This fic does not, strictly speaking, fit into the Feel the Fear universe, but the Pictland and Gwynedd herein are very similar versions of the characters in the FtF fic Vanished (this version of Gwynedd is simply a little more aware of his feelings towards Pictland). They are not brothers or otherwise related to one another at this point in their history, but will eventually go on to form a part of the nations of Scotland and Wales.
I've written a few fics about these two kingdoms now, but this was the one I most enjoyed writing!
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Gwynedd: A kingdom in the north of what would later become Wales.
Pictland: Land of the Picts, who lived in what would become Scotland to the north of the rivers Forth and Clyde
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Pictland breathes deep of the piquant steam rising from the thick cuts of venison and dense seed bread Gwynedd had fetched for him, but although his eyes narrow hungrily, he says, "I cannot take this."
"Whyever not?" Gwynedd places his hands, flat-palmed, against the edge of the plate when Pictland tries to pass it to him, and gently pushes it back towards the other kingdom, urging him to keep it. "I noticed you didn't tarry long enough in the hall to break your fast this morning, so you must be famished, and trudging through all that snow just now must have frozen you through to the marrow. If you warm your belly, the rest of you is sure to follow."
"I cannot," Pictland repeats, loosening his fingers in just such a way that Gwynedd has to quickly bend his own and clutch at the plate to keep it from falling and ruining meat and bread both for all but the dogs. "Your people need to eat and I do not. Best this goes to one of them. Winter's settling in earnest now, and I know your food supplies will be stretched thin enough before it's over."
"Come winter's end, perhaps they will be, but for the moment, my stores are fully stocked. The only hardship you're causing is your own by refusing it."
He smiles encouragingly, but Pictland shakes his head in adamant refusal. Sighing, defeated, Gwynedd turns aside to set the plate down on a nearby table and pick up the cup of mead he had set there.
"You must at least take a little to sup," he says. "Even at the season's turning, we always have mead to spare. You won't be depriving anyone."
He tries to press the cup upon Pictland, but the other kingdom grabs his wrist, forcing him to keep his distance.
Pictland's fingers are like blades of ice, cutting deep into Gwynedd's skin, and his grip slackens involuntarily at the frigid shock of their touch. The cup falls, spilling mead across the rush-strewn floor and the toes of Gwynedd's boots.
Gwynedd gives a quick twist of his arm to break Pictland's own grip, and then captures Pictland's hand between both of his before he has chance to retract it again.
"What are you doing?" Pictland asks. His eyes widen, growing round and lambent as the hunter's moon. Above them, his long lashes tremble, and the flakes of snow still caught in them glitter like stars as they catch the light.
The sight transfixes Gwynedd, and he cannot catch sufficient breath to give reply. Nor would he know what to say if even he could, because action had so far preceded thought that he is just as perplexed by it as Pictland.
The heel of Pictland's hand is rough and sword-callused, as are his fingertips. They snag against Gwynedd's palm as Pictland flexes his fingers, perhaps testing Gwynedd's hold.
Gwynedd can feel that slight movement reverberating through his arm all the way up to his shoulder. He finds he cannot make himself let go, either.
Pictland's call of his name – voice cracking like the ice on a Spring-thawed lake – brings Gwynedd back to himself, and reminds him of the question that hangs unsatisfied between them.
"I thought to chafe some warmth back into your hands," Gwynedd says, because it is the an answer that comes to him readily, though it is not reason or honesty. "I often do the same for my brothers when they have been out in the cold without the luxury of gloves."
He expects a reminder that they are not brothers – needless, as Gwynedd forgets it only at those times and in those ways, it seems, when the forgetting will prove most embarrassing for the both of them – and for Pictland to pull away. But he does neither.
"My people used to do the same for me when I was a wean," he says, casting his gaze out to settle on some far distant part of the kitchen. "They do not seem to think of it now that I am near grown, though. And I would not put my hands in my brother's care for fear that he might take the chance to break my fingers."
Pictland's averted eyes ensure he will not be able to see that his faint smile is not echoed on Gwynedd's face, and Gwynedd is relieved for that. Pictland, he knows, is a proud sort who scorns pity, and he would likely be angered if he could see the truth that Gwynedd's certain is writ plain in his expression.
His heart and his guts and his throat have all tightened in the way they always do when Pictland makes mention – always so passionless, always so detached – of the isolation in which he seems to pass most of his days. He knows that others do not always crave talk and touch as much as he does himself when he is lacking in them, but he yet wonders if Pictland might need both more than he ever admits.
As Gwynedd starts to rub his hands, Pictland's smile grows, and the jittery, tingling feeling at Gwynedd's shoulder spreads up his neck and down to his chest, blossoming into a heated fullness there that makes his ribs ache pleasantly.
He's so enrapt by the feeling that, when Pictland speaks again a long moment later, his heart skips a startled beat at the sound.
"I'm sorry that I refused your kind offer of vittles," Pictland says, "but it makes me uneasy that I have tarried here so long already and given you nothing in return for my board. Game is so scarce now, I cannot even help replenish your table, and I have naught else to offer."
Gwynedd would not think it too long if Pictland chose to stay the year entire, but he knows better than to betray such a thing. It is the way of their kind to yearn for their own homes and people and land, and grow heartsick and weary from their lack. It would be a cruelty to keep Pictland from them for a greater span than absolute necessity dictates.
"You are my guest," he says instead, "and it is my pleasure to provide all that I can for your comfort. You have seen that my brothers repay me only with their company, surely? I want nothing more from them, or you."
"Your brothers have much to say," Pictland says slowly, "and they sing you songs and recite poems of their own devising. I struggle to hold a note, my words lend themselves ill to poetry, and I know no stories worth telling."
"I can't believe that!" Gwynedd calls out in surprise. "You have lived for more years than any of the rest of us, and you must have seen at least one thing during that time that would make for a grand tale. I, for one, would be glad to listen to it, even if you cannot tell it with a bard's tongue."
Pictland catches his bottom lip up between his teeth, and he frowns pensively for a while. Eventually, he says, "There is one that I think might interest you, if you would like to hear it?"
At Gwynedd's eager nod, Pictland continues with: "One day, my brother was walking the line of his land's backbone, up where the mountains fill the sky, and he came across a fox which had been caught in a rabbit snare.
"It must have struggled long and hard to free itself, because the ground beneath it was torn and bloodied, and its exertions had burnt its flesh away until little remained save skin and raw bones.
"Now, my brother had once before been inflicted with such desperate hunger that he had been driven to the eating of a fox, so knew its meat would taste foul, and he had no need of a new pelt, especially one all torn up and covered in mud and piss. Thus, he determined to leave the carcass for the hunter to deal with, when next they came to check their traps.
"When he began to move away, there came a whimper; so small and so quiet that he almost mistook it for the whispering of the wind. He turned back to the fox, studied it more closely, and could scarce believe it when he saw its flank give a little tremble. It still lived!
"Now, my brother is not so hard of heart that he could leave some poor beast to a slow death out there in the cold, so he took out his knife, meaning to slit its throat and give it the peace of a quick ending. When he lifted his hand, though, it felt as though some vast force outside of himself guided it instead towards the wire wrapped tight around that fox's leg.
"As soon as he cut it free, the fox sprang to its feet as nimbly as if it had just awoken from a deep, healing sleep. It swung its head towards my brother then, and spoke to him in the voice of a man.
"'In return for your kindness,' it said, 'I owe you a boon. Beneath yonder oak tree is my den, and if you seek me out there before the moon has waned again and speak to me your wish, I shall grant it to you.'
"My brother is not rash, so for the fortnight that followed, he thought long and hard about what he should ask of the fox.
"After he crossed swords in anger, he thought that he would ask for endless strength so his arm would never falter. And when his belly yawned empty, he thought he would ask for a bowl that was always filled to the brim with good food. A bottomless cup of mead when he was parched, a magnificent cloak that warmed itself from within when he was cold.
"As the time drew near for him to return to the fox with his answer, he realised how selfish all those thoughts had been. He went to his king, then, to relate his story, and ask what his king may wish for himself and their people.
"His king did not pause for one moment before saying that he wished to rule these lands from sea to sea, north to south and east to west.
"My brother carried that wish all the way up to the mountains' feet, and sought out the fox's den beneath the oak tree. When he crouched down and looked inside it, however, it was empty."
Pictland might not have a bard's tongue, but the steady rhythm of his words has borne Gwynedd along just as easily one of their well-crafted and honed tales might. His heart beats just as fast in the silence Pictland draws out to heighten the anticipation for the conclusion of his own tale.
He knows his role as listener well, and thus when the quiet and his thundering pulse grow too much to bear he asks, "And did your brother find the fox? Did it grant his wish?"
"Are you ruled by his king?" Pictland says with a grin. "Naw, he looked high and low for that damn fox, all that day and each that followed, too. The moon had started waxing again before he finally gave up and crawled back to his king with his tail between his legs, to tell him that he would not be a mighty conqueror any time soon.
"To this day, my brother swears on his very life that a fox spoke to him, but I'm apt to believe that he was deep in his cups, as he so often is, and imagined the whole meeting. A talking fox? Have you ever heard of such a thing before?"
"No," Gwynedd admits gloomily, his dashed expectations making him feel slightly despondent. If such stories did not end in triumph for their hero, they usually contained some moral lesson, or sting in their tail.
Pictland looks to him in some puzzlement, and then upon searching his face, he flushes and hurriedly drops his head. "It was a poor tale," he says huskily, "I warned you that I don't know any good ones, but I thought you might find some humour in it, all the same."
If he had known it to be a jest from the start, Gwynedd thinks that he might have, and for Pictland's sake he tries to reframe it as such now. He imagines Pictland's brother, whom he has conceived a great dislike of in absentia through Pictland's accounting of him, fruitlessly searching for something as ridiculous as a talking fox, and the picture he paints for himself eventually raises a weak, belated chuckle from him.
Still, Pictland's head does not lift, and it's only when Gwynedd determines that he should squeeze his hand in order to fortify his attempt at reassurance that he notices he is still clasping it
Pictland's story had stolen all of his attention, so his awareness of their contact had faded along with the slowing movement of his own hands. He cannot pretend to be lending his heat to Pictland now – the other kingdom's fingers, in any case, are blood warm once more – or anything other than cradling his hand for no real purpose.
As it always is when he comes late to the realisation that is touching Pictland in a unseemly, lingering way, his first instinct is to blurt out apologies and hurry away as quick as he is able.
But he tamps down that impulse, because Pictland has not pulled away – he must be conscious of it now, too, Gwynedd's certain of that – and Alt Clut had told him that he was too easily disheartened in this; too quick to presume that Pictland's desires run contrary to his own.
Last night, Alt Clut, all full of newly-found bravado and courage about such matters, had also told him that he should just tell Pictland how highly he holds him in regard, or, if his words should happen to fail him, let a kiss speak in their stead.
It had seemed like sound advice when it was given, he and his brother alone in Gwynedd's chambers, but here and now, with Pictland's pale neck still bared in a bow and his cheeks reddened in shame, Gwynedd discovers he has neither the strength nor the hardness of spirit to act upon it.
Because Pictland is so reluctant to share his thoughts and his heart, whatever semblance of friendship they have built up over the centuries is fragile yet. Too fragile to withstand any rough handling or wrong-headed actions on Gwynedd's part.
Especially when Pictland has just admitted that he feels beholden to Gwynedd, and thus Gwynedd could not trust that any claim of reciprocated feelings, any returned kiss, were anything other than the repayment of a perceived debt.
He resolves – as he has resolved so many times in the past when he found himself standing at such a crossroads before – that he will not press for anything more than Pictland is willing to first seek out for himself,
He lets Pictland's hand fall. "It was not a poor tale at all," he says, forcing a smile onto his lips and into his voice. "In fact, I would like to hear another, if you can recall one. Especially if it concerns your exploits and not your brother's."
Pictland's own smile is tentative but hopeful. "I fear you might not be able to credit it after the last," he says, "but I did once uncover a magic stone, myself."
"If you spun it as well as you did the last, then I suspect you could make me believe anything for the duration," Gwynedd says, which causes Pictland's colour to rise even higher.
He wets his lips, settles back in his seat, but before he launches into his storytelling, and to Gwynedd's astonishment, he lays his unwarmed hand against Gwynedd's still-open palm.
Gwynedd dithers momentarily, unsure whether to interpret the move as a searching one, or merely a request for simple comfort. Ultimately, though, he cannot help but fold his hands around Pictland's in return, because he knows that he would curse himself for a fool later if he refused, whatever the gesture may truly mean.