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kinkfestFandom: D. Gray-man, Tyki Mick/RaviRabiLaviWhatever
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nagaina_ryuuoh
Prompt: 7. D.Grayman, Tiki Mick/Rabi: Beloved enemies - "Considering your job you could take either side and still be doing it."
Date: July 4th, posted early on the grounds that I doubt I'll get anywhere near a computer tomorrow.
Rating: Rish, for smut of a non-explicit but definitely described nature, plus A for Angst, S for Sap, W for Woe, and B for Tyki's occasionally bugfuck internal narration.
Warnings: Spoilery for recent (i.e., Chapters 120 - 123) of the manga; contains rampant baseless speculation RE possible future events deriving therefrom. I tried to avoid discussing too many specifics, but some things are vaguer than others.
Author's Notes: I tried to make this goofy, lighthearted, and somewhat cheerful; it refused. Completely. Instead, it preferred to be disturbing and kinky and almost entirely from Tyki's POV. Plot also kept intruding despite my best efforts, as did my current fetish for pretentious pseudo-Victorian verbiage. Still, I hope the list enjoys.
Somewhere between the Angel and King’s Cross, Tyki Mick realized he was being followed. It took a moment of consideration, as he casually wended his way through the press on the crowded midday streets, to determine why he hadn’t picked up on it long before: his shadow was out of uniform and doing quite a credible job of blending into the background, just one among many hundreds out on an unusually fine late winter day, a sombrely-clad young man perhaps running an errand, perhaps just enjoying a stroll. It was that ridiculous shock of rufous hair that gave him away; bits and pieces poked out from under the brim of the perfectly respectable hat he was wearing, caught the wan shafts of sunlight passing through the high bright overcast, returned them in flickers of colour bright as a fresh-struck copper obol. One such flicker caught and held the corner of Tyki’s eye long enough to earn a full glance, and that was when he saw the patch hiding in the shadow the hat-brim, as his pursuer turned quickly to avoid eye contact. Silly, that. If he’d just continued on, Tyki’s eye might have slid past him completely; now he was spotted, and he might not even realize it. Correction: he did not realize that he’d been spotted because he continued to follow as Tyki began evasive manoeuvres and considered options. High-street was thronged as far as the eye could see with heartily winter-sick Londoners, out enjoying the first respite from the bitter cold that the City’d had since January, and Upper-street was very much the same. Plenty of crowd to lose himself in altogether, and Upper-street the far likelier option so far as native camouflage went: most of the loiterers there were young, male, at heels, and milling about on the paving of pubs, billiard-rooms, and gentlemen’s clubs of dubious gentility, smoking and indulging in ill-considered displays of public drunkenness and loudly discussing politics in authoritative tones of personal ignorance.
It was not entirely unreminiscent of the bachelor’s quarters in the Ark on a good day and it was with a mild pang of something resembling homesickness that he took hold of the brim of his hat with one hand and, applying his free elbow and hand with art and guile, created a distraction to go with the camouflage. Outraged shouts and at least one shoving match broke out on the pavement behind him. Tyki stretched his legs and walked briskly away from the results of his endeavours, a gentleman on a mission not a pleasure-stroll for all the world, and the crowd briefly gave way before him, aiding his escape without the need to even walk partway through anyone. He found a street-level grocery and ducked inside it, browsed among the shelves, found an untenanted corner to walk through and then strolled through the store-rooms of two or three adjoining buildings, emerging back into the watery sunlight in a narrow breezeway that he was obliged to inch down sideways to regain the pavement. He zigged across Upper-street, dodging omnibus and carriage traffic as went, and continued on the opposite side of the street in the general direction of his objective which was, in this case, lunch. More specifically, lunch at one of the less objectionable dining-parlours lining the way, one that had two centuries worth of coal-smut and tobacco-smoke staining the rafters instead of three and a continuously-revolving card game or two occupying the corner tables at which a man might defray the entire cost of his meal in a few rounds.
As he made his entrance into the smoky environs of the parlour, the usual suspects were already ensconced at their usual tables and the usual barmaid caught his eye and began filling his usual order as he found his own seat. He hung his jacket and then his hat on the hook behind his favourite chair at his preferred table – off to one side, allowing an unobstructed view of the door, not quite in a real corner – and turned around to find the Bookman’s apprentice already seated across from the spot he intended to occupy. Smiling.
“What circle of Hell,” Tyki asked softly, “did you crawl out of this morning?”
“Chelsea, actually.” The exorcist replied, removing his hat. “May I join you?”
“It seems as though you already have.” Tyki, presently lacking the desire for a scene or a public murder, seated himself, as well. “How did you find me?”
“Trade secret.” Under any other circumstances, he might have found the wry little look offered him extremely winsome; given the present situation, he had to tightly control the urge to reach across the table and do something he’d regret. “Let’s not play coyer than we have to, shall we?” The Bookman-in-waiting paused as the barmaid arrived and deposited her burden: two mugs of something red and mulled, a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a plate of stewed eels swimming in their own grease. “I’m here to make you an offer.”
“An…offer.” An entirely involuntary chuckle escaped him. “Pardon me, but I find that rather…rich? Tragically farcical, perhaps? What could the Black Order possibly have to offer me that wouldn’t end in vast unpleasantness somewhere along the line?”
“I’m not here on behalf of the Black Order.” Quietly. “I speak for myself in this. I want – “
“Yourself.” Tyki smiled, and the man sitting across from him flinched slightly. “You want. And what is it that you want from me, precisely? And why in Hell should I care what you want?”
“You’re not going to make this even a little easy, are you?” The Bookman-in-waiting asked, a certain asperity coming into his tone. “I’m sorry – “
“No. I’m not.” Tyki replied, and served the eels. “Keep your apologies. You’re buying lunch. And, now, to the offer, if you please.”
He sampled the fare, grimaced slightly, and admitted, “There’s no way to say this without it sounding completely self-serving. I want the truth, and I want you to tell it to me. In your own words.”
“You’re right, that does sound completely self-serving.” Tyki sipped the wine, suddenly utterly without appetite. “I presume you mean the truth about my family. What makes you think that I, of all the bloody descendants of the House of Noah in this miserable world, have it?”
“You have at least part of it. I don’t presume you have all of it – but you’re the part I have the best chance of reaching.” The Bookman-in-waiting admitted with irritatingly admirable candour. “Rho – I’m sorry. Your sister suggested as much to Allen once, and General Cross, after a great deal of evasion on the issue, more or less confirmed it.”
“She wasn’t my sister.” He closed his eyes until the urge to weep went away. “Well. Cross is many things, but a liar isn’t usually one of them, I’ll give you that. How’s young General Walker keeping himself these days?”
“Busy.”
“I’d imagine, given all the rumours of not particularly well-concealed warfare on the Continent I keep hearing. Next time you see him, tell him I expect we’ll play five-card in Hell one day. Perhaps sooner than later.” He opened his eyes. “The memories are the birthright of the whole clan, at least as much as anything else. Everyone has some – even, I suppose, Cross.”
“He does. I asked. Eventually, he even told me what they were.” Hands spread across the table. “That’s what I want. The truth, as you understand it to be. The past, and how it came to influence the present. The why of it all. If you can give me that, I’ll – “
“You’ll what?” Tyki was beginning to enjoy, in an entirely mean spirited way, how certain shades of his smile made the Bookman-in-waiting flinch and look away. “Protect me from your colleagues in the Black Order? They’ve a good hundred-odd reasons to be significantly less interested in my living person than you. Hide me from what’s left of my loving family – “
“It’s true, then.”
Tyki felt both his smile and any trace of satisfaction vanishing. “…What else did my bastard step-relation tell you?”
“He suggested that…ah…your family might regard you as…how to put this delicately?…an involuntary enemy partisan?” A grimace. “Actually, he told Allen it probably would have been kinder to kill you cleanly.”
“He’s right, it would have been.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice and saw no reason to try. “’Involuntary enemy partisan’ – which of us didn’t want to be coy again? ‘Deserter,’ is one word, little Bookman. ‘Apostate,’ is another. ‘Tainted,’ is one for the final analysis. Tainted by your boy-General’s boundless compassion, even for his mortal enemies, befouled beyond cleansing. He couldn’t bring himself to kill me, but he’d take my life.” A chuckle. “I’ll have to wait for my own family for anything else. See? A tragic farce. And now you want me to be a traitor in truth, as well.”
“No. I want you to help me understand. I want you to help me understand how it came to be this way. I want to put an end to it without the loss of another human life, Noah or otherwise. I want to help put an end to this war, not let it repeat itself, over and over again.” Earnest, he was intensely earnest, Tyki would give him that. “You can’t tell me that you want the people you care about to keep killing and dying for no reason.”
“No. But I think you give all of us too much credit, if you think the power to prevent that lies in any of our hands.” He closed his eyes again. “You realize there wasn’t an offer in any of that, right?”
“I have a safe house I could put you up in. The Order wouldn’t know. And Panda hates the city more than he hates split infinitives and Middle English spellings.” A hand closed over his own and he looked up, shocked, into that ridiculously earnest face with that ridiculously earnest single eye that missed little and forgot nothing. “Will you help me?”
“Nothing good can come of this. Yes. Damn you, yes.”
©
“…Ravi.”
“General.”
“I trust your mission went well.”
“…Yes. Yes, it did.”
♥
The safe house was, it turned out, precisely that: a trim little cottage on the south bank of the Thames, near enough to the City that Tyki could easily imagine a cantankerous old man defining it as ‘too close,’ whereas he could only consider it ‘not close enough by half.’ He had chosen to go to ground in London for a profusion of reasons of a fundamentally practical nature: the enormous human population, perfect to hide within and among; the ease with which a relatively remunerative occupation could be procured anywhere cards were played; the unlikelihood of becoming suicidally bored, no matter how disagreeably sedentary his existence might become. Well, perhaps not that: the boredom had gotten fairly awful in less than a month and forced him to start cheating in increasingly baroque ways in order to maintain a proper level of interest in nearly any game. That helped, if only a little, as the risk of being caught and, possibly, horribly murdered in a squalid little Whitechapel alley had a generally beneficial effect on his concentration. The loneliness was far, far worse than the boredom and subsequently much more difficult to manage successfully. After all, even the meanest palliative to it was generally closed to him: he dared not stay too long in any one place, even in the City, and moved frequently from hostel to boarding house to tavern. He’d stayed longest at his little apartment of rooms in Islington, long enough to become known by face and tastes at least to a handful of the locals, which was he supposed something between laziness and recklessness on his part but was mostly a product of solitary folly. Alone was his least favourite mode of existence and he regularly woke in the night, feeling about for Eaze or Rhode or, God help him, even Lero, and suffering pangs of absolute desolation when he woke enough to realize that no one else was there, or would be.
There was simply no help for it, and he resigned himself quietly when the Bookman-in-waiting unlocked that little cottage door for him, to tedium and isolation both. It was set back from the road on a little rise above the river, which was clearly visible from most of the windows and from the little winter-dead rear garden, surrounded in somewhat overgrown boxwood hedges and a high spreading tree or two. There were neighbours, and some of them quite close by, but most of the houses and cottages to either side were closed up yet for the winter and wouldn’t see anyone but servants sent to clean and air them for a good six months. This particular dwelling was among the smallest on the road, consisting of a single boxy structure of white-washed stone, its roof of sound grey slate, its door and window-shutters painted an oddly vivid shade of green. Inside were four rooms: a bachelor’s bedchamber of one (admittedly very comfortable) bed and chest of drawers; a bath that had obviously had some recent remodelling; a kitchen; and a room that seemed to serve as a combination of other uses, including dining, sitting, and studying, as it held a table and several comfortable chairs and a bookcase full of tomes that had probably been selected for their complete innocuousness. They had arrived by night and his host was gone before first light the next morning; by noon, supplies had arrived sufficient for several weeks, along with a note that he scrutinized and laid aside: it wasn’t in a language he could read.
For the best part of that first morning, he sulked about feeling thoroughly sorry for himself – he felt he deserved at least that much of a wallow. More than that, however, and even he wouldn’t be able to stand himself and so he began searching for pleasing diversions or, if not diversion, than at least something to be in a better mood about. He found it, weirdly, outside in the garden, which was not the sort of thing he was in any way accustomed to: given his druthers, he rarely stayed in one place long enough to watch anything grow, even when he wasn’t being driven by the relative certainty of his own agonizing demise. It was clearly even later in the winter than he’d thought for little green spikes of newly emergent plants were pushing their way up through the damp soil of the kitchen herb-beds, tiny and delicate. Buds were beginning to frost the trees and hedges and he decided, if he had to be in a good mood about anything, he’d take some pleasure in that: he’d never been wronged by a tree, and there were worse things than to sit on the verge between city and country and watch the world come back to life in the springtime. By the middle of the week, he was contemplating systematically burning every green and growing thing for two square miles because, frankly, he knew he was working too damned hard not to do so.
Fortunately, the Bookman-in-waiting made a timely return before he, or tragedy, could strike.
“Hullo,” the annoyingly cheerful little bastard announced, as he came in still dripping from the slow, soaking rain that had settled in about noon that day, “Country air agreeing with you?”
“…No.” Tyki flipped a card in the elaborate game of Solitaire he’d set up around himself.
“Oh. Well.” The Bookman-in-waiting reached into his coat and pulled out a small canvas pouch, which he heaved over. “Go ahead and add to the ambient pollution level if that’d make you feel more to home. I noticed you were almost out of – “
“Cigarettes.”
“Yes. Go ahead and get it out of your system – Panda smokes like a chimney sometimes, too.” Tyki got the distinct feeling he was being laughed at, but couldn’t bring himself to care. “I’ll make dinner.”
The meal, that night, was a particularly fine one of fresh-caught fish baked with lemon and white wine and stuffed with herbs, followed by coffee that was almost as good as Eaze’s and a plum tart that had made it to the cottage only slightly squished by the journey. Clearly, Bookman Minor had learned how to make the best of simple things somewhere during the course of his education, and Tyki told him so without reservation.
“You’re welcome,” the deservedly cheerful bastard replied, as they leaned back together next to the fire, the rain drumming on the roof above them. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get back before this. Panda was keeping me busy running errands in the City.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask. Panda?” Tyki inclined a questioning brow and received a chuckle in response.
“My mentor. The Old Man himself. It was the first cheeky thing I ever called him, and it’s rather stuck over the years.” The Bookman-in-waiting grinned in fond reminiscence. “If you ever hear him call me anything, it’ll probably be ‘puppy.’ Or hooligan.”
“Or…?”
“Or what?”
“You have a name, don’t you?”
“Oh!” He smacked himself lightly on the forehead. “I thought you knew. Ravi. My…”
“Victims?”
“…friends and colleagues call me Ravi.” The tip of his tongue darted across his lips. “I suppose it’d be easier than ‘you’ from here on out, yeah?”
“Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavi.” Tyki let it roll around inside his mouth a bit. “It suits, I suppose. There’s a river in India called – “
“Yes, I know,” Ravi, Bookman Minor, resolutely cheerful bastard, sounded mildly aggrieved to have that information imparted to him yet again. “Also a Hindi god. Panda thinks I did that on purpose but…not really.”
Tyki felt the corners of his mouth twitching involuntarily. “I’ll take your word for it. I suppose I owe the honour of hosting your divine person to our previously defined arrangement?”
“Yes. I’ll be leaving for Home tomorrow and I was hoping to have something to take with me. For research purposes, you understand.” He bent and dug about in the canvas courier’s satchel he’d brought with him, emerging with a black leather bound journal and pen case. “The Archive is vast – I’m fairly sure that, given the volume of incidental information it holds about the House of Noah, specific information from memories could be corroborated by additional evidence, referenced by time.”
“What good would that do?”
“It would help in identifying the foundations, the underlying causes of all this, so they can be addressed and repaired.” A fresh pot of ink came down on the table. “Can you tell me something…early? The earliest memories you have, I mean. As early as you can tell.”
“I would like to be on record as believing you completely insane, and yet unable to think of a better place to start.” Tyki licked his lips and closed his eyes, reached back into a place that was much quieter, and much brighter, than it had been before. “Let me…think.”
♥
“…He doesn’t seem to remember the events surrounding the creation of the first Ark.”
“He wouldn’t. He wasn’t born until well after the original was complete. I suspect you’ll find he doesn’t really remember the Deluge, either.”
“And you would know that how…?”
“Because I remember the hour he first drew breath.”
♥
Life fell into a bit of a pattern and, Tyki was forced to admit, the pattern wasn’t precisely unpleasant. The Bookman seemed intent on staying close to Home and sent forth his apprentice to run errands, fetch information sources, engage in the sort of scholarly commerce that their lineage favoured more than war; as a consequence, that apprentice often had a considerable degree of liberty in accomplishing his assorted tasks and a good deal of time on his hands once they were done. He visited, as often as he was able, and Tyki was quietly shocked at how much he looked forward to those visits, even if they were more often than not delicate interrogations on crimes and tragedies and terrible circumstances eight thousand years dust. In those hours, at least, he wasn’t alone; Ravi, to give him the credit that he deserved, seemed to realize it and lingered longer than was strictly necessary some days, some nights, after he’d finished talking and couldn’t make himself remember anything more.
On one of them, Ravi set a cup of tea at his elbow and sat down in the chair nearest his own, a strange, set look on his face. Or perhaps it was a trick of firelight and shadow; he was never quite sure, afterwards. “You miss them.”
“Of course.” He sipped the tea, peppermint, which was soothing on his talked-sore throat and leant his head back against the cushions of the chair. “Don’t you miss your family? You had to give them up to become the Bookman’s apprentice, didn’t you?”
“I…don’t remember them. My parents.” Ravi paused, glanced away, looked back and couldn’t hold his gaze. “Panda adopted me as his heir when I was very young.”
“Ah. Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t remember mine very well, either. It’s strange – how things that happened centuries and millennia ago can seem so sharp and clear, it’s like they happened yesterday…and I can’t clearly recall my own mother’s face.” He smiled slightly, humourlessly. “I suppose it’ll come back to me eventually. Or maybe the next person unfortunate enough to have me banging around in the back of their head. Between you and me, I’m not so sure I’d wish that on anyone – I’ve made a bit of a wreck of things.”
“Don’t say that,” Ravi replied, softly. “It’s not your fault.”
“You’re kind to say.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “I beg to differ but –“
“It. Is not. Your fault.” Ravi’s voice was taut with a species of righteous outrage that Tyki rarely heard at all, much less directed in his own defence; it was mildly astounding. “We both know who did this, to you, to your family. Don’t you dare take one ounce of blame from where it belongs.”
“I somehow get the feeling you’re losing your objectivity in that regard,” He felt compelled, by native honesty, by some stupid, foolish urge to hold all that righteousness at arm’s-length, to reply. “I’m not innocent in all this. I killed. I can’t even really say that I regret it that much. I…don’t know that I would do it again. But, for them, I did and I couldn’t undo it if I wanted to.”
“You’ve killed. So have I. That doesn’t mean either of us are monsters.” That single earnest eye flicked closed. “I don’t want you to think you deserve to be forgotten. You don’t deserve that – no one does. I – “
Tyki reached out and laid a pair of fingers across his companion’s mouth. “You really don’t know when to shut up, do you?”
Ravi’s lips parted against his skin. “Never…really learned.”
♥
“He…doesn’t think he remembers anything else. Nothing coherent enough to cross-reference and date, at any rate – just snippets here and there. He speaks medieval Occitan when he’s in certain states of mind. Poetry, I think.”
“Likely. Pleasure is his essence, after all – the Languedoc, before de Montfort, was arguably the most pleasant place to be had in Christendom.”
“…I…The last concrete date I was able to confirm was Jerusalem, 1099. The First Crusade. God, he remembers being there. He remembers dying there, it was the most terrible thing I ever – “
“Don’t forget that he’s also always where the blood begins flowing in rivers. That’s why I wanted you to get him out of London.”
♥
That summer was memorably, miserably hot, at least insofar as Tyki was concerned, and far more barren of company. He supposed it was inevitable: the war, which had seemed to slow a bit over the bitter winter and through the long, wet spring, was alive again and the Bookman’s apprentice was one of those expected to fight it. Supplies arrived more frequently than any human visitor; this time, they included newspapers written in Portuguese, for which he was grateful. Second-hand contact with the world was better than no contact at all, he decided, even if the whole situation gave him far too much time to brood on things he couldn’t change. Brood and, more disturbingly, dream. Before this, he rarely troubled to remember his dreams; now, the assailants of his sleeping mind bled over into the waking world in ways that almost daily made him question both senses and sanity, relative though it might be. The shambling, crumbling corpse of the girl who was and wasn’t his sister occupied the corner of his eye during the day, vanishing whenever he tried to look at her directly, raspy horror of a voice leaving children’s rhymes hanging on the air behind her; by night, she sat on the bed next to him as he slept or tried to sleep, fire-blackened flesh crumbling off her scorched bones with every hissing promise that they would be together again soon, soon. One morning, he woke to find Eaze coughing blood and pus and assorted other secretions out of his consumption-damaged lungs in the middle of the kitchen floor; that night, he dreamt of plague-decimated villages and cities where the ill and the hale of whole families were boarded up inside their homes and set to the torch.
After that, it became increasingly difficult to discern the difference between horrid flights of wildly overactive imagination and even more horrific fragments of true memory, dredged from some black and polluted place in his blood, his soul. He dreamt death – his own – every time he closed his eyes, until he almost felt himself a ghost haunting his own body, and resolved that enough was enough and he wouldn’t sleep again until fatigue forced him to do so. Serial abuse of all the coffee and tea in the house kept him so tightly and highly strung that sleep fled his company for the best part of four days; on the fifth, absolute exhaustion of mind and body crashed down on him with such force that he never could quite recall how he got to bed thereafter. He woke sprawled at a neck-disobliging angle some time later with a tousled red head lying on his belly, attached to a black-clad body, that upon closer examination turned out to be the eyeless, tongueless corpse of the Bookman-in-waiting, mouth slit across his cheeks and lips carved away into a hideous rictus-grinning parody of another very familiar face.
For the first time, he was glad that no neighbours lived close enough to hear him screaming.
Ravi arrived unannounced late one sticky August night as he sat fighting sleep and shadows in his favourite chair in front of the cold fireplace. He did not, in fact, recall falling asleep, though he must have for he bolted awake at the feather-light touch on his shoulder and struck before he had sense enough to see who it was; strong, callused hands caught at his wrists and kept him from doing something he’d regret in the morning. “You! You’re – “ He wanted to cry alive alive alive but thought that might come across as a touch alarming, as well as half-mad. “Here. You’re here. It’s the middle of the night.”
“I came to check on you. I was – I haven’t had a chance in a while, I thought I’d – “ Ravi didn’t appear capable of finishing a sentence, which Tyki found strangely mollifying. “Are you all right?”
“I’m – “ A part of him wished, very much, to soothe the worry off Ravi’s face with a half-truth; a far larger part wanted very much to be soothed instead. “No. I’ve been sleeping badly.”
“The heat? You need summer clothes, don’t you? I’m an idiot, I’ll – “
“No.” Softly. “Nightmares.”
Ravi’s mouth worked silently for a moment. “Oh. What -- ?”
“Him. Them.” He licked his lips, damp with sweat, and closed his eyes. “It’s almost over, isn’t it? The preliminaries. The prologue. It’s all about to begin in earnest and the only thing left to do is lay the last of the sacrifices on the altar.” He laughed hollowly. “At least I might see one of them again before the end. Maybe. He could always come for me himself.”
“Don’t say that.” Low and fierce. “I promised you – I promised you I’d – “
“Keep me safe? Hide me from them? From him? Idiot. You can’t. You never could. He knows me, bone and blood, he always has. Just like you know my mind, my soul.” He leaned forward and rested his forehead against Ravi’s chest, felt his heart pounding hard enough to make his ribs ache through that contact. “Ravi. Please.”
“I – “
“Please.” He whispered. “I…don’t want to regret…everything about these last days. I don’t want to die not knowing you the way…you know me. Please. Just…tonight. You don’t have to come back.”
“Oh. Oh, God.”
It was sweeter, far, far sweeter than even his wildest imaginings had led him to think it might be, and far more intense, as well. He never expected to sink in and drown, pulled down by hot-hungry kisses and the caress of knowing, gentle hands, slender hips and strong legs and a body that yielded its secrets to him willingly. The Bookman’s apprentice was not a stranger to this. He was not an innocent to be broken by it. He knew his own pleasure, he knew his own unsecret, unhidden desires, and he knew how to offer them, how to accept the pleasure and the desire and the hungers offered to him in return. It was, for that night, in that bed, pinioned whimpering and mewling beneath him, rocking astride him back arched and head thrown back, spilling hot offerings again and again across his belly, crying his name in desperate anguish and ecstatic release, perfect.
Perfect, once, one last time.
He found that he couldn’t even regret it, the next morning, when he woke alone.
♥
“Please. We can’t do this. It’s obscene. He knows – he’s always known – he’s just sitting there, waiting to die, he – “
“There’s nothing more to be down now, Bookman. You know that as well as I do. The final act has been set in motion – there’s nothing left for him to do but play this last part. If you’re right about him, he’ll even let it happen.”
“That’s all this ever was to you. A lure. Blood on the altar, to draw him.”
“A sacrifice. Yes. Better one than millions, especially one that the Millennium will come for himself. Think. You know I’m right.”
♥
It wasn’t summer, and it wasn’t quite yet autumn. The air tasted faintly of smoke, rich and hazy, and the trees were starting to turn; already, a scattering of yellow leaves covered the back garden. It was altogether pleasant to sit there and bask in the late afternoon sunshine, letting the heat melt into his bones; he would be cold forever soon enough, inherited memories etched into someone else’s blood, words on a page in a book that, after awhile, no one would want to read. He hoped, quietly, that Ravi had gotten some sidelong use out of the whole thing after all: that, at some point in a future he couldn’t imagine, the war would actually end, that the children of Noah would be reconciled to the children of everyone else, that all the old wrongs would be righted and all the old wounds healed. He doubted it, but he hoped nonetheless, if only for the sake of that particular sweet idiot and the boy who hadn’t wanted to kill him.
A shadow fell over him, colder than the day should have allowed and smelling of blood and tears that should have dried a very long time before. “Tyki-pon. It’s good to see you again. To think you’ve been here this whole time. And you’ve even prepared the altar – how thoughtful! I never should have doubted you! ♥”
Tyki let his eyes fall closed.
©
He might have been asleep – it looked, for all the world, as though he had gone out back and settled down and drifted off in the early autumn sunshine. Artfully disarrayed black curls fell across his forehead, just so; immaculate white sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, one arm across his lap, a single playing-card still held between deft, slender fingers; head leant back against the white-washed garden wall as though he might rouse at any moment and complain about the pain in his neck; there was, altogether, surprisingly little blood and what there was had been put to good use. Ravi knelt, unmoving, at his side, one cold hand cradled in his own, and fought the urge to howl. Instead, he forced himself to ask, quietly and evenly, “What does it say?”
“It says,” General Cross replied, in precisely the same tone, “Queen to Knight, King’s Four: check.”
“I hope,” Ravi said from between clenched teeth, “that only one of you ever comes to know precisely how much I hate you both at this moment.”
A snort. “Boy, feel free to hate me as much as you like. This was a bloody exercise in futility and, regardless of what my idiot apprentice might think, I hate wasting moves more than money. We’ll never have a chance like this again.”
“An exercise – “ He stopped, swallowed, relaxed his grip. “Every word I said to him was a lie. I gave my word, and you never intended to even try keeping it. He believed me and you – “
“As I said, hate me all you like. Allen learned the practical benefits years ago, and it’s time the rest of you did, as well.” Softly. “Let’s go. There’s nothing left to do for him – he made his own choices, as well, Bookman. Remember that.”
“I somehow doubt that will be a problem.”
Crossposted like woah.
Author:
nagaina_ryuuohPrompt: 7. D.Grayman, Tiki Mick/Rabi: Beloved enemies - "Considering your job you could take either side and still be doing it."
Date: July 4th, posted early on the grounds that I doubt I'll get anywhere near a computer tomorrow.
Rating: Rish, for smut of a non-explicit but definitely described nature, plus A for Angst, S for Sap, W for Woe, and B for Tyki's occasionally bugfuck internal narration.
Warnings: Spoilery for recent (i.e., Chapters 120 - 123) of the manga; contains rampant baseless speculation RE possible future events deriving therefrom. I tried to avoid discussing too many specifics, but some things are vaguer than others.
Author's Notes: I tried to make this goofy, lighthearted, and somewhat cheerful; it refused. Completely. Instead, it preferred to be disturbing and kinky and almost entirely from Tyki's POV. Plot also kept intruding despite my best efforts, as did my current fetish for pretentious pseudo-Victorian verbiage. Still, I hope the list enjoys.
Somewhere between the Angel and King’s Cross, Tyki Mick realized he was being followed. It took a moment of consideration, as he casually wended his way through the press on the crowded midday streets, to determine why he hadn’t picked up on it long before: his shadow was out of uniform and doing quite a credible job of blending into the background, just one among many hundreds out on an unusually fine late winter day, a sombrely-clad young man perhaps running an errand, perhaps just enjoying a stroll. It was that ridiculous shock of rufous hair that gave him away; bits and pieces poked out from under the brim of the perfectly respectable hat he was wearing, caught the wan shafts of sunlight passing through the high bright overcast, returned them in flickers of colour bright as a fresh-struck copper obol. One such flicker caught and held the corner of Tyki’s eye long enough to earn a full glance, and that was when he saw the patch hiding in the shadow the hat-brim, as his pursuer turned quickly to avoid eye contact. Silly, that. If he’d just continued on, Tyki’s eye might have slid past him completely; now he was spotted, and he might not even realize it. Correction: he did not realize that he’d been spotted because he continued to follow as Tyki began evasive manoeuvres and considered options. High-street was thronged as far as the eye could see with heartily winter-sick Londoners, out enjoying the first respite from the bitter cold that the City’d had since January, and Upper-street was very much the same. Plenty of crowd to lose himself in altogether, and Upper-street the far likelier option so far as native camouflage went: most of the loiterers there were young, male, at heels, and milling about on the paving of pubs, billiard-rooms, and gentlemen’s clubs of dubious gentility, smoking and indulging in ill-considered displays of public drunkenness and loudly discussing politics in authoritative tones of personal ignorance.
It was not entirely unreminiscent of the bachelor’s quarters in the Ark on a good day and it was with a mild pang of something resembling homesickness that he took hold of the brim of his hat with one hand and, applying his free elbow and hand with art and guile, created a distraction to go with the camouflage. Outraged shouts and at least one shoving match broke out on the pavement behind him. Tyki stretched his legs and walked briskly away from the results of his endeavours, a gentleman on a mission not a pleasure-stroll for all the world, and the crowd briefly gave way before him, aiding his escape without the need to even walk partway through anyone. He found a street-level grocery and ducked inside it, browsed among the shelves, found an untenanted corner to walk through and then strolled through the store-rooms of two or three adjoining buildings, emerging back into the watery sunlight in a narrow breezeway that he was obliged to inch down sideways to regain the pavement. He zigged across Upper-street, dodging omnibus and carriage traffic as went, and continued on the opposite side of the street in the general direction of his objective which was, in this case, lunch. More specifically, lunch at one of the less objectionable dining-parlours lining the way, one that had two centuries worth of coal-smut and tobacco-smoke staining the rafters instead of three and a continuously-revolving card game or two occupying the corner tables at which a man might defray the entire cost of his meal in a few rounds.
As he made his entrance into the smoky environs of the parlour, the usual suspects were already ensconced at their usual tables and the usual barmaid caught his eye and began filling his usual order as he found his own seat. He hung his jacket and then his hat on the hook behind his favourite chair at his preferred table – off to one side, allowing an unobstructed view of the door, not quite in a real corner – and turned around to find the Bookman’s apprentice already seated across from the spot he intended to occupy. Smiling.
“What circle of Hell,” Tyki asked softly, “did you crawl out of this morning?”
“Chelsea, actually.” The exorcist replied, removing his hat. “May I join you?”
“It seems as though you already have.” Tyki, presently lacking the desire for a scene or a public murder, seated himself, as well. “How did you find me?”
“Trade secret.” Under any other circumstances, he might have found the wry little look offered him extremely winsome; given the present situation, he had to tightly control the urge to reach across the table and do something he’d regret. “Let’s not play coyer than we have to, shall we?” The Bookman-in-waiting paused as the barmaid arrived and deposited her burden: two mugs of something red and mulled, a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a plate of stewed eels swimming in their own grease. “I’m here to make you an offer.”
“An…offer.” An entirely involuntary chuckle escaped him. “Pardon me, but I find that rather…rich? Tragically farcical, perhaps? What could the Black Order possibly have to offer me that wouldn’t end in vast unpleasantness somewhere along the line?”
“I’m not here on behalf of the Black Order.” Quietly. “I speak for myself in this. I want – “
“Yourself.” Tyki smiled, and the man sitting across from him flinched slightly. “You want. And what is it that you want from me, precisely? And why in Hell should I care what you want?”
“You’re not going to make this even a little easy, are you?” The Bookman-in-waiting asked, a certain asperity coming into his tone. “I’m sorry – “
“No. I’m not.” Tyki replied, and served the eels. “Keep your apologies. You’re buying lunch. And, now, to the offer, if you please.”
He sampled the fare, grimaced slightly, and admitted, “There’s no way to say this without it sounding completely self-serving. I want the truth, and I want you to tell it to me. In your own words.”
“You’re right, that does sound completely self-serving.” Tyki sipped the wine, suddenly utterly without appetite. “I presume you mean the truth about my family. What makes you think that I, of all the bloody descendants of the House of Noah in this miserable world, have it?”
“You have at least part of it. I don’t presume you have all of it – but you’re the part I have the best chance of reaching.” The Bookman-in-waiting admitted with irritatingly admirable candour. “Rho – I’m sorry. Your sister suggested as much to Allen once, and General Cross, after a great deal of evasion on the issue, more or less confirmed it.”
“She wasn’t my sister.” He closed his eyes until the urge to weep went away. “Well. Cross is many things, but a liar isn’t usually one of them, I’ll give you that. How’s young General Walker keeping himself these days?”
“Busy.”
“I’d imagine, given all the rumours of not particularly well-concealed warfare on the Continent I keep hearing. Next time you see him, tell him I expect we’ll play five-card in Hell one day. Perhaps sooner than later.” He opened his eyes. “The memories are the birthright of the whole clan, at least as much as anything else. Everyone has some – even, I suppose, Cross.”
“He does. I asked. Eventually, he even told me what they were.” Hands spread across the table. “That’s what I want. The truth, as you understand it to be. The past, and how it came to influence the present. The why of it all. If you can give me that, I’ll – “
“You’ll what?” Tyki was beginning to enjoy, in an entirely mean spirited way, how certain shades of his smile made the Bookman-in-waiting flinch and look away. “Protect me from your colleagues in the Black Order? They’ve a good hundred-odd reasons to be significantly less interested in my living person than you. Hide me from what’s left of my loving family – “
“It’s true, then.”
Tyki felt both his smile and any trace of satisfaction vanishing. “…What else did my bastard step-relation tell you?”
“He suggested that…ah…your family might regard you as…how to put this delicately?…an involuntary enemy partisan?” A grimace. “Actually, he told Allen it probably would have been kinder to kill you cleanly.”
“He’s right, it would have been.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice and saw no reason to try. “’Involuntary enemy partisan’ – which of us didn’t want to be coy again? ‘Deserter,’ is one word, little Bookman. ‘Apostate,’ is another. ‘Tainted,’ is one for the final analysis. Tainted by your boy-General’s boundless compassion, even for his mortal enemies, befouled beyond cleansing. He couldn’t bring himself to kill me, but he’d take my life.” A chuckle. “I’ll have to wait for my own family for anything else. See? A tragic farce. And now you want me to be a traitor in truth, as well.”
“No. I want you to help me understand. I want you to help me understand how it came to be this way. I want to put an end to it without the loss of another human life, Noah or otherwise. I want to help put an end to this war, not let it repeat itself, over and over again.” Earnest, he was intensely earnest, Tyki would give him that. “You can’t tell me that you want the people you care about to keep killing and dying for no reason.”
“No. But I think you give all of us too much credit, if you think the power to prevent that lies in any of our hands.” He closed his eyes again. “You realize there wasn’t an offer in any of that, right?”
“I have a safe house I could put you up in. The Order wouldn’t know. And Panda hates the city more than he hates split infinitives and Middle English spellings.” A hand closed over his own and he looked up, shocked, into that ridiculously earnest face with that ridiculously earnest single eye that missed little and forgot nothing. “Will you help me?”
“Nothing good can come of this. Yes. Damn you, yes.”
©
“…Ravi.”
“General.”
“I trust your mission went well.”
“…Yes. Yes, it did.”
♥
The safe house was, it turned out, precisely that: a trim little cottage on the south bank of the Thames, near enough to the City that Tyki could easily imagine a cantankerous old man defining it as ‘too close,’ whereas he could only consider it ‘not close enough by half.’ He had chosen to go to ground in London for a profusion of reasons of a fundamentally practical nature: the enormous human population, perfect to hide within and among; the ease with which a relatively remunerative occupation could be procured anywhere cards were played; the unlikelihood of becoming suicidally bored, no matter how disagreeably sedentary his existence might become. Well, perhaps not that: the boredom had gotten fairly awful in less than a month and forced him to start cheating in increasingly baroque ways in order to maintain a proper level of interest in nearly any game. That helped, if only a little, as the risk of being caught and, possibly, horribly murdered in a squalid little Whitechapel alley had a generally beneficial effect on his concentration. The loneliness was far, far worse than the boredom and subsequently much more difficult to manage successfully. After all, even the meanest palliative to it was generally closed to him: he dared not stay too long in any one place, even in the City, and moved frequently from hostel to boarding house to tavern. He’d stayed longest at his little apartment of rooms in Islington, long enough to become known by face and tastes at least to a handful of the locals, which was he supposed something between laziness and recklessness on his part but was mostly a product of solitary folly. Alone was his least favourite mode of existence and he regularly woke in the night, feeling about for Eaze or Rhode or, God help him, even Lero, and suffering pangs of absolute desolation when he woke enough to realize that no one else was there, or would be.
There was simply no help for it, and he resigned himself quietly when the Bookman-in-waiting unlocked that little cottage door for him, to tedium and isolation both. It was set back from the road on a little rise above the river, which was clearly visible from most of the windows and from the little winter-dead rear garden, surrounded in somewhat overgrown boxwood hedges and a high spreading tree or two. There were neighbours, and some of them quite close by, but most of the houses and cottages to either side were closed up yet for the winter and wouldn’t see anyone but servants sent to clean and air them for a good six months. This particular dwelling was among the smallest on the road, consisting of a single boxy structure of white-washed stone, its roof of sound grey slate, its door and window-shutters painted an oddly vivid shade of green. Inside were four rooms: a bachelor’s bedchamber of one (admittedly very comfortable) bed and chest of drawers; a bath that had obviously had some recent remodelling; a kitchen; and a room that seemed to serve as a combination of other uses, including dining, sitting, and studying, as it held a table and several comfortable chairs and a bookcase full of tomes that had probably been selected for their complete innocuousness. They had arrived by night and his host was gone before first light the next morning; by noon, supplies had arrived sufficient for several weeks, along with a note that he scrutinized and laid aside: it wasn’t in a language he could read.
For the best part of that first morning, he sulked about feeling thoroughly sorry for himself – he felt he deserved at least that much of a wallow. More than that, however, and even he wouldn’t be able to stand himself and so he began searching for pleasing diversions or, if not diversion, than at least something to be in a better mood about. He found it, weirdly, outside in the garden, which was not the sort of thing he was in any way accustomed to: given his druthers, he rarely stayed in one place long enough to watch anything grow, even when he wasn’t being driven by the relative certainty of his own agonizing demise. It was clearly even later in the winter than he’d thought for little green spikes of newly emergent plants were pushing their way up through the damp soil of the kitchen herb-beds, tiny and delicate. Buds were beginning to frost the trees and hedges and he decided, if he had to be in a good mood about anything, he’d take some pleasure in that: he’d never been wronged by a tree, and there were worse things than to sit on the verge between city and country and watch the world come back to life in the springtime. By the middle of the week, he was contemplating systematically burning every green and growing thing for two square miles because, frankly, he knew he was working too damned hard not to do so.
Fortunately, the Bookman-in-waiting made a timely return before he, or tragedy, could strike.
“Hullo,” the annoyingly cheerful little bastard announced, as he came in still dripping from the slow, soaking rain that had settled in about noon that day, “Country air agreeing with you?”
“…No.” Tyki flipped a card in the elaborate game of Solitaire he’d set up around himself.
“Oh. Well.” The Bookman-in-waiting reached into his coat and pulled out a small canvas pouch, which he heaved over. “Go ahead and add to the ambient pollution level if that’d make you feel more to home. I noticed you were almost out of – “
“Cigarettes.”
“Yes. Go ahead and get it out of your system – Panda smokes like a chimney sometimes, too.” Tyki got the distinct feeling he was being laughed at, but couldn’t bring himself to care. “I’ll make dinner.”
The meal, that night, was a particularly fine one of fresh-caught fish baked with lemon and white wine and stuffed with herbs, followed by coffee that was almost as good as Eaze’s and a plum tart that had made it to the cottage only slightly squished by the journey. Clearly, Bookman Minor had learned how to make the best of simple things somewhere during the course of his education, and Tyki told him so without reservation.
“You’re welcome,” the deservedly cheerful bastard replied, as they leaned back together next to the fire, the rain drumming on the roof above them. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get back before this. Panda was keeping me busy running errands in the City.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask. Panda?” Tyki inclined a questioning brow and received a chuckle in response.
“My mentor. The Old Man himself. It was the first cheeky thing I ever called him, and it’s rather stuck over the years.” The Bookman-in-waiting grinned in fond reminiscence. “If you ever hear him call me anything, it’ll probably be ‘puppy.’ Or hooligan.”
“Or…?”
“Or what?”
“You have a name, don’t you?”
“Oh!” He smacked himself lightly on the forehead. “I thought you knew. Ravi. My…”
“Victims?”
“…friends and colleagues call me Ravi.” The tip of his tongue darted across his lips. “I suppose it’d be easier than ‘you’ from here on out, yeah?”
“Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavi.” Tyki let it roll around inside his mouth a bit. “It suits, I suppose. There’s a river in India called – “
“Yes, I know,” Ravi, Bookman Minor, resolutely cheerful bastard, sounded mildly aggrieved to have that information imparted to him yet again. “Also a Hindi god. Panda thinks I did that on purpose but…not really.”
Tyki felt the corners of his mouth twitching involuntarily. “I’ll take your word for it. I suppose I owe the honour of hosting your divine person to our previously defined arrangement?”
“Yes. I’ll be leaving for Home tomorrow and I was hoping to have something to take with me. For research purposes, you understand.” He bent and dug about in the canvas courier’s satchel he’d brought with him, emerging with a black leather bound journal and pen case. “The Archive is vast – I’m fairly sure that, given the volume of incidental information it holds about the House of Noah, specific information from memories could be corroborated by additional evidence, referenced by time.”
“What good would that do?”
“It would help in identifying the foundations, the underlying causes of all this, so they can be addressed and repaired.” A fresh pot of ink came down on the table. “Can you tell me something…early? The earliest memories you have, I mean. As early as you can tell.”
“I would like to be on record as believing you completely insane, and yet unable to think of a better place to start.” Tyki licked his lips and closed his eyes, reached back into a place that was much quieter, and much brighter, than it had been before. “Let me…think.”
♥
“…He doesn’t seem to remember the events surrounding the creation of the first Ark.”
“He wouldn’t. He wasn’t born until well after the original was complete. I suspect you’ll find he doesn’t really remember the Deluge, either.”
“And you would know that how…?”
“Because I remember the hour he first drew breath.”
♥
Life fell into a bit of a pattern and, Tyki was forced to admit, the pattern wasn’t precisely unpleasant. The Bookman seemed intent on staying close to Home and sent forth his apprentice to run errands, fetch information sources, engage in the sort of scholarly commerce that their lineage favoured more than war; as a consequence, that apprentice often had a considerable degree of liberty in accomplishing his assorted tasks and a good deal of time on his hands once they were done. He visited, as often as he was able, and Tyki was quietly shocked at how much he looked forward to those visits, even if they were more often than not delicate interrogations on crimes and tragedies and terrible circumstances eight thousand years dust. In those hours, at least, he wasn’t alone; Ravi, to give him the credit that he deserved, seemed to realize it and lingered longer than was strictly necessary some days, some nights, after he’d finished talking and couldn’t make himself remember anything more.
On one of them, Ravi set a cup of tea at his elbow and sat down in the chair nearest his own, a strange, set look on his face. Or perhaps it was a trick of firelight and shadow; he was never quite sure, afterwards. “You miss them.”
“Of course.” He sipped the tea, peppermint, which was soothing on his talked-sore throat and leant his head back against the cushions of the chair. “Don’t you miss your family? You had to give them up to become the Bookman’s apprentice, didn’t you?”
“I…don’t remember them. My parents.” Ravi paused, glanced away, looked back and couldn’t hold his gaze. “Panda adopted me as his heir when I was very young.”
“Ah. Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t remember mine very well, either. It’s strange – how things that happened centuries and millennia ago can seem so sharp and clear, it’s like they happened yesterday…and I can’t clearly recall my own mother’s face.” He smiled slightly, humourlessly. “I suppose it’ll come back to me eventually. Or maybe the next person unfortunate enough to have me banging around in the back of their head. Between you and me, I’m not so sure I’d wish that on anyone – I’ve made a bit of a wreck of things.”
“Don’t say that,” Ravi replied, softly. “It’s not your fault.”
“You’re kind to say.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “I beg to differ but –“
“It. Is not. Your fault.” Ravi’s voice was taut with a species of righteous outrage that Tyki rarely heard at all, much less directed in his own defence; it was mildly astounding. “We both know who did this, to you, to your family. Don’t you dare take one ounce of blame from where it belongs.”
“I somehow get the feeling you’re losing your objectivity in that regard,” He felt compelled, by native honesty, by some stupid, foolish urge to hold all that righteousness at arm’s-length, to reply. “I’m not innocent in all this. I killed. I can’t even really say that I regret it that much. I…don’t know that I would do it again. But, for them, I did and I couldn’t undo it if I wanted to.”
“You’ve killed. So have I. That doesn’t mean either of us are monsters.” That single earnest eye flicked closed. “I don’t want you to think you deserve to be forgotten. You don’t deserve that – no one does. I – “
Tyki reached out and laid a pair of fingers across his companion’s mouth. “You really don’t know when to shut up, do you?”
Ravi’s lips parted against his skin. “Never…really learned.”
♥
“He…doesn’t think he remembers anything else. Nothing coherent enough to cross-reference and date, at any rate – just snippets here and there. He speaks medieval Occitan when he’s in certain states of mind. Poetry, I think.”
“Likely. Pleasure is his essence, after all – the Languedoc, before de Montfort, was arguably the most pleasant place to be had in Christendom.”
“…I…The last concrete date I was able to confirm was Jerusalem, 1099. The First Crusade. God, he remembers being there. He remembers dying there, it was the most terrible thing I ever – “
“Don’t forget that he’s also always where the blood begins flowing in rivers. That’s why I wanted you to get him out of London.”
♥
That summer was memorably, miserably hot, at least insofar as Tyki was concerned, and far more barren of company. He supposed it was inevitable: the war, which had seemed to slow a bit over the bitter winter and through the long, wet spring, was alive again and the Bookman’s apprentice was one of those expected to fight it. Supplies arrived more frequently than any human visitor; this time, they included newspapers written in Portuguese, for which he was grateful. Second-hand contact with the world was better than no contact at all, he decided, even if the whole situation gave him far too much time to brood on things he couldn’t change. Brood and, more disturbingly, dream. Before this, he rarely troubled to remember his dreams; now, the assailants of his sleeping mind bled over into the waking world in ways that almost daily made him question both senses and sanity, relative though it might be. The shambling, crumbling corpse of the girl who was and wasn’t his sister occupied the corner of his eye during the day, vanishing whenever he tried to look at her directly, raspy horror of a voice leaving children’s rhymes hanging on the air behind her; by night, she sat on the bed next to him as he slept or tried to sleep, fire-blackened flesh crumbling off her scorched bones with every hissing promise that they would be together again soon, soon. One morning, he woke to find Eaze coughing blood and pus and assorted other secretions out of his consumption-damaged lungs in the middle of the kitchen floor; that night, he dreamt of plague-decimated villages and cities where the ill and the hale of whole families were boarded up inside their homes and set to the torch.
After that, it became increasingly difficult to discern the difference between horrid flights of wildly overactive imagination and even more horrific fragments of true memory, dredged from some black and polluted place in his blood, his soul. He dreamt death – his own – every time he closed his eyes, until he almost felt himself a ghost haunting his own body, and resolved that enough was enough and he wouldn’t sleep again until fatigue forced him to do so. Serial abuse of all the coffee and tea in the house kept him so tightly and highly strung that sleep fled his company for the best part of four days; on the fifth, absolute exhaustion of mind and body crashed down on him with such force that he never could quite recall how he got to bed thereafter. He woke sprawled at a neck-disobliging angle some time later with a tousled red head lying on his belly, attached to a black-clad body, that upon closer examination turned out to be the eyeless, tongueless corpse of the Bookman-in-waiting, mouth slit across his cheeks and lips carved away into a hideous rictus-grinning parody of another very familiar face.
For the first time, he was glad that no neighbours lived close enough to hear him screaming.
Ravi arrived unannounced late one sticky August night as he sat fighting sleep and shadows in his favourite chair in front of the cold fireplace. He did not, in fact, recall falling asleep, though he must have for he bolted awake at the feather-light touch on his shoulder and struck before he had sense enough to see who it was; strong, callused hands caught at his wrists and kept him from doing something he’d regret in the morning. “You! You’re – “ He wanted to cry alive alive alive but thought that might come across as a touch alarming, as well as half-mad. “Here. You’re here. It’s the middle of the night.”
“I came to check on you. I was – I haven’t had a chance in a while, I thought I’d – “ Ravi didn’t appear capable of finishing a sentence, which Tyki found strangely mollifying. “Are you all right?”
“I’m – “ A part of him wished, very much, to soothe the worry off Ravi’s face with a half-truth; a far larger part wanted very much to be soothed instead. “No. I’ve been sleeping badly.”
“The heat? You need summer clothes, don’t you? I’m an idiot, I’ll – “
“No.” Softly. “Nightmares.”
Ravi’s mouth worked silently for a moment. “Oh. What -- ?”
“Him. Them.” He licked his lips, damp with sweat, and closed his eyes. “It’s almost over, isn’t it? The preliminaries. The prologue. It’s all about to begin in earnest and the only thing left to do is lay the last of the sacrifices on the altar.” He laughed hollowly. “At least I might see one of them again before the end. Maybe. He could always come for me himself.”
“Don’t say that.” Low and fierce. “I promised you – I promised you I’d – “
“Keep me safe? Hide me from them? From him? Idiot. You can’t. You never could. He knows me, bone and blood, he always has. Just like you know my mind, my soul.” He leaned forward and rested his forehead against Ravi’s chest, felt his heart pounding hard enough to make his ribs ache through that contact. “Ravi. Please.”
“I – “
“Please.” He whispered. “I…don’t want to regret…everything about these last days. I don’t want to die not knowing you the way…you know me. Please. Just…tonight. You don’t have to come back.”
“Oh. Oh, God.”
It was sweeter, far, far sweeter than even his wildest imaginings had led him to think it might be, and far more intense, as well. He never expected to sink in and drown, pulled down by hot-hungry kisses and the caress of knowing, gentle hands, slender hips and strong legs and a body that yielded its secrets to him willingly. The Bookman’s apprentice was not a stranger to this. He was not an innocent to be broken by it. He knew his own pleasure, he knew his own unsecret, unhidden desires, and he knew how to offer them, how to accept the pleasure and the desire and the hungers offered to him in return. It was, for that night, in that bed, pinioned whimpering and mewling beneath him, rocking astride him back arched and head thrown back, spilling hot offerings again and again across his belly, crying his name in desperate anguish and ecstatic release, perfect.
Perfect, once, one last time.
He found that he couldn’t even regret it, the next morning, when he woke alone.
♥
“Please. We can’t do this. It’s obscene. He knows – he’s always known – he’s just sitting there, waiting to die, he – “
“There’s nothing more to be down now, Bookman. You know that as well as I do. The final act has been set in motion – there’s nothing left for him to do but play this last part. If you’re right about him, he’ll even let it happen.”
“That’s all this ever was to you. A lure. Blood on the altar, to draw him.”
“A sacrifice. Yes. Better one than millions, especially one that the Millennium will come for himself. Think. You know I’m right.”
♥
It wasn’t summer, and it wasn’t quite yet autumn. The air tasted faintly of smoke, rich and hazy, and the trees were starting to turn; already, a scattering of yellow leaves covered the back garden. It was altogether pleasant to sit there and bask in the late afternoon sunshine, letting the heat melt into his bones; he would be cold forever soon enough, inherited memories etched into someone else’s blood, words on a page in a book that, after awhile, no one would want to read. He hoped, quietly, that Ravi had gotten some sidelong use out of the whole thing after all: that, at some point in a future he couldn’t imagine, the war would actually end, that the children of Noah would be reconciled to the children of everyone else, that all the old wrongs would be righted and all the old wounds healed. He doubted it, but he hoped nonetheless, if only for the sake of that particular sweet idiot and the boy who hadn’t wanted to kill him.
A shadow fell over him, colder than the day should have allowed and smelling of blood and tears that should have dried a very long time before. “Tyki-pon. It’s good to see you again. To think you’ve been here this whole time. And you’ve even prepared the altar – how thoughtful! I never should have doubted you! ♥”
Tyki let his eyes fall closed.
©
He might have been asleep – it looked, for all the world, as though he had gone out back and settled down and drifted off in the early autumn sunshine. Artfully disarrayed black curls fell across his forehead, just so; immaculate white sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, one arm across his lap, a single playing-card still held between deft, slender fingers; head leant back against the white-washed garden wall as though he might rouse at any moment and complain about the pain in his neck; there was, altogether, surprisingly little blood and what there was had been put to good use. Ravi knelt, unmoving, at his side, one cold hand cradled in his own, and fought the urge to howl. Instead, he forced himself to ask, quietly and evenly, “What does it say?”
“It says,” General Cross replied, in precisely the same tone, “Queen to Knight, King’s Four: check.”
“I hope,” Ravi said from between clenched teeth, “that only one of you ever comes to know precisely how much I hate you both at this moment.”
A snort. “Boy, feel free to hate me as much as you like. This was a bloody exercise in futility and, regardless of what my idiot apprentice might think, I hate wasting moves more than money. We’ll never have a chance like this again.”
“An exercise – “ He stopped, swallowed, relaxed his grip. “Every word I said to him was a lie. I gave my word, and you never intended to even try keeping it. He believed me and you – “
“As I said, hate me all you like. Allen learned the practical benefits years ago, and it’s time the rest of you did, as well.” Softly. “Let’s go. There’s nothing left to do for him – he made his own choices, as well, Bookman. Remember that.”
“I somehow doubt that will be a problem.”
Crossposted like woah.
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Date: 2007-07-03 11:32 pm (UTC)That was all sorts of amazing. TT_TT Poor Tyki!
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Date: 2007-07-04 02:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-04 05:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-05 07:31 pm (UTC)I'm glad you enjoyed. ^_^
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Date: 2007-07-05 11:13 pm (UTC)This was lovely and hurty in all the right, desperate ways.
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Date: 2007-10-07 05:58 pm (UTC)I don't know DGM very well at all only just starting to watch it, and even then in bits and pieces...but I enjoyed reading this very much. Thank you for sharing.
Wow
Date: 2009-09-25 02:41 pm (UTC)