Hermit Writing Corner

Pirate AU: Desert duo pirates! The story starts when Grian’s ship takes down the merchant ship Scar was on at the time.

Pirate AU Origins: Little blurbs I haven’t been able to get out of my head about their time before they were pirates

Pygmalion AU: To be honest, with the direction I’m taking it, this would be more fit to a Greek Mythos AU, but it has it’s roots in Pygmalion. Scar is a sculptor :]

Archeologist AU: Not an accurate representation of digging or deserts. Basically, it’s modern day desert duo trying to find treasure and uncover the story of their newest dig site, The Red Desert. The two more experienced members of their dig team seem to be a bit more connected to this case than the rest of them. Weird.

The wastes were turning up useless scrap after useless scrap, Mumbo too busy with a commission to entertain him, even the ticking of his wings was the same as ever. They didn’t even ache. At least then, complaining or not, wouldn’t leave him bored.

If he’s being honest, he probably shouldn’t have gone out to scavenge.

Days like these are best kept in line by staying in a place with overarching rules, a guarantee he won’t overstep anything and end up missing more than a chunk of wing.

The wastes don’t have that. They have metal, radiation, rust, and scavengers.

“This is a lot further than we’ve travelled before,” remarks Scar, frayed gas mask making him seem bizarrely human, bizarrely out of place in one of mumbo’s white button up and a false corset. He knows by the whirl of Scar’s fans, that the green metal would be warm to the touch.

He climbs the hill anyway.

There’s the clanging of other scavengers, only two of them at the foot, and they’re pulling something out of a shaking pile that’s large and expensive.

“Ooh, a lucky find for those fellas!”

Grian says nothing in return.

His wings click. Once. Twice.

Take it from them.

He widens his stance, careful not to make a sound on copper and aluminum and iron.

Imagine how excited Mumbo will be.

His wings spread like butter across the sky.

And he jumps. Dives, towards the two.

What should’ve happened was a simple wrap of his hands around the machinery and an arc back into the air and away. What should’ve happened would have been enough to satiate his boredom. What should’ve happened, is that he should have been faster.

What did happen, is that he gets his hands curled around the machine. He’s on the upbeat of his wings, when a hand wraps around his ankle.

He registers the impact. He registers the stars. He registers how the metal crumples beneath him, denting and damaging the scrap.

And then he registers the pain of being slammed into the ground.

“What the fuck, you little asshat!” The nearest one sounds. Their mask is colored the same white as the gleam of a jawbone. They raise a foot and stomp on Grian’s hand, grinding it into the dry dirt with the heel.

He has half a mind to scan the hills for Scar, but the android is lost among the shadows and the piles of scrap encircling them. His heart sinks.

“Hey, dude!” Comes the second one—their mask is layered to look like a growing of fungus. “Take it easy, they’re already down.”

“Their mask is cool,” remarks the third, the one his missed and the one who grabbed him. Their mask is simple and plain, a stark contrast to his own, hooked in the shape of a beak. They’re dressed in dark browns, almost blended completely against the ground.

“That doesn’t matter, they tried to *steal* from us. Why I oughta—“ And they grab his wing.

Something in his mind goes a little haywire. The bones there are fragile, half-molded to metal and muscle, and he does his darnedest to bash their faces in with the prosthetic.

He manages to clip Shrooms across the temple, drawing his knife and lunging at another, but it doesn’t last long. It was never going to last long, three against one. But he gets some good hits in, spills enough blood.

He ends up fully pinned, a boot against his back and his racing heartbeat prominant in the pressure from a steady, constant pull of his wing in a scavenger’s hand.

“What’s going on here?” Comes a familiar voice, and Grian feels like crying. If they leave him alive, at least Scar can get him back to Mumbo.

“Are you with this vulture,” one of them spits.

“I am, and I promised he’s very much learned his lesson—“

“He sliced my arm open,” they growl. And yeah, he did do that. The drip of blood fills him with a cruel pride that they’re going to need to go home after this and waste the day away.

“You deserved it,” he calls back, and is rewarded with a particularly painful tug on his wing.

“Fellas, I promise you that if you let him go, you’ll never see us ever again. Heck, we’ll even leave you little things for yourself to improve profits! How’s that for a deal?”

“How about instead we slice his throat?” And he knows it’s a bluff. Killing someone over a single piece of scrap is ludicrous, and these guys don’t seem insane enough to do it to a first-time offender. They’re farther than typical from their bubble, and while Grian’s had his own fair share of death threats they’ve only ever been serious in total nowhere. It’s got to be a bluff. It has to be.

He’s going to die if it’s not.

Grian looks up, eyes following metal legs to Scar’s face to find the other staring directly at him.

He doesn’t know what Scar sees in him, but he hears his fan kick on just beneath the noise of the wastes.

The android steps forward, steps closer. Grian can’t tell a single thing about what he’s thinking, but he knows his neck is starting to ache from the angle he’s keeping it at to keep Scar in view. Something about the quiet won’t let him look away. Scar rears back a fist.

And then he hears the crack of bone.

The weight falls off his back, his wing, and Grian is left staring into empty space as Scar takes measured steps behind him, and out of view.

The impacts behind him begins to sound wet, like the repeated thump of a hammer against drowned wood.

Grian has dabbled a bit, long before he met Mumbo, in engineering himself. It was more buildings than robots, trains instead of anything that breathes. But there’s one thing he still remembers, clear as day.

A robot may not injure a human being.

He snaps to attention at the sound of footsteps. Unfamiliar, from inside the prince's room. Not an unusual occurrence, as the prince was known to have the occasional lover within (he didn't wish for the prince to snag his hand next with that sly grin of his. That would be unprofessional), but the shout of alarm certainly was.

Things speed up. An intruder. A knife. His sword in his hand.

The assailant left through the window, and Grian would've followed if it wasn't for the iron grip on his elbow. If it wasn't for how he turned back to find his charge with his signature grin fraying, and with blood trickling from a knife that came too close.

He holds him, and things speed up again.

A siege. A plot, with blood stained on the tiles and climbing up the walls.

He has his job, and he does it well.

They'd made it to the stables, smoke and ash in his lungs from a castle burning at his back, and he ushers Scar onto his horse. He would have left his prince there, in favor of staying and fighting, if it wasn't for olive eyes boring into his own and asking him to stay by his side.

His prince’s words were never orders, no matter how Grian wishes so. If they were orders, he wouldn't have a choice in mounting up his own steed and riding away from his dying guardsmen. He didn’t hesitate, though, in following. He never needed to.

Grian’s still staring at that wooden ceiling.

He doesn't remember where they are. He doesn't remember arriving.

The woods ahead of him, the frantic gait of a galloping horse.

Darkness.

Is Scar still with him?

Was he taken?

He shoves himself out of soft sheets onto wood flooring, and is rewarded immediately with a stabbing pain in his abdomen. Where the hard shell of his armor should be instead are bandages, clumsily applied but a solid example of well-enough.

He can put together the rest of the pieces from there.

His collapse is evidently noted, judging by the resulting clamor in the kitchen, and sure enough, rapidly approaching in his familiar, uneven gait is--

"Why are you shirtless?"

And if it were anyone other than his prince, he surely would have gotten a rap on his knuckles for his tone.

But because it is, he's instead rewarded with a beautiful, bubbling laugh.

"What do you mean? I did all this hard work getting us to the safehouse, patchin' you up, and sometimes I just need to let my chest breathe, you know?" his prince says, his crooked smile curling around his words, and Grian feels himself soften at the warmth it gives off.

He can't believe he actually fell for this idiot.

His prince approaches, scooping him up and setting him back on the bed with easy movements and a lot of pain in his side, and Grian gives him a stare once he's done with a bit of writhing.

"It's my job to take care of you, you know," he manages, and it's the pain that makes him breathless. Only the pain. Not the proximity, not the warmth, not how he imagines those hands to linger.

"You’ve protected me plenty,” is the response, and he says it with a softness that has Grian snapping his gaze away from him, towards the door he came from. “Maybe I wanted to return the favor."

Following is a moment without a response, and the gap sits warmly in the air next to quiet birdsong.

"My prince," Grian drawls once his voice returns, and he can see Scar's face drop as the other takes in his tone. "Are you trying to cook?"

Whoever said sheepishness had no place in a royal's expression had never met the prince, and how it throws off any comments pointed at him.

"I thought I'd give it a go, you know? How hard could it be?"

"I smelled it burning.”

"Chef’s choice!"

Grian feels the laugh bubble out of him in peals, and like this, he can pretend the way their hands fell together was something more purposeful than gravity.

This is the man he followed into battle. Will keep following, because he’ll be damned if he lets the most interesting man he’s met die.

Ridiculous.

Grian hops off the table he’s on himself, closing the distance to brush a knuckle against Scar’s cheek to check if the metal’s warm. Having been scavenging and generally being around him for nearly every minute he was awake—Mumbo banned Scar from the workshop after one too many clumsy accidents, so Scar was his—it was bizarre to see him so lifeless again.

It felt wrong, to hold a hand in front of that metal grin and feel no breath from it. He’s usually so full of personality, but his eyes are dull and dilated, and his chest is open while Mumbo works.

He’s just a bot. Someone programmed to be likable and easy to talk to. He’s not anything important.

Don’t get him wrong, Grian’s gotten attached to bots before. There was Grumbot, the little, trashy fortune teller bot Mumbo patched up and then burnt out. There was N.P.C, the simulator that glitched onto an obsessivity with rustic homes.

Scar felt different. Feels different.

His voice changes, ever so slightly, when he wants to smile more than the metal will allow him. And when he gets super excited, the whirr of his fan gets louder and his speech comes faster until it’s almost incomprehensible.

It makes him feel warm, even in the sticky chill of the wastes.

“Where do you think he came from, Mumbo?” He asks, turning his attention to the mechanic.

“I thought you pulled him out of the wastes yourself, mate,” he replies, working on extracting the faulty line in Scar’s chest. His core is ticking steadily, a healthy beat to match the churning of mystery liquid inside.

…Maybe more oil?

He doesn’t care, actually. Redstone wants him dead.

“Well, yes, from the wastes, but I mean before that.”

“Maybe he came from outer space,” Mumbo says, and Grian has to grin.

“What?!”

“Don’t you reckon it was aliens who dump a bunch of mystery metals outside the bubble?” He asks, matching Grian’s smile. “Think about it. It makes perfect sense.”

“Aliens destroyed the world?”

“Definitely. Metal? 100% alien.”

Grian hears the clicks of his wings settling, and he tips his head back and laughs.

“Makes sense as to why the government’s banned him then.”

“Yeah, why he’s—” Mumbo breaks the momentum of the conversation, looking to Grain with his eyes behind his ridiculous googles. “Oh, that’s not part of the bit. He is?”

“…yes? Honestly I don’t see why, maybe something with the uncanny valley.” He punctuates the muse with the clatter of a dozen metal doodads, trying to make space to lean an elbow on the worktable.

“I’ll keep that in mind. I mean, it’s not like the laws are in place for a reason to keep us safe or anything! No, not at all,” Mumbo laughs.

“It’s too late to put him back.”

“I know.” His voice dips, and there’s all that worry Mumbo keeps in his chest. “He brought us a cat.”

“And it’s Scar. He’s more likely to hurt himself than anyone else. First law of robotics and all, those have been around forever.”

Mumbo’s frown doesn’t disappear, and Grian finds uncertainty worming through his mind in turn.