So it totally figures that as soon as I set a deadline I miss it! I like to post chapters at a 1000 words plus and now also by Sunday, I swear I'll get the hang of it! . Thank you again to you lovelies that reviewed (some twice, MissOblivion) or who have on nearly every chapter (This is REVAH, your username never fails to cackle), fav'd, and alerted this story. Now get to reading the chapter! GO! I have to go plot the next chapter and figure out what the frak I'm doing with this. So, uh, review if the spirit moves ya!
Disclaimer: If I owned Reaver he'd have spent the entire game in a wet shirt. :3 Well at least a good cutscene or two.
Arfur rammed his fist into the other man's stomach, his eyes reflecting coldly in the afternoon light that filtered in through the broken window. His time in Bowerstone Prison had made him hard. Harder than his younger days when he'd been content working in the shadow of Nicky the Nickname. Arfur was stronger now, ambitious even. He waited as the bedraggled man retched onto the floor. Bowerstone was ripe for the picking. No bandits to compete with, no crime lords to cozy up to, no Nicky the Nickname. Arfur had seen to that himself and it seemed he should have dealt with little Sparrow personally as well.
"I were up early this mornin'. Could a slept in, right, couldn't I?" he pushed the crouched man over with his foot. "Couldn't I Alex?"
"I tried! I tried!" Alex shouted in his defense. "You said she traveled alone!"
"Hear that Reg? It's all me fault isn't?" Arfur addressed the gypsy woman shackled to the wall with mocking expression. "Me informant were bad. The ship captain lied. Reg forged the bloomin' letter she got from Sparrow 'erself! Right!" Arfur kicked Alex in the side again and again until the man managed to scream out another excuse.
"Reaver," Alex gasped, "Reaver was with her!"
Arfur stopped, his foot inches away from driving into Alex's side again. "Maybe yer should start from the beginnin'?"
"If you woke up in a strange house hearing those noises, you would go investigate. I would bet my favorite painting, the one I had done just after the tenth burning of the Hero's Guild a fantastic piece you know that man was the first to capture the peculiar curve of my jaw when I make this face." Reaver slicked back his soaking wet hair and posed. "See?"
Sparrow, dressed in a clean shirt and breeches with her damp hair pulled over loosely one shoulder, glared at the pirate clearly slightly amused by his rambling excuse as to why he had been watching her bathe. She leaned back in her chair, the wooden back pressing uncomfortably against her shoulders, propped her feet on the table.
"Reaver, light burn you, I will dump another bucket of water on you."
Reaver fingered his damp shirt, "You could just ask me to take it off, you know." He smirked pleased by the red that bloomed beneath Sparrow's tan.
"You're impossible, you know that?"
"Dear Madam, I know, but if I am impossible than you are positively thorny." Reaver laughed leaning closer to Sparrow.
"I am not! I just don't inflate your ego like everyone else!"
Reaver shook his head, "I worked hard building up my ego. I needed no help doing it."
The hero dropped her hand reflexively letting it hang in the air waiting for her dog's wet nose to push into her palm. She smiled, a particularly witty response waiting on her tongue but she stopped realizing what she had done. Tobar searching nose didn't press against her palm and then Sparrow remembered it never would again. Suddenly her embarrassment at being caught naked seemed pathetic against this simple reminder of what she lost.
"Reaver?"
She stared at Reaver and he stared back. Here it was, the moment she should shoot him in the knees. The moment where she should make him crawl out of her house with his pretty face twisted until no one would ever want him again so he could feel half of what she felt, live half the life she had.
"Yes?" he answered, his voice soft, his eyes shimmering with some emotion that Sparrow couldn't name. Here was the point where she told him to leave and meant it. Reaver could read it in her face, in her body. She was thinking about that bitter and bloody connection they shared. First he had tried to sacrifice her to the Shadow Court (he had no idea how she had gotten out of that) and then he had given her up to Lucien, an action that had lead to capture of the Three Heroes (himself, a brutish woman known as Hammer, and the will scarred mage Garth) and the death of Sparrow's beloved dog. Unbidden, excuses began to spring up in his mind. He'd changed his mind after his deal with Lucien after meeting her. He'd stopped feeding information to Lucien but somehow he had known about the ritual anyway. She had changed something in him, unlocked a part of himself that he had lost.
"Shut-up." Her voice wavered and Sparrow turned her face away, unable to continue looking into those eyes. She would deal with all of this later in an uninterrupted bath. She would process this bundle of feelings and what Reaver wanted and why she couldn't seem to send him away later.
Arfur crouched with several of his goons and Alex in the bushes outside of Sparrow's house. That it was the house that she and her sister used to squat next to did not escape him. After Alex's failed attempt at nabbing the girl, Arfur was convinced he'd have to pull off every aspect of his revenge personally.
"Woss our move boss?" one of the goons asked Arfur.
Arfur slapped the man on the back of his head. "O'course not! We'll strike wen she's alone! Blimey! Wen she least expects it! You want deal wif Reaver?"
The brute shook his head quickly. No one in their right mind wanted to deal with Reaver firsthand. Cruel, manipulative, and –if you believed the tales—immortal, Reaver was a force to be reckoned with and certainly not one Arfur wanted to take on at the same time as the Hero of Bowerstone.
Arfur motioned for them to move out and once they were sequestered in the abandoned warehouse at the edge of Old Town, Arfur turned his mind to plotting.
"Did any fairy spot yer put the sleep syrup in Sparrows pint?"
Alex, bruised and beaten as he was, shook his head enthusiastically. "No, no one saw."
Arfur nodded thoughtfully, "Fink she'd meet yer again, then, eh? Wivout the boytoy?"
"Yeah, I think she might."
"Midnight, right, Bowerstone Clocktower. Make sure she's there. Alone. We'll be waitin'. If yer fuck this up, right, Alex, and yer'll be gahn on a wee walk off Poorman's Point."