That’s pain he can’t work with. Vladimir’s features tense and twist into something agonized, and the grip he has on Talon’s face tenses before it slips off. He digs his fingers into his throat, and thinks about tearing it open, ripping every vein and artery and cord and piece of muscle out of it, dragging it all across the ground, stain the wood and the trees. He tries, he fucking tries, grabbing Talon’s wrist while he attempts to suffocate the life out of him.
“You—” he curses, twisting the wrist to pull the knife free. Vladimir heaves something thick with his own blood, feeling cool air rush over his agonizing wound, bones bare for the wind to gnaw on. He bends Talon’s wrist in such a way that he’s trying to snap it in half, but his focus is all on the magic he’s trying to summon out of him. The blood on his hand and in his ribs should do something, should thrum with life and morph into the blades he needs, grow in shape to reaching claws and dig into every orifice of Talon’s and start to burn him from the inside.
But the connection feels severed. Running his mind and thoughts over the blood, but it just runs out of him, dripping down his chest and staining his shirt. He feels human. He feels mortal. But he still hears the screams of his mentor and everyone before that, furious and demanding and crying for revenge. Vladimir’s teeth grit and he screams when he makes a fist and slams it into Talon’s cheek, where his blood stains his skin. Where is it. Work. WORK! WORK!
His skin tears and rips when he tries to force himself on to Talon with the knife in his wrist, driving it towards him. His hand slips, and the knife plunges itself, for just a moment, against his leaning shoulder. Power bleeds from him. He should be able to burn Talon from the fucking inside. He should be able to drop into the sanguine essence and feel himself heal, but—he can’t. He feels the pressure in his knees whenever he drops into the pool, but nothing happens. Nothing is happening. Nothing is fucking happening and he’s slamming his bleeding fists into Talon’s face because it’s the only thing he can fucking do.
Panic and hysteria and anger and revenge and bloodhunger and bloodlust and hatred and carnal, feral, inhuman instinct—
“I’m going to FUCKING KILL YOU!” Vladimir screams, clawing his nails down Talon’s face, over his eye, scratching deep. “WORTHLESS FUCKING CREATURE!”
Blood is smeared on his face, but it isn’t the first time; his victim is heaving and clawing at him and trying to break every bone in his body while being in so much pain they can barely move, but it isn’t the first time. Talon yanks the knife out of Vladimir’s chest and watches him bleed out, scream, curse, writhe.
He waits with a stopped heart for the blood magic, but it doesn’t come. He waits with full lungs to be exploded from the inside out, but it doesn’t come. He waits to die, but it doesn’t come. Talon holds the knife in one trembling hand that suddenly is no longer trembling.
For the first time in his life he can remember, Talon grins, splits his face in two with the kind of grim joy that he’s only seen on men like the one in front of him.
“You can’t–,” he laughs, too, and that is also a first time, from all the way in the depths of his lungs, high pitched and keening. “You can’t use your magic! You can’t fucking use your magic!”
Talon grips Vladimir’s shoulder with one hand to steady him, and drives the knife deep into his gut with the other.
“Try– fucking– killing me now!” Another thrust. “With no powers and no weapon and–,” Again. “No fucking upper hand!”
He stabs him, over and over, again and again and again and again and again and again, all in places that will hurt, but not kill him instantly. Talon is doing that on purpose. He wants Vladimir to suffer. It is not the method of an assassin, which is to kill quick and silently and leave as little a mess as possible. But he’s had enough of that. He’s had enough hiding, and quietness, and obedience. His eyes are wild and his grin in feral.
“What’s it fucking like?” Gripping Vladimir’s shirt at the shoulders, he heaves him close to his face. “Huh? To have no power? To be punished– by those above you? To be at their fucking mercy?” Talon heaves in his own right, from tears he has been shedding since the beginning, but he’s not sad. Far from it. “Powerless and– worthless and– a fucking tool–,”
Finally, he thrusts the knife into the crook of Vladimir’s neck, and he watches his head loll, the telltale sign that someone has utterly lost consciousness or died.
Talon heaves once, twice.
Talon lays Vladimir’s corpse out on the ground, limbs splayed, and straddles his chest. With each stab he finds somewhere new and interesting to inflict his rage; his eyes, his throat, his hands. Talon considers ripping out his teeth and keeping them as a souvenir, or cutting off one of his fingers. Slice off a lock of hair.
Talon is driving his knife deep into the underside of Vladimir’s chin, trying to reach his vertebrae with the tip of his blade, when his organs seize, and he chokes, and he himself falls down dead next to his masterwork.
