catmask for follows, reblogs, and yapping

ever since finishing the game I've been pondering my headcanon/au for how erik's post canon situation would look like if he lived on and I finally sat down to sketch out some concepts for it... still got thoughts forming on it but in short he does not get better! also just an excuse to draw him in all black + his red. my favourite edgelord <3

don't look too closely at the historical accuracy of these I was chasing cool factor for now... will be putting my reasearch glasses on now

close ups!

totem; post game hansry; rated t, inventing new blasphemies in love rituals; 3k words; hans carves henry a wooden figure of himself. through blood and killing and stealing and coming home, it becomes the only real thing.

.

“We certainly didn’t invent giving gifts,” he whispers. “Although it feels like it. It feels like nobody has ever given anyone anything until you gave me this little wooden figure.”

Hans shrugs. Freckles on his shoulders, an old scar just under the collarbone from a wound Henry wasn’t there to defend him from, once. More lost details, more differences, more that persists only in Henry’s mind. Oh, to capture this. To be able to hold it in his hand with such pressure that it breaks the skin. To absorb it and let it absorb him.

“Why not?” Hans asks. “We can say we invented it.”

“You can’t just say that.”

“I can say whatever I want. Kiss me. I’ll invent a new way to show you what I mean.”

Henry lowers his head. His hand on Hans’s chest brushes once more on the blonde hair there. Yellow in the sunlight, like the figure he carved and painted and presented to Henry. Hans’s mouth is like water to kiss. Henry’s tongue slips in easily. He could sink here, straight through Hans, through their bed, through the ground, into nonexistence. The figure in Hans’s hand the only solid and real thing around them. Through blood and killing and stealing and coming home, the only real thing.

Knight of the dark sun

Gustave Doré (1832–1883), “The Corpse Candles”

illustration from “The Days of Chivalry; Or, The Legend of Croquemitaine” by Ernest L’Épine (as Quatrelles), 1866

engraved by Heliodore Joseph Pisan (1822–1890)