deercountry | Then came July like three o’clock in the afternoon, hot and listless and miserable...

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Then came July like three o’clock in the afternoon, hot and listless and miserable...

Who: Augustine the First and some CR
What: Assorted probably-all-closed-to-specific-characters threads
When: Throughout July
Where: All around Trench; specific locations listed in TLs as necessary.

Content warnings for this character: Blood, gore, unconcerned attitude toward violence (and toward inflicting body horror on others). Frequent, if not constant, amoral and callous outlook on life. Hypersexual, with a tendency to use sex and sexuality as a weapon, with or without involving magic. Death of a sibling. Sibling as an omen (and also a snake). Suicide (by pact or otherwise). Imperialistic tendencies.

Specific warnings for this post: Lots of violence; forced blood bonds (remember those from February?), or at least performed with a complete lack of 'informed consent'; wasp-related imagery (hopefully fairly vague for my sake, too).

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Being able to see — him — as an amalgamation between the Man who Used To Be God and every horrible part of a Herald, when they were under the open sky, with the ocean forming a horizon a world away — in other words, with a lot of space nearby — had been bad enough.

(God is dead. John has, apparently, been lost even longer. Neither name is willing to cross Augustine's mind when thinking about him, the horrifying creature replacing someone who was worth loving — and he can't very well call him 'Teacher', either.)

He'd cleared a path back to the house, with Alfred's help — with Alfred keeping the rearguard, so he didn't have to worry about having his spine ripped out by, by that thing — and had spent as long as he possibly could locking and warding the gate and the rest of the house's boundaries, for that matter, once he had followed Augustine back — surprisingly enough with Kaworu in tow.

(He doesn't like that he's effectively locked Kaworu in with him, obviously — but under the circumstances, he's desperately hoping that they'll just settle into their own rooms and keep plenty of distance between each other, and that that thing will stay wherever it has been, suppressed, for the past three months.)

It's a good thing that Lyctors don't need sleep, technically, because he didn't get a wink of it all night; being enclosed in the same house as something so horrible is as bad as being trapped in a waking nightmare, unable to escape, unable to change it. It doesn't matter that the night before the boat trip, he was — theoretically — exactly the same as he is now; it doesn't matter that Augustine's perception is the only thing that's changed.

Now he knows, and he can't abide it, and he's going to have to fix it or die trying — not for the first time; but that's entirely fitting, and exactly what he deserves for letting things rest for three months, not trying to be sure that John, the Man in the equation, the aspect he loved best and brightest, was the one that was truly present. Let him die, if it comes to that, if that's the only way to fix things for the kids — it won't be the first time, anymore, and it isn't as if this holding-pattern of a life in Trench is so valuable on its own to merit being selfish instead.

It's shortly after dawn that the memory floats to the surface of his mind; a page he'd read, months ago, at those Archives, even before he'd encountered Harrowhark there — what was the book's title, again? Something about a Beginner's Guide — he'd picked it up because he was trying to understand why blood was so strange here, that was it — but it had been about blood pacts, not blood consistency, and so he hadn't kept reading it all the way through. Some of it, though, keeps nudging its way into his thoughts, as he gets up from his sleepless bed, changing his shirt to a less-rumpled one, keeping his weapons close as he heads to the kitchen.

Everyone knows the story: the Reckoning was made to go fight the impossible battle against blood pollution, corruption, and beasthood [...] the Bonding Pact can be the ultimate sign of devotion [...] despite being one of the strongest pacts in this world, it is also one of the simplest to perform [...] can be performed any time of year [...] not required to have an audience [...] these bonds can be forced on an individual...

He can still feel Kaworu's presence, upstairs, in the bedroom he shares with Paul — wherever he's ended up, but Augustine can't worry about that right now, not if he's going to do anything to fix this —

Worse, he can still feel the buzzing wrongness, as he draws closer to God's room, the sound and the feeling of too many insects in too small a space — the thought crossing his mind, once again, that God had been far too casual about the idea that Faith had 'bees in her blood', at the end of May, and that even then it had raised a flag in Augustine's mind — and he breaks, and turns and flees the house, long before he's close enough to knock on that door.

It's easier than he expects, to find the book again — but then, there's more than one copy available, for a book covering information so basic, isn't there? The instructions are even as simple as they claim to be, and quite frankly he'd rather take the tradeoff of it being easier to get the roses than to have the strongest possible version of success, as he reads through the possibilities once again.

(Finding ash or bone will never be difficult, for a necromancer — especially one who smokes, when the instructions are so nonspecific about the kind of ash — and yet if it's all the same, the description of how the paste is supposed to smell notwithstanding, he's quite relieved that they're not supposed to consume it.)

It's the next day that the doubts kick in, after another sleepless night spent staring out his window at the silver snuffbox bathing in moonlight on the porch railing. (He doesn't think about how he hasn't slept in two overly-action-packed days, or the effects of long-term proximity to Heraldic horror.) How's he going to know this even works? Joy may have managed to take God apart — for five minutes, anyway — but it's a joke to think that he's ever been able to make any change to God or Man, as opposed to his surroundings, without his actively-willing consent.

These bonds can be forced on an individual.

He has to believe it will work, because — because He lost — because God came here through the same squidly mechanism as everyone else, and this magic comes from a creature as far beyond him as God was beyond His Saints, as far as a Lyctor is beyond a necromancer —

It's just that he'll still feel so much more comfortable if he knows that it can work on someone with a greater power beyond mere life and death.

But he does know of someone he can test it on, come to think of it — he's just going to need to find her within the next ten hours, to give him time to convince her to help him save the world, or at least keep the God who Became Wasp from ruining it any further.

«And if she doesn't agree?»

He knows the answer to Alfred's question; he knows Alfred knows, too; if he never says it, does it matter?

"She will," Augustine murmurs, rubbing at his tired and bloodshot eyes. "Of course she will. We just need to find her."

Thankfully for Augustine, Sarah hasn't gone to the Farther Shores to explore; she isn't out past Trenchwood, either, even if he was the one to initially point her that way. She can instead be found in the canals of Willful Machine, or rather at them — watching the boats go by and looking at this or that model as if she's trying to memorize them.

She's realized that she needs to get herself a boat, but she's also pretty sure that the easiest way to do so will probably be to build one, and it won't be easy to pay for materials when she's not super confident about the safety of giving away her blood.

That makes starting a farm hard, too.

Sarah has a long blue knit duster wrapped around her and her hair down and letting it be caught by the wind, so almost all of her is shielded somehow; no one will be able to accidentally touch her, and she has something of an emotional shield up against the onslaught of People that the district has.

The duster and the hair, both flapping in the wind, make beautiful flags; Alfred had noticed her hair, the first time his brother had talked to her, because he'd always had a thing for hair like that.

It isn't going to do much good to tell anyone that, now, when he's just a ghost of his former self, when his body isn't exactly going to be the prime attractive form in the view of anyone he'd actually want to have interested in him — but he'd still enjoyed her hair, wistfully, back then, and he still notices it now, as he skims through the rooftops as high as he dares, when the air is full of so many creatures jealous of their airway-rights and prerogatives.

He's still the first one to find her, and so he sends the image to his brother, and he perches on a lamp-post nearby, and decides that his best bet is going to be talking to her, to make sure she doesn't leave too quickly, to make sure he doesn't have to stalk after her —

«Sarah, hey, nice to see you again,» he calls, and then flicks his tongue out at her, guiltily. «Um. Not that I think that you and I talked, all that much — you talked to Augustine, though!»

She had always liked snakes, and so the first thing to come out of Sarah when she notices that there is actually a ... flying snake talking to her is an exhalation of a laugh at the tongue flicker. It's—he's?—much larger than any kind of snake she's spent any amount of time around, never spending enough time in forests to attract rattlers, but hopefully the friendly snake is not going to attack her either.

"I think I remember seeing you," Sarah says politely, because that's about the truth of it; she either saw the snake-Omen, or didn't, but somehow still perceived him enough that his existence does not surprise her.

«I'm Alfred,» he offers up quickly, in the interests of politeness — he has more than enough qualms about the rest of his brother's plans, today, along with more than enough concerns in the wake of the boat ride two days ago — how was that only two days ago? — and so he slithers a little bit lower down on the lamp post, to be closer to head-height and a nice conversational distance.

«I'm also very cuddly and friendly, I promise! I mean no harm to you or anything! Neither does Augustine, but he is looking for you, so I hope you don't mind that I told him I spotted you.»

"Well met, Alfred," says Sarah with a smile that is—a little awkward, a little shy, but not exactly hesitant. She is well socialized, now. She has been of the wider world more than she has not. But some things never change, and Sarah King being a little bit unsteady in facial expressions is probably one of them. "I'm afraid I haven't gotten a chance to grow anything yet, so the produce he wanted isn't going to be ready this quickly."

She wanted to ask what cuddly looked like from a massive snake, but as of yet was resisting the temptation.

«Oh — no, I don't think it has anything to do with produce,» although he sounds — is — a little hesitant, on that count. Maybe it does, or maybe he's planning to work his way up to the topic a little bit more casually...?

Well, fuck it, Alfred thinks.

«I mean, is there anything that you could have grown this quickly, that would actually be worth buying from you, if you'd had perfect conditions but hadn't started anything yet?»

"Well," Sarah hesitates, thinking about it.

She glances out at the canal for a second, bites at the edge of her lip, turns back to Alfred: "No, I don't think so, unless the way this world has—changed me—the blood thing—unless there is and I don't know about it yet."

As if he might know and be able to tell her. If he did, he probably would've volunteered it already.

«Oh — that would be so cool,» which is outright wistful. «I have no idea whatsoever if that's actually possible, though, I'm sorry — have you figured out what kind of blood you do have, though? It's useful information to know, regardless! I'm kind of shit out of luck when it comes to blood, personally, given that I'm mostly made out of smoke and glitter. Given that Augie's got Darkblood, though, that's the joke — the glitter, I mean.»

"It's Paleblood."

Sarah has figured that much out. That is nearly the only thing she has got figured out, having been in Trench a matter of days, but it is something that she can confidently figure out. Whether that's the right way to say it, whether it should have been I'm Paleblood, though, that she didn't know.

It was another thing to be added to a very, very long list of things to figure out and steps to get herself established. She may have been weary at this point in her life of starting over and establishing herself once more, but she's also extremely experienced at it.

"And you're just a clever illusionist show, obviously. Smoke and glitter. All you need now are mirrors."

«Awfully hard to carry them, though,» Alfred points out wryly.

"Which is, presumably, why he'd make me carry them," Augustine adds more dryly, offering Sarah a smile as he appears from the crowds.

(He looks ... wary. Jittery. Like he hasn't slept in a couple of days, for some reason, although as a Lyctor he does at least look functional, unlike most people would after trying that. He also looks as though he doesn't really trust the crowd around them not to turn on him, or on them, at a moment's notice. At least they aren't by the seashore.)

"Hello again, Sarah, and well-met, and all of that — have you been settling in all right, then? Found a good place to stay?" Can that be enough of the small talk, maybe? Can they get to work on the actual reason he went looking for her?

The only downside to the test, and its evident success, is in the way he now has to wait another twenty-four hours to get the timing right. Another night spent with a snuffbox soaking up moonlight; another night spent without sleep, with a persistent itch in his eyes as they bleed and try to heal again, as his blood tries to weep from them without being liquid or even entirely real; another night spent far too close to the maddening buzz of him, of his voice and his movements in the house — another night spent with his hands on the hilts of his weapons, ~~hoping for and~~ fearing his approach —

Alfred spares him what he can; God's hairbrush floats into the room, in the middle of the night. John was never as particular about his hair as his blood — foolish, really, given what they could have done, with time enough, and need, had it not proven simpler just to seduce him —

He can't think about that right now, though, can't think about what it was like when he was held, wanted, loved, fucking cherished —

When the film over his eyes lightens enough to see again, it's to find that Alfred has somehow already managed to pick nearly half the hairbrush clean of John's hair, leaving it neatly piled up between them.

He still has more roses, and he'll always have more ashes.

Only sixteen more hours to go until twilight, and then —

Then he'll have to go kick a wasp's nest, and see what comes boiling out.

He's doing fine.

Fine in the everything-on-fire way, fine in the way that nothing is stopping him. He can pace the house and lose every third step when he forgets walking, forgets gravity, forgets he's not meant to have wings. It feels horribly natural. She's always beside him, or within him, or she is him, and now he's lost his cover for pretending it isn't so. Now everyone can see what she is, and what he is, and all that it implies.

God paces, and paces, and paces, and he looks like the first shrieked notes of a dead planet's fury. It's funny, right? It's fitting.

Augustine is still in the house. He flinches and he shudders and he does not leave, he doesn't leave him, Augustine never leaves him. Kaworu is here, pacing too sometimes, in that distant and drowsy way she used to back in the early days. He's a thing of eyes and saltwater. She hated having just two eyes, so John's happy for him, you know? Let the kid have as many eyes as he wants.

John's doing fine.

He is in the bedroom when Augustine finally comes to him. Annabel's echo lingers out of sight, boiling up as smoke in his footprints when he bothers to touch the ground. She is in his heart and his mind and his soul but she doesn't talk much, she's not chatty.

So it is with heavy, inhuman attention that he turns to face the door.

He started when he'd only used up twelve of his sixteen hours, because — well, there were a few false starts; that's as good a way as any of describing having to stop dead and bolt back to a bathroom for another round of dry-heaving, time and time again; of being stuck standing in the midpoint of the hallway, forehead pressed against a wall or doorframe, focusing hard on his breathing so he won't —

There are three points burning themselves into his awareness, three points of endless gravity holding him in this world, three weights balancing him in their orbit, three points to make a plane to say this is where you are in the universe —

A moon-bathed silver snuffbox, full of ash and roses.

A blade of obsidian and enamel and blood and radiation, borne in a leaden sheath tucked against his spine.

Alfred, curled around his heart, but not — at the moment — his shoulders.

(He has no idea of the messages Alfred has been sending, during this Godawful stretch of time, using Augustine's own Omni for the purpose.)

He stops, just outside the door to John's bedroom; he hesitates, fingers gripping the doorframe, as if it's there to protect him from what's inside — even though he can hear the buzzing-clattering-drone of the world's worst home invader, just on the other side of the thin piece of wood (too thin, too brittle, to protect him from the stinger that suits a wasp of God's size, and he's standing close enough to the door to be struck, if God were to choose to strike) — and his knees are trembling, this is stupid, this is suicidal, why doesn't he have his blades? (Their blades.) Why did he decide to leave both rapier and smallsword downstairs, out of reach, leaving him dependent on something so unfamiliar instead? He can still go back, he isn't trapped in the room yet — he might still make it back upstairs again before twilight's ending —

«I will be with you, always,» Alfred reminds him, coiling around his spine, not just his heart. «Even until the end of the world.»

"I bet you say that to all the boys," Augustine whispers, and sets his mouth in a laugh he can't voice, and (with Alfred's helping him, maybe more than he realizes) opens the door without knocking.

He walks into the domain of the Man who Became God, the God who Became Squid, the Squid who Became Wasp, and he shuts the door behind himself, and leans back against it, and doesn't bother to brush away the fresh dusting of blood glittering away from the corners of his eyes.

"'Help me do this thing, and then we'll talk, you and I,'" he recites, his grey eyes fixed on the terrible voids which serve as God's, the better to ignore the rest of His horrible form. (His expression hasn't yet changed.) "Time's up, John."

If I repent — if I get on my knees — will you finally tell me the truth?

(He leans against the door, just enough to show that he isn't going to bolt through it; he's still taller than John, and everything he Became, so long as his feet stay on the floor, so long as his legs remain more human-shaped than not — tall enough to look down his nose without having to tilt his head back very far, anyway. One thing is definite, no matter what shape John is in as Augustine's words sink in: he isn't on his knees. Not for this corruption of the God he's worshipped for millennia.)

~~(Not yet.)~~

Augustine comes to him ramrod-straight and trembling, swallowing past nausea and sick wet fear. Augustine doesn't run. It would be funny, wouldn't it, it'd be so fucking poetic, if Augustine took one look at him and ran. Gone or fled.

But Augustine's here to talk, here for answers, and John spreads his horrible segmented hands in a gesture to mean he has nothing left to hide.

"Let's talk," he agrees. The sound of it buzzes and clicks in his throat. "Let's talk. I owe you that, Augustine, I know I do. This is not really the stage I had planned."

He shivers forward on iridescent wings, with a sound that would scrape any necromancer's nerves raw. He draws closer. He is not yet unkind enough to reach out and touch, but he wants to. He wants to.

It's been a rough couple of days for this household, in the wake of God's hubris, in the wake of God's failure, in the wake of God's transformation. Everyone he loves is gone, or fled — except for the ones who were there for him at the very beginning, awakened into an empty world, his first two disciples —

So yeah, honestly it has to suck for him, that one of them is a dead snake created by the very beings who have apparently found it such a delight to dunk on John Gaius, Necrolord Prime, and the other — the other can't look at him. Not directly, anyway; not without his eyes darkening in real time, blood spilling inside and out, filming his vision, sublimating into dust on the wind of every blink of his eyelashes; not without making his mouth tighten and his lips blanch in a way that says that once again his body really does want him to consider the advisability of purging away any exposure to this thing before him —

Augustine's hands are not that visible — he's wearing gloves, all the better to limit the number of places a Herald, or something like one, could touch him readily — and above and beyond that, there's the fact that one hand is insouciantly resting in a pocket, the other at the small of his back. (Anyone looking from ~~God~~'s angle might think his palm was against the door, for stability, or perhaps that it was poised to grab the knob, if escape ends up the only reasonable option after all. Anyone might think it willpower alone that's got Augustine's spine held so straight, for that matter. Anyone logical would expect that the sheath of his new sliver of a knife, described as against his spine, must be a vertical line at the small of his back, under his clothing — they wouldn't stop to think how literal a necromancer could be, with a description like that, knowing the shape of a human spine as intimately as so many do. None of that even approaches the question of what he's holding in his pocket, in the palm of his other hand.)

He swallows again. Three points make a plane. He opens his eyes, as ~~God~~ buzzes closer — close enough to touch; close enough to strike —

"Going to tell me what you were planning, at some point?" he rasps out, his unfocused eyes locked on a point as far away as the beach, somewhere on the other side of the thing in front of him that's been so busy destroying everything he's ever loved. (Which he? John? Augustine? Alfred? ... does it matter?)

The monster is inside the house with him.

No one else is. (But what about Kaworu? Is he really present? Is he aware of anything being wrong with the person who made this house into a home, and then destroyed it?) No one is going to be concerned about what happens to him, shut away with this monster. (Sarah will, and Cassowary — but he isn't thinking about one, and isn't aware the other knows.) Nobody is going to notice if he fails at carrying out this plan. ("I made my promises too long ago to give up on them now. And anyway, I suspect if I leave, there won't be anything to come back to, here.") Nobody's going to care if he fails, either. (It is a look of fellow feeling. It is one that says, wordlessly, that whatever their necromancers may do, they are cavaliers, and there is an understanding of their duty between them; that in absence of any compelling reason not to be, they are comrades in common cause of care. Ortus still might.)

"Was there a point when you planned how you'd recover from a failure, John, or did you decide that you would win or die trying, and damn the consequences to anyone caught by the fallout?"  His words are not the only weapon he holds, but they are the first he wields, even as his flesh parts bloodlessly over his lumbar vertebrae, yielding the ~~all-too-~~eager handle of a blade up to his restless fingers.

"You know what I was planning," he says, like complaint, and it comes clicking. "Mate— Augustine— come on— what do I ever want? I didn't lie, not really. I wanted the River. I wanted the road home."

He wanted his kingdom; he wanted his war; he is a revenant of himself and he knows it, he's always known it, driven fixedly onward towards unfinished business. (He will not rest here, apart from her. He will not let them keep him in a box, buzzing madly and dashing himself against the walls, knowing she is somewhere else.)

(He wanted to win and die trying.)

"I didn't think," rattles the thing God has become, "it would look like this."

He breaks; he cannot bear even this slight distance, this still tension, the quiet in this room. He cannot bear Augustine with his back against a door and acid in his throat and his brother vanished somewhere, horrified into silence. He can't bear to be alone in here.

John, with chitin segmented in glossy black over his bare phalanges, reaches out. Maybe Augustine will shriek and maybe he'll vomit and maybe he'll rip God's arm from his body, but he needs the reaction, needs to press, needs something.

Alfred is right here, of course; he would never abandon his beloved brother, his necromancer, in a moment so deadly serious as this; he is the armor wrapped around his brother's heart and soul, yielding back every ounce of vim and vigor, of speed and reflex, with both of them knowing full well the risks inherent to this course of action.

They will die trying anyway, even if neither of them thinks that God, in rage and grief and failure, will think enough of his love for his First Saint — someone who has already betrayed him once, at least; someone who has already tried to kill him, before this; someone who drew his blades against God on the beach, only a few days ago, who fought hard enough and cruelly enough to drive God's Omen away from her chosen battle with a boy turning into a nuclear apocalypse — to spare his life, to spare him pain, when he strikes.

(They don't really know what winning would look like; how can they plan for success?)

The creature backing him further and further into the closed doorway reaches for him, and it's so much worse when John's face is right there in the midst of these atrocities, looking so heartbroken. It — he — reaches for Augustine, all the worst parts of a massive space bee, melted over the bared and warped skeleton of a man, and if it had only been bone it wouldn't have been so terrible, but — every inch of him is made into a reminder of ten thousand years of lies, give or take a few centuries.

"The Resurrection Beasts —"
"Can't kill me."
"You acted afraid —"
"Acted is operative."

He reaches for Augustine, desperate for a reaction, and he gets one: Augustine explodes.

Not as Mercymorn had, bare moments before the words replaying in his mind; he explodes into action, the knife in his hand no longer held at his back but blocking, parrying, countering the weapon of God's outstretched hand — a blade that is hungry, a blade that's a tooth, a blade that thirsts for blood ~~— a blade that has already tasted his blood, no matter how carefully he thinks he's pulled it from its sheath beside his spine —~~ a blade that has tasted the blood of John Gaius before —

He strikes true, and he strikes at a speed so much faster than human reaction times could ever allow. The arm in front of him is scored open even before the knife is visible; the snuffbox from Augustine's pocket is open below it, ready and waiting, as the first sudden gush of blood escapes, thanks to a knife that eats away at the will and the wards which keep the Blood of God inviolate — with his own blood joining it, fragments of a second later, mixing in that silver moon-soaked container — combine all the ingredients into the cup and thoroughly stir with a fragment of bone — and the blade bites into the chitin covering the wrist still stretching toward Augustine, bites through it, paralyzes hand and fingers long enough that those chitin-covered bones can sift and stir through the mucky substance of ash and rose and hair, wetted down with black-glitter blood, and it ought to be the world's absolute worst arts-and-crafts project but instead there is a paste that smells like roses and has homogenized to black without glitter, and it's already on the hand of the creature of madness and horror that is supposed to be John Gaius, Necrolord Prime, beloved and brother and king and Redeemer —

Augustine lets go of the knife, drags his hand through the paste, and throws himself forward and sideways, launching away from the closed door behind him because there's another doorway right there, leading to the ensuite bathroom, and the last thought in his mind before the shock of contact is I love you and he doesn't know if it's Alfred or John or both ~~or himself~~ he means —

("Stop your mission, John. Give up on the thing I know you’ve been looking for since the very beginning. Stop expanding. Stop assembling this bewildering cartography, this invasion force. I’ve puzzled over it for five thousand years, and I don’t believe I truly understand it now. But let it go. Let them go. Nobody has to be punished anymore for what happened to humanity.")

The goop on his hand makes contact with the face of God, somewhere atop that hellish eldritch monstrosity that's supposed to be a human, as his weight and momentum force both of them back into the too-cramped hallway, into the Doorway —   And time crashes down on him again, with two absolute certainties: that this is going to hurt, a lot, and that he only wishes he'd had the option to do something like this before he'd pulled the Mithraeum into the River.

«Please — please just stop lying to me. Stop lying to yourself, John. Please, please, please —»

Edited 2022-07-24 07:14 (UTC)

John knows this fucking tooth.

It's a real blade, now, but all he can recall is the horrible judder of the thing against his bare and bloody ribs; the way it shredded his heart and spilled out galaxies of Darkblood upon the black sand; the look in Paul's face, the break in his voice. He'd let John hold him, and now here they are. Now here's his knife jammed between ulna and radius, snagged between bands of chitin, shivering unholy pain all up and down God's arm. Augustine pries his stuck-through wrist down, grinds the bare bone of his fingers through a paste of blood and roses, and John is too slow to realize what is happening.

He is too focused on the contact, the singing pain, Paul's fucking knife, to understand what's being done to him.

Then it's too late. Augustine flings himself incomprehensibly forward, bowling straight into the black-chitin nightmare of his God— John catches him by the shoulder and digs in, the rose-tarred bones of his hands puncturing the fabric of Augustine's shirt, biting into yielding flesh because he just wants to feel something split and crack, wants to hurt him, wants—

He—

Please, please, please comes the frantic litany, like the flash before the thunderclap. Then it's all pain, a mad horrific violation of pain, five bolts of agony through his shoulder in perfect echo— when he clenches his fingers with the flinch, the pain deepens in time—

John says something that might be Fuck or What or How, and might be voiced or internal. He recoils; he tears free of Augustine's shoulder and falls back to clutch at his own phantom wound, and then the blazing lines of finger-marks upon his face. They shine with moonlight, etched bright and clean in the same white as the rings of his eyes.

The question has been asked by countless philosophers, in armchairs and bars and social media platforms, throughout vast swathes of human society: Is it better to be happy, or to be right?

Well, Augustine is proven right, and he is definitely not happy about it — but how can he be, in the midst of crazed grief and near-suicidal desperation? He's said his piece; he's disarmed himself, because out of everything he could have planned, he didn't come here to try to kill John (again); he has flung himself to the mercy of capricious foreign gods, to see if they might be able to intercede with his own, gone mad from their brethrens' interference; he doesn't know if he expects them to fail, or for the thing John's become to kill him anyway, for daring to ask them. It doesn't matter. He made his plan and he committed to it and he executed it — more flawlessly than he'd honestly expected — and now there's nothing left but the punishment, which hurts about as much as expected — a mind-numbing agony, as his left shoulder shatters under the impact of those insectoid talons — there's nothing in his mind, no words or thoughts or prayers or images, just the overriding pain — and then it gets worse, the grip tightening, clavicle and second rib splintering against chitin, lung punctured under the renewed assault — and the worst of it isn't even the way his body still tries (however feebly) to heal around these intrusions, so that each millimeter is a new injury.

It's the sheer mind-scrambling terrible madness, of having the substance of a half-Herald violating the boundaries of his flesh and ripping him to shreds at a metaphysical level. It's a worse injury than he's had in thousands of years; at least this time it isn't his skull —

And then it's gone, ripped free and away from him, violently enough to send him stumbling away — dropping en route, a child's abandoned marionette, crashing to a stunned halt under the bathroom sinks, gaining a temporary concussion for his troubles as well.

True, there's some part of his bruised brain aware that he's also been stabbed in the right arm — that there's an alien blade through his wrist — but it's a far more muted agony, for him; more distant, at a further remove — and besides, it wasn't made by a Herald; it will heal quickly enough, as soon as he (or someone else) takes it out.

And then:

Augustine's eyes flick open and lock on to John's, and they are too grey for what they've become, for most of the past ten thousand years. They're Augustine's eyes, not Alfred's ever-so-slightly-noticeably-browner, ashier grey — which means, of course, that they are Alfred's eyes, now; the eyes Augustine's body has borne every single time he dipped into the River, trusting Alfred's soul to keep him safe and intact, even when fighting Heralds.

"Please, my Lord," Alfred says with his brother's mouth and throat and his own voice, far more exactly correctly his than poor Pyrrha can manage with Gideon's anatomy. "Please — I beg of you, I pray, my God, my God — stop, if ever anything has given you pause in your life — don't kill us, John," he whispers. "Please."

Augustine— Alfred— somebody, fuck if he cares, prays. John could fucking kill him. John could kill everything and everyone and all of everything just to get a moment's peace, just to get some quiet, because there is too much—

There's a voice in his head, another body in his body; it's like awakening to thanergy and thalergy and soul. It's like becoming God. It's like—

It is nothing he wanted, and he hates it, and it's terrifying.

"What have you done to me," rasps God, and he falls back. He doesn't hurt him. He recoils at a stumble and a shuddering buzz until his wings meet the wall, and then he has nowhere else to run, so he stops. He is cornered; he is at a loss. He makes a sound that might be a laugh or the start of a sob, and it sounds horrific in his ruined wasp's voice. Everything about this is categorically bad. "Fuck."

The knife is still in his arm, juddering incomprehensibly against chitin and bone. He lets it. God or John or whoever he is, a monster who has been leashed at the level of his very soul and knows it, sinks down against the wall and puts his face in his hands.

Around them, the room is quiet.

Time passes.

Not that much of it, admittedly; a minute, two — long enough for a Lyctor's body to finish repairing shattered bone and punctured lung, shredded muscle and ligament; long enough for the silence surrounding them to permeate the whole house, and for the creak of its settling to become all the more nightmarish.

The most patient man present rises, then; he stands; he carefully pulls off the shirt he's wearing, tugging a little where the wounded shoulder has tried to incorporate the fabric embedded into it in five places, and drops it to the floor. He pads over to the monster that is also a man that he loves and a God he has worshiped for the entirety of his remembered life, and sets his hand around the bones of an arm that bears only a passing resemblance to a human's, and he tugs the knife free from God's wrist without any real effort needed.

It breaks Alfred's heart, to see God brought so low — but cavaliers are never so affected by Heralds as their necromancers; he isn't vomiting, there's no blood leaking from his eyes, or anywhere else for that matter. He's had time to get used to the idea, over the past few days, that this is what has become of the God who Became Man. The only emotion written across Augustine's face, as Alfred crouches just before God, hand still pressed to the wretched bones of his arm, is that sorrowful, patient heartbreak. "You look like shit, my Lord," he says, not unsympathetically.

(The knife has vanished; the pain has vanished; there are no thoughts in John's head but his own, with Augustine absent from his own, kept safe from the horror of God-as-his-own-Herald behind the shield of his brother's soul — a blood bond, after all, can't be between a Sleeper and an Omen, now, can it — creatures made of smoke and their Sleeper's blood that they are?)

The only proof of any of it, then, is the moonlit marks glowing on the left shoulder of whichever Quinque brother it is, there before him, hand gentle and warm against his weary bones — five pale streaks wrapped around the joint, splayed out too wide for the spread of a human hand, each truncating too bluntly for human fingers — too abruptly, too blurrily for a simple hold.

"You should really get to bed, John," Alfred adds more gently — forgivingly, almost — and makes to tug his God to his feet, to steer him off to his neglected bed.

(The mark of the claw, the talon, the digit that so little resembles John's thumb does not quite obliterate part of the small, narrow, even-paler whole handprint just a little too high to be centered above Augustine's heart.)

Augustine— no, Alfred, the way Pyrrha is not Gideon— approaches. He feels abruptly exposed, naked, shameful. He wants to draw away. He wants to cover the wet bare lines of his bones, the segmentation around his jaw, the gloss of chitin. He wants very badly to hide.

Alfred speaks to him gently, and touches his arm. There is no echoed lurch of pain and nausea in the touch: it is gentle, smooth. John lets him. John lets him draw out Paul's knife, take it away.

"Alfred," he says, in his ruined voice. It sounds nearly pleading. He rises with the touch; he lets himself be steered. The bare-muscle backs of his thighs touch the bedspread and he sits, obediently. He is half in a daze. He has not let anyone guide him in a very long time.

He looks at the man before him, searching the face for familiarity. He lingers for a long time on those eyes.

"John," Alfred repeats. He's gentle about it, still. The smile that twists Augustine's lips never belonged to Augustine, not the way those eyes did, once upon a myriad ago. The stillness, as he crouches there, just beside the bed — stolen eyes level with stolen eyes — that's always been Alfred's as well, hasn't it? No matter that his brother has worn it for so many millennia; he hasn't been, since coming to Trench, has he — just as restless and restive as the last time he walked the Earth, however many lifetimes ago that really was.

"You're not doing any good for either of you like this, my Lord," is, if anything, even more gentle, even if it isn't quite forgiving; there's been a distinct lack of remorse on everyone's parts, so far, for the past several days. His right hand wraps around John's left shoulder, squeezing lightly; an echo, a reminder, a complete failure to write moonlight into his skin again — and he guides the lost Shepherd to lie down, tucking him in like a child who'd awoken from a nightmare and gone seeking reassurance.

"Sleep, if you can, my friend," he suggests. "Rest, if you can't. I need to get Augustine safely to his own bed as well," tinged with a sorrow — he really can't leave his brother tucked in beside a half-Herald, after all. "But... I can come back up here, afterward, if you think the company would help."

(The contrast, in how the two brothers show their love, might sting, or worse — but could Alfred afford such magnanimity if Augustine hadn't taken on such a burden?)

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Then came July like three o’clock in the afternoon, hot and listless and miserable...

Build a Better Bond [closed]

[Sarah]

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[the Emperor]

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cw: violence against insects and also God, without even asking about it in advance

cw: violence, mental violation

cw: gore, violence, body-hopping oops

cw: disorientation and violation continues

cw: borrowed body, injury descriptions

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