Can't Fight Fate

Felicia was getting to him. This place was getting to him. His only contact with the outside world was through the guards' whispered conversations when they thought he was asleep. More recently, they'd felt a ripple through the kingdom. A new power being introduced into their world before disappearing. They assumed whomever it was had simply masked their presence. Yin and Yang perhaps? But the Creators couldn't step foot into the Underworld, and the beings had held true to their promise and hadn't stepped into reaper affairs for centuries. So long that many thought them dead, only revived through stories.

Grim wasn't so sure about that. As a future king, he'd been tutored extensively on the history of their world. While the reasons for the contract between the gods and reapers remained a mystery in many ways, the effects could still be felt in the Underworld. Something was missing, and whether that was humanity or Yin and Yang's power, Grim didn't know. But he didn't discount their existence for simple fact that he'd underestimated Felicia, and the capabilities of his kingdom to protect itself. To underestimate, or discount the creators that had created the, would be foolish.

"I don't remember you being this rude before," Felicia murmured

"I don't remember you being this much of a crazy ass bitch before," he retorted easily. "What can I say? Being tortured has changed me. I'm not sure what turned you into whatever the fuck you are though."

"Oh, Grim," Felicia sighed sadly. "Soon you will tell me what I am. Two simple words."

"I'll say them now, if you tell me them," he said flatly.

Her eyes sparked, before settling, glazing over. "It would not be the same. I desire them freely, without coercion."

"Never. Going. To. Happen."

Her tone was mild, "We will see, won't we?"

His body jerked in response, and he loathed the reaction. Eight weeks in a dank, dark dungeon were fucking with his mind. Days on end being tortured by a child in frilly dresses was turning his body into something else. Hours and hours of nothing but her sugary-sweet voice, that changed every so often to a chilled voice that said if he just came to her side it would end. And he'd tell that other side of Felicia that he was on her side, just to make the pain stop.

"I don't believe you," she'd respond and continue her assault.

A part of him craved the true death that shimmered just beyond his grasp. Burning alive for a few minutes didn't seem all that horrible or terrifying, he would take the immeasurable pain over the plans Felicia had for the coming weeks, months, and centuries until he gave her whatever she wanted from him.

Grim was spiraling, eclipsing his former self for a creature he didn't even know. His father's words came back to him resonating like tinkling glass in his mind: "I've lost myself. I'm out of my mind. I've lost myself. I'm out of time."

Somewhere along the line of his imprisonment, Grim had started to understand the things his father used to say to him in his madness. The Bloodspurn King's impossible riddles made sense; the nonsensical rhythms became easier to decipher than clear cut words.

"Ah, ah, ah."

A knife jabbed into his side, cutting through tissue and forcing its way into the space between his ribs. Grim felt the knife twist, the blood run down his torso and clump with the mess on his legs, then drip on the floor.

"What are you?" she asked. "Who are you?"

Every so often she'd ask that question. At first he hadn't understood. He was himself: King of the Bloodspurn people, Ruler of the Seven Provinces, husband to a human.

That was never the right answer.

"Your prisoner," Grim tried, deciding he had more to lose if he didn't answer. "Bloodspurn King."

Felicia lowered her eyes, shielding her gaze. When she looked up, a forced smile twisted her lips, "Better luck next time."

She pulled the knife out and plunged it into his neck.

Grim tried to see past the pain and block out his prison. It wasn't like he'd never felt agony before. Shedding, dying, even his first twenty-eight years as a human hadn't been the most pleasant experiences.

And how did I get through those? Grim wondered as he finally blocked out Felicia and the dark cavern surrounding him. He reached for those memories.

Time passed differently for reapers; it was infinite, only shortened by one's folly. Grim was, for all intents and purposes, immortal. The past had no sway in the future, and it could even be dangerous to traverse into. Memory was like a desert beholden with spots of quicksand that killed a reaper slowly. His father had fallen into one where Grim's birth mother resided, and he'd never gotten out, sinking slowly deeper every day.

His mind found a memory of the time he was as close to human as possible. When his heart had beat. The memory was strange, like decade-old furniture covered with a tarp and dust and cobwebs.

There had never been a point to remembering how hunger, thirst, or any of the other human ailments felt. He knew he would never experience them again. A twisted smile curved his lips, just on the other side of the look a homicidal killer might give his intended victim. Yet here I am.

"Hold him."

Grim's eyes popped open at the sudden drop in her voice. Blue diamonds pierced through the darkness in his effort to see what was going to happen. Two guards--guards that he knew, who had protected him in the past--came towards Grim with blank faces, tightened the chains on his wrists and ankles and pulled his body taut.

Unbearable pain shot from his fingertips to every open and oozing sore on his body. It twisted around broken bones and organs that were healed and then damaged and then healed once again in a cycle.

A spark of light lit the darkness, scaring what little strength he had left. Grim had thought he was ready for this moment. He was wrong. A part of him still wanted life. Damn.

Felicia had lit her scythe's blade on fire. Unable to help himself--or perhaps unable to stop himself--Grim screamed loud and long.

A black laced hand covered blood red lips. Her fingers began to shake, blue eyes darkening, lids sliding low. "Yes. There you are."

Heels clicked on dirty, cold stone floors as she came ever closer to him. Felicia smiled, waving the scythe around until it looked like a ring of fire dancing in the air.

"Feel that? Coursing through your body? It's me. I hold everything you are in my hands. I will become your beginning, Grim."

Felicia smiled so sweetly, with passion and desire. It looked like she was a heartbeat from saying she loved him. Emotions shot between them as Felicia looked Grim from head to toe, marveling at her own handy work. He could only imagine how he looked, covered in blood with every bone broken and cuts like a million tic-tac-toe boards on his flesh.

She lifted the scythe, shifted on her feet. Grim closed his eyes as he saw her swing do--

"Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

Grim awoke a time later to the sounds of scrubbing and crying. He had no clue who it was, but he was pretty sure it wasn't Felicia. She'd left sometime before after she'd bored herself with him.

"Who's there?" Grim felt relieved that his tongue was back; it must have grown in when he'd been asleep.

The scrubbing stopped, but the sobs still punctuated the darkness.

He tried to see through the void to creature making the noise, but only one of his eyes had healed. It took another few seconds of combing the darkness before he was finally able to notice a slightly darker shadow huddled a few feet from him.

"Who are you?"

He stared at her hard and noticed her body shaking violently, dark hair dancing against her face.

"I-I can't."

Pushing the pain in his mind aside, Grim wondered if this was another trick. The girl was young, maybe a century, if that. It was in the air, a light power, barely anything but a wisp.

He couldn't understand what the girl was doing there. Why she'd been sent down to his cell. Wariness colored his tone as he adjusted to a more comfortable position against the stone wall. "Are you a Castoff prisoner?"

The girl hesitated, but a noise he couldn't hear, or one that didn't exist, startled her and she resumed her scrubbing with renewed vigor. Her body still trembled, matching the hesitation in her voice. "No, Your Highness. I'm a maid."

Anger flared through Grim, quicker than he could quell. "You know who I am."

"Yes."

"How long I've been down here? To the day--the fucking hour."

Another pause, and then a voice no human could hear. "Nine weeks, two days, and I think four or five hours. I prepared the... the...."

"Soup," Grim said flatly. He'd never heard her voice, only seen a brief glimpse of her face.

His palms itched. He wanted to kill the girl, burn her and feed her ashes to her family. It was irrational. None of this was her fault, and if he knew Felecia, the girl had most likely been coerced.

His chains rattled as Grim tried to break free and wring the girl's neck. She was only a few feet away, barely anything. Yet here he was, chained like some animal--feeling like an animal. She knew who he was, knew what she was scrubbing off the floor, yet she did nothing.

Bitterness clouded his mind, saturated with fear and anger. But there was something else, something that flared at the edges of his consciousness. He could not bring himself to completely hate the girl. She was weak; she was scrubbing parts of him off the floor, and did not look to be enjoying herself. If her voice was any indication, she wasn't getting some perverse glee in the act but rather revolution.

No, a saner part of Grim pushed itself into his mind, there was something else going on here.

Rage blinded him, forced out words he never should have asked, "You will not help me?"

"I cannot," her voice was rushed as if she was running and being chased by an enemy. The girl scrubbing stopped again. Grim focused his power and used what little remained to see past the darkness to her slim, pale fingers gripped tightly around the brush. Her entire body was shaking badly as she clutched the brush harder, until her knuckles turned white. "S-She will kill my family if I try. Anyone who disobeys her is burned immediately, along with their family members."

His power wavered, and the room was once again pitch black with a slightly darker shadow a few feet from him. Grim closed his eyes and tried to rest, preserve the energy he had left, and use it to heal himself, but he didn't stop talking to the girl. He needed to hear something other than Felicia's laughter and the guards' uncomfortable grunting. It was as if the young maid's voice was a palm for his wounds, those both mental and physical.

"How long has this been going on?" Grim asked as he leaned his head back on the cool stone and felt a part of his skull that hadn't quite healed scrap against it. He hissed and flinched, as if he could escape the pain.

"Almost a year."

Her small voice drew him back as he hung his head. Almost a year, she'd said. Grim knew Felicia had to be the one responsible for the deaths that had sprung up recently. She was the murderer. He wondered how she could really kill so many of her kind, but then her gleeful face came back to him when she'd impaled him on a blade, and he wondered no more.

The princess held a grudge against him; Grim understood that. And maybe it was partly his actions that drove her to this state. He hadn't married her--hadn't given his power to her, but to a human instead. He'd let his heart get away with him, and now the organ would kill him.

His heart beat ever since Felicia gave him the drug. Slow, stopping at long intervals only to thump back to life painfully. Grim wondered why he hadn't had a heart attack already from all the pain the Castoff girl had inflicted on him.

The pain was back again, cycling around to claw at him and gnaw on his tired bones. Grim sometimes wondered how long he had been a captive of Felicia's but then he realized it didn't matter; time no longer mattered, only pain. Pain, a brief respite in the form of sleep or small bits of food, and then more mind-numbing pain.

"I understand," Grim said softly, pushing the agony in his body and mind to the side for just a few more moments. "I'm sorry for being terse. Being rude."

"No! N-Not at all--" Another broken sob, "Please forgive me, Highness. Forgive me."

Grim shook his head even though it caused him pain and the girl couldn't see it. She had done nothing wrong. Everything that was happening was on him. It all came back to him. Circles. If he hadn't been insistent on marrying Nina. If he had just followed the rules. If he'd just married the princess then--

"Grim," Nina's voice followed to him, a memory from the past. "If-ing helps no one and hurts everyone."

She'd said that to him when they'd been in his study reading a book. Nina had been curled on his lap, and he'd been telling her about the council and the decisions he'd made. Wondering if they'd been the correct and best ones, and what would have happened if he'd let it play out a different way. But she'd interrupted him with a finger to his lips, soft words, and those piercing chestnut eyes.

"You can't second guess yourself," she'd said, "You can't if, or but, or wonder. You are the king."

King. What did that even mean now? Nothing. Titles, power, centuries old wars and rules. That was all the past, all things that could not be reclaimed. Grim understand the importance of learning from the past, but to follow it, to repeat those same mistakes was foolish bordering on madness. Is that what he had done with Nina? Fallen into a never ending vortex of mistakes?

He balled his fists, ignoring the pain it brought him. He knew what he needed to do. The past was gone, it couldn't be changed, but at that moment, he could do something. "Have you done anything that you need to be forgiven for?"

"I'm not helping you escape," her voice was low, tortured, and young. So very young. "I didn't intervene when I heard your screams in my room. I didn't stop her when she asked me to put the--"

He watched her body crumple, forehead pressed to the dirty, grimy floor. The girl's entire body shook as salty tears splashed against jagged rock. Grim didn't try to calm her, didn't speak to her as she let out tears she had been holding at bay for a long time. All he did was listen.

He wasn't hearing the cries of one girl, but of his whole kingdom. That was what she represented to him, a kingdom destroyed. The Bloodspurns had been feared, had been strong. His forefathers had been vicious murderers, and their legacy had sustained the kingdom for centuries. But then fear never lasted long, and once it was gone there was only grief left.

The Bloodspurns needed something else, something new to rally behind. They were not murderers, they were stronger than that. But they still needed the fury, needed the anguish and pain. As much as it pained Grim to think of it, the one thing that might unite his kingdom again was the one thing that might also tear it, and him, apart.

Vengeance. Retribution. Nothing brought people closer than the goal of hurting someone that had hurt them. Human's said that two wrongs didn't make a right. However, Grim suspected that they could cancel each other out.

"No," he spoke the word out loud, physically shaking the thoughts from his head. Hurting others would solve nothing, and make him no better than past kings. Grim was not the past, he was the future. Everything that would ever be, not failed things that were.

"What is your name?" Grim leaned closer. He knew Felicia could come down at any moment, knew that the princess might hurt the maid simply to get back at him.

"Freyja, Your Highness."

"Freyja," Grim tried the word out on his tongue. "A strong name. Good. Call me Grim."

He heard the blush in her voice. "Thank you, Highness. My father named me after her in the hopes I would be as blessed in childbirth as she was. But I cannot call you by that name, you are--"

"And don't think you've done anything wrong," he interrupted. "If you feel that way, don't. I pardon you--absolve you of any and all responsibility to help me. Help yourself, Freyja."

There was a long silence as the girl absorbed what Grim had said. He heard shuffling and then felt a cool hand on his calf. He looked down and saw a darker shadow at his feet. "I had heard you were unlike the other kings--that you cared about us." Her voice was soft and filled with admiration, "Truly, you are a wonder."

Grim felt something cool and metallic slide up his body and around. He reached out and grasped the knife, wrapping his fingers tightly around the hilt. Than she was gone, and he heard scrubbing once more. He heard the sound of her scrubbing and found it soothing, like a lullaby entrancing him to sleep.

Before the dark and sweet void of a dreamless sleep claimed him, he spoke, "I wish you nothing but happiness, Freyja."

The scrubbing stilled for a second before it continued with renewed vigor. "Thank you... Grim. I would wish the same for you--"

"Don't," Grim's voice was soft, sleep threading his words, "This is enough. This is enough."

Freezing water splashed his face once, twice. Grim coughed, sputtered, forced it from his lungs and drew in breaths.

"Seems you've woken up, my king." It was Felicia. It was always her.

Grim opened his eyes to see the cell lit by sconces. They flared gently and danced off the blades and tools hanging from the walls. His cell smelled fresh, was once again clean of his blood and other unmentionable thing. It was as if the space had been reborn, and Grim remembered Freyja. How hard had she scrubbed to get it this clean? He knew it could not have been easy.

Flexing his fingers, Grim felt the blade still in his hand. He looked at Felicia, took a deep breath, fixed his expression and slid the blade right up into his skin. The pain was nothing he wasn't used to, and it was perhaps slightly better because he had prepared himself for it.

Thankfully it did not take the skin long to try and close around the blade, holding it in place as well as any sheath. Once that was done, he cocked his eyebrow and raked Felicia with a scathing glance. "Tell me, Felicia, what does your family think about this?" He smiled coldly, all teeth. "I want to make sure I thank them with a bonfire."

The princess clapped her hands giddily and the guards on either side of her shifted uneasily. A shadow just past his cell, beyond his line of vision, moved. Grim tried to see the dark figure, but it was obscured. "Oh! That fire is back. I wonder what caused such a shift in you." She twirled a black curl around her manicured finger. "Did the little maid promise to get you out of here?"

"No." Grim leaned forward and spat at her feet. "Is your father up-top sharpening the blades?"

She held out her foot and a guard came and wiped to spit away. Felicia laughed softly, "I killed my entire family before I went to the Bloodspurn Castle. Gave them a drug similar to yours, and then burned them all."

Grim flinched back and the knife drove deeper into his back. He masked the pain with a look of disgust that wasn't hard to conjure. "You killed your family?"

She tilted her head, and Grim saw a darker shadow move behind her eyes. "Someone had to do it."

Grim blanched at the coolly delivered words, stunned into silence. It was one thing if her whole family had a vendetta against his family, which he could chalk up to feuds of the past, but this? She had killed her entire family in one foul swoop. That took more than planning and precision, it took a level of cold detachment that very few possessed.