A/N: Now that I've fully exorcised my many, many feelings about the canon version of Nick and Adalind getting together via my Long Way Home series, I'm turning my attention to dreaming up another way they could have gotten together earlier in the series. Well, I say another way. It's the same way, just with different timing. Also, one of the ideas on my mood board is Catherine Schade and Kelly Burkhardt meeting Bud at Adalind's baby shower. Things might get a little wild around here. Join me, won't you?
Title from "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell.
"I think it's time we settle our differences," he says. "Violently."
She woges then and rushes him—all silver moonlight in deadly motion—and he barely has time to brace before she's on him, a storm of fists and magic that has him barely keeping pace, barely holding her back. They're an equal match—all fire and ice—all burning fury—and when they finally land on the damp forest floor, it's only luck and fate that land her squarely on top—straddling him and the startling hardness between them that he hadn't even noticed in the fight for his life only moments before.
She woges back and stares at him with her beautiful human face, bearing down against him, and he gasps, because yeah, she's evil and yeah, she just tried to kill Hank with sex, but man, maybe it'd be worth it?
"Fuck," she says. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." And then she kisses him, and it's not unlike the fight that came before—this heat between them that flares again and has them rolling—fighting to get to be on top—fighting to see whose pants can unzip first and how little they have to shimmy them down to finally find the heat they're looking for—fingers licking at each other like flames, lips and tongues fighting the same old fight until finally—finally—he's on top, and then he's in her.
Later he'll think there probably should have been a moment of surprise and reconsideration when he slid home into her heat, but they're well beyond that now. There's no rational thought to be had here between two mortal enemies fucking on the forest floor. It's primal, this thing between them. It's singing in their blood. The light calls to the dark, and the dark begs for it. A tale as old as time. And it's anyone's guess who's the light at the moment.
"Oh god," he says, clutching her hips to him while she rolls them and moves above him, glowing in the moonlight. "Oh god, please—"
She shuts him up with a kiss that bites and shorts him out. He might be bleeding, but he couldn't care less, not when he's coming apart in her arms while she shudders and keens in his.
"Well, fuck," he says some time later, when his sight and his breath have returned. The moon is still full and shining above them, and the stars are still twinkling, and he's got pine needles and mulch in his ass crack, and everything feels completely, irrevocably changed.
Adalind snorts and rolls over, nosing at his shoulder, still covered in practical green canvas. They'd barely stripped the necessary parts—he vaguely remembers ripping away lacy red panties?—and now he's a little sad that he didn't get to see more of her under that turtleneck. He'll never have the chance again, what with the mortal enemies thing and Hank—
Oh fuck, Hank.
He looks at her with panic, and she laughs again.
"Yeah," she says, "we really did just do that. Guess we had a lot of tension to work out."
There's blood on her lips—his and hers, mixed—and as her tongue traces through the red there he realizes there's blood on his lips, too—her blood—and the taste overwhelms him—vital salt and iron racing through his veins, burning him from the inside out.
She starts to shake then, and some primal part of him feels a bone deep satisfaction that she's still quaking for him—still feeling the aftershocks of their rutting—but that quickly disappears when she starts to scream, and he realizes it's not aftershocks at all, it's rigor mortis. She shakes and shakes and shakes until she's horribly, deathly still, and then he sees her ghost—her hexenbiest face in white smoke, shrieking it's way up into the night's sky.
"Oh my god," Adalind says, sobbing now. "Oh my god, you killed me. It's gone. My powers, my purpose. I'm nothing now. Nothing!"
Nick doesn't hesitate. He's holding her before he even knows it—kissing her before the thought even comes. It's not like the last time—all rushing blood and battle and power—it's softer now. Sweeter.
"You're not nothing," he says, pulling away to wipe at the flood of tears running down her cheeks. "Not to me."
Eventually, she stops crying. Not through any intervention of his but because tears are their own kind of magic, and it turns out Adalind had a lot of things to cry about.
"I'm so sorry," she says. "I'm so sorry for everything."
"I'm sorry," he says. "I mean, we came here to kill each other, but I didn't mean to do that. Not that way. Not when we were—"
"Oh god," she says. "We were! I don't know why I just had to bite you."
Nick knows why—or senses it anyway. Something about blood and guts and raw, burning fire. Something primal and potent dammed up in both of them that needed to be let out with their incisors. Something that's still lurking here between them, even after the flood.
"We should go," Nick says. "I need to go see if Hank's okay."
"Oh god," Adalind groans, covering her face with her hands. "I don't think I can ever face Hank again."
"Yeah, somehow I don't think he's going to be thrilled to see you."
Adalind huffs out an aborted chuckle. "Yeah, I don't think anyone is going to be happy to see me."
"You're coming with me then?"
"What else am I gonna do?" she says, sitting up and starting to button her jeans. "Go see my mother and Sean, I guess, but that can wait. It's my apartment, anyway. Better go make sure Hank is alive."
He stares at her while she picks rotted leaves out of her golden hair with a grunt of disgust, and she looks up at him with one raised eyebrow.
"What?"
"Just...you're taking this really well. Maybe too well? I think I'm waiting for you to freak out more."
"You and me both," Adalind says, standing and wincing. "Afterglow is a hell of a drug, Nick. I think you broke me. Enjoy it while it lasts."
They take separate cars back to her apartment, and once alone, Nick realizes he's also feeling a little broken, all of a sudden. Nothing about his current situation seems real—the fight, the sex, the tears, the quiet acceptance of responsibility on Adalind's part, and his own surprising willingness to let her come within twenty yards of Hank. She almost killed him three hours ago, and then she tried to kill Nick, and none of that seems to matter right now because they fucked in the woods and came away transformed.
Into what remains to be seen.
They park outside of her building and stand there together under a street lamp, heads bowed while they try to think of something to say.
"Does my hair look okay?" Adalind asks, and Nick laughs. Because no, it really doesn't—it's tangled and well-fucked and a little bit mulchy—but also he really doesn't care. He'd love the chance to mess it up some more.
And that's the precise moment when he remembers Juliette. His girlfriend. His dream girl. His everything.
"What?" Adalind asks, clearly catching the shock of horror on his face, and he feels like throwing up.
"I have a girlfriend," he says.
"Oh," Adalind says, "right."
They stare at each other in the bright artificial light of the lamp, and then she starts to laugh. A deep, shaking belly laugh that hits him at the base of his spin and sends sparks upward, until he's laughing, too. Not at Juliette, who deserves much, much better, but at the absolutely ridiculous chain of events that have brought him here to this moment with this woman in this space before they take the next plunge into the new mess that is their lives.
"So, Hank," Adalind says finally, hiccupping a little after all that laughing. "Let's go check on Hank."
They head inside where they find Monroe and Rosalee waiting at the door. They both freeze when they see Adalind, hackles rising.
"Nick, is that who I think it is?" Monroe asks—growls really, although Nick can't see the usual fangs that accompany that tone.
"You left Hank with a blutbad and a fuchsbau?" Adalind's voice is rising in that way he's starting to recognize as disbelief that he keeps surprising her.
"They're my friends," he says, "it's cool, guys, she's here to help. I think."
"You think?" Rosalee asks. "Nick, what happened out there?"
"They had sex," Monroe says, sniffing the air and tasting it like it's leaving a bad taste in his mouth. "What the hell, Nick?"
"You had sex with Adalind?" This last comes from Hank, naked in the doorway of the bedroom, looking like he's ready to punch Nick until he looks at Monroe and Rosalee and just...faints.
"Crap," Monroe says, already moving to check Hank for a pulse or any further head trauma. "He must have seen us woge."
"How?" Nick asks, feeling even more bewildered. "I didn't even see you woge."
Rosalee stops on her way to Monroe's side and turns back to Nick.
"You didn't see us woge?"
"No," Nick says. "It must have been really quick."
"Nick," Adalind says—softly, gently—one hand in his somehow, stroking it in little soothing circles, "they've been woged since we got here."
He nearly faints then, what with all the fighting and blood loss and now this—the dawning loss of his Grimm-ness—his superpowers gone just like Adalind's in puff of proverbial smoke.
