[TW: implied/mentions of sexual assault - not between the pairing]

This is the alley where stray cats come to die.

The worn hide of his boot scatters a puddle on cracked asphalt, breaking waves into the overcast reflection of the sky. The city disappears from it; even his balloon, tethered to the sturdiest railing he could find, for a moment is lost, washed away.

The alley has nothing of the flair he came to expect from this long-drawn game. It's not the decadent, charming backdrop of a silent heist film. Not the calculated neglect of a bank's backstreet, service door left hanging from its hinges. It's not the cigar-foggy bar where golden teeth glinted at him from the shadow of a wide brim, and foreign men have leered and said, Glæpur, you say? Never heard of him.

Every city has a place like this. A place that, winter nearing, crowds with doomed, desperate things, resigned to never see the spring to come. Silent, the echo of his steps bouncing off the bare peeling walls, oddly metallic; its hiding nooks full of last breaths long-drawn, a brave green sprout out of every crack. A disgraced sanctuary, reclaimed, anarchic, overgrown.

It is a graveyard, yet it doesn't hold a single body. All is swept by the crawling underwood—the stray dogs, the roaches, the bone-grubbers. Life chasing death, even out here, in this tangle of wires and stone boxes, in the city's innermost food chain.

He breathes in the foreign air and its memory of decay, walking forward, fingers tight around the strap of his haversack. He follows the trail. What's left of the hunter's thrill of the weeks past is now nothing but a dull, nauseating urgency clenched down in his guts. Even with no jingle from his hat, his instincts know when he's late. And oh, is he late.

Maybe too late, for the one stray cat he's after. Maybe nothing will be left for him to find—not even his bones. It would be a waste of time, nothing more, he tells himself. Nothing more.

It would be a reminder, even, if anything. Maybe then he'll finally learn there are things a hero shouldn't dabble with. It will be punishment, for letting his priorities shift so much, for having been so indulgent and undisciplined―for this chest that aches and yearns and will not learn. It will be a lesson, old school, as harsh as needed.

The short day darkens around him as he hesitates on his next step. The ground is marked with his nemesis' presence, like a shiver through the dumpsters and the whispering scutch stalks. A step more, and the air shifts, changing weight and density. The alley is a stage that comes alive around him, quivering, eyes on him from every shadow.

"At last," he says, determined not to let the other have the first word, as if the rules of a contract inhabited the mouth of the first one to speak. For a moment, aside from the sturdy grass springing back behind him, nothing moves.

"At last, indeed," the shadow drawls, leaving the wall, emerging into its long, thin human shape. The eyes in it are only one pair, grey like a winter sky and just as troubled. "Íþróttaálfurinn. Was starting to think you got tired of this game."

The elf draws a breath in, holds it. Of course, he's here. Of course, he's still alive. Of course. Of course.

He is a predictable thing, this man. Not too bright, and just as sturdy as the wiry grass under his feet. Of course he wouldn't just die on him. No rule and no contracts ever inhabited this stray cat's mouth—and the elf's chosen name hasn't rolled off someone's tongue that easily in a long, long time.

"Glæpur," he acknowledges, breathing out. It's not relief, he tells himself, it's just convenience. "I knew you'd get locked up over here, sooner or later. It did take a little time―then all I did was follow the signs."

He followed newspaper scraps, in fact. Then whispers in the wind, then his own nose, after the stench of dirty money and dirty favours. His crystal, as if to make a point, has been silent. Glæpur gives him a slow smile, wide and mute and full of teeth.

"A little time," he echoes, letting his arms open and fall at his sides.

Something's off about him. The elf is used to grand speeches and gestures, to his sparkling wit, to the level of vitality that—impossibly—matches his own. The elf cannot put his finger on it―but now, even from a distance he can see the heaviness of his step, the fight to barely keep upright. Is he drunk, or something else, something worse?

He steps into the man's silence, the four or five yards of empty air between them, fills it. "If it isn't like you," he taunts, "to bust out of prison and wind up in another."

"Across the whole Ocean, this time," Glæpur points out, voice deep with pride. A twitch shakes his long limbs, white bare branches in the cold breeze. "A n-new record."

He's in short sleeves, the elf notices. Nothing but thin slacks and a ratty t-shirt. Pilfered off some unfortunate clothesline, knowing him, prison stripes left behind in exchange.

"Then escape again, but stay where you were most likely to be caught again," the elf continues, instead of saying, even for a human of the far North, that's not enough for this weather. "There is hiding in plain sight, Glæpur, and then there's not even trying."

"Wasn't hiding, wasn't trying." The storm-eyes stray up, augur observing the pattern of migratory birds. He nods towards the tethered balloon when he spots it, only dull-ochre sun in the grey sky. "I'd been waiting."

Íþróttaálfurinn shifts his weight. The man shifts his. They move nothing but these words so heavy, these wayward priorities, this air dense enough to slice through as the question curls itself behind the elf's teeth. Did you want me to find you? But he bites down on it, chewing, swallowing. It falls on a pile of other eaten questions. Been piling up for a while, there on his clenched guts, in these months of empty chase.

He clears his throat, shifts again. "You came here," he dares, "where I was most likely to come look for you."

Glæpur nods. "Only green place in this whole hellscape." He spits on the ground, then straightens to look down at him. The storm in his eyes churns now, accusatory, strained. "Police mutts got no elven nose."

His voice is off too, exhausted, like that last speck of muddy snow huddling in a street corner, resisting inevitability. The elf steps closer, covering half the distance left―and the feeling comes back to him a tenfold stronger: he is late.

He staggers, almost. He's late, and he doesn't know what he has missed. The air seems to push against him as Glæpur inches backwards, but only a couple steps. Though the alley is littered with broken glass, the man hasn't armed himself. If it means armistice, defeat, or trickery, he knows not. He shouldn't care, even, and yet.

"Time's up, Glæpur," he says anyway, and Glæpur's breathing like air can't fill him, heaving almost. The elf points his thumb back over his shoulder, and holds up the fingers of his other hand. "Alright, fine―I'm giving you five minutes to catch your breath. But then you're going back in, no fuss."

And even from there, even with all that empty, hostile air between them, he can see the blood drain from the man's face.

A step forward, two steps back. Glæpur is shorter, off his heels, but still long and thin enough to look stretched, white as a leek and just as ready to snap. True, primal fear stares back at him, for maybe the first time since he's met this wandering, rootless stray.

"Wait, I can't―I need more time," Glæpur says low, and the blood chills in the elf's own veins at the catch in his voice. A step more. No steps back. "It's… it's not like back home, here."

"Should have thought of that before you crossed over," he chides, propping his fists on his sides. He looks up into the man's ashen face, fighting the pity out of his voice. "Got yourself here, so you're going to stay here. Five minutes, not a second more."

Glæpur's spidery, ever-moving hands climb up to dab at his upper lip. He swallows, breathing grown erratic and throat working emptily, as a shaky hand skitters to tug down the already stretched neck of the t-shirt. The elf catches a glimpse of something red.

"Can't go back," Glæpur mutters.

He backs away from him but the elf has calculated his steps, and the wall at the end of every blind alley is all that's left to back into. Glæpur jolts and shoots a hand behind him when he bumps into it, scratching into the rough bricks with ragged, dirty nails.

"I can't go back," he repeats, strangled, without looking at him.

"Too bad," the elf says. Glæpur might still be faking: he's good at faking, after all. An actor and a con artist, makes a living off his silver-tongue, talks his way out of every corner. This is exactly the situation where he would have reason to fake. And yet.

He looks like he's about to faint, the elf notices, he's frozen still like cornered game. He looks ill, even, seen up close; the shadows in his eyes are glazed over, the shadows around them deeper than ever. No, he tells himself. A hero lives his life to help others―but he has to hold back now, hold still, hold on. When heroes shift their priorities like he's been doing―that's when it all falls to pieces.

Then, Glæpur's long grasshopper legs fold, the man crumbling off himself with nothing but a breathy groan, head thudding back into the wall and sliding down it—not faking, his instincts scream, and the ache in his chest becomes a sharp, stab-like wrench.

He moves fast, bracing his arm around the man's middle, holding him up. Glæpur chokes out a pained gasp, voice shrivelling into a whimper at the end, attempting to twist away.

"What…" The elf moves his arm, drawn to glance down. Mostly to himself, he notes, "… you're injured."

The too-light shirt has rucked up between the wall and his arm. The man's abdomen is a sunset sky of reddened skin and mottled blue, down to the hipbones that jut above the worn waistband.

"No shit," Glæpur rasps. His long spine curves like a question mark around his arm, hanging over it, breathing fast and shallow. Heavy-lidded eyes slide shut for a moment. "They make criminals, here. Whatever they've already done, makes them worse―Glaumbæjar is a damn kindergarten in comparison… you wouldn't believe."

The elf's eyes can't leave the beaten sky on his stomach, until Glæpur tugs the shirt down. The seam at his shoulder rips a little with the gesture, revealing red circles of dotted marks on the tip of his clavicle. The man grunts under his stare, shifting uncomfortably, like he can hear him ask, is this what made you run?

Íþróttaálfurinn doesn't ask how they make criminals, in this strange faraway place. What Glæpur might say would compromise him, and what he might omit would haunt him at night, chase him in his dreams down an alley, corner him into a brick wall. He watches the man's body heat curl into steam in the cold air, eaten away by the impending dusk.

"I don't want to believe what humans do to themselves, most of the time," the elf murmurs after a while, voice softer than he'd like, more open than he'd like. Still catching his breath, Glæpur only makes a noise between a snort and a tsk.

He'll give him a couple of hours, Íþróttaálfurinn decides, and no more. It would be useless to bring him in like this, anyway: they'd lay him down on a hospital stretcher, instead of a prison cot. And from there, it would be true what they say―that no cage ever held Glanni Glæpur until the new moon, and no bed until the next morning.

All of his time and work would go to waste, then. Glæpur would just disappear again, get lost in the shadows again, and the game would start all over again. All the while, the much-needed break―in which he knows where Glæpur is, if he eats and sleeps, lives or dies―would be skipped. For reasons he takes care to avoid, like a skein of geese spotted from afar, the thought is unbearable.

For now, the man is there, breathing strained between the wall and his forearm, half-bracing against him, half-struggling to break free, like always. Glæpur cannot win: his strength has never been a match for the elf's. And yet, now… now the elf was late to the game, and something happened, and Glæpur was always a willowy man, but now he's disappearing. It feels like his arm could go twice around his torso.

A curse slips soft out his mouth. "Damn, how―how long since you've eaten something?" he hisses, voice catching. His free hand brushes into shivering ribs through the dark worn-through fabric. Glæpur yelps out a laugh, flinching away. He slides down the wall again. He's melting down it, boneless, grimacing in pain, and the elf kneels down with him.

"Forgot. Don't need it," he rasps. Dirty, flaked nails sink into his bare arm, pulling in and pushing away at the same time, with the same nervous energy. "Too much of a hassle."

His nails have always been so well-cared, long and lacquered in wine-red or deep magenta, glitter like small stars trapped under a transparent coating. The elf remembers them clinking against a glass of liquid of the same hue, a small show of impatience. Rubbing smooth over his lower lip, carefully lined. Leave behind thin lines of raised hairs as, in accidental proximity, they grazed his arm.

The elf looks at the grasping hand, and thinks he has started a dangerous line of questioning. From inquiring about food to, how long since you slept a full night, sat down to rest, been inside where it's warm, the leap is too short. And from there to, how long since you felt safe, even shorter.

Íþróttaálfurinn, and all the ones like him, was never good with too-short leaps.

All he has in his haversack are maps, water, and a paper bag with cherries in it. Leaving the man propped against the wall, legs carelessly sprawled on the scutch-ridden asphalt, he discards the first and rustles for the second. Glæpur, lost, found, parched, accepts the canteen against his lips with surprising trust.

Then, as the man drinks, tilting his head back and gulping noisily, the elf spots another red mark. The outline of human fingers runs long across his pale throat, unmistakeable.

The elf's hand twitches, jolting up the canteen, and his nemesis chokes on his next sip. Glæpur, eyes teary and over-bright, glares up to him, pulling him out of his shock.

"Is this how you repay me," he sputters, drying his mouth on the shirt, "after the time I won back your jingly-trinket at poker?"

The elf clears his throat, gulping down the apology stuck there. "It's an elven crystal. On my hat. That you had lost me a moment earlier."

A vague smirk appears on the other's face at the memory. "And I had to bet so much money—"

"Which was stolen."

Then a giggle. "—and use so much of my brain-power…"

"Not much to begin with."

Glæpur throws back his head in a deep, genuine laugh.

It sounds just a little dusty and just a little hysterical, like it's been in there a while, going sour. Yet, the elf can look at nothing but the crime scene on his throat, ice at the pit of his stomach. The marks look fresh, just like the sunset on his middle, barely starting to go purple-green around the edges.

Abruptly, the laughter ceases. "Must have used up all my luck, then," Glæpur says, again looking up into the grey unknown.

He pulls his knees up and gathers himself in his own arms, trying to rub the gooseflesh down. For a moment—but it might just be the liquid reflection—his skyward eyes seem filled with tears.

The elf has to turn away his whole body, lock his arms down to keep still. He struggles through the stiffness of his hands to unknot the aviator scarf from his neck. When he shakes it out, it distends into a short yellow cape.

"T-that's a neat trick," Glæpur concedes, hitching his shoulders as the thing goes around him, as if it could hurt him somehow.

"I put it on when I fly above 20,000 feet," the elf explains, a little sheepishly. "It gets chilly."

He said it with complicity, he realizes, mouth drying. Implied there, somehow, there was an, even for us, creatures of the deep North. But Glæpur only gives a tired eye roll, pulling the capelet tight around himself.

The elf finds himself trying to shuffle away the awkwardness by digging again into his bag, retrieving the cherries. They have travelled with him, maybe as anxious as him to hear a word in their native tongue; it is only fitting, for their journey to end on the stray cat's dark lips, in the alley where those like him come to die.

"They won't keep you full for long," he warns, as though the man might not know how cherries work. "But it's still something."

The cherries have kept him company from the start of this round, harvested early and ripened in the angled sunlight of their island, the home-place up North where the prisons are gentle, and human hearts are easily swayed. Where he couldn't find the man anywhere, and his crystal kept misleadingly quiet.

"Don't need to be full," Glæpur replies, grinning wide around the red fruit balanced against his incisors. Somehow, as usual, this not-too-bright thing has understood too much.

Glæpur, lost, found, beaten, leans away from the wall and more into him, persuading him with the deceptive frailty of his shivering form. A long hand curls around the elf's forearm, soft and lazy this time, keeping him there. Past the cherry, moving too-warm over his fingers, the man's breath smells of decay, of hopes left to die in a ditch.

One by one, carefully, he pushes the fruits through the row of sharp teeth. The cherries are still perfect, somehow, and so are the teeth, somehow. Only a couple have come off, leaving dark windows in that drunken smile. Rotten, sold, punched out? No way to know but ask―and he cannot ask.

One by one, the elf offers his palm for him to spit the stones, slick and red like hummingbird hearts. The storm-filled eyes glint drowsily as his nemesis swallows, uncaring.

"Now you'll scream when you go," Íþróttaálfurinn chides, teacher-voice slipping out, headshake making his cap dangle on his shoulder.

"Been screaming a while now, anyway," Glæpur says with another dissonant, stuttering laugh.

His lids hang heavy, dark as makeup yet painted only with dehydration and lack of rest. He always had that air of ruin clinging to him, even at his best. He smiles wide with his teeth stained red, like the still-sneering loser in a fist fight, reeking of desperation and unbroken spirit. The elf only half-grins back, implications chilling him to the core.

Then, a siren wails in the distance and, lid on a grease fire, the laughter dies.

"They're here," Glæpur rasps. The spider-fingers skitter up his arm, sinking in, dirt under his nails leaving black crescents among the elf's freckles.

"They?" he asks, but no answer comes from his shaken nemesis. He only backs into the corner formed by the wall and the elf's body, coiling tight as a spring, and Íþróttaálfurinn starts to understand why he ran.

The number 10 on his breastplate will be imprinted in his cheek when he pulls away, the elf thinks, as he haltingly draws his free arm around Glæpur's tense shoulders.

"I need more time," the man gasps, flinching at the light touch, breathless again, "I need―give me three hours."

"I shouldn't," the elf says low, frowning, more out of habit than anything.

He watches the man's wide eyes well up with tears in an instant, and if he lies to himself hard enough he can still pretend that what wells up parallel in his chest is nothing but pity. He wants to extend him the same mercy he would show anyone, nothing more.

"T-thirty minutes then," Glæpur pleads, swallowing hard, a crease of despair between his thick eyebrows. The drastic underselling is what shocks him most. "Only thirty minutes. I'll pay for them, I swear."

"You? Pay for something?" The elf tuts, condescending tone hopefully masking his obvious worry. "Besides, you've got nothing on you."

"Oh, I always have something on me," says the cherry-smile, absent. The flick of his tongue spreads the red juice like lipstick, and taking rhetoric for literal, he says, "Never know when you need to buy some time, and Glanni Glæpur can always pay."

And his hands run straight down, brittle nails and blanched knuckles, a crawl of contrasting forces alighting, all shaking, to the elf's belt.

For a moment, all Íþróttaálfurinn can hear is a distant rumble―his own blood, pounding in his head as he sits frozen, as the man's fingers flutter unfocused around his belt buckle.

"No―wait, wait, you don't have to―" he stutters, low and hurried, coming back to his senses. "Glanni Glæpur can't pay this time."

Distantly over the quieting gale in his veins, he hears Glæpur's familiar growl of impatience. He takes the skittering, unfocused hands, and plucks them away from his clothes. The nails aren't just dirty. They're blue with cold.

"Here," he murmurs, and against his better judgement he folds them in his, and rubs. "I'll loan you two hours."

His nemesis just looks at him, brows knitted, eyes wide. The grey in them looks blind-white, too transparent in the shadow of his dark circles, too young under all that decay. The long hands curl small inside his.

"You're bad at selling time," he murmurs in the thick veil of silence that descends over them.

The elf allows himself a small grin. "Perhaps."

The red smile comes again, splitting Glæpur's grave face, crinkling his liquid eyes. "It's a tough business to be in. Sooner or later, we all go."

This is nothing. This is the same mercy he'd have for anyone, he tells himself, clinging desperate. He tries not to think of the thick stack of blankets in the storage box in his balloon; he pushes off his mind the round baskets full of good, healing fruit. He tries not to think that, probably, the last time the man has rested safe were the few nights in that hotel room in Latibær.

"They go later, if you don't poison them."

The man's hands tense a little, but don't pull away. "Some would pay for that, too."

The elf shakes his head. "You can still go back, you know," he says, cutting through the maze of tangents, yet somehow still avoiding what he really wants to say.

You could let me take you back. Come back home, where I can make it in time if you're in trouble. Like he does for everyone else, he tells himself. Just like everyone else, and nothing more. Nothing more.

"Back to that town?" Glæpur sneers. He tries to laugh but it doesn't come out right, fizzling out in a cough, in a pained bend. He pulls away to wrap his arms around his battered torso again. "Ow―no, I… I can never go back."

The mess in Latibær resurfaces in his mind―children tricked into labour, accused of theft and poisoning, mayoral election fraud, countless other crimes. But, the elf thinks, if the town people can forgive, who is he to judge? And Glæpur himself… it wasn't Latibær that ruined him. He has seen how the man works, and there's no way that was his only failed scheme.

"The people are forgiving, there," the elf says, willing his voice even. "Forgetful… not that bright, honestly. You could easily―"

"What, make an honest living?" Another aching laughter, splintered into coughs. In his honey-chewed English, Glæpur sneers at him, "You gonna make an honest man out of me, Elf?"

The words strike him harder than expected. Íþróttaálfurinn closes his eyes, and it takes him three tries to exhale his held breath.

"Just... think about it," he says then, sighing out, giving in. He scoots closer, rubbing large circles on his back to ease the coughing. When he speaks, his voice isn't even anymore. "I… don't loan time just any day, you know?"

The man shifts minutely towards him, stiffening. "You're… giving me my three hours, then?"

This isn't just mercy… and it never was. He wants to gather this whole quivering mess up in his arms, carefully, and let him rest as long as he needs. His nemesis has finally broken him, it seems, with his storm-eyes and cherry-smile. With his reek of desperation, with all the things that aren't pity that he has sowed in his chest.

He sighs, "I'm giving you the night."

Glæpur freezes. When the elf looks down at him, his face is ashen again, all colour gone. The juice on his mouth sears the eye, as blood on fresh snow. The fear coils out of him, suffocating, and he's shaking even harder now―and the elf can't stop his hands from pulling in, soothing, cradling, when the man breathes in and exhales a shuddering sob.

"Hey, hey, now," the elf murmurs, rubbing warmth into him through the yellow fabric, trying not to press too hard. For once, he gets to ask exactly what he wants to ask. "Glæpur, what's gotten into you?"

"The whole night―ah," Glæpur says, starting in a shout and finishing cold, restrained. He glances down to the elf's arms around him, then runs a hand over his face, eyes screwed shut. "I see, I see. Of course. We are more alike than I thought, aren't we?"

"What are you talking about?" the elf asks, twisting in incomprehension, trying to grasp the root of the misunderstanding he sees hanging above them.

"Nothing. Just… didn't think you had that much jackal in you, that's all." Glæpur wipes away the tears like a boy, with the length of his forearm, not a care. A shiny smudge of snot stays there, like a snail track. He sucks up a powerful, noisy sniff, pushing his jaw forward. "I'm impressed, actually. Come on, then, all yours. Take your piece."

Íþróttaálfurinn watches him shrug off the capelet, like an old time diva shedding her nightgown, and he finally understands. The entire surface of his skin ripples with alarm and revulsion.

"No―for goodness sake. Not like that," he yelps, as the other's shirt is already halfway over his head. The bruising comes all the way up to his chest, and the elf is rambling, panicking. "You're injured―gods knows what happened to you, and you're crying… and we aren't even―that's not how this works, that's not how I work, Glæpur!"

His nemesis, once again, is looking at him like a deer in the headlights, inching back just a little from his shouting. They're both shaking now, the elf's hands struggling to pull the shirt back over his head.

"O-oh," Glæpur stutters, stuck there, short hair dishevelled. Reflexively, he tugs the light shirt tighter around himself, pulling the broken seams. Then, pressing his heart and clawing for a semblance of his usual flare, he says, "W-what a scare you gave me there, for a moment."

The elf can't answer. Taking a few minutes to calm his racing thoughts and whirling blood, he lets his eyes focus and unfocus on the red circles that litter Glæpur's bare, livid shoulders. He brushes his fingers against one, and though the gesture is sudden, this time the man doesn't flinch away.

"These are… human bite-marks," he says, his voice full of unmasked sorrow in the moment of suspension, of waiting. His nemesis looks down and away, biting his lower lip, clenching the fabric tighter.

"Yes," comes the whispered, terrible confirmation. "Told you. Not like back home, over here."

Bite-marks. The elf feels like everything has gone death-still around them. He can see the rest of the damage. He can see how it slows the other's movements, how it makes him flinch and grimace and neglect the need for food. But it's the bite-marks that finish him.

He would expect anger to rise like a tide inside him, the need to ask questions, ask names, ask to be made into an instrument of vengeance—but there's nothing in him. For a moment, he is nothing but grief.

He cannot picture any of the rest―he doesn't have a shape for it in his head, no form to grasp. Only the bites make it real: in his years of fighting, he has seen, given, and received many of those. It gives shape to the horror, to just how cloying, how close, how heavy the presence of his enemies must have been. He can see the blunt teeth sinking and breaking skin, he can see the frozen light in Glæpur's transparent eyes, the deer-like stasis of pain and shock. He presses his lips tight, fighting the sudden lurch in his stomach.

"I should not have let this happen," he says when he can speak. "I should not have been late. This is my fault."

He expects Glæpur to agree, to say, that's right, this is what you do. You were supposed to prevent this. This is all your fault.

"Hey, hey, now," the man echoes him instead, turning completely towards him to cup his face, half-laughing and half-sobbing. "What's gotten into you, elf? Who doesn't deal with a little occupational hazard, sooner or later?"

The elf has no use for the justifications that had already built inside him, and it kills him. It kills him that the man himself doesn't seem to think much of what happened. Glaepur, lost, found, hopeless, doesn't believe he would be saved, doesn't think himself worth even a hero's everyday mercy.

"Not this," he chokes a little, shaking his head in Glæpur's long hands. All the barriers raised around his heart are trampled, undone, locks cracked open. He's unprepared for the heat, when his fingers brush the man's warm cheek, for his little gasp when the elf leans forward until their foreheads touch. "No, never this."

His eyelashes are so long, dark and curved like fern sprouts. He dries them with a careful brush of his knuckles, biting his lip to focus on the gesture, make it slow enough that he won't make his nemesis flinch.

Glæpur doesn't flinch. He leans into his hand, sighing deeply, and does nothing but angle his face up. The cherry-red print he leaves behind is almost too faint, a bark with no bite, a touch too shy and holy to live in the lips of a disgraced man. The kiss is cold with short, shuddering breaths, and wet with rushing tears.

"I'm so tired," he confesses, like it is some huge, shameful secret. He tastes sweet, like cyanide. Like a long-drawn game, finally lost. "But I can't sleep, can't sit still―I'm stuck, I see them behind me every time I turn a corner and―" he takes in a shaky inhale. "I'm just s-so tired."

He sucks in a sharp breath when the elf pulls him off the asphalt, up and into the cradle of his knees. The elf wishes his breastplate didn't have to be so hard under the man's chin, when he pulls him to curl forward, leaning into his neck.

"Why… what is this, though?" the man tries, gesturing unsteadily to the motion, voice full of incomprehension. "Why are you doing this…?"

"It helps to… make it go away," the elf tries. He lets his thumbs rub small circles into the other's back, and he accepts it, pressing quietly against him. "From your mind. Like a bad dream."

"Hah," Glæpur chuckles, a little derisive and a little unhinged, "wouldn't that be nice, now."

The elf feels heat rise in his cheeks, and he's grateful that by having the other against his shoulder he, too, is shielded from view. He wasn't expecting to have to explain it, to receive the painful confirmation that the man has never been held, never been comforted. At a loss, he slipped into the language that works on frightened children.

"If anything helps you rest, I'll do it," he offers. Some of the bite-marks are right in front of him, stark on the pale skin. He angles his head a bit, so his moustache will not chafe them, and holds back a shudder. "I'll guard you while you sleep, if you want."

"I'll be gone by morning," Glæpur whispers, flush into his bare neck, like a warning. "You loaned me one night, after all."

Íþróttaálfurinn takes a breath deep from the diaphragm. He looks up at the now dark sky, considering how the weight difference between his balloon and the sun itself is less still than the difference between what he meant when he loaned that night, and what Glæpur meant when he accepted. The question, the offer, threatens to get stuck behind all the others, there on his guts that, with his nemesis light in his arms, don't clench painfully anymore.

"You could let me take you back, instead," he says eventually, voice soft, and it's easier than he'd ever imagined. "You could let the town forgive you, and forgive yourself. Let me keep you safe."

Glæpur doesn't laugh at any of it. In fact, he makes no remarks.

There is a long stretch of silence and bated breath, then a new full-body shudder, so strong it's almost a spasm. "C-could I…?" the man chokes out, barely audible. "After… after everything?"

"Definitely," the elf assures.

The man buries his face even deeper into his neck, clutching him so hard the edges of the breastplate dig into the elf's sides. He doesn't feel persuaded, or deceived, as he pulls his shaking nemesis into him, so close it's hard to breathe, pressing soothing kisses to his temple, his cheekbone, behind his ear.

There, he murmurs, "Shh, rest now. I've got you."

Glæpur makes a number of false starts, many stuttered, but I, but you, but them. None of them go anywhere, lost in tears. The elf rocks him slow, chasing the wracking sobs with tender whispers. I've got you, he tells him over and over, until the crisis gives in to exhaustion.

Chest aching in relief, the elf brushes his fingers through prison-cropped hair, growing slow, uneven. Glæpur's scalp is grainy with raised bumps, slanted hairless lines where the open skin has merged long ago, parting the hair like paths through a forest. He traces those ill-healed memories, and the man sighs into his calloused fingers, sleeping like a sated child.

It was never mercy, not even for a moment, and he had always known. Time that can be sold and loaned, Glæpur said. Maybe gifted, too. It all edges on a hero's choice, the order of his priorities… and for regrets there is always time.

When he lifts him, his nemesis' long body folds easily in the middle, perfect to lift and carry off. Like he was always meant to be held, arms wrapped over all the harsh angles of his body, kept warm, kept safe.

The elf's gaze climbs the bare stone walls, up to the tethered balloon, sun-bright in the slatesteel sky, perched, waiting. Step after step after step, he leaves the hidden graveyard behind. No bite for the dogs, not for the roaches, no bone for the grubbers.

This stray―his stray―is not dying here tonight, he thinks, and his hold tightens, just a little.

He will give him until spring.

Set between the second play (Glanni Glæpur í Latabæ) and the Christmas audiodrama (Jól í Latabæ).

Shoutout to Bjomolf for betaing, to Edgebug for inspiring me to write for Lazytown, to the works of Dirtgrvb and Cowroyalty for getting me into this particular ship. And to Stereobone's Desiderata for the cherry imagery that's been with me since 2012.

Title from Eliza Rickman's Cinnamon Bone