Work Text:
left-aligned text: February 1820
right-aligned text: March 1890
Jonah is a spitfire on Barnabas, and in him, and in his sleeping mind and in his daydreams, and the man likes—no, loves—to be told that, the prince, the prick. Unforgettable and overwhelming, he is a whirlwind; a tornado, and Barnabas cannot help but be swept up in the force that is him. He thinks: likely, Jonah’s flames have licked every inch of his body and mind by now, and his mark has been seared so thoroughly that Barnabas cannot find any part of himself left untouched.
Tonight, Jonah’s wildfire of a personality has Barnabas face up against the wall, arm twisted behind his back. Smooth ivory wallpaper against his cheek, three fingers in his arse. Barnabas bites off a gasp and a plea as those clever fingers twist, and Jonah knees him in the back of the thigh—it’s all he can do to keep from crumpling, saliva smearing against the wall wetly.
The prison is silent as Basil Gainesworth helps his patron up the stairs of the tower. He wonders if its inhabitants know the end is coming.
He and Jonah had talked this over a few hours previously, as the gathering started to wind down, Barnabas’s guests filtering away into discrete rooms, they themselves alone in a quiet side room. “Would be nice to win a fight for once,” his Jonah said, a distant look in his sharp eyes.
“You win plenty,” Barnabas told him.
“Debates,” he said, “not fights.” His soft white hand brought a sip of wine to pink lips, then set the glass aside.
Barnabas said nothing to this.
In the next room over, Smirke laughed at something Michele murmured, the sound softened but still clear through the open doorway.
Jonah moved closer, seating himself next to him. Kissed him on the cheek, took the drink out of his hand, set it on the table.
“Stay still, please,” Jonah asked of him, and Barnabas did.
And Jonah cracked him across the face, bloodying his lip, and the sudden sharp and blissful ache that Barnabas felt spike through his core was bright and entirely brand new. Something novel every day, in Jonah’s company.
Mr. Magnus has to pause, two flights up the stairs, to catch his breath. Basil keeps a careful hold of his elbow, watching with concern, his compassion waved off with a frail, impatient hand. Mr. Magnus has waited a long time for this. Basil follows him up the steps. He’s been waiting, too.
After the party’s ended, its attendees escorted out the doors in pairs and trios, Barnabas is crushed against the wall of his bedroom with his own weight and Jonah’s touch.
He runs his tongue along the scab the strike had left a few hours ago, sweet metallic blood blooming on his tongue, and it makes him arch, makes him gasp for breath. He wishes he was gasping Jonah’s breath, that they could be sharing air. Barnabas can feel Jonah’s gaze on him always, across rooms and buildings and miles, but he savors the times he’s privileged to meet those impossible grey eyes up close. He doesn’t seem to have earned that right tonight, yet; he gets smooth, cool wallpaper pressing against his forehead and the view of his arousal dripping onto the floor.
Barnabas closes his eyes against the sight, but opens them again, blind with shock, at a particularly cruel twist of Jonah’s fingers up inside the softness of him, and he bites down on that scab on his lip. Jonah’s touch aches inside him—Barnabas seems to be always aching these days, in his collapsing empty socket of a heart—it makes a nice change for that ache to be externalized. Nice to have a pain that fills him instead of empties. He sighs out silently and leans into the bruising stab.
Jonah huffs a harsh, frustrated breath, hot and damp against Barnabas’s neck, and takes his fingers away. Barnabas chokes on the whine he holds back at the absence, wondering what he must have done wrong, and Jonah doesn’t tell him—says only to “stay.” Forearms on the wall, head hanging, Barnabas follows the direction, the only thing he can physically do for Jonah’s pleasure. He dare not look back, despite how much he wants to see Jonah’s eyes, desperate to see, terrified of what expression he’s making. He listens to his breath and the fabric rustle of Jonah adjusting, counts the floorboards under his bare feet. His lip is starting to painfully swell when he licks over it.
A pause, after the distinctive whisper of straps against trousers. A thoughtful hum in Jonah’s throat. He’s scheming, Barnabas thinks, and feels a cold thrill of anticipation pool. “You take this too well,” Jonah says.
Barnabas isn’t sure what to say to that.
He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do.
Nothing seems good enough for Jonah, lately. Well, that’s fine. It’s not like Barnabas has anything of merit to offer him.
Jonah can pinpoint the moment Basil Gainesworth’s resolve breaks, but his body is too old and weary from trekking up the stairs to do anything about it. Gainesworth’s eyes are wide and white, his frame panting for breath as the ritual continues, and his gaze darts ever towards the exit.
Fear has captured his stupid assistant’s imagination; fear has taken years of delicate cultivation of priorities, of making Jonah’s goals Gainesworth’s, and has dashed all that careful planning to the ground in favor of raw animal terror.
Jonah hates the man now more than he’s possibly hated another human being in his entire life.
Barnabas’s silence is obscenely loud.
Jonah scoffs. He ties Barnabas’s wrists behind his back as he maintains that damnably obedient silence. It makes Jonah want to grab his skull and crack his face against the wall. He forces that want for brutality into a smack at the cleft of Barnabas’ arse. The bones in his hand, alert, are singing.
“Turn around.” Barnabas does.
“Kneel.” He goes.
Jonah doesn’t give the order for Barnabas to open his mouth, but he does so regardless at the press of insistent fingers. They slide in deep, deeper than Jonah expects the quiet man to take, but through his shuddering shoulders he sucks, hollow-cheeked. Jonah puts on a face as though he disapproves, and a part of him does. Well-behaved is not what Jonah wants right now. He wants him filthy, wants him pleading for his mercy: Jonah bound him to allow him space to struggle, and Barnabas is doing no such thing.
He pulls his fingers out of Barnabas’ too-accepting warmth once more and gathers up a handful of soft, brown hair, pulling at the roots sharp enough to provoke a wince. Jonah rests the tip of his wooden cock upon Barnabas’ bottom lip and watches him, unsurprisingly, try to engulf it with his mouth. “Desperate man,” Jonah says like an insult. Barnabas simply nods, which is infuriating.
So Jonah cradles Barnabas’ head in his hands and fucks into his mouth until there is spit, until there are tears, until Barnabas loses his composure and his teeth scrape along the shaft—apologies pour out of him once his jaw is free enough to make them, abruptly arrested by Jonah grabbing him under the chin. “The next time you do that, I will pry them from your mouth myself, is that understood?”
It goes like this: the screaming climbs higher and higher, building upon itself into a physical force. A thousand trapped voices locked into the walls of Jonah’s life’s work, pitching ever louder as Millbank’s foundation shudders itself apart into the gushing soft earth below. It’s become an echo chamber, Jonah’s masterpiece has, and its occupants’ screams outlive the throats that birthed them.
Gainesworth presses his hands to his ears, to his face, tears at his own skin with prettily polished nails gone dull and rough with the dirty work of building Jonah’s crown.
In that moment, Barnabas believes the threat, and fear keeps him opened wide for Jonah. He doesn’t do it again—not when he splutters and shifts in his kneeling, not when his fingers pick at the bonds to test if he can free himself. Not even when Jonah has crushed his nose against the buttons anchoring his cock in place and his entire world is pressure, lungs too empty and stomach much too full. When Jonah stops rutting into him and Barnabas has his throat back, he yells and crumples, retching up fluid on the floorboards like a man drowned.
“Oh, is that blood I see?” and Jonah sounds gleeful, disgustingly so.
Barnabas wishes he could wipe his eyes to better seek out any trace of scarlet in the sick puddle. Jonah, too amused by the pathetic picture he makes, lets him suffer.
“Is oil even necessary, after all of that?” Jonah wonders aloud, gathering up a thick strand of Barnabas’ spit before it can drip to the floor, draping it back on his cockhead.
“I should like to fuck you on your back, I think.”
Gainesworth stumbles blindly to the exit, bleeding from the ears and the nose and his sad, soft brown eyes, feeling for the doorway with fingertips rubbed raw.
“Don’t you dare, you cowardly little shit,” Jonah mouths silently in the deafening cacophony. He is trapped where he sits on his throne, the Ceaseless Watcher wrapped on him and in him and seeping into every vital crevice of his mind, but his cane is on the floor, by his heel—it only takes a spasming kick to send it rolling, skittering across the shaking floor, and as Gainesworth finds the open doorway, he is too blinded by blood and the pressure of noise. There is the moment his weight bears down on the cane underfoot, and then there is one more scream lost in the broken dam of sound.
Millbank falls, swallowed up by the hungry earth.
“Water,” whispers Barnabas, and it’s the first thing he’s said all night since the scene began, besides those desperate apologies. Jonah freezes in place, his silence gone still and blank. Barnabas feels acid in his nasal cavity, his mouth foul and burning, and the word comes out hoarse and gritty. “Please, Jonah, some water first.”
Finally, Jonah shifts his weight and moves away. Barnabas hangs his head down, and focuses on breathing, on flexing his fingers in his arms’ bonds. When water comes, it’s laden on a clean rag, Jonah slipping the saturated tip of it into Barnabas’ mouth to suck at.
He takes in a mouthful of clothy water, swishes it in his mouth, and spits it out to join whatever hideous smelling mess he’s left on the floor, and then the tip is slipped back in, and he sucks at the linen for his ravaged throat. Thirst quenched, more or less, he hears Jonah dip it back in the tub and wring it out before he feels the icy touch of it against his skin. Jonah touches his face carefully, gingerly, as he dabs at the crust of tears and the sweat at his temple.
When his eyes are cleared enough to blink open and gaze up, Jonah’s face is expressionless. “Thank you,” Barnabas says.
Jonah’s mouth tightens imperceptibly as he dabs off the last bit of fluid and sweat from Barnabas’ cheek.
“We’ll pick this up later,” he says quietly, one hand holding the weight of Barnabas’ head as the other unwraps his wrists. Barnabas looks up at him with a jolt of fear, of the terrifying insecurity of rejection.
“Did I do something wrong?”
Jonah drags himself down the drowned tower, flight by flight of freshly ruined stairs. He is numb with knowledge, numb to everything but the teeth of a broken rib gnawing at his innards. He is going to drown in this body, in both blood and Beholding, but he is still Jonah Magnus, and he still moves forward. He comes to a stop when he finds Gainesworth piled in a heap on one of the landings. The man is breathing still, somehow.
Battered, but in better shape than the carcass Jonah’s been carting around for the past few decades. Jonah crawls over to the body breathing so quick and shallow, like a rabbit in a snare. Gainesworth’s face is clammy and gritty and hot beneath his hands, unseeing and insensate. “Coward,” whispers Jonah, his voice hoarse and choked with dust.
He straddles the boy’s body, and digs his thumbs in.
“Did I do something wrong?” Barnabas’ eyes are still a bit red-lined with tears, dumbly confused at the end of the scene. His ridiculous cock is still red and firm, dripping hopeful little filthy drops onto the floor, and suddenly Jonah cannot abide the smell or the sight or the too-hot touch of Barnabas’ skin against his own.
“Later,” he repeats, and vigorously pulls Barnabas to his feet to the chaise, letting him stumble after him on floor-numbed knees.
He seats Barnabas down firmly, with practiced ease, and tugs a down-stuffed blanket over him for his nudity, and as he shakily pours out a glass of the water he had on hand, Barnabas calls out, “Are you all right, Jonah?”
The nerve. The fucking nerve.
Jonah slams the glass down on the end table, spilling a rill of water on the surface. He bites back his words, keeps his face angled safely away. He needs to get a handle on himself, he needs to pull back, disengage; he needs to shove this ugliness somewhere else. “I’ll have a servant come to clean this up in half an hour. If you don’t feel like putting on a show for them, I recommend you find yourself in bed before then.”
Jonah leaves him in the room, heart pounding, and stalks back to the one he’s claimed for the night. The harness is ripped off and piled in a corner, a towel thrown on top to smother the smell of Barnabas’s gullet still sharp in his nose, and he shoves himself messily into the dressings of a gentleman, reshapes himself into someone with control and discipline. It’s a hasty dressing, done up with shaking fingers and gritted teeth, but he smooths out his hair in the mirror and takes a deep breath,
And he is Mr. Magnus, founder of the Magnus Institute, and he is going to take a long walk to clear the thick, saccharine stickiness Barnabas has left cloying in his lungs, the hellfire licking at his ribs and threatening to consume his composure.
His hand trembles when he drapes the scarf round his neck.
The first servant he comes across is too startled by his appearance to say anything when he makes the promised request. He leaves them frozen still in the hall as he throws his riding coat over his shoulders, and, cane in hand, he throws himself into a storm that is inches from becoming a blizzard.
He braces himself against the whipping winds that lash at his bare face, relishing the icy burn that rushes through his lungs, and grins into the storm. He’s wilder and worse than anything nature can throw at him.
Jonah awakens. Though Gainesworth’s arm snapped in his tumble down the tower, at least his ribs are not sinking hungry teeth into his guts, and he can breathe.
So far, so good.
He is bruised, of course, his sides tender, and his head bleeds, in a number of places: his temple, his ears that still ring with the ghost of Millbank’s fall, his nose clogged with blood and filth, and his eyes—oh, his eyes, they are raw and burning and don’t know how to fit in their cavities yet, but they are his, they are Jonah, he survived and no one else in this damned place did. Jonah lives.
Jonah stands.
Jonah breathes.
His ankle is weak—not broken, he thinks, but it can’t quite hold his weight all the way. It’s enough, though. Enough to hold himself up straight, breathing carefully through new lungs, and enough to glance down from a new, unfamiliar height at his old and withered self.
A dried husk. A tool, used and broken. An incongruity.
He laughs, once, and winces and stumbles, and then laughs again, no matter that he thinks he might have a cracked rib after all—he’s suffered worse, after decades of corsets and girdles and bruising linen bandages. He laughs, giddy with pain and with the anticipation of a life cut loose from those trappings, a whole lifetime ahead of him of actually being in the right body.
He feels like a child, and he’s falling to his knees and collapsing onto the chest of the broken thing he used to be, still laughing as the tears track filthy bloody trails down stubbled cheeks.
A smear of soft brown iris, cast away and discarded, gazes morosely at the new man weeping on the broken body on the ground for a long time, before Jonah finally stands and carelessly grinds what’s left of the abandoned thing into the filth of Millbank beneath his heel on his first steps forward.
The estate surrounding the Bennett household is unrecognizable in the storm. Blinding sheets of snow toss and twist in the wind, tugging at Jonah’s riding coat, searing his skin with cold. Jonah bares his teeth into the wind and steps forward, and forward, the sound of his breath loud in his ears. This is the sort of night he’s meant for, he thinks: pressing onward through the storm, taking his bright vicious pride out on the furious gale. Forces of nature meeting one another.
A drift of wind spatters his cheek with wet snow and brings with it a sound drawn thin like twine.
Jonah shivers, drawing his coat closer together. There are no wolves on the continent, he knows; save, perhaps, the ones with skin on the outside of their fur. He can take them, though, tonight of all nights; with his cane in his hand, and the fire raking claws at his ribcage, he can take anything on, he thinks.
The sound comes again, wheedling and plaintive. It is his name.
Jonah stops dead in the storm.
On the second day, after a long and agonizing night of dragging a sprained ankle down the streets of London, Jonah Magnus wakes up once more.
His eyes are glued together with tears, and blood, and fluids that weren’t meant to ever see the light. He shudders at the raw, tender hurt of his eyelids when he tries to blink them open, somehow aching even more now than they had when freshly displaced.
It’s a unique challenge to navigate his bedroom blind on new unsteady legs, and even when he finds the pitcher of water, he has to wipe his face clean with one hand, the other limp with the nauseating pain of a snapped humerus. Still, he manages to melt the sediment caked onto his face—Basil Gainesworth’s face. No, not Basil’s anymore. Whoever it is staring back at him through the faintly fogged mirror, it’s not the craven fool who wasn’t strong enough to withstand Jonah’s vision come to its full and awful culmination.
Basil Gainesworth has a dimpled chin, Jonah finds. He’d never paid much attention to it before. It has been enough days since Jonah initiated the Crown that the vain man’s trimmed facial hair has become thick and rough under Jonah’s exploratory touches, turning soft and curled where it climbs up his jaw in proud mutton chops. It will need trimming, to properly retrain this face to its cleanly masculine shapes, but…
It hadn’t sunk in last night, but today it does. Jonah had always been boyish, but aged. Basil—Jonah, who is now Basil, who is still Jonah, who has become something else entirely, maybe—he carries youth and maturity both, and it is this hope; this deeply buried but frantic hope, that being perceived as this will lead to different outcomes. Open new doors.
His eyes, raw and aching and throbbing gently in his robbed skull, begin leaking.
A new face, a new life.
Jonah presses foreign fingerprints into foreign cheeks and regards the ruin of Millbank. His life’s work, torn to rubble, and every life caught in its terrible walls torn down with it.
His breath fans out from his nostrils, hitting the web of his thumb and forefinger hot and vital. Every life except one. Slowly, under the hand clutching at his stolen face, Jonah smiles. A bright, cruel twist that is his, and his alone.
Over a thousand lives exchanged for one new.
Yes. Jonah Magnus would make that trade again.
“What did I do?” Jonah can barely hear the question over the wind and through Barnabas’s chattering teeth. “What happened? How do I make it better, Jonah?” Endless, endless questions, needling at Jonah’s ear as he treks through the snow, Barnabas’s vulnerable frame tucked under Jonah’s arm and stumbling at his side. Jonah doesn’t answer him, focusing instead on following his path back to the house—he needs to move fast to keep up with the way the snow is starting to fill his bootprints.
“Please, just say the word, and I’ll do better, be better—just talk to me.” Jonah scowls and clutches Barnabas tighter to his side. Though the other man is taller than him by a squint, Jonah can barely feel his weight. Fragile. Impermanent. Frighteningly mortal, especially when the idiot goes wandering around in snowstorms in underclothes and a blanket. Wretched, wretched fool, and Jonah can still feel the solid weight of Barnabas’s cheek under his hand when he’d let Jonah slap him, and the dark, disbelieving glee of that moment, and Jonah does not answer. He cannot.
Barnabas stops begging, eventually. He stops talking at all, and the only sound Jonah can hear is the chatter of his teeth under the wind.
Jonah increases his pace.
It’ll be inconvenient if the impetuous idiot perishes of something as stupid as following Jonah out here.
The warm glow of the house soon appears, though, and so do the scared calls of the servants from the open door. Jonah readjusts his hold on Barnabas and tromps the rest of the way to the open door. Immediately, the servants begin fussing, and Jonah has to snarl to scatter the lot. They direct their attentions on Barnabas, instead, helping him to the chaise in the lounge, and Jonah finally has a chance to catch his breath and start shucking his soaked outerwear.
“Fine way to treat your toys,” says Michele.
Jonah turns from where his hands are still arranging his riding coat on its peg. Giovanni Michele is sipping at something amber in a tumbler, party clothes comfortably rumpled under the banyan he’s filched.
“Thought you left with the rest of the party,” Jonah replies, after a moment of sizing up the lagging party attendee. “Fine manners, overstaying your welcome.”
Michele smiles, self-satisfied and secretive. He is unbearably smug, trim and fastidious in his waistcoat, as Jonah melts puddles onto the floor in his hastily shoved on clothes. “Yes, I think so too! Lives are so fleeting, after all, we must appreciate our time together whilst we may. And from what I can see, you and your young beau are appreciating your time in a rather unconventional manner.”
“Are you really pretending that this is any of your business?” Jonah spits, finally reaching for one of the towels the simpering staff had left behind and wrecking his hair with it. “You and I have appreciated such unorthodox scenes more times than I can count.” Icy droplets are dripping down into unspeakable places, now, and Jonah hates this confrontation more than he can possibly explain, all of a sudden. “Good night, Michele, I’m going to bed.”
“Without putting your doll away? Is it your intention to mistreat your things so?”
Jonah glances at the chaise where the staff have left Barnabas for the moment, cocooned in a fresh warm blanket, facing the fireplace. He is still where he lies, save for the occasional shudder. “Not that I’d judge you if it was your intent, of course,” Michele says, damnably, “I only want to verify with you that you mean it.”
When Jonah looks down at Michele, his eyes are squinted with amusement, and they are cold, and curious, and very, very clear. “The next time you see your boy,” Michele continues when Jonah remains speechless, “How do you want him to remember you?”
Jonah imagines it, then, the next night he’ll share with his oldest friend, with this hideous fucking night heavy in the air between them: Barnabas’s head whipped to the side, Jonah’s hand stinging, and the fact that it was Jonah who had failed, Jonah’s weakness to his whims, his inability to predict his own limits.
Jonah cannot breathe.
Something about Michele softens, a bit. When his hand cups Jonah’s cheek, it is cool and crisp in an entirely different way from the biting ice of the storm outside. “Go on, dear, take care of your doll,” he says, and Jonah would bite his finger off for the patronizing tone, but he has more important matters to attend to.
Instead, he stumbles away from Michele’s cool touch, collapses onto the chaise, and pulls Barnabas’s head onto his lap. He is still halfway soaked, and there’s a trickle of water running down over his nose as he settles in the seat, but Barnabas presses the weight of his head into Jonah’s thigh like it’s home.
“All right there, angel?” Barnabas murmurs, his voice hoarse and helplessly fond. “Rough night, tonight.”
He looks up at Jonah, and his eyes are so, so gentle. Jonah brushes a damp curl out of his face and softly touches his fingertips to Barnabas’s eyelids, slipping them closed over warm brown. “I’m fine. You should rest.”
What Michele does after that, Jonah doesn’t know and doesn’t care. He spends the night in front of the fireplace, running his fingers over Barnabas’s fine soft hair.
He is so disgustingly fragile. And Jonah finds he’s not quite ready to let him break, yet. Not like this.
“Good morning, my dear!”
Jonah stands frozen in the doorway of his home; his Institute. On his doorstep stands Giovanni Michele, brightly grinning and dressed absolutely atrociously—like a tartan blanket that has fallen desperately in love and clings to his shoulders in the hope of its affections being returned. Michele lifts an arm out of the tartan monstrosity and doffs his cap respectfully.
Jonah, still dressed in Basil Gainesworth’s ragged torn clothing from… two days ago? three? stares wordlessly at the unwelcome visitor. “Pardon my forwardness, my lamb, but is the master of the house available today?”
He flares his nostrils—Basil does not have as good of a nose for this expression, he’s disappointed to find, he must experiment to find the proper ways to express his distaste later—and pastes on a simpering smile. That’s the sort of thing this man used to wear, right? “Sorry, sir, he’s out for today. Can I help you?”
Michele peers up at him quizzically and tsks with a shake of his head. Jonah grits his teeth. Fucking patronizing. Some things never change, no matter how many decades. “On the contrary, darling, I think I ought to be the one offering to help you. When were you intending to get your poor broken arm set?”
Truth be told, Jonah hadn’t considered a plan for that complication quite yet. He’d anticipated dealing with it soon, of course, after he’d figured out the best way to ensure the Institute would remain in the right hands. He’s good at improvising. Well, then he’ll improvise, even if it puts him in Michele’s debt. Better the old man than the Lukas family, at least.
He sighs, steps aside to let the busybody show himself in, and viciously scowls as Michele immediately takes it upon himself to start looking at everything. Fucking rude, to examine a man’s abode the day after he’d anticipated the world would be his. Jonah did not haul his broken body across the streets of London in the middle of the night to tidy up his home, for Christ’s sake.
Michele prods at a drift of papers abandoned on the floor with his cane. Jonah could wring his skinny little neck if his arm weren’t snapped. “Do you fucking mind, darling?”
“Oh, not at all, my pleasure,” Michele simpers, picking up one of the later Millbank blueprints and watching the paper roll maze-like corridors onto the floor with evident fascination. “Actually, come to think of it, I am a bit parched, may I get us a tipple?”
“Are you serious?”
“Never in my life—it ages one terribly.” Michele aligns one finger along his nose and winks, then bustles out the room to the small kitchen which is, like the other rooms in the house of a man who’d been quite confident in his plans that by now the world would be under his command, in shabby repair. Michele tsks again, offensively—if Jonah has to hear him make that noise one more time, he’s going to destroy the bitch, no matter how many decades of acquaintanceship they’ve shared—and rummages with a disappointed air in Jonah’s dilapidated liquor cabinet.
Jonah sags at the entryway to the kitchen, leaning against his good shoulder. Following this idiot around his own home on wounded limbs is the opposite of what he wants to do with his first days as a new man, and Jonah finds he is growing quite queasy from holding himself upright. His face is feeling cold and damp with sweat. That is it: he cannot tolerate this any longer. “Giovanni. Emil. Andre, whoever you are, can you please get out of my house? Kindly?”
“Not in good conscience, duckie—I’d never forgive myself. Ah, here we are!” Something clear and noxious in a tumbler dangles in Jonah’s face, swimming slightly with his vision. Jonah snatches it and downs the stuff before Michele can try to hand feed him like a babe. The spirit hits his tongue horrifically, and Jonah realizes suddenly that Basil cannot handle his liquor. It’s tossed to the back of his throat, anyway, and it burns the entire way down. “And I can’t leave yet,” Michele continues, irritatingly, “I’m being followed. Do you see the gentleman out the window?”
Aggravated beyond belief, his throat on fire, Jonah glances back out the room to the front window and sees nothing but an empty street as Michele takes his broken arm in both hands and swiftly sets it into place.
The sound he makes comes from his chest, and it comes out more of a bellow than a yelp, and Jonah can’t help but find satisfaction in the deep resonance from his ribs, even as the pain rocks him and sends his stomach jumping with nausea. “Ach, there, come now,” Michele shushes, tying up Jonah’s arm with a length of fabric—a cravat? No, something else, where did he get that? “You don’t want that to heal wrong, trust me: it is not an experience I’d recommend any of my associates accumulate.”
“What does it matter to you,” Jonah rasps, collapsed on the floor—when did he drop down here? Wasn’t he standing? The liquor burns in his veins, making him dizzy. Damned body. Perhaps he should have fed it by now.
Michele frowns at him from where he crouches at his side. “Still haven’t gotten the hang of taking care of your toys, Jonah? It’s been a few years, I thought you’d get at least a little better at it by now. Might want to get a handle on that sooner than later.”
“It is the very opposite of being any of your business, Michele, I really cannot give a fuck over what you think of how I treat them.”
“Look at the estate you’re renting, sweet,” Michele says with a knowing twist of his mouth, and Jonah, wondering what the hell he’s implying, glances down at the body he’s fought for and won. Bruised, battered, shaking with nerves and with lack of food. Hm. “If you don’t take care of the bodies you surround yourself with, there won’t be any left over to slip into—one way or another, assuming you’re keeping the tastes you had your first time around as a young man.”
“You’re disgusting,” Jonah spits, and starts struggling to his feet. Michele watches with that wretched half-grin when his ankle twists under him and he falls back to the floor, groaning weakly. “Get out of my house.” It’s a rasp, this time, and not as effective as Jonah wishes it were, with his cheek pressed against the dirty floor.
Michele rolls his broken body onto its back with his cane, careful of his trussed-up arm, and crouches over him like the world’s most jovial vulture. “Bit of advice, from one of immortal life to another. If you’re going to run in these circles, you’re going to need intent, or you’ll wash up with the rest of your victims.”
Jonah squints up at him, breathing harshly with pain. Intent. Michele is staring down at him with those clear, cold eyes, some kind of expectation in that empty gaze. He’s waiting for an answer, Jonah thinks. He’s waiting for proof of something, maybe. Fine, all right. If Michele wants to play games with Jonah, he’ll play.
He smiles shyly—now, this expression comes naturally, he’ll need to add it to his repertoire—and reaches with his good arm, up to touch Michele’s lined face. The man raises his eyebrows, intrigued by this turn of events, and leans in closer to let Jonah thread his fingertips into silver-edged hair, wispy and thin between his ear and his collar. Jonah lets his smile go sweet, as Michele crouches down further, and, with a jackknifing twist of his body, uses his grip to smash Michele’s head into a metal cabinet knob.
“I have committed thousands to death for the sake of the knowledge to survive,” he tells the man bleeding on his floor, as he slowly rolls to his knees. “I gouged out the eyes of the last man who betrayed me with his cowardice. I have ripped mine own out, Michele, with my bare hands: tore them from my skull, nerve by nerve, for the chance of a new life.” Michele groans, shudders, and the pool of blood at his head flows further into the kitchen.
Jonah stands, finally, unsteady on that damned weak ankle, but standing taller and prouder than he had when he’d met Michele at the door, and even his ankle doesn’t seem to be aching as much as it was before. Jonah tests it by kicking Michele in the side and is gratified by the lack of shocking pain and by another weak groan. “Is that enough of a show of intent, Michele? Do you need further proof?”
Michele coughs wetly. The brass cabinet knob Jonah bashed his temple into is, gratifyingly, dripping bloody red. Jonah smiles with a grim little twist, and stumbles into the kitchen to pour himself another of whatever the fuck Michele had forced on him earlier. Might as well get started on getting this body used to alcohol now.
The next shot isn’t any easier than the first was, and Jonah nearly coughs it up before he manages to finish the whole of it. He leans his weight over the counter, hair sticking to his face in sweat-sticky clumps, and he doesn’t look up from the empty glass between his hands when Michele rises off the floor, levitating gently, a feather falling in reverse. His heels click together when he alights on the floor, and Jonah is not nearly drunk enough for this vaudeville horseshit.
“Good show, duckie, well done!” Michele says. He claps politely.
“For the last time, get out of my house. Next time I have to ask, I’ll be more thorough in testing that immortality of yours.”
“Don’t be sour, my puss, I’ll be on my way shortly. You’re committed to this path, then?”
“Michele, darling, bosom friend,” Jonah says, turning to face Michele. “The next time you cast doubt on my capacity to do this, I will bury you so many miles under my drowned prison that the color of the sky will only be a glimmer of a memory of a dream.”
Michele, who is as windswept and abominably dressed as ever, save for the murderous streak of blood running down his temple, smiles from ear to ear, and takes Jonah’s hand in his own two. “I’ll be expecting great things, then, my boy,” he grins, pumping the handshake like he’s posing for the paper, “A pleasure, Mr. Gainesworth, a pleasure. Looking forward to working with you in the future.”
“Jesus Christ, please just go.”
Michele is already at the threshold, his hat perched on his mass of silvered and bloodied hair. “You’re welcome for the arm, by the by—ta!” and then he’s gone, a speck in the sky.
Jonah glances at the hand Michele had been shaking and realizes it is the one that was loosed from its sling at some point. It does not ache when he clenches his fist, no more than any of his other limbs.
When he walks forward, it is on steady feet, and he carries his new body tall and proud to the open doorway. He breathes in the fresh air off of the river, with ribs that are whole and unencumbered, and he takes a moment to sneer at the open sky. “Interfering busybody.”
Jonah watches the people walking outside, and he watches the insects skimming over the river, and he watches the city alive and humming, and he watches its inhabitants working and loving and fearing. He and Beholding glut themselves on all the potential waiting outside for a few more heartbeats before Jonah closes the door.