted in turn. But enchantments do not always glimmer gently, as the stories might tell. Some are dark, and serve only darker hungers. Some only wrench the body to harder aggression.

Hunger, already palpable, flares wherever he was made to feel. It tightens and knots in his jaw; it races up the long muscle of his back; it clenches in his fists; it aches to be spent in every muscle still heaving. Instinct yearns to take her by the nape of the neck, to toss her to the same ground even now drinking the dead man's blood, to pin her flat and take what was promised. The sight of the blood, the ripe tang of it, spurs his lust as plainly as the stroke of a bare hand, and he comes forward, though it is not to seize his wife.

His own sword is drawn in a silver streak, brought above his head with both hands on the hilt, and brought down again to cleave the dead man's back. Blood gleams in profusion here, too - and splintered bone and all the rank proof of the gods' disdain for man - and the grunt which carries the swing rolls with pleasure.

He beholds the fresh desecration for a long moment, long enough to consume all with a flash of his steel eyes, and then he turns to the woman who took the coward's head. Here his eyes raze again, and the step that brings him to her is a refocusing of his intent, a narrowing of that hunger which has waited long enough. His hand rises to the side of her head, toward her hair, with the unflinching purpose of sinking his claws there. A better man would wonder if his lady might not welcome such a touch at an execution, but he is not a man often given pause. For him there is only blood. ]

And now I will have yours.

The truth is that she has not given much thought, for all her planning, to what it will mean to be wedded. It has been easy enough to set aside, for it will be a short marriage, in the tale she has spun for herself: short, and ending in both their deaths, but not before they take back the Mark and cut a bloody swathe through the forces of Mordor. She has brought the warlord to the land in need of war; and they will pull back the civilians to the Hornburg, and the fighting men will ride East (with her among them, of course), and their deaths will be the stuff of songs.

The intervening period, then - that inevitably short marriage - has not seemed important, only a moment in a greater matter. But now he is closer than she has, for the most part, allowed him; and there is blood on his hands, as there is on hers; and the air reeks of blood and death, and there is no small part of her that sings to that metal tang. And she sees the hunger in his eyes, feels rough fingers sink into the blood-smirched gold of her hair, and understanding comes like a hammer-blow upon a woman who, for all her sword and shield, is a maiden still: this is what she has traded, in her innocence and her fury, for justice. This bloody hand, and the heat of his body searing even across the small distance between them, and the wild hunger in his eyes. There is an animal behind his face, silvered teeth bared.

Gríma's blood laps against the toe of her boot, spreading from the brutalised body of the man who took everything from her. There is an animal in her, too, and it howls in triumph; and her blood is quickened, her high cheekbones flushed, and perhaps her hunger is not quite the same as his, but there is a hunger that coils and rises in her, even so.

She turns her face up to his, her own eyes steel-sharp, meeting his gaze unflinching. This is what she has traded, she thinks again, for her people: for them she has pilloried her honour, betrayed the laws of the Mark, slain her own countrymen on the steps of the city. For Rohan, she has cast aside the cold purity and maiden gentleness that for so long were her armour and her chains. And she is not blind to her own dishonour; and there is some part of her that revels in the brutal hunger in his gaze, the violence that thrums behind it, the crudeness of his approach. It seems fitting. She did not return to this city to take a maiden's place, nor that of a noble and honourable wife. She came for blood. What else should pay for it?

There is another part, too. His breath is hot against her cheek, where spatters of scalding blood rapidly grow cold. Her adrenaline thunders through her veins; her heart a galloping rush, a cavalry charge of triumphant, scornful energy; and her breath catches a little in her throat, and she thinks But you will not die a maid; and she is exquisitely, terribly aware of the bare column of her throat, an animal vulnerability, and just as aware of the bloody sword still hanging from her hand. She feels herself at once predator and prey, warrior and maiden, traitor and victim; and there is another part that pulses and rushes with the raw, tautly-balanced energy of the moment, and those storm-grey eyes that meet his darken by the moment.

"Now?" Her voice is low, for him alone, but it is not shy; if anything, alongside incredulity, there is an edge of something like excitement.

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when things break bad...

Bad End AU Meme

honey i'm home (and also blanket cw for violence, noncon, etc)

be still my beating heart

no idea why i went with brackets, we can switch if u wanna!

let's go prose