#this is the wip of one shot turns into 25k++ words so i divide it into several chapter

[vsyrworld]

milk teeth on AO3

Is complete! Read now♡

Four times Charles asked Carlos to marry him + 1 time Carlos finally gave him a ring.

M/M pairing. Carlos Sainz Jr / Charles Leclerc.

rate mature for a shameless smut

ps. it is just basically my 2024 season delulu with charlos secret date on every race🙂

playlist : the journey of our fallacies

(shout out to @charlos-angst and @leclercskiesahead for helping me during the process)

[falke-scribblings]

Swords and Sorcery [Thematic Thursday 03.15]

It’s Thematic Thursday over on /trash/! It’s a perfect excuse to do what I did when the sci-fi prompt came up and submit the first chapter of a WIP.

The difference, I hope*, is that this time I’ll be able to post more of it more quickly. I’m 25k-ish words in, and much closer to finishing. As usual, once it’s ready to go I’ll start installments over on AO3, which is much better suited to walls of text.

Until then, please enjoy this preview.

Nicholas Wilde pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders and waited in the shadow of the well. He wished his charges for the evening would step as lively as he did. The longer they were out here, the higher the chances that Sentinels would be along to challenge them.

He supposed that was what he got for working with tourists.

The two beavers eventually trundled up across the square behind him. They were huddled close together against the bite of the wind, heads bowed to watch their feet in the drifting snow. The male carried a bulging traveler's sack.

"How much further, Mr..."

"West." Nick pointed toward the bluff that rose at the edge of village. "And not far now. Your accommodations are just down there, by the stream."

"You told us at the inn that your rooms were the best the village had to offer." The man's companion hadn't stopped complaining this whole time. "But we're almost at the wall. Isn't that dangerous? They say the magic-"

"The Ford hasn't seen trouble for years," Nick cut her off. He kept his easy smile in place. "From bandits or otherwise. The Council Watch is too thorough for that."

She looked dubious.

"The stream and the square are just steps away. There's fresh water, and a baker down the road, and you'll get first light when the sun rises tomorrow."

They weren't buying it. Nick pushed the wide door open and now even the husband's face started to twitch with disgust. He narrowed his beady eyes at Nick.

"This is a barn."

Nick ignored the scent of the mostly-fresh hay he'd stocked the place with. It was a barn, at least during the warm season. But Nick knew the owner packed up and left for the shores to the south this time of year, and left the building empty.

And it was odd that two beavers would complain about it. Didn't they live in dams? A barn was a far sight better than earthwork and raw timber already.

They were the ones with the gold, though, and who was he to judge by appearances? They certainly didn't take his cloak for anything more than that of a part-time innkeep.

"And this is, for better or for worse, the best Morrigan's Ford has to offer right now." He grimaced in affected sympathy. "There's just the one inn, and it's full up - which is the whole reason we had to expand to alternate rooms. I know it's not much, but it will be warm and dry." He paused while a gust pushed flurries of snow past them. The woman shivered. "And it will be out of the cold. I'll see about more fuel for the brazier, so you can run it all night."

The chill wind seemed to help the beavers come to a decision. They shared a glance and the husband finally nodded.

"I suppose it's the best we'll hope for on short notice," he said. "It's all right, Meera. Look, there's the heater. We can make a nice supper."

With their minds finally made up, they passed over the gold. Nick took it carefully, without making a show of it. It had been a long time since he'd had two whole pieces to rub together, but they didn't need to know that.

"There's a door for small mammals there in the wall." He pointed. "And a trough on the far side. Make yourselves comfortable. I'll be back with more fuel soon."

He was telling the truth, but he had another stop to make first.

The Burrow End Inn was a whole different kind of warm. There was smoke on the air and great roaring fires, not like the little braziers Nicholas' charges would huddle around tonight. Chatter from dozens of mammals washed over him as he pushed through the doors and the crowd. He could smell roasting meat and garlic.

Jalis, the innkeep, was a broad-shouldered ox who was at once kindly and a completely ruthless businessmammal, depending on who asked. Nobody gave him a second look, even when he paused at the end of the bar to bend and confer with a fox in a dark cloak.

Nicholas gave him his cut in the scam - twenty silver for the lost business from turning away the beavers, and twenty silver for the room Nicholas had reserved himself, for the next few nights. In weather like this, he would treat himself with a proper hearth and feather bed.

"Any sign of the watch?" he asked.

Jallis just raised an eyebrow.

Nicholas sighed and flicked another silver back the innkeep's way with a thumb. Jallis caught it out of the air.

"Not a peep, on a night like this," he said, and winked. The coin disappeared. "Last anyone here talked of them, they were to the east, securing the supply roads."

"Still?" Nicholas shrugged and tapped his forehead in salute. "West it is, then. Don't wait up for me."

---

He moved from shadow to shadow with practiced ease, not that it was all that necessary in the midnight cold. The roads were deserted, especially so down here where the river curved its way south again. The old dock and its storehouses where the harbormaster collected coal and pitch might have looked abandoned, if one didn't know better.

Yet Nicholas still paused to concentrate from time to time, to blur his silhouette and shroud his form, so anyone watching the widest roads through the moonlight might mistake his passage for the wind stirring in the trees, or a gust of glittering snow. It was just safer that way.

Nicholas knew all about safe. It was the only way to go through life these days, when news shot through the village every week of new decrees and new guilds and new armies massing out in the wilderness. No, that old beaver was right. Magic was stirring - not just in the old places, but in lands that hadn't felt the wild energy in so long that the knowledge of what it could do had become legend.

It made him uneasy. Willow Vale, beyond the hills, already crawled with a strange static. it was like something he could almost smell, almost hear. He steered clear now, even if it meant a hit to his meager business. If it got any worse, he would have to think about leaving entirely. He didn't want to get tangled up in it when the rest of the village finally caught on.

Most other mammals were rightly scared of it, too - the Council Watch rushed around to follow up on even the most tenuous or rumors, and wealthy mammals hired militias on top of that to protect their lands and from the opportunists and bandits that exploited the chaos. The most foolish of mammals wanted a piece of the magic itself, never mind that the energy tended to overwhelm its vessels or rot them from within.

It was all anyone ever talked about now - and so Nick didn't feel guilty at all about looking out for himself at the expense of others. If they were too busy worrying about magic, or more bandit attacks, to ask more careful questions about who they were buying a room from, that was hardly his problem. It wasn't like anyone was getting hurt.

Of course, not everyone saw it so cleanly. They kept reminding him of it, too.

Nick stopped in the dark shadow where the wood of the coal hoppers was cracked and warped enough that small pieces occasionally fell through. This, too, was nothing anyone would miss.

But the ground was mostly clear, all the way up to the edge of the shed. Nick came around the divider, his attention on the snow in front of him, and stopped.

A rabbit stood at the top of the mound of coal. She wore a suit of dull metal armor, which was so large on her frame it might have been comical, had she not also carried a serious polearm sharpened to a razor edge. Even planted in the loose material under her feet, it was longer than she was tall.

Nicholas swallowed the wariness and smiled. He should have known she wouldn't be far behind him.

"Cold night to be lurking around here," he said.

"Not cold enough, it seems." She shifted her feet - grey fur now smudged black from where she'd walked in the coal - and slid down the pile so she could scowl at him at his eye level. "Nicholas Wilde. What brings you to the docks?"

He kept his paws where she would be able to see them. "A mammalitarian gesture, nothing more. My clients need to keep warm tonight."

"Yes, I saw you leading those travelers across the square." Her eyes narrowed. "What did you dupe them into this time? A sty? The compost shack?"

"You wound me, Hopps."

She drew herself up, which wasn't saying much, considering her stature, and tapped a paw to the cobalt trim on her pauldrons. "That's Sentinel Hopps to you."

"Spend a week out in Willow Vale and everything changes. Judith Hopps, a full Sentinel now..."

Her breath clouded in a sigh. "You know the drill, Wilde. Stand on the path, and put those knives of yours at your feet."

It wasn't worth forcing the issue here in the cold. For all his tone, Nicholas had no interest in actually crossing blades with even the most diminutive of the Council Watch. He had no doubt she was stronger and smarter than she appeared - still probably not enough to prevail in a fight, but why risk a fight in the first place? And she would know if he tried to hide his intentions from her, to get the upper paw. That was the opposite of safe.

So he drew his daggers from his cloak - slowly - and laid them in the frozen grass at the edge of the road.

"The mammals you swindle might not know or care that you're not really an innkeep," Judith said. "But you can't steal coal to keep them warm. Not when there's wood for the gathering." Her foot tapped. "All of them, Nicholas."

Now Nicholas did grimace, and reached behind him to pull a third slender knife from the back of his belt. "Technically, the path on this side of the building is public lands. That the dockmaster can't be bothered to maintain his storehouses isn't my-"

"Enough." The edge of her glaive caught the moonlight. "Are we going to have a problem, Nicholas?"

"Well, you've done your best to ensure problems are impossible."

Her eyes flashed. "If only you were as considerate."

Nicholas smiled again. This was nothing he hadn't heard before. He was a troublemaker. Shifty. Sly. It came with the red tail, and the fangs and the wandering paws. He let it roll off while she paced around him and looked him up and down, as if deciding whether to make it official.

And eventually Judith's frown softened. "I know there are mammals that need to stay warm, Nicholas. You should know that's the only good reason I have not to arrest you again."

"Indeed." His strongest memory of that night in the Watchhouse was the snickering from the other Sentinels, when they'd seen Judith had bothered hauling his harmless tail in at all. To this day, he still didn't know if she'd ignored it, or if she just hadn't caught it. "It's certainly not because you have nothing better to do."

"Stick to wood, and we won't have to keep doing this."

"You don't enjoy our chats?" He bent to retrieve his tools and spirited them away under his cloak again. "You'd rather be off chasing wilds magic?"

"I would rather be with the Captain, patrolling the roads for bandits." She corrected him and hopped off the coal to stand on the road. Her ears were up again and she was watching him closely in the moonlight. "But someone has to keep an ear on the village, if only for the hapless travelers who don't know any better."

She'd drawn night watch in midwinter, in other words. Someone at the Watchhouse really didn't like her, it seemed. This time he hid the smile.

"Far be it from me to impede you any further, then," Nicholas said. He touched his brow.

"Wood, Nicholas." She angled her glaive. "And stay out of trouble."

"Oh, certainly." And for once, he meant it. As soon as he was done disappointing the beavers he'd put up in the barn with the few pieces of coal he'd already collected, Nicholas intended to splurge on a nice hot meal and sleep until noon.

He turned to leave her standing in the cold wind, and didn't bother sneaking. She would see right through it.

---

Judith was freezing, but she knew that adding another tunic under her mail would just make the whole lot heavier, and she wouldn't even have the energy to shiver.

Not that she would have noticed just now. Her indignation over the village's most persistent fox was helping keep her warm on her rounds.

He didn't respect Sentinel armor at all, and it never seemed to matter. Wilde didn't think of her as a keeper of the peace, much less any kind of threat at all. And none of the other Sentinels ever bothered putting him in his place. Maybe they knew it was a lost cause.

Or maybe, Judith had to confront when she made it to the base of the wall, Wilde was just more right than she wanted to admit. Nothing ever happened in this village. It was, as some of the longer-tenured Sentinels grumbled, where peacekeeping went to waste its time, even as the world outside its walls got more and more uneasy.

But Judith was convinced that on its own made it worth struggling up cold stone stairs designed for larger mammals, or letting the westerly wind at the top of the battlement chill her armor out even more. Morrigan's Ford was quiet below her, with only a few lights burning to betray signs of life at all.

She saw that for the bigger picture that Wilde couldn't, or wouldn't. If she and the rest of them didn't do their jobs - even when they were cold and lonely - that sleepy, boring peace could slip away. It had happened already, in the villages and towns furthest from the keeps where the Sentinels were stretched thinnest. The story was different each time - storms, or sickness, or bandits, yes - but the result was the same.

It was surely better that nothing continue to happen under her watch, than to risk something worse.

So Judith continued her pacing, all the way down the length of the western wall. She passed flickering torches and the lone guardhouse, where Hayfew, the oldest goat on the Watch, somehow stayed awake, propped on his pike. He, at least, always spared her a nod as she went by.

And all remained as it should be when she came off the wall. The docks were still quiet, and the roads to the south that went into the fields. There was no sign of Wilde - though she wasn't sure she would know he was there, if he wanted to hide from her.

Judith had even dared to start hoping of a cup of hot soup and a warm billet when the noise came to her over the wind.

She paused in the archway of the western gate, perked her ears up again and listened hard.

It was just the wind. Just the wind, and the flutter and snap of the torch in its bracket-

And the faint rasp of hooves from the other side of the locked gate.

Judith stood rooted where she was, while the training she finally had to use for real seemed to take forever to come to mind in the cold. The window in the gate was too high for her, and there was no stool like the one she kept at the main gate to the north. There were no other sentries to alert - the nearest was Hayfew, back down the wall.

So she snatched the torch from its holder herself and jumped up the stairs again, unsteady with such large tools in each paw.

The wind battered her sensitive ears back when she came to the parapet - and here, too, she was too short to see out properly. She clambered right up onto the ramparts and braced her glaive between them, trusting the stout ash pole to support her weight and her even heavier armor while she leaned out over the dizzying drop.

"Who goes there? Sing out for the Watch!"

Still no answer against the wind - and only barely did Judith see the glint of nighttime eyes looking back up at her. Wide and round. Prey. Someone was out there, all right, and they needed her help. These days especially, travelers who came to harm passing between the villages weren't always lucky enough to make it to the next one.

So back down to the gate she went, to haul on the giant bolt and push it open. But she was not prepared to meet something so beyond even her ability to help. Her words, her carefully prepared speech - they guttered in her throat.

They were both dressed for fair weather in the fields, not a midwinter storm, and they were so exhausted they made no move to stagger forward into shelter.

A deer, Judith finally identified her, swaying on her feet where a badger supported her - and both of them dripping blood in the fresh snow from fur and skin that had been flayed half off their bones.