𝙰𝚄𝙶𝚄𝚂𝚃𝚄𝚂.

ARISTOS.

[aveaugvstus]

JAYA.

♦ ♦ ♦

All that she knows, as easily, as quickly, Jaya no longer does. It should not surprise her. It has been engrained in muscle memory, has it not? Her hands have known these priciples longer than it has taken for her mind to grasp them, and yet, still she has come to know, these principles bequeathed to her by the woman from whose womb she tore through like a battlecry. It had been her amma who had taught her: a single thread — the right thread, or perhaps the wrong one, depending on how one perceives it — is all it takes to make the garment come undone, unravelling in one’s very hands, that quickly. Have you ever watched someone you love die? Augustus Sutherland asks of her, with an earnestness to his gaze that needles at her. Acutely, she feels it: the tug; hard and vicious, malicious, in a manner that must be purposeful – for who understood if not she, the ways in which the wounded wanted others to know their pain. Is that not why the wounded scream? To pierce all those who have not been. To be understood—seen—known: the only desire of humankind more common than a fear of its inevitability.

Her mother never did at the end. She never screamed.

Have you ever watched someone you love die?

         ( you remember — you remember the taste of palm over your mouth, the salt of sweat in tributaries born palmary creases, pebbled with calluses only a woman whose hands know harsh, menial work could be. you remember fingertips pressing on your throat… quiet, you remember them demanding, staunching your cry in the pipe before it burst upwards. you remember the whimper that left her. you remember the wet gurgle of her last breath. you remember after, too — though you remember naught of the in-between sludge you’d been drug through. you remember her hair, the dark cloud of it so close matching your own, escaping the thick, frayed rope of her braid, how it had splayed over the wrinkled skirts of eden’s skirts, how she had stroked the stilled head in her lap, tears silent — tears relentless. you remember the life having left her eyes, the eyes your own face wore. you remember, you remember, you remember —  )

The last memory before the name of VERA had been thrust upon her, heritage pillaged for the sake of survival. A fledgling Jaya’s memories resurfacing in the resurrection’s mind as Sutherland unspools her so unceremoniously.

Have you ever watched someone you love die?

“Yes.”

♦ ♦ ♦

FIN.

[aveaugvstus]

JACK.

see? jack wants to laugh, to shriek to the high heavens like a sisyphus as he watches that god-damned boulder roll back down the hill. look at what you’ve done to me, you’re the reason–did you truly think you could be so easily extricated from my body? from the muscle of the hand and the heart in turn? if that beast, if this place in all of its icy and shadowy horror takes the one, it takes the other two in turn–in a far more slow and horrific sort of decaying. 

perhaps it knows that, somehow–and that is why it plagues the young ( have the two of them always been so? has jack always been so very old, with his trembling hands and the lifetime he’s already seemingly lived and died out there in the desert? how has it taken him so long, to see there is a life the two of them have yet to have the chance to live, to fill with happiness and joy and all of the things jack signed away in tamati’s blood?) man who stands in front of him, shrouded in plumes of smoke like a spectre, as if the veil between this life and elysium or whatever hell comes next has been parted for just a moment to allow jack to see a glimpse of the future, more than jack (a vessel already haunted) or vladya (perhaps the only hope either of them have, anymore). 

he bites down hard on his bottom lip, shoves his hands without any measure of grace into the pockets of his jacket, and he waits for august to come to the conclusion that jack has paid enough penance in the form of his best friend’s silence. 

he’s prepared to wait until both of them turn to nothing more than skin and bone, right here in the armory room–but it takes only a few long moments before something of the truth unfurls itself, like the gossamer smoke that august exhales into the air. 

“and yet i am the one who fulfilled its promise, because i kept you alive.” he says. august may be furious with him, but jack refuses to let rage of any kind seep into his words–he needs the other man to know that rationality played a part in this, that keeping him alive is a cold and simple fact, not some esoteric question of grey areas that can be easily debated into the eternities. he needs to know that not a second has passed where has come to regret the decision he made, and that he would do it again without hesitation if it meant that his best friend got to draw breath for another day–that he moved one step closer to an actual future for himself, written by his own hand. “you would have hit the water and been too cold to use your mind your your body, and then you would have drowned, august. it’s as simple as that.” 

he curls his fingers into the meat of his palms, exhales a shaky breath of air. he wants nothing more than to reach for the cigarette again, to let the acrid burn in his throat be something else to focus on–but he’s spent too long turning away, hiding behind the hero’s mask. “places like this–” he shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders. “they always promise life, to make you something bigger to fill the grand, empty stage of it. you follow that whisper, you allow yourself that action, and then–you blink and you’re in the same place you started, only this time you’ve done something you have to live with, for the rest of your life.” 

please, he wants to fall to his knees and beg. i can save you from this, if you’d only let me. i’m ready to let you go, if you’d just let me do so knowing you’ll turn away from where i stand.

it begins and ends with water, back to the riverbed where it all began, streaming past his ankles as he stands, rooted to the spot in time. in helpless oblivion. the current isn’t merciless, simply apathetic; it could slow to a trickle and still, it would crawl onwards. you cannot move time any more than you could move the sea against the tides when the moon holds court. under its dominion, the noblesse of night and the infinite stretch of twilit intention, he lies in his lover’s arms and thinks about the heat of his mouth, the burn of his skin, the warmth of him lighting every surface and hollow of him with liquid gold. he thinks of anything but the cold asleep in his veins, dormant in the silt and regolith of his bones.

maybe this is what love is — realising how strange it is to measure time in minutes and seconds and not breaths, not heartbeats or the escalation of gravity between your last touch and the ache for the next. he exists in the aperture of yesterday evening, and now, and more, he lives in the rift between vladya’s hands on him then and when he’ll touch him next. a two-fold urgency, double-bladed upon the pendulum swing of paradise and madness. he doesn’t let vladya see it on him, not willingly. if he tastes it on him, unravels the urgency from the way he clings to him like a shadow amidst their sheets, recognises the bruising, blooming pomegranate rot of his desperation, they don’t speak of it.

he thinks he dies a little every time vladimir severs them. but it isn’t death, because when august lies awake, in the dim half-shadows of moon and scintillating wave, he places bets with death. he traces the planes and angles of vladya’s face over and over, and dares death to take him before he has committed him so fully to heart, he could conjure him out of aether with the vessel of his own blood and sinew. he watches vladya, always. in distraction and focus, drinking him in as if he could paint every pathway in his mind with his memory, as if he could cheat death by osmosis.

he doesn’t let vladya see him like this, half-gone with fixation. driven to the brink of near mania. with jack, it doesn’t matter. jack has always seen through him, to the sediment and veins. he reaches out for the cigarette again, already burned a third of the way through, and presses it to his mouth despite the fact that it feels like trespassing without vladimir’s lips on him. 

“you’ve cast me as ophelia, as if i’ve already gone half-mad.”  smoke pools out of his mouth, and he surprises himself at the lack of bitterness lacing his words. just the same coldness, and borderless indifference, like a glimpse through a frozen surface the wrong way. he imagines it often, his second favourite dream other than vladimir, how it would have felt to go under the water that night. at a certain temperature, freezing feels like burning to the human body — and wouldn’t that be something? to burn after feeling cold for so long. to burn with something other than this certainty, this fucking damocles sword hanging over his head. the blade point of it rests on his tongue, sinks a little, a half-moon arc of blood: sometimes dying is a mercy. sometimes it's living that is the suffering. it’s the sort of ultimatum that springs from his mind, alive and fully-formed, cancerous in its vividness, invading every inch of him until there is nothing left but salted earth and soundless gasps for clemency.

“i know you don’t sleep anymore, jack.”  is this cruel? augustus isn’t by nature, but his honesty comes like a knife sometimes, slipped between the ribs when you least expect it. his voice, sleep-soft, quiet as siren song to the only damned who can hear it, coils around the smoke.  “you look at vladimir and i like sometimes you see someone else in our shadows. in our footfalls at your side. maybe we aren’t veterans of war like you, but we’ve seen enough battlefronts to know when a man looks hunted. i might have thrown myself from the halyards into the sea but you hold yourself like you’ve got a bullet in your gut and it hasn’t finished bleeding out. i’m not the only one that’s been changed by this place.” this place, this unholy eden of his and vladimir’s. maybe they are damned, maybe they deserve it for the happiness they dare to dangle over the mouth of a starving beast. but at least augustus is going willingly, at least he goes with eyes wide open, heart in vladimir’s hands.

“perhaps, for once, we should talk about you.”

[sirensignal]

@wilccard @aveaugvstus ( 1 / ? )

[sirensignal]

@aveaugvstus @wilccard ( 2 / ? )

[existential-celestial]

—I am never away from you. Even now, I shall not leave you. In another world, I shall be still that one who loves you, loves you Beyond measure, beyond—

CYRANO in “Cyrano de Bergerac,” Edmond Rostand, tr. Brian Hooker

[soracities]

Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, The Whitsun Weddings

[Text ID: “What will survive of us is love.”]

[aveaugvstus]

VLADYA.

JACK. 

WHEN | BEFORE THE RESCUE DEPARTS  WHERE | THE TOP DECK WITH | ANYONE IN THE RESCUE PARTY 

[...]

“no one goes anywhere alone–you go in pairs, or you go in groups. if you do find yourself alone, do not attempt to continue your search until you’ve met up with someone else–isolation is exactly what this thing wants, and you will be powerless against it. finally,” his hand moves to the strap of his rifle, and he bites down hard on his bottom lip again. “the safety of the missing crew and guests is first priority–do not engage if you have the chance to get them out. only take the shot if you think you have the advantage, and only if that advantage is clear–we’re going into its territory, and our knowledge is limited, and those are not ideal conditions for open warfare.” 

he clenches the muscle in his jaw, stands to his full height, tightens his grip until his knuckles go white. “is that understood?” 

mentioned / @aveaugvstus​, @wilccard​

[...]

When the others depart, Vladimir brings his hand around August’s elbow. He squeezes, once, and then motions towards jack. A look of understanding passes between them. The soldiers walk closer over the ice, until in the whole circle of five, six feet around, the most the lantern allows them to see, there is nothing but the three of them.

His tone, when he talks, sounds like neither soldier, neither martyr; sounds like nothing at all, except like the northern wind that makes everything ache, come clean, break apart.

❝ I am not leaving either of you alone. The lot of them are going to be safer in a herd, that’s the most they’ll be able to do. Spin in circles, cry wolf, whatever. But we can do this bloody thing one better. We’re trained for this: the three of us. Jack, we can’t rely on tracking - that’s impossible, with this sightline. I can barely track August over there. Maybe we don’t have to. Maybe we need to keep walking until the terrain changes, and then hold our position. It’s the island they’re headed to, now? Then so be it. Whatever is to be found, it will be on the island. ❞  

to say that they have been distracted, from vigilance, from the promethean and its sharp descent into waking horror and ravenous torment at the hands of a faceless, omnipotent leviathan, would be a risible understatement. there are reasonable grounds to argue for selfishness and the scarcity of silver linings, however, when even a sliver of happiness in times like these would seem a flagrant beacon of impropriety. never mind that pleasure could be derived from something as trivial as vladimir’s fingertips grazing his arm, or the catch of his smile in the crook of his mouth when he's being particularly clever and distinctly contrarian. never mind that they are men, and royal marines, and the penalty for being caught doing what they do under the cover of unabating nightfall is lashes enough to flay a man to death. 

it is a risk, calculated, weighed against safety and survival and found disproportionately lacking against the newfound intensity of touch, taste, sight, sound that has revolutionised even the most prosaic things. the night between them, and the darkened morning that breaks without light or day, dawns sun-warm and sauternais sweet. his mornings begin haloed by the wild curls of vladya’s hair, untameable even by august’s practiced fingers and magnanimous attention, and end with his love curled around him in apostrophe, in a promise of more, of tomorrow and all the little pleasures and discoveries it will bring. 

from the outside in, through the looking-glass of love tempered into a more palatable form of fondness, he could never have conceived it, how love agape was its own unchartered no man’s land to him. little conqueror, his lover calls him. well, he is an explorer, a pioneer, he maps vladimir’s body beneath his hands, charts trajectories across his hips and down his thighs, lays claim to each new piece of him that he uncovers with the zealousness of worship. they touch with familiarity and invention and the fine balance between both drives august to the fever-point of madness; he goes to his knees over it, frequently. let the ship outside of their room, their bed, go to hell and highwater so long as vladimir kisses him come morning like new sacrament. 

besides, haven’t they been here before? love in a time of war, or a terror waged upon them akin to siege warfare, blood and lust laced hand in hand. if they are going to die for the promethean, surely they are owed. they are owed these fragments of sequestered bliss, their laurel wreaths and sheathed damocles swords. augustus refuses guilt. he says a prayer for the commander’s dead paramour, and runs his palm down the mast of vladimir’s spine, presses a kiss to the small of his back and prays for another day. the disappearances and the rescue party occur in a domino flurry of marshalled chaos. the captain himself disembarks from the ship to lead the search for the group because ayla, god, reckless, dauntless, wilful ayla with the resourceful imagination and brave, bleeding heart is among them.

there are men made for command and there are men made for the bloodsport. as the former, jack has risen to command with the ease of one born for it, presiding over orders like he has twenty years of experience leading battlefronts and not ten. vladimir, too, if he wanted it. but he was never one for crowns or accolades — even when it came to the slaughter required of soldiers, he seemed to hesitate at times, as if his heart knew better than his mind the cost of blood upon the conscience. august, with his gilded birthright and noblesse oblige, may have been destined to lead armies, but he was always better suited to the killing. the cool, steady precision of it. the thunderous roar of cannon fire and artillery drowned out into a hum echoed by his blood, the spike of adrenaline clearing everything from his line of sight except the next kill. 

of course, whether the beast can be truly killed by mere mortals remains to be seen, or divined in fear and entrails. 

“knowing ayla, she’s led them straight into the heart of it. to barter with the beast, or to charm it into not eating us and killing us all for sport, god only knows. either way, that’s where we need to go.”  god help her when they find them. malachy may well lose his mind right there and then and banish her to exile under lock and key for the rest of the voyage. 

wry, with a genuine note of morbid disquiet, he gestures at the guns in their hands.  “do you suppose we’ve brought enough weapons to kill a creature made of smoke and nightmares? perhaps we should’ve brought the dynamite too. i know you said this is a rescue mission, jack, but you have to entertain the chance that getting a clear shot is the only way we’re getting them out of here.”  alive, august thinks. he doesn’t say it, because it would feel too much like a death sentence. a bad omen spoken into existence. 

[aveaugvstus]

VLADYA.

August doesn’t even deign to register the jokes — he bats them away as easily as he had done with Vladya’s insults, in the past; those splinters of denial & dishonesty he used to pinch inside their skins, to keep them both alive, to keep them both free of this kind of hurt. This kind of dread. This bloodied scene, it dawns on him, a thought crushed into existence by the pain in his body, is what I tried to stave off. Delay. Prevent. Anything; no, everything, I think I would’ve done everything to save ourselves from it — except stay away from you. That I could not do. And because I could not, would not, I now have no right to regret it.

He feels it, though. Is all overish with it. The terror seeps from Augustus, waves and scintilla, and pours down his own spine. Cold sweat blooms across it in increments. Like slates of ice. It makes the shirt stick to his body; makes him slump, as in retreat, as in mounting up forces, on the sepulcher of pillows Jonathan had set up.

He hears what August is asking even in the quiet. Even in the strain on his voice: no, no joviality here. No levity permitted. The bones sculpted in his face have the tinge of a catacomb, for a second; the tinge of an oath sworn over a ghost-fence. August is looking at him, yes, but August is also speaking to something inside them both: a place that has rendered words obsolete a long time ago. The soldier knows what this is: an ultimatum of despair. It has come so many times before. Even as he feels this thought gather momentum, even as he tries to tamp it ( you are not well, after all, Vladya lad; stop dreaming in centuries and focus on the task at hand ) he can hear it. The way eternity rings out inside the silence. The same eternity they always come to. Swear you’ll never leave me here alone. Swear I’ll never have to trace you among spirits again.

And the answers is always the same.

I cannot swear it. My love, I am so sorry, I cannot swear it. I saw it, August. This creature. It looked at me, not like a challenge, not like a taunt: it looked at me with the burden of inevitability in its face. Its… faceless sight. And yet so familiar.

But August’s voice catches. Here, now: it tapers out like a candle of tallow. This man he loves, this thing he has adored and pored over like pale gold, since boyhood, since birth, since martyrdom: this thing is now suffering. Vladimir cannot bear a second of it. What is one more lie? What is one more splinter in the crook of our elbow; in the lull of our tongue?

❝ August. Come here. ❞ He draws back on the bed. At the same time, his arms spread out, making a bower for August to settle into. Bandages be damned; witnesses be damned. He cares for nothing except to wipe out the fear in his face: the fear in both of them. When the other’s shoulder settles next to his, the world falls quiet. Out of reach, out of weight. Dread moves somewhere at the end of the stage, far into the pitfall. This, always: touch subdues it. A distant thought: if they court martial us for this, that means we’ll still survive the journey. A second thought: I love you so much it buries me.

Vladimir presses a kiss on August’s head. Saltwater. Sun: but quieter. Faded. Already? Yes. Already. ❝ I swear it, alright? I won’t be dead until I’m a hundred. Now, will you please kiss me back before the entire world realizes we’re here, and we’re on Her Majesty’s bloody payroll? I think that’s a fair request, all things considered. ❞

this moment, like so many before it, pools in the shallow hollow of his fingers, cupped cradle-like around this lifetime. he looks at vladya, his mouth full of saltwater and grave dirt, and marvels at how it feels like the world is splitting open around them each time, how it still manages to feel new and raw and singularly unbearable. his skin, freshly flayed, pared open, and oh, his heart, ship of theseus resurrected only to be dashed against the same rocks. ad nauseam. ad infinitam. we know how this ends, don’t we? we always have. we always do. the axiom floats in a quiet that engulfs him whole, swallowing him in a drowning that welcomes him home like sleep.

he hears the entirety of them in echoes. in syncopated words and elision of meaning, laughter and persiflage smoothed over the plasterwork cracks where honesty would seep through. he has loved him for so long, so endlessly, that he forgets the language they speak now has words and not just glances, gazes silhouetted by souls.

because love is a finite concept. in spite of everything, it is the very nature of the thing. but tenderness, the soft, ripe grief of mourning — the kind of loss that sits in your throat and infuses all your breaths with a feeling of aching repentance, that you would dare live, that you could bear to endure — has no tangible epilogue. so imagine you know this all along, imagine you go into it, eyes wide open, soft underbelly exposed, palms spread for prayer, and you love him anyway. because it is a choice, and it is the only one you will ever have, the only thing that keeps you from putting an end to this maddening sequence, for mercy. you choose these glimpses of shimmering bliss, these dawn-lit wisps of happiness, ephemeral, brief. a lightning flash illuminating the sky in brilliance, and gone again. the waves and waves of oblivion, afterwards that are less than lethe nothingness, not even an absence to be defined by. you choose it all: the beginning, and the end, and everything in one long, blazing strip of so-called fate.

he is shaking as he crawls into vladya, a tremor racking through his frame that starts at his fingertips and goes all the way to his soul. when he kisses vladimir, breathes him in and dies in the feeling of him, his mouth, his lips, finality heating the desperation and press of his hands in his hair, it is with absolution. liar. he tastes salt, or maybe blood, maybe this is what last rites will always taste like to him on vladya’s tongue. lie to me if you have to. tell me how we will survive all this, and love, too. tell me it is not for nothing as long as i have you. 

they never asked for eternity — and that is the real tragedy, isn’t it? just a little less suffering. a little more time. he lays down next to vladya, nearly on top of him, pressed against him as if their seams and limbs and skin could bleed into each other by sheer force of love and sacrifice and all that they have withstood, a thousand years of standing apart as two bodies. despite himself and despite the appeasement of the lie, he doesn’t make vladya promise. he knows him like the shudder of his last breath drawn in this world, and the shape of his soul, through shades and memory, in the next. he cannot make him promise. they lie tangled together, and august breathes deeply, lives every second and every last space between their heartbeats from here till sleep.

the world goes still for them, as if with grace, a quiet interlude sequestered from time.

FIN.

[aveaugvstus]

AYLA.

“You know I don’t listen.” Her tone is light, but the weight of the words must easily be conveyed by familiarity. You know. He does, knows her as well as almost anyone, better than most. They’ve lived on their own island for years, time to time locking out every other human shape. Creatures are welcome, so long as they’re woodland and benevolent.  He knows she wont have listened to what anyone else has said about him, at least wont have heard. Unless it’s to be used as motivation for her forceful spin and quick words. They may not be near to the predators of their pasts, but ignorance is far too stupid to be layered. A base impulse easily defeated by its own reflection. - Explain that to me? Say your words again and make me understand their meaning. Ask yourself to. 

“Don’t be cruel to my eyes, Gust. It’s what they see.” Her movement is no longer tar-dredged so much as faltering. Easy to settle down across from him now, with the weight of bricks pushing her to it. One for every part of the wall he has built up for himself. He’s not keeping the sea out, just locking himself in.  “All of it’s true, So how about you recognise that no one can damn you but yourself? Hmm. Don’t make me fight the sea for you because you refuse to believe you can do it too.” I hope you won’t have to.  It’s so simple, childlike, as though either of them can settle a dispute with a force of nature. As though good intentions and protection are all that is needed to serve him against whatever’s happening. What is happening? 

Places both hands on the table, fingertips loosely folded into palms, so knuckles might knock against wood if she needs to call his attention. More likely so he can decide to take or leave. Stretches across and withdraws, like a cat, just seeking to encroach into vision or attention or to skim at his mind like a stone to stir the waters. Stir the sea and prove it can be shifted. “You don’t have to stay there, with it’s teeth in you. You could be here, or somewhere else.” Doesn’t try to tell him that what he thinks is real is not, despite how much she wishes to ease the idea of it, to say there’s nothing to fear. There’s nothing to fear but fear itself. “Tell me where you’d rather be, imagine you tell me a secret so you can fear what I’ll do with it.” There’s too many around them for such things, even if they’re necessary distractions. And that is the entire point, to think of something good being given away, so something bad might be replaced.

but you have always been too good for this world and the people, wretched and salvageable alike, within it. you have always been too good. even as children, half-feral and foregone to their make-believe wilderness, her mouth was all halo, and her intentions all sunlight and fawn-eyed. it was easier back then, when all the monsters they fought were firmly imaginary and all it took to vanquish them was courage, a true heart, and dauntless purpose. 

“sometimes it would do us both good to listen more.”  threadbare and distanced, a ventriloquist act of sanity. he sounds every bit the part he has never wanted to play: adult-like. or some semblance of it. the world outside is cold and cruel and not so kind outside the walls of our secret garden. but that’s the way of things, isn’t it? you grow up and you abandon childhood, you forget how to fly and fall and dream five impossible things before breakfast because the gravity of being grown is too heavy for whimsicality. society treats minds like ours as expendable. and now i am just another madness-tainted thing, lost to the waves and ice-cold grip of a beast without name or face or shadow. 

there’s a vein of truth to her words and it makes them bitter-soft, a cloak of sweet-intentioned comfort that makes him want to drown for an entirely different reason. he has always been hungry for glory, for fame at any cost — be it life or death. is the monster not simply giving him what he has craved for so long? it is certainly a happier death than slaughter on a battlefield, death in service of an empire’s neverending conquest of lands and peoples that look just like him. maybe this is the path of salvation, albeit the unexpected one.  “if i go to sleep and i wake up in the ice, is that my fault, too? maybe it thinks i am an easy target.”

for all the academy’s indomitable rigor and regimen, here is the flaw in their grand machine: their soldiers were made for brute force or cannon fodder. what would they know to do with an enemy that has no throat to sever and no visible weakness to pierce a bullet through? how do you fight a lernaean hydra when you cannot even conceive of which head to cut off first? it is the sea, it is the hydra, but underlying everything is the palpable fear that permeates all that he sees, touches, hears. fear is the mind-killer. fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. the dredges that remain after the fear has passed over him and through him is honesty; yet to tell it true, to tell it like a through-line from the very beginning to the end, threaded all the way in his veins and the passageways of his heart, would make it real. and real is tangible. killable.

“if i tell you my secret, it will make it real. and it will make everything that much more stark, that much more painful.”  he anticipates what she will say before she says it, because she is both older and wiser, and purer at heart, than anyone he has ever known. she sees through things in order to see their good, their silver lining. real is painful, and that is life. wouldn’t you rather experience it? all the life and pain and fear, than exist in the in-between and the dark? wouldn’t you rather taste real sunlight? he sucks in a breath and reaches out for her, stretches out between them in a lifeline, a chain of wildflowers woven at the stems, knotted like tiny keepsakes.  “i do not want to be anywhere else but here, and that’s part of the tragedy, the bitter irony, i suppose. that in these darkest hours and nightmares, i have made my own world with the man that i love. his name is vladimir. and i will follow him anywhere, for as long as he will let me. even if that means staying here, in the sea and the ice, and letting it come for me. i could not imagine any other life but this.”

[aveaugvstus]

CYRUS.

WHEN / JULY, 1845   WHERE / THE COMMON MESS  WITH /  @aveaugvstus​ 

in his dreams, the voices come from shapes.

they lumber towards him, down a stretch of beach with sand like ash–like the ruins of a citadel after something horrible and overwhelming has taken place, leaving the blackened hands of the academic to make sense of the tragedy–neither fully human, with flesh and bone to give them structure, nor fully something else, something with the features of animal or creature. they shimmer like shadow, with horrible and unblinking white eyes, continually moving towards where he always stands–rooted to the spot with terror. 

and then they always reveal their horrible maws–the black abyss hidden behind rows and rows of sharp and jagged teeth that seem more like spires of rock–and they scream. they scream and cyrus always feels as though his bones are going to shatter inside of him, fill his bloodstream with bleached ivory fragments that will one day be pieced together, one day be nameless and nailed to a museum wall like a crucifix. they howl, and they snarl, and cyrus knows that they will one day reach him. one day his living body will be consumed by the nightmares as though his life has been turned inside out. 

today, however, is apparently not that day–today he wakes with a sharp inhale of breath, the kind that only comes from men deprived, and the mess comes swimming into focus. he’d fallen asleep on the table–his plate of food sits untouched, near his own crossed arms which had served as a kind of makeshift pillow. in the hazy moments, where he is neither fully awake nor fully asleep, the voices are dull–almost quiet. 

he blinks, scrubs the heels of his palms roughly into his eye sockets, and for the first time notices that augustus has taken the seat across from him, has been silently watching him for–who knows how long. his cheeks do not color with embarrassment, as perhaps they should–no, instead he shrugs his shoulders, drags a hand through his unruly hair. “did i–call out or anything? make a fool of myself?” he asks, worries his bottom lip between his teeth.

—

everything has seemed a touch surreal since the seas turned to ice and the skies bled white. the promethean, suspended in arctic purgatory and spiralled liminal space, has become an ark of lost souls. and while they are anchored here by a design not of their own making, everything but the hell frozen over beneath them has come unbound. unmoored; shifting and vacillating between day and night. shadows and sounds blur and coalesce like an artist’s impression of perdition, damnation so sisyphean even terror has become mechanical.

they could be passengers abandoned upon charon’s voyage into the unknown, adrift in one long, final odyssey: the dream of the dead long after they are gone. it is not death that augustus fears, it is time. time, and the breathless pursuit of it every moment and every beat and pulse of blood, and the loss of it. the aching, endless question without echo, without catharsis, that remains after death has come to break bread with you and the empty head of the table where time should be is all there is.

he is too young to be this preoccupied with death, to dream of it and carve space for it in the silhouette of every waking thought like he has had all the time in the world to make his peace with its proximity. he will always die young; it is as inevitable a fact as his name — patrician, divine, legacy-born — and his love — φίλτατος. but for now, he is not yet dead. and he has an unwavering duty to life to live it vividly, indelibly, as if the sun will never set. he blinks himself back into reality, the spectre of a gilt-smile dawning on his face.

“if you are a fool then we are two fools sitting here with our ghosts and our bad dreams.”  cyrus bears the ink-dark rings of sleeplessness and burdened nights, same as the rest of the crew aboard the ship. before, it was ghosts that haunted them; now they have subsumed the fear and the silence and become a shade of themselves. hollowed, and haunting. august, too, is dimmed, subdued, a flicker where once he was an easy, effortless blaze able to illuminate a dark room a mile away. he pulls comfort into his eyes, warmth from some other daylight untouched by ice and cold winds; they are not yet shadow and dream.

“let it not consume our daylight hours too, yes? tell me something happy instead. tell me about life before all this. what did you dream of that was so sweet it made you wish it would last a little longer every time?”

[aveaugvstus]

JONATHAN.

medical school had not prepared jonathan for this, the most startling of discoveries he had made as a doctor: the sick bed was the great truth-teller of the world. it was a space that whispered of what might come to pass — the failing of the human body, the death of a once-alive creature. for the one who laid in it, they often wrestled with their own weights: a boy holding his hand and asking for a parent’s love long gone; an old woman leaning forward to confess she had kicked the ladder from beneath her cruel husband years ago; jaya clutching his collar and telling him her true name, her true nature. how often jonathan occupied these dual roles of healer and confessor. 

but the sick bed did not end at the edge of the mattress. it brought forth truths from those who cared for the ones in it. how often had jonathan tried to make himself invisible as stories of love, of forgiveness, of hatred bound up in grief poured from visitors? he walked into the sickbay to a sight he was not meant to see, but it was not altogether surprising.

vladimir was well-loved; jonathan had simply been blind to where that love might come from. he would carry it with him quietly now, in the space where all his patients’ secrets rested, between his heart and his ribs. 

“he’s been through an ordeal. the best he can do is sleep. bruised ribs don’t heal in two days.” it was alarming, in its own way, but not yet enough to cause augustus concern. certainly not enough for jonathan to add vladimir’s symptoms to the growing lists of abilities the creature might have. “it is good you are here. talk to him, hold his hand if you’d like. connect him to this world.” jonathan placed a hand on augustus’ shoulder, a brief comfort. “and if you trust him, trust in his nature to return to you. he is a stubborn-willed, infuriating, brave man; this will not best him, beast or otherwise.” 

—

august is a creature of zealousness in all things: be it love, be it rage or defiance or sorrow — there is no middle ground with him. he wears his heart emblazoned like a crest on his sleeve, not as weakness but as shield and phalanx, a spear head honed to saber point. this empyrean fervour, the kind that parts seas and moves heaven and earth with divine will, he has forged into a temple ground of devotion, of whole-bodied love. he has loved vladimir quietly, in shadow and slivers of moonlight crested with liquor and lust-drunk inhibitions, and he has loved him in echoes, to the sound of ringing steel and dreams of battle drums. he will not love him soundless anymore. this man is mine, as i am his. he would scream it from the foremast and the crow’s nest if his every action and movement did not already do it for him.

the part of him that is still capable of rationality heeds caution; they could be court martialled, three hundred lashes for sodomy or gaol. a lifetime separated by scars, by seas. let them try, something deep inside him, unholy, leonine, bared teeth slick with raw blood, snarls. he does not need the doctor’s compliance — or his silence — but the lack of disgust releases the chokehold around his breath, cuts frees the apprehension knotted in his throat.

“he is reckless.”  narrowed gaze skims the bandages limning vladya’s ribs, the crown of sickly white cradling his skull.  “always ready to fall on his sword. or someone else’s.”  usually mine. august does not feel particularly like holding his hand at this moment. he wants to grip him by the jaw and demand answers, or scream bloody murder, or beg him never to do that again. the fury is so blinding it is all he can see and taste and hear for a moment, the gunfire haze of war and its legion of cannons.  “it will be the death of him.”  he sees it in bloodless strips of memory, ashen and white, the miasma of smoke swathing the funeral pyre. the gravestone.  “if it was not this beast it would have been some other war.”

august lifts his head and the look in his eyes is a thousand years old, a thousand miles afar. deathlike and resigned to it, with the chilling mourning of surrender.  “i fear i will not even have the chance to hold his hand like this next time.”

[aveaugvstus]

VLADIMIR.

it wasn’t like this before in dublin, or in the seychelles. or, well — it was, and it wasn’t. still that unbearable heat, the slick slide and staking of claim, of vladimir’s tongue tracing leylines and bloodlines leading all the way to rome. and beyond rome and ancient, razed languages, no rosetta stone from here to bethlehem, or antoich, between the gasps and and pressed petal skin of lovers. still the mouth that augustus has known in all its shapes and form: sharp and razor quick, honey-glazed and fond, and now — a firebrand, a collision of meteoric phenomena, a burning if this is what it feels like to be savaged by pleasure.

the feeling of worship is also not new. augustus has never found salvation or rote solace in religion. arrogant boy, vainglorious thing — he has never found a god worthy of the magnitude, the unremitting zealousness, of his love. not until vladimir.

he would pray at the altar of vladimir’s mouth — he does  (  a little longer, a little less tragedy, please, please, just this once  )  — and kiss hymns up his sides with his palms spread wide in supplication. would make offerings at the valley of his hips, the temple of his throat and collarbones and his cock — augustus understands now. what it is to give yourself over to something greater than you and your heart, the pact you’ve made with life. he understands what it means now to breathe a name like he’s begging for mercy or rapture, as if immortality is just beyond the reach of his fingertips, the feeling of his knuckle pressing into him, through him.  “vladya. vladya.”  a cry of abandon, paean to the holy trinity of vladya’s fingers, his tongue, his lips. the world narrows to him and his worshipping, the blistering daze of his eyes as he drinks in the question in vladimir’s — more, please. another. and vladimir acquiesces, anoints him. his very own god. their very own creation myth.

it must be, because the storm burst of pleasure that lurches through him is like nothing else that has ever come before or after. it is like nothing august has ever felt.   this is not new with vladya, either; he has been his guide, his consigliere in so many things — but august never knew it could be like this. that this was inside him, waiting to be discovered, unearthed, brought into life like an awakening crafted by vladya’s hands and the dawning of his lips. his mouth is oceanwater, enveloping him, pulling him deep under until there is nothing but the warmth of pure drowning. the tightness of his throat, the brush of his cock against the back of vladya’s mouth — he cannot breathe, cannot think, cannot parse anything else but this. of course it is religion. of course it is invention. how else do you explain it? how else could you explain the sound that tears from august’s lips, a note of past and future striking discordant in the present, rippling throughout moments lived and breathed to this peak of violent bliss.

august is not proud of the sound, too, that slips from his mouth as vladya retreats and the brush of cool air after the loss of heat and wetness is so unbearable as to be a crime. but the time for pride is long past and he will go down on his knees so long as vladimir doesn’t stop touching him. vladya himself is a wreck, flushed golden and the colour of sunset just before the sky bleeds violet. his lips are stained pink, shiny and bruised wet. august wants to kiss him so badly he cannot breathe, wants to sink into him, suck the taste of his own cock from his lips. he curls his fingers through the hair at vladya’s ears, breathless, mindless, wondering at how this could still feel like inventing something when they have done it so many countless times before.  

“it sounds —”  surreal. elysian. like something not of this world.  “sounds perfect. i would like that. i want that.”  he sounds young, unguarded, looking down at his entire world between his thighs, the boy pressing kisses to his skin like he cannot imagine being made for anything else. however long i can have this, he thinks, desperate, an invocation to whoever will listen, however long you will let me. however long we have. his eyes go wet for a brief, wretched moment, static prickling on his skin like a hum of lightning. he has never wanted so fiercely to live. all his empyrean ambitions, his endless hunger for cenotaphs and eternity, had rested on a single vital fact: death, and its inevitability. he understands now, how paris might have felt. my kingdom for love, ten thousand burning ships for love. for them. let everything else burn save for them. the sensation billowing up into his mouth is like the visceral flood of air when you’ve been underwater too long, the opposite of drowning, or dying, or longing for death until it fools you into thinking it is for glory.  “yes,”  is all he can think to say.  “yes.”

vladimir pushes into him, and he opens for him the way he has done so since before the beginning of time, a making or an unbecoming — an act of transformation either way — a moan rising to his lips and spilling out revelation. above him, vladimir looks like a titan, the muscles of his arms rippling as the slow, steady heat of his cock pours through him. it’s the last coherent thought he has, this, and the blinding fullness of vladya inside him. the feeling of him, heavy and thick, an impossible size and depth august wouldn’t have thought possible of having within him. he can barely breathe through it, the burn and wildfire, everything reduced to flickers of pure sensation and thrilling headiness, so full and so deep and so everything, all at once. his fingers curl into vladya’s back, nails pressing a constellation of crescent moons into him just to test the give of his skin, and receives the sweetest shudder for his attempt. it feels a thousand moments long, the steady pressure of vladya’s cock sinking into him, and when their hips meet at last, august can only gasp, only pray.

“god. god, vladya. vladimir. fuck.”

and then vladya is moving so deep inside him he thinks he might choke on it. he clutches at him, his mind a series of daguerrotype frames of all those times he glimpsed vladimir’s length in their rooms, in the lockers and baths, those times he had dreamt of him and what it would be like to take him, or be taken, to feel him inside — none of that could have prepared him for the reality. there’s a rhythm to this, or there should be, but vladimir knows the verse better than he does, and august is rendered soundless save for the music of helpless pleasure, his moan a groundswell between them as vladya draws back, draws away and then, thrusts back into him. spearing into him, his cock pushing through the tight and wet and heat. august thinks he could live in this feeling, could make a home out of it, a pyre out of it. 

“vladimir.”  he tips his face up, legs parting wider around him, for him, hips shifting like a willow beam. he demands without any command given, just the red, slick wanting of his mouth as he surges up to devour him.

[filthiestlaugh]

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

Anne Carson, Introduction to Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

[aveaugvstus]

JAYA.

♦ ♦ ♦  

what a privilege: to presume to know. she supposes it is hardly a revelation to find sutherland bedecked in its ornamental finery. perhaps if it were some startling realisation—if it elicited a thunderbolt-jolt—jaya’s hand may have whipped up from her side, quick as a whip rearing to lash flesh raw, and sought to wring that pompous austerity from the man’s hide. yet the knowledge does not creep up on her. it merely serves as an insignificant reminder, one that she did not need. she does not know who he is; she knows what he is. the two are not the same. for him, this is immensely fortunate. for herself – ah, well. that, she has yet to decide. 

for now, jaya regards him shrewdly. unforgiving. dauntless.

there is no pretence to obscure her unabashed observation of him, whilst she appraises augustus with silent, simmering disdain. then again: there never is. she is as she is—whatever she is—even if it is unknowable. to infer the mist of her revenant existence to a hypothesis of clarity is a fool’s error to waste time composing. still, his supposition is valiant. it nearly warms her to him, that gall; a feat that may very well have found itself successful, were it not for the ways it sickens her, his reduction of her to a transparency she would not have survived, had she succumbed to it a day of her many lives. here it the proof of it: the officer mentions the quartermaster, and jaya does not blink twice.

as if she cannot still feel the wild silk of golden tendrils twisted between her fingers or the savage burning of her own roots. as if her tongue knows not the salt of her sweat. oh no, princeling, jaya thinks, she does not deny me. the sweet poison of those words never leave her lips; they remain coating her tongue with their saccharine sin, masking bitter illusions of betrayal, the dregs of which sit, sedimentary, at the back of her mind. it recedes from consciousness, eclipsed by the indelible hilarity of sutherland’s audacious misconception, if he truly is such a profound idiot as to actually fucking believe that she would confess to him the dark intricacies of her black heart, draw a map for him with the constellated mappings of her abundant scar-tissue.

jaya smiles at him: no flash of bared teeth, rendered enigmatic and cruel. it would stop his breath, to know what she could bear. this, she knows, and still, her curiosity lingers – morphs from a phantom to corporeal entity, making itself known, once she wishes for it to, in the scrunched pucker of her brows. “and what is it that you saw?” the question is drawled, not a flicker of recognition when it came to his own inquiries. 

mentioned: @riversoaked​

♦ ♦ ♦

if this were london, if this were the surfeited, garlanded echelons of the ton, his armour might be a well-crafted smirk, its blade point sharpened on a whetstone of silken charm and chivalry. the same way tailors and blacksmiths cut their teeth on their trade, callous by callous, measure by measure, he has weathered all assaults of squalls and windstorm. from the shamelessly barbed to the tempered slight, he has deterrents for them all. if this were london, he would put some pithy, capricious bon mot in his mouth and whittle away her overt distaste for him till it was nothing but air.

right now, he doesn’t have the patience for it. charisma takes electricity that he does not have nor feel even burrowed deep in the reserves of spine or pride. to speak butter-soft with tongue dripping in gilt and bordeaux demands a presence of mind he has let wander into unchartered realms. how to haul it back into the light by its teeth and make sense of it and not sound a blathering fool? what would they do with him, if he spoke of what he saw in earnest? paint him in the same brush of madness as snow, with his lies and deceit lacerated across his arms? anything he could endeavour to rationalise, to explain and quantify with sound mind and eyes, she seems to want to tear to shreds. and yet the longing to speak is still there, poisoning his veins with feverishness, with an urgency bordering on desperation.

you do not understand; it showed me the future. it showed me what is to transpire, and i am only alive now because it will let me watch him die first. that is always how it goes, with us. it is always him first. — what sense could he possibly make of that to a woman who already despises him? how could he not sound delirious, unhinged, unfit for duty, with a confession like that? he bites down on his lip, just for something solid in his mouth that isn’t blood or teeth, or the shape of his name on his lips, the hollow of a scream. his eyes are round and hollowed and too old for his face and the youth that sticks to his skin like gold leaf and fading dappled sunlight.  “— before i tell you, answer me this: have you ever watched someone you love die?”

[aveaugvstus]

KATJA.

the coat she’d taken from the cabin of one officer or another, rifling through her options until she’d found the best-maintained specimen with the shiniest buttons and the most cleanly starched cuffs. however, that still wasn’t enough to make the impact she desired, the coat alone a tepid show of bravura, one of a dozen others on board. she needed more flair, a way to signal her daring, her commitment, with a bang. there was no half-assing tonight’s scheme; she had one chance to make an impact, otherwise at risk of coming off wishy-washy and throwing her whole operation askew, putting her very survival in jeopardy.

all of which is to say: really, she’d been left with no choice but to pinch the captain’s own hat, directly from the captain’s own quarters, in the middle of the night; tip-toed inside while he was sleeping and had the whole thing over with in a handful’s giddy moments and, voilà, one of her proudest professional achievements, complete.

standing on the orlop, she practically preens under the hat’s weight, even as the odd thing falls crooked over her ears, threatening to fly away at any strong gust of wind. the bizarre shape of it— a distended bell? the mirrored snouts of a two-headed beast? a cat’s smirk done up in beaver felt?— endears itself to her like the face of some particularly ugly dog, as does the smooth silk binding around the edges, richer than anything she’s ever owned. however, the real draw of the hat had been the layers of gold trim, unmistakeable from afar, glimmering under the low moon even in the nearly-pitch dark. with that trim, there’s no question whose quarters she had to pilfer the cap from; it’s the most obvious gut-punch of a brag, just as she’d intended it to be.

“sutherland,” she says, with a deep, sweeping bow, the drama of it only slightly undermined by her hat listing threateningly to the left. “how lovely to run into you like this, on such a lovely night. here, sir, have a bon-bon.” she straightens, inconspicuously fixing her hat, and reaches into her inner coat pocket for a sweet, which she brandishes at the marine with the grandeur of one presenting the finest prize. “my father always said to me, minnie darling, any business worth your time is worth celebrating with a toast. champagne is a bit more difficult to procure around these parts, however, so hopefully a marzipan truffle is equally to your tastes.” it’s a blatant falsehood; truly, her father had said no such thing, and never presided over his own business transactions with more panache than a quick handshake, or perhaps a stern sort of don’t fuck with me look. but that’s all neither here nor there.

the mention of a master plan has katja smirking, ego sufficiently boosted as she crosses her arms behind her back and makes a show of looking the marine up and down, as if taking thorough stock of his mettle. “oh, all in good time, my friend. there is certainly much i’d like to discuss with you tonight, but first— how do i know i can trust you? no professional worth the shirt on their back reveals their design quite so easily. however,” she spreads her arms, ever so reasonable. “that doesn’t mean i’m not open to being convinced.”

god, he could choke at her audacity if he wasn’t already so puffed up with sheer delight. the captain’s goddamn hat. even in the obscured shadows, he would recognise the shape of that damn hat anywhere, on any deck or naval battlefield. the whole encounter has the vaguely surreal feeling of a dream. curiouser and curiouser, and even moreso as she presents him with a sweet like an eccentric pedler from a folk tale.  “where in the hell did you get that from? when?!” a spluttering of bewilderment and wonderment in equal measure, flitting from shock to sweetness to a confounding halfway state of bizarrely endeared and thoroughly perplexed. he’s no fool, however, and marzipan is delicious; he takes the proferred treat.

“you’d think someone with your considerable talents would’ve managed to pilfer us a bottle of something vintage.”  nonchalant and flippant, as if it’s nothing to him that she hadn’t been able to ransack the spirits room, one of the most heavily secured strongholds of the entire ship. his gaze shutters, a delicate fan of long lashes belying the raffish jab of his bald-faced taunt. what are co-conspirators for, if not to fan the flames of frivolous rebellion?  “guess that’s out of your particular range of expertise?”

the mention of trust nearly has augustus giving the punt away, almost fumbling it with a bastardised attempt at smothered laughter. he swallows it instead, sucking in a sharp breath through his teeth to resist the urge. he unwraps the wax paper packaging around the little truffle and takes a bite out of it, chewing thoughtfully at her proposition.  “haven’t i demonstrated my trustworthiness by not ratting you out? i think that earns me a little more than a truffle, delightful as it tastes. how else shall i convince you? by revealing the hidden treasures of the armory chest?”  levelling her with a composed, teasingly solemn gaze, he arches a careful brow.  “or perhaps the navy’s true purpose in seeking the northwest passage and all the cryptic, preternatural secrets buried in its icy trail?”

[chrisevansbf]

[aveaugvstus]

TRISTAN.

he clenches his jaw as the images play out before him, the same horrible play, with the same horrible marionette strings tied around his wrists to render him incapable of ever taking another action–the face of the man he’d loved, pulled too tightly into an expression that tristan could not read, the way the beast held his shoulders as though they didn’t fit quite right, the horrible empty imitation of the capitaine’s voice. the puppet pulls against its bonds, emits a howl that goes unheard through its wooden mouth, as it pulls the trigger and blood spills from skin too pale to be living, surely, too cold, devoid of every imperfection that tristan had catalogued like a particularly devoted cartographer. 

he wishes that he could speak about it now as the young man does–as though his worst nightmares were nothing more than a shadow that may or may not have danced in the corner of his eye. but once you have looked your worst fear in it’s cold and all-too-dead looking eyes, there was no room for anything other than absolutes. 

“i confess monsieur, i think i would rather have your doubts, than your certainties–if only for your own sake.” tristan says quietly, after what feels like a small eternity has suddenly stretched out before him like ribbon, like a river that disappears over the curve of the earth, the horizon line. his voice is rough to his own ears, a thing dragged across stone, a piece of canvas made brittle from sunbleach and worn through with holes, flapping in the wind–a thing bruised with a thousand screams continually swallowed with saltwater. he almost wonders if it is a mistake to speak at all–for that island took every mourner’s wail tristan forced into the dark and hungry pit of his stomach and turned them into grave dirt, rendered him a thing only capable of conjuring the dead with his words. 

he bites down hard on his bottom lip, drags his hands over his face. his skin is warm, rough to the touch–he lives, for all that such a reassurance is worth. “that is what it does–it shows you the thing you love most in this world and tries to make you afraid of it, tries to take it from your grasp with teeth and claws.” perhaps it makes him a coward, that he avoids the younger man’s gaze, that he fixes on an indistinct point over his shoulder–perhaps he has always been one, and this act of being forced to invent new ways of saying the same horrid things is has just brought it to the surface in the same way that a bruise brings blood just underneath the surface of the skin. such knowledge does not make the speaking of it any easier, any less painful to him. 

“it wore the face of the man i loved, tried to speak to me in his voice.” he says, shakes his head. he exhales slowly, digs his fingertips into the wood of the table. “it wanted me to shoot him, to make me watch him die by my hand–a nightmare i had never communicated to a single soul.” he meets the soldier’s eyes then, reaches out to touch his hand gently, a gesture easily shirked if necessary. “but i lived to tell the tale, as did you. do not do yourself the disservice of selling such a feat short, mon ami.”

love wears so many faces that sometimes it is easy to forget that it eats at the same table as grief. but there is no breaking bread with mourning like this, is there? not the kind tristan henin has danced with and been left deathless, not the same tale he walks over and over, soles bloodied and palms slick with blood he both sees and doesn’t see, wearing an anodyne groove into the same world emptied of his capitaine. something in augustus, beyond the turn of soul and shadow, recognises him. there are no bargains between grief and men: it is a death that eats you raw, that expects you to keep on living, long after you have wished for your last breath beside his body. his unmarked grave.

it occurs to augustus, as he looks at the agathe’s second and their former captain’s right hand, that he is seeing a sliver of time trapped as if through a glass darkly, an echo of boundless, borderless providence. this is the unspoken price, the sacrifice you swore to shoulder without poring over its cracks and fissures for the promise of days, the kiss of sunlight through a shaft of golden sky. could you bear it, augustus? could you bury it, swallow it, retell it a hundred times and not feel the inclination to go to your knees or to the sea. what has kept tristan alive thus far is inimitable. it is perhaps the purest, bravest martyrdom any of them will ever know or dare. to live when the sweetest thing would be to die.

i could never be afraid of vladimir, i have known him a thousand times and i will know him a thousand times more. i have killed him, too, probably. death is nothing to fear; living without him, in madness as a defense against terror and against grief — that would be a fate worse than death.

“call it by another name if you must, to bear it, but it is strength. a lesser man would have laid down his arms.”  that’s the curse of it, isn’t it. you would love them even with their hands around your neck, their bullet pressed to your throat. and perhaps because tristan knew his captain the same way augustus knows vladimir, in death, at the end of the world, by the sound of his feet striking the earth, he killed him rather than let a monster wear his face and desecrate his body with its teeth and crucifix lies. at the touch, augustus warms, at once moved by his wonder at the courage of this man, this saviour, and by compassion so emphatic it feels like he has lived it already. heliotropic, unfurling beneath a ray of sun, he turns over his hand and lets his palm press against the weathered callouses of the other man. 

“you lived because it is what he would have wanted. and here you are taking care of your crew, your people, as he would have done, if he were alive.”  you lived because life was not yet done with you, because fate is unforgiving and cruel when she is not tender and serendipitious and laying the world at your feet as he loved you. the corners of his mouth flicker and give beneath the weight of irony, laced with metallic, macabre daring.  “all you have to do now is survive. make it to the end, so that he did not die for nothing.”