Title: Mourner's Dawn
Author: Kytten
Pairing: Lucien Lachance/OMC
Rating: PG13
Disclaimer: Don't own.
Author's Note: I'm almost done with this beast! One more chapter to write. ONE MORE. XD Muahahaha. (Which means this will be 50 chapters long. So don't panic yet.)
It was hell waiting until nightfall to be led through the streets by a ghost intent on walking through people. Which didn't make following him the easiest of endeavors. Still, he couldn't concentrate on it overmuch. He had to find Sam. He was nervous to the point of making himself sick. Or maybe it was their bond.
Either way…
Lucien grit his teeth, and shoved a Nord out of his way, frustrations reaching a breaking point. But then the White-Gold tower was looming above him and he felt strangely confident.
"Sam?" he'd just managed to catch the boy before he hit the ground. When the boy didn't respond, without so much as a flicker of an eye, Lucien frowned and laid him down on the bed.
He was breathing, heart beating, he'd only managed to work himself into exhaustion.
Lucien laughed, relieved.
"You idiot," he muttered, stripping the boy of his outer layers. "Why do you do this to yourself?"
He was spattered with blood. There was even a hand print on the seat of his pants.
Antoinetta. He'd bet money on it.
"Lucien?"
Lachance shook off the memory and turned to look at the ghost, his shadows still firmly in place.
"You'll need to follow me very close. We've got to weasel our way into the guard quarters to get to Sam."
"You left him with the guards?" he hissed, glaring.
But Eldamil only smiled.
"Under then, actually."
Sam closed his eyes, leaning hard against the wall, looking around at the wreckage of a once great civilization. He could see the memories here— the ghosts of ghosts, shadows of builders and the people who had lived here, impressions of people when they'd been happiest.
Hello… look at all of you. You look so cheerful. Stuck here for all eternity and you couldn't be happier.
He felt desperately close to breaking. Nothing was going right. He'd never asked to be the champion. He'd only wanted to help, and look where it got him.
I wish… I wish I was happy.
Nothing he could do for that. They'd always recognize him. Champion of Cyrodill, there'd be no getting away from it. There was no way to shed this skin he'd been shoved into, no way to change his shape.
Lets play a game…
Sam startled up then, a flicker of hope bursting into life.
Lucien.
Sneaking past the guards was not the easiest thing he'd ever done by far. It didn't help that Eldamil walked through the guards and far ahead of him, leaving him to dodge between them, trying very hard to keep so much as the air of his passing from being noticed.
When they finally made it into the guard quarters, Eldamil swore.
"Too many guards. I thought they'd be gone by now. We'll have to do it the hard way."
Lucien glared, attempting to mime the question as to what exactly constituted the hard way, when Eldamil began tossing everything he could get his hands on in all directions. And damn was he fast.
Crouching very low and as close to the wall as he could manage, Lucien attempted to avoid both the flying projectiles and manic guards. They tried to stay and fight but Eldamil was doing something to their detect life spells and so they fumbled around like teenagers in their first fight. The mer, on the other hand, was having a ball of it, appearing in opposite sides of the room, tossing up mattresses and bits of crockery.
When finally the last guard left the room, he swept Lucien up into an awkward stranglehold of a hug and plunged through the grate in the fireplace.
Eldamil swore once they'd reached the bottom, a mass of tangled limbs. It was very obvious Sam wasn't there.
"Where in the hell have you taken me, you lying son of a bitch?" Lucien growled, turning on him. "What have you done with Sam?"
A moment later and he'd been tackled to the ground from behind, a furious writhing mass swinging itself around to better lodge under his chin.
Laughing as his instinct to kill suddenly evaporated, Lucien pulled the bundle closer.
"I swear, Samwane. I leave you for a day and this is the trouble you get into?"
They sat there together for a long moment, coiled together like two halves to something broken before Sam stood and pulled Lucien up after him, twining their fingers so as not to lose contact entirely.
"I've found the way out," he said, and Lucien balked to hear it.
It wasn't his voice. For that matter, it wasn't any one voice at all. It was tens, hundreds of voices, deeper than the furthest abyss, higher than the highest of the Jerall Mountains. And somehow, Lucien realized that the voice he heard, belonged to Sithis.
Perfect chaos in a lithe little elf.
"Do me a favor, Samwane," he ground out, using a great deal of willpower to keep his teeth from chattering. "Be silent."
The minute Sam hit the open air again, he was off and dancing, swinging around in wide circles with his arms held straight out. Lucien couldn't help but laugh.
"With all due respect, Listener, that's hardly befitting a man of your station."
Sam spun, still laughing and flashed a rather rude gesture that would certainly have been aided by a pair of calipers and a carrot or two, before zipping up into a tree.
"Where are you going?" Eldamil asked, looking rather hazy in the moonlight.
"Back to Farrugut," Lucien answered. "It's well defended, secluded and hopefully I can find a cloaking spell fast enough to work on squirming Bosmers."
Sam laughed, leaping from one tree to the next in a totally suicidal jump.
"Samwane!" Lucien bellowed, half panicked at the sight of his near death experience. "Get down, for Sithis' sake!"
"Catch me!" Sam called back with that voice that spanned millennia.
It must have taken a while, to get all that sound into one tiny little body. Which is probably why Sam had squeaked for so long. It had taken Falcar to break a wall down enough for them to fit.
Lucien started to say something before Eldamil laughed and cut him off.
"Are you going to ignore a direct order from your superior?" he asked.
With a curse, Lucien realized he was right… and that he hadn't climbed a tree in ten years.
"You're an idiot, Samwane," Lucien muttered as they rode, still nursing his injured arm.
Sam was covered with scrapes, but grinning. He felt better than he had recently, and that was very good. It was like the storm clouds that had rolled in so quickly, had rolled right back out again. The storm had passed. He had Lucien, he had his freedom, he had his voice… well, a voice.
"Lucien?" he asked at length. "Can I ask you a favor?"
Startled by the tone in those half a million voices, Lucien turned.
"Of course," he said, frowning. "But you'd do just as well to order me."
Sam shrugged.
"I need you to make me disappear." Then, as an afterthought, "and tell me the color of your eyes."
Farragut was freezing, but Sam was happy to see the inside of it again. Lucien checked his supplies, moving around the room methodically. Sam watched, feeling like he was floating somewhat outside himself.
Everything was going to change.
It was an odd thought— looking in the mirror and not recognizing himself any more. Odder still, that Lucien would be the one to do it, to initiate this change. But he wasn't afraid.
Not afraid…
The thought brought with it a crushing wave of joy, exhilaration. No more being too-stretched out, worried about politics and Ocato's rivals and who'd seen him on the street going where. No more worrying about losing Lucien, of being taken from his own life, of living life inside a figurative cage.
Catching him staring, Lucien smiled before slipping through the grate, down to the depths of Farragut where he kept his potions.
"We can leave your eyes the same, I think," he was saying as he walked. "You've a fairly common color."
Sam slipped off the bed and padded after him.
"I really doubt we can change the structure of my face enough to—"
Lucien turned with an absolutely wicked grin, but there was a flicker of something strange lurking in his eyes.
"You'd be surprised."
And then it was gone. Sam shook it off, and simply followed, watching as Lucien nodded to the guardians as though they were still alive, keeping one arm firmly around Sam's shoulders to mark his claim.
"You know," Lucien said at length, "I think you'd look decent as a blond."
