Xander'd had enough.
Both in the sense of alcohol, and in the sense that he'd watched the same small-town, low-life assholes hitting on not one, not two, but three of his female companions—two of whom were his bloody sisters—all evening. Ordinarily, he didn't have to worry about this sort of thing; Camilla was more than capable of fending for herself, and genuinely grew annoyed if Xander stepped in. But Corrin looked distinctly uncomfortable, and repeatedly tugged on the short tunic of her samurai armor as if it would reach further down her thighs by sheer force of will. Hinoka was laughing too loudly, swearing too forcefully, and slamming her tankards down too aggressively, sloshing beer across the table in an attempt to appear as unladylike as humanly possible.
Xander took a deep breath, counted to ten for the millionth time that evening, and took another sip of beer.
"Lord Xander?" Laslow inputted delicately. "You seem troubled."
"Do you need someone stabbed?" Peri asked, scooting toward the edge of her seat. "I can do that."
Xander sighed. "No, Peri." He set down his tankard. "Although they could probably use a decent clocking."
"I can do that, too," said Peri hopefully.
Xander was just about to dissuade her again when what he noticed at his sisters' table made him choke on his ale. The man who had been bothering Corrin all night had been leering at her backside as she'd gotten up, and actually had the audacity to grab it. Corrin had immediately yelped and swatted his hand away, but the man had only cackled, and his friends joined in. Fury blazed in Hinoka's eyes, hot and wild, and Camilla cut the laughter short with a biting comment Xander was unfortunately too far away to catch.
He thumped both hands down on the table and pushed himself up to his full height, broad shoulders creaking in protest. Xander's scowl only deepened as he thundered across the bar toward Camilla, Corrin, and Hinoka's table.
In his wake, Laslow murmured a quiet, "Oh, no."
Xander didn't even stop for pleasantries, instead yanking the man upright by the scruff of his neck. "You will apologize," Xander barked, as if giving marching orders.
"Hey, now!" The bald man's hands came up to the level of his eyes, palms out. "Nobody said she was yours."
Xander blinked a few times. "My sister," he then snapped. "And moreover, it doesn't matter. You have no right to—"
"Oh, moreover," one of the man's friends sneered. He leaned back in his chair, the picture of languid power. "This bloke thinks he's better than us, gents."
A vein pulsed in Camilla's temple. "'Gent' is not how I'd describe you."
The man beside her winked over his tankard of ale. "You're cute when you're feisty."
"Then you're gonna love me." Hinoka slammed her hands onto the table and pushed herself up to her full height.
Somewhere across the bar, Azama noticed the display and uttered a quiet, "Oh, no."
"Piss off," Hinoka snarled, "or I'll knock the piss out of you."
"Please," Xander said, not really understanding why, "do allow me."
Hinoka shook her head. "Together."
And the paladin and the sky knight each sent a fist careening into the bald man's jaw line. The man crashed across the table, dragging glassware with him and narrowly missing cutlery.
"Who the hell do you think you are?!" the man who'd been sitting next to Camilla barked. He had a nasty scar over his cheekbone—the result of a training accident, perhaps, or an agricultural machine malfunction.
"Crown Prince Xander," said the paladin flatly, "heir of Nohr."
Laughter skittered across the bar, which had gone deathly silent in watching Xander's war march. It took Xander a moment to realize that everyone had assumed he'd been joking. Even Hinoka and Camilla let off surprised, uneasy laughs. Corrin could only stare at her old brother, ruby eyes wide.
"Don't be a shit," the scarred man barked, helping his friend roll off the table with some difficulty.
"Oh, that's rich," Camilla hissed, now on her feet herself.
The third man, who until now had been lazily spread across his chair, was now on upright, staring Camilla down like an angry bull. "Don't start shit you can't finish," he threatened lowly.
A shattering of glass came from across the bar. Everyone at the table turned toward the source of the noise, only to discover Niles with a smashed wine bottle in one hand and the broken shards of glass in the other, arrayed through his fingers like shuriken. Blood ran down his fingers, but the one-eyed archer seemed not to notice.
And that's about when the fight started.
The bald man launched himself at Xander, who only just had the time to duck out of the way like a boxer in a cage match. Hinoka instinctively lashed out with a roundhouse kick that unfortunately left her wide open to the scarred man's tackle. In the same moment, Camilla put herself between the lazy man and Corrin, not that it ended up mattering. The entire bar had erupted into chaos, and it seemed anyone who wasn't in direct service to either Crown was a threat.
"'Ey!" Niles barked. "Archer-boy!" Takumi jerked his head towards where the one-eyed man hadn't even bothered to rise from his seat. "Take these."
Takumi fumbled with the glass shards Niles sent his way, managing not to drop any by some miracle, although his hands were torn up in the process. "What are these for?"
"Come over here, and I can show you a thing or two," Niles said with a wink (which was sort of undermined by the eye patch), and a shake of the hand holding the shards like shuriken.
Takumi's cheeks bloomed scarlet, but Beruka didn't even crack a smile. The assassin had already leapt from her seat beside Niles, pelting headlong into the melee without so much as a backward glance.
"Hey!" Takumi managed. "That is enough with the—"
"If you don't last longer than thirty seconds," Ryoma said to his brother as he jogged past, "you're an embarrassment to the family!"
"THAT IS ENOUGH, LOBSTER-MAN!" Takumi bellowed after his older brother, but he still flung a shard of glass at the woman who had tried to clock Ryoma over the head with a wine bottle not unlike Niles'. The shard struck true; the woman dropped the bottle as she shrieked in pain and clutched her bleeding forearm.
Saizo sprang forward to protect his liege, Kagero directly in tow. The ninja were born for subterfuge, naturally, but Kagero had never been more grateful for her ability to incapacitate without killing than she was in that moment. Ryoma, for his part, was throwing punches like this was all in good fun, and not because his "brother-in-law" was an overprotective git, to use Saizo's muttering.
Although to be fair, Kagero thought privately, Lord Ryoma would have done something similar, if he'd gotten there first.
The moment the fight had broken out, Orochi had ducked for cover behind the bar. She was a being made for divination and magic, thank you very much. These brutes could pound on each other as much as she wanted; she would stay out of it.
"Beruka!" Camilla barked as her reticent retainer appeared near her in the brawl. "You must stand down!"
"With all—" Beruka paused to drop below someone's clumsy punch, and rolled her shoulder directly into the woman's solar plexus. "—due respect milady,—" She took the second punch, thrown by the woman's husband, directly in the jaw. Beruka snarled and lashed out, grabbing the man by the collar of his loose, white shirt, and throwing him bodily over the nearest table. "—I will not."
The unfortunately side effect of Beruka's professional bar-brawling was that Corrin had been separated from Camilla. The dragon-woman held no love for war, skilled as she was in it, and was honestly too stunned by the last few minutes to do much, anyway. "Kaze!" she shouted, not really anywhere in particular. "Where are you?"
A voice sounded from over her shoulder—"Here, milady."—and was followed by a purple-haired figure in her periphery, whipping around the edge of the table to smash into the bald man's side with all the force of a royal ninja.
Meanwhile, Setsuna had appeared in the doorway, back from her trip to the bathroom. She stared at the room in confusion, blinking once, twice, thrice, and then finding that this chaos was still going on.
"Setsuna!" Hinata called over to her. "Get behind us!"
"Okay!" Setsuna dropped under a few punches while she made her way over to the booth where Lord Takumi had positioned himself behind the wall of muscle that was Hinata and Oboro. "Should I get my bow?"
Oboro's eyes widened almost comically over the back of the man she'd just kneed in the groin. "We're not trying to kill anybody!"
"Oh." Setsuna accepted a few of the glass shards Lord Takumi handed her with some reluctance, but the glass felt familiar and solid in her hands. "Okay."
When the fight had broken out, Laslow and Peri immediately snapped forward, determined to protect their liege. It turned out that Hinoka apparently had that covered, and that Xander could probably use the catharsis of beating the living piss out of someone, anyway. So now they remained, as ever, each other's watcher and protector. Peri was giggling as she smashed her fist into noses and ears and heard cartilage crunch. Laslow tried very hard to flit between assailants and around tables, and keep Peri from losing herself in a fight that was really not meant to have anyone die afterward.
Odin and Selena, however, had not snapped to in defense of their lieges. One, Odin's was currently in the astral castle, and two, because Beruka apparently had Lady Camilla covered. Instead, Odin had placed himself bodily between Selena and anything in her vicinity, effectively trapping her in the booth she'd previously occupied with Kaze and Azama.
"Move it, Odin," Selena barked, hammering on his back.
Odin said nothing, which, when Selena thought about it later on, had to have nearly murdered the man.
"Odin, you're a mage now! Get out of my bloody way!"
But Odin refused to budge, instead rolling under and around blows meant for no one in particular. Even when he made a fist out of it, his fell hand twitched and shook, although that seemed to do nothing to his aim.
Selena huffed her last sigh of annoyance, and ducked under the table proper. It was a real effort to squirm around the table legs (and a real test of fortitude not to squeal at the used napkins and dead roach under the table), but she managed to wiggle her way out of the table and into the melee proper—and right into the direct path of someone's boot.
Selena snarled in pain, and the sound made Odin's focus snap around. He cursed when he found her missing from where he'd supposedly been protecting her—cursed her with every deity he knew—before he took to scouring the nearby tables for her.
Selena felt her heart twist cruelly in her chest, and made up for it by launching herself at the nearest villager, who just so happened to be trying to take Azama's festal from him.
It had been a long time since he'd fought like this, Xander thought. Siegfried required such precise control; he could never afford to take his mind off his targets and his strategies for even a moment. But here, in this madcap brawl in a Hoshidan inn in the middle of nowhere, Xander didn't have to be the controlled, precise weapon his father had molded him into. The freedom was intoxicating—or maybe that was the beer—or maybe that was the way Hinoka's long legs kept snapping out to smash a boot into someone's solar plexus—or maybe it was just that Xander felt less like the stoneborn Crown Prince than he perhaps ever had.
Ryoma, in direct contrast, was no stranger to uncontested brawls. Growing up with a brother as prickly as Takumi, Ryoma had long since learned to put up or shut up. In Ryoma's youth, Yukimura had frequently warned him that he would end up as wayward as his father had been, if he didn't shape up. Ryoma, every time and without fail, had taken the insult personally, and had become the High Prince of Hoshidan anyone would be proud of almost out of sheer spite. He never lost his love of a good fight, though. There was just something so satisfying about it.
But all at once, the fisticuffs came to a grinding halt when the bald man Xander had originally yanked to his feet pulled a knife. Camilla and Beruka had been forced to scatter, lest they lose fingers or worse, but Corrin had not been so lucky. And Xander had been just a hair too slow to catch the man before he yanked Corrin to him and pressed the shiny metal blade to her throat.
He didn't need to say anything; the bar grew silent of its own accord.
"That's enough," the man barked anyway, and the bar cringed at the sound.
Hinoka pointedly smashed yet another roundhouse into the man standing next to her.
The bald man scowled, and pressed his knife harder against Corrin's pale, white throat. Blood welled up from the hairline cut, and Corrin's facial expressions seemed torn between terror, horror, and blinding rage.
"Easy there, milord," the man said mockingly to Xander. "Call off your dogs and maybe I won't slit her pretty little throat."
Xander's teeth ground together so loudly, Hinoka could hear him from where she stood. There was no winning in a standoff like this, and both the bald man and Xander knew it.
"Same goes to you, milady," the scarred man said, throwing the mockery to Camilla, now. He took up with his friend, the bald man, leering at everyone and sharpening his knife on a raspy old whetstone.
"You will unhand my sister," Camilla said, loathing dripping from every syllable. "Hoshidan dastard."
"Oh will I, now?" The bald man seemed to contemplate Corrin's blood as it pooled on his blade.
Takumi had long since stopped listening to the Nohrians' forced banter with this man who was holding a damned knife to Corrin's throat. Takumi turned the final glass shard in his hands over and over while he contemplated what to do. The three men who had been bothering Hinoka, Camilla, and Corrin earlier had positioned themselves between the Nohrians and the door. If they so much as moved, the men could be out the door with Corrin in the following instant, and the Crescent Butchers episode would easily repeat itself.
He would have one shot, then, both literally and figuratively, to make this work.
Takumi first glanced to Oboro, and then Hinata. They both nodded, and only then did the white-haired prince of Hoshido ease himself out of his seat. The man with the knife to Corrin's neck was too busy arguing with Xander and Camilla to notice movement in the background.
As Takumi and his retainers drew nearer, he could pick up bits and pieces of the conversation centered on Corrin. Xander and Camilla, quite rightly, would not back down. The fact that they'd lowered their fists was surprising enough to Takumi. He knew there was nothing either of them could do without risking Corrin's neck in the most literal of senses, but surely their retainers would be…?
Ah, there were Xander's grey-haired dancer and pastel-haired Cavalier. They were talking quickly and quietly back and forth, and could have easily been mistaken for a husband comforting his terrified wife. Takumi didn't see Camilla's assassin, which left an uncomfortable knot in the pit of his stomach, but the sharp-tongued woman who made a habit of pissing everybody off was half-concealed behind the bar. She studied Corrin's assailant intently, as if she could determine where to strike with her words just by looking.
And gods, did Takumi's head hurt. He was used to it, by now—he had always suffered migraines, though never of this magnitude and frequency before—but it made his vision blur sometimes, and sometimes the world would grow hazy, and he'd have to squint through purple fog just to see the nose on the end of his own face.
Takumi set himself twenty-ish paces back from the man with the knife, who was evidently losing patience. Xander and Camilla had subtly crept forward during the course of the standoff, cutting off the man's escape anywhere but out the door. Takumi bit back on his molars; he couldn't risk someone obscuring his line of sight, and these Nohrians were only getting in his way. Helplessly, he glanced to his retainers once more, and Hinata and Oboro nodded once again. They slipped sideways a bit more, making pointed eye contact with Xander's retainers and Hinoka. They all seemed to understand, not that that surprised him about his sister.
Takumi's pulse pounded in his throat. He had to line this up perfectly, and couldn't draw attention to himself to do it. That he'd made it this far undetected was a miracle, and no doubt a testament to Xander's commanding presence (and obvious fury). Privately, Takumi could admit to himself that he was glad to see that Corrin's Nohrians "siblings" cared for her so deeply. At least she had been well looked after, in that damned hellhole of a country.
"We're leaving," the man with the knife growled. "If you try to follow, we'll kill her."
Out of time. Takumi shut his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and then snapped them open and let the glass shard fly with a practiced flick of the wrist. "HAI!" he barked.
The man with the knife jerked his head toward the source of the noise, and was greeted with a shard-shuriken dead between the eyes. He staggered, and his grip on both Corrin's hair and his knife loosened. Oboro and Hinata had shot forward the instant Takumi gave the signal, on perfect course to tackle the two men still standing near Corrin, but they apparently needn't have bothered.
The next moments seemed to happen in slow motion.
Corrin's delicate features settled on blinding rage, and the moment the man's grip loosened, she pressed forward. She pivoted on her feet (bare, as always), borrowed samurai armor billowing out behind her, and dropped into something that looked like a swordsman's stance.
"I make my own fate," she hissed.
She hopped backwards, grinning like a fiend. Horns were growing like vines from her forehead, claws like scythes from her fingers. Corrin rolled forward, the exact way they had seen hundreds of times on the battlefield, but without the Yato to slice through her opponent, she was left with nothing but those claws. Blood splattered across the bald man's clothes, but the princess wasn't finished.
She hopped back again, and the dragon grew further still, swallowing her arms with its grey, scaly hide. She snapped her palms together and the dragon's ruthless jaws grew between them, spitting out a blast of energy not unlike the arrows Takumi fired from Fujin Yumi.
The world resumed its usual pacing.
The man with the knife was blasted backwards. The sound his head made when it cracked against the far wall made Takumi wince. The man grew ominously still, a small splattering of blood on the wall behind him.
Oboro and Hinata pulled up short when it became apparent that Corrin didn't need their help. In fact, they both shied away from the dragon princess, unmasked horror in their eyes. Corrin appeared not to notice either of her brother's retainers, and instead turned back to face Xander and Camilla.
"Let's go," she said hoarsely.
"Right behind you, sister dear," Camilla said, plucking her half-drunk wineglass from the table as she did so. She glanced pointedly to Beruka, who had somehow appeared at her elbow, and the assassin nodded before disappearing to reclaim her liege's effects.
Xander turned to face the silenced bar. He made the "forward march" gesture of Nohrian commanders, and said, lowly, "Key dragons, move out."
The bar patrons watched in horrified silence as the "mercenaries" gathered themselves and their things and began seeing themselves to the door.
"I thought we weren't trying to kill anyone?" Setsuna asked Oboro as the two women hiked up the stairs to grab their weapons, as well as their lieges'.
"Well," Oboro said, glancing with horror to where the bald man still lay motionless, "we weren't."
-)
At the risk of getting too personal for a second, here:
PSA to anyone on antidepressants: If you feel like not-yourself for a prolonged but quantifiable period of time, it might not be your mental illness; it might just be the medicine.
Exhibit A: Yours truly was too exhausted to write until she switched to a different medication.
Stay safe, friends. And pay attention to how your medicine makes you feel.
Also:
Sabriel41: Thank you so much for your kind words. I'm glad you're enjoying my work :)