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basic-banshee · 7 years ago

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THE WEEKEND, PART IV: THE RECKONING

PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | [complete]

tagging: @ughthatsprettygay @the-roses-have-thorns @rachelaredhead @magickspills @violetsummers23254 @its-okay-that-ur-not @somberlysad @overlyselfaware @cactus---daddy @katterpillar

*content warning* there’s a fight scene in this chapter, with some violence

thanks for reading! this is the end. I hope you enjoy this campy spookfest. thanks for the love!

BAZ

Someone is crying.

I jolt awake, my whole body tensing. There’s a weight on me, and I can hear the sobbing coming through the window, and everything is dark. Is the banshee on me? Is something on me? My fangs come out unbidden, and I turn, preparing to strike, only to see—

Snow.

His arm is flung across me, and he’s pulling me into his chest, his head tucked into my neck. I can feel his lips on my bare skin, his hot breath tickling against my hair.

This is fucking pornographic.

Another loud sob from outside pulls me back into my body. Something is right outside my window, and I can hear footsteps and then slamming, and more whispering. I sit up, and Snow’s arm falls away as he wakes up, his eyes blinking groggily as he squints up at me.

“Wha—” he starts to say, but I put my hand over his mouth and hold one finger to my lips. I point out the window just as the sobbing noise comes again, and I see Snow’s eyes go wide, and his too red lips fall open. Crowley, I need to get a hold of myself; we’re about to be attacked by a banshee, but all I can think about is his mouth on my neck.

I slip out of bed and pad to the window, and Snow follows. I can feel him standing on his toes to crane his neck over my shoulder to look out as well, and it’s making it hard to focus. I can feel his breath on me.

There’s nothing outside though. But I can still hear the sobbing.

“You hear that, right?” he whispers, and I nod. At least I’m not alone.

“I don’t think that’s a fox,” I respond. He squares his jaw and nods grimly.

“Me neither.”

Before I can even blink, he’s pulled that ridiculous sword of his and is tugging on his boots. (You think he’d put on his shoes before pulling the sword, but somehow those things never occur to him.)

“Do you think you’re going to go outside and slay a banshee?” I ask him. He shrugs. He looks pissed. Honestly, I love him when he looks pissed.

Aleister fucking Crowley, I need to get my shit together.

“I’m going to put an end to this,” he growls. “Something has been fucking with us all night.”

“Snow, it’s just noises. Even if it is a banshee, they don’t hurt you. Wraiths won’t either. It’s unsettling, but there’s not actually anything wrong.”

There’s more whispering from the hallway and downstairs, and then another slam, and Snow pulls at his hair.

“I can’t think with all of this going on! It’s driving me fucking mental!” he shouts, grabbing a coat from a nearby chair (it’s mine) and dashing out into the hall. I follow. From outside I hear more slamming, and when we get to the sitting room we can hear clear, human footsteps even louder. Snow yanks open the front door and steps out into the night, his sword brandished, his magic starting to glow, and he looks fucking ferocious.

“Whatever the fuck is out there, just show yourself!” he shouts. “Let’s just get this over with!”

The night is silent, and for a moment I think we’re only going to hear the echoing of Snow’s challenge, but then there’s a rustling noise from the wooded copse next to the cottage, and then three men wearing track jackets appear.

“Oh,” Snow says. He lets the sword fall to his side limply and he turns back to look at me. He actually looks disappointed. “It’s just goblins. I thought it was going to be something more, you know, serious.”

Just goblins?

The chavy-looking creatures start to approach, and I hold out my wand. I’ve never actually seen a goblin up close, but I’ve heard they’re nasty little things. And stupid, as well. But what surprises me is how fit they are. They’ve got a sickly green tint, but they’re shockingly attractive for things that eat people. I guess it’s hypocritical to assume they’d be ugly; after all, I’m supposed to eat people, but I’m still staggeringly attractive.

“Why are we being haunted by goblins?” I snap.

Snow still has his sword at his side—despite being terrified a few hours ago, he now seems entirely bored—and just shrugs at me.

“Whoever kills me gets to be king, I think,” he says, gesturing lazily at the approaching goblins with his sword. He sounds dejected. “They don’t normally come in groups though. I guess they’re learning.”

I’m in love with a lunatic.

The first goblin lunges when it hits the gate, and Snow’s sword swings up faster than I can blink and catches it in the gut. Crimson blood spurts out into the snow and there’s steam as the warm liquid melts through the ice. The next one leaps at me and I sing a spell at it quickly and it goes flying backward just as Snow cuts down its partner.

“Are they usually this easy to kill?” I ask. Snow pauses, as if he’s actually thinking it over, when a shout goes up from the woods, and five more goblins come rushing.

“Shit, they really did learn,” Snow curses, and drops back into his fighting stance. There’s a yell from above me, and I look up to see Gareth hanging out of one of the upstairs windows.

“Behind you!” he shouts, and I spin. More goblins are coming up from behind the house. Crowley. How badly did Snow piss these things off? I turn and Snow and I stand back-to-back, and I start throwing curses as fast as I can. I summon fire and shoot it off at two goblins to my left just as Snow kicks in the head of one approaching from the right. We circle, so he’s facing the house and I’m facing the woods, and I see him take two heads off in one clean sweep as I incinerate another.

The boys are throwing curses from the upstairs windows, but they aren’t making much of an impact as goblin after goblin appears from the woods. Why are they all fucking wearing Adidas? Is it some kind of dark creature uniform requirement? This looks like a bad night at Wetherspoons.

We’re covered in blood and ash and smoke and I can feel Snow’s magic starting to rise, the air around us shimmering. If he goes off, he’ll take the whole fucking house with him, along with the other boys inside. I can hear him breathing heavily, and in the flickering light cast by several of my burning goblins, I can see that his pupils have massively dilated. Shit. He’s about to blow.

“Simon,” I say, reaching behind me and taking his hand. “Simon, breathe.”

SIMON

There’s blood and screams everywhere, the air smells like ash, and I’m blinking out.

It always feels like this, right before I go. My mind shuts off. My hands shake and then the air blurs and then I just...go. I black out. I wake up in a mess of rubble and death. I don’t like going off—it hurts, it’s not fun, and it’s always embarrassing and exhausting—but I don’t always have a choice. No. I never have a choice.

My body is starting to vibrate with untapped magic when I feel something cold press into my hand.

“Simon.”

I blink.

“Simon, breathe.”

I do what I’m told. One small breath. Then another. I kick at a nearby goblin and swing my sword into its neck, but I can still feel the tug of a cool hand in mine. It’s grounding me.

“Just one at a time. Let it go,” the voice calls, and I close my eyes for a moment and feel myself shifted sideways. I let the magic go. I try to. I try to just breathe it out and let it flow back inside me, settle in my stomach the way it’s supposed to.

It’s working. Not entirely, but a bit, and when I open my eyes, Baz is standing in front of me, his legs spread in a fighting stance, blocking the goblins from getting to me. He’s singing spells so fast I can’t even hear what he’s saying, but goblins are going up in flames in front of us and another pair gets cut in half. Blood splatters across Baz’s face but he doesn’t blink, just keeps casting with one hand. His other hand is holding mine, but it’s not holding him back. He looks terrifying and fierce, and I haven’t seen him like this since the chimera. But then he was poking me, shouting at me, trying to get me to go off. Now he’s trying to calm me down, actively standing in front of me, trying to...protect me.

There’s only a handful of goblins left now, and I take off the head of the one closest to me and pull my sword through another two as Baz sets the last one on fire. It reeks. Everything reeks. But then it’s silent.

Baz is panting when he lets go of my hand and grabs me by the shoulders.

“Are you okay?” he demands forcefully. “Are you going to go off?”

I shake my head. I have no idea what’s happening, but I know that Baz just took on probably ten goblins singlehanded, and stopped in the middle of a fight to calm me down and protect me.

He nods, pulls me in, kisses my forehead with a comically exaggerated smack, then pulls back.

“You decapitated at least fifteen goblins, you homicidal fuck,” he says. There’s a wild grin on his face, and he has blood streaked across his cheek. A bit of his hair is stuck to it. He looks away, scans the rest of the yard, then pushes me toward the door of the house. We scramble inside, still looking over our shoulders. The other boys are standing in the sitting room, their eyes wide as they take us in. We’re covered blood and guts, and we reek of burning flesh and hair. I know Baz looks like a demon, and I can’t imagine what I look like.

Probably dazed.

Baz kissed me.

But there’s still shit to kill. So I’ll think about that later.

“What about the sobbing?” I ask. “The banshee, I didn’t see her, did you?”

Baz shakes his head and moves back to the window—we’re still in battle mode—but the other boys stand there awkwardly.

“Yeah there….there was no banshee,” Will says. “We uh...we were fucking with you.”

The room goes silent.

“What?” Baz says, spinning on his heel. Will glances sideways.

“The crying? And the whispering and slamming? That was us. We just wanted to try to scare you two a bit, you know—” but Will doesn’t get to tell us what we know, because Baz stalks across to him and grabs him by the collar.

“Hey, hey!” I shout, diving towards them. I grab Baz’s arm and try to lower it. “Just let it go. It doesn’t matter.” Baz isn’t looking at me, he’s still full of battle rage and he looks ready to murder Will, and even though I’ve seen a far more human side of Baz this weekend, I still think he has it in him to tear Will limb from limb. “Baz! Let him go. Just forget him.”

Baz’s eyes blink over to me for a second, and then I see his arm relax, and his fist slowly uncurls from Will’s jumper.

“We didn’t know about the goblins,” Gareth says. He’s standing in the corner near Rhys looking extremely uncomfortable. I can tell he feels guilty. “I heard the footsteps but I thought it was Will and Jeffrey doing another spell. It was just supposed to be a prank. You know, to get back at Baz. We were going to all laugh about it.”

“There are thirty goblin corpses burning on the lawn,” Baz says. His voice is deadpan. “Hysterical.”

“We didn’t know about the goblins. That was just a freak coincidence,” Jeffrey mutters. I sigh and sheath my sword.

“They follow me everywhere,” I tell Baz. “There was no way to know.”

Baz is silent for a few minutes and I can practically see him thinking, deciding whether he’s going to slaughter all of us, starting with Will. Finally his face relaxes. He looks tired as hell—shit, I feel tired as hell—and his hair is matted with blood. He does not look like his usual perfect self.

“I’m going to get cleaned up,” he says finally. “If I hear one more noise tonight, I’m killing the person who made it.”

BAZ

I don’t think I’ll ever feel clean again. There’s goblin blood everywhere. And there’s not a shower here.

I fill up the bath in the small upstairs bathroom with as much water as I can manage, then spell it warm and settle in. I feel like a bit of a toddler, trying to clean myself in a too small tub, and also every part of me not touching the water is fucking freezing, so I try to go as fast as possible, while also dragging this out as long as possible, because I know Snow is waiting in the room. I heard him follow me upstairs, and I can hear him shuffling around through the thin wall.

When I get out, I’m going to have to talk to him. And I’m going to have to face the fact that I kissed him.

I mean. Sort of kissed him. I kissed his forehead. It was a heat of the moment, battle reaction type of thing, but I was just so sure he was going to go off, and I was running high from fighting, and he had been an absolute beast, and I just…reacted.

It could have been some kind of bro-kiss, right? Is that a thing? Straight men do that, sometimes, in movies. I could probably convince Snow of that. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll convince Snow it was some kind of brothers-in-arms thing, and not because I was wildly relieved and also turned on.

Honestly, I haven’t felt like that since the chimera. And that’s the day I realised I was wildly in love with him.

So, fuck.

Snow is already in the bed when I get back to the room, so I guess he’s decided that even without threat of ghosts or banshees, he’s bunking with me. It’s fine (I wouldn’t want it any other way) but what’s really upsetting me is that the floor around the bed is littered with his bloody shirt and trousers, and the jumper I leant him (a cream cashmere cable knit) is balled by the fire. (It will never be the same.)

Which means Snow is lying in the bed, practically starked.

I did not sign up for this.

“You can stay here, but you’re not sleeping like that,” I snap. I have my back to him, I don’t even want to look, and I hear him shift to sit up.

“Like what?”

“Are you wearing trousers?” I ask. There’s a pregnant silence.

“My only pair are covered in blood,” he says quietly.

“Then clean them. And get dressed,” I snap, throwing his clothes to him. This boy has spent seven years trying not to change around me, and then suddenly he decides he’s sleeping in his pants? What the fuck?

“I…” he starts, then sighs. “Fuck, I’m tapped. I couldn’t do a spell right now if I tried.”

“And how is that different from normal?” I sigh. He’s useless. I spell his clothes clean and toss them on the bed, and I wait until I hear rustling behind me indicating that he’s getting dressed to turn.

“Why are you still sleeping in here? There’s no banshee,” I say, because I can’t accept anything good that’s given to me. Snow scowls.

“Why did you kiss me?”

I almost choke. Sometimes I forget how fucking direct he is. Why tiptoe around something awkward when you can just barrel right through it, Simon Snow style?

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I snap, pulling back the covers and getting in. Apparently my defensive manoeuver for the evening is to just...go to sleep.

“You called me Simon, and you kissed me.”

“You’ve lost it,” I say, turning to face the wall so my back is to him. “You’ve finally cracked.”

“Don’t do that!” he shouts. He’s standing at the foot of the bed and he starts pacing angrily, pulling at his hair and scowling at me. “Don’t…you…” he’s sputtering, and I almost pity him. “You calmed me down! You called me Simon and you kept me from going off. Why?”

“Because I didn’t feel like dying tonight,” I snarl. “I have bags under my eyes from not sleeping, and I intend to leave a beautiful corpse.”

“Rich, considering you already are one,” he mutters. I sit up.

“Did you just call me a beautiful corpse?”

“What? No.”

“Just some light vampire humour, then? ‘Haha Baz, thanks for saving me, did you know you’re dead? By the way, you’re also fit.’ Just a casual joke?” I snarl. His eyes go wide.

“I didn’t mean—I was just—you were—“ he stops, hangs his head, the wind gone from his sails. He sighs and looks up, his blue eyes drilling into me. “I don’t want to fight with you right now. You were brilliant out there. And, you know. Thanks for keeping me from going off.”

How fucking dare he manage to get words out right now.

“I don’t care that you kissed me,” he continues. He stops, tugs on his hair, and then sits on the bed. “It was...nice.”

I don’t say anything. There’s nothing I could possibly say that would recenter whatever the fuck is currently happening and have it make sense in the world I live in. Snow is blushing —I can see it creeping up his cheeks, and he turns to me and says, “You were holding me while you slept. And I...liked it.”

My eyes have to be as wide as an ogre’s.

“And I...I liked fighting. With you. Together. Instead of against each other.”

Maybe I did summon a demon earlier, and it killed me, and this entire evening has been some twisted form of purgatory. Snow is moving closer to me on the bed. Why is he moving closer? What is he getting at? What is—

I should just turn off my brain.

SIMON

Penny once told me that I was the most stupidly successful person she’d ever met.

“You just stumble into things and you try your best and you’re brave, and it works out! Things shouldn’t work out for you, but they do,” she’d said. She didn’t sound mean or jealous. She was just laying out the truth.

I could use some stupid success right now. Because I’m about to do something absolutely mental. I’m about to do something that could end in my death.

But Baz’s hair is wet from the bath and hanging loose around his face and he kissed me. He started it. He laid down a challenge. And we never back down from challenges.

So I lean closer. Impossibly closer.

“I liked fighting. With you. Together. Instead of against each other,” I say. His face is frozen in a mask of disinterest, but I can see how hard he’s clenching his jaw. If he was uncomfortable, he would have either punched me or mocked me by now.

“What I’m getting at is...I’d rather fight next to you. Than against you. Would you…” I pause. “Would you want that? Because I think….I think we would make a good team.”

Baz blinks. Once. Twice.

“We’re enemies,” he says, dumbly. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him sound stupid. I just shrug.

“We don’t have to be.”

“Why? Because we were stupid enough to fall for a prank and then killed some goblins together?”

He sounds nervous. I kind of like that. He never sounds nervous. I shrug and lean back on the bed, so I’m on my back facing up, and I smile at him. I’ve never done that before.

“Because you slept in my arms,” I say.

Baz shifts uncomfortably and picks at his sleeve.

“Fitfully and unknowingly.”

“And you kissed me,” I add. He looks at the wall.

“That was in the heat of battle. Like a ‘we survived, good job mate’ kind of thing,” he says. I actually laugh—usually his lies are better than this.

“Are you seriously trying to pull a no homo?” I ask, then shake my head. I’m starting to panic, because honestly I thought this was going to go better, and I didn’t think he would fight me this much (which was a pretty stupid mistake, I realise now). “I told you I didn’t mind. I told you I liked it. And I….” Stupidly successful. I need to be stupidly successful. “I wouldn’t mind if you did it again.”

Baz looks at me like he’s about to eat me.

BAZ

I kissed him.

He said, “I wouldn’t mind if you did it again,” and I kissed him. I’ve never been that brave in my life. He was practically begging me to. So I did.

Crowley, I did. And he kissed me back.

Kissing Simon Snow is like fighting thirty goblins while standing back-to-back. It’s frenzied and scary and strangely elating, and you’re out of breath but it’s so good and it’s a battle. Neither of us sceding ground, and by the end you feel like you’re bloody and on fire.

“Where the fuck did that come from?” I ask as we break away. Snow had pulled away briefly to throw his crucifix across the room, but then we’d collided again, a mess of limbs and kisses and whispered laughs.

“I told you. I like fighting alongside you,” he says. His hand slowly comes up to play with my hair. I’m definitely dead. I’ve absolutely left this earth.

“So you stalk me for years, accusing me of being a murderer, and then I finally get around to murdering things, and now you want to snog me and be homicidal boyfriends?” I snarl.

I expect Snow to stutter, to push me away, to choke on the word “boyfriend” but instead he just shrugs.

“Yeah, I guess. Let’s do that,” he says. We’re lying on our backs, and his hand reaches out in the dark and finds mine, and he squeezes. “If you’d want to.”

“Are you seriously asking me if I want to be your boyfriend? Less than six hours ago you threw me across the room for trying to summon a demon.”

“Well, Will made you. And you weren’t really going to summon it. But anyway, you’re the one who mentioned the boyfriend thing.”

“As a joke, Snow,” I say, incredulous. I can’t believe I’m lying here, in Scotland, in the midst of a snowstorm, with thirty burning goblins outside the window, in bed with Simon Snow, talking about being boyfriends.

“Oh,” he says. He’s quiet. “I’d be fine with it. If you want to. I’d like that, I think. If you want it.” He goes quiet again, and I think he’s waiting for a response, but then he speaks again. “I like being close to you, I guess. And knowing what you’re doing. I liked having you sleep in my arms because it felt right to just….have you there.”

He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing to me right now. I roll to my side so I can get a better look at him. So I can determine if he’s lying, or trying some kind of plot to kill me. But that’s not Snow’s style. He doesn’t plot. He doesn’t lie.

“Do you want some Walkers?” I say, because I have to say something. His eyes light up and he nods.

“I thought you were out,” he whispers, like we’re talking about something holy. I suppose we are, in a way. I sit up and lean over the bed to grab my satchel, and I almost jump when I feel the ghost of Snow’s fingers running across my back. When I sit back up, I upend the rest of my food storage and look as his face lights up.

“Can I have...anything?” he breathes, like a child, and I nod. He picks up an Aero bar and attacks it, before throwing me a lazy smile.

“Simon, I…” I pause. How does someone say this. “I do want this. You. The homicidal boyfriends thing.”

He smiles again, his cheeks stretching impossibly high, and I could kiss him. I should kiss him. I can do that now.

But he beats me to it.

His mouth tastes like chocolate and smoke.

#carry on #carry on fanfic #snowbaz #snowbaz fanfic #completed

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