Asphodel: Prologue | BloodyMary
Summary: Simon Fleischer earns a special kind of resentment. Worse, heās in Rylandās university anatomy department, a man who likes science because dead things can still be beautiful. Yikes.
A specimen complicates things, and Simon Fleischer is very much still there.
(or alternatively, Grace gets his heart broken in many, many ways.)
Author's note: Hi! This author has thought of another fic idea to feed their Snobby academic! Ryland Grace brainworms. The following chapters (if there will be any) might be exclusively posted to AO3, if that's okay. Please do check it out on AO3 if it interests you, and kudos and comments are really appreciated!!! This author feeds on engagement. :)
"Surely, surely, thou wilt trust me
When I say thou dost disgust me.
O, I hate thee with a hate
That would fain annihilate;"
āIndeed, Indeed I Cannot Tellā
āHenry David Thoreau
The first thing Ryland Grace would later insistāonly when pressedāwas that Simon Fleischer would have died in the snow if it weren't for him. Whether from hypothermia or a body resolute that revenge was a dish best served cold, the mechanism did not particularly matter. Regardless of cause, Simon would have died a slow, painful death.
In retrospect, Simonās death would have been the simpler outcome.
They had just left the laboratory well past two in the morning. Simon walked ahead of him. Always did. Ryland had never found it worth commenting on. A half-step, sometimes two. Simon never showed any skin apart from his face. Gloves covered his hands, long coats swallowed the rest of him, and his favorite was a burgundy scarf wrapped twice around his neck despite all circumstances. If Ryland were a poet, he would have called Simon a saint sealed in glass. The patron saint of fakes.
"You could at least pretend to be concerned," Ryland had said.
The argument had started back in the laboratory, though Ryland no longer remembered which one of them had initiated it that evening. Possibly him. Maybe it hadn't even started at the laboratory, and he was confusing all the arguments they had with one another.
It had been a horrible month. That was all.
Ahead of him, Simon's stride crushed fallen snow. Young unknowing snowflakes from above settled across the dark wool of his shoulders without melting. They kept walking; Simon might have walked forever until the cold preserved him as he wished to be remembered.
"You're a horrible person, Fleischer."
āAnd yet,ā Ryland heard, āyou continue to walk beside me.ā
Ryland almost replied to that. Some sharp little thing, a quip to reclaim the upper hand of the argument. Their conversations had long since deteriorated into contests of attrition, each waiting for the other to bleed first.
He supposed all the warning signs had already been there. Anger was a terrible master: consumed you from the heart out until the next thing you knew, you were a hollow vessel to use for the empty space to travel onward.
Melted snow had long since seeped through the leather of Ryland's gloves. A burning sensation, ironically. Pricked his fingers 'till they were numb while every breath scraped cold against the back of his throat.
Simon lifted a gloved hand toward his face then, fingers brushing beneath the frame of his glasses. An adjustment, presumably; Grace could not tell when all he saw was the back of his coat and his black hairālikely, however, Simon always touched those damn things.
Rylandās gaze drifted toward Simon's nape, covered by the scarf. The movement tugged the scarf loose enough for one end to slip over his shoulder.
Oh, how easy it might have been to keep walking had Simon loved a different color.
All the medieval artists would have adored Simon Fleischer, would have dragged him half-starved and shivering beneath cathedral light to paint him an icon of martyrdom. Cursed he would be, all the painters would find their brushstrokes doomed to fall from their beloved saint's portrait, even the paint would understand it was being asked to sanctify the unsanctifiable.
This is why Ryland doesn't fancy himself a person who loved imagining anymore. Rylandāstupid Rylandāstanding half a step behind, realized that the world had begun to imitate art.
A splash of crimson hit the snow between them.
Then another, then there were more farther behind them already half-buried beneath fresh snowfall.
Red was acceptable around Simon. All the flashes of red over the years and one passing trace of the shade would wrench Ryland's attention in its direction.
"Simon?"
Pavlovās dog in a laboratory coat, you know.
"Simon!"
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