#hansryversary

But he's seen Hans at full speed, and knows he's chopping up his own gait to compensate for Henry's shorter legs.

Between them, the streets of Rattay seem to fold. In moments, they're across the drawbridge, at the door to his humble shelter. He wrests himself free, expecting to hear Hans continue up the stairs to the upper levels of Pirkstein. But the footsteps ahead of him suddenly stop.

"Henry, where do you think you're going?"

In the high walls of Pirkstein, Hans is just a shadow, a black shape within a black courtyard.

"To bed," Henry replies dumbly.

"We have those in the castle. Come on!" Hans doesn't wait for an answer before he grasps Henry's wrist again. Their feet hammer up the wooden steps to Hans's temporary accommodations.

The fire is going in the hearth, recently tended by some dedicated servant, since departed. After minutes of running blindly in the dark, being able to see more than shapes feels like an indulgence. The whole room looks bright as a painting, the murals fresh and vivid, although all things pale compared to the man who walks in their midst. Henry shuts the door behind him as Hans moves unencumbered through the room, throwing the window open to let in the night air.

"Christ, what an evening!" he sighs, stretching his arms up. A flash of his back peers out at Henry between his braies and his shirt, just a glimpse of the divot where his spine climbs up his torso.

"I'll say," Henry sighs. Hot from the run and the fire, he tugs off his scarf. "I can't remember the last time I sang sober… Did my lord enjoy himself, at least?"

"Enjoy being thrown out on my arse by some peasant?"

Not a peasant, Henry thinks. No more than he's one. But that remark pales to the more prescient matter at hand, one that makes something inside Henry sit up with interest.

"What? You mean you didn't…?"

"No! Christ, Henry." Hans has turned to him, unbuttoning his clothes with an indignant little snort that flares his nostrils. It's easy to stare. Harder to turn away, staring into the fire like he hopes the flames will sear away the impression of Hans's clavicle bone. "I've been known to get… overeager on occasion, but she wasn't that pretty!"

"But you said—"

"I know, I know." From the corner of his eyes he can see Hans's pourpoint hanging loose, shrugged away. "I fear I may have given my heart away too quickly. She couldn't even read, can you believe it?"

"Neither could I 'til a short time ago."

"You had other things going for you," Hans says dismissively.

"Like what?"

The question calls for him to look over at Hans. He finds him struck still in the midst of putting away his dayclothes, as if he's realised what he just said, and been asked in reponse. "You have a knight's bearing," he says, but is certain to add, "albeit not one's blood. I daresay even true knight's could stand to learn something from you."

Hans clears his throat, glancing at Henry, stood in the middle of the room like a deer caught in a hunter's sight. "Go sit down," he fusses. "You look like a servant standing there."

"Right, ehm…" Henry's heart is still fast-paced from the journey here. His eyes dart around the room, trying to remember which bed Hans favours and choosing the opposite. The mattress soon bears the weight of two men, though, as Hans drops beside him in nothing but his braies and his undershirt.

He had seen him naked before, but this is more intimate by far. Fine blond hairs grow in a uniform layer down his legs— not like Henry's, whose dark, thick hair practically has to be brushed flat. He can see the fire between Hans's toes when he stretches. He can sense the heat between their bodies where their shoulders and thighs touch.

Hans seems ignorant to all these little intimacies, stretching his neck back to bounce his skull against the wall. "I don't know what I was thinking."

"You were a man in love," Henry says, in a gentle voice he'd never thought Hans would hear. "What was there to think about?"

Peering through his lashes, Hans smiles at Henry out of the side of his mouth.

"Perhaps you're right. Here…" He produces the letter from where he must have clutched it after he undressed and hands it, unthinking, to Henry. The parchment is a little tattered, a little crumpled, a little ruined in the strength of Hans's palm. Henry unfolds it, flattening it against his thigh as Hans adds, "You read it. At least you can appreciate my verse."

"I haven't read much about love. Besides what you gave me."

"Keep them. It may help you when you fall in love."

Heat rushes to his ears. "I don't know about that, Sir."

"You don't expect to fall in love?"

"It's not that, it's just when I do, I don't expect I'll be writing poetry about it. Not… not any they'd want to listen to, like." Playing with the folded flap of Hans's letter like it's the soft purse of Mutt's ear, he finds himself hoping the soft, downy feathers swallow him whole.

He can hear Hans smiling. "Well, I'd like to hear it, even if she won't. But only if you read mine now, else I'll never speak to you again- and tell me what you think!"

Henry laughs, then Hans. "Alright," he relents. "Shall I read aloud?"

In the days after their hunt, he had honed his knowledge of the written word at Hans's bedside, muttering aloud the few books he could afford until Hans bid he read for them both. It's that he hearkens to, now, though they haven't known one another long enough for him to rightly call it a pasttime.

"If you like. I shan't stop you."

Henry clears his throat before he begins:

"My sweetest," he says. He casts his eyes towards Hans, and finds him looking back; an inscrutable expression is riddled on his face. "I am your most devoted secret admirer. Secret, for until I know you long for me as I do for you, I shall not make myself known to you…"

As he continues on, there is something familiar about Hans's verse. His choice of words, crude and heavy with the expectation of sex. They seem almost secondhand, as if he had inherited off of some other man who had told him all the things their sex found beautiful about the other. It isn't a quality he expects to see in Hans's work. Hans, who is always talking about pretty girls and good times.

His voice pitches up a little as he nears the end, nervous at even the notion that another man might understand. By the time the words "Your most ardent Secret Admirer" leaves his lips he almost sounds like he's singing— more a bird's tune than the rough drinking song he had tripped through earlier to disguise the sound of Hans's escapades upstairs.

He lets the last words linger until he nearly forgets who they're for.

Karolina, the butcher's daughter.

"It's beautiful," he says at last, pained by his own earnestness. He's read plenty, now, but little he felt seen by. He had thought reading was for seeing parts of the world he would never go to, not somewhere he might see himself reflected. "Pity she couldn't read it."

No answer. Henry looks, and Hans is sleeping, drifting off to one side. He ought not be surprised, it had happened before, when he was still healing. Though he may be healing, still. Just instead of a Cuman's arrow, it's a broken heart.

"Hans?"

He tries to wake him (or maybe he just wants to touch him), delicately brushing the noble angles of his face with his fingers. Hans doesn't stir, but sinks, nose burying into the soft flesh of Henry's arm.

He hasn't slept in the same bed as another since his parents, climbing carefully in after that party the night before the raid. His Ma and Pa slept so peacefully beside each other, mouths slightly open to let the air in, but he wonders now if there were ever a time when they shared a bed as he does now with Hans— their unquiet hearts beating in their chests.

It isn't a memory. Maybe it isn't a dream.

Bianca waits by the river, her arms full of sticks. They are five and ten-and-five and twenty. They are racing sticks down the river. Bianca will switch guesses when she sees half-way down that her first pick will lose, and he will let her.

"We were never going to get married, were we?" she asks— or he does.

"No," he says— or she does. "I don't think so."

"I wish I were alive so you could ask," she says. "And so I could tell you no."

"Me, too."

They follow the sticks longer than ever before: beyond Skalitz, past Talmberg, to the mill at Rattay's feet. They swim together in an impossible current, uphill, to the market town's gates. Bianca's stick gets caught upon another, and another after that. A hundred little sticks, piled up, never making it to Rattay.

Somehow, his slips through. The miller's wheel pushes it, and it tumbles through the slates. A yellow feather skims across the surface of the stream, just ahead of the linden stick, guiding it through.

"Kurva!" He had always liked the sound of her cursing, the nasty words so sweet in her voice. "Looks like I've lost."

"Ah, you'll win next time," he tells her.

"You better be sure I do," she teases. She's drifting away, away from him— or he is, as his stick floats away, away. Into the castle. Beyond Skalitz.

"I love you, Bianca."

"I loved you, Hal. Give Tess my love, as well."

They had laid down together overnight. Henry with his head on a pillow and Hans curled against his chest. The spear of his nose points towards his heart.

Hares and boars were nothing compared to the sounds humans were capable of making. They didn’t cry out as much, weren’t begging for their lives and welfare of their loved ones as they were left in abandon as a soon-to-be cold corpse on the ground, with all of their history, both past and future, burned away.

The corpses of animals didn’t look ugly, either, didn’t look perverted in the way human corpses did. Like a sight no one should ever be prepared to witness. And yet, Hans had come to see that sight so often now, it hardly made his heart skip a beat anymore, and he felt sickened by the mere thought of it.

Animals never seemed to Hans much as anything except for these moving things he had sometimes shot at for sport, as well as the source of the meat he’d been eating every single day without a moment’s thought put behind it.

Until much recently, he had never even butchered an animal, never cared to cleave a knife past meat and bones himself, which wouldn’t come to anyone’s surprise after the dirty work he had put out over and over during his brief venture as a poacher.

People – the ones who had known his father more than Hans ever had himself – had told him how much of an unconventional person his old man had been. All too adventurous and never too above getting his own hands dirty, that’s what people had said about him.

Perhaps butchering an animal was something his father might have taught him. That was, eventually, if fate had only meant for his life to turn out differently to the mess it was today. If only his father hadn’t been so adventurous as to get himself killed. If only… everything had turned out differently.

Hans barely had time to linger on it, but there was a faint smile creeping on his face despite his circumstance, at the thought that his father and him may not have been too different from each other. It nearly made him feel joy as he let go of his ninth arrow, hitting yet another Praguer, this time in the knee, crippling him instantly.

A clean shot. A perfect mark.

Thank you for getting that one for me, Hans.

It’s what Hans imagined Henry thinking as the man threw him a smile over his shoulder, as if they were both one and the same.

I’ve been wanting to write something set during the first game for a while, so Hansryversary came at just the right time. I hope you enjoyed it! I haven’t written het sex in ages; honestly, I think I’ve done it once in my 30 years of life, so I’m a little rusty. The next and final chapter will be available over the weekend.

Losing both his horse and two of his royal hunting hounds in one fell swoop was a deed not even Hans thought himself capable of, yet nearly losing his life to those barbaric Cumans may have topped it all, were it not for his newly appointed page who had gracefully cut him loose and aided him in his dire escape.

But at the same time, who could have guessed those Cuman bastards to be as bold enough as to set up camp so close to castle grounds?

It was madness as much as it was certain proof of how much the country of Bohemia had fallen since King Charles’ departure from life – that was, if what had happened to Skalitz wasn’t proof enough.

“How are you holding up, my lord?”

It was when the two of them were about halfway back to Pirkstein when Henry asked him, his breath as exhausted as young Lord Capon’s.

The boy had been carrying him all this way, yet at the same time, did so with arms Hans thought were surprisingly well trained for what he had believed a blacksmith’s skills to be worth for.

“Not great,” Hans replied with heavy eyes before he let out an exasperated groan. “I feel like my head’s going to kill me,” he added.

His face was bloodied and bruised nearly beyond recognition, his right eye swollen and his lip busted open after many a blow he received from his savage captors.

The sun was already threatening to set behind them beyond the distant forests, and yet, Hans’ steps became less and less motivated to keep going nonetheless. Less steady.

For once, Hans wished he had stopped caring about putting that blacksmith’s boy in his place and had simply given him a horse as well. At least then, they might have been able to ride that horse back to the castle instead. However, with how things had turned out now, Hans was but a mere hair’s breadth away from fainting with how long he’d been forced to stand and limp on his feet despite the injuries he’d retained from his Cuman attackers.