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bucca2 · 8 months

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Shrike pt. 2 - always a well dressed fraud who wouldn’t spare the rod

König x high school sweetheart reader

3rd person, König's perspective, she/her pronouns for reader, reader is Austrian/has lived in Austria and speaks German for most of the story, romance, pining, friends to lovers, reader's nickname is Thorn, König's first name is Alexander

4.2k words

tw: child abuse, spousal abuse, graphic descriptions of violence (mostly König’s imagination and violence in the field as a soldier, König’s dad dies pretty gruesomely), car crash

spätzchen = cute/little sparrow. Google Translate will say that means “spit”, but I trust a German reddit user a lot more than I trust Google.

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The first time König ever imagined killing someone, he was seven.

He remembers it clearly, one of the earliest memories he has. His father had asked him to hold the hammer as he was installing a shelf, and in a rare moment of childhood whimsy, he was pretending the ball-peen hammer was a little airplane. He was absorbed, making little puttering and vroom noises, absentmindedly waving the hammer around before—

“Fuck!” König drops the hammer at the sharp noise of swearing. He’d accidentally swung it right into his father’s leg.

“You stupid little pest—can’t you hold a goddamn hammer without hitting me with it?” He withers underneath the older man’s glare.

His father picks up the hammer and crouches down, pointing the hammer threateningly in his son’s face. “I should take a swing at you right now to teach you a lesson.”

His mother runs into the room, alerted by the shouting. “Is everything alright?”

“Would I be yelling if nothing were the matter?” His father sneers. “Our son’s a dimwit. Can’t hold a hammer without smashing me in the shin with it.”

“He’s still just a boy,” König’s mother says, placing a soothing hand on her son’s head and swiftly moving to block him from his father. “I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”

“We’ve been too soft on him, that’s what it is.” His mother swallows hard, and an instinctual, almost primal panic rises in him.

“It was an accident, I’m sure,” she says, trying to calm the temper of the monster in front of her. “Alexander, you’ll say you’re sorry, won’t you?”

“Don’t speak for him! He’ll never become a man like that. Why are you always getting in my fucking way?” He wants to leave. He wants to grab his mother’s hand and run, because the increasing venom in his father’s voice surely cannot mean anything good.

“I didn’t mean—” It happens so quickly that König barely understands what’s just happened, but suddenly his mother is on the floor, and his father is looming over him like an evil spectre.

“Next time, you’ll be the one I’m knocking flat,” he threatens. He stalks out of the room, throwing the hammer onto the floor with a loud thump that echoes the pounding of König’s heart.

“Mama?” He quickly shuffles over to his mother.

“I’m alright, spätzchen,” she says, wincing as she sits up. “We’ll just have to be more careful when we play around with heavy tools, yes?” Her hand is gentle as it smooths over his hair.

“Yes, mama,” he whispers.

That night, he lays awake in bed, staring at the water spot on his ceiling. But instead of imagining sheep, he imagines splatterings of blood. Covering the walls and floor, reaching even the ceiling, as he smashes his father in the face with the hammer over and over again. Until König can no longer see his venomous expression. Until his father can never hurt Mama again.

He falls asleep with a smile on his face.

“So…should I call you ‘your majesty’ now?” she asks, nudging him playfully. (The way she used to, but if he thinks about the tingles it sent through him back then his brain will fill with static.)

He lets out a huff that’s sort of a laugh. “Don’t be silly. Most of the people I work with don’t speak German, so König is like a name to them. I don’t tell people my name.”

“Hmm…I like the sound of my king,” she muses.

He’s so glad she can’t see him blushing. He feels like a high schooler all over again.

“Is that why you wear the hood?”

“Hmm?”

“Because you don’t want people to know your identity?”

“In the field, yes. It would be dangerous otherwise. I do a lot of work with terrorist cells.”

“Isn’t it frightening to do that kind of work? Having to come face-to-face with people like that?”

“I have met some frightening people.” He watches as she turns and meets his gaze, reveling in the heat that spreads across her cheeks. “But they also met me.”

She stares at him with an admiration that steals his breath away. It’s a bit new for him. He’s spent a long time nurturing a persona that makes people look at him in either fear or disgust. Or not look at him at all.

“You’re different,” she muses. “You’re so…confident.”

“Arrogant, you mean?” He chuckles as she visibly panics. “I’m good at what I do, rosethorn.”

“There’s a lot of things you’ve gotten good at,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“Talking. Looking at me when you speak.”

“I think everybody gets better at that as they grow up.”

“I got worse at it. It’s just a lot. I look at people and start thinking about everything that could go wrong, or all the ways I could upset them.”

She describes a sensation as familiar to him as the flutter of his hood around his face. It’s never really gone away, no matter how competent and cocky he gets. What is new to him is her feeling that way.

He hates seeing her like this. She startles. She flinches. She feels smaller: not physically, but her presence has shrunk. He wants to wring the neck of whoever has made her into this timid creature.

“The mask scared me when I first saw it at the checkpoint. But I don’t mind it now if that makes sense? It makes me feel more at ease.”

“You may be the only person who feels that way. I don’t exactly look very cuddly.”

That draws a laugh out of her, albeit a small one. He’d forgotten how much he liked the sound.

“That’s because when someone doesn’t know what your face looks like, it frightens them. It doesn’t bother me.”

“You know what I look like, though.”

“As a teenager. I don’t know what you look like as a man.”

“Not much different. Maybe a more chiselled jaw.”

She snorts. “Are you going to show me?”

“You might not like what you see.”

“You said you didn’t look much different.”

“As a younger man, no. I…have a lot of scars now. It’s not nice to look at.”

He thinks about their last meeting a lot. For a few years he just couldn’t stop tormenting himself with the memory. He had spent all that time scared of his own feelings, petrified of saying or doing anything about it. And when he had finally worked up the nerve to stop being a fucking coward, all he did was hold her hand. Their last day together, and that was as much as he could muster.

He's thinking about it now as she slides her hand over his, just the way he did all those years ago. She’s thinking about it too, by the look in her eye as she squeezes his hand.

“I wouldn’t mind. But I won’t force you to take it off. Not until you’re ready.”

She waited for him to become comfortable enough then, and she would still wait for him now, he realizes. All his worries about not being able to pick back up where they last ended vanish—that she would be afraid of him. That she would be closed off, or that it would feel irreparably different between them. But being with her feels as natural as the press of his knife’s hilt in his palm.

He hasn’t lost his chance. And this time, he will not lose her again.

Blood. Viscera. The clean slice of a blade as it splits open a throat. The light dying in a felled enemy’s eyes. For most soldiers, these are repulsive aspects of the job. The worst, but most inescapable part. The dirty work.

For König, they’re the highlight of the job.

As a child, he could never punch back, never return an insult, never fight. If he got in any trouble, there would be a greater hell to pay back home. After a while, he became numb to whatever punishment his father sought for his crimes. It was his mother’s reaction he could never stand—her sadness. Her disappointment. Her worry.

So he sat and stewed. The bullies who called him names and mocked his silence were powerless before him in his mind. He imagined crushing the bones in their hands under his foot, caving their heads in with a rock, stabbing them over and over again with a serrated knife that tore their guts out and severed their tendons.

König had special plans for his father that grew more elaborate with every fresh abuse the man inflicted on him. First, he would break the man’s legs. Then, he’d shatter each of the fingers with a hammer. He’d begin the main event by kicking him in the stomach, kneeing him in the junk and hearing him howl in pain. Then he would bring out a knife—it changed over the years from a kitchen knife, to various switchblades, to the trusty field knife he keeps on him at all times now. He’d start by outlining the lips his father used to shout and swear and degrade, then moving along his cheek to his temple, dancing the blade all along the edges of his face before peeling the skin away—

He had a brief flash of fear on his first true deployment. Imagining intense violence is much different than experiencing it firsthand. Stories of recruits vomiting, fainting, losing their minds and needing to be restrained in the middle of a firefight haunted him as he stood in front of a door, moments before kicking it down.

His first kill was like a revelation. Watching the man fall to the ground, a gaping hole in his forehead, his gun still smoking from the shot. It was as satisfying as it had always felt in his imagination. His first takedown with a knife was even better—the brief struggle, the spray of blood, the slow jerking before limpness made his enemy into a corpse. König knows his way around guns, for sure, but knives were different. Graceful, soundless, elegant.

Hands-on.

He’s not some mindless serial killer, of course. The kill is only half the fun. The vicious satisfaction of justice is what really does it for him. He flourishes taking down human trafficking cells, ending the lives of vile animals who take and use and destroy. In every woman he rescues, he sees his mother, bound to a terrible life. In every child, he sees himself, helpless in the face of unimaginable cruelty.

In every kill, he sees his rosethorn, felling a bully in one blow. That one image, like a painting framed in the museum of his mind, fuels his every move, provides his purpose. She becomes his guiding star, haloed in light and bathed in the blood of unworthy men. Every trafficker, every terrorist, every drug kingpin taken down is his tribute to her, impaled upon the hedgerow thorns as evidence of his devotion.

That’s why it’s so devastating to return home and find her gone. He had wanted to come back as someone he was proud of being around her. Someone tall and strong, someone actually worthy of holding her hand. But she’s not here, and her parents are nervous, hesitant to tell him anything about her. Of course, he thinks with bitterness as he wishes them well and turns to leave. What was he to their daughter, anyway? Just some snivelling boy she went to school with.

That bitterness grows like a seed in him as he makes his way home. His mother’s out, which means his father is in a nasty mood. Like he always is when there’s nobody around to wait on him hand and foot. He’s standing in the kitchen waiting for König when he returns home from visiting Thorn’s parents.

“Where the fuck have you been? Just got back and already running out on us.” Being an asshole comes as naturally as breathing to this man. König doesn’t dignify him with a response to his inquiry.

Not that his father cared to know, anyway. “I need to get to Ben’s house. You’re driving me.”

König resists the urge to roll his eyes. Ben is his father’s gambling buddy. He’s probably keen to know how his latest bet panned out. Just another entry on the long list of his dirtbag sperm donor’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.

“Drive yourself.”

“I didn’t teach you to drive for you to disrespect me like this. You’re going to drive me.”

He went through a phase when he was a fresh recruit of constantly defying his father. Now that he was too big, too skilled to be hit, he didn’t have to listen to the old bastard, he thought.

He should have known better. His mother never said a word, but he realized how reckless and inconsiderate he had been when she flinched as he hugged her one day. The bruises were all up and down her ribs.

That evil old arschloch always did know how to get his way in the end.

Ten minutes later, he’s behind the wheel, absorbed in thoughts about Thorn. Where had she gone? Why did she leave? She was so smart, he knows she could have gone to university. Did she go abroad? Is that truck about to crash into them?

He jolts to attention. That truck is about to crash into them.

The moments right before an accident are often described as moving in slow motion, but it doesn’t go that way for König. He’s just barely got enough time to jerk the steering wheel hard before impact. The collision sends the car off the side of the road, rolling over and over again until it comes to a halt against a tree.

Maybe it’s because he’s been in more dangerous situations than this, but he finds his mind unusually calm as he assesses himself for injuries, his head throbbing. He got lucky—he’s banged-up and covered in scratches from broken glass, but his limbs all seem functional, and his spine appears to be intact. He may have a concussion, but that’s not the most pressing concern right now.

The metal groans as he pulls himself free, coughing from the fumes. Fuck. It’s on fire. He needs to put distance between himself and the wreck before it explodes. He’s just managed to haul himself to his feet when he hears the angry bellow.

Goddammit. He’d forgotten about the Krampus sitting next to him.

He manages to pick his way to the other side of the car, where his father is fully pinned underneath the wreckage. It’s bad—his legs are twisted in a way König has only seen once in his line of work (that time, it had been an entire building falling on someone), and the frame of the car has come just shy of cutting him clean in half.

“Get me the fuck out of here!” His father growls. König instinctively moves towards him to help when a thought occurs to him.

He’s dreamed about murdering his father countless times, but he’s always known it was a bad idea. There was no guarantee he’d get away with it, and if he got locked up for murder, he might never get to see Thorn again. Not to mention the heartbreak it would have caused his mother. So day after day, year after year, he had stewed with no end in sight, waiting on Father Time to get his shit sorted.

But now here is an opportunity. His opportunity to get rid of his father once and for all, with no blood on his hands. Well, none that anybody else will know about.

He watches, like a passive observer in his own body, as he steps away from his father, arms retreating to his sides. His father spits and curses and finally resorts to begging, but König just stands, all sound distorted as if his head is underwater. Staring into the face of the man who has tormented him all his life.

It all floods his mind, every violent thought he’s ever cultivated against him, every gory fantasy that carried him to sleep. It savors of anticlimax, watching him burn to death through no direct action of König’s. And yet, he feels peaceful.

He sees him now for the pathetic old man he is. In an instant, he is no longer the monster down the hall, the boogeyman in his home. He only sees a pitiful animal, fruitlessly fighting its demise.

He would never have changed. König knows this—he realized it a long time ago. The only way to free himself and his mother from this evil is to purge it completely from this earth. This is the truth he knows now, after years of ending the lives of countless abusers in the field.

His father is slowing down now, the smoke choking him and silencing him. König pulls out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. They’re smashed, but he finds one perfect stick and pulls it out.

He holds the end of it to the flames ripping through the interior of the car to light it and walks away to wait.

It’s hard to not intervene. He won’t be stationed here for much longer, and the idea of leaving his guardian angel to return to her own personal hell every day twists his stomach into knots. But as she respects his privacy, he respects hers.

It’s a bright and sunny day when she admits her husband is abusive.

“I swear, I’ll never forget the look on his face. He didn’t bother me after that, and I was never partnered with him again until he was transferred to some other division.” König’s regaling her with a tale of a fellow recruit who fucked around and found out.

“His loss.”

“Don’t I know it,” he says with a lazy chuckle.

She leans her hand on her chin, looking up at him through her lashes. “You are so charming, you know that? Makes me jealous of all the other girls you’ve practiced that charm on.”

There weren’t a lot. None of them were you, he thinks before responding.

“Don’t let your husband hear you say that.” He meant that lightheartedly, but the word husband comes out with a hard edge to it.

“Maybe then he’d know what it feels like,” she mutters. He watches her visibly stiffen as she realizes she’s just said that out loud.

It’s like an entire conversation is had without either of them making a sound. He knows what she meant. She knows he knows. An awful truth that sits between them like a noxious gas.

“…won’t you tell me about it?” That’s another thing that hurts him and pisses him off. She doesn’t talk the same way as when they were young: it’s difficult to draw conversation out of her now. He’s not used to talking more than she does.

“I don’t want to worry you.”

He scoffs. “Too late for that.”

“I just don’t like to talk about it.” She’s fidgeting with her hands. She never did that before.

“I want to help you.”

Shit. Should he not have said that? She looks off into the distance when he does, like she wishes she were somewhere else. Is she mad at him? Is he imposing? Is she going to close herself off?

“I don’t know that you could,” she says, and he relaxes. Well, as much as he can when the woman he’s lived his entire adult life for tells him that he can’t help her.

“I can listen to you, at least.”

They’ve spent so many years apart, so many developmental stages of their lives traversed without the other. First kiss. First car. Graduations. Promotions. There should be a certain kind of distance between them, ice that needs to thaw. They’ve changed, that’s undeniable, and there’s plenty of time for them to explore those changes later (he hopes).

But all of that melts away the moment she leans her head on his shoulder. He’s so nervous that he’s conscious of his breathing.

“It hasn’t been…a good marriage,” she says, forcing the words out. “He wasn’t faithful. But…I loved him. So I stayed. I thought I could salvage things.”

Something ugly rears its head inside him when she says I loved him. It bothers him that she’s not talking about him when she says that. But what right does he have to feel that way? When he spent so long fucking around and not being there to protect her?

“When he said we were moving here, I thought it would give me an opportunity to leave him but…that hasn’t happened.”

“Why not?” She could do anything she wanted to, he thinks.

“I…I don’t have anything other than him,” she whispers, almost shamefully. “My parents are retired, I’m stuck in a foreign country, and I have no career prospects. I’m stuck.”

He opens his mouth to say something, then thinks better of it.

“I’m also just…tired. I’m so tired.” Her voice is soft, defeated. “Some days I alternate between wanting to think for myself and needing someone else to do it for me.”

“You can’t stay here, rosethorn.”

“I don’t know what else I can do. I don’t have anything or anyone.”

“You have me.”

She looks at him, sweet and hopeful and with a vulnerability he craves. This is it. His whole life, his entire career, has led to this moment. Finally, he can do something for the person who gave him everything.

“Come back home with me. I have a house in Vienna. You could visit your parents whenever you wanted.”

She looks hesitant. “I don’t want to be a bother.”

“Never,” he says, too forcefully. He adjusts his tone to be gentler. “Let me do this for you.”

Her expression looks conflicted. “I know I can trust you. But I just can’t bring myself to rely on another person so fully like that so soon. I need to do my own thing…figure some things out for myself.”

Shit. He didn’t consider this, but she’s right. He watched his mother depend on an abusive monster all his life, not just for her own sake, but to keep a roof over her son’s head and food in his stomach. She would have left his father, if only she had been able to. She was like a new woman after the accident—free to do as she liked, when she liked, without having to care for or appease someone else.

“I’ll pay you,” he blurts out, surprising even himself. She looks at him in confusion.

“For what?”

“I’m deployed for weeks or months at a time. I need someone to live in the house, take care of it. Make sure it’s not slowly developing black mold or a roach infestation, because I sure as hell wouldn’t know.” He’s a fucking genius.

She seems to mull it over for a moment. “I think…I’d like that. I haven’t been to Vienna since I was a child.”

He loves watching her think, a look of concentration on her face that makes her look so cute, but also so intelligent. The gears are turning in her head.

“I would just have to divorce him. But he’s not going to like that.”

“I’ll help you get back home and stay with your parents before you serve the papers,” he quickly offers. “That way it’ll be harder for him to try anything. When I’m done here, I’ll join you.” She doesn’t know that her husband will never get the chance to try anything. König will make sure of it. He just needs her out of the house her husband lives in.

She looks at him and really, truly smiles. Oh, her smile. Her smile, like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. Her eyes crinkle, her cheeks flush, her whole face radiates warmth. Yes, he thinks. Any length he goes to is worth it if he can draw this out of her every day for the rest of his life.

“It might happen quickly…within the next day or two,” she says. “I don’t have a lot to pack, and I don’t want him to get suspicious.”

“Good idea. I’ll book travel immediately.” It’s all falling into place now. He’s so close to having what he’s been dreaming about for so long, he can taste it.

“Thank you, Alexander.” He looks at her and sees a renewed resolve in her. This is the rosethorn he remembers. This is the woman he loves.

Love is more than a piece of paper, König knows. His parents had the paper, but if there had been any love, it was long gone by the time König was a child. No, love is devotion and protection. König knows how to love her. And he knows that another piece of paper will not set her free. Only he can do that.

"Bucca, why is there German in italics if they're speaking German the whole time?" because I felt like it, okay? I use asshole too much to describe his dad, so I need to spice it up. also, spätzchen is a cute (and thematically appropriate) nickname.

sorry this took so long! like I mentioned in a separate post, I had the entire rest of the story plotted out pretty early after finishing the first chapter, but I was busy all week and ended up changing the structure of this chapter and removing some things. I hope this meets expectations <3 as always, leave me your feedback and corrections! and if you'd like to be on the taglist, please drop a reply! (this also applies if I somehow missed your request to be tagged.)

ps. I saw Hozier tonight. I feel like a different person now. if you want to get a head start on the vibes for the next chapter, listen to Francesca and Who We Are off his new album, Unreal Unearth. I heard both of them live tonight!

taglist: @crowbird @poohkie90 @cumikering @iytatsworld @papaver-decervicatus @anxietyrain @riotakire @ax0lotly @kneelingshadowsalome @cookiepie111 @kacchasu @no1runawaymilkdad @chthonian-spectre @backwards-readings @yxllowtxpe @garbau @hexqueensupreme @queenthorin1 @violetstyless @her-majesty-theking @vegan-peppermint @peonytarian

#bucca writes #könig #könig x reader #könig cod #könig mw2 #call of duty #cod mw2 #cod x reader #cod #mw2 #konig #konig cod #konig x reader #fic:shrike

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