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

[butnotyet]

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).

Comments

cw: borrowed body, injury descriptions

[butnotyet]

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.)

[necrolord]

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.

[butnotyet]

"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?)