Chapter Text
The man stumbled out of the sea at about 2:45 PM in the evening. Though it wasn’t that late in the day, you couldn’t help but think of it as the evening. The sun never made it far up into autumn sky when you were this far north. You were alerted to the stranger’s presence by a thump that was so muffled by the snowy landscape that you barely noticed it at all. You let out a huff of frustration, put down the blanket you were crocheting, pulled on your parka, and went to investigate after taking a moment to remove the wedding band from your right hand.
The wind lashed at your face as it whipped up snow that your view. The landscape was a freezing hell, the snow hardly broken past the paths you routinely followed heading either towards the forest or the village. Normally in such horrid conditions the whole of it would seem to all blur together. However, the dark mass which had collapsed just beyond the shoreline was an unmistakable contrast to the colors of the arctic landscape.
You trudged over to him, asking if he was okay in your accented Danish. No response. He lay sprawled on his stomach, face obscured by the drifting snow and a great hood. He was dressed in what once was probably appropriate clothing for the weather. Now the whole of the back of his thick coat was burned straight to hell, and his back along with it. What you could see of the non-blistered skin had the waxy color of a corpse. You groan. He clearly had been dead a while – who in heaven’s name had dropped him here? He certainly hadn’t been there this morning, so presumably this was what you had heard. You look around to see if there was anything else around that could have possibly made the noise. There didn’t seem to be. Everything was as you had left it.
You closed your eyes and let out a groan. You were going to have to bury him on your own; Lord knew there was no point trying to send for help with it. Better still, it had been more than a month since the ground had frozen for the winter and the man had to be at least eight feet tall. You rubbed at your temples and tried to prepare yourself for the unutterably thankless task of trying to give this poor man a semblance of a decent burial.
Well, it was already too late in the piss-poor excuse for a day that they had up here, so there wasn’t a chance of getting him in the ground before tomorrow. However, you thought you could probably handle getting him away from the sea and up towards a better location for a grave. You headed to your shed; you were pretty sure there had to be something that you could use to move him in here. Lo and behold, you found a rusted wheelbarrow. That would have to work, or else you would have to break ground on the stony shore. Moving eight feet of dead weight sounded slightly less miserable, though if you were honest with yourself you knew it was probably a negligible difference. Why, oh why had he picked such an inconvenient way to drop dead, you began to wonder before cutting yourself off with horror at your train of thought.
You forced the thrice-damned thing through the piles of snow to the beach and stopped short as soon as you got there. You could see a hollowing of the small snowdrift by where you assumed his face was. His breath had been slowly melting it. Shit, he wasn’t dead. Your relief was quickly drowned out by the knowledge that if he was so badly burned and still unmoving, he was probably on his way out. Especially in this weather.
“Sir, are you awake? I need to get you inside if I’m going to help tend to your wounds,” you say. He moaned and the hood shifted as if he were trying to bury his head in the snow. Well, it looked like you weren’t likely to get much help from him. You assessed the situation. He was prone on the ground and badly burned. There was no obvious way to get him up without aggravating his wounds, but hopefully he could help you out some if he was conscious. You moved over to the side of him wasn’t as badly burned and try to gently raise his arm so you can support him with your shoulder. Your hand barely brushed up against him before his whole body flinched away.
Speaking in the most soothing voice you could possibly muster, you tried again to get him to respond. “Sir, either you need to stand up on your own or I am going to have to get you into the house myself. If you stay out here in this weather, you’ll freeze to death.” He murmured something incomprehensible; as far as you could tell it wasn’t another language. It sounded more like delirious mumbling. Maybe his burns were infected and he was running a fever. You gave up on trying to reason with him and took his arm as gently as you could without your grip being too weak to hold onto him. He flinched again, but not so hard that your hand was knocked free.
You paused for a moment, partially trying to let him realize you weren’t going to hurt him but also trying to figure out what you’d do if he came up swinging. He was much larger than you. While you couldn’t see quite how strong he was under the thick clothing, you were pretty sure you didn’t want to find out the hard way. After a moment of watching him, you realized he probably wasn’t going to do anything and started trying to gently – gently – lift his arm around your shoulder. His entire body seized up, but he allowed it.
You began to slowly try to pull him to his feet, and after a moment he seemed to realize what you were trying to do. He leaned on you heavily and you grunted trying to support him. He pulled himself to his feet at what seemed to be great difficulty. You couldn’t really tell, though. The both of you were facing the same way, and he was entirely too tall for you to see his face from your angle.
“Alright, are you going to be able to walk, or am I going to have to haul you up there in the wheelbarrow?” you ask, knowing that it was pointless. He didn’t understand you. You decided to try to pull him along and if he looked like he was going to collapse immediately you were going to make damned sure he did it onto the wheelbarrow.
You started taking small steps and he began to plod after you. While he was leaning heavily onto you for support, he didn’t seem like he was about to faint again just yet. Excellent, that’s a blessed relief, you thought to yourself. The both of you slowly made your way back up to your house, him groaning from pain and you from the exertion of mostly carrying this giant of a man.
You maneuvered him into your house, but you could feel his strength flagging. Your luck ran out on the threshold of what was now, apparently, your guest room. He began to slump, and you found yourself supporting his full weight. Letting out a multilingual string of swear words you did your utmost to keep him slung across your shoulders and dragged him bodily to the bed. You barely managed it – good Lord he was big – but you managed to all but drop him down onto the bed. It was then that you screamed.
His face was revealed for the first time since you saw him, and it was unlike anything you had ever seen. His sallow skin was as thin as onion paper, and you could trace the veins on his face. Some of the larger ones slightly pulsed in time to the pumping of his heart. His complexion was a waxy sort that you had only ever seen on the dead. Great scars ran up and down his face, dividing it into three parts. The sutures had long since been removed, but the holes where they had been inserted left small ancillary scars forming dotted lines on either side of the main ones. Many of the dots appeared warped as when a seam is pulled too tightly and the fabric puckers around the thread. One of the larger panels of his face was a slightly different skin tone from the rest, and another seemed more aged than the others. The seam dividing these ran over his lips, and it slightly deformed the upper one pulling it slightly upwards to form a permanent sneer.
You backed out of the room and shut the door behind you. You started to pace around the room like a caged animal wondering just what it was that you had brought into your home. You could hardly believe he was human given his size and appearance, but neither could you think of what else he could be. You had long since stopped believing in the fey or any other superstitions, and if demons came up from Hell you were quite sure that they could disguise themselves better than that. You weren’t sure what the hell you had trustingly invited in.
Your panic was interrupted by another faint moan of pain from the room. You forced yourself to calm down enough to think rationally. Whatever this man was, first and foremost he was hurt. Very badly so. If he was some kind of horrifying monster, he was in no shape to attack you. If he was human, however…. You took some deep breaths. You couldn’t throw him out in the cold. It would be unconscionable. If he awoke and turned out to be some kind of unthinking beast you could reevaluate, but for now you felt morally bound to swallow your fear and treat his wounds.
Pressing your lips into a thin line, you turned around and opened the door.