Chapter Text
The story started in a deceptively banal way, with a comment about the weather;
“It’s an awful storm we’re having tonight, isn’t it?”
Malcom stopped, casting a wary eye towards the voice. A gentleman in a beige coroner’s smock had entered the foyer, the shutters of the corridor still swinging behind him. Dark eyes flicked appraisingly over Malcom first, and then the wrapped corpse he had deposited on the counter. An edge of dry warning crept into his tone as he replied, “Yeah, nothing like these Norden winters.”
The mortician hummed in sympathetic agreement, coming over to examine the corpse. He lifted a gloved hand to pick at the damp shroud and examine what was below. Malcom’ knuckles ghosted over the handle of the barbed dusters in his pocket. “It’s a delivery for Herr Brandt. The good doctor only, sensitive stuff, ‘m afraid.” He cut in, an asymmetric, charming quirk across his lips.
The man drew back from the shroud with an apologetic smile, “I’m afraid Herr Brandt is not here tonight, no one else is, actually.” He smoothed his gloved hands over the front of his smock, “It’s the storm, no one wants to be at work in this awful weather, yet there is still work to be done. I’ll be filling in for Herr Brandt, whatever… arrangement you have with him, I will uphold.”
The mortician gestured down the corridor for Malcom to follow and disappeared through the creaking shutters. Malcom could feel something uncanny cloying the air. With the storm-damp corpse hefted over a shoulder, he followed. He knew this part of the night well. Gas lamps flickered in utilitarian brackets along the wall and cast irregular patterns along the regular tiles. His footsteps echoed wetly along the corridor. The clatter of sleet was muffled by the thick stone of the building, but the chill and damp of Elendhaven’s winter storms had followed them.
“So you’re… filling in for Herr Brandt? Funny, he didn’t mention having an assistant. How long have you worked here?” Malcom hefted the corpse onto the autopsy table and stepped back with folded arms. He leant against the sinks jutting out of the far wall, the old brass pipes whistling echoes of the storm winds outside.
“Not long, but I’m quite familiar with the theory of it all. It’s important to treat the dead gently, you never know when they might wake up.” The mortician’s eyes flicked to him, thinking twice and stifling a wink.
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t want to be waking up in the pieces this fellow is about to find himself in. And, you know, the dead waking up would be a problem for everyone.”
“Yes, especially the poor coroner,” he replied, lips quirking in an attempt at humour.
Malcom offered a dry smile in return, “did Herr Brandt tell you about our arrangement?”
“He told me enough.” Came the stilted response with another shaky smile.
“Then, you won’t mind if I stay until the job’s done?” Malcom’ voice cooled in the chemical-laced air, banishing the lingering fumes to the peripherals of their senses.
“Of course not.” He acquiesced quickly, “Besides, if anyone does wake up, I know there are capable hands nearby.”
“Oh doctor, you’re too kind,” He flashed the mortician an easy, charming smile, “Really, I swear I’ve seen you somewhere before. Have we met?”
“Ah, I’ve been told that a lot, I must have one of those forgettable faces,” The man replied, an awkward laugh lighting his tone. It sat strangely against the old stains across his smock, and the blood-crusted grouting below the operation table.
He wasn’t sure how anyone could forget him. He was tall, with a slender and fine-boned build the dust-toned coroner’s uniform clung to unfairly flatteringly. His eyes were black as the ocean and long hair the colour of blood. His hands worked a scalpel like a musician’s, dancing leganto across they keys of the corpse’s ribs. “Don’t think that’s quite the case. There’s something more, a power in the name,”
The mortician hummed, “Something like that, perhaps. If there’s power in a name it must be a great gift, and a powerful one at that. So, tell me, what name would suit me?”
Malcom studied the black gaze the mortician fixed him with, drawn into the depths. They held no trace of pupil or iris, just a dark, smooth lens calmer than the heaving darkness of the ocean. Like the void between stars, his subconscious whispered, and when the light hit it just right, a lone pinprick of life cut through the emptiness.
Or the stillness found beyond the grave.
“Carrion,” The word was so quiet he wasn’t sure it could be heard, “Carrion. You look like a Carrion.” The name tingled on Malcom’ tongue, lingering warm and desperate against his split lip like the breath shared after a kiss.
The man, Carrion now, cracked a smile across his thin, almost bloodless lips. “Carrion,” He repeated, trying it out, tasting the syllables and whispering them back into the gloomy morgue to trail away like incense smoke. “I like it, it feels good. If I’m to be a thing with a name, I’d like to have a name that is remembered. Do you mind terribly if I keep it?”
“Oh-of course not.” He stuttered inelegantly. Malcom stumbled over the mortician’s phrasing; ‘a thing with a name’. He shook it off, and in an attempt to regain some of his charm; added, “What sort of man do I look like?”
“Oh, you?” Carrion smiled warmly, eyes glinting with knowledge of something he had no right to in the stagnant kerosene light, “Why, that’s an easy answer. Your name is Malcom.”
Notes:
Ch1 has had its final overhaul thank you for reading - Enjoy!
Chapter 2: Bones
Chapter Text
The best phrase to describe Malcom Ferris was ‘built like a brick shithouse’. He stood at 5’8’’, with a barrel chest and dense bones that he had broken many times over. At twenty-eight, he had long since left behind his teenage proportions and grown into his bulk, more a workhorse than a deceptively strong colt. The fights helped with that, and in the inner pocket of his overcoat rested a set of heavy, worked iron knuckle dusters. Countless nicks and dents in the black iron showed how well-used they were. They’d stopped feeling just a little too big years ago, fitting into his hands like they’d been moulded to each other.
No matter where he went, Malcom’ heavy-set gait rattled Elendhaven’s streets with purpose. He was made of intention and blunt force trauma; wound and coiled like steel springs, waiting to snap and deliver their cold, metallic bite. He was a fighter; his father had said he was a killer. He deserved to take a little back, to live in his city however he pleased after everything it had taken from him.
Malcom exalted in the raucous whoops and shouts of the crowd at his every quirk and quip. Contrary to popular belief, he did know how to pick his fights; it was choice that led to him to picking them frequently and irreverently. It was fun heckling sailors, to talk circles around the witless drunks until the ensuing brawl drowned out the stench of cheap beer and greasy chowder.
He picked fights for the sake of it, he won because there was no other acceptable option.
While Elendhaven’s gentry tucked themselves away and tittered meaninglessly about quotas and currency in their decaying manor houses, Malcom ruled the Black Moon’s streets. He hadn’t paid for a drink in three years; he hadn’t lost a fight in four. Two years ago, he tried to hold a racketeering operation over the docks and fishing trades. Pettily, he maintained that if the economy was strong enough for it, and if he’d had the muscle to support it, it would have worked.
In this city at the edge of the world, he was its prince with bloody knuckles.
Irreverent, but never careless. Malcom was sure to ply his trade with skill. He made sure that the victims of his back-alley intimidations and pub brawls would never be cast carelessly into the hungry ocean or devoured by flames in an unmarked, mass grave. They would never end up like the plague-ridden corpses that haunted memories of his childhood. They deserved more dignity than that, because there was nothing that a corpse could do to spite the kindness you’d shown them.
+++
For the longest time, he was a thing that lacked a name. He was a thing that lurked in the shadows of Elendhaven’s gutters, and in the light of its feeble gas-lampposts. He was a thing with a frame thin as a needle and just as quick, darting through the city on the seam between a dark sky and darker ocean. He was easily forgotten, and he had sharp little hands, that stole sharp, little things. There wasn’t much that the nameless thing of Elendhaven knew about itself or its world, and what few things it did; it had to learn slowly on its own.
The thing knew the body it lived in was different. Not wrong, necessarily, just different.
He learned this against the walls of a shack in the Black Moon’s harbour, when a rough boy was holding his fragile neck against the wooden slats, slimy under a film of pale green algae. Buttons clacked against a chipped blade, as the boy drew it down the front of a shredded, filthy garment the nameless thing wore. The boy was saying something in a low tone that would have been threatening, if the creature could hear over the rush of blood in its ears. It all seemed poorly planned, the thing noted, as the boy loosened his meaty hold in confusion. The thing spasmed when it was stabbed. It clutched at the shiv trapped in the arch of his ribs as the dock boy staggered back. ‘Freak! Aberrant!’ were the boy’s dying words; the shiv wrenched free of the thing’s ribs and finding its new mark.
When the boy stopped twitching and the thing stole his clothes, it couldn’t tell their blood apart.
The thing knew it didn’t like heights.
When it looked up at the sleek cliffs and mountains surrounding Elendhaven, a chill travelled down its spine. His already dry and aching throat squeezing tighter in unnamed panic. One grey afternoon, the thing had watched some of the people from the town that matched its height walk along Elendhaven’s pebbled beach. They were digging through the stones, shouting in triumph when the grey and black parted under their scuffed shoes to a glimmer of white. He cringed when the pearlescent roe was hurled with wicked glee against the basalt cliffs.
The thing learned new words; pain, hunger, thirst, cold. Things that correlated to the uncanny skin it inhabited. It learned that to stop its abdomen from clenching so much it could barely move, it needed to eat. To soothe it’s aching throat, it needed to drink. When it could barely keep its eyes open and its thoughts felt foggy and slow, it needed to sleep. To stop itself from waking up cold and sore, that had to happen somewhere dry.
When it learned to speak, it started in the slurring accent of Elendhaven’s sailors and dock-rats. It listened to them curse and cheer, shout and scream, and found the old muscle-memory of how to make those words, too. A home tutor taught him to read, and he ducked under the windowsill as the rich, entitled parents scolded their children with an open hand, for the crime of being distracted during their lessons and wasting their parents’ precious money. A housekeeper taught him to cook, until the family she served cast her onto the streets for ruining their food one too many times.
Over the years he stole his knowledge, his accent, others’ lives, and eventually his occupation. He stole bright moments of fleeting daylight in the short summers and vicarious memories of warm hearths as Norden frost crept over his numb limbs in the long winters.
Eledenhaven’s nameless thing thought that one night, it would freeze solid like the black ice slicking the city’s uneven paving stones, and melt away when the sun returned.
Chapter Text
His hands were steady as they drew the scalpel in smooth arcs over the corpse’s battered chest. Layers of bruise-mottled skin parted under the deep strokes of the y-incision. The arms of the cut travelled along the corpse’s ribs to the end of its breastbone, the tail cutting through the drunkard’s meaty abdominal walls and stopping at the base of their pubic bone. When the skin had been peeled back and the ribs were revealed, Carrion sawed through the seams of the sternal plate with an unwieldy bone saw, his strokes surprisingly measured for his frame. Malcom watched the coroner work. He noted that even as he handled the sailor’s organs, removing and weighing them, expelling the bowels, he tried to touch the man as little as possible. Nothing lingered, nothing wasted. He was clinical and attentive, focused on his work with little mind paid to his audience.
“You’re sure we haven’t met somewhere before?” He tried again. The coroner’s certainty with the name he’d never given nagged at his senses as the man worked. Malcom feigned nonchalance as he watched Carrion make a guiding incision across the back of the sailor’s skull. He noted that the process was being performed as an autopsy, rather than a post-mortem rite.
Malcom thought of the living body was an oxymoronic creation. In equal parts, the human body was fragile and sturdy. Every action was underpinned by a relentlessly stubborn need to survive, that warred with the desire to destroy itself in increasingly creative ways. He’d never admit it, but his familiarity with both concepts was mapped beneath the skin, through the shrine of flesh, where the bone sits.
“No, I don’t believe so. But, Herr Ferris, you do have a rather distinctive reputation. It haloes you quite fittingly, like light cast from the streetlamps through fog.” Carrion replied smoothly, a puff of exertion escaping his lips as his saw bit into the cranium.
Malcom huffed, “Please doctor, I’m nothing so divine.”
“No? If we’re not our own gods then, what does that make us?” The lights thrummed in time with the mortician’s inquisitive hum.
“It makes us monsters,” His answering smirk was all teeth, “This city’s got a habit of creating them. Spits ‘em out from the black sea or forges them in the mines. Sure, the canaries sent down there come out sometimes, never the same though.”
“I suppose it does,” Malcom didn’t miss the tense click of the mortician’s tongue as he responded. “The ribs are built in such a specific way, to cage the monsters living in a human heart.”
Malcom hummed, watching carefully as the mortician removed the brain and set it to a side in a dish filled with preservative chemicals. There were specific customs surrounding preparation of the dead in Elendhaven. Among them, was that the head would be severed and left along Elendhaven’s bleak shoreline, until eventually, the bones became salt. As children, Malcom and his siblings would spend their summer afternoons searching for teeth in the black sand of Elendhaven’s harbour, and when the plague took them from him, Malcom scoured the pebbled coastlines for Hallandrette’s magic roe.
Malcom' bit back the sneer forming across his lips. The mortician seemed entirely calm and focused, unaware or uncaring of his disregard for Elendhaven’s customs. His gaze wandered over Carrion’s slim form, trailing up from the contours of his shoulders and slender neck to settle at the base of the other man's skull. A well-placed hit, and he would be dead before hitting the ground.
Still, that left him without someone to provide the proper rites. He’d made a habit of treating his victims with a specific kind of respect and was reluctant to break it.
"Familiar with the process, eh?" Mockery slipped into Malcom’ tone.
“Those of science, yes.” Carrion kept his body turned towards the corpse, his gaze and tone focused on some distant goal.
Malcom moved slowly as he swung his weight from the sinks he leant against and sauntered through the morgue. Carrion schooled his expression into neutrality as his dark eyes tracked Malcom’ movements. Eventually, the mortician twisted at his slim waist to keep Malcom out of his peripheries.
“You see, I know Heinrich Brant pretty damn well. Been coming to him with special deliveries for quite some time now, and it just isn’t like him to stay home because of some bad weather.” Malcom scoffed, “if that was all it took, he’d never get any work done.”
“I’m not sure what you’re implying, Herr Ferris.” Carrion replied with forced sterility, “Herr Brandt is at home to weather the storm. He has two children, one six and the other four, and a wife with a terrible phobia of this city. It makes you wonder how she lives in it, until you realise that she doesn’t.” The mortician tutted.
Carrion turned and rested the small of his back against the rim of the autopsy table, his gloved fingers curling around its raised edge as Malcom closed the distance between them, stepping into the other man’s space. “I think they’re quite a sweet family, actually,” Carrion continued, head tilting back as Malcom angled his profile upwards into a glare, “if you ignore the opium he feeds his wife to treat the mania lurking in her eyes, or the gull chicks his six-year-old daughter likes to drown in the harbour’s tide pools.”
“Oh, the gulls,” He smiled with a nostalgic purr, “There’s a trick to finding their nests, clearly she’s a smart girl, I didn’t even have to show her.” Malcom leant forward again, almost pressing their bodies flush. His hands curled around the mortician’s dainty wrists and pressed them into the lip of the table. They were slim, like the rest of his build, and with an experimental squeeze that sent a twinge skittering across Carrion’s expression, Malcom knew he could break them with ease.
“I think she’ll fill her father’s newly vacant position when she’s old enough.”
“How sweet. Yet, here I was, thinking that I had a career well in-hand only to be replaced by a six-year-old. Should I have run my resume past you first, Herr Ferris? I assure you, Herr Brandt realised I had quite the aptitude for the role,” Carrion’s lip curled in an acerbic smirk.
“You certainly have a unique position well in-hand, don’t you? Puts me in one too, one that looks like I need a new coroner, while you need to make yourself useful, so you don’t end up on that slab yourself.” He tightened his hold against the man’s ineffective, performative struggles, “With that in mind, I think that we can help each other.”
“Can we now?” Carrion asked dryly with an arch in his brows, “And in this hypothetical arrangement I would what, exactly?”
“You seem like a smart man, and there’s plenty to read at the city library,” With a non-answer and a vicious grin, Malcom released the mortician’s wrists, stepping back to clap a hand on his new associate’s shoulder.
Seconds ticked past slowly as Carrion’s dark eyes narrowed at the wolfish grin Malcom pinned him with.
Malcom moved with a lurch, his hand clamping hard against the hollows of Carrion’s fine collarbone. He yanked Carrion forward as he drove a fist into the man’s ribs, tucking perfectly into the brittle bones curling around his sides.
Carrion’s ribs snapped under the impact in a litany of small, fragile crackles that caved inwards under Malcom’ calloused knuckles. The man hissed in pain, attempting to flinch back against Malcom’ vice-like grip on his collar and failing. Malcom would admit that he kept his knuckles pressed into the divot he’d created in Carrion’s ribs for longer than he needed to. He pressed against the indent, ignoring the stifled yelp he was met with.
Bizarrely, Malcom was reminded of a fish’s skeleton.
He shoved Carrion away, letting him hit the operation table and slump against its rim. The man glared balefully at him with dark eyes through his long lashes. Malcom pulled a cocky, self-satisfied smirk over the unsettled confusion twisting around his throat.
“Be seeing you soon, Carrion.” He called pleasantly over a shoulder, disappearing down the dingy corridor, and into the night beyond.
Notes:
Big thanks to my lovely beta reader, wouldn't have made it this far without you <3
Chapter Text
Elendhaven was a city made of forgotten rituals and the magic of old gods. Its aberrant eccentricities seeped through its streets and coated them like the pale crust of salt that wafted in on the winds from the black sea. At the city’s centre stood an effigy of their patron goddess; Hallandrette, the queen of the sea, the mother of monsters, and gatekeeper of the dead. It was said that when the world ended, it would begin with the rasp of creatures shuffling and scraping their way to the shore under the cold eddies of Hallandrette’s tides.
It was said that monsters slept under the Black Moon, waiting for their queen to end world and wake them from their slumber.
The kingdoms of Mittengeldt would never understand how Elendhaven’s people loved and feared their forsaken city, so they forsook them in turn. Mittengeldt’s people tried to dismiss the city’s magic as baseless superstition as they swept into its haunts and desecrated its old rituals. They stayed far, far away, until it suited them to flood into the bounds of the Black Moon and scrabble for the wan glimmers of silver lurking in its mines.
Rats, all of them. And Malcom held nothing but disdain for the opportunistic southerners.
Rain and sleet lashed against the building’s shutters and the ocean’s roar rattled Elendhaven’s streets, rattling the city’s salt-crusted bones. Despite the characteristic winter storm, tonight was a lucky night. While he’d made it inside just before the storm started the rank smell starting to waft from the wrapped corpse he’d brought and long walk it would take him to get home was thinning his patience. Malcom drummed his fingers impatiently against the morgue’s counter. What was keeping his new contact?
After another particularly brutal howl of the storm, Malcom was done waiting. He lifted the corpse over a shoulder and stalked through the hospital’s halls. His footsteps echoed dully, and the morgue’s door clanged open under the heel of his boot.
“It’s damn rude to keep your new boss waiting, didn’t Herr Brandt teach you better?” Malcom called, the edge of a sardonic sneer dancing along his greeting.
His entry was met with the startled clatter of a set of forceps against the tilled floors. Carrion whipped around to him, his blood-toned brows carving a notch into the centre of his forehead in confusion. His dark eyes blinked and his lips parted as the thought of something slowly ticked through his mind.
“You can remember me?” Malcom almost missed the soft, bewildered breath that escaped the mortician’s lips.
“Yes? We did meet, had a whole conversation too, or were the broken ribs I left you with that forgettable,” Malcom frowned, irritation and an undercurrent of confusion lacing from his tone.
A disbelieving laugh bubbled out of Carrion’s pretty throat, “Yes, yes, between four and seven of them, it was very unpleasant, but no, that-this is not how it works. This is never how it works,” He let out an unhinged huff, raising a blood-slicked glove to run through his hair but thinking better of it at the last second. With the index finger of the glove pinched between two sharp teeth, Carrion wriggled a pale hand free form the leather and distractedly ran it through his hair. His dark eyes were wide and unfocused in the dim light of the morgue, darting blankly through the space of Malcom’ general vicinity.
“Right well, it is now.” Malcom folded his arms, patience running thin, “I’ve met you, and I know you, and you have a job to do for me, or else I’m going to break between four and seven more of your brittle ribs.”
Carrion’s attention snapped to him with something sharp lurking in his gaze. They held each other’s sight for long seconds, the dark look captivating Malcom growing predatory. His movements were quick and sharp as he approached, stepping fearlessly into Malcom’ space with an elated grin pulling at his lips.
“I don’t think that you understand how special this is, Herr Ferris, it must be something about you,” Carrion tilted closer as Malcom leant back to prevent the tips of their noses from brushing, lip curling defensively, “If only I could...” An un-gloved hand came to brush the stubble along Malcom’ jaw and tilt his head differently, searching for a better angle to examine something in his eyes.
There was something bright and reckless twitching across the man’s expression, quirking his pale lips and raising a light flush across his high cheekbones. This close, Malcom could see the freckles scattering along the bridge of his nose and browbone, slightly grey-tinged, like his skin refused to accept the correct amount of saturation. With a thrill of heat crawling down his throat, Malcom recognised the breathless, unhinged grin painting Carrion’s face as victory. It looked good on him.
The touch continued to wander, trailing along the underside of his jaw and to the squared-off hinge that met the column of his throat. Tepid fingers searched the sensitive tendons and arteries of Malcom’ neck, finding purchase at the press of his pulse, which rose steadily under the attention. Carrion’s delicate thumb curled over his windpipe, pressing just above his Adams apple. The mortician’s other hand, the one still covered by a slightly bloodied glove, came up to prod at his upper lip, nudging past it to thumb against his lateral incisors.
The burning tang of old blood and chemicals snapped Malcom from whatever bizarre spell the mortician’s liquid eyes had cast over him. He roughly batted the hand away, lip curling in irritation as he took hold of Carrion’s collar and spun them around. A started gasp was driven from Carrion’s lungs by his impact with the morgue’s wall.
“What did you just try to fucking do?” Malcom sneered. The stagnant lights shuddered as the mortician was pressed into the thin gas pipes running along the wall. His breath hitched as a lose bolt bit uncomfortably into his back and he raised his hands in mock placation.
He spoke with a look of reckless elation sparking hungrily behind his eyes, “Oh, my dear Malcom this is a cause to celebrate-”
“Cut the creepy shit and explain!” He slammed the mortician into the wall again to interrupt his rambling. Malcom took vicious satisfaction in the harsh knock of the back of Carrion’s skull against the stone, even as another hysterical laugh bubbled from the grin cracking across his lips.
“I’m sure I mentioned being forgettable-” he gasped out, blinking hazily, “I assure you, Herr Ferris, it wasn’t an exaggeration. This city refuses to let me exist,” his lips curled into a hateful sneer.
“These wretched gutters have been trying to drown me since the day I crawled free of them, and there has never been an indication that it could be changed... until now,” An expression of spiteful joy cracked across the pinned man’s face; elation at having altered a nature that fundamentally refused to change. Malcom let his hold loosen slightly on the mortician’s lapels now that he was sort-of getting an answer. He could understand some of it, the thrill of winning a bitter fight.
Carrion relaxed against him, head cocking to one side to shake a strand of blood-tinged hair out of his eyes. With a saccharine note in his voice, and a grin that held too-sharp teeth, Carrion leant forward as he continued.
“Which is why, my dear Malcom, it’s a cause for celebration. Let me buy you a drink.”
Notes:
I am so sorry this was so goddam late, Ch5 is in the works I am hoping it'll be back on track next week.
Chapter Text
Carrion marvelled at the strange turns of it all. In less than two hours on that unassuming night, Malcom Ferris had given him both a name and several broken ribs, and both backhanded gifts meant more to him than he could put into words.
It still sent a giddy tingle across his tongue, Carrion, it was a name, it was his name. He’d had to practice saying it; he’d never learned to introduce himself, after all.
Elendhaven’s formerly nameless thing cast a look over his shoulder, eyes glazing over what he knew to be Malcom’ form in the darkness. He couldn’t see the killer’s cloaked bulk, not really, but the displacement of the icy rain was enough. It battered against his oilskin coat, catching stray glimmers from the dim streetlights. A glassy, private smile pulled across Carrion’s lips, and he was glad that the night hid it from the Black Moon’s cruel eyes.
He smirked at Malcom’ grousing as it escaped his lips in quick puffs of vapour. It didn’t live long, as Elendhaven’s vengeful rain shattered the warm clouds.
Carrion lingered a moment longer than he needed to at the threshold of their destination. Like most signposts in Elendhaven, the plaque denoting the spindly building as the ‘Doves Nest’ had been desaturated by time. The wood had been greyed and paled under years of exposure to the wan sunlight and spray of salt from the sea. Its hinges must have been replaced recently, as they only creaked a little in the winter gale. Warm light filtered out through the frosted glass windows, casting mottled patterns into the night beyond. His pale fingers curled around the bar of the door and his gaze flicked over his companion’s profile as the light played across his features. There was a deep notch between Malcom’ brows and a scowl pulling the corners of his lips into an impatient sneer. He smiled wistfully, wondering how many microfractures traced through the sharp contours of his jaw; what sound would the calloused bone make as he ran his nails over it?
“Are we getting a drink or are you just going to stand there like a fuckin’ barnacle for the rest of the night?”
He met Malcom’ irritable snap with a serene smile, fingers flexing absently around the doorhandle.
“My apologies, Herr Ferris. Please, after you,” Carrion smiled demurely as he opened the door, the expression twitching as Malcom shoulder-checked him while he passed.
Carrion followed through, ducking into the larger man’s shadow as he pulled the door shut behind them. The Nests’ warmth washed over them, a haze of cigar smoke and the cloying scent of alcohol sealing edges of the doorframe and banishing remnants of the storm. Inside, the pub’s patrons moved, breathed, and talked like a single living organism, rather than the assorted tenth of Elendhaven’s adult population that they were. An amalgamated mess of conversation and the heady scent of humanity at ease assaulted Carrion’s senses. Spitefully, he thought about leaving the door open just enough to welcome Elendhaven’s brutal winter into the Nest. His gaze wandered over Malcom’ body and the relaxing notch of discontent in his brows as he shucked his coat and hung it on a hook beside the door, and Carrion decided against it.
When he visited any of Elendhaven’s establishments on his own, Carrion would simply slip through the crowds like water, taking what he wanted and moving on before the glassy haze faded from the inhabitant’s eyes. But tonight, with his special company, something about his usual habits felt inadequate. He was dealing with back-water royalty, after all. They needed to be entertained.
“Shall we?” Carrion swept a hand at the seething throng of the Nest’s patrons, his own coat hanging on the wall beside Malcom’. Rain dripped off the stiff fabric, collecting in the concaved tiles by the door before the flooring gave way to wood panelling. He cast a grin towards his companion, his synapses firing in excitement at the newness of the experience.
“If you cut the fucking stalling and explain,” Malcom met his grin with a glower, sneering out a response.
“Of course, Herr Ferris,” Carrion laughed airily, “I’d never deny you.”
Malcom threw a scoff over his shoulder as he pushed through the crowd. Carrion let him go, content to stand back and watch the wonderful flex of his broad shoulders. He snickered as Malcom bullied a duo of poor sailors out from their small, oblong table.
Carrion drifted away, seeking the drinks he had promised his companion.
There was a new woman working behind the bar, maybe thirty, with thick hair braided and tossed over her shoulder. She had dark eyes, and, under the warm tones of a gentle tan, she had a Norden complexion; a true Elendhaven national. But something wrong lurked in her accent, tainting Elendhaven’s working-class drawl with the nasally whistle found throughout Mittengeldt’s kingdoms. Carrion noted the oddity of her accent as she spoke with a patron at the bar, another woman in a green woollen frock with an instrument case against the leg of her stool. The accent was interesting, but it made the barkeep unlike other people.
She turned to address the formerly nameless thing with the relaxed, somewhat tired smile of someone that had been working through a long night and, despite being eager for it to be over, wasn’t going to be impolite about it. Like other people however, her sentence trailed off when she set to address Carrion, the light brightening her eyes clouding over.
“Good evening, I’m terribly sorry to steal you from your lovely company, but my partner and I have been waiting a very long time for our drinks. Now, I hate to intrude, but would you mind doing something about that?” Carrion softened his brows and twitched his lips into an apologetic smile. He affected his voice with the upmost politeness, black eyes focusing on the woman’s response.
The thing of Elendhaven had learned that while the knife and fist reigned supreme, words could still be very powerful things. Through extensive experimentation, it learned that there were specific ways it could say things to get what it wanted. There were ways language could be spun, words twisted and twined through the air, to sweep a mesmerising haze over the unsuspecting listener.
“Ah, I’m sorry about that. We’ve been so busy tonight; you and your friend must’ve slipped my mind. I’ll get it all squared away for you now. What name is the order under again?” She replied, eyes flicking down at an immaculately kept receipt leger just behind the countertop.
He fell quiet, stumbling at the simple question. Usually, when this kind of thing was asked of him, he would redirect it, lacking a name to supply. But tonight, he did have a name.
“Carrion,” He concluded, folding his arms on the countertop and leaning over curiously. The name, his name, buzzed in the air. He fought the urge to break into a wide grin and settled for a bemused smile as the barkeeper checked over her ledger.
She frowned, ink-spotted fingers trailing down one edge of the page along a list of names, currency and orders. “Strange, I’m not seeing anything. What did you order again?”
The haze was beginning to clear from her voice as she looked over the pristine, logical rows of her leger. Carrion scanned the pages as she flicked through the book, blessedly noting how she seemed to have signed and dated each page. The signature of Claudia Dovetale perched in the top corner, written in a sensible, clear print.
“How odd,” Carrion laughed faintly, hoping it came out as sheepish rather than showing his bubbling irritation, “You were very busy when I made the request. There was a group of sailors around the bar, they were all rather loud and uncouth, like the crew of the Mensis had been wrecked upon the lovely harbour you’ve created, Miss Dovetale.”
She let out a short laugh, looking up to meet Carrion’s gaze at his quip, “They can be a little like that sometimes, even when you’ve gotten used to them.”
“Oh, especially when you’re used to them,” Carrion chuckled along, watching a complacent haze settle back over her expression.
Carrion quickly realised that Miss Claudia Dovetale was far too logical for his typical methods to work. It was always difficult for the spoken word, no matter how much uncanny weight was levelled behind it, to counteract something that was enshrined in ink. He suspected it would take far longer to word his requests specifically enough to unravel her pragmatism than his guest had patience for.
Still, after longer than he would have liked, Carrion returned to the table Malcom had claimed with two stout glasses of rich, honey-toned liquor. He liked how the light split through the rippling liquid, unbroken by ice or unnecessary patterns in the glasswork.
He found the bulkier man relaxed into the sturdiest chair of the two at their table. Malcom managed to take up most of the space available, leaving Carrion to presumably slip his thin frame into the chair opposite. He sat with his thighs spread wide, one leg propped up against the central stem of the table and the other stretching comfortably aside. Somehow, he managed to avoid slouching while reclining comfortably on his makeshift throne.
Carrion set the drinks lightly down on the worn lacquer of the table, his eyes flicking up just in time to catch the almost impressed arch of Malcom’ brow in response to his choice of alcohol. He smoothed a strand of hair behind his ear, something in his organs fluttering at the pseudo-praise. Not entirely by accident, the thick heel of his boot rapped against Malcom’ outstretched shin as Carrion manoeuvred himself into the cramped space.
Carrion responded to his scowl playfully, resting his arms on the table and leaning forward. His thin, delicate fingers curled around his glass as it was raised to his lips for an experimental sip. His eyes tracked the movement as Malcom did the same, a picture of easy, relaxed calm in the eye of a violent storm.
And then he ruined it, by opening his mouth.
Notes:
I am so goddam sorry this chapter took so long to come out, it was tough to find time to write, and then when I started writing it just kind of kept going... so it ended up 1.7K words...
Hope y'all enjoyed!
Chapter 6: Long Walks and Foreign Novels
Notes:
I am so sorry this took so long to be written, It's actually much longer and I decided to split it into two chapters to be able to upload something. As it is, this chapter is almost 2k words and would have easily doubled that if I hadn't split it.
Anyway, enjoy!
CW: Implied harm to children
Chapter Text
They had managed to come to an arrangement.
Carrion noted his companion’s surprise when he snaked a gloved hand through the crook of his elbow. Even through the thick coats that Elendhaven’s winter demanded, and the frigid mist of seawater dusting their side, Malcom ran warm, and Carrion clung to it like a tumour. In the days when he was still Elendhaven’s nameless thing, he had watched the townsfolk walk along the coastline like this. Usually in the summer, on painfully bright days when the ocean sparkled like obsidian shards, townsfolk would walk along the coastline in pairs. One in a dress that was hiked up on her hip to prevent it from catching, the other in a loosened cravat and light jacket.
It seemed so simple for the townsfolk to fall into their vapid little rituals. Elendhaven’s nameless thing had never understood them, but Carrion as the new thing he had become, maybe he could understand the strangeness. He’d always considered himself an experiential learner, too.
He found that, despite Malcom’ stiffness, the man had yet to push him away, and his organs squirmed pleasantly at it, matching the pleased little hum that trembled in his throat.
Sheltered under a bleak outcropping among the tide pools was a young woman. Willowy and tragic, with pale blonde hair that hung around her narrow face in a cloud reminiscent of a manic delirium. Something, an infant presumably, was swaddled in her arms, while another little girl with the same pale and thin hair as her mother crouched beside a tide pool.
With a jagged, salt-bleached stick of driftwood curled in her little hands, the child prodded at the beached corpse of something that was once a seal. The suggestion of her pale brows knotted together in confusion, the point of her tongue prodding against her bottom lip as she investigated the aberration.
Carrion was pulled along as Malcom approached the trio, the creatures hand falling from his companion’s side as a conversation passed between Malcom and the woman; ‘Lucy’. He caught Malcom’ scowl, when Elendhaven’s dark prince kicked the aberration back into the sea. It fell over the jagged, sloping rocks with the wet cracks of scale and bone. Carrion watched its eyes, that should have been as black as the ocean were it not for the fog of death had clouded them, sending off-red veins through the glossy lenses. The tumour that grew over its mouth had split down its centre like an overripe fruit; bearing seeds shaped like teeth and streaked by swollen capillaries through mesocarp.
Carrion shuddered as the aberration disappeared beneath the black waves like it had never been there at all.
He was brought back to reality by the cruel little brat as she stamped her feet. She made a shrill whine in Malcom’ direction and was met with a pat on the head.
“Nona, little miss, I need to have a word with your mother, so why don’t you show Mr Carrion here what you’ve been teaching the gulls, hmm?”
“Maybe, but he doesn’t look like he’d get it. Papa says not to waste time telling people things they’re too stupid for.” She cast a sceptical look in his direction.
Malcom laughed. Carrion did not.
“He just might be,” He patted her head, “But you’re such a smart girl, I’m sure you can figure out how to explain it right. It’ll be a challenge, won’t it?”
The brat’s eyes sparkled and she nodded with determination, “Oh, okay! I can do that!” she turned to Carrion, puffing herself up with an incredible amount of self-importance for a six-year-old. She sauntered over the rocks and took hold of Carrion’s sleeve. His lip curled in disgust at the contact, but the little monster seemed not to notice or care.
“Come on! The gulls might float away! They need to learn to hold their breath so they can swim, because Mama said if you can’t swim when the world ends, you’re going to drown.” The child, ‘Nona’ his memory supplied, pulled him to crouch beside a nearby tide pool with her.
“But they’re being bad and not learning when I’m trying to teach, so you need to hold them down until they stop moving and then they float to the top. Their little faces stay in the water, that means they’re learning.” She finished with a sagely nod.
Carrion nodded along as the awful little cretin fixed him with wide eyes. She used small words and spoke slowly, like he was as capable of understanding her lessons as the dead gulls.
For reasons he couldn’t quite identify, the formerly nameless thing of Elendhaven discovered a deep hatred of this child.
He was spoiled for choice.
There were just so many methods he could use to dispose of Nona Brandt.
+++
Malcom and Lucy watched her child lead the mortician away. The little girl pulled the sleeves of the ginger-haired vulture to crouch with her beside a tide pool filled by the grey, bobbing corpses of gull chicks.
Unlike the vicious black water scrabbling for purchase against Elendhaven’s coastline, when Lucy spoke the watery quality of her voice was thin and flimsy. It dribbled from the anorexic contours of her throat, over her cracked lips and down her sharp chin until it eventually came to rest atop the bonnet-clad head of the infant curled into her chest.
“I didn’t know you made friends these days, Malcom.”
“I don’t.” He scoffed, “That freak’s not a friend. He’s my new associate, met him when he put your husband into an early retirement, how’s the city widow’s pension treating the Brandt family these days?”
“No?” She cooed at her child. She carried on, seeming to have missed the question Malcom asked, “You were walking awful close for two not-friends,”
“Like I said, he’s a freak, kind of like you, now that I think about it.” He gestured at the black dress she wore and the little it did to hide her waif-thin form. Pale and thinning blonde hair fluttered like moths around her narrow face, while a veiled bonnet rested innocently on the rocks beside her, a widow’s shield and comfort. Her eyes were ringed by desaturated shadows, her lips were cracked and her eyes that had once been a warm brown like tilled soil were clouded and grey.
“What the fuck happened to you, Lucy?”
He tried to mask his voice with disgust but couldn’t keep treacherous little tendrils of pity out of his words. They surprised him, sneaking up from the depths like an aberration. Usually, the mutated creatures would never survive long upon Elendhaven’s coastline, and he would kick their beached and reeking corpses back into sea without a second thought.
A breath that Malcom almost mistook for a laugh whistled out of her throat, “I changed, Malcom. Didn’t you?”
“We’re not children anymore. I grew up, like we all had to far too quick. I had to learn how the world worked fast, and what I had to be to live in it. I suppose you never had to how to change yourself, you’ve always been strong enough to make everything else do that for you. Everything except Jessie-”
“Don’t-” His heart spasmed painfully at the name- even after all these years- “I’m warning you, Lucy. Don’t go there.”
She fell silent. Then,
“Do you still believe in those fairy tales we grew up with? Hallandrette’s roe, the monsters sleeping under the Black Moon, the dancers in the lightning at sea?”
He scowled, “I’m not a fucking child. You said it yourself, we all had to grow up.”
“Maybe, but I started telling those same fairy tales to my children, and together we started watching them come true. I think... I think that when you tell them, it brings them all back and makes them real – isn’t that right?” She dabbed the snotty nose of her infant and traced the round contours of its face with her vapid eyes.
“You’ve really fucking lost it.”
She continued on, apparently missing his disbelief-driven insult, “There’s one that I’ve been telling a lot recently. Ever since Heinrich died. Maybe if my children believe it, it’ll come true. It’s about one of Drowning Queens’ children, called a Hallenkind-”
“Rent boys, really?” Malcom raised a sarcastic brow, “I didn’t think you’d be into that sort of thing...” He trailed off as displeasure pulled her lips into a thin, sour line. Malcom sighed through his nose, feeling indulgent, but not without disrespect. “Go on then, tell me your favourite fairy-tale. Clearly, we’ve got nothing better to do.”
“A Hallenkind is a creature of old myth. The Drowning Queen lays her roe in the sand, and when a wretched and broken soul finds one, if they give the ocean what they love most, Hallandrette will let them hatch her magic roe. She’ll send them a companion, someone made of black water, fish bones and dark matter from the bottom of the Nord Sea. A Hallenkind to love their master in the deepest ways that they crave. A companion for lonely souls...”
“Bullshit,” Malcom snapped, throat tight.
“It’s not!” With a jerk of her birdlike neck, Lucy twisted her clouded gaze against him, eyes shining with unshed tears, “Just because she didn’t grant your wish, doesn’t mean she won’t grant mine- ours!”
The infant began to whine as her grip tightened on its pudgy form.
“I’m not just wishing for me, it’s for us. For everything- I-I need Heinrich back! He’s my nights, my days, my dreams and my nightmares and that-!”
She took a shallow breath, her fingers jerked, her child started to scream. She finished softly, like wind in her sails had abandoned her. “That’s what a Hallenkind is for- to make it’s masters dreams come true.”
Malcom watched silently as she remained oblivious to the infant crying in her too-tight grip. He waited with a deepening scowl as the minutes ticked by and her lip began to move in trembling whispers. Things that made his brow twitch began to fall from her lips, such as ‘...give away what I love most....’ and ‘I need to but I don’t know if I can cast you away...’ and one more of ‘...the water’s so dark can it really give anything back?’
“You aren’t her anymore, you know. Just someone wearing her face.” He broke the crying of her child with a sneer, “Badly at that, playing house while high and manic doesn’t suit you.”
Lucy blinked lazily, like a dazed cat, and she smiled a lopsided smile, “You don’t know what suits me, Malcom. Who have you been all these years anyway? Even if you hate this city, we grew up in it together and its shaped who and what you are. The city doesn’t love us, but we have to love it back, that’s how it works. What a Hallenkind is made for too...”
Her throat rattled with a strained laugh, “Maybe that’s why the Queen never sent Jessie back to you. You were always made for him, and then your master died and now you’re just another hollowed out, broken monster beached on the Black Moon’s shore. Cursed with an unrequited love, he could never have loved—”
He hit her.
Chapter 7: Coagulation
Summary:
CW: Self-Harm, harm to children (very brief, skip until after the page break to avoid it)
Chapter Text
Somewhere in the distance, an infant and its mother were crying. Beyond them, a wandering fisherman was calling out to the duo under the outcropping, asking if said widow and her infant were alright.
Malcom was storming away from the tragic scene he had caused.
In front of him, under the deceptively strong grip of his spidery fingers, Nona thrashed and shrieked.
Carrion appreciated the irony of it as he watched strands of her pale hair spasm in the dark water. Like him, Nona clearly had become an experiential learner; how could she understand the lesson of her dead gulls without a shared experience?
His idle musings were rudely interrupted by a yank at the back of his coat and his upper arm. Carrion gasped as the collar of his coat and shirt rode into his neck under the commanding pull of Malcom’ rough hands. The vile little brat jerked free of his grip and the tide pool’s depths, her little body heaving with desperate gasps. On trembling legs, the little girl staggered to hide in the black ruffles of her mothers’ skirt, to disappear under a different kind of dark tide.
As Malcom manhandled him away from the sputtering child and her tittering mother, he was reminded that they’d come to Elendhaven’s black coastline with a purpose. His hair tangled with the shoulder-strap of his (Herr Brandt’s, really) battered satchel of mortuary tools as Malcom yanked and shoved him along.
He had a point to prove to the city’s brutal prince, after all.
+++
Malcom fumed as he shoved the mortician across the slick ground. Fury mingled with something murky, and the cocktail of emotion seeped into his organs. He hated the tightness that scratched at the inside of his chest cavity, the same that always did when he thought of his long-gone best friend, and he hated even more how easily Lucy had used it to get under his skin despite her mania.
He’d let Lucy off lightly for the way she’d spoken to him.
“Was that rough extrication truly necessary?” Carrion tutted as he freed himself from the other man’s grip and smoothed down his rumbled coat.
“Quiet.” Malcom scowled at him.
The fond scoff Carrion answered with made him seethe.
Malcom sneered, “Get on with it, or we’ll be proving your claims on my terms.”
“Yes, yes- peace, Schatz. There’s no need to be so impatient about it.” He dropped his hands from where they’d been unwinding a red scarf from his neck. He smirked, “You know I wouldn’t deny you.”
Carrion continued to primly remove his outer layers, placing the thick coat and scarf on a flat rock. He methodically tied his hair back and rolled up the fabric of his shirt sleeves, revealing bony wrists, marbled with icy veins. He flicked open his satchel and laid it out atop the folded clothes. The array of blades, needles and tools glinted dully in the grey morning with the reflection of pale sunlight off the black sea. Almost lovingly, the man trailed his fingers along the polished handles of the tools, the metals and ceramics singing under his nails.
A scalpel, its blade wickedly sharp and subtle filigree engraved into the slim handle, danced into his hand.
With the ghost of a smile dancing across his pallid lips, he, pressed the tip against the radial artery of his wrist. Blood welled under the implement’s touch, clinging to the incision like hallowed ground. He drew it along the vein and the pool of dark blood followed the path that had been carved for it. He held out his hand, as if offering Malcom a dance, while the cut welled, stemmed and quickly closed. The blood followed the slim contours of Carrion’s forearm, falling silently onto the dark rocks at their feet.
He tilted his head back, a smirk quirking at Malcom’ sceptical glower, “Something not to your satisfaction, Herr Ferris?”
“Impressive trick you’ve got there.” Malcom let his gaze wander over the mortician’s pale limbs, his hands, his scalpel. To the dissection tools splayed across their makeshift altar. His hands followed, trailing over their slim handles far rougher than Carrion’s touch had been. The tools clacked dully against his nails, rather than singing.
The man scoffed, cocky and challenging, “If you’re so convinced I’m pulling some sort of trick, you’re welcome to try it yourself.”
His hands settled on an ice-pick. Cruelly long, thick, a brutal tool befitting brutal work. With a hum, Malcom pulled it from the casing and made a few abortive stabbing motions in the air.
Carrion watched him with an unsettling giddiness sparking in his black eyes, “Please rest assured that not only would you be unable to kill me, but you would also be unable to hurt me in any way that matters.”
He stalked forward with a glare, placing a hand at Carrion’s sternum and shoving him back, pressing him back against the sleek cliffsides.
Pale, cold hands grasped for Malcom’ calloused ones. Bare forearms snaked out of his dark, rolled back sleeves, where blood was drying in strange webs and drips over the smooth flesh. He tilted his head back, bearing that pale, pretty throat and placing the sharp point of the pick at the seam between the cartilage ridges of his larynx and the underside of his mandible. Malcom wouldn’t know its name, but it was placed in line with the hyoid bone, a brittle thing, easy to crack through.
He parted his lips, and Malcom didn’t give him the satisfaction of making some other self-confident quip. With a narrowed glare, he pressed the ice pick through the mortician’s throat, pressing until the sharp implement had buried itself to the hilt and scraped against the basalt cliffs through the base of Carrion’s skull. Carrion’s eyelids, pale and near translucent in an amphibian way, flickered in surprise. His fingers twitched at Malcom’ wrists with an ineffective pull. Dark blood pooled at his pale lips, bubbling out of his punctured throat with a wet, almost placating gurgle.
He didn’t let go. Not until he’d made his point.
“As useful as your skills are, you’ve been pushing your luck.” He muttered darkly, “Because of that, I don’t much care if you can’t die like you keep saying, or if you’re wrong and after today, I’ll need to find a new coroner.” He jerked the pick, and was rewarded with a pained choke, “But let’s say you’re right, then this won’t even scar, and I can do it again if it’s clear you haven’t learned the damn lesson.”
As slowly as he’d pushed the pick in, he pulled it out, wriggling the spike and widening the wound as he did so. A steady trickle of dark blood leaked from the puncture, following the arches of the man’s lithe tendons and cartilage. It pooled at hollow of his throat between those two, sharp collarbones, and trickled further down past the undone buttons to seep into the charcoal fabric of his shirt. Some of the depth had faded from his ocean-dark eyes, hazing over with fog caused by the loss of oxygen to his brain. Carrion choked and sputtered inelegantly at the blood pooling in his airways, a few stray specks landing across Malcom’s hand and jaw as he swayed back. He watched, patient, predatory, the ice-pick flicked absently towards the ground and spraying a crimson arc over the dark rocks.
The mortician slumped against the cliffs behind him, legs weakening, head drooping forward. Stray strands of blood-red hair dripped over the sharp planes of his brow and cheekbones, matching the droplets falling from his pallid lips. Carrion’s breath caught in a series of wet, choking coughs.
Traitorously, his thoughts wandered to what it would feel like to have the mortician choking on something else.
The mortician forced his head back, resting it against the cliffs so Malcom could see that the puncture at his throat was steadily closing. The coagulated shudder of Carrion’s breaths subsided, and the sharp, victorious glint returned to his eyes.
“Satisfied?” His voice was hoarse, pale lips flecked with dark, brilliant blood and pulling at the sharp corners into a smirk.
Chapter 8: Claudia
Summary:
A traveller returns to a home that doesn't recognise her.
Notes:
I'm not dead! Neither is this fic!
Holy shit this chapter was a pain in the ass to write but this I have most of ch9 written and it looks like approx 2k words of filth and dubcon. Also I have covid so please excuse any writing/continuity issues
Chapter Text
Elendhaven hadn’t changed. She was sure of it from the first moments the ocean’s bitter scent wafted through her train car. It stung and called to her in equal parts. Her home, sort-of. Claudia Dovetale was returning to an early winter which was one of the worst possible times to visit the Black Moon – if there was ever a good time. From the ominous clouds dissolving the line between the sea and sky, it was going to be a brutal winter too.
The chill tinted the black ocean grey and cast its unhealthy pallor over the city itself as she moved down its muted streets.
Her boots clacked against the smooth stones, made clammy by the sea spray in the air.
It had been so long since she’d walked these streets, but the caution and quiet reverence that the presence of an old god inspired came to her like an old friend. The feeling placed its arm around her shoulder and gently guided her past the fading signage and old buildings huddling for sanctuary in the Black Moon’s streets. Claudia passed a street of residential apartments, where cramped balconies were separated by rusting iron railings. She passed Hallandrette’s statute at the town’s centre.
The effigy had been built decades ago from materials mined from the cliffs surrounding Elendhaven, when industry had injected false life into the city’s veins like adrenaline. Iron, clad in copper that had once-upon-a-time shone with its own sunlight despite the desaturating effect of the Black Moon’s harbour. Claudia couldn’t imagine the effigy as anything other than its blackened, sickly green. Lazy trickles of dark water rolled down the gaunt planes of Hallandrette’s cheeks and through the fingers of her grasping hands. Leaving had given Claudia a new appreciation of the irony; how the Queen of the Dead who held domain over the ocean was always depicted as drowning.
Supressing a shudder, Claudia hurried through the streets.
Her family home, the one she had been sent away from almost fifteen years ago, stood spindly and frail. Algae crept from the cobblestones at its threshold up the old bricks beside the braced door and towards the pivot-point and stem of the iron doorbell. Claudia carefully raised her fingers and rang the bell.
+++
What struck her the most was that their voices were different to how she had imagined them. Not how badly they had aged (in her father’s case) or their poor health following lingering effects of the Twin Plagues; but their voices. They both sounded different to the ways she’d narrated their letters in her head.
With a twinge of guilt, Claudia realised that she’d expected them to sound like her, not what she could have been if she’d never been sent away.
The afternoon over Elendhaven’s streets was, as expected, absolutely miserable. Though the table she shared was far enough away from the windows, the irregular rattle of the rain against the fogging glass set her teeth on edge. At any moment, she expected the glass to crack, and for the winter to creep its damp fingers across the lacquered floors and into the pot sitting at the centre of her table for the sole, spiteful purpose of souring the brew.
Though the heaviest of his coats had been surrendered upon entry and his scarf was neatly folded over the back of his chair, her companion was still wrapped in layers of wool and cotton. Thinning brown-ginger hair was tied into a small tail at the base of his skull while errant strands clung to his temples and to the arches of his somewhat receding hairline. Warm light from the gas-bulbs cast kind shadows into the tired creases of his brow and around his mouth. It warmed his skin and hid his underlying pallor.
Julius had smiled warmly to her when they’d met outside the Doves’ Nest after Claudia had unpacked and reunited with her father. He insisted that he lead her by the arm to the tea house where he had booked a table for their reunion. They walked briskly through the rain with her arm tucked into the crook of his elbow.
Then, she had barely noticed his voice above the clatter of the rain.
Now, seated across from each other at a cozy table with a pot of tea and plate of sugar cookies between them, how she had imagined her best friend’s voice chafed against how she heard him. Over the years, she had associated Julius with comfort, home, stability. They exchanged letters like clockwork despite the best efforts of the world around them and his level-headed comfort had gotten her through the hardest of her days at the academy.
With another flutter of guilt, Claudia realised that she had expected Julius to have grown out of his accent just like she had. To leave the Black Moon behind.
“That’s enough about our dreary city, tell me about the South! What was the Academy like? Is the Southern Ocean really as blue as they say it is?”
“It’s that and more Julius! The academy was outside Sandhurst in this beautiful little town called Bruckenseitte which had a train line to the seaside. When my aunt and uncle visited to celebrate my graduation, I took them on a tour of the town. We walked along the promenade where the water below shifted between blues and greens as kelp waved under the pier.” Claudia softened as Julius watched her over the crescents of his spectacles, a smile pulling the corners of his lips.
“That’s right, congratulations on your graduation Dove! I always knew you could do it.”
“I know, you said as much in your letter. Or were you not so sure,” She teased with a light poke at his glasses.
“Of course I was sure-” He swatted away her hand indignantly, “But it’s another thing for it to be real.”
“It is,” Claudia hummed.
They chatted like that for some time. A fresh waft of steam coiled from the spout of their teapot and the sugar cookies were replaced by a tray bearing small ramekins of fish pate and sliced pickles while water crackers bordered the dishes. The clink of their teacups and slow lilt of their voices disappeared under the drum of rain outside.
Claudia would make this city her home again.
arazmis on Chapter 1 Mon 01 Jan 2024 09:35AM UTC
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JackBivouac on Chapter 2 Sat 30 Dec 2023 08:37AM UTC
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osc_extinct on Chapter 2 Sat 30 Dec 2023 08:57AM UTC
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