Even the illusion of June is enough to send a stabbing pain through my chest

[butnotyet]

Who: Augustine the First and ____________ (This could be you!)
What: A little bit of everything, including Event threads, and who knows what else
When: Throughout June
Where: All around Trench; specific locations listed in TLs as necessary.

Content warnings for this character: Necromancer with visibility issues (still running a little bit Invisible Man) seeking CR for explicit gore/body horror as a matter-of-fact daily occurrence / being jaded AF about life in Trench and otherwise (look, man, he's older than dirt) / needs more people to be slutty at-or-with (bearing in mind he is, again, currently at-least-mostly Invisible, you/your character's kinks/mileage May Vary, player more interested in vague/FTB/finessing a scene than anything explicit). Also, his omen is his brother, and also a venomous snake, and also really chatty.

Specific warnings for this post: Nightmares featuring a lot of violence, including self-inflicted/suicide; various types of religious imagery/discussions, definitely including "taking the Lord's Name in vain"; invisible nude spying on God (might get spicy).

Comments

[unsheathedfromreality]

He lets a younger Augustine take his bleeding hand, smiling reflexively in the face of that gentle earnestness.

He returns his Deathless Lord's look with another smile, a subtle half of a thing, the silent language of spouses long-married.

To smile in the face of that pyre-ash stare, that utter devastation that blighted a myriad from its inception, would be to mock at the funeral of all a man's hopes. He does not smile; he moves impulsively to embrace that hollow shell in three dimensions and four, folding him in a cocoon of feather and chitin and eye.

And,

(he is already shattered across an extra dimension of space; what's three more of time?)

He is still not smiling as he seats himself beside Augustine without ceremony, flat on the ground as humans do so he can lean a shoulder against his friend's shoulder. "He thought he was saving you, didn't he?"

It's a guess, impulsive as the embrace that didn't-happen-and-is-now-happening. It's a guess, but put together from all the pieces arrayed before him, capped with the strong impression he's already got of Alfred: A man so sweetly devoted to his brother he would do anything, ask anyone, to brighten Augustine's life.

[butnotyet]

"The math didn't add up," the old man says with the young man's voice, slumping exhaustedly into a beloved's trustworthy embrace, fingers pulling the memory or idea of a cigarette out of a dream's pocket and lighting it with all the solemnity of ritual of every forgotten prayer dropped at the wayside of time's passage.

Coils of smoke rise around them and linger in the air, like incense, like a funeral pyre, like a comfort, like a vice. He draws in the air in front of him, smoke and glowing ember painting a hint of the mind-bogglingly complex necromantic theorems that were all meant to balance down to a simple trade: a death for a life everlasting. They linger in the air, drifting and reshaping themselves as he speaks, until every line equates to one concept only:

Death.

"We knew there had to be another way," he continues, voice racing along as frantic as a surfer on the leading edge of a tsunami. "It took him so little effort to keep us as we were — without aging — to heal even the worst of wounds, or bring us back from things that should have, that did, kill us, time and again — it had been centuries of that! But we needed to be able to travel further — beyond the system — and we couldn't, not as we were. But there had to have been something that would have worked, that wouldn't have had this as the cost —"

He cuts himself off, sharp as a knife, sharp as the void of space curtailing the passage of sound waves. He takes a drag on his cigarette; when he speaks again, his voice is as anciently preserved as one smoked for ten thousand years ought to be. (Far more than it is, in his daily life.)

"He killed all of them, like this, by proving it worked, you know. If I'd let him die — if I'd said the cost was too great, if I'd said it didn't work — none of the others would have been lost, the way they were. He was the first. I was the first. And I was too selfish to let him die forever, to let him leave me — and so I lost him anyway, and have spent every day since then wishing I'd had five minutes to stop him, to keep him alive, so that we could have kept trying."

[unsheathedfromreality]

It is the Emperor--Illarion knows--that Ava speaks of when he says it took him so little effort to keep us as we were. It is a human man incongruous beneath a mantle of immortal godhood who brought them back from things that should have, that did, kill us, time and again-- And yet the shrike cannot but imagine his own unprepossessing, beloved Prince--who'd never wanted Royalty to descend upon him, nor the signifier of Preservation--who'd saved his people again, and again, and again, even when they'd begun to wonder (with all the world) if it would have been better to let them die--

It is Evdokim, Dusya, Illarion thinks of as he considers those smoke-scrawled theorems. (They are all-but-meaningless to his rational mind, written in a foreign hand and tongue he scarce recognizes; intuition understands them immediately, for hadn't he also paid into that equation--immortal life for death, death to save a race from extinction, and death, death, death left in the shrikes' wake.) It is Dusya he thinks of--guiltily, forlornly--as Ava speaks of a love that cannot release the beloved. and all the awful consequences that flow from it.

Death, the smoke spells, and Illarion looks beyond it, to the impressionistic desaturated suggestion of the death that began this--Alik's death, worn down to a splash of scarlet beneath sunset. "We hold it sacred," he murmurs, "that no one's full-culpable for what she didn't have knowledge to predict. Could never have known would follow, no matter how long she studied.

"Did you know then, Ava?" You catches in the lazy drifting strands of spilled Darkblood and velleity ripples into the brief image of Augustine-then: Bright, vigorous, unburdened. Gone again in a gust of smoke. "Could either of you know? Or," the shrike's grip on his friend tightens, "do you place the weight of the man's years on the boys who hadn't lived them?"

From another, the questions might be rhetorical; they might be meant to offer a plausible excuse to a suffering soul--a momentary refuge from despair and self-flensing despite, to think I couldn't have known. From Illarion, they come with a Warlord's sharp interest in what is true--and a Warlord's withheld judgment, no matter how ugly that truth might be.

Mere reassurance isn't going to fix the problem they're in. As much treat a festering wound, a rotted limb, with a kiss and glib words.

It would be an insult, a betrayal, to come this far and give so little.

[butnotyet]

He (Augustine, Augustin, Ava) collapses in on himself in the wake of the question, crushed under the weight of it — how dare someone so trusted by him betray him with such a question as this? — until there is no more bright-eyed (spiritual-)youth, no more beloved Deathless, only the palimpsest-cipher ash-cast of a deathless human, looking up to meet his eyes without a lick of fear or sensibility either one.

His eyes are very, very grey, as empty of color as they are of lived-in life, as he laughs without any humour at all. "Of course I knew," he says, so lightly, because of course this topic is so painful that every single one of his defenses rises up again, no matter how many times he might try to lower them himself; no matter how many times someone else might find a path past them, for that matter. "Do you think we hadn't all discussed it, time and time again, for years? The advisability of one pair or another taking a trial run of it, maybe under Teacher's watchful eye, the better to clean up the inevitable mess we were bound to make of it?"

He scoffs, and looks away, at the lingering carmine smear amongst the grey matte of their environment. (There are tears on his cheeks; he ignores them.)

"Al—he knew, too. And Cris — they'd made some sort of pact, apparently; I think she'd been planning to go first — and he figured, better someone potentially lose a brother than a lover, if it turned out he was wrong, they were wrong, and it was just a final death waiting for him."

(The backdrop behind him is flickering a little, dim and slow, morphing between not-quite-glimpsed settings of Somewhere Else — where there is, maybe, something else yet to be gleaned from this horror, still.)

"I think it was worse, of course," he continues, voice drained even of its façade of levity, thinned and paled by ten thousand years' experience with this endlessly-terrible moment. "If I'd just let him die — Teacher still might have been able to bring him back, again; even if he hadn't been, we would have found each other again, before all that long, in the River — like poor Samael and Anastasia must've done."

His gaze flickers, too, to the observer (friend, husband, Disciple, shrike) beside him, against him —

"He was right twice, of course; losing a lover is worse, really."

[unsheathedfromreality]

But did you know, Illarion wants to press, even as his first thrust crumples Augustine on himself and leaves the Lyctor hollow and cinereous as the stolen eyes in his native face. Did you know, Agushka, that it could never end gladly? Or did someone hide that from you?

It's special pleading--he doesn't truly know enough, not enough to judge and not enough to absolve Augustine or Alfred of full culpability for what they'd done. Something in the memory itself suggests that Augustine didn't truly hoard all the blame for himself (or Alfred); that perhaps the black god who'd told him kindly, pitilessly, that it was too late could have done more. Could have rendered all the tragedy entirely unnecessary, and relieved his Saints of choices they were not ready to make.

Either way, it's a step backward, not forward, that he's made his friend withdraw from him. The shrike turns his head aside from Augustine's look, veiling his eyes and shuttering his eyes not to avoid seeing but to protect the other man in the flux of his grief. The scenery's changing, he notes as he listens; lets a little part of him wonder what that portends while the rest of him listens--picks up the pieces of the tragedy around them.

"I think," he murmurs, "he knew you too well, Ava. That you couldn't let him die; that you both acted out of great love, and great fear."

He looks sidelong at his friend, returning the glance without risking eye-lock. The tears catch his attention, and it is an old pattern in him that moves his hand to wipe them away.

"Who else did you fear for so?"

He's a gist, an intuition now, of where the nightmare wants to go. Perhaps he can nudge it that way--perhaps the demon will be waiting for them there.

[butnotyet]

Who did he fear for? Who did he lose?

"Why, all of them," he answers, (young and) surprised, eyes heedlessly widening — and they're sitting on a bench in a small kitchen in a large building, with only a very small square patch of sunlight tracing its faded arc across the floor before them. There are ghosts in that room, grey flickering smudges of people moving too quickly, like stop-motion film — preparing food, eating it together, cleaning up, fighting, making up (right on the table before them, for about as long as it takes Ava's heart to sound out one quickened beat) — two adults, two children — no, teens, or a young adult, perhaps?

And then Ava is not leaning into his side at all; he's standing at the sink, idly listening to the radio playing something meant to be musical to a human's ear — with even humans in argument over whether or not it missed that mark — as he washes up dishes from both breakfast and the night before, it seems.

There's a distant sound like thunder, sudden and sharp and rumbling, carrying on a bit too long (far too long) for the lack of electrical bite in the air and the square of sunlight on the floor, but all he does is frown, a little, and shake his head, and continue cleaning up.

(There is a ghost beside the shrike, still sitting on the bench, the observer rather than the observed; he would moan, if he could be heard, or go running through the door, fruitless as it would be; she's already dead, after all. She died first, in the first cluster, as the building started to collapse.)

The rest of the scene plays out anyway: the Important News Bulletin that Interrupts Your Regularly-Scheduled Broadcast; the color draining from his face; the way he bolts from his home, dragging the focus (and the observers) with him, to the collapsed rubble that used to be a three-quarters-finished mixed-use building, in this crowded-up city on this wide-open, empty planet — meant to hold dozens of families, already inhabited by twenty — and her, his wife, one of the engineers responsible for the construction and its safety.

The building is rubble; whatever strain caused its destruction would have had to have been caught months ago, at minimum, to be properly corrected; he isn't thinking about that, wouldn't care if he was, he's too busy racing into a building that's gone from three dimensions to very-nearly-two, digging through debris for the fading life signs he can still sense.

It's astonishing, the feats a human body can be capable of, when it heals all its injuries instantaneously; when mere animal strength can be reinforced as easily as a thought, with extra muscle tissue or with a suddenly-present shaft of bone to serve as additional leverage. He removes entire walls that have fallen and trapped people, leaving them to suffocate, bones shattered, breathing in nothing but dust and smoke and their own blood, and he pulls them from the wreckage and shoves them towards safety, bones set and mended, organs quivering in astonished wholeness, even as he wraps a hand around an extended wrist to yank them free —

He's looking for his wife, of course, but she's already dead; in the end, he only finds her because he knows her so well, down to blood and bone. There's nothing beautiful left in the burned corpse he sits beside, shocky and still in his grief, ignoring the danger still evident to any mere human present —

But then, this is still only his nightmare; the danger here has nothing at all to do with a building that collapsed thousands of years ago.

(Already, the air is filling with foreshadowed echoes from hours later, days later, the moment when their daughter, screaming at him, decides it's her father's fault that her mother is dead — and how could he convince her otherwise, when he agrees with her conclusion?)

[unsheathedfromreality]

All of them.

It is a familiar answer for an elf who grew attached to mortals, or a shrike to the short-lived. Everyone who wasn't one of your own kind would wither and fade within short decades of meeting them, then go the way of all Yav into death and decay. Even immortality wasn't a guarantee one's flock would always be there--war, disease, starvation, and accident always awaited. In a way, it was easier-and-harder to lose an elven peer to violence or corruption, or a mortal one to the ravages of age, for so went all the world. But to lose someone already so painfully short-lived to something one should have foreseen, something one had the power to prevent, if she'd only acted soon enough, or realized--

Once, a dear human friend of his had died in Shroudwood--snatched by some huge pillar-touched beast while traveling through an area the shrikes had known was safe. Worse, she'd been there under his aegis, using his maps, and it had protected her not at all. Illarion hadn't been a direct witness--odds were he would not have survived it--but he had heard, after. The horror that impels a young (bright, optimistic, determined) Augustine out the door and keeps him digging in the rubble until there's nothing more to surface--the horror that fuels a genuine miracle for a half-dozen families, but not the grieving Saint who enacts it--that is familiar from the inside. The lurking suggestion around the nightmare's edge, the pending second shift to a memory of deserved excoriation--that is familiar from the inside.

You are so much more than we are! You walk the border between life and death, Creation and Hell, and hold Hell's powers in your hands! You have lived centuries and seen so much more to life--and you couldn't save her?

He had had a Prince older than human civilization to bring his crushed heart to for mending and instruction; he'd had a Priest (and lover) with her own myriad behind her to shrive him of his guilt, deserved and undeserved. The hurt had still remained, and the lesson with it, until all such hurts lost their bite in death--but it had not festered. It had been expertly cleaned.

Had anyone done that for you, Ava? In Alik's case it seemed not--they were all too young and raw, all caught up in the cascade the First Martyr unleashed, and who then could rightly apportion blame or relieve it when all of them--those others--were suffering?

Memory moves the shrike again from where he's ankle-deep in rubble to lay a paternal hand on the younger Augustine's head; it's like stroking smoke. The older version, witness instead of witnessed, seems far more insubstantial and yet is solid beneath Illarion's palm when he shifts to rest it on his friend's back.

"She was the second?" The dispassionate Disciple-soldier he is, and, "I am sorry," the friend-husband-brother he strives to be.

[butnotyet]

"Yes," he answers blankly, staring down at a face he kissed that morning, skin blackened and peeled, lips pulled back in a grimace, split open, weeping interstitial fluid that boiled off in the heat. There were photographs, on the wall in the apartment where he'd been cleaning up the dishes; there had been those ghostly-flicker memories, even right against the table — cooked through like this, no resemblance is left behind.

(In the wake of this devastation, with so much dust and death and chemical residue in the air, it doesn't really smell like a barbecue; at least they are spared that horror.)

“This was my wife,” says the ghostly-substantial man under his hand, staring down at his solidly-insubstantial self, staring down at the death of his happiness. “My first wife — I could have — I should have told her to stay home, we’d been talking of having a third child — I wanted to ask her to stay home, that day, I remember. Our son — my eldest — he’s gone, was — was gone to the Cohort, and our daughter was going to be at Melia’s sister’s after school that day, so we could have had the flat to ourselves all day, if she’d just stayed home —“

The building still would have collapsed; her grief would have been laced with self-excoriation every bit as sharp as his, if she had been the only one of her team to survive, especially for such a reason as playing hooky; she was already mortal, already bound to die after mere decades with him, and who is to say that such a grief would not have hastened her demise regardless? Who could say that her grief would not have ulcerated and multiplied into the sort of malignancy that destroyed the heart and the mind and the will to live?

But it didn’t matter, because she was dead before the noise reached him; no matter how quickly he might move, even in his future when his red, human blood is replaced by glittering, incomprehensible darkblood, he cannot move — could never move — quickly enough to reverse the course of time, to have been already in the room when the collapse began, or to have padded it and everyone in it through some absurd construct of human flesh, warped and spun from his own body or theirs, that she and everyone else in the building might not have died — for how could she survive her grief, if anyone died in the collapse of the building whose safety she was meant to ensure, and she was not already in that number?

”What kind of Saint are you even supposed to be, Da–— Augustine — if you can’t work a proper miracle and bring her back, anyway?!”

(The noise leaks in from his memory of the hours yet to come, clear enough to be heard aloud in a young woman’s voice, thick with grief and a rage searching for a target; the flinch, the sob, is tangible, under the shrike’s hand.)