Title: Heart Of Ice: Chapter Twenty: Crack
Author: Allison Wonderland
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Fabian gets Avery back on track after the trauma of the less than helping hands and something monumental happens to give him new hope.
Warning(s): Language, homosexuality, sex between a male and a male adult not quite human thing, angst.
Disclaimer: Technically, this is a rewrite of the movie Labyrinth. However, how much it resembles the movie remains to be seen. I do not own/am not associated with Labyrinth or anything related to it. However, all of the characters and some of the ideas in this story are mine.
Note(s): Chapters 19 and 20 were originally the same chapter but it was so long I decided to divide it into two separate chapters. I'm not sure about this chapter. I think maybe it seems too sudden or something but this scene has to be here because of something else that happens later on. Also, I want to thank everyone who reviewed the last chapter here because I can't reply to individual reviews right now and I also want to thank everyone who is still reading this story for sticking with it so long. I promise it won't take three months for the next chapter to come out.
Making an entrance was required, even when one was only making an entrance into a dark, dank, filthy, slimy hole in the ground, mostly because one's future betrothed - or so Fabian hoped - was in said hole. He wore a bright white shirt much the same as the one he had been wearing upon his first meeting with Avery, open down to the center of his chest to show off a sideways half moon pendant. Over the shirt he wore a sparkly forest green waistcoat with leggings of the same color. His boots of shiny black dragon hide covered his legs up to just below his knees and his cape, knee-length with a high outward curled collar, was forest green like his waistcoat and just as sparkly. He adjusted the collar in front of the full length mirror in his dressing chamber and disappeared from the room in a burst of green glitter.
In the darkness something moved. The sound of footsteps startled Avery and he lifted his head. "Who's there?" he whispered, shrinking back against the wall. No, he thought. No more. Not now. Not ever. If something else happened, something like what those awful hands had done to him, he had no idea what he would do.
"Avery," a voice said softly.
The Goblin King's voice. "No!" Avery gasped. He pressed himself closer against the wall, his entire body shaking.
"Shh." The voice seemed gentler now but still Avery could not see the Goblin King. Palm down, Fabian rotated his wrist and when his palm faced upward again another of his crystal orbs rested there. He blew a breath of warm air onto it and it began to emit a bright white light. He took his hand away and the crystal orb floated like a soap bubble over to Avery.
He stared at the little round light hovering in front of his face for a moment, so relieved that he could have hugged the Goblin King. Then curiosity got the better of him and he reached out a hand to touch it. To his surprise the hard glass orb settled in his hand and stayed there, pulsing with soft light. "Thank you," he whispered. Now that he was no longer surrounded by darkness the world seemed like a much friendlier place, even considering what had just happened to him with the hands. For however long the light lasted, for however long the Goblin King let him keep it, whatever his reasons for creating it in the first place, Avery would be grateful to him for that one little thing. "Why?" he asked, turning his face away from the light to stare up at tall, thin man in front of him.
He shrugged and Avery had never seen such a fluid, graceful gesture. "Because you were frightened," he said in his gravel-wrapped-in-silk voice. "Does the darkness frighten you, Avery? Or was it something else?"
With a whimper Avery turned away from the Goblin King, his eyes closed, his head bowed.
So Fabian had been right. The hands had not just tossed him down here; they had done other things to him as well. At least he had released Snork on them a punishment. Fabian's heart was frozen but he remembered how he had treated his lovers and those who had won his favor before he was cursed. There was no reason he could not treat Avery the same way, just for a few moments, even though he was incapable of feeling the same way about the boy as he had all of his other lovers. "Avery," he said softly, kneeling down beside the boy. His pants were so getting dirty; he needed to dispatch a few goblins to scrub out the oubliette at some point. "Look at me." The Goblin King cupped the boy's chin in his hand and turned the tear stained face to look at him.
"Leave me alone." Eyes the color of the ocean on a cold day looked down to avoid the king's mismatched gaze.
"Shh." The Goblin King's thumb rubbed a smudge of dirt from Avery's cheek. He kissed the place where the dirt had been. It was wet and tasted salty, like tears. Before Quiana's curse had taken effect he had done his best never to make his lovers cry but it had happened sometimes. He had always kissed away the tears then too. And if he wanted to make this boy love him enough to cry for him, enough to break the curse…
He found himself with both arms full of skinny teenage boy and said skinny teenage boy shaking against him. It seemed Avery was so desperate for comfort and contact with another human – or a Faery who was closer to human than anything else in the labyrinth – that he was willing to take it from the only source available – the Goblin King himself. The boy's hands – filthy things, Fabian could not help thinking – curled into the folds of his formerly pristine white shirt.
"Don't cry," the Goblin King said gently because he had done gently with past lovers too. "You will only make yourself ill. Then how will you make it to the center of my labyrinth to find Jilly?" He realized a moment later that he should not have reminded the boy of his sister and that he himself had taken the baby.
But then Avery turned his head just as Fabian moved to kiss away another tear, which seemed to be working if the way the boy was clinging to him was anything to go by. Or maybe the boy was just traumatized. Either way, their lips met. It was Avery's first kiss and Fabian's first kiss in almost four hundred years and had happened entirely by accident but when the Goblin King deepened it just to see what the boy would do he was quite surprised when Avery responded by opening his mouth beneath the king's own and pressed his body closer, seeking either comfort or satisfaction, Fabian had no idea. With all of the boy's attention on him the Goblin King focused his own thoughts, concentrating his power on getting inside Avery's mind. Manipulating another Faery's memories, emotions, or thoughts was nothing when one had the power of the King of the Goblins at his disposal and humans were even easier but Fabian had lost the ability to control the emotions of others when he had lost the ability to feel emotions himself. But he could still make the boy forget.
Dimly, somewhere in the back of his mind, Avery was very aware of what had just happened to him in the shaft of hands and still frightened of the darkness but the Goblin King was a warm presence in the dark, cold little chamber – even if he was evil and had stolen Avery's sister – and anything was better than being alone.
Forget.
Avery let out a tiny gasp when he heard the word for it had not come to him in the usual way, but as a foreign thought from inside his own head.
Forget.
The memory of the hands seemed to fade farther back into his subconscious until he was aware only that something awful had happened, something that had frightened and hurt and confused him.
Forget.
What, Avery wondered as the Goblin King's lips touched his again, was he supposed to forget? The fingers of his right hand curled into the white-blonde strands of hair that hung to just past Fabian's shoulders, his left clutched at the silky fabric of his shirt, and another thought entered the boy's mind, one of his own this time. The Goblin King had stolen his sister, sent Avery himself through the labyrinth, was supposed to be evil. Except…except just now he hardly seemed evil at all. In fact – and he was aware that it could have just been his hormones talking – he seemed almost…nice. "Fabian," he murmured. The single word came out as a soft, throaty whisper and he barely recognized his own voice.
Something in Fabian's chest shifted. He gasped as he pushed the boy away from him and stumbled. It would not do to show weakness before a human and he caught himself before he fell but the weakness in his knees was nothing compared to the pain in his chest. Never had he experienced such an intense ache except…
Except on the day Quiana had frozen his heart.
"What have you done to me?" he asked as he glared at the boy. This pain, it was all Avery's fault. He had been fine until that kiss and perhaps he would be fine again once he was away from the boy. With the corner of his mind that was not consumed by the pain radiating from his chest Fabian summoned up his magic and used it to transport himself back to his bedchamber.
Before he lost consciousness and collapsed on his bed he felt his heart beat, just once, as it had not since the day he had been cursed. The ice encasing his heart cracked just enough to allow him to feel something he had not with the other boys who had gone into his labyrinth: hope that perhaps his curse was coming to an end.
And then there was nothing but blackness, free from the pain as his heart beat a second time.