Work Text:
“So we’re going to kill God,” said Augustine the First, Saint of Patience, blessed hand of the King Undying, holy roller of cigarettes. He was draped against the metal bannister, looking rather like a vulture, but an elongated vulture who smoked and wore wrinkled suits. Cloaked by all that height and all those angles, his face was scrunched into something both sad and profoundly amused.
“Yes,” answered Mercymorn the First, Saint of Joy, Lyctor to the Kindly Prince, lemon-mouthed accomplice to an assassination plan. “Yes, we’re going to kill God. How nice. How kind. Yippee. Yay. Splendid.”
“Don’t get hysterical,” Augustine said.
“I am perfectly calm! I am perfectly collected! I am perfectly capable of murder!!” Mercymorn was wild-eyed even by the standards of a Lyctor’s irises, hollow and red-rimmed and tired. Her Canaanite robes hung from the very tips of her shoulders and shifted twitchily on the metal-grated floor. If Augustine was a vulture, then she was his deranged pigeon - which was a direct quote from him - and she was quite a bit more affrighted than he, leaning back against the wall and twisting her horribly old fingers round and round and round each other.
“Joy, I know this is difficult,” Augustine prompted gently, tapping ashes from his cigarette directly onto the bannister. “You love John. I love John. It’s hard not to get attached to the man, for fuck’s sake, he’s made us tea nearly every day for thousands of years.”
“Yes. Yes, he has, hasn’t he.”
“That’s what I just said, darling. We’re his accomplices unless we either leave him or kill him, and we can’t leave him because he’d be pissed off all the way to hell, so. One option.”
“One option.” Mercymorn let out a bitter little huff and aggressively rubbed at her eyes. “And Dominicus dies.”
Augustine affirmed, “And Dominicus dies.”
“And then,” said the Saint of Joy with despairing conviction, “we hurl ourselves straight into the nearest star.”
Augustine tilted his head, which made his long and angular face seem even more akin to a vulture. He touched his fingers to his chin in perfectly calm contemplation, outwardly unperturbed. Then he told Mercy, “I don’t really want to die.”
“I would want to die after peeling God and the Nine Houses to shreds,” Mercy replied instantly. “I’ve been perfecting a theorem for centuries, it’s awfully horrible.” (“Redundant phrase,” said Augustine.) “I am not very nice, but even I would feel at least a little bad after… after that.”
“Mercymorn the First, you notorious lynchpin, did you just defy every law of nature and admit that you are not very nice?”
“Augustine.”
“Mercymorn.”
They stared at each other across the hallway, Augustine’s smoke drifting dejectedly through the basement hallway, Mercymorn’s acidity palpable on every inch of the ancient metal. Augustine made that blank face he always made, something masked behind it, something vaguely nasty threaded through the wrinkles of his face.
“Mercymorn,” he said again, very quietly. “We are going to break into the Locked Tomb, for God’s sake. Quite literally for the sake of his death. If that fails, we - you - are going to unravel him, and the Nine Houses with him, so help us all. I believe hurling ourselves straight into the nearest star is justified.”
“It is,” came her barely audible reply. “It is.”
Augustine lifted himself from the bannister at last, now imposing with his height and immaculate posture. He let his cigarette fall to the floor, and he reached across the dim hallway. To Mercy’s slight horror and surprise, he took her limp hand in his own and drew it to his chest in a sort of subdued passion. He placed his other hand on the pommel of his rapier, that glistening blade sheathed at his hip, that ancient death that gleamed even in the feeble light.
“I swear by the sword of Alfred Quinque,” he declared in a low whisper, “best of men and cavaliers, that I will stand by and with you in the most dreadful act we shall ever perform, and that I will die with you when it is over, be it plunging into a star or being ripped apart by the wrath of God, et cetera. I will retain my dedication to the cause, I will aid you in cracking the uncrackable Locked Tomb, and should the monster within fail to complete its purpose, then I will watch gratefully as you finish the job, and then I will die by your side, resting easy. You have my oath.”
Mercymorn stared, pale and shining, almost but not quite shivering; her forehead glistened with sweat. She was staring at their clasped hands, still pulled close to Augustine’s chest, and she was breathing very quickly. She almost seemed as if she was in complete shock until she spoke, ever so quietly, a slight tremble in her voice:
“Then by Cristabel, we’re doing it.”
Augustine’s hand fell from his rapier; he released Mercy and stepped away from her, sinking back into the shadows. He slumped back against the bannister and stared at his feet. Mercy was completely still. Her skin glowed an almost apparitional pale in the light, surrounding her with a sickly halo that hung iridescent on her robes. Then she moved her head - she was staring at the floor; she was staring at her hands; and then she stared at the morose Augustine, and he looked up to meet her gaze.
“I hate this,” said Mercymorn. “I despise this. It’s despicable.”
“Quite,” said Augustine.
“And more than that,” Mercymorn continued (Augustine sighed), “I almost don’t want him to hate me. Dear John, the stubborn man, or savage, or both - he could’ve stopped taking planets a long time ago.”
Augustine said, “You snipe at him all the time. He already hates you.”
“Fuck off,” the Saint of Joy suggested. “No he doesn’t. You just swore the most passionate oath I have ever heard from your insensible mouth. Don’t lose the sentiment.”
“I am not losing the sentiment,” said the Saint of Patience evenly. “I am being a bastard to cope with a death that hasn’t happened yet. I mean every word of that oath, and it hurts, Joy, it is physically painful to make such a goddamned promise. I am being insensible, and I am not sorry, sister, I’m just sad.”
Mercymorn’s eyes narrowed into slits. Then she closed them, and she exhaled, and she shuffled to stand up straighter; her robes flitted across the floor like the trailing tail of a peacock. She stepped up to Augustine. He stood, impassive, as she clutched the shoulder of his forever crumpled shirt. She pressed her other hand to his other shoulder. She looked him directly in his not sorry, just sad eyes, the insensible grey of an eternal hurricane.
And into his ear she hissed, “I hope God never forgives us.”