MERCILESSLY
Written on January 26, 2023 (♒︎)
Content Warning: The dynamics surrounding the sexual activity here are such that meaningful consent is not possible, and things get bloody. However, both parties involved show continued enthusiasm throughout the proceedings even in the midst of threatened or actual bodily injury. It also should be noted that both parties do engage in coercive behavior, although Zalbag (as is completely unsurprising given my greater corpus of work) is the character who ends up freshly injured and unconscious post-sex. The violence is also a bit of an edge case. It's roughly typical for a canon with so many beautifully rendered sprites vomiting up blood and isn't terribly explicit, but it's within the range of something that can evoke a visceral "Ow! Oh shit!" reaction.
Author's Notes: This fic is part of an ongoing tradition of me writing something self-indulgent for myself on my birthday. It is also inspired by the January prompt "Whenever I Look at You..." from the 2023 Year of the OTP challenge. The fic itself and its title are inspired by The Bravery's "Hatefuck", which has long been on my playlist for these two.
The battle had not been a glorious one, and Zalbag's eyes never met those of Wiegraf Folles until both of them were halfway back to Igros and it was certain that the man should live to be hanged. He had been nearly killed in the first volley of spellwork; the Hokuten who'd found him considered taking his head prematurely before Zalbag was consulted. It would—perhaps—have been a mercy to let them do so. The healers patched him up on the road as best they could, but he was not well.
They did not speak then. Zalbag had no taste for speech making. Wiegraf poured all his venom through his gaze rather than his tongue. They certainly made no allusions to any past beyond the last several months. There was no thread to tie the men back to the boys they once were—no sign or gesture that might speak to sins long since buried in the northlands. When Zalbag was brought face to face with the former Captain Folles, the only sentiment between them was contempt.
He'd told his men to see he was treated as best they could manage—fairly but with no comforts greater than those owed any prisoner. He imagined Wiegraf—were their roles reversed—would not give him the indignity of any tenderness.
Zalbag wondered sometimes, in the silences of vespertide prayer, if that had been their real crime—if it had not been so much the heat of their blood as the slow-growing warmth beyond it. By the time the Romandans were fled, there had been a familiarity between them that grew dangerous. As mortified as he remained regarding all the particulars of carnal sin, it seemed the greater stain now that he had once yoked himself so unevenly to a commoner in his concerns.
"Will God bury us in different hells, do you think? One for rich men and one for poor? I never heard such a thing, but you talk to the bastard more than I do."
They had been at Riovanes, full of new Dorter ale brought by the city's liberators—the two of them foolish youths some half a year entangled in their offenses. Wiegraf—as he often had— tried to smother Zalbag's apprehensions with mockery. Zalbag—as he often had—took poorly to it.
He remembered that exchange in particular, though–that point where they’d fallen away from spite. He'd not anticipated then the weight of a body breaking the weight of silence: a half embrace as they looked out over the battlements. He had not anticipated he should return it.
"One hell's what all other sinners share," he'd whispered then–impulsive.
“We’ll have to make do.”
Wiegraf had nodded. It was not the last time they'd give over to a dangerous intimacy approaching something unspoken—something beyond the pragmatics of lust.
How many times after did they flirt with discovery? How many other silences hungered to be filled? There were instants where both had come close to saying things that could not be said–where Zalbag remembered the track of an indecipherable word traced along his back or the whisper of unvoiced breath against his neck. The scant successors there had been to Wiegraf were less troubling: men of better rank and better practiced at discretion. In the decade since the two had parted, Zalbag was able almost to forget the idiocy of that first fall—reducing the whole of the affair to the mechanics of mouths and bodies. Those were actions that could not carry with them any trace of sentimentality.
He supposed Wiegraf had done the same.
The end would come at the scaffold. Zalbag had thought, driving down the long hills from burning Zeakden, that if he wanted to have some penitence left him, it must be there. He would subject himself to watching Wiegraf as men watched the heretics broken and burnt in Mullonde—to endure as witness to Wiegraf as sufferer. Even before the man was dragged out of death and into his custody, Zalbag had taken a grim satisfaction that that ordeal might start the payment of all of it: of past sin, of present cruelty, of the dead girl no doubt gone to ash within the fortress and the failings his own family must charge him with. If he were to bear Wiegraf's death well, he could learn to bear the weight of other crimes.
As the white towers of Igros finally came into view, he told himself that would be the beginning of the end: that he should begin to part from sin as his the man who introduced him to it died.
Wiegraf knew nothing of Zalbag's resolve when he finally made his request. Wiegraf—doubled over with so much pain and bitterness—reckoned he may never have known anything of Zalbag Beoulve at all.
It has been only a day since they'd confined him to a cell, and Wiegraf had little head for whether there should be a trial or if he'd just be strung up on a gibbet in the course of the Duchy sorting things out–tallying casualties and sending word back East. He imagined that the Beoulves had plenty with which to keep themselves busy upon Zalbag's homecoming; he'd been made to understand that the youngest son of the House was vanished, that many plans had gone awry, that Golagros—who might have solved all manner of problems had he been handy enough to aim his blade a handspan higher—had somehow made even more of a mess of things than he had when they had parted. Miluda was dead. Gustav’s band slaughtered or flown. If there was a real humiliation to dying, it was that it had to be in the midst of everything coming apart and nothing changing.
He was fully prepared—in light of that—for Zalbag to refuse to see him and to never give him another thought for the short term of his life. Wiegraf, even in very different days, was never one to be much surprised that Zalbag should prove callous. As he tried to maneuver himself into a position where the draft was low and the line of stitches along his ribs pulled as little as possible, he did his utmost not to feel sorry for himself . He had only so many hours or days left to him. He wanted to spend as little time as possible moping about how he'd once spent a wild and gorgeous summer fucking a man now content to set his head on a pike.
The stonework against which he lay fettered was stupidly cold, and he felt glum he could enjoy his environs little more than the wind and snow that preceded them. There was no torch or candle, only a thin crack of light where the door out into a hallway did not meet its frame. Wiegraf had become able, over time, to make out the dim shapes of things around him: the bars of the grating that bisected the room, the lump of a wooden table and chairs beyond them, the bowl full of half-eaten broth and bones he'd been given. He remembered, without fondness, his dead sister's disdain for every thin soup they'd tried to warm their bellies with over the past season. It was sad that the aftertaste of gristle and meat seemed a bit of luxury after so many months of boiled tack and winter herbs.
He reckoned by now that it was well into the night, and his hopes that Zalbag might thwart expectations and consent to see him were dimming. If he had been able to sleep, perhaps, he might have had his cynicism borne out. He tried to sleep. Even knowing each moment of conscious thought was set to be stolen forever away from him, he was exhausted to the point of greater pain. When the slit of light framing the door warped and expanded, he almost thought it a fantasy—an illusion a doomed prisoner might conjure in his despair.
There came the echoing sound of voices from outside as Wiegraf lifted himself up. There was a jangle of keys. When a figure entered the room, a single candle in its hand, he knew who it must be even before it lifted the hood of its cloak.
Wiegraf looked at him—the man’s features gaunt and expressionless, his frame thin. He clenched his teeth hard without a word of acknowledgement.
Zalbag looked at him and likewise said nothing—not as he lowered the candle to the table, not as he opened the door to the barred wall between them, not as he undid the shackles that bound him and dragged him upright and forward by the wrist.
It was only when they were close enough to see the reflections of the flame in each other's eyes that he spoke.
"Sit."
Wiegraf sat. Zalbag, gaze never parting from him, moved to the other side of the table and sat too.
There was another silence, and Wiegraf bit the edge of his tongue as he looked over the man before him, his own eyes adjusting to the shift in light: the dark cloak, the gray tunic, the hair and beard not yet trimmed after a week on the field. Aside from the shimmering glint of a well wrought dagger by his hip, Zalbag Beoulve had nothing about him now that smacked of nobility.
Wiegraf rested his arms against the surface in front of him, flexing his fingers as he checked the feeling in his hands. He realized he had lost the track of whatever plan he must have had when he'd asked for this meeting.
"I was told you wished to see me," Zalbag sai,d as if sensing Wiegraf's uncertainty. His words were clipped with irritation. "I would not have come otherwise."
"I know."
"I had assumed you had something of which you wished to speak."
Wiegraf bit the edge of his tongue again, trying to recollect if he had. Zalbag continued.
"I hope you do not expect..."
"I expect nothing of you." Their eyes were suddenly locked. "Nothing that I do not expect of every man of your rank."
"Then you understand I will do what is necessary?"
"Kill me?" Wiegraf exhaled through his teeth. "Was that ever in doubt?"
"What do you want then, Wiegraf?"
Wiegraf tensed as he braced his arms against the table. He ached as he pried himself upright and leaned forwards. Even in the bare light of the candle, he could see Zalbag tense as he drew close to him.
"What do you think I want?" he asked, aware of how his breath must feel against the other man's skin.
He was not sure what answer he expected to the question. He was not surprised when it was more silence.
"You had him kill my sister, you know?" Wiegraf said eventually, drawing back from the topic he knew must hang in the air. He did not retreat an inch in the space separating them. "Why shouldn't you kill me?"
"You had your men all but kill my brother."
"Your brother's a cunt, Zalbag."
Zalbag blinked. Wiegraf laughed in the pause he took to compose himself after.
"If you were looking for some sort of sympathy in all this, you're doing a poor job drawing mine out." Zalbag's voice was cold. "You know there's no eleventh hour mercy here. If there's something between us that must be said, come out and say it."
“Something between us?” Wiegraf leaned forward even more.
The cool rhythm of Zalbag's breathing went still.
"If there was such a thing, there shan't be much longer," Zalbag whispered.
Once more, Wiegraf had not really had a plan—or if he had, it had been forgotten by then—lost in the midst of sickness and sleeplessness. He had certainly not thought to himself in all the hours prior that he would make the wild attempt he did then, and as he moved, it was unclear he had much conscious thought as to what he was doing then.
If there was anything at the forefront of Wiegraf Folles' mind, it was closing the gap between their lips: cutting off Zalbag's contempt with a kiss and proving to himself that there remained warm humors pulsing beneath the man's skin.
The tumble against him, the shock of the embrace returned—these he hadn't prepared for. Neither too had he anticipated the hard tension through both of their frames as he darted for the grip of the blade in Zalbag's belt and grabbed it fast.
His body was painfully overextended as it stretched against the table, and he thought—had Zalbag's guard been up as it should have been—that it should have been an easy thing to cast him off. It was absurd—suspect perhaps—that the Savior of Ivalice should do virtually nothing between the moment when Wiegraf first lurched against him and the moment at which his own blade came to lie keen against his throat.
Zalbag went still as the kiss broke. It seemed to Wiegraf, even in the wavering candlelight, that he had gone quite pale.
"Doesn't seem to be gone yet, you insufferable prick.”
Zalbag looked at him and said nothing.
"I'll ask you again what you think I want?"
He could see the motion of Zalbag swallowing, the flesh of his neck writhing against the blade.
"I can't say I know, Wiegraf?" he replied softly. "If you were a sensible man, I think you'd want to take the opportunity to slit my throat and attempt an escape."
Wiegraf tensed his arm but didn't move. Zalbag was quite correct.
"You were going to have me killed, weren't you?"
"I've been in no way unclear on that point."
"Would you have deigned to appear when it happened?" Wiegraf said, jaw clenched. "Would you have had the stomach to watch?"
Zalbag had at no point looked away from Wiegraf following the kiss. Their eyes had remained fixed on one another's; his expression remained unchanging. Still, in that instant there seemed some strange alchemy in the air that altered the quality of his gaze—that left Wiegraf feeling stripped of all his pretense of righteousness. Wiegraf recalled in a brief flash that his house's crest was a basilisk: the beast with a poisonous eye.
"As I watch you now."
His voice was like ice before it cracked.
Wiegraf realized his arm was beginning to shake—that exhaustion, pain, and all the immediate circumstances of his position were taking their toll. He remembered again how distant any expectations he might have had for this interview really were. He could just make out a thin tickle of red where the dagger must have broken the skin.
He blinked, and suddenly he was pulled out of balance, tumbled across the table as two hands gripped hard around his wrist and wrenched it away. His side seemed about to split open, and the candle fell to the floor, and suddenly he was dashed to the flagstones below, fingers prying against his fingers as he swung and stumbled. In the dark, he tried to get away his arm, tried to get in a blow. It occurred to him very belatedly that whatever Zalbag's immediate intentions might be, he was—in fact—fighting for his life.
He managed to cuff his assailant in the face before he was pinned down. He kicked as he felt the weight of a body pressed fast over his own, a strong wiry arm bringing the hand that held the blade firm against his throat as the muscles of his arm refused to lock.
He felt lips against his lips again, hard and hungry, and his face grew hot as fingers coiled into the meat of his bicep. Wiegraf kissed Zalbag Beoulve once more, the same knife caught between them. Wiegraf kissed him as his thoughts burned with outrage at each caress. It was a mirroring of their configuration a moment prior, and he was indignant that it should be such a little change to make things so abysmally different. As he tensed underneath Zalbag's grip, he could only think how infinitely more wretched it all was. His head swam as he fell into the sensations of stubble against his cheek, of legs wrapped around his legs.
He hated Zalbag—hated that he should be so ready to kill and to fuck him in equal measure—hated to think what an easy thing it should be to steal this parting taste of him and then let death wash it forever from his lips. He hated too that he wanted it: to taste again and to be tasted.
They broke, falling to ragged gasps, and Wiegraf felt the hand without the blade trail down the flesh of his arm, across the fabric of his thin tunic, down to fumble at the laces of his hose. He dared not move as he thought to the swell of his own prick under Zalbag's hand, but he let out a sharp sigh when the man finally tugged it free. His eyes traced the outline of the shadow over him, and he tried to reconcile it with images of the past—with the two of them as they had been and not as they were.
Wiegraf tensed as he remembered sunlight: the sour taste of the morning kiss, Zalbag's tousled hair glowing gold before the arrow slit that framed him. They had been boys. They could never have anticipated more than a year's future beyond. As another hiss of breath escaped his lips, and as he began to rock against Zalbag's grip, he thought with a pang of directionless jealousy as to how Zalbag was much more deft at this than he had been back then.
"Will you watch me with this in your blood, then?" Wiegraf whispered. "Is this what you wanted?"
"What did you want a moment ago, Wiegraf?"
Wiegraf ignored the question, knowing he did not want to answer—knowing that the first kiss, the initial excuse of that blade between them—had all been his.
"Will you look at me as I kick and think of this?" he hissed. "Will you stand in somber judgement at the gallows with your fucking prick at attention?"
He looked at the shadow of Zalbag's face again, imagining their eyes still locking—imagining that last lingering gaze as the world went dark. He thought to mock him more—to push father: to ask if he'd find some other stream in which to quench his ardor afterward or else to fumble in the earth beneath his corpse for mandrakes to eat. He was unsurprised when his own question was ignored in turn, Zalbag pushing his lips against his once more.
Wiegraf moved his free arm up along his back to draw him closer. The space between them began to collapse.
And for a moment Wiegraf braced to feel the cold bite of steel into his neck
In the next tumble of motion that followed, he never quite lost the sense that he was about to die for his foolishness. He jerked his knee upwards and pushed up against the knife, Zalbag arching back as their lips parted—as he lost his grip and lost his balance. Suddenly Wiegraf had the space to spring up, and suddenly they were struggling, and suddenly there was the coarse motion of the cape swung back and the slippage of so much sweat against the dagger grip and the cold air against his exposed parts. He was standing. He had the knife again. He had room to dodge and room to swing and in the dreamlike dark that surrounded him, he did not quite know how he managed it.
It could have been no more than a minute later when Wiegraf found himself bracing Zalbag against the table, the chink of light beyond the door casting a line over his face while he stifled a groan that any sane man would made into a proper shout.
The dagger was now wedged in the man's left hand, pinning it hard into the wood beneath it.
Wiegraf, had he been sane himself, ought to have fled—snapped Zalbag's neck or simply committed to an eventual chase. He ought not have continued to lean against him, face against face, hand pinning his injured hand while he felt the unmistakable flex of fingers trying to intertwine with his own.
He was still hard, the curve of his swollen prick dragging against the back of Zalbag's garments.
He turned his head for another kiss and felt no shock when Zalbag returned it, face shaking and lips trailing a line of blood between their mouths. He'd bitten hard into the flesh his lower lip.
Wiegraf tried—as he pushed aside the cloak, as he groped around with his free arm between Zalbag's legs–to remember what he’d looked like by day. He tried to remember Riovanes and how the fingers pinned beneath his right hand had wrapped around his own once before. He swallowed hard as he found the clasp of a belt, as he pulled aside cloth and felt bare flesh beneath his hands, as he kissed Zalbag again to ensure that no word could be spoken between them then.
Zalbag's breath was ragged and halting. As Wiegraf felt anew the sting of his own injuries, he wondered if he'd torn a stitch in the fight. The cut was not so deep, if he recalled. It had not been worth the Hokuten wasting magic on.
Wiegraf broke his grip on Zalbag's unpinned hand. The man shaking beneath him made no motion to stand or to fight, and when drew his right hand to Zalbag's face, parted their lips, and pushed his fingers into his mouth, he did not take the opportunity to bite. Zalbag's eyes shone bright as polestars as he sucked at the digits probing his mouth—slowly, deliberately—tongue coating them thick with blood and spit as Wiegraf's ragged breathing kept time with his own.
Wiegraf didn't waste much time after that. Every motion came fast again: the press of slick fingers into Zalbag's flesh, the fast push of his own cock into him not long after, the burn of their joined bodies as Zalbag tensed hard around him, drawing another gasp of what must be pain through his bloody lips. God, he did not mind that it hurt. He hoped that it hurt. As he began to rock into Zalbag, he hurt enough himself. Wiegraf could trace a line back to the past if he liked—remember that pale, pious boy with whom he'd once wanted to be gentle. He could just as easily skip forward. As he drove into him hard, Wiegraf imagined how Zalbag might look by morning if he died here—how Lord Dycedarg might be called to find his much lauded brother bloody and despoiled, cold spend dripping down his thighs. Zalbag gasped out an indecipherable half word as Wiegraf reached around to stroke him—as he shifted to brace his other arm around his neck.
"Saint's cunt, but I should kill you," he whispered, hand slipping upward around Zalbag's swollen erection.
"You probably should," Zalbag gasped back. "I'm not—"
There was a choking grunt that cut him as Wiegraf gripped him hard, fucked him hard, tightened the forearm against his throat. It didn't matter what he was going to say. He didn't want to hear any more assurances of Zalbag's disinclination towards mercy.
Wiegraf did not need mercy from him.
He kept pistoning into him after, losing himself in the heat of Zalbag's taut flesh, wondering if he'd fuck them both raw before he was done. He imagined marking him that way too, leaving some bloody impression of himself to ruin him as he’d ruined his hand. All the while, Zalbag still bucked and panted and writhed against him, eager as he had been when he'd held the dagger.
They both seemed very close when Zalbag finally spoke again, breathing out in short gasps a series of words that Wiegraf did not want to hear.
The sentence was short—short and mortifying and mired hopelessly in the past tense.
Wiegraf told himself he hadn't the ability to make it out. He imagined he might have misheard. He cut him off before he could say more anyway, pulling fast against his throat until he could feel the hard pulse in the large veins of his neck go slow. They both came around then—Zalbag's body going slack under him's as both men spent themselves in a mutual collapse.
Wiegraf loosed his grip very soon after that, and trembling, felt around to see if his heart was beating still. It was, and knowing both that he should not speak and could not be heard anyway, whispered something back as leaned over Zalbag to undo the clasp of his cloak.
He ran a hand over his hair after that.
Wiegraf laced his trousers. He slung the cloak over his shoulders. He felt for the beat of a pulse once more. He pulled the dagger from Zalbag's hand and heard a long painful inhalation that did not give way to wakefulness. As he stood at the threshold of the door, hands shaking as he tried to make out the shapes of men on the other side of the light, he did not once look back.
He was fast enough to catch the sentry off guard. The man didn't have time to recognize the face beneath the hood was not General Beoulve's before the blade was through his windpipe, and he expired with a gurgle and not a shout. As Wiegraf walked—calmly, deliberately—through the lowest halls of Igros, he did not linger on how strange it should be that only one guard had been stationed. He did not let himself think about what he had just done or what should result from it. He just kept moving, doing his utmost in the dark of the fire lit halls to act as if he belonged to them.
By the time he found himself under the stars again, feet stumbling mechanically through the slush and mud, he had no memory of the particulars of his escape. There was a vague impression of the long road through Ordallia then: of soldiers all but sleeping while still on the move. In that twilight of waking thought, he did not recall Zalbag, collapsed and bloody within his cell. He did not think of the gallows. In what brief flashes of alertness there were before the graying dawn, he remembered Miluda if he remembered anyone.
When he awoke, it was against a hayrick, and he did not know where he was. An unanticipated thaw and a stout wool cloak had seemingly saved him from frostbite, and he could see that the bulk of the hillsides were a dull, yellow green.
It was only gradually that Wiegraf recognized to whom the cloak belonged, the scent of skin and sweat still embedded in its threads. When his memories of the night past returned, he closed his eyes.
Shaking, he held the article fast, and thought for a moment that he might not rise to continue his march.
Zalbag was not found before the murdered guard was, and by then he had been awake for just long enough to make himself presentable. His clothing was in no great disarray, save where he'd torn a sleeve for cloth enough to clean off and bind his hand. His demeanor was calm. When the first knight burst into the room, panicked and pale, Zalbag was the model of stoic soldierhood again, leaning against the wall by a door nobody could know he had spent a quarter of an hour too stunned to exit.
He explained that Folles had unfettered himself unseen and taken him off guard. He recommended the knights sweep the castle first—telling them he had little faith the man would get far.
When a chemist was finally brought to tend him, it was with his brother accompanying. Dycedarg, still recovering from the work of a rebel's dagger himself, was very cool in his sympathy. The debacle at Zeakden, Ramza's disappearance, Alma's growing hysteria: all these things had been offset previously by Wiegraf Folles standing ready to be made example of. Zalbag more than understood his brother's unhappiness and gave him every thanks for what concern he showed.
He told him firmly that Wiegraf would be found, although he made made no oath or promise.
The day was overcast. When no track or trace could be found of the Corpse Brigade's surviving leader, it was to no one's surprise that Zalbag Beoulve should take it upon himself to pray. The grey sky shone dim somewhere behind the chapel's colored glass as he tried to muster some petition that Wiegraf should be recovered—that he should have it within his power again to attempt that path to repentance, no matter how greatly he had strayed.
Even in prayers not spoken, his words rang hollow. With or without a hangman presiding, he knew what he would see were he ever to see Wiegraf's face again—what he saw every time he had looked at him. He knew what he would recall and where he would be transported to.
Kneeling before the altar, he knew that it would be no salvation.
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