Chapter Text
Exhausted and aching, Julien struggled to keep his eyes open and focused on the Tachonis boy’s back. The bay quarter horse he’d been given was a calm, level-headed creature, and it followed the boy’s steed toward the Barrowdells with little to no communication on Julien’s part, which he appreciated in his progressively worsening state. His chest ached, the essence of necrotic magic lingered like a foul taste on the back of his tongue, bitter and acrid. Most of his wounds had been magically mended, but he was not by any means fit to be traveling a long distance without rest.
None of them were. And yet that was the plan. It had been the plan as the sun rose and it was the plan now, pushing into the afternoon.
He watched the orc woman fuss over the dead boy. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she motioned to the Tachonis boy’s clothes, still torn and soaked in his lifeblood. She looked concerned. The boy gazed back at her like he was struggling to comprehend what she was saying.
Julien blinked his dry eyes and shook his head in an effort to clear it. Dizziness was setting in and it refused to leave.
“We will need to stop soon.” Vaelus’ soft voice nearly made him leap from his skin. “It is clear we will not do well in combat if we do not take the time to rest.”
“You are not mistaken.” Julien admitted, sighing.
“How long do you intend to keep going?”
It was oddly soothing, how she spoke without judgement in her voice. “Until we have to stop.”
Her laugh was little more than a hum. “That may have been two miles ago.”
He glared at her but she refused to wither under his gaze. It wasn’t worth it. He gave up trying to stare her down and deflated into his saddle, the leather of his armor creaking in protest. “Fine. Fine. Call a halt.”
“Thaisha!” Vaelus called immediately, urging her mount forward.
Fruitlessly Julien attempted to scrub the tiredness from his eyes again. His fingers shook slightly and it infuriated him. He felt useless. He was too tired to control his thoughts, which started to spiral, conjuring images of the horror from the night before.
He turned his attention to Lady Aranessa in an effort to push those thoughts away. He found her gazing back at him, her eyes dark with sympathy.
He followed the others off the road to a glade where the remains of an old camp had already flattened or beaten back most of the greenery, the ashes of an abandoned campfire still visible within a circle of stones. They went about the task of setting up camp mechanically and without speaking much. But for the Tachonis boy, who stood awkwardly next to the fire, twisting his fingers like he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them.
Julien thought briefly about walking over and kicking him in the boot just to see if he would flinch but decided against it. Instead, he pulled his bags from his horse and watched Aranessa place several small branches she’d harvested into the old firepit, then the Tachonis boy looked at his hand and conjured a small green orb of fire that he dropped, lighting the wood, grimacing the whole time he moved his fingers.
He’d never seen an arcanist shake out their hands after casting a spell before. It was odd. Everything about the necromancer was odd, really.
When they had the bedrolls placed and the supplies put away, Thaisha went to tend the horses and Vaelus started preparing some semblance of a meal. And the Tachonis boy just… sat there, next to the fire, looking down at his hands like he didn’t recognize them.
Julien decided to approach. It was too much effort to conceal his exhaustion or his general annoyance, so he stomped his way across the campsite until he stood beside him. Occtis looked up at him with eyes that shone an eerie green even in the afternoon light.
“Oh… hi.” The necromancer said the words like he had to vomit them, working them up his throat and then spitting them out of his mouth.
Julien said nothing. Instead, he sat on the dirt next to the fire and let the warmth of it wash over his face and hands.
After a moment of staring at him unblinkingly the boy turned back to the fire.
The silence between them was tense but not volatile, and Julien closed his eyes and breathed for just a moment. The body next to him made no sound but for stilted, forced panting.
He cracked his eyes and peered to the right, carefully studying the creature. What he saw was not what he expected, the arcanist was not staring at the fire or his hands or even Julien. He had closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around his chest, his hands balled into tight fists, every muscle in his body tense. His breathing was forced and shallow, panicked, or desperate. He was the embodiment of terror. Or maybe misery.
He was not the cold duplicitous husk Julien wanted to see.
To hate.
An emotion sparked in Julien’s chest, one that he did not frequently feel or specifically understand, but he thought it might be a cousin to pity.
“Are you cold?” He tried to keep his voice razor thin and threatening, lest that softness he was feeling seep into his tone.
Occtis shook his head and his eyes fluttered open, though they did not seem to focus on anything. “Not… not the way you mean.” He half-gasped. “Sorry. I’m--I’m so-sorry… I can’t…” He punched his own chest with his bony fist and the impact sounded hollow. “I can’t catch my breath.”
“Do you even need to breathe?” Julien spat.
The boy’s expression turned strangely sad. “No. But it’s…scary not to.”
Julien frowned. This was not the conversation he had been hoping to have. He had hoped to unleash his stress and anger and grief on a monster, but the person he’d picked as his target did not fit the frame he’d constructed. He was too exhausted to artificially feed the inner fire that he wished would burn him up in rage and anguish.
Instead, he placed two fingers on the boy’s exposed wrist, where he found the skin cold and waxy and thin. “Ah.” He feigned haughtiness. “I see what you mean. You’re as cold as a fish.”
A harsh, nervous laugh scratched and clawed its way from the dead boy’s throat in a raspy, empty gasp and he collapsed a little, folded into himself, and clutched at his chest. “Fuck.” He tried to curse, but no sound came from his mouth. Julien watched as the boy convulsed a little, gathered himself, retched, and tried again. Julien reached out despite himself and pulled him back up to sitting by the shoulder, opening his ribs and abdomen so a natural rush of air filled his compressed lungs.
Occtis looked relieved and turned his face up toward the sky. “Th-thank you. I’m…” He breathed a few more times until he found a new rhythm, slower and deeper than the one he had been trying to keep before. The tension in his muscles relaxed away but not in a manner that Julien had ever seen -- it was gone all at once, like a marionette with its strings suddenly cut, or a muscle deprived of its tendon. “You don’t have to be nice to me.” He sighed out a long breath before he slowly pulled in another. Anxiety radiated off of him in consistent waves but he didn’t tense up again. “My family ruined your life, too.”
“Too?” Julien echoed, his throat dry. Too. A part of him wanted to take offense, to insist that the Tachonis family had done so much wrong to the Royce and the Davinos that anything they could possibly do to one of their own would be meaningless.
Julien turned away from Occtis and ran his hands through his hair, tearing out several tangled strands.
Empathy. That was what he was feeling. He knew what it was, but he wasn’t aware of a time he’d ever felt it.
“...like they ruined mine. They killed your father and murdered--” Occtis was trying to expound upon how they could find a common ground but he kept messing up the timing of breathing and speaking at the same time.
“You.” Julien interjected, in a rare moment of realization. “Your family murdered you.”
Occtis scoffed, and spoke softly and slowly, “I don’t think they’d see it that way.”
Julien broke into a humourless laugh. “Do not make excuses for them.” He made a broad and exaggerated gesture. “I do not trust you. I can’t--”
“Good.” Occtis stopped him in a hiss. “I’m dead. My father tried to force me to—” He ran out of air again and he shook his head in frustration before his mouth kept moving soundlessly. “I don’t want to help them.”
“You good?” Thaisha interrupted with a voice saturated with suspicion. She stood on the far side of the fire looking down at them.
Occtis gave a jerky nod and took in a breath that rattled his ribcage. “Just… processing.”
She flashed him a soft smile. “Take your time.” She shot Julien an untrusting glare before she walked away.
Julien watched the Tachonis boy fold in on himself and pull his limbs in until he took up half the space he had before, hugging his knees. “Was there something you wanted?” He said very carefully, timing his words around his attempts to work air through his chest.
“There was. Not so much anymore. You look miserable enough.” Julien admitted. “What else has changed, dead boy? No need to breathe, what else? Do you feel anything anymore?”
Occtis studied him for a moment before he answered. “Everything… out here is so… muted. But the inside is… loud.” He held his right hand in front of his face and experimentally wiggled his fingers. After a thoughtful pause he went on, speaking like a person dictating from an essay or a script, cold and removed. “I’m aware of my tendons pulling on my bones, my muscles contracting, I can feel what little blood is left in my veins.” He made a fist and then opened his hand again while he breathed a few times, getting back into the rhythm. “The parts of the body that aren’t moving feel like they are atrophying, but I’ll have to do some research to see how much of that is true and how much of it is in my mind.”
“The body?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Occtis huffed a mournful laugh, his clinical tone abandoned. “It doesn’t feel like it’s mine. It’s just… a thing.”
Julien shivered involuntarily. His body was often his means of escaping his mind and the thought of that tether being weakened or severed made him feel sick to his stomach. “It sounds like a nightmare.”
“It’s not so bad. I’m still… me. And I’m still here.” His voice dropped to an apologetic whisper. “Your father is not, and I’m sorry.”
“I am not sure he would have wanted this half-existence you’re describing, but I appreciate the sentiment, however little it does.”
Occtis hung his head. “And you really don’t have to be nice to me.”
Julien snorted. “You’ll regret telling me that. I don’t intend to leave you alone, boy.”
Occtis just sighed despondently and gazed into the fire, the orange light reflected in his eyes like a feline’s. “Then I should tell you that I can’t sleep, but between you and Vaelus you can probably keep me under constant watch. Do you… d-do you want me to keep you um… in the loop?”
“Of what?”
“About the things that I discover about…” He gestured at his chest and down his person. “This thing I’m possessing.”
Julien gave a slow, unsure nod and narrowed his eyes. “You really feel like yourself, but not your body?”
“Hmm.” Occtis gave a slight nod. “It’s… meat. It’s dead and hollow.” Julien made an involuntary sound of disgust in the back of his throat and the Tachonis boy shrugged. “I’ve seen so many cadavers in my studies, the only difference is that this one’s mine.”
“I will not pretend to understand you, but I appreciate you sharing anything new you learn as to your nature.”
“You’re… welcome. You should go um… go. I don’t want to…” He breathed very deeply and went on in a rush. “Time my breathing so I can speak, for the moment.”
Julien shrugged. “You don’t have to keep up appearances on my account.”
Occtis gave him that same strange, appreciative smile before he ceased to breathe.
-- --
Over the evening Julien remained Occtis’s shadow. The arcanist hadn’t been lying. He did not eat, and drank only when prompted, feeling neither hunger nor thirst. He did not go to sleep, but he managed to lay down while Pincushion bounded about the camp and curled in Vaelus’ lap.
Julien took his vigil with Vaelus in silence. She would watch the camp the entire night, but they had all agreed to take turns keeping her company. Two sets of eyes were more reliable than one.
She caught him staring.
“If it brings you any comfort, I can tell you that he is undead. I sense him like one, though it is not as strong a taint as the one carried by creatures like the ghouls we encountered.” She spoke so softly and purposely and slowly, her eyes turned toward the immobile figure, her fingers stroking the undead fox. “I sense no evil from him. He is… not what he was before. But he is not a vile thing.”
Julien watched her continue to pet the dead thing as if it were alive, its unblinking button eyes partially shaded by its paws. “Will he become one, given the opportunity?”
She shrugged. “That is a choice for us all.”
They fell into an uneasy silence.
Julien did not sleep well when his watch was over.
— —
The next day they made it to a small hamlet built primarily of squat wooden buildings with winding muddy roads spread between them like narrow veins between desiccated organs. It was not a friendly looking place and there was discussion of moving on without stopping -- their party would likely raise suspicion if they simply walked down the main thoroughfare -- but it was instead decided they would break into two groups and enter town separately, with magical disguises on their more recognizable companions.
Occtis made himself look like a young orc, perhaps another possible son of Thaisha’s, with sage skin and dark hair. He breathed more naturally than he had before, having spent time on the road practicing. “I only have an hour before I have to recast, we should hurry.” It was odd, hearing his thin, reedy voice come out of that gruff orcish mouth.
“Here we go, then.” Thaisha nodded, and they proceeded with their plan.
Surprisingly, the human woman working the counter at the Haron’s Nest didn’t ask any questions, just rented each group a room and informed them that food and drink were available and continued about her day, none the wiser.
They ascended the stairs in a trickle so as to not raise suspicion, but gathered in a single, incredibly austere room over ten minutes.
“Vaelus and I will go get supplies,” Thaisha explained in a hushed whisper. She was easy to hear, given how tightly packed the tiny room was with the five of them. “Occtis should stay here. If you’re recognized, we’re fucked.”
“I’ll stay with him.” Julien said at once.
Thaisha narrowed her eyes at him but she nodded. “Keep your heads down and if everything goes as planned, we’ll be back on the road by morning.”
“If it isn’t too much to ask, will you get me some extra clothes for me?” Aranessa asked, offering a small bag of coins.
“Yes, of course.” Thaisha smoothly pocketed the funds. “And Occtis?”
“Y-yeah?” He startled, his disguise shifted awkwardly.
“Stay. Put. I know you’re curious. Just…”
He huffed a laugh. “I already died once.”
The others did not seem to think the joke was funny.
Vaelus and Thaisha took their leave. Julien brooded. Aranessa quietly insisted on making use of the inn’s bath alone. Occtis pulled out a book and sat stiffly on the edge of one of the beds.
After a short silence he met Julien’s eyes, lifted his eyebrows, and then crumbled into the mattress. He exhaled all breath from his lungs like a death rattle and lay sideways, slack and boneless and shapeable, like a tired cat sprawled across a plush cushion.
Julien’s mouth spasmed in an undeniable little grin, but he scoffed and crossed his arms in an attempt to disguise his amusement. “What are you doing?” He couldn’t keep the emotion completely out of his voice.
Occtis did not open his eyes. “You told me not to… pretend around you. And I’m… can I just… read without breathing? I’ve been trying to practice, but…”
“It doesn’t scare you anymore?” Julien filled in.
“It’s not worth it.” Occtis said with a tone of desperation. “It’s… everything is work, I guess. I used to love food, good food, I’d eat when I was anxious or thinking. I don’t need to eat now. I can. But I’m not hungry and…” He slowed down his breathing and his tempo of speech, timing his words so he could say them with the least effort. “Chewing and swallowing takes thought, and I am aware of where every bite is. It’s not that it isn’t something I love anymore. But… it’s not… easy.”
Julien tried to imagine what it would be like, but he couldn’t. Feeling, touch, and kinesthetics were the things he constantly craved. He couldn’t imagine a world where moving his limbs and digesting food became work.
“You’re tired.” Julien concluded.
Occtis gave a weak nod. “Yes. Er… no. I… I don’t know if I’m always tired or if I’m never tired. But I can’t sleep. I wish I could.”
“It’s fine,” Julien said, pushing away from the wall and crossing the room to sit on the opposite bed where he sank down on the thin straw mattress with a sigh. “Like I said, I know what you are, so don’t pretend otherwise.”
“Do you, though?” Occtis mumbled. “Because I am not entirely sure what I am, and I’m a necromancer.”
A genuine laugh escaped him and Julien briefly entertained the idea of covering it with a feigned cough. He didn’t. “I understand that you don’t need to breathe or sleep. I know you’re dead.” He began to unbuckle his demigauntlet -- no, his father’s demigauntlet -- and sloughed it from his arm like a snake shedding its skin. He rolled his left shoulder and stretched his forearm and his fingers with a soft groan before he started to remove his shoulder armor. “Dead doesn’t mean evil.”
“Hwaa…” Occtis didn’t have the breath but his confusion was still conveyed.
“Vaelus told me, and I believe her. You’re undead, but you’re not evil.”
Occtis pushed himself up on his elbows and cocked his head in a pose Julien was very familiar with, but not in the same context. “Then… what am I?”
Julien shrugged. “I didn’t ask. Maybe you should.”
“No. That’s okay.” Occtis flopped back onto his own mattress. He left his book on his chest and covered his eyes with his hands, mouthing a silent curse toward the ceiling.
“What?”
Occtis shook his head without saying a word. His fingers dug into his scalp like he meant to rip his skin.
“No.” Julien said more to himself than the boy. He still had one boot on but he stood anyway and crossed the space between their beds. He thought momentarily of sitting on the floor nearby or balancing on the edge of the mattress, but he settled instead on what he was comfortable with. He sat down on the mattress beside Occtis’ hips and leaned over him imposingly.
At the least it stopped Occtis from continuing his spiral into existential dread. With a startled yelp he pulled his arms together over his chest and blinked up at him, looking just a bit like a frightened rodent or a very confused house cat, unsure of what to do with his extremities.
Julien boxed him in, one hand on either side of his head. “Stop pretending and tell me, what are you thinking? Vaelus knows more about you than you do, so why not ask her?”
Occtis groaned but the sound came out a grotesque wet hiss before he sucked more air into his lungs and he cleared his throat. He chewed on his words, clearly processing a jumble of ideas, while Julien stayed still, aware of every mechanical shift of the body beneath his own. “I don’t want to be right.” Occtis finally managed.
“Right about what?” Julien leaned closer. It was odd. Occtis relaxed more and more into the mattress the closer he pressed him. Usually that was a means to build tension, not release it.
“I’m Hollow.” Occtis ground out the words with a minimal amount of voice behind them, just sandy, dry breath. “I don’t have a soul. Or I don’t have all of one.” His whole body tensed and he looked up at Julien with an expression full of anguish. “I remember being… torn, ripped like a scrap of fabric stretched too thin. And then I faded.” He blinked twice. “But I woke up dead anyway.”
Julien slowly eased himself away from the arcanist and came to sit on the floor beside the bed. He was not good at this, but he knew what he would have wanted in the same position. “It doesn’t matter--”
“No, it does--”
“Stop it.” Julien’s tone took on a commanding quality that he did not normally use outside of intimate encounters, but he would think about that detail later. He gripped Occtis’ right hand in his left and squeezed, grinding the bird-thin bones against each other. “Do you feel that?”
Occtis didn’t even flinch. “Not like I should. I know I exist, Julien, but I am not whole. There is--” He interrupted himself with an inhuman sound, like the gekkering of a fox, shrill and instinctual. “I’m wrong.”
“I suppose we did always have that in common.” Julien interjected, and he allowed himself to sound warm and to be honest. A strange, indefinable sensation burned like a starved ember deep in his chest.
“But…” Occtis met his eyes. “You’re living.” He didn’t want to breathe or speak anymore, so he didn’t. Instead, he rolled from the bed and into Julien, his stiff limbs capturing the older man in the loosest of cages, all bones and ashes and echoes of things that could have been. He made a series of incomprehensible sounds somewhere between sobs and growls and whimpers, none of them forgiving.
Julien remained stunned still for a moment before he gently wound his arms around Occtis’s frame and pulled the cold, unliving body against his chest. That was what the situation called for, wasn’t it? He didn’t know what he was doing, but he held the scarecrow-light form of the dead boy while it convulsed with near silent grief for its own being. Thin fingers dug into Julien’s shoulders and his back, stronger than they had any right to be, and he ignored them. He ran his right hand from the back of Occtis’ head down to his mid back in what he remembered was a soothing gesture when he was a child.
It was strange, holding a cold, dead thing that wasn’t breathing, but still moved with all the pain and sorrow of a person.
“I’m sorry.”
“Shut up.” There was no bite in Julien’s whisper. “Just shut up and exist outside of your own head for one fucking minute.”
Occtis nodded against his shoulder and sagged against his ribs. His long arms still draped around Julien but they didn’t have any power in them. He grew perfectly still, chest to chest, his forehead against Julien’s shoulder, hip to hip. Despite all of Julien’s senses telling him that Occtis was nothing but a corpse he kept rubbing at his back in a feeble attempt to soothe.
He leaned on the bed for support but when Occtis didn’t move, he didn’t make him.
Eventually his arm grew tired and slowed until it paused, resting gently on the boy’s hip. Occtis stayed exactly as he had been, still as a stone.
Aranessa opened the door, a look of confusion on her face before she slipped in and quietly closed it behind her. “What’s this?” She asked in a slightly bemused whisper.
Julien shrugged helplessly. “He was panicking.”
“So you hugged him to death?”
“No!” He whispered back, indigent. “Maybe he’s finally asleep.”
She placed her bag of dirty traveling clothes on the little round table next to the door and ran a hand through her wet hair. “How long are you going to stay there?”
“I don’t know! You think I had a plan?”
“You only plan for one thing when you embrace someone.” She was teasing him. The Lady of the fallen house of Royce was teasing him.
He narrowed his eyes at her in mock annoyance. “I was not trying to fuck a dead man.”
“Well, if anyone would…” She snickered and winked.
Julien rolled his eyes but didn’t argue, knowing she’d needle him until he accidentally spooked the boy. Instead, he leaned his head back against the mattress and hit his head against the edge of Occtis’s abandoned book, knocking it to the floor beside him.
Nerves and Stimuli Post-Mortum.
Why couldn't it have been a steamy romance novel?
“What the hell?” Thaisha hissed from the door. In her arms she carried a bundle wrapped in parchment, and at her side her travel bag bulged with their renewed supplies, but her dark red eyes fell on Occtis’ slumped form in Julien’s arms.
Aranessa interceded, stepping away from the table with her hands raised to slow the orcish woman’s charge. “He’s not hurt.”
“He’s not breathing.”
“He doesn’t have to.” Julien reminded her. “Help me get him up on the bed.”
“How did this happen?” She asked, passing the parchment package to Aranessa, who struggled to hide her amusement.
Julien shook his head. “I don’t even know at this point.”
“...sorry.” Occtis muttered into his shoulder, and he shifted his stiff limbs and slid back a few inches to sit by himself on the wooden floor, eyes downcast shyly though he did not blush. “I…uh… I was... I…” He fiddled with a lace on his boot. “I lost it for a minute. And then I pretended.”
“Pretended?” Thaisha prompted.
“That his heartbeat was mine.” His voice was little more than a breath.
“Oh, Occtis--”
“No, it’s...” He interrupted her. “That was probably the most normal I’ve felt since… you know…” His laugh was mirthless and dry.
Julien took the book that had fallen on the floor and plopped it into his lap. “You’re too much in your head, boy. Stop thinking so much about what you lost and start appreciating the things you still have. Like boring books.”
“Thank you.” Occtis pulled the book tightly against his chest. “And… yeah, just… thank you.”