praetoreus

[praetoreus]

“no,” she chokes, clutching at the doctor’s wrist, scrabbling clumsily for the needle as her heart lurches in sluggish fits. panic makes a coffin of her chest. there is a pressure at her wrists and ankles that beats against every gasp of her pulse. a hundred times over her own voice hurricanes in frantic squalls about her head, but she can't extract a word or warning from the blood in her ears.

if the needle pierces her skin she will be sedated, or worse. if they have her body she won’t get it back again. two red points of light shudder above her, hazy, hot, the relentless twin suns of a borealis summer. these lightning-strike thoughts are quick and disjointed and absurd. the tendons in her wrists pull taut along a half-submerged titan chassis. she can’t recall ever being to borealis.

the hand she is uselessly fumbling tightens around her own. her grip is weak and wet. through layers of thick lather something indents the back of her hand. it’s the tattoo of an IV tapping at her veins–it’s the sure weight of a pilot’s arm console–it’s a thumb, now fit into the valley between knuckles, its fingers nesting in her palm. another swipes across her eyes, swathing her forehead with a pressure and a gentleness.

she becomes aware of her own pulse, throbbing at every point of contact. then there is grass beneath her neck, spider-leg wiry, clinging to dehydrated life. then, a rolling thunder pain–scraping out her stomach, clawing deep into her lungs nad her shoulders–not the needlepoint sting of a scalpel but the ache of a bruise, a splintered tree, fire-hot–and again she gasps, bellowing smoke, treading shallowly the blood in her chest.

and the sky above her rearranges into two blank eyes, a mask, a tasselled headdress fluttering in a plaintive breeze. her vision is blurry, but she follows the maze of tubes about the hunter’s neck, loses herself, blinks against the nausea and pain.

get up, demands a voice. somewhere far away. but the hunter is holding her hand and cupping her forehead, and the sun-soaked dirt is softer than a hospital gurney, and nothing restrains her but the open sky.

“the fear is yours,” says the hunter, voice low, melodic. “it comes from you, but it does not own you. you will feel it, and you will let it pass.” they brush her hair from her temples in the detached way one would sooth an animal. “but you will not láta. this saar is not fatal. you are a fighter, felagi. the fear will only keep you alive if you do not feed it. do you understand?”

don’t let them do this, says one voice. trust yourself, says another. she no longer has the strength to squeeze the hunter's hand.

“yes,” she whispers, swallows, tries again: “yes.”

distantly they shift, and they fold her hand into the negative space around as syringe, and glove it with their own; and together they hold the needle to her chest.

“survival is never easy,” they say as they urge her thumb into the plunger. “you, ghost, know this better than most. felagi, do not stop fighting for it.”

[praetoreus]

“why him?”

from anyone else, the bitten accusation would sting like judgement. darius has known the general’s daughter longer than he knew the general--and is well familiar with mercurial younger siblings besides--so he knows the disgust swelling beneath her tongue predicates only desperation. the same anger cuts her gaze from the young men who coyly ask after miss du couteau, bites at the soldiers who attempt her father’s name like a curse.  nails abrade leather abrade skin where she worries her dagger-hilts. there is no one of her name who has not disappointed her, and there is blood drying under her nails.

why him? blue-eyed and lantern-jawed and unremarkable but as a war hero, something any noxian knows is worth nothing at all. self-important and petulant and unremarkable, sunlit in his core. (and the battlefield ever refracts prismatic through him at its centre, breath and blood and banners kaleidoscoping the shield who shines and shines and never burns. he looks to his prince with such naked devotion that darius feels his pulse against the phantom ring on his finger. being good serves less than being strong, but the devil has wings and has kept darius under them so long he can no longer recall the colour of his son’s eyes.)

never shit where you eat, as the saying goes. draven will not go to war and katarina, who bears her brother’s scar like a family crest, has some tricks known only to the dead. the crownguard sister should not be marching and she should not be at the prince’s side but she glows the same as him, has the same dimples in her cheeks. she is one pristine step removed from royalty and everything anathema to noxus. she should not be here and the crownguard sets his strong jaw in defiance of his fear, but he cannot protect her and the prince and the trajectory of battle all at once. somewhere in darius’s bubble he knows the general’s favourite mercenary will be grinning as she lines up a shot.

both he and katarina cry out when the bullet pierces the younger crownguard’s shoulder.

shame is the negative of war and louder than the drums. the language of violence has one word for weakness and both of them are tonguing it like a poison. darius has learned to sleep to the beat of his wife’s receding steps, but anymore his dreams are gilt and summer-blue and the sadness in her downturned mouth becomes dimples dotting a fearful grimace, her calloused hands become bloodstained petricite cradling a small blonde head.

he knows what garen’s smile looks like and he knows where katarina goes at night. the streets afforded him vocabulary for neither, and he doesn’t need to tell her what she has had carved into her, so he says nothing and tries to feel no kinship when she smiles back across enemy lines with demacian gold in her teeth.

she will not say it either, but when she spits pink at her feet and walks away darius knows it as a secret kept, and understands. she will slit the throats of garen’s countrymen and darius will endure as he always has, the stolid might upon which swain lays his vision, and both of them will hate as they love and love in demacian blood.

[praetoreus]

she likes him best like this: his hair wild with electricity, skin red around the clasps of his mask and hints of manic knowledge in his eyes and the scent of blood like cologne, his jaw working when he looks at her like he could tear and tear into her and never be content. she likes him when their cogs misalign, when his crazy looms threatening over her crazy.

maybe he could hurt her. he might even try.

the thought makes her clench her thighs, lick her lips. and jack, jack watches her like a snake coiled to strike, like he’s got his teeth in her already, and it’s exactly the wrong kind of attention that has her basking, thriving, thumbing her own belt loops like an invitation.

(”it was my mother,” nisha says to him one of these nights, high and wild on his sweat and his fear and the hollow of his throat, digging her fingers in a little harder. his grin under her has too many teeth and his head too many faces, all of him trembling with empyrean whispers and the promise of blood.

his hands divoting her hips, dragging over the same bruises, jack says, “my grandmother,” and grins even wider when she leans her weight onto his neck.)

[praetoreus]

“what if you’re wrong?” lilith asks to the beat of sanctuary’s hull creaking and groaning through space. promethea is shades of neon and mud in the widescreen of the darkened bridge, twirling slowly among its satellites; atlas is as much space junk as it is a military base as it is a great shining monument to ego, but maya doesn’t care to think of rhys twirling his moustache in idolatrous envy while his men trade bullets and blood transfusions and one helios for another.

she thinks of ava’s headphones, massive over-ear fossils scavenged somewhere between homes that she keeps close because she can’t sleep in silence. she thinks of the veins of white fire that begin to creep up tannis’s arms if she only looks peripherally, fizzling in only as her focus fades elsewhere.

she thinks of brother sophis’s heart and the way it felt still hot and lurching in her hand. sometimes the past is the past and sometimes it lives like an infection, caked under her fingernails, lodged in the back of her throat. her wings burn so hot some days she can barely think, so anymore her exit strategies come with numbers and contingencies and contingencies.

a bruise is purpling under lilith’s eye. it kisses her cheekbone like a blush, dusting the sharp, alien angle with a human sheen. there is blood on her knuckles and frown lines parenthesizing her dry lips. eridium still sings under her skin but the notes have lost tempo with her heartbeat, hands shaking, veins screeching with music she no longer stands to hear, but that, this close, this quiet, stands the hair on maya’s arms.

“you came to pandora because you had to,” maya says eventually, and lilith doesn’t flinch, but her fists clench a little tighter, the song scraping out a little harsher. “people like us, the universe doesn’t give choices. i’m not wrong. and if i am, then that’s one lost girl who can choose to leave pandora behind.”

lilith says nothing. her eyes are still hawk-sharp but their shine is comet trails and lasers through glass, reflected and refracted into echoes of herself. as maya retires to her quarters, lilith remains where she is, silhouetted alone against the galaxy outside.

[praetoreus]

“top or bottom?” maya asks, and ava casts out the same trapped-animal look she thinks she has outgrown, the one that meets the brother who rouses her for rounds from dream-wracked sleep, that she pockets for indignation when her fingers are too sticky and not fast enough. that same look maya pretends not to see after hours of meditation leave ava rattling the bones of restlessness and immotile anger in her own head.

guilt is high and ruddy in ava’s cheeks when she climbs into the bottom bunk. it’s smaller, boxed in on all sides but the one facing the door. comfort is something she has to take where she can get, but she is versed through fire in the algebra of the galaxy: her safety will ever come at the cost of someone else’s. even simple self-preservation is a wellspring of guilt in a child so already hazed.

maya hasn’t told ava of her own childhood on athenas, more threat than girl, more family with maliwan and with dead trees than with any of the monks who fed her and taught her and directed her like lining up a crosshair. how to stand where you’re placed, how to act like a monster. how to find warmth in blood and splattered guts over the guiding touch of a parent.

(the first time maya clapped ava on the shoulder with something approaching affection, they had both flinched, and maya began to section like a vaccine any maternal instincts pandora had not bled from her.)

[praetoreus]

the second ascended arrives under cover of storm. atop the palace, from where the whole of the city can be observed, sivir sees him only backlit by an angry snap of lightning: too large to be a man, his silhouette almost that of an animal. he lingers at the outskirts of the city, hesitation clear even in the distant set of his spine, while the storm, in his deliberation, drenches them both.

in the end, sivir’s survival instincts outweigh her mistrust. azir seems almost chagrined when she tells him, a sudden guilt writ in the worry of his claws against his wrists, clinging small to his sceptre like a child awaiting a lecture.

his name is nasus, though azir greets him general, a title that draws his posture taut. though he stands larger than azir, he stands in denial of it; all of him trends inward, not just hunched shoulders and delicate steps, but a stance like he is quietly trying to occupy as little space as he can. to hold such power and be ashamed of it is something sivir cannot understand; but against azir’s radiance nasus settles, weary, and whatever anger azir had been expecting does not come.

instead, they talk. it is hushed, and much of it is in a tongue sivir doesn’t know, but recognises as ancient shuriman: as they speak, occasionally she will glimpse understanding, though she has never studied the language as such. most of her knowledge has been gleaned off relics and ruins, a word here and there appealing to a vague, opaque memory.

she knows very clearly the word blood, uttered almost reverently, and on a gesture of azir’s arm nasus’ eyes shift to her as if noticing her for the first time. suddenly she has never felt as much an intruder upon this life as she does here, between two gods--and she does not know how to feel at all when nasus, heedless of this all, looks upon his emperor’s blood with pity.

[praetoreus]

“i asked your elders for permission first,” he tells her after, as her fingertips track eddying paths through the crags and valleys of his back. he is embarrassed, and it makes her teeth ache with want to sink into him.

“what did they say?” she asks, not because she is concerned, but because she likes the way his muscles tense in little ripples under her hands.

his voice a shade above petulance, lucian answers, “they said i was too demacian, and only a fool would have to ask,” and a wild laugh bubbles up from her chest. she loves him so much in that moment she feels dizzy and alive with it, the overflow of life in her bursting through her ribs and her eyelids and her fingertips.

“you are,” senna says, “both,” and, “kiss me, you demacian fool,” and he does, and he does, and she would kiss him with everything in her, and she would marry him even if he hadn’t asked.

[praetoreus]

sundown bears heavy the threat of burgeoning moonlight, the mountain to be cloaked in secret shame; and here, too, is shame in both of them, huddled in a single bedroll as the last pink tongues of sunlight ebb and are swallowed by shadow. they are no longer girls; this is the fleeting indulgence of children afraid of the dark, afraid of the punishment of night and that light that only cuts and ruins. leona feels foreign to her own body--she is gaseous and nothing, a star suspended in empty space--and diana’s face is sharp and pale and anxious in the darkness between them, nearly lost in the silvery flow of her liquid mercury hair. and there is fear in the heat of her skin, in the anticipatory tremble of her hand and her breath that she measures so carefully it comes halting and sudden.

and diana’s hand is curled between their bodies, open and close enough to take in her own.

“what will you do?” leona asks the stillness that compresses her, darkness coating her tongue, her own voice shaky and righteous and wrong in her own head. she does not flinch. she will not flinch.

two breaths, quickly in and out. there is no colour in the harsh night of targon, but diana’s eyes glitter clear and achingly bright.

“i don’t know,” she whispers, and they both know she is lying.

[praetoreus]

lucian tells her he loves her with mercury-stained teeth, when her face still itches with blood and gravedirt, and his gun in her hand still sloughs wisps of smoke, rising to join the gloom between them. moonlight catches his eyes and his open wounds in silver, and with the mist pulling at her ankles he takes her by the wrist and says nothing more.

his eyes reflect tremulously the brackish water of the isles, dead faces and worry in ripples with his heartbeat. the mist pools whispers at the base of her skull--heavy like a secret--in this moment the scent of mud and rot is so thick she thinks she is mad with it, or the whispers would not be so clear, his fingertips on her pulse not suddenly her only tether to the earth. maybe she would not find herself wanting him to dig and dig through vein and tendon until he bares her blackened bones to the trees above.

a glimmer of blood trembles where his lower lip has split. senna says, “it should be so easy,” and kisses him until his blood clots under her tongue.

[praetoreus]

live meteorites litter the sky, white tendrils of fire racing, reaching for earth; some of them, she knows, will be yorha herself, operator models who never saw the surface and who will burn before reaching it.

they die believing it’s for a cause. a2 can’t decide whether she pities or envies them. it won’t matter, ultimately; she lowers her head to her sword, polishing yorha blood from its blade (glimmers of the bunker reflected bright as the sun) and suppressing the nausea clenching her throat.

(she shakes off the image, unbidden, of an android with dark hair, red eyes wide and wild like a trapped animal; and how her chest had ached, and how, when they were never meant to be human, how she hadn’t understood—)

[praetoreus]

tim doesn’t have a shadow here, long limbs and capes the architecture of a city that comprises him as much as he lives it, haunts it; he doesn’t move and it’s almost as if he isn’t, black cats in the night, streetlights refracting through him into rainbows and nothing. paris was painful but it wasn’t as cruel (the scent of blood too sharp and sour, tim’s voice too harsh, i won’t give up on him like i gave up on you) --

gotham is ghosts in a graveyard and bodies they never got to keep, and tim is a newton’s cradle, small and shiny and always in motion, always swinging back to home.

“conner,” he says, deliberate. kon kind of hates when clark calls him that -- another hedge, more distance from a home he might have had, once -- but tim’s always said it like he invented it. (he’s said it then, but it hadn’t been him and kon had been more not-lex and not-clark than kon) --

[praetoreus]

“don’t sneak up on me like that,” he says. his hands, now flesh, drop into his lap. “what do you want?”

click--tongue against teeth. “you ran. you failed. they are not happy with you.” she never offers a name, only they, only hints and a show of her teeth.

“i--” her back is to him now. she will understand, but he can’t--he can’t even look at her, dropping his face to solid hands. “the mark,” he manages, muffled. “it was him.”

her face is tilted toward the artificial light. “who?”

“jack.” click. “jack morrison--”

“ha! you cry for that coward?”

“NO.”

his voice chars, twists into something hot, angry, inhuman; a growl that seems to startle her, as well she can be. her mocking smile falls to a frown thoughtful, almost angry.

“no,” he repeats. “sometimes... i forget what i used to be. but i saw him and--knowing”--his voice crackles like fire as his face melts into black, black, eyes blinking and teeth gnashing where there should be none, something that hurts if she looks at it directly--”knowing once i was--not--not this--this fucking thing, this monster--”

she does not break eye contact. “i used to be a man, amélie,” he says, “i used to be--”

“alive?”

he laughs. it sounds muted, defeated, but human. “it was a slip. i won’t fail again. next time”--through his fingers again, head in his hands--”i’ll kill him, i will... i’ll kill him...”

it startles him when she kneels, takes both his hands in both of hers (ice snuffing out a flame) and shushes, as to a child, murmurs, “it is better to be dead like us, chérie--nothing to feel, nothing to hurt.” her lips close to his fingers, she says, “they’ll forgive you this time. and they’ll take it away, gabriel--

“you just have to ask--”

[praetoreus]

his grip on her wrist burns both of them, hot rage bubbling through his skin and into hers, her corpse-cold fingers curling into a fist—they both know he could break her like this. shatter her forearm in one hand, easy as cracking an egg. she doesn't flinch as he bears down. she'd reached for his face with something like curiosity, had she the capacity for such an indulgence, and her gaze is at once impassive and imperious, peering at him down her nose. "you can still cry," she says, as if it isn't tearing him to pieces. as if it's anything but another mistake. as if it will make either of them human— "i am almost jealous," the widowmaker continues as she pulls her wrist from his grasp (already beginning to fray, bone and ash melting, smoke curling along ice—)

[praetoreus]

the next time 9S draws his sword, 2B drops into a fighting stance immediately, virtuous treaty in hand before she can catch up to her own programming.

“i know,” says 9S, a note of quiet resignation bittering his tone.

he stands his blade upright in the sand, and 2B runs him through with hers.

the sun heats her circuits to an almost painful degree, but a cold dread blooms from her chest when 9S lifts his weak hands to her face, fumbling for a moment before unclasping her combat visor and letting it fall. artificial blood drips from his mouth as he grimaces, sadly, and grips her arm with both hands.

“you don’t... have to do this,” he coughs, voice splintered into broken glass. her eyes are burning--”you can stop. 2B.”

“i’m sorry,” says 2B. she doesn’t recognise her own voice. “i’m so sorry.”

+

(“i want you... to do this... for me,” he gasps through the machinery creeping up his jaw, and 2B, eyes burning, closes trembling hands around his throat.)

[praetoreus]

“talcott and i will hold down the fort,” she promises gladiolus before he sets out for hammerhead. a tight, pinched look has taken up semipermanent residence on his face, and his interpersonal presence has dwindled to clipped interactions that leave both parties terse, wanting; but he softens for iris, as he always does.

“stay out of trouble,” he grumbles, lifting her into a hug just this side of painful. her feet don’t touch the pavement.

“be careful,” she responds in lieu of what she wants to say, which is come back alive--the words stick in her throat. gladiolus’s arms tighten until her bones creak, quietly, wind chimes in her chest.

+

when insomnia fell, her father dead, her king dead, iris held herself together until she was truly alone; she had felt so stupid as her sobs wracked the earth, tore the skin from her throat and scraped at her eyes and burnt her lungs to ash--she’d felt helpless, a small, useless shield, and she hated it.

and then when she was sure she could never cry again, iris picked herself up. she began to put flowers in her hair, and sew dolls half her size, and find herself again in the noise and bustle of lestallum; though it wasn’t a replacement for insomnia, its sheer liveliness kept iris in its heart and kept her warm, if just for a short while.

now, the city is fuller than ever, but so is it empty, hushed; and so is iris, sorrow cresting over a numb disbelief. now, safe haven is ghosts in a graveyard and bodies they never got to keep, and iris is a newton’s cradle, small and shiny and falling into the same patterns, ever swinging back to home.

[praetoreus]

there are no shadows in lucis--not anymore--only a knife’s edge between a blanket of floodlights (uncomfortable and too bright, too artificial and more a cage than the guiding hands of sunlight) and a darkness so thorough it makes all her muscles ache. she can only watch as gladiolus, anger ever close in his heart, walks the edge with a fury approaching desperation, bitter and fierce like poison; ignis she sees even less, fervent hope lending him to recklessness as he clings to the distant light of a dead star, a light refracted sharp through his own grief; and prompto is--he’s prompto, but a version of himself who withers ever so gradually in the night, whose smiles become echoes suspended in heavy fog.

there are no shadows in lucis, but there are still shadows in people. they manage.

+

but it doesn’t happen all at once. in the first month, while they struggle to regain control of orbits thrown out of sync, a new despair descends so quietly she almost misses it trying to navigate her own: the tang of sulfur on the back of her tongue, the way the sky seems to close in on itself, locking them all in a box with no exit.

gladiolus, who hasn’t stuck around long enough to spare more than a few words for his sister, exchanges quiet, rushed plans with monica, and that afternoon, they head for lestallum. as iris escorts a brave-faced talcott out to the truck, she blinks through a peripheral glimpse of bright daisy yellow, and lifts her head to see prompto atop the lighthouse, alone and still, his face tilted toward the dying sun.

[praetoreus]

the chosen king vanishes.

with no oracle to keep her and no king to call on her, shiva floats through her days as she did before lunafreya--between kings, in the wake of gralea and before. time passes; days shorten until each dawn brings only a few hours of sunlight, then a few minutes, then none at all. all the world’s creatures either flee or die.

time passes. his would-be kingsglaive scatters--one lucian city still has light; another outpost lies to the east, nearest the crown city--and in all the space in between, they serve. altissia, once famed for its beauty, remains in ruins; far north, niflheim suffers what it cannot control.

shiva knew it before, felt its doom--the starscourge--but again she had been a fool in love with an idea, with warm, gentle hands and a warm, clever tongue. again she had lost.

but the king still lives.

time passes. chance finds the kingsglaive together, at least for the night; and gentiana finds them bruised, scarred, unhappy, but at least alive.

“have hope,” is what she says, light refracted through glass and wind chimes in the night. they aren’t the words she longs to part, but even a fool in love learns when to hold her tongue; she knows they've learned, too, when their awed silence crests without breaking, when the ghosts between them lie untouched.

the ice in her bones has always melted for warm, gentle hands and warm, gentle hearts. to have loved so deeply brings them all only pain--though shiva’s king is long dead, her anger long dissolved, even shards make a whole, and the chosen king still lives. through endless, drunken nights, through the scent of fresh pastries and dog tags on a grave and blue flowers pressed between the pages of a notebook, they have hope. it’s all she can offer.