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Martyn stood frozen as he watched the body of his king dissipate in front of him.
The blood stayed put. Martyn’s hacks at the nape of Ren’s neck had splattered it all across the altar. He’d hacked hacked hacked. Three strikes is what it had taken to send Ren from Yellow to Red. And, oh, why hadn’t Ren enchanted the axe with sharpness instead of unbreaking?
And now there was blood blood blood on his hands and the axe and the floor and Ren was gone gone gone.
And Martyn was frozen.
And Ren was in front of him again.
His skin was a sickly gray and his eyes were red red red behind his sunglasses and—
“You have done well, laddie.”
Martyn found that he couldn’t open his mouth to respond.
“You have passed thy test. You may lower thy axe.”
Martyn hadn’t even realized he was still gripping it. It clattered to the floor, now. Martyn quickly followed, dropping to one knee and bowing his head to his king. It was all too similar to the pose Ren had taken as he’d ordered Martyn to do the unthinkable. “My liege,” he said… because what else could he possibly say?
“Rise, my hand.”
Who was Martyn to disobey?
Ren’s paw was cupping his cheek. “You are awfully shaken, aren’t you?”
Martyn let out a hollow laugh. A nearby phantom echoed it. “You— you may find that being ordered to behead your most trusted ally may do that, my king.”
Ren let out something almost akin to a snort. Martyn’s attempt at humor wasn’t too horrendously misplaced, then. “You understand why it had to happen?”
Martyn nodded, even though he didn’t understand— not really. Maybe he knew the reasoning, but his heart was too full of emotion to convince himself.
“I must be in a position to take the offensive,” Ren spoke softly, like he sensed Martyn’s hesitation. “I have to send a message to the desert. And I would not trust anyone but you with such a responsibility. I would not want it to be anyone but you.”
(A test, he had called it, before.)
“What’s death like?” whispered Martyn. “I never asked the first time.”
“A little bit moist, to be honest.” Ren smiled as he said it— and, okay, if Ren was smiling, then things were okay. Ren wouldn’t smile if they weren’t okay.
Ren’s thumb brushed against the stubble on his cheek, and Martyn abruptly realized that he was crying. How embarrassing.
“You have helped me greatly, tonight. How may I now repay you, Martyn?”
He called him Martyn. Not hand or laddie, but Martyn.
“You know that I require nothing but the honor of serving you, my lord.”
“But if you could have more?”
“Personally, I don’t find theoreticals useful, my king.”
“Martyn.”
He heaved a breath, trying to seriously consider the question through his racing thoughts. “I would appreciate… reassurance," he said.
“Of what sort?”
“That you are here. That becoming Red has not changed you. That I have not wronged you. That you forgive me.” It came out in a rush.
“And how shall I go about proving these things to you?”
Somehow, Ren had moved closer throughout the interaction without Martyn noticing. Their noses were mere inches apart. Ren’s sunglasses were the only thing keeping the eye contact from becoming unbearable, the redness in his eyes barely veiled.
Surely… surely he wasn’t offering to…
Martyn’s shoulders stiffened. “My— my lord, I—”
“Anything you want, hand. If it will make you feel better, I will do it. All you have to do is ask.”
Martyn brought a bloodstained hand to rest on Ren’s hip. Ren’s paw was still on his cheek. The air between them mingled, puffs of silver appearing with each huff of the cool air. Snow fell lightly around them, despite the heat from earlier that day, like someone had whispered into the universe’s ear that it needed to frame this— that it was important. Flakes of the snow were catching on Ren’s hair and beard.
All of the anxieties in his head came to a crashing halt; his attention was concerned only with this moment.
Martyn closed the distance between their lips.
He closed his eyes, head tilted. Ren’s lips were chapped. He tasted almost– coppery? Martyn didn’t want to think of the taste as bloody. He wondered vaguely if that resulted from Redness or simply from Ren’s wolfish nature. His beard scratched Martyn’s chin and upper lip, though not unpleasantly. It belatedly occurred to Martyn that he was standing there with his lips slightly parted and pressed onto Ren’s, which probably wasn’t an acceptable thing to do to your friend, much less your king. Ren wasn’t moving either– Martyn’s choices were to pull back or push forward, and pulling back would mean having to face Ren’s red red red eyes. He pushed his tongue at the junction of Ren’s lips cautiously. Ren's mouth opened immediately in response, seemingly jumpstarted. His canines were so sharp that Martyn feared he’d pierce his lip by pure accident. He wasn’t all too sure that he’d mind. Martyn deepened the kiss yet again, tightening his hand on Ren’s hip and kissing with all the strength he had. Martyn knew that he was kissing like a starved man— desperate— but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Ren returned in kind, his paws traveling to Martyn’s love handles and gripping there, so tight that Martyn once again feared he’d draw blood. He could have stayed in that moment forever, blissfully distracted from their circumstances.
Ren’s fingers found the waistband of Martyn’s trousers, then paused. “This is not an order,” he whispered into Martyn’s mouth. “The control is in your trusted hands.”
Redness made players bolder, it seemed. Martyn couldn’t imagine his king from a few hours ago making such a move. (Or, maybe, he allowed himself to think, Ren had just been waiting for an opportunity.)
“Please,” Martyn said through heavy breathing. “But—” He glanced up at the falling snow and distantly circling phantoms, then down at the abandoned axe and crimson-splattered altar. “Inside?”
Ren grinned. He grabbed Martyn’s hand and pulled him toward the building. Martyn lingered for half a moment too long, gazing at the altar. Ren didn’t mention it.
The kissing quickly became horizontal in Ren’s cot. It was a tiny thing— hardly befitting a king, but their kingdom was small and their resources thusly limited. (The kingdom would never get bigger, only smaller, Martyn dully thought. If– when– Ren won this wretched game, his kingdom would be made of only himself and ghosts.) The cot really wasn’t big enough for two, but they made do. It wasn’t as though either of them were complaining about being pressed together.
Ren tugged at Martyn’s waistband. “Remove these vile cloth confines, laddie.”
Martyn wished that his shimmying out of his trousers was more graceful than it ended up being, but Ren didn’t seem to mind. He pulled off his shirt while he was at it, leaving himself in only boxers.
Ren let out a long, deep whistle as he took in the sight. Martyn could only stare at the ragged scar that now adorned Ren’s neck.
(Hack hack hack.)
(There was blood on his hands, blood on his hands, blood on his hands.)
“Apologies for not having a body more befitting an audience with a king, my lord,” he muttered.
Ren’s brow creased. “What do you mean, dude?”
Martyn averted his eyes. Having to say it would just be humiliating, and not in a sexy way. He was far from unaware of the fact he wasn’t conventionally attractive. He held far too much chub on his frame, and his body didn’t even have the decency to distribute it appealingly. Stretch marks littered his stomach and thighs. He was covered in scars from head to toe, though most were decades faded. A few were brand new. The hair on his arms and legs was a strange color– not quite the blonde of his head but too light to be considered brown, and it curled around itself in strange patterns. His fingernails were chewed to stubs. That was just what occurred to him at that moment. He didn’t even want to think of what Ren would think once he removed his boxers.
He felt a paw on his cheek. “Would thou speak ill of my kingdom, hand?”
Martyn snapped to attention. “Ne’er, my king.”
Ren’s claw brushed under his eye. “Your body is my kingdom.”
“O– oh.” Martyn was sure that the crimson in his cheeks at that moment would have rivaled that splattered on the altar outside. “A part of your kingdom, you mean,” he corrected. Like semantics were what mattered here.
“I think you’ll find that you are the only kingdom I need,” he practically growled, which— yeah. That was way hotter than it had any right to be, if a bit cringy. Ren barrelled on like he wasn’t actively turning Martyn’s brain to flustered goop, though Martyn didn’t hear him, too focused on the fact that he was unbuttoning his shirt.
Ren unhooked his suspenders and slid his shirt off of his shoulders and goddamn of course he was sexy naked too.
Before Martyn even really had the time to appreciate the view, Ren had leaned in close(r), his arms wrapping around Martyn's hips and lightly grasping his ass. "When I said take you clothes off, I meant all of 'em, my dude."
Martyn chuckled and shimmed out of his boxers, silently grateful that Ren was too close to get a proper look. Yeah, yeah, don't speak ill of his kingdom or whatever. He could internalize that another time.
Another time, he thought, like they had time for another time. Like he had any right to long for another time before they'd even done it the first time.
If only their kingdom had been established during peaceful times. If only they had the rest of their lives to revel in being together… Well, they did have the rest of their lives, it was just that that amounted to… a month, if they were optimistic? A few weeks? Less?
Another time. A man was allowed to dream.
"So how do you want this to go, hand? It's all up to you." He paused. "Uh, within reason, obviously."
"Oh! Um."
Martyn was at a loss. In all fairness, he was in very close proximity to a half-naked very attractive man, and his brain had recently been turned into the aforementioned goop.
Ren continued to prompt him, "You wanna top? Bottom? What're you into?"
Like a broken record: "Oh! Um…"
C'mon, Littlewood, these were very reasonable questions for him to be asking. To be frank, he'd kind of assumed that Ren would be topping, based purely on the power dynamic at play between them. In another universe, HR would have an aneurysm with this one. If this were a YouTube series, virtue-signalling fans on Tumblr would send mean asks about it, probably.
But if Ren was asking…
"Whatever you need, my hand. This is for you."
Martyn needed to feel in control, he thought. In this out-of-control world. That, and he wanted to please his king, even if he was still a little unsure of his capabilities of doing so.
Sod it, Ren wouldn't have asked if he didn't mean it.
"I think… I think I'd like to top, if that's okay." Wherever his usual veneer of confident social skills had gone, they were not in the room with them. He waited with bated breath for Ren's response.
Ren's face split into a grin. He used his thighs to lever Martyn's and turned so that Martyn was knelt over him. "Let's make some magic, baby!"
Ren quickly stripped the rest of the way, throwing his clothing haphazardly to the side. Whew, it might have been a good thing that Martyn was topping, because he wasn't sure that he could take that thing.
He removed his sunglasses last, which—
Red, red, red. Martyn distracted himself by using his hand to warm up his dick a little. And then, a thought: "Do we have anything we can use as lube?" It would be so typical for this plan to be brought to a halt by something as stupid as that.
Apparently, this had also not occurred to Ren. "Uhmmmm." His face scrunched up adorably. "Cactus paste and water?" he offered.
"Yeahhhhh… No."
"I'm okay with a bit of stretch and friction, dude," insisted Ren.
Martyn squinted. "Are you sure?"
"On a normal day, probably not so much, but…" He shrugged. "Redness, ya know? Makes everything… I don't know how to even describe it."
Martyn supposed he'd experience it eventually, whether he wanted to or not.
So, he got to the work of stretching Ren out. He started with one finger, worked up to two, then three, and thought about adding a fourth in a kind of scrunched-up way before deciding this was probably more than enough for their purposes. Ren spent this whole time alternating between making low moans and semi-casual conversation, in pure Rendog fashion.
Maybe Martyn should have been more surprised(?) by the whole about-to-have-sex-with-his-King thing, but it felt… natural. Like it would have been odder if they hadn't ended up in this situation. Like it was meant to be. That might have been the shock, though, or the fact that when you stuffed an odd dozen players together with a world border (and a looming deadline of imminent death), sex was pretty much bound to happen. Martyn would bet good money that they weren't the only ones; he'd seen how Jimmy and Scott had been acting recently.
He chose to believe that he and Ren's devotion was special, nevertheless.
Martyn situated his knees on either side of Ren's hips, his upper half remaining mostly upright, one of his hands beside Ren's head on the cot and the other on Ren's pec. Ren's tail was pressed against the cot, but he insisted that that was fine. His paws came to rest on Martyn's love handles. Ren twisted their legs together so that his inner-knees were resting on Martyn's ankles. It was comfortable. They fit together well.
Martyn pressed in slowly. Ren cursed under his breath. Even with the prep, the lack of lube was palpable.
"Is this okay?" asked Martyn, anxiously.
"More than okay," Ren breathed. And then, because he was Ren, "Takes more than a bit of stretchage to get Rendiggitydog to back down, my dude!"
They stayed still that way for a moment. Ren appeared to be catching his breath. Martyn, meanwhile, was fixated on the jagged scar adorning Ren's neck.
Hack.
He lightly traced his fingertips across it. He didn't even remember bringing his hand up to do so.
Hack.
Respawns weren't supposed to leave scars like that. Not that this server seemed to care.
HACK.
"Laddie?"
Damn, he'd probably spent a few seconds too long staring at Ren's neck, hadn't he? What was the appropriate amount of time to stare at a sexual partner's neck?
Did Ren even know the scar was there? It wasn't like they had any mirrors around. Could he feel it? Did it still hurt?
Ren grasped Martyn's fingers and brought them up to his mouth, kissing them softly. "It's okay, Martyn."
Something flared deep in Martyn's gut at the way that Ren said his name.
He wanted to hear it more. More passionately, more desperate, more wrecked, more, more, more.
His hips stuttered to a start.
They found their rhythm relatively quickly, Ren's hips pressing up from the cot in time with Martyn's own, causing the cot to shake… As previously mentioned, it wasn't particularly well-made.
He thought vaguely of filling Ren with pups. It was a ridiculous notion, but Martyn was drunk on the intimacy of it all. It was a pleasant thought, that of making an heir for their little kingdom. They didn't have enough time to make it happen, even if they did have the necessary pairing of parts for it. But he could let it live in his imagination all that he wanted.
He shifted his angle slightly, and it must have been good, because Ren moaned. "Right there, Martyn. Right there."
Ren started to babble off compliments as Martyn rammed into him. Martyn wasn't coherent enough to appreciate them word for word, but he certainly got the gist: that he was doing amazing— that he was amazing. That Ren wouldn't rather have anyone else as his hand. As an ally. As a friend. As a partner. That if this game was what it took to bring them together, then maybe it wasn't a bad game at all. That if they were going to die, Ren was glad that they would be together when it happened.
Ren's claws gripped Martyn's shoulders, hard enough to bruise. "Faster," he groaned. "Faster."
Martyn obliged.
Ren came, cum splattering both their stomachs. He released his death grip on Martyn, falling back onto the cot. Martyn gave a few more firm pumps, wanting to finish before Ren tipped into overstim.
And as Martyn came, all of his half-developed plans of betrayal disappeared.
And if he was being completely honest with himself, they hadn’t been real plans for a very long time, if they ever had been. It was easier on his mind if he pretended that he wasn’t actually devoted. That he wasn’t in too deep. That he could back out of this game of pretend at any time. That it wouldn’t destroy him to do so.
Any allusions of those notions were gone now— washed away by the sweat and blood and cum covering their skin.
He collapsed on top of his king, their arms quickly wrapping around one another.
Wow. Not a bad reward for passing a test, in all honesty.
They shifted so that Martyn was no longer crushing Ren, but they stayed clinging together. Maryn vaguely noted that his bangs had come loose from his headband and were dropping sweatily into his eyes. He could hear Ren's tail wagging. They lay like that for a few minutes, until their pants slowed into steady breathing.
“Milord?” Martyn whispered into the dark.
“Yes, hand?”
“…I swear to you that I will never put you in the position which thou didst put me in today.”
Ren snickered and Martyn realized that that might have been a poor choice of phrasing.
“If fate so turns that you and I are the last two remaining in this dreadful game,” he continued anyway, “then I— I swear to you that I will not force you to take my life by thy own noble hand. That I will take care of that myself.” It wasn’t a question, which of them would be the winner of the game if it came down to the two of them.
When it came down to the two of them.
Don't think about the desert don't think about the desert don't think about—
“Martyn…”
“I swear it, my king,” he said again.
“I couldn’t ask you to do that, my hand.”
Martyn stared into those eyes (once a steely blue, now blood red). “I would never commit the sin of making you ask.” He didn’t want Ren to ever have to feel the way Martyn had felt, standing there with that axe in his hands. And at the end of the game, there wouldn’t be sappy sex to help make it feel better after. That would be it.
That would be it.
They lay in silence for a few long moments.
Martyn didn’t want to pull out. He wasn’t ready for this to end.
The lines of the game had blurred, and suddenly Martyn felt very silly. Ren wasn’t a king. Their kingdom didn’t exist. They were like children playing a game of make-believe. Ren's crown may as well have been plastic— the fake accent and Beowulfian language were cringe at best. Any outsider would be laughing their arses off at them.
This little charade was a coping mechanism and they both knew it. RentheDog and InTheLittleWood being torn from their homes with no explanation and forced to fight in a death match against their friends where only one would survive? That was something horrific. That was enough to drive any one of them to insanity.
But a king and his loyal hand fighting nobly for honor and victory?
That was something from a storybook. Something a lot easier to swallow. It turned even the most tragic parts into a thrilling tale. Every good story needed hardships so that the ending where everything worked out fine held any weight.
(What would everything working out fine look like in this story of theirs, anyway? With Grian and Scar dead? Grian, who Martyn had known for more years than he could count? Grian who he had laughed and cried with, lifetimes ago? Scar, who Ren had confided in Martyn, during some of their worst nights, was one of the best friends that a dog could ask for? With everyone dead? Their friends, their friends, their friends dead?)
Hell, Ren and Martyn barely even knew each other.
It was too painful to think about. They’d fallen into this game of pretend for a reason.
And Martyn, laying there, balls deep into Ren… Ren’s cheek on his chest and his paw lazily twirling Martyn’s chest hair… Martyn’s nose in Ren’s hair… his breath causing Ren’s ear to twitch unconsciously…
Laying there, Martyn consciously decided that it wasn’t pretend anymore. He decided that being Martyn and Ren was too hard. Martyn and Ren didn’t want to deal with the consequences of this night of lovemaking. Instead, Ren was the king and Martyn was the king’s hand, and it wasn’t just a game of pretend anymore, because that’s what Martyn needed.
He needed this.
(Later, he would dully realize that Ren had reached this point in his mentality too, sometime before Martyn had. He never would pinpoint precisely when.)
…
The hand eventually pulled out and mentally prepared himself to go clean himself up (wash the blood off of his hands— fuck, there was still blood on his hands), before collapsing in his own cot. He’d wash the sheets of his king’s cot first thing tomorrow— it would be improper to move or wake him now. He started to get up, but the king held him close. The hand hadn’t even thought that he was still awake.
“Tomorrow, laddie,” he muttered. Despite the use of ‘laddie,’ his voice was distinctly Ren’s, lacking that Scottish-adjacent tilt. “Stay with me tonight, hand. Everything can be handled in the morning.”
The hand settled back in. “Yes, my king.”
[End.]