A/N: This was gonna be a full-length, smutty kind of thing but yeah. Things don't always go according to plan.
Enjoy!
There's a damsel in the tower, the people say, and she's trapped there for their own good. When she screams, they say, people fall dead like flies, souls sucked into the thin night air and fed to her presence.
A banshee, they say, only brings death.
He watches the tower as night climbs around them, shrouding the village in the distance in darkness. There are lights that pop up there light little orange stars, the villagers surely watching and waiting for him to fall. Waiting for him to fail.
Maybe it's the wind that howls in that moment, but Free doesn't think it is.
He waits.
The lights wink out one by one, marking the time as the villagers give up on watching and go to sleep. Maybe they think he'll turn tail and run as soon as he's alone. Maybe they think he needs the quiet, the loneliness, the night empty of foreign gazes before he attempts his magic.
And maybe, maybe the latter ones might even be right.
It's not a full moon, so he doesn't even bother to try a full transformation. Instead, he concentrates on specifics - on claws and teeth and ears and tail, all that he might need to keep his balance and climb and take down his opponent.
He climbs.
The tower is tall, empty of doors and windows except for one, at the very top. They had built it for her, for the banshee, for the bringer of death, far away from the village so that her cries wouldn't do more harm than a small pain in their chests at their loudest.
This also means that they won't see him like this, and that he'll get his gold without further issues.
There's a growth of dead vines clinging to the sides of the tower. The villagers had said that the banshee caused it to die - but Free had seen the scorch marks on the earth around the tower, the circles of salt that surrounded it. She might bring death, but she hadn't been the only one to do so.
Free can attest to that.
He pulls himself through the small rock opening, barely large enough to fit his shoulders through, and gets entangled in silky curtains before rolling in. They rip, and he winces.
"I sure hope you're paying for that," comes a dry voice. "Do you know how hard it is to get curtains when you're forever trapped in a tower?"
He hesitates. "...Pretty hard?"
Someone moves in front of him. He spots two pale feet peeking out from beneath a flowy kind of dress, cute toes curling against the cold.
"You got it," says the banshee, and she sounds soft.
He manages to wriggle and roll out of the mess of tangled curtains without much further damage - or so he likes to think. Because the truth is this: when you're a being full of sharp, pointy bits, and big enough to fill a large doorframe, and with the kind of clumsiness that gets you banned from all shops with breakable things, the damage you leave behind is always nothing less than huge.
"Sorry about your curtains," he says sheepishly, and takes a look at the bringer of death.
Turns out that the bringer of death is very cute and very not-bringer-of-death looking, and Free gets blindsided by a sudden urge to cover her with a blanket. Because seriously, she looks cold.
She tugs at a strand of blue-white hair, black lips turning into a mournful pout. "I really liked them, too."
"Sorry," he says again, rubbing the back of his neck. "I, uh, could try to get some new ones...?"
Only he can't, not really, because he's been hired to take down this tiny little cold-looking waif of doom, but it turns out that he's already second-guessing that decision.
"I guess," she says, and takes a look at him. "Oh, wow. You're huge."
He shrugs awkwardly. "I... actually get that a lot. Don't you have a blanket? You look a bit cold."
She huffs out another pout. "Yeah, they're not worth a lot at this point. They took out all the winter stuff and never put it back, so I think they might have been hoping to freeze me and my poor frogs to death. Speaking of which, what are you doing here?"
He doesn't want to say that he's the contingency plan in case the freezing bit didn't work.
She seems to guess anyway, and deflates. "Oh. Oh. Sorry. Would you mind waiting a few more weeks, though? I'm kind of waiting for a package, and I would hate for it to go to waste."
"...I guess? As long as you don't scream until then." Free supposes he wasn't really given a time limit to complete his task, and she seems like a nice girl. "Do you want me to fetch some firewood or something?"
She turns the full force of a gentle smile on him.
Free thinks he wasn't really cut out for this mercenary business thing, after all.