Snippet #1516765

There was a man before him who looked oddly familiar, but Lionel did not stop, he merely pressed forwards, sword in hand. There was no time to be paying attention to minor details – this was a time to stay alive and not lose this Gods-forsaken battle. He was cursing at all of this in his mind, even though he was fully aware of the fact that it had been his plan to begin with.

Blade met blade with the ear-stinging screech of scraping metal. They were slowly pouring themselves back past the Inner Walls of the Keep. Lionel felt something stinging his left arm and, with a guttural roar, sliced his blade outwards. It slashed through the neck of his opponent – taking the head clean off. And then he was moving onwards, the adrenaline pounding in his veins making him not notice the arrow shaft sticking out of his left shoulder. He had been shot by one of the Winterfell bowmen and it had yet to register.

Soon it would catch up with him, but not yet – not while the clamor of battle was everywhere and his blood was throbbing hard through him. His heart hammered against his chest like a hammer and for now he knew that he was still alive.

---

It was almost as if time had crawled down to a near stand-still as she watched the deathly sharp Valyrian steel blade of Lionel’s Night swish through the air. She followed its arcing path, her mouth going dry as she watched the blade’s edge bite into her brother’s neck. Leliana imagined hearing the clean cutting noise of blade through flesh and bone above the din and clamor of battle all around them.

And then Lionel was moving on to the next foe and it struck her that he probably had not even realized that he had just taken Richard’s life. She bit back the urge to giggle at the sight.

Richard’s head toppled off his body as if it were a pumpkin and he, a scarecrow. It hit the ground and she could have sworn the noise had thudded like a thousand drums which were suddenly pounding an odd rhythm in her mind – something which almost made her want to dance. She watched his head roll and then come to a stop, his dead eyes open and staring at nothing.

She walked through the fray towards Richard’s headless body – her lips pieced together to form an ‘o’. Leliana reached down and placed her hands on either side of Richard’s disembodied head and lifted it up from the ground and pooling blood as if it were made of glass.

“I missed you,” she told him as she cradled his head in her arms, her smile spreading warmly across her lips. She looked around, trying to find a spot where she could sit down with Richard to talk and catch up on the last two and a half months. There was so much to talk about!

She found a crate off to the side of a stone wall, in a nook more or less removed from the main area of the fighting. There Leliana placed Richard’s head in her lap and looked down at him into his dual-colored eyes, unable to keep herself from reaching out to brush the hair out of his wide open, staring eyes.

A man is like a deer because they have eyes and those eyes stare right back up at you.

“Are we playing a game, Richard?” She asked him, sounding more like a confused young girl than a pirate woman she had been playing at. “You know I always hated staring contests with you – I always blink first.” She did not understand why he wasn’t talking back to her. She blinked.

She wondered where Uncle Quin was – wouldn’t he also like to see Richard? But…hadn’t Uncle Quin been stabbed? Leliana looked back down at Richard and something like worry began to nag at her. There was something wrong about this situation, something that was disturbing her very deeply…but she just could not place her finger on it.

“Richard, Richard what do I do?” She asked him, swallowing the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat and was refusing to go away. “My head hurts so much. It’s so loud, Richard. I-I can’t focus.” She rubbed at her temples with one hand, her face twisting into a snarling grimace. And then her features smoothed back out and she was looking down at her brother again. And she was smiling.

---

“Yes, milady,” Ammon said, his demeanor dissolving perfectly into that of a humble servant, “I will take the utmost care of him.” He bowed to the Princess and then watched as she departed with a playful smirk. Well, his ought to be interesting – the Princess clearly cared for Kervall. This made the situation even more satisfying for Ammon, because now he knew that he was exploiting someone’s romantic interest – and that was always leagues more fun.

He turned to Kervall. “As much as I would love to have you lying on your back with your legs splayed open just so, I can’t quite have you doing so out here in the open and on the grass,” Ammon commented as he raised a single eyebrow at the less-than-graceful amblings of Kervall. Ammon crouched down and grabbed the man by the arm, tugging him upwards and then slinging that same arm over his shoulders.

“Up we go,” he said as he heaved both himself and Kervall to a standing position with a grunt of effort. “Let’s get you to your chambers, hm? That sounds like a good plan, if I may say so myself.” A good plan indeed. Ammon grinned deviously as he began to guide Kervall towards the entrance back into the Red Keep.

---the next morning---

Ammon awoke not in his own bed, but in that of Kervall, lying on his back sandwiched between the sheets and the body of the man he had slept with. “Good morning, sweetcheeks,” Ammon said as he shifted himself upwards a few inches so as to have a better view of the naked man sprawled partly across him, “I think I ought to start calling you tiger. Hmm, what say you?” Ammon wiggled his eyebrows up and down and extracted his hand from wherever it had been previously sandwiched and gave Kervall’s cheek a pinch.

After having finished last night, Ammon had rolled off the man and then pulled him over him almost like a makeshift human blanket. They had more or less remained in that same position upon morning.

“For your first time with a man, you took it incredibly well,” Ammon continued to say and gave Kervall a nod of approval. “I should get you drunk more often.” He had to admit to himself that he had rather thoroughly enjoyed the events of the previous night, what with the torrid embraces and the creaking of the bed that had filled up much of the time.

This was, in Ammon’s opinion, a conquest well-won. He would have to make a joke later to Sirena about how he pillaged himself a village. Or something that sounded equally catchy.