Chapter Text
“They were married, you know,” Porter says offhandly. He’s draped across the couch - across Jace, more specifically - like a cat. Languid and lithe, ready to pounce, playing with a rip in his leather glove as he rambles. “Back before the war went down, the unnamed god had a spouse.”
A mortal one? is Jace’s first thought. It slips through the cracks before he can stop himself and burrows under his skin. It’s mortifying, honestly. He’s not a proper divine caster, but he should still know better. Gods don’t care about mortals.
Or - at least not like that.
In lieu of letting himself feel anything in particular about the information, he frowns down at the map of Elmville in front of him, spread across his coffee table. They’ve been at this for the better part of an hour, superimposing a shatterstar pattern onto the geography and marking down all the best possible locations for ascension rituals. Well, that's what Jace is doing. Porter is lying on the couch with his boots kicked up on Jace’s legs, getting mud everywhere, and spouting out bullet point factoids about his family’s legacy.
This is typical, these days. Far be it from him to be useful in his own fucking ascension.
“Did you hear me?” Porter asks idly, just to drive the annoyance home. He tugs at a tassel on the gilded pillow behind his head, as if he isn’t perfectly well aware of how much those things cost to buy at the Elmville branch of Williams-Somatics.
“Well, I assume the spouse was mortal, and died,” Jace replies tartly. “You were pretty pointed about the past tense.” He can be professional, damn it. Professional and level-headed, despite how easy it would be to Vortex Warp his coworker out into the hallway and cast Arcane Lock on the apartment door. It's not like he hasn't done it before.
“No, no. Divine, for sure." Porter cracks his knuckles. “The spouse is gone, just like the unnamed god. We don’t know the name of either of 'em. That's the problem with the family history. Lots of erasure, very little information. They did seem to be on contentious terms, though. At least towards the end there, once the wars began."
When Porter starts talking about ancestral wars, all hope of him being helpful in the planning have officially gone down the drain. Jace mentally starts to realign his schedule for the night.
“Did they get a divorce?” he says, after a long moment of Porter looking at him expectantly. "War does seem to be a good way for gods to go about that."
“Hmm?”
“A divorce,” Jace repeats. “What, Porter, have you never heard of those before? When two people hate each other very much -”
“Oh, shut the fuck up, Stardiamond.”
Porter sits up slowly; one of his eyebrows is arching into the stratosphere. It’s not quite anger, not yet, but it’s certainly annoyance. Well, fair's fair. Equal and opposite reaction. Jace tries and fails to swallow down a razor-edged grin at the sight.
“I’m not one of your teenagers," he says gruffly. A tad threateningly, even. Oh, yay. "Don’t treat me like one.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Jace lets the words drip with condescension. He’s rewarded by Porter's eyebrow shooting another inch higher. “I always forget what you do and don’t know.”
Porter leans forward, manuevering further into Jace's space, preparing to pounce. He’s wearing a ripped-up tank top and washed-out jeans, an abominably casual look that Jace should really be mad about. A glint of crimson dances across the back of his irises, the sickeningly focused energy of rage that’s always near the surface. When they'd first met, Jace had been unable to stop thinking about that redness for weeks. It still haunts the back of his eyelids when he's bored at work, which is almost all of the time.
“About the plan, Mr. Stardiamond? Or just in general?”
“Take your pick,” Jace says, through a mean little laugh. "I mean, we both know that I'm the brains of the operation!"
He rolls his eyes just to twist the knife a teensy bit more, and oh, yes. There’s Porter’s anger, finally taking over from the annoyance, right on cue. It probably should be boring at this point, two years into fucking and one year into trying to burn the world to ash - poking the barbarian’s buttons, pushing past the warning signs. It probably shouldn’t make the hairs on the back of Jace’s neck stand up, equal parts fury and fascination.
It does, though, because of course it does. Of course it does.
“More than you,” Porter growls. His tongue is working, wet muscle flexing between white teeth. It will be so nice to bite it, to gnaw at Porter’s lips till they split open like fresh fruit. It will be so, so satisfying. It always is. “In any circumstance, Jace, I think I know more than you.”
“What, like you’re in charge?” Jace retorts. It's the next line in the script. He knows it, Porter knows it. They've done this so many times before. "There's no godhood without me to fix you, Cliffbreaker. Don't you fucking forget it."
The words slip out of his mouth easily; it's the same feeling as pushing a glass off a shelf, just for the joy of watching it smash on the floor. Sure enough, Porter’s hand flashes out, fingers curling up into Jace's hair. He tugs Jace’s mouth down to his, hard, vicious enough that they'll definitely both bruise.
The ritual location definitely isn’t going to get finalized tonight. Whatever. Fuck it. That's a problem for another day.
***
He only really thinks about the implications three hours later. Porter is gone, but the remnants of him remain - the Elmville map discarded beneath the couch, the pillows and upholstery thrown every which way, a fresh dent in the wall where they slammed up against it hard enough to crack the paper. Jace’s throat is sore and it hurts to swallow. There’s a bite mark on one shoulder blade that flares deliciously with pain whenever he breathes. Altogether? A very successful evening.
The mess is far too much to clean up, though. He's tired and spent, so he flops onto the carpet and orders in from FeastDash. It's Saturday night; he doesn't have to handle high schoolers for another thirty hours. He deserves a reward. Well, another reward, aside from sex with Porter, which is unfortunately a pretty decent one. Not that he'll ever say it to his face. God knows that Porter doesn't need the ego boost.
A spouse. Hilarious. The unnamed god was married, before all remnants of their name and general existence got wiped off the face of the earth. It makes sense that they were wed to another lost god, actually. Even with the restrictions of oblivati mori in place, if the second god was still around, there would be marginally more information for Jace and Porter to work off of.
As it is, they're tragically stuck extrapolating nothingness from nothingness. All this, and midterms are due in two weeks. Jace's life sucks, sometimes.
What domain would they have covered?
Hmm. It's an interesting question. Jace rolls his shoulders as he thinks, appreciates the muscle-deep burn left behind by his recent questionable decisions. The unnamed god - God #1, for the sake of his own clarity - oversaw the domain of war, at least once Porter's ancestors started worshipping them. Before that, though, the research indicates that the domain was either something adjacent to "justice" or "sunrise." Perhaps a little bit of both. God #2, the spouse, could have had any other domain, in theory. In Jace's experience, though, the gods tend to be a little more....poetic, in their relationships, than normal mortal beings do.
So it was probably an equal, opposing domain. Not "injustice"; that would be a bit too vague. Something like trickery, or nighttime, or lies. Those would have paired nicely together. Maybe desolation? Or despair? Something like that. Those sound decently ominous and saccharine.
That domain would still be open, probably. Just like the unnamed god's. Easy to claim. Ripe for rewriting, for ownership, habitation.
Jace's phone dings. He swallows down the thoughts and checks the notification to see that his FeastDash driver is five minutes away, which means that it's time for him to put on enough clothes and concealer to be briefly presentable to non-Porter eyes.
It's just as well. This is a stupid line of thinking, anyway. It's not directly relevant to the ascension plan; they still need to find God #1's name, and figure out how to get Porter into their place. God #2 is just a sidenote, not even the main priority. He's getting distracted - and really, he can't afford to be distracted, even for a moment. There are too many balls in the air. There's too much at stake. Midterms, damn it. Midterms, and all the murders he still has to somehow cover up.
When Jace slips into bed a few hours later, though, his sleep is fitful. In his dreams, he sees an endless forest, a skeletal face, a clouded sky. He sees the astral plane, the celestial plane, the Nine Hells filled with pits of infernal fire. Worlds upon worlds. It's wickedly difficult to travel interplanar, even for a caster of his considerable skill. Gods don't have problems like that, really; they can go almost anywhere they please, in some form or another. Gods can rewrite the world with a flick of their fingers, wipe the smug smirks off their coworker's faces with a single thought. Gods can take a hell of a beating. Gods can command attention and desire. They're undeniable, unmockable. Needed, and valued, and noticed.
What would it be like to be a god?
Shit, what would it be like to be married?
Terrible, probably. It's fortunate that he'll never be either of the two.
The dreams don't get any less uneasy. When Jace wakes, far too late into Sunday, it takes him a few minutes to clear the afterimages from his eyes. He ignores the unread texts on his phone, the faint taste of rust in his mouth. He ignores the way that one of the shadows in the corner moves strangely, when he looks at it. Just a trick of the light.
It's only bad dreams. He's an adult, godsdamn it; he's better than this. Nightmares never really hurt anyone, anyway.