With My Feet Upon The Ground

[feckinboomstick]

Who: Cassian, Tannusen and Garrus
Where: Everglade, in Cassian's Subgate
What: An end to two thousand years worth of BULLSHIT
Warnings: DEATH. VIOLENCE. ATTEMPTED CANNIBALISM. MENTIONS OF FORMER CANNIBALISM. BODY HORROR. HIGH SCORE HIGH SCORE HIGH SCORE

It was happening again. He knew it was. He could feel that crushing weight on his chest, slowly pressing the air from his lungs. He'd tried so very, very hard to hide it from everyone, easier to do with the newer employees, more or less. The priest was predisposed to wheezing a lot after all, and the air was still thick with pollen. It was no wonder he might have been having more episodes, right?

But Tannusen.

Tannusen would know. Tannusen would be aware. Tannusen was aware, communicated silently, no words for it to hear, no motions for it to grow suspicious of. Walled off from the more important parts of his mind, it was making it very clear that it had no idea what was happening. The beast was starving, it'd been so, so long, and these soulless husks did nothing to appease it. Someone else was going to have to die.

Someone who had a real life. Someone with a real family, with hopes, with dreams. Someone with real feelings and real thoughts. A real person and.... He didn't want to go back to that. Not another life on his hands, it'd almost been tolerable with these atomatons but...

The man was so gray, so washed out, doggedly working in the herb garden outside the rectory, something, anything to take his mind off...

Everything, off everything. It sat in his head like a lead brick, refusing to be budged, and in anger and frustration, a rock was hurled from the dirt, resulting only in a brief episode of wheezing and gasping. Too much exertion. It wasn't happy.

Tonight, it just had to be tonight, he couldn't deny it any longer, he could take this torture any longer.

Comments

[black_black_heart]

The smell of burning flesh made itself known as reality re-asserted itself, Tannusen only peeling his hand off of the knife -- yes, peeling -- once Hastur was well and truly out. The burns went all the way up his arm, raw and open and bleeding, spiraling like tentacles. The sleeve of his shirt and suit jacket crumbled away in places as nothing more than ash.

Tannusen was quick to loop his good arm around Cass and lower him gently to the ground, holding him close, his expression ripped wide open with an agony that words could never fully describe.

"I'm so sorry, love," he whispered, barely able to see Cassian through his own tears, "I'm so sorry. You can rest, now. Please, rest..."

[feckinboomstick]

Impossible really, to actually gauge what was going through Cassian's head. Too tired, too far gone to put too much thought.

Confusion?

Well yes. That was there, but for this moment, for once in his entire life... he was... comfortably singular.

Alone. Alone in his head, like someone had come through and in one fell motion, swiped away every ounce of filth and dirt and darkness from his brain.

Even as cool numbness began to sink in, he tried desperately to hold onto that feeling, this alien, wonderful feeling of so many, many horrific, painful memories going mercifully dark, his mind no longer pushed past the boundaries of human capability.

Weak hands fumbled for Tannusen, even now trying to sooth that pain, those burns were- He almost tried to ask, as if he'd forgotten what had happened, if Tannusen remembered where the bandages and antiseptic were.

He wanted to ask if he'd finally drink something, to numb the pain, he wanted to tug him down and beg him to stop crying, that he was right here...

The wet, warm, tacky fluid soaked into his heavy coat only confused him now as soundless whispers, slurred questions, nothing anyone could understand, escaped him as the last motion the man ever made, was to reach up with failing hands and clumsily wipe away those tears.

The last thing he saw before his eyes rolled back was that face, Tannusen's face, filled with an emotion he'd have given anything to scrub from him.

The last sound, a soft, gurgling, pathetic wheeze.

[black_black_heart]

Tannusen felt it the moment that body went utterly slack. The last breath seeping out of those tortured lungs. He buried his face in the corpse's neck and wailed with grief, the sound full of absolute heart-breaking agony and yes, the pain of part of his very soul crumbling away like the tatters of his sleeve.

Cold iron was anathema to Faeries. Wielding it was worse. Killing with it, even worse. Murdering a loved one, one who trusted them, loved them back?

He'd never be the same, on so many levels. Never.

Never.

Garrus' presence was completely forgotten by this point, the tiger screaming his pain into the dead meat of his beloved's body. He'd eventually wear himself out, if left to it, but it would take... a while.