#i think theyre fun and should have more interactions beyond their cat and mouse game :( | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

xanrae · 10 months

Text

do dungeon lords dream of satyrs?

laios gives mithrun a friendly and totally welcome tip on how to counter insomnia.

dungeon meshi, crack/comedy, post-canon (as of posting), laios, mithrun, possibly ooc?

https://archiveofourown.org/works/48943753

It would be no stretch of the imagination to say that Laios and Mithrun had, at best, a strained working relationship. They had spent quite some time on opposite ends of the narrative, embodying ‘crazy monster man who would become dungeon lord and plunge the world into an unending hell’ and ‘ruthless elven military leader here to mete out their own brand of justice with impunity’, respectively.

Still, Kabru was a miracle worker, and while he’d utterly failed to reconcile the two during the dark old days, these were the bright new days of the future, where anything was possible, apparently including getting (parts of) Team Laios and (some of) the Canaries on personable terms. It turns out that when you manage to rid the world of a voring demon (Mithrun)/work together to prepare your sister for a giant feast for a celebratory “Congrats for surviving the fall of a dungeon and not getting eaten yourself!” block party (Laios), you (collective) can forgive a lot of things.

The death of the demon hasn’t brought Mithrun’s desires back, and neither has it chased away whatever is causing his insomnia. Now that Kabru is no longer always free to give pre-bedtime footrubs, Mithrun has fallen back on spells and potions to find sleep. He’s holding one of the latter in his hands now, contemplating the flask when a creak announces the opening of his bedroom door. Mithrun’s head snaps up, and only the vague awareness that Cithis would be very unhappy if he told her he’d wasted her potion and needs another one, actually, please and thank you stops him from teleporting it into the shape silhouetted in the doorway. Damn, hadn’t he locked that thing?

“What’s that?” With absolutely no sense of propriety, the shape starts moving into the room before Mithrun can ask it what the hell it wants. A little further into the room and no longer blocking the only source of light, the hazy shadow resolves itself into the horrible, towering shape of one Laios Touden.

The two stare at one another for a long moment. Laios is happily awaiting an answer to his totally normal and totally sane question, and Mithrun wonders if he’s wandered into the wrong room and started preparing for a night in someone else’s bed. Outside of a dungeon, his sense of direction is once again totally fucked. But he glances around, sees his armor folded neatly on the table, his pack sitting in the corner. Yyyyes, definitely his own room. His one good eye flickers back to Laios, who seems to see no problem with continuing to stand at the doorway of the Canary Captain’s room with no explanation.

“Sleeping draught,” Mithrun answers finally.

“What’s it made of?”

The sparkle in Laios’s eyes makes it clear what kind of answer he’s looking for. Mithrun takes no pleasure in squashing the tallman’s hopes and dreams, but he doesn’t exactly feel bad either. “Just herbs.” Then, because he feels it necessary, he adds, “We don’t consume monsters where I come from.” Where anyone comes from, actually. That seems to have been a uniquely Island Dungeon phenomenon, thanks to Team Laios. And while food is food is food, he also can’t say he’s sorry to never eat a walking mushroom again.

“Oh.” Laios seems to deflate just a little, and Mithrun keeps staring at him, expecting the tallman to leave at any moment now that monsters have been removed from the equation. Instead, Laios moves closer, and Mithrun tenses, grip tightening around the sleeping potion. Needs must, and Cithis would simply have to deal with remaking him the potion, but Laios only raises the tray that had been hitherto unaddressed in his hands.

“Well, we were just having dinner, and we thought that since you really helped with chopping up Falin’s dragon body, you might want something to eat....” He trails off, seeing the expression on Mithrun’s face. “Oh, don’t worry,” Laios continues cheerfully. “We’re not done prepping her yet!”—Mithrun’s face is carefully impassive here, the deliberately unaffected air of someone who doesn’t love the words he’s just heard—“This is just beef.” He sets the tray with a soft clink of cutlery on the table next to Mithrun’s armor. “But if you’re sleeping now, you could always have it tomorrow for breakfast!” Mithrun just nods wordlessly. A collage of a wild-eyed, monster-crazed Laioses—the impression he’d from the other adventurers up til now—flashes through his mind. But the tallman seems vaguely normal now, even if he had casually mentioned his sister in a way that most people would find unpalatable (hah).

“Do you know,” Laios says, totally unprompted, just as Mithrun is believing that he’ll finally leave him to finish taking his potion, “that when I can’t sleep, I count satyrs? Maybe that would help you.”

There’s another long moment as they stare at one another—Laios cheerfully expectant, Mithrun at a total loss for words that, for once, has nothing to do with his piteously atrophied social skills. Satyrs do not figure anywhere in the top million things Mithrun would like to think about prior to bed, especially in multiples. In fact, there is literally not a single thing on god’s green earth that he would hate more to think of in the moments before a reluctantly-inflicted rest than goat-like monsters. Even the most tolerable iteration, where the goat-demon is pulp beneath his bloodied fists, is definitely not conducive in any way shape or form to the peaceful and relaxing repose that is usually the goal of sleep.

Mithrun eventually finds it in himself to say, “Is that so.” His tone is so flat that, had any philosophers or engineers been present, they could have derived a new method of ensuring level construction from those three words alone.

Laios doesn’t notice, though. Content in a friendship overture well executed, he waves Mithrun good night and finally, thankfully, leaves, closing the door with a soft click behind him. In the greatest exercise of will to date in Mithrun’s not-inconsiderable life, he does not knife, strangle, disembowel, replace the brains of, or otherwise maim Laios as he leaves—though perhaps the down in his pillow might have been a superior alternative to whatever was currently occupying the space between the tallman’s ears, Mithrun notes sourly, flopping back onto his bed. He cannot down the sleeping draught fast enough.

He does not count satyrs.

#writing #fanwork #fanfic #dungeon meshi #laios #mithrun #crack #comedy #i think theyre fun and should have more interactions beyond their cat and mouse game :(

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