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embossross · 1 year

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The Devotion of the Girl in the Mirror

Chapter 5 >> Chapter 6 >> Masterlist

✣ Pairing: Rindou x AFAB fem!Reader w/ a chapter cameo of reader/yuzuha

✣ Warning: 18+ explicit content, minors DNI

✣ Series: part of the In the Belly of the Beast fic universe

✣ Chapter CW: ptv sex, oral (blowjobs & eating out), choking, degradation and praise, cock worship, edging and orgasm denial/control

✣ Story CWs: BDSM dob/sub relationship; sex (oral, ptv, pta, etc.); genre typical drug use, alcohol, smoking

✣ Synopsis: A story of two lonely people find love for better or worse. Or, dom!Rindou is sweet on his girl. Or, on paper, you and Rindou have nothing in common. But sometimes chemistry defies logic, and with every conversation, you find yourself more bewitched until all you see, smell, or hear is Rindou.

✣ Word Count: ~10.8k

A great clenching of his bowels catapults Rindou into consciousness. Nausea and the certainty that he is going to puke chases soon after. Rindou stumbles to his feet in the direction of the bathroom only to discover the door is not there. The pressure in his head increases, a high vibrancy of pain accompanied by a vertiginous warping of his vision and equilibrium.

He vomits right on the carpet.

When his stomach is empty, Rindou takes stock of his surroundings. He is shirtless, wearing an unfamiliar pair of YSL sweats. The bedroom is twice as large as his with a sitting area opposite the bed and subdued paintings of hunting dogs and long-dead kings peering down from the walls. By the puddle of bile seeping into the fibers of the carpet, a meowing British Shorthair pokes around curiously until Rindou shoos it away.

This is Ran’s bedroom.

Regaining his bearings, Rindou makes his way to Ran’s bathroom. He helps himself to Ran’s toothbrush and drinks water straight from the tap until his guts gurgle miserably and he vomits again, this time into the toilet. The process repeats itself one more time before his hangover recedes enough to risk leaving the bathroom. He grabs a hand towel to throw over the mess he left on the floor in a quick detour before he hunts for his brother.

It is some indiscriminate hour of the day. The curtains are drawn tight in every room, blocking the sun or moon from view, and Rindou can’t find his phone in the master bedroom where he slept, which should concern him more, but he is too disoriented to worry. Ran isn’t in the kitchen or dining room, his study or living room, so Rindou checks the guest bedroom.

A long, thin lump shaped more like a body pillow than a man though much too tall, hides beneath the comforter in the guest room. A grandfather clock with the chimes removed shows the time to be near one, presumably in the afternoon. Too early to wake Ran without a fight.

“Oi, where’s my phone?” Rindou barks. He wants to ask why he’s here because somewhere between vomiting the second and third time, Rindou realized he has no memories of how he came to sleep in his brother’s bed. He remembers the sight of your teary face in the bathroom – it’s crystal clear unfortunately – remembers finishing the bottle of bourbon in the car, remembers driving – oh fuck and he should not have been driving black out last night. Shit. The memories grow glossier as the hours progress, the scope of his mental vision shrinking like a burning photograph, until eventually there is nothing but emptiness left.

He wants to fill in the blanks of his hazy memory, but admitting to Ran that he blacked out like a sorority girl after her third vodka cranberry is too harrowing, so Rindou asks after his phone instead.

The lump that is his brother groans and shifts but does not emerge from beneath the covers. Rindou grips the railing at the foot of the bedframe and gives it a weighty shake until Ran’s head pops out. His eyes are covered by a sleep mask, hair a mess.

“Phone. Where is it?” Rindou says.

“Go away,” Ran hisses, or at least that’s how Rindou interprets the garbled words as Ran burrows back beneath his blankets.

“I need my phone now, dickhead. Come one, where is it?”

Only Ran’s arm appears this time, feeling around on the bedside table until he finds a paperweight, which he promptly flings at Rindou’s head. It is well-aimed and thrown with enough force to knock him unconscious but too slow by half, and Rindou easily dodges aside.

“Ran –!”

“Coffee! Coffee first!” Rindou tries to interrupt but Ran talks right over him. “Coffee!”

Resigned and more than a little annoyed, Rindou returns to the kitchen and brews a pot of instant coffee. No sugar, no milk. Exactly the way he knows his brother hates. While rifling through Ran’s cabinets for a mug, his stomach flips again, so Rindou decides to eat a late breakfast.

Thirty minutes later, Rindou sits, chowing down on a fried omelet, leftover onigiri found in the fridge, and a bowl of steamed rice when his brother finally emerges from his den. Ran beelines to the coffee and drinks the first cup without pause before pouring a second. This one, he bothers to treat with milk and gomme syrup for taste. Ran follows Rindou’s example then, starting on his own breakfast, expertly carving up a grapefruit as the first caffeine blast hits his system. Rindou can see the moment sleep fully leaves his brother’s eyes.

“Well, good afternoon, Sleeping Beauty,” Rindou scoffs.

“I wouldn’t be so quick to mock. I did, after all, let you sleep in my bed last night. You’re welcome for that.”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks. I threw up on your floor by the way. Probably want to deep clean that,” Rindou returns.

Ran cranes his long neck heavenward as if searching for divine intervention. “Little brothers…the gift that never stops giving.”

“Anyway, I’m gonna head out. Just hand over my phone,” Rindou says.

“Can I trust you with this?” Ran asks seriously, unearthing the phone from the pocket of his silk pajama pants.

“Uh…yeah?”

“Convincing,” Ran grimaces, but he tosses the phone Rindou’s way anyway. “She didn’t call or text by the way.”

Rindou ignores this unasked for information in favor of scrolling his notifications: a few nonurgent business emails, a call from Mochi he should return, and an update on an MMA match he follows. When he flips to his calls log to check what time Mochi called, he sees a slew of outbound calls, 34 to be exact, all to your number. He slumps in his seat and groans.

“Don’t tell me you blacked out,” Ran sneers, missing nothing as he watches Rindou over his cup of coffee.

“Piss off.”

“I gave you so much advice last night, too. Some of my best work, and you went and forgot it. Well, don’t think I’m going to repeat everything for your benefit now. You’ll have to settle for the Cliff Notes version.”

“I don’t need advice,” Rindou snaps.

“Oh, don’t you? Why don’t I fill you in on what you forgot? I got home from work this morning around 7 AM, and what did I find? My baby brother sleeping on my front step. No idea how long you were there by the way. I figured, okay, he just needs to sleep it off. But, oh no, you spent the next two hours talking my ear off about your girl problems. Crying intermittently, I might add. Really moving stuff if you’re the type for it. I had to take your phone after the ninth time you tried calling her. It was getting pathetic.”

The timestamps on his outbound calls show the last attempt was logged at 7:45 AM true to Ran’s accounts. If anyone but Mikey blew up his phone that much, he would block them on principle. Considering the lack of reply, you probably did just that.

Rindou doesn’t remember any of it.

“The long and short of my advice, by the way, call her. Today. Tell her you’re so sorry and want to be with her, just her. No wait, tell her, you’re sorry, and that you just got scared because you’ve never felt this way about a woman before. Tell her you love her and that you want to be with her and only her. That no woman can compare! That she’s more beautiful than Lady Kiritsubo, sexier than Kyoko Fukada and Naomi combined, more bewitching than Lady Murasaki, that you would not stop at the murder of 130 men but would fell 10,000 if only to look upon the moon of her face. Are you writing this down? This is good stuff,” Ran says.

“I’m not saying any of that stuff,” Rindou groans.

“Fine, not sure why. That sweet girl of yours would just about cream herself if you compared her to all those literary figures, but whatever. For some reason, she likes you, so I’m sure whatever you say will move her,” Ran allows.

“I’m not going to say anything to her.”

The knife contacts the cutting board with a sharp knocking sound that rings out in the otherwise silent kitchen. Juices from the grapefruit drip off its serrated edge. The British Shorthair, whose name Rindou remembers is Tortoiseshell, leaps onto the counter and winds her bushy tail along Ran’s arms in an affectionate gesture, like she can sense Ran’s growing ire, neck going red and heat rising higher by the second.

“And why the hello not?”

“Because she told me not to call her,” Rindou says simply.

“Sure didn’t stop you yesterday,” Ran says, but Rindou waves that away with the excuse that he was drunk. Ran sights like his personally pained by Rindou’s stupidity. “When she told you not to contact her, she meant don’t waste my time. I promise you, she did not mean, don’t call me and give me everything I want and am asking for. Tell her you’re a one-woman man from here on out, and it should work out just fine.”

“But I’m not. I’ve never wanted to be a boyfriend or whatever. That’s not what this was, and she understands that,” Rindou says.

“So, you don’t want to be with her?”

“Of course, I do.”

“Then, you want to be with her but not as much as you want to be with other women? There’s something other women are giving you that she can’t?” Ran tries.

“Not necessarily.”

“Then, what? Because I’m getting mad like I’m the girl you’ve been stepping out on. You’re not making sense. She does all the freaky stuff you’re into. She’s the best lay of your life,” Ran says, brushing aside Rindou’s threatening glare. “These are your words, Rin. Not mine. You said so last night. You also said that she loves you and that you love her.”

This time, when his stomach flips, Rindou knows better than to blame it on his hangover. He almost accuses Ran of lying, but he can read Ran’s facial tics and mannerisms as clearly as directives in an instruction manual, all concise, clinical language and the steps in sequence. There is no lie hidden in Ran’s hands as they wave about, punctuating this or that point, only frustration at Rindou’s stubbornness in the tilt of Ran’s chin.

He remembers the track of your tears down your face. How they stubbornly clung to your jaw line, refusing that final plummet until new tears slid down and forced them away. Overcrowding. The memory is so clear in the way memories can be, meaning it is false and true at the same time. In his memory, there is only the facsimile of a public toilet, and the edges fade to black like they do on film. The counters of your face are so familiar to him, so easy to trace, but an aura of white, hot light shines around you, transforming you into an angel, the kind built for God’s bloodiest wars. The details of your hair and clothes are wrong, but not the tears. Those are clear enough that he can imagine wiping them away with his thumb here and now.

As Ran carries on, Rindou downs an entire bottle of water without coming up for air as if by blocking one sense, he might drown out whatever Ran says next. The words – about how Rindou pledged his love for you last night – reach him regardless.

Neither brother speaks for several minutes. Both busy themselves in their respective breakfasts and eye the lined marble of the tabletop like its trajectory of cracks map to the elixir of life. Rindou tries to deaden his mind, to ward off thoughts second and feelings first.

Eventually, Ran sighs and sits down at the counter opposite him. All that remains of the grapefruit is the sticky rind and guts clinging to the forgotten knife.

“Do you remember our time in family court before we went to juvie?” Ran asks. “I was so pissed they were locking us up. I didn’t wanna leave Miki behind or what we’d built in Roppongi, but I was so damn pleased when we walked into lockup that first day. You and I together. Felt like it was just another neighborhood, just another street war, and we were going to win it.”

Rindou smiles faintly at the memory. He remembers their first days with less fondness, but he also left nothing behind when they were sentenced away. All he claimed in the world was his brother and his own body, and they couldn’t take either away from him. It was hardly a punishment at all.

“I never told you, but Izana said something to me a couple months in. Something I never forgot…He asked me why I didn’t…why I didn’t tell them it was all me. Try to take the fall for everything and get you off,” Ran says.

“What are you talking about? They had us on everything. With witnesses. You couldn’t have gotten me off.”

“Probably not,” Ran admits dully. “But maybe…maybe I could have told them that you never wanted any of it. That I was kicking your ass at home and forcing you into the gang life. Maybe they would have believed it, been lenient.”

“No one would have believed that,” Rindou scoffs.

“Maybe. Probably not. But the point is…the point is I didn’t even try.” Ran lets the words sit between them for a long moment, eyes on his plate but mind turned inward to the sins of his past. “Because it had always been you and me. We didn’t need a gang so long as we were together. And that’s exactly how I wanted it. Us against the world. I’ve lost things. But I chose this, all of it, for better or worse. You? I watch you sleepwalking through life, and I can’t remember if you ever really chose anything, or I just dragged you along behind me. I wonder if you’re just on a bullet train, and it’s moving too fast for you to get off, and you’ve been on it so long, you figure you might as well ride it to the final destination, just speeding along, doing what you’ve always done.”

When Rindou tries to swallow, all the moisture in his mouth evaporates, and his throat stutters over a rough, empty path to his gullet. He struggles to even look at Ran. His entire being shrinks away from his brother only to find that sentiment waits for him wherever he retreats. Ran’s sincerity, the power in these hypnotic, never before spoken words, cows him into submission. He breaks free only through an extreme display of will.

“You’re telling me I should quit? Settle down with a wife and kids and become what? A salaryman?”

“Fuck no! No, you don’t up and quit. We’re in this for life,” Ran says, flicking his fingers in Rindou’s direction as if to signal that he finds his brother’s lack of intelligence exhausting. “I’m saying that you have a chance to make a choice and change things for yourself right now. I’m saying that opportunities like this don’t come around all that often, get rarer every year we get closer to the grave, and I’m saying that if you let this chance pass you by, I’m going to blame myself forever.”

“I’m never drinking again,” Rindou groans because it is easier than searching for a grain of sincerity to match Ran’s earnest sermon.

Thankfully, Ran depletes his stores of sincerity in the same moment, tossing his parting words over his shoulder, “I’m going back to bed. Your clothes are in the dryer. You puked on them, too, by the way. You really are the greatest house guest. Can’t imagine why we don’t do this more.”

Ran disappears back into the dark, tunnel-like halls for a few hours of much deserved sleep. Rindou stays at the table for another long half hour, not thinking. In fact, he uses every ounce of his brain’s considerable powers to avoid thinking altogether. By the time he leaves, he is an expert at meditation.

In the days that follow the explosion of your relationship – less plane crashed into the side of a mountain and more nuclear holocaust – Rindou descends into his own nuclear winter. The days are short as snow blankets the city. It weighs down telephone lines and cartwheels down slanted roofs. Pipes burst from the cold. Rindou foregoes his car and walks to the store, no gloves or hat, hands wind-chapped and roughened to hewn wood. Boots left to dry in the entryway, he steps into puddles of melted ice whether he comes or goes.

The roads clear quickly, and he returns to work. Then, he returns home.

Amidst the wreckage, Rindou wiles away the hours with thoughtless labor. His bottom line thrives. Not that anyone but Kokonoi notices enough to comment on his newfound dedication. All the inroads he made with his fellow executives in the last several months dry up, the waters of goodwill between them polluted by the radioactive dust typical of any nuclear fallout. He finds his colleagues too loud, too vulgar, too happy, too miserable, too much, too much, too much. And so, he avoids them entirely.

He goes through the motions, relying on pure muscle memory to wake his empty husk of a body in the mornings, to carry it to the gym, to navigate rush hour traffic, to feed it just enough to survive. Little else reaches him. He does not touch another human being.

The days repeat with so little variation that when Rindou lies down to sleep at night, he struggles to remember what he did that day. He tries to retrace his steps and form something coherent from the detritus, but the effort exhausts him, and he often falls asleep without making any progress.

Like he is bunkered down in a fallout shelter, he lives but does little else.

Weekends pose the most harrowing challenge. He sleeps as many hours as his body will allow, which for the first time since adolescence means half the day. When he blinks awake to a messy bedroom in the evenings, he turns to video games to pass the time. Music irritates him. The notes are discordant and false. Sometimes, he reads. Not your books, never those, kicked into a dusty corner under his bed, but books on dinosaurs, the deep sea, space, anything long ago or far away from here.

In one chapter on Newton’s second law of motion, he reads about the earliest understanding of “inertia,” how scientists billed it as the resistance to motion, assuming that stillness was the natural state of any object. He reads that the word “inertia” is derived from the Latin “inertem,” meaning, amongst other things, inactive, helpless, and weak.

He notices his foot has fallen asleep, that he has not sat up from his slump on the couch in hours.

Yet another weekend, he surrenders himself to the authority of the television. He skips past sitcoms with their long-married couples, dramas with their tender romances, sports with their screeching optimism, and finally settles on documentaries. Despite his sleep-saturated body, he drifts off to one, waking up to a scientist crooning to his captive jellyfish. The scientist explains that the jellyfish he raises are biologically immortal, that after reaching sexual maturity, they are able to regenerate to the polyp stage once again, return fresh and renewed. They could continue forever and ever this way. The documentarians fawn over the jellyfish as an elevated being, their cells key to humanity’s future immortality. He half-hallucinates, half-images the documentarians talking to him from the screen, promising him that there will be no end to this, that they will inject him with jellyfish venom and return him to this purgatory again and again and again.

He turns off the TV and dreams of drowning.

The temperature rises as March dawns, the sun beating heat down on the back of his neck for the first time in as long as he can remember. And that’s not all. He remembers the child throwing a tantrum outside the konbini as he walks to work, he remembers a joke Sanzu tells to no laughs before a meeting, he remembers the taste of a cold beer breaking on his tongue.

Spring draws near and winter thaws, and with it, Rindou lets himself feel for the first time in nearly three weeks. He misses you terribly.

The memory of you is a blistering wound, barely healed enough to touch, but he tries, remembering every time he made you laugh, every time you made him laugh in turn. He remembers soft flesh yielding in his hands when he gripped your waist and the equally soft flesh of your inner thigh. He remembers your bottomless appetite for new experiences, how you wanted to experience the world with him at your side. He remembers until the past and present merge into a stagnant stream, until the only thing he can’t remember is why he refused monogamy so insistently when it means an eternity without summers.

There is no autopilot, nothing natural at all about texting you after so long apart, but he chooses to anyway. His fingers move key by key, every word carefully considered and chosen, and then he chooses to push send. He moves.

It is as simple a message as he could manage: Can we talk?

That night, for the first time in a long time, Rindou does not dream.

Rindou is well-acquainted with the exterior of your apartment block. It is a relic from when architecture built out rather than up. Each apartment has its own front door and step. The building is an ugly white block of cement and plaster, but the neighborhood has planted symmetrical stripes of shrubbery between each apartment to liven it up, and you say that in the spring when the flowers bloom, the block is transformed in a vibrant display of every imaginable color: soft blue nemophilas and sickeningly yellow canola flowers, plump purple tulips and tender pink plum blossoms. Now, with the frost barely thawed, the flower beds lie dormant.

A minute passes after he knocks on your door, and he wonders if he dreamed your response last night when you invited him over to talk. At his feet, a cat meows. Rindou makes eye contact, and the cat flees into the bushes that separate your stoop from your neighbor’s. He watches for some sign of the cat, but the bushes don’t so much as rustle on your quiet street.

Maybe he dreamed the cat, too.

Just as Rindou decides to shoot you a text, the door opens, and then there is you. You, just as he remembered, all light and life and color. A lifetime’s worth of tension plummets off his shoulders at this measly, first sight of you.

Voice clear and lovely and unavoidable as the chiming of a temple bell calling him home, you usher him inside, past the entryway and up a narrow flight of stairs to the second floor. You chatter away about how you are in the middle of laundry, and would he mind if you do chores while he talks?

Under normal circumstances, he would closely observe your childhood home, looking for clues to the person you once were in the wear of the tatami and pictures framed on the wall, but the mere nape of your neck enthralls him and fixes his gaze. You shine like a beacon, the kind of light that doesn’t merely attract but blurs and blends the shadows until he can see nothing else.

Your clothes hang drying on the balcony, which is too cramped for two to stand comfortably, so he opts to hang back in the attached living room, while you fold your clothes into a basket. Rindou realizes that the task gives you the perfect excuse to avoid eye contact, which you have gracefully evaded since he arrived. It is a worrying sign perhaps, but it means he can study your face shamelessly as you work. There is a layer of grease atop your scalp and no makeup to cover the shadows that border your eyes. He looks no better, of course, but at least he’s been sleeping, and he frowns at these signs of neglect. Even so, he could get drunk on watching you unhindered like this.

The tension of all that is left unsaid writhes until you can’t help but break the silence, always the first to snap.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” you ask.

“I know you asked me to leave you alone, but I don’t want to. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” you confess quietly.

Something stronger than relief blooms where there has been so much pain, and Rindou spits out his response, words tumbling into one another without pause.

“Then what are we doing? Let me take you out!”

“Rindou, we can’t just go back to how things were,” you sigh. “I don’t mean that I won’t. I mean that I can’t. When things started between us, I thought I was just down for the ride, and I had no expectations of you or us, but then…everything just kind of snuck up on me, and when we were together, I felt so safe and cared for, like I never have before, and it was wonderful. Then, with a snap of your fingers, all of that just went away, and I was left with nothing, and it sucked. Trust me, I’ve thought about calling you a hundred times a day because it’s been so hard. But if I break now, I’m going to have to start moving on all over again from scratch, and I can’t do that. I need to just…get it over with.”

“Well, I don’t want to just get over it.”

The sun beats down on his brow through the glass, and a base sheen of sweat bursts from beneath his skin. The way you express yourself, honest and eloquent, as if inviting him to truly understand you, will never not amaze him, never not leave him scrambling for something half as true to share with you in turn. Words have never been his weapon of choice; he leads with his fists, his wits if pressed, the allure of fresh banknotes, but never his words, and now, they are the only thing that may save him. He had hours to prepare something to convince you to give him another chance, but the words sounded so stupid in his mind that he threw out every option as fast as he could imagine them. His memory has been shaky lately or he would recite the speech Ran wrote for him verbatim. His brother had been right. He should have written it down.

So, it is with no plan and with brains scrambled like a cracked egg that Rindou continues, “You’re not the only one who things snuck up on. You’re the best part of my day. Even now, as shitty as things stand between us, you’re still the best thing in my life. I never wanted to be a boyfriend. But I’ve had lots of time to learn that I want to lose you even less. A lot less. If you need me to give up seeing other women, to commit, or whatever else, then I’ll do it. If it means you can feel safe with me again, I’ll do it.”

“I’m not trying to trap you, or change you,” you sigh.

“Too late! I’m fucking trapped! And I don’t care. I want you way more than I want my freedom.”

Finally, you turn away from the laundry, back to the horizon, and look at him. You are guarded, no fake smiles to reassure or disarm. You are, however, listening, and Rindou lets himself hope that somehow, somehow, he has found the words powerful enough to undo the damage he wrought.

“That all sounds really nice,” you admit, “But you obviously don’t want to be my boyfriend, or we would have had this talk a while ago. It took you weeks to realize you want me.”

For such a smart woman, you could say the stupidest things, and Rindou is incensed enough at the very idea of not wanting you that he tells you as much. A spark of fire, something finally more impassioned than dull resignation sparks in your eye at the insult, but he plows forward before you can snark back.

“I knew I wanted you from the moment I first saw you. And I always miss you the second you leave my side. What it took me weeks to admit was…well shit, that I can’t live without you because I love you.”

A gust of wind weaves its way between the taller buildings that flank your apartment to blast past the balcony just as your fingers fumble removing a white tee-shirt from the clothesline. The shirt flies out on an updraft. As if dancing with the wind, it whirls in tight circles just out of reach of your outstretched hand, a brief white flag before the wind dies down and it plummets to the street.

You lean over the balcony, like you might leap to follow it, but finding no escape in that direction, you turn to face Rindou’s love confession head-on, just as he once faced yours. He had expected the words, “I-love-you” to hurt, to tear open his throat on their journey out and to ache like a rotting tooth. After all, people lost their minds for love. They died for love. And when love was gone, they cauterized the wound, all decayed flesh and mindless bumbling through the motions, like living zombies. Love hurt or some shit, right?

Yet, he doesn’t regret telling you now, even as you stand quietly without returning his feelings. A million possibilities for heartbreak manifest in front of him, but Rindou feels stronger than he has in weeks. There are so many secrets that still divide you, but this one fundamental truth is undeniable, unretractable. Never again will he be able to claim he’s never loved. This love will forever be a part of his history, and Rindou embraces the fixedness of the path that lies before him, one that is forever imprinted upon by your shared love.

“You’re making it nearly impossible to refuse you,” you sigh out.

“Good. You shouldn’t,” Rindou agrees.

The screen door squeaks as you close it behind you, stepping close enough that he can faintly sense your body heat and lavender scented detergent emanating from the laundry basket. You stand together at a precipice. Your mouth twists to the side in what he recognizes as fear.

“I’m scared,” you whisper. “If we do this, and I get hurt again…I can’t –”

“Do you remember our first date, when you told me all about your favorite story? The one with the girl whose brother kills her?” Rindou blurts out. He doesn’t know where he is going with this. Inspiration hovers three steps ahead of his brain.

“A Smiling Death’s Head?” you ask uncertainly.

“Yeah, you said you hated that one version of it because the woman dies for a man who won’t choose her in return. You like the one where the woman is brain and risks everything – her honor, her family’s honor, her life even – for love, and the man she loves is willing to do the same. I’m thinking, that’s us right now. I’m here, baby, and I’m choosing this even though you might hurt me now. I don’t care what shit there is down the road, I’m choosing you, and I want you to do the same. Be brave like the women in your books and take this leap with me, please.”

Like a sunflower to the sun, your whole body leans in his direction as you say, “That might be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I’d tell you not to get used to it, but who knows? This is the first time I’ve ever been in love. Maybe I am a romantic. You’ll have to choose me to find out.”

Pure joy knocks you off balance and tumbling into his arms. In seconds, you are tangled together. Your thighs clamp tight around his hips and your chin tucks into the notch between his neck and shoulders. His nose buries into the crook of your exposed throat, breathing in the balmy scent of sweat and sun. Just as naturally, your arms wrap around his waist as he holds you aloft. There is no space between your bodies. Nothing has felt more right since he first drew breath upon entering the world.

He has made his choice, and now you have made yours.

Rindou carries you into the open kitchen, sitting you on a high countertop, where neither of you need loosen your grip on the other. In fact, as he no longer needs to support your weight with his hands, he is free to tighten the embrace, wrapping two big arms around your back to clutch you even tighter to the heat of him.

Together like this, you both breathe through what feels like two blissful eternities that make the time spent apart seem like the passing of a few errant seconds. Time stops when you are gone, and it races when you are near. Rindou doubts he’ll ever return to the days of idly passing the time again. Not so long as he has you.

It is one of the happiest moments of his life. Not the happiness of a victory, but the absolute relief of a stay of execution, a sparing of the hangman’s noose. You are so unbelievably warm and soft as you cling to him. Little noises escape your mouth and get lost against his chest. It takes him a moment to recognize those sounds are words: “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

The fabric of his shirt sags from the weight of your tears as you weep, and he hates to imagine how exhausting the last several weeks have been as you ran yourself into the ground to avoid your heartbreak. He promises to care for you even when you can’t, or won’t, care for yourself. And now is as good a time as any to get started.

“No more tears,” Rindou cajoles, loosening your embrace just enough to draw your head up and look into those pretty eyes.

“I know I’m being ridiculous,” you hiccup-laugh. “I’m just so happy.”

He pinches the fat of your cheeks between his fingers, squishing your face into an adorable pout that stops the tears in their tracks.

“Now that I’m back, you’re going to be a good girl and listen to me, right?” he coaches.

You attempt a nod around his grip on your face, an eager half bob at the command.

“Good. First things first, you’re going to tell me everything I’ve missed while we were apart. And, I mean everything, baby. What’s going on with school, your mom, your friends. I want to know how Naoto’s work event went, how things are at the library, what you’re reading. If you read the nutritional information off a cereal box, I want to know about it,” Rindou orders.

“Yes, sir,” you slur through his fingers, and somehow you manage to sound perky and enthused despite your pinched lips and bloated cheeks.

“And you’re going to start taking care of yourself now that I’m back. No more all-nighters or studying until you collapse. You get seven hours of sleep every night minimum. You eat three meals a day. And you take at least one hour every day to do something fun, I don’t care what.”

“But sir!” you protest.

“That’s an order. Blink twice if you understand me.”

As your wet lashes bat down twice, Rindou notices the dreamy film that descends over your eyes, that recognizable, sleepy slide towards subspace as you relax your brain and surrender entirely to his will. All it took was the sound of his voice to affect you. And that’s not all. When the fingers of his other hand, the one not manipulating your cute little face, shift slightly on your neck, not even a full caress, you suck in a powerful breath like the touch might shatter you to pieces.

He vows to never take this, the power he commands over you, for granted again. Because as ardently as you react to his slightest touch, he is just as devoted in the hunt for those same reactions. He drinks up your sighs and pleasures and delicious little nose scrunches like an alcoholic at an open bar.

The sun filtering into the room is dimmer now, lighting up the dust mites as they float past the window. Rindou massages the base of your neck with a firm hand. Like a kitten, you purr and cant into the touch. He could stay like this until nightfall, until forever. Based on the little shivers that wrack your spine, the pathetic whimpers you can’t suppress, you are less contented, calves winding around his hips in a suggestion he only pretends to ignore.

“I have to tell you something,” you murmur, lips trailing his neck until they reach his ear. “I have to tell you, I was bad while we were apart.”

Rindou hides his smile in the base of your neck, continuing to stroke you like a beloved pet, “Were you now? I find that hard to believe.”

“I was, Sir. I came three times without permission. Twice on my own and once at the club,” you report.

Technically, you had his permission at the club when you came on Lady’s fingers as he nodded along with the audience, but he doesn’t tell you that, too amused by the eager way you tattle on yourself in the hopes he’ll spank you clean through a dry orgasm, thighs flexing around his waist as you imagine it. And he might punish you yet, but not today. Not when the weight of you in his arms feels like returning home after an odyssey, and unlike Odysseus, Rindou would have forgiven you anything – any infidelity, any betrayal, any treason – in his relief to find peace here once again.

“Hmm, you have been bad,” Rindou plays along. “And what do you think I ought to do about that?”

“Whatever you think best, Sir,” you offer, trying and failing to perform meekness as your excitement grows.

Rindou untethers you from his body, making sure you are seated securely on the counter beside an overflowing drying rack before he slides down, down, down to the floor, dragging your sweatpants along with him. You loom over him like a mountain in your half-naked glory, built like you were hand-crafted by a divine power for his enjoyment, designed to be worshipped. He belongs on his knees.

He lifts a foot to his mouth, tongue teasing past the toes, where he knows you are most ticklish, and pressing steady kisses to the arch. Slowly, he laps higher, passing your ankles, laving the muscles of your calves, and dedicating special attention to the sensitive skin behind your knees. An unstoppable giggle breaks free at the tickle, but your eyes warn him this is no laughing matter. His descent is achingly slow. Every centimeter he rises on your left leg must be repeated on his right before he will go higher, drawing out the torture until your breath goes shallow. It is an unhurried kind of worship that relaxes as well as arouses. There is a voluptuous surrender in the way he lingers on your legs, ignoring where you most want him as if time presents no obstacle to his exploration. All the while, he maintains eye contact, violet eyes transfixing you in place.

At your inner thighs, Rindou can’t resist, and he sucks twin hickeys onto each side. It’s the silken softness of your skin there, where you are never exposed to the sun. It’s the way your cunt smells, so close to his face as he marks you. You haven’t shaved in a few days, but the fine hairs hardly detract from the pillowy flesh. His cock aches for you.

Your panties join your sweatpants on the floor. For a solid minute, Rindou can do nothing but stare at your pretty pussy, so familiar and so missed. His hot breath dances over the sensitive skin, and you squirm, begging for the return of his mouth.

He smothers your cunt and himself in the process with open mouth kisses. Wet trails of his spit glisten in the wake of his lips. He uses his fingers to pinch at your hood until your glossy, little clit peeks out for him. The kisses he lays there are purposeful, devotional.

“Rindou, sir, please,” you whimper.

“You want me to eat this pretty pussy the way my pretty girl likes it?” Rindou asks.

You nod eagerly, and Rindou makes a show of considering it. The kisses he just gifted you were merely playful, a pantomime of what you really needed. Even as he toyed with your clit, your hips bucked greedily against the anchor of his hands at your hips, begging for more pressure, more, more, more.

“I was going to reacquaint myself with this perfect body from your toes to your eyelids. If I get distracted here, who will play with the rest of your body? Who will play with your pretty tits? Do you still want me to lick this cunt?”

“Yes, sir,” you answer swiftly.

“Well, since you’re being so polite,” Rindou hums, rubbing a firm hand up your inner thigh until you arch. “I’ll do it, but only if you play with your tits just the way you know I would. You’ll have to be my hands, baby.”

It is an uncharacteristically kind decision, but Rindou can’t summon up the will to call you belittling names or deny you too badly. You may be a pathetic, needy cockslut, but he is the one who couldn’t survive three weeks without the hug of your cunt, so what does that make him? At least, for today, he is simply too drunk on your body to degrade you the way you deserve.

Even without his firm hand, you are still an obedient little thing – one of the things he loves most about you – so you hasten to show off, tugging your tee-shirt up over your breasts and grabbing handfuls of your own flesh. He loves the way your fingers leave marks from how hard you grope and squeeze them. Rindou slips a hand in his pants, so that he can thumb at the head of his cock, watching the way you touch yourself. The foot he previously licked plants right on his shoulder to keep you spread open for him. Then, he dives back into your pussy.

With his tongue, Rindou laps out the wetness that collects at your entrance and smears it up to the top of your mound. It is messy. You practically flood his mouth at first contact, and he relishes that familiar tang. He buries everything – from his tongue to his nose – between your folds, lapping and sucking until your thighs quiver. With your clit, he is merciless, all pressure and speed as it has left the defenses of your clitoral hood and now beckons to him, an engorged button for him to tweak and nudge and suction into the hot wetness of his mouth.

You express your approval of his efforts by overenthusiastically abusing your tits. When you pinch your nipples, you tug that extra amount until they’re sore. When you squeeze them, you grope your tits like a pervert, hard and merciless. When you caress the undersides, you follow up with a stinging slap to the center that alights your nerves and brings tears to your eyes. It is masterful, a work of pure artistry, for an audience of one. And what an appreciative audience! Rindou shucks off his jeans, so he can palm the head of his cock as he watches the student become the master. He taught you this, this brutality, this unrestrained use of your body, and he wonders whether you spanked your ass raw in his absence, pretending your little hand was larger, meatier, his.

The toes on his shoulder clench, and he knows you are going to cum. All of those signs particular to you and your pleasure are committed to his memory and on display now as he worries your clit with his tongue.

So, of course, Rindou pulls back from your cunt, breaking a strand of spit that connects him to your pussy with his hand.

It is adorable the way your hips arc, humping at air like that might give you the stimulation you need to fly over the edge. As soft as he feels towards you in the new dawn of your shared love, Rindou can’t help but laugh at the pathetic display. It is easy to bat your hand away when you move it towards your own pussy, funny how the pitiful moue of your lips trembles at being denied. You must be out of practice to think for a second he would let you rut yourself to orgasm without permission. An out of practice needy hole in need of discipline. He can’t even feel disappointment. It’s simply too pathetic. Too pathetic and too intoxicating.

Nothing in his long life of vice compares to the knowledge that your pleasure belongs to him. His to control, his to provide. Like a headrush, a heady sense of his own power and gratitude for it stuns him into stillness. Rindou has always liked this power, enjoyed the needy pleas of the women he fucked and the way they would surrender beneath his hands, hoping, praying, that he might let them cum. He would snicker and mock their desperation even as the blood rushed to his cock. But there is an opposite side to the coin as well, a kind of self-flagellation because even as he denies you, he is simultaneously denying himself. Because the only sight better than your miserable cries at an edge is the glorious sight of you coming undone, brain blitzed and tongue heavy and breasts heaving and stomach clenching and…

“I didn’t tell you to stop abusing those tits,” Rindou warns.

He simply watches and you spring back to action, drawing the meat of your breast as high as it will go to try to tongue at your own nipple. When you aren’t satisfied, you spit and use the slick to rub aching little circles over each nipple. Your neck arches back at the feeling. Rindou can see when a zap of pleasure rolls through your body in the way your throat swallows, in the way your untouched hole spasms around nothing. He jerks his cock rapidly, splitting his attention between your performance and that clenching hole.

Two minutes pass after your first edge before Rindou decides he can safely return to your clit without immediately sparking an orgasm. Rindou licks his fingers, messy and thorough, before guiding them to your entrance. There is a nudge of resistance as he sinks two fingers inside as it’s been weeks since he last used you here, and he imagines that same tight pressure massaging his shaft, suffocating him at the root.

Sunk inside to the second knuckle, Rindou maneuvers until he finds your front walls, and then he plunges his fingers repeatedly into that spot as you shake and moan. He doesn’t even need to touch your clit now as it all but vibrates at the internal stimulation. One hand plants on your belly to hold you in place as he picks up speed, fingering your tiny cunt expertly until your squeals are as loud as the wet gushing from between your thighs and the sound of blood pounding in Rindou’s head.

Rindou works a third finger inside you, so that you won’t shatter when his cock breaks you open later. Then, he kisses up and down your stomach to where your cunt is stretched open by his fingers and only just grazing your clit with his passing tongue. Your head lolls like a broken doll, waist twitching one way then the next. Your twitchy little hole tells him that you will cum soon, fluttering like a vice around his fingers. He leaves it to the last possible second, so that he almost worries his mistimed it before abandoning your pussy again.

This time, you don’t try to alleviate the ache but bite down on your own fist in a childish cry of grievance at what is taken from you. He can literally see your hole clench around nothing, an enticing invitation for his neglected cock. An invitation he has ignored long enough.

Rindou stands, lifting you off the counter and depositing you knees-first on the cold tile. His cock hovers at face level, hard, demanding, weeping from missing you too long.

He smacks the meat of your cheek with his cock. A few heavy blows that bounce the head off your lip, leaving it stained with his essence. Whenever Rindou jerks off, he is vicious with his prick. His hand would blur from how fast he jerks it, but in contrast, you are always so delicate to start, all kitten licks and starry eyes at his cock like it is a rare book or something equally valuable to you. It is not so different from the worshipful way he learned your body. He craves that show of devotion from you, its own kind of commitment ceremony more powerful than swearing oneself in front of a priest or signing some stupid papers. He wants to see you pledge yourself to him in the basest ways imaginable.

“No hands. No tongue. No mouth,” Rindou says, voice too tight for the command to land as one, but you listen anyway. You are perfect like that.

The skin of your cheek is soft as you rub yourself against him like a cat. You twist under his cock, so that it rests heavy across your pretty features. A fan whirs overhead, but Rindou can clearly hear the deep breath you take through your nose as you soak in the smell of him. Laid out like this, his cock is nearly as long as your face.

Despite the limitations he imposed, you find a way to shift his cock, so it stands to attention between his stomach and your face, which you then rub up and down in time to his heartbeat. You have eyes only for his cock, so close to your nose that it crosses your eyes. The understimulation combined with your debauched face is the worst kind of torment. He has known hell in broken ribs, in a child’s empty belly, in the devastation of the drug trade he peddles. He has known hell. But he has never known a hell that lived so close to heaven as this.

“Go ahead and add your hands and tongue. Still no mouth,” Rindou urges.

Your hand is gentle when it grips him at the base and strokes. His skin stretches forward as you skim up, up, up the length of him. He jumps when slim fingers ghost over the head.

Both hands begin to work in tandem, stroking in opposite directions, different rhythms, so that every centimeter of him is caressed. Like you want to tempt him to sink into your mouth, you open wide and let his tip sit on your tongue. The pink little muscle writhes against the underside where he is most sensitive. Too often when he uses your mouth, he chokes you on the length of him until you flounder, wild-eyed and proud in your accomplishment. This, letting you take the lead and showcase all your skill and study of him, may become a guilty a pleasure for him though. As you trace your tongue up the vein lining his shaft, he realizes you know his body every bit as well as he knows yours.

“Please, can I suck it, sir? I want to make you feel good,” you plead.

“You’re already making me feel good. And besides, you look too pretty like this,” Rindou murmurs, gliding a hand down your spit-stained cheek.

“Like this, sir?”

There is nothing submissive, sweet, or innocent in the way you lick a wet streak from base to tip. So terribly slowly that by the time you kiss the plump head of him, his eyes have rolled back in bliss.

Then, like a secret, you whisper into his cockhead,” I love you, sir.”

By you, he is undone.

Most likely, Rindou thinks, he lowered you gently to the ground then, but this is pure speculation as one moment you are on your knees, and the next you are on your back, legs wound his waist, and his cock bullying its way into your pussy.

It is like coming home when your hips meet with a loud smack, as close as two people can be, cock pressed up and into your stomach. He is gentler when he pulls out, making sure your walls can accommodate him. Your heels dig painfully into his ass at the slow slide. They tighten as if to keep him there when he sinks back in deep.

The only way he could possibly fuck you after everything you shared today is deep. Not too hard or fast, but penetrating, inescapable thrusts that make you wail when he bottoms out.

A cunt is a cunt, he always thought. There is only so much variation in depth, in tightness, in slickness, in heat from one woman to the next. And that’s true of yours, too, except when he’s inside you, he’s not only feeling your walls massage his cock, he’s also smelling the natural perfume that emanates from your neck and thighs. He’s tasting the sweat off your delicious breasts. He’s soaking up the cries and moans that you offer him like a votive. Yes, you are deliciously obedient and hot, but you are also just you, and that is manifold times more addictive than the drugs he sells for a living.

His balls draw up, and Rindou is shocked to realize he could cum already. He empties his mind, counting his breaths until the urge to fill you ebbs away to more manageable levels. Still his balls ache fiercely.

You fare little better as each thrust breaks you open. His hips grind into yours, pressing him tight to where you folds spread open, where your clit is engorged and primed. Your hands rub through layers of sweat on his back to press him even closer. Nose-to-nose, so you trade breaths and groans through open mouths.

“Please, can I cum, sir?” you ask.

“You wanna cum?” Rindou grits out.

You grasp his wrist, the one not supporting his bodyweight off the floor, and guide his hand to your bared throat. Instinctively, his fingers curl around your pretty neck, not pressing, just there, like a favorite necklace.

“Make me cum,” you say.

Your hand folds over his own and flexes until he begins to squeeze, cutting off your air supply. A little smile of pure contentment curls your lips as you ease into the sensation of being choked. Without air, your brain panics, the cock digging its way to your center begins to feel less welcome, less safe, more startling and therefore unignorable. And then, your brain slackens, and his grinding cock becomes the center of your universe. Just feeling remains and nothing else.

It is a wonder you still trust him enough to let him do this.

A wonder. That’s what you are.

“Cum for me, baby,” Rindou prays, lips to your ear. “Cum as hard as you can.”

His hand loosens to allow a windfall of air to flood your lungs and short circuit your brain. The sudden relief compounds the way he speeds up his thrusts, so that your cunt is filled just the way he knows you need it.

You start to cum sometimes on the second stroke. The little bit of slack he had to maneuver inside you disappears. It is a vice that wraps around his cock. Your pussy pulses haphazardly, like a clenching fist, and he floods your womb with cum.

Lips meet in a messy kiss. Off-center and desperate. But neither of you have the brain power for artistry. His cock is too busy with the aftershocks, managing seven hot spurts into the haven of your cunt after the initial torrent. And you are practically crying into his mouth; a short but obliterating orgasm that wracked you to your core and left you devastated in the aftermath.

This must be what people call ‘making love.’

Sometime in the aftermath, Rindou remembers that you share the apartment with your mother, and that he cannot make a bed here on the kitchen floor with a soft cock buried in her daughter’s cunt. First, impressions count after all.

On autopilot, he takes you to the shower, where you both clean up, bodies limp against one another. At no point do you stop holding hands. Even when you pee after. You remain tethered to each other every step of the way.

Your mind wakes up just enough to direct him to your bedroom afterward. The bed is only a twin, but he prefers it, the way it forces you both to stay wrapped up entirely in each other’s arms. You practically lay across his thigh as you both fall into a deep sleep.

An hour or two after judging by the angle of the sun seeping through your window, Rindou wakes up. Vaguely, he notices for the first time his surroundings. The duvet on your bed is threadbare and patchy, but the sheets are surprisingly soft. The room is mostly neat with dirty clothes tucked away in a hamper and clean clothes folded away, though the desk in the corner is piled haphazardly with books and looseleaf notes. A pen must have rolled off your desk earlier because the wheel of your desk chair is lodged atop it. The walls are painted a delicate eggshell yellow, and there are no embarrassing childhood posters there but rather tacked-up photos of you and your friends, you and your mom, you and him.

Rindou finds it hard to swallow when he sees the photos, looks away.

“Morning,” you rumble sleepily into his skin.

He kisses you soundly before correcting you that it is sometime in the early evening. It doesn’t matter either way. Time has abdicated its power. Whether it’s six in the evening or six in the morning, he will stay in this cramped bed, holding you. Short of the police breaking down the door or a zombie apocalypse, nothing could compel him to stop.

“I didn’t dream it,” you murmur to yourself.

“No,” Rindou confirms simply. He has never been a man of many words and now that the time for speeches has passed, he finds himself exhausted of them. He prefers to listen anyway, missed your songbird voice in his ear.

“And you’re not going to regret it?” you say.

Rindou shakes his head.

“I can introduce you as my boyfriend now?” you question.

“Mmmhmm,” Rindou hums, placing a delicate kiss to the crest of your ear.

Your fingers curl tightly around his hand, and you say urgently, “Please don’t cheat on me. I think it’ll kill me.”

“Shh, stop worrying. I won’t even look at another woman again, okay?” Rindou promises.

This little bout of insecurity passes, unable to survive the absolute security of his deep-voiced assurances. Then, you proceed to tell him all about your time apart. Rindou hardly speaks a word, soaking up the way you effortlessly create a full-bodied narrative of details and characters and feelings. You talk mostly about schoolwork and the library, your friends weaving in and out of the periphery of your stories. Occasionally, he asks a question, sparking new stories that outrun the clock until the sky is dark outside and your voice scratchy from overuse.

It takes Rindou by surprise when you say seemingly out of the blue, “Earlier, when you said you would never even look at a woman again…I don’t think you have to take it that far. I mean, unless you want to, but I’m not asking you to.”

“Thanks, that would have made leaving the house kind of hard,” Rindou laughs lowly. “But seriously, I won’t touch anyone but you. You have my word.”

You squirm out from the cocoon of his arms, and he unconsciously chases your body heat. Once you are sitting up, sheets tumbling over your peaked nipples, you say, “I don’t mind if you do, a little.”

Now it is Rindou’s turn to sit up.

“You don’t mind if I touch other women a little?”

“Oh, this is so embarrassing,” you groan at the disbelief in his voice. “I just mean, when we first met and you flogged that woman…I thought that was so hot, watching you. And I could see us wanting to go to the club again sometime, as a couple, and it would be okay with me at least, if you wanted to umm, do a scene with someone else. I think I might even like it. Or, umm, so long as it’s not sex, I think it would be fine even if I’m not there so long as you tell me all about it,” you say.

“What does sex mean to you?”

You think about it for a moment. “Anything that gets your dick wet.”

A beat later Rindou starts to laugh. He laughs until his stomach hurts, while you beat your fists into his shoulder and insist it’s not funny. But it is funny! It is funny that he wasted so many weeks thanks to his stubborn pride when you weren’t even demanding his forever faithfulness, leaving the door wide open to all kinds of sins and debauchery so long as he what? Maintained open communication?

All you ask is that he gives up sticking his dick in other women and in exchange he gets…everything. He gets everything.

When Rindou finally catches his breath, he eyes you like the marvel you are and says, “I really don’t know what I did to deserve you.”

“Funny, I feel the same way,” you smile. “So, I don’t want you getting your dick wet with anyone else, and I want to know what you do with other people. I may change my mind down the road, but I actually thought about it a lot after everything that happened, and I think that’s my boundary. So, until I do change my mind, that’s the rule. What about you? What boundaries do you have for me?”

Rindou has put little thought into it, assuming a vanilla-style definition of monogamy would be your future together, but half the answer comes instantly, “I control your orgasms. No cumming without my permission.”

“I like that,” you agree.

“And no dating anyone else. Watching you with Lady was fucking hot, and I wouldn’t mind sharing you with other doms if you are interested down the line, but no cumming and no going out with them.”

“Oh, no dating for you either! No dating and no falling in love. And you can’t do scenes with the same woman over and over without me. I don’t want you developing feelings for anyone. I didn’t think of that,” you say.

Rindou nods. “It sounds like we’ll both have to work out the details as they come along. But I’m open to changing the rules as we go because all that really matters is that we’re together, and you’re happy.”

“You’re going to make me happy?” you tease.

You smile beatifically, an angel on earth. A sun to his sunflower, a planet to his moon sucking him into your orbit. Rindou never believed he could make anyone happy, but he knows now that he is going to try until there’s no fight left in him.

“I’m going to make you very happy,” he vows.

It is a rebirth, and it is a start. And you both think in that moment that you hope there is no end to the bright future that lies in front of you.

This is love.

A/N: editing this was a saga, so sorry if i missed anything!

Easing in her slender forearm for a pillow - Matsuo Bashō

#tokyo revengers smut #tokyo revengers x reader smut #tokyorev smut #tokyo revengers x reader #rindou smut #rindou x reader smut #rindou haitani #rindou x reader

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atlantic-riona · 1 year

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Exile of the Sons of Uisliu

A (long! very long!) retelling of the tale, Longes mac nUislenn (“Exile of the Sons of Uisliu”), an Irish tale from the Ulster Cycle of medieval Irish literature. Written for the Four Loves Fairy Tale event by @inklings-challenge.

Notes: I’ve published part of this before, though right now I can’t find the post. I finished it for the challenge, as it fit well with the themes. It was originally intended to be a retelling that made it easier to approach medieval Irish literature for those who felt intimidated by the often more archaic translations. As such, it sticks very closely to the two sources I was working from, though events from both get blended together in a way that weren’t, strictly speaking, present in both tales. See the end of the story for sources (with links!) and further notes about the adaptation process.

Pronunciation: “Derdriu” = “Deer-druh,” Noisiu = “Nee-shuh,” “Cathbad” = “Kah-vuh,” “Conchobar” = “Kon-cho-var” (with the “ch” as in “loch”, though I’ve heard various other pronunciations as well, Leborcham = “Leh-vor-cham, Cúchulainn = “Koo-chull-in”, “Uisliu” = ish-loo, “Eogan” = “Oh-wen”, and “Medb” = “May-uhv”. The other names should be less tricky, but let me know if you have problems with them.

This is the story of Derdriu.

Of beauty in death.

Some say the story begins before she was even born, at her scream from her mother’s womb. This is somewhat true; it was indeed this scream that caused the men of Ulster to rise from their beds and demand to know its origin. And it was this scream that caused her mother to press her hands to her face and deny any knowledge of its origin, despite the fact it came from her own womb. Indeed, it was this scream that caused Cathbad, the great and wise druid, to set the question of its origin at rest.

He said, “It is your daughter, woman. Her loveliness will surpass all others; her green eyes and tall form will cause envy among queens and desire among kings. Men will slaughter for her and over her, and heroes will do great deeds in her name.”

He said, “She will bring great evil to our land.” Then he fell silent and no more was said on the subject.

And some say the story begins when Deirdre entered the world for the first time, innocent of her great power and tragic fate. Again, the druid Cathbad prophesied of the evil that would follow in the girl’s wake, of jealousy and war and exile. And of death, of beloved children and heroes alike.

“Her tale will be famous,” he said, “as famous as the graves of the men who fought for her and the men who come after her.”

Hearing this, the men of Ulster cried aloud, “Kill the child! Kill her!” For they did not wish to see Ulster and its people suffer such a fate.

“Wait!” came one voice from the crowd. It was Conchobar, king of Ulster. “This girl won’t be killed; I want her for myself. I’ll make sure that no man sees her before we are wed, so there will be no fighting. And so that there will be no jealousy either, no woman will see her.”

No man present defied him.

And so Derdriu was taken away and raised by foster-parents. True to his word, Conchobar let no one else see her-except for Leborcham, who was Conchobar’s messenger and a satirist. It was she who acted as nurse and teacher to Derdriu. Besides them, Derdriu had no contact with anyone or anything from the outside world.

A lonely life for anyone, to be sure.

Years passed, and Derdriu, as predicted, grew into the most beautiful woman in all of Éire. Her hair was yellow as a warrior’s cloak, and her eyes were green as the land she walked on day after day; her lips Parthian-red and her teeth pure white. She saw no one but her foster parents and Leborcham, who had grown very fond of the girl.

One winter day, Leborcham and Derdriu sat outside watching her foster-father slaughter a calf for their supper. The blood from the calf stained the snow, and a raven swooped down to drink it.

Derdriu was struck by this, and said to Leborcham, “I'd like a man such as that: hair as black as a raven, cheeks as red as blood, and body as white as snow.”

A familiar story, is it not?

Without thinking, Leborcham replied, “Then may you have success, for there is one close by. Noisiu son of Uisliu is the man you’re seeking.” Then she fell silent, for she had remembered that Derdriu was bound for Conchobar’s bed.

“I want to see him,” Derdriu said.

“You musn’t,” Leborcham said reluctantly.

“If I don’t, I’ll be sick.”

This went on for some time, until Leborcham agreed to lead Derdriu to where Noisiu was. However, she refused to do anything more than that, for although she was fond of the girl, she could see nothing but harm in encouraging anything further.

Noisiu’s habit was to wander the ramparts of Emain Macha, the place where Conchobar and the other Ulaid gathered, chanting to himself. The chanting of Noisiu and his brothers was said to increase the milk of any cow that heard it, it was that pleasing to listen to. And for any man or woman who heard their chanting, they at once felt peace and happiness.

Do not think that the sons of Uisliu were skilled only in chanting or other such arts. Their skill in battle was renowned; they were swift and strong, and if the three brothers had to fight all of Ulster at once they would be so skilled with their blades and so able at defending one another that it would be a long time before their defeat.

And they were honorable, too; it was their honor that would be their downfall in the end.

Having gotten Leborcham to tell her of this tradition of Noisiu’s, Derdriu made a plan.

Noisiu was walking along the ramparts alone, chanting, when Derdriu came up to him. As though she intended to pay him no attention or recognition, she strolled past him, his fine voice making her heart beat faster.

Noisiu stopped his chanting and watched her go by. When she made to pass him entirely, he said, “That is a fine heifer going by.”

“As well it might,” she said, and turned to face him. At seeing her beauty, he recognized her for Derdriu, King Conchobar’s future wife. “The heifers grow big where there are no bulls, you know.”

“You have the bull of this province all to yourself,” he said, not taking his eyes off her. “For you are to be wed to Conchobar himself.”

She tossed her head. “Of the two, I’d pick a game young bull like yourself.”

“Cathbad’s prophecy,” he said. “Have you forgotten it?” When she made no reply, he reminded her: “He said you will bring death and destruction to the men of Ulster. Your marriage to Conchobar is the solution to that.”

“I don’t want the men of Ulster or Conchobar,” she said and looked at him. “I want you.”

He shook his head and made to leave, although he did not wish to.

“Are you rejecting me?” she cried.

“I am.”

She darted around in front of him and gripped him by the ears. “If you don’t take me with you, may shame and mockery fall upon you!”

“Leave me alone!”

“You’ll do it!”

“Woman, I will not!”

“My name is Derdriu,” she cried, “and I love you, Noisiu son of Uisliu! I loved you before I knew your face or form or voice, and now that I have seen them I love you even more! I will love you until the day I die!”

He reached up and pulled her hands from his ears. “Hush, or you’ll wake the whole of Ulster! Already the warriors inside exclaim and reach for their swords.” But he did not let go of her hands.

“It seems to be their recurring reaction to me,” she said, and they looked at each other without saying anything.

Perhaps Derdriu’s story begins here, where she and Noisiu made plans to slip away later that night when the sons of Uisliu and their company departed Emain, with Derdriu planning to hide amongst the women. Of course Noisiu’s brothers, Ardán and Annle, came with the two, and it was they who suggested seeking refuge with another king of Ireland.

Whatever the start of the story was, this point was certainly the beginning of the end for all four of them.

They traveled from king to king, from one place to another, hunted by an angry Conchobar and all his warriors. Finally, in order to be free, they left Éire and escaped to the land of Alba.

They had no friends there, and so settled in the wilderness. Despite the fact that she was once again living with only three other people for company, Derdriu was happier than she had ever been. The brothers hunted for game, and when that ran out, they raided for cattle.

It was to be expected that the people of Alba rose up against them. As has been said before, the sons of Uisliu were skilled in many things, and cattle-stealing was certainly one of those things they excelled at. The people of Alba, however, excelled at disliking those who stole all of their livestock and food, and were certainly willing to do something about it. Both sides were well-matched, despite the brothers being greatly outnumbered. But the brothers were sick of fighting, and they searched for an alternative.

So they made an offer to the king of Alba: they would stop stealing cattle and in return, he would hire them as his soldiers. It was a good offer, and the king accepted it.

Noisiu and his brothers built their houses among the other warriors, but were careful to build them so that Derdriu could not be seen from the outside. For they did not wish for her beauty to bring them the same kind of trouble they had tried to escape in Éire. And for a time this worked.

But then, one day, the king’s steward came by early in the morning when everybody was asleep. He saw Derdriu and Noisiu sleeping peacefully, and even in sleep, Derdriu’s beauty struck him silent.

The steward went to the king, who was sleeping. The steward said, “My king, my king, I have found the perfect woman for you. She lies with Noisiu son of Uisliu even now, and she is a woman worthy of any king in the world. If you kill Noisiu now, you can have her to wife.”

The king declined to have Noisiu killed, saying, “Go instead and ask her every day in secret if she will leave Noisiu and wed me.”

And so every day the steward came to visit Derdriu while the brothers were away. And every day, she turned him down. At night, when the brothers returned, she told Noisiu of the steward’s visits.

“This is a bad business,” said Noisiu, “but I can’t see what there is to be done about it yet.” For if they offended the king, they could not return to Éire, and where else could they go? So the visits continued.

As Derdriu refused the king’s advances day after day, the king tried a different tactic. He ordered the brothers into fierce battles and set dangerous traps for them in the hopes that they would be slaughtered. But the sons of Uisliu were so skilled in battle and so clever that they always ended up unharmed.

Finally, the king grew weary of all this. “Try her one last time,” he told the steward. “Then we’ll kill the sons of Uisliu and take her anyway.”

The steward did as the king commanded. He said to Derdriu, “Listen. If you don’t do as the king wishes, he will gather up all the men of Alba and slaughter your beloved Noisiu and his brothers. Is that what you desire? Rather, by going to the king you may save their lives.”

It is not known what exactly Derdriu said to him after that, but it is certain that it was yet another refusal. The steward went away angry, and told the king that Derdriu had rejected him yet again. The men of Alba were called. Derdriu saw that they were many in number, too many for the sons of Uisliu to defeat without terrible cost.

Noisiu, Ardán, and Annle came home and Derdriu told them what the steward had said.

“You must leave,” she said. “If you don’t leave tonight, you won’t live to see tomorrow.”

Ardán, the youngest brother, said, “Will you not be coming with us, then?”

Annle, the middle brother, said, “It would certainly be a waste of all our efforts so far if she did not.”

And Noisiu, the eldest brother, said, “Do you not think we can protect you?”

So Derdriu went with them. They left that very night and traveled over the sea until they reached an island that was between Alba and Éire. The king of Alba pursued them with many men, but the sons of Uisliu fended them off in a series of battles deserving of their own heroic legend.

The news of the exiles’ flight from Alba reached Éire. Everybody said to Conchobar that it would be a great shame if the sons of Uisliu fell to an enemy king in an enemy land by the fault of a bad woman. “Forgive and protect them instead, Conchobar, and let the sons of Uisliu come home,” they said. “It is better to do this then to let them be harmed by enemies.”

“Very well then,” Conchobar said. “Let them come home. I will guarantee their safety. Send for them.”

“Who will take the message?” they asked.

“It is well known that Noisiu son of Uisliu will only come in peace to Éire again if he is brought by one of three people: Cúchulainn son of Sualdam, Conall Cernach son of Amergin, and Fergus mac Roich,” Conchobar said. “I will choose one of them.”

He took Conall aside and asked him, “What would you do, Conall, if I sent you to bring the sons of Uisliu back to Éire and through some cunning and betrayal-not my own, of course-they were slaughtered despite your promises of safety?”

Conall answered, “Any Ulsterman, no matter who he was, would fall at my hand. No man would escape my wrath.”

“That is a good answer, Conall,” Conchobar said. “But I see you will not be my choice.”

Next he asked his nephew Cúchulainn the same question.

Cúchulainn was more perceptive and answered thus: “I swear that if you were to ask me to do such a thing, and to bring them home to be slain by you, I would take no bribe from you, great though it might be, in favor of taking your own head for such a deed.”

“I see that you do not love me either, Cúchulainn,” Conchobar said, and sent him away.

He called Fergus over to him and asked him the same question.

And Fergus said, “I swear not to attack you yourself, but if any Ulsterman should attempt harm on them, death and destruction will meet that man by my hands.”

“You will be messenger, Fergus,” Conchobar said. “It was you who had the best answer.”

So Fergus mac Roich was chosen as messenger. He sailed to their island, accompanied only by his son Fiacha, but could find no traces of the exiles. He made a loud call for them. Derdriu and Noisiu were playing fidchell, and both heard Fergus’ shout.

“That is a man of Éire shouting,”said Noisiu, looking up from the board.

Derdriu recognized it as Fergus’ voice, but said, “No, you are mistaken. That is a man of Alba.”

Again Fergus shouted, and again Noisiu looked up from the board. “There it is again, and this time I am sure it came from a man of Éire.”

“You are mistaken,” Derdriu said, “and now it is your turn. Play on.”

Fergus shouted a third time, and this time Noisiu knew for certain his voice was that of a man from Éire. He rose from his seat and told Ardán to go and meet the speaker, to see who it was. For it would make them poor hosts if they neglected their guest any longer.

“I know who it is,” said Derdriu. “It is Fergus mac Roich. I recognized his voice from the start.”

Angry, Noisiu demanded to know why she had concealed this from him.

“I dreamed last night,” she said. “I dreamed that three birds flew to us from Emain Macha, and that in their beaks were three sips of honey. They left the honey with us, but took three sips of our blood in return.”

Noisiu sat down. “What do you think your dream meant?” Dreams might foretell the future or provide insight into the present, and so were not to be ignored.

“Fergus comes from our beloved home bearing a message of peace, but the message he bears is false, for a false message of peace is sweeter than honey. That is the meaning of the honey.”

“And the blood?” said Ardán, for he hadn’t left yet.

“The three sips of blood the bird took from us,” said Derdriu, “are the three of you, who will leave with him and be tricked.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” said Ardán. The others agreed.

Then Noisiu said, “Never mind that for now. We’ve left Fergus waiting at the harbor for far too long. Ardán, go and fetch him.”

Ardán, grumbling, went down to fetch Fergus. But he was much heartened to see him and his son, and kept asking tidings of Éire, and of Ulster especially.

“It’s glad we are to see you,” Fergus and Fiacha said, “and we’ll tell you everything when everyone’s there to hear it.”

And when Noisiu and Annle and Derdriu saw the travelers, their hearts were gladdened also; and they also asked for tidings of the land they missed so dearly.

“We bring the best tidings,” Fergus said. “I have been sent to bring you back to Éire. Conchobar guarantees your safety, and I swear to you I’ll see you safe to him on the very day we set foot back in Éire.”

“Don’t go,” said Derdriu to Noisiu. “It will end badly, I’m sure of it.”

But the brothers dearly missed their homeland, and great was their desire to return.

“We will go,” they said. And even though they longed to return, they were also practical and knew they must put in safeguards. “But only if you yourself, Fergus, accompany us, as well as Dubthach and Conchobar’s eldest son Cormac, and if all three of you swear as to our safety.”

Fergus agreed to this, as it was a prudent request, given what had happened the last time the four had set foot in Éire.

But Derdriu argued against it; she said that going to Éire would be their doom and that she felt sure their deaths awaited them there. And although the brothers pleaded and cajoled, argued and promised, she would not be swayed.

Finally Fergus said to her, “You need not fear, lady: should all the men of Éire betray you, I will fight and defeat them no matter how great their number. Their shields will be poor protection against the wrath of my sword. Of that you may be certain.”

“Friend Fergus,” she said, “I’ll hold you to that.”

They boarded the ship and set sail for Éire. As they passed Alba’s shores, Derdriu looked behind her at them and cried, “Farewell to you, O land that I loved! O land that was my home, I will miss your shores and hills, and the happy days we spent among them. O land, I will not see you again in this lifetime.”

Then she sang a lament, mourning all the places she had loved and lost. “If it were not for Noisiu,” she said, “I would not have left them.”

Dubthach and Cormac met them when they landed. The sons of Uisliu were so glad to be home that they swore they would not rest or eat until they had eaten Conchobar’s food. So the group started their journey at once.

Alas, Conchobar’s treachery knew no bounds. For he had sent Borrach mac Annte to draw Fergus away from them, and this was how he did it.

There was a geas upon Fergus, and it was this: he could not refuse an invitation to a feast. A geas was a powerful thing, and the breaking of it would lead to one’s doom.

Borrach met up with the group on the road and invited Fergus to several feasts. Fergus grew red with anger and cursed Borrach, saying it was ill-done of him to pick today of all days to invite him to a feast. Borrach would not rescind his invitations and so Fergus was caught between his promise to see the sons of Uisliu safely to Conchobar and his old geas.

“What should I do?” Fergus asked Noisiu.

Derdriu said, “Do what you want, friend Fergus. If you prefer to forsake us for a feast, then by all means do so. Leaving us is surely a good price to pay for a feast.”

“I won’t forsake you,” he said. “I’ll send my son Fiacha on with you and my own word of honor as well. And there will be Dubthach and Cormac as well.”

But Dubthach and Cormac chose to remain with Fergus, leaving only Fergus’ son Fiacha to accompany the sons of Uisliu and Derdriu.

“We give you thanks,” said Noisiu to Fiacha, “since none but our own hands have ever defended us in combat.” They were angry with Borrach, and left quickly.

Fergus was gloomy about that but trusted that the whole of Éire could not defeat Fiacha.

“Noisiu,” Derdriu said, “I will give you some advice, although you will not listen to it.”

Noisiu drew her closer. “What is this advice of yours, O Derdriu?”

“Tonight we should go back to our island and remain there until Fergus has finished with his feast. Thus his word will be fulfilled and we may continue onward with him as safeguard.”

“That is evil advice,” Fiacha said. “My father has sworn to see you safe home today, and I am duty-bound to carry out his oath. Do you doubt his honor? If you turn back now it will be an insult.”

Derdriu was silent for a long time. At last she spoke: “Great is the evil fallen upon us today because of Fergus, since he abandoned us for a feast.” She was greatly sorrowed, for she had only agreed to come back to Éire because of Fergus’ oath to protect them. And then she chanted:

“Great is my grief that I have come

at Fergus’ word, that reckless son of Roich.

I will lament and mourn forevermore—

and my heart is bitter because of it.

O sons of Uisliu—

your last days have come.”

Noisiu chanted in response:

“Say not such things,

O woman as radiant as the sun!

Fergus would not have fetched us

if destruction were in his heart.”

Derdriu chanted:

“Alas, I grieve for you,

O delightful son of Uisliu!

To have left our home in strange lands—

nothing good will come of it.”

They came to the White Cairn of the Watching, on Sliab Fuad. There was a pleasant glen there. Derdriu stayed behind and fell asleep. At first they did not notice she was not with them, but Noisiu, turning to say something to her, let out a cry of startlement.

“What is it?” Annle asked.

“Derdriu is not with us; she must have fallen behind.”

They hurried back and arrived there just as she was waking up. Noisiu knelt beside her. “Why did you stay behind, Derdriu?”

“I fell asleep,” said she, “and as I slept I dreamed.”

“What did you dream of?” he said.

“I saw each of you without a head,” she said. “I grew frightened and woke up.”

“It was only a dream,” he said.

“A sad dream,” she said.

Then they traveled onward to a place known as “the Height of the Willows.” Then Derdriu said to Noisiu, “I see a cloud of blood about your head, and I would give all of you advice!”

“What is your advice, Derdriu?” Noisiu asked.

“To go tonight to Cúchulainn’s place of dwelling and stay there until Fergus comes; or to have Cúchulainn escort us with promises of safety to Conchobar.”

“I am not afraid,” said Noisiu, “so we will not do that. And we have sworn to stop for nothing until we reach Conchobar anyway.”

Derdriu sang a song, then, about the great cloud of blood she saw hanging over Noisiu’s head, but Noisiu ignored this.

They went onwards through the familiar lands, accompanied by Fergus’ son Fiacha, until they came to the green at Emain Macha.

While they had been traveling to Emain, Conchobar had made peace with his old enemy, Eogan mac Durthacht, the king of Fernmag. Eogan was to kill Noisiu and his brothers, and any who opposed this.

So when Derdriu, the sons of Uisliu, and Fiacha came to the green at Emain, Eogan was waiting for them in the middle of it with Conchobar. Hired soldiers surrounded Conchobar so that the sons of Uisliu could not reach him. Behind them, women sat on the ramparts of Emain to watch the fighting.

Eogan and his men came to where the sons of Uisliu stood. Fiacha was standing at Noisiu’s side. Eogan delivered Conchobar’s welcome to Noisiu with a spear thrust so fierce it broke his back. Fiacha grabbed Noisiu and flung himself over him, bringing them both down to the ground. The second spear thrust through Fiacha’s body ended Noisiu. Then the green came alive with battle.

Ardán and Annle defended Derdriu fiercely. They linked their shields together and put her between them, and such was their skill that they slaughtered all those who came against them.

Seeing so many fall, Conchobar turned to Cathbad the druid. “O Cathbad, work some enchantment upon the sons of Uisliu. See their skill and how many they have slain. If they should escape now, Ulster will never be safe from them. I swear if you do this, I will not harm Uisliu’s sons.”

Conchobar’s words were persuasive in the face of all the dead strewn about the green, and Cathbad believed him. He lifted a hand and suddenly a sea, with great waves that crashed like thunder, lay ahead of the sons of Uisliu and Deirdre. Behind them, not two feet away, were the men of Ulster, waiting for the chance to strike. The sea surged ever closer, threatening to engulf them, and the brothers placed Derdriu on their shoulders so that she would be safe from drowning.

With the sons of Uisliu thus trapped, Conchobar ordered someone to kill the brothers. But no man of Ulster moved, for everyone there had borne Noisiu and his brothers great love.

But Eogan mac Durthacht spoke up, saying that he was ready to behead them both.

“Since that is so,” Ardán said, “kill me first, as I am the youngest.”

“No,” Annle said. “Kill me first instead.”

Then Eogan struck a blow that severed the heads of both on the spot, and all the Ulstermen cried out in grief.

Fergus had been told of the treachery of Conchobar, and came now with Dubthach and Cormac to Emain. They entered the green, and saw Noisiu, lying dead under Fiacha’s body, and Ardán and Annle, beheaded by Eogan.

Furious at how his oath had been broken and his son slain, Fergus gave battle to the men of Ulster. Dubthach and Cormac joined him. All three fought fiercely, and many fell by their hand that day, including Cormac’s younger brother Maine.

During the fighting, Deirdre slipped away to the far side of the green, and it was there she happened to meet Cúchulainn, returning to Emain Macha.

“Are you here to betray us too?” she said to him. “The sons of Uisliu lie dead on the green of Emain; you may as well kill the daughter of Fedlimid and lay her with them.”

“Dead? Betrayed?” Cúchulainn asked, and Derdriu told him the whole sorry tale. At this a glint came into his eye and he said, “That is sad news indeed. Who killed them?”

“Eogan mac Durthacht,” she said. “But it was at Conchobar’s demand.”

“Let us go and find them,” Cúchulainn said, “and make sure they have a proper burial.” He had not yet realized that his foster-father Fergus was the one leading the fight against Conchobar and Eogan’s men, and so he did not join the fight himself—though if he had, it would not have gone well for his enemies.

They came to the place where the bodies lay, and Derdriu flung herself down on top of Noisiu and kissed him, her lips red with his blood. “Without the three sons of Uisliu, I am not alive,” she said. “A day spent with them was full of mirth; a day without them a day of mourning. A curse on Conchobar, a curse on Cathbad, a curse on me—I wish I had died, that trickery and floods on my behalf had not killed them!”

And she sang a song of lamentation, refusing to part from the fallen brothers, though Cúchulainn tried to persuade her to flee to safety.

There was much weeping in Emain that day; and not just for the many brave Ulstermen who had fallen at the hands of Fergus, Dubthach, and Cormac. Dubthach slew the women of Ulster, and Fergus burned Emain. Three thousand men joined them when they went to Connacht. Ailill and Medb, the rulers of Connacht, welcomed them—not out of any great love, but because of the enmity between them and Ulster. With Aillil and Medb they found protection, but the exiles’ vengeance did not stop there. There was not a single night that passed from that day without the exiles wreaking more destruction and sorrow upon Ulster.

As for Derdriu, she was with Conchobar a year. During that year she did not smile. She barely ate, she rarely slept. She rested her head on her knee and would not lift it, though Conchobar brought musicians to try and raise her spirits.

When the musicians came, she would chant:

“You say the men of Emain coming home

triumphant is a brilliant sight to see;

I say that more brilliant was the sight

of the sons of Uisliu returning home.

Noisiu bearing mead,

Ardán and Anle bearing meat—

a sweeter supper by far

than any at the table of Conchobar.

The airs you play today lack the music

of Noisiu, who sang like the sea,

of Ardán, who sang bright as sunlight,

of Anle, who sang like the wind in the trees.

I loved Noisiu, the great hero—

loved him to his death.

I don’t sleep, I can’t sleep—

the son of Uisliu will never return.”

If Conchobar tried to calm her, she would say, “What are you thinking, you who heaped sorrow upon me? I might live a hundred years or more, and yet even then I wouldn’t have any love for you. You took the thing I loved most in the world, and I will not see him until I die. I weary of you—I see nothing but the dark stones of the grave covering Noisiu, once so bright and beautiful.”

And if he persisted, she would say to him, “Fergus wronged us, taking us over the sea to you. He sold his honor for a drink. If all the warriors of Ulster gathered before us today, without hesitation I would trade them all for Noisiu. Do not break my heart further today; I am not long for the grave. My sorrows are higher and heavier than the waves of the sea. If you were wise, you would know this.”

One day, Conchobar tired of this and asked, “Who do you hate most?”

“You and Eogan mac Durthecht!” she said.

“Then go live with Eogan for a year,” he said.

He gave her to Eogan, and the next day the three set out for the gathering at Macha. Derdriu was behind Eogan in the chariot. She looked down, so that she would not have to see the two men she hated most. She had sworn that neither of them would have her.

Conchobar had been watching her and Eogan, and when he saw her look down, he said, “Your glance is that of a ewe between two rams, Derdriu, sitting here between me and Eogan.”

Up ahead, there was a big boulder. When she heard him, she leapt up and struck her head upon it, smashing her skull to bits, and she was dead.

Even then, Conchobar was jealous that Noisiu and Derdriu dwellt in death together, and he ordered that their graves be far apart from one another. Yet every morning, the graves were found open, with the lovers inside one of them. To keep them apart, Conchobor had stakes of yew driven through their bodies, and the graves remained closed.

This was the story of Derdriu. Of beauty in death. Beauty brought Derdriu death: the death of the sons of Uisliu, the death of many in Ulster, and lastly her own death.

It was not death itself that was beautiful. The beauty was how Derdriu lived. Destined for a tragic fate even in the womb, was there ever any escape for her? And yet she chose, again and again, to turn away from the path laid out for her. Again and again, she chose the son of Uisliu.

Perhaps that had always been her fate. Or perhaps not. Prophecies are fickle things.

Years passed. Ulster and Connacht went to war. Cúchulainn stood alone against Medb’s invading army, and was later betrayed; death, winged raven, perched on his shoulder. Conchobar heard of the death of Christ and became so angry at the injustice that blood sprang from his head and he died. His eldest son Cormac was invited out of exile to be king of Ulster, and swearing friendship with Aillil and Medb, returned—only to meet death at the hands of men of Connacht. Fergus met death at the hands of Ailill, who met death through the plotting of Medb, who met death by the patient vengeance of one of Conchobar’s sons. Emain Macha was abandoned for Ard Macha close by, which became Armagh, where Saint Patrick built his church.

Two yew trees grew from the stakes in the graves. They grew and grew, until they became so tall that they could entwine with each other at last, centuries later, over the cathedral at Armagh.

Sources: “The Tragical Death of the Sons of Usnach,” The Cuchullin saga in Irish literature, Eleanor Hull (p. 22-53) and “Exile of the Sons of Uisliu,” The Táin, translated by Thomas Kinsella (p. 8-20).

Additional Notes: Because this was meant to make the medieval tales more approachable, in parts of my retelling there may be dialogue and such that read like simplified/altered versions of the original sources. I highly recommend reading the originals, linked below, for a fuller appreciation of the tale, especially Kinsella’s, as in my opinion his translations are the most readable and beautiful of any I’ve read. I’m happy to provide more detail about the adaptation process, the history behind the literature, and the wider context of the Ulster Cycle if anybody has questions.

#inklingschallenge #inklings challenge #four loves fairy tale theme challenge #theme: eros #theme: storge #fairy tale: exile of the sons of uisliu #story: complete #my writing #irish mythology #ulster cycle #wasn't quite sure how to tag it properly because I feel that all four of the types show up in the story #but since they're basically all related and the whole mess is started by a romantic affair I went with those two #this is LONG jsyk #like really long #also in case anybody is interested in the academic side of things:#I tried to stick to the older spellings but I was inconsistent #particularly with the fada I think 😅#(the fada is the little mark above some of the letters)#the ending condenses quite a bit of the rest of the Ulster Cycle #especially the death tales #also also since it isn't really explicitly stated in the original sources #I left out how Noisiu is (I think??) supposed to be a nephew of Conchobar #which tbh would track with the Celtic love triangle (young warrior nephew loves the old king's queen/beloved) that shows up everywhere #Arthur Guinevere and Lancelot (or Mordred)#Mark Iseult and Tristan #Fionn Grainne and Diarmuid #etc etc #(ask me someday about the Celtic love triangle because I have THOUGHTS)#anyway my point is that everybody here is basically related somehow #even Medb is Conchobar's ex-wife lol

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