Helter Skelter

[Seven Xu]

Spring 1, 511 AV. Dawn.

Angry earth shook Lhavit’s bastard from his sleep and forced white lids open; hot air had burst windows and showered the floor with glass and paper; trails of black ink from shattered pots drew rivers over parchment and blood-stained hardwood. The sun—if it had risen at all—had been stifled by a swarm of clouds, as ominous and red as the Blood Moon that had offered its face the night before, and every night since the man could remember, when winter turned to spring, and the world mourned.

Now, the sky bled under a blanket of deafening silence, and Seven could only grasp for a handful of body-warm sheets where he hoped to find an arm, a shoulder. He felt his heart stop in the lifetime it took for his bird to finally wake and roll over with a doe-eyed, flat-lipped stare. Reciprocated panic flourished on those smooth features, long enough for Seven to realize his own twisted mien before Victor pulled on an amused smile. A bold hand caught him around the waist and drew him in and that mask of flippancy faded into nothingness; the halfblood was drawn in closer, tighter, and his bitter lips were tasted before he managed to worm away.

It had to be some terrible illusion, the Trickster’s macabre tribute to the end of the world; it could happen every year, Seven stubbornly thought, in an attempt to subdue the rising bile in his throat.

The walls of the Sun and Stars Tavern were trembling, burdened by the larger buildings it always found itself wedged between, but Seven heard only the sound of his own heart pushing blood past his ears. Thum, thum, thum. He fished the floor for a discarded pile of linen and cotton, and in smoldering twilight managed to dress himself in his own. Come on, he thought to scream, but Victor had managed to look beyond his fool and was pulling leather shoes over socks.

The tavern’s first floor was a ruin of broken glass, upturned chairs and fallen tiles. Those that remained on the ceiling told a story of an angry sky, churning all colors of orange-red, umber, and yellow; it was as if the heavens had been set ablaze.

And then the inferno was on them, and hot fingers plunged through broken window and open door, smelling of ash and death. The storm threatened to rip back the tavern’s wall and spill its contents into the street, where buildings and bodies occupied burned and bloodied cobblestone. Seven’s knees buckled, a frightened wail caught in his throat, tears blurred his vision, and he succumbed to his foundering stomach.

[Victor Lark]

In the skull-crushing silence, there was only warmth to guide him; red light poured around him and hot terror burned on his companion’s trembling hands. Victor was more than accustomed to his patron divine’s antics, and had been ready to take them in stride. But as he followed his fool, so he slowly grasped the extent of Seven’s panic, and he began to suspect that this was something more. In the tumult of the morning, he turned his infinitely diverted mind to the familiarity of soft flesh over thin bones, of the persistent poison on his lip and tongue. That, at least, was comforting, as the world collapsed around them and Victor struggled to determine the proper reaction.

His jaw hung slack, though his eyes widened until they ached. It was all he remembered of that white face, before it turned into a fleeing head of hair. Somehow, it felt familiar... but why?

Victor could only watch the slight man fall to his knees, too consumed was he in that peculiar look on Seven’s face, even as he turned up from a heavy retch. It was as he helped him to his feet again that Victor recognized fear for what it was.

And no longer did he trail blindly or think idly. The whole of his body adopted a new purpose as he straightened his fool and stared at terrified crimson gaze; his expression adjusted carefully into that irritating mirror, like it sometimes did. With perfected fear hanging from his trained face, his head rocked madly on a pivoting neck, eager eyes twisting between the sky and the street and Seven. He tried to focus on that fear as he regarded the chaos around them, as he attempted to comprehend the dire circumstance, and be afraid of it.

If for no other reason than to celebrate the discovery, he embraced Seven firmly, held him close even as the world fell silently around them. Two giant black buildings caught each other from caving into their tavern, their home, and spilled a small assortment of loosed stones around them; still he held on, his mind on other matters. He could feel a half-blood heartbeat drum wildly against his own, but his chest could not respond like his face could, could not catch the contagion of fear. It took an instant to remember another means to help a heart find its fury.

When he did, there was no announcing it. He pulled his fingers through shaking white bones and ran. Without concern for shelter or thought of the future, he ran. He knew from long days of wandering that there was no purpose in searching or planning, and that the faster they moved, the faster they would stumble upon what they needed. So he ran and ran and ran, clutching his friend’s fright behind him.

[Seven Xu]

Windows threw their glass onto the street in a thousand glimmering shards; an angry sky churned overhead, torn apart by hot white lightning; a building buckled and collapsed on itself at the end of the street, half-ablaze and teeming with smoke and dust. Two sets of feet soundlessly pounded the charred flagstone. When he turned, he saw the tavern, held in a crushing embrace by its adjacent protectors. Seven let himself close his eyes. For a heartbeat, the world went black.

When he stumbled, lurched forward and nearly lost his foothold, he was sure the street itself had parted to swallow him. He cried out, emptied his lungs on dead air. Trembling white fingers tightened their steadfast lock around calloused olive knuckles, and forced searching reds open. The city had been warped, turned to a sickening whirl of ash and earth and crumbling stone. The tang of bile was fresh in his mouth and his stomach yearned to loose more, but Victor urged him on.

Seven’s legs threatened to turn to useless nothings beneath him, but he kept the muted tempo of leather-bound toe to heel, following his fleet-footed bird without question or hesitation—until the callous ground reached up again to grab him and drag him to his knees. Agonizing heat shot up his leg, numbed his toes and forced a string of expletives from trembling lips. It was not the ground that had claimed his leg, but the splintered remains of a wooden portico; a heavy pillar had fallen behind the pair and pinned the halfblood at the ankle.

He screamed for Victor, for the placation a terrified mask on an empty and broken face, for the living warmth of a hand no longer wrapped around his. Pain flourished beyond the numbness of shock; it brought tears to his eyes and blanched what color remained on his desperate countenance. More debris fell, kicking up a torrent of orange embers. Only then did Seven feel the crush of fire: greedy, petulant fire that stole the air from spent lungs and lapped at white flesh.

Inimitable iron caught and held bleary crimson. Then, Seven’s mouth slackened, and disarray bled into comfortable darkness.

[Victor Lark]

The danger was supposed to be an illusion, a challenge that snapped at his heels but never bit down. He could always outrun it, if he could not outwit it. In the heat of those moments, the flood of djed-fire and cascades of wood and stone, he had forgotten that it could be anything but. His heart was pounding, and the blood in his ears was all the noise he was allowed, the throbbing pressure that echoed the hoarse burn in his throat and the sticky sweat on his neck. A pressing hand tugged back at him with every step, and the grooves of time’s intimacy wore their fingers together, wound them in an infinite knot. As he pulled forward again, so he climbed closer to the verge, the promise of fear. Nothing was impossible, here. Not even this.

But then the knot broke, and they loosed like they had never been bound at all.

The world became real.

His heart danced in his chest as he was forced to pause. It urged him to go on, to chase that uncatchable dream, to abandon that which he had lost. Fire flashed beneath the dark sky, and Victor found himself in a narrow alley of yellow-green houses, their windowsill flowers twitching in the commotion. Only then did he realize how his arm ached; his empty hand rose to hold it and found the sleeve torn, the flesh wet and raw. He flinched, and a flush of fresh cuts hissed on the side of his face. Stunned, he turned to look back.

The scene behind him was entirely different. The walls were crawling with some wild, colorless mass of magic, and flames had risen wherever they could. Blackened by ash and reddened by destruction, a white face reached desperately up at him. Then his fool lost his face to oblivion, and Victor remembered why he had stopped.

Pieces of a home were still falling around them, and then there was a suddenly a wash of people: a whole family, screaming soundlessly at each other, leapt from the hole in the second story and fled without heed to the man who crouched in the rubble beside his friend. He moved quickly—neither desperately nor efficiently, but perhaps irritably—to fish through the debris and find the foot that delayed them. “How dare you,” he was allowed to say to the vacuum, because there was no one there to hear him. How dare you take this away from me. “Wake up!”

Seven did not wake, no matter how hard Victor shook him. Unable to believe that he was anything but stubbornly succumbed, Victor propped the limp pile of bones against his chest’s good side and wrapped his bad arm beneath warm, tired legs. His own body’s objections seemed similarly silenced as he heaved to his feet and, thusly burdened, continued to run.

He was not looking for anything. How could he? There was no other strategy to choose but aimlessness, and yet for the first time in a long time, he felt lost, like Ionu was far away and the challenges were a new and urgent pledge of death. Forced to forget his previous pursuits, he never once let Seven go, though sometimes he propped him against a wall when his legs refused to move. His heart burned with exertion, and he could not tell whether his face was moist with sweat or tears. He wondered if that was what fear was, but something deep within him, like the calm breaths from his oblivious companion’s close chest, told him it wasn’t.

He would not be able to say how long it took him to find that ugly green spire; in fact, he could not much remember his path to it, through it, or under it. The tables had been turned, the door to the cellar open. Victor was spent of running by then, but still he walked. From the stale basement air into the cool open beyond, into the soft whistle of a breeze and the tap of his shoes on ancient cobbles and the distant clamor of voices, he walked. He walked until he could not walk any more, and he fell against a foreign wall in a heap of limbs and wet musk. He stared at a black wall under a red moon, and he heard his breath come short and heavy, and he dreamed of fire and fear.

[Seven Xu]

NoteSeven has first and second degree burns from the knee down on his right leg, as well as a broken ankle and some superficial scrapes and cuts.

Alvadas raged through the day, and quieted in the evening; the blood moon lingered in the black embrace of stagnant air, ever vigilant and unmoving. The streets below had reached their capacity with those savvy enough to reach them: the young and the old, the wounded and the dying, they all scraped and shuffled and fought their way to the proffered safety of a nebulous labyrinth. Sound had returned; most notably, the maddening shifts of buildings above as their remains were shuffled and teased by the automata that were the city’s unsympathetic streets.

A bird embraced his fool between the humid walls of a dim alleyway.

Seven had succumbed to fear and fire, but dreamt of laughter, steel grey eyes, and a hungry mouth. He dreamt of sour wine and bitter ale and a pair of legs—not unlike his—tangled around him, before they withered away like smoke. Then, they were barreling across rooftops, counting heads, and shouting at birds; they were men, they were children, they were masters of their own world.

Unrelenting pain dragged the halfblood back to his nightmarish reality. He screamed and was heard, but a soggy shoulder muffled his efforts and he broke their numb embrace to fill his chest with noisome air. Every breath escaped him in a pitiable whine, as white fingers and seeing eyes scoured and memories pieced themselves together. “Gods,” tears had occupied his cheeks long before he woke, but were carving new rivers down pallid cheeks, “my leg, it—”

He hissed. It was hot, when he reached, a trembling hand skirting over charred and melted linen in a panicked attempt to seek relief in knowing. He found only wrecked flesh below the knee; it was a burning, throbbing, bloodied mess that sent angry knives up his thigh when the tips of his fingers dared to brush it.

Seven receded into the waiting wrap of another body to relish what comfort it offered. His shoulders trembled and he thumbed the smooth, cold hilt of the dagger at his belt, but was too struck to unsheathe it. Instead, he began to tear at the remains of his pant leg with his blood-soaked fingers. “This needs to come off,” he managed to push his intentions through grit teeth, but his voice was halted by a sob when stubborn linen seized a shattered ankle and fresh pain tugged at his wits. Seven writhed, as if trying to escape his own burned and broken leg, and buried his face between the body-warm folds of a familiar shirt. “Fuck, fuck, oh, gods. Victor, I can’t do this.”

[Victor Lark]

Victor stared. His hands reached half-heartedly for the thrashing body before him, craving to touch it but withheld by an intangible shield of hesitancy. The situation was eerily unique, and it gave him more than a moment’s pause. Stunned, he kneeled beside Seven and watched him. Wincing, crying, screaming, eyes creasing, teeth gnashing, head rocking with incommunicable suffering... Victor turned to the leg in question as he wrapped his hands around the head that sought solace in his chest, wrung frustrated fingers through trembling white hair. He had been burned before, but only by a candle flame and only in the form of a fingertip blister; bright red flesh oozed from Seven’s leg and clawed at his pretty white skin and, yet again, Victor could not imagine what it felt like. For the first time in a long time, he wondered if he wanted to.

He could have stayed calm, could have easily assumed the level head and comforting words that would help his burned fool through the pain. But if the thought occurred to him, it didn’t last long. His hands began to shake, his face stretched into that smiling frown of pain. In that gentle way he had, too slow to be real, he lifted Seven’s face and looked down on it. Sometimes Victor could manage tears, but this was not one of those times.

“I can’t— fuck— I don’t know what to do.” And yet he seized those frantic fingers and deftly removed them from where they grappled at ruined cotton. Through the inelegance of his charade, he extracted the belt eventually and was tugging the rest of it away when a scream louder than any of the others rang through their alley and in Victor’s ears, mingling with the multitude of other despairing cries as they lifted into the ever-dark sky. His mask faltered as he inserted a hasty, “I’m sorry, it— oh, gods,” and with measured dexterity peeled cloth from flesh, and flesh from flesh, and wretched, beautiful wails from blanched lips.

When Seven’s legs and feet were finally stripped, Victor did not regard the wounds or the swollen ankle. He knew nothing that could help or heal them, and the blood that flowed freely from his injured arm was taking its toll on his strength. With that distraction overcome, Victor returned to his sobbing companion and attempted the same. He lay beside Seven, held his tear-drenched face, and kissed it all over with a careful mix of quaking fear and genuine passion. His heart was not beating quite fast enough, but still the frenzy in the task made him believe he was close. If he looked long enough into that rubied terror, that bloodied pain, he might see it. If he shook in rhythm with the body beside him, then he might feel it. He might come to the revelation he needed, in this moment, or the next, or maybe the next...

[Seven Xu]

Moments passed, clung to them like sweat with promise, and faded away.

Fire gnawed at Seven’s flesh and abraded his wits. He could feel his bare thighs pressed to wet flagstone, the acrid sting of tears and smoke; he could feel the press of a body and the suffocating breath of calculated concern. Every second heartbeat he’d catch that mouth and offer wordless libation on trembling, mewling lips. He could feel what was. What was not—what could not be—he grasped for in foundering desperation.

In that moment, he wanted to believe it. He had to believe it. A fool could succumb to the sliver of possibility beyond those iron eyes. If anything could rip back that mask and rove through boundless emptiness, it was this. Cry, gods be damned. Feel something. Comfortable black fleece teased his bleary vision. The halfblood groped for the charade, clawed at flawless olive cheeks and beyond to lose convulsing fingertips in a swarthy, sweat-matted mess. He buried his face in the length of a clammy neck and wailed as belief waned and a pain that went deeper than angry flesh gripped his chest.

A hand on the back of his head worked to soothe, to draw away the pain; for a heartbeat, the gesture felt selfless. Candidness and paralyzing curiosity had made Victor’s oft-flawless act clumsy, transparent, but he was still there. He was there, and the yearning for something more was just as strong in the careful, frustrated beat of his heart. He was flesh and bone. Whatever he could or could not feel, he was real.

Nothing has changed. Seven tried to ease back into ignorance. He dropped from the embrace. His face shone—more tears and spittle, now, than sweat—his chest heaved and his leg screamed. I know what you are, he wanted to say, I still, “I love you,” he rasped.

A ragged sigh escaped him, tried to assuage a heart that had climbed in his throat. Familiar crimson was suddenly an uneasy feature on a pallid face. Seven stared, unblinking, his mouth a taught line that bordered on a grimace. That odd expression did not last long, before it broke, and the twist of overwhelming pain returned. He sobbed, grasped for the collar of a threadbare and charred shirt, begged for a kiss. Seven was too craven to say it outright, but with hands planted firmly on either side of a rattled face, he made his intention clear. Fangs met the inside of a scarred lip, leaving behind a lingering burn far stronger than any before it.

“… And fuck you if you say it back, Victor Lark.” He tried to smile. White lashes fluttered over delirious eyes. Nothing has changed. “I just—I can’t—this changes nothing.”

[Victor Lark]

“I...” Tongue and teeth tossed to the next word, but then he realized that he had lost them all. The air seemed quieter even now, with only two pairs of heaving lungs to stir it. Victor hated the silence more than ever, because it was not a Trickster’s prank or a moment of stilled lust; it was a hanging accusation, a belated revelation. It was empty words marked with meaning by the shuddering lilt of a desperate tongue, and that meaning was stolen from him before he could think to comprehend it. Whatever had filled Victor in the chaos was gone, and the shock that remained left him hollow. It was only speechlessness, and it swallowed him whole.

Thum thum. Thum thum. His settling heart pounded on the inside of flushed red lips, reminding him of what he really wanted: another kiss, another dose of venom, another drop of emotion, another iota of belonging. He had never wanted love, because he had never loved. What he had was an addiction, an obsession, and he did not know if that meant any more or less than love. It made him feel alive; it made him want to live. Victor loved that, at least. He needed it.

He should have thanked him, or something, should have reciprocated that laugh. He could have, but he did not want to. He was exhausted of trying. His face fell and so did his body, shoulders colliding with the wall behind him as his head nested atop Seven’s. He closed his eyes, sucked in his lover’s smell between the leaden stenches of ash and blood, and then opened them again. Depthless iron tipped toward the heavens and stared at the blackness above. “I’m tired,” he admitted, flat and factual. “You keep me awake. If that’s not love, I don’t care about love.”

In one instant, they were in a quiet room of dim-lit lace, exchanging promises of loyalty; in the next, they were hanging from a windowsill, mingling honesty and desire on a thousand hot kisses. Then they were in the dark, in a stone cage with a narrow bed or a dank cellar with a secret door, demanding the ultimate truth.

Tell me how you feel.

“I need you. I meant it when I said I’d never go, because I need you. That’ll never change.” Victor looked down at Seven, and his maskless face made the gesture seem absentminded, casual. He sheathed the metal of his eyes in a pair of endless red pools; there he searched for a response that he would never see, and saw a promise that, eventually, he could.

[Seven Xu]

“Never,” he echoed, “Never, never.”

Exhaustion had crept up on him while he thrashed and wailed. Now he had settled and accepted the numbing pain of heat nagging at exposed flesh with little more than plaintive whimpers beneath shallow, ragged breaths. “And I need you— maybe too much,” white lashes fluttered, “but I don’t care.”

Seven abandoned their embrace to double over and shove a silent accusation at his burned leg. It screamed at him in its truculence, dared him to touch it, to loose another crackle of pain through his body as quick and furious as lightning. “Love is a word.” Wavering hands squeezed his thigh, a futile attempt to stop pain at its source, “You’re the only one that means anything to me, Victor. This city—the world—could as well crumble and blow away, so long as I have you. You’re all I’ve got. No,” he dipped his chin to wipe a tendril of venomous dribble on his shoulder, “That doesn’t sound the way I want it to sound.

“You’re everything.”

A stare eclipsed by uneven and heavy lids looked back on bare slate. A head of raven was still cocked and awkward, leering up from where his fool had left him. The corners of Victor’s lips often settled deep in his cheeks, giving him a look of detached satisfaction. Lips could mean as little or as much as the words they spun; Seven offered the mouth a pained smile, and a white-knuckled grip slackened around his useless leg. “And we’re nothing without each other.” He chewed his lip, felt the familiar crawl of heat up his neck. “I never want to be without you, Victor. I never want to be nothing.”

Spoiled white slumped back against a wilting shoulder, beneath the head that had waited unwearyingly for it. Seven’s good knee knocked against the pair on his left, giving opportunity to stare at the mess of singed linen and flesh he had left behind. It was enough to make him retch. He wiped dew-laden lashes with a sleeve. The warmth on his throat had turned to a prickling tingle, as though it was waking from a numb sleep. Blind fingers groped at the cause, fingered the contours of silvered flesh that had risen from a pasty canvas. Another scratch—as if he was wanting for them. His hand found his lap.

Seven sucked in a low breath. “Help me wrap my leg, and then we’ll do your arm. Then we can sleep.”

[Victor Lark]

Victor leaned against the warm white head that fell against his shoulder, and his searching fingers found solace between Seven’s. So many words hung between them; they were truths and promises and confessions, and they were as easy to hear as they were impossible to say. He knew what Seven meant, though he could not hope to match his eloquence, and the knowing was almost like empathy. That much contented him, even in the absence of pain or fear. He had closed his eyes to let the meaning sink deep, to touch something and hold on. When a pause stilled in his ears, he spoke blindly into the scalp beneath him.

“You’ll never be nothing. You’re more than anything I’ve ever known, you fool. And I need you,” he repeated, and inhaled deep, failed to stifle a habitual laugh. “To breathe.”

Their hands rose simultaneously to satisfy an itch. Victor leaned reluctantly away, tipping his head toward what remained of Seven’s pants as the injured halfblood resolved their attention to his pain. The nothingness he thought he hated had grown too comfortable by then, and Victor found himself unconcerned with how it felt to be burned. He turned his thoughts to what he knew about wrapping wounds. It was enough to survive the life of a gambler, though this charred and tender flesh was beyond his experience. He could tell, at least, that there was no salvaging the cotton that had wrapped it before, so he pulled his hands to the buttons of his ruined shirt and began to peel it away instead. Only when he could feel the cool air on his sweat, as he pulled damp-heavy cloth from his aching arm, did he notice the mark.

It shined strangely on his lover’s neck, like quicksilver poured in milk. “Seven,” he mumbled, parting sticky hair from clammy flesh and thumbing the shape that had appeared there. It was more elegant than a wound, and less red, but there was nothing else he could think it to be. Hopeless confusion resurfaced; Victor knew every contour of every inch of that body, but he did not recognize this. “Seven, you’ve got—I don’t know. It’s...”

There were no words. Victor frowned.