genessia | [ Action | OPEN ] if love's a fight then I shall die, with my heart on a trigger

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[ Action | OPEN ] if love's a fight then I shall die, with my heart on a trigger

Who: Cassian Lynch, Tannusen, and OPEN
Where: The hospital folks wake up in when they've died.
What: A direct continuation of this scene.
Where: Six+ hours after Cassian's death.
Warnings: Angst, probably some gore, more angst.
NOTES: Folks are welcome to encounter him wandering the hospital, but please don't prevent him from finding Cass in that thread at the end of it.

- - - - -

Tannusen could be found wandering the hospital in a daze, dried tears caked on his face, his right arm and hand a bloodied, burned mess. His soul, already crumbling to ash in places from the act he'd just committed, smoked and hissed at being inside this banal place that ate away at the Faerie like an acid.

He didn't care.

The tiger wandered the halls, brushing aside the fake people who tried to stop him for one reason or another -- it wasn't visiting hours, his arm -- without seeming to really even register them.

...

Eventually, eventually, one of the rooms he glanced into made him stop in his tracks. Pause, for a long few minutes in shock. He hadn't really expected Cassian's body to re-appear here, and wasn't sure, yet, what it meant that it had. Tannusen stepped into the room and stared at the body for another long moment, not quite registering that it was breathing; the expression was no longer slack with death.

It was only after he'd climbed right onto the hospital bed with the unconscious man that he realized there was a heartbeat drumming away in that thin chest.

He didn't know why.

The tiger just clung to the smaller man and shut his eyes, listening to the sounds of life where there shouldn't have been any.

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It had been posed at him, like it was a difficult choice to make.

To accept death? Finality, peace, the comfort of knowing that he'd no longer have to drag himself endlessly through time, never aging, never dying, constantly pushed to the edge of sanity, watching everyone he'd ever cared about crumble away to nothing.

Or to go back? Go back to a world that wasn't his, to troubles and toils that were no longer his problem, his issue.

He could finally... see his family again. His mother, his father. All the faces he'd once cared about back at the monastery, two thousand years ago. The people in his long, painful life that had given him just a few beautiful moments of happy peace before they too met their end, and end he'd been so sure he'd never taste.

It was posed as something that should have required thought. Should have forced him to question if it was worth it, throwing away a piece of himself just to return.

.... It wasn't.

Tannusen would hear, for the first time, with his head pressed against the priests chest, an unhindered breath. It still caught, whistled, wheezed. His lungs were terribly scarred after all.

But no entity held his body hostage anymore.

Another, almost cautious sounding breath, deep, loud and uncomfortable.

But full, even if it was let out in a wracking series of coughs, having pushed himself a bit far.

Slurred mumbling, dreamlike, faintly asking for a moment about the sun in the window and shutting them bedamned curtains, one hand immediately, instinctively, going to his side to touch the man beside him before he'd attempt to roll into him, half convinced it was all some... horrific nightmare.

Against the weight of two thousand years of pain, of wanting death, of wanting to see those people again...

Tannusen hadn't even considered that he might be more than the faintest blip in the face of all of that.

Still hadn't, really. Deeply confused under all that marrow-deep exhaustion.

The hospital bed was tiny, especially for two full-grown men to be in it, even if one was much smaller than the other. Tannusen didn't care; he let his back press up against the cold metal railing on his side and let Cass roll into him, still not sure how this was even possible. Was this even real?

Maybe he'd finally, truly snapped.

Would it have really been a surprise for anyone who knew the situation?

He draped his wounded arm, crunchy and sticky, over Cassian's shoulders and buried his face in the priest's hair, finding he still had tears left in him after all.

It was the sensation of the wounded flesh that actually broke the illusion of laying in his own bed.

That burn.

Tannusen's face.

Hot tears, they weren't his own, hitting his skin-

His eyes snapped open as Tannusen buried his face in his hair, the dull sensation of a painful pressure, ghost like in its quality, radiating through the center of his chest. Like a deep, but old bruise.

The knife.

The thing. That wild, eternal feeling moment of no control, thousands of years sucked out of his head in a moment- Even now the only memories that clung from half of those lived years were so dim, his mother and fathers face still sharp and clear, places, only the worst and best events, everything else had fallen away and the newer, fresher memories clung stubbornly.

Tannusen-

"Tannusen..." He didn't touch his arm, or at the very least, he tried not to, fumbling for his face as he tried to pull him to look at him properly, his voice threatening to choke itself in his throat. That face, that face was so clear to him, so beautifully sharp in comparison to all the pain he'd ever lived through. That face had survived the cleansing like a diamond in the ocean, just as brilliant as it had been when it was first tossed into the storm.

"Why did you come back," Tannusen whispered, agonized, "you could have rested. Could have seen them again."

He let his head be maneuvered however Cassian's hands moved him, though his eyes stayed shut, tears he hadn't thought he could still produce seeping out from between the closed lids.

"You deserve to rest..."

That face.

His strongest memory now, everything else so aged... now so decayed, as it should have been with any normal human mind. Old memories fading, graying, some tinting with nostalgia while unpleasant ones were finally allowed to fall to the wayside.

That face.

That perfect, beautiful face, a ray of sunlight that wouldn't be shut away. He moved in, kissing away tears, fumbling and shaking.

"Because it ain't heaven without ye in it."

Tannusen blinked his swollen and reddened eyes open, briefly, before the swell of tears forced them shut again. "I'm never going to be there, Cass. You should have forgotten me."

What was a few months -- not even a year, yet -- in the face of those millennia of pain?

Nothing.

In the end, he should have been nothing. A passing flash of light, a single pleasant dream. A Faerie, just passing by like a dust mote caught briefly in a sun beam.

"I can't forget ye... Don't ask that of me, Tannusen, please."

A few months? A year?

The happiest moments of a long, bleak life, a voice that broke through the fringe of madness and the spiked walls he'd constructed around himself, desperate to never again experience the pain of losing someone.

"... You're the only memory I've had... in two thousand years... that gave me any light. Don't tell me to snuff it."

He'd have touched Cassian's face, but one hand was trapped by how they were laying, and the other... best not to call attention to that one's state.

Once his Glamour came back he could take care of it. That just... might be a while, though.

There wasn't as much... soul... as much Faerie in there to accumulate it back up, now. Banality pressed in from all sides, leaning hard against the parts of him that crumbled away. Reality was an eager predator with no sense of boundaries.

"But you could have rested if you did!" Tannusen's eyes cracked back open again, expression anguished, "And I... I killed you. Took your trust and..."

It didn't matter that it had been to break a curse. He'd murdered Cassian. Assassinated him, as surely as any target his father had ever set him on, or that he'd picked himself.

"And tore away that last monument to two thousand years of failure." Mumbled into him, smoothing away tears, kisses pressed to his temple, his cheeks, his lips.

"Gave me back clarity. Sanity." An odd thing for a fae to do, if one were to look at it in that fashion, but this wasn't about irony here.

"I've drawn breath for two thousand years, Tannusen. What's seventy more of them against that." Even when the fairy inevitably unraveled, the man left behind would... still be, in a sense, Tannusen.

He might be so lucky as to stumble across the fae again, later on in life. He'd... be different. They'd both be different.

But now, perhaps, age was finally going to overcome him.

Something that wouldn't happen, otherwise.

Half-Unravelled even as he lay here, his pointy ears slightly less... pointy. Still not round, but...

Banality ate at him, corrosive, etching into all the new cracks and breaks in his soul. Consuming what had broken off, but never satisfied. The hospital wasn't helping; banality was stronger in here than in most other locations.

"I knew I was going to have to kill you, this whole time," Tannusen murmured, shutting his eyes again. The kissing was welcome; he didn't press into them, but only because he was too tired to move more than he had to. This had been a very, very long ordeal. And the last six hours or so had been the longest, in many ways.

"Ever since that night I woke up screaming and begging your forgiveness..." That hadn't been an uncommon occurrence, but he knew Cassian would know which time he spoke of. He'd been loud enough for Trahearne to hear him in his own room. "I knew that was the only way to break it. I just had to learn how..."

And every mention of doing something in the future, everything that may have been responded to with something along the lines of 'we have time', had set him off.

"I didn't think I'd ever hear your voice again. I thought the last I'd see of you would be when I murdered you..."

It would have been so, so much easier to just let things... go. The status quo had worked for two thousand years, right? The selfish option would have been the easiest; do nothing.

How many people on this world or any other would have taken that option instead?

Edited 2017-05-26 23:12 (UTC)

That long... Months and months of this... Cassian curled into him, trying once more, as he'd always done, to cradle Tannusen's head to him, threading his fingers through his hair.

"Tannusen." It wasn't admonishing, in the slightest. Painful, empathetic, concerned... how could he have missed this much?

He'd realized something was wrong early on yes, but not to... this degree.

But he understood, the reasoning, the secrecy. It was understood but...

"I never wanted ye to suffer like this..."

Edited 2017-05-27 05:41 (UTC)

Tannusen was more than cooperative, pressing against Cassian's chest to listen to that heartbeat in between the priest's words. A heartbeat he'd silenced... back to beating again. He'd never thought to hear it again.

Cassian's voice, Cassian's heartbeat, feeling fingers in his hair, his name spoken with such care...

No, he was perfectly willing to burrow into this, despite the painful locale and the way his arm crackled and stuck for a moment to the priest's otherwise immaculately-clean clothing when Tannusen shifted closer and curled the wounded arm between them.

"I never wanted you to suffer at all. Two thousand years, Cass. I'm..." how often had he thought this, during those months? During that talk with the tattooed Azrael? "I'm the shittiest consolation prize for all of that pain."

"It was never your fault that it happened, Tannusen..." Though it didn't seem a point worth stating, Tannusen knew that, but it wasn't just the pain of two thousand years of torment that was the cause of this.

Nope.

"Tannusen your arm..." Trying to move now, to see it, to tend to it-

"Ye won't be gettin' better in here... We have to get back to the subgate, you'll fall apart in here..."

Tannusen let Cassian have access to it, the burns were pretty... fucking horrific. The skin of his palm was just gone, left behind on that fucking knife if it still even existed. The burning curled up his arm in a way that was distinctly like tentacles. Either Hastur had tried to pry him off or that was just the pattern the burning had taken due to how Tannusen was effected by the non-reality of things.

He hadn't changed his own clothes; bits of burned sleeve stuck to the wounds in places, open and raw.

"At least out of here..." he agreed quietly. Tannusen had come to the hospital in part to let it rip him apart, a slow and agonizing end to a slow and agonizing ordeal. Finding Cassian had put a stop to that intent, but it hadn't put a stop to the effect this banal place was having on him.

Was he dramatic? Yes. All Faerie were. And even before he'd woken to being a Faerie, this was the man who'd tried to carve his own heart out once, as a boy. "I got blood all over your shoulder..."

And any lint from the cloth had in turn stuck to the wounds, of course.

"As close to home as we can get."

He'd feel better, with Tannusen, inside the comfort of his own house, knowing he was in their bed, safe, safe from the ravages of the hospital.

"It doesn't bother me none, Tannusen."

He moved to slide free of the other mans hold, if only to get out of bed, coaxing gently to try and help the fairy up.

"Here, lean to me."

Tannusen admittedly was still wondering if he was hallucinating this whole experience.

If he was, he didn't want to stop. Let madness take him, if this was the result. He'd be the happiest mad-man he'd ever been.

"I... cleaned you up, put you in fresh clothes," Tannusen allowed himself to be helped out of the tiny hospital bed, "before the barbie people came."

He didn't know why it was important to him for Cassian to know, but it was. He'd taken care of the body, he had. If it had taken days for the barbies to show up, he'd have stayed glued to the corpse's side the whole time, too.

It hadn't been Cass anymore.

But he'd thought that was all that was left to him.

So he'd taken care of it.

"... Thank ye, Tannusen." It did matter to him. He'd been so sure, that if or when he finally passed away, there'd be no one alive or willing to attend to his corpse. That he'd he left there, to rot, no final rites, no respect for his remains.

Even if he was so sure it wouldn't even matter in the end, it was... a deeply uncomfortable idea, for the Catholic. To be abandoned in death, not buried at all, buried improperly, unmarked, unblessed, untouched.

Knowing Tannusen had been there to clean the body and give him some semblance of dignity when he himself could no longer attend to it...

It was a comforting thought.

"I... I cannot begin to tell ye how much that means to me."

Tannusen leaned down to press a lingering kiss to Cassian's temple.

"I did the same for Isaac, when I found him. He wasn't a priest, but he was a little religious. French Canadian, you know, they tend to be."

So, he got it. He did. He'd even brushed out Cassian's coarse hair, polished his glasses...

"I couldn't Heather Balm the wound away like I did for his corpse," Tannusen started for the door out of the hospital room, after glancing around to make sure everything was in order. His good arm stayed draped over the priest's shoulders, but not for support, not really.

Not physical support, at least.

"So it evens out, I guess. Yours was at least fresh, and..."

Ah... Issac. It... hurt more to know Tannusen had to tend to the body of a loved one not once, but twice. It seemed like something one should never have to do, if they were so lucky. His fingers passed the underside of Tannusen's jaw delicately as he stooped to kiss his temple.

"It's alright, Tannusen. Just knowin' ye were there..." That was enough for him. Not actually alone, even when he couldn't be fully there to appreciate it.

"You've done so well by me. For the life of me I'll never figure out what ye see." It wasn't fully honestly self deprecating, the tone sadly sweet and vaguely humorous as he tried to drag Tannusen from his thoughts.

"I didn't leave your corpse alone," Tannusen murmured, because he understood a vigil, at least. "Not once. Followed it when the barbies came for it, too, until I ran into a barrier in the back of the Bay and couldn't follow anymore. Then, I came here."

Not so much out of any expectation Cassian might show up here, of course. He'd made it pretty clear he hadn't expected the priest to come back.

But what did they do with the bodies of those who didn't take the bargain? Did they lay dead in hospital beds, waiting for staff to notice and take them to the morgue? Did they simply get sent back to their world?

Either way, the sting of banality had called to him in the depths of absolute despair.

Walking out into the sea...

"That goes double for you, since you just came back..." for me, he couldn't even voice it.

"You're too wonderful a person for words..." They'd finally gotten out of the hospital, but... after consideration...

"Tannusen. Would it be better for ye if... we were to settle for a while in the bar?"

He was aware what Velvet Lust acted like, after all, and as wild and strange as the rectory could be, it was no Velvet Lust.

Just a cluttered home of oddities.

"I want ye to heal."

That earned a startled, if exhausted, little laugh out of the tiger. Just, so shocked at that assessment of himself, he didn't even know how to respond to it directly.

"...Velvet's also closer," Tannusen murmured instead, "but yes, it would help. And there's dross there."

Edited 2017-05-27 19:20 (UTC)

"Then we'll go there." Not for now.

Not for a few hours.

Go there.

"I can't rest with your arm like..."

With his soul so burned.

"There's a secret basement." Secret enough for Cass to not even have known about it. Tannusen shuffled along with the smaller man, on down the sidewalk toward his territory. "Furnished and plumbed and everything. Lots of books."

Most weren't even Szel's. He'd returned all of those, by now... all but Lil.

He still needed to find out what Lil wanted, now that this mission of his was done. It wasn't a mindless object; he wouldn't simply shut it down and put it back in its little box and return it to an eternity on a book shelf. Not unless that was what it wanted.

"I don't... want to leave your side for... a while," Tannusen admitted, hesitantly. "I spent so long convinced this was going to be the end..."

"A secret basement? Didn't know ye had one of those in there..." Each step was careful, not too long, but not patronizingly small either. Enough to just almost appear totally normal.

Except for the fact one of them had a huge, sticky, tentacle shaped burn on him.

Oops.

"That's... so much more... than I'd ever have expected from anyone, Tannusen."

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