charisstoma

Title: The Quenching of Iron
Author: charisstoma
Word count: 611

“Hey Rufus, need some piss over here,” is what Harry heard all the time.

Just once he’d like someone to buy him some drink down at the tavern so he’d have something quality to drink and then piss out. Smith was too tight with his coin. No one was going to buy a drink for him if there was nothing in it for them or rather nothing to stick themselves into to fuck. He might as well be a monk with all the water he had to drink and a celibate monk at that.

“Waiting over here.”

With a sigh Harry took himself into the smithy to top up the urine quench tank.

The ring of iron hooves on the cobbles said that Smith had a buyer for the sword he’d finished. With a shiver Harry poured water over his head feeling its coolness wash the sweat off his chest and back. He’d brought Smith in some chopped wood for the forge; as pissing, though his primary function, wasn’t the only thing he was useful for, as Smith liked to would say.

“Beautiful.”

Looked like Smith’s talents were approved of.

“How much?”

“He’s a virgin. He stays a virgin else he’s no use for quenching the iron.”

A laugh responded, “A virgin to quench your iron for you? I’d pay for him to quench mine.”

Smith gasped. “He’s no whore for sale.”

“Pretty enough and my coin is good.”

“He’s not for sale.”

There was the sound of a blade being drawn, “Then I’ll take him for free.”

“Off with you Rufus!”

Harry ran ducking through the back of the smithy and out to take to the winding lane through into the copse. He hid under a concealing arched laurel’s boughs and waited for night to fall. When finally he left his den of leaves he carefully crept back to the smithy. The forge had been banked for the night so Smith must have escaped the knight’s displeasure.

“Smith?” he softly called.

“Here.”

Smith hadn’t escaped totally, his arm was bloodied but appeared whole.

“You escaped, did you my Rufus?
“Aye. I hid under a laurel tree.”

For some reason this set Smith off into laughter. “Well then I think it time I made an honest smith of you. Nothing like nearly losing someone, to put a person into mind of how much a fool you’d been. I expect that a no longer virgin ginger would be just as good for quenching iron as a virgin one anyway. That is… if you’ve a mind to take up with someone like me whose been tamping down his feelings.”

“I still have to tend to the wood?”

Smith went off into mirth again, “Aye, both for the forge and for the smith if you’ll have me.”

“Will you buy me some drink down at the tavern then?”

“Well as to that, thought you might like to learn how to brew our own ale. Don’t think I’ve not noticed you talking to some of the good wives about things.”

“You want me to learn the smithy, cut the wood, brew our ale… next thing I know you’ll have me cleaning the house and making the meals.”

“Thought we could share some of those chores off and on, as long as you’ll share my bed.”

“Like wedded?”

“Like wedded.”

Harry grinned, “okay but you keep calling me Rufus. M’name’s Harry.”

“Harry then, though I’ll be calling you Rufus in public. Don’t want folk to think I’ve gone soft now, do I?”

“Well I am supposed to tend to your wood,” Harry snickered, “no getting me with bairn though.”

"Think we could be avoiding that bit."

Working title -Familiar mpreg for Meri (fan fic)

A Very Handy Man
By Iron Dog

Where was that damn mewing coming from? He'd been hearing it nearly every day
for a week now. He'd checked all the usual suspects. Under the impossibly heavy
couch that took four burly football players to move, behind the dryers in the
laundry room. Hell, he'd even pressed his ear to the various walls of the residence
thinking the little trouble-maker had gotten in there via the loose duct cover
he kept meaning to fix but never got around to.

The sound was driving him crazy. It yanked on his heart strings, the plaintive,
lost and alone tone making him seriously consider taking a hammer to random spots
of the original lathe and plaster walls looking for the poor little waif. The historical
society would have kittens of their own if he did that and he preferred not to have to
deal with their melodramatics over a little damaged plaster that could be fixed easy
enough with a quick trip to Home Depot.

The mewing sounded again; a please help me call that made Devin's heart beat faster
and his palms sweat in sympathetic anxiety. He closed his eyes let his head thunk back
against the door frame he was leaning against. His whole world seemed to have been
turned topsy-turvy after that party. Hell, he wasn't even supposed to have been there.

There'd been the frantic phone call late in the evening, begging him to come fix a
hole and not say anything about it that some idiot had made in a wall during a party
that wasn't supposed to be happening. As the maintenance man for the school, it was
his job to fix things that got broken regardless of when that happened.

The party had been in full swing when he got there and the hole had been minor
enough that it could've waited until morning. The hugely dilated pupils of several of
the students clued Devin into why it was thought to be an earth shattering gaping maw
into the abyss when it was barely three inches across and bore a striking resemblance
to someone's fist. Having partaken of a little wacky tabacky in his misspent youth,
Devin wasn't one to judge.

The likely culprit had skedaddled with a guilty look as soon as Devin started on the patch job.One of the boys stayed behind to watch, his eyes as big as the others. He was a cute little thing.Strawberry blond and bookish looking even if there were no glasses present. He'd edged closer and closer as Devin worked until he was nearly hanging over his shoulder. One thing led to another and before he was really sure how it happened, he had the guy pressed up against the wall and his tongue down the blond’s throat.

He probably had a contact high from all the shit floating around even though he couldn’t detect any of the tell-tale smell of weed being vigorously smoked.


Devin remembered very clearly rocking both their worlds. He remembered dozing off in a sweaty, satisfied tangle of arms and legs. He remembered waking and wondering if his little bookworm would be up for round two only to find a lovely marmalade cat sleeping on his bare chest, tail tip quivering ever so slightly. His mystery lover was nowhere in sight and he didn’t even have a name to use to go looking for the guy. Devin’s disappointed sigh was heavy enough to wake the cat. It opened crystal blue eyes, gave him a startled look, and took off like a shot leaving long scratch marks across his chest and belly.

Devin tried to find the enticing guy around the campus but he seemed to have disappeared into thin air. He thought he saw the cat a few times but it was always from a distance. There were a lot of cats on the campus, part of some rescue and rehabilitation thing, he thought. He liked cats so having one almost always underfoot was fine with him.

But this desperate mewing of a lost kitten was driving him crazy with worry. Devin wondered if his hearing was acting up again. It’s been fine for a longer than usual time. He should probably go to the clinic and get it checked out. Again. He’d always heard weird noises and sounds and sometimes even voices that nobody else seemed to hear. The docs told him nothing was wrong with his hearing and one had even urged that he speak to a psychologist about the voices in his head. Fuck that noise. Devin knew he wasn’t crazy like that one doc implied. He just sometimes heard whispers about not taking a certain route home that had him avoid a huge traffic accident or a low voice that told him to go back home and untangle the neighbour’s dog from its chain wrapped around its throat or a sharp, piercing noise that kept him from touching a live wire that was supposed to be dead, avoiding a possibly fatal shock.

His Grammy said he had The Knowing and had nodded sagely. She said she understood all about that because she had the same gift, too. She’d then had a rousing conversation with a potted violet so he didn’t take what she said seriously. He loved his Grammy, but she’d always been a little... special for as long as he’d known her.

Devin sighed and straightened. If there really was such a thing as this Knowing thing that his Grammy insisted he had, he’d have appreciated some kind of manual or instruction book. Or even some directions scrawled on a napkin on how to make it work so he could find the poor kitten and rescue it. Devin just knew the kitten’s mews were going to continue to haunt him until he found it and made things right for the kitten. He smiled a little when the stray thought that it would be adorable if it was a marmalade kitten with the same gorgeous crystal blue eyes like the one that’d been asleep on his chest after his evening with his cute little bookworm. He might just need to keep the kitten when he found it he thought with a grin.