Nnoitra wakes up to some asshole in fancy armour staring into his face. There's sunlight above, which seems wrong. There's not much sun in Hueco Mundo.
"It is finished," says the man gravely, which is some kind of Aizen-level vague portentous bullshit. "Welcome."
Nnoitra doesn't feel very welcomed. He narrows his eyes - plural. He has two eyes. That's fucked up. And wrong. Bad. He licks his teeth. Slowly he peels himself off the dirt. Nobody offers him a hand up, which tells him that... at least these people still have a vested interest in keeping their arms.
His body feels all fucked up. Creaky and organic. Wrong. Bad. Just like the eye. He's tall, but he doesn't loom, and he's thick, barrel-chested. If he cracked open this armour, Nnoitra bets he'd see all flat plains of heavy functional muscle.
He reaches up and slides his fingers over his eye - ow, that stings - and then closes it and tries again. No hole. Huh.
He shifts his weight experimentally. Blood pumps. Muscles, real ones, shift and stretch. They contract. He breathes in and his chest rises. It falls.
"What the fuck," says Nnoitra.
"It can be - disorienting," says this grave, solemn motherfucker in front of him. Is he an arrancar - or was he one? What is this shit?
"In my Joining," says another voice, this one soft. It belongs to a man with sandy hair and an expression like a kicked dog. Nnoitra can feel the urge to beat him rising just from looking at his face. He goes on, heedless of that particular danger, "only one of us died."
What the fuck is a Joining? He can hear the capital letters. Is that what they call it when they bring a hollow to life? They seem to expect him to know all this shit...
Must be. Nnoitra scowls fiercely. He doesn't love Hueco Mundo, and he couldn't care less about Aizen, who is largely a means to a spectacularly violent end, but - he's used to it, at least. And Tesla isn't here. Must, presumably, still be a hollow. If they were looking for strong hollows to bring back - to turn into soldiers, maybe, which would explain all the fucking armour - there's a long way to go between Tesla and Nnoitra. He's more likely to find himself working with that dumbass Grimmjow.
Nnoitra eyes the Solemn Grave Asshole. He looks like a better opponent than that guy whining about his dead friends. What kind of hollow is that, anyway?
He glances sideways, following the guy's gaze. There are dead human bodies there, two of them, stacked neatly aside. Maybe those were hollows that didn't come back right...? It doesn't look like anyone's even going to eat them. A waste. Whatever. Nnoitra isn't hungry yet - and isn't that weird? He feels like he never knew what it was like not to be hungry. But now he's... not. Weird.
Solemn Grave asshole keeps talking, but Nnoitra's not really listening. He can't feel reiatsu, but he can feel something. Something strange and diseased and corrupt, down to the - he glances up at the unfamiliar brightness of the sun - the south, probably. He doesn't have a word for it other than 'reiatsu' so that's what he's gonna call it.
"It's the darkspawn," says the one with the sandy hair and the big wobbly eyes, who until this point has seemed fixed on the bodies. "Every one of us can feel them. Duncan thinks they'll attack soon."
Nnoitra brightens at this, and makes a dull, pleased noise in his throat. Maybe he is still hungry for something, after all. He licks his lips. "Yeah?" he says, trying for casual and missing by a mile, "how soon?"
The man gives him a searching look. "Dusk, probably. Darkspawn... do better in the dark."
Makes two of us, Nnoitra thinks. And then he contemplates the feeling of teeming corruption building out there to the south. He's never fought against an entire army before. Never annihilated thousands all at once.
Hell, maybe this won't be so bad. He'll need to figure out how to get back eventually - obviously, because if nothing else, Tesla's not here and Nnoitra isn't in the habit of doing his own laundry, but -
Well. Like he said, he's never killed a whole army before.
"Sounds good," he says, feeling the smile crack right across his face. That, at least, hasn't changed. His teeth are a weight in his skull, still aching for a taste.
The coward in armour right next to him looks at Nnoitra like he thinks that statement is naive. "You won't be saying that by morning," he mutters, like he knows anything.
Nnoitra laughs, because he bets he fucking will, and then he ignores him and settles into stillness. He can wait until nightfall for the army to come to him.
Solemn Grave turns out to have a name after all, but Nnoitra forgets it really fast. In his head these two are just Solemn Grave and Coward, anyway, and the main reason Nnoitra hasn't tried to attack them yet is because they seem like they're gearing up to take on a whole army of weird monsters, which is what you might call an area of interest for Nnoitra.
They had to have a meeting about it first, which is actually pretty familiar. Solemn Grave gets more like Aizen with every fucking breath. Shinigami and humans have more in common than the shinigami would like to admit. Nnoitra pays as much attention to this meeting as he has to any of Aizen's - which is to say, he mostly tunes it out and makes a vague 'uh-huh' noise when addressed.
(They've decided to call him 'Cousland'. Well, he won't remember their names, so that's, you know, whatever.)
Something about it all annoys Coward, but Nnoitra has already pegged him as being not very bright, so it's probably nothing. In the end, going along with this bullshit results in them all pointing Nnoitra to a tower full of monsters to kill, which is no bad pay off for mumbling 'uh-huh' and standing around for a few hours.
This whole place isn't built like anywhere Nnoitra knows: not the soaring monochrome lines of Las Noches, not the grey neon-lit huddle of Tokyo, not the tight suburban landscape that springs up once you get into the outer districts and hit Karakura, and certainly nothing like the sprawling bleak dunes of Hueco Mundo more generally.
Ostagar, as they call this place, is made of roughly-squared grey stone, iron and wood, and it is old enough to be kind of worn around the edges. It's sturdy for a building, but Nnoitra reckons he can bust it up pretty easily if he needs to. A cero will do it, but he bets he can just hit it hard enough to break the rocks. But, hey, it keeps the wind off, he guesses, and the army probably likes having a thing to defend.
They have to cross a bridge to get to the tower, and just like the rest of the place it looks pretty sturdy on its own - plenty of heavily armoured soldiers traipse on top of it and all - but Nnoitra isn't really surprised that someone fires a cero at it and the whole thing immediately buckles behind them. It does not actually smell like a cero, it's too acrid and earthy for that, and Nnoitra can't feel the reiatsu of it, but the effect is pretty similar. Big boom, lots of light and heat, crumbling masonry, screaming.
Nnoitra nearly stops in his jogging across the last, still-stable part of the bridge, nearly turns back and throws himself through the smoking gap that remains, because maybe it will be more fun - or at least more challenging - to go find whoever fired that thing and kill them. But then two steps ahead of him Coward gives an unexpected, deep-voiced cry and Nnoitra's attention snaps back to his immediate surroundings.
This fight's found him. He smiles wide, and something in his chest loosens and relaxes at the sight of the armed monsters bearing down upon them.
Nnoitra even gets to take a halberd off one of them once they're all down, and now they're talking. He wipes the black blood off of it with a scrap of fabric and looks at the blade gleam in the torchlight for a moment. It's no Santa Teresa - what is? - but it's a polearm, which is a very good thing indeed.
He gets it wet almost immediately. It feels good to be doing what he's made for.
"Are you, uh, always like this?" Coward asks between breaths. He's having trouble keeping up, and they're not even inside the tower yet.
"You can stay out here if you can't keep up," Nnoitra says, flicking more black blood off his blade with a twist of his wrist. "More for me."
He's not even really sure what 'like this' means in this context. These monsters aren't as challenging as the corrupt sense of them scrabbling around in the back of his mind tells him they should be. It's lucky that they attack in groups, but...
"I'm fine," says Coward, between his teeth. Nnoitra's offended him. Good.
There's movement ahead, boots in the dirt, and Nnoitra takes a deep breath of smoke and shit and rank diseased blood and speeds toward it, feeling his strange living muscles bunch and stretch and ache cruelly. It's been forever since his blood pounded hot in his veins, and now he feels this alien, living pulse like a war drum thundering in his skull.
"That wasn't a cue to speed up!" yells the guy despairingly. Nnoitra ignores him.
The next six minutes are nothing but a blur of move, fight, kill. Nnoitra finally licks a fleck of blood from his mouth and discovers that they've made it to the doors.
"I think that was one of ours." Coward is wearing a look that settles somewhere in the vast reaches between discomfort and horror.
Nnoitra glances where he's looking. It's a man in an odd dress. Nnoitra vaguely remembers him being in a knot of monsters, and also not putting up much resistance when Nnoitra cleaved him from neck to navel.
It looks like he's expected to say something, so he rolls the pole of his halberd on one shoulder, sending light bouncing off the blade as it spins, and prosaically says, "Guess that's what you get for being weak on a battlefield."
"Are you serious," hisses Coward, but then there are more monsters, and, blessedly, the idiot can't talk and fight simultaneously.
The monsters - darkspawn or whatever - are shit at fortifying their position in the tower. They're clever enough to arrange the tools other people have left behind, kind of, but beyond a couple of crude barricades they don't use any part of the tower the way it's clearly designed to be used. Nnoitra's never seen a tower like this in his life, but as he climbs multiple stairwells - steep, narrow ones - he can tell just moving through them that they'd reduce his range to shit all, and that they'd make Coward, with his right-handed grip on his sword, worse than useless. There's fire in the tower, too, low-burning piles of smoking bodies and torches and braziers, but nobody tosses it down on them from above, and not one of the monsters even takes advantage of having the high ground.
It is obvious that the monsters don't have the collective intelligence for strategic planning, and barely for immediate tactical plans. If they're any smarter than animals, it's not by much.
Coward keeps pausing to register his dismay that they're here at all, which galls Nnoitra. He doesn't mind tearing effortlessly through their ranks. But every time C- Oh, fine, fuck, Alistair - every time he says, "Maker's breath!" and "there wasn't supposed to be any resistance here!" Nnoitra rolls his eyes so hard it starts to hurt his head.
"What are all these darkspawn doing ahead of the horde?" he asks when they climb to the second floor and Nnoitra confirms for himself that the darkspawn're too stupid to use the stairs to their advantage.
He finally takes pity on the poor confused idiot and says, "They're not smart enough to actually use the advantage of taking a tower in the middle of your camp. So either they found their way here mysteriously by accident and somehow wiped out the people who fortified the place," which is... unlikely, to say the least, given the relative numbers of darkspawn compared to the human bodies, "or someone let them in."
He's not surprised when getting an answer to his question doesn't make Alistair shut the fuck up for more than five seconds running.
"Maker's breath. Nobody would-"
"Whatever." Nnoitra waves him off. Clearly he's going to be stubborn in the face of what's very obvious. Nnoitra doesn't care enough to argue about it. "I think there are more in here."
There are. Nnoitra kicks in the door with a crash and a splintering of wood, and then howls a wordless challenge at the monsters inside.
This time there's one doing something with its reiatsu, which seems challenging right up until Alistair steps forward and sort of - gestures, clenches his fist, looking all grim and unhappy, and the monster just fuckin' keels over.
Nnoitra is torn between warring sentiments. On the one hand, he feels strongly that Alistair should stay out of his goddamn fights and on the other he sort of suddenly feels like he's realised what the coward is actually good for. Kidou. Go figure.
They wipe out everything on that floor and climb to the next.
"It doesn't make sense. The darkspawn threaten everyone! Who would let them in?"
"Don't care," Nnoitra reminds him, and gets a very sour look indeed. Although, if he's honest, he can think of at least two or three reasons why you might loose monsters on someone: don't think the monsters are that threatening and you have a use for them, like Aizen; or maybe you don't care how much chaos they cause, even to your own side, because chaos is the whole point; or perhaps you think the forces present are capable of dealing with them so they won't pose a future problem and you want to use them as a distraction to those forces, or...
There're enough reasons that Alistair has to be very sheltered, or not very bright, to miss them. Or both. Nnoitra is not a charitable man, so he's going with 'both'.
The top floor of the tower, when they finally reach it, contains an enormous beast. It is twice as tall as Nnoitra, at least, and has huge curved horns sticking out of its skull. Alistair gags to see that it is eating someone, clawed hands and mouth bright where the air has hit the blood, but Nnoitra -
Well. The human's body obscures the shape of the monster's face they kick down the door and enter, and for a second Nnoitra looks at the hulking silhouette of it and his guts lurch and his strange human heart jolts in its bony cage and he barks - "Tesla?"
It raises its head at the sound. It isn't Tesla. It's clearly not Tesla. It has horns, not tusks, and an ugly flat face. And it's no cleverer than any of the other stupid monsters .
Nnoitra is going to murder it for making him feel so fucking stupid.
His mouth pulls back from his teeth.
"You know its name?" Alistair says, then, more urgently: "That thing has a name?"
Probably it does. Even monsters have names. Nnoitra would know.
"No," he says shortly.
The big monster roars deafeningly at them, with all of the ferocity and none of the eerie harmonics of a real hollow. Nnoitra's face falls into hard lines of rage, and he chooses not to think about why he's so angry about that.
"Stay here," he tells Alistair, and then rushes in, leaving him to sputter.
Finally, thinks Nnoitra savagely. Something worth killing.
Alistair chooses this moment to stop being an enormous coward for thirty fucking seconds, of course. When he dives in to take a blow from one of the ogre's enormous clawed hands on his big tower shield, Nnoitra has the option of diverting his swing to avoid his back, or just pretending he's not there at all.
Alistair bellows when the bladed edge of Nnoitra's halberd bites into his arm, and there is such an amount of blood that even through his battle-haze and bubbling resentment, Nnoitra thinks: guess that's a weakness in the armour around here.
Now Alistair can barely lift his shield. He staggers out of the way of a blow that would otherwise have pulped his head, helm or no helm. With him out of the way, Nnoitra cleans up fast.
He takes not-fucking Tesla's head off with a sweep of his arm, lunging in with the halberd in the way the weapon is designed to do - lots of reach, lots of leverage. He's not even in range of the claws when the head comes off.
It falls with an almighty thump that makes the tower floor tremble.
Nnoitra ignores it and instead stalks past the twitching body to give the skull the savage kick it deserves, directly into its ugly flat face. It slams into a wall and makes the air smell like mortar dust.
He feels unsatisfied. That did not make the ogre hurt nearly as much as Nnoitra still wants.
Alistair is still here, he remembers, and he spins on his heel to see him. He has been lighting a huge and unnecessary fire for whatever reason - is that some kind of signal? a beacon for something? - and his back is to Nnoitra, because he is a fucking moron.
Nnoitra looks speculatively at his back, at the place where a flexible mesh instead of solid steel covers the back of his neck. Alistair has already shown quite a capacity for hurt, and Nnoitra thinks that will make what comes next a lot more gratifying.
He twirls the slicked pole of his halberd thoughtfully, making broad whistling circles with its shining bloodied head. The back of Alistair's arm is a mess where he's packed cloth into the armour to staunch the bleeding. With the shield, he might have been - not a challenge, exactly, he can't give him that much credit, but a distraction at least.
"Hey," he begins thoughtfully, finally attracting the man's attention. Alistair turns, blinks over the decapitated head of the ogre, and twitches back toward Nnoitra.
"You hit me," he says numbly, getting clumsily back to his feet, babying his limp arm.
Nnoitra lets his thin lips stretch broadly across his face in a horrible smile. He is about to respond - mostly to tell Alistair how much worse he's gonna do to him in a second - but that's when the darkspawn break down the tower door in a shower of wood splinters and hot metal.
Is this what the signal fire's for? Maybe Alistair is less useless than he seems.
This is the last clear thought Nnoitra has for some time. The rest is lost in the soothing red wash of violence as the darkspawn rush in, screaming and hissing and roaring, brandishing their notched weapons and leaking toxic blood all over the floor.
And then a dragon shows up, ostensibly to rescue them.
Nnoitra fights. By god does Nnoitra fight. The dragon, however, is after all a dragon, and it does not take no for an answer.
"You hit me," is the first thing Alistair says when they both wake up in some old hag's hut in the woods. "With a weapon!"
"You were in the way," Nnoitra says right back, and Alistair twitches like - like he's expecting Nnoitra to tell him it was an accident or some shit. He won't. It wasn't.
"Are you-"
"I can do it again," Nnoitra adds. He takes two steady steps forward, right into Alistair's space. He sees his throat move when he swallows nervously.
He is afraid. Nnoitra can almost smell it on him. He is properly afraid of Nnoitra. The thought gives him a second's satisfaction, but it's rapidly washed away by a tide of irritation.
Stupid fucking coward. Nnoitra spits at his feet.
Alistair flinches wildly.
"Enough," says the old hag in a voice full of an authority she has not earned.
He can feel her reiatsu, and he knows instinctively that this is - the dragon, that is her released form, her resurreccion, except she's not even a real hollow. That doesn't mean this ancient bitch can talk to Nnoitra like that.
He turns stiffly upon her, already sneering and reaching for his weapon - which isn't there. Of course it's not.
"That energy will serve you well against the darkspawn, boy," she drawls humorously in her ancient, creaking voice.
Nnoitra grinds his teeth, and when he opens his mouth again she gives him a long, steady stare. For a terrible moment he feels like she's looking right through him. Her gaze is heavy and calculating. She's not just old, he thinks abruptly, like a human is - she's old like a hollow is. She's old like Starrk or like Barragan, ancient like the landscape. His hair is standing on end.
"You are not what you should be. Or perhaps you are exactly what you should be." Her eyes are distant. "Time will tell. Don't look so mad, boy," she adds, knowingly, "there will be plenty of bloodletting before the work is done."
Nnoitra has between six and ten rude things to say in response to this, and they're all vying for primacy so hard that he opens his mouth and nothing but an angry hiss emerges.
"Great," says Alistair, an unwelcome relief in his utterly clueless interjection. His voice makes Nnoitra shudder. "Good thing that's not at all creepy or anything."
They end up taking the old hag's bitch daughter with them, which is just - Nnoitra hadn't even planned to take Alistair with him. Not alive, anyway. Maybe as a snack.
She's some kind of big kidou expert, which could arguably be helpful if Nnoitra wanted or needed her help. But he's not even sure why he's fighting darkspawn and not just - just fucking setting the hag's shack on fire.
He doesn't know what happens here, or how the hag talks him into this shit. He begins the conversation with a clear idea of what he wants, but staring into her ancient, flat eyes, he's... all turned around.
In the end, he leaves the forest followed unhappily but obediently, for unknown reasons, by a dumb coward and a vicious bitch who dresses like a whore and doesn't know how to keep her mouth shut.
Nnoitra feels like he's replaced Tesla with a pair of people who are way stupider and about twelve times less competent. And he doesn't even like them. He grinds his teeth until a headache forms. Fuck.
At least there are plenty of darkspawn on the road upon whose bodies he can express his feelings.
"Invigorating," drawls Morrigan, flicking rank darkspawn blood off her pauldron with idle fingers. She is plainly sarcastic. If she was a man, Nnoitra might not want to break her jaw so often. She's not, and he does.
Something's watching out for her, though, or else she has the devil's luck, because a distraction seems to present itself every time the urge starts to itch.
Bandits try to waylay them outside of some shitty little town and Nnoitra is just so tired of killing darkspawn.
It's not that darkspawn don't feel pain - from their caterwauling he knows they do - but they don't... satisfy, in the way a whole person does. They're not complex enough to get upset about how unfair it is. They just know it hurts, and that's kind of boring.
That's how Nnoitra comes to be sitting sprawled on top of a highwayman with his long legs flung out on either side of the man's big prone body, talking to him while he cuts his fingers off one by one. He can't move so much anymore, Nnoitra broke a lot of his bones to get here.
"I like that look," he tells him, feeling relaxed and kind of good for the first time in days, even though he raise his voice to be heard over the begging and bellowing. "You get this face every time I do one, you know? It's like, you know that's gone now and it's never coming back. And..." another shaking howl, "...there's your thumb.'
"This is so unnecessary," Alistair says faintly.
Nnoitra can almost feel his disapproval.
"If they did not want to be hurt, they should not have tried to rob us," says Morrigan, although she has that sound in her voice like she's just realised that possibly she's made a mistake coming with them so easily.
"You can't honestly think-"
He tunes them out and returns his attention to the job at hand. He pauses, looking at the bloody mess he's made, licking his teeth. The man's pale. He's probably gonna lose him soon.
"Hey, hey, are you right-handed?" He laughs. "Jacking off's gonna be a bitch..."
In the end, someone reports the screaming - which, yeah, it goes on for a while, but so what? - and a lone templar shows up to investigate.
He is sufficiently upset that they have to kill him, too.
"This is not good," says Alistair while Morrigan riffles through his armour for spare change. His voice has a note of creeping hysteria. "This is not good-"
Nnoitra rolls his eyes and ignores him.
He's ready to breeze through the village and keep going. It's a tiny shitty little town full of screaming children and crying adults. There's nobody he even wants to fight here, which is saying something, because Nnoitra has been known to occupy himself with colonies of brainless gillian when he's bored. He can distantly feel some darkspawn, but he's not sure where. They're just sort of... around.
The village isn't even nice. Everything is mud and old wood and it smells like dirt and refuse and the fat they coat their torches in at night. Even their big fancy church smells like all that covered by woodsmoke and incense. He is ready to leave before he even gets there.
Alistair, or possibly Morrigan, or maybe they're just bickering - he isn't really listening that closely - is going on about how they should think about their next step, which is... stupid.
Their next step is they're gonna find the archdemon.
An archdemon, as far as the old hag could tell them, is basically a dragon if a dragon was also a darkspawn.
So they're gonna find the archdemon and whack its head off. Or else they'll die fighting it. Either way it's going to be grand.
For whatever weird reason, Alistair takes exception to this plan. Even though 'fight the darkspawn' is exactly what he's supposed to want to do.
"How are we going to get to the archdemon," Alistair complains. This man has so many fucking feelings, maybe Nnoitra should call him Whingey instead of Coward. "There's going to be an army of darkspawn in the way."
"So we - kill - them - first." He gives each word its own special weight like emphasis might make Alistair pay attention. Nnoitra feels like spending time with this man is making his fucking brain leak out his ears.
"We- that's the inn. Cousland, that's the inn. We need to resupply, remember?"
Resupply? He wrinkles his face. He's already been told he's not allowed to eat darkspawn - apparently they're poisonous, and also Morrigan and Alistair had looked like they were gonna purge their guts on the spot - so probably they'll need food. There aren't enough people on the roads to feed all of them.
That's when he feels it.
It's ...familiar.
Nnoitra's head swings west like a weathervane following the wind. He breathes in like he might be able to catch the scent.
Maybe there's something worth stopping for in this piece of shit little town after all. "Get your supplies then. I'll catch up."
Nnoitra begins walking.
"Cousland?" A pause. Seriously, what the fuck is a Cousland? He has to figure that out one day. "Cousland!"
"Leave it," says Morrigan's much fainter voice, and then the two of them trail off into bickering, which he can no longer hear.
Tesla is hung in a fucking public gibbet.
Nnoitra isn't kidding. Tesla's just... standing there. In a big cage. In the middle of the village.
His fingers are curled around the bars. He looks exhausted.
Nnoitra knows it's him by his reiatsu, of course. But he doesn't look that much like Tesla. He's big. Very big. Heavyset, with grey brown skin and curling horns that are, in fact, subtly reminiscent of the ogre from Ostagar. They should be tusks, probably, but otherwise this is like some strange merge of his released and sealed forms.
He has only a fine strip of coarse blond hair. That's weird.
Nnoitra also knows it's him, because the first thing he says, in a tone of breathless, profound relief, is: "Nnoitra-sama."
Aside from the fact that nobody here knows his proper name, there is literally one person in the world - in any world - who sounds that pleased to see Nnoitra.
"Yo, Tesla," he says, grinning. He's not really that happy to see Tesla, exactly. He's not.
He is, however, happy to see Tesla in a gibbet. That's why his weird human heart is going so fast and he feels like his day is looking up.
He comes close enough to touch and then begins to laugh. His laughter is loud and shrieking like a broken hinge, and a few of the villages intentionally skirt further around the gibbet just to avoid him.
Tesla doesn't seem nearly as amused but of course he waits politely for Nnoitra's hilarity to wear itself out.
When it does Nnoitra leans against his cage and meets his eyes. Tesla's a bit taller than him like this, although out of the gibbet he might not be. He catches his breath and uses the bars to support his weak knees.
He does not let Tesla out.
"This has gotta be the dumbest shit you've ever done," says Nnoitra. His face feels like he's about to cry. Holy shit.
Tesla looks distinctly uncomfortable.
It turns out that when he arrived in this world, Tesla showed up somewhere far away from Nnoitra and instead of someone shoving a blade at him and saying 'go get it', he got a bunch of screaming farmers. It's perfectly understandable to Nnoitra that Tesla killed them all and ate them and then, if he's reading through the lines of this carefully worded story, stumbled around confused for a while.
And then a bunch of templars showed up and shot him full of poison before Tesla could kill them all. That explains why there was only one of them to come after Nnoitra back on the road to this shitty little town.
"And, what, you're too weak to escape? Don't fucking lie to me, Tesla." Nnoitra says. "Or are you just scared of them?"
"The body gets thirsty," says Tesla, sullen and ashamed. Nnoitra likes him with his head bowed, oh yes he does. He likes those horns, too, perfectly curved and inviting. "The water they give is tainted, but..."
But the body gets thirsty. Yeah, Nnoitra's noticed that. "Pathetic," he tells him anyway.
"I... apologise for my weakness," Tesla says.
Nnoitra scoffs, and he sticks a finger through the bars and traces the bump in Tesla's throat. He pushes hard against it when Tesla swallows. He doesn't flinch.
Nnoitra sighs a deep dramatic sigh. "I sure do have a useless fucking fraccion, don't I Tesla?"
His shoulders, so big in his cage, are tense. "Indeed, Nnoitra-sama," he agrees.
"What kind of fraccion needs to be rescued by his master?" he wonders aloud.
"...An unworthy one, Nnoitra-sama," Tesla says.
"Uh-huh," says Nnoitra. "So for what reason should i let you out for?"
Tesla swallows. Nnoitra feels it against his fingers. Ah.
He looks at Nnoitra and doesn't answer.
Nnoitra eyes him for a few long seconds, mostly to stretch the moment out. There's no way he's gonna leave Tesla here. He knows it. He's not sure if Tesla knows it, but if he's not a goddamn moron he should.
It satisfies something in Nnoitra to make Tesla say it, to make him denigrate and abase himself like this. So he waits.
"No reason, Nnoitra-sama," says Tesla quietly.
"That's right," Nnoitra agrees pleasantly. "Because you're fucking useless, aren't you?"
"...Yes," Tesla agrees, looking away.
Oh, that's nice. For about a second. And then something sours in Nnoitra's unfamiliar, too-human belly and he scowls.
"Guess it can't be helped," he mutters, tired of the game, and then he reaches out and snaps the big hooked lock that's keeping the cage closed.
He sees, in his peripheral vision, one of the villagers flinch at the sound. More than one of them turn toward the cage.
"C'mon, Tesla. We're gonna kill an archdemon." Whatever the fuck that is, really.
Tesla, too, looks as though he isn't sure what that is, but he also says, with every evidence of sincerity (no matter how hard Nnoitra glares suspiciously at him), "Yes, Nnoitra-sama, I'd be delighted."
The delight, Nnoitra gathers, is in following him to do it, not in the act itself. Tesla is a puzzling person.
Nnoitra steps back and lets him out of the cage. He obediently gets out. Out of the gibbet. Nnoitra nearly laughs again. He runs his hand over the bars instead.
Neither Alistair nor Morrigan seems pleased to meet Tesla. Nnoitra is as concerned about that as he is about the rest of their feelings.
"So... what's a qunari doing in southern Ferelden?" Alistair asks.
"Following my master," Tesla says, which is... true. He usually doesn't pull out 'my master' quite like that, though, and the sound of it simultaneously settles Nnoitra's nerves and rubs him entirely the wrong way.
He shakes his hair back with a twitch of his head and gets moving. Tesla, as expected, falls into step immediately behind him.
"Nnoitra-sama..." he begins, glancing back uncertainly at Alistair and Morrigan.
Nnoitra darts a look back at them. He knows what Tesla is asking without asking: why are they here, why are they alive, why has Nnoitra let them -
And Nnoitra is at a loss as to how to explain them to him. He doesn't know. He hasn't seriously injured them since he left the hag's hut, and he doesn't know.
He thinks if he knew himself, he still probably wouldn't explain them. Tesla sounds like he's insecure, like he wonders if Nnoitra is replacing him. Nnoitra is annoyed by the implication, and his mind cascades into a series of increasingly aggravated thoughts: that this is stupid, that it shouldn't concern Tesla if Nnoitra does replace him, that his curiosity in asking is some effort at passive manipulation of Nnoitra, that Tesla has no right, that Nnoitra is stupid for thinking about it this much -
"Leave it," Nnoitra snaps. His head aches from grinding his teeth.
Obediently, Tesla leaves it.
That, too, annoys Nnoitra.
Curiously, the feeling doesn't last. They walk through the day - some villagers try to stop them leaving, yelling about grey wardens, and Nnoitra looks over them with a jaundiced eye. There's no point, he thinks. This ragged mob is all scared little people trying to do right by their loved ones. That makes Nnoitra want to turn back and set the whole fucking village on fire with all their precious people still in it out of pure spite. But it does not, importantly, make him interested in killing them.
"Go on," he says to Tesla instead.
Tesla, once he gets started, enjoys killing mostly for the sake of killing. His motives are simple. He's a simple kind of guy in the end.
At least someone's having fun, Nnoitra thinks. He is weirdly content watching in this case.
The village mob has some loose change, and Morrigan collects it without comment from the bodies whose pockets can still be recognised.
The walking isn't that bad, either. The scenery here isn't like Hueco Mundo, all sloping rock and dirt and green canopies, but a path's a path. The human body likes sunlight, and sometime there are highwaymen or roving bands of darkspawn just for flavour. By sundown Nnoitra is very nearly mellow.
Tesla seems to notice, too. They make camp and the others sleep. He and Nnoitra remain awake, still used to being thoroughly nocturnal. They sit by the guttering campfire, whose low-burning remains throws them into warm shadows. Both of them have keen eyes, but the shadows disguise their expressions. Quietly Tesla asks, "Do you like it here, Nnoitra-sama?"
Nnoitra rolls one shoulder. He doesn't answer for ages, and Tesla's attention doesn't wane and he doesn't ask again. He just waits. One of his horns gleams with red light from the coals.
He feels like he should say no. There's a dearth of really challenging fighting here. Nnoitra thinks if he doesn't die fighting this archdemon thing he's going to be mortally bored within a week. Boredom will be a shit way to go.
"Could be worse, I guess," he says instead, staring at the light reflected on the curve of Tesla's horn. He remembers his thought from earlier. Inviting. Yes.
"Should we look for a way home?" Tesla asks cautiously, peering at him from behind those strange eyes.
"Hmm," Nnoitra rumbles, instead of giving him an answer. "Come here."
He kicks one leg wide so he can lean back on both of his hands, and so Tesla can crawl between his knees. Nnoitra knows he'd come right over the blistering coals on his bare hands and knees if Nnoitra asked it of him. He doesn't ask, but the knowledge that he could settles something else in his gut. It's familiar. Tesla's steadiness and obedience are just
... so easy.
Tesla comes so close Nnoitra can feel the heat of him, and he lets it leech away into his own cooler skin. This, too, is familiar.
"Nnoitra-sama?" he prompts, close enough that Nnoitra can feel the hot wash of his breath. He wonders if he'll hear a heart beat when he gets close enough.
Slowly, he slides one long finger up one of Tesla's horns. It's hard and cool.
"I guess we can stay here for a while, since you like it so much," Nnoitra drawls.
Tesla blinks once, slowly, and then he smiles and says, "I would be happy to."