Work Text:
Sometimes, Mercymorn remembers.
She doesn’t know what she remembers.
But she remembers.
###
Saint of Joy.
The title is hardly paramount to all the things that Mercy is.
If you asked a half-dozen other people (or people that were once a dozen people that were once sixteen turned eight, seven, six—collapsing like towers crumbling into one another while He watched overhead—until it was three) they would tell you the title is simply nothing.
It was both gift and curse, bestowed upon her from the lips she knew in ways she did not understand.
He—her Undying Lord, He who pulled her from nothing and crafted her anew, He who blessed her with the touch of his hand against her cheek, He who guided her. He who taught her.
He who named her.
Flesh is her House.
Her art.
In the moment of her re-naming, she became more than one, yet less than half. Mercymorn Cristabel.
Flesh is her House. Her art.
Mercy’s body is not foreign to her. Lyctoral flesh is constantly healing, the cells it sheds rebuilding on the ever-burning soul buried inside the very atoms of her being. But it’s hers.
That a human's cells all replenish themselves completely every seven years is a complete fabrication, she’d said once—with a tongue that doesn’t fit in her mouth anymore and a memory that wedges uncomfortably between her teeth. Some change faster. And I swear to God if you keep smoking outside my window, A—(the memory fizzles, catches like a match to tinder—fuzz and smoke before she finds herself tasting blood inside her mouth)—you’ll wish your cells remade themselves every hour.
Theoretically—her cells rebuild themselves more frequently.
Theoretically, every hour she is someone new.
She hasn’t believed that for ten thousand years.
And she’s inclined to believe she hasn’t believed that for much longer.
Mercymorn does not remember.
Her body does.
###
This story takes place before two became one, the holiest of unions blessed by the Kindly Prince, the Emperor Undying, His Celestial Kindliness, the First Reborn, The Necrolord Prime himself.
This story takes place before the First and Second Saints to serve the Undying King rose to their position.
This story takes place at Canaan House.
###
The first time Mercymorn had sex with Augustine, she sobbed so hard she vomited.
###
There was nothing to say on the matter except that Cristabel was, in rare form, completely out of her mind.
It was a rare form, though not impossible. No, Mercymorn had long-since learned that nothing was impossible when it came to Cristabel. If something had once been impossible, it would’ve righted itself in her hand and fit itself into the perfect shape to melt and coo like any of the small animals that she’d coaxed out of hiding back in her garden on the Eighth.
That was the Cristabel that Mercy knew.
This one?
“It’s a party, Mercy,” Cristabel said, with all the weight of someone who genuinely, completely, believed that Mercy would give up a moment of study in her laboratory for anything less than an all-consuming blaze through the walls of Canaan House. And even then, she’d hesitate.
Nothing was more important than this. He called her, and she answered. Nothing would ever be so important as this. Mercy opened her mouth to say as much but Cristabel clicked her tongue, one calloused-yet-delicate hand settling on the hilt of her rapier.
For a single, foolish, moment Mercy wondered if Cristabel was going to mock her.
But her head tilted instead, a mane of molten-steel red hair tumbling down loose over a shoulder. “I know it’s important,” the ever-present smile faded slightly into the sincere softness that always ghosted across her lips. “But this is important, too.”
“It’s a party,” Mercy said, “there’s nothing about a party with Ulysses and Cyrus that would ever come close to even scraping against the floor of something important. And I know for a fact that Valancy is going to be in attendance and if Valancy is going then so is Loveday and if I have to spend another moment in—”
Cristabel’s storm-soft eyes robbed Mercy of everything she wanted to be saying in the moment. She glowered instead.
Cristabel did not budge.
The study of the Eight was not a tremendous space. Mercy had only managed brief glimpses of the interior of the rooms allotted to the other houses—but it had been enough to judge that each of them were given relatively fair partitions. Even if Cassie’s seemed a bit small—though Mercy would concede that it could have been due to the complete lack of available floor space.
There were two beds, both made meticulously by Mercy every morning, with loose silvery-white drapery arching over the walls behind them to create the same sort of peaceful clean lines that had decorated the whole of the Eight since Mercy first founded it. Off the platform that housed the beds, Mercy’s desk was tucked against the farthest wall—well appointed with flimsy, her tablet, and a host of pens for her to scribble with or chuck haplessly at the wall in a blinding frustration. She kept everything atop it organized in a fierce precision, every creaking pile of books was categorized based on subject matter, on use, and within those they were alphabetized neat and carefully.
On the floor beside it, a set of weights were neatly racked alongside the rolled up mat Cristabel used to do her stretches every morning and night.
The opposite wall was nearly entirely subsumed by the whiteboard Mercy had pilfered from a store room in the laboratory, and (after the second time it disappeared) labeled it with her name in tape and marker. At the moment, every piece of flimsy Mercy could get her hands on, several books, and her fingertips were ink-stained to their core.
She’d written and rewritten her thoughts, her ideas, the methods behind her experiments and every single damned thing she’d done—and she was rapidly approaching nowhere.
This was all to say that Cristabel was standing close enough to Mercy that if she were any other person she’d say was too close. And seeing as she wasn’t ang other but but was, in fact, Cristabel, Mercy instead deemed it almost too close.
Her lips pinched in a tight frown. “No. I have work to do!”
“It can wait,” Cristabel tried. “It’s dinner.”
“And drinks!!” Mercy cried in turn. “Dinner always turns into dinner and drinks and next thing I know Samuel is sitting next to me because we’re both watching Ulysses and Valancy touch (!!) each other!”
“And that’s fun,” Cristabel returned. “Our Emperor wouldn’t have resurrected us with the capacity to feel pleasure like that if he didn’t want us to ever indulge it.”
Mercy made a face. And she knew she made a face because Cristabel clicked her tongue in response. “Come on, don’t make that face. Indulge with me. Our Lord encourages it.”
“He most certainly does not.”
Cristabel arms crossed over her chest. “Ask him.”
Mercy would never be able to describe the sound she made at the idea of arriving at the door of the Emperor Undying, the Kindy Prince, the Necrolord Prime—her Teacher and her Lord and asking if he would grant permission for her to spread her legs so that one of her most tolerable forced-by-proximity companions could pleasure her.
Her face went several degrees hotter—mottling with a pink heat that stained its way down the front of her perfectly appropriate blouse. “Cristabel Oct.'' It was a warning as much as a plea. “Do not blaspheme here. Here!!!”
“It’s not blasphemous to enjoy the things that He gave us,” Cristabel said, sitting on the edge of the perfectly-made bed. “He wants us to be happy.”
“We serve Him,” Mercy corrected, fervently. “We love Him. Everything we do is for Him. Our happiness needn’t be one of His concerns. The idea that He would deign to consider such a thing—“
“Mercy. Come off it,” Cristabel interrupted, without bite. “He loves us. He loves all of us. He wouldn’t have asked us here if he didn’t.”
Mercy’s lips tightened. She moved to smooth out the wrinkles left behind from Cristabel’s brief perch atop the sheets. “And if, if, that is true then I strive to be worthy of it, Cristabel. And if that means I unlock the secrets to this in this house, then I will do so. And I will be the first to serve him.”
“In any case,” Cristabel sighed, the fight leaving her body in a slumping sort of way. “I’m going. You can stay here and work and be dreary all you like, my dear.”
She kissed Mercy’s cheek. Mercy frowned harder. “Must you? Why do you ever want to go to that awful thing?”
Cristabel shrugged one shoulder. The lace strap of her shirt fell down it. She picked it back up and slid it into place. “They’re fun, Merce.”
“There can’t be anything fun there. There’s other people, Cristabel. There’s Loveday! And the Fifth!!”
“I’m not going for Loveday.”
Mercy frowned harder. “Absolutely not. You cannot be interested in another House’s necromancer!”
A laugh that sounded like wind chimes ringing out over a warm evening came filtering from Cristabel’s chest. “Trust me,” she said before departing. “I’m not interested in another House’s Necro.”
Cristabel left, and the Eight House study was suddenly much emptier.
###
In later years, Mercy would finally attempt to decipher Cristabel’s cryptic meaning in her tender words.
She wonders, on occasion, as she watches her own fingers wrap around the foreign hilt of a rapier she never wanted to wield, if it was ever real.
If Cristabel had done to her what she’d done to John.
Hands brushing against another set of calloused ones over supper—eyes catching under the flickering light of the lab, a sly whisper of a smile.
Mercy has been a fox as long as there have been foxes on the Eight, but she never once considered the possibility that someone might be able to outplay her.
Did you really love him? She wants to ask, one hand pressed to her chest as she considers the ease with which she could pass through sinew and bone and wrap her fingers around her ever-beating heart. It takes around 570 pounds of pressure if you intend to crush a human heart from the outside—breaking the ribs and snapping the sternum one by one until the heart itself cannot expand.
Until failure occurs.
It takes remarkably less if you’re cradling the heart in the palm of your blood-slick hand.
Or were you plotting from the beginning?
Sometimes Mercy squeezes. 570 pounds of unnecessary pressure.
Sometimes she doesn’t.
###
The only possible positive to Canaan House’s dining room serving as a host to whatever unseemly activities were going to inevitably play out, was that the rest of the halls were nearly serene.
Between the sixteen of them, there was never a tremendous amount of unclaimed space. The pool always housed two to three people swimming at once, the gym and sparring ground found themselves endlessly occupied.
The library and labs were the worst. Cassiopeia and Nigella haunted them until late in the evening, far past when Mercy typically liked to retire for the evening.
The first time Mercy had stepped through the halls, she’d thought there would be quiet lurking in the corners. But Cytheria took to the gardens, nurturing the buds as she coughed indelicately into her handkerchief, and the sparring room was overwhelmed with an endless chain of whoever had decided in the moment that certainly they were the one who would best Pyrrha (they rarely were, though Mercy had heard from unreliable sources that Valancy had once laid her out on her back. In immediate retrospect, Mercy was unsure if that meant that Valancy had won in fair rights.)
There was never quiet. There was never peace.
Perhaps there was something to the dinner parties after all, then.
A sense of tranquility, so long as Mercy didn’t stop to think where it came from.
Spoilt for choice, she made her way down the long, arching halls of Canaan House—looping around and around to find the perfect place to set up shop enough to putter through the last few pages of the Eightfold Word.
I will, she told herself with the same steady resolve she faced everything else with. I will be the first Saint to serve the Undying King.
I will serve Him as I always have.
I will serve Him as I always will.
I will serve Him.
I will—oh for fucks sake.
Her internal prayers rattled the moment she rounded a corner directly into a wash of acrid cigarette smoke.
“Under no circumstances,” Mercy hissed to no one in particular. “Under! No!! Circumstances!!!”
Her nose wrinkled as she followed the putrid stench down the hall, winding to where an easy blue light seeped out beneath the crack in the bottom of the door. The saltwater pool had become a place of refuge for many of them.
Mercy had no idea why. She detested it.
Pools. Filthy things.
And—not that she held any concrete evidence—she was fairly certain the very first time it had been used by more than one individual person, one of them had been Ulysses which rendered the entire pool unusable for Mercymorn. Forever. Immediately.
The door opened silently, and the sound of her footfall was covered by the rhythmic lapping of waves against the siding. Someone was moving in the water.
No.
Not someone.
Mercy knew that rancid, putrid stench anywhere. She fanned the air in front of her face, as if it would do anything to disperse the clinging smell of cigarette smoke that clung to her mucosa and left her feeling blackened and sticky-slick from the back of her throat to the clenching pit of her stomach.
The lights dotted around the salt-water pool doused the room in a gentle blue glow, leaving everything a comfortably monochromatic wash. It stole the excited haze of color and left it in bland shades of blue-grey and black.
Mercy would have liked it better without the blue.
She would have liked it better slate grey and white, touches of silver for excitement. A flash of color here and there for emphasis. Her eyes trip along to a laid out towel, carefully kept away from the greenish-glow of the water beside it.
Atop the towel sat the source of the smell and the source of all of Mercymorn’s irritation for the last several years.
The years we’re not all spent at Canaan House. No, no. Mercy had been annoyed with Augustine since the moment he was named. One hand under his chin, one hand under hers.
Augustine.
Mercymorn.
Mercy had been crying, she didn’t know why but she was. And the moment her tears stopped, Augustine had pulled himself up to embrace their Kindly Prince and promptly elbowed Mercy in the head while doing so.
She’d blinked the tears back and, with a fury she’d never known, (which wasn’t fair—she hadn’t known anything as far as she was aware she’d been alive for ten minutes), she’d shouted at him for nearly another ten minutes after that. Half the time they’d been alive.
And, occasionally, it still felt like Mercymorn spent half her life yelling at Augustine Quinque.
He sat there, like all of Canaan House was his personal domicile. Smoke drifted lazily from the cigarette resting between his index and middle finger infecting the air around him—as if no one else in the whole system mattered but him. One foot dangled down into the water, casting his pale skin with a sickly green glow. It cut immediately at the water edge, rendering Augustine’s flesh with the reflected shades and shadow instead.
There was a book propped on his other bent knee and he was hunched over scribbling in it.
What little clothing he wore was half-damp and clinging so terribly that Mercy pointedly did not look. She opted to stare at the slightly askew tile on the pool room floor instead.
“Some of us” She snapped, her face twisting into the mask of rage she forever felt when in his presence, “would like to be breathing in this holy and sacred house instead of choking in it.”
Augustine did not bother looking up. One long arm unfurled to ash his cigarette into the slick tile flooring. “Some of you can take a walk in the very holy and sacred gardens, then. I’m busy.”
Mercy huffed, flicking one strand of her pale-blush hair back behind an ear. “Doing what?” She asked. “And you better not even consider cleaning yourself in the pool after one of Ulysses' dinner parties. Other people use them, Augustine.”
Other people. Not her. Never her.
That made him glance up. Pale eyes watched her for a moment before they turned back down to the notebook in his lap. “Mercymorn. I understand that you are certifiable, but trust me when I say that I am not at the dinner party. If I was, I wouldn't be here. Working.”
Color built in her cheeks. “You could have come after! Well, how am I supposed to know when those things finish?”
“Usually around the time everyone else does,” Augustine said, flipping a page in his book. He sketched out a few more notes. Mercy gagged.
“Eugh! Absolutely—blegh!!” She stuck her tongue out as the image of their closest supposed companions entangled as such entered her mind unbidden. “No!!”
“Mercymorn that is traditionally,” another page flipped, “how orgies work. And, in my personal experience, one doesn’t typically have the energy for coming after.”
“I hate you,” she seethed, stalking as carefully as she could over the slick tile. The last thing she’d need to do would be to slip in front of Augustine of all people. “I hate you so much I have no idea why our Lord invited you (you!!!) of all people resurrected in his Holy name.”
Augustine looked up a second time.
“A plant would have made a better representative of the Fifth! Or a particularly adept rock!!”
One pale brow raised. It looked verdant in the awful glow of the room.
“I’m glad you think so highly of my House, Mercymorn,” Augustine said, voice dripping with the saccharine sweetness it always did when he dug his filthy claws into her words to twist them. “I’m touched. I had no idea how deeply the Eighth was invested in our wellbeing.”
Mercy, in a moment of collection and maturity, threw his pen in the pool.
“Lovely. Glad to see the Eighth’s logic and impartial judgment in action.”
“Stop!!” She hissed. “Smoking!! In!! The pool!!”
And with equal decorum, she stalked out the way she’d come and pretended to not hear the sound of a cigarette lighter clicking furiously behind her.
###
The first night Mercymorn was alive, in a warm bed that remembered her though she did not remember it, she wished she was still dead.
There wasn’t a reason for the feeling.
She was happy, ostensibly, in the fawn-like newness of her life.
There wasn’t anything to be unhappy about.
Cristabel slept beside her, arms wrapped tight around Mercy like a child clinging to a beloved stuffed animal.
Mercy didn’t sleep.
On the other side of the cramped little room, on a cot that hardly fit his body and with his hand brushing the rise-and-fall beat of his brother’s living back, Augustine didn’t sleep either.
She knew he didn’t because she felt him. His eyes were like a cat in the night, watching its prey. Every time she looked over he was there.
Mercy didn’t ask why.
But her mouth tasted like his blood. She didn’t know how she knew it was his.
She just did.
She has never forgotten what it tasted like, the same way she has never forgotten the way that Cristabel held her that night or the way the fine hairs on the nape of her neck stood up under Augustine’s stern gaze.
(Or the touch of his hand, a half-dozen times. She tried to scrub him from her nervous system, she tried to rewire herself to forget the way it feels when he puts his hands on her hips, she tried to tear him out of her. God made her forget once but he couldn’t do it twice. Some days she wanted to beg, to plead, to drop to her knees before John and vow herself back into his service if he washed the memory of Augustine’s hands cupping her chest and his lips brushing her pulse-point from her forever.
Some days she scrapes her nerves out of every part of her that he had ever touched. It grows back the same, with Augustine woven into her.
It’s worse when she tries again. It’s worse when she reaches deeper and finds John there, too.)
###
Cristabel had stumbled back to the study at nearly half-past midnight, reeking of wine and sex. She had Anastasia’s lipstick smeared under her jaw and the start of an awful bruise peeking out from beneath her sleeves.
Following her interaction with Augustine, Mercy had given up on finding a place to study. She had been working in her room instead.
“You’re doing too much,” Cristabel had said, in the moments after she landed face-down in her perfectly made bed. “You need to relax, Mercymorn.”
Mercy leaned an elbow onto the spot on her desk she kept perfectly clear for her elbow. “We were invited here to research.”
“To live while we did research,” Cristabel corrected. “No one expects you to work yourself to death for this. This…Lyctoral thing—“
“—this thing we were asked to do by our Lord himself!!—“
“You won’t make it there without rest. I understand,” Cristabel paused to roll onto her side, her skirts rucked up awkwardly around her. “I understand that this is important. I know that sacrifices must be made. And I know what being asked here means to you, to us.”
Mercy looked resolute at her paper. She’d scribbled out nearly an entire neat line of theorems. She was in the middle of replacing an equation she’d thought of, swapping out the thanergetic needs in a perfect transposition for thalergetic instead.
It wasn’t going to work.
She knew it wasn’t going to work. And she knew why it wouldn’t work.
She scribbled it out next. “Then you know why I’m still working, Cristabel. One of us is going to figure this out first. And it is going to be me or it is going to be the Fifth and so help me, Cristabel, if Augustine Quinque ascends to the place besides our Kindly Prince before I do, if he earns the title of First beside him I am going to reach inside him and use his small intestine as a noose and hang him from the rafters.” The tip of Mercy’s pen scratched through the sheet of flimsy, leaving a score mark across the table. She cried out in indignant rage. “I hate him!! See?? The sort of stupid, mindless—yugh!!”
The bed squeaked in protest as Cristabel shifted her weight up off it. “Mercy,” she chided, softly. A familiar hand landed on her shoulder. “Come on now.”
For a moment, the whole room was darker than it had ever been before. For a moment all Mercy could smell was stale blood and rancid flesh. She leaned her cheek on Cristabel’s hand as every inch of her desperate nervous system reached out at once for her.
“Cristabel,” she murmured, the rage sapping from her body as a tender palm swept up over her cheek. It pushed up into her hair.
Sometimes she wondered if Cristabel was secretly a necromancer—if her hands were made to draw the stress from Mercy’s body in a way that only another flesh magician could.
“It’s alright,” Cristabel said, bowing her head to kiss the crown of Mercy’s hair. “You’re alright. Let’s get you to bed.”
###
Cristabel’s touch does not live in Mercy’s body the way Augustine’s does.
It doesn’t root around between her skin and wind its way between her bones. It doesn’t settle between her lungs and pulsate like a false-start heart, lying to her again and again and again telling her that she had always known the way that Augustine’s mouth tastes when he’s just finished swallowing John to the root.
She woke up once with the taste of him lingering.
She pulled her teeth out one by one to drown him in a sea of her own blood. Then the tongue. Then the jaw. She remade her mouth anew, she swallowed her own spit and skin again and again and again. She’d break herself down to her component parts, put herself together anew if it meant that one day she could live in a body that no one ever touched. Not Cristabel, not Augustine, not Him.
Maybe then she could live in peace.
It did not work.
It never works.
And Mercy cannot forget.
And it isn’t fair and it isn’t fair and it isn’t fair.
###
Mercy hated dreaming.
Typically her dreams were rote, boring things. She dreamt of the Eighth, of being lost in twisting and winding white-and-silver corridors that bled, eventually, into the wrapping into rust-colored walls that smell like old blood and line themselves with uncomfortable brass.
When her dreams were not rote, she’d dream of running through them, feet bare against soft, squelching floors that lurched and pitched as gunfire echoed through the halls. She often dreamed she had blood on her face that wasn’t hers.
In those dreams, her mouth contorted itself into impossible shapes, screaming names she didn’t remember when she woke.
It didn’t matter.
Other nights her dreams were the worst things to ever happen to her. The other dreams tormented her. They lived in her head and offered her the sort of putrid, rancid things she’d never dare conjure in the worst moments of her waking mind.
She’d once accused Augustine of causing them, pouring his coffee into his lap over breakfast and hissing at him to stay out of her head with his pathetic spirit magic.
He’d claimed to have no idea what she meant, bared his teeth at her, and choked on whatever he wanted to say as she managed to wedge his throat closed with four of his back teeth.
Alfred handled Augustine. Cristabel handled Mercy.
The Emperor Undying handled them all.
Of course it was Augustine’s fault.
Because it would take nothing short of the worst act of necromancy known to man to ever, ever, make Mercy dream of having sex with Augustine.
And worse.
That night Mercy dreamt, as she unfortunately had with some frequency, of committing intolerable and indelible acts with Augustine. She dreamed of laying in a bed that smelled like wood and the acrid tinge of chemicals—she dreamed of hands she’d never felt before moving down the rise and slope of her hips as she straddled his lap.
There you are, he’d purred in her ear, saying other words she didn’t know in voices she’d never once considered Augustine’s smoke-addled vocal cords were capable of making. Come on, now. Be a good girl, hm?
(On some level, when she was awake, Mercymorn did occasionally wish that Augustine would dare to utter the words good girl in her direction. This was largely for a viable excuse in which she would be permitted to enter her fist through his abdominal cavity and tear his tongue out through his liver.)
In the dreams, she shuddered at the words. In the nightmares, she whimpered. She’d nodded in her dreams that night, breathing in the scent of expensive whiskey tinged with the dredges of formaldehyde. She’d tangled her fingers in his hair, pulling him closer as she clawed into his back.
His hands on her hip wrenched her about, pulling her into the right place to fuck into her again and again and again until she couldn’t do anything but choke on each whine-punctured breath—(That’s right, go on, take it all for me. I know how badly you need it, gagging for my cock all day, were you?)--In her waking mind, it would have made Mercy retch. In her dream, she cried out, arching off the mountain of pillows that smell of patchouli and something sickly sweet.
That was where the dream wrenched itself from awful to profane.
Sometimes she dreamed that Augustine’s touch was only a prelude to a second. Sometimes she dreamed of a sigh beside them both, warm and comfortable.
Let me take her, He’d whisper, an edge of teasing wrapped coy around affection. Not like that—I mean of course like that later but—
Sometimes it was Him beside her. Sometimes it was Augustine’s hands guiding her down onto the chest of the Emperor Undying himself.
Sometimes Mercy woke up before her flesh touched his—before she could consider the horrifying sensation of his Holy skin pressed to hers.
Sometimes she didn’t. God forgive her, sometimes she didn’t.
She woke with the ghost of John’s chest under her cheek, the phantom-limb sensation of soft hair tickling her as His lips pressed into the crown of her head.
She curled over onto herself, her pillow damp beneath her as another choked sob muffled itself between her lip and her teeth.
Her nails found her biceps, digging hard enough to leave crescent-moon welts as she swallowed and swallowed and swallowed.
Mercy hadn’t dreamt of the Emperor Undying in such a way since she’d arrived at Canaan House. Not since her feet left the Eighth and she’d cast herself into the rooms floors upon floors beneath the feet of the Great Resurrector Himself. Where she belonged.
She did as she always did when the blasphemous nightmares dared to seep into her sleeping mind.
Clambering silently from her bed, Mercy dropped to trembling knees. Lord, Teacher, Father, Guide, she reminded herself, folding to touch her forehead to the ground in desperate supplication to no one but the thought of Him above her.
The heat of the dream blossomed through her, spreading like the all-consuming flames as she tried she tried she tried to scrub the memories from her.
It isn’t right, it isn’t right to think of Him like that, to reach for his image and pervert it into twisted fantasy.
She trembled against the floor as the bitter light poured itself over it—cold and merciless. “Emperor forgive me,” she murmured softly as she shifted her legs tighter closed in an effort to stymie the pulse of latent arousal.
Each beat of her panic-struck heart drew frames of her malformed nightmares back to her mind.
“Emperor Undying.”
Him, spread out on his back, head tilted to the side to show the silver-and-black speckled like of his jaw.
“Your Celestial Kindness.”
—lips parted like He dare pray to her. Like He dare do something so profane as to whisper her name with reverence and joy.
“King of the Nine Renewals.”
—His fingers in her hair, pulling her up to crush His lips to her own. The feeling of His hand on her back and a second set there on her chest. Fingers toying with her nipples as she knelt over their shared Lord—
“First Reborn, Gentle Emperor.”
—the brush of Augustine’s chest against her back, the feeling of both of them and both of them and both of them the sound He makes when he—
Mercy muffled another choked sound as her arms gave beneath her own shaking weight.
Her cunt throbbed between her clamped legs, leaving her thighs messy and slick as she shuddered. His name danced on the tip of her tongue, cascading down the back of her throat in a rush of warm heat that she longed to swallow around in ways she never fully understood.
She would not say it.
She’d said it before, whispered into her pillows on the Eighth, on the delicate edge between awake and asleep, between here and there. It had been an evening where she’d lost control, where she’d woken up with the feeling of His touch skating down the length of her back and the feeling of herself twisting at the core with a fanatical craving for him. She’d whimpered for Him with her knees wrapped around a pillow and her hips working desperately to find any form of heretical relief buried there in layers of fabric and feather.
She said it before.
She would not say it now.
She would not say it now with Cristabel asleep a few inches from her sin.
Not here. Not here.
Mercy, feeling half-drunk on an arousal she would never permit herself to act upon, stumbled up to her feet.
She left Cristabel sleeping there, peaceful in her ignorance of Mercy’s storm-wild strife, she gathered the carefully maintained if well-worn cardigan around herself and her silky slip-nightgown, and she set about to wander the hallowed, holy halls of Canaan House.
I will not blaspheme your name, Mercy thought, hazy in half-prayer still. I will not.
###
That was before.
To become disillusioned with God, Mercy must’ve loved him once.
And she did. In a way, she thinks she still does. (Is wanting to kill God the same as loving him? Did Gideon still love Pyrrha when he drove the steel into her heart? Did Cassiopeia still love Nigella?)
Sometimes she lays there, on the days when she can’t sleep and the days when she cannot stomach thinking of Cristabel and ripping her own chest open in a lazy attempt at self-annihilation.
Sometimes she wonders why she loves Him.
Her body, her art.
Sometimes she wonders why she craves Him. Why her flesh calls to His, a siren-song whisper unsettled under her skin. Why it feels like she’ll never be whole without his fingertips brushing against her shoulder in ways it never had before or why her breath won’t settle unless his hand was covering hers.
She woke up, for the first time in her new life, with John’s arms wrapped around her and her bloody face pressed to his chest. And, with all the fury of a lost child sobbing for their mothers arms, some nights she weeps for him.
And some nights she weeps for Him.
###
The lights were on in the labs by the time Mercy made her way down to the winding metal corridors. They buzzed overhead with the agonizing and irritating whine that always made her grit her teeth. It was more horrid when Cristabel wasn’t there to chatter through it.
And even more intolerable when she pushed the metal door open with a creak, to find—of any of the people she’d been forced to share a holy site with—Augustine hunched over the table, a smoldering tray of ash and bone fragments at his elbow.
He scribbled in his notebook as the smell of incense and charred vertebrae fragments struck her.
Her nose wrinkled.
“Why weren’t you at the party,” Mercy asked. It came out as an accusation and she wasn’t entirely sure if that wasn’t what she intended. She pulled her sweater closer around her chest.
Augustine glanced up at her. He was dressed very much the same as he did on the average evening—with an air of perfection that Mercy knew couldn’t last this late into the night. His hair was slicked flat against his head, perfect but for the smallest wayward curl starting to form at the base of his neck. The cuffs of his shirt were rolled up to the elbow, leaving the pale stretches of skin between it and his wrist smudged with ash from whatever spirit calling he’d done before she arrived. He was missing his tie-pins and two of the gold rings that he wore on his left pinky and his right middle finger. It was imperfection masquerading as flawless. It was messy shoved underneath the rug where no one would ever think to look.
It was all Augustine ever was: gilded.
“What business is it of yours, Mercymorn?”
“One of us is going to become the first to ascend to His side,” Mercy pointed out, shuffling forward. Her shadow cast over Augustine’s tray. He moved it back into the artificial light. “I want to know if you were working in the pool because you were onto something.”
“Even if I was,” Augustine said, setting his pen down into the cradle of his pages. “I wouldn’t tell you, Mercy. I have nothing to gain from the Eighth, and I have nothing to gain from you. It would just be offering you a leg-up on the others that you didn’t earn.”
Mercy huffed an irritated sound through her nose. “Hardly! I’m just as close as you are, Augustine, I know it. Because if I were any closer I’d be there.”
“Then why aren’t you already?” He asked, leaning back.
There was one of the same uncomfortable metal chairs across from him, and one to either side. Mercy took one of the ones beside him, leaving the corner as the only space between them.
“Cigarette?” Augustine offered, holding out that awful little pack of hand-rolled things. Mercy wrinkled her nose. He took one for himself. “Suit yourself.”
“There has to be an answer,” she said, fierce and attentive. Augustine shrugged one artfully thin shoulder and lit his cigarette. “There has to be! He wouldn’t ask us here if there wasn’t, Augustine, you know that.”
“He might’ve.” Augustine sighed, an exhale of smoke filtering to join the fading remnants of his summoning. “I don’t pretend to understand him, Mercy, and quite frankly it’s very un-Eighth of you to suggest you could.”
She felt her cheeks color. “I am not implying that I understand Him, you foul little wretch. I am simply acting in my faith that our Kindly Prince would not lead us astray.”
Augustine hummed, clicking his lighter open and closed. “What’s your catch? Your folly? Your white whale so to speak?”
“Would it kill you to speak like a human being for once?”
“It might,” Augustine replied. “I cannot for the life of me figure out the soul preservation aspect of it. Theoretically, it would work—all of it—but how do you maintain two souls without entirely subsuming one of them?”
“It isn’t possible,” Mercy said. “It isn’t which means consuming the soul isn’t how it’s to occur. It has to be an exchange, Augustine, it’s the only way to ensure both souls survive the process.”
Augustine extended one hand, flicking a bone fragment out of his ashtray. It clicked miserably across the table. “And how do you exchange one for the other? It would be like a brain transplant, Mercymorn.”
“It could work,” She huffed, slinking her shoulder down onto the table-top. “And it would be much different from a brain transplant, a brain doesn’t house a soul it’s a system of electric pulses that inform your—”
“Mercy, please,” Augustine said, draping one hand over his eyes. “If i wanted a lecture on the human body from you of all wretched and heartless shrews, I would have knocked on your door and asked: Dearest Nercynorn, I have decided that I’m no longer suitable for this solar system and I long for the worst and slowest form of death. I know, despite the hundreds of years that I have lived thus far and despite my countless contributions to the cultural epicenter of the Empire—” “We get it, Augustine.” “ — I’m hardly finished—despite my contributions, I think I deserve a deeply agonizing death and have such come to your room here, in the dead of night, to ask you to bore me to death with one of your endlessly dull lectures.”
Mercy blinked. “Are you finished now?”
The hand lifted off Augustine’s eyes. “I am.” His cigarette had burned down quite low by that point.
They sat in silence for one moment. Then another.
“Alfred went.” Augustine said. “I think it’s unnecessary to note that if Alfred is attending an orgy, I needn’t be there. It’s awful enough that there are a finite amount of individuals in regular attendance. We haven’t discussed it but I’d rather not think of the possibility of sharing.”
Mercy felt her face twist up in disgust. “You two—”
“Not together.” Augustine made a sound of revulsion. “I wouldn’t even invoke John’s name for that one. Really, Mercymorn, you do know that there are things that don’t need to be asked, right?”
“I was curious! And it’s improper to invoke His name—“
“And you are more than welcome to keep it to yourself! And I didn’t, Mercy.”
“You said it. You called Him by it, Augustine,” she hissed as she wrapped her surgical-gauze colored cardigan tighter around her chest. “You know I hate when you do that! I hate when you use His name.”
Augustine’s face pinched in annoyance. “It’s his name, Merce. His name is John. It isn’t like it’s a secret and even if it were it certainly isn’t one he’s keeping from us. Go on. You can say it. John Gaius.”
(Go on, be a good girl.)
The sound of metal scratching against metal echoed in the empty lab as Mercy shoved herself back from the desk.
John, came the echo of her voice in her own mind—the taste of his name sweeter than the honey-rich wine she’d had the last time he’d deigned to let her sit in his office. John, the shape of it burned into her memory from too many dreams she’d never dare to remember.
John.
She knew the way it sounded, the way it tasted pressed into his lips even if she’d never touched them with her own.
She stood there, quaking in a fury unlike any of the other Houses. Her rage was Eighth, through and through. It always had been.
“Do. Not. Ever.”
“What, Mercy?” Augustine rose from his own seat, circling the corner of the table. He stalked her around it, like a snake.
Mercy wondered, briefly, if they had snakes on the Fifth. She didn’t know what creatures stalked their tall grasses, or what haunted the wild and ceaseless raging storm. She didn’t care, truely.
All that matters was that Augustine was a snake and he was there, circling her.
The clinging smell of incense and cigarette smoke constricted around her, an undulating limb that wrapped and wrapped and wrapped as her shoulders trembled with the weight of her anger.
“Do not. Call him that.”
Augustine slithered forward, filling the space before her with the oppressive breadth of his presence. “Or what, Mercy? Please, God in the rooms above us tell me. What are you going to do to me? Are you going to tell him? Are you going to gather your skirts and march upstairs to tell Daddy that Augustine was calling him by his own name? Please, Mercymorn, please tell me if you do. I would give anything, anything, to watch him laugh in your face.”
He loomed over her, a slash of a man somehow composed of everything and nothing at once. He was the sliver of light creeping beneath the doorway of the pool. He was his own smoke-trail necromancy, creeping towards the ceiling to pool miserably along buzzing fluorescent lights.
He was the distant hum and hiss of the machinery and the silence of the world of anything but them.
The small of Mercy’s back collided with the metal lip of the table and she didn’t know when she’d backed so close to it or when Augustine had slipped into place so neatly in front of her and she didn’t know when she’d been there before but she had.
She knew the feeling of cold metal biting through the fabric of a nervous-system thin sleeping gown. She knew the feeling of Augustine’s heat radiating for him, the feeling of warmth radiating through layers of clothing and seeping through the atoms and dust particulars between them. She knew him, bouncing off the atoms of space from his chest to hers and the planetary orbit of his body drawing her closer and closer.
Mercy always hated being so close to Augustine.
It felt like Dominicus, pulling the Houses to her core.
She hated that she knew him. That she knew and that she knew him and she didn’t know how.
And she hated that he was there and she knew, deep in the hard-wire facets of her joints and her bones, that Augustine was there. Trace elements of him bleeding into her like an infinite half-life, sticking in her bones from a life she couldn’t remember and a history she never wanted to know.
Augustine didn’t speak. Neither did she.
Mercy hated that.
She hated that she didn’t expect him to speak and she hated that she knew he never spoke like this.
And she hated, she hated, that nothing about the way he kissed her was a surprise.
###
Sometimes she wonders if she loved him once.
It’s the only excuse.
Sometimes she wonders if she died in his arms. Sometimes she wonders if he held her until her heart stopped beating on that last night before they woke up new and different and unchanged at once.
She wonders if he kissed her.
If he loved her.
In every iteration, in every imagination that Mercy conjured of a life in which she and Augustine stood side by side, she cannot fathom a world in which that was true.
To imagine a world where she loved Augustine is like imagining a world where she did not love John.
###
Augustine did not kiss like a necromancer.
He did not kiss like an artist weaving spirits from the shadows, he did not kiss like a summoner beckoning her from the other side.
He kissed like a madman.
Lips teeth and tongue, he kissed her like he hated her.
And Mercy was no better. She shoved her tongue past his lips, tracing the inside of his teeth like she could draw sigils into the roof of his mouth. And maybe she could have, the way he bent to the tilt of her mouth for just long enough to let her think she had the upper-hand before a set of narrow-boned fingers wrenched their way into her hair.
He twisted and bent her down to his will instead, oblivious to the gasp that slipped between their lips.
Augustine tasted like venom, serpentine and acrid as his tongue traced the sharp edges of her teeth. She bit at his lower lip, earning herself a coarse chuckle and a click of his tongue.
“Bad girl,” his voice ground out, low and rough. “Come on, Mercy, I know you want to be good for me.”
(That’s right, Mercy, came the echo. Good girl.)
“There is nothing,” she hissed against his mouth, “that I want less in this world than your approval.”
“Then tell me to get off you.”
“Get off me.”
Augustine’s hands dropped from the table, where he’d been caging her on either side and all at once the line of his body removed itself from hers.
And— and how many times had she done this? How many times had he grabbed her. She could feel him a dozen times, she knew the feeling of his fingers tapping out the rhythmic beat of her heart against the side of her ribs better than she knew the interviewing veins of her own body.
She knew him intimately—beyond sex, beyond the rote physical interaction of his body pressed against her, beyond the brutal and rough animalistic contact. She knew him the way Dominicus beheld the planets. She knew him the way the Eighth House knew the foxes and the stars and the air around them.
She knew him the way she knew how to breathe.
And all at once Mercy was cold.
(How many times had she done this?)
(You look so pretty with your legs all spread for me.)
And all at once Mercy was furious.
She lunged forward, all whip-wild anger and the sort of foreign-flush of rage she hadn’t felt in this mind before. It was like she was drawn by instincts buried deep beneath the stones of Canaan House, something clawing its way from a horrifying labyrinthine pit and scratching at the walls of her chest until the bone was left scored and scarred.
One hand fisted in the front of Augustine’s shirt, pulling him down to her as she shoved her mouth against his in a filthy, awful excuse of a kiss.
It was all spit and tongue, mindless hunger and fury tied together by the force of his arms looping back around waist. They were animals, devolved back down into the wet, filthy creatures that once clambered from the churning oceans.
Instruments toppled—Augustine’s ashtray spilling bone and soot across the tile, a collection of scalpels and pens and sheafs of flimsy were sent careening off into the blissful oblivion that existed outside their embrace—as their combined strength managed Mercy up onto the steel table.
Mercy had spent hundreds of years feeling something curiously missing.
She had spent hundreds of years with a hole in her chest and an ache in her skin and a void-pitch emptiness ghosting her lips that she named her Emperor Undying.
Hundreds of years missing things she never remembered she lost, hundreds of years tangled in the remembrance of all the things she’d long forgotten.
Augustine touched her waist, the movement rucking silk over bare skin.
She forgot.
Mercymorn never forgot.
For a moment she forgot the missing-limb pain of her nights and the anaphylactic ache of her mornings. She forgot the pain and the irritation. She forgot it all.
She forgot it all.
(She didn’t forget it all. No. It haunted her. Augustine’s hands on her hips, the way his nose buried itself in her hair as his fingers worked at the well-worn sweater that tucked itself up into her waist. Her stomach churned with the memory that wove itself between the delicate fibres of her nervous system. Augustine’s breath, washing hot over her temple, his trousers rough against the inside of her thighs as her fingers shoved notes off a desk in the darkness. The sound of a stethoscope—a stethoscope? That’s silly, Mercymorn. You don’t use a stethoscope. You never have.)
(There was no stethoscope.)
(There had never been a stethoscope.)
(Then how do you know what it was?)
(How do you know what it sounds like when it hits the linoleum flooring in John’s office?)
Mercy ground her teeth, a rough and violent noise that shredded the prey-instinct pulse of her throat.
There were no nightmares. There was no iron-blood stench. There was no stethoscope. All there was was Augustine, his hand shoving up her dress, his trousers rough where the sensitive inside of her thighs ground against him in a half-mindless and desperate plea to wrench him closer and closer and closer in all the ways she never wanted him before.
“Slut,” Augustine said, voice somewhere between playful and grating as he dipped his face to her throat.
Mercy shouldn’t have tipped her head back.
You were never supposed to bare your throat for snakes.
Augustine’s teeth caught on the point of her pulse, one hand bracing the small of her back as the two of them bent down over the table. He nipped, delicate despite all the things Mercy knew of him, just once before he laid her out over the table.
“God, you really are a whore,” he said, half-breathless. Mercy’s cheeks colored. “The way the legs spread for me right away? The way you came down here in the dressing gown? God you wanted this so badly, didn’t you, Mercy? You wanted this, you wanted me so badly.”
“Shut up,” she hissed, one hand snapping to ruck her dress down over her thighs.
But Augustine was faster.
Deceptively strong fingers wrap around her wrist, holding her steady. “Come on, Merce. Don’t pretend you’re not dripping for it.”
“I swear—“ Mercy hissed.
Augustine tossed her hand back. “Put it up by your head, Mercy. I’m losing patience with you.”
“Augustine!”
“I mean it. I can walk away now, Mercymorn. Leave you spread out and wet on the laboratory table for anyone who might come looking for you.” Augustine leaned back, drinking in the debauched sight of her. “Maybe I’ll fetch John.”
It was a bolt of frozen—frozen—frozen something she refused to name lancing through her gut. Slowly, she laid both wrists by her head.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
Augustine urged her legs apart with a brush of two fingers on the inside of one knee. His touch was feather-light but delicately calloused.
“I’d just pop upstairs, knock on his office door—he’s certainly still awake, I don't know when he sleeps—and say John please, Mercymorn got herself into a bit of a mess. She asked for your help. And then he’d come running down to you and find you here. Messy. Wet.”
She shuddered, thighs twitching as Augustine walked his fingers down beneath the hem of her dress. “Augustine.”
“Your voice really gets gratingly high when you’re aroused doesn’t it, Mercymorn. Seriously you could be shattering glass somewhere. And that’s not safe in a place like this.” Another few inches, drawing him closer and closer to the quiet ache she’d tried to swallow from that very evening.
Mercy thrashed beneath him, a violent gesture designed to wrench his fingers somewhere useful. “And you are simply grating constantly!” She hissed. “Without end. That I’m putting up with you enough to—” Her rant was cut before it could flourish—nipped in the tender bud by Augustine’s mouth closing over hers. She continued on despite it, lips working against his. “ —touch me in a way that is perverse and sacreligious.” (Though it manifested as touth me in—mm!!! —a way that ith per—unf—perverff and—and—Augustine!)
His name, gasped and shattered, came with his fingers, brushing up against the soft, slick-dampened curls between her thighs. It was hardly a substantial touch, nothing more than a feather-brush, but she reacted with a bolt as if Augustine had run his hand through her stomach and out through her back.
“Mercymorn,” he breathed against her lips. She tasted his disbelief tangled in the distant scent of smoke and the memory of expensive whiskey that he hadn’t touched in weeks. “You absolute slut.”
“I was sleeping,” Mercy snarled, lips sliding spit-slick and feverish against his own. “I don’t wear pants when I sleep.”
“Mmmhm,” Augustine crooned, fingertips nudging just a scant inch higher until he whispered a touch against her quiet, close-hold desperation. “And why’s that?”
“They’re uncomfortable,” she hissed, arms twitching as she considered, briefly, tearing her wrists down from beside her head and tugging her nightgown past her knees—as if that would do anything but form an immodest little modesty tent over Augustine’s arms
She clamped her legs shut around him instead.
Augustine clicked his tongue. “Come now, Mercy. If you really want me to stop you just have to say it. Everything else is just a petulant little tantrum you’re throwing to prove to yourself that you’re not a wretched whore.”
He timed his fingers to the moment, using Mercy’s brief distraction of incoherent and all-consuming rage to slip his fingers higher.
“Which, really, dove, we all know you are.”
And higher.
“Oh, Mercymorn.”
And higher.
“Look at you.” He was breathless, like the feeling of her legs shaking around his wrist could wrench the air from the pit of his lungs. “Thank the Emperor you’re not upright. You’d cause a flood, you little harlot.”
His fingers slid against her, slotting into place like he’d drawn out the curvature of her body once before. His touch found her without practice or effort—hardly in the place she wanted it, in the sensitive nerve endings and the tender-fleshed hidden parts of her and the space between her ribcage and her sternum, and the space between her atlas and her nuchal line.
Augustine’s voice came with an echo. “So wet for me—do you want to beg? Is that it? I’ll make you beg, Merce.”
(So wet for me, dove—that’s right. You want it so terribly. Look at you—look at the way your thighs shake with it. You need me so desperately it makes you tremble. Ah—ah, my dear. I want to see it drip. You’re going to sit there and shake until you’re ready to beg.)
Mercy’s head thrashed back as the same nightmare stench of metal and chemicals flooded her with all the wrathful force of a long-forgotten storefront. It slammed through her, rattling the scores marks of bones she didn’t know if she’d ever broken once before or not.
It made her dizzy.
It made her sick.
It made her angry.
“You awful!! Terrible!!! Cruel excuse for a pathetic waste of a man!!”
Augustine hummer. His fingers drew back from between her thighs—just far enough for the light to catch on the slick mess she’d left of them. He spread them, letting the buzzing light tangle itself in the come strung mortifyingly between them. Mercy’s cheeks pooled with what remaining blood wasn’t otherwise occupied.
“I hate you,” she seethed. “So much.”
“If that’s how you feel,” Augustine said, with that same smug tone. “This says more about you than it does about me, doesn’t it?”
Mercy wanted to scream.
She wanted to kick him.
She did kick him.
Augustine’s hand snapped down with a grunt—lithe, narrow fingers encircling her ankle without much effort at all. “Say it.”
“Say what,” she howled, the stink of metal on metal burning with the distant stench of unfamiliar corpses—a ghost of a past taken from her with the blanket of resurrection. “Say that you—“ another thrash as she fought the hand on her ankle “—are!!—“ Augustine used his hold on her leg to pull her closer, a flash-bang movement yanking her knee up over his shoulder. “The worst!!!”
“Oh Augustine you’re so awful,” He mimicked, in a squeaky, shrill imitation of her voice. “It’s terrible how you abuse and malign me. The only thing I do is whimper and finger myself to John’s image.”
Mercy nearly gagged on the thought—her throat closing around the fist-sized knot of sacrilege that came with the idea of—of—of doing that. That thing she cannot name, that thing she cannot think of.
“How dare—’
“Oh Augustine—”
“I don’t sound like that,” she wailed, shrill and squeaking.
“Oh Augustine! You can’t touch me there, I only want the Emperor Undying to touch me like that. I lie there at night, three fingers in my drooling cunt waiting for him to come and fill me with his holy—”
Mercy’s other foot found his diaphragm rather easily—a burst of necromancy sapping the air from his lungs and leaving them momentarily withered and dry. A wretched cough wormed its way up from his chest once she permitted him to breathe again.
“Do not,” she hissed. “I will rend you apart if you dare.”
Augustine’s storm-rage eyes turned on her. “Dare to do what?” He snarled. “I don’t have to use necromancy to be better than you, Mercymorn. I can have you like this. You want me to have you like this. You’ve always wanted me to have you like this, I know.”
I know. It echoed around in her mind, a horrifying thought tripping through the firing synapses and down her frontal lobe to wedge itself miserably into the parts of her brain that refuse to fire correctly no matter how many times she considered rewriting it. I know.
Do you know like I know, she wanted to ask, her tongue tangling over the thought in the moment. Do you know that I want you to hold me down and have me until I cannot breathe the same way I know that you want to?
Mercymorn did not ask.
She didn’t have to.
“Then stop talking about it,” she said, voice shivering in need. “And do it.”
She kicked him again, this time colliding her heel with his shoulder to force him to take hold of her, to force him to pull both legs further up his shoulder, to force him to bring a knee to the edge of the hard metal table.
To force him up there with her, his trousers rough between her legs and his breath hot on her temple, and the scent of his sweat and his hair and his skin and his—and his—and—and Mercy didn’t know the scent she was missing but the one she knew. Maybe it was incense, something she forgot from the early days of resurrection—when the Emperor was there with his wavering smiles and his cold eyes and they forgot their names every few hours, only to be tenderly reminded with a warm kiss to the top of their heads.
Maybe it was that. Maybe it was something they left behind in the pitted out place of rotten blood and ancient meats.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
He smelled right, he smelled wrong, he smelled like Augustine always smelled. He smelled like he did every time she walked past him, every time she drifted too close into his ever-call orbit. He smelled like Augustine and he smelled wrong.
“Go on,” he whispered, nose nudging into her temple. “You held your hands there the whole time. Be a good girl now, Merce.”
Mercy’s arms wrapped around his shoulders and she didn’t know why she knew it was what he wanted only that she did.
(Tell me if you want me to stop.)
(For fucks sake, if I wanted you to stop I’d tell you.)
(Fuck me for trying to be polite then. I’ll make sure to treat you like the absolute whore you are.”
(Fuck you.)
(You’re clearly trying.)
Mercy did not know when Augustine dropped her legs to undo his fly. She didn’t know when he took the time to ruck her dress up high enough to slip a hand beneath the silk.
Time was relative, a fleeting and eternal and unholy thing—it didn’t matter in a place like this. It didn’t matter because Augustine’s hand had molded itself over her chest perfectly. It didn’t matter because the first brush of his thumb against a pebbled nipple set each and every millimeter of her body alight with a white-hot bolt of electricity.
“There you are,” he breathed, shoving the fabric up further—careless of how it bit into her sides and the space beneath her arms in the unnatural bend and twist of it. He bared her to the false-sun clinging to the ceiling above them, and her dreams predicted him once again. Augustine was tongue, then lips, then teeth.
The blisteringly hot tip of his tongue flicked over the tightened bud of Mercy’s breast—a teasing touch that only made her huff an irritated breath before he closed his mouth entirely over it with a rough and particularly vicious suck. She didn’t cry out because she was far, far too busy biting her lip.
Her back arched off the table regardless.
Augustine only hummed around her, tongue rolling over her nipple as he drew his hand up to pinch the other between his thumb and forefinger. Mercy’s cunt clenched as the touch seized her from her atoms outward. Filthy bare toes curled against him as she pushed herself up shameless and nude towards his waiting mouth.
Augustine buried his chuckle into her skin as his teeth nipped at her delicately enough to make her wrench half-towards and half-aware from the sharp sensation.
“Fuck you,” she snarled. “I’m—if you’re going to have me, then have me. If you’re going to play with me—”
“It’s foreplay, Mercy,” Augustine told her right breast. “I pity whatever man stumbles into your bed next. Though it’s honestly for the best. I’d hate to put my cock anywhere near that fanged maw of yours.”
“Eugh!! I am never putting my mouth anywhere near your genitalia!”
“Mercy, please say cock. It’s about to be in that tight, wet little cunt of yours.”
Her protest was silenced by his mouth sliding back over hers and the soft shift of his hand down to the space between his own legs.
Her teeth found his lower lip as he took himself in his other hand and pressed the length of his cock against her. He slid through her slick, the shape of him burning into her body in ways she didn’t know it was possible.
Mercy’s legs locked around him, pulling Augustine’s chest flushed against her own. The hand on her chest dropped down to brace himself beside her as his lips slid—feverish and swollen from the shape of her teeth—over the shape of her own parted ones.
She took him like she was made to. She took him like her body had known the entirety of her life—from the moment of her rebirth to the exact breath she took as he split her open on the length of him.
There was not a world in which Mercymorn did not know him, there was not a world in which her body was not made for him and his was not made for her. It was complete—total and whole.
And—for a moment—Mercy knew what it was like to have been shot.
###
Tell me again.
Tell you what, dove?
Nevermind. Forget it, forget I said anything! Jesus Christ are you going to be like this? Are you really going to do this now? I was being playful, I was being—you know what, I don’t know why I bother trying.
How is it my fault? You’re the one who took what I thought was a very nice moment and ruined it by being a tremendous arse yet again!! I have no idea why I ever bother with you.
I didn’t do anything. But fine. No, no, there you go. Go on, pick up little sweater and storm out like you do every time. It’s very mature of you, Doctor. I’m aghast, I’m shocked. You know, I used to think it was your intellect and your medical degree that John sought you out for. But I get it now, it was the maturity. That’s it.
Go to Hell.
You first.
###
Tell me again.
You know.
I want to hear you say it.
Why don’t you say it first, then? I’ll say it again if you say it.
Fuck off.
Absolutely, my dear.
###
Tell me again.
It’s fine. We’re going to be fine. John’s going to—
Please?
…okay. Okay.
###
Nails bit into the fabric of Augustine’s shirt, twisting and tugging the pressed shape of it out of place. Breath slid hot between parted lips, an afterthought between messy, imprecise kisses. Someone groaned, a low smoke-rattled noise and someone else whined—tangled in hair and twisting around a silk dressing gown.
Mercy wished she could feel him, his skin pressed to hers.
She wished she could feel him, but she didn’t need to because she knew what it would feel like. Mercy knew what his skin felt like, slick with sweat and sex as his stomach slid over hers. She knew what it would feel like when his arms brushed against the ticklish sides of her ribcage and the feeling of his bony hips biting in to the muscle and fat of her thighs.
She knew what it would feel like just as she knew what he would feel like moving within her.
She knew—each of her dreams were right. They knew the way he’d touch her, they’d know the way he felt with the head of his cock toying up between her folds and nudging against her clit before he finally, finally!, pulled back to let himself sink into her.
They played, like the violin that Mercy’s fingers never forgot, the sensation of Augustine’s cock sliding within her, the way he would drop his hands to her hips to pull her into the perfect position to send her back arching off the metal table. The way her hands would drop—one into his hand and another clawing at his back. The sound of their bodies sliding together, the slick sounds of sex bouncing off the empty walls of the lab and returning back to her tenfold. The way she’d cry his name as he fucked into her, a shape that is wrong-wrong-wrong on her tongue as each beat of his hips against hers pushes it out of her chest again and again and again.
She wailed, careless in the moment of anyone else who might be listening, of Cassie working her endless nights and Valancy preening in the washrooms. Nothing mattered, no one else mattered.
Her dreams told her that Augustine would drop a hand down—that he’d set the palm of one narrow hand on her pubic bone and wedge a thumb between them without a pause or a break in the beat of his hips.
She knew, she knew, that Augustine would find her clit with the same easy effort that he’d done everything else with. She knew that his face would screw into a mask of concentration, that heavy, pale brow furrowed tight as if their shared pleasure couldn’t possibly be anything less than the most puzzling theorem he’d seen to date. She knew he would talk.
And Emperor preserve her, Augustine talked.
“Fuck, Mercy, how are you so fucking tight? Is it that stick up your arse? Because if so you—fuck!--you should keep it there, hm? I’ve never—you’re so fucking—” He’d growled, as raw and wrathful as he had earlier, as he shoved himself into her again and again. “It’s like you were made for me, dove. Like John plucked you out of the fucking abyss as a gift. You like when I fuck you there?” Mercy did, at that moment, attempt to give a verbal affirmation. It came out as a whimper. “You get so tight when I do. You know that? Clamp down like—like the little prude you are. I take back what I said earlier. There’s no—mmf—there’s no way you’re getting three of your fingers up there.”
“Augustine,” She’d pleaded, her legs tightening around him as each merciless drive of his cock deeper and deeper into her struck perfectly—each rock of their bodies together, each sickening slap of flesh to flesh. She didn’t know what she wanted—she couldn’t put it to words, the sudden-sink of something missing. Of something else.
“I’ll fuck you open,” he said, like a vow, like a prayer, into the sweat-slick hollow of her throat. His lips moved against her, like he was tasting the beading taste of her exertion. “Mercy, I’ll fuck you open until you can take anything. I’ll fuck you messy, love, any day of the week.”
(That’s right, my girl. Are you going to open up for me? Oh look at you, look how well that pretty little pussy can stretch. Ah-ah. I know you can take it. You’ve taken so much more. There’s no reason you can’t take it now. That’s right.)
She opened her mouth as the tears started to prick in the corners of her eyes. They mingled somewhere between exertion and a weight she could not name. A hiccup escaped her instead.
Above her, panting and breathless already, Augustine shushed her with an affection otherwise unknown. “It’s alright.” One arm looped around her, pulling them flush until she could feel the call-and-response beat of his heart against her own. “Come on now, that’s my girl.”
(Come on now, that’s my girl. Let John in, too. I wish you could see his face—God, I wish you could see his face right now. You’re doing so good. You’re doing so good for us.)
Mercy bit her lower lip until she tasted copper blossoming over her tongue.
The dream would not stop coming. It wouldn’t stop, waves upon waves dashing her upon the sand and rocks again and again and again. It was like the River had her—sending her awash through the bodies and the corpses, bouncing her off bones and dragging her across the skin-splitting sand until she bled out there at the bottom.
The tears ran tracks down her cheeks, hot and slick as she thrashed beneath him, teeth grinding so hard somewhere—beyond the haze of adrenaline and dopamine that flooded her system—her jaw muscle ached and she felt her eardrums pop and rush with the blood pressure.
“Go on, come. Be a good girl and come for me.”
(Come for us. That’s right. Be a good girl and come for us.)
It ripped through her like bone fragments splintering out from her ribcage. It shredded her like a her spine tearing itself out of her body like a construct—it felt like skin flayed apart, it felt like bones breaking, it felt like the muscle convulsions of the recently deceased tightening in the abdomen and forcing them to sit up all at once.
It was God, it was Hell, it was Augustine reaching through her past her skin and her sternum and her lungs and her heart—reaching and reaching and reaching into the core of her existence and twisting her until she couldn’t do anything other than fall to pieces in the cage of his arms.
When she came, she sobbed.
Augustine swore above her. Maybe it was before he pulled himself from her body or before he spent himself across the inside of her thighs or after or during or somewhere in between.
She didn’t know. She didn’t care.
(I love you, I love you so much—) ( —I love you—)
(We love you.)
Mercy’s chest ached and her stomach churned and, with Augustine panting against her, she turned and she sobbed. And she sobbed.
She didn’t know why, but she did.
“Mercy,” he breathed, his voice steady as his arms trembled around her. “Mercy, you—we’ve—”
There was a question as her breath refused to come, as she felt her lungs collapse like a dying star—half-bitten and consumed. Her throat seized shut and all she could taste was Augustine’s blood and all she could ear was the popping above her and tile shattering and rushed breathing and the fear and I love you, I love you, we love you—
All at once she felt sick.
Her hands dropped down to her arms, nails biting into the bare skin until crescent-moon welts became ringed in crimson.
It was as if she had become possessed.
It’s alright. We’re together, we’ll go together—It’s alright. We’re together, we’ll go together (That’s right, go on. It’s just us, we’ve got you)--it’s alright. We’re together, we’ll go—(Come on, we’ve got you. We’re right here)
And then, with her stomach sour and twisting, Mercymorn shoved Augustine’s stock-still form aside, and she vomited onto the floor of the lab.
We’ve got you, it’s alright.
“Mercy,” Augustine said, as she trembled beside him. “You felt that, didn’t you?”
“Do not,” Mercymorn hissed, the corners of her mouth frothy with bile and blood. “Augustine, do not.”
The lab was quiet, but for the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the distant hum and hiss of machinery. Mercy timed her breath (in and out. In and out.) before she slid back off the desk, ignoring Augustine’s offered hand.
She fixed her dress.
He fixed his trousers.
The storm did not quell.
Something roiled inside her.
Emperor forgive me.
And, with the remnants of her sin dripping down the inside of her bitten thigh, Mercy went to find God.